What's In a Word: Adobencha-

Some of you knew, figured out, or at least suspected that the Japanese word adobencha- comes from the English word adventure.

Every language has loan words. English certainly has some from Japanese, such as karaoke and karate. What's interesting about karaoke is that English has actually borrowed the oke part back from Japanese after it was originally borrowed from English.

The kara part of both karate and karaoke is a Japanese word meaning empty. The te part of karate is a Japanese word meaning hand: empty hand.

The oke part of karaoke actually come from the English word orchestra, which was borrowed into Japanese as o-kesutora, which is then often shortened to oke. 

Here, I am using the hyphen to lengthen the duration of the preceding vowel. (We don't usually do this when writing Japanese in Roman characters, but it is the way it's done in Japanese, particularly in loan words.)

In Japanese, the vowels always have the same sound, but the duration can be different. So, for my word adobencha, it really should be adobenchaa, or adobencha-; the final vowel sound has a long duration. 

The Japanese spellings of loan words are usually chosen so the spelling comes out similarly, rather than trying to make the sounds match. Even if the sounds were made to match as much as possible, they wouldn't be perfect. But the focus on spelling makes the pronunciation even farther off. And then, too often, Japanese speakers think of the word as close enough to the English pronunciation to be understood. It's one of things that complicates communication between Japanese and English speakers.