Chinglish adds flavor to my alphabet soup

San Diego-based consultancy group - Global Language Monitor claims Chinglish is adding the most spice to the alphabet soup of today's English by contributing more words than any other single source to the global language.

And the more Chinese I learn, the more appetizing this seems.

Subscribing to the Elizabethan definition of a word as "a thing spoken and understood", GLM is using a predictive quantities indicator (PQI) to scan the Web for emergent English words and track their mainstream use over time.

As GLM president Paul JJ Payack says: "Language colors the way you think. Thinking in Chinese is completely different."

And every day that I learn more Chinese, the more vibrant this coloration becomes in my mind. This is mostly because of the descriptive nature of the language, in which many words are created by mixing and matching diasylobolic words to create new diasylobolic words.

Generally speaking, English is more definitional, so its words are more terminological than descriptive. For example, a "spider" is a spider - the word in itself tells you nothing about what it represents. But the Chinese word for spider (zhizhu) literally translates as "clever insect" - a description it earns in Chinese by spinning intricate webs to ensnare prey.

In Chinese, you don't ride a bike, bus or train; you instead respectively ride a (zixinche) "self-walk vehicle", a (gonggongqiche) "public all-together gas vehicle" or a (huoche) "fire vehicle".