Portál čínštiny:
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Listing of Chinese dialects in
Ethnologue (http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=1270:)
Dictionaries
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Zhongwen.com: (http://www.zhongwen.com) Chinese to English dictionary and other
resources presented in English; searchable by English meanings; Chinese text
displayed as graphics (i.e. does not require any Chinese font).
MDBG free online Chinese-English
dictionary (http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php?page=chardict)
Chinese Pinyin English Dictionary (http://www.asinah.org/travel-guides/chinese.html)
Chinese Characters
Dictionary (http://www.chineselanguage.org/CCDICT/index.html): supports Japanese,
Korean, Cantonese, Hakka etc.
Chinese - English Dictionary (http://www.websters-onlinedictionary.org/definition/Chinese-english/): from Webster's Online
Dictionary (http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org) - the Rosetta Edition.
Chinese - French Dictionary (http://www.chinese-tools.com/tools/chinese-frenchdictionary.html) search chinese, pinyin or french.
Chinese dictionary (http://www.online-dictionary.biz/english/chinese) Free ChineseEnglish-Chinese dictionary.
Resources for students of Chinese
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The Chinese Outpost: (http://www.chinese-outpost.com)Language learning site
centered around an “Introduction to Mandarin Chinese” tutorial that aims to demystify
the Chinese Language—in everyday language, not academese—with units focused on
Pronunciation, Characters, and Grammar.
Oneaday.org (http://www.oneaday.org) One Chinese idiom a day (simplified and
traditional characters) with pinyin transliteration and English translation.
Sheik's Cantonese Forum (http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/phorum/) Forums for
Cantonese Learner
Shanghaiexpat.com: Chinese Learning
Forum (http://www.shanghaiexpat.com/PNphpBB2-viewforum-f-17.phtml)
Marjorie Chan's ChinaLinks (http://deall.ohio-state.edu/chan.9/c-links.htm): A large
collection of Web resources by a professor of linguistics at Ohio State University
Chinese-Tools.com (http://www.chinese-tools.com/): Free online chinese tools.
On-line Chinese Tools (http://www.mandarintools.com/): Tools for learning and using
Chinese.
Chinese Learning Center (http://chinese-school.netfirms.com): Site on learning
Chinese and Chinese language general information.
Rikai.com (http://www.rikai.com/perl/HomePage.pl?Language=Zh) A web-mediator
that adds mouseover pinyin readings and English meanings to Chinese web-pages.
Chinese Symbols (http://chinese-school.netfirms.com/Chinese-symbolscustomized.html) Introduction to Chinese characters
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Mandarin Chinese Language Programs in Shanghai (http://www.mandarincenter.com) Mandarin Center offers great inexpensive Mandarin courses
www.OCRAT.com (http://www.ocrat.com/) Chinese-related web pages with a focus
on Chinese language learning for English speakers including animations that
demonstrate stroke order
Resources on Chinese in general
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Shanghainese (a Wu Chinese dialect) (http://www.zanhe.com/): a project to introduce
and promote the Shanghai dialect. In the works.
Chinese Linguistics (http://www.unet.univie.ac.at/~a9305416/): Sites on Chinese
linguistics
Wu-Chinese.org (江南雅音话吴语) (http://www.wu-chinese.org/): Introduction, statistical
data, vocal records, dialectmaps and literature datum of Wu Chinese
Chinese Language and Culture Forums: (http://www.chinese-forums.com/) An online
community.
Chinese language:
Některé čínské znaky se nezobrazují, pokud bude uživatel chce prostudovat původní
text, stačí přejít na adresu: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language )
The Chinese language (汉语/漢語, 华语/華語, or 中文; Pinyin: Hànyǔ, Huáyǔ, or
Zhōngwén) is a tonal language and a member of the Sino-Tibetan family of
languages. Although Chinese is often regarded for cultural reasons as a single
language, its range of regional variation is comparable to that of the Romance
languages. However, all of the users of spoken varieties of Chinese have always
used a common formal written language, which has since the beginning of the
twentieth century been Vernacular Chinese (based on Mandarin), written using a
nearly identical set of Chinese characters.
