116-657: CTBC Financial Holding Co., Ltd. (Former: ChinaTrust Financial Holding Company Ltd. , Chinese : 中國信託金融控股 ) is a holding company principally engaged in the finance industry through its eight major subsidiaries . Assets — $ 115.7 billion (2015). The holding company is based in CTBC Financial Park, Taipei , Taiwan . The company's products and services are classified into eight categories: banking , including corporate banking , consumer finance and retail banking ; securities , including securities brokerage , trading and underwriting services, as well as
232-547: A family . 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 66%, or around 800 million speakers, 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
348-469: 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 ; a 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
464-457: 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 such as 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
580-510: 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 oracle bone versions. The Zhonghua Zihai (1994) contains 85,568 head entries for character definitions and
696-599: A Shanghai resident may speak both Standard Chinese and Shanghainese ; if they grew up elsewhere, they are also likely fluent in the dialect of their home region. In addition to Standard Chinese, a majority of Taiwanese people also speak Taiwanese Hokkien (also called 台語 ; 'Taiwanese' ), Hakka , or an Austronesian language . A speaker in Taiwan may mix pronunciations and vocabulary from Standard Chinese and other languages of Taiwan in everyday speech. In part due to traditional cultural ties with Guangdong , Cantonese
812-519: A Taiwanese corporation or company is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Chinese language Chinese ( simplified Chinese : 汉语 ; traditional Chinese : 漢語 ; pinyin : Hànyǔ ; lit. ' Han language' or 中文 ; Zhōngwén ; 'Chinese writing') is a group of languages spoken natively by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in China , as well as by various communities of
928-462: 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. The Chinese government's official Chinese designation for the major branches of Chinese is 方言 ; fāngyán ; 'regional speech', whereas the more closely related varieties within these are called 地点方言 ; 地點方言 ; dìdiǎn fāngyán ; 'local speech'. Because of
1044-612: A collection of folk songs gathered during the Ming dynasty by Feng Menglong in southern Jiangsu and northern Zhejiang, where Northern Wu is today spoken, shows clear signs of modern Wu Chinese in its lexicon. Other Ming documents that are either written in Wu or contain parts where Wu is used include: These works contain a small handful of unique grammatical features, some of which are not found in contemporary Mandarin, Classical Chinese , or in contemporary Wu varieties. They do contain many of
1160-564: A compromise between the pronunciations of different regions. The royal courts of the Ming and early Qing dynasties operated using a koiné language known as Guanhua , based on the Nanjing dialect of Mandarin. Standard Chinese is 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
1276-714: A corresponding increase in the number of homophones . As an example, the small Langenscheidt Pocket Chinese Dictionary lists six words that are commonly pronounced as shí in Standard Chinese: In modern spoken Mandarin, however, tremendous ambiguity would result if all of these words could be used as-is. The 20th century Yuen Ren Chao 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 less ambiguous disyllabic compounds. Only
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#17327934690751392-776: A direct result of the geography. Coastal varieties also share more featural affinities, likely because the East China Sea provides a means of transportation. The same phenomenon can be seen with Min varieties . It has also been noted that Huizhou Chinese and the Tongtai branch of Huai Chinese share significant similarities with Wu Chinese. Wu is divided into two major groups: Northern Wu ( Chinese : 北部吳語 ; pinyin : Běibù Wúyǔ ) and Southern Wu ( Chinese : 南部吳語 ; pinyin : Nánbù Wúyǔ ), which are not mutually intelligible. Individual words spoken in isolation may be comprehensible among these speakers, but
1508-473: A language that was not only phonologically and lexically different to the Wu Chinese of the time, but was syntactically and morphologically distinct as well. This Old Mandarin influence manifested in the form of the modern literary layer , as it was also the court language of the time. Coblin believes that this literary layer is also the origin of Huai Chinese . Unlike the previous periods,
1624-464: A large section of the population and Chinese administrative practices to form the state of Wu . The majority population of the state would have been the ancient Baiyue peoples, who had very different customs and practices compared to the Chinese. It is said in Master Lü's Spring and Autumn Annals that the customs and languages of the states of Wu and Yue were the same. This refers not just to
1740-576: A millennium. The Four Commanderies of Han were established in northern Korea in the 1st century BCE but disintegrated in the following centuries. 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. Later, strong central governments modeled on Chinese institutions were established in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, with Literary Chinese serving as
1856-444: A particularly defined entity like Standard Mandarin or Hochdeutsch . Most speakers are only aware of their local variety's affinities with other similarly classified varieties, and will generally only refer to their local Wu variety rather than to the dialect family as a whole. This is typically done by affixing 話 ('speech') to a location's endonym. For example, 溫州話 ( Wu Chinese pronunciation: [ʔy˧꜖ tɕiɤu˧꜖ ɦo˩꜒꜔] )
