ベストカー: best car
デジイン: design
The first term was an advertisement for the coolest car of 2007, so it was understandable to use English as a draw. It sounds cool to have the title in words from English, even if there are words for "best" and "car" in Japanese. However, the second term was used in the credits for a show, and there are normal Japanese words for design. The use of design in Katakana confuses me. It was probably used for the name of a company, or else I would guess the word would appear in normal Japanese. Most likely, people just use Katakana when they see fit, and there are not such clear bounds as to when and where Katakana is used.
Therefore, I think that the textbooks disagree on their descriptions of Katakana because they all struggle with defining exactly where Katakana should appear. It is not exactly clear when Katakana should be used, and is most likely used simply at the disgression of the writer. It appears in phoenetics, names, onomatopoeia, and others. The authors make attempts to solidify what is in actuality a very fluid topic. Nevertheless, the large variations in where Katakana appears is extremely interesting, and is probably worth a study in and of itself.
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9 comments:
It can be somewhat confusing when terms with Japanese equivalents are expressed in katakana. Whether a word is expressed in katakana seems like an arbitrary decision and like you mentioned, there are no unconditional categories--except maybe loan words and onomatopoeia.
Yup, totally agree. I also said in my analysis that I think even Japanese people disagree about how to use katakana. It's very ambiguous.
“Most likely, people just use Katakana when they see fit, and there are not such clear bounds as to when and where Katakana is used.”
Strongly agree! That's the hardest part of learning a foreign language, I mean, native people just say it in that way, and you dont know why, and they dont know either...to make our japanese really good like native speaker, we not only need to learn alot in class, but also watch movie, listen songs ...do lots of things which may help you to get the sense of how they speak Japanese^
I guess it's one of those things that don't actually have rules, you just sort of get a feel for it eventually. Like "ox" and "oxen" vs. "box" and "boxen", who says it's supposed to be "boxes"? It just is.
Hi David,
This is Ai, a TA from your lab.
Your analysis is deep and interesting, and makes me think why 'design' became a normal Japanese word. It was probably because Japanese hadn't had an exact equivalent word before 'design' came from English.
I heard in a semantics class at TC that Japanese originally had fewer words expressing colors; therefore we call 'pink' 'ピンク' or just call colors of something, such as 茶色（ちゃいろ）. Although I doubt we Japanese didn't recognize many colors, it is interesting to think how language and people's notion are related each other.
ありがとうございます。
わたしのだいがくはりっぱですよ。
Your first example seems to be using katakana in order to be flashy. ベストカー is a much better catchphrase than 一番の車 or anything along those lines. As a minor point though, I think it is a valid distinction to make that the ad was using katakana, not English, as its draw. Japanese ads and the like do sometimes use English and also sometimes use katakana. I was having a discussion with some peers recently about katakana spellings that is on par with a lot of your observations, particularly the fact that the bounds of usage are unclear.
A good example to use would be your second example, デジイン. Oftentimes the way a word is katakana-ized is counter-intuitive or unnatural to English speakers and it is possible (indeed easy) to convert an English word into katakana incorrectly (like MacDonald's, which I will not even try to reproduce correctly here). When you do this you will be corrected by a Japanese speaker to the correct katakana word. This is because while English borrows words from other languages (and thus are pronounced correctly when they match their original pronunciation) Japanese makes these words into Japanese words and uses them as such. Thus ベストカー is not English but Japanese. I believe this is a major reason why the bounds are so unclear about katakana usage.
とてもおもしろいです。ありがとう、みなさん。
Equivalents are often difficult to find, as each place has its own culture and its own needs. English just has "I," but Japanese has multiple ways to say "I."
"Thus ベストカー is not English but Japanese."
-This amazes me. It is so English in every sense, yet it has been japanized (or however one wants to call it) and has become its unique own. I guess that is also the case for so many French words that have been incorporated into English. "Buffet" is a common term that we use and speak incorrectly every day, but by our standards, it is completely correct to pronounce that "u" as a short vowel, even though it should be long, and to pronounce the "et" as "ay" instead of "eh." おもしろいですね。
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