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112-559: The script was used to write and transcribe varieties of Chinese , the Tibetic languages , Mongolian , the Uyghur language , Sanskrit , probably Persian , and other neighboring languages during the Yuan era. For historical linguists , its use provides clues about changes in these languages. Its descendant systems include Horizontal square script , used to write Tibetan and Sanskrit. During

224-1215: A vowel must also use the null base consonant letter ꡝ 'a (e.g. Mongolian 'a mi than "living beings"). In Chinese, and rarely Mongolian, another null base consonant ꡖ -a may be found before initial vowels (see "Letter 23" below). dhish tthi te (Sanskrit dhiṣṭhite ) [ Tathāgatahṛdaya-dhāraṇī Line 16] (TTHA plus reversed I) nish tthe (Sanskrit niṣṭhe ) [ Tathāgatahṛdaya-dhāraṇī Line 10] (TTHA plus reversed E) '-a kad ddha ya (Sanskrit ākaḍḍhaya ) [Ill.4 Line 7] (DDA plus reversed HA) ush nni ... (Sanskrit uṣṇīṣa ) [Ill.3 Line 6] (NNA plus reversed I) kshu nnu (Sanskrit kṣuṇu ) [ Tathāgatahṛdaya-dhāraṇī Line 2] (NNA plus reversed U) ha ra nne (Sanskrit haraṇe ) [Ill.4 Line 5] (NNA plus reversed E) pu nn.ya (Sanskrit puṇya ) [ Tathāgatahṛdaya-dhāraṇī Line 13] (NNA plus reversed subjoined Y) mu dre (Sanskrit mudre ) [Ill.3 Line 9] ba dzra (Sanskrit vajra ) [Ill.3 Line 9] bkra shis (Tibetan bkra-shis "prosperity, good fortune") [Ill.5] sa^ ha ... (Sanskrit saṁhatana ) [Ill.3 Line 9] Following are

336-461: A common language based on Mandarin varieties , known as Guānhuà ( 官話 / 官话 'officer speech'). While never formally defined, knowledge of this language was essential for a career in the imperial bureaucracy. In the early years of the Republic of China , Literary Chinese was replaced as the written standard by written vernacular Chinese , which was based on northern dialects. In the 1930s,

448-488: A rime dictionary published in 601, noted wide variations in pronunciation between regions, and was created with the goal of defining a standard system of pronunciation for reading the classics. This standard is known as Middle Chinese , and is believed to be a diasystem , based on a compromise between the reading traditions of the northern and southern capitals. The North China Plain provided few barriers to migration, which resulted in relative linguistic homogeneity over

560-500: A tone split conditioned by syllabic onsets. Syllables with voiced initials tended to be pronounced with a lower pitch, and by the late Tang dynasty , each of the tones had split into two registers conditioned by the initials, known as "upper" ( 阴 / 陰 yīn ) and "lower" ( 阳 / 陽 yáng ). When voicing was lost in all dialects except in the Wu and Old Xiang groups, this distinction became phonemic, yielding eight tonal categories, with

672-602: A branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family , many of which are not mutually intelligible . Variation is particularly strong in the more mountainous southeast part of mainland China. The varieties are typically classified into several groups: Mandarin , Wu , Min , Xiang , Gan , Jin , Hakka and Yue , though some varieties remain unclassified. These groups are neither clades nor individual languages defined by mutual intelligibility, but reflect common phonological developments from Middle Chinese . Chinese varieties have

784-413: A change to writing the two consonants side by side. In the latter case, this combination may be indicated by a diacritic on one of the consonants or a change in the form of one of the consonants, e.g. the half forms of Devanagari. Generally, the reading order of stacked consonants is top to bottom, or the general reading order of the script, but sometimes the reading order can be reversed. The division of

896-678: A classification of Li Rong , distinguishing three further groups: Some varieties remain unclassified, including the Danzhou dialect (northwestern Hainan ), Mai (southern Hainan), Waxiang (northwestern Hunan ), Xiangnan Tuhua (southern Hunan), Shaozhou Tuhua (northern Guangdong), and the forms of Chinese spoken by the She people ( She Chinese ) and the Miao people . She Chinese, Xiangnan Tuhua, Shaozhou Tuhua and unclassified varieties of southwest Jiangxi appear to be related to Hakka. Most of

1008-457: A combination of innovations and retention of distinctions from Middle Chinese: Chinese finals may be analysed as an optional medial glide , a main vowel and an optional coda. Conservative vowel systems, such as those of Gan dialects , have high vowels /i/ , /u/ and /y/ , which also function as medials, mid vowels /e/ and /o/ , and a low /a/ -like vowel. In other dialects, including Mandarin dialects, /o/ has merged with /a/ , leaving

1120-480: A compound word or phrase. This process is so extensive in Shanghainese that the tone system is reduced to a pitch accent system much like modern Japanese . The tonal categories of modern varieties can be related by considering their derivation from the four tones of Middle Chinese , though cognate tonal categories in different dialects are often realized as quite different pitch contours. Middle Chinese had

1232-457: A conjunct. This expedient is used by ISCII and South Asian scripts of Unicode .) Thus a closed syllable such as phaṣ requires two aksharas to write: फष् phaṣ . The Róng script used for the Lepcha language goes further than other Indic abugidas, in that a single akshara can represent a closed syllable: Not only the vowel, but any final consonant is indicated by a diacritic. For example,

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1344-473: A default vowel consonant such as फ does not take on a final consonant sound. Instead, it keeps its vowel. For writing two consonants without a vowel in between, instead of using diacritics on the first consonant to remove its vowel, another popular method of special conjunct forms is used in which two or more consonant characters are merged to express a cluster, such as Devanagari, as in अप्फ appha. (Some fonts display this as प् followed by फ, rather than forming

