A Contrastive Study Of Loanwords In Chinese And German

As an open dynamic system, language is always in development and growing. In the contemporary world the exchange among international community has expanded in every respect, to which a prominent reaction in languages is appreciable increase of loanwords. The study of loanwords, being important components of the vocabulary system, is concerned by linguists all the time by further researching in every aspect with rich achievement and opinion conflict at the same time. This paper deals with loanwords of the modern Chinese and German language, contained in "Chinese Dictionary of Loanwords,""Modern Chinese Dictionary"(5th edition) and "Duden:Das Fremdworterbuch"(9th edition). Based on conclusions of previous researches on loanwords in Chinese and German language, we analysed the loanwords contrastively to reveal similarities and differences between the two languages and observed further their basic characteristics.Both of the two language adopt loanwords phonetically, morphemically and semantically from donor languages. Being different from phonetic borrowing in German, Chinese characters’ semantisation gives a positive or negative influence on borrowed words in the process, therefore people consciously choose certain characters to cause or avoid sematic associations on one hand and create new phono-semantic compound characters on the other. After being incorporated into a recipient language, the loanwords are impacted by its phonetics, semantics and grammar and integrate with it. However the integration’s level differs in languages. Generally speaking, loanwords are less influenced in German than in Chinese. They also have an effect on the recipient language while integrate with it. In this regard, Chinese is relatively less impacted than German, which is caused by typological differences between donor and recipient language and closely related to loanwords’ proportion in the vocabulary of Chinese and German language.With economic development and intensifying contact between countries and nations loanwords will be more frequently adopted and more widely used while integrate faster.