"crymad" > wrote in message

> No, nothing like the L'Académie Française to protect the purity of
> Japanese.

L'Academie Francaise is an old private joke. Nobody ever listened to them
and well, we have no real problem in French, we have always taken as many
loan words as other languages, and never passed the limit (the limit in my
opinion is when the man in the street no longer understands).

In Japan, it's the government that is desesperately trying to stop the
anarchic katakana-word chaos. They have now teams working on the problem.
The reason is the meaning of 80% of the katakana words is completely
obscure, nobody understands. They've passed the limit long before I
arrived. OK, they are loan words, but so randomly introduced and distorted
(in pronunciation and usage). I'm sure Crymad gets the picture.

The other day the Prime Minister was talking to the Diete and said he wanted
to discuss about "Japan frog" (the term was in spoken "katakana English"),
everybody was puzzled. After a few minutes, someone asked him what he was
talking about : he meant "Japanese flag". That guy is said to have
extraordinary communication skills for a Japanese politician.
Less educated people also create their katakana jargon.

On a package of tuo cha (it's written in decorative Chinese characters,
that's how I know what it is), on the back, they wrote in katakana to put
the "pua-rutibo-ru" (Puer tea-ball, they mean Puer tuo cha, they have just
invented the neologism) in a "tipottu" (tea pot).
A friend lectured me that I had to use an English style pot (a "tipottu")
with a ball-shaped tea strainer (a "tibo-ru"). As she hardly speaks English,
she never made the relation between "tibo-ru" and "tea ball", she has always
considered it like a brand name.

Kuri