The way
133-671: The "goal" Background Chinese texts Classical Post-classical Contemporary Zen in Japan Seon in Korea Thiền in Vietnam Western Zen The Śūraṅgama Sūtra ( Chinese : 首楞嚴經 ; pinyin : Shǒuléngyán jīng , Sūtra of the Heroic March ) (Taisho no. 945) is a Mahayana Buddhist sutra that has been especially influential on Korean Buddhism (where it remains
266-437: A logographic script using Chinese characters ( chữ Hán ) to represent Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary and some native Vietnamese words, together with many locally invented characters representing other words. Early linguistic work in the late 19th and early 20th centuries ( Logan 1852, Forbes 1881, Müller 1888, Kuhn 1889, Schmidt 1905, Przyluski 1924, and Benedict 1942) classified Vietnamese as belonging to
399-636: A minor syllable occurred). These fricatives were not present in Proto-Viet–Muong, as indicated by their absence in Mường , but were evidently present in the later Proto-Vietnamese stage. Subsequent loss of the minor-syllable prefixes phonemicized the fricatives. Ferlus 1992 proposes that originally there were both voiced and voiceless fricatives, corresponding to original voiced or voiceless stops, but Ferlus 2009 appears to have abandoned that hypothesis, suggesting that stops were softened and voiced at approximately
532-469: 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
665-457: 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
798-510: 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
931-401: A Chinese philosophical obsession dating back to at least the time of Mencius, when Mencius entered into debate with Kao-tzu on the original purity of the mind. The indigenous provenance of such texts is also indicated by their clear influence and borrowing from other current popular East Asian works, whether or not these other works were Indian or East Asian composition. Muller also writes that
1064-599: 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
1197-748: A brief glance" through these apocryphal works "by someone familiar with both indigenous sinitic philosophy and the Indian Mahāyāna textual corpus yields the recognition of themes, terms and concepts from indigenous traditions playing a dominant role in the text, to an extent which makes it obvious that they must have been written in East Asia." He also notes that apocryphal works like the Śūraṅgama contain terms that were only used in East Asia: ...such as innate enlightenment (本覺 pen-chüeh) and actualized enlightenment (始覺 chih-chüeh) and other terms connected with
1330-462: 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
1463-615: 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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#17328022320911596-714: 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
1729-455: A few English translations: The Śūraṅgama Sūtra contains teachings from Yogācāra , Buddha-nature , and Vajrayana . It makes use of Buddhist logic with its methods of syllogism and the catuṣkoṭi "fourfold negation" first popularized by Nāgārjuna . One of the main themes of the Śūraṅgama Sūtra is how knowledge of the Buddha's teaching ( Dharma ) is worthless unless it is coupled with
1862-570: A group of monks to China, asking whether this book was a forgery or not. A Chinese upasaka or layperson told the head monk of the Japanese monastic delegation, Master Tokusei that this was forged by Fang Yong. Zhu Xi , a 12th-century Neo-confucian who was opposed to Buddhism, believed that it was created during the Tang Dynasty in China, and did not come from India. The Qianlong Emperor and
1995-447: A main vowel component followed by a shorter semivowel offglide /j/ or /w/ . There are restrictions on the high offglides: /j/ cannot occur after a front vowel (i, ê, e) nucleus and /w/ cannot occur after a back vowel (u, ô, o) nucleus. The correspondence between the orthography and pronunciation is complicated. For example, the offglide /j/ is usually written as i ; however, it may also be represented with y . In addition, in
2128-642: A major subject of study in Sŏn monasteries) and Chinese Buddhism (where it was a regular part of daily liturgy during the Song ). It was particularly important for Zen/Chan Buddhism . The doctrinal outlook of the Śūraṅgama Sūtra is that of Buddha-nature , Yogacara thought, and esoteric Buddhism . The Śūraṅgama Sūtra was widely accepted as a sutra in East Asian Buddhism , where it has traditionally been included as part of Chinese-language Tripitakas . In
2261-576: 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
2394-448: A paper published in 1856. Later, in 1920, French-Polish linguist Jean Przyluski found that Mường is more closely related to Vietnamese than other Mon–Khmer languages, and a Viet–Muong subgrouping was established, also including Thavung , Chut , Cuoi , etc. The term "Vietic" was proposed by Hayes (1992), who proposed to redefine Viet–Muong as referring to a subbranch of Vietic containing only Vietnamese and Mường . The term " Vietic "
