An Intercultural-Communicative Study On Chinese Loanwords Into The English Language

The lexical borrowing from Chinese to English is a case for interculturalcommunication. Some features of intercultural communication will be discussed byanalyzing Chinese loanwords borrowed into English in different historical periods. Itcan be discovered that firstly borrowing from Chinese to English, as a linguistic andsocial phenomenon, could reflect the intercultural communication between thewestern world and China. Secondly, loanwords are put into different historicalperiods in order to analysis and discover the correlation between loanwords andintercultural communication. The correlation is just the interests of the English worldin Chinese culture and loanwords in different historical periods.The present study employs multiple methods, including collection and set-up ofcorpus of loanwords from Chinese to English, a combination of descriptive andexplanatory, synchronic and diachronic，qualitative and quantitative analysis. Corpuscontains378loanwords and their corresponding information. Loanwords are mainlyselected from6dictionaries,1foreign journals and some books. All data are listed inthe light of chronological order. Meanwhile, the history of loanwords from Chineseto English is divided into three periods. Therefore, data will be analyzed qualitativelyand quantitatively.Analysis on loanwords shows that loanwords are scanty before17thcentury;however, most of loanwords are related to material culture, such as silk, tea andporcelain, which accurately reflect that the western world focused on silk culture andtea culture in China. From17thcentury to the beginning of20thcentury, the westernworld no longer looked up to Chinese culture as before, but advocated food cultureof China. From the establishment of China to open-door policy, more and moreloanwords about domestic politics, economy, trade and culture came into Englishlanguage; it is convinced that western countries began to look upon Chinese culturewith diversified attitudes. There is a constant flow of Chinese loanwords into Englishin different historical periods and pragmatical changes of loanwords have beenproceeding, the change of vocabulary in the form of words and their meanings aremuch more rapid than other aspects of language. Due to the degree of assimilation ofborrowing, their usage condition and living status are different too, which also showstrends of English loanwords from Chinese in future.The intercultural-communicative study on English loanwords from Chineseprovides a theoretical evidence for drawing up the study of intercultural communication. It also has certain practical significance in foreign language teachingand translation.