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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.
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.
In Cantonese usage, this is used in lieu of shù (束), e.g. a bundle of flowers "jar", "jug" — beverages such as beer, soda, juice, etc. (A recent loan-word from English, it may be considered informal or slang.) 陣: 阵: zhèn zan6: jan6 "gust", "burst" — events with short durations (e.g. lightning storms, gusts of wind 風 / 风, etc ...
Cantonese is an analytic language in which the arrangement of words in a sentence is important to its meaning. A basic sentence is in the form of SVO, i.e. a subject is followed by a verb then by an object, though this order is often violated because Cantonese is a topic-prominent language.
Literary readings (文读; 文讀; wéndú) are usually used in loanwords, geographic and personal names, literary works such as poetry, and in formal contexts, while colloquial readings (白读; 白讀; báidú) are used in everyday vernacular speech.
Bilingual punning makes the use of similarity in pronunciation between English and Cantonese to attract attention, especially for advertisements. In particular, 'fun' is frequently used as it forms almost complete homophonous with the Cantonese characters like 分 (fan1, 'point' or 'to share') and 紛 (fan1, 'many and various'). Examples ...