Japanese words of Portuguese origin | Hacker News Reader

Japanese words of Portuguese origin

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273 pointslermontov170 comments

Fun story, Tempura was allegedly inspired by Portuguese "Peixinhos da horta" which was a poorman meal of fried green beans, that was popular during Lent. [0]

Of course as with many things in japanese culture they carried Tempura to a next level.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20170808-the-truth-about-...

Related "Why Portuguese Food is Hiding Everywhere"[0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiXtAPfMj6o

I went to Portugal and thought the food was just awful. It seems they exported all the good stuff lol

I can't speak for your experience but in the last 20 odd years specially in Lisbon, Porto, and much of Algarve the number of tourist trap restaurants exploded.

Reminds me of a friend's comment after he went to Greece on his honeymoon: "I've had much better Greek food in NYC."

There used to be more fasting and abstinence than Lent: "The word tempura comes from the Ember Days (quatuor tempora in Latin), the quarterly periods of fasting in Western Christian churches, where believers go meatless." (Wikipedia)

"The word ember originates from the Latin quatuor tempora (literally 'four times')." (Wikipedia)

See also: Rogation Days for more fasting and abstinence.

I understood that actual fasting was pretty much a poor people thing for catholics at least. i.e. That rich lords/merchants would just pay some repentance fee to their local church and could eat whatever they wanted (except for Good Friday)?

Is that what the Calvinists have been telling you?

It depends on time period. Indulgences weren't things that were for sale before the High Middle Ages, and then their sale was controversial. It was part of the motivation of the Protestant movement, and much curtailed during the Catholic Counter-reformation.

And then there absolutely were some (many, maybe) nobles and merchants who were genuinely devout. Even emperors, like Louis the Pious. I'd imagine they tried a little harder.

I mean... there is no 'one thing' any Catholic has done. There have been faithful Catholic Lords/Monarchs, and there have been not-so-faithful ones. Making blanket statements like 'actual fasting was pretty much a poor people thing' is not really a good description. Fasting is really something only the rich can do anyway, since if you're already poor... you're not missing much. There have been very faithful Catholic noble families (the Habsburgs come to mind -- many are still quite faithful today!) and they certainly did the normal fasting.

That being said, I've never heard of replacing the fasting days with a 'repentance fee'. I'm not going to say it's never happened because there have been billions of Catholics, and probably millions of priests so maybe someone did that somewhere. However, under normal Catholic doctrine it's impossible to pay to repent. God's mercy is freely given without money.

Anyway, that's not how indulgences work. They aren't a matter of "gain this indulgence and I get to indulge in something that's normally a sin."

Since fasting and abstinence are a matter of Church Law and not Divine Law, the practices can be the subject of a dispensation or commutation by an authority such as the pastor. For example, on St. Patrick's Day in these United States, when it falls on a Friday (as it did this year) it's customary for bishops to grant dispensations for the faithful to enjoy corned beef, or a commutation, to pray the Rosary and then enjoy corned beef (or pork tempura).

Whether any given pastor could be influenced by the money from a "rich lord/merchant" is left as an exercise for the reader, but if practically all his parishioners are tithing and paying his salary anyway, then what can you do?

Also Catholics are supposed to fast all Fridays of the year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friday_fast

Wow - I was recently in Lisbon for the second time in two years, and I insisted my other half and I ordered these at a restaurant, as I had tried them on my first visit and they were delicious!

I described them to her as 'tempura fried green beans', assuming naively that the influence came in the other direction!

I had actually wondered if tempura was a loan word a long time before I learned that it was due to how Romance language it sounds.

> Of course as with many things in japanese culture they carried Tempura to a next level

That is true. Although to experience the real thing you really have to be in Japan.

Sadly the Westernised versions of Tempura are more often than not massacred imitations.

The most common errors in the West are that the batter is wrong or, the most common of all faults ... the oil is old.

With true Tempura in Japan, the oil is frequently refreshed during the course of service and in addition is not shared with other deep fried foods. Both of which actions serve to maintain the delicate taste and texture of true Tempura.

Sadly in the West (if you're lucky !) the chef will simply dump the Tempura in the same deep-fat fryer that he's been using all day to fry god knows what else.

