home Folk remedies Which group does Chinese belong to? Official languages of China

Which group does Chinese belong to? Official languages of China

The Chinese language serves as a means of communication for a huge mass of people. It is spoken by 95% of the Chinese population, as well as representatives of the Chinese people living in other Asian countries: Vietnam, Laos, Burma, Taiwan, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia. According to the latest data, more than a billion people on the planet consider this language their native language (for English this figure is half as much).

But while in Russia representatives of different regions of the country understand each other perfectly, in China everything is different. The Chinese language has a huge number of dialects, which are so different that many linguists consider them to be separate languages. Residents of different provinces often cannot even carry on a conversation on everyday topics.

To solve this situation, in 1955 the authorities introduced an official language, which was taken to be the northern dialect of Putonghua (Beijing dialect). The choice was due to the fact that speakers of the northern branch of the dialects made up 70% of the country's population, and their number included residents of the capital. Putonghua was actively introduced into everyday life: it was taught in schools and universities, and broadcast on television.

However, due to the fact that the majority of the country's population are peasants, dialects continue to actively exist. A special mentality played a role here: the cult of ancestors and the cult of history have always flourished in China. Each dialect is part of a centuries-old culture, and to abandon it would be tantamount to death.

Reasons for the multi-dialect composition of the Chinese language

Linguists divide the territory of China into two large dialect zones: northern and southern. The north has always been a unified whole and was the scene for historical events, while in the south everything was quiet, but at the same time it represented separate isolated areas. This can explain the relative similarity of the dialects of the northern branch, the speakers of which can at least communicate with each other, which cannot be said about the southern dialects.

The main reason for the formation of many dialects was the numerous migrations of the Chinese in search of a quiet life and their contacts with neighboring peoples. In the process of communication, there was an active exchange of vocabulary, elements of phonetics and writing. Speakers of ancient dialects communicated with each other and with representatives of other nations, unwittingly forming new language systems.

The differences in the language systems of different dialects lie in the areas of phonetics, vocabulary, and to some extent grammar. Therefore, when oral communication between residents of different parts of the country reaches a dead end, there is a way out - to explain in writing. Why were the speech features that formed different groups of dialects not reflected in the written language of the Chinese?

Development of written language

The written language of Chinese dates back about 4 thousand years. Its peculiarity is that all the metamorphoses that it has undergone during its existence are in no way connected with oral speech. The pronunciation of hieroglyphs changed under the influence of various factors, but their outline remained unchanged. Thanks to this, numerous dialects in China have a single written system.

The earliest source of ancient Chinese writing is inscriptions on fortune telling stones, first discovered in Henan Province in 1899. They were made with a chisel and were graphic elements that were images of objects, people, and animals. The folding features characteristic of modern hieroglyph writing were absent. The difficulty was that there were many variants of the outline of the same hieroglyph.

All subsequent periods of development of the hieroglyphic system of the Chinese language pursued the goal of simplifying the outline of characters, as well as introducing a single letter throughout China. This task was accomplished during the reign of the Qin dynasty. In 221 BC. Emperor Qin Shihuang united the country after internecine wars and began work on unifying the written language. According to researchers, the brush was invented at the same time, which is used for writing to this day.

At the beginning of the 20th century, it was proposed to simplify the structure of hieroglyphs, citing the fact that overly complex writing is the reason for poor economic development. In 1964, simplified characters gained official status and are now the official script throughout China.

A unified writing system provided a common literary tradition, and that is why the Chinese dialects did not receive the status of separate languages.

How many dialects are there in Chinese? Dialect groups

Most linguists recognize the traditional classification, according to which there are 7 dialect groups. These include:

northern dialects (guanhua);
Gan;
Hakka (Kejia);
Min;
Yue (Cantonese).

In recent years, an increasing number of researchers in the world have recognized 3 more groups: Pinghua, Jin and Anhui. There are also dialects that are not included in any classification; they are mixed languages.

Northern dialects (Guanhua)

This is the largest group in terms of number of speakers (about 800 million) and territory covered. This includes the Beijing dialect of Putonghua, adopted in the 50-60s. 20th century for the official language of China, Taiwan and Singapore. Western scholars call it Mandarin: guanhua is translated from Chinese as “official letter,” and mandarin officials are called guan. Many scientists refer this name to the entire group.

Guanhua dialects have several branches depending on geographical location. Due to historical factors, they have much in common and are mutually understandable.

Dialects Gan

Gan dialects are spoken by residents of the province of central and northern Jiangxi, as well as by residents of some parts of other provinces: Fujian, Anhui, Hubei, Hunan. About 2% of the Chinese belong to this group, which is more than 20 million people.

Hakka dialects (kejia)

This branch also spreads in Jiangxi province, but only in its southern part, as well as in the central and northwestern regions of Guangdong province and western Fujian. There are speakers of this group in Taiwan and Hainan. In the West, this branch is recognized as a separate language.

In terms of phonetic composition, the Hakka dialects have much in common with Central Chinese. The standard among them is the Meixian dialect, widespread in Guangdong province, whose authorities in 1960 proposed a system of transliteration using the Latin alphabet. Speakers of the Hakka branch make up 2.5% of the total number of Chinese speakers.

Minh dialects

This group is considered one of the oldest among sinological researchers. Min is the second name for Fujian province and is still used today. The Min languages cover southeastern China (mostly Fujian, as well as eastern Guangdong), including the islands of Hainan and Taiwan. Geographically, this group is divided into southern and northern. The Taiwanese dialect has the largest number of speakers.

Dialects U

One of the largest groups in the Chinese language, in terms of the number of speakers it is second only to Putonghua (8% of the population), some researchers assign it the status of a language. This branch is sometimes called the Shanghai dialect. Distribution area: most of Zhejiang province, Shanghai city, southern regions of Jiangsu province. There are speakers of the Wu group in some areas of the provinces of Anhui, Jiangxi and Fujian.

The phonetics of this branch of dialects is characterized by softness and ease. The most popular dialects are Suzhou and Shanghai.

Dialects of Xiang (Hunan)

The Xiang branch covers about 5% of the country's Chinese-speaking population. It is divided into Novosyansky and Starosyansky dialects. The latter is of great interest to sinologists. The Novosyansk language has undergone changes under the influence of Putonghua, whose speakers surround its area of distribution on three sides. Of the subdialects, the most typical is the dialect of the city of Changsha.

Dialects of Yue (Cantonese)

The group also bears the name of one of the dialects - Cantonese. The word “canton” comes from the French language, which is how the British called Guangzhou during the colonial era. The distribution area of the Yue languages is Guangdong Province and some regions adjacent to it. Guangzhou is considered the main dialect.

Pinghua, Anhui and Jin dialects

These branches do not receive a separate status from all researchers; they are usually included in the groups of the traditional classification. Dialects Pinghua is part of the Cantonese dialect and is represented by the Nanning dialect.

