Etymology of ramen and katsu
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Nancy Friedman just published "52 interesting things I learned this year" (Fritinancy, 12/30/2024). The whole thing is worth reading, but I especially liked (10), which resonates with (17), which references LLOG.
10. Japanese ramen is a borrowing from Chinese lamian, the source of lo mein. They’re essentially the same word: “The l to r switch occurred because the Japanese r sound is an alveolar tap halfway between the phonemes.” (Adam Aleksic , Etymology Nerd. More on L/R convergence on Adam’s Instagram account.)
17. Katsu, Japanese for a fried meat, seafood, or vegetable cutlet, is a “boomerang word.” It’s a clipping of katsuretsu, which was adapted from English “cutlet,” which in turn was borrowed from French côtelette. Katsu has now boomeranged back into English: it was added to the OED in March 2024. (South China Morning Post and Language Log)
David Morris said,
December 31, 2024 @ 6:18 pm
I encountered South Korean 라면 ra-myeon (which exists alongside 라멘 ra-men) and 돈가스 don-ka-seu before I encountered the Japanese equivalents. My Korean-born wife reports also the spellings 돈까스 (which is what I remembered) and 돈카츠.
In Australia, I have seen 돈가스 'translated' as 'pork katsu'.
Jonathan Smith said,
December 31, 2024 @ 6:39 pm
Wrong re: source of lo mein right? This Cantonese term lou1min6 apparently means lit. 'mixed noodles'. The Mandarin gives the impression they are lao1 scooped (from water) but this may be a folk etymology…
Philip Taylor said,
January 1, 2025 @ 4:12 am
“The l to r switch occurred because the Japanese r sound is an alveolar tap halfway between the phonemes” — this assertion reminds me of a conversation with one of my Chinese teachers, Zhou Shangzhi, when he was on sabbatical in Kyoto and invited me to visit him there. Speaking of Nara, a nearby city, Shangzhi said (paraphrase) "it's real name is Nala but the Japanese cannot pronounce their ls". I thought (but did not say) that perhaps the reality is somewhat different — perhaps the Chinese cannot pronounce their rs, as evidenced by the frequent humorous British references to "flied lice".
But to be fair to the Chinese, the narrator of Kan Qian's Colloquial Chinese does produce a clear /r/ sound in Nà liang gè rén, shì shéi, a sound which is noticeably less clear in Rèn shi nǐ, wǒ hěn gāo xìng. where it is far closer to /ʒ/ (but not to /l/). In fact, nowhere in the audio version of Colloquial Chinese does any Pinyin "r" sound like /l/.
David Marjanović said,
January 1, 2025 @ 9:42 am
Mapping [ɹ~ɻ] to /l/ is a southern Chinese thing; in northern China, it's mapped to /ɻ~ʐ/ – the r of Pinyin (but e.g. j of Wade-Giles), which corresponds to quite different sounds across southern China (e.g. [z], [j]…).
Chris Button said,
January 1, 2025 @ 9:42 am
It would be nice if someone could point to a study about the origin of ramen in Japan — both in terms of the food and the word itself.
One thing for certain is that the word rāmen itself is a recent borrowing.
A reading of the 拉 component of 拉麺 lāmiàn as rā in Japanese turns 拉 into an "ateji" with a reading that overrides the standard reading of rō. It is similar to how kōhī "coffee" may be written as 珈琲 regardless of the standard readings of the characters.
Interestingly, the standard reading of 拉 as rō is the same as that of 老 as rō, which is apparently found in an alternative obsolete form 老麺 for 拉麺. If we take 老麺 at face value as rōmen, rather than rāmen, we end up with the pronunciation rōmen for 撈麺 "lo mein"!
Hopefully someone more well-versed in these matters can clear this up?
Chris Button said,
January 1, 2025 @ 9:51 am
Also, on the topic of ramen and katsu, best not to confuse your tonkatsu "pork cutlet" with the tonkotsu "pork bones" used to make your tonkotsu ramen!
Philip Taylor said,
January 1, 2025 @ 10:12 am
"Mapping [ɹ~ɻ] to /l/ is a southern Chinese thing" — well, Zhou Shangzhi (L1 = Shanghainese) was a native of Shanghai which is in Eastern China according to the maps that I have consulted, but it is below the North-South centreline so perhaps also qualifies as being in Southern China.
