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91-525: The Dzungarian Gate ( Chinese : 阿 拉 山 口 ; pinyin : Ālā Shānkǒu ; Kazakh : Жетісу қақпасы Jetısu qaqpasy or Жоңғар қақпасы Joñğar qaqpasy ) is a straight valley which penetrates the Dzungarian Alatau mountain range along the border between Kazakhstan and Xinjiang , China. It currently serves as a railway corridor between China and the West. Historically, it has been noted as

182-578: A hexameter poem (now lost) about a journey to the Issedones of the far north. Aristeas reported that beyond them lived the one-eyed Arimaspians , further on were the gold-guarding griffins , and beyond these the Hyperboreans. This Aristeas, possessed by Phoibos , visited the Issedones ; beyond these live the one-eyed Arimaspoi, beyond whom are the Grypes that guard gold, and beyond these again

273-470: A legendary creature with the body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle , is a common heraldic theme of Central Asia. According to modern theory, the griffin was an ancient misconception derived from fossilized remains of the Protoceratops found in conjunction with gold mining in the mountains of Scythia , present day eastern Kazakhstan. According to Mayor and Dodson the association of

364-469: 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

455-457: 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

546-510: 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

637-599: 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

728-462: 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

819-615: 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

910-556: A connection between the Dzungarian Gate and the home of Boreas , the North Wind of Greek mythology . With legend describing the people who live on the other side of this home of the North Wind as a peaceful, civilized people who eat grain and live by the sea. Its gateway status is now supplanted by the new gateway city of Khorgas . The windswept valley of the Dzungarian Gate, 6 mi (10 km) wide at its narrowest,

1001-478: A convenient pass suitable for riders on horseback between the western Eurasian steppe and lands further east, and for its fierce and almost constant winds. In his Histories , Herodotus relates travelers' reports of a land in the northeast where griffins guard gold and where the North Wind issues from a mountain cave. Given the parallels between Herodotus' story and modern reports, scholars such as Carl Ruck , J.D.P. Bolton and Ildikó Lehtinen have speculated on

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1092-714: 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

1183-564: A distance of three thousand miles. On the west, the Ala-tau drops suddenly from peaks above snow-line to the level of the floor of the depression, 700 feet above the level of the ocean,—the lowest altitude in the inland basins of Central Asia, with the exception of the Turfan depression , which is actually below sea-level. Geologically, the valley of Dzungarian Gate was created by the active strike-slip Dzungar fault system. In strike-slip faults

1274-576: 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

1365-411: A northern land known as Hyperborea ("Beyond the North Wind"), where people lived in complete happiness and had extraordinarily long lifespans. Chinese language Chinese ( simplified Chinese : 汉语 ; traditional Chinese : 漢語 ; pinyin : Hànyǔ ; lit. ' Han language' or 中文 ; Zhōngwén ; 'Chinese writing') is a group of languages spoken natively by

1456-542: 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

1547-508: 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

1638-678: 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

1729-551: A story of a traveller to the East who visited a land where griffins guard gold and east of which live the Hyperboreans, modern scholars have theorized that the Dzungarian Gate may be the real-world location of the home of Boreas, the North Wind of Greek Legend. The Greek writer Herodotus writes in his Histories (4.13) that the explorer Aristeas , a native of Proconnesus in Asia Minor active circa 7th century BC, had written

1820-631: 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

1911-575: 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

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2002-524: A violent temper to match. He was frequently shown as a winged old man with shaggy hair and beard, holding a conch shell and wearing a billowing cloak. Pausanias wrote that Boreas had snakes instead of feet, though in art he was usually depicted with winged human feet. Closely associated with horses (native to the Eurasian steppe; see Przewalski's horse , also known as the Dzungarian horse ), Boreas

2093-602: 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

2184-490: Is called either 华语 ; 華語 ; Huáyǔ or 汉语 ; 漢語 ; Hànyǔ ). Standard Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. The governments of both China and Taiwan intend for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. Therefore, it is used in government agencies, in the media, and as a language of instruction in schools. Diglossia is common among Chinese speakers. For example,

