The first katakana word I would like to discuss is the word トナカイ which means "Reindeer". Based on Google translate this word seems to be commonly written in katakana and not hiragana, even though it has kanji counterpart (馴鹿) with the same pronunciation and meaning.
I found this word from the anime "Usagi Drop" in the special episode 2. The episode is about Christmas and Santa where Reindeer is mentioned. The link to this episode is http://anilinkz.com/usagi-drop-ova-special-2 where the word is mentioned at 2.55 and 5.20 minute.
(On the side note, this anime is very good. Highly recommended if you have not watched it yet.)
I think this word is a loan word from foreign language, presumably non-English. Unfortunately my knowledge of any other language is nearly non-existent so I am not able to pinpoint the exact origin. Some Wikipedia search on name etymology and local names of this animal does not help either. There is a class of loan words from non-English language, for example アルバイト (part time job, from German), so this is probably not very surprising.
The second use of katakana I would like to discuss is how people's first names are sometimes written in katakana. For example the following youtube video is a song by Utada Hikaru https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Q5-4yMi-xg. Even though it is nice, there is nothing particular about this song but I want to draw attention to the title of the video where Utada Hikaru is written as 宇多田ヒカル. Note that her first name is written in katakana even though it is a perfectly Japanese name. I found this way of writing names to be quite common.
I think the reason for this is to emphasize the first name as separated from the last name. This might be because if everything is written in kanji or hiragana it might be ambiguous to tell apart the first name from the last name. This is just a speculation though.
Different textbooks explain katakana differently. I think this is because katakana has a wide range of usage, some of which are subtle or difficult to understand for new learners of Japanese. Many textbooks introduce katakana as a way to write loan words which is the first function we learn. The more advanced features such as onomatopoeic words or emphasized words are left until fairly advanced stage in learning Japanese because they require substantial familiarity with the language to understand.
I didn't know how to read 馴鹿 even though I am a Japanese.
ReplyDeleteI've never wrote "馴鹿".
I only write "トナカイ".
I think I mostly use katakana to write the name of animals.
I know that there are kanji to express the name of animals, but I hardly use them.
I sometime use hiragana to write the name of animals when I want to express that the animal which I am mentioning is quite cute.
When I looked for katakana examples, I found a haiku that uses katakana for the word "person": ヒト. I was very confused so I decided to look it up. According to wikipedia, in Japanese, katakana is used for names of species (of animal, plant, etc), so the haiku was actually talking about the human species. I also found a lot of katakana used for names of plants even when they weren't talking about the species in general, so maybe that's why reindeer was written in katakana.
ReplyDeleteThat's an interesting example you used — when the textbook was describing foreign loan words I automatically assumed English loan words in my head, but forgot about other languages Japanese may have drawn upon to loan. Sometimes we'll come across words written in Katakana but don't immediately jump out as an English word and I find that that confuses me quite a bit like チャーハン which I believe was borrowed from Chinese.
ReplyDeleteIn hindsight it almost seems like textbooks under-defining how Katakana is used may have done us a favor because their usage really is so varied and this may have been even more confusing to learn had we tried to memorize when and where to use them.
Hullo,
ReplyDeleteI think one aspect of katakana that you raise here, and which is interesting to note for some of its other uses, is the fact that loanwords can also be from non-English languages. An example of this that we've learnt so far is ドイツ for Germany, but it also seems to include scientific words, which tend to come from Latin (ナトリウム for sodium, for example). I suppose this is an obvious point but it's one that we might overlook.
Incidentally I looked up reindeer in every language that I thought might be plausible as a source for the Japanese word (French, German, Russian, Dutch, Chinese, Latin) and none of them look anything like トナカイ. Most peculiar!
I’ve found too that common animal names (e.g. neko, usagi, ahiru) and not just loan words, are often written in katakana. When writing yomikata over names or addresses when filling out administrative forms, katakana is often used too.
ReplyDelete^agreed. With regards to Katakana use in the first names, I think it's usually only done by celebrities to spread the appeal/brand of their names. (I feel like an ordinary Japanese person spelling out their name in Katakana might be eyed weirdly.)
ReplyDelete