think twice about
昨日の授業でもありましたが、NHKの放送番組では外国語が「乱用」され、内容を理解できずに精神的苦痛を受けたとして、７１歳の男性が１４１万円の慰謝料を求めました。
think twice aboutは「〜について2度考える」ということですが、そこから転じて「〜について躊躇する、ためらう、迷う」などの意味で用いられます。ここは否定形なので「何も考えずに」「迷うこともなく」という意味になります。さて公共放送のカタカナ使用に一石を投じる形となった訴えですが、司法はどういう判断を下すことになるのでしょうか。（Haramii）
Japanese man sues broadcaster NHK for using too many foreign words
A PENSIONER is suing Japan's national broadcaster for emotional distress, claiming the overuse of foreign loanwords has rendered many of its programmes unintelligible, his lawyer said today.
Hoji Takahashi, 71, is demanding 1.41 million yen ($15,000) in damages for the broadcaster's reliance on words borrowed from English, instead of their traditional Japanese counterparts.
"The basis of his concern is that Japan is being too Americanised," lawyer Mutsuo Miyata said. "There is a sense of crisis that this country is becoming just a province of America."
Japanese has a rich native vocabulary, but has a tradition of borrowing words from other languages, often quite inventively and sometimes changing their meaning in the process.
Most Japanese speakers do not think twice about using words including "trouble", "risk", "drive" or "parking", among many others.
Although English provides the bulk of loanwords -- an inheritance of the post World War II US occupation and subsequent fascination with American culture -- words borrowed from many other languages are also in use.
Thus, the word for part time work is a Japanised version of the German "arbeit", "concierge" comes from the French and the Spanish "pan" is understood as bread.
However, Japan's phonic structure, in which sounds are usually made of a consonant and a vowel, renders many of these borrowed words unintelligible to speakers of the language from which they came.
The English "trouble" becomes "toraburu", for example, while the French "concierge" is pronounced "konsheruju".
Takahashi, a member of "Nihongo wo taisetsu ni suru kai" (The Treat Japanese as Important Association), brought his suit because entreaties to NHK had been ignored, his lawyer said.
