The difficulty of borrowing in Chinese
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The Strange Reason Chinese Doesn’t Borrow Words
Time for another Julesy:
Once again, Julesy hits the nail on the head — squarely and repeatedly.
Selected readings
- "Massive borrowing" (2/18/19
- "Of chariots, chess, and Chinese borrowings" (6/7/24)
- "The origin of 'thing' in Chinese" (5/10/25)
- "The Englishization of Chinese enters a new phase" (8/8/24)
- "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)
- "Japanese periodic table versus Chinese periodic table" (5/25/22)
- "Names of the chemical elements in Chinese" (5/3/15)
- "Names of the Elements in Chinese" (5/4/15)
- "Ping-pong bing-bang" (6/30/19)
- "'War Symphony': a modern Chinese poem" (11/5/17) — if the video in the post doesn't play, try this
- "A radical proposal for sinographs" (5/23/25) — abolish them
Philip Taylor said,
October 4, 2025 @ 7:03 am
I completely misunderstood the title of this thread — I thought that "borrowing" referred to money, goods, etc., not words !
wgj said,
October 4, 2025 @ 7:36 am
It says a lot about the insular nature of the Chinese language and language culture, if for nearly two millennia between the introduction to Buddhism and the introduction to Christianity, there was no significant amount of loanwords brought into Chinese. But I don't know if that's really true – the video doesn't cite any academic research on this claim. It's particularly extraordinary considering that during half of that time, (major parts of) China was being ruled by people of (at least partial) non-Han origin – including the Wei, Tang, Liao, Jin, Yuan and Qing dynasties. And we know that many other aspects of the Chinese culture – food, clothing, furniture, music etc. – and even some aspects of the language – particularly pronunciation – was heavily influenced by external trends during the same time.
Jerry Packard said,
October 4, 2025 @ 8:01 am
Chinese has many borrowings – from English just to name a few: bus cheese engine microphone taxi laser pump telephone toast vitamin… the list goes on, not to mention the religious terms over the centuries.
wgj said,
October 4, 2025 @ 8:01 am
One thing the video doesn't mention towards the end – possibly because the author lives outside China and isn't familiar with official policies – is that the PRC government forbids use of Latin-character loanwords in official communication and suppress it in non-official public communication as well. That means, while 90% of ordinary Chinese say "NBA", the state media say "美职篮" (American professional basketball); while 99% of ordinary Chinese say "PPT", the state media say "演示" (presentation); while 99.99% of ordinary Chinese say "DNA", the state media say "脱氧核糖核酸 (DNA)" – they have to add "DNA" in parentheses because ordinary Chinese people wouldn't even know the Chinese word for it.
If an expert talks about an "APP" (I've never understood why that word is commonly written in all-caps in China) on TV, the subtitle would change it to "（手机应用）" (cellphone app) instead of simply transcribing the original. And the word is put in parentheses to signify that it's what the speaker intended to say, but not what they actually said, same as if the speaker had misspoken – in fact, from the state's perspective, the speaker had indeed misspoken by not following the official language rules of avoiding Latin-character loanwords.
Even TV shows produced for state TV channels would avoid using words like APP and PPT, and use the much less common Chinese version instead. That's just one of many, many reasons why Chinese TV shows are so unrealistic.
wgj said,
October 4, 2025 @ 8:06 am
@Jerry Packer: None of the examples you gave is widely used in mainland China. Some, like bus and toast, will be understood by 30-year-old urbanites, but not by 50-year-old villagers.
Jerry Packard said,
October 4, 2025 @ 10:29 am
@wgj – When a language translates or ‘borrows’ words from another language, the way the borrowing takes place indicates the extent to which the borrowing culture is receptive to the culture it is borrowing from.The general rule is that if a country is receptive to the culture that is being borrowed from, then the borrowing of words will be phonetic, while if the borrowing country is less receptive to the borrowed culture then word borrowing will be semantic in nature. So it would not be surprising to see that recent borrowings from US English would be more semantic than phonetic. So, when Chinese culture is non-receptive, toast and bus would more likely be 烤面包 and 公共汽车。
Jonathan Smith said,
October 4, 2025 @ 11:40 am
I want to say there was a recent video posted about how a huge chunk of Mandarin came from Japanese… hmm.
And not just Japanese; Mandarin is full of loans from everywhere and especially from other Chinese languages and neighboring non-Sinitic languages like those suggested by wsj… it's just that they're relatively well-hidden. How/why are very interesting questions.
Re: Jerry Packard's list of words from English (some indirectly), 巴士/大巴, 芝士, 麦(克), 的(士), 泵(浦), 维他命 etc. etc. surely are "widely used" in the PRC unless things have changed dramatically in the last decade. Orthographic "APP" I assume because everyone says "ei pi pi".
Mark Hansell said,
October 4, 2025 @ 1:10 pm
The title of this video is much broader than the actual subject matter– it should have been called "Why there are so few phonetic loans in the written Mandarin of Mainland China." Most of what was discussed does not apply to Taiwan or Hong Kong, because the sociolinguistic situations there (more bilingualism, less xenophobia, less official control) have led to much more borrowing directly by speakers with some knowledge of the source language in informal contexts. The cases discussed in the video are mainly indirect borrowing by monolinguals, mediated by professional translators, a situation that favors borrowing by meaning rather than by sound. The notable exception is when she talks about borrowings among young (internet-savvy) people, like 'capybara' and 'DIY', where a community of borrowers already familiar with the foreign words import them more directly into Mandarin.
The comparison with Japanese makes it clear that the "difficulty" of borrowing is political/sociological, not linguistic. The phonological limitations (no consonant clusters, few final consonants, etc.) apply equally well to Japanese, yet Japanese borrows foreign words by sound prolifically and easily. Of course Japanese has a phonetic script (katakana) to easily write foreign words without having to agonize over which character to write them with— but katakana are nothing but simplified Chinese characters selected to represent particular syllables, exactly like the XInhua News Agency's list of characters for transliterating foreign names. Chinese speakers could use that set of characters exactly like Japanese uses katakana, if there were willingness/permission to do so.
In other words, Chinese speakers often borrow foreign vocabulary in various ways, the language and the writing system provide various strategies for doing so. When they don't, it may be because the sociolinguistic situation is not right, because official or unofficial ideologies like language "purism" prevent it, or it may be happening more than we think, but invisible because we are only lookiing at the character-based written language.
Seth Kazan said,
October 4, 2025 @ 1:42 pm
I'm developing a conlang 3SDeductiveLanguage(1Sense=1Sign=1Sound) that cannot borrow words, not by choice, but because, in it, each word is its own definition, while foreign words are just meaningless labels…
It shares with Mandarin a semantic monosyllabism that makes a translated word meaningful without being longer than a borrowed word and that it is by nature better adapted to the language corpus, and therefore superior in every way…