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99-586: Beijingxi (Beijing West) railway station ( Chinese : 北京西站 ; pinyin : Běijīngxī Zhàn ), colloquially referred to as West Station ( Chinese : 西客站 ), is located in western Beijing 's Fengtai District . Opened in early 1996 after three years of construction, it was the largest railway station in Asia with an area of 510,000 m (5,500,000 sq ft), before being surpassed by Shanghai Hongqiao railway station in platform capacity. The station serves in average 150,000–180,000 passengers per day with

198-469: 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

297-457: 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

396-510: 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

495-599: 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

594-462: 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

693-615: 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

792-714: 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

891-414: A maximum of 400,000 people per day. It was expanded during the 2000s decade, during which several platforms were added. It also has a fairly large number of car-parking spaces. The construction concept of Beijing West railway station began as early as 1959. It was planned and researched three times in history, but the first two were put on hold for political and economic reasons. For the third time, in 1989,

990-576: 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

1089-542: 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

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1188-508: 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

1287-678: 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

1386-543: A transfer station between Line 7 and Line 9. Beijing West railway station's architectural style, building quality, design and planning have been criticised and controversial since its opening, but despite this, the station is still one of Beijing's most eye-catching buildings. At the end of 2007, the "Beijing New Landmarks Selection" event sponsored by the Beijing News announced the top ten new landmarks in Beijing after

1485-631: 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

1584-575: 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

1683-602: 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

1782-709: 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

1881-435: 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,

1980-603: 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

2079-445: 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

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2178-668: 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

2277-566: Is the Beijing terminal for most trains leaving the city for destinations in western and southwestern China, including Xi'an , Chongqing , Chengdu , Lhasa and Urumqi . Major "traditional" rail lines beginning at this station include the Beijing-Guangzhou railway (via Wuhan ) and the Beijing–Kowloon railway (via Nanchang and Shenzhen ). Beijing West is the terminal both for the Beijing–Kowloon through train and (since

2376-489: 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,

2475-501: 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

2574-500: 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

2673-552: 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

2772-428: 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

2871-753: 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

2970-909: The Beijing railway station was greatly alleviated. Beijing West station is the passenger train departure station of Beijing–Guangzhou high-speed railway , the two main railway lines in China: Beijing–Guangzhou railway (connected via the Beijing-Guangzhou railway west long link) and the Beijing–Kowloon railway , and a high-speed railway line. Most passenger trains in China's Central South, South China, Southwest, and Northwest China depart from Beijing West Railway Station. As of May 2011, Beijing West railway station had received more than 110 trains per day, of which about 100 departed. The Beijing underground cross-city railway , which passes through

3069-612: The Cultural Revolution led to the suspension of the overall urban planning work in Beijing and the cancellation of the planning agency. In January 1975, the first session of the 4th National People's Congress was convened. Deng Xiaoping was elected Vice Premier of the State Council and began to preside over the daily work of the Central Committee and the State Council; Wan Li was then appointed as

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3168-533: 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

3267-710: 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

3366-570: The Ming and Qing dynasties, the lake became an attraction outside of Beijing. It gradually became the place for the royal family and noblemen to enjoy the nature. In 1982, the Beijing government rebuilt this park and made it one of the major urban parks in the city. In 2000, the park was largely renovated, and many landscapes and scenic areas were added to it. 39°53′34″N 116°18′56″E  /  39.8928°N 116.3156°E  / 39.8928; 116.3156 This Beijing location article

3465-595: 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

3564-408: The lotus pond that was still in the suburbs in the urban master plan. Therefore, for a long period of time thereafter, the lotus pond area has been a warehouse area dominated by simple bungalows. No permanent building has been constructed. However, due to the reduction in the scale of construction during the three-year difficult period , the planning has not made much progress. The subsequent start of

3663-478: 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

3762-596: 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

3861-575: The " Counterattack the Right-Deviationist Reversal-of-Verdicts Trend " in 1976, and the site plan was shelved without approval. Into the 1980s, with the gradual implementation of the reform and opening up policy, the pressure of China's railway transportation infrastructure has increased greatly, and transportation capacity is tight. By 1981, Beijing's railway passenger traffic had increased sharply, and 108 pairs of passenger trains were running every day in

3960-632: 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. Lotus Pond Park During