1456-520: A diacritic, but writes all other vowels as full letters (similarly to Kurdish and Uyghur). This means that when no vowel diacritics are present (most of the time), it technically has an inherent vowel. However, like the Phagspa and Meroitic scripts whose status as abugidas is controversial (see below), all other vowels are written in-line. Additionally, the practice of explicitly writing all-but-one vowel does not apply to loanwords from Arabic and Persian, so

1568-548: A final and a tone . In general, southern varieties have fewer initial consonants than northern and central varieties, but more often preserve the Middle Chinese final consonants. Some varieties, such as Cantonese, Hokkien and Shanghainese , include syllabic nasals as independent syllables. In the 42 varieties surveyed in the Great Dictionary of Modern Chinese Dialects , the number of initials (including

1680-477: A full alphabet. The letters of a ʼPhags-pa syllable are linked together so that they form syllabic blocks. ʼPhags-pa was written in a variety of graphic forms. The standard form (top, at right) was blocky, but a "Tibetan" form (bottom) was even more so, consisting almost entirely of straight orthogonal lines and right angles. A " seal script " form ( Chinese : 蒙古篆字 ; pinyin : měnggǔ zhuànzì ; "Mongolian Seal Script"), used for imperial seals and

1792-436: A letter modified to indicate the vowel. Letters can be modified either by means of diacritics or by changes in the form of the letter itself. If all modifications are by diacritics and all diacritics follow the direction of the writing of the letters, then the abugida is not an alphasyllabary. However, most languages have words that are more complicated than a sequence of CV syllables, even ignoring tone. The first complication

1904-469: A letter representing just a consonant (C). This final consonant may be represented with: In a true abugida, the lack of distinctive vowel marking of the letter may result from the diachronic loss of the inherent vowel, e.g. by syncope and apocope in Hindi . When not separating syllables containing consonant clusters (CCV) into C + CV, these syllables are often written by combining the two consonants. In

2016-416: A marker, usually the same as the attributive marker, though some varieties use a different marker. All varieties have transitive and intransitive verbs. Instead of adjectives, Chinese varieties use stative verbs , which can function as predicates but differ from intransitive verbs in being modifiable by degree adverbs. Ditransitive sentences vary, with northern varieties placing the indirect object before

2128-413: A particular vowel, and in which diacritics denote other vowels". (This 'particular vowel' is referred to as the inherent or implicit vowel, as opposed to the explicit vowels marked by the 'diacritics'.) An alphasyllabary is defined as "a type of writing system in which the vowels are denoted by subsidiary symbols, not all of which occur in a linear order (with relation to the consonant symbols) that

2240-498: A primary division between northern groups (Mandarin and Jin) and all others, with Min as an identifiable branch. Because speakers share a standard written form , and have a common cultural heritage with long periods of political unity, the varieties are popularly perceived among native speakers as variants of a single Chinese language, and this is also the official position. Conventional English-language usage in Chinese linguistics

2352-665: A reduced pitch range that is determined by the preceding syllable. Most morphemes in Chinese varieties are monosyllables descended from Old Chinese words, and have cognates in all varieties: Southern varieties also include distinctive substrata of vocabulary of non-Chinese origin. Some of these words may have come from Tai–Kadai and Austroasiatic languages. Chinese varieties generally lack inflectional morphology and instead express grammatical categories using analytic means such as particles and prepositions . There are major differences between northern and southern varieties, but often some northern areas share features found in

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2464-416: A result of the spread of writing systems, independent vowels may be used to represent syllables beginning with a glottal stop , even for non-initial syllables. The next two complications are consonant clusters before a vowel (CCV) and syllables ending in a consonant (CVC). The simplest solution, which is not always available, is to break with the principle of writing words as a sequence of syllables and use

2576-409: A segmental writing system in which consonant–vowel sequences are written as units; each unit is based on a consonant letter, and vowel notation is secondary, similar to a diacritical mark . This contrasts with a full alphabet , in which vowels have status equal to consonants, and with an abjad , in which vowel marking is absent, partial , or optional – in less formal contexts, all three types of

2688-851: A single mid vowel with a wide range of allophones . Many dialects, particularly in northern and central China, have apical or retroflex vowels, which are syllabic fricatives derived from high vowels following sibilant initials. In many Wu dialects , vowels and final glides have monophthongized , producing a rich inventory of vowels in open syllables. Reduction of medials is common in Yue dialects . The Middle Chinese codas, consisting of glides /j/ and /w/ , nasals /m/ , /n/ and /ŋ/ , and stops /p/ , /t/ and /k/ , are best preserved in southern dialects, particularly Yue dialects such as Cantonese. In some Min dialects, nasals and stops following open vowels have shifted to nasalization and glottal stops respectively. In Jin, Lower Yangtze Mandarin and Wu dialects,

2800-460: A six-way contrast in unchecked syllables and a two-way contrast in checked syllables. Cantonese maintains these eight tonal categories and has developed an additional distinction in checked syllables. (The latter distinction has disappeared again in many varieties.) However, most Chinese varieties have reduced the number of tonal distinctions. For example, in Mandarin, the tones resulting from

2912-575: A standard national language with pronunciation based on the Beijing dialect was adopted, but with vocabulary drawn from a range of Mandarin varieties, and grammar based on literature in the modern written vernacular. Standard Chinese is the official spoken language of the People's Republic of China and Taiwan, and is one of the official languages of Singapore. It has become a pluricentric language , with differences in pronunciation and vocabulary between

3024-502: A syllable with the default vowel, in this case ka ( [kə] ). In some languages, including Hindi, it becomes a final closing consonant at the end of a word, in this case k . The inherent vowel may be changed by adding vowel mark ( diacritics ), producing syllables such as कि ki, कु ku, के ke, को ko. In many of the Brahmic scripts, a syllable beginning with a cluster is treated as a single character for purposes of vowel marking, so

