Chinese language
The article's introduction is disputed. (February 2024) ) |
Chinese | |
---|---|
汉语; 漢語; Hànyǔ or 中文; Zhōngwén | |
Native to | The Sinophone world: Mainland China, Taiwan, Singapore |
Native speakers | 1.35 billion (2017–2022)[1] |
Sino-Tibetan
| |
Early forms | |
Standard forms |
|
Dialects | |
Official status | |
Official language in | |
Recognised minority language in | Pu-Xian Min czh – Huizhouczo – Central Mingan – Ganhak – Hakkahsn – Xiangmnp – Northern Minnan – Southern Minwuu – Wuyue – Yuecsp – Southern Pinghuacnp – Northern Pinghuaoch – Old Chineseltc – Late Middle Chineselzh – Classical Chinese |
Glottolog | sini1245 |
Linguasphere | 79-AAA |
Map of the Chinese-speaking world
Regions with a native Chinese-speaking majority.
Regions with significant Chinese-speaking minorities.
Regions where Chinese is not native but an official or educational language. | |
Han language | |
---|---|
Hanyu Pinyin | Hànwén |
Bopomofo | ㄏㄢˋ ㄨㄣˊ |
Gwoyeu Romatzyh | Hannwen |
Wade–Giles | Han4-wen2 |
Tongyong Pinyin | Hàn-wún |
IPA | [xân.wə̌n] |
Chinese (simplified Chinese: 汉语; traditional Chinese: 漢語; pinyin: Hànyǔ; lit. 'Han language' or 中文; Zhōngwén; 'Chinese writing') is a group of languages[e] spoken natively by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in China. Approximately 1.35 billion people, or around 16% of the global population, speak a variety of Chinese as their first language.[4]
Chinese languages form the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. The spoken varieties of Chinese are usually considered by native speakers to be dialects of a single language. However, their lack of mutual intelligibility means they are sometimes considered to be separate languages in a family.[f] Investigation of the historical relationships among the varieties of Chinese is ongoing. Currently, most classifications posit 7 to 13 main regional groups based on phonetic developments from Middle Chinese, of which the most spoken by far is Mandarin with 66%, or around 800 million speakers, followed by Min (75 million, e.g. Southern Min), Wu (74 million, e.g. Shanghainese), and Yue (68 million, e.g. Cantonese).[6] These branches are unintelligible to each other, and many of their subgroups are unintelligible with the other varieties within the same branch (e.g. Southern Min). There are, however, transitional areas where varieties from different branches share enough features for some limited intelligibility, including New Xiang with Southwestern Mandarin, Xuanzhou Wu Chinese with Lower Yangtze Mandarin, Jin with Central Plains Mandarin and certain divergent dialects of Hakka with Gan. All varieties of Chinese are tonal to at least some degree, and are largely analytic.
The earliest Chinese written records are
Classification
Linguists classify all varieties of Chinese as part of the
History
The first written records appeared over 3,000 years ago during the Shang dynasty. As the language evolved over this period, the various local varieties became mutually unintelligible. In reaction, central governments have repeatedly sought to promulgate a unified standard.[11]
Old and Middle Chinese
The earliest examples of Old Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on
Middle Chinese was the language used during
Classical and vernacular written forms
The complex relationship between spoken and written Chinese is an example of diglossia: as spoken, Chinese varieties have evolved at different rates, while the written language used throughout China changed comparatively little, crystallizing into a prestige form known as Classical or Literary Chinese. Literature written distinctly in the Classical form began to emerge during the Spring and Autumn period. Its use in writing remained nearly universal until the late 19th century, culminating with the widespread adoption of written vernacular Chinese with the May Fourth Movement beginning in 1919.
