On the Chinese resistance to lexical borrowing: a writing-driven self-purification system

Abstract

The Chinese language is known for its resistance to lexical borrowing. Transliterations can hardly be retained in this language that use pre-existing characters to simply transcribe the pronunciation of the source word in the donor language. This exclusion can be attributed to the ideographic nature of Chinese characters. Given the stable graphic-meaning correspondence, novel use of characters is expected to be consistent with their usage in previous literature, while the association between the graphic form and the phonetic form has always been loose, rendering it meaningless to use characters as a mere phonetic representation. Here writing is having an effect on the assimilation of loanwords, and more generally, the purist language ideology, which runs counter to the traditionally assumed derivative position of writing, thus shedding light on the implicit effect of writing on language ideology.