4059-551: The Beijing Municipal Government again formally proposed the construction of the Beijing West station. In March of the same year, the Beijing Municipal Government led the establishment of the "Beijing West Railway Station Preliminary Working Group", which convened a number of design institutes with certain strengths across the country to conduct an architectural design competition. At the same time, with

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4158-649: The Beijing Municipal Government, the Ministry of Railways, and the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications submitted to the State Planning Commission the document "On the basis of the revised plan for the Beijing West Railway Station", and proposed an investment of 2 billion yuan. Construction started in 1991 and opened in 1993. Used, the finishing work was completed in 1994. In March 1991, the State Council formally approved

4257-564: The Beijing West Railway Station during the 2009 Spring Festival, setting a record high since the station was established. According to the "Medium and Long-Term Railway Network Planning (2008 Adjustment)", the incoming routes of the Beijing hub have been adjusted accordingly. The Beijing Railway Hub has formed a layout of seven passenger stations including Beijing Railway Station, Beijing South Railway Station, Beijing West Railway Station, Beijing North Railway Station, Tongzhou Railway Station, Xinghuo Railway Station and Fengtai Railway Station. Due to

4356-511: The Beijing-Harbin Line and other directions. According to the railway development plan, the capacity of Beijing West Railway Station will continue to increase year by year. It is estimated that by 2020, the number of trains arriving and departing from Beijing West Railway Station will reach 137 pairs, including 79 pairs of high-speed trains. Beijing West railway station is a terminal for both "traditional" and high-speed trains. It

4455-603: The Beijing-Shijiazhuang Passenger Dedicated Line. The Beijing Underground Diameter Line, which was proposed as early as 1959 and connects Beijing Railway Station and Beijing West Railway Station, started construction in December 2005, and was completed and opened to traffic on March 20, 2015. The underground Diameter Line enables both Beijing Railway Station and Beijing West Railway Station to receive and dispatch passenger trains from

4554-565: 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

4653-822: The Level 2 Departures Hall. A VIP lounge is available for Business Class passengers travelling HSR. Ticket counters and machines are available beside the main entrances. The station has dual- island platforms with a cross platform interchange between lines 7 and 9. On one side, originating line 7 trains interchange with southbound line 9 trains towards Guogongzhuang , whilst on the other, terminating line 7 trains interchange with northbound line 9 trains towards National Library . *No passenser trains stop here, but have ticket office Chinese language Chinese ( simplified Chinese : 汉语 ; traditional Chinese : 漢語 ; pinyin : Hànyǔ ; lit. ' Han language' or 中文 ; Zhōngwén ; 'Chinese writing')

4752-539: The Minister of Railways, responsible for rectifying the chaotic railway transportation system at that time; In March, the "Decision of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on Strengthening Railway Work" was issued as a mobilization order for the comprehensive rectification of the railway, and it soon achieved results, and then proposed to build the Beijing West railway station again. At that time,

4851-613: The Ministry of Railways and the Beijing Municipal Government, it was decided to jointly establish a planning working group to be responsible for researching and selecting the site and construction plan of the West Railway Station. The Third Design Institute of the Ministry of Railways (now China Railway Design Group Co., Ltd.) and Beijing Architectural Design Institute (Now Beijing Architectural Design and Research Institute Co., Ltd.) were responsible for specific technical work. After some investigation, comparison and discussion,

4950-533: The Ministry of Railways and the Beijing Railway Bureau started the second phase project of Beijing West Railway Station, adding three platforms 7, 8 and 9 on the basis of the original 6 platforms. After the completion of the project, Beijing West Railway Station can send 137 trains daily. At the same time, a large-scale transformation of the station platform has been carried out, including improving lighting facilities, transforming awnings, and raising

5049-528: The Olympic Games to launch the "Beijing First Impression" project aimed at the Capital Airport and its surrounding areas, as well as major railway stations in Beijing and its surrounding environment. Public facilities and places have been comprehensively renovated and renovated, but the capacity of the West Railway Station to receive and dispatch trains is still tight. In the second half of 2003,

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5148-876: The Preliminary Design of the Station Building Reconstruction Project” document, Beijing West Railway Station will be transformed in four aspects: the elevated waiting room, the passenger service system project, the VIP waiting room in the South Station Building, and the related transformation of the hub transfer facilities. There is a patio in the elevated waiting room between the second and ninth platforms, adding an elevated waiting space of 6,600 square meters; adding paper magnetic card ticket making machines, automatic ticket machines and necessary network equipment; adding

