Features of adaptation of English lexical borrowings in the process of Japanese lexicon formation

Abstract

For centuries, the lexical composition of the Japanese language has been quite actively replenished with lexical borrowings from various foreign language sources. First of all, it was the Chinese language, borrowings from which (the so-called "kangos") in certain historical periods (VI–XII centuries) accounted for more than 50% of the entire lexicon of the Japanese language. After the discovery of Japan by Europeans (XVI century), the Japanese language in the period from XVI to XVIII centuries began to be replenished with borrowed vocabulary, first from Portuguese and later from Dutch. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Japanese vocabulary included a significant number of Anglicisms, as well as some lexical borrowings from German, French and Russian. The article focuses primarily on English lexical borrowings and the peculiarities of their adaptation at the graphic, phonetic and morphological levels in different periods of their entry into the Japanese language, and also reveals the reasons for some changes in the process of their adaptation. A fundamental feature of the graphic adaptation of English vocabulary is that its fixation in writing with "katakana" graphemes conveys precisely the Japanese, not the English, pronunciation of such words, which greatly complicates their recognition and adequate semantic identification by foreigners. In the second half of the XIX century the Japanese initially used the letters of the Latin alphabet "romaji" for its transmission in writing, and starting from the 20th century they began to record borrowed English vocabulary only with the "katakana" graphemes, one of the two variants of the Japanese syllabic alphabet "kanji". Most often, anglicisms borrowed from the Japanese language are found in such fields of activity as: cooking, sports, medicine, entertainment, trade, space, computer technology. Among the main features of the adaptation of anglicisms at the phonetic and morphological levels, the following should be highlighted: 1. Truncation of the endings of borrowed English words. 2. The use of only open syllables in the pronunciation of almost all English words, since in Japanese all syllables are open except for those ending in a consonant ン [n]. 3. Lengthening in borrowed anglicisms of vowels that were stressed in the original English words; graphically, such lengthening is conveyed by the corresponding katakana character (ー). 4. Doubling of the consonant sound [t] mainly at the end of borrowed tokens. 5. Simplification of the morpheme composition of borrowed anglicisms both at the level of individual words in word combinations and at the level of word combinations. Another vivid example of the adaptation of anglicisms in the Japanese language is the appearance of a phenomenon called "wasei-eigo" – pseudo-anglicisms.