Turning English into Cantonese: The Semantic Change of English Loanwords

Abstract

Wakefield describes English loanwords in Hong Kong Cantonese, explaining how their meanings have changed from what they originally were in English. He presents in detail a number of fascinating examples, such as the adjective ku1, which was borrowed from English’s “cool.” This word is typically used as a compliment in English to describe someone or something as fashionably attractive, while the borrowed version ku1 has a pejorative meaning, describing a person as distant or unfriendly. Another example is the loanword hep1pi2 (“happy”), which is an adjective that can additionally be used as a verb in Cantonese, meaning to do something that makes one happy, referring to anything from drinking with friends to having sex. Wakefield’s discussion of loanwords portrays some fascination consequences of language contact.

English Loanwords in Cantonese

Considering Hong Kong’s 150-year history as a British colony, it is not surprising that borrowing from English has provided a large number of new words that have fully integrated into Hong Kong Cantonese (Wong et al. 2009). Studying loanwords can tell us a number of interesting things about language and culture. Most studies related to loanwords have focused on their phonology, while comparatively few have looked at their syntax or semantics; as far as I know, only Chan and Kwok (1982), and Wong, Bauer, and Lam have discussed the semantics of English loanwords in Cantonese (from here on referred to as ELCs). Building on their work, this chapter presents some examples of how ELCs have changed their meanings from what they originally were in English. Kay (1995) notes that “[w]hen elements of a foreign culture and language are ‘borrowed’ into the culture and langauge [sic] of another, they became adapted to their new cultural and linguistic context” (68). Looking at the semantic change of ELCs can therefore reveal some things about how Hong Kong’s language and culture have adopted and transformed English into Cantonese.

Probably every language in the world has loanwords, so Tadmor (2009) puts it. This well-documented phenomenon is an inevitable result of close contact between languages, which “leads to a need for terms to name foreign objects and concepts which were previously unknown to the speakers of the borrowing language” (Louwrens 1993, 9). English is the most widely used lingua franca around the globe, resulting in contact with and borrowing from many of the world’s languages. Chinese, for example, has given English numerous words and a few phrases, such as “kowtow,” “bok choy,” “tea,” “tycoon,” and “no can do.”

Contact induces borrowing in both directions; many languages now include English loanwords in their lexicons (Kay). The number of English borrowings varies widely among languages, and it is reasonable to assume that the number is relatively high in Hong Kong Cantonese. This is because Hong Kong was a British colony from 1841 to 1997, during which time English was the language of government, law, international commerce, and tertiary education. To a large extent this has remained unchanged since 1997, especially with regard to written English (Evans 2011). This high degree of contact between the two languages within all levels of society has inevitably influenced their lexicons, but because of the two languages’ unequal status, English has influenced Cantonese much more than vice versa. English has been, and remains, a language of power and prestige in Hong Kong.

People’s level of English has traditionally been judged by society as positively correlated with their education level and social status. Many people therefore have an incentive to code-mix English with their Cantonese as a way of displaying their knowledge of English. While often Cantonese-English code-mixing is used to “fill a lexical or stylistic gap in Cantonese,” it is also used, so Li avows in 2002, “for dynamic manipulation, or ‘display,’ of the speaker’s social identities and distance vis-à-vis the interlocutor(s)” (84). In other words, not only do many Hongkongers use English terms to express things they cannot readily express with a Cantonese equivalent, they may also do so to attempt to raise their social status in the eyes of others (see Li 1999b). Whatever the reasons behind code-mixing and the eventual borrowing of words from one language into another, it is a multistage process driven by bilinguals (Lehiste 1988).

