Gairaigo
Encyclopedia
Gairaigo is Japanese
for "loan word
" or "borrowed word", and indicates a transliteration
(or "transvocalization") into Japanese. In particular, the word usually refers to a Japanese word of foreign origin that was not borrowed from Chinese
, primarily from English. Japanese also has a large number of loan words from Chinese, accounting for a sizeable fraction of the language. These words were borrowed during ancient times. Modern Chinese loanwords are generally considered gairaigo and written in katakana
, or sometimes written in Chinese and glossed with katakana furigana
.
For a list of terms, see the List of Gairaigo and Wasei-eigo terms.
, particularly in the post-World War II era (1945–). Words are taken from English for concepts which do not exist in Japanese, but also for other reasons, such as a preference for English terms or fashionability – many gairaigo have existing synonyms in Japanese.
In the past, more gairaigo came from other languages besides English. The first non-Asian countries to have extensive contact with Japan were Portugal
and the Netherlands
in the 16th and 17th centuries, and Japanese has several loanwords from Portuguese
and Dutch
, many of which are still used in Japan today.
In the Meiji era, Japan also had extensive contact with Germany
, and gained many loanwords from German
, particularly for medicine, which the Japanese learned from the Germans. Notable examples include (often abbreviated to ), from German Arbeit, "work" and . They also gained several loanwords from French
at this time.
In cases cognate
or otherwise etymologically related words from different languages may be borrowed, sometimes being used synonymously, sometimes used distinctly.
The most common basic example is versus earlier , where they are used distinctly. A more technical example is ソルビトール (English sorbitol
) versus ソルビット (German sorbit), used synonymously.
, gairaigo are usually written in katakana
. Older loanwords are also often written using ateji
(kanji
chosen for their phonetic value, or sometimes for meaning instead) or hiragana
, for example tabako from Portuguese, meaning "tobacco" or "cigarette" can be written タバコ (katakana), たばこ (hiragana), or 煙草 (the kanji for "smoke grass", but still pronounced "tabako" – meaning-ateji), with no change in meaning. Another common older example is tempura
, which is usually written in mixed kanji/kana (mazegaki) as 天ぷら, but is also written as てんぷら, テンプラ, 天麩羅 (rare kanji) or 天婦羅 (common kanji) – here it is sound-ateji, with the characters used for sound value only.
A very few gairaigo are sometimes written with a single kanji character (chosen for meaning or newly created), in which case this is considered not ateji but rather kun'yomi, as the character is used for meaning, not sound. These characters are often written as katakana instead, however. An example is ; see single-character gairaigo for details.
, literally, "English made in Japan"), and not all gairaigo come from English.
Due to Japanese pronunciation rules and its mora
-based phonology, many words when spoken in their entirety take a significant amount of time to pronounce. For example, a one-syllable word in a language such as English (break) often becomes several syllables when pronounced in Japanese (in this case, burēki , which amounts to four moras). The Japanese language therefore contains many abbreviated and contracted words
, and there is a strong tendency to shorten and simplify words. This also takes place with gairaigo words. For example "remote control", when transcribed to 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 . Portmanteaus, such as wāpuro for "word processor", are common. Karaoke
, a combination of the Japanese word kara (meaning empty) and the clipped form oke of the English loanword "orchestra" (J. ōkesutora ), is a portmanteau that has entered the English language. Ordinarily, Japanese 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 teema 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 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 (such as a wood-burning stove). The Japanese term for a cooking stove is another gairaigo term, renji , from the now obsolete English genericized trademark "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 also difficult for learners of Japanese
to distinguish between gairaigo, giseigo (onomatopoeia), and gitaigo (ideophone
s: words that represent the manner of an action, like "zigzag" in English
— jiguzagu in Japanese), which are also written in katakana
.
Some exceptions exist, such as , which conjugates as a normal Japanese verb – note the unusual use of katakana (サボ) followed by hiragana (る).
Gairaigo functions as do morphemes from other sources, and, in addition to wasei eigo (words or phrases from combining gairaigo), gairaigo can combine with morphemes of Japanese or Chinese origin in words and phrases, as in (compare ), (compare ) or .
In set phrases, there is sometimes a preference to use all gairaigo (in katakana) or all kango/wago
(in kanji), as in マンスリーマンション (monthly mansion) versus 月極駐車場 (tsukigime chūshajō, monthly parking), but mixed phrases are common, and may be used interchangeably, as in テナント募集 (tenanto boshū) and 入居者募集 (nyūkyosha boshū), both meaning "looking for a tenant".
