old chinese language

Any Latin or Greek etymologies are dropped and converted into the corresponding Chinese characters (for example, anti- typically becomes "反", literally opposite), making them more comprehensible for Chinese but introducing more difficulties in understanding foreign texts. When used within European texts, the tone transcriptions in both pinyin and Wade–Giles are often left out for simplicity; Wade–Giles' extensive use of apostrophes is also usually omitted. Definition from Wiktionary, the free dictionary, Appendix:Baxter-Sagart Old Chinese reconstruction, https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Category:Old_Chinese_language&oldid=46749443, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. In modern spoken Mandarin, however, tremendous ambiguity would result if all of these words could be used as-is; Yuen Ren Chao's modern poem Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den exploits this, consisting of 92 characters all pronounced shi. Category:Old Chinese appendices: Pages containing additional information about Old Chinese. Another result of the English influence on Chinese is the appearance in Modern Chinese texts of so-called 字母词/字母詞 zìmǔcí (lit. In Mandarin much more than in other spoken varieties, most syllables tend to be open syllables, meaning they have no coda (assuming that a final glide is not analyzed as a coda), but syllables that do have codas are restricted to nasals /m/, /n/, /ŋ/, the retroflex approximant /ɻ /, and voiceless stops /p/, /t/, /k/, or /ʔ/. our editorial process. "food-thing"). Mandarin Chinese or simply Mandarin (/ ˈ m æ n d ər ɪ n / (); simplified Chinese: 官话; traditional Chinese: 官話; pinyin: Guānhuà; literally: "speech of officials") is the language of government and education of the Chinese mainland and Taiwan, with the notable exceptions of Hong Kong and Macau where a local dialect of Chinese called Cantonese is more often used. The traditional system, 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. Whether you’re traveling in a Chinese-speaking country, or having a conversation with native Mandarin Chinese speakers, the months and seasons are useful to know. As a result of former French colonization, Vietnamese switched to a a Latin-based alphabet. The spoken language of Chinese is thought to be a member of the Sino-Tibetan language family. The BIG 5 character set, which includes 13,600 characters, is the most common character set used in Traditional Chinese fonts. Traditional Chinese fonts are typically used in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, and most overseas Chinese communities. A History of the Chinese Language provides a comprehensive introduction to the historical development of the Chinese language from its proto Sino-Tibetan roots in prehistoric times to Modern Standard Chinese. Currently, most classifications posit 7 to 13 main regional groups based on phonetic developments from Middle Chinese, of which the most spoken by far is Mandarin (with about 800 million speakers, or 66%), followed by Min (75 million, e.g. As this system approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels, i.e. Presentation [] For further information, including the full final version of the list, read the Wikipedia article: Swadesh list. [16] These works define phonological categories, but with little hint of what sounds they represent. Here's a great collection of Chinese sayings and idioms with Chinese characters, pinyin pronunciation, and English translations and explanations, to help you learn and enjoy the Chinese language, while understanding Chinese people's attitudes, life, and values more deeply.. "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent (電話 is in fact from the Japanese 電話 denwa; see below for more Japanese loans). Helpful Chinese Expressions: about age. The Hanyu Da Zidian, a compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries for characters, including bone oracle versions. [29], Historically, the Chinese language has spread to its neighbors through a variety of means. Cantonese). Some of the conservative southern varieties of modern Chinese have largely monosyllabic words, especially among the more basic vocabulary. Use the audio clips for pronunciation and listening practice.. Qiu Gui Su is a native Mandarin speaker who has taught Mandarin Chinese for over 20 years. [g] Snapshot of a Field and a Language Family in Flux", "Language or Dialect—or Topolect? For example, characters like 冇 and 係 for Cantonese and Hakka, are actively used in both languages while being considered archaic or unused in standard written Chinese. For some reason, people love to exaggerate the age of Chinese civilisation. Ancient Chinese writing evolved from the practice of divination during the Shang Dynasty (1600-1046 BCE). Because most Chinese words are made up of two or more characters, there are many more Chinese words than characters. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le 了 (perfective), hái 还/還 ("still"), yǐjīng 已经/已經 ("already"), and so on. That captures the essence of the English expression "getting old fast" pretty well. The most time-honored and popular Chinese sayings present wisdom or a concept in short pithy idiom. ), whose texts include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the “Shijing”, the history of the “Shujing”, and portions of the Yijing. Today, it is much more common to use existing Chinese morphemes to coin new words in order to represent imported concepts, such as technical expressions and international scientific vocabulary. Difficulties have included the great diversity of the languages, the lack of inflection in many of them, and the effects of language contact. Genesis 3:1-5. [17] Linguists have identified these sounds by comparing the categories with pronunciations in modern varieties of Chinese, borrowed Chinese words in Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean, and transcription evidence. prestige variety, such as Standard Mandarin), as the issue requires some careful handling when mutual intelligibility is inconsistent with language identity. "stone dust"), shíkū 石窟 "grotto" (lit. Only the first one, 十 "ten", normally appears as such when spoken; the rest are normally replaced with, respectively, shíjì 实际/實際 (lit. We can use “你多大？ With roughly 1.2 billion speakers, Chinese is the most spoken language in the world, ahead of even English (though English is still the most widely learned as a second language). This replaced the old writing language standard of Literary Chinese before 20th century. [45] Definitely you will run into problems if you don't have some idea on how to read/decode classical Chinese, which can be very difficult. The relationship between spoken and written Chinese is rather complex ("diglossia"). The texts of Zhou dynasty comprise of writings on artefacts of bronze, history of Shujing, the poetry of Shijing, and parts of I Ching or Yijing. Whether you’re telling a new acquaintance how old you are, figuring out bus routes, ordering food in a restaurant, paying for a taxi, or bargaining in a local market, … Most written Chinese documents in the modern time, especially the more formal ones, are created using the grammar and syntax of the Standard Mandarin Chinese variants, regardless of dialectical background of the author or targeted audience. In an attempt to improve literacy, the Chinese government began simplifying characters in the 1950s. 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. Between 80% and 90% were classified as phonetic compounds such as chōng 沖 (pour), combining a phonetic component zhōng 中 (middle) with a semantic radical 氵 (water). "interconnected tribes"). The ancient Chinese were very concerned with knowing the future and would go to diviners for guidance on making decisions. Here are a few examples of Hanyu Pinyin and Wade–Giles, for comparison: Other systems of romanization for Chinese include Gwoyeu Romatzyh, the French EFEO, the Yale system (invented during WWII for U.S. troops), as well as separate systems for Cantonese, Min Nan, Hakka, and other Chinese varieties. Chinese is the most valuable second language, opening up the future to young learners. [34] This massive influx led to changes in the phonological structure of the languages, contributing to the development of moraic structure in Japanese[35] and the disruption of vowel harmony in Korean. Sign up to join this community "internet logbook") for blog in Hong Kong and Macau Cantonese. English Even a dragon (from the outside) finds it hard to control a snake in its old haunt . In addition to Mandarin, most Taiwanese also speak Minnan, Hakka, or an Austronesian language. Chinese includes many regional language varieties, the main ones being Mandarin, Wu, Yue and Min. The vast majority of Chinese immigrants to North America spoke the Taishan dialect, from a small coastal area southwest of Guangzhou. This page was last edited on 22 June 2017, at 02:22. Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including 佛 Fó "Buddha" and 菩萨/菩薩 Púsà "bodhisattva." [32] Scholars from different lands could communicate, albeit only in writing, using Literary Chinese. The 1999 revised Cihai, a multi-volume encyclopedic dictionary reference work, gives 122,836 vocabulary entry definitions under 19,485 Chinese characters, including proper names, phrases and common zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific and technical terms. The 'Phags-pa script, for example, has been very helpful in reconstructing the pronunciations of premodern forms of Chinese. Because some Chinese variants have diverged and developed a number of unique morphemes that are not found in Standard Mandarin (despite all other common morphemes), unique characters rarely used in Standard Chinese have also been created or inherited from archaic literary standard to represent these unique morphemes. For example, 沙发/沙發 "sofa" and 马达/馬達 "motor" in Shanghainese sound more like their English counterparts. Standard Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect, the dialect of Mandarin as spoken in Beijing. However, this is only partially correct. [51] A Taiwanese may commonly mix pronunciations, phrases, and words from Mandarin and other Taiwanese languages, and this mixture is considered normal in daily or informal speech. For other languages spoken in China, see, "Han language" redirects here. Most modern varieties of Chinese have the tendency to form new words through disyllabic, trisyllabic and tetra-character compounds. Calligraphy artists can write in traditional and simplified characters, but they tend to use traditional characters for traditional art. More and more students want to learn Chinese in China. zhang Shangfang 1995: p. 296) The primary method we use in