Sociolinguistic implications in Chinese-language borrowings in English’ GARLAND CANNON Borrowing is a vast topic, as evidenced by the 1,507 bibliographical entries in Deroy (1980), the most comprehensive work on the subject. Early sociolinguistic studies have concentrated on ‘native’ items or items borrowed from within the same language family, as perhaps initiated by Haugen — who composed the classic Norwegian study on bilingualism (1969) and a 156-page bibliography of American bilingualism (1956) — and extended by Fishman et al. (1966) to language maintenance and shift in the US, and by Hope (1971) to borrowings between French and Italian. Three recent language-specific extensions are Steinmetz’s (1986) book on Yiddish in American English, with close attention to bilingual speakers of Yiddish and English who live side by side with monolingual English speakers, and the intimate borrowings into English therefrom. Pfeffer’s dictionary (1987) lists and describes over 3,000 German borrowings in American and British English. The third book is more relevant to lan- guage in its social context in Asia — Chan and Kwok’s study of 108 Cantonese borrowings into Hong Kong English (1985). A fourth study (Cannon 1988) collects and describes 981 known, unduplicated items in English dictionaries that ultimately have at least some provenience from Chinese (a general term used here to mean Mandarin, Cantonese, and a few related languages). It is of interest to summarize those data and conclusions and make sociolinguistic applications. Scholars have generally considered Chinese to have had little impact on English. Serjeantson’s book on English borrowings (1935) and current histories of the language indicate that Chinese has given few items, though some of the items have high frequency. Serjeantson tabulates only 27 items from Chinese, some of which overlap with Japanese because they entered English through that intermediary language. They are all viable, as they appear in Webster's Third (1961). My study of Chinese borrowings provides a comparison with my two Japanese studies (1981, 1984) and with the total borrowings among the 13,683 recent items in the two Barnhart dictionaries (1973, 1980) and Merriam’s 12,000 Words (1986 — 0165~2516/90/0086-0041 $2.00 Int'l. J. Soc. Lang. 86 (1990), pp. 41-55 © Walter de Gruyter42 G. Cannon see Cannon 1987). It sheds light on Chan and Kwok (1985), by con- sidering how many of their items have a place in general English, as opposed to being part only of a geographically restricted vocabulary. It considers the chronology of the 981 items and their history in English, regional and stylistic limitations, their possible place and productivity in general international English, problems caused by the source languages, and their meanings and grammar. As we will see, by far the most productive of these items have been the long-naturalized tea and Japan (from Chinese Jihpen, shortened from Jih-pen-kuo ‘land of the origin of the sun’). Sixty-four of the 81 tea compounds where fea is in initial position can be dated: teaspoon (1686) is the oldest. There are three in 1686-1689, teacup (1700) and 18 others in 1700-1790, tea garden (1802) and 29 others in 1802-1898, and tea basket (1901) and ten others in 1901-1975. Fifty-four of the 149 Japan items can be dated: Japan ‘insular empire’ is the oldest (1613). There are four in 1614-1688, Japanese (1707) and four others in 1707-1793, Japan lily (1813) and 25 others in 1813-1895, and Japanese quince (1900) and 17 others in 1900-1970. Dates are available for only 435 of the non-tea and non-Japan items. Six appear before 1600: galingale (1000), bonze, li, litchi, and typhoon (1588), and Tangut (1598). There are T’ien (1613) and 21 other items in 1613-1699, bohea (1701) and 52 others in 1701-1796, nankeen hawk (1804) and 154 others in 1804-1899, and winter melon (1900) and 197 others in 1900-1981. Chien ware (1981) has the most recent date. At least 221 of these items were recorded after Serjeantson’s book appeared. Few of these items have temporal labels to indicate that they may no longer be in use, though Merriam’s excluding from Webster's Third 30 nouns and one adjective that appear only in Webster's Second (1934) suggests that they are not used today. These include nine primarily units of weight or measurement that take a zero plural (like ch'ien and ch’ih). By contrast, 155 items that are not in Webster’s Second surface in Web- ster’s Third, a fact which suggests that they may be fairly new in English. Thirty recent Chinese borrowings are tabulated in my 1987 corpus. These include items like barefoot doctor, cheongsam, dim sum, mao-tai, wok, and hegemony. The latter, translated