. For example, platform was borrowed as /hōmu/, as */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 in writing by non-traditional combinations of katakana, generally using small katakana or diacritics (voicing marks) to indicate these non-traditional sounds. Compare , where traditional sounds are used, and , where the non-traditional combination フォ (fu-o) is used to represent the non-traditional sound combination /fo/. Similarly, Japanese traditionally does not have the sound /v/, instead approximating it by /b/, but today /v/ is sometimes used in pronunciations – for example, "violin" can be pronounced either or , with ヴァ (literally "voiced u"+"a") representing /va/.
This change in Japanese phonology following the introduction of foreign words (here primarily from English) can be compared to the earlier posited change in Japanese phonology following the introduction of Chinese loanwords, such as closed syllables (CVC, not just CV) and length
becoming a phonetic feature with the development of both long vowels
and long consonants
– see Early Middle Japanese: Phonological developments.
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, Japanese learners prefer using English words that have become gairaigo over those that have not.
of the native Japanese adjective
arigatai (有難い) combined with the polite verb gozaimasu. Evidence that the word arigatai was in use several centuries before contact with the Portuguese exists, for example, in the Man'yōshū. This makes the two terms false cognate
s.
See the list of Japanese terms mistaken for gairaigo for more examples.
into their original source languages, particularly in the jargon of fans of Japanese entertainment. For example, anime
(アニメ) is gairaigo derived from the English word for "animation
", but has been reborrowed by English with the meaning of "animation in the Japanese style". Similarly, puroresu
(プロレス) 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 an Indo-European language into Japanese, then on into other Indo-European languages, yielding distant cognates. An example is , originally borrowed from Russian, and distantly cognate (from the same Indo-European root) to English "roe
" (fish eggs), though the only indication is the shared "r".
Japanese language
is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
for "loan word
Loanword
A loanword is a word borrowed from a donor language and incorporated into a recipient language. By contrast, a calque or loan translation is a related concept where the meaning or idiom is borrowed rather than the lexical item itself. The word loanword is itself a calque of the German Lehnwort,...
" or "borrowed word", and indicates a transliteration
Transliteration
Transliteration is a subset of the science of hermeneutics. It is a form of translation, and is the practice of converting a text from one script into another...
(or "transvocalization") into Japanese. In particular, the word usually refers to a Japanese word of foreign origin that was not borrowed from Chinese
Chinese language
The Chinese language is a language or language family consisting of varieties which are mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...
, primarily from English. Japanese also has a large number of loan words from Chinese, accounting for a sizeable fraction of the language. These words were borrowed during ancient times. Modern Chinese loanwords are generally considered gairaigo and written in katakana
Katakana
is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji, and in some cases the Latin alphabet . The word katakana means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana scripts are derived from components of more complex kanji. Each kana represents one mora...
, or sometimes written in Chinese and glossed with katakana furigana
Furigana
is a Japanese reading aid, consisting of smaller kana, or syllabic characters, printed next to a kanji or other character to indicate its pronunciation. In horizontal text, yokogaki, they are placed above the line of text, while in vertical text, tategaki, they are placed to the right of the line...
.
For a list of terms, see the List of Gairaigo and Wasei-eigo terms.
Source languages
Most, but not all, modern gairaigo are derived from EnglishEnglish language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
, particularly in the post-World War II era (1945–). Words are taken from English for concepts which do not exist in Japanese, but also for other reasons, such as a preference for English terms or fashionability – many gairaigo have existing synonyms in Japanese.
In the past, more gairaigo came from other languages besides English. The first non-Asian countries to have extensive contact with Japan were Portugal
Portugal
Portugal , officially the Portuguese Republic is a country situated in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula. Portugal is the westernmost country of Europe, and is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the West and South and by Spain to the North and East. The Atlantic archipelagos of the...
and the Netherlands
Netherlands
The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...
in the 16th and 17th centuries, and Japanese has several loanwords from Portuguese
Portuguese language
Portuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...
and Dutch
Dutch language
Dutch is a West Germanic language and the native language of the majority of the population of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname, the three member states of the Dutch Language Union. Most speakers live in the European Union, where it is a first language for about 23 million and a second...
, many of which are still used in Japan today.
In the Meiji era, Japan also had extensive contact with Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
, and gained many loanwords from German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
, particularly for medicine, which the Japanese learned from the Germans. Notable examples include (often abbreviated to ), from German Arbeit, "work" and . They also gained several loanwords from French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
at this time.
