Interesting facts about the Chinese language. Chinese character: history, meaning, components

Hello, dear readers - seekers of knowledge and truth!

Or better say hello like this: Nihao! Did you know that the literal translation of the Chinese greeting Ni hao means " you're good»?

How many words are in Chinese, how many people speak it, is there an alphabet, what are Chinese surnames made of, why there are no spaces between words - our selection of 25+ unusual facts answers these and other funny questions.

The main thing

About one and a half billion people around the world are fluent in Chinese. Moreover, this figure can grow by a hundred or two while you are reading this article, because everyone knows the high birth rate in China.

Apart from the People's Republic of China, Singapore and Taiwan, where Chinese is the official language, it can often be heard in European countries, USA, Australia, Russia - it is here that there are many Chinese communities.

Chinese began to emerge in antiquity and is known as one of the earliest of today. existing languages. Archaeologists have repeatedly found the bones of animals, on which the first hieroglyphs were carved. These artifacts date back to the 14th century BC.

The further history of the development of the language is due to the efforts of the scientist Cang Jie, who lived in the 3rd century BC. He worked on creating a system of pictograms, which later became hieroglyphs.

The Chinese language is rightfully considered the champion in complexity. By the way, the most complex languages various studies have acknowledged:

Chinese;
haida;
Eskimo;
Tabasaran;
chippewa.

Dialects in China a large number of, and they are all grouped. Eight to twelve such groups are named.

Moreover, they are so different from each other that the population of Shanghai is unlikely to understand immigrants, for example, from Guangzhou.

However, from all the variety, one language was chosen, which is considered official throughout China - this is " putonghua', better known as ' Mandarin". It is used in means mass media, in political activity and other important areas of society.

About written language

The Chinese do not memorize the alphabet at school - it simply does not exist here. Instead, they learn hieroglyphs.

Scientists call frightening ordinary person 100,000 hieroglyphs. Indeed, most of them are now ordinary life not used, except in ancient Chinese scriptures.

It is enough to know about ten thousand characters in order not to get lost in modern life: read literature, use the Internet, watch popular science programs, work. Approximately a thousand hieroglyphs will be enough to communicate with others on common topics understand the thread of the conversation.

However, this is still a lot, given that some hieroglyphs may differ only in the absence or presence of a dash or dot. This is due to the fact that each hieroglyph consists of the so-called radicals that can connect with each other.

For example, the word "good" consists of radicals denoting "woman" and "child". Is it true that a woman and a child are good?

Each hieroglyph usually does not mean a word as a whole, but one syllable.

Learning Chinese has become a little easier since 1958. Zhou Yuguang came up with a system by which the syllables of hieroglyphs were transformed into Latin characters.

This system is called "pinyin" and translates as "written phonetics". She made Chinese writing easier, and now pinyin is often used in books, scientific articles. In this system, accent marks suggest the correct intonation.

The surnames of the Chinese consist of one syllable, but they are quite diverse - there are more than four thousand of them.

About pronunciation

The meaning of Chinese words largely depends on the tonality of the pronunciation of vowels:

neutral;
even;
ascending;
descending;
descending-ascending.

The syllable "ma" has three meanings: mother, horse, hemp, scold. Nose correct intonation it ceases to be nonsense, and the phrase written in pinyin"mā mà mǎ ma" encloses the question, "Does your mother scold the horse?"

The sound written in pinyin with the character "r" is very different from the Russian or English equivalent - it is pronounced like "zh".

Words may have more more values. For example, the word “chiang” alone, depending on the pronunciation and context, can be a general, soy sauce, a river, or a mechanic, or it can mean the verbs “command”, “surround”, “drop”, “go down”, “be due” .

About grammar and punctuation

Pro Chinese grammar we can say that it is relatively easy: there are no concepts of conjugations and tenses of verbs, genders, declensions, cases of nouns, there is not even a plural as such. Morphemics are also quite primitive: there are no endings, prefixes, suffixes. The only thing is that you need to remember the rules for the order of words in sentences.

