JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. . H ISTORIES OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE and particularly Serjeantson's famous book on borrowings in English indicate that exotic languages like Japanese and Chinese (a general term which we will use for Peking Chinese, Cantonese, and a few related languages) have contributed few items, though some of the items enjoy high frequency. For Japanese, the same few examples are cited again and again in the histories, and Serjeantson lists only 20 borrowings principally beginning in the nineteenth century (1935, 239-40). A recent search (Cannon 1981, 1982) discovered 587 main entries of Japanese provenience and another 216 derived from the old borrowingJapan, which Japanese originally borrowed from Chinese. Seven desk-dictionaries recorded 151 different entries of Japanese items presumably in general English.Similarly, Serjeantson lists only 27 items from Chinese, some of which overlap with Japanese in that they came into English through that intermediary language (237-40). Our purpose in this paper is to make a study of Chinese borrowings which will provide a useful comparison with the two Japanese studies and with the total borrowings in the 13,683 main-entry items recorded in The Barnhart Dictionary of New English since 1963 (1973), The Second Barnhart Dictionary of New English (1980), and Merriam's 9,000 Words (1983-see Cannon 1987). We will shed light on Chan and Kwok's 1985 book-length study of Chinese in Hong Kong English by seeing how many of their 108 items have gained general acceptance in English, as opposed to being part only of a geographically restricted oral and written vocabulary. We will also consider the chronology of the items and their history in English, any regional distributions and stylistic labeling of these borrowings from a tonal language into a nontonal one, their possible place and productivity in general international English, problems caused by the source languages, and the meanings (including onomastics) and grammar of the items. Finally, this study will fit the borrowings into a revised, expanded taxonomy based on the classic studies by Haugen (1950) and Bloomfield (1933). Perhaps predictably, Serjeantson's figures for Chinese borrowings are badly omissive. Even the contemporary Webster's New International Dictionary of the English Language (2nd ed., 1934, xiv-hereafter, Webster's Second) notes that, "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," and cites examples not in Serjeantson like 3 This content downloaded from 130.237.165.40 on Tue, 29 Sep 2015 16:53:02 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions AMERICAN SPEECH 63.1 (1988) fu...

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract