http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/f...128cz.html

"For example, take the loanword sekuhara, formulated from two English words "sexual" and "harassment." Unflattering concepts such as "sexual harassment" are often expressed in English, ostensibly to distance them from Japanese culture. Sexual harassment is alive and well in Japan, however, and has nothing to do with the English language nor the people who speak it. There are many other words like this, including eizu (AIDS), ecchi (the English "H" but refers to eroticism, i.e.: pornography) and tero (terrorism) all of which give English a bad image. There is a linguistic libel suit brewing here.

Such blights on the English language and culture get the ire of those of us who speak English as a native language in Japan. After all, the Japanese language could make up its own word for "terrorism." It strikes me as politically incorrect to associate such concepts solely with English, a minority language in Japan."

The overall tone of the article is joking, but I thought the above point was interesting. Are they humorously exaggerating or would you say a high percentage of loanwords reflects the above quotes?

Related topic: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...9#pid68689 (A link to this interesting essay: http://appling.kent.edu/ResourcePages/Co...lution.htm)

I think it's an exaggeration for the sake of humor. Though there is a large percentage of oversensitive gaijin in Japan who like to get their panties in a knot over anything. I don't think the Japanese maliciously choose to use "bad" words specifically from English, it's just that English is one of the most dominant and universal languages in the world.

I personally think there are bigger things in life to worry about.

I expect the term セクハラ comes from from the outside world (ie. english speaking world) because the concept of having laws dealing with it was also imported. We don't call sashimi sliced raw fish or karate weaponless fighting. エッチ comes from 変態 by the way.

Wait, Terror is a Latin term, right?

You'd have to have a screw loose to take the quoted passage seriously, or to think that the sample of "negative" loanwords given there was at all representative of the pervasiveness of English loanwords in the Japanese language. English loanwords cover a huge range of concepts, from the everyday to the highly technical, and it won't take long in studying the language to realize that there is no preference for loanwords with so-called negative connotations. Sometimes the loanword has a scholarly connotation, other times a childish one. Other times, English is simply used for creating acronyms.

The ~50k database of loan words is an extremely extensive list of every single loan word ever seen written down. The amount of loan words in actual permanent circulation are much less. The OED contains roughly 60 million entries, again the most exhaustive and extensive dictionary we ever have on the English language doubt we use all that 60 million though.

What they're saying is interesting and not surprising, but honestly, most Japanese people I've met don't have any idea where most loanwords came from.

Its exactly the same with Japanese loanwords in the western world. Kamikaze and Harakiri are never nice to look at and Judo/Karate are known as special techniques for brutally beating people to death (I heard).

It's funny, precisely because I don't like them, I try to avoid loanwords a bit too much when learning Japanese. Also, since apparently there's so many IT loanwords I doubt, as liosama says, they're in common parlance. In fact, their mutual indecipherability seems to be the common trait. At any rate, it made me stop to think. All of a sudden, every loanword that came to mind seemed to have a negative connotation. Coincidence?? Next you'll tell me that if I go outside and look for blue cars, it'll just be a coincidence if I spot a bunch of them! ^_^

But in all seriousness, the psycholinguistics of loanwords is fascinating, isn't it? Any good books on the topic?

What about all the good words they take, like Cool, Happy, Smart, Fun, etc?

Stealing our personalities!

I'm sure if you looked you could make the same argument about English adopting French words.

shadysaint Wrote:I'm sure if you looked you could make the same argument about English adopting French words.

In the silky words of the Matrix's Merovingian...

shadysaint Wrote:I'm sure if you looked you could make the same argument about English adopting French words.

Depends on how you make the argument. There are a lot of loanwords from French that have to do with the legal system, some even left strange footprints on our grammar, like attorney general and court martial, which are some of the only examples where the adjective follows an English noun. The words jury, felon, judgment, sue, plead, accuse, slander and adultery are a small handful of examples. You could take something like this and cast French loanwords in the same "negative" light.

But there are far more French loanwords for the most banal items. Tens of thousands of them. (As is the case with English loanwords in Japanese). Words like bucket, calendar, grain, ocean, people, noise, use, brown, blue, mail, cherry, sugar, forest, ceiling, dinner, physician, dozen, cry, reply, the list goes on...all these came into English from French, yet most people would never suspect it.