Rise of northern dialects
After the fall of the
Up to the early 20th century, most Chinese people only spoke their local variety.[25] Thus, as a practical measure, officials of the Ming and Qing dynasties carried out the administration of the empire using a common language based on Mandarin varieties, known as 官话; 官話; Guānhuà; 'language of officials'.[26] For most of this period, this language was a koiné based on dialects spoken in the Nanjing area, though not identical to any single dialect.[27] By the middle of the 19th century, the Beijing dialect had become dominant and was essential for any business with the imperial court.[28]
In the 1930s, a standard national language, 国语; 國語; Guóyǔ; 'national language', was adopted. After much dispute between proponents of northern and southern dialects and an abortive attempt at an artificial pronunciation, the National Language Unification Commission finally settled on the Beijing dialect in 1932. The People's Republic founded in 1949 retained this standard but renamed it 普通话; 普通話; pǔtōnghuà; 'common speech'.[29] The national language is now used in education, the media, and formal situations in both mainland China and Taiwan.[30] Because of their colonial and linguistic history, the language used in education, the media, formal speech, and everyday life in Hong Kong and Macau is the local Cantonese, although the standard language, Mandarin, has become very influential and is being taught in schools.[31]
Influence
Historically, the Chinese language has spread to its neighbors through a variety of means. Northern Vietnam was incorporated into the
Although they used Chinese solely for written communication, each country had its own tradition of reading texts aloud, the so-called Sino-Xenic pronunciations. Chinese words with these pronunciations were also extensively imported into the Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese languages, and today comprise over half of their vocabularies.[36] This massive influx led to changes in the phonological structure of the languages, contributing to the development of moraic structure in Japanese[37] and the disruption of vowel harmony in Korean.[38]
Borrowed Chinese morphemes have been used extensively in all these languages to coin compound words for new concepts, in a similar way to the use of Latin and Ancient Greek roots in European languages.[39] Many new compounds, or new meanings for old phrases, were created in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to name Western concepts and artifacts. These coinages, written in shared Chinese characters, have then been borrowed freely between languages. They have even been accepted into Chinese, a language usually resistant to loanwords, because their foreign origin was hidden by their written form. Often different compounds for the same concept were in circulation for some time before a winner emerged, and sometimes the final choice differed between countries.[40] The proportion of vocabulary of Chinese origin thus tends to be greater in technical, abstract, or formal language. For example, in Japan, Sino-Japanese words account for about 35% of the words in entertainment magazines, over half the words in newspapers, and 60% of the words in science magazines.[41]
Vietnam, Korea, and Japan each developed writing systems for their own languages, initially based on Chinese characters, but later replaced with the hangul alphabet for Korean and supplemented with kana syllabaries for Japanese, while Vietnamese continued to be written with the complex chữ Nôm script. However, these were limited to popular literature until the late 19th century. Today Japanese is written with a composite script using both Chinese characters called kanji, and kana. Korean is written exclusively with hangul in North Korea (although knowledge of the supplementary Chinese characters (called hanja) is still required), and hanja are increasingly rarely used in South Korea. As a result of former French colonization, Vietnamese switched to a Latin-based alphabet.
English words of Chinese origin include tea from Hokkien 茶 (tê), dim sum from Cantonese 點心 (dim2 sam1), and kumquat from Cantonese 金橘 (gam1 gwat1).
Varieties
The sinologist Jerry Norman has estimated that there are hundreds of mutually unintelligible varieties of Chinese.[42] These varieties form a dialect continuum, in which differences in speech generally become more pronounced as distances increase, though the rate of change varies immensely. Generally, mountainous South China exhibits more linguistic diversity than the North China Plain. Until the late 20th century, Chinese emigrants to Southeast Asia and North America came from southeast coastal areas, where Min, Hakka, and Yue dialects are spoken. Specifically, most Chinese immigrants to North America until the mid-20th century spoke Taishanese, a variety of Yue from a small coastal area around Taishan, Guangdong.[43]
In parts of South China, the dialect of a major city may be only marginally intelligible to its neighbours. For example, Wuzhou and Taishan are located approximately 260 km (160 mi) and 190 km (120 mi) away from Guangzhou respectively. However, the Yue variety spoken in Wuzhou is more similar to the Guangzhou dialect than Taishanese is—while Wuzhou is located directly upstream from Guangzhou on the Pearl River, Taishan is to Guangzhou's southwest, with the two cities separated by several river valleys.[44] In parts of Fujian, the speech of some neighbouring counties or villages is mutually unintelligible.[45]
Grouping
Local varieties of Chinese are conventionally classified into seven dialect groups, largely based on the different evolution of Middle Chinese voiced initials:[47][48]
- Sichuanese, and also the Dungan language spoken in Central Asia
- Suzhounese, and Wenzhounese
- Gan
- Xiang
- Teochew
- Hakka
- Yue, including Cantonese and Taishanese
The classification of Li Rong, which is used in the Language Atlas of China (1987), distinguishes three further groups:[46][49]
- Jin, previously included in Mandarin.
- Huizhou, previously included in Wu.
- Pinghua, previously included in Yue.
Some varieties remain unclassified, including the
Standard Chinese
Standard Chinese is the standard language of China (where it is called 普通话; pǔtōnghuà) and Taiwan, and one of the four official languages of Singapore (where it is called either 华语; 華語; Huáyǔ or 汉语; 漢語; Hànyǔ). Standard Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. The governments of both China and Taiwan intend 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.
Nomenclature
The designation of various Chinese branches remains controversial. Some linguists and most ordinary Chinese people consider all the spoken varieties as one single language, as speakers share a common national identity and a common written form.[55] Others instead argue that it is inappropriate to refer to major branches of Chinese such as Mandarin, Wu and so on as "dialects" because the mutual unintelligibility between them is too great.[56][57] However, calling major Chinese branches "languages" would also be wrong under the same criterion, since a branch such as Wu, itself contains many mutually unintelligible varieties, and could not be properly called a single language.[42]
There are also viewpoints pointing out that linguists often ignore mutual intelligibility when varieties share intelligibility with a central variety (i.e. prestige variety, such as Standard Mandarin), as the issue requires some careful handling when mutual intelligibility is inconsistent with language identity.[58]
The Chinese government's official Chinese designation for the major branches of Chinese is 方言; fāngyán; 'regional speech', whereas the more closely related varieties within these are called 地点方言; 地點方言; dìdiǎn fāngyán; 'local speech'.[59]
Because of the difficulties involved in determining the difference between language and dialect, other terms have been proposed. These include topolect,
Phonology
Syllables in the Chinese languages have some unique characteristics. They are tightly related to the morphology and also to the characters of the writing system; and phonologically they are structured according to fixed rules.
The structure of each syllable consists of a
In Mandarin much more than in other spoken varieties, most syllables tend to be open syllables, meaning they have no coda (assuming that a final glide is not analyzed as a coda), but syllables that do have codas are restricted to nasals /m/, /n/, /ŋ/, the retroflex approximant /ɻ/, and voiceless stops /p/, /t/, /k/, or /ʔ/. Some varieties allow most of these codas, whereas others, such as Standard Chinese, are limited to only /n/, /ŋ/, and /ɻ/.
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 polysyllabic 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 English.[g]
Tones
All varieties of spoken Chinese use tones to distinguish words.
A very common example used to illustrate the use of tones in Chinese is the application of the four tones of Standard Chinese, along with the neutral tone, to the syllable ma. The tones are exemplified by the following five Chinese words:
Character | Gloss | Pinyin | Pitch contour |
---|---|---|---|
妈; 媽 | 'mother' | mā | high, level |
麻 | 'hemp' | má | high, rising |
马; 馬 | 'horse' | mǎ | low falling, then rising |
骂; 罵 | 'scold' | mà | high falling |
吗; 嗎 | INTR.PTC | ma | (varies)[h] |
In contrast, Standard Cantonese has six tones. Historically, finals that end in a stop consonant were considered to be "checked tones" and thus counted separately for a total of nine tones. However, they are considered to be duplicates in modern linguistics and are no longer counted as such:[66]
Character | Gloss | Jyutping | Yale | Pitch contour |
---|---|---|---|---|
诗; 詩 | 'poem' | si1 | sī | high, level; high, falling |
史 | 'history' | si2 | sí | high, rising |
弒 | 'assassinate' | si3 | si | mid, level |
时; 時 | 'time' | si4 | sìh | low, falling |
市 | 'market' | si5 | síh | low, rising |
是 | 'yes' | si6 | sih | low, level |
Grammar
Chinese is often described as a 'monosyllabic' language. However, this is only partially correct. It is largely accurate when describing Old and Middle Chinese; in Classical Chinese, around 90% of words consist of a single character that corresponds one-to-one with a
Most modern varieties have the tendency to form new words through polysyllabic
Character | Gloss | MC[i] | Cantonese |
---|---|---|---|
十 | 'ten' | dzyip | sap6 |
实; 實 | 'actual' | zyit | sat6 |
识; 識 | 'recognize' | dzyek | sik1 |
石 | 'stone' | dzyi | sek6 |
时; 時 | 'time' | dzyi | si4 |
食 | 'food' | zyik | sik6 |
In modern spoken Mandarin, however, tremendous ambiguity would result if all of these words could be used as-is. The 20th century Yuen Ren Chao poem Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den exploits this, consisting of 92 characters all pronounced shi. As such, most of these words have been replaced in speech, if not in writing, with less ambiguous disyllabic compounds. Only the first one, 十, normally appears in monosyllabic form in spoken Mandarin; the rest are normally used in the polysyllabic forms of
Word | Pinyin | Gloss |
---|---|---|
实际; 實際 | shíjì | 'actual-connection' |
认识; 認識 | rènshi | 'recognize-know' |
石头; 石頭 | shítou | 'stone-head' |
时间; 時間 | shíjiān | 'time-interval' |
食物 | shíwù | 'foodstuff' |
respectively. In each, the homophone was disambiguated by addition of another morpheme, typically either a near-synonym or some sort of generic word (e.g. 'head', 'thing'), the purpose of which is to indicate which of the possible meanings of the other, homophonic syllable is specifically meant.
However, when one of the above words forms part of a compound, the disambiguating syllable is generally dropped and the resulting word is still disyllabic. For example, 石; shí alone, and not 石头; 石頭; shítou, appears in compounds as meaning 'stone' such as 石膏; shígāo; 'plaster', 石灰; shíhuī; 'lime', 石窟; shíkū; 'grotto', 石英; 'quartz', and 石油; shíyóu; 'petroleum'. Although many single-syllable morphemes (字; zì) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllable compounds known as 词; 詞; cí, which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cí can consist of more than one character–morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more.
Examples of Chinese words of more than two syllables include 汉堡包; 漢堡包; hànbǎobāo; 'hamburger', 守门员; 守門員; shǒuményuán; 'goalkeeper', and 电子邮件; 電子郵件; diànzǐyóujiàn; 'e-mail'.
All varieties of modern Chinese are
Chinese has a
Vocabulary
The entire Chinese character corpus since antiquity comprises well over 50,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are in use and only about 3,000 are frequently used in Chinese media and newspapers.[69] However, Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words. Because most Chinese words are made up of two or more characters, there are many more Chinese words than characters. A more accurate equivalent for a Chinese character is the morpheme, as characters represent the smallest grammatical units with individual meanings in the Chinese language.
Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and lexicalized phrases vary greatly. The
The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary, the 12-volume 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 2016 edition of Xiandai Hanyu Cidian, an authoritative one-volume dictionary on modern standard Chinese language as used in mainland China, has 13,000 head characters and defines 70,000 words.
Loanwords
Like many other languages, 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.
Some early Indo-European loanwords in Chinese have been proposed, notably 'honey' (蜜; mì), 'lion' (狮; 獅; shī), and perhaps 'horse' (马; 馬; mǎ), 'pig' (猪; 豬; zhū), 'dog' (犬; quǎn), and 'goose' (鹅; 鵝; é).[71] Ancient words borrowed from along the
Modern borrowings
Modern neologisms are primarily translated into Chinese in one of three ways: free translation (calques), phonetic translation (by sound), or a combination of the two. Today, it is much more common to use existing Chinese morphemes to coin new words to represent imported concepts, such as technical expressions and international scientific vocabulary, wherein the Latin and Greek components usually converted one-for-one into the corresponding Chinese characters. The word 'telephone' was initially loaned phonetically as 德律风; 德律風 (délǜfēng; Shanghainese télífon [təlɪfoŋ])—this word was widely used in Shanghai during the 1920s, but the 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') | 'television' |
电脑; 電腦 (diànnǎo; 'electric brain') | 'computer' |
手机; 手機 (shǒujī; 'hand machine') | 'mobile phone' |
蓝牙; 藍牙 (lányá; 'blue tooth') | 'Bluetooth' |
网志; 網誌 (wǎngzhì; 'internet logbook')[l] | 'blog' |
Occasionally, compromises between the transliteration and translation approaches become accepted, such as 汉堡包; 漢堡包 (hànbǎobāo; 'hamburger') from 汉堡; 'Hamburg' + 包 ('bun'). Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes (phono-semantic matching), such as 马利奥; 馬利奧 (Mǎlì'ào) for the video game character 'Mario'. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example 奔腾; 奔騰 (bēnténg; 'dashing-leaping') for 'Pentium' and 赛百味; 賽百味 (Sàibǎiwèi; 'better-than hundred tastes') for 'Subway'.
