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Interest in learning Chinese is growing all over the world. In addition to China's growing influence in the world, this is also facilitated by the development of transport and communications, which makes our world not so big and certainly not limitless. Chinese (the main dialect of Putonghua) is the most widely spoken language in the world.
More than 800 million people on Earth use this language as their native language. Two languages that are regularly spoken by more than one billion people are English and Chinese. English is spoken by more than 1.8 billion people in the world, and Chinese by more than 1.3 billion people.
These figures also include those people who use these languages as a second language or business communication. Languages spoken in China Many languages are spoken in China. Most known languages(dialects) are Mandarin and Cantonese. Cantonese is a language (dialect) spoken by the majority of the population in southeastern China. In addition, in China there is a large number of local dialects, as well as languages spoken by representatives of various ethnic groups other than the Han Chinese. Click here to learn more about Languages Spoken in China. Chinese characters.
Writing is what is a particularly striking part of the Chinese language. Chinese characters today are the only example of the use of a graphic form of writing in the world. Many hieroglyphs are very symbolic, many hieroglyphs have some kind of history associated with their origin or use. Chinese characters are especially beautiful when written with a brush and in the traditional way. Chinese writing, Chinese calligraphy, is a highly revered art form. Chinese literature Mastery of language, and especially mastery of its written form and the ability to read any texts, is important sign educated, literate, cultured person.
Chinese literature contains a lot of philosophy, poetry, folk art. Many examples of literature are very unusual and absolutely unique. One of the reasons for the uniqueness of Chinese literature is its relative isolation from external influences for thousands of years. Check out our selection of Chinese sayings and proverbs. Learning Chinese. We have provided information for you regarding learning Chinese. Many of our clients want to learn to speak a little Chinese before traveling to China.
Some of them even want to learn to recognize hieroglyphs - at least the simplest and most common ones. The Chinese language is often said to be the most difficult language on the planet. This is mainly due to the difficulty of remembering hieroglyphs. The number of main characters in modern Chinese is from 3 to 4 thousand. If learning to read and write is not so easy, and it requires time and effort, then learning a few phrases does not seem too much challenging task. Check out the Chinese Lessons and Chinese Phrases pages. The Chinese language is based on syllables.
Each syllable corresponds to one hieroglyph. Chinese words can be written with Latin letters with help special system, which is called pinyin. (See the Chinese Pronunciation page.) Introduction to Chinese Calligraphy During our tours, which include visits to cities such as Beijing, Xi'an or Guilin, tourists have the opportunity to take Chinese calligraphy lessons at very affordable prices. This program item can be added to any of the tours to these cities.
Most of the best museums in China have collections of calligraphy samples. Check out our tours that include museum visits. For those travelers who are particularly interested in the history and development of Chinese calligraphy, and would also like to see various cultural relics associated with this art, the most best choice is the Museum of Chinese Characters in Anyang City in Henan Province. At the Forest of Stone Columns Museum
The city of Xi'an exhibits many works by recognized ancient masters of calligraphic art. The main part of this museum is dedicated to very valuable stone sculptures. Contact us to create your own unique China tour. Frequently asked questions on the topic Learning Chinese How many people in the world study Chinese? Around the world, about 1.3 billion people speak Chinese.
That's almost one sixth of the population globe. How difficult is it to learn Chinese? Learning Chinese, like any other language foreign language, presents a certain challenge for those people who have never spoken it. Regular practice is very important for learning Chinese. It is advisable to devote a certain amount of time a week to it, and even better, practice the language every day. How many Chinese characters do I need to learn? Knowledge of 3 to 4 thousand of the most frequently used hieroglyphs is considered sufficient to use the language in Everyday life and the ability to read any texts. Other frequently asked questions
Chinese language belongs to Chinese-Tibetan family languages, which, in addition to Chinese, includes Dungan, Burmese, Tibetan and some others. Chinese is spoken by more than 95% of the Chinese population and about 24 million ethnic Chinese living in Laos, Vietnam, Kampuchea, Myanmar, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippine Islands, as well as a growing number of immigrants in the countries North America, Western Europe and in Russia.
