Some of the examples under あれ use katakana where I didn’t expect it, and I want to understand why.
Example 1:
あれはダメ
I’ve never read ダメ before, but have heard it a lot. JPDB does list this spelling as the most common. Is it a loanword? What language does it originate from?
Related to this, does anyone have a good centralized reference for finding which language loanwords originate from? When searching for origin, I end up having to dig through random search results, and it’d be nice to have a core searchable resource for this. It’s ok if the resource is entirely in Japanese, so please let me know!
Example 2:
いくらなんでもあれはヒドいよ。
Why is ヒド spelled with katakana here? ひどい is the only kana-only option listed in JPDB.
The internet seems to think it’s Japanese in origin, and started off as a bit of Go terminology. The kanji version is 駄目. In go, a space surrounded by stones is an eye, and 駄目 is a space that’s surrounded in such a way that putting a stone there doesn’t increase your territory and is a useless, wasted move. The first kanji in this word, 駄, means “poor quality, worthless” (and also “pack-horse”, but that’s not important right now), and だ is its onyomi. (It also turns up in 無駄 [むだ] “waste”.) め of course is the kunyomi of 目, so this is an on-kun compound.
I don’t know of a good online source of etymology for Japanese words – I usually search for the word plus 由来 and see what turns up, but I know this is kind of at risk of finding bogus folk etymologies. Hopefully that hasn’t happened to me here…
Ok, that makes sense! Thank you. I feel like the い should also be katakana here in that case, but it may just be that I need to develop my language intuition further
I thought so too, but I think the reason い is in hiragana here – is becaue い is actually not part of the word, but rather the okurigana, which determins the tense.
Like 古い → 古くない (old → not old)
フルい → フルくない
This way you can separate the word itself from the okurigana.
由来, got it. Jisho doesn’t list a different language origin, so I think it is Japanese origin.
Thanks for sharing the explanation you found for the origin, it makes a lot of sense. Like you say, who knows if it’s fully accurate, but I run into that plenty for English words too.
That would make sense. The Jisho entry example sentence (via Tatoeba, unsure how verified these are) has ヒドイ. Maybe there’s no definitive rule? Or it’s something that others are also confused about and get wrong.
