Chinese language

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For the official language of the People's Republic of China, Taiwan, and Singapo
re, see Standard Chinese. For other languages spoken in China, see Languages of
China.
Unless otherwise specified, Chinese texts in this article are written in (Simpli
fied Chinese/Traditional Chinese; Pinyin) format. In cases where Simplified and
Traditional Chinese scripts are identical, the Chinese term is written once.
Chinese
??/?? or ??
Hnyu or Zhongwn
Hanyu trad simp.svg
Hnyu (Chinese) written in traditional (left) and simplified (right) characters
Native to China, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Macau, Malaysia, the United
States, Canada, Indonesia, Vietnam, and other places with significant overseas
Chinese communities
Ethnicity Han Chinese
Native speakers
unknown (1.2 billion cited 19842000)[1]
Language family
Sino-Tibetan
Sinitic
Chinese
Standard forms
Putonghua (Standard Mandarin)
Dialects
Mandarin
Jin
Wu (incl. Shanghainese)
Huizhou
Gan
Xiang
Min (incl. Teochew, Amoy, Taiwanese)
Hakka
Yue (incl. Cantonese, Taishanese)
Ping
Writing system
Chinese characters, zhuyin fuhao, Latin, Arabic, Cyrillic, braille
Official status
Official language in
China
Hong Kong
Macau
Taiwan
Singapore
Burma Wa State, Burma
United Nations
Recognised minority language in
Canada
Malaysia
United States
Regulated by China National Commission on Language and Script Work[2]
Taiwan National Languages Committee
Singapore Promote Mandarin Council/Speak Mandarin Campaign[3]
Malaysia Chinese Language Standardisation Council
Language codes
ISO 639-1 zh
ISO 639-2 chi (B)
zho (T)
ISO 639-3 zho inclusive code
Individual codes:
cdo Min Dong
cjy Jinyu
cmn Mandarin
cpx Pu Xian
czh Huizhou
czo Min Zhong
gan Gan
hak Hakka
hsn Xiang
mnp Min Bei
nan Min Nan
wuu Wu
yue Yue
och Old Chinese
ltc Late Middle Chinese
lzh Classical Chinese
Linguasphere 79-AAA
Glottolog sini1245[4]
{{{mapalt}}}
Map of the Sinophone world.
Information:
Countries identified Chinese as a primary, administrative, or native language
Countries with more than 5,000,000 Chinese speakers
Countries with more than 1,000,000 Chinese speakers
Countries with more than 500,000 Chinese speakers
Countries with more than 100,000 Chinese speakers
Major Chinese-speaking settlements
This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, yo
u may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters.
Chinese languages (Spoken)
Simplified Chinese ??
Traditional Chinese ??
[show]Transcriptions
Chinese language (Written)
Chinese ??
Literal meaning Chinese text
[show]Transcriptions
This article contains Chinese text. Without proper rendering support, yo
u may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Chinese characters.
Chinese (?? / ??; Hnyu or ??; Zhongwn) is a group of related language varieties, s
everal of which are not mutually intelligible, and is variously described as a l
anguage or language family.[a] Chinese forms one of the branches of the Sino-Tib
etan language family. Originally the indigenous speech of the Han majority in Ch
ina, it is now spoken by many Chinese ethnic groups. About one-fifth of the worl
d's population, or over one billion people, speaks some form of Chinese as their
first language.
Varieties of Chinese are usually perceived by native speakers as dialects of a s
ingle Chinese language, rather than separate languages, although this identifica
tion is considered inappropriate by some linguists and sinologists.[5] The inter
nal diversity of Chinese has been likened to that of the Romance languages, alth
ough all varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic. There are between 7 and 13
main regional groups of Chinese (depending on classification scheme), of which
the most spoken, by far, is Mandarin (about 960 million), followed by Wu (80 mil
lion), Yue (60 million) and Min (50 million). Most of these groups are mutually
unintelligible, although some, like Xiang and the Southwest Mandarin dialects, m
ay share common terms and some degree of intelligibility.
Standard Chinese (Putonghua/Guoyu/Huayu) is a standardized form of spoken Chines
e based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. It is the official language of the P
eople's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC, also known as Ta
iwan), as well as one of four official languages of Singapore. It is one of the
six official languages of the United Nations. The written form of the standard l
anguage (??; Zhongwn), based on the logograms known as Chinese characters (?? / ?
?; hnzi), is shared by literate speakers of otherwise unintelligible dialects.
Of the other varieties of Chinese, Cantonese (the prestige variety of Yue) is in
fluential in Guangdong province and Cantonese-speaking overseas communities and
remains one of the official languages of Hong Kong (together with English) and o
f Macau (together with Portuguese). Min Nan, part of the Min group, is widely sp
oken in southern Fujian, in neighbouring Taiwan (where it is known as Taiwanese
or Hoklo) and in Southeast Asia (also known as Hokkien in the Philippines, Singa
pore, and Malaysia). There are also sizeable Hakka and Shanghainese diasporas, f
or example in Taiwan, where most Hakka communities are also conversant in Taiwan
ese and Standard Chinese.
Contents [hide]
1 History
2 Influences
3 Varieties of Chinese
3.1 Classification
3.2 Standard Chinese and diglossia
3.3 Nomenclature
4 Writing
4.1 Chinese characters
4.2 Homophones
5 Phonology
5.1 Tones
6 Phonetic transcriptions
6.1 Romanization
6.2 Other phonetic transcriptions
7 Grammar and morphology
8 Vocabulary
9 Loanwords
9.1 Modern borrowings and loanwords
10 Education
11 See also
12 Notes
13 References
14 Further reading
15 External links
History[edit]
Main article: History of the Chinese language
Most linguists classify all the varieties of Chinese language as part of the Sin
o-Tibetan language family and believe that there was an original Proto-Sino-Tibe
tan language from which the Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman languages descended. The r
elation between Chinese and other Sino-Tibetan languages is an area of active re
search, as is the attempt to reconstruct the proto-language. The main difficulty
in this effort is that, while there is enough documentation to allow one to rec
onstruct the ancient Chinese sounds, there is no written documentation that reco
rds the division between Proto-Sino-Tibetan and ancient Chinese. In addition, ma
ny 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) Indo-European languages from Proto-Indo-European d
o not apply to Chinese, an analytic language, because of the paucity of inflecti
onal morphemes in modern varieties.[6]
Categorization of the development of Chinese is a subject of scholarly debate.
