Noncompositional

In a previous post I discussed some activities of Japan’s national language research institute, which starting in 2003 started publishing lists of loan words in Japanese, most of them recent loans, that they felt should not be used in government and other popular documents (e.g., newspapers) because they contributed to a lack of comprehension on the part of the general public. Some typical examples of words taken wholesale from English into Japanese are informed consent, community, universal service, and soft landing (as in a slow economic quieting-down).

Over at LanguageLog, Mark Liberman wondered how borrowing a foreign word could lead to evasive language, as I had said. Indeed, many of the concepts that the institute singled out originated in various sectors of the American and/or European business and government world, and so no equivalent is immediately available in Japanese. It thus may seem natural to just take the foreign concept and stick it into your language unomi…uh, I mean…sans accommodation. Though this may be bad technique, surely it is not “evasive.” Or is it?

I admit (and this is hard, being a mini-lexicographer) that I did not mean to imply that such users of gairai-go were evasive or using ii-mawashi. In the case of government documents or in newspapers, the Kokken asserts that the use of gairai-go is due to writers putting priority their own ease of writing rather than their audience’s ease of understanding (外来語の使用状況を見ると，読み手の分かりやすさに対する配慮よりも，書き手の使いやすさを優先しているように見えます。). However, from the point of view of the reader the effect, I believe, may be a sort of evasiveness or equivocation [insert some word that means: 'You keep using that word. I do not think you know what it means']. Because many of these words are used without supplementary definitions in Japanese ([this would also alleviate the problem, I suppose]), those people without much exposure to English (and often, specifically business and government terminology) will be left thinking that the wool might have been pulled over their eyes. After all, if you’re not sure what the difference between サーベイランス surveillance and モニタリング monitoring is, you might be a bit confused if you receive a notice that local law enforcement will be stepping one of them up in your area (the latter is about making sure you don’t miss any changes in a situation, while the former is about making sure you don’t let anything evil/bad escape your attention). So while these two words, if understood by everyone in the conversation, could lend a good amount of precision to the discourse, for someone not familiar with the subtleties, it may as well be doublespeak.

Of course in the end, as with most things like the Kokken’s suggestions, it’s basically a moot point, since the Kokken really just makes suggestions to other government agencies (and newspapers, though I don’t think they have to follow the guidelines). The places where you see the most obvious use of katakana-go is in advertisements, television, and other popular media. In those places it has a sort of chic, or so I’m told. So as long as learning (some sort of) English is liu xing, uh, en vogue, there’s no expecting the use of gairai-go to decrease. Thankfully, the American government is well aware that English is superior to other languages, and so we need not fear our kooteki shorui being contaminated.

[edited to fix some markup and minor content]