1972-454: A potential proto-system for Wu using the several varieties included in these boundaries. A similar attempt was attempted by William L. Ballard, though with significantly fewer localities and a heavy skew towards the North . The sole basis of Li Rong 's classification was the evolution of Qieyun system voiced stops . This was also Chao's only "necessary and sufficient" requirement for
2088-542: A secure reconstruction of Proto-Sino-Tibetan, the higher-level structure of the family remains unclear. A top-level branching into Chinese and Tibeto-Burman languages is often assumed, but has not been convincingly demonstrated. 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
2204-508: A similar way to the use of Latin and Ancient Greek roots in European languages. 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
2320-665: A singular nasal and a glottal stop . Some varieties however, may deviate from this and have features such as the addition of -/k/ , or the omission of the glottal stop. Wu varieties typically preserve Qieyun system voiced initials ( /b/ , /d/ , /ɡ/ , /z/ , /v/ , etc.) though some varieties have lost this feature. Implosives are also occasionally found in Wu varieties, primarily in suburban Shanghainese varieties , as well as in Yongkangese [ zh ] . Wu languages have typologically high numbers of vowels and are on par with Germanic languages in having
2436-631: A unified standard. The earliest examples of Old Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones dated to c. 1250 BCE , during the Late Shang . The next attested stage came from inscriptions on bronze artifacts dating to the Western Zhou period (1046–771 BCE), the Classic of Poetry and portions of the Book of Documents and I Ching . Scholars have attempted to reconstruct
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#17327934690752552-575: A variety of Yue from a small coastal area around Taishan, Guangdong . In parts of South China, the dialect of a major city may be only marginally intelligible to its neighbors. For example, Wuzhou and Taishan are located approximately 260 km (160 mi) and 190 km (120 mi) away from Guangzhou respectively, but the Yue variety spoken in Wuzhou is more similar to the Guangzhou dialect than
2668-497: A variety to be Wu. This definition is problematic considering the devoicing process has occurred in many Southern Wu varieties and in Northern Wu varieties situated near Huai Chinese . It furthermore would place unrelated varieties such as Old Xiang in this category, and also includes Hangzhounese despite its linguistically complex situation. Therefore, more elaborate systems have developed, but they still mostly delineate
2784-602: Is Taishanese. Wuzhou is located directly upstream from Guangzhou on the Pearl River , whereas Taishan is to Guangzhou's southwest, with the two cities separated by several river valleys. In parts of Fujian , the speech of some neighbouring counties or villages is mutually unintelligible. Local varieties of Chinese are conventionally classified into seven dialect groups, largely based on the different evolution of Middle Chinese voiced initials: Proportions of first-language speakers The classification of Li Rong , which
2900-565: Is a major group of Sinitic languages spoken primarily in Shanghai , Zhejiang province , and parts of Jiangsu province , especially south of the Yangtze River , which makes up the cultural region of Wu . The Wu languages are at times simply called Shanghainese , especially when introduced to foreigners. The Suzhounese variety was the prestige dialect of Wu as of the 19th century, but had been replaced in status by Shanghainese by
3016-454: Is accepted that these readings would have been loaned from the language variety of medieval Jiankang. One prominent historical speaker of the medieval Wu language was Emperor Yangdi of the Sui dynasty and his Empress Xiao . Emperor Xuan of Western Liang , a member of Emperor Wu of Liang 's court, was Empress Xiao's grandfather and he most likely learned Wu at Jiankang . It is also noted in
3132-490: Is called either 华语 ; 華語 ; Huáyǔ or 汉语 ; 漢語 ; Hànyǔ ). Standard Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. 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. Diglossia is common among Chinese speakers. For example,
3248-475: Is not uncommon to encounter children who grew up with a regional variant of Mandarin as their parent tongue with little or no fluency in a Wu variety at all. This led to a step up in the preservation and documentation of Wu Chinese, with the first major attempt being the Linguistic Atlas of Chinese Dialects , which surveyed 2,791 locations across the nation, including 121 Wu locations (an increase from
3364-603: Is often described as a 'monosyllabic' language. However, this is only partially correct. It is largely accurate when describing Old and Middle Chinese; in Classical Chinese, around 90% of words consist of a single character that corresponds one-to-one with a morpheme , the smallest unit of meaning in a language. In modern varieties, it usually remains the case that morphemes are monosyllabic—in contrast, English has many multi-syllable morphemes, both bound and free , such as 'seven', 'elephant', 'para-' and '-able'. Some of
3480-445: Is only about an eighth as many as English. All varieties of spoken Chinese use tones to distinguish words. 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
3596-403: Is seen in the Book of Wei , which unflatteringly compares the speech of Jiangdong to the calls of wild animals. The court language of Jiankang at this time would not have been the same as the civilian Wu language, though it would have been closely related. This would also mark the time where Japanese Go-on ( 呉音 ; Hepburn : go-on ; pinyin : Wúyīn ) readings were loaned, and it
