ケーキ

Pattern visualization

Examples

1. 誕生日にケーキを食べました。▶ —
   I ate cake on my birthday.
2. このケーキはとても甘いです。▶ —
   This cake is very sweet.
3. ケーキを一つください。▶ —
   One cake, please.

Collocations

Mnemonic

ケーキ — keeki, a loanword from English "cake". Written in katakana. It was not clipped like コンビニ or スマホ ── "cake" is already short, with nothing to cut. Instead the English sound was stretched to fit Japanese phonology. English "cake" is one syllable, [keɪk]. Japanese has no such final stop or diphthong ── so ケー (a long vowel catching the diphthong) + キ (a vowel i added to the final k) ── three beats, ケーキ. The meaning drifts a little too. English "cake" runs wide, from dense pound cakes to fruitcakes; the default image of Japanese ケーキ is the airy sponge-and-cream ショートケーキ. As Western confections (洋菓子) arrived in the Meiji era, "cake" resettled ── its name and its texture both made Japanese.

Quick check

1. Why does one-syllable English "cake" become the three-beat ケーキ in Japanese?

   • Japanese phonology lacks the final stop and the diphthong, so vowels are inserted
   • to turn it into an abbreviation
   • to convert it into kanji
   • because the meaning changed