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81-722: Fengguan literally means "phoenix crown" in English language, a name that originates from its adornments: phoenixes made of inlaid kingfisher feathers , as well as gold dragons, beaded pheasants, pearls , and other gemstones . One of the earliest phoenix crowns that has been excavated belonged to Empress Xiao of the Sui dynasty . The type became most popular during the Ming dynasty , with many changes made over time. Fengguan evolved from Fengchai ( Chinese : 鳳釵 ; pinyin : fèngchāi ; lit. 'phoenix hairpin'),

162-400: A fish . Today, however, it is often described as a composite of many birds including the head of a golden pheasant , the body of a mandarin duck , the tail of a peacock , the legs of a crane , the mouth of a parrot , and the wings of a swallow . The fenghuang's body symbolizes the celestial bodies: the head is the sky, the eyes are the sun, the back is the moon, the wings are the wind,

243-469: 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

324-457: 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

405-510: 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

486-599: 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

567-462: 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

648-615: 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

729-714: 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

810-478: A dragon representing the emperor. From the Jiajing era (1522–1566) of the Ming dynasty onwards, a pair of phoenixes was differentiated by the tail feathers of the two birds, typically together forming a closed circle pattern – the male identified by five long serrated tail feathers or "filaments" (five being an odd, masculine, or yang number) and the female by what sometimes appears to be one but

891-511: A gender distinction is typically no longer made, and fenghuang are generally considered a feminine entity to be paired with the traditionally masculine Chinese dragon . Fenghuang are known under similar names in various other languages ( Japanese : hō-ō ; Vietnamese : phượng hoàng or phụng hoàng ; Korean : bonghwang ). In the West, they are commonly called Chinese phoenixes or simply phoenixes , although mythological similarities with

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972-542: A long tradition in the area of Zhejiang . The fengguan was a symbol of good fortune. However, women who were remarrying for a second times and who were to be become a man's concubine were not allowed to wear fengguan . Fenghuang Fenghuang are mythological birds featuring in traditions throughout the Sinosphere . Fenghuang are understood to reign over all other birds: males and females were originally termed feng and huang respectively, but

1053-576: 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

1134-542: 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

1215-463: A separate male feng and a female huang as symbols of yin and yang. The male feng represented the yang aspect while the huang represented the yin aspect; and together, the feng and huang image was symbolic of love between husband and wife. However, since the Qin dynasty , the fenghuang progressively went through a feminization process as the dragon became a symbol of masculinity. Eventually,

1296-508: 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

1377-678: 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

1458-631: 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

1539-575: 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

1620-602: 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

1701-709: 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

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1782-473: Is a symbol of virtue and grace. The fenghuang also symbolizes the union of yin and yang . The first chapter of the Classic of Mountains and Seas , the "Nanshang-jing", states that each part of fenghuang's body symbolizes a word. The head represents virtue ( 德 ), the wing represents duty ( 義 ), the back represents propriety ( 禮 ), the abdomen represents credibility ( 信 ) and the chest represents mercy ( 仁 ). The fenghuang originally consisted of

1863-425: Is also related to *plum , OC : * ‍ 風 , mod. fēng "wind". Historical linguist Marc Miyake reconstructs 鳳凰 , OC : * ‍ N-prəm-s ɢʷˁɑŋ , mod. fènghuáng , which he proposes, though with uncertainty, to be the affixed form of 風皇 , OC : * ‍ prəm [ɢ]ʷˁɑŋ ( B&S ) , mod. fēng huáng "wind sovereign". The fenghuang has positive connotations. It

1944-490: 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,

2025-480: Is different. For example, the phoenix crown of Ming Empress Xiaoduanxian has 6 dragons, 3 phoenixes, 5,449 pearls, 71 rubies, and 57 sapphires. Other phoenix crowns of empresses excavated from the Ming tombs have 9 phoenixes, between 12 and 9 dragons, more than 3,500 pearls, and more than 150 gemstones. The pearls, gemstones and kingfisher feathers were made into ornamental flowers, leaves, clouds, and temple ornaments ( Chinese : 兩博鬢 ; pinyin : liǎngbóbìn ;

2106-461: Is in fact usually two curling or tendrilled tail feathers (two being an even, feminine, or yin number). Also during this period, the fenghuang was used as a symbol representing the direction south. This was portrayed through a male and female facing each other. Their feathers were of the five fundamental colors: black, white, red, green, and yellow. These colours are said to represent Confucius ' five virtues: The phoenix represented power sent from

