Chinese words in English

There are hundreds of languages in Asia, and most of them are not written in the Roman alphabet. As is typical in situations where transliteration is necessary, there are competing systems at a given time plus the systems of transliteration change over time, which leads to variety in spelling. What is more, any given word may not enter English directly, but rather via intermediate languages, and an intermediate language may shape a word strongly.

Chinese and Hindi are discussed here, but there are many more Asian languages that have given words to English—languages such as Tagalog, Sinhalese, Malayalam, Tamil, Tibetan, Javanese, and Japanese. Not only are there hundreds of Asian languages, there are a very many Asian language families. It is because of geography rather than linguistic relatedness that words from Asian languages are grouped together here.

CHINESE IN ENGLISH
It is often claimed that more speakers speak Chinese than any other language. Such claims are intersting. The language referred to as "Chinese" seems more like a group of languages, not a single language. And what are often called "Chinese dialects" are different languages that are mutually incomprehensible (at least orally), languages as different as Danish and English.

For the purposes of exploring English language words, the two most important Chinese languages are Mandarin and Cantonese. Both are written in a 2,000-year-old system of ideograms or "characters" that requires a great deal of education to master: There are approximately 40,000 of them. Just reading the daily paper requires knowing several thousand. Thus attaining literacy in Chinese takes much longer than in English. The sounds of Chinese can, however, be represented in the Roman alphabet (by a system called Pinyin), just as Japanese can (Romaji). The Pinyin system is the current official way to represent Chinese in Roman letters. Historically, there have been other systems.

There is one aspect of Chinese that is quite foreign to English speakers. Namely, what English speakers would call the same sound can have several meanings depending on its "tone." Mandarin has four tones, Cantonese has nine. Even if the tone is the same, there may be more than one homophone (which are written by different characters). For instance, there are 24 unrelated Mandarin Chinese words that are spelled L-i-a-n in Pinyin. See "yen" in table below, which has three different English meanings and corresponds to several different etyma in Cantonese and Mandarin (aka Pekingese).

A factor that unites Cantonese and Mandarin is that a Cantonese speaker can read something written by a Mandarin speaker, and vice versa. That is because the characters' meanings are the same in Mandarin and Chinese. The sounds that correspond to a given character are, however, different in Cantonese and Mandarin. Thus in writing, it is one language, whereas in speaking, it is two. I do not know enough about the grammar of each to say anything about that aspect. I am not sure how to count languages in general, but this sure does throw a spanner into the works.

Most Chinese-derived English words are relatively easy to spell. Here are some of the most common Chinese-derived English words:

word/open compound	Etymological meaning	etymology comment	First use in OED
brainwashing		translation of Chinese	1950
bok choy	white + vegetable	Cantonese	1847
cheongsam	long + gown	Cantonese	1957
chow	meat dumpling	perhaps Pekingese	1856
dim sum	speck/refreshment + heart/center	Cantonese	1948
ginkgo	silver + apricot	came into English via New Latin and Japanese	1727
ginseng	?	Pekingese	1654
gung ho	short for: Light Industries Cooperative Society	Pekingese	1942
judo	gentleness + art, way	Pekingese, came into English via Japanese	1889
jujitsu	gentleness + art	Pekingese, came into English via Japanese	1875
kalanchoe	mustard + orchid + vegetable	perhaps Cantonese, came via New Latin	1830
kowtow	strike/bump + head	Pekingese	1863
kumquat	gold + orange	Cantonese	1699
kung fu	skill	Cantonese or Pekingese	1966
lo mein	stirred noodles	Cantonese	not in OED
oolong	black + dragon	labeled simply Chinese in Webster's Third	1845
pekoe	white + down	Amoy (from city Xiamen in s. Fujian: ~=Taiwanese)	1713
pinyin	arrange + sound	Pekingese	1963
ramen	pull + noodles	Pekingese, came into English via Japanese	1972
shar-pei	sand + fur	Cantonese	1976
shih tzu	lion + dog	Pekingese	1921
Shogun		Pekingese, came into English via Japanese	1615
souchong	small + sort	Pekingese	1760
tai chi	"the Absolute in Chinese Cosmology" (full name is tai chi chuan: chuan = fist, boxing)	Pekingese	1736
taipan		Pekingese	1834
tangram		Pekingese + Greek	1864
tea		Amoy	1598
tycoon	great + ruler	Pekingese, came into English via Japanese	1857
typhoon	great + wind	Cantonese and Greek influence on earlier Arabic, which was from Greek	1588
wok		Cantonese	1952
won ton		Cantonese	1948
yen	round, circle, dollar	Pekingese, came into English via Japanese	1870's-80's
	craving	Cantonese or Pekingese
	opium	Cantonese or Pekingese
zen		Sanskrit > Pali > Pekingese > Japanese > English

• Two of the words listed above are from Amoy, a language of Southeastern China.
• Among the other words, clearly there are a couple of patterns: 
• (1) borrowings directly from Cantonese or Pekingese and
  
• (2) borrowings that came via the intermediary of Japanese, which borrowed a great deal from China, including a writing system.
  
