Chinese language

:Unless otherwise specified, Chinese texts in this article are written in ([[Simplified Chinese]]/[[Traditional Chinese]]; [[Pinyin]]) format. In cases where Simplified and Traditional Chinese scripts are identical, the Chinese term is written once. or |statesPeople's Republic of China (PRC, commonly known as mainland China), Republic of China (ROC, commonly known as Taiwan), Hong Kong Singapore Malaysia Macau the Philippines the United States of America Australia Indonesia Mauritius Peru Canada and other regions with Chinese communities |region(majorities): Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore
(minorities): Southeast Asia, and other regions with Chinese communities |speakersapprox 1.3 billion |rankChinese, all: 1 Mandarin: 1
Wu: 12
Cantonese: 18
Min: 22
Hakka: 33
Gan: 42 |familycolorSino-Tibetan |fam1Sino-Tibetan languages |fam2Sinitic languages |dia6Gan Chinese |dia7Hakka Chinese |dia5Xiang Chinese |dia2Jinyu Chinese |dia1Mandarin Chinese |dia4Wu Chinese |dia3Huizhou Chinese |dia8Yue Chinese (including Cantonese-Taishanese) |dia9Ping Chinese |dia10Shaojiang Min |dia11Min Bei |dia12Min Dong (including Fuchow) |dia13Min Zhong |dia14Puxian Min |dia15Min Nan (including Amoy, Taiwanese) |scriptChinese character , zhuyin fuhao pinyin Xiao'erjing |nation lt;br /> lt;br /> * * lt;br /> (official, but not national language)lt;br />
|minority lt;br />(minority and auxiliary)

|agencyIn the PRC: National Language Regulating Committee A map below depicts the linguistic subdivisions ("languages" or "dialect groups") within China itself. The traditionally recognized seven main groups, in order of population size are: | class"wikitable sortable" style"font-size:90%;" aligncenter !align"left" width"180"|Name !align"left" width"60"|Abbreviation !align"left" width"80"|Pinyin !align"left" width"200"|Local Romanization of Chinese !align"left" width"60"|Simplified Chinese !align"left" width"60"|Traditional Chinese !align"left" width"100"|Total
Speakers |- |rowspan2|Mandarin Chinese lt;br/>Notes: includes Standard Mandarin |rowspan2|Guan; 官 |Guānhuà |Pinyin Guānhuà |官话 |官話 |rowspan2|c. 1365 million |- |Běifānghuà |Pinyin Běifānghuà |北方话 |北方話 |- |Wu Chinese lt;br/>Notes: includes Shanghainese dialect |Wu; 吴／吳 |Wúyǔ |Long-short (romanization) Ng nyiu orGhu nyiu |吴语 |吳語 |c. 90 million |- |Yue Chinese
Notes: includes Cantonese & Taishanese |Yue; 粤／粵 |Yuèyǔ |Jyutping Jyut6 jyu5;
Yale_Romanization#Cantonese Yuht yúh |粤语 |粵語 |c. 80 million |- |Min Chinese lt;br/>Notes: includes Taiwanese Hokkien & Teochew dialect | Min; 闽／閩 |Mǐnyǔ |Pe̍h-ōe-jī Bân gú;
Bàng-uâ-cê |闽语 |閩語 |c. 50 million |- |Xiang Chinese |Xiang; 湘 |Xiāngyǔ |Xiang Chinese Shiāenỳ |湘语 |湘語 |c. 35 million |- |rowspan2|Hakka Chinese |rowspan2|Kejia; 客家 |Kèjiāhuà |Guangdong Romanization#Hakka Hak-kâ-fa orHak-kâ-va |客家话 |客家話 |rowspan2|c. 35 million |- |Kèhuà |Guangdong Romanization#Hakka Hak-fa orHak-va |客话 |客話 |- |Gan Chinese |Gan; 贛 |Gànyǔ |Gan Chinese Gon ua |赣语 |贛語 |c. 31 million |} Disputed classifications by some Chinese linguists: | class"wikitable sortable" style"font-size:90%;" aligncenter !align"left" width"180"|Name !align"left" width"60"|Abbreviation !align"left" width"80"|Pinyin !align"left" width"200"|Local Romanization of Chinese !align"left" width"60"|Simplified Chinese !align"left" width"60"|Traditional Chinese !align"left" width"100"|Total
Speakers |- |Jin Chinese lt;br/>Notes: from Mandarin |Jin; 晋／晉 |Jìnyǔ |None |晋语 |晉語 |45 million |- |Huizhou Chinese lt;br/>Notes: from Wu |Hui; 徽 |Huīzhōuhuà |None |徽州话 |徽州話 |~3.2 million |- |Pinghua lt;br/>Notes: from Yue |Ping; 平 |Guǎngxī Pínghuà |None |广西平话 |廣西平話 |~5 million |} There are also some smaller groups that are not yet classified, such as: Danzhou dialect (儋州话／儋州話), spoken in Danzhou on Hainan Island; Xianghua (乡话／鄉話), not to be confused with Xiang (湘), spoken in western Hunan and Shaozhou Tuhua (韶州土话／韶州土話), spoken in northern Guangdong The Dungan language spoken in Central Asia is very closely related to Mandarin. However, it is politically not generally considered "Chinese" since it is written in Cyrillic and spoken by Dungan people outside China who are not considered ethnic Overseas Chinese In general, the above language-dialect groups do not have sharp boundaries, though Mandarin is the predominant Sinitic language in the North and the Southwest, and the rest are mostly spoken in Central or Southeastern China. Frequently, as in the case of the Guangdong province, native speakers of major variants overlapped. As with many areas that were linguistically diverse for a long time, it is not always clear how the speeches of various parts of China should be classified. The Ethnologue lists a total of http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid90151 14], but the number varies between seven and seventeen depending on the classification scheme followed. For instance, the Min variety is often divided into Northern Min (Minbei, Fuchow) and Southern Min (Minnan, Amoy-Swatow); linguists have not determined whether their mutual intelligibility is small enough to sort them as separate languages. In general, mountainous South China displays more linguistic diversity than the flat North China. In parts of South China, a major citys dialect may only be marginally intelligible to close neighbours. For instance, Wuzhou is about 120 miles upstream from Guangzhou but its dialect is more like Standard Cantonese spoken in Guangzhou, than is that of Taishan 60 miles southwest of Guangzhou and separated by several rivers from it (Ramsey, 1987).