Cantonese speakers’ frequent practice of one-time borrowing to say something that is best expressed by an English word, or to display one’s knowledge of English, has resulted in many of these words eventually becoming fully integrated into Cantonese and becoming ELCs. The way a word is pronounced determines whether it is a one-time borrowing or a loanword. When English words are code-mixed or one-time borrowed into English, they are pronounced basically like English syllables with English stress patterns. In contrast, the pronunciation of formerly English words that have become ELCs typically includes Cantonese lexical tones used along with Cantonese syllables.¹ Chan and Kwok, who devote an entire book to English loanwords in Hong Kong Cantonese, present the following stages of the integration process:

• 1. The pre-loan stage, as they described it, appears to be code-mixing. In this stage words “remain English words” (49). They “are not understood by the bulk of the general population … [and] are spoken with a close approximation to their original [English] sounds” (50).

• 2. The first stage involves words that are “widely understood by the community, but their usage is often restricted to colloquial, informal discourse” (53).

• 3. Loanwords that reach the second stage “not only commonly occur in a sinicized form in the spoken language, but also have widely accepted Chinese characters” (58).

• 4. Loanwords that have reached the third stage are “used on formal occasions … [and in] news items, editorials, government documents, [etc.]” (60).²

While the pre-loan stage and first stage always occur first and second, respectively, I don’t consider the second and third stages to be necessary criteria for an ELC to be considered as having fully integrated into Hong Kong Cantonese. Most ELCs, once borrowed into Cantonese, have not then been borrowed into standard written Chinese, which is a different language from Cantonese. It is therefore not surprising that many ELCs do not have Chinese character forms. The form of written Chinese that represents colloquial Cantonese regularly includes ELCs, and while many of them have been given Chinese character forms, many have not. Those that do not have Chinese character forms are incorporated into the text by using the original English. For example, the loanword men1 “man” is written as “man” within Cantonese texts. Such words are commonly known by Hongkongers, who can consistently pronounce them using a widely agreed upon form that follows the rules of Cantonese phonology. It is reasonable to argue, therefore, that even ELCs that never go beyond the first stage should be considered fully integrated—so long as they are widely known and pronounced as if they are Cantonese. And of course there is no doubt that ELCs which have moved onto the second or third stage have fully integrated.

The Phonology of Loanwords

Among the large number of studies on loanwords, phonology is the most examined feature by far, and a great deal has been written about the phonology of ELCs (e.g., Yip 1993, 2002; Bauer and Benedict 1997, chapter 3; Luke and Lau 2008; Bauer and Wong 2010; Bauer 2016 and references therein). The key source of empirical evidence in studies on loanword phonology is the phonetic properties of words in the source language and the phonetic properties of those same words after they have been integrated into the borrowing language. Hypotheses are then made about which sounds within the source language are salient to speakers of the borrowing language and how the strings of combined sounds are then reinterpreted into a string of sounds that follow the phonological rules of the borrowing language. As explained by Silverman (1992), “[i]n loanword phonology we seek to uncover the processes by which speakers possessing one phonological system perceive, apply native representational constraints on, and ultimately produce forms which have been generated by a different phonological system” (289). The collective findings of loanword studies have been used by some phonologists as evidence in support of universal phonological theories.

The Semantics of Loanwords

Comparatively few studies have looked at the semantics of loanwords, and none, as far as I know, have done so to the extent done for the examples presented below. If we were to examine closely enough, it could probably be argued that every loanword has acquired a culture-specific meaning to some extent (Kay). Louwrens says that “borrowing goes hand in hand with a change in the meaning of the adoptive or borrowed word” (9). Even common nouns will change meaning, however slightly, because the items they refer to are used differently, and thought of differently, in different cultures. Kay gives two reasons as to why loanwords are so susceptible to semantic change. One reason is that speakers of the borrowing language may not have a good understanding of what the words meant, and how they were used, in the source language. The other reason she provides is that “with words of foreign origin, there is no deep cultural motivation to protect their original meanings” (72).

