What do you think of alphabetic words?

Since China’s reform and opening up, the number of alphabetic words has increased. Although the proportion of alphabetic words is not large in absolute terms, they are used more frequently in daily life and cover a wider range. wide.

The so-called alphabetic words refer to the original form words of foreign languages ??in modern Chinese and their abbreviated forms as well as the forms of letters plus Chinese characters. Alphabet words include both foreign words and words created by Chinese society using Western letters.

From the perspective of components 1. Alphabet words composed purely of Western letters.

(1) From foreign languages: WTO, CS, GDP. (2) Abbreviated from Chinese Pinyin: GB (National Standard), HSK (Chinese Proficiency Test).

2. Alphabet words composed of Arabic numerals and Western letters: F1, 3D.

3. Alphabet words mixed with Chinese characters and Western letters: Karaoke, AA system.

4. Alphabet words mixed with Arabic numerals, Western letters and Chinese characters: 4S store, 4D cinema.

From the perspective of troubleshooting 1. Letter words starting with Chinese characters: Karaoke, Ah Q.

2. Letter words starting with Western letters: WTO, F1, GDP, HSK (Chinese Proficiency Test).

3. Letters starting with Arabic numerals: 4S shop, 3D.

The impact of alphabetic words on the Chinese system

(1) Positive impact

First of all, the emergence of alphabetic words has overcome the difficulty of Chinese in expressing certain new things. defects.

Text 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 ultimately the vocabulary used to record language. This can be proven by Lu Xun’s naming of “Ah Q”. "Ah Q" has no surname, so people call him "Ah Quei". In order to find a suitable Chinese character for this sound, Lu Xun spent a lot of effort, but in the end he could not accurately express the concept of the name "Ah Q", and finally had to " According to the popular British spelling, he is called Quei, or Ah Q for short.

It is precisely because of the requirements of the meaning and content of words that their text form has to bypass Chinese characters and use letters. The subsequent letter words also have this internal cause. In the era of globalization, new concepts and new things emerge one after another, and many new vocabulary words are introduced from abroad. Due to the cultural differences between East and West, Chinese often encounters difficulties in the expression process. For example, "MPEG 1 Audio Layer3" is very difficult to record in Chinese characters when translating it into Chinese. Often we can only explain it, that is, "a commonly used digital audio compression format". There is no way to name it, and The translation process often consumes a lot of energy and time, and is seriously out of touch with the urgent needs of real-life communication. Therefore, the universal and concise "MP3" has become a common practice among the public. Alphabet words have naturally become the assistants of Chinese characters, serving the Chinese language by replacing Chinese characters in areas where they are inconvenient or even unusable.

Secondly, alphabetical words enrich the Chinese writing system.

The Chinese writing system has gradually evolved from a single language to a rich one with the development of history. In ancient times, Chinese writing was all done with Chinese characters, and sentences with circles and dots were only read in the Han Dynasty. In modern times, punctuation marks were introduced from foreign countries and mixed with the original circle and dot marks. In 1904, the Commercial Press published the book "English Han Xie", which was the earliest publication in China to use punctuation marks. In 1919, the Preparatory Committee for the Unification of the Mandarin Language was established. Hu Shi, Zhou Zuoren, and Qian Xuantong proposed the "Proposal for the Promulgation of New Punctuation Marks" and listed 12 types of punctuation marks. The following year, the Ministry of Education of the Beiyang Government issued an order to adopt it. Since then, punctuation marks have become an indispensable and important part of the Chinese writing system.

Thirdly, the emergence of alphabetic words has prompted ordinary Chinese vocabulary to "compete" with them.

For foreign words, Chinese often has a process of transliteration first and then free translation. Chinese sometimes has a similar process for alphabetical words. In terms of expressing new things and new concepts, although ordinary Chinese vocabulary is not as concise and convenient as alphabetic words, it can take advantage of visualization.

