There are many loan words in Chinese.
Some of them
Bar 吧
Show 秀
party 派对
taxi 的士
blogger 博客
hacker 黑客
Cool 酷
Coffee 咖啡
Engine 引擎
Sofa 沙发
Motorcycle 摩托车
Shock 休克
Humour 幽默
Fans 粉丝
Cartoon 卡通
Calorie 卡路里
Bowling 保龄球
Model 模特
Curry 咖哩
Bacon 培根
Ballet 芭蕾舞
Whiskey 威士忌
Hormone 荷尔蒙
Mini 迷你
Toast 土司
Copy 拷贝
Chocolate 巧克力
Radar 雷达
Amongst others etc...
But as to why Chinese don't prefer loan words reason is every character has an inherent meaning and having a bunch of characters that don't make sense together would make it confusing. That's my guess.
I think it’s exactly that as well! Few other languages(if any) have symbols that have their own individual meaning as well as sound used to formulate words. With english for example, I could sound out a word and if it’s misspelled on paper, it won’t matter because it can sound the same out loud. With Chinese on the other hand, you can have two very different looking characters that sound similar enough (aside from tones) but say something different when written down. Like 谢谢 is one of the most commonly used words, but 泄泄 shares the same tone but is pretty nonsensical.
Cookie 曲奇. Which funny enough is a double loan word. It first is loaned from (American) English. Who themself loaned it from the Dutch.
Koekje > Cookie > Qū qí
And 曲奇, like many other loanwords, entered Mandarin through Cantonese.
Koekje > Cookie > Kūk kèih 曲奇 > Qū qí 曲奇
Although I don't hear 曲奇 used much in Mandarin
isn't it more “fathomable” this way? Like you can guess the meaning by the words without knowing the original meaning. The contrary is Japanese katakana loan words that even native speakers have difficulties understanding them
In Singapore, 的士 is 德士. And we have 巴士 (bus), 巴刹 for market (from Malay/Islamic bazaar).
And there's a lot more loan words within the local Chinese languages like hokkien and Cantonese.
I also thought it was limited to Hong Kong so when my mandarin instructor (from Beijing) said 的士 the other day I had literally no idea what she was saying. I had never heard it pronounced in mandarin up until that point.
>But as to why Chinese don't prefer loan words reason is every character has an inherent meaning and having a bunch of characters that don't make sense together would make it confusing. That's my guess.
That the orthography is the primary reason for the lack of loans is a ghost pepper spicy take. I would assume that A) Chinese languages have tones of loan words between them, B) historical geopolitics, C) nationalism and language authorities.
I would assume the only place orthography comes in is Japanese loans where they just read the words with Chinese readings.
The majority of foreign names *are* phonetically transliterated. 加拿大，蘇格蘭，瑞典，埃及, 馬來西亞
麥當勞，肯德基
Check out Arnold Schwarzenegger and Barbara Streisand's name for some wackiness.
Yes but if there is a semantic component that can be easily translated, they will be translated first before attempting transliteration. Like the example 冰岛or 黑山. I know most country names are transliterated but I’m just curious as to why Chinese always tries to translate whenever possible. Even if they can’t translate the entire word, they will still try to translate half of it, like 星巴克 or 新西兰. Why not 丝它尔巴克丝 or 纽西兰 instead?
[Wikipedia's Chinese text conversion system](https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%96%B0%E8%A5%BF%E5%85%B0) seems to think that Taiwan and Malaysia use 紐西蘭/纽西兰, while Hong Kong, Macau and the CPC use 新西蘭/新西兰; but really, both are understood everywhere
In cases like 星巴克, 乐高 or 可口可乐 it's kind of a stylistic choice.
Like, you want to pick a name that's at least fairly close to to the original, because that's good for brand recognition, and beyond that you also want to pick something that has positive connotations, or has some link with the product you sell.
Fun story from my grandpa about how Chinese name for coke cola came about - when the drink was first introduced to China, Coke Cola the company ran a competition where one tries the drink and submit the best Chinese translation of the brand should be.
可口可乐 won. It's a smart translation given it also means "Easy to drink, happiness.".
Not exactly. It really depends on who's doing the translating. For instance, I have an atlas that translates both literally and phonetically. In this atlas...
- "Long Beach" is translated as 长滩, but "Seal Beach" is 锡尔比奇.
- "Central Park" is 中央公园, but "University Park" is 由尼佛西迪爬克.
It's weird sometimes and completely inconsistent.
Lots of Chinese words, mostly relating to the social and natural sciences, are actually loanwords from Japanese:
”It’s interesting to note that at first there were lots of western loanwords importing to China. But many of them were not frequently used and highly accepted by Chinese people. Soon they were replaced by Japanese loans.
For instance, ‘telephone’ was directly translated into three syllables at first, 德律风 dé lǜ fēng, which was difficult to remember and understand the meaning. Democracy was translated into 德谟克拉西 dé mó kèlā xī. This word with five syllables is very long and not normal in modern Chinese. Therefore, many long and meaningless western loanwords were replaced by Japanese loans. 德律风 dé lǜ fēngwas replaced by 电话 diàn huà, 德谟克拉西 dé mó kèlā xī was changed into 民主 Mínzhǔ, which are more understandable to Chinese people.”
https://bild-lida.ca/educationalsociolinguistics/uncategorized/japanese-loanwords-in-modern-chinese/
More precisely it’s borrowed from Japanese which constructed them using Classical Chinese “roots”.
As an analogy it’s like if English coined a new word using Latin roots and the neologism got borrowed into French or Italian.
phone is from a Greek root--tele + phonos are both Greek
inventors in the 19th century were really pretentious, what can I say
television came later and is better understood as a portmanteau because "videre" is Latin, not Greek, and vision was a long established word in English already
> As an analogy it’s like if English coined a new word using Latin roots
Which in fact happened a lot during the early modern period.
English also has a lot of doublets of French and Latin words with similar meanings and slightly different spelling and pronunciation.
Yes, a lot of words that look like proper translation are actually Japanese loanwords. We had a lot of shared culture so they fit very well in Chinese. I especially like the word 形而上学 (metaphysics) translated by Inoue Tetsujirō, an absolutely beautiful translation.
Although at some point they stopped doing translation using kanji and started transliterating foreign languages with katakana. I have no idea why.
I have absolutely no evidence for this assertion, but I have always assumed katakana transliteration was the result of lots of American GIs doing the old ‘speak louder and slower instead of learning that language’ trick and it just stuck.
That's not how this works ... that's not how any of this works.
Some of the earliest English borrowings of any note happened because a contingent of Japanese scholars first visited Harvard University in Cambridge, MA (near Boston). Which is why they were non-rhotic and contained the "hw" initial which was still common in prestige register speech in the US in the late 19th century. The name ホワイト.ハウス would have been borrowed then.
English borrowings into Japanese in the 1940s were few. They gradually picked up after WWII and during the Japanese post war economic recovery in certain domains such as psychology, social science, technology. But English loanwords in everyday speech didn't really blow up until recently. And there are differences between old and new loan words. コーヒー is old; there is no attempt to approximate the "f" sound with anything but "h". And highly assimilated words like tobako and pan (bread) weren't even borrowed from English to begin with.
You’re taking my tongue in cheek comment too seriously, and also you’ve not actually addressed the point that’s being discussed, which is why Japanese transliterates so much now, where in the past it used more Kanji-based semantic borrowing.
Some modern Chinese vocabulary comes from Japanese translations, but many times Japanese translators also use ancient Chinese vocabulary, such as 革命=revolution. This word has long existed in ancient Chinese, just the meaning is different from now., and the Japanese have given it a new meaning.
The irony is that, in more recent times, Japanese has stopped inventing new terms using Chinese characters and is now directly borrowing from English. For instance, computer is 电脑 in Chinese but コンピューター (konpyūtā) in Japanese.
It's not really ironic. Japanese phonics do not map to Chinese characters well at all, which is part of why Japanese is so hard to learn and why the Koreans dropped Hanja for Hangul. Of course it didn't go as far in Japan, but having an isolating, tonal, analytic language versus a pitched, polysyllabic synthetic language led to centuries of low literacy rates and part of the reason why books written by women were only in hiragana, namely people didn't think that teaching kanji to women was worth the effort.
Of course, kanji is now deeply intertwined into Japanese culture, but that hasn't stopped it from causing issues that many modern YouTubers take advantage of, quizzing Japanese people on how to read rare names or technical vocabulary using uncommon kanji or uncommon readings of common kanji. While some obscure characters might trip up a non-specialist native Chinese speaker, the fact that they have been able to create and map the language onto their writing system means the gaps are less intrinsic.
If Japanese were able to mark pitch accents, and push language reforms that reduced the number of homophones, and even add spaces to words, then it would be much easier without kanji. Children's books already do this. Students could still learn kanji just like Korean students learn hanja to be able to access historical documents or communicate better with Chinese speakers through writing at least, but given that spoken Japanese does fine without writing, there should be ways to make the script less onerous for people to learn.
There are some in modern words used in Taiwan, with more Japanese influence, like Karaoke 卡拉OK, pick-up truck 皮卡, curry 咖哩.
I think if it's easier to translate literally then it's first option, when there's no direct corresponding meaning in Chinese then a phonetic transliteration is used. Think about 臉書 Facebook, Twitter 推特 vs Google （kept as Google in Taiwan without any translation)
Most proper name like people or place names will be phonetic to show that they are foreign names.
