Japan''s Built-in Lexicon of English-based Loanwords

SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION 26Series Editor: David Singleton, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland Japan's Built-in Lexicon of English-based Loanwords Frank E... However, Japanese EFL Englis

Japan's Built-in Lexicon of English-based Loanwords

SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

Series Editor: Professor David Singleton, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland

This series brings together titles dealing with a variety of aspects of language acquisition and processing in situations where a language or languages other than the native language is involved Second language is thus interpreted in its broadest possible sense The volumes included in the series all offer in their different ways, on the one hand, exposition and discussion of empirical findings and, on the other, some degree of theoretical reflection In this latter connection, no particular theoretical stance is privileged in the series; nor is any relevant perspective – sociolinguistic, psycholinguistic, neurolinguistic, etc – deemed out of place The intended readership

of the series includes final-year undergraduates working on second language acquisition projects, postgraduate students involved in second language acquisition research, and researchers and teachers in general whose interests include a second language acquisition component.

Other Books in the Series

Focus on French as a Foreign Language: Multidisciplinary Approaches

Jean-Marc Dewaele (ed.)

Second Language Writing Systems

Vivian Cook and Benedetta Bassetti (eds)

Third Language Learners: Pragmatic Production and Awareness

Maria Pilar Safont Jordà

Artificial Intelligence in Second Language Learning: Raising Error Awareness

Marina Dodigovic

Studies of Fossilization in Second Language Acquisition

ZhaoHong Han and Terence Odlin (eds)

Language Learners in Study Abroad Contexts

Margaret A DuFon and Eton Churchill (eds)

Early Trilingualism: A Focus on Questions

Julia D Barnes

Cross-linguistic Influences in the Second Language Lexicon

Janusz Arabski (ed.)

Motivation, Language Attitudes and Globalisation: A Hungarian Perspective

Zoltán Dörnyei, Kata Csizér and Nóra Németh

Age and the Rate of Foreign Language Learning

Carmen Muñoz (ed.)

Investigating Tasks in Formal Language Learning

María del Pilar García Mayo (ed.)

Input for Instructed L2 Learners: The Relevance of Relevance

Anna Nizegorodcew

Cross-linguistic Similarity in Foreign Language Learning

Håkan Ringbom

Second Language Lexical Processes

Zsolt Lengyel and Judit Navracsics (eds)

Third or Additional Language Acquisition

Gessica De Angelis

Understanding Second Language Process

ZhaoHong Han (ed.)

For more details of these or any other of our publications, please contact:

Multilingual Matters, Frankfurt Lodge, Clevedon Hall,

Victoria Road, Clevedon, BS21 7HH, England

http://www.multilingual-matters.com

SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION 26

Series Editor: David Singleton, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland

Japan's Built-in Lexicon of English-based Loanwords

Frank E Daulton

MULTILINGUAL MATTERS LTD

Clevedon • Buffalo • Toronto

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Daulton, Frank E.

Japan's Built-in Lexicon of English-based Loanwords / Frank E Daulton.

Second Language Acquisition: 26

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1 Japanese language–Foreign words and phrases–English.

2 English language–Study and teaching–Japan I Title.

PL664.E5D38 2008

495.6'2421–dc22 2007029788

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN-13: 978-1-84769-030-2 (hbk)

Multilingual Matters Ltd

UK: Frankfurt Lodge, Clevedon Hall, Victoria Road, Clevedon BS21 7HH.

USA: UTP, 2250 Military Road, Tonawanda, NY 14150, USA.

Canada: UTP, 5201 Dufferin Street, North York, Ontario M3H 5T8, Canada.

Copyright © 2008 Frank E Daulton.

All rights reserved No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

The policy of Multilingual Matters/Channel View Publications is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products, made from wood grown in

sustainable forests In the manufacturing process of our books, and to further support our policy, preference is given to printers that have FSC and PEFC Chain of Custody certification The FSC and/or PEFC logos will appear on those books where full certification has been granted to the printer concerned.

Typeset by Datapage International Ltd.

Printed and bound in Great Britain by the Cromwell Press Ltd.

Acknowledgements vii

Introduction: The Importance of Cognates for EFL in Japan 1

Part 1: Japan’s Importation of English 1 The Assimilation of English into JapaneseA Historical and Linguistic Overview
9

2 Today’s Generation of Gairaigo 24

Part 2: Gairaigo and Language Acquisition 3 Resolving the Paradox of Cognates 43

4 The Effect of Loanwords in Japanese on the Learning of English 61

Part 3: The Built-in Lexicons 5 Common Loanword Cognates for High-frequency and Academic English 77

6 Quantifying the Overlap and Quality of Japanese/English Cognates 87

Part 4: Exploiting Japanese Loanword Cognates 7 Barriers to Accessing Cognates 101

8 Extending Word Knowledge Within Word Families 110

Epilogue
New Horizons 123

Appendix 1 The Standard Set of Katakana 131

Appendix 2 The List of Common Loanwords Corresponding to the BNC 3000 133

Appendix 3 Academic Borrowed Words 156

Appendix 4 The Similarity of 1K Sampled Borrowed Words and Japanese Loanwords 164

Appendix 5 The Similarity of 2K Sampled Borrowed Words and Japanese Loanwords 168

v

Appendix 6 The Similarity of 3K Sampled Borrowed

Words and Japanese Loanwords 171References 173Index 183

Ryukoku University has provided support for this publication.

This book is dedicated to my parents, who loved books

A note on scripts:

English vocabulary items will appear in the Roman alphabet underlined(e.g word) Japanese loanwords will appear in the Roman alphabetunderlined and italicised (waado), using a modified Hepburn Romani-sation; occasionally loanwords will appear in their katakana forms

vii

Introduction: The Importance of

Cognates for EFL in Japan

Sometimes worlds are linked by words English night, for example, isrelated to nuit (French), Nacht (German), nacht (Dutch), nicht (Scots), nat(Danish), noc (Czech, Polish), noch (Russian), noc (Serbian), nox (Latin),nakti- (Sanskrit), nate¨ (Albanian), noche (Spanish), nos (Welsh), noite(Portuguese), notte (Italian), nit (Catalan), noapte (Romanian), no´tt(Icelandic) and naktis (Lithuanian), all deriving from Proto-Indo-Eur-opean nekwt- Moreover, as a result of the Norman Conquest and otherhistorical events, French and Latin have strongly influenced English,leading to cognates such as promenade and focus English, in turn, hasspread across the globe and is spoken by some two billion people.Native English speakers are greatly helped in learning relatedlanguages because of this web of linguistic connections

In contrast to English, the Japanese language developed in relativeisolation Japanese belongs to the Japonic language family, which isshared only by the Ryukyuan languages spoken around Okinawa Whenthe Japanese needed a writing system and to enhance their lexicon, theyborrowed from their immediate neighbours, China and Korea Japanese

is essentially spoken only in its homeland, and being fluent in Japaneserequires mastery of a complex system of honorifics that reflect thehierarchy of Japanese society In many aspects, English and Japanese arecompletely dissimilar languages; we say potato, the Japanese say jagaimo ;

we say tomato, the Japanese say tomato ( )

In fact, while Japanese phonology, syntax, pragmatics and discoursehave remained relatively impervious to outside influence, a distant and

transformed the Japanese lexicon Through the activities of certainJapanese individuals, a flood of English words have been ‘borrowed’

English-based poteto (potato) has arrived as an alternative to Japanesejagaimo The scale of Japan’s borrowing of English is virtually unpar-alleled in the world

1

However, Japanese EFL (English as a foreign language) has largelyneglected this potential resource, and research on loanword cognates haslanguished; this is unfortunate, in light of the arguably dismal state ofEnglish education in Japan.

