Brand names play an important role in determining the success or failure of a new product or service (Armstrong and Kotler 1997), influencing its acceptance by the public (Charmasson 1998). Thus brand names are a crucial component of marketing strategies. A well-made brand name should suggest positive connotations and the relevance of the product, be short, distinctive and easy to memorize (Robertson 1989; Kohli and LaBanh 1997). In choosing a brand name one should take into account phonological…

The purpose of this lemma is to summarize some general principles for transcribing foreign names into Chinese characters, in particular, Standard Chinese (SC). It is not controversial that the Chinese language has long been noted for its resistance to “phonetic borrowings” from foreign languages (Amelung et al. 2001; Norman 1988; Novotná 1967; Wiebusch and Tadmor 2009, among others; see also The World Loanword Database [WOLD]). Specifically, in comparison to Japanese and Korean, Standard Chinese is highly resistant to phonetic loans (or, so…

bā guā 八卦 ‘eight trigrams’: Origin of the Chinese Writing System Bā Jīn 巴金 (1904–2005): Esperanto bǎ 把: Light Verbs bǎ 把-construction: Areal Typology | Bǎ 把-construction | Movement Structures | Serial Verbs | Syntax-Phonology Interface | Systemic Linguistics | Warring States to Medieval Chinese bǎ 把-construction, acquisition: Acquisition of Bèi 被 and Bǎ 把, L1 bǎ 把-construction, aspect: Aspect, Inner bǎ 把-construction, coverbs: Serial Verbs bǎ 把-construction, development: Warring States to Medieval Chinese bǎ 把-construction, Medieval Chinese: Medieval Chinese Syntax bǎ 把-cons…

Chinese characters are the indigenous writing system of China. That writing system is among the handful of independent inventions of writing by human beings, along with Sumerian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Mayan hieroglyphs. But Chinese characters are unique in being the only such writing system to have been in continuous use up to the present day. For thousands of years, they have not only functioned to write Sinitic languages, they have been borrowed and adapted to write many other languages of Asia. They remain a component of other modern writing systems, most notably (as kan…

This article provides an overview of the large and complex field of Chinese phonology, giving cross-references to other articles in the ECLL that provide more detailed information. It summarizes three main aspects of Chinese phonology: synchronic, historical, and traditional. 1. Synchronic Although Chinese is a large family made up of (at least) dozens of mutually unintelligible languages, each with considerable internal dialectal diversity, the family is fairly compact and homogeneous when it comes to phonological typology. All Chines…

face: Face | Grice’s Cooperative Principle from a Chinese Perspective | Illocutionary Acts of Requesting and Inviting face avoidance: Speech Perception face, Confucian philosophy: Face face, politeness: Face | Politeness face-to-face interaction: Politeness facework: Politeness facial expressions: Sign Languages, Táiwān factive presupposition trigger: Presupposition Triggers factual concessives: Concessives, Premodern factual evidential: Tibetan Language factual mood: see indicative mood falling intonation: Tone and Intonation false starts: Disfluent Speech fal…

Typology Areal Typology Typology of Sinitic Chinese as a Monosyllabic Language Varieties of Chinese and Dialectology Dialect Classification Dialect Diversification, Major Trends Dialect Geography (Geolinguistics) Language versus Dialect Layers in Dialectology Dialects, Premodern Northwest Medieval Chinese Ancient Chǔ 楚 language Ancient Wú 吳 Language Gàn 赣 Dialects Hakka Dialects Huī 徽 Dialects Jìn 晉 Dialects Mandarin, Varieties of Mǐn 閩 Dialects Pínghuà 平話 Dialects Wú 吳 Dialects Xiāng 湘 Dialects Yuè 粵 Dialects Dialect Islands Běijīng, The Language of Hohhot, The Language of Sh…

