Hi all, please redirect me if this is not the right subreddit\~
I’m looking for terms originating in Japanese that went through cyclical reborrowing. The best one I have is 変態 entering English as *hentai*, being shortened to H and pronounced as the letter, returning to Japanese as エッチ and then back to English as *ecchi.* It’s a great example to showcase semantic changes as well but it’s not the most appropriate for academic discourse, so I’ve been wondering if someone here could give me a more suitable example.
4 comments
[https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%AC%E8%AA%9E%E3%81%8B%E3%82%89%E8%8B%B1%E8%AA%9E%E3%81%B8%E3%81%AE%E5%80%9F%E7%94%A8](https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%AC%E8%AA%9E%E3%81%8B%E3%82%89%E8%8B%B1%E8%AA%9E%E3%81%B8%E3%81%AE%E5%80%9F%E7%94%A8)
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maybe this list might help? Japanese- derived english terms next to their current japanese equivalent.
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I think the word “honcho” might be a good candidate for you.
😐📸
I think I can come up with some EN-JA-EN examples (such as “cosplay”), but JA-EN-JA seems to be a conundrum.
Btw as a native speaker I know the word エッチ has alrealy been in use in media such as movies and manga as early as 1960s, far before *hentai* came in use as a name for the porn genre. The word must have been directly derived from 変態, most probably first as a jargon for 変態 among girls.
The ISO 639-1 two letter language code for Japanese is “ja”. The three letter abbreviation is “jpn”.
In the future I suggest you stick with those instead of “jap” which many see as offensive: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jap