# How does Chinese assign tone to loanwords from non-tonal languages? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [August 24, 2006, 10:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-chinese-assign-tone-to-loanwords-from-non-tonal-languages/370101 "2006-08-24T22:09:25Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 9\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Lama\_Pacos](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/d6d6ee/32.png) [@Lama\_Pacos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lama_Pacos)\ **Post date:** [August 24, 2006, 10:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-chinese-assign-tone-to-loanwords-from-non-tonal-languages/370101/1 "2006-08-24T22:09:25Z")
Do they drop tone altogether? Is it decided arbitrarily? Or perhaps by analogy to native Chinese words that are phonetically or semantically similar? ---
**Author:** ![jjimm](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/ba8739/32.png) [@jjimm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jjimm)\ **Post date:** [August 24, 2006, 10:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-chinese-assign-tone-to-loanwords-from-non-tonal-languages/370101/2 "2006-08-24T22:15:22Z")
[QUOTE=Lama Pacos] Or perhaps by analogy to native Chinese words that are phonetically or semantically similar? [/QUOTE] 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. ---
**Author:** ![Throatwarbler\_Mangrove](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/8c91f0/32.png) [@Throatwarbler\_Mangrove](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Throatwarbler_Mangrove)\ **Post date:** [August 24, 2006, 10:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-chinese-assign-tone-to-loanwords-from-non-tonal-languages/370101/3 "2006-08-24T22:18:47Z")
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”. ---
**Author:** ![Frylock](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/ce7236/32.png) [@Frylock](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Frylock)\ **Post date:** [August 24, 2006, 11:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-chinese-assign-tone-to-loanwords-from-non-tonal-languages/370101/4 "2006-08-24T23:01:56Z")
[QUOTE=kawaiitentaclebeast] You’re assuming there is a single monolithic “the Chinese” who **arbitrates** this kind of thing. [/QUOTE] (Emphasis added) There is no such assumption to be found in or reasonably attributed to the OP. -FrL- ---
**Author:** ![Throatwarbler\_Mangrove](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/8c91f0/32.png) [@Throatwarbler\_Mangrove](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Throatwarbler_Mangrove)\ **Post date:** [August 24, 2006, 11:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-chinese-assign-tone-to-loanwords-from-non-tonal-languages/370101/5 "2006-08-24T23:07:58Z")
> [@](#): > > There is no such assumption to be found in or reasonably attributed to the OP. 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? ---
**Author:** ![Frylock](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/ce7236/32.png) [@Frylock](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Frylock)\ **Post date:** [August 24, 2006, 11:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-chinese-assign-tone-to-loanwords-from-non-tonal-languages/370101/6 "2006-08-24T23:23:16Z")
[QUOTE=kawaiitentaclebeast] 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? [/QUOTE] 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- ---
**Author:** ![Throatwarbler\_Mangrove](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/8c91f0/32.png) [@Throatwarbler\_Mangrove](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Throatwarbler_Mangrove)\ **Post date:** [August 24, 2006, 11:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-chinese-assign-tone-to-loanwords-from-non-tonal-languages/370101/7 "2006-08-24T23:42:43Z")
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: > [@](#): > > Do they drop tone altogether? Is it decided arbitrarily? Or perhaps by analogy to native Chinese words that are phonetically or semantically similar? Is: 1. However the fuck I feel like doing it. Yay for living languages! and 1. 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. ---
**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\ **Post date:** [August 25, 2006, 2:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-chinese-assign-tone-to-loanwords-from-non-tonal-languages/370101/8 "2006-08-25T02:15:57Z")
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](http://www.pinyin.info/readings/mair/taiwanese.html#part3c): > [@](#): > > The myth that there is only a single Chinese (Han) language and that it is spoken by more than a billion people (Chen 1999: 1) is as widespread, relatively recent, persistent, and obnoxiously misleading as the myth that the Great Wall was the only man-made object on earth that could be seen from the moon. Furthermore, both of these myths were perpetrated by Westerners and foisted upon the Chinese. Fortunately, the Ripleyesque “Believe It or Not!” nonsense about the Great Wall (Waldron 1990: 214, 253n596) has at last been disproven by astronauts who went to the moon and could not see any man-made structures on earth with the naked eye. The myth about a nation of Chinese speaking a single language made up of countless “dialects” with only negligible differences of “accent” continues to root itself ever more deeply in the global consciousness, plaguing common sense and scientific observation all the while. > > [snip] > > The mischief surrounding the myth of monolingualism was further exacerbated during the middle of the first half of the twentieth century with the mistranslation of the word fangyan as “dialect.” In linguistic classification, a dialect is normally defined as a variety of a certain language, the language being the larger unit and the dialect the smaller unit. Furthermore, although different dialects of the same language may have slightly different phonological, lexical, and grammatical properties, they are usually considered to be mutually intelligible. Naturally, subdialects – which are smaller, lower level divisions of dialects – have fewer differences among each other than do dialects. By uniformly translating fangyan as “dialect,” this gives the misleading impression that all Sinitic languages are mutually intelligible, but this is patently not the case. ---
**Author:** ![Excalibre](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/898d66/32.png) [@Excalibre](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Excalibre)\ **Post date:** [August 25, 2006, 3:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-chinese-assign-tone-to-loanwords-from-non-tonal-languages/370101/9 "2006-08-25T03:26:56Z")
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.