[rrradical]

Oh interesting. Japanese is like this. Many years ago it absorbed Chinese nouns, but more recently it has absorbed many English nouns.

Some Americans learning Japanese will regret this last part- wishing that the language stayed “pure”, as if it were ever actually pure, whatever that means.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> wishing that the language stayed “pure”, as if it were ever actually pure, whatever that

I have wished for consistency in every language I have ever learned or tried to learn, which I suspect is what "pure" would mean in this context. Imported words often use different roots and conjugate inconsistently, which makes it harder to remember and use them. (Though of course, as sibling comments point out, any living language will import from other languages; the only escape is in conlangs... but if you actually used those they'd get the same difficulty:])

[s1artibartfast]

Japanese is fascinating because they have an different alphabet symbolism for imported words. It has the same phonetics as native Japanese, but the written language distinguishes the origin.

[Dalewyn]

This is actually not entirely correct.

Japanese has three forms of writing: Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana.

Kanji, which stands for "Han Language/Characters", was imported from China; "Kan" is the Japanese reading of "Han". It's used more or less as when it was imported and is largely interchangable with Traditional Chinese.

Hiragana originated as a simplification of cursive Kanji, because people both today and from a few millenia ago find Kanji too complicated to deal with at times. Its name means "Simplified Kana", in contrast to Kanji.

Hiragana is used to accent Kanji and connect sentences together for better flow and comprehension (known as Okurigana), can be used by itself (sometimes in place of Kanji, especially for childrens writing), and is sometimes used to convey an image of cuteness ("kawaii") and femininity due to its curvy styling. Pronunciation guides for Kanji (known as Furigana), if present, are also written with Hiragana.

Katakana similarly originated as a simplification of Kanji, though its styling is more straight than Hiragana to enable easier writing with instruments besides brushes or pens on paper (eg: engraving in wood or stone). Its name means "Partial Kana", signifying that it's derived from the parts of Kanji characters.

Katakana is used today to write foreign words, scientific names (including Japanese ones), and certain Japanese names such as those of businesses. It's also used to give emphasis, like how bold or italic styling or all caps is used in English. In times past, Katakana was also used instead of Hiragana to accent and connect sentences.

Both Hiragana and Katakana have respective characters in their alphabets and phonetically can be interchanged character for character.

The common modern day understanding that Katakana "is for foreign words" is merely just one of its use cases.

[fknorangesite]

> Japanese is like this.

Every language is like this.

[eru]

Different languages embrace this to different degrees.

[semi-extrinsic]

Except Icelandic.

[detourdog]

In Israel a Briefcase was referred to as a James Bond.