Китайский язык как пишется иероглифами

Unless otherwise specified, Chinese in this article is written in simplified/traditional/pinyin order. If the simplified and traditional characters are the same, they are written only once.

Chinese
汉语/漢語, Hànyǔ or 中文, Zhōngwén
Hànyǔ written in traditional (top) and simplified characters (middle); Zhōngwén (bottom)
Native to	Sinophone world
Native speakers	1.35 billion (2022)
Language family	Sino-Tibetan Sinitic Chinese
Early forms	Old Chinese Middle Chinese
Standard forms	Standard Mandarin Standard Cantonese
Dialects	Mandarin Jin Wu Gan Xiang Min Hakka Yue Ping Huizhou
Writing system	Chinese characters (Traditional/Simplified) Transcriptions: Zhuyin Pinyin (Latin) Xiao’erjing (Arabic) Dungan (Cyrillic) Chinese Braille ʼPhags-pa script (Historical)
Official status
Official language in	Mandarin: China Singapore Taiwan Cantonese:[a] Hong Kong Macau
Regulated by	Ministry of Education (in the reserved name of «National Commission on Language and Script Work [zh]«) (Mainland China) National Languages Committee (Taiwan) Civil Service Bureau (Hong Kong) Education and Youth Affairs Bureau (Macau) Chinese Language Standardisation Council (Malaysia) Promote Mandarin Council (Singapore)
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 Min czh – Huizhou czo – Central Min gan – Gan hak – Hakka hsn – Xiang mnp – Min Bei nan – Min Nan wuu – Wu yue – Yue csp – Southern Pinghua cnp – Northern Pinghua och – Old Chinese ltc – Late Middle Chinese lzh – Classical Chinese
Glottolog	sini1245
Linguasphere	79-AAA
Map of the Chinese-speaking world.   Regions with a native Chinese-speaking majority.   Regions where Chinese is not native but an official or educational language.   Regions with significant Chinese-speaking minorities.
This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA.

Han language (general or spoken)
Simplified Chinese	汉语
Traditional Chinese	漢語
Literal meaning	Han people/dynasty’s language
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin Hànyǔ Wade–Giles Han4-yu3 Tongyong Pinyin Hàn-yǔ Yale Romanization Hàn-yǔ IPA [xân.ỳ] Wu Romanization hoe3 nyiu2 Hakka Romanization Hon Ngi Yue: Cantonese Yale Romanization hon yúh Jyutping Hon3 jyu5 Canton Romanization hon3 yü5 IPA Cantonese pronunciation: [hɔ̄ːn.jy̬ː] Southern Min Hokkien POJ Hàn-gí, Hàn-gú Eastern Min Fuzhou BUC Háng-ngṳ̄
Chinese text (especially written)
Chinese	中文
Literal meaning	Chinese («middle/central») text (or writing)
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin Zhōngwén Wade–Giles Chung1-wên2 Tongyong Pinyin jhong-wún Yale Romanization jūng-wén IPA [ʈʂʊ́ŋ.wə̌n] Wu Romanization tson1 ven1 Hakka Romanization Chung-Vun Yue: Cantonese Yale Romanization Jūng mán Jyutping Zung1 man4*2 Canton Romanization Zung1 men4*2 Southern Min Hokkien POJ Tiong-bûn Eastern Min Fuzhou BUC Dṳng-ùng
Han text (especially written and when distinguished from other languages of China)
Simplified Chinese	汉文
Traditional Chinese	漢文
Literal meaning	Han text (or writing)
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin Hànwén

Chinese^[c] (中文; Zhōngwén,^[d] especially when referring to written Chinese) is a group of languages spoken natively by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in Greater China. About 1.3 billion people (or approximately 16% of the world’s population) speak a variety of Chinese as their first language.^[1]

Chinese languages form the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages family. The spoken varieties of Chinese are usually considered by native speakers to be variants of a single language. However, their lack of mutual intelligibility means they are sometimes considered separate languages in a family.^[e] Investigation of the historical relationships among the varieties of Chinese is ongoing. Currently, most classifications posit 7 to 13 main regional groups based on phonetic developments from Middle Chinese, of which the most spoken by far is Mandarin (with about 800 million speakers, or 66%), followed by Min (75 million, e.g. Southern Min), Wu (74 million, e.g. Shanghainese), and Yue (68 million, e.g. Cantonese). These branches are unintelligible to each other, and many of their subgroups are unintelligible with the other varieties within the same branch (e.g. Southern Min). There are, however, transitional areas where varieties from different branches share enough features for some limited intelligibility, including New Xiang with Southwest Mandarin, Xuanzhou Wu with Lower Yangtze Mandarin, Jin with Central Plains Mandarin and certain divergent dialects of Hakka with Gan (though these are unintelligible with mainstream Hakka). All varieties of Chinese are tonal to at least some degree, and are largely analytic.

The earliest Chinese written records are Shang dynasty-era oracle bone inscriptions, which can be dated to 1250 BCE. The phonetic categories of Old Chinese can be reconstructed from the rhymes of ancient poetry. 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. Qieyun, a rime dictionary, recorded a compromise between the pronunciations of different regions. The royal courts of the Ming and early Qing dynasties operated using a koiné language (Guanhua) based on Nanjing dialect of Lower Yangtze Mandarin.

Standard Chinese (Standard Mandarin), based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin, was adopted in the 1930s and is now an official language of both the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of China (Taiwan), one of the four official languages of Singapore, and one of the six official languages of the United Nations. The written form, using the logograms known as Chinese characters, is shared by literate speakers of mutually unintelligible dialects. Since the 1950s, simplified Chinese characters have been promoted for use by the government of the People’s Republic of China, while Singapore officially adopted simplified characters in 1976. Traditional characters remain in use in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and other countries with significant overseas Chinese speaking communities such as Malaysia (which although adopted simplified characters as the de facto standard in the 1980s, traditional characters still remain in widespread use).

Classification[edit]

Linguists classify all varieties of Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family, together with Burmese, Tibetan and many other languages spoken in the Himalayas and the Southeast Asian Massif.^[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. Difficulties have included the great diversity of the languages, the lack of inflection in many of them, and the effects of language contact. In addition, many of the smaller languages are spoken in mountainous areas that are difficult to reach and are often also sensitive border zones.^[6] Without a secure reconstruction of proto-Sino-Tibetan, the higher-level structure of the family remains unclear.^[7] A top-level branching into Chinese and Tibeto-Burman languages is often assumed, but has not been convincingly demonstrated.^[8]

History[edit]

The first written records appeared over 3,000 years ago during the Shang dynasty. As the language evolved over this period, the various local varieties became mutually unintelligible. In reaction, central governments have repeatedly sought to promulgate a unified standard.^[9]

Old and Middle Chinese[edit]

The earliest examples of Chinese (Old Chinese) are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones from around 1250 BCE in the late Shang dynasty.^[10] The next attested stage came from inscriptions on bronze artifacts of the Western Zhou period (1046–771 BCE), the Classic of Poetry and portions of the Book of Documents and I Ching.^[11] Scholars have attempted to reconstruct the phonology of Old Chinese by comparing later varieties of Chinese with the rhyming practice of the Classic of Poetry and the phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters.^[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.^[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.^[14] Several derivational affixes have also been identified, but the language lacks inflection, and indicated grammatical relationships using word order and grammatical particles.^[15]

Middle Chinese was the language used during Northern and Southern dynasties and the Sui, Tang, and Song dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the Qieyun rime book (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by rhyme tables such as the Yunjing constructed by ancient Chinese philologists as a guide to the Qieyun system.^[16] These works define phonological categories, but with little hint of what sounds they represent.^[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.^[18] The resulting system is very complex, with a large number of consonants and vowels, but they are probably not all distinguished in any single dialect. Most linguists now believe it represents a diasystem encompassing 6th-century northern and southern standards for reading the classics.^[19]

Classical and literary forms[edit]

The relationship between spoken and written Chinese is rather complex («diglossia»). Its spoken varieties have evolved at different rates, while written Chinese itself has changed much less. Classical Chinese literature began in the Spring and Autumn period.

Rise of northern dialects[edit]

After the fall of the Northern Song dynasty and subsequent reign of the Jin (Jurchen) and Yuan (Mongol) dynasties in northern China, a common speech (now called Old Mandarin) developed based on the dialects of the North China Plain around the capital.^[20]
The Zhongyuan Yinyun (1324) was a dictionary that codified the rhyming conventions of new sanqu verse form in this language.^[21]
Together with the slightly later Menggu Ziyun, this dictionary describes a language with many of the features characteristic of modern Mandarin dialects.^[22]

Up to the early 20th century, most Chinese people only spoke their local variety.^[23]
Thus, as a practical measure, officials of the Ming and Qing dynasties carried out the administration of the empire using a common language based on Mandarin varieties, known as Guānhuà (官话/官話, literally «language of officials»).^[24]
For most of this period, this language was a koiné based on dialects spoken in the Nanjing area, though not identical to any single dialect.^[25]
By the middle of the 19th century, the Beijing dialect had become dominant and was essential for any business with the imperial court.^[26]

In the 1930s, a standard national language, Guóyǔ (国语/國語 ; «national language») was adopted. After much dispute between proponents of northern and southern dialects and an abortive attempt at an artificial pronunciation, the National Language Unification Commission finally settled on the Beijing dialect in 1932. The People’s Republic founded in 1949 retained this standard but renamed it pǔtōnghuà (普通话/普通話; «common speech»).^[27] The national language is now used in education, the media, and formal situations in both Mainland China and Taiwan.^[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.^[29]

Influence[edit]

Historically, the Chinese language has spread to its neighbors through a variety of means. 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. The Four Commanderies were established in northern Korea in the first century BCE, but disintegrated in the following centuries.^[30] Chinese Buddhism spread over East Asia between the 2nd and 5th centuries CE, and with it the study of scriptures and literature in Literary Chinese.^[31] Later Korea, Japan, and Vietnam developed strong central governments modeled on Chinese institutions, with Literary Chinese as the language of administration and scholarship, a position it would retain until the late 19th century in Korea and (to a lesser extent) Japan, and the early 20th century in Vietnam.^[32] Scholars from different lands could communicate, albeit only in writing, using Literary Chinese.^[33]

Although they used Chinese solely for written communication, each country had its own tradition of reading texts aloud, the so-called Sino-Xenic pronunciations. Chinese words with these pronunciations were also extensively imported into the Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese languages, and today comprise over half of their vocabularies.^[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.^[36]

Borrowed Chinese morphemes have been used extensively in all these languages to coin compound words for new concepts, in a similar way to the use of Latin and Ancient Greek roots in European languages.^[37] Many new compounds, or new meanings for old phrases, were created in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to name Western concepts and artifacts. These coinages, written in shared Chinese characters, have then been borrowed freely between languages. They have even been accepted into Chinese, a language usually resistant to loanwords, because their foreign origin was hidden by their written form. Often different compounds for the same concept were in circulation for some time before a winner emerged, and sometimes the final choice differed between countries.^[38] The proportion of vocabulary of Chinese origin thus tends to be greater in technical, abstract, or formal language. For example, in Japan, Sino-Japanese words account for about 35% of the words in entertainment magazines, over half the words in newspapers, and 60% of the words in science magazines.^[39]

Vietnam, Korea, and Japan each developed writing systems for their own languages, initially based on Chinese characters, but later replaced with the hangul alphabet for Korean and supplemented with kana syllabaries for Japanese, while Vietnamese continued to be written with the complex chữ nôm script. However, these were limited to popular literature until the late 19th century. Today Japanese is written with a composite script using both Chinese characters (kanji) and kana. Korean is written exclusively with hangul in North Korea (although knowledge of the supplementary Chinese characters — hanja — is still required), and hanja are increasingly rarely used in South Korea. As a result of former French colonization, Vietnamese switched to a Latin-based alphabet.

