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Words of Chinese origin have entered European languages, including English. Most of these were direct loanwords from various varieties of Chinese.However, Chinese words have also entered indirectly via other languages, particularly Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese, that have all used Chinese characters at some point and contain a large number of Chinese loanwords.
The term gong'an originally referred to the table, desk, or bench of a Chinese magistrate. [citation needed] It was later used as a name for unusual legal cases. [9]Gong'an as a genre of fiction has been translated into English as "court-case" fiction [10] or "crime-case" fiction. [11]
For example, Di Gong'an (狄公案) is the original title of Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee, the famous Chinese detective novel based on a historical Tang dynasty judge. Similarly, Zen kōan collections are public records of the notable sayings and actions of Zen masters and disciples attempting to pass on their teachings.
Within the Chinese language, the same character 公 (gōng) is used as a noun in the terms for respected male relatives (e.g. 老公, lǎogōng, "husband", and 外公, wàigōng, "maternal grandfather") and as an adjective in the terms for various male animals (e.g. 公牛, gōngniú, "bull", and 公羊, gōngyáng, "ram" or "billy goat").
Loanwords have entered written and spoken Chinese from many sources, including ancient peoples whose descendants now speak Chinese. In addition to phonetic differences, varieties of Chinese such as Cantonese and Shanghainese often have distinct words and phrases left from their original languages which they continue to use in daily life and sometimes even in Mandarin.
One of those is the word 番鬼 (pinyin: fānguǐ, Jyutping: faan 1 gwai 2, Hakka GR: fan 1 gui 3, Teochew Peng'im: huang 1 gui 2; loaned into Indonesian as fankui), meaning "foreign ghost" (鬼 means 'ghost' or 'demon'), which is primarily used by Hakka and Mandarin-speaking mainland Chinese and Chinese Indonesians to refer to non-Chinese ...
"set" — books 書 / 书, teaware 茶具, collectibles, clothes 衣裳, etc. 聽 (听) 听: tīng ting1: ting1 for canned beverages (e.g. soda, cola) "tin" ("听" is common and informal in handwriting Traditional Chinese) — A recent loanword that have involved in Mandarin from Cantonese 團: 团: tuán tyun4: tyun4
Some Classical Chinese words can have more than one meaning. However, Classical Chinese words still exist among many chengyu, or Chinese idioms. The Classical Chinese words and examples will be written in traditional characters, and the modern vernacular will be written in both simplified and traditional characters.