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(4) The 'prestige' factor
knowledgeable;
the wish to appear
(5) The desire to show a spirit of good fellowship and
camaraderie, or a genuine wish to integrate.
In most cases, of course, we cannot isolate a single motive for the borrowing of a term. There is usually a mixture of motives. We have observed more than once that there seems to be no hard and fast rules governing the choice of method in the introduction of a new 'name'. Much depends on the caprice of the users of a language.
In our Appendix we have some 105 items; 23 of them, either because they are recent borrowings and/or because their currency is restricted to Hong Kong, have not been sanctioned by inclusion in any standard dictionary. The words include 'names' for various aspects of material and spiritual civilization. As might be expected, the largest number of loan words come from the field of food and beverages, ranging from tea through pak choi to tofu to dimsum and yumcha. A number of loans come from Chinese religious and philosophical beliefs, and range from established terms like taoism and zen and the much-abused pair yin and yang to fungshui to purely 'local' terms like Chung Yeung and Tin Hau and even Choy Sun (used in the local English media exclusively to mean the Financial Secretary.) There are quite a few borrowings relating to clan and social or other organizations, like tong and hoey13, and kuk as in Heung Yee Kuk and Po Leung Kuk, and sports and recreation, for example kungfu, tai chi, mahjong.
Compiling a fairly exhaustive list of loan words in general use and supplying their etymologies and examples of uses are arduous and time-consuming tasks, but what is perhaps most interesting and thought-provoking, from the linguist's point of view, in the study of word borrowing, is the vexed question of what constitutes integration of the so-called loan words into the vocabulary.
When I use terms like 'borrow', 'import' and 'loans' in discussions of lexical borrowing, in fact, these terms do not accurately describe the process by which, say, tea has become a 'borrowed' term. In this process new words may be added to the
74
(4) The 'prestige' factor
knowledgeable;
the wish to appear
(5) The desire to show a spirit of good fellowship and
camaraderie, or a genuine wish to integrate.
In most cases, of course, we cannot isolate a single motive for the borrowing of a term. There is usually a mixture of motives. We have observed more than once that there seems to be no hard and fast rules governing the choice of method in the introduction of a new 'name'. Much depends on the caprice of the users of a language.
In our Appendix we have some 105 items; 23 of them, either because they are recent borrowings and/or because their currency is restricted to Hong Kong, have not been sanctioned by inclusion in any standard dictionary. The words include 'names' for various aspects of material and spiritual civilization. As might be expected, the largest number of loan words come from the field of food and beverages, ranging from tea through pak choi to tofu to dimsum and yumcha. A number of loans come from Chinese religious and philosophical beliefs, and range from established terms like taoism and zen and the much-abused pair yin and yang to fungshui to purely 'local' terms like Chung Yeung and Tin Hau and even Choy Sun (used in the local English media exclusively to mean the financial Secretary.) There are quite a few borrowings relating to clan and social or other organizations, like tong and hoey13, and kuk as in Heung Yee Kuk and Po Leung Kuk, and sports and recreation, for example kungfu, tai chi, mahjong.
Compiling a fairly exhaustive list of loan words in general use and supplying their etymologies and examples of uses are arduous and time-consuming tasks, but what is perhaps most interesting and thought-provoking, from the linguist's point of view, in the study of word borrowing, is the vexed question of what constitutes integration of the so-called loan words into the vocabulary.
When I use terms like 'borrow', 'import' and 'loans' in discussions of lexical borrowing, in fact, these terms do not accurately describe the process by which, say, tea has become a 'borrowed' term. In this process new words may be added to the
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