from Pinyin pa-ch’uan’chu-i ‘doctrine of domination’, duplicates an old Greek loan translation already in English. (This accidental duplication presents an etymological problem for lexicographers, who may be tempted to list the new, similar meaning under other meanings of hegemony like ‘preponderant influence or author- ity’; but they will mislead readers if they do so unless they specify the Chinese source, which will then make the entry rather messy.) The 30 items (2.9% of the borrowings tabulated in the book) contrast with theChinese borrowing in English 43 80 Japanese loans (7.8%), which trail only French (25%) and are tied with Spanish as the second-highest source for loans into English today. Trailing the 38 Russian items, Chinese is in eleventh place. Few of our 981 items have stylistic or regional associations that may limit their currency. Seven are labeled as slang — char ‘tea’, chow ‘food’, yen ‘opium’, yen-yen ‘craving for opium’, adj. gung ho ‘enthusiastic’, and v. chow and jap ‘make a sneak attack on’. This low figure (.7%) contrasts with the 4.3% slang items in the borrowings in the 1987 corpus. Nor do problems of etiquette arise in our Chinese corpus; none of the items is socially stigmatized as obscene or vulgar. They do not refer insensitively to body parts or functions that might be considered coarse in English- speaking culture except possibly distantly for the new meaning of tearoom ‘men’s room used as a site for homosexual activity’. Even this example might be questioned, as tea might be a pronunciation spelling of the abbreviated T ‘toilet’ and so exclude the example from our corpus. Only 14 items are regionally labeled. Eight of the ten British items Telate to tea, and six of the British compounds contain an initial tea and an English noun, as in teacake. This proportion (1%) exceeds the .6% of British labels in the borrowings in the 1987 data. By contrast, the .4% of US items (v. jap, sang ‘ginseng’, yen ‘opium’, and yen-yen) is smaller than the 4.5% of US items in those borrowings. Teaboy ‘manservant’ is Irish. Of course, our Chinese corpus may be so large because it comes from dictionary collections of items that might have been partly taken from rather obscure sources and that might seldom occur in speech, not to mention that editors aggressively compete with their rivals to find a larger number of words. Here we must rely on the longtime integrity chiefly of Barnhart, Merriam, and Oxford. But we can still guard ourselves by checking for the items’ appearance in eight leading desk dictionaries, where space is precious and word frequency must be high for an item to be admitted. Three are British, and the other five are American. The equivalent British collections are the Concise Oxford Dictionary (1984), Longman Dictionary (1984), and Chambers English Dictionary (1988). The American ones are the Funk & Wagnalls Standard College Dictionary (1980), Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary (1983), Random House College Dictionary (1984), Concise American Heritage Dictionary (1987), and Webster's New World Dictionary (1988). The statistics are as follows: 168 of our items appear in one desk dictionary and 101 in two dictionaries. Another 196 occur in at least three: 45 items in all eight, 32 in seven, 27 in six, 34 in five, and 58 in three or four dictionaries. We will list only the 45 that occur in all eight, since the complete list appears in my 1988 study:44 G. Cannon Cantonese, chopstick, chopsuey, chow mien, fan-tan, ginseng, ginkgo, green tea, adj. gung ho, Jap, japan, v. japan, Japanese, adj. Japanese, japonica, judo, jujitsu, kaolin, ketchup, kowtow, kumquat, nankeen, oolong, pekoe, pongee, samisen, sampan, v. shanghai, Shinto, Shintoism, Shintoist, shogun, Taoism, teabag, and five other compounds of tea + an English noun, tycoon, typhoon, yang, yen ‘currency’, yen ‘craving’, yin Thus 20 percent of our corpus may belong to general international English, a membership which indicates something about their social dimension. That is, unless specifically marked as foreign, the item has probably been fully assimilated into English. Of the few desk dictionaries that mark items as not being fully naturalized, Webster's New World Dictionary does not mark any of the 45. Obviously, if an item is no longer a loanword because it has been fully assimilated, it has preserved none of its foreign flavor. Retention of diacritical marks is not a measurement, as evinced by naturalized items like café, déja vu, résumé, and réle, and by the usual lack of diacritics in English type fonts. Also, an assimilated item has undergone successful replacement of any Chinese phonemes that have no English