As for the Anhui group, the opinions of researchers differ. Some attribute it to the Gan group, others are of the opinion that it belongs to the northern dialects, and still others include it in the Wu. Sometimes the Anhui dialects are combined with the Hakka group.

Jin or Shanxi are usually classified as northern dialects. In 1985, researcher Li Rong proposed identifying them as a separate group, citing the presence of features uncharacteristic of guanhua. This concept has gained both supporters and opponents; there is no consensus on this issue yet.

The division of the Chinese language into dialect groups is determined mainly by geographical or historical factors; the names for them were often selected according to the same principle, which sometimes diverged from the classification of research scientists.

Dialect groups have all the criteria to have the status of separate languages, but a single script for all of China ensures the integrity of the Chinese language. With the introduction of Putonghua as an official means of communication, many began to consider it a real language, and all other groups - dialects, which, being a huge layer of historical and cultural heritage, are carefully preserved by their speakers.

Languages that are not related to Chinese. Chinese, like most other Sino-Tibetan languages, is characterized by the presence of semantic tones, monosyllabism of almost all simple words and, to a greater extent than other languages of this family, an almost complete absence of inflectional affixes.

Dialects.

There are nine groups of dialects in modern Chinese. The dialects of six of these groups are common in the coastal and central regions: 1) the Wu dialects - in the area of the cities of Shanghai and Ningbo; 2) Northern Min dialects - in the area of the city of Fuzhou; 3) Southern Min dialects - in the area of the cities of Xiamen (Amoy), Shantou (Swatou) and in Taiwan; 4) Hakka dialects - in the area of the city of Meixian, in the northeast of Guangdong province and in the south of Jianxi province; 5) Cantonese - in the central and eastern parts of Guangdong province, including the city of Guangzhou (Canton); 6) Xiang dialects - in Hunan province. These six dialect groups cover about a quarter of China's territory and are spoken by a third of the country's Chinese-speaking population. These groups differ from each other, as well as from the northern dialects spoken in the rest of the country, to about the same extent as Dutch differs from English or Italian from French.

In addition, there are three subgroups of northern dialects (called Mandarin in the Western tradition): the northern, which includes the Beijing dialect, and the southern and central, spoken in particular in the cities of Nanjing and Chongqing. These subgroups differ in much the same way as New England English in the United States and Australia, and are therefore often mutually intelligible. The generally accepted standard Chinese, or the national language Putonghua, is based on the dialect of Beijing (otherwise Beijing, as the name of the capital of China began to be reproduced in the West at the insistence of the Chinese).

Phonetic system.

Putonghua has a fairly simple phonetic system. With few exceptions, each minimum meaningful unit in Chinese is equal to a syllable consisting of an initial (the syllable-initial consonant), a final (the rest of the syllable minus the initial), and a tone. Any of the vowels i,u And b can also act as a non-syllabic vowel, or medial - an element occupying a position between the initial and the syllabic vowel; i And u(or o) are also possible at the very end of a syllable after a syllabic vowel. Thus, there are diphthongs like ia,uo,ai,ei and triphthongs like uai And iao.

The only syllabic final consonants that exist are -n And -ng, and also in relatively few words -r And -m(the presence of such words is not reflected in most dictionaries, but they appear in speech when vowels are dropped during fluent pronunciation). There cannot be words in the Chinese language whose phonetic appearance would be similar to Russian splash, bevel or fistula.

Tones.

Alphabetical writing systems.

The first attempts to create an alphabetic script for the Chinese language were made by Christian missionaries back in the 17th century. However, most of the alphabets created by missionaries for specific dialects of the Chinese language were not widely used. In the first half of the 20th century. The so-called “Romanized alphabet”, developed in 1926–1928 by a group of leading Chinese linguists, and the alphabetic writing based on Latin script, created in 1928–1931 in the Soviet Union by Russian and Chinese scientists as part of a program to eliminate illiteracy among the Chinese population of the Far East, became famous. (according to the 1926 census, about 100 thousand Chinese lived in the USSR). The second of these two romanized alphabets was not based on the Beijing dialect, but on a group of dialects of Northern China that distinguished between soft and hard consonants. In the USSR it was used until 1936. Subsequently, most of the Chinese population of the USSR was repatriated, which meant the end of one of the most extensive experiments in the spread of a romanized script for the Chinese language.

Of the many alphabetic systems developed to record the Chinese language, the Wade-Giles system (which took into account previously created romanized alphabets) was the most commonly used for a long time. In a slightly modified form, it was used in general publications, including newspapers, atlases, etc., and until 1979 it was used in the PRC in publications intended for distribution abroad. However, subsequently another Latin alphabet, Pinyin, officially adopted in China in 1958, began to be increasingly used for a variety of purposes: for teaching hieroglyphs; in telegraphy; in the reading and writing system for the blind; in the press to convey proper names; for recording some languages of national minorities; when teaching the population the national form of the Chinese language. It is believed that Pinyin was a direct descendant of the romanized Chinese alphabet, developed in the early 1930s by Soviet and Chinese linguists (the main difference is the mandatory designation of tones, which connects it with the national language Putonghua). Although the Wade-Giles script and the Pinyin alphabet are based on the same linguistic principles, the latter has attempted to reduce or eliminate the use of hyphens within words and diacritics, and wherever possible to represent a single sound with a single letter instead of using combinations consonant letters.

In Russia, in addition to Pinyin, Cyrillic transcription notation is often used to convey Chinese words. Thus, the name, which in the Wade-Giles system was written as Ch"ü Ch"iu-pai, and in Cyrillic transcription as Qu Qiubai, when written in pinyin, looks like Qu Qiubai. Currently, most scientists in the world (with the exception of the work of Taiwanese and a number of American linguists) use the Pinyin alphabet to phonetically record the Chinese language.

The table below shows how specific finals and initials are written in Pinyin, Wade-Giles, and Cyrillic transcription; In some cases, explanations are provided.

