146-410: " Four Barbarians " ( Chinese : 四夷 ; pinyin : sìyí ) was a term used by subjects of the Zhou and Han dynasties to refer to the four major people groups living outside the borders of Huaxia . Each was named for a cardinal direction: the Dongyi ("Eastern Barbarians"), Nanman ("Southern Barbarians"), Xirong ("Western Barbarians"), and Beidi ("Northern Barbarians"). Ultimately,
292-672: A minor syllable followed by a full syllable, as in modern Khmer , but still written with a single character. The development of characters to signify the words of the language follows the same three stages that characterized Egyptian hieroglyphs , Mesopotamian cuneiform script and the Maya script . Some words could be represented by pictures (later stylized) such as 日 rì 'sun', 人 rén 'person' and 木 mù 'tree, wood', by abstract symbols such as 三 sān 'three' and 上 shàng 'up', or by composite symbols such as 林 lín 'forest' (two trees). About 1,000 of
438-469: 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
584-414: A radical that conveys a broad semantic category, resulting in compound xingsheng ( phono-semantic ) characters ( 形聲字 ). For the earliest attested stage of Old Chinese of the late Shang dynasty, the phonetic information implicit in these xingsheng characters which are grouped into phonetic series, known as the xiesheng series , represents the only direct source of phonological data for reconstructing
730-457: 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
876-497: A "barometer of civilisation"; a meter for sophistication and cultural refinement. The Chinese began making a distinction between China ( Hua ) and the barbarians ( Yi ) during that period. Huaxia , the earliest concept of "China", was at the center of tianxia ("[everywhere] under heaven; the world"). It was surrounded by "Four Directions/Corners" ( 四 方 ; sìfāng ), "Four Lands/Regions" ( 四 土 ; sìtǔ ), " Four Seas ", and "Four Barbarians/Foreigners". The text Erya from
1022-546: A "sea" etymology, "Since the ancient Yuè (=Viet) word for 'sea' is said to have been yí , the people's name might have originated as referring to people living by the sea". Yi is the Modern Chinese pronunciation. The Old Chinese pronunciation is reconstructed as * dyər ( Bernhard Karlgren ), * ɤier (Zhou Fagao), * ləj ( William H. Baxter ), and * l(ə)i (Axel Schuessler). Schuessler defines Yi as "The name of non-Chinese tribes, prob[ably] Austroasiatic, to
1168-510: 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
1314-599: 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
1460-462: 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
1606-615: 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
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#17327660866751752-714: 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
1898-481: A geographical sense, as well as between Zhou subjects and non-Zhou subjects in a political sense." Eastern Zhou canonical texts, says Chen, "frequently assert a differentiation between Xia (or Zhongguo ), meaning those states in the central plains subject to the Zhou sovereign, and Yi 夷, Di 狄, Rong 戎, and Man 蠻, all of which could be used generally to refer to non-Chinese ethnic groups". Among these four terms, Yi
2044-576: 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
2190-582: A minister will not be able to protect my sons and grandsons and people; and may he not also be pronounced dangerous to the state?" It is only the truly virtuous man who can send away such a man and banish him, driving him out among the barbarous tribes around, determined not to dwell along with him in the Middle Kingdom. The Liji also gives detailed information about the Four Barbarian peoples. The people of those [ wufang 五方] five regions –
2336-571: A range of purposes. As in the modern language, there were sentence-final particles marking imperatives and yes/no questions . Other sentence-final particles expressed a range of connotations, the most important being *ljaj 也 , expressing static factuality, and *ɦjəʔ 矣 , implying a change. Other particles included the subordination marker *tjə 之 and the nominalizing particles *tjaʔ 者 (agent) and *srjaʔ 所 (object). Conjunctions could join nouns or clauses. As with English and modern Chinese, Old Chinese sentences can be analysed as
2482-570: A result, the syntax and vocabulary of Old Chinese was preserved in Literary Chinese ( wenyan ), the standard for formal writing in China and neighboring Sinosphere countries until the early 20th century. Each character of the script represented a single Old Chinese morpheme , originally identical to a word. Most scholars believe that these words were monosyllabic. William Baxter and Laurent Sagart propose that some words consisted of
2628-606: A rich literature written in ink on bamboo and wooden slips and (toward the end of the period) silk. Although these are perishable materials, a significant number of texts were transmitted as copies, and a few of these survived to the present day as the received classics. Works from this period, including the Analects , the Mencius and the Commentary of Zuo , have been admired as models of prose style by later generations. As
2774-542: 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
2920-404: A significant period of development prior to the extant inscriptions. This may have involved writing on perishable materials, as suggested by the appearance on oracle bones of the character 冊 cè 'records'. The character is thought to depict bamboo or wooden strips tied together with leather thongs, a writing material known from later archaeological finds. Development and simplification of
