Re: I'm back, sort of

Isidora Zamora wrote:
> I got used to it, but I found it strange to hear "TV" and "computer" in the
> middle of Danish sentences.
I find English loans in Japanese to be rather unsettling sometimes.
Other times rather amusing.  I find it more amusing when it's in an
informal context (say, a song), and sometimes quite depressing when it's
in a more formal context (like, when I saw _kyanpasu raifu_ - campus
life - on the Osaka U. web page - kyanpasu I can understand, but
_raifu_?!)

> "How do you say 'economic depression' in Danish?"  "Økonomisk
> depression," came the answer.  I didn't know whether to feel stupid
> or amazed.
The thing with some English loans in Japanese is that they're so heavily
mangled that they're hard to recognize.  :-)  And the original English
is often unintelligible to the Japanese, too.  For example, "orange
juice" is "oreenji juusu".  A friend of mine who once visited Japan told
me about a time when she was at a restaurant and asked for "Orange
juice", and the waiter had no idea what she meant until she used the
form _oreenji juusu_  :-)

--
"There's no such thing as 'cool'.  Everyone's just a big dork or nerd,
you just have to find people who are dorky the same way you are." -
overheard
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