Standard Mandarin and diglossia

Standard Mandarin often called "Mandarin", is the official standard language used by the People's Republic of China the Republic of China and Singapore (where it is called "Huayu"). It is based on the Beijing dialect which is the dialect of Mandarin Chinese as spoken in Beijing The government intends for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. Therefore it is used in government agencies, in the media, and as a language of instruction in schools. In mainland China and Taiwan, diglossia has been a common feature: it is common for a Chinese to be able to speak two or even three varieties of the Sinitic languages (or “dialects”) together with Standard Mandarin. For example, in addition to putonghuaa resident of Shanghai might speak Shanghainese dialect and, if they did not grow up there, his or her local dialect as well. A native of Guangzhou may speak Standard Cantonese and putonghua a resident of Taiwan, both Taiwanese Hokkien and putonghua/guoyu A person living in Taiwan may commonly mix pronunciations, phrases, and words from Standard Mandarin and Taiwanese Hokkien and this mixture is considered normal under many circumstances. In Hong Kong, Standard Mandarin is beginning to take its place beside English and Standard Cantonese, the other official languages.

Linguistics

Linguists often view Chinese as a language family though owing to Chinas socio-political and cultural situation, and the fact that all spoken varieties use one common written system, it is customary to refer to these generally mutually unintelligible variants as "the Chinese language". The diversity of Sinitic variants is comparable to the Romance languages From a purely Linguistic prescription point of view, "languages" and "dialects" are simply arbitrary groups of similar idiolects, and the distinction is irrelevant to linguists who are only concerned with describing regional speeches technically. However, the idea of a single language has major overtones in politics and cultural self-identity, and explains the amount of emotion over this issue. Most Chinese and Chinese linguists refer to Chinese as a single language and its subdivisions dialects, while others call Chinese a language family. Chinese itself has a term for its unified writing system, Zhongwen(中文), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu(汉语／漢語, “spoken languages] of the Han Chinese —this term could be translated to either “language” or “languages” since Chinese possesses no grammatical number . In the Chinese language, there is much less need for a uniform speech-and-writing continuum, as indicated by two separate character morphemes 语／語 yuand 文 wenEthnic Chinese often consider these spoken variations as one single language for reasons of nationality and as they inherit one common cultural and linguistic heritage in Classical Chinese Han native speakers of Wu, Min, Hakka, and Cantonese, for instance, may consider their own linguistic varieties as separate spoken languages, but the Han Chinese as one—albeit internally very diverse—ethnicity. To Chinese nationalists, the idea of Chinese as a language family may suggest that the Chinese identity is much more fragmented and disunified than it actually is and as such is often looked upon as culturally and politically provocative. Additionally, in Taiwan it is closely associated with Taiwanese independence where some supporters of Taiwanese independence promote the local Taiwanese Minnan based spoken language. Within the People’s Republic of China and Singapore, it is common for the government to refer to all divisions of the Sinitic language(s) beside Standard Mandarin as fangyan(“regional tongues”, often translated as “dialect ”). Modern-day Chinese speakers of all kinds communicate using Vernacular Chinese although this modern written standard is modeled after Mandarin, generally the modern Beijing dialect.

Language and nationality

The term sinophone coined in analogy to English-speaking world and francophone refers to those who speak the Chinese language natively, or prefer it as a medium of communication. The term is derived from Sinae the Latin word for ancient China.

