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127-615: Ejin River ( Chinese : 额济纳河 ), also Etsin Gol , Ruo Shui ( Chinese : 弱水 ; lit. 'weak water', 'weak river') or Ruo He in ancient times, is a major river system of northern China. It flows approximately 630 kilometres (390 mi) from its headwaters on the northern Gansu side of the Qilian Mountains north-northeast into the endorheic Ejin Basin in

254-469: 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

381-457: 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

508-510: 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

635-599: 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

762-462: 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

889-615: 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

1016-714: 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

1143-452: A dark colour which, during time, has contributed to the river being described as Hei (黑), that is Black . The orography in this part is obviously quite steep, with elevation peaks up to 5544 m asl and vegetation mainly made up of wild shrubs. Most of the precipitation fallen annually over the basin is concentrated in this area, creating two main river courses that join just north of the hydrometric station of Yingluo. The midstream area

1270-474: A generic sub-basin, is structured as follows: Δ W = P + R i n + G i n − E T − R o u t − G o u t {\displaystyle \Delta W=P+R_{in}+G_{in}-ET-R_{out}-G_{out}} . Most of the precipitation is found in the upstream area, also showing a positive correlation with elevation. The evapotranspiration volumes are almost

1397-452: A maximum at the apex to zero at a crossing point (straight line), also called an inflection, because the curvature changes direction in that vicinity. The radius of the loop is the straight line perpendicular to the down-valley axis intersecting the sinuous axis at the apex. As the loop is not ideal, additional information is needed to characterize it. The orientation angle is the angle between sinuous axis and down-valley axis at any point on

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1524-405: A meander because helicoidal flow of water keeps the bank washed clean of loose sand, silt, and sediment and subjects it to constant erosion. As a result, the meander erodes and migrates in the direction of the outside bend, forming the cut bank. As the cut bank is undermined by erosion, it commonly collapses as slumps into the river channel. The slumped sediment, having been broken up by slumping,

1651-411: A meander is part of an entrenched river or part of a freely meandering river within a floodplain, the term slip-off slope can refer to two different fluvial landforms that comprise the inner, convex, bank of a meander loop. In case of a freely meandering river on a floodplain, a slip-off slope is the inside, gently sloping bank of a meander on which sediments episodically accumulate to form a point bar as

1778-421: A meandering stream periodically shifts its channel is known as a meander belt . It typically ranges from 15 to 18 times the width of the channel. Over time, meanders migrate downstream, sometimes in such a short time as to create civil engineering challenges for local municipalities attempting to maintain stable roads and bridges. The degree of meandering of the channel of a river, stream, or other watercourse

1905-431: A meandering watercourse is termed meander geometry or meander planform geometry. It is characterized as an irregular waveform . Ideal waveforms, such as a sine wave , are one line thick, but in the case of a stream the width must be taken into consideration. The bankfull width is the distance across the bed at an average cross-section at the full-stream level, typically estimated by the line of lowest vegetation. As

2032-576: 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

2159-428: A river meanders. This type of slip-off slope is located opposite the cutbank. This term can also be applied to the inside, sloping bank of a meandering tidal channel. In case of an entrenched river, a slip-off slope is a gently sloping bedrock surface that rises from the inside, concave bank of an asymmetrically entrenched river. This type of slip-off slope is often covered by a thin, discontinuous layer of alluvium. It

2286-542: 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

2413-413: A self-intensifying process...in which greater curvature results in more erosion of the bank, which results in greater curvature..." The cross-current along the floor of the channel is part of the secondary flow and sweeps dense eroded material towards the inside of the bend. The cross-current then rises to the surface near the inside and flows towards the outside, forming the helical flow . The greater

2540-508: 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

2667-678: 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

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2794-434: A symmetrical valley sides. He argues that the symmetrical valley sides are the direct result of rapid down-cutting of a watercourse into bedrock. In addition, as proposed by Rich, Thornbury argues that incised valleys with a pronounced asymmetry of cross section, which he called ingrown meanders , are the result of the lateral migration and incision of a meander during a period of slower channel downcutting . Regardless,

2921-631: 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

3048-575: 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

3175-485: A very convoluted path along the lower reach. As a result, even in Classical Greece (and in later Greek thought) the name of the river had become a common noun meaning anything convoluted and winding, such as decorative patterns or speech and ideas, as well as the geomorphological feature. Strabo said: ‘...its course is so exceedingly winding that everything winding is called meandering.’ The Meander River