Foreign words, mainly proper nouns, 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 (Yǐsèliè), and 'Paris' becomes 巴黎 (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 (luóji, 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 Shanghai during the early 20th century, and later loaned from there into Mandarin, hence their Mandarin pronunciations occasionally being quite divergent from the English. For example, in Shanghainese 沙发; 沙發 (sofa) and 马达; 馬達 ('motor') sound more like their English counterparts. Cantonese differs from Mandarin with some transliterations, such as 梳化 (so1 faa3,2; 'sofa') and 摩打 (mo1 daa2; 'motor').
Western foreign words representing Western concepts have influenced Chinese since the 20th century through transcription. From French, 芭蕾 (bālěi) and 香槟; 香檳 (xiāngbīn) were borrowed for 'ballet' and 'champagne' respectively; 咖啡 (kāfēi) was borrowed from Italian caffè 'coffee'. The influence of English is particularly pronounced: from the early 20th century, many English words were borrowed into Shanghainese, such as 高尔夫; 高爾夫 (gāo'ěrfū; 'golf') and the aforementioned 沙发; 沙發 (shāfā; 'sofa'). Later, American soft power gave rise to 迪斯科 (dísīkē; 'disco'), 可乐; 可樂 (kělè; 'cola'), and mínǐ ('miniskirt'). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English, such as 卡通 (kaa1 tung1; 'cartoon'), 基佬 (gei1 lou2; 'gay people'), 的士 (dik1 si6,2; 'taxi'), and 巴士 (baa1 si6,2; 'bus'). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, for example, 粉丝; 粉絲 (fěnsī; 'fans'), 黑客 (hēikè; 'hacker'), and 博客 (bókè; 'blog'). In Taiwan, some of these transliterations are different, such as 駭客 (hàikè; 'hacker') and 部落格 (bùluògé; 'interconnected tribes') for 'blog'.
Another result of English influence on Chinese is the appearance in of so-called 字母词; 字母詞 (zìmǔcí; 'lettered words') spelled with letters from the English alphabet. These have appeared in colloquial usage, as well as in magazines and newspapers, and on websites and television:
三G手机 'third generation of cell phones' |
← | 三 (sān; 'three') | + | G; 'generation' | + | 手机; shǒujī ('cell phone') |
IT界 'IT circles' |
← | IT | + | 界 (jiè; 'industry') | ||
CIF价 'Cost, Insurance, Freight' |
← | CIF | + | 价; jià; 'price' | ||
e家庭 'e-home' |
← | e; 'electronic' | + | 家庭; jiātíng; 'home' | ||
W时代 'wireless era' |
← | W; 'wireless' | + | 时代; shídài; 'era' | ||
TV族 'TV-watchers' |
← | TV; 'television' | + | 族; TV zú; 'clan' |
Since the 20th century, another source of words has been kanji: Japan re-molded European concepts and inventions into 和製漢語, wasei-kango, 'Japanese-made Chinese', and many of these words have been re-loaned 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, 经济; 經濟; jīngjì; 経済, keizai in Japanese, which in the original Chinese meant 'the workings of the state', 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 loaning, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese share a corpus of linguistic terms describing modern terminology, paralleling the similar corpus of terms built from Greco-Latin and shared among European languages.
Writing system
The Chinese orthography centers on Chinese characters, which are written within imaginary square blocks, traditionally arranged in vertical columns, read from top to bottom down a column, and right to left across columns, despite alternative arrangement with rows of characters from left to right within a row and from top to bottom across rows (like English and other Western writing systems) having become more popular since the 20th century.[73] Chinese characters denote morphemes independent of phonetic variation in different languages. Thus the character 一 ('one') is pronounced as yī in Standard Chinese, yat1 in Cantonese and it in Hokkien, a form of Min.
