Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics

1. Why Study Loanword Phonology? Loanword Phonology is the study of how non-native forms are adapted to conform to the segmental, phonotactic, suprasegmental and morphophonological restrictions of the borrower language. Within the generative tradition, it is widely accepted that adaptation processes approximate experimentations in real-life environments (cf. Berko’s 1958 wug test) since loanword data can reveal the grammatical knowledge of speakers as well as help resolve alternative grammatical analyses (e.g., Hyman 1970). For example, consonant clusters (e.g., sk- or pr-…

1. History English words must have started coming into the Cantonese lexicon soon after the British maritime trade brought the two peoples and their languages into contact with each other in the 17th century. As early as 1637, the English mercantile trader Peter Mundy, who traveled to Macau and Canton on an expedition led by Captain John Weddell, kept a written record of this early contact. In his diary, Mundy described an interpreter who helped facilitate conversations between the visitors and th…

The most significant wave of borrowings from Japanese occurred as a part of the modernization of Chinese between 1895 and 1919. Borrowing continued until it ebbed away with World War II, only to resume more recently with the spread of Japanese technology and popular culture. Borrowing from Japanese meant a reversal of the direction of influence that had persisted since the 5th century, when the Japanese began to adopt Chinese characters to write their language. As a result of the use of Chinese …

Russian loans started to flow into Chinese from the establishment of Russian-Chinese trade contacts in the late 17th century, following the signing of the Treaty of Nerchinsk (1689) and their further regularization by the Treaty of Kyakhta (1727). At the end of the 19th century Russian loans became even more numerous due to the first phase of construction of the Chinese Eastern Railway (1897–1903) which linked Sibera and northeast China. This period of more than two hundred years of close border…

The Chinese language and its users as well as contributors are drawn from diverse speech communities from both within and outside Mainland China. Given the size and diversity of the constituent groups and the complex relationships among them over time, it is naturally inevitable that contact-induced two-way linguistic transfers such as word borrowings have taken place throughout history and continue to take place among these speech communities. There is much traditional interest on word borrowin…

Chinese civilization has been in contact with foreign peoples since the beginning, but the identification of loanwords from non-Chinese languages in the earliest forms of Chinese (Loanwords, Pre-Qín) is troublesome. However, the picture of borrowing becomes much clearer from the Hàn dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) onward. Stages of premodern Chinese beginning with late Old Chinese (roughly 1st to 5th centuries CE; Old Chinese Phonology) can be reconstructed with much more confidence than earlier Old Ch…

Early Chinese civilization is regarded by the general public as if it were self-contained, and its language, Old Chinese (Old Chinese Phonology), at first glance appears to be a closed system unlike, say, Latin which is full of obvious Greek loanwords. However, a "pure" language without loanwords is an anomaly. For decades, specialists have attempted to identify loanwords in Old Chinese. Such words have potentially tremendous consequences for our understanding of the cultural situation of early …

Lù Zhìwéi 陸志韋 was an important linguist, psychologist, and educator who laid the foundations of psychology in China, a Christian convert involved in the governance of Yenching (Yānjīng 燕京) University, and a member of the Chinese Academy of Science. His main achievements in linguistics lie in historical phonology, as well as in lexicology and morphology. 1. Biography Lù Zhìwéi 陸志韋 was born in Nánxún 南潯, Wúxīng 吳興 county, in what is today a district of Húzhōu 湖州 municipality, Zhèjiāng province, in 1894 as Lù Bǎoqí 陸保琦 (Zhào 2012:26). His mother died whe…