The Mandarin Language is called
Putonghua 普通話 "Common Language"in Mainland China
Guoyu 國語 "National Language"ｉｎTaiwan
Huayu 華語 by the Chinese overseas communities Dialects or Languages?Chinese language is the language spoken by most people of the world, at least theoretically. There exist many inhabitants of China, especially in the South, that do barely understand the official language that is based upon the dialect of Peking. There are a few numbers of dialects, or we should better call it languages, in China that are related to the official language. These dialects are more archaic than the modern official language and tend to have more tone pitches and closed syllable endings. The most important languages are:
Cantonese Guangdonghua 廣東話 or Yueyu 粵語, spoken in Guangdong (the origin of the city name Canton is actually the province name, the city is called Guangzhou)
Wu 吳, spoken in the Yangtse Delta and Shanghai (hence called Shanghaihua 上海話). Wu is the name of an old feudal state of the Spring and Autumn Period.
Northern Min Minbeihua 閩北話, spoken in northern Fujian province
Southern Min Minnanhua 閩南話, spoken in southern Fujian and Taiwan
Hakka 客家, distributed in many provinces of South China and oversees. "Hakka" means "guest people"; the Hakka language "islands" are enclaves inmidst of territories where mainly Cantonese is spoken
Gan 贛, spoken in Jiangxi
Xiang 湘, spoken in Hunan
Recently some dialects were classified as languages: Dongan (the language of the Muslim Chinese in the West), Jin in Shanxi, Mindong, Minzhong and Puxian in Fujian, and Huizhou in Anhui and Zhejiang.Relatives of the Chinese Language are the Tibeto-Burmese languages, the languages of Tibet and of modern Myanmar and many, many small tribes that live in the Himalaya and its foothills. Thai and Vietnamese are definitely not related to Chinese, even if both are isolating (one word-one syllable) languages that have also tone pitches. English for example is also an isolating language, and many highly agglutinating (one word-one chain) languages like Turkish and Japanese have lots of one syllable nouns. Tone pitch languages exist all over the world, and tonality is no criterium for language relationship.The vast country of China comprises many territories where people live that speak languages that are not related to Chinese, like Uighurs, Mongols, Tajiks, Koreans and Russians. And we don't have to forget the many national minorities in the southwest that speak languages related to Thai, Vietnamese and Tibetian. In Taiwan live a few aboriginal people of Malaio-Polynesian origin. The aboriginal people of southern China as well as the nomad immigrants in the north are long assimilated to the Chinese and are not distinguishible except a few officially accepted minorities.The Development of Chinese LanguageLike stated above, Chinese is a tonale language.
In modern Chinese, every syllable has four different tone pitches (sisheng 四聲):
high pitch (yinsheng 陰聲),
rising pitch (yangsheng 陽聲),
lower rising pitch (shangsheng 上聲), and
falling pitch (qusheng 去聲).The quickly falling tone pitch (rusheng 入聲) that once marked a final voiceless stop, disappeared during the end of Song and the Yuan Dynasties. Finally, in two-syllable-words, the second syllable is sometimes unaccented, so to say a pitchless tone (lingsheng 零聲).
In Cantonese exist eight different tone pitches: high, upper rising, upper falling, upper entering, low, lower rising, lower falling, and lower entering; in daily use they are reduced to six. The problem in reconstructing old Chinese language is that we do know how words were written, but because Chinese script is not a sound script (at least not in general) but a symbolic script, we do know nothing about the pronunciation of the old words. Only the researches of Bernard Karlgren (1889-1978) and E. G. Pulleyblank (* 1922) helped to reconstruct middle Chinese (Tang to Song Dynasties) and finally old and archaic Chinese. Both used the rime dictionaries of the Tang and Song Dynasties (Qieyun and Guangyun) and rime groups of the oldest poetry book, the Shijing. Frome these studies, we see that the final sound system of old Chinese was much more complex than today. While we have today only open syllables (without consonant: cha, ji, bo, dao) and the two finals -n (fan, lun, jin) and -ng (fang, cheng, qing). In old Chinese there were also finals like -l, -m, -g, -k, -t, and -p, in archaic Chinese even -gs.
And there existed sound clusters at the begin of a syllable, like gl-, hl-, tr-, mj-, shw- and so on. Such a sound system makes old Chinese much more similar to Tibetian and Burmese. Compared to this, modern Chinese sounds quite crippled and oversimplified. Even at the begin of the 20th century, there existed not so much vowel-less syllables like in modern Chinese, like the seven syllables [d][t][][],[dz][ts][s]. Syllables like [dzi] or [tsi] have died out. Southern dialects (or languages?) in China still show final consonants like -m, -p, -t and -k. Chinese loanwords in Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese show the vanished syllable endings. The Chinese loanword "law" (modern Chinese falü, old Chinese something like paplüet) in Korean is pôp, in Japanese a little bit forced to hôritsu, in Vietnamese turned around to luât pháp. Southern Chinese dialects like Cantonese still today show the ancient syllable endings: "law" in Cantonese is faatleuht. The simplification of the language was due to the central administration in a vast empire that allowed people to come around. Different dialects had to near each other and step by step threw away difficult sounds. The classical written language that had developed during the late Zhou and Han Dynasty, had the same importance like Latin in the West.
