Linguists have long contemplated over the weirdness of the Japanese language.  Not so long time ago the consensus was that Japanese belonged squarely in the Ural-Altaic family of languages alongside Korean, Mongolian and Turkish.  Now linguists are not quite sure.  They have given up putting Japanese into a box and called it “language isolate” — then more recently they have come up with a label “Japonic”: including East Japanese (extinct), West Japanese, and Okinawan.  Other linguists put Japanese together with Korean.

The challenge with understanding Japanese is that it is in fact a creole — a mutt language consisting of many sources.  The Japanese language is made of the indigenous Austropolynesian words, Chinese- and Korean-derived words and in recent centuries also many Western (Indo-European) words primarily from German, French, Portuguese, Dutch and English, all adapted with amazing inconsistency (a good example is the words deriving from the Indo-European words for “card”: the playing card is “karuta” from Portuguese “o cartão”; the doctor’s chart is “karute” from French “la carte” — hence “à la carte” is likewise “ara karute”; but the credit card is “kaado” from English “the card.”).

This indiscriminate and uncoordinated borrowing of foreign words by the Japanese stands in contrast with the French (in which the official “La Academie” decides whether and how) and with the Chinese (in which almost all foreign words are translated into Chinese letters).  This practice has done two-fold injustices.  First, it corrupted the Japanese language beyond recognition — and also contribute to a rapid lexical changes as new words and concepts are borrowed every day by the mass media and the academia.  Second, it also leads to the poor foreign language skills by the Japanese speakers as mistaken usage of English and other foreign words are deeply embedded in their ordinary speeches.

Here are some of my pet peeves about wrong borrowings of English words that I see too often on the Internet:

• “Version up” (バージョンアップ).  Proper English is “to upgrade” or “to release a new version.”
• “Renewal open” (リニューアルオープン).  This means “to reopen (a store) after renovation.”  On a related note, “renewal” (リニューアル) as used in Jap-Engrish means renovation.  In English “renewal” also means to extend life to another term, like renewing a driver’s license.