A question about the japanese language:
Lately I have been watching a bunch of japanese movies (with subtitles, I don’t understand any japanese). What I noticed was anglicisms for words that I wouldn’t classify as particularly “english”.
At first, I thought that this was only about words for things that didn’t exist in japan until the recent past.
But for example: In one movie a guy said “I’ll show you my collection now”, and he said “collection”, which clearly sounded like the english word.
Is this just a thing in movies, or is this a thing in everyday-japanese as well?
“Collections” probably existed in Japan way before japanese people met english speaking ones. What did they call it before that?
2 comments
This is a thing in IRL Japanese as well. I don’t think there’s any particular deep reason; English just finds a way to weasel itself into any language because of its influence.
There’s a whole class of words in Japanese called 外来語 (gairaigo, literally “came from outside words”) that covers loanwords from other languages, particularly English. The American occupation of Japan after WW2, as well as the resulting strong economic ties led to a lot of English words being borrowed into Japanese. A lot of common words, particularly for newer concepts, come straight from English, but a lot of words that already had a Japanese word ended up getting ported in too just because people started using it.
A good example is ミルク (miruku), or “milk”. There is a Japanese word for cow’s milk (牛乳 – gyūnyū), but people will often use ミルク to talk about the beverage.