Until the begin of the 20th century, all official documents, and even private essays and letters were written in a 2000 years old monosyllabic language, full of citings of the old books and writings. This language could only be used by scholars and well educated people. The literary form that first used the everyday language were the Yuan Dynasty theatre plays and Ming and Qing novels. Writers of the early 20th century fought for the introduction of everyday language (putonghua 普通話) into the literature. Today, only official letters and documents are written in classic language, but even newspapers and higher literature make use of the short and precise classical written language. People who know to write in classical Chinese (wenyan 文言) are esteemed highly.During the course of centuries, Chinese language did not only make itself free from a rich but complicated sound system, but the tone pitches assimilated in such a way that some sounds like [dji] or [u] can stand for more than one dozen words of very different meaning.
In written language, there is no problem with homophony as every word or almost every word has only one character that can barely misunderstood. Reading alound a text in classical written language, the listeners are hardly able to understand a great part of the text.Measurements of the spoken language to encounter this homophony was the development of two-syllable words for nouns, verbs, adjectives and even for conjunctions. Today, most words in Chinese consist of two syllables, composed of two single words, like aiqing "love" from ai 愛 "love, affection" and qing 情 "feeling, sentiment, temperament". The classical word fang 方 can have the meanings of "direction" (modern: fangxiang 方向), "location" (difang 地方), "square" (fangxing 方形; fangmi 方米 fangzhang 铀ܐtion), "aspect, side, party" (fangmian 方面), "mode, manner" (fangshi 方式), "method" (fangfa 方法), "plan, concept" (fanglüe 方略), "stategy" (fangce 方策), "recipe" (fangji 方劑, fangzi 方子, fangr 方ㄦ, "occultism" (fangshu 方術, fangji 方技), "honest, upright" (fangzheng 方正), "just now" (fangcai 方才), and so on; to discern between the different meanings, two-syllable words came up (in brackets). Already in the oldest examples of Chinese literature, we find two-syllable words with rhyming or reduplication character, like yaotiao 窈窕 "lonely, pityful; honest", qingting 蜻蜓 "dragonfly", putao 葡萄 "grapes".
Another method to enrich a word are suffixes, like the [dz] in [ba-dz] baozi 包子 "filled dumpling" and [i-dz] yizi 椅子 "chair", or the guttural [r] in [ta-r] char 茶ㄦ "tea" (in Peking dialect).Loanwords, New Words and Foreign NamesLike all people, the Chinese had an intensive contact with neighboring people. They adopted many words from the northern steppe people that used things the Chinese did not know. When the Chinese learned to know and to use these things, they also adopted the foreign word for these objects: 駱駝 lwaktuo "camel" or 酪 lwak "yoghurt" from the nomad people, 蜜 mjit "honey" and 獅子 shejshe "lion" from the Tocharians. Southern China was occupied 2500 years ago by Austro-Asiatic people, different from the Chinese in ethnic, cultural and linguistic means. Still today, south Chinese people look different from the northern people that were stongly mixed with the steppe peoples.
But also the non-Chinese people of the south tributed their parts to Chinese language, especially to the southern dialects of Fujian province. In the official language, we find still today traces of the southern peoples' languages: 江 klang "stream, Yangtse river" or 虎 khla "tiger". Words that came with Buddhist religion were either transscribed with sounds (and their respective characters without taking their real meaning) or translated: the Buddhist term nirvâna is called in Chinese 涅磐 niepan (a crippled version of the Sanskrit word) or 寂 ji "serenity" or 智緣滅 zhiyuanmie "destroying the cause of awareness" or simply mie 滅. Even personal names of foreigners were sometimes translated by their meaning, like 竺法護 Zhufahu "Protecor of the Law" for the Indian monk translator Dharmaraksha (transcribed as 曇摩羅察 "Tanmoluoji").
During the 19th century many Chinese went to Japan for educational purposes. Like in Europe where scholars created artificial Latin or Greek words, Japanese and Korean scholars created artificial Chinese words that came to China when the foreign Chinese students went back to their country. In our times, when hundreds of new words rush into China, there is also a need either to describe them with sounds or to translate them. Some loanwords use describing syllables that have also a meaning: 黑客 heike "black host = computer hacker", 雷射 leishe "thunder stroke = Laser". A very famous example of marketing is that of Coca-Cola company, in Chinese called 可口可勒 Kekou-kele "tasty and funny". Other examples are 跑車 paoche "racing car = Porsche" or the word for "taxi", 的士 dishi (Cantonese pronunciation: diksi) "targeting Sirs".