3066-508: 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
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#17327660866753212-678: 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
3358-596: A specific ethnic group that had battled against the Shang since the time of King Wu Ding . Second, Yi meant specifically or collectively (e.g., zhuyi 諸夷) peoples in the remote lands east and south of China, such as the well-known Dongyi (東夷), Nanyi (南夷), and Huaiyi (淮夷). Western Zhou bronzes also record the names of some little-known Yi groups, such as the Qiyi (杞夷), Zhouyi (舟夷), Ximenyi (西門夷), Qinyi (秦夷), and Jingyi (京夷). Chen notes, "These yi are not necessarily identical with
3504-603: A state of decay as we in China"; "The Master said, In private life, courteous, in public life, diligent, in relationships, loyal. This is a maxim that no matter where you may be, even amid the barbarians of the east or north, may never be set aside." This text has an indirect reference to "barbarians" (5/6), "The Master said, The Way makes no progress. I shall get upon a raft and float out to sea." The (c. 290 BCE) Confucianist Mencius (1A/7) uses Siyi once when Mencius counsels King Xuan of Qi (r. 319–301 BCE) against territorial expansion: "You wish to extend your territory, to enjoy
3650-631: 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
3796-575: 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
3942-602: 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
4088-709: 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
4234-510: Is believed to be a Chinese innovation arising from earlier prefixes. Proto-Sino-Tibetan is reconstructed with a six-vowel system as in recent reconstructions of Old Chinese, with the Tibeto-Burman languages distinguished by the merger of the mid-central vowel *-ə- with *-a- . The other vowels are preserved by both, with some alternation between *-e- and *-i- , and between *-o- and *-u- . The earliest known written records of
4380-1096: Is by far the earliest attested member of the family, its logographic script does not clearly indicate the pronunciation of words. Other 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 poorly described because they are spoken in mountainous areas that are difficult to reach, including several sensitive border zones. Initial consonants generally correspond regarding place and manner of articulation , but voicing and aspiration are much less regular, and prefixal elements vary widely between languages. Some researchers believe that both these phenomena reflect lost minor syllables . Proto-Tibeto-Burman as reconstructed by Benedict and Matisoff lacks an aspiration distinction on initial stops and affricates. Aspiration in Old Chinese often corresponds to pre-initial consonants in Tibetan and Lolo-Burmese , and
4526-490: 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,
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4672-451: Is composed of 大 "big" and 弓 "bow" – but the earliest Shang dynasty oracle bone script was used interchangeably for yi and shi 尸 "corpse", depicting a person with bent back and dangling legs. The archeologist and scholar Guo Moruo believed the oracle graph for yi denotes "a dead body, i.e., the killed enemy", while the bronze graph denotes "a man bound by a rope, i.e., a prisoner or slave". Ignoring this historical paleography ,
4818-450: Is largely absent in later texts, and the *l- forms disappeared during the classical period. In the post-Han period, 我 (modern Mandarin wǒ ) came to be used as the general first-person pronoun. Second-person pronouns included *njaʔ 汝 , *njəjʔ 爾 , *njə 而 and *njak 若 . The forms 汝 and 爾 continued to be used interchangeably until their replacement by the northwestern variant 你 (modern Mandarin nǐ ) in
4964-412: Is not always straightforward, as words were not marked for function, word classes overlapped, and words of one class could sometimes be used in roles normally reserved for a different class. The task is more difficult with written texts than it would have been for speakers of Old Chinese, because the derivational morphology is often hidden by the writing system. For example, the verb *sək 'to block' and
5110-603: 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
5256-445: 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
5402-692: Is respectful and reverent, your heart loyal and faithful, if you use only those methods sanctioned by ritual principles and moral duty, and if your emotional disposition is one of love and humanity, then though you travel throughout the empire, and though you find yourself reduced to living among the Four Yi 夷 tribes, everyone would consider you to be an honorable person. If you strive to be the first to undertake toilsome and bitter tasks and can leave pleasant and rewarding tasks to others, if you are proper, diligent, sincere, and trustworthy, if you take responsibility and oversee it meticulously, then wherever you travel in
5548-668: 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
5694-489: 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,
5840-409: Is the oldest attested stage of Chinese , and the ancestor of all modern varieties of Chinese . The earliest examples of Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones from around 1250 BC, in the Late Shang period. Bronze inscriptions became plentiful during the following Zhou dynasty . The latter part of the Zhou period saw a flowering of literature, including classical works such as
5986-501: 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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6132-500: 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