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3712-668: Is specifically meant. 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, 石 ; shí alone, and not 石头 ; 石頭 ; shítou , appears in compounds as meaning 'stone' such as 石膏 ; shígāo ; 'plaster', 石灰 ; shíhuī ; 'lime', 石窟 ; shíkū ; 'grotto', 石英 ; 'quartz', and 石油 ; shíyóu ; 'petroleum'. Although many single-syllable morphemes ( 字 ; zì ) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllable compounds known as 词 ; 詞 ; cí , which more closely resembles
3828-489: 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), based on CC-CEDICT, contains over 84,000 entries. The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary,
3944-501: Is used as an everyday language in Hong Kong and Macau . The designation of various Chinese branches remains controversial. Some linguists and most ordinary Chinese people consider all the spoken varieties as one single language, as speakers share a common national identity and a common written form. Others instead argue that it is inappropriate to refer to major branches of Chinese such as Mandarin, Wu, and so on as "dialects" because
4060-575: Is used for Wenzhounese . Affixing 閒話 is also common, and more typical of Northern Wu, as in 嘉興閒話 ( Wugniu : ka-shin ghae-o ) for the Jiaxing variety [ zh ] . Names for the group as a whole include: It is believed that Han Chinese peoples first arrived at the area during pre-dynastic history . After the migrations proceeding the Upheaval of the Five Barbarians ,
4176-500: Is used in education, media, formal speech, and everyday life—though Mandarin is increasingly taught in schools due to the mainland's growing influence. Historically, the Chinese language has spread to its neighbors through a variety of means. Northern Vietnam was incorporated into the Han dynasty (202 BCE – 220 CE) in 111 BCE, marking the beginning of a period of Chinese control that ran almost continuously for
4292-552: Is used in the Language Atlas of China (1987), distinguishes three further groups: Some varieties remain unclassified, including the Danzhou dialect on Hainan , Waxianghua spoken in western Hunan , and Shaozhou Tuhua spoken in northern Guangdong . Standard Chinese is the standard language of China (where it is called 普通话 ; pǔtōnghuà ) and Taiwan, and one of the four official languages of Singapore (where it
4408-428: 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. The complex relationship between spoken and written Chinese is an example of diglossia : as spoken, Chinese varieties have evolved at different rates, while
4524-753: The Qieyun rime dictionary (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. These works define phonological categories but with little hint of what sounds they represent. 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. The resulting system
4640-579: The Baiyue language of the area, but also of that of "Ancient Wu", a Sinitic language likely only used by the nobility. The northern border of this Ancient Wu language is at the Huai River rather than the Yangtze like it is today, and its southern limits may have reached as far as Fujian , as Proto-Min may have been a daughter language to Ancient Wu, though this is not fully accepted. As early as
4756-626: The Chinese diaspora . Approximately 1.35 billion people, or 17% of the global population, speak a variety of Chinese as their first language . Chinese languages form the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. The spoken varieties of Chinese are usually considered by native speakers to be dialects of a single language. However, their lack of mutual intelligibility means they are sometimes considered to be separate languages in
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4872-594: The Eastern Wu dynasty , commentators criticized the speech of the Southern aristocracy (ie. that of the Wu-speaking areas), noting that it is neither Wu-sounding nor Northern. However, evidence suggests that the primary language among the populace was, in fact, Sinitic, although not one that was perceived as "civilized". This possible civilian language would be a common Jiangdong Sinitic language ( 古江東方言 ), as
4988-603: The Jianghuai area due to events such as the Red Turban Rebellions . The Hongwu Emperor ordered for people from Jiangnan , primarily in Suzhou , Songjiang , Jiaxing , Hangzhou , and other Northern Wu -speaking areas, to resettle the now depopulated areas in modern central Jiangsu . More migration happened several decades later to avoid wokou pirates. These migrations are believed to have contributed to
5104-533: The Korean , Japanese and Vietnamese languages, and today comprise over half of their vocabularies. This massive influx led to changes in the phonological structure of the languages, contributing to the development of moraic structure in Japanese and the disruption of vowel harmony in Korean. Borrowed Chinese morphemes have been used extensively in all these languages to coin compound words for new concepts, in
5220-710: The May Fourth Movement beginning in 1919. After the fall of the Northern Song dynasty and subsequent reign of the Jurchen Jin and Mongol Yuan dynasties in northern China, a common speech (now called Old Mandarin ) developed based on the dialects of the North China Plain around the capital. The 1324 Zhongyuan Yinyun was a dictionary that codified the rhyming conventions of new sanqu verse form in this language. Together with
5336-595: 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 普通话 ; 普通話 ; pǔtōnghuà ; 'common speech'. The national language is now used in education, the media, and formal situations in both mainland China and Taiwan. In Hong Kong and Macau , Cantonese is the dominant spoken language due to cultural influence from Guangdong immigrants and colonial-era policies, and