Old Chinese was the language common during the early and middle Zhou dynasty (10
46256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the Classic
of Poetry and portions of the Book of Documents and I Ching. The rhymes of the C
lassic of Poetry and the phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese char
acters provide hints to their Old Chinese pronunciations. Work on reconstructing
Old Chinese started with Qing dynasty philologists. The first complete reconstr
uction was devised by the Swedish linguist Bernhard Karlgren in the early 1900s;
most present systems rely heavily on Karlgren's insights and methods. Old Chine
se was not wholly uninflected. It possessed a rich sound system in which aspirat
ion and voicing differentiated the consonants, but probably was still without to
nes.
Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably ? m "h
oney", ? shi "lion," and perhaps also ? ma "horse", ? zhu "pig", ? quan "dog", a
nd ? "goose". Reconstructions of Old Chinese are not definitive, so this hypothe
sis is tentative.[b] The source also notes that southern dialects of Chinese hav
e more monosyllabic words than the Mandarin Chinese dialects.
Middle Chinese was the language used during Southern and Northern Dynasties and
the Sui, Tang, and Song dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be div
ided into an early period, reflected by the Qieyun rime book (601 CE), and a lat
e period in the 10th century, reflected by rhyme tables such as the Yunjing cons
tructed by ancient Chinese philologists to summarize the Qieyun system. Linguist
s are more confident of having reconstructed how Middle Chinese sounded. The evi
dence for the pronunciation of Middle Chinese comes from several sources: modern
dialect variations, rhyming dictionaries and tables, foreign transliterations,
and Chinese phonetic translations of foreign words. The pronunciation of the bor
rowed Chinese words in Japanese, Vietnamese and Korean also provide valuable ins
ights.
The development of the spoken Chinese languages from early historical times to t
he present has been complex. Most Chinese people, in Sichuan and in a broad arc
from the north-east (Manchuria) to the south-west (Yunnan), use various Mandarin
dialects as their home language. The prevalence of Mandarin throughout northern
China is largely due to north China's plains. By contrast, the mountains and ri
vers 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 during the early Ming dynasty, Na
njing Mandarin became dominant at least until the later years of the Qing dynast
y. Since the 17th century, the Qing dynasty had set up orthoepy academies (????/
????; Zhngyin Shuyun) 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 language
s 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 b
oth the PRC and the ROC, but not in Hong Kong) of a compulsory educational syste
m committed to teaching Mandarin. As a result, Mandarin is now spoken by virtual
ly all young and middle-aged citizens of mainland China and on Taiwan. Cantonese
, not Mandarin, was used in Hong Kong during the time of its British colonial pe
riod (owing to its large Cantonese native and migrant populace) and remains toda
y its official language of education, formal speech, and daily life, but Mandari
n has become increasingly influential since the 1997 handover.
The term sinophone, coined in 2005 in analogy to anglophone and francophone, ref
ers to those who speak at least one Chinese language natively, or prefer it as a
medium of communication. The term is derived from Sinae, the Latin word for anc
ient China.[c]
Influences[edit]
See also: Adoption of Chinese literary culture and Sino-Xenic vocabularies
The Tripitaka Koreana, a Korean collection of the Chinese Buddhist canon
The Chinese language has spread to neighbouring countries through a variety of m
eans. Northern Vietnam was incorporated into the Han empire in 111 BCE, beginnin
g a period of Chinese control that ran almost continuously for a millennium. The
Four Commanderies were established in northern Korea in the first century BCE,
but disintegrated in the following centuries.[7] Chinese Buddhism spread over Ea
st Asia between the 2nd and 5th centuries CE, and with it the study of scripture
s and literature in Literary Chinese.[8] Later Korea, Japan and Vietnam develope
d strong central governments modelled on Chinese institutions, with Literary Chi
nese as the language of administration and scholarship, a position it would reta
in until the late 19th century in Korea and (to a lesser extent) Japan, and the
early 20th century in Vietnam.[9] Scholars from different lands could communicat
e, albeit only in writing, using Literary Chinese.[10]
Although they used Chinese solely for written communication, each country had it
s own tradition of reading texts aloud, the so-called Sino-Xenic pronunciations.
Chinese words with these pronunciations were also borrowed extensively into the
Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese languages, and today comprise over half their v
ocabularies.[11] This massive influx led to changes in the phonological structur
e of the languages, contributing to the development of moraic structure in Japan
ese[12] and the disruption of vowel harmony in Korean.[13]
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 A
ncient Greek roots in European languages.[14] Many new compounds, or new meaning
s for old phrases, were created in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to nam
e Western concepts and artifacts. These coinages, written in shared Chinese char
acters, have then been borrowed freely between languages. They have even been ac
cepted into Chinese, a language usually resistant to loanwords, because their fo
reign 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 som
etimes the final choice differed between countries.[15] The proportion of vocabu
lary of Chinese origin thus tends to be greater in technical, abstract or formal
language. For example, Sino-Japanese words account for about 35% of the words i
n entertainment magazines, over half the words in newspapers, and 60% of the wor
ds in science magazines.[16]
Vietnam, Korea and Japan each developed writing systems for their own languages,
initially based on Chinese characters, but later replaced with the Hangul alpha
bet for Korean and supplemented with kana syllabaries for Japanese, while Vietna
mese continued to be written with the complex Ch? nm script. However these were l
imited to popular literature until the late 19th century. Today Japanese is writ
ten with a composite script using both Chinese characters (Kanji) and kana, but
Korean is written exclusively with Hangul in North Korea, and supplementary Chin
ese characters (Hanja) are increasingly rarely used in the South. Vietnamese is
written with a Latin-based alphabet.
