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words of Chinese origin are almost always anglicized in pronunciation. There may be doubt concerning how the word should be pronounced, but rarely is the Chinese pronunciation retained. For example, take the word cheongsam. The affricate /ts/ is replaced by the English /ch/ and the rounded vowel similar to that in the English "bird", but with lip-rounding, is replaced by a vowel identical to that in the English 'long'. Similarly in fung shui the Cantonese diphthong /oey/ (similar to that in the French 'lui') is substituted by the /u/ + /i/ sequence as in the English 'ruin'. On the graphological level, there is no question of the loans being written in Chinese characters. The letters of English alphabet may however occur in rather unfamiliar combinations, as in the case of e-o-n-g occurring in cheongsam, and u-e-y in chopsuey.
Another requirement for full assimilation is related to the grammatical status of the word. Grammatically, it is assigned to a word class, or may have multiple-class membership. It behaves like other members of the class, so that if it is a countable noun it is inflected for number, and if it is a verb, it can take a past tense ending, and so on. Thus typhoon is inflected for number and kowtow for person and tense. It obeys the syntactical rules of the language in combining with other words to form grammatical sentences. For example, the headline 'Running water for lamas' occurs in The South China Morning Post, (7/82) also in the same paper, someone is described as 'mingling with the rich tai tais'. The word is not restricted in occurrence to limited contexts, but may be found to combine freely with other words to form bigger constructions, so that one can speak of Bruce Li as a 'kung fu superstar' The South China Morning Post (26/4/82), while in Noble House the writer mentions ‘a flood of amah Cantonese' (p. 1017). Cheongsam, in its past participle form, functions as an adjective in ‘cheongsamed girl', as used by Richard Hughes (p. 98) and James Clavell (N.H., p. 9). Derivational affixes may be added, as when ‘ism' or ‘ist' is added to the loans tao, lama, Mao, giving taoist, taoism, lamaism, Maoist and so on. It does not matter that Confucius originally derives from a surname plus a title; now that it has been established in the English language, one can derive Confucian and Confucianism from it. Again, it is of no significance that the model for Shanghai
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words of Chinese origin are almost always anglicized in pronunciation. There may be doubt concerning how the word should be pronounced, but rarely is the Chinese pronunciation retained. For example, take the word cheongsam. The affricate /ts/ is replaced by the English /ch/ and the rounded vowel similar to that in the English "bird", but with lip-rounding, is replaced by a vowel identical to that in the English 'long'. Similarly in fung shui the Cantonese diphthong /oey/ (similar to that in the French 'lui') is substituted by the /u/ + /i/ sequence as in the English 'ruin'. On the graphological level, there is no question of the loans being written in Chinese characters. The letters of English alphabet may however occur in rather unfamiliar combinations, as in the case of e-o-n-g occurring in cheongsam, and u-e-y in chopsuey.
Another requirement for full assimilation is related to the grammatical status of the word. Grammatically, it is assigned to a word class, or may have multiple-class membership. It behaves like other members of the class, so that if it is a countable noun it is inflected for number, and if it is a verb, it can take a past tense ending, and so on. Thus typhoon is inflected for number and kowtow for person and tense. It obeys the syntactical rules of the language in combining with other words to form grammatical sentences. For example, the headline 'Running water for lamas' occurs in The South China Morning Post, (7/82) also in the same paper, someone is described as 'mingling with the rich tai tais'. The word is not restricted in occurrence to limited contexts, but may be found to combine freely with other words to form bigger constructions, so that one can speak of Bruce Li as a 'kung fu superstar' The South China Morning Post (26/4/82), while in Noble House the writer mentions ‘a flood of amah Cantonese' (p. 1017). Cheongsam, in its past participle form, functions as an adjective in ‘cheongsamed girl', as used by Richard Hughes (p. 98) and James Clavell (N.H., p. 9). Derivational affixes may be added, as when ‘ism' or ‘ist' is added to the loans tao, lama, Mao, giving taoist, taoism, lamaism, Maoist and so on. It does not matter that Confucius originally derives from a surname plus a title; now that it has been established in the English language, one can derive Confucian and Confucianism from it. Again, it is of no significance that the model for Shanghai
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