2527-546: A process of tonogenesis , in which distinctions formerly expressed by final consonants became phonemic tonal distinctions when those consonants disappeared. These characteristics have become part of many of the genetically unrelated languages of Southeast Asia; for example, Tsat (a member of the Malayo-Polynesian group within Austronesian ), and Vietnamese each developed tones as a phonemic feature. After
2660-642: A representative on the Government Council for Nationalities, an advisory body of the Czech Government for matters of policy towards national minorities and their members. It also grants the community the right to use Vietnamese with public authorities and in courts anywhere in the country. Vietnamese is taught in schools and institutions outside of Vietnam, a large part contributed by its diaspora . In countries with Vietnamese-speaking communities Vietnamese language education largely serves as
2793-540: A role to link descendants of Vietnamese immigrants to their ancestral culture. In neighboring countries and vicinities near Vietnam such as Southern China, Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand, Vietnamese as a foreign language is largely due to trade, as well as recovery and growth of the Vietnamese economy. Since the 1980s, Vietnamese language schools ( trường Việt ngữ/ trường ngôn ngữ Tiếng Việt ) have been established for youth in many Vietnamese-speaking communities around
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#17328022320912926-542: 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
3059-508: 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
3192-678: 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
3325-519: A stage commonly termed Middle Vietnamese ( tiếng Việt trung đại ). The pronunciation of the "rime" of the syllable, i.e. all parts other than the initial consonant (optional /w/ glide, vowel nucleus, tone and final consonant), appears nearly identical between Middle Vietnamese and modern Hanoi pronunciation. On the other hand, the Middle Vietnamese pronunciation of the initial consonant differs greatly from all modern dialects, and in fact
3458-552: A third of the Vietnamese lexicon in all realms, and may account for as much as 60% of the vocabulary used in formal texts. Vietic languages were confined to the northern third of modern Vietnam until the "southward advance" ( Nam tiến ) from the late 15th century. The conquest of the ancient nation of Champa and the conquest of the Mekong Delta led to an expansion of the Vietnamese people and language, with distinctive local variations emerging. After France invaded Vietnam in
3591-631: 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
3724-575: 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
3857-602: 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
3990-709: 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
4123-486: Is also known by abbreviated versions of the title such as traditional Chinese : 大佛頂首楞嚴經 ; ; pinyin : Dà Fódǐng Shǒuléngyán jīng ; Korean : 대불정수릉엄경 ; Vietnamese : Đại Phật Đảnh Thủ-Lăng-Nghiêm Kinh or simply and more commonly traditional Chinese : 楞嚴經 ; ; pinyin : Léngyán jīng ; Korean : 능엄경 ; Vietnamese : Lăng-Nghiêm Kinh . An original Sanskrit version of Śūraṅgama Sūtra
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4256-527: Is also spoken by the Jing people traditionally residing on three islands (now joined to the mainland) off Dongxing in southern Guangxi Province , China . A large number of Vietnamese speakers also reside in neighboring countries of Cambodia and Laos . In the United States, Vietnamese is the sixth most spoken language , with over 1.5 million speakers, who are concentrated in a handful of states. It
4389-523: Is an Austroasiatic language spoken primarily in Vietnam where it is the official language . Vietnamese is spoken natively by around 85 million people, several times as many as the rest of the Austroasiatic family combined. It is the native language of ethnic Vietnamese (Kinh), as well as the second or first language for other ethnicities of Vietnam , and used by Vietnamese diaspora in
4522-490: 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,
4655-486: Is not known to be extant and the Indic provenance of the text is in question - it is arguably apocryphal . A Sanskrit language palm leaf manuscript consisting of 226 leaves with 6 leaves missing which according to the introduction "contains the Śūraṅgama Sūtra" was discovered in a temple in China and now resides at Peng Xuefeng Memorial Museum. But scholars have not yet verified if this is the same text or some other sutra (like