At least in Spain we have multiple ways of batter-fry our food, which are simply different and not "wrong" per se. For example with calamari you can have them "calamares rebozados"[1] vs "calamares a la romana"[2], which are two very different styles of doing it. And then even within those there are variations ofc. While Japanese Tempura is very homogeneous on its style all across, like most of Japanese food (quality might vary a lot, but cooking styles usually don't).

Then there is the point of oil, while we'd normally use olive oil in Spain, it's crazy expensive in Japan so surely they use other oils, which also change the taste and very likely make it feel lighter.

[1] https://content-cocina.lecturas.com/medio/2021/06/09/calamar...

[2] https://cdn3.misrecetascaseras.com/sites/default/files/style...

Do you deep fry in olive oil?

Of course, that's how e.g. Spanish omelette is done and how it gets part of its taste.

There is a grade of olive oil — "extra light" — which is very good for deep frying. The darker stuff popular on salads won't work so well.

I appreciate the Westernized version more for being delicious while eschewing the decadence, wastefulness, and snobbery of the Japanese version.

Fast food places in Japan are like fast food places in other places. They don’t make the snobby versions.

There’s great Japanese food in Los Angeles (and presumably other pacific cities).

Always old oil, wrong temp, wrong oils / bad oil blends, less regional variety as seen in Japan. Never mind the range of ingredients battered and ways of serving/plating it. Tempura in North America is dire. I’ve eaten at many Michelin tempura exclusive restaurants

You're saying there's not just one but multiple fine dining restaurants that exclusively serve (bad) tempura and you've sought them out?

no just a qualifier on personal experience eating around japan. there are almost no michelin starred tempura restaurants in north america, like 2 total in the US. the tempura places in toronto are all bad so i stopped going.

The Indian curry vindaloo is also a Portuguese dish although few Indian restaurants actually serve real Vindaloo which you'll only get at a Goan house or an East Indian house. Only Christians eat Vindaloo really because it has to be made with pork, as it's a pork dish, and only us Indian Christians eat pork as far as I know.

It comes from the Portuguese dish Vinha d'Alho (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carne_de_vinha_d%27alhos). It's a simple recipe and tastes excellent.

There's a whole set of Indian pork and beef curries with Portuguese influence that are amazing and unfortunately never sold in restaurants.

Vinho d'Alho is actually more broad than just that dish; it can refer to anything marinaded in wine and garlic (which is literally what the name refers to, as stated in the wikipedia article).

I grew up in an Azorean household, and a lot of stuff besides pork gets prepped that way (or a permutation thereof)

Sure, the original dish may be broader, but the Indian vindaloo curry is a particular dish made with garlic and wine vinegar and some other spices. It's categorically not what most restaurants serve as vindaloo

They got it from India and then took it Japan.

I speak Japanese and Spanish - when I went to Japan with my Mexican wife, she asked how to say "bread" in Japanese and I said "pan" and she said, "honey, you're mixing up your Japanese and your Spanish, that's the Spanish word for bread".

Always loved that simple joke from Takahashi: "Pan da panda"... (Depicting the bread holding aloof panda.)

Japanese comedy excels at these very bad jokes.

Having gone through half a century of Japanese period, Taiwan also calls bread "pan".

This answered questions I didn't even know I had. Everyone knows pan. But I never thought to ask why the word for England didn't sound like English, or why soap bubble is a loanword. (It sounds Japanese enough to me, but I guess it's always written in katakana, so I should have wondered.)

イギリス is also written 英吉利, which implies that it came from the Mandarin, not Portuguese.

The question is whether the Japanese got the word from the Chinese, and if so where the Chinese got it from, or whether the Japanese got the pronunciation independently and then noticed that the Chinese already had a kanji for that word and decided to use it.

China and Europe had been sending diplomatic and trade missions to each other for well over a millennium before there was any direct contact between the West and Japan (and also since long before England came into existence). It seems likely Japan's early knowledge of Europe, including England, came via the Chinese.

This may be an Ateji, using Chinese characters phonetically to represent loan words: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ateji

They're the same characters in Chinese, and pronounced differently, so I doubt your hypothesis in this case.