There are usually no problems with punctuation either: when listing, commas are put, and slashes, and in all other cases they are ordinary. The points here are empty inside, and the ellipsis is not three, but six ordinary points.

Where there are no punctuation marks, there are no spaces between words - the Chinese know their native language well and intuitively feel the end of one concept and the beginning of another.

But with the pronoun “they” everything is more complicated: masculine, feminine and neuter, for example animals, mean different words, albeit somewhat similar. And when we are talking about a group of people where there are representatives of both male and female, a “male” pronoun is necessarily chosen.

About the complexities

The Chinese like to use idioms in speech - allegorical expressions that have figurative sense. In China, they are available for almost any occasion.

The people of China are quite self-sufficient people. Most of them do not think that they need to learn a foreign language.

It is easy to see this when you come here on a trip - almost no one, even in the field of tourism, catering, service, speaks English. You will have to explain literally on the fingers.

The Chinese language is so complex that the profession of "simultaneous interpreter" simply does not exist. The meaning of each word depends on the context, so it is likely to convey the content incorrectly, sometimes - exactly the opposite.

If Russian is famous for its confusing phrase "yes no, probably", then in Chinese there is not even a word for "yes" or "no". That is, if you were asked if you can perform a dragon dance, you need to answer “I can” or “I can’t.”

About funny

Even taking into account the fact that the Chinese cannot be called polyglots, they speak English here more people than in the United States of America.

Outwardly calm and conservative Chinese also often use profanity, which, by the way, has a rich set of words.

Keyboards with hieroglyphs do not exist - they all simply would not fit. Here pinyin comes to the rescue - the word is entered in Latin, and then the hieroglyph is selected from the list.

The Japanese at one time did not have an alphabet, and they "borrowed" the Chinese characters that are still used today.

Among foreign tourists coming to Russia, the Chinese are the champions - more than six hundred thousand people a year. Therefore, in large cities, for example, in Moscow, St. Petersburg, more and more often in tourist places you can see signs and signs in three languages: Russian, English and Chinese.

And as a last curious fact, I would like to tell you how the complexity of the Chinese language added work to the marketers of a well-known transatlantic corporation. The original name "Coca-Cola" is heard by the Chinese as "bite off the wax tadpole". That is why the drink in China received a new name, which is pronounced as " keku-kele» – « mouth full of happiness».

Conclusion

I probably shouldn't say how important it is to understand the meaning of each character when it comes to Chinese. Otherwise, embarrassment cannot be avoided, like a cute tattoo of hieroglyphs on the arm, which contains a set of incoherent phrases or a stylish Chinese-style interior decorated with incomprehensible words.

In any case, the Chinese language is not only difficult, but very exciting, interesting and fun.

Thank you very much for your attention, dear readers! Join us - subscribe to new fresh articles to learn even more interesting things about oriental culture.

1. There are 2 kinds of commas in Chinese: one kind separates homogeneous members sentences, and the other is used in other cases. At the same time, it should be noted that there are no spaces between words in Chinese so the person is not fluent in the language can't tell where one word ends and another begins ;

2. Chinese writing has more than 40,000 hieroglyphs;

3. In China, there are 5 to 12 dialect groups, the difference between them is stronger than, for example, the difference between Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian languages: residents of Shahai, Fuzhou, Xiamen and Guangzhou, communicating in their own dialects, will hardly understand each other's arcs. At the same time, despite such a variety of dialects, writing in ALL regions of China is ONE;

4. The sound "r" existing in the transcription of the Chinese language is not at all similar to the Russian "r", when transliterated into Russian, it is transmitted by the sound "zh": for example, the name of the most famous newspaper of China, renmin ribao, is known in Russian as " People's Daily";