Early Archaic Chinese: Non-Chinese Substrates | Warring States to Medieval Chinese early bilinguals: Bilingualism, Neurolinguistic Studies early koine: Dialect Classification Early Mandarin: Rime Dictionaries Early Mandarin, K-type questions: Yes/No Questions Early Medieval Chinese, passive constructions: Medieval Chinese Syntax Early Middle Chinese (EMC): Děng 等 (Division and Rank) | Medieval Chinese Syntax | Middle Chinese Phonology | Periodization | Warring States to Medieval Chinese Early Modern Chinese: see Jìndài Hànyǔ 近代漢語 Early Old Chinese (shànggǔ qiánqī 上古前期…

10 cycle: see heavenly stems 12 cycle: Zodiac | see also earthly branches 12 semitone musical system: Musical Notation A Dictionary of the Chinese Particles (1974): Chinese Linguistics in North America A Dissertation on the Nature and Character of the Chinese System of Writing (1838): Western Views of the Chinese Language A Grammar of Colloquial Chinese: as Exhibited in the Shanghai Dialect (1868): Chinese Linguistics in North America A’-dependency: Empty Categories A’-movement: Bèi 被-construction | Movement Structures A’-movement, sentence processing: Sentence Processing:…

Volume I Abbreviations, Acronyms, Initialisms 1 Academia Sinica Balanced Corpus 5 Acquired Dyslexia and Dysgraphia 7 Acquisition of Bèi 被 and Bǎ 把, L1 10 Acquisition of Classifiers and Count-Mass Distinction, L1 (Mandarin) 15 Acquisition of Discourse and Pragmatics, L1 20 Acquisition of L2, Overview 27 Acquisition of Logical Connectives and Focus, L1 34 Acquisition of Nouns and Verbs, L1 40 Acquisition of Oral and Written Chinese by Hong Kong Deaf Children 45 Acquisition of Phonology, L1 49 Acquisition of Relative Clauses, L1 57 Acquisition of Semantics, L1 63 Acquisition of Shangha…

Given the logographic nature of Chinese characters (Chinese Writing), someone unfamiliar with the language might be forgiven for wondering how Chinese speakers would be able to write newly coined or nonsensical words. Indeed, given the zero-sum, “you either know it or you don’t” nature of the Chinese writing system, novel coinage does seem difficult, at first glance. The fact that Chinese “words” are usually represented by 2-3 characters (Shu and Anderson 1999) does give us some insight into how…

T’en: Non-Sinitic Languages of Southeast China | Sui Language T’rung: see Dúlóng tā 他 vs qú 渠 or yī 伊: Dialect Classification Ta-ang (Dé’áng 德昂): Austroasiatic Languages Tabghach (Tuòbá 拓跋): Altaic Elements in Chinese taboo, names: Personal Names taboo, superstition: Taboo Tafsir (Koranic exegesis): Arabic in China tag questions: Illocutionary Acts of Requesting and Inviting tagging: Word Length tagging model: Peking University Treebank tagging strategies: Word Length Tai Don script: Dǎi 傣 Language Tai languages, numerals: Chinese Loanwords in the Languages of Southeast Asia Ta…

Abbreviations, acronyms, and initialisms are the result of some form of reduction of the phonological shape or orthographic representation of one or more words. Although “abbreviation” is sometimes used as a cover term for any kind of reduction of an existing word or phrase, strictly speaking, abbreviations are purely graphical shortenings, such as, for instance, the English “Dr.” for “Doctor” (Kreidler 2000; López Rúa 2006). “Acronyms” (< Greek ákron ‘tip, end’ + ónyma ‘name’) are generally understood as words made up of the first letters (or, less commonly, the fi…

N170: Character Recognition and Phonological Access, Neurolinguistic Studies N200: Lexical Semantic Processing, Neurolinguistic Studies N400: Character Recognition and Phonological Access, Neurolinguistic Studies | Dyslexia, Acquired | Lexical Semantic Processing | Neuro-imaging Studies | Neurolinguistic Studies | Neurolinguistics, Overview | Morphological Processing of Compounds, Neurolinguistic Studies | Relative Clause Comprehension, Neurolinguistic Studies N400, bilinguals: Bilingualism, Neurolinguistic Studies Nà Zhōng 納忠 (1909–2008): Arabic in China N…