4788-730: Is not to be confused with the similarly titled Śūraṅgama Samadhi Sutra ( T. 642 首楞嚴三昧經; Shǒuléngyán Sānmèi Jīng ) which was translated by Kumārajīva (344–413). The complete title preserved in Chinese 大佛頂如來密因修證了義諸菩薩萬行首楞嚴經 means: The Sūtra on the Śūraṅgama Mantra that is spoken from above the Crown of the Great Buddha's Head and on the Hidden Basis of the Tathagata's Myriad Bodhisattva Practices that lead to their Verifications of Ultimate Truth. An alternate translation of
4921-415: Is notated i or y (with the difference between the two often indicating differences in the quality or length of the preceding vowel), and after /ð/ and /β/ , where it is notated ĕ . This ĕ , and the /j/ it notated, have disappeared from the modern language. Note that b [ɓ] and p [p] never contrast in any position, suggesting that they are allophones. The language also has three clusters at
5054-603: 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
5187-534: Is often mistaken for a tilde in modern reproductions of early Vietnamese writing. As a result of emigration , Vietnamese speakers are also found in other parts of Southeast Asia , East Asia , North America , Europe , and Australia . Vietnamese has also been officially recognized as a minority language in the Czech Republic . As the national language, Vietnamese is the lingua franca in Vietnam. It
5320-445: 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
5453-401: Is related to daoyin ). Benn argues that the Śūraṅgama's "taxonomy" of immortals was "clearly derived" from Taoist literature . In a similar fashion, the Śūraṅgama's "ten types of demons" (鬼 gui), are also influenced by Taoist and Confucian sources. After the critiques of the Śūraṅgama from Lyu Cheng and Liang Qichao, Shi Minsheng (釋愍生) established a rigorous response to them, criticizing
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5586-410: Is significantly closer to the modern Saigon dialect than the modern Hanoi dialect. The following diagram shows the orthography and pronunciation of Middle Vietnamese: ^1 [p] occurs only at the end of a syllable. ^2 This letter, ⟨ ꞗ ⟩ , is no longer used. ^3 [j] does not occur at the beginning of a syllable, but can occur at the end of a syllable, where it
5719-668: 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
5852-466: Is the first language of the majority of the Vietnamese population, as well as a first or second language for the country's ethnic minority groups . In the Czech Republic , Vietnamese has been recognized as one of 14 minority languages, on the basis of communities that have resided in the country either traditionally or on a long-term basis. This status grants the Vietnamese community in the country
5985-489: 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,
6118-653: Is the third-most spoken language in Texas and Washington; fourth-most in Georgia, Louisiana, and Virginia; and fifth-most in Arkansas and California. Vietnamese is the third most spoken language in Australia other than English, after Mandarin and Arabic. In France, it is the most spoken Asian language and the eighth most spoken immigrant language at home. Vietnamese is the sole official and national language of Vietnam. It
6251-501: 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
6384-500: 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
6517-552: 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
6650-413: Is used, among others, by Gérard Diffloth , with a slightly different proposal on subclassification, within which the term "Viet–Muong" refers to a lower subgrouping (within an eastern Vietic branch) consisting of Vietnamese dialects, Mường dialects, and Nguồn (of Quảng Bình Province ). Austroasiatic is believed to have dispersed around 2000 BC. The arrival of the agricultural Phùng Nguyên culture in
6783-428: 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
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#17328022320916916-446: Is written with two Chinese characters or in a composite character made of two different characters. This conveys the transformation of the Vietnamese lexicon from sesquisyllabic to fully monosyllabic under the pressure of Chinese linguistic influence, characterized by linguistic phenomena such as the reduction of minor syllables; loss of affixal morphology drifting towards analytical grammar; simplification of major syllable segments, and
7049-697: 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
7182-470: The Śūraṅgama Samadhi Sūtra ). The first catalogue that recorded the Śūraṅgama Sūtra was Zhisheng ( Chinese : 智昇 ), a monk in Tang China . Zhisheng said this book was brought back from Guangxi to Luoyang during the reign of Emperor Xuanzong . He gave two different accounts in two different books, both of which were published in 730 CE. Traditionally there have been questions regarding
7315-533: 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
7448-710: 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
