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How the Language Works Unlike in English, where words are composed of letters, written Chinese words are made up of characters. Most words are composed of two characters, but words are commonly made up of one, three, four or more. Each character represents a syllable and tone for a spoken Chinese language (except for Chinese languages that have no tones like Shanghainese). Contrary to popular belief, a character by itself does not necessarily have any meaning. Often, though, characters have associated meanings as with prefixes, roots or suffixes in English. Like in English, context greatly affects the meaning and pronunciation of a written Chinese word and character. Context and Meaning The character 中 can be used in a number of different words with various meanings. 中文 (zhongwen) is the Chinese word for "Chinese". 中 is associated with China in this context. The word 中国 (zhongguo) is the Chinese word for "China" because it was the "central kingdom." A 中心 (zhongxin) is a center (i.e. a health center). 中美 (zhongmei) means Sino-American, but 中美洲 (zhongmeizhou) is Central America. So, we can see that 中 is associated with both China and being in the middle of something. However, there are more variations. When 中 is placed at the end of a prepositional phrase, it can mean "during" or "within." When used as a verb, it is associated with hitting as with 中断 (zhongduan, to terminate) or 中毒 (zhongdu, to get poisoned). Thus, it is clear to see that 中 by itself has little meaning. Characters have an associated meaning that context heavily affects. I don't think this is correct because 断 means "cut" and 中断 literally means cut/terminate (in the middle). And 毒 means "poison" and 中毒 literally means to put poison into(中) something, thus it means "poisoned" Other characters have no associated meaning by themselves. For instance, 可 (ke) has no clear meaning. It needs to be used in concert with other characters to produce any meaning at all. I think 可 means "but", it can be followed by a sentence/clause or a word, 可是 also means "but", which is usually followed by a sentence/clause Additional characters have no meaning or shed their meaning because they are used for names. 布什 (Bushi) is George W. Bush and has no association to cloth which 布 represents. Context and Pronunciation When characters are applied to a specific Chinese language (i.e. Mandarin), they usually have a single spoken sound and tone. Context, though, does sometimes affect pronunciation (both sound and tone). The most famous example is 行 which is "hang" in a word like 银行 (yinhang, bank) and "xing" in a word like 行为 (xingwei, behavior). Components and the Radical Each character is composed smaller pieces. Some pieces also have associated meanings and can cue the reader on to the meaning of the word. For instance, most characters with three dashes on the side are associated with water or liquids as with the character 江, which is associated with bridges. Others pieces can cue the reader as to the pronuniciation. There are no hard rules when it comes to character components; exceptions are very common. Each character has a designated primary component called the "radical." This is used for classification of the character in dictionaries. The stroke number of the remaining components is then used for further classification. Radicals can be difficult to determine, but overtime, a reader becomes familiar with identification. There are a little over 100 radicals that are used for classifying the 5000 commonly used Chinese characters. With the radical and the count of remaining strokes in a character, one can find a character in a dictionary. Looking Up a Word Say someone comes upon a word they do not know. For example, 管理. The first thing the reader must do is identify the radical in the first character- 管. In this case, the radical is on the top. The reader would count the number of strokes in the radical. It may not be obvious, but the radical has 6 strokes. One then looks up that radical in a Chinese dictionary's radical index. This particular radical has roughly 40 different characters that contain it. So, the reader then counts the number of strokes in the rest of the character. Again, it may not be obvious, but the character has 8 remaining strokes. There are 6 characters that have both that radical and 8 remaining strokes. This is a managable number to find the character. The dictionary would then contain common words starting with the character 管. The reader would go through the list until they found the proper word. Written Chinese The relationship among the Chinese spoken and written languages is complex. It is compounded by the fact that spoken variations evolved for centuries, since at least the late Hàn Dynasty, while written Chinese changed less. Until the 20th century, most formal Chinese writing was done in Classical Chinese or Literary Chinese (文言 wényán), which was very different from any spoken variety of Chinese, much as Classical Latin differs from modern Romance languages. Since the May Fourth Movement of 1919, the formal standard for written Chinese was changed to Vernacular Chinese (/ báihuà), which, while not completely identical to the grammar and vocabulary of dialects of Mandarin, was based mostly on them. The term standard written Chinese now refers to Vernacular Chinese. Chinese characters are morphemes independent of phonetic change. Thus, although the number one is yi in Mandarin, yat in Cantonese and tsit in Hokkien (form of Min), they derive from a common ancient Chinese word and still share an identical character (). Nevertheless, the orthographies of Chinese dialect groups are not completely identical, and their vocabularies have diverged. In addition, while literary vocabulary is mostly used by all dialects, colloquial vocabularies are often different. Colloquial non-standard written