Chinese is one of the official and working languages of the UN. There are 7 dialect groups in the Chinese language : northern (北, the most numerous - over 800 million speakers), Wu (吴), Xiang (湘), Gan (赣), Hakka (客家), Yue (粤), Min (闽).
Dialects of Chinese vary phonetically, making inter-dialect communication difficult (and sometimes makes it so difficult that it actually makes it impossible), also sometimes differ in vocabulary, partly in grammar , but at the same time the basics of their grammar and vocabulary united.
Standard Chinese is the means of communication between speakers of different dialects. Mandarin(普通话), which is considered the standard Chinese language and phonetic norm. This is what we teach all our students in Russia. In Singapore, huayu (华语), in Hong Kong and Taiwan - guoyu (国语).
As mentioned a little earlier, there are minor differences in phonetics between dialects (which, however, become more significant as you move south or west). Mandarin and Huayu writing use abbreviated characters , and in goyu - full hieroglyphs. In some cases, full understanding between native Chinese different dialects it is possible only when both parties switch to Putonghua or writing.
Therefore, despite the fact that dialects are a manifestation of the richness of the Chinese language and the originality of the great national culture Celestial Empire, they still hinder China’s movement towards a national language that would be spoken by all residents of China, both in the north, and in the south, and in the east, and in the west.
Chinese, like most other Sino-Tibetan languages, is characterized by the presence of semantic tones.
Chinese characters
Chinese characters being one of the ancient systems letters on earth
differs significantly from the writing systems of other languages.
Every hieroglyphic sign (Chinese characters) - this is not a letter, but a whole word, or a syllable-morpheme. Throughout its centuries-old history, Chinese characters have undergone significant changes.
Various books on Chinese characters say that characters were invented by Cang Jie(倉頡 cāng jié) - court historiographer of the mythical emperor 皇帝 (huáng dì). He was often depicted with four eyes, symbolizing his insight. Before the invention of hieroglyphics, the Chinese used knotted writing. It is even mentioned in 道德经 (dào dé jīng) and in the commentary to 易经 (yì jīng).
Evolution of Chinese characters, having gone through several more stages (until 200 BC there was a style of 隶书 (lìshū), which was considered a style of business writing), including through the unification during the time of the emperor 秦始皇 (Qín ShǐHuáng), ended with the separation of three standard calligraphic styles: 楷书 (kǎishū), 行书 (xíngshū) and 草书 (cǎoshū).
Kaishu style楷书 (kǎishū) was a statutory letter, used when writing or composing official documents.
Shinshu style(Cursive writing 行书 – xíngshū) allowed for some abbreviations of elements in the hieroglyph, and the Caoshu style (Cursive writing 草书 – cǎoshū) could be used in private correspondence or in calligraphy itself.
The last point in changing Chinese characters there was a transition to simplified characters (简体字 jiǎntǐ zì). This happened in the 60s-70s. 20th century. Full characters are still used, for example in Taiwan, Macau and Hong Kong.
The oldest written monuments of Chinese writing
The most ancient written monuments (fortune-telling inscriptions on bronze, stones, bones and turtle shells) apparently date back to the 2nd half of the 2nd millennium BC. e. Ancient literary monuments- “Shujing” (“Book of History”) and “Shijing” (“Book of Songs”) (1st half of the 1st millennium BC).
Based on the living dialects of that time, a literary ancient Chinese language - wenyan , which over time diverged from the language of oral communication and became (already in the 1st millennium AD) incomprehensible to the ear.
This written language, reflecting the norms of the ancient Chinese language, was used as literary language until the 20th century, although it underwent significant changes over the centuries (in particular, it was replenished with terminology).
Phonetics of the Chinese language
The sound composition of the Chinese language in the field of phonetics is characterized by the fact that it consonants and vowels (data on the number of phonemes differ) are organized into a limited number of toned syllables of a fixed (constant) composition.
In Putonghua there are 414 syllables, taking into account tone variants - 1324 (in Putonghua there are 4 distinctive tones, each syllable can have from 2 to 4 tone variants). Syllable division is morphologically significant, i.e. each syllable is the sound shell of a morpheme or simple word. A separate phoneme, as a carrier of meaning (usually a vowel), is toned and represents special case syllable.