6278-552: 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
6424-428: 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
6570-465: The Analects , the Mencius , and the Zuo Zhuan . These works served as models for Literary Chinese (or Classical Chinese ), which remained the written standard until the early twentieth century, thus preserving the vocabulary and grammar of late Old Chinese. Old Chinese was written with several early forms of Chinese characters , including oracle bone , bronze , and seal scripts . Throughout
6716-753: 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
6862-485: The Shuowen Jiezi , a dictionary compiled in the 2nd century, 82% of the 9,353 characters are classified as phono-semantic compounds. In the light of the modern understanding of Old Chinese phonology, researchers now believe that most of the characters originally classified as semantic compounds also have a phonetic nature. These developments were already present in the oracle bone script, possibly implying
7008-404: The Han dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE) used the ethnonyms Yi and Siyi . For example, the (139 BCE) Huainanzi , which is an eclectic compilation attributed to Liu An , uses Siyi "Four Barbarians" in three chapters (and Jiuyi "Nine Barbarians" in two). Yu understood that the world had become rebellious and thereupon knocked down the wall [built by his father Gun to protect Xia], filled in
7154-464: The Han period and the subsequent Northern and Southern dynasties . Old Chinese verbs , like their modern counterparts, did not show tense or aspect; these could be indicated with adverbs or particles if required. Verbs could be transitive or intransitive . As in the modern language, adjectives were a special kind of intransitive verb, and a few transitive verbs could also function as modal auxiliaries or as prepositions . Adverbs described
7300-541: The Himalayas and the Southeast Asian Massif . The evidence consists of some hundreds of proposed cognate words, including such basic vocabulary as the following: Although 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 Austronesian . Although Old Chinese
7446-533: 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
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#17327660866757592-710: 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
7738-595: 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
7884-457: The Spring and Autumn period (771–476 BC), these four exonyms were expanded into "general designations referring to the barbarian tribes" in a given cardinal direction. For example, " Yi " became " Dongyi ", literally meaning "East(ern) Yi ". The Russian anthropologist Mikhail Kryukov concludes: This would, in the final analysis, mean that once again territory had become the primary criterion of
8030-464: The Tang period. However, in some Min dialects the second-person pronoun is derived from 汝 . Case distinctions were particularly marked among third-person pronouns. There was no third-person subject pronoun, but *tjə 之 , originally a distal demonstrative , came to be used as a third-person object pronoun in the classical period. The possessive pronoun was originally *kjot 厥 , replaced in
8176-458: The Vietic branch of Austroasiatic have similar tone systems, syllable structure, grammatical features and lack of inflection, but these are believed to be areal features spread by diffusion rather than indicating common descent. The most widely accepted hypothesis is that Chinese belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family , together with Burmese , Tibetan and many other languages spoken in
8322-511: The Warring States period , writing became more widespread, with further simplification and variation, particularly in the eastern states. The most conservative script prevailed in the western state of Qin , which would later impose its standard on the whole of China. Old Chinese phonology has been reconstructed using a unique method relying on textual sources. The starting point is the Qieyun dictionary (601 AD), which classifies
8468-511: The Zhou dynasty ( c. 1041–771 BCE ), the contrast between the 'Chinese' Zhou and the 'non-Chinese' Xirong or Dongyi was "more political than cultural or ethnic". Lothar von Falkenhausen argues that the perceived contrast between "Chinese" and "Barbarians" was accentuated during the Eastern Zhou period (770–256 BCE), when adherence to Zhou rituals became increasingly recognised as
8614-478: 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
8760-596: 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
8906-457: The "casual use of such concepts as " Tianxia "...and "Four Barbarians"." The Chinese classics contain many references to the Siyi "Four Barbarians". Around the late Spring and Autumn period (771–476 BCE) or early Warring States period (475–221 BCE), the names Man , Yi , Rong , and Di became firmly associated with the cardinal directions. Yi changed from meaning a specific "barbarians in
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#17327660866759052-682: 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. Old Chinese Old Chinese , also called Archaic Chinese in older works,
9198-500: The 1980s usually propose six vowels : Vowels could optionally be followed by the same codas as in Middle Chinese: a glide *-j or *-w , a nasal *-m , *-n or *-ŋ , or a stop *-p , *-t or *-k . Some scholars also allow for a labiovelar coda *-kʷ . Most scholars now believe that Old Chinese lacked the tones found in later stages of the language, but had optional post-codas *-ʔ and *-s , which developed into