Most modern written Chinese is in the form of
Due to the divergence of variants, there are a number of unique morphemes that are not found in Standard Chinese. Characters rarely used in Standard Chinese have also been created or inherited from archaic literary standard to represent these unique morphemes. For example, characters like 冇 and 係 are actively used in Cantonese and Hakka, while being archaic or unused in standard written Chinese. The most prominent example of a non-Standard Chinese orthography is
Chinese had no uniform system of phonetic transcription until the mid-20th century, although enunciation patterns were recorded in early
In
Chinese characters
Each Chinese character represents a monosyllabic Chinese word or morpheme. In 100 CE, the famed Han dynasty scholar
Modern characters are styled after the regular script. Various other written styles are also used in Chinese calligraphy, including seal script, cursive script and clerical script. Calligraphy artists can write in Traditional and Simplified characters, but they tend to use Traditional characters for traditional art.
There are currently two systems for Chinese characters.
The Internet provides practice reading each of these systems, and most Chinese readers are capable of, if not necessarily comfortable with, reading the alternative system through experience and guesswork.[78]
A well-educated Chinese reader today recognizes approximately 4,000 to 6,000 characters; approximately 3,000 characters are required to read a
Romanization
Romanization is the process of transcribing a language into the Latin script. There are many systems of romanization for the Chinese varieties, 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 Christian missionaries in the 16th century.
Today the most common romanization standard for Standard Mandarin is
The second-most common romanization system, the
When used within European texts, the tone transcriptions in both pinyin and Wade–Giles are often left out for simplicity; Wade–Giles's extensive use of apostrophes is also usually omitted. Thus, most Western readers will be much more familiar with Beijing than they will be with Běijīng (pinyin), and with Taipei than T'ai2-pei3 (Wade–Giles). This simplification presents syllables as homophones which really are none, and therefore exaggerates the number of homophones almost by a factor of four.
For comparison:
Characters | Wade–Giles | Pinyin | Meaning |
---|---|---|---|
中国; 中國 | Chung1-kuo2 | Zhōngguó | China |
台湾; 台灣 | T'ai2-wan1 | Táiwān | Taiwan |
北京 | Pei3-ching1 | Běijīng | Beijing |
台北; 臺北 | T'ai2-pei3 | Táiběi | Taipei |
孫文 | Sun1-wên2 | Sūn Wén | Sun Yat-sen |
毛泽东; 毛澤東 | Mao2 Tse2-tung1 | Máo Zédōng | Mao Zedong |
蒋介石; 蔣介石 | Chiang3 Chieh4-shih2 | Jiǎng Jièshí | Chiang Kai-shek |
孔子 | K'ung3 Tsu3 | Kǒngzǐ | Confucius |
Other systems include Gwoyeu Romatzyh, the French EFEO, the Yale system (invented for use by US troops during World War II), as well as distinct systems for the phonetic requirements of Cantonese, Min Nan, Hakka, and other varieties.
Other phonetic transcriptions
Chinese varieties have been phonetically transcribed into many other writing systems over the centuries. The
As a foreign language
With the growing importance and influence of China's economy globally, Standard Chinese instruction has been gaining popularity in schools throughout East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Western world.[80]
Besides Mandarin, Cantonese is the only other Chinese language that is widely taught as a foreign language, largely due to the economic and cultural influence of Hong Kong and its widespread usage among significant Overseas Chinese communities.[81]
In 1991 there were 2,000 foreign learners taking China's official Chinese Proficiency Test, called
See also
- Chengyu
- Chinese characters
- Chinese computational linguistics
- Chinese exclamative particles
- Chinese honorifics
- Chinese language law
- Chinese numerals
- Chinese punctuation
- Chinese word-segmented writing
- Classical Chinese grammar
- Han unification
- Languages of China
- North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics
- Protection of the Varieties of Chinese
Notes
- ^ The colloquial layers of many varieties, particularly Min varieties, reflect features that predate Middle Chinese.[2][3]
- ^ De facto spoken language—while no specific variety of Chinese is official in Hong Kong and Macau, Cantonese is the predominant spoken form and the de facto regional spoken standard. The Hong Kong government promotes trilingualism between Cantonese, Mandarin, and English; while the Macau government promotes quadrilingualism between Cantonese, Mandarin, Portuguese, and English, especially in public education.
- ^ National Commission on Language and Script Work
- ^ Especially when distinguished from other languages of China
- ^ "Chinese" refers collectively to the various language varieties that have descended from Old Chinese: native speakers often consider these to be "dialects" of a single language—though the Chinese term 方言; fāngyán; 'dialect' does not carry the precise connotations of "dialect" in English—while linguists typically analyze them as separate languages. See Dialect continuum and Varieties of Chinese for details.
