Quote:
Originally Posted by Hatredcopter
I'm not sure if Japan "likes" Portugal, but there is a reason why Japanese have many Portuguese loan words in their vocabulary. Portugal was one of the first European countries to make contact and trade with Japan hundreds of years ago. Therefore, the Japanese had to use Portuguese words for the items they got from the Portuguese. Some of those Portuguese words are still used in Japan today.
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Right, such as "pan", meaning bread. Some Japanese don't know the origin of some words though, so I remember a funny exchange one time where a Japanese friend was saying "pan" comes from English. Well, "pan" is a word in English... it's a flat-bottomed cooking utensil, like a frying pan.
"No", he said, "the pan you eat!"
"Huh? We don't eat pans... you must mean a pan you eat out of? We call that a dish..."
"No, I mean pan shaped like this..." as he motioned a loaf of bread.
"Ahh, you mean a bread pan, for baking bread!"
"What is bread? You should know pan, it's a loan word!"
We finally figured things out, and he learned than not all loan words are from English, and I learned the Japanese (and Portuguese) word for bread!
Someday I'll tell you about the hilarious way I learned the Japanese word for "duck"....