3136-439: A term in linguistics was proposed by Peter T. Daniels in his 1990 typology of writing systems . As Daniels used the word, an abugida is in contrast with a syllabary , where letters with shared consonant or vowel sounds show no particular resemblance to one another. Furthermore, an abugida is also in contrast with an alphabet proper, where independent letters are used to denote consonants and vowels. The term alphasyllabary

3248-471: A third tone changes to a second tone when followed by another third tone. Particularly complex sandhi patterns are found in Wu dialects and coastal Min dialects. In Shanghainese, the tone of all syllables in a word is determined by the tone of the first, so that Shanghainese has word rather than syllable tone. In northern varieties, many particles or suffixes are weakly stressed or atonic syllables. These are much rarer in southern varieties. Such syllables have

3360-577: A three-way tonal contrast in syllables with vocalic or nasal endings. The traditional names of the tonal categories are 'level'/'even' ( 平 píng ), 'rising' ( 上 shǎng ) and 'departing'/'going' ( 去 qù ). Syllables ending in a stop consonant /p/ , /t/ or /k/ ( checked syllables ) had no tonal contrasts but were traditionally treated as a fourth tone category, 'entering' ( 入 rù ), corresponding to syllables ending in nasals /m/ , /n/ , or /ŋ/ . The tones of Middle Chinese, as well as similar systems in neighbouring languages, experienced

3472-463: A valid syllable, in the ʼPhags-pa script initial vowels other than ꡝ a may occur without a base consonant when they are not the first element in a diphthong (e.g. ue ) or a digraph (e.g. eeu and eeo ). Thus in Chinese ʼPhags-pa texts the syllables u 吾 wú , on 刓 wán and o 訛 é occur, and in Mongolian ʼPhags-pa texts

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3584-620: A velar or glottal initial: Plural personal pronouns may be marked with a suffix, noun or phrase in different varieties. The suffix men 们 / 們 is common in the north, but several different suffixes are use elsewhere. In some varieties, especially in the Wu area, different suffixes are used for first, second and third person pronouns. Case is not marked, except in varieties in the Qinghai–Gansu sprachbund . The forms of demonstratives vary greatly, with few cognates between different areas. A two-way distinction between proximal and distal

3696-479: A verb cognate with yǒu 有 , which can also be used as a transitive verb indicating possession. Most varieties use a locative verb cognate to zài 在 , but Min, Wu and Yue varieties use several different forms. Abugida An abugida ( / ˌ ɑː b uː ˈ ɡ iː d ə , ˌ æ b -/ ; from Ge'ez : አቡጊዳ , 'äbugīda ) – sometimes also called alphasyllabary , neosyllabary , or pseudo-alphabet  – is

3808-420: A vowel can be written before, below or above a consonant letter, while the syllable is still pronounced in the order of a consonant-vowel combination (CV). The fundamental principles of an abugida apply to words made up of consonant-vowel (CV) syllables. The syllables are written as letters in a straight line, where each syllable is either a letter that represents the sound of a consonant and its inherent vowel or

3920-470: A vowel marker like ि -i, falling before the character it modifies, may appear several positions before the place where it is pronounced. For example, the game cricket in Hindi is क्रिकेट krikeṭ ; the diacritic for /i/ appears before the consonant cluster /kr/ , not before the /r/ . A more unusual example is seen in the Batak alphabet : Here the syllable bim is written ba-ma-i-(virama) . That is,

4032-810: A whole. As with the Romance languages descended from Latin , the ancestral language was spread by imperial expansion over substrate languages 2000 years ago, by the Qin and Han empires in China, and the Roman Empire in Europe. Medieval Latin remained the standard for scholarly and administrative writing in Western Europe for centuries, influencing local varieties much like Literary Chinese did in China. In both cases, local forms of speech diverged from both

4144-516: A wide area. Contrastingly, the mountains and rivers of southern China contain all six of the other major Chinese dialect groups, with each in turn featuring great internal diversity, particularly in Fujian . Until the mid-20th century, most Chinese people spoke only their local language. As a practical measure, officials of the Ming and Qing dynasties carried out the administration of the empire using

4256-403: A word into syllables for the purposes of writing does not always accord with the natural phonetics of the language. For example, Brahmic scripts commonly handle a phonetic sequence CVC-CV as CV-CCV or CV-C-CV. However, sometimes phonetic CVC syllables are handled as single units, and the final consonant may be represented: More complicated unit structures (e.g. CC or CCVC) are handled by combining

4368-662: A zero initial) ranges from 15 in some southern dialects to a high of 35 in Chongming dialect , spoken in Chongming Island , Shanghai . The initial system of the Fuzhou dialect of northern Fujian is a minimal example. With the exception of /ŋ/ , which is often merged with the zero initial, the initials of this dialect are present in all Chinese varieties, although several varieties do not distinguish /n/ from /l/ . However, most varieties have additional initials, due to

4480-463: Is a non-segmental script that indicates syllable onsets and rimes , such as consonant clusters and vowels with final consonants. Thus it is not segmental and cannot be considered an abugida. However, it superficially resembles an abugida with the roles of consonant and vowel reversed. Most syllables are written with two letters in the order rime–onset (typically vowel-consonant), even though they are pronounced as onset-rime (consonant-vowel), rather like

4592-498: Is actually a seal script of Tibetan . Korean records state that Hangul was based on an "Old Seal Script" (古篆字), which may be ʼPhags-pa and a reference to its Chinese name Chinese : 蒙古篆字 ; pinyin : měnggǔ zhuànzì (see origin of Hangul ). However, it is the simpler standard form of ʼPhags-pa that is the closer graphic match to Hangul. The following 41 are the basic ʼPhags-pa letters. Letters 1-30 and 35-38 are base consonants. The order of Letters 1-30