Elsewhere in the thread people are saying that loanwords got kanji arbitrarily assigned before katakana was in wide use, and it was it this phase of language development that the Japanese and Portuguese first interacted.

I don't know the etymology and don't have a Japanese input method handy, but "coffee" is another word occasionally written with kanji to be fancy.

Every country has a kanji version of its name. If you see a newspaper headline that says Rice-Buddha Relations at All Time Low, it means America (Rice) and France (Buddha) are squabbling.

Brazil is home to the largest Japanese population outside Japan.

I bet they brought a couple of Japanese words to Brazilian Portuguese too.

Hashi for chopsticks I believe.

In Brazil when we play rock-paper-scissors we say "Jan Ken Po"

Probably more in Sao Paulo or areas with a large Japanese population. Never heard of this in Rio de Janeiro.

Pedra, papel e tesoura in Minas, anyway.

Same in Porto Alegre. If I heard "Jo-kem-po" I'd think someone from a younger generation that learned those works from some TV series.

I can provide my anecdote. I prefer jokempo, and I miss meetings with other nerds in the CCMQ and going to Jambo bookstore. Late 90s. Then using this with colleagues at the local universities.

I'm from Amapá and as a kid (~30 years ago) I remember hearing "jo-ken-pô" a lot. Not anymore as an adult (people just say "pedra-papel-tesoura") but if you said jo-ken-pô I'm sure people would understand what you meant.

And this is the first time in my long life I see it actually written down! :)

I had to look up how to spell it haha

The two that comes to mind is rock-paper-scissors, which we call "jokenpô", that is similar to the japanese 'jankenpon'. Chopsticks are "hashis" like already mentioned.

Also, we call soy-sauce "shoyu", which is the japanese for soy.

Probably caqui too (from kaki), and kabocha (same name). And other food depending on where you are in Brazil (manju, dorayaki, gobo, rakyo, azuki, wasabi, ra-men, udon, ...).

Other words are used in management, like in English (kaizen, kaban).

And in games & sports, besides jokenpo, there's also kendama that's sometimes used (bilboque in portuguese? That toy Chaves & Kiko always fight for :). Judogi, sensei, most judo moves are not translated as in English and we use the Japanese version in Portuguese too. Some in anime and tech, like mecha, otaku, manga, anime, mangaka.

And in the Brazilin-Japanese community it's common to switch to a version of Portuguese that mixes some words that were widely used: benjo (bathroom), kusai (smelly), gohan (food, rice), kitanai (dirty), se-no (ready-set). That varies in each region and community, but it's common to switch to use these old-fashion words like benjo, which is how all my family spoke in the countrysde of Sao Paulo, but sounds redneck/wrong if you say that to a Japanese nowadays.

Tsunami, emoji, soja, jo-ken-pô, judô, karatê, sushi, origami.

Because of Japanese immigration, there’s a lot of people in the Southeast with Japanese last names.

Even more surprising is the list of Japanese words of Dutch origin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_Japanese_words_of_...

The Dutch opportunistically arrived mostly after the Portuguese had been driven out by the Japanese, but still managed to leave the Japanese language with words like bīru, kapitan and madorosu. I'm sure these words would have come up during the Portuguese era as well.

For words which are similar (captain, alcohol etc.) I wonder how they know it comes from Dutch and not Portuguese.

The linked article actually says captain more likely came from Portuguese.

The words of German origin are here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gairaigo_and_wasei-eig...

I’m glad to finally learn an explanation for エネルギー

ワンダーフォーゲル (Wandervogel) is missing from that list. And I just learned that it was an anti-industrialization movement.

There's an interesting, vaguely related family of terms derived from ゲバルト, from Ger. Gewalt "violence", that all refer to 60s-era student political movements and protests.

For example ゲバヘル, protective helmets students wore during protests, and even ゲバ字 "violence characters" - referring to an angular form of writing used on protest fliers and signs, meant to prevent authorities from identifying the author by their handwriting.

Example of such characters: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NAVI_hansen_shukai.j...

Those gebaji (ゲバ字) are really interesting stuff, would deserve their own discussion on HN.

