ambassador for hungary
Thursday, 13 Mar 2025
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I have never experienced anything more unsatisfying than figuring out what a Katakana word means.
In Japanese, Katakana is the alphabet they use to spell words that are borrowed from another language.
I’ve never seen it pictured better as a horse tornado for children
Yeah one thing I noticed about Japanese is that they will just straight up borrow a word if they don’t have it. The twist is that it has to be spelled with katakana which gives it a distinctive japanese vibe. My favorite is Ramune which actually comes from the word lemonade. It’s also carbonated, due to a long story
There was someone on TikTok where their mother didn’t speak English as a first language, and she also called a merry-go-round a horse tornado
“Ah yes, this merry go round is made of merry go round”
A similar thing happened in reverse when my school took us to Japan. We have a war memorial thing where we go to a small town where POWs from our town were taken in WW2, the town are really nice.
We met the mayor and some local officials, and in the spirit of cultural exchange we were going to play a Japanese game with them. So they set up a bunch of chairs in a circle, and then put some music on. When the music stopped you’d have to sit down on a chair- But the catch was there weren’t enough chairs for everyone.
It was just musical chairs. They didn’t seem to know it existed outside Japan. (Or maybe they didn’t communicate it right? But the translator we had was super chill and she said it was supposed to be a Japanese game for us to play together)
Learning Japanese is fun bc you get to tell people that a lot of Japanese words are just English words with different phonetics.
Why is it that the phrasing “they had no blessed idea what she was saying” is sending me so hard
If a concept didn’t exist before the 1850s or so, and/or it’s something that clearly originated in the West, saying it in English with a thick Japanese accent and writing it in katakana is a pretty safe bet for how to translate it to Japanese.
I arrived at the hotel in Bolivia and am a fluent Spanish speaker but the word for check-in just left my brain.
Me: buenos, tengo una reserva y quiero… lo siento, se me olvidó como decir check in.
Clerk: por supuesto, decimos “el check-in”
Me: (mentally smacking myself in the forehead) Sí, quiero hacer check-in por favor.
So many loan words/phrases, for this translator one too many
It’s one of those words that had a “proper” Japanese kanji word back in the days (回転木馬 – kaiten okuba, lit. “spinning metal horse”) but the more “modern-feeling” katakana synonym has overtaken it. Makes sense – they’re rarely wooden anymore.
Another great example is what they call “strollers”: the newfangled ベビーカー “bebiikaa” versus the old-timey 乳母車 “ubaguruma”(lit. “nursing mother’s wagon/car”. I’ve only heard grandmas on the internet call it the second one, and that was in a “what do old Japanese people call x?” video.
A couple decades ago I visited Italy for a couple weeks. I was still a smoker back then.
You could not buy cigarettes in convenience stores or grocery stores. There were all these little hole in the wall shops that had a sign that said “Tabacchi” or where tobacco products were sold.
So at times I had to ask people on the street where the nearest Tabacchi shop was. No one understood my pronunciation of that word, but it was pretty easy to pantomime smoking a cigarette and make circular motions with my hands. People understood no problem that I was asking where to buy cigarettes.
It was a little frustrating tho, but eventually I met an Italian who spoke great English and I asked him what the Italian word is for cigarettes so that I could ask for help a little easier.
The Italian word for cigarettes is sigarette. I have no idea why I never thought to ask any Italian where to buy cigarettes. A whole lot of wasted effort there..
“horse tornado for children”
And… flaired!
[Kinda the opposite situation](https://youtu.be/DTQRFoS62nQ?si=g6GS443ym5jRci7x)
Oh two cool ones that come to mind is the Japanese word for suit come from a corruption of Savile Row. Another is that the Hong Kong Cantonese word for Shotgun is a corruption of the word Remington. Since their police force was outfitted with imported Remington 870s for like 50 + years
There is an Australian-ism where someone being unserious is playing “silly buggers”. When our Prime Minister (Bob Hawke) said “no more silly buggers” to a visiting Japanese delegation, it was translated as “no more happy homosexuals”.
Kato Lomb, for those who are interested. Although I don’t think she was ever an ambassador. I believe she was interpreting for an ambassador.
See, the thing is, what is being described is a CAROUSEL. At least, in North American English. A merry-go-round is similar, but doesn’t have horses and is powered by the children. No going up and down in a merry-go-round, only round and round.
You guys have favourite translators?
sharknado spinoff time?
The 187 Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division are known as “Rakkasans” today because when they were posted to Japan for occupation duties after the war, they told the locals they were paratroopers, which translated into Japanese as “Falling Umbrella Man,” or Rakkasan.
It is even more confusing that some ‘merry-go-rounds’ have no horses either.
When I was in Japan asked (in my polite but very minimal Japanese) for a treat at the bakery and then asked what it was called. The woman behind the counter smiled and said it was called “Cherry pie”.
People have favourite translators?
I love the implication that there must be, therefore, a horse tornado for adults.
Tatsuro Yamashita – Merry-Go-Round (LIVE, 1985, RARE)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3f9AwFzFibM
If you don’t know the word say it in english with a japanese accent.
🤣
I remember a video of someone he mother made about the same translation but in Spanish (Dez the Lez, I think)
I knew the word was merry go round cause it’s in one of the sailor moon ending songs lol. Amazing the vocabulary you can learn from songs
Of all the things that happened, this definitely did