Examples of loan words in English include "tea", from Minnan t (?) and "kumquat",
from Cantonese gam1gwat1 (??).
Varieties of Chinese[edit]
Main article: Varieties of Chinese
Jerry Norman estimated that there are hundreds of mutually unintelligible variet
ies of Chinese.[17] These varieties form a dialect continuum, in which differenc
es in speech generally become more pronounced as distances increase, though the
rate of change varies immensely.[18] Generally, mountainous South China displays
more linguistic diversity than the North China Plain. In parts of South China,
a major city's 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 that of Guangzhou than is that of Taishan, 60 miles southwest of G
uangzhou and separated from it by several rivers.[19] In parts of Fujian the spe
ech of neighbouring counties or even villages may be mutually unintelligible.[20
]
Classification[edit]
Local varieties of Chinese are conventionally classified into seven dialect grou
ps, largely on the basis of the different evolution of Middle Chinese voiced ini
tials:[21][22]
Mandarin, including Standard Chinese
Wu, including Shanghainese
Gan
Xiang
Min, including Hokkien, Taiwanese and Teochew
Hakka
Yue, including Cantonese and Taishanese
The classification of Li Rong, which is used in the Language Atlas of China (198
7), distinguishes three further groups:[23][24]
Jin, previously included in Mandarin.
Huizhou, previously included in Wu.
Pinghua, previously included in Yue.
The primary branches of Chinese in eastern China and Taiwan[23]
Numbers of first-language speakers (all countries):[25]
Circle frame.svg
Mandarin: 847.8 million (70.9%)
Jin: 45 million (3.8%)
Wu: 77.2 million (6.5%)
Huizhou: 4.6 million (0.4%)
Gan: 20.6 million (1.7%)
Xiang: 36 million (3.0%)
Min: 71.8 million (6.0%)
Hakka: 30.1 million (2.5%)
Yue and Pinghua: 62.2 million (5.2%)
Some varieties remain unclassified, including Danzhou dialect (spoken in Danzhou
, on Hainan Island), Xianghua (spoken in western Hunan) and Shaozhou Tuhua (spok
en in northern Guangdong).[26] The Dungan language, spoken in Central Asia, is a
Mandarin variety, but is politically not generally considered "Chinese" since i
t is written in Cyrillic and spoken by Dungan people outside China who are not c
onsidered ethnic Chinese.
Standard Chinese and diglossia[edit]
Main articles: Standard Chinese and List of countries where Chinese is an offici
al language
Putonghua / Guoyu, often called "Mandarin", is the official standard language us
ed by the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China (Taiwan), and Singap
ore (where it is called "Huayu" or simply Chinese). It is based on the Beijing d
ialect, which is the dialect of Mandarin as spoken in Beijing. The government in
tends for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common languag
e of communication. Therefore it is used in government agencies, in the media, a
nd 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 lan
guages (or "dialects") together with Standard Chinese. For example, in addition
to putonghua, a resident of Shanghai might speak Shanghainese; and, if he or she
grew up elsewhere, then he or she may also be likely to be fluent in the partic
ular dialect of that local area. A native of Guangzhou may speak both Cantonese
and putonghua, a resident of Taiwan, both Taiwanese and putonghua/guoyu. A perso
n living in Taiwan may commonly mix pronunciations, phrases, and words from Mand
arin and Taiwanese, and this mixture is considered normal in daily or informal s
peech.
Nomenclature[edit]
In common English usage, Chinese is considered a language and its varieties "dia
lects", a classification that agrees with Chinese speakers' self-perception. Mos
t linguists prefer instead to call Chinese a family of languages, because of the
lack of mutual intelligibility between its divisions. Measuring this mutual int
elligibility is not precise, but Chinese is often compared to the Romance langua
ges in this regard. Some linguists find the use of "Chinese languages" also prob
lematic, because it can imply a set of disruptive "religious, economic, politica
l, and other differences" between speakers that exist between for example betwee
n French Catholics and English Protestants in Canada, but not between speakers o
f Cantonese and Mandarin in China, owing to China's near-uninterrupted history o
f centralized government.[27]
Chinese itself has a term for its unified writing system, Zhongwn (??), while the
closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hnyu (??/??, "s
poken language[s] of the Han Chinese")this term could be translated to either "la
nguage" or "languages" since Chinese lacks grammatical number. For centuries in
China, owing to the widespread use of a written standard in Classical Chinese, t
here was no uniform speech-and-writing continuum, as indicated by the employment
of two separate morphemes yu ?/? and wn ?. The characters used in written Chines
e are logographs that denote morphemes as a whole rather than their phonemes, al
though most logographs are compounds of similar-sounding characters and semantic
disambiguation (the "radical"). Modern-day Chinese speakers of all kinds commun
icate using the modern standard written language, the written form of Standard C
hinese.
In Chinese, the major spoken varieties of Chinese are called fangyn (??, literall
y "regional speech"), and mutually intelligible variants within these are called
ddian fangyn (????/???? "local speech"). Both terms are customarily translated in
to English as "dialect".[27] Ethnic Chinese often consider these spoken variatio
ns as one single language for reasons of nationality and as they inherit one com
mon cultural and linguistic heritage in Classical Chinese. Han native speakers o
f Wu, Min, Hakka, and Cantonese, for instance, may consider their own linguistic
varieties as separate spoken languages, but the Han Chinese as onealbeit interna
lly very diverseethnicity. To Chinese nationalists, the idea of Chinese as a lang
uage family may suggest that the Chinese identity is much more fragmented and di
sunified than it actually is and as such is often looked upon as culturally and
politically provocative. Additionally, in Taiwan it is closely associated with T
aiwanese independence, some of whose supporters promote the local Taiwanese Minn
an-based spoken language.
Writing[edit]
Main articles: Written Chinese, Mainland Chinese Braille and Taiwanese Braille
The relationship between the Chinese spoken and written language is rather compl
ex. Its spoken varieties evolved at different rates, while written Chinese itsel
f has changed much less. Classical Chinese literature began in the Spring and Au
tumn period, although written records have been discovered as far back as the 14
th to 11th centuries BCE Shang dynasty oracle bones using the oracle bone script
s.
