107-672: The Bayi Rockets ( Chinese : 八一双鹿电池火箭 ; pinyin : Bāyī Shuānglù Diànchí Huǒjiàn ) were a professional basketball team based in Nanchang , Jiangxi , China, which played in the South Division of the Chinese Basketball Association . The Rockets were the only CBA team owned and governed by the People's Liberation Army (PLA). On 20 October 2020, The Chinese Basketball Association announced that
214-670: A Jesuit missionary in China, wrote the first book that used the Latin alphabet to write Chinese, entitled Xizi Qiji ( 西字奇蹟 ; 'Miracle of Western Letters') and published in Beijing in 1605. Twenty years later, fellow Jesuit Nicolas Trigault published 'Aid to the Eyes and Ears of Western Literati' ( 西儒耳目資 ; Xīrú ěrmù zī )) in Hangzhou. Neither book had any influence among
321-469: 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
428-457: 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
535-404: A tone number at the end of individual syllables. For example, tóng is written tong . Each tone can be denoted with its numeral the order listed above. The neutral tone can either be denoted with no numeral, with 0, or with 5. Briefly, tone marks should always be placed in the order a, e, i, o, u, ü , with the only exceptions being iu and io where the tone mark is placed on
642-510: 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
749-637: A GB recommendation in 1996, and were last updated in 2012. In practice, however, published materials in China now often space pinyin syllable by syllable. According to Victor H. Mair , this practice became widespread after the Script Reform Committee, previously under direct control of the State Council , had its power greatly weakened in 1985 when it was renamed the State Language Commission and placed under
856-599: 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
963-462: 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
1070-400: A common practice in some sub-dialects, is rarely used in official publications. Even though most initials contain a consonant, finals are not always simple vowels, especially in compound finals ( 复韵母 ; 複韻母 ; fùyùnmǔ ), i.e. when a "medial" is placed in front of the final. For example, the medials [ i ] and [ u ] are pronounced with such tight openings at the beginning of
1177-563: 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
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#17327767335971284-714: 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
1391-498: A final that some native Chinese speakers (especially when singing) pronounce yī ( 衣 ; 'clothes'), officially pronounced /í/ , as /jí/ and wéi ( 围 ; 圍 ; 'to enclose'), officially pronounced /uěi/ , as /wěi/ or /wuěi/ . Often these medials are treated as separate from the finals rather than as part of them; this convention is followed in the chart of finals below. The conventional lexicographical order derived from bopomofo is: In each cell below,
1498-588: A friendly international competition against the Washington Bullets (now Washington Wizards ) during the 1970s. Bayi dominated the CBA in its early years, winning seven championships in the first eight seasons of CBA competition, including the first six titles in the league's existence. During the first five years of this legendary title run, the Rockets were undefeated in playoff games. The Rockets also had
1605-473: A front high rounded vowel, namely after the letters j , q , x , and y . For example, the sound of the word for 'fish' ( 鱼 ; 魚 ) is transcribed in pinyin simply as yú , not as * yǘ . This practice is opposed to Wade–Giles, which always uses ü , and Tongyong Pinyin , which always uses yu . Whereas Wade–Giles needs the umlaut to distinguish between chü (pinyin ju ) and chu (pinyin zhu ), this ambiguity does not arise with pinyin, so
1712-523: A home-game unbeaten streak of 65 games that ended in 2002. But in recent years, other CBA teams have become more competitive, and Bayi would only win one more championship after its initial spree of success, with that title coming in the 2006–07 CBA season . During the 2004–05 CBA season , the Bayi Rockets finished in third place in the South Division and defeated the Beijing Ducks in
1819-576: 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
1926-542: 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
2033-508: 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
2140-678: A single language. However, their lack of mutual intelligibility means they are sometimes considered to be separate languages in 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
2247-718: A transliteration system for Chinese, his discussion ultimately led to a proliferation of proposed schemes. The Wade–Giles system was produced by Thomas Wade in 1859, and further improved by Herbert Giles , presented in Chinese–English Dictionary (1892). It was popular, and was used in English-language publications outside China until 1979. In 1943, the US military tapped Yale University to develop another romanization system for Mandarin Chinese intended for pilots flying over China—much more than previous systems,
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#17327767335972354-631: 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
2461-575: 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
2568-602: 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
