Loanwords in the Chinese Language

Shi Youwei

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000293531
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Linguistique

A loanword, or wailaici, is a word with similar meaning and phonetic form to a word from a foreign language that has been naturalized in the recipient language. From ancient times, cultural exchanges between China and other countries has brought and integrated a myriad of loanwords to the Chinese language. Approaching the topic from a diachronic perspective, this volume is the first book-length work to chart the developmental trajectory, features, functions, and categories of loanwords into Chinese.

Beginning with a general introduction to the Chinese loanword system, the author delves deeper to explore trends and standardization in Chinese loanword studies and the research landscape of contemporary loanword studies more generally. Combining theoretical reflections with real-life examples of Chinese loanwords, the author discusses not only long-established examples from the dictionary but also a great number of significant loanwords adopted in the 21st century. The author shows how the complexity of the Chinese loanword system is intertwined with the intricacies of the Chinese character system.

This title will be an essential reference for students, scholars, and general readers who are interested in Chinese loanwords, linguistics, and language and culture.

1 Chinese loanwords
An external lexical influence on the native language

1.1 Loanword as a concept

1.1.1 Defining the concept: the first cut

A tentative definition. A loanword (or wailaici 外来词 in Chinese, which literally mean “words coming from outside”) is a word of foreign origin and is, in a sense, equivalent to a “borrowed word” (or jieci 借词 in Chinese). Generally speaking, a loanword in the Chinese language is a word which must, first and foremost, be in a direct or indirect etymological relationship in terms of meaning with a certain word of a foreign language; that is completely or partially (about 50%) borrowed from that corresponding foreign word in terms of phonetic form; and that has, to varying degrees, been naturalized in the recipient Chinese language. Strictly speaking, a word is not a loanword unless or until it has been in use in the Chinese language for a relatively long period of time or with considerable frequency. Take jiasha 袈裟 (the outer patchwork—usually saffron—robe worn by a Buddhist monk), for example. Though written in Chinese characters, jiasha comes from the Sanskrit word kasaya in both meaning and pronunciation. Bingqilin 冰淇淋, or its variant bingjiling 冰激凌, is another example. Borrowed from the English “ice cream” in both meaning and composition, the Chinese loanword represents the second component of the English compound (cream) in sound (qilin or jiling) and the first component (ice) in lexical meaning with an autochthonous Chinese morpheme (bing, meaning “ice”), thus making it a hybrid kind of loanword. Kache 卡车 (“car”) is still another example: it only partially originates from another language in that the first component ka 卡 is borrowed in both meaning and pronunciation from the English “car,” while the second component che 车 meaning “vehicle,” an autochthonous Chinese morpheme, is added as semantic marker for the purpose of easier comprehension and acceptance by Chinese speakers. Having been in use in the Chinese language for a long time, words like these have all taken root and become bona fide members of the Chinese lexicon. In the following section, we will explore the loanword as a concept before offering a revised definition.

Four tiers of loanwords. There are four basic tiers in what we usually refer to as loanwords despite the quasi nature for the last tier.

Tier One. Tier-one loanwords refer to total phonemic loaning, that is, the borrowing of sound, from other languages (e.g. buding 布丁 from the English “pudding”) or those total phonemic loans added with a Chinese morpheme as semantic marker (e.g. kache from the English “car”).

Tier Two. Tier-two loanwords refer to part phonemic and part semantic loaning, that is, the borrowing of lexical meaning, from other languages, such as motuoche 摩托车 (motorcycle: motuo as phonemic loaning from “motor” and che as semantic loaning from “cycle”) and the above-mentioned bingjilin (bing as semantic loaning from “ice” and jilin as phonemic loaning from “cream”).

