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102-764: China Qiyuan ( Chinese : 中国棋院 ; pinyin : Zhōngguó Qíyuàn ) is an official agency responsible for board games and card games such as go , bridge , chess and Chinese chess affairs under the All-China Sports Federation of the People's Republic of China . It oversees the Chinese Weiqi Association , the Chinese Chess Association , the Chinese Xiangqi Association and

204-547: 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

306-469: 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

408-457: 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

510-510: 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

612-599: 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

714-462: 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

816-563: 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

918-714: 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

1020-621: A given rhyme group, tone and initial, as medial glides were not considered part of the rhyme. Further innovations are found in a rime dictionary from the late 16th century describing the Fuzhou dialect , which is preserved, together with a later redaction, in the Qi Lin Bayin . This work enumerates the finals of the dialect, differentiated by both medial and rhyme, and classifies each homophone group uniquely by final, initial and tone. Both finals and initials are listed in cí poems. Tangut

1122-453: A merger of palatal allophones of dental sibilants and velars, is a much more recent development. Assigning phonetic values to the finals has proved more difficult, as many of the distinctions reflected in the Qieyun have been lost over time. Karlgren proposed that type B finals contained a palatal medial /j/ , a position that is still accepted by most scholars. However Pulleyblank, noting

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1224-576: 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

1326-472: A rhyme dictionary written entirely in Tangut, but with the same structure as the Chinese dictionaries. The dictionary consists of one volume each for the Tangut level and rising tones, with a third volume of "mixed category" characters, whose significance is unclear. As with the Chinese dictionaries, each volume is divided into rhymes, and then into homophone groups separated by a small circle. The pronunciation of

1428-542: 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

1530-508: 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

1632-473: A sophisticated featural analysis to the rime books, but were separated from them by centuries of sound change, and some of their categories are difficult to interpret. The so-called Sino-Xenic pronunciations, readings of Chinese loanwords in Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese, were ancient, but affected by the different phonological structures of those languages. Finally modern varieties of Chinese provided

1734-457: A speller for itself. Thus, for example, From this we may conclude that 東, 德 and 多 must all have had the same initial. By following such chains of equivalences Chen was able to identify categories of equivalent initial spellers, and similarly for the finals. More common segments tended to have the most variants. Words with the same final would rhyme, but a rhyme group might include between one and four finals with different medial glides, as seen in

1836-631: 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

1938-575: 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

2040-458: A wealth of evidence, but often influenced each other as a result of a millennium of migration and political upheavals. After applying a variant of the comparative method in a subsidiary role to flesh out the rime dictionary evidence, Karlgren believed that he had reconstructed the speech of the Sui-Tang capital Chang'an . Later workers have refined Karlgren's reconstruction . The initials of

2142-602: 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

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2244-490: 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,

2346-603: 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

2448-445: 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

2550-668: 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

2652-489: 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,

2754-501: 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

2856-500: 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

2958-552: 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

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

3162-701: 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

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3264-564: The Chinese Contract Bridge Association . Chinese language Chinese ( simplified Chinese : 汉语 ; traditional Chinese : 漢語 ; pinyin : Hànyǔ ; lit. ' Han language' or 中文 ; Zhōngwén ; 'Chinese writing') 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

3366-626: 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 a single language. However, their lack of mutual intelligibility means they are sometimes considered to be separate languages in

3468-576: The Jin dynasty , eventually became the prescribed system for the imperial examination. It became the standard for official rhyme books, and was also used as the classification system for such reference works as the Peiwen Yunfu . The Píngshuǐ rhyme groups are the same as the tóngyòng groups of the Guangyun , with a few exceptions: Yan Zhengqing 's Yunhai jingyuan ( c.  780 )

3570-533: 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

3672-710: 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

3774-595: 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

3876-424: The Qieyun found in 1947, showing that the expanded dictionaries had preserved the phonological structure of the Qieyun intact, except for a merger of initials /dʐ/ and /ʐ/. For example, although the number of rhyme groups increased from 193 in the earlier dictionary to 206 in the Guangyun , the differences are limited to splitting rhyme groups based on the presence or absence of a medial glide /w/ . However

3978-537: The Qieyun system are given below with their traditional names and approximate values: In most cases, the simpler inventories of initials of modern varieties of Chinese can be treated as varying developments of the Qieyun initials. The voicing distinction is retained in Wu Chinese dialects, but has disappeared from other varieties. Except in the Min Chinese dialects, a labiodental series has split from

