73
(Swatow, Amoy, Foochow). Many expatriates, and most particularly those long resident expatriates most sympathetic to things Chinese, regularly moved up and down the coast, from one ‘dialect' area to another. The expatriate community was essentially one, the 'China Coast community' with intimate inter-port contacts, but the native communities among which this expatriate community was scattered formed not one, but several quite separate communities. In these circumstances, words borrowed by the China Coast expatriate community and so completely assimilated as to appear in writing, had to be acceptable to expatriates in all areas of the China coast. Obviously, the presence of competing models, pronounced differently, from different 'dialects', would slow down assimilation of any one of them severely. It is only since 1950 that expatriates exposed to Chinese have overwhelmingly been exposed to only one dialect - Cantonese, and since the process from initial interest in a foreign model, through use in racy speech, to tentative use in writing to final formal lexicographic acceptance is at best a matter of several decades, it is not surprising that it is only in the last decade that the numbers of linguistic loans from Cantonese in Hong Kong English have become substantial.
Motives for Phonetic Borrowing
Countering the forces acting against phonetic loans are others which encourage them, albeit on a relatively small scale. The motives for phonetic borrowing are various. In the case of lexical borrowing from Chinese into English with special reference to the Hong Kong situation, it seems justifiable to enumerate the motives in the following way:
(1) Economy and precision in need-filling;
(2) The desire for freshness and raciness of expression;
(3) The desire to give exotic connotations; and a sense of local colour;
73
(Swatow, Amoy, Foochow). Many expatriates, and most particularly those long resident expatriates most sympathetic to things Chinese, regularly moved up and down the coast, from one ‘dialect' area to another. The expatriate community was essentially one the 'China Coast community' · with intimate inter-port contacts, but the native communities among which this expatriate community was scattered formed not one, but several quite separate communities. In these circumstances words borrowed by the China Coast expatriate community and so completely assimilated as to appear in writing, had to be acceptable to expatriates in all areas of the China coast. Obviously, the presence of competing models, pronounced differently, from different 'dialects', would slow down assimilation of any one of them severely. It is only since 1950 that expatriates exposed to Chinese have overwhelmingly been exposed to only one dialect- Cantonese and since the process from initial interest in a foreign model, through use in racy speech, to tentative use in writing to final formal lexigographic acceptance is at best a matter of several decades, it is not surprising that it is only in the last decade that the numbers of linguistic loans from Cantonese in Hong Kong English have become substantial.
Motives for Phonetic Borrowing
Countering the forces acting against phonetic loans are others which encourage them, albeit on a relatively small scale. The motives for phonetic borrowing are various. In the case of lexical borrowing from Chinese into English with special reference to the Hong Kong situation, it seems justifiable to enumerate the motives in the following way:
(1) Economy and precision in need-filling;
(2) The desire for freshness and raciness of expression;
(3) The desire to give exotic connotations; and a sense of
local colour;
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