Tier Three. Tier-three Chinese loanwords, with a broader definition than the first two tiers, refer to graphic loaning, i.e. adoption of both the writing form and meaning from other languages. There are two kinds of graphic loaning. One is direct borrowing of words formed partially or wholly out of Western alphabetic letters (fully letter-composed words are called zimuci in Chinese, and there will be separate and detailed discussions about them later). Because of their unmistakable foreign origin but ambiguous linguistic Chinese-ness, there is still some controversy over the status of these fully or partially letter-composed words. This book regards those words in alphabetic graphic loaning which have already taken root and settled down in the Chinese language as loanwords in general or at least as “quasi-loanwords.” The other kind of graphic loaning involves the borrowing of those Japanese words which are composed of Chinese characters (called kanji in Japan). These words are not directly phonemic but predominantly graphic or graphemic borrowing, such as shenjing 神经 (meaning “nerve”), which is directly graphemically borrowed from the Japanese shinkei 神経 (shinkei: the Romanized representation based on the Japanese pronunciation system of on-yomi¹) and shouxu 手续 (“procedure”), which comes directly from the Japanese tetsuzuki 手続 (tetsuzuki: the Romanized transcription based on the Japanese pronunciation system of kun-yomi). Both composed of and written in Chinese characters, these directly borrowed words are, in their origin, either created or modified in the source culture. Tetsuzuki belongs to a kind of Japanese word which uses Chinese characters to express autochthonous Japanese morphemes, so its corresponding Chinese shouxu is a typical loanword. Shinkei belongs to another kind of Japanese word which borrows Chinese morphemes or lexicons and infuses them with a slightly new meaning; the words are borrowed in graphic form and semantic shape but not according to the pronunciation of the borrowed language, so such Chinese words of foreign etymological origin may better be regarded as a kind of “quasi-loanwords.” At the same time, seen from the perspective of the Chinese language, because they are completely naturalized in Chinese—with Chinese characters with basically the same meaning and graphic form as well as the same word formation as the Chinese language—these loosely termed loanwords may also be regarded as “quasi-indigenous Chinese words” (more on this in Section 1.4 of this chapter).

Tier Four. The tier-four Chinese loanword refers to loan-translation or calque, that is, a word which is morphemically translated from its corresponding foreign word, with the original morphemic order and lexical structure retained, such as heiban 黑板 (hei meaning “black” and ban meaning “board”) from the English word “blackboard.” Such words may be considered loanwords in the broadest sense of the term or, theoretically speaking, may at least be treated as another kind of quasi-loanwords. In general, however, words in tier four are not placed in the bona fide Chinese loanword category in mainland China; this book will follow that convention for now.

Words with borrowed morpheme(s). It should be noted that not all words which contain borrowed lexical elements are loanwords. Despite some borrowed phonemic elements, semantically speaking, these words do not come completely from foreign words and therefore are not generally classified as bona fide loanwords. Take shafa tao 沙发套, lu jipu 驴吉普, dadi 打的, and pingtan 乒坛. As their component parts, respectively, shafa is obviously a phonemic loan from the English word “sofa”; jipu comes from “jeep”; di is short for dishi, a (Cantonese) phonemic loan from “taxi”; and ping is short for pingpang 乒乓, a phonemic loan from “ping-pong” or table tennis. But, taken as a whole, these words are formed with the addition of indigenous Chinese morphemes, such as “tao” (meaning “cover” in English), “lu” (donkey), “da” (take), and “tan” (field or arena), to the above phonemically borrowed foreign components, resulting in distinctively Chinese practices or phenomena. In other words, the words are derivative of loanwords but are not bona fide loanwords themselves. Some other words, like dika 涤卡 (from Dacron + khaki) and diba 迪吧 (from disco + bar), originate from foreign elements but do not in their totality come directly from one single foreign word; instead, they are created in the Chinese language itself as a combination of two independently used terms (e.g. “disco” and “bar”). Their borrowed elements are merely imported morphemes that join the words as component parts (more on this in Sections 4.2.1, 4.2.3, and 4.3 in Chapter 4).

1.1.2 Types of loanword formation

There are two basic types of loanword formation: lexical borrowing and substrate influence in language assimilation.

Lexical borrowing. There are two kinds of lexical borrowing: borrowing through proximity and borrowing through culture. Borrowing through proximity occurs either under duress or when multi-ethnic groups live together, whereas borrowing through culture happens in the process of cultural diffusion. The majority of Chinese loanwords enter the language by means of the latter, but historically, there have also been cases of borrowing through proximity, either during specific periods in time or in some demographically distinct areas, such as those during the early Yuan dynasty (1271–1368 AD), in Taiwan under Japanese rule (1895–1945), and in some ethnically populated frontier regions.

