Università degli Studi di Torino

Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici

Corso di Laurea in Lingue e Civiltà dell'Asia e dell'Africa

Tesi di laurea magistrale

Lexical Borrowing as a Sociolinguistic

Phenomenon: Focus on Early Chinese
Loanwords in English

Relatore: Laureando:
Prof. Esterino Adami Luigi Ottolini

anno accademico 2013-2014

Contents
INTRODUCTION....................................................................................................1
1 BORROWING.......................................................................................................3
Language change...............................................................................................3
1.1 Language contact...........................................................................................3
1.1.1 The role of bilinguals.......................................................................................4
1.2 Defining borrowing.......................................................................................6
1.2.1 The terminology of borrowing........................................................................6
1.2.2 Definitions for borrowing...............................................................................7
1.2.3 Borrowing and analysability...........................................................................9
1.2.4 “False” borrowings?.......................................................................................11
1.2.5 Synchrony and diachrony in the identification of borrowing.......................13
1.3 Integration of borrowings: adoption vs. adaptation..................................15
1.3.1 Phonological integration................................................................................15
1.3.2 Morphological and syntactic integration......................................................18
1.3.3 Integration and acclimatisation...................................................................20
1.3.4 Effects of borrowing......................................................................................21
1.3.5 The “citizenship” of loanwords.....................................................................22
1.4 Borrowing and code-switching...................................................................23
1.4.1 Looking for boundaries.................................................................................24
1.4.2 An unnecessary boundary?...........................................................................26
1.5 Categorisation of borrowing.......................................................................28
1.5.1 Taxonomies of borrowing.............................................................................28
1.5.1.1 Haugen's................................................................................................28
1.5.1.2 Weinreich's............................................................................................29
1.5.2 Cultural and core borrowings.......................................................................30
1.6 Constraints on borrowing...........................................................................31
1.6.1 Linguistic constraints on borrowing.............................................................31
1.6.1.1 Hierarchy of borrowability.....................................................................31
1.6.1.2 Core and peripheral vocabulary............................................................33
1.6.1.3 other linguistic constraints....................................................................36
1.6.2 Social constraints on borrowing...................................................................37
1.6.2.1 Borrowing scale under different kinds of contact.................................38
1.7 Motivations for borrowing..........................................................................42
1.7.1 Loanwords by necessity.................................................................................42
1.7.2 Luxury loanwords.........................................................................................44
1.7.3 The role of prestige and the directionality of borrowing..............................45
1.7.4 Other factors influencing borrowing behaviour...........................................48
1.7.4.1 Language as an instrument for social integration.................................48
1.7.4.2 Language ideology................................................................................50
2 BRIEF HISTORY AND ASPECTS OF CHINESE-ENGLISH CONTACT..........53
2.1 A long history of contact.............................................................................53
2.1.1 The Silk Road................................................................................................53
2.1.2 Missionaries..................................................................................................55
2.1.3 The System of Canton and the Opium War..................................................56
2.1.4 Learning from the West................................................................................59
2.1.4.1 Which West?.........................................................................................60
2.2 Emigration..................................................................................................62
2.3 Developing bilingualism............................................................................64
2.3.1 Why English?................................................................................................65
2.3.1.1 How could English obtain its international role?.................................65
2.3.1.2 The “cosmopolitan” character of English..............................................67
2.3.2 The study of English in China......................................................................68
2.3.2.1 English status........................................................................................68
2.3.2.2 Quantifying English users in China......................................................69
 2.3.2.3 A “Chinese” English?.............................................................................71
3 CHINESE BORROWINGS IN ENGLISH..........................................................73
3.1 Identifying high and low.............................................................................73
3.2 Chinese is a language family......................................................................75
3.2.1 Chinese main varieties..................................................................................76
3.3 Factors, modes and characteristics of Chinese-English borrowing.........80
Methodological foreword......................................................................................80
3.3.1 Causes and channels.....................................................................................81
3.3.2 Borrowing strategies....................................................................................83
3.3.3 Characteristics of integration.......................................................................84
3.4 A historical perspective..............................................................................87
3.4.1 Identifying the nature of contact..................................................................88
3.4.2 Quantifying language-contact......................................................................90
3.5 “Chinese borrowings in English”: quantity and origins............................92
3.5.1 Cannon's study..............................................................................................92
3.5.1.1 Sociolinguistic implications of Chinese borrowings in English............94
3.5.2 Yang Jian's study..........................................................................................95
3.5.3 Dialectal sources of Chinese loanwords.......................................................98
3.5.4 Transmission languages of Chinese loanwords..........................................102
4 A DIACHRONIC ANALYSIS OF EARLY CHINESE BORROWINGS IN
ENGLISH..............................................................................................................107
4.1 Foreword....................................................................................................107
4.1.1 Corpus and aims..........................................................................................107
4.1.2 Methodology and data presentation...........................................................107
4.2 Results.......................................................................................................109
4.3 Remarks and comments...........................................................................134
4.3.1 Time and the quantity of Chinese loanwords..............................................134
4.3.2 Chinese loanwords in English (variety)......................................................135
4.3.3 “Culturally-loaded” Chinese loanwords.....................................................136
4.3.4 Assimilation................................................................................................138
4.3.5 Semantic fields and dialectal sources.........................................................139
CONCLUSION.....................................................................................................143
REFERENCES.....................................................................................................147
Dictionaries.....................................................................................................153
GRAZIE................................................................................................................155
 INTRODUCTION
A language is a highly culturally-loaded system of rules and conventions
established through a long time, primarily made of grammar and words. Such
system is not immutable, on the contrary it constantly changes, especially in
situations of language-contact, as speakers are confronted with other speakers'
features they might be willing to “borrow” and imitate in their own language. As
words are bearers of culture, and loanwords in particular are its “ambassadors”
into recipient languages, borrowing may also be viewed as a gauge of cultural
exchange.
The present study begins from the observation that, although borrowing is
theoretically a two-way phenomenon, as both languages involved have features
they may lend to the other, it usually displays an evident “directionality” from
the so-called higher language into the lower language: two statuses that are
usually assigned by socio-historical factors. Nonetheless, borrowing from the
lower language into the higher language is not excluded, but mostly limited to
“loanwords by necessity”, i.e. those words designating referents highly related to
the borrowing language-culture, which the recipient language-culture did not
have (nor probably need) before it was in contact with it.
The aim of this research is to investigate lexical borrowing as a sociolinguistic
phenomenon with a focus on the language-contact between Chinese and
English: for this reason a thorough definition of borrowing is given in §1,
beginning with a description of the setting of language-contact, which is the
prerequisite for borrowing. We then give a definition of borrowing itself, as
characterised by the integration of loanwords in the phonological and
grammatical system of the recipient language, of the strategies through which a
word is borrowed, and of borrowing in contrast to another sociolinguistic
phenomenon sharing some of its characteristics (code-switching). We then
delve into the linguistic and social constraints on borrowing, and finally into the
very motivations underlying such process, explaining that need is only a part of
them, and social prestige also plays a key role.
In §2 we move to our main field of interest: Chinese-English contact,
summarising its long history, beginning as early as the emergence of the Silk
Road, then stretching through approximately two millennia of contact, which

1
was first indirect and eventually direct in the last four hundred years. A
relationship which evolved from commercial to cultural, experiencing a military
phase too, involving Chinese emigration towards anglophone countries and the
unstable role of English as a foreign language in China. Bilingualism in Chinese
and English was an extremely rare (and even stigmatised) phenomenon when
direct contact was first established in the seventeenth century, whereas it is an
increasingly spreading (and demanded) skill today, fostering language-contact
and consequently borrowing between the two languages.
In §3 we apply the general theory on borrowing outlined in §1 to the specific
case of Chinese-English contact sketched out in §2, arguing that Chinese is
probably to be labelled as the subject language, and English as the dominant
one, at least in the one and a half century beginning with the First Opium War
(1840). After a description of Chinese main varieties, we investigate the
channels, borrowing strategies and patterns of integration through which
Chinese loanwords entered the English lexicon. We then focus on some
sociolinguistic features of Chinese-English contact, emphasising the emergence
of a correlation between the nature of such contact and the characteristics of
intervening borrowing in certain historical periods. Some interesting correlation
between certain semantic fields and the borrowing from certain Chinese dialects
does also clearly emerge.
Finally, in §4, we analyse a list of about one hundred Chinese loanwords which
were found widely accepted in general English in a study carried out in 1988
(see §3.5.1). We investigate them diachronically by means of five etymological
and three general dictionaries published over the century before the study, thus
trying to find when these loanwords were “accepted” in general English, if their
etymology was already recorded as Chinese, and if (and when) an indication of
their source-dialect was also given.
The aim of this research is not that of demonstrating the possibility for lexical
borrowing from a subject into a dominant language, which, though a rarer
phenomenon than its opposite, is a self-evident truth. Instead, our aim is to
investigate the process and stages through which borrowing occurs in relation to
the social prestige attached to the languages (and dialects) involved. By means
of a diachronic study, we also try to predict future trends of such phenomenon.

2
 1 BORROWING

Language change
One of the most evident characteristics of languages is that they change trough
time. It is obvious when we read some works by Chaucer, Shakespeare or Milton
and measure their distance with today's English, but it is still apparent when we
do the same test with Dickens', Orwell's or Rushdie's. Not only lexicon, but
prosody and grammar too change. When asked what this change is due to,
linguists would answer it is the outcome of forces which can be either language-
internal (e.g. simplification in producing or processing the language) or
language-external (i.e. socio-historical). Among these, language contact is of
paramount importance in that it provides speakers of different languages with
features they could be willing to “borrow” from a donor or source language to
convey new meanings or to express themselves in new ways which are still
unknown in the recipient language. Such borrowing may become popular
among recipient language speakers who would start replicating it, leading to the
point when a particular pattern once considered “foreign” is established as a
widely accepted borrowing.
In linguistics, borrowing usually refers to lexical borrowing, which is probably
the most widespread and rapid among the phenomena caused by language
contact, but structural (phonological, morphological and syntactic) patterns
may be borrowed too. Haspelmath (2009: 38-39) distinguishes material
borrowing (the borrowing of “sound-meaning pairs, generally lexemes”) and
structural borrowing (“the copying of syntactic, morphological or semantic
patterns”), which is a couple fairly resembling the above mentioned dichotomy.
We will follow the most widely accepted terminology labelling structural
borrowing as interference, while the term borrowing will be reserved for lexical
borrowing, i.e. as a synonym of loanword.

1.1 Language contact

Contact between human beings is a social phenomenon which involves a
linguistic dimension, as some features 1 from every speaker's language (or
1

3
idiolect) may be chosen by other speakers and thus be spread.
Most, if not all, languages have been influenced by contact with others; and the
borrowing of words, as Sapir (1970: 193) notes, is “the simplest kind of influence
that one language may exert on another”.
As Robins (1964: 312) pinpoints, borrowing is indeed an unavoidable process in
contact situations:

Wherever there are culture contacts of any sort between the speakers of
different languages, and this means virtually everywhere, speakers will
make use of words from other languages to refer to things, processes,
and ways of behaviour, organization, or thinking, for which words or
phrases were not available or convenient in their own language hitherto.
Borrowing has always prompted strong emotional reaction and passionate
condemnation from purists who saw it as an aberration of the correct language,
for example during Fascist autocracy in Italy, it even “offended users of other
languages” (cf. Phillipson 1992: 7). On the other hand, as Winford (2003: 1-2)
notes, linguists (and language contact scholars in particular) have seen language
mixture as “testaments to the creativity of humans faced with the need to break
down language barriers”.
Language contact is therefore a widespread phenomenon which, as it is outlined
by Winford (2003: 11-22), occurs in three main kinds of contact situations:
language maintenance, language shift and language creation2.
Our study focuses on the first kind of contact situation, as it appears to be the
natural habitat for borrowing. Note, in fact, that Thomason & Kaufman (1988:
37) define borrowing as “the incorporation of foreign features into a group's
native language by speakers of that language”, thus making clear that the
recipient language is maintained and that the agents of change are its native
speakers.
We will return on different situations of language contact later in §1.6.2.1.

Cf. Bloomfield (1967: 444) “Throughout his life, the speaker continues to adopt features from
his fellows”; also cf. Mufwene (2001) on the concept of “features pool”.
2
Winford (2003) thus defines the three situations: language maintenance (“the preservation
by a speech community of its native language from generation to generation”, p.11), language
shift (“the partial or total abandonment of a group's native language in favor of another”,
p.15), language creation (“involve such extreme restructuring and/or such pervasive mixture
of elements from more than one language that they cannot be considered cases of either
maintenance or shift in the strict sense of these terms”, p.18).

4
 1.1.1 The role of bilinguals
Language change, Matras (2009: 310) highlights, is “always the product of
innovations that are introduced by individual speakers in the course of
discourse interaction”. In Haugen's (1950: 212) view, “while it is true that we
shall rarely if ever be able to catch a speaker in the actual process of making an
original borrowing, it is clear that every loan now current must at some time
have appeared as an innovation”. For native speakers of a recipient language, to
be the agents of this particular kind of change (borrowing), they must have
some kind of knowledge of the source language, either they learnt it through
formal education or acquired it in an actual encounter with the foreign language
group. In other words, even if McMahon (1994: 204) maintains that “lexical
borrowing requires only very restricted bilingualism”, speakers of a recipient
language must have developed some.
Bilinguals appear to have a pivotal importance in language change (and
borrowing in particular) because, having developed bilingualism, their mind is
where the closest, fastest, clearest and most unavoidable of contact happens.
They are also the ones able to modulate the interference of the other language in
their speech to monolinguals, so as to make themselves understood. 3
Kemmer (2013) describes borrowing as a process through which a word is firstly
used by some speakers of the borrowing language (with enough knowledge of
the source language to utilize the relevant words) and then develops into a
widely used loanword. At first, the new word might be used only with speakers
who also know the word, then with speakers to whom the word was not
previously known. At this point, the word may sound ‘foreign’; however, in time
more speakers can become familiar with it and “the community of users can
grow to the point where even people who know little or nothing of the source
language understand, and even use the novel word themselves”. The novel word
has thus become “conventionalized”, i.e. it made its way from bilinguals' to
monolinguals' speech; or, in Matras' (2009: 147) words, it has become
“available in a wider set of interaction contexts”. Once “conventionalized”, the
loanword is wholly a part of the recipient language, it is “sedimented sand”
influencing the course of the “river” which is the language, as Weinreich (1968:

3
See Weinreich's (1968: 71-82) work for a deeper approach to the question of bilinguals role,
the relative status of their language and their behaviour in speech situations.

5
11) described:

In speech, interference is like sand carried by a stream; in language, it is the

sedimented sand deposited on the bottom of a lake. [...] In speech, it occurs
anew in the utterances of the bilingual speaker as a result of his personal
knowledge of the other tongue. In language, we find interference phenomena
which, having frequently occurred in the speech of bilinguals, have become
habitualized and established. Their use is no longer dependent on bilingualism.
According to Martinet (1966: 163) the process leading from interference in a
bilingual's speech to the adoption from the whole community (Weinreich's
sedimentation) is well-exemplified by French monolinguals' use of “il est
supposé (sortir)” for “il semble (qu'il sortira)”, calqued on the English “he's
supposed (to go out)”.

1.2 Defining borrowing

1.2.1 The terminology of borrowing

In his well known and oft-cited work, Haugen (1950: 211-12) was the first to
highlight the absurdity of the metaphor “since the borrowing takes place
without the lender's consent or even awareness, and the borrower is under no
obligation to repay the loan”. Haugen did nonetheless admit that different labels
as “stealing”, “adoption” or “diffusion” were unfitting as well, concluding that
“the real advantage of the term ‘borrowing’ is the fact that it is not applied to
language by laymen. It has therefore remained comparatively unambiguous in
linguistic discussion, and no apter term has yet been invented” (ibidem). Thus,
more than sixty years after his work, and with his advice in mind, we still keep
on using the term.
Matras (2009: 146) asserts that the term borrowing is misleading in that it
“emphasises too much the aspect of ownership and the boundaries between the
linguistic systems involved” arguing that “this diverts attention away from the
dynamic process of sharing a structure or word-form, adopting, applying, and
using it”. For this reason, on the basis of Johanson's (2002) choice of the term
‘copying’ (“which emphasises the creative use of an item within the ‘recipient’
language”), Matras (2009: 146) opts for the term ‘replication’ “to capture even
more closely the fact that we are dealing not with issues of ownership or even
direct imitation or duplication, but rather with the activity of employing an
item, in context, in order to achieve a communicative goal”.

6
The centrality of the creative role of the speaker in the borrowing process is also
clear to Gusmani, who favours the term ‘imitation’ (It. imitazione), which we
consider particularly apt to describe the phenomenon in that it does not stress
on the ownership of the term, but emphasises the process of bringing a system
closer to another. Haugen's (1950: 212) definition of borrowing as “attempted
reproduction” is certainly one many would agree on, but, as Gusmani (1973: 12)
notes, his differentiation of borrowings according to their mixing of
“importation” and “substitution” (see §1.5.1.1 below) could be mistaken for a
statement of their status of “foreign”, something which was lent (here the idea of
ownership resurfaces again). According to Gusmani (ibidem), borrowing is best
described by the term ‘imitation’ which highlights the importance of the model;
and the author also warns us that imitation is not to be understood as a passive
acceptance, but as an active and creative acquisition effort.
Finally, it is worth reminding that the English term “loanword” is itself a
loanword modelled on the German Lehnwort (cf. Haugen 1992: 197).

1.2.2 Definitions for borrowing

According to Martinet (1966: 163) borrowing is a particular example of
interference already established (i.e. accepted and used) in the recipient
language.
For Bloomfield (1967: 444), it is “the adoption of features which differ from
those of the main tradition” which the speaker continues to adopt from his
fellows throughout his life.
Haugen (1950: 212, emphasis in the original) first set three rules as axiomatic:

(1) EVERY SPEAKER ATTEMPTS TO REPRODUCE PREVIOUSLY LEARNED

LINGUISTIC PATTERNS in an effort to cope with new linguistic situations. (2)
AMONG THE NEW PATTERNS WHICH HE MAY LEARN ARE THOSE OF A
LANGUAGE DIFFERENT FROM HIS OWN, and these too he may attempt to
reproduce. (3) If he reproduces the new linguistic patterns, NOT IN THE
CONTEXT OF THE LANGUAGE IN WHICH HE LEARNED THEM, but in the
context of another, he may be said to have ‘borrowed’ them from one language
into another.
Haugen's (ibidem) definition of borrowing is thus “the attempted reproduction
in one language of patterns previously found in another”.
It is worth noting that, in the three just mentioned classical studies, the
definition of borrowing (referring to interference, features and patterns in

7
Martinet, Bloomfield and Haugen respectively) is meant to be broad enough to
encompass both lexical and structural borrowing4. It was already clear that, in a
situation of language contact, lexicon was just one of the fields being influenced.
Following this tradition, Lehman (1992: 17) has more recently defined
borrowing as “the result of the influence of one language on another”,
enumerating it as one of the major explanations for language change.5
This concept of “borrowing as influence” is brought to its somehow extreme
consequences by Gusmani (1973: 7), who suggests that, theoretically, we should
call ‘borrowing’ each and every contact-induced interference among languages,
not just national or literary languages, but even individual languages, since the
contact-induced enrichment of every language under some other language
influence could be defined as ‘borrowing’. This is probably too strong an
assumption which leads Gusmani (ibidem) to a hyperbolic conclusion: all the
endowment which an individual language is constituted by is indeed built up on
borrowing, since it was assimilated trough the imitation of some other
individual's language (parents', playmates', etc.).
Nevertheless, Gusmani acknowledges it is admittedly useful to limit the scope of
the term “borrowing” to the most considerable phenomena of language
interference, those happening among national or literary languages. He (ivi: 8)
concludes it is therefore reasonable to keep on using this more restricted notion
of borrowing.
Indeed, Gusmani (1973: 11) theorises that both the borrowing of a foreign word
or the coinage of a new lexical item built on native material answer the same
kind of necessity (i.e. adapting linguistic means to new expressive needs).
Speaking of lexical borrowings, he (1973: 12) remarks that “ex-novo” creations
are not “ex-nihilo” at all actually, since the speaker innovating the recipient
language relates, either directly or indirectly, to a model, a benchmark to build
his innovation on.
4
Here, we might partly disagree with Myers-Scotton's (2002: 234) critique: “by ‘pattern’
Haugen means largely lexical elements, not grammatical patterns”. We would argue
Haugen's definition was intentionally broad to encompass all kind of “attempted
reproductions”. On the other hand, we would follow Myers-Scotton's (ibidem) point when
she notes that “even while insisting that borrowing is ‘strictly a process and not a state’ (p.
213), he acknowledges that ‘most of the terms used in discussing it are ordinarily descriptive
of its results rather than of the process itself’”.
5
Lehman (1992: 17) enumerates three major explanations for language change, the other two
being the imperfect learning of language by children and the effects of the system or systems
of individual languages.

8
Poplack, Sankoff, & Miller (1988: 47-48) also compare the adoption of a
loanword to other monolingual processes (e.g. semantic extension or formation
of new compounds, see §1.5.1), but they argue that the similarities between such
processes are to be found in the socially-conditioned success or failure of these
innovations, not in the existence of a model. They regard borrowing from an
essentially semiotic point of view, defining loanwords as “the emergence of a
new word-meaning relationship”.
Haspelmath (2009: 36) adheres to the most common and broad sense of
borrowing, defining loan simply as “a word that at some point in the history of a
language entered its lexicon as a result of borrowing (or transfer, or copying)”
(author's emphasis). The two optional terms the authors gives in brackets refer
to Clyne's (2003) and Johanson's (2002) terminology respectively; among
these, Haspelmath favours the last one “because the transfer metaphor still
suggests that the donor language loses the element in question”.
In Haspelmath's (2009: 36) view the process, then, can be further subdivided in
adoption and imposition (or retention) depending on whether the borrowers
are native speakers imposing “adopting elements from other languages into the
recipient languages”, or whether non-native speakers have imposed properties
of their native language onto the recipient language.

1.2.3 Borrowing and analysability

Particularly interesting and useful, in Haspelmath's work, is the connection he
draws between loanword and its inner morphemic structure (2009: 37, italics in
the original):

Loanwords are always words (i.e. lexemes) in the narrow sense, not lexical
phrases, and they are normally unanalyzable units in the recipient language.
The corresponding source word in the donor language, by contrast, may be
complex or even phrasal, but this internal structure is lost when the word
enters the recipient language. For example, Russian has the loanword
buterbrod ‘sandwich’, borrowed from German Butter-brot [butter-bread]. This
is a transparent compound in German, but since Russian has no other words
with the elements buter or brod, the Russian word is monomorphemic and not
analyzable by native speakers.
A similar example is the French loanword in Italian abat-jour ‘lampshade,
night-lamp’. Its morphemic structure is analysable, in French, as abattre
‘lowering’ + jour ‘light’, but it is not in Italian. It should be noted that the same
kind of unanalysability is found in completely adapted (see §1.3 below)

9
loanwords as Italian bistecca, from English beefsteak, which is unanalysable in
Italian, neither is discernible its relation with rosbif, from English roast-beef.
The deep integration of this word in the Italian lexicon is visible from its Italian-
like phonology and its productivity (bistecca ai ferri ‘grilled beefsteak’,
bistecchiera ‘steak pan-grill’).
Haspelmath's (2009: 37, note 3) further definition of the concept of loanword
follows: “when a word is analyzable within the recipient language, it can
normally not be a loanword”, he also adds that this holds true “even if its
members are loanwords: the English compound train station is not a loanword,
although it consists of two borrowed roots”.
However, Haspelmath (2009: 37) also observes that some light can be shed on
loanwords' unanalysability (and the compound may thus become transparent
again), when numerous words carrying the same morphemes are borrowed
from the source language. This is the case with some Chinese borrowings in
Japanese (whose writing system also uses a set of Chinese characters, directly
inherited from the Chinese tradition):

Japanese borrowed kokumin 国 民 ‘ citizen’ (from Chinese guó-mín [country-

people]) […], but it also borrowed other words with the element kok(u)
‘country’ (e.g. kok-ka 国家 ‘nation’, kok-u 国王 ‘king’), and other words with the
element min ‘people’ (e.g. minshū 民眾 ‘population’, jūmin 住民 ‘inhabitant’).
As a result of these multiple borrowings, many of the original Chinese
compounds are again transparent in Japanese, and can be regarded as
analyzable.
Once the morphemes are analysable in the recipient language, they can become
so deeply integrated into the morphemic system of the language that they can
even become productive, i.e. they can be used to produce native creations which
would be, in turn, unclear or bizarre in the previously source language. For
example, the borrowing into Italian of the English words baby, baby-sitter,
baby-doll and baby-boom brought to the nativization of the morpheme baby
which was used to coin native creations as baby talento ‘a child or very young
person of talent’ or baby pensione ‘retirement at a very young age’.
This shows no contradiction with Haspelmath's definition, because even if baby
is for sure an English loanword in Italian, baby pensione is not, since it is
analysable: it is in the end made up of a borrowed morpheme whose meaning is
clear and a native word (see §1.5.1).

10
Haspelmath's definition of the connection existing between the analysability of
a lexical item and its status of native word can therefore help us to define what
is native, or at least nativized (integrated), but cannot work the other way
round: it cannot neatly identify “non-loanwords”. Simply as the author (2009:
38, my emphasis) puts it: “we can never exclude that a word is a loanword, i.e.
that it has been borrowed at some stage in the history of the language. Thus, the
status of native words is always relative to what we know about the history of a
language”. A hundred years from now, if no records or linguists' inference will
demonstrate that abat-jour and baby have once been borrowed into Italian, and
if their phonology and orthography will integrate (Italian has no /Ʒ/ in its
phonological inventory, neither [j] and [y] in its autocthonous alphabet), they
will probably look like native items to Italian speakers.

1.2.4 “False” borrowings?

What we just said is certainly not new, as Whitney (1881: 16) already
acknowledged that “whenever crude material of foreign origin is introduced by
borrowing into the full vernacular use of a language, it becomes an integral part
of that language, undistinguished, except to reflective and learned study, from
the native material”.
We could certainly agree on the fact that, among the words speakers use when
they speak their native language, unless something is perceived as strange in
their phonology, morphology or orthography, or a known foreign model is
widely identified as archetype, every word appears as perfectly native to their
mind, and they probably do not even ask themselves where that word came
from. Many loanwords can thus be perceived as native items to speakers who do
not know the “model” they come from. Italian words such as canguro
‘kangaroo’, ferrovia ‘railway’ or realizzare ‘understand, be aware of’ are Italian-
looking in all their aspects, but they are nonetheless the outcome of different
processes of borrowing (see §1.5.1): canguro was imported with a little
phonological adaptation from one of Australia's indigenous languages
(känguru), ferrovia was the outcome of a lexical translation of the original
German word Eisenbahn (lit. ‘iron’ + ‘way’), while realizzare, a term already
existing in Italian, was enriched with the new meaning calqued on the English
term's polysemy.

11
However, the opposite can also happen, and some “strange looking” words may
also be mistaken for loanwords while they, according to some linguists, are not.
As Gusmani (1973: 65-66) noted, the foreign-looking aspect of a word is not a
sufficient guarantee of its status of loanword, the existence of a foreign model
and the likelihood of the mimetic relationship (It. ‘rapporto mimetico’) between
the two needs also to be proved.
Some acknowledgedly English words as mister and footing were imported into
Italian and then assigned a completely new meaning they did not have in the
previously source language: ‘coach, mister’ and ‘jogging’ respectively. English
morphemes record and man were combined into Italian to form recordman ‘the
person who holds the best performance (especially in sports) ’, a native creation
not existing in English6. Two more examples of false loanwords are quoted by
Gusmani (1973: 68 and 73): Italian and French scotch ‘adhesive tape’ is due to
the identification of the registered trademark “Scotch tape” with the product
itself, while English tandem was created on native at length ‘lengthwise’ using
Latin material7.
Do we have to consider the above mentioned “strange looking” words as
loanwords, since they (at least the raw materials) were brought into the
recipient language from another, or, following Gusmani (1973: 73-75), as false
exoticisms (It. ‘falsi esotismi’), since even if the material is foreign, the product
(the word itself) is an indigenous innovation, and therefore classify them as
native vocabulary?
All the words in the first paragraph (canguro, ferrovia, realizzare) are
unanimously recognized as loanwords because they undoubtedly have an older
model with the same meaning in a foreign language. Therefore, they need no
more analysis.
We believe the words in the second paragraph (mister, footing, recordman,
scotch, tandem) are also to be labelled as products of borrowing since their
material is borrowed from another language, even if the process which led to
their new signification is completely inherent to the recipient language and has
no model in the source one.

6
For a specialised study on false Anglicisms in Italian see Furiassi (2010).
7
Italian lexemes quoted in this and the previous paragraph were checked and confirmed in
DIR 1988, LDEL 1991 and OXP 2001.

12
Here, following Haspelmath's (2009: 44) conclusion that “in general, a word
can only be recognized with certainty as a loanword if both a plausible source
word and a donor language can be identified”, the point is clear. If we are to
consider “source word” as an immutable unit of “shape and meaning” (cf.
Haspelmath 2009: 43), an alien and almost an intruder 8 into the recipient
language with no possibilities for integration and participation in the active life
of the language, we cannot consider these words as loanwords, since their
meaning has changed in the process, and a source language native speaker
would not recognize them. Neither would we consider borrowing any kind of
structural interference or nativization, an admittedly inconvenient conclusion.
On the other hand, if we concede that a unit of shape and meaning may undergo
borrowing into a recipient language and, although losing its analysability, be re-
interpreted as a morpheme and actively participate in the language, even
acquiring new significations, we must admit all the above mentioned words are
rightfully to be considered as loanwords.
Indeed, we believe this process exemplifies exactly what Gusmani (1973: 12)
himself has specified about his notion of “imitation” (not a passive acceptance,
but an active and creative acquisition effort) and matches what was previously
referred to as “the creative use of an item within the ‘recipient’ language” by
Matras (2009: 146). The English lexemes mister and footing, as well as the
morphemes record and man were first copied (or imitated) into Italian and
therefore creatively employed to express new meanings (a particular kind of
training, a record-holder) or use (mister ‘coach’ can be used as vocative whereas
the Italian indigenous synonym allenatore cannot).

1.2.5 Synchrony and diachrony in the identification of borrowing

As Haspelmath (2009: 43-44) writes:

Linguists identify words as loanwords if they have a shape and meaning that is
very similar to the shape and meaning of a word from another language from
which it could have been taken [...], and if the similarities have no plausible
alternative explanation. Most importantly, of course, we need to exclude the
possibility of descent from a common ancestor, which is a very common reason
for word similarities across languages.
Of the three conditions involved in the identification of loanwords mentioned by
Haspelmath, one can be investigated on a synchronic ground (similarities
8
The term is quoted from Deroy (1956: 215), Fr. intrus.

13
among languages), while two have to be dealt with on a diachronic one
(plausible explanations for similarities and exclusion of a common ancestor).
After what was just summarised about the analysability of a word (§1.2.3) and
false borrowings (§1.2.4), the role of linguistics in determining the native or
non-native status of words is evidently fundamental and unavoidable,
loanwords being difficult, if not impossible, to spot by “laymen”.
The problem is, as Fries & Pike (1949: 31) put it, that “dialect mixture cannot be
studied or legitimately affirmed to exist unless two systems have previously
been studied separately. It follows that in a purely descriptive analysis of one
particular language as spoken by a bilingual, no loans are discoverable”. No
loans are discoverable because, according to Gusmani (1973: 16), even for the
first speaker borrowing a word from another language, the loanword is not an
intruder (as Deroy 1956: 215 named it) in the recipient language, but a
necessary part of it, as the simple fact that he had to use it proves (we will return
to the reasons why he chose to use it later in §1.7.3).
It seems that only linguistic scholars, grounding their studies on historical
foundations and finding a convincing model within a foreign language in
contact, can isolate loanwords and other contact-induced change in languages.
Furthermore, Manfredi, Simeone-Senelle, & Tosco (forth.: 7-8) observe “the
identification of a borrowed item always depends on both structural and socio-
historical assessments”. Haugen (1950: 229) is even more straightforward and
his words sound like a verdict: “to identify the results of a historical process like
borrowing is simply not possible by a purely synchronic study”. He explains (ivi:
227) that being a historical process, borrowing can only be identified by
historical methods, through a twofold comparison. First, the diachronic
“comparison between earlier and later states of a given language to detect
possible innovations, and thereupon a comparison of the innovations
discovered with possible models in other languages”. This process involves a
knowledge of earlier states of the language as well as of “whatever languages
may conceivably have exerted the influence in question”.
Diachronicity seems thus unavoidable in studying borrowing, and a synchronic
study seems therefore bound to be fruitless, as they are so perfectly integrated
into the recipient language. Poplack & Sankoff (1984: 100) “dispute this all-or-

14
nothing viewpoint of the borrowing process, focusing specifically on the
mechanisms by which an item is gradually converted from a foreign element to
a nativized one”. Their study focuses on the “synchrony of integration” of a set
of words into a stable bilingual (Spanish-English) community, identifying the
degree of integration of English words into Spanish (i.e. whether they are to be
considered as loanwords) on the basis of a set of indexes of their occurrence in
their elicited corpus. Worth noting, in our field of interest, is that they argue
(ivi: 125) that, if one compares the indexes on the basis of intergenerational
differences, their synchronic analysis has a predicting potential, namely
describing if English words are becoming accepted as loanwords and English
usage is advancing in the community.

1.3 Integration of borrowings: adoption vs. adaptation

When a word is imported into a language, it has often to undergo a process
known among linguists as integration (which we can define as ‘to comply with
the recipient language rules’) in order to fit in the phonological, morphological
and syntactic pattern of the recipient language. Morphological and syntactic
integration are often compulsory processes, as the recipient language may
request to assign grammatical features (gender, tense, etc.) which are absent (or
different) in the source language. On the other hand, phonological integration,
although common, is up to the speaker's choice and skills, he may indeed choose
to reproduce the loanword near or far from the model.
McMahon (1994: 204) suggests a distinction between adaptation (“nativise the
loan, attempting to fit into the patterns of the borrowing language”), and
adoption (“borrow a word in its donor-language form, maintaining features
foreign to the borrowing language”). She (ibidem) argues that the choice of
adaptation vs. that of adoption is primarily up to bilinguals.

1.3.1 Phonological integration

Phonological integration, which is probably the first to arise, is not easy to
distinguish from L1 interference in second language acquisition, as both of these
phenomena reveal themselves in the identification of a phoneme of the
secondary system with one of the primary system. In each of the two “the
speaker subjects it [the word] to the phonetic rules of the primary language”

15
(Weinreich 1968: 14) or, at least, “relies heavily on the phonetic categories of the
L1” (Winford 2003: 213) in his perception and production of the L2 or source
language. The border between the two 9 can theoretically be drawn on the “social
acceptance” of the adaptation: phonological adaptation is accepted in borrowing
but stigmatised as “imperfect learning” in second language acquisition, e.g.
thriller /'triller/ is the “accepted” form of the English loanword into Italian
(where there is no /θ/ sound), whereas a more faithful English-like
pronunciation /ˈθrɪləʳ/ would sound unintelligible and even ridiculous in speech
because, as Poplack & Sankoff (1984: 130) indicate “once a term is accepted into
the speech community, and adapted into a particular phonological form, it is
that form which is transmitted across generations in much the same way as
monolingual neologisms”.
Bloomfield (1967: 446) noted that “in so far as the phonetic systems are parallel,
this involves only the ignoring of minor difference”, e.g. the substitution of /ə/
with /e/ in the Italian realization of English computer /kom'pjuter/ (instead
of/kəmˈpjuːtəʳ/), or the unification of /æ/ and /i/ in an indistinct /a/ in the
Italian realization of English management /ma'naʤment / (instead of /
ˈmænɪdʒmənt/).
On the other hand, when the phonetic systems of the two languages in contact
are less alike and their phonological inventories do not match (which is
obviously the rule rather than the exception), the speaker borrowing the word
from the source language lexicon may substitute one of its phonemes with the
nearest he finds in the recipient language. This may bring to such a deep change
that even source language native speakers may not recognise their own language
material, as the the imitation is too far from the model (e.g. Japanese
rinoryūmu, from English linoleum, quoted in Gusmani 1973: 17).
Often, as Fries & Pike (1949: 36) note, the non distinction of two similar sounds
which are phonemic (constituting distinctive phonemes, e.g. /n/ and /ŋ/ in sin
and sing) in a language is brought on by speakers of a language in which those
sounds are allophonic (alternative forms of the same phoneme), or even lacking.
If so, the recipient language (its speakers) usually substitutes foreign phonemes
9
Thomason & Kaufman (1988: 39) claim that one major difference between borrowing and L1
interference is that the former begins with vocabulary, while the latter “begins instead with
sounds and syntax, and sometimes includes morphology as well, before words from the
shifting group's original language appear in the TL [Target Language]”.