About one-fifth of the world speaks some form of Chinese as their native language,
making it the language with the most native speakers. The Chinese language,
spoken in the form of Standard Mandarin, is the official language of the People's
Republic of China and the Republic of China on Taiwan, as well as one of four official
languages of Singapore, and one of six official languages of the United Nations.
Spoken in the form of Standard Cantonese, Chinese is one of the official languages
of Hong Kong (together with English) and of Macao (together with Portuguese).
Chinese (汉语/漢語；中文)
Spoken in:
China (the PRC and the ROC),
Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, and
other Chinese communities around
the world
Region:
Total
speakers:
1.2 billion
Ranking:
1 (if considered a single language)
Genetic
Sino-Tibetan
classification:
Chinese
Official status
Official
language of:
PRC, ROC, Singapore
Regulated by: In the PRC: various
agencies (http://www.chinalanguage.gov.cn/)(in Chinese)
in the ROC: Mandarin Promotion
Council
Language codes
ISO 639-1
zh
ISO 639-2
chi (B) / zho (T)
SIL
-See also: Language - List of languages
"Chinese (written) language" (pinyin: zhōngwén) written in Chinese characters
The terms and concepts used by Chinese to separate spoken language from written
language are different from those used in the West, because of differences in the
political and social development of China in comparison with Europe. Whereas
Europe fragmented into smaller nation-states after the fall of the Roman Empire, the
identities of which were often defined by language, China was able to preserve
cultural and political unity through the same period, and maintained a common
written language throughout its entire history, despite the fact that its actual diversity
in spoken language has always been comparable to Europe. As a result, Chinese
makes a sharp distinction between "written language" (wén; 文) and "spoken
language" (yǔ; 語). The concept of a distinct and unified combination of both written
and spoken forms of language is therefore much stronger in the West than in China.
The varieties of spoken Chinese in China
Spoken Chinese:
The map on the right depicts the subdivisions ("languages" or "dialect groups") within
Chinese. The seven main groups are:
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Mandarin (shown in the map as divided into East and West groups, but also includes
the Jianghuai and Huguang areas depicted in the map)
Wu (includes Shanghainese)
Xiang
Gan
Hakka
Cantonese (or Yue)
Min (which linguists further divide into of 5 to 7 subdivisions on its own, all of which
are mutually unintelligible).
Linguists who distinguish ten instead of seven major groups separate the following
groups:
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Jin from Mandarin
Pinghua from Cantonese
Hui from Wu
There are also many smaller groups that are not yet classified, such as: Danzhou
dialect, spoken in Danzhou, on Hainan Island; Xianghua (乡话), not to be confused
with Xiang (湘), spoken in western Hunan; and Shaozhou Tuhua, spoken in northern
Guangdong. See List of Chinese dialects for a comprehensive listing of individual
dialects within these large, broad groupings.
There is also Standard Mandarin, the official standard language used by the People's
Republic of China, the Republic of China, and Singapore. Standard Mandarin is
based on the Beijing dialect, which is the dialect of Mandarin as spoken in Beijing,
and the governments intend for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as
a common language of communication. It is therefore used in government, in the
media, and in instruction in schools.
There is much controversy around the terminology used to describe the subdivisions
of Chinese, with some preferring to call Chinese a language and its subdivisions
dialects, and others preferring to call Chinese a language family and its subdivisions
languages. Even though Dungan is very closely related to Mandarin, not many
people consider it "Chinese", because it is written in Cyrillic and spoken by people
outside of China who are not considered Chinese in any sense.
It is common for speakers of Chinese to be able to speak several varieties of the
language. Typically, in southern China, a person will be able to speak Standard
Mandarin, the local dialect, and occasionally a more general regional dialect, such as
Cantonese. Such polyglots will frequently code switch between Standard Mandarin
and the local dialect, depending on the situation. A person living in Taiwan, for
example, will commonly mix pronunciations, phrases, and words from Standard
Mandarin and Taiwanese, and this mixture is considered socially appropriate under
many circumstances.