Other characters of loanwords have no real meaning in that combination, like 考貝 kaobei "copy", 摩登 modeng "modern" or 克隆 kelong "clone". There are much more examples of translated words, for example 電腦 diannao "electric brain = computer" or 光碟 guangdie "gleaming disk = CD". Some items also show the possibility of both translating, like 擴音器 kuoyinqi "sound enlarging tool = microphone", and transscribing 麥克風 maikefeng, or 電子郵件 dianzi youjian "electronical mail" as a translation for e-mail, simply called yimeir 伊妹兒 following the sound of the English word. A special field of adopting loan words and even creating new characters, is the field of chemistry.
氨 an "ammonium" is described with the character for 氣 "gas, air" and the phonetic part 安 an. 碘 dian "iodine" with the radical for 石 "stone" and the phonetic part 典 dian. 汞 gong "quicksilver" is decribed as a liquid thing 水 "water" called 工 gong (from mercurium). 酯 zhi "esters" are described with a bottle 酉 and 旨 zhi "tasty, fragrant", because many esters have a very aromatic perfume. The word for "carbohydrate" 醣 tang (all kinds of sugar) is combined of a bottle 酉 and the abbreviated character and sound for 糖 tang "sugar".
Foreign names cannot be translated but must be transscribed with characters that sound like the syllables of the foreign name: Bulaier 布萊爾 for Prime Minister Tony Blair. While there are great differences in how to transscribe a foreign name, the government of mainland China tries to standardize transscriptions. The Soviet ruler Stalin is transscribed in mainland China as 斯大林 Sidalin [sz-da-lin], in Taiwan as 思達林, with different characters. Countries are often abbreviated, like 阿美利加 Ameilijia (southern dialect pronunciation Ameliga) "America" to 美國 Meiguo "beautiful country".
But there are examples of translated names like that of the city of San Francisco. During the gold rush, Chinese immigrants called this city 金山 Jinshan "Gold mountain". Transcriptions: how to write down pronunciationThe old Chinese became aware of the sound system of their own language when they had to translate foreign words with a meaning that could not be expressed in Chinese: Buddhist terms. Dictionaries that tried to express pronunciation came up during the Tang Dynasty. They used the "reverse cutting" system (fanqie 反切), using the initial sound and the final sound of two words/characters to describe the sound of a word/character. For example: 他前切 [ta][tçin]qie "pronounced like [t-] and [-in] ([tjn])". Another possibility to express the pronunciation of a character was to cite a character with an identical pronunciation, like 薪讀若新 "xin (firewood), read like xin (new).
".The first transscriptions of Chinese language that have been made by Westerners were all written like the particular travelers, merchants or missionaries heard the words and wrote them down following the writing rules of their own language. French people of course wrote the same words not in the same style like British would have done or people from the Netherlands. There did not exist a standardized style of transscription until the late 19th century. Typically for the early transscriptions was the hard style transscription of the sounds [dj] or [tç] as "k", like "kin" for [djin] or "kü" for [tçy], for instance "King-ting ku-kin t'u-shu ki-ch'eng" for 清定古今圖書集成 (pinyin: Qing ding Gujin tushu jicheng).
Many geographic names of China are still known today in their old transscription like the provinces Shan-tung, Fo-kien, Kiang-su, or the cities of Peking and Kanton. Also the names of people like Chiang Kai-shek or Sun Yat-sen are derived from non-standardized transscriptions of non-Mandarin languages or dialects (in standard Mandarin, they are called Jiang Jieshi resp. Sun Yixian - but no Chinese calles the founder of the Republic by this name - the is called Sun Zhongshan).Wade-Giles TranscriptionThe first persons to create a standard transscription of Chinese were T.F. Wade (d. 1895) and H.A. Giles (d. 1935).
Their system called Wade-Giles (chin.: Wei Tuoma shi pinyin 威妥瑪式拼音) is quite correct in reflecting the vowels (like "yüen" for [jyn]), but is very complicated in the manner of reflecting consonants. Wade and Giles saw the hard sound "k" as a soft one and added an apostroph to express hard pronunciation: [gan] is written "kuan", [kan] is written k'uan. The sound [] (the french "j") is written "j", the sound [ç] is "hs". A great problem to find a word in an index is that the Wade-Giles system makes no difference between the consonants [tç] and [t] - both "ch'", [d] and [dj], both "ch". Only in their syllable context, these sounds are recognizable as two different sounds: the vowel-less syllables are added by an "ih", like "ch'ih" for [t] and "chih" for [d]. The syllables [tçi] and [dji] are written "ch'i" resp. "chi". The syllables [dz] and [dzu] are written "tzu" resp. "tsu".The tone pitches are marked by one of four numbers added to the transsciption, like hsiao3.
Little girl sings a chinese new year song:
3 year-old little girl sings a chinese song:
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