counterpart by similar English ones and has been adapted into the English morphemic and syntactic systems. Clearly, items that appear multiply in desk dictionaries are not ‘specialized’ — that is, belonging only in the vocabulary of those interested in Chinese culture. Omission of an item may be revealing, not just in indicating that it is probably not in general international English, but also that its presumed low currency increases its usefulness for special situations or personal reasons like trying to impress one’s audience. One who uses a loan translation like drunken shrimp, which is not in desk dictionaries, may be (un)consciously conveying a sense of sophistication and affluence, of casually incorporating into one’s speech an appreciation of a delectable but expensive Chinese dish that ordinary speakers of English do not know or at least cannot afford. Such low-currency loanwords have a role in code switching between languages, primarily to clarify a meaning or also to save time, as when one might be writing in Chinese and can economically fit an equivalent phrase into the Chinese linguistic structure. They have a particular role in intralanguage switching, as in styles, where a face-to-face encounter can become a primary mechanism for influencing the hearer’s speech by adding new morphemes to it (see Trudgill 1986), but where the reading of the written loanword may have no effect. Unfortunately, dictionaries provide no information about the impor- tant matter of speakers’ registers, even as scholars have neglected the sociocultural setting wherein the borrowing occurs, a matter which has significant sociolinguistic implications. Most of our items probably cameChinese borrowing in English 45 from monolingual English writers, just as Chan and Kwok’s sources (1985: 28-43) were chiefly monolinguals who know little Cantonese, which is less prestigious than Mandarin and much less so in Hong Kong than is English, as opposed to the elaborate code switching between Cantonese and English that is so common in Hong Kong. Our corpus lacks such critical information: for example, is the item chiefly used by English-speaking expatriates in at least a partly Chinese environment, in a Chinatown in an English-speaking environment like London, or in a purely English setting, or only to small and intimate groups? Does the consistent use of such items contribute to one’s being a member of a more sophisticated social class (and its absence, of a lower class)? Do age, occupation, status, or social factors permit (or prohibit) its use? Such unavailable information might help to explain the important fact that at least 80% of our corpus is not a part of general international written English, not to mention other vital information: for example, is the writer or speaker a bilingual in Chinese and English, a blue-collar worker, or a lower-middle-class urbanite? If our data were measured in face-to-face encounters, we might find a different percentage of items in general English. It might be revealing to test the items in my corpus, as listed in the Appendix to the 1988 paper, through uniform procedures and suitable contexts in various places (say, Singapore, Melbourne, Johannesburg, Vancouver, Chicago, and London) upon various English-speaking sub- jects chosen according to the usual sociolinguistic levels, education, gen- der, and language background. The items might become a supplement in projects like the Hong Kong one on spoken English (see Bolton and Kwok 1988). The tests might include measures to determine whether the given item conveys its transferred meaning without the cumbersome use of an accompanying definition. If it cannot, it is low in intelligibility and may lose all social advantages supposedly gained by its use. Then one who interpolates it into ordinary speech may be indulging in fanciful rather than true style variation within one’s total idiolect, where the adding of a translation may call attention to the item’s noncurrency and convey a pedantic or at least partly negative impression. Determination of such viability in varying social contexts is important, as communication ultimately depends upon the audience rather than upon inherent qualities in the item. Moreover, such determination can help to resolve the problem of ‘bloating’ that plagues most collections of borrowings — that is, gradation among the vocabularies of various speakers. As said, in productivity, Japan and tea combinations with an English element or elements have overwhelming dominance. There are 81 com- pounds with tea in initial position (tea rose), tea and its functionally shifted verb and adjective, and four derivations like tealess. Tea occurs46 G. Cannon