Job Discussion Forums

[randytheringworm]

Many of the words in Japanese pertaining to Christianity, such as "Seishou" (Bible) and "bokushi" (pastor) were coined not by the Japanese themselves but by western missionaries literate in Japanese. Somehow I think that if it had been left to the Japanese themselves the words would now be "Baiburu" and "pasutaa". [as in"pasutaa primavera," hyuk, hyuk]

On the other hand at around the same time, the man who founded Keio University ( I forget his name but his face is on the 5000 yen bill) was creating new Japanese words such as "enzetsu" (speech, as in public oration) to accomodate post-Meiji Restoration realities.

Other new words , such as "shakai" (society) are Japanese readings of the kanji for new words already coined in China, where Western ideas had penetrated earlier than they did in Japan.

Still, I find myself wondering, what covert (and perhaps not consciously intended) nuance is communicated by , for example, calling the disease AIDS "eizu" rather than making an acronym from the Japanese for "Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome"? It's easy to say that by so doing, there's an implication that "eizu" is something that need only concern people who live in or visit foreign countries, but does it really resonate that way for a native speaker of Japanese?

[JimDunlop2]

hehe.. Thanks randy... That was pretty funny. (pasutaa)

Anyway, one can't help but wonder whether it's just laziness. After all, every other language must come to grips with new phenomena and technology, or whatnot. As long as it's a living language it should be no problem.

Even a pictographically-based written language like Chinese has obviously found ways to accomodate words like "computer" and "e-mail."

For someone like me it's a little strange, as I speak fluent Czech (and I am fairly competent reading and writing it too). But the Czech that I learned came at a time when much of today's computer technology haden't been invented (or popularized) yet... So now when I visit the Czech Republic, I have to grasp the various concepts that I know well in English, exist in Czech but the words are completely different.

In Canada, French was seeing many "anglicismes" making their way into the language -- words that were "borrowed" from English. Driving a car? No problem -- "le steering... le hand-brake..." But efforts at re-frenchifying the language have started to bring back words like "volant... frein a main..." to combat the laziness of just replacing words.

It takes effort to preserve a language... Obviously the effort just isn't worth it for the Japanese to do so.

Heu! Tintinnuntius meus sonat! (Latin for: Hey! My beeper's going off)

[Apsara]

Although AIDS is "eizu" in Japanese, SARS, a disease which didn't come to Japan other than being in the newspapers everyday, is "shingata haien" (new type pneumonia". I don't know if we can read a lot into the katakana-ising of words- it's always baffled me that "kisu" and "sekkusu" are katakana-ised- I mean, they did have those things before English-speaking foreigners arrived, right?!