Evolution of the Chinese language?

Question

I am a student of Mandarin Chinese currently living in Beijing and I have noticed something odd in my studies. Whereas in English new words are invented all the time which have no previous roots from Latin, German or French like most English words, I have noticed that there seems to be a lack of entirely unique new Chinese words. For example whenever a new piece of technology is introduced into China they seem to just make an amalgam of existing words, eg. 电脑 (diannao) which means computer or if translated literally means 'electric brain'. So, I was wondering is there any entirely new Chinese words which have their own unique and new characters?

So there have been no new characters created recently then?

Answer 1

Of course I have no idea of chinese, but, why do you say English creates new words from nothing? Can you give examples?
Words like "google" does not count, as the brand (or trademark) name became popular and atarted being used as verbs or nouns. Letting aside words as "google", do you have more examples?

Answer 2

The only thing I know is the character Ta meaning her or him, originally it was considered to be neutral but now like a few years ago they put the nu (woman character) in front of it to make Ta female.

PS I have no complaints about the Chinese characters it actually makes it easier to learn and understand.

for example da xue - university is actually big school or big learning.

size is da xiao - big small

Makes alot of sense, no?

There are actually loan words such as sha fa for sofa
and bye bye also.

But there really aren't too many. Since Chinese is a character based language and not a letter based one, it really makes more sense to combine characters than to search for new outside words. They would have to use characters for the sounds and not the meanings and it really would not make much sense. Then people can understand the meanings better.

Answer 3

Of course there are new words & terms in Chinese, just like in other languages, after especially the new technology became a daily necessity for all. I see nothing wrong with using 電腦 for computer; it describes it pretty well.

Now, what about 雅 虎 ( graceful tiger ) for Yahoo, 谷歌 ( valley song ) for Google? And what about 博 客 ( learned guest / client ) for Blogger?

Answer 4

Has english gotten any new letters? We still have had A to Z for hundreds of years, with no new letters. Its the same for chinese. The "new" generation has many new words they just use there alphabet to write it.

Answer 5

English has an alphabet. It is easy to throw letters together in new ways. Chinese uses pictographs. it is easy to throw pictographs together in new ways. It is less easy to create new letters of the alphabet in English or new pictographs. it is, however, possible to make new pictographs, contrary to your generalization. By the way, your word from computer is quite reasonable, as it, like a number of other constructions in Chinese, is identical to the construction in Greek, electronikos ekefalos.

Answer 6

They've had to spend the last 500 consolidating the 50,000 already in existence to more reasonable 3000-5000 commonly used ones. Why on earth would they want to make more. (But, yes, they can still make new characters. They still do it occasionally in Taiwan for artistic purposes, but I think that would be heresy in China considering they went out of their way to simplify ("uglify") them.)

Answer 7

I dun think so.