Chinese usually involves “dialectal characters” which may not be understood in other dialects or characters that are considered archaic in standard written Chinese. Cantonese is unique among non-Mandarin regional languages in having a written colloquial standard, used in Hong Kong and by non-Standard Mandarin speaking Cantonese speakers overseas, with a large number of unofficial characters for words particular to this variety of Chinese. By contrast, the other regional languages do not have such widely-used alternative written standards. Written colloquial Cantonese has become quite popular in online chat rooms and instant messaging, although for formal written communications Cantonese speakers still normally use standard written Chinese. Also, in Hunan, some women wrote their local language in Nü Shu, a syllabary derived from Chinese characters. The Dungan language, considered a dialect of Mandarin, is also nowadays written in Cyrillic, and was formerly written in the Arabic alphabet, although the Dungan people live outside China. Written standards One can classify Chinese writing into the following basic types: The relationship between the Chinese spoken and written languages is complex. This complexity is compounded by the fact that the numerous variations of spoken Chinese have gone through centuries of evolution since at least the late Hàn Dynasty. However, written Chinese has changed much less than the spoken language. Until the 20th century, most formal Chinese writing was done in wényán, translated as Classical Chinese or Literary Chinese, which was very different from any of the spoken varieties of Chinese in much the same way that Classical Latin is different from modern Romance languages. Chinese characters that are closer to the spoken language were used to write informal works such as colloquial novels. In the May Fourth Movement of 1919, the formal standard for written Chinese was changed to báihuà , or Vernacular Chinese, which, while not completely identical to the grammar and vocabulary of Standard Mandarin, was based mostly on the dialects of modern spoken Mandarin. The term standard written Chinese now refers to Vernacular Chinese. Although few new works are now written in classical Chinese, it is still taught in middle and high school and forms part of college entrance examinations. Classical Chinese forms are also sometimes included in written works to give them a highly formal or archaic flavor. The Chinese script also was the base for some other East Asian scripts like the scripts of Khitan and Jurchen, Kanji in Japan, Chữ-nho in Vietnam and Nushu, a script since the 15th century exclusively for Chinese women in Hunan. Transcending intelligibility of speech Chinese characters are understood as logosyllabic morphemes that are independent of phonetic change. Thus for example, although the number one is "yī" in Mandarin, "yat" in Cantonese and "tsit" in Hokkien, they derive from a common ancient Chinese word and are written with the same character: 一. Nevertheless, the orthographies of Chinese dialects are not identical. The vocabularies used in the different dialects have also diverged. In addition, while literary vocabulary is often shared among all dialects (at least in orthography), colloquial vocabularies vary widely. Colloquially written Chinese usually involves the use of "dialectal characters" which may not be understood in other dialects or characters that are considered archaic in báihuà. The complex interaction between the Chinese written and spoken languages can be illustrated with Cantonese. In Hong Kong, Cantonese speakers are all taught standard written Chinese in school even though its grammar and vocabulary are based on Mandarin, which is not generally spoken in Hong Kong. As every character in standard written Chinese has a Cantonese pronunciation, standard written Chinese can be read aloud using Cantonese pronunciation but the result is very different from normal spoken Cantonese. For Cantonese speakers in Guangdong Province where nearly everyone can also speak Mandarin, this difference between the written and spoken language is much less pronounced as standard written Chinese can be read aloud in its standard pronunciation which is Mandarin. In most written communication, Cantonese speakers whether they also speak Mandarin or not will write in standard written Chinese. A literate Chinese typically can read such communication without much difficulty. However, colloquially spoken Cantonese features different grammar and vocabulary, which, if written down, can be largely unreadable by an untrained non-Cantonese speaker. Standard written Chinese essentially functions as a different register for Cantonese speakers who don't speak Mandarin, because they do not write in the way they usually speak. In Hong Kong, Standard written Chinese spoken aloud using Cantonese pronunciation (usually with some colloquial words substituted in) serves as an acrolect used in newscasts and other formal contexts. Written colloquial Cantonese does exist however, and Cantonese is unique among non-Mandarin regional languages in having a widely used written colloquial standard. This is due in part to the fact that Hong Kong, a large Cantonese speaking territory, was outside of Chinese control for over a hundred years before the British returned it to the People's Republic of China in 1997. In contrast, the other regional languages do not have such widely used alternative written standards. Written colloquial Cantonese has become quite popular in certain tabloids, online chat rooms, and instant messaging. Even so, Cantonese speakers will use standard written Chinese in most formal written communications. As with other aspects of the Chinese language, the contrast between different written standards is not sharp and there can be a socially accepted continuum between the written standards. For