The education ministry is setting up a committee “to propose ways to prevent too many imported words from entering the Japanese language.”

Spoken Japanese is a mishmash of Japanese and ‘loan words’ from English, French, German, Dutch & other languages. Rendered in katakana, often both the pronunciation and the meaning change from the original.

Are loan words necessary? There are plenty of Japanese words that are being forced out of service in favor of ‘cooler’ loan words. In those cases, loan words aren’t necessary and only confuse things. But some words, such as computer terms, are new in every language. Why not use a common jargon in those cases?

The French have been fighting this same losing battle for decades. Maybe the education ministry should go have a chat with the people who tried to ban “le weekend.” Posted by kuri at June 27, 2002 08:19 AM