Strategies of new words formation in Chinese and Japanese in the 21st Century

Bahkmatova Anna Postgraduate student; Institute of Asian and African Countries; Lomonosov Moscow State University; Chinese linguistics, interpreter (Chinese & English) 117152, Russia, Moscow, Donskoy district, Sevastopolsky ave., 3 room 5, sq. 7 annabakhmatova@yandex.ru

In the 21st century, with the acceleration of scientific and technological progress, new objects, concepts and phenomena began to appear faster and faster in everyday life, for which new words appear in the vast majority of languages of the world. Languages that use hieroglyphics have a tool for writing neologisms, which allows you to record new words not only through phonetic borrowings, but also by creating words from significant morphemes-hieroglyphs that reveal the essence of the designated concept.

A significant number of works have been devoted to the problems of word formation in Chinese and Japanese, covering this issue for each of the languages separately, but there are few comparative studies. For example, classical works on graphics by Chinese linguists Wang Fengyang ^[1] and Yang Ronglu ^[2] provide a detailed description of the mechanisms for creating vocabulary through hieroglyphics in modern Chinese. Among Russian Sinologists, A. A. Khamatova was interested in this topic, having devoted many works to lexicology in general and new Chinese vocabulary in particular ^{[3, 4]}.

There are also works of the same scale on the topic of word formation and writing in Japan, for example, the works of Arakawa Kiyohide on Japanese lexicology, hieroglyphics and comparative studies. Some of his works touch on the topic of comparing Japanese and Chinese languages. For example, in his work "The meaning of hieroglyphs in modern Japanese. Comparative studies of Japanese and Chinese languages" ^[5] he analyzes the process of changing and local interpretations of Chinese characters borrowed into Japanese, and describes changes in their original meanings. This topic was of interest to many linguists of Chinese origin, who wrote and published articles in Japanese, exploring the problems of the mutual influence of Chinese and Japanese languages. Such authors include Chen Liwei ^[6] and Chen Shengbao ^[7]. In his works, Chen Liwei highlighted the difference between the prototypical word order in Chinese and Japanese and explained the difference in word structure, and Chen Shenbao compared many aspects of Japanese and Chinese vocabulary, which are its main differences. In Russian Sinology and Japanese studies, the topic of comparing Japanese and Chinese vocabulary has been less covered, and among the works dealing with the topic of comparing the two languages directly, one can single out E. V. Mayevsky's article "The Meiji Lexical Revolution" ^[8], which describes in detail the borrowings of new economic and sociological terms from Japanese into Chinese.

However, all these works mostly belong to the end of the XX – beginning of the XXI century. In recent years, there have been very few works devoted to the analysis and comparison of Japanese and Chinese vocabulary, and even more so to the mutual influence of languages at the present stage. Therefore, this article, in addition to all the goals listed below, is also aimed at attracting interest in the topic of comparing Chinese and Japanese vocabulary, as well as demonstrating the interrelationships of two syntactically and genealogically different languages at the present stage through the analysis of new words that arose in the 21st century.

This article is devoted to the analysis of strategies for writing and forming new words in Chinese and Japanese, which appeared in the 21st century, as well as identifying their interrelationships and mutual influences between the two languages. The main goal is to identify the mechanisms of formation and ways of forming new vocabulary in both languages and to identify their differences and points of intersection.

The main difference in the writing systems of the two languages is that Japanese uses both hieroglyphic and alphabetic writing, whereas Chinese relies entirely on hieroglyphics. Therefore, at the present stage, most new terms in Japanese are phonetically borrowed from English and written in the katakana alphabet ^[9], whereas in Chinese phonetic borrowings are less common, and new words are mostly borrowed from foreign languages through calculus or created inside the Chinese language independently of other languages ^[10]. Root decomposition continues to be the main way of creating new vocabulary in Chinese, and a productive way in Japanese ^[11]. Both languages actively form new words using a hieroglyphic base. This is what generates the cross-borrowing between Chinese and Japanese, when a new term appears first in one language and then is adapted by another.