5. If you accurately convey the name of the drink "Coca-Cola" in Chinese characters, you get the phrase "bite the wax tadpole". The marketers of the Coca-Cola company had no choice but to change the name to " ko-ku-ko-le", which in Chinese means" a mouthful of happiness ";

6. One word in Chinese can have dozens of meanings depending on the intonation with which it is pronounced. So word "chiang" can mean "must", "command", "general", "river", "soy sauce", "mechanic", "drop", "go down", or "surround";

7. The territory of China is 9,596,960 sq. km. It is the fourth largest country in the world by area. Largest cities China - Shanghai and Beijing. China also has the most big square in the world - area tiananmen;

8. A 56-year-old resident of Shanghai sued the publishers of Xinhua Zidian, the most popular explanatory Chinese dictionary. The plaintiff claims to have found 4,000 errors in the dictionary;

9. Valid in China Government program support of the Chinese language "Chinese language bridge", within the framework of which 322 Chinese language centers "Confucius Institute" and 369 Confucius classes have already been opened in the world. In the future (for 2020), there should be 1000 such centers;

10. In the translation of the gospel into Chinese, the phrase "in the beginning was the word" sounds like "in the beginning was the Tao", and "I am the bread of life" as "I am the rice of life." The translation of the Orthodox New Testament into Chinese was completed by Archimandrite Gury (Karpov) in 1864. AT this moment only one copy of this book has survived;

11. During the 2008 Olympic Games, all signs and signs in Beijing were translated from Chinese into English. As a result, such pearls as "racist park" ("racist park") appeared instead of "park national minorities”, sign “in Peaceful time do not enter" on the emergency exit of the building and the inscription "beware of running water", which prohibits swimming in one of the city's ponds;

12. Most of the 4100 Chinese surnames are written in one character.

For several decades, tattoos with Japanese and Chinese characters have been popular. They attract people with their hidden meaning, secret antiquity and magical meanings. Hieroglyphs belong to inscription tattoos, however, due to the peculiarities of the language, they look more like a drawing.

Traditional Chinese script

Hanzi - traditional Chinese script, officially used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau and even outside the country. There are about 47 thousand hieroglyphs in this language, but not all of them are used. For a competent letter, you need to know about four thousand characters.

Many Chinese words are composed of several characters, where one sign means one syllable. In addition to traditional Chinese writing, there is also a simplified one, which was invented to improve literacy in the country. Simplified characters have fewer dashes than traditional ones, and are used in China, Singapore, and Malaysia.

Chinese characters are considered the most ancient compared to the rest, they are used in Chinese, as well as in Korean and Japanese. Until 1945, this script was used even in Vietnam.

No one knows how many hieroglyphs exist (it is assumed that about 50 thousand), since their number and appearance are constantly changing.

Around the world, about a thousand different characters are used every day. This amount is enough for about 93% of the printed material.

Writing hieroglyphs

The Chinese consider it normal to know two thousand characters. The spelling of the character depends on its designation, for example, 一 is read as and, its meaning is one. The hieroglyph containing the most dashes is composed of three characters - 龍, translated as "dragon" and pronounced "moon".

Chinese writing retains its form throughout the country and is independent of dialect. If you need to report something, and you write a message on paper, then a Chinese from any province will understand you.

Keys in Chinese characters are called graphic components. Separately, they are simple signs and help to attribute the hieroglyph to a separate topic. For example, the key 人 can have different meanings in different characters:

By itself, it translates as "man";
In the character 亾 means death;
In the 亿 sign, it takes on the meaning "many", "one hundred million";
In the hieroglyph 仂, it is translated as "remainder";
The character 仔 with this sign means "child".

Tattoos are also complex, telling a story. So the client can imprint on his body a little story that has for him great importance. Most often, inscriptions are in Chinese and Japanese, but there are also Korean and Vietnamese hieroglyphs.

Many stuff tattoos as a talisman, considering them part of the ancient culture of China and Japan. Such tattoos do not present any difficulty for masters, as they have small size(most often no more than a palm).

