Similarly, the addition of (the grass radical) produced mòlì to translate the Sanskrit name for jasmine () and (clothes) was added to other characters to permit jiāshā, the Chinese version of Sanskrit kasaya. Another such example is pīngpāng the Chinese word for ping pong, in which both characters are formed by removing a stroke from the similar sounding character bīng, and at the same time, the two characters look like a net and a paddle. The most general radical for transcription is the mouth radical, which is used to transcribe not only certain foreign terms (such as kāfēi, "coffee"), but also terms for which no Chinese characters exist in non-Mandarin varieties of Chinese (such as in Cantonese). Such phono-semantic compounds make up the majority of Chinese characters, but new ones coined to communicate foreign words only infrequently reach common use today. Notable exceptions are the Chinese characters for chemical elements, which mostly consist of combining pre-existing characters with the appropriate radicals, such as for gases. See also Sinicization Chinese Language Standardisation Council of Malaysia Romanization of Chinese Cyrillization of Chinese Ateji, the Japanese equivalent Place names in China Chinese exonyms Chinese characters for transcribing Slavonic, for transcription from Church Slavonic Jingtang Jiaoyu, for transcribing Arabic to Chinese characters The Secret History of the Mongols, a surviving document written in Mongolian transcribed to Chinese characters Official Cantonese translations of English names for British officials References Citations Sources Names of the World's Peoples (), published by the Xinhua News Agency, October 1993, /Z21 Chinese language Transcription (linguistics)