User:Kcumming/Update to Gairaigo page

This is a selected list of gairaigo, words originating or based on foreign language (generally Western) terms, including wasei-eigo (pseudo-Anglicisms). Many derive from Portuguese, due to that country's early role in Japanese-Western interaction, or from French and German, due to those countries' cultural and scientific prominence during Japan's modernization in the Meiji Era. However, most come from English, perhaps the dominant world language today. Due to the large number of western concepts imported into Japanese culture during modern times, there are thousands, possibly tens of thousands of these English borrowings.

Nonetheless, many are in fact pseudo-borrowings: despite their links to foreign language words, the word forms as used in modern Japanese are not used in the same way in their languages of origin.

In fact, many such terms, despite their similarity to the original foreign words, are not easily understood by speakers of those languages (e.g. left over as a baseball term for a hit that goes over the left-fielder's head, rather than uneaten food saved for a later meal as in English—or famikon ファミコン from "Family computer," which actually refers to the Nintendo Entertainment System).

It should be noted that the Japanese phrase arigato ("Thank you") does not derive from Portuguese (obrigado), as is erroneously claimed by some, but is instead a regularly-derived Japanese form.


 * Note:
 * US = American English
 * UK = British English

Gairaigo from languages other than English
This section contains examples of gairaigo from languages other than English.

External link

 * (Jp) List of Japanese words of French origin (Japanese Wikipedia)

Gairaigo 日本語における外来語の事例集