2675-709: 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 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
2782-662: Is based on the phonological system of Beijing Mandarin. Other romanization schemes have been devised to transcribe those other Chinese varieties, such as Jyutping for Cantonese and Pe̍h-ōe-jī for Hokkien . Based on the "Chinese Romanization" section of ISO 7098:2015, pinyin tone marks should use the symbols from Combining Diacritical Marks , as opposed by the use of Spacing Modifier Letters in bopomofo. Lowercase letters with tone marks are included in GB 2312 and their uppercase counterparts are included in JIS X 0212 ; thus Unicode includes all
2889-493: Is both a medial and a coda, the nucleus may be dropped from writing. In this case, when the coda is a consonant n or ng , the only vowel left is the medial i, u , or ü , and so this takes the diacritic. However, when the coda is a vowel, it is the coda rather than the medial which takes the diacritic in the absence of a written nucleus. This occurs with syllables ending in -ui (from wei : wèi → -uì ) and in -iu (from you : yòu → -iù ). That is, in
2996-435: 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,
3103-473: Is distinct from the concept of consonant and vowel sounds as basic units in traditional (and most other phonetic systems used to describe the Chinese language). Every syllable in Standard Chinese can be described as a pair of one initial and one final, except for the special syllable er or when a trailing -r is considered part of a syllable (a phenomenon known as erhua ). The latter case, though
3210-603: Is less ubiquitous in Taiwan. It is used to teach Standard Chinese, normally written with Chinese characters , to students already familiar with the Latin alphabet . Pinyin is also used by various input methods on computers and to categorize entries in some Chinese dictionaries . In pinyin, each Chinese syllable is spelled in terms of an optional initial and a final , each of which is represented by one or more letters. Initials are initial consonants, whereas finals are all possible combinations of medials ( semivowels coming before
3317-519: Is not limited only to pinyin, since many languages that use the Latin alphabet natively also assign different values to the same letters. A recent study on Chinese writing and literacy concluded, "By and large, pinyin represents the Chinese sounds better than the Wade–Giles system, and does so with fewer extra marks." As pinyin is a phonetic writing system for modern Standard Chinese , it is not designed to replace characters for writing Literary Chinese ,
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3424-614: Is not ordinarily reflected in pinyin spelling. Standard Chinese has many polysyllabic words. Like in other writing systems using the Latin alphabet, spacing in pinyin is officially based on word boundaries. However, there are often ambiguities in partitioning a word. The Basic Rules of the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet Orthography were put into effect in 1988 by the National Educational and National Language commissions. These rules became
3531-603: 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
3638-445: 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
3745-460: Is sometimes used instead by convention. For example, it is common for cellphones to use v instead of ü . Additionally, some stores in China use v instead of ü in the transliteration of their names. The drawback is a lack of precomposed characters and limited font support for combining accents on the letter v , ( v̄ v́ v̌ v̀ ). This also presents a problem in transcribing names for use on passports, affecting people with names that consist of
3852-668: 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
3959-489: 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,
4066-624: Is the most common romanization system for Standard Chinese . In official documents, it is referred to as the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet . Hanyu ( 汉语 ; 漢語 ) literally means ' Han language'—that is, the Chinese language—while pinyin literally means 'spelled sounds'. Pinyin is the official romanisation system used in China, Singapore, Taiwan, and by the United Nations . Its use has become common when transliterating Standard Chinese mostly regardless of region, though it
4173-501: 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
4280-500: 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
4387-552: 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
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4494-428: 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
4601-513: Is written over an i , then it replaces the tittle, as in yī . In dictionaries, neutral tone may be indicated by a dot preceding the syllable—e.g. ·ma . When a neutral tone syllable has an alternative pronunciation in another tone, a combination of tone marks may be used: zhī·dào ( 知道 ) may be pronounced either zhīdào or zhīdao . Before the advent of computers, many typewriter fonts did not contain vowels with macron or caron diacritics. Tones were thus represented by placing
4708-753: 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
4815-533: 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
4922-710: 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