INITIALS IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER:
Pinyin	Wade-Giles system	Russian system
b	p	b
c	ts’, tz’	ts, h (before ua)
ch	ch’ (before a, e, ih, o, u)	h
d	t	d
f	f	f
g	k	G
h	h	X
j	ch (before i, )	tsz
k	k'	To
l	l	l
m	m	m
n	n	n
p	p'	P
q	ch’ (before i, )	ts
r	j	and
s	s, sz	With
sh	sh	w
t	t'	T
w	w	V, F (before u)
x	hs	With
y (also added before initial syllabic i)	y	i (combined ya) e (combined ye) AND(before i) and (before o) yu (combination of yo before ng, u)
z	ts, tz	tsz
zh	ch (before a, e, i (ih), o, u)	zh

FINALS IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER:
Pinyin	Wade-Giles system	Russian system
a	a	A
ai	ai	ah
an	an	anh
ang	ang	en
ao	ao	ao
e	e,o	uh
ei	ei	Hey
en	en	en
eng	eng	en
er	erh	er
i	i, ih, u	u, s (after c, s, z)
ia	ia (ya)	I
ian	ien (yan, yen)	yang
iang	iang (yang)	yang
iao	iao (yao)	yao
ie	ieh (ye, yeh)	e
in	in	yin
ing	ing	in
iong	iung (yong, yung)	yun
iou, iu	iu (you, yu)	Yu
o	o	O
ong	ung	un
ou	ou, u (after y)	oh, yu (after y)
u	u	y, yu (after j, q, x)
ua	ua (wa)	wow
uai	uai (wai)	wy
uan	uan (wan)	wuan
uang	uang (wang)	one
ui	ui, ui	wow
un	un	un, yun (after j, q, x)
uo	uo,o	O
		yu
e	eh	yue
yu		yu
Explanations regarding the pronunciation of letters of the Pinyin alphabet: an after ypronounced like en ; b,d,g – weak unaspirated consonants P , T, To.Since in Chinese consonants do not differ in deafness-voicing, some voicing is possible during pronunciation; p ,t,k - strong aspirates P , T, To(as in English wordspie, t ime, k ind); c - strong aspirate ts ; ch – strong aspirate “hard” h(merged tsh ); e – vaguely reminiscent of Russian s or an unstressed vowel in a word this ; ei - similar to Hey ; h - looks like Russian X ; i – looks like Russian And, but afterc,s,z,ch,sh,zh,r resembles a short one s ; j – weak unaspirated consonant, reminiscent of Russian t or jie ; ng – velar nasal consonant, as in English long; q – strong aspirated consonant, reminiscent of Russian h or t ; r – reminds me of Russian and; and if it is at the end of a word (for example,huar), it resembles Englishr; sh – reminds me of Russian w ; ui– reminds way weak sounding uh ; b– reminiscent of German b ; w – reminiscent of Englishw; x– reminds me of soft Russian sya ; y - similar to th ; yu (y)– reminds yu ; z – weak unaspirated ts ; zh – weak unaspirated “hard” zh(vaguely resembles a fused j ).

Grammar.

Most Chinese sentences have a subject and a predicate, and the function of the predicate can also be an adjective and, less often, a noun. For example, Ni 3 lai 2 “You come”; Ta 1 qiong 2 “He is poor”; Zhe 4 ge ren 2 hao 3 ren 2 “This man is a good man.” What is traditionally considered to be the subject of a Chinese sentence is primarily the logical topic of the utterance, otherwise called the topic, and not necessarily the designation of the agent, so that the action denoted by the verb does not always come from the subject. Wed: Zhe 4 di 4 fang ke 3 yi 3 kai 1 hui 4 letters. “This place can hold meetings”, i.e. “This place can hold meetings.”

In a Chinese sentence, in addition to the subject group and the predicate group, the following important syntactic constructions are distinguished: 1) a coordinating construction, which is often not formalized by any conjunction or at least a pause, for example feng 1 hua 1 hue 3 yue 4 "wind, flower, snow (and) moon "; ta 1 men sha 1 ren 2 fang 4 huo 3 “they kill people (and) set fire”; 2) defining constructions, and the definition always precedes the defined, for example da 4 shi 4 “big event”, yi 1 ding 4 dui 4 “undoubtedly correct”, kan 1 men 2 de ren 2 letters. "door security man", i.e. "watchman, gatekeeper"; 3) verbal-object construction, with the verb always preceding the object: kan 4 bao 4 “read the newspaper”, kan 4 shen 2 me “do what?”; 4) construction “resultative verb” (the first component is the action, the second is the result or circumstance of this action): chi 1 wan 2 letters “there is a finish”, i.e. "eat completely."

The minimum meaningful unit is usually a syllable, which is written with one hieroglyph. However, in modern spoken Chinese, and to a large extent also in written Chinese, many of these units are combined into closely related combinations that are included in syntactic structures such as those described above. Such combinations, to a greater extent than the monosyllabic elements that form them, behave like words and correspond to the words of Western languages. For example: di 4 ban 3 "ground board", i.e. "gender", fou 3 ding 4 "not to recognize", i.e. "deny", hao 3 kan 4 "look good", i.e. "Beautiful", zhuo 1 z "table + noun suffix", i.e. "table", lai 2 le "to come + suffix of completion", i.e. “came”, shuo 1 zhe “talk + continuation suffix”, i.e., for example, “talking”.

In the Chinese language, a larger number of words than, for example, in English (not to mention Russian) can be multifunctional, i.e. appear in different sentences as different parts of speech, but the idea that any Chinese word can refer to any part of speech is far from true. For example, men 2 “door” is a noun, zou 3 “to go” is a verb, tai 4 “too” is an adverb, etc. There is a class of enclitics, or particles, that are often considered to form a Chinese-specific part of speech. They differ from other suffixes in that they are attached not only to individual words, but also to phrases and sentences. For example, the definition indicator de can be present not only in the phrase ta 1 de shu 1 "his book", but also in ta 1 xie 3 xin 4 yong 4 de pi 3, "he writes letters using + definition indicator + pen", i.e. "the pen he uses (when) writing letters." Although this is quite similar to English constructions like Can"t a fellow touch the girl he"s in love with"s hair? “Can’t a guy touch the hair of the girl he’s in love with?”, where the component girl he is in love with "the girl he's in love with" is a modifier of the noun hair, it should be noted that in English such constructions are still very rare, while in Chinese they are completely normal and are used constantly. In Chinese there are no affixes with a case meaning , person, tense and gender. The plural form is inherent in nouns denoting persons and personal pronouns. The verb, as already noted, has an aspect category expressed by suffixes.

Historical development.

Middle Chinese.

Most modern dialects go back to the language of the northwestern part of Chinese territory proper, centered in the city of Chang'an (now Xi'an, Shaanxi Province). Based on historical sources (for centuries, the Chinese have always paid serious attention to their language), as well as a comparative historical study of modern dialects, it is possible to reconstruct in some detail the phonetic system of the Middle Chinese language (called Ancient Chinese in Western Sinology, i.e. literally ancient Chinese, which does not correspond to the terminology adopted in Russia, cf. below) approximately 600 AD. Because the city of Chang'an was a cultural and political center under several dynasties, the area's pronunciation spread widely. By the time it reached the south and east, the dialects of the north had already changed greatly towards a simplified phonetic system. This is one of the reasons why modern northern dialects are the furthest from Central Chinese. The Wu and Xiang dialects have retained the old initials to the greatest extent: p,p",b"; t,t",d";k,k",g";ts,ts",dz" etc., and Cantonese, Amoi and Hakka have preserved the old final syllabic consonants better than others: -m,-n,-ng,-p,-t,-k. Therefore, poetry from the Tang Dynasty, for example by authors such as Li Bo and Du Fu, rhymes much better when read in Cantonese than in Northern ones.