5452-1114: The Qieyun system , this Old Chinese dialect cannot be the primary origin of Wu Chinese today. It is known that Wu languages inherited a significant number of loanwords of Kra-Dai origin. A study of the variety spoken in Maqiao , a suburb of Shanghai , found that 126 out of around a thousand lexical items surveyed were of Kra-Dai origin. Terms such as 落蘇 ( Wugniu : loq-su 1 " aubergine ") are also shared between other Sinitic languages (eg. Teochew , Peng'im : lag sou ) as well as Kra-Dai languages (cf. Standard Zhuang lwggwz ). Shared terms with Austroasiatic languages have also been suggested, though many of them, such as Vietnamese đầm , bèo , and kè , have also been argued to be areal features , Chinese words in disguise, or long shots. Though Sino-Tibetan , Kra-Dai, Austronesian and Austroasiatic are mostly considered to be unrelated to each other, Laurent Sagart has proposed some possible phylogenetic affinities. Specifically, Tai–Kadai and Sino-Tibetan could possibly both belong to
5568-500: The Qing dynasty , missionaries began translating the Bible into various local varieties, recording the exact pronunciations of many varieties for the first time. This was also when the economic boom of Shanghai happened, leading to its urban variety becoming the prestige variety over that of Suzhou . The 20th century marked a pivotal moment of Wu linguistic change, as Standard Mandarin
5684-454: The Wenqiji ( 问奇集 ; 問奇集 ; Wènqíjí ) includes a chapter called Gedi Xiangyin ( 各地鄉音 ) that records the local pronunciations of terms in various areas. Unlike the Qieyun preface, it separates the early Southwestern Mandarin of Huguang , ie. that of Chu, from Wu Chinese. The chapter records typical features of modern Wu, such as: Texts in the early Qing dynasty remained much
5800-810: The Wu Hu uprising and the Disaster of Yongjia during the Western Jin dynasty , collectively known as the Upheaval of the Five Barbarians , the imperial court from the Heluo region , along with a large migration wave from the North that lasted 150 years, primarily northern Jiangsu and much of Shandong , entered the Jiangnan region , establishing a new capital at Jiankang , modern-day Nanjing . Migrants went as far south as central Zhejiang , though many settled in
5916-414: The checked tone in the form of a glottal stop . Wu varieties also have noticably unique morphological and syntactic innovations, as well as lexicon exclusively found in the Wu grouping. It is also of note that the influential linguist Chao Yuen Ren was a native speaker of Changzhounese , a variety of Northern Wu. The Wu varieties, especially that of Suzhou, are traditionally perceived as soft in
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#17327934690756032-513: The northern Wu-speaking areas occurred, which some believe created the north-south geographical divide we see today. Yongjianese [ zh ] , a variety of Oujiang Wu , was first recorded during the Song dynasty . Yongjianese is the variety in which the Liushugu [ zh ] ( 六書故 ) by Dai Tong [ zh ] ( 戴侗 , 1200-1285) is written. This treaty of calligraphy
6148-478: The oracle bone inscriptions created during the Shang dynasty c. 1250 BCE . The phonetic categories of Old Chinese can be reconstructed from the rhymes of ancient poetry. During the Northern and Southern period , Middle Chinese went through several sound changes and split into several varieties following prolonged geographic and political separation. The Qieyun , a rime dictionary , recorded
6264-596: 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. 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. Most recent reconstructions also describe an atonal language with consonant clusters at
6380-512: The turn of the 20th century , coinciding with a period of rapid language change in the city. The languages of Northern Wu constitute a language family and are mutually intelligible with each other, while those of Southern Wu neither form a phylogenetic language family, nor are mutually intelligible with each other. Historical linguists view Wu of great significance due to its obviously distinct nature. The Wu languages typically preserve all voiced initials of medieval Chinese , as well as
6496-837: 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 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. Wu Chinese Wu ( simplified Chinese : 吴语 ; traditional Chinese : 吳語 ; pinyin : Wúyǔ ; Wugniu and IPA : wu-gniu 6 [ɦu˩.nʲy˦] ( Shanghainese ), ghou-gniu 6 [ɦou˨.nʲy˧] ( Suzhounese ))
6612-561: The Huai variety was confined inside the town itself until the 1960s; at present, it is overtaking the Wu variety even in rural areas. Several important proponents of vernacular Chinese in official use, such as Lu Xun and Chao Yuen Ren , were speakers of Northern Wu varieties, in this case Shaoxingese and Changzhounese respectively. Wenzhounese was used during the Second World War to avoid Japanese interception. After
6728-565: The Latin-based Vietnamese alphabet . English words of Chinese origin include tea from Hokkien 茶 ( tê ), dim sum from Cantonese 點心 ( dim2 sam1 ), and kumquat from Cantonese 金橘 ( gam1 gwat1 ). The sinologist Jerry Norman has estimated that there are hundreds of mutually unintelligible varieties of Chinese. These varieties form a dialect continuum , in which differences in speech generally become more pronounced as distances increase, though
6844-791: The Sino-Austronesian language family (not to be confused with Austroasiatic) due to a scattering of cognates between their ancestral forms, and there is also some, albeit much more tenuous, evidence to suggest that Austroasiatic should also be included. However, his views are but one among competing hypotheses about the phylogeny of these languages, and is not widely accepted. See the Sino-Austronesian languages article for some further detail. It does appear that Wu varieties have had non-Sinitic influences, and many contain words cognate with those of other languages in various strata. These words however are few and far between, and Wu on
