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 The
Chinese language (汉语/漢語, 华语/華語, or 中文; Pinyin: Hànyǔ, Huáyǔ, or
Zhōngwén) is a tonal language often regarded as a member of the
Sino-Tibetan family of languages. Although Chinese is often mistakenly
thought to be a single language, its regional variation is comparable
to that of the Romance languages; variants of Spoken Chinese are
different enough to be mutually incomprehensible. See Is Chinese a
language or family of languages?
Chinese can refer to Spoken Chinese or Written Chinese. For Spoken
Chinese, there are somewhere between six and twelve main regional
groups (depending on classification scheme), including Mandarin,
Cantonese, Fujianese and Hakka. However, dialects of Chinese almost
always share a common written form (with occasional dialect-specific
characters, such as in Cantonese). Qin Shi Huang, the First Emperor of
China, united Chinese writing in the third century BC by setting
standard written forms for which there had previously been many
regional variations. Before the 20th century, the common written form
was Literary Chinese (Classical Chinese), which no one spoke as a
mother tongue. In the early 20th century, the baihuawen movement pushed
the birth of the new written form, Vernacular Chinese, based on
Mandarin. In the meantime, dialect-specific characters have developed
primarily in Cantonese, but also occasionally in other dialects.
About one-fifth of the people in the world speak some forms 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(together with English, Malay, and Tamil), and
one of six official languages of the United Nations(together with
English, Arabic, French, Russian, and Spanish). Spoken in the form of
Standard Cantonese, Chinese is one of the official languages of Hong
Kong (together with English) and of Macau (together with Portuguese).
Among Chinese diaspora, Cantonese is the most common language one can
hear in Chinatowns, thanks to early immigrants from Southern China.
However, the rise of Northern and Taiwanese immigrants has led to the
increase in the use of Mandarin and various Min dialects.
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 that of Europe. As a result, Chinese makes a sharp distinction
between "written language" (wén; 文) and "spoken language" (yǔ; 语/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.
Go up
Spoken Chinese
 The
map on the right depicts the subdivisions ("languages" or "dialect
groups") within Chinese. The traditionally recognized seven main groups
are (in order of population size):
• Mandarin 北方 or 官话 (Beijing dialect)(shown in the map as divided into
East and West groups, but also includes the Jianghuai and Huguang areas
depicted in the map)
• Wu 吳 (Shanghainese and Old Suzhou dialect)
• Cantonese 粵 (Guangzhou dialect)
• Min Family 閩, which linguists further divide into 5 to 7 subdivisions
on its own, all of which are mutually unintelligible.
• Xiang 湘 (Changsha dialect)
• Hakka 客家 (Moi-yen/Meixian dialect)
• Gan 贛 (Nanchang dialect)
In parenthesis above are the culturally dominant or representative
dialects of each language or dialect group today.
Chinese linguists have recently distinguished 3 more groups from the
traditional seven:
• Jin 晉 from Mandarin
• Hui 徽 from Wu
• Pinghua 平话 from Cantonese
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.
In the sense that the written language is based on Standard Mandarin
and the dialects are (for the most part) spoken but not written
languages, the situation in China is a complex and interesting case of
diglossia.
Go up
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 socio-political
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 is even a saying in Chinese,
nán chuán běi mǎ (南船北馬), meaning "boats in the south, horses in the
north": the flat plains of northern China allow 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 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
occurred in less clear terms, with cultural influence being the
dominant source of dialect standardization. Dialects spoken in China's
regional political or cultural capitals were still seen as prestigious
and widely used as the lingua franca throughout the entire region (much
like Europe's case); their linguistic influence however were more
dependent on the status and wealth of the capital than entirely on the
political boundaries of the region.
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
its languages have not been standardized until the last few decades
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; 18 of them are officially recognized national languages.
Although Cantonese and Mandarin have low mutual intelligibility, these
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 Shanghainese (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.
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, 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
Taiwan 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, Uyghurs, 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 reunification 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.
Go up
Written Chinese
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.
Also, in Hunan, some women wrote their local language in Nü Shu, a
syllabary derived from Chinese characters. The Dungan language, thought
to be a dialect of Mandarin, is also nowadays written in Cyrillic, and
was formerly written in the Arabic alphabet, although the Dungan people
live outside of China.
