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Some Classical Chinese words can have more than one meaning. However, Classical Chinese words still exist among many chengyu, or Chinese idioms. The Classical Chinese words and examples will be written in traditional characters, and the modern vernacular will be written in both simplified and traditional characters.
The meaning of a Chinese character is the morpheme meaning recorded in it. The meaning of a single-character word is its character meaning. The meaning of a multi-character word is generally derived from the meanings of the characters. The main ways to combine character meanings into word meanings include: [16] [17]
Xiandai Hanyu Cidian (simplified Chinese: 现代汉语词典; traditional Chinese: 現代漢語詞典; pinyin: Xiàndài Hànyǔ Cídiǎn; lit. 'Modern Han Language Word Dictionary'), also known as A Dictionary of Current Chinese [2] or Contemporary Chinese Dictionary, [1] is an important [note 1] one-volume dictionary of Standard Mandarin Chinese published by the Commercial Press, now into ...
A page from the Yiqiejing yinyi, the oldest extant Chinese dictionary of Buddhist technical terminology – Dunhuang manuscripts, c. 8th century. There are two types of dictionaries regularly used in the Chinese language: 'character dictionaries' (字典; zìdiǎn) list individual Chinese characters, and 'word dictionaries' (辞典; 辭典; cídiǎn) list words and phrases.
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.
For example, 言不由衷 'speak not from the bosom' and 'to speak with one's tongue in one's cheek' share idiomatic meanings. The Chinese not having conducted maritime explorations of the North Atlantic during imperial times, the expression 冰山一角 'one corner of an ice mountain' is a rare example of a chengyu that emerged in the early ...
The Thousand Character Classic (Chinese: 千字文; pinyin: Qiānzì wén), also known as the Thousand Character Text, is a Chinese poem that has been used as a primer for teaching Chinese characters to children from the sixth century onward. It contains exactly one thousand characters, each used only once, arranged into 250 lines of four ...
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 ...