You are viewing a single comment's thread from:

RE: 10 English Words that Are Actually Japanese

in GEMS2 years ago

As an Asian (a Filipino) I have known most of these words since I was a kid. And even then, we already knew about their Japanese origins, particularly kamikaze since my maternal grandfather was in the Army in WW2, and told us a lot of stories fighting the Japanese.

Also quite common here in usage, and common knowledge of its origin too is karaoke, since we Filipinos love to sing. So I am quite surprised that many have just realized just now that these words came from the Japanese, especially with their obvious un-Westernlike spelling. 😉

Sort:  

Thanks for the great comment! Have some !PIZZA

I've been in Japan 20 years and speak the language, so these are pretty obvious to me too, but as you can see from the other comments, they are far from obvious to most people. Even as simple a one as karaoke. The pronunciation has shifted so much from the original Japanese that most people accept it as a completely English word.

Spelling is not really much of a clue, since English spelling is a horrible mess, so a strangely spelled word could be from the Norman conquest, or it could be from the grammarians years later who tried to Latinize so many English words that weren't even originally from Latin, or it could have been one of the words mangled by the great vowel shift. Similarly, English contains words from almost all living languages and many dead ones so even if one can correctly identify a loanword, unless they are familiar with Japanese they probably can't realize that loanword is Japanese.