Writing

The relationship among the Chinese spoken and written languages is rather complex. Its spoken variations evolved at different rates, while written Chinese itself has changed much less. Classical Chinese literature began in the Spring and Autumn period although written records have been discovered as far back as the 14th to 11th centuries BCE Shang dynasty oracle bone using the oracle bone script . The Chinese orthography centers around Chinese characters, hanzi which are written within imaginary rectangular blocks, traditionally arranged in vertical columns, read from top to bottom down a column, and right to left across columns. Chinese characters are morpheme independent of phonetic change. Thus the number "one", yiin Mandarin Chinese jatin Yue Chinese and chi̍tin Hokkien dialect (form of Min), all share an identical character ("一"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as 冇 and 係 for Yue Chinese and Hakka Chinese which are considered archaic or unused in standard written Chinese. Written colloquial Cantonese has become quite popular in online chat room and instant messaging amongst Hong-Kongers and Cantonese-speakers elsewhere. Use of it is considered highly informal, and does not extend to many formal occasions. Also, in Hunan some women write their local language in Nü Shu a syllabary derived from Chinese character . The Dungan language considered by some a dialect of Mandarin, is also nowadays written in Cyrillic and was formerly written in the Arabic alphabet although the Dungan people live outside China

Chinese characters

Chinese characters evolved over time from earlier forms of hieroglyph . The idea that all Chinese characters are either pictograph or ideograph is an erroneous one: most characters contain phonetic parts, and are composites of phonetic components and semantic Radical (Chinese character) Only the simplest characters, such as ren人 (human), ri日 (sun), shan山 (mountain), shui水 (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar Xu Shen in the Han Dynasty classified characters into six categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80–90% as phonetic complexes consisting of a semanticelement that indicates meaning, and a phoneticelement that indicates the pronunciation. There are about 214 radicals recognized in the Kangxi Dictionary Modern characters are styled after the kaishu (楷书／楷書 kǎishū (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy including seal script (篆书／篆書 zhuànshū), cursive script (草书／草書 cǎoshū) and clerical script (隶书／隸書 lìshū). Calligraphy artists can write in traditional and simplified characters, but tend to use traditional characters for traditional art. File:XingshuLantingxv.jpg by Wang Xizhi written in Semi-cursive script ] There are currently two systems for Chinese characters. The Traditional Chinese character still used in Hong Kong Taiwan Macau and Chinese speaking communities (except Singapore and Malaysia outside mainland China takes its form from standardized character forms dating back to the late Han dynasty The Simplified Chinese character system, developed by the Peoples Republic of China in 1954 to promote mass literacy simplifies most complex traditional glyph to fewer strokes, many to common [[caoshu]]shorthand variants. Singapore which has a large Chinese community, is the first—and at present the only—foreign nation to officially adopt simplified characters, although it has also become the de factostandard for younger ethnic Chinese in Malaysia The Internet provides the platform to practice reading the alternative system, be it traditional or simplified. A well-educated Chinese today recognizes approximately 6,000-7,000 characters; approximately 3,000 characters are required to read a Newspapers of the People's Republic of China The PRC government defines literacy amongst workers as a knowledge of 2,000 characters, though this would be only functional literacy. A large unabridged dictionary like the Kangxi Dictionary contains over 40,000 characters, including obscure, variant, rare, and archaic characters; fewer than a quarter of these characters are now commonly used.

