カメラ

Pattern visualization

Examples

1. カメラで写真を撮ります。▶ —
   I take photos with a camera.
2. 新しいカメラを買いました。▶ —
   I bought a new camera.
3. このカメラは小さくて軽いです。▶ —
   This camera is small and light.

Collocations

Mnemonic

カメラ — kamera, a loanword from English "camera". Written in katakana. If コンビニ and スマホ are clippings of yesterday's English, カメラ is the opposite ── its root runs back two thousand years. English "camera" comes from Latin camera obscura ("dark room"). Latin camera meant "a vaulted room", and its root is Greek kamara ("an arched room"). A camera once truly was a room ── pierce a small hole in the wall of a dark room and the scene outside falls, inverted, on the far wall. That room shrank and shrank into a handheld box, and only the name "room" came along. When you say カメラ, you are unknowingly calling an ancient word for "a vaulted room".

Quick check

1. What did the Latin word camera — the distant root of English "camera" — originally mean?

   • a (vaulted) room ── from camera obscura, "dark room"
   • light
   • eye
   • picture