Last Sunday, Rebecca Fu went to a Cantonese restaurant called Xǐ yùn lái dà jiǔdiàn 喜運來大酒店 (Happy Fortune Arrives Grand Hotel — actually a modest establisment) in Manhattan's Chinatown. When she saw the following entry on the menu, she had no idea what it was: xiāngjiān shìde 香煎士的. The xiāngjiān 香煎 was not a problem; it means simply "fried" or "pan fried". But, even though she's a graduate of Peking University, Rebecca drew a complete blank on shìde 士的. The characters seem to mean "scholar's", but "fried scholar's" just doesn't make sense. It was only when Rebecca asked the waiter how to pronounce 士的 in Cantonese — whereupon he said "si6 dik1″– that she understood what 士的 meant.
The usual way to say "steak" in Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM) is niúpái 牛排, and that expression is also used in Cantonese, where it is pronounced ngau4 paai4. But si6 dik1 士的 ("steak") is also used very commonly in speech and even, as on restaurant menus, in writing. This is a good example of how a parallel vocabulary develops in Cantonese and other Sinitic languages: one based on indigenous morphemes, and one on loanwords.
Cantonese has been especially prolific in borrowing words from other languages, and many of these words (I'll mention a few of them below) have entered the standard MSM lexicon. Shanghainese has also borrowed many foreign words directly via their sounds ("clamp," "captain," "last car," etc.), and these too have often passed into the MSM lexicon. The same is true of other topolects that are not normally written (or are not wholly writable) in Chinese characters. In contrast, MSM is more apt to create loan translations for new terms and ideas that enter the language from abroad through calquing or through recycling (by redefinition) of old words (e.g., the MSM words for "philosophy", "religion", "economics", "literature", and so forth). When the latter (recycled and redefined words) pass through Japan (China –> Japan [where the redefinition takes place] –> China), we may refer to such loans as "round-trip words".
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