16
with native material, but it may also import them, thus enriching its inventory.
Usually, this process requires a longer time to happen, and a more intensive
borrowing from the source language, but under those circumstances, phonemes
may eventually be assimilated as well. Fries & Pike (1949: 39) explain that:

A loan sequence of phonemes can be considered completely assimilated

when (a) it parallels the sequences occurring in native materials, or is
analogous to them; when (b) its occurrence in relation to grammatical
boundaries is the same as sequences in native words; and when (c) the
words containing it are in common use by the monolinguals; or a loan
sequence may be considered completely assimilated when it serves as a
pattern for the development of new sequences in the native materials.
Intensive borrowing can, indeed, alter the phonetic system of the recipient
language and “growing familiarity with the source language phonology and
syntax may lead to a newer, more correct version of a foreign form” (Bloomfield
1967: 447). Therefore, as Bloomfield (1967: 446-47) notes, the earlier borrowing
of the English word automobile was reproduced by Menomini 10 older speakers
(who knew no English and whose language had no lateral or trill) as
/atamo:pen/ while it was closer to the English model in the reproduction of
younger speakers with some knowledge of English, who pronounced it as
/atamo:pil/ thus introducing the new phoneme. Following McMahon (1994:
204) we would define the first kind of pronunciation as an example of
adaptation of the loanword to the phonetic structure of the recipient language,
and the second as an adoption.
According to Myers-Scotton (2002: 42), differences in the phonology of the two
languages and the degree of bilingualism of the speakers using the borrowed
forms are two of the main factors influencing the degree of integration (i.e. the
choice of adoption or adaptation): the closer the phonetic systems are and the
more widespread the bilingualism is, the closer the phonological aspect of the
loanword will be to the model, even if this entails adoption of new patterns.
In addition to bilingualism, McMahon (1994: 205) claims that also the quantity
of loans from the same source language plays a role in determining the degree of
adaptation, because “if the speakers of the recipient language are familiar with
the donor language, they are less likely to adapt words borrowed from it”.

10
Menomini or Menominee is an Algonquian language of the Great Lakes region in north
America (today's north-eastern Wisconsin).

17
Poplack (1988: 108) adds two more variables influencing the phonological level
of integration, stating that it is not stable but changes over time as “a gradually
increasing function of date and attestation of the word and its current frequency
in usage”.
Poplack's two parameters can theoretically be confirmed in the above-
mentioned case of Menomini reported by Bloomfield. We may indeed
hypothesise that older speakers' language reflected an earlier state of borrowing
evolving in the direction carried out by younger speakers, as well as that
automobiles were becoming more common to be seen over that period of time
(Bloomfield wrote in the 1930s) and therefore presumably more frequent in
people's speech.
Also from a phonological perspective, McMahon (1994: 206) underlines that
“adaptation will also depend on spelling”, as the “orthographic conventions of
the donor and recipient languages may give entirely different pronunciations” 11.
This interference of the speakers' L1 is also visible in borrowing, thus Bloomfield
(1967: 448) notes that “the influence of literate persons works also against a
faithful rendering” because, as the loanword may initially be read but not heard,
they may pronounce it according to their native language's orthography.
Therefore, Higa (1979: 284), insightfully concludes that “this phenomenon
indicates that intellectuals tend to borrow foreign words through the eye, while
others borrow through the ear”12.

1.3.2 Morphological and syntactic integration

Morphosyntactic integration is also common and sometimes indispensable for
the word to be usable in the recipient language. As Haspelmath (2009: 42)
notes “languages with gender and inflection classes need to assign each word to
a gender and inflection class, so that it can occur in syntactic patterns which
require gender agreement or certain inflected forms”.
Gender assignment criteria may sometimes be unclear or even arbitrary. For
example, in Italian every noun must be assigned a gender: when a loanword is
11
McMahon (1994: 206): “as with Don Quixote, who is [don kihote] in Spanish but [dɒn
kwɪksɒt] for many English speakers”.
12
Higa (1979: 284) quotes some examples from English loans in Japanese backing this thesis:
“for instance, such sewing terms as cotton, chalk and machine (=sewing machine) have been
borrowed by Japanese dressmakers from English and are pronounced as [k ʌtʌn], [tʃʌko] and
[miʃin], but outside of the dressmaking circle their pronunciations are [kotton], [t ʃɔ:ku] and
[mʌʃin]”.

18
adapted, the choice of its gender may rely on its last letter (as in Italian, words
ending with -o are usually masculine, while -a is usually for feminine, and
nouns ending with -e may be both). If the loanword is not-integrated and
perhaps has a consonant as its last letter, though, the choice of its gender may
depend on the analogy with its indigenous counterpart (thus It. mail may be
inflected as feminine if the speaker associates it with feminine posta ‘post’, or as
masculine if he associates it with masculine messaggio ‘message’). Verbs are
less troublesome to borrow into Italian, as they are always assigned the first of
the three conjugations Italian has (-are).
After complete adaptation to the recipient language structure, the loanword is
subjected to its morphosyntactic system as any other native word (It. adj.
sportivo and adv. sportivamente were created on the basis of the loanword
sport from En. sport), inflections (En. garages from French garage) and
composition (the above cited It. recordman from En. record and man).
As Bloomfield (1967: 453-54) and Haspelmath (2009: 43) note, this process of
adaptation to the recipient language morphosyntactic structure may be avoided
if a large number of loanwords are simultaneously imported from the same
source language. If so, there may be less need for adaptation, and source
language patterns may be imported instead. Examples of the case in point are
some foreign-patterned plural in English as Russian bolshevik, bolsheviki;
Greek criterion, criteria; Latin focus, foci and curriculum, curricula).
Haspelmath (2009: 42) highlights that German even borrowed a few case forms
from Latin, e.g. das Leben Jesu ‘the life of Jesus’. Furthermore, English
notoriously borrowed heavily from Latin-French inflective system after the
Norman conquest, e.g. suffixes -ible, -able and -ity which are nowadays used
inflecting native words as well.
Another kind of failed compliance with the recipient language morphosyntactic
structure is reported by Myers-Scotton (2002: 42), who cites the borrowing of
the agglutinated form alchemy from Arabic al kimiya, where al ‘the’ is an article
mistaken for a part of the word. Italian shows the opposite phenomenon in the
noun usignolo ‘nightingale’, (DIR 1988) from a diminutive of Latin luscinius,
where the first [l] was mistaken from an article and dropped in the process
(therefore Italians say l'usignolo instead of il lusignolo). We believe the fact that

19
both of the loanwords can be preceded by an article proves that they are due to
the misinterpretation of the structure of the foreign word. Nonetheless, they
show no further influence on the recipient language morphosyntactic structure.
Obviously, differences in the writing systems of the two languages in contact are
also to be taken into account. We may therefore describe another kind of
adaptation: orthographic adaptation. We would speak of transliteration when
two alphabets have a conventionalised one-to-one relationship between each of
their letters (e.g. Cyrillic or Greek and Latin scripts), and transcription when
there is no such a correspondence or when one of the two languages is not
alphabetical.

1.3.3 Integration and acclimatisation

Gusmani (1973: 22) pinpoints the problematic and sometimes blurry boundary
between integrated and not-integrated loanwords, arguing that every loanword
establishes some form of relationship network with the linguistic pattern it is
brought into. He (ivi: 23) therefore distinguishes between integration and
acclimatisation (It. acclimatamento). It is worth remarking that while
Gusmani's concept of integration is parallel to that of adaptation,
acclimatisation is not analogous to that of adoption at all, as it is not described
by the formal appearance of the word, but by the speaker's usage of the word:
the more the speaker makes himself familiar with the neologism (even in a
single, specific register or technical speech), the more the neologism is
“acclimatised”. On the contrary, as Gusmani (1973: 22-24) underlines,
acclimatisation and integration often go hand in hand with each other: the
nearer the neologism was made to the recipient language structure, the more it
is considered as “familiar” by the speaker. Kemmer (2013) confirms this view
when she writes that “a newly adopted borrowed word gradually adopts sound
and other characteristics of the borrowing language” through
conventionalization, i.e. as it “progressively permeates a larger and larger
speech community”.
Of course, some well-acclimatised words may even show little or no formal and
morphological integration at all (Gusmani 1973: 23-24): e.g. Italian bar and
stop which are pretty accurate imitation of their English archetype; their
acclimatisation is nonetheless evident in their productivity (barista, stoppare).

20
As it was already reported (see §1.3.1 above), phonological integration has been
described as a function of proximity of the phonetic systems involved and the
degree of bilingualism by Myers-Scotton (2002) or of date of attestation and
frequency of use by Poplack (1988). Gusmani (1973: 60-65, who also supplies
the following examples in brackets) adds a further criterion combining
Poplack's, asserting that time not always works in the direction of integration
which may in fact be either progressive or regressive. He argues that when a
loanword moves from a solely technical speech or a high register to a broader
one, used by more speakers, it may become nearer to the recipient language
structure (the process thus being progressive): e.g. It. fuorigioco has replaced
the previously loaned En. offside in soccer. When the opposite process is in
place, and the loanword was first acquired through popular speech and then
moved to a higher register, it may become more similar to the model as it is
used by more educated people willing to show a deeper knowledge of the source
language (the process thus being regressive): e.g. Old High German Kriahhi and
Anglo-Saxon Crēacas are replaced by today's Ger. Grieche and En. Greek,
showing more similarity to Lat. Graecus.
Progressive and regressive integration as described by Gusmani may be
compared with the insightful study on the “synchrony of integration” by Poplack
& Sankoff (see also §1.2.5), who (1984: 101) emphasise that “the linguistic
integration of loanwords is but one aspect of their assimilation into a language.
The sociological process of acceptation is another”. They (ivi: 128) also define a
number of indices measuring what they “assumed to be key components of the
mechanism of integration of foreign material into a recipient language”, among
which the consistency in loanwords assignment to a gender (see the example of
It. mail quoted above). Poplack & Sankoff (ivi: 129) explain that:

at early stages, analogical and/or phonological conditioning of gender is

equivocal and some inconsistency may result. As integration proceeds,
however, this inconsistency is completely resolved in one of two ways: either a
single gender becomes the norm, or two phonologically distinct reflexes of the
same etymon persist, each with appropriate gender.
Thus, the authors record both masculine el suéter and feminine la suera
(‘sweater’) in their corpus.

21
 1.3.4 Effects of borrowing
Borrowing always affects the recipient language. In a case such as the one just
described, one of the two synonyms will probably be displaced by the other, or
acquire a more specialized meaning thus justifying the dichotomy.
Weinreich (1968: 54-55) argues that, except for loanwords with entirely new
content, the transfer or reproduction of foreign words affects the recipient
language vocabulary in one of three ways:
(1) confusion in usage between the content of the new and old word
designating the same concept;
(2) disappearance of the old word (“En. paper ‘newspaper’ causes the
semantic extension of Amer. Portuguese papel leading to the discarding
of the old gazeta”);
(3) survival of both the new and old word, with a specialization in content.
Of course, if borrowing is relatively intense, as it was already described, “the
impact on the borrowing language can be far wider than the simple addition of a
few words, affecting the phonology, morphology and syntax as well as the
lexicon” (McMahon 1994: 209). As Winter (1973: 144) puts it: “no component of
a natural language is totally immune to change under the impression of outside
languages”.

1.3.5 The “citizenship” of loanwords

As it was already summarised in §1.2.4, loanwords may be undistinguishable
from native creations. And so far, it was argued that adaptation also plays a role
in this kind of confusion: as Deroy (1956: 215, my translation) describes, “the
loanword is an intruder. It is not immediately recognized on a par with native
words by the recipient language. It creeps slowly in, dresses itself up, exhorts
speakers to familiarise with it, lets its foreign origin be forgotten”. When the
process is completed “the foreign origin of the form has disappeared, and
neither the speaker nor, consequently, a relevant description can distinguish it
from native forms” (Bloomfield 1967: 449). There is no distinction in the status
of canguro, ferrovia, realizzare and other Italian native words in speakers'
mind.
Still, as Higa (1979: 286) notes, “in many languages borrowed words are not
given full-fledged ‘citizenship’ immediately”. The author argues that “certain

22
written devices are applied to them so that they can be visually identified as
borrowed words”, e.g. borrowed words are often italicized or put in quotation
marks in English (and Italian too) by writers and journalists during the period
of their first appearance. As time goes by and readers get used to them, though,
these devices may be “turned off” and borrowed words suffer no such
discrimination.
On the other hand, some languages seem to be more discriminatory against
foreign material, refusing to ever give them full-fledged citizenship. For
example, Japanese even has a distinct syllabary (called katakana) which is used
to write words borrowed from foreign languages (except Chinese, from which
Japanese characters were derived), as well as onomatopoeia and technical and
scientific terms. As reported by Higa (ibidem), this practice is “official and
mandatory” as it is a governmental policy administered by the Ministry of
Education.
The situation is similar in Chinese, where there is not a specific writing system
reserved for borrowing, but a subset of characters is reserved to transliterate the
approximately two thirds of foreign names which are transcribed phonemically
(cf. Chen Yan 2013: 2). The set, as reported by Chen Yan (ivi: 5), is delimited by
language planning institutions like the Xinhua News Agency, which since the
1950s have been compiling handbooks with foreign sounds associated to
Chinese characters and brought to the publication of the volume Names of the
World's Peoples (NWP 2007).

1.4 Borrowing and code-switching

The notion of code-switching may also be useful in the definition of borrowing.
As it was summarised by Winford (2003: 14), code-switching (or code-mixing)
involves “the alternate use of two languages (or dialects) within the same stretch
of speech, often within the same sentence”. This definition ranges along a
linguistic continuum stretching from the case in which (ivi: 103) “bilingual
speakers alternate between codes within the same speech event, switch codes
within a single turn, or mix elements from two codes within the same
utterance”. The first two cases can be further labelled as inter-sentential (each
sentence is made up by material from a single language), the last one as intra-
sentential (material from more than one language).

23
 1.4.1 Looking for boundaries
Manfredi et alii (forth.: 30) support the view of “a neat separation” existing
between borrowing and code-switching, maintaining that while borrowing “is
part and parcel of the recipient language and is glossed and analyzed as such”,
code-switching “is an instance of one or more alien elements entering a
recipient language without – at least in principle – being integrated into the
latter”. This distinction, though reasonable, is not always easy to put into
practice, since intra-sentential code-switching produces utterances which have
most of their lexicon as well as morphosyntactic apparatus from one language in
which some foreign material is inserted, e.g. “I could understand que [that] you
don't know how to speak Spanish, verdad? [right?]” (Poplack 1980: 596). Here
the problem of delimiting the boundary between this particular form of code-
switching and borrowing is apparent: are “que” and “verdad” Spanish
loanwords in English, or are they instances of code-switching?
Winford (2003: 107) describes the two chief criteria that have been used to
distinguish between the two:
(1) the degree of use by monolingual speakers (“established loans are
commonly used by monolingual speakers, whereas code switches tend to
be transitory phenomena”); and
(2) the degree of morphophonemic integration (borrowings are more
integrated than code switches).
Nonetheless, Winford (ibidem) reports that they are not immune to critiques as,
contesting the first criterion, some researchers have argued that “frequency
counts are inconclusive, and that the distinction between a switch and a
borrowing is not transparent to bilinguals”. The criterion of morphophonemic
integration, Winford (ibidem) continues, is also problematic “since both
borrowings and code switches may or may not be morphologically and
phonologically adapted” (cf. also Myers-Scotton 1993: 180-91).
Maintaining that code-switching cannot be identified on linguistic basis alone,
Poplack & Sankoff (1984: 103) propose the criterion of social integration
(“acceptance and use by community member”) asserting that it must also be
viewed as a discriminant: a high degree of social integration signals a loanword,
whereas a low degree suggests an instance of code-switching.

24
In a later article, Poplack (1988: 106; 2012) confirms the importance of social
integration, adding the further criterion of frequency which signals established
(accepted) loanwords, i.e. words which “recur relatively frequently, are widely
used in the speech community, and have achieved a certain level of recognition
or acceptance, if not normative approval”. Poplack et alii (1988: 50) thus
distinguish on a statistical basis between forms that occur only once in their
corpus (nonce borrowings) and those used by more than one speaker more than
once (widespread loans).
Myers-Scotton (2002: 41) takes into account predictability, maintaining that
“while one cannot predict when a borrowed form will reoccur, one can predict it
definitely will reoccur because it has a status in the recipient language”. On the
other hand, she (ibidem) emphasises, “the codeswitching form may or may not
reoccur; it has no predictive value”.
Two additional and important (though not easy to account for) criteria
delimiting borrowing and code-switching need to be described: the degree of
bilingualism of the speakers and the institutional acceptance of the words.
Scholars agree on the fact that code-switching is typically a bilinguals'
phenomenon, as Haspelmath (2009: 40) notes “from the point of view of the
entire language (not that of a single speaker), a loanword is a word that can
conventionally be used as part of the language. In particular, it can be used in
situations where no code-switching occurs, e.g. in speech of monolinguals”. We
can therefore exclude that any “foreign” word pronounced by a monolingual be
a code switch, as he is unable to code-switch to a language he cannot speak; of
course the opposite is not true at all, as bilinguals utterances may include code
switches as well as borrowings.
Institutional acceptance may be measured by the insertion in dictionaries,
which ratify the acceptance of the loanword as part of the recipient language, in
contrast to the “extemporaneity” (or unpredictability) of code switches, which
are mostly confined to oral speech.
Of course, these two criteria are problematic too. It is indeed not easy to
evaluate the degree of bilingualism of each individual, nor it is to define a
certain degree to be the limit below which no code-switching is possible.
Besides, insertion in dictionaries, though easy to verify or disprove, is an ex-post

25
evidence incapable of accounting for such a living phenomenon as code-
switching. Dictionaries are nonetheless undeniably capable of accounting for
borrowings, and they are the most solid ground we have to build our research
on.

1.4.2 An unnecessary boundary?

Myers-Scotton (2002: 153) proposes to solve this type of dualism on the basis of
her Matrix Language Frame (MLF) model13. According to her, this would make
the dichotomy unnecessary (“from a synchronic point of view, there is no need
to make the borrowing vs. codeswitching distinction”), since “a single model
(the MLF model) can cover all singly occurring elements from the Embedded
Language in the Matrix language frame”. Myers-Scotton (1993: 166) explains
that “in the case of borrowing the Matrix Language is also the recipient
language, while the EL [Embedded Language] is the source of CS [code-
switching] forms and also B [borrowed] forms”.
On the contrary, according to Myers-Scotton, the distinction can be drawn on a
linguistic line and from a diachronic perspective. Firstly, she (2002: 239)
distinguishes two semantic types of words, cultural and core borrowed forms
(see also §1.5.2): the former are “words for objects new to the culture (e.g. CD or
compact disk, espresso), but also for new concepts (e.g. overtime)”, the latter
are “words that more or less duplicate already existing words in the L1 (e.g.
words for ‘brother’ or ‘home’ or words for time references such as le weekend in
French), which meet no real lexical needs and may be redundant. Then, she
(ibidem) contends that cultural and core borrowings enter the recipient
language following two different paths: cultural forms appear abruptly14 in the
language (to fill lexical gaps), whereas core forms start out as bilinguals' code
switches and eventually develop into established loanwords.
Myers-Scotton (2002: 243) therefore compares code-switching to an “avenue”
13
Winford (2003: 138): “the MLF model is based on the assumption that one of the languages
involved in code switching, referred to as the matrix language (ML), sets the grammatical
frame for mixed constituents. […] The other language involved, from which elements are
incorporated into the ML frame, is the embedded language (EL)”. The model seems to draw
on Haugen's (1950: 211) observation that speakers “may switch rapidly from one [language]
to the other, but at any given moment they are speaking only one [...]. The introduction of
elements from one language into the other means merely an alteration of the second
language, not a mixture of the two”.
14
Myers-Scotton (1993: 171-72) highlights that abruptly “does not mean that the new cultural
B form will be used without exception by 100 per cent of the speech community. Certain
groups of speakers may always resort to calquing or paraphrase”.

26
along which core borrowed forms gradually come into the recipient language (or
ML). She (ibidem) suggests that “a potential borrowed form must first appear as
a codeswitching form a number of times. From here, they can move - as
borrowed forms - into even monolingual speech in the recipient language”. In
this light, code-switching is therefore a mechanism, a process.
Matras (2009: 147) agrees with Myers-Scotton on the fact that “the seeds of
borrowing are found in the occasional use of second-language insertions in the
speech of bilinguals”, but he (ivi: 110) believes her distinction between
borrowings and code switches is unconvincing because its motivation “stems at
least in part from a need to satisfy the internal mechanics of her Matrix
Language Frame model”, which “requires a mechanism to distinguish between
ML and EL lexemes”. Matras counters her view with “a more pragmatic
approach to the multilingual repertoire”, arguing that Myers-Scotton's two-way
distinction can conceivably be replaced by a dynamic (rather than strictly linear)
continuum, shown in Fig. 1.
Matras' (2009: 110-14) proposal identifies “several different dimensions that
join together to determine the status of a word-form in a language contact
constellation”: whether this word-form is a loanword or a code switch may be
determined by a “bundle of criteria, each arranged on a continuum”.
Bilinguality
bilingual speaker ↔monolingual speaker
Composition
elaborate utterance/phrase ↔single lexical item
Functionality
special conversational effect, stylistic choice ↔default expression
Unique referent (specificity)
lexical ↔para-lexical
Operationality
core vocabulary ↔grammatical operations
Regularity
single occurrence ↔regular occurrence
Structural integration
not integrated ↔integrated
codeswitching ↔borrowing

Fig. 1: Bidirectional dimensions of the code-switching vs. borrowing continuum as presented by

Matras (2009: 111).
Matras (ivi: 113-14) explains:

The prototypical, least controversial kind of borrowing thus involves the

27
 regular occurrence of a structurally integrated, single lexical item that is used
as a default expression, often a designation for a unique referent or a
grammatical marker, in a monolingual context. The least controversial
codeswitch is an alternational switch at the utterance level, produced by a
bilingual consciously and by choice, as a single occurrence, for special stylistic
effects. In-between the two we encounter fuzzy ground.

1.5 Categorisation of borrowing

As it was already mentioned earlier in §1.2.4, not every loanword is brought into
a language following the same path or strategy: some are imported in a shape
fairly resembling their model (e.g. It. canguro), some are made up with native
materials translating the model (e.g. It. ferrovia), some others are not brought
into the recipient language, but the meaning of an already existing word is
extended instead to include the one that the analogous foreign model also has
(e.g. It. realizzare).
A coherent framework in the identification of borrowings is thus needed to
identify and contextualise them.

1.5.1 Taxonomies of borrowing

1.5.1.1 Haugen's
One of the earliest and important attempts made to establish such a framework
is the one proposed by Haugen (1950), who introduced a number of concepts,
such as loan-blend and loan-shift (cf. Van Hout & Muysken 1994: 40). Haugen
(1950: 212) argues that “since borrowing is a process involving reproduction,
any attempt to analyze its course must involve a comparison of the original
pattern with its imitation”. He then makes a distinction between two kinds of
reproduction: importation (“the loan is similar enough to the model so that a
native speaker [of the source language] would accept it as his own”) and
substitution (the model has been reproduced “inadequately”), suggesting that
such a distinction also applies to loanword constituent patterns. Finally, Haugen
(ivi: 213-15) proposes a categorisation of borrowings into:
(1) loanwords: importation of both meaning and phonemic shape (e.g. Fr.
charivari from Amer. En. shivaree);
(2) loanblends (or hybrid): importation of meaning and a part of the
phonemic shape, while the other has been analysed and then substituted
with indigenous material (e.g. Pennsylvania Ger. blaumepie from Amer.

28
 En. plum pie);
(3) loanshifts:
(a) importation of meaning through the substitution of the whole word
phonemic shape (calques, e.g. German Wolkenkratzer and It.
grattacielo from En. skyscraper), or
(b) the extension of the meaning of indigenous material (semantic loans,
e.g. Amer. Port. use of humoroso with the meaning of the Amer. En.
humorous).
Notably, Haugen's categories of loanwords are defined according to the extent of
morphemic substitution: none, partial or complete respectively.
Finally, loan creations which were inspired by a foreign concept (e.g. Ger.
Umwelt [around-world] coined to render French milieu [mid-place]
‘environment’) are “not strictly loans at all” to Haugen (ivi: 220).

1.5.1.2 Weinreich's
A slightly different taxonomy proposed by Weinreich (1968: 47-51) divides
borrowing into simple lexical elements and compounds.
In the borrowing of simple lexical elements, the most common path is the
“outright transfer of the phonemic sequence” (e.g. It. sciuscià from En. Shoe-
shine), but the extension of the use of an indigenous word on the model of a
foreign word (It. realizzare) may also occur.
When compound words are borrowed, Weinreich describes three possible paths
they can follow to enter a language:
(1) all elements transferred in analysed form (e.g. Florida Spanish objetores
conscientes from En. conscientious objectors);
(2) all elements reproduced by semantic extensions or equivalent native
words through
(a) loan translation (e.g. Louisiana French marchandises sèches from En.
dry goods),
(b) loan renditions (in which the model compound only furnishes a
general hint for the reproduction, e.g. Ger. Halb-insel from Lat. paen-
insula), or
(c) loan creations (new coinages stimulated by the need to match
designations available in a language in contact, e.g. Yiddish mitkind

29
 on En. sibling and Ger. Geschwister;
(3) some elements are transferred while others are reproduced, creating a
hybrid compound (e.g. Pennsylvania Ger. esix-jug ‘vinegar jug’).

1.5.2 Cultural and core borrowings

Another important border borrowings can be divided on is that of cultural and
core borrowings as described by Myers-Scotton (2002: 239). As it was already
summarised in §1.4.2, cultural borrowings are words for things or concepts
previously unknown in the recipient language, they are also called “loanwords
by necessity (or need)”, as they are needed to fill gaps in the recipient language
inventory. On the other hand core borrowings are words for things or concepts
which already have a designation in the recipient language (which they
duplicate or replace), therefore they are also called “luxury loanwords”, because
they meet no real lexical need.
The distinction by Myers-Scotton echoes back to the one between core and
peripheral vocabulary, which divides the “essential” vocabulary used in everyday
conversation (bread, water, food, kitchen, eat, sleep, dream, wake, run)15 and
the one of the “periphery” of the language, usually confined to specific or
technical speech. As it is described by Minkova & Stockwell (2006: 463) “the
most frequent words form the core of the vocabulary, shared by all adult
speakers; outward from that core lie layers of words of decreasing frequency and
familiarity”.
Of course, the cultural and core borrowing distinction is not so neat and self-
evident, as it is not the distinction between core and peripheral vocabulary
which is obviously not a linguistic universal and may change according to the
geographic position and historical period. In fact, words designating ‘snow’,
‘polar bear’ or ‘igloo’ may evidently be core vocabulary in some language of the
Arctic circle, whereas peripheral in the equatorial region; other words may also
pass from a status to the other during a period of time, e.g. computer or
stagecoach.
Moreover, even within the same language and historical period, the designation
for the same “core” thing or concept may vary depending on register or place:
e.g. Hughes (2000: 391-92) notes that weird, bloody and trek would be core

15
The list is taken from Minkova & Stockwell (2006: 466).

30
words in American, Australian and South African English respectively, but not
in British.
Minkova & Stockwell (2006) try to delimit core vocabulary on a statistical basis.
Assuming that the core vocabulary is composed of items of high frequency, they
investigate three previously studied corpora 16 and individuate the core
vocabulary of the language in the one thousand most frequent words. The
authors (ivi: 464) admit that the estimate of a word's frequency is susceptible to
the size of the corpus, the types (spoken or written) of material included and the
range of text types; still, we believe such an approach has conspicuous
advantages.

1.6 Constraints on borrowing

The extent of lexical borrowing depends on a range of social and linguistic
factors that vary from one contact situation to another. Here we will try to
outline some of the most important among them.

1.6.1 Linguistic constraints on borrowing

1.6.1.1 Hierarchy of borrowability

As we can see in our everyday use of loanwords, certain words (e.g. nouns,
adjectives and verbs) are more easily borrowed than others (e.g. pronouns and
conjunctions). This is caused by a linguistic (i.e. structural) constraint
determining the degree of borrowability of lexical categories which is known
among linguists as “hierarchy of borrowability”.
As early as 1881 Whitney (1881: 19-20) defined, on the basis of common sense, a
scale on which he ranged the various lexical categories according to the freedom
with which they were borrowed:

By universal consent, what is most easily transferred from one tongue to

another is a noun; the name of a thing is language-material in its most
exportable form. Even an adjective, an attributive word, has a more marked
tinge of formal character, and is less manageable; and a verb, a predicative
word, still more […]. Next to the verb, among parts of speech, would come the
adverb, with the yet more formal prepositions and conjunctions, and the

16
Cf. Minkova & Stockwell (2006: 463-64): (a) the Amer.En. based Brown Corpus, a data base
of one million words from 500 samples of texts from a very broad range of genres, compiled
in the Nineteen-sixties; (b) the Lancaster-Oslo-Bergen Corpus, designed to match the Brown
Corpus in size (one million words) and sample texts (500) and compiled in the Nineteen-
seventies; (c) the British National Corpus, dating mainly from 1985 to 1994 and collecting
one hundred million words of both written (90%) and spoken (10%) English.

31
 pronouns; and, not far from these, the formative elements proper, the prefixes
and suffixes, first of derivation and then of inflection; and last of all, the
fundamental features of grammatical distinction.
A century later, a slightly different hierarchy was outlined by Muysken (1981,
quoted in Van Hout & Muysken 1994: 41 and Winford 2003: 51) as follows:

nouns > adjectives > verbs > prepositions > coordinating conjunctions >
quantifiers > determiners > free pronouns > clitic pronouns > subordinating
conjunctions
A comparison of the two shows some difference in the lower positions of the
scale, whereas the upper ones are identical: content words on top and function
words on the bottom.
Whitney (1881: 14) argued that “the grammatical apparatus merely resists
intrusion most successfully, in virtue of its being the least material and the most
formal part of language”. As Haugen (1950: 224) notes, Whitney “did not deny
the possibility of borrowing even members of the last two classes, but contended
that they are unusual and generally secondary to the borrowing of vocabulary
items”, and concludes (ibidem, author's emphasis): “all linguistic features can
be borrowed, but they are distributed along a SCALE OF ADOPTABILITY which
somehow is correlated to the structural organization”.
Winford (2003: 51) gives two motivations for the low degree of borrowability of
the grammatical apparatus, the first one is not so different from Whitney's
formality and Haugen's structuredness, while the second one is new: “part of
the reason for the greater accessibility of nouns and adjectives lies in the fact
that they form less tightly knit subsystems of the grammar than functional
morphemes do. Moreover, they occur frequently in contexts where they can be
isolated and extracted as loans”.
Van Hout & Muysken (1994: 42) believe that the reason is to be found in “one of
the primary motivations for lexical borrowing” (see §1.7.1): “to extend the
referential potential of a language. Since reference is established primarily
through nouns, these are the elements borrowed most easily”, a position
endorsed by Matras (2009: 172) too.
A “generativist” answer to nouns' higher borrowability is suggested by Myers-
Scotton (2002: 240) who asserts that “nouns are borrowed more frequently
than any other category because they receive, not assign, thematic roles. That is,
their insertion into the frame of another language is less disruptive of predicate-

32
argument structure than insertions of any content morphemes assigning
thematic roles (i.e. verbs, but also prepositions and predicate adjectives)”. Her
position is echoed by Van Hout & Muysken (1994: 54-55) who assert that the
principal explanation lies “in the different role that these categories play in the
organization of the sentence”, as “a verb is more crucial to that organization
than a noun”.
McMahon (1994: 209) adds a further, extra-lexical dimension in the scale of
borrowability, maintaining that “the lexicon is most easily and radically
affected, followed by the phonology, morphology and finally the syntax”, a
position endorsed by Thomason & Kaufman (1988: 73) too, who strongly believe
that the depth of borrowing is linked to the depth of contact (see §1.6.2.1).

1.6.1.2 Core and peripheral vocabulary

The distinction made earlier in §1.5.2 between core and peripheral vocabulary is
particularly important in the study of linguistic constraints on borrowing, as the
borrowing of core as opposed to peripheral vocabulary seems to be subjected to
strong limitations (cf. Winford 2003: 53). “the assumption that basic vocabulary
is almost immune to replacement via borrowing”, as Winford (ibidem) notes, is
indeed “vital to the assessments of language relatedness via the comparative-
historical method”. The indigenousness of the core is confirmed, at least for the
English language, by the authoritative Oxford English Dictionary (OED2: vol. 1,
p. XXIV):

The vast aggregate of words and phrases which constitutes the vocabulary of
English-speaking people presents [...] the aspect of one of those nebulous
masses familiar to the astronomer, in which a clear and unmistakable nucleus
shades off on all sides […] the English vocabulary contains a nucleus or central
mass of many thousand words whose ‘Anglicity’ is unquestioned; [...] but they
are linked on every side with other words which are less and less entitled to this
appellation and which pertain ever more and more distinctly to the domain of
local dialect, of the slang and cant of ‘sets’ and classes, of the peculiar
technicalities of trades and processes, of the scientific terminology common to
all civilized nations, and of the actual languages of other lands and peoples.
If we interpret the distinction between basic vocabulary and core vocabulary on
the ground of how often they are used, the point of view of the editors of the
OED is confirmed by Minkova's & Stockwell's (2006: 465-66) statistics (shown
in Fig. 2) which emphasise that, of the 1,000 most frequent words of English
used for everyday conversation up to 83 percent of the items are descendants of

33
Old English words. Moreover, the two to four items which enter the top-ranked
one hundred words in the various corpora 17 (state, n.; use, v.; people; just, adv.;
very; really) are very early loans, mostly attested since the thirteenth century.
The percentage of Germanic words “drops dramatically in the 2,000 word layer”
though, and keeps on diminishing in the following ones.

Fig. 2: Sources of the most frequent 10,000 words of English, copied from Minkova & Stockwell
(2006: 466).

As Minkova & Stockwell (2006: 466-67) note, the percentages of the first row
“bear out the assertion that […] the core lexicon, which includes function words
and common words such as water and food, go, sleep, wake, sister and brother,
green and yellow, is predominantly native in origin”, whereas “lexemes
covering more complex and abstract notions: autonomy, capitalism, cognition,
delight, discretion, elegant, psychoanalysis, supreme, reverberate, telethon,
which are spread over the outer frequency layers, are loanwords”. A connection
seems therefore to exist between frequency of use and resistance to borrowing
or, broadly speaking, to change in general: as Haspelmath (2008: 50) observes
“it is well known that high-frequency items are resistant to other types of
language change such as analogy”.
Another recent study by Hughes (2000: 391-94) contests the “Anglicity” of the
core, finding a surprising portion of Norman French (33%) and Latin (12%)
material against a small Anglo-Saxon one (47%) in the 600 most frequent
words18, thus showing (ivi: 394) that the character of the core is changing as
17
See note 16.
18
Hughes' list is confined to those words found to be among the most frequent thousand in
both written and spoken English by the LDOCE, whose data are based on the Longman
Lancaster Corpus of British and American Speech (thirty million words from various

34
classical terms are increasingly assimilated.
The small permeability of core vocabulary and the slowness of its change are at
the centre of Swadesh's studies. Swadesh (1952: 452) hypothesised that the rate
of change of core vocabulary is “relatively constant”, it happens in constant
percentages per time elapsed, and he tried to find this constant by studying the
degree of linguistic differentiation within the core vocabulary of various
languages. He (ivi: 455) formed a list of 215 “relatively stable lexical items”
(“body parts, numerals, certain objects of nature, simple universal activities”)
assumed to be (ivi: 457) “universal” to every language and “non-cultural”, that is
“refer to things found anywhere in the world and familiar to every member of a
society”.
Beyond the original aim which brought Swadesh to edit his list, we can use it as
an early attempt to establish a “universal vocabulary” of generic concepts and
investigate the possibility of borrowing in core vocabulary: since, according to
the assumption, these concepts exist in every human community, there would
be no need to borrow their designations. Nonetheless, as Matras (2009: 166)
pinpoints, the problem is that “such a view of borrowing is oriented almost
entirely toward the ‘gap’ hypothesis”, leaving no space for others (see §1.7).
A critique of the core-peripheral distinction is brought on by Thomason (2001:
72) who contends that it is “a rough practical distinction, not a well-supported
theoretical notion” and emphasises that there is “no theoretical foundation for
this notion of universal-and-thus-hard-to-borrow basic vocabulary”.
More recently, a team of linguists coordinated by Haspelmath & Tadmor (2009,
and WOLD 2007) tried to define a new list on more scientific bases. As Tadmor
(2009: 72) contends, Swadesh's list was in fact “the intuition of a brilliant,
knowledgeable, and accomplished scholar, but nonetheless an intuition”,
whereas the aim of the team is to produce “an alternative, empirically-based
basic vocabulary list”.
The team compared a list of 1460 words19 (cf. Haspelmath 2008: 57-58) in 41
languages of the world, aiming at finding universals of lexical borrowing. In
their search for core vocabulary, the scholars did not limit themselves to

sources) and the British National Corpus (see note 16), cf. Hughes (2000: 361).
19
The list is composed by the IDS (see References) list (1,310 words) and 150 more words
linked to the modern world (e.g. radio, truck, hospital, election, etc.), cf. Haspelmath (2008:
57).

35
resistance to borrowing only, but took into consideration other notions normally
associated with the concept of core vocabulary (analysability, universality, and
age) (cf. Tadmor 2009: 68). The new list, named Leipzig-Jakarta, is composed
by the 100 top-ranking items in the database, and includes many body parts, as
well as natural phenomena (rain) and generic animal terms (bird, fish), basic
properties (big, small, old and colors), pronouns (I, you), etc.
Their work also gives (cf. Tadmor 2009: 64) a portrait of the semantic fields
most affected by borrowing (religion and belief, clothing, social and political
relations, food and drink) and most-resistant to borrowing (sense perception,
the body, kinship).

