THE internet is replete with funny Chinese signs in English, but a friend currently in Kunming, in southwester China, sends in a doozy of an unusual one. He translates it as "fall fashions, selling fast." (The characters are autumn, style, hot and sell in that order.) What's unusual is the borrowing of just a single bit of English: that "-ing" ending. Chinese doesn't have a progressive aspect that closely mirrors the English "running" and such. So this seems to be nothing more than to add a little foreign glamour to a bland shoe-sale sign.

Normally when foreign words and sounds are imported into a language, they are rendered into that language's writing system. France is called Faguo in Chinese. The "Fa" comes from "France", but it's rendered with the Chinese character 法. 法 means something like "law", but ever since the Chinese bolted it to "-guo" for France, the "law" meaning is lost, maybe a bit like most people don't think of "Argentina" as particularly silvery.

Here, though, none of the many characters pronounced "ying" were used. Though one might have been, it probably would have been confusing, since the characters also have meanings, and none of them has (yet?) been conventionalised as representing the English "-ing".

Also weird is that while borrowing from one language to another is common, borrowing grammar is not nearly as common. It does happen: Romanian, a Romance language, is influenced by Slavic grammar, for example. But borrowing a suffix like this isn't common. I wonder if it'll become more so as English penetrates further into China. (Or if Chinese authorities will react against it, as they have done with Roman-letter acronyms.)

Addendum: Ben Zimmer notes that Mark Liberman covered this ground in 2008. If so, the real news here may be that Chinese "-ing" has made it from Hong Kong and Taiwan, where we might expect this to begin, as far as Kunming. It's a big city, but far inland, away from China's outward-facing coast.