Innovative Japanese Borrowings in English

要旨

Innovative Japanese Borrowings in English Garland Cannon .Before the 20th century, neologisms recorded in English-language dictionaries consisted chiefly of transfers from other languages, either as phonetic loans like the 1553 bonze (< F but ultimately < Jp bonso, now bozu), or as some sort of translation like the 1876 Arita ware (< Jp Arita-yaki). During the medieval period and the Renaissance , there was large-scale borrowing from the classical languages and the Romance descendants of Latin, but with steadily decreasing reliance on foreign elements to expand the word stock. An analysis of 13,683 neologisms added to English much more recently (the last four decades) has shown that loanwords now total only about 10 percent of new English words. That is, existing elements now furnish almost all of the needed constituents, even though many of these are naturalized forms of earlier borrowings into English, e.g., hologram (< holo- + -gram; Cannon 1987, 252). Japanese, like English, is heavily composed of elements borrowed from other languages, and its vocabulary has probably undergone the largest transfer (both quantitative and proportional) from English of all modern languages. During the Meiji period (1868-1912), Emperor Mutsuhito's systematic westernization of Japanese ideas and culture stimulated radical but serious suggestions that Japanese was a dated language and was retarding modern industrial development. So English should be adopted as the national language to move Japan into the modern world. Today "Japlish" flourishes throughout Japanese culture: in the media, there are the television program Ekusaito Naita 'Excite Nighter' and the weekly magazine Friday. Some of the Top Twenty hit songs in Tokyo have English names (McCrum, and others 1986, 43). This article shows that recent transfers from Japanese into English are reflecting such prior English influence on Japanese and are thereby creating large questions about the very concept of borrowing. Innovative Japanese Borrowings in English91 Lexical and other elements are likely to be transferred between two languages in contact, and such borrowing is apt to expand as the people who speak those languages gain more influence in the world. The history of Japanese-English lexical interrelationships exemplifies this principle, with a rise in the number of loanwords as the two peoples engaged in more interaction politically, militarily, commercially, and culturally. The number of Japanese loans in English has increased steadily since 1940 (Cannon 1981, 1994c). Fennell's Stanford Dictionary (1892) indicated that Japanese had given English only 27 items by 1892 and was in 22d place in the list of foreign sources, with Latin in first place and Spanish in fourth place. By 1987, however, Japanese and Spanish were tied for second place among recent suppliers, but trailing far behind French (Cannon 1987). The tabulated 276 English neologisms of Japanese provenience outnumber the 227 items of Spanish origin, to make Japanese the second most productive modern supplier and slowly gaining on French (Cannon 1994b). Donald Smith (1974) proposed three types of language contact between Japanese and English. First, Japanese English (produced by Japanese speakers) consists of English that is heavily influenced by the phonology, grammar, and lexicon of Japanese. Instructions that come with Japanese products are well-known examples of Japanese English. A parallel variety of English Japanese is not notable mainly because so few English speakers learn the language of Japan. Second, English words are borrowed into Japanese with various degrees of phonological and morphological adaptation. Twentiethcentury examples are English demonstration borrowed as demonsutor ëshon and then clipped to demo (which English borrowed back about 1964 as a reinforcement for the English demo, neologized by 1936; Matsuda 1986, 52), and mass communication borrowed as masukomyunik ëshon. A comparable recent example from Ja

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