4080-467: The Three Kingdoms period, containing more than 11,000 characters grouped under the five notes of the ancient Chinese musical scale . The book did not survive, and is known only from descriptions in later works. Various schools of the Jin dynasty and Northern and Southern dynasties produced their own dictionaries, which differed on many points. The most prestigious standards were those of

4182-559: The four tones . Because there were more characters of the 'level tone' ( 平聲 ; píngshēng ), they occupied two juǎn ( 卷 'fascicle', 'scroll' or 'volume'), while the other three tones filled one volume each. The last category or ' entering tone ' ( 入聲 ; rùshēng ) consisted of words ending in stops -p , -t or -k , corresponding to words ending in nasals -m , -n and -ng in the other three tones. Today, these final stops are generally preserved in southern varieties of Chinese , but have disappeared in most northern ones, including

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4284-478: 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

4386-596: 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

4488-399: The rime tables . A few entries are re-ordered to place corresponding rhyme groups of different tones in the same row, and darker lines separate the tóngyòng groups: The rime dictionaries have been intensively studied as important sources on the phonology of medieval Chinese, and the system they reveal has been dubbed Middle Chinese . Since the Qieyun itself was believed lost until

4590-652: 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. Rime dictionary These dictionaries specify

4692-565: 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

4794-517: The Swedish linguist Bernard Karlgren , for the categories described in these works, to distinguish them from the concept of poetic rhyme. Chinese scholars produced dictionaries to codify reading pronunciations for the correct recitation of the classics and the associated rhyme conventions of regulated verse. The earliest rime dictionary was the Shenglei (lit. 'sound types') by Li Deng ( 李登 ) of

4896-405: The above sample, under the entry for the rhyme group 刪 in the last part the table of contents (on the right page) is the notation " 山同用 ", indicating that this group could rhyme with the following group 山 . The following are the rhyme groups of the Guangyun with their modern names, the finals they include (see next section), and the broad rhyme groups ( shè 攝 ) they were assigned to in

4998-445: The above table of rhyme groups. The inventory of initials Chen obtained resembled the 36 initials of the rime tables, but with significant differences. In particular the "light lip sounds" and "heavy lip sounds" of the rime tables were not distinguished in the fanqie, while each of the "proper tooth sounds" corresponded to two distinct fanqie initial categories. Unaware of Chen's work, the Swedish linguist Bernard Karlgren repeated

5100-608: The analysis identifying the initials and finals in the 1910s. The initials could be divided into two broad types: grave initials (labials, velars and laryngeals), which combine with all finals, and acute initials (the others), with more restricted distribution. Like Chen, Karlgren noted that in syllables with grave initials, the finals fell into two broad types, now usually referred to (following Edwin Pulleyblank ) as types A and B. He also noted that these types could be further subdivided into four classes of finals distinguished by

5202-399: 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

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5304-484: 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

5406-496: The emperor produced an expanded revision called the Guangyun . The Jiyun (1037) was a greatly expanded revision of the Guangyun . Lu's initial work was primarily a guide to pronunciation, with very brief glosses, but later editions included expanded definitions, making them useful as dictionaries. Until the mid-20th century, the oldest complete rime dictionaries known were the Guangyun and Jiyun , though extant copies of

5508-576: 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

5610-517: The final compilation was by Lu alone, after he had retired from government service. The Qieyun quickly became popular as the standard of cultivated pronunciation during the Tang dynasty . The dictionaries on which it was based fell out of use, and are no longer extant. Several revisions appeared, of which the most important were: In 1008, during the Song dynasty , a group of scholars commissioned by

5712-413: 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

5814-491: 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

5916-618: 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

6018-445: The great demand for revisions of the work. Particularly prized were copies of Wáng Rénxū's edition, made in the early 9th century, by Wú Cǎiluán ( 呉彩鸞 ), a woman famed for her calligraphy. One of these copies was acquired by Emperor Huizong (1100–1126), himself a keen calligrapher. It remained in the palace library until 1926, when part of the library followed the deposed emperor Puyi to Tianjin and then to Changchun , capital of

6120-469: The initials with which they could combine. These classes partially correspond to the four rows or "divisions", traditionally numbered I–IV, of the later rime tables. The observed combinations of initials and finals are as follows: Some of the "mixed" finals are actually pairs of type B finals after grave initials, with two distinct homophone groups for each initial, but a single final after acute initials. These pairs, known as chongniu , are also marked in

6222-535: The labial series, a development already reflected in the Song dynasty rime tables. The retroflex and palatal sibilants had also merged by that time. In Min dialects the retroflex stops have merged with the dental stops, while elsewhere they have merged with the retroflex sibilants. In the south these have also merged with the dental sibilants, but the distinction is maintained in most Mandarin Chinese dialects. The palatal series of modern Mandarin dialects, resulting from

