Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
In English, existential clauses usually use the dummy subject construction (also known as expletive) with there (infinitive: there be), as in "There are boys in the yard", but there is sometimes omitted when the sentence begins with another adverbial (usually designating a place), as in "In my room (there) is a large box."
For articles on words and phrases related to a specific area of China, or to a specific spoken variant, please refer to one of the subcategories. Subcategories This category has the following 14 subcategories, out of 14 total.
Old Chinese had two families of negation markers starting with *p-and *m-, respectively. [181] Northern and Central varieties tend to use a word from the first family, cognate with Beijing bù 不, as the ordinary negator. [60] A word from the second family is used as an existential negator 'have not', as in Beijing méi 沒 and Shanghai m 2. [182]
Loanwords have entered written and spoken Chinese from many sources, including ancient peoples whose descendants now speak Chinese. In addition to phonetic differences, varieties of Chinese such as Cantonese and Shanghainese often have distinct words and phrases left from their original languages which they continue to use in daily life and sometimes even in Mandarin.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Redirect page
In syntax, Classical Chinese words are not restrictively categorized into parts of speech: nouns used as verbs, adjectives used as nouns, and so on. There is no copula in Classical Chinese; 是 (shì) is a copula in modern Chinese but in old Chinese it was originally a near demonstrative ('this'), the modern Chinese equivalent of which is 這 ...
The Heian period (794–1185) facilitated the emergence of a system known as kanbun, which involved the use of Chinese text with diacritical marks that allowed Japanese speakers to read and restructure Chinese sentences. Chinese characters also came to be used in writing Japanese words, resulting in modern kana syllabaries.
Classical Chinese's most obvious contrast with modern written vernacular Chinese is that the former rarely uses words of more than one character; nearly all Classical words are one character in length. This stands directly in contrast with vernacular Chinese, in which two-character words are extremely common.