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).

Varieties[edit]

Jerry Norman estimated that there are hundreds of mutually unintelligible varieties of Chinese.^[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.^[42] Generally, mountainous South China exhibits 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 neighbors. For instance, Wuzhou is about 190 kilometres (120 mi) upstream from Guangzhou, but the Yue variety spoken there is more like that of Guangzhou than is that of Taishan, 95 kilometres (60 mi) southwest of Guangzhou and separated from it by several rivers.^[43] In parts of Fujian the speech of neighboring counties or even villages may be mutually unintelligible.^[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.^[45]
The vast majority of Chinese immigrants to North America up to the mid-20th century spoke the Taishan dialect, from a small coastal area southwest of Guangzhou.^[46]

Grouping[edit]

Local varieties of Chinese are conventionally classified into seven dialect groups, largely on the basis of the different evolution of Middle Chinese voiced initials:^[47][48]

• Mandarin, including Standard Chinese, Pekingese, Sichuanese, and also the Dungan language spoken in Central Asia
• Wu, including Shanghainese, Suzhounese, and Wenzhounese
• Gan
• Xiang
• Min, including Fuzhounese, Hainanese, Hokkien and Teochew
• Hakka
• Yue, including Cantonese and Taishanese

The classification of Li Rong, which is used in the Language Atlas of China (1987), distinguishes three further groups:^[40][49]

• Jin, previously included in Mandarin.
• Huizhou, previously included in Wu.
• Pinghua, previously included in Yue.

Some varieties remain unclassified, including Danzhou dialect (spoken in Danzhou, on Hainan Island), Waxianghua (spoken in western Hunan) and Shaozhou Tuhua (spoken in northern Guangdong).^[50]

Standard Chinese[edit]

Standard Chinese, often called Mandarin, is the official standard language of China, de facto official language of Taiwan, and one of the four official languages of Singapore (where it is called «Huáyŭ» 华语/華語 or Chinese). Standard Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect, the dialect of Mandarin as spoken in Beijing. The governments of both China and Taiwan intend for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. Therefore, it is used in government agencies, in the media, and as a language of instruction in schools.

In China and Taiwan, diglossia has been a common feature. For example, in addition to Standard Chinese, a resident of Shanghai might speak Shanghainese; and, if they grew up elsewhere, then they are also likely to be fluent in the particular dialect of that local area. A native of Guangzhou may speak both Cantonese and Standard Chinese. In addition to Mandarin, most Taiwanese also speak Taiwanese Hokkien (commonly «Taiwanese» 台語^[51][52]), Hakka, or an Austronesian language.^[53] 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.^[54]

Due to their traditional cultural ties to Guangdong province and colonial histories, Cantonese is used as the standard variant of Chinese in Hong Kong and Macau instead.

Nomenclature[edit]

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»).^[55] 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.^[41] Because varieties from different groups are not mutually intelligible, some scholars prefer to describe Wu and others as separate languages.^{[56][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.^[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,^[57] although others do not regard it as decisive,^{[58][59][60][61][62]} particularly when cultural factors interfere as they do with Chinese.^[63] As Campbell (2008) explains, linguists often ignore mutual intelligibility when varieties share intelligibility with a central variety (i.e. prestige variety, such as Standard Mandarin), as the issue requires some careful handling when mutual intelligibility is inconsistent with language identity.^[64] John DeFrancis argues that it is inappropriate to refer to Mandarin, Wu and so on as «dialects» because the mutual unintelligibility between them is too great. On the other hand, he also objects to considering them as separate languages, as it incorrectly implies a set of disruptive «religious, economic, political, and other differences» between speakers that exist, for example, between French Catholics and English Protestants in Canada, but not between speakers of Cantonese and Mandarin in China, owing to China’s near-uninterrupted history of centralized government.^[65]

Because of the difficulties involved in determining the difference between language and dialect, other terms have been proposed. These include vernacular,^[66] lect,^[67] regionalect,^[55] topolect,^[68] and variety.^[69]

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.^[70]

Phonology[edit]

Syllables in the Chinese languages have some unique characteristics. They are tightly related to the morphology and also to the characters of the writing system; and phonologically they are structured according to fixed rules.

The structure of each syllable consists of a 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. 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.

In Mandarin much more than in other spoken varieties, most syllables tend to be open syllables, meaning they have no coda (assuming that a final glide is not analyzed as a coda), but syllables that do have codas are restricted to nasals /m/, /n/, /ŋ/, the retroflex approximant /ɻ/, and voiceless stops /p/, /t/, /k/, or /ʔ/. Some varieties allow most of these codas, whereas others, such as Standard Chinese, are limited to only /n/, /ŋ/, and /ɻ/.

The number of sounds in the different spoken dialects varies, but in general there has been a tendency to a reduction in sounds from Middle Chinese. The Mandarin dialects in particular have experienced a dramatic decrease in sounds and so have far more multisyllabic words than most other spoken varieties. The total number of syllables in some varieties is therefore only about a thousand, including tonal variation, which is only about an eighth as many as English.^[f]

Tones[edit]

All varieties of spoken Chinese use tones to distinguish words.^[71] 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. 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 is the application of the four tones of Standard Chinese (along with the neutral tone) to the syllable ma. The tones are exemplified by the following five Chinese words:

Examples of Standard Mandarin tones

Characters	Pinyin	Pitch contour	Meaning
妈/媽	mā	high level	‘mother’
麻	má	high rising	‘hemp’
马/馬	mǎ	low falling-rising	‘horse’
骂/罵	mà	high falling	‘scold’
吗/嗎	ma	neutral	question particle

Standard Cantonese, in contrast, has six tones. Historically, finals that end in a stop consonant were considered to be «checked tones» and thus counted separately for a total of nine tones. However, they are considered to be duplicates in modern linguistics and are no longer counted as such:^[72]

Examples of Standard Cantonese tones

Characters	Jyutping	Yale	Pitch contour	Meaning
诗/詩	si1	sī	high level, high falling	‘poem’
史	si2	sí	high rising	‘history’
弒	si3	si	mid level	‘to assassinate’
时/時	si4	sìh	low falling	‘time’
市	si5	síh	low rising	‘market’
是	si6	sih	low level	‘yes’

Grammar[edit]

Chinese is often described as a «monosyllabic» language. However, this is only partially correct. It is largely accurate when describing Classical Chinese and Middle Chinese; in Classical Chinese, for example, perhaps 90% of words correspond to a single syllable and a single character. In the modern varieties, it is usually the case that a morpheme (unit of meaning) is a single syllable; in contrast, English has many multi-syllable morphemes, both bound and free, such as «seven», «elephant», «para-» and «-able».

Some of the conservative southern varieties of modern Chinese have largely monosyllabic words, especially among the more basic vocabulary. In modern Mandarin, however, most nouns, adjectives and verbs are largely disyllabic. A significant cause of this is phonological attrition. Sound change over time has steadily reduced the number of possible syllables. 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.^[f]

This phonological collapse has led to a corresponding increase in the number of homophones. As an example, the small Langenscheidt Pocket Chinese Dictionary^[73] lists six words that are commonly pronounced as shí (tone 2): 十 ‘ten’; 实/實 ‘real, actual’; 识/識 ‘know (a person), recognize’; 石 ‘stone’; 时/時 ‘time’; 食 ‘food, eat’. These were all pronounced differently in Early Middle Chinese; in William H. Baxter’s transcription they were dzyip, zyit, syik, dzyek, dzyi and zyik respectively. They are still pronounced differently in today’s Cantonese; in Jyutping they are sap9, sat9, sik7, sek9, si4, sik9. 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. As such, most of these words have been replaced (in speech, if not in writing) with a longer, less-ambiguous compound. 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. ‘actual-connection’); rènshi 认识/認識 (lit. ‘recognize-know’); shítou 石头/石頭 (lit. ‘stone-head’); shíjiān 时间/時間 (lit. ‘time-interval’); shíwù 食物 (lit. ‘foodstuff’). In each case, the homophone was disambiguated by adding another morpheme, typically either a synonym or a generic word of some sort (for example, ‘head’, ‘thing’), the purpose of which is 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 disambiguating syllable is generally dropped and the resulting word is still disyllabic. For example, shí 石 alone, not shítou 石头/石頭, appears in compounds meaning ‘stone-‘, for example, shígāo 石膏 ‘plaster’ (lit. ‘stone cream’), shíhuī 石灰 ‘lime’ (lit. ‘stone dust’), shíkū 石窟 ‘grotto’ (lit. ‘stone cave’), shíyīng 石英 ‘quartz’ (lit. ‘stone flower’), shíyóu 石油 ‘petroleum’ (lit. ‘stone oil’).

Most modern varieties of Chinese have the tendency to form new words through disyllabic, trisyllabic and tetra-character compounds. In some cases, monosyllabic words have become disyllabic without compounding, as in kūlong 窟窿 from kǒng 孔; this is especially common in Jin.

Chinese morphology is strictly bound to a set number of syllables with a fairly rigid construction. Although many of these single-syllable morphemes (zì, 字) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cí (词/詞), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cí (‘word’) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more.

For example:

• yún 云/雲 ‘cloud’
• hànbǎobāo, hànbǎo 汉堡包/漢堡包, 汉堡/漢堡 ‘hamburger’
• wǒ 我 ‘I, me’
• shǒuményuán 守门员/守門員 ‘goalkeeper’
• rén 人 ‘people, human, mankind’
• dìqiú 地球 ‘The Earth’
• shǎndiàn 闪电/閃電 ‘lightning’
• mèng 梦/夢 ‘dream’

All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphology—i.e., changes in form of a word—to indicate the word’s function in a sentence.^[74] 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).^[g]

They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. 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.

Chinese has a subject–verb–object word order, and like many other languages of East Asia, makes frequent use of the topic–comment construction to form sentences. Chinese also has an extensive system of classifiers and measure words, another trait shared with neighboring 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 dropping.

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 50,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are in use and only about 3,000 are frequently used in Chinese media and newspapers.^[75] However Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words. Because most Chinese words are made up of two or more characters, there are many more Chinese words than characters. A more accurate equivalent for a Chinese character is the morpheme, as characters represent the smallest grammatical units with individual meanings in the Chinese language.

Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and lexicalized phrases vary greatly. The Hanyu Da Zidian, a compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries for characters, including bone oracle versions. 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. The CC-CEDICT project (2010) contains 97,404 contemporary entries including idioms, technology terms and names of political figures, businesses and products. The 2009 version of the Webster’s Digital Chinese Dictionary (WDCD),^[76] based on CC-CEDICT, contains over 84,000 entries.

The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary, the 12-volume Hanyu Da Cidian, records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters and gives over 370,000 definitions. The 1999 revised Cihai, a multi-volume encyclopedic dictionary reference work, gives 122,836 vocabulary entry definitions under 19,485 Chinese characters, including proper names, phrases and common zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific and technical terms.

The 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.

Loanwords[edit]

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.

