The Plot Hatching Factory

I was struck the other day by a Chinese chap on Google+ who posted a short message that said: 安装ing. That translates as ‘installing’, in this context it was software since he posted a link to the software he was installing. What’s interesting is the use of the inglish ‘ing’ morphology to indicate the verb usage of the word in the continuous present.

I’ve seen a number of interesting uses of English in Chinese but mostly they are word-based in nature. Coincidental allophones seems to be a powerful motivator but this observation is a different animal altogether. Chinese has little morphology and indeed many words, including 安装 (an zhuang), are verbs and nouns which need context and syntax to disambiguate them. A syntactic example: 我正在安装一台新电脑。（wo zhengzai anzhuang yi tai xin diannao). The 正在 tells us that 安装 is a verb and we’re doing it in the present.

The English morphological rule of using the suffix -ing to indicate the present continuous action of the verb struck this native Chinese speaker as useful enough to use instead of the Chinese structure which would have been 正在安装. In fact a quick Google search turned up millions of such occurrences in the Chinese blogosphere on this and other verbs.

I’m was at a bit of loss as to why this might be but I’ve come to suspect that it’s a coincidence of practicality as well as a coincidence that the English form happens to be an easily said phoneme that is an existing Chinese final phoneme.  In essence 安装ing is actually easier to say than the native Chinese form and flows perfectly naturally. The final piece of the puzzle is the ideal vector to introduce it into the language, namely how others will recognise it when they see it for the first time.

That little -ing is a handy little package of information which is obviously English, given the latin alphabet, provides the pronunciation (the final exists in Chinese pinyin) and they’ll be be aware of it from their English-language tuition in school. I imagine some small part of appearing ‘cool’ by using English in such a way is also a motivator. It certainly seems to occur more often with the younger Chinese speakers.

Chinese has relatively little morphology or none at all depending on how you look at it. The best example is the plural marker 们 (men) although it’s highly limited to animate objects. There’s also the 者 (zhe) agent marker, which similarly doesn’t really exist stand alone (a bound morpheme) but though it sounds quite useful to indicate someone who does a particular thing, like adding -er in English, in practice it’s extremely limited again and most of the time there’s a proper word.

As far as verbs go, the past perfect 过 (guo) marker and to a lesser extent the muddy but generally past tense 了 (le) marker are the best evidence that the Chinese find affix-morphology an easy to deal with concept. I suspect that the reason that they have not become a more consistent system in Chinese is because of the clash of compound words made from compliments. Something like 出去 (chuqu), out-go.

In fact if we consider the most common ways you would want to modify a verb, tense, then in fact we can say Chinese has a pretty good system of tense modification but it seems to just be missing that last piece. You can say it happened, or it happened past tense perfect but you cannot say it’s happening now, for that you need to do something entirely different and use a syntactical structure.

As an aside here: It is interesting that even the morphologically-rich English does not indicate a verb will be performed in the future by adding a morphological suffix. Instead, just as with Chinese, we use an auxiliary such as ‘will’.

I have only observed evidence of Chinese wanting to say verb-ing something. The clash I mentioned with two-character compliments really raises the question of whether Chinese will adopt something like 出去ing. Whether this sounds like it’s a good idea for a Chinese speaker may shed some light on whether they actually consider 出去 (and the thousands of similar compliments) actual grammatical constructs or if they think of them as individual words, something I’ve pondered for awhile.