Quote:
Originally Posted by Vexx
English is a hodge-podge of borrowed, stolen, and blenderized words reflecting Latin and Anglo-Saxon roots buried under a dozen other fly-by language lootings. Almost any native english speaker knows what you mean by "tsunami", "arigato". "konnichiwa", etc. Try counting the number of French words in the English language. English has dozens of ways to say the same thing... at least Japanese remains a bit simpler in that regard (maybe a dozen  ). |
But French influence lasted roughly 200 years after William's invasion in 1066, after which English became dominant over French in Parliament and amongst royalty. I would name dynasties and stuff, but I forgot most of my English history since it's been a year since I last studied it.
You can't really compare the same amount of Latin influence with English to English's affect on Japanese; I think Sino-Japanese vocabulary is the equivalent of words with Latin roots in English.
Quote:
Originally Posted by bsla
Sorry, I can't remember any examples right now, but it could be that I was mistaking Gairaigo, these 'borrowed' words for truly english words. Must be that while I watch animes I tend to notice a familiar, though more or less modified, word in the sea of japanese and I attribute that modification to accent or incorrect pronunciation on character's part. Though there are probably also literal english words in use for reasons you've mentioned.
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There is a difference between gairaigo (words originating outside of Japan) and gaikokugo (words literally used by other languages). For example, if a character in anime speaks English with a bad accent, it still tries to be "English." But if a character tosses around a few words you're familiar with from English, it's most likely gairaigo.
Gairaigo, words taken from other languages as Vexx explained, generally have *somewhat* different meanings in Japanese compared to the original meaning. However, phonetic differences among languages are very hard to ignore by the time you're an in your late teens or are an adult, meaning that, without practice, your pool of distinguishable phonemes will remain within the scope of your language. It may *sound* like bad English, but many of those words have their own meaning among Japanese and simply carry the remnants of the original language it came from. So they're not literally 1 for 1 in Japanese and English. What you're hearing is Japanese.
Here's a better way to distinguish whether or not the word is gairaigo or gaikokugo. Japanese has several "classes" of words. These are: nouns, verbal nouns, noun adjectives, adjectives, and verbs. The interesting thing is that the majority of loaned words in Japanese are placed in the noun, verbal noun, or adjective noun categories; the rest are closed categories. For example, the Sino-Japanese word 運動する (undou suru) is a verbal noun. The roots come from Chinese (yun dong), which is a noun, then has a verb attached to it (suru). Thus, it becomes "Japanese."
If you notice that the words you're hearing are not among these categories, then it's likely to be "English." For example, articles don't exist in Japanese, so if you hear "the ____" (often Japan-ified as ザ・＿＿＿）, it's most likely meant to be English, even with a sea of Japanese around it. In comparison, the word "through" （スルーする） is often used to mean "to ignore," which is not its function in English.
Just the other day, my Korean roommate was watching a video about dancing, and, although I don't know any Korean, could guess several words because they sounded like Japanese/Chinese (i.e. undou/yun dong, aka movement/exercise). It was fun. XD