Two types of semantic change are described by Kay for English loanwords in Japanese. One type was a word’s denoting the Western-style version of something. Two examples she gave of this were the loanwords resotorun “restaurant” and kuppu “cup,” which she explains are not used to refer to Japanese-style restaurants or cups, respectively. The other type of semantic change she mentions is the narrowing of the meaning from its counterpart in the source language. Louwrens observes semantic change in loanwords within different Bantu languages. His study also mentions semantic narrowing, and additionally discusses four other types of semantic change: (1) semantic extension or generalization, when loanwords take on additional or more encompassing meanings; (2) radical semantic change, when loanwords mean something extremely, or even entirely, different from the original word in the source language; (3) change of emotive content, which can be of three types: amelioration (i.e., change toward a good meaning), pejorative shift (i.e., change toward a bad meaning), or taboo/euphemism (i.e., euphemistic use of a loanword to replace taboo words); and (4) metaphorical change, where a word with a literal meaning in the source language is changed to a metaphorical meaning after entering the borrowing language. Al-Athwary (2016), who studies the semantic change of English loanwords in Arabic, looks at all the same types of semantic change as Louwrens’ except radical semantic change.

In line with Louwrens’ statement that borrowing is necessary for expressing “concepts which were previously unknown to the speakers of the borrowing language” (9), Li (1999a) avers that an English expression often “best reflects what [a bilingual Hong Konger] wants to say. … [I]n many situations the English expression somehow cannot be avoided” (8). Examples he supplies of concepts that are not expressible by single, non-loanwords in Cantonese are “skyline,” “happy hour,” “unplugged,” and “native speaker” (8). Li is referring to code-mixing, but as explained above, that is the first step toward adopting loanwords. Most English words have multiple meanings and many belong to more than one word class, but when an English word is code-mixed into a Cantonese sentence, only one of the word’s meanings is utilized. If this English word eventually ends up fully integrating into Cantonese, then probably only the meaning that has been used for code-mixing will end up getting transferred, and even that single meaning is likely to get altered.

One consequence of this process can be a reduction of a word’s syntactic categories (i.e., its word classes). Chan and Kwok state that a “word in the original language may have multiple class membership, but the loan word usually enters the borrowing language as a member of a single class” (39). They provide the example of the loanword laai1san2 “license,” which is only borrowed into Cantonese as a noun. Another example is the word lip1 “lift” which is a British English borrowing synonymous with elevator. This noun was derived from the verb “to lift,” and there is a clear and obvious semantic relationship between the verb “to lift” and the noun “a lift.” The reduction of word classes when “license” and “lift” are borrowed is a form of semantic narrowing because these Cantonese nouns, unlike their English counterparts, are no longer associated with verbs that mean “to permit” and “to raise up,” respectively.

Semantic narrowing does not necessarily involve a reduction in syntactic categories. The ELC mai4lei5 “mini,” for example, is an adjective borrowed from an adjective. It originally has a restricted use because it is borrowed to refer to miniskirts when they were in fashion (Chan and Kwok, 44). So, originally, this is all the term refers to; but, it later extends its use to refer to a small version of anything: mai4lei5 baan2 “mini version.” This is an interesting example of adjusting an ELC’s meaning after borrowing has taken place to bring it more in line with the meaning of the initially borrowed English word. This indicates that the semantic change of ELCs is dynamic, and can move either way—from or toward—their primary English meanings.

Chan and Kwok, and Wong, Bauer, and Lam furnish a sample of an ELC that adds a syntactic category. The ELC fen1 “friend” can be a noun as in (1), or an adjective as in (2)³:

(1)	Leih	jau5	gei2	do1	go3	fen1	aa3?	(fen1 used as a noun)
	You	have	how	many	CL	friend	PRT
	“How many friends do you have?”
(2)	Keoi5dei6 hou2 fen1.							(fen1 used as an adjective)4
	they very friend
	“They’re close friends.” (Lit. “They’re very friend”)
								(Chan & Kwok 41)

