Types of borrowing

Scholars distinguish types of borrowings differently. Fischer (Reference Fischer, Kastovsky and Mettinger2003) divides borrowings into three types, i.e. morphological, semantic, and sociolinguistic. Katamba's textbook (Reference Katamba2004) recognizes two kinds of lexical borrowing, i.e. loanwords and loanshifts. Haugen suggests that loanshifts include ‘loan translations’ and ‘semantic loans’ (Reference Haugen1950: 215). This study follows the typology and terminology employed by Haugen (Reference Haugen1950) and Durkin (Reference Durkin2009), and makes the following four divisions of lexical borrowing, i.e. (1) loanword, (2) loan translation, (3) semantic loan, and (4) loan-blend.

Nearly half of the words on the list have been included in the OED’s entries or sub-entries, and a large proportion of them are loanwords, naturalized by Pinyin and other romanization systems. It is noteworthy that two recent loans, namely hukou ‘an official document certifying residence’ and daigou ‘a person outside China who buys consumer goods on behalf of people living in China’, though they do not appear in the OED Online, have been included in Oxford Dictionaries Online.

Other types of lexical borrowing also contribute several words to the list, such as Middle Kingdom, Spring Festival, firepot, silk road for loan translations and dragon, trigram, cadre for semantic loans. Both types use existing English words to express the Chinese objects or concepts rather than transliterating the original Chinese expressions. In some cases, the ethnic tag ‘Chinese’ is added to indicate their Chinese origin as in Chinese New Year, Chinese lantern, and Chinese wall. Footnote ³

Several long-established words and phrases are still used today like acupuncture, Empress of Heaven, and Terracotta Warriors, which give a veiled hint that the objects or concepts originally came from China. Tofu, now a household word in English, is an indirect borrowing via Japanese and reads tōfu (とうふ) in Japanese. There is only a slim chance that tofu will be superseded by its Pinyin form, doufu.

On the other hand, not all the items listed in the top 100 are Chinese-specific things, such as peace, anti-corruption, party, harmony, innovation, and mushroom. One reason for ranking them in the list is that they appear so frequently in the China-related news, especially in the past several years. For example, online shopping (wanggou 网购) and high-speed rail (gaotie 高铁), which are among China's ‘Four New Great Inventions’, were not invented by the Chinese at all.

Romanization of Chinese words

As I have already mentioned, the report only reveals which Pinyin words are most recognized in the English-speaking world. As a result, we cannot find those long-established Chinese loans that entered the English language a long time before the Pinyin system was created, such as tea, chopstick, ketchup, and loquat. Neither can we find many popular loanwords from Chinese dialects other than Mandarin, especially those from Cantonese including bok choy, dim sum, hoisin, Hong Kong, wok, and so on.

Considering the exclusion of the aforementioned Chinese loanwords, much of the top 100 list is made up of words that many English speakers might not recognize. To test this, the words on the list were looked up in the OED Online. Only 15 out of the top 100 have been included in the OED Online with their Pinyin forms as the headword. The 15 items are as follows:

Wade-Giles was the prevalent romanization system of Chinese before Pinyin and has been gradually replaced by the latter since the 1950s. Though the Pinyin forms of several words are increasingly used in the English world, their Wade-Giles spellings are still adopted as the headword in the OED Online. Here are the seven items that are ranked in the top 100 list in their Wade-Giles forms:

The romanization of headwords of Chinese origin in the OED Online is quite inconsistent since editing this large-scale dictionary is such a long-term project. Besides the words romanized by the Pinyin and Wade-Giles systems, mah-jong, fum, Confucianism ‘from Confucius’, and goji on the list exemplify unusual naturalization of their spellings.

Duplication of borrowing

Different types of borrowing and variant spellings both cause some duplicated forms to express the same thing. Table 1 illustrates a collection of doublets which appear as headwords in the mainstream dictionaries. Words only found in quotations are not included.

Table 1:

Duplications of words in the list of the 100 most recognized Chinese words

Besides the examples listed in Table 1, several proper names also have different variants in English, though dictionaries like the OED Online normally avoid including these encyclopaedic entries. In Chinese, ru (儒, lit. ‘soft’) is the word used to name the doctrine of the ancient Chinese philosopher Confucius, but Ruism is not as commonly used as Confucianism in the English-speaking world. Obviously, Confucianism is named after its founder, Confucius, which is markedly different from the present Pinyin form Kongzi (孔子) or Kongfuzi (孔夫子). According to the etymological note on Confucian in the OED Online, the Jesuit missionaries gave birth to the word Confucius:

