The Englishization of Chinese enters a new phase
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Xinyi Ye came upon this post on Zhīhū 知乎 ("Did you know?"), a Chinese social media site that is comparable to Quora:
Rúhé kàndài huíguó rénshì shuōhuà jiádài Yīngwén?
"How should we view / treat people returning to China [from abroad] who mix English in their speech?"
The author is Ren Zeyu, who seems to be an anime artist, based on the bio of his account.
He begins by questioning whether what they are adding to their speech is English or whether it has already become bona fide Chinese.
He takes the well-known example of "cool" (I'll summarize what he says here). Before the year 2000, if somebody mentioned in a praiseworthy way that something was "kù 酷", which at that time literally meant "cruel; ruthless; brutal; oppressive; savage", people would consider that he was mixing English "coo[l]" in his Chinese speech, because at that time English "cool" was still in the early stages of being absorbed into Chinese. Standard dictionaries listed only the negative, pejorative meanings of "kù 酷"; there was not a trace of the positive meaning of "neat; nifty" and so forth. However, with the passage of time and with more and more saying "coo[l]" in a positive, approbatory sense, it gradually became a Chinese word. Now, if you say that someone or something is "kù 酷" (i.e., "cool"), no one would think that you're mixing English in your speech. The positive meanings "cool; neat; nifty" have now become the primary definitions for "kù 酷".
The author then proceeds briefly to discuss other early borrowings that are polysyllabic transcriptions, such as those for "sofa", "media", and "hysteria". Here is where he moves on to new territory, and I believe that this is where the situation has become enormously important, because people are no longer feeling the need to syllabize, much less hanziize, English words. They just say them flat out, and nobody blinks an eye that they are English words in Chinese. They have already instantly become Chinese terms — at least in speech. Nobody has cared to figure out how they should be written in hanzi. Even if you write them, you write them with roman letters, and this takes us back to the old point that Mark Hansell made decades ago (see "Selected readings" below): the roman alphabet has become an integral part of the Chinese writing system, just as romaji is in the Japanese writing system.
Ren makes the very interesting point that, even if you are planning to study abroad in Germany, you wouldn't say "ná dàole Zulassung 拿到了Zulassung" ("got a Zulassung"), you would still say "ná dàole offer 拿到了offer" ("got an offer"), because "offer" has become a Chinese word and that is the correct way to say what you want to express in Chinese".
There are hundreds of such words in current Chinese discourse, and they are at diverse stages of absorption into Chinese, e.g., "app", "logo", and "Ptú P图" (lit. "P picture/image"). Though I don't know for certain exactly what English expression this ("Ptú P图") is supposed to correspond to, it is very widely used. If you do a Google search on "P图", you will get lots and lots of suggestions, and they all seem to have to do with Photoshop. I have a feeling that some of the English origin expressions were coined by Chinese, sort of like "Handy" in German for "mobile / cell phone".
When it starts to look like this, it's easy for me to get lost:
Nǐ zhīdào nàgè B zhàn up zhǔ ma?
你知道那个B站up主吗?
Tāde nèiróng hǎo low ò!
它的内容好low哦!
Since that's insider's Chinese, I'm not going to render it into English. In bold type, Ren insists that it's "quán Zhōngwén 全中文" ("completely Chinese"). But, if an outsider to that group comes up and says, "Tài wǎnle, wǒ yào go jiāle 太晚了，我要go家了" ("I'm too late, I'd better go home"), the people of the original group would think his speech is weird for the way it has mixed in an English word.
The reasons why I think these developments are so significant are the following:
1. their speech and writing are so longer restricted to syllables and sinographs
2. they do not think they are code switching; they think they are speaking pure Chinese.
3. they are not bound by Mandarin or other topolectal phonotactics (twenty-thirty years ago, by and large they still strictly adhered to Sinitic phonotactics).
Many of the above phenomena may be attributed to the way English is being taught and learned by Chinese in China and abroad. Very successfully! I'm often astonished by how good my PRC students' spoken English is. The sheer scope, scale, and numbers of individuals studying English are enormous — 400,000,000 in the PRC alone, and millions outside of China. Plus the impact of popular culture, scholarship, science and technology, business being conducted in the global language can hardly be overstated. But that's the subject for another post.
Selected readings
- "YouCool" (3/7/08)
- "Too cool!" (5/4/16)
- "Creeping English in Chinese" (1/23/17)
- "Creeping Romanization in Chinese, part 5" (7/6/23)
- "Creeping Romanization in Chinese, part 4" (12/15/18)
- "Creeping Romanization in Chinese, part 3" (11/25/18) — includes a very long (but not complete) list of previous Language Log posts on Romanization, Englishization, digraphia and diglossia, biscriptalism and multiscriptalism, bilingualism and multilingualism
- "Nerd, geek, PK: Creeping Romanization (and Englishization), part 2" (3/5/13)
- "Creeping Romanization in Chinese" (8/30/12)
- "The Westernization of Chinese" (9/6/12)
- Mark Hansell, "The Sino-Alphabet: The Assimilation of Roman Letters into the Chinese Writing System," Sino-Platonic Papers, 45 (May, 1994), 1-28 (pdf)
Jerry Packard said,
August 8, 2024 @ 6:02 am
In Cixin Liu’s _The Dark Forest_ (黑暗森林) – the second volume of _The Three Body Problem _ trilogy – the scientist Luo Ji awakens from a 185-year hibernation in Beijing around the year 2110, to make the following observation upon awakening (translation courtesy Google translate):
At first Luo Ji felt that the doctor's accent was strange, but he soon discovered that the pronunciation of Mandarin did not change much, but that it was mixed with a large number of English words. While the doctor was speaking, what he said was reflected on the ceiling with subtitles. It was obviously real-time speech recognition. Perhaps in order to facilitate the understanding of the awakened person, all the English words were replaced with Chinese characters.
