FOREIGN CURRENCY NAMES IN CHINESE

The importance of Chinese has grown, particularly recently, as a world language. Despite this trend, sufficient attention has not been paid as yet to its word-formation. This paper consequently asks how the Chinese language, where new words are mainly created by composition, deals with the transfer of foreign currency names. Based on a corpus composed of the currency names of the United Nations member states, this text compares their names in English, as the source language for the transfer of Euro-American reality for Chinese, and in Chinese. A subsequent quantitative analysis demonstrates which of the methods of word-formation is the most productive in relation to foreign currency names in Chinese.