2275-624: Is located between Lake Alakol to the northwest, part of the Balkhash-Alakol Basin in Kazakhstan, and Ebinur Lake ( Chinese : 艾 比 湖 ; pinyin : Àibǐ Hú ) to the southeast in China. At its lowest, the floor of the valley lies at about 1,500 feet (460 m) elevation, while the surrounding peaks of the Dzungarian Alatau range reach about 10,000 feet (3,000 m) to the northeast and 15,000 feet (4,600 m) to

2366-603: 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

2457-445: 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

2548-668: 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

2639-489: 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,

2730-941: Is theorized that although drainage to the Arctic Ocean basin (e.g. by the Ob and Yenisei Rivers) was prevented, the lake would eventually overflow to the Mediterranean Sea through a circuitous route that would include the Aral Sea , the Caspian Sea , and the Black Sea . This would have resulted in water from the Selenga River and Lake Baikal draining over a course of some 9,700 kilometres (6,000 mi), considerably longer than any river's course today. See Mangerud et al. (2004) for diagrams and descriptions of

2821-501: 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

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2912-500: 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

3003-552: 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

3094-428: 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

3185-753: 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

3276-659: The Dzungars , who were so called because they formed the left wing ( züün , left; gar , hand) of the Mongolian army, the self-named Oirats . It was raised to its greatest prominence by Galdan (also known as Galdan Boshigtu Khan) in the latter half of the 17th century, who made repeated incursions on the territory of the Kazakh state, until Galdan was wiped out by the Qing government in about 1757–1759. It played an important part in

3367-634: The Hyperboreoi , whose territory reaches to the sea. Except for the Hyperboreoi, all these nations are always at war with their neighbors... Based on Greek and Scythian sources, Herodotus describes the Issedones as living east of Scythia and north of the Massagetae , while the geographer Ptolemy (VI.16.7) appears to place the trading stations of Issedon Scythica and Issedon Serica in

3458-533: 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

3549-710: 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

3640-595: 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

3731-843: The Tarim Basin . They may have been identical with the people described in Chinese sources as the Wusun . According to E. D. Phillips, the Issedones are "placed by some in Western Siberia and by others in Xinjiang." J. D. P. Bolton places them on the south-western slopes of the Altai Mountains . Since Herodotus places the Hyperboreans beyond the Massagetae and Issedones , both Central Asian peoples, it appears that his Hyperboreans may have lived in Siberia . Heracles sought

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3822-643: The Tarim Basin . Trade usually took the southern route and migrations the northern. This is most likely because the Tarim leads to the Ferghana Valley and Iran, while Dzungaria leads only to the open steppe. The difficulty with the southern route was the high mountains between the Tarim and Ferghana. There is also another reason. The Taklamakan Desert of the Tarim is too dry to support much grass, and therefore lacked nomads likely to rob caravans. Its inhabitants lived mostly in oases formed where rivers ran out of

3913-594: The golden-antlered hind of Artemis in Hyperborea. As the reindeer is the only deer species of which females bear antlers, this would suggest an arctic or subarctic region. Following Bolton's location of the Issedones on the south-western slopes of the Altay Mountains , Ruck places Hyperborea beyond the Dzungarian Gate into northern Xinjiang . The griffin ( Greek : γρύφων, grýphōn ),

4004-478: 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

4095-596: 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

4186-811: 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. West Siberian Glacial Lake The West Siberian Glacial Lake , also known as West Siberian Lake ( Russian : Западно-Сибирское море ) or Mansiyskoe Lake ( Russian : Мансийское озеро , Mansi Lake ),

4277-650: The Dzungarian Gate must have presented a still more wonderful sight" when it "formed a narrow strait joining the Dzungarian inlet with the vast seas of Western Siberia ," Carruthers quotes the British journalist and MP , Morgan Philips Price , with whom he travelled: One can picture the Dzungarian Gate in the Ice Age : a narrow strait through which the Arctic-AraloCaspian Sea ebbed and flowed into

