German loanwords in Japanese
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Did you know there were German words in Japanese?!
I wonder how the Japanese words would’ve been pronounced if all those loanwords came from English instead of German. All of the words mentioned here are very similar in English (except for arbeit) , but English pronunciation is different so I wonder how that would’ve affected Japanese pronunciation of those words if at all. I know there’s a ton of English loanwords in Japanese too tho
You’re wrong… All those words (except arbeit) don’t come from English language but initially from French language !
@ricmag4183 that’s not in question here. But they came to Japan from contact with Germans. The pronunciation is clearly originally German.
It’s possible…not much tbh. Probably the most likely thing to happen would be something like エネルギー (enerugii) would be エナージー (enaajii). So any “ar”, “er”, “ir”, or “or” would be an elongated vowel instead of pronouncing the r.
@@ricmag4183thats is not what they said at all, infact they already said that the words came from the german language
@@Zarugoza5969 エナジー exists in Japanese.
There are also a significant amount of Japanese medical words that have been taken from the Dutch language!! Dutch can be pretty similar sounding to German but is a very different langauge.
Also Portuguese loan words in Japanese, for very similar reasons as the Dutch.
@@kitcuttingI think パン /pan/ for bread is one right?
Full video on Japanese linked under username🎯
I always knew there were a lot of these from German, but I never realized all these words I always figured came from English actually came from German. That explains why some of them have a bit more deviated pronunciation than I would have expected
And don’t forget that the majority of those words come initially from the French language !
Energie, vaccin, gomme (gum), etc.
Years after learning German as my 3rd language this “discovery” was fun when leaning Japanese
That is sooooo cool!😊
I also happen to speak German as well.
One mistake you sometimes see from Japanese English speakers is “ice burn” for icy road, when in fact アイスバーン comes from the German Eisbahn
As a German this is the first time I have heard of “Vakzin”. we usual call it Impfstoff.
in german u don’t like new words, u either call them “stoff” (stuff) or “ding” (thing) or “zug” which means $h!t in saudi arabia
I’ve heard Vakzin many times, especially in media
@@zyadmackawy6469 aehm no. not all cause they are “new”. Stoff means “material” here. its the vaccination material. as ‘to vaccinate’ is ‘impfen’, ‘vaccination’ is ‘Impfung’. so it makes.
same for the other words, though i could explain them with any examples you have.
also: do u know how many loanwords we have? or new words we come up with, where most dont have those parts?
btw what do you mean? the word ‘sht’ or that they mean nothing? in the latter case: different kinds of languages go about in different ways. you cannot always translate all parts 1:1 and you would rarely do that.
Great video, Paul! It’s interesting to point out that a significant portion of western loanwords in Japanese also come from Dutch as well, likely due to the Dutch being the only foreigners the Japanese would trade with during Sakoku. The Japanese word for ‘German’, “doitsu” actually comes from the Dutch ‘duits’.
Other than that, arukooru (alcohol), buriki (blik, a tincan), karan (kraan, a faucet), supoito (spuit, a syringe), chifusu (typhus), shian (cyaan/cyan) and yojiumu (from jodium, aka iodine) are all words that derive from Dutch.
Also koppu (I believe it is derived from kop in Dutch)
One of my favorite strange Japanese loan words is the country “Mexico”, pronounced in Spanish as roughly MAY HEE KOH, which could have been taken directly into Japanese. But nope, they turned the English pronunciation, MECK SIH KOH, into MAY KEE SHEE KOH, which grates on my ears.
Or at least did when I learned enough Japanese to travel. Maybe they’ve corrected this since.
many german probably dont know, that the what joghurt comes from turkish “yoğurt”
Apart from Arbeit all of these loanwords are also loanwords in German (from Latin, Greek, Turkish etc).
X2
I don’t know if there is a way to trace those Japanese words specifically to German when they are in fact quite widely used in other languages too. Maybe based on historical evidence and chronology… 🤔
Interesting.
バウムクーヘン, Baumkuchen, litterally tree cake, is another one. This German cake and its name were adopted early on by the Japanese. It is considered as a delicassy. One of my biggest suprises in Japan. In a mountain village bakery, I recognized the name as German but didn’t know the cake yet. I found it later in Germany.
Yea, they’re really popular in Japan.
Yes this is true of all foreign words used in Japan, Katakana , the script you are using, was developed purely for foreign words entering their language. It was and is a means of protecting their language from foreign influencers.
So that’s why Japan call German Doitsu
they do sound like they could be borrowings from English, but sometimes the hard G and the vowels make it more clear
funfact. These words are also borrowed words in the german language :D. Most of them have a greek or latin origin.
Good, they loaned the most importent german word; Arbeit.