How do loanwords appear in the Japanese vocabulary. If someone or some group decided to borrow a new word, how does it propagate to the rest of the population? Or are loanwords a regional thing?
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1+1 Interesting question. I don't really know. But I would imagine it works just like with any other language. Nowadays with social media, advertisements, news broadcasts, movies,... not to speak of nearly ubiquitous cell phones etc,... I would think new words could easily trend very quickly.– A.EllettCommented Jul 7 at 18:43
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This is an interesting question, but I don't think you can get any authoritative answer here, and arguably off-topic. I think you will have a better chance over at linguistics.stackexchange.com/search?q=loan– ed9w2in6Commented Jul 8 at 6:09
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1 Answer
Imagine how English has adopted loanwords from other languages, such as barista, tsunami, entrepreneur, siesta, guru, emoji, and so on. There's really no fundamental difference in Japanese.
Unlike some countries such as China, where a government authority actively controls the use of loanwords, Japan (as well as countries like the UK and USA) does not have such a system. There is no organization or person that can "decide" whether to adopt new words as loanwords. All new words spread through a natural process, and there is no distinction between loanwords and other new words.
New terms like element names or computer terminology often spread first among experts, while new food or sport names are popularized largely through media (including traditional mass media and SNS). Some words originate as slang among young people and gradually become widely used. While the individual processes vary case by case, loanwords do not receive any special treatment just because they are loanwords.
However, it can be said that Japanese is one of the languages with a strong tendency to readily accept new foreign concepts as katakana loanwords. For example, new food or sport names are rarely "translated" today. (This was different 100 years ago).
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What I find interesting in Japanese is the tendency to just loosely craft new "loanwords" based on what something could have been called the origin language (but actually is not), e.g. キッチンカー (food truck), バージョンアップ (software upgrade), エヌジー (failure, no good), and so on. Commented Jul 8 at 3:15
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I don't think China "controls loanwords" in a manner any more than (say) what Académie Française does for French. Chinese in general just prefers loanwords coined as calques rather than what Japanese and Korean does; that way of borrowing words results in words like 德謨克拉西 ("democracy") and 賽因斯 ("science"), which are simply awkward in Chinese and abandoned long ago. Even Taiwanese doesn't use bopomofo in this way.– dROOOzeCommented Jul 8 at 19:39
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1@dROOOze - I've been curious to know who decides how a person's name should be written, like 特朗普 or 川普 for example. Commented Jul 8 at 21:18
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1@aguijonazo Mainland China generally refers to a giant phonetic table for transliterating sounds for their official media (popular media may, but usually doesn't, deviate from this). The result is longer, very systematic (kind of like Japanese), and also more like the original language than Taiwan's transliteration. Taking the example of "Trump", 特朗普 (PRC) demarcates Tr explicitly (like トランプ), whereas 川普 (Taiwan)'s style would be more like チャンプ. Taiwan does have an official system, which I believe is more systematic, but media are very likely to deviate from it.– dROOOzeCommented Jul 8 at 22:18
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@dROOOze I was under the impression that 国家語言文字工作委員会 and Académie Française play roughly the same role, but if you say they're different, I'm sure you're right. But what about new words that are neither transliterations nor calques? 手球 and 门球 are obviously calques but 羽毛球 is not, right?– narutoCommented Jul 9 at 9:44