Gairaigo
Gairaigo is Japanese for "loan word" or "borrowed word", and indicates a transliteration into Japanese. In particular, the word usually refers to a Japanese word of foreign origin that was not borrowed in ancient times from Old or Middle Chinese, but in modern times, primarily from English or other European languages. These are primarily written in the katakana phonetic script, with a few older terms written in Chinese characters ; the latter are known as ateji.
Japanese has many loan words from Chinese, accounting for a sizeable fraction of the language. These words were borrowed during ancient times and are written in kanji. Modern Chinese loanwords are generally considered gairaigo and written in katakana, or sometimes written in kanji ; pronunciation of modern Chinese loanwords generally differs from the corresponding usual pronunciation of the characters in Japanese.
For a list of terms, see the List of gairaigo and wasei-eigo terms.
Cognates
In some cases, cognates or etymologically related words from different languages may be borrowed and sometimes used synonymously or sometimes used distinctly.The most common basic example is versus earlier, where they are used distinctly. A more technical example is versus , used synonymously.
''Wasei-kango''
In addition to borrowings, which adopted both meaning and pronunciation, Japanese also has an extensive set of new words that are crafted using existing Chinese morphemes to express a foreign term. These are known as wasei-kango "Japanese-made Chinese words". This process is similar to the creation of classical compounds in European languages. Many were coined in the Meiji period, and these are very common in medical terminology. These are not considered gairaigo, as the foreign word itself has not been borrowed, and sometimes a translation and a borrowing are both used.Writing
In written Japanese, gairaigo are usually written in katakana. Older loanwords are also often written using ateji or hiragana, for example tabaco from Portuguese, meaning "tobacco" or "cigarette" can be written タバコ, たばこ, or 煙草, with no change in meaning. Another common older example is tempura, which is usually written in mixed kanji/kana as 天ぷら, but is also written as てんぷら, テンプラ, 天麩羅 or 天婦羅 – here it is sound-ateji, with the characters used for sound value only.Few gairaigo are sometimes written with a single kanji character ; consequently, these are considered kun'yomi rather than ateji because the single characters are used for meaning rather than for sound and are often written as katakana. An example is ; see single-character loan words for details.
False friends and ''wasei-eigo''
There are numerous causes for confusion in gairaigo: gairaigo are often abbreviated, their meaning may change, many words are not borrowed but rather coined in Japanese, and not all gairaigo come from English.Due to Japanese pronunciation rules and its mora-based phonology, many words take a significant amount of time to pronounce. For example, a one-syllable word in a language such as English often becomes several syllables when pronounced in Japanese. The Japanese language, therefore, contains many abbreviated and contracted words, and there is a strong tendency to shorten words. This also occurs with gairaigo words. For example, "remote control", when transcribed in Japanese, becomes rimōto kontorōru, but this has then been simplified to rimokon. For another example, the transcribed word for "department store" is depātomento sutoa but has since been shortened to depāto. Clipped compounds, such as wāpuro for "word processor", are common. Karaoke, a combination of the Japanese word kara "empty" and the clipped form, oke, of the English loanword "orchestra", is a clipped compound that has entered the English language. Japanese ordinarily takes the first part of a foreign word, but in some cases the second syllable is used instead; notable examples from English include and.
Some Japanese people are not aware of the origins of the words in their language, and may assume that all gairaigo words are legitimate English words. For example, Japanese people may use words like tēma in English, or rimokon, not realizing that the contraction of "remote control" to rimokon took place in Japan.
Similarly, gairaigo, while making Japanese easier to learn for foreign students in some cases, can also cause problems due to independent semantic progression. For example, English "stove", from which sutōbu is derived, has multiple meanings. Americans often use the word to mean a cooking appliance, and are thus surprised when Japanese take it to mean a space heater. The Japanese term for a cooking stove is another gairaigo term, renji, from the English "range"; a gas stove is a gasurenji.
Additionally, Japanese combines words in ways that are uncommon in English. As an example, left over is a baseball term for a hit that goes over the left-fielder's head rather than uneaten food saved for a later meal. This is a term that appears to be a loan but is actually wasei-eigo.
It is sometimes difficult for students of Japanese to distinguish among gairaigo, giseigo, and gitaigo, which are also written in katakana.
Wasei-eigo presents more difficulties for Japanese and learners of Japanese as such words, once entered the lexicon, combine to form any number of potentially confusing combinations. For example, the loanwords chance, pink, erotic, over, down, up, in, my, and boom have all entered wasei-eigo lexicon, combining with Japanese words and other English loanwords to produce any number of combination words and phrases. 'Up,' or appu, is famously combined with other words to convey an increase, such as seiseki appu and raifu appu. 'My," or mai, also regularly appears in advertisements for any number and genre of items. From "My Fanny" toilet paper to "My Hand" electric hand drills, mai serves as a common advertising tool. Infamously, the beverage brand Calpis sold a product regrettably named mai pisu or 'my piss' for a short time.
