People say that English absorbs lots of words from other languages. I've heard the metaphore that other languages borrow but English hunts you down, beats and robs you, then leaves you lying sensless in an alley. Which isn't all that innacurate in a way.
But Japanese is pretty crazy about taking words too. If the word is remotely useful, it will end up in Japanese as a katakana word, eventually it may change to hiragana. Some professor type will at some time try to make a similar word with proper kanji, but those words rarely survive.
Part of why I find this stuff so cool is that part of my interest in the Japanese language is so I can better understand my tribe's language, Zuni. Both are language isolates that have ended up borrowing from nearby languages over the years, and their true origins are difficult to determine. So I have an interest in how extant language isolates evolve, and for obvious reasons Japanese is far more thoroughly documented than my tribe's (which I can't even speak).
I like how English and Japanese steal from each other, too.
I only just learned the English "honcho" as in "head honcho" comes from 班長.
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