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MA MENG
influence. After 1919, Western sentence structures and punctuation marks were deliberately adopted, especially by the so-called "New Literary writers", such as Hsu Chih-mo and Hsieh Pin-hsin 謝冰心.
Since 1949 new efforts have been made in Mainland China to work out a Chinese grammar on the Western pattern. As a result, the sentence structure of the Chinese language has become still more westernised, as a glance at the People's Daily will suffice to show. There are also signs of a deliberate effort to introduce Western phrases and grammatical patterns into the spoken language; but so far at least these appear chiefly in political or ceremonial speeches.
It should be noted that Western influence on the Chinese language, since the May 4th Movement, has been primarily English, not only because English has been the most widely used foreign language in China but also because since that time most Chinese translations of foreign literature have been made from English.
The most remarkable feature in the recent linguistic changes in China has been the rapid growth of vocabulary, which has greatly enriched the language. This growth has been due to the coinage of new terms to describe new situations or to replace old terms, and the use of traditional, colloquial or regional terms used in a new sense.
As in all languages, new Chinese terms or expressions can have foreign or native sources; but in Chinese the great majority of new terms have come from foreign sources. Mass assimilation of Western knowledge in recent years has created an ever growing demand for new terms to describe objects or situations hitherto unknown in China. However, since, with a few exceptions, the Chinese language is written in monosyllabic characters and lacks a uniform pronunciation, it does not lend itself well to the adoption of foreign terms by transliteration. Transliteration being difficult, new terms have more commonly been introduced into Chinese by translating the foreign term into Chinese characters - a practice that can cost more effort than the coinage of new terms. When Liang Ch'i-ch'ao described his impressions of a visit to the British Parliament, he coined the expression pa-li-men. “Science” and “democracy" first became known in China as sai-yin-szu or sai-hsien-sheng ("Mr. Science")