History

Most linguists classify all varieties of modern spoken Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family and believe that there was an original language, termed Proto-Sino-Tibetan from which the Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman languages descended. The relation between Chinese and other Sino-Tibetan languages is an area of active research, as is the attempt to reconstruct Proto-Sino-Tibetan. The main difficulty in this effort is that, while there is enough documentation to allow one to reconstruct the ancient Chinese sounds, there is no written documentation that records the division between Proto-Sino-Tibetan and ancient Chinese. In addition, many of the older languages that would allow us to reconstruct Proto-Sino-Tibetan are very poorly understood and many of the techniques developed for analysis of the descent of the (fusional language Indo-European languages from Proto-Indo-European language do not apply to Chinese, an isolating language because of "morphology (linguistics) paucity" especially after Old Chinese.http://languageserver.uni-graz.at/ls/mat?id1181&typem Analysis of the concept "wave" in PST.] Categorization of the development of Chinese is a subject of scholarly debate. One of the first systems was devised by the Sweden linguist Bernhard Karlgren in the early 1900s; most present systems rely heavily on Karlgrens insights and methods. Old Chinese sometimes known as "Archaic Chinese", was the language common during the early and middle Zhou Dynasty (1122 BCE–256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the [[Shijing|Shījīng]],the history of the [[Shujing|Shūjīng]],and portions of the [[Yijing|Yìjīng]](I Ching. The phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters provide hints to their Old Chinese pronunciations. The pronunciation of the borrowed Chinese characters in Japanese, Vietnamese and Korean also provide valuable insights. Old Chinese was not wholly uninflected. It possessed a rich sound system in which Aspiration (phonetics) or rough breathing differentiated the consonants, but probably was still without tones. Work on reconstructing Old Chinese started with Qing dynasty philologist . Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably :wikt:蜜 mì"honey", :wikt:獅 shī"lion," and perhaps also :wikt:馬 mǎ"horse", :wikt:犬 quǎn"dog", and :wikt:鵝 é"goose". The source says the reconstructions of old Chinese are tentative, and not definitive so no conclusions should be drawn. The reconstruction of Old Chinese can not be perfect so this hypothesis may be called into question.Encyclopedia Britannica s.v. "http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-75039/Chinese-languages Chinese languages]": "Old Chinese vocabulary already contained many words not generally occurring in the other Sino-Tibetan languages. The words for ‘honey and ‘lion, and probably also ‘horse, ‘dog, and ‘goose, are connected with Indo-European and were acquired through trade and early contacts. (The nearest known Indo-European languages were Tocharian and Sogdian, a middle Iranian language.) A number of words have Austroasiatic cognates and point to early contacts with the ancestral language of Muong-Vietnamese and Mon-Khmer"; Jan Ulenbrook, Einige Übereinstimmungen zwischen dem Chinesischen und dem Indogermanischen(1967) proposes 57 items; see also Tsung-tung Chang, 1988 http://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp007_old_chinese.pdf Indo-European Vocabulary in Old Chinese];. The source also notes that southern dialects of Chinese have more monosyllabic words than the Mandarin Chinese dialects. Middle Chinese was the language used during Southern and Northern Dynasties and the Sui dynasty Tang dynasty and Song dynasty dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the "Qieyun rime book (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the "Guangyun rime book Linguists are more confident of having reconstructed how Middle Chinese sounded. The evidence for the pronunciation of Middle Chinese comes from several sources: modern dialect variations, rhyming dictionaries, foreign transliterations, "rhyming tables" constructed by ancient Chinese philologists to summarize the phonetic system, and Chinese phonetic translations of foreign words. However, all reconstructions are tentative; some scholars have argued that trying to reconstruct, say, modern Cantonese from modern Cantopop rhymes would give a fairly inaccurate picture of the present-day spoken language. The development of the spoken Chinese languages from early historical times to the present has been complex. Most Chinese people, in Sichuan and in a broad arc from the northeast (Manchuria to the southwest (Yunnan , use various Mandarin dialects as their home language The prevalence of Mandarin throughout northern China is largely due to north Chinas plains. By contrast, the mountains and rivers of middle and southern China promoted linguistic diversity. Until the mid-20th century, most southern Chinese only spoke their native local variety of Chinese. As Nanjing was the Capital (political) during the early Ming Dynasty Nanjing Mandarin became dominant at least until the later years of the Qing Dynasty Since the 17th century, the Qing Dynasty had set up orthoepy academies (正音书院／正音書院; Zhèngyīn Shūyuàn) to make pronunciation conform to the standard of the capital Beijing. For the general population, however, this had limited effect. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The Beijing Mandarin court standard was used solely by officials and civil servants and was thus fairly limited. This situation did not change until the mid-20th century with the creation (in both the PRC and the ROC, but not in Hong Kong) of a compulsory educational system committed to teaching Standard Mandarin As a result, Mandarin is now spoken by virtually all young and middle-aged citizens of mainland China and on Taiwan Standard Cantonese not Mandarin, was used in Hong Kong during the time of its British colonial period (owing to its large Cantonese native and migrant populace) and remains today its official language of education, formal speech, and daily life, but Mandarin is becoming increasingly influential after the Transfer of the sovereignty of Hong Kong Classical Chinese was once the lingua franca in neighbouring East Asian countries such as Japan Korea and Vietnam for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century.*Sheng Ding and Robert A. Saunders, Talking Up China: An Analysis of Chinas Rising Cultural Power and Global Promotion of the Chinese Language EASTASIA, Summer 2006, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 4

Influences

Throughout history Chinese culture and politics has had a great influence on unrelated languages such as Korean language and Japanese language Korean and Japanese both have writing systems employing Chinese character (Hanzi), which are called Hanja and Kanji respectively. The Vietnamese term for Chinese writing is Hán tự It was the only available method for writing Vietnamese until the 14th century, used almost exclusively by Chinese-educated Vietnamese élites. From the 14th to the late 19th century, Vietnamese was written with Chữ nôm a modified Chinese script incorporating sounds and syllables for native Vietnamese speakers. Chữ nôm was completely replaced by a modified Latin script created by the Jesuit missionary priest Alexander de Rhodes, which incorporates a system of diacritical marks to indicate tones, as well as modified consonants. Approximately 60% of the modern Vietnamese lexicon is recognized as Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary the majority of which was borrowed from Middle Chinese. In South Korea the Hangul alphabet is generally used, but Hanja is used as a sort of boldface. In North Korea Hanja has been discontinued. Since the modernization of Japan in the late 19th century, there has been debate about abandoning the use of Chinese characters, but the practical benefits of a radically new script have so far not been considered sufficient. Derived Chinese characters or Zhuang logogram are used to write Zhuang language songs, even though Zhuang is not a Chinese dialect. Since the 1950s, the Zhuang language has been written in a modified Latin alphabet.Zhou, Minglang: Multilingualism in China: The Politics of Writing Reforms for Minority Languages, 1949-2002(Walter de Gruyter 2003); ISBN 3-11-017896-6; p. 251–258. Languages within the influence of Chinese culture also have a very large number of loanword from Chinese. Fifty percent or more of Sino-Korean vocabulary likewise for a significant percentage of Sino-Japanese vocabulary and Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary vocabulary. Chinese has also lent a great deal of many grammatical features to these and neighboring languages, notably the lack of grammatical gender and the use of classifier (linguistics) Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of 茶 (POJ tê), "ketchup" from the Minnan pronunciation of 鲑汁／鮭汁 (koe-tsiap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 金橘 (kam kuat).

