Do they drop tone altogether? Is it decided arbitrarily? Or perhaps by analogy to native Chinese words that are phonetically or semantically similar?
In my limited experience of venacular Cantonese, this is the case. E.g. taxi is “dik si” - phonetically similar to the loan-word, but two pre-existing words with their own tones. “Gay man” is “geh lo” - again, one pre-existing word with its own tone. “James” is “jim si” - again, pre-existing words.
I think it’s generally done in a way to mimic the emphasis used in the original language.You’re assuming there is a single monolithic “the Chinese” who arbitrates this kind of thing. There isn’t, it’s a living language with widely differing dialects, people make shit up all the time. Often loan words would be introduced that were Cantonese in origin and sound nothing like their original form in Mandarin, e.g. “Mcdonalds” is transliterated into Chinese as “Mai Dang Lao”, which in Mandarin doesn;t sound all that close to the original but in Cantonese, much closer. The tones generally used are “Mai4 Dang1 Lao2” which to Western ears would sort of sound like the emphasis was on the middle “Dang” syllable, as it is in the original english word. If you switched the tones around it might sound like “MacdoNALDS”, or “MACdonalds”.
(Emphasis added)
There is no such assumption to be found in or reasonably attributed to the OP.
-FrL-
I meant that there isn’t a single person or goverment body who arbitrarily decides this stuff. I admit I could have used a better word than “arbitrate” to describe it. All happy now?
What I meant is that the OP does not assume there is any government body or any single individual or anything like that which makes these decisions.
No big deal, sorry to post twice about it.
But anyway, the post doesn’t assume that.
-FrL-
Look, I understand we’re here to fight ignorance, and not each other, just so there’s absolutely no confusion, the answer to the question:
Is:
- However the fuck I feel like doing it. Yay for living languages!
and
- Generally it’s done in such a way that the syllables which are emphasized in the original word remain emphasized in the Chinese version. Often none of this really means anything since the original loan word may have been from a completely different Chinese dialect.
It should be noted that there is no such language as Chinese, and the various things called ‘dialects’ (Mandarin, Cantonese) are really languages.
From here:
I don’t know a ton about this, so this is going to be just a sort of brief, top-of-my-head sketch.
You have to understand, firstly, that the Chinese languages all have pretty restrictive phonotactics: that is, there’s a lot of rules about what makes a pronounceable word in Chinese - for instance, there are simply no consonant clusters in any of the Chinese languages. In Mandarin, the only consonant sounds permitted at the ends of syllables are R, N, and NG; there’s a few more permitted in some of the other Chinese languages, but for the most part syllables from other languages don’t have direct equivalents in the various Chinese languages. So things like brand names are generally translated with sounds that are just sort of inspired by the original name, with meanings that are pleasant and positive. So Coca-Cola is “ke3 kou3 ke3 le4”, which is not really an entirely grammatical sentence but basically works out as “can drink, can enjoy”. The tones are sort of irrelevant to the translation process, since the name is only going to be a vague approximation anyway. The tones for the syllables in the brand name are just whatever tones those syllables had anyway.
For things like foreign names and place-names, there’s a sort of standard set of characters used to approximate the foreign sounds. I believe there’s roughly standard translations for common first names, and translations for last names are normally created from those standard characters. Those characters all represent words with tones, of course, so the translations end up with tones attached by default. But the tone isn’t terribly important. Further, a lot of foreign place-names were translated quite awhile ago, and not into Mandarin but into Shanghainese or Cantonese, as those languages were spoken in major port cities with direct contact with Western visitors. So many Mandarin names for foreign cities and countries sound quite dissimilar to the actual names.
Other than that, at least in regard to standard Mandarin (as opposed to slang, which I’m not familiar with) and presumably the other Chinese languages as well, relatively few words are borrowed in that way. You simply can’t generally come up with a close equivalent to any foreign word within the limits of Chinese phonotactics, so foreign words are usually re-coined in Chinese. The word “telephone” is a good illustration. My understanding is that the initial word used was “delüfeng” (I don’t remember the tones), an attempt at approximating the English word. Of course, it’s not terribly close to the English, and it’s a rather awkward word in Chinese. Meanwhile, the Japanese invented their own word, which translates roughly as “electric speech”. The Japanese word was then borrowed into Chinese - a very easy process, since you simply read the characters with their Chinese rather than Japanese readings, and the resulting word, “dian4hua4” doesn’t sound anything like the foreign word but is instantly transparent to Chinese speakers and sounds like a native word. That sort of thing is generally done rather than attempting to replicate the pronounciation of foreign languages.
One interesting thing to note is that words are of course borrowed quite freely amongst all the Chinese languages, as most characters have a pronounciation in each of the Chinese languages, so the writing system ends up independent enough of the individual languages it records that it can function as an easy way to borrow words from one Chinese language into another.