In Middle Chinese, as in modern, there were four tones: the old level tone gave in the modern language the first tone (or the second, depending on whether the initial was voiceless or voiced); the old rising tone corresponds, roughly speaking, to the modern third tone; the old “outgoing” (falling) tone - to the modern fourth tone; syllables with the old so-called incoming tone, i.e. syllables ending in -p,-t,-k and which did not have tonal oppositions, in modern language they can have any of the four tones - in accordance with certain patterns, with numerous exceptions.

Ancient Chinese language.

About the language of the classical period, which in Western Chinese studies is called Archaic Chinese, i.e. archaic Chinese, and which existed during the time of Confucius (approximately 550–480 BC), we know less, and the opinions of researchers here vary more. However, everyone usually agrees that in ancient Chinese there was a contrast between voiceless and voiced stop consonants in terms of aspiration and unaspiration: t,t",d,d";k,k",g,g"; and so on. (cf. t,th,d,dh and so on. in Sanskrit), there was a greater variety of final syllabic consonants: in addition to -p,-t,-k,-m,-n,-ng more -b(rarely), -d,-g,-r; There were some initial syllable combinations of consonants: kl,gl,pl,bl etc., and there was also a slightly different distribution of words across tonal groups.

The grammar of ancient and middle Chinese differs from modern Chinese less than phonetics. Most of what has been said above about the grammar of modern language also applies to earlier periods - with one caveat: polysyllabic words were much less often formed from monosyllabic root words, and the language was much closer to complete monosyllabicity than in subsequent centuries. The word order is basically the same - with the difference that adverbs of manner, place, etc. often follow the main verb rather than precede it, whereas in modern Chinese they precede the main verb. Remnants of inflection are detected (for example ngo"me" - ngâ“I, my”) and sound alternations serving for word formation (for example kian"see" - g"ian“to see each other, to show”), but already in the classical period they were not productive.

Book language.

Although the Chinese dialects differ in their pronunciation of the same words to the same extent that Spanish differs from French, they have never been considered different languages - mainly because there is a single common book language called Wenyan, which until recently was the only widely and universally used form of written language. As already mentioned, dialects differ primarily in pronunciation, less in vocabulary, and only to a minor extent in grammar. Wenyan does not have its own pronunciation, but the vocabulary and grammar are the same throughout, so that, generally speaking, it is impossible to determine where the author of a Wenyan text is from unless one hears him read it aloud. This is somewhat reminiscent of the situation in Europe during the early Middle Ages, when national languages began to emerge, but scholars continued to write in Latin, with everyone reading and speaking Latin with the pronunciation characteristic of their own language. However, wenyan was not only used by scientists. It was used in government and business, in most newspapers and books, and in personal correspondence. In the first half of the 20th century. In written communication, the “commonly understood language” of Putonghua was established (it is based on Baihua, a written language reflecting the spoken language of the northern dialects), although Wenyanisms continued to be actively used.

The importance of Wenyan is not only that it is written in a single national writing system, but also that it is a cumulative product of general literature, and its vocabulary, although dependent on style, varies little depending on the origin of the author. Therefore, even if it were not written in hieroglyphs, it would still be a common language for the entire country (pronounced differently), although hieroglyphic writing undoubtedly contributed to maintaining its unity. This aspect of Wenyan is also evident in the fact that illiterate or blind fortune tellers and storytellers who have never learned hieroglyphs can quote classics and proverbs in Wenyan just as freely as those who can read and write. When schoolchildren and students wrote academic essays in Wenyang, they spoke or even sang their phrases to get the rhythm, since much of what is acceptable or unacceptable in the way of expression in Wenyang depends on the rhythm. Nobody conducts conversations in Wenyang (the compressed telegraphic style, understandable in the text written in characters that distinguish homonymous words, makes spoken speech in Wenyang extremely ambiguous), but it is still widely used for practical purposes. Root words are taken from Wenyan to create terminology for various areas of modern life, and this is how a huge number of so-called new terms have arisen, which are simply words of modern Chinese, not spoken language or Wenyan.

Chinese writing.

The oldest Chinese writings were found on shells and bones and date back to the 14th century. BC. Although some of the signs in these inscriptions depicted objects and concepts and were pictograms or ideograms, most signs already in ancient times served to record specific words. For example, the word er 4 is written with a sign consisting of two lines, but not liang 3, although both of them mean “two”; the sign, which is a simplified image of a dog, serves to record the word quan 3, but not the synonymous word gou 3 .

Although the style of writing the strokes that make up hieroglyphs has undergone significant changes (partly as a result of changing writing tools), the structure of most hieroglyphs has remained largely unchanged since the Qin Dynasty (221–206 BC), and since the 3rd century . AD hieroglyphs became similar to modern ones. Traditionally, there were six categories of hieroglyphs, which are now reduced to three groups:

1) pictograms and ideograms (about 1500 hieroglyphs). These include the oldest simple signs (for example, mu 4 "tree"; san 1 "three"), as well as combined signs indicating more abstract meanings (for example, the hieroglyph nan 2 "man" consists of tian 2 "field" and li 4 "strength"; the idea is that a man is one who uses his strength in the field);

2) phonideograms (phonograms), which make up the majority of modern hieroglyphs. These are complex signs consisting of keys that give a hint of the meaning of a word or morpheme, and so-called phonetics, indicating the exact or approximate sound of the sign, for example the hieroglyph tou 2 "head" consists of the key ye 4 "head" and the phonetics dou 4 "beans" ". In Chinese dictionaries, characters are usually arranged according to keys, their number is 214;

3) so-called “borrowed” hieroglyphs - signs of different structures, originally created for certain words, and then used to write other words. For example, the character wan 4 was originally an image of a scorpion, but then it was borrowed to write the word wan 4, which sounded exactly the same, with the meaning “10,000”.

Of the types listed above, categories 1 and 2 more or less correspond to the European idea of the nature of Chinese writing. Category 3 is the most important from the point of view of the history of writing, since writing a word according to its sound and using phonetics regardless of its semantic meaning is the first step towards an alphabet. The next logical step, which was never actually taken, would be to write each syllable with exactly one hieroglyph, which would lead to the emergence of syllabary writing. But development in the direction of phonetic writing was stopped by the widespread use of phonograms, which now include the majority of all hieroglyphs.

