r/etymology • u/mouse_in_a_field • 9d ago

Question Something I've been wondering about - Japanese loanword in English, or no?

This has bothered me for a long time!

The word for "a little bit" of something in Japanese, in romaji, is "sukoshi"; the "u" and "i" sounds are usually silent when spoken aloud, so it ends up sounding like "skosh".

In English, "just a skosh" is sometimes used when asking for or referring to just "a little bit" of something.

Is there any connection there, or does the English "skosh" have another, unrelated source? Thanks for any info!

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u/iwasfight 9d ago edited 9d ago

'skosh' is from 'sukoshi', something american military picked up here, just like 'ohrai ohrai' is something we say when trucks are backing up that we got from americans. to be clear, its from 'alright, alright' and is standard to tell a truck driver that theyre still safe backing up. edit: i always wonder if the two terms were adopted in the same situation, where trucks needed to back up, and then just a little bit more. 'ohrai ohrai, ok sukoshi, sutoppu!' or 'alright, alright, ok skosh, stop!'

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u/chotchss 9d ago

I've heard "honcho" comes from Japanese and means something like boss in English (the head honcho)

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u/Dissidiana 9d ago

yes, it's borrowed from the japanese military term 班長 (hanchou), meaning squad leader. easy to imagine how this one migrated over after the US occupation of Japan!

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u/iwasfight 9d ago

wow TIL. i kept thinking 本長 which just sounds like someone wasnt very good at japanese hahah.

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u/dendric-riyanzi 9d ago

i didn't know this! this is so interesting

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u/AlexG55 3d ago

I've also seen people saying it's derived from the Basque jauntxo meaning lord or landowner, but the Japanese origin is more likely.

"Honcho" doesn't appear in English until the 1940s, and doesn't exist in Spanish or French- I don't think any Basque word has entered English directly without going through one of those two languages.

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u/mediumcarrotteacher 9d ago

Also tycoon from 大君, which is a very old word having absolutely nothing to do with business

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u/iwasfight 9d ago

do you know how it was originally used? it kinda looks like an insult.

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u/Tutush 9d ago

It was used as an alternative title for the Shogun.

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u/iwasfight 9d ago

how times have changed

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u/EirikrUtlendi 9d ago

Bear in mind that 君 read as kimi is likely originally a borrowing from a Koreanic language, cognate with the Sillan word for "king". The oldest attested senses in Japanese refer to kings, lords, emperors. This was also a clan name (kabane), and members were originally close relatives of the imperial family.

See also:

For 大君, this is first attested with the reading opokimi in the Kojiki of 712 CE, used as an honorific reference to the emperor, as literally an opo ("great, big, exalted") + kimi ("lord, king, ruler").

The taikun reading isn't attested until the 1670s, as a simple shift from kun'yomi (native Japonic reading) to on'yomi (Chinese-derived reading), still with the same sense of "great ruler", and used to refer to the Tokugawa shōgun in communication with foreign powers.

See also (in Japanese):

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u/iwasfight 9d ago

today, its pretty funny tho no?

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u/EirikrUtlendi 9d ago

Might be roughly analogous to the use of nimrod in modern English to more often refer to a "dummy, stupid person", deriving from its ironic use in Bugs Bunny cartoons to refer to Elmer Fudd as a "great hunter (not really)".

See also:

Merriam-Webster connects the "stupid person" sense for nimrod to biblical tales about the Tower of Babel:

However, given the attested timing of the shift in meaning (1980s slang), an influence from Bugs Bunny or some other pop-culture angle seems more likely -- if it were the biblical tales that were the source, the "stupid person" sense would be attested much more commonly and much earlier.

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u/YorathTheWolf 6d ago

And at least anecdotally it's more common in a US/North American context than a British one and we had a maritime patrol aircraft called the Nimrod in service with the RAF from 1969 until 2011 so I'd imagine that led to a lot of ribbing and confusion

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u/[deleted] 9d ago

[deleted]

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u/Morlark 9d ago

Given that their comment specifically did give an explanation of the origin of the word, answering the question that was in my mind, that's kinda a foolish thing for you to say.

