Hacker News Reader

And robot is 機器人, literally machine man. Mandarin is weird about loan words. Where the Japanese will gobble up any word and incorporate it into “Japanese,” Chinese goes through some complicated hoops to come up with a word etymologically rooted in Chinese. However, in practice everyone I know says “email” instead of 電子郵件.

View on HN

Japanese used to do this thing too -- back then Kanji was still the proper scholarly thing to use and scholars were the main contact to Western knowledge. In fact, a good number of Chinese words for Western concepts came from Japanese translations. 社会 society, 经济学 economy, 自由 liberty all came from Japanese translations.

https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/漢語中的日語借詞

I think it's because Japan was the first to adopt western education. It's why people you wouldn't expect to be were educated in Japan, like the founder of the CPC or Chiang Kai Shek

> come up with a word etymologically rooted in Chinese

So here's an interesting point: etymologically, Chinese is the only evolving language other than English.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com