A language in a state of flux

Today, I want to write response to the article written by Tomoko Otake.

In this article, she pointed out the problem of loanwords, which is known as gairaigo in Japanese. By historical background, we know that we borrow letters from Chinese, or words from English. I heard that Japanese are good at adapting or be used to new things. I think that is right. We use kanji or gairaigo as part of Japanese. By this reason, Japanese were able to communicate with other countries. However, it is considered to be borrowing too much recently. According to he survey, most Japanese really know the meaning of the words. Pronunciation changed, so it is even hard for foreigners to guess the meaning too. Moreover, there are some words that have different meaning to the original meaning.

In this article, there were examples of otaku and politicians. I don’t think there is any problem about otaku using jargon. I think they are not using them because of showing off their knowledge, but they just creating their own world. However, when I talk about politicians, there is no problem using jargon at congress, but I think they should use words when they are talking in TV so that every citizen can understand what they want to do for country. Well, though politics are usually sound difficult for common citizen, why do they make the story more difficult to understand? It just increases the number of people who don’t have interest to politics, like me.