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Early Mandarin loanwords in contemporary English

The influence of transcription systems on orthography

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 June 2019

Zhen Wu
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Extract

English vocabulary has expanded over centuries by ‘borrowing’ lexical items from other languages (Katamba, 2005; Durkin, 2014). Compared with European languages, non-European languages are never major sources of word borrowing in English, with Chinese staying even more peripheral. Scholars have recorded no more than a few hundred English words of Chinese origin. This, however, does not make it easier to study the etymology and semantics of Chinese loanwords. The complication arises from the various source dialects from which Chinese words were borrowed (Mandarin, Cantonese, Amoy, Hokkien, etc.) and also from transcription processes, in which Chinese logograms are ‘romanised’ into phonetic representations so as to be readable for English speakers. It is a procedure easily affected by the transcribers' own cognition and the transcription systems employed, and the arbitrariness of the above variables contributes much to the fact that the orthography of Chinese loanwords, especially those entering the English language early, are prone to changes. This article aims to shed some light on how the ways of transcription may affect the spelling of Chinese loanwords.

Type
Research Article
Information
English Today , Volume 36 , Issue 1 , March 2020 , pp. 23 - 29
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019

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Footnotes

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the postgraduate forum ‘Workshopping words and opening dialogues’ at the University of Sussex in June 2018. I am grateful to Prof. Bas Aarts, Dr. Kathryn Allan and Prof. Lynne Murphy for their inspiring comments. I would also like to thank Dr. Andrew Moody for his suggestions on an earlier draft of the present paper.

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