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».^[h]
Ancient words borrowed from along the Silk Road since Old Chinese include 葡萄 pútáo «grape», 石榴 shíliu/shíliú «pomegranate» and 狮子/獅子 shīzi «lion». Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including 佛 Fó «Buddha» and 菩萨/菩薩 Púsà «bodhisattva.» Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as 胡同 hútòng «hutong». Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as 葡萄 «grape,» generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or Pāli, the liturgical languages of North India. Words borrowed from the nomadic tribes of the Gobi, Mongolian or northeast regions generally have Altaic etymologies, such as 琵琶 pípá, the Chinese lute, or 酪 lào/luò «cheese» or «yogurt», but from exactly which source is not always clear.^[77]

Modern borrowings[edit]

Modern neologisms are primarily translated into Chinese in one of three ways: free translation (calque, or by meaning), phonetic translation (by sound), or a combination of the two. Today, it is much more common to use existing Chinese morphemes to coin new words to represent imported concepts, such as technical expressions and international scientific vocabulary. 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. For example, the word telephone was initially loaned phonetically as 德律风/德律風 (Shanghainese: télífon [təlɪfoŋ], Mandarin: délǜfēng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later 电话/電話 diànhuà (lit. «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). Other examples include 电视/電視 diànshì (lit. «electric vision») for television, 电脑/電腦 diànnǎo (lit. «electric brain») for computer; 手机/手機 shǒujī (lit. «hand machine») for mobile phone, 蓝牙/藍牙 lányá (lit. «blue tooth») for Bluetooth, and 网志/網誌 wǎngzhì (lit. «internet logbook») for blog in Hong Kong and Macau Cantonese. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as 汉堡包/漢堡包 hànbǎobāo (漢堡 hànbǎo «Hamburg» + 包 bāo «bun») for «hamburger». Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes (phono-semantic matching), such as 马利奥/馬利奧 Mǎlì’ào for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example 奔腾/奔騰 bēnténg (lit. «dashing-leaping») for Pentium and 赛百味/賽百味 Sàibǎiwèi (lit. «better-than hundred tastes») for Subway restaurants.

Foreign words, mainly proper nouns, continue to enter the Chinese language by transcription according to their pronunciations. This is done by employing Chinese characters with similar pronunciations. For example, «Israel» becomes 以色列 Yǐsèliè, «Paris» becomes 巴黎 Bālí. A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including 沙发/沙發 shāfā «sofa», 马达/馬達 mǎdá «motor», 幽默 yōumò «humor», 逻辑/邏輯 luóji/luójí «logic», 时髦/時髦 shímáo «smart, fashionable», and 歇斯底里 xiēsīdǐlǐ «hysterics». The bulk of these words were originally coined in the Shanghai dialect during the early 20th century and were later loaned into Mandarin, hence their pronunciations in Mandarin may be quite off from the English. For example, 沙发/沙發 «sofa» and 马达/馬達 «motor» in Shanghainese sound more like their English counterparts. Cantonese differs from Mandarin with some transliterations, such as 梳化 so¹ faa^3*2 «sofa» and 摩打 mo¹ daa² «motor».

Western foreign words representing Western concepts have influenced Chinese since the 20th century through transcription. From French came 芭蕾 bālěi «ballet» and 香槟/香檳 xiāngbīn, «champagne»; from Italian, 咖啡 kāfēi «caffè». English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed, such as 高尔夫/高爾夫 gāoěrfū «golf» and the above-mentioned 沙发/沙發 shāfā «sofa». Later, the United States soft influences gave rise to 迪斯科 dísikē/dísīkē «disco», 可乐/可樂 kělè «cola», and 迷你 mínǐ «mini [skirt]». Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English, such as 卡通 kaa¹ tung1 «cartoon», 基佬 gei¹ lou² «gay people», 的士 dik¹ si^6*2 «taxi», and 巴士 baa¹ si^6*2 «bus». With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, for example, 粉丝/粉絲 fěnsī «fans», 黑客 hēikè «hacker» (lit. «black guest»), and 博客 bókè «blog». In Taiwan, some of these transliterations are different, such as 駭客 hàikè for «hacker» and 部落格 bùluògé for «blog» (lit. «interconnected tribes»).

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. «lettered words») spelled with letters from the English alphabet. This has appeared in magazines, newspapers, on web sites, and on TV: 三G手机/三G手機 «3rd generation cell phones» (三 sān «three» + G «generation» + 手机/手機 shǒujī «mobile phones»), IT界 «IT circles» (IT «information technology» + 界 jiè «industry»), HSK (Hànyǔ Shuǐpíng Kǎoshì, 汉语水平考试/漢語水平考試), GB (Guóbiāo, 国标/國標), CIF价/CIF價 (CIF «Cost, Insurance, Freight» + 价/價 jià «price»), e家庭 «e-home» (e «electronic» + 家庭 jiātíng «home»), Chinese: W时代/Chinese: W時代 «wireless era» (W «wireless» + 时代/時代 shídài «era»), TV族 «TV watchers» (TV «television» + 族 zú «social group; clan»), 后РС时代/後PC時代 «post-PC era» (后/後 hòu «after/post-» + PC «personal computer» + 时代/時代), 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 concepts and inventions into wasei-kango (和製漢語, lit. «Japanese-made Chinese»), and many of these words have been re-loaned into modern Chinese. Other terms were coined by the Japanese by giving new senses to existing Chinese terms or by referring to expressions used in classical Chinese literature. For example, 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. As a result, these terms are virtually indistinguishable from native Chinese words: indeed, there is some dispute over some of these terms as to whether the Japanese or Chinese coined them first. As a result of this loaning, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese share a corpus of linguistic terms describing modern terminology, paralleling the similar corpus of terms built from Greco-Latin and shared among European languages.

Writing system[edit]

The Chinese orthography centers on Chinese characters, which are written within imaginary square blocks, traditionally arranged in vertical columns, read from top to bottom down a column, and right to left across columns, despite alternative arrangement with rows of characters from left to right within a row and from top to bottom across rows (like English and other Western writing systems) having become more popular since the 20th century.^[78] Chinese characters denote morphemes independent of phonetic variation in different languages. Thus the character 一 («one») is uttered yī in Standard Chinese, yat¹ in Cantonese and it in Hokkien (a form of Min).

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. This replaced the old writing language standard of Literary Chinese before the 20th century.^[79] However, vocabularies from different Chinese-speaking areas have diverged, and the divergence can be observed in written Chinese.^[80]

Meanwhile, colloquial forms of various Chinese language variants have also been written down by their users, especially in less formal settings. The most prominent example of this is the written colloquial form of Cantonese, which has become quite popular in tabloids, instant messaging applications, and on the internet amongst Hong-Kongers and Cantonese-speakers elsewhere.^[81]

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, 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.

The Chinese had no uniform phonetic transcription system for most of its speakers until the mid-20th century, although enunciation patterns were recorded in early rime books and dictionaries. 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 missionaries resulted in some Latin character transcription/writing systems, based on various variants of Chinese languages. Some of these Latin character based systems are still being used to write various Chinese variants in the modern era.^[82]

In Hunan, women in certain areas write their local Chinese language variant in Nü Shu, a syllabary derived from Chinese characters. The Dungan language, considered by many a dialect 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 Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Russia; some of the related Hui people also speak the language and live mainly in China.

Chinese characters[edit]

Each Chinese character represents a monosyllabic Chinese word or morpheme. 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. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, including many of the simplest characters, such as rén 人 (human), rì 日 (sun), shān 山 (mountain; hill), shuǐ 水 (water). 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). Almost all characters created since have been made using this format. The 18th-century Kangxi Dictionary recognized 214 radicals.

Modern characters are styled after the regular script. Various other written styles are also used in Chinese calligraphy, including seal script, cursive script and clerical script. Calligraphy artists can write in traditional and simplified characters, but they tend to use traditional characters for traditional art.

There are currently two systems for Chinese characters. The 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. The Simplified Chinese character system, introduced by the People’s Republic of China in 1954 to promote mass literacy, simplifies most complex traditional glyphs to fewer strokes, many to common cursive shorthand variants. Singapore, which has a large Chinese community, was the second nation to officially adopt simplified characters, although it has also become the de facto standard for younger ethnic Chinese in Malaysia.

The Internet provides the platform to practice reading these alternative systems, be it traditional or simplified. Most Chinese users in the modern era are capable of, although not necessarily comfortable with, reading (but not writing) the alternative system, through experience and guesswork.^[83]

A well-educated Chinese reader today recognizes approximately 4,000 to 6,000 characters; approximately 3,000 characters are required to read a Mainland newspaper. The PRC government defines literacy amongst workers as a knowledge of 2,000 characters, though this would be only functional literacy. School-children typically learn around 2,000 characters whereas scholars may memorize up to 10,000.^[84] A large unabridged dictionary, like the Kangxi Dictionary, contains over 40,000 characters, including obscure, variant, rare, and archaic characters; fewer than a quarter of these characters are now commonly used.

Romanization[edit]

Romanization is the process of transcribing a language into the Latin script. There are many systems of romanization for the Chinese varieties, due to the lack of a native phonetic transcription until modern times. Chinese is first known to have been written in Latin characters by Western Christian missionaries in the 16th century.

Today the most common romanization standard for Standard Mandarin is Hanyu Pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People’s Republic of China, and later adopted by Singapore and Taiwan. Pinyin is almost universally employed now for teaching standard spoken Chinese in schools and universities across the Americas, 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 represents, with the Chinese character alongside.

The second-most common romanization system, the Wade–Giles, 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 is largely an Anglicization, it may be particularly helpful for beginner Chinese speakers of an English-speaking background. Wade–Giles was found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until 2009 was widely used in Taiwan.

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. Thus, most Western readers will be much more familiar with Beijing than they will be with Běijīng (pinyin), and with Taipei than T’ai²-pei³ (Wade–Giles). This simplification presents syllables as homophones which really are none, and therefore exaggerates the number of homophones almost by a factor of four.

Here are a few examples of Hanyu Pinyin and Wade–Giles, for comparison:

Mandarin Romanization Comparison

Characters	Wade–Giles	Pinyin	Meaning/Notes
中国/中國	Chung¹-kuo²	Zhōngguó	China
台湾/台灣	T’ai²-wan¹	Táiwān	Taiwan
北京	Pei³-ching¹	Běijīng	Beijing
台北/臺北	T’ai²-pei³	Táiběi	Taipei
孫文	Sun¹-wên²	Sūn Wén	Sun Yat-sen
毛泽东/毛澤東	Mao² Tse²-tung¹	Máo Zédōng	Mao Zedong, Former Communist Chinese leader
蒋介石/蔣介石	Chiang³ Chieh⁴-shih²	Jiǎng Jièshí	Chiang Kai-shek, Former Nationalist Chinese leader
孔子	K’ung³ Tsu³	Kǒngzǐ	Confucius

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.

Other phonetic transcriptions[edit]

Chinese varieties have been phonetically transcribed into many other writing systems over the centuries. The ‘Phags-pa script, for example, has been very helpful in reconstructing the pronunciations of premodern forms of Chinese.

Zhuyin (colloquially bopomofo), a semi-syllabary is still widely used in Taiwan’s elementary schools to aid standard pronunciation. Although zhuyin 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 can 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 widespread is the Palladius system.