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4704-595: Is also written as ḥPʻags-pa, Phaspa, Paspa, Baschpah, and Pa-sse-pa. During the Mongol Empire , the Mongol rulers wanted a universal script to write down the languages of the people they subjugated. The Uyghur -based Mongolian alphabet is not a perfect fit for the Middle Mongol language , and it would be impractical to extend it to a language with a very different phonology like Chinese . Therefore, during

4816-499: Is congruent with their temporal order in speech". Bright did not require that an alphabet explicitly represent all vowels. ʼPhags-pa is an example of an abugida because it has an inherent vowel , but it is not an alphasyllabary because its vowels are written in linear order. Modern Lao is an example of an alphasyllabary that is not an abugida, for there is no inherent vowel and its vowels are always written explicitly and not in accordance to their temporal order in speech, meaning that

4928-495: Is difficult to draw a dividing line between abugidas and other segmental scripts. For example, the Meroitic script of ancient Sudan did not indicate an inherent a (one symbol stood for both m and ma, for example), and is thus similar to Brahmic family of abugidas. However, the other vowels were indicated with full letters, not diacritics or modification, so the system was essentially an alphabet that did not bother to write

5040-462: Is most common, but some varieties have a single neutral demonstrative, while others distinguish three or more on the basis of distance, visibility or other properties. An extreme example is found in a variety spoken in Yongxin County , Jiangxi, where five grades of distance are distinguished. Attributive constructions typically have the form NP/VP + ATTR + NP, where the last noun phrase

5152-470: Is similarly used as a literary form by speakers of all varieties. Dialectologist Jerry Norman 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, although there are also some sharp boundaries. However, the rate of change in mutual intelligibility varies immensely depending on region. For example,

5264-476: Is syllables that consist of just a vowel (V). For some languages, a zero consonant letter is used as though every syllable began with a consonant. For other languages, each vowel has a separate letter that is used for each syllable consisting of just the vowel. These letters are known as independent vowels , and are found in most Indic scripts. These letters may be quite different from the corresponding diacritics, which by contrast are known as dependent vowels . As

5376-486: Is the case for syllabaries, the units of the writing system may consist of the representations both of syllables and of consonants. For scripts of the Brahmic family, the term akshara is used for the units. In several languages of Ethiopia and Eritrea, abugida traditionally meant letters of the Ethiopic or Ge‘ez script in which many of these languages are written. Ge'ez is one of several segmental writing systems in

5488-456: Is the head and the attributive marker is usually a cognate of de 的 in the north or a classifier in the south. The latter pattern is also common in the languages of Southeast Asia. A few varieties in the Jiang–Huai, Wu, southern Min and Yue areas feature the old southern pattern of a zero attributive marker. Nominalization of verb phrases or predicates is achieved by following them with

5600-491: Is the same as the traditional order of the thirty basic letters of the Tibetan script, to which they correspond. Letters 35-38 represent sounds that do not occur in Tibetan, and are either derived from an existing Tibetan base consonant (e.g. Letters 2 and 35 are both derived from the simple Tibetan letter ཁ kha , but are graphically distinct from each other) or from a combination of an existing Tibetan base consonant and

5712-566: Is to use dialect for the speech of a particular place (regardless of status), with regional groupings like Mandarin and Wu called dialect groups . Other linguists choose to refer to the major groups as languages. However, each of these groups contains mutually unintelligible varieties. ISO 639-3 and the Ethnologue assign language codes to each of the top-level groups listed above except Min and Pinghua, whose subdivisions are assigned five and two codes respectively. Some linguists refer to

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5824-670: Is with North Indic scripts, used in Northern India, Nepal, Tibet, Bhutan, Mongolia, and Russia; and Southern Indic scripts, used in South India , Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia . South Indic letter forms are more rounded than North Indic forms, though Odia , Golmol and Litumol of Nepal script are rounded. Most North Indic scripts' full letters incorporate a horizontal line at the top, with Gujarati and Odia as exceptions; South Indic scripts do not. Indic scripts indicate vowels through dependent vowel signs (diacritics) around

5936-657: Is written as ꡂꡞꡏ gim . ʼPhags-pa script was added to the Unicode Standard in July 2006 with the release of version 5.0. The Unicode block for ʼPhags-pa is U+A840–U+A877: U+A856 ꡖ PHAGS-PA LETTER SMALL A is transliterated using U+A78F ꞏ LATIN LETTER SINOLOGICAL DOT from the Latin Extended-D Unicode block. Varieties of Chinese There are hundreds of local Chinese language varieties forming

6048-649: The Brahmi alphabet . Today they are used in most languages of South Asia (although replaced by Perso-Arabic in Urdu , Kashmiri and some other languages of Pakistan and India ), mainland Southeast Asia ( Myanmar , Thailand , Laos , Cambodia , and Vietnam ), Tibet ( Tibetan ), Indonesian archipelago ( Javanese , Balinese , Sundanese , Batak , Lontara , Rejang , Rencong , Makasar , etc.), Philippines ( Baybayin , Buhid , Hanunuo , Kulitan , and Aborlan Tagbanwa ), Malaysia ( Rencong ). The primary division

6160-490: The Ge'ez abugida (or fidel ), the base form of the letter (also known as fidel ) may be altered. For example, ሀ hä [hə] (base form), ሁ hu (with a right-side diacritic that does not alter the letter), ሂ hi (with a subdiacritic that compresses the consonant, so it is the same height), ህ hə [hɨ] or [h] (where the letter is modified with a kink in the left arm). In the family known as Canadian Aboriginal syllabics , which

