Lettered words
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Helena Riha
Abstract
Lettered words are new borrowings and native creations in Chinese written fully or partly with Roman letters. Lettered words in which the letters fit into the Chinese visual ‘frame’ of writing, the ‘equidimensional square’, are adopted “as is,” bypassing traditional borrowing processes that employ Chinese morpheme-syllable-characters (zì). These include primarily initialisms, since each letter fits into one frame. Compounds containing a Roman letter as a morpheme (X in X-ray) are adapted as hybrid words that retain the letter morpheme. We hypothesize that lettered words are shorter than English words on average and use primarily upper case letters. We conducted a corpus study of lettered words in Chinese newswires to test these assumptions, finding that shorter words are most frequent, upper case is preferred, and initialisms are most common. We conclude that Roman letters are a new set of zì that can now be used to form words in Chinese.
Abstract
Lettered words are new borrowings and native creations in Chinese written fully or partly with Roman letters. Lettered words in which the letters fit into the Chinese visual ‘frame’ of writing, the ‘equidimensional square’, are adopted “as is,” bypassing traditional borrowing processes that employ Chinese morpheme-syllable-characters (zì). These include primarily initialisms, since each letter fits into one frame. Compounds containing a Roman letter as a morpheme (X in X-ray) are adapted as hybrid words that retain the letter morpheme. We hypothesize that lettered words are shorter than English words on average and use primarily upper case letters. We conducted a corpus study of lettered words in Chinese newswires to test these assumptions, finding that shorter words are most frequent, upper case is preferred, and initialisms are most common. We conclude that Roman letters are a new set of zì that can now be used to form words in Chinese.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Foreword and acknowledgements vii
- Editors’ introduction 1
- Affixation vs. conversion. 15
- The -alis/-aris allomorphy revisited 33
- French property nouns based on toponyms or ethnic adjectives 53
- Morphological variation in the construction of French names for inhabitants 75
- The invisible hand of grammaticalization 89
- Paradigmatic realignment and morphological change 107
- Areal-typological aspects of word-formation 129
- Variation and change in morphology and syntax 149
- Optional multiple plural marking in Maay 177
- Lettered words 193
- Word creation 201
- Pleonastic morphology dies hard 217
- Index of languages and terms 245
- Index of subjects and terms 247
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Foreword and acknowledgements vii
- Editors’ introduction 1
- Affixation vs. conversion. 15
- The -alis/-aris allomorphy revisited 33
- French property nouns based on toponyms or ethnic adjectives 53
- Morphological variation in the construction of French names for inhabitants 75
- The invisible hand of grammaticalization 89
- Paradigmatic realignment and morphological change 107
- Areal-typological aspects of word-formation 129
- Variation and change in morphology and syntax 149
- Optional multiple plural marking in Maay 177
- Lettered words 193
- Word creation 201
- Pleonastic morphology dies hard 217
- Index of languages and terms 245
- Index of subjects and terms 247