As a foreign language[edit]

With the growing importance and influence of China’s economy globally, Mandarin instruction has been gaining popularity in schools throughout East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Western world.^[85]

Besides Mandarin, Cantonese is the only other Chinese language that is widely taught as a foreign language, largely due to the economic and cultural influence of Hong Kong and its widespread usage among significant Overseas Chinese communities.^[86]

In 1991 there were 2,000 foreign learners taking China’s official Chinese Proficiency Test (also known as HSK, comparable to the English Cambridge Certificate), then the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660 in 2005^[87] and 750,000 in 2010.^[88]

See also[edit]

• 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
• Protection of the Varieties of Chinese

Notes[edit]

References[edit]

Citations[edit]

Sources[edit]

Further reading[edit]

• Hannas, William C. (1997), Asia’s Orthographic Dilemma, University of Hawaii Press, 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, University of California, Berkeley, ISBN 978-1-55729-071-7.
• R. L. G. «Language borrowing Why so little Chinese in English?» The Economist. 6 June 2013.
• Huang, Cheng-Teh James; Li, Yen-Hui Audrey; Li, Yafei (2009), The Syntax of Chinese, Cambridge Syntax Guides, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, doi:10.1017/CBO9781139166935, ISBN 978-0-521-59958-0.

External links[edit]

• Classical Chinese texts – Chinese Text Project
• Marjorie Chan’s ChinaLinks Archived 20 July 2011 at the Wayback Machine at the Ohio State University with hundreds of links to Chinese related web pages

Unless otherwise specified, Chinese in this article is written in simplified/traditional/pinyin order. If the simplified and traditional characters are the same, they are written only once.

Chinese
汉语/漢語, Hànyǔ or 中文, Zhōngwén
Hànyǔ written in traditional (top) and simplified characters (middle); Zhōngwén (bottom)
Native to	Sinophone world
Native speakers	1.35 billion (2022)
Language family	Sino-Tibetan Sinitic Chinese
Early forms	Old Chinese Middle Chinese
Standard forms	Standard Mandarin Standard Cantonese
Dialects	Mandarin Jin Wu Gan Xiang Min Hakka Yue Ping Huizhou
Writing system	Chinese characters (Traditional/Simplified) Transcriptions: Zhuyin Pinyin (Latin) Xiao’erjing (Arabic) Dungan (Cyrillic) Chinese Braille ʼPhags-pa script (Historical)
Official status
Official language in	Mandarin: China Singapore Taiwan Cantonese:[a] Hong Kong Macau
Regulated by	Ministry of Education (in the reserved name of «National Commission on Language and Script Work [zh]«) (Mainland China) National Languages Committee (Taiwan) Civil Service Bureau (Hong Kong) Education and Youth Affairs Bureau (Macau) Chinese Language Standardisation Council (Malaysia) Promote Mandarin Council (Singapore)
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 Min czh – Huizhou czo – Central Min gan – Gan hak – Hakka hsn – Xiang mnp – Min Bei nan – Min Nan wuu – Wu yue – Yue csp – Southern Pinghua cnp – Northern Pinghua och – Old Chinese ltc – Late Middle Chinese lzh – Classical Chinese
Glottolog	sini1245
Linguasphere	79-AAA
Map of the Chinese-speaking world.   Regions with a native Chinese-speaking majority.   Regions where Chinese is not native but an official or educational language.   Regions with significant Chinese-speaking minorities.
This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA.

Han language (general or spoken)
Simplified Chinese	汉语
Traditional Chinese	漢語
Literal meaning	Han people/dynasty’s language
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin Hànyǔ Wade–Giles Han4-yu3 Tongyong Pinyin Hàn-yǔ Yale Romanization Hàn-yǔ IPA [xân.ỳ] Wu Romanization hoe3 nyiu2 Hakka Romanization Hon Ngi Yue: Cantonese Yale Romanization hon yúh Jyutping Hon3 jyu5 Canton Romanization hon3 yü5 IPA Cantonese pronunciation: [hɔ̄ːn.jy̬ː] Southern Min Hokkien POJ Hàn-gí, Hàn-gú Eastern Min Fuzhou BUC Háng-ngṳ̄
Chinese text (especially written)
Chinese	中文
Literal meaning	Chinese («middle/central») text (or writing)
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin Zhōngwén Wade–Giles Chung1-wên2 Tongyong Pinyin jhong-wún Yale Romanization jūng-wén IPA [ʈʂʊ́ŋ.wə̌n] Wu Romanization tson1 ven1 Hakka Romanization Chung-Vun Yue: Cantonese Yale Romanization Jūng mán Jyutping Zung1 man4*2 Canton Romanization Zung1 men4*2 Southern Min Hokkien POJ Tiong-bûn Eastern Min Fuzhou BUC Dṳng-ùng
Han text (especially written and when distinguished from other languages of China)
Simplified Chinese	汉文
Traditional Chinese	漢文
Literal meaning	Han text (or writing)
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin Hànwén

Chinese^[c] (中文; Zhōngwén,^[d] especially when referring to written Chinese) is a group of languages spoken natively by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in Greater China. About 1.3 billion people (or approximately 16% of the world’s population) speak a variety of Chinese as their first language.^[1]

Chinese languages form the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages family. The spoken varieties of Chinese are usually considered by native speakers to be variants of a single language. However, their lack of mutual intelligibility means they are sometimes considered separate languages in a family.^[e] Investigation of the historical relationships among the varieties of Chinese is ongoing. Currently, most classifications posit 7 to 13 main regional groups based on phonetic developments from Middle Chinese, of which the most spoken by far is Mandarin (with about 800 million speakers, or 66%), followed by Min (75 million, e.g. Southern Min), Wu (74 million, e.g. Shanghainese), and Yue (68 million, e.g. Cantonese). These branches are unintelligible to each other, and many of their subgroups are unintelligible with the other varieties within the same branch (e.g. Southern Min). There are, however, transitional areas where varieties from different branches share enough features for some limited intelligibility, including New Xiang with Southwest Mandarin, Xuanzhou Wu with Lower Yangtze Mandarin, Jin with Central Plains Mandarin and certain divergent dialects of Hakka with Gan (though these are unintelligible with mainstream Hakka). All varieties of Chinese are tonal to at least some degree, and are largely analytic.

The earliest Chinese written records are Shang dynasty-era oracle bone inscriptions, which can be dated to 1250 BCE. The phonetic categories of Old Chinese can be reconstructed from the rhymes of ancient poetry. 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. Qieyun, a rime dictionary, recorded a compromise between the pronunciations of different regions. The royal courts of the Ming and early Qing dynasties operated using a koiné language (Guanhua) based on Nanjing dialect of Lower Yangtze Mandarin.

Standard Chinese (Standard Mandarin), based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin, was adopted in the 1930s and is now an official language of both the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of China (Taiwan), one of the four official languages of Singapore, and one of the six official languages of the United Nations. The written form, using the logograms known as Chinese characters, is shared by literate speakers of mutually unintelligible dialects. Since the 1950s, simplified Chinese characters have been promoted for use by the government of the People’s Republic of China, while Singapore officially adopted simplified characters in 1976. Traditional characters remain in use in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and other countries with significant overseas Chinese speaking communities such as Malaysia (which although adopted simplified characters as the de facto standard in the 1980s, traditional characters still remain in widespread use).

Classification[edit]

Linguists classify all varieties of Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family, together with Burmese, Tibetan and many other languages spoken in the Himalayas and the Southeast Asian Massif.^[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. Difficulties have included the great diversity of the languages, the lack of inflection in many of them, and the effects of language contact. In addition, many of the smaller languages are spoken in mountainous areas that are difficult to reach and are often also sensitive border zones.^[6] Without a secure reconstruction of proto-Sino-Tibetan, the higher-level structure of the family remains unclear.^[7] A top-level branching into Chinese and Tibeto-Burman languages is often assumed, but has not been convincingly demonstrated.^[8]

History[edit]

The first written records appeared over 3,000 years ago during the Shang dynasty. As the language evolved over this period, the various local varieties became mutually unintelligible. In reaction, central governments have repeatedly sought to promulgate a unified standard.^[9]

Old and Middle Chinese[edit]

The earliest examples of Chinese (Old Chinese) are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones from around 1250 BCE in the late Shang dynasty.^[10] The next attested stage came from inscriptions on bronze artifacts of the Western Zhou period (1046–771 BCE), the Classic of Poetry and portions of the Book of Documents and I Ching.^[11] Scholars have attempted to reconstruct the phonology of Old Chinese by comparing later varieties of Chinese with the rhyming practice of the Classic of Poetry and the phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters.^[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.^[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.^[14] Several derivational affixes have also been identified, but the language lacks inflection, and indicated grammatical relationships using word order and grammatical particles.^[15]

Middle Chinese was the language used during Northern and Southern dynasties and the Sui, Tang, and Song dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the Qieyun rime book (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by rhyme tables such as the Yunjing constructed by ancient Chinese philologists as a guide to the Qieyun system.^[16] These works define phonological categories, but with little hint of what sounds they represent.^[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.^[18] The resulting system is very complex, with a large number of consonants and vowels, but they are probably not all distinguished in any single dialect. Most linguists now believe it represents a diasystem encompassing 6th-century northern and southern standards for reading the classics.^[19]

Classical and literary forms[edit]

The relationship between spoken and written Chinese is rather complex («diglossia»). Its spoken varieties have evolved at different rates, while written Chinese itself has changed much less. Classical Chinese literature began in the Spring and Autumn period.

Rise of northern dialects[edit]

After the fall of the Northern Song dynasty and subsequent reign of the Jin (Jurchen) and Yuan (Mongol) dynasties in northern China, a common speech (now called Old Mandarin) developed based on the dialects of the North China Plain around the capital.^[20]
The Zhongyuan Yinyun (1324) was a dictionary that codified the rhyming conventions of new sanqu verse form in this language.^[21]
Together with the slightly later Menggu Ziyun, this dictionary describes a language with many of the features characteristic of modern Mandarin dialects.^[22]

Up to the early 20th century, most Chinese people only spoke their local variety.^[23]
Thus, as a practical measure, officials of the Ming and Qing dynasties carried out the administration of the empire using a common language based on Mandarin varieties, known as Guānhuà (官话/官話, literally «language of officials»).^[24]
For most of this period, this language was a koiné based on dialects spoken in the Nanjing area, though not identical to any single dialect.^[25]
By the middle of the 19th century, the Beijing dialect had become dominant and was essential for any business with the imperial court.^[26]

In the 1930s, a standard national language, Guóyǔ (国语/國語 ; «national language») was adopted. After much dispute between proponents of northern and southern dialects and an abortive attempt at an artificial pronunciation, the National Language Unification Commission finally settled on the Beijing dialect in 1932. The People’s Republic founded in 1949 retained this standard but renamed it pǔtōnghuà (普通话/普通話; «common speech»).^[27] The national language is now used in education, the media, and formal situations in both Mainland China and Taiwan.^[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.^[29]

Influence[edit]

Historically, the Chinese language has spread to its neighbors through a variety of means. 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. The Four Commanderies were established in northern Korea in the first century BCE, but disintegrated in the following centuries.^[30] Chinese Buddhism spread over East Asia between the 2nd and 5th centuries CE, and with it the study of scriptures and literature in Literary Chinese.^[31] Later Korea, Japan, and Vietnam developed strong central governments modeled on Chinese institutions, with Literary Chinese as the language of administration and scholarship, a position it would retain until the late 19th century in Korea and (to a lesser extent) Japan, and the early 20th century in Vietnam.^[32] Scholars from different lands could communicate, albeit only in writing, using Literary Chinese.^[33]

Although they used Chinese solely for written communication, each country had its own tradition of reading texts aloud, the so-called Sino-Xenic pronunciations. Chinese words with these pronunciations were also extensively imported into the Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese languages, and today comprise over half of their vocabularies.^[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.^[36]

Borrowed Chinese morphemes have been used extensively in all these languages to coin compound words for new concepts, in a similar way to the use of Latin and Ancient Greek roots in European languages.^[37] Many new compounds, or new meanings for old phrases, were created in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to name Western concepts and artifacts. These coinages, written in shared Chinese characters, have then been borrowed freely between languages. They have even been accepted into Chinese, a language usually resistant to loanwords, because their foreign origin was hidden by their written form. Often different compounds for the same concept were in circulation for some time before a winner emerged, and sometimes the final choice differed between countries.^[38] The proportion of vocabulary of Chinese origin thus tends to be greater in technical, abstract, or formal language. For example, in Japan, Sino-Japanese words account for about 35% of the words in entertainment magazines, over half the words in newspapers, and 60% of the words in science magazines.^[39]

Vietnam, Korea, and Japan each developed writing systems for their own languages, initially based on Chinese characters, but later replaced with the hangul alphabet for Korean and supplemented with kana syllabaries for Japanese, while Vietnamese continued to be written with the complex chữ nôm script. However, these were limited to popular literature until the late 19th century. Today Japanese is written with a composite script using both Chinese characters (kanji) and kana. Korean is written exclusively with hangul in North Korea (although knowledge of the supplementary Chinese characters — hanja — is still required), and hanja are increasingly rarely used in South Korea. As a result of former French colonization, Vietnamese switched to a Latin-based alphabet.

