Noncompositional

The recent news that the national language-monitoring agency of Iran has put forth a long list of loan words that are to be replaced by native words or (sometimes newly-coined?) compounds. Posts from Language Log, Gwynn Dujardin, and Language Hat cover the issue, mostly amused at the attempt of a central regulatory agency to control the uncontrollable.

Back when I was in Japan in 2003-4, the National Institute for Japanese Langauge (国立国語研究所, or 国研 Kokken) released its second list of suggested rewordings of gairai-go (外来語言い換え提案), or loan words mostly from western languages. However, unlike the efforts of some other national bodies, Kokken (or rather, the Gairaigo committee) does not wish to purge the Japanese language of evil foreign influences (yet! mwa ha ha), but instead encourage understanding and discourage evasive language. They point out that often the use of gairaigo is more about increasing ease for the writer or speaker (who can just import a foreign concept without explaining it), as opposed to increasing understanding for the reader or listener. Their suggestions are also, well, suggestions, rather than written-in-stone law. Their documents in particular single out government-issued documents, newspapers, and other texts with a high level of exposure to the public. They don’t really care what people use in their own homes, but if people don’t understand what their government is saying, maybe something isn’t going right.

A list of all the offending words suggested over the past several years is available here (mostly Japanese, but the English words are listed). Some of my favorite, in the sense of “yes, these should be replaced with understandable words,” are ofusaito sentaa (off-site center, a facility for dealing with a nuclear power plant disaster that is located away from the power plant) and ritaanaburu (returnable, said of products that can be recollected and reused, or simply reused directly by the consumer). Some, however, I think are here to stay, such as logu-in (login) and comyunitii (community).

In particular, newspapers that reported on the Suggestions document pointed out that government-issued health insurance documents with words like インフォームドコンセント informed consent posed a particular problem to seniors, those least likely to understand the borrowings and also most likely to be adversely affected by the problem. In addition to words related to insurance and finance, the Suggestions documents contain commonly-used words related to modern technology and business, such as maruchimedia ‘multimedia’, waakushoppu ‘workshop’, gurando desain ‘grand design’ (i.e., overall plan), and dampingu (’dumping’, i.e., putting massive amounts of product on the market at very low prices). The document suggests replacement word(s) for the English imports, for instance: 複合媒体 ‘compound medium*’, 研究集会 ‘research meeting’, 全体構想 ‘comprehensive plan’, and 不当廉売 ‘unjust discount selling.’

It also reports the results of surveys undertaken by the Institute regarding the percentage of people who understand the English borrowings. The report gives an out-of-4 rating to each word based on how many general people answered ‘yes’ to the question ‘do you understand this word?’ It also gives the same ratings just for respondents over the age of 60. For the above words, the ratings are multimedia–3/2, workshop–2/2, grand design–1/1 dumping–2/3 (overall/over-60). Full results, including actual percentages, for all of the words for each of the four surveys are available from the Kokken Gairaigo Committee website. The survey results are here.

Among the most commonly understood words are sutora (strike), puraibasii (privacy), risutora (restructuring (of a company)), risaikuru (recycle), and borantia (volunteer). The bottom of the list includes kyuretaa (curator), firansoropii (philanthropy), oosentishitii (authenticity), and pubulikku imborubumento (public involvement).

Words that many people say they have seen but that relatively few people say they understand include sekutaa (sector, 67.6% of respondents say they have seen the word, 35% say they understand it, and 55.2/27.6% for seniors), gaidorain (guideline, 89.5/56%, 80.7/45.9% for seniors ), and anarisuto (analyst, 58/18.4%, 44.3/9.2% for seniors).

• the word 媒体 baitai for ‘media’ is a calque; the original meaning for baitai is…well, medium, in its original meaning. Baitai is about one-ninth as common as メディア media on a Google search over Japanese sites. A search over all languages for 媒体 gets nearly all Chinese websites. As a side note, one of my favorite calques in Chinese/Japanese is related to linguistics: 形態論, literally ‘theory of form.’ What does it mean? Morphology.