Abstract
The author discovers in the development of Chinese lexicon that there are two kinds of words in today’s Chinese, one of which is Chinese character words, the majority of Chinese lexicon, while the other is lettered words, which occupy only a small part of Chinese lexicon and are mostly loanwords. The article also points out that the emergence of lettered words is a result of the policy of reform and opening and the need of today’s information society. Moreover it is a new and promising method to borrow words from foreign languages. This paper discusses in detail the word-formation of lettered words as well as the relevant problems, such as pronunciation, ways of writing and indexing system. The indexing system proposed here is computer-based and totally automated, which may be of reference value for the automation of dictionary compilation.
| Keywords: | Chinese; lexicon; lettered word; word-formation; loanword |
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