6960-412: The Wu of today and that of the 13th century . The Ming dynasty saw continued development of local operas, such as Suzhou pingtan , and more vernacular texts being written. In particular, the contemporary Classic Chinese Novels , such as Water Margin , are believed to have significant lexical and syntactic influence from Hangzhounese . The Yuan-Ming transition saw a tremendous loss of life in
7076-616: The Wu-like features in western Huai Chinese groups, such as Tongtai . Dialectal differences were not as obvious in textual sources until Ming times, and thus regional linguistic distinctions were only seen in media after the fall of the Yuan. These differences are largely found in musical sources such as historical folk songs and tanci (a kind of ballad or lyric poem). For instance, the Shange ( 山歌 ; Shāngē ; 'Mountain songs'),
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#17327934690757192-486: The Wu-speaking area. Xuanzhou Wu therefore significantly receded, which is reflected in the fact that it is now only spoken in the mountainous highlands of southern Anhui . Some territorial changes and stratification occurred, primarily near the Yangtze River . The newly-arrived Huai Chinese varieties have been slowly overtaking the suburban and rural Wu varieties. For instance, in Lishui county, Nanjing prefecture,
7308-928: The collection Zhuibaiqiu ( 綴白裘 ), and the legends written by Shen Qifeng [ zh ] or what are known as Shenshi Sizhong ( 沈氏四種 ), as well as huge numbers of tanci ( 彈詞 ) ballads. From the late Qing period to Republican China (the 19th and early 20th centuries), long-form vernacular novels ( 蘇白小說 or 吳語小說 ) such as The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai ( 海上花列傳 ) and The Nine-tailed Turtle ( 九尾龜 ) started appearing. Both above examples are pornographic in nature. Other works include: Wu-speaking writers who wrote in vernacular Mandarin often left traces of their native varieties in their works, as can be found in Guanchang Xianxing Ji and Fubao Xiantan ( 負曝閒談 ). Works in this period also saw an explosion of new vocabulary in Wu varieties to describe their changing world. This clearly reflects
7424-564: The critical historical factors for these boundaries lies in the movement of the population of speakers. This is often determined by the administrative boundaries established during imperial times . As such, imperial boundaries are essential for delineating one variety from another, and many varieties' isogloss clusters line up perfectly with the county boundaries established in imperial times, although some counties contain more than one variety and others may span several counties . Another factor that influences movement and transportation, as well as
7540-399: 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 polysyllabic words than most other spoken varieties. The total number of syllables in some varieties is therefore only about a thousand, including tonal variation, which
7656-484: The difficulties involved in determining the difference between language and dialect, other terms have been proposed. These include topolect , lect , vernacular , regional , and variety . 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
7772-403: The ears of speakers of both Wu and non-Wu languages, leading to the idiom "the tender speech of Wu" ( 吴侬软语 ; 吳儂軟語 ). Speakers of Wu varieties are mostly unaware of this term for their speech, since the classificatory imposition of "Wu" used in linguistics today is a relatively recent coinage. Saying someone "speaks Wu" is therefore akin to saying someone "speaks a Romance language"; it is not
7888-528: The end of the syllable, developing into tone distinctions in Middle Chinese. Several derivational affixes have also been identified, but the language lacks inflection , and indicated grammatical relationships using word order and grammatical particles . Middle Chinese was the language used during Northern and Southern dynasties and the Sui , Tang , and Song dynasties (6th–10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by
8004-428: The establishment of administrative boundaries, is geography. Northernmost Zhejiang and Jiangsu are very flat—being in the middle of a river delta , and as such are more uniform than the more mountainous regions farther south towards Fujian . The Taihu varieties, like Mandarin in the flat northern plains , are more homogeneous than Southern Wu, which has a significantly greater diversity of linguistic forms, likely
8120-458: The exclusive use of Mandarin as well as certain Mandarin promotion measures, promotion and regularization of Wu languages became improbable and left them more prone to Mandarinization. In 1992, students in Shanghai were banned from speaking Shanghainese at all times on campuses. As of now, Wu has no official status, no legal protection and there is no officially sanctioned romanization . It
8236-413: The first one, 十 , normally appears in monosyllabic form in spoken Mandarin; the rest are normally used in the polysyllabic forms of respectively. In each, the homophone was disambiguated by the addition of another morpheme, typically either a near-synonym or some sort of generic word (e.g. 'head', 'thing'), the purpose of which is to indicate which of the possible meanings of the other, homophonic syllable
8352-479: The flowing discourse of everyday life mostly is not. Another lesser group, Western Wu , is synonymous with the Xuanzhou division, which not only has a larger influence from the surrounding Mandarin varieties than much of Northern Wu, but also has very unique phonetic innovations, making it typologically quite different to the rest of Wu. Southern Wu is well known among linguists and sinologists as being one of