- ^ Various examples include:
- David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 312. "The mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages."
- Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p. 2. "The Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family."
- Norman (1988), p. 1. "[...] the modern Chinese dialects are really more like a family of languages [...]"
- DeFrancis (1984), p. 56. "To call Chinese a single language composed of dialects with varying degrees of difference is to mislead by minimizing disparities that according to Chao are as great as those between English and Dutch. To call Chinese a family of languages is to suggest extralinguistic differences that in fact do not exist and to overlook the unique linguistic situation that exists in China."
Linguists in China often use a formulation introduced by Fu Maoji in the Encyclopedia of China: 《汉语在语言系属分类中相当于一个语族的地位。》; "In language classification, Chinese has a status equivalent to a language family."[5]
- ^ a b DeFrancis (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.
- neutral tone.
- ^ Using Baxter's transcription for Middle Chinese
- ^ There are plural markers in the language, such as 们; 們; men, used with personal pronouns.
- ^ A distinction is made between 他; 'he' and 她; 'she' in writing, but this was only introduced in the 20th century—both characters remain exactly homophonous.
- ^ Hong Kong and Macau Cantonese.
References
Citations
- ^ Chinese at Ethnologue (27th ed., 2024)
Eastern Min at Ethnologue (27th ed., 2024)
Jinyu at Ethnologue (27th ed., 2024)
Mandarin at Ethnologue (27th ed., 2024)
Pu-Xian Min at Ethnologue (27th ed., 2024)
Huizhou at Ethnologue (27th ed., 2024)
Central Min at Ethnologue (27th ed., 2024)
(Additional references under 'Language codes' in the information box) - ^ Norman (1988), pp. 211–214.
- ^ Pulleyblank (1984), p. 3.
- ^ "Summary by language size". Ethnologue. 3 October 2018. Retrieved 7 March 2021.
- ^ Mair (1991), pp. 10, 21.
- ^ a b Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (2012), pp. 3, 125.
- ^ Norman (1988), pp. 12–13.
- ^ Handel (2008), pp. 422, 434–436.
- ^ Handel (2008), p. 426.
- ^ Handel (2008), p. 431.
- ^ Norman (1988), pp. 183–185.
- ^ Schüssler (2007), p. 1.
- ^ Baxter (1992), pp. 2–3.
- ^ Norman (1988), pp. 42–45.
- ^ Baxter (1992), p. 177.
- ^ Baxter (1992), pp. 181–183.
- ^ Schüssler (2007), p. 12.
- ^ Baxter (1992), pp. 14–15.
- ^ Ramsey (1987), p. 125.
- ^ Norman (1988), pp. 34–42.
- ^ Norman (1988), p. 24.
- ^ Norman (1988), p. 48.
- ^ Norman (1988), pp. 48–49.
- ^ Norman (1988), pp. 49–51.
- ^ Norman (1988), pp. 133, 247.
- ^ Norman (1988), p. 136.
- ^ Coblin (2000), pp. 549–550.
- ^ Coblin (2000), pp. 540–541.
- ^ Ramsey (1987), pp. 3–15.
- ^ Norman (1988), p. 133.
- ^ Zhang & Yang (2004).
- ^ Sohn & Lee (2003), p. 23.
- ^ Miller (1967), pp. 29–30.
- ^ Kornicki (2011), pp. 75–77.
- ^ Kornicki (2011), p. 67.
- ^ Miyake (2004), pp. 98–99.
- ^ Shibatani (1990), pp. 120–121.
- ^ Sohn (2001), p. 89.
- ^ Shibatani (1990), p. 146.
- ^ Wilkinson (2000), p. 43.
- ^ Shibatani (1990), p. 143.
- ^ a b Norman (2003), p. 72.
- ^ Norman (1988), pp. 189–191; Ramsey (1987), p. 98.
- ^ Ramsey (1987), p. 23.
- ^ Norman (1988), p. 188.
- ^ a b Wurm et al. (1987).
- ^ Norman (1988), p. 181.
- ^ Kurpaska (2010), pp. 53–55.
- ^ Kurpaska (2010), pp. 55–56.
- ^ Kurpaska (2010), pp. 72–73.
- ^ 何, 信翰 (10 August 2019). "自由廣場》Taigi與台語". 自由時報. Retrieved 11 July 2021.
