So i got curious if you guys have another word for cake i saw it was keki? Or something but is there any other words or has it always been called keki?
It kinda sounds like something gotten from the English language and turned into japanese
Checked translator subreddit but this does not fit there since im curious about past history of what the word cake used to be called if anything
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You’re absolutely correct. In Japanese there’s three types of “alphabets”. kanji, which comes from ancient Chinese characters, hiragana which was created based off kanji, and katakana which is used to create Japanese words that are suppose to be words from abroad. I don’t know the history of cake, but the word “cake” was introduced from Europeans. That’s why we use katakana and sprinkle a Japanese tone to it, to say ケーキ(keki).
Ps funny enough, there are Chinese characters that sound like “cake”, 元気菓子, but rarely will people use that.
Japanese uses a lot of loan words from other languages.
My favorite is パト (Pato) which comes from the Spanish word for duck, but in Japanese it means pigeon. There’s also パン (pan) which means bread in Spanish as well as japanese.
To answer your question, a lot of loan words do have Japanese counterparts. The first example that comes to mind is 牛乳 (gyuunyuu) which means milk. A lot of times they’ll just say ミルク (miruku) which is literally just the English word “milk.”
I’m no expert on Japanese culture but I suppose they use the loan words a lot because it’s different or cool sounding to them.