The Chinese orthography centers on 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. Chines
e characters are morphemes independent of phonetic change. Thus the character ?
("one") is uttered yi/yao in Standard Chinese, jat1 in Cantonese and chi?t/it in
Hokkien (form of Min). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have
diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique
"dialectal characters", such as ? and ? for Cantonese and Hakka, which are consi
dered archaic or unused in standard written Chinese.
Written colloquial Cantonese has become quite popular in online chat rooms and i
nstant messaging amongst Hong-Kongers and Cantonese-speakers elsewhere. Use of i
t is considered highly informal, and does not extend to many formal occasions.
In Hunan, women in certain areas write their local language in N Shu, a syllabary
derived from Chinese characters. The Dungan language, considered by many a dial
ect of Mandarin, is nowadays written in Cyrillic, and was previously written in
the Arabic script. The Dungan people are primarily Muslim and live mainly in Kaz
akhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Russia; some of the related Hui people also speak the l
anguage and live mainly in China.
Chinese characters[edit]
Main article: Chinese character
"Preface to the Poems Composed at the Orchid Pavilion" by Wang Xizhi, written in
semi-cursive style
Each Chinese character represents a monosyllabic Chinese word or morpheme. In 10
0 CE, the famed Han dynasty scholar Xu Shen classified characters into six categ
ories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loan
s, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categori
zed as pictographs, including many of the simplest characters, such as rn ? (huma
n), r ? (sun), shan ? (mountain; hill), shui ? (water). Between 80% and 90% were
classified as phonetic compounds such as chong ? (pour), combining a phonetic co
mponent zhong ? (middle) with a semantic radical ? (water). Almost all character
s created since have been of this type. The 18th-century Kangxi Dictionary recog
nized 214 radicals.
Modern characters are styled after the regular script. Various other written sty
les 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 traditional system,
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 cha
racter system, developed by the People's Republic of China in 1954 to promote ma
ss literacy, simplifies most complex traditional glyphs to fewer strokes, many t
o common cursive shorthand variants.
Singapore, which has a large Chinese community, is the firstand at present the on
lyforeign nation to officially adopt simplified characters, although it has also
become the de facto standard for younger ethnic Chinese in Malaysia. The Interne
t provides the platform to practice reading the alternative system, be it tradit
ional or simplified.
A well-educated Chinese reader today recognizes approximately 4,0006,000 characte
rs; approximately 3,000 characters are required to read a Mainland newspaper. Th
e PRC government defines literacy amongst workers as a knowledge of 2,000 charac
ters, though this would be only functional literacy. A large unabridged dictiona
ry, like the Kangxi Dictionary, contains over 40,000 characters, including obscu
re, variant, rare, and archaic characters; fewer than a quarter of these charact
ers are now commonly used.
Homophones[edit]
Standard Chinese has fewer than 1,700 distinct syllables but 4,000 common writte
n characters, so there are many homophones. For example, the following character
s (not necessarily words) are all pronounced ji: ?/? chicken, ?/? machine, ? bas
ic, ?/? to hit, ?/? hunger, and ?/? accumulate. In speech, the meaning of a syll
able is determined by context (for example, in English, "some" as the opposite o
f "none" as opposed to "sum" in arithmetic) or by the word it is found in ("some
" or "sum" vs. "summer"). Speakers may clarify which written character they mean
by giving a word or phrase it is found in: ?????,?????,???? Mngzi jio Jiaying, Ji
alng Jiang de jia, Yinggu de ying "My name is Jiaying, 'Jia' as in 'Jialing River'
and 'ying' as in 'England'."
Southern Chinese varieties like Cantonese and Hakka preserved more of the rimes
of Middle Chinese and also have more tones. Several of the examples of Mandarin
ji above have distinct pronunciations in Cantonese (romanized using jyutping): g
ai1, gei1, gei1, gik1, gei1, and zik1 respectively. For this reason, southern va
rieties tend to need to employ fewer multi-syllabic words.
Phonology[edit]
See also: Standard Chinese phonology, Historical Chinese phonology and Varieties
of Chinese
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), preceded by an onset (a single consonant, or consonant+glide; zero o
nset is also possible), and followed (optionally) by a coda consonant; a syllabl
e also carries a tone. There are some instances where a vowel is not used as a n
ucleus. An example of this is in Cantonese, where the nasal sonorant consonants
/m/ and /?/ can stand alone as their own syllable.
Across all the spoken varieties, most syllables tend to be open syllables, meani
ng they have no coda (assuming that a final glide is not analyzed as a coda), bu
t syllables that do have codas are restricted to /m/, /n/, /?/, /p/, /??/, /t/,
/k/, or /?/. Some varieties allow most of these codas, whereas others, such as S
tandard Chinese, are limited to only /n/, /?/ and /??/.
The number of sounds in the different spoken dialects varies, but in general the
re has been a tendency to a reduction in sounds from Middle Chinese. The Mandari
n dialects in particular have experienced a dramatic decrease in sounds and so h
ave far more multisyllabic words than most other spoken varieties. The total num
ber of syllables in some varieties is therefore only about a thousand, including
tonal variation, which is only about an eighth as many as English.[d]
Tones[edit]
All varieties of spoken Chinese use tones. A few dialects of north China may hav
e as few as three tones, while some dialects in south China have up to 6 or 10 t
ones, 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 moder
n Japanese.
