90-567: Tsing Yi ( Chinese : 青衣 ), sometimes referred to as Tsing Yi Island , is an island in the New Territories of Hong Kong , to the northwest of Hong Kong Island and south of Tsuen Wan . With an area of 10.69 km (4.13 sq mi), the island has been extended drastically by reclamation along almost all its natural shore and the annexation of Nga Ying Chau ( 牙鷹洲 ) and Chau Tsai . Three major bays or harbours, Tsing Yi Lagoon , Mun Tsai Tong , and Tsing Yi Bay ( 青衣灣 ) in
180-469: 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
270-457: 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
360-510: 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
450-599: 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
540-462: 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
630-615: 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
720-469: A controversial new dioxin burning plant was also put into operation during 2004, arousing much concern for the residents of Tsing Yi and Hong Kong island. Since 2018, Tsing Yi hosts its very own local craft beer brewery - H.K. Lovecraft, making craft lager instead of craft ale. There are three hotels in Tsing Yi Town, at the east of Tsing Yi Island, facing the marvellous view of Rambler Channel and
810-714: 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
900-518: A drop-off point for fishermen and tourists, and as a mooring site for government boats. In the early days, education on the Tsing Yi Island was mostly private. The first public school on the island is Tsing Yi Public School , a primary school founded by villagers and businessmen on the island. In the post-World War II era, Hong Kong Government provides 9-year free education to all children from primary one to secondary three. The public school
990-576: 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
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#17327982885801080-493: A new series of development: Airport Railway , Ting Kau Bridge to Ting Kau and North New Territories , Tsing Ma Bridge to Ma Wan and Lantau Island , Rambler Channel Bridge to Kowloon and Hong Kong Island , Duplicate Tsing Yi South Bridge on the south side of Tsing Yi Bridge. On the island, new residential projects, Tivoli Garden , Grand Horizon, Mount Haven, Villa Esplanada , Tierra Verde , and Cheung Wang Estate were completed. The final part of reclaimed land near
1170-542: 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
1260-508: 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
1350-678: 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
1440-631: 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
1530-575: A variety of Yue from a small coastal area around Taishan, Guangdong . In parts of South China, the dialect of a major city may be only marginally intelligible to its neighbors. For example, Wuzhou and Taishan are located approximately 260 km (160 mi) and 190 km (120 mi) away from Guangzhou respectively, but the Yue variety spoken in Wuzhou is more similar to the Guangzhou dialect than
1620-489: Is Tsing Yi Town Clinic near Tsing Yi Garden. There is also one maternal and child health centre , Tsing Yi Maternal and Child Health Centre , on the island. It is just next to Tsing Yi Cheung Hong Clinic . There is at least one private clinic in each housing estate. In town planning, Tsing Yi Hospital was supposed to be built near Cheung Hang Estate but the plan was put off owing to financial difficulty of Hospital Authority . All public and private housing estates on
1710-602: 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
1800-709: 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
1890-490: 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,
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#17327982885801980-495: Is expected to grow to 203,300 in the near future. Most of the population live in Tsing Yi Town . Tsing Yi Island is a hilly island with Tsing Yi Peak in the south and Liu To Shan in the north east. Small plain can be found surrounding the former Tsing Yi Lagoon in island northeast. The rocks on the island are mainly granite and were exposed due to extensive housing, industrial and infrastructure construction. Although
2070-584: Is in Primary One Admission (POA) School Net 66. Within the school net are multiple aided schools (operated independently but funded with government money); no government schools are in this net. Numerous schools are founded on Tsing Yi Island, namely: The Department of Health operates two general out-patient clinics on the island in Tsing Yi Town . The first one is Tsing Yi Cheung Hong Clinic in Cheung Hong Estate and another
2160-603: 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
2250-445: 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