7581-988: The Mon–Khmer branch of the Austroasiatic language family (which also includes the Khmer language spoken in Cambodia , as well as various smaller and/or regional languages , such as the Munda and Khasi languages spoken in eastern India, and others in Laos , southern China and parts of Thailand). In 1850, British lawyer James Richardson Logan detected striking similarities between the Korku language in Central India and Vietnamese. He suggested that Korku , Mon , and Vietnamese were part of what he termed "Mon–Annam languages" in
7714-595: 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
7847-542: The Red River Delta at that time may correspond to the Vietic branch. This ancestral Vietic was typologically very different from later Vietnamese. It was polysyllabic, or rather sesquisyllabic , with roots consisting of a reduced syllable followed by a full syllable, and featured many consonant clusters. Both of these features are found elsewhere in Austroasiatic and in modern conservative Vietic languages south of
7980-561: The Sutra of Perfect Enlightenment , which has only one fascicle, as opposed to the Śūraṅgama 's ten, as a precis of the essential points of the Śūraṅgama ." Benn points out several passages which present uniquely Chinese understandings of animal life and natural phenomena that are without Indic precedent (such as the "Jelly fish with shrimp for eyes" and the "wasps, which take the larvae of other insects as their own") but that are found in earlier Chinese literature . James A. Benn also notes how
8113-597: The Vietnamese orthography with the phonetic pronunciation to the right. Some consonant sounds are written with only one letter (like "p"), other consonant sounds are written with a digraph (like "ph"), and others are written with more than one letter or digraph (the velar stop is written variously as "c", "k", or "q"). In some cases, they are based on their Middle Vietnamese pronunciation; since that period, ph and kh (but not th ) have evolved from aspirated stops into fricatives (like Greek phi and chi ), while d and gi have collapsed and converged together (into /z/ in
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#17328022320918246-478: 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
8379-596: 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
8512-578: The Śūraṅgama even borrows ideas that are mostly found in Taoist sources (such as the Baopuzi ) , such as the idea that there are ten types of " immortals " (仙 xiān ) in a realm located between the deva realm and the human realm. The qualities of these immortals include common ideas found in Taoism, such as their "ingestion of metals and minerals" and the practice of "movement and stillness"( dongzhi , which
8645-522: The Śūraṅgama shows evidence of being influenced by the metaphysical framework of the Ch'i-hsin lun ( Awakening of Faith ), another apocryphal treatise composed in China. James A. Benn notes that the Śūraṅgama also "shares some notable similarities with another scripture composed in China and dating to the same period", that is, the Sutra of Perfect Enlightenment . Indeed, Benn states that "One might regard
8778-660: 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. Vietnamese language Vietnamese ( tiếng Việt )
8911-725: The Chinese Tripitaka is Mahābuddhoṣṇīṣa-tathāgataguhyahetu-sākṣātkṛta-prasannārtha-sarvabodhisattvacaryā-śūraṅgama-sūtra , rendered by Hsuan Hua as "Sutra of the Foremost Shurangama at the Great Buddha's Summit Concerning the Tathagata's Secret Cause of Cultivation, His Certification to Complete Meaning and All Bodhisattva's Myriad Practices". The full title of the sutra also appears as traditional Chinese : 大佛頂如來密因修證了義諸菩薩萬行首楞嚴經 ; ; pinyin : Dà Fódǐng Rúlái Mìyīn Xiūzhèng Liǎoyì Zhū Púsà Wànxíng Shǒuléngyán jīng ; Korean : 대불정여래밀인수증료의제보살만행수릉엄경 ; Vietnamese : Đại Phật đỉnh Như Lai mật nhân tu chứng liễu nghĩa chư Bồ Tát vạn hạnh thủ-lăng-nghiêm kinh . It
9044-402: The Classical Chinese syntax, on which attention has usually been centered. Thus one of the difficulties with the theory that the Sutra is apocryphal is that it would be difficult to find an author who could plausibly be held accountable for both structure and language and who would also be familiar with the doctrinal intricacies that the Sutra presents. Therefore, it seems likely that the origin of
9177-512: The French colonial era. The following diagram shows the phonology of Proto–Viet–Muong (the nearest ancestor of Vietnamese and the closely related Mường language ), along with the outcomes in the modern language: ^1 According to Ferlus, * /tʃ/ and * /ʄ/ are not accepted by all researchers. Ferlus 1992 also had additional phonemes * /dʒ/ and * /ɕ/ . ^2 The fricatives indicated above in parentheses developed as allophones of stop consonants occurring between vowels (i.e. when
9310-459: The Japanese scholar Mochizuki Shinko's (1869–1948) Bukkyo kyoten seiritsu shiron "showed how many of the text's doctrinal elements may be traced to sources that already existed in China at the beginning of the eighth century, and he also described he early controversy surrounding the text in Japan." Charles Muller and Kogen Mizuno also hold that this sutra is apocryphal (and is similar to other apocryphal Chinese sutras). According to Muller, "even
