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I’m in Season 3 right now. The word Vanilla is in the common loan words list. I’ve been looking up the loan words in jisho.org going to google and putting in the words to see where these loan words are used. For the most part, even though there’s some variation to the main katakana spelling for the common words list, I use the katakana spelling of the one that comes up with the most results from google or is actually defined by wikipedia. For the word Vanilla though, it is a bit strange…
According to http://jisho.org/words?jap=&eng=vanilla&dict=edict —
Vanilla is ワニラ / ワニラ / ヴァニラ — they are all very similarI put into google: ワニラ vanilla and it gives me the “Did you mean: ヴァニラ vanilla”
I put into google: バニラ — this gives me the good results too and is used by plenty of businesses. On wiki, バニラ – Wikipedia
I put into google: ヴァニラ — lot of results but the top sites seem to be beauty oriented (not so much concerned with this spelling since it doesn’t seem like the common way to spell vanilla–what is weird though is Google did recommend it when I originally typed in ワニラ vanilla)I think Koichi says it ワニラ in the recording so I will use that. But I am curious as to why in this particular case for vanilla, it seems “バニラ” is correct and also “ワニラ” is correct?
Are there any other common cases where this happens or possibly a general idea I am missing when it comes to the learning, use, and spelling of loan words?
Thanks.
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This topic was modified 10 years, 9 months ago by
This is speculation on my part, but it may be because there is a vanilla plant, vanilla fruit, vanilla bean, vanilla oil, vanilla essence, vanilla flavor, or vanilla as in a synonym for plain or ordinary.
So it’s possibly due to context, but it could also be that there is simply more than one favored way of writing it as it is a borrowed word and thus they are using a best approximation of it, so opinions on that may differ as language is generally created from use, so if a lot of places use different terms, they will all be more or less acceptable.
Thank you! That sounds like a great possible explanation.
バ and ヴァ are both ways of representing the Va sound. Both are technically correct, but the latter is a bit newer than the former, so you’re probably going to see the former more often. You’re not going to get funny looks whichever one you use, though.
ワニラ is probably how it was pronounced by whoever introduced the word in the first place.
Ahhh I see. It’s good to know that the various spellings for vanilla are OK so that on the occasion I do come across other words that have a few different spellings I will be able to pick out the most common one.
Thank you!
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This topic was modified 10 years, 9 months ago by
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