The State of English Education in Japan

The late Edwin O Reischauer, renowned US ambassador to Japan,satirically listed Japan’s miserable performance in English as one of theSeven Wonders of the World (Honna, 1995) Despite the vast resourcesdevoted to English education, and the vast amount of English circulating

in forms ranging from billboards to everyday loanwords, Japan is amongthe world’s monolingual societies where English-speaking visitors havegreat difficulty communicating

For more than 100 years, there has been formal English education inJapan
with most Japanese people today having studied it for at leastsix years Ninety-nine percent of the Japanese study English for threeyears at middle school, and about 92% for a further three years at highschool (Morrow, 1987) The average Japanese person has had at least 3120hours of English instruction (Honna, 1995); more if they attended college.However, Japanese EFL is characterised by not only its dependence ongrammar-translation and focus on entrance exams, but by large classes oftaciturn students Sociocultural factors such as self-efficacy, fear offailure, anxiety and intolerance of mistakes afflict learners Languagelearners without the confidence to produce require much greater time toachieve any measure of fluency, as they are not actively engaged intheory testing, and have limited reception and production opportunities(Ringbom, 1987) Indeed, Japanese learners lack what Ngeow (1998) calls

a ‘positive disposition towards learning’, which should include: highmotivation; risk-taking attitudes; mindfulness or attentiveness; and asense of responsibility for learning

Even the linguistic circumstances work against English education, andmost Japanese consider English to be very distant and not useful indaily life

First, Japan is not a society in which English plays a meaningful role

as a language of international communication The lack of nity to use it weakens the motivations of learners to acquire aworking command of English This is true in many places other thanJapan (Honna, 1995: 57)

Indeed, the situation of Finnish EFL used to be quite similar bom, 1987); learners in such situations spend only a very limited time onlearning.

(Ring-The results of Japan’s universal English education system are poorindeed Loveday (1996: 153) describes the Japanese public as ‘basilectal’;

‘distant non-bilingual’ (p 95); and having ‘a low, pidgin-like levelcovering only the most basic of needs’ (p 99) Almost no graduate cancommunicate with foreigners beyond a few formulaic expressions Notsurprisingly, Japan ranks near the bottom of nations in TOEFL scores(Bronner, 2000), and English is one of the most unpopular subjects amongstudents (Loveday, 1996)

The Potential of Cognates in Japanese EFL

Most researchers believe communicative competence is heavily based

on the lexicon Vocabulary acquisition was once the neglected area oflanguage study, but this tendency has been replaced by a growingawareness that a solid vocabulary is necessary in every stage of learning.Vocabulary knowledge enables language use, language use enablesthe increase of vocabulary knowledge, knowledge of the worldenables the increase of vocabulary knowledge and language use and

so on (Nation & Waring, 1997: 7)

Not surprisingly, vocabulary ability correlates positively with overalllinguistic ability (e.g Anderson & Freebody, 1981; Read, 2000) Numer-ous studies confirm the crucial role of vocabulary in both L1 (e.g Carroll,1972) and L2 acquisition (Coady & Huckin, 1997; Huckin et al , 1993;Schmitt & McCarthy, 1997; Schreuder & Weltens, 1993)

Japan’s English education system encourages learners to memorisecomplex and obscure grammar rules, but fails to provide the massivevocabulary expansion, passive and active, needed to attain commu-nicative competence

It is a maxim that without grammar, very little can be communicated,but without vocabulary, nothing can For instance, if someone were to askyou on the street, ‘Telephone box, where?’, you could guess what he orshe means, whereas if the questioner does not know the expression

‘telephone box’, nothing beyond gestures can be communicated; nately, almost any Japanese tourist knows ‘telephone box’, as it exists inJapanese as a cognate (Uchida, 2001a)

fortu-Throughout the world, learners’ L1 (first language) can be their mostimportant asset in acquiring a second language This is, for instance, the

case for Korean learners of English, despite their preconception thatEnglish is very difficult.

The effort of vocabulary learning is necessary to achieve a certainresult desired by the learner, and the learner may be encouraged byseeing how fast he can go The learner is interested primarily inaccomplishment He is interested in effort only in so far as it isconducive to the accomplishment which he desires In particular,with cognates, it is easy for him to recognize the form and meaning

of vocabulary items and to produce such sentences as he would like

to express (Lee, 1958: 57
58)

English words in Korean are called Oi-rae-eo, which, like Japanesegairaigo , means literally ‘words coming from abroad’ There arenumerous other parallels to English borrowing in Japan, including:transliteration; phonological transformation; and that loanwords havereached almost every aspect of Korean life It is noteworthy that mostEnglish loanwords in Korean, e.g kola (cola), kopi (coffee), plaet-fom(platform), cham-pu (shampoo), ais-krim (ice cream), taeksi (taxi), wiski(whiskey), nait-klop (nightclub) and koktel pati (cocktail party), also exist

in Japan’s more extensive loanword lexicon

For a start, similarities between native language and target languagevocabulary can reduce the time needed to develop good readingcomprehension (e.g Odlin, 1989), and enhance motivation and con-fidence (e.g Ngeow, 1998; Pea, 1988), both of which are crucial forcontinued learning

Most students of English in Japan are at a relatively low level in theirstudies For such learners, intralingual cues are unavailable, as they lacktarget language knowledge concerning phonology, orthography, mor-phology and syntax (Palmberg, 1987) Contextual cues are likewiseproblematic as such interpretations are biased by sociocultural percep-tions Fortunately, Japanese can draw upon their previous languageknowledge, particularly the phonological and orthographic correspon-dences that arise through borrowing

Because of the vast number of English words that have beenborrowed, the Japanese have access to countless potential cognates,which include high-frequency and academic words English loanwords

in Japanese are a built-in lexicon of English words learners have yet toencounter Unfortunately, the role of L1 in L2 acquisition has beenactively neglected in Japan

An Investigation

When two distant fields of research are linked, often remarkablepossibilities are revealed Such an important link pertains for Japaneseindividuals learning English On the one hand, much has been writtenabout the importance of certain types of English vocabulary, such ashigh-frequency and academic words On the other hand, there are anenormous number of English-based loanwords in Japanese What if theJapanese are already familiar with many of the most important words ofEnglish, due to the English-based vocabulary stored in the Japaneselexicon as gairaigo ?

This book is divided into four parts The first part will introduce theborrowing of English into Japanese and the modern generation ofgairaigo The second part will attempt to resolve the ‘paradox of cognates’and clarify the effect of loanwords in Japanese on the learning of English.The third part will examine the common loanwords in Japanese that arebased on high-frequency and academic English, and attempt to assess thequality of these cognates The fourth part will focus on the barriers toJapanese learners of English in utilising their L1 resource, particularlytheir ability to extend borrowed word knowledge within English wordfamilies The epilogue presents some general principles and concretesuggestions about how to make use of gairaigo in teaching

Japan offers a prime example of lexical borrowing, which relates tothe important phenomenon of language transfer (in second and foreignlanguage learning) Many of the characteristics of lexical borrowing inJapan, and its effects on L2 learning, can be found elsewhere in the world;inquiries regarding my research on Japanese loanword cognates haveincluded those from English teachers in Malaysia and Rwanda Swahili, forinstance, has imported a substantial number of high-frequency loanwordsfrom English, mainly key concepts in modern society such as hospitali(hospital), sukari (sugar) and tikiti (ticket) (Ringbom, 2007) Moreover,because of the wide influence of English vocabulary throughout the world,

a Tanzanian learning Finnish, for instance, will be aided by the Englishwords (e.g doctor) that exist in both Swahili (e.g daktar ) and Finnish(e.g tohtori ) (see Ringbom, 2007: 79, 121)

The insights gained by examining language borrowing in Japan can beapplied wherever language contact has occurred and foreign languagesare learned