Often people choose simple characters that mean one word. Also, masters make tattoos denoting some phrase. You can prick both a proverb and your own phrase.

Most tattoos are filled with black ink, sometimes red or white is used. It happens that hieroglyphs serve as an addition to a large tattoo - for example, a dragon.

Examples of hieroglyphs with translation

Tattoo parlors offer each client a standard set of hieroglyphs. Most often, these symbols are used as talisman tattoos.

Happiness

According to the Chinese, happiness depends on the patronage of Heaven and the Gods. The tattoo is aimed at good luck, happiness and luck in any field.

Great happiness

Such a tattoo is considered a very strong talisman. Many believe that she grants wishes. It is best to use it to attract happiness in a relationship with a soulmate.

Love

Helps to attract happy love. It helps to make love mutual, attract a life partner and gives happiness and peace.

Eternal love

Also used as a talisman, personifies "love to the grave", mutual understanding, support, sincere and happy love. Keeps fiery love forever and supports the feelings of two people.

Luck

Great idea for a talisman tattoo. Saves luck and increases it, gives luck.

Wealth

It helps to create the right atmosphere to attract wealth, prosperity in the right area. Provides both material and spiritual wealth. Brings both money and good luck, luck. It is a good amulet.

Money

The most common type of tattoo. Helps in attracting wealth and money. If this sign is placed indoors, it also attracts wealth. It looks like a hieroglyph of wealth, but it attracts only money, prosperity and good luck in such matters.

Prosperity

Helps with promotion career ladder, regulates failures in life. It is used to attract good luck in the desired field of activity. It is considered not only a talisman, but also a talisman.

abundance

Brings prosperity to the house of the tattoo wearer, both monetary and moral. Similar to the hieroglyph of prosperity, it attracts good luck in the desired field of activity.

Strengthens health and increases life expectancy. It is considered a talisman and protects from death at a young age.

Strength

Increases physical and spiritual strength, tempers the moral foundation, helps the owner to cope with problems more efficiently and quickly. Suitable for exemplary families.

Joy

It is used to achieve inner harmony, attract and maintain a good mood.

Health

Helps in solving health problems, restores physical and mental strength. Extends life and its quality.

World

It means great responsibility, power. Can be used for tattoos for some personal beliefs.

the beauty

It is considered a talisman to attract beauty, retains external and internal attractiveness.

Makes the owner of the tattoo more bold and courageous, helps to cope with difficulties.

Independence

It represents freedom of action and the desire to do things your way. Helps get rid of bad habits or occupations.

Courage

It characterizes the owner of the tattoo as a strong and strong-willed person and helps to maintain this quality.

Dream

It personifies sublimity, inspiration, contributes to the fulfillment of desires.

Fulfillment of desires

Like the previous hieroglyph, it helps in the fulfillment of cherished desires; it is a more powerful amulet in comparison with it.

Proverbs in Chinese

Often, fans of Chinese or Japanese culture, who trust the horoscope, stuff their zodiac sign in the horoscope of China or Japan on their skin. The most common place for a tattoo is the neck (sometimes the stomach or back). You can also get a tattoo on the arm, shoulder, behind the ear or on the ankle.

The Chinese and Japanese prefer English-translated hieroglyphs as tattoos, often with a bunch of mistakes. Europeans often get by with tattoos with a primitive meaning.

You can also choose a tattoo that means some proverb or word that has a special meaning for you. Such a tattoo will become your personal talisman. The photo below shows hieroglyphs denoting simple objects:

If you want a tattoo with several hieroglyphs at once, select a proverb or desired phrase. It can express your life credo, character and life goals. In addition, Chinese proverbs are very instructive and interesting. You can choose any proverb in the photo below:

Many celebrities get tattoos in the form of hieroglyphs, believing in them. magical power or putting a special meaning. For example, Janet Jacon has several tattoos of hieroglyphs on his neck.

