Any words in Mandarin that can't be written in Chinese characters?

[Supervin]

As I'm aware, in some Chinese dialects, there are a number of words and expressions that can't be written in Chinese characters, and as a result use the alphabet or the romanization spelling of the word in those dialects to express those words at times in writing.

 

What are some of the words in Mandarin (any word, could also include slang, colloquial expressions, etc.) that can't be written in Chinese characters, and can only be written either with the alphabet or using the pinyin spelling of the word?

 

Any words you know or online links with such words would be appreciated.

[Demonic_Duck]

• "Pià": onomatopoeia for a slapping sound.
• "Duāng": onomatopoeia for the sound of hair becoming bouncy (sometimes humorously written as ⿱成龙, as the word was invented by Jackie Chan).

There are also words with characters which aren't included in unicode, such as:

• [cèi] (Beijing dialect, meaning "smash"), for which the character is ⿰卒瓦
• [biángbiáng] (meaning a type of thick noodle popular in Shaanxi), for which the character is very complicated

[陳德聰]

Do words like "cao" and "ri" and "bi" etc count even though they have characters that are commonly used?

[wibr]

Off the top of my head:

 

X光 (x-ray)

QQ (used Taiwan, means something like "chewy")

Ｔ恤 (T-Shirt)

[陳德聰]

Just thought of "hold住"

[Demonic_Duck]

If we're allowing loanwords, “小case” (meaning something that is very easy to achieve) would be another one. “High” (meaning "in high spirits") is sometimes written in English, but also sometimes nativized to “嗨”.

[mouse]

 

 

Do words like "cao" and "ri" and "bi" etc count even though they have characters that are commonly used?

 

Don't think they'd count as there are characters, even though they're rarely used (肏，屄).

 

I think 日 comes from Sichuanese.

[akdn]

The question and answers brought to mind an article by David Moser: Some Things Chinese Characters Can't Do-Be-Do-Be-Do.

 

He argues that Chinese characters constrain the writer to produce 'standard' sounds and words, thus precluding the effective written-form of Chinese nonsense words and vernacular versions of spoken Chinese.  

 

This quote gives a taste of the argument:

 

English has numerous conventions for representing casual oral speech: “Are you kiddin’ me?” “Whaddya wanna do tonight, Marty?” “I’m gettin’ outta here!” “Gimme that.” And so on. Such spelling conventions have been employed in the literature of most alphabetic traditions for hundreds of years, and are often an invaluable link to the vernaculars of the past. English-language writers from Mark Twain to James Joyce have used the flexibility of the alphabet to vividly re-created various speech worlds in their works. It is, in fact, hard to imagine how much of the literature of the West could have been produced without recourse to such devices.

Chinese characters, by contrast, cannot reproduce the equivalent elisions and blends of colloquial Chinese, except in rare cases, and only at the level of the syllable. [...] The result is that China effectively has no tradition of realistically notating vernacular speech (Moser, 2001).

[Demonic_Duck]

ku as in “kuan” + en as in “men” = kuen

 

宽文切 already exists (kun), as does 宽门切 (ken). I'm assuming "kuen" should sound like the former rather than the latter, but either way it's already a valid syllable.

 

Also, though it's true that such examples are relatively few in number, "duang" and "pia" above are both recent examples of the exact phenomenon he's claiming doesn't exist.

 

Edit: I actually agree with a fair bit of what he's saying, though. Especially about transliteration of names into Chinese, the results of which are almost universally horrible. 亚里士多德？ Yeuck.

[889]

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/43183-looking-for-chinese-words-composed-with-roman-letters/

[TimAstier]

There are also the case of words that may have an equivalent in Chinese but are almost always used with English terms.

The two examples that come to my mind are PPT (for Powerpoint Presentation) and APP.