terminally in 49 compounds (afternoon tea), and in three medially (New Zealand tea tree). Except for tea olive and the shifted meaning of tearoom, all the tea items are rather old. Perhaps the concept and use of tea have been fully utilized in English-speakers’ culture and may have little future productivity, though the frequency of items like teabag and cup of tea remains high. The productivity of the 149 items containing some form of Japan is higher. There are six simplexes or shortenings (Jap), the combining form Japano-, 23 affixations utilizing one or two bound forms (Japaneseness, Japanophile), 16 Japan + English Noun (+ Noun) as in Japan wax five Japan + Suffix + Noun as in japanned peacock, and 98 Japanese + Noun (+ Noun) as in Japanese cedar. Such items are still coming into English, but at a somewhat diminished rate; and 72 containing Japan or tea may belong to the general vocabulary. The language sources of our corpus complicate matters in three ways. First, the items are almost entirely from Cantonese or Mandarin, and these often differ considerably in pronunciation and lexis. The problem of determining the exact source is sometimes very difficult. Webster's Third made a valiant effort to identify at least all the Mandarin or Cantonese sources and yet ended by having to etymologize many items simply as Chinese. When there is only a written translation of an item, we may not be able to determine whether it came from Mandarin or Cantonese, or from lesser sources like Amoy. When an item is transli- terated, the lack of a consistent system of phonetic conversion (if only to convey any aspiration, which is phonemic in Chinese) means that English speakers will pronounce initial borrowed stops and fricatives routinely as aspirates. Such problems may prevent our learning the pro- nunciation of the source item and thus block identification of its language. Lack of such information creates an obvious gap in scholars’ understand- ing of how and to what degree phonetic interference plays a part in certain contact situations. Most of our items are from Mandarin. However, England’s early trading base was in Canton, not in North China, so that Cantonese was the principal oral source of the early Chinese borrowings. When the item was not made into a loan translation, it was transliterated according to Cantonese pronunciation, whereas Mandarin is spoken by many more Chinese people. (Indeed, an ongoing study suggests that adolescents in Hong Kong, where Cantonese is the chief language, may denigrate Can- tonese, feel no antipathy toward Putonghua [the official national language of China, based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin], and probably feel that Putonghua is superior [Pierson 1988], though the Chinese Govern- ment’s suppression of student protests in Beijing may affect this attitude.)Chinese borrowing in English 47 This dual source of borrowings helps to explain the goodly number of variant forms that we have found but deleted because of duplication, especially when the source was evidently not Mandarin, which has a more assured spelling (see Chan and Kwok 1982: 18). The second complication may be worse. The Chinese writing system is as notoriously poor in a one-to-one relationship between sound and symbol (and also in transmitting meaning) as is the English phonetic representation. So the problem of consistent transliteration is com- pounded; for an undependable nonalphabetic writing system is providing an item for another undependabie but alphabetic writing system. We can hardly be surprised that several high-frequency Chinese loans still have spelling variations, some so different that variant forms or cross-refer- ences are needed in desk dictionaries. These two complications have sometimes blocked emergence of a standard form even after centuries — for example, tea (vs. cha, chia, tay, tsia). Of course, inroads into the problem have been made by the Barnett-Chao and Meyer-Wempe systems for Cantonese, and by various romanization systems for Mandarin. (What is needed is not to romanize Chinese script with Pinyin, but to devise a standard system for inputting Chinese characters into a computer system, so as to preserve the cultural history and provide a unifying element for the people — see DeFrancis 1984). Yet many Western speakers who romanize Chinese items are naive speakers who do not know the necessity of consistent relating of orthographic shape to the originating phonologi- cal shape. They are somewhat like Tarzan of the Apes, whom Edgar Rice Burroughs depicts as painfully learning to read from a child’s primer but without an informant (see Householder 1971: 244-248). Also, the multi- plicity