9344-467: The Chinese historian K. C. Wu claimed that Yi should not be translated as "barbarian" because the modern graph implies a big person carrying a bow, someone to perhaps be feared or respected, but not to be despised. The scholar Léon Wieger provided multiple definitions to the term yi : “The men 大 armed with bows 弓, the primitive inhabitants, barbarians, borderers of the Eastern Sea, inhabitants of
9490-479: The Chinese language were found at the Yinxu site near modern Anyang identified as the last capital of the Shang dynasty , and date from about 1250 BC. These are the oracle bones , short inscriptions carved on turtle plastrons and ox scapulae for divinatory purposes, as well as a few brief bronze inscriptions . The language written is undoubtedly an early form of Chinese, but is difficult to interpret due to
9636-565: 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
9782-637: The Middle Chinese rising and departing tones respectively. Little is known of the grammar of the language of the Oracular and pre-Classical periods, as the texts are often of a ritual or formulaic nature, and much of their vocabulary has not been deciphered. In contrast, the rich literature of the Warring States period has been extensively analysed. Having no inflection , Old Chinese was heavily reliant on word order, grammatical particles , and inherent word classes . Classifying Old Chinese words
9928-582: The Middle states, and the Rong, Yi, (and other wild tribes round them) – had all their several natures, which they could not be made to alter. The tribes on the east were called Yi. They had their hair unbound, and tattooed their bodies. Some of them ate their food without its being cooked. Those on the south were called Man. They tattooed their foreheads, and had their feet turned in towards each other. Some of them (also) ate their food without its being cooked. Those on
10074-522: The Nine Wild Tribes of the East. Someone said, I am afraid you would find it hard to put up with their lack of refinement. The Master said, Were a true gentleman to settle among them there would soon be no trouble about lack of refinement." Yidi 夷狄 "Eastern and Northern Barbarians" occurs twice, "The Master said, The barbarians of the East and North have retained their princes. They are not in such
10220-483: The Old Chinese period, there was a close correspondence between a character and a monosyllabic and monomorphemic word. Although the script is not alphabetic, the majority of characters were created based on phonetic considerations. At first, words that were difficult to represent visually were written using a "borrowed" character for a similar-sounding word ( rebus principle ). Later on, to reduce ambiguity, new characters were created for these phonetic borrowings by appending
10366-465: The Shang dynasty: "With this he gained the trust of the Empire, and when he marched on the east, the western barbarians complained, and when he marched on the south, the northern barbarians complained. They all said, 'Why does he not come to us first?'" Dongyi occurs in a claim (4B/1) that the legendary Chinese sages Shun and King Wen of Zhou were Yi : "Mencius said, 'Shun was an Eastern barbarian; he
10512-467: The Shang remnant elites with courtesy and tolerance, whereas they treated yi people with less respect." Shang people were employed in positions based upon their cultural legacy and education, such as zhu 祝 "priest", zong 宗 "ritual official", bu 卜 "diviner", shi 史 "scribe", and military commander. Yi people, who had a much lower status, served the rulers in positions such as infantry soldiers, palace guards, servants, and slave laborers. Chen compares
10658-491: The South-West countries." Hanyu Da Cidian , a major Chinese language dictionary, notes Siyi as derogatory: "古代華夏族对四方小数民族的統称. 含有轻蔑之意." [Contrasting with the ancient Chinese people, a name for ethnic minorities in all four directions. Contains a pejorative meaning.] "Four barbarians" is the common English translation of Siyi . Compare these Chinese-English dictionary equivalents for Siyi : "the four barbarian tribes on
10804-424: The Zhou area. Although their language changed over time, it was highly uniform across this range at each point in time, suggesting that it reflected the prestige form used by the Zhou elite. Even longer pre-Classical texts on a wide range of subjects have also been transmitted through the literary tradition. The oldest sections of the Book of Documents , the Classic of Poetry and the I Ching , also date from
10950-416: The barbarous tribes all around will come and acknowledge your sovereignty.' The king said, 'Oh! Grand-Master, the security or the danger of the kingdom depends on those officers of Yin. If you are not (too) stern with them nor (too) mild, their virtue will be truly cultivated. … The penetrating power of your principles, and the good character of your measures of government, will exert an enriching influence on
11096-488: The borders of ancient China", "the barbarians on borders of China", and "four barbarian tribes on the borders". Some scholars interpret the si "four" in Siyi as sifang (四方 "four directions"). Liu Xiaoyuan says the meaning of Siyi "is not 'four barbarians' but numerous 'barbarous tribes' in the four directions". However, Liu also states that the term yi might have been used by the early Chinese to simply mean "ordinary others". Yuri Pines translates Siyi as "barbarians of
