Katakana Analysis

As we have learned, katakana have three primary purposes- onomatopoeia, loan words, and emphasis. That is, they can serve to represent a sound, or to identify a word that comes from another language, or they can emphasize a particular word. In a sense, I believe that this latter process involves defamiliarizing the reader with a word that they might pass over quickly. By forcing the reader to spell out the word rather than simply look at the kanji ideogram, for instance, the writer has enabled the reader to dwell on the word, so that they might devote more attention to that word than they might otherwise have done.

I looked at online newspapers like Asahi (Asashi.com) to find my katakana words, and I was surprised to find that many were "borrowed" from English, such as キャリアアップ、 カタログ、トレーニング, and レッスン. (career, catalogue, training, and lesson). While I understood the concept of borrowed words, I believe that these concepts existed in some indigenous form within Japan prior to contact with English language speakers. Therefore, the usage of these terms is not merely a question of using the foreign alphabet to represent foreign ideas.

I think we can see that there is some sort of cachet to using English words, or some purpose beyond pure necessity. For the terms I have listed above, I can see how some might have felt that they were associated too deeply with traditional forms of education, particularly in terms of the kanji terminologies. Perhaps we can sense a desire to emphasize the modern and global implications of these new usages in opposition to Confucian interpretations of the same concepts. Perhaps, furthermore, there is a feeling that these modern and global terminologies will be beneficial to the reader, providing a greater ability to interact outside of the Japan sphere. Or, maybe they just seem cooler.