Borrowing of verbs vs. nouns? [from LINGUIST list]

[janilta@j.email.ne.jp]

Rirando-san,

Ara, yoroshiku ne ! Nihongo shabereru kata wa yappari ooi desune... ;-)
Yes, I agree with you, Japanese has indeed a very simple system for verb
(noun + suru) creation which allows every one to use it (Japanese living
in other countries may use a local noun plus suru to create verbs as
call/phone suru as well as telephoner suru, etc, etc, even if this does
not become standard Japanese). But again, Japanese is a very porous
language and f ex 'gettu suru' is now totally standard, which was
probably not the case some years ago.

Besides, Dave, the kanji (Chinese characters, perhaps more than 50 pc of
the total vocabulary) clusters are in general still linguistically felt
in Japanese as foreign borrowings and do not work as the 'original'
Japanese words. But there are exceptions as f ex 'shikakui' (square,
adj) from the 'Chinese' borrowing 'shikaku' (four edges ie square) plus
adjective marker -i (in English we have 'a square is square, to
square'...). I can also think of 'naui' (trendy) from Eng 'now' + i with
the same construction. For 'real' verbs, I can think of 'saboru' (to
play truant/cut classes/work) from French 'sabotage' + verb marker -ru
(originally 'sabotage + suru' perhaps, but eventually a verb has been
created).

Lastly, Theresa, I guess the place you mentioned is the private name of
this very nightclub. Indeed, 'un drugstore' is a word used in standard
French (though rarely), but it stands for something quite different from
its US counterpart (perhaps 'a small mall' would be the closest
translation).

Well, not a very CJ oriented posting... Sorry !
Regards, Yann