Starting from the late 19th century, the number of words of English and other European language origin that entered Chinese was enormous. What is most perplexing of all is that the number of words of Chinese origin that entered the English lexicon before 1950, while relatively few in comparison, say, with words from South Asian or European languages, is fairly substantial. This (the abundance of recent English loans in Chinese and the scarcity of Chinese loans in English) is a conundrum that I've been gnawing on for quite a while now. Stephan Stiller lists the following translational equivalents:ĭisphatic ( léishè 鐳射 jīguāng 激光, "clone" > kèlóng 克隆, "cool" > kù 酷, "e-mail" > yīmèier 伊妹儿 - the list is almost endless most of the items are phonetic transcriptions, but often with a humorous touch or a hint of appropriate meaning. Cheng Fangyi offers "not good enough" and "not as good as expected". We might consider "unhelpful" (from Rebecca Fu) as a possible English rendering. One such campaign that sticks in my mind was undertaken on behalf of "ungelivable" or "ungeliable", an invented English term for the Chinese expression bù gěilì 不给力 (lit., "doesn't give force / energy"), which was supposedly untranslatable into existing English terminology. This is particularly odd for recent times, when there has been so much contact between Chinese and English speakers, and there have even been campaigns on the part of Chinese officials, journalists, and netizens to promote particular expressions for adoption into English. English loves to borrow far and wide, yet it is strange how few words of Chinese origin there are in English. In " Why so little Chinese in English?", Robert Lane Greene ponders the paucity of recent Chinese loanwords in English, and there is a further discussion on Language Hat.
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