03 November 2011

Katakana Analysis draft

The first case I will analyse is the title of an album by Yellow Magic Orchestra back in 1993 called テクノドン, Technodon.
As far as my knowledge goes Technodon does not come from any foreign language. Google results for the name also all point to this album. Therefore I would suppose it as a Japanese self-created name, neither borrowed nor original. Apparently this type of words is categorised into Katakana-using words in Japanese.
Technodon's cover, unfortunately with no "テクノドン" printed on it. In case someone wonders about the big cross on the name YMO, it seemed the band got bored and decided to credit itself Not YMO during the 90's after a reformation.


On a more personal account, using Katakana here seems also helps to deliberately create certain ambiguity on the intepretation of this name. Obviously テクノ refers to the music genre. However, for ドン, Technodon's Wikipedia tells me it can refer to 丼(どん), meaning a bowl of food (the Wikipedia page made a mistake for the Kanji here,) "ドン", the onomatopoeia sound for explosion, or even don, the Italian honourific term. In this artistic expression sense, using テクノドン is way better than using テクノ丼 or something else. I believe Technodon is not the only example of such usage.
By the way, this is a fantastic album.

My second pick is the name of a type of Toyota's cars, カムリ, kamuri. The car is named Camry in English, though.
By the first look it seems to be a loan word, yet amusingly the origin of this loan is Japanese itself. カムリ comes from 冠 (かんむり), roughly a series of headresses to worn indicate diferences in officers’ ranks. It is believed to be introduced by Prince Shoutoku during the Asuka period, which is more than a thousand years ago.
Heian period male aristocrat (Fujiwara Koremitsu?) wearing kanmuri, 京都風俗博物館.
Therefore カムリ doe not really count as a loan word, but still Katakana is used here. It seems to serve for commercial use in the Japanese market only (because in the west kamuri is not the car's name). I do wonder why did Toyota bother to create such a word. Wouldn't simply using かんむり in Japan and Camry in the west be better? But anyways, it is definitely an interesting example of Kanataka usage.

Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technodon
http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/トヨタ・カムリ
http://yaplog.jp/amika-voice/archive/715 (for the second picture)
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1 comment:

  1. Woodlandcreature3 November 2011 at 15:59

    I like the examples that you raised, since they are not the kind that can be fully covered in most textbooks. For technodon, since using kanji already has meaning, using ドン allows for multiple interpretations and makes the name have multiple layers of meaning. I guess its kind of like in English, when people purposely use the wrong word with the same sound to make a joke. With the Toyota Camry example, I guess Kanmuri is too literal? In any case, the fact that it was originally Japanese --> English --> brought back to Japanese is a great example. - すぎもと

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