Jonathan Smith said,
January 1, 2025 @ 1:50 pm
"it's real name is Nala but the Japanese cannot pronounce their L's"
hahaha I mean… this would at least be parsable as a thought if the city "really" named "Nala" were not a *Japanese* city… as it stands, just WTF
In case it's not well-known the whole "flied lice" meme is mostly due to Japanese only having one liquid phoneme, often described as an apical tap/flap [ɾ] or sth — using this sound for various foryn Ls / Rs is thus a feature of Japanese-accented English etc. To some this is hilarious e.g. esteemed founder of Lululemon who apparently chose the brand name for just this reason ("It's funny to watch them try to say it." ha…)
Re: "mapping [ɹ~ɻ] to /l/" in Chinese being southern — this mostly tracks but thing is there are limited r- syllables even in Mandarin. No /ra/ /ri/ for example… so there could be cases where l- gets chosen cuz the vowel. Then there is Hokkien which one can analyze as liquidless and foreign [d] to say nothing of [r] etc. can be represented with /l~d/…
Jerry Kreuscher said,
January 1, 2025 @ 2:06 pm
No doubt many others here know much more about this. The L & R muddle intrigues me. Long ago I had a Thai phrase book in which I often saw an R where I heard an L. For example the very common phrase that I heard as "my pen lye" was shown as "my pen rye". Made me wonder what's wrong with my hearing.
For lagniappe, recently I noticed that an early volume of Cambridge Ancient History spells ziggurat with a double-K rather than the more familiar double-G. Hardly the same thing, but similar-seeming to my poor understanding of phonetics.
Chris Button said,
January 1, 2025 @ 2:35 pm
It seems that 拉 was added to the Jōyō "common use" kanji list in 2010.
However it comes only with its kan'yō-on "ra" as in 拉致 "rachi", which can also be pronounced "ratchi" (using the kan'yō-on "ratsu" instead of "ra" for 拉, albeit not included in the Jōyō list).
Chris Button said,
January 1, 2025 @ 2:44 pm
And to be clear, that ra is not the rā of rāmen
Philip Taylor said,
January 1, 2025 @ 4:48 pm
In case it's not well-known the whole "flied lice" meme is mostly due to Japanese only having one liquid phoneme, often described as an apical tap/flap [ɾ] or sth — using this sound for various foryn Ls / Rs is thus a feature of Japanese-accented English etc. — OK, but we Britons have far more exposure to English spoken by Chinese (usually Cantonese) speakers than to English spoken by Japanese speakers, yet "flied lice" was a standard, if offensive, joke about (and even used in, I am sorry to say) Chinese restaurants.
DTX said,
January 1, 2025 @ 11:10 pm
One I'll add is from 2023: Ben Zimmer in the Wall Street journal had an interesting article about the word "karaoke." While he didn't use the work boomerang, it certainly fits this.
Karaoke began in Japan as a word for advertisers and others who couldn't afford an orchestra, so they used recorded music. "Kara" means empty (as in karate, empty hand). Oke was a shorted version of okesutora which is the Japanese pronunciation of orchestra. Now the word has been borrowed back across the globe.
Chris Button said,
January 2, 2025 @ 10:02 am
Somewhat off topic, but here is Marc Miyake's comment on 拉 in his "Old Japanese: A Phonetic Reconstruction" book:
"The rarer irregular -tu characters such as 拉 Kan'yô-on ratu 'break' (cf. EMC *ləp, Go rohu, Kan rahu, SK lap, SV lạp [laap]) contain relatively frequent irregular -tu characters as their phonetic elements. I suspect that the OJ period SJ codas *-p *-t *-k were neutralized as a glottal stop *-q (*[ʔ]) in rapid speech. This *q then merged with -t, the only other permissible final stop, which in turn merged with [tsu] after the seventeenth century (… cf. the variation between [ʔ] and [t] as a coda in modern English)."
Chris Button said,
January 2, 2025 @ 4:50 pm
Pulleyblank has an interesting note in his lexicon under 拉. He assigns the older/obsolete meaning "break" to a modern reading là, and then he says:
"Modern lā pull is a different word."
Certainly it is. I wonder where it came from though?
Chris Button said,
January 2, 2025 @ 6:14 pm
Since là seems to be the expected reflex (granted the tonal evolution from stop codas can be problematic), lā suggests something else is going on.
Presumably then:
Mandarin lā (the macron indicating the tone) is the source of modern Japanese rā (the macron indicating a long vowel).
Mandarin là is from the same EMC rəp / LMC rap source as Go-on rohu / Kan-on rahu (now both modern Japanese rō) and Kan'yō-on ra(tsu).
Jonathan Smith said,
January 2, 2025 @ 7:03 pm
re: Mand. la1 pull etc, it is apparently one of those eternal LL topics :D
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4906
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=52514
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=59422
and others I'm sure
FWIW I don't see right away that me/anyone mentioned the Mandarin word la4 'leave behind', (standardly written "落" these days but with "拉" also seen) which looks a lot like a cognate at some level to Cant. laai6 'leave behind' (apparently written "攋")… which also means 'have the shits' etc. So Mand. la1 in 'defecate etc.' could be a reanalysis with 'pull'. IDK though how this relates to origins of la1 'pull' itself which of course is odd in being one of those high register tone sonorant words… Schuessler (2009: 214) suggests maybe it's a "Mand. archaic colloquialism" reflecting the same etymon as tuo1 拖 'drag'.