Two more categories should be mentioned that are not distinguished in the traditional classification. One of them is the category of “extended” hieroglyphs. For example, cai 2 “material” is clearly a phonoideogram consisting of the semantic element mu 4 “wood” and the phonetics cai 2 “talent”. But there was a semantic connection between “talent” and “material,” and the “extended” hieroglyph has an expanded meaning of “wood, material, natural data.” This is somewhat reminiscent of the differentiation of the words check and check in English, with the difference that in Chinese such cases are extremely numerous. The other category is a hybrid of categories 3 (borrowings) and 2 (phonoideograms). For example, it is a slightly modified form of the image of a dancing figure and is used as a phonetic borrowing to write the word wu 2 “not to have.” Later, a differentiating element was added to this hieroglyph, so that the word wu 3 “dance” began to be written, and the hieroglyph ceased to be used in this original meaning. Some scholars consider such hieroglyphs to be derivative.

As a result of the fact that the number of hieroglyphs began to exceed the number of root words, an abundance of variant forms of hieroglyphs arose, not to mention variations in the writing of strokes and other graphic options. The largest dictionary in terms of the number of hieroglyphs contains about 50 thousand hieroglyphs. The directory of telegraph codes, in which each hieroglyph is assigned a combination of four Arabic digits (from 0000 to 9999), is, of course, limited to no more than 10 thousand hieroglyphs, but it includes all widely used hieroglyphs, except for rare proper names - the majority proper names are formed from ordinary words. A modern newspaper uses 6–7 thousand hieroglyphs.

Modern development.

The Chinese language, like the language of any other people, has constantly undergone changes, but three processes that have taken place in the current period in the PRC are especially noteworthy: the unification of the national language, the movement for literature in the spoken language and the reform of writing. Over the course of about four centuries, the language of the northern capital, called Beiping, Beijing and Beijing, became increasingly prestigious and widely used and was called Guanhua "official, official language" (hence the Western name "Mandarin"), Guoyu "national language" and Putonghua "commonly understood" (i.e. non-local) language.” It is based on the Beijing dialect. Radio stations always hire men and women who were born and educated in Beijing as announcers.

The Spoken Language Literature Movement aims to use the language spoken in everyday life, called Baihua, instead of Wenyan, which was considered the only acceptable language for serious writing until Hu Shi launched the Baihua Movement in 1917. With the exception of Buddhist teachings from the Tang Dynasty (618–907) and some philosophical texts from the Song Dynasty (960–1269), all writing in the spoken language of the local population was limited to popular stories. Now books and periodicals are published on baihua, and it is increasingly replacing wenyan.

The third process is writing reform. The Chinese writing system has not undergone radical structural changes since the 2nd century. BC. The existing characters were perfect for writing wenyan, in which almost all words are monosyllabic. With the spread of Baihua and the change in the phonetic appearance of words, many old phonetic differences disappeared, and this is one of the reasons why Wenyang is never spoken by speakers of Chinese dialects. The sentence meaning "The meaning is even stranger" was understandable both in written form and by ear in the past when it was pronounced (the sign indicates a glottal stop); but in Mandarin it now sounds yi 4 yi 4 yi 4 yi 4 and is incomprehensible to the ear even in context, although in written form it remains a completely flawless phrase in Wenyang. (See illustration for an extreme case of this kind.) The similarity in pronunciation of words that differed in the past was unconsciously compensated for in spoken baihua mainly through the use of polysyllabic words. However, in written baihua, redundancy inevitably arose in the characters. For example, the hieroglyph zhong 1 “devotee” consists of zhong 1 “middle” and xin 1 “heart”, which is graphically completely legitimate, but such a word cannot be clearly understood by ear. Therefore, in baihua the word “devotee” will be zhong 1 xin 1 (literally “devoted by the heart”), which is more understandable by ear, but when it is written in hieroglyphs, the redundancy immediately becomes noticeable - the repetition of the hieroglyph “heart”. Thus, the increasing use of baihua in writing provides an additional reason - in addition to the difficulty of learning characters - for the creation of a phonetic writing system. From 1910 to the present, various literacy campaigns have been carried out, usually in combination with the teaching of Mandarin and the teaching of a unified standard pronunciation. For this purpose, a system of 37 national phonetic signs, created on the basis of features of Chinese characters, was used to record the reading of hieroglyphs. Until now in China, no official action under any government has aimed at the immediate adoption of a phonetic writing system to replace hieroglyphs, although individuals and the government have taken steps to prepare for reform. At the same time, various measures were taken to simplify the writing of hieroglyphs, which, however, did not always lead to greater orderliness in their graphic structure.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the trend towards polysyllabic words was stimulated in part by the influx of foreign terms, while the laconic wenyan continued to serve as the source for numerous political slogans. Simplification of hieroglyphs has been steadily carried out, reaching a point where further simplification seems unlikely. Putonghua was successfully introduced, although it was never intended for it to replace local dialects in everyday oral communication. (Moreover, there are noticeable differences in pronunciation when people speak Putonghua in different areas. In the process of becoming the official language, Putonghua loses its close ties with the Beijing dialect, having been influenced by the language of various state leaders originally from the province.)

Increased attention to the Pinyin system was attracted by the decision taken in the PRC in 1979 to use it in publications intended for distribution abroad. In the long term, the PRC aims to replace hieroglyphs with pinyin, which should become the generally accepted system of Chinese writing.

Literature:

Dragunov A.A . Studies on the grammar of modern Chinese. M. – L., 1952
Solntsev V.M. Essays on Modern Chinese. M., 1957
Yakhontov S.E. Verb category in Chinese. L., 1957
Lu Shu-hsiang. Outline of Chinese Grammar, vol. 1–2. M., 1961–1965
Yakhontov S.E. Ancient Chinese language. M., 1965
Korotkov N.N. . Main features of the morphological structure of the Chinese language. M., 1968
Zograf I.T. Middle Chinese. M., 1979
Sofronov M.V. Chinese language and Chinese society. M., 1979
Large Chinese-Russian dictionary, vol. 1–4. Ed. I.M.Oshanina. M., 1983–1984
Large Russian-Chinese dictionary. Beijing, 1985
Bibliography on Chinese linguistics, vol. 1–2. M., 1991–1993

Republic of China
Singapore
UN
SCO Total number of speakers: Rating : Classification Category: Writing: Language codes GOST 7.75–97: ISO 639-1: ISO 639-2:

chi(B); zho (T)

ISO 639-3: See also: Project: Linguistics

It is proposed to merge this page with the Current situation with the implementation of the Chinese state language.

Explanation of reasons and discussion - on the page Wikipedia:Toward unification/July 5, 2012.
The discussion lasts one week (or longer if it is slow).
Discussion start date: 2012-07-05.
If discussion is not required (the obvious case), use other templates.
Do not delete the template until the discussion is concluded.

