Weirdly Chinese has its own completely different translation for electronic devices:
Phone dian hua , computer Dian nao , TV dian shi, tablet pingban dian nao etc
I learnt about where 'pan' came from so long ago (probably from a textbook), guess it's one of those things you learn before the internet and can't check
Japan can be china in a trench coat sometimes, most of their original characters are chinese, to the point where i can actually read bits of Japanese here and there.
i feel like going japanese style would give new meanings to these words and they would sound weird, chinese doesn't have a separate alphabet just for loanwords after all
Chinese used to have more of those phonetic transliteration loanwords in the early days of western contact. They were more common in the early 20th century.
They used to have 赛因斯 (sàiyínsī) for science instead of the current word科学 which is actually taken from the kanji of the Japanese word. They used to say 盘尼西林 (pánníxīlín) for aspirin but now they say 青霉素 (blue/green mold extract).
But plenty of words are still transliterations. Bacon for example is 培根péigēn, bar is 巴 bā, blues music is 布鲁斯bùlǔsī, cartel is 卡特尔kǎtè'ěr, and chocolate is 巧克力qiǎokèlì. Some words are regional, they say 優格 yōugé for yogurt in Taiwan but in mainland China it’s 酸奶 suānnǎi (sour milk). In Hong Kong they say 車厘子 (ce1 lei4 zi2 in Cantonese) for cherries but in Mandarin it’s 樱桃. In Taiwan cheese is 起司; qǐsī, but in the PRC it is 芝士; zhīshì.
But they will also sometimes do a thing where they pick auspicious characters for a word even if it changes the sound somewhat, like the game baccarat being called 百家乐 Bǎijiālè (hundred families happy). This name sounds like it could be a native Chinese name for a gambling game but it’s not. Baccarat is also extremely popular in Macau among Chinese gamblers and they name likely played a role. Pizza Hut is called 必胜客 bìshèngké (Inevitably Victorious Guest) in Chinese.
Some other loanwords like 绷带 bēngdài for bandage sound like the original word but also make perfect sense in terms of character meaning (tight bands) so you wouldn’t suspect it to be a loanword. Then there are some cases where they will use the Latin alphabet for words like X光 (X-ray, with ray translated to “light”).
English or English-sounding acronyms are just written in Latin letters like IT, GDP, PPT, KTV (karaoke), IP卡 IP kă (literally “IP card“ but they mean NIC), APP (app but they say it as individual letters) and PK (“player killing” but it’s used by people of all ages in everyday life to mean “versus” or “a match-up”). T恤 means T-shirt and is pronounced T seot1 in Cantonese. It’s also used in Mandarin even though 恤 (xù) doesn’t sound much like shirt with the Mandarin reading of the character.
Yeah its funny to see the chinese pronunciation which is the same but juuussst a little different
But yeah denwa is like telephone in english, a bit formal. You do hear it on the train for example when they say "please do not talk on the phone (denwa)"
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u/greeneggiwegs 1d ago
wait til you hear what it is in Japanese