5247-568: The Third Design Institute of the Ministry of Railways on the spot to arrange the West Station at this location, and the design drawings needed to be submitted within three months. After the meeting, the group forwarded the site selection opinions to the Beijing Municipal Government for comments. By the end of the 1980s, the problem of tight passenger capacity in the central Beijing railway hub became more and more serious. It

5346-542: The approval of the State Council, the pre-relocation works for the construction of the Beijing West station were launched during 1989. Involving the Xibianmen Goods Yard of Guang'anmen railway station and many factories and residential areas at Beijing West, the process had been large, difficult, and costly. At that time, the state's total investment in the project was 2.3 billion yuan, with the demolition alone costing more than one billion yuan. In March 1990,

5445-607: The central station, with an average daily passenger volume of 352,000; Beijing Station, as the largest railway passenger station in Beijing at that time, was already overloaded in operation, the annual passenger flow of Beijing Station in 1981 was 27.72 million, equivalent to 78,000 passengers per day. On 3 October 1981, the then Mayor of Beijing Jiao Ruoyu and Secretary of the Municipal Party Committee Duan Junyi reported on Beijing's railway transport situation to Vice Premier Wan Li and talked about

5544-583: The closure of Beijing South Railway Station, the Beijing West Railway Station expanded the No. 9 platform and constructed the No. 10 platform to accommodate part of the passenger flow of Beijing South Railway Station. In addition, as part of the expansion, the canopies of platforms 1 to 7 were rebuilt at the same time, and the canopies of platforms 8 to 10 were newly built, using large-span, arc-shaped, steel truss-structured canopies without platform columns. In February 2009, more than 13 million passengers got on and off at

5643-407: The delay of the reconstruction and expansion plan of Fengtai Station, Beijing-Shijiazhuang Passenger Dedicated Line will be introduced to Beijing West Station in the near future, and Fengtai Station will be introduced after the new station of Fengtai Station is completed. For this reason, Beijing West Railway Station needs to carry out the largest reconstruction since its construction. The “Approval for

5742-496: The design and planning of the Beijing West Railway Station. This was the third such occurrence in the history of Beijing Municipal Government. It is proposed to construct the Beijing West station as soon as possible. In early December 1981, the Beijing Railway Bureau issued a letter to the Ministry of Railways and the Beijing Municipal Government to apply for the construction of the Beijing West Railway Station, and

5841-491: The design specification of the Beijing West station. The designed capacity of Beijing West Railway Station is 60 to 70 pairs of trains per day, but the actual number of trains sent during the Spring Festival peak period is as high as 90 to 100 pairs. This overload operation has caused great pressure on the already imperfect station facilities. In 2001, the Beijing Municipal Government took advantage of Beijing's bid for

5940-399: 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

6039-484: 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

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6138-576: 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

6237-413: 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

6336-491: 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

6435-618: 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

6534-527: The idea at the time was to use Beijing West Railway Station and Beijing Railway Station as the main passenger terminal of the hub, and may connect the two major stations through the center of Beijing through four parallel underground tunnels. The site of the West Railway Station is directly opposite the Gongzhufen (Tomb of the Princess). The Beijing Municipal Government has correspondingly reserved land for

6633-586: 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

6732-528: 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

6831-418: The lotus pond to get an overview of the local area. Due to the dry season at that time and the excessive extraction of groundwater in the lotus pond area over the years, more than 20 hectares of ponds were dried up, overgrown with weeds, and deserted; the design team believed that this area did not occupy arable land and there would be less demolition, which was in line with the plan and saved money. It instructed

6930-455: 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

7029-425: 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

7128-583: 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

7227-622: The opening of the Qingzang railway in 2006) for the Beijing- Lhasa trains. Beijing West is the northern terminal of the Beijing–Guangzhou high-speed railway as of December 2012. High-speed trains leave the station for Guangzhou and Shenzhen, as well as various destinations on the connecting lines, such as Taiyuan and Xi'an . There are, however, plans to construct a new major railway terminal (the new Fengtai railway station ) in

7326-538: 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

7425-496: The planning working group came up with the preliminary plan for Beijing West railway station in November 1975 and determined that the Beijing West station was a pass-through station. The station's site is located at the southwest corner of Lianhua Bridge. The road runs northwest–southeast, adopts a triangular square, and the station faces the center of the overpass. However, the political situation changed again soon after, affected by