3302-413: A waveform the meandering stream follows the down-valley axis, a straight line fitted to the curve such that the sum of all the amplitudes measured from it is zero. This axis represents the overall direction of the stream. At any cross-section the flow is following the sinuous axis, the centerline of the bed. Two consecutive crossing points of sinuous and down-valley axes define a meander loop. The meander

3429-602: 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

3556-709: 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

3683-581: Is called Ejin River. About 2,000 years ago, the river was said to have a much more abundant flow than it does today and thus its perennial reaches stretched much farther out into the desert than it does today. Parts of the river flow through the Hexi Corridor , a valley which once formed a significant portion of the Silk Road . The upper section of the river, also known as the Heihe (or 'Black River'),

3810-490: 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,

3937-419: Is called lateral accretion. Lateral accretion occurs mostly during high water or floods when the point bar is submerged. Typically, the sediment consists of either sand, gravel, or a combination of both. The sediment comprising some point bars might grade downstream into silty sediments. Because of the decreasing velocity and strength of current from the thalweg of the channel to the upper surface of point bar when

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4064-401: Is characterized by the presence of wide ranges of cultivated fields, mainly in the oases that follow the principal route of the river. The city of Zhangye , main centre of the region, is located next to a wide north-west bend of the river. The high population (940 in/km in 2015) and croplands density implies a high water demand , estimated at 2,400,000 m (85,000,000 cu ft)/year in

4191-568: Is measured by its sinuosity . The sinuosity of a watercourse is the ratio of the length of the channel to the straight line down-valley distance. Streams or rivers with a single channel and sinuosities of 1.5 or more are defined as meandering streams or rivers. The term derives from the winding river Menderes located in Asia-Minor and known to the Ancient Greeks as Μαίανδρος Maiandros ( Latin : Maeander ), characterised by

4318-603: 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

4445-445: 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

4572-424: Is produced by the gradual outward migration of the meander as a river cuts downward into bedrock. A terrace on the slip-off slope of a meander spur, known as slip-off slope terrace , can be formed by a brief halt during the irregular incision by an actively meandering river. The meander ratio or sinuosity index is a means of quantifying how much a river or stream meanders (how much its course deviates from

4699-458: Is readily eroded and carried toward the middle of the channel. The sediment eroded from a cut bank tends to be deposited on the point bar of the next downstream meander, and not on the point bar opposite it. This can be seen in areas where trees grow on the banks of rivers; on the inside of meanders, trees, such as willows, are often far from the bank, whilst on the outside of the bend, the tree roots are often exposed and undercut, eventually leading

4826-592: Is south of Izmir, east of the ancient Greek town of Miletus , now Milet, Turkey. It flows through series of three graben in the Menderes Massif, but has a flood plain much wider than the meander zone in its lower reach. Its modern Turkish name is the Büyük Menderes River . Meanders are a result of the interaction of water flowing through a curved channel with the underlying river bed. This produces helicoidal flow , in which water moves from

4953-668: 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

5080-489: 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,

5207-478: Is the length along the centerline. Once a channel begins to follow a sinusoidal path, the amplitude and concavity of the loops increase dramatically. This is due to the effect of helical flow which sweeps dense eroded material towards the inside of the bend, and leaves the outside of the bend unprotected and vulnerable to accelerated erosion. This establishes a positive feedback loop . In the words of Elizabeth A. Wood: "...this process of making meanders seems to be

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5334-405: Is the most common type of fluvial lake, is a crescent-shaped lake that derives its name from its distinctive curved shape. Oxbow lakes are also known as cutoff lakes . Such lakes form regularly in undisturbed floodplains as a result of the normal process of fluvial meandering. Either a river or stream forms a sinuous channel as the outer side of its bends are eroded away and sediments accumulate on

5461-430: Is two consecutive loops pointing in opposite transverse directions. The distance of one meander along the down-valley axis is the meander length or wavelength . The maximum distance from the down-valley axis to the sinuous axis of a loop is the meander width or amplitude . The course at that point is the apex. In contrast to sine waves, the loops of a meandering stream are more nearly circular. The curvature varies from