11242-462: The borrowed character would be modified slightly to distinguish it from the original, as with 毋 wú 'don't', a borrowing of 母 mǔ 'mother'. Later, phonetic loans were systematically disambiguated by the addition of semantic indicators, usually to the less common word: Such phono-semantic compound characters were already used extensively on the oracle bones, and the vast majority of characters created since then have been of this type. In
11388-527: The character of the people, so that the wild tribes, with their coats buttoning on the left, will all find their proper support in them, and I, the little child, will long enjoy much happiness. The (c. 239 BCE) Lüshi Chunqiu has two occurrences of Siyi . Seeking depth, not breadth, reverently guarding one affair … When this ability is utterly perfect, the barbarian Yi states of the four quarters are tranquil. (17/5) If your desires are not proper and you use them to govern your state, it will perish. Therefore,
11534-498: The civilized world and though you find yourself reduced to living with the Four Tribes, everyone would be willing to entrust you with official duties. John Knoblock notes, "The 'Four Yi tribes' refers to the barbarians surrounding the Chinese "Middle Kingdom" and does not designate particular peoples". The Xunzi uses Man-Yi-Rong-Di once. Accordingly, [諸夏] all the states of Xia Chinese have identical obligations for service to
11680-414: The classical period by *ɡjə 其 . In the post-Han period, 其 came to be used as the general third-person pronoun. It survives in some Wu dialects, but has been replaced by a variety of forms elsewhere. There were demonstrative and interrogative pronouns , but no indefinite pronouns with the meanings 'something' or 'nothing'. The distributive pronouns were formed with a *-k suffix: As in
11826-430: The clothes suitable for them; their proper implements for use; and their vessels which they prepared in abundance. In those five regions, the languages of the people were not mutually intelligible, and their likings and desires were different. To make what was in their minds apprehended, and to communicate their likings and desires, (there were officers) – in the east, called transmitters; in the south, representationists; in
11972-424: The combination *-rj- to explain the retroflex and palatal obstruents of Middle Chinese, as well as many of its vowel contrasts. *-r- is generally accepted. However, although the distinction denoted by *-j- is universally accepted, its realization as a palatal glide has been challenged on a number of grounds, and a variety of different realizations have been used in recent constructions. Reconstructions since
12118-476: The concept of the Four Barbarians to justify their rule. Just how heaven ( yang ) was matched with the inferior earth ( yin ) , "the Chinese as an entity was matched with the inferior ethnic groups surrounding it in its four directions so that the kings could be valued and the barbarians could be rejected." Lius and Huang propose that later Chinese ideas about the "nation" and "state" of China evolved from
12264-418: The core issues. For example, the Old Chinese initial consonants recognized by Li Fang-Kuei and William Baxter are given below, with Baxter's (mostly tentative) additions given in parentheses: Various initial clusters have been proposed, especially clusters of *s- with other consonants, but this area remains unsettled. Bernhard Karlgren and many later scholars posited the medials *-r- , *-j- and
12410-490: The core vocabulary of Old Chinese to Sino-Tibetan , with much early borrowing from neighbouring languages. During the Zhou period, the originally monosyllabic vocabulary was augmented with polysyllabic words formed by compounding and reduplication , although monosyllabic vocabulary was still predominant. Unlike Middle Chinese and the modern Chinese languages, Old Chinese had a significant amount of derivational morphology. Several affixes have been identified, including ones for
12556-481: The defenses of the sons of Heaven were the rude tribes on every side of the kingdom; and when their authority became low, their defenses were the various States. In addition, the Zuozhuan has an early usage of Man-Yi-Rong-Di 蠻夷戎狄 meaning "all kinds of barbarians". When any of the wild tribes, south, east, west, or north, do not obey the king's commands, and by their dissoluteness and drunkenness are violating all
12702-416: The derived noun *səks 'frontier' were both written with the same character 塞 . Personal pronouns exhibit a wide variety of forms in Old Chinese texts, possibly due to dialectal variation. There were two groups of first-person pronouns: In the oracle bone inscriptions, the *l- pronouns were used by the king to refer to himself, and the *ŋ- forms for the Shang people as a whole. This distinction
12848-660: The dialect spoken in the Chu region during the Warring States period . These rhymes, together with clues from the phonetic components of xingsheng characters, allow most characters attested in Old Chinese to be assigned to one of 30 or 31 rhyme groups. For late Old Chinese of the Han period, the modern Southern Min languages, the oldest layer of Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary , and a few early transliterations of foreign proper names, as well as names for non-native flora and fauna, also provide insights into language reconstruction. Although many of
12994-399: 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
13140-484: 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
