Chinese language - Photos and All Basic Informations

Chinese language Photos:

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Chinese language Basic Informations:

Spoken Chinese

Main article: Spoken Chinese See also: List of Chinese dialects A map below depicts the linguistic subdivisions ("languages" or "dialect groups") within China itself. The traditionally recognized seven main groups, in order of population size are: Name Abbreviation Pinyin Local Romanization Simp. Trad. Total Speakers Mandarin Notes: includes Standard Mandarin Guan; 官 Guānhuà Pinyin: Guānhuà 官话官話 c. 1365 million Běifānghuà Pinyin: Běifānghuà 北方话北方話 Wu Notes: includes Shanghainese Wu; 吴／吳 Wúyǔ Long-short: Ng nyiu or Ghu nyiu 吴语吳語 c. 90 million Yue Notes: includes Cantonese & Taishanese Yue; 粤／粵 Yuèyǔ Jyutping: Jyut6 jyu5; Yale: Yuht yúh 粤语粵語 c. 80 million Min Notes: includes Taiwanese & Teochew Min; 闽／閩 Mǐnyǔ POJ: Bân gú; BUC: Mìng ngṳ̄ 闽语閩語 c. 50 million Xiang Xiang; 湘 Xiāngyǔ Romanization: Shiāen'ỳ 湘语湘語 c. 35 million Hakka Kejia; 客家 Kèjiāhuà Hakka Pinyin: Hak-kâ-fa or Hak-kâ-va 客家话客家話 c. 35 million Kèhuà Hakka Pinyin: Hak-fa or Hak-va 客话客話 Gan Gan; 贛 Gànyǔ Romanization: Gon ua 赣语贛語 c. 31 million Disputed classifications by some Chinese linguists: Name Abbreviation Pinyin Local Romanization Simp. Trad. Total Speakers Jin Notes: from Mandarin Jin; 晋／晉 Jìnyǔ None 晋语晉語 45 million Huizhou Notes: from Wu Hui; 徽 Huīzhōuhuà None 徽州话徽州話 ~3.2 million Pinghua Notes: from Yue Ping; 平 Guǎngxī Pínghuà None 广西平话廣西平話 ~5 million There are also some smaller groups that are not yet classified, such as: Danzhou dialect (儋州话／儋州話), spoken in Danzhou, on Hainan Island; Xianghua (乡话／鄉話), not to be confused with Xiang (湘), spoken in western Hunan; and Shaozhou Tuhua (韶州土话／韶州土話), spoken in northern Guangdong. The Dungan language, spoken in Central Asia, is very closely related to Mandarin. However, it is politically not generally considered "Chinese" since it is written in Cyrillic and spoken by Dungan people outside China who are not considered ethnic Chinese. In general, the above language-dialect groups do not have sharp boundaries, though Mandarin is the predominant Sinitic language in the North and the Southwest, and the rest are mostly spoken in Central or Southeastern China. Frequently, as in the case of the Guangdong province, native speakers of major variants overlapped. As with many areas that were linguistically diverse for a long time, it is not always clear how the speeches of various parts of China should be classified. The Ethnologue lists a total of 14, but the number varies between seven and seventeen depending on the classification scheme followed. For instance, the Min variety is often divided into Northern Min (Minbei, Fuchow) and Southern Min (Minnan, Amoy-Swatow); linguists have not determined whether their mutual intelligibility is small enough to sort them as separate languages. In general, mountainous South China displays more linguistic diversity than the flat North China. In parts of South China, a major city's dialect may only be marginally intelligible to close neighbours. For instance, Wuzhou is about 120 miles upstream from Guangzhou, but its dialect is more like Standard Cantonese spoken in Guangzhou, than is that of Taishan, 60 miles southwest of Guangzhou and separated by several rivers from it (Ramsey, 1987). [

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Standard Mandarin and diglossia

Main article: Standard Mandarin Putonghua / Guoyu, often called "Mandarin", is the official standard language used by the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China, and Singapore (where it is called "Huayu"). It is based on the Beijing dialect, which is the dialect of Mandarin as spoken in Beijing. The government intends 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 mainland China and Taiwan, diglossia has been a common feature: it is common for a Chinese to be able to speak two or even three varieties of the Sinitic languages (or “dialects”) together with Standard Mandarin. For example, in addition to putonghua a resident of Shanghai might speak Shanghainese and, if they did not grow up there, his or her local dialect as well. A native of Guangzhou may speak Standard Cantonese and putonghua, a resident of Taiwan, both Taiwanese and putonghua/guoyu. A person living in Taiwan may commonly mix pronunciations, phrases, and words from Standard Mandarin and Taiwanese, and this mixture is considered normal under many circumstances. In Hong Kong, Standard Mandarin is beginning to take its place beside English and Standard Cantonese, the other official languages.[citation needed] [

