ceigered:

gyrus:Japanese and Chinese are relatively free of Latinate words. Japanese has far more English-based words, but that depends on the semantic field.

I've noticed Chinese tends to take the meaning of some words it would otherwise loan from Latin and uses existing vocab to do it. Japanese tends to borrow some scientific/sci-fi or technology related vocab from English, then Nihonise it (terebi, camera, kameriha (came(ra) rehea(rsal)), dejikame (digi(tal) came(ra)), and so forth, and in Chinese: "dianhua" = telephone, literally "eletric speech", which is translated from "Tele" and "phone")

Originally delefeng, until the Chinese saw that the Japanese had used denwa, also meaning electric speech and written with the same characters as dianhua, and decided to copy it.

Ah I see, mmm, delefeng, reminds me of "Aodaliya" (Australia)

gyrus:
Originally delefeng, until the Chinese saw that the Japanese had used denwa, also meaning electric speech and written with the same characters as dianhua, and decided to copy it.

But the Chinese are much less apt to adopt foreign words than the Japanese are. Consider the word for baseball. When the game first game to Japan, they called it 野球 or "yakyuu" for "field" and "ball". But, I rarely if ever hear that word anymore. Everyone uses the transliterated ”ベースボール” (beesubooru). If I remember correctly, and please tell me if I'm wrong, the Chinese use the word 棒球 which makes more sense to me. (Even though I don't know how to say it) The two characters mean "pole" and "ball".

My feeling is, if these characters had been introduced in Europe (and the Admiral Zheng Ho scenario is really fascinating), I wonder if the Europeans would have still made compounds like "base" + "ball" or if they would have followed whatever example the Chinese adopted. I still remember my grandmother telling me about playing "stickball" when she was a little girl, so it isn't outside the realm of possibility.

Stickball is actually a separate sport from baseball, though it is related.

But regarding colonialism by the Chinese, I feel that perhaps we could get an idea of what would have happened in Europe if the Chinese had colonized it, by looking at what happened in areas that were colonized in real life. The current territory of China was not always held by the Han ethnic group. Borders shifted, nations were created and conquered, and they didn't all speak the same language (or indeed, even languages that are in the same family). Therefore China has, as we all know, many "dialects". But we have also languages from a completely different family and with a completely different script. It would be interesting to make note of the assimilation of Han words into unrelated languages (like Tibetan and Uyghur), and it would also be interesting to know if Mandarin assimilated words from the Manchu language, during the Qing dynasty.

I just took a look in Nicholas Ostler's "Empires of the Word" to get some information. According to Ostler, the story of the Machu's and the Qing dynasty seems absolutely fascinating. They installed themselves as rulers in the mid 17th century and brought their own language with them. It remained an official written language of the empire until 1911, but had mostly died out in the 18th and 19th centuries. The conquerors accepted Mandarin as their new language!

Ostler also says there was a detachment of soldiers sent to Xinjiang in 1764 whose descendants still speak the language of Xibo. Otherwise it is dead.

The language apparently did not accept many cognates, but did incorporate some elements of the Chinese language. For example, Chinese differentiates between Women (pronoun "We" excluding the person you are speaking to) and zanmen ("We" including the person you are speaking to) Manchurian languages made similar differentiations even though they were from a different family.

Ostler also mentions some books called zi-di-shu or "son's books" which were popular from the time period. They contained Manchu words written in Chinese grammatical word order. He also says that this style never caught on.