13286-414: The duties of society, the king gives command to attack them. The (c. 4th century BCE) Mozi has one occurrence of Siyi referring to King Wu of Zhou . After King Wu had conquered the Shang dynasty and received the gifts bestowed by God, he assigned guardians to the various spirits, instituted sacrifices to Zhou's ancestors, the former kings of Shang, and opened up communications with the barbarians of
13432-496: The early Zhou period, and closely resemble the bronze inscriptions in vocabulary, syntax, and style. A greater proportion of this more varied vocabulary has been identified than for the oracular period. The four centuries preceding the unification of China in 221 BC (the later Spring and Autumn period and the Warring States period ) constitute the Chinese classical period in the strict sense. There are many bronze inscriptions from this period, but they are vastly outweighed by
13578-512: The east and southeast of the central plain (Shandong, Huái River basin), since the Spring and Autumn period also a general word for 'barbarian'", and proposes a "sea" etymology, "Since the ancient Yuè (=Viet) word for 'sea' is said to have been yí , the people's name might have originated as referring to people living by the sea". The modern character for yi ( 夷 ), like the Qin dynasty seal script ,
13724-485: The east" to "barbarians" generally, and two new words – Siyi and Man-Yi-Rong-Di 蠻夷戎狄 – referred to "all non-Zhou barbarians in the four directions". The Zuozhuan and Mozi contain the earliest extant occurrences of Siyi . The (early 4th century BCE) Zuozhuan commentary to the Chunqiu (" Spring and Autumn Annals ") uses Siyi four times. The affair [presenting Rong prisoners and spoils of war to Duke Zhuang]
13870-512: 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
14016-481: The finer details remain unclear, most scholars agree that Old Chinese differed 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 Old Chinese as a language without tones, but having consonant clusters at the end of the syllable, which developed into tone distinctions in Middle Chinese. Most researchers trace
14162-413: 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
14308-491: 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
14454-472: The four barbarian groups either emigrated away from the Chinese heartland or were partly assimilated through sinicization into Chinese culture during later dynasties . After this early period, "barbarians" to the north and the west would often be designated as " Hu " (胡). Ancient China was composed of a group of states that arose in the Yellow River valley. According to historian Li Feng, during
14600-406: The four corners". In Chinese Buddhism , siyi (四夷) or siyijie (四夷戒) abbreviates the si boluoyi (四波羅夷) "Four Parajikas " (grave offenses that entail expulsion of a monk or nun from the sangha ). Bronze inscriptions and reliable documents from the Western Zhou period (c. 1046–771 BCE) used the word Yi in two meanings, says Chinese sinologist Chen. First, Yi or Yifang (夷方) designated
14746-525: The four quarters, so that there was no one in the world who did not pay him allegiance. The (c. 4th century BCE) Guanzi recounts how Duke Huan of Qi (d. 643 BCE) conquered all his enemies, including the Dongyi 東夷, Xirong 西戎, Nanman 南蠻, and Beidi 北狄. Further to the west, he subjugated the Western Yu, of Liusha and for the first time the Rong people of Qin were obedient. Therefore, even, though
14892-488: 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
15038-704: The homage of Ch'in and Ch'u, to rule over the Central Kingdoms and to bring peace to the barbarian tribes on the four borders. Seeking the fulfillment of such an ambition by such means as you employ is like looking for fish by climbing a tree." This text (3A/4) uses Yi 夷 in quoting Confucius, "I have heard of the Chinese converting barbarians to their ways, but not of their being converted to barbarian ways." The Mencius uses western Xiyi 西夷 four times (three contrasting with northern Beidi 北狄), eastern Dongyi 東夷 once, and Yidi 夷狄 once. Three repeated Xiyi occurrences (1B/11) describe Tang of Shang establishing
15184-609: The king and have identical standards of conduct. The countries of Man, Yi, Rong, and Di barbarians perform the same obligatory services to the kind, but the regulations governing them are not the same. … The Man and Yi nations do service according to treaty obligations. The Rong and Di do irregular service. The (3rd–1st centuries BCE) Liji uses Siyi once. But if it be his character, when he finds men of ability, to be jealous and hate them; and, when he finds accomplished and perspicacious men, to oppose them and not allow their advancement, showing himself really not able to bear them: such
15330-586: 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
15476-548: The language. The corpus of xingsheng characters was greatly expanded in the following Zhou dynasty. In addition, the rhymes of the earliest recorded poems, primarily those of the Classic of Poetry , provide an extensive source of phonological information with respect to syllable finals for the Central Plains dialects during the Western Zhou and Spring and Autumn periods . Similarly, the Chu Ci provides rhyme data for
15622-528: 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
15768-547: The late Zhou dynasty defines the Four Seas as " the place where the barbarians lived, hence by extension, the Four Barbarians... are called the four seas". The Four Barbarians were the Yi to the east of China, Man in the south, Rong in the west, and Di in the north. Scholars such as Herrlee Glessner Creel argue that Yi , Man , Rong , and Di were originally Chinese names of particular ethnic groups or tribes. During