6272-583: The Kharoṣṭhī and Brāhmī scripts ; the abjad in question is usually considered to be the Aramaic one, but while the link between Aramaic and Kharosthi is more or less undisputed, this is not the case with Brahmi. The Kharosthi family does not survive today, but Brahmi's descendants include most of the modern scripts of South and Southeast Asia . Ge'ez derived from a different abjad, the Sabean script of Yemen ;

6384-612: The Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area , Chinese varieties require an intervening classifier when a noun is preceded by a demonstrative or numeral. The inventory of classifiers tends to be larger in the south than in the north, where some varieties use only the general classifier cognate with ge 个 / 個 . First- and second-person pronouns are cognate across all varieties. For third-person pronouns, Jin, Mandarin, and Xiang varieties have cognate forms, but other varieties generally use forms that originally had

6496-759: The Pax Mongolica the script even made numerous appearances in Western medieval art . ʼPhags-pa script: ꡏꡡꡃ ꡣꡡꡙ ꡐꡜꡞ mongxol tshi , "Mongolian script"; Mongolian : дөрвөлжин үсэг dörvöljin üseg , "square script"; дөрвөлжин бичиг dörvöljin bichig , "square writing" Tibetan : ཧོར་ཡིག་གསར་པ་ , Wylie : hor yig gsar pa "new Mongolian script"; Yuan dynasty Chinese : 蒙古新字 ; pinyin : měnggǔ xīnzì "new Mongolian script"; 國字 ; pinyin : guózì "national script"; Modern Chinese : 八思巴文 ; pinyin : bāsībā wén "ʼPhags-pa script"; 帕克斯巴 ; pàkèsībā In English, it

6608-536: The aksharas ; there is no vowel-killer mark. Abjads are typically written without indication of many vowels. However, in some contexts like teaching materials or scriptures , Arabic and Hebrew are written with full indication of vowels via diacritic marks ( harakat , niqqud ) making them effectively alphasyllabaries. The Arabic scripts used for Kurdish in Iraq and for Uyghur in Xinjiang , China, as well as

6720-852: The tree model to Chinese. Scholars account for the transitional nature of the central varieties in terms of wave models . Iwata argues that innovations have been transmitted from the north across the Huai River to the Lower Yangtze Mandarin area and from there southeast to the Wu area and westwards along the Yangtze River valley and thence to southwestern areas, leaving the hills of the southeast largely untouched. Some dialect boundaries , such as between Wu and Min, are particularly abrupt, while others, such as between Mandarin and Xiang or between Min and Hakka, are much less clearly defined. Several east-west isoglosses run along

6832-555: The ʼPhags-pa alphabet. Descending from Tibetan script , it is part of the Brahmic family of scripts , which includes Devanagari and scripts used throughout Southeast Asia and Central Asia . It is unique among Brahmic scripts in that it is written from top to bottom, like how classical Chinese used to be written; and like the Manchu alphabet or later Mongolian alphabet is still written. It did not receive wide acceptance and

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6944-463: The Beijing dialect distinguishes mā ( 妈 / 媽 'mother'), má ( 麻 'hemp'), mǎ ( 马 / 馬 'horse) and mà ( 骂 / 罵 'to scold'). The number of tonal contrasts varies between dialects, with Northern dialects tending to have fewer distinctions than Southern ones. Many dialects have tone sandhi , in which the pitch contour of a syllable is affected by the tones of adjacent syllables in

7056-520: The Hebrew script of Yiddish , are fully vowelled, but because the vowels are written with full letters rather than diacritics (with the exception of distinguishing between /a/ and /o/ in the latter) and there are no inherent vowels, these are considered alphabets, not abugidas. The Arabic script used for South Azerbaijani generally writes the vowel /æ/ (written as ə in North Azerbaijani) as

7168-768: The Huai and Yangtze Rivers. A north-south barrier is formed by the Tianmu and Wuyi Mountains . Most assessments of mutual intelligibility of varieties of Chinese in the literature are impressionistic. Functional intelligibility testing is time-consuming in any language family, and usually not done when more than 10 varieties are to be compared. However, one 2009 study aimed to measure intelligibility between 15 Chinese provinces. In each province, 15 university students were recruited as speakers and 15 older rural inhabitants recruited as listeners. The listeners were then tested on their comprehension of isolated words and of particular words in

7280-686: The Indic scripts, the earliest method was simply to arrange them vertically, writing the second consonant of the cluster below the first one. The two consonants may also merge as conjunct consonant letters, where two or more letters are graphically joined in a ligature , or otherwise change their shapes. Rarely, one of the consonants may be replaced by a gemination mark, e.g. the Gurmukhi addak . When they are arranged vertically, as in Burmese or Khmer , they are said to be 'stacked'. Often there has been

7392-477: The Latin alphabet supplanted Latin itself, and states eventually developed their own standard languages . In China, Literary Chinese was predominantly used in formal writing until the early 20th century. Written Chinese, read with different local pronunciations, continued to serve as a source of vocabulary for the local varieties. The new standard written vernacular Chinese , the counterpart of spoken Standard Chinese,

7504-537: The Middle Ages up to the 20th century, and for inscriptions on the entrance doors of Tibetan monasteries. Although it is an alphabet, phagspa is written like a syllabary or abugida, with letters forming a single syllable glued or ' ligated ' together. Top : Approximate values in Middle Chinese. (Values in parentheses were not used for Chinese.) Second : Standard letter forms. Third : Seal script forms. (A few letters, marked by hyphens, are not distinct from

