{"id":1019,"date":"2008-01-04T21:47:03","date_gmt":"2008-01-04T13:47:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/2008\/mandarin-borrow-ing-english-grammatical-forms\/"},"modified":"2015-12-17T19:08:18","modified_gmt":"2015-12-17T11:08:18","slug":"mandarin-borrow-ing-english-grammatical-forms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/2008\/mandarin-borrow-ing-english-grammatical-forms\/","title":{"rendered":"Mandarin borrow-ing English grammatical forms"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"click<\/a>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<\/em> added — and not one but two<\/em> examples of this. <\/p>\n

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 台灣維新ing (“Táiwān wéixīn-ing<\/em><\/span>“): “Taiwan is modernizing.” (Click the image to see the whole poster.)<\/p>\n

The other example I noticed was in a newspaper headline about the Hong Kong pop diva Faye Wong: 明年拚老三 天后暫不復出 李亞鵬王菲 積極做人ING (Míngnián pīn lǎosān — tiān hòu zàn bù fùchū — Lǐ Yàpéng, Wáng Fěi jījí zuòrén-<\/span>ing<\/em>. “Next year work hard to produce third child — superstar temporarily not appearing — Li Yapeng and Faye Wong are energetically working on making a baby.”)<\/p>\n

There are several other interesting things about the Faye Wong headline, such as the way in most other contexts zuòrén<\/span> (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.<\/p>\n

In both of these examples, -ing<\/em> 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 zài<\/span>: <\/p>\n