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Linguistics

Main article: Identification of the varieties of Chinese Linguists often view Chinese as a language family, though owing to China's socio-political and cultural situation, and the fact that all spoken varieties use one common written system, it is customary to refer to these generally mutually unintelligible variants as "the Chinese language". The diversity of Sinitic variants is comparable to the Romance languages. From a purely descriptive point of view, "languages" and "dialects" are simply arbitrary groups of similar idiolects, and the distinction is irrelevant to linguists who are only concerned with describing regional speeches technically. However, the idea of a single language has major overtones in politics and cultural self-identity, and explains the amount of emotion over this issue. Most Chinese and Chinese linguists refer to Chinese as a single language and its subdivisions dialects, while others call Chinese a language family. Chinese itself has a term for its unified writing system, Zhongwen (中文), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (汉语／漢語, “spoken language[s] of the Han Chinese)—this term could be translated to either “language” or “languages” since Chinese possesses no grammatical numbers. In the Chinese language, there is much less need for a uniform speech-and-writing continuum, as indicated by two separate character morphemes 语／語 yu and 文 wen.[clarification needed] Ethnic Chinese often consider these spoken variations as one single language for reasons of nationality and as they inherit one common cultural and linguistic heritage in Classical Chinese. Han native speakers of Wu, Min, Hakka, and Cantonese, for instance, may consider their own linguistic varieties as separate spoken languages, but the Han Chinese as one—albeit internally very diverse—ethnicity. To Chinese nationalists, the idea of Chinese as a language family may suggest that the Chinese identity is much more fragmented and disunified than it actually is and as such is often looked upon as culturally and politically provocative. Additionally, in Taiwan, it is closely associated with Taiwanese independence, where some supporters of Taiwanese independence promote the local Taiwanese Minnan-based spoken language. Within the People’s Republic of China and Singapore, it is common for the government to refer to all divisions of the Sinitic language(s) beside Standard Mandarin as fangyan (“regional tongues”, often translated as “dialects”). Modern-day Chinese speakers of all kinds communicate using one formal standard written language, although this modern written standard is modeled after Mandarin, generally the modern Beijing dialect. [

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Language and nationality

The term sinophone, coined in analogy to anglophone and francophone, refers to those who speak the Chinese language natively, or prefer it as a medium of communication. The term is derived from Sinae, the Latin word for ancient China. [

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Writing

Main article: Written Chinese The relationship among the Chinese spoken and written languages is rather complex. Its spoken variations evolved at different rates, while written Chinese itself has changed much less. Classical Chinese literature began in the Spring and Autumn period, although written records have been discovered as far back as the 14th to 11th centuries BCE Shang dynasty oracle bones using the oracle bone scripts. The Chinese orthography centers around Chinese characters, hanzi, which are written within imaginary rectangular blocks, traditionally arranged in vertical columns, read from top to bottom down a column, and right to left across columns. Chinese characters are morphemes independent of phonetic change. Thus the number "one", yi in Mandarin, jat in Cantonese and chi̍t in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("一"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as 冇 and 係 for Cantonese and Hakka, which are considered archaic or unused in standard written Chinese. Written colloquial Cantonese has become quite popular in online chat rooms and instant messaging amongst Hong-Kongers and Cantonese-speakers elsewhere. Use of it is considered highly informal, and does not extend to many formal occasions. Also, in Hunan, some women write their local language in Nü Shu, a syllabary derived from Chinese characters. The Dungan language, considered by some 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. [

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Chinese characters

Main article: Chinese character Chinese characters evolved over time from earlier forms of hieroglyphs. The idea that all Chinese characters are either pictographs or ideographs is an erroneous one: most characters contain phonetic parts, and are composites of phonetic components and semantic radicals. Only the simplest characters, such as ren 人 (human), ri 日 (sun), shan 山 (mountain), shui 水 (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar Xú Shèn in the Hàn Dynasty 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, and 80–90% as phonetic complexes consisting of a semantic element that indicates meaning, and a phonetic element that indicates the pronunciation. There are about 214 radicals recognized in the Kangxi Dictionary. Modern characters are styled after the regular script (楷书／楷書 kǎishū) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (篆书／篆書 zhuànshū), cursive script (草书／草書 cǎoshū) and clerical script (隶书／隸書 lìshū). Calligraphy artists can write in traditional and simplified characters, but tend to use traditional characters for traditional art. "Preface to the Poems Composed at the Orchid Pavilion" by Wang Xizhi, written in semi-cursive style There are currently two systems for Chinese characters. The traditional system, still used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau and Chinese speaking communities (except Singapore and Malaysia) outside mainland China, takes its form from standardized character forms dating back to the late Han dynasty. The Simplified Chinese character system, developed by the People's Republic of China in 1954 to promote mass literacy, simplifies most complex traditional glyphs to fewer strokes, many to common caoshu shorthand variants. Singapore, which has a large Chinese community, is the first—and at present the only—foreign 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 the alternative system, be it traditional or simplified. A well-educated Chinese today recognizes approximately 6,000-7,000 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. 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.' [

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History

History of China ANCIENT 3 Sovereigns and 5 Emperors Xia Dynasty 2100–1600 BCE Shang Dynasty 1600–1046 BCE Zhou Dynasty 1045–256 BCE Western Zhou Eastern Zhou Spring and Autumn Period Warring States Period IMPERIAL Qin Dynasty 221 BCE–206 BCE Han Dynasty 206 BCE–220 CE Western Han Xin Dynasty Eastern Han Three Kingdoms 220–280 Wei, Shu & Wu Jin Dynasty 265–420 Western Jin 16 Kingdoms 304–439 Eastern Jin Southern & Northern Dynasties 420–589 Sui Dynasty 581–618 Tang Dynasty 618–907 ( Second Zhou 690–705 ) 5 Dynasties & 10 Kingdoms 907–960 Liao Dynasty 907–1125 Song Dynasty 960–1279 Northern Song W. Xia Southern Song Jin Yuan Dynasty 1271–1368 Ming Dynasty 1368–1644 Qing Dynasty 1644–1911 MODERN Republic of China 1912–1949 People's Republic of China 1949–present

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