The morpheme zi (子) in Kongzi (孔子), meaning ‘master’, is commonly used in a respectful term of address to a man. Besides Kongzi, there are several other Zi's in ancient China, such as Mengzi (孟子), another great Confucian sage; Laozi (老子), the founder of Taoism and the author of Tao Te Ching; and Sun Zi (孙子), the author of The Art of War. These four Zi's are all listed in the top 100 most recognized Chinese Pinyin-spelt words used in English. However, the Pinyin forms of the four Zi's are less frequently used than other variants, which are well established in the English lexicon. To test this, here I conduct an experiment by comparing the frequencies of all variant forms in the Google Ngram Viewer (see Figures 1–4). According to the Google Corpus, the Latinised Confucius has been the dominant form throughout the past two centuries. In a similar vein, Mencius is far more prevalent than other variants; it was not until the 1990s that the Pinyin form Lao Zi or Laozi exceeded Lao-tzu, which was transcribed by the Wade-Giles system. In comparison, Sun Tzu, also a Wade-Giles transcription, is still the more common spelling than Sun Zi and his original name Sun Wu.

Figure 1.

Ngram of Kongzi variants

Figure 2.

Ngram of Mengzi variants

Figure 3.

Ngram of Laozi variants

Figure 4.

Ngram of Sunzi variants

Semantic fields

The report divides the 100 Chinese words into 11 subject categories (see Table 2). According to the semantic distribution shown in the table, a large proportion of the words on the list are related to traditional Chinese objects or concepts. For example, among the top 20, six are terms of Chinese martial arts, including Shaolin, wushu, qigong, gongfu, taiji, and shifu. Names for the traditional Chinese festivals and relevant things also contribute several terms to the list, such as Qingming, Chongyang, Yuanxiao, Chunjie, Zhongqiu, hongbao, chunjie, chunyun, and denglong. Food terms without doubt perform an important role among all selected candidates on the list, from the well-known jiaozi, doufu, huoguo, gouqi, mantou, to a longer name of a dish like gobao jiding.

Table 2:

Semantic categorization of the top 100 most recognized Chinese words

In Chinese culture, there is no clear boundary between religious and philosophical systems, so that several lexical items can fall into either the ‘Religion’ or ‘Philosophy’ category. The listed ancient Chinese philosophers have been discussed above, whose names are more commonly naturalized by non-Pinyin systems. Other words in this semantic category are religio-philosophical concepts like yin-yang, qi, dao, and bagua (or eight trigrams).

In terms of Chinese culture, merging a Chinese mythical creature into the English lexicon and Western culture is not easy to execute. The easiest way is to use an existing English word to name it, for example, dragon and phoenix. In Chinese and East Asian culture, a dragon is a propitious imaginary animal. In the past, a dragon was used as an imperial symbol of Chinese emperors. In the present day, the common parental expectation is to ‘hope the child to become a dragon/phoenix’ (望子成龙/望女成凤), an idiomatic Chinese expression. During the late half of the 20^th century, four Asian regions, namely South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, were collectively called Four Little Dragons (四小龙) after their rapid industrial and economic growth. However, in Western culture a dragon is an evil monster. In many fairy tales, the dragon plays the part of the villain and is doomed to be killed by a prince or a knight. The story of Saint George slaying a dragon is now a legend, but the image of a dragon often appears when people in various countries celebrate Saint George's Day. Like a dragon can also be a figurative description of a ‘fierce or violent person’. A popular British TV show is known as ‘Dragons’ Den’, in which entrepreneurs pitch their business ideas to five potential investors, who are referred to as dragons. Considering the difference, the initials Chinese and East Asian are sometimes added before dragon when referring to the Chinese-specific creature. Dictionaries normally do not give a separate definition for the Chinese dragon, with one exception. The Unabridged Merriam-Webster's Dictionary defines dragon as ‘a beneficent supernatural creature in Chinese mythology connected with rain and floods.’ Under one definition in the online Oxford Dictionaries we can find ‘In European tradition the dragon is typically fire-breathing and tends to symbolize chaos or evil, whereas in East Asia it is usually a beneficent symbol of fertility, associated with water and the heavens.’ Alternatively, long (龙), meaning ‘dragon’ in Chinese, is used in a few cases, though the headword for long in the Unabridged Merriam-Webster is in its Wade-Giles romanization lung.

