(Should also state that Macao also has interesting loan words in Cantonese, but that they a) have also adopted many of HK’s English loan words, and b) seem to be adopting loan words from Mandarin [where another word would be used in Cantonese], pronounced in Cantonese than HK. I’d love to find out if anyone’s done studies on this, but I’ve barely the time to follow interesting blogs. :)

Oi-lin: Yes, and some of those words even made it into Japanese (e.g. 回). I think there is a difference though in terms of scale, although I don’t know much about Cantonese specifically… and I wouldn’t be surprised if the language spoken on a Britified trader’s island had more loanwords than the language defined by a landlocked, communist capital.

This is not wholly true. The Chinese (especially Cantonese) have adopted many words from foreign languages (nothing like the Japanese), and there are characters that are basically used only for foreign loanwords. I’m guessing that these are somewhat like manyougana from back when, but I’m of course not certain, not being a student of Japanese philology. :)

SZS is a special case, to be sure. Kumeta Koji’s work is so heavily reliant on language (even apart from marginalia and in-jokes) that an Ota King-approved localization would be a rewrite of Asterixian proportions.

Presented with a similar problem, the Chinese clearly took a very different route.

I don’t know enough about the history of Chinese to say, but I bet practical issues (lack of kana, lower general literacy) have a lot to do with this.

But imagine if Japan had leaned toward kanjifying everything or translating it into something Japanese-sounding?

It is interesting to look at certain fields and see how they turned out one way or the other. Food and fashion: Mostly straight-up loanwords. Politics and philosophy: Mostly translations (into Sino-Japanese, natch). Music: Somewhere in between… And then of course you have the practice of writing 極美 and giving it the furigana アイデアル. What column does that one go in? Ah, I love Meiji Japanese.

Turning back to the fansub debate, I am seeing signs of a similar tension over the direction of loan words in English (except on a much more fringe level). There’s an off chance that these debates could help chart the direction of English in the years to come as well.

Similarly, to get us back on track, the criticisms of Ogai in his article sound like jealousy, or sour grapes.

I mean, have you seen Zetsubō Sensei? I absolutely love it, but there is so much text it’s basically impossible to watch without pausing every fifteen seconds. Without counting subtitles.