(1) Positive impact
First of all, the emergence of alphabetic words overcomes the defects of Chinese in expressing some new things.
Writing and language are the relationship between recording and being recorded, that is, the relationship between form and content. Content determines form, and form serves content is the fundamental law. Written recording language is the vocabulary of recording language in the final analysis, which can be proved by Lu Xun's naming of The True Story of Ah Q. "Ah Q" has no surname, and everyone calls him "Aqui". In order to find a suitable Chinese character for this sound, Lu Xun spent a lot of time, but in the end he could not accurately express the name concept of "Ah Q", and finally he had to write it as Ah Q according to the popular spelling in Britain. It is precisely because of the requirements for the meaning and content of words that their writing forms have to bypass Chinese characters and adopt letters. Later alphabetic words also had this internal cause. In the era of globalization, new concepts and new things emerge one after another, and many new words are introduced from abroad. Due to the cultural differences between the East and the West, Chinese often encounters difficulties in the process of expression. For example, "MPEG 1 Audio Layer3" is difficult to record in Chinese translation, and can only be interpreted as "a common digital audio compression format", and there is no way to name it. Moreover, the translation process often consumes a lot of energy and time, which is seriously out of touch with the urgent needs of real communication, so the universal and concise "MP3" has been recognized by the public. Alphabetic words naturally become the assistants of Chinese characters, replacing Chinese characters to serve Chinese in inconvenient or even unusable fields.
Some people think that the appearance of alphabetic words destroys the "purity" of Chinese characters, which is ignorance of the nature of words. Language is just a tool for people to communicate and think. We should cherish the language of our motherland, but we should not blindly worship it. Chinese characters can't express themselves accurately, so people introduce Latin letters to create Chinese Pinyin to overcome it. Similarly, when there are defects in language expression, we can also learn from the strengths of other nationalities and create alphabetic words. The appearance of alphabetic words also reflects the influence of economic globalization on language and writing.
Secondly, alphabetic words enrich the writing system of Chinese.
With the development of history, the writing system of Chinese has gradually changed from single to rich. In ancient times, the writing of Chinese was completely completed by Chinese characters, and only the reading of sentences with circles and dots began in the Han Dynasty. In modern times, punctuation marks were introduced from foreign countries and mixed with the original circle and dot symbols. 1904, The Commercial Press published the book Han Shu in English, which was the earliest publication using punctuation marks in China. 19 19, the preparatory meeting for the unification of putonghua was established. Hu Shi, Zhou Zuoren and Qian put forward the proposal on promulgating new punctuation marks, listing 12 punctuation marks, which were adopted by the Ministry of Education of Beiyang government the following year. Since then, punctuation marks have become an indispensable part of Chinese writing system.
Similar to punctuation, there are Arabic numerals. Arabic numerals were introduced into China from13rd century to14th century, but they were not popular at that time. At the beginning of the 20th century, with the absorption and introduction of foreign mathematical achievements, Arabic numerals began to be used slowly in China, and now they have become the most commonly used numerals in people's study, life and communication. It is used to write and record modern Chinese together with punctuation marks and Chinese characters.
The emergence of alphabetic words is another major change in the Chinese writing system. As early as 1978, the authoritative normative dictionary Modern Chinese Dictionary in China included such alphabetic words as "Ah Q", "Klan" and "X-ray". Now, many dictionaries have added letter words in their appendices, and letter words have become a part of Chinese vocabulary. This makes the Chinese character writing system have one more writing form, from a single Chinese character to a binary pattern of Chinese characters and letters.
The introduction of punctuation marks, Arabic numerals and alphabetic words reflects the openness and innovation of Chinese.
Thirdly, the appearance of alphabetic words makes Chinese common words "compete" with them.
Chinese often has a process of transliteration before free translation for loanwords, and Chinese sometimes has similarities with alphabetic words. In expressing new things and new concepts, ordinary Chinese vocabulary is not as concise and convenient as alphabetic words, but it can give full play to the advantages of visualization. For example, at first people used fans to express their enthusiastic supporters of a certain kind of things or stars, and later a new word "fans" appeared, which is both a transliteration of fans and an image description of these enthusiastic fans, because "diaosi" can mean "missing", "tangled" or "lingering". In addition, "vermicelli" and food "vermicelli" have the same name, which also makes people feel close. These reasons make the new word "fans" quickly popular. For another example, in the past, in order to save storage space, computer software systems only used two decimal places to record the last two digits of the year, which would regard 2000 as 1900, which caused a series of problems. This system defect is called "Y2K problem". Because system defects are represented by bugs in English, a new word "Millennium bug" was born, which was very popular at the turn of the Millennium.
