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is a perversion of 'come ashore", the call used to entice Western sailors ashore. In the majority of cases there is little controversy, especially when we are dealing with the more recent borrowings.
We have noted the relatively small number of phonetic loans from Chinese, but of course the process is a continuing one, with new loans being added from time to time. And I ought at this point to consider the possible forces militating against the large-scale borrowing of phonetic loans from Chinese into English. There would appear to be some rather obvious factors, while others are put forward much more tentatively, confirming the theory that there are no hard and fast rules governing word borrowing.
(1) The Disparate Nature of The Two Languages. Unlike related languages such as, for example, French and German, the structures of English and Chinese are very different, and this tends to discourage borrowing and assimilation.
(2) The Absence of a Very Large Group of Persons Proficient in Both Languages. In order for large-scale borrowing to take place a considerable group of bilinguals has to be assumed. In Hong Kong, as people living here are aware, the vast majority of those who have any degree of bilingual mastery of Chinese and English are in fact Chinese, and the type of bilingualism consists of what has been described as 'additive' bilingualism11 and is rarely ambilingualism. Only a rare few among the English-speaking community speak any dialect of Chinese, and fewer still are able to write Chinese. The lexical borrowing therefore naturally tends to be more in one direction. And this leads us to a third possible factor for the relative smallness of the number of phonetic borrowings,
(3) Lack of Integration by the Majority of the English-speaking Expatriate Community. Leonard Bloomfield has written, 'Cultural borrowing of speech-forms is ordinarily mutual. It is one-sided only to the extent that one nation has more to give than the other.'12 I am certainly not saying that the Chinese language or