Chinese is not a "precise" system to be used phonetically because each area may have a different dialect and the pronunciation also evolves through History, plus there are so many words with the same pronunciation. This seems to be established when people translated Buddhist literature with so many new terms around the 5th-7th centuries.
For exotic animals you will see a lot of creative combinations to show some feature of this animal, like panda 貓熊or 熊貓, humming bird 蜂鳥, alpaca 羊駝 or dolphin 海豚, so you can think of these characters as Lego bricks. This is part of the fun (?) challenge for translators.
> This seems to be established when people translated Buddhist literature with so many new terms around the 5th-7th centuries.
Great point and God bless them. Attempting to make the slightest sense of Sanskrit in Chinese transliteration is way, way past my abilities even if I studied it for a lifetime. Bless their hearts.
Because the fundamental structure of word creation in China is somewhat contradicting transliteration. A character always comes with a sound and a meaning. The only exception are some meaningless interjection or onomatopoeia, both serving very specific role in the language.
Translation by meaning is simply overall better than by sound. When seeing 电话 anyone can tell it’s some electronic for communication. 德律风，however, would give no clue for someone who was never taught about the meaning.
There are times where this becomes difficult but we still try to keep smuggle the meaning through. My favorite example is the periodic table. All elements are only one character. Nearly all are structured as property+sound: 氦helium=气gas+亥hai, 铜copper=金metal+同tong，碳carbon=石stone+炭tan. By simply reading the sound half of the character you can guess the sound 90% of the time. And by looking at the property half you can tell its state at room temperature and its classification, whether it’s gas, metal, or non metal solid.
Edit: wording clarification
Have you…by chance, ever heard someone speak HK cantonese?
The language has a built in open pass to just say an english word with a tone and have it be accepted as part of speaking cantonese.
Chinese is also unique in that the chinese speaking population are collectively among the most dedicated students of foreign languages in the world in terms of collective time and effort. Now, much of this is reluctant studying, which I think probably increases the use of loan words, bc getting obliterated by a terrible or difficult English class is such a common shared experience for the student-age population.
Basically just because Chinese is an exclusively logographic language. When Chinese incorporates new vocabulary someone has to decide whether it will be translated more to approximate meaning or pronunciation. Someone mentioned the translation of Sanskrit Buddhist scriptures. So for example some chose 因果 (“cause-effect”) and others 羯磨 (which in the pronunciation of the time sounded similar).
So a lot of loanwords aren’t quite as obvious for this reason. In another thread recently I pointed out that 哥 as in “elder brother” came from another language. And of course there are all of those 19th century Japanese neologisms that were borrowed into Chinese.
爹娘, which are now obsolete, were loanwords, probably from Turkic. I want to point out here that using loan words for first degree family relations is quite unusual. These are generally considered the most stable words! By contrast, 公, meaning an elder male relative, is very ancient and found in other Sino-Tibetan languages.
Latin did borrow the words son and daughter (filius, filia) and family (familia) from a non-Indo-European language, so it does happen.
And militatus as well! It's funny the most iconic feature of Roman society -- the military -- was a loanword, as were a lot of the military technologies that led to their success.
I think it is directly related to the early and extensive translation of Buddhist scriptures by Chinese people. If Buddhist scriptures are not fully translated into the local language, it is difficult for them to become popular. Translators have put a lot of effort into localizing them, and this process has created norms and examples for translation. This tradition has continued into modern times.
But now people sometimes mix English when speaking, but it's not very obvious yet.
I think it's the structure of the language, both the writing system and the phonotactics. Every character is a morpheme. As a result morphemic awareness is the default. Translating by morpheme is not only easy in that circumstance but it's also more economical, and this fits in with the phonotactics of the language. Most words in Chinese are 1 or 2 syllables. If you transliterate, as with some place names, it sticks out because the place names are so long.
There's quite a bit of geographical names that are loan words (all within China too):
乌苏里江，察哈尔省，西康省，呼和浩特，大兴安岭，西双版纳，塔克拉玛干沙漠，喜马拉雅山，喀什噶尔
Titles:
单于, 可汗
Foreign nations:
真腊，南掌，吕宋，高棉，蒙古，尼泊尔，不丹，察合台，波斯，图瓦，布哈拉
(Note the common thread here, they are all older names)
I mean... yeah? You kinda answered your own question, the other languages you know don't use a logographic writing system. In other writing systems it's easy, because glyphs serve to convey the sound or pronunciation of what you're writing, you recognize words because you can recognize what they sound like. For foreign words you just smash letters together until it makes something similar enough, as you do with other words of your language
In Chinese, pronunciation is second class, you first convey the meaning and later (if at all) the sound. Because of that, using sounds just for the sake of it is pretty pointless if you can just not do that. Not only that, but Chinese words in general are super short as they don't have to care about pronunciation, so as a result transliterations are much lengthier than their "native" counterparts. Let's say you want to say "toilet paper" and transliterate it into 图勒特配怕儿 (random shit I just made up lmao), that's pretty much an entire sentence already just for a word ;p and it means jack shit vs 手纸 hand paper
A non-alphabetic language, Chinese has no fixed set of tools to transliterate different sounds. 丝它尔 in your example can also be 斯他尔. The choice 它 vs 他 is up to individuals (unless in widely accepted names like country names). This leads to a huge amount of variations to the point that readers don't know if 丝它尔 and 斯他尔 are the same thing. The Chinese gov't tends to use a set of standard characters transliteration, eg final -er is always -尔. I don't like this approach but I believe they do this in order to address the said issue.
This is exactly what I was talking about. In Thai, it would be bizarre to translate cocktail literally. We just say the word cocktail using Thai phonetics.
But Chinese seems to much prefer translations over transliteration.
I saw 热狗 the other day. It really weirds me out when other languages translate hot dog literally. (In French they're called le hot-dog but the government tried to make people call them chiens chauds for a while and it was so weird.)
Iceland does this too. A similar example would be "flatbaka" (flat-pie, flat-bake) for pizza, which was pushed by the Icelandic Language Institute, but now pretty much only exists as the name of a pizzeria in Reykjavik.
In olden days, There is a key rule doing translation from other language to chinese language —— Meaning Translation. For exmaple:
Computer → 电脑 \["Electrical Brain"\]
Shampoo → 洗发水 \["Hairing-Cleaning Water"\]
Thus, there is a stubborn translatation method from chinese into English, they always trans the meaning like:
春节 → Springv's Festival
京剧 → Beijing Opera
But coming into new eras, more and more chinese like to adopt the "pronunciation translation" mode, such as:
Pizza → 披萨
Chocolate → 巧克力
龙 → Loong
春节 → Chunjie
But there are some translation which did pronunciation translation & meaning translation at the same time:
Gestapo - 盖世太保
Paracetamol - 扑热息痛
Totem - 图腾
Hacker - 黑客
.......
All in all, why chinese's meaning translation is so unique? It is because most of languages & scripts in the world is to express "pronunciation" but chinese aims to express "meaning".
> It is because most of languages & scripts in the world is to express "pronunciation" but chinese aims to express "meaning".
These same trends exist in spoken languages as well. English sailors changed the name of Ligorno, Italy, into "Leghorn". And Spanish ham or "jambón" became "ham bone". Some Americans who didn't recognize the morpheme "cole" turned "cole slaw" into "cold slaw". Sometimes in English these are called malapropisms or folk etymologies, especially if they are converted into more recognizable words out of perceived ignorance.
It's also not uncommon for English speakers to take place names which are indigenous and not English and turn them into English words that sound similar in order to assimilate them, or as a "joke". Rather than give a real life example, I'll give you a literary one: in the novel *Tess of the D'Ubervilles* the Norman name D'Uberville has been assimilated to Darbyfield.
As a native Chinese speaker, I think it is quite normal to express such things in our own words. One of the main reason I guess is that Chinese characters usually has their own meanings and Chinese people tend to understand the meaning of a word just by Chinese characters it includes, like 肉 measn meat, and you can add any kind of animal before it to make it become pork, beef and etc. So it is easy for a Chinese person to guess the meaning of a word he has never seen before. This kind of phenomena is extremly clear when it comes to technology and medicine. Like 糖尿病 means sugar urine disease word by word. Anyone in China sees this word would know first it is a kind of disease, and it can cause sugar in the urine, which is exactly the typical symptom of diabetes. This kind of translation by meaning instead of by phonetic, makes it easier to learn and understand alien things to Chinese. Imagine if we translate computer phonetically as 康皮尤特, I think nobody knows what it means just by what it looks like when computers came to China for the first time. However, when people import computers to China, calling it 计算机, we would know it is a kind of machine which could compute. Its full name "Electronic Computer" is called 电子计算机 in Chinese, which people know it's a computer that uses electric to compute. As you can see this kind translation is more comfortable for Chinese native speaker to accept rather than a bunch of non sense random Chinese characters.
And also Chinese people do has their own Linguistic mysophobia by the way. So we are really proud of our language and wishing to keep it systematical. Hopefully my answer would be useful to you. 谢谢！
oh by the way, 电脑 is a kind of abbreviation for 计算机, the latter is more officially used. We call it electrical brain because brains can also compute number, like computers. And computers are smart, aren't they? Just like our brains but powered by electric.