example, in writing an informal love letter, one may use informal báihuà . In writing a newspaper article, the language used is different and begins to include aspects of wényán. In writing a ceremonial document, one would use even more wényán. The language used in the ceremonial document may be completely different from that of the love letter, but there is a socially accepted continuum existing between the two. Pure wényán, however, is rarely used in modern times. Note: The concept of "language independence" for written Chinese was sharply criticized by John DeFrancis in his book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy; he claims that the standard written Chinese is strongly tied to the Mandarin spoken language. Chinese characters (1) Main articles: Chinese character, Punctuation: East Asian punctuation The Chinese written language employs the Hàn characters (漢字/汉字 pinyin hànzì), which are named after the Hàn culture to which they are largely attributed. Many Chinese characters appear to have originated as depicting concrete objects. The first examples we have of Chinese characters are Shāng dynasty inscriptions on oracle bones, which are animal bones used in osteomancy (divination using bones). The materials used were, with very few exceptions, the scapulas of oxen (leading to the term scapulimancy), and turtle plastrons (lower shells; thus the term plastromancy). From these shells and bones is derived the modern Chinese term for the earliest Chinese writing: 甲骨文 jiǎgǔwén (lit. "shell-bone-script", see Oracle bone script). Over the course of the Zhōu and Hàn dynasties, the characters became more and more stylized. Abstract symbols, such as those indicating up and down, combined characters and phonetic loans were already fully developed in even the earliest known oracle bones. For example, 人 rén, meaning "person", originated from a pictogram (象形字 xiàngxíngzì, lit. "like-shape-words") of a man; the concepts "trust", "trustworthiness" etc. are represented by 信, a combination of "man" and "speech/word"; and 九, the pictogram of a hand with the arm bent at the elbow, thus representing zhǒu "elbow", had already been borrowed for jiǔ "nine", which had the same or similar pronunciation. Also, additional components were added so that many characters contain one element that gives (or at least once gave) a fairly good indication of the pronunciation (the "phonetic component"), and another component (the "semantic" component) gives an indication of the general meaning of the character. Such 形聲字 xíngshēngzì, lit. "shape-sound-words" are termed picto-phonetic, phono-semantic, phonetic compounds, etc.. In the modern Chinese languages, the majority of characters are thusly phono-semantically based rather than logographically based. An example would be the character for the word 按 àn that means "to press down". It contains 安 ān (peace), which serves as its phonetic component, and 手 shǒu (hand), that indicates that the action is frequently one that is done using one's hand. A number of Chinese characters are derived out of each other; as a result some classical dictionaries contain circular references of words having identical radicals and meanings. However, new meanings have been injected into these redundant words through popular usage. Some words were also "borrowed" (ie. additional meanings were attributed thereto) because they bore phonetic resemblance with a concept that had no assigned written character. Many styles of Chinese calligraphic writing developed over the centuries, such as seal script (篆書, seal-script), cursive script (草書), clerical script (隸書) and regular script (楷書, aka kǎishū or standard script). In Japan and Korea, Hàn characters were adopted and integrated into their languages and became Kanji and Hanja respectively, the names being Japanised and Koreanised pronunciations of 漢字. Japan still uses Kanji as an integral part of its writing system, while Korea's use of Hanja has diminished considerably: it was abolished in North Korea in the 1950s, but revived in the 1960s as cultural continuation proved inadequate without Chinese characters; South Korea has entirely deprecated Hanja use outside of obscure academic, medical or other jargon. In the field of software and communications internationalization, CJK is a collective term for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, and the rarer CJKV for the same plus Vietnamese, all of which are double-byte languages, as they have more than 256 characters in their "alphabet". The computerized processing of Chinese characters involves some special issues both in input and character encoding schemes, as the standard 100+ key keyboards of today's computers do not allow input of that many characters with a single key-press. The Chinese writing system is mostly logographic, i.e., each character expresses a monosyllabic word part, also known as a morpheme. This is helped by the fact that over 90% of Chinese morphemes are monosyllabic. The majority of modern words, however, are multisyllable and multigraphic. Multisyllabic words have a separate logogram for each syllable. Most Han Chinese characters have forms that were based on their pronunciation plus meaning combined, rather than their meanings alone, and they do not directly express ideas. Character forms There are currently two standards for printed Chinese characters. One is the Traditional Chinese characters (繁體字 fántǐzì), used in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau. Mainland China and Singapore use the Simplified Chinese characters (简体字 jiǎntǐzì) developed by the PRC government in the 1950s and finalised in the 1964 list. Many simplified versions were derived from historically-established, albeit sometimes obscure, simplifications, mostly calligraphic simplifications (through cursive script), others through the replacement of a complex part of a character with a