Watch Japanese people try to speak without using English words

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Originally published at: Watch Japanese people try to speak without using English words | Boing Boing

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What’s their word for anime?

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Remembering interview, decades ago, on UK Radio4 where somebody asked, challenging the usefulness of Gaelic in the modern age, ‘so what’s Gaelic for spaghetti bolognese?’.

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Pretty sure you can’t speak any English without hitting a loan word as that’s pretty much the whole of the language.

I really enjoyed that video as it was enlightening to see how the different people reacted to the question. The older people vs the younger people was the most notable. The woman who spoke near the end who said that the older generation wouldn’t think it odd if someone didn’t use loan words, but that the younger people would notice it and think it odd was particularly insightful.

Thanks for the video, Mark.

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“I think there will be more tourists in 2020…”

That didn’t age well.

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My ex-MiL is Polish, and she would talk with her sister in Polish some times. As for “what people sound like”, Polish to me is a lot of shza, cha, and pshh sounds. So they would be talking away and then suddenly you would hear “blue jeans”.

“Ah! I know that word!”

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You can speak English without using French-derived (or Latin, etc), and it won’t even sound weird, as long as you restrict yourself to discussions of elk-hunting and the like.

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There are a few ways you could express it. こまどり would work, and not only avoids English-derived words, but also Chinese-derived words, which is much harder in Japanese.

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Oddly, it seems that there’s a bunch of people in Japan who’ve learned Welsh. (I wouldn’t be shocked if Hayao Miyazaki, who’s a big fan of Wales, was one.)

Feh, it didn’t make the text, but it’s in the podcast. (Starting at 37m.)

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How about Kaiju?

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A similar task would be asking American’s/English to talk without using a French word. Something like 30% of English comes from French, though some of them have changed over time to sound different.

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Been wondering, if you are a native Japanese speaker, how easy is it to learn Korean and vice versa?

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Kaiju (怪獣) is Chinese-derived Japanese; it came into English along with Ultraman etc. There is a yamato-kotoba word for ghost or monster, 化け物 (bakémono).

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Fear dúr…

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You may be taking me too literally.

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Wouldn’t be the first time I did that.

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The difference is that most loan words used in Japan are from the post WWII era, within living memory. French has had a thousand year head start.

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Didn’t they get a lot of words from Portuguese before then?

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Old joke:

Two men, moderately proficient in Yiddish, were lamenting the fact that there are Yiddish expressions that you can’t translate well into English. Furthermore, there were some English words that cannot not be easily translated into Yiddish. One man said to the other, I have difficulty finding a Yiddish word that adequately conveys the concept of of the English word “disappointed.” His friend said, “My mother speaks only Yiddish. I’ll find out from her how to say disappointed in Yiddish.”
The man goes to his mother’s house and say’s “Mama, you know that I always come over for Shabbos dinner every Friday night. How would you feel if, one Friday, I called and said I wouldn’t be coming over for Shabbos?” The mother replied, “Oy! Ich’ll zein zayer disappointed!”

(And yes, there evidently is a Yiddish word for “disappointed”: entoisht.)

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Now do Bollywood