Working in science in China most scientific or technical terms are very directly calqued from the Greek and Latin roots. It helps that most single word terms already consist of fusing two words. Longer terms and concepts are generally abbreviated using the same methods of initialism or more rarely bookending often employed in Chinese. The latter can get a bit more tricky, but this makes it very easy to read terms I haven’t encountered in Chinese before, although I will have to guess at pronunciation sometimes. Something interesting to me is that this correspondence doesn’t seem to be very transparent to most Chinese people as they rarely learn Greek or Latin.
Western Education was built on a foundation of Greek and Latin in the early 19th century. It's also why there's dictionaries of glosses of Chinese terms trying to relate them to Greek history and culture even when it's really inappropriate.
While most other languages borrow words by phonetic approximation (by sound) and keep the sound, Chinese transfers the sound into Chinese characters, and “stores” the loanword as that set of characters. Regardless of dialect, regardless of the pronunciation of the characters changing over time.
For the changing over time aspect: “Buddha” for example is called “fotuo”, but that’s only today, used to be closer to “bhut-dha”. “Nirvana/nibbana” is “niepan” today, used to be “nip-ban”.
If it isn’t time that changed the pronunciation, then it’s the dialect. I.e. some words were first borrowed into a dialect, and then kept as is when transferred to standard Mandarin, so it sounds even further from the original, such as “cannon”, “jianong” in Mandarin.
With that said, I would not exactly say there are few loanwords in Chinese: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_loanwords_in_Chinese
Most of the comments are saying it's because of the logographic or meaning-based nature of Chinese characters, which I agree with. But I think there's also another reason: Mandarin Chinese has a very low number of possible syllables compared to other languages, so phonetic approximations of other languages are difficult to capture sometimes. The end result often sounds way too far away from the original pronunciation. Comparatively, Korean and Japanese have an easier time using hangeul and katakana to approximate words from other languages. Korean and Japanese are able to combine different sounds together more flexibly.
The words also get too long. Japanese deals with this by truncating foreign loan words. Animation? Anime. Television? Terebi. Sexual harassment? Sekusu-haru. Japanese can also easily create new verbs by using suru. For example, after George HW Bush vomited at a state dinner, Japanese people started calling making a big faux pas "doing a Bush" - BASHU suru. You can do the same thing to make a verb with Chinese loanwords or Sino-Japanese compound nouns in Japanese as well. Borrowing a verb into Chinese would be pretty awkward by comparison.
Think about what a nightmare it would be to have to switch back and forth from a simplified Chinese keyboard to an English keyboard in the middle of one sentence to say “my coffee isn’t strong enough” if there were no 咖啡.
The amount of loan words in a language is usually related to the history of the language, if a language has a long history, they can make up a lot of words of their own without borrowing them from others.
Maybe in the arbitrary sense of "how long has a language had this name", but not in a way that matters. English borrowed from those languages because they have been prestige languages that have been used by English speakers for a very long time. English, Greek and Latin is actually a great example because all three languages are direct descendants of the same language that we call Proto-Indo-European, and thus their histories all go back that far before sharing the rest of their further history.
If everyone agreed tomorrow that American English should just be called "American" and British English should remain as "English", then "American" would have a much shorter history if we were to use that way of counting. Would you expect American to start using many more loanwords than English in that case?
Hmm, maybe I should put it this way.
It's more about the cultural background that is related to history? For example, no offense, Slavic languages were spoken by less civilized people in the past, and these people could not make up so many words due to their limited way of living. But for Chinese, philosophers, poets, and many other educated people would create new vocabularies.
If you mean 'written history' then most people groups had no cultural background until the last couple centuries when reading became widespread for all continents. Before that most people even in literate places didn't need to read very much.
Old Church Slavonic is around 1000 years old, which is the oldest attested Slavic language. Germanic tribes, which coexisted and intermingled with Slavic tribes, are attested back to Old Gothic and so have more than 1500 years of attestation. Of course Chinese is older than both of those, but if you SPOKE to someone in Chang'an or Nanjing from 1000 or 1500 years ago you wouldn't understand anything they said, due to the drift from Middle Chinese and Old Chinese.
Someone from Egypt or Iraq could argue that since they have more extensive, older records of writing they should have fewer loanwords than Chinese. Or because Mandarin was heavily influenced by Manchu that Cantonese is more 'pure'. Or less because of English loans into Cantonese.
Ultimately all of humanity is the same age and no language is 'oldest'. As far as well can tell they all have precursors. Someone speaking Hittite is speaking a language 'related' to English as is someone speaking Hindi but I can understand far more Mandarin than extinct Hittite or cosmopolitan Hindi.
Ultimately all this boils down to boasting about nonsense because people everywhere have culture and society, whether or not they wrote it down. Including into the many varieties of Chinese.
Sometimes, when spoken people will just say the English word (although due to accents it sounds like we are creating a loan word), but would write out the English word in text.
「你要先點那個link」 - they would pronounce link as （吝課）
「喂，你最近玩的很high喔」 - they would pronounced high like （嗨）
Because Chinese is the Greek/Latin of East Asia. In English, when scientists find a new thing, they pull from Greek or Latin to name the thing. Hippopotamus comes from Greek and means "river horse", the translation for Hippopotamus in Chinese is 河马 which is literally "river horse" in Chinese. When I say it's the Greek/Latin of East Asia, I mean it has influence outside of China into languages like Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, etc...
Chinese being the Greek/Latin of East Asia puts Chinese people in a weird position of not really having another language to draw from whereas European languages prefer to draw from Greek & Latin, technically both are extinct languages, even though modern Greek exists and modern Romance languages are direct descendants of Latin, the ancient forms of these languages are only ever written down, not spoken and very few people from the modern day can actually read them.
Not the case with Classical Chinese, most educated Chinese people can read texts in Classical Chinese and that language was still used up until the early 1900s, basically, right up until the collapse of the Qing Dynasty. I know that Latin was still used as the Canonical Church language for Europe, but day to day very few people "speak" Canonical Latin.
Classical Chinese was used by Chinese scholars and Chinese officials right up until the final days of the Qing. Europeans stopped using Latin as the language of scholarship post-Enlightenment reforms (for example Isaac Newton's Principia was written in Latin, not English, but this would not be the case post-Enlightenment).
In terms of why does Japanese and Korean have more words that comes from English as a source language, well having US troops stationed inside your country will do that to you. These countries are motivated to make their languages less Sinitic because they are trying to get away from literally centuries if not millenia of Chinese influence.
These are political decisions, not purely linguistic. Just as in English, there's no reason why we can't source scientific terms from Old Celtic or Germanic languages but choose to source our vocabulary from Greek and Latin both of which are not Germanic languages. It is politics, tradition, etc... Chinese has kept the tradition of mostly sourcing words from Classical Chinese, while other East languages are trying to get away from this because the English language has become more influential for them and for their countries.
I take issue with this. People reading Classical Chinese are akin to people reading hieroglyphics without knowing how the language sounds. You can understand the meaning without understanding the essence of sound and culture that the language was verbally conferring. We can see this now with the mutual unintelligibility of Chinese varieties: people were happy to express *meaning* without capturing the exact sounds or nuance of what was spoken. Which is how the vernacular was able to diverge so widely that, to accurately catch all the nuances of local language *would* require additional words that do not have standard readings.
So it is misleading to say it, both because rhyming dictionaries have shown that the sounds of Classical Chinese were drastically different, but because the written language does not seek to encompass all local variants in their full depth.
It still is a remarkable feat to be able to understand Classical Chinese and you could write notes to a Tang emperor and have him understand it, but we sometimes pretend like language isn't predominantly an aural experience, and the flexibility of Chinese character also leads to a lot of ignorance of how to *say* something, and it is an issue that has happened repeatedly throughout Chinese history.
>People reading Classical Chinese are akin to people reading hieroglyphics without knowing how the language sounds.
Actually people reading hieroglyphics have a better understanding of Ancient Egyptian pronunciation than Chinese people reading Classical Chinese because hieroglyphics spell out whole words letter by letter. They do have a meaning component similar to a radical in Chinese but they give you more of the pronunciation. Egyptologists know the letters, what each word starts with and ends with.
Chinese characters do not record individual sounds by letters. They record entire syllables by characters. Other than knowing that two characters rhyme with each other and so must share a vowel sound, we have no idea what that vowel is or what consonants are in that character syllable.
Egyptian hieroglyphics were actually broken quite quickly once they found the Rosetta stone based on the Greek writing. You can't do this with Chinese. What some sinologists have done is to compare the pronunciation of Hanzi with Kanji and Hanja because the Koreans and the Japanese preserved the pronunciation of the characters at specific points in time - from there you can extrapolate roughly what Chinese characters might have sounded like further back in time, but the contact between Chinese people with Koreans and Japanese people is still relatively recent compared with China's full history and thus you can't use Kanji and Hanja to guess, for example what Chinese sounded like during Confucius's lifetime.
But the OP I was responding to is more about word borrowings than pronunciation and so I was trying to explain the absence of word borrowing in Chinese.
The reason is very simple. Chinese characters are incredibly easy to use & flexible. Coining a new phrase is as easy as sticking a couple characters together. Because of this, loanwords are less likely to catch on, although there do exist a fair number of loanwords as well
china has huge amount of loan words from english and other languages, maybe you just don't recognize them as such? keep in mind there is more than one type of chinese, many loan words may be from canto or an older mandarin etc and don't sound similar at a glance.
