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Chinese Much of English is made up of words from other languages, and Chinese is an important contributor in this respect. Scholars estimate that there are about 1,000 émigrés from Chinese into English. Two of them, spring roll and brainwashing, are loan translations. Spring roll, first recorded in English in 1943, is a translation of Chinese chūn "spring" and juǎn "roll." Brainwashing, first recorded in a September 1950 Florida newspaper article about forcible indoctrination of U.S. prisoners of war captured during the Korean conflict, is a translation of xǐnǎo, with xǐ meaning "to wash" and nǎo "brain." But most of the words are direct borrowings from Cantonese and Modern Standard Chinese. For example, from Cantonese, English has naturalized chop suey, kumquat, moo goo gai pan, sampan, taipan, and tong (an organized crime gang). From Modern Standard Chinese, English has naturalized chow mein, feng shui, ginseng, kowtow, mahjongg, and pongee.
Modern Standard Chinese and Cantonese have separately given English two homographs (words spelled alike but with different meanings, origins, and sometimes different pronunciations): yen, the Japanese currency unit, and yen, a noun and a verb meaning "wish, desire." Yen, the currency unit, arrived in English in the late 19th century via Japanese from Modern Standard Chinese yuán, literally "round." The second yen, whose origin is somewhat murky, was originally associated in English with the argot of opium smokers. It is thought that this yen, which arrived in the early 20th century in the form yen-yen ("strong craving for opium"), came from Cantonese yán "wish, hope, desire." Occasionally words derive from other forms of Chinese, for example, bok choy, which is from Guangdang dialect.
Most of the words associated with the martial arts are ultimately of Chinese origin, but came into English via Japanese. Examples are aikido, dan, judo, jujitsu, and sensei. An exception is kung fu, a direct late 19th-century borrowing from Chinese gōngfu, literally "merit-master."
At least two Chinese words have migrated into English as generic terms: gung ho and kaolin. First recorded in 1942, gung ho was the motto of some U.S. Marines operating in Asia during World War II. It comes from Chinese honghé, literally "work together," a shortening of gōngyèhézuòshè "Chinese Industrial Cooperative Society." Kaolin, which is first recorded in the early 18th century, comes from Chinese gāoling "high hill," an area of Jiangxi province where this fine white clay is found.
Chinese has also been the transport medium of some very well-traveled words, one of them typhoon. First recorded in English in the late 16th century, it probably arrived first via Arabic ṭūfān "deluge," through English people who experienced heavy storms in South Asia, where Arabic was a language used in Islamic circles. The English respelled the word touffon or tufan, pronouncing the "ou" as in "you." Thereafter, English ships encountered violent storms while operating in the China Sea. Their crews heard the Cantonese word taaî fung, literally "big wind," and picked it up as well, changing the pronunciation of the first syllable from the "ou" sound to an "i" sound, resulting in a further respelling of the word. Thus Cantonese is the most immediate influence on the spelling and pronunciation of the word we use today. But all in all, tea is perhaps the most internationalized of these word travelers in the sense that it has distanced itself from obvious Chinese cultural and semantic associations. Somewhat of a mysterious émigré, tea is thought to have come into English in the 17th century via Dutch tee. That word was derived from a Malay term traceable to Amoy Chinese dialect te, the equivalent of Modern Standard Chinese chá. See also Japanese.
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