of the romanization systems encourages inconsistency even by the linguistically sensitive converter of Chinese segments into Roman writing and may ultimately militate against the temporary form (much less its full assimilation into English). The third complication in the language source is the intermediate language(s) that may transmit the item. Japanese is by far the chief intermediary source, ultimately furnishing 149 items that contain some form of Japan, plus another 53. Among these are the well-known gingko, judo, jujitsu, samisen, Shinto, shogun, soy, tycoon, yen, and Zen. French provided Kuchean, souchong, kaolin, and the latter’s five derivations. Hindustani, New Latin, Pidgin English, and Mongolian provided one or two items each. There are instances where a Chinese item (fan-seng) went through Japanese into Portuguese, before going into the French that finally furnished the 1588 English loan bonze. All Chinese influence vanished in this complex movement, as three intervening languages put their own stamp upon the item. Such items should be tagged so as to48 G. Cannon differentiate them from directly borrowed ones, showing that they reflect facts about the intermediary language, not about Chinese or its influence on English. By contrast, a purely semantic description of our items is fairly straight- forward. The chief semantic area is food and drink, closely followed by botany and then geography and the arts. (The domination of food and drink items may linguistically reinforce a typical Western stereotypic view — that the Chinese are particularly interested in food.) Borrowings almost invariably come into English with only one meaning, as is true for most of the 30 recent Chinese loans (chiao, Shih Tzu, and teh ch’i have two meanings — see Cannon 1987: 96). They usually gain additional meanings if they remain viable, as many French, Greek, and Latin loans have demonstrated over the centuries. However, though Serjeantson’s 27 items are among the oldest and best-known Chinese borrowings in Eng- lish, only ten have multiple meanings. Inspection of the three meanings of litchi discovers that they are too closely related to fit the figurative, transferred, or extended changes that characterize most new meanings. Thus it meant ‘the fruit’ by 1588, ‘the tree’ by 1775, and ‘the genus’ by 1782. This experience parallels that of tea, except that tea also meant ‘meal’ by 1738. The development of /itchi nut provided some of the needed disambiguation. While seven other items in our corpus have at least three meanings, only nankeen has five — ‘fabric, trousers, color, porcelain, kind of lace’. This is the only item that has experienced most of the usual semantic shift of loans in English. Otherwise, they added meanings in the way that the old sampan (1620) did. From its original meaning of ‘small boat of Chinese pattern’, it became ‘US eight-foot punt’ by 1897, and ‘Hawaiian boat built on Oriental lines’ in recent decades. So only 7% of our corpus has gained at least one new meaning. This apparent incapacity to become ordinary semantic building blocks over the centuries, so as to refer commonly to non-Asian contexts, indicates that Chinese borrowings are like Japanese ones in being curtailed in semantic shift and even productivity when taken into a non-Asian language and culture, and that they experience considerable difficulty in becoming fully assimilated. Why is this so? Explanations that Chinese languages are very different typologically and culturally are too general to shed real light on language in its social and transplanted contexts. This incapacity merits comprehen- sive investigation. Is there something in the nature of East Asian lan- guages or in tonal languages like Chinese that prevents their words from being fully assimilated into a Western or Indo-European tongue and so bars the words’ otherwise eventually expected semantic and linguistic productivity? The fact that the contact is between speakers—users rather than constructs called languages undoubtedly has much to do with theChinese borrowing in English 49 explanation, but it is clear that the majority of our 981 items are still rather foreign, sometimes even after centuries. Also, how much and how purely is the substance or object itself also borrowed into the culture? The question opens an almost infinite pan- orama. For example, consider the Chinese item borrowed into Bahasa Malaysia as nasi goreng ‘fried rice’ and then reborrowed into English in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and some other places in Southeast Asia. It forms a set with other nasi compounds like -ayam ‘chicken’, -lemak ‘fat’, -itik ‘duck’, and -babi ‘pork’. It is an