9443-490: 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
9576-727: The Red River Delta and into the adjacent uplands, possibly to escape Chinese encroachment. The oldest layer of loans from Chinese into northern Vietic (which would become the Viet–Muong subbranch) date from this period. The northern Vietic varieties thus became part of the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area , in which languages from genetically unrelated families converged toward characteristics such as isolating morphology and similar syllable structure. Many languages in this area, including Viet–Muong, underwent
9709-479: The Red River area. The language was non-tonal, but featured glottal stop and voiceless fricative codas. Borrowed vocabulary indicates early contact with speakers of Tai languages in the last millennium BC, which is consistent with genetic evidence from Dong Son culture sites. Extensive contact with Chinese began from the Han dynasty (2nd century BC). At this time, Vietic groups began to expand south from
9842-665: The Third Changkya Khutukhtu , the traditional head tulku of the Gelug lineage of Tibetan Buddhism in Inner Mongolia, believed in the authenticity of the Śūraṅgama Sūtra. They later translated the Śūraṅgama Sūtra into the Manchu language, Mongolian and Tibetan. (see translations) Hurvitz claims that the Śūraṅgama Sūtra is "a Chinese forgery". Faure similarly claims that it is "apocryphal." In China during
9975-475: The beginning of syllables, which have since disappeared: Most of the unusual correspondences between spelling and modern pronunciation are explained by Middle Vietnamese. Note in particular: De Rhodes's orthography also made use of an apex diacritic, as in o᷄ and u᷄ , to indicate a final labial-velar nasal /ŋ͡m/ , an allophone of /ŋ/ that is peculiar to the Hanoi dialect to the present day. This diacritic
10108-498: The change of suprasegment instruments. For example, the modern Vietnamese word "trời" (heaven) was read as *plời in Old/Ancient Vietnamese and as blời in Middle Vietnamese. The writing system used for Vietnamese is based closely on the system developed by Alexandre de Rhodes for his 1651 Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum et Latinum . It reflects the pronunciation of the Vietnamese of Hanoi at that time,
10241-621: The command of the Qianlong Emperor . The third Changkya Khutukhtu Rölpé Dorjé or 若必多吉 or Lalitavajra (1716–1786) convinced the Qianlong Emperor to engage in the translation. The third Changkya Khutukhtu supervised (and verified) with the help of Fu Nai the translation of the Śūraṅgama Sūtra. The complete translation of the Śūraṅgama Sūtra into Tibetan is found in a supplement to the Narthang Kangyur. There are
10374-466: The daughter languages from distinctions in the initial and final consonants. Vietnamese tones developed as follows: Glottal-ending syllables ended with a glottal stop /ʔ/ , while fricative-ending syllables ended with /s/ or /h/ . Both types of syllables could co-occur with a resonant (e.g. /m/ or /n/ ). At some point, a tone split occurred, as in many other mainland Southeast Asian languages . Essentially, an allophonic distinction developed in
10507-399: 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
10640-484: 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
10773-442: The diphthongs [āj] and [āːj] the letters y and i also indicate the pronunciation of the main vowel: ay = ă + /j/ , ai = a + /j/ . Thus, tay "hand" is [tāj] while tai "ear" is [tāːj] . Similarly, u and o indicate different pronunciations of the main vowel: au = ă + /w/ , ao = a + /w/ . Thus, thau "brass" is [tʰāw] while thao "raw silk" is [tʰāːw] . The consonants that occur in Vietnamese are listed below in
10906-412: The discourse of the tathāgatagarbha - ālayavijñāna problematik (the debate as to whether the human mind is, at its most fundamental level, pure or impure) appear in such number that the difference from the bona fide translations from Indic languages is obvious. Furthermore, the entire discourse of innate/actualized enlightenment and tathāgatagarbha-ālayavijñāna opposition can be seen as strongly reflecting
11039-506: The early modern era, the reformist Liang Qichao claimed that the sutra is apocryphal, writing, "The real Buddhist scriptures would not say things like Surangama Sutra, so we know the Surangama Sutra is apocryphal. In the same era, Lü Cheng ( Chinese : 呂澂 ) wrote an essay to claim that the book is apocryphal, named "One hundred reasons about why Shurangama Sutra is apocryphal" ( Chinese : 楞嚴百偽 ). According to James Benn,
11172-576: The end of the syllable, developing into tone distinctions in Middle Chinese. Several derivational affixes have also been identified, but the language lacks inflection , and indicated grammatical relationships using word order and grammatical particles . Middle Chinese was the language used during Northern and Southern dynasties and the Sui , Tang , and Song dynasties (6th–10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by
