Republic of China
Singapore
UN
SCO
chi(B); zho (T)
| 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 widespread 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 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.
- 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 writing continues to be used in Taiwan along with horizontal writing. However, in mainland China, vertical writing and pre-reform hieroglyphics 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 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, i.e. 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 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 compound word from a phrase. Form formation is represented mainly by verbal aspectual suffixes. Optional form plural, formed by the suffix 们 (men), 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, 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.
The sentence may take the form of an active and passive design; permutations of words are possible (within certain limits) without changing their syntactic role. Chinese language has a developed system complex sentences, formed by union and non-union 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.
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 - “milk”, or baby 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, 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: 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
Relationship between various types 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 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 complex languages peace. In the record list it is mentioned along with the Chippewa languages,
Chinese is one of the oldest languages in the world. The first written monuments date back to the era of the Shang-Yin dynasty (XVI-XI centuries BC, or more precisely, XIII-XI centuries BC). They were fortune-telling inscriptions on shields made of cow shoulder blades and turtle shells. Later, fortune-telling inscriptions began to be made on bronze vessels. Then, in the 7th century. BC e., the first written artistic monuments appeared that reflected oral speech. Created during the Western Zhou Dynasty (11th century - 770 BC), The Book of Songs (Shijing) was the earliest anthology of poetry in China. It includes 305 poems, most of which date from this period.
In the V-III centuries. BC e. written speech ceases to reflect the changes that have occurred over the centuries in oral speech. Therefore, during this period the literary language was formed wenyan, based on the norms of the ancient Chinese language. Wenyan functioned continuously throughout the subsequent history of China, but by the 7th-9th centuries. it ceases to reflect oral speech, remaining the language of science, technology, politics and administration. At this time, China was forming new language, closer to oral speech - baihua. Appeared by the 14th century. Chinese drama and Chinese novel are written in Baihua. As for philosophical prose and short stories, they are traditionally written in Wenyang. Thus, starting from the Sunn era (X-XIII centuries), a situation of peculiar bilingualism developed in China: in parallel, written Wenyan and oral-written Baihua existed.
The formation of the new Baihua language was accompanied by the emergence of new morphological features - the development of a two-syllable (and, accordingly, two-morpheme) word norm, the emergence of derivational and formative affis, which developed from significant words. At the same time, the sound composition of the syllable was simplified (the disappearance of consonant clusters, the fall of almost all final syllabic consonants, etc.).
By the 14th century A relatively common spoken language was also developed, based on the Beijing dialect. It got the name guanhua, or Mandarin.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, namely by 1919, Baihua defeated Wenyan and became the only literary language, but this affected first of all fiction, while in many areas of official communication the influence of Wenyan continued to persist in subsequent times. In addition to China, wenyan was widely used outside the country - in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam.
As for the general spoken language, after Xinhai Revolution In 1911, the modern spoken language began to be intensively introduced in the country - goyu. The language policy of all governments was aimed at creating a single language based on the Beijing dialect.
After the founding of the People's Republic of China, the government defined the goal of its language policy as “the unification of the dialects of the Chinese language,” as stated by Premier Zhou Enlai in a report at a meeting convened by the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference on January 10, 1958. He named teaching the national language. The main goal in spreading the national language, according to Zhou Enlai, was to teach it in school. In 1955, the unified state national language received a new name - “commonly understood language”, or Mandarin. According to the official definition, Putonghua is “ mutual language of the Chinese nation, the basis of which is the northern dialects, the standard pronunciation is the pronunciation of Beijing, the grammatical norm is the exemplary works of modern baihua.”
The spread of Putonghua began in 1956, when its norms were just being created, and actively continued until 1960, after which it began to decline due to internal turmoil.
Currently, Putonghua is the official language of the People's Republic of China. The task of spreading Mandarin turned out to be so important that in 1982, mention of it was included in the Constitution of the People's Republic of China. In 1986, a new program for the dissemination of Putonghua was adopted. It provided for its transformation into a common Chinese language of oral communication and education by the beginning of the new millennium. Its knowledge is recognized as important in such areas public life and departmental structures, such as the central party and state apparatus, the army, large industrial production, schools, central radio and television, cinema. This is the language of modern Chinese socio-political, scientific and fiction literature. In the field of agricultural and small industrial production, local dialects still predominate in everyday communication. A significant part of the urban population, especially residents of large cities, usually speak Putonghua to a greater or lesser extent. According to data at the end of 1998, only a fifth of the Chinese are ready to consider Putonghua as their native language, and 80% of the population speak it only at the simplest conversational level. It is no coincidence, therefore, that the law (if we are not talking about radio or television) allows the use of dialects “if necessary” or “in case of emergency.” Since 1998, every September the authorities have regularly held a week of Mandarin propaganda; officials, teachers, radio and television journalists, as well as actors must pass an exam (test) to determine their level of knowledge of the national language. For example, in Shanghai, one of the largest metropolises and a major dialect center of China, by January 1, 2004, all 100 thousand officials were required to have a certificate of proficiency in Mandarin. Since 2002, all applicants to the civil service must first pass an exam on their knowledge of Mandarin.
There are almost three hundred languages and dialects in use in the People's Republic of China, but only one is officially recognized as a state language. The language of China in which it is customary to sign documents business meeting and broadcast on federal channels is called Putonghua.
Some statistics and facts
- According to accurate data, 56 recognized ethnic groups in China speak 292 languages.
- Standard official language PRC is an official spoken word only on the mainland.
- Official status in the Tibet Autonomous Region has Tibetan language, and in the territories of Inner Mongolia - Mongolian.
- The spoken languages in the republic belong to at least 9 families.
- Not all Chinese languages use the Chinese script.
- In addition to the Chinese script, on banknotes of the People's Republic of China, Arabic, Latin, Mongolian and Tibetan scripts are used. This was done for those groups of the country’s population that do not use hieroglyphs when writing.
Mandarin in Chinese
Westerners call Mandarin Chinese, officially adopted as the state language in the PRC. The vocabulary and phonetics of Putonghua are based on the norms of the Beijing dialect, which belongs to the northern group of numerous dialects in the Celestial Empire. Its written standard is called "baihua".
However, the island territories of the PRC have completely different official languages and in Taiwan, for example, it is called “Guoyu”.
Exam in the Middle Kingdom
In 1994, the Chinese authorities introduced an exam on the level of Mandarin, according to the results of which only native Beijingers make less than 3% of errors in writing and speaking. For working as a radio correspondent, for example, no more than 8% of errors are allowed, and for teaching Chinese at school - no more than 13%. Only a little more than half of the inhabitants of the Middle Kingdom were able to pass the level of proficiency in Putonghua with an error rate of less than 40%.
Note to tourists
When going on a trip to China, remember that you will not have problems communicating only in the territories bordering Russia, in the capital, Shanghai, Hong Kong and a couple of other large cities. The entire province does not even speak English at all, and only in large hotels can you find a receptionist or waiter who can help solve problems that a foreigner may have.
Carry a business card with the hotel name in Chinese to show the taxi driver. They do not speak English even in the capital.
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 spoken languages there are also more than a dozen. 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 China, as native and 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. Often used modal verbs and suffixes, 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. Study almost always involves traveling to a country to obtain best result. This is called the "immersion method". The language is inextricably linked with the traditions and culture of the country, so it will become 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 for development own business and improving your own well-being.
