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is the name of a city, or that kowtow comes from a verb plus noun construction in another language, or that chin chin derives from a Chinese salutation or greeting. As English verbs they behave like verbs in English, so that one can say 'He loves to kowtow to people in high places', or 'A lot of unfortunate people were shanghaied against their will', or 'They were chin-chinning each other'. There is the tendency for English speakers to borrow whole units from Chinese, rather than individual morphemes, without regard to the grammatical classes to which the borrowed morphemes belong. For example as I have said kowtow is a combination of verb + noun, but not only does neither kow nor tow appear in any other combinations or singly, the verbal infliction for tense comes at the end of what was the noun part of the borrowed term, hence kowtowed, not kowed the tow when the word is used in the past tense form.
In the process of assimilation into the borrowing language, a loan word may undergo semantic change: it may become more general or narrower in meaning. For example, kung fu from
is the term for Chinese martial arts but now it often collocates with shoes, and kung fu shoes refers to flat cloth shoes not necessarily used in doing kung fu. Thus kung fu as premodifier for shoes has been generalized in meaning. A very interesting case of a word broadening its meaning through insufficient information about the lending language is gweilo
, which among all but the most knowing expatriates, is taken to be a generic term for foreign 'devils', both male and female. In Clavell's Noble House we find ‘any quai loh woman' (p. 712). We often hear Western women referred to as 'gweilo lady'. In fact, the second morpheme of 'gweilo' is masculine, a coarse term for 'man'. The feminine equivalent is, and the Chinese term for an expatriate woman would be, the transliterated form of which gwei por
is gaining some currency at least in the spoken language of expatriates.
In becoming more like a word of the borrowing language, the loan word may become less and less like the 'model' in the lending language, in pronunciation, in written form, in grammatical function and in a few cases in meaning. Perhaps we can take it that a word has become an integral part of the language
81
is the name of a city, or that kowtow comes from a verb plus noun construction in another language, or that chin chin derives from a Chinese salutation or greeting. As English verbs they behave like verbs in English, so that one can say 'He loves to kowtow to people in high places', or 'A lot of unfortunate people were shanghaied against their will', or 'They were chin-chinning each other'. There is the tendency for English speakers to borrow whole units from Chinese, rather than individual morphemes, without regard to the grammatical classes to which the borrowed morphemes belong. For example as I have said kowtow is a combination of verb + noun, but not only does neither kow nor tow appear in any other combinations or singly, the verbal infliction for tense comes at the end of what was the noun part of the borrowed term, hence kowtowed, not kowed the tow when the word is used in the past tense form.
In the process of assimilation into the borrowing language, a loan word may undergo semantic change: it may become more general or narrower in meaning. For example, kung fu from
is the term for Chinese martial arts but now it often collocates with shoes, and kung fu shoes refers to flat cloth shoes not necessarily used in doing kung fu. Thus kung fu as premodifier for shoes has been generalized in meaning. A very interesting case of a word broadening its meaning through insufficient information about the lending language is gweilo
, which among all but the most knowing expatriates, is taken to be a generic term for foreign devils', both male and female. In Clavell's Noble House we find ‘any quai loh woman' (p. 712). We often hear Western women referred to as 'gweilo lady'. In fact, the second morpheme of 'gweilo' is masculine, a coarse term for 'man'. The feminine equivalent is, and the Chinese term for an expatriate woman would be, the transliterated form of which gwei por
is gaining some currency at least in the spoken language of expatriates.
In becoming more like a word of the borrowing language, the loan word may become less and less like the 'model' in the lending language, in pronunciation, in written form, in grammatical function and in a few cases in meaning. Perhaps we can take it that a word has become an integral part of the language
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