A very common example used to illustrate the use of tones in Chinese are the fou
r tones of Standard Chinese (along with the neutral tone) applied to the syllabl
e ma. The tones are exemplified by the following five Chinese words:
The four main tones of Standard Mandarin pronounced with the syllable 'ma':
MENU0:00
Example of Standard Mandarin tones
Hanzi Pinyin Pitch contour Meaning
?/? ma high level "mother"
? m high rising "hemp"
?/? ma low falling-rising "horse"
?/? m high falling "scold"
?/? ma neutral question particle
Standard Cantonese, by contrast, has nine different tones:[28]
Example of Standard Cantonese tones
Hanzi Jyutping Pitch contour Meaning
?/ ? si1 ?? - High level 'poem
? si2 ?? - High rising history
? si3 ?? - Mid level to assassinate
?/? si4 ?? - Mid-low falling time
? si5 ?? - Mid-low rising market
? si6 ?? - Mid-low level yes
? si7 ?? - High stopped color
? si8 ?? - Mid stopped thorn
? si9 ?? - Mid-low stopped to eat
Phonetic transcriptions[edit]
The Chinese had no uniform phonetic transcription system until the mid-20th cent
ury, although enunciation patterns were recorded in early rime books and diction
aries. Early Indian translators, working in Sanskrit and Pali, were the first to
attempt to describe the sounds and enunciation patterns of Chinese in a foreign
language. After the 15th century, the efforts of Jesuits and Western court miss
ionaries resulted in some rudimentary Latin transcription systems, based on the
Nanjing Mandarin dialect.
Romanization[edit]
"National language" (??; Guyu) written in Traditional and Simplified Chinese char
acters, followed by various romanizations.
See also: Chinese language romanisation in Singapore and Romanization of Mandari
n Chinese
Romanization is the process of transcribing a language into the Latin script. Th
ere are many systems of romanization for the Chinese languages due to the lack o
f a native phonetic transcription until modern times. Chinese is first known to
have been written in Latin characters by Western Christian missionaries in the 1
6th century.
Today the most common romanization standard for Standard Chinese is Hanyu Pinyin
, often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of C
hina, and later adopted by Singapore and Taiwan. Pinyin is almost universally em
ployed now for teaching standard spoken Chinese in schools and universities acro
ss America, Australia and Europe. Chinese parents also use Pinyin to teach their
children the sounds and tones of new words. In school books that teach Chinese,
the Pinyin romanization is often shown below a picture of the thing the word re
presents, with the Chinese character alongside.
The second-most common romanization system, the WadeGiles, 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 i
s an Anglicization, it may be particularly helpful for beginner Chinese speakers
of an English-speaking background. WadeGiles was found in academic use in the Un
ited States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently[when?] was widely
used in Taiwan.
When used within European texts, the tone transcriptions in both pinyin and WadeG
iles are often left out for simplicity; WadeGiles' extensive use of apostrophes i
s also usually omitted. Thus, most Western readers will be much more familiar wi
th Beijing than they will be with Beijing (pinyin), and with Taipei than T'ai-pei
(WadeGiles). This simplification presents syllables as homophones which really ar
e none, and therefore exaggerates the number of homophones almost by a factor of
four.
Here are a few examples of Hanyu Pinyin and WadeGiles, for comparison:
Mandarin Romanization Comparison
Characters WadeGiles Hanyu Pinyin Notes
??/?? Chung-kuo Zhonggu "China"
?? Pei-ching Beijing Capital of the People's Republic of China
??/?? T'ai-pei Tibei Capital of the Republic of China (Taiwan)
???/??? Mao Tse-tung Mo Zdong Former Communist Chinese leader
???/??? Chiang Chieh4-shih Jiang Jish Former Nationalist Chinese leade
r (better known to English speakers as Chiang Kai-shek, with Cantonese pronuncia
tion)
?? K'ung Tsu Kong Zi "Confucius"
Other systems of romanization for Chinese include Gwoyeu Romatzyh, the French EF
EO, the Yale (invented during WWII for U.S. troops), as well as separate systems
for Cantonese, Minnan, Hakka, and other Chinese languages or dialects.
Other phonetic transcriptions[edit]
Chinese languages have been phonetically transcribed into many other writing sys
tems over the centuries. The 'Phags-pa script, for example, has been very helpfu
l in reconstructing the pronunciations of pre-modern forms of Chinese.
Zhuyin (also called bopomofo), a semi-syllabary is still widely used in Taiwan's
elementary schools 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 article. Syllables based on pinyin and zhuyin ca
n 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 wides
pread is the Palladius system.
Grammar and morphology[edit]
Main article: Chinese grammar
See also: Chinese classifiers
Chinese is often described as a "monosyllabic" language. However, this is only p
artially correct. It is largely accurate when describing Classical Chinese and M
iddle Chinese; in Classical Chinese, for example, perhaps 90% of words correspon
d to a single syllable and a single character. In the modern varieties, it is st
ill usually the case that a morpheme (unit of meaning) is a single syllable; con
trast English, with plenty of multi-syllable morphemes, both bound and free, suc
h as "seven", "elephant", "para-" and "-able". Some of the conservative southern
varieties of modern Chinese still have largely monosyllabic words, especially a
mong the more basic vocabulary.
In modern Mandarin, however, most nouns, adjectives and verbs are largely disyll
abic. A significant cause of this is phonological attrition. Sound change over t
ime has steadily reduced the number of possible syllables. In modern Mandarin, t
here are now only about 1,200 possible syllables, including tonal distinctions,
compared with about 5,000 in Vietnamese (still largely monosyllabic) and over 8,
000 in English.[d]
This phonological collapse has led to a corresponding increase in the number of
homophones. As an example, the small Langenscheidt Pocket Chinese Dictionary[29]
lists six common words pronounced sh (tone 2): ? "ten"; ? "real, actual"; ? "kno
w (a person), recognize"; ? "stone"; ? "time"; ? "food". These were all pronounc
ed differently in Early Middle Chinese; in William H. Baxter's transcription the
y were dzyip, zyit, syik, dzyek, dzyi and zyik respectively. In modern spoken Ma
ndarin, however, tremendous ambiguity would result if all of these words could b
e used as-is, and so most of them have been replaced (in speech, if not in writi
ng) with a longer, less-ambiguous compound. Only the first one, ? "ten", normall
y appears as such when spoken; the rest are normally replaced with, respectively
, ?? shj (lit. "actual-connection"); ?? rnshi (lit. "recognize-know"); ?? shtou (lit
. "stone-head"); ?? shjian (lit. "time-interval"); ?? shw (lit. "food-thing"). In e
ach case, the homophone was disambiguated by adding another morpheme, typically
either a synonym or a generic word of some sort (for example, "head", "thing"),
whose purpose is simply to indicate which of the possible meanings of the other,
homophonic syllable should be selected.