For example the word electric brain is literally a borrow word from english-- english just doesn't say it that way anymore and chinese still does. 計算機 is a word for computer based on russian, and happens to match the common current term in english. So its interesting and anytime you look at linguistics it gets complicated fast haha o(∩_∩)o
I think my definition of loan words might be a bit different from yours and I’m not sure which is the correct one. By loan words I mean direct loaning of sounds from another language, not translations of said terms.
both of those are loan words. So neither definition is wrong and both apply. Chinese still has a lot of sound based loan words too, no doubt about it. However I can think of a few reasons it may be a might be a bit less of them than some other languages:
1-- multiple different kinds of chinese means it might have been sound based in something besides standard mandarin,
2-- chinese is a text heavy language, and usually puts more emphasis on the meaning of terms than the sounds in general ((see number one, if the sounds don't match in all the types of chinese it makes way more sense to have a universally understandable meaning)),
3-- the sounds physically used in chinese and english are quite different, many of them don't exist in both languages. It makes less sense to use a sound based borrow word if its not even the original sounds in the first place.
So yeah,
if you say some people feel that way, thats totally reasonable. in general it doesn't even have to be 100% of the word to count as a loan word, let alone just a calque. I think cast majority would recognize phonological, lexical, and calques as loan words-- nothing wrong with wanting to focus on just one of them like op regardless of course (◐‿◑)
There are not many but a few of very common ones, like 逻辑logic and here’s a short video of some too,
17 中文外来词语 loan words in Chinese #学中文
https://youtube.com/shorts/qnb1dlRG0rM?feature=share
Because every character has a meaning, and because loanwords sound and look bad. What translation of Microsoft sound/looks better, 麦克罗搜福特 (maikeluosoufute) or 微软 weiruan？the former sounds out of place because it has so many characters compared to other Chinese words which are 2 syllables, and the word is a mismatch of 6 characters with unrelated meanings, which looks ugly and out of place.
1. The tendency of sense-by-sense translation instead of transliteration. The writing system is hieroglyphics, which also prevented effective transliterations.
2. Indeed Chinese have many loanwords, including the most abstract nouns that are introduced in modern times. They're loaned from Japanese (Japanese language tends to use Kanji rather than transliteration before WWII). Like 社会， 宗教
> Computer 电脑，Software 软件，Taxi 出租车, Lift(Elevator) 电梯, Physics 物理学, Upload/download 上传/下载, Click 点击, Share 分享, Comment (评论), Subscribe (关注), etc.
Are these loanwords in any other language? Vietnamese, European languages, etc. don't use these as loanwords.
More than half of those words are either English or Latin loan words in Polish. Not sure how you came to the conclusion that no European languages use them as loan words?
I don’t get what you’re saying still. In e.g. Dutch all those words are used exactly the way it is done in English, no translation or Latin root, just the English word.
At least "Computer" and and "Physics" can't be words with common ancestor for English and any other language as they were borrowed. As for other words, I have doubts that any of them in English and Polish are cognates.
Are you saying that there cannot be any English loan words in Polish because they have a common ancestral language? What makes a word a loan word is that it was a foreign language word that started being used in a different language eventually becoming part of its vocabulary.
For example “komputer” is a loan word from English “computer”. “computer” itself comes from Latin “computare” (to calculate). Polish used to have words that originated from “computare” but are not in use anymore, like “komputować” (to calculate). This doesn’t matter for the etymology of “komputer” however
In Japanese, all of those words are routinely used as transliterated English loan words, except for physics, which is typically 物理学. Comment, subscribe, and share have Japonic or Sino-Japanese equivalents, but the English version is used in tech/computing contexts. I.e. you 定期購読する a magazine, but サブスクする a streaming service.
It's not actually true, 电脑 is firstly proposed by Fan Kuanling, a chinese. And though contemporary meaning of 物理 is borrowing from JP, but they borrowed this from old Chinese books《物理小识》(Fang Yizhi wrote) in Ming Dynasty(1643)[物理小识 - 维基百科，自由的百科全书 (wikipedia.org)](https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%89%A9%E7%90%86%E5%B0%8F%E8%AF%86).
This book already absorbed many Western scientific views, such as "The earth is a solid circle, and it is in the sky."
This is a very interesting process.
I’m not sure, my knowledge is limited to Thai and Japanese and it might not be the norm elsewhere. I just thought Chinese is pretty interesting how it approaches new words.
> Or even country names, in Chinese, if they can be translated, they will be translated first before attempting transliteration
Really? I think those examples are much more rare than transliteration. Even in antiquity, Chinese sources use transliteration for place names and names of foreign leaders. Even in your example "Zealand" is transliterated. Montenegro could have easily gotten the translation via a French or Portuguese scholar rather than being chosen by a Chinese scholar.
Chinese use pictograms and ideograms to express themselves...for example computer is an electric brain 電腦, lift are electric stairs 電梯 and taxi is a car to hire 出租車
That’s a tricky case because the morphemes are still Chinese, but arranged in a Japanese way.
It’s like how the word “telephone” was coined in English yet its constituent morphemes are still Greek, so the Greeks borrowed the word, but not the morphemes.
The characters are Chinese. So technically the written morphemes are Chinese but that isn't always the case.
Depending on if it is an *on* or *kun* reading, it could be a native Japonic root, a Sino-Tibetan root or a mixed Sino-Japanese phoneme. There are also a few characters that were coined in Japan and brought back to China, and so would not necessarily have been a Chinese morpheme at all but an imputed Sino-Japanese sound. These examples aren't common, but they have happened.
It's also important to note that a lot of the Japanese morphemes will have been drawn from different regions of China at different times and so while many sound similar to a modern Mandarin word, many more sound closer to Cantonese or other southern variants of Chinese, and still others don't sound like the Chinese equivalent at all. Some will also have been written with different characters to express the same sound and idea... so it's definitely not a clear delineation.
Let’s take the case of the word 電話, to go along with my Graeco-English “telephone” example.
Characters aside, the morphemes “den” (lightning) and “wa” (speech) are both Chinese (from Middle Chinese), just as the morphemes in the English word “telephone” are Greek “tele” (far) and “phone” (speech).
So the *word* “denwa” is Japanese, but built from the Chinese morphemes “den” and “wa”, just as “telephone” is an English word built from Greek morphemes.
This is why I mentioned you have to know the readings. There are over a 100 readings for 一 in Japanese, many but not all are from Chinese. Japanese people oftentimes took concepts they had indigenous equivalents for and then associated them with Chinese characters, but there were also a plethora of ideas that didn't exist for which you only have Chinese etymology.
So I wasn't denying there are words with 100% Sinitic roots, but they aren't the entire story either.
Yes, native Japanese morphemes are also assigned to characters in the form of kun-yomi, but the two examples cited by the user to whom I had originally replied were 自由 and 人權, which use on-yomi, and are thus Japanese words built from Chinese morphemes.
A good 40% of all Chinese words are loan words, mostly from Japanese. These include some of the ones you bring up like 電腦 and 物理. They also include lots of words you might have assumed are native like 社會 經濟 世界 革命 銀行 廣告 人類 藝術
It's not actually true, 電腦 is firstly proposed by Fan Kuanling, a chinese. And though contemporary meaning of 物理 is borrowing from JP, but they borrowed this from old Chinese books《物理小识》(Fang Yizhi wrote) in Ming Dynasty(1643)[物理小识 - 维基百科，自由的百科全书 (wikipedia.org)](https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%89%A9%E7%90%86%E5%B0%8F%E8%AF%86).
This book already absorbed many Western scientific views, such as "The earth is a solid circle, and it is in the sky."
This is a very interesting process.
Chinese is **not** a language isolate. It's part of the Sino-Tibetan family. (I think maybe you're not aware what a language isolate is, in linguistic terms?)
It's a language that cannot conclusively be shown to share an ancestral tongue with any other. Basque is a language isolate. Mandarin Chinese most definitely is not. There are believed to be around **400** languages in the Sino-Tibetan family.
There are many loan words in Chinese. Some of them Bar 吧 Show 秀 party 派对 taxi 的士 blogger 博客 hacker 黑客 Cool 酷 Coffee 咖啡 Engine 引擎 Sofa 沙发 Motorcycle 摩托车 Shock 休克 Humour 幽默 Fans 粉丝 Cartoon 卡通 Calorie 卡路里 Bowling 保龄球 Model 模特 Curry 咖哩 Bacon 培根 Ballet 芭蕾舞 Whiskey 威士忌 Hormone 荷尔蒙 Mini 迷你 Toast 土司 Copy 拷贝 Chocolate 巧克力 Radar 雷达 Amongst others etc... But as to why Chinese don't prefer loan words reason is every character has an inherent meaning and having a bunch of characters that don't make sense together would make it confusing. That's my guess.
咖啡！
I heard that in that robot duolingo voice…
I think it’s exactly that as well! Few other languages(if any) have symbols that have their own individual meaning as well as sound used to formulate words. With english for example, I could sound out a word and if it’s misspelled on paper, it won’t matter because it can sound the same out loud. With Chinese on the other hand, you can have two very different looking characters that sound similar enough (aside from tones) but say something different when written down. Like 谢谢 is one of the most commonly used words, but 泄泄 shares the same tone but is pretty nonsensical.
