Festival
- Katakana English: フェスタ
- sounds like: FES-tah
- English origin word: festival
- Actual Japanese word: 祭 (まつり / matsuri)
One of the strange things about the Japanese language is its seeming inability to evolve by expanding the meaning of words to encompass new or changing ideas. And festa is a good example of that. While Japanese has a word for festival, matsuri, it is only used for traditional Japanese festivals. Anything with a more modern flair, such as the flower festival above or the design festival below, are called festa. There really shouldn’t be anything wrong with「花祭り」(hana-matusri), but the event planners scrapped the Japanese words for both flower and festival. One of the problems with this shortened version of the English word ‘festival’ is that it often appears in posters written in English, so when Japanese speak in English they assume they’re using an actual English word which, of course, it isn’t.
Nohongo 