inexpensive dish when eaten in an open-air stall, where there is little overhead (no air conditioning or cleaning, with food scraps brushed onto the floor), and where the dish contains only a few small, poor-quality shrimps. Numerous variations abound even there, with Western expatriates not likely to be served nasi goreng containing the really hot red chilis in it, as opposed to what a Malay or Chinese Malaysian will be served. The dish is quite different from an equivalent nasi goreng in Djakarta, Hong Kong, Taiwan, or the People’s Republic of China. Nasi goreng is linguistically wholly different from and may be a potential replacement for fried rice. When an expatri- ate returns to an English-speaking country after X time, will there be an immediate or eventual return to the use of fried rice when that concept is needed, and is not the meaning of fried rice still considerably changed? For example, perhaps partly because nasi goreng belongs to a set of nasi compounds naming foods that people in Malaysia eat constantly, my wife and I still think of nasi goreng first, before having to return to our original fried rice to order the food at an American restaurant, even after many months back in the US following a sojourn in Kuala Lumpur. There is also the partly irrelevant question of which language provided the loan translation nasi goreng in the first place. In Kuala Lumpur, Cantonese may order it as /c*at fan/, whereas Mandarin speakers will likely call it /c*at fan/. Chow fan is in our corpus, and the -a- in fan may lead English speakers to pronounce the word closer to Mandarin than to Cantonese. Sociolinguistic consideration of such meanings, including the faithful- ness or nonfaithfulness of semantic transmission into English, may open Pandora’s box. As previously noted, we should first try to identify the source item or items in the particular Chinese language. Next, we need to determine whether its meaning or meanings in the particular contexts have a generalized or specialized reference, or a negative or positive social attitude or moral judgment, or a metaphorical extension, and then to determine whether the meaning transmitted into English conveys that dimension or social judgment. There are several ameliorated examples like taipan. We also want an overall assessment: are the Chinese meanings50 G. Cannon in our corpus relatively faithfully transmitted? Is the overall transmission as faithful as for transmission from other regional tonal languages (say, Thai), or from nontonal languages in general, or from Indo-European languages as an example of nontonal ones? The questions are almost endless. If the religion of the people who speak the source language is different from that of the people who are borrowing the words, are even the nonreligious words less likely to be faithfully transmitted than if the religion is the same between the two peoples? Ethnic and political differ- ences pose other obvious problems, where there can also be a change in attitude in one of the peoples (as toward the names Mao and Kuomintang) and thus a complicating question of diachronics (see Weinreich 1953: 83-110). When we turn to the form classes of our items, we find 166 nonnouns. There are 142 adjectives (15%, vs. the 8% adjectival borrowings in my 1987 corpus). The 19 verbs (1.9%) generally coincide with the 1.2 percent of verb borrowings in the 1987 corpus, but nine of ours are functional shifts from nouns (Shanghai) rather than verb-forming derivations like auralize. There are also three functionally shifted interjections (such as chin-chin), the reduplicated adverb chop-chop, and the shortening Japano- as a combining form. The 815 nouns (83%) proportionately coincide with the 89% noun borrowings in the 1987 corpus. They are grammatically straightforward except for two abbreviations (VPC, PLA) and much irregular pluraliza- tion. The latter occurs in the 39 nouns that take a zero plural (including nine primarily units of weight or measurement like hu and kin), the 24 that can take a zero or the usual -s (/i and yuan hsiao), and three collective plurals (Japanese). These 66 are only half of the 125 zero forms that I found in Japanese nouns (1984), though proportionately as many count nouns take regular plurals as do those in that Japanese corpus. Our zero plurals occur mainly among items denoting measurement, money, and geographical or ethnic groups. Names of money units like chiao and renminbi follow the trend discovered in my 1987 book — that such items from uninflected languages usually pluralize in English with a zero, not to mention the well-known practice in American Black English. However, fen ‘smallest Chinese currency’ pluralizes