ABSTRACT
The modern transformation of Japan was accompanied by an intensive linguistic activity, in which new terms were coined and new meanings were applied to old terms, in an attempt to accommodate the Japanese language to the ideas and institutions adopted from the West. Usually, the Japanese did not transliterate the appropriate foreign terms, as this would have sounded strange and unfamiliar, nor did they invent native Yamato kotoba words for them, which might look cumbersome and unsophisticated. Instead, they used familiar Chinese ideographs to depict the strange new concepts. By coining new Chinese compounds (like kokusai for ‘international’) or giving new meanings to old compounds (like shimpo which came to mean ‘progress’),the novel concepts were assimilated more easily. In this way the Japanese created hundreds of new Chinese compounds during the Meiji period, many of which were later adopted by the Chinese when they embarked on their own modernization programme. 1