1.6.1.3 other linguistic constraints

Syntagmatic constraints, structural complexity and typological difference
between the languages involved are also mentioned by Winford (2003: 51-53)
among linguistic constraints on borrowing; Higa (1979: 285) further adds what
we could call an “ease of production” constraint.
(1) Syntagmatic constraints are related to morphological and syntactic
properties of lexical classes (see also §1.3.2), as Winford (2003: 52) puts it “the
greater the degree of lexical complexity in the paradigms of a lexical class, the
more resistant it is to borrowing”. This, according to Winford (ibidem), “may be
why verbs, which tend to be morphologically complex as well as central to the
syntax of the sentence, tend to be borrowed less than other open-class
categories”. It follows that the typological similarity in verbal structure between
the languages in contact may operate as a facilitating factor in borrowing, as in
the case (reported by Winford 2003: 52 from Treffers-Daller 1994: 110) of most
French verbs borrowed into Brussels Dutch which “tend to be from the -er class,
since these lend themselves most readily to the incorporation into the class of
regular Dutch verbs whose infinitival suffix is -en”.
(2) Structural complexity constraints, as Winford (ibidem) highlights, may also
explain “the preference for morphologically simple lexical items over more
complex ones in bilingual borrowing” noted by Poplack et alii (1988: 60), or
some speaker's strategies of simplification to facilitate the borrowing of verbs, as
those documented in Mayan languages “whose speakers borrow Spanish
infinitives and use a Mayan verb meaning ‘do’ as an auxiliary to which Mayan

36
inflection can be added to convey tense/aspect meanings”.
(3) Typological differences between the structures of the languages in contact
may also inhibit direct borrowing and promote the use of different strategies, as
loan-shifts or loan-translations instead. The mechanism was already known to
Weinreich (1968: 61) who emphasised that “if Tibetan resisted transfers from
Sanskrit and restricted its borrowing to loan translations it was only because the
structure of Sanskrit words was so different from its own structure; the
resistance to transfers from a language with more congenial word structure, like
Chinese, has not been so great”. On the other hand, “the transfer of morphemes
is facilitated between highly congruent structures” (ivi: 33).
Tadmor (2009: 63) also highlights that the recipient language typology is
particularly important as a constraint in the borrowing of verbs: “the more
isolating the recipient language, the less morphosyntactic adaptation is
necessary for borrowing verbs as such; conversely, the more synthetic the
language, the more adaption is required”, he concludes that it is therefore
“much easier to borrow verbs into isolating languages than it is into synthetic
languages”.
(4) Ease of production is suggested by Higa (1979: 285) as a factor in the choice
between loanwords and native creations. The author quotes examples of English
loans in Japanese and emphasises that En. loan computer was initially
preferred over its Japanese translation denshi keisanki ‘electronic computer’ but
later discarded when the latter was shortened into densanki. Higa also reports
the opposite process happened with En. department store, initially less used
than its Jap. translation hyakkaten (a five-syllable word in Japanese phonology)
but eventually favored when it was shortened into depaato. Higa (ibidem)
concludes that “when a foreign words is introduced as a possible loanword
together with its newly coined equivalent in the borrowing language, the shorter
of the two is usually adopted. When a borrowed word and its translation are of
the same syllabic length, the translation is usually adopted”.

1.6.2 Social constraints on borrowing

As Weinreich (1968: 62) acknowledged, “the unequal degrees of resistance to
transfers and the preference for loan translations over transfers are a result of
complex socio-cultural factors which are not describable in linguistic terms

37
alone”. Structural constraints (cf. Winford 2003: 53) may in fact not apply when
the right social conditions prevail.

1.6.2.1 Borrowing scale under different kinds of contact

Linguists dealt with different situations of language contact, hypothesising how
these may impact on the borrowing that occurs, limiting or enhancing its
patterns. Physical side-by-side contact of language groups in situations of equal
or unequal bilingualism is just one side of the coin. In fact, as Winford (2003: 2)
notes, “externally induced changes do not even require […] actual social
contact”, on the contrary “a great deal, perhaps the majority of lexical borrowing
results from only marginal contact with other languages” (ivi: 30), e.g. in the
written form, through literature or religious texts and articles, the agents of
change being writers, translators and journalists.
The most important attempt to define the continuum ranging from slight lexical
borrowing to extreme structural borrowing under the influence of various kinds
of contact is the one made by Thomason & Kaufman (1988). The authors (ivi:
35) challenge all the proposed linguistic constraints on interference claiming
that they “fail because linguistic interference is conditioned in the first instance
by social factors, not linguistic ones”. Therefore they (ivi: 47-48) introduce the
concept of intensity of contact which, in a borrowing situation, “crucially
involves factors of time and of level of bilingualism”. They argue that if few
speakers of the borrowing language are bilingual, then only words will be
borrowed, but if there is “extensive bilingualism on the part of borrowing-
language speakers, and if this bilingualism persists over a long period of time,
then substantial structural borrowing is a probability”.
A high degree of bilingualism (ivi: 67) may in turn be regarded as a reflection of
“the more nebulous factor of cultural pressure: a population that is under great
cultural pressure from another speech community is likely to be largely
bilingual in the language of that community”. Cultural pressure is “exerted by
politically and numerically dominant group on a subordinate population living
within its sphere of dominance” (ibidem), it is a function of the social
motivations that promote the adoption of foreign features into a group's L1 (e.g.
social advancement). A reformulation of Thomason's & Kaufman's “cultural
pressure” is given by Myers-Scotton (2002: 238) who further highlights the

38
importance of the demographic ratio:

serious lexical borrowing requires a critical mass: it happens when persons who
are well connected in the society adopt the new words. In addition, borrowing
is helped along when large numbers of persons in the same society have some
measure of bilingualism, because if speakers care about being understood,
other societal members have to be bilingual enough to understand the
imported words when they are first used.
In Thomason's and Kaufman's scheme, greater intensity of contact leads to
more borrowing, from both the points of view of the quantity of borrowed items
and the depth of change they cause (from minor phonological innovations to
major syntactic modifications). The boundaries between any two borrowing
categories of their scale are admittedly “fuzzy” (ivi: 77), nonetheless useful to
our investigation of lexical borrowing.

Fig. 3: The borrowing scale. Summarised from Thomason & Kaufman (1988: 74-76).

As shown in Fig. 3, the first stage of the scale involves the borrowing of non-
basic vocabulary. This may happen, according to Thomason & Kaufman (1988:
77) both with “prestige-borrowings between separated populations” without
widespread bilingualism (e.g. today's English borrowings from French chaise,
ballet, pâté), and with “borrowings into the languages of superordinate groups
from those of numerically inferior subordinate population” (e.g. cultural items
from immigrants' languages, as Yiddish kosher, Ger. sauerkraut or It. spaghetti
into Amer.En.).
The upper stages of the scale, involving longer time and stronger cultural
pressure, also display the borrowing of non-basic vocabulary, which is thus
confirmed to be “harder” to borrow. Phonological and morphosyntactic

39
structures are also difficult to borrow and require even more intense contact.
As highlighted by Myers-Scotton (2012: 236), Thomason's & Kaufman's scheme
is innovative in that it makes the extent of borrowing and the types of elements
borrowed (not just lexical but also structural) dependant on the degree of
cultural contact.
A different description of various types of language contact is proposed by
Loveday (1996), whose scheme (reported in Fig. 4) is more apt for synchronic
investigation of language contact phenomena, as it does not take into account
the “time” factor and it is instead limited to the degree of community
bilingualism. The author himself (ivi: 16) admits that “no more than a general
profile of a community during a particular phase of development is taken as the
stage of reference”, and that the amount of contact and the degree of societal
bilingualism may change over time.

Fig. 4: Socio-linguistic typology of language-contact settings and their corresponding contact-

phenomena. Copied from Loveday (1996: 13).

The first three settings of Loveday's scale seem important to our research, as
they may be the ones in which Chinese loanwords appeared into English.
Distant or dominant non-bilingual setting is characterised by the absence of
“community-wide relations” between the communities of the languages in
contact, and by the unfamiliarity of the donor language, whose acquisition is not
socially required, in the recipient language community. Contact in this setting,
as Loveday (1996: 17) describes, is usually limited to lexical borrowing.
Channels for this kind of contact (ivi: 18) may be opened by travellers, explorers

40
or temporary emigrants from the recipient language community who “bring
back the language contact to their own group” or immigrants with “a certain
level of influence”. The contact may also be indirect, requiring just written or
oral (radio, records or films) materials; in such cases, mediating agents tend to
be specialists of various kinds (journalists, translators, religious or academic
researchers) with a “sufficiently influential position to diffuse items into their
community”. A third type of distant non-bilingual setting (ibidem) is the one in
which “the donor language of contact is employed by a subordinate group within
the territory of a socio-economically and ethno-linguistically superior recipient
community, the majority of whose speakers are ignorant of the donor variety”
(e.g. indigenous groups who were subjected to British colonization).
Distant but institutional setting (ivi: 19-20) is similar to the first one, with the
major difference that although the acquisition of the foreign language “is not
part of community activities”, it is “promoted through an institution such as a
school”. The teaching of the foreign language may have different reasons (e.g.
political dominance, cultural prestige or economic advantage). Loveday
(ibidem) notes that as “there are hardly any countries in the contemporary
world which do not provide some of its citizens with the chance of institutionally
acquiring a foreign language”, this setting is particularly common. Loveday
excludes borrowing among its contact-phenomena which seem confined to the
“classroom-talk” type.
The bounded and/or subordinate community (ivi: 20-21) is the one in which
cultural displacement or economic disadvantage lead to social distance between
the two communities, restricted social contact and the recipient community
being “sealed-off” (for example where immigrants' communities live in isolation
from the local population). This setting is characterised by “markedly low level
of bilingualism”, fossilized interlanguages and even pidginization “resulting
from lack of access to the contact model or lack of assimilatory motivation”, and
also borrowing.
Loveday's description of “distant contact” satisfies Winter's (1973: 138) primary
condition for borrowing (“a channel of communication must exist between the
originator and the potential adopter of a speech habit”) individuating such a
channel not only in those influential people with a contact to the source

41
language, but also in the ever-growing (Winford 2003: 31) “global avenues of
communication such as radio, television, and the internet”. These are sufficient
to open the door for borrowing, and have facilitated the spread of vocabulary
from the culture factories producing films, songs, novels, academic research,
food and drink, fashion, and so forth, into every other recipient culture.
As we will see in §1.7.3, this exchange is virtually bidirectional and may operate
from every culture to every culture; still, it usually has a “favoured” direction, a
directionality.

1.7 Motivations for borrowing

So far, we have defined borrowing against a set of other language-contact
phenomena, the social and linguistic setting it requires, its integration into the
recipient language through various strategies and the constraints it is subjected
to. What is still left to be analysed is the starting point of borrowing: why was
the process initiated in the first place? Why do languages influence each other?
And why do they have to borrow at all?

1.7.1 Loanwords by necessity

Again, we will resort mostly to Weinreich's fundamental work to answer these
questions. He (1968: 56) pinpoints that the vast majority of loanwords is
motivated by the “need to designate new things, persons, places and concepts”,
that is to say, when faced with “new areas of cultural knowledge and experience
through contact with others” (Winford 2003: 37), speakers usually resort to
foreign “ready-made designations” as it is “more economical than describing
things afresh. Few users of language are poets” (Weinreich 1968: 57).
Loanwords by necessity are evident in place names (e.g. U.S. names like Illinois,
Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, derived from Native American languages, cf.
Winford 2003: 31), in flora and fauna names (e.g. Aboriginal kangaroo, koala,
billabong) and, most of all, in cultural traits and designations (Indian sari,
Chinese cheongsam, Australian boomerang). In fact, as Robins (1964: 313)
argues, loanwords are most obviously exemplified in the words for foreign
products: “the words for coffee, tea, and tobacco, in English and in most
European languages are all loans, from Arabic, Chinese, and an American-
Indian language respectively, languages of the regions from which, or through

42
which, these products were first imported into Europe”. Thus, a language
vocabulary, as Minkova & Stockwell (2006: 461) emphasise, “reflects the
political, economic, cultural, and social events in the histories of its speakers”.
Bloomfield (1967: 458) puts it even more clearly: “cultural loans show us what
one nation has taught another”, and he (ibidem) explains:

The recent borrowings of English from French are largely in the sphere of
women's clothes, cosmetics, and luxuries. From German we get coarser articles
of food (frankfurter, wiener, hamburger, sauerkraut, pretzel, lager-beer) and
some philosophical and scientific terms (zeitgest, wanderlust, umlaut); from
Italian, musical terms (piano, sonata, scherzo, virtuoso). From India we have
pundit, thug, curry, calico; from American Indian languages, tomahawk,
wampum, toboggan, moccasin. English has given roast beef and beefsteak to
other languages [...]; also some terms of elegant life, such as club, high life,
five-o'clock (tea), smoking (for ‘dinner-jacket’), fashionable, and, above all,
terms of sport, such as match, golf, football, baseball, rugby.
It looks like if “one can almost estimate the role which various peoples have
played in the development and spread of cultural ideas by taking note of the
extent to which their vocabularies have filtered into those of other peoples”
(Sapir 1970: 193-4). In fact, “where institutions, beliefs, ceremonies, arts,
sciences, and the like, pass from race to race”, Whitney (1881: 10-11) observed,
“names cannot help going with them”. Therefore, following Higa's (1979: 277-
81) hypothesis, one could even quantitatively determine the content and
amount of culture learnings between two given cultures counting the number of
loanwords each of them had given the other.
Loanwords are unavoidable in a vast set of culturally-denoted domains 20. As
Minkova & Stockwell (2009: 51) explain “during the eighteenth century it
became impossible, as it still is, to speak about western music in English
without using an Italian word. At the beginning of the twenty-first century it is
probably impossible to speak about computers in any language without using
some English words”. It is also the pressure to modernise and keep abreast of
developments in science, technology and other fields of knowledge which
prompt language to enrich their vocabularies through borrowing.
The “need” to replenish a language vocabulary, though, may also come from
inside. As Weinreich (1968: 57-59) notes, other internal linguistic factors are
also there and activate lexical innovation:
(1) low frequency of words: “the frequent words come easily to mind and
20
For an in-depth study on specialised discourse see Gotti (2003).

43
 are therefore more stable; relatively infrequent words of the vocabulary
are, accordingly, less stable, more subject to oblivion and replacement”
(as we already saw in §1.5.2);
(2) pernicious homonymy: when two words of the recipient language
sounds too much alike, a word may be “borrowed from another language
in order to resolve the clash of homonyms”;
(3) loss of expressive force: certain words tend to lose their expressive force
and constantly need synonyms to be replaced with. The need for
euphemisms and slangy cacophemisms may also be met by borrowing.
All of the motivations reported above are somehow related to the concept of
“need” as a factor promoting lexical borrowing.
A last example of borrowing by necessity is the one labelled therapeutic by
Haspelmath (2009: 50). This kind of borrowing happens when a word becomes
“unavailable” in a language as a consequence of homonymy or taboo. As
described by the author (along with Matras 2009: 170, and Moravscik 1978:
119), word taboo is a phenomenon happening in some cultures where there are
rules that prohibit a certain word that occurs in a deceased person's name, or a
word that occurs in the name of a taboo relative, in such cases the need to
replace certain everyday vocabulary items is met by the borrowing of words
from the surrounding languages (e.g. in Australian languages, cf. Dixon 2002:
27, 43, and Comrie 2000: 80-84).

1.7.2 Luxury loanwords

The “gap” hypothesis (i.e. lexical borrowing to fill lexical gaps) may be intuitive
to understand, but cannot answer to the entire question alone. As Haspelmath
(2009: 36) highlights, even in such cases “there is always the question why a
borrowing had to take place at all, because all languages have the means to
create novel expressions out of their own resources”. Furthermore, some
instances of borrowing are even “incomprehensible” to us, as a fully equivalent
word existed beforehand (e.g. En. borrowed window from Old Norse, even if
Old English had the equivalent word eagþyrel, cf. Haspelmath 2009: 36).
To cope with such problem, Winter (1973: 138) broadens the concept of “need”.
He argues that a condition for transfer is that it “must be in response to some
need”, that is “the adopter must be in a position to derive some gain from the

44
transfer”. Such gain, he explains, may be material (e.g. the chance to do
business with an outside group) or non-material (adopting part of a prestigious
group speech habit “one might be able to share their glory, if only in one's own
imagination”).
As described earlier in §1.1.1, bilinguals have a special role in borrowing
because, unlike the monolingual speaker who depends “on indigenous lexical
material and whatever loanwords may happen to be transmitted to him” to
replenish his vocabulary, they have “the other language as a constantly available
source of lexical innovation” (Weinreich 1968: 59). Bilinguals, Weinreich (ivi:
59-60) claims, have three additional factors that may prompt their borrowing:
(1) a comparison with the other language they know may lead them to feel
that some of their language semantic fields are “insufficiently
differentiated” and therefore need lexical enrichment through borrowing;
(2) a symbolic association of the other language with “social values”, either
positive or negative, may cause bilinguals to use identifiable loanwords
from it “as a means of displaying the social status which its knowledge
symbolizes”. This strategy may aim at:
(a) a prestigious language to elevate the register of one's speech, e.g.
Latin loanwords in today's English; or
(b) a non prestigious language in slangy speech, with cacophemistic or
comic purposes to obtain through the pejorative connotations of the
low language;
(3) bilinguals' speech may suffer from the interference of another vocabulary
through mere “oversight”, “when the speaker's attention is almost
completely diverted from the form of the message to its topic, the transfer
of words is particularly common”.

1.7.3 The role of prestige and the directionality of borrowing

Thomason & Kaufman (1988: 44) wonder “why would you replace some of your
native lexicon and grammatical features with those of another language unless
you wanted to emulate the speakers of that language because of admiration or
respect for them?”
Indeed words seem to be borrowed for language-external rather than language-
internal factors, for example when they are perceived as “prestigious” or “novel”

45
by speakers of the recipient language, and this, as Haugen (1992: 199) notes, “is
especially true if the speakers feel inferior to the speakers of the other language,
as did the English when they were ruled by the Norman French”.
As Winford (2003: 38) observes, apart for situations of bilingualism, where
macro-level factors as intensity of contact and cultural pressure (§1.6.2.1) play a
role, many kinds of borrowings under distant contact seem to be motivated by
considerations of fashion or prestige, these include the perceived “economic
advantages that follow from such borrowing”. Winford (ibidem) continues: “the
spread of English loanwords into many languages across the globe since the
mid-twentieth century may be attributed partly to these factors”. Bloomfield's
(1967) distinction between cultural and intimate borrowing may be helpful.
(1) “Cultural borrowing” (which may happen in distant contact setting),
Bloomfield (1967: 461) argued, “is ordinarily mutual” but, he admitted, it
can also be “one-sided only to the extent that one nation has more to give
than the other”. For example, following what was said in §1.7.1, it could
be argued that French has more to give to English in the field of women
garments, whereas English has more to give to French in the domain of
computer and information technology.
(2) On the other hand, in situations of “intimate borrowing”, which
Bloomfield (1967: 461) describes as happening when “two languages are
spoken in what is topographically and politically a single community”
arising “for the most part by conquest, less often in the way of peaceful
migration”, borrowing is often one-sided. In such situations, fashion and
prestige seem to be prerogatives of only one of the languages involved.
The author therefore distinguishes between higher (“spoken by the
dominant and privileged group”) and lower language, claiming that in
such situations borrowing is usually from the more prestigious into the
socially subordinate language, as speakers may find it more sophisticated
to borrow from it21. We therefore may speak of a unidirectional
borrowing with a defined directionality, apart for “the most obvious
cultural loans” the upper language makes from the language of the

21
A typical example of the perceived prestige of higher languages is the rank of ask, question
and interrogate in English, where Latin items are perceived as more prestigious than the
Germanic one, showing more literary and formal difference in register.

46
 immigrants (e.g. Amer.En. spaghetti). Treffers-Daller (1994: 104)
empirically confirms the parallelism existing between relative prestige
and the directionality of borrowing when she finds that there are ten
times as many tokens of French borrowings in her Dutch data as there
are in her French data collected in the bilingual city of Brussels.
Prestige is one of the main motivations for borrowing. Under its influence, as
Matras (2009: 151) summarises, “speakers imitate elements of the speech of a
socially more powerful, dominant community in order to gain approval and
social status”, they borrow words even if equivalent and efficient designations
do exist in their native language, since these lack, in their view, the “special
conversational effect that is evoked by the loanword”; or they borrow words
(McMahon 1994: 205) just to “impress” their interlocutors.
According to Gramley (2001: 117), the prestige conferred to a language “derives
from its association with education, religion, business, or some other area of
activity which is associated with power as opposed to a language which is more
peripheral to the centre of the power”.
Prestige credited to literary languages may also play a role in borrowing to such
an extent that dead languages may influence living ones both lexically (e.g. Latin
fixed expressions in European languages) and morphosyntactically (e.g.
Sanskrit into Dravidian languages). Robins (1964: 315) suggests that we define
as a “special sort” of loanwords the ones taken from “dead languages that have
attained the status of classics” (as Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Chinese, etc.), since
these words are formed on a free combination of ancient morphemes without a
necessary correspondent in the ancient source language. “The language of a
people that is looked upon as a center of culture”, Sapir (1970: 192) notes, “is
naturally far more likely to exert an appreciable influence on other language
spoken in its vicinity than to be influenced by them”.
Cultural dominance, as explained by Higa (1979: 280), is “highly correlated
with economic and military dominance” and “defined in terms of achievements
in arts, sciences and technology”. Higa (ivi: 278) also asserts that the
directionality of borrowing and its amount are predictable, as they vary “as a
function of cultural, economic or military advancement and dominance”. The
“dominance-subordination relationship” between two cultures can therefore be

47
determined on the basis of the quantity of loanwords from one language to the
other.

1.7.4 Other factors influencing borrowing behaviour

In addition to the “social value” (cf. Weinreich 1968: 59, quoted earlier)
attached to the higher language, other factors may pressure the speaker of the
lower language to use features from it and to adhere to its standard: “ridicule
and serious disadvantages”, as Bloomfield (1967: 462) noted, may even “punish
his imperfection”. As Poplack (1988: 113-14) finds out, the norms of the
community on “how to speak” override individual abilities, thus demonstrating
that borrowing behaviour is acquired: “it must be a community ‘mode’ in order
to gain any real currency”.

1.7.4.1 Language as an instrument for social integration

Speakers of the lower language may want to “enter” certain activity domains
which are a prerogative of speakers of the higher language, and therefore try to
acquire social prestige through the borrowing of higher language material,
developing what Matras (2009: 58-59) defines “unidirectional bilingualism”. In
a similar situation, borrowings from the lower to the higher language are
impossible since they “would not be understood and might lead to a breakdown
in communication”. In situations of unequal prestige, borrowing “will be
concentrated in the semantic fields where the more prestigious speakers wield
the greatest influence” (McMahon 1994: 202; see also Poplack et alii 1988: 61).
Lexical borrowing is defined by Higa (1979: 291) as a cultural behaviour whose
process and results “reflect the basic aspects and characteristics of the cultures
of both the borrowing and the borrowed”. The use or non-use of loanwords is
not limited to language social prestige only, but it also reflects a choice made by
the speaker: as Haspelmath (2009: 48) claims “the way we talk (or write) is not
only determined by the ideas we want to get across, but also by the impression
we want to convey on others, and by the kind of social identity that we want to
be associated with”. Therefore, the social prestige or the convenience of a
designation by cultural borrowing may be overridden by cultural conventions.
In a migration setting, for example, the social identity one may want to convey
may be one of integration in the host community or, on the contrary, one
defined in contrast with it: a phenomenon of “mediation” on one's identity is to

48
be observed here. This causes an overturn in speakers' motivations for the use of
loanwords in their home country and abroad: as Higa (1979: 289) reports,
lexical borrowing in the Japanese spoken in Japan is done (as elsewhere) “to
meet lexical needs primarily and social-psychological needs secondarily”; in the
Japanese spoken by the Japanese community in Hawaii, on the contrary, these
needs are reversed to satisfy the need for a group identity first.
Higa (ivi: 284, 289) pinpoints that “unnecessary borrowings” in their native
languages may be used by immigrants to foreign countries to show their
“progress of acculturation”: the fact they are becoming part of the host society.
On the contrary, borrowing from their native language (retentions) into the host
community language (see also Haspelmath 2008: 47) may be used for the
purpose of creating a new variety of the majority language that expresses the
minority group's cultural identity. “Where social-psychological needs are
important”, Higa (1979: 289) concludes, “words are often borrowed even
unnecessarily”. In-group solidarity must therefore also be taken into account in
order to study borrowing behaviour.
Furthermore, as McMahon (1994: 246) and Schneider (2011: 196-97) indicate,
the prestige of a language may be both overt (conferred to the higher-status
group whose behaviour and language are seen as prestigious) and covert
(assigned to those speakers, often at the opposite end of the social scale, who are
really admired even if their vernacular is officially stigmatised). Matras (2009:
151) suggests that English loanwords from Angloromani (the Romani-derived
vocabulary used by English and Welsh Gypsies) like pal ‘friend, companion’
(from Romani phral ‘brother’) demonstrate that “fashionable words can also
come [...] from the speech of marginalised and minority groups”. The richness
of the communicative means is ultimately the major goal of the language.
“Underlying all the different motivations for borrowing”, Matras (ivi: 152)
describes, “is the bilingual's need to negotiate a complex repertoire of linguistic
structures and to balance effectiveness and precision of expression against the
social demand on complying with the norm to select only context-appropriate
structures”. The “extent of control and pressure that is exerted on speakers to
conform to more established speech norms” and the “directionality of
bilingualism” are in fact, in Matras' (ivi: 312) view, ultimately “the crucial

49
factors of innovations in contact”.

1.7.4.2 Language ideology

When language becomes the symbol of group identity, borrowing may also be
influenced (prevented) by language ideology. Indeed, loyalty to one's native
language and pride in its autonomy may, as Winford (2003: 40-41) explains,
“encourage resistance to any foreign incursions”. As Weinreich (1968: 99)
theorises, “a language, like a nationality, may be thought of as a set of behavior
norms; language loyalty, like nationalism, would designate the state of mind in
which the language (like the nationality), as an intact entity, and in contrast to
other languages, assumes a high position in a scale of values, a position in need
of being ‘defended’”.
Language ideology, especially for languages with a written tradition and a
powerful status, may be reflected in the existence of language authorities issuing
policies and legislations to prevent or eliminate foreign borrowing (cf. Winford
2003: 40-41). In such a case we would speak of purism which, as Haspelmath
(2009: 47) explains, “is often manifested in published recommendations [...]
likely to be followed by teachers, journalists, etc.”: e.g. cultural pressure to avoid
English loanwords in French and replace them with neologisms based on
French words promoted by language-planning bodies (courriel for e-mail).
With the exception of institutional policies which can at least be quantified,
language ideology (or nationalism) seems unfortunately very hard to measure
scientifically. For example, how should we consider the language attitude of
Japanese? Its mandatory use of a distinct sillabary to write foreign words
(§1.3.5) would suggest to place it at the top of a hypothetical ranking of language
purism; still, its modern lexicon shows a widespread acceptance of loanwords
(7.29% of the total lexicon from English, cf. Winford 2003: 32; and 48% from
Chinese, cf. Loveday 1996: 41). And if in his historical study Jespersen (1919:
150) was proud of Englishmen's “curiosity about the life of other nations”
reflected in the capacity of English to “swallow foreign words raw, so to speak,
instead of preferring to translate the foreign expression into some native
equivalent” (ivi: 152), Tadmor (2009: 55-58) warns us that the most useful
explanations to “what makes a language particularly amenable to lexical
borrowing” appear to be language specific rather than general.

50
However, Tadmor (ivi: 58) finds some sociolinguistic circumstances underlying
the languages with the highest and the lowest percentage of loanwords in his
corpus:22 widespread bilingualism in the community, “minority language”
status, socio-political marginalisation, short history, long absence from
ancestral homeland, permissiveness towards borrowing and absence of an
official standard are associated with a high rate of borrowings, while their
opposites with a low one.

22
Of the 41 languages analysed in Haspelmath & Tadmor (2009), Selice Romani (a dialect
spoken by about 1,350 people in a village in south-western Slovakia) is the language which
borrowed the most, with 62.7% of loanwords among the 1,460 lexical items of the list (see
also note 19), whereas Mandarin Chinese is the one which borrowed the less, with only 1.2%.

51
52
 2 BRIEF HISTORY AND ASPECTS OF CHINESE-
ENGLISH CONTACT

2.1 A long history of contact

2.1.1 The Silk Road

The establishing of Chinese early contacts with the Western world precedes by
far the emergence of the English language in Europe. Indeed, it can be traced
back to the legendary Silk Road, on which a large number of goods (and
concepts of immaterial culture) travelled back-and-forth from Asia to Europe.
Usually exotic designations were also attached to such goods and made their
way into Latin and German and, eventually, into modern European languages.
According to Miao Ruiqin (2005: 23), the Silk Road took shape during the Han
( 汉 / 漢 , 206 BC – 220 AD)23 dynasties as an important inner land trade route
linking China central plain and the western territories (xiyu 西域). Some scholars
disagree with the dating though, and propose to postdate it to the third century
AD (Von Glahn 2010: 139) or even to pre-date it to the fourth and fifth centuries
BC (Beckwith 2009: 73).
Von Glahn (2010: 139) indeed pinpoints that, even if the expensive import of
Chinese silk in the Roman empire has long been known, the notion of a Silk
Road during the Han era is mostly a legend, as no proof of Roman products in
China neither of Chinese commercial missions in central Asia exist. The author
(ibidem) observes that the organization of commercial caravans seems to start
in the third century AD, that is after the collapse of the Later Han dynasty; he
also argues that the vast circulation of Han goods (silk fabrics, lacquer artefacts
and bronze mirrors) in central Asia was mostly due to gifts and tributes rather
than to full-fledged commerce.
As Beckwith (2009: 78-79) reports, in the central period of Classical Antiquity
(from the third century BC to the third century AD), “the volume of trade with
Central Eurasia – the Silk Road – grew to such an extent that Roman and
Chinese writers, who normally disdain to mention commerce, actually discuss
it”. The author (ibidem) nonetheless admits that “despite the trade, and a few
23

The names of Chinese dynasties are given according to their pinyin transliteration. Their
Chinese characters (simplified / not simplified), and the period of their rule are also given in
brackets the first time they occur.

53
long-distance diplomatic contacts, the Romans and Chinese remained far apart
both geographically and culturally”, as they were “not very much interested” in
the world beyond their immediate neighbours.
Precisely from a linguistic point of view, it is interesting to note that the
importance of the contact between the two ancient empires is testified by the
association of the Chinese population with its most-known product. As the OED
explains, the ultimate source of the word silk (attested since 888) is commonly
supposed to be Latin sēricus or Greek σηρικός ‘silken’, from “Latin Sēres and
Greek Σῆρες, the oriental people (perhaps the Chinese) from whom silk was first
obtained”.
At the opposite end of the Eurasian continent, the Roman empire was known as
“Great Qin” (Da qin 大 秦 , cf. Menegon 2010: 292-93), whose first record
appeared in the fifth century AD in the “Book of the Later Han” (Houhan shu 后
汉书 / 後漢書 ). Knowledge of Great Qin on the part of the Chinese was probably
due to alleged “legations”, who were probably merchants from the eastern
provinces of the Roman empire in the second century.
As reported by Von Glahn (2010: 150), the Silk Road emerged as the main
Eurasian land trade route during the Southern and Northern dynasties
(Nanbeichao 南 北 朝 , 420 – 589), as the settlements around the oasis of the
Gansu Corridor, which was the cradle of the northern trait of the Road, had
already become blooming trade villages in the fourth century. Miao Ruiqin
(2005: 24) asserts that it grew increasingly important under Sui ( 隋 , 581 - 618)
and Tang ( 唐 , 618-907) dynasties, when China “entered one of the most
prosperous periods in its history”. The Tang dynasty conquest of vast areas of
central Asia (modern Xinjiang 新 疆 ) secured the trade route and “contacts
between Chinese and the languages spoken along the road remained active and
frequent”. Under the Tang dynasty, as Menegon (2010: 295) reports, some cities
were even opened to Nestorian monks, and Xi'an ( 西 安 , back then known as
Chang'an 长安 / 長安) was home to the first documented Christian community in
China.
During Tang later period and under Song ( 宋 , 970 - 1279) dynasties, Chinese
international commerce was moving from the inner land silk road to the
maritime silk road which stretched to India, Persia and the Arabian peninsula
(Von Glahn 2010: 183, and Menegon 2010: 296).
So far, all the contacts between China and Europe had been indirect, through

54
the mediation of border populations. With the foundation of the immense
Mongol empire during the thirteenth century, though, the contact became
direct. Genghis Khan's grandson Kublai was in fact the founder of Yuan ( 元, 1271
– 1368) dynasty. Menegon (2010: 296-97) asserts Russians, Germans, English
and other Europeans were present at Kublai's court, who instructed Marco
Polo's uncle and father on their first voyage to China to bring an official message
to the Pope requesting him to send sages of the Christian religion to his court.

2.1.2 Missionaries
The presence of missionaries in China, which was abruptly stopped under the
Ming ( 明 , 1368 – 1644) first emperor, reappeared after the expansion of
European trade brought the Portuguese to take control of Macao in 1557. That
time, as Menegon (2010: 304) reports, Catholic missionaries following soldiers
and merchants were fundamental in cultural mediation and through their work,
for the first time since Marco Polo, direct information about the Chinese empire
reached Europe. Menegon (ivi: 315) emphasises that missionaries compiled
pioneering studies of different aspects of Chinese civilisation (including
philosophy, political system, flora and fauna, and architecture) and started the
systematic translation of Western works into Chinese and vice versa, thus
founding European sinology. As Menegon (ivi: 316-17) summarises, growing
interest for Chinese philosophy developed in Europe with Leibniz and Voltaire,
and appreciation for Chinese architecture and porcelain reached the pinnacle
during the Rococo period.
The first missionaries to initiate the process of translation of Western works
were the Jesuits, followed by the Protestant. Tsien (1954: 306) maintains that
“the appearance of Western knowledge in Chinese intellectual circles at the end
of the sixteenth century marked the beginning of the second great importation
of foreign culture in Chinese history - the first being that of Buddhism”; he
(ibidem) adds that in the following two centuries at least eighty Jesuits
participated in translating into Chinese more than four hundred works. The
missionary aim of the translation project was evident in the fact that (ivi: 307)
more than half of these works were related to Christianity, while about one-
third to science and the remainder concerned Western institutions and
humanities.
Another missionary, Tsien (ivi: 308) reports, contributed to the phonetic study

55
of Chinese: Trigault's Xiru ermu zi ( 西 儒 耳 目 资 , Aid to the eyes and ears of
Western scholars) was an early attempt to latinise Chinese in 1626. According
to Tsien (ivi: 309), Trigault's translation of Aesop's Fables is also to be credited
as the first Western literary work to be introduced in China.
Till the forced opening of the treaty ports following the Opium Wars in the mid
nineteenth century (see §2.1.3), Menegon (2010: 304) emphasises, missionaries
were the only long-time residents within China. Given the scarce opportunities
of actual contact between Chinese and the few foreigners living in China (mostly
confined to seaports and forbidden to learn Chinese, cf. Adamson 2002: 233), it
would not be too hasty to hypothesise missionaries' translations were the main
vehicle of language contact of the time.
Still under the Ming dynasty, the first major contact between the English and
the Chinese also took place. As Bolton (2003: 126, cited in Imm 2009: 452)
reports, in 1637 “an expedition of four ships under the command of Captain
John Weddell arrived in Macau and Canton (Guangzhou)”. It was an event
which was going to shape Chinese history, and Chinese-English language
contact as well.
Missionary presence in China came under attack under the Qing ( 清 , 1644 –
1911) dynasty. The clash between Christian theology and Chinese thousand-
years old rites resulted in the “Chinese Rites Controversy” 24 (Menegon 2010:
320, Gu Weiying 2001: 41) which brought emperor Yongzheng to ban all
Western missionaries from China in 1724. The ban, which officially lasted more
than one hundred years, was not extended to those missionaries employed at
the emperor's court as scientific and technology advisers: therefore it was not an
isolationistic and anti-scientific choice (cf. Menegon 2010: 321).

2.1.3 The System of Canton and the Opium War

The Qing state, as Spence (2013: 115) emphasises, had no Ministry of Foreign
Affairs: “relations with non-Chinese peoples were instead conducted by a variety
of bureaus and agencies that, in different ways, implied or stated the cultural
inferiority and geographical marginality of foreigners, while also defending the
state against them”. At the time, China kept on using the same methods in
dealing with foreigners as it had always done, failing to realise the (mostly
24
Gu Weiying (2001: 41, note 11) summarises the Chinese Rites Controversy causes as “the
translation of the term ‘God’ into Chinese language, and the permission given by the Jesuits
to Chinese Christians to continue the performance of honors rendered to Confucius and
ancestors in accordance with the customs of the country”.