4368-603: The Dzungarian Gate with gold and griffin ( Protoceratops ) skeletons spanned a thousand years of classical history: The second-century A.D. Alexandrian geographer Ptolemy and ancient Chinese sources agree in locating the issedonians along the old trade routes from China to the West, from the western Gobi desert to the Dzungarian (or Junggarian) Gate, the mountain pass between modern Kazakhstan and north-western China. Recent linguistic and archaeological studies confirm that Greek and Roman trade with Saka-Scythian nomads flourished in that region from Aristeas's day to about A.D. 300—exactly

4459-565: 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

4550-652: The Soviet side, the railway reached the border town of Druzhba (Dostyk) (whose names, both Russian and Kazakh, mean 'friendship') in 1959. On the Chinese side, however, the westward construction of the Lanzhou-Xinjiang railway was stopped once it reached Urumqi in 1962. Due to the Sino-Soviet Split , the border town remained a sleepy backwater for some 30 years, until the Alashankou railway station

4641-488: The action of water. This valley once formed the connecting link between the drainage of Dzungaria and that of Southern Siberia. The chain of lakes at either end of the valley ( Balkash , Ala Kul , Ebi Nor , etc.), are the remains of the great Asiatic Mediterranean Sea ; if their waters were to rise a few hundred feet they would break through the Gate, flooding the plains to the north and south. Noting that, "In prehistoric days

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4732-462: The blocks slide past each other laterally, and in this case they do so in a counter-clockwise direction or dextrally, similar to the famous San Andreas Fault . Remarking on it as a geological and physical phenomenon, Carruthers continues: [T]he Dzungarian Gate is as unusual as that of the Jordan depression . They are both examples of a rift-valley caused by the movement of the earth's crust, not by

4823-477: The cave of the stormwinds somewhere near the Dzungarian Gate" has been known for 2500 years, by travelers from Aristeas in the classic era, to Giovanni di Piano Carpini in the Middle Ages (before Marco Polo ), and to Gustaf John Ramstedt in the 20th century. Carruthers reports the story of the buran , a ferocious winter wind said to sally from a hole in the side of a mountain: We had frequently heard of

4914-537: The depression; the wind is called "ebe," or "yube" by the Kirghiz, and in special cases, when it reaches its maximum velocity, the term "buran" is applied. Boreas ( Greek : Βορέας , Boréas ) was the Greek god of the cold north wind and the bringer of winter. (Mallory and Adams speculate that the name may derive from a Proto-Indo-European root *gworh- meaning mountain.) Boreas is depicted as being very strong, with

5005-528: The desert—all that remains of the great icy sea. The alluvial plains , once its bed, are now covered by desert grasses , while the forest clings only to the shaded slopes and gullies on the northern slopes of the mountains. One of the earliest mentions of the Dzungaria region dates to when Emperor Wu of Han (reigning 141–87 BCE), dispatched the Han Chinese diplomat Zhang Qian to investigate lands to

5096-399: 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

5187-484: 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

5278-464: 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

5369-444: 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

5460-413: 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

5551-491: 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

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5642-435: 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

5733-407: The history of Mongolia and the great westward Mongolian migrations. After 1761 its territory fell mostly to the Qing dynasty ( Xinjiang and north-western Mongolia) and partly to Russian Turkestan (earlier the Kazakh state provinces of Semirechye - Jetysu and Irtysh river). A traveler going west from China must go either north of the Tian Shan through Dzungaria or south of the Tian Shan through

5824-531: 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

5915-408: 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

6006-455: 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

6097-400: The mountains into the desert. These were inhabited by peasants who were unwarlike and merchants who had an interest in keeping trade running smoothly. On the other hand, Dzungaria had a fair amount of grass, few towns to base soldiers in and no significant mountain barriers to the west. Therefore, trade went south and migrations north. The Chinese city of Alashankou lies on the eastern end of

