Usually its like just a few words sprinkled in, or at most like one or two lines…
Literally I feel like they’re just trying to say: “Hey this is a foreign language I’m sooo cooool!”
The english language literally steals words from other languages and adopts them.
Macabre Ennui Taco Plaza Café Ballet Cuisine Restaurant Elite Genre Police Patio Rodeo Canyon Guitar Tomato Mosquito Hamburger Wanderlust Angst Pizza Pasta Piano Opera Balcony Volcano Algebra
I can keep going but I think you get the point. Some english songs do throw in other languages at times too.
Many Asian songs, especially Japanese and Korean will often include english because they are all taught english in school and english is used in the business world. When visiting Korea and Japan, in major cities, a large amount of signage will include english to aid tourists.
I feel like English is more of a patois/pidgin than people think. Just the impact of the Normans, French/Gauls, Celtics and then latterly cultural impact of the French/Germans, Indians, Jews greatly shaped our language in the middle ages, which has kind of settled into a language slurry in the last 600 years.
Umm… don’t plenty of English language songs do this too?
Mhmm…The amount that is used in jpop is way bigger.
Of the top of my head I mainly see bilingual english speakers (like spanish/mexican) that use maybe some spanish word sprinkled inbetween.
Meanwhile jpop can sometimes be 10% (and more) english in the lyrics.
You know how many French words/phrases I hear in English songs? Coup de x, raison d’être, déjà vu, etc
I feel like at this point, many of those are basically English words now. Like Déjà vu.
Not to mention the use of hors d’oeuvres, cul-de-sac, faux pas, rendezvous, cliche…
And then there’s the German ones: kindergarten, eigenvalues, …
De hell is “Eigenvalues”??
Please show me songs about eigenvalues.
I found two that are at least loosely about eigenvalues:
And a few more containing the word “eigenvalue” but not focussing on it.
Edit: Despite my best effords, I could not find any songs in german about eigenvalues or eigenvectors. Very sad.
Oh, the Fourier transform of revolution In the manifold of dialectic space Comrades, let us normalize the solution To the eigenvalue of the human raceI am not entirely sure I’m going to let that count as English. /s
I believe when the person said what the fuck are eigenvalues? They were intending on mainstream English songs.
Lmao two wildly different concepts
L’amour vs Science.
Not just songs, but all the other languages showing up in English comes up conversationally too! When you did something wrong, there’s the “mea culpa”. Or in the courts, there are tons of Latin phrases like “nolo contendre”. I’ve had “perritos calientes” (hot dogs, literally hot puppies) in Spain, but never have I had a “giant cheese” (quesadilla) or “little donkey” (burrito) in the states. And we just borrow other phrases as-is like “Je ne sais quoi” and schadenfreude.
It’s not unheard of there to be English language tracks that drop in random French, Italian or Spanish words and phrases
It’s just regular cultural exposure to other languages ultimately. No rule says you need to stick to one language in a song, so some musicians throw in some stuff from other languages they’ve heard, because why not
I was gonna say this too. Que Sera Sera, Livin’ la Vida Loca… I’m sure I could think of more.
Psycho killer, qu’est-ce que c’est
Even German: Wayne Newton - Danke Schoen
Or Deak Kennedys “California Über Alles” (the accent is just soo bad)
L’amooooooouuuuuur !!!
As if US music isn’t full of random Spanish words
Oh well, que sera sera…
This is more of a question than a thought, but apparently the English language borrows from lots of Latin-ish and other alphabetic languages of centuries past.
Yes English is awkward. I didn’t write the rules or definitions either. 🤷
Just think.
Right now at your local hardware store are tons of tools you can buy. If you need to cut something, you can buy a saw.
And when you use the saw, the word “saw” is the verb of how you use the noun. So you’d use a saw to saw.
And if you had an instinct to cut a saw in half, you might use a second saw to cut the first saw in half.
