I saw the topic of (Chinese) language purity in the forum, so I want to talk about loanwords used in Chinese at present.
Today, when Chinese is marginalized and English is demonized, some people think that the purity of Chinese has been destroyed, so they propose to defend the quintessence of Chinese and launch a Chinese defense war for Chinese people all over the world ("Without the essence of China traditional culture and the prototype of Chinese characters, we will become new illiterates who have forgotten their ancestors for several classics", Wang Meng 2004). This is quite similar to the so-called trend of "de-China" caused by narrow nationalism in some Asian countries, but as far as the development and inheritance of language are concerned, I personally think that the statement of "purity of language" is a false proposition.
The development of language needs to learn from foreign words. Historically, no matter which nation, it has never subverted its own language by learning foreign words. Even in Japan with a high degree of reference, the influx of foreign words has not caused the decline of Japanese national culture. On the contrary, the richness of Japanese culture has been developed due to the introduction of a large number of foreign cultures. Modern English vocabulary is about 2 million, and daily vocabulary is 300,000 to 500,000. Compared with other European languages such as French, the daily vocabulary is around 70,000. Grammatically, French is a inflectional language, and 26 Latin letters are also used. It is also one of the international languages (estimated at 65.438+0.2 billion people), but why is it so different from English in vocabulary? An important reason is that English has absorbed a large number of foreign words.
The word "loanwords" in Chinese originated from the etymological study of Japanese, and its extended definition is that all lexical units that have no etymological relationship with Chinese and are borrowed by Chinese are called non-Chinese etymological words, that is, loanwords or loanwords. According to etymology, non-Chinese etymological words can be divided into national loanwords (from China minority languages) and international loanwords. 1990 edition of Chinese loanwords Dictionary (Cen Qixiang) contains 4,207 loanwords, most of which are characters in Greek and Roman myths and literary masterpieces. More importantly, there are foreigners' names, place names, drugs, chemical elements, currencies of various countries and names of articles. If this is a special collection of loanwords, I have also noticed that the popular Modern Chinese Dictionary is said to have added the appendix "New Words and New Concepts Appearing This Year" and added nearly 2,000 loanwords, such as WTO, and even retained the spelling of western letters instead of transliteration of Chinese characters.
Actually, there is no need to look it up in the dictionary. Just list some English loanwords in Chinese: beer, coffee, chocolate, sofa, poker, jazz, jeep, engine, romance, salon, hysteria, logic, model ... These words are deeply rooted in Chinese and have many ingenious translations. For example, Humor was written by Mr. Lin Yutang. Mr. Lin Yutang is a writer of fists who I admire very much. Many of his works were first published in English, and later in Chinese, such as My Country and My People, Moments in Beijing and so on. I suggest that all China students who study English should read them.
If the absorption of international loanwords in Chinese mainly started in the middle of19th century (of course, don't ignore the words that entered Chinese because of religion, such as Bodhisattva, Buddha, Heaven, Hell and Hamani), then the absorption of national loanwords appeared at the same time as the emergence of Chinese. Today, it is difficult for us to distinguish which words belong to the origin of Chinese and which words belong to other nationalities. Look at the phonetic basis of modern Chinese, such as "Hutong" in Mongolian and "Hui dialect" in ancient Persian. The "Jin" comes from the "vest" in Manchu, and there are countless. Maybe everyone knows "AMO", "ENI" and "Ge 'e" in the Qing Palace drama that is flying all over the sky, but I don't know that when we go out to take the bus, the word "station" comes from the Mongolian word "JAM", right?
A few days ago, I watched a report on Sinology in the TV series Hanwu the Great, in which it was mentioned that some scholars thought that China's "sword" actually came from nomadic people, and the word "sword" itself was a foreign word, which was a chorus of "Lu Jing" (also known as "Guanglu"). "Lu Jing" is the name given to Bao Dao by northern nomads, which may come from Iranian or Turkic. I don't know much about Iranian language, but the Mongolian words "sword" and "knife" are both pronounced as "JIERD" or "ILDE", which seems to confirm each other.
If you want to say the etymology of Chinese, you can't finish it. Having said that, I just want to say that there is no need to protect the purity of Chinese. Including all kinds of "nonstandard" languages in Chinese at present, such as "proverbs"
Affirming the existence of loanwords in Chinese and acknowledging the influence between cultures is by no means national nihilism. Although I am a (non-extreme) nationalist and often a religious fanatic, I still need to be more tolerant in language and culture and less big hats. Slogans such as "Down with XX imperialism" are funny only when they are used out of the background of the times.
Recently, P.S. saw in the news that a college student in Zhejiang demonstrated the possibility that Ningbo dialect belongs to Altaic language family, saying that dozens of words similar to Daur and Mongolian were found in Ningbo dialect. From this, it can be inferred that comrades with fever can probably conclude that Chinese also belongs to Indo-European language family by looking at the dozens of examples of Chinese loanwords I cited above. What's more, even professionals can't say it clearly. A teacher casually said that Chinese and Japanese belong to the same language family in a TV program paid by the New X Party. I don't think I dare to talk nonsense on TV about this controversial issue. If simply borrowing Chinese characters from Japanese means that they belong to the same language family, then Mongolians * * * and China are now writing in Roman alphabet, which is probably not Altaic language family. ...
The most authoritative linguistic works in China all admit that Chinese is a language family, not a single language. The widely accepted encyclopedia of China; The statement in column B on page 523 of Language Volume is: "Chinese is equivalent to the position of a language family in the classification of language families." In the superordinate classification, historical linguists agree that there is an obvious connection between Chinese and Tibetan-Burmese languages. Therefore, Tibetan-Burmese and Chinese * * * form an independent language family, namely Sino-Tibetan language family. In order to keep the consistency of terminology and taxonomy, the word "Chinese" is best expressed as "SINITIC" (SINO → SINITIC) in English.
Like other language families, Chinese has experienced a complicated development process. In the long history, Chinese and Indo-European, Austronesian, South Asian, Tibeto-Burman, Turkic, Tungusic, Mongolian and other languages have influenced each other. The nature of the relationship between Chinese and other languages and language families contacted by Chinese needs to be fully studied and determined.