2340-668: Is specifically meant. However, when one of the above words forms part of a compound, the disambiguating syllable is generally dropped and the resulting word is still disyllabic. For example, 石 ; shí alone, and not 石头 ; 石頭 ; shítou , appears in compounds as meaning 'stone' such as 石膏 ; shígāo ; 'plaster', 石灰 ; shíhuī ; 'lime', 石窟 ; shíkū ; 'grotto', 石英 ; 'quartz', and 石油 ; shíyóu ; 'petroleum'. Although many single-syllable morphemes ( 字 ; zì ) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllable compounds known as 词 ; 詞 ; cí , which more closely resembles
2430-538: Is subject to the Protection of the Harbour Ordinance . Tsing Yi ( 青衣 ) literally means "green/ blue/ black clothes", but is also a kind of fish, most likely blackspot tuskfish , once abundant in nearby waters. People named the island after the fish. Tsing Yi Tam ( 青衣潭 , Tsing Yi Deep Pool) or Tsing Yi Tam Shan ( 青衣潭山 , Tsing Yi Deep Pool Hill) also appeared on some early Chinese maps. The island
2520-489: 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,
2610-416: Is then mainly funded by the government. Another school for the children of fishermen, Tsing Yi Fishermen's Children's Primary School, was founded by Fish Marketing Organisation . In 1977, Cheung Ching Estate, the first public housing estates on the island, marked the beginning of the new town on the island. To accommodate new schooling children, three primary schools and Buddhist Yip Kei Nam Memorial College ,
2700-501: 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
2790-500: 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
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2880-552: 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
2970-546: Is used instead of Tsing Yi Island , and Chung-Hue Island instead of Chun Fa Island . Tsing Yi Town , together with Kwai Chung Town, is part of Tsuen Wan New Town in the Kwai Tsing District in the New Territories . Although Tsing Yi Island is a de facto outlying island, it is not accordingly included in the Islands District . Historically, Tsing Yi Island, with Kwai Chung, were usually in
3060-428: 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
3150-753: 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
3240-533: 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
3330-710: 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
3420-515: The Mobil oil storage depot to Mayfair Garden and Cheung Ching Estate once aroused enormous concern for the safety of the residents. Some social workers and residents urged the government to relocate the storage facilities. The government decided to halt the last phase of the Mayfair Garden development scheme. The storage facility remained at the same location until Container Terminal 9 was on
3510-595: 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
3600-478: 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
3690-596: 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
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3780-662: 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. Tsing Yi Tong Tsing Yi Lagoon , or Tsing Yi Tong ,
3870-565: 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
3960-453: The Temple for celebrations. The temple was white in color and thus people call it Pak Miu ( 白廟 , lit. ' White Temple ' ). From the 1920s onwards, a Chinese company built lime factories on the present site of Greenfield Garden . It is the earliest known industry on the island. The lime industry continued to flourish during the 1950s, and a tanning factory was also founded at
4050-622: The bridge afterward. Several dockyards moved to the west shore of the island at the end of the 1970s. During the 1950s, Wok Tai Wan on Tsing Yi Island was a paradise for nudists , and hence Tsing Yi was once synonymous with nudism in Hong Kong. After the establishment of the Tsing Yi Bridge, the Hong Kong government commenced an extensive new town project on the island. Cheung Ching Estate , Cheung Hong Estate and Mayfair Gardens were consequently built in heaps. The vicinity of
4140-513: The bridge. Traffic congestion became the burning problem in the community, and subsequently fueled protest. Finally, Tsing Yi North Bridge , a connection to Tsuen Wan town was built to ease off the congestion, as well as to accommodate the local residential population boom. Tsing Yi was continually under further development and Greenfield Garden , Serene Garden , Broadview Garden , and Cheung Hang Estate were constructed. The final decision to relocate Hong Kong International Airport spurred
4230-483: The container terminals. They are: Tsing Yi Island is a transportation hub in Hong Kong. Eight bridges connect to the island. Within the island: Tsing Yi station , at the northeastern part of Tsing Yi Island, in Tsing Yi Town , is served by MTR Tung Chung line and Airport Express . It is also the only rail station on the island. Tsing Yi is served by an extensive bus network, with routes terminating at different parts of Hong Kong. There are 9 bus termini on