But you wouldn’t do that. YOU have no desire to do that. But maybe someone else does. And maybe you just happened to bear witness to the cutting of the saw. You will have seen it. And since thats now in past tense, you saw it happen.
In which case you will have saw a saw saw a saw.
have saw
Bro doesn’t even know about seen 🤣
icu
I’m probably gonna fuck this up, it’s something of an old ‘meme’, before I was even born in 1982. Anyways, an old riddle I once heard, from a book written before I was born…
Riddle…
- You’re stuck in a room, no windows and no doors.
- All you have is a table and a mirror, how you get out?
Answer…
- You look in the mirror and see what you saw.
- You use the saw to cut the table in half.
- Two halves make a whole.
- You climb through the hole and you’re out!
Yeah, works better verbally LMFAO!
If I, as a child in the 80s had said that to my mom, she would have said “Quit being asinine. That would never work.”
Yeah. I suppose it wouldn’t…
And that boys and girls, is how you give a child depression, and a reason to question if talking at all is even worth it.
Hint: No. It’s not.
Now there’s a woman who never read the Phantom Tollbooth.
My parents gave me the book of riddles. Wish I still had it…
That’s the only depression here, that I don’t still have the book ☹️
Double edit: I rather liked the book.
I once saw a man in Arkansas, who had a saw which could out saw any saw that it saw saw; the man said, “Have you saw a saw that could out saw the saw you saw in Arkansas? If you have saw a saw that could out saw the saw you saw in Arkansas, show me the saw saw.”; when he said that I saw a saw, I said, “Yes I did saw a saw in Arkansas, and what a saw I saw, that saw saw!!”
I was going to say that you’re more like The Brain. Then as I increased the font size, I realized your name is Pirky. Not Pinky. So now my reference makes no sense.
“I could have swore i saw a saw saw a saw on the shore.”
“…Are you sure?”
“Certain. And i couldn’t quite cut time to help curt Tim cut the curtain in tin.”
You can be too close to a door to close it.
Styx would like a word.
♫ Voulez-Vous Coucher Avec Moi Ce Soir ♫
Yes, I can imagine. It’s done literally all the time, in every genre.
English contains a veritable shitload of loanwords as well.
But you’re not wrong when you think they’re trying to be cool. You’ll hear this most often in hiphop, which started in English and not every language lends itself to rap. So they throw in an f-bomb here or there. Imitation is the highest form of flattery type stuff.
Also, English is the most commonly learned foreign language on this planet. A lot of contemporary music genres came out of North America. I would say internet culture is most pervasive in English as well. A lot of tech jargon becomes English loanwords in other languages. There are reasons beyond wanting to sound cool as well.
That strongly depends on culture. In poland this doesn’t happen at all. On the other side, in Japanese works I’ve seen not only English words included, but completely fake languages (Nier Automata Ost) or pseudo languages faking Latin or English (Madoka Ost, Hellsing TV intro)
Maybe English speaking people with tattoos of Chinese letters is the equivalent?
you know the saying that english is five languages in a trenchcoat that drags other languages into alleyways to ruffle through their pockets for loose nouns?
english is basically the european pidgin language.
No, I didn’t know that “saying”, but I’m glad I do now.
Saying what now?
In Dutch we have a term called “borrowed words”, those are words we stole from a different language.
For example “Portefeuille” is a Dutch word, but it originate from the French. Another example is “computer”, we do not have/use a Dutch variant.
Using these words in a song will sound like your described. But it’s actually still Dutch
Mm, English calls them loanwords. Like we’re going to give them back at some point.
But English itself is an unholy marriage of Dutch and French, each half taking the other half as loanwords. It’s a miracle we get anything communicated.
Like we’re going to give them back at some point.
You might, actually. It’s called reborrowing or repatriated loans, where a language borrows a word from another language that was itself a loanword from the initial language. English doesn’t seem to have many examples of these but there are many examples where English borrowed and then “returned” a word.