Morpheme
The morpheme is usually monosyllabic . Lots of one-syllable words. Some of the old monosyllabic words are not syntactically independent; they are used only as components of complex and derivative words. The two-syllable (two-morpheme) word norm dominates. Due to the growth of terminology, the number of more than two-syllable words is increasing. Due to the peculiarities of the phonetic-morphological structure of the Chinese language, it has almost no direct borrowings, but it widely uses semantic borrowings, forming tracing papers.
The rapid growth of polysyllabic vocabulary reinforces the characterization of modern Chinese as polysyllabic. Word formation is carried out through compounding, affixation and conversion.
Models of word composition are analogues of models of word combinations. 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 plural form is inherent in 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, in some cases optional, and of an agglutinative nature. Agglutination in the Chinese language does not serve to express the relationships between words, and the structure of the Chinese language remains predominantly isolating.
Chinese Syntax
The syntax of the Chinese language is characterized by a nominative system , relatively fixed word order, the Definition always precedes the defined. The sentence may take the form of an active and passive design; permutations of words are possible (within certain limits) without changing them syntactic role. The Chinese language has a developed system of complex sentences formed by conjunction and non-conjunction composition and subordination.
Chinese is an interesting language, and it is possible to learn it. More than a billion Chinese know this. Go ahead - go for it!
Chinese language video
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| 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. |
Chinese (whale. trad. 漢語, ex. 汉语, pinyin: hànyǔ, pal. : Hanyu, or whale. ex. 中文, pinyin: zhōngwen, pal. : zhongwen- if you mean writing) - the most common modern language (a set of Chinese “dialects” that are very different from each other is considered by most linguists as 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 the South- East 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 common language, and a family of languages, and what traditionalists call dialects of Chinese, in fact - various languages.
Chinese letter
IN Chinese writing each hieroglyph stands for 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.
- Most complete dictionary 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 letter continues to be used in Taiwan along with horizontal. 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.
By virtue of 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 radical turn in history Chinese culture became written use 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 Japanese: 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, which are used when receiving state test to the level of knowledge of Putonghua (“Mandarin Shuiping Tsheshi”), include 400 syllables without taking into account tone differences. The tables are based on modern normative 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 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 degrees, 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, the present-future and past tenses are distinguished, there is an inventory of aspectual indicators and a complex system modal particles.
Chinese language has developed system 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. Associated with this rule famous case when a father who was an avid Internet user was denied registration of his son under the name " " .
Previously, the Chinese had several names throughout their lives: in childhood - “milk”, or baby name(xiao-ming, whale. ex. 小名, pinyin: xiǎo míng), adults received 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, min, although "milk" names in childhood were still common: 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-hsiang), but later it became accepted continuous writing:167 (correct - Feng Yuxiang). Most common Chinese surnames: Lee ( 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
Relationship between different species phraseological units and their place in the range " 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 Chinese linguist Ma Guofanem (马国凡), consisting of five ranks:
- 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 complex languages peace In the record list it is mentioned along with the Chippewa languages,
Introduction
IN Chinese about 70,000 hieroglyphs And phonetic sounds. The average Chinese needs to know about 3,000 characters to be able to read newspapers. There are 5,000 hieroglyphs taught in secondary schools.
This article provides short review Chinese language, the language of the Han people, the main ethnic group of China, as in Chinese People's Republic, and in Taiwan. China has more than 1 billion people, or about 95 percent speak in Chinese. There are also languages of other groups, such as Tibetan, Mongolian, Lolo, Miao, Tai, etc., which are spoken by small nations. Chinese is also spoken by expat communities in South-East Asia, Northern and South America and on the Hawaiian Islands. In fact, in the world in Chinese speaks more people than in any other language. English is the second most spoken language, and Spanish is third.
As the dominant language in East Asia, Chinese has a major influence on the writing and vocabulary of neighboring languages not related to it in origin, such as Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese. It has been estimated that before the 18th century, more than half of the world's books were printed by the Chinese.
General features of the Chinese language
Chinese, along with Tibetan, Burmese and the languages of many tribes of South and Southeast Asia, belongs to Sino-Tibetan language family . In addition to basic vocabulary and sounds, Chinese and most related languages have a number of features that distinguish them from most European languages: They are monosyllabic and tonal. To indicate differences in meaning between words that sound similar, in tone languages each syllable has a distinctive characteristic pitch, high or low, or a distinctive slope contour, rising or falling.