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6324-586: 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

6426-562: The language, and is a major component in the reconstruction of Old Chinese phonology . From early in the Tang dynasty, candidates in the imperial examination were required to compose poetry and rhymed prose in conformance with the rhyme categories of the Qieyun . However, the fine distinctions made by the Qieyun were found overly restrictive by poets, and Xu Jingzong and others suggested more relaxed rhyming rules. The Píngshuǐ ( 平水 ) system of 106 rhyme groups, first codified during

6528-528: 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

6630-579: The latter were marred by numerous transcription errors. Thus all studies of the Qieyun tradition were actually based on the Guangyun . Fragments of earlier revisions of the Qieyun were found early in the century among the Dunhuang manuscripts , in Turfan and in Beijing . When the Qieyun became the national standard in the Tang dynasty, several copyists were engaged in producing manuscripts to meet

6732-417: The mid-20th century, most of this work was based on the Guangyun . The books exhaustively list the syllables and give pronunciations, but do not describe the phonology of the language. This was first attempted in the rime tables , the oldest of which date from the Song dynasty, but which may represent a tradition going back to the late Tang dynasty. Though not quite a phonemic analysis, these tables analysed

6834-455: 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

6936-425: 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

7038-583: 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

7140-406: The north, while 脂 and 之 rhymed in the south. The three groups are treated as tongyong in the Guangyun and have merged in all modern varieties. Although Karlgren's identification of the Qieyun system with a Sui-Tang standard is no longer accepted, the fact that it contains more distinctions than any single contemporary form of speech means that it retains more information about earlier stages of

7242-399: The northern capital Luoyang and the southern capital Jinling (modern Nanjing ). In 601, Lù Fǎyán ( 陸法言 ) published his Qieyun , an attempt to merge the distinctions in five earlier dictionaries. According to Lu Fayan's preface, the initial plan of the work was drawn up 20 years earlier in consultation with a group of scholars, three from southern China and five from the north. However

7344-549: The old traditions. New genres of vernacular literature such as the qu and sanqu poetry appeared, as well as the Zhongyuan Yinyun , created by Zhōu Déqīng ( 周德清 ) in 1324 as a guide to the rhyming conventions of qu . The Zhongyuan Yinyun was a radical departure from the rhyme table tradition, with the entries grouped into 19 rhyme classes each identified by a pair of exemplary characters. These rhyme classes combined rhymes from different tones, whose parallelism

7446-511: The other tones, but placed after the other syllables with labels such as 入聲作去聲 ( rùshēng zuò qùshēng 'entering tone makes departing tone'). The early Ming dictionary Yùnluè yìtōng ( 韻略易通 ) by Lan Mao was based on the Zhongyuan Yinyun , but arranged the homophone groups according to a fixed order of initials, which were listed in a mnemonic poem in the ci form. However, there could still be multiple homophone groups under

7548-538: 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

7650-405: The placement of the first four rhyme groups in the Qieyun suggests that they had distinct codas, reconstructed as labiovelars /ŋʷ/ and /kʷ/ . Most reconstructions posit a large number of vowels to distinguish the many Qieyun rhyme classes that occur with some codas, but the number and the values assigned vary widely. The Chinese linguist Li Rong published a study of the early edition of

7752-438: The preface of the recovered Qieyun suggests that it represented a compromise between northern and southern reading pronunciations. Most linguists now believe that no single dialect contained all the distinctions recorded, but that each distinction did occur somewhere. For example, the Qieyun distinguished three rhyme groups 支, 脂 and 之 (all pronounced zhī in modern Chinese), although 支 and 脂 were not distinguished in parts of

7854-440: The pronunciation of 東 was described using the characters 德 tok and 紅 huwng indicating t + uwng = tuwng . The formula was followed by the character 反 fǎn (in the Qieyun ) or the character 切 qiè (in the Guangyun ), followed by the number of homophonous characters. In the above sample, this formula is followed by the number 十七 , indicating that there are 17 entries, including 東 , with

7956-431: The pronunciations of characters using the fanqie method, giving a pair of characters indicating the onset and remainder of the syllable respectively. The later rime tables gave a significantly more precise and systematic account of the sounds of these dictionaries by tabulating syllables by their onsets, rhyme groups, tones and other properties. The phonological system inferred from these books, often interpreted using

