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English-based words in Asian languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| dostoyevsky Diglot Newbie Germany Joined 5600 days ago 9 posts - 9 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 1 of 5 28 July 2009 at 5:57pm | IP Logged |
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Hi,
I am wondering how foreign (mostly English) words are represented in other Asian languages. I am learning Japanese and kind of like their idea to try to approximate the English pronunciation of the word in Katakana syllables, this also comes handy when writing one's own name. Do other Asian languages like Mandarin, Cantonese, and Korean do this in a similar fashion or is the pronunciation in these languages more or less different from the foreign word? Eg how are terms such as "Profile" or "Wall" (like the Facebook wall) represented in Mandarin and Korean? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Linguistics Diglot Groupie Finland Joined 5628 days ago 59 posts - 62 votes  Speaks: Mandarin*, English Studies: German, Finnish | Message 2 of 5 28 July 2009 at 10:53pm | IP Logged |
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If a similar Chinese word exists and fits the idea, people tend not to "borrow" the foreign pronunciations, but since younger generations use the Internet more often these days, by looking at their "translations", I sometimes find it hard to decide whether I should laugh or cry.
Out of curiosity, I switched it to Mandarin, and it shows "Profile" as "ge ren zhu ye" (= personal profile), and "Wall" as "tu ya qiang" (= graffitti wall). It makes sense to me at least. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Choscura Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5548 days ago 61 posts - 82 votes Speaks: English*, Thai | Message 3 of 5 18 September 2009 at 8:47pm | IP Logged |
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Here (Thailand) some of the translations are so bad it's... well, engrish.com has a lot of stuff from Thailand. I'll say that.
The problem with borrowing words between languages is that you're not always borrowing the same idea for that word, or sometimes you borrow the same idea and give it the wrong word- the classic example of that here is the word "farang", or "foreigner", which is derived from the thai pronunciation of 'francois' during the first (official) interraction between the kingdom of Siam and the western world. For reference, "farang" is the thai word for "guava". EDIT: I should put in a better example. Mayonnaise (english) became "salat krim" (salad cream), and is used with sugar on lettuce or cabbage to make 'salad farang'. Edited by Choscura on 19 September 2009 at 4:49pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Captain Haddock Diglot Senior Member Japan kanjicabinet.tumblr. Joined 6768 days ago 2282 posts - 2814 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Ancient Greek | Message 4 of 5 16 October 2009 at 11:30am | IP Logged |
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One thing I've noticed is that when I'm translating Japanese documents to English (for work) and come across a
loanword from English, 90% of the time I have to translate it as something else completely in English. The Japanese meaning and usage has simply drifted too far from the original English and become a unique Japanese word in its own right. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Warp3 Senior Member United States forum_posts.asp?TID= Joined 5535 days ago 1419 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese | Message 5 of 5 16 October 2009 at 4:11pm | IP Logged |
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Korean does this a *lot* from what I've seen thus far. They convert many English loan words to Korean by creating a word in Hangul that simulates the sound (sometimes it ends up sounding a bit different, but is usually very close).
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