On the Problems of Lettered Words
LIU Yongquan
Abstract
The author notes in the development of the Chinese lexicon that there are two kinds of words in Modern Chinese. One of these is Chinese character words, which constitute the majority of the Chinese lexicon. The other is lettered words, which occupy only a small part of the lexicon and are mostly loanwords. The author also notes that emergence of lettered words is a result of the Policy of Reformation and Opening, and of the needs of today's information society. Moreover, this is a new and promising method for borrowing words from foreign languages. This paper discusses in detail the word-formation of lettered words as well as relevant problems, such as pronunciation, style of writing, and indexing system. The indexing system proposed here is computer-based and totally automated, and may be a worthy reference for the automation of dictionary compilation.