アルバイト・バイト

Is probably the most well known example. The german "Arbeit" is used commonly to refer to part time work.

Woah "power-up" (as in the mushroom Mario takes to be double-sized) is originally Japanese! Never noticed how it's not grammatically sensible English.

Similar to how "long time no see" is either from Mandarin or pidgin English.

"X up" is a common construct in wasei eigo (Japan-made English). An upgrade is a "version up", a raise across the whole company is a "base up", etc.

Yes, that's what's conveyed in the Wikipedia article, in the entry "-appu". One of the examples was "power-up", and that's when I went "Woah!".

I think it's safe to assume that the Portuguese "pão" (bread) was pronounced much closer to "pan" around the time they made contact with Japan, and that's what stuck in Japan while the Portuguese pronunciation kept evolving. I find it strange otherwise that the Japanese word is closer in pronunciation to the Spanish "pan", or even the French "pain", than the modern day Portuguese word.

Didn't the Japanese have bread or balconies before the Portuguese arrived? How does that work?

How do people survive without bread? This may be hard to believe, but it is actually possible. The trick is eating something else. :)

(They did have steamed grain products, just not baked ones.)

Don't know about balconies.

I didn't ask how people survive without bread. I asked whether the Japanese had bread before the Portuguese got there.

Steamed/baked wheat buns of various kinds have been eaten in China for a long time and are known in Japan as well under the name manju (饅頭). Wiki says they were first introduced in 1341, but they're still associated with Chinese food and typically served as sweet snacks with tea, not as a meal. Savoury meat buns (肉まん nikuman) do exist, but they're nowhere near as common as bao in China.

There are also many cracker-like hard "breads" made from rice flour, notably sensei, but these too are snacks, not mains.

Autocorrect changed senbei to sensei.

> Don't know about balconies.

I don't suggest eating balconies.

UNLESS you're on a Japanese game show and it smells of chocolate

No they didn't have bread before the Portuguese arrived, but that's also to be expected given the prevalence of rice versus wheat.

What, you can't grind rice, make flavour out of it, and bread out of that?

Rice flour has no gluten, so no, you can’t use it like wheat to make bread.

You can make cakes with rice though, which they did have.

(When you see modern gluten-free bread in a bakery/supermarket, it’s still basically a cake recipe, tweaked to resemble the texture of bread)

Gluten-free bread uses a binding agent, typically xanthan gum [1], a small amount of it is really noticeable when you are doing home baking.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xanthan_gum

I really encourage you to try this and see what happens. You need wheat to make bread. The only way to make leavened bread from rice is using highly processed synthetic ingredients to create the gluten structure.

According to the Japanese wiki page on bread, it was introduced in 1543 then banned as part of the Christian bans. They mostly ate whole grains, then used flour for noodles.

Japanese has a couple of words for 'door' (some of which refer to Japanese style sliding doors): 戸, 扉, 障子, but one of the more frequent ones is ドア which is a loan word from English 'door'. Adoption of loan words can be strange.

They systematically use the English word for sex, yet I'm sure they'd been doing it far before contact with westerners.

That reminds me of something from a childhood TV show, an invention from the future called どこでもドア (the Anywhere Door).

As for why they use a loan word for "door", I'm guessing it's due to the wide adoption of Western-style doors for which there's no equivalent word in Japanese. And why loaned from English instead of any other language, like Portuguese? I imagine it has some historical reason, related to which country such doors were originally imported from.

Western-style fluffy bread was not present in Japan before Portuguese trade.

The introduction through trade also applies to other eastern countries - China was exposed through the silk road, India through Portuguese and middle eastern trade.

You have similarly surprising culinary events in the West. Tomatoes weren't introduced to Italy until the 16th century, an tomato sauce wasn't a thing before the 18th century - before that, pasta (itself assumed to come from Chinese noodles) was eaten dry with your fingers. Potatoes first arrived in Europe around the same time.

> Didn't the Japanese have bread or balconies before the Portuguese arrived? How does that work?

I ask myself that every day. I think the answer is prestige.

In my language, Romanian, many words are borrowed from English because there's no home-grown equivalent, like "hacker".

