A Study On The Loanwords From English Based On Modern Chinese Dictionary

Research on Chinese lexicon on methodology, content, perspective, ways, etc. has been improved greatly both on the quality and quantity since the policy of reform and opening-up. Frequent contact and communications on economics technology and culture have been made during the 21st century because of the globalization in the world, which results in the contact of different languages and much more new loan words occurrence. Just as what Sapir said that language was not sufficient itself, which was always influenced directly and indirectly by others. Whatever reasons and aims of the language contact were, loan words appeared early on the level of the lexicon.In 1958, Gao Mingkai and Liu Zhengtan first employed the term"Loan words"formally in their wok, Modern Chinese Loan Words Research, due to the influence of a new linguistic term"word"in the west. It was recognized widely under their initiation. In the history of Chinese language, large number of loan words entered into Chinese language during the Han Dynasty at first. Due to the transmission of Buddhism and the translation of the sutra, there appeared the first upsurge of loan words borrowed from other languages. During the late Ming Dynasty and early Qing dynasty, there appeared a lot of loan words from Indo-European languages, especially from English language. That was the second upsurge of loan words in the history of Chinese language. From the late Qing dynasty to the mid of 20th century, great historical changes took place both in society and Chinese language. Not only the technical terms in the west but also many Chinese characters and words in Japanese were introduced into Chinese language, which was the third upsurge of loan words in the history of Chinese language. During the new age of reform and opening to the outside world, the dominating status of English language has been increasing. Loan words from English in Chinese language became more and more acceptable by the Chinese people. In this period, the quantity and the speed of the loan words entering into the Chinese language have been surpassing than those in any other period in the history of Chinese language. The data of this thesis are based on the domestically-oriented standardized Modern Chinese Dictionary. The loan words marked in English in the 5th version of the dictionary are the focus of the research. Loan words in other versions, including the 1983 version, the 1996 version and the 2002 version are also covered in the research. On the basis of the corpus constructed by ourselves, both quantitative and qualitative analysis will be done. Comparisons between the loan words from English in Chinese common language and those in Concise Oxford English Dictionary will be made on phonetic, semantic and grammar in order to find the characteristics and the channel of the process from English into Chinese. Based on lexicography, lots of research has been done synchronically and diachronically on the item-choosing, item-adding and item-deleting, the layout of the dictionary and the explanation of revised edition, which is of a certain value for the normalization, the edition of language-oriented dictionary and the content dictionary of loan words.Besides the introduction and the conclusion parts, this thesis mainly consists of the following parts: combined research on Chinese loan words from English and the language-oriented dictionary; diachronic research on Chinese loan words from English from the 1st edition to the latest one of Modern Chinese Dictionary; contrastive research on Chinese loan words from English in Modern Chinese Dictionary with those in Concise Oxford English Dictionary and the explanation analysis of Chinese loan words from English in Modern Chinese Dictionary. Through the diachronic and synchronic analysis and contrastive analysis, the changes of the Chinese loan words from English in the language-oriented dictionary can be displayed objectively and the rules and the characteristics of Chinese loan words from English in phonetic, semantic and grammar can play some role in lexical teaching and lexicography research.All the data mentioned in the thesis are obtained from the corpus constructed by ourselves. This thesis aimed to reflect the reality of the development of Chinese loan words from English in modern Chinese and to have some effect and to present some references on the teaching and the edition of loan words dictionary in the future.