However, when one of the above words forms part of a compound, the disambiguatin
g syllable is generally dropped and the resulting word is still disyllabic. For
example, ? sh alone, not ?? shtou, appears in compounds meaning "stone-", for exam
ple, ?? shgao "plaster" (lit. "stone cream"), ?? shhui "lime" (lit. "stone dust"),
?? shku "grotto" (lit. "stone cave"), ?? shying "quartz" (lit. "stone flower"), ?
? shyu "petroleum" (lit. "stone oil").
Most modern varieties of Chinese have the tendency to form new words through dis
yllabic, trisyllabic and tetra-character compounds. In some cases, monosyllabic
words have become disyllabic without compounding, as in ?? kulong from ? kong; t
his is especially common in Jin.
Chinese morphology is strictly bound to a set number of syllables with a fairly
rigid construction which are the morphemes, the smallest blocks of the language.
While many of these single-syllable morphemes (?, z) can stand alone as individu
al words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as c (?/?
), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chin
ese c (word) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but ther
e can be three or more.
For example:
yn ?/? "cloud"
hnbaobao, hnbao ???/???, ??/?? "hamburger"
wo ? "I, me"
rn ? "people"
dqi ?? "earth"
shandin ??/?? "lightning"
mng ?/? "dream"
All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on s
yntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphologyi.e., changes in
form of a wordto indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chin
ese has very few grammatical inflectionsit possesses no tenses, no voices, no num
bers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for persona
l pronouns), and only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in Engli
sh). There is, however, a gender difference in the written language (? as "he" a
nd ? as "she"), but it should be noted that this is a relatively new introductio
n to the Chinese language in the twentieth century, and both characters are pron
ounced in exactly the same way.
They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Man
darin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le ? (perfective), hi ?/?
(still), yijing ??/?? (already), and so on.
Chinese features a subjectverbobject word order, and like many other languages in
East Asia, makes frequent use of the topiccomment construction to form sentences.
Chinese also has an extensive system of classifiers and measure words, another
trait shared with neighbouring languages like Japanese and Korean. 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 droppi
ng.
Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess
differences.
Vocabulary[edit]
The entire Chinese character corpus since antiquity comprises well over 20,000 c
haracters, 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 Chine
se words than there are characters.
Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and phrases vary greatly. The Han
yu Da Zidian, a compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries f
or characters, including bone oracle versions. The Zhonghua Zihai (1994) contain
s 85,568 head entries for character definitions, and is the largest reference wo
rk based purely on character and its literary variants. The CC-CEDICT project (2
010) contains 97,404 contemporary entries including idioms, technology terms and
names of political figures, businesses and products. The 2009 version of the We
bster's Digital Chinese Dictionary (WDCD),[30] based on CC-CEDICT, contains over
84,000 entries.
The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary, the 12-volum
ed Hanyu Da Cidian, records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters and gives o
ver 370,000 definitions. The 1999 revised Cihai, a multi-volume encyclopedic dic
tionary reference work, gives 122,836 vocabulary entry definitions under 19,485
Chinese characters, including proper names, phrases and common zoological, geogr
aphical, sociological, scientific and technical terms.
The latest 2012 6th edition of Xiandai Hanyu Cidian, an authoritative one-volume
dictionary on modern standard Chinese language as used in mainland China, has 6
9,000 entries and defines 13,000 head characters.
Loanwords[edit]
See also: Translation of neologisms into Chinese and Transcription into Chinese
characters
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.
Ancient words borrowed from along the Silk Road since Old Chinese include ?? "gr
ape", ?? "pomegranate" and ??/?? "lion". Some words were borrowed from Buddhist
scriptures, including ? "Buddha" and ??/?? "bodhisattva." Other words came from
nomadic peoples to the north, such as ?? "hutong". Words borrowed from the peopl
es along the Silk Road, such as ?? "grape" (pto in Mandarin) generally have Persia
n etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or Pali,
the liturgical languages of North India. Words borrowed from the nomadic tribes
of the Gobi, Mongolian or northeast regions generally have Altaic etymologies, s
uch as ?? "ppa", the Chinese lute, or ? "cheese" or "yoghurt", but from exactly w
hich source is not always clear.[31]
Modern borrowings and loanwords[edit]
Modern neologisms are primarily translated into Chinese in one of three ways: fr
ee translation (calque, or by meaning), phonetic translation (by sound), or a co
mbination of the two. Today, it is much more common to use existing Chinese morp
hemes to coin new words in order to represent imported concepts, such as technic
al expressions and international scientific vocabulary. Any Latin or Greek etymo
logies are dropped and converted into the corresponding Chinese characters (for
example, anti- typically becomes "?", literally opposite), making them more comp
rehensible for Chinese but introducing more difficulties in understanding foreig
n texts. For example, the word telephone was loaned phonetically as ???/??? (Sha
nghainese: tlfon [t?l?fo?], Mandarin: dlufeng) during the 1920s and widely used in
Shanghai, but later ??/?? dinhu (lit. "electric speech"), built out of native Chin
ese morphemes, became prevalent (?? is in fact from Japanese, where it is pronou
nced denwa; see below for more). Other examples include ??/?? dinsh (lit. "electri
c vision") for television, ??/?? dinnao (lit. "electric brain") for computer; ??/
?? shouji (lit. "hand machine") for mobile phone, ??/?? lny (lit. "blue tooth") fo
r Bluetooth, and ??/?? wangzh (lit. "internet logbook") for blog in Hong Kong and
Macau Cantonese. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromise
s (phono-semantic matching) are accepted, such as ???/??? hnbaobao (lit. "hamburg
bun") for "hamburger". Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound l
ike the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as ???/??? tuolaji
"tractor" (lit. "dragging-pulling machine"), or ???/??? malo for the video game ch
aracter Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example ??/?? ben
tng (lit. "dashing-leaping") for Pentium and ???/??? Sibaiwi (lit. "better-than hun
dred tastes") for Subway restaurants.