4320-399: 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
4410-484: 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
4500-413: The drastic town development. Tsing Yi Estate , Cheung On Estate , Cheung Fat Estate , Ching Tai Court and Tsing Yi Garden were built after all reclamations were accomplished. Ching Wah Court was built adjoining to Cheung Hong Estate. At the same time, Tsing Yi Bridge was seriously overburdened and its structure was unable to cope with increasing traffic. There was only a one-way road in each direction on
4590-458: The early morning hours. Some gather and practise dancing in the playground near Tsing Yung House of Cheung Ching Estate . 22°20′44″N 114°06′00″E / 22.34556°N 114.10000°E / 22.34556; 114.10000 Chinese language Chinese ( simplified Chinese : 汉语 ; traditional Chinese : 漢語 ; pinyin : Hànyǔ ; lit. ' Han language' or 中文 ; Zhōngwén ; 'Chinese writing')
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#17327982885804680-576: 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
4770-413: 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
4860-411: The first secondary school on the island, were built with the estate. More schools were erected when new estates were completed. In 1999, a post-secondary college, Hong Kong Technical College (Tsing Yi) , was completed and provides vocational training for all adults in Hong Kong. In the 2000s, the number of schooling children began to drop and the several schools are facing the fatal fate. All of Tsing Yi
4950-491: 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
5040-417: The franchise of the company came to an end, Hong Kong and Kowloon Ferry took over the route and operated it. All ferry services ceased with rapid development of road and rail transport, especially MTR Tung Chung line with its station just a few hundred metres away from the ferry pier. It no longer takes residents to Tsuen Wan and Central . The pier is now open to the public, and continues to be used as
5130-618: 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
5220-553: The government's agenda. Later on, the tenor of town development shifted northward. Two fisherman harbours, Tsing Yi Tong and Mun Tsai Tong were reclaimed for residential use. Many fishermen were relocated from their boats parked in the typhoon shelter to the Ching Tao House, a new residential block on land, of Chueng Ching Estate. The land inhabitants were put together into several designated areas so as to re-build their villages. The primary sectors had all died out owing to
5310-456: The highest peak, Tsing Yi Peak , on the island. In the early days, the inhabitants on the island were mostly farmers and fishermen. The major population concentrated in the northeast portion of the island. Farmers grew rice , vegetables and pineapples , while fishermen lived in huts connected by plank walkways in the small harbour of Tsing Yi Tong which stretched far back into the island. Many fishermen also lived on their junks and boats all
5400-515: The island have their own shopping centres or markets . Cheung Fat Shopping Centre , by Hong Kong Housing Authority was once the largest shopping centre and was later supplanted by MTR Corporation 's Maritime Square , as the shopping focus of the island. Tsing Yi is home to Hong Kong United Dockyard , located on the west side since 1980. People practise tai chi in Tsing Yi Promenade near Maritime Square in Tsing Yi Town in
5490-403: The island is not fallen in the administration of country park , most of the hilly area remains green. The Tsing Yi Peak climbs to 334 m (1,096 ft)and is a barrier separating industrial west and residential east. The hilly area of the island largely remains intact and is designated as a green belt . In 1997 a once lost endemic plant, Hong Kong croton , was found in the woodland beneath
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#17327982885805580-436: The island: Before the completion of Tsing Yi Bridge, ferry was the only public transport to mainland Hong Kong. Tsing Yi Pier was built near Tsing Yi Town before the reclamation. The pier followed the change of shoreline owing after reclamation, and moved to the waterfront near Greenfield Garden . Hovercraft service between Tsuen Wan, Tsing Yi and Central was provided by the former Hongkong and Yaumati Ferry . After
5670-586: 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
5760-528: 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
5850-455: 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
5940-425: 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
6030-583: 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
6120-609: The north side of the island. In the 1970s, six large-scale companies on the island collectively built the Tsing Yi Bridge to connect Tsing Yi Town and Kwai Chung Town over the Rambler Channel . The bridge was soon transferred to the Hong Kong Government , remaining the sole road connection to the island for more than ten years. Several industrial buildings for light industries were constructed beside
