Japanese Tomboys
By thomas on Nov 30, 2008 in Japanese
I came across an interesting word in the Japanese novel I’m reading. The word is おてんばさん (otenbasan). It means tomboy. It has kanji too: お転婆さん. This makes it look like the actually word is 転婆 (tenba) with an honorific o- prefix and honorific -san suffix.
But this is not the case. This word is actually a loan word. Normally loan words with kanjis in them come from Chinese. Most non-Chinese loan words are written in katakana like “hamburger”: ハンバーガー. But お転婆さん (otenbasan) doesn’t come from Chinese.
It comes from Dutch! From the word ontembaar, which according to online dictionaries means “indomitable, never-say-die, unsubduable“. Not hard to see how it could come to mean “tomboy” in Japanese. But why does a Dutch word get kanjis? I don’t know the answer for sure, but I’d guess the word was borrowed a long time ago, like back in the 1700s when a bunch of Dutch people were hanging out in Japan. Using katakana for loan words is kinda new (I think).
Another word that does this is 天ぷら (tempura: Japanese deep-fried food), which comes from the Portuguese word tempero, meaning (again, according to an online dictionary) gravy or meat drippings. There were some Portuguese guys hanging out in Japan back in the 1600s. I don’t know for sure, but I would guess this word was borrowed into Japanese back then and that’s why it gets a kanji.
Anyway, back to otenbasan – “tomboy“. The “-san” suffix here is honorific, like the “-san” you add to peoples’ names. But the “o-” here is not the honorific prefix “o-”. The Dutch word has the “o” too. So why isn’t there a kanji for the “o”? No idea!
Do you know any other European words that get kanji in Japanese? If so, please let me know!
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Maybe the Japanese themselves were confused about that “o-” and din’t know whether it was a prefix or not. Or maybe they knew it wasn’t, but they were used to put “o-” at the start of the word as お, so it just seemed right.
sergey samokhov | Nov 30, 2008 | Reply
The most obvious one that springs to mind for me is 煙草. I think there were a good bit more, but as with tobacco you tend to see them written in katakana these days.
justin | Dec 1, 2008 | Reply
かん (缶) is another common one, one that you still see all over the place. It’s from dutch, if I recall.
Andrew | Jan 14, 2009 | Reply
You’re right about the use of katakana for foreign words being more recent.
亜米利加
伊太利亜
仏蘭西
Have any idea what those are? They’re how a few countries used to be written before katakana became common.
アメリカ
イタリア
フランス
You might be familiar with the term 米国. Well, guess where they got the 米 from? Likewise, 伊 is used as a one-character abbreviation for Italy, and 仏 for France.
There’s a certain cut-off point somewhere back in the day when they switched to katakana. Before that, pretty much all loan words were approximated with standardized characters, just as they are in modern Chinese (note above how the リ above is represented by 利 both times in kanji).
I’m not sure what the cut-off point is, but I’d be interested in finding out.
Vincent Pace | Feb 17, 2009 | Reply