8468-491: The form of a word), to indicate a word's function within a sentence. In other words, Chinese has very few grammatical inflections —it possesses no tenses , no voices , no grammatical number , and only a few articles . They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood . In Mandarin, this involves the use of particles such as 了 ; le ; ' PFV ', 还 ; 還 ; hái ; 'still', and 已经 ; 已經 ; yǐjīng ; 'already'. Chinese has
8584-547: The formation of modern Wu, with many early coincidental strata that are hard to differentiate today. It is unclear as to when exactly the language of the Baiyue became extinct, though during the Eastern Han dynasty , Kra-Dai words were recorded in the everyday vernacular of people in the region, and by the end of the Western Jin, the common language of the region was Sinitic, as will be explained below. As early as
8700-515: The founding of the People's Republic of China , the strong promotion of Mandarin in the Wu-speaking region yet again influenced the development of Wu Chinese. Curiously, Wenzhounese was used again during the Vietnam War to avoid enemy comprehensibility. Wu varieties were gradually excluded from most modern media and schools. With the influx of a migrant non-Wu-speaking population, the near total conversion of public media and organizations to
8816-603: The geographically less challenging areas in the north, that is to say, the Yangtze Delta and the Hangjiahu Plain . Early stages of this period of change was likely marked by diglossia , with the commonfolk typically speaking Ancient Wu or their native Shandong or northern Jiangsu Chinese, and the nobility, both new migrants and old aristocracy, typically speaking a varity not dissimilar to that of early medieval Luoyang . This linguistic situation eventually led to
8932-618: The government of the People's Republic of China, with Singapore officially adopting them in 1976. Traditional characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and among Chinese-speaking communities overseas . 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 . Although
9048-486: The great social changes which were occurring during the time. At the same time, missionary Joseph Edkins gathered large amounts of data and published several educational works on Shanghainese , as well as Bibles in a few major Wu varieties, including Southern Wu varieties such as Jinhuanese and Wenzhounese . Following the Taiping Rebellion , many migrants from Mandarin -speaking areas migrated into
9164-517: The greater scope of Sinitic languages is less easily typified than prototypically northern Chinese varieties such as Mandarin or prototypically southern Chinese varieties such as Cantonese . Its original classification, along with the other Sinitic varieties, was established in 1937 by Li Fang-Kuei , whose boundaries more or less have remained the same, and were adopted by Yuan Jiahua in his influential 1961 dialect primer. These limits were also adopted by Chao Yuen Ren , and he even further created
9280-575: The history of Wu Chinese after the Mongol conquest of China becomes a lot clearer, due to the emergence of vernacular texts. Following the Mongol conquest of China , a period of relative stability followed, and vernacularism started being further embraced. This is evident in the fact that Chinese opera productions, including those of both the Northern and Southern Wu-speaking regions, started using their local varieties rather than Classical Chinese , as
9396-418: The issue, although major international databases , such as Glottolog and Ethnologue , do not share similar sentiments. Although more TV programs are appearing in Wu varieties, they are no longer permitted to air during primetime. They are generally more playful than serious and many of these shows, such as Hangzhou 's " 阿六頭説新聞 " ("Old Liutou tells you the news"), provide local or regional news in
9512-586: 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. Scholars from different lands could communicate, albeit only in writing, using Literary Chinese. Although they used Chinese solely for written communication, each country had its own tradition of reading texts aloud using what are known as Sino-Xenic pronunciations . Chinese words with these pronunciations were also extensively imported into
9628-615: The largest vowel quality inventories in the world. The Jinhui variety , spoken in Shanghai's Fengxian District , can be analyzed to have 20 vowel qualities. The abnormal number of vowels in Wu is due in part to rimes ending in glottal stops may be analysed as a short vowel in many varieties, as well as unique sound shifts, such as the tensing of Qieyun system shan ( 山 ) and xian ( 咸 ) rimes, among other factors. Both breathy and creaky voice are also found in Wu varieties. Breathy voice appears in Northern Wu and may act as
9744-528: The late 19th century. Today Japanese is written with a composite script using both Chinese characters called kanji , and kana. Korean is written exclusively with hangul in North Korea, although knowledge of the supplementary Chinese characters called hanja is still required, and hanja are increasingly rarely used in South Korea. As a result of its historical colonization by France, Vietnamese now uses
9860-497: The latter of which even having international titles. Today, popular support for the preservation of Wu languages is very strong, while feature-length movies such as B for Busy and highly successful TV shows such as Blossoms Shanghai have been filmed in Wu varieties (in both aforementioned cases, Shanghainese ). It is now not uncommon to see advertisements and billboards, as well as government media, using Wu Chinese written in non- ad hoc orthographies. Wu's place within
9976-455: The more conservative modern varieties, usually found in the south, have largely monosyllabic words , especially with basic vocabulary. However, most nouns, adjectives, and verbs in modern Mandarin are disyllabic. A significant cause of this is phonetic erosion : sound changes over time have steadily reduced the number of possible syllables in the language's inventory. In modern Mandarin, there are only around 1,200 possible syllables, including