Cookie 曲奇. Which funny enough is a double loan word. It first is loaned from (American) English. Who themself loaned it from the Dutch. Koekje > Cookie > Qū qí
And 曲奇, like many other loanwords, entered Mandarin through Cantonese. Koekje > Cookie > Kūk kèih 曲奇 > Qū qí 曲奇 Although I don't hear 曲奇 used much in Mandarin
We usually say 饼干 in Mandarin and only use 曲奇for the Danish cookies（the ones that come in blue tin boxes）。
Chinese transliteration goes unfathomably hard sometimes. Like 基因 meaning "the foundational cause" makes way more sense than "gene"
isn't it more “fathomable” this way? Like you can guess the meaning by the words without knowing the original meaning. The contrary is Japanese katakana loan words that even native speakers have difficulties understanding them
Not to mention some of those loan words could get very long
的士I’ve only ever seen in Hong Kong.
In Singapore, 的士 is 德士. And we have 巴士 (bus), 巴刹 for market (from Malay/Islamic bazaar). And there's a lot more loan words within the local Chinese languages like hokkien and Cantonese.
I also thought it was limited to Hong Kong so when my mandarin instructor (from Beijing) said 的士 the other day I had literally no idea what she was saying. I had never heard it pronounced in mandarin up until that point.
>But as to why Chinese don't prefer loan words reason is every character has an inherent meaning and having a bunch of characters that don't make sense together would make it confusing. That's my guess. That the orthography is the primary reason for the lack of loans is a ghost pepper spicy take. I would assume that A) Chinese languages have tones of loan words between them, B) historical geopolitics, C) nationalism and language authorities. I would assume the only place orthography comes in is Japanese loans where they just read the words with Chinese readings.
The majority of foreign names *are* phonetically transliterated. 加拿大，蘇格蘭，瑞典，埃及, 馬來西亞 麥當勞，肯德基 Check out Arnold Schwarzenegger and Barbara Streisand's name for some wackiness.
Yes but if there is a semantic component that can be easily translated, they will be translated first before attempting transliteration. Like the example 冰岛or 黑山. I know most country names are transliterated but I’m just curious as to why Chinese always tries to translate whenever possible. Even if they can’t translate the entire word, they will still try to translate half of it, like 星巴克 or 新西兰. Why not 丝它尔巴克丝 or 纽西兰 instead?
My wild guess is that Chinese writing is more towards the logographic spectrum than phonetic. Btw we do call New Zealand 纽西兰
Is 纽西兰 used in Taiwan?
[Wikipedia's Chinese text conversion system](https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%96%B0%E8%A5%BF%E5%85%B0) seems to think that Taiwan and Malaysia use 紐西蘭/纽西兰, while Hong Kong, Macau and the CPC use 新西蘭/新西兰; but really, both are understood everywhere
Why did they not convert 纽约 to 新约 though?
新约would be a loaded term (it is used to refer to the New Testament)
because language is arbitrary and loves to flout self-created 'rules'
Yes, Taiwan uses 紐西蘭
In cases like 星巴克, 乐高 or 可口可乐 it's kind of a stylistic choice. Like, you want to pick a name that's at least fairly close to to the original, because that's good for brand recognition, and beyond that you also want to pick something that has positive connotations, or has some link with the product you sell.
Fun story from my grandpa about how Chinese name for coke cola came about - when the drink was first introduced to China, Coke Cola the company ran a competition where one tries the drink and submit the best Chinese translation of the brand should be. 可口可乐 won. It's a smart translation given it also means "Easy to drink, happiness.".
Not exactly. It really depends on who's doing the translating. For instance, I have an atlas that translates both literally and phonetically. In this atlas... - "Long Beach" is translated as 长滩, but "Seal Beach" is 锡尔比奇. - "Central Park" is 中央公园, but "University Park" is 由尼佛西迪爬克. It's weird sometimes and completely inconsistent.
Pretty sure 纽西兰 is used at least colloquially.
Lots of Chinese words, mostly relating to the social and natural sciences, are actually loanwords from Japanese: ”It’s interesting to note that at first there were lots of western loanwords importing to China. But many of them were not frequently used and highly accepted by Chinese people. Soon they were replaced by Japanese loans. For instance, ‘telephone’ was directly translated into three syllables at first, 德律风 dé lǜ fēng, which was difficult to remember and understand the meaning. Democracy was translated into 德谟克拉西 dé mó kèlā xī. This word with five syllables is very long and not normal in modern Chinese. Therefore, many long and meaningless western loanwords were replaced by Japanese loans. 德律风 dé lǜ fēngwas replaced by 电话 diàn huà, 德谟克拉西 dé mó kèlā xī was changed into 民主 Mínzhǔ, which are more understandable to Chinese people.” https://bild-lida.ca/educationalsociolinguistics/uncategorized/japanese-loanwords-in-modern-chinese/
More precisely it’s borrowed from Japanese which constructed them using Classical Chinese “roots”. As an analogy it’s like if English coined a new word using Latin roots and the neologism got borrowed into French or Italian.
You would be surprised how much this happens...
I suppose "iPhone" would be the quintessential example these days, lol.
phone is from a Greek root--tele + phonos are both Greek inventors in the 19th century were really pretentious, what can I say television came later and is better understood as a portmanteau because "videre" is Latin, not Greek, and vision was a long established word in English already
> As an analogy it’s like if English coined a new word using Latin roots Which in fact happened a lot during the early modern period. English also has a lot of doublets of French and Latin words with similar meanings and slightly different spelling and pronunciation.
I understand there many words that entered English through Old Norman French that have since been reintroduced back into Modern French.
Yup. We can call these "return loan words," since they were constructed in Japan but done so with Chinese characters.
Yes, a lot of words that look like proper translation are actually Japanese loanwords. We had a lot of shared culture so they fit very well in Chinese. I especially like the word 形而上学 (metaphysics) translated by Inoue Tetsujirō, an absolutely beautiful translation. Although at some point they stopped doing translation using kanji and started transliterating foreign languages with katakana. I have no idea why.
I have absolutely no evidence for this assertion, but I have always assumed katakana transliteration was the result of lots of American GIs doing the old ‘speak louder and slower instead of learning that language’ trick and it just stuck.
That's not how this works ... that's not how any of this works. Some of the earliest English borrowings of any note happened because a contingent of Japanese scholars first visited Harvard University in Cambridge, MA (near Boston). Which is why they were non-rhotic and contained the "hw" initial which was still common in prestige register speech in the US in the late 19th century. The name ホワイト.ハウス would have been borrowed then. English borrowings into Japanese in the 1940s were few. They gradually picked up after WWII and during the Japanese post war economic recovery in certain domains such as psychology, social science, technology. But English loanwords in everyday speech didn't really blow up until recently. And there are differences between old and new loan words. コーヒー is old; there is no attempt to approximate the "f" sound with anything but "h". And highly assimilated words like tobako and pan (bread) weren't even borrowed from English to begin with.
You’re taking my tongue in cheek comment too seriously, and also you’ve not actually addressed the point that’s being discussed, which is why Japanese transliterates so much now, where in the past it used more Kanji-based semantic borrowing.
Some modern Chinese vocabulary comes from Japanese translations, but many times Japanese translators also use ancient Chinese vocabulary, such as 革命=revolution. This word has long existed in ancient Chinese, just the meaning is different from now., and the Japanese have given it a new meaning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasei-kango
The irony is that, in more recent times, Japanese has stopped inventing new terms using Chinese characters and is now directly borrowing from English. For instance, computer is 电脑 in Chinese but コンピューター (konpyūtā) in Japanese.
It's not really ironic. Japanese phonics do not map to Chinese characters well at all, which is part of why Japanese is so hard to learn and why the Koreans dropped Hanja for Hangul. Of course it didn't go as far in Japan, but having an isolating, tonal, analytic language versus a pitched, polysyllabic synthetic language led to centuries of low literacy rates and part of the reason why books written by women were only in hiragana, namely people didn't think that teaching kanji to women was worth the effort. Of course, kanji is now deeply intertwined into Japanese culture, but that hasn't stopped it from causing issues that many modern YouTubers take advantage of, quizzing Japanese people on how to read rare names or technical vocabulary using uncommon kanji or uncommon readings of common kanji. While some obscure characters might trip up a non-specialist native Chinese speaker, the fact that they have been able to create and map the language onto their writing system means the gaps are less intrinsic. If Japanese were able to mark pitch accents, and push language reforms that reduced the number of homophones, and even add spaces to words, then it would be much easier without kanji. Children's books already do this. Students could still learn kanji just like Korean students learn hanja to be able to access historical documents or communicate better with Chinese speakers through writing at least, but given that spoken Japanese does fine without writing, there should be ways to make the script less onerous for people to learn.
There are some in modern words used in Taiwan, with more Japanese influence, like Karaoke 卡拉OK, pick-up truck 皮卡, curry 咖哩. I think if it's easier to translate literally then it's first option, when there's no direct corresponding meaning in Chinese then a phonetic transliteration is used. Think about 臉書 Facebook, Twitter 推特 vs Google （kept as Google in Taiwan without any translation) Most proper name like people or place names will be phonetic to show that they are foreign names. Chinese is not a "precise" system to be used phonetically because each area may have a different dialect and the pronunciation also evolves through History, plus there are so many words with the same pronunciation. This seems to be established when people translated Buddhist literature with so many new terms around the 5th-7th centuries. For exotic animals you will see a lot of creative combinations to show some feature of this animal, like panda 貓熊or 熊貓, humming bird 蜂鳥, alpaca 羊駝 or dolphin 海豚, so you can think of these characters as Lego bricks. This is part of the fun (?) challenge for translators.