15914-466: The limited subject matter and high proportion of proper names. Only half of the 4,000 characters used have been identified with certainty. Little is known about the grammar of this language, but it seems much less reliant on grammatical particles than Classical Chinese. From early in the Western Zhou period, around 1000 BC, the most important recovered texts are bronze inscriptions, many of considerable length. These texts are found throughout
16060-453: The moat surrounding the city, gave away their resources, burned their armor and weapons, and treated everyone with beneficence. And so the lands beyond the Four Seas respectfully submitted, and the four Yi tribes brought tribute. (1.6) Chinese language Chinese ( simplified Chinese : 汉语 ; traditional Chinese : 漢語 ; pinyin : Hànyǔ ; lit. ' Han language' or 中文 ; Zhōngwén ; 'Chinese writing')
16206-431: The modern language, localizers (compass directions, 'above', 'inside' and the like) could be placed after nouns to indicate relative positions. They could also precede verbs to indicate the direction of the action. Nouns denoting times were another special class (time words); they usually preceded the subject to specify the time of an action. However the classifiers so characteristic of Modern Chinese only became common in
16352-455: 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
16498-425: 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
16644-404: The name Yi "furnished the primary Chinese term for 'barbarian'," despite paradoxically being "considered the most civilized of the non-Chinese peoples." Schuessler defines Yi as "The name of non-Chinese tribes, prob[ably] Austroasiatic, to the east and southeast of the central plain (Shandong, Huái River basin), since the Spring and Autumn period also a general word for 'barbarian'", and proposes
16790-583: 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
16936-618: The numerous yi in Eastern Zhou literature. On the contrary, except for the Huaiyi , Dongyi and Nanyi , these yi all seem to have vanished from the historical and inscriptional accounts of the Eastern Zhou". Inscriptions on bronze gui vessels (including the Xun 詢, Shiyou 師酉, and Shi Mi 史密) do not always use the term yi exclusively in reference to alien people of physically different ethnic groups outside China. According to Chen, " yi "
17082-586: The oracle bone characters, nearly a quarter of the total, are of this type, though 300 of them have not yet been deciphered. Though the pictographic origins of these characters are apparent, they have already undergone extensive simplification and conventionalization. Evolved forms of most of these characters are still in common use today. Next, words that could not be represented pictorially, such as abstract terms and grammatical particles, were signified by borrowing characters of pictorial origin representing similar-sounding words (the " rebus strategy"): Sometimes
17228-538: 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
17374-404: 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 ,
17520-403: The reading pronunciation of each character found in texts to that time within a precise, but abstract, phonological system. Scholars have sought to assign phonetic values to these Middle Chinese categories by comparing them with modern varieties of Chinese , Sino-Xenic pronunciations and transcriptions. Next, the phonology of Old Chinese is reconstructed by comparing the Qieyun categories to
17666-552: 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
17812-509: 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
17958-520: The rhyming practice of the Classic of Poetry (early 1st millennium BC) and the shared phonetic components of Chinese characters, some of which are slightly older. More recent efforts have supplemented this method with evidence from Old Chinese derivational morphology , from Chinese varieties preserving distinctions not found in the Qieyun , such as Min and Waxiang , and from early transcriptions and loans. Although many details are still disputed, recent formulations are in substantial agreement on
18104-510: The sage-kings of antiquity paid particular attention to conforming to the endowment Heaven gave them in acting on their desires; all the people, therefore, could be commanded and all their accomplishments were firmly established. "The sage-kings held fast to the One, and the barbarians of the four directions came to them" refers to this. (19/6) The Daoist Zhuangzi uses Siyi twice in the (c. 3rd century BCE) "Miscellaneous Chapters". The sword of
18250-469: The scope of a statement or various temporal relationships. They included two families of negatives starting with *p- and *m- , such as *pjə 不 and *mja 無 . Modern northern varieties derive the usual negative from the first family, while southern varieties preserve the second. The language had no adverbs of degree until late in the Classical period. Particles were function words serving
18396-467: The script continued during the pre-Classical and Classical periods, with characters becoming less pictorial and more linear and regular, with rounded strokes being replaced by sharp angles. The language developed compound words, though almost all constituent morphemes could also be used as independent words. Hundreds of morphemes of two or more syllables also entered the language, and were written with one phono-semantic compound character per syllable. During
18542-517: 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
18688-561: 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
