The difficulty of borrowing in Chinese

The Strange Reason Chinese Doesn’t Borrow Words

Time for another Julesy:

Once again, Julesy hits the nail on the head — squarely and repeatedly.

 

Selected readings

• "Massive borrowing" (2/18/19
• "Of chariots, chess, and Chinese borrowings" (6/7/24)
• "The origin of 'thing' in Chinese" (5/10/25)
• "The Englishization of Chinese enters a new phase" (8/8/24)
• "YouCool" (3/7/08)
• "Too cool!" (5/4/16)
• "Creeping English in Chinese" (1/23/17)
• "Creeping Romanization in Chinese, part 5" (7/6/23)
• "Creeping Romanization in Chinese, part 4" (12/15/18)
• "Creeping Romanization in Chinese, part 3" (11/25/18) — includes a very long (but not complete) list of previous Language Log posts on Romanization, Englishization, digraphia and diglossia, biscriptalism and multiscriptalism, bilingualism and multilingualism
• "Nerd, geek, PK: Creeping Romanization (and Englishization), part 2" (3/5/13)
• "Creeping Romanization in Chinese" (8/30/12)
• "The Westernization of Chinese" (9/6/12)
• Mark Hansell, "The Sino-Alphabet: The Assimilation of Roman Letters into the Chinese Writing System," Sino-Platonic Papers, 45 (May, 1994), 1-28 (pdf)

 

• "Japanese periodic table versus Chinese periodic table" (5/25/22)
• "Names of the chemical elements in Chinese" (5/3/15)
• "Names of the Elements in Chinese" (5/4/15)

 

• "Ping-pong bing-bang" (6/30/19)
• "'War Symphony': a modern Chinese poem" (11/5/17) — if the video in the post doesn't play, try this

 

• "AI Overview: bits and pieces (German "ich" and Starbuck WA)" (10/11/24)

 

• "A radical proposal for sinographs" (5/23/25) — abolish them