Chan and Kwok translate (2) into English as: “They are very friendly.” They presumably do so because fen1 “friend” is being used as an adjective and “friendly” is the adjective form of “friend.” The literal translation of hou2 fen1 is “very friend,” but this proves unacceptable in English. Rather than turn the noun “friend” into an adjective, however, a more accurate translation is “good friends,” which is how Wong, Bauer, and Lam (258) translate it. The meaning of fen1 is different from the English adjective “friendly,” from which most of the meaning of “friend” has been bleached. The act of being friendly means to be nice to people; it doesn’t actually refer to treating people as, or considering them as, friends. The Cantonese adjective fen1, on the other hand, does entail the meaning of friendship, and along with that, the Cantonese cultural version of such a relationship. The meaning of fen1 is also very different from “friend-like,” because that implies that a person is like a friend but not actually a friend. This is a fascinating contrast between the two languages. For whatever reason, English adjectives that are derived from the noun “friend” lose much of the noun’s meaning, while this same derivational process in Cantonese creates an adjective that retains the noun’s core meaning.

Wong, Bauer, and Lam note that the noun men1 “man” is another example of a noun being used as an adjective. The difference between men1 and fen1 is that the adjective version of men1 is similar to the adjective version of the noun “man” in English. Therefore, as shown in (3), it translates best by using the same word category.

(3)	Lei5	hou2	men1!
	you	very	man
	“You’re so manly!”

English has a much richer system of morphology than Cantonese. In English, words are often marked according to their syntactic category, while in Cantonese the forms of words usually do not differ among categories. The Cantonese word sing4gung1 “succeed,” for instance, can be used as a verb, a noun, an adjective, or an adverb without changing its form. The English counterparts are “succeed,” “success,” “successful,” and “successfully,” all of which have different forms. ELCs may therefore change their syntactic category in Cantonese without changing their forms. In the case of men1 “man,” using it as an adjective gives a meaning that is similar to the adjective version of that word in English (i.e., “manly”). In contrast, the meaning of the English adjective “friendly” shifts from the meaning of the noun “friend,” so using fen1 as an adjective in Cantonese has no similar English counterpart. Having said that, we must realize that the adjective men1 and “manly” are still semantically different from each other; they both entail culture-specific meaning related to the qualities that define the role of a “man.” The difference is just not as obvious as it is for the adjectives fen1 and “friendly.”

Cantonese is not entirely void of morphology, and Wong, Bauer, and Lam rightly point out that the morpho-syntactic integration of loanwords is evidence of their being fully integrated into Cantonese. For example, loanword adjectives (or what some Chinese linguists prefer to call stative verbs) behave like typical Cantonese adjectives. They can take the perfective suffix zo2 “-en” and can reduplicate and take the adverb-forming suffix dei2 “-ly.” For example, the metaphorical loanword haai1 “high” can be used in these two ways: haai1-zo2 “gotten high,” Lit. “highed”; and haai1 haai1 dei2 “a little high.” This is not considered here to be evidence of semantic change; it merely shows full integration into Cantonese grammar, behaving the way adjectives behave in Cantonese. Something that does show the ELC haai1 “high” to have undergone semantic change is the fact that it can be used as a transitive verb, as shown in (4), which is something that English’s “high” is incapable of doing.

(4)	Keoi5	hai6	mai6	haai1 -zo2	je5	aa3?
	s/he	is	is-not	high-PERF	thing	PRT
	“Is s/he high on something?” (Lit. “Has s/he highed something?”)

In this example, the noun je5 “thing” is functioning as the object of the transitive verb haai1 “high.”

Wong, Bauer, and Lam create and analyze a database of over 700 ELCs. Sixty-one percent of the loanwords in their database have Chinese character representations, meaning they have reached at least the second stage of Chan and Kwok’s integration process. Regarding the kind of semantic change under discussion here, Wong, Bauer, and Lam state that “the meanings of the loanwords usually remain the same as those of the source words [in English]” (260). Examples they supply of unchanged meanings are gik6lik1zi2 “clutch,” aa6paat1man4 “apartment,” aan1ti4 “auntie,” and ang1kou4 “uncle.” I agree that gik6lik1zi2 “clutch” is likely virtually the same in the minds of Cantonese speakers as “clutch” is in the minds of English speakers. However, aa6paat1man4 “apartment” is likely different from English’s “apartment” due to socio-cultural distinctions. And there is no doubt that aan1ti4 “auntie” and ang1kou4 “uncle” have undergone semantic change; these terms are used by Cantonese-speaking children and teenagers to address women and men in society who are not actually their aunts and uncles. These loanwords are not used to refer to and address actual kin, which requires the use of the more intricate system of kinship terms that distinguishes a number of different types of aunts and uncles. This is elaborated upon below.

