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Gairaigo are Japanese words originating from, or based on, foreign-language, generally Western, terms.These include wasei-eigo (Japanese pseudo-anglicisms).Many of these loanwords derive from Portuguese, due to Portugal's early role in Japanese-Western interaction; Dutch, due to the Netherlands' relationship with Japan amidst the isolationist policy of sakoku during the Edo period; and from ...
The modern Japanese writing system uses a combination of logographic kanji, which are adopted Chinese characters, and syllabic kana.Kana itself consists of a pair of syllabaries: hiragana, used primarily for native or naturalized Japanese words and grammatical elements; and katakana, used primarily for foreign words and names, loanwords, onomatopoeia, scientific names, and sometimes for emphasis.
Abbreviations are common in Japanese; these include many Latin alphabet letter combinations, generally pronounced as initialisms.Some of these combinations are common in English, but others are unique to Japan or of Japanese origin, and form a kind of wasei eigo (Japanese-coined English).
In modern Japanese orthography, ぢ (di) is only used in compound words where rendaku causes ち (chi) to become voiced, as in はなぢ (鼻血 hanaji "nosebleed"), and where it immediately follows a ち, as in ちぢむ (縮む chijimu "shrink"). Its use in rendaku is retained in order to avoid confusion about the origin of the compound.
'Kana' is a compound of kari (仮, 'borrowed; assumed; false') and na (名, 'name'), which eventually collapsed into kanna and ultimately 'kana'. [3]Today it is generally assumed that 'kana' were considered "false" kanji due to their purely phonetic nature, as opposed to mana which were "true" kanji used for their meanings.
Words of Japanese origin have entered many languages. Some words are simple transliterations of Japanese language words for concepts inherent to Japanese culture. The words on this page are an incomplete list of words which are listed in major English dictionaries and whose etymologies include Japanese.
Hiragana, the main Japanese syllabic writing system, derived from a cursive form of man'yōgana, a system where Chinese ideograms were used to write sounds without regard to their meaning. Originally, the same syllable (more precisely, mora ) could be represented by several more-or-less interchangeable kanji, or different cursive styles of the ...
' kanji for use in personal names ') are a set of 863 Chinese characters known as "name kanji" in English. They are a supplementary list of characters that can legally be used in registered personal names in Japan, despite not being in the official list of "commonly used characters" ( jōyō kanji ).