Part 1

Japan’s Importation of English

Chapter 1

The Assimilation of English into

Linguistic Overview

Languages have always been greedy As seen in ancient Coptic codicescontaining Hebrew loanwords, virtually every language has from time totime increased its vocabulary by borrowing from other languages Still,Japan has distinguished itself by the scale and alacrity of its borrowing,and foreign words have had an immense influence on Japan’s languageand society

In the following two chapters, we will examine gairaigo
the Westernloanwords, which are integral to Japanese First, let us examine thehistorical context of Japan’s borrowing, and its linguistic repercussions,beginning with the arrival of a remarkable visitor

Japan’s First Native English Teacher

Ranald MacDonald, Japan’s first documented native speaking teacher

of English, is among the most important figures history has overlooked.According to biographer Schodt (2003), MacDonald was born in 1824 inthe Oregon Territory, the son of a Chinook Indian princess and aprominent Scottish official MacDonald grew up with tales of exotic andforbidden Japan, whose castaway sailors were occasionally rescued byAmerican whaling ships; because of Japan’s draconian policy ofisolation, such hapless Japanese were forbidden to return to theircountry MacDonald got the outlandish idea of becoming a castawayhimself to enter Japan, despite the danger of being executed in the terranon grata

In 1845, shunning a comfortable life as a clerk, MacDonald became asailor in America’s burgeoning whaling fleet After three years at sea, atage 24, MacDonald embarked on what his ship’s captain described as a

‘wild and fool-hardy expedition’ (Schodt, 2003: 187)
having himself setadrift in a tiny boat off the coast of Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido.After feigning distress offshore, he was ‘rescued’ by aboriginal Ainu,who cared for him in their village However, MacDonald was eventually

9

reported to the samurai stationed nearby, who examined, interrogatedand incarcerated him He was next moved to Nagasaki, on Japan’ssouthern island of Kyushu; here was the only port where the governmentpermitted limited trade with the Dutch on a tiny artificial island in theharbour.

MacDonald was again examined and interrogated, and forced to step

on an image of the Virgin Mary to prove he was not a Catholicmissionary Then MacDonald was imprisoned in a small room of a localtemple Several American sailors who had deserted their whaler werealso being held in Nagasaki; two would perish in captivity

MacDonald, however, was well treated, for not only did his captorssee him as bold, affable and well educated (he had arrived with a trunkfull of books), the authorities were desperate to learn English In order toconduct trade with the Dutch, a contingent of professional interpretersresided in Nagasaki With American and British influence in the outsideworld growing, several interpreters realised their need to learn English.MacDonald became their teacher, and for seven months regularly taught

a group of 14 from his confinement One of the interpreters, EinosukeMoriyama, became his friend and later played an important role innegotiations when Commodore Matthew Perry and the legendary ‘BlackShips’ forcefully ended Japan’s isolation in 1853

After 10 months in Japan, MacDonald was released to the Americanwarship USS Preble, which had approached Nagasaki to retrieve thedeserters and attempt (unsuccessfully) to open trade relations Thepositive impression MacDonald made on his captors likely influencedJapan’s later relations with the USA Certainly, MacDonald’s serendipi-tous arrival in Nagasaki inaugurated English education in Japan

Thereafter Japan gradually turned its attention to the English world
with, it turns out, some affinity In 1854, George Henry Preble,1 whoaccompanied Commodore Perry’s second expedition to Japan, to receiveits reply to US demands for trade, wrote:

They have a great aptitude at catching English sounds and ask theAmerican name of everything they see, and so pick up a vocabulary

of our language (cited in Miller, 1967: 266)

Contact with Americans was at first limited to designated Japanese atisolated trading posts such as that in Nagasaki However, following the

1868 Meiji Restoration, the Japanese rushed to introduce Western cultureand technology, eventually including a vast number of words

Japan’s Borrowing of English

Historically speaking, English during the first few centuries followingthe Norman invasion (Miller, 1967), or perhaps Polish after the fall of theSoviet Union (Arabski, 2006), are among the few languages that havebeen as hospitable to loanwords as Japanese Japanese contact withEnglish began more than 200 years ago, contact with other Europeanlanguages goes back 500 years and heavy linguistic borrowing fromChina preceded that Although Japan experienced no colonisation and isgeographically isolated, loanwords have long been a feature of Japanese;the Japanese language has undergone a number of periods of massiveborrowing, mostly from Chinese (including thousands of Chinesecharacters) English words have become especially important sinceWWII, and these loanwords have become genuine parts of the Japaneselexicon, found in daily conversation and the world of letters

The variety of words in Japanese

English-based loanwords coexist in Japanese with various types ofvocabulary The three major types of words in Japanese by origin are:native vocabulary (wago); Sino-Japanese vocabulary (kango ); and Westernvocabulary (gairaigo) Other noteworthy words are those of Ainu(indigenous Japanese) and Korean origin The first major languageborrowing was from Chinese, which continued over 1500 years Mostborrowed words in Japanese are of Chinese origin, however theirnumber has remained relatively constant while Western-based words(i.e gairaigo) have greatly increased (Shibatani, 1990) According to an

1859 dictionary, 60% of words were Sino-Japanese, but by 1956 this haddecreased to 47.5% as the total number of contained words nearly tripled(Park, 1987) Indeed the flow of language from the Middle Kingdom haslong ago ceased, and American English is the overwhelming source ofnew words

In Japanese, among Western languages, English is dominant Theperiods of borrowing of Portuguese, Spanish, Latin, Dutch, French andGerman predate the large-scale borrowing of English, and many of thesewords still remain in the active Japanese lexicon Yet whenever aloanword from another European language competes with an Englishword, the English word usually prevails (Miller, 1967) For example, bettofrom German bett (originally used in Japanese for a hospital bed)has been replaced by beddo from English bed Occasionally, competingloanwords give rise to a choice of synonyms and collocations (Kay, 1995);

for instance, gurasu comes from English and refers to a glass for drinking,while garasu comes from Dutch glas and refers to the material.

Among borrowings from the West, the portion of English loanwordshas grown to dominance this century: between 1912 and 1925, 51.9% ofgairaigo came from English and in 1964, 80.8% (Shibatani, 1990); in 1968,87% (Seward, 1968); and by 1975 about 90% (Yazaki, 1975; cited inKimura, 1989) The recent explosion of konpyuuta tekunorojii (computertechnology) has accelerated this trend

The growth and number of Western loanwords

The steady growth of Western loanwords following CommodorePerry’s historic visits can be seen in Japanese/Japanese dictionaries.The 1859 dictionary Genkai already contained 551 loanwords, constitut-ing 1.4% of the total words (Shibatani, 1990) About one century later, the

1956 Reikai Kokugo Jiten contained 1428 loanwords, about 3.5% of itscontent, and by the 1989 dictionary Nihongo Daijiten , 13,300 items or 10%

of words, were of Western origin (Tomoda, 1999) Since the end of WWII,loanwords have been the driving force in Japan’s lexical expansion Forinstance, 60
70% of the new words in the annually revised dictionary ofneologisms, Gendai Yougo no Kiso Chishiki (1980), are Western loanwords(Honna, 1995)

The expansion of loanwords is not limited to dictionaries In the 1960s,one study of Japanese magazines found that 4% of words were ofWestern origin (Seward, 1968), while another estimated that 10% of theJapanese lexicon consists of non-Chinese and non-Japanese words, notincluding hybrid elements, which make up an additional 6% (Loveday,

newspaper rose from 2.5% in 1952 to 10.1% by 1997 (Oshima, 2004: 93).And in conversation, one estimate found that 13% of words used wereloanwords (Honna, 1995: 45)