Wong, Bauer, and Lam also discuss examples of semantic narrowing and semantic extension. The address term aa3soe4 “sir” is a vocative that has undergone semantic narrowing because it is only used to address male policeman and teachers. At the same time, it has undergone a change of syntactic category because it can also be used as a noun:

(5)	loeng5-go3	aa3soe4
	two-CL	sir
	“two teachers” or “two policemen” (Lit. “two sirs”)

Another example provided of semantic narrowing is foem1 “firm,” which only refers to the firmness of muscles. An example given of extension is the word sot1 “short,” which has extended its meaning from the verb “to short(-circuit)” to being used metaphorically as an adjective to refer to someone being crazy (i.e., to their brain having short-circuited). Shown below is how this ELC involves several semantic changes. In fact, I’ll illustrate that when we take a close look at the meanings and uses of ELCs, we discover that many of them have undergone multiple types of semantic change. Based on the types of semantic changes discussed in the literature, and which are shown in Table 2.1, six ELCs will be examined to see how many changes each one has undergone.

Table 2.1 List of types of semantic change

Most of this list is based on what other authors have described, but there are a few additions. Subcategories are added to types (e) and (f), and the categories (g) and (h) are both new. The category (g) “change of valency” refers to whether or not an ELC that is a verb takes more, fewer, or different types of complements than the original source word in English. It can also refer to changes in what types of things an adjective can modify. Category (h) is the reverse of (i), which relates to Kay’s observation that some English loanwords in Japanese only refer to Western versions (i.e., the source language versions) of those things. In contrast (h) is about a loanword’s meaning changing in a way that is based on the culture of the borrowing language. An example of this is aan1ti4 “auntie” and ang1kou4 “uncle,” which, as explained both above and below, are Cantonese versions that refer to something culturally different from what “auntie” and “uncle” refer to in English.

Six Examples of Semantic Change

The list of semantic change types in Table 2.1 is used here like a kind of checklist for analyzing six ELCs. This is done by contrasting each ELC with the word in English from which it is borrowed. As explained by Chan and Kwok, a loanword is usually borrowed from only one of multiple syntactic categories of a word in the source language. This is illustrated above in relation to the ELC lip1 “lift,” which is borrowed only from the noun version of that word. In cases like this the loanword is contrasted only with the version of the word that it is borrowed from. This is recognized as a form of immediate semantic narrowing since the ELC, at the time of borrowing, has fewer syntactic categories and meanings than its English counterpart. It is possible that such words may then undergo semantic extension if they add syntactic categories or extend their meanings after borrowing takes place. It is therefore not contradictory to analyze an ELC as having undergone both narrowing and extension, as illustrated above in relation to the ELC mai4lei5 “mini.”

Each loanword is analyzed in relation to numerous types of semantic change. This differs from prior studies that have typically described a type of semantic change and then given one or more examples of words that have undergone that type of change. For each of the six ELCs discussed below, the word is first shown along with its English counterpart. Following this, each type of semantic change undergone is listed and discussed, using the letters that correspond to those shown in the left column of Table 2.1.

sot1 “short”

• (a) Semantic extension/expansion: The ELC sot1 was borrowed from the English verb “to short” (i.e., meaning “to short out” or “to short circuit”). It refers to this in Cantonese but has extended its meaning to metaphorically refer to someone’s brain having shorted out, meaning they’ve gone crazy.

(6)	Din6zai3	sot1 -zo2.
	electric switch	short-PERF
	“The electric switch has shorted (out).”