[edit]
Is Chinese a language or a family of languages?
Spoken Chinese comprises many regional and often mutually unintelligible variants.
In the West, many people are familiar with the fact that the Romance languages all
derive from Latin and so have many underlying features in common while being
mutually unintelligible. The linguistic evolution of Chinese is similar, while the sociopolitical context is quite different.
In Europe, political fragmentation gave rise to independent states which are roughly
the size of Chinese provinces. This in turn generated a political desire to create
separate cultural and literary standards to differentiate nation-states and to
standardize the language within a nation-state. In China, a single cultural and literary
standard (Classical Chinese and later, Vernacular Chinese) continued to exist while
at the same time the spoken language continued to diverge between different cities
and counties, much in the same manner as European languages diverged from each
other, as a result of the sheer scale of the country, and the obstruction of
communication by geography.
As a case in point, mountainous South China displays more linguistic diversity than
the flat North China. There's even a saying in Chinese, nán chuán běi mǎ (南船北馬),
meaning "Boats in the South and horses in the North." The flat plains of northern
China allows one to cross with relative ease using a horse, but the dense vegetation
and numerous mountains and rivers of the south prevented this. In southern China,
the most efficient means of transportation was by boat. For instance, Wuzhou is a
city that lies about 120 miles upstream from Guangzhou, the capital of the
Guangdong province in the south. By contrast, Taishan is only 60 miles southwest of
Guangzhou, but several rivers must be crossed in order to reach it. Because of this,
the dialect spoken in Taishan, relative to the dialect spoken in Wuzhou, has actually
diverged more from the Standard Cantonese spoken in Guangzhou (Ramsey, 1987).
This diversity in spoken forms and commonality in written form has created a
linguistic context that is very different from that of Europe. For example, in Europe,
the language of a nation-state was usually standardized to be similar to that of the
capital, making it easy, for example, to classify a language as French or Spanish.
This had the effect of sharpening linguistic differences. A farmer on one side of the
border would start to model his speech after Paris while a farmer on the other side
would model his speech after Madrid. Moreover, the written language would be
modelled after the dialect of the capital, and the use of local speech or mixtures of
local speech would be considered substandard and erroneous. In China, this
standardization did not occur.
More relevant to China's situation is that of India. Though India has historically not
been as unified as China, parts of it speaking multiple languages have long been
united in various states, and many of the languages have not until the last few
decades been standardized through political centralization. Sanskrit long played a
role as a common written language. In India, however, the status of the different
descendant languages of Sanskrit as separate languages is not in question; 16 of
them are official languages.
Few linguists would seriously hold that Cantonese and Mandarin are the same
language in the way they use the term, but for the popular classification of a speech
variety as a language or dialect, linguistic considerations are often not as important
as cultural or nationalistic ones. In self-description, Chinese people generally
consider Chinese to be one single language, partly because of the common written
language. In order to describe dialects, Chinese people typically use the speech of
location, for example Beijing dialect (北京話/北京话) for the speech of Beijing or
Shanghai dialect (上海話/上海话) for the speech of Shanghai. Often there is not even
any awareness among laypeople that these various "dialects" are then categorized
into "languages" based on mutual intelligibility, though in areas of greater linguistic
diversity (such as the southeast) people do think of dialects as being grouped into
categories like Wu or Hakka. So although it is true that many parts of north China are
quite homogeneous in language, while in parts of south China, major cities can have
dialects that are only marginally intelligible even to close neighbours, there is a
tendency to regard all of these as "Chinese dialects" — equal subvariations of a
single Chinese language. As with the concept of Chinese language itself, the
divisions among different "dialects" are mostly geographical rather than based on
linguistic distance. For example, Sichuan dialect is considered as being distinct from
Beijing dialect in the same way that Cantonese is, despite the fact that linguistically
Sichuan dialect and Beijing dialect are both considered Mandarin dialects by linguists
while Cantonese is not.