The absolute number of Western words borrowed into Japanese isextremely high Specialty dictionaries devoted to gairaigo typically list20,000
30,000 loanwords and can exceed 50,000 One dictionary with52,500 loanwords, published in 2000, contained 45,000 loanwords written

in katakana and 7,500 written in the original Roman alphabet (MacGregor,2003); the first edition of this dictionary, published in 1972, containedonly 20,000 loanwords

However it is virtually impossible to establish the number ofloanwords Besides the fast pace of borrowing and their often ephemeralnature, there is a problem of standards The distinction between a

recognised loanword and an English word appearing in katakana isambiguous Specialised loanword dictionaries vary greatly in size,usually in accordance with publishers’ wishes General dictionaries are

a better measure of a loanword’s bona fide acceptance into the overalllexicon, but also involve arbitrary criteria And while the rather exclusivedictionaries of ‘common’ loanwords ostensibly apply the stricteststandards for loanword selection, in reality, authors tend to be quitesubjective in their methods (see Daulton, 2001) In the end, howevercomprehensive a dictionary is, it will fail to include the newestloanwords, and however exclusive a dictionary is, some portion ofloanwords will be obscure to the public

Considering that Japanese and English are linguistically unrelatedlanguages
remote in origin, space and culture
that around 10% ofthe Japanese lexicon is of English origin is astounding Conventionalwisdom explains this phenomenon by crediting Japan’s legendary knackfor adapting foreign ideas and technology; however, this overlooks thecrucial role of the Japanese script katakana

Katakana and Borrowing

Japanese uses a variety of scripts, and among those katakana hasallowed Western words to be easily incorporated into Japanese Japan’snear-exclusive use of a unique script for borrowed words may be unique

in the world

The scripts of Japan

The Japanese use a complex mixture of orthographic forms; the typical

‘Japanese’ orthographic systems can generally be divided into kanji

Kanji means literally ‘Chinese characters’, and is a meaning-basedscript (logography), wherein one character represents the meaning of awhole word or morpheme Thousands were imported from China beforethe 8th century when Japanese had no writing system Kanji stronglyinfluenced the subsequent creation of kana

Kana is a sound-based system where the mora (i.e a short syllable)rather than the phoneme is the basic unit For instance, the loanword

(friend; more commonly tomodachi ) is written in four kana thatcorrespond to the Japanese morae furendo The two types of kana,hiragana and katakana , were formed in the 8th and 9th centuriesrespectively (Uchida, 2001a) Each contains 46 basic letters (71 with theuse of diacritics, used for voicing) In contrast to the round shape of

hiragana (e.g ), katakana (e.g ) has bold and simple lines Asloanwords are written almost exclusively in katakana , they are distin-guished at a glance from words of native Japanese or ancient Chineseorigins.2

Most of Japanese writing is a combination of kanji and hiragana withoccasional appearances of katakana In general, kanji are used for contentwords of native Japanese origin (i.e wago), or for various words ofChinese origin (i.e kango ) Hiragana is used for some content words,most of which are of native Japanese origin, as well as grammaticalfunction morphemes (i.e inflections and particles) Kanji is generallypreferred to hiragana , partly because knowledge of kanji reflectsintellectual ability and because logographic kanji is semantically moretransparent than syllabic kana However, as hiragana has near universallegibility, (most) candidate names on election posters, for instance, arewritten in hiragana An average sentence consists of about 65% hiragana ,

25
30% kanji and 4% katakana (Taylor, 1981), with Roman numbers andthe Roman alphabet appearing sporadically While Roman numbers arefar more common than their Japanese counterparts (written in kanji), themost common use of the Roman alphabet is in marketing (e.g magazinetitles and numerous shop names), and in graphic design (e.g productnames and on T-shirts)

Although the principal use of katakana is for foreign words and foreignnames, it has a diverse variety of uses Other applications include: a widerange of proper nouns; onomatopoetic expressions; the texts of tele-grams; some colloquial forms; many non-loan plant and animal names;and emphasis (Seeley, 1990) On the other hand, a few Western loans such

as tabako (tobacco) are so integrated into Japanese that they are written inhiragana and are thought of as native Japanese words (Takashi, 1990).Japanese children learn these four scripts in school At the age of six,they learn the basic hiragana and then katakana Kanji education beginsimmediately after katakana , lasting until age 18 because of its difficulty Inthe fourth grade of elementary school, two years before Englisheducation starts, the Roman alphabet (known as rooma-ji ) is taught.3Prior to the end of WWII, foreign ideas were typically adopted into theJapanese language by loan translation Under this system, calques werecreated with the Chinese kanji that either captured a foreign word’smeaning or simply provided a phonetic equivalent For example, airport

is calqued as kuukoo ( ), which comprises one kanji for air and one forport However, the national policy at the request of the AmericanOccupation Forces was to promote literacy and democracy by limitingthe use and education of kanji, indirectly leading to the demise of the

system of loan translation (Honna, 1995) Furthermore, it was decreedthat Western loanwords be encoded in katakana , greatly encouraging thecreation and use of loanwords.4

Katakana allows any foreign word to be borrowed into the Japaneselanguage, even on a temporary basis, making the loanwords immediatelylegible to even monolingual Japanese Using katakana to transcribeforeign words is far more convenient than creating new combinations

of Chinese characters, which would require a consensus or officialapproval before coming into general use

It gives any individual the ability and freedom to write an Englishword in native script, without having to assign or learn charactersfor it, nor know its spelling in the original (Kay, 1995: 72)

Transcription is typically based on the sound of the English word, andany foreign word can easily be transcribed into katakana

Another way to view the use of katakana is as an aid to literacy, such ashow italics in English alert readers that a word is foreign However, nomatter how widely used a Western loanword in Japanese becomes, withfew exceptions, it will always be written in katakana , whereas French de´ja`

vu, for example, is so widely used in English as to no longer requireitalics (or French accent marks)

The linguistic segregation of gairaigo (literally ‘words from outside’)caused by katakana is not stigmatising Indeed, katakana was originallychosen to represent loanwords because of its higher prestige historicallythan hiragana , having been used to notate Buddhist scripture (Loveday,1996) The result is not a linguistic apartheid , but a clear compartmenta-lisation of the two cultures, instilling confidence in the integrity of thenative language (see Kay, 1995) This partially explains why there hasbeen very little attempt to limit the number of gairaigo

Occasionally Western loanwords appear in their original, Romanalphabet form, and the use of all capital letters is common Some areabbreviations written in the Roman script, for example the innovative

pronounced as if they were written in katakana , that is, ooeru and shiidii

An acronym such as GATT, too, is pronounced as a Japanese word, gatto.English words appearing in their unchanged Roman alphabet formoccurs in the media and particularly as graphic design elements Theseare typically decorative, sometimes misspelled, and usually not clearly

understood Various mixtures of katakana and the Roman alphabet canoccur as well, such as ING (‘golfing’) For a listing of the basickatakana and their English equivalents, see Appendix 1.