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).

Varieties[edit]

Jerry Norman estimated that there are hundreds of mutually unintelligible varieties of Chinese.^[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.^[42] Generally, mountainous South China exhibits 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 neighbors. For instance, Wuzhou is about 190 kilometres (120 mi) upstream from Guangzhou, but the Yue variety spoken there is more like that of Guangzhou than is that of Taishan, 95 kilometres (60 mi) southwest of Guangzhou and separated from it by several rivers.^[43] In parts of Fujian the speech of neighboring counties or even villages may be mutually unintelligible.^[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.^[45]
The vast majority of Chinese immigrants to North America up to the mid-20th century spoke the Taishan dialect, from a small coastal area southwest of Guangzhou.^[46]

Grouping[edit]

Local varieties of Chinese are conventionally classified into seven dialect groups, largely on the basis of the different evolution of Middle Chinese voiced initials:^[47][48]

• Mandarin, including Standard Chinese, Pekingese, Sichuanese, and also the Dungan language spoken in Central Asia
• Wu, including Shanghainese, Suzhounese, and Wenzhounese
• Gan
• Xiang
• Min, including Fuzhounese, Hainanese, Hokkien and Teochew
• Hakka
• Yue, including Cantonese and Taishanese

The classification of Li Rong, which is used in the Language Atlas of China (1987), distinguishes three further groups:^[40][49]

• Jin, previously included in Mandarin.
• Huizhou, previously included in Wu.
• Pinghua, previously included in Yue.

Some varieties remain unclassified, including Danzhou dialect (spoken in Danzhou, on Hainan Island), Waxianghua (spoken in western Hunan) and Shaozhou Tuhua (spoken in northern Guangdong).^[50]

Standard Chinese[edit]

Standard Chinese, often called Mandarin, is the official standard language of China, de facto official language of Taiwan, and one of the four official languages of Singapore (where it is called «Huáyŭ» 华语/華語 or Chinese). Standard Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect, the dialect of Mandarin as spoken in Beijing. The governments of both China and Taiwan intend for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. Therefore, it is used in government agencies, in the media, and as a language of instruction in schools.

In China and Taiwan, diglossia has been a common feature. For example, in addition to Standard Chinese, a resident of Shanghai might speak Shanghainese; and, if they grew up elsewhere, then they are also likely to be fluent in the particular dialect of that local area. A native of Guangzhou may speak both Cantonese and Standard Chinese. In addition to Mandarin, most Taiwanese also speak Taiwanese Hokkien (commonly «Taiwanese» 台語^[51][52]), Hakka, or an Austronesian language.^[53] 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.^[54]

Due to their traditional cultural ties to Guangdong province and colonial histories, Cantonese is used as the standard variant of Chinese in Hong Kong and Macau instead.

Nomenclature[edit]

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»).^[55] 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.^[41] Because varieties from different groups are not mutually intelligible, some scholars prefer to describe Wu and others as separate languages.^{[56][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.^[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,^[57] although others do not regard it as decisive,^{[58][59][60][61][62]} particularly when cultural factors interfere as they do with Chinese.^[63] As Campbell (2008) explains, linguists often ignore mutual intelligibility when varieties share intelligibility with a central variety (i.e. prestige variety, such as Standard Mandarin), as the issue requires some careful handling when mutual intelligibility is inconsistent with language identity.^[64] John DeFrancis argues that it is inappropriate to refer to Mandarin, Wu and so on as «dialects» because the mutual unintelligibility between them is too great. On the other hand, he also objects to considering them as separate languages, as it incorrectly implies a set of disruptive «religious, economic, political, and other differences» between speakers that exist, for example, between French Catholics and English Protestants in Canada, but not between speakers of Cantonese and Mandarin in China, owing to China’s near-uninterrupted history of centralized government.^[65]

Because of the difficulties involved in determining the difference between language and dialect, other terms have been proposed. These include vernacular,^[66] lect,^[67] regionalect,^[55] topolect,^[68] and variety.^[69]

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.^[70]

Phonology[edit]

Syllables in the Chinese languages have some unique characteristics. They are tightly related to the morphology and also to the characters of the writing system; and phonologically they are structured according to fixed rules.

The structure of each syllable consists of a 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. 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.

In Mandarin much more than in other spoken varieties, most syllables tend to be open syllables, meaning they have no coda (assuming that a final glide is not analyzed as a coda), but syllables that do have codas are restricted to nasals /m/, /n/, /ŋ/, the retroflex approximant /ɻ/, and voiceless stops /p/, /t/, /k/, or /ʔ/. Some varieties allow most of these codas, whereas others, such as Standard Chinese, are limited to only /n/, /ŋ/, and /ɻ/.

The number of sounds in the different spoken dialects varies, but in general there has been a tendency to a reduction in sounds from Middle Chinese. The Mandarin dialects in particular have experienced a dramatic decrease in sounds and so have far more multisyllabic words than most other spoken varieties. The total number of syllables in some varieties is therefore only about a thousand, including tonal variation, which is only about an eighth as many as English.^[f]

Tones[edit]

All varieties of spoken Chinese use tones to distinguish words.^[71] 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. 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 is the application of the four tones of Standard Chinese (along with the neutral tone) to the syllable ma. The tones are exemplified by the following five Chinese words:

Examples of Standard Mandarin tones

Characters	Pinyin	Pitch contour	Meaning
妈/媽	mā	high level	‘mother’
麻	má	high rising	‘hemp’
马/馬	mǎ	low falling-rising	‘horse’
骂/罵	mà	high falling	‘scold’
吗/嗎	ma	neutral	question particle

Standard Cantonese, in contrast, has six tones. Historically, finals that end in a stop consonant were considered to be «checked tones» and thus counted separately for a total of nine tones. However, they are considered to be duplicates in modern linguistics and are no longer counted as such:^[72]

Examples of Standard Cantonese tones

Characters	Jyutping	Yale	Pitch contour	Meaning
诗/詩	si1	sī	high level, high falling	‘poem’
史	si2	sí	high rising	‘history’
弒	si3	si	mid level	‘to assassinate’
时/時	si4	sìh	low falling	‘time’
市	si5	síh	low rising	‘market’
是	si6	sih	low level	‘yes’

Grammar[edit]

Chinese is often described as a «monosyllabic» language. However, this is only partially correct. It is largely accurate when describing Classical Chinese and Middle Chinese; in Classical Chinese, for example, perhaps 90% of words correspond to a single syllable and a single character. In the modern varieties, it is usually the case that a morpheme (unit of meaning) is a single syllable; in contrast, English has many multi-syllable morphemes, both bound and free, such as «seven», «elephant», «para-» and «-able».

Some of the conservative southern varieties of modern Chinese have largely monosyllabic words, especially among the more basic vocabulary. In modern Mandarin, however, most nouns, adjectives and verbs are largely disyllabic. A significant cause of this is phonological attrition. Sound change over time has steadily reduced the number of possible syllables. 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.^[f]

This phonological collapse has led to a corresponding increase in the number of homophones. As an example, the small Langenscheidt Pocket Chinese Dictionary^[73] lists six words that are commonly pronounced as shí (tone 2): 十 ‘ten’; 实/實 ‘real, actual’; 识/識 ‘know (a person), recognize’; 石 ‘stone’; 时/時 ‘time’; 食 ‘food, eat’. These were all pronounced differently in Early Middle Chinese; in William H. Baxter’s transcription they were dzyip, zyit, syik, dzyek, dzyi and zyik respectively. They are still pronounced differently in today’s Cantonese; in Jyutping they are sap9, sat9, sik7, sek9, si4, sik9. 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. As such, most of these words have been replaced (in speech, if not in writing) with a longer, less-ambiguous compound. 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. ‘actual-connection’); rènshi 认识/認識 (lit. ‘recognize-know’); shítou 石头/石頭 (lit. ‘stone-head’); shíjiān 时间/時間 (lit. ‘time-interval’); shíwù 食物 (lit. ‘foodstuff’). In each case, the homophone was disambiguated by adding another morpheme, typically either a synonym or a generic word of some sort (for example, ‘head’, ‘thing’), the purpose of which is 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 disambiguating syllable is generally dropped and the resulting word is still disyllabic. For example, shí 石 alone, not shítou 石头/石頭, appears in compounds meaning ‘stone-‘, for example, shígāo 石膏 ‘plaster’ (lit. ‘stone cream’), shíhuī 石灰 ‘lime’ (lit. ‘stone dust’), shíkū 石窟 ‘grotto’ (lit. ‘stone cave’), shíyīng 石英 ‘quartz’ (lit. ‘stone flower’), shíyóu 石油 ‘petroleum’ (lit. ‘stone oil’).

Most modern varieties of Chinese have the tendency to form new words through disyllabic, trisyllabic and tetra-character compounds. In some cases, monosyllabic words have become disyllabic without compounding, as in kūlong 窟窿 from kǒng 孔; this is especially common in Jin.

Chinese morphology is strictly bound to a set number of syllables with a fairly rigid construction. Although many of these single-syllable morphemes (zì, 字) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cí (词/詞), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cí (‘word’) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more.

For example:

• yún 云/雲 ‘cloud’
• hànbǎobāo, hànbǎo 汉堡包/漢堡包, 汉堡/漢堡 ‘hamburger’
• wǒ 我 ‘I, me’
• shǒuményuán 守门员/守門員 ‘goalkeeper’
• rén 人 ‘people, human, mankind’
• dìqiú 地球 ‘The Earth’
• shǎndiàn 闪电/閃電 ‘lightning’
• mèng 梦/夢 ‘dream’

All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphology—i.e., changes in form of a word—to indicate the word’s function in a sentence.^[74] 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).^[g]

They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. 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.

Chinese has a subject–verb–object word order, and like many other languages of East Asia, makes frequent use of the topic–comment construction to form sentences. Chinese also has an extensive system of classifiers and measure words, another trait shared with neighboring 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 dropping.

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 50,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are in use and only about 3,000 are frequently used in Chinese media and newspapers.^[75] However Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words. Because most Chinese words are made up of two or more characters, there are many more Chinese words than characters. A more accurate equivalent for a Chinese character is the morpheme, as characters represent the smallest grammatical units with individual meanings in the Chinese language.

Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and lexicalized phrases vary greatly. The Hanyu Da Zidian, a compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries for characters, including bone oracle versions. 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. The CC-CEDICT project (2010) contains 97,404 contemporary entries including idioms, technology terms and names of political figures, businesses and products. The 2009 version of the Webster’s Digital Chinese Dictionary (WDCD),^[76] based on CC-CEDICT, contains over 84,000 entries.

