Thread by @ZevHandel

In this thread I’m going to talk about one of my favorite etymologies. The history of this word has got it all: it’s a fascinating tale of multi-lingual and multi-cultural interaction, full of surprises. I'm excited, let's go!

Our tale begins in reverse chronological order with this rather bizarre-looking written Chinese word:

“卡拉OK”

pronounced kǎlā’ōukēi in Mandarin. (Hang onto your hats, we’ll get to the Japanese source word soon.)

“卡拉OK” is orthographically really quite strange. But that is indeed the standard written form of kǎlā’ōukēi. It pops right up in my MacOS Chinese input method.

“卡拉OK” is a fully *phonographic* (purely sound-based) representation of the spoken Mandarin word kǎlā’ōukēi, a four-syllable word with no meaningful sub-parts. The two characters 卡 and 拉 are phonograms. That is, they represent only two meaningless syllables.

Yes, 拉 commonly writes the Mandarin word lā ‘to pull’, but it’s not being used that way here. It’s just writing a sound. There’s no pulling involved.

The two letters O and K are also phonograms. They also represent two meaningless syllables. Specifically, they represent the syllables that have the same pronunciation as the Chinese names of the letters. Those Mandarin letter names are borrowed from American English.

The word kǎlā’ōukēi is occasionally written with four Chinese characters as 卡拉歐剋, or in a variant form as 卡拉歐克 (kǎlā’ōukè). But “卡拉OK” is far more common. What do we make of this preference for "OK" over "歐剋"?

We have to accept the fact that modern Chinese orthography includes roman letters alongside Chinese characters. It’s a writing system that uses two scripts.

Some common, ordinary Mandarin words—admittedly, not many—are ordinarily written with roman letters, even if it’s also possible to write them entirely in characters. For example, we have “X光” and “T恤”. And we also have “KTV”, which has now replaced kǎlā’ōukēi in many contexts.

These written forms containing roman letters present certain interesting lexicographic challenges: Where do these words go in a dictionary or a book index?

An interesting thing about roman letters in Chinese orthography is that they don’t function as alphabetic letters. What I mean by that is that they don’t represent individual consonant and vowel sounds as they do in writing systems like English, German, or Spanish.

Instead they represent one or more syllables. Most of them are syllabograms! In Chinese orthography, the graphs T, O, and K represent the syllabic sounds tī, ōu, and kēi. But I digress. Let’s get back to the word kǎlā’ōukēi 卡拉OK.

The Mandarin word kǎlā'ōukēi is, of course, a borrowed form of the Japanese word karaoke, most often written entirely in katakana as カラオケ.

The fact that it is written in katakana suggests the likelihood that it is a Western borrowing. But if so, what is the source word and what is the source language? It doesn’t sound like any English or Dutch word that I know.

On the other hand, karaoke is sometimes written as 空オケ, with the kara part written in kanji. The use of kanji suggests a native Japanese word. So what’s going on?

Well, the word is actually a compound. It’s made up of two meaningful parts combined together. The first part is kara, a native Japanese word that is normally written 空, meaning ‘empty’.

Even if you don’t speak Japanese, you probably are familiar with this word kara, though you may not realize it. It’s exactly the same kara as in karate, the Japanese martial art. Karate literally means “empty hand”, because this martial art is practiced without weaponry

The kara part of karate means ‘empty’, and the te part means ‘hand’. (If you like sushi but don't know Japanese, you may know this Japanese word te ‘hand’ from temaki ‘hand roll [cone-shaped sushi]'.)

Okay, so we’ve figured out the first half of karaoke: it’s kara 空 ‘empty’. So what then is oke?

This is the really interesting part of the word! As noted earlier, the katakana spelling suggests a Western borrowing, and indeed this is in origin an English word, though it’s hardly recognizable to English speakers.

I feel like keeping you in suspense, but I suppose that would be unfair. So I’ll reveal the origin in the next tweet. Ready?

The source word is “orchestra”. Borrowing into Japanese as ōkesutora, it was then abbreviated (which is not uncommon for very long borrowings) down to its first two syllables: oke.

So karaoke is a Japanese hybrid compound, a Frankenstein monster of a word stitched together from two parts with disparate origins.

The first half is the native Japanese word kara meaning ‘empty’, and the second half is an abbreviation oke of the borrowed English word ōkesutora meaning ‘orchestra’.

The written form 空オケ reflects its hybrid origin. The all-katakana written form カラオケ is, I would guess, the result of a feeling that a mixed kanji-katakana word looks a bit weird.

So karaoke literally means “empty orchestra”. Why? Because when you sing karaoke, the song has been metaphorically emptied of its lyrical content, leaving only the instrumental part behind. It’s up to you, the singer, to fill that emptiness.

One of the most common situations in which a word gets borrowed across languages is when an object or practice is borrowed across cultures. Lacking a word for this new thing, the borrowing cultures readily adopt the word used in the source culture’s language.

So, as the practice of karaoke traveled around the world, propelled by the cultural prominence of Japan in the late 20th century, the Japanese word “karaoke” became English “karaoke” and Mandarin “kǎlā’ōukēi”.

The English pronunciation, carry-OH-kee, is significantly warped from the Japanese, a result of accommodation to the phonology and stress patterns of English, and probably further distorted by orthographic interference from the Japanese rōmaji spelling and analogical influences.

But let’s set the fascinating oddities of the English pronunciation aside, and think a bit about the incredible journeys through time and space that the parts of this word have undergone.

In the 19th century, Japanese speakers borrowed the English word orchestra as ōkesutora, written オーケストラ. This was the result of a cultural borrowing of the Western-style orchestra into Japan.

This borrowed word was abbreviated to oke オケ. In the mid 20th century, it was compounded with the Japanese word meaning ‘empty’, kara 空, to form the new word karaoke. Then the cultural practice of karaoke was exported around the world.

The West gave Japan the orchestra, and then Japan gave the empty orchestra back to the West. The names for these things traveled with them back and forth across the world.

But how many English speakers recognize their word “orchestra” sitting right there at the end of the Japanese word karaoke after its round-trip journey had been completed? It's been reduced to two unassuming syllables.

(The word “orchestra” in turn enters European languages from an ancient Greek word via Latin, so we could take this tale back a few millennia more, but for now let’s stick to modern times.)

The Japanese word karaoke was borrowed into Mandarin as kǎlā’ōukēi. In this case, there is no return of a loaned word—there are no Chinese elements lurking in the history of the Japanese word. Once in Chinese, the spoken word is rendered into writing purely phonographically.

But in an odd twist—a delightful bit of serendipity—the phonograms chosen to represent the four syllables of this word in writing are two Chinese characters and two roman letters. Why two roman letters instead of the characters 歐剋, which have the pronunciations ōu and kēi?

My guess is that the written form is influenced by the nearly universal prevalence of the English word okay, known to people around the world in the written form “OK”.

Why do I call this a delightful bit of serendipity, the sort of thing that gives an etymologist a thrill?

Because, unbeknownst to either Chinese or English speakers, the part of the Chinese word written with roman letters is *precisely* the part that comes from English: orchestra > ōkesutura > oke > ōukēi.

There’s a lot of historical, cultural, linguistic, and orthographic complexity packed into the four syllables of kǎlā’ōukēi!

/end