11305-413: 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
11438-491: 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
11571-618: The government of the People's Republic of China, with Singapore officially adopting them in 1976. Traditional characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and among Chinese-speaking communities overseas . Linguists classify all varieties of Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family , together with Burmese , Tibetan and many other languages spoken in the Himalayas and the Southeast Asian Massif . Although
11704-511: The great bulk of material in the Sutra is Indic, though it is obvious that the text was edited in China. However, a great deal of further, systematic research will be necessary to bring to light all the details of the text's rather complicated construction. A number of scholars have associated the Śūraṅgama Sūtra with the Buddhist tradition at Nālandā . Epstein thinks that certain passages in
11837-599: The importance of picking the proper faculty ( indriya ) as a vehicle for meditation, instructions for the construction of a tantric bodhimanda , a long mantra, a description of fifty-seven Bodhisattva stages , a description of the karmic relationship among the destinies ( gati ), or paths of rebirth, and an enumeration of fifty demonic states encountered on the path." Chinese language Chinese ( simplified Chinese : 汉语 ; traditional Chinese : 漢語 ; pinyin : Hànyǔ ; lit. ' Han language' or 中文 ; Zhōngwén ; 'Chinese writing')
11970-406: The internal evidence then indicates that the Sutra is probably a compilation of Indic materials that may have had a long literary history. It should be noted though, that for a compilation, which is also how the Sutra is treated by some traditional commentators, the Sutra has an intricate beauty of structure that is not particularly Chinese and which shines through and can clearly be distinguished from
12103-531: 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
12236-446: The late 19th century, French gradually replaced Literary Chinese as the official language in education and government. Vietnamese adopted many French terms, such as đầm ('dame', from madame ), ga ('train station', from gare ), sơ mi ('shirt', from chemise ), and búp bê ('doll', from poupée ), resulting in a language that was Austroasiatic but with major Sino-influences and some minor French influences from
12369-528: 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
12502-427: The main syllable). When a minor syllable occurred, the main syllable's initial consonant was intervocalic and as a result suffered lenition , becoming a voiced fricative. The minor syllables were eventually lost, but not until the tone split had occurred. As a result, words in modern Vietnamese with voiced fricatives occur in all six tones, and the tonal register reflects the voicing of the minor-syllable prefix and not
12635-465: The majority of Vietnamese vocabulary are disyllabic and trisyllabic words. Vietnamese is written using the Vietnamese alphabet ( chữ Quốc ngữ ). The alphabet is based on the Latin script and was officially adopted in the early 20th century during French rule of Vietnam . It uses digraphs and diacritics to mark tones and some phonemes . Vietnamese was historically written using chữ Nôm ,
12768-423: The misinterpretations that both Lyu and Liang made for understanding the Śūraṅgama. In Shi Minsheng's Arguments Against Lyu Cheng'critiques (辯破楞嚴百偽),Shi Minsheng listed 100 arguments that corresponded to Lyu Cheng's 100 critiques, showing accurate evidence that is traceable in Buddhist scriptures. Ron Epstein gives an overview of the arguments for Indian or Chinese origin, and concludes: Preliminary analysis of
12901-484: The modern Taisho Tripitaka , it is placed in the Esoteric Sutra category (密教部). The sutra's Śūraṅgama Mantra is widely recited in China, Korea, Japan and Vietnam as part of temple liturgies. Most modern academic scholars (including Mochizuki Shinko, Paul Demieville , Kim Chin-yol, Lü Cheng [ zh ] , Charles Muller and Kogen Mizuno ), argue that the sutra is a Chinese apocryphal text that
13034-455: 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
13167-425: 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
13300-583: 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
13433-497: The north and /j/ in the south). Not all dialects of Vietnamese have the same consonant in a given word (although all dialects use the same spelling in the written language). See the language variation section for further elaboration. Syllable-final orthographic ch and nh in Vietnamese has had different analyses. One analysis has final ch , nh as being phonemes /c/, /ɲ/ contrasting with syllable-final t , c /t/, /k/ and n , ng /n/, /ŋ/ and identifies final ch with
