re: #19 wheat-dogg, raker of forests, master of steam

Japanglish lesson

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Video

Lyrics are in the comments. For example: スターバックス Sutabakkusu (Starbucks)

They do the same thing in China, transliterate foreign words into Mandarin. It takes a while to learn how to reverse the process to arrive at the original word or name. For example: 星巴克 xing ba ke (Starbucks) Though in this case, the Chinese name replaces “star” with its Mandarin equivalent “xing” and uses “ba ke” to phonetically replace “buck.”

That was fun. About twenty years ago there was a government memo demanding that agencies cut back on the use of English loan words, but the memo itself was chock full of English loan words. Common English names usually end up getting shortened. So Sutabakkusu becomes Su-ta-ba, Makudonarudo becomes Makudo, etc.

There are so many Chinese tourists in Japan now that it makes me wonder if English will sometime become a thing of the past.