>>2218755>>2218760Actually "anime" is a double loanword. It started as the English "animation" which made its way over to Japanese. As is normal for all loanwords it's pronunciation was adapted to the native phoneme set and became アニメショーン (animeshōn). Eventually this was truncated to simply アニメ (anime). This truncation eventually made it's way back to English where it came to specifically refer to cartoons of Japanese origin. So anime is just Engrish that made it's way back to English and became a new word. There is no reason to treat "waifu" any different.