8058-606: The puppet state of Manchukuo . After the Japanese surrender in 1945 , it passed to a book dealer in Changchun, and in 1947 two scholars discovered it in a book market in Liulichang , Beijing. Studies of this almost complete copy have been published by the Chinese linguists Dong Tonghe (1948 and 1952) and Li Rong (1956). The Qieyun and its successors all had the same structure. The characters were first divided between

8160-404: 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 ,

8262-552: 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

8364-509: 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

8466-517: The rime tables as describing a Late Middle Chinese stage, in contrast to the Early Middle Chinese of the rime dictionaries. In his Qièyùn kǎo (1842), the Cantonese scholar Chen Li set out to identify the initial and final categories underlying the fanqie spellings in the Guangyun . The system was clearly not minimal, employing 452 characters as initial spellers and around 1200 as final spellers. However no character could be used as

8568-510: The rime tables by splitting them between rows 3 and 4, but their interpretation remains uncertain. There is also no consensus regarding which final of the pair should be identified with the single final occurring after acute initials. Karlgren also sought to determine the phonetic values of the abstract categories yielded by the formal analysis, by comparing the categories of the Guangyun with other types of evidence, each of which presented their own problems. The Song dynasty rime tables applied

8670-473: The rime tables, is known as Middle Chinese , and has been the key datum for efforts to recover the sounds of early forms of Chinese. It incorporates most of the distinctions found in modern varieties of Chinese , as well as some that are no longer distinguished. It has also been used together with other evidence in the reconstructions of Old Chinese . Some scholars use the French spelling rime , as used by

8772-494: The same pronunciation. The order of the rhyme groups within each volume does not seem to follow any rule, except that similar groups were placed together, and corresponding groups in different tones were usually placed in the same order. Where two rhyme groups were similar, there was a tendency to choose exemplary words with the same initial. The table of contents of the Guangyun marks adjacent rhyme groups as tóngyòng ( 同用 ), meaning they could rhyme in regulated verse. In

8874-463: 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

8976-561: 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

9078-436: The standard language. Each tone was divided into rhyme groups ( 韻 yùn ), traditionally named after the first character of the group, called the yùnmù ( 韻目 'rhyme eye'). Lu Fayan's edition had 193 rhyme groups, which were expanded to 195 by Zhangsun Nayan and then to 206 by Li Zhou. The following shows the beginning of the first rhyme group of the Guangyun , with first character 東 ('east'): Each rhyme group

9180-428: The syllables of the rime books using lists of initials, finals and other features of the syllable. The initials are further analysed in terms of place and manner of articulation, suggesting inspiration from Indian linguistics , at that time the most advanced in the world. However the rime tables were compiled some centuries after the Qieyun , and many of its distinctions would have been obscure. Edwin Pulleyblank treats

9282-564: 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

9384-547: 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

9486-419: The use of these syllables in the transcription of foreign words without such a medial, claims the medial developed later. A labiovelar medial /w/ is also widely accepted, with some syllables having both medials. The codas are believed to reflect those of many modern varieties, namely the glides /j/ and /w/ , nasals /m/ , /n/ and /ŋ/ and corresponding stops /p/ , /t/ and /k/ . Some authors argue that

9588-512: 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

9690-452: 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

9792-517: 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

9894-453: 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,

9996-485: 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

10098-414: Was implicit in the ordered of the Guangyun rhymes. The rhyme classes are subdivided by tone and then into groups of homophones, with no other indication of pronunciation. The dictionary reflects contemporaneous northern speech , with the even tone divided in upper and lower tones, and the loss of the Middle Chinese final stops. Such syllables, formerly grouped in the entering tone, are distributed between

10200-435: Was subdivided into homophone groups preceded by a small circle called a niǔ ( 紐 'button'). The entry for each character gave a brief explanation of its meaning. At the end of the entry for the first character of a homophone group was a description of its pronunciation, given by a fǎnqiè formula, a pair of characters indicating the initial ( 聲母 shēngmǔ ) and final ( 韻母 yùnmǔ ) respectively. For example,

10302-403: Was the first rime dictionary of multisyllabic words rather than single characters. Though no longer extant, it served as the model for a series of encyclopedic dictionaries of literary words and phrases organized by Píngshuǐ rhyme groups, culminating in the Peiwen Yunfu (1711). A side-effect of foreign rule of northern China between the 10th and 14th centuries was a weakening of many of

10404-535: Was the language of the Western Xia state (1038–1227), centred on the area of modern Gansu . The language had been extinct for four centuries when an extensive corpus of documents in the logographic Tangut script were discovered in the early 20th century. One of the sources used to reconstruct the Tangut language is the Sea of Characters [REDACTED] [REDACTED] ( Chinese : 文海 ; pinyin : Wénhǎi ),

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