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IV. An attempt at analysing the stages of integration of a phonetic loan, from a spoken stage to a written one and in some cases to inclusion in a standard dictionary.
V. A discussion of the linguistic changes, phonological, graphological, grammatical and semantic, which take place when an item from Chinese is borrowed as a phonetic loan into the English vocabulary.
VI. A fairly exhaustive account of all the phonetic loans in the active/passive vocabularies of Hong Kong expatriates, with explanations with regard to dialect of origin, stage of integration, and notes, where relevant, on well-known examples of uses. Some reference will be made, where applicable, to stylistic values.
VII. A survey of 'false loans', words commonly thought, mistakenly, to be of Chinese origin. Examples are 'joss', 'nullah', or 'catty'. Many tend to be words of Eastern, rather than specifically Chinese, origin.
VIII. An Appendix giving a list of phonetic loans with notes on pronunciation, meaning and etymology. I have included a very much abridged version of this appendix, giving only the loan words and the Chinese characters from which they are believed to have been derived together with very brief definitions.
We have carried out our research through observation, listening and discussions and years of reading local and international publications. More specifically, for this project our corpus is made up of a selected sample of newspapers and journals, published locally, in the United Kingdom and the United States, read regularly, and in the case of two English language newspapers published locally, daily, for a period of two years. Also included in our corpus is a group of novels and works of non-fiction about China and Hong Kong. In addition, we sent out 300 questionnaires to a sample group of expatriates in an effort to discover the loans which were actually in their