But even common words are being replaced with English ones. E.g. fashion instead of modă, know-how instead of cunoștințe (knowledge), brand — marcă, however – însă (you know your language is in danger of disappearing when the conjunctions are being replaced).

This is in spite of the fact that people can often hardly pronounce the English words, for example businessman is pronounced /biznismen/ (with no way to differentiate between man and men), or pronouncing "guard" as "goo-ard".

Sure, there are loanwords that have become rooted in Romanian. But (unless one is part of a minority of people using English every day e.g. at work) a lot of those English words in Romanian are affectations of youth that disappear with age. The linguistic behavior of all my hipster friends changed radically as soon as they settled down into staid family life.

Sometimes they don't disappear with age and they become the new standard for the next generation.

If age-related reversion to the old way of speaking was a universal given then we wouldn't see half the linguistic drift that we do.

I don't think they're affectations of the youth. Take the term "fake news". If journalists were in the business of informing people they would translate it ("știri false"), but they always say "fake news".

You also hear experts use English terms because it makes them look more sophisticated. For example instead of saying the equivalent of "Ukrainians need to be trained to use American weapons" with all-Romanian words, you'll hear "Ukrainians need KNOW-HOW to use American weapons" with "know-how" being untranslated, even though this sentence is more awkward than the first one.

The one bit of Romanian I learned there: Merci!

I wonder this when I studied Russian and saw all the French/German loanwords. "Did the Russians not use to have screens/beaches/furniture before the Enlightenment?"

> Did the Russians not use to have screens/beaches/furniture before the Enlightenment?

I don't know the evolution of the terms in question, but I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't!

Like, what is a beach (or пляж)? It's basically берег (riverbank/seashore) but intended for recreation use. Did people of the past have enough time to recreationally use their seashores/riverbanks? I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't.

Same about furniture/мебель. I would assume that in the past (at least in the villages), people would often have benches, beds, tables custom-made specifically for their house, and they would not be meant to be moved out.

Мебель/furniture presupposes that people produce it in one place, and then people move it to their house, and this was often not the case in the past.

If your bed is made when your house is built, and cannot be moved out because bed frame goes directly into your wall, is that still furniture? Is furniture a useful word to describe that?

(Not sure about screens)

>the Portuguese "pão" (bread)

In India, the word pao or pav in street food / snacks like vada pav and pav bhaji, probably comes from the Portuguese.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vada_pav

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pav_bhaji

My favorite variant is khada pav bhaji, in which the vegetables are in chunks, not mashed.

That's interesting. I would have assumed they were cognate from PIE but it appears not.

The icing on the vada pav is the fried chillis, so to to speak.

The nasal sound of pão is very difficult for foreigners.

> I think it's safe to assume that the Portuguese "pão" (bread) was pronounced much closer to "pan" around the time they made contact with Japan

The evolution of nasal vowels in Portuguese out of Latin *n predates contact with Japan by centuries (see Nasal Vowel Evolution in Romance by Rodney Sampson, Oxford University Press, 1999).

It’s not unusual at all that Japanese, a language without nasal vowels, would then replace the Portuguese nasal vowel with the closest equivalent it had.

Japanese has nasal vowels and indeed the "a" in Japanese "pan" is nasalized.

I obviously meant phonemic nasal vowels. In Japanese, nasality of vowels appears in the context of a nasal consonant, so when borrowing the Portuguese word, Japanese had to supply the final consonant.

Wiktionary says the pronunciation of modern Portuguese pão is [pɐ̃ʊ̯̃] in IPA. Modern Japanese has [p] but not [ɐ̃]. The vowel closest to [ɐ] is [a], and to get the nasalization of [ɐ̃], the following consonant needs to be [ɴ], giving "pan" [pãɴ]. As a bonus, [ʊ̯̃] is a back nasal vowel and [ɴ] is a back nasal consonant. So modern Japanese "pan" is a good match for modern Portuguese pão.

To support your theory, you'd need to look at a language where borrowings with nasal vowels and syllable-final nasal consonants can reliably be distingished from each other, i.e. not Japanese.

> [ɴ] is a back nasal consonant

Not quite! This is a peculiarity of Japanese transcription: the moraic nasal [0] is often transcribed as /ɴ/ or /N/ in phonemic representation, while its phonetic realisation varies between [m~n~ɲ~ŋ]; it is true uvular [ɴ] only utterance-finally, but apparently even that is controversial.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_phonology#Moraic_nasa...

I wrote [ɴ] instead of /ɴ/ for a reason. It's true that the phoneme /ɴ/ has various realizations (including as no consonant at all, only nasalizing the preceding vowel), but when considering "pan" in isolation, the /ɴ/ is utterance-final and has the commonly accepted realization [ɴ].

I can agree with that. Thanks for clarifying!

(Maybe I’m just too used to people getting confused about this stuff…)

“Pão” is pronounced pretty similarly to “pan,” and nothing at all like “pow

I wonder if the Chinese bao comes from pão as well.

No, this is a false cognate. Chinese bāo (包) is short for miànbāo (麵包), literally meaning "flour wrap/package", and its use has been attested since the Song Dynasty (ca. 11th century), whereas the Portuguese didn't have contact with China until the 16th century. The pronunciation of 包 at that time was still mostly similar to what it is today – using IPA notation, it is reconstructed as /pˠau/, compared to /pau̯/ today.

IT was more likely because the heavy nasal/adenoidal vowels in Portuguese were extremely difficult for Japanese speakers.

> I find it strange otherwise that the Japanese word is closer in pronunciation to the Spanish "pan", or even the French "pain", than the modern day Portuguese word.

That's because Japanese is extremely phonetically poor.

Pao led to pan (fancy sandwiches if anime is right) in Japanese and pav (small buns) in Hindi, Indians use the word bread the same. Sabao led to sabun (soap) in Hindi. We have Portuguese-Indian community, of which Rodriguez is the most common name IME, and most common names in many countries. In Malayalam, mesa means table, and plataeu in English.

>fancy sandwiches if anime is right

From my anime knowledge, it's "bread" though seemingly any meal with bread instead of rice is also called "pan." It also links to the Japanese Wikipedia page for bread.

"Pan" is just bread, all kinds (source: Japanese wife, and I lived in Japan for a while - I did grocery shopping daily)

Rodrigues, with an 's', and Fernandes are the most common Portuguese influenced surnames in Goa, if I recall correctly.

Such names ending in 'z' are more likely Spanish in origin.

My hunch is that the above poster is slightly imprecise in the spelling but in India it's the Portuguese all the way.

Nope, just different origin centuries. He’s is right about current day portugal and spain, but these names have not been inherited from today’s portuguese.

Language and names evolve. And it’s been more than 5 centuries since portugal reached india

In my experience with Indians with Portuguese origin surnames have generally matched modern orthography.

A search on forebears.io seems to support my experience:

Rodriguez 1 in 2.6 million

Rodrigues 1 in 27 thousand

Rodrigues is modern Portuguese orthography.

Yes, it is.

It’s not as simple. They can be ‘z’ and be Portuguese related, if it is been carried over for generations. The ‘s’ standardization is from the XX century. The Portuguese reached India at the end of the XV century.

In places like Indian, these names have been carried over for many generations, so you can’t compare them directly with modern conterparts

Well, bear in mind that 8-10 centuries ago Castillian, Galician-Portuguese and the rest of Romances overlapped a lot, and they were a lot more similar to each other.

Pinto, Dias, Gomes, Menezes, Mascarenhas, D'Souza, Coutinho, DeSa or D'Sa, Lobo are some other fairly common Portuguese influenced surnames in India, with the most in Goa and next most in Mumbai, but also occur elsewhere, since people move.

Another good story is "Vindaloo", which originates from the portuguese "Vinha d'alhos". As expected, the portuguese version is much less spicy :)

The curry you get in restaurants is not Vindaloo. Vindaloo is spicy but it's not the overwhelmingly spicy thing most restaurants sell. A lot of them just rebrand a tangy spicy curry as Vindaloo and sell it. If you have Goan or East Indian Vindaloo, it's spicy, but it also has a lot of sweetness, and it's made of pork.

My favourite is Castella a type of speciality cake from Nagasaki. Castella means Castilian and it is the cake you can buy in pretty much every bar in Spain. Brought to Japan 400 years ago by the Portuguese and now a local speciality.

In Portugal we call it "pão-de-ló"

Yeah Biscocho here in Spain.

This is something I have often thought about - the quantity of Japanese words that are similar to Portuguese and Greek. It really bothers me.

...why would it bother you?

Knowing something exists but not why can be irritating

Exactly.

The world's largest Japanese community outside of Japan lives in Brazil, if what my Brazilian wife tells me is correct

(If it is incorrect then please take up your complaints with her but make sure not to implicate me)

Correct. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_diaspora And BBC has something about Brazil in particular: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-42859249

(Interestingly, as so many came to Brazil from Okinawa more than a hundred years ago, they have managed to keep more of the Okinawan language than Okinawa itself, and people of Japanese origin coming back to Okinawa are helping in saving an endangered language.)

If you follow Mixed Martial Arts this is much more obvious

A Berenstain moment for me to learn that arigatō isn’t derived from obrigado.

The eveidence presented on Wikipedia does not convice me. Even if arigatashi existed before contact with the Portugese, arigatō may have been a merger of obrigado and arigatashi.

On the contrary I feel the evidence is pretty much conclusive. arigatō comes from arigataku (an adverbial form), through a well-known "u-sound" change, as also explained on the page. Influence from Portuguese was not needed for that to happen.

(And according to this page: https://selftaughtjapanese.com/2015/11/02/the-real-origin-of... the word was used in its "ou" form before the Portuguese even arrived in Japan - 1543)

I think the Wiktionary explanation is pretty detailed about the formation of arigatou: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%81%82%E3%82%8A%E3%81%8C%E...

Given the inflection exists for other words, e.g. o-medetaku -> omedetou and o-hayaku -> ohayou, I'm pretty sure it's derived entirely from Japanese grammar.

  Modern Japanese -i adjectives formerly ended in -ki for the attributive form. This medial /k/ dropped out during the Muromachi period, both for the attributive form (-ki becoming -i) and for the adverbial form (-ku becoming -u). However, the adverbial form reverted back to -ku thereafter for most words, with the -u ending persisting in certain everyday set expressions, such as arigatō, おはよう (ohayō), or おめでとう (omedetō), and in hyper-formal speech.[4]

Also, no evidence of aigratou being used in the -u from before the Portuguese arrived. It may be true that the similarity is purely a coincidence, but the evidence is very weak, and maybe without Portuguese influence ariɡatau would be used only in some fringe cases.

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=52018 - it was used more than a century before the Portuguese arrived.

Frankly, I don't think you understand Japanese morphology at all and are blowing a whole load of hot air.

The inflection of arigatashi -> arigatou is quite straightforward and any adjective in Japanese can undergo the same inflection:

- arigatashi -> arigatai: modernization

- arigatai -> arigataku: adverbalization

- arigataku -> arigatau -> arigatou: u-onbin

It would perhaps also help your case if you didn't misspell "arigatou" twice in your post, either.

I'm not sold that it means "difficult to exist/rare", instead of "there is a difficulty." It makes sense to think of thanking somebody as also apologizing for having them deal with a difficulty.

It’s a straightforward form of 複合形容詞 (compound adjective), formed from verb stem + adjective. For instance:

- 読み難い: yomu (to read) + nikui (difficult) -> yominikui: “difficult to read”

- 分かり易い: wakaru (to understand) + yasui (easy) -> wakariyasui: “easy to understand”

Applying this construction:

- 有り難い: aru (to be) + katai (difficult) -> arigatai: literally “difficult to be”

varanda, kapitan exists in my language ( Malayalam ) as well, with same meaning and origin. Also vada pav , which is a beloved food in Mumbai also uses pav , which comes from pão, bread in Portugese.

Interesting such a small small country had such a worldwide impact

There are multiple words in Malayalam, like savala (for onions), mesa( for table ), kasera (for chair), janela(for window), all likely from Portuguese influence!

I speak Portuguese and just got back from Portugal with my anime-obsessed boss. It was endless embarrassment when I told him to say “obrigado” to thank people, but he just said “arigato” the whole week — even after dozens of corrections.