13566-538: 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
13699-405: The plain-voiced stops became voiceless and the allotones became new phonemic tones. The implosive stops were unaffected, and in fact developed tonally as if they were unvoiced. (This behavior is common to all East Asian languages with implosive stops.) As noted above, Proto-Viet–Muong had sesquisyllabic words with an initial minor syllable (in addition to, and independent of, initial clusters in
13832-443: The power of samādhi (meditative absorption), as well as the importance of moral precepts as a foundation for the Buddhist practice. Also stressed is the theme of how one effectively combats delusions and demonic influences that may arise during meditation. According to Ron Epstein , a key theme of the sutra is the "two types of mind", furthermore, "also contained in the work are a discussion of meditational methodology in terms of
13965-404: 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 ,
14098-552: 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
14231-509: 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
14364-546: The same except that ơ [əː] is of normal length while â [ə] is short – the same applies to the vowels long a [aː] and short ă [a] . The centering diphthongs are formed with only the three high vowels (i, ư, u). They are generally spelled as ia, ưa, ua when they end a word and are spelled iê, ươ, uô, respectively, when they are followed by a consonant. In addition to single vowels (or monophthongs ) and centering diphthongs, Vietnamese has closing diphthongs and triphthongs . The closing diphthongs and triphthongs consist of
14497-473: The same time, according to the following pattern: ^3 In Middle Vietnamese , the outcome of these sounds was written with a hooked b (ꞗ), representing a /β/ that was still distinct from v (then pronounced /w/ ). See below. ^4 It is unclear what this sound was. According to Ferlus 1992, in the Archaic Vietnamese period (c. 10th century AD, when Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary
14630-517: 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
14763-561: 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
14896-487: The split from Muong around the end of the first millennium AD, the following stages of Vietnamese are commonly identified: After expelling the Chinese at the beginning of the 10th century, the Ngô dynasty adopted Classical Chinese as the formal medium of government, scholarship and literature. With the dominance of Chinese came wholesale importation of Chinese vocabulary. The resulting Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary makes up about
15029-452: The surviving two ancient texts. Buton Rinchen Drub Rinpoche mentioned that one of the two texts was probably translated from Chinese; thereby suggesting the second text may have possibly been translated from another language. The entire Śūraṅgama Sūtra was translated in 1763 from Han Chinese into the Manchu language , Mongolian and Tibetan languages and compiled into a four language set at
15162-544: The sutra do show Chinese influence, such as the section on the Taoist immortals, but he thinks that this "could easily represent an adaptive Chinese translation of Buddhist tantric ideas. The whole area of the doctrinal relationship between the Taoist nei-tan , or so-called "inner alchemy", and early Buddhist tantra is a murky one, and until we know more about both, the issue probably cannot be resolved adequately." Epstein further writes regarding uniquely Chinese influences found in
15295-457: The sutra: the text's reliance on the Buddhist science of reasoning (hetuvidya) and the Śūraṅgama mantra. The Śūraṅgama Sūtra was translated into Tibetan probably during the late eighth to early ninth century. However possibly because of the persecution of Buddhism during King Langdarma 's reign (ca. 840-841), only a portion of Scroll 9 and Scroll 10 of the Śūraṅgama Sūtra are preserved in
15428-505: The syllable-initial ch /c/ . The other analysis has final ch and nh as predictable allophonic variants of the velar phonemes /k/ and /ŋ/ that occur after the upper front vowels i /i/ and ê /e/ ; although they also occur after a , but in such cases are believed to have resulted from an earlier e /ɛ/ which diphthongized to ai (cf. ach from aic , anh from aing ). (See Vietnamese phonology: Analysis of final ch , nh for further details.) Each Vietnamese syllable
15561-498: The text: "As to things Chinese, there are various short references to them scattered throughout the text, but, just as well as indicating the work's Chinese origin, they also could be an indication of a translation style of substitution of parallel items, which would fit right in with the highly literary Chinese phraseology." In arguing for an Indic origin, Epstein gives three main reasons: Similarly, Rounds argues for an Indic source by pointing out "two indisputably Indian elements" in