Britney Spears filled with a hieroglyph, which in translation means "strange." The singer claims that she wanted to get a tattoo with the translation "mystical", but did not get the desired result.

With another singer Melanie C, also has a tattoo on his shoulder, denoting "Girl Power" (girl power). It was this phrase that was the motto of the musical group Spise girls. Singer Pink got a tattoo with the translation "happiness".

Keys in hieroglyphs

Some hieroglyphs seem intuitive. Many images are similar to those objects and things that are depicted. This is explained by the fact that hieroglyphs originated from pictograms, which most accurately depict their meaning with a drawing.

For example, the hieroglyph 日 means the sun, it is used in all languages of the peoples East Asia. Initially, its image was round, but over time it has changed a bit. Hieroglyphs round shape ceased to be used in the letter due to its inconvenience.

In addition, the common hieroglyph in different scripts brought peoples together. This symbol is considered a key, it is used in hieroglyphs such as:

The underline character 旦 means dawn;
The left-slash character 旧 means "ancient".

Another key 厂, resembling the letter "g", also has different meanings in different words:

The curl character 厄 translates to "difficulty";
The multi-stick character 历 means "calendar, history";
The character with a cross 厈 means "cliff".

Where to get a tattoo

Many, making a tattoo of hieroglyphs, believe in their miraculous power. If you believe that a tattoo can protect you from evil spirits or trouble, get it in a prominent place. A tattoo on the open part of the body drives away misfortunes and problems.

Often the neck is chosen as a place for a tattoo, but it is not necessary to stuff it there. Great place there will also be an arm or collarbone area.

You can also get a tattoo on a closed area of \u200b\u200bthe body - the back, side, lower abdomen, leg or ankle. Combinations of inscriptions with drawings of Chinese women, dragons, etc. look very nice.

Tattoos can be done in 2D and 3D. The latter look quite impressive, especially on the back or on the stomach.

Such tattoos are more popular among Europeans than among the Chinese or Japanese.

Hieroglyph tattoos have always been popular and are unlikely to ever go out of style. lovers Eastern culture often see a mystical meaning in tattoos.

Before going to the salon, you need to carefully consider the future tattoo so as not to stuff some kind of absurdity on the body. There are cases when a person trusts the master, expressing his preferences and not understanding the hieroglyphs at all. The master, on the other hand, fills in a completely different phrase or word that the client asks for, often insulting or humiliating.

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

This language is considered to be the oldest among the existing dialects. But that's not all the secrets and features of the language! This collection contains 30 cognitive facts about Chinese, which may surprise.

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

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Chinese writing was used as early as 4,000 years ago. The oldest "document" with hieroglyphs is attributed to XVII century BC e. Already in the state of Shang-Yin, "jiaguwen" - divinatory writings - were made on the shells of turtles. The first hieroglyphs on the bones of animals in this area were discovered only in the 20th century, so scientists are still studying this stage in the development of writing in the Shang era.
Chinese writing is fundamentally different from all other languages and does not consist of letters, but of hieroglyphs. Each hieroglyph is designed to represent a single syllable, sound or whole word. Also, writing is different in that it does not go from left to right, but from top to bottom and from right to left. However, in last years The Chinese prefer to use traditional European writing. The classic arrangement can only be found in editions with cultural value- Art books.
In total, at the moment there are about 80 thousand different hieroglyphs, but most of them are no longer used. To live and understand 80% of the text, it is enough to learn only 500 characters. For a comfortable understanding of 99% of the text, it is enough to know 2400 characters.
Chinese is a tonal language. It has four basic tones: high flat, rising (mid to high), falling low and then rising to mid, falling (high to low), and neutral. Tone can completely change the meaning of a word, for example, tāng in a flat tone means "soup", and táng with a rising tone means "sugar".
The main difficulty in learning this language is to pronounce the tones correctly. You can make a big mistake by choosing the wrong tone. illustrative example- the phrase "wo xiang wen ni" with different tones can mean "I want to ask you" and "I want to kiss you".

