Portuguese words in Japanese, and beyond

January 8, 2023 @ 10:38 am · Filed by under Borrowing, Etymology, Language and food

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Len Leverson sent me his unpublished paper titled "O 'pão' Português Conquista o Mundo" about how the Portuguese word for bread spread across the globe.  That got me to thinking about how many words of Portuguese origin are in Japanese.  I'll focus on "pão" more squarely in a moment, but first just a quick list of some important and interesting words of Portuguese origin in Japanese.

The first one that pops into my mind (for obvious reasons since I spent a couple of decades studying the mummies of Eastern Central Asia) is mīra ミイラ ("myrrh") because, when the Portuguese were selling Egyptian mummies to the Japanese as medicine, they often mentioned myrrh as one of the preservatives, and the Japanese took the part for the whole.

Starting in 1543, the Portuguese were the first modern Europeans to visit Japan.  Consequently, many words of Portuguese origin entered the Japanese vocabulary.  Surprisingly, such a quintessentially Japanese dish as tempura derives from Portuguese (cf. tempero ["seasoning"]).

The Japanese word for "pants; trousers") is a little bit more complicated.  Portuguese jibão ("underwear") led to Japanese juban / jiban ("underwear for kimonos"), but its cognate in French, jupon, led to zubon in Japanese.

Likewise, kappa ("raincoat") derives from Portuguese capa (nowadays yielding to reinkōto).

A few more:

Jap. manto < Port. manto ("cloak")

Jap. chokki < Port. jaque ("jacket; vest")

Jap. kurusu < Port. cruz ("cross")

Jap. rozario < Port. rosario ("rosary")

Japn. fetisshu < Port. feitiço ("spell; charm; sorcery"), though I suppose this may have come via English

So, the next time you go to a Japanese restaurant wearing a cape or cloak, vest, and trousers (well, underpants) to have tempura with bread, you can thank the Portuguese who brought these items and words to Japan.  But avoid the mummies in Japanese museums, for they might cast a fetish upon you, causing you to run for your rosary and cross.

Now, let's look more closely at Portuguese "pão":

From Old Portuguese pan, from Latin pānem, accusative singular form of pānis, possibly from a derivative of Proto-Indo-European *peh₂- (“to feed, graze”). (compare Catalan pa, French pain, Galician pan, Italian pane, Romanian pâine, Spanish pan).

(source)

Descendants

(source)

Zeroing in on Japanese pan パン ("bread"; also "pastries, any baked good with a crust [a type of food]"):

Usage notes
  • The kanji spellings 麺麭, 麺包, and 麪包 are examples of jukujikun. Use of these spellings is extremely rare in modern Japanese.
  • While usually translated as 'bread', the term also covers a wide variety of baked goods that would not be called bread in English. This includes bread-like sweets like brioche, filled puff pastries and similar items, as well as various Asian steamed dough dumplings.
Descendants

(source)

Zooming in on the Minnan word, unless you are literate in Sinographic Taiwanese, chances are that you will not recognize the non-Unicode character in the name of the shop run by the Taiwanese master baker Wu Pao-chun 吳寶春:

That's  (semantophore mài 麥 ["wheat"] + phonophore fāng 方 ["square; topo-"]).

Another lesson in how words, plus the things and ideas they designate, travel around the world.  In my estimation, neither the things and ideas, nor the words to represent them, would traverse such vast expanses unless people took them.

 

Selected readings

January 8, 2023 @ 10:38 am · Filed by under Borrowing, Etymology, Language and food


25 Comments

  1. VVOV said,

    January 8, 2023 @ 10:58 am

    In what context is クルス used (other than romanization of the name Cruz)?

    My Japanese is a bit rusty now, but I recall “cross” usually being 十字 (for the generic shape) or 十字架 (for the Christian cross specifically)

  2. Laura Morland said,

    January 8, 2023 @ 11:30 am

    Fascinating! I suppose that, back in 1543 the Portuguese were not using forks, since フォーク (fōku) apparently comes from English…?

    That's just a musing. Here's my real question, from the other direction: I've always assumed that the Japanese お茶 (cha) led to Portuguese chá, whereas the source of the word "tea" must be different for the other Romance languages.