For example, at first, people used fans to express enthusiastic supporters of certain things or celebrities. Later, a new word "fans" appeared, which is both the transliteration of fans and an image description of these fanatics, because "silk" ” can metaphorically mean “missing”, “entangled” or “lingering”.

(2) Negative impact

First, there is a certain abuse of alphabetic words in Chinese.

It has become an obvious trend for people to use Chinese pinyin to "create" alphabetical words in Internet languages. However, the Internet is a special environment, and Internet language is a special product in this context. Therefore, the development of alphabetical words in Internet language can take its course without causing any impact on daily language. In daily life, the misuse of letter words does need to be paid enough attention to. It is convenient and concise to use alphabetic words, but in addition to using alphabetic words, Chinese already has the customary form of abbreviated words - abbreviations, abbreviations and their formation methods have long been familiar to people, so some longer words are basically There is no need to use Chinese Pinyin letters to abbreviate words, and there is no need to use the abbreviated letters of English words to abbreviate.

Second, alphabetical words sometimes make the meaning of a sentence unclear.

On the one hand, alphabetic words have poor image quality. If some relatively rare alphabetic words do not have Chinese annotations, ordinary readers will not be able to know their meanings. On the other hand, since alphabetic words are usually composed of the first letters of several English words, different words may use the same form, which can easily lead to polysemy. For example, CS can refer to a business strategy in economics (Customer Satisfaction), and an online game also uses this abbreviation (Half-life: Counter-Strike); ABC can refer to basic knowledge or general common sense, and Refers to American Born Chinese; CPO can refer to both Chief Privacy Officer (Chief Privacy Officer) and Chief Programmer Officer (Chief Programmer Officer); ATM can refer to Automation Teller Machine, It can also refer to the asynchronous transmission mode (Asynchronous Time Division Multiplexing) in network technology; therefore, if such letter words are used without indicating the Chinese meaning, it is easy to cause misunderstandings and ambiguities, which may cause unpredictable losses.

In addition, there are also irregularities in the pronunciation and writing form of alphabetical words. In terms of pronunciation, such as HSK, GB, etc., some people advocate using the pronunciation of Chinese Pinyin, while people usually use the pronunciation of English letters. In terms of writing, the capitalization of some letters and words is not uniform. For example, e-mail, e-mail, e-mail, and email coexist in three forms. Differences in these aspects will cause confusion in the use of alphabetical words in television, radio, newspapers and other industries, and will also bring certain troubles to people's communication.

The influence of the Chinese system on alphabetic words is similar to how words from French are governed by English language rules, and alphabetical words are also governed by Chinese language laws.

(1) Alphabetic words accept the grammatical control of Chinese.

The most typical example of this is N. N is very different from other letter words. It has been deeply imprinted with the Chinese language. It has a strong Chinese color in both its meaning and usage. The most important thing is that its meaning involves the creation of the Chinese language, has no basis for Chinese pinyin, and has no direct source in everyday language in foreign languages. N is just a letter in English, but in modern Chinese it means "extremely large amount", which is very exaggerated. "This meaning may come from the usage of N in mathematics. In mathematics, N represents a sequence of natural numbers, which can represent an infinite increase in quantity. However, other letters are different. They are just temporary substitutes for a certain number, not a collection of numbers. In this way The usage has deeply affected students, and this mathematical concept has expanded from books to spoken language." For example, "N kinds of rumors" means very, very many rumors. In Chinese, N has at least two uses: one is used as a numeral, meaning a very large number, followed by a quantifier, such as "I sent him N text messages yesterday and he didn't reply."

The second usage is as an adverb, meaning "extremely high degree". It is derived from the first usage and has the meaning of "very" or "ten", such as "I want to know her phone number." It can be seen from the usage of N that the part of speech and usage of alphabetic words must conform to the grammatical rules of Chinese before they can officially become part of the Chinese language.