Foreign words, mainly proper nouns, continue to enter the Chinese language by tr
anscription according to their pronunciations. This is done by employing Chinese
characters with similar pronunciations. For example, "Israel" becomes ??? yisli,
"Paris" becomes ?? bal. A rather small number of direct transliterations have sur
vived as common words, including ??/?? shafa "sofa", ??/?? mad "motor", ?? youm "h
umor", ??/?? luj "logic", ??/?? shmo "smart, fashionable", and ???? xiesidili "hyste
rics". The bulk of these words were originally coined in the Shanghai dialect du
ring the early 20th century and were later loaned into Mandarin, hence their pro
nunciations in Mandarin may be quite off from the English. For example, ??/?? "s
ofa" and ??/?? "motor" in Shanghainese sound more like their English counterpart
s.
Western foreign words representing Western concepts have influenced Chinese sinc
e the 20th century through transcription. From French came ?? bali "ballet", ?? x
iangbin, "champagne", and from Italian ?? kafei "caff". English influence is part
icularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words ar
e borrowed, such as ???/??? gaoerfu "golf" and the above-mentioned ??/?? shafa "
sofa". Later United States soft influences gave rise to ??? dsik "disco", ??/?? ke
l "cola", and ?? mni "mini [skirt]". Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinc
t loanwords from English, such as ?? "cartoon", ?? "gay people", ?? "taxi", and
?? "bus". With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue i
n China for coining English transliterations, for example, ??/?? fensi "fans", ?
? heik "hacker" (lit. "black guest"), ??? bluog "blog" (lit. "interconnected tribes
") in Taiwanese Mandarin.
Another result of the English influence on Chinese is the appearance in Modern C
hinese texts of so-called ??? zmuc (lit. "lettered words") spelled with letters fr
om foreign alphabets. This has appeared in magazines, newspapers, on web sites,
and on TV: ?G?? "3rd generation cell phones" (? san "three" + G "generation" + ?
? shouji "mobile phones"), IT? "IT industry", HSK (hnyu shuipng kaosh, ??????), GB
(gubiao, ??), CIF? (Cost, Insurance, Freight + ? ji "price"), e?? "electronic home
" (?? jiating "home"), W?? "wireless generation" (?? shdi "generation"), ??call, T
V?, ????? "post-PC era" (? hu "after/post-" + PC "personal computer" + ?? shdi "epo
ch"), and so on.
Since the 20th century, another source of words has been Japanese using existing
kanji (Chinese characters used in Japanese). Japanese re-molded European concep
ts and inventions into wasei-kango (????, lit. "Japanese-made Chinese"), and man
y of these words have been re-loaned into modern Chinese. Other terms were coine
d by the Japanese by giving new senses to existing Chinese terms or by referring
to expressions used in classical Chinese literature. For example, jingj (??/??,
keizai), which in the original Chinese meant "the workings of the state", was na
rrowed to "economy" in Japanese; this narrowed definition was then re-imported i
nto Chinese. As a result, these terms are virtually indistinguishable from nativ
e Chinese words: indeed, there is some dispute over some of these terms as to wh
ether the Japanese or Chinese coined them first. As a result of this loaning, Ch
inese, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese share a corpus of linguistic terms descr
ibing modern terminology, paralleling the similar corpus of terms built from Gre
co-Latin and shared among European languages.
Education[edit]
See also: Chinese as a foreign language
With the growing importance and influence of China's economy globally, Mandarin
instruction is gaining popularity in schools in the USA, and has become an incre
asingly popular subject of study amongst the young in the Western world, as in t
he UK.[32]
In 1991 there were 2,000 foreign learners taking China's official Chinese Profic
iency Test (comparable to the English Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the
number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660.[33] By 2010, 750,000 people
had taken the Chinese Proficiency Test.
See also[edit]
Portal icon China portal
Portal icon Language portal
Chinese exclamative particles
Chinese honorifics
Chinese numerals
Chinese punctuation
Classical Chinese grammar
Four-character idiom
Han unification
Languages of China
North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics
Notes[edit]
Jump up ^ Several authors note that Chinese varieties are as diverse as a family
of languages:
David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ
ersity Press, 1987), p. 312. "The mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is t
he main ground for referring to them as separate languages."
Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Gram
mar (1989), p. 2. "The Chinese language family is genetically classified as an i
ndependent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family."
Norman (1988), p. 1. "[...] the modern Chinese dialects are really more like a f
amily 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 Chin
ese 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 Chi
na."
Jump up ^ Encyclopdia Britannica s.v. "Chinese languages": "Old Chinese vocabular
y 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 an
d early contacts. (The nearest known Indo-European languages were Tocharian and
Sogdian, a middle Iranian language.) A number of words have Austroasiatic cognat
es and point to early contacts with the ancestral language of MuongVietnamese and
MonKhmer"; Jan Ulenbrook, Einige bereinstimmungen zwischen dem Chinesischen und d
em Indogermanischen (1967) proposes 57 items; see also Tsung-tung Chang, 1988 In
do-European Vocabulary in Old Chinese.
Jump up ^ McDonald, E. (25 March 2011). The '???' or the 'Sinophone'? Towards a
political economy of Chinese language teaching. China Heritage Quarterly, Austra
lian National University: "The term 'sinophone' seems to have been coined separa
tely and simultaneously on both sides of the Pacific: by Geremie Barm in his 2005
essay 'On New Sinology';[4] and by Shu-Mei Shih in her 'Sinophone Articulations
Across the Pacific',[5] and developed at greater length in a book by the same a
uthor."
^ Jump up to: a b DeFrancis (1984) p.42 counts Chinese as having 1,277 tonal syl
lables, 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.
References[edit]
Jump up ^ Chinese language reference at Ethnologue (16th ed., 2009)
Jump up ^ china-language.gov.cn (Chinese)
Jump up ^ "Speak Mandarin Campaign". Retrieved 2011-08-09.