The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary, the 12-volume Hanyu Da Cidian, records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters and gives over 370,000 definitions. The 1999 revised Cihai, a multi-volume encyclopedic dictionary reference work, gives 122,836 vocabulary entry definitions under 19,485 Chinese characters, including proper names, phrases and common zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific and technical terms.

The 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.

Loanwords[edit]

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.

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».^[h]
Ancient words borrowed from along the Silk Road since Old Chinese include 葡萄 pútáo «grape», 石榴 shíliu/shíliú «pomegranate» and 狮子/獅子 shīzi «lion». Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including 佛 Fó «Buddha» and 菩萨/菩薩 Púsà «bodhisattva.» Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as 胡同 hútòng «hutong». Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as 葡萄 «grape,» generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or Pāli, the liturgical languages of North India. Words borrowed from the nomadic tribes of the Gobi, Mongolian or northeast regions generally have Altaic etymologies, such as 琵琶 pípá, the Chinese lute, or 酪 lào/luò «cheese» or «yogurt», but from exactly which source is not always clear.^[77]

Modern borrowings[edit]

Modern neologisms are primarily translated into Chinese in one of three ways: free translation (calque, or by meaning), phonetic translation (by sound), or a combination of the two. Today, it is much more common to use existing Chinese morphemes to coin new words to represent imported concepts, such as technical expressions and international scientific vocabulary. 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. For example, the word telephone was initially loaned phonetically as 德律风/德律風 (Shanghainese: télífon [təlɪfoŋ], Mandarin: délǜfēng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later 电话/電話 diànhuà (lit. «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). Other examples include 电视/電視 diànshì (lit. «electric vision») for television, 电脑/電腦 diànnǎo (lit. «electric brain») for computer; 手机/手機 shǒujī (lit. «hand machine») for mobile phone, 蓝牙/藍牙 lányá (lit. «blue tooth») for Bluetooth, and 网志/網誌 wǎngzhì (lit. «internet logbook») for blog in Hong Kong and Macau Cantonese. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as 汉堡包/漢堡包 hànbǎobāo (漢堡 hànbǎo «Hamburg» + 包 bāo «bun») for «hamburger». Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes (phono-semantic matching), such as 马利奥/馬利奧 Mǎlì’ào for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example 奔腾/奔騰 bēnténg (lit. «dashing-leaping») for Pentium and 赛百味/賽百味 Sàibǎiwèi (lit. «better-than hundred tastes») for Subway restaurants.

Foreign words, mainly proper nouns, continue to enter the Chinese language by transcription according to their pronunciations. This is done by employing Chinese characters with similar pronunciations. For example, «Israel» becomes 以色列 Yǐsèliè, «Paris» becomes 巴黎 Bālí. A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including 沙发/沙發 shāfā «sofa», 马达/馬達 mǎdá «motor», 幽默 yōumò «humor», 逻辑/邏輯 luóji/luójí «logic», 时髦/時髦 shímáo «smart, fashionable», and 歇斯底里 xiēsīdǐlǐ «hysterics». The bulk of these words were originally coined in the Shanghai dialect during the early 20th century and were later loaned into Mandarin, hence their pronunciations in Mandarin may be quite off from the English. For example, 沙发/沙發 «sofa» and 马达/馬達 «motor» in Shanghainese sound more like their English counterparts. Cantonese differs from Mandarin with some transliterations, such as 梳化 so¹ faa^3*2 «sofa» and 摩打 mo¹ daa² «motor».

Western foreign words representing Western concepts have influenced Chinese since the 20th century through transcription. From French came 芭蕾 bālěi «ballet» and 香槟/香檳 xiāngbīn, «champagne»; from Italian, 咖啡 kāfēi «caffè». English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed, such as 高尔夫/高爾夫 gāoěrfū «golf» and the above-mentioned 沙发/沙發 shāfā «sofa». Later, the United States soft influences gave rise to 迪斯科 dísikē/dísīkē «disco», 可乐/可樂 kělè «cola», and 迷你 mínǐ «mini [skirt]». Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English, such as 卡通 kaa¹ tung1 «cartoon», 基佬 gei¹ lou² «gay people», 的士 dik¹ si^6*2 «taxi», and 巴士 baa¹ si^6*2 «bus». With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, for example, 粉丝/粉絲 fěnsī «fans», 黑客 hēikè «hacker» (lit. «black guest»), and 博客 bókè «blog». In Taiwan, some of these transliterations are different, such as 駭客 hàikè for «hacker» and 部落格 bùluògé for «blog» (lit. «interconnected tribes»).

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. «lettered words») spelled with letters from the English alphabet. This has appeared in magazines, newspapers, on web sites, and on TV: 三G手机/三G手機 «3rd generation cell phones» (三 sān «three» + G «generation» + 手机/手機 shǒujī «mobile phones»), IT界 «IT circles» (IT «information technology» + 界 jiè «industry»), HSK (Hànyǔ Shuǐpíng Kǎoshì, 汉语水平考试/漢語水平考試), GB (Guóbiāo, 国标/國標), CIF价/CIF價 (CIF «Cost, Insurance, Freight» + 价/價 jià «price»), e家庭 «e-home» (e «electronic» + 家庭 jiātíng «home»), Chinese: W时代/Chinese: W時代 «wireless era» (W «wireless» + 时代/時代 shídài «era»), TV族 «TV watchers» (TV «television» + 族 zú «social group; clan»), 后РС时代/後PC時代 «post-PC era» (后/後 hòu «after/post-» + PC «personal computer» + 时代/時代), 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 concepts and inventions into wasei-kango (和製漢語, lit. «Japanese-made Chinese»), and many of these words have been re-loaned into modern Chinese. Other terms were coined by the Japanese by giving new senses to existing Chinese terms or by referring to expressions used in classical Chinese literature. For example, 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. As a result, these terms are virtually indistinguishable from native Chinese words: indeed, there is some dispute over some of these terms as to whether the Japanese or Chinese coined them first. As a result of this loaning, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese share a corpus of linguistic terms describing modern terminology, paralleling the similar corpus of terms built from Greco-Latin and shared among European languages.

Writing system[edit]

The Chinese orthography centers on Chinese characters, which are written within imaginary square blocks, traditionally arranged in vertical columns, read from top to bottom down a column, and right to left across columns, despite alternative arrangement with rows of characters from left to right within a row and from top to bottom across rows (like English and other Western writing systems) having become more popular since the 20th century.^[78] Chinese characters denote morphemes independent of phonetic variation in different languages. Thus the character 一 («one») is uttered yī in Standard Chinese, yat¹ in Cantonese and it in Hokkien (a form of Min).

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. This replaced the old writing language standard of Literary Chinese before the 20th century.^[79] However, vocabularies from different Chinese-speaking areas have diverged, and the divergence can be observed in written Chinese.^[80]

Meanwhile, colloquial forms of various Chinese language variants have also been written down by their users, especially in less formal settings. The most prominent example of this is the written colloquial form of Cantonese, which has become quite popular in tabloids, instant messaging applications, and on the internet amongst Hong-Kongers and Cantonese-speakers elsewhere.^[81]

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, 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.

The Chinese had no uniform phonetic transcription system for most of its speakers until the mid-20th century, although enunciation patterns were recorded in early rime books and dictionaries. 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 missionaries resulted in some Latin character transcription/writing systems, based on various variants of Chinese languages. Some of these Latin character based systems are still being used to write various Chinese variants in the modern era.^[82]

In Hunan, women in certain areas write their local Chinese language variant in Nü Shu, a syllabary derived from Chinese characters. The Dungan language, considered by many a dialect 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 Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Russia; some of the related Hui people also speak the language and live mainly in China.

Chinese characters[edit]

Each Chinese character represents a monosyllabic Chinese word or morpheme. 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. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, including many of the simplest characters, such as rén 人 (human), rì 日 (sun), shān 山 (mountain; hill), shuǐ 水 (water). 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). Almost all characters created since have been made using this format. The 18th-century Kangxi Dictionary recognized 214 radicals.

Modern characters are styled after the regular script. Various other written styles are also used in Chinese calligraphy, including seal script, cursive script and clerical script. Calligraphy artists can write in traditional and simplified characters, but they tend to use traditional characters for traditional art.

There are currently two systems for Chinese characters. The 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. The Simplified Chinese character system, introduced by the People’s Republic of China in 1954 to promote mass literacy, simplifies most complex traditional glyphs to fewer strokes, many to common cursive shorthand variants. Singapore, which has a large Chinese community, was the second nation to officially adopt simplified characters, although it has also become the de facto standard for younger ethnic Chinese in Malaysia.

The Internet provides the platform to practice reading these alternative systems, be it traditional or simplified. Most Chinese users in the modern era are capable of, although not necessarily comfortable with, reading (but not writing) the alternative system, through experience and guesswork.^[83]

A well-educated Chinese reader today recognizes approximately 4,000 to 6,000 characters; approximately 3,000 characters are required to read a Mainland newspaper. The PRC government defines literacy amongst workers as a knowledge of 2,000 characters, though this would be only functional literacy. School-children typically learn around 2,000 characters whereas scholars may memorize up to 10,000.^[84] A large unabridged dictionary, like the Kangxi Dictionary, contains over 40,000 characters, including obscure, variant, rare, and archaic characters; fewer than a quarter of these characters are now commonly used.

Romanization[edit]

Romanization is the process of transcribing a language into the Latin script. There are many systems of romanization for the Chinese varieties, due to the lack of a native phonetic transcription until modern times. Chinese is first known to have been written in Latin characters by Western Christian missionaries in the 16th century.

Today the most common romanization standard for Standard Mandarin is Hanyu Pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People’s Republic of China, and later adopted by Singapore and Taiwan. Pinyin is almost universally employed now for teaching standard spoken Chinese in schools and universities across the Americas, 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 represents, with the Chinese character alongside.

The second-most common romanization system, the Wade–Giles, 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 is largely an Anglicization, it may be particularly helpful for beginner Chinese speakers of an English-speaking background. Wade–Giles was found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until 2009 was widely used in Taiwan.

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. Thus, most Western readers will be much more familiar with Beijing than they will be with Běijīng (pinyin), and with Taipei than T’ai²-pei³ (Wade–Giles). This simplification presents syllables as homophones which really are none, and therefore exaggerates the number of homophones almost by a factor of four.

Here are a few examples of Hanyu Pinyin and Wade–Giles, for comparison:

Mandarin Romanization Comparison

Characters	Wade–Giles	Pinyin	Meaning/Notes
中国/中國	Chung¹-kuo²	Zhōngguó	China
台湾/台灣	T’ai²-wan¹	Táiwān	Taiwan
北京	Pei³-ching¹	Běijīng	Beijing
台北/臺北	T’ai²-pei³	Táiběi	Taipei
孫文	Sun¹-wên²	Sūn Wén	Sun Yat-sen
毛泽东/毛澤東	Mao² Tse²-tung¹	Máo Zédōng	Mao Zedong, Former Communist Chinese leader
蒋介石/蔣介石	Chiang³ Chieh⁴-shih²	Jiǎng Jièshí	Chiang Kai-shek, Former Nationalist Chinese leader
孔子	K’ung³ Tsu³	Kǒngzǐ	Confucius

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.

Other phonetic transcriptions[edit]

Chinese varieties have been phonetically transcribed into many other writing systems over the centuries. The ‘Phags-pa script, for example, has been very helpful in reconstructing the pronunciations of premodern forms of Chinese.