At the beginning of learning Chinese, students do nothing but pronounce syllables in different tones. It is very difficult for foreigners to learn how to express tonality correctly, which is curious, the Chinese themselves easily switch from tone to tone. It is worth noting that the inhabitants of the Middle Kingdom themselves are sympathetic to the mistakes of foreigners, because it is a great joy for them that someone is learning their language. Usually there are very few daredevils!
But the Chinese themselves from different parts countries may well not understand each other. Their spoken dialect is so different from each other, but share a common grammar. Thus linguists often argue whether these dialects are different languages because they are completely different from each other. Disputes by disputes, but so far Chinese is one language with different dialects.
Since Chinese has been a rapidly developing language in recent years, famous people increasingly choose it for study. For example, Mark Zuckerberg gave a speech in Chinese during his speech at Peking University. And even Prince William wished a New Year in an interview in Chinese!
Studies have shown that Chinese speakers use both temporal lobes of their brains. But English speakers only use left side. It just has to do with tone.
Chinese writing has a very strange, incomprehensible to a foreigner, logic. Linguists advise to study the language along with the culture of the country, since they have been practically inseparable since ancient times.
In 1958, the official standard for romanization of Chinese, pinyin, was introduced. With the help of a special system, it can be represented as a Latin transcription. Pinyin was created by Chinese linguist Zhou Yuguang. By the way, he is also known for his long life expectancy - 111 years.

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In this regard, the Chinese keyboard simply does not exist in nature. Still, who will place more than 5 thousand hieroglyphs on the keyboard! The Chinese communicate using pinyin - a group of hieroglyphs is attached to each letter of the Latin alphabet. You need to select the desired option with the number.
Most hieroglyphs differ in only one dash, so it will also be difficult to understand them. All of them are from radicals, or, in a simple way, keys. If you parse words by hieroglyphs, you can break the brain, for example, "good" is "woman" 女 plus "child" 子. Why the sum of a woman and a child gives the word "good" - this is a mystery.
Although sometimes some logic can be traced. For example, a character consisting of two 女 (woman) means ... "difficulties, troubles, dispute." Well, it happens!
In 1946, Chinese became one of the official languages UN. However, until 1974, it was practically not used as a worker.
At the same time, Chinese has an incredibly simple grammar. It does not even have childbirth and plurals, no verb conjugations. He could be the most plain language in the world, if not great amount hieroglyphs and division by tones.
For this, Chinese officially got into the Guinness Book of Records as one of the most difficult in the world. So those who complain about the difficulty of learning can reassure themselves with this fact - this is not fiction!
The Chinese language is very loved in Europe, and the rest of the world, but only because of the hieroglyphs. Chinese icons can be found anywhere, from wallpapers to cups. Of course, no one thinks about the meaning, the main thing is that it should be beautiful!
But for the Chinese, calligraphy of Chinese characters is a real art form. There are five known writing styles. In Chinese history, there were many masters of calligraphy who became famous thanks to the art of writing.

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No other languages are spoken in China, even in in public places. For example, it is rare to find an English speaker among airport employees. Tourists have to deal with the intricacies of Chinese!
The peculiarities of the keys of Chinese make the Chinese the owners of the most absolute pitch in the world. No wonder, because from birth they are forced to listen to the tones of their mother tongue and determine the meaning of the word by five tones!
By the way, Chinese has little in common. The Japanese took many characters from Chinese characters, but these languages are completely different in pronunciation. However, the Chinese themselves sometimes do not understand each other, what can we say about the Japanese!
There are no words for "yes" or "no" in Chinese. It is customary for them to answer with the verb from the question. Moreover, the particle "not" is present in this language. It looks like this: to the question "Do you like fish?", the Chinese will answer "I love it" or "I don't like it."
Chinese youth in Internet communication uses digital codes. With the help of a set of numbers, a special system of communication with frequently used phrases was developed. For example, 520 is "I love you" and 065 is "I'm sorry."
Chinese has a pair with Russian common words. These include "tea" (chá), "mother" (māma), and "father" (bàba).

