New Words

[NoNameAsName]

Hi,

Forgive my ignorance if this topic has been up before, I am starting a full time chinese course soon and am starting to think of questions...

The main one that keeps coming up in my mind is this:

How does chinese cope with new words. It seems like english steals and makes up new words all the time, but i dont know how one would do this in chinese. And when words do get phonetically absorbed into the chinese languages, how are they represented in the character system?

Cheers,

[HashiriKata]

Most of new words will be made up from the stock of already available Chinese characters (which have established pronunciations).

[liuzhou]

Chinese, like most languages, makes new words in almost the same way as English does, most often by compounding and by borrowing (although there are other methods).

[md1101]

they do it quite easily. sometimes they do simple sound translations as they have done for many countries. 马来西亚(ma3 lai2 xi1 ya4) is malaysia for example. for online (as in on the internet) they say 网上(wang3shang4) simply meaning 'on the net' so if translation is suitable they'll do it that way. or if not they'll just use a 'sound translation' as opposed to a 'meaning translation'.

[NoNameAsName]

> 马来西亚(ma3 lai2 xi1 ya4) is malaysia for example

okay. I can understand this. But if you didnt know about a country called malaysia. what would that mean?

[liuzhou]

But if you didnt know about a country called malaysia. what would that mean?

About the same as "Malaysia" would mean in English if you didn't know it was a country. Absolutely nothing.

[HashiriKata]

About the same as "Malaysia" would mean in English if you didn't know it was a country. Absolutely nothing.

Any word, and in any language, would mean nothing if you don't know it!

[yingguoguy]

I think it's a reasonable question. I mean you could translate 马来西亚 literally as "Horse comes to west Asia" if you didn't know it's a place name. And there's nothing in those string of four characters that tells the newbie whether it's a place name, a word, or a complete sentance! English has spaces between words, and capital letters which is a nice way of telling the foreign learner when he doesn't need to reach for his dictionary. There's no confusion between say "Newbridge" and "a new bridge".

[liuzhou]

you could translate 马来西亚 literally as "Horse comes to west Asia" if you didn't know it's a place name.

Perhaps, you could. But no sane Chinese speaker would ever do so, even if they had never heard of the country! Can you imagine any context in which that would be possible.

Oh, I'm going to Horse comes to West Asia for my holidays!

I don't think so. It is clearly a reference to a country or place in every possible context.

It is the same as when I yell "电话" to my Chinese mother-in-law to call her to the phone.She doesn't think "Oh I am required on the electric talk" any more than than my mother in England thinks of "Far Sound" when I yell "Telephone".

Literally translating Chinese compounds or phonetic borrowings is a totally fruitless and misguided notion.

Got to go now and get on with some work on my electric brain!

[yingguoguy]

Ah, but unfortunately I am not a sane Chinese speaker.

Imagine you're a newbie foreign learned who comes across this sentance:

马来西亚很热。(Malaysia is very hot)

Now you're very pleased because you've finally come across a sentance which you know all the individual characters. So you start to parse the sentance and you get "horse come east asia very hot". Now, a native speaker will know that this is ungrammatical, but the learner might come to the assumption that it means "The horse comes to East Asia very eagerly"　(Eagerly is given as another meaning of 热 in my dictionary").

Literally translating Chinese compounds or phonetic borrowings is a totally fruitless and misguided notion.

Absolutely, here the learner has been misguided by using the literal meanings, rather than the phonetic values of the characters. But the written language gave him no clue that the phonetics were what was required.

But there must be a connection between the meanings and the written form of the word, in the sense that writing 码涞希压 for Malaysia would be completely wrong though it's phonetically correct. So it's valid, in fact essential, for a learner to ask what the literal meaning of a transliteration is so he can write it correctly. Even Chinese will describe how to write Malaysia in the style:

马路的马

来年的来

西安的西

亚洲的亚

While when you call your mother to the phone, agreed she's not thinking Electric Speach, but if she was asked how to write it she'd surely come up with that break-down. But 电话 is a sensible construction for Telephone. Sure if you didn't know the word you probably couldn't guess it's meaning, (is it a Microphone, a Speak and Spell...), but once you know that, remembering Electric Speach and hence dianhua, is easier than remembering dianhua on it's own, and in conjunction with 电视 电脑 普通话 a useful way of remembering vocab.

But dianhua is a meaning-compound made in China. If you look at Malaysia then with the exception of 亚 (Asia)　none of the elements suggest anything Malaysian. (At least to me)

Coming back to NoNames original question, in the old days of Chinese when you needed represent a new word you'd often add a radical to a character with the same sound. So for example 淋 meaning to get wet, is 林 (forest）with the water radical added at the side. Both are pronounced lin. The problem is that there got to be so many characters, thesedays there is great resistance to creating any more, so existing characters are used. For example 摩托车 motouche meaning motorbike is a combination of 摩 to rub, 托 to rely on and 车 meaning vehicle. Only the last one characters has a meaning which relates to the overall meaning. Had cars existed in the Qin dynasty (actually probably earlier than this) it's probably that seperate characters would have evolved for it, for example you might have a character which looks like 摩 except that the bottom 手 is replaced by 车.

