Okay. Maybe it’s because it’s my native language, and I should just accept that this is how white people use the word, but the word paddy came from the malay word padi. And the meaning of padi is not the field itself, it means the plant that the rice grain comes from. Therefore when we say the rice field, in Malay we say kawasan padi, or paddy field. Which in Japanese is literally 田んぼ. BUT! In wanikani, paddy field is WRONG!.
Meanwhile, rice paddy in my language translates as the rice from the ‘paddy’ plant. It pisses me off that I keep getting this wrong when it was the white people that came to our land that misunderstood what paddy meant, and in the end messed up my wanikani.
The End.
by the way, this is just a non-serious venting post. that word will be burnt in a few weeks. All good.
Yes. after finishing 10 levels, it occured to me to just use synonyms feature (and sometimes just use Malay as the meaning) as long as i understood what it meant.
Wikipedia’s article on the subject uses “paddy” as a modifier, most commonly as “paddy field”. So I guess using “paddy” as a noun to refer to the field itself is just a lazy English abbreviation.
I suspect it’s because English already has words for “rice” and “field” and doesn’t need to borrow them; the foreign concept here is “using a flooded area to grow crops rather than dry land”, so the foreign loanword floating around in sentences referring to them is going to tend to drift in meaning as readers who don’t know its origin assume it’s referring to the foreign concept rather than being a synonym for a word they’re already familiar with.
The OED has examples that start with using “paddy/padi” clearly to mean rice, like
The captain..presented him with a bag of ‘paddy’ or ‘rough rice’. (1868)
and some which use “paddy field” in a way which could mean “rice field” or could mean “flooded field”:
Mr. Cooper..was upset into a newly-flooded paddy-field by the great man’s outriders. (1871)
and cases clearly using “paddy” to mean the field, not the crop:
Two good feet deep the waters lie In the paddies soggy bare. (1904)
which brings you to “rice paddy” where the author wants to clarify what the crop is:
Wanikani’s goal is to teach Japanese to English speakers and not to bring English usage of loan words in line with their (in this case, Malay) etymological roots, so it’s probably not worth their time fighting what to me as a native English speaker has always been the standard usage of the English word.
Similarly, the meaning of the Japanese word コンセント , despite being a borrowing from an English word, does not mean what an English speaker would think hearing the pronunciation, and is not how an English speaker would have designed a word for its actual meaning. So it’s not just western languages that use loan words in ways that don’t gel with their etymology.
Fun fact. there are many examples of growing paddy/padi without flooding an area. I googled and in english it’s called upland rice cultivation. A popular type of paddy grown in such a way is in East Malaysia (Borneo Island), called Padi Huma.
Someday, when our AI overlords have finally completed their world takeover, I would expect that they would undertake a “great language reconciliation” to rectify all such language injustices, fix all spelling and pronunciation issues, and otherwise harmonize the linguistic chaos that traces its roots to the Tower of Babel.
Until that glorious day arrives, however, we will have to adapt ourselves to overcome and triumph over the linguistic legacy of inhomogeneities.
I use Yomitan to bring up dictionary definitions from JMDict, and after I had typed in paddy field and was marked wrong, I looked, and paddy field was the first dictionary definition so I was happy enough to add the synonym. I’m a Brit, and had only heard of paddy used adjectivally before. Now I know a little more, thank you.