Terms and Conditions Hongkongers fear culture and identity 'waning, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=History_of_the_Chinese_language&oldid=993658663, Articles needing additional references from February 2007, All articles needing additional references, Wikipedia articles with style issues from November 2019, Articles with multiple maintenance issues, Articles containing simplified Chinese-language text, Articles containing traditional Chinese-language text, Articles with unsourced statements from February 2007, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 11 December 2020, at 20:03. As the reader can appreciate, by the time of Xu's scholarly work, the written Chinese language had evolved enormously from its primitive, pictographic Shang Dynasty origins, with characters/ words that included both a semantic (meaning bearing) as well as a phonetic (pronunication-bearing) component. It is also interesting to note that the "rain cloud" part of the compound ideograph for "thunder" is in fact a compound itself, since part of the ideograph for "rain cloud" is a modified "roof" of sorts, which we might here interpret as "the sky". As a result, Mandarin is now spoken by virtually all people in mainland China and on Taiwan[citation needed]. The language wouldn’t be what it is today without having adopted and altered huge segments of Chinese, elements of French and a writing system based on the Roman alphabet. It is commonly known as the ‘Beijing Dialect’ which … ), phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Learn how and when to remove these template messages, Learn how and when to remove this template message, personal reflection, personal essay, or argumentative essay, "Cantonese or Putonghua in schools? Written Chinese emerged in its embryonic form of carved symbols approximately 6,000 years ago. The Vietnamese language has managed to weather the far-from-easy history of its parent country. I am assuming that the "pig under roof" imagery is symbolic of "mom, dad and a flock of kids", rather than any suggestion of a family being able to afford a pig (though either will work), and if we assume that early Chinese people may have lived on raised houses (houses on stilts) – as some Chinese ethnic minorites still do – then the sow might well have suckled her piglets on a bed of straw on the ground, underneath the human habitation part of the house, thus the sow would have been "under the roof". In time, Chinese-medium schools were established for the benefit of the poorer Chinese community. Work on reconstructing Old Chinese started with Qing dynasty philologists. According to this theory, language began when our ancestors started imitating the natural sounds around them. The hanzi character consists, as indicated, of two parts, or components, a semantic and a phonetic component. [3] In the later early and middle Zhou dynasty (1122–256 BC), writing which descended from the Shang is found texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the Shijing, the history of the Shujing, and portions of the Yijing. We have seen an example of Chinese numerals ("one - two - three" in the Simple Ideographs image) above; here are the numbers 1 through 10, as well as a few compounds of the number 10: A modern "writing" counterpart to the above "printed" numerals – which typically appear on bank notes, cheques, coins, etc. Writing is one of the cornerstones of civilization, and perhaps nowhere was this more true than in China. Rather than being defeated by these, it seems to have made them its own. (Page of tag Chinese) Below are some examples of Shang Dynasty period Oracle-Bone pictographs as well as a few pictographs that have survived down through time, such as the pictographs for a mountain, a tree and a pig. This tells a lot about how they see themselves in relation to their neighbours. Mandarin language, the most widely spoken form of Chinese. Table 1.2 shows the major periods of the Chinese language and their relevant Ɵmespans, based on Wang (1958) and Xiang (1993). Y… Most linguists classify all of the variations of spoken Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan family and believe that there was an original language, called Proto-Sino-Tibetan, similar to Proto Indo-European, from which the Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman languages descended. It is the most commonly used language in China, and one of the most commonly used languages in the world. Today, Chinese words are genuinely alphabetized with the help of Pinyin, then the various alternative script styles are listed (see more on Pinyin, aka Hanyu Pinyin, and similar earlier efforts to "translate" Chinese languages into a Western sound alphabet – aka Romanization, or Latinization – in the orthography section below). Chinese New Year, also known as the Lunar New Year or the Spring Festival, is the most important among the traditional Chinese festivals. The Cuneiform script from about 5,500 years ago was used in Mesopotamia (present day Iraq and Iran) they were in use for about 3,000 years. Today, however, baihua has become the official standard written language for all Chinese people, regardless of their spoken language, even if unofficial vernacular forms of written Cantonese, etc., exist. [7] Continuing previous policies, the People’s Republic of China sought to further standardize a common language, now dubbed Putonghua ("Common Speech"), for national and political unity. Our local experts are always ready to create