7616-411: The Yuan dynasty (c. 1269), Kublai Khan asked the Tibetan monk ʼPhags-pa to design a new alphabet for use by the whole empire. ʼPhags-pa extended his native Tibetan alphabet to encompass Mongol and Chinese, evidently Central Plains Mandarin . The resulting 38 letters have been known by several descriptive names, such as "square script", based on their shape, but today, are primarily known as

7728-435: The coastal area from Zhejiang to eastern Guangdong . Standard Chinese takes its phonology from the Beijing dialect, with vocabulary from the Mandarin group and grammar based on literature in the modern written vernacular . It is one of the official languages of China and one of the four official languages of Singapore . It has become a pluricentric language , with differences in pronunciation and vocabulary between

7840-463: The consonants to the point that they must be considered modifications of the form of the letters. Children learn each modification separately, as in a syllabary; nonetheless, the graphic similarities between syllables with the same consonant are readily apparent, unlike the case in a true syllabary . Though now an abugida, the Ge'ez script , until the advent of Christianity ( ca. AD 350 ), had originally been what would now be termed an abjad . In

7952-480: The consonants, often including a sign that explicitly indicates the lack of a vowel. If a consonant has no vowel sign, this indicates a default vowel. Vowel diacritics may appear above, below, to the left, to the right, or around the consonant. The most widely used Indic script is Devanagari , shared by Hindi , Bihari , Marathi , Konkani , Nepali , and often Sanskrit . A basic letter such as क in Hindi represents

8064-517: The context of sentences spoken by speakers from all 15 of the provinces surveyed. The results demonstrated significant levels of unintelligibility between areas, even within the Mandarin group. In a few cases, listeners understood fewer than 70% of words spoken by speakers from the same province, indicating significant differences between urban and rural varieties. As expected from the wide use of Standard Chinese , speakers from Beijing were understood more than speakers from elsewhere. The scores supported

8176-933: The dialects of the Southern zone are derived from a standard used in the Yangtze valley during the Han dynasty (206 BC – 220 AD), which he called Old Southern Chinese, while the Central zone was a transitional area of dialects that were originally of southern type, but overlain with centuries of Northern influence. Hilary Chappell proposed a refined model, dividing Norman's Northern zone into Northern and Southwestern areas, and his Southern zone into Southeastern (Min) and Far Southern (Yue and Hakka) areas, with Pinghua transitional between Southwestern and Far Southern areas. The long history of migration of peoples and interaction between speakers of different dialects makes it difficult to apply

8288-581: The direct object and southern varieties using the reverse order. All varieties have copular sentences of the form NP1 + COP + NP2, though the copula varies. Most Yue and Hakka varieties use a form cognate with xì 係 'to connect'. All other varieties use a form cognate with shì 是 , which was a demonstrative in Classical Chinese but began to be used as a copula from the Han period. All varieties form existential sentences with

8400-462: The examples above to sets of syllables in the Japanese hiragana syllabary: か ka , き ki , く ku , け ke , こ ko have nothing in common to indicate k; while ら ra , り ri , る ru , れ re , ろ ro have neither anything in common for r , nor anything to indicate that they have the same vowels as the k set. Most Indian and Indochinese abugidas appear to have first been developed from abjads with

8512-419: The greatest differences in their phonology , and to a lesser extent in vocabulary and syntax . Southern varieties tend to have fewer initial consonants than northern and central varieties, but more often preserve the Middle Chinese final consonants. All have phonemic tones , with northern varieties tending to have fewer distinctions than southern ones. Many have tone sandhi , with the most complex patterns in

8624-681: The initials of the ʼPhags-pa script as presented in Menggu Ziyun . They are ordered according to the Chinese philological tradition of the 36 initials. The Shilin Guangji used Phagspa to annotate Chinese text, serving as a precursor to modern pinyin . The following are the Phagspa transcriptions of a section of the Hundred Family Surnames in the Shilin Guangji. For example, the name Jin ( 金 ), meaning gold,

8736-403: The languages previously dominant in these areas, and forms of the language spoken in different regions began to diverge. During periods of political unity there was a tendency for states to promote the use of a standard language across the territory they controlled, in order to facilitate communication between people from different regions. The first evidence of dialectal variation is found in

8848-603: The letter ꡦ ee is never found in an initial position in any language written in the ʼPhags-pa script (for example, in Tao Zongyi's description of the Old Uighur script, he glosses all instances of Uighur 𐽰 e with the ʼPhags-pa letter ꡦ ee , except for when it is found in the initial position, when he glosses it with the ʼPhags-pa letter ꡠ e instead). However, initial semi-vowels, diphthongs and digraphs must be attached to

8960-477: The like, was more elaborate, with squared sinusoidal lines and spirals . This ʼPhags-pa script is different from the ʼPhags-pa script, or 八思巴字 in Chinese, that shares the same name but its earliest usage can be traced back to the late 16th century, the early reign of Wanli Emperor . According to Professor Junast 照那斯图 of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences , the later ʼPhags-pa script

9072-548: The literary standard and each other, producing dialect continua with mutually unintelligible varieties separated by long distances. However, a major difference between China and Western Europe is the historical reestablishment of political unity in 6th century China by the Sui dynasty , a unity that has persisted with relatively brief interludes until the present day. Meanwhile, Europe remained politically decentralized, and developed numerous independent states. Vernacular writing using

9184-432: The local varieties as languages, numbering in the hundreds. The Chinese term fāngyán 方言 , literally 'place speech', was the title of the first work of Chinese dialectology in the Han dynasty , and has had a range of meanings in the millennia since. It is used for any regional subdivision of Chinese, from the speech of a village to major branches such as Mandarin and Wu. Linguists writing in Chinese often qualify