Development of the Chinese language
Language and dialects
Spoken Chinese includes many dialects that can be classified into seven main groups. Although they use a common written form, their speech is mutually incomprehensible, and for this reason they are sometimes called languages. The differences between Chinese dialects are similar to the differences in pronunciation and vocabulary among Romance languages. However, in fact, most Chinese speak one dialect (adverb), which in the West is called Mandarin, based on the Beijing dialect, the standard pronunciation. Mandarin is also the basis of the modern written language of the common people baihua(the language of the Bai people in southwest China), which replaced classical Chinese in school after 1917, and the official spoken language, Mandarin , which was introduced for teaching as a national language in schools in 1956. For this reason, the West usually speaks only of Chinese.
Modern Chinese dialects(from the 11th century AD) originated from Ancient Chinese(or Archaic Chinese)language(8th-3rd centuries BC), the supposed sounds of which have been reconstructed. Even though the words in Ancient Chinese language were monosyllabic, it was changeable. The next step development of the Chinese language, which has been carefully analyzed - Middle Chinese ( or Old Chinese) language(until about the 11th century AD). By this time, the rich sound system of Ancient Chinese had advanced far in the direction of the oversimplification we see in modern dialects. For example, ancient Chinese had a series of consonants such as p, ph, b, bh (where h means panting or panting). IN Middle Chinese they moved to p, ph, bh; in modern standard language only left R And ph(currently written b And p).
The modern syllable of the adverb Mandarin consists of at least the so-called final element (finals), namely, the vowel ( a, e) or semivowel ( i,u) or a combination thereof (diphthong or triphthong), with a tone (neutral, raised, lowered or falling), and sometimes a final consonant, which, however, can only be n, ng, or r. In Ancient Chinese, however, in addition to this, final consonants could be p,t,k,b,d,g And m. The final element may be preceded by an initial consonant, but not by a consonant cluster. There were probably clusters in Ancient Chinese, as at the beginning of the words klam and glam. With the reduction of sound differences, for example when final n is absorbed by final m, so that syllables such as lam and lan become simply lan, the number of syllables in Mandarin that differ from each other in sound increased to about 1,300. There were no less words, but most of them were homonyms. Thus, while the words "poetry", "reward", "wet", "lose", "corpse" and "louse" were pronounced differently in Middle Chinese, in Mandarin they all became one word "shi" with a neutral tone. In fact, so many homonym words have appeared that it would have become unacceptable for the language if they had not developed at the same time Difficult words. Thus, “poetry” became shi-ge: “poetry-song”; teacher - shi-zhang, “senior teacher.” Although the dictionary of modern Chinese contains many more such compound words, in relation to monosyllabic expressions, most compound words still break down into independently meaningful syllables.
Written Chinese
Grammar Highly inflected languages such as Latin and Russian are characterized by the fact that to denote grammatical differences a change is made in the composition of the word. Modern Chinese, on the other hand, never changes and no additional sounds are added to words in this regard. Because there is no inflection of nouns to indicate, for example, subject or object, just as there is no indication that verbs, nouns and adjectives agree with each other in number and case. Word order is even more strict than in English, indicating the relationship of words to each other in a sentence. IN general outline, the word order in Chinese is similar to the word order in English: subject-verb-object, adverbial. Upon closer inspection, the grammar reveals large differences between these languages. In English, the subject is always the doer of the action, but in Chinese it is most often just an object followed by some comments. An example is the following sentence: “Nei-ke shu yezi hen da” - which literally means: “That tree has very large leaves,” that is, “that tree has very large leaves.”
Moreover grammatical features Chinese language is that the verb does not express tense.
