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81-437: Wokou ( Chinese : 倭寇 ; pinyin : Wōkòu ; Japanese : 倭寇 ; Hepburn : Wakō ; Korean :  왜구 ; Hanja :  倭寇 ; RR :  Waegu ), which translates to "Japanese pirates", were pirates who raided the coastlines of China and Korea from the 13th century to the 17th century. The wokou were made of various ethnicities of East Asian ancestry , which varied over time and raided

162-469: 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

243-457: 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

324-510: 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

405-599: 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

486-462: 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

567-615: 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

648-714: 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

729-464: A memorial dated 1553, the pirates were 10% barbarian people, 20% Ryukyuan people , and the rest from Fujian and Ningbo areas of China. According to Ray Huang , a Chinese-American historian, the Japanese pirates frequently collaborated with Chinese groups. Chinese explorers even led expeditions. However, the primary fighters were Japanese pirates. Japan served as a base for the Japanese pirates, and

810-576: 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

891-600: A record of sea battles in 1380 whereby one hundred warships were sent to Jinpo to rout Japanese pirates there, releasing 334 captives. Wokou sorties decreased thereafter. The wokou were effectively expelled through the use of gunpowder technology, which the wokou lacked, after Goryeo founded the Office of Gunpowder Weapons in 1377 (which was abolished twelve years later). In 1419, the Korean army landed in Tsushima and started

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972-477: A result of the war, the coastal defense capabilities of China and Korea were significantly reduced, and the people living in Tsushima , Iki , and Gotō Islands in Kyushu suffered extreme poverty . For these reasons, wokou gradually intensified their looting on the coasts of China and Korea. Chŏng Mong-ju was dispatched to Japan to deal with the problem. During his visit, Kyushu governor Imagawa Sadayo suppressed

1053-542: 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

1134-508: 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

1215-678: 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

1296-674: A temporary pirate state in Caboloan (Pangasinan) before the Spanish expelled him. The identity of the wokou is subject to some debate, with various theories about the ethnic makeup and national origin of the pirates. Professor Takeo Tanaka of University of Tokyo proposed in 1966 that the early wokou were Koreans living on these outlying islands. In the Annals of the Joseon Dynasty , the compiled section for King Sejong relates that

1377-631: 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

1458-575: 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

1539-425: A vassal named Yi Sun-mong ( Korean :  이순몽 ; Hanja :  李順蒙 , 1386–1449) told his monarch "I hear that in the late Goryeo kingdom period, wokou roaming (our country) and the peasants could not withstand them. However only 1 or 2 (out of 10) were caused by (real) Japanese. Some of our peasants imitatively wore Japanese clothing, formed a group and caused trouble... in order to stop all evils, there

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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1782-490: 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,

1863-534: Is nothing more urgent than the Hopae ( personal identification system)". However, Yi did not live during the Goryeo dynasty and was likely relating rumor or legend as opposed to solid documented evidence. Moreover, the thrust of Yi's speech concentrates on how national security was deteriorating and how it required special attention; it is possible he made use of unreliable information to support his point. Yi's assertion

1944-603: 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

2025-445: 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

2106-668: 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

2187-489: 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,

2268-483: Is therefore not highly valued as a source for wokou by other researchers. Goryeosa records 529 wokou raids during the 1223–1392 period but mentions the "fake Japanese" only three times. The current prevailing theory is that of Shōsuke Murai, who demonstrated in 1988 that the early wokou came from multiple ethnic groups rather than one singular nation. Murai writes that the wokou were "marginal men" living in politically unstable areas without national allegiances, akin to

2349-501: 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

2430-500: 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

2511-552: 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

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2592-428: 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

2673-697: The Qieyun rime dictionary (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by rhyme tables such as the Yunjing constructed by ancient Chinese philologists as a guide to the Qieyun system. These works define phonological categories but with little hint of what sounds they represent. Linguists have identified these sounds by comparing the categories with pronunciations in modern varieties of Chinese , borrowed Chinese words in Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean, and transcription evidence. The resulting system

