Japanese Borrowings in English

Abstract

BORROWING HAS recently been declining as a major source of new English words (Cannon 1978, Cannon and Egle 1979). For example, borrowing accounts for only 252 items, or about 6 percent, of the 3988 new words recorded as main entries in Merriam-Webster's 6,000 Words. Even after we add the borrowings recorded in The Barnhart Dictionary of New English since 1963, the total is only 477 different loanwords. Of these, the major sources are French (140 words), Latin (39), Japanese (37), Italian (33), Spanish (30), German (24), and Greek (24). The predominance of Indo-European sources is hardly surprising. Mary S. Serjeantson (1935, pp. vii, 183) listed Latin, French, Scandinavian, and Italian as the most important sources. She credited Arabic as having given English the largest number of non-Indo-European loanwords, sometimes by way of another language, but noted that the number of Arabic items had declined in recent centuries (pp. 213-20). By contrast with her 192 items from Arabic, she listed only 20 borrowings from Japanese, principally beginning in the nineteenth century (pp. 239-40). Serjeantson's important book on loanwords in English, upon which histories of English have naturally drawn, is in great need of updating. Indeed, the surprising number of 33 Japanese items tabulated by Cannon and Egle (1979), in contrast with 9 items from Scandinavian and 8 from Arabic, suggests the need for a search of dictionaries to ascertain how the Japanese cultural and economic ascendancy on the world scene since World War II has affected the English vocabulary. Unfortunately, the search cannot be exhaustive without a meticulous checking of tens of thousands of pages.I The dictionaries are not on computer tape, so we cannot mechanically retrieve the items derived from Japanese or any other language. A rigorous manual search, however, discovered 587 main entries of Japanese provenience and another 216 items derived from the old borrowingJapan, which was originally a Chinese word. These Japanese loanwords make a chronological linguistic analysis feasible. The base source of Webster's Third provided 528 items, the largest number. The OED and OED Supplement (1933, 1972, 1976) dated many of the loanwords, while adding 134 dated items not also in Barnhart or 6,000 Words. The latter two dictionaries contributed 50 different loans.2 Burchfield and Smith (1973-74) added another 16.