• It is difficult to speak of Cantonese, Pekingese, or Japanese spelling patterns, because none of those languages "spell" words with an alphabet. The most that can be said is that the spelling patterns are either adapted English spelling patterns or the best that English-speakers could muster to represent the original sounds. That means that Chinese-derived words are a bit more likely to be "spelled like they sound" than native English or European-language–derived English words.
  

There are, of course, more Chinese-derived English words than those in the above table: the above table shows only a few more or less familiar ones.

Hindi-derived English Words

Hindi is another major world language that has had a significant lexical influence in English. Hindi is an official language of India that is spoken mostly by Hindus. (India has 15 "major" languages.) Spoken mostly in Northern and Central India, Hindi is an Indo-European language of the Indo-Iranian branch and is thus much more closely related to English than Chinese is. It is written in Devanagari script, which is an abjad script that is usually used for Sanskrit as well, having 34 consonant+schwa signs and 9 vowel signs (well, it does depend on how one counts). It descends from the Nagari script, which is from the Gupta Brahmi Script, which dates back to the 3rd century BCE and may have developed from Aramaic, which is a semitic script cognate with the script that Greeks and Romans borrowed. Devanagari is written left to right and has only consonant letters with a default /a/ that is not written ( other vowels are done by diacritics, but initial vowels have their own independent signs). Hindi has been extensively influenced by the older language Sanskrit. Among the most common Hindi-derived English words are:
 

Hindi-derived English word/open compound	etymology comment (if word did not originate in Hindi or has other influences)
bandanna	from Sanskrit
bangle
banyan (tree)	from Sanskrit
bungalow
burka/burqa/burkha/bourkha	from Arabic
cheetah	from Sanskrit
chintz
chop ("mark on goods")
cot	from Sanskrit
cowrie	from Sanskrit, of Dravidian origin
cummerbund	from Persian
cushy	from Persian
dhurrie
dinghy	also from Bengali
dungaree
gunnysack	from Sanskrit, probably of Dravidian origin
gymkhana	probably modification of Hindi, from Persian: influenced by Greek
hindustani	from Persian
izzat	from Arabic
juggernaut	from Sanskrit
jungle	from Sanskrit
jute	also Bengali, probably from Sanskrit
lac	also Persian
loot	from Sanskrit
mahout	from Sanskrit
memsahib	from Hindi-ified English madam (> mem) + Hindi sahib "master"
mongoose	from Prakrit, perhaps Dravidian origin
nabob	from Arabic
pajama	from Persian
punch?	from Sanskrit
raja	from Persian
rupee	from Sanskrit
seersucker	from Persian
shampoo	(I once saw a bumper sticker that read "Boycott shampoo: use the real thing": folk etymology joke)
sitar/sittar	from Persian
tom-tom
veranda	part Hindi, part Portuguese

• There are many food words that derive from Hindi:
  
• ghee (from Sanskrit),
  
• chutney (from Prakrit),
  
• biryani,
  
• lassi,
  
• masala,
  
• garam masala,
  
• naan,
  
• paratha,
  
• poori,
  
• raita,
  
• roti,
  
• samosa,
  
• tandoori,
  
• basmati (from Sanskrit), and
  
• kabob (also Persian, Arabic and Turkish: originally Turkish)

And once again, this list is just a few more or less familiar words: there are many many more Hindi-derived English words.

For comparison's sake, to give us an idea of how many English words that were borrowed from Hindi were NOT listed in the list above, here is a list of all the English words in W3 that contain the language Malayalam in their etymology section in W3: that does not necessarily mean they have a Malayalam etymon in their past, because the dictionary sometimes lists Malayalam cognates. Malayalam is a language of southern India closely related to Tamil, one of the official languages of Sri Lanka. The list includes 47 words, 7 of which were familiar to me ("candy" is not one: this "candy" refers to a unit of weight). It's not scientific, but it can give you a very rough idea of how many words from Hindi (or Chinese) were NOT listed in the lists above. There are 7 familiar words out of a total of 47 words either from Malayalam or with cognates from Malayalam listed in the dictionary. If the same ratio holds for Hindi-derived words (it may not), then with 37 Hindi-derived words that were familiar to me, there ought to be 247 total Hindi-derived words. Someday I'll test that extrapolation.

ENGLISH WORDS FROM MALAYALAM

areca avaram bark ballam blatti family bola[2,noun] cachou candy[3,noun] carandas catechu chakram chatty[2,noun] chay[1,noun]

chetty choli choultry chuckler copra corge cot[6,noun] cowrie[1,noun] curry[2,noun] ilava illipe[1] illupi

jackfruit jangada kadamba kandelia katel kathakali katuka moringa muncheel nayadi nayar niota

ola pandal pariti pattamar pettah piney dammar poon[1,noun] popadam teak[1,noun] urena zamorin