Chinese (whale. trad. 漢語, ex. 汉语, pinyin: hànyǔ, pal. : Hanyu, or whale. ex. 中文, pinyin: zhōngwen, pal. : zhongwen- if we mean writing) - the most widespread modern language (a set of Chinese “dialects” that are very different from each other is considered by most linguists as an independent language group, consisting of separate, although related, languages); belongs to the Sino-Tibetan (Sino-Tibetan) language superfamily. Was originally the language of China's main ethnic group - han.

In its standard form, Chinese is the official language of the People's Republic of China and Taiwan, and one of the six official and working languages of the United Nations.

Linguogeography

Range and numbers

Distribution of the Chinese language in the world:
Countries where Chinese is the primary or official language Countries with over 5 million Chinese speakers Countries with over 1 million Chinese speakers Countries with more than 0.5 million Chinese speakers Countries with more than 0.1 million Chinese speakers Cities with significant numbers of Chinese speakers

Chinese is the official language of the People's Republic of China, Taiwan and Singapore. It is spoken by over 1.3 billion people worldwide.

Chinese serves as one of the 6 official and working languages of the UN. Historically, it is the language of the Han people, which dominates the national composition of the People's Republic of China (more than 90% of the country's population). In addition, tens of millions of Chinese, who retain their language, live in almost all countries of Southeast Asia (in Singapore, making up more than 75% of the population); there is a significant Chinese diaspora scattered around the world.

Discussion

According to some Western linguists, Chinese is not a single language, but a family of languages, and what traditionalists call dialects of Chinese are actually different languages.

Chinese letter

In Chinese writing, each character represents a separate syllable and a separate morpheme. The total number of hieroglyphs exceeds 80 thousand, but most of them can be found only in monuments of classical Chinese literature.

Knowledge of the 500 most common characters is enough to understand 80% of ordinary modern Chinese text; knowledge of 1000 and 2400 characters allows you to understand 91% and 99% of such text, respectively.
3000 hieroglyphs are enough to read newspapers and non-specialized magazines.
Large one-volume bilingual dictionaries usually include 6000-8000 hieroglyphs. Among this volume there are already many very rarely used hieroglyphs, for example, those used in the names of ritual objects of antiquity or medicines of traditional Chinese medicine.
The most complete dictionary of hieroglyphs Zhonghua Zihai("The Sea of Chinese Characters" 中華字海), published in 1994, contains 87,019 characters.

Chinese characters consist of graphemes, there are about 316 graphemes in total, and graphemes in turn consist of strokes - from one to 24.

Currently, Chinese characters exist in 2 versions: simplified, adopted in mainland China, and traditional - in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and some other countries.

Traditionally, the Chinese wrote from top to bottom, with columns running from right to left. Currently, in the PRC they predominantly write horizontally, from left to right, following the model of European languages; vertical writing continues to be used in Taiwan along with horizontal writing. However, in mainland China, vertical writing and pre-reform hieroglyphs are still used as a semantic reference to traditional Chinese culture - in publications on art history, art periodicals, etc.

Due to political reasons, the northern dialects, which were distinguished by greater uniformity compared to the southern ones, acquired dominant importance in the Chinese language. On their basis, the “language of officials” was formed, guanhua, which acquired the status of the official language of the empire. Along with it, the so-called baihua- the spoken language of the common people.

A dramatic turn in the history of Chinese culture was the written use of spoken language; it is believed that the primacy in this belongs to Jin Shengtan ( whale. trad. 金聖歎, ex. 金圣叹, 1610?-1661). Movement for the democratization of literacy at the beginning of the 20th century. marked a revolutionary transition to Baihua as the main language of written communication and the beginning of the unification of Chinese dialects.

The vocabulary of the Chinese language went through two stages of transformation: adaptation of a new semantic layer that arose with the penetration of Buddhism into China in the 1st century AD. e. - and merging with the world lexicon of the New Age, the most accessible carrier of which was the Japanese language: from the beginning of the 20th century. the penetration of many Western concepts begins, adapted through the once borrowed Chinese characters, but which took shape in Japan and, thus, are borrowings for the Chinese language.

Linguistic characteristics

Phonetics and phonology

The consonants and vowels of Chinese are organized into a limited number of toned syllables of a fixed composition. In Putonghua there are 414 syllables, taking into account tone variants - 1332 (in Putonghua there are 4 distinctive tones, each syllable can have from 1 to 4 tone variants + neutral tone). Syllable division is morphologically significant, that is, each syllable is the sound shell of a morpheme or simple word. The tonal system has reading rules: tones can be modified or neutralized.

Modern tables that are used when taking the state test for the level of knowledge of Putonghua (“Mandarin Shuiping Tsheshi”) include 400 syllables without taking into account tone differences. The tables are based on the modern standard phonetic dictionary “Xinhua Zidian” (Beijing, 1987), from the list of syllables of which 18 interjections and rare readings of hieroglyphs, considered dialectal or outdated book ones, were excluded.

Morphology

The morpheme is usually monosyllabic. Some of the old monosyllabic words are not syntactically independent - they are used only as components of complex and derivative words. Disyllabic (two-morphemic) words dominate. As terminology develops, the number of words with more than two syllables increases.

Word formation is carried out using the methods of compounding, affixation and conversion.

Traditionally, the Chinese language had almost no direct borrowings, but widely used semantic calques, for example, 电 - electricity, lit. lightning, 电脑 - computer, lit. electric brain, 笔记本电脑 - laptop, lit. notebook-computer. Nowadays, phonetic borrowings are becoming more common, for example, 克隆 ( kelong) "clone". Some new loanwords are beginning to supplant existing calques, for example, 巴士 (bāshì) "bus" (from English. bus) displaces 公共汽车, lit. public, gas cart.

In Chinese, in many cases it is impossible to distinguish a compound word from a phrase. Form formation is represented mainly by verbal aspectual suffixes. The optional plural form formed by the suffix 们 (men) is common to nouns denoting persons and personal pronouns.

One affix can be used for "group" design, that is, it can refer to a number of significant words. Affixes are few in number, sometimes optional, and of an agglutinative nature. Agglutination in Chinese does not serve to express the relationships between words, and the structure of the language remains predominantly isolating.

Chinese syntax is characterized by a nominative structure, a relatively fixed word order: the definition always precedes the defined, no matter how it (the definition) is expressed: from one word to a whole sentence. Circumstances expressed by adverbs of degree, etc., are placed before the verb; so-called “additions” (of time, result) - usually follow the verb.

A sentence can take the form of an active or passive construction; permutations of words are possible (within certain limits) without changing their syntactic role. The Chinese language has a developed system of complex sentences formed by conjunction and non-conjunction composition and subordination.

Significant parts of speech are conventionally divided into “names” and “predicates”. The latter also include adjectives. For many words, polyfunctional use is possible. In modern Chinese, a distinction is made between present-future and past tense, there is an inventory of aspectual indicators and a complex system of modal particles.