Jerry Packard said,
August 8, 2024 @ 6:12 am
And further down the line…
“ …Let’s go, they’ve been waiting in the reception room for a long time.” The nurse said. Luo Ji noticed that she tried her best to avoid English words when she spoke, but some Chinese words seemed very jerky in her mouth. She was almost speaking ancient Chinese. Sometimes when she had to speak modern languages, there would be words on the wall. The ancient Chinese translation is shown accordingly.
Victor Mair said,
August 8, 2024 @ 6:12 am
So apt, Jerry!
Jerry Packard said,
August 8, 2024 @ 6:31 am
And further down the line…
“ …Let’s go, they’ve been waiting in the reception room for a long time.” The nurse said. Luo Ji noticed that she tried her best to avoid English words when she spoke, but some Chinese words seemed very jerky in her mouth. She was almost speaking ancient Chinese. Sometimes when she had to speak modern languages, there would be words on the wall. The ancient Chinese translation is shown accordingly.
And then further down…
The commander is now speaking standard Chinese, but the three major fleets have formed their own language, which is somewhat similar to modern Chinese and modern English on Earth. It just blends the two languages more evenly. The vocabulary is Chinese and English. Half and half.
David Moser said,
August 8, 2024 @ 6:37 am
This reminds me of an older Language Log post, "an orgy of code switching", https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=22077 , in which a group of business people at a conference seemed to be unable to utter a sentence in Chinese without including an English word or two. All the examples are genuine.
Victor Mair said,
August 8, 2024 @ 6:40 am
Unbelievable!!!
Incredible! This harkens back to my long unpublished novel, China Babel.
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=63227
First draft October, 1986, but the basic ideas were already formulated in the 60s.
Right under the title, I styled it: A mock satiric novel of the near future.
It's all about what you're describing from Cixin Liu’s second volume of The Three Body Problem trilogy
Victor Mair said,
August 8, 2024 @ 6:44 am
Your "Orgy" post fits too, David.
Tin said,
August 8, 2024 @ 8:30 am
P stands for Photoshop. Because it was usual to see people adjust pictures with it. So P图 literally means adjusting a photo with Photoshop, but now it turned to mean adjusting photos in general.
Tin said,
August 8, 2024 @ 8:35 am
What is amazing is P now is actually a verb meaning adjusting photos in daily conversation! Like 你可以帮我P一下吗？(Would you adjust photos you’ve taken for me?) when you told a cameraman.
justin said,
August 8, 2024 @ 9:27 am
Some people explained 'P' above… clearly this is not English. It is a borrowing of the name of an English letter for a Chinese concept. There is no slang or usage whatsoever in English where "P" is a verb and means "doing photo editing". . .
Are the American names of the letters of the Alphabet even strictly English anymore? Yes you have proper names for them in Indonesian, German, Spanish, etc. but every single country that uses non-Latin writing systems considers the "names" of those letters to be the American names of them. (Well, you can argue that in Thai there are a few that are pure Thai names since they are so far off from English phonetics. But not so in China imo.)
Victor Mair said,
August 8, 2024 @ 1:35 pm
This Chinese "P" concept is pronounceable.
It is also a part of speech.
∴ it must be a word.
∴ it has an etymology.
What is the etymology of this Chinese "P" word?
Victor Mair said,
August 8, 2024 @ 5:24 pm
From an octogenarian Chinese friend:
So true. I now despair of hearing my young Chinese acquaintances speak _real_ Chinese. Their Chinese is always strewn with English. I want a _Chinese_ conversation, please, not half-and-half.
Victor Mair said,
August 8, 2024 @ 5:28 pm
From a Penn M.A.:
When I go back to China, I have to make radical adjustments and speak what feels like archaic Chinese to me.
Chas Belov said,
August 10, 2024 @ 12:05 am
Thinking of Cantonese:
BB (bibi) – baby
的士 (diksi) – taxi
多士 (dosi) – toast
巴士 (basi) – bus
Victor Mair said,
August 10, 2024 @ 8:31 am
In the 90s, BBji BB機/机 or BPqi BP器 ("beeper") were quite the rage in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the PRC. Without trying to specify which designation was used where and, for convenience sake, using only traditional characters, beepers were also referred to by the following terms: hūjiàoqì 呼叫器 ("pager"), xúnhūjī 尋呼機 ("pager"), callji call機 ("pager"), BB.Call ("pager"), etc.
Technically they were referred to as wúxiàndiàn jiào rén yèwù 無線電叫人業務 ("wireless calling service").
Vampyricon said,
August 12, 2024 @ 3:57 pm
@Chas Belov
There are definitely better Cantonese candidates than 的士、多士、巴士. For example, take the doublet mit1si4 and /miːs⁵/, referring to a female teacher and the verb "to miss" respectively.
Will C-S. said,
August 13, 2024 @ 6:40 pm
> Some people explained 'P' above… clearly this is not English.
Would, say, "anime" be considered an English word before it got reborrowed?
David Marjanović said,
August 14, 2024 @ 2:19 pm
Phonosemantic matching wins again!
Chas Belov said,
August 16, 2024 @ 4:25 pm
When I was studying Cantonese, I bought a comic book from Hong Kong in SF Chinatown. Obviously, the characters were impenetrable to me, but I remember it using "call機" for pager in one of the speech bubbles.