(2) Alphabetic words are governed by the rhetorical rules of Chinese.

After a new alphabetical word appears, a large number of imitated words are sometimes produced. For example, CBD (Central Business District) was very popular for a period of time, and living in CBD was the dream of many people, so terms 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 has emerged, and e-era, e-school, e-yuan, e-book, etc. have also emerged, as if everything has an information-based color.

(3) Chinese strives to make the meaning of alphabetic words clear.

Alphabetic words mainly record pronunciation, and their meaning cannot be identified by their configuration. Therefore, when creating certain alphabetic words, a related Chinese morpheme is often added to supplement the semantic category of the abbreviation. Such as AB corner (referring to two actors who play the same role in a drama, generally referring to two people with the same status and role), BP machine, BB boy (baby), call machine (pager), etc. There are also some transliterations or free translations of the remaining words by retaining single letters, such as B-ultrasound, H-share, Y chromosome, IC card, etc. Even if people do not know the specific meaning of these letter words in the sentence, they can understand the meaning of the sentence with the help of the Chinese morphemes in the word and the relevant context. These alphabetic words are consistent with the semi-phonetic and semi-free translation of foreign words (such as ballet, beer, etc.), reflecting the characteristics of the Chinese language.

(4) Chinese alphabetic words should be transformed into glyphs as much as possible.

Due to Chinese's resistance to polysyllabic words, Chinese has an automatic domestication of alphabetic words (especially polysyllabic alphabetic words introduced from pure original words) in favor of simplicity. Most Chinese words are two-syllable and three-syllable words, so Chinese will also try to control the number of syllables in alphabetic words or letters in alphabetic words to less than four. For example, the simplification process of the word E-mail is that the original electronic mail (e-mail) was abbreviated to E-mail. Some people simply use mail instead of E-mail, and EM is also included in the "Dictionary of Modern Chinese New Words" , as the abbreviation of E-mail. For another example, the online chat tool is OICQ, but its abbreviation QQ is popular now. And KTV private rooms where people use karaoke are often called K rooms now. In the "Dictionary of Modern Chinese New Words", there are more than 370 alphabetical words included, but only more than 80 letters have four or more syllables.

Sometimes two-syllable alphabetic words are even simplified into single-syllable words. For example, NB often means "powerful" or "strong", which can be a compliment or a derogation. For example, "Students who score over 600 points in the CET-6 are very cool" and "It's so cool for such a young child to smoke." Now on the Internet, NB is sometimes referred to as N for short. For example, "140 classic computer skills - it's really awesome", "I just saw a really awesome car, let's estimate the price."

In addition, there is another way to transform the glyphs to give the letters image, such as "A-line skirt", "V-neck", "U-shaped tube", "H-shaped steel", "T-shaped talent" , "X-shaped legs", etc., use this image to express concepts and describe things, making it easy for readers to imagine the specific appearance of things.

(5) Chinese takes the initiative to create new alphabetic words.

Alphabetic words are not equal to foreign words. Many alphabetic words are created. The alphabetical words produced in Chinese are often close to daily life and are relatively easy to understand.

Most of these alphabetic words are the abbreviations of Chinese Pinyin or English abbreviations for Chinese things: the alphabetic words from the abbreviation of Chinese Pinyin include GB (National Standard), HSK (Chinese Proficiency Test), PSC (Putonghua Proficiency Test), RMB (Renminbi) , ZL (patent), etc.; and A shares (stocks issued for domestic use), B shares (special stocks with par value in RMB, subscribed and traded in foreign currencies or Hong Kong dollars), CHINANET (China Net), CCTV (China Central Television ) and CNC (China Network Communications Company) use English letters, but they represent Chinese things. In addition, the test of G (GRE, a master's qualification for American universities), T group (people who want to study abroad and take TOEFL), H class (people with the characteristics of Hard, High Education, Happy, Hope), etc., are even more reflected. Some characteristics of Chinese social life.