6 replies to this topic

[Daniel]

Mandarin Chinese is a living language; indeed, if you measure by number of speakers, it is the most living language in the world. Like any other living language, it must surely be creating new words year by year.

I was wondering, are new Hanzi entering the language to represent the new words? Or are most new Chinese words di- or trisyllabic (e.g. shouyinji, jisuanji), and thus capable of being represented by multiple existing Hanzi written in sequence? Or I suppose a third possibility exists, that most new Chinese words simply become homographs (is that the correct word?), i.e. they become new and alternate pronunciations or meanings for existing Hanzi?

[nishishei]

New characters are created all the time to serve as given names. The practice is now mostly only found in rural areas. Character creation is actually a huge problem because it means these exotic characters are often not in the latest character sets of Chinese encodings, including Unicode. Another thing is that no one knows how to pronounce the created character, and can only take educated guesses based on the parts of the character.

New words are typically never formed using newly created characters, simply because there exists a character for each syllabic sound and typically a character with an appropriate morpheme can be found for a given sound. Most common characters created today for lexical purposes are those with the mouth/oral radical kou3 口 added on to the portion that provides the phonetic information. New monosyllabic words tend to just become an added definition for a selected existing character.

It would be like English recycling Latin roots for 95% of the new words, with the occasional completely phonetically loaned word in the remaining (such as 咖啡 kafei = coffee, and 沙发 shafa = sofa). In English's actual case, other than for scientific terminology (where Latin roots dominate), most loaned words are borrowed whole; and new ideas are also often added to existing words (virus, spam, net).

[Daniel]

Thank you, that clarifies everything a lot. The combination of kou3 + phonetic for new Hanzi seems an eminently practical solution.

[AhMan]

hey, question for mandarin speakers. Mandarin speakers have no problem with r, unlike southerners who could only say l instead of r, right? How come they did not creat some foreign names according to Mandarin but instead using Cantonese.
Example; JiaNaDa => Ge Na Da should be more correct with original sound
Yi lan => Yi ran should be more correct with original sound
You can name more.

[hansioux]

hey, question for mandarin speakers. Mandarin speakers have no problem with r, unlike southerners who could only say l instead of r, right? How come they did not creat some foreign names according to Mandarin but instead using Cantonese.
Example; JiaNaDa => Ge Na Da should be more correct with original sound
              Yi lan    => Yi ran should be more correct with original sound
You can name more.

There is only one R sound in Mandarin, it's just R. It can't be combined with anything. That's why it is impossible to have Ran.

[nishishei]

hey, question for mandarin speakers. Mandarin speakers have no problem with r, unlike southerners who could only say l instead of r, right? How come they did not creat some foreign names according to Mandarin but instead using Cantonese.
Example; JiaNaDa => Ge Na Da should be more correct with original sound
               Yi lan    => Yi ran should be more correct with original sound
You can name more.

加拿大 (Canada) was coined in Shanghainese = Kanada, IPA: [ka na da]
(Cantonese is kanatai, or gaa1naa4daai6 in Jyutping)

Regarding Iran, that's because the Mandarin r only sounds somewhat similar to the English r, but it doesn't really sound like r's from most Indo-European languages. Pinyin "Yilang" is far closer to how Iranians pronounce their country than Pinyin "Yiran". Don't associate everything foreign with only the English pronunciation. In reality the Mandarin r isn't even an /r/, it's just a retroflex of /z/ (like the Mandarin sh is a retroflex of /s/; Wade-Giles spelled the Pinyin r as a j)

[AhMan]

ran like zi ran = nature, natural.
But I guess my knowledge is just too shallow. People are helping me out here so thank you guys.