neologisms--newly created words

[zackzhou]

well, interesting

the gay marriage in china is not yet legal, and it is still a new concept for Chinese. so, I am not sure if there are some new-created words to describe daughter's wife. perhaps, my chinese need to be updated

[hparade]

i think rather than creating new words, maybe we can just adapt the old ones and extend their meanings? i wonder how's the progress of same sex marriage in the US now, i know there's still many rejections...

gay and lesbian have a long history in china, but the term "homosexual" is relatively new to china

[sfr@rcn.com]

Whether there's opposition or not depends partially on where you live. What has happened in the US lately is that the religious right (mostly Christian, but with an Orthodox Jewish voice added occasionally) are more active and complain louder than the entire rest of the population. As a result, their opinions may appear to be the prevailing public opinion when, in fact, it's not.

Around where I live, in urban northern California, there is no problem with same-sex marriages.

And, because of the way we reckon kinship and the fact that our set of kinship terms isn't as precise as the Chinese ones are, we can just call a daughter's wife a daughter-in-law and a son's husband a son-in-law. Homosexuality doesn't have to enter into the kinship terminology at all. Also, English is one of the most flexible languages in terms of accepting neologisms and foreign words.

Sandra

Sandra

[hparade]

English is one of the most flexible languages in terms of accepting neologisms and foreign words

yes, i agree that

[Quest]

japanese is another, and french is the opposite.

[sfr@rcn.com]

True. The difference between English and Japanese is that the Japanese spell foreign words in a different script so they are labelled as foreign words. English just incorporates them.

And, I get the feeling that Chinese is similar to French in that new concepts, foreign objects and experiences are translated into Chinese (or French, for those readers who are going to nitpick the structure of this sentence).

Sandra

[Jose]

French?!

The French language uses lots of foreign words and, like most European languages, derives most of its technical and formal vocabulary from Latin and Greek. I think it is right to group it with English rather than Chinese in this respect.

I think the only European language that can be compared with Chinese in its rejection of foreign words is Icelandic. I don't know the language, but I know that words like "television" or "electronic" are rendered in that language by using the Icelandic equivalents of the original Greek words ("distance + sight", "amber", and so on).