56
economic and military) difference between its long-time neighbouring small
populations and European newcomers. The Qing, Spence (ivi: 117) argues, were
“basically uninterested in the potential governmental gains to be made from
foreign trade”; they therefore dealt with European merchants as previous
dynasties had always done with legations from small neighbouring states
bringing tributes to the court to show their respect and submission. The fact,
reported by Spence (ivi: 118), that Dutch and Portuguese embassies in the early
Qing period failed to establish broad trading privileges with China and had
instead “to be content with the status of ‘tributary nations’, registered with the
Ministry of Rituals and permitted to send trade missions only at stipulated
intervals” is epitomising of China modus operandi. At the beginning of the
eighteenth century, Von Glahn (2010: 212) pinpoints, most part of Chinese
maritime commerce was directed toward South-east Asia.
Since 1715, Canton seaport was emerging among the ones favoured by foreign
merchants (Menegon 2010: 326, Spence 2013: 118-19). British were also
permitted to trade in Zhoushan (Chusan) and Xiamen (Amoy), as regular
commercial interactions between the English and the Chinese were established
during the eighteenth century (Imm 2009: 453). In an attempt to control
foreign trade and increase their profit by regulating prices, Chinese traders in
Canton, under governmental impulse, formed the Cohong (from gonghang 公行,
‘combined merchant companies’), a monopolistic guild specialised in the trade
of foreigners most favoured products: tea, fabrics and porcelain.
In the later eighteenth century, as Spence (2013: 119) explains, a growing
number of foreign traders began to arrive at China's doors; the Qing response
was to reinforce all the preceding rules: the whole of “European trade was
restricted to the one port of Canton after 1760, and foreigners were forbidden
residence there except during the trading season”. It was the birth of the
“System of Canton”.
British traders could not stand such limitations and sought access to the rest of
the Chinese market beyond the southern coast. To solve the situation, a legation
led by Lord George Macartney was sent to the Qing court with the aim to
establish reciprocal embassies in Beijing and London and commercial access to
the other ports along the Chinese coast. Such aims, as Kissinger (2011: 68)
highlights, “would have seemed modest to any educated Briton of the time –
especially compared with the recently established British dominion over the

57
neighbouring giant, India” - but were going to clash with Chinese tradition, in
which “the notion of free trade, resident embassies, and sovereign equality […]
were unheard of” (ivi: 66). As Kissinger (ivi: 70) notes, all the examples of
British scientific and industrial prowess (artillery pieces, diamond-studded
wristwatches and even a hot-air balloon) Macartney had brought with him to
show the fabulous benefits China might obtain by trading with Britain were
considered extravagant, but useless products of a faraway small island wishing
to express its respects to China, and none of Macartney's requests was satisfied.
Since no British goods seemed to be capable of arousing the interest of Chinese
internal market, all the import from China was paid for with silver (cf. Menegon
2010: 327), draining the financial resources of the Crown. To equalise the
balance of trade and to incur rising costs under Cohong monopoly, the British
enhanced the illegal opium market. Chinese and European interests began to
clash as Qing official Lin Zexu forcefully opposed the contraband and
sequestered large amounts of opium. The relationship crashed: “Western
writers and political philosophers of the eighteenth century, who for a time had
been caught in a cycle of admiration for China”, Spence (2013: 5) summarises,
“began to study China's weaknesses with a sharper eye, arguing that if the
Chinese would not adapt to living in the world, there was a real chance that their
country would be destroyed”.
British navy destroyed Qing
defences in the First Opium War
(1839-42), and the resulting Treaty
of Nanjing gave Britain what
Macartney's mission failed to
obtain. It was the beginning of the
century of “national humiliation”
(Wang Zheng 2012): China was
repeatedly invaded (the Second
Opium War was less than twenty
years later, 1856-60) and obliged
to concede privileges to foreign
nations as they came and invade its
territory (the vignette in Fig. 5 is
epitomising of how China was seen
Fig. 5: “Le gâteau des Rois et... des Empereurs”
published on Le petit journal (Jan. 16th 1898). 58
at the time).
Chinese Pidgin English, Zou Yuanyan (2006: 100) describes, spread in this
same period, when the Treaty Ports were established in China in 1843, but
declined towards the end of the century as standard English began to be
systematically taught in schools and universities.

2.1.4 Learning from the West

After most of Jesuit missionaries were expelled in 1724, at the beginning of the
nineteenth century, Tsien (1954: 310) explains, Protestant missionaries took up
the translational work they had left: between 1810 and 1867 their writings were
devoted to Christianity except for twelve per cent (cf. also Masini 2009: 629).
Masini (2009: 627) notes that the first of Protestant missionaries, Robert
Morrison, devoted his life to the study of Chinese and the diffusion of English in
China.
The humiliating provisions the peace treaties imposed on China and the
example of Japanese military success against China (1895) and Russia (1905)
forced China to a political reflection on its role in world politics, and its very
own possibilities to survive. Chinese intellectuals called for modernisation
which, according to many of them, could only be reached by learning from the
West (cf. Kui Zhu 2011: 100); and English, as Miao Ruiqin (2005: 26)
highlights, was the language most books were translated from.
It is therefore not surprising that since the middle of the nineteenth century
translation programmes have been a characteristic part of Chinese
governmental activity directed toward modernisation (cf. Tsien 1954: 305, 316).
Governmental schools as the Tongwen guan ( 同 文 馆 / 同 文 館 ) were created to
train competent personnel, and institutions took charge of the translational
work of Western books in this period, focusing mainly on works concerning
technology, natural and social sciences. The data reported by Tsien (ivi: 313-15)
show that during the latter half of the nineteenth century there was “a great
increase of translations in natural and applied sciences” which accounted for
more than seventy per cent of the total, with a small five per cent devoted to
philosophy and religion: a complete overturn of the statistics of the earlier
period. More than half of these works were translated from English.
“The enthusiasm for translation at the end of the nineteenth century”, as Tsien
(ivi: 317-18) reports, “was reflected in the establishment of many privately

59
supported societies devoted exclusively to translating Western works”, e.g. John
Fryer's Scientific Depot (Gezhi shu shi 格 致 书 室 ) specialised in scientific and
technical subjects. At the turn of the twentieth century, at least forty official and
private publishers were engaged in translation and publishing (Tsien 1954: 138).
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the enthusiasm for natural and
applied sciences of the past century shifted to the social sciences and
humanities. Tsien (ivi: 318-19) explains that this datum may also be interpreted
as indicating “a growing understanding by Chinese intellectuals that the
solution of China's fundamental problems did not depend purely upon military
and technical knowledge, but rather upon a synthetic knowledge of Western
political, economic, and social organization”. Tsien's statistics thus show that
almost half of the books translated between 1902 and 1904 concerned history
and institutions, and more than one quarter of those translated between 1912
and 1940 were Western literary works.

2.1.4.1 Which West?

During the century of national humiliation, many powers tried to sit at China's
table to take a slice of the cake (cf. Fig. 5 above): the “Wests” China could learn
from were therefore many. Tsien's (1954) research is once more useful to our
study in that it displays the languages foreign works were translated from, thus
providing us with a glimpse of the amount of cultural (and linguistic) contact
between them and Chinese. The choice of “which West?” is not only dependant
on the quality of the research a foreign culture/language is able to produce, but
also, as the author (ivi: 323) highlights, on the political and economic relations
between the nations involved: “the closer their diplomatic relations, the more
extensive are their cultural interchanges”.
Tsien (ivi: 323-25) therefore notes how the source languages the majority of
books were translated from in certain periods were exactly those of the
countries China was having major relationships with, in the same periods.
Thus, between 1850 and 1899, Britain was the major source accounting for fifty
per cent of translated works, and English totalled 65% if American sources were
also added (ivi: tab. III).
From the Sino-Japanese war of 1895 until the May Fourth Movement of 1919
(which had Japanese aggression during World War One as one of the main
targets), the economic and military success of “Westernised Japan” served as
China's chief stimulus: many reformers stressed the need to learn from an
60
Eastern country and a large number of students went to Japan to study. In the
1902-1904 period, Japanese is thus the source language of a whole 60 per cent
of translated books, while English accounts for a small 16.8% (ivi: tab. IV).
Japanese aggression aroused hostility toward the Eastern neighbour, and China
turned to Western countries again. Tsien (ivi: 324) maintains that “the
American attitude toward China won the friendship of the Chinese people”, and
outgoing students turned to the United States as a favoured destination. The
feeling of the time is also visible in the source languages of translated works
between 1912 and 1940 (ivi: tab. V), in which English (American and British)
works amount to 56%, especially in social and natural sciences and literature.
With the founding of the Communist Party of China in 1921 and its following
affiliation to the Communist International led by the Russian party, China's
relationship with the Eurasian giant, which had not produced significant
cultural exchanges during the nineteenth century, began to produce some. Tsien
(1954: 324) reports that from 1919 to 1949 about 650 titles were translated from
Russian (9.5% of the total, while English still led with 67%), with literature and
social sciences doing the lion's share.
With the victory of the Communist Party and the establishment of the People's
Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, political, economic and cultural relations with
Russia flourished and extensive translation of Russian works became part of the
new government's policy. Tsien (ibidem) continues “according to a report of
1950, about 2,147 translations on various subjects, mostly ideological and
scientific literature, were published during the year. Of these, 1,662 or 77.5 per
cent are from the Russian language, while translations from English dropped to
382 titles, representing 18 per cent of the total production”. Russian influence
on China, as Miao Ruiqin's (2005: 28) highlights, may also be spotted in the
large number of Russian words which were borrowed into Chinese from 1949 to
the mid 1960s. The phenomenon had clearly political and diplomatic
motivations, but also practical ones as “Russian books and journals were the
dominant media of foreign science and technology that China had access to”
(Miao Ruiqin 2005: 28).
Following the deterioration of Sino-Russian relations and the reconciliation
with the US through the ping-pong diplomacy 25, as Miao Ruiqin (ibidem)
emphasises, most of Russian loanwords disappeared from Chinese, and English
25
See Kissinger (2011) for a detailed and first-hand account.

61
regained its previous role.
With the end of the Cultural Revolution (Wenhua da geming 文化大革命 1966 -
1976) and the death of chairman Mao Zedong and premier Zhou Enlai in 1976,
and the rise of Deng Xiaoping, China's political direction was going to change
toward a “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” (Zhongguo tese shehuizhuyi
中国特色社会主义 ) more oriented to the international market. The policy, launched

in December 1978, is known as “Reform and Opening Up” (Gaige kaifang 改革开
放 ), and brought to the re-establishment and widening of communication with
the West. China's contacts with the anglophone world and the rise of English as
a global language (see also Miao Ruiqin 2005: 28) resulted in a significant
acceleration of the language-contact between the two languages.

2.2 Emigration
Aside from the linguistic contact due to political and economic relationships,
which (following Loveday 1996, discussed in §1.6.2.1) in the absence of a long-
lasting military occupation we would label as “distant”, the mobility of people
has also been gaining an important role in the process. Between the eighteenth
and the nineteenth century, emigration was in fact becoming a mass
phenomenon in Chinese society, and situations of language-contact with
English arose when Chinese emigrants formed small communities in
anglophone countries. It would not be surprising if, in such situations, English
native speakers in touch with Chinese communities would borrow some useful
word from them to designate new things, or if Chinese people becoming
bilinguals in English would suffer some retention from their L1 when speaking
English. In both cases, as it was described in §1.1.1, the word may have been
successfully spread and passed from bilinguals' to monolinguals' speech thus
entering the “standard” language.

62
Ceccagno (2009: 297) maintains that till World War Two about 90% of Chinese
migrants had moved to South-eastern Asia, but since the ending of the
nineteenth century some also went to Europe and America. For example, as
Spence (2013: 204) reports, a large Chinese community moved to the United
States in the gold rush of 1848-49, and the very Chinese name of the city of San
Francisco (Jiujinshan 旧 金 山 , literally ‘old mountain of gold’) stands as a
monument to emigrants' dreams.
Nonetheless, they did not make a
fortune in the gold rush, on the contrary,
Spence (ibidem) continues, Chinese
emigrants flourished as market
gardeners, storekeepers and
laundrymen or in the great railway-
building boom of the 1860s. Chinese
immigration in the US was soon
opposed by public opinion and even
legally forbidden by the “Chinese
exclusion Act” (see Fig. 6) of 1882 which Fig. 6: a cartoon opposing the “China
exclusion act”. The caption reads “We must
imposed almost total restriction to draw the line somewhere, you know”. Copied
from Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, n.
Chinese immigration. 54 (April 1st 1882), p. 96.

The rising tendency of Chinese students to go to the United States (instead of

Japan) to study in the 1920s was already mentioned earlier. It would have been
easy to predict that the trend was to be stopped after 1949 due to political
motivations.
Between 1949 and 1978, Ceccagno (2009: 297) summarises, migration from
China was moderate, mostly temporary, limited to socialist countries and under
strict control by the authorities. The fear motivating the closure (cf. Spence
2013: 559) was again that of an over-westernisation of China and the
abandonment of Marxist values.
After the implementation of the Reform and Opening Up policy (hereafter
“Reforms”) though, Chinese emigration toward the rest of the world resumed.
As reported by Spence (ivi: 589), “during 1978 a preliminary group of 480 able
Chinese students was dispatched to twenty-eight countries to study”, many of
them and of the ones sent abroad in the following years attended technical-
training (mathematics, physics, chemistry, mechanics). Today, many students

63
are encouraged to go overseas on post-doctoral fellowships, while big cities
compete among themselves for overseas students and scholars by offering them
preferential policies (Zweig, Chen, & Rosen 2004: 740). According to official
data quoted by Ceccagno (2009: 305), the number of Chinese students abroad is
growing very rapidly: if there were 115,000 Chinese students abroad in 2004,
their total amount since 1949 had already touched on 900,000. More recent
data from the Institute of International Education (2014) testify that China
remains the leading place of origin of international students in the United States
for the fifth year in a row, after seven years of double-digit increases: more than
270,000 (31% of all international students) in 2014. The statistics is even more
astonishing if one considers (ibidem) that China sent no students to the US from
the 1950s until the mid 1970s.
Ceccagno (2009: 305) focuses on a major difference between Chinese students
studying abroad at the beginning of the twentieth century and in recent times:
during the former period, students' permanence in the foreign country was
limited to the courses they attended, whereas today students usually do not go
back to China after they end their courses, and often stay instead in the foreign
country as immigrants: indeed, only one quarter of the previously mentioned
900,000 Chinese students abroad since 1949 has returned back to China (Zweig
et alii 2004).
Many other Chinese, especially from developed and rich coastal regions of
China (cf. Ceccagno 2009: 301), emigrated for business reasons to make a
fortune abroad. In the Reforms era, as Ceccagno (ivi: 298) notes, there was a
switch in the political and societal approach toward people willing to leave
China to go abroad: if during the Cultural Revolution they were publicly
criticised as unpatriotic, after the Reforms their aspirations were deemed as
legitimate and reasonable, and they were considered resources for the country:
the vast proportion of foreign direct investments in China made after 1978 by
Chinese emigrants or their descendants seem a reasonable motivation for the
switch (cf. Ceccagno 2009: 298).
At the time of Ceccagno's (2009: 297) study, she reports that it was estimated
that people of Chinese heritage living outside China (the so-called huaren 华 人
or huaqiao 华 侨 ) were about 35 million, and (ivi: 302) Chinese migrants were
the most populous group in Canada, the second in Australia and the third one in
the US.

64
 2.3 Developing bilingualism
As it was argued earlier in §1.1.1, bilinguals play a pivotal role in language-
contact. After having analysed (§2.2) Chinese migration to anglophone
countries, which understandably brought to some kind of bilingualism, at least
on the part of the immigrant community, it could be useful to investigate the
presence of English in China. Quantifying the number of Chinese-English
possible bilinguals (i.e. one of the possible habitats of language-contact), may
give a glimpse of the scope and depth of the phenomenon.

2.3.1 Why English?

Since language-contact is mostly a social phenomenon, it is reasonable to begin
our research from a preliminary question: why should a government of a far-
Eastern country invest money in English institutional education instead of on
another, closer language? Why did English gain its leading role in China too?
China is in fact part of what Kachru (2005: 14) defined as the English
“expanding circle”. China, the author (ivi: 73) states, is a technologically
established and emerging power in which bilingualism in English is
continuously on the increase, “in spite of a love-hate relationship with it”.
As we said earlier in §2.1.4.1, the presence of English in China has historical
reasons in that it follows China's political relations with Western anglophone
powers (notably the UK and the US), but it is not the inheritance of a military
occupation as it is, for example, in India and South Africa. The choice therefore
must be based on different motivations, that is on English international role.
English is in fact “the major language of wider communication and the primary
natural language candidate for an international language in the world today”
(Fishman, Cooper, & Conrad 1977: 7).

2.3.1.1 How could English obtain its international role?

The motivations for the spread of English are certainly not (or at least not
mostly) linguistic.
When describing the Growth and structure of the English language one
hundred years ago, the Danish scholar Otto Jespersen (1919: 17) asserted that
“the English language is a methodical, energetic, business-like and sober
language, that does not care much for finery and elegance, but does care for
logical consistency”; he (ivi: 2, author's emphasis) added that English is
“positively and expressly masculine”, “the language of a grown-up man” which

65
has “very little childish or feminine about it”. Jespersen's description may sound
extravagant and even unscientific today, but, as a knowledgeable scholar, he
knew that language supremacy had little to do with logical consistency or other
language-internal factors:

It would be unreasonable to suppose, as is sometimes done, that the cause of

the enormous propagation of the English language is to be sought in its
intrinsic merits. When two languages compete, the victory does not fall to the
most perfect language as such. Nor is it always the nation whose culture is
superior that makes the nation of inferior culture adopts its language [...]
Political ascendancy would probably be found in most cases to have been the
most powerful influence. (Jespersen 1919: 243-44)
Nor does the prestige English is endowed with rest upon aesthetic elements, as
it was shown that “listeners unfamiliar with dialects which, within their own
communities, evoke positive reactions, are unable to distinguish them, in any
systematic way, from "unfavourable" varieties - in terms of pleasantness,
mellifluence and other aesthetic qualities” (Edwards 1996: 704).
On the contrary, the reasons for choosing a particular language as favoured
foreign language, as Crystal (1997: 4) summarises, include “historical tradition,
political expediency, and the desire for commercial, cultural or technological
contact”. Nonetheless, the most important factor is always power in its broader
meanings:

A language does not become a global language because of its intrinsic structural
properties, or because of the size of its vocabulary, or because it has been a
vehicle of a great literature in the past, or because it was once associated with a
great culture or religion These are all factors which can motivate someone to
learn a language, of course, but none of them alone, or in combination, can
ensure a language's world spread. […] A language becomes an international
language for one chief reason: the political power of its people - especially their
military power. The explanation is the same throughout history. (Crystal 1997:
7)
Indeed Crystal (1997: 7-8) emphasises that language dominance is not solely the
result of military might: economical power is also essential to maintain and
expand it.
Therefore, English success seems primarily motivated by historical reasons, as,
to put it in Crystal's (ivi: 110-11) words, it happened to be at “the right place at
the right time”. As it was summarised by Schneider (2011: 37), in fact, English
was three times in a row spread around the globe as the language:
(4) of the immense British empire;
(5) of the industrial revolution and of technological innovation;

66
 (6) of the world's remaining superpower and the leading force in
globalisation, the US.
As a result, “when new technologies brought new linguistic opportunities,
English emerged as a first-rank language in industries which affected all aspects
of society - the press, advertising, broadcasting, motion pictures, sound
recording, transport and communications” (Crystal 1997: 110-11).
Some scholars even theorised that the English language is being spread and
used as an instrument to exert a new type of imperialist control: a linguistic
imperialism which permeates all other types of imperialism, as it controls the
very medium for transmitting ideas (Phillipson 1992: 52). This type of policy is
exemplified by a statement Phillipson (1992: 8) quotes from a director of a
worldwide-chain of English language schools: “Once we used to send gunboats
and diplomats abroad; now we are sending English teachers”.

2.3.1.2 The “cosmopolitan” character of English

Kachru (2005: 99) highlights the “unique and multidimensional character of the
diffusion of English”, a language which “for the first time in linguistics history
[…] has established contact with practically every language family in all the
continents”. English, Kachru (ibidem) continues, “provides a cross-cultural and
cross-linguistics indicator of change, acculturation, and convergence”.
Since borrowing are testaments to language and culture contacts, such contacts
are exemplified by the richness of English vocabulary. Indeed, Jespersen (1919:
16) enthusiastically writes that, unlike French and Italian languages which were
strictly regulated by official academies blaming every words not found in their
dictionaries, English writers have always been free to take their words from
other languages. The consequence, he (ibidem) states, has been that “English
dictionaries comprise a larger number of words than those of any other nation,
and that they present a variegated picture of terms from the four quarters of the
globe”.
Jespersen's point is echoed by Crystal (2003: 126), who defines English as an
“insatiable borrower” always welcoming foreign words in its lexicon; he
(ibidem) calculates that “over 350 languages are on record as sources of its
present day vocabulary”. To understand the scope of such diversity, it is useful
to report Winford's (2003: 29) estimate, according to which 75% of present
English words were borrowed from other languages through history. In another
study, Minkova & Stockwell (2006: 467) calculate an amount of 45% French
67
and 16.7% Latin borrowings among the 10,000 English most frequent words 26,
as well as 4.2% words from other Germanic languages and 2.3% from non-
Indoeuropean languages. Minkova & Stockwell (ivi: 472) further pinpoint that
65 to 85 per cent of the Old English vocabulary has been “lost” through the
years, also in favour of such borrowing process.
The etymological richness and diversity of English, as reported by Crystal (1997:
6), is also cited as one of the properties making English “internationally
appealing”. The “familiarity” of its vocabulary (“deriving from the borrowing of
thousands of new words from the languages with which it has been in contact”),
Crystal (ibidem) notes, “gives it a cosmopolitan character which many see as an
advantage for a global language”.

2.3.2 The study of English in China

2.3.2.1 English status

“The relationship between the English language and Chinese politics and
society”, Adamson (2002: 231) writes, “has historically been ambivalent”.
Following China's international relations, the language was in fact, Adamson
(ibidem) notes, regarded at different times as “the tongue of military aggressors,
barbarians, imperialist” or the one of “trade partners, academics, technical
experts, advisers, tourists and popular culture”.
Adamson (2002) proposes a periodisation of English in China into three main
phases:
(1) the Qing dynasty was characterised by “the aggressive clash of cultures,
in which English was the language of a technically powerful enemy whose
culture appeared to the Chinese as essentially barbaric” (ivi: 232); under
the System of Canton, foreigners were even forbidden to learn Chinese,
whereas, after the Opium wars, institutions as the Tongwen Guan were
established to facilitate transfer of scientific knowledge in the wake of the
“Learning from the West” movement (ivi: 233);
(2) in the Republican era (1911 - 1949), English was regarded as a vehicle for
exploring Western philosophy and ideas and interact with the West in
diplomacy (ivi: 232); accordingly, English assumed greater proportions
in China's education system (ivi: 236);
(3) in the early years of the PRC, Russian was the main foreign language

26
See note 16 on Minkova's & Stockwell's corpora.

68
 being taught, while English was made unpopular by political events and
therefore dropped in most curricula (ivi: 237); after the Sino-Soviet
schism during the 1960s, Russian declined and English was boosted:
competence in English became important for individuals to gain access to
higher education (ivi: 238), a trend which reached its pinnacle after
Deng's Reforms (ivi: 240).
Under Qing dynasty, Imm (2009: 453) highlights, contact was already
considerable as “the burgeoning of the Canton trade in the late 18th century and
the establishment of the British settlement in Penang in 1786 provided a
platform for intense interactions between diverse English-speaking and
Chinese-speaking groups”. Imm (ibidem) also emphasises “the surfacing of
educated varieties of English in major cities such as Shanghai and Hong Kong”
following the establishment of Protestant missionary schools across China in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
The first half a century of the PRC is described by Bolton & Graddol (2012: 4 -5)
as a “roller-coaster” for the teaching of English, since it was very limited in
favour of Russian in the first decade, boosted after Sino-Russian schism,
outlawed in many parts of the country during the Cultural Revolution,
popularised again after the Reforms, and finally made compulsory in 2001.
Bolton & Graddol (ivi: 5) report that today English has reached a key
importance in educational advancement as it is one of the three subjects (the
others being mathematics and Chinese) tested in the University Entrance
Qualifying Exam (gaokao 高考 ). Li Yang & Hu Yinan (2011) report that English
“is now taught, as a requirement, in virtually all Chinese postsecondary
institutions”.
In today's China, English is regarded as the language of international
communication (Zhao Yong & Campbell 1995: 377), the key to the country's
development (Hu Xiaoqiong 2005: 30), and an instrument to improve one's
living standards (Li Yang & Hu Yinan 2011). Nonetheless, the pervasiveness of
English has also come under attack, in public declarations against “abusive use
of language, such as random English mixing, direct use of English words or
acronyms and coined expressions mixed with English or other foreign languages
in print and digital publications” which “have ‘seriously damaged’ the purity of
Chinese and ‘destroyed the harmonious and healthy linguistic and cultural
environment’” (SCIO 2010, translated by Zhang Wei 2012: 40).

69
2.3.2.2 Quantifying English users in China
As early as 1985, only seven years into China's Reforms, Crystal (1985, quoted in
Zhao Yong & Campbell 1995: 377-78) estimated that China had “the largest
number of learners of English as a foreign language in the world”, but lamented
that “China has always been excluded from the statistical reviews [of users of
English in the world] because of the shortage of information from inside the
country”.
It is still difficult to quantify English users in China, but it could be somehow
easier to hypothesise the number of English learners. In fact, as Zhao Yong &
Campbell (1995: 378) note, “in China, English is primarily learned in formal
classrooms, thus the cline of proficiency parallels that of educational level”; they
(ivi: 379) also report that “when leaving senior high school, the students are
supposed to have had more than 900 hours of instruction” in English. Zhao
Yong & Campbell (1995: 381)27 estimated the number of English learners in
China to be “around 200 million”, a figure confirmed also by Bolton (2003,
cited in Bolton & Graddol 2012: 7). More recently, Wei Rining & Su Jinzhi
(2012: 11)28 estimated the number may be as high as 390 million, an estimate
confirmed by the official figures reported by Li Yang & Hu Yinan (2011) (“some
400 million Chinese have studied English in the past 30 years”).
The number of students currently studying English in secondary school is
estimated to be over 60 million by Hu Xiaoqiong (2005: 30). Nonetheless, as
English is becoming a valuable asset in pupils' education, a English-related
industry of training-courses (with a market value of 30 billion Yuan, about 4
billion Euros) has also flourished (cf. He Na 2010: 3) outside institutional
education. He Na (2010: 1) reports official figures by China Education Daily
(Zhongguo jiaoyu bao 中 国 教 育 报 , a national newspaper published by the
Ministry of Education) estimating that more than 400 million Chinese were
studying English as of July 2010. The size of the phenomenon is also visible in
the fact that “more than 400,000 full-time English teachers make a living by
English” (Zhao Yong & Campbell 1995: 385), whereas there were only 450

27
Zhao Yong & Campbell (1995) consider the number of graduates of colleges and secondary
schools after 1982, as it was the year when a student starting junior high in 1979 (“when most
schools started teaching English again”) graduated. They also propose a different possible
figure of 400 million which also takes into account secondary school graduates before 1982.
28
Wei Rining's & Su Jinzhi's (2012) results are obtained through a cross-check of China's 2000
Census data on junior secondary (or above) education qualifications which show how many
people had studied one foreign language, and SGO (2006) data on which foreign language
was studied.

70
secondary school teachers of English in the whole country in 1957 (Adamson
2002: 237, quoting data by Ministry of Education 1984).
Of course, not every English learner may be regarded as an English user. Wei
Rining & Su Jinzhi (2012: 11) report SGO (2006) data according to which “only
7.3% and 23.3% of the people that had studied English claimed to use English
‘often’ and ‘sometimes’ respectively”.
Furthermore, not every English learner has the same level of proficiency. Zhao
Yong & Campbell (1995: 382) hypothesise a very small part of “advanced” users
(5 million, who studied English for nine years) and “intermediate” users (30
million, who studied English for six years), against a vast majority (160 million)
of “beginners” (with three only years of education).

2.3.2.3 A “Chinese” English?

“Despite the astonishing number of learners”, Bolton & Graddol (2012: 8) note,
“English is still a ‘foreign’ language for most Chinese”. When China reopened its
door through the Reforms, English had already been established as the lingua
franca of the world, and its knowledge was perceived as a key to the country's
development (Hu Xiaoqiong 2005: 30). Ignorance in English is, on the contrary,
feared today as a barrier to such development: Hu Xiaoqiong (2005: 30)
explains “the insufficient standard attained by most learners means that it still
acts as a barrier to China's development and limits the contribution that the
world's most populous country can make in terms of knowledge and research”.
Hu Xiaoqiong (2005) recently conducted a survey among 585 Chinese English
teachers finding that, as the teachers know that “very few of their students are
learning English to go to an English-speaking country or even to work primarily
with native speakers”, they believe “it thus does not make sense to spend so
much more time and effort on acquiring a variety of English that is not
necessary” (ivi: 32). Two thirds of the surveyed teachers, the author (ivi: 33)
reports, believe that “China English will become a standard” because of a set of
sociolinguistic reasons including the vast amount of speakers, local cultural
characteristics and because of the difficulty Chinese find in the so-called
standard English.
The concept of a Chinese variety of English is better analysed by Bolton (2003)
and Kirkpatrick & Xu Zhichang (2002), whereas Gao Liwei (2001) and Yang
Jian (2005) reflect on the nativisation of English in China focusing primarily on
words which occur in China's English magazines and newspapers (whose
71
reporters and contributors are mainly local bilingual English speakers).

72
 3 CHINESE BORROWINGS IN ENGLISH

3.1 Identifying high and low

As it was summarised earlier in §1.7.3 and §1.7.4, due to sociocultural factors,
borrowing is often a one-way phenomenon from the so-called dominant
language to the subject one. When we focus on national languages as part of the
culture which their relative countries “export” along with their products, we can
observe that languages from countries enjoying a particularly high degree of
influence on other ones from a cultural, military or economic point of view, are
usually the ones exporting the largest amount of loanwords into the languages
of the countries being under that influence (Caruso 2009: 9). Under similar
circumstances, the numerous English loanwords we find in other languages is
no surprise, but the amount of foreign-origin words we find in English 29
somehow is.
If one was to argue which is the dominant and which is the subject language
between English and Chinese, after the history of their contact was sketched out
in the previous chapter and particularly in §2.1 and §2.2, one would probably
conclude that English is the dominant language and Chinese is the subject one.
Such conclusion would primarily draw on the fact that the contact was “indirect”
till the 1637 expedition captained by Lord Weddell, and no real prestige was felt
on either side; as soon as contact deepened and the Opium Wars burst out in the
mid-nineteenth century though, the relationship of power between China and
England became clear: England military might imposed the unequal treaty of
Nanjing on China and the century of national humiliation followed. China was
afflicted by internal rebellions and foreign invasions, split under the control of
warlords, invaded by Japan and divided by civil war; during this whole period,
cultural contact with the anglophone world was primarily evident in the intense
translational activity which had English as a major source (§2.1.4.1).
When the Communist Party succeeded in restoring China's unity under the PRC
in 1949, after an early period in which English was somehow “refused” for
political reasons, the role of English as the lingua franca of the world was
recognised after Deng's Reforms at the ending of the 1970s, and the learning of
English within China grew rapidly, as did the number of Chinese emigrants to
anglophone countries (§2.2).
29
See data reported from Winford (2003) and Minkova & Stockwell (2006) in §2.3.1.2

73
What has been summarised above would suggest us to label Chinese-English
contact, at least since the First Opium War, as one of the first three language-
contact settings described by Loveday (1996, see §1.6.2.1), on the Chinese part:
(1) it was distant contact when English was seen as the “language of the
barbarians” in the eighteenth century30, its acquisition was not socially-
required and even stigmatised (Adamson 2002): channels for this kind of
contact were opened by returnees from anglophone countries (usually
students abroad) and translators;
(2) it was distant but institutional contact when English schools were
opened in China by foreign missionaries and eventually by Chinese
institutions, and it is again after the Reforms, when English is seen as the
key to national development, and its ignorance is feared as a barrier to it
(Hu Xiaoqiong 2005);
(3) it is bounded or subordinate contact wherever Chinese emigrants
communities live in isolation in anglophone countries.
Following Higa's (1979: 277-81, see §1.7) assertions that cultural dominance is
highly correlated with economic and military dominance, and that the
“dominance-subordination relationship” between two cultures can be measured
on the basis of the quantity of loanwords from one language to the other, the
comparison between the numerous English loanwords into Chinese against the
fewer Chinese loanwords into English seems to prove the relationship of power
hypothesised above.
Liu Yanshi (2004, cited in Kui Zhu 2011: 101) asserts that there are in total
5,218 entries borrowed from English according to the Chinese Loanwords
Dictionary (Shi Youwei 2000), and among them 340 items have come into
common use. On the other hand, Cannon's (1988) study finds 979 entries
borrowed from Chinese in eight desktop dictionaries (listed in References), 196
of which are recorded in at least three dictionaries, thus showing a general
acceptance in international English (Cannon 1988: 9). An update of Cannon's
research was done twenty years later by Yang Jian (2009), who found that 59
more Chinese loanwords had entered “general English”. Comparing the about
five thousands English loanwords in Chinese to the about one thousand Chinese
30
On the other hand, as it was mentioned in §2.1.2, a growing interest for Chinese language
and culture spread among European intellectuals in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Though it remained an elitist phenomenon, it may have started a similar language-contact
situation in Europe too, as those intellectuals certainly had a “sufficiently influential position
to diffuse items into their community” (Loveday 1996: 18).

74
loanwords in English, we may therefore hypothesise a roughly 5 to 1
relationship of power between English and Chinese. Although it would be an
oversimplification, clearly.
Another relevant difference between the loanwords that each language gave to
the other one is the asymmetry reported by Kui Zhu (2011: 103): while the
majority of Chinese loanwords in English are “related to Chinese culture,
customs, specialities and philosophy” (and therefore “not very frequently used
in English speakers' conversation except when they are talking about topics
concerned with China”, ivi: 104), English loanwords in Chinese “cover almost all
aspects of Chinese society”, ranging from specialised terminology to daily
expressions, thus permeating more deeply the life of the Chinese. What Kui Zhu
calls “asymmetry” is a particular instance of what was labelled “directionality of
borrowing” in §1.7.3, from the “dominant” towards the “subject” language: it
certainly is the aspect which most clearly signals that, although “distant”, the
contact is “dominant” (Loveday 1996) on the English part.

3.2 Chinese is a language family

Before we start analysing Chinese loanwords in English as if they were the
products of a coherent and homogeneous language (as if the “Chinese”
etymological label used in dictionaries was more definite and exhaustive than,
for example, a “European” label), we need to highlight the linguistic diversity
existing within China.
Indeed, American sinologist Jerry Norman (1988: 1) emphasises that

Few language names are as all-encompassing as that of Chinese. It is made to

serve at once for the archaic inscriptions of the oracle bones, the literary
language of the Zhou dynasty sages, the language of Tang and Song poetry and
the early vernacular language of the classical novels, as well as the modern
language in both its standard and dialectal forms.
Given the obvious difference between the Old Chinese of the archaic
inscriptions, which is “at least as different from the modern standard language
as Latin is from Italian or French” (Norman 1988: 1), the variety of the dialectal
sources of “Chinese borrowings” is also to be noted. In fact, Chinese dialects
differ “quite dramatically” from one another, to the point that Norman (ivi: 2)
emphasises that “a speaker of the Peking dialect can no more understand a
person speaking Cantonese than an Englishman can understand an Austrian
when each employs his native language”.

75
Chen Ping (1999: 50-51) argues that “from a historical perspective, all of the
major Chinese dialects split from the same stem”, but they eventually evolved
independently along different paths. Chinese linguistic situation is thus
summarised by Norman (1988: 187):

To the historical linguist Chinese is rather more like a language family than a
single language made up of a number of regional forms. The Chinese dialectal
complex is in many ways analogous to the Romance language family in Europe:
both have their roots in a large-scale imperial expansion.
Here, the provocative definition of the difference between language and dialect
commonly attributed to Max Weinreich would be appropriate: “a language is a
dialect with an army and navy”.
Furthermore, Norman (1988: 187) notes that the greatest diversity among
dialects is to be found in central and southern zones, i.e. precisely the areas
where the main economic contacts of the nineteenth century took place. The
situation and geographic distribution of Chinese dialects, at least of those
interested in the borrowing phenomenon toward English, need therefore to be
studied31.

3.2.1 Chinese main varieties

Mandarin is the most widely spoken among Chinese dialects. Dialects of the
Mandarin sub-family, Norman (1988: 190) estimates, are “spoken by about 70
per cent of China's Han population” 32. Mandarin dialects, Norman (ibidem)
continues, are “found everywhere north of the Yangtze River” (except for those
border regions where non-Han languages predominate), throughout most of the
South-West and in some “Mandarin-speaking ‘islands’” in the South-Eastern
area of China, as well as in the emigrants colonies in many cities of Europe and
North America (ivi: 191). Mandarin is based on the speech of Beijing and the
North-Eastern region of China (Zou Yuanyan 2006: 99), it is the official
language for both mainland China (known as putonghua 普 通 话 ) and Taiwan
(known as guoyu 国 语 ), and one of the four official languages of Singapore
(known as huayu 华 语 ). As Chen Ping (1999: 51) notes, Mandarin owes its
strength to the political and cultural importance of the area in which it is
spoken. Being the official language of the country, its importance and
31
Here the focus will be limited to the geographic distribution and cultural connotations of
Chinese main dialects. See Norman (1988: 181-244) for a thorough linguistic analysis of the
(mostly phonological) differences among them.
32
As reported by the National Bureau of Statistics of China (2011), 91.5% of China's nearly 1.4
billion people are of Han ethnicity.

