Chinglish adds flavor to my alphabet soup

A massage is a (anmo) "press and touch". A pimple is a (qingdou) "youth bean". Investing is to (touzi) "throw funds". And when you don't make your money back, the disappointment is conveyed directly as (saoxing) "sweep interest".

While linguists ballyhoo English's capacity for specificity, this has in some ways become its weakness, as the definitional often trumps the descriptive, with wonderful exceptions, such as "rainbow". But that's where the other widely vaunted strength of the language - its capacity to ravenously gobble up other languages' words - could become a beautiful thing. And I'm glad to know the English language is developing a growing taste for Chinese food.

In the 1960s, there were about 250 million English speakers, mostly from the United States, the United Kingdom and their former colonies.

Today, the same number of Chinese possesses some command of the language, and that number is growing. One possibility is the plethora of localized "lishes", such as Chinglish, Hinglish (a Hindi-English hybrid) and Spanglish (an English-Spanish hybrid) could branch so far from English, they become mutually unintelligible tongues sharing a common root, much as Latin did in Medieval Europe.

Many linguists agree that if the lishes splinter, Chinglish will likely become the most prominent offshoot by virtue of sheer numbers, giving Chinese primary ownership of the language.

Perhaps then, English could become more beautiful than I could now describe - at least with its currently existing words.

(China Daily 02/20/2008 page20)