So you know how romaji is when Japanese words are written out with English characters? Is there a term for the opposite process? As in, English words written out with Japanese characters? Like the name Rick being written out with katakana characters. Is there a term for that equivalent to romaji?

12 comments

1. I guess the term would be “loan word” or “borrowed word”

2. I don’t think there is an answer for that, and technically romaji is the romanization of the japanese writing system. Generally, katakana is used to write foreign loan words or for emphasis or ambiguity (i.e. in a novel or literature), but it is also used commonly for names, especially in games etc. or to disambiguate two of the same names. Since romaji is a writing system I wouldn’t say it has an inverse, however, japanese has words for loan words: gairaigo or wasei-eigo, but again I wouldn’t say that this is some sort of inverse of romaji… I don’t think your question makes sense, but I hope this helps!

3. No idea about the specific term for writing foreign words in kana, but the phenomenom of expressing a word in another writing system is called transliteration.

4. コーヒー is coffee as much as it is café or Kaffee. It is not the same as romaji.

5. [x] = katakana

6. Technically コーヒー is from the Dutch 😉

   Both “romaji” and “katakana” are writing systems, so why not just:

   リック is the katakana version of the name Rick.

7. I Think the Word you are looking for is 外来語 (gairaigo)

8. >then コーヒー is the [x] version of the English word “coffee.”

   I personally say “gairaigoize[d]”. It’s not a real word but I just googled the Japanese equivalent 外来語化 and there are tens of thousands of results, including in academic publications. For example:

   >scriptは「スクリプト」として外来語化されている単語です

9. カタカナ言葉

10. ローマ字 or Romaji is a loan word from Japanese so I don’t really think there is a English version of foreign words I Japanese since you don’t see a lot of English speaks (in the grand scheme of things) learning Japanese, at least at a level that a word would be created for the purpose of translation

11. カタカナ語

12. There are two different but related things going on here. Transliteration and transcription. Transliteration is the process of using one writing system to represent things from another writing system in a predictable way. Rōmaji can be thought of as an example of this (although a fairly forgetful one, since it forgets kanji and the difference between katakana and hiragana). Transcription on the other hand is using a writing system to represent the sounds of a language. These are not completely separate concepts however, and many systems are not one or the other exactly.

    For example, some romanization systems for Japanese use latin equivalents for the kana, so the long o sound would be represented by oo or ou depending on how it’s represented in Japanese kana. On the other hand, other romanization systems use ō for both, since they sound the same. The first is more of a transliteration and the second is more of a transcription. However, since kana are phonetic anyway, rōmaji are usually essentially both transcriptions and transliterations, although different systems lean more one way or the other.

    Now katakanization is maybe a bit more complicated to analyze, in particular because it’s not really a formal system. In any case it’s certainly not a transliteration system because it doesn’t directly turn letters into kana, it’s more concerned with representing the sounds.

    That said, I would call any individual example a “katakana transcription” of the English word. It seems like the Japanese word for transcription (in general, not necessarily with katakana) is 転写 (https://ja.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%BB%A2%E5%86%99_(%E8%A8%80%E8%AA%9E%E5%AD%A6)), although this is probably linguistics terminology. I would guess that most people just say カタカナで書く most of the time.

    Finally, I should add that コーヒー is the Japanese word for coffee. It might etymologically be a transcription of an English/Dutch word, but it is a Japanese word. So most of the time you see it being used in Japanese it’s not being used as a transcription, but just a normal word. It’s only being used as a transcription when it’s being used to represent the sound of the English word coffee rather than the concept of coffee itself. You can describe Japanese words that are loaned from other languages as 外来語.

    That said, most English names written in katakana are transcriptions, since those names are not Japanese words, and the katakana are being used to represent the sound of the name.