2754-480: 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

2835-710: 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

2916-595: 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

2997-458: The Philippines before their extermination in the 17th century. Aparri in northern Luzon was established as a pirate city-state under the patronage of the wokou. The area around Aparri was the site of the 1582 Cagayan battles between wokou and Spanish soldiers. The wokou were not limited to Aparri. The pirate-warlord Limahong attempted and failed to invade Manila and afterwards set up

3078-646: The Zomia thesis. Supporters of this theory point out that one of the early wokou leaders, Ajibaldo, was variously claimed by period sources to be Mongolian, Japanese, Korean, and an "islander"; his name is apparently Korean and Mongolian in origin. Primary sources: Secondary sources: Mann, C. C. (2011). 1493: Uncovering the new world Columbus created. Vintage.161-163 Chinese language Chinese ( simplified Chinese : 汉语 ; traditional Chinese : 漢語 ; pinyin : Hànyǔ ; lit. ' Han language' or 中文 ; Zhōngwén ; 'Chinese writing')

3159-478: 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

3240-596: 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

3321-562: The wokou , Japanese pirates, also called wakō , along with the Iki and Matsuura . Repeated pirate raids made the Goryeo dynasty and the subsequent Joseon dynasty at times placate the pirates by establishing trade agreements and negotiate with the Muromachi shogunate and its deputy in Kyūshū and at times use force to neutralize the pirates. In 1389, General Pak Wi (朴威) of Goryeo attempted to clear

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3402-401: The Ōei Invasion , the largest operation against the wokou. General Yi Jongmu 's fleet of 227 ships and 17,285 soldiers set off from Geoje Island toward Tsushima on 19 June 1419. According to "Veritable Records of the Joseon Dynasty" a Korean history book, on 20 June the Korean army captured 129 wokou ships, burned 1,939 houses, killed 114 people, captured 21 people, and rescued 131 Chinese who

3483-635: 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. Treaty of Gyehae Tsushima

3564-411: The 16th century were led by Chinese traders whose livelihoods were halted by the Ming trade bans. Because of the extent of corruption in the Ming court, many Chinese officials had relations with the pirates and benefited from the piracy, making it difficult for central authorities to control. Two well-known Chinese military figures involved in combating the wokou were Qi Jiguang and Yu Dayou . Yu Dayou

3645-697: The Daimyo of Tsushima, Sō Sadamori proposed a Gyehae treaty. The number of trade ships from Tsushima to Korea was decided by this treaty, and the Sō clan monopolized the trade with Korea. This treaty was signed by Joseon dynasty king Sejong the Great and the Lord of Tsushima island in 1443. The daimyō of the So clan of Tsushima island was granted rights to conduct trade with Korea in fifty ships per year, in exchange for receiving

3726-480: The Japanese provided all of the military expertise and equipment to the Japanese pirates. In attempts to centralize political control, the Ming dynasty enacted trade bans with the consensus being that "unrestricted trade would lead to chaos". With maritime trade outlawed, China's navy was reduced, and as a result, they could not combat increased smuggling, which led to wokou control over the southeastern coast. Although wokou means "Japanese pirates", major wokou groups in

3807-565: 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

3888-779: The coastal forts built for defense against wokou can still be found in Zhejiang and Fujian . Among them are the well-restored Pucheng Fortress (in Cangnan County , Zhejiang) and Chongwu Fortress (in Chongwu , Huai'an County , Fujian ), as well as the ruins of the Liu'ao Fortress in Liu'ao, Fujian . According to the History of Ming , 30% of the 16th-century wokou were Japanese, and 70% were ethnic Chinese. According to Censor Du Zhonglu, in

3969-399: 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

4050-484: 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

4131-576: 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

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4212-413: 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

4293-491: 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

4374-618: 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

4455-570: The island of Wokou pirates, but uprisings in Korea forced him to return home. On June 19, 1419, the recently abdicated King Taejong of Joseon sent General Yi Jongmu to an expedition to Tsushima Island to clear it of the Wokou pirates, using a fleet of 227 vessels and 17,000 soldiers, known in Japanese as the Ōei Invasion . The Korean army returned to the Korean Peninsula on July 3, 1419, and Korea gave up occupation of Tsushima. In 1443,