76
distribution are also being spread through formal education and the media, in
China and abroad33.
Yue ( 粤 ) is a relatively homogeneous group of dialects primarily spoken in the
Southern provinces of Guangdong and Guangxi, and in Hong Kong. As Norman
(1988: 214) highlights, the term Cantonese, which is sometimes used
interchangeably with Yue, should be reserved for the dialect spoken in Canton
and not used as a general name for the group as a whole. The variety, which is
the primary language of the fertile Pearl River delta, is also present in many part
of the Chinese diaspora, particularly in overseas Chinese settlements in the
United States, Europe and South-East Asia (Zou Yuanyan 2006: 99). Chen Ping
(1999: 51) maintains that, despite the sphere in which Cantonese is used is far
smaller than that of Mandarin, it is nonetheless a “strong dialect”, which “has
made inroads into other dialect areas in the Southern part of China particularly
in the twentieth century” to the point that “starting from the 1980s, there has
been a growing number of people in other parts of the country who are eager to
learn the dialect”. Chen Ping (ivi: 52) claims that the strength of Cantonese is
“to a large extent attributable to the economic success of the Cantonese-
speaking area”, particularly to its dynamic economic development after the
Reforms. The importance of Cantonese is also to be highlighted from a cultural
point of view: of all the Southern dialects, Cantonese is in fact the only one that
has a highly developed written language (with a set of characters coined for the
purpose), which is used in many types of popular folk literature and music
(ibidem, and Norman 1988: 215).
Min ( 闽 ) dialects are commonly spoken with local variations in Fujian (a variety
known as Hokkien), Taiwan and Hainan provinces (Zou Yuanyan 2006: 99).
Norman (1988: 228) highlights that “numerous archaisms not preserved
elsewhere” and “a whole series of local innovations which are peculiarly Min”
are found in the region, as well as “strong internal differentiation”; the reason of
such phenomena being attributable to “long centuries of relative isolation and
the lack of convenient lines of communication within the region itself”. Chen
Ping (1999: 52) emphasises that in the centuries from the Southern Song (1127 -
1279) until the beginning of the twentieth century, “Min had been a strong
dialect expanding its geographical base” to the formally Cantonese speaking
areas and to Taiwan and Hainan. Its strength, Chen Ping (ibidem) argues, has
33
See Seng & Lai (2010) for an analysis on the growth of “Global Mandarin”.

77
weakened considerably since then: it has been dwindling and losing ground in
favour of Mandarin and Cantonese in many places. Among Southern Min
(Minnan 闽南 ) dialects, Amoy34 (the one spoken in the island-city of Xiamen, on
the Taiwan strait) has a prominent role in Chinese-English language-contact, as
the city has been an important centre of international commerce.
China's main dialectal families also include:
(1) Wu ( 吴 ) dialects, which are spoken around the lower Yangtze River and
its tributaries, primarily in Southern Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces
(Zou Yuanyan 2006: 99, and Norman 1988: 199). The most notable of
Wu dialects is Shanghainese (spoken in Shanghai). Wu is one of the
“central dialects” (the others being Gan 赣 and Xiang 湘 , spoken in
Jiangxi and Hunan provinces respectively) identified by Norman (1988:
197-209), who argues that such dialectal families are “the result of
centuries of Northern linguistic intrusion into a region that originally was
home to dialects of a more purely Southern type”.
(2) Kejia ( 客家 ), also known as Hakka, is mostly scattered throughout South-
Eastern China in Guangxi province and throughout the Min and Yue
regions, in the mountainous region of Northern Guangdong, South-
Western Fujian and extreme-Southern part of Jiangxi, but also Hainan
and Taiwan (Zou Yuanyan 2006: 99, and Norman 1988: 224). Zou
Yuanyan (2006: 99) describes that historically “the Hakka people were
northerners who moved south during several waves of migration”, and
their very name (which means ‘guest’) testifies to their immigrant status
in the areas to which they moved.
Chen Ping (1999: 52) describes Wu, Kejia, Xiang and Gan as “declining” and
“weak” dialects in comparison with the former three ones, reporting that “their
areas have been dwindling and they are seldom learned by speakers of other
dialects for the purpose of enhancing their communicative competence”. See
Fig. 7 below for a map of Chinese dialects areas.
Pidgin English (yangjingbang yingyu 洋 涇 浜 英 語 ) is not a Chinese dialect,
clearly. Indeed, like any other pidgin, it is a simplified language developed as a
means of communication in trade situations, and it is not native to anyone.
Nonetheless, it had a role in Chinese borrowing in English as it was the jargon
34
Many of the scholars cited in the present research use “Cantonese” for “Yue” and “Amoy” for
“Min”. We will faithfully report the designations they use in order to correctly present their
work. Reference may be made to the present paragraph for clarity.

78
used by Chinese and British traders in the port of Canton since the mid-1640s
(during early direct contacts) and up till the end of the nineteenth century, when
it declined as standard English began to be systematically taught in schools and
universities (Zou Yuanyan 2006: 100). We chose to include Pidgin-English in
the present paragraph to account for two English words borrowed from (or at
least through) it, chop-chop and chop-stick, which will be part of our research in
§4.

Fig. 7: Chinese dialects areas, copied from Norman (1988: 184).

79
 3.3 Factors, modes and characteristics of Chinese-
English borrowing

Methodological foreword
The loanwords quoted in the present and the following paragraphs display a
great diversity in their shape: the reasons underlying such diversity are primary
the transliteration systems and source dialects involved. We chose to describe
such aspects in different steps of the present chapter, believing they will thus be
clearer to the reader.
Being a non-alphabetical language, the need to find a convenient transliteration
system (e.g. to use as an educational instrument) was felt at least as soon as the
first missions were set (§2.1.2). The two most important systems are the Wade-
Giles, which was created in the nineteenth century and used till the second half
of the twentieth century, and the pinyin, which was created by Chinese linguists
(on governmental impulse) in the 1950s and eventually imposed in the
international arena since approximately the 1980s. Chinese words borrowed
before such date are therefore written according to the former system (see
§3.3.3 and note 38). More transliteration systems do exist, but had less impact
on borrowing.
As it was outlined in §3.2, the label “Chinese” is attached to a variety of
languages that are very different in their phonological shape. The difference
among yamen (Mandarin), kumquat (Yue) and tea (Min) will be described in
§3.5.3.
Loanwords are followed by the Chinese model from which they were borrowed
as they are reported in the articles cited. The Mandarin pronunciation of
Chinese characters is also given in pinyin (written in italics) 35 if it clearly differs
from the English word (e.g. in cases of loan translation) or to testify phonetic
borrowing. When a word is described as Mandarin in §3.5.3, but its shape is
very different from the reported Mandarin pronunciation, such difference may
be attributable to an earlier borrowing (according to a Wade-Giles
transliteration). The definition (summarised from the OED) of some unusual
word may also be given in ‘single curved quotes’ when necessary.

35
In the present and the following chapter, tones will also be attached to the pinyin
transliteration: a choice we made to be more precise and exhaustive on the Chinese etyma of
the loanwords under examination.

80
 3.3.1 Causes and channels
As in every other language-contact situation, in Chinese-English contact too,
lexical borrowing is mostly motivated by the need to fill lexical gaps and
designate things which do not exist in English (see loanwords by necessity,
described in §1.7.1). As Zhao Yonggang (2009: 149) summarises, gaps may be
found in various semantic fields, such as political (Taiping 太 平 ‘ insurgents
rebelling against Ming in the nineteenth century’), economic (mu 亩 ‘ unit of
measurement for land’), topography and geographic names (Szechuanese
‘inhabitant of Sichuan province’ from Sìchuān 四川 ), everyday life (bird's nest ‘a
soup’ a loan translation from yànwō 燕窝 , mah-jong 麻 将 ‘Chinese traditional
board-game’), and culture and art (wu-wei 无为 ‘a Taoist practice’, wushu 武术
‘the Chinese martial arts’)36.
Even if no clear gap exists in English though, Chinese words may be borrowed
for efficiency (see also what was labelled “ease of production constraint” in
§1.6.1.3, and what Weinreich describes as perceived insufficient differentiation,
reported in §1.7.2). Imm (2009: 466-67) notes that Chinese words are borrowed
in Malaysian English to practically distinguish among referents that are not
differentiated in the recipient language, “without having to resort to
inconvenient constructions which may not be understood by other people
within the community”. Thus, he (ibidem) describes that kway teow, mee and
mee hoon (or mee bihun) “allow ME [Malaysian English] users to distinguish
between ‘broad rice noodles’, ‘wheat noodles’, and ‘fine rice noodles’”.
Chinese loanwords are also used “to convey specific undertones that are difficult
to replicate using existing English words” (Imm 2009: 467), or to emphasise
that the person denoted is of Chinese background, e.g. “when an ME user makes
reference to a towkay/tauke, for instance, he is talking about a Chinese
businessman or shop-owner (always male, usually older), not about a Malay or
Indian businessperson and never about a foreign entrepreneur” (ibidem).

36
The diversity among the loanwords in this paragraph is worth remarking: every one of them
clearly refers to Chinese culture, but whereas bird's nest, mah-jong, wu-wei and wushu may
be eaten, played or practised everywhere, and they therefore “follow” the export of such
referents into a language which lacked a designation for them, Taiping may only refer to the
rebellion of the nineteenth century, and it could therefore be argued that it is more an entry
for encyclopedias than for dictionaries. Nonetheless, it is recorded as a loanword in some
dictionaries of our corpus (see §4), and this complies with the criterion chosen for the
present study. Similarly, Szechuanese is also recorded in dictionaries and was therefore
included; it could be contended that any other adjective derived from a toponym would be a
loanword by the same token, and we argue it is, as it is the result of a contact and its record
signals the importance such place had for the recipient language.

81
Sociolinguistic factors as demographics and degree of bilingualism are
confirmed as playing a role in borrowing (see also §1.6.2.1). Imm (2009: 469)
maintains that “the high representation of Hokkien, Cantonese and Mandarin
borrowings in ME and the corresponding low representation of borrowed terms
from other Chinese languages suggests that the more widespread the source
language is, the greater the potential for words from that language to infiltrate
the recipient language”.
The channels through which Chinese words entered English are numerous.
Wang Rongpei & Chang Junyue (2001: 71-72) assert that geographical distance
is the only reason why Chinese gave less words to English than other European
languages did. This is probably an oversimplification, as geography undoubtedly
limited contact and therefore borrowing, but socio-historical factors too played
a major role (cf. §1.6.2 and §2.1.4.1). Their assertion that today, following the
flourishing trade and the development of the media, the situation is changing
(ibidem) is to be read as emphasising that these phenomena are ‘narrowing’ that
distance. They (ivi: 72) individuate three main channels for Chinese borrowings
in English:
(1) commerce, either
(a) indirect, as is the case with words borrowed prior to English presence
in China (tea, china ‘stoneware and porcelain’, silk), or
(b) direct, as is the case with many Chinese names for food, fruit and
fabric (oolong ‘a kind of tea’, loquat ‘a fruit’, pongee ‘a silk fabric’);
(2) the media. Many loanwords related to the political discourse spread into
English after 1949: e.g. paper tiger ‘a person, country, etc., that appears
powerful or threatening but is actually weak or ineffective’ (zhǐ lǎohǔ 纸老
虎 ), one country with two systems ‘a constitutional principle by Deng
Xiaoping affirming the coexistence within China of socialism and
capitalism’ (yīguóliǎngzhì 一国两制 ), Great Cultural Revolution (wénhuà
dàgémìng 文 化 大 革 命 ), Great Leap Forward (dà yuèjìn 大 跃 进 ), all
imported through the process of loan translation. The channel, the
authors (ibidem) highlight, has widened recently but opened as soon as
missionaries like Robert Morrison (§2.1.4) started publishing newspapers
in China;
(3) bilingual zones, e.g. Hong Kong, Singapore, and the China-towns in
England and the US. Such environments permitted the borrowing of

82
 items like wok ‘bowl-shaped pan’ (huò 镬 ) and cheongsam ‘traditional
Chinese female dress’ (qípáo 旗袍).
Further channels, the authors (ibidem) describe, are opened by foreign language
teaching, tourism and diplomacy.

3.3.2 Borrowing strategies

Gu Juhua (2006: 63) summarises three main borrowing strategies through
which Chinese loanwords are imported into English, also providing some
explanatory and useful example (see taxonomies proposed in §1.5.1 for
comparison):
(1) phonetic borrowing (yinyi 音译 ) is the importation of both meaning and
phonemic shape. It was previously implemented according to the Wade-
Giles phonetic transcription system, often according to the dialectal
(§3.2) pronunciation used in the coastal regions ‘in touch’ with the West
(e.g. bok choy 白菜 , chi kung 气功 , wok 镬 ), then switched to the pinyin
system after the founding of the PRC (e.g. Renminbi 人民币, guanxi 关系);
(2) loan translation (yiyi 意译) may be subdivided in
(a) imitation (fangyi 仿译) of the Chinese source through a word-for-word
translation into English, e.g. paper tiger (zhǐlǎohǔ 纸 老 虎 ), lose face
(diūliǎn 丢脸), spring rolls (chūnjuǎn 春卷),
(b) explicitation (shiyi 释义 ) of the origin of the the object which is being
borrowed, usually adding a “China” or “Chinese” label to it, e.g. China
rose (yuèjì 月 季 ), Chinese Wall (Chángchéng 长 城 ), Chinese boxes
(tàopán 套盘),0
(c) half phonetic and half semantic translation (banyin banyiyi 半音半意
译) is made by adding a phonetic transliteration of a Chinese object to
an English noun explicitateting it, e.g. tung oil (fr. tóng 桐 + yóu ‘oil’
油 ), Peking opera (fr. jīng 京 abbrev. for Beijing + jù ‘opera’ 剧 ),
Lungching tea (fr. lóngjǐng + chá ‘tea’ 龙井茶);
(3) loan blend (yinyi jia yingyu cizhui 音 译 加 英 语 词 缀 ) is made adding an
English affix to a Chinese stem (e.g. Tao-ism, Peking-ology, Long
March-er).
In his study37 on Chinese borrowings in Malaysian English, Imm (2009: 462-64)
37
Imm's study is based on the “Malaysian English Newspaper Corpus”, a five million word
corpus comprising newspaper articles sourced from two of the most authoritative English
language dailies in Malaysia: The Star and The New Straits Times. His research is limited to
articles published between Aug. 1st 2001 and Jan. 30th 2002 (Imm 2009: 452).

83
calculates how often each strategy is used:
(1) 52% of Chinese borrowings are imported through “total morphemic
importation” (Gu Juhua's phonetic borrowing), and “a fair amount of
variability in the orthographic representation of these words” is visible as
“there is no standard system of transliterating morphemes of Chinese
origin in ME [Malaysian English]”, e.g. Cantonese dumplings (húntún 馄
饨 ), are alternatively written as wantan, wanton, and wonton, though
here the lack of an official transliteration system for Chinese dialects can
also be hypothesised as the reason for such variability;
(2) 10% of Chinese borrowings involves “both morphemic importation and
morphemic substitution” (Gu Juhua's half phonetic and half semantic
translation or loan blend), in which one Chinese word is transliterated
and imported, while the other is replaced with an English equivalent, e.g.
kung-fu master (gōngfū 功夫 ‘kung-fu’ + shīfù 师傅 ‘master’);
(3) 38% of Chinese borrowings entail “total morphemic substitution” (Gu
Juhua's imitation), in which the Chinese compound form is broken down
into its component morphemes and each one is replaced with an English
equivalent, e.g. Nine Emperor Gods (calqued on Jiǔ huáng yé 九 皇 爷
literally ‘nine emperor father’).

3.3.3 Characteristics of integration

Gu Juhua (2006: 63-70) argues that the shape and use of Chinese loanwords in
English have some peculiar characteristics:
(1) many early modern “phonetic borrowings” were shaped according to
dialectal varieties of the coastal regions, as these were the areas where
early contacts with anglophones took place (e.g. pekoe and bohea from
Min dialect, litchi and kung-fu from Yue dialect), but some were also
borrowed from Mandarin (e.g. yamen and Taiping). In modern times,
the majority of Chinese phonetic borrowings is based on their Putonghua
(Mandarin) pronunciation;
(2) transliteration is an important step in the borrowing process. People and
place names borrowed before 1979 (when pinyin was established as the
standard romanisation system) were written on the basis of the Wade-
Giles system (e.g. Chou En-lai, Mao Tse-tung, Peking, Tsingtao), but
those which were still viable afterwards were then written according to

84
 the new system38 (e.g. Zhou Enlai, Mao Zedong, Beijing, Qingdao). Some
of the early forms had already became conventional and widely spread
and therefore continued to be used as such (Hong Kong, Macao), while
others became accepted in both forms (Peking/Beijing,
Canton/Guangzhou);
(3) Chinese loanwords in English may undergo semantic extension (e.g. silk
may also designate ‘silken garments’, ‘the silk-like filiform styles of the
female flower of unripe maize’ and even ‘parachute’ in Amer.En.; whereas
kowtow may refer ‘to an act of obsequious respect, often with derogatory
meaning’);
(4) category shift39 is also a frequent phenomenon as, after having entered
English lexicon as nouns, Chinese loanwords may be directly converted
to other lexical classes as soon as it is needed (e.g. to kung-fu, to feng-
shui, to shanghai ‘to transfer forcibly or abduct’).
(5) From a morphological point of view, units of measurement (li ‘Chinese
itinerary measure’ 里 , yuan ‘Chinese unit of currency’ 元 ) tend to add not
-s for plural, while already “highly anglicised” loans (sampan ‘a Chinese
boat’, wok) do (ivi: 62, see also Cannon 1988: 17);
(6) widely accepted loanwords have gained “convenient and necessary”
(biyao he bianli 必要和便利 ) derivations as any other English lexical item
(Confucius, Confucian, Confucianism; to shanghai, shanghaier,
shanghaied; typhoon, typhonic) (ivi: 62).
Zhao Yonggang (2009: 149) suggests that Chinese loanwords in English may be
divided on the basis of their degree of phonological, morphological, and
semantic integration (see also the discussion made in §1.3) in the recipient
language:
(1) totally integrated: words that have been unobtrusively and completely

38
Moody (1996: 412) maintains that “before the early twentieth century, there was no standard
or even reliable system of transcribing Chinese characters in a Roman alphabet”, and that
Wade-Giles-based loanwords entered English between 1912 and 1949, while pinyin ( 拼 音 )
transcription system (which was officially accepted for use in China in 1956) became the
most accepted after the establishment of the PRC. Moody (ibidem) disagrees with Gu Juhua,
stating that all the borrowings that have entered English since 1950 (instead of 1979) used
pinyin romanisation, e.g. Renminbi (人民币, whose Wade-Giles rendering would be Jenminpi)
was borrowed in 1957. It is worth noting that Wade-Giles transliteration was still used in
American scholarship about China in the 1980s; the economic development of China
probably played a role in the international acceptance of the new system: indeed, it can be
hypothesised that a third-world country could hardly succeed in imposing its own standard.
39
See also Chen Donnson (1992: 62) and Jin Qibin (2004: 70) for further examples of semantic
extensions and category shifts.

85
 assimilated into English vocabulary (e.g. silk and China, whose
integration is also testified by their high productivity);
(2) partially integrated: words that, despite they underwent phonological
and morphological integration, still carry “Chinese characteristics”
(zhongguo tese 中国特色 ) (e.g. litchi), their ‘instability’ being reflected in
their many possible spellings (e.g. litchi is also spelled as litchee, lichi,
leechee, lychee);
(3) not yet integrated: words which clearly show “Chinese characteristics”
both in spelling and sound, e.g. dazibao literally ‘big letter newspaper’
(dàzì bào 大字报).
The process through which Chinese loanwords enter the three phases defined by
Zhao Yonggang is described by Wang Rongpei & Chang Junyue (2001: 72-73),
who hypothesise a four-stages process of “absorption and assimilation” (xishou
tonghua 吸收同化):
(1) infiltration (shentou 渗 透 ) coincides with the first instances (either
spoken or written) of use of a foreign word, often accompanied by its
translation. This is usually the stage in which the pronunciation and the
spelling of a loanword influence one another according to the phonetic
and orthographic rules of English (depending on the word being
borrowed “through the eye” or “through the ear”, see §1.3.1);
(2) early assimilation (chubu tonghua 初 步 同 化 ) is the stage in which the
loanword adheres to English phonological and syntactic rules. As a
consequence, different spellings of the same word may appear and
coexist in such phase, but the process leads towards standardisation (also
under the influence of language policies, e.g. the official adoption of
pinyin);
(3) considerable assimilation (xiangdang tonghua 相当同化) is testified by the
adoption of English morphological patterns, e.g. gweilo ‘foreign devil’
(guìlǎo 鬼 佬 ) developed the plural form gweilos, whereas to japan ‘to
varnish with any material that gives a hard black gloss’ developed any
other verb's inflectional endings;
(4) complete assimilation (wanquan tonghua 完全同化 ) is reached when the
foreign origin of the word is hardly discernible to laymen as it underwent
phonological adaptation (e.g. tea, wok, nankeen) and semantic extension
(e.g. silk), and developed potential for category shift (e.g. formerly noun

86
 Shanghai is also adjective and verb), inflection and derivation (e.g. tea,
teas, teaed, teaer).
Stratagems often used with recent borrowings (translations given in brackets
and quotation marks or italic, cf. §1.3.5) are symptoms of incomplete
assimilation and are not found in the last stage (ivi: 73).

3.4 A historical perspective

As it was described previously in §1.7.1, “cultural loans show us what one nation
has taught another” (Bloomfield 1967: 458). Following Moody (1996: 405), it is
therefore reasonable to hypothesise that the nature of the contact between two
cultures is reflected in the semantic fields of the words which were borrowed.
For example, Moody (ibidem) argues that it is widely accepted that the large
number of Latin religious terms borrowed into Anglo-Saxon (e.g. altar, chalice,
litany, mass) reflects “the importance of Roman Christianity in England during
that period”. Likewise, “borrowings from Chinese languages 40 also reflect the
nature of contact between Chinese and English speakers” (ibidem). A study of
those Chinese loans which entered English in different periods may therefore be
useful to determine the nature of Chinese-English contact.
For example, two borrowings are particularly worth remarking: silk (in 888, cf.
OED), which was a distortion of China's name (§2.1.1), and china ‘China
porcelain, China-ware’ (in 1555, cf. OED), which signal that China was so
famous for such products that its very name became their synonym. The total
identification of the product with the country of origin and vice versa gives a
picture of the main context of contact: commerce, mainly in silk and porcelain
products.
Two more loanwords deserve particular attention. The first is kowtow (in 1804,
cf. OED), it is the word for ‘the Chinese custom of touching the ground with the
forehead in the act of prostrating oneself, as an expression of extreme respect,
submission, or worship’, it was the act requested to British ambassadors
Macartney and Amherst to be received by the Chinese emperors, an act which
the ambassadors were not willing to perform, creating one of the earliest clash
of cultures among the two countries (Kissinger 2011: 64-80). The second is yen
‘the craving of a drug-addicted for his drug (orig. for opium)’: such word,

40
Moody (1996: 418, note 1) thus explains his use of such plural “because many Chinese
dialects are mutually unintelligible, I have chosen to treat the various dialects sources of
borrowings as separate language sources”. See §3.2.1 on main Chinese varieties.

87
borrowed few years after the Opium Wars (in 1876, cf. OED), may be regarded
as a milestone in Chinese-English contact, as it is the blatant mark of the
phenomenon which brought to the conflicts. More recent loanwords such as
Boxer, Maoism, Spiritual pollution, Reform and Opening Up and the like left
marks of China's main political changes in the English language. These
loanwords and their appearing may be compared to newspapers headlines, in
the way they identify what is - or was - ‘going on’.

3.4.1 Identifying the nature of contact

Two different periodisations (both based on the dating given by the OED) of
such contact are proposed by Gu Juhua (1996) and Zhao Yonggang (2009).
Gu Juhua (1996: 61-62) describes a three-phased history of contact spanning
the two millennia since the emergence of the Silk Road. The author suggests
that each of the periods had its main semantic fields involved in borrowing (thus
indicating main contexts of contact or, at least, what most aroused Westerners'
interest) and preferred borrowing strategy:
(1) early period (from Qin to mid-Ming dynasty, i.e. third century BC –
sixteenth century), in which as commercial intercourse, human relations
and communication between China and England were scarce, almost no
culture could be exchanged. As a consequence, loanwords of such period
are limited to China, Chinese, Sino- and silk, i.e. to the name China itself.
(2) middle period (from later Ming to the 1911 Revolution), in which
commerce with England (and later with the US) became increasingly
frequent. As trade was limited to the System of Canton (and Southern
China in general) till mid-nineteenth century, loanwords were mostly
from Yue and Min dialects and imported through phonetic borrowing.
Borrowings of such period reflect the particular importance of certain
objects, and may be divided into seven main semantic fields:
(a) tea products: tea, cha (chá 茶 ), hyson (xīchūn 熙春 ), pekoe (báiháo 白
毫), congou (gōngfū 工夫), oolong (wūlóng 乌龙);
(b) stoneware and porcelain: kaolin (gāolǐng 高岭 ), nankeen (nánjīng 南
京), wu ts'ai (wǔcǎi 五彩)
(c) animals: shanghai ‘a domestic breed of fowl’ (Shànghǎi 上海 ), kylin ‘a
fabulous animal of composite form’ (qílín 麒麟 ), shih-tzu ‘a dog’ (shīzi
狮子狗);

88
 (d) silk fabrics: shantung (Shāndōng 山 东 ), pekin (Běijīng 北 京 ), honan
(Hénán 河南), tsatlee (Qīlǐ 七里);
(e) food: chowmein (chǎomiàn 炒 面 ), pakchoi (báicài 白 菜 ), chopsuey
(zásuì 杂碎), lo mein (lāmiàn 拉面), tofu (dòufu 豆腐);
(f) plants and fruits: litchi (lìzhī 荔枝 ), longan (lóngyǎn 龙眼 ), tung (tóng
桐), ginseng (rénshēn 人参);

(g) local customs: chop-sticks (kuàizi 筷子 ), pipa ‘a lute’ (pípá 琵琶 ), wei-

chi ‘Chinese chess’ (wéiqí 围 棋 ), cohong (gōngháng 公 行 ), kowtow
(kētóu 磕头), yen ‘craving’ (yǐn 瘾), coolie (kǔlì 苦力), chin-chin (qǐng 请).
(3) recent period (from 1911 to present), in which China underwent big
changes, and international trade and communication grew fast.
Borrowing also speeded up, particularly after the establishment of the
PRC, when many words relating to China's policies (but also traditional
culture) entered English. Loans of such period are imported through both
(a) phonetic borrowing, e.g. gungho (gònghé 共和 ), dazibao (dàzì bào 大
字 报 ), mahjong (májiàng 麻 将 ), tai chi chuan (tàijí quán 太 极 拳 ),
dimsum (diǎnxīn 点心), fengshui (fēngshuǐ 风水), and
(b) loan translation, e.g. Four modernizations (sìgè xiàndàihuà 四个现代
化 ), Reform and Opening Up (gǎigé kāifàng 改 革 开 放 ), Special
Economic Zone (jīngjì tèqū 经济特区 ), Dragon boat festival (lóngzhōu
jié 龙舟节).
The author's indication that the preferred borrowing strategy has been changing
through the three periods, shifting slowly from phonetic borrowing to loan
translation, is rather interesting. It is indeed reasonable to argue that this shift
may suggest that longer and more intense contact has led England (and the
anglophone world in general) to a growing knowledge of China and its language,
thus making such strategy possible and even convenient.
A different periodisation of Chinese-English contact and the related borrowing
is proposed by Zhao Yonggang (2009: 147-48), who confirms the three-phased
periodisation, but maintains that the two main events on whose borders it
should be divided are the First Opium War (1840 – 1842, see §2.1.3) and the
founding of the the PRC in 1949:
(1) the period till the Opium War may be further divided on the line of 1637,
when the first British fleet arrived in China:
(a) before 1637, communication between the two countries needed a

89
 third country act as a mediator, as in the case of silk which was
borrowed through Latin and Greek (§2.1.1), cha ‘tea’ (chá 茶 ) through
Portuguese, and tea (from the same Chinese etymon, but in Minnan
dialect) from Dutch;
(b) After 1637, England and China (and, as a consequence, their
languages) were in direct contact and borrowing speeded up, e.g.
bohea (wǔyí 武夷), kowtow (kòutóu 叩头, a possible variant of kētóu 磕
头), Confucian (kǒngzǐ 孔子), Taoism (dào 道);
(2) between the Opium War and the establishment of the PRC, China
gradually fell into a semi-colonial and semi-feudal society. Beside a small
amount of words for tea and silk products and stoneware, borrowing of
such period mostly reflects China's “backwardness” (luohou 落 后 ) and
“mystery” (shenmi 神 秘 ), e.g. fan-tan ‘a gambling game’ (fān tān 番 摊 ),
mahjong, yen ‘craving for opium’, yen-shee ‘deposit of opium ashes
formed in the bowl of an opium pipe’ (yān shǐ 烟 屎 ), kylin (qílín 麒 麟 ),
lohan ‘Buddhist arhat’ (luóhàn 罗汉 ), lingchi/lingchih ‘a fungus believed
to give longevity’ (língzhī 灵芝); nonetheless, some other loanwords of the
period also reflect the transformation of Chinese culture, e.g. pai-hua
‘vernacular language’ (báihuà 白话);
(3) after 1949, most of borrowing reflects China's major historical events,
political reforms and economic developments, but also Chinese peculiar
culture, e.g. Maoism, Denger ‘follower of Deng Xiaoping’ ( 邓小平 ), work-
point (gōngfēn 工 分 ), xiahai ‘change one's occupation to enter market
economy’ (xiàhǎi 下海 ), family planner (jìhuà shēngyù 计划生育 ), Special
Economic Zone.

3.4.2 Quantifying language-contact

The nature of Chinese-English contact till 1934 and the amount of lexical
borrowing towards English are defined by the compilers of the Webster's
Second (W2: XIV, cited by Knowlton 1970: 9) as follows:

In addition to proper names, more than a hundred words of Chinese origin

have come into the English language, largely as a result of early trade contacts
with China. These borrowings include especially names of plants, fruits,
vegetables, governmental organizations, and the names of Chinese dynasties
The flow of lexical exchange (“more than a hundred words”) of the early period
of contact seems to slow down in the following three decades: a fairly

90
comprehensible phenomenon if one considers that those were the years of the
World War Two, the Japanese invasion of China, the civil war, and China's
isolation following the establishment of the PRC. The scarce influence of
Chinese (along with Japanese and Korean) borrowing toward English is attested
by the compilers of the Webster's Third (W3), among whom, as Knowlton (1970:
8-9) reports, there were no specialists of such languages; Knowlton addressed a
query to the publishers of the dictionary questioning this choice, they thus
justified it: “because new words from these sources were comparatively few
during the interval since the second edition” (Knowlton 1970: 8-9).
Of course, Chinese-English historical relationship is also reflected in English
loanwords into Chinese. It is therefore worth noting that China's “closure”
between the establishment of the PRC and the Reforms (1949 – 1978) is
mirrored in the scarce quantity of loanwords which entered the language in the
same period. Wang Tiekun (1993, cited in Sun Hechuan & Jiang Keli 2000: 105)
quantifies as many as 3,600 new words emerging between 1949 and 1978, only
27 (0.75%) among these were loanwords (a less than one per year rate) 41. The
situation changed in the Reforms era, when not only China's market, but
Chinese vocabulary too opened, as Wang Tiekun's (ibidem) statistics show that
among the 1,700 new words coined in the period, 58 (3.4%) were loanwords
(almost 6 per year).
The pace of the growth of China's interrelation with the outside world is testified
by the growing number of loanwords Chinese import every year, and by their
rising percentage among Chinese neologisms, shown below in Fig. 8.

Fig. 8: Average loanwords into Chinese per year and their percentage among total neologisms.
Data for 1949/1978 and 1979/1988 are from Wang Tiekun (1993), data for 1991 and 1992 from
Yu Gengyuan (1992 and 1993 respectively). All data are cited from Su Hechuan & Jiang Keli
(2000: 105-06).
41
Here, we might disagree with Sun Hechuan's & Jiang Keli's (2000: 106) claim that “the few
absorptions of English words into Chinese during the years 1949-77 attest to China's prior
lack of need for Western influence”, arguing it attests instead to China's lack of Western
influence and contact in general.

91
 3.5 “Chinese borrowings in English”: quantity and
origins
Two main studies on Chinese borrowings in English were conducted by Cannon
(1988) and Yang Jian (2009), quantifying how many words recorded in English
major desktop dictionaries are labelled as “Chinese” in their etymologies.

3.5.1 Cannon's study

Cannon's work, which “remains unparalleled among studies of Chinese
borrowings with regard to comprehensiveness” (Yang Jian 2009: 91), is of great
interest to our research in that it gives a reliable corpus of Chinese loanwords in
English, and some highly helpful statistics which will be briefly summarised
here.
Cannon (1988) uses eight modern English dictionaries of the time (listed in
References) to calculate the number of Chinese loanwords in English. He
chooses three dictionaries edited in the UK and five in the US as a standard of
“general” English, finding as many as 979 entries 42. He then arbitrarily assumes
“a minimum of three appearances as an indication of acceptance in general
international English” (Cannon 1988: 9), concluding his research with a total of
196 words “generally accepted” in English: 45 of these words are recorded in
every dictionary he used.
The importance and the main object of the commercial relation between the two
countries is evident in the great productivity of the word tea. As many as 133
viable compounds with such component appear in Cannon's study (in initial,
final and medial position), category shifts of such word also appear as adjective
and verb, e.g. teaer, teaette, teaey, tealess (Cannon 1988: 10). Tea is not the
most-productive word in Cannon's corpus though, indeed such position is held
by the word Japan, which is contained “in some form” in as many as 149 items
(ibidem).
Cannon also gives useful indications of the semantic fields most involved in
borrowing. In an attempt to test the generalisation by Chan & Kwok (1985: 51)
that “food is the area of Chinese culture which has had the greatest impact on
the English-speaking world” (Cannon 1988: 15), he (ivi: 13-18) categorises his
979 items corpus in 19 semantic areas, the most numerous of which are food

42
Cannon (1988: 8-9) admits “our corpus may be so large because it contains rather rare words
that most native speakers of English would not recognize, perhaps because the dictionary
editors have collected items from more obscure sources that English readers seldom see”.

92
and drink including utensils (190 items), biota (175), geography (110) and arts
(100). Chan's & Kwok's assumption seems therefore being confirmed, but as
Cannon (ivi: 15-16) explains that the first two categories are “badly skewed” by
the two most-recurring words (tea appears in 100 items out of the 190 of the
“food and drink” category and 24 of the “biota”, while some form of Japan is
contained in 80 of the 134 of the “biota” group), he concludes that if those items
are disregarded, “geographical” rather than food items constitutes the chief area
(ivi: 17).
Still from the semantic fields' perspective, it is worth noting that 59 items refer
to ceramics (again, one of the areas of major interest to British trade), that the
49 religious-philosophical items reflect the wide variety in Chinese religions,
spanning from Buddhism and Shintoism to Confucianism and Taoism, and that
33 of the 48 governmental-political items concern the Communists in China and
their policies (ivi: 16), a field that gave numerous words in the twentieth
century, particularly through loan translation. Such strategy is poorly
represented in the corpus, as only 49 loan translation and their 11 derivations,
compounds and functional shifts (6.1%) are found in the study (ivi: 21).
Some speculation on the importance of the identification of the place of origin
with the product was already made earlier in §3.4, the surprising proportion of
the onomastic source in Cannon's study deserves therefore to be noted. The
author (ivi: 14) reports that 51% (501 items) of his corpus contains at least one
proper noun: among them “place-names dominate, town or city names
providing 136 items” (14%) which refer to “the people, dialect, or artistic activity
found there” as in the case of the silk fabrics quoted above from Gu Juhua
(1996), which are named after their places of origin.
Finally, Cannon (1988: 18) provides useful information on the lexical categories
of Chinese loanwords in English. Not only are his data consistent with the
“hierarchy” that was described earlier in §1.6.1.1, but they give an even more
radicalised image of the phenomenon. Indeed, as many as 813 (83%) items are
nouns, 142 (15%) are adjectives and only 19 (1.9%) are verbs. Chinese borrowing
in English becomes even more hierarchical if one considers that 118 of the 142
adjectives come from proper nouns, and 9 of the 19 verbs are functional shifts
from nouns.
Wang Rongpei & Chang Junyue (2001: 73) connect Cannon's findings to their
four-phased process of absorption and assimilation (described earlier in §3.3.3),

93
explaining that
(1) words found in one or two dictionaries belong to the first phase
(“infiltration”), and are often written in italics or quotation marks and
accompanied by explicating notes;
(2) three or four appearances correspond to the “early assimilation” phase,
such words have already been integrated, have inflectional endings and
resemble English phonological shape (tao, shanghaier, chiao, fen, Peke);
(3) five to seven appearances correspond to “considerable assimilation”, such
words do not need notes or quotation marks usually (Confucian, Maoist,
wok, soy);
(4) words found in each dictionary are equal to native words in use, they are
not limited in time or place but used by speakers from all over the world
(Cantonese, tea, silk, china).
The authors (ibidem) admit two inconsistencies in their description. One is the
word yuan ‘currency’ 元 , which despite being recorded in seven dictionaries
shows no morphological inflection for plural (but note that such phenomenon is
described as typical of units of measurement by Gu Juhua, see §3.3.3). The
other is guanxi ‘personal network of influence’ ( 关 系 ), which despite being
largely used, especially in newspapers and China-related business talk, is not
recorded in any of the dictionaries (neither in the OED): such an exclusion is
surprising, but it is reasonable to predict that it will be recorded in future
editions.