10092-495: The most internally diverse among the Sinitic groups , with very little mutual intelligibility between varieties across subgroups. In the first edition of Li 's Language Atlas of China , Wu was divided into six groups ( 片 ): Cao Zhiyun rearranged some of the Southern Wu divisions based on a larger corpus of data. According to Cao, it can be divided into three broad divisions: Taizhounese remained unchanged as it
10208-425: The mutual unintelligibility between them is too great. However, calling major Chinese branches "languages" would also be wrong under the same criterion, since a branch such as Wu, itself contains many mutually unintelligible varieties, and could not be properly called a single language. There are also viewpoints pointing out that linguists often ignore mutual intelligibility when varieties share intelligibility with
10324-583: 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
10440-538: 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 Southwestern Mandarin , Xuanzhou Wu Chinese with Lower Yangtze Mandarin , Jin with Central Plains Mandarin and certain divergent dialects of Hakka with Gan . All varieties of Chinese are tonal at least to some degree, and are largely analytic . The earliest attested written Chinese consists of
10556-644: The preface of the Qieyun , a Sui dynasty rime dictionary , that the speech of Wu, as well as that of Chu , is "at times too soft and light". A "ballad–narrative" ( 說晿詞話 ) known as The Story of Xue Rengui Crossing the Sea and Pacifying Liao ( 薛仁貴跨海征遼故事 ), which is about the Tang dynasty hero Xue Rengui , is believed to have been written in the Suzhounese . After the An Lushan rebellion , significant migration into
10672-404: The rate of change varies immensely. Generally, mountainous South China exhibits more linguistic diversity than the North China Plain . Until the late 20th century, Chinese emigrants to Southeast Asia and North America came from southeast coastal areas, where Min, Hakka, and Yue dialects were spoken. Specifically, most Chinese immigrants to North America until the mid-20th century spoke Taishanese ,
10788-552: The related subject dropping . Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess differences. 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. 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
10904-509: 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. Without
11020-488: The same as that of the Ming dynasty. Works of the time include the Qingzhongpu ( 清忠譜 ) and Doupeng xianhua ( 豆棚閒話 ), an early Qing baihua novel. During the 18th century , significant lexical shifts away from that seen in Shange took place; many sources we have of the period are operatic in nature. Representative works from this section include the operas (especially kunqu operas) by Qian Decang ( 錢德蒼 ) in
11136-502: The same regions. Regardless of the justification, the Wu region has been clearly outlined, and Li's boundary in some ways has remained the de facto standard. In Jerry Norman 's usage, Wu dialects can be considered "central dialects" or dialects that are clearly in a transition zone containing features that typify both northern and southern Chinese varieties. Dialectologists traditionally establish linguistic boundaries based on several overlapping isoglosses of linguistic features. One of
11252-708: The securities-related futures business; bill and bond , including brokerage, trading, underwriting, certification , guarantee and advisory services; insurance brokerage, providing property and life insurance services; venture capital , focusing on the high technology industries , such as telecommunications semiconductor industries; asset management , including the acquisition , management and processing of financial debts from financial institutions ; security services, such as stationing of security guards in office buildings , and lottery , including issuance , marketing , promotion , prize drawing , prize claiming , and management . This article about
11368-517: The six official languages of the United Nations . Standard Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin and was first officially adopted in the 1930s. The language is written primarily using a logography of Chinese characters , largely shared by readers who may otherwise speak mutually unintelligible varieties. Since the 1950s, the use of simplified characters has been promoted by
11484-561: The slightly later Menggu Ziyun , this dictionary describes a language with many of the features characteristic of modern Mandarin dialects. Up to the early 20th century, most Chinese people only spoke their local variety. 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 官话 ; 官話 ; Guānhuà ; 'language of officials'. For most of this period, this language
11600-563: The time of Guo Pu (275–324), speakers easily perceived differences between dialects in different parts of China, including the area where Ancient Wu was spoken. The language slowly receded from the north due to growing pressure from the Central Plains , until its northern limit was set near the Yangtze River towards the end of the Western Jin dynasty . Note, however, that due to the fact that all modern Wu varieties work within
11716-623: The tonal distinctions, compared with about 5,000 in Vietnamese (still a largely monosyllabic language), and over 8,000 in English. Most modern varieties tend to form new words through polysyllabic compounds . In some cases, monosyllabic words have become disyllabic formed from different characters without the use of compounding, as in 窟窿 ; kūlong from 孔 ; kǒng ; this is especially common in Jin varieties. This phonological collapse has led to