Phonology

The phonology structure of each syllable consists of a syllable nucleus consisting of a vowel (which can be a monophthong diphthong or even a triphthong in certain varieties) with an optional syllable onset or syllable coda consonant as well as a tone (linguistics) There are some instances where a vowel is not used as a nucleus. An example of this is in Yue Chinese where the nasal consonant sonorant consonants and can stand alone as their own syllable. Across all the spoken varieties, most syllables tend to be open syllables, meaning they have no coda, but syllables that do have codas are restricted to or Some varieties allow most of these codas, whereas others, such as Mandarin Chinese are limited to only two, namely and Consonant cluster do not generally occur in either the onset or coda. The onset may be an affricate consonant or a consonant followed by a semivowel but these are not generally considered consonant clusters. The number of sounds in the different spoken dialects varies, but in general there has been a tendency to a reduction in sounds from Middle Chinese The Mandarin dialects in particular have experienced a dramatic decrease in sounds and so have far more multisyllabic words than most other spoken varieties. The total number of syllables in some varieties is therefore only about a thousand, including tonal variation, which is only about an eighth as many as EnglishDeFrancis (1984) p.42 counts Chinese as having 1,277 tonal syllables, and about 398 to 418 if tones are disregarded; he cites Jespersen, Otto (1928) Monosyllabism in English; London, p.15 for a count of over 8000 syllables for English.. All varieties of spoken Chinese use tone (linguistics) A few dialects of north China may have as few as three tones, while some dialects in south China have up to 6 or 10 tones, depending on how one counts. One exception from this is Shanghainese dialect which has reduced the set of tones to a two-toned pitch accent system much like modern Japanese. A very common example used to illustrate the use of tones in Chinese are four tones of Standard Mandarin applied to the syllable "ma." The tones correspond to these five Chinese character * "mother"—high level * "linen" or "numb"—high rising * "horse"—low falling-rising * "scold"—high falling * "question particle"—neutral

Phonetic transcriptions

The Chinese had no uniform phonetic transcription system until the mid-20th century, although enunciation patterns were recorded in early rime book and dictionaries. Early India translators, working in Sanskrit and Pali were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of Chinese in a foreign language. After the 15th century, the efforts of Jesuits and Western court missionaries resulted in some rudimentary Latin transcription systems, based on the Nanjing Mandarin dialect.

Romanization

Romanization is the process of transcribing a language in the Latin alphabet There are many systems of romanization for the Chinese languages due to the lack of a native phonetic transcription until modern times. Chinese is first known to have been written in Latin characters by Western Christianity in China in the 16th century. Today the most common romanization standard for Standard Mandarin is [[Hanyu Pinyin]] often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China and later adopted by Singapore and Taiwan Pinyin is almost universally employed now for teaching standard spoken Chinese in schools and universities across Americas Australia and Europe Chinese parents also use Pinyin to teach their children the sounds and tones for teaching new words. The Pinyin romanization is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, with the Chinese character alongside. The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859 and modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As this system approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels, i.e. it is an Anglicization it may be particularly helpful for beginner Chinese speakers of an English-speaking background. Wade-Giles was found in academic use in the United States particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan. When used within European texts, the Tone (linguistics) transcriptions in both pinyin and Wade-Giles are often left out for simplicity; Wade-Giles extensive use of apostrophes is also usually omitted. Thus, most Western readers will be much more familiar with Beijingthan they will be with Běijīng(pinyin), and with Taipeithan Tai²-pei³ (Wade-Giles). Here are a few examples of Hanyu Pinyinand Wade-Giles, for comparison: |class"wikitable" |+Mandarin Romanization Comparison |- ! style"background:#efefef;"|Characters !! style"background:#efefef;"|Wade-Giles !! style"background:#efefef;"|Hanyu Pinyin !! style"background:#efefef;"|Notes |- |中国／中國||Chung1-kuo²||Zhōngguó||"China" |- |北京||Pei³-ching1||Běijīng||Capital of the Peoples Republic of China |- |台北||Tai²-pei³||Táiběi||Capital of Taiwan, officially the Republic of China |- |毛泽东／毛澤東||Mao² Tse²-tung1||Máo Zédōng||Former Communist Chinese leader |- |蒋介石／蔣介石||Chiang³ Chieh4-shih²||Jiǎng Jièshí||Former Nationalist Chinese leader (better known to English speakers as Chiang Kai-shek with Cantonese pronunciation) |- |孔子||Kung³ Tsu³||Kǒng Zǐ||"Confucius" |} Other systems of romanization for Chinese include Gwoyeu Romatzyh the French EFEO Chinese transcription the Yale Romanization (invented during WWII for U.S. troops), as well as separate systems for Yue Chinese Minnan Hakka Chinese and other Chinese languages or dialects.

