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Comment by tokyoseb

That example is interesting. The Japanese word for real estate, 不動産, actually came from French [1], 'immobilier' (real estate, by opposition to what is movable or 'mobile' such as 'meubles' or 'mobilier', i.e. furniture). And of course the French word comes from Latin...

[1] https://ja.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E4%B8%8D%E5%8B%95%E7%94%A3

The Japanese would treat the whole combination as a single word (in my experience) and wouldn't analyse the components either (although 'they make sense'). The etymology is often more apparent in Japanese and Chinese thanks to the characters, whereas it's not always easy to see it in other language (unless you speak Latin or Greek..). But this is a borrowed word and in this particular case it's very intuitive to French speakers as immobilier / mobilier / mobile are all common words.

parent tokyoseb 6 years ago

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