Wasei-eigo is often employed to disguise or advertise risque or sexual terms and innuendos, especially when used by women. Wasei-eigo terms referencing a person's characteristics, personality, and habits also commonly appear as Japanese street slang, from poteto chippusu or 'potato chips' for a hick and esu efu 'SF' for a 'sex friend.'
Grammatical function
Gairaigo are generally nouns, which can be subsequently used as verbs by adding auxiliary verb. For example, "play soccer" is translated as サッカーをする.Some exceptions exist, such as, which conjugates as a normal Japanese verb – note the unusual use of katakana followed by hiragana. Another example is gugu-ru, which conjugates as a normal Japanese verb, in which the final syllable is converted into okurigana to enable conjugation.
Gairaigo function as do morphemes from other sources, and, in addition to wasei eigo, gairaigo can combine with morphemes of Japanese or Chinese origin in words and phrases, as in , or.
In set phrases, there is sometimes a preference to use all gairaigo or all kango/wago, as in マンスリーマンション versus 月極駐車場 , but mixed phrases are common, and may be used interchangeably, as in テナント募集 and 入居者募集, both meaning "looking for a tenant".
Phonology
Borrowings traditionally have had pronunciations that conform to Japanese phonology and phonotactics. For example, platform was borrowed as /hōmu/, because */fo/ is not a sound combination that traditionally occurs in Japanese. However, in recent years, some gairaigo are pronounced more closely to their original sound, which is represented by non-traditional combinations of katakana, generally using small katakana or diacritics to indicate these non-traditional sounds. Compare and sumaho, where traditional sounds are used, and, a variant of the latter word using traditional sounds, where the non-traditional combination フォ is used to represent the non-traditional sound combination /fo/. This leads to long words; e.g., the word for "fanfare" is spelled out as, with seven kana, no shorter than the Roman alphabet original.Similarly, Japanese traditionally does not have any /v/ phoneme, instead approximating it with /b/, but today /v/ is sometimes used in pronunciations: for example, "violin" can be pronounced either or, with ヴァ representing /va/.
Another example of the Japanese transformation of English pronunciation is, in which the two-syllable word taxi becomes three syllables because consonants don't occur consecutively in traditional Japanese, and in which the sound of English is pronounced
This change in Japanese phonology following the introduction of foreign words can be compared to the earlier posited change in Japanese phonology following the introduction of Chinese loanwords, such as closed syllables and length becoming a phonetic feature with the development of both long vowels and long consonants – see Early Middle Japanese: Phonological developments.
Due to the difficulties that Japanese have in distinguishing "l" and "r", this expansion of Japanese phonology has not extended to inventing different kana for /l/ vs. /r/. Therefore, words with /l/ or /r/ may be spelled identically if borrowed into Japanese. One important exception is due to the fact that Japanese typically borrows English words in a non-rhotic fashion, so that syllable-final "-r" and "-l" can still be distinguished. For example, "bell" is ベル and "bear" is ベア, rather than both being ベル.
As a built-in lexicon of English
The English words that are borrowed into Japanese include many of the most useful English words, including high-frequency vocabulary and academic vocabulary. Thus gairaigo may constitute a useful built-in lexicon for Japanese learners of English.Gairaigo have been observed to aid a Japanese child's learning of ESL vocabulary. With adults, gairaigo assist in English-word aural recognition and pronunciation, spelling, listening comprehension, retention of spoken and written English, and recognition and recall at especially higher levels of vocabulary. Moreover, in their written production, students of Japanese prefer using English words that have become gairaigo to those that have not.
Misconceptions
The word sounds similar to the Portuguese word obrigado, which has the same meaning. Given the number of borrowings from Portuguese, it may seem reasonable to suppose that the Japanese imported that word—which is the explanation accepted and indeed published by many. However, arigatō is not a gairaigo; rather, it is an abbreviation of arigatō gozaimasu, which consists of an inflection of the native Japanese adjective arigatai combined with the polite verb gozaimasu. There is evidence, for example in the Man'yōshū, that the word arigatai was in use several centuries before contact with the Portuguese. This makes the two terms false cognates. If the Portuguese word had been borrowed, it would most likely have taken the form オブリガド, or maybe ōrigado, and while it is even possible that it would be spelled with 有難 as ateji, it would regardless start with o rather than a, and the final o would have been short rather than long.Reborrowings from Japanese
Some gairaigo words have been reborrowed into their original source languages, particularly in the jargon of fans of Japanese entertainment. For example, anime is gairaigo derived from the English word for "animation", but has been reborrowed by English with the meaning of "Japanese animation". Similarly, puroresu derives from "professional wrestling", and has been adopted by English-speaking wrestling fans as a term for the style of pro wrestling performed in Japan. Kosupure, or cosplay, was formed from the English words "costume play", referring to dressing in costumes such as those of anime, manga, or videogame characters, and is now used with enthusiasm in English and other languages.There are also rare examples of borrowings from Indo-European languages, which have subsequently been borrowed by other Indo-European languages, thus yielding distant cognates. An example is, originally borrowed from Russian икра, and possibly distantly cognate to English "roe", though the only indication is the shared "r".