In this article, we will analyze the names of new phenomena that arose after 2000 and are recorded in English in the Oxford English Dictionary (hereinafter OED) in such fields as social networks and the Internet, digitalization and technology, social and economic phenomena or movements, chemistry and medicine, physics and cosmology., biology, environment and ecology, artificial intelligence, virtual reality and virtual calculations. We used words in English as a basis, since it is the language of globalization, and the OED most accurately captures words for new phenomena. Sometimes phrases that are recorded in the OED as a separate dictionary entry have been taken as a comparable unit, which means that in the modern world this phrase is perceived as a separate independent concept.

Our study used OED data from the official website (Oxford English Dictionary: oed.com ), a filter for dictionary entries published for the first time in 2000-2025. The author selected 70 of the most popular new words in the areas indicated above. The frequency of words was checked using the Corpus of Modern American English (Corpus of Contemporary American English, COCA, english-corpora.org/coca ). For the most frequent 10 words from each topic, Chinese and Japanese analogues were selected, the reality and frequency of use of which were also checked against the national corpus of these languages: The Linguistic Corpus of the Chinese Language of the Beijing University of Language and Culture (bcc.blcu.edu.cn ) – for the Chinese language and the Balanced Corpus of Modern Japanese Written Language of the State Institute Japanese language and Linguistics (shonagon.ninjal.ac.jp ) – for Japanese.

Also, during the analysis, new Chinese and Japanese words were classified according to their mode of formation. We have identified the following productive ways of word formation for the new vocabulary of Chinese and Japanese languages:

1. Phonetic borrowings are borrowings of a vocabulary unit while preserving its sound form, recorded by the characters of the Katakana alphabet in Japanese ^[12], hieroglyphs in Chinese ^[13]. In this case, hieroglyphs are desemanticized, and morphemes have no semantic meaning. For example, in the case of the English word bitcoin (Rus. "bitcoin"), its Chinese counterpart is 比特币 btèbì, and in Japanese, bittokoin. In both languages, it is mainly the sound that is borrowed, not the meanings.

2.1. Tracing papers (semantic borrowings) are borrowings of a dictionary unit through the literal translation of its parts into the borrowing language at the expense of its own morphemes ^[14]. In the case of Chinese and Japanese, calculus is performed by writing a word in hieroglyphics, and the meaning of the word becomes deducible from its components ^[15]. For example, English artificial intelligence (Rus. "artificial intelligence") in Chinese is written as 人 rngōng zhìnéng (literally 人réngōng "artificial" and 智能 zhìnéng "intelligence"). The Japanese language uses the equivalent of 人 jinkō chinō.

2.2. Half–scales are borrowings of a dictionary unit partly through literal translation and partly by phonetic borrowing ^[16]. For example, the English nanomaterial (Rus. "nanomaterial") in Chinese has the form 纳米材料 nàmǐ cailiào, where 纳米 nàmǐ is a phonetic loan from. "nano-", and 材料 cailiào is a literal translation of part of the word "-material". A similar process occurs in Japanese, only part of the phonetic loan is not written hieroglyphically, but in the katakana ナノ材料 nano zairyō, where ナノ nano is a phonetic loan from. "nano–", 材料zairyō is the literal translation of part of the word "-material".

3. Root decomposition is a method of creating new words in Chinese and Japanese, in which a new word is created from its own morphemes and without direct translation of parts of the borrowed vocabulary unit ^[17]. For example, the English word binge-watch (Rus. "uninterrupted viewing of content") it consists of two lexemes: binge (Rus. "revelry") and watch (Rus. "viewing"), but in Chinese and Japanese equivalents these meanings are not translated literally, as was the case with tracing papers, but on the contrary, independent concepts are created to translate the entire word binge-watch. Cf. kit. 刷剧 shuājù (dosl. "flipping through the series") and Japanese ikkimi (literally "watching in one go").

