How we pluralise Chinese terms

We keep a lot of Chinese words in our translations. Jianghu, neili, shifu, jin, xia. The reasoning for that is covered elsewhere — in why we say dao and jian and why we footnote Chinese terms. This article is about a smaller question that turned out to be more interesting than expected.

Is it three jin, or three jins?

We had both. Our own corpus said li, liang, shichen, mu, wen, chi, cun and qian never took an -s, while jin and zhang occasionally did. That is not a standard, it is an accident. So we went looking for the actual rule.

The rule is not “foreign words don’t pluralise”

The tempting answer is that borrowed words keep their foreignness and therefore resist English endings. That is wrong, and English disproves it constantly. Kimonos. Tsunamis. Futons. Typhoons. Gurus. Tycoons. Every one of those is a borrowing that took an English plural without fuss.

The better generalisation is that a loanword acquires English plural morphology at the point it stops being felt as foreign. Plural marking is a symptom of naturalisation, not a stylistic preference. Which means the question is never “is this word foreign?” but “has this word been absorbed?” — and the answer varies by word, by register, and over time.

What Japanese and Korean borrowings show

English has been absorbing Japanese and Korean vocabulary for longer and more thoroughly than Chinese, which makes them a useful control.

Start with money and measures, because they are the cleanest case. Yen. Won. Nobody writes ten thousand wons. The pattern holds for units that are less familiar too: tatami is a unit of floor area as much as a mat, and a room is a six-tatami room, never six-tatamis. Tsubo, pyeong — the same. Measures resist the plural more stubbornly than any other class of borrowing.

Social roles are where it gets instructive, because the same word goes both ways depending on where it is used. In literary and historical writing, these stay invariant: the forty-seven samurai, the daimyō of the western provinces, the yangban of the late Joseon. Cross into general or commercial English and the identical class of word takes the -s without complaint: shoguns, ninjas, chaebols. Nothing about the words changed. The register did.

Relational terms are the most consistent of the three. Senpai, kōhai, sensei, sunbae, hoobae. It is hard to find careful English that pluralises any of them. Two things seem to be going on: they describe a position relative to whoever is speaking rather than naming a free-standing category, and they are used to address people, where number never comes up.

What that gives us

Measures stay invariant. Three jin, ten li, five liang, two shichen. Every comparable borrowing agrees, and there is a detail specific to Chinese that settles it. The Chinese measures that do pluralise in English are catty and catties, tael and taels, picul and piculs — which are precisely the words we have rejected, because they reached English through the Malay of the maritime trade rather than from Chinese, and belong to the vocabulary of the customs house rather than the story. Those words take English plurals because they were naturalised into the English of the treaty ports. Adopting their grammar while rejecting their vocabulary would be half a decision.

Common nouns for people stay invariant too. The xia gathered at the inn. Two xiake. This one we changed our minds on. We had 95 instances of “xias” in our prose and had been treating that as settled, which it was not — it had never been examined, it was just what we happened to have typed. Held against the pattern, xia sits with samurai and yangban rather than with ninjas and chaebols. Our register is the literary one. Number is carried by context and verb agreement, which is what English already does when it writes “the samurai were waiting”.

Relational terms stay invariant. His two shixiong. Where a real plural is needed, the answer is usually to recast — “fellow disciples” reads better than anything with an -s on the end.

Peoples take the -s. The Mongols, the Manchus, the Jurchens. This is ordinary English and there was never a question.

The trap, and the case we argued about

Dynasties are not peoples. English does not pluralise dynastic names: the Ming, under the Qing, the Song fell. Not the Mings. We found seventy-three instances of “the Jins” in one translation, referring to the Jurchen state, and nearly swept them into the singular on the assumption they were the unit of weight misbehaving. They were not. They were a different error entirely — and a mechanical fix would have flattened a twenty-year war into a measure of grain. Anyone running a sweep over plural forms should carve out ethnonyms first.

Names are the visible case. We write Seven Xia of Wudang for 武当七侠 and Four Xia of Taiyue for 太岳四侠, with no -s, because a name built from the common noun inherits the noun’s form. English does this without strain when the loanword is invariant — the Forty-Seven Ronin, not the Forty-Seven Ronins.

This is the one we argued about longest, and the case for an exception was not bad: a numeral-plus-noun title reads as an English name rather than as a borrowed word, and English names do go both ways, since the Three Musketeers pluralises. But an exception here would have been the worst possible place for one. Group epithets are high-frequency and prominent — they turn up in headings, article titles and the first line of character entries — so a rule that held everywhere except there would be a rule that mostly appeared to be broken.

There was also a tell we had missed. The slugs for these articles were already seven-xia-of-wudang and four-xia-of-taiyue. Whoever wrote them had applied the rule instinctively before it existed; only the display names had drifted.

Why bother

None of this is visible to a reader who is enjoying the story, which is the point. The reason to settle it is that inconsistency is visible — three jin on one page and three jins on the next is the kind of small wrongness that makes a translation feel unattended, even when the reader cannot say what is bothering them.

The larger reason is that the grammar should follow the same logic as the vocabulary. We keep these words because we want the reader standing inside the world rather than outside looking in. Bolting an English ending onto them pulls in the opposite direction, quietly, one letter at a time.