« The 郷！ Team | Main | Some Aspects of U.S. Media Abuses/Problems »
August 4, 2005
Pucchi = Petit
I had always assumed that the Japanese slang for "small" - puchi (or putcchi) - was some sort of homegrown creation, but lo and behold, it's an abbreviated adaptation of the French word petit. Seeing that it took me thirteen years of my life to figure out that deodorant came from "de-odor," maybe I'm the last person in the world to have noticed the foreign origin of puchi.
Posted by marxy at August 4, 2005 3:45 PM
Comments
Which thirteen years was it? Were they all in a row?
Posted by: channing at August 4, 2005 4:42 PM
ha!
Posted by: r. at August 4, 2005 5:38 PM
well since pucchi sounds like petit, and describes small things, I got it right away.
Again you mess me up with the single "=" instead of "==". How would you express non-equality? I use "!="
Posted by: Chris_B at August 4, 2005 8:37 PM
Posted by: r. at August 4, 2005 9:16 PM
r: I'm dissapointed, I bet you could have found that glyph somewhere in UTF-8
Posted by: Chris_B at August 4, 2005 9:34 PM
i like to do it lo-fi
Posted by: r. at August 4, 2005 10:06 PM
LOL... that"s great. I just figured it out myself a few months ago, after 4 years here. Every time I tell someone they are as amazed as I was.
Posted by: Rrrrrrr at August 4, 2005 11:10 PM
news to me.
Also learned last night in regards to the earlier discussion about 痔 that it's ぢ.It was news to me and my boss. We learned it from his 小六 daughter.
Posted by: nate at August 4, 2005 11:52 PM
I guess those 3 years of French I took in high school were worth something after all.
Posted by: Chris_B at August 5, 2005 1:24 AM
Next you'll tell me sumoru means something in some anonymous foreign language.
Don't feel too bad. My sister was 16 when she realized that grandparents are parents, only on a grander scale.
Posted by: Carl at August 5, 2005 1:48 AM
I don't think it's such a dumb thing to miss.
It's not often that a schwa sound is transliterated as an "u" in japanese. There are countless instances of petit being written as ぺティ or something similar on consumer products too.
Posted by: nate at August 5, 2005 11:07 AM
Interesting. I don't think I would have ever gotten that. Thanks. :) it does make some sense though. some things that are right in front of you take forever to see.
now...if only there was a japanese word for "ditto". But I guess you would just say ditto.
Posted by: yoshi at August 7, 2005 4:24 AM