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

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Introduction

AT Chinese about 70,000 hieroglyphs and phonetic sounds. The average Chinese needs to know about 3,000 characters to be able to read newspapers. 5000 hieroglyphs are taught in secondary schools.

This article provides a brief overview Chinese, the language of the Han people, the main ethnic group of China, as in Chinese People's Republic as well as in Taiwan. China has over 1 billion inhabitants, 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 peoples. Chinese is also spoken by expat communities in South-East Asia, North and South America and the Hawaiian Islands. In fact, in the world in Chinese more people speak than any other language. English is the second most spoken language, and Spanish is third.

As the dominant language in East Asia, Chinese has a great influence on the writing and vocabulary of neighboring languages not related to it by origin, such as Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese. It has been estimated that before the 18th century, more than half of the books in the world were printed by the Chinese.

General features of the Chinese language

Chinese, together with Tibetan, Burmese and the languages of many tribes in South and Southeast Asia, refers to Sino-Tibetan language family . In addition to the main 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 similar-sounding words, in tone languages each syllable has a distinctive characteristic pitch, high or low, or a distinctive slope contour, rise or fall.

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 (dialect), which in the West is called Mandarin, taken as the basis of the Beijing dialect, the pronunciation standard. Mandarin is also the basis of the modern written language of the common people. baihua(language of the Bai people in southwest China), which supplanted Classical Chinese in schools after 1917, and the official spoken language, putonghua , which was introduced for teaching as a nationwide school language in 1956. For this reason, in the West they usually speak of one Chinese language.

Modern Chinese dialects (beginning in the 11th century AD) are descended from ancient chinese(or Archaic Chinese)language(8th-3rd century BC), the alleged sounds of which have been reconstructed. Although the words in ancient chinese were monosyllabic, it was changeable. The next stage in the 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 Old Chinese had moved 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 labored breathing). AT Middle Chinese they moved to p, ph, bh; in modern standard language only R and ph(currently spelled b and p).

The modern syllable of the Mandarin dialect consists of at least the so-called finite element (finals), namely, the vowel ( a, e) or semivowel ( i,u) or combinations 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 Old Chinese, however, in addition to this, the 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 cluster of consonants. Probably there were clusters in Old Chinese, as at the beginning of the words klam and glam. With the reduction in sound differences, for example, when the final n is absorbed into the final m, so that syllables such as lam and lan simply become lan, the number of syllables in Mandarin that differ from each other in sound increased to about 1300. There was no less words, but most of them were homonyms. Thus, the words "poetry", "reward", "moist", "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 homonymous words have appeared that it would become unacceptable for the language if they had not developed simultaneously with them. 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 up into independently significant syllables.

Written Chinese

Grammar Highly inflectional languages such as Latin and Russian are characterized by the fact that a change is made in the composition of the word to indicate grammatical differences. Modern Chinese, on the other hand, never changes and no additional sounds are added to words in this regard. Because there is no declension 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. The word order is even more strict than in English language, indicating the relationship of words to each other in a sentence. AT in general terms, the word order in Chinese is similar to the word order in English: subject-verb-object, circumstance. On closer examination, the grammar reveals great differences between these languages. In English, the subject is always the doer of the action, but in Chinese it is most often just the subject followed by some kind of commentary. An example is the following sentence: "Nei-ke shu yezi hen da" - that in literally means: "The leaves of that tree are very large," that is, "that tree has very large leaves."
Furthermore grammatical features of the Chinese language are that the verb does not have tense.