5588-501: 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

5715-500: 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

5842-552: 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

5969-428: 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

6096-753: 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

6223-518: The Gobi Desert . The river forms one of the largest inland deltas or alluvial fans in the world. Its drainage basin covers about 78,600 square kilometres (30,300 sq mi) in parts of the Chinese provinces of Gansu and Inner Mongolia , which flows within the Zhangye area of Gansu; when it flows across Jiuquan area, it was renamed as Ruo Shui; when it flows across Alxa League , it

6350-533: 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

6477-710: 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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6604-595: 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

6731-483: The Ozark Plateau . As noted above, it was initially either argued or presumed that an incised meander is characteristic of an antecedent stream or river that had incised its channel into underlying strata . An antecedent stream or river is one that maintains its original course and pattern during incision despite the changes in underlying rock topography and rock types. However, later geologists argue that

6858-630: The Xi He (西河, Western river ) that follow on in the desert for another 220 km before emptying into two terminal lakes, the Sogo Nur and the Gaxun Nur , respectively, collectively forming the Juyan Lake Basin . The delta is made of the alluvial fan of the river itself, crossed by hundreds of dry channels entrenched by the river during its frequent course changes. Because the climate of

6985-449: The bedrock are known as either incised , intrenched , entrenched , inclosed or ingrown meanders . Some Earth scientists recognize and use a finer subdivision of incised meanders. Thornbury argues that incised or inclosed meanders are synonyms that are appropriate to describe any meander incised downward into bedrock and defines enclosed or entrenched meanders as a subtype of incised meanders (inclosed meanders) characterized by

7112-478: 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

7239-596: 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

7366-639: 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. Meander The zone within which

7493-483: The 2001–2012 time frame. This demand is mainly satisfied using the river (71%) and groundwater (29%). Notwithstanding the water influx from the rivers descending from the north-west side of the Qilian mountains, the total balance of the river in this part is negative (that is more water is lost than acquired). After the stream gauge at Zhengyi, the river describes a wide north-east turn , developing its last 400 km in

7620-419: The Chinese government are visible in the increase of the stored water volume in the 2001–2012 period. Along the river course a series of stream gauges are located. For each, the following table states position and average of the (yearly cumulated) discharge. Following the available discharge data, a flow increase is present in the upstream area (up until Yingluoxia), followed by gradually decreasing values in

7747-565: 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

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7874-468: The area has followed a drying trend over the past 10,000 years or so, the delta is no longer considered active (i.e. deposits are not being built up significantly) and is slowly being eroded by wind and water action. The analysis of the different components of the hydrological balance in the three main areas of the basin allows to distinguish the different geoclimatic mechanisms at work. The hydrological balance, in its most complete version and formulate for

8001-411: The average fullbank channel width. The length of the stream is measured by channel, or thalweg, length over the reach, while the bottom value of the ratio is the downvalley length or air distance of the stream between two points on it defining the reach. The sinuosity index plays a part in mathematical descriptions of streams. The index may require elaboration, because the valley may meander as well—i.e.,

8128-554: The bottom from the outside to the inside. The flow is supplied by a counter-flow across the surface from the inside to the outside. This entire situation is very similar to the Tea leaf paradox . This secondary flow carries sediment from the outside of the bend to the inside making the river more meandering. As to why streams of any size become sinuous in the first place, there are a number of theories, not necessarily mutually exclusive. The stochastic theory can take many forms but one of

8255-404: The boundary layer, pressure force dominates and fluid moves along the bottom of the river from the outside bend to the inside bend. This initiates helicoidal flow: Along the river bed, fluid roughly follows the curve of the channel but is also forced toward the inside bend; away from the river bed, fluid also roughly follows the curve of the channel but is forced, to some extent, from the inside to

8382-559: The case of the Anderson Bottom Rincon, incised meanders that have either steep-sided, often vertical walls, are often, but not always, known as rincons in the southwest United States . Rincon in English is a nontechnical word in the southwest United States for either a small secluded valley, an alcove or angular recess in a cliff, or a bend in a river. The meanders of a stream or river that has cut its bed down into

8509-407: The context of meandering rivers, a boundary layer exists within the thin layer of fluid that interacts with the river bed. Inside that layer and following standard boundary-layer theory, the velocity of the fluid is effectively zero. Centrifugal force, which depends on velocity, is also therefore effectively zero. Pressure force, however, remains unaffected by the boundary layer. Therefore, within

