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Words of Chinese origin have entered European languages, including English. Most of these were direct loanwords from various varieties of Chinese.However, Chinese words have also entered indirectly via other languages, particularly Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese, that have all used Chinese characters at some point and contain a large number of Chinese loanwords.
Lin's Chinese-English Dictionary of Modern Usage comprises approximately 8,100 character head entries and 110,000 word and phrase entries. [10] It includes both modern Chinese neologisms such as xǐnǎo 洗腦 "brainwash" and many Chinese loanwords from English such as yáogǔn 搖滾 "rock 'n' roll" and xīpí 嬉皮 "hippie".
Loanwords have entered written and spoken Chinese from many sources, including ancient peoples whose descendants now speak Chinese. In addition to phonetic differences, varieties of Chinese such as Cantonese and Shanghainese often have distinct words and phrases left from their original languages which they continue to use in daily life and sometimes even in Mandarin.
The word calque is a loanword, while the word loanword is a calque: calque comes from the French noun calque ("tracing; imitation; close copy"); [5] while the word loanword and the phrase loan translation are translated from German nouns Lehnwort [6] and Lehnübersetzung (German: [ˈleːnʔybɐˌzɛt͡sʊŋ] ⓘ).
Sino-Vietnamese words have a status similar to that of Latin-based words in English: they are used more in formal context than in everyday life. Because Chinese languages and Vietnamese use different order for subject and modifier, compound Sino-Vietnamese words or phrases might appear ungrammatical in Vietnamese sentences.
A Chinese-English Dictionary: 1892: Herbert Allen Giles' bestselling dictionary, 2nd ed. 1912 A Dictionary of the Chinese Language: 1815–1823: First Chinese-English, English-Chinese dictionary, Robert Morrison: A Syllabic Dictionary of the Chinese Language: 1874: First Chinese-English dictionary to include regional pronunciations, Samuel ...
In China, letters of the English alphabet are pronounced somewhat differently because they have been adapted to the phonetics (i.e. the syllable structure) of the Chinese language. The knowledge of this spelling may be useful when spelling Western names, especially over the phone, as one may not be understood if the letters are pronounced as ...
Bopomofo annotations – adds inline and pop-up annotations with bopomofo pronunciation and English definitions to Chinese text or web pages. Mandarin Dictionary – needs Chinese font for Big5 encoding; Chinese Phonetic Conversion Tool – converts between Pinyin, Bopomofo and other phonetic systems