English affixes in Japanese
Summary
Description
Information and examples are from Nagano and Shimada (2018). The affixes derived from English in this entry are colloquially used instead of native Japanese affixes. The English source forms for mia- (my) and -in (in) are not affixes, but the one for -chikku (-tic ‘-like’) is.
1 possessive noun formation prefix
- mai- ‘privately owned, relating to oneself, noun modifier’, e.g. mai-hashi (hashi ‘chopsticks’) ‘personal pair of chopsticks’, mai-kasa (kasa ‘umbrella’) ‘personal umbrella’, mai-kaya (kaya ‘mosquito net’) ‘personal mosquito net’, mai-nabe (nabe ‘firepot meal, usually had as a group’) ‘firepot meal for one’, mai-osechi (osechi ‘traditional Japanese dish for the New Year’) ‘self-made osechi’, mai-uchiage (uchiage ‘celebration after a performance’) ‘one’s own party’ (Nagano and Shimada 2018:76).
2 adjectivizing suffixes
- -chikku ‘-like, adjective from noun’, derived from English -tic, e.g. muneo-chikku (Muneo first name of a famous Japanese politician) ‘reminding one of Muneo Suzuki’, otome-chikku (otome ‘a young girl, maiden’) ‘girlish’, yarase-chikku (yarase ‘staging’) ‘giving the impression of having been staged’. Native equivalents include -kusai, -ppoi, -rashii and -shii (Nagano and Shimada 2018:66).
- -in ‘contained inside’, e.g. takoyaki-in gyōza ‘takoyaki octopus stuffed gyoza dumpling’, with -in substituting the native suffix -iri when the latter immediately precedes the genitive marker no (Nagano and Shimada 2018:69–70). This form is also attested as a prefix with English stems, involving the containing and contained objects appearing in the reverse order (Nagano and Shimada 2018:71).