The Chinese language has a developed system of function words. The main ones are: prepositions, postpositions, conjunctions, particles, counting words, indicators of sentence members, predicative neutralizers.

In terms of the relationship between subject and object, Chinese is an active language, but the differences between active and stative verbs are expressed not morphologically, but syntactically.

Anthroponymy

Typically, Chinese people have names consisting of one or two syllables, which are written after the surname. There is a rule that a Chinese name must be translatable into Mandarin. A well-known case is associated with this rule, when a father, an avid Internet user, was denied registration of his son under the name “”.

Previously, the Chinese had several names throughout their lives: in childhood - a “milk” or children’s name (xiao-ming, whale. ex. 小名, pinyin: xiǎo míng), adults received an official name (min, whale. ex. 名, pinyin: ming), those serving among their relatives bore a middle name (zi, whale. ex. 字, pinyin: zì), some also took a pseudonym (hao, whale. ex. 号, pinyin: hào). However, by the mid-1980s, it became common for adults to have only one official name, Ming, although “milk” names were still common in childhood:164-165.

In Russian, a space is usually placed between the Chinese surname and given name: Surname Name, while the name is written together. In old sources, Chinese names were written with a hyphen (Feng Yu-xiang), but later the continuous spelling became accepted: 167 (correctly Feng Yu-xiang). Most common Chinese surnames: Li ( whale. ex. 李, pinyin: Lǐ), Wang ( whale. ex. 王, pinyin: Wang), Zhang ( whale. ex. 张, pinyin: Zhāng) :164 .

Chinese women tend to keep their maiden names when they marry and do not take their husband's surname (almost universally in the People's Republic of China), but children tend to inherit their father's surname.

Phraseologisms

The relationship between different types of phraseological units and their place in the range of “oral speech - written language” (the category 谚语 is combined with 俗语)

Currently, the most common classification in Chinese phraseology is the one proposed by the Chinese linguist Ma Guofan (马国凡), consisting of five categories:

Chengyu ( whale. trad. 成語, ex. 成语, pinyin: chengyŭ, literally: “ready-made expression”) - idiom.
Yanyu ( whale. trad. 諺語, ex. 谚语, pinyin: yànyŭ) - proverb
Xekhouyu ( whale. trad. 歇後語, ex. 歇后语, pinyin: xiēhòuyǔ, literally: “speech with a truncated ending”) - innuendo-allegory
Guanyunyu ( whale. trad. 慣用語, ex. 惯用语, pinyin: guanyòngyŭ, literally: “habitual expression”) - phraseological combination
Suyu ( whale. trad. 俗語, ex. 俗语, pinyin: súyǔ, literally: “colloquial expression”) - saying

The Chinese language is listed in the Guinness Book of Records as one of the most difficult languages in the world. In the record list it is mentioned along with the Chippewa languages,

On the territory of the PRC (People's Republic of China) there are many active languages and their dialects. Their number has already reached almost 300, and one of them is extinct. Most of the languages are practically unstudied, but some are supported by the state and are used throughout most of the country. These include Chinese or Mandarin, Mongolian, Zhuang, Uyghur and Tibetan.
However, the official spoken language throughout the country is still Mandarin, although some areas have additional officially recognized languages. However, even the official language has differences in different territories within China. Since many different nationalities and peoples live in the country, there are also dozens of spoken languages. They can be classified into almost 9 language families: Sino-Tibetan, Tai-Kadai, Miao-Yao, Austroasiatic, Altaic, Indo-European and Austronesian.

Putonghua is the main language of China

This language is the official language not only in the territory of the People's Republic of China, but also in Taiwan. The written version of Putonghua is called Baihua. Speaking specifically about the written form of the language, it is worth noting that its lexical and pronunciation base is based on the Beijing dialect of Chinese. The grammar is more modern, but also related to this dialect.
Like many Asian languages, Putonghua belongs to the group of isolating tone languages. When studying it, it is worth remembering the main thing that if you change the tone of voice when pronouncing the same word, then its meaning changes, which can cause misunderstanding in a conversation. Any syllable in a word in this language is an independent morpheme, except for one suffix “er”.

Mandarin dialects

Very often this language is called "universal" because it is used in science, politics, business and literature. All other dialects that exist besides Putonghua have certain differences, and speakers of different dialects may not understand each other, although they live in the same country.
Despite all the differences, almost all known dialects of Putonghua are based on the same grammatical structure and have a similar vocabulary. But there are very significant differences in vocabulary. Pitch and pronunciation differ the most. True, all these dialects can be combined into groups. In the territory of one group of languages, residents communicate freely without losing the meaning of the conversation, understanding each other perfectly. People from another group, as noted earlier, are almost impossible to understand.
This language is taught in all educational institutions of China as a native language and is widely promoted by the government and the media throughout the republic, this is necessary so that the entire population gradually switches to a single language.

Learning Chinese

Almost everyone starting to learn this language expects special difficulties. This arises because there is confusion between written and spoken Chinese. The difficulty lies in the writing. Studying it is a complex and time-consuming process. Although conversational is a little easier to learn, there are still a lot of problems there: mastering the tones and learning all the rules of pronunciation is not an easy task.
Like many other languages, such as English, Chinese also has significant, function and construction words, which include prepositions, particles and conjunctions. You can ask questions about significant words. When constructing sentences, few grammatical means are used, even including complex ones. There are no cases in Chinese, and prepositions play an important role. It is difficult to create a series of definitions preceding the word being defined. For example, in English, this order is strictly fixed, but here there is no such thing.
Verbs in Chinese are not conjugated according to persons and numbers. Modal verbs and suffixes are often used, which serve to change the verb tense. You need to understand that language has a special system of modal particles, without which it is impossible to compose or understand a sentence.

In addition, in the Chinese language there are no non-syllable suffixes; they must form a syllable, and not contain one letter. At the same time, the language has a lot of polysyllabic words and a very developed system of word formation with a predominance of compounding.
The Chinese language is freely taught in any country. Almost always, studying involves traveling to a country to achieve a better result. This is called the "immersion method". The language is inextricably linked with the traditions and culture of the country, so this will be a good help in learning Chinese.
You can also hire a tutor or take group courses. China's influence in the world is increasing, so many people are beginning to understand the importance of learning Chinese to develop their own business and improve their own well-being.

The Chinese language is so rarely chosen to be studied, but it has long since reached the level of global significance. More than 1.3 billion people, which is almost 1/5 of the world's population, speak Chinese.

This language is rightfully considered the oldest among existing dialects. But these are not all the secrets and features of the language! This collection contains 30 educational facts about Chinese that may surprise you.

According to the latest data, this language is spoken by about 1.3 billion people worldwide. They mainly live in China (or PRC), Singapore, Taiwan, the Philippines and other countries where Chinese communities are located. They are also in Russia, Australia and Asia. There are practically no Chinese in South America and Africa.
We call this language Chinese, but many linguists distinguish this group of dialects into a separate branch. At the moment, there are about 10 dialects, which differ mainly in vocabulary and phonetics. The differences are so significant that many Chinese do not understand each other.
The most widespread dialect of this language is Northern Chinese. It is spoken by about a billion Chinese people around the world. The main Northern Chinese speaking population lives in the northern and western parts of China. It is in relation to this dialect that one can hear “Mandarin” in Western literature, but the Chinese themselves call it “Putonghua.”
So where does the word "Mandarin" come from in relation to Chinese? The fact is that this is the name of the widespread Northern Chinese dialect in Europe. This name was attached to it many centuries ago, when merchants from Portugal began to build relations with China. At first they called officials Mantri, which later transformed into Mandarin. And since in this country the official language is called the hieroglyph Guanhua, or “language of officials,” it soon began to be called “Mandarin.”
By the way, the name of the tangerine is directly related to the above fact. When it was first brought from China to Europe, the Europeans immediately began to call it, like everything Chinese, mandarin!

@scmp.com

Chinese writing was used 4 thousand years ago. The oldest “document” with hieroglyphs dates back to the 17th century BC. e. Already in the state of Shang-Yin, “jiaguwen” - fortune-telling writings - were made on the shells of turtles. The first hieroglyphs on animal bones in the area were only discovered in the 20th century, so scientists are still studying this stage of the development of writing during the Shang era.
The Chinese writing system is fundamentally different from all other languages and consists not of letters, but of hieroglyphs. Each hieroglyph is intended to represent a separate syllable, sound or whole word. Also, writing differs in that it does not go from left to right, but from top to bottom and from right to left. However, in recent years, the Chinese have preferred to use the traditional European script. The classic arrangement can only be found in publications with cultural value - books on art.
In total, there are currently about 80 thousand different hieroglyphs, but most of them are no longer used. To live and understand 80% of the text, it is enough to learn only 500 characters. To comfortably understand 99% of the text, it is enough to know 2400 characters.
Chinese is a tonal language. It has four basic tones: high flat, rising (mid to high), falling to mid and then rising, falling and one additional neutral. Tone can completely change the meaning of a word, for example, tāng with a flat tone means "soup", and táng with a rising tone means "sugar".
The main difficulty in learning this language is pronouncing the tones correctly. You can make a big mistake just by choosing the wrong tone. A good example is the phrase "wo xiang wen ni" with different tones can mean "I want to ask you" and "I want to kiss you."

At the beginning of learning Chinese, all students do is pronounce syllables in different tones. It is very difficult for foreigners to learn to express tonality correctly, which is curious; the Chinese themselves easily move from tone to tone. It is worth noting that the inhabitants of the Middle Kingdom themselves are sympathetic to the mistakes of foreigners, because it is a great joy for them that someone is learning their language. Usually there are very few daredevils!
But the Chinese themselves from different parts of the country may well not understand each other. Their spoken dialect is so different from each other, but they share the same grammar. Thus, linguists often argue whether these dialects are different languages, because they are completely different from each other. Disputes are disputes, but for now Chinese is one language with different dialects.
Since Chinese has been a rapidly developing language in recent years, famous people are increasingly choosing it to study. For example, Mark Zuckerberg gave a speech in Chinese when speaking at Peking University. And even Prince William wished New Year in Chinese in an interview!
Research has shown that Chinese speakers use both temporal lobes of their brain. But English speakers only use the left side. This has everything to do with tonality.
Chinese writing has a very strange logic, incomprehensible to a foreigner. Linguists advise studying the language along with the culture of the country, since they have been practically inseparable since ancient times.
In 1958, the official standard for romanizing Chinese, Pinyin, was introduced. Using a special system, it can be presented in the form of Latin transcription. The author of pinyin was the Chinese linguist Zhou Yuguang. By the way, he is also known for his long life expectancy - 111 years.

@blog.oxforddictionaries.com

In this regard, the Chinese keyboard simply does not exist in nature. Of course, who will place more than 5 thousand hieroglyphs on the keyboard! The Chinese communicate using pinyin - each letter of the Latin alphabet has a group of hieroglyphs attached to it. Use a number to select the required option.
Most hieroglyphs differ in only one stroke, so it will also be difficult to understand them. All of them are made up of radicals, or, in simple terms, keys. If you sort words by hieroglyphs, you can break your brain, for example, “good” is “woman” 女 plus “child” 子. Why the sum of a woman and a child gives the word “good” is a mystery.
Although sometimes some kind of logic can be traced. For example, a character consisting of two 女 (woman) means... “difficulties, troubles, dispute.” Well, it happens!
In 1946, Chinese became one of the official languages of the UN. However, until 1974 it was practically not used as a worker.
At the same time, Chinese has incredibly simple grammar. It doesn't even have genders or plurals, or verb conjugations. It could be the simplest language in the world, if not for the huge number of hieroglyphs and tonal divisions.
For this, Chinese was officially included in the Guinness Book of Records as one of the most difficult in the world. So those who complain about the difficulty of learning can reassure themselves with this fact - this is not fiction!
The Chinese language is very popular in Europe and the rest of the world, but only because of its hieroglyphs. Chinese icons can be found anywhere, from wallpaper to cups. Of course, no one thinks about the meaning, the main thing is that it is beautiful!
But for the Chinese, calligraphy of Chinese characters is a real form of art. There are five known writing styles. In Chinese history, there were many masters of calligraphy who became famous for their art of writing.

@whatson.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au

Other languages are not spoken in China, even in public places. For example, it is rare to find an English speaker among airport employees. Tourists have to deal with the intricacies of Chinese!
The peculiarities of Chinese tones make the Chinese the owners of the most absolute pitch in the world. Of course, since birth they are forced to listen to the tones of their native language and determine the meaning of a word using five tones!
By the way, it has little in common with Chinese. The Japanese took many symbols from Chinese characters, but the pronunciation of these languages is completely different. However, the Chinese themselves sometimes do not understand each other, let alone the Japanese!
There are no words for "yes" or "no" in Chinese. They usually answer with the verb from the question. Moreover, the particle “not” is present in this language. It looks like this: to the question “Do you like fish?”, the Chinese will answer “I love” or “I don’t like.”
Chinese youth use digital codes in online communication. Using a set of numbers, a special communication system with frequently used phrases was developed. For example, 520 is “I love you”, and 065 is “excuse me”.
The Chinese language has a couple of words in common with Russian. These include “tea” (chá), “mother” (māma) and “dad” (bàba).

Learning the language of the Celestial Empire is not an easy task. However, with due effort, it can be overcome. This collection of facts has helped you to imagine at least a little what a miracle the Chinese language is!

Do you like the article? Support our project and share with your friends!

Which group does Chinese belong to? Official languages ​​of China