Due to this self-perception of a single Chinese language by the majority of its
speakers, some linguists respect this terminology, and use the word "language" for
Chinese and "dialect" for Cantonese, but most follow the intelligibility requirement
and consider Chinese to be a group of related languages, since these languages are
not at all mutually intelligible, and show ranges of variation comparable to those
among the Romance languages. As with many areas that have been linguistically
diverse for a long time, whether the speech of a particular area of China should be
considered a language in its own right or a dialect of another is not always clear, and
many of the languages do not have sharp boundaries between them. The
Ethnologue lists a total of
fourteen (http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=1270), but the number
varies between seven and seventeen depending on how strict the intelligibility
criterion is.
The distinction between a single language and a language family has major political
overtones, and the amount of emotion put into this issue arises from political
implications. To some, the description of Chinese as a language family implies that
China should actually be considered several different nations, and challenges the
notion that there is a single Han Chinese "race". For this reason, some Chinese are
uncomfortable with the idea that Chinese is not a single language, as this perception
might legitimize secessionist movements. Supporters of Taiwanese independence do
tend to be strong promoters of Min- and Hakka-language education, for example.
Furthermore, for some, the implication that describing Chinese as multiple languages
is more correct carries with it the implication that the notion of a single Chinese
language and a single Chinese state or nationality is backward, oppressive, artificial,
and out of touch with reality.
However, the links between ethnicity, politics, and language can be complex. For
example, many Wu, Min, Hakka, and Cantonese speakers who would consider their
own varieties to be separate spoken languages, and the Han Chinese race to be a
single entity, do not regard these two positions as contradictory; instead they
consider the Han Chinese to be an entity that is, and has always been, characterized
by great internal diversity. Moreover, the government of the People's Republic of
China officially states that China is a multinational state, and that the very term
"Chinese" refers to a broader concept called Zhonghua minzu that incorporates
groups that do not natively speak Chinese at all, such as Tibetans, Uighurs, and
Mongols. (Those that do speak Chinese and are considered "ethnic Chinese" from an
outsider point of view are called Han Chinese — this is seen as an ethnic and cultural
concept, not a political one.) Similarly on Taiwan, one can find supporters of Chinese
unification who are also interested in promoting the local language, and supporters of
Taiwan independence who have little interest in the topic. And, in an analogy to the
mainland Chinese idea of Zhonghua minzu, the Taiwanese identity also incorporates
Taiwanese aborigines, who are not at all considered Han Chinese because they
speak Austronesian languages, predate Han Chinese migration to Taiwan, and are
culturally and genetically linked to other Austronesian-speaking peoples such as the
Polynesians.
[edit]
Written Chinese
Main article: Chinese written language
The relationship among the Chinese spoken and written languages is complex. This
complexity is compounded by the fact that the numerous variations of spoken
Chinese have gone through centuries of evolution since at least the late Han
Dynasty, while written Chinese has changed much less.
Until the 20th century, most formal Chinese writing was done in wényán (文言),
translated as Classical Chinese or Literary Chinese, which was very different from
any of the spoken varieties of Chinese in much the same way that Classical Latin is
different from modern Romance languages. Since the May Fourth Movement of
1919, the formal standard for written Chinese was changed to báihuà (白話/白话), or
Vernacular Chinese, which, while not completely identical to the grammar and
vocabulary of Mandarin, was based mostly on it. The term standard written Chinese
now refers to Vernacular Chinese.
Chinese characters are understood as morphemes that are independent of phonetic
change. Thus, although the number one is "yi" in Mandarin, "yat" in Cantonese and
"tsit" in Hokkien, they derive from a common ancient Chinese word and still share an
identical character: 一. Nevertheless, the orthographies of Chinese dialects are not
completely identical. The vocabularies used in the different dialects have diverged. In
addition, while literary vocabulary is often shared among all dialects, colloquial
vocabularies are often different. Colloquially written Chinese usually involves the use
of "dialectal characters" which may not be understood in other dialects or characters
that are considered archaic in standard written Chinese.