7524-468: The platform. On October 2 of the same year, the entry-exit joint inspection hall of Beijing West Railway Station was opened for passengers of the Beijing-Kowloon through train (Z97 times), so the Beijing-Kowloon through train no longer stopped at Changping Station. The renovated Beijing West Railway Station canopy is the first large-span steel structure canopy in China. In 2005, in anticipation of

7623-481: The preliminary design was officially launched. Subsequently, the planning team headed by former Minister of Railways Lu Zhengcao , together with personnel from the Ministry of Railways, Beijing Railway Administration, and the Third Design Institute of the Ministry of Railways, conducted on-site inspections to select the site for the station. The team members once climbed the Xiaotu Mountain on the north bank of

7722-414: The preparatory work, adjustment planning, and re-reporting were resumed and finally approved by the state. Beijing West railway station project was jointly funded by the Beijing Municipal Government and the Ministry of Railways. It was a key project in China's eighth five-year plan with a total investment of 6.5 billion yuan. After the completion of the Beijing West railway station, the passenger pressure at

7821-534: The public vote in January 2008. Beijing West railway station unexpectedly took 51,335 votes, second only to the National Stadium, becoming the new landmark in Beijing with the second most votes. As early as the 1950s, the concept of building the second passenger-railway station for Beijing and the underground diameter line had been formed. In the autumn of 1959, when the Beijing railway station , one of

7920-422: The railway department and planning department were still very vague about the location and construction plan of Beijing West railway station. There was no detailed design before, and whether the planned underground diameter line was retained or not, and the technical plan was not finalized, resulting in the design of Beijing West railway station. It is difficult to decide whether to choose through or end. As agreed by

8019-411: The railway department considered that the expansion of the elevated waiting room would not only have a high budgetary cost, but would also affect the erection of the elevated waiting room. Due to the inconvenience caused by the platform of the column, the renovation project of the elevated waiting room was finally cancelled, and the existing waiting room resources were used to allocate the passenger flow of

8118-404: 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 ,

8217-552: 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

8316-509: 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

8415-569: The second floor of the South Station Ticket Center Transformed into a VIP area; and opened up the south exit of the east and west outbound passages, so that passengers can directly access the South Square transportation hub. The renovation project of the elevated waiting room was originally planned to start in early April 2012. Affected by this, a total of 159 trains were adjusted for this purpose. However,

8514-463: 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

8613-511: 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

8712-546: The southwestern part of Beijing, and to eventually make it the terminal for the high-speed trains on the Beijing-Guangzhou line. The Beijing underground cross-city railway connects Beijing West with Beijing railway station . Bus route numbers in bold denotes terminus at the stop. Regular rail services leave from Platforms 1–11; HSR leaves from Platforms 12–18. A dedicated exit is used for passengers arriving on Platform 18. ← Beijing–Guangzhou Railway —— Beijing–Kowloon Railway → All passengers will leave Beijing West from

8811-623: 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

8910-547: 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

9009-462: The urban area of Beijing and connects to Beijing railway station, was opened to traffic on 20 March 2015. Beijing railway station is one of the transportation hubs in Beijing. There are bus hubs in North Square and South Square. A large number of buses depart from there; a taxi rank is also built underground; and the subway station reserved for construction has been completed by the end of 2011,

9108-512: 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

9207-452: 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

9306-488: The working group compiled and reported the "Beijing West Railway Station Plan and Tasks", and the Yangfangdian Road plan that reached a consensus as early as 1983 was officially "thawed". Since August 1990, the architectural plans of 7 design units have been selected. After several rounds of demonstration and selection of various design plans, the implementation design plan had been determined. On 30 September 1990,

9405-517: 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

9504-664: The “ Ten Great Buildings ” erected in celebration of the 10th anniversary of the National Day of the People's Republic of China , was just completed, the then Premier of the State Council , Zhou Enlai , during the process of reviewing the planning of Beijing's railway, affirmed the suggestion of a west passenger station in Beijing. In the general layout of the Beijing Railway Hub revised in September 1960,

9603-453: 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,

9702-485: 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

9801-473: Was more difficult to cope with demand by relying solely on one main passenger station and two auxiliary passenger station ( Beijing North and Beijing South ) with insufficient equipment and capacity. Those three stations have not been expanded on a large scale for more than 30 years, and the passenger volume of the Beijing area has increased four-fold from 1970 to 1988. The construction of the Beijing West railway station has become an urgent need. In February 1989,

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