The Chinese Language

Introduction
The Chinese language is a language or language family consisting of varieties
which are mutually intelligible to varying degrees, with most of the varieties not being
mutually intelligible. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in
China, it forms once of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages. About one-fifth
of the world’s population, or over one billion people, speaks some variety of Chinese as
their native language. Internal divisions of Chines as their native language. Internal
divisions of Chinese are usually perceived by their native speakers as dialects of a single
Chinese language, rather than separate languages, although this identification is
considered inappropriate by some linguists and sinologists.
Characteristics of Chinese
Standard Chinese
Standard Chinese is a standardized form of spoken Chinese based on the Beijing
dialect of Mandarin Chinese, referred to as Guanhua or Beifanghua in Chinese. Mandarin
Chinese history can be dated back to the 19th century, particularly by the upper classes
and ministers in Beijing. Standard Chinese is the official language of the People’s
Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC, also known as Taiwan), as
well as one of four official languages of Singapore. It is one of the six official languages
of the United Nations.
Putonghua/Guoyu, often called “Mandarin”, is the official standard language used by the
People’s Republic of China, the Republic of China (Taiwan), and Singapore (where it is
called “Huayu”). It is based on the Beijing dialect, which is the dialect of Mandarin as
spoken in Beijing. The government intends 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 language of instruction in schools.
In mainland China and Taiwan, diglossia has been a common feature: it is common for a
Chinese to be able to speak two or even three varieties of the Sinitic languages (or
“dialects”) together with Standard Chinese. For example, in addition to Putonghua, a
resident of Shanghai might speak Shanghainese; and, if he or she grew up elsewhere,
then he or she may also be likely to be fluent in the particular dialect of the local area. A
native of Guangzhou may speak both Cantonese and Putonghua, a resident of Taiwan,
both Taiwanese and Putonghua/guoyu. A person living in Taiwan may commonly mix
pronunciations, phrases, and words from Mandarin and Taiwanese, and this mixture is
considered normal in daily informal speech.
History of the Chinese language
Most linguists classify all varieties of modern spoken Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan
language family and believe that there was an original language, termed Proto-Sino-
Tibetan, from which the Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman languages descended. The relation
between Chinese and other Sino-Tibetan languages is an area of active research, as is
the attempt to reconstruct Proto-Sino-Tibetan.
Mandarin is now spoken by virtually all young and middle-aged citizens of mainland China
and on Taiwan. Cantonese, not Mandarin, was used in Hong Kong during the time of its
British colonial period (owing to its large Cantonese native and migrant populace) and
remains today its official language of education, formal speech, and daily life, but
Mandarin is becoming increasingly influential after the 1997 handover.
Classical Chinese was once the lingua franca in neighbouring East Asian countries such
as Japan, Korea and Vietnam official documents were written in Chinese until the colonial
period.
Influences
Throughout history Chinese culture and politics has had a great influence on unrelated
East Asian languages such as Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese. Korean and
Japanese both have writing systems employing Chinese characters (hanzi), which are
called Hanja and Kanji, respectively.
In South Korea, the Hangul alphabet is generally used, but Hanja is used as a sort of
boldface. In North Korea, Hanja has been discontinued. Since the modernization of the
Japan in the late 19th century, there has been debate about abandoning the use of
Chinese characters, but the practical benefits of a radically new script have so far not
been considered sufficient.
Languages within the influence of Chinese culture also have a very large number of
loanwords from Chinese. Fifty percent or more of Korean vocabulary is of Chinese origin,)
likewise for a significant percentage of Japanese and Vietnamese vocabulary. Examples
of loan words in English include “tea, from Minnante; “ketchup”, from the Cantones
ke2zap1 and “kumquat”, from the Cantonese gam1gwat1.
Writing
The relationship between the Chinese spoken and written language is rather complex. Its
spoken varieties evolved at different rates, while written Chinese itself has changed much
less. Classical Chinese literature began in the Spring and Autumn period, although written
records have been discovered as far back as the 14th to 11th centuries BCE Shang
dynasty oracle bones using the oracle bone scripts.
The Chinese orthography centers on Chinese characters, hanzi, which are written within
imaginary rectangular blocks, traditionally arranged in vertical columns, read from top to
bottom down a column, and right to left across columns. Chinese characters are
morphemes independent of phonetic change. Thus the number “one”, yi in Mandarin, jat
in Cantonese and chit in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character (“—“).
Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-
standard written Chinese often makes use of unique “dialectal characters” which are
considered archaic or unused in standard written Chinese.
Chinese Characters
Chinese characters evolved over time from earlier forms of hieroglyphs. The idea that all
Chinese characters are either pictographs or ideographs is erroneous: most characters
contain phonetic parts, and are composites of phonetic components and semantic
radicals. Only the simplest characters, such as ren (human), ri (sun), shan (mountain;
hill), shui (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar XuShen
in the Han Dynasty classified characters into six categories, namely pictographs, simple
ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative
characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80-90% as phonetic
complexes consisting of a semantic element that indicates meaning, and a phonetic
element that indicates the pronunciation. There are about 214 radicals recognized in the
Kangxi Dictionary.
There are currently two systems for Chinese characters. The traditional system, still used
in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau and Chinese speaking communities (except Singapore
and Malaysia) outside mainland China, takes its form from standardized character forms
dating back to the late Han dynasty. The Simplified Chinese character system, developed
by the People’s Republic of China in 1954 to promote mass literacy, simplifies most
complex traditional glyphs to fewer strokes, many to common caoshu shorthand variants.
Singapore, which has a large Chinese Community, is the first—and at present the only—
foreign nation to officially adopt simplified characters, although it has also become the de
facto standard of younger ethnic Chinese in Malaysia. The Internet provides the platform
to practice reading the alternative system, be it traditional or simplified.
Romanization
Today the most common Romanization standard for Standard Chinese is Hanyu Pinyin,
often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People’s Republic of china, and
later adopted by Singapore and Taiwan. Pinyin is almost universally employed now for
teaching standard spoken Chinese in schools and universities across America, Australia
and Europe. Chinese parents also use Pinyin to teach their children the sounds and tones
of new words. “Pin Yin” literally translates into “spell sound.”
Grammar and morphology
Chinese is often described as a “monosyllabic” language. However, this is only partially
correct. It is largely accurate when describing Classical Chines and Middle Chinese; in
Classical Chines, for example, perhaps 90% of words correspond to a single syllable and
a single character. In the modern varieties, it is still usually the case that a morpheme
(unit of meaning) is a single syllable; contrast English, with plenty of multi-syllable
morphemes, both bound and free, such as “seven”, “elephant”, “para-“ and “-able”. Some
of the conservative southern varieties of modern Chinese still have largely monosyllabic
words, especially among the more basic vocabulary.
In modern Mandarin, however, most nouns, adjectives and verbs are largely disyllabic. A
significant cause of this phonological attrition. Sound change over time has steadily
reduced the number of possible syllables. In modern Mandarin, there are now only about
1,200 possible syllables, including tonal distinctions, compared with about 5,000 in
Vietnamese (still largely monosyllabic) and over 8,000 in English.
Tones and homophones
Official modern Mandarin has only 400 spoken monosyllables but over 10,000 written
characters, so there are many homophones only distinguishable by the four tones. Even
this is often not enough unless the context and exact phrase or ci is identified.
Southern Chinese varieties like Cantonese and Hakka preserved more of the rimes of
Middle Chinese and have more tones. The previous examples of ji, have more distinct
pronunciations I Cantonese (romanized using jyutping): gail, geil, geil, gikl,gail, and zikl
respectively. For this reason, southern varieties tend to need to employ fewer multi-
syllabic words.
Chinese character is the smallest unit in Chinese, regardless of oral or written forms.
Most of them are the combination of sound, form and meaning. Each Chinese character
represents one syllable with its independent meaning.

