Chinese Borrowings in English

Abstract

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...

Chinese borrowings in English

“…Barely 10 years after China started its economic reform, when the country was only beginning to comprehend the importance of English, and when hardly anyone would have predicted the emergence of a Chinese variety of English as frequently discussed in world Englishes literature today, Cannon (1988) demonstrated there was already a total of 979 lexical items in English imported from Chinese. It was apparent that the majority of these words lacked acceptance in general English, with the exception of 196 words.…”

“…In possibly the most comprehensive linguistic study ever conducted of Chinese words in general English, Cannon (1987; 1988) revealed the full scope of borrowing from Chinese, which is rarely discussed in professional literature. Cannon counted a total of 979 Chinese borrowings.…”

“…More than 20 years have passed since the publication of the eight dictionaries used in Cannon (1988). It is therefore high time now to re‐examine Chinese borrowings with acceptance as reflected in updated leading dictionaries, by comparing them with those found in the eight older dictionaries in Cannon's study.…”

Chinese Borrowings in English, Chinese Cultural Identity and Economic Development

“…One of the most important standards distributed by Cannon (1988) Table 1 indicates that the number of Chinese borrowings in English before 20th century is pretty small. There is no doubt that the development of Chinese borrowings in this period is comparatively slow.…”

“…Cannon added that one of the most important standards is that one Chinese word must be committed by three in eight leading dictionaries if the word can be rolled into English, Analyses on Chinese borrowings in terms of their illustrations were rare except Cannon's studies. An all-round study about borrowed items has been undertaken by Cannon (1988), which is attributed to the basic construction of the corpus of Chinese borrowings. Cannon's analyses of Chinese borrowings are involved in the language source, semantics of linguistics, language grammar and general viewpoints on the differences between Chinese borrowings and their interpretations.…”