18834-476: The social status of Yi with " xiangren 降人, people captured from other states or ethnicities, or their descendants". Chen analyzed diachronic semantic changes in the twin concepts of Xia and Yi . During the Western Zhou, they were employed to distinguish "between the Zhou elite and non-Zhou people"; during the Eastern Zhou, they distinguished "between the central states and peripheral barbarian tribes in
18980-563: The soldiers went forth only once, their great accomplishments [victories] numbered twelve, and as a consequence none of the eastern Yi, western Rong, southern Man, northern Di, or the feudal lords of the central states failed to submit. This text also recommends, "To use the states bordering the four seas to attack other states bordering the four seas is a condition distinguishing the central states." The (c. 4th century BCE) Confucian Analects does not use Siyi , but does use Jiuyi 九夷 "Nine Barbarians" (9/19), "The Master wanted to settle among
19126-589: The son of heaven has a point made of Swallow Gorge and Stone Wall … It is embraced by the four uncivilized tribes, encircled by the four seasons, and wrapped around by the Sea of Po. (30) Master Mo declared, "Long ago, when Yü was trying to stem the flood waters, he cut channels from the Yangtze and the Yellow rivers and opened communications with the four uncivilized tribes and the nine regions. (33) Many texts dating from
19272-623: 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
19418-547: 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
19564-512: 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
19710-612: The verbification of nouns, conversion between transitive and intransitive verbs, and formation of causative verbs. Like modern Chinese, it appears to be uninflected, though a pronoun case and number system seems to have existed during the Shang and early Zhou but was already in the process of disappearing by the Classical period. Likewise, by the Classical period, most morphological derivations had become unproductive or vestigial, and grammatical relationships were primarily indicated using word order and grammatical particles . Middle Chinese and its southern neighbours Kra–Dai , Hmong–Mien and
19856-468: The we-group, whereas the consciousness of common origin remained secondary. What continued to be important were the factors of language, the acceptance of certain forms of material culture, the adherence to certain rituals, and, above all, the economy and the way of life. Agriculture was the only appropriate way of life for the [ Huaxia ]. In Chinese, the term "Four Barbarians" uses the character for Yi ( 夷 ). The sinologist Edwin G. Pulleyblank states that
20002-400: The west were called Rong. They had their hair unbound, and wore skins. Some of them did not eat grain-food. Those on the north were called Di. They wore skins of animals and birds, and dwelt in caves. Some of them also did not eat grain-food. The people of the Middle states, and of those Yi, Man, Rong, and Di, all had their dwellings, where they lived at ease; their flavours which they preferred;
20148-471: The west, Di-dis; and in the north, interpreters. The Shujing history uses Siyi in two forged "Old Text" chapters. Yi said, 'Alas! be cautious! Admonish yourself to caution, when there seems to be no occasion for anxiety. Do not fail to observe the laws and ordinances. … Do not go against what is right, to get the praise of the people. Do not oppose the people's (wishes), to follow your own desires. (Attend to these things) without idleness or omission, and
20294-452: 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
20440-408: 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
20586-453: 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,
20732-409: Was also used for "certain groups of people residing in places within the region of Zhou control". Expanding upon the research of Li Ling that Western Zhou bronze writings differentiate the Zhou people ( Wangren 王人, lit. "king's people") from other peoples ( yi 夷), Chen found three major categories: people of Zhou, people of Shang, and people of Yi (neither Zhou nor Shang). "The Zhou rulers treated
20878-812: Was born in Chu Feng, moved to Fu Hsia, and died in Ming T'iao. Ken Wen was a Western barbarian; he was born in Ch'i Chou and died in Pi Ying." Yidi occurs in context (3B/9) with the Duke of Zhou , "In ancient times, Yu controlled the Flood and brought peace to the Empire; the Duke of Chou subjugated the northern and southern barbarians, drove away the wild animals, and brought security to the people." The (c. 3rd century BCE) Xunzi uses Siyi twice in one chapter. If your deportment
21024-493: Was contrary to rule. When a prince has gained success over any of the wild tribes, he presents the spoils to the king, who employs them to terrify other tribes. It is virtue by which the people of the Middle State are cherished; it is by severity that the wild tribes around are awed. I have heard that, when the officers of the son of Heaven are not properly arranged, we may learn from the wild tribes all about. Anciently,
21170-485: 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
21316-515: Was most widely employed for "barbarian" clans, tribes, or ethnic groups. The Chinese classics used it in directional compounds (e.g., "eastern" Dongyi 東夷, "western" Xiyi 西夷, "southern" Nanyi , and "northern" Beiyi 北夷), numerical (meaning "many") generalizations ("three" Sanyi 三夷, "four" Siyi 四夷, and "nine" Jiuyi 九夷), and groups in specific areas and states ( Huaiyi 淮夷, Chuyi 楚夷, Qinyi 秦夷, and Wuyi 吳夷). Historians Liu Junping and Huang Deyuan describe how early Chinese monarchs used
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