Other phonetic transcriptions

Chinese languages have been phonetically transcribed into many other writing systems over the centuries. The 'Phags-pa script for example, has been very helpful in reconstructing the pronunciations of pre-modern forms of Chinese. Zhuyin (also called bopomofo, a semi-syllabary is still widely used in Taiwans elementary school to aid standard pronunciation. Although bopomofo characters are reminiscent of katakana script, there is no source to substantiate the claim that Katakana was the basis for the zhuyin system. A comparison table of zhuyin to pinyin exists in the Zhuyin#Zhuyin vs. Tongyong Pinyin & Hanyu Pinyin Syllables based on pinyin and zhuyin can also be compared by looking at the following articles: * Pinyin table * Zhuyin table There are also at least two systems of cyrillization for Chinese. The most widespread is the Cyrillization of Chinese from Pinyin

Grammar and morphology

Modern Chinese has often been erroneously classed as a "monosyllabic" language. While most of the morpheme are single syllable , in northern varieties like Mandarin the noun , adjective and verb are largely di-syllabic. There has been a pronounced tendency to create disyllabic words when compared to Classical Chinese Classical Chinese is a highly isolating language with each morpheme generally (about 90% of the time) corresponding to a single syllable and a single character; most modern varieties of Chinese, however, have the tendency to form new words through disyllabic, trisyllabic and tetra-character compound word In some cases, monosyllabic words have become disyllabic without compounding, as in 窟窿 kulongfrom 孔 kong this is especially common in Jin Chinese Chinese morphology (linguistics) is strictly bound to a set number of syllable with a fairly rigid construction which are the morpheme , the smallest blocks of the language. While many of these single-syllable morphemes (字, zì can stand alone as individual word (linguistics) they more often than not form multi-syllabic Compound (linguistics) known as cí(词／詞), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cí(“word”) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more. For example: * Yun雲—“cloud” (traditional) * Yun云—“cloud” (simplified) * Han-bao-bao/Hanbao漢堡包／漢堡—“hamburger” (traditional) * Han-bao-bao/Hanbao汉堡包／汉堡—"hamburger" (simplified) * Wo我—“I, me” * Ren人—“people” * Di-qiu地球—“earth (globosity)” * Shan-dian閃電—“lightning” (traditional) * Shan-dian闪电—"lightning" (simplifed) * Meng夢—“dream” (traditional) * Meng梦—"dream" (simplified) All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic language , in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than Morphology (linguistics) i.e., changes in form of a word—to indicate the words function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has very few grammatical inflection —it possesses no Grammatical tense no grammatical voice no number (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), and only a few Article (grammar) (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English). There is, however, a Grammatical gender difference in the written language (他 as "he" and 她 as "she"), but it should be noted that this is a relatively new introduction to the Chinese language in the twentieth century. They make heavy use of grammatical particle to indicate grammatical aspect and grammatical mood In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le 了 (perfective), hai 还／還 (still, yijing 已经／已經 (already, etc. Chinese features Subject Verb Object word order and like many other languages in East Asia makes frequent use of the topic-comment construction to form sentences. Chinese also has an extensive system of classifier (linguistics) and measure word , another trait shared with neighbouring languages like Japanese language and Korean language Other notable grammatical features common to all the spoken varieties of Chinese include the use of serial verb construction pro-drop language and the related null subject language Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess differences.

Tones and homophones

Official modern Mandarin has only 400 spoken monosyllables but over 10,000 written characters, so there are many homophone only distinguishable by the four tones. Even this is often not enough unless the context and exact phrase or cí is identified. The mono-syllable jī first tone in standard Mandarin corresponds to the following characters: 鸡／雞 chicken 机／機 machine 基 basic 击／擊 (to) hit 饥／饑 hunger and 积／積 product In speech, the glyphing of a monosyllable to its meaning must be determined by context or by relation to other morphemes (e.g. "some" as in the opposite of "none"). Native speakers may state which words or phrases their names are found in, for convenience of writing: 名字叫嘉英，嘉陵江的嘉，英國的英 Míngzi jiào Jiāyīng, Jiālíng Jiāng de jiā, Yīngguó de yīng "My name is Jiāyīng, the Jiafor [[Jialing River]]and the yingfor the short form in Chinese of [[United Kingdom|UK]]" Southern Chinese varieties like Cantonese and Hakka preserved more of the syllable rime of Middle Chinese and have more tones. The previous examples of jī have more distinct pronunciations in Cantonese (romanized using jyutping : gai1 gei1 gei1 gik1 gei1 and jik1respectively. For this reason, southern varieties tend to need to employ fewer multi-syllabic words.

Vocabulary

The entire Chinese character corpus since antiquity comprises well over 20,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are now commonly in use. However Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words; since most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters, there are many times more Chinese words than there are characters. Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and phrases vary greatly. The [[Hanyu Da Zidian]] a compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries for characters, including bone oracle versions. The [[Zhonghua Zihai]](1994) contains 85,568 head entries for character definitions, and is the largest reference work based purely on character and its literary variants. The CC-CEDICT project (2010) contains 97,404 contemporary entries including idioms, technology terms and names of political figures, businesses and products. The 2009 version of the Websters Digital Chinese Dictionary (WDCD).*Dr. Timothy Uy and Jim Hsia, Editors, Websters Digital Chinese Dictionary - Advanced Reference Edition, July 2009 , based on [[CC-CEDICT]], contains over 84,000 entries. The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary, the 12-volumed Hanyu Da Cidian , records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters, and gives over 370,000 definitions. The 1999 revised [[Cihai]] a multi-volume encyclopedic dictionary reference work, gives 122,836 vocabulary entry definitions under 19,485 Chinese characters, including proper names, phrases and common zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific and technical terms. The latest 2007 5th edition of [[Xiandai Hanyu Cidian]]现代汉语词典／現代漢語詞典, an authoritative one-volume dictionary on modern standard Chinese language as used in mainland China has 65,000 entries and defines 11,000 head characters.

