China bans English words in media

[dipsydoodle]

Source: BBC News

China has banned newspapers, publishers and website-owners from using foreign words - particularly English ones.

China's state press and publishing body said such words were sullying the purity of the Chinese language.

It said standardised Chinese should be the norm: the press should avoid foreign abbreviations and acronyms, as well as "Chinglish" - which is a mix of English and Chinese.

The order also extends existing warnings that applied to radio and TV.

Read more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12050067

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"Chinglish" :rofl:

[Lint Head]

1. I'm appalled! They should call it Englese.

English is what we speak over here in these Tea Bagger United States so if we are going to be banned we need to be
banned in the patriot "English First" way.
:evilgrin:

[dipsydoodle]

2. Presumably foreign abbreviations and acronyms

refers to wtf etc. :)

[Sinistrous]

3. Didn't the French do this a few years back?

[dipsydoodle]

4. The French have always done so

but they remain stuffed by such expressions as le weekend.

They also have unique words for which there is no literal translation - entrepreneur for example.

[Confusious]

15. The french have no word for entrepreneur

I heard that from fox.

[dipsydoodle]

17. It was GWB who that first

wasn't it ? :rofl:

[Confusious]

18. yep. what a dumbass. nt

[mistertrickster]

5. People just don't know how language works. We borrow words all the time:

Spanish--

conquistador
lareit (la reata, the rope)
patio
junta
guerilla

French--

au contrarie
carte blanche
beau coup
belles lettres
entreprenuer
raison d'etre
coup d'etat
salon

Chinese--

ketchup
gung ho (gong he, work together)
kow tow
taipan
taiphoon
fengshui
"long time, no see"

Hindi--

bungalow
pundit
guru
jungle
thug
verandah

[XemaSab]

9. It goes deeper than that

English is a language built on a foundation of words borrowed from the continent. Even words that don't sound "foreign" probably have foreign etymologies.

[Igel]

22. English is built on a couple of closely related Germanic dialects.

Its grammar and core vocabulary are Germanic. At least arguments that English is a creole have gone by the board.

Educated speech has a large number of borrowings and we have a lot of doubles because of borrowings--things like sheep/mutton or cow/beef. Then again, educated speech in most languages these days has either a large number of borrowings *or* a large number of calques. English preferred borrowing to calquing. Languages like Czech preferred calquing to borrowing (at least in the "pure" variety favored by nationalists; sometimes they split the difference by important a Russian word and "Bohemizing" it, formulating what it would have looked like had it been Common Slavic and then subject to all the specifically Czech sound changes).

True, it's hard to speak for hours and hours without running to words that we got from abroad. But the foundation is Germanic, even if much of the superstructure is Latinate, either directly or via some variety of French.

Then again, you're point's trivially true if we just assume that Anglo-Saxon was "borrowed" from NW Europe.

[mistertrickster]

24. Some interesting observations, but what is the essential point?

The original post said that the Chinese were trying to "outlaw" borrowings.

My point is that it is almost impossible to do this because that's what languages do.

You seem to be trying to refute something I never implied . . . not sure what it is.

[Uncle Joe]

10. And Neanderthal -- "Freedom Fries." n/t

[Dover]

11. Exactamundo! Seems like an exercise in futility. Are you familiar with Nushu, the secret script?

Language is a fluid rather than a solid. And like water, communication/language/self expression can always find a way around obstacles. In the case of cultural obstacles such as women experienced in China (enforced illiteracy), a script was simply created to circumvent the mainstream language that was off limits to them.

Nüshu is a special written language used and understood only by women in Jiangyong County, Hunan Province. Discovered 20 years ago, this mysterious language has been handed down, mother to daughter, for generations. Women formed their own written symbols to represent the words in their local dialect. Hence men can usually understand nüshu if they hear it read aloud.

This language is now facing extinction.


http://womenshistory.about.com/gi/o.htm?zi=1/XJ&zTi=1&sdn=womenshistory&cdn=education&tm=2034&gps=117_268_1008_550&f=10&tt=14&bt=1&bts=1&zu=http%3A//www.chinavoc.com/life/focus/wmbook.asp

http://www.ancientscripts.com/nushu.html

[mistertrickster]

25. This is fascinating. I had never heard of this before.

They came up with their own syllabary (like an alphabet, but each symbol is a consonant and vowel together).

I wonder if this predates other syllabaries based on Chinese characters, such as Japanese hirigana.

[Nuclear Unicorn]

12. Exactly. You can hardly call it "english"

"That amalgamated hodge-podge of half-pronounced words" would be more accurate.

To ban english would be to ban all the other languages we borrowed words from.

[smirkymonkey]

16. It's just as well....

Check out this website, not very PC, but still pretty funny:

http://www.engrish.com

[Confusious]

14. English "borrows" words more then any other language

English has at least 1 million words, the nearest competitor, 300,000.

As someone once said about English "English didn't so "borrow" as much as it chased them down a dark alley, beat them senseless, and rifled through their pockets for vocabulary."

[SkyDaddy7]

6. Sounds like they have taken a page out of our playbook...

"Chinglish" Classic! LOL!

[TygrBright]

7. Heh. Here in NM, we've had Spanglish as the state language forever or thereabouts. n/t

[valerief]

8. Cha-Chinglish!

:rofl:

[Nitram]

13. It never works

Been tried before. The Japanese during WWII and, most famously, France. It's impossible to influence the natural evolution of any language through legislation.

[Doctor_J]

19. Another way that our wing nuts are like the Chinese dictators

At least Chinese is the native language in China.

[Igel]

23. Like Cree is the native language in North America.

Chinese is a number of dialects. The official Mandarin is native to northern China. It spread because of imperialism, intermarriage (viz "colonialism"), and ritual oppression of the inferior local yahoos by the superior, more cultured northerners. Even in the 20th century people in the southern half of the country usually spoke their native, "indigenous" languages--over a hundred of them. Many of those are threatened.

(Although, of course, the claim can be made that no language is indigenous to anywhere but NE Africa. They all came from somewhere else, it's just the final stages that are local. Like French is imported Latin with a bit of German influence, and a bit of Celtic--but Latin, German, and Celtic are Indo-European and only were imported into Italy, N. Europe, and NW Europe in maybe 1000 to 600 BCE.)


Chinese is a language indigenous to China. Chinese is a set of mutually incomprehensible or barely comprehensible dialects that most linguists would call independent languages (except that their speakers don't really think of them that way). But Chinese is just one of scores of other indigenous languages.

[skoalyman]

20. gotta luv chinglish llol

[slackmaster]

21. Germany did the same thing for non-German words in the 1930s

Especially English and French ones.