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by jonathankoren
761 days ago
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Those are often transliterations into the latin alphabet or direct adoption of foreign words and therefore are not English. For example, 氣 is only spelled "qi" in pinyin. "Chi" is also a perfectly fine transliteration if you use Wade-Giles. They're equivalent in every respect, except orthography. Same with "koran", "quran", "coran", and "kuran". They're the same word. You don't need the Q. I can say with complete confidence, because Q is not a letter in Arabic. "Sioux" while an American word isn't English either. It's Lakota. The only reason we spell it with an "ioux" instead of an "oo" is because it got transliterated into French. If you want to completely change the orthography of these words to better match the adopted English pronoucations of these words, I'm all for it! I'll get the shampain and the kapaqeno! But you don't get to |
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No, “direct adoption of foreign words into English” is, in fact, English, as are transliterations adopted into English. (I mean, it's literally ominnthe description.)
If they weren't, the ~1/3 of English vocabulary resulting from the wholesale importing of French after the Norman conquest would be not-English.
But, sure, the rule about “qu” applies to “English” if you adopt a definition of what is “English” that excludes most of the actual language.