The Transformation of English to Japanese

Like expatriates ‘gone native’, English words are greatly transformed

by Japan Compared to English loanwords found in languages such asFrench and Dutch, those in Japanese undergo much more drastic changescrossing the considerable linguistic distance It follows that for nativespeakers of English, English-based loanwords are indecipherable whenwritten and typically incomprehensible when spoken Former Ambassa-dor to Japan Reischauer commented:

It is pathetic to see the frustration of Japanese in finding that Englishspeakers cannot recognise, much less understand, many of theEnglish words they use (cited in Shibatani, 1990: 150)

In addition to the obvious change to Japanese katakana , major changesinclude: phonological transformation; shortening and other morpholo-gical changes; hybridisation and coinage; grammatical transformations;and semantic change

Phonological transformation

Typically around the world, loanwords are initially marked as foreign

by retaining close to their original pronunciations and spellings; bycontrast, English loanwords in Japanese are phonologically transformedand almost always transliterated

Such changes are stark as the phonological system of English andJapanese are quite different; English utilises a much larger inventory ofphonemes and permits quite elaborate consonant clusters, which areabsent in Japanese English vowel and consonant sounds absent inJapanese must be represented by rough Japanese equivalents Thisprocess has both consistent and systematic elements, and irregular andinnovative ones as well Moreover, as Japanese is a consonant/vowel(CV) language, consonant clusters are broken up by the insertion ofvowels (a process known as anaptyxis or vowel epenthesis ), and finalconsonants and consonants coming at the end of syllables are generallynot allowed Thus English becomes ingurishu

The degree of phonetic deviation often depends upon whetherloanwords were originally borrowed from the spoken or writtenmedium While phonological transformation based on aural input tends

to resemble the original English (e.g takushii corresponding to taxi), alarge number of gairaigo have been adapted based on their written form,which results in pronunciations quite dissimilar from the original (e.g.sutajio for studio).

As Japanese lacks many English phonemes, it sometimes fails to makevarious important distinctions, resulting in homonyms that only exist inJapanese For the Japanese, a word form such as rinku ( ) has twodistinct meanings that correspond to English rink and link Otherexamples are: raito (light and right); korekushon (collection and correc-tion); furai (fly and fry); hooru (hall and hole); and besuto (best and vest).Once assimilated, pronunciations of English words are quite resilientvis-a`-vis native models The general public seldom attempts to imitatenative English pronunciations

In short, most Japanese seldom or never hear spoken English; they

do not attempt to pronounce English words, and they do not borrowEnglish words They pronounce them the way they hear thempronounced on radio and television, and they spell them the waythey see them spelled in the popular press, that is, as fullyassimilated Japanese words with a minimum of departures fromthe sounds and sound sequences and spelling principles thatcharacterise native Japanese words (Quackenbush, 1974: 64)

Although there is generally consensus over the katakana spellings ofloanwords, alternative phonological forms occasionally persist with,notwithstanding, a tendency to move closer to the original English givenwidespread use (Hatch & Brown, 1995; Seeley, 1990), such as nyuusu(news) changing to nyuuzu

A remarkable development in modern Japanese is the general andofficial (since the 1980s) acceptance of innovative combinations ofexisting katakana that enable foreign words to be pronounced moreaccurately New combinations include: as in sherifu (sheriff); as

in tisshu (tissue); and as in viza (visa) Many changes are too subtle

in iesu (yes) Some newer innovations such as (va ) are rarely used,

well established These innovations reflect the desire among someJapanese for a more accurate reproduction of foreign sounds; they beginwith the youth and intelligentsia, and can eventually become part of themainstream phonological system of Japanese (see Uchimoto, 1994)

The most obvious morphological change is shortening (sometimescalled clipping or truncation ), where usually the most semanticallyimportant morphemes are all that remain of the original word Short-ening can occur as soon as an English word is borrowed or later on.Although abbreviations can occur in English (e.g perm, perp), they arefar more abundant in Japanese

Loanword shortening is common because loanwords tend to beawkwardly long When English words are assimilated into Japanese,all spoken consonants except ‘n’ must have a vowel attached to them tomake a proper Japanese syllable, thus the fast food franchise ‘McDo-nalds’ becomes ‘makudonarudo’ Because each mora in Japanese takesabout the same length of time to pronounce, in theory, pronouncingsutoraiku takes five times as long to say as strike (Uchida, 2001a) Backclipping is the most common means of shortening, and other examplesinclude depaato (department store) and masukomi (mass communication).Fewer words have their first syllables cut, such as hoomu (platform) andneru (flannel), and rarely middle syllables are omitted, as in boorupen(ballpoint pen)

There are more varieties of shortening When a phrase consisting ofseveral morphemes is borrowed, grammatical morphemes tend to beomitted, for instance ‘-ed’ or ‘-d’ as in condensu miruku (condensed milk).Meanwhile, in truncated compounding , which is also common for nativeJapanese words, two shortened loanwords are combined, as in paso-kon(personal computer) and han-suto (hunger strike) Another form ofshortening is abbreviation Examples include: OL (‘office lady’); PR(public relations); OB (‘old boy’); and CM (commercials) Most of theseabbreviations, such as OL (pronounced ou-eru ), are Japanese coinages,incomprehensible to non-Japanese

Shortening can also lead to semantic confusion because of homonymy.For example, restaurant can be shortened to ‘REST’ in Roman alphabetsigns, such as ‘CAFE´ REST’ However, shortening simplifies thepronunciation of loanwords and facilitates their integration into Japanese

Hybridisation and coinage

The semantically transparent roots of Western-based loanwords can bequite productive in coinages, and Japanese affixes are easily applied toforeign words

Hybrids (also known in English as loanblends and in Japanese askonshugo) are formed by combining Western words with native Japanese

words and words of Chinese origin Hybridisations such as dai-hitto(Japanese big  English hit) and nouveau-dai (French new  Japaneseera) make compounds of European bases and Sino-Japanese nominalbases These hybridisations can also occur between different Europeanlanguages, such as bakansu-uea (French vacances  English wear) Theyinclude very common words such as that for an American personamerika-jin
‘-jin’ ( ) being the kanji affix for person.

Creative coinages using Western elements are common Newlycreated expressions combining existing gairaigo have been referred to

as ‘pseudo-loanwords’ (Stanlaw, 1987) One example is sukinshippu (skin

 -ship), denoting (normal) physical intimacy, usually between parentand child; however this is not a combination of skin and -ship, but rather

an original variation of the English word kinship Another example isbaajin-roodo (‘virgin road’), which refers to the red-carpet aisle trod by abride and her father in a church wedding It is in this realm that linguisticconfusion between native speakers of English and that of Japanese oftenpeaks, and such creations are derided as ‘Japlish’ or ‘Engrish’

Innovative compounding is increasingly popular, and it includesthree-part compounds such as hea-meiku-aatisuto (literally ‘hair andmakeup artist’) and hybrid compounds involving different scripts Japa-nese linguistics authorities do not always officially recognise such radicalforms, although they may become orthodox over time Innovativecompounding involves the ‘independent, creative, evolutionary rework-ing of transferred elements in order to meet local needs’ (Loveday, 1996:155)

Many English words in Japanese, indeed, occur only in compoundphrases Basic English words such as man, woman, boy, girl, baby, care,home, air, tree, sun and food, which have well established Japaneseequivalents, are not used on their own but are highly productive whencombined with other forms in Japanese such as sararii-man (‘salaryman’)and mai-hoomu (‘my home’)

Grammatical transformation

Most loanwords are nouns, followed distantly by adjectives Roughly90% of loanwords are nouns (see Honna, 1995; Loveday, 1996), which areeasier to borrow than other parts of speech as they do not require majorgrammatical modification such as nominal inflections for gender, person

or number As Japanese does not mark plurality, the absence or presence

of the English plural morpheme /s/ occurs arbitrarily, depending onwhether the originally transferred model was singular or plural

Examples of loanwords appearing only in the plural are shuuzu (shoes),sokkusu (socks) and taitsu (tights); examples of loanwords incongruentlyappearing only in the singular are sunikaa (sneaker) and sutokkingu(stocking).

