Chinese is a group of related linguistic dialects that form one of the branches of the Sino-Tibetan language family. In many cases, speakers of different dialects do not understand each other. Chinese is spoken by most Chinese and many other ethnic groups in China. Almost 1.4 billion people (about 19% of the world's population) speak Chinese in one form or another. This article will tell you about some aspects of the grammar of the Chinese language and its features and history in general.
Dialecticism of Chinese
Species of the Chinese language are usually described by native speakers as dialects of the same Chinese language, but linguists note that they are as diverse as the language family.
The dialectal diversity of the Chinese language resembles various Romance languages. There are several main regional dialects of Chinese (depending on the classification scheme), of which the most common is:
- Mandarin or standard Chinese (about 960 million speakers, it communicates throughout the southwestern region of China);
- dialect-Wu (80 million carriers, common, for example, in Shanghai);
- Ming dialect (70 million, for example, the dialect is widespread outside of China, in Taiwan and other overseas territories);
- Yue dialect (60 million carriers, another name is Cantonese) and others.
Most of these dialects are mutually incomprehensible, and even dialect dialects within the Ming group are not understandable to the speakers of one or another Minsk dialect. However, the Xiang dialect and some southwestern dialects of mandarin can have common terms and a certain degree of similarity. All the differences are in tonality and some grammatical aspects. Although the practical grammar of the Chinese language of all dialects has many common features, there are certain differences.
Standard Mandarin
Standard Chinese is a unified form of spoken Chinese, based on the Beijing dialect of putonghua. It is the official language of China and Taiwan, as well as one of the four official languages of Singapore. The grammar of modern Chinese is based on this system. It is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. The written form of the standard language, based on logograms, which are known as Chinese characters, is common to all all dialects.
Chinese classification
Most linguists classify all varieties of Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family, along with Burmese, Tibetan and many other languages spoken in the Himalayas and Southeast Asia. Although the kinship between these languages was first established at the beginning of the 19th century and is now widely studied, the Sino-Tibetan family is much less studied than the Indo-European and Austro-Asian. Difficulties include a wide variety of languages, the absence of inflections in many of them, and the lack of language contacts. In addition, many small languages are spoken in remote mountainous areas, which are often also vulnerable border areas. Without a reliable reconstruction of the proto-Sino-Tibetan language, the structure of the highest level of this language family remains unclear.
Phonetic system of the Chinese
Chinese is often described as a “monosyllabic” language, that is, one word consists of one syllable. However, this is only partially true. This is largely an accurate description of classical Chinese and medieval Chinese. In classical Chinese, approximately 90% of words actually correspond to one syllable and one character. In modern varieties of Chinese, as a rule, the morpheme (unit of meaning) is one syllable. In contrast, English has many polysyllabic morphemes, both connected and free. Some of the conservative southern forms of Chinese are mainly composed of monosyllables, especially among words in the basic vocabulary.
In putonghua (a standardized version of the pronunciation and writing of hieroglyphs), most nouns, adjectives and verbs are mostly two-syllable. A significant reason for this is phonological depletion. Phonetic changes over time steadily reduce the number of possible syllables. In modern Mandarin, there are currently only about 1,200 possible syllables, including tonal differences, compared with about 5,000 syllables in Vietnamese (still mostly monosyllabic). This phonetic lack of sounds has led to a corresponding increase in the number of homophones, that is, words that sound the same. Most modern varieties of Chinese tend to form new words through joining several syllables together. In some cases, monosyllables have become bisyllables.
Chinese grammar
Chinese morphology is strictly associated with many syllables with a rather rigid structure. Although many of these monosyllabic morphemes may be separate words, they most often form polysyllabic compounds that more closely resemble the word that is traditional in the Western sense. A Chinese “word” may consist of more than one morpheme character, usually two, but may be three or more. This is an elementary grammar of the Chinese language.
For instance:
- yún 云 / 雲 - "cloud";
- hànbǎobāo, hànbǎo 汉堡包 / 漢堡包,汉堡 / 漢堡 - "hamburger";
- wǒ 我 - "I, me";
- rén 人 - "people, man, humanity";
- dìqiú 地球 - "Earth";
- shǎndiàn 闪电 / 閃電 - "lightning";
- mèng 梦 / 夢 - "dream".
All varieties of modern Chinese dialect languages are analytical languages because they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure), and not on morphology. That is, changes in the form of the word - to indicate the function of the word in the sentence. In other words, Chinese has very few grammatical inflectional endings. In this group of languages there is no such thing as verb tense, no grammatical collaterals, no numbers (singular, plural, although there are multiple markers, for example, for personal pronouns), and only a few articles (equivalents that exist in English).
Chinese often use grammar markers to indicate the aspect and mood of a verb. In Chinese, this is due to the use of particles such as le 了 (perfect form), hái 还 / 還 (“still”), yǐjīng 已经 / 已經 (“already”) and others.
Syntax Features
The theoretical grammar of the Chinese language provides the following word order: subject-verb-object, like many other languages in East Asia. Often used special constructions called comments to form a variety of refinements in sentences. Chinese also has an extensive system of special classifiers and counting words, which are a hallmark of such eastern languages as Japanese and Korean. Another noticeable feature of the grammar of the Chinese language, characteristic of all varieties of mandarin, is the use of the serial construction of verbs (several connected verbs in one word describe one phenomenon), the use of "zero pronoun". Of course, to consolidate these grammatical features, exercises in the grammar of the Chinese language are required.
Chinese vocabulary
Since antiquity, there are more than 20 thousand characters, of which about 10 thousand are currently commonly used. However, Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words. Since most Chinese words are made up of two or more characters, there are more words in Chinese than hieroglyphs. The best term in this sense would be a morpheme, since they represent the smallest grammatical units, individual meanings and / or syllables in Chinese.
The number of characters in Chinese
Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and phrases vary widely. One of the authoritative collections of Chinese characters includes 54,678 characters, including even ancient characters. The Beijing reference book contains 85,568 characters and is the largest reference work based solely on the literary version of Chinese.
The grammar of the Chinese language for beginners is rather complicated, those who want to master these unique languages will have to learn all the linguistic subtleties.