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Words of Chinese origin have entered European languages, including English. Most of these were direct loanwords from various varieties of Chinese.However, Chinese words have also entered indirectly via other languages, particularly Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese, that have all used Chinese characters at some point and contain a large number of Chinese loanwords.
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 proportion of vocabulary of Chinese origin thus tends to be greater in technical, scientific, abstract or formal language or registers. For example, Sino-Japanese words account for about 35% of the words in entertainment magazines (where borrowings from English are common), over half the words in newspapers and 60% of the words in science ...
Distribution of Chinese dialect groups within the Greater China Region This video explains the differences in pronunