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The Oxford English Dictionary's latest update adds 23 Japanese words (theguardian.com)
9 points by amin on April 7, 2024 | hide | past | favorite | 4 comments


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.)



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"


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"




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