Quxiang Thinking
QUXIANG-THINKING OF NEW WORDS OF CHINESE LANGUAGE
Zhang Yumei
Introduction Quxiang-thinking is one of the traditional ways of Chinese thinking. It is a way that the thinking always goes with pictures, by the imagine medium, to reason out some abstract things. This way of thinking was in the process of using and creating the ancient Chinese and ancient Chinese Characters. In the international context, a plenty of new Chinese words have emerged with grammars different from traditional Chinese ones. Meanwhile Chinese native speakers still insist on creating new words, transforming loanwords with Quxiang-thinking by the way of homophonic pun, analogy, relativity, etc., and using the lifelike Chinese Characters, lively Chinese words, Chinese word-building to transform the loanwords into the system of Chinese vocabulary. I have found some rules in the Quxiang-thinking by studying the newly appeared Chinese words in the latest five years and I will analyze them from four aspects as follows: 1. Self-created Pidgin English word and finally turned into common Chinese word One of the classical examples is the Pidgin English word “ungelivable”. It seems much like English word for its prefix “un” and suffix “ble”, but “geli” in the middle of it actually is the Chinese Pinyin for Chinese Character 给力, which means strongly support, very cool, very good, etc. I believe nobody understands this “English word” without any additional explanation. The word ungelivable expresses some information to us: with the globalization, especially in the situation that English is compulsory course in the school in China, the thinking way of many Chinese has been tending towards that of English; Meanwhile they Still stubbornly keep their own traditional way of thinking which is called Quxiang-thinking. In this example, the core etyma geli is Chinese Pinyin, though the prefix and the postfix are English. In the etyma geli, one part of it is ge，and its Chinese character is 给, which means enough
Zhang Yumei
Introduction Quxiang-thinking is one of the traditional ways of Chinese thinking. It is a way that the thinking always goes with pictures, by the imagine medium, to reason out some abstract things. This way of thinking was in the process of using and creating the ancient Chinese and ancient Chinese Characters. In the international context, a plenty of new Chinese words have emerged with grammars different from traditional Chinese ones. Meanwhile Chinese native speakers still insist on creating new words, transforming loanwords with Quxiang-thinking by the way of homophonic pun, analogy, relativity, etc., and using the lifelike Chinese Characters, lively Chinese words, Chinese word-building to transform the loanwords into the system of Chinese vocabulary. I have found some rules in the Quxiang-thinking by studying the newly appeared Chinese words in the latest five years and I will analyze them from four aspects as follows: 1. Self-created Pidgin English word and finally turned into common Chinese word One of the classical examples is the Pidgin English word “ungelivable”. It seems much like English word for its prefix “un” and suffix “ble”, but “geli” in the middle of it actually is the Chinese Pinyin for Chinese Character 给力, which means strongly support, very cool, very good, etc. I believe nobody understands this “English word” without any additional explanation. The word ungelivable expresses some information to us: with the globalization, especially in the situation that English is compulsory course in the school in China, the thinking way of many Chinese has been tending towards that of English; Meanwhile they Still stubbornly keep their own traditional way of thinking which is called Quxiang-thinking. In this example, the core etyma geli is Chinese Pinyin, though the prefix and the postfix are English. In the etyma geli, one part of it is ge，and its Chinese character is 给, which means enough