Jump up ^ Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarstrm, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Ma
rtin, eds. (2013). "Chinese". Glottolog 2.2. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for E
volutionary Anthropology.
Jump up ^ Mair (1991).
Jump up ^ Analysis of the concept "wave" in Proto-Sino-Tibetan.
Jump up ^ Sohn & Lee (2003), p. 23.
Jump up ^ Miller (1967), pp. 2930.
Jump up ^ Kornicki (2011), pp. 7577.
Jump up ^ Kornicki (2011), p. 67.
Jump up ^ Miyake (2004), pp. 9899.
Jump up ^ Shibatani (1990), pp. 120121.
Jump up ^ Sohn (2001), p. 89.
Jump up ^ Shibatani (1990), p. 146.
Jump up ^ Wilkinson (2000), p. 43.
Jump up ^ Shibatani (1990), p. 143.
Jump up ^ Norman (2003), p. 72.
Jump up ^ Norman (1988), pp. 189190.
Jump up ^ Ramsey (1987), p. 23.
Jump up ^ Norman (1988), p. 188.
Jump up ^ Norman (1988), p. 181.
Jump up ^ Kurpaska (2010), pp. 5355.
^ Jump up to: a b Wurm et al. (1987).
Jump up ^ Kurpaska (2010), pp. 5556.
Jump up ^ Lewis, Simons & Fennig (2013).
Jump up ^ Kurpaska (2010), pp. 7273.
^ Jump up to: a b DeFrancis (1984), pp. 5557.
Jump up ^ ARE THERE SIX OR NINE TONES IN CANTONESE? - Patrick Chun Kau Chu and M
arcus Taft, School of Psychology, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Austral
ia 2011
Jump up ^ Terrell, Peter, ed. (2005). Langenscheidt Pocket Chinese Dictionary. B
erlin and Munich: Langenscheidt KG. ISBN 1-58573-057-2.
Jump up ^ Dr. Timothy Uy and Jim Hsia, Editors, Webster's Digital Chinese Dictio
nary Advanced Reference Edition, July 2009
Jump up ^ Kane (2006), p. 161.
Jump up ^ "How hard is it to learn Chinese?". BBC News. January 17, 2006. Retrie
ved April 28, 2010.
Jump up ^ (Chinese) "????????:2005?????????12?",Gov.cn Xinhua News Agency, Janua
ry 16, 2006.
Literature
DeFrancis, John (1984), The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, University of Ha
waii Press, ISBN 978-0-8248-1068-9.
Kane, Daniel (2006), The Chinese Language: Its History and Current Usage, Tuttle
Publishing, ISBN 978-0-8048-3853-5.
Kornicki, P.F. (2011), "A transnational approach to East Asian book history", in
Chakravorty, Swapan; Gupta, Abhijit, New Word Order: Transnational Themes in Bo
ok History, Worldview Publications, pp. 6579, ISBN 978-81-920651-1-3.
Kurpaska, Maria (2010), Chinese Language(s): A Look Through the Prism of "The Gr
eat Dictionary of Modern Chinese Dialects", Walter de Gruyter, ISBN 978-3-11-021
914-2.
Lewis, M. Paul; Simons, Gary F.; Fennig, Charles D., eds. (2013), Ethnologue: La
nguages of the World (Seventeenth ed.), Dallas, Texas: SIL International.
Miller, Roy Andrew (1967), The Japanese Language, University of Chicago Press, I
SBN 978-0-226-52717-8.
Mair, Victor H. (1991), "What Is a Chinese "Dialect/Topolect"? Reflections on So
me Key Sino-English Linguistic terms", Sino-Platonic Papers 29: 131.
Miyake, Marc Hideo (2004), Old Japanese: A Phonetic Reconstruction, RoutledgeCur
zon, ISBN 978-0-415-30575-4.
Norman, Jerry (1988), Chinese, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0
-521-29653-3.
(2003), "The Chinese dialects: phonology", in Thurgood, Graham; LaPolla, Randy J.
(eds.), The Sino-Tibetan languages, Routledge, pp. 7283, ISBN 978-0-7007-1129-1.
Ramsey, S. Robert (1987), The Languages of China, Princeton University Press, IS
BN 978-0-691-01468-5.
Shibatani, Masayoshi (1990), The Languages of Japan, Cambridge University Press,
ISBN 978-0-521-36918-3.
Sohn, Ho-Min (2001), The Korean Language, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0
-521-36943-5.
Sohn, Ho-Min; Lee, Peter H. (2003), "Language, forms, prosody, and themes", in L
ee, Peter H., A History of Korean Literature, Cambridge University Press, pp. 155
1, ISBN 978-0-521-82858-1.
Wilkinson, Endymion (2000), Chinese history: a manual (2nd ed.), Harvard Univ As
ia Center, ISBN 978-0-674-00249-4.
Wurm, Stephen Adolphe; Li, Rong; Baumann, Theo; Lee, Mei W. (1987), Language Atl
as of China, Longman, ISBN 978-962-359-085-3.
Further reading[edit]
Hannas, William C. (1997), Asia's Orthographic Dilemma, University of Hawaii Pre
ss, ISBN 978-0-8248-1892-0.
Qiu, Xigui (2000), Chinese Writing, trans. Gilbert Louis Mattos and Jerry Norman
, Society for the Study of Early China and Institute of East Asian Studies, Univ
ersity of California, Berkeley, ISBN 978-1-55729-071-7.
Ramsey, S. Robert (1987), The Languages of China, Princeton University Press, IS
BN 978-0-691-01468-5.
Schuessler, Axel (2007), ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese, Honolulu: U
niversity of Hawaii Press, ISBN 978-0-8248-2975-9.
R. L. G. "Language borrowing Why so little Chinese in English?" The Economist. J
une 6, 2013.
External links[edit]
Chinese edition of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Classical Chinese texts Chinese Text Project
USA Foreign Service Institute Chinese basic course
Mandarin Chinese children's story in simplified Chinese showing the stroke order
for every character. on YouTube
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