In cases cognate
Cognate
In linguistics, cognates are words that have a common etymological origin. This learned term derives from the Latin cognatus . Cognates within the same language are called doublets. Strictly speaking, loanwords from another language are usually not meant by the term, e.g...
or otherwise etymologically related words from different languages may be borrowed, sometimes being used synonymously, sometimes used distinctly.
The most common basic example is versus earlier , where they are used distinctly. A more technical example is ソルビトール (English sorbitol
Sorbitol
Sorbitol, also known as glucitol, Sorbogem® and Sorbo®, is a sugar alcohol that the human body metabolizes slowly. It can be obtained by reduction of glucose, changing the aldehyde group to a hydroxyl group. Sorbitol is found in apples, pears, peaches, and prunes...
) versus ソルビット (German sorbit), used synonymously.
Writing
In written JapaneseJapanese writing system
The modern Japanese writing system uses three main scripts:*Kanji, adopted Chinese characters*Kana, a pair of syllabaries , consisting of:...
, gairaigo are usually written in katakana
Katakana
is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji, and in some cases the Latin alphabet . The word katakana means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana scripts are derived from components of more complex kanji. Each kana represents one mora...
. Older loanwords are also often written using ateji
Ateji
In modern Japanese, primarily refers to kanji used phonetically to represent native or borrowed words, without regard to the meaning of the underlying characters. This is analogous to man'yōgana in pre-modern Japanese...
(kanji
Kanji
Kanji are the adopted logographic Chinese characters hanzi that are used in the modern Japanese writing system along with hiragana , katakana , Indo Arabic numerals, and the occasional use of the Latin alphabet...
chosen for their phonetic value, or sometimes for meaning instead) or hiragana
Hiragana
is a Japanese syllabary, one basic component of the Japanese writing system, along with katakana, kanji, and the Latin alphabet . Hiragana and katakana are both kana systems, in which each character represents one mora...
, for example tabako from Portuguese, meaning "tobacco" or "cigarette" can be written タバコ (katakana), たばこ (hiragana), or 煙草 (the kanji for "smoke grass", but still pronounced "tabako" – meaning-ateji), with no change in meaning. Another common older example is tempura
Tempura
], is a Japanese dish of seafood or vegetables that have been battered and deep fried.-Batter:A light batter is made of cold water and soft wheat flour . Eggs, baking soda or baking powder, starch, oil, and/or spices may also be added...
, which is usually written in mixed kanji/kana (mazegaki) as 天ぷら, but is also written as てんぷら, テンプラ, 天麩羅 (rare kanji) or 天婦羅 (common kanji) – here it is sound-ateji, with the characters used for sound value only.
A very few gairaigo are sometimes written with a single kanji character (chosen for meaning or newly created), in which case this is considered not ateji but rather kun'yomi, as the character is used for meaning, not sound. These characters are often written as katakana instead, however. An example is ; see single-character gairaigo for details.
False cognates and wasei-eigo
There are a number of causes for confusion in gairaigo, notably: gairaigo are often abbreviated, their meaning may change (either in Japanese, or in the original language after the borrowing has occurred), many words are not borrowed but rather coined in Japanese (there are wasei-eigoWasei-eigo
are Japanese pseudo-Anglicisms: English constructions not used in the English-speaking world or by native English speakers, but that appear in Japanese. This should not be confused for foreign words gairaigo, which generally refer to words from European languages, especially American English...
, literally, "English made in Japan"), and not all gairaigo come from English.
Due to Japanese pronunciation rules and its mora
Mora (linguistics)
Mora is a unit in phonology that determines syllable weight, which in some languages determines stress or timing. As with many technical linguistic terms, the definition of a mora varies. Perhaps the most succinct working definition was provided by the American linguist James D...
-based phonology, many words when spoken in their entirety take a significant amount of time to pronounce. For example, a one-syllable word in a language such as English (break) often becomes several syllables when pronounced in Japanese (in this case, burēki , which amounts to four moras). The Japanese language therefore contains many abbreviated and contracted words
Japanese abbreviated and contracted words
Abbreviated and contracted words are a common feature of Japanese. Long words are often contracted into shorter forms, which then become the predominant forms. For example, the University of Tokyo, in Japanese Tōkyō Daigaku becomes , Tōdai, and "remote control", rimōto kontorōrā , becomes rimokon....
, and there is a strong tendency to shorten and simplify words. This also takes place with gairaigo words. For example "remote control", when transcribed to 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 . Portmanteaus, such as wāpuro for "word processor", are common. Karaoke
Karaoke
is a form of interactive entertainment or video game in which amateur singers sing along with recorded music using a microphone and public address system. The music is typically a well-known pop song minus the lead vocal. Lyrics are usually displayed on a video screen, along with a moving symbol,...
