Grill-mania: X-yaki vs. yaki-Y

There are lots of Japanese food names that have the word yaki in them.  Americans are familiar with a few of these, for example:

yakitori
sukiyaki
teppanyaki
yakisoba

Since I've been here I've also eaten:

okonomiyaki
takoyaki

So this got me to thinking: Why is it that in some of these compound words yaki occurs at the beginning, and in some it is found at the end?  There ought to be a meaningful difference.

In all cases these names refer to fried or grilled foods.  The verb yaku (焼く) means 'to burn', and by extension 'roast, grill, fry'.  In Japanese, one way to form nouns from verbs is to attach -i to the verb stem.  The result is a noun meaning 'thing that is verb-ed'.  So if you take the verb yaku, remove the -u ending to get the stem yak-, and then add -i, you end up with the noun yaki 'thing that is grilled'.

In Japanese grammar, compounds of the form XY generally mean 'a Y that has a property related to X'; in linguistic terms, Y is the head and X modifies the meaning of Y.  To put it another way, XY is a specific kind of Y.  This is just as in English: a police officer is a kind of officer, a bluebird is a kind of bird, and a textbook is a kind of book.

So according to that understanding, the literal meanings of the words above should be something like:

yakitori: grill+bird = 'grilled chicken'
yakisoba: grill+soba-noodle = 'fried noodles'

sukiyaki: spade+grill = 'kind of Japanese hotpot'
teppanyaki: iron-griddle+grill = 'dish cooked on a hot iron griddle'
takoyaki: octopus+grill = 'grilled balls made from flavored ground-up octopus'
okonomiyaki: preference ('liked thing')*+grill = 'grilled dish made from batter with various ingredients'

And indeed, my Japanese linguist friends tell me that this is the correct understanding of these compound words. (Thanks, Japanese linguist friends!)

More generally, we can say that yaki-Y is the food Y prepared by grilling.  In contrast, X-yaki is the name of a grilled dish, where X tells us something about the principle ingredient, the method used, or some other feature of the dish.  Yakiteppan (a grilled iron griddle) would be inedible, but teppanyaki is just fine to eat.

We can see the contrast between X-yaki and yaki-Y even more clearly in this pair of words:

yakitamago: grill+egg: 'a fried egg'
tamagoyaki: egg+grill: 'a particular kind of grilled dish made with eggs, a Japanese-style rolled egg omelet'

Incidentally, I think the Wikipedia entry for tamagoyaki is mistaken when it says the name literally means 'grilled egg'.  It actually means 'egg grilled-thing'.

tamagoyaki (courtesy Wikipedia)

* By the way, okonomi is a noun derived from a verb (konomu 好む 'to like') in the same way that yaki is derived from yaku.  The o- on the front is a so-called honorific prefix.