Zhuyin (colloquially bopomofo), a semi-syllabary is still widely used in Taiwan’s elementary schools to aid standard pronunciation. Although zhuyin 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 can 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 widespread is the Palladius system.

As a foreign language[edit]

With the growing importance and influence of China’s economy globally, Mandarin instruction has been gaining popularity in schools throughout East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Western world.^[85]

Besides Mandarin, Cantonese is the only other Chinese language that is widely taught as a foreign language, largely due to the economic and cultural influence of Hong Kong and its widespread usage among significant Overseas Chinese communities.^[86]

In 1991 there were 2,000 foreign learners taking China’s official Chinese Proficiency Test (also known as HSK, comparable to the English Cambridge Certificate), then the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660 in 2005^[87] and 750,000 in 2010.^[88]

See also[edit]

• 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
• Protection of the Varieties of Chinese

Notes[edit]

References[edit]

Citations[edit]

Sources[edit]

Further reading[edit]

• Hannas, William C. (1997), Asia’s Orthographic Dilemma, University of Hawaii Press, 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, University of California, Berkeley, ISBN 978-1-55729-071-7.
• R. L. G. «Language borrowing Why so little Chinese in English?» The Economist. 6 June 2013.
• Huang, Cheng-Teh James; Li, Yen-Hui Audrey; Li, Yafei (2009), The Syntax of Chinese, Cambridge Syntax Guides, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, doi:10.1017/CBO9781139166935, ISBN 978-0-521-59958-0.

External links[edit]

• Classical Chinese texts – Chinese Text Project
• Marjorie Chan’s ChinaLinks Archived 20 July 2011 at the Wayback Machine at the Ohio State University with hundreds of links to Chinese related web pages

Китайские язык целиком состоит из иероглифов. Способ составления звуков и отдельных слов радикально отличается от того, которым пользуется большинство развитых стран, алфавитного.

Изучать основные китайские иероглифы начинает все больше людей. Это связано с тем, что Китай становится все более влиятельной страной на экономической карте, и иметь в штате сотрудника, владеющего столь сложным навыком, хочет много компаний.

Полное собрание всех возможных иероглифов, не знает ни один человек. Их насчитывается почти сто тысяч штук. Но для комфортного общения или чтения газет необходимо запомнить только базовые.

Возможно ли быстро запомнить китайские иероглифы

Изучение, запоминание большого количества китайских иероглифов для начинающих дело не простое. Главной сложностью является отличная языковая система. Если не расти в среде где используется такая методика построения слов и предложений, будет непросто к ней привыкнуть.

Но нужно учитывать то, что более миллиарда людей смогли освоить ее. Главное, верить в свои силы.

Что нужно помнить при запоминании:

• Понимание системы языка, его основ, происхождения облегчит задачу.
• После запоминания определенного количества, следующие иероглифы будут учиться легче.

Изучая этот язык, нужно помнить, что только регулярные и долгие занятия принесут существенные плоды.

Список самых легких

Каждый символ в китайской письменности имеет свое значение. Случается, что иероглиф отражает то значение, на которое он похож. Некоторые знаки при помощи обычной иллюстрации отражают всё своё значение.

Но это самые простые символы, и их минимальное количество. Не нужно думать, что таким знакам нужно уделять меньше времени при изучении. Ведь то, что потребовало минимальных усилий, может не сработать в какой-то момент. Далее будут рассмотрены десять основных символов китайской письменности.

Yī

Данный символ изображается в виде горизонтальной палочки, которая имеет длину одной буквы. Такой простой символ должен и обозначать что-то простое. Так и есть, стоящий отдельно от других, он означает цифру один. Его легко запомнить путем понимания способа китайского счета – одна палочка означает один, а две палочки два и так далее.

Знать значение символов, без понимания их работы, в предложении будет недостаточно. Чтобы простым способом объяснить метод построения слов можно привести пример: если после знака «десять», рядом написать «один», то получится одиннадцать. Таким же образом составляется «тринадцать».

Rén

Очень распространенный символ. Напоминает детский рисунок шалаша, но на деле имеет значение «Человек». Чтобы легче его запомнить, можно представить, что в верхней части есть голова, а ниспадающие боковые черточки оборудованы башмаками.

Пишется он просто. Сначала ручкой сверху влево идет одна дуга, потом сверху идет вправо.

Если использовать последовательно «один», «указатель» и «человек», получится значение «один человек».

Rù

Очень похож с предыдущим внешне, но сильно отличается по значению. Если прибавить к знаку «человек» небольшую черту от верхнего края влево, значение изменится на «входить».

Легче запомнить можно путем визуализации. Он похож на что-то острое, что проникает в дерево. Пишется он точно так же, как и «человек», только сначала обозначается черточка, а потом боковые дуги.

Rì

Уже тяжелее визуализировать, потому, что раньше этот иероглиф писался по-другому. Когда-то это был круг с точкой посередине. Значение было легко запоминающееся и очевидное. Самый важный круг в жизни человека, это какой? Правильно, солнечный, поэтому значение у этого символа было «солнце», или время суток, когда оно было видно «день». Современный вид был изменен на квадратик с небольшой чертой. Пишется он просто:

• Первая вертикальная линия левая.
• Вторая горизонтальная верхняя.
• Затем вертикальная правая.
• В конце дорисовывается средняя и нижняя горизонтальная линия.

Shān

Уже более простой символ, который похож на трезубец. Еще он похож на три верхушки гор. Поэтому его значение «гора». Очень простой в написании, запоминании, он пишется следующим образом:

• Вертикальная левая, горизонтальная нижняя линии образуют полочку.
• На нее ставятся поочередно самая большая и такая же, как первая линия.

Kǒu

Иероглиф в виде пустого квадрата. Многие когда его видят, думают, что у компьютера просто драйвера не могут показать данный знак. На мониторе он выглядит как ошибка в программном коде, но его создатели и не думали, что возникнет такая проблема. Означает он «вход», «кита»,«список» или «рот». Пишется он на бумаге так же как и солнце, только без средней линии. Сочетание «человека» и «списка» образует «населения». Логику понять тяжело, особенно если не знать предысторию.

Zhōng

Все больше уходят создатели от идеи простоты и понятливости. Данный символ может в зависимости от контекста иметь значение «центр», «внутренность» и «середина». По сути, если представить объемную модель этого символа, можно увидеть плоскость, которая пронизывается вертикальной чертой посередине. Выглядит он как горизонтальный прямоугольник, центр которого пересекает прямая линия.

Hǔo

Ну, здесь уже можно особо не включать воображение, чтобы увидеть в этом китайском иероглифе «огонь». Сначала может показаться, что это «человек» машущий появившимися ручками, но нет. Пишется он на бумаге так же как и «человек», но первыми нужно обозначить языки пламени, которые окутывают его со всех сторон. Если записать последовательно «огонь» и «гору» получиться «вулкан».

Nǚ

Сложный в написании китайский символ. Он обозначает «женщину». Но, чтобы представить ее нужно напрячься. Он задумывался как, дама, которая слегка склонила голову. Сначала нужно написать верхнюю линию и левую ногу, затем пересекающую ее и правую ногу. Чтобы указать на то, что речь идет именно о человеческой женщине, нужно добавить символ «человек».

Mén

Выглядит символ как дверь в старых ковбойских салунах. Китайцы тоже так подумали и решили обозначить им дверь. Пишется он следующим образом:

• Сначала длинные вертикальные линии.
• Затем 6 коротких горизонтальных.
• А после две вертикальные.

Таблица китайских радикалов

Китайская письменность иероглифического типа имеет несколько отличий от стандартного способа составления слов, которые нужно запоминать. Радикалы, так же как и буквы могут быть частью одного слова. Это простые линии, которые сами по себе несут определенный смысл, но их сочетание или добавление в другие символы позволяет составлять новые слова. Если правильно пользоваться радикалами, их также иногда называют ключами, можно легко запоминать иероглифы, ориентироваться в китайских словарях и таблицах, при поиске слова.

Скачать таблицу китайских радикалов

Сколько всего существует иероглифов

Если учитывать устаревшие, которые используются для чтения древних книг, специальные и новые, их более 100 000 штук. Выучить все китайские иероглифы, которые есть, поистине величайший подвиг. Хорошо, что этого делать не нужно.

Чтобы разговаривать с китайцами и понимать суть их теле и радиопередач достаточно 500 штук. Если выучить одну тысячу, то 90% всех газет будет понятно. Знание 2500 позволит читать 99% беллетристической литературы. Чтобы сдать экзамен на знание языка, придется выучить 3000 символов.

Структура символов

У всего есть основа, поняв которую можно с легкостью ориентироваться в незнакомом материале. Китайские иероглифы имеют своеобразные черты, по которым они могут разделяться на группы. При знакомстве, это просто набор хаотично расставленных палочек и черточек, но на самом деле, это не так.

Черты

Черты, из которых состоит иероглиф, это и есть виды палочек и черточек, они не имеют самостоятельного смысла. Это способ разделить существующие слова по их внешнему виду и стилю написания. Нужно знать, что любое количество иероглифов может состоять только из четырех типов черт, таких как:

• Простые. Линии, точки.
• Кривые. Черты, содержащие крюки.
• Сложные. Ломанные или закрученные линии со сложной конфигурацией.
• Сложные с крюком.

Графемы и ключи

Графемы имеют то же значение, что и радикалы. Это простейшие печатные знаки, у которых только одно принципиальное значение. Их используют для составления лексически сложных слов. Это самые простые слова, ими обозначаются предметы природы или базовые понятия. Они могут содержать разное количество черт.

Сложные знаки

Для составления сложных китайских иероглифов используется сочетание нескольких графем. Способов составления таких слов два, первый это идеографический, а второй фоноидеографический. Чтобы понять в чём разница нужно остановиться поподробнее на них.

Идеографический способ

Слова, составленные данным способом, содержат несколько печатных графем, сочетание значений которых образует новое понятие. Стоит отметить, что сочетание графем и радикалов не влияет на произношение слова. В современном китайском словаре примерно десятая часть самостоятельных слов является идеографемами.

Фоноидеографический способ

Этот тип иероглифа содержит два типа ключей. Первый указывает на семантику слова, и конкретизирует понятие о предмете. Второй указывает на произношение слова. Таких знаков более 80% в китайском языке.

Способы быстро запомнить написание

Не существует определенного рецепта, по которому можно будет легко запомнить сразу много символов. Некоторые из них настолько сложны в написании, что на заучивание одного может уйти неделя. Но знание основ составления графем и черт позволит быстрее ориентироваться.

Нужно учить правила иероглифики, применяя фантазию и воображение. Если каждый символ сопоставить с предметом, который он обозначает, можно упростить процесс зубрежки.

Как читать

Особенность китайских иероглифов, это не привязанность написания с произношением и чтением. Даже зная фонетический ключ, можно не всегда правильно произносить отдельные слова. Сложность также вызывает существование омофонимов. Это слова, которые китайцы пишут по-разному, они имеют разное значение, но звучат одинаково. Из-за их существования возникают некоторые сложности при правильном переводе устной речи.

Легко ли учить японские иероглифы после китайских

Свои истоки японский язык берет из китайского. Это немного видоизмененные знаки, которые также содержат графемы и черты. Отличительной чертой японского языка является наличие алфавита, катаканы, хироганы. При желании можно все слова и предложения писать полностью ими, а можно использовать для этого иероглифы кангдзи. Если человек изучил большое количество китайских иероглифов, ему будет проще, чем тому, кто первый раз столкнулся с таким стилем письма. Но загвоздка в том, что сами иероглифы могут быть написаны одинаковы, но вот значение у них другое.