3.5.1.1 Sociolinguistic implications of Chinese borrowings in English

Cannon devotes an article (1990) to the presentation of the sociolinguistic
implications of Chinese borrowings in English, in which he emphasises that his
findings testify to the growing importance of the Chinese source for English
vocabulary. As the author claims (ivi: 41), “scholars have generally considered
Chinese to have had little impact on English”: Serjeantson's (1962: 237-40)
History of Foreign Words in English, published in the 1930s, tabulated only 27
items from Chinese (six more if one also adds loanwords of Chinese origin
mediated by Japanese). The trend, he (ivi: 42) notes, was already in place after
Serjeantson's study, as the W3 (1961) records 155 new items which were not in
the W2 (1934), a fact which suggests that they were “fairly new in English”.
Nonetheless, the author admits that the majority of Chinese loanwords “are still
rather foreign” (ivi: 49) in English vocabulary. In fact, he (ivi: 48) explains that
94
“old” loans usually gain additional meanings if they remain viable for a long
time (“as many French, Greek and Latin loans have demonstrated over the
centuries”), but despite Serjeantson's 27 items being among the oldest and best-
known Chinese borrowings in English, only ten of them have multiple
meanings. Among Cannon's (1988) loanwords, only 7% has gained at least one
new meaning: e.g. nankeen (which was not in Serjeantson's list) has five (‘fabric,
trousers, colour, porcelain, kind of lace’).
Among Chinese loanwords, only tea and possibly Japan have moved into the
core vocabulary (Cannon 1990: 51). All “tea items”, the author notes, are rather
old (cf. OED's dating), as if “the concept and use of tea have been fully utilized in
English-speakers' culture and may have little future productivity” (ivi: 46).
Cannon (ivi: 43) maintains that few of the items in his corpus have “stylistic or
regional associations that may limit their currency” and “none of the items is
socially stigmatized as obscene or vulgar”: in other words, they are not used to
enrich the vocabulary potential for “slangy speech” (see Weinreich's motivations
for lexical innovation described in §1.7.1). Some critical information is missing
though, and further statistical research is needed to answer the sociolinguistic
questions the author poses about the words in his corpus:

is the item chiefly used by English-speaking expatriates in at least a partly

Chinese environment, in a Chinatown in an English-speaking environment like
London, or in a purely English setting, or only to small and intimate groups?
Does the consistent use of such items contribute to one's being a member of a
more sophisticated social class (and its absence, of a lower class)? Do age,
occupation, status, or social factors permit (or prohibit) its use? […] is the
writer or speaker a bilingual in Chinese and English, a blue-collar worker, or a
lower-middle-class urbanite? (Cannon 1990: 45)

3.5.2 Yang Jian's study

Twenty years after Cannon's (1988) research, Yang Jian (2009) updates his
colleague's work to investigate if old loanwords have stood the test of time and
are still found in dictionaries, to find out if new ones have been borrowed, and
to try to infer possible trends from them.
Abiding by Cannon's methodology, Yang Jian uses the new editions of six of his
predecessor's dictionaries, and replaces the other two (all are listed in
References), maintaining the three-British vs. five-American proportion (Yang
Jian 2009: 92). He takes Cannon's most-attested 196 Chinese loanwords (those
found in at least three dictionaries) as a corpus, then excludes all the

95
compounds formed by Japanese or tea and an English noun43, and all the
loanwords which came into English via other languages 44, obtaining a reduced
list of 100 items. Yang Jian then looks the resulting words up on the new
dictionaries and, defining arbitrarily a “borrowing with acceptance” as one
occurring in at least three dictionaries (as in Cannon 1988), he finds that
Cannon's loanwords did stood the test of time, and even became more common
over the last twenty years. Cannon's and his findings are shown below in Fig. 9.

Fig. 9: Chinese loanwords in Yang Jian's list, divided according to their appearances in
Cannon's (1988) and Yang Jian's (2009) dictionaries. The image is copied from Yang Jian
(2009: 94).

43
The author (2009: 93) thus justifies his choice: “their unmatched productivity in forming
compounds, clearly discernible even 20 years ago, shows they have been well integrated into
the English language, effectively separating them from most words of Chinese origin”.
44
The author (ibidem) justifies his choice maintaining that since China is “no more in seclusion
as before 1980”, many more Chinese words enter English without the help of transmission
languages. He (ibidem) also highlights that most of the loanwords which entered English
through Japanese “have referents usually associated with Japan rather than China” and are
therefore “largely irrelevant to the rapidly developing contact between Chinese and general
English”.

96
As the comparison between Cannon's and Yang Jian's works in Fig. 9 shows, 95
out of 100 words with acceptance in Cannon's modified list are found in no less
than three of the newer dictionaries, thus preserving the “acceptance” they had
twenty years earlier.
Moreover, the visual comparison clearly shows that a much larger proportion of
words (57 to 25) is now found in each dictionary, thus showing that such words
“not only stood the test of time as other borrowings with acceptance, but also
are occurring more frequently in general English than 20 years ago” (ivi: 96):
they are somehow more “accepted” than they were before.
Finally, Yang Jian finds 59 more items recorded in at least three of his eight new
dictionaries, i.e. 59 more, newly “accepted” loanwords. They are shown below in
Fig. 10.

Fig. 10: New Chinese loanwords found in Yang Jian's (2009) dictionaries. The image is copied
from Yang Jian (2009: 95).

As he finds that a total of 154 items are now recorded in at least three
dictionaries, as compared with only 100 items twenty years earlier, the author
(ivi: 95) argues that “Chinese borrowings with acceptance have grown by 54 per
cent”, an astonishing growth in the short period under examination.
The analysis of the semantic fields involved shows that “food and drink” is
dwindling among more recent borrowings and is no longer the largest semantic
field which is left to “history and politics” (ivi: 103), thus suggesting that the
nature of contact and the field of major interest is changing towards different
aspects of Chinese culture and society in particular.
From the point of view of the borrowing strategies, Yang Jian (ibidem)
highlights the rising portion of loan translations among the new items (10 items,

97
or 17.5%), as compared to the percentage among the older items (10 items, or
10%); he (ivi: 94) also reports the sizeable percentage of loan translations (40%)
he found in a previous study (Yang Jian 2005), thus confirming a trend that was
already mentioned in §3.4.1.
Yang Jian (2009: 97) further sheds some light on the dialectal sources of the
new items, explaining that loanwords from Cantonese and Amoy dialects have
decreased during the last twenty years when compared with those from
Mandarin. He (ivi: 100) maintains that this is primarily attributable to the
growing contact between anglophone and Mandarin-speakers: both in business
(no more confined to the Yue or Min speaking South) and language learning
(English in China and Chinese abroad), as well as to the status of such languages
“in relation to the rapidly changing Chinese sociolinguistic landscape” (ivi: 97).
The choice of Mandarin as a national language, carried out after the
establishment of the PRC, is certainly part of this landscape. As Mandarin is
being established as the language of the official discourse, it limits the space for
contact between the other dialects and English and finds more inroads into it.
Finally, the author (2009: 104-05) hypothesises that

in the foreseeable future, Chinese borrowings will occur more frequently, more
borrowings will come from Mandarin, the majority of the new loanwords will
be Pinyin-based, and both the new loanwords and loan translations will occur
in various semantic fields. Additionally, a higher proportion of Chinese words
will be borrowed as loan translations than in the corpus developed by Cannon
(1988).

3.5.3 Dialectal sources of Chinese loanwords

As it was described earlier in §3.2, “Chinese” is an all-encompassing umbrella-
term. Its size risks “skewing” our research, hiding important aspects and thus
influencing our deductions. Fortunately, some in-depth analyses on the source
languages of Chinese loanwords in English were done, linking such words to
their etyma (or models) in Chinese ‘varieties’. Such studies give a fundamental
contribution to our research in that they highlight connections which would be
invisible if one limited himself to the “Chinese” etymological label.
The attempt, made by the editors of the Webster's Third, to give specific dialect
attributions for words of Chinese origin was defined by Knowlton (1970: 28) as
a “desirable ambition” but perhaps too great a task for perfection and
consistency to be achieved. Indeed, not every ‘phonetic’ loan may be coherently
and undoubtedly traced back to its source dialect as the possible model in one

98
dialect may be too similar to that in another one, and loan translation is even
more difficult to attribute, as Chinese varieties differ primarily in phonology
rather than in lexicon (Moody 1996: 407).
Due to the historical motivations mentioned earlier (§2.1.3), a sizeable portion
of early borrowings came from Southern dialects, above all Yue (also Cantonese)
and Min (also Amoy), while the rest is almost certainly of Mandarin origin:
these are the three main sources identified by Chen Donnson (1992: 61).
When one tries to delve deeper into Chinese borrowings and divides them
amongst dialectal sources and semantic fields, significant correlations between
referents and places of origin emerge, as if certain dialects had ‘specialised’ in
giving certain semantic areas to English. After all, it seems reasonable that
words for tea products were borrowed from Amoy (or Min), the dialect of the
primary tea producing region of China (Fujian), that words for traditional foods
were borrowed from the dialect of the cuisine they belonged to (often Cantonese
or Yue), and that words for ‘institutional’ topics were borrowed from the ‘dialect’
used in those institutions (the “Mandarin” label, which today is the translation
used for the ‘common language’ or putonghua 普通话 enhanced by institutional
policies after the founding of the PRC, was also used in the past to designate
guanhua 官话 the ‘speech of officials’ used in the government).
A comprehensive study on transmission and source languages of the loanwords
identified by Cannon (1988) was carried out by Moody (1996). The scholar bases
his corpus on the 196 items “with acceptance” (recorded in at least three
dictionaries) in his predecessor's research, then investigates their source or
transmission languages and the semantic fields in which these borrowings
occur. To prevent his results from being “skewed” by the already mentioned
high productivity of tea and Japan, Moody (ivi: 406) includes them as a single
borrowing in his corpus; he (ibidem) also deletes ten loan translations from the
list45. This leaves a corpus of 92 words, which is shown below in Fig. 11.
As the author (ivi: 405) highlights, these loanwords “form general semantic
fields which reflect the nature of contact between Chinese and English speakers”
and, it is possible to argue, between English and speakers of each Chinese
45
The deleted items are: barefoot doctor, Canton crepe, Canton flannel, face, Middle
Kingdom, paper tiger, Red Guard, scorched earth, warlord, and winter melon. Moody
(1996: 406-07) gives two reasons for such deletions: the first one concerns the fact that
scholars are not unanimous in defining loan translation as borrowing (cf. §1.2.3), the second
one depends on the main target of his study “because typological differences between
Chinese languages usually do not appear in loan translations, they offer little evidence about
the source or transmission languages”.

99
variety.

Fig. 11: Summary of source languages of Chinese borrowings in English as given by Moody
(1996: p. 408). The dating of first attestations in brackets is also given by the author and based
on the OED2.

The division reported in Fig. 11 emphasises that borrowings from Mandarin

mainly refer to three semantic fields typically associated with “high” culture
(ibidem):
(1) philosophy and religion (e.g. Confucius, I-Ching, tao, yin and yang);
(2) history and politics (e.g. Tang, Sung and Ming dynasties, Japan,
Maoism, yamen);
(3) art (e.g. silk products pongee and shantung, and stoneware petuntse).
New Mandarin loanwords in Yang Jian's (2009) study also predominantly refer
to these areas (e.g. feng shui, Mencius, laogai, putonghua, pipa), testifying that
the correlation between Mandarin and such semantic fields is still productive.
Zou Yuanyan (2006: 99) highlights a further semantic field in Mandarin
borrowings: that of units of measurement and currency (liang, li, fen, chiao,
yuan), which also suggests “the official nature of this language”.
On the other hand, borrowings from Cantonese (Yue) dialect primarily include a

100
large number of words for various foods (e.g. bok choy, chopsuey, chow mein,
dimsum, wonton and wok, and tropical fruits kumquat and loquat), which is
again the semantic field of most of new Cantonese borrowings found by Yang
Jian (2009). Zou Yuanyan (2006: 99) maintains that this is attributable to the
“large number of Chinese emigrants from Cantonese-speaking regions” in the
last 150 years (cf. §2.2), many of whom ran Chinese restaurants (Yang Jian
2009: 104), such supposition is congruent with the dating given by the OED2.
Remaining Cantonese borrowings in Cannon's (1988) list are also worth noting
in relation to Canton's history: sampan ‘a Chinese boat’, taipan ‘a foreign
merchant’ (which are testaments to Chinese trade relation with the British
seafarers that began in the city) and yen ‘craving for opium’ (whose importance
was already emphasised in §3.4).
Finally, it is self-evident that Amoy (Min) borrowings belong to only one sub-
category, each and everyone of them being a word related to tea. The role of
Fujian province as China's primary tea producing region was already
mentioned, its foreign trade with the Dutch (whose language may have been the
intermediary with English in the borrowing of tea, cf. OED) and Portuguese
until the middle of the eighteenth century and later with the British (Zou
Yuanyan 2006: 99-100) is also to be noted: the influence of the Amoy dialect on
this semantic field is profound. The fact that 4 of its 5 loanwords were borrowed
within a period of 36 years in the early eighteenth century suggests that such
channel has somehow ‘frozen’, in favour of the remaining sources: Yang Jian
(2009) finds only one borrowing from Amoy in the recent period (cumshaw ‘a
present’), but it was already recorded in TCD (as Pidgin-English).
Moody (1996: 416) acknowledges that the source language of the 13 “uncertain”
items “cannot be determined from phonological similarity or historical
evidence”, as the Mandarin and Cantonese pronunciations of such words are
similar except that in tone (a difference which was clearly lost in borrowing).
Nonetheless, Chen Donnson (1992: 61) argues that one of them (sycee) is
Cantonese. Another item which is labelled as “uncertain” by Moody (souchong)
is definitely such, as Chen Donnson argues it is Amoy, W3 defines it Mandarin,
while Knowlton (1970: 14) suggests it is “more likely” Cantonese. The same
holds true for longan, the etymon of the fruit being “uncertain” for Moody,
whereas Mandarin for the W3 and Cantonese for Knowlton (1970: 14). Two of
the tea varieties which are labelled as Amoy by Moody (hyson and pekoe) are

101
believed to be Mandarin (“Beijingese”) and Cantonese respectively by Chen
Donnson (1992: 61), whereas another one which Moody defines Mandarin
(oolong) is labelled Cantonese by Knowlton (1970: 14) and Chen Donnson
(1992: 61).

3.5.4 Transmission languages of Chinese loanwords

The analysis of the transmission languages through which Chinese words were
borrowed into English may also emphasise historical and sociolinguistic
implications, attesting to the the important intermediary roles they played in
different historical periods.
Chen Donnson (1992), who bases his study on different sources from those used
by Cannon (1988), resulting nonetheless in a comparable amount of loans
(200), asserts that 200 more words of Chinese origin have reached English
through Japanese (Chen Donnson 1992: 61). One is the word Japan itself
(Rìběn 日本, which is already considered among Chinese loans by Cannon 1988);
other examples the author cites are samisen (sānxiàn 三 线 literally ‘three
strings’) and ginkgo (yínxìng 银杏, literally ‘silver apricot’).
Once more, Moody (1996) does a precious work identifying the transmission
languages of the words in Cannon's (1988) list, as shown below in Fig. 12. He
graphically divides them from ‘purely’ Chinese loanwords, highlighting their
diversity from the former group.

Fig. 12: Summary of transmission languages of Chinese borrowings in English as given by

Moody (1996: p. 408). The dating of first attestations in brackets is also given by the author
and based on the OED2.

As can be seen in Fig. 12, Japanese is the most active transmitter of Chinese
words into English: the motivation for such role lies probably in the

102
geographical and cultural closeness of the two countries, and in Japanese earlier
“opening” towards the West, which brought the country to act as a mediator
between East and West. The peculiarity of Japanese borrowings is that “most of
these items have been borrowed into English as if they were native Japanese
words rather than Chinese loans” (Moody 1996: 407), such perception has led to
some instance of double borrowing from a single Chinese etymon, e.g.
Japanese-transmitted yen ‘currency’ and Chinese yuan ‘currency’ ( 元 ), whose
distinction is maintained in the fact they refer alternately to Japanese and
Chinese currency respectively. Besides, the Chinese origin of these loanwords is
difficult to observe in their English forms (e.g. the etyma of seppuku and judo
would be qièfù 切腹 and róudào 柔 道 respectively in Mandarin). Moody (1996:
407) argues that “in the process of having been borrowed [from Chinese] into
Japanese, these words are culturally and linguistically nativized as Japanese
before they are borrowed into English”. Therefore, what is Chinese in them
seems to be limited to the fact that they are written in Chinese characters,
whereas the whole of their ‘meaning’ (not a secondary aspect in borrowing) is
Japanese.
The second most active transmission language is French, but the author (407-
09) acknowledges that the three loanwords derived from the toponym Běijīng
( 北 京 ), i.e. Peking, Pekin, and Peke, and the one derived from the toponym
Nánjīng (南京), i.e. nankeen, are considered (unmediated) Mandarin borrowings
in the W3. Moody (ivi: 418, note 7) admits that two of these borrowings (Peking
and nankeen) may be French-influenced rather than French-transmitted, and
therefore considered as borrowed directly from Chinese. This may lead to re-
evaluate the importance of French as a transmission language of Chinese loans
in English. For two of the remaining loanwords transmitted through French in
Moody's list, French must be considered only the last step in the transmission
process: galingale ‘an aromatic root’ has in fact made a long ‘journey’ from the
original Chinese etymon gāoliangjiāng 高 粱 姜 through Persian and Arab, then
French and eventually into English (Serjeantson 1962: 237); while bonze
‘Buddhist clergyman’, whose etymon is Chinese fánsēng 凡 僧 , owes its
phonological form to the Japanese pronunciation (bonzō) transmitted through
Portuguese and then French (ivi: 239). According to Moody (1996: 409), these
two last cases epitomise the complexities of the transmission through Indo-
European languages, which “typically obscures the word's Chinese origin”.

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Pidgin English was the transmission language for two words before it fell into
disuse as described earlier in §3.2.1: chop-chop ‘quickly’ and chopstick.
According to the OED (and W2, cf. Knowlton 1970: 12), the latter is derived
from the former, as Pidgin speakers who had a limited understanding of written
Chinese substituted the Pidgin word chop ‘quick’ (kuài 快) as a mistranslation of
the almost homonymous Chinese word for ‘chopstick’ (kuàizi 筷 子 ). The set of
such borrowings was certainly the trade of the System of Canton, where Pidgin-
English developed.
Dutch is the transmission language for soya from Japanese shōyu ( 酱油 ) which
was originally borrowed from Mandarin (jiàngyóu or maybe chǐyóu 豉 油 , cf.
Serjeantson 1962: 239). The same Japanese word shōyu was also borrowed into
English as soy, representing a second case of double borrowing from a single
etymon (Moody 1996: 410). The role of this language is attributable to the Dutch
expansion in South-East Asia and Southern Japan in the seventeenth century.
A third instance of double borrowing is that of tea and cha, both borrowed from
the same etymon (chá 茶 , cf. Moody 1996: 415): the former from the Amoy
pronunciation t'e, through Portuguese; the latter from the Mandarin (or
possibly Cantonese, cf. Moody 1996: 415) one, through Dutch.
Cannon himself already noted the particular status of the words in his list which
were indirectly borrowed, as intervening languages put their own stamp upon
such items (1990: 47), for this reason he (1988: 13) emphasised that:

we must broaden the concept of borrowing in order to accommodate

such items, which must be tagged so as to separate them from directly
transmitted loanwords and to show that they reflect facts about the
intermediary language, not about Chinese or its influence on English.
Finally, two loanwords in Cannon's list are recorded as “non-Chinese” by
Moody. The first one is darjeeling which is simply “not a Chinese loanword” to
the author (ivi: 417), the mistake probably originating “because of its frequent
collocation with tea”. The second is ketchup, for whose etymology the author
(ivi: 416-17) makes some interesting argumentation. He explains that the
Cantonese cognate (ke jap 茄酱 , Mandarin: qié jiàng) of the English term refers
to both ‘tomato juice’ and ‘ketchup’, but when the character ke 茄 (qié) is used in
isolation it means ‘eggplant’, whereas it becomes ‘tomato’ only when preceded
by the modifier faan 番 (fān). This, in the author's opinion, suggests that the
meaning of ‘tomato’ “is not central to the Chinese character; instead a tomato is

104
a kind of eggplant”. Therefore, he (ibidem) argues, the Cantonese word for
‘ketchup’, literally ke ‘eggplant’ + jap ‘juice’, has a highly conventionalized
meaning. Besides, Moody adds that the character ke 茄 (Mandarin: qié)
“strongly resembles two other characters frequently used to transliterate foreign
words”: jiā 加 and kā 咖 46 thus suggesting that the Cantonese word was also
borrowed from another etymon. Both of Moody's arguments are quite
convincing, and here we cannot but acknowledge that there is not unanimous
consensus on the etymology of the word, as the other dictionaries used in the
present research also disagree: while the OEDs record it as “probably” of
Chinese (Cantonese, as does Chen Donnson 1992: 61) origin, CHA and TCD
record it as East-Indian, while W3 and SKT as Malaysian (but SKT adds
“perhaps ultimately of Chinese origin”). Furthermore, those dictionaries which
label ketchup as “Chinese” add a translation which reads ‘brine of pickled fish’,
which seems to have nothing in common with the ke jap or qié jiàng ( 茄 酱 )
proposed by Moody (1996), neither with today's “tomato ketchup”; Jufrasky
(2014: 49-63) explains such differences narrating the long history of southern
China's “preserved-fish sauce”. He (ivi: 54-55) argues that ke-tchup was the
name given by Fujianese traders to such product in the sixteenth century, but
maintains that ke is not part of the word for tomato ( 茄 ) as it was described by
Moody (1996), but a different ke (which he does not report); he also emphasises
that tomatoes were not added to the recipe until the nineteenth century,
probably first in Britain (ivi: 60). Therefore, the borrowing of the noun seems to
be independent from the ‘evolution’ the sauce underwent in the West. That of
ketchup is just an example of the troublesome and fascinating history a single
word may carry with itself.
It is worth noting that among the loanwords which (according to Moody and the
other cited studies) made their way into English through transmission
languages, only one was borrowed in the twentieth century (and from an
etymon of more than one hundred years earlier). This datum may be viewed as
showing that Chinese and English have developed a closer contact, thus no more
necessitating an intermediary between them. Again, history and borrowing
prove to be interrelated.

46
Note that the character qié 茄 itself, pronounced jiā, may be used to transliterate phonetic
borrowings, e.g. jiākè 茄克 ‘jacket’ and xuějiā 雪茄 ‘cigar’.

105
106
 4 A DIACHRONIC ANALYSIS OF EARLY CHINESE
BORROWINGS IN ENGLISH

4.1 Foreword

4.1.1 Corpus and aims

Here, we present a survey of the 196 entries Cannon (1988) found in at least
three of the eight dictionaries he analysed, reduced to 100 according to Yang
Jian's (2009) criteria (cf. §3.5.2, notes 43-44). We also added chopstick and
chop-chop to the list, as the scholarship used for the present research maintains
that they were imported via Pidgin English, hence we consider them quasi-
direct borrowings. The decision to exclude words allegedly borrowed through
every other transmission language (as in Yang Jian 2009) derives from the main
focus of the present research, that is the (direct) contact between the two
languages. We acknowledge that other possible corpora may also have been
chosen for the present research: for example, including indirect borrowings may
shed a light on the knowledge of the role played by transmission languages in
the etymological dictionaries we used, whereas choosing different (in time or
place of publishing) dictionaries may give different results.
Following Cannon's assumption that, being recorded in at least three
dictionaries, the loanwords in his list were already “accepted” in general
English at the time of his study (1988), we investigate them by means of five
etymological dictionaries (CHA, TCD, SKT, PAR, O66) and three general
dictionaries (HID, O34, W3), which were published over the century before
Cannon's research (1880s to 1960s). By doing so, we try to verify
(4) when the loanwords which were already widely recorded in the
authoritative desktop dictionaries of the 1980s were accepted into the
“official” language;
(5) if their etymology was already recorded as Chinese;
(6) if further indication on their dialectal source or transmission language
was given.

4.1.2 Methodology and data presentation

Each word in the list was looked up in the OED and reported according to the
first given spelling in the headlines. On the same line, the word is followed by
the dating of the first appearance as given by the OED in brackets, the

107
pronunciation in IPA (for words the reader may be unfamiliar with), and a
symbol explaining its etymology:

Fig. 13: Legend

V: Verified the word is recorded, and the etymology is Chinese;
O: Other the word is recorded, but not as Chinese;
U: Uncertain the word is recorded, but no etymology is given;
X: Absent the word is not recorded.
On the second line, eventual alternative spellings of the word (in bold font) and
the etymology recorded in the OED are presented in square brackets. On the
third and the following lines, the relative lexical categories (with the dating of
appearance) and definitions by the OED are given. It is worth remarking that a
single headline is displayed for both categories of five items, which were split in
Cannon (1988): Jap (n. and adj.), japan (n. and v.), Japanese (n. and adj.),
kowtow (n. and v.) and yen (n. and v.).
Below the definition of each word, a chart presents the results of our research.
Each column displays one of the dictionaries used for the present study: a
symbol (see the Legend in Fig. 13) shows if the dictionary recorded the word
and, if so, if the etymology is Chinese, otherwise or uncertain.
Where two words are related (and their etymology is evidently one), the symbol
is copied in the derived one, as the source is to be considered identical: for
example “O (like japan)” informs the reader that the (non Chinese) etymology of
such word is under the entry japan. Where no etymology is given for a word, but
a clear indication of the place of origin of the referent is mentioned, the symbol
will be attached following such indication: for example Confucian will be
labelled “V” if the entry states “follower of the Chinese philosopher”.
If a rather different definition from the one of the OED is given in the dictionary
under examination, it will be reported after the symbol. Where further
etymological indications are given in the dictionaries (e.g. from which
transmission language or source dialect, possible alternatives or degree of
certitude), they are reported in square brackets.
To be certain the word is or is not recorded, each word in the list is looked up in
each dictionary under every possible spelling quoted by the OED, and
compounds are looked up under each of their components.

4.2 Results
barefoot doctor (1971) V
[< translating Chinese chìjiǎoyīshēng, < chì ‘bare’ + jiǎo ‘foot’ + yīshēng ‘physician’]

108
n. A paramedical worker with basic medical training, esp. one working in rural China.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X X X X X X X X

bohea (1702) /bəʊˈhiː/ V

[also bohee. < Chinese Wu-i(shan) the Wu-i hills in north of Fuhkien]
n. The name was given in the beginning of the 18th c. to the finest kinds of black tea; but the
quality now known as ‘Bohea’ is the lowest, being the last crop of the season.
adj. Of the Wu-i hills, whence black tea was first brought to England; applied also to tea of
similar quality grown elsewhere.
CHA TCD SKT O34 PAR W3 O66 HID
V V V V X V V V
[Chinese] the lowest [Chinese] [fr. Chin. [Chin (Pek) finest kind [Chinese
quality of Wu-i wu3-i2, hills of black tea (Fukien
tea, tea name of in China [XVIII < dialect) bu-
generally district] where it Fuhkienese i, Mandarin
[Chin.] was grown] Chinese Chinese
Bu-i, local wu3i2, after
var. of Wu-i Wu-i Shan,
[...] whence [...] where
black tea the black
was first tea was
brought to grown]
England]

bok choi (1847) Brit. /ˌbɒk ˈtʃɔɪ/, U.S. /ˌbɑk ˈtʃɔɪ/ V

[also pak-tsae, bok tsoi, pak choi, baak choi. < Chinese (Cantonese) baahk choi (Meyer-
Wempe transcription paâk ts'oi ) ‘white vegetable’ < baahk ‘white’ + choi ‘vegetable’]
n. A kind of edible Chinese cabbage, Brassica rapa (Chinensis group), having broad, smooth-
edged leaves which taper into succulent broad white petioles.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X X X X X V X V
pak choi: pak choi
[Chin [Cantonese
(Cantonese) paak ts'oi,
paâk ts'oi Mandarin
‘white pai2ts'ai4
vegetable’] ‘white
vegetable’:
pai2 ‘white’
+ ts'ai4
‘vegetable’]

Canton crape (1860) V

n. Originally made of silk from Canton, this crêpe is widely used for dresses; it has a very pebbly
surface and drapes and hangs beautifully.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X X X X X V X V
[fr. Canton, only China [originally
China] crape made in
Canton,
China]

Canton flannel (1881) V

n. a soft, downy fabric, the same on both sides.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X X X X X V X V
[originally

109
 made in
Canton,
China]

char (1919) /tʃɑː(r)/ V

[< Chinese (Mandarin) ch'a tea] from the etymology in tea: [The Portuguese brought the form
cha (which is Cantonese as well as Mandarin) from Macao. This form also passed overland into
Russia]
n. Popular spelling of cha [Properly, the name of tea in the Mandarin dialect of Chinese, which
was occasionally used in English at the first introduction of the beverage. (Some subsequently
applied it as a name to the special form of rolled tea used in central Asia). Now used slang for
‘tea’.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X X X X V V V X
(see tea) [Hindi cā, (see tea)
fr. Chin
(Pek ) ch’a2]

cheongsam (1957) /tʃɪɒŋˈsæm/ V

[also chong-sam. < Chinese]
n. a garment worn by Chinese women.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X X X X X X X X

chin-chin (1795) /tʃɪn tʃɪn/ V

[< Chinese ts'ing ts'ing]
n. a phrase of salutation. Also used as a drinking toast.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X X X V X V V X
[Chin. interj. [XVIII <
ts'ing [Chin (Pek) Chinese
ts'ing] ch’ing3 t'sing
, ch’ing3 t'sing]
-ch’ing3, an
expression
of courtesy]

chop-chop (1834) /ˈtʃɒpˈtʃɒp/ O

[< Pidgin-English, < Chinese k'wâi-k'wâi]
adv. and int. Quick, quickly; hurry up!
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X X X X O O X X
[a pidgin [Pidgin E.
mispron. fr. a Chin
of the dial. word
Cantonese akin to Cant
version of kap4kap4]
a Pekinese
word for
‘promptly’,
‘speedily’]

chop-stick (1699) V
[< In Chinese and in “pigeon-English” chop means ‘quick’; ‘quick sticks’ would be a kind of
equivalent of the Chinese name, k'wâi-tsze, i.e. ‘nimble boys’, ‘nimble ones’]

110
n. pl. The two small sticks or slips of bone, wood, ivory, or the like, held between the thumb and
fingers of one hand by the Chinese in place of a fork for conveying food to the mouth.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
U U X V O O V O
[chop, a [transl. of [pidgin [pidgin E., [XVII < [Pidgin
corruption Ch. K'wai- version of fr. chop Chinese English
if kih tsze a Ch ‘fast’ (fr. a and Pidgin chop ‘fast’,
‘quick’] ‘nimble name, Chin dial. English prob fr.
ones’ fr. which word akin chop ‘quick’ Cantonese
Chin chop means lit. to Cant kap + stick; kap,
‘quick’ + ‘the + E stick; translation Mandarin
stick] speedy transl. of of Ch. chi2 ‘fast,
ones’] Chin (Cant) K'wâi-tsze hurried’ +
faaì tsź] ‘nimble sticks. A
boys, loose
nimble translation
ones’] of
Cantonese
fai chi and
Mandarin
kwai4 tse0
‘fast ones’]

chop suey (1888) /ˌtʃɒpˈsuːɪ/ V

[< Chinese (Cantonese) shap suì ‘mixed bits’]
n. A Chinese-style dish of meat or chicken, rice, onions, etc., fried in sesame-oil. Also fig.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X X X X X V V V
[Chin [XIX < [Cantonese
(Cant) shap Chinese tsap sui,
suì ‘odds ‘mixed Mandarin
and ends’, bits’] cha2 sui4
fr. shap ‘mixed
‘miscellano pieces’]
us’ + suì
‘bits’]

chow (1872) /tʃaʊ/ O

[Pidgin-English and slang ‘food, or a meal, of any kind’. Also spec. = chow-chow. Also attrib.]
n. This sense is supposed to be due to the use of the chow (‘the edible dog of China’) as food by
poor Chinese.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X O X V V V O O
a mixture Chinese slang for [perhaps fr. [perh. [Pidgin
of food preserve 'food', Chin (Pek) Pidgin English,
such as of orange- short for chiao3 meat English, of prob fr.
the peel, chowcho dumplig] unknown Mandarin
Chinese ginger, &c w a dish of slang: a origin] ch'ao3 to
use [Chin] mixed meal or stir, fry,
[Pidgin- preserves mealtime cook]
English] orig Ch

chow chow (1889) /ˈtʃaʊtʃaʊ/ U

[Also chow-dog. < According to Col. Yule, “pigeon-English”; of uncertain origin]
n. A dog of Chinese breed, something like a Pomeranian, usually black or brown, with a black
tongue.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X O X V V V V O
a dog of dog of a a breed of [fr. a Chin [XIX < like [perh.

111
 Chinese Chinese dog orig dial. word chow] Pidigin
breed breed Ch akin to Cant English, fr.
[Pidgin- kaú ‘dog’] Cantonese
English] kao and
Mandarin
kou3 ‘dog’]

chow mein (1903) /tʃaʊ meɪn/ V

[< Chinese, lit. ‘fried flour’]
n. Fried noodles served with a thick sauce or stew composed of chopped meat, vegetables, etc.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X X X X X V X V
[Chin (Pek) [Cantonese
ch'ao3 variant of
mien4 , fr. Mandarin
ch'ao3 ‘to ch'ao3 mien4
fry’ + mien4 ‘fried
‘flour, noodles’]
dough,
vermicelli’]

confucian (1847) V
[< name Confucius + -an suffix. Confucius is Latinized from the Chinese K'ung Fû tsze, meaning
‘K'ung the (our, your) Master (or Philosopher)’, K'ung being the surname of the great Chinese
sage]
adj. Of or relating to the Chinese philosopher Confucius, or his teaching, or followers.
n. A follower of Confucius
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
V V X V V V V V
the [fr. fr. the fr. the Chin pert. to the fr. the
Chinese Confucius Latin form philos. Chinese Chinese
philos. latiniz. of of philosopher philos. and
K'ung Fû Pekinese [XIX fr. teacher
tsze ‘K'ung K'ung fu- Confucius,
the tzu ‘King latinized
master’ + Master’ form of
-an] Chinese
K'ung Fu
tsze]

confucianism (1862) V
n. the doctrines or system of Confucius and his followers.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X V X V X V X V
the (like fr. the Chin fr. the
Chinese Confucian philos. Chinese
philos. ) philos. and
teacher

congou (1725) /ˈkɒŋɡuː/ /ˈkɒŋɡə/ V

[also Congo, Kongo. < Chinese kung-fu ‘work’ and ‘workman’, kung-fu-ch‘a apparently ‘tea on
which work or labour is expended’. The omission of the f is the foreigner's corruption (Prof.
Legge)]
n. A kind of black tea imported from China.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
V V V V X V V V
a kind of [Chinese a kind of [fr. Chin. black tea [XVIII < [Amoy

112
black tea kung-fu black tea kung-fu from China Chinese kong hu
[Chinese]. ‘labour’, [Chinese] (cha) [prob. fr. (Amoy) (tē),
referring ‘labour Chin kung hu tē, Mandarin
to the (tea)’] (Amoy) for kung fu kung1 fu1
labour kong-hu ch'a ‘tea on (cha2), tea
expended ‘expenditur which elaborately
in e of time labour has prepared or
producing and effort, been brewed, fr.
the tea] pains taken’ expended’, kung1 fu1
(Pek kung1- fr. kung fu ‘labor,
fu1)] ‘work, work’]
workman’,
ch'a ‘tea’]

dim sum (1948) /dɪm sʌm/ V

[also deem sim, tim-sam. < Cantonese dím sàm; compare Chinese diǎnxin]
n. A savoury Cantonese-style snack; a meal consisting of these. Also attrib.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X X X X X X X X

face (1834) V
[Originally used by the English trading community in China. < Partly after Chinese liǎn ‘face,
moral character’, and partly after miànzi ‘face, social prestige’]
n. Reputation, credit; honour, good name. Freq. in to loose face, to save face.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X X X X X O X O
such such
meaning is meaning is
reported, reported,
but no but no
Chinese Chinese
influence is influence is
mentioned mentioned

fan-tan (1878) /ˈfæntæn/ V

[< Chinese fan t'an ‘repeated divisions’]
n. A Chinese gambling game, in which a number of small coins are placed under a bowl and the
players then bet as to what will be the remainder when the pile has been divided by four.

CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID

X X X X X V V V
[Chin fan1- [XIX < [Cantonese
t'an1] from Ch. fan t'an
2: a card fan t'an ‘repeated
game also ‘repeated division’:
called divisions’] fan ‘times,
sevens. division’ +
t'an
‘distributio
n, division’]

fen (1852) /fən/ V

[also fan, fun. < Chinese fēn ‘one hundredth part’]
n. A Chinese monetary unit equivalent to one hundredth of a yuan or one tenth of a jiao;
formerly, a candareen. Also, a coin of this value.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X X X X X V X V
[Chin (Pek) [Mandarin

113
 fen1] fen1]

ginseng (1692) /ˈdʒɪnsɛŋ/ V

[also genseg, ginsem, ginsing, jin(g)sing, gengzeng, ghinschenn. < Chinese jên shên;
the first word means ‘man’, the second is of obscure meaning; Giles suggests that the compound
means ‘image of man’, and alludes to the forked shape of the root]
n. A plant of either of two species of the genus Aralia or Panax, found in Northern China and
Nepaul, also in Canada and the eastern United States.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X V X V X V V V
a Chinese [from Ch. [Chin (Pek) XVII < Ch. [Mandarin
panacea jên-shên jen2-shen1] jēn shēn jen2 shen1:
for (jên 'man') ‘man jen2 ‘man’
exhaustio perh. = image’, with (because
n of body ‘image of allusion to the forked
or mind man’, with the form of root
[from allusion to the root] resembles a
Chin. jin- forked human
tsan ] root] being with
limbs) +
shen1
‘ginseng’]

gung-ho (1942) /ɡʌŋ həʊ/ V

[also kung-hou. < Chinese kung ‘work’ + ho ‘together’]
n. A slogan adopted in the war of 1939–1945 by the United States Marines under General E.
Carlson (1896–1947); hence as adj.: enthusiastic, eager, zealous.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X X X X X V X O
[fr. Chin [Pidgin
(Pek) English:
kung1-ho2 prob
(short for Mandarin
ch'ing1- kung1 ‘work’
1 2
kung -yeh + ho2
2 4
ho -tso ‘together’]
she4 ‘Light
Industries
Cooperative
Society’),
taken to
mean ‘work
together’]

Han (1936) /hæn/ V

n. Designating a Chinese dynasty [...] marked by the introduction of Buddhism, the extension of
Chinese rule over Mongolia, the revival of letters, and increase of wealth and culture.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X X X X X V X V
1: Han a Chinese
[Chin] dynasty
dynasty 2:
Han race

hyson (1740) /ˈhaɪsən/ V

114
[< Chinese hsi-ch‘un, in Cantonese hei-ch‘un, ‘bright spring’, the name of coarse green tea.
young hyson is Yü-ch‘ien ‘before the rains’ (so called from the early picking of the leaf), whence
a former trade-name uchain]
n. A species of green tea from China. young hyson, a fine green tea.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
V V V V X V V V
a very fine a very fine a kind of [fr. Chin. [Chin (Pek) [XVIII < [Cantonese
sort of sort of tea hsi-ch'un hsi1 ch’un1, Chinese hei ch'on,
green tea green tea [Chinese: lit. ‘bright lit. hsi-ch'un Mandarin
[Chinese [Chinese] from spring’] ‘flourishing (Cantonese hsi1 ch'un1
‘first Amoy hi spring’] hei-ch'un) ‘bright
crop’] ‘blooming’ ‘bright spring’]
; ch'un, spring’]
‘spring’;
Chinese
hei-ch’un]

I-Ching (1786) /iː ˈtʃɪŋ/ V

[< Chinese, lit. ‘Book of Changes’]
n. The name of an ancient Chinese divination manual, based on symbols known as the eight
trigrams and sixty-four hexagrams.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X X X X X X X X

Jap (c1880) O
n. Colloquial abbreviation of Japanese adj. As n. and adj. the word Jap has strong derogatory
connotations and is now falling into disuse.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X U X V V O X V
(see (see (like japan) (like japan)
japanese) japanese)

japan (1688) O
[also Giapan, Japon < apparently < Malay Jăpung, Japang, < Chinese Jih-pŭn (= Japanese
Ni-pon), ‘sun-rise’, ‘orient’, < jih (Japanese ni) ‘sun’ + pŭn (Japanese pon, hon) ‘origin’. The
earliest form in which the Chinese name reached Europe was apparently in Marco Polo's
Chipangu, in Pigafetta Cipanghu. The existing forms represent Portuguese apão and Dutch
Japan, ‘acquired from the traders at Malacca in the Malay forms’ (Yule)]
n. A varnish of exceptional hardness, which originally came from Japan. (1688)
v. 1. trans. To lacquer with japan; to varnish with any material that gives a hard black gloss. 2.
transf. To make black and glossy as in japanning; to polish or cover with black. 3. slang. To
make clerical, to ordain with reference to the black coat). (1688)
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
U U U V V O V V
after the named (see (see [fr. Japan, [XVII < [from
manner of from the japanese) japanese) whence it from Malay Japan,
the country. orig. came] Japang, prob. fr.
Japanese Japung Malay
or people adoption of Japang, fr.
of Japan. Ch. Jih pun Chinese
‘sunrise, Jih4-pen3
orient’] ‘(Land of
the) Rising
Sun’]

Japan clover (1884) U

115
n. a leguminous annual introduced into the southern United States in 1840 from China and
Japan.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X X X X X O X U
(like japan)

Japan current (1865) O

[→ kuroshiwo. Japanese, < kuro ‘black’ + shiwo ‘tide’]
n. The Black Current or Gulf Stream of Japan.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X X X X X X X U

Japan wax (1859) U

n. a yellow wax obtained from the berries of certain plants of the genus Rhus.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X X X X X O X U
(like japan)

Japanese (1604) O
[< Japan n. + -ese suffix]
adj. Of or pertaining to Japan. (1719)
n. 1 A native of Japan. 2 The Japanese language. (1604)
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
U U X V V O V V
[prob. fr. [Japan (like japan) (like japan) (like japan)
Malay derives,
Japung fr. via Early
Chin. Jih- Modern
pun French
‘sunrise’ and
(jih ‘sun’ + French
pun Japon, fr.
‘origin’)] Ch.
Jihpên, a
shortening
of Jih-
pên-kuo
‘land of
the origin
of the
sun’]

Japanesque (1883) O
[< Japan n. + -esque suffix]
adj. Japanese in style or manner.
n. A design or ornament in Japanese style.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X X X V X O X X
(see (like japan)
japanese)

japonica (1819) /dʒəˈpɒnɪkə/ O

[< modern Latin, feminine of japonicus pertaining to Japan]
n. 1 A name used for various plants originally native to Japan, esp. formerly the camellia (C.
japonica); now usually designating a spring-flowering, deciduous shrub of the genus
Chænomeles, esp. C. japonica, the Japanese quince, or its fruit. 2 The fruit of the Asian plant
Zizyphus jujuba (Z. sinensis); cf. Jujube n.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID

116
 X U X O O O O O
[modern [French [New Latin, [feminine [New Latin
Latin] Japan is fr. fem of of modern Japanese,
latinized Japonicus Latin from
as Japanese, Japonicus Japonia,
Japonia, fr. Japonia ‘Japanese’] Japan]
with Japan + L
Scientific -icus -ic]
Latin adj. 1: camellia
Japonicus 2: japanese
, whence quince 3:
japonica] crape
myrtle

jiao (1949) /dʒaʊ/ V

[also chiao fr. Chinese]
n. a unit of currency and coin in China.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X X X X X X X V
[Mandarin
chiao3 ‘an
animal's
horn’, liquid
measure
made from
a horn]

ketchup (1711) V
[also kitchup, catchup. Apparently < Chinese (Amoy dialect) kôechiap or kê-tsiap ‘brine of
pickled fish or shell-fish’ (Douglas Chinese Dict. 46/1, 242/1). Malay kēchap (in Dutch spelling
ketjap), which has been claimed as the original source (Scott Malayan Wds. in English 64–67),
may be from Chinese. The Japanese kitjap, alleged in some recent dicts., is an impossible form
for that language. (? error for Javanese)]
n. A sauce made from the juice of mushrooms, walnuts, tomatoes, etc., and used as a condiment
with meat, fish, or the like. Often with qualification, as mushroom ketchup, etc.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
O O V V X O V V
catchup, [East a sauce [probably [fr. Malay [XVIII < [Malay
[probably Indian [Malay from Ch. kěchap from Ch. kechap, fr.
of E. kitjap] kēchup, kôe-chiap ‘spiced fish (Amoy) Chinese
Indian kichup, a ‘brine of sauce’] kōe-chiap, (Amoy)
origin] sauce; in pickled kē-tsiap kōetsiap,
Dutch fish’] ‘brine of kētsiap
spelling fish’, cf. ‘brine of
ketjup. Malay fish’: koe
Perhaps kēchap ‘minced
ult. of (Dutch seafood’ +
Chinese ketjap), tsiap ‘brine,
origin] which is sauce,
prob. fr. juice’,
Chinese] Mandarin
chih3]

kowtow (1804) /kaʊˈtaʊ/ /kəʊˈtaʊ/ V

[also kow-too, ko-too, -tou, ka-tou, koo-too < Chinese k'o-t'ou, k'o ‘knock’ + t'ou ‘the head’]
n. 1 The Chinese custom of touching the ground with the forehead in the act of prostrating
oneself, as an expression of extreme respect, submission, or worship. 2 fig. An act of obsequious
respect. (1804)
v. 1 intr. To perform the kow-tow. Also transf. 2 fig. To act in an obsequious manner. (1826)
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID

117
 X V X V X V V V
[Chin.] [from Ch. [fr. Chin [XIX <
[Mandarin
k'o-t'ou (Pek) k’o1 from Ch.
k'o1 t'ou2:
(k'o t’ou2, fr. k’o1 k'o-t'ou, k'o
k'o1 ‘to
‘knock’ + ‘to strike, ‘knock’ +
knock,
t'ou bump’ + t'ou ‘head’]
bump’ +
‘head’)] t’ou2 ‘head’]
t'ou2 ‘head’]

kumquat (1699) V
[also camquit, cum-, -quot, kum-kat. < The Cantonese dialectal form of the Chinese name
kin kü ‘gold orange’]
n. A small, orange-like citrus fruit from a tree of the genus Fortunella, native to southern China
and Malaysia.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X X X X V V V V
[fr. the [fr. Chin cumquat [Cantonese
Cantonese (Cant) kam [Cantonese kam kwat,
pron of kwat, fr. variation of kam kat,
Pekinese kam ‘gold’ Chinese kin Mandarin
chin-chu + kwat kü ‘gold chin1 chü2
lit. ‘golden ‘orange’] orange’] ‘golden
orange’] orange’:
chin1 ‘gold,
golden’ +
chü2
‘orange’]

kung fu (1966) /kʊŋˈfuː/ /kʌŋ-/ V

[also kung-fu. < Chinese]
n. The Chinese form of karate. Also attrib.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X X X X X X X X

kuomintang (1912) /kuːəʊmɪnˈtæŋ/ /-ˈtɑːŋ/ V

[< Chinese, lit. ‘national people's party’]
n. A nationalist radical party founded in China under Sun Yat-Sen in 1912, and led, after his
death in 1925, by Chiang Kai-Shek, constituting the government before the Communist Party
took power in October 1949, and subsequently forming the central administration of Taiwan.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X X X X X X X V
[Mandarin
kuo2 min2
tang3
‘Nationalist
Party’: kuo2
‘nation’ +
min2
‘people’ +
tang3
‘party’]

li (1588) /liː/ V
[also lii, le(e), ly. lai < Chinese]
n.1 The ordinary Chinese itinerary measure. 2 A Chinese weight, one-thousandth part of a
liang. (A li of silver is equivalent to the copper coin called by Europeans a cash. 3 Chinese rule,
rite, religion 4 An ancient Chinese cooking vessel of bronze or pottery with usu. three hollow
legs.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID

118
 X V X X X V V V
1. a any of Chinese [Chinese li3]
Chinese various itinerary
weight; 2. Chinese measure
a Chinese units of [XVI],
mile distance Chinese
[Chinese] [Chin (Pek) weight
li3] [XVII]

liang (1827) /ljæŋ/ V

[ also leang. < Chinese]
n. A Chinese weight, about 1⅓ oz. avoirdupois; this weight in silver as a money of account. Also
called tael.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X V X X X V X V
a Chinese [Chin (Pek) [Mandarin
ounce or liang3] liang3]
tael

litchi (1588) /ˈliːtʃiː/ V

[also lechia, lechya, lichea, letchee, lichee, lé ché, leecha, leeche, leechee, li-chee,
lichi, li-chi, lychee, lychus. < Chinese li-chi]
n. The fruit of an evergreen tree, Litchi chinensis, of the family Sapindaceæ, native to southern
China but widely cultivated in tropical countries elsewhere; the fruit is a large berry with a
rough, brown skin and sweet, white flesh, which is eaten fresh or preserved.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X V X V X V V V
a Chinese [fr. Chin. [Chin (Pek) [XVI < [Cantonese
fruit; the li-chi] li4 chih1] Chinese li- lai chi,
tree it tchi] Mandarin
grows on li4chih1]

longan (1732) /ˈlɒŋɡən/ V

[Also lungung, lungan, lung-yen. < Chinese lung-yen, lit. ‘dragon's eye’, < lung ‘dragon’ +
yen ‘eye’]
n. The fruit of an evergreen tree, Nephelium Longanum, cultivated in China and the East
Indies; also, the tree itself.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X X X X X V X X
[Chin (Pek)
lung2 yen3,
lit. ‘dragon
eye’]

loquat (1820) /ˈləʊkwæt/ V

[Also lacott, loquet, loquette, loquot. < Chinese (Canton dialect) luh kwat, literally ‘rush
orange’]
n. The fruit of Eriobotrya japonica, a native of China and Japan, introduced into southern
Europe, India, and Australia. The tree itself. Also loquat tree.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X V X V X V V V
an [fr. Chin. [Chin [XIX < [Cantonese
esteemed luh kwat (Cant) lō- Chinese luh lō kwat, lo
Chinese ‘rush kwat] kwat ‘rush kat,
and orange’] orange’] Mandarin
Japanese lu2chü2
fruit ‘rush
[Chinese] orange’: lu2
‘rush’ +
chü2

119
 ‘orange’]

mahjong (1922) Brit. /ˌmɑːˈ(d)ʒɒŋ/, U.S. /ˌmɑˈ(d)ʒɑŋ/ V

[< Chinese májiàng. Compare French mah-jong(g) (c1923). The pronunciation with /ʒ/ does
not reflect Chinese pronunciation, and results from analogy with words with /ʒ/ from French]
n. A game for four (of modern Chinese origin, and introduced into Europe and North America
in the early 1920s), normally played with 136 tiles divided into five or six suits representing
various natural and mythological entities (such as winds, dragons, bamboos, etc.). Also: the
achievement of a winning hand in the game.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X X X V V V V V
a Chinese [fr. the [fr. Mah- [XX < [Cantonese
game Cantonese Jongg, a Chinese ma ma chiung,
pron of a trademark] ‘sparrow’ + Mandarin
Pekinese a game of djung ma2
word Chinese ‘play’] chiang4,
meaning origin ma2 ch'iao4
‘house ‘house
sparrow’: sparrow’ (fr.
? from the the figure of
noise a house
made by sparrow on
the the leading
players] piece of one
of the suits:
ma2
‘spotted’ +
ch'iao4
‘bird,
sparrow’)]

maoism (1950) V
[< the name of Mao Zedong (1893–1976), chairman of the Communist Party of the People's
Republic of China (1949–76) and Chinese head of state (1949–59) + -ism suffix]
n. The Marxist–Leninist theories of Mao Zedong, developed and formerly practised in
communist China, having permanent revolution as a central principle, and emphasizing the
importance of the peasantry, small-scale industry, and agricultural collectivization.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X X X X X X X V
the
communist
political
philosophy
and practice
developed
in China
chiefly by
Mao tse-
tung
maoist (1949) V
[< the name of Mao Zedong (see Maoism n.) + -ist suffix. French maoiste (1942)]
n. A follower of Mao Zedong or his theories.
adj. Of or relating to Maoism or its adherents.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X X X X X X X X

maotai (1962) Brit. /maʊˈtʌɪ/, U.S. /ˌmaʊˈtaɪ/ V

[also mao tai, Mao-t’ai. Shortened < Chinese máotáijiǔ < máotái Maotai, the name of a town
in Guizhou province, south-west China + jiǔ ‘liquor, spirit’]

120
n. A strong alcoholic drink traditionally made in south-western China by distillation in a pot
still of a fermented mixture of wheat and sorghum.
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X X X X X X X X

Middle Kingdom (1662) V

[< Chinese Zhōngguó ‘central state’ (< zhōng ‘centre, middle’ + guó ‘country, state, nation’)]
n. originally the name given to the imperial state, in contrast to the dependencies surrounding
it; (also) from 1911, after Chinese Zhōnghuá (<zhōng + huá magnificent; best part; corona) part
of the official name of the People's Republic of China, and conventionally translated as ‘China’,
China (with reference to the centrality of China's position in the world, as perceived by its
inhabitants).
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X U X U X X X V
Middle Middle [an
Kingdom Kingdom improper
refers to refers to translation
China, but China, but of
no no Mandarin
relation relation Chinese
with the with the name for
translatio translatio China:
n of n of chung1
Zhōngguó Zhōngguó ‘middle’ +
is is kuo2
mentioned mentioned ‘nation’]

Ming (1795) V
[also Min. < Chinese Míng, lit. ‘bright, brilliant, light’]
n. 1 (The name of) a dynasty founded by Zhu Yuanzhang (1328–98) which ruled in China from
1368 until 1644, between the Yuan and the Qing (Ch'ing) dynasties; a ruler belonging to this
dynasty. 2. Ming porcelain.
adj. 1 Designating or relating to the Ming dynasty or its rulers. 2. Designating porcelain ware
made in China during the Ming dynasty and characterized by elaborate designs and vivid
colours. 3. Of a colour: characteristic of Ming porcelain, as Ming blue, Ming green, etc.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X X X X X V X V
[fr. Chin [Mandarin
(Pek) ming2 ming2
‘bright, ‘luminous,
clear, enlightened’
luminous’] ]

oolong (1845) Brit. /ˈuːlɒŋ/, U.S. /ˈuˌlɔŋ/, /ˈuˌlɑŋ/ V

[also olong, wulong. also with capital letter. < Chinese wūlóng < wū ‘black’ + lóng ‘dragon,
imperial’]
n. A variety of dark-coloured China tea. Also oolong tea. Made by fermenting the partially dried
leaves to about half the degree usual for black teas.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X U X X X V X V
a variety [fr. Chin [Mandarin
of black wu1 lung2, wu1 lung2
tea lit. ‘black ‘black
dragon’, fr. dragon’:
wu1 ‘black’ wu1 ‘black’
2
+ lung + lung2
‘dragon’] ‘dragon’]

orange pekoe (1829) Brit. /ˈpiːkəʊ/, /ˈpeɪkəʊ/, U.S. /ˈpiˌkoʊ/, /ˈpeɪˌkoʊ/ V

121
[< Chinese (Southern Min) pekho < pek ‘white’ + ho ‘down, fine hair’ (compare Chinese
(Mandarin) báiháo (Wade-Giles transcription paihao)).] A number of theories exist as to the
origin of the epithet orange. It perhaps refers to the colour of the leaf buds or of the infusion;
there is also some suggestion that originally there might have been some admixture of some part
of the orange bush. However, it does not now designate a particular variety or quality of tea,
simply a grade based on the size and age of the leaves used. Tea was first imported to Europe by
the Dutch in the 17th cent., and it has also been suggested that the reference is to the House of
Orange, but no contemporary evidence has been found to support any of these theories]
n. A grade of black leaf tea made from slightly larger leaves than pekoe and often including part
or all of the leaf buds as well as the young leaves. Also: a drink made from this. The term is used
esp. in the grading of tea produced in Sri Lanka and parts of southern India.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X but V X X X but V X U but V for X but V for U but V for
for pekoe for pekoe pekoe pekoe pekoe
[Chinese] [Chinese]

Panchen Lama (1780) Brit. /ˌpantʃən ˈlɑːmə/, U.S. /ˌpɑn(t)ʃ(ə)n ˈlɑmə/ O

[ < Tibetan < paṇchen ( short for paṇdita chen-po ‘great scholar, great learned one’) + bLama
(the title given to the Buddhist priests of Mongolia and the Tibetan territories of southwestern
China)]
n. In Tibetan Buddhism: the head lama of the Tashilhunpo monastery (in central Tibet), second
to the Dalai Lama in the spiritual and political hierarchy, and (since the 17th cent.) regarded as
being the reincarnation of Amitabha, the second most important Tibetan incarnate lineage after
the Dalai Lama; the Tashi Lama.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X X X X X V X O
(only (only (only (only (only [panchen (only [fr. the
Lama: Lama: Lama: Lama: Lama: fr. Chin Lama: Tibetan title
[Tibetan [Tibetan]) [Tibetan]) [XVII < [Tibetan]) (Pek) pan1 [XVII < Pan-chen-
llama]) Tibetan: ch’an2] Tibetan: rin-po-che
blama]) blama]) ‘great jewel
(among the)
scholars’]

paper tiger (1836) V

[< after Chinese zhǐlǎohǔ < zhǐ ‘paper’ + lǎohǔ ‘tiger’]
n. A person, country, etc., that appears powerful or threatening but is actually weak or
ineffective.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X X X X X U X X

pekoe (1713) Brit. /ˈpiːkəʊ/, /ˈpeɪkəʊ/, U.S. /ˈpiˌkoʊ/, /ˈpeɪkoʊ/ V

[also peckho, pecko, peko. < Chinese (Southern Min) pekho < pek ‘white’ + ho ‘down, fine
hair’ (compare Chinese (Mandarin) báiháo (Wade-Giles transcription paihao)]
n. A high-quality black tea, made from leaves picked young with the down still on them.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
V V V V X V V V
a scented a kind of [fr. Ch. [Chin [XVIII < [Chinese
black tea black tea pek-ho (Amoy) from Ch. (Amoy) peh
[Chinese] (Chinese, (pek pekho, fr. (Amoy) ho: peh
Amoy ‘white’ + pek ‘white’ pek-ho, i.e. (Mandarin
dialect ho + ho pek, pak pai2) ‘white’

122
 pek’ho, ‘down’)] ‘down’] (Mandarin + ho
from pek peh, pai) (Mandarin
‘white’, ho ‘white’ + ho hao2)
‘down’)] (Mandarin ‘down’]
hao) ‘down,
hair’]

petuntse (1728) Brit. /peɪˈtʊntsə/, /pɪˈtʌntsə/, U.S. /pəˈtʊn(t)sə/ V

[also petunsa, petunse, petuntze, pehtuntse. < Chinese báidūnzi (Wade-Gile transcription
pai-tun-tzu; pronunciation with e in the first syllable is due to southern Mandarin dialect) < bái
‘white’ + dūnzi ‘stone block’ (probably referring to the shape in which the pulverized stone was
transported; < dūn ‘mound, stone’ + -zi, enclitic suffix forming nouns)]
n. A white earth prepared (originally in China) by pulverizing a kaolinized granite, and used
with kaolin in the manufacture of porcelain to obtain transparency. Also: the material from
which this earth is prepared, china stone.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X X X V X V X V
[fr. Chin. China stone [Chinese
pai-tun- [Chin (Pek) (Central
tze (pai pe2 tun1 tzŭ, China)
‘white’ + fr. pe2 pe2tun1 tzŭ0:
tun ‘stone’ ‘white’ + pe2
+ suf. tun1 tzŭ (Mandarin
-tze)] ‘mound of pai) ‘white’
earth’] + tun1 tzŭ0
‘mound of
earth’]

Pinyin (1963) Brit. /ˌpɪnˈjɪn/, U.S. /ˈpɪnˈjɪn/ V

[also pin-yin. < Chinese pīnyīn < pīn ‘to put together’ + yīn ‘sound’]
n. The standard system of romanized spelling for transliterating the Chinese language, adopted
officially by the People's Republic of China in 1979 and based on the pronunciation of the Peking
(now Beijing) dialect of Mandarin Chinese.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X X X X X X X X

pongee (1711) Brit. /pɒnˈdʒiː/, /ˈpɒndʒiː/, U.S. /ˈpɑndʒi/, /pɑnˈdʒi/ V

[also paunche, bungee, ponjee. < Chinese běnjī (Wade-Giles transcription pen-chi), lit.
‘home-made’, ‘home-woven’ < běn ‘own’ + jī ‘loom’]
n. A soft, usually unbleached kind of Chinese silk fabric, woven from uneven threads of raw silk;
(also) any fabric resembling this. Originally made from the cocoons of wild silkworms and also
known as Chefoo silk.
adj. Made of this fabric.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X V X V V V V V
[Chin.] [perh. [Pekinese [Chin (Pek) [XVIII < [Mandarin
from Ch. pen-chi pen3 chi1, fr. from Ch. pen3chi1
3
pun-chi ‘home- pen ‘own’ pun-chī = ‘(made by)
‘own woven, + chi1 Mandarin one's own
loom’] home ‘loom’] pun-kī ‘own loom’: pen3
loom’] loom’ or ‘own’ + chi1
pun-cheh ‘loom’]
‘own
weaving’,
i.e. home-
made]

Qing (1790) /tʃɪŋ/ V

[also Ching , Tsing < Chinese Qīng (Wade-Giles transcription Ch'ing)]

123
n. A Chinese dynasty of Manchu emperors which ruled from 1644 until 1912, when it was
overthrown by the Chinese Revolution; the era of this dynasty's rule.
adj. Of or designating the Qing.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X X X X X X X V
Ch'ing
redirects to
Manchu

Red Guard (1954) V

[< red adj. + guard n. < Chinese hóngwèibīng (1966; < hóng ‘red’ + wèibīng ‘guard’, lit.
‘guard-soldier’)]
n. In China: 1. a name given to any of the armed units of rural people in China during the
Second Revolutionary Civil War (1927–37); 2. a militant youth movement in the People's
Republic of China which carried out attacks on intellectuals and other disfavoured groups as
part of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution (1966–76); 3. a member of either of these groups.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X X X X X X X X

Renminbi (1957) /ˈrɛnmɪnbi/ V

[also jenminbi, jenminpi, jen min pi. < Chinese rénmínbì, the name of the currency of
China (1948; Wade–Giles transcription jên-min-pi ) < rénmín ‘the people’, regarded collectively
(< rén ‘person, human being’ + mín ‘the people’) + bì ‘money, currency’]
n. 1. (The name of) the system of currency of the People's Republic of China, introduced in 1948
and having the yuan as its principal unit. Abbreviated RMB. 2. The principal unit of this
currency; the yuan.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X X X X X X X X

sampan (1620) /ˈsæmpæn/ V

[also champana, champan, champane, sampane, siampan, sampaan, sampang,
sanpan. < Chinese san-pan (san ‘three’, pan ‘board’); compare Annamite tam-ban (tam
three). Compare the Spanish spelling cempan (Oviedo 1535); also Portuguese champana]
n. A Chinese word meaning ‘boat’, applied by Europeans in the China seas to any small boat of
Chinese pattern.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X V V V V V V V
a small a kind of [fr. Chin [originally Chinese [XVII < any of
boat used skiff, used san-pan from skiff, Chinese various flat-
in China in the East (san Portugues Japanese san pan, fr. bottomed
and Japan (Malay ‘three’ + e the word boat, or san ‘three’ skiffs used
(also sampan - pan travelled Hawaiian + pan on the
san'pan) Chinese ‘board’)] to Malaya boat used in ‘board’] waterways
[Chin. sanpan, and fishery of the
san, sam lit. ‘three China; the [Chin (Pek) Orient
‘three’, boards’) s- form san1 pan3, [Chinese
pan ‘a derives fr. san1 san1 pan3
board’] immediate ‘three’ + (obsolete;
ly from Ch pan3 ‘board, now shan1
san-pan] plank’] pan3): san1
‘small boat’
+ pan3
‘board’]

scorched earth (1937) V

[< Apparently a translation of Chinese jiāotŭ (zhèngcè) ‘scorched earth (policy)’]
n. used attrib. of a policy of destroying all means of sustenance or supply in a country that
might be of use to an invading enemy, or of orders, operations, etc., designed to effect this
policy; also transf. and fig., and absol.

124
 CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X X X X X X X U
scorched-
earth policy

shanghai (1853) V
[also shanghae, shanghay. < Shanghai or Shanghae, the name of one of the chief seaports of
China]
n. A long-legged, large breed of domestic fowls, with feathered shanks, reputed to have been
introduced from Shanghai; now developed into the brahmas and cochins.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X V X X X V X V
introduce [fr. (like
d from Shanghai, shanghai v.)
Shanghai city in
in China eastern
China]

shanghai (1871) V
[< Shanghai or Shanghae, the name of one of the chief seaports of China]
v 1. Naut. slang (orig. U.S.). To drug or otherwise render insensible, and ship on board a vessel
wanting hands. 2. transf. To transfer forcibly or abduct; to constrain or compel. colloq.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X U X V V V V [XIX < fr. V
[Shanghai [from [fr. Shanghai, [after
in China] Shanghai Shanghai; name of a Shanghai
where this fr. the Chinese (city), from
practice formerly seaport] the former
either widespread custom of
originated use of kidnapping
or earliest unscrupulo sailors to
flourished us means to man ships
] procure going to
sailors for that city]
voyages to
the Orient]
shanghaier (1917) V
n. one who shanghais.
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X X X X X V X X
(like
shanghai v.)

shantung (1882) /ʃænˈtʌŋ/ V

[< the name of a province of North-east China where it is manufactured]
n. A soft undressed Chinese silk (formerly undyed, since 1907 dyed to any shade of colour).
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
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[fr. manufactur
Shantung, ed in
province in Shantung,
northeast China
China]

Shih Tzu (1921) /ˈʃiːtsuː/ V

[also Shitzu. < Chinese shīzigǒu < shī ‘lion’ + zi ‘son’ + gǒu ‘dog’, formerly transliterated shih-
tzu kou]
n. A small long-coated dog of the breed so called, originally developed in China, often tan or
grey and white in colour, with long ears and a tail curling over the back.

125
 CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
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souchong (1761) /suːˈʃɒŋ/ V

[also sutchong. < Chinese siao-chung (Cantonese siu chung) ‘small sort’]
n. One of the finer varieties of black tea.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
U V V V X V V V
a fine sort a kind of [French f. any of [XVIII < [Mandarin
of black tea Chinese several Chinese hsiao3chun
tea [fr. [Chinese, siao Chinese siao chung g3 ‘small
Chin. siao maybe ‘small’ + black teas; (Cantonese kind’:
‘small’, Cantonese chung the coarser siu chung) hsiao3
chung or Amoy] ‘sort’] leaves ‘small sort’] ‘small’ +
‘sort’] obtained chung3
screening ‘kind’]
fired tea [fr.
Chin (Pek
hsiao3
chung3, lit.
‘small sort’]

Sung (1673) /sʊŋ/ V

[also Sunga, Song < Chinese sòng]
n. The name of a dynasty which ruled in China from 960 to 1279; a member of this dynasty.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X X X X X V X V
[fr. the a Chinese
Sung dynasty
dynasty of
China]

sycee (1711) /saɪˈsiː/ V

[also sizee, seze. < Chinese sí (pronounced in Canton sai, sei) sz' ‘fine silk’: “so called because,
if pure, it may be drawn out into fine threads” (Giles in Yule and Burnell Hobson-Jobson)]
n. Fine uncoined silver in the form of lumps of various sizes, usually having a banker's or
assayer's seal stamped on them, formerly used by the Chinese as a medium of exchange. Also
sycee silver.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X X X V X V V V
[fr. Chin. [Chin [XVIII < [Cantonese
Sí sz' ‘fine (Cant) saì Chinese sí sai si ‘fine
silk (as sz, lit. ‘fine (pronounce silk’ (so
capable of threads, d in Canton called
being fine silk’] sai, sei) sz' because the
drawn out ‘fine silk’] pure silver
fine)’] can be spun
into fine
threads,
Mandarin
hsi4 su1: hsi4
‘thin, fine’ +
su1 ‘silk,
thread’]

Tai Chi (1736) /taɪ ˈtʃiː/ V

126
[also t’ai chi.< Chinese tàiji, < tài ‘extreme’ + jí ‘limit’]
n. 1. In Taoism and Neo-Confucianism, the Supreme Ultimate. Also, the symbol which
represents this. 2. In full T'ai Chi Ch'uan [Chinese quán ‘fist’], a Chinese martial art, believed to
have been devised by a Taoist priest in the Sung dynasty (960–1279), promoting meditative as
well as physical proficiency.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X X X X X X X X

taipan (1834) /ˈtaɪpæn/ V

[also taepan, typan. < Dial. variant of Chinese dàbān]
n. A foreign merchant or businessman in China.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X X X X X V X X
[Chin (Pek)
tai4 pan1]

Tai-ping (1853) /taɪpɪŋ/ V

[also Taë-ping. < Chinese T‘ai-p‘ing, i.e. t‘ai ‘great’, p‘ing ‘peace’]
n. The name given to the adherents of a great rebellion which arose in Southern China in 1850,
under the leadership of Hung-siu-tsuen, styled Tien-wang, Heavenly Prince, and T‘ai-p‘ing-
wang, Prince of great peace, who claimed a divine commission to overthrow the Manchu
dynasty and establish one of native origin, to be called the T‘ai-p‘ing Chao or Great Peace
Dynasty. Also attrib.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X V X V X V X X
the name [fr. Chin. [Chin (Pek)
Tai-ping t'ai p'ing t’ai4 p’ing2
‘Grand ‘great ‘peaceful’]
Peace’ was peace’]
applied by
the leader
and his
followers
to his
“reign”
Tang (1669) /tæŋ/ V
[also T'ang, Tanga. < Chinese táng]
n. The name of a dynasty which ruled in China from A.D. 618 to c.906; a ruler belonging to this
dynasty.
attrib. or as adj. Freq. used to designate artefacts, etc., of this period.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
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[fr. Chin Chinese
(Pek) dynasty
t’ang2]

tangram (1864) /ˈtænɡræm/ U

[Origin obscure: second element apparently -gram ( Greek γράμμα) comb. form]
n. The name given to a Chinese geometrical puzzle consisting of a square dissected into five
triangles, a square, and a rhomboid, which can be combined so as to make two equal squares,
and also so as to form several hundred figures, having a rude resemblance to houses, boats,
bottles, glasses, urns, birds, beasts, men, etc. (The Chinese name is Ch'i ch'iao t'u ‘seven
ingenious plan’. The name tangram seems to have been given in England, or perhaps in U.S. but
some have conjectured for the first element Chinese t'an ‘to extend’, or t'ang commonly used in
Canton for ‘Chinese’. Others have conjectured Tan to be the name of the inventor; but no such
person is known to Chinese scholars).
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
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127
 a Chinese [?] [perh. fr. [XIX < [possibly
puzzle Chin (Pek) unknown Chinese
t’ang2 origin] t'ang2
‘Chinese’ + ‘Tang,
E -gram] Chinese
dynasty’
hence the
Chinese +
-gram]

tao (1704) /taʊ/ /d-/ V

[also Dao, Tao, taou, tau. < Chinese dào (Wade-Giles tao) ‘way, path, right way (of life),
reason’]
n. 1 In Taoism, an absolute entity which is the source of the universe; the way in which this
absolute entity functions. 2. In Confucianism and in extended uses, the way to be followed,
the right conduct; doctrine or method.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X X X X X V X X
[Chin (Pek)
tao4, lit.
‘way’]

Taoism (1838) V
[also taou-, tau-, tavism, Daoism. < Tao + -ism suffix]
n. A system of religion, founded upon the doctrine of the ancient Chinese philosopher Laotsze
(or Lao-tzŭ), born 604 B.C., set forth in the work Tao tê king, ‘Book of reason and virtue’,
attributed to him. It ranks with Confucianism and Buddhism as one of the three religions of
China.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X V X V X V V V
the [fr. Chin. [tao + -ism] [XIX < fr. [Mandarin
religious tao ‘way’ + Tao tê king tao4 ‘the
system -ism] ‘book of Way’]
founded reason and
by the virtue’, in
Chinese which the
philosoph system is
er Lao-tze set forth]

Taoist (1838) V
[also taouist, Daoist. < Tao + -ist suffix]
n. An adherent of Taoism.
adj. Of or belonging to the Taoist or Taoism.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X V X X X V X V
(like [tao + -ist] (like
Taoism) Taoism)

tea (1655) V
[also tay, tey, té, thé, the, tee, thea, tea. < (perhaps through Malayte, teh) Chinese, Amoy
dialect te, in Fuchau tiä = Mandarin ch'a (in ancient Chinese probably kia); […] The form te
(thé) was brought into Europe by the Dutch, probably from the Malay at Bantam (if not from
Formosa, where the Fuhkien or Amoy form was used). The original English pronunciation /te:/,
sometimes indicated by spelling tay, is found in rhymes down to 1762, and remains in many
dialects; but the current /ti:/ is found already in the 17th cent., shown in rhymes and by the
spelling te]
n. The leaves of the tea-plant, usually in a dried and prepared state for making the drink); first
imported into Europe in the 17th century, and now extensively used in various parts of the