9296-494: The lower-pitched allophones occur with initial voiced consonants. (Traditional Chinese classification nonetheless counts these as different tones.) Most Wu dialects retain the tone categories of Middle Chinese, but in Shanghainese several of these have merged. Many Chinese varieties exhibit tone sandhi , in which the realization of a tone varies depending on the context of the syllable. For example, in Standard Chinese

9408-480: The main routes of migration and communication in southern China. The first scientific classifications, based primarily on the evolution of Middle Chinese voiced initials, were produced by Wang Li in 1936 and Li Fang-Kuei in 1937, with minor modifications by other linguists since. The conventionally accepted set of seven dialect groups first appeared in the second edition (1980) of Yuan Jiahua 's dialectology handbook: The Language Atlas of China (1987) follows

9520-405: The most common vowel. Several systems of shorthand use diacritics for vowels, but they do not have an inherent vowel, and are thus more similar to Thaana and Kurdish script than to the Brahmic scripts. The Gabelsberger shorthand system and its derivatives modify the following consonant to represent vowels. The Pollard script , which was based on shorthand, also uses diacritics for vowels;

9632-435: The null base consonant 'A (Letter 30). So in Chinese ʼPhags-pa texts the syllables 'wen 元 yuán , 'ue 危 wēi and 'eeu 魚 yú occur; and in Mongolian ʼPhags-pa texts the words 'eeu lu "not" and 'eeog bee.e "gave" occur. As there is no sign for the vowel a , which is implicit in an initial base consonant with no attached vowel sign, then words that start with an

9744-423: The placements of the vowel relative to the consonant indicates tone . Pitman shorthand uses straight strokes and quarter-circle marks in different orientations as the principal "alphabet" of consonants; vowels are shown as light and heavy dots, dashes and other marks in one of 3 possible positions to indicate the various vowel-sounds. However, to increase writing speed, Pitman has rules for "vowel indication" using

9856-460: The position of the /i/ vowel in Devanagari, which is written before the consonant. Pahawh is also unusual in that, while an inherent rime /āu/ (with mid tone) is unwritten, it also has an inherent onset /k/ . For the syllable /kau/ , which requires one or the other of the inherent sounds to be overt, it is /au/ that is written. Thus it is the rime (vowel) that is basic to the system. It

9968-553: The positioning or choice of consonant signs so that writing vowel-marks can be dispensed with. As the term alphasyllabary suggests, abugidas have been considered an intermediate step between alphabets and syllabaries . Historically, abugidas appear to have evolved from abjads (vowelless alphabets). They contrast with syllabaries, where there is a distinct symbol for each syllable or consonant-vowel combination, and where these have no systematic similarity to each other, and typically develop directly from logographic scripts . Compare

10080-414: The preceding letter.) Unlike the ancestral Tibetan script, all ʼPhags-pa letters are written in temporal order (that is, /CV/ is written in the order C–V for all vowels) and in-line (that is, the vowels are not diacritics). However, vowel letters retain distinct initial forms, and short /a/ is not written except initially, making ʼPhags-pa transitional between an abugida , a syllabary , and

10192-417: The script does not have an inherent vowel for Arabic and Persian words. The inconsistency of its vowel notation makes it difficult to categorize. The imperial Mongol script called Phagspa was derived from the Tibetan abugida, but all vowels are written in-line rather than as diacritics. However, it retains the features of having an inherent vowel /a/ and having distinct initial vowel letters. Pahawh Hmong

10304-508: The script may be termed "alphabets". The terms also contrast them with a syllabary , in which a single symbol denotes the combination of one consonant and one vowel. Related concepts were introduced independently in 1948 by James Germain Février (using the term néosyllabisme ) and David Diringer (using the term semisyllabary ), then in 1959 by Fred Householder (introducing the term pseudo-alphabet ). The Ethiopic term "abugida"

10416-418: The semi-vowel (subjoined) ྭ wa (e.g. Letter 36 is derived from the complex Tibetan letter ཁྭ khwa ). As is the case with Tibetan, these letters have an inherent [ a ] vowel sound attached to them in non-final positions when no other vowel sign is present (e.g. the letter ꡀ with no attached vowel represents the syllable ka , but with an appended vowel ꡞ i represents

10528-527: The south, and vice versa. The usual unmarked word order in Chinese varieties is subject–verb–object , with other orders used for emphasis or contrast. Modifiers usually precede the word they modify, so that adjectives precede nouns. Instances in which the modifier follows the head are mainly found in the south, and are attributed to substrate influences from languages formerly dominant in the area, especially Kra–Dai languages . Nouns in Chinese varieties are generally not marked for number. As in languages of

10640-433: The split of Middle Chinese rising and departing tones merged, leaving four tones. Furthermore, final stop consonants disappeared in most Mandarin dialects, and such syllables were distributed amongst the four remaining tones in a manner that is only partially predictable. In Wu, voiced obstruents were retained, and the tone split never became phonemic: the higher-pitched allophones occur with initial voiceless consonants, and

10752-535: The stops have merged as a final glottal stop , while in most northern varieties they have disappeared. In Mandarin dialects final /m/ has merged with /n/ , while some central dialects have a single nasal coda, in some cases realized as a nasalization of the vowel. All varieties of Chinese, like neighbouring languages in the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area , have phonemic tones . Each syllable may be pronounced with between three and seven distinct pitch contours, denoting different morphemes. For example,

10864-400: The syllable ꡀꡞ ki ). Letters 31-34 and 39 are vowels. Letters 31-34 follow the traditional order of the corresponding Tibetan vowels. Letter 39 represents a vowel quality that does not occur in Tibetan, and may be derived from the Tibetan vowel sign ཻ ai . Unlike Tibetan, in which vowels signs may not occur in isolation but must always be attached to a base consonant to form

