Chapter 36 Section 3 The Influence of Foreign Nations or Foreign Languages ​​on Chinese Characters

What I talked about above is the situation that some foreign nationalities or foreign countries accept the influence of Chinese characters.In fact, most of the history of the Han nationality’s contact with other nations or foreign countries is much longer than the history when they began to borrow or learn from Chinese characters to create characters. There are also many countries and nations outside the cultural circle of Chinese characters that are also different from the Han nationality. cultural exchange.These contacts and exchanges inevitably left traces in Chinese characters.There are quite a few elements in Chinese that come from foreign languages ​​and foreign languages, and many words such as lion, grape, alfalfa, loquat, betel nut, myrrh (drug name), Buddha, Bodhisattva, hell, devil, station (post), Huluba ( medicine name), emerald (jade name), etc., were introduced into China hundreds of years or even nearly 2,000 years ago.Since modern times, with the "Eastward Spread of Western Learning", more and more new words have been introduced, too numerous to enumerate.

However, in most cases, Chinese users use existing Chinese characters to record such loanwords through transliteration, translation of meaning, or combination of sound and meaning.But sometimes new words are specially created for such new words.For example, in the "Jade Department" of "Shuowen Jiezi", there is a character "(Wang Ding) [liu Liu], which is annotated as: "Bi (Wang Ding) also came out of Xihuzhong. "According to modern scholars' research, it is a newly created special word for the Chinese translation of the Sanskrit proverb veluriya (later translated as "Bi Liuli" or "bark glass"). A kind of flower came from ancient Persia (now Iran), and the original translation was "wiping Li, Moli, Moli, and Moli", and later created the word "jasmine", which became the standard word form, adding cursive prefixes to indicate that their meaning category is plants. There is another word "magic", which is from the Sanskrit word mara It is a newly created special character for the province of Chinese translation. Xuanying, a monk in the Tang Dynasty, compiled a dictionary of Buddhist scriptures, "All Sutras Yinyi", and pointed out: "Magic, there is no such word in the book, and the translator made it. "(Volume 21) shows that it is a new word created by the translator of the Buddhist scriptures according to the meaning.

After Mendeleev's periodic table of elements in modern Russia (1834-1907 A.D.) was introduced to China, chemists acted as Cangjie and created many new words, such as chlorine, neon, and magnesium. , scandium (scandium), arsenic (arsenic), selenium (selenium), etc.These characters are generally formed using the phonetic method. For example, the side of the gold character indicates a metal element, the side of the stone character indicates a non-metallic solid element, the beginning of the gas character indicates a non-metallic gas element, and the rest indicates the pronunciation.These new pictophonetic characters are reasonable in structure and meet the needs, and they will soon become popular.

There are also some new characters created by other methods. For example, the pipe pump (that is, the water press) is called "pump", which was originally a transliteration of the English pump by the people of Guangzhou. .This dialect word was later absorbed by Mandarin. It can be seen that the intake and absorption of foreign words in Chinese is active, and many new characters have been produced in this process, which has enriched the library of Chinese characters.This is an aspect of cultural exchanges between China and foreign countries, which deserves our attention and study.