the comparative study of Old Chinese and Proto-Indo-European is also to compare the roots of Old Chinese with those of archaic Indo-European languages. The 18th-century Kangxi Dictionary recognized 214 radicals. [69] A few dialects of north China may have as few as three tones, while some dialects in south China have up to 6 or 12 tones, depending on how one counts. [52], The official Chinese designation for the major branches of Chinese is fāngyán (方言, literally "regional speech"), whereas the more closely related varieties within these are called dìdiǎn fāngyán (地点方言/地點方言 "local speech"). Chinese parents also use Pinyin to teach their children the sounds and tones of new words. These coinages, written in shared Chinese characters, have then been borrowed freely between languages. Chinese people have traditionally been good at drawing lessons from the ordinary things of life. [5] Although the relationship was first proposed in the early 19th century and is now broadly accepted, reconstruction of Sino-Tibetan is much less developed than that of families such as Indo-European or Austroasiatic. Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as 胡同 hútòng "hutong". Learn more in the Cambridge English-Chinese simplified Dictionary. [9], The earliest examples of Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones from around 1250 BCE in the late Shang dynasty. With the growing importance and influence of China's economy globally, Mandarin instruction is gaining popularity in schools in the United States, and has become an increasingly popular subject of study amongst the young in the Western world, as in the UK. These include vernacular,[64] lect,[65] regionalect,[53] topolect,[66] and variety.[67]. 1. Many have just four Chinese characters. Traditional Chinese . American linguist Morris Swadesh believed that languages changed at measurable rates and that these could be determined even for languages without written precursors. [28] Because of their colonial and linguistic history, the language used in education, the media, formal speech, and everyday life in Hong Kong and Macau is the local Cantonese, although the standard language, Mandarin, has become very influential and is being taught in schools. ; Category:Old Chinese entry maintenance: Old Chinese entries, or entries in other languages containing Old Chinese terms, that are being tracked for attention and improvement by editors. Syllables based on pinyin and zhuyin can also be compared by looking at the following articles: There are also at least two systems of cyrillization for Chinese. "electric brain") for computer; 手机/手機 shǒujī (lit. Its spoken varieties have evolved at different rates, while written Chinese itself has changed much less. Some theories suggest that images and markings on pottery shards found at Ban Po Village are evidence of an early writing system but this claim has been challenged repeatedly. [53] Conventional English-language usage in Chinese linguistics is to use dialect for the speech of a particular place (regardless of status) and dialect group for a regional grouping such as Mandarin or Wu. [13] Most recent reconstructions also describe an atonal language with consonant clusters at the end of the syllable, developing into tone distinctions in Middle Chinese. Today we'll mainly learn two of them: (1) nǐ duō dà 你多大？ how old are you. Learn more in the Cambridge English-Chinese simplified Dictionary. The oldest known example of Old Chinese was found at the archaeological site of the ancient city of Yinxu. There are many systems of romanization for the Chinese varieties, due to the lack of a native phonetic transcription until modern times. 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 diviner (someone who today would be called a 'psychic' or a 'medium') would carve the person's question into the bone and then heat it with a hot poker or place it near a fire. [25] The People's Republic founded in 1949 retained this standard but renamed it pǔtōnghuà (普通话/普通話; "common speech"). Even if we consider Mandarin, Cantonese and other Chinese languages separately, Mandarin is still the second most spoken language in the world. The word "devil" is composed of two characters -- the second character is actually contained inside the first character. It literally means "a thousand song with the same tunes" (it would certainly getting old fast and bore people). Romanization is the process of transcribing a language into the Latin script. That captures the essence of the English expression "getting old fast" pretty well. Some scholars divide the history of the Chinese languages into Proto-Sinitic (Proto-Chinese; until 500 bc), Archaic (Old) Chinese (8th to 3rd century bc), Ancient (Middle) Chinese (through ad 907), and Modern Chinese (from c. the 10th century to modern times). The 2009 version of the Webster's Digital Chinese Dictionary (WDCD),[73] based on CC-CEDICT, contains over 84,000 entries. [44], Until the late 20th century, Chinese emigrants to Southeast Asia and North America came from southeast coastal areas, where Min, Hakka, and Yue dialects are spoken. [63], Because of the difficulties involved in determining the difference between language and dialect, other terms have been proposed. They are still pronounced differently in today's Cantonese; in Jyutping they are sap9, sat9, sik7, sek9, si4, sik9. — If you don't do stupid things you