Page "Chinese language" Paragraph 4

Since the 20th century, another source of words has been Japanese using existing kanji ( Chinese characters used in Japanese ).

Japanese re-molded European concepts and inventions into wasei-kango ( 和製漢語, lit.

" Japanese-made Chinese "), and many of these words have been re-loaned into modern Chinese.

Other terms were coined by the Japanese by giving new senses to existing Chinese terms or by referring to expressions used in classical Chinese literature.

For example, jīngjì ( 经济 ／ 經濟, keizai ), which in the original Chinese meant " the workings of the state ", was narrowed to " economy " in Japanese ; this narrowed definition was then re-imported into Chinese.

As a result, these terms are virtually indistinguishable from native Chinese words: indeed, there is some dispute over some of these terms as to whether the Japanese or Chinese coined them first.

As a result of this loaning, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese share a corpus of linguistic terms describing modern terminology, paralleling the similar corpus of terms built from Greco-Latin and shared among European languages.