Random 05 Dec 2007 05:02 pm

Miruku

For reasons that will become clear in the next few months, I’ve been recently browsing travel books about Japan. Amidst all the comments on the, say, interesting cultural aspects of the Japanese people, one thing that I found particularly puzzling was the number of Japanese words that seem to be derived from English words, adapted to the local pronunciation rules.

For example: “milk” is “miruku” (ミルク) (”l” sounds become “r”, consonants are always followed by a vowel); “beer” is “biiru” (ビール); and at least one book claims that “water” is “uota”, but that seems to apply only to mineral water; the “standard” water is “mizu” (水). And that’s only in the “beverages” chapter!

So, what has me puzzled is… what happened to the “original” words for these things? It seems obvious to me that the Japanese would have had words for beer and milk before being contacted by English speakers; the original words must have somehow been displaced by the imported ones. It is a common process for a language to acquire words from others, but it’s not so common that this would happen to words that are so regularly used.

Very interesting… I hope to find out what process caused this.

4 Responses to “Miruku”

  1. on 31 Dec 2007 at 3:39 pm 1.mpp said …

    Well Milk & Beer didn’t really exist in Japan I don’t think. At least not in the form that we recognise. They didn’t have cows (and they don’t really have the farmland to graze them afaik) and they had sake before beer was introduced from Europe.

    Most things introduced from western cultures would be described using katakana (as opposed to hiragana and kanji which are used for more typical Japanese text). Hence the names are very similar but not identical to the English versions. Note the difference is because each katakana character would be the equivalent of two English characters, a vowel and a consonant. That’s why “milk” is “miruku”. Oh, and you would find that the two occurances of “u” in “miruku” would be almost silent when pronounced anyway.

    I’m not sure the origins for hiragana and katakana, other than being a simplified version of more traditional Chinese texts. Kanji is much closer to traditional Chinese, although exactly what the similarities might be I do not know/remember.

    Japanese culture has been heavily influenced by the Americans since the end of WWII.

    – mpp

  2. on 03 Jan 2008 at 11:37 am 2.Wilson said …

    I’ll grant you the beer, although Wikipedia claims it was introducted there by the Dutch before 1868 (how does one say “beer” in Dutch?). And they certainly never had the habit of consuming milk from cows (or any other type of cattle); even today, it seems like 90%+ of the Japanese are lactose-intolerant, in fact (the mutation allowing for digestion of milk showed up first in northern Europe).

    However, milk doesn’t come only from cows, and I’m pretty sure the habit of nursing babies was not introduced in Japan by western cultures…

    (it looks like miruku is a modern thing, and the other word they have for milk (gyuunyuu, 牛乳) is seen as outdated and slightly disgusting)

  3. on 27 Feb 2008 at 10:38 pm 3.Nicole said …

    1. Your few months are almost up, Wilson, so you need to tell us what’s going on :)

    2. How does mpp know all this stuff?

    3. “how does one say “beer” in Dutch?”: bier. That’s generally the first word you learn when you move to the Netherlands …

  4. on 28 Feb 2008 at 9:58 am 4.Wilson said …

    Indeed… but the plans have changed since then :-)

    We were planning a trip to Japan in April, to take advantage of having some relatives there at the same time who could act as interpreters. But we already had a trip to the US planned for later in the year, and in the end we decided that we couldn’t fit both trips in the same budget, so we’re saving Japan for later and will instead go to the US.

    About the “bier”, it looks like the Japanese may have indeed inherited the word from Dutch rather than English…