Ahrens, Kathleen: Metaphor Processing Aldridge, Edith: Ergativity and Unaccusativity Old Chinese Syntax: Basic Word Order Wh-questions, Premodern Alleton, Viviane: Chinese Linguistics in France Personal Names Alves, Mark: Chinese Loanwords in the Languages of Southeast Asia Chinese Loanwords in Vietnamese Anderl, Christoph: Medieval Chinese Syntax Northwest Medieval Chinese (with Osterkamp, Sven) Anderson, Matthew M.: Notions of “Chinese” Number of Characters Andrist, Eleni: Internet Language Writing Systems for the Visually Impaired Ansaldo, Umberto: Comparatives P…

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-…

D’Elia, Pasquale (1890–1963): Chinese Linguistics in Italy Dà cíhǎi 大辭海 (Great sea of words): Lexicography, Modern Dà Guójiā Xiǎo Cídiǎn 大國家小詞典: Lexicography, Modern Dà Sòng chóngxiū Guǎngyùn 大宋重修廣韻 (The re-amended Guǎngyùn of the Great Sòng): Rime Dictionaries Dàbāo 大包 dialect, Jìn 晉: Jìn 晉 Dialects Dàbù 大埔 Hakka (Kèjiā 客家), spoken corpus: Táiwān Spoken Chinese Corpus Dàbù 大埔 resultatives: Resultatives Dàchíshān 大岐山: Qiāng 羌 Language Dàdū 大都: Mandarin, Varieties of Dagur (Daur, Dáwò’ěr 達斡爾): Altaic Languages | Languages and Language Families | Mongolian | Non-Sini…

1. Introduction Chinese texts that consist solely of Chinese characters (henceforth Hànzì 漢字) are increasingly rare. In the globalized economic and cultural environment, Arabic numerals and Roman letters are nearly unavoidable in writing. Even a book of classical texts, if reprinted in recent decades, will bear the letters ISBN on the back cover. Newspapers, magazines, websites, advertisements abound with alphabetic expressions both familiar to the English speaker ( WTO, IBM) and uniquely Chinese ( KTV, AA制 [ zhì ‘made’]). Many of these expressions (“lettered words”, as …

Mǎ Déxīn 馬德新 (1794–1874): Arabic in China Mǎ Jiān 馬堅 (1906–1978): Arabic in China Mǎ Jiànzhōng 馬建忠 (1844–1900): Mǎshì wéntōng 馬氏文通 | Word and Wordhood, Premodern | Word Classes, Modern Mǎ Jīnpéng 馬金鵬 (1913–2001): Arabic in China Mǎ Xiàngbó 馬相伯 (1840–1939): Mǎshì wéntōng 馬氏文通 mǎ 馬 < *mmra-q ‘horse(s)’ and wǔ 武 < *ma-q ‘martial’: Shuōwén Jiězì 說文解字 mǎ 馬 ‘horse’, as loanword: Loanwords, Pre-Qín Mǎ’ěrkāng 馬爾康 county: see mbarkhams county Macaísta cerrado: Macau: Language Situation Macaísta creole: see Patuá creole Macanese: Pidgins and Creoles Macanese communities: Macau: Language Si…

L[ow] language: Diglossia L1 acquisition: see acquisition L1 attrition: Language Attrition L1 influence, tone perception: Acquisition of Tone, L2 | Perception and Production of Chinese Sounds by Non-native Speakers L2 acquisition: see acquisition L2 Chinese: see Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language labeling, using Roman letters: Roman Letters in Chinese Writing labiodentalization, Northwestern Medieval Chinese: Northwest Medieval Chinese labiovelars: Haudricourt, André-Georges (1911–1996) Labovian approach: Sociolinguistics Lachi language (Lājī 拉基): Tai-Kadai …