Заключение

Китайский язык — это полезный инструмент для каждого делового человека. Если учитывать, что почти каждый пятый человек на земле китаец, то можно назвать его одним из самых распространенных.

Чтобы облегчить его изучение, нужно совмещать зубрежку слов и учить правила иероглифики, с пониманием, чем руководствовались создатели данного слова. Будет полезно изучить историю страны и ее культурное наследие.

В языках большинства стран слова составляются на базе алфавита. Китайский вариант — иероглифы. Именно с их изучения принято начинать освоение речи и письменности. Не существует людей, знающих все подобные символы, так как их общее число достигает 100000. Нужно лишь запомнить основные, чтобы овладеть навыками общения и чтения. Сами китайские иероглифы и то, как читать их, относят к главным сложностям процесса. Освоение любого учебного материала предполагает знакомство с принципами, на которых он основан, формирование подхода, включающего понимание.

Изучаем китайский язык с нуля: иероглифика

Система письменности, состоящая из специфических символов, общепринята в Китае на протяжении трех с половиной тысяч лет, если не более. Во всем мире данный порядок может быть устроен по одному из двух способов.

1. Фонетический, где с помощью знаков записывают звучание языковых единиц, собранных в алфавит.
2. Иероглифический тип письма. Символами записывается лексическое значение единиц речи: слов, слогов, отражающее знание о предмете. К подобной разновидности относится китайская письменность.

Второй тип включает гораздо больше элементов, чем алфавит, состоящий из трех десятков букв. Каждая морфема или знаковый слог в китайском языке обозначается отдельным символом. Основной трудностью для изучающих выступает необходимость запоминания большого числа символов. Также требуется освоить, как надо писать китайские иероглифы, читать, произносить с учетом тона. Большинство иероглифов весьма сложны по структуре. Исторически система развилась из пиктографии или рисуночного письма, когда знаками обозначались предметы, смысловые понятия.

Подобную письменность по праву считают уникальной, весьма отличной от алфавитного типа. «Китайская грамота» отличается целым рядом особенностей. Например:

• вместо словесного ударения используются тоны, с помощью которых различается смысл, акцент делается лишь на слоге в рамках всей фразы;
• важен порядок слов, заменяющий падежи;
• применяются служебные символы, немногочисленные, но помогающие выразить мысль, намерение.
• во многих случаях считается излишним применять понятие пола к предметам или числа;
• один знак может читаться по-разному, что удобно для изъяснения, но трудоемко для освоения.

Попытки перехода на фонетическое письмо, предпринятые после образования КНР, окончились неудачей. Китайцам трудно пользоваться алфавитом из букв, лишенных значения по отдельности. Для успешного овладения языковыми навыками нужно научиться универсальному видению, свойственному любому средству общения в мире. Постижение лексики, грамматики, фонетики должно подчиняться цели: нормально выразить то, что мы осмысленно хотим сказать или написать по ситуации. А также понять собеседника.

Сколько всего существует иероглифов

У китайского языка слоговая структура. Количество слогов (морфем) ограничено, чуть больше 400. Каждому соответствует иероглиф. Подобными схематическими начертаниями также обозначаются слова. При произношении значение определяется не только звуком, но и тоном. Общее число символов весьма велико, а именно:

• включив в список все новые и специальные знаки, а также те, с помощью которых читают старинные книги, можно получить около 10 тысяч иероглифов;
• для сдачи экзамена по китайскому языку необходимо освоить 3000;
• 2500 символов в словарном запасе позволит читать литературу;
• зная 500 иероглифов, можно смотреть телевизионные передачи на китайском и разговаривать;
• с помощью 1000 читают газеты.

Сейчас в письме насчитывается около 2500 популярных и 1000 менее распространенных иероглифов. Обычный современный типографский шрифт из 700 знаков именуют «сунским письмом» (графика периода династии Сун). «Большой китайско-русский словарь» включает 40000 символов, а толковый — почти 48000.

Возможно ли быстро запомнить китайские иероглифы

Не столь просто новичку освоить большое количество знаков письменности с особенным методом построения слов и предложений. Но множество людей справилось с проблемами, изучая китайский язык и иероглифы. Чтобы облегчить задачу запоминания, потребуется следующее:

• понимание системы, основ и происхождения языка;
• нужно освоить определенное число ключевых иероглифов, чтобы процесс изучения следующих символов упростится;
• лишь регулярные систематические занятия, упорство принесут результаты.

Не будет достаточным выучить какое-то количество иероглифов, чтобы понимать смысл прочитанного. Необходимо также знать их сочетания и составляющиеся из символов слова.

Таблица китайских радикалов

В иероглифе присутствует графическая компонента, под которой он значится в словаре. Подобные элементы именуются ключами или радикалами. Они могут представлять собой отдельное слово или быть частью усложненного символа. Это система, дающая возможность понять любой иероглиф. А также подсказка, помогающая освоить правила написания, чтения. Наиболее популярная таблица радикалов состоит из 214 знаков, древний словарь включает 540. Ключи иначе называются простыми иероглифами, входящими в состав сложных языковых единиц. Они являются заголовками разделов словарей. Таблица помогает освоить китайские иероглифы, являясь аналогом алфавита. В иероглифе содержится лишь один ключ, но бывает несколько графем. Изучение радикалов — первый шаг для обучающегося, обязательная задача.

Все графемы разделяют на три типа.

1. Радикал или ключ с законченным смыслом, способный использоваться отдельно, состоящий из одной или нескольких черт.
2. Фонетик, не несущий смысла. Он лишь произносится, помогает озвучить весь символ, хотя не определяет тон. Многочисленные подобные знаки лучше запоминать вместе с самими иероглифами.
3. Графема третьего типа не наделяется смыслом и произношением, дополняет речевую единицу. В настоящее время все реже используется.

В таблицу радикалы сведены для удобства, располагаясь по числу линий, из которых состоят (до 17). Там же содержится транскрипция и расшифровка. Выученные ключи облегчают постижение сложных иероглифов, включающих много черт.

Структура символов

Ряд своеобразных штрихов позволяют разделить китайские иероглифы на группы. Написание символов подчиняется закономерностям. Есть базовые элементы — черты, составляющие графему. Последних в составе иероглифа присутствуют несколько, они формируют более сложную конструкцию. Одна из них является радикалом, ориентирующим поиск в словаре. Второй задачей после освоения таблицы ключей является вырабатывание способности усматривать и выделять эти компоненты. То есть — правильно расшифровывать иероглифы. Постепенно появится навык понимания смысла символа по имеющимся в составе графемам.

Черты

Основные штрихи — простейшие части символов. Иероглиф составляется из палочек и черточек, которые сами по себе не наделяются смыслом. Существует лишь четыре типа линий:

• простые, в том числе точки;
• кривые с крючком;
• со сложной конфигурацией: ломаные, закрученные;
• сложные с крючком.

Есть и иные классификации. Установлен строгий порядок написания черт. К примеру, сначала пишется горизонтальная, затем вертикальная линия. Первой вычерчивается верхняя, а также та, что посередине, после чего добавляются штрихи с обеих сторон от нее. В 60 годах 20 века производилось упрощение языка. Черты распространенных китайских иероглифов уменьшались по количеству.

Графемы и ключи

Радикалы являются простейшими знаками, имеющими лишь одно значение. Из них составляют понятия, сложные по части лексики, но тоже представляющие собой лишь основу. То есть — обозначения предметов, явлений природы, окружающего мира. Например: небо, солнце, женщина, ребенок. Составление графем, наделенных устойчивым лексическим смыслом, производится из штрихов. Это самые древние компоненты языка, десятая часть распространенных иероглифов. Ключи (радикалы) — основные знаки из черт и графем, стандартом является перечень из 214 элементов.

Сложные знаки

Более замысловатые иероглифы, слова составляются двумя путями. Это идеографический и фоноидеографический способы. Такие символы включают несколько графем в сочетании. Чтобы их понять, потребуется подробное рассмотрение.

Идеографический способ

Слово составляется из нескольких графем, при сочетании значений которых образуется понятие. Результирующая идеограмма читается практически без связи со смыслом входящих в нее элементов, хотя производится от семантики, содержания этих единиц. В языке присутствует примерно 10% идеографических знаков. Например, символы, обозначающие женщину и ребенка, совместно образуют понятие «хорошо». При сложении знаков солнца и луны получается идеограмма «понимание». Толпа прописывается как три человека, а лес обозначается столькими же символами дерева.

Фоноидеографический способ

Иероглифами такого вида являются знаки, содержащие два ключа. Один из них, семантический множитель, указывает на смысл, делает конкретным понятие. Это также иероглифический ключ, относящий символ к той или иной группе. Другой, фонетик, отвечает за произношение, чтение. Например, при сочетании символов «женщина» и «лошадь» получается слово «мама». Подобных фоноидеограмм в языке 80%.

Способы быстро запомнить написание

Иногда приходится затрачивать много времени на разучивание одного иероглифа. Ведь некоторые знаки весьма сложно написать. Сориентироваться поможет знание основных принципов составления черт и графем. Правописание освоится быстрее, если процесс сопровождается освоением правил. Будет легче понять, как учить китайские иероглифы для всех начинающих, если осознать наличие четкой структуры символов без случайных компонентов. К примеру:

• происхождение графем — упрощение и видоизменение старинных абстрактных рисунков, поэтому рекомендуется применить воображение и фантазию, позволяющую сопоставить каждый знак с обозначаемым предметом;
• не следует экономить время на многократном прописывании ключей ручкой или мягким карандашом;
• необходимо запомнить правильный порядок черт;
• для освоения идеограмм и фоноидеограмм иногда не лишним будет придумать историю, вытекающую из смысловых значений элементов с множеством штрихов.

Разбор сложных знаков помогает приобщиться к культуре и философии Китая.

Как читать

Особенность иероглифов в том, что написание практически не связано с чтением и произношением. Не так просто одолеть значительное их количество, определенный метод для запоминания отсутствует. Учим символы зубрежкой, принимая во внимание ряд рекомендаций для ускорения:

• знание ключей по таблице поможет понять смысл нового иероглифа с первого взгляда, разобрать его на графемы;
• использование фантазии делает процесс творческим, тем более, что печатные знаки происходят от старинных рисунков-пиктограмм;
• большинство символов являются фонографическими, поэтому рекомендуется изучить фонетики, как их элементы, обратившись к специальной таблице.

Проверенным приемом для разучивания является развешивание бумажек с иероглифами по всему дому. Прописанные символы надо проговаривать, а после освоения заменять на новые. Потребуется и практика, например, чтение со словарем.

Легко ли учить японские иероглифы после китайских

Аналогичная система речи и письменности существует в ряде других стран, попавших под китайское влияние. Именно такое происхождение имеет японский язык, включающий несколько видоизмененные иероглифы из черт и графем. Наряду с такой системой письма существуют слоговые азбуки, называемые катакана и хирогана. Смешанный порядок дополняется латинскими буквами, арабскими цифрами. Иероглифика японская и китайская часто имеет сходство в одинаковом или похожем написании речевых единиц. Но их значение не всегда точно соответствует. Хотя процесс изучения второго похожего языка значительно упрощается, заново разучивать символы все-таки нужно.

Деловым людям весьма пригодится освоение иероглифов в качестве полезного инструмента. Ведь почти каждый пятый житель планеты является носителем китайского языка. Облегчить процесс помогут методы, связанные не с одной лишь зубрежкой. Потребуется понимание правил.