The China Language Life Report (2006) released by the Ministry of Education in August 65438+June 2007 lists 17 1 new Chinese words, of which there are only two letters, namely "M-type society" (referring to the globalization trend, the polarization between the rich and the poor is obvious, the middle class loses its competitiveness, the number is greatly reduced, and the society. But only one of the hottest words in 2008 has an alphabetic word ("Don't be too CNN"). This shows that ordinary Chinese vocabulary has maintained its vigorous vitality under the strong impact of alphabetic words.
(2) Negative effects
First of all, there are some phenomena of abusing alphabetic words in Chinese.
It has become an obvious trend that people casually use Chinese Pinyin to "create" alphabetic words in network language. However, the network is a special environment, and the network language is a special product under this background. Therefore, the development of alphabetic words in network language can go with the flow and will not have an impact on daily language. In our daily life, we should pay enough attention to the abuse of alphabetic words. It is convenient and concise to use alphabetic words, but in addition to alphabetic words, there is already a customary form of abbreviation in Chinese-abbreviation, and abbreviation and its formation method have long been familiar to people, so there is no need to abbreviate some longer words with pinyin alphabetic words, let alone abbreviations of English words.
In addition, the inclusion of alphabetic words in Chinese-dominated sentences often becomes the focus of readers' attention, but if there are too many alphabetic words in a sentence, it will distract attention and affect the reading quality. For example, "OLs in the E-era sometimes wears the most fashionable and dazzling styles, and sometimes only wears a black classic T-shirt and a pair of DIY jeans, which appears in the most fashionable pub and makes some little MM jealous." This sentence gives people a sense of confusion and affects people's understanding of the sentence.
The abuse of alphabetic words is directly related to people's excessive pursuit of new trends. When alphabetic words just appear, people will pay too much attention to them and become the capital for some people to show off their knowledge. As letter words gradually become a part of people's daily life, people's freshness will naturally decline, and the abuse of letter words may be alleviated.
Second, letter words sometimes make the meaning of sentences unclear.
On the one hand, alphabetic words are not vivid, and some relatively uncommon alphabetic words are incomprehensible to ordinary readers without Chinese annotations. On the other hand, because alphabetic words usually consist of the first letters of several English words, different words may use the same form, which easily leads to polysemy. For example, CS can not only refer to a customer satisfaction in economics, but also be used in an online game (half-life: anti-terrorism elite). ABC can represent basic knowledge or general knowledge, and it can also refer to American-born Chinese. CPO can refer to both the chief privacy officer and the chief programmer. ATM can refer to both ATM and asynchronous time division multiplexing in network technology. Even the familiar Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) means the British Federation of Industry and Archives Bus. Therefore, if these alphabetic words are not marked with Chinese meaning when they are used, they will be easily misunderstood and ambiguous, which may cause unpredictable losses.
In addition, the pronunciation and writing forms of alphabetic words are also irregular. Pronunciation, such as HSK, GB, etc Some people advocate pronouncing in Chinese Pinyin, while people usually pronounce in English letters. In writing, the case of some alphabetic words is not uniform. For example, e-mail, e-mail and e-mail coexist. These differences will cause confusion in the use of alphabetic words in TV, radio, newspapers and other industries, and also bring some trouble to people's communication.
2. The influence of Chinese system on alphabetic words
Just as words from French are governed by English language rules, alphabetic words are also governed by Chinese language rules.
(1) Alphabetic words are mainly Chinese grammar.
The most typical example in this respect is n, which is very different from other alphabetic words. It has been deeply branded with Chinese, and its meaning and usage have a strong Chinese color. Most importantly, its meaning includes the creation of Chinese, without the motivation of Chinese Pinyin, and without the direct source in the daily language of foreign languages. N is just a letter in English, but in modern Chinese it means "great" with a very exaggerated color. "This meaning may come from the usage of n in mathematics. In mathematics, n represents a natural number sequence, which can represent the infinite increase of quantity, while other letters are different. They are just a number in the era, not a collection of numbers. This usage has deeply influenced students, and this mathematical concept has been extended from books to spoken English "(CoCo Lee, 2006). For example, "N kinds of rumors" are many rumors. In Chinese, n has at least two usages: one is used as a numeral, which means a large number, followed by a quantifier, such as "I sent him n short messages yesterday, but he didn't reply". The second usage as an adverb means "extremely high degree", which is derived from the first usage and almost means "very" and "very", such as "I want to know her telephone number".