The number of adjectives, adverbs and verbs borrowed are relativelyfew, and they require particular affixes (e.g -na , -ni , -suru ) to enter thesame inflectional paradigms as Japanese words of the same part ofspeech

Although the assignment of word class tends to correspond to theoriginal language, it can be freely changed when entering Japanese.5Anyword to be borrowed is treated as an uninflected noun or bound basethat does not belong to a word class, potentially convertible by means ofsuffixation (Loveday, 1996) Examples include how the English adjectivecool (not coolly) is borrowed and used as an adverb in ‘kuuru ni asoberu ’(‘to play coolly’) Grammatically speaking, the Japanese equivalents ofmany English adjectives are effectively nouns plus -na {as in ‘romanchikkuna’ (romantic)}, and the equivalents of many English adverbs are nounsplus -ni {as in ‘romanchikku ni’ (romantically)} These converting devicesare uniquely reserved for the grammatical integration of loanwords,making morphological changes unnecessary in the loan-bases

Practically any loanword can be verbalised This is done so easily byadding -suru , which some refer to as the ‘magic power of suru ’ (Sato,1995: 134) For example, the loanword noun enjoi (based on the verbenjoy) becomes ‘enjoi suru ’ (‘to enjoy’) Gerunds can be verbalised, as in

‘jogingu suru ’ (literally ‘to jogging’), and
as with enjoy, above
verbscan be (redundantly) verbalised as in ‘arenji suru ’ (‘to arrange’) Verbforms can also be obtained from nominal loan-bases by applyingJapanese verbs, as in ‘paama wo kakeru ’ (‘to perm one’s hair’)

Rarely loanwords are innovatively inflected in ways usually reservedfor native words This unorthodox suffixation is a favourite of non-standard registers such as youth slang Examples include ‘paniku-ru ’ (‘topanic’) and ‘nau-i ’ (now  adjectival inflection) A few other verbs donot require any affix since they naturally end with -ru sounds (afterassimilation), making them immediately compatible to the Japaneseinflectional system These include daburu , meaning ‘to double’ or ‘torepeat a year’, and toraburu , meaning ‘to meet with trouble’

borrowing (Arabski, 2006); Japan may have often been an exception tothis, as can be seen in the slogan from Japan’s 19th-century rush formodernity: ‘Western technology, Japanese spirit’ Indeed, some believethat it is the incomplete linguistic assimilation of foreign loanwordsthat allows Japanese traditional concepts and culture to be maintained(Kay, 1995) It would be difficult to find a borrowed word that hasretained exactly the same meaning or context of use as its word oforigin.

Words often take on adapted meanings to serve the needs of achanging society Loanwords are especially open to modification,both on entering the language, and with time One reason is that themeaning or usage of a word in its original language may not be fullyunderstood; nor need it be, as loanwords are used without reference

to their source words Another is that, with words of foreign origin,there is no deep cultural motivation to protect their originalmeanings The flexibility of form and meaning of loanwords enablesthem to adapt easily to the structure of the host language, andcurrent trends and needs (Kay, 1995: 71
72)

Loanwords are malleable and tend to shift meanings much morequickly than a Japanese or Sino-Japanese word (Miura, 1979), and themore Japanese come to use a loanword, the more its meaning(s) canevolve Some loanwords may stray farther and farther from the donorlanguage, while individuals familiar with English may use other loan-words in ways increasingly similar to the original (Kay, 1995) In mostcases, native speakers will experience confusion in Japan, as a fairlydetailed acquaintance with the intricacies of modern Japanese urban life

is necessary to fully understand loanwords

Semantic changes can be generally summarised into three types:

Semantic Shift: In extreme cases, the meaning of a loanword and theEnglish word on which it is based are completely dissimilar An example

is the loanword kanningu (cunning), which has the meaning of ‘cheating

on a test’ Such semantic shift is rare, although colourful examples areconspicuous

Semantic Restriction: Also know as ‘semantic narrowing’ or tic specialisation’, this phenomenon accounts for the loanword sutoobu(stove), which means only a room heater in Japanese, not a devicefor cooking Semantic restriction allows new cultural distinctionswithout expanding the meanings of existing words, as in Japanese

okaasan (mother) versus English-based mazaa , which refers only toCatholic nuns Semantic restriction is the most common type ofsemantic change throughout the world, as loanwords are usuallyborrowed to fill specific lexical gaps (Hatch & Brown, 1995).

than its original borrowed word The loanword handoru (from handle)has a variety of meanings in Japanese, from the steering wheel of a car tothe handlebars of a bicycle Semantic extension is relatively rare inJapanese

Semantic restriction and extension lead to cognates being convergent

or divergent, which will be discussed in Chapter 3

Subtler varieties of semantic change involve connotation or feeling.Semantic downgrading , or pejoration , can be seen in words like bosu (boss),which means the powerful head of a group of gangsters or politicians, oraisu (ice), meaning a usurer In semantic upgrading, positive connotationsare attached to loanwords for the purpose of ‘sociolinguistic profit’ or

‘impression management’ (Loveday, 1996: 202), which is often seen inmarketing Over time, loanwords can lose one connotation and evencome to hold the opposite

Conclusion

Today, there is no linguistic barrier to the absorption of foreign wordsinto Japanese Yet the transformations that English words undergo whenassimilated into Japanese effect their learnability We will see in Chapter

6 that the resemblance of English words and Japanese loanwords is quitesufficient for learning to be facilitated Before we address that complexissue, to more fully understand the nature of gairaigo , let us examine themodern process of loanword creation

Notes

1 George Henry Preble came from an illustrious naval family, and the mentioned USS Preble was named in honour of his uncle, Commodore Edward Preble.

above-2 Other features that mark loanwords as foreign are: the use particular affixes (i.e
na, -ni and
suru); certain sequences of syllables that are uncommon or unknown in Japanese; a larger number of syllables than is common in Japanese words; or innovative combinations of katakana created specifically to allow foreign words to be pronounced in a form nearer to their original.

3 Some believe the early introduction of the Roman alphabet is to the detriment

of later English studies; confusion results from children experimenting with the Roman alphabet in writing Japanese (Fukunishi, 2001).

4 Rarely, both systems are applied to a concept; for example, the early loanword Asia can be written either with three Chinese characters ( ) or phonetically in katakana ( ) (Kay, 1995).

5 The actual patterns of class conversion for Western loans today are extremely complex and idiosyncratic For a detailed explanation, see Loveday, 1996.

Chapter 2

Today’s Generation of Gairaigo

The process of gairaigo’s creation is bewildering Since WWII, Japan hasbeen inordinately disposed to borrowing words from English, eclipsingthat from other European languages Particularly in the areas of popularculture and science, borrowing has accelerated New loanwords tend to

be used indiscriminately, and most are not well understood and faceobscurity or eventual extinction Nevertheless, the minority of loanwordsthat reach the linguistic mainstream is sufficient to maintain and expandthe already vast gairaigo lexicon in everyday use

This chapter presents an overview of the modern mechanisms ofgairaigo generation For perspective, it will begin with brief etymologies

of some noteworthy loanwords Next, the borrowing and dissemination

of gairaigo will be examined, with a focus on its key player
the massmedia A study of the Mainichi newspaper reveals the development ofloanwords in vivo , through nonce borrowing and idiosyncratic usage Asfor the public’s response to the massive influx of English, individuals’comprehension, acceptance and usage of loanwords varies Yet we willfind that the vitality of loanwords is such that they can coexistredundantly with Japanese words and even come to replace them

The two fates for a loanword according to Loveday (1996: 78) are: ‘ .Either integration and acceptance into the community code or rejectionand oblivion’ Well established loanwords enjoy prominence in dailyconversation and print, and in some cases further adjustments inpronunciation, morphology and semantics However most loanwordsspend tenuous lives confined to large gairaigo dictionaries Indeed, themajority of English words ever borrowed have, in the words of Motwani(1991: v), already decayed into ‘trite, ineffective expressions not basic tothe Japanese lexicon and everyday speech’ To understand how a givenloanword can be created and evolve, let us examine five noteworthyexamples (see Maeda, 2005).1

