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Thinking about it, I’m not THAT surprised…

Students are doing it on-line all the time, I’m only surprised that this is somehow “official” use now.

I haven’t paid attention to it much, but I expect others with similar linguistic backgrounds to mine are like that. My sister does it too, for example. It’s NOT common to do this in regular Singaporean English (Singlish), though – inflectional suffixes are routinely omitted, almost as if people are using Chinese syntax with English/Mandarin/Hokkien/Malay lexical items.

Personally, I do it all the time – I’m from Singapore, English is my native language and I learned Mandarin Chinese in school. Occasionally I will find that a Mandarin expression is much more apt than anything in English I can think of, and then I’ll add whatever tense/aspect/plural endings needed to make it grammatical in English. But this grafting is to a Chinese word in a majority-English sentence, not a majority-Chinese one, so my case is quite different.

It’s certainly not uncommon. For example, the Mystery and Thrillers magazine cover has a cover line reading “???????????ing ” (and I think they’ve used the same wording ever since the magazine launched mid-year). My guess is that it started online (or close to it, like in cutesy IM language), similar to other grammatical borrowings (?? being another prominent example).

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For lagniappe: , which has lots of examples of Mandarin’s b?.

(?????ing????????????), Frank Hsieh’s blog, March 27, 2007

, China Times, November 30, 2007

Has anyone seen or heard other examples of this -ing grafting?

L? YГPpГYng, WГѕng F?i j?jГ] zГPi zuГ¶rГYn

In both of these examples, -ing is used to emphasize the currentness of the actions. But it is of course possible in Mandarin to stress that something is going on now — and to do so without borrowing forms from English. For example, with zГPi:

There are several other interesting things about the Faye Wong headline, such as the way in most other contexts zuГ¶rГYn (lit. “be/make a person”) means something like “be a mensch.” But I don’t want to digress too much lest I never finish this post.

The other example I noticed was in a newspaper headline about the Hong Kong pop diva Faye Wong: ????? ?????? ????? ????ING (MГ]ngniГѕn p?n l?os?n — ti?n hГ¶u zГPn bГ fГ ch? — L? YГPpГYng, WГѕng F?i j?jГ] zuГ¶rГYn-ing. “Next year work hard to produce third child — superstar temporarily not appearing — Li Yapeng and Faye Wong are energetically working on making a baby.”)

The image here is from a poster for the DPP’s presidential candidate, Frank Hsieh, that came out in March but which I didn’t see until a few days ago. It reads ????ing (“TГѕiw?n wГYix?n-ing“): “Taiwan is modernizing.” (Click the image to see the whole poster.)

Putting English words in Mandarin sentences is of course extremely common in Taiwan and elsewhere in Asia, generally because this is thought to look cool and modern. But last month I was surprised to see Mandarin sentences with just English’s -ing added — and not one but two examples of this.

Mandarin borrow-ing English grammatical forms

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