with -s. As was discovered in Japanese zero plurals, an inflectible noun’s long residence in English does not mean that its plural will eventually be analogized to -s. If a Chinese item enters English as a count noun that pluralizes with a zero, it apparently remains a zero. Though these 66 items considerably increase the total number of zero plurals in English, we should note that about two-thirds of them are not a part of the general vocabulary. Overall, our Chinese borrowings have helped English to keep pace withChinese borrowing in English 51 primarily cultural advances, so that people can use it as a tool for intellectual or artistic endeavors (see Hope 1971: 709). The items generally represent new cultural items and practices in English and have not re- placed existing English words. Excepting tea and possibly Japan, they have not moved into the core vocabulary (see Scotton and Okeju 1973 relative to Ateso, where a large number of items moved into the core vocabulary). They have generally come into English in conventional ways. They may be pure borrowings, without any translation or addition of English or other elements, except for the needed transliteration. Once they are accepted, few items have experienced the usual anticipated derivation, as Confucian did in the forming of anti-Confucian. Exclusive of Japan or tea items, our data contain a much smaller proportion of English elements than do the borrowings in the 1987 corpus. Suffixation is usually done with -ese, forming nouns like Peking- ese. The most innovational word-formation process is seen in de-Maoifi- cation (1977) and de-Maoization (1969), where there had been no Chinese semantic need for a Chinese equivalent of Maoification or Maoization, and which thus required the simultaneous addition of a prefix and suffixes to the naturalized proper noun Mao. This may be a new kind of derivation in English, first recorded in 1957 in de-Stalinization. This contrasts with the otherwise conventional prefixing of de- to a presumed Maoization. Today, 90% of the expansion of the English vocabulary is being done through use of native Germanic or long-assimilated classical elements. This trend is challenged by most of our Chinese corpus, where English has gained new morphemes. The reversal is partly due to the Chinese phonological and graphemic systems, which are quite different from English. Yet the sounds and tones are not so alien to English as to restrict the number of transliterations, which would be in the majority if we disregard the 230 Japan and tea items. These provide phonological data rather than morphological or even morphosyntactic data about language and writing systems in contact. Except for the chiefly onomastic items with -ese, these items have seldom accepted English bound or free morphemes, either at the time of their borrowing or during their anglicization. When there is Tesistance to such hybridization, the result is usually a loan translation or at least a loose translation like wallposter, where no trace of the Chinese sounds or tones remains. There are 49 loan translations, plus their 11 derivations, compoundings, or functional shifts. Some of the most familiar are capitalist road, Communist China, Cultural Revolution, ish ball, foreign devil, Long March, the verb phrase lose face, paper tiger, Red Guard, scorched earth, and shark's fin. Infrequently, the loan translation and its transliterated source came52. G. Cannon into English writing at about the same time and so were in immediate competition, as in three-anti and Sanfan. English has engaged in numbers of such dual borrowings in recent years, as in taking refried beans and Spanish frijoles refritos at about the same time, but other times taking only the original French form gauchiste and its anglicized gauchist. Are there formal, discoverable reasons for borrowing an item in translated rather than in phonetic form? Vague explanations like the availability of the oral or prestige form are inadequate. Information about the English speakers who know and use such words might help to answer the question. For example, frijoles refritos is much more likely to appear in the English- language newspapers and English speech along the US-Mexico border (and the reverse can be seen in Spanish-language newspapers in Mexico along the border), whereas refried beans is much more likely to appear in non-Spanish-speaking areas of Chicago. Such a dual practice raises questions about the nature of borrowing. Was there really a double borrowing in the first place; if not, which item was taken into English? Should bilingual and/or regional use be tabulated within the total number, and if not, how can such sources be