- ^ 李, 淑鳳 (1 March 2010). "台、華語接觸所引起的台語語音的變化趨勢". 台語研究. 2 (1): 56–71. Retrieved 11 July 2021.
- ISSN 1996-4617. Retrieved 30 May 2015.
- ^ Kuo, Yun-Hsuan (2005). New dialect formation: the case of Taiwanese Mandarin (PhD). University of Essex. Retrieved 26 June 2015.
- ^ Baxter (1992), pp. 7–8.
- ^ DeFrancis (1984), pp. 55–57.
- ^ Thomason (1988), pp. 27–28.
- ^ Campbell (2008).
- ^ a b DeFrancis (1984), p. 57.
- ^ Mair (1991), p. 7.
- ^ Bailey (1973:11), cited in Groves (2010:531)
- ^ Haugen (1966), p. 927.
- ^ Hudson (1996), p. 22.
- ^ Mair (1991), p. 17.
- ^ Norman (1988), p. 52.
- ^ Matthews & Yip (1994), pp. 20–22.
- ISBN 978-1-58573-057-5.
- ^ Norman (1988), p. 10.
- ^ "Languages - Real Chinese - Mini-guides - Chinese characters". BBC.
- ^ Timothy Uy and Jim Hsia, Editors, Webster's Digital Chinese Dictionary – Advanced Reference Edition, July 2009
- ^
- Egerod, Søren Christian. "Chinese languages". Encyclopædia Britannica.
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.
- Ulenbrook, Jan (1967), Einige Übereinstimmungen zwischen dem Chinesischen und dem Indogermanischen (in German) proposes 57 items.
- Chang, Tsung-tung (1988). "Indo-European Vocabulary in Old Chinese" (PDF). Sino-Platonic Papers.
- Egerod, Søren Christian. "Chinese languages". Encyclopædia Britannica.
- ^ Kane (2006), p. 161.
- ^ "Requirements for Chinese Text Layout" 中文排版需求.
- ^ Huang Hua (黃華). 白話為何在五四時期「活」起來了? (PDF) (in Chinese). Chinese University of Hong Kong. Archived (PDF) from the original on 10 October 2022.
- ^ 粵普之爭 為你中文解毒 (in Chinese).
- ^ 粤语:中国最强方言是如何炼成的_私家历史_澎湃新闻. The Paper 澎湃新闻.
- ^ 陳宇碩. 白話字滄桑. The New Messenger 新使者雜誌 (in Chinese).
- ^ 全球華文網-華文世界,數位之最 (in Chinese).
- S2CID 53981784.
- ^ "How hard is it to learn Chinese?". BBC News. 17 January 2006. Retrieved 28 April 2010.
- ^ Wakefield, John C., Cantonese as a Second Language: Issues, Experiences and Suggestions for Teaching and Learning (Routledge Studies in Applied Linguistics), Routledge, New York City, 2019., p.45
- ^ (in Chinese) "汉语水平考试中心:2005年外国考生总人数近12万",Gov.cn Xinhua News Agency, 16 January 2006.
- ^ Liu lili (27 June 2011). "Chinese language proficiency test becoming popular in Mexico". Archived from the original on 29 June 2011. Retrieved 12 September 2013.
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Further reading
- Arablouei, Ramtin; Rund Abdelfatah (26 May 2022). "The Characters That Built China". Throughline. NPR. Retrieved 27 August 2023. On the history of the standardization of Mandarin as the Chiense primary national dialect.
- Hannas, William C. (1997), Asia's Orthographic Dilemma, University of Hawaii Press, ISBN 978-0-8248-1892-0.
- Huang, Cheng-Teh James; Li, Yen-Hui Audrey; Li, Yafei (2009), The Syntax of Chinese, Cambridge Syntax Guides, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, S2CID 209828119.
- ISBN 978-1-55729-071-7.
- R. L. G. (6 June 2013). "Why So Little Chinese in English?". Johnson (blog): Language Borrowing (topic). The Economist. Archived from the original on 20 June 2013. Retrieved 27 August 2023.
- Tsu, Jing (2022). Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern. New York: Riverhead Books. OCLC 1246726702.
External links
- Classical Chinese texts – Chinese Text Project
- Marjorie Chan's ChinaLinks; Archived 20 July 2011 at the Wayback Machine at the Ohio State University with hundreds of links to Chinese related web pages