From the usage of n, we can see that the part of speech and usage of letter words must conform to the grammatical rules of Chinese in order to formally become a part of Chinese.
(2) Alphabetic words are mainly Chinese rhetoric.
After a new letter word appears, sometimes a large number of parodies will be produced. For example, CBD (Central Business District) was very popular for a while, and living in CBD was the dream of many people, so the words such as CBD back garden, CBD backyard and CBD bedroom came into being. For another example, with the advent of the information age, a representative word "e" came into being, and so did the e-era, e-school, e-yuan, e-books and so on, as if everything had the color of information.
(3) Chinese strives for clear meanings of alphabetic words.
Alphabetic words are mainly recorded by pronunciation, and their semantics cannot be recognized by their configuration. Therefore, when some alphabetic words are created, a related Chinese morpheme is often added to supplement the semantic categories of abbreviations. Such as AB corner (referring to two actors playing the same role in the play, generally referring to two people with the same status and role), BP machine, BB (baby), pager (pager) and so on. Others transliterate or translate other words by keeping a single letter, such as B-ultrasound, H-shares, Y-chromosomes, IC cards, etc. Even if people don't know the specific meaning of these letter words in sentences, they can understand the meaning of sentences with the help of Chinese morphemes and related contexts. These alphabetic words conform to the semi-transliteration and semi-free translation of foreign words (such as ballet, beer, etc.). ), which embodies the characteristics of Chinese.
(4) In Chinese, the letter words should be converted as much as possible.
Because Chinese resists disyllabic words, there will be an automatic domestication of letter words in Chinese (especially disyllabic letter words introduced from pure original words). Most of Chinese are disyllabic words and trisyllabic words, so Chinese will try to keep the number of syllables in alphabetic words or letters below four. For example, the simplification process of the word E-mail is that the original electronicmail is abbreviated as E-mail, and some people simply use mail instead of E-mail. In the Dictionary of Modern Chinese Neologisms, EM is included as the abbreviation of E-mail. For another example, the online chat tool is OICQ, but its abbreviation QQ is popular now. The karaoke private room used by people is often called K room now. In the Dictionary of Modern Chinese Neologisms, there are more than 370 alphabetic words, but only more than 80 of them are more than four syllables.
Sometimes disyllabic words are even simplified to monosyllabic words. For example, NB often means "awesome" and "strong", which can be positive or negative. For example, "students who score above 600 in CET-6 are very NB" and "such a young child smokes too NB". Now on the Internet, NB is sometimes referred to as N for short. For example, "140 computer classic skills-true n" "I just saw a very n car, let's estimate the price."
In addition, there is another way of glyph transformation, such as "A-shaped skirt", "V-shaped collar", "U-shaped tube", "H-shaped steel", "T-shaped talent" and "X-shaped leg", which are used to express concepts and describe things, so that readers can easily imagine the specific appearance of things.
(5) Chinese actively creates new alphabetic words.
Alphabetic words are not equal to foreign words, and many alphabetic words have been created. Alphabetic words produced in Chinese are often close to life and relatively easy to understand. Most of these alphabetic words are Chinese Pinyin abbreviations or English abbreviations representing things in China: alphabetic words from Chinese Pinyin abbreviations include GB (National Standard), HSK (Chinese Proficiency Test), PSC (Mandarin Proficiency Test), RMB (RMB), XPP (Cheating in Summer), ZL (Patent), etc. While A-shares (domestic stocks), B-shares (special stocks denominated in RMB and subscribed and traded in foreign currency or Hong Kong dollars), CHINANET (China Network), CCTV (China Central Television) and CNC (China Network Communication Company) use English letters, but they represent China's things. In addition, G (GRE), T-group (people who want to study abroad and take the TOEFL test) and H-class (people who are hardworking, highly educated, happy and hopeful) reflect some characteristics of social life in China.
The emergence of new letter words is also reflected in the gradual evolution of letter words with a single meaning into new meanings. For example, in the process of generalization, PK directly derives various new meanings. Specifically, it mainly means "confrontation", "confrontation" and "one-on-one", and also means "defeat", "kill" and "elimination" (Li Xiaoyan 2007). PK is now used to express "duel" similar to VS. For example, "China vs America" in the sports game preview can be expressed as "China vs America" and now it can also be expressed as "China PK America". The semantic evolution of PK shows that there are clues of polysemous words, synonyms and synonyms in alphabetic words, which are developing into mature words.