5029-477: The Ministry of Education . Mair claims that proponents of Chinese characters in the educational bureaucracy "became alarmed that word-based pinyin was becoming a de facto alternative to Chinese characters as a script for writing Mandarin and demanded that all pinyin syllables be written separately." Pinyin superseded older romanization systems such as Wade–Giles and postal romanization , and replaced bopomofo as
5136-595: 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
5243-554: The WCBA , the men's soccer team Bayi Zhengbang , and the women's soccer club Bayi Xiangtan . In August 1979, the Bayi Rockets played the Washington Bullets , when the Bullets became the first NBA team to travel to China. The Bayi Rockets lost. The Bayi Rockets have a long history that predates the current CBA. When they entered the league in its inaugural season of 1995–96 , they had already won 34 national titles. They had also held
5350-478: 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
5457-596: 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
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#17327767335975564-638: The "father of pinyin". They based their work in part on earlier romanization systems . The system was originally promulgated at the Fifth Session of the 1st National People's Congress in 1958, and has seen several rounds of revisions since. The International Organization for Standardization propagated Hanyu Pinyin as ISO 7098 in 1982, and the United Nations began using it in 1986. Taiwan adopted Hanyu Pinyin as its official romanization system in 2009, replacing Tongyong Pinyin . Matteo Ricci ,
5671-710: 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. Pinyin Hanyu Pinyin , or simply pinyin ,
5778-589: The Bayi Rockets failed to make the playoffs. After two first-round playoff exits in 2009–10 and 2010–11 , the club has not made it back to the playoffs, and have become one of the worst teams in the league. In 2018, the Bayi Rockets moved from Ningbo to their current location in Nanchang, Jiangxi. In the 2019–20 season , Bayi ranked last in the CBA with a 6–40 record. In May 2020, the People Liberation's Army announced that it had decided to withdraw
5885-634: The Establishment of Diplomatic Relations between the United States and China in 1979. In 2001, the Chinese government issued the National Common Language Law , providing a legal basis for applying pinyin. The current specification of the orthography is GB/T 16159–2012. Chinese phonology is generally described in terms of sound pairs of two initials ( 声母 ; 聲母 ; shēngmǔ ) and finals ( 韵母 ; 韻母 ; yùnmǔ ). This
5992-546: The Fifth Session of the 1st National People's Congress on 11 February 1958. It was then introduced to primary schools as a way to teach Standard Chinese pronunciation and used to improve the literacy rate among adults. Despite its formal promulgation, pinyin did not become widely used until after the tumult of the Cultural Revolution . In the 1980s, students were trained in pinyin from an early age, learning it in tandem with characters or even before. During
6099-565: 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
6206-601: The Private Use Areas, and some input methods (e.g. Sogou Pinyin) also outputs the Private Use Areas code point instead of the original character. As the superset GB 18030 changed the mappings of ⟨ḿ⟩ and ⟨ǹ⟩ , this has caused an issue where the input methods and font files use different encoding standards, and thus the input and output of both characters are mixed up. Other symbols are used in pinyin are as follows: The spelling of Chinese geographical or personal names in pinyin has become
6313-727: The Quarter-Finals of the CBA Playoffs, but lost in the Semi-Finals to the reigning titleholders, the Guangdong Southern Tigers . This defeat marked the first time since the league's founding that the team did not advance to the CBA Finals, and the only time in the organization's first 12 years that the club failed to reach the championship series. The 2008–09 CBA season marked the first year that
6420-678: The Rockets and Bayi Kylin from the CBA. They had not showed up in their opening game of the 2020–21 season before the announcement. To continue the legacy left behind by the Bayi Rockets, a new team joined the CBA, residing in Ningbo again, and were known as the Ningbo Rockets . The new team commenced playing in the 2021–22 CBA season . Chinese language Chinese ( simplified Chinese : 汉语 ; traditional Chinese : 漢語 ; pinyin : Hànyǔ ; lit. ' Han language' or 中文 ; Zhōngwén ; 'Chinese writing')
6527-590: The Rockets had withdrawn from Chinese Basketball Association (CBA) following a decision by the PLA. The Bayi Rockets were founded in 1955 in Ningbo , Zhejiang . The team's founding members served in the People's Liberation Army , and the "Bayi" in its name represents the anniversary of the founding of the PLA, 1 August. There are also several other army clubs using the Bayi name in other sports leagues, including Bayi Kylin in
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#17327767335976634-416: The absence of a written nucleus the finals have priority for receiving the tone marker, as long as they are vowels; if not, the medial takes the diacritic. An algorithm to find the correct vowel letter (when there is more than one) is as follows: Worded differently, The above can be summarized as the following table. The vowel letter taking the tone mark is indicated by the fourth-tone mark. Tone sandhi