Next, let's look at the comparison tables for each of the topics. Each of them on the right shows the ways of word formation for each word.

Table 1

Table 2

Table 3

Table 4

Table 5

Table 6

Table 7

The comparative analysis showed that, depending on the topic, the ways of forming new words differ. As a percentage, this can be represented as follows:

Social networks, the Internet:

- Chinese: tracing paper (45%), root application (40%);

- Japanese: phonetic borrowings (70%), root addition 20%

Digitalization and technology:

- Chinese: tracing paper (70%) and root application (20%);

- Japanese: phonetic borrowings (70%).

Social and economic phenomena or movements:

- Chinese: tracing paper (70%), root application (25%);

- Japanese: phonetic borrowings (60%), tracing paper 35%.

Chemistry and Medicine:

- Chinese: root application (60%), tracing paper (40%);

- Japanese: phonetic borrowings (40%), tracing papers (40%).

Physics and Cosmology:

- Chinese: root application (50%), tracing paper (40%);

- Japanese: phonetic borrowings (55%), tracing papers (20%).

Biology, ecology

- Chinese: tracing paper (85%), root application (10%);

- Japanese: tracing paper (50%), phonetic borrowings (30%).

Artificial intelligence, virtual reality, virtual calculations

- Chinese: tracing paper (90%);

- Japanese: tracing paper (60%), phonetic borrowings (40%).

Based on the data obtained, the following conclusions can be drawn:

(1) In Japanese, hieroglyphic notation is preferred for complex concepts, while phonetic notation through the alphabet is preferred for simpler concepts. The closer the topic is to the mass consumer (social networks, household appliances, social phenomena), the more often katakana is used to record phonetic borrowings, and accordingly, the more complex and narrow the term (scientific, technical, abstract concepts), the higher the probability of using hieroglyphic writing through tracing paper or root addition.

In Chinese, all topics are dominated by tracing papers and root expressions, through which the meanings of concepts are decomposed into components and thus become more understandable to the native speaker ^[18]. Phonetic hieroglyphic notation is rare, but it is used in some cases where, for example, a proper name appears in the name (cf. Higgs boson) or the name of a new phenomenon represents one of many similar phenomena (cf. bitcoin has a phonetic loan, but the general category to which it belongs, is written using the calculator jià mì huòbì "cryptocurrency").

At the same time, the following trend persists in both languages: the more complex the concept, the easier it is to reveal it using the root decomposition and the clearer the term will become for the native speaker. For example, the physical term of the GMR (giant magnetoresistance) are not taken through its English abbreviation GMR, and is transmitted through jeroglificos Corneliani: Keith. 巨磁阻效应 jùcízǔ xiàoyìng / jap. 巨大磁気抵抗効果 kyodai jiki teikō kōka. This makes the term, although not so concise, quite transparent, since the general meaning is derived from parts of the words.

(2) Hieroglyphs in both Japanese and Chinese are used to write phonetically "inconvenient" words, namely those words that do not fit well into the phonetics of the language. In Chinese, almost all words belong to this category and are poorly understood due to their dissonance when translated into Chinese.

Japanese is much easier to adopt and adapt foreign words in its own way, but there are still cases when the English term does not fit well into Japanese phonetics (it is long, contains unusual sounds), in this case it is most often calculated, which means it is written in hieroglyphs. For example, there is the Japanese hieroglyphic term kikai gakushū "machine learning" (literally machine learning + learning), created through calculus, but there is also a rare variation of it, a phonetic loan from English machine learning. However, due to the fact that kikai gakushū better reveals the essence of this concept, less is used.

(3) In Japanese, there is a problem of competition between katakana and hieroglyphs (phonetic borrowings and hieroglyphic words). In modern Japanese, foreign terms are more often phonetically borrowed and written in the Katakana alphabet, but if the term remains incomprehensible to native speakers, a hieroglyphic analogue appears in parallel. For example, "crowdfunding" has both a phonetic loanword, kuraudo fandingu, and a calcified term. "masses of people" + "means") or, for example, "biomarker" has the phonetic notation バイーーカー baiomakā and the calcified term 生 se seitai shihyō. In the above two cases, the terms are used with the same frequency, unlike the example in paragraph (2).