10976-435: The syllable [sok] would be written as something like s̥̽, here with an underring representing /o/ and an overcross representing the diacritic for final /k/ . Most other Indic abugidas can only indicate a very limited set of final consonants with diacritics, such as /ŋ/ or /r/ , if they can indicate any at all. In Ethiopic or Ge'ez script , fidels (individual "letters" of the script) have "diacritics" that are fused with

11088-405: The term to distinguish different levels of classification. All these terms have customarily been translated into English as dialect , a practice that has been criticized as confusing. The neologisms regionalect and topolect have been proposed as alternative renderings of fāngyán . The usual unit of analysis is the syllable, traditionally analysed as consisting of an initial consonant ,

11200-591: The texts of the Spring and Autumn period (771–476 BC). Although the Zhou royal domain was no longer politically powerful, its speech still represented a model for communication across China. The Fangyan (early 1st century AD) is devoted to differences in vocabulary between regions. Commentaries from the Eastern Han (25–220 AD) provide significant evidence of local differences in pronunciation. The Qieyun ,

11312-497: The three forms. Standard Chinese is much more widely studied than any other variety of Chinese, and its use is now dominant in public life on the mainland. Outside of China and Taiwan, the only varieties of Chinese commonly taught in university courses are Standard Chinese and Cantonese . Local varieties from different areas of China are often mutually unintelligible, differing at least as much as different Romance languages and perhaps even as much as Indo-European languages as

11424-570: The three forms. It is also one of the six official languages of the United Nations . At the end of the 2nd millennium BC, a form of Chinese was spoken in a compact area along the lower Wei River and middle Yellow River . Use of this language expanded eastwards across the North China Plain into Shandong , and then southwards into the Yangtze River valley and the hills of south China. Chinese eventually replaced many of

11536-481: The varieties of Mandarin spoken in all three northeastern Chinese provinces are mutually intelligible, but in the province of Fujian, where Min varieties predominate, the speech of neighbouring counties or even villages may be mutually unintelligible. Proportions of first-language speakers Classifications of Chinese varieties in the late 19th century and early 20th century were based on impressionistic criteria. They often followed river systems, which were historically

11648-630: The various techniques above. Examples using the Devanagari script There are three principal families of abugidas, depending on whether vowels are indicated by modifying consonants by diacritics, distortion, or orientation. Lao and Tāna have dependent vowels and a zero vowel sign, but no inherent vowel. Indic scripts originated in India and spread to Southeast Asia , Bangladesh , Sri Lanka , Nepal , Bhutan , Tibet , Mongolia , and Russia . All surviving Indic scripts are descendants of

11760-585: The vocabulary of the Bai language of Yunnan appears to be related to Chinese words, though many are clearly loans from the last few centuries. Some scholars have suggested that it represents a very early branching from Chinese, while others argue that it is a more distantly related Sino-Tibetan language overlaid with two millennia of loans. Jerry Norman classified the traditional seven dialect groups into three zones: Northern (Mandarin), Central (Wu, Gan, and Xiang) and Southern (Hakka, Yue, and Min). He argued that

11872-480: The vowel diacritic and virama are both written after the consonants for the whole syllable. In many abugidas, there is also a diacritic to suppress the inherent vowel, yielding the bare consonant. In Devanagari , प् is p, and फ् is ph . This is called the virāma or halantam in Sanskrit. It may be used to form consonant clusters , or to indicate that a consonant occurs at the end of a word. Thus in Sanskrit,

11984-428: The words ong qo chas "boats", u su nu (gen.) "water", e du -ee "now" and i hee -een "protection" occur. These are all examples of where 'o , 'u , 'e , 'i etc. would be expected if the Tibetan model had been followed exactly. An exception to this rule is the Mongolian word 'er di nis "jewels", where a single vowel sign is attached to a null base consonant. Note that

12096-530: The world, others include Indic/Brahmic scripts and Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics . The word abugida is derived from the four letters, ' ä, bu, gi, and da , in much the same way that abecedary is derived from Latin letters a be ce de , abjad is derived from the Arabic a b j d , and alphabet is derived from the names of the two first letters in the Greek alphabet , alpha and beta . Abugida as

12208-469: Was chosen as a designation for the concept in 1990 by Peter T. Daniels . In 1992, Faber suggested "segmentally coded syllabically linear phonographic script", and in 1992 Bright used the term alphasyllabary , and Gnanadesikan and Rimzhim, Katz, & Fowler have suggested aksara or āksharik . Abugidas include the extensive Brahmic family of scripts of Tibet, South and Southeast Asia, Semitic Ethiopic scripts, and Canadian Aboriginal syllabics . As

12320-438: Was inspired by the Devanagari script of India, vowels are indicated by changing the orientation of the syllabogram . Each vowel has a consistent orientation; for example, Inuktitut ᐱ pi, ᐳ pu, ᐸ pa; ᑎ ti, ᑐ tu, ᑕ ta . Although there is a vowel inherent in each, all rotations have equal status and none can be identified as basic. Bare consonants are indicated either by separate diacritics, or by superscript versions of

12432-487: Was not a popular script even among the elite Mongols themselves, although it was used as an official script of the Yuan dynasty until the early 1350s, when the Red Turban Rebellion started. After this, it was mainly used as a phonetic gloss for Mongols learning Chinese characters . In the 20th century, it was also used as one of the scripts on Tibetan currency, as a script for Tibetan seal inscriptions from

12544-489: Was suggested for the Indic scripts in 1997 by William Bright , following South Asian linguistic usage, to convey the idea that, "they share features of both alphabet and syllabary." The formal definitions given by Daniels and Bright for abugida and alphasyllabary differ; some writing systems are abugidas but not alphasyllabaries, and some are alphasyllabaries but not abugidas. An abugida is defined as "a type of writing system whose basic characters denote consonants followed by

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