In a similar vein, phoenix and several other romanized forms from Chinese are alternatively used to name a bird-like supernatural creature. Since most Chinese words average out at two characters in length, the Chinese phoenix is termed feng huang (凤凰) – feng for ‘male phoenix’ and huang for ‘female phoenix’. Other variants include fêng huang, fum hwang, fum hoam, and fung-hwang (see also Table 2). The gender distinction between feng and huang does not apply when the former is paired with long ‘dragon’ and connotates femininity. As was mentioned above, in the past, long was used as the symbol of the Chinese emperor; feng represented their empresses. Thus, feng (also fum, fung) can appear alone without gender reference. Another variation of the Chinese phoenix is ho-ho, or more fully, ho-ho bird. Though the OED Online only mentions that ho-ho originates from Chinese, it may be an indirect borrowing via Japanese. The Japanese word for ‘phoenix’ borrows the Chinese characters but reads hō-ō (ほうおう), which sounds very similar to ho-ho.

On the list of the top 100 recognized Chinese Pinyin words, two legendary names, Wukong and Chang'e, are particularly noticeable since they are not included in the ‘Chinese Culture’ category but in the ‘Economics & Technology’ category instead. As an unwritten tradition in astronautics, spaceflight programs and crafts prefer to use mythological names such as Apollo, Helios, and Ulysses. China's Dark Matter Particle Explorer (DAMPE), launched in 2015, has the nickname ‘Wukong.’ Wukong (悟空), also known as the Monkey King, is the main character in a great classical novel, Journey to the West (西游记). Literally, wu means ‘to understand’ while kong refers to ‘space’, and thus the Wukong explorer carried out the mission of understanding space. Similarly, the ongoing Chinese Lunar Exploration Program (CLEP) since 2003 is named after the Chinese goddess of the moon, Chang'e (嫦娥), who is believed to reside on the moon. In legend, Chang'e is accompanied by a rabbit called yutu (玉兔, lit. ‘jade rabbit’). In reality, the Yutu lunar rover landed on the moon with the Chang'e 3 lander in 2013.

Besides aeronautics, China also achieves significant breakthroughs in areas of everyday consumer products, public transport services and electronic payment platforms. Among all the innovations, four stand out and are collectively called the ‘Four New Great Inventions’ (新四大发明), including high-speed rail (高铁), online shopping (网购), Alipay (支付宝), and dockless shared bicycles (共享单车), and three of them are on the top 100 most recognized wordlist. However, according to the BBC's Reality Check verdict, ‘China did not invent any of these technologies – but it has led the way in their widescale implementation.’ (Jakhar, Reference Jakhar2018). Although the so-called ‘Four New Great Inventions’ were not invented in China, they were reinforced by China's cutting-edge technologies. People all over the globe are using these new Chinese-developed modernizations, no matter whether they are aware of it or not.

In a recent College English Test Band-6 (CET-6), a nationwide college-level English exam, students were asked to translate gaotie (高铁, lit. ‘high iron’), the Chinese word for high-speed rail, into English. High-speed rail or high-speed train is without doubt a standard answer. But for students who do not have a high level of proficiency in English, some Chinglish-like expressions are created, such as tall subway, high way, and even high Fe (because Fe is the symbol of the chemical element iron). After the test, how to express gaotie in English also triggered a heated discussion on the Internet. According to the Guidelines for the Use of English in Public Service Areas edited by the Standardization Administration of the People's Republic of China (2017), the official English expression for gaotie is G-series high-speed train, as opposed to another type of Chinese rail transport D-series high-speed train (dongche 动车). Interestingly, if the CET-6 examinees directly write the transliteration of the Chinese Pinyin form as gaotie, they lose marks in exams. This shows that gaotie has not been adopted by English like its Japanese counterpart Shinkansen. As the world's first high-speed rail, Shinkansen (新幹線), also nicknamed bullet train because of its appearance and speed, has already been included in the OED Online. Another Japan-made train, Azuma (東), meaning ‘east’ in Japanese, has been operated by Virgin Trains East Coast (now LNER) since October 2017 and shortens the travel time between London and Edinburgh to four hours. Probably in the near future, gaotie will make its way to English like Shinkansen and Azuma, with more exports to different countries and more trains carrying the Chinese brand name gaotie.

Concluding remarks

Although the top 100 list covers a representative sample of the Chinese words used in the English-speaking world, 100 is a fairly small sample size. Besides, the list only takes account of the usage of Chinese Pinyin forms, so the words that spread to the West before the Pinyin system was created are not included. As a result, the list does not contain many examples of well-established Chinese loanwords. On the positive side, the top 100 list covers a range of semantic categories of Chinese-specific things and concepts. These 100 Chinese words, to some extent, do reflect the acceptance of Chinese borrowing by English speakers and the English lexicon, with nearly half of them being included in the OED Online through different borrowing processes. Although not all the words on the list are frequently used in their Pinyin forms, in the foreseeable future, the Pinyin spelling may be more popular and more recognizable to English users. Furthermore, words on this list may provide a benchmark for dictionary editors when they are looking for lexical contributions from Chinese.