8636-408: The curvature of the bend, and the faster the flow, the stronger is the cross-current and the sweeping. Due to the conservation of angular momentum the speed on the inside of the bend is faster than on the outside. Since the flow velocity is diminished, so is the centrifugal pressure. The pressure of the super-elevated column prevails, developing an unbalanced gradient that moves water back across

8763-399: 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

8890-484: 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

9017-405: The downvalley length is not identical to the reach. In that case the valley index is the meander ratio of the valley while the channel index is the meander ratio of the channel. The channel sinuosity index is the channel length divided by the valley length and the standard sinuosity index is the channel index divided by the valley index. Distinctions may become even more subtle. Sinuosity Index has

9144-576: 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

9271-413: 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

9398-491: 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

9525-565: The formation of both entrenched meanders and ingrown meanders is thought to require that base level falls as a result of either relative change in mean sea level , isostatic or tectonic uplift, the breach of an ice or landslide dam, or regional tilting. Classic examples of incised meanders are associated with rivers in the Colorado Plateau , the Kentucky River Palisades in central Kentucky , and streams in

9652-428: The full force of the flood. After a cutoff meander is formed, river water flows into its end from the river builds small delta-like feature into either end of it during floods. These delta-like features block either end of the cutoff meander to form a stagnant oxbow lake that is separated from the flow of the fluvial channel and independent of the river. During floods, the flood waters deposit fine-grained sediment into

9779-404: The fullbank channel width and 3 to 5 times, with an average of 4.7 times, the radius of curvature at the apex. This radius is 2–3 times the channel width. A meander has a depth pattern as well. The cross-overs are marked by riffles , or shallow beds, while at the apices are pools. In a pool direction of flow is downward, scouring the bed material. The major volume, however, flows more slowly on

9906-618: 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

10033-416: The inner side, which forms a meandering horseshoe-shaped bend. Eventually as the result of its meandering, the fluvial channel cuts through the narrow neck of the meander and forms a cutoff meander. The final break-through of the neck, which is called a neck cutoff , often occurs during a major flood because that is when the watercourse is out of its banks and can flow directly across the neck and erode it with

10160-443: The inside bank of a river bend. On the inside bend, this sediment and debris is eventually deposited on the slip-off slope of a point bar. Scroll-bars are a result of continuous lateral migration of a meander loop that creates an asymmetrical ridge and swale topography on the inside of the bends. The topography is generally parallel to the meander, and is related to migrating bar forms and back bar chutes, which carve sediment from

10287-406: The inside of the bend where, due to decreased velocity, it deposits sediment. The line of maximum depth, or channel, is the thalweg or thalweg line. It is typically designated the borderline when rivers are used as political borders. The thalweg hugs the outer banks and returns to center over the riffles. The meander arc length is the distance along the thalweg over one meander. The river length

10414-519: The landscape has caused increased erosion, leading to desertification of the region and a gradual reduction of the river flow. The lower part of the river was once confused to be the middle reach of the Yellow River , which lies farther east but flows for a significant distance in the same direction paralleling the Ruo River. The former Tangut city of Khara-Khoto , now deserted, lies near

10541-586: 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

10668-528: 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

10795-567: The lower end of the river. According to legend, the city was abandoned after Ming forces diverted the river away from the city in 1372. European explorers that visited the area include Pyotr Kuzmich Kozlov (1907–1909) and John DeFrancis (1935). In the 20th century, China's main spaceport, the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center was constructed in the lower course of the Ruo Shui, with launch pads on both sides of

10922-420: The meanders are fixed. Various mathematical formulae relate the variables of the meander geometry. As it turns out some numerical parameters can be established, which appear in the formulae. The waveform depends ultimately on the characteristics of the flow but the parameters are independent of it and apparently are caused by geologic factors. In general the meander length is 10–14 times, with an average 11 times,

11049-492: The midstream area. This flow weakening is the result of the net balance between the tributaries descending from the north-east side of the Qilian Shan and the considerable derivations related to the cropfield area. Chinese language Chinese ( simplified Chinese : 汉语 ; traditional Chinese : 漢語 ; pinyin : Hànyǔ ; lit. ' Han language' or 中文 ; Zhōngwén ; 'Chinese writing')

