A Dissertation by GRACE HUI-CHIN LIN Submitted to the Office of ...

create a new word for productions from overseas. I detected that superstition
was a point of selecting words. For example, for “Benz,” we would not use
the sound of “s,” which meant “die” in Taiwanese dialect. I found many
words were translated and newly created from the other languages.
In the second interview, Cheng Chih offered many examples of interlanguage in
order to demonstrate how he interpreted the strategies in the interlanguage:
Two methods of the ancient Chinese word creator, Tsang-Jei, applied to create
Chinese characters also could be applied to “coin a word with pronunciation”
(形聲: 應 鷹 膺) and “coin a word with deconstruction.” (會意: 休 婦 森
信 ) These two skills applied word producing methods through the
“pronunciation” and “deconstruction” of a word to produce new words.
Cheng Chih stated that some Taiwanese people would listen to pronunciation and
create some foreign words, which can not be found in a dictionary. The similar
Chinese sounds of the foreign words made listeners quickly realize which foreign
word the speakers meant. He said:
For example, “Formosa,” (beautiful island in Portuguese) 福 (lucky) 爾摩
沙 (sand); and “Benz,” 鵬馳 (huge bird running speedily) were words with
the same pronunciations as the original lexis and also with the precise
meanings. Taiwanese people listen to the sounds of words and create new
Chinese words that make sense with the original words.
123