Chinese characters
The Chinese written language employs Chinese characters (漢字/汉字 pinyin:
hànzì), a system based on logograms, where each symbol represents a
morpheme (a meaningful unit of language).
There is no concrete record on the origin of characters. Legend
suggests that Cangjie, a bureaucrat of Huangdi, legendary emperor of
China in about 2600 BCE, invented Chinese characters, but the
archaeological evidence, mainly the oracles found in the 19-20th
centuries, only dates Chinese characters back to the Shang dynasty in
1700 BCE.
The vast majority of oracle bone inscriptions were found in Yinxu of
the Shang Dynasty, but there have been Zhou dynasty related oracle
inscriptions found also, but their numbers are significantly few. The
forms of the characters in the inscriptions changed over the two to
three hundred years of usage, and scholars can date the inscriptions of
the Shang to the ruler by the content, particularly from the name of
the diviners who inscribed the shell or bone artifacts.
Contemporaneous with the end of Shang and Western Zhou periods are the
bronze inscriptions. Over the last century, a great many ancient bronze
artifacts have been unearthed in China which show dedicational texts of
the Zhou aristocrats where the characters themselves show similarities
and innovations compared to the oracle inscriptions.
It is said that during the reign of Zhou King Xuan (宣王 827-782 BCE), a
revision in the form of written characters were undertaken, and these
became refered to as the "greater seal script" or dazhuan.
One of the misconceptions about Chinese characters is to think that a
character is only a pictograph. 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. In 100 AD, Xushen, a famed scholar in
the Han Dynasty, classified characters into 6 categories, only 4% of
them are pictographs, while 82% are phonetic complexes, which consists
of one element (the radical) that gives an indication of meaning, and
another element (the phonetic) that gives (or at least once gave) an
arguably good indication of the pronunciation.
There are currently two standards for Chinese characters. One is the
traditional system, essentially a streamlined styling of its
forerunner, kaishu (indeed, kaishu serves as the model from which all
modern characters are derived). It is still in use in Hong Kong,
Taiwan, and Macau.
When the 20th century began, however, the fall of Chinese Empire
sparked the reform of Chinese culture. In 1950s, after the Communist
Party took control of Mainland China, the simplified system was
adopted. It reduced the number of strokes needed to write certain
radicals as well as reducing the number of synonymous characters.
Singapore, which has a large Chinese community, is the first and only
foreign country to recognize and officially adopt the simplified
characters.
Various styles of Chinese calligraphy
To add to the complexity, various written styles are used in Chinese
calligraphy, including zhuanshu (篆書, "seal-script"), caoshu (草書, "grass
script"), lishu (隸書, "official script") and kaishu (楷書, "standard
script"). Calligraphers can write in traditional and simplified
characters, but they tend to use traditional characters for the
traditional art.
As with Latin script, a wide variety of fonts exist for printed Chinese
characters, a great number of which are often based on the styles of
single calligraphers or schools of calligraphy.
[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-Sino-Tibetan, 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 proto-Sino-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 in the early 1900s. The system has been subjected to
numerous revisions, but later recostructions heavily rely on Karlgren's
insights and methods.
Old Chinese (T:上古漢語S:上古汉语P:Shànggǔ Hànyǔ), sometimes known as 'Archaic
Chinese', was the language common during the early and middle Zhou
Dynasty (1122 BC - 256 BC), 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. The pronunciation of the borrowed Chinese
characters in Japanese, Vietnamese and Korean also provide scholars
with some valuable insights. Old Chinese was not wholly uninflected. It
possessed a rich sound system in which aspiration or rough breathing
differentiated the consonants, but probably had no tones yet. Work on
reconstructing Old Chinese started with Qing dynasty philologists.
Middle Chinese (T:中古漢語S:中古汉语P:Zhōnggǔ Hànyǔ) 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
(T:正音書院S:正音书院P:Zhèngyīn Shūyuàn) 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.
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 (Hanzi), which are called Hanja and Kanji,
respectively.