a hassle-free tour for you. One of the first systems was devised by the Swedish linguist Bernhard Karlgren in the early 1900s. The pronunciation of the borrowed Chinese characters in both Japanese and Vietnamese also provide valuable insights. Chinese civilization has long held a deep obsession with the written word, influencing its culture in forms ranging from poetry to imperial recordkeeping. (in fact, one of the first "agricultural products" of ancient Sumeria was beer, a product that was brewed and kept in urns – presumably plugged in order to prevent the beer from becoming flat). The first speech was onomatopoeic —marked by echoic words such as moo, meow, splash, cuckoo, and bang. When asked to define the concept of civilization, many historians look to the advent of writing. Wenyan was the main, or "classical", form of Chinese writing that spanned the period beginning with the Han Dynasty and ending, roughly, with the last such dynasty in the early 20th century (the new writing script was introduced in the 1920s, during the Republic of China (1912-49) period). Over 750,000 clay tablets using the cuneiform characters have been unearthed. Even to the untutored eye, Chinese characters are not an alphabet, though many Americans who want to ask about them d… In historical linguistics, the history of the Chinese language includes the various changes over time of the Chinese language in its various incarnations. There are thousands of spoken languages in the world and most can be traced back in history to show how they are related to each other.For example:By finding patterns like these, different languages can be grouped together as members of a language family.There are three main language families: 1. At about the same time that baihua was introduced, other scholars, including the Chinese-American linguist, Zhao Yuanren, had begun to experiment with a written form of Mandarin. Even though some hanzi characters consist of up to 64 combined strokes, all hanzi characters, however complex, are nonetheless composed of the aforementioned set of only 12, standardized strokes, meaning that regardless of the number of combined strokes, a hanzi/ traditional character can always be disaggregated into its 12 standardized strokes, as follows: Since Chinese words do not consist of letters, the "alphabetization" of Chinese characters in an ancient character dictionary such as that compiled by the lexicographer Xu Shen is more complicated, and is at least partly determined by the character's number of combined strokes (first come the single-stroke characters, then the double-stroke characters, etc., etc.). Try Prime EN Hello, Sign in Account & Lists Sign in Account & Lists Orders Try … Mandarin is also one of the four official languages of Singapore, and one of the eight official languages of the United Nations. The development of the spoken Chinese from early historical times to the present has been complex. In aims of reducing the country’s approximately 80% illiteracy rate, the “Decision of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee and State Council Concerning Elimination of Illiteracy” of March 1956 solidified the Communist Party’s plans to reform the country’s traditional characters to a simplified writing system. The top part of the ideograph for "thought" – and perhaps ditto for "man" – was originally "brain", i.e., brain + heart (thought) and brain/intellect + strength (man), but it eventually got corrupted, as it were – as did as many a Chinese word – by, in the instance of "brain", the homophone "field", which sounds the same as "brain". Origins of Chinese Language. Chinese is part of the Sino-Tibetan language family, a group of languages that all descend from Proto-Sino-Tibetan. In the case of "man", either brain/intellect or field would work, since early agrarian man (and we have already established that written language arose thanks to the sedentary – as opposed to nomadic – lifestyle that agriculture brought with it) tilled the fields, or at least he did the most strenuous part of this effort, even if the daily task of tending the field may have eventually been delegated to the female, once the crop had begun to sprout. Mandarin Chinese is spoken in all of China north of the Yangtze River and in much of the rest of the country and is the native language of two-thirds of the population. After the establishment of the Chinese Nationalist Party, the 1913 Conference on Unification of Pronunciation planned to widely use and teach Mandarin as the official national standard, changing Guanhua to Guoyu ("National Language"). In Hong Kong, Macau, Guangdong and sometimes Guangxi, the language of daily life, education, formal speech and business remains in the local Cantonese. The diviner (someone who today would be called a 'psychic' or a 'medium') would carve the person's question into the bone and then heat it with a hot poker or plac… The education level and literacy rate among the Chinese population were pretty low at the time, although the wealthier Chinese who lived in town were able to send their children to Christian missionary schools set up by the British. The evidence for the pronunciation of Middle Chinese comes from several sources: modern dialect variations, rime dictionaries, foreign transliterations, rime tables constructed by ancient Chinese philologists to summarize the phonetic system, and Chinese phonetic translations of foreign words. Just as Nu Wa breathed life into the first human beings, Cang Jie