6188-425: 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

6279-583: 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

6370-538: 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

6461-406: The period during which griffins were most prominently featured in Greco-Roman art and literature. The story of Boreas , the personified cold north winter wind of Greek legend who lived in a cave north of Greece, parallels that of the buran , a strong winter wind said to blow into the Kazakh Steppe out of a hole in a mountainside in the Dzungarian Gate. Ildikó Lehtinen writes that "the story of

6552-404: 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 ,

6643-552: 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

6734-509: 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

6825-472: The seas of Central Asia , scoured by icebergs descending from ancient glaciers on the Ala-tau and Barlik Mountains and forested perhaps down to the water's edge,—not unlike the Straits of Belle Isle at the present day. Now a change has been wrought; earth-movement has drained the sea. But away to the north there still remain the lakes of Ala Kul, Sasik Kul, and Balkash , and on the south Ebi Nor,—pools left in

6916-517: The six official languages of the United Nations . Standard Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin and was first officially adopted in the 1930s. The language is written primarily using a logography of Chinese characters , largely shared by readers who may otherwise speak mutually unintelligible varieties. Since the 1950s, the use of simplified characters has been promoted by

7007-561: 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

7098-460: The southwest. Douglas Carruthers , who explored the area in the first decade of the 20th century, writes: The Dzungarian Gate is a defile about six miles wide at its narrowest point, and forty-six miles long, connecting Southern Siberia with Dzungaria. It forms a natural pathway from the plateau of Mongolia to the great plain of North-western Asia, and is the one and only gateway in the mountain-wall which stretches from Manchuria to Afghanistan, over

7189-489: The terrors, dangers, and winds of the Dzungarian Gate... The natives relate the usual traditions as to the origin of the winds in this locality. In the myths of Central Asia a "hole in the mountain," or "an iron gate in a lake" is the usual explanation of the origin of winds. In the case of which I am writing the island called Ala-tyube—a small extinct volcano in Ala Kul—is made responsible for the furious winds which sweep through

7280-623: 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

7371-547: 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

7462-512: 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

7553-716: The valley in the Börtala Mongol Autonomous Prefecture of Xinjiang . To the west, in the Almaty Province of Kazakhstan, lies its smaller counterpart, Dostyk , or Druzhba in Russian. Modern development of the pass for its economic potential was delayed by political considerations. An agreement between the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China to connect Kazakhstan with Western China by rail had been reached in 1954. On

7644-597: The west. The northernmost Silk Road trackway , about 2,600 kilometres (1,600 mi) in length, connected the ancient Chinese capital of Xi'an to the west over the Wushao Ling Pass to Wuwei and emerged in Kashgar before linking to ancient Parthia . Dzungaria is named after a Mongolian kingdom which existed in Central Asia during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It derived its name from

7735-452: 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

7826-517: 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

7917-740: Was a periglacial lake formed when the Arctic Ocean outlets for each of the Ob and Yenisei rivers were blocked by the Barents-Kara Ice Sheet during the Weichselian Glaciation , approximately 80,000 years ago. It was situated on the West Siberian Plain , and at its maximum extent the lake's surface area was more than 750,000 km which is more than twice that of the present-day Caspian Sea . It

8008-453: 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,

8099-511: Was finally completed on September 12, 1990. Since the 2010s, freight trains to Russia, Germany or Poland are sent over the pass. The Dzungarian Gate has been noted in modern history as the most convenient pass for horseback riders between the western Eurasian steppe and lands further east, and for its fierce and almost constant winds. The area has also become known for its gold deposits and for producing prodigious numbers of dinosaur fossils, especially Protoceratops . Given that Herodotus relates

8190-485: 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

8281-501: Was said to have fathered twelve colts after taking the form of a stallion, to the mares of Erichthonius , king of Troy . Pliny ( Natural History iv.35 and viii.67) thought that mares might stand with their hindquarters to the North Wind, and bear foals without a stallion. Przwalski's mares are noted for turning their hindquarters to strong winds. The Greeks believed that Boreas's home was in Thrace, and Herodotus and Pliny both describe

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