This is because katakana in Japanese and phonetic hieroglyphic notation in Chinese are convenient for quick borrowing, but suffer from the accuracy of the conveyed meaning, and hieroglyphs provide semantic transparency, but the terms are much more difficult to create. That is why the Japanese language resorts to calculus and hieroglyphic writing of new terms only if the phonetic borrowing from a foreign language has some drawbacks, for example, the meaning is not too transparent, the combination of sounds is difficult to pronounce, etc.

(4) In scientific and environmental vocabulary, both languages exhibit parallel root decomposition or calculus, when both languages independently form new words: "carbon neutrality" is translated as 炭素中立 tansochūritsu in Japanese and 碳中和 tàn zhōnghé in Chinese (in both cases, as follows. "carbon" + "neutrality", but expressed in different hieroglyphs).

The process of borrowing hieroglyphic vocabulary sometimes works both ways, and to a greater extent in the technological sphere and popular culture. For example, Japanese 無人機 mujinki, "unmanned aerial vehicle (drone)" was perceived in the Chinese language and adapted as 无人机 wúrénjī, although earlier in the Chinese language used construction 无人驾驶飞行器 wúrén jiàshǐ fēixíngqì "unmanned flying device." In the opposite direction, the Chinese term 爆买 bàomǎi "purchases in large quantities" was borrowed into Japanese, which received a similar form in Japanese.

An important factor is the state language policy regarding new borrowings from foreign languages ^[19].The main extralinguistic reason for the predominance of root sentences and hieroglyphic words used to denote new concepts in Chinese is that in order to preserve the purity of the Chinese language and prevent the dominance of Anglicisms, the Law on the State Standard Language of the People's Republic of China was adopted at the state level in 2001. According to its provisions, foreign terms must first be translated in meaning, and not written phonetically. There are also directives Affairs Office of language and writing of China (国家语言文字工作委员会语言文字规范（标准）管理办法 "Order management linguistic standards (standards) State Committee on Language and Writing"), issued in 2010, which state that when introducing foreign terms, translation should be preferred over transcription in order to preserve the purity of the Chinese language. All this, of course, affects the ways in which new words are formed in the Chinese language and limits phonetic borrowings. In Japan, however, there is no such restriction on phonetic borrowings by state language planning authorities, so now katakana is widely used, even, for example, in translations of foreign film titles, where this is not required and is not due to the reasons listed above ^[20].

In general, Japanese shows a tendency towards phonetic borrowings and abbreviations, while Chinese is more actively using calculus and the creation of new phrases. At the same time, in some cases, word formation in two languages proceeds in parallel: terms with the same meaning but different forms appear. Cross-borrowings between Chinese and Japanese also occur, but they are rare and limited. This is especially noticeable in the case of borrowings from Chinese into Japanese. The latest terms can sometimes be borrowed from Chinese due to the growing influence of China in the technological sphere, however, in general, most terms related to science and technology, on the contrary, are borrowed from Japanese into Chinese: "artificial intelligence" whale. 无人机 wúrénjī from YAP. 無人機 mujinki, "synthetic biology" kit. 合成生物学 héchéng shēngwùxué from YAP. 合成生物学 gōsei seibutsugaku and "neuroplasticity" kit. 神经可塑性 shénjīng kěsùxìng from YAP. 神経可塑性 shinkei kasosei. This is due to Japan's historical role in adapting Western concepts through hieroglyphs. Back in the Meiji era (1868-1912), the Chinese language borrowed a huge layer of scientific vocabulary from the Japanese language ^[6], although now the influence of the Japanese scientific community obviously plays a lesser role for China, therefore, Japan's lexical innovations are borrowed into Chinese in very limited quantities. It is important to note that the globalization of science increases the dependence of both languages on English rather than on each other.