I was browsing this same list this morning to see if there was any merit to his behavior.

That must have been terrible to bear.

Better than saying "gracias"...

As a Japanese native speaker, it's fun to learn our words with foreign origin.

As a Korean, it's wild to see what words that we got from the Japanese come from somewhere even further. I've always wondered some like

Jjokki - Jacket/vest

Ppang - Bread

dah-mah (I think?) - bulb/fuse

mang-toh - Coat/cloak

jjah-mong - pomelo like fruit

jjokki could be from German "Jacke"

(afaik here are also many German loanwords in japanese, specially in engineering & medical fields)

ppang sounds like it came from french "pain"

mang-toh also french "manteau"

wishatzu - shirt (from white shirt)

oranju jusu - orange juice

Close to Spanish:

Chaqueta/Pan/Manto(old fashioned -centuries- cloak/coat/cape)/Limón

There are very few connections between Korea and Portugal, unlike Japan, where it is quite noticeable, especially in places like Nagasaki.

Portuguese "Arrufadas" -> Hawaiian "Sweet Bread Rolls"

Everything in Hawaii is a stretch,

Portuguese sausage is apparently italian and nothing like linguiça.

Malasadas are kinda like fried dough eaten around Christmas or bolas de berlin, but not really.

Sweet break is pao-de-leite but not quite.

I was always curious about why tabaco was written in hiragana but this article explains it.

> Many of the first words which were introduced and entered the Japanese language from Portuguese and Dutch are written in kanji or hiragana, rather than katakana, which is the more common way to write loanwords in Japanese in modern times.

It would be nice if the page included the words of Portuguese origin, and not just the Japanese.

Doesn't it? It has both a "Pre-modern Portuguese" and a "Modern Portuguese" column in the table.

You are right, it does. I didn’t see them because the table gets cut off on mobile; just the first three columns are in view.

Gosh, my favorite has to be hiryūzu. The Chinese characters mean flying dragon head. But, the word in Portuguese is filhos which means sons or a type of sweet pastry. That's an amazing journey.

Keep in mind that "filhos" and "filhós" are completely different words.

Not if you're a cannibal. :)

Absolutely good point. I'm sure it was the pastry version they were using.

The incredible thing to me is that if I heard hiryuuzu, I would never have assumed it came from either of these Portuguese words. But, if I say it a few times, it does fit the Japanese tongue and how they would repeat it back if they heard a Portuguese speaker. Japanese does not really have a pure F or a pure H sound, it is in between, and of course, the Portuguese lh is like nothing in Japanese, but fits ryuu. Which is great, being in between L and R. I just love how these off kilter sounds resolve to that romaji.

I love even more how the Kanji pronunciation fits and then the Kanji they chose to use for those sounds. It is really fun when a foreign word suddenly gets Japanese characters and there is no historical reason for that. The word just sprang into existence without a backstory at that second.

I was surprised when I found out the Japanese word for bread , Pan, is the same word in Spanish.

This answers questions I have long had, as I was not previously aware of the Muromachi period.

English, of course, takes from every language it encounters.

Surely the english translation of varanda is veranda(h).

No, a veranda is not a balcony. They are similar, but there is a clear difference – a balcony is something above ground level.

In Portuguese, the word "varanda" is used to refer to that above ground level construction.

https://tnthomeimprovements.com/2022/02/27/what-is-the-diffe...

I’ve used it referring to the ground level too. Others as well. Not common, but no one would wonder what you’d be talking about. It would be better to call it a terraço, but it would be neither here nor there.

In my region [Brazil] "varanda" corresponds to the en-US "porch".

Why would people downvote a comment like this? Varanda in Brazil means "porch" indeed.

Baranda (derived from varanda) in Bengali means porch too!

Brazilian here. The first Portuguese-rooted Japanese word I learned was Kuruzu [PT: Cruz; EN: Cross]. It is lacking in the Wiki page. I wonder if it still in use.

EDIT: The word does not appear in search. The word don't seem to exist as a noun. I've been given wrong information, apparently. I apologize for spreading it.

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