(7)	Keoi5	sot1 -zo2.
	S/he	short-PERF
	“S/he’s gone crazy.” (Lit. “S/he’s shorted”)

• (b) Semantic narrowing: Semantic narrowing is involved in the sense that sot1 is no longer related to the adjective “short,” which the verb “to short (out)” and the noun “a short (circuit)” are both derived from and still obviously related to.

• (d) Change of emotive content—amelioration (A), pejorative shift (P), taboo/euphemism (E): When used to refer to a person’s having gone crazy, it is pejorative (P).

• (e) Metaphorical change—metaphorical change (C), metaphorical gain (G), metaphorical loss (L): This is a case of metaphorical gain (G) because saying that a person, or a person’s brain, has short-circuited is metaphorical. This can be done in English as a joke, but it is not a regular, fully established usage as is the case for sot1 in Cantonese.

• (f) Change of syntactic category—change (C), addition (A), reduction (R): This is a case of syntactic category addition (A) because the metaphorical use of sot1 “short” that means crazy is an adjective. It is also a case of category reduction (R) because it is only borrowed from the English verb “to short.” It cannot be used as a noun (*jat1go3 sot1; one-CL short; “a short circuit”)—the * indicates it is ungrammatical. Nor is it still related to the English adjective “short,” which is what the term short circuit is based on (i.e., a shortened circuit).

At first glance it may seem strange to say that sot1 has both lost and gained the syntactic category adjective. This makes sense, however, because the adjective with a literal meaning related to length was lost, while a metaphorical adjective was gained. They are clearly different adjectives with entirely different meanings.

• (g) Change of valency: Its metaphorical use takes a human subject, whereas the verb version of “to short” in English uses an inanimate electrical circuit as a subject.

The next example is an interesting case because it appears on the surface to be an example of the kind of word that has a concrete meaning which one would assume ought to be the same in both English and Cantonese. The measure word “ounce” is borrowed into Cantonese because there was a need under the British measuring system to add this word for the straightforward purpose of measuring things. Nevertheless, it appears to have undergone three types of semantic change on our list.

on1si2 “ounce”

• (b) Semantic narrowing: In the sense that it has lost its metaphorical usage (see below), it can be analyzed as having undergone narrowing.

• (e) Metaphorical change—metaphorical change (C), metaphorical gain (G), metaphorical loss (L): In English, one can refer metaphorically to having “an ounce of courage,” or of many other human qualities. The loanword on1si2 “ounce” cannot be used in this way in Cantonese and has therefore undergone a metaphorical change in the direction of loss (L). The English sentence in (8) cannot be expressed naturally in Cantonese, as shown with the question marks preceding (9). The sentence in (9) would be perfectly acceptable if the word lik6 “strength” were replaced by seoi2 “water,” which would then be using the literal meaning of on1si2 “ounce.”

(8)	I don’t have even an ounce of strength.

(9)	??Ngo5	jat1- on1si2	lik6	dou1	mou5	aa3.
	I	one-ounce	strength	also	NEG	PRT

• (f) Change of syntactic category—change (C), addition (A), reduction (R): In English, “ounce” is a measure word, while in Cantonese it is a classifier, so it has changed categories (C). These categories are obviously very similar to each other, and it is not clear whether there is any significant difference in how these are represented in the minds of English and Cantonese speakers, respectively.

hep1pi2 “happy”

• (a) Semantic extension/expansion: The meaning of hep1pi2 when used as an adjective is very similar to English’s “happy.” However hep1pi2 can also be used as a verb meaning “to do something that makes one happy.” The examples in (10) and (11) show a contrast in grammatical aspect; in (11) the verb hep1pi2 is followed by the progressive aspect marker gan2, and this is translated literally into English as “happying.”

(10)	Ngo5dei6	gam1maan5	heoi3	bin1dou6	hep1pi2 ?
	we	tonight	go	where	happy
	“Where’re we going to have fun tonight?” (Lit. “Where’re we going to happy tonight?”)

