The Oxford English Dictionary's latest update adds 23 Japanese words

The Oxford English Dictionary's latest update adds 23 Japanese words(theguardian.com)

9 points by amin 2 years ago | 4 comments

jmholla 2 years ago |

The article doesn't dive into all the words (it only covers eight of them). I found them in a different article https://maynkmodi.substack.com/p/23-new-japanese-words-made-...:

> donburi, hibachi, isekai, kagome, karaage, katsu,curry, kintsugi, kirigami, mangaka, okonomiyaki, omotenashi, onigiri, santoku, shibori, takoyaki, tokusatsu, tonkatsu sauce, tonkotsu, washi tape, yakiniku

(katsu and tonkatsu have two definitions.)

wolverine876 2 years ago | |

Here's the OED's press release with more detail:

https://s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/com.idmgroup.oed100.sound...

In Japanese:

https://s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/com.idmgroup.oed100.sound...

And a list of all the new words in this update, not just Japanese

https://www.oed.com/information/updates/march-2024/new-word-...

082349872349872 2 years ago |

my current favourite bit of japanese: 関係ない(kankeinai)

"this is superfluous: its connection with what we are talking about has a weight ~0"

chaorace 2 years ago | |

Expanding on that for the benefit of those who may find joy in trifling:

- Noun: 関係 [kankei] -- A noun which roughly means relations/involvement

- Component Kanji

--- 関: Semantically equates to "connection"

--- 係: Semantically equates to "participation"

- Verb: ない [nai] -- A foundational verb which inverts ある [aru]. ある is how you concretely indicate that something exists in a specific way. ない is how you concretely indicate that something exists NOT in that specific way.

So... putting it all together; the phrase is a grammatically complete utterance that more or less says "this is anything but material to that". Something which this rough translation fails to convey is the flexibility of the saying -- depending on context it can be used to communicate anything from "that's irrelevant" to... "none of my business" or even... "none of your concern"