4536-586: 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

4617-528: 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

4698-656: The mainland from islands in the Sea of Japan and East China Sea . Wokou activity in Korea declined after the Treaty of Gyehae in 1443 but continued in Ming China and peaked during the Jiajing wokou raids in the mid-16th century. Chinese reprisals and strong clamp-downs on pirates by Japanese authorities saw the wokou disappear by the 17th century. There are two distinct eras of wokou piracy. The early wokou mostly set up camp on

4779-455: 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

4860-425: 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

4941-583: 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

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5022-538: 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

5103-603: The outlying islands of the Japanese archipelago in the Sea of Japan , as opposed to the 16th-century wokou who were mostly non- Japanese . The early wokou raided the Japanese as well as the Chinese and Koreans. The first recorded use of the term wokou (倭寇) is on the Gwanggaeto Stele , erected in modern Ji'an, Jilin , China to celebrate the exploits of Gwanggaeto the Great of Goguryeo ( r.  391–413 ). The stele states that "wokou" ("Japanese robbers") crossed

5184-404: 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 ,

5265-472: The record of 10 July, the number of soldiers killed by wokou was rectified to 180. On the other hand, according to historical documents recorded by the Sō clan, the death toll of the Korean army was 2,500. When the Treaty of Gyehae was concluded between the Joseon and Sō Sadamori of Tsushima in 1443 and the Sō clan was given trade privileges, wokou's activities along the Korean Peninsula calmed down. Some of

5346-552: 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

5427-509: 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

5508-469: The sea and were defeated by him in 404. The term wokou is a combination of the Chinese terms Wō (倭), referring to either dwarfs or pejoratively to the Japanese, and kòu ( 寇 ) " bandit ". The origin of the term wokou dates back to the 4th century, but among wokou's activities, which are divided into two academic periods, the pirates called "early wokou" were borne from the Mongol invasions of Japan . As

5589-517: 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

5670-561: 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

5751-623: The tonal distinctions, compared with about 5,000 in Vietnamese (still a largely monosyllabic language), and over 8,000 in English. Most modern varieties tend to form new words through polysyllabic compounds . In some cases, monosyllabic words have become disyllabic formed from different characters without the use of compounding, as in 窟窿 ; kūlong from 孔 ; kǒng ; this is especially common in Jin varieties. This phonological collapse has led to

5832-547: 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

5913-512: 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

5994-427: The wokou had captured. On 29 June, they burned 15 wokou ships and 68 houses, killed 9 people, and rescued 15 people, including Chinese and Koreans, who had been held captive, but more than 100 soldiers were killed by wokou. On 3 July, the Korean army withdrew to Geoje Island and finally withdrew completely after giving up the re-landing and occupation of Tsushima because of the loss of Korean army and worsening weather. In

6075-558: The wokou, returning their captured property and people to Korea. In 1405, Ashikaga Yoshimitsu sent 20 captured pirates to China, where they were boiled in a cauldron in Ningbo . According to Korean records, wokou were particularly rampant roughly from 1350. After almost annual invasions of the southern provinces of Jeolla and Gyeongsang , they migrated northwards to the Chungcheong and Gyeonggi areas. The History of Goryeo has

6156-452: 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

6237-517: 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

6318-584: Was a Ming dynasty general assigned to defend the coast against the wokou. In 1553, a young man named Qi Jiguang became the Assistant Regional Military Commissioner of the Ming dynasty. He was assigned to "punish the bandits and guard the people", which meant taking on the wokou attacking the Ming east coast. At that time, he was 26 years old. On the eve of the following year, he was promoted to the full commissioner in Zhejiang because of his successes. The wokou even entered

6399-453: 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,

6480-485: 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

6561-407: Was then an important trade center. The private trade started between Goryeo , Tsushima, Iki , and Kyūshū, but halted during the Mongol invasions of Japan between 1274 and 1281. The Goryeosa , a history of the Goryeo dynasty, mentions that in 1274, an army of Mongol troops that included many Korean soldiers killed a great number of Japanese on the islands. Tsushima became one of the major bases of

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