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borrowed, and may remain on the periphery of the vocabulary, or it could move, through various intermediate stages, towards the core of the English word stock. A.J. Bliss in his Dictionary of Foreign Words and Phrases has this to say about words of foreign origin in the English vocabulary: 'Words of foreign origin form a spectrum graduating imperceptibly from words like faith at one end, the foreign origin of which would be obvious only to the professional student of language, to words like eclat, which no one would consider anything but "foreign", at the other; it would be possible to prepare a segment of words each slightly but perceptibly more "foreign" than the preceding one, covering the whole range between these two extremes'.15
When an expatriate greets his Chinese colleagues with dzou san 'Good Morning', or when he thanks a waiter for bringing his food by saying m goi 'Thank you', he is speaking Chinese, perhaps with an English accent. The expressions are not, strictly speaking, loans, even though they occur in the midst of what is predominantly English speech. For such words and expressions, there are no standardized written forms, and the speaker would, in most probability, not think of using them with other expatriates except perhaps in a humorous context. Other expressions well-known to the expatriate community in Hong Kong include nei hou ma; mm goi? 'How are you?' and tsoi gin 'See you again' or 'good bye'.
Ronald W. Langacker uses the example of 'hippie' to illustrate his point that changes in the structure of a language do not come about instantaneously. Take the word hippie for instance, which has spread very rapidly through much of the English-speaking world. Someone must have used the word first, or maybe a small number of people created it independently. In either case, many weeks or months must have gone by between the time it was coined and the time it became an item of general use'.10
In the case of loans, the words may appear first within quotation marks or in italics, to indicate their foreign origin. Before a word becomes sufficiently familiar, it is customary to provide a kind of gloss or explanation. Of course, many words which have gained currency in Hong Kong are less familiar to readers outside Hong Kong, and writers may feel a need to
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borrowed, and may remain on the periphery of the vocabulary, or it could move, through various intermediate stages, towards the core of the English word stock, A.J. Bliss in his Dictionary of Foreign Words and Phrases has this to say about words of foreign origin in the English vocabulary: 'Words of foreign origin form a spectrum graduating imperceptibly from words like faith at one end, the foreign origin of which would be obvious only to the professional student of language, to words like eclat, which no one would consider anything but "foreign", at the other; it would be possible to prepare a segment of words each slightly but perceptibly more "foreign' than the preceding one, covering the whole range between these two extremes'.15
When an expatriate greets his Chinese colleagues with dzou san 'Good Morning', or when he thanks a waiter for bringing his food by saying m goi "Thank you', he is speaking Chinese, perhaps with an English accent. The expressions are not, strictly speaking, loans, even though they occur in the midst of what is predominantly English speech. For such words and expressions, there are no standardized written forms, and the speaker would, in most probability, not think of using them with other expatriates except perhaps in a humorous context. Other expressions well- known to the expatriate community in Hong Kong include nei hou ma; fkkjh? 'How are you?' and tsoi gin L 'See you again' or 'good bye'.
Ronald W. Langacker uses the example of 'hippie' to illustrate his point that changes in the structure of a language do not come about instantaneously. Take the word hippie for instance, which has spread very rapidly through much of the English-speaking world. Someone must have used the word first, or maybe a small number of people created it independently. In either case, many weeks or months must have gone by between the time it was coined and the time it became an item of general use', 10
In the case of loans, the words may appear first within quotation marks or in italics, to indicate their foreign origin. Before a word becomes sufficiently familiar, it is customary to provide a kind of gloss or explanation. Of course many words which have gained currency in Hong Kong are less familiar to readers outside Hong Kong, and writers may feel a need to
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