Chinese to import -英 -美 as grammatical particles
Language Log: A new way of 寫ing Mandarin reports a trendy expression in IM/internet Chinese.
A paper by Jia Lou, "From English morpheme to symbol of Chinese netizenship: Exploring -ing in Chinese blogs", NWAV 34, 2005.
I am too removed from the speaker community to have any intuition. But I was struck by the following comment (emphasis added):
Update — John Cowan writes:
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I’m not about to get into an argument on this topic, about which I know almost nothing. But Jerome L. Packard, The Morphology of Chinese, Cambridge University Press, 2000 (p. 71), lists six "grammatical affixes" ("the verbal aspect markers -le, -zhe and -guo; the resultative potential ‘infixes’ -de and bu- and the human noun plural suffix -men"). It’s true that this is roughly the same number of grammatical affixes as English — perhaps it’s even one more — but the basis of my feeble attempt at humor was the idea that Chinese is not an especially rich area for would-be importers of grammatical affixes.
Chinese actually has been a pretty active importer of grammatical commodities throughout its history. In terms of affixes, the -化 （roughly -ize, as in 现代化 [modernize]，计算机化 [computerize]) was borrowed from Japanese along with a whole bunch of others (one that I still have trouble with: -中, as in 热卖中). Some of these should be counted as re-patriation, because the morphemes were first borrowed to Japanese from Chinese. But nonetheless, the particular usages, particularly the grammaticalization of these morphemes, were novel and useful enough to be worth copying.
Why -ing? Why not -ed, -ish, or anyother oddities of English? Other than that netizens live their lifes in the present, I’d suggest that -ing is phonologically well-formed in Chinese, whereas other affixes such as -ed are not (Standard Chinese only allow two consonant codas -n and -ng, and in Pekingnese -r). Apparently -ing has not spread to speaking yet, but when it does, it should perhaps be written as "-英", which (a) is pronounced exactly as "-ing", first tone, (b) means English or British, and (c) as a native morpheme its meaning is vague enough to be grammaticalized for a completely different role.
This, of course, will be perceived as an unfair trade practice by the US. So my next suggestion is for the Congress to authorize whoever takes over the Whitehouse next year to start a secrete negotiation with the Chinese government over the export of "MAY", which is a very precious little grammatical word. Chinese arguably lacks a precise counterpart of "may", which may cause all kinds of international impasses. The sticking point will be whether it will be officially transliterated as "-美", "-没", or "-霉", all of which sounds exactly like "may". The first one, of course, means "beauty", and also is the abbreviation of "美国, The US of America", lit. "The Beautiful Country". This is clearly where the national interest lies. The 2nd choice means "null, nothing, all gone". And you don’t want to know the last.
Completely unrelated: years back I read a paper — must have been written by a Chinese engineer of sort — arguing that Chinese was faulty because it doesn’t have an equivalent of "WHICH" to introduce restrictive relative clauses. His solution was to import "which", written as "唯其". Nobody picked it up, of course. The Congress would never approve a plan to export "witches" to China, would it? End of digression.