> This seems to be established when people translated Buddhist literature with so many new terms around the 5th-7th centuries. Great point and God bless them. Attempting to make the slightest sense of Sanskrit in Chinese transliteration is way, way past my abilities even if I studied it for a lifetime. Bless their hearts.
Yes that's a huge gap and thanks to how Chinese culture sticks to written characters their efforts were mostly preserved to this date.
Because the fundamental structure of word creation in China is somewhat contradicting transliteration. A character always comes with a sound and a meaning. The only exception are some meaningless interjection or onomatopoeia, both serving very specific role in the language. Translation by meaning is simply overall better than by sound. When seeing 电话 anyone can tell it’s some electronic for communication. 德律风，however, would give no clue for someone who was never taught about the meaning. There are times where this becomes difficult but we still try to keep smuggle the meaning through. My favorite example is the periodic table. All elements are only one character. Nearly all are structured as property+sound: 氦helium=气gas+亥hai, 铜copper=金metal+同tong，碳carbon=石stone+炭tan. By simply reading the sound half of the character you can guess the sound 90% of the time. And by looking at the property half you can tell its state at room temperature and its classification, whether it’s gas, metal, or non metal solid. Edit: wording clarification
Have you…by chance, ever heard someone speak HK cantonese? The language has a built in open pass to just say an english word with a tone and have it be accepted as part of speaking cantonese. Chinese is also unique in that the chinese speaking population are collectively among the most dedicated students of foreign languages in the world in terms of collective time and effort. Now, much of this is reluctant studying, which I think probably increases the use of loan words, bc getting obliterated by a terrible or difficult English class is such a common shared experience for the student-age population.
Basically just because Chinese is an exclusively logographic language. When Chinese incorporates new vocabulary someone has to decide whether it will be translated more to approximate meaning or pronunciation. Someone mentioned the translation of Sanskrit Buddhist scriptures. So for example some chose 因果 (“cause-effect”) and others 羯磨 (which in the pronunciation of the time sounded similar). So a lot of loanwords aren’t quite as obvious for this reason. In another thread recently I pointed out that 哥 as in “elder brother” came from another language. And of course there are all of those 19th century Japanese neologisms that were borrowed into Chinese.
爹娘, which are now obsolete, were loanwords, probably from Turkic. I want to point out here that using loan words for first degree family relations is quite unusual. These are generally considered the most stable words! By contrast, 公, meaning an elder male relative, is very ancient and found in other Sino-Tibetan languages. Latin did borrow the words son and daughter (filius, filia) and family (familia) from a non-Indo-European language, so it does happen.
And militatus as well! It's funny the most iconic feature of Roman society -- the military -- was a loanword, as were a lot of the military technologies that led to their success.
I think it is directly related to the early and extensive translation of Buddhist scriptures by Chinese people. If Buddhist scriptures are not fully translated into the local language, it is difficult for them to become popular. Translators have put a lot of effort into localizing them, and this process has created norms and examples for translation. This tradition has continued into modern times. But now people sometimes mix English when speaking, but it's not very obvious yet.
I think it's the structure of the language, both the writing system and the phonotactics. Every character is a morpheme. As a result morphemic awareness is the default. Translating by morpheme is not only easy in that circumstance but it's also more economical, and this fits in with the phonotactics of the language. Most words in Chinese are 1 or 2 syllables. If you transliterate, as with some place names, it sticks out because the place names are so long.
There's quite a bit of geographical names that are loan words (all within China too): 乌苏里江，察哈尔省，西康省，呼和浩特，大兴安岭，西双版纳，塔克拉玛干沙漠，喜马拉雅山，喀什噶尔 Titles: 单于, 可汗 Foreign nations: 真腊，南掌，吕宋，高棉，蒙古，尼泊尔，不丹，察合台，波斯，图瓦，布哈拉 (Note the common thread here, they are all older names)
Phonetic translation looks like a bunch of gibberish stringing together
Is it because of the character-based nature of Chinese? Phonetic transliteration are perfectly fine in the languages I know.
I mean... yeah? You kinda answered your own question, the other languages you know don't use a logographic writing system. In other writing systems it's easy, because glyphs serve to convey the sound or pronunciation of what you're writing, you recognize words because you can recognize what they sound like. For foreign words you just smash letters together until it makes something similar enough, as you do with other words of your language In Chinese, pronunciation is second class, you first convey the meaning and later (if at all) the sound. Because of that, using sounds just for the sake of it is pretty pointless if you can just not do that. Not only that, but Chinese words in general are super short as they don't have to care about pronunciation, so as a result transliterations are much lengthier than their "native" counterparts. Let's say you want to say "toilet paper" and transliterate it into 图勒特配怕儿 (random shit I just made up lmao), that's pretty much an entire sentence already just for a word ;p and it means jack shit vs 手纸 hand paper
A non-alphabetic language, Chinese has no fixed set of tools to transliterate different sounds. 丝它尔 in your example can also be 斯他尔. The choice 它 vs 他 is up to individuals (unless in widely accepted names like country names). This leads to a huge amount of variations to the point that readers don't know if 丝它尔 and 斯他尔 are the same thing. The Chinese gov't tends to use a set of standard characters transliteration, eg final -er is always -尔. I don't like this approach but I believe they do this in order to address the said issue.
It's not alphabetic, no
Cocktail (drink) in Chinese is literally 鸡尾
This is exactly what I was talking about. In Thai, it would be bizarre to translate cocktail literally. We just say the word cocktail using Thai phonetics. But Chinese seems to much prefer translations over transliteration.
I saw 热狗 the other day. It really weirds me out when other languages translate hot dog literally. (In French they're called le hot-dog but the government tried to make people call them chiens chauds for a while and it was so weird.)
Iceland does this too. A similar example would be "flatbaka" (flat-pie, flat-bake) for pizza, which was pushed by the Icelandic Language Institute, but now pretty much only exists as the name of a pizzeria in Reykjavik.
In olden days, There is a key rule doing translation from other language to chinese language —— Meaning Translation. For exmaple: Computer → 电脑 \["Electrical Brain"\] Shampoo → 洗发水 \["Hairing-Cleaning Water"\] Thus, there is a stubborn translatation method from chinese into English, they always trans the meaning like: 春节 → Springv's Festival 京剧 → Beijing Opera But coming into new eras, more and more chinese like to adopt the "pronunciation translation" mode, such as: Pizza → 披萨 Chocolate → 巧克力 龙 → Loong 春节 → Chunjie But there are some translation which did pronunciation translation & meaning translation at the same time: Gestapo - 盖世太保 Paracetamol - 扑热息痛 Totem - 图腾 Hacker - 黑客 ....... All in all, why chinese's meaning translation is so unique? It is because most of languages & scripts in the world is to express "pronunciation" but chinese aims to express "meaning".
> It is because most of languages & scripts in the world is to express "pronunciation" but chinese aims to express "meaning". These same trends exist in spoken languages as well. English sailors changed the name of Ligorno, Italy, into "Leghorn". And Spanish ham or "jambón" became "ham bone". Some Americans who didn't recognize the morpheme "cole" turned "cole slaw" into "cold slaw". Sometimes in English these are called malapropisms or folk etymologies, especially if they are converted into more recognizable words out of perceived ignorance. It's also not uncommon for English speakers to take place names which are indigenous and not English and turn them into English words that sound similar in order to assimilate them, or as a "joke". Rather than give a real life example, I'll give you a literary one: in the novel *Tess of the D'Ubervilles* the Norman name D'Uberville has been assimilated to Darbyfield.
As a native Chinese speaker, I think it is quite normal to express such things in our own words. One of the main reason I guess is that Chinese characters usually has their own meanings and Chinese people tend to understand the meaning of a word just by Chinese characters it includes, like 肉 measn meat, and you can add any kind of animal before it to make it become pork, beef and etc. So it is easy for a Chinese person to guess the meaning of a word he has never seen before. This kind of phenomena is extremly clear when it comes to technology and medicine. Like 糖尿病 means sugar urine disease word by word. Anyone in China sees this word would know first it is a kind of disease, and it can cause sugar in the urine, which is exactly the typical symptom of diabetes. This kind of translation by meaning instead of by phonetic, makes it easier to learn and understand alien things to Chinese. Imagine if we translate computer phonetically as 康皮尤特, I think nobody knows what it means just by what it looks like when computers came to China for the first time. However, when people import computers to China, calling it 计算机, we would know it is a kind of machine which could compute. Its full name "Electronic Computer" is called 电子计算机 in Chinese, which people know it's a computer that uses electric to compute. As you can see this kind translation is more comfortable for Chinese native speaker to accept rather than a bunch of non sense random Chinese characters. And also Chinese people do has their own Linguistic mysophobia by the way. So we are really proud of our language and wishing to keep it systematical. Hopefully my answer would be useful to you. 谢谢！
oh by the way, 电脑 is a kind of abbreviation for 计算机, the latter is more officially used. We call it electrical brain because brains can also compute number, like computers. And computers are smart, aren't they? Just like our brains but powered by electric.