Cantonese is unique among non-Mandarin regional languages in having a widely
used written colloquial standard with a large number of unofficial characters for words
particular to this variety of Chinese. By contrast, the other regional languages do not
have such widely used alternative written standards. Written colloquial Cantonese
has become quite popular in online chat rooms and instant messaging, although for
formal written communications Cantonese speakers still normally use standard
written Chinese.
[edit]
Chinese characters
Main article: Chinese character
The Chinese written language employs Chinese characters (漢字/汉字 pinyin hànzì),
a systems based on logograms, where each symbol represents a morpheme (a
meaningful unit of language). Chinese characters appear to have originated some
time during the Shang dynasty. Initially, characters were pictures of their meanings
with and without much abstract meaning, but as time passed the characters evolved
to express a more complex language as well as becoming highly stylized . Today, the
vast majority of characters consist of one element (the radical) that gives an
indication of meaning, and another element (the phonetic) that gives (or at least once
gave) a fairly good indication of the pronunciation. Easily recognizable pictorial
resemblances to real-life objects have been all but lost through stylization.
Various styles of Chinese calligraphy.
Many styles of Chinese calligraphic writing developed over the centuries, such as
zhuanshu (篆書, seal-script), caoshu (草書, grass script), lishu (隸書, official script)
and kaishu (楷書, standard script). As with Latin script, a wide variety of fonts exists
for printed Chinese characters, a great number of which are often based on the styles
of single calligraphers or schools of calligraphy.
There are currently two standards for Chinese characters. One is the Traditional
system, used in Taiwan. Mainland China and Singapore have adopted a simplified
system developed by the PRC government in the 1950s, that reduced the amount of
strokes needed to write certain radicals as well as reducing the number of
synonymous characters. Most simplified versions were derived from historically
established, though obscure, cursive simplifications. Hong Kong and Macau use
mainly the Traditional system, but for some characters they have adopted the
simplified form. In Taiwan, many simplifications are used when characters are
handwritten, whereas in printing, traditional characters are the norm. In addition, most
Chinese use some personal simplifications.
[edit]
History
Most linguists classify all of the variations of Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan
language family and believe that there was an original language, called Proto-SinoTibetan, similar to Proto Indo-European, from which the Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman
languages descended. The relations between Chinese and the other Sino-Tibetan
languages are still unclear and 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
very good documentation that allows us to reconstruct the ancient sounds of
Chinese, there is no written documentation concerning the division between protoSino-Tibetan and Chinese. In addition, many of the languages that would allow us to
reconstruct proto-Sino-Tibetan are very poorly documented or understood.
Categorization of the development of Chinese is a subject of scholarly debate. One
of the first systems was devised by the Swedish linguist Bernhard Karlgren; what
follows is a modern revision of his system.
Old Chinese (上古漢語), sometimes known as 'Archaic Chinese', was the language
common during the early and middle Zhou Dynasty (11th to 7th centuries B.C.), texts
of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the Shijing, the history
of the Shujing, and portions of the Yijing (I Ching). The phonetic elements found in
the majority of Chinese characters also provide hints to their Old Chinese
pronunciations. Old Chinese was not wholly uninflected. It possessed a rich sound
system in which aspiration or rough breathing differentiated the consonants. Work on
reconstructing Old Chinese started with Qing dynasty philologists.
