Posted on 04/27/2003 4:28:26 PM PDT by Timesink
Sunday, April 27, 2003 at 06:00 JST
TOKYO — The National Institute for Japanese Language proposed Friday that the government avoid using 59 English or English-like terms in their Japanese-language documents.
In its first completed report, the institute's panel listed the 59 terms which it had selected out of 62 samples it examined and offered Japanese-language expressions to replace them, except for "normalization," for which it failed to find a Japanese phrase.
The panel conducted a survey on public recognition of the sample terms and decided that only three — "impact," "care" and "day service" — were suitable for use in Japanese-language documents.
The 59 terms include "informed consent," "delivery," "second opinion," "barrier free" and "lifeline."
The panel compiled the final report after conducting the public recognition poll based on an interim report it issued in December on the 63 terms.
The panel, comprised of academics, translators and media representatives, plans to compile a second interim report in July on 58 more sample terms.
The institute is affiliated with the Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Ministry. (Kyodo News)
Well, you're a fine one to talk about arrogance (2 r's, by the way), when you start telling the Japanese how to talk. You are also crude, rude and bigoted as well, when you mention trailer parks in that tone. Have you ever tried to drag a hundred dollar bill through a trailer park?
It's also rather arrogant, and ignorant too, when you don't know that "The French Disease", in this context, means the obsession of government to tell all Japanese speakers how they must speak the language.
I expect that it will work in Japan about as well as it does in France. Also about as well as the laws passed in this country in the early to's to convert all highway signs to kph, and the law that all television stations must broadcasting an HD television signal by 2000, I think it reads.
Why are you so indignant about it, anyway? Do you teach Japanese language courses?
Gonorrhea?
Slainte,
CC
This has nothing to do with what the people can and can't speak or even write. It has to do with the government using words in its official documents which do not occur in their (Japanese) dictionary and which the general populace probably doesn't understand correctly and for which Japanese words exist. If for some reason the U.S. government started using Spanish lingo and then started using Spanish words in official documents when equivalent English words were available, conservatives would be in an uproar. This has absolutely nothing to do with what advertisers can and can't say.
drapeau blanc - white flag
capitulez - capitulate
aide et confort - aid and comfort
Additional concessions to the French will be made by using these easy to remember rules:
Your argument does not hold.
While most of these words do have Japanese equivalents, most young Japanese people still use the loan words.
Yes..you are correct. But since most of the words are English loan words, it's easy to get used to expecting the word to be English. So I get stumped when I am reading a Katakana word or phrase, trying to figure out what it is, only for my instructor to tell us it is a Dutch word!
That's a name, not a word. Nevertheless, it's not only the Japanese who have problems of this sort. I learned a few years ago that in Gaelic one cannot put certain consonants together. It came together when I heard a friend (from Gaelic-speaking Scots) unable to pronounce the name "Cathleen." It always comes out "Cath-a-leen."
And if you think native English-speakers don't have this problem, go study Russian. (Or Gaelic.)
I never thought about that before. I am going to have to bring that up to my Japense instructor.
There are so many oddities in the English language that never occured to me until I started taking Japanese.
For one, why do we say "one cat"....there can only be "one cat" so why do we use the word "one" in front of the singular word "cat"? You'll never have "two cat" or "three cat".
Also, it must confuse the heck out of foreigners learning English when we pluralize some words and not others (e.g.: deer)
I remember - like arubai (arbeidt - for part-time job) and Abekku (avec - for boy/girlfriend) - or maybe they don't use those anymore. (I haven't been back to Japan for a few years.)
Any ASIJ alumni around here?
Learning English can be a real son of a bitch. Take pronounciation, for instance. A famous author, I can not recall who, once pointed out that one can spell 'fish' as 'ghoti' if one assumes the 'gh' in the word 'enough,' the 'o' as in the word 'women' and the 'ti' as in the word 'fiction.'
First of all, I am not telling the Japanese how to speak. As for the number of r's in a word, we all make typos, however, it's usually those who point them out in mid-debate who appear the most "arrogant" and "ignorant". My tone towards trailer parks is contextual. Your attempt to frame me as a bigot has no merit in that I don't hate people who live in trailer parks, I am merely aware that they are, on average, much less likely to be educated. If you have some facts disputing that, then I will apologize and use a different slur.
In addition, I think that if you reread the article you will understand that this is not about what the Japanese people can or can't say, but what language the Japanese government should use in its documents.
Rather than getting into some huge spin-off debate I will simplify my 2 points. 1: It is arrogant for Americans to condemn foreign governments for trying to preserve their language and culture. 2: Jinglish may be the cool thing to speak on the streets of Tokyo, but it has no business being co-opted into government documents.
I wonder how many of you on this forum would go totally ape-sh!t if you surfed over to the congressional archive website and saw "Dis law be to give da peeps props." or "The presidente shall aparezca himself before this escritorio uno time in every mes..."
Nice strawman, but hardly equivalent. English has swallowed thousands of foreign words whole. What ought to be wrong is the use of an entire foreign language in official documents. But there should be nothing wrong with adopting a foreign word that conveys an idea for which there is no single word in the mother tongue.
What Japan wants is equivalent to insisting the President's menu at his ranch be listed as 'melted cheese on toasted unleavened flour bread' rather than 'quesadillas.'
It is absurd to protest the enrichment of a language with foreign words that convey a concept not already captured by one word in the mother tongue.
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