2187-603: 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

2268-445: 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

2349-668: 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

2430-629: Is the Silk Painting of Human Figure with Dragon and Phoenix , pictured left. In the Qin dynasty (221–206 BC), phoenix hairpins (i.e. hairpins with fenghuang decorations) and shoes which were also decorated with phoenix designs were supposed to be worn by the Imperial concubines of the Qin Emperor. During the Han dynasty (2,200 years ago) two phoenixes, one a male ( feng , 鳳 ) and

2511-419: Is the 9-dragons-9-phoenixes crown. Jiulongsi fengguan ( Chinese : 九龍四鳳冠 ) is the 9-dragons-4-phoenixes crown. Liulongsan fengguan ( Chinese : 六龍三鳳冠 ) is the 6-dragons-3-phoenixes crown. Sanlonger fengguan ( Chinese : 三龍二鳳冠 ) is the 3-dragons-2-phoenixes crown. Only the crowns of empresses and crown princesses (wife of crown prince) can have temple ornaments adorned, with

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2592-489: 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,

2673-501: 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

2754-452: 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

2835-552: 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

2916-428: 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

2997-753: The Qieyun rime dictionary (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by rhyme tables such as the Yunjing constructed by ancient Chinese philologists as a guide to the Qieyun system. These works define phonological categories but with little hint of what sounds they represent. Linguists have identified these sounds by comparing the categories with pronunciations in modern varieties of Chinese , borrowed Chinese words in Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean, and transcription evidence. The resulting system

3078-514: The Chinese hairpin worn by empresses and emperor's concubines. The wearing of fengchai was issued by Emperor Qin Shihuang (259BC–210BC). It was in Eastern Jin (317–420 AD) that the word fengguan first came up; however, it was referring to the hairpin which was imitating the comb of Chinese phoenix . The earliest fengguan discovered was the crown of Empress Xiao of

3159-533: 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

3240-953: The Kunlun Mountains in northern China. The earliest known ancient phoenix design dates back to about 7000–8000 years ago and was discovered in Hongjiang , Hunan Province , at the Gaomiao Archeological Site. The earliest known form of dragon-phoenix design, on the other hand, dates back to the Yangshao culture ( c.  5000  – c.  3000   BC) and was found at an archeological site near Xi'an in Shaanxi Province . This ancient usage of phoenix and dragon designs are all evidence of an ancient form of totemism in China. During

3321-710: 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

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3402-595: 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

3483-632: The Shang dynasty , phoenix and dragon images appear to have become popular as burial objects. Several archeological artifacts of jade phoenix and jade dragons were unearthed in tombs dating from the Shang dynasty period. During the Spring and Autumn period (c.   771 – c.   476   BC) and the Warring States period , common form of unearthed artifacts is the combination of dragon-phoenix designs together. One such artifact

3564-673: The Sui dynasty , unearthed from the Emperor Yang of Sui 's tomb in 2013. The crown was made under the order of Emperor Taizong of Tang after the empress's death. The artifact was protect-repaired and studied in Shaanxi Provincial Cultural Heritage Administration ; later, a replica was made based on the studies. Kingfisher feathers were extremely rare during the Ming dynasty and were potentially sourced from Cambodia . The numbers of phoenixes, dragons and precious gems on each crown

3645-503: The feng and the huang merged into a single female entity. In ancient and modern Chinese culture, fenghuang can often be found in the decorations for weddings or royalty , along with dragons . This is because the Chinese considered the dragon-and-phoenix design symbolic of blissful relations between husband and wife, another common yang and yin metaphor. In some traditions, it appears in good times but hides during times of trouble, while in other traditions it appeared only to mark

3726-478: 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

3807-596: 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

3888-447: The 'wings' at the sides and back of the crown). The weight of the entire crown can range from 2–3 kilograms (4.4–6.6 lb). There are different varieties of fengguan . The number of dragons, phoenixes and pheasants, in addition to the presence of certain ornaments was dictated by rank. Shierlongjiu fengguan ( Chinese : 十二龍九鳳冠 ) is the 12-dragons-9-phoenixes crown. Jiulongjiu fengguan ( Chinese : 九龍九鳳冠 )

3969-565: The Latin-based Vietnamese alphabet . English words of Chinese origin include tea from Hokkien 茶 ( tê ), dim sum from Cantonese 點心 ( dim2 sam1 ), and kumquat from Cantonese 金橘 ( gam1 gwat1 ). The sinologist Jerry Norman has estimated that there are hundreds of mutually unintelligible varieties of Chinese. These varieties form a dialect continuum , in which differences in speech generally become more pronounced as distances increase, though

4050-511: The Western phoenix are superficial. A common depiction of fenghuang was of it attacking snakes with its talons and its wings spread. According to the Erya 's chapter 17 Shiniao , fenghuang is made up of the beak of a rooster , the face of a swallow , the forehead of a fowl , the neck of a snake , the breast of a goose , the back of a tortoise , the hindquarters of a stag and the tail of

