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Originally Posted by vorpal_rabbit
Simple! Tsunami has passed into common parlance in English. "Jishin" and "kazan" still require a bit of knowledge of Japanese to know the meaning. Plus, as was mentioned earlier, tsunami more accurately describes what is actually happening. Combine that with the tendency of the English language to assimilate other words into itself (the creation of synonyms), and you see phenomena like "tsunami" being used to the exclusion of the previous English term.
Historical linguistics is your friend!
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Well yes but what I'm wondering is how the word "tsunami" happened to become so widely used in English. Why are we using that particular word to the exclusion of others, and why the Japanese word? I'm sure plenty of other languages also have words to describe the same thing, not to mention our own (even if the waves aren't particularly "tidal" in origin).