Orthographic Constraints on the Integration of English Loanwords in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

Chinese loan words of English origin can be roughly divided into three groups: phonemic loan, semantic loan and combination of the above two. This paper gives a brief sketch of the three different kinds of loanwords and goes a step further to point out that semantic loan tends to be the eventual form of adaptation for words borrowed from English, for the reasons that Chinese is monosyllabic, Chinese writing system is morphemic, and has little to do with its sound system, etc. Therefore, direct replication of the pronunciations of English words (phonemic loan or transliteration in this sense) is not compatible with the coding structure of Chinese. It tends to be replaced by loan translation or semantic loans. To support this hypothesis, this paper presents a data-based analysis of 55 borrowed lexical items as found in 80 articles from a Chinese newspaper and a magazine. The findings show that transliterated loanwords are not as well-accepted as semantic loans in Chinese and usually are replaced by the latter.