Vocabulary Borrowing

A third reason may be that, by using these words not readily understood by the public, the speaker may achieve a clandestine purpose obfuscating his message, a tool that may prove useful in certain situations in politics or academia!

Do We Need All These Words?

One may wonder why so many words can be borrowed into Japanese. Aren't there duplicates? Are they needed? In the case of Chinese numerical series mentioned above, there was a functional reason for adopting the Chinese system. But what about words like, say, sutekki "walking stick," borrowed many decades ago? Japanese had a perfect word for it already: tsue, which means exactly what sutekki means. But sutekki is an imported walking stick, crafted with western material and workmanship. Fashion-conscious people sport it, not always because they are old and needed something to prop them up. Tsue is natively Japanese, imbued with the image of wobbly old men and women; it lacks modern (i.e., foreign) flavor of sutekki. As one can see from this example, newly acquired words usually have a different (most often narrower) semantic coverage so they rarely, if ever, have the same range of signification as the Japanese counterparts. In fact a phenomenon such as this points to an important generalization about vocabulary, that in a language there are no true synonyms. Sutekki's meaning is narrower and tsue broader and more general.

A similar example--consider the case of basu 'bath, bathtub' (incidentally, not to be confused with basu, which means 'bus'). This sounds more modern and therefore more useful when such connotation needs to be transmitted to the reader in certain situations (e.g. copyediting a newspaper ad for a modern, western style home or advertising a western-style spa where one can luxuriously relax in a tub). Basu is also free of traditional range of signification that Japanese has with (o)furo 'bath'. Furo conjures up at least for some Japanese people the idea of relaxing in a large rocky pool at a hot spring or in a tub made of perfumey hinoki (Japanese cypress). As one can see, (o-)furo and basu are not synonymous.

Thus to answer to the question "do we need them?, we say yes. These words perform an important linguistic and social function.

Is Japanese Deteriorating? Shouldn't There Be a Policy Regulating Language Use?

Many Japanese critics and government officials in Japan fear that Japanese is in danger of losing ground to foreign languages and wonder if the language can continue to perform its main function as Japan's cultural icon. Officially appointed government commissions do recommend using "Japanese" words rather than English import. They fail to recognize several important characteristics about language. First, it is near impossible to control language use; attempts in this vein in the past have failed. Second, language is dynamic, possessing synergy with society and people. Language follows its own life and no one has successfully controlled its destiny. Third, the perception that the Japanese language is in the state of flux and is "moving in the wrong direction" has always been there. This serves as a testimony to the second point above that language is dynamic. So the fact that many have this perception is not a just source of concern. Fourth, the use of foreign words is self-regulating and has its automatic feedback mechanism, that is, if use is excessive and not achieving desired sociolinguistic effect (mentioned above), it will be used less. On the other hand, if it is not used enough and language seems to lose its freshness, then the use will increase. It seems to best to leave language be and let it do what it wants to do.