As languages go, English is a notoriously promiscuous one, borrowing caricatures from Italian, chutzpah from Yiddish and faux pas from French.
And yet despite the English-speaking world's deep and wide confluences with Chinese culture, for some reason, few Chinese words have lately entered the English-speaking world's vocabulary.
China's state media is hoping that could change: Last week, it cited several Chinese entries that have recently appeared UrbanDictionary.com. 'English speakers may soon be saying 'you can you up, no can no bb' in response to criticism,' the official Xinhua news agency said, referring to a Chinese phrase that means if you can do it, do it, and if you can't, don't criticize others. ( In Beijing dialect, 'BB' means to nag or complain.)
But don't hold your breath. There are some 8 million entries on UrbanDictionary.com, a volunteer effort akin to a Wikipedia of slang, the majority of which-'asdfwefewfawefwea,' anyone?-most people would never have heard. (By way of comparison, there are only some 230,000 words in the whole of the Oxford English Dictionary.)
Some of the Chinese terms that have entered UrbanDictionary.com include 'people mountain people sea,' a literal derivation of (), a term used to refer to large crowds, as well as 'No zuo no die,' a riff off (), that is, if you don't do something stupid, bad things won't happen to you.
It seems implausible that such terms could enter mainstream English parlance. Linguists note that the heyday for linguistic absorption from China occurred before 1950, as can be seen in the spellings of certain loaner words-kowtow, gung ho, ketchup-many derived from non-Mandarin Chinese languages such as Cantonese.
Though there are other Chinese terms that are well-known in English, such as bok choy or chow mien, as the Economist's Johnson language blog has pointed out, '[English-speaking countries] borrowed the foods, and their Chinese names merely hitched a ride into English.' The same could be true of another-by now-commonly known Chinese term, feng shui.
By contrast, China has adopted plenty of English words, each given its own transliterated characters-ku for cool, yimeir for email, leisi for lace, wutuobang for Utopia. Other terms used in China are the same ones that have been exported in English around the world: 'okay, bye bye, man.'
On the English side, resistance to Chinese words doesn't seem to be a simple difficulty of pronunciation: though Mandarin's different tones may be daunting, the basic syllables are easy enough, and the trickiness of French or Japanese pronunciation (coup d'etat, karaoke) hasn't stopped English from embracing words from either language.
And there are plenty of words that would seem ripe to jump the Pacific: Here at China Real Time, one particularly accessible term, mafan-meaning a hassle, or difficulty-could be easily adopted by English speakers (and in fact already has been by many on staff). And who could resist the roll-off-the-tongue ease of mamahuhu, a term that means 'so-so'? (The literal translation is 'horse horse tiger tiger.') Maybe, as some theorize, it's just a matter of time, as China's reach grows, and exchanges continue to deepen.