    Wiktionary states that the Japanese word comes from "Chinese 茶, highly likely via Cantonese caa4 rather than Hokkien tê."

    So it's surely not a mystery, but I've always liked the apparent Japanese-Portuguese connection with chá.

  3. DJL said,

    January 8, 2023 @ 1:58 pm

    Might be a good opportunity to point out that whilst many people in Portugal are aware of the Portuguese origin of various Japanese words, there are also some mistaken pairings being parried around: ‘arigato’ doesn’t come from ‘obrigado’, for instance, as I have heard people claim on occasion. (On the topic of cha and tea, some people in Portugal also claim that the word ‘tea’ is an acronym in Portuguese, but that’s another story…).

  4. SlideSF said,

    January 8, 2023 @ 2:15 pm

    I read somewhere as a kid, in some kind of "fun facts" article in a newspaper or comic book, that the word for tea in every language in the world derives from the Chinese words te or cha. Soi far I have never run into an exception to this rule, not that I have been actively searching.

  5. Terry K. said,

    January 8, 2023 @ 2:44 pm

    Regarding words for tea, see the Tea Map post from earlier this year, as well as the other posts linked to there.

  6. Terry K. said,

    January 8, 2023 @ 2:44 pm

    …Or, last year, that is, 2022.

  7. Philip Anderson said,

    January 8, 2023 @ 3:54 pm

    If the borrowed words ending in -n came from Portuguese rather than Spanish or another Romance language (and Papiamento has taken words from both Spanish and Portuguese), it must have been before the medial ‘n’ was lost leaving a nasal vowel, and eventually the diphthong. But I think this was complete by this period?

  8. Jim Unger said,

    January 8, 2023 @ 4:16 pm

    Don't forget kasutera, the name of something like a small sponge cake, something Japanese no doubt learned to make from Portuguese.

    By the way, 麺麭, 麺包, and 麪包 for pan are not really jukujikun because there are no separate pseudo-kun for each character. They are more properly examples of ateji compounds: an indivisible word (in this just a borrowing) glossing a pair of kanji presumed to be an authentic Chinese written word.

  9. Lucas Christopoulos said,

    January 8, 2023 @ 7:07 pm

    The Portuguese used Lequios or Lequeos for 琉球 from the time of the military commander and adventurer Afonso de Albuquerque (1453-1515) after his conquest of Malacca in 1511 in his book, the “Commentarios do Grande Affonso d'Alboquerque.”

  10. Jim Breen said,

    January 8, 2023 @ 8:28 pm

    In the JMdict dictionary we tag the source language of loanwords from other than English. I just did a quick count and we have 142 tagged for Portuguese. This contrasts with over 500 from German and nearly 1,000 from French. Most of the Portuguese ones are quite old borrowings and many have kanji (ateji) forms as well.

  11. martin schwartz said,

    January 8, 2023 @ 10:26 pm

    And let's not forget tempura, on which Rodger C (Magi, myrrh, mummies) had an interesting comment, on which see further Wiktionary.Those with an antique literary flair should enjoy
    Sir Thomas Browne, "Mummy is medicine"; look it up.

  12. martin schwartz said,

    January 8, 2023 @ 10:33 pm

    I meant the "quattuor tempora)" etymology, which seems to match realia far better (Portuguese religious period of abstention from meat and instead frying vegetables and seafood) than "tepero" 'seasonings'.

  13. Chris Button said,

    January 8, 2023 @ 10:35 pm

    mīra ミイラ ("myrrh") because, when the Portuguese were selling Egyptian mummies to the Japanese as medicine, they often mentioned myrrh as one of the preservatives, and the Japanese took the part for the whole

    which ultimately seems to connect back to the same Semitic source as 麻 as well

    Likewise, kappa ("raincoat") derives from Portuguese capa (nowadays yielding to reinkōto).

    It's funny how the little river-dwelling "kappa" (河童) imp could do with its own kappa raincoat.

  14. Jay Rubin said,

    January 9, 2023 @ 2:37 am

    You might enjoy seeing how much fun the writer Akutagawa Ryūnosuke had imagining seventeenth-century Portuguese Christian terms in his 1922 story “O-Gin”. See my Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories (Penguin, 2006), pp. 83-89.