Loanwords

Like any other language, Chinese has absorbed a sizable number of loanwords from other cultures. Most Chinese words are formed out of native Chinese morphemes, including words describing imported objects and ideas. However, direct phonetic borrowing of foreign words has gone on since ancient times. Words borrowed from along the Silk Road since Old Chinese include 葡萄 "grape , 石榴 "pomegranate and 狮子／獅子 "lion . Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including 佛 "Buddha" and 菩萨／菩薩 "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as 胡同 "hutong . Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as 葡萄 "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persia etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or Pāli the liturgical language of North India Words borrowed from the nomadic tribes of the Gobi Mongolian or northeast regions generally have Altaic etymologies, such as 琵琶 "pípa", the Chinese lute, or 酪 "cheese" or "yoghurt", but from exactly which Altaic source is not always entirely clear.

Modern borrowings and loanwords

Modern neologisms are translated into Chinese primarily in three ways: free translation (calque by meaning), phonetic translation (by sound) and phono-semantic matching (partially transcriptive with a careful selection of meaning-encoding characters). Today, it is much more common to use existing Chinese morphemes to coin new words in order to represent imported concepts, such as technical expressions and international scientific vocabulary owing to the structural differences from Western languages. Any Latin or Greek language etymologies are dropped and converted into the corresponding meaning-carrying Chinese characters (e.g. anti- typically becomes "反", literally opposite, making them more comprehensible for Chinese but introducing more difficulties in understanding foreign texts. For example, the word telephonewas loaned phonetically as 德律风／德律風 (Shanghainese dialect télífon Standard Mandarin délǜfēng during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later 电话／電話 (diànhuà"electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include 电视／電視 (diànshì"electric vision") for television, 电脑／電腦 (diànnǎo"electric brain") for computer; 手机／手機 (shǒujī"hand machine") for cellphone, and 蓝牙／藍芽 (lányá"blue tooth") for Bluetooth 網誌 (wǎng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as 汉堡包／漢堡包 (hànbǎo bāo "Hamburgbun") for "hamburger". Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as 拖拉机／拖拉機 (tuōlājī "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马利奥／馬利奧 for the video game character [[Mario]] This is often done for commercial purposes, for example 奔腾／奔騰 (bēnténg"running leaping") for Pentium (brand) and 赛百味／賽百味 (Sàibǎiwèi"better-than hundred tastes") for Subway (restaurant) Foreign words, mainly proper nouns (names of people, places), continue to enter the Chinese language by transcription according to their pronunciations. This is done by employing Chinese characters with similar pronunciations. For example, "Israel" becomes 以色列 (pinyin: yǐsèliè, "Paris" becomes 巴黎 (pinyin: bālí. A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including 沙发／沙發 shāfā"sofa", 马达／馬達 mǎdá"motor", 幽默 yōumò"humor", 逻辑／邏輯 luójí"logic", 时髦／時髦 shímáo"smart, fashionable" and 歇斯底里 xiēsīdǐlǐ"hysterics". The bulk of these words were originally coined in the Shanghainese dialect during the early 20th century and were later loaned into Mandarin, hence their pronunciations in Mandarin may be quite off from the English. For example, 沙发／沙發 and 马达／馬達 in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor". Western foreign words have had great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transcription. From French language came 芭蕾 (bāléi"ballet"), 香槟 (xiāngbīn "champagne"), via Italian language 咖啡 (kāfēi"caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese dialect many English words are borrowed, such as the above-mentioned 沙发／沙發 (shāfā"sofa"), 幽默 (yōumò"humour"), and 高尔夫／高爾夫 (gāoěrfū"golf"). Later United States soft influence gave rise to 迪斯科 (dísīkè"disco"), 可乐／可樂 (kělè"cola") and 迷你 (mínǐ"mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Yue Chinese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon 卡通 (cartoon), 基佬 (gay people), 的士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, e.g. 粉丝／粉絲 (fěnsī"fans"), 黑客 (hēikè"Hacker (computer security) , literally "black guest"), 部落格 (bùluōgé"blog", literally "interconnected tribes") in Taiwanese Mandarin Another result of the English influence on Chinese is the appearance in Modern Chinese texts of so-called 字母词 zìmǔcí("lettered words") spelled with letters from foreign alphabets. This has appeared in magazines, newspapers, on web sites and on TV: 三G手机 "3rd generation cell phones" (三 sān"three" + G "generation" + 手机 shǒujī"mobile phones"), IT界 "IT environment", HSK (hànyǔ shuǐpíng kǎoshì 汉语水平考试), GB (guóbiāo 国标), CIF价 (Cost, Insurance, Freight + 价 jià"price"); e家庭 "electronic home" (家庭 jiātīng"home"); W时代 "wireless generation" (时代 shídài"generation"); 的士call, TV族, 后РС时代 "post-PC era" (后 hòu"after/post" + PC "personal computer" + 时代 shídài"epoch"), etc. Since the 20th century, another source has been Japan Using existing kanji which are Chinese characters used in the Japanese language the Japanese re-moulded European concepts and inventions into [[wasei-kango]](和製漢語, literally Japanese-made Chinese, and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Other terms were coined by the Japanese by giving new senses to existing Chinese terms or by referring to expressions used in classical Chinese literature. For example, jīngjì(经济／經濟, keizai), which in the original Chinese meant "the workings of the state", was narrowed to "economy" in Japanese; this narrowed definition was then reimported into Chinese. As a result, these terms are virtually indistinguishable from native Chinese words: indeed, there is some dispute over some of these terms as to whether the Japanese or Chinese coined them first. As a result of this toing-and-froing process, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese share a corpus linguistic of terms describing modern terminology, in parallel to a similar corpus of terms built from Greco-Latin terms shared among European languages.