(11)	Keoi5dei6	hai2dou6	hep1pi2	gan3.
	they	there	happy	PROG
	“They’re having fun.” (Lit. “They’re happying”)

• (d) Change of emotive content—amelioration (A), pejorative shift (P), taboo/euphemism (E): The verb form of hep1pi2 is often used to refer to people having sex, causing some to say it has adopted that meaning. It therefore seems like it might be a euphemism for the taboo subject of sex, in which case we could say this loanword has undergone a change related to this particular subcategory of emotive content (i.e., E). However, I tentatively analyze this as a case of sexual innuendo rather than euphemism, because the verb hep1pi2 can be used to refer to anything from relaxing on the beach, to drinking with friends, to having sex—what it refers to is understood pragmatically based on the context. Perhaps in the future it will become strongly enough associated with the act of having sex to justify analyzing it as a euphemism.

• (f) Change of syntactic category—change (C), addition (A), reduction (R): It has undergone addition (A), adding the category of verb.

ku1 “cool”

• (b) Semantic narrowing: The ELC ku1 refers to people or their facial expressions as being distant, unfriendly, or arrogant. It has lost the literal meaning of English’s “cool,” which refers to temperature, and is only used metaphorically as just described. Even this metaphorical meaning has narrowed significantly because only the negative version of “cool” is borrowed. This is the version used in expressions such as “being cool toward someone,” “being decidedly cool about a proposal,” or “giving a cool reception.” In English this use of “cool” is less common than the positive version that is used to compliment someone, their actions, or their possessions.

• (d) Change of emotive content—amelioration (A), pejorative shift (P), taboo/euphemism (E): Even though the meaning of the version of “cool” that is borrowed is quite similar to what ku1 “cool” means, this ELC can still be analyzed as having undergone a pejorative shift (P). The reason is because ku1 is normally used to modify a person, and says something about his or her quality. The negative version of English’s “cool,” in contrast, modifies an action or a stance (i.e., “cool about,” “cool toward”), and as such does not necessarily entail a pejorative meaning about the person involved.

• (f) Change of syntactic category—change (C), addition (A), reduction (R): It has undergone reduction (R), having lost the category of verb “to cool.”

• (g) Change of valency: Ku1 is limited to being used with human subjects. This is because it has lost the literal meaning of “cool,” preventing it from referring to temperature and also because its metaphorical meaning now describes a human quality, facial expressions, or actions that are judged as being ku1. This contrasts with the negative version of English’s “cool,” which normally modifies actions, though it can also modify a person (e.g., “He was cool and distant”).

ang1kou4 “uncle”

• (c) Radical semantic change: At first glance it would seem that ang1kou4 “uncle” might have virtually the same meaning in Cantonese as its counterpart does in English, with the only difference being that Cantonese has more subcategories of this relationship. However, in Cantonese ang1kou4 is not actually used as a kinship term. Instead it is used as a vocative for children to address men in society who are in fact not their uncles. It can also be used as a noun to refer to men in society from the perspective of children. When children address men who actually are their uncles, they will use the Cantonese term that expresses the appropriate subcategory of uncle, for example, suk1suk1 “father’s younger brother,” baak3baak3 “father’s older brother,” kau5fu2 “mother’s brother,” and so on.

• (h) Denoting a version based on the culture of the borrowing language: Children’s use of ang1kou4 “uncle” as a vocative to address men in society who are not actually their uncles mimics the special use of suk1suk1 “father’s younger brother” to do the same thing. Unlike ang1kou4, however, the kinship term suk1suk1 also has two uses that ang1kou4 does not: it can be used as a noun to refer to a category of uncle, or it can be used as a vocative to address men who actually are that type of uncle, i.e., the younger brother of the speaker’s father.

haai1 “high”

• (b) Semantic narrowing: This is another case of an ELC that did not borrow the literal meaning of the word borrowed from English. Haai1 “high” is used metaphorically in a way similar to how it is used in English. It can refer to being elatedly happy or high on drugs or alcohol.