11832-547: The traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cí can consist of more than one character–morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more. Examples of Chinese words of more than two syllables include 汉堡包 ; 漢堡包 ; hànbǎobāo ; 'hamburger', 守门员 ; 守門員 ; shǒuményuán ; 'goalkeeper', and 电子邮件 ; 電子郵件 ; diànzǐyóujiàn ; 'e-mail'. All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages : they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure), rather than inflectional morphology (changes in
11948-462: The two locations in PKU's earlier surveys). This also led to the formation of an elaborate database including digital recordings of all locations, however, this database is not available to the general public. The atlas's editor, Cao Zhiyun, considers many of these languages "endangered" and has introduced the term 濒危方言 ('languages in danger' or 'endangered local languages') to raise people's attention to
12064-496: The unique features in its vocabulary present in contemporary Wu, such as pronouns , but clearly indicate that not all of the earlier unique features of these Wu varieties were carried into present varieties. These works also possess a number of characters uniquely formed to express features not found in the classical language and used some common characters as phonetic loans (see Chinese character classification ) to express other uniquely Wu vocabulary. A 16th century text called
12180-512: 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: In contrast, Standard Cantonese 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: Chinese
12296-402: The variety, but most are limited to fifteen minutes of airtime. Popular video sites such as Youku and Tudou also host a variety of user-uploaded audio and visual media in many Wu varieties, most of which are regional TV shows, although some are user-created songs and the like. A number of books are also appearing to teach people how to speak Wu varieties such as Suzhounese and Shanghainese ,
12412-578: The vernacular that would later lead to modern Wu Chinese started taking shape, though the court language of Jiankang (today Nanjing ) was still noticably different to that of the commonfolk. A second migration wave during the Southern Song dynasty , this time to Lin'an (Hangzhou), led to the formation of the modern literary layer , and during the Yuan and Ming dynasties , many operatic traditions and vernacular texts began to appear. Later, during
12528-403: The whole is most strongly influenced by other Chinese languages rather than any other linguistic influence. This period is bookended by two major migration waves into the Wu-speaking area. The first was in the 4th century CE from primarily the mountains of Shandong , whereas the second happened during the 12th century CE , and originated from the Heluo region. Due to events such as
12644-452: The words in newspapers, and 60% of the words in science magazines. 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
12760-517: The written language used throughout China changed comparatively little, crystallizing into a prestige form known as Classical or Literary Chinese . Literature written distinctly in the Classical form began to emerge during the Spring and Autumn period . Its use in writing remained nearly universal until the late 19th century, culminating with the widespread adoption of written vernacular Chinese with
12876-462: Was promoted nation-wide , though the 21st century is seeing revival efforts for many Wu Chinese varieties. Before the migration of the Han Chinese peoples, the Jiangnan region was inhabited by Kra-Dai or Austroasiatic peoples, which were dubbed barbarians by the early Chinese. According to traditional history, Taibo of Wu settled in the area during the Shang dynasty , bringing along
12992-453: Was a koiné based on dialects spoken in the Nanjing area, though not identical to any single dialect. By the middle of the 19th century, the Beijing dialect had become dominant and was essential for any business with the imperial court. In the 1930s, a standard national language ( 国语 ; 國語 ; Guóyǔ ), was adopted. After much dispute between proponents of northern and southern dialects and an abortive attempt at an artificial pronunciation,
13108-485: 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. 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
13224-693: Was not included in the study. This was later adopted by the second edition of Li's Atlas . Minor adjustments were also made regarding Northern Wu subdivisions. Wu varieties typically possess a larger phonological inventory than many Sinitic languages . Many varieties also have tone systems known for highly complex tone sandhi . Phonologies of Wu varieties are diverse and hard to generalize. As such, only typologically significant features will be discussed here. For more information, refer to individual varieties' pages. In terms of consonants , those in initial positions are more plentiful than those in finals . Finals typically only permit two consonant phonemes ,
13340-598: Was published in 1320. After the Jingkang incident , the imperial capital of the Song dynasty was moved from Bianjing (modern-day Kaifeng) to Lin'an (Hangzhou), starting the Southern Song period. This also coincided with a large migration wave mostly from the Heluo region, a strip of the Central Plains south of the Yellow River that roughly stretches from Luoyang to Kaifeng , which also brought
13456-545: Was the norm during and before the Song dynasty. The Tō-on ( 唐音 ; Hepburn : tō-on ; Pinyin : Tángyīn ) pronunciations introduced during the Japanese Kamakura period were largely rooted in the vernacular of northern Zhejiang at around the end of the Song dynasty or start of the Yuan dynasty , despite what its name may suggest. Analyses on texts of the time reveal stark phonetic differences between
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