Education

With the growing importance and influence of Chinas economy globally, Mandarin Chinese instruction is gaining popularity in schools in the USA and has become an increasingly popular subject of study amongst the young in the Western world, as in the UK.lt;/ref> In 1991 there were 2,000 foreign learners taking Chinas official Chinese Proficiency Test (comparable to the English University of Cambridge ESOL examination , while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660."汉语水平考试中心：2005年外国考生总人数近12万",http://www.gov.cn/jrzg/2006-01/16/content_160707.htm] Xinhua News Agency January 16, 2006.

See also

* Chinese characters * Chinese exclamative particles * Chinese honorifics * Chinese classifier * Chinese number gestures * Chinese numerals * Chinese punctuation * Classical Chinese grammar * Chengyu * Han unification * Haner language * HSK test * Languages of China * North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics * Nü shu

References

* * * * *

Footnotes

Further reading

* ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawai’i Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X. * ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-0-8248-2975-9. * http://sinoplanet.com/wiki/Phrasebook Chinese Phrase Book], sinoplanet, 2009

External links

* http://books.google.com/books?id18ByRWP_1UQC&pgPA292&lpgPA292&dq%22you+kongr%22&sourcebl&otsISgOxCzbHk&sig3Q1lLiGX6EbuqhI32WB6OpAIQ48&hlen&eiKwCLSb2EDY-ctweB58SlBw&saX&oibook_result&resnum1&ctresult Keys to the Chinese Language: Book II—Google Books * http://multitree.linguistlist.org/trees/Sino-Tibetan:%20Composite@588781 Chinese language Tree Category:Chinese language Category:Sinology Category:Isolating languages af:Sjinees ar:لغة صينية an:Idioma chinés az:Çin dili bn:চীনা ভাষা zh-min-nan:Hàn-gí be:Кітайская мова be-x-old:Кітайская мова bcl:Intsik bar:Kinäsische Språch bo:རྒྱ་སྐད། bs:Kineski jezik br:Yezhoù sinaek bg:Китайски език ca:Xinès cv:Китай чĕлхи ceb:Inintsik cs:Čínština cy:Tsieinëeg da:Kinesisk (sproggruppe) de:Chinesische Sprachen dv:ސީނީ et:Hiina keel el:Κινεζική γλώσσα es:Idioma chino eo:Ĉina lingvaro eu:Txinera fa:زبان چینی hif:Chinese bhasa fo:Kinesiskt mál fr:Langues chinoises ga:An tSínis gv:Çhengaghyn Sheenagh gl:Lingua chinesa gan:漢語 hak:Hon-ngî xal:Китдин келн ko:중국어 haw:‘Ōlelo Pākē hy:Չինարեն hi:चीनी भाषा hsb:Chinšćina hr:Kineski jezik io:Chiniana linguo ilo:Pagsasao nga Intsik id:Bahasa Tionghoa is:Kínverska it:Lingua cinese he:שפות סיניות jv:Basa Cina kl:Kineserisut (oqaatsit) kn:ಚೀನಿ ಭಾಷೆ ka:ჩინური ენა kw:Chinek sw:Kichina lo:ພາສາຈີນ la:Lingua Sinica lv:Ķīniešu valoda lt:Kinų kalba lij:Lengua cineise li:Chinees jbo:jugbau hu:Kínai nyelv mk:Кинески јазик ml:ചൈനീസ് ഭാഷ mr:चिनी भाषा arz:لغه صينى ms:Bahasa Cina mn:Хятад хэл nah:Chinatlahtōlli nl:Chinese talen ja:中国語 no:Kinesisk nn:Kinesisk språk oc:Lengas siniticas pnb:چینی km:ភាសាចិន nds:Chineesche Spraak pl:Język chiński pt:Língua chinesa crh:Çin tili ty:Reo Tinitō ro:Limba chineză qu:Chinu simi ru:Китайский язык sah:Кытай тыла stq:Han-Chinesiske Sproaken st:Se-china sq:Gjuha kineze simple:Chinese language sk:Čínština sl:Kitajščina sr:Кинески језик sh:Kineski jezik fi:Kiinan kieli sv:Kinesiska tl:Wikang Tsino ta:சீன மொழி te:చైనీస్ భాష th:ภาษาจีน tr:Çince tk:Hytaý dili tw:Chinese language uk:Китайська мова ur:چینی زبان ug:خەنزۇ تىلى za:Vahgun vi:Tiếng Trung Quốc wa:Chinwès (lingaedje) zh-classical:漢語 war:Tsino (yinaknan) wuu:汉语 yi:כינעזיש yo:Èdè Ṣáínà zh-yue:中文 bat-smg:Kėnu kalba zh:汉语

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