A while ago I wrote about the postfix nature of the japanese language. Basically, this means that a whole lot of information is conveyed through suffixes, postpositions, and such… and the verb goes at the end.
Now. One of the first things I learned is that to identify a person’s nationality, add the suffix -jin to the name of their country. Thus:
Nihon-jin: Japanese (person)
Furansu-jin: French (person)
etc.
Similarly, to identify a language, add the suffix -go to the name of its country of origin.
Nihon-go: Japanese (language)
Furansu-go: French (language)
etc.
Early on, I was introduced to the notion that if I were to go visit Japan, I would be considered a gaijin; an outsider. Because of this, I should expect people to be polite, but not outgoing; I’d not be part of the in-group.
About as early, it was explained that a large number of words in popular culture, slang, and basically everything technical is a loanword from English; many are contracted (sometimes in odd places; terebi = television), but most are recognizable once you learn to compensate for the lack of the letters ‘l’, ‘v’, and any consonant except ‘n’ not immediately followed by a vowel.
I just learned that the japanese word for such loan words is gairaigo. I’d like to make the deduction from this that the ‘gai’ root therefore means ‘outsider’ or ‘foreigner’, but I’m hampered by the extra two syllables in the middle. Where does the ‘rai’ come from? What does it mean?
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