phonetically-similar glyph. In Taiwan, some simplifications are used when characters are handwritten, for the sake of speed and convenience, but in printing traditional characters are the norm. In addition, most Chinese use some personal simplifications. The simplification process is actually not restricted to the Simplified system. In order to computerize Chinese, the authorities in Taiwan have tried to "standardize" the glyphs of characters being used, in order to eliminate unnecessary variations. As a result, several characters are combined into one, and some characters have their written form altered to ease the glyph generation process by computing technologies at that time. However, these simplification processes are rather minor as compared to those done by the Mainland government. Writing direction Due to their unique block, square nature and the morphologically inactive nature of the language, Chinese characters are generally written without spaces at word boundaries, and can be written either horizontally or vertically and from right to left or left to right, or from top to bottom or bottom to top. Traditionally, writing was done vertically, going from top to bottom and arranged in columns going from right to left; on signboards etc. which were horizontal, the columns were reduced to a character each, effectively resulting in horizontal right-to-left writing. Even in the 1950s and 1960s, television subtitles still ran from right to left. After the modernisation efforts of the PRC government in those same decades took a stronger hold there, however, horizontal left-to-right writing à la Latin has become usual practice. In Taiwan and Hong Kong, a parallel process developed with increased exposure to the West, especially the United States, and especially with the advent of technology. Singapore, for its part, has been dually influenced by both its tradition of adopting PRC guidelines with regard to Chinese writing, and by its predominantly Anglophone society. Despite the rise of horizontal writing (which facilitates inclusion of Hindu-Arabic numerals and Roman-lettered acronyms, inter alia), vertical right-to-left writing has persisted in Taiwan and Hong Kong especially in literature, due to the absence of government official policy on adopting horizontal writing. Chinese characters (2)
Romanization Romanization is the process of transcribing a language in the Latin alphabet. There are many systems of romanization for the Chinese languages; this is due to the complex history of interaction between China and the West, and to the Chinese languages' lack of phonetic transcription until modern times. Chinese is first known to have been written in Latin characters by Western Christian missionaries of the 16th century, but may have been written down by Western travelers or missionaries of earlier periods. At present, the most common romanization system for Standard Mandarin is Hanyu Pinyin /, also known simply as Pinyin. Pinyin is the official Mandarin romanization system for the People's Republic of China, and the official one used in Singapore (see also Chinese language romanisation in Singapore). Pinyin is also very commonly used when teaching Mandarin in schools and universities of North America and Europe. Perhaps the second-most common system of romanization for Mandarin is Wade-Giles. This system was probably the most common system of romanization for Mandarin before Hanyu Pinyin was developed. Wade-Giles is often found in academic use in the U.S., and until recently was widely used in Taiwan (Taipei city now officially uses Hanyu Pinyin and the rest of the island officially uses Tōngyòng Pinyin /). Here are a few examples of Hanyu Pinyin and Wade-Giles, for comparison: Regardless of system, tone transcription is often left out, either due to difficulties of typesetting or propriety for audience. Wade-Giles' extensive use of easily-forgotten apostrophes adds to the confusion. Thus, most Western readers will be much more familiar with Beijing than they will be with Běijīng, and with Taipei than with T'ai²-pei³. Regardless of romanization, the words are pronounced the same. Learning a system of romanization requires occasional deviations from the learner's own language, so, for example, Hanyu Pinyin uses ‹q› for very different values than an English speaker would probably be used to; the sound represented is similar to the English ‹ch› but pronounced further forward (an aspirated alveolo-palatal fricative, /tɕʰ/). This is a cause of confusion but is unavoidable, as Mandarin (and any language transcribed) will have phonemes different from those of the learner's own. On the other hand, this can be beneficial, since learners can immediately be made aware of the fact that they will have to learn a new pronunciation. With languages that use similar orthography, the temptation to pronounce words just as in one's mother tongue can lead to great misunderstanding. There are many other systems of romanization for Mandarin, as well as systems for Cantonese, Minnan, Hakka, and other Chinese languages. See the article category . Other transcriptions Chinese languages have been phonetically transcribed into many other writing systems over the centuries. The Phagspa script, for example, has been very helpful in reconstructing the pronunciation of pre-modern forms of Chinese. Zhuyin (; also known as bopomofo) is still widely used in Taiwan's elementary schools. 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: There are also at least two systems of cyrillization for Chinese. The most widespread is the Palladius system. Since the Dungan language is usually considered a dialect of Mandarin Chinese, the Dungan alphabet can also be considered a cyrillization of one dialect of the Chinese language, albeit one used in a very specific context. See also | |||||||||||
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