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Comment by pfannkuchen | Hacker News Reader

> After a few rounds of bastardization, ransel became “randoseru” in Japanese.

I thought there was actually a formal transliteration system the Japanese use for foreign words? Like with cutlet becoming katsu retsu. Not quite “bastardization”.

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There is a formulaic way to transliterate words based either on their roman lettering or their pronunciation in their native tongue. But loanwords aren't always mere transliterations, they often have some kind of adaptation or simplification. So like for example the word building would be nigh impossible to transliterate relying on its roman lettering alone. It would have to be pronounced something like buierujingu. Using its pronunciation in English would be a better starting point; transcribing that into Japanese sounds would be like birujingu. And what Japanese actually does is take birujingu and cut it in half, and thus the actual word for building is biru. (Well, not exactly. Biru is just talking about modern buildings, like concrete and/or steel construction. The word for "building" in general is tatemono.)

I don’t know if there’s a formal method, but there is a method – given an English word, I can almost always figure out how to say it as an English-to-Japanese loanword. Somehow. I think it’s just something that comes naturally once you understand the phonetics?

The author is right that there must have been something going on, because else the transliteration would have resulted in just "ranseru".

A better, and more formal word used in linguistics, would be "corruption".

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