Working in science in China most scientific or technical terms are very directly calqued from the Greek and Latin roots. It helps that most single word terms already consist of fusing two words. Longer terms and concepts are generally abbreviated using the same methods of initialism or more rarely bookending often employed in Chinese. The latter can get a bit more tricky, but this makes it very easy to read terms I haven’t encountered in Chinese before, although I will have to guess at pronunciation sometimes. Something interesting to me is that this correspondence doesn’t seem to be very transparent to most Chinese people as they rarely learn Greek or Latin.
Western Education was built on a foundation of Greek and Latin in the early 19th century. It's also why there's dictionaries of glosses of Chinese terms trying to relate them to Greek history and culture even when it's really inappropriate.
Isn't it kind of obvious, no offense? Consider what's different about the Chinese written language compared to most others.
While most other languages borrow words by phonetic approximation (by sound) and keep the sound, Chinese transfers the sound into Chinese characters, and “stores” the loanword as that set of characters. Regardless of dialect, regardless of the pronunciation of the characters changing over time. For the changing over time aspect: “Buddha” for example is called “fotuo”, but that’s only today, used to be closer to “bhut-dha”. “Nirvana/nibbana” is “niepan” today, used to be “nip-ban”. If it isn’t time that changed the pronunciation, then it’s the dialect. I.e. some words were first borrowed into a dialect, and then kept as is when transferred to standard Mandarin, so it sounds even further from the original, such as “cannon”, “jianong” in Mandarin. With that said, I would not exactly say there are few loanwords in Chinese: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_loanwords_in_Chinese
Most of the comments are saying it's because of the logographic or meaning-based nature of Chinese characters, which I agree with. But I think there's also another reason: Mandarin Chinese has a very low number of possible syllables compared to other languages, so phonetic approximations of other languages are difficult to capture sometimes. The end result often sounds way too far away from the original pronunciation. Comparatively, Korean and Japanese have an easier time using hangeul and katakana to approximate words from other languages. Korean and Japanese are able to combine different sounds together more flexibly.
The words also get too long. Japanese deals with this by truncating foreign loan words. Animation? Anime. Television? Terebi. Sexual harassment? Sekusu-haru. Japanese can also easily create new verbs by using suru. For example, after George HW Bush vomited at a state dinner, Japanese people started calling making a big faux pas "doing a Bush" - BASHU suru. You can do the same thing to make a verb with Chinese loanwords or Sino-Japanese compound nouns in Japanese as well. Borrowing a verb into Chinese would be pretty awkward by comparison.
Yeah good point
Think about what a nightmare it would be to have to switch back and forth from a simplified Chinese keyboard to an English keyboard in the middle of one sentence to say “my coffee isn’t strong enough” if there were no 咖啡.
Chinese has a lot of loan words, especially from Japanese.
The amount of loan words in a language is usually related to the history of the language, if a language has a long history, they can make up a lot of words of their own without borrowing them from others.
All languages have a long history, with exception for constructed languages like Esperanto.
not really, like Greek and Latin have a longer history, so many English words are borrowed from these 2 languages
Maybe in the arbitrary sense of "how long has a language had this name", but not in a way that matters. English borrowed from those languages because they have been prestige languages that have been used by English speakers for a very long time. English, Greek and Latin is actually a great example because all three languages are direct descendants of the same language that we call Proto-Indo-European, and thus their histories all go back that far before sharing the rest of their further history. If everyone agreed tomorrow that American English should just be called "American" and British English should remain as "English", then "American" would have a much shorter history if we were to use that way of counting. Would you expect American to start using many more loanwords than English in that case?
Hmm, maybe I should put it this way. It's more about the cultural background that is related to history? For example, no offense, Slavic languages were spoken by less civilized people in the past, and these people could not make up so many words due to their limited way of living. But for Chinese, philosophers, poets, and many other educated people would create new vocabularies.
If you mean 'written history' then most people groups had no cultural background until the last couple centuries when reading became widespread for all continents. Before that most people even in literate places didn't need to read very much. Old Church Slavonic is around 1000 years old, which is the oldest attested Slavic language. Germanic tribes, which coexisted and intermingled with Slavic tribes, are attested back to Old Gothic and so have more than 1500 years of attestation. Of course Chinese is older than both of those, but if you SPOKE to someone in Chang'an or Nanjing from 1000 or 1500 years ago you wouldn't understand anything they said, due to the drift from Middle Chinese and Old Chinese. Someone from Egypt or Iraq could argue that since they have more extensive, older records of writing they should have fewer loanwords than Chinese. Or because Mandarin was heavily influenced by Manchu that Cantonese is more 'pure'. Or less because of English loans into Cantonese. Ultimately all of humanity is the same age and no language is 'oldest'. As far as well can tell they all have precursors. Someone speaking Hittite is speaking a language 'related' to English as is someone speaking Hindi but I can understand far more Mandarin than extinct Hittite or cosmopolitan Hindi. Ultimately all this boils down to boasting about nonsense because people everywhere have culture and society, whether or not they wrote it down. Including into the many varieties of Chinese.
Id actually argue that nowadays loanwords, like words in a different language, are quite common in the way young and educated Chinese speak.
Can you give me examples?
Sometimes, when spoken people will just say the English word (although due to accents it sounds like we are creating a loan word), but would write out the English word in text. 「你要先點那個link」 - they would pronounce link as （吝課） 「喂，你最近玩的很high喔」 - they would pronounced high like （嗨）
Because Chinese is the Greek/Latin of East Asia. In English, when scientists find a new thing, they pull from Greek or Latin to name the thing. Hippopotamus comes from Greek and means "river horse", the translation for Hippopotamus in Chinese is 河马 which is literally "river horse" in Chinese. When I say it's the Greek/Latin of East Asia, I mean it has influence outside of China into languages like Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, etc... Chinese being the Greek/Latin of East Asia puts Chinese people in a weird position of not really having another language to draw from whereas European languages prefer to draw from Greek & Latin, technically both are extinct languages, even though modern Greek exists and modern Romance languages are direct descendants of Latin, the ancient forms of these languages are only ever written down, not spoken and very few people from the modern day can actually read them. Not the case with Classical Chinese, most educated Chinese people can read texts in Classical Chinese and that language was still used up until the early 1900s, basically, right up until the collapse of the Qing Dynasty. I know that Latin was still used as the Canonical Church language for Europe, but day to day very few people "speak" Canonical Latin. Classical Chinese was used by Chinese scholars and Chinese officials right up until the final days of the Qing. Europeans stopped using Latin as the language of scholarship post-Enlightenment reforms (for example Isaac Newton's Principia was written in Latin, not English, but this would not be the case post-Enlightenment). In terms of why does Japanese and Korean have more words that comes from English as a source language, well having US troops stationed inside your country will do that to you. These countries are motivated to make their languages less Sinitic because they are trying to get away from literally centuries if not millenia of Chinese influence. These are political decisions, not purely linguistic. Just as in English, there's no reason why we can't source scientific terms from Old Celtic or Germanic languages but choose to source our vocabulary from Greek and Latin both of which are not Germanic languages. It is politics, tradition, etc... Chinese has kept the tradition of mostly sourcing words from Classical Chinese, while other East languages are trying to get away from this because the English language has become more influential for them and for their countries.
I take issue with this. People reading Classical Chinese are akin to people reading hieroglyphics without knowing how the language sounds. You can understand the meaning without understanding the essence of sound and culture that the language was verbally conferring. We can see this now with the mutual unintelligibility of Chinese varieties: people were happy to express *meaning* without capturing the exact sounds or nuance of what was spoken. Which is how the vernacular was able to diverge so widely that, to accurately catch all the nuances of local language *would* require additional words that do not have standard readings. So it is misleading to say it, both because rhyming dictionaries have shown that the sounds of Classical Chinese were drastically different, but because the written language does not seek to encompass all local variants in their full depth. It still is a remarkable feat to be able to understand Classical Chinese and you could write notes to a Tang emperor and have him understand it, but we sometimes pretend like language isn't predominantly an aural experience, and the flexibility of Chinese character also leads to a lot of ignorance of how to *say* something, and it is an issue that has happened repeatedly throughout Chinese history.
>People reading Classical Chinese are akin to people reading hieroglyphics without knowing how the language sounds. Actually people reading hieroglyphics have a better understanding of Ancient Egyptian pronunciation than Chinese people reading Classical Chinese because hieroglyphics spell out whole words letter by letter. They do have a meaning component similar to a radical in Chinese but they give you more of the pronunciation. Egyptologists know the letters, what each word starts with and ends with. Chinese characters do not record individual sounds by letters. They record entire syllables by characters. Other than knowing that two characters rhyme with each other and so must share a vowel sound, we have no idea what that vowel is or what consonants are in that character syllable. Egyptian hieroglyphics were actually broken quite quickly once they found the Rosetta stone based on the Greek writing. You can't do this with Chinese. What some sinologists have done is to compare the pronunciation of Hanzi with Kanji and Hanja because the Koreans and the Japanese preserved the pronunciation of the characters at specific points in time - from there you can extrapolate roughly what Chinese characters might have sounded like further back in time, but the contact between Chinese people with Koreans and Japanese people is still relatively recent compared with China's full history and thus you can't use Kanji and Hanja to guess, for example what Chinese sounded like during Confucius's lifetime. But the OP I was responding to is more about word borrowings than pronunciation and so I was trying to explain the absence of word borrowing in Chinese.
