Research On The Chinese Loanwords Transliterated From English In Late Qing Dynasty

The late Qing dynasty is an important period in the history of China-western communication.On the one hand,the western missionaries translated many Western scientific books when they were spreading the Christine doctrines in China.On the other hand,the opening of treaty ports after the Opium War and the Chinese intellects'initiative to learn from the West boosted the exchange and communication between China and the West.This is also the time when loanwords flourished in Chinese,exerting enormous influence in the development of Chinese vocabulary.Domestic and foreign researchers have conducted extensive studies on the loanwords created in Ming and Qing dynasties.These studies,more often than not,pay much attention to the overall features of loanwords or liberally-translated words.Etymologically speaking,Japanese loanwords are under the spotlight,while those of other language origins catch little attention.In addition,most scholars prefer to use the books published in that period or dictionaries on loanwords as reference,but the value and potential of bilingual dictionaries,which are also authoritative and demonstrative texts,are not fully tapped.Given all these,this research,based on the previous studies on the topic,chooses An English and Chinese Standard Dictionary edited by W.W.Yen,the largest and most comprehensive bilingual dictionary before 1911,as its corpus and takes loanwords transliterated from English as the research object.It carries out in-depth description of the transliterated words,summarizes its features and patterns,and contrasts it with the transliterated words in modern Chinese to find the evolution paths.Taken all these into consideration,the research is divided into eight parts for discussion:Chapter one is the introduction part which illustrates the research background,clarifies research object,and demonstrates the reason and the rationale behind this study.After reviewing the previous literature on the topic,it set the objectives of research and its methodologies.Chapter two takes a historical review of the idea of transliteration and development of transliterated words before 1911.In the late Qing dynasty,the concept of transliteration has been upgraded to a theoretical height and the number,etymology and semantic types of transliterated words have great development.Chapter three observes and describes the transliterated loanwords from the perspective of phonetics and phonology.Based on the comparison between English and Chinese phonetics and phonology,it conducts statistical analysis on the representation of English phonemes in Chinese.The comparative study shows that the general patterns of sound borrowing have emerged in the late Qing dynasty,despite the irregularities affected by dialect and improper pronunciation.Chapter four centers around Chinese characters to discuss on the change of words.The Chinese characters used in transliterated words are essentially phonetic loan characters.Existing Chinese characters,both frequently-used and rarely-used,and newly-created characters are applied.Within the same translation methods,the Chinese characters used in the word are affected by three factors:pronunciation,shape of Chinese characters,and semantics.For those words with only one transliterated representation in late Qing dynasty,they could be inherited,adjusted,misappropriated,or deleted in modern Chinese.For those with different transliterated representation,the situation is more complicated:one representation could be inherited in modern Chinese;one representation might be adjusted to take up the position;two representations could co-exist;and all the transliterated representation might be retired from the language.Chapter five focuses on the sematic aspect of transliterated loanwords.To begin with,it discusses the dissolution and substitution of the meaning in ancient Chinese words.Then,it compares the lexical meaning and grammatical meaning of the transliterated words and its English origin.In terms of conceptual meaning,the transliterated words show a strong tendency of semantic filtering,leading to the prevalence of monosemic words;in the realm of associative meaning,it seems that the language system is likely to delete derogative connotations and add appreciative connotations to the word.As for structural meaning,single words and compound words with attributive structure take up the major share and the decoupling of redundant semantic Chinese characters is often found.Regarding functional meaning,transliterated words mostly serve as noun or noun phrases and their part of speech might change during time but only scarcely.In the respect of category meaning,grammatical gender and number are largely filtered by Chinese.There might be a few exceptions,but they are subjected to the regulation and adjustment of the Chinese lexical system and the usage could be different.Chapter six discusses the interaction between liberally-translated words and transliterated words from the perspective of translation and culture.The two translation methods embody translation strategies of domestication and foreignization respectively,which reflects the power struggle between domestic and foreign cultures.The shift from transliteration to liberal translation is the result of assimilation mechanism,the economy of language,and ethnocentrism;whereas,the reversing trend(liberal translation to transliteration)is more relevant to the anti-tradition ideological and cultural movement and the presence of linguistic imperialism.Chapter seven takes a micro perspective to analyze three English words and their equivalence in Chinese.It discusses its representations in the late Qing dynasty and the competition among different Chinese translations.In addition,it explains the change in sound or meaning of these words,which is also a special phenomenon.The last chapter is the conclusion part which reviews and summarizes the overall situation and evolution of loanwords transliterated from English,pointing out the originality and also shortcomings of the research.