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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.
A calque / k æ l k / or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal, word-for-word (Latin: "verbum pro verbo") translation. This list contains examples of calques in various languages.
Sometimes, different Chinese characters are used to express the same meaning in Cantonese and Mandarin. If you use the one commonly used in Cantonese to express the same meaning when you are speaking or writing Mandarin, a native speaker may be confused or even find it difficult to understand, and vice versa.
Modern Han Chinese consists of about 412 syllables [1] in 5 tones, so homophones abound and most non-Han words have multiple possible transcriptions. This is particularly true since Chinese is written as monosyllabic logograms, and consonant clusters foreign to Chinese must be broken into their constituent sounds (or omitted), despite being thought of as a single unit in their original language.
Here are three representative examples of praise: "the most extraordinary Chinese–English dictionary I have ever had such pleasure to look Chinese words up in and to read their English definitions"; [22] "The thorough scholarship and fresh outlook make it a valuable contribution to Chinese lexicography, while the high production standards and ...
A rime table or rhyme table (simplified Chinese: 韵图; traditional Chinese: 韻圖; pinyin: yùntú; Wade–Giles: yün-t'u) is a Chinese phonological model, tabulating the syllables of the series of rime dictionaries beginning with the Qieyun (601) by their onsets, rhyme groups, tones and other properties.
官話字母; Guānhuà zìmǔ, developed by Wang Zhao (1859–1933), was the first alphabetic writing system for Chinese developed by a Chinese person. This system was modeled on Japanese katakana, which he learned during a two-year stay in Japan, and consisted of letters that were based on components of Chinese characters.
Historically, neighboring states and peoples of China were often given exonyms or descriptions that were pejorative in nature. For instance, the first exonym for Japan from the Han dynasty (206 BCE – 24 CE) was the Chinese Wo or Japanese Wa 倭 meaning "submissive; dwarf barbarian"; this was replaced by the endonym 日本 (rìběn) by the 8th century.