quote:
Originally posted by gaogao:
These Japanese/Chinese words have no place in the English language and only serve to confuse the reader. Are you somehow implying that the English language is undeveloped that it needs to borrow from another? It doesn't. And if the speaker uses English terms translated from Japanese terms, at least he will know what he is talking about.
It is not the idea, the english is undeveloped, but some japanese words have no matching translation in any western language.
A language reflects the mentatlity of the people, that made and use it. Some common thoughts of the japanese people have no place in the western mentality (and that is one of the reasons, why bishoujo is here not as popular, as it deserves to be).
If you take this into account, English is not "undeveloped". It serves it's purposes very well, but in order to adopt ideas, foreign to the mentality of the people using the language, you have two ways of dealing with it:
a) define new words to the language
b) adopt words from another language, that already describe these ideas
Alternative c) would be to use descriptions of the meaning of the missing words. However, this would lead to using complese clauses instead of a single word and thus make sentences really long (and repetitive).