English words from Chinese zt

English words from Chinese

This list parallels my similar pages on words from Arabic and Amerindian languages. The main sources are the OED, the AHD, a number of Chinese dictionaries, ZhongWen.com, and Wikipedia (for nailing down the exact characters).

I’ve included a number of proper names, partly because it's fun to know that (e.g.) Mao means 'wool', partly because Chinese place names tend to have clear, simple etymologies with useful words in them.

M. = Mandarin, C. = Cantonese (given, I’m afraid, in whatever transliteration was near at hand). I use = rather than ← to emphasize that the relationship between the two is cognacy, not derivation. That is, the Cantonese word doesn’t derive from the Mandarin; both derive from an older Middle Chinese form.

Japanese has borrowed Chinese words at various periods. For instance, the gei in geisha doesn’t derive directly from modern Mandarin yì, but from an earlier stage of the language, closer to Middle Chinese ngiäi (Karlgren’s reconstruction).

Thanks to Hirofumi Nagamura, Philip Newton, bicoherent, Ran, and Rachel Kronick for corrections.

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