Purity of Chinese language debated
People's Daily Online, China - 13 Sept. 2004... Unlike alphabetic languages, such as English, that are technically open, Chinese as a hieroglyphic language has a born disadvantage in borrowing words from other languages, Xue adds.
With China's opening-up, he notes, it has become increasingly difficult for the Chinese language to sinicize the huge influx of new loan words, whether through transliteration or free translation. "It is unavoidable for people to use some English words in their Chinese," Xue says.
Evolvement of Chinese? --- Citing the use of katakana in the Japanese language, he says the syllabic writing system used for writing down foreign names, places and words of foreign origin has greatly contributed to the huge absorption of foreign culture into Japanese. Likewise, Xue stresses, the acceptance of foreign words in Chinese should be taken as a necessary linguistic strategy to embrace new things. ...