Middle Chinese (中古漢語) was the language used during the Sui, Tang, and Song
dynasties (7th through 10th centuries A.D.). It can be divided into an early period, to
which the 切韻 'Qieyun' rhyme table (A.D. 601) relates, and a late period in the 10th,
which the 廣韻 'Guangyun' rhyme table reflects. Linguists are confident of having a
good reconstruction of how Middle Chinese sounded. The evidence for the
pronunciation of Middle Chinese comes from several sources: modern dialect
variations, rhyming dictionaries, and foreign transliterations. In addition, ancient
Chinese philologists devoted a great deal of effort to summarizing the Chinese
phonetic system through "rhyming tables", and these tables serve as a basis for the
work of modern linguists. Finally, Chinese phonetic translations of foreign words also
provide plenty of clues about the nature of Middle Chinese phonetics. However, all
reconstructions are tentative; scholars have shown, for example, that trying to
reconstruct modern Cantonese from the rhymes of modern Cantopop would give a
very inaccurate picture of the language.
The development of the spoken Chinese languages from early historical times to the
present has been complex. The language tree shown below indicates how the
present main divisions of the Chinese language developed out of an early common
language. Comparison with the map above will give some idea of the complexities
that have been left out of the tree. For instance, the Min language that is centered in
Fujian Province contains five subdivisions, and the Mandarin dialects (Beifanghua)
also contains nine, such as Yunnan hua and Sichuan hua.
Most Chinese living in northern China, 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 the result of geography, namely the plains of north China. By contrast, the
mountains and rivers of southern China have promoted linguistic diversity. The
presence of Mandarin in Sichuan is largely due to a plague in the 12th century. This
plague, which may have been related to the Black Death, depopulated the area,
leading to later settlement from north China.
Until the mid-20th century, most Chinese living in southern China did not speak any
Mandarin. However, despite the mix of officials and commoners speaking various
Chinese dialects, Nanjing Mandarin became dominant at least during the officially
Manchu-speaking Qing Empire. Since the 17th century, the Empire had set up
orthoepy academies (正音書院 zhengyin shuyuan) in an attempt to make
pronunciation conform to the Beijing standard (Beijing being the capital of Qing), but
these attempts had little success. During the last 50 years of the Qing Dynasty, in the
late 19th century, the Nanjing Mandarin standard was finally replaced in the imperial
court by Beijing Mandarin. For the general population, although variations of
Mandarin were already widely spoken in China then, a single standard of Mandarin
did not exist. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use
their regionalects for every aspect of life. The new Beijing Mandarin court standard
was thus fairly limited.
This situation changed with the creation (in both the PRC and the ROC) of an
elementary school education system committed to teaching Mandarin. As a result,
Mandarin is now spoken fluently by a majority of people in Mainland China and in
Taiwan. In Hong Kong, the language of education and formal speech remains
Cantonese, but Mandarin is becoming increasingly influential.
[edit]
Influence on other languages
Throughout history Chinese culture and politics has had a great influence on
unrelated languages such as Korean, Vietnamese, and Japanese. Korean and
Japanese both have writing systems employing Chinese characters, which are called
Hanja and Kanji, respectively. Vietnamese was, until the 19th century, written with
Chu Nom, but this has now been completely replaced by a modified Latin script. 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.
Languages within the influence of Chinese culture also have a very large number of
loan words from Chinese. In Korean 50% or more of the vocabulary is of Chinese
origin and the influence on Japanese and Vietnamese has been considerable.
Chinese also shares a great many grammatical features with these and neighboring
languages, notably the lack of gender and the use of classifiers.
[edit]
Phonology
Note: This page contains phonetic information presented in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) using
Unicode. See IPA in Unicode if you have display problems.
For more specific information on phonology of Chinese see the respective main
articles of each spoken variety.
The phonological structure of each syllable consists of a nucleus consisting of a
vowel (which can be a monophthong, diphthong, or even a triphthong in certain
varieties) with an optional onset or coda consonant as well as a tone. There are
some instances where a vowel is not used as a nucleus. An example of this is in
Cantonese, where the nasal sonorant consonants /m/ and /ŋ/ 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 /m/, /n/, /ŋ/, /p/,
/t/, /k/, or /ʔ/. Some varieties allow most of these codas, whereas others, such as
Mandarin, are limited to only a couple, namely /n/ and /ŋ/. Consonant clusters do not
generally occur in either the onset or coda. The onset may be an affricate 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 as a result
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.