Chinese writing bears the features of antiquity and conservatism: each distinctive symbol or hieroglyph corresponds a single word in dictionary. To read newspapers you need knowledge from 2000 to 3000 hieroglyphs. Large Chinese Dictionary contains more than 40,000 characters(arranged by shape or sound). The most ancient discovered Chinese texts are fortune-telling statements, carved on turtle shells and shoulder blade bones of cattle, by diviners Shang Dynasty related to early 14th century BC. These are the so-called inscriptions on oracle bones. Although the writing system has since been standardized and stylistically modified, its principles and many of its characters remain fundamentally the same. Like other ancient writings, Chinese was created based on pictures. She then moved on to a word-by-word representation of language when people realized that many words were too abstract and were easier to express through specific sounds rather than conveying their meaning through a picture. However, unlike other scripts, Chinese still uses pictography along with phonetic word formation. Besides, sound designations were not adapted to changes in pronunciation and retained key to pronunciation from 3000 years ago. Building blocks Chinese writing system- these are several hundred pictograms meaning such basic words as: “man”, “horse”, “axe”. In addition, there are composite pictograms. For example, the hieroglyph showing a person carrying grain means “harvest” or “year” (nian).
Written Chinese
(continued) Phonetic borrowings are pictograms specific words, taken to indicate abstract words with the same or similar sound. The principle of a rebus, or visual pun, is used. So, for example, the pictogram for the word “dustpan” (ji) was borrowed to represent the words “this”, “his”, “her” (qi or ji). This double meaning had many characters in the Zhou era (11th-3rd century BC). If the scribes of that time had decided that only a pictogram of the word "scoop" would denote any syllable pronounced ji, they would have discovered the principle of the phonetic syllabary, which became the predecessor of the alphabet. However, due to large number homonyms in the Chinese language, scribes preserved writing in the form of pictures. The image of a scoop began to be used exclusively for the words “him” and “her”. In the rare cases where scribes actually meant "dustpan", they tried to avoid ambiguity by using complex hieroglyph, in which the pictogram "bamboo" was added to the word "scoop", signifying the material from which the scoops were made. This is the process by which any pictogram taken to indicate a sound could be joined to any other chosen to indicate a meaning, forming a phonetic union. Thus, the word "scoop" combined with the word "earth", instead of "bamboo", pronounced ji, means "ground". Today, simple and complex pictograms are still used for some basic words: "house", "mother", "child", "rice" and "fire". However, probably 95 percent of words in Chinese are written using phonetic conjunctions.
For expression modern concepts in Chinese, native equivalents are usually invented from significant syllables, or transmission occurs through phonetically similar sounds. For example, the word “chemistry” is expressed in Chinese as “the study of transformations.”
Written Chinese
Shi Huangdi, the first emperor of a unified China, suppressed the spread of many regional scripts by introducing a simplified, standardized script called Small seal. At Han Dynasty(206 BC - 220 AD) this letter gave rise to clerical, running, draft, and standard. Printed Chinese script is modeled into standard script. Italic, running or rapid writing contains many abbreviated characters used in artistic calligraphy and in commercial and private correspondence, so it has long been prohibited for use in official documents. Over the last 3000 years, there have been basic writing styles:
1. Printing style,
2. Regular wrist style,
3. Running style,
4. “Herbal” style.
Printing abbreviated characters is still prohibited in Taiwan, but has become common practice in the People's Republic of China. Non-abbreviated hieroglyphs are called traditional. Many old people in the People's Republic of China still use traditional characters, and some have difficulty with abbreviated characters. Abbreviated hieroglyphs are sometimes called "simplified".
Transliteration methods
In the English-speaking world, since 1892, Chinese words(excluding personal names and geographical names) are usually transliterated according to a phonetic spelling system called romanization of Wade Giles. She was suggested by sir Thomas Wade(1818-95) and Herbert Giles(1845-1935). However, personal names were romanized according to individual wishes, and place names followed the ad hoc spelling rule introduced by the Chinese Postal Administration. Since 1958, another system of phonetic romanization known as pinyin(“spelling”), where it is used for telegrams and in primary education. The replacement of traditional characters with the Pinyin script has been proposed, but it is unlikely to be fully implemented due to the threat this replacement poses to literature and historical documents classical Chinese. Simplification over time sound system, as a result of which many homonyms appeared, led to the fact that the short classic style became incomprehensible when transmitted in alphabetical transcription. On January 1, 1979, Xinhua (New China News Agency) began to use pinyin in all shipments in foreign countries. US government, many scientific publications and newspapers such as the New York Times also adopted the pinyin system, as did Funk & Wagnall's New Encyclopedia.