A typology of lexical borrowing in Modern Standard Chinese

Abstract

The question of how best to classify Modern Standard Chinese loanwords is rather a fraught one. Various principles of categorization have been proposed in the literature; however, previous classification systems have generally covered only a relatively small proportion of all loanwords currently in use. Even attempts to provide an exhaustive catalog of lexical borrowing strategies have often been characterized by nontransparent structure, internal inconsistency or even incompleteness. This has hindered meaningful cross-linguistic comparisons of language change in Modern Standard Chinese vis-à-vis other languages. The aim of this paper is to present a new and clearly structured, comprehensive inventory of the different types of lexical borrowing that have occurred in Modern Standard Chinese over the past 30 to 40 years. Systematic cross-linguistic comparisons reveal that examples of almost all of the categories of lexical borrowing noted in the literature on English language change can likewise be provided in relation to Modern Standard Chinese. In addition, Chinese offers several options for borrowing lexical items not available to speakers of English. Overall, this paper presents a picture of Modern Standard Chinese speakers as cultivating a flexible, creative, playful approach to their use of language. The explicit recognition of the fact that many so-called "alphabetic words" are established loanwords is found to have implications for the typological classification of Chinese script, as well as for other fields such as second language teaching. A secondary finding not anticipated in the research question is that Chinese orthography shows tentative early signs of potentially developing from a morpho-logographic to a phonetic writing system.

59 | 2023

“…Concerning transliteration from English into Chinese, Chen (2013) distinguishes between three kinds of transliteration: 1) phonemic transcription and phonemic loans; 2) transliteration plus notes and annotated transliterations; 3) half transliterations plus half translations and loanblends. 25 The first, phonemic transcription and phonemic loans, include lexical items that have no equivalents in the target language and which are thus phonemically transcribed with Chinese 25 See also Cook (2018): in the thorough categorisation of lexical borrowings existing in Standard Mandarin Chinese, the author recognises different types of transliterations, among which the categories of "transliteration plus explanation" and "transliteration plus translation" (13) are pretty much the same as Chen's (2013, 3) "transliteration plus notes and annotated transliterations" and "half transliterations plus half translations and loanblends".…”

Pragmatic Functions of English Borrowings in Chinese

“…Previous studies are mostly focused on the structural properties of English borrowings in Chinese, including their phonological and orthographic integration, semantic changes, and distribution in different parts of speech and lexical fields (e.g., Lu, 2006;Dang, 2017;Cook, 2018). However, there are few studies shedding light on the functional aspect of English borrowings.…”