6210-449: The northeast, have been completely reclaimed for new towns . The island is generally zoned into four quarters : the northeast quarter is a residential area , the southeast quarter is Tsing Yi Town , the southwest holds heavy industry , and the northwest includes a recreation trail, a transportation interchange and some dockyards and ship building industry. The island is in the northwest of Victoria Harbour and part of its coastline
6300-538: 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
6390-404: 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 ,
6480-552: 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
6570-509: 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
6660-413: The same administration unit as Tsuen Wan because of their proximity and close-knit neighbourhood. Unlike Kwai Chung, however, whose villages are part of Tsuen Wan Rural Committee , Tsing Yi Island has its own, Tsing Yi Rural Committee . The rural committee was politically significant until the establishment of a District Council and Regional Council (now-abolished), and even less significant since
6750-423: The same period. After World War II , other heavy industries moved in as well. In the 1960s, several oil companies moved their oil storage depots onto the island and a Green Island Cement cement plant. CLP later commissioned its 1520 MW oil-fired Tsing Yi Power Station in 1969 at Nam Wan due to its proximity to the oil tank farms. Meanwhile, some small shipbuilding companies opened on Tsing Yi, and remain on
6840-424: The shore had been laid waste for almost a decade until Tsing Yi Promenade was built in 2004. Local Hong Kong cultural pursuits of Chinese music and dancing, walking and Chinese exercise are in evidence in most evenings. From 2000 to 2004, Container Terminal 9 was built on the reclaimed southwest shore of the island, together with resident blocks, Rambler Crest . Nearby, and well within sight of Central. Victoria ,
6930-517: 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
7020-561: 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
7110-579: The time, fishing in the nearby waters. Even as late as the 1970s, Tsing Yi Tong resembled Tai O with its characteristic stilt houses and water vehicles. Like many other fishing villages in Hong Kong, the Tsing Yi dwellers worshipped Tin Hau , the goddess of mercy and the sea. A Tin Hau Temple was built on the shore of Tsing Yi Tong. At the birthday of Tin Hau, fishermen of all nearby waters would come to
7200-623: 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
7290-547: 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
7380-539: The urban population grew much larger than the rural population. There were about 4,000 people on the island when the British took the New Territories around 1898. In the following one hundred years, the population has grown to nearly 50 times this size; the 2001 Census calculating that the population of the island was 193,432 in 55,478 households . In an estimation in 2007, there are about 200,400 people. It
7470-512: 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
7560-452: 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
7650-517: 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
7740-492: Was a lagoon on the east shore of Tsing Yi Island in Hong Kong. Its water came from a stream in the nearby valley of Liu To and its outlet was at Tsing Yi Bay . It acted as the shelter for nearby boat people , especially after large-scale land reclamation in Tsuen Wan and Kwai Chung . Once their boats moved into the lagoon, they never moved out. This was because their boats were too old for fishing far away. The lagoon
7830-453: 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,
7920-538: Was also known as Chun Fa Lok ( 春花落 ) once upon a time, which means the fall of spring flowers , or Chun Fa Island , on some Western maps. Now, Chun Fa Lok is still a place name or a former village on the southeast corner of the island. A government document in the Ming Dynasty named the water near Chun Fa Lok, Chun Fa Yeung ( 春花洋 ), which is the ocean of spring flowers . The Ming navy once defeated pirate fleets there. In some historical sources, Tsing-I Island
8010-485: 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
8100-543: Was unable to escape the fate of development. Both the lagoon and the neighbouring Tsing Yi Bay, were reclaimed for new towns . The boat people were forced to give up their boats and were relocated to public housing estate on the island. After reclamation, the northern portion became Tsing Yi Estate and the remainder became temporary housing areas , which were later demolished. 22°21′03″N 114°06′27″E / 22.3509°N 114.1076°E / 22.3509; 114.1076 This Hong Kong location article
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