created a written form of the Chinese language that gave it a new birth. The "leading" (i.e., on the left-hand side) part of a character, which is typically very stylistic, is generally the semantic component and has traditionally been referred to as a radical. Words consisting of multiple syllable-characters first arose with the introduction of Chinese language reforms during the 1920s, following the 1917 development of the written form of Mandarin, baihua, in the vernacular style, by the Chinese scholar, Hu Shi. By the time of the late Han (BCE 206 – CE 220) Dynasty (in fact, during the Eastern Han (CE 25-220) Dynasty period, or the second half, as it were, of the Han Dynasty), a comprehensive set of more stylized characters – officially called hanzi (han zi = "Han (Dynasty) writing") though more often referred to today as "traditional characters" – was developed by the lexicographer Xu Shen, who compiled the first Chinese dictionary, which included an analysis of the Chinese written character.*(3). Xu divided the system of Chinese characters then in use into six categories: pictographs, simple and compound ideographs (an ideograph expresses an abstract idea, such as hope, or a number, etc. Roots of Chinese language. The earliest Chinese written language was the pictographic characters that belong to the so-called Oracle-Bone script. For years, linguists have debated the origins of the Sino-Tibetan tongue, and how the different but related languages emerged. The phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters also provide hints to their Old Chinese pronunciations. Mandarin Chinese, also known as Huayu (華語“language of the Chinese”), Guoyu (國語 “national language”), or Putonghua (普通話”common language”), is the official language of the PRC (since 1982) and the Taiwan (since 1932). Starting in the 1100s B.C., during the Zhou Dynasty, Chinese language became more standardized, as several texts were written in the language, including the famous philosophical work, theI Ching. By the 12th century, the syllabic writing systems, “hiragana” and “katakana”, were created out of “kanji”, providing the Japanese new freedom in writing their native language. 甲骨文 Jiaguwen of the Shang Dynasty (c. 1765-1112BC) is a group of Chinese … Chinese character inscriptions have been found in turtle shells dating back to the Shang dynasty1 (1766-1123 BC) proving the written language has existed for more than 3,000 years. *(4) Amazingly, there are only 12 standardized strokes in the Chinese language in use today. If the sound system of the Chinese language remained more or less stable within an extended period of Ɵme, then we can regard this Ɵmespan as one stage of the language. Therefore, despite their affinity, the common ancestry of the Chinese and Tibeto-Burman languages remains an unproven hypothesis. This situation changed with the creation (in both the PRC and the ROC, but not in Hong Kong and Macau) of an elementary school education system committed to teaching Modern Standard Chinese (Mandarin). The prevalence of Mandarin throughout northern China is largely due to north China's plains. In Egypt at around 5,000 years ago the famous hieroglyphic script developed; in this case the characters are pictograms but the script fell out of use by 500CE. "4000 BCE-1000 CE: Early China and the Shang | Central Themes and Key Points | Asia for Educators | Columbia University". In India the short-lived H… By contrast, the mountains and rivers of southern China favoured linguistic diversity. The Chinese script is not the oldest known script. The adaptation of Chinese characters during the sixth to ninth centuries A.D. was the most important event in the development of the language. The original Chinese language, called Proto-Sino-Tibetan, eventually evolved to form variations of the language such as Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman. It wasn’t until the creation of the People’s Republic of China in the late 1940s that a mass program was shaped to ensure that people around the country spoke the same language. Contact Us During the Qing's last 50 years in the late 19th century, the Beijing Mandarin finally replaced Nanjing Mandarin in the imperial court. But in spite of what the Japanese may think of themselves, they do not have extraterrestrial origins, and are indeed related to several peoples in Asia.We shall have t… The origins of the Japanese people is not entirely clear yet. Old Chinese was not wholly uninflected. Most Chinese people, in Sichuan and in a broad arc from the northeast (Manchuria) to the southwest (Yunnan), use various Mandarin dialects as their home language. It is common for Japanese people to think that Japan is not part of Asia since it is an island, cut off from the continent. It is interesting to note the underlying fertility concept inherent in the compound ideographs for "good" and "home/family". Relatively few words are onomatopoeic, and these words vary from one language to another. Xu Shen's dictionary listed 540 radicals, though this list puzzlingly included a number of redundancies (and note that by the time of the latter part of the Qing (CE 1644-1911) Dynasty, the number of radicals had been reduced to only 214). The dominating … With a standardized writing system for all official documents and communication, unification of the mutually unintelligible spoken dialects was possible. Testimonial Some radicals, however, represent the phonetic component. 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