24

Aisu-kuriimu
life is sweet

Ice cream was first sold in Japan in the summer of 1869, in swelteringYokohama, as kouri-gashi (‘ice sweets’), a name that gained notoriety forbeing homonymous with ‘loaning money at a high interest rate’ In 1888,the famed sweets company Fugetsudo began selling ice cream in thefashionable Ginza district of Tokyo, followed by another company in

1899 Thereafter, ice cream spread throughout Japan and came to beknown as aisu-kuriimu and for a while aisu-kuriin (‘ice clean’) in its low-fat version

On 6 December 1904, Mitsui Clothing Shop changed its name andbegan offering a wide variety of goods and services Soon ‘MitsukoshiDepaatomento-sutoa ’ (department store) earned a reputation for superiorquality and service In the 1910s and 1920s, the nomenclature wasshortened to depaatomento and later simply depaato However, thisimported business model did not proliferate until the late 1920s and1930s, when many depaato flourished and came alternatively to be known

as hyakkaten , which literally means ‘a hundred shops’ Both words arecommonly used today, although depaato is preferred in conversation

In a 1956 Aichi Toyota public relations magazine, editor HaruoHamaguchi coined the expression mai-kaa (‘my car’) to refer to andpromote private car ownership, a new phenomenon Then in December

of 1961, Professor Yoshihiro Yoshino of Ritsumeikan University in Kyotowrote the best seller entitled Mai-kaa, which drove the expression toprominence The expression mai-kaa christened a social revolution,leading to today’s ‘mai-kaa-shakai ’ (‘my car society’) with over 50 millionprivate cars on the road

Amid the social unrest of the early 20th century, an English/Japanesehybrid was created to express ‘to urge to action’ The stem of the Englishnoun agitation was spliced to a Japanese verbal affix to produce theconjugatable verb aji-ru At first, aji-ru was used only in reference to thelabour movement However on 1 September 1931, aji-ru was featured in

an Osaka Asahi Shimbun newspaper column on popular neologisms; atthis point, it was also said to mean ‘to encourage’ and ‘to encourage with

praise’ Ironically, the student protest era of the 1970s saw the demise ofaji-ru and it is linguistically extinct today.

American teachers introduced baseball to Japan in the 1870s Variousnames for the sport competed, including tama-asobi (‘ball play’), teikyuu(‘bottom ball’), and even dakyuu-onigokko (‘hitting ball demon’), but aftermany seasons only beesubouru (baseball) was retained However, in 1893

a particular baseball club introduced yakyuu (‘field ball’) in the title of itsclub history, and this appellation went on to win the title of baseball.Thereafter in a slump, beesubouru was benched as the Pacific Warapproached and all English was banned from the game Still today,yakyuu is the authorised name of Japan’s most popular sport, althoughbeesubouru left retirement to become a pinch-hitting alternative Count-less more foreign players have been brought back, such as sutoraiku(strike) and houmuran (homerun), and fresh additions to the lineupinclude naitaa , coined by a reporter three years after the first night game

in 1948

The Modern Borrowing of English by the Elite

While gairaigo literally means ‘words that came from outside’, two lesscommon but descriptively accurate expressions are kariirego (literally

‘words borrowed in’) and shakuyougo (‘borrowed words and terms’).Indeed, English words do not infiltrate the Japanese language by theirown initiative but are ‘borrowed’ by someone However, linguists canseldom identify who precisely created a loanword Indeed, it may besurprisingly common for loanwords to be introduced simultaneously orsuccessively by unrelated individuals What can generally be said is thatelite groups in society, those in the government (e.g bureaucrats andlawmakers), academia (e.g translators and researchers), and particularlythe media (e.g copy-writers and journalists), are the main actors in theflood of new gairaigo (Loveday, 1996; Tomoda, 1999) A typical borrowing

is unilaterally carried out by what Quackenbush (1974: 60) calls ‘a verysmall number of individuals’ Indeed, most people have never heard ofthe English word before:

Words like these do not ‘filter into’ Japanese
they are createddeliberately and sprung on an unsuspecting public (Quackenbush,1974: 66)

The tendency is to borrow from English rather than other Westernlanguages.

The activity of these elite borrowers has led to various levels of lexicalpenetration For illustration, the percentage of loanwords amongtechnical words (i.e jargon) for certain academic fields is summarised

in Table 2.1

It can be seen that while the academic fields on the left are dominated

by loanwords, those to the right are linguistically conservative bycomparison In very conservative fields, such as law and politics, theonly loanwords used consist almost entirely of hybrid compounds(Loveday, 1996), combinations of foreign words with native ones Despitethis, a survey conducted by NHK (Japan Broadcasting) found that out of

a sample of 11,835 names of local government projects, 25.2% containedgairaigo (Mogami, 1984; cited in Tomoda, 2005) Within a given field,there is some variation among branches; while economics is a ratherconservative field (see Daulton, 2006), monetary and financial economics

is dominated by loanwords such as hejji-fando (hedge fund)

Regarding loanwords in secondary education, the Vocabulary Survey ofJunior-High School Textbooks (Kokuritsu Kokugo Kenkyuusho, 1987; seealso 1986) examined four science books that covered physics, chemistry,biology, geology and astronomy; and three social studies textbooks thatcovered politics, economics, geography and history, and found that 10 ofthe most frequent 330 words (3.3%) were English-based The mostfrequently appearing words were amerika (America), igirisu (England)and then furansu (France)

Although mostly nouns relating to material items are borrowed, thosefor abstract concepts are increasing Moreover, there is an increase in theborrowing of other more-difficult-to-understand English words, such asverbs, adjectives and phrases (Tomoda, 1999)

Adapted from : Loveday (1996)

In regards to Japan’s uninhibited borrowing of English, many linguistsrefer to the principle of ‘total availability’:

Since the end of World War II, and particularly during theoccupation of Japan by English-speaking troops, total availabilityhas been exercised Today any English word is fair game forJapanization (Park, 1987: 34)

This is as true for public speaking as for writing Typically borrowinginvolves a kind of codemixing, where a single foreign word
usually a

Grosjean, 1982) However, when Junichiro Koizumi visited the site ofthe World Trade Center terrorist attack, the mediagenic prime ministerincluded in his statement to the Japanese press verbatim English phrasessuch as ‘haato-bureikingu ’ (‘heart breaking’) and ‘ui masuto faito teror-izumu ’ (‘we must fight terrorism’) to emphasise Japan’s solidarity withthe USA (see Rebuck, 2002)

Although English words and phrases are typically borrowed to filllexical gaps such as in kechappu (ketchup) and CD-pureiyaa (CD player),they have myriad uses Activists electively introduced the loanwordssutoukaa (stalker) and domesuchikku-baiorensu (domestic violence) to drawattention to pre-existing social issues (Rebuck, 2002) English-likeexpressions are used as well; bureaucrats coined ‘safety driver’ (in theRoman alphabet) to promote ‘anzen-unten ’ (‘driving safely’) (Seaton,2001)

English words are borrowed not to create vocabulary, per se , but toachieve a goal, such as promoting a product or idea Thereafter, aborrowing gains foothold in the lexicon if more individuals exploit it fortheir own purposes Eventually, a loanword can snowball into promi-nence through the proverbial 800-pound gorira
the Japanese massmedia

The Dissemination of Loanwords by the Media

Once a loanword has been conceived and launched, it is the massmedia, more than the government and academia, that is able todisseminate it Itself a borrower, Japan’s mass media is technologicallyadvanced and far reaching Japanese watch more television than evenNorth Americans, the Internet is exploding, literacy is universal andbookstores thrive New loanwords are adopted by media personnelaccording to their usefulness and promoted to the extent that they can be

further exploited Meanwhile, an underground of utilitarian loanwords(e.g scientific terminology) circulates largely out of the mainstream.

