matiwords

YouTube video by 天月-あまつき-YouTube Official Channel 【MV】パーペキヒーロー【天月/まふまふ/un:c/Gero/少年T/そらる/超学生/となりの坂田。/luz】

here's a song that uses this word, because i will always find an excuse to post japanese music on this account: www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZaT... (the song is called pāpeki hīrō)

マッチ matchi is from english match, but ポンプ isn't from english pump — it's from dutch pomp instead (which also means pump).

word of the day: japanese マッチポンプ matchi-ponpu, literally 'match-pump'. means stirring up problems and solving them yourself just to take credit for it, and comes from the idea of starting a fire (with a matchstick) just to put it out (with a pump) later (and take credit for it).

this is literally 'dramatic, sadistic, domestic, chaotic', but notice how kaosutikku has a -su- that chaotic doesn't? this is because it's not chaotic, but a japanese-made word from カオス kaosu + ～ティック -tikku, a more englishy version of ～チック -chikku. it'd be *chaostic if we had it in english

i forgot to sneak in a reference to one of my favorite songs in this thread! anyway here it is: www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TUM.... the first line has one of those japanese-made words with -chikku, or rather, -tikku:

ドラマチック、サディスティック、ドメスティック、カオティック
doramatikku, sadisutikku, domesutikku, kaosutikku

(there's other japanese-made words with english elements that use suffixes too, like ボリューミー boryūmī from *volumey, meaning plump and fluffy, like for ex. a pancake. i just wanted to highlight -chikku because i think it's cool.)

instead of just doing its thing with other loanwords. so you get 乙女チック otomechikku 'girly, girlish' from 乙女 otome 'young lady', or 漫画チック mangachikku 'manga-like, manga-style' from 漫画 manga.

only the -chikku form is really productive though (bare -ikku usually attaches to words that already have "foreign" shapes that can take it, like オカルティック okarutikku 'eerie, paranormal' from オカルト okaruto < occult). but it being productive means it can attach to words that are completely native,

why not make ファンタジック fantajikku 'fantastical', literally *fantasic, from ファンタジー fantajī 'fantasy'? why not add the suffix to the word メルヘン meruhen, meaning 'fairytale', from german märchen, to get メルヘンチック meruhenchikku, fairytale-like? and this is how the suffix -(ch)ikku was born.

once you've got so many -chikku words and their corresponding nouns, like the pair ドラマ dorama ~ doramachikku, or ロマン roman [< french] ~ ロマンチック romanchikku, it's easy to start using this suffix to make new words. if you have both アイロニー aironī and アイロニック aironikku,

like ロマンチック romanchikku from romantic, ドラマチック doramachikku from dramatic, エキゾチック ekizochikku from exotic, and so on. there's also other words that have not -chikku but just -ikku, and those also reinforce the suffix: エキセントリック ekisentorikku < eccentric, ストイック sutoikku < stoic.

and it's the suffix ～チック -chikku. this is an adjective-forming suffix, meaning something like "-like", and it comes from the -tic ending of english adjectives like dramatic, fantastic, autistic, neurotic, phonetic.

japanese first got this suffix through borrowing whole words that had this ending,

i love it when suffixes that originally come from a foreign language become productive. english has a few cases of this, both older (-able) and newer (-ista), but i'd like to talk about one portuguese one and another one from japanese. i'll start with the japanese one first,

oh wait no the name is actually from scottish gaelic ruadh 'red(-haired)', so maybe 赤 or 紅 is more appropriate

you could write ロイ as 王 (etymologically, it's from old french for 'king') and just let people guess how to read it lol

hello thoughts of the road (路意)

‹ #langsky #lingsky #linguistics ›

welcome to matiwords! my name is mati [ˈmat͡ʃi], and this is my linguistics account. expect to see posts about historical phonology and etymology mostly, with a slight cjk focus. also writing systems from time to time

oh by the way you can read my older stuff at rentry.co/marticles

this is true btw what the other mati is saying is real