Chinese writing bears the features of antiquity and conservatism: each distinctive symbol or hieroglyph corresponds to single word in dictionary. Reading newspapers requires knowledge from 2000 to 3000 hieroglyphs. Large Chinese dictionary contains over 40,000 characters(arranged by shape or sound). The most ancient discovered Chinese texts are fortune telling, carved on tortoise shells and shoulder blades of cattle, by soothsayers shang dynasty relating to early 14th century BC. These are the so-called inscriptions on fortune-telling bones. Although the writing system has since been standardized and stylistically modified, its principles and many of its characters remain fundamentally unchanged. Like other ancient scripts, Chinese was created on the basis of pictures. She then moved on to word-by-word representation of language when people realized that many words are too abstract and easier to express in terms of how they sound rather than by conveying their meaning through a picture. However, unlike other scripts, pictography is still used in Chinese along with phonetic word formation. In addition, sound designations have not been adapted to changes in pronunciation and have retained the key to the pronunciation that was 3000 years ago. Building blocks of Chinese writing system- these are several hundred pictograms, meaning such basic words as: "man", "horse", "axe". In addition, there are compound pictograms. For example, the hieroglyph, which indicates a person carrying grain, means "harvest", or "year" (nian).

Written Chinese

(continued) Phonetic borrowings are pictograms of specific words taken to indicate abstract words with the same or similar sound. The principle of the rebus, or visual pun, is used. So, for example, the pictogram for the word "garbage scoop" (ji) was borrowed to represent the words "this", "his", "her" (qi or ji). Such double value had many hieroglyphs in the Zhou era (11-3 century BC). If the scribes at that time had decided that only the pictogram of the word "scoop" would stand for any syllable pronounced as ji, they would have discovered the principle of the phonetic syllabary that became the precursor of the alphabet. However, due to a large number homonyms in Chinese, the scribes preserved the script in the form of pictures. The image of the scoop began to be used exclusively for the words "his", "her". On the rare occasions when scribes actually meant "garbage scoop", they tried to avoid ambiguity by using complex character, in which the pictogram "bamboo" was added to the word "scoop", meaning the material from which the scoops were made. This is the process by which any pictogram taken to indicate a sound could be attached to any other chosen to indicate a meaning, forming a phonetic union. Thus, the word "scoop" in combination with the word "earth", instead of "bamboo", pronounced as ji, means "foundation". Today, simple and complex pictograms are still used for some of the basic words: "house", "mother", "child", "rice", and "fire". However, probably 95 percent of the words in Chinese are written using phonetic conjunctions.

To express modern concepts in Chinese, native equivalents from meaningful syllables, or transmission occurs through a phonetically close sound. 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 stationery, running, draft, and standard. Printed Chinese writing is modeled into standard writing. Cursive, running or speed writing contains many abbreviated characters used in artistic calligraphy and in commercial and private correspondence, so it has long been banned from use in official documents. Over the past 3000 years, the main styles of writing have been:
1.Printed style,
2.Regular brush style,
3. Driving style,
4. "Herbal" style.

The printing of abbreviated characters is still banned in Taiwan, but has become a 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. The abbreviated characters are sometimes referred to as "simplified".

Transliteration methods

In the English-speaking world, since 1892, Chinese words (with the exception of personal names and geographical names) are usually transliterated according to a phonetic spelling system called romanization of Wade Giles. She was proposed to sir Thomas Wade(1818-95) and Herbert Giles(1845-1935). However, personal names have been romanized according to individual wishes, and toponyms follow the non-systematic spelling rule introduced by the China Postal Administration. Since 1958, another system of phonetic romanization has been officially introduced in the People's Republic of China known as pinyin("spelling"), where it is used for telegrams and in primary education. The replacement of traditional characters by pinyin has been proposed, but this is unlikely to be fully implemented due to the threat that this replacement poses to the literature and historical documents of classical Chinese. Simplify over time sound system, as a result of which many homonyms appeared, led to the fact that the brief classical 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. The 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.