Higher proportion of new words in China?

[Wippen (inactive)]

I have a feeling there is a higher proportion of new words are appearing in the Chinese language than there is in English, say. This is based on a 'feeling' and is based on the many new phenomena occurring in China. Examples of new words appearing in recent years include: 月光族，官二代，闪婚，

 

Anyone knows where the new words appearing in the Chinese language are counted, where this can be looked up?

 

It would be interesting to know. If there are more new words, this could indicate there are many new phenomena that are common and therefore need a "name". 

 

Could it also indicate the Chinese language lends itself to more creativity?

Is the compact hanzi way of expressing a concept also useful when it comes to new word creations?

 

What do you think?

 

[imron]

I think there are plenty of new words being created in English all the time, here are some ones recently added to the dictionary, and keep in mind there are plenty that have been created that aren't in the dictionary yet either e.g. lol and others.

 

Can't help with a source for new Chinese words.

[Zbigniew]

I think it would be very hard to establish which out of English and Chinese is currently more productive of neologisms unless you completely equalized the degrees of monitoring, reporting and recording of neologisms in the two languages. In practice this would be impossible to achieve. 

50 minutes ago, imron said:

that aren't in the dictionary yet either e.g. lol

"LOL" was accepted by the OED a few years back, apparently: https://public.oed.com/the-oed-today/recent-updates-to-the-oed/previous-updates/march-2011-update/

One of the most recent entries is "Mansplaining". A Chinese translation, anyone?

[889]

開腿族。

[Publius]

Define "word".

Is "hot dog" a word?

[ZC]

I feel like hot dog is a word, even if it is strictly two words, they comprise a single noun. Like ice cream or fire hydrant. All of those have spaces inside but in my opinion they still represent a word. All of them are strictly two words but are also listed as a pair in the dictionary separate from either word alone, I guess at that point it’s mostly a discussion on semantics rather than creating ways to describe items or concepts that didn’t have a name before.

[Wippen (inactive)]

@imron that thread has great content. Thanks for posting also liked the name Mental Floss.

 

@Zbigniew 

@publius I  was not trying to test an academic hypothesis. Nevertheless thanks for your insightful comments.

 

In the meantime I have found an answer that I can use for my pondering. :-)

 

Thanks to everyone that contributed to this thread.

 

 

 

 

 

[Publius]

"What constitutes a word" and "who gets to decide" -- these are difficult questions to answer.

I asked because I wanted to remind the OP that the lack of orthographic boundaries in one language might be influencing her perception regarding the proportion of new words in Chinese and English.

There are more hair-splitting questions.

Is NBA a valid word in the Chinese language? Does it count as a word in English?

And since some people make a clear distinction between acronym and initialism, how about NASA? 打拐办? 打狗办? roflmaobbq? 喜大普奔?

Is "couth" a word? I remember not so long ago it was used to demonstrate the concept of bound morphemes.

What about nonce words such as mauvemail, vajayjay, covfefe? How many times must a word be used, before you can call it a word?

When it comes to new, is 河蟹 a new word? 強國? "to be disappeared?" "to Netflix and chill?"

Is "it me" a new word or am I missing something?

Is 兰州烧饼 a new word? What's wrong with 沙县小吃?

[Wippen (inactive)]

@Publius I really appreciate your untiring effort in providing good answers. This is also here the case.

I found a usable answer to my question somewhere else.

 

Thanks to everyone who contributed above.

[陳德聰]

I think contributors would appreciate if you shared that usable answer here

[Wippen (inactive)]

54 minutes ago, 陳德聰 said:

think contributors would appreciate if you shared that usable answer here

The ball has been taken home :-,)

[Shelley]

3 hours ago, Tøsen said:

The ball has been taken home :-,)

 

That's ok we will get our own ball:)

[陳德聰]

I don’t think that’s a proper use of that phrase if you never brought the ball in question to play. But I guess we can continue the discussion without you, as Shelley suggests.

 

The Global Language Monitor claims a new word is created in English every 98 minutes, but they also do not seem to list anywhere on their site how they arrived at that number. This amounts to 14.7 new words per day. I believe the implication is a more lax-leaning definition of “word,” which encompasses probably every conception of word in English linguistics (that would include acronyms and initialisms, but not bound morphemes).

 

In contrast, the Chinese Ministry of Education does an annual report on new words in Chinese. Unfortunately, the possibility of a more lax-leaning definition of “word” is not gonna happen, as there is a policy directive to “clean up” (净化) incoming words. So strictly speaking, it is impossible to know the actual numbers, but in a summary of the 2013 one I found this:

Quote

《中国语言生活绿皮书》收录的新词语，2006年新词语约171条，2007年约254条，2008年约359条，2009年约396条，2010年约500条，2011年约有594条，2012年约585条，2013年约364条，尽管有阶段性增减变化，但平均每天至少都有一条新词语出现。

 

So “at least” 1 new word a day by more narrow standards. I can’t be bothered to pay money to read any of the more recent reports considering every news article has not included a number, but instead the top 10 new words.

 

@Publius Broadly speaking, yes all your examples except couth should be words, and 河蟹 and 强国 would be considered new words. But I think we can be relatively sure that they are not being included in official reports done by the MOE

 

For perspective, in 2006, the OED added about 12 times the number of new words to the dictionary than appeared in China’s “annual new words.” But then again the idea that there were only 171 new words in a given year seems preposterously low.

 

Edit:

So, I mean, by that count... It’s exactly the opposite of what you hypothesized @Tøsen