15694-734: The title reads: The Sutra of the Foremost Shurangama at the Great Buddha's Summit Concerning the Tathagata's Secret Cause of Cultivation His Certification to the Complete Meaning and Bodhisattvas' Myriad Practices A common translation of the sutra's name in English is the "Heroic March sutra" (as used e.g. by Matthew Kapstein, Norman Waddell, and Andy Ferguson), or the "scripture of the Heroic Progress" (as used e.g. by Thomas Cleary). The Sanskrit title preserved in
15827-509: 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
15960-579: The tones, whereby the tones in syllables with voiced initials were pronounced differently from those with voiceless initials. (Approximately speaking, the voiced allotones were pronounced with additional breathy voice or creaky voice and with lowered pitch. The quality difference predominates in today's northern varieties, e.g. in Hanoi , while in the southern varieties the pitch difference predominates, as in Ho Chi Minh City .) Subsequent to this,
16093-547: 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
16226-725: The translation of this sutra as it was not sponsored by the Imperial Chinese Court and as such the records regarding its translation in the early eighth century were not carefully preserved. However, it has never been classified as apocrypha in any Chinese-language Tripitakas including the Taisho Tripitaka where it is placed in the Esoteric Sutra category (密教部). Dispute about this text arose in 8th century in Japan, so Emperor Kōnin sent Master Tokusei ( Hanyu Pinyin : Deqing ; Japanese : 徳清 ) and
16359-512: 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
16492-422: The voicing of the main-syllable stop in Proto-Viet–Muong that produced the fricative. For similar reasons, words beginning with /l/ and /ŋ/ occur in both registers. (Thompson 1976 reconstructed voiceless resonants to account for outcomes where resonants occur with a first-register tone, but this is no longer considered necessary, at least by Ferlus.) Old Vietnamese/Ancient Vietnamese was a Vietic language which
16625-452: 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
16758-452: The world such as in the United States , Germany and France . Vietnamese has a large number of vowels . Below is a vowel diagram of Vietnamese from Hanoi (including centering diphthongs ): Front and central vowels (i, ê, e, ư, â, ơ, ă, a) are unrounded , whereas the back vowels (u, ô, o) are rounded. The vowels â [ə] and ă [a] are pronounced very short, much shorter than the other vowels. Thus, ơ and â are basically pronounced
16891-604: The world. Like many languages in Southeast Asia and East Asia , Vietnamese is highly analytic and is tonal . It has head-initial directionality, with subject–verb–object order and modifiers following the words they modify. It also uses noun classifiers . Its vocabulary has had significant influence from Middle Chinese and loanwords from French . Although it is often mistakenly thought as being an monosyllabic language, Vietnamese words typically consist of from one to many as eight individual morphemes or syllables;
17024-517: 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
17157-453: 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,
17290-494: Was borrowed) it was * r̝ , distinct at that time from * r . The following initial clusters occurred, with outcomes indicated: A large number of words were borrowed from Middle Chinese , forming part of the Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary . These caused the original introduction of the retroflex sounds /ʂ/ and /ʈ/ (modern s , tr ) into the language. Proto-Viet–Muong did not have tones. Tones developed later in some of
17423-635: Was composed in literary Chinese and reveals uniquely Chinese philosophical concerns. However, some scholars such as Ron Epstein argue that the text is a compilation of Indic materials with extensive editing in China. The sutra was translated into Tibetan during the late eighth to early ninth century and other complete translations exist in Tibetan, Mongolian and Manchu languages (see Translations ). Śūraṅgama means "heroic valour", "heroic progress", or "heroic march" in Sanskrit. The Śūraṅgama Sūtra
17556-433: 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
17689-784: Was separated from Viet–Muong around the 9th century, and evolved into Middle Vietnamese by 16th century. The sources for the reconstruction of Old Vietnamese are Nom texts, such as the 12th-century/1486 Buddhist scripture Phật thuyết Đại báo phụ mẫu ân trọng kinh ("Sūtra explained by the Buddha on the Great Repayment of the Heavy Debt to Parents"), old inscriptions, and a late 13th-century (possibly 1293) Annan Jishi glossary by Chinese diplomat Chen Fu (c. 1259 – 1309). Old Vietnamese used Chinese characters phonetically where each word, monosyllabic in Modern Vietnamese,
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