won't end up in tragedy. The improved understanding of Old Chinese phonology has enabled the study of the origins of Chinese words (rather than the characters with which they are written). For example, in addition to Standard Chinese, a resident of Shanghai might speak Shanghainese; and, if he or she grew up elsewhere, then he or she is also likely to be fluent in the particular dialect of that local area. Other terms were coined by the Japanese by giving new senses to existing Chinese terms or by referring to expressions used in classical Chinese literature. Whether you’re traveling in a Chinese-speaking country, or having a conversation with native Mandarin Chinese speakers, the months and seasons are useful to know. [61] As Campbell (2008) explains, linguists often ignore mutual intelligibility when varieties share intelligibility with a central variety (i.e. Chinese-tools.com provides a broad range of free tools available to use on your computer. The Dungan language, considered by many a dialect of Mandarin, is nowadays written in Cyrillic, and was previously written in the Arabic script. Which are your favorite Chinese proverbs, quotes, and sayings? Examples of loan words in English include "tea", from Hokkien (Min Nan) tê (茶), "dim sum", from Cantonese dim2 sam1 (點心) and "kumquat", from Cantonese gam1gwat1 (金橘). "stone-head"); shíjiān 时间/時間 (lit. Most Chinese people consider the spoken varieties as one single language because speakers share a common culture and history, as well as a shared national identity and a common written form. [d] Investigation of the historical relationships among the varieties of Chinese is just starting. There are some instances where a vowel is not used as a nucleus. Chinese is first known to have been written in Latin characters by Western Christian missionaries in the 16th century. Northern Vietnam was incorporated into the Han empire in 111 BCE, marking the beginning of a period of Chinese control that ran almost continuously for a millennium. Traditional Chinese . Various other written styles are also used in Chinese calligraphy, including seal script, cursive script and clerical script. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example 奔腾/奔騰 bēnténg (lit. Chinese (simplified Chinese: 汉语; traditional Chinese: 漢語; pinyin: Hànyǔ[b] or especially for written Chinese: 中文; Zhōngwén)[c] is a group of language varieties that form the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages, spoken by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in Greater China. The Chinese language is the oldest written language in the world with at least six thousand years of history. Each Chinese character represents a monosyllabic Chinese word or morpheme. There are many different ways to say how old are you in Chinese. This connection between Chinese and Tibetan languages is made on the basis of lexical items, rather than morphology or syntax. As a result, these terms are virtually indistinguishable from native Chinese words: indeed, there is some dispute over some of these terms as to whether the Japanese or Chinese coined them first. Old Chinese, sometimes known as “Archaic Chinese”, was the common language during the early and middle Zhou Dynasty (11th to 7th centuries B.C. For example, jīngjì (经济/經濟; 経済 keizai in Japanese), which in the original Chinese meant "the workings of the state", was narrowed to "economy" in Japanese; this narrowed definition was then reimported into Chinese. In the modern varieties, it is usually the case that a morpheme (unit of meaning) is a single syllable; In contrast, English has plenty of multi-syllable morphemes, both bound and free, such as "seven", "elephant", "para-" and "-able". [72] In other words, Chinese has very few grammatical inflections—it possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), and only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English).[f]. The Zhonghua Zihai (1994) contains 85,568 head entries for character definitions, and is the largest reference work based purely on character and its literary variants. Practice alone with your textbooks, with Mandarin-speaking friends or online with the many online Mandarin schools that exist. [41] These varieties form a dialect continuum, in which differences in speech generally become more pronounced as distances increase, though the rate of change varies immensely. [14] Several derivational affixes have also been identified, but the language lacks inflection, and indicated grammatical relationships using word order and grammatical particles. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes (phono-semantic matching), such as 马利奥/馬利奧 Mǎlì'ào for the video game character Mario. Shanghainese), and Yue (68 million, e.g. Old Chinese is also known as Archaic Chinese, which as common during the reign of Zhou Dynasty from 1122 BC to 256 BC. Chinese proverbs and four-plus character idioms are developed from the formulaic or social expression and historical story in Chinese. Therefore, it is used in government agencies, in the media, and as a language of instruction in schools. Mandarin Chinese is a fairly complex language to learn, especially for English speakers. The Zhongyuan Yinyun (1324) was a dictionary that codified the rhyming conventions of new sanqu verse form in this language. [12] Although many of the finer details remain unclear, most scholars agree that Old