"new" words

[mungouk]

This may be way above my level, but I thought it was interesting.

 

In English, and other languages, it's very common to coin new words as a "portmanteau" or "neologism".

 

How does this work in Chinese where you don't have an alphabet, abugida, or similar which can be used to spell out the new word?  (Or is this one reason why Chinese has so few loan words?  Especially compared to, say, Japanese which even has Katakana for this purpose.)

 

I was just reading this article about this supposedly new word "qiou" (‘dirt-poor’ and ‘ugly’), which it says can't be written in Hanzi.

 

Very interesting.

 

 

[Michaelyus]

Well, it's already got a Chinese character, just not one that's official or input-able by IME.

I agree with the statement that the character and even the sound is much more transparent than other neologisms.

 

Lots of other neologisms are novel combinations of other already-existing syllables (even 高富帅 can be considered in this category). 

Character play is a different avenue, and quite a lot more restricted. 

[陳德聰]

This is actually quite comical. I hadn't seen it/heard it before.

 

I had a student write a paper on the survival rates of neologisms for a linguistics class once, let me see if I can find it and if it has a good/sound explanation I'll ask her if I can share it

[anonymoose]

Does it have to be writable using characters? Biu biu biu seems to be a new one, usually written in "pinyin".

[Dawei3]

Victor Mair's languagelog has a discussion on this character as well:  http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=40892#comments

[DavyJonesLocker]

On 12/5/2018 at 12:15 AM, mungouk said:

 

I was just reading this article about this supposedly new word "qiou" (‘dirt-poor’ and ‘ugly’), which it says can't be written in Hanzi.

 

Certainly becoming popular. I have see more than a few wechat moments posts sharing it. It will only been a matter of time before there is a way of writing it whether official or unofficially recognized as a legitimate character