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tā He 打 dǎ hit 人。 rén person 他 打 人。 tā dǎ rén He hit person He hits someone. Chinese can also be considered a topic-prominent language: there is a strong preference for sentences that begin with the topic, usually "given" or "old" information; and end with the comment, or "new" information. Certain modifications of the basic subject–verb–object order are permissible and ...
For the most part, in Brazilian Portuguese, você and vocês (singular and plural "you", respectively) are used as the V form in more relaxed situations (for example, between two strangers with the same age in the streets), while o senhor and a senhora ("Mr"/"Sir" and "Mrs"/"Madam", plurals os senhores and as senhoras) are used in formal speech ...
Sometimes, a singular V-form derives from a third-person pronoun; in German and some Nordic languages, it is the third-person plural. Some languages have separate T and V forms for both singular and plural, others have the same form and others have a T–V distinction only in the singular. Different languages distinguish pronoun uses in ...
There are also various other uses of classifiers: for example, when placed after a noun rather than before it, or when repeated, a classifier signifies a plural or indefinite quantity. The terms classifier and measure word are frequently used interchangeably—as equivalent to the Chinese term 量词 (量詞) liàngcí, literally 'measure word'.
ngo 5 I 想 soeng 2 want 睇 tai 2 read 晒 saai 3 all 佢 keoi 5 it 先 sin 1 first 還 waan 4 return (keoi5 = the book) 我 想 睇 晒 佢 先 還 ngo5 soeng2 tai2 saai3 keoi5 sin1 waan4 I want read all it first return 'I want to finish reading it before I return it.' Plural suffix (-dei6) One of the few grammatical suffixes in the language, the suffix (-dei6) cannot be used to form plural ...
However, when only one of the plural pronouns is related to the singular, that may be the case for either one. In some dialects of Mandarin Chinese, for example, inclusive or exclusive 我們 ／ 我们 wǒmen is the plural form of singular 我 wǒ "I", and inclusive 咱們 ／ 咱们 zánmen is a separate root.
A Chinese word is thus inherently gender-neutral, and any given word can be preceded by an morpheme indicating masculinity or femininity. For example, the word for "doctor" is yīshēng (Traditional: 醫生, Simplified: 医生). To specify the gender of the doctor, the speaker can add the morpheme for "male" or "female" to the front of it.
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.