, a combination of the Japanese word kara (meaning empty) and the clipped form oke of the English loanword "orchestra" (J. ōkesutora ), is a portmanteau that has entered the English language. Ordinarily, Japanese 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 teema 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 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 (such as a wood-burning stove). The Japanese term for a cooking stove is another gairaigo term, renji , from the now obsolete English genericized trademark "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
Baseball
Baseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each. The aim is to score runs by hitting a thrown ball with a bat and touching a series of four bases arranged at the corners of a ninety-foot diamond...
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
Wasei-eigo
are Japanese pseudo-Anglicisms: English constructions not used in the English-speaking world or by native English speakers, but that appear in Japanese. This should not be confused for foreign words gairaigo, which generally refer to words from European languages, especially American English...
.
It is sometimes also difficult for learners of Japanese
Japanese language
is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
to distinguish between gairaigo, giseigo (onomatopoeia), and gitaigo (ideophone
Ideophone
Ideophones are words used by speakers to evoke a vivid impression of certain sensation or sensory perceptions, e.g. smell, color, shape, sound, action, or movement. Ideophones are attested in all languages of the world, however, languages differ in the extent to which they make use of them...
s: words that represent the manner of an action, like "zigzag" in English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
— jiguzagu in Japanese), which are also written in katakana
Katakana
is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji, and in some cases the Latin alphabet . The word katakana means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana scripts are derived from components of more complex kanji. Each kana represents one mora...
.
Grammatical function
Gairaigo are generally nouns, which can be subsequently used as verbs via adding the auxiliary verb . This is the same as borrowings from Chinese.Some exceptions exist, such as , which conjugates as a normal Japanese verb – note the unusual use of katakana (サボ) followed by hiragana (る).
Gairaigo functions as do morphemes from other sources, and, in addition to wasei eigo (words or phrases from combining gairaigo), gairaigo can combine with morphemes of Japanese or Chinese origin in words and phrases, as in (compare ), (compare ) or .
In set phrases, there is sometimes a preference to use all gairaigo (in katakana) or all kango/wago
Yamato kotoba
are native Japanese words, meaning those words in Japanese that have been inherited from Old Japanese, rather than being borrowed at some stage. They are also known as...
(in kanji), as in マンスリーマンション (monthly mansion) versus 月極駐車場 (tsukigime chūshajō, monthly parking), but mixed phrases are common, and may be used interchangeably, as in テナント募集 (tenanto boshū) and 入居者募集 (nyūkyosha boshū), both meaning "looking for a tenant".
Phonology
Traditionally borrowings have had pronunciations that conform to Japanese phonology and phonotacticsPhonotactics
Phonotactics is a branch of phonology that deals with restrictions in a language on the permissible combinations of phonemes...
. For example, platform was borrowed as /hōmu/, as */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 in writing by non-traditional combinations of katakana, generally using small katakana or diacritics (voicing marks) to indicate these non-traditional sounds. Compare , where traditional sounds are used, and , where the non-traditional combination フォ (fu-o) is used to represent the non-traditional sound combination /fo/. Similarly, Japanese traditionally does not have the sound /v/, instead approximating it by /b/, but today /v/ is sometimes used in pronunciations – for example, "violin" can be pronounced either or , with ヴァ (literally "voiced u"+"a") representing /va/.
This change in Japanese phonology following the introduction of foreign words (here primarily from English) can be compared to the earlier posited change in Japanese phonology following the introduction of Chinese loanwords, such as closed syllables (CVC, not just CV) and length
Length (phonetics)
In phonetics, length or quantity is a feature of sounds that are distinctively longer than other sounds. There are long vowels as well as long consonants .Many languages do not have distinctive length...
becoming a phonetic feature with the development of both long vowels
Vowel length
In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived duration of a vowel sound. Often the chroneme, or the "longness", acts like a consonant, and may etymologically be one, such as in Australian English. While not distinctive in most dialects of English, vowel length is an important phonemic factor in...
and long consonants
Gemination
In phonetics, gemination happens when a spoken consonant is pronounced for an audibly longer period of time than a short consonant. Gemination is distinct from stress and may appear independently of it....
– see Early Middle Japanese: Phonological developments.
Gairaigo 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, Japanese learners prefer using English words that have become gairaigo over those that have not.