The Vietnamese term for Chinese writing is Han Tu, which was the only
available form to express the language until the 14th century, used
almost exclusively by Chinese-educated Vietnamese elites. Vietnamese
was, from the 14th century to the end of the 19th century, written with
Chu Nom, which was a modified Chinese script that incorporated sounds
and syllables appropriate for native Vietnamese speakers. However, this
has now been completely replaced by a modified Latin script that
incorporated a system of diacritical marks to indicate the tones, as
well as modified consonants. The Vietnamese language has mixed with
multiple elements similar to Cantonese in regards to the specific
intonations and rather sharp consonant endings. However, there is a
slight influence from Mandarin due to the sharper vowels and, along
with Mandarin, have the "kh" sound that is non-existent in other
Asiatic languages.
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 loanwords from Chinese. In Korean 50% or more of the
vocabulary is of Chinese origin and the influence on Japanese and
Vietnamese has been considerable. 10% of Philippine language
vocabularies are of Chinese origin. Chinese also shares a great many
grammatical features with these and neighboring languages, notably the
lack of gender and the use of classifiers. The Japanese, Korean, and
Vietnamese languages as a whole have also seemed to the retain sounds
of Classical Chinese that can otherwise be found only in the south of
China.
Go up
Sounds
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.
A very common example used to illustrate the use of tones in Chinese
are the five tones of Standard Mandarin applied to the syllable "ma".
The tones correspond to these five characters:
This article or section uses Ruby annotation. If you are using a
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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.
• "mother" — high level
• "hemp" — high rising
• "horse" — low falling-rising
• "scold" — high falling
• question particle — neutral
Romanization
Romanization is the process of transcribing a language in the Latin
alphabet. There are many systems of romanization for the Chinese
languages; this is due to the complex history of interaction between
China and the West, and to the Chinese languages' lack of phonetic
transcription until modern times.
At present, the most common romanization system for Standard Mandarin
is Hanyu Pinyin, also known simply as Pinyin. Pinyin is the official
Mandarin romanization system for the People's Republic of China, and
has also been adopted as the official Mandarin romanization system used
in Singapore. Pinyin is also very commonly used when teaching Mandarin
in U.S. schools.
Perhaps the second-most common system of romanization for Mandarin is
Wade-Giles. This system was probably the most common system of
romanization for Mandarin prior to the development of Hanyu Pinyin.
Wade-Giles is often found in academic use in the U.S., and is widely
used in Taiwan.
Regardless of system, tone transcription is often left out, either due
to difficulties of typesetting or propriety for audience. Wade-Giles'
extensive use of easily-forgotten apostrophes adds to the confusion.
Thus, most Western readers will be much more familiar with Beijing than
they will be with Běijīng, and with Taipei than with T'ai2-pei3.
Regardless of romanization, the words are pronounced the same. Learning
a system of romanization requires occasional deviations from the
learner's own language, so, for example, Hanyu Pinyin uses "q" for very
different values than an English speaker would probably be used to; the
sound represented is similar to the English "ch", but is further back.
This is unfortunate but unavoidable, as Mandarin (and any language
transcribed) will have phonemes different from those of the learner's
own.
There are many other systems of romanization for Mandarin, as well as
systems for Cantonese, Minnan, Hakka, and other Chinese languages.
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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 single-syllable
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 single-syllable 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, zhè liǎngge zì shì shénme yìsi?
激光, 這兩個字是甚麼意思?
激光, 这两个字是什么意思?
The sentence literally
translates to, "Jī 激 and guāng 光, these two zì 字, what do they mean?"
However, the more natural English translation would probably be,
"Laser, this word, what does it mean?" Even though jīguāng 激光 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 in the same way. For instance,
the morphemes that correspond to the meanings "chicken" 雞/鸡, "machine"
機/机, "basic" 基, "hit" 擊/击, "hunger" 饑/饥, and "sum" 積/积 are also
pronounced jī in Mandarin. 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. For this reason, it is
very common for Mandarin speakers to put characters in context as a
natural part of conversation. For example, when telling each other
their names (which are often rare, or at least non-colloquial,
combinations of zì), Mandarin speakers will often state which words
their names are found in. As a specific example, a speakers might say
名字叫嘉英，嘉陵江的嘉，英國的英 Míngzi jiào Jiāyíng, Jiālíngjiāng de jiā, Yíngguó de
yíng "My name is Jiāyíng, the Jia of Jialing River and the Ying in
England."