Chinese differs from Middle Chinese in lacking retroflex and palatal obstruents but having initial consonant clusters of some sort, and in having voiceless nasals and liquids. After the 15th century, the efforts of Jesuits and Western court missionaries resulted in some Latin character transcription/writing systems, based on various variants of Chinese languages. In modern Mandarin, however, most nouns, adjectives and verbs are largely disyllabic. [20] However, with commitment and daily practice, it is certainly possible to successfully master. During the Northern and Southern dynasties period, Middle Chinese went through several sound changes and split into several varieties following prolonged geographic and political separation. Japanese re-molded European concepts and inventions into wasei-kango (和製漢語, lit. Below are some of the most common wisdom sayings that give practical life advice. Here, the researchers found oracle bones with the earliest form of the Chinese language. "time-interval"); shíwù 食物 (lit. The 7th (2016) edition of Xiandai Hanyu Cidian, an authoritative one-volume dictionary on modern standard Chinese language as used in mainland China, has 13,000 head characters and defines 70,000 words. The phonological structure of each syllable consists of a nucleus that has 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 onset is also possible), and followed (optionally) by a coda consonant; a syllable also carries a tone. In modern Mandarin, there 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.[e]. Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and lexicalized phrases vary greatly. In 100 CE, the famed Han dynasty scholar Xu Shen classified characters into six categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Reflections on Some Key Sino-English Linguistic terms". Follow the English translations, listen carefully to the Chinese pronunciation and practice saying the months and seasons aloud. When the bone would crack, the lines formed would be interprete… This simplification presents syllables as homophones which really are none, and therefore exaggerates the number of homophones almost by a factor of four. Some early Indo-European loanwords in Chinese have been proposed, notably 蜜 mì "honey", 狮/獅 shī "lion," and perhaps also 马/馬 mǎ "horse", 猪/豬 zhū "pig", 犬 quǎn "dog", and 鹅/鵝 é "goose". Chinese Language Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for students, teachers, and linguists wanting to discuss the finer points of the Chinese language. The Chinese language is the group of languages used by Chinese people in China and elsewhere. Spoken by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in China, about 1.2 billion people (or approximately 16% of the world's population) speak a Chinese language as their first language. Zhuyin (colloquially bopomofo), a semi-syllabary is still widely used in Taiwan's elementary schools to aid standard pronunciation. School-children typically learn around 2,000 characters whereas scholars may memorize up to 10,000. "blue tooth") for Bluetooth, and 网志/網誌 wǎngzhì (lit. The royal courts of the Ming and early Qing dynasties operated using a koiné language (Guanhua) based on Nanjing dialect of Lower Yangtze Mandarin. Google's free service instantly translates words, phrases, and web pages between English and over 100 other languages. Most linguists now believe it represents a diasystem encompassing 6th-century northern and southern standards for reading the classics.[19]. 'Not do not die.') However Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words. In mainland China and Taiwan, diglossia has been a common feature. We start with the … This category has the following 6 subcategories, out of 6 total. It only takes a minute to sign up. Old Chinese, sometimes known as “Archaic Chinese”, was the common language during the early and middle Zhou Dynasty (11th to 7th centuries B.C. A very common example used to illustrate the use of tones in Chinese is the application of the four tones of Standard Chinese (along with the neutral tone) to the syllable ma. [7] A top-level branching into Chinese and Tibeto-Burman languages is often assumed, but has not been convincingly demonstrated. "electric vision") for television, 电脑/電腦 diànnǎo (lit. [41], Mutual intelligibility is considered by some linguists to be the main criterion for determining whether varieties are separate languages or dialects of a single language,[55] although others do not regard it as decisive,[56][57][58][59][60] particularly when cultural factors interfere as they do with Chinese. Modern characters are styled after the regular script. The earliest Chinese written records are Shang dynasty-era oracle bone inscriptions, which can be dated to 1250 BCE. A native of Guangzhou may speak both Cantonese and Standard Chinese. Some of these Latin character based systems are still being used to write various Chinese variants in the modern era.[79]. Helpful Chinese Expressions: about age. Classical Chinese literature began in the Spring and Autumn period. [54][better source needed] Jerry Norman called this practice misleading, pointing out that Wu, which itself contains many mutually unintelligible varieties, could not be properly called a single language under the same criterion, and that the same is true for each of the other groups.

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