11176-455: 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

11303-418: The more heterogeneous braided river deposits. There are two distinct patterns of scroll-bar depositions; the eddy accretion scroll bar pattern and the point-bar scroll pattern. When looking down the river valley they can be distinguished because the point-bar scroll patterns are convex and the eddy accretion scroll bar patterns are concave. Scroll bars often look lighter at the tops of the ridges and darker in

11430-504: The most general statements is that of Scheidegger: "The meander train is assumed to be the result of the stochastic fluctuations of the direction of flow due to the random presence of direction-changing obstacles in the river path." Given a flat, smooth, tilted artificial surface, rainfall runs off it in sheets, but even in that case adhesion of water to the surface and cohesion of drops produce rivulets at random. Natural surfaces are rough and erodible to different degrees. The result of all

11557-425: 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

11684-583: 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

11811-538: 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

11938-416: The outer to the inner bank along the river bed, then flows back to the outer bank near the surface of the river. This in turn increases carrying capacity for sediments on the outer bank and reduces it on the inner bank, so that sediments are eroded from the outer bank and redeposited on the inner bank of the next downstream meander. When a fluid is introduced to an initially straight channel which then bends,

12065-401: The outside bend and high fluid velocity at the inside bend. This classic fluid mechanics result is irrotational vortex flow. In the context of meandering rivers, its effects are dominated by those of secondary flow. Secondary flow : A force balance exists between pressure forces pointing to the inside bend of the river and centrifugal forces pointing to the outside bend of the river. In

12192-436: The outside bend. The higher velocities at the outside bend lead to higher shear stresses and therefore result in erosion. Similarly, lower velocities at the inside bend cause lower shear stresses and deposition occurs. Thus meander bends erode at the outside bend, causing the river to becoming increasingly sinuous (until cutoff events occur). Deposition at the inside bend occurs such that for most natural meandering rivers,

12319-529: The outside of the curve and deposit sediment in the slower flowing water on the inside of the loop, in a process called lateral accretion. Scroll-bar sediments are characterized by cross-bedding and a pattern of fining upward. These characteristics are a result of the dynamic river system, where larger grains are transported during high energy flood events and then gradually die down, depositing smaller material with time (Batty 2006). Deposits for meandering rivers are generally homogeneous and laterally extensive unlike

12446-415: The oxbow lake. As a result, oxbow lakes tend to become filled in with fine-grained, organic-rich sediments over time. A point bar , which is also known as a meander bar , is a fluvial bar that is formed by the slow, often episodic, addition of individual accretions of noncohesive sediment on the inside bank of a meander by the accompanying migration of the channel toward its outer bank. This process

12573-475: The physical factors acting at random is channels that are not straight, which then progressively become sinuous. Even channels that appear straight have a sinuous thalweg that leads eventually to a sinuous channel. In the equilibrium theory, meanders decrease the stream gradient until an equilibrium between the erodibility of the terrain and the transport capacity of the stream is reached. A mass of water descending must give up potential energy , which, given

12700-404: 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 ,

12827-552: 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

12954-509: 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

13081-691: The river width remains nearly constant, even as the river evolves. In a speech before the Prussian Academy of Sciences in 1926, Albert Einstein suggested that because the Coriolis force of the earth can cause a small imbalance in velocity distribution, such that velocity on one bank is higher than on the other, it could trigger the erosion on one bank and deposition of sediment on the other that produces meanders However, Coriolis forces are likely insignificant compared with other forces acting to produce river meanders. The technical description of

13208-399: The river. The basin subdivision reflects the different hydrological dynamics typical of the numerous natural contexts to be found within the basin. Most of the population is found in the midstream area, together with the oases and the agricultural consortia. The main course of the river starts in the Qilian mountains at an elevation of 3650 m asl . The loamy sediment load gives the waters

13335-400: The same notwithstanding the high area difference among the three areas because of the consistent vegetation presence in the upstream (wild shrubs) and midstream (croplands) areas. In the E T {\displaystyle ET} term, when shifting from the vegetated (upstream and midstream) to the arid (downstream) areas, the transpiration element decreases in importance in favour of

13462-416: The same velocity at the end of the drop as at the beginning, is removed by interaction with the material of the stream bed. The shortest distance; that is, a straight channel, results in the highest energy per unit of length, disrupting the banks more, creating more sediment and aggrading the stream. The presence of meanders allows the stream to adjust the length to an equilibrium energy per unit length in which