The problem of homonyms also exists but is less severe in southern
Chinese varieties like Cantonese and Taiwanese, which preserved more of
the rimes of Middle Chinese. For instance, the previous examples of jī
for "stimulated," "chicken," and "machine" have distinct pronunciations
in Cantonese (romanized using jyutping): gik1, gai1, and gei1,
respectively. For this reason, southern varieties tend to employ fewer
multisyllabic words.
There are a small number of morphemes in Chinese, many of them
loanwords, that consist of more than one syllable. These words cannot
be further divided into single-syllable meaningful units, however in
writing each syllable is still written as separate zì. One example is
the word for "spider," zhīzhū, which is written as 蜘蛛. Even in this
case, Chinese tend to try to make some kind of meaning out of the
constituent syllables. For this reason, the two characters 蜘 and 蛛 each
have an associated meaning of "spider" when seen alone as individual
characters. When spoken though, they can never occur apart.
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Loanwords
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", 石榴 "pomegranate" and 獅子 "lion". Other words were borrowed from
Buddhist scriptures, including 佛 "Buddha" and 菩薩 "bodhisattva".
Foreign words continue to enter the Chinese language by transcription
according to their pronunciations. This is done by employing Chinese
characters with similar pronunciations; characters in this case are
usually taken strictly for their phonetic values. For example, "Israel"
becomes 以色列 (pinyin: yǐsèliè). The Chinese characters used here
literally mean "using-colour-rank", or "ranking using colour", but the
sense is automatically ignored because it is understood that the
characters are used for their phonetic values only. Characters which
are used nearly 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. For
example, 斯 sī and 爾 ěr, which are Classical Chinese words for "this"
and "you", are never used in their original senses (except in a limited
number of idiomatic expressions) and more often used to transcribe the
sounds /s/ and /l/ in foreign words. Nevertheless, this method tends to
yield somewhat strange results, and is therefore overwhelmingly used to
transcribe foreign names only. A rather small number of direct phonetic
borrowings have survived as common words, including 幽默 yōumò "humour",
邏輯 luójí "logic", 時髦 shímáo "smart, fashionable", 麥克風 màikèfēng
"microphone", and 歇斯底里 xiēsīdǐlǐ "hysterics".
It is much more common to use existing Chinese morphemes to coin new
words in order to represent imported concepts, such as technical
expressions. Any Latin or Greek etymologies are dropped, making them
more comprehensible for Chinese but introducing more difficulties in
understanding foreign texts. For example, the word telephone was loaned
phonetically as 德律風 (Standard Mandarin: délǜfēng) during the 1920s, but
later 電話 (diànhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese
morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include 電視 (diànshì
"electric vision") for television, 電腦 (diànnǎo "electric brain") for
computer; 手機 (shǒujī "hand machine") for cellphone, and 藍牙 (lányá "blue
tooth") for Bluetooth. Occasionally half-transliteration,
half-translation compromises are accepted, such as 漢堡包 (hànbǎo bāo,
"Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so
that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese
morphemes. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example 奔騰 (bēnténg
"running leaping") for Pentium and 賽百味 (sàibǎiwèi "better-than hundred
tastes") for Subway restaurants.
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. These words are called wasei-kango in
Japanese (和製漢語 literally Japanese-made Chinese), and many of these
words 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), zhǔyì (主義, しゅぎ, -ism)
and làngmàn (浪漫、ロマン、romance). Some of these terms were coined by the
Japanese by giving new senses to existing Chinese terms or by referring
to expressions used in classical Chinese literature. As a result, these
terms are virtually indistinguishable from native Chinese words:
indeed, there is dispute over some of these terms as to whether the
Japanese or Chinese coined them first. As a result of this to-and-fro
process, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese continue to share
many terms describing modern terminology, in parallel to a similar
corpus of terms built from Greco-Latin terms shared among European
languages.
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Grammar
In general, all spoken varieties of 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 an 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 various differences.
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