6741-609: The common accented characters from pinyin. Other punctuation mark and symbols in Chinese are to use the equivalent symbol in English noted in to GB 15834. According to GB 16159, all accented letters are required to have both uppercase and lowercase characters as per their normal counterparts. GBK has mapped two characters ⟨ḿ⟩ and ⟨ǹ⟩ to Private Use Areas in Unicode respectively, thus some fonts (e.g. SimSun) that adhere to GBK include both characters in
6848-421: The contemporary Chinese literati, and the romanizations they introduced primarily were useful for Westerners. During the late Qing, the reformer Song Shu (1862–1910) proposed that China adopt a phonetic writing system. A student of the scholars Yu Yue and Zhang Taiyan , Song had observed the effect of the kana syllabaries and Western learning during his visits to Japan. While Song did not himself propose
6955-702: The country after the People's Republic was established. Earlier attempts to romanize Chinese writing were mostly abandoned in 1944. Zhou became an economics professor in Shanghai, and when the Ministry of Education created the Committee for the Reform of the Chinese Written Language in 1955, Premier Zhou Enlai assigned him the task of developing a new romanization system, despite the fact that he
7062-399: 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
7169-484: 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
7276-464: 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
7383-413: 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
7490-401: The following is an exhaustive table of all possible finals. The only syllable-final consonants in Standard Chinese are -n , -ng , and -r , the last of which is attached as a grammatical suffix . A Chinese syllable ending with any other consonant either is from a non-Mandarin language (a southern Chinese language such as Cantonese , reflecting final consonants in Old Chinese ), or indicates
7597-491: 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
7704-565: 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
7811-598: The height of the Cold War the use of pinyin system over Wade–Giles and Yale romanizations outside of China was regarded as a political statement or identification with the mainland Chinese government. Beginning in the early 1980s, Western publications addressing mainland China began using the Hanyu Pinyin romanization system instead of earlier romanization systems; this change followed the Joint Communiqué on
7918-441: The initials ⟨ l ⟩ and ⟨ n ⟩ when necessary in order to represent the sound [y] . This is necessary in order to distinguish the front high rounded vowel in lü (e.g. 驴 ; 驢 ; 'donkey') from the back high rounded vowel in lu (e.g. 炉 ; 爐 ; 'oven'). Tonal markers are placed above the umlaut, as in lǘ . However, the ü is not used in the other contexts where it could represent
8025-586: 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
8132-528: 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
8239-772: The method of Chinese phonetic instruction in mainland China . The ISO adopted pinyin as the standard romanization for modern Chinese in 1982 (ISO 7098:1982, superseded by ISO 7098:2015). The United Nations followed suit in 1986. It has also been accepted by the government of Singapore , the United States's Library of Congress , the American Library Association , and many other international institutions. Pinyin assigns some Latin letters sound values which are quite different from those of most languages. This has drawn some criticism as it may lead to confusion when uninformed speakers apply either native or English assumed pronunciations to words. However, this problem
8346-455: 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
8453-404: The more convenient form ju is used instead of jü . Genuine ambiguities only happen with nu / nü and lu / lü , which are then distinguished by an umlaut. Many fonts or output methods do not support an umlaut for ü or cannot place tone marks on top of ü . Likewise, using ü in input methods is difficult because it is not present as a simple key on many keyboard layouts. For these reasons v
8560-440: The most common way to transcribe them in English. Pinyin has also become the dominant Chinese input method in mainland China, in contrast to Taiwan, where bopomofo is most commonly used. Families outside of Taiwan who speak Mandarin as a mother tongue use pinyin to help children associate characters with spoken words which they already know. Chinese families outside of Taiwan who speak some other language as their mother tongue use
8667-425: 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
8774-579: The names of several pinyin letters using -ê finals. According to the Scheme for the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet , ng can be abbreviated with the shorthand ŋ . However, this shorthand is rarely used due to difficulty of entering it on computers. (Starts with the vowel sound in f a ther and ends in the velar nasal ; like s ong in some dialects of American English) An umlaut is added to ⟨ u ⟩ when it occurs after
8881-583: 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
8988-538: 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
