Loanwords in Japanese

8 Loanword phonology

“…[ɔ] → /a/ sak.kaa 'soccer', ka.ku.te.ru 'cocktail' Table 1 gives a summary of English lax vowels and the Japanese vowels that basically correspond to them (see Irwin 2011 for a more comprehensive discussion). It is worth adding here that English [ae] after velar stops, i.e., [k] and [ɡ], tends to enter Japanese with the palatal glide /j/: e.g., /kjat.to/ 'cat', /kja.ra.me.ru/ 'caramel', /kjan.pu/ 'camp', /gjan.gu/ 'gang', /gja.gu/ 'gag' (Quackenbush and Ohso 1990: 56;Irwin 2011: 97).…”

Prosodic size and rendaku immunity

“…81-93), accentuation patterns in compounds (Tsujimura and Davis 1987;Kubozono and Mester 1995;Alderete 1999), loanword clipping (Itô 1990;Loveday 1996, pp. 138-152;Irwin 2010), reduplication in mimetics (Poser 1990, pp. 94-95;Hamano 1998, pp.…”

“…In reality, however, the phenomenon cuts across the vocabulary strata to hugely varying degrees: it occurs with only exceptional rarity in FJ (Vance 1987, p. 141;Takayama 2005, pp. 178-181;Irwin 2010); with a frequency of approximately 10-20% in SJ (cf. (1c) where the second element is SJ), depending on whether the SJ element is a binom (Vance 1996, p. 25, App. 2) or a mononom (Irwin 2005, pp.…”

Loanwords and Pragmatic Competence

“…Lexical borrowing across languages has been a common practice ever since there has been language contact among people of different linguistic backgrounds. For example, there was language contact between Japanese and the Jesuits who spoke Portuguese during the Iberian period, the first epoch of loanword history in Japan that lasted for approximately 100 years from the middle of the 16th century (Irwin, 2011). In spite of the minimal amount of contact with other languages that people in Japan have and have had, the scale of lexical borrowing in Japanese is comparable to that of English (Irwin, Butterfield: Loanwords and Pragmatic Competence 2011).…”