What does the Chinese Language use for new and loan words?

3 Comments

1. Aidant says:

   November 1, 2009 at 9:30 am

   They use existing characters to replicate sounds. However, they may change characters slightly to make it different from the character’s original meaning. For example, my friends use 嘿 (hēi) all the time which obviously means ‘hey!’, it comes from the character 黑 (hēi) meaning ‘black’ and just has an extra mouth radical to indicate speech and make it different from the original character. I’ve only ever seen ‘iPod’ referred to as ‘iPod’, there seems to be no characters for this word. However, Google is now 谷歌 gǔgē (meaning ‘valley song’) which shows that foreign loan words also have to make sense in Chinese. Coca Cola is notoriously 可口可乐 kěkǒukělè which indicates some sort of oral pleasure…Lastly we have the word ‘Internet’ which can be 英特网 （yīng tè wǎng）which makes no sense in Chinese but is a merge of English and Chinese, yingte being ‘inter’ and wang being ‘net’. Hope that explains a bit!
2. jm says:

   November 1, 2009 at 9:30 am

   they use some words from English, yet use Chinese chararcters
3. Joriental says:

   November 1, 2009 at 9:30 am

   Peter 彼得
   Mike 麦克
   Leo 利奥
   Carl 卡尔
   Truman 杜鲁门
   George Walker Bush 乔治·沃克·布什
   McDonald’s 麦当劳

   All in Hanzi (Chinese character)