• (e) Metaphorical change—metaphorical change (C), metaphorical gain (G), metaphorical loss (L): It has undergone metaphorical loss (L) because it cannot be used metaphorically to modify things such as prices or temperatures.

• (f) Change of syntactic category—change (C), addition (A), reduction (R): It can additionally be used as a transitive verb as shown above in example (4), which shows the verb haai1 “high” taking je5 “thing” as an object.

• (g) Change of valency: As a transitive verb it can now take an object.

The results of the above descriptions are summarized in Table 2.2. The first column shows each ELC along with the English word from which it is borrowed. The column labeled “category” shows the syntactic category (or categories) of the original English word on the left of the arrow and the category (or categories) of the ELC on the right of the arrow. The information shown for sot1 indicates that the English word “short,” from which it was borrowed, can be used as an adjective (Adj), a noun (N), or a verb (V). The loanword sot1 is borrowed from the verb version of “short,” so the adjective and noun on the “English” side of the arrow are shown in parentheses. The letters a–i in the following columns represent the different types of semantic change listed in Table 2.1. A check inside a box indicates that the ELC in that row has undergone that type of semantic change. A letter inside a box also indicates it has undergone that type of semantic change, and further indicates which subcategory (or subcategories) of that type of change is involved.

Table 2.2 Summary of syntactic and semantic changes

While Table 2.2 is informative, it is not fully meaningful unless used in tandem with a description of each word, similar to the descriptions provided above. Without such descriptions to refer to, some aspects of the table could be misleading. For example, of the six ELCs examined, four were concluded to have undergone semantic narrowing. This may turn out to be the case for a majority of ELCs but for differing reasons. It is therefore not very meaningful to group all these words together based only on the fact that they have undergone narrowing. One way to address this is to subcategorize “narrowing” into different types, with each type represented with a different letter, not unlike what I’ve done for the types of semantic change referred to in columns d, e, and f. Subcategorization could also be considered for all other types of semantic change not subcategorized here.

Concluding Remarks

This paper reviews the literature on semantic change in loanwords and, based on the types of semantic change described in previous studies, proposes a more thorough and systematic method for analyzing the semantic change of ELCs in relation to the words from which they are borrowed. Six ELCs were examined to demonstrate how the method works. Much work remains to be done, but it does not need to be done from scratch. Important groundwork has been laid down by Chan and Kwok, and Wong, Bauer, and Lam. There are of course limitations to the method used here. For example, it could be argued that this method does not look at enough categories of semantic change, or that the ones included should be modified. Another problem is the lack of written records, making it difficult to know when, and from which one of an English word’s meanings, an ELC is borrowed. For example, the word ku1 “cool” may actually have been borrowed from the positive version of the English word “cool,” in which case the changes it has undergone could be analyzed very differently from what is described above. Aside from the facts, it is interesting to note that at least one Cantonese speaker appears to have confused the positive version of English’s “cool” as having the same meaning as ku1. Some 35 years ago when I complimented her in English by saying she was “cool,” she was offended and asked that I not say that about her. At the time I couldn’t understand why, but now I believe I do.

The semantic change of loanwords is interesting and worth studying. It tells us a great deal about how two languages and cultures have affected each other though their mutual contact. In the case of ELCs we can see which English concepts are considered useful enough and/or interesting enough to Cantonese speakers to warrant borrowing. We can also see which version(s) of a given word is selected for borrowing, and which are not. We see how the Cantonese speech community changes the pronunciations and meanings of English words to the point that they are no longer English—they have morphed entirely into Cantonese. This all shows that Hong Kong integrates a fascinating blend of langua-cultures, where sincerely saying keoi5 hou2 ku1 (Lit. “He’s so cool”) is not a compliment, where a young girl only addresses a man as ang1kou4 “uncle” if he’s not really her uncle, and where you have to be careful how you use the word “happy” as a verb.