English words and abbreviations such as ATM, DVD, e-mail and WTO are permeating (遍布) people’s daily lives more than their Chinese counterparts, prompting(促进) China to add common English words to its newly published Chinese dictionaries.
The newly published Modern Chinese Dictionary 2002 appended edition and Standard Modern Chinese Dictionary both include four pages of English words and abbreviations.
Linguists said that compared with terms containing multiple words, their English counterparts were much simpler. GDP, for instance, which in Chinese is called “guo nei sheng chan zong zhi”, is already commonly accepted by Chinese people for its convenience.
Another new phenomenon is that more English-Chinese combined words are created without purely Chinese words to match. For example, “T xu shan” in Chinese means T-shirt in English.
Linguists predicted that with China’s increasingly opening up and the economic globalization(经济全球化), more English words would melt into the Chinese language. In the 1996 edition of the Modern Chinese Dictionary, only 39 English words and abbreviations were cited, whereas in the 2002 edition, the number rose to 142.