128
world. According to Meyer, Konversations-Lexikon, the first mention of it in Europe is due to
the Portuguese in 1559 (under the name cha); chia is mentioned in Maffei's Historia Indica in
1588. Under the name te, thee, it was imported by the Dutch from Bantam (where brought by
Chinese merchants from Amoy) c1610–55; first known in Paris 1635, in Russia (by way of
Tartary) 1638, in England about 1650.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
V V V V V V V V
[from [from [from the [from Ch. [Malaysia [Chin [via Dutch [earlier tay,
south Ch. South Amoy dial. t'e, n tēh is an (Amoy) t’e; tee, from tee (prob
the, the Chinese te pronuncia from Ch. adapt. of akin to Ch. (Amoy) via Dutch
common (pronounc tion tē of ch'a] Ch. chia or Chin (Pek) t'e, in thee and
form ed tā), the the tcha, ch’a2 tea] Mandarin Malay the),
being common Chinese whence E dial. ch'a , fr. Amoy te,
tscha] form name for cha, a whence fr. Ancient
being ch'a the plant] specified earlier cha, Chinese
or ts'a] rolled tea, chaa, chia ch'a
and sl (XVI)] (whence
char, any Mandarin
tea] ch'a2)]

tuchun (1917) /ˈduːdʒuːn/ /ˈtuːtʃuːn/ V

[also Tuchun, Tu Chün. < Chinese dūjūn, < dū ‘govern’ + jūn ‘military’]
n. In China at the time of the Three Kingdoms, the title of a military leader; later, in the early
years of the Republic of China, the highest military leader in a province; a warlord.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X X X X X V X V
[Chin (Pek) [Chinese
tu1-chün1, tu1chun1: tu1
lit. ‘to
‘overseer of supervise’ +
troops’] chün1 ‘army,
troops’]

tung oil (1881) /tʌŋ/ V

[< Chinese tóng]
n. a drying oil obtained from the seeds of tung trees and used in varnishes, paints, and inks; so
tung oil tree.
tung-yu (1788) n. [< Chinese yóu ‘oil’] tung oil.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X V X X X V X V
tung oil part trans. extracted
[Chinese of Chin from the
‘varnish (Pek) yu2- seeds of
tree’] t’ung2 ‘tung tung tree,
tree oil’, fr. also called
yu2 ‘oil’ + Chinese
t’ung2 wood oil
‘tung tree’]

tung tree (1899) /tʌŋ/ V

129
[< Chinese tóng]
n. Any of three trees of the genus Aleurites or Vernicia (family Euphorbiaceæ), A. fordii, A.
cordata, and A. montana, which are native to China and Japan and are cultivated there and
elsewhere for the oil from their seeds. So tung tree.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X X X X X V X V
[Chin (Pek) [Mandarin
t’ung2] t'ung2 +
tree]

typhoon (1588) V
[also touffon, tuffon, tuffone, tuffin, tufon, tufaon, tufan, typhawn, tuphan, toofan,
touffan, tūfān. β. tuffoon, tiffoon. γ. tay-fun, ty-foong, tifoon, tyfoon, typhoon. < Two
different Oriental words are included here: (1) the α-forms (like Portuguese tufão , †tufõe ) are <
Urdu (Persian and Arabic) tūfān ‘a violent storm of wind and rain, a tempest, hurricane,
tornado’, commonly referred to Arabic tāfa, ‘to turn round’ (nouns of action tauf , tawafān ),
but possibly an adoption of Greek τῡϕῶν typhon n.2; (2) the β- and γ- forms represent Chinese
tai fung, common dialect forms (as in Cantonese) of ta ‘big’, and fêng ‘wind’ (hence also German
teifun). The spelling of the β-forms has apparently been influenced by that of the earlier-known
Indian word, while that now current is due to association with typhon n.2]
n. A violent cyclonic storm or hurricane occurring in the China seas and adjacent regions,
chiefly during the period from July to October.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
V O O V V U V V
[Ch. tei- [Port. [Arab [partly [from [alte. [XVI < [Cantonese
fun ‘hot tufão -Ar., tūfān - from Cantonese (influenced from Ch. tai fung
wind’] Pers., Hin. Greek Arabic tai-fung ‘a by Gk tai fung, ‘great wind’,
tūfān ‘a τνϕῶν, the tūfān great typhōn dial. Mandarin
hurricane’, word has perh. fr. wind’: ‘whirlwind’ variations ta4feng1: ta4
perh. been Greek Gk etymologi and Chin - of ta ‘big’, ‘great’ +
traceable claimed as tuphōn cally Cant - taaî fêng ‘wind’] fêng1 ‘wind’
to Gr. Chinese, ‘whirlwind influenced fung (but in form
typhōn, from the ’, partly by Early ‘typhoon’, influenced
whence Chinese from Ch. Modern fr. taaî by Greek
obs. Eng. ta, ‘great’, tai fung English ‘great’ + Tuphōn,
typhon, ‘a and fang ‘big wind’] tuphon, fung ‘wind’) ‘typhon’)]
whirlwind’ (Cantones tuphan, of earlier
. The e fung) tufon, touffon,
Chinese ‘wind’; as from Ar tufan fr. Ar
t'ai fung ‘a if ‘great tūfān, tūfān
great wind’. But from ‘hurricane,
wind’, pao this seems Greek deluge’, fr.
fung, to be a late tuphōn ‘a Gk typhōn
‘fierce mystificati hurricane’, ‘whirlwind’;
wind’, are on, and from akin to Gk
prob. unhistoric Tuphōn typhein ‘to
independe al] ‘God of smoke’]
nt] Winds’,
akin to
Greek
tuphos]

war-lord (1922) V
[translating Chinese jūnfá]
n. In China, a military commander who had a regional power base and ruled independently of
the central government, esp. in the period 1916–28.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X X X V X U X U
great an an
captain independen independen

130
 (esp. of . t warlord is t warlord is
[..] Chin. recorded recorded
civil-war
generals

whanghee (1790) V
[also w(h)anghee. < Chinese huang ‘bamboo sprouts too old for eating’, a hard white-skinned
bamboo (Giles)]
n. A cane made of the stem of one or other species of Phyllostachys, Chinese and Japanese
plants allied to and resembling bamboos. Also whangee-cane.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X X X X X V V V
any of [XIX < fr. any of the
several Chinese several
Chinese huang bamboolike
bamboos ‘bamboo Asian
[prob. fr. sprouts too grasses
Chin (Pek) old for [Mandarin
huang2-li2 eating’] huang2li2:
2
fr. huang huang2
‘yellow’ + ‘yellow’ + li2
2
li ‘bamboo ‘a kind of
cane’] bramble’]
winter melon X
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X X X X X U X V
a musk [translation
melon of Chinese
(Cucumis tung1 kua1]
melo
inodorus)

wok (1952) /wɒk/ V

[also wock. < Chinese (Cantonese)]
n. A bowl-shaped pan used in Chinese cookery.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X X X X X X X X

won ton (1948) /wɒn tɒn/ V

[also wan tan, wun tun, and as one word. < Chinese (Cantonese), Pinyin húntun]
n. A small round roll or pocket of dough containing a savoury filling, eaten alone (after being
deep-fried) or boiled in soup ( won ton soup).
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X X X X X V X V
[Chin [Cantonese
(Cant) wan wan tan,
t’an] Mandarin
hun2 t'un2]

Wu (1908) V
[ < Chinese wú]
n. Used attrib. of a group of Chinese dialects spoken in Shanghai, the south of Jiangsu province,
and most parts of Zhejiang province, China. Also absol.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X X X X X V X X
[Chin (Pek)
wu2]

yamen (1747) /ˈjɑːmʌn/ V

131
[also yamun, yamoun, yamên. < Chinese ya ‘tent or pavilion of a general, official residence,
office’ + mun ‘gate’]
n. The office or official residence of a Chinese mandarin; hence, any department of the Chinese
public service, as the tsung li yamun or Chinese ‘foreign office’, established in 1860.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X V X V X V V V
the office [Chin. ya headquarte [XIX < [Mandarin
and ‘general's rs, office, Chinese fr. ya2 mên2:
residence marquee’, court [Chin ya ya2 ‘office of
2
of a mun (Pek) ya - ‘general's a
mandarin ‘gate’] men2] tent or magistrate’,
[Chin.] pavilion, probably
official from ya2
residence’ ‘tooth, flag
+ mun with
‘gate’] serrated
borders
(placed at
the
entrance of
a governor's
office)’ +
mên2 ‘door’]
yang (1671) /jɛn/ V
[also Yang. < Chinese yáng ‘yang, sun, positive, male genitals’]
n. In Chinese philosophy, the masculine or positive principle (characterized by light, warmth,
dryness, activity, etc.) of the two opposing cosmic forces into which creative energy divides and
whose fusion in physical matter brings the phenomenal world into being. Also attrib. or as adj.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X X X X X V X V
[Chin (Pek) [Mandarin
yang2 yang2 ‘the
‘bright, sun,
masculine masculine
principle’] element’]

yen ‘craving’ (1876) /jɛn/ V

[also yin, ying. < Probably of Chinese origin. The most likely etymon is Chinese (Cantonese)
yǎn ‘craving’; the forms yin and ying may reflect the Mandarin pronunciation yǐn of the same
character]
n. The craving of a drug-addict for his drug (orig. for opium).
v. (intr.) to crave for a drug; to yearn, desire strongly. (1919)
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X X X X V V X V
[from Ch: obs. E [Cantonese
Pekinese slang, fr. yan,
yen Chin (Cant) Mandarin
‘opium’ in-yǎn, fr. yin3
(lit. in ‘opium’ + ‘addiction’]
‘smoke’)] yǎn
‘craving’]

yin (1671) V
[Also Yin, Yn. < Chinese yīn ‘shade, feminine; the moon’]
n. In Chinese philosophy, the feminine or negative principle (characterized by dark, wetness,
cold, passivity, disintegration, etc.) of the two opposing cosmic forces into which creative energy
divides and whose fusion in physical matter brings the phenomenal world into being.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X X X X X V X V
[Chin (Pek) [Mandarin
yin1 ‘dark, yin1 ‘the

132
 feminine moon,
principle’] shade,
femininity’]

yuan (1921) /jʊˈɑːn/ V

[also yüan. Pl. unchanged. < Chinese yuán ‘round’]
n. A Chinese unit of currency introduced in 1914, equal to 10 jiao; a coin of this value.
CHA TCD SKT 034 PAR W3 O66 HID
X V X V V V V V
only only only [Chin (Pek) only [Mandarin
Japanese Japanese Japan's yüan4, lit. Japan's yüan2
gold or monetary monetary ‘round, monetary ‘round
silver coin unit [Jap. unit [a circular’] unit [XIX (thing),
[Jap., - fr. Chin. modificati Jap.-Chin. dollar’]
Chin. yüan on of Ch yüan
yuen ‘round, yüan ‘round ,
‘round, a dollar’] ‘circle, round
dollar’] round thing,
(object)’ circle,
hence ‘a dollar’]
coin’]

4.3 Remarks and comments

4.3.1 Time and the quantity of Chinese loanwords

From a quantitative point of view, it is surprising but evident that only three
words of Cannon's (1988) list were recorded in every dictionary of the century
before his study that were used for the present research: japan (n. and v.), tea
and typhoon. These three words are among the oldest according to the dating
given by the OED, and two of them were in Serjeantson's (1962) list of Chinese
borrowings (typhoon was not considered a Chinese borrowing in her study,
neither in many other). Among them, only tea is unanimously considered a
Chinese loanword derived from chá 茶, and every dictionary but PAR recognises
Amoy (or a “southern dialect”) as source language. The etymon of japan (and
words sharing its root) is Chinese Rìběn 日本 for half of the dictionaries used in
the present study, but Japanese or uncertain for the remaining half. The case of
typhoon is more debated, as it is traced back to a Chinese etymon by five
dictionaries47, while it has an independent Mediterranean origin for the
remaining three ones.
47

As none of the dictionaries we used gives the Chinese characters, we have to deduce them
from the pronunciation they report and the translation they attach. These lead to dàfēng 大风
‘big wind’, whereas the modern Chinese for ‘typhoon’ is táifēng 台风, where the first character
in isolation means ‘platform, stage, support’. This suggests that the Chinese taifeng has “a
highly conventionalised meaning” as the one described by Moody (1996) with reference to ke
jap (§3.5.4), and may therefore be a borrowing itself. Nonetheless, there are no reasons to
exclude Chinese dafeng as a possible etymon for English typhoon.

133
The case of ketchup was already considered at the end of the previous chapter,
as there is no unanimous consensus on its (certainly Asian) origin: its possible
Chinese etymon (asserted in four dictionaries) would be the Amoy
pronunciation of qiéjiàng 茄酱 . There is only one dictionary not reporting such
word: PAR. The same volume is also the only one omitting four notorious tea
varieties, whose first appearances are rather old (the eighteenth century,
according to the OED): bohea (wǔyí 武夷), hyson (xīchūn 熙春), pekoe (báiháo 白
毫) and souchong (xiǎochūn 小春 ). Such omissions are vindicated in Partridge's
(1958: IX) foreword, where the editor claims that exoticisms have “deliberately
been treated very meagrely”.
Other loanwords which are recorded in seven dictionaries (chopstick, confucian,
japanese, sampan) are probably excluded in the remaining one because of mere
time, SKT and CHA being published when the contact was still not so strong,
and the words were either rare or their record “unnecessary”. Indeed, these two
dictionaries are the ones reporting the smallest number of words of Cannon's
list: 12 in CHA and 10 in SKT, and the only two dictionaries not recording words
as chow, chow-chow, japonica, pongee and shanghai (v.), which being in every
one else seem rather “accepted”. The word japonica is surely not Chinese
derived, as all the dictionaries recording it give a modern Latin origin. Neither
are chop-chop (which is allegedly Pidgin-English) and face in its ‘moral
character, social prestige’ meaning, upon which no Chinese influence is
mentioned in the dictionaries in our corpus.
Additional loanwords whose acceptance in general English seems a mere matter
of time are chop suey, fan-tan, whanghee, kumquat, and mahjong, the first
three ones being recorded in the three newer dictionaries in a row (i.e. since the
1960s), kumquat since PAR (1950s) and mahjong since O34 (1930s). The
opposite phenomenon, i.e. words recorded in a row in earlier dictionaries and
not in later ones, thus suggesting that they became somehow “obsolete”, is not
in place, at least for the words in Cannon's list.
The low number of Cannon's words in CHA and SKT is not solely a matter of
time though, as it is worth noting that another rather old dictionary, TCD,
already recorded as many as 36 items. The same amount of Cannon's words (36)
was recorded later in O34 and O66 (with some small differences between the
two, some items being deleted while others inserted), whereas only 19 items
were not perceived as “exoticisms” and therefore recorded in PAR. The highest

134
number of words in Cannon's list is recorded in W3 (76) and HID (71), which
contain at least twice as many Chinese loans as every one other.

4.3.2 Chinese loanwords in English (variety)

The above mentioned high representation of Chinese loanwords in W3 and HID,
particularly evident if compared to the one in other dictionaries, may have three
possible explanations:
(1) being published later, such dictionaries had more time to take notice of
the appearance (and the acceptance) of more words in English lexicon;
(2) such dictionaries are simply more thorough and richer than the others;
(3) the third possible reason concerns English varieties, as W3 and HID are
the only two dictionaries used in the present research which were
published in the US, the same country where also Cannon's (1988) work
was compiled.
The first option is somehow disproved by the fact that O66 (1966), published in
the very same period of W3 (1961) and HID (1969), records only half of such
words, a surprising difference which urges us to find another motivation. The
second one is a possible reason, as W3 and HID are indeed the most voluminous
dictionaries (2600 and 1500 pages respectively) among the ones we used (the
other have between 500 and 1200 pages), but could not be the only one. The
third explanation suggests that the reason underlying the high representation of
Cannon's words in W3 and HID may be American English as a variety of
English, in which a higher proportion of Chinese loanwords is accepted, possibly
for historical reason (e.g. strong Chinese immigration, cf. §2.2). Testifying to
such explanation is the sizeable amount of words which are recorded only in
these two dictionaries: 19, among which the most notable are probably three
items of the “food” semantic field as bok choi, chow mein and won ton, Pidgin-
English chop-chop and, interestingly enough, the name of four of the five
dynasties in Cannon's list (Han, Tang, Sung, Ming, whereas notice of the Qing
dynasty is recorded only in HID, but under Manchu). Another word recorded
only in the American dictionaries, winter melon, is not even recorded in the
OED.
Yet, three of such items recorded only by the American dictionaries of our
corpus were in each one of the eight dictionaries (3 British and 5 American)
used by Cannon (which were published less than 20 years later than ours):
chow mein, yang, and yin. This datum may suggest that such words first

135
entered American English and then eventually spread into what Cannon defined
“general” English.
Time certainly plays a role in the exclusion of 11 “modern” items (appearing in
the twentieth century according to the OED), which are totally absent in every
dictionary of the century before Cannon's (1988) study, but again were in at
least three of the dictionaries he used48.

4.3.3 “Culturally-loaded” Chinese loanwords

Two more items which were “accepted” in general English at the time of
Cannon's study are not recorded in any dictionary, but according to the dating
of the OED appeared much earlier: I-Ching (Yì jīng 易经) and Tai Chi (tàijí 太极),
both emerging in the eighteenth century according to the OED. Their total
exclusion from the dictionaries in our corpus is harder to explain: a possible
motivation may be that they designate referents highly related to Chinese
culture, for which probably there was no need up until Cannon's time, when the
growth of Chinese immigration in anglophone countries and of the interest
towards China's culture made them a more “accepted” part of the English
lexicon.
Additional items with prominent “Chinese characteristics” are philosophical
concepts as Yin (yīn 阴) and Yang (yáng 阳 ), whose record is also limited to W3
and HID; taoism (dào 道) and confucianism (Kǒngzǐ 孔子), which are also in TCD
and O34 (but confucian is recorded in all but SKT). The importance of the
borrowing of kowtow (kētóu 磕 头 ), not a philosophical concept but a long-
standing traditional custom) was already emphasised in §3.4: such word is
recorded in five dictionaries, being excluded only in the ones displaying the
lowest number of Chinese items (CHA, SKT, PAR). The borrowing of Chinese
measure units too signals the deepening of contact, either commercial
(familiarising with the measure system of the trading partner may improve the
commercial intercourse) or cultural (through the translation of Chinese novels
and works in general, in which such words are usually kept in their original
form). Liang (liǎng 两 ) is recorded in TCD, W3 and HID, whereas li ‘itinerary
measure’ (lǐ 里 ), whose first appearance occurred as early as the sixteenth
century, is also in 066. All units of currency but the newest Renminbi (rénmínbì
48
These items are: barefoot doctor (chìjiǎoyīshēng 赤 脚 医 生 , 1971), cheongsam (qípáo 旗 袍 ,
1957), dimsum (diǎnxīn 点 心 , 1948), kung-fu (gōngfū 功 夫 , 1966), maoist (Máo 毛 , 1949),
maotai (máotái 茅 台 , 1962), pinyin (pīnyīn 拼 音 , 1963), Red Guard (hóng wèibīng 红 卫 兵 ,
1954), Renminbi (rénmínbì 人民币 , 1957), shih-tzu (shīzigǒu 狮子狗 , 1921), and wok (huò 镬 ,
1952).

136
人民币 , which is in none of our dictionaries, as it was mentioned in note 48) are
recorded in HID: yuan (yuán 元 ), jiao (jiǎo 角 ) and fen (fēn 分 ). HID seems the
most thorough dictionary in this field, but fen and yuan are recorded also in
W3, and it is worth mentioning that yuan is recorded in four more dictionaries
too, but only with reference to the Japanese coin (which is usually called yen,
from the same Chinese etymon, as it was described in §3.5.4).
A further interesting field in ‘measuring’ cultural intercourse is that of popular
games. Only three items made it to “general English” at the time of Cannon's
(1988) study, thus showing that the anglophone audience had familiarised with
them: tangram (qīqiǎo tú 七巧板 ) is in five dictionaries, mahjong (májiàng 麻将)
is in every one since 034, and fan-tan (fān tān 番摊) in the three newer volumes
(W3, O66, HID). The etymology of tangram is uncertain in the Oxfords, and
“perhaps” Chinese in W3 and HID. Only HID attests a Cantonese origin for fan-
tan, whereas the “sparrow” three dictionaries (PAR, O66, HID) make reference
to describing mahjong's etymology is probably to be found in the other name of
the game (máquè 麻雀 which also means ‘sparrow’).

4.3.4 Assimilation
Two important “characteristics of Chinese loanwords in English” signalling
“complete assimilation” (see §3.3.3) are category shift and derivation. Five
words were recorded as two different entries in Cannon's list, but reported as
one in the present study, their difference being limited to their lexical category:
Jap (n. and adj.), japan (n. and v.), Japanese (n. and adj.), kowtow (n. and v.)
and yen (n. and v.). Each of these pairs of words was included in a single chart
because both meanings quoted in Cannon (1988) were signalled in every
dictionary recording them, thus showing that their category shift was already
happened (maybe at the same time of their very appearance in the English
lexicon).
Some other groups of words in Cannon's list clearly derives from a single root.
The fact that they were recorded as different entries in his study suggests that
their assimilation had already brought them to develop derivational forms,
which the compilers of Cannon's dictionaries believed deserved an entry.
Testing if each of these derivational forms was mentioned in older dictionaries
may be fallacious in that an exclusion may be motivated by ordinary reasons of
space, not only by a supposed “non-acceptance” of such word. Nonetheless, the
earlier recording of a form compared to another may suggest which one derived

137
from which. For example, the adjective (and noun) confucian is recorded in
each of the dictionaries used in the present study but one (SKT), whereas its
(derived) noun confucianism is only in four of them (TCD, O34, W3, HID), thus
suggesting that the name of the philosophy derived from the one of its followers.
On the contrary, adj. and n. maoist does not appear in any of the dictionaries we
used, whereas its noun maoism is recorded in at least one (HID), therefore the
followers derived from the philosophy. The same seems to have happened for
taoist (mentioned in three volumes: TCD, W3, HID) and taoism (in five: also
O34, O66), whereas tao, which appeared one century earlier (1704) is recorded
only in W3.
The particular meaning of Japanesque ‘Japanese in style or manner’ deserved a
recorded variant-form derived through the -esque suffix in two only dictionaries
(O34, W3), while the indication of the agentive form shanghaier is worth
recording only in W3.
Chop-stick, the characteristic eating utensils of to the Far East (kuàizi 筷子 ), is
an unanimous case of loan blend (see §1.5.1), where a native affix (-stick) was
attached to a foreign word (chop), and it is recorded in every dictionary but
SKT. On the contrary, tangram is not surely an instance of loan blending, as its
second part is analysed as the Greek suffix -gram only in W3, HID and OED,
but unanalysed in the remaining three dictionaries recording it (TCD, O34,
O66).

4.3.5 Semantic fields and dialectal sources

As it was mentioned earlier in §4.3.1, major tea varieties (bohea, congou, hyson,
pekoe, souchong) are mentioned in every dictionary but PAR, thus suggesting
that they have long been accepted in general English; another one, oolong, is
recorded in only three volumes (TCD, W3, HID). Among them, only pekoe and
oolong have clear dialectal sources (Amoy and Mandarin, respectively) in the
dictionaries which mention such information; on the contrary, the sources
hypothesised for the other varieties are not unanimous, and hyson even has its
etymon alternately in Amoy (O66), Cantonese (HID) or Mandarin (W3).
The Cantonese influence on food semantic field, as well as its novelty in the
English lexicon is confirmed by the dictionaries used for the present study. As
chow mein (chǎomiàn 炒面 ), bok choy (báicài 白菜 ), won ton (húntún 馄饨 ) and
chop suey (zásuì 杂 碎 ) are recorded only in more recent W3 and HID, though
the last one is also in O66 and the first one is labelled “Pekinese” (i.e. Mandarin)

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in W3. The fact that they are recorded in the American dictionaries of our
corpus is again a testament to the migration of people from the Yue-speaking
areas into the US. As mentioned earlier in note 48, dim sum (diǎnxīn 点心 ) and
wok (huò 镬 ) are not mentioned in any of our dictionaries because their
appearance is too recent (even subsequent to half of our dictionaries),
nonetheless, as Moody (1996: 414) declares, they are certainly Cantonese
because Mandarin speakers use totally different pronunciation for such words.
The source language of chop-stick is under debate (cf. §3.5.4), as Pidgin-English
is mentioned in the four most recent dictionaries (whereas a direct Chinese
source, kuàizi 筷子 , is given in O34), but a previous Chinese etymon (Cantonese
in W3 and HID) is suggested in all of them, making it unclear if it is to be
considered as Chinese or Pidgin-English 49. Chow presents a similar situation,
being defined Chinese in O34, PAR and W3, whereas Pidgin-English in TCD,
O66 and HID. Its etymon is also unclear, as both W3 and HID display some
uncertainty when tracing it back to Mandarin jiǎo ‘dumpling’ (饺), and chǎo ‘stir-
fry’ (炒) respectively.
Still in the productive semantic field of food, of the four fruits in Cannon's list,
only kumquat (jīnjú 金橘 ) has a clear Cantonese source in the four dictionaries
reporting it (PAR, W3, O66, HID), whereas the “older” litchi (lìzhī 荔 枝 ),
recorded in five, is described as Mandarin (W3) or Cantonese (HID). W3 is the
only dictionary recording longan (lóngyǎn 龙眼), from Mandarin. Finally, loquat
(lújú 芦橘), also recorded in five dictionaries, is Cantonese for the only two trying
to delve into its dialectal origin (again W3 and HID).
A context of rather intensive commercial intercourse between Chinese and
English is that of fabrics and garments. Five items in Cannon's list belong to
such semantic field: cheongsam, canton crepe, canton flannel, pongee and
shantung. Among these, cheongsam is not reported in any dictionary (see note
48) but, on the basis of its pronunciation, it is certainly Cantonese for Moody
(1996: 414); whereas the three fabrics named after a toponym (canton crepe,
canton flannel and shantung) are recorded only in the American dictionaries
(W3, HID). Again, the item appearing the earliest is the one with more
acceptance (and probably currency): pongee (maybe from běnzhī 本 织 ) is
recorded in six dictionaries (all but CHA and SKT) and was considered based on

49
In the relative chart in §4.2 above, an “O” was attached to every item labelled “Pidgin” in a
dictionary, whereas a “V” was given where the “translation” of a previous Chinese source was
mentioned.

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Mandarin since PAR.
Still from the perspective of commercial intercourse, only one item in Cannon's
list belongs to the semantic field of stoneware and porcelain: petuntse (bái
dūnzi 白 墩 子 ), and is recorded in O34, W3 and HID. The scarcity of such
semantic field (and of the one of “fabrics”) is in part attributable to the choice to
follow Yang Jian (2009) in excluding loanwords entering English through
transmission languages (e.g. nankeen and kaolin were recorded in all eight
dictionaries used by Cannon 1988). Another possible and partial explanation
may be the high degree of specialisation that such terms present, which may
have prevented them from entering Cannon's dictionaries as part of “general
English”.
Words belonging to the semantic field of “history and politics” constitute a
sizeable portion of our corpus, accounting for at least 18 items. As it was
mentioned earlier in §4.3.2, the names of five Chinese dynasties (Han, Tang,
Sung, Ming, and Qing) are recorded only in the two more recent American
dictionaries (W3, HID). The designation for the governmental departments of
such dynasties, yamen (yámen 衙 门 ), is the most-recurring item among the
semantic field of “history and politics”, as it is recorded in five dictionaries
(TCD, O34, W3, O66, HID). Two items designate two military leaders with
different historical role and connotation, tuchun (dūjūn 督 军 ) and war-lord
(jūnfá 军阀): the former is recorded only in W3 and HID (with explicit reference
to China), whereas the latter is presented as a loan translation in O34, but
quoted without reference to China in W3 and HID. A sign of the major historical
event of the Taiping (Tàipíng 太 平 ) rebellion, which created an oppositional
state in southern China in the mid-nineteenth century, is recorded in three
dictionaries (TCD, O34, W3), the first one being published few decades after the
facts: this loanword may reveal the echo such event had abroad, with the leader
of the rebels proclaiming himself Jesus's younger brother. Middle Kingdom is
referred to China in three dictionaries (TCD, O34, HID), but only the last one
describes it as a loan translation of Chinese Zhōngguó ( 中 国 ). Among the
remaining items of such semantic field, paper tiger is the only one appearing
before the twentieth century, but it is recorded in one only dictionary (W3),
without any reference to its Chinese possible etymon zhǐlǎohǔ ( 纸 老 虎 ). The
majority of the other words (gung-ho, Kuomintang, maoism, scorched earth,
maoist, barefoot doctor, Red Guard) are therefore too recent to be recorded in

140
the dictionaries of our corpus, but the first four of them made it to the newest
one (HID) at least. The case of gung-ho ‘enthusiastic, eager, zealous’ deserves
being emphasised: indeed, it was the slogan used by the US Marines, borrowed
from Chinese gōng ‘work’ ( 工 ) + hé ‘together’ ( 合 ). This word, consistently
reported in the American dictionaries (W3, HID), is given the Mandarin
pronunciation of a cooperative society as an etymon in the first one, and the
Pidgin-English inflection of the same word in the second.
Confirming the generalisation expressed earlier in §3.5.3, a correlation between
dialectal source and semantic field emerges from the analysis of the items
reported in the present paragraph: borrowings from Amoy are rather old and
limited to the subgroup of tea; on the contrary, Cantonese loans are very recent
and primarily related to food and cookery; finally, items referring to “high
culture” such as philosophy, history and politics are prerogative of borrowings
from Mandarin. Consistently with Yang Jian's (2009) point (see §3.5.2), one
third of the items belonging to this last semantic field were borrowed rather
recently and through loan translation (paper tiger, war-lord, Red Guard,
scorched earth, barefoot doctor, Middle Kingdom).

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 CONCLUSION
We undertook this research with the aim to investigate the process and stages of
lexical borrowing in relation to the social prestige attached to the languages
involved: our field of principal interest was the contact between Chinese (and
some of its main varieties, see §3.2) and English.
The discussion brought on in §1 set a framework for the definition of borrowing,
highlighting its different strategies and the patterns of integration of loanwords.
We analysed the prerequisite of language-contact, the pivotal role played by
bilinguals, the social and linguistic constraints on borrowing, and the
importance of need and prestige as its main motivations.
A brief history of Chinese-English relationship and its major aspects was
outlined in §2, describing the nature of their contact, which was mainly
commercial in the beginning (seventeenth century) and eventually undermined
by war and political divisions (especially after the founding of the PRC). We also
drew on statistical data on the translations from English which were published
in China through the years, the growing number of Chinese emigrants to
anglophone countries (mainly the US), and that of Chinese students studying
English as a foreign language in China. All these data gave a picture of the ever-
increasing possibilities for language-contact: indeed, if international migration
and bilingualism were understandably rare in the past, they are becoming a
common experience for a growing number of people recently, expanding the
potential for contact and, therefore, borrowing. A potential which is eventually
realised, as the dating of Chinese loanwords in English given by the OED shows
an increasing frequency in the appearance of new words from Chinese.
In §3, the theoretical discussion on borrowing made in §1 and the history of
Chinese-English contact sketched out in §2 brought us to hypothesise, following
Loveday's (1996) scheme:
(1) a distant but dominant role of English upon Chinese since the First
Opium War in the mid-nineteenth century;
(2) a distant but institutional contact between the two languages, since
knowledge of English was regarded as a key to national development,
towards the end of the Ming dynasty (1911) and is again after the Reforms
(1978);
(3) a bounded or subordinate contact wherever Chinese people, emigrated
abroad since the nineteenth century, lived and live in isolation in

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 anglophone countries.
A description of Chinese main dialects (or varieties), which are as different
among them as romance languages are, was drawn to give the reader useful
indications that were later developed.
In §3 we also investigated channels, borrowing strategies and patterns of
integration through which Chinese loanwords entered the English lexicon.
Analysing Chinese borrowings from the multiple points of view of
(1) time of appearance,
(2) nature of Chinese-English contact in that same period,
(3) borrowing strategy,
(4) semantic fields, and
(5) source-dialects involved,
some interesting correlation emerge (§3.3, §3.4, §3.5): early borrowings are
mainly phonetic, calqued on the pronunciation of southern dialects (especially
Min) and related to tea products, borrowings from Mandarin in the same period
mirror “high” semantic fields (e.g. philosophy, religion, government), whereas
loanwords from Yue emerge especially in the twentieth century and belong to
the semantic field of food. A tendency to borrow increasingly from Mandarin
and through loan translation emerged recently, but borrowings from Yue are
still productive in culinary semantic field, whereas Min source seems to have
dried out long ago.
In §4, we carried out a diachronic analysis on about one hundred Chinese
loanwords which were “widely accepted” in general English in the 1980s. Our
methodology consisted in looking them up in eight dictionaries published over
the century preceding such decade: by doing so, we found when these words
were recorded in English dictionaries (a fact that we consider equal to their
admittance in “general English”), if their etymology was recorded as Chinese,
and if (and when) a more specific indication of their source-dialect was given.
Indications of source dialects are worth remarking not only because, comparing
them, certitude or inconsistency may emerge, but also because their
introduction testifies to a deeper knowledge of (and interest in) China's
linguistic and cultural diversity.
Our results confirmed the correlations and the tendencies emerging in §3. We
also found that only three (tea, typhoon, and japan) of Cannon's (1988) one
hundred “accepted loanwords” had always been such (i.e. recorded) in the

143
century before his study, whereas the others had probably made their way into
English just a few years before his research. These results (on the century
preceding his study), combined with the ones by Yang Jian (2009, on the two
decades following it) emphasise that the borrowing of Chinese items into
English is speeding up, as some loanwords were not even recorded in the
dictionaries we used, but were cited in all the dictionaries Cannon (1988)
examined, and Yang Jian (2009) found even more in his research.
In other words, even though the point made by the scholars cited in §1.7.3 is
certainly reasonable when they claim that borrowing is usually a one-way
phenomenon, and if the discussion made in §2 brought us to argue that Chinese
is probably to be labelled as the subject language and English as the dominant
one, we nonetheless have to acknowledge an increasing amount of lexical
borrowing from the so-called subject to the so-called dominant language. But
are they still such? Further research comparing data on new Chinese loanwords
entering English and new English loanwords entering Chinese is needed to
demonstrate whether or not the phenomenon is balancing, and deeper study on
Chinese and anglophone countries' societal, economic and cultural
characteristics may add if such (possible) balancing is due to globalisation or to
the rising of China's importance in world economy. If so, such an importance
would certainly be mirrored in an increasing flow of Chinese loanwords into
English (and Western languages in general).
Nonetheless, it is worth noting that, so far, the vast majority of the Chinese
loanwords in English found by both Cannon (1988) and Yang Jian (2009) are
loanwords by necessity, designating objects and concepts previously unknown
in the West (tea varieties, Chinese dynasties, philosophies and other culturally-
loaded items), and none of them but tea and Japan (whose Chinese origin is
under debate though) is part of English “core vocabulary” (§1.6.1.2). A future
update of Minkova's & Stockwell's (2009) statistical research may reveal if some
of Chinese loanwords will compete, in frequency, with loanwords from other
sources. Furthermore, only if the “asymmetry” described by Kui Zhu (2011, see
§3.1) will eventually level, it will be possible to argue that a real balancing is
taking place. Possible future borrowing of more lexical categories than the
“highly borrowable” (§1.6.1.1) nouns, adjectives and verbs which were found so
far may also be an important indicator of a deeper infiltration of Chinese items
into English (some Chinese particles and interjections are already found in

144
Singapore and Malaysian English, cf. lah in the OED).
Still, every loanword is a bearer of culture, and culturally-loaded Chinese words
in English, even if used only when speaking about China, are forerunners of its
culture and may eventually spread it. The appearance of words designating
Chinese philosophical concepts and arts, but also sports and typical dishes, is
clearly a sign of the spread (and importance) of the ‘China-related discourse’ in
the West, and as such deserves being emphasised.
In the period since the Reforms, the communication between China and the
anglophone countries has been enhanced and more Chinese-origin words are
entering English lexicon at an increasing pace, being used more often in
people's talks (Kui Zhu 2011: 102). The relationship of power mirrored by lexical
borrowing (see §1.7.3) moved from the identification of the product with its
place of origin (e.g. silk in 888, and china in 1634), through the distortion of
China's name used in derogatory terms (e.g. chinaman in 1872, and chink in
1901) and to the loan-blend of a Chinese word in an advanced technological field
such as aerospace (taikonaut ‘a Chinese astronaut’ in 1998, fr. tàikōng 太 空
‘ space’ + -naut): a change reflecting China's contemporary major role in the
international arena (Zhao Yonggang 2009: 150, Chen Donnson 1992: 62).
Many scholars quoted in the present research agree on the hypothesis that
Chinese loanwords will continue entering English at a growing pace (Zhao
Yonggang 2009: 150), principally through loan translations and in various
semantic fields (Yang Jian 2009: 105), reflecting the nature of contact between
Chinese and English speakers (Moody 1996: 417). From the point of view of
loanwords' shape, it is reasonable to predict (with Yang Jian 2009) that the
double shift towards a growing importance of Mandarin as a source dialect and
pinyin as a transliteration system will also continue, reflecting the rising
importance of Chinese “official” and centralised discourse.
Observing lexical borrowing between Chinese and English (as well as other
Western languages) will certainly be a gauge of the occurring cultural exchange,
mirroring (or even predicting) the growing importance a language-culture is
gaining towards the other.

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 GRAZIE
dopo un'intera tesi sull'importanza delle parole, questa parola voglio dedicarla
(per sineddoche):

alla mia famiglia, per avermi sempre supportato nelle mie scelte, e per la
pazienza necessaria a farlo;
a Miriam, per l'aiuto, i consigli, la comprensione, e la musica;
a* compagn* del Collettivo di Lingue, per avermi fatto pensare, parlare, agire, e
ridere a dirotto (in ogni coniugazione);
a tutti gli amici che hanno attraversato questi anni d'università e con me hanno
condiviso pranzi freddi, rabbie ed euforie;
alle preziosissime biblioteche civiche e universitarie, per avermi aperto tutti i
mondi che possono essere chiusi in un libro;
a Dante, Lu Xun, Camus, Hitchcock, De Andrè e i Pink Floyd;
all'ex ministra Gelmini, per avermi insegnato l'importanza della Cosa Pubblica;
alle macchinette del caffè disseminate per UniTo e biblioteche: non ce l'avrei
mai fatta a fare tutto questo senza di loro;
a chiunque abbia letto anche solo questa pagina, non ci speravo. Scriverle è stato
affascinante, comunque.

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