(Actually I like that one, I'll start writing it like that from now on...)

[HashiriKata]

Imagine you're a newbie foreign learned who comes across this sentance:

马来西亚很热。(Malaysia is very hot)

Now you're very pleased because you've finally come across a sentance which you know all the individual characters. So you start to parse the sentance and you get "horse come east asia very hot". Now, a native speaker will know that this is ungrammatical, but the learner might come to the assumption that it means "The horse comes to East Asia very eagerly"　(Eagerly is given as another meaning of 热 in my dictionary").

I'm a non-native speaker and I make this kind of mistakes all the time, so what? Is there any language designed to cater for the needs of foreign learners?

[yingguoguy]

Is there any language designed to cater for the needs of foreign learners?

Esperanto?

Seriously, Liuzhou's point was that 马来西亚 is obviously a country in every possible context. My point was that something which is very obvious to a native is very far from obvious to the foreign learner. You sometimes need quite detailed knowledge of grammar to even guess which characters are likely to make up a single word. As you learn to read Chinese you pick up a sense of which hanzi are commonly used in transliterations (there was a lis posted here ...http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/806-chinese-monsters0&page=2&highlight=transliteration)

But as I recall this contains about 400 members, it's far from straight-forward.

Saying something is difficult for the foreign learner is not the same as saying that the system should be changed for our benefit.

NoName originally asked quite a complex question about how new words are formed in Chinese, and Liuzhou replied that it was basically the same as every other language, compounding and borrowing. While this is true it's actually far more complex than that. Chinese, at least the written portion of it, is significantly different from most languages in that every character has a meaning. Now in transliteration the meaning of the individual character is essentially discarded for the phonetic meaning. But it's not a stupid question to ask what the meanings of the individual characters in a compound are, for the purposes of learning. You could argue that 马来西亚 is meaningless if you don't know it, but it's meaningless in the way "fish purple riding bicycle" is meaningless, not in the way that "wamaluganmi" is meaningless.

It's also worth noticing that while Chinese does indeed use both compounding and borrowing, it is far keener on compounding existing Chinese words than it is on taking on foreign words. As an example Christmas is 圣诞节 ”Holy Birth Festival", which actually tells the Chinese more about the festival than the word Christmas tells the English. English doesn't generally chose to call, say, Yom Kippur "Atonement No-work Day", it just squeezes the foreign sounds as good as they'll go into it's alphabet. Similarly most languages have just taken "computer" as is, instead of form their own word like 电脑.

(Actually come to think of it, the word 圣诞节 was probably chosen by missionaries, but my point still stands).

Even countries were traditionally given names half on sound, half on compounded meaning hence 美国 英国 法国 德国 America, England, France, Germany or if you like better "Beautiful Country", "Brave Country", "Lawful Country", "Virtous Country". While I'm not sure how apt they are I'd rather be called any of them than "Horse Comes to East Asia".

I think it's increasingly common for transliterations to be used though, as Chinese becomes more open.

[md1101]

i can understand that you can get confused thinking something actually means something as opposed to being just a name. i do it quite often with peoples names when reading my textbook. but as time has gone on i've gotten more used to picking up what is a name and country etc. as for translating malaysia to 'horse comes to east asia'... the chinese would even laugh at that because they dont think of it in that much detail just like we dont think of telephone in that much detail (tele-phone). thats the feeling i get anyway

[Ferno]

yingguoguy, these morphemes may help you out on paper but unfortunately it does not carry over to spoken language, where individual morphemes mean absolutely nothing due to the amount of homonyms, since people who made up characters didn't care about the spoken language - they assumed the characters would always make things clear.

ie, "christmas" 圣诞节 holy + birth + festival ... sheng4 + dan4 + jie2

--> now try looking up all the morphemes that correspond to sheng4 and dan4 and jie2. Hey, what about 勝蛋结 "sheng4 dan4 jie2" - 'victorious egg knot' .. why not?

[Ferno]

i can understand that you can get confused thinking something actually means something as opposed to being just a name. i do it quite often with peoples names when reading my textbook. but as time has gone on i've gotten more used to picking up what is a name and country etc. as for translating malaysia to 'horse comes to east asia'... the chinese would even laugh at that because they dont think of it in that much detail just like we dont think of telephone in that much detail (tele-phone). thats the feeling i get anyway

from Asia's Orthographic Dilema (pinyin.info)

Character-literate East Asians, for their part, are denied this luxury; on some level they are forced by the nature of their writing system to associate meaning with every syllable long after semantic change has erased the original connection-assuming the connection was logical to begin with -- and to this extent fail to grasp the totality of the new concept.

