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我 wǒ I 给 gěi give 你 nǐ you 一本 yìběn a 书 shū book [我給你一本書] 我 给 你 一本 书 wǒ gěi nǐ yìběn shū I give you a book In southern dialects, as well as many southwestern and Lower Yangtze dialects, the objects occur in the reverse order. Most varieties of Chinese use post-verbal particles to indicate aspect, but the particles used vary. Most Mandarin ...
The earliest historical linguistic evidence of the spoken Chinese language dates back approximately 4500 years, [1] while examples of the writing system that would become written Chinese are attested in a body of inscriptions made on bronze vessels and oracle bones during the Late Shang period (c. 1250 – 1050 BCE), [2] [3] with the very oldest dated to c. 1200 BCE.
The Chinese language has always consisted of a wide variety of dialects; hence prestige dialects and linguae francae have always been needed. Confucius (c. 551 – c. 479 BC) referred to yayan 'elegant speech' modeled on the dialect of the Zhou dynasty royal lands rather than regional dialects; texts authored during the Han dynasty (202 BC – 220 AD) also refer to tongyu (通語 'common ...
In 2010, Tibetan students protested against changes in the Language Policy on the schools that promoted the use of Mandarin Chinese instead of Tibetan. They argued that the measure would erode their culture. [10] In 2013, China's Education Ministry said that about 400 million people were unable to speak the national language Mandarin.
Chinese is first known to have been written in Latin characters by Western Christian missionaries in the 16th century. Today the most common romanization for Standard Chinese is Hanyu Pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the PRC, and later adopted by Singapore and Taiwan. Pinyin is almost universally employed now for teaching standard spoken Chinese ...
Mandarin (traditional Chinese: 官話; simplified Chinese: 官话; pinyin: Guānhuà; lit. 'official speech') was the common spoken language of administration of the Chinese empire during the Ming and Qing dynasties. It arose as a practical measure, due to the mutual unintelligibility of the varieties of Chinese spoken in different parts of ...
Standard Chinese (simplified Chinese: 现代标准汉语; traditional Chinese: 現代標準漢語; pinyin: Xiàndài biāozhǔn hànyǔ; lit. 'modern standard Han speech') is a modern standard form of Mandarin Chinese that was first codified during the republican era (1912–1949).
Distribution of Chinese languages in China Distribution of Mandarin dialects in China. Chinese language (or Chinese languages) can be divided to 10 primary dialects (or languages). [59] Each Han Chinese subgroup (民系) can be identified through their dialects: [54] [55] Wu (吴语): Jiangzhe people (江浙民系) Hui (徽语): Wannan people ...