13589-417: The sediment is deposited the vertical sequence of sediments comprising a point bar becomes finer upward within an individual point bar. For example, it is typical for point bars to fine upward from gravel at the base to fine sands at the top. The source of the sediment is typically upstream cut banks from which sand, rocks and debris has been eroded, swept, and rolled across the bed of the river and downstream to

13716-505: The shape of an incised meander is not always, if ever, "inherited", e.g., strictly from an antecedent meandering stream where its meander pattern could freely develop on a level floodplain. Instead, they argue that as fluvial incision of bedrock proceeds, the stream course is significantly modified by variations in rock type and fractures , faults , and other geological structures into either lithologically conditioned meanders or structurally controlled meanders . The oxbow lake , which

13843-445: The shortest possible path). It is calculated as the length of the stream divided by the length of the valley . A perfectly straight river would have a meander ratio of 1 (it would be the same length as its valley), while the higher this ratio is above 1, the more the river meanders. Sinuosity indices are calculated from the map or from an aerial photograph measured over a distance called the reach , which should be at least 20 times

13970-421: The sidewalls induce a pressure gradient that causes the fluid to alter course and follow the bend. From here, two opposing processes occur: (1) irrotational flow and (2) secondary flow . For a river to meander, secondary flow must dominate. Irrotational flow : From Bernoulli's equations, high pressure results in low velocity. Therefore, in the absence of secondary flow we would expect low fluid velocity at

14097-421: The simple evaporation . The volumetric balances, instead, show different signs: in the mountain area the input-over-output excess can be explained with the important precipitation volumes; in the midstream area the cultivations require a great amount of water that is extracted from the aquifers, increasing the water deficit; finally, in the downstream area the positive effects of the water replenishment programme of

14224-411: The sinuous axis. A loop at the apex has an outer or concave bank and an inner or convex bank. The meander belt is defined by an average meander width measured from outer bank to outer bank instead of from centerline to centerline. If there is a flood plain , it extends beyond the meander belt. The meander is then said to be free—it can be found anywhere in the flood plain. If there is no flood plain,

14351-517: 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

14478-561: 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

14605-419: The stream carries away all the sediment that it produces. Geomorphic refers to the surface structure of the terrain. Morphotectonic means having to do with the deeper, or tectonic (plate) structure of the rock. The features included under these categories are not random and guide streams into non-random paths. They are predictable obstacles that instigate meander formation by deflecting the stream. For example,

14732-403: The stream might be guided into a fault line (morphotectonic). A cut bank is an often vertical bank or cliff that forms where the outside, concave bank of a meander cuts into the floodplain or valley wall of a river or stream. A cutbank is also known either as a river-cut cliff , river cliff , or a bluff and spelled as cutbank . Erosion that forms a cut bank occurs at the outside bank of

14859-416: The swales. This is because the tops can be shaped by wind, either adding fine grains or by keeping the area unvegetated, while the darkness in the swales can be attributed to silts and clays washing in during high water periods. This added sediment in addition to water that catches in the swales is in turn is a favorable environment for vegetation that will also accumulate in the swales. Depending upon whether

14986-568: 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

15113-547: 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

15240-406: The trees to fall into the river. A meander cutoff , also known as either a cutoff meander or abandoned meander , is a meander that has been abandoned by its stream after the formation of a neck cutoff. A lake that occupies a cutoff meander is known as an oxbow lake . Cutoff meanders that have cut downward into the underlying bedrock are known in general as incised cutoff meanders . As in

15367-512: 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

15494-621: The western fringe of the Badain Jaran Desert . Apart from the physiological riparian vegetation, this last part of the hydrological basin is mainly desertic, and the water losses caused by both evaporation and deep percolation cause the water flux to weaken. This pattern has caused the river to be named Ruo (弱, Weak ). After the Langxinshan stream gauge, the river splits into two entities: the Dong He (東河, Eastern river ) and

15621-452: 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

15748-517: 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

15875-453: 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,

16002-404: Was first settled by the Chinese in about 100 B.C. Many outposts were created to protect Silk Road traders from the frequent attacks of barbarians , as the water-abundant valley of the river in relation with the aridity of the surrounding terrain provided an easy route for Huns and Mongols to launch raids. Since then, the river valley has been intensely cultivated and logged. However, clearing of

16129-485: 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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