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active and/or passive vocabularies, their attitudes to Chinese culture and the Chinese language. An attempt is made to analyse the extent to which their knowledge of Chinese loan words is conditioned by their life style. Of the 300 questionnaires sent out, 128 were returned. We selected at random 100 as our sample. While we did attempt to find answers to the vexed problem of what constitutes full integration for a loan word partially through the responses, our conclusions were by no means dependent on the subjective answers of the respondents, but were based very much on linguistic criteria. By way of comparison we sent an abridged questionnaire to respondents living in Britain and the United States, most of whom had never been east of Suez; we were astounded by the extremely low rate of recognition by both groups.
Given the sociological factors, which act as incentives or disincentives to learning a language, and the vastly disparate nature of the two languages, it should come as no surprise although it often does—that the number of loans from Chinese which have entered the English vocabulary, in various stages of integration, is very low indeed, far lower than English words which have entered into the lexicon of Hong Kong Chinese. The exchange has by no means been an equal one to date.
The list of English loan words in Hong Kong Chinese given in our earlier monograph comprises almost 400 items while our list of Chinese loans comprises only about a quarter of this number, and a larger number in the former list meet our tentative criteria of full integration. What is more, our studies seem to indicate that with a few exceptions like tea, kowtow and tycoon, kaolin, gung ho, Chinese loan words are usually restricted to strictly 'Eastern' or specifically Chinese contexts and are sometimes used on a sort of transliterated 'once-off' basis in novels or journalistic writing with a view to giving stylistic flavour, for example, Tien-tze AF, immediately glossed in Elegant's Dynasty as 'The Son of Heaven' (p. 20). Most Chinese terms have, as in the nature of lexical borrowing in general, been taken over because of the need to find a name for a thing new to the borrowing culture and hence without a name in the borrowing language.
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active and/or passive vocabularies, their attitudes to Chinese culture and the Chinese language. An attempt is made to analyse the extent to which their knowledge of Chinese loan words is conditioned by their life style. Of the 300 questionnaires sent out, 128 were returned. We selected at random 100 as our sample. While we did attempt to find answers to the vexed problem of what constitutes full integration for a loan word partially through the responses, our conclusions were by no means dependent on the subjective answers of the respondents, but were based very much on linguistic criteria. By way of comparison we sent an abridged questionnaire to respondents living in Britain and the United States, most of whom had never been east of Suez; we were astounded by the extremely low rate of recognition by both groups.
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Given the sociological factors, which act as incentives or disincentives to learning a language, and the vastly disparate nature of the two languages, it should come as no surprise although it often does · that the number of loans from Chinese which have entered the English vocabulary, in various stages of integration, is very low indeed, far lower than English words which have entered into the lexicon of Hong Kong Chinese. The exchange has by no means been an equal one to date.
The list of English loan words in Hong Kong Chinese given in our earlier monograph comprises almost 400 items while our list of Chinese loans comprises only about a quarter of this number, and a larger number in the former list meet our tentative criteria of full integration. What is more, our studies seem to indicate that with a few exceptions like tea, kowtow and tycoon, kaolin, gung ho, Chinese loan words are usually restricted to strictly 'Eastern' or specifically Chinese contexts and are sometimes used on a sort of transliterated once-off' basis in novels or journalistic writing with a view to giving stylistic flavour, for example, Tien-tze AF, immediately glossed in Elegant's Dynasty as 'The Son of Heaven' (p. 20). Most Chinese terms have, as in the nature of lexical borrowing in general, been taken over because of the need to find a name for a thing new to the borrowing culture and hence without a name in the borrowing language.
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