On Mon, Jul 25, 2011 at 9:19 AM, Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets <tsela.cg@
gmail.com> wrote:

> On 25 July 2011 16:09, Adam Walker <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> > >
> > Well, on a multiple choice test the answer would be D. All of the above.
> > Sometimes, as Philip mentioned, you actually get a new character, but
> this
> > is probably the rarest solution.  Most of the time you either get
> something
> > like elcetric speak = telephone, electric brain = computer, or you get
> > heavily sinicized transliterations of English terms written out in
> > chraracters used purely for phonetic reasons. iPhone seems to be written
> > out
> > in English within Chinese text, with no attempt at giving it a chatacter
> > realization.
> >
> >
> That's because it's a brand. Those are usually left untransliterated. The
> same thing is done in Greek. Actually, English and other languages written
> in the Latin alphabet are the odd ones out for requiring transliteration of
> everything. Other writing systems usually don't mind intrusions from alien
> writing systems, at least for brands.
>
Actually, Chinese, at least as it is written in Taiwan, is more than
tolerant of English inclusions and text with random bits of English here and
there (even when written in vertical left-right or right-left columns) is
quite common.  French gets similar, though less frequent treatment as does
Japanese.

Adam