[atitarev]

In a Japanese text - all foreign place and people names are written in katakana phonetical syllabary - the rest is written in kanji (hanzi) and hiragana (another syllabary). Foreign names stand out and for a learner it's easy not just to separate them from the rest but to guess the topic. Look at the excerpt from a Japanese language site below - American geographical names are highlighted for you, so you can see how different the katakan characters are from the rest of the text.

今回の事件では、ニューヨークとワシントンがねらわれました。アメリカでは、ニューヨークが経済の中心、ワシントンが政治の中心と分かれています。日本は東京が政治と経済の両方の中心ですが、その点が異なっています。

Browsing a Western magazine translated into Chinese I was unable to find the names of famous actors, etc, you must be good at the language to do that. If an article had a picture or a name written in Latin, then it was easy

Nipponman posted once that he hated katakana. I find katakana quite useful.

I know even some people (Chinese learners or students who are in the process of learning) just skip foreign names because they are hard to read, pronounce and they don't make any sense (as if they should). Another issue - there's no real standard is there for the names? A foreign name can be transcribed differently by different publishers and then you can't tell if that's the same place or person.

胡锦涛此行将取道夏威夷，预定下月28日先抵达华盛顿停留三天，再转往纽约和洛杉矶，在美国本土展开为期一个星期的访问。另一位消息人士说，华盛顿、纽约和洛杉矶三个城市访问的先后顺序仍可能调整。

The article here has English names as well - you have to know the names to understand them. Of course, I am talking about learners. But I don't think names come out for native Chinese speakers either - there's no highlighting like capitalisation or katakana.

http://www.zaobao.com/special/china/sino_us/pages3/sino_us240302.html

[yingguoguy]

Ferno, I read through the sample chapter of that book: here. It's very interesting, I'd like to get hold of a full copy, is it available in China?

I take your point about morphemes, I guess I have been talking more about how words appear on the page. We were talking about how new words are created and often this is done with the chacters being the most important factor and sounds second. I accept that if someone says "shengdanjie" you wouldn't get the meaning from that, if you didn't know it. On the other hand, if a Chinese person hears a new word, isn't their first response to ask what the characters are?

I wasn't going to mention katakana, but as Atitarev brought it up Yes, katakana are an absolute god-send for the foreign learner, clearly signalling a foreign word or name. It's also worth noticing that there are recent additions to the set (like ヴァfor 'va') to deal with sounds traditionally outside the range of Japanese sounds. How would this be done in Chinese? By assigning a new sound to an existing character, or does it simply not happen?

Out of interest what do dialect speakers do with 马来西亚? Does it get converted to the dialect pronounciations of each of the syllables, or does it stay close to “Malaysia"?

[atitarev]

Out of interest what do dialect speakers do with 马来西亚? Does it get converted to the dialect pronounciations of each of the syllables, or does it stay close to “Malaysia"?

It gets converted to the dialect pronunciation, same way as Mandarin has foreign words, which remind only very remotely the original pronunciation or not at all (they are borrowed through Cantonese, whose characters are pronounced closer to the original:

加拿大 Jiānádà Canada

瑞士 Ruìshì Switzerland

瑞典 Ruìdiǎn Sweden

Cantonese:

Ga1-na4-daai6

Seui6-si6 (French: Suisse)

Seui6-din2

"Canon" is pronounced something like "Jianeng" for the same reason.

It's also worth noticing that there are recent additions to the set (like ヴァfor 'va') to deal with sounds traditionally outside the range of Japanese sounds. How would this be done in Chinese? By assigning a new sound to an existing character, or does it simply not happen?

It simply doesn't happen, as far as I know.

[Ferno]

Ferno' date=' I read through the sample chapter of that book: here. It's very interesting, I'd like to get hold of a full copy, is it available in China?

[/quote']

Sorry, dunno.. do book stores ship to China?

I take your point about morphemes' date=' I guess I have been talking more about how words appear on the page. We were talking about how new words are created and often this is done with the chacters being the most important factor and sounds second. I accept that if someone says "shengdanjie" you wouldn't get the meaning from that, if you didn't know it. On the other hand, if a Chinese person hears a new word, isn't their first response to ask what the characters are?

[/quote']

ah, realize the significance of this... how much do you think Chinese mentality has been influenced by having these little picture/character/morphemes in such a prominent position? An interesting thought - a person with an alphabeitc language will think of the larger idea of a word, while a Chinese or Japanese person will think of the word's components.

[HashiriKata]

Ferno, I read through the sample chapter of that book: here. It's very interesting

It is, but don't let it convince you that weapon of mass destruction is everywhere in Iraq!