Substrate influence. Substrate influence refers to a process in which there remain some linguistic residual fragments of one’s native language (called “substrate”) in its adoption of (or replacement by) another language (called “superstrate”) as a result of multi-ethnic integration and/or cultural integration based upon multi-ethnic contact. These linguistic traces out of this long accumulative process may contain not only phonemic and syntactic features but also lexical units of the original substrate language. For example, the Cantonese dialect of Chinese still retains some of the phonemic lexicon used by the ancient non-Han Baiyue 百越 (literally “Hundred Yue”) ethnic peoples who lived in southern China between the first millennium BC and the first millennium AD, such as the Cantonese la⁵ (meaning “search”), pronounced in the fifth tone (first tone in the ethnic Zhuang language 状语 and fifth tone in the ethnic Dong 侗语 and Shui 水语 languages); tam (meaning “tread”) in the sixth tone (tam⁶ in the sixth tone in Zhuang and ȶam⁶ in the sixth tone in Dong and tom² in the second tone in the ethnic Li language 黎语); and kap⁷ (meaning “frog”) in the seventh tone (kop⁷ in the seventh tone in the ethnic Zhuang, Dai 傣语, and Thai languages 泰语). Residual substrate influence is fundamentally different from situations in which some language (or speech community) borrows, of its own volition, from another language in order to enrich the borrowing language. But, as far as the end result is concerned, they are the same: seen from the standpoint of the recipient language, words arising from either type of formation come from outside and have not altered the recipient language in any meaningful way.

Therefore, loanwords can be seen as the result of either or both of two processes. One is lexical borrowing, the result of which can be called “borrowed words” (jieci) in the narrow sense. The other is language shift due to the above-mentioned racial/ethnic and cultural process, the resultant words of which may be called “substrate words,” though they are not strictly “borrowed words,” as the term is generally understood. Some can be the result of both: Chinese words such as gege 格格 (young daughter of a rich or noble family) and saqima 萨其马 (candied fritter, similar to a Rice Krispies square), which originated from the Manchu language (gege and sacima, respectively), might have been borrowed by both the Han Chinese and the Manchu linguistic fragments retained in Chinese when the Manchu people abandoned their ethnic language. So, while it is highly improbable to determine the exact types of formation for some lexical component units, it might not be a bad idea to collectively place them in the category of loanwords for easier systematic analysis. This is one major aspect where loanwords conceptually differ from borrowed words.

Direct and backflow lexical entry. Examined from the perspective of language contact involving the ties between loanwords and the interacting languages, both loanwords of the first lexical borrowing and substrate loanwords arrive in the recipient language by means of either direct entry or backflow entry. Backflow entry refers to a phenomenon in language contact in which a word in language B, which is originally borrowed from language A but has later been assimilated by and integrated into language B, flows back to language A as a loanword. This is a very obvious case of lexical backflow, and it has occurred on many occasions throughout the history of the contact between Chinese and the languages of other ethnic communities.

A classic example of Chinese loanwords via backflow entry in modern history is boshi 博士, borrowed graphically verbatim from Japanese, which was, in turn, borrowed from Old Chinese 博士. Further back in Chinese history, there were quite a few of these return loanwords, some even experiencing multiple flows back and forth. Here are some examples: sangkun 桑昆 (a high-ranking military title in the Yuan dynasty), which was borrowed from the Mongolian word sanggun, which was, in turn, first borrowed from the Chinese word jiangjun 将军 (incidentally, sangkun shared the same etymological origin with another return loanword, wenxiang 详稳, used in China’s Liao dynasty, which lasted from 907 AD to 1125 AD); laba 喇叭, which came from the Mongolian labai, which was from the Turkic labay, which originated from the Chinese luobei 螺贝; tuli 秃里 (a large square banner symbolizing the status of a general in the Yuan dynasty), which was from the Mongolian tug, which, in turn, originated from the Chinese dao 纛; shahai 沙海 (cloth shoes), which came from the Mongolian saxai, which, in turn, originated from the Chinese saxie 靸鞋; taiji 台吉 (title of a duke or regional magistrate), which was borrowed from the Mongolian taiji, which, in turn, originated from the Chinese taizi 太子; bahashi 八哈失 or bashi 八石 (teacher), which came from the Mongolian bagsi, which, in turn, originated from boshi 博士; bashi 把势 or 把式 (a skillful master good at martial arts; skill; wushu), which came from the Mongolian bagsi, which came from the Manchu baksi, which, in turn, originated from the Chinese boshi 博士; zhangjing 章京 (a title of a military official in the Qing dynasty ...