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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 ...
Classical Chinese did not distinguish number in some of its pronouns, for example, 我 wǒ could mean either 'I, me' or 'we, us'. There was no 3rd-person personal pronoun form that could be used in subject position, but the distal demonstrative 彼 bǐ 'that, those' and the anaphoric demonstrative 是 shì frequently take that role.
As such, sentence-final particles in this sense often perform an interpersonal function, rather than a grammatical one. Nevertheless, there are cases in which sentence-final particles do perform grammatical functions, such as Mandarin ma 嗎/吗, the "question particle," which changes the grammatical mood of a sentence to interrogative.
The first book devoted to the study of Chinese particles, 《語助》, was written by Lu Yi-Wei (盧以緯) in the period of the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368). Later important works include 《助字辨略》 (Some Notes on the Helping Words) by Liu Qi (劉淇) and 《經傳釋詞》 (Explanations of the Articles Found in the Classics) by Wang Yin-Zhi (王引之), both published during the Qing ...
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 ...
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.
Chinese adjectives (simplified Chinese: 形容词; traditional Chinese: 形容詞; pinyin: xíngróngcí) differ from adjectives in English in that they can be used as verbs [1] (for example 天 黑 了; tiān hēi le; lit. "sky black perfective") and thus linguists sometimes prefer to use the terms static or stative verb to describe them.
The space between two words should be set at half the width of a Chinese character, shorter than the distance between two lines. Because the average length of a Chinese word is about 2 characters, if a space is of full width of a Chinese character, longer than the inter-line distance, the lines of words will appear scattered, not compact. [10]