  15. Andreas Johansson said,

    January 9, 2023 @ 3:54 am

    Philip Andersson wrote:
    "If the borrowed words ending in -n came from Portuguese rather than Spanish or another Romance language (and Papiamento has taken words from both Spanish and Portuguese), it must have been before the medial ‘n’ was lost leaving a nasal vowel, and eventually the diphthong."

    I don't think this follows, borrowing a nasal vowel as oral vowel followed by a nasal stop would be far from unprecedented.

  16. KIRINPUTRA said,

    January 9, 2023 @ 9:32 am

    If I may be so bold, 麭 is not in use — except "ceremonially", in the presence of incentives from a certain Chinese government ministry. Unlike PHÁNG or 빵 or パン. And thank God for that. It's a vanity Mandograph.

    The go-to sound graph for PH + ÁNG syllables is 紡, but the Hoklo Sinographs haven't had much of a full run of things in the era since the adoption of the word PHÁNG, as it happens…. 吳's in-house Sinograph bottles the reading of 紡 in the element 方, following native logic; and combines that with the 麥 radical, following Mandarish or Middle China logic. (The native script has traditionally used a much shallower palette of radicals for creating Sinographs. And it may be difficult for many learned modern minds to grasp this concept, let alone fully appreciate the wisdom of it.)

    Also, this is a very modern word, and discussing it puts us in a context where Hokkien & "Formosan Hoklo" very much behave as the separate languages that Formosan Hoklo speakers generally believe them to be. I've never heard PHÁNG used in any dialect of Hokkien, although you figure Quemoy 金門 Hokkien might have borrowed it.

  17. J.W. Brewer said,

    January 9, 2023 @ 11:36 am

    Is there a consensus view as to exactly when Old Portuguese "pan" became Modern Portuguese "pão" (and of course it may have been a gradual transition, and different in different regional dialects etc.) that would enable one to see how the timing of that change relates to the first Japanese encounter with Lusophones?

  18. Chau said,

    January 9, 2023 @ 2:07 pm

    @KIRINPUTRA
    Taiwanese pháng is a loan from Japanese, borrowed during the Japanese era (1895-1945). Afterwards it spread to Quemoy 金門. See the map of Chinese dialectal equivalents for 麵包 ('Bread') in Wiktionary:
    https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Template:zh-dial-map/%E9%BA%B5%E5%8C%85
    I can attest to the use of pháng in Quemoy as I was stationed there during my (mandatory) military service.

  19. Victor Mair said,

    January 9, 2023 @ 8:53 pm

    From John Whitman:

    My favorite word of Portuguese (or more likely Spanish) provenance in Japanese is meriyasu メリヤス ‘knitwear’, which is supposed to come from P. meias or Sp. medias ‘sock’. Spanish is probably a better source in this case, since Portuguese hasn’t had the medial d since Portuguese was Portuguese.

  20. KIRINPUTRA said,

    January 10, 2023 @ 2:58 am

    Thank you, Chau. I figured that would've been the case.

    Interesting paradigm @ that map, BTW.

  21. David Morris said,

    January 10, 2023 @ 7:34 am

    I can't pronounce Korean bbang correctly. All I can do is say bang (room) louder. Context sometimes helps: Gyeongju bbang (bread from a regional city) v norae bang (singing room/karaoke). I had previously known ddang (land) and have just discovered dang (sugar).

  22. David Marjanović said,

    January 10, 2023 @ 11:54 am

    I read somewhere as a kid, in some kind of "fun facts" article in a newspaper or comic book, that the word for tea in every language in the world derives from the Chinese words te or cha. Soi far I have never run into an exception to this rule, not that I have been actively searching.

    There are very few exceptions, e.g. Polish herbata (from Latin, but not restricted to herbal teas).

  23. Chris Button said,

    January 11, 2023 @ 6:54 pm

    Aren't you ignoring the "ta" component of "herbata"?

  24. Andreas Johansson said,

    January 12, 2023 @ 1:52 am

    Acc'd Wiktionary he is, the word apparently deriving from Neo-Latin herba thea.

  25. David Marjanović said,

    January 12, 2023 @ 12:26 pm

    Oh. I had forgotten that (!) and thought it was a participle, like "*herbed water" or something.

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