Anglicisation of the mass media

Some new loanwords fill lexical gaps the public had been unaware of,such as puraibashii (privacy) did for premodern, community-centredJapan, and cutting-edge technical jargon such as nanotekunorojii (nano-technology) does today

Anglicisation is intense in the mass media The National LanguageResearch Institute (Kokuritsu Kokugo Kenkyuusho, 1995; 1997) exam-ined the words used by the six major television networks from April toJune of 1989 It found that 64 of the most frequently spoken 1186 words(5.4%) were either a loanword or were a hybrid with English; the topthree were amerika (America), terebi (television) and then nyuusu (news).Among written words (e.g those used in graphics), 38 of the mostfrequent 492 words (7.7%) were or contained a loanword; the top threewere puroduusaa (producer), ‘nihon terebi ’ (literally ‘Japan Television’, thename of a network) and then ‘GIANTS’ (the name of a baseball team,appearing in the Roman alphabet) By contrast, while Western scientificterminology such as arukaroido and saikurotoron can be passivelydisseminated by mass media channels, its currency tends to be asrestricted as alkaloid and cyclotron are in the English world

Shibatani (1990) found that loanwords accounted for a substantialportion of words used in newspapers as well The distribution of nativewords, Sino-Japanese words, loanwords and hybrids in the newspapersfrom 1971 examined is summarised in Table 2.2

Tokens are every occurrence of a word, even repeated, and types areunique words Loanwords (including borrowing from all Western

Adapted from : Shibatani (1990)

languages) constituted 4
6% of tokens, and a more consistent 12
12.7%

of types It should be noted that ‘hybrid’ in this study included not onlycombinations of Western and native words or Western and Chinese-based words, but also combinations of native and Chinese-based words.Around the world, the three typical reasons lexical items are borrowedare: new political and economic situations; technological developments;and new lifestyles (Arabski, 2006) This generally pertains in Japan aswell, even where English and English-based loanwords are used mostconspicuously and intensely
in marketing However a distinctivefeature of Japanese marketing is that the actual use of gairaigo isessentially decorative and discourages comprehension

English and loanwords to serve the consumer society

The typical Japanese person encounters most new loanwords
andmany English words
through marketing and advertising, where theyare prominently featured Takashi (1990) reported that 22.3% of wordtokens in a sample of print advertisements were classed as gairaigo Firstcontact is usually written, sometimes spoken, but seldom both Loan-words are typically transcribed into the bold, angular katakana , givingthem a visual quality that is modern, foreign, hip and cutting-edge.Alternatively, English can be transcribed in the original Roman alphabetliteratim as in ‘SALE’ and innovatively as in ‘I feel Coke’ Both katakanaand the original Roman alphabet enhance the attention-grabbingpotential of English, making it an effective tool in promotional strategies.The majority of Japanese live in crowded urban areas, where citizenscan be efficiently bombarded with advertising through what Rollins(1999) refers to as ‘ TV screens, billboards and subway car interiorslike societal wallpaper’ The market for goods is highly competitive, andmarketers aggressively and innovatively appeal to consumers Because

of its ubiquity and appeal, marketers exert a strong impact on theshaping of future colloquial Japanese

The activity of the mass media in disseminating new terms,coupled with almost universal basic English-language education,has resulted in a rapid absorption of new gairaigo (Tomoda, 1999:251)

When marketers use or adapt loanwords, they take advantage of thepublic’s superficial knowledge of basic English

The collective energy and time spent by more than sixty millionJapanese who compulsorily studied English for six years is truly

enormous, and it must certainly have been useful for something Ipropose that it has been used for facilitating the influx of Englishloans into Japanese (Honna, 1995: 59)

Marketers generally draw from the basic English to which all Japanesepeople have been exposed When the public meets the new loanword,their knowledge of the corresponding English word is activated throughinterlexical activation
regardless of phonetic similarity (see Tamaoka &Miyaoka, 2003) This makes the resulting brand names and advertisingtext more memorable

The public’s typically vague understanding of English allows aloanword to be used quite flexibly Indeed, the value of loanwords andforeign words often depends on their obscurity; loanwords’ intrinsicnovelty helps marketers break through the advertising clutter, andloanwords’ obscurity engages the imagination Therefore, the intellig-ibility and intrinsic meanings of loanwords are often knowinglysacrificed, and the writer’s motto in Japan could be stated as: ‘Let thereader beware’ (Miller, 1967: 245)

Particularly in advertising, we find numerous instances of not lexicalborrowing, per se , but decorative language mixing and switching toappeal to people’s emotions and influence consumer behaviour A recent

the first kana (i.e katakana character) of the rather obscure loanwordinsupireeshon (inspiration) was replaced with the Chinese character fordrink, in- ; the resulting enigmatic expression is unlikely to spread faroutside the advertising campaign.2 In a study of advertising, it wasfound that 45% of loanwords were such ‘special-effect givers’ and 23%demonstrated another sort of decorative use
brand names {e.g ‘Rigein’(regain)} (Takashi, 1990: 330
331) As for other classifiable uses ofloanwords, 16% were lexical gap fillers {e.g pen (pen)}, 13% technicalterms {e.g fakushimiri (facsimile)} and 0.5% euphemisms {e.g basuto(bust)} Because of how marketers use loanwords, the language of themass media can be considered a special variety distinct from colloquialJapanese (Haarmann, 1984)

From the stereotypes the Japanese hold, each foreign language evokesspecific connotations English words suggest that products have apractical use, are of high quality and enjoy international appreciation(see Haarmann 1984; 1986), thus they are used to introduce cars, stereos,sportswear, alcoholic drinks, and so on Similarly, it is common forforeign models and celebrities to appear in advertisements Some arguethat the images Japanese individuals hold of English speakers is much

more favourable than those held by English speakers towards them(Seaton, 2001).

The degree to which marketers expose the Japanese to gairaigodepends on demographics and interests For instance, Takashi (1990)found more loanwords appearing in advertisements directed towardsstudents than towards business workers and homemakers, with nonotable difference relating to gender The fashion-conscious and/orinternationally minded (e.g wine drinkers) are more likely to encounterEnglish and gairaigo in advertising than the conservative and/ornationally minded (e.g sake drinkers)

The Development of Loanwords

After dissemination through mass media channels has begun, words attain some level of intelligibility with the public At first, because

loan-of the speed loan-of borrowing, their obscure nature, and that they are notwritten with meaning-based Chinese characters, new loanwords oftenexist at or beyond the public’s level of comprehension Some are neverincluded in even the loanword dictionaries ranging to around 50,000entries

The obscurity of loanwords can persist In 1973, the Japan casting Corporation (NHK) conducted a survey of the comprehension offoreign loanwords (cited in Shibatani, 1990), and of the 100 loanwordspresumed to be widely known, about 40% were misunderstood by halfthe respondents In a follow-up survey, NHK tested the recognition andcomprehension of 15 of the most commonly used words in the media.While the average recognition rate was 77%, only half were actuallyunderstood, showing that people were not always familiar with even themost frequently used loanwords and did not necessarily understandthose they claimed to know Moreover, Daulton (2001) found the

Broad-‘common’ loanwords in two loanword dictionaries (Kamiya, 1994;Motwani, 1991), partially collected from mass media sources, were farless established than presumed; even when tested among universitystudents, arguably the group most adept with loanwords, an average of16.5% of loanwords were not well understood

If the litmus test of a loanword’s dissemination is how well the publicunderstands it, the efficacy of the mass media is unclear On the onehand, the most radical and active use of loanwords, e.g by marketers,has limited effect among the public, whose needs involve lexical gaps forconcrete objects On the other hand, although new loanwords are oftenperceived with but vague comprehension, the media’s use of them can