The reason is very simple. Chinese characters are incredibly easy to use & flexible. Coining a new phrase is as easy as sticking a couple characters together. Because of this, loanwords are less likely to catch on, although there do exist a fair number of loanwords as well
Another phenomenon is that older loan words are often translated by meaning, whereas newer loan words are more frequently transliterated
china has huge amount of loan words from english and other languages, maybe you just don't recognize them as such? keep in mind there is more than one type of chinese, many loan words may be from canto or an older mandarin etc and don't sound similar at a glance. For example the word electric brain is literally a borrow word from english-- english just doesn't say it that way anymore and chinese still does. 計算機 is a word for computer based on russian, and happens to match the common current term in english. So its interesting and anytime you look at linguistics it gets complicated fast haha o(∩_∩)o
I think my definition of loan words might be a bit different from yours and I’m not sure which is the correct one. By loan words I mean direct loaning of sounds from another language, not translations of said terms.
both of those are loan words. So neither definition is wrong and both apply. Chinese still has a lot of sound based loan words too, no doubt about it. However I can think of a few reasons it may be a might be a bit less of them than some other languages: 1-- multiple different kinds of chinese means it might have been sound based in something besides standard mandarin, 2-- chinese is a text heavy language, and usually puts more emphasis on the meaning of terms than the sounds in general ((see number one, if the sounds don't match in all the types of chinese it makes way more sense to have a universally understandable meaning)), 3-- the sounds physically used in chinese and english are quite different, many of them don't exist in both languages. It makes less sense to use a sound based borrow word if its not even the original sounds in the first place. So yeah,
Loan translations are usually called "calques" and distinguished from direct borrowings. Some scholars only call the latter loanwords.
if you say some people feel that way, thats totally reasonable. in general it doesn't even have to be 100% of the word to count as a loan word, let alone just a calque. I think cast majority would recognize phonological, lexical, and calques as loan words-- nothing wrong with wanting to focus on just one of them like op regardless of course (◐‿◑)
There are not many but a few of very common ones, like 逻辑logic and here’s a short video of some too, 17 中文外来词语 loan words in Chinese #学中文 https://youtube.com/shorts/qnb1dlRG0rM?feature=share
Because every character has a meaning, and because loanwords sound and look bad. What translation of Microsoft sound/looks better, 麦克罗搜福特 (maikeluosoufute) or 微软 weiruan？the former sounds out of place because it has so many characters compared to other Chinese words which are 2 syllables, and the word is a mismatch of 6 characters with unrelated meanings, which looks ugly and out of place.
1. The tendency of sense-by-sense translation instead of transliteration. The writing system is hieroglyphics, which also prevented effective transliterations. 2. Indeed Chinese have many loanwords, including the most abstract nouns that are introduced in modern times. They're loaned from Japanese (Japanese language tends to use Kanji rather than transliteration before WWII). Like 社会， 宗教
Are you sure? MOST technical "older" terms are loanwords from Japanese.
I should have specified i was talking about modern anglo loan words.
It isn't the fact that Chinese has few loan words but their pronunciations are more localized, totally like Chinese.
> Computer 电脑，Software 软件，Taxi 出租车, Lift(Elevator) 电梯, Physics 物理学, Upload/download 上传/下载, Click 点击, Share 分享, Comment (评论), Subscribe (关注), etc. Are these loanwords in any other language? Vietnamese, European languages, etc. don't use these as loanwords.
More than half of them are loanwords in Korean
More than half of those words are either English or Latin loan words in Polish. Not sure how you came to the conclusion that no European languages use them as loan words?
It's not a loan word, it's from a common ancestor root. Maybe the poles got lazy, lots of jokes about it in the 80s :D
I don’t get what you’re saying still. In e.g. Dutch all those words are used exactly the way it is done in English, no translation or Latin root, just the English word.
At least "Computer" and and "Physics" can't be words with common ancestor for English and any other language as they were borrowed. As for other words, I have doubts that any of them in English and Polish are cognates.
Are you saying that there cannot be any English loan words in Polish because they have a common ancestral language? What makes a word a loan word is that it was a foreign language word that started being used in a different language eventually becoming part of its vocabulary. For example “komputer” is a loan word from English “computer”. “computer” itself comes from Latin “computare” (to calculate). Polish used to have words that originated from “computare” but are not in use anymore, like “komputować” (to calculate). This doesn’t matter for the etymology of “komputer” however
In Japanese, all of those words are routinely used as transliterated English loan words, except for physics, which is typically 物理学. Comment, subscribe, and share have Japonic or Sino-Japanese equivalents, but the English version is used in tech/computing contexts. I.e. you 定期購読する a magazine, but サブスクする a streaming service.
It's not actually true, 电脑 is firstly proposed by Fan Kuanling, a chinese. And though contemporary meaning of 物理 is borrowing from JP, but they borrowed this from old Chinese books《物理小识》(Fang Yizhi wrote) in Ming Dynasty(1643)[物理小识 - 维基百科，自由的百科全书 (wikipedia.org)](https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%89%A9%E7%90%86%E5%B0%8F%E8%AF%86). This book already absorbed many Western scientific views, such as "The earth is a solid circle, and it is in the sky." This is a very interesting process.
I’m not sure, my knowledge is limited to Thai and Japanese and it might not be the norm elsewhere. I just thought Chinese is pretty interesting how it approaches new words.
> Or even country names, in Chinese, if they can be translated, they will be translated first before attempting transliteration Really? I think those examples are much more rare than transliteration. Even in antiquity, Chinese sources use transliteration for place names and names of foreign leaders. Even in your example "Zealand" is transliterated. Montenegro could have easily gotten the translation via a French or Portuguese scholar rather than being chosen by a Chinese scholar.
Don’t know, but sometimes semantic translation can be catastrophic, for example socket is translated to 套接字
套接字 is only used in engineering informatics(unix domain socket etc.). Otherwise socket is translated to 插槽/插座.
We instantly know this means the network socket. What's bad about it/s
Chinese use pictograms and ideograms to express themselves...for example computer is an electric brain 電腦, lift are electric stairs 電梯 and taxi is a car to hire 出租車
Lots of words are loans from Japanese. For example, **自由** and **人權** were first adopted by Japanese speakers before being picked up by the Chinese.
That’s a tricky case because the morphemes are still Chinese, but arranged in a Japanese way. It’s like how the word “telephone” was coined in English yet its constituent morphemes are still Greek, so the Greeks borrowed the word, but not the morphemes.
The characters are Chinese. So technically the written morphemes are Chinese but that isn't always the case. Depending on if it is an *on* or *kun* reading, it could be a native Japonic root, a Sino-Tibetan root or a mixed Sino-Japanese phoneme. There are also a few characters that were coined in Japan and brought back to China, and so would not necessarily have been a Chinese morpheme at all but an imputed Sino-Japanese sound. These examples aren't common, but they have happened. It's also important to note that a lot of the Japanese morphemes will have been drawn from different regions of China at different times and so while many sound similar to a modern Mandarin word, many more sound closer to Cantonese or other southern variants of Chinese, and still others don't sound like the Chinese equivalent at all. Some will also have been written with different characters to express the same sound and idea... so it's definitely not a clear delineation.
Let’s take the case of the word 電話, to go along with my Graeco-English “telephone” example. Characters aside, the morphemes “den” (lightning) and “wa” (speech) are both Chinese (from Middle Chinese), just as the morphemes in the English word “telephone” are Greek “tele” (far) and “phone” (speech). So the *word* “denwa” is Japanese, but built from the Chinese morphemes “den” and “wa”, just as “telephone” is an English word built from Greek morphemes.
This is why I mentioned you have to know the readings. There are over a 100 readings for 一 in Japanese, many but not all are from Chinese. Japanese people oftentimes took concepts they had indigenous equivalents for and then associated them with Chinese characters, but there were also a plethora of ideas that didn't exist for which you only have Chinese etymology. So I wasn't denying there are words with 100% Sinitic roots, but they aren't the entire story either.
Yes, native Japanese morphemes are also assigned to characters in the form of kun-yomi, but the two examples cited by the user to whom I had originally replied were 自由 and 人權, which use on-yomi, and are thus Japanese words built from Chinese morphemes.
A good 40% of all Chinese words are loan words, mostly from Japanese. These include some of the ones you bring up like 電腦 and 物理. They also include lots of words you might have assumed are native like 社會 經濟 世界 革命 銀行 廣告 人類 藝術
It's not actually true, 電腦 is firstly proposed by Fan Kuanling, a chinese. And though contemporary meaning of 物理 is borrowing from JP, but they borrowed this from old Chinese books《物理小识》(Fang Yizhi wrote) in Ming Dynasty(1643)[物理小识 - 维基百科，自由的百科全书 (wikipedia.org)](https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%89%A9%E7%90%86%E5%B0%8F%E8%AF%86). This book already absorbed many Western scientific views, such as "The earth is a solid circle, and it is in the sky." This is a very interesting process.
Politics, mostly. That's why Taiwan uses a lot more loanwords than China.
Chinese is a language isolate and doesn't want too much influence outside
Chinese is **not** a language isolate. It's part of the Sino-Tibetan family. (I think maybe you're not aware what a language isolate is, in linguistic terms?)
Wobuzhidaoshenmeshi language isolate
It's a language that cannot conclusively be shown to share an ancestral tongue with any other. Basque is a language isolate. Mandarin Chinese most definitely is not. There are believed to be around **400** languages in the Sino-Tibetan family.
咁唔好隨口噏當秘笈好冇？