All varieties of spoken Chinese use tones. 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 which has
reduced the set of tones to a two-toned pitch accent system much like modern
Japanese.
This article or section uses Ruby annotation. If you are using a Mozilla browser, you may need to install this
support patch (http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/_rubysupport) to view this correctly. Without the necessary
support, you may see transcriptions in parentheses after the character, like this: 了(le), instead of on top of the
character as intended.
A very common example used to illustrate the use of tones in Chinese are the four
main tones of Standard Mandarin applied to the syllable "ma". The tones correspond
to these four characters:
mā
妈, "mother" - high level
má
麻, "hemp" - high rising
mǎ
马, "horse" - low falling-rising
mà
骂, "scold" - high falling
Listen to the four tones?.
[edit]
Morphology
Chinese morphology is strictly bound to a set number of syllables with a fairly rigid
construction which are the morphemes, the smallest building blocks, of the language.
Some of these morphemes can stand alone as individual words, but contrary to what
is often claimed, Chinese is not a monosyllabic language. Most words in the modern
Chinese spoken varieties are in fact multisyllabic, consisting of more than one
morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more.
The confusion arises in how one thinks about the language. In the Chinese writing
system, each individual morpheme corresponds to a single character, referred to as a
zì (字). Most Chinese speakers think of words as being zì, but this view is not entirely
accurate. Many words are multisyllabic, and are composed of more than one zì. This
composition is what is known as a cí (詞), and more closely resembles the traditional
Western definition of a word. However, the concept of cí was historically a technical
linguistic term that until only the past century, the average Chinese speaker was not
aware of. Even today, most Chinese speakers think of words as being zì. This can be
illustrated in the following Mandarin Chinese sentence (romanized using pinyin):
Jīguāng, zhèi liǎngge zì shì shénme yìsi?
The sentence literally translates to, "Jī and guāng, these two zì, what do they mean?"
However, the more natural English translation would probably be, "Laser, this word,
what does it mean?" Even though jīguāng is a single word, speakers tend to think of
its constituents as being separate (Ramsey, 1987).
Old Chinese and Middle Chinese had many more monosyllabic words due to greater
variability in possible sounds. The modern Chinese varieties lost many of these
sound distinctions, leading to homonyms in words that were once distinct.
Multisyllabic words arose in order to compensate for this loss. Most natively derived
multisyllabic words still feature these original monosyllabic morpheme roots though.
Many Chinese morphemes still have associated meaning, even though many of them
no longer can stand alone as individual words. This situation is analogous to the use
of the English prefix pre-. Even though pre- can never stand alone by itself as an
individual word, it is commonly understood by English speakers to mean "before,"
such as in the words predawn, previous, and premonition.
Taking the previous example, jīguāng, jī and guāng literally mean "stimulated light,"
resulting in the meaning, "laser." However, jī is never found as a single word by itself,
because there are too many other morphemes that are also pronounced jī, for
instance, the morphemes that correspond to the meanings "chicken" and "machine."
It is only in the context of other morphemes can an exact meaning of a zì be known.
In certain ways, the logographic writing system helps to reinforce meaning in zì that
are homophonous, since even though several morphemes may be pronounced the
same way, they are written using different characters. Continuing with the example,
we have:
Pinyin Traditional Characters Simplified Characters
Meaning
jīguāng
激光
激光
laser ("stimulated light")
jīqǐ
激起
激起
to arouse ("stimulated rise")
jīdàn
雞蛋
鸡蛋
chicken egg
gōngjī
公雞
公鸡
rooster ("male chicken")
fēijī
飛機
飞机
airplane ("flying machine")
jīqiāng
機槍
机枪
machine gun
[edit]
Loan Words
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 in
ancient times include 葡萄 "grape" and 苜蓿 "alfalfa". Other words were borrowed
from Buddhist scriptures, including 佛 "Buddha" and 菩薩 "bodhisattva".
There is an official system for approximating foreign words using Chinese characters,
but this sometimes yields strange results and is mainly used for rendering foreign
names. Characters in this case are usually taken strictly for their phonetic values.
Characters which are used exclusively in the transcription of foreign words are
present in Chinese; many of these characters date back to Middle Chinese wherein
they were used to translate Sanskrit phonemes.
Since transliteration is often cumbersome, new words that follow Chinese word
building rules have been devised. For example, the word telephone was loaned as
德律風 (Standard Mandarin: délǜfēng) in the 1920s, but later 电话 (diànhuà "electric
speech") became prevalent. On the other hand, 麥克風 (màikèfēng), a transcription
of microphone, remains popular, although 话筒 (huàtǒng, "speech tube") is gradually
replacing it. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are
accepted, such as 汉堡包 (hànbǎo bāo, "hambur bun") for hamburger. Technical
expressions, if not derived from people's names, are often translated using Chinese
morphemes, dropping any Latin or Greek etymologies they may have, making them
more comprehensible for Chinese but introducing more difficulties in understanding
foreign texts. A rather small number of direct phonetic borrowings have survived as
common words, including 幽默 "humour", 浪漫 "romance", 邏輯 "logic", and 歇斯底里
"hysterics".
Another important source came from a related writing system, kanji, which are
Chinese characters used in the Japanese language. The Japanese used kanji to
translate many European words in the late 19th century and early 20th century, which
were then loaned into Chinese. Examples include lìchǎng (立場, たちば, stance),
zhéxué (哲學, てつがく, philosophy), chōuxiàng (抽象, ちゅうしょう, abstract),
guóyǔ (國語, こくご, national language), and zhǔyì (主義, しゅぎ, -ism). Chinese and
Japanese continue to share many terms describing modern terminology as a result of
this to-and-fro process, in parallel to a similar sharing among European languages of
such terms, built from Greco-Latin roots.
[edit]
Grammar
In general, all spoken varieties Chinese are isolating languages, in that they depend
on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphology (changes in
the form of the word through inflection). Because they are isolating languages, they
make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood.
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.
Even though Chinese has no grammatical gender, it has a extensive system of
measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring (but not related) languages
like Japanese and Korean. See Chinese measure words for an extensive coverage
of this subject.
Other notable grammatical features common to all the spoken varieties of Chinese
include the use of serial verb construction, pronoun dropping (and the related subject
dropping), and the use of aspect rather than tense.
Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess
certain differences. See Chinese grammar for the grammar of Standard Mandarin
(the standardized Chinese spoken language), and the articles on other varieties of
Chinese for their respective grammars.
[edit]
Related topics
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

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Chinese numerals
Haner language
Four-character idiom
Common phrases in different languages
Chinese measure words
Nü shu
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Han unification
HSK test
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List of writing systems
Numbers in various languages
[edit]
References
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DeFrancis, John (1984). The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. University of
Hawaii Press. ISBN 0-8248-1068-6.
Hannas, William C. (1997). Asia's Orthographic Dilemma. University of Hawaii
Press. ISBN 0-8248-1892-X.
Norman, Jerry (1988). Chinese. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-29653-6.
Ramsey, S. Robert (1987). The Languages of China. Princeton University Press. ISBN
0-691-01468-X.
[edit]
Chinese: spoken varieties
Mandarin | Jin | Wu | Hui | Xiang | Gan | Hakka | Yue | Pinghua | Min
Categories:
Danzhouhua | Shaozhou Tuhua | Xianghua
Subcategories of Min:
Min Dong | Min Bei | Min Zhong | Pu Xian | Min Nan | Qiong Wen | Shao
Jiang
Note: The above is only one classification scheme among many.
Comprehensive list of Chinese dialects
Official spoken
Standard Mandarin | Standard Cantonese
varieties:
Historical phonology: Old Chinese | Middle Chinese | Proto-Min | Proto-Mandarin | Haner
Chinese: written varieties
Použitý zdroj: Encyklopedie Wikipedia