Ginormous, Chinese, and orthographic creativity
In his recent post The Ginormous question of language and creativitivity, revisited yet again… Kevin refuted the idea that the Chinese writing system deprives its people of X, where X in question this time was creativity. Kevin suggests that much of the neologistic creativity in English happens at the morphological level (c.f., this year’s Top 10 New words Merriam-Webster’s site). Chinese characters, which generally correspond to morphemes, is as good a medium as any other language/orthography for word plays. John B gave a great example in the comment,
The Chinese make up an enormous amount of slang — they just do it in different ways. 疯购 (shopaholic, a play on 疯狗, rapid dog), for instance, is one of my current favorites.
There was a period of time after the oracle bone script when new characters were constantly created for new morphemes in the Chinese languages. Creativity, however, quickly lead to decaptivations. One of the first things the First Emprior did was to clean up the numerous orthographies in various states, and he — his minister Li Si — achieved this by burning books and burrying scholars alive. But I guess this is not what Rob Gifford meant by lacking of creativity.
The Chinese characters become relatively fixed in the next 2 thousand years or so. I don’t mean to suggest new characters were not created — in fact, just the contrary. The primary linguistic creativity, however, has shifted from inventing mono-syllabic morphemes to bi-syllabic morphemes and words. That is, the number of characters had become relatively stable, whereas compound words graduatlly became the predominate phonological forms of words.
Creativies with characters never died out completely. In fact, the turn of last century saw a renewed character creativity when Western chemestry was introduced to China. There you have a whole bunch of morphemes that never existed in the language. And you bet, new characters were created for them. The alternative — phonetic translation using existing characters — was tried and failed. We are left with 40+ new characters for names of basic elements and a whole bunch more for organic chemestry terms. Luckly, this surge of orthographic creativity didn’t go too far. Newer loan words tend to have multi-syllabic phonetic or semantic translations.
One can still find examples, albeit few in number, of intra-syllabic/morphemeic creativities in Chinese. 甭 (beng2) merges 不 (bu4 or bu2, "not") and 用 (yong4, "to use; to need"), and means literally 不用 ("not necessary"). Similarly, 孬 (nao1) is a combination of 不 (bu4, "no, or not") and 好 (hao3 "good"), and you guessed what it means. Both probably originated in dialects: 甭 is frequently used in Beijinese; 孬 is probably used in Henan or the vicinity. There are probably more examples like these in Chinese.
Speaking of English neologisms, it appears that the rule governing these sub-morphemic mergers is not unlike that of Chinese compounding. Whether it is ginormous, confuzzled, or chillax, you mix parts of two synonyms (or near synonyms in a particular context) together, which mutually reinforce the meaning of both and the new word. This is essentially how losts of Chinese di-syllabic words are made — combining synonyms or antonyms. Given the ginormous homophone problems in the Chinese language at the morphemic level, you need the reinforcement of the two elements to convey what you mean. Psychologically this involves forward and backward priming from partial words. Maybe others can shed light on the phonological constraints involved here.