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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.
Singular and plural forms are marked from the general form. The general is used when the specific number is deemed irrelevant or unimportant. In this system, the singular is often called the singulative, to distinguish it as derived from a different form. Similarly, the plural derived from the general has been called the plurative. [195]
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 ...
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.
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.
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 ...
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]