Pinyin is the Chinese Phonetic System-spelling and sound

Chinese tones are classified into 4 categories
Flat
Rising
Falling and Rising
Falling

Vocabulary
The entire Chinese character corpus since antiquity comprises well over 20,000
characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are now commonly in use. However Chinese
characters should not be confused with Chinese words; since most Chinese words are
made up of two or more different characters, there are many times more Chinese words
than there are characters.
Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and phrases vary greatly. The Hanyu Da
Zidian, a compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries for character
definitions, and 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, the 12-volumed
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 lates 2007 5th edition of XiandaiHanyuCidian, an authoritative one-volume dictionary
on modern standard Chinese language as used in mainland China, has 65,000 entries
and defines 11,000 characters.
Basic Rules
 Question with an interrogative pronoun

A question with an interrogative pronoun has the same word order as that of a
declarative sentence.
When the interrogative particle (ma) is added at the end of a declarative
sentence, it becomes a question.
Example:
o You like him.
o Do you like him?
o He is a teacher.
o Is he a teacher?

 The possessive particle (de)

When used attributively to show possession, a noun usually takes the structural
particle (de) after it.
Example:
o My teacher
Loanwords
Like any other language, Chinese has absorbed a sizable number of loanwords from
other cultures. Most Chinese words are formed out of native Chinese morphemes,
including words describing imported objects and ideas. However, direct phonetic
borrowing of foreign words has gone on since ancient times.
Ancient words borrowed from along the Silk Road since Old Chinese include “grape” and
“pomegranate” and “lion”. Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including
“Buddha” and “bodhisattva.” Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such
as “hutong”. Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as “grape”
(putao in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is
generally derived from Sanskrit or Pali, the liturgical languages of North India. Words
borrowed from the nomadic tribes of the Gobi, Mongolian or northeast regions generally
have Altaic etymologies, such as “pipa”, the Chinese lute or “cheese” or “yoghurt”, but
from exactly which source is not always clear.
III.Chinese Phonetic Alphabet
There have been many different systems of transcription used for learning to pronounce
Chinese. Today the official transcription accepted on an international basis is the Pinyin
alphabet, developed in China at the end of the 1950’s.
Initials
A syllable in Chinese is composed of an initial, which is a consonant that begins the
syllable, and a final, which covers the rest of the syllable.
b p m f
d t n l
g k h
i q x
z c s
zh ch sh r

 m, f, n, l, h and sh are pronounced as in English.

 d like “d” in “bed” (unaspirated)j like “g” in “genius” (unaspirated)z like “ds” in
“beds”zh like “j” in “job” like “p” in “spin” (unaspirated)g a soft unaspirated “k”
sounds like “sh” in “sheep” but with the corners of the lips drawn back somewhat
like “r” in “rain”.
 Particular attention should be paid to the pronunciation of the so called
“aspirated”.