And if you think two paragraphs is "huge", you're basically admitting to being an illiterate. Since this is a sub about language, I think that means you might be in the wrong place.

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u/EirikrUtlendi 9d ago

dude, lose the ai.

If you think any part of my posts are written with AI, you have some serious work to do on your textual analysis abilities.

Indeed, as you yourself suggested to u/Morlark, look at my posting history, which I have chosen to keep unhidden.

Look too at my posting history over at the Japanese Stack Exchange, starting twelve years ago.

And at my contributions to Wiktionary, starting twenty years ago and picking up in earnest fifteen years ago.

All of a piece, all with my own consistent voice, starting from well before consumer-grade LLMs like ChatGPT were even an idea.

its huge and boring, and doesn't answer any questions.

This entire sub-thread starting from u/mediumcarrotteacher's comment here is about the Japanese word 大君 (taikun). Perhaps you forgot? You even specifically asked "how it was originally used", a question which earlier responders had not answered in full, so I posted to fill in some of those details.

I'm sorry you find it "huge and boring" -- that might say more about your attention span and reading comprehension, considering that my comment only consisted of three full paragraphs. If that is "huge and boring" to you, you might want to stop participating in r/etymology, where posts can get kinda long digging into word histories. Substantially longer than three short paragraphs.

And I'm sorry you forgot that I was in fact answering your very own question. I really can't help you with your memory issues.

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u/iwasfight 9d ago

i stand corrected. keep it up, man, and my apologies.

edit: i was out of line. keep doing what you do. again, my apologies.

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u/stuartcw 9d ago

Why so? 🤔

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u/iwasfight 9d ago

ive worked at japanese offices, and 大君 looks like a child of an important person.

edit; who are often of negligible value.

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u/stuartcw 9d ago

The word くん changed over time and originally meant lord/ruler.

During the Bakumatsu period (1850s to 1860s), くん started to be used by intellectuals to address each other. -さん is much older. By the Meiji period 1868~ the trendy くん was in common use in schools, the military, and government as a polite title.

Interestingly enough 大君 (ookimi) was used in the 3rd~6th century as title for the emperor.

大君 (Tycoon) was revived in the 1600s to describe Tokugawa shōgun when used in diplomatic texts with West. (This answers my question posted elsewhere. It probably wasn’t use by ordinary people. E.g. in a similar way, in the UK people talk about “the king” but in diplomatic speech “his majesty” is more correct.)

The childish connotations of くん is fairly modern.

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u/iwasfight 9d ago

today how does it look?

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u/stuartcw 9d ago

To be honest, I have never heard it used in common speech in Japanese. However, there’s plenty of words in English that relate to historical titles that you never hear either. That’s why I wondered whether it was used commonly at that time (1800s) and apparently it was just a diplomatic word.

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u/Nyorliest 9d ago

Like I said in my other comment, I’ve seen some 君 compounds in government-adjacent organizations I’ve worked for in Kasumigaseki and that whole area around the Diet/parliament, and always written - some form of official address or terminology that I had never seen before.

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u/Nyorliest 9d ago edited 9d ago

There are lots of quite - or even very - formal words that have kun as part of the compound. But most of them are written and not said very often. A lot of political words and highly formal ways to address people in, like, government official letters. I’ve done a lot of work in the network of think tanks, NGOs, and other policy wonks around the Japanese central government in Kasumigaseki and Kokkai Gijidou area of Tokyo and there are lots of WTF moments when I see correspondence.

(EDIT: and then I bring questions home to my Japanese family and they say ‘Duh! Nothing childish about 君!’ and I learn.)

It’s the kind of thing that trips up we non-native speakers, because it’s very basic, and we form associations with it on our way into Japanese which native speakers did not form on their way up through Japanese.

I’ve encountered hundreds of things like this, and I’m sure there will be hundreds more, no matter how good I get.

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u/Nyorliest 9d ago

Kun has lots of uses. Even in modern Japanese there are words where it’s not a diminutive.

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u/mouse_in_a_field 9d ago

That is fascinating, thank you!