4131-492: The beginning of a new era. In China and Japan, it was a symbol of the imperial house, and it represented "fire, the sun, justice, obedience, and fidelity". The phoenix is still used in modern Japan and Korea in relation to the head of state: Other uses include: Chinese language Chinese ( simplified Chinese : 汉语 ; traditional Chinese : 漢語 ; pinyin : Hànyǔ ; lit. ' Han language' or 中文 ; Zhōngwén ; 'Chinese writing')

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4212-399: 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

4293-484: 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

4374-462: The empress's crown having 6 blades of temple ornaments (3 on each side). Jiudiguan ( Chinese : 九翟冠 ; lit. 'nine-pheasants crown'), qidiguan ( Chinese : 七翟冠 ; lit. 'seven-pheasants crown') and wudiguan ( Chinese : 五翟冠 ; lit. 'five-pheasants crown'), adorned with beaded pheasants and gold phoenixes, are worn by royal concubines and princesses (includes wives of princes), with

4455-528: 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

4536-463: The feet are the earth, and the tail is the planets. The fenghuang is said to have originated in the sun. Its body contains the five fundamental colors: black, white, red, yellow, and green. It sometimes carries scrolls or a box with sacred books. It is sometimes depicted with a fireball. It is believed that the bird only appears in areas or places that are blessed with utmost peace and prosperity or happiness. Chinese tradition cites it as living atop

4617-413: 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

4698-491: 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

4779-618: 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

4860-481: The heavens to the Empress. If a phoenix was used to decorate a house it symbolized that loyalty and honesty were in the people that lived there. Or alternatively, a phoenix only stays when the ruler is without darkness and corruption ( 政治清明 ). Linguist Wang Li relates element 鳳 , OC : * ‍ bums ( ZS ) , mod. fèng to 鵬 , OC : * ‍ bɯːŋ (ZS) " peng , fabulous great bird"; 鳳

4941-586: The language of administration and scholarship, a position it would retain until the late 19th century in Korea and (to a lesser extent) Japan, and the early 20th century in Vietnam. Scholars from different lands could communicate, albeit only in writing, using Literary Chinese. Although they used Chinese solely for written communication, each country had its own tradition of reading texts aloud using what are known as Sino-Xenic pronunciations . Chinese words with these pronunciations were also extensively imported into

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5022-528: 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

5103-455: 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

5184-425: 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

5265-583: 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

5346-452: The number of pheasants representing the wearer's royal rank. The crown princess can only have 4 blades of temple ornaments (2 on each side) All other noblewomen/wives and daughters of officials wear the pearl-and-emerald crown ( Chinese : 珍珠翡翠冠 ; pinyin : zhēnzhūfěicuìguān ), where the crown is just adorned with pearls and gemstones (in various ornamental shapes). Phoenix crowns worn with diyi have no strings of pearls by

5427-451: The other a female ( huang , 凰 ) were often shown together facing one other. In the Han dynasty , an imperial edict decreed that the phoenix hairpins had to become the formal headpiece for the empress dowager and the imperial grandmother. Later, during the Yuan dynasty the two terms were merged to become fenghuang , but the "King of Birds" came to symbolize the empress when paired with

5508-538: 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

5589-404: 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 ,

5670-552: 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

5751-509: 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

5832-476: The sides of the head. Noblewomen cannot have temple ornaments on their headdresses. Coloured hats worn by commoner women on their wedding ceremony during the Ming and Qing dynasty was also called fengguan . The practice is believed to have started during Southern Song when the Emperor rewarded a girl for saving his life. Women wearing the fengguan as part of their set of wedding clothing has been

5913-517: 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

5994-511: The slightly later Menggu Ziyun , this dictionary describes a language with many of the features characteristic of modern Mandarin dialects. Up to the early 20th century, most Chinese people only spoke their local variety. Thus, as a practical measure, officials of the Ming and Qing dynasties carried out the administration of the empire using a common language based on Mandarin varieties , known as 官话 ; 官話 ; Guānhuà ; 'language of officials'. For most of this period, this language

6075-568: 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

6156-547: 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

6237-512: 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

6318-452: 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

6399-465: 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

6480-453: 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,

6561-485: Was hidden by their written form. Often different compounds for the same concept were in circulation for some time before a winner emerged, and sometimes the final choice differed between countries. The proportion of vocabulary of Chinese origin thus tends to be greater in technical, abstract, or formal language. For example, in Japan, Sino-Japanese words account for about 35% of the words in entertainment magazines, over half

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