identified for exclusion? Will bilin- guals ever adopt refried beans for their English speech, rather than continuing to use frijoles refritos? In short, just what is to be regarded as a borrowing? Does dual borrowing occur in all languages? When English is borrow- ing from Chinese, it does, but in a smaller proportion than for French or Spanish dual borrowing. When there is dual borrowing, does the loan translation fit the eighteenth-century European pattern discovered in Thomas’s study of ‘international’ calques (1975), where there was a kind of compromise between the idiosyncratic neologism and the loanword? There is no taking of abbreviations or acronyms from Chinese, as is sometimes done from languages with alphabetic writing systems, as hap- pened in the English borrowing of the Russian acronym sambo ‘judo wrestling’. The same problem confronts any potential Chinese borrowing of an English initialism. The situation is nicely illustrated in the Shogaku- kan Dictionary (1986), a Japanese translation of about 40,000 recent items collected by Random House. The perhaps 1,000 initialisms could not ‘translate’ well, as one would have to try to make an acronym out of the would-be equivalent Japanese characters (producing perhaps unusual or meaningless combinations), or else try to choose Japanese characters approximating the sounds in the English acronym (producing a sequence of sounds that might suggest something wholly different in Japanese). So the ‘translation’ usually became Japanese full forms to permit the Japan- ese to understand them. A similar problem is being encountered in the Korean edition of the Random House dictionary that is being prepared.Chinese borrowing in English 53 We have seen the disparate kinds of our data, which require a refined taxonomy building on the classic studies of Bloomfield (1933), Haugen (1950), and Weinreich (1953). Adequate chronological information must be available to the taxonomy. Otherwise, it will not be able to account for twentieth-century items like tea basket, or older semantic shifts like macao ‘card game’, functional shifts like the interjection pung, and deriva- tions like teaer, especially when they come from naturalized elements taken from Chinese. Such examples are part of normal change in a lexicon, not borrowings. Properly, the etymologist should tag the item to indicate that a Chinese etymon was the original source, even though it is now acting like an ordinary English word. So the actual number of borrowings in our corpus is considerably less than 981. (The three- division taxonomy is in my 1988 paper, and the question of degree of assimilation is addressed at length in my forthcoming paper on Malay borrowings.) This sociolinguistic spinoff from the 1988 paper further indicates that histories of the English language, which treat Chinese slightly or not at all, badly need revision. Histories should report the productivity of the naturalized tea and Japan in providing basic elements for several hundred additional English items over the decades, exceeding the productivity even of some high-frequency scientific combining forms from Latin and Greek. Histories should elaborate on the large Chinese corpus that was previously unknown and that includes many items which have long been a part of general international English. These items need to be subjected to close study to determine their degree of naturalization, and scholars should use them to cast revealing light on words in their social context when they are attempting to cross linguistic boundaries that are some- times barriers, particularly when different language families are involved. So, despite scholarly advances, important gaps in sociolinguistic research remain. Chinese has been giving large numbers of words to English, Japanese, and Korean for more than a century, though the rate has decreased in recent decades. Whether this trend will continue or even reverse itself remains to be seen, but the overall subject continues to shed light on language change and interchange. Texas A&M University Note I. In its original form, this paper was presented at the First Hong Kong Conference on Language and Society, in April 1988.54 G. Cannon References Barnhart, Clarence L., Steinmetz, Sol, and Barnhart, Robert K. (1973). The Barnhart Dictionary of New English since 1963. Bronxville, NY: Barnhart/Harper. —, Steimetz, Sol, and Barnhart, Robert K. (1980). The Second Barnhart Dictionary of New English, Bronxville, NY: Barnhart. Bloomfield, Leonard (1933). Language. New York: Holt. Bolton, Kingsley, and Kwok, Helen (1988). The description and analysis of spoken English in Hong Kong. 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