More than 20 years have passed since the publication of the eight dictionaries used
in Cannon (1988). It is therefore high time now to re-examine Chinese borrowings with
acceptance as reflected in updated leading dictionaries, by comparing them with those
found in the eight older dictionaries in Cannon’s study. This paper first looks at the
increased number of Chinese borrowings and the changing roles of the source Chinese
languages. It also discusses changes in the borrowings’ orthographic forms and their
semantic fields.
The Chinese borrowings in the current study are of two types: loanwords and loan
translations. There are a number of categories for lexical borrowing, sometimes with
up to three or more proposed (Bolton 2003; McArthur 2002), but loan translations and
loanwords are the two commonly recognized. Loan translations involve ‘rearranging words
in the base language along patterns provided by the other and thus create a new meaning’
(Romaine 1995: 57). Loanwords, frequently the largest group among lexical borrowings
from a certain language into English, are defined as ‘morphemic importation without
substitution’ (Haugen 1950: 214).