9095-558: The pinyin letters assigned to each initial are accompanied by their phonetic realizations in brackets, notated according to the International Phonetic Alphabet . In each cell below, the first line indicates the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcription, the second indicates pinyin for a standalone (no-initial) form, and the third indicates pinyin for a combination with an initial. Other than finals modified by an -r , which are omitted,
9202-412: The pinyin system, four main tones of Mandarin are shown by diacritics: ā, á, ǎ, and à. There is no symbol or diacritic for the neutral tone: a. The diacritic is placed over the letter that represents the syllable nucleus , unless that letter is missing. Tones are used in Hanyu Pinyin symbols, and they do not appear in Chinese characters. Tones are written on the finals of Chinese pinyin. If the tone mark
9309-411: The practice to use "LYU" and "NYU" in passports. Although nüe written as nue , and lüe written as lue are not ambiguous, nue or lue are not correct according to the rules; nüe and lüe should be used instead. However, some Chinese input methods support both nve / lve (typing v for ü ) and nue / lue . The pinyin system also uses four diacritics to mark the tones of Mandarin . In
9416-404: 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 ,
9523-552: 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
9630-509: 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
9737-487: The result appears very similar to modern Hanyu Pinyin. Hanyu Pinyin was designed by a group of mostly Chinese linguists, including Wang Li , Lu Zhiwei , Li Jinxi , Luo Changpei , as well as Zhou Youguang (1906–2017), an economist by trade, as part of a Chinese government project in the 1950s. Zhou, often called "the father of pinyin", worked as a banker in New York when he decided to return to China to help rebuild
9844-418: The second vowel instead. Pinyin tone marks appear primarily above the syllable nucleus—e.g. as in kuài , where k is the initial, u the medial, a the nucleus, and i is the coda. There is an exception for syllabic nasals like /m/ , where the nucleus of the syllable is a consonant: there, the diacritic will be carried by a written dummy vowel. When the nucleus is / ə / (written e or o ), and there
9951-453: 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
10058-561: 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
10165-443: The sound lü or nü , particularly people with the surname 吕 ( Lǚ ), a fairly common surname, particularly compared to the surnames 陆 ( Lù ), 鲁 ( Lǔ ), 卢 ( Lú ) and 路 ( Lù ). Previously, the practice varied among different passport issuing offices, with some transcribing as "LV" and "NV" while others used "LU" and "NU". On 10 July 2012, the Ministry of Public Security standardized
10272-498: The standard written language prior to the early 1900s. In particular, Chinese characters retain semantic cues that help distinguish differently pronounced words in the ancient classical language that are now homophones in Mandarin. Thus, Chinese characters remain indispensable for recording and transmitting the corpus of Chinese writing from the past. Pinyin is not designed to transcribe varieties other than Standard Chinese, which
10379-568: 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
10486-547: 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
10593-441: The use of a non-pinyin romanization system, such as one that uses final consonants to indicate tones. Technically, i, u, ü without a following vowel are finals, not medials, and therefore take the tone marks, but they are more concisely displayed as above. In addition, ê [ɛ] ( 欸 ; 誒 ) and syllabic nasals m ( 呒 , 呣 ), n ( 嗯 , 唔 ), ng ( 嗯 , 𠮾 ) are used as interjections or in neologisms ; for example, pinyin defines
10700-512: 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
10807-435: The vowel), a nucleus vowel, and coda (final vowel or consonant). Diacritics are used to indicate the four tones found in Standard Chinese, though these are often omitted in various contexts, such as when spelling Chinese names in non-Chinese texts. Hanyu Pinyin was developed in the 1950s by a group of Chinese linguists including Wang Li , Lu Zhiwei , Li Jinxi , Luo Changpei and Zhou Youguang , who has been called
10914-452: 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
11021-517: 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
11128-453: 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,
11235-528: Was authored in January 1956 by Ye Laishi , Lu Zhiwei and Zhou Youguang. A revised Pinyin scheme was proposed by Wang Li, Lu Zhiwei and Li Jinxi, and became the main focus of discussion among the group of Chinese linguists in June 1956, forming the basis of Pinyin standard later after incorporating a wide range of feedback and further revisions. The first edition of Hanyu Pinyin was approved and officially adopted at
11342-485: 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
11449-576: Was not a linguist by trade. Hanyu Pinyin incorporated different aspects from existing systems, including Gwoyeu Romatzyh (1928), Latinxua Sin Wenz (1931), and the diacritics from bopomofo (1918). "I'm not the father of pinyin", Zhou said years later; "I'm the son of pinyin. It's [the result of] a long tradition from the later years of the Qing dynasty down to today. But we restudied the problem and revisited it and made it more perfect." An initial draft
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