Misconceptions
The word arigatō (Japanese for "thank you") 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 inflectionInflection
In grammar, inflection or inflexion is the modification of a word to express different grammatical categories such as tense, grammatical mood, grammatical voice, aspect, person, number, gender and case...
of the native Japanese adjective
Japanese adjectives
According to many analyses, the Japanese language does not have words that function as adjectives in a syntactic sense, i.e. tree diagrams of Japanese sentences can be constructed without employing adjective phrases. However, there are words that function as adjectives in a semantic sense...
arigatai (有難い) combined with the polite verb gozaimasu. Evidence that the word arigatai was in use several centuries before contact with the Portuguese exists, for example, in the Man'yōshū. This makes the two terms false cognate
False cognate
False cognates are pairs of words in the same or different languages that are similar in form and meaning but have different roots. That is, they appear to be, or are sometimes considered, cognates, when in fact they are not....
s.
See the list of Japanese terms mistaken for gairaigo for more examples.
Reborrowings from Japanese
Some gairaigo words have been reborrowedReborrowing
Reborrowing is the process where a word travels from one language to another and then back to the originating language in a different form or with a different meaning.This is indicated by A→B→A, where A is the originating language....
into their original source languages, particularly in the jargon of fans of Japanese entertainment. For example, anime
Anime
is the Japanese abbreviated pronunciation of "animation". The definition sometimes changes depending on the context. In English-speaking countries, the term most commonly refers to Japanese animated cartoons....
(アニメ) is gairaigo derived from the English word for "animation
Animation
Animation is the rapid display of a sequence of images of 2-D or 3-D artwork or model positions in order to create an illusion of movement. The effect is an optical illusion of motion due to the phenomenon of persistence of vision, and can be created and demonstrated in several ways...
", but has been reborrowed by English with the meaning of "animation in the Japanese style". Similarly, puroresu
Professional wrestling in Japan
Puroresu is the popular term for the predominant style or genre of professional wrestling that has developed in Japan. The term comes from the Japanese pronunciation of "professional wrestling" , which is shortened to puroresu . The term became popular among English-speaking fans due to Hisaharu...
(プロレス) derives from "professional wrestling
Professional wrestling
Professional wrestling is a mode of spectacle, combining athletics and theatrical performance.Roland Barthes, "The World of Wrestling", Mythologies, 1957 It takes the form of events, held by touring companies, which mimic a title match combat sport...
", and has been adopted by English-speaking wrestling fans as a term for the style of pro wrestling performed in Japan. Kosupure
Cosplay
, short for "costume play", is a type of performance art in which participants don costumes and accessories to represent a specific character or idea. Characters are often drawn from popular fiction in Japan, but recent trends have included American cartoons and science fiction...
, or cosplay, was formed from the English words "costume play", referring to dressing in costumes such as those of anime, manga
Manga
Manga is the Japanese word for "comics" and consists of comics and print cartoons . In the West, the term "manga" has been appropriated to refer specifically to comics created in Japan, or by Japanese authors, in the Japanese language and conforming to the style developed in Japan in the late 19th...
, or videogame characters, and is now used with enthusiasm in English and other languages.
There are also rare examples of borrowings from an Indo-European language into Japanese, then on into other Indo-European languages, yielding distant cognates. An example is , originally borrowed from Russian, and distantly cognate (from the same Indo-European root) to English "roe
Roe
Roe or hard roe is the fully ripe internal egg masses in the ovaries, or the released external egg masses of fish and certain marine animals, such as shrimp, scallop and sea urchins...
" (fish eggs), though the only indication is the shared "r".
See also
- List of gairaigo and wasei-eigo terms
- Japanese words of Portuguese originJapanese words of Portuguese originMany Japanese words of Portuguese origin entered the Japanese language when Portuguese Jesuit priests introduced Christian ideas, Western science, technology and new products to the Japanese during the Muromachi period ....
- Japanese words of Dutch originJapanese words of Dutch originJapanese words of Dutch origin started to develop when the Dutch East India Company initiated trading in Japan from the factory of Hirado in 1609...
- Japanese words of Portuguese origin
- EngrishEngrishrefers to unusual forms of English language usage by native speakers of some East Asian languages. The term itself relates to Japanese speakers' tendency to inadvertently substitute the English phonemes "R" and "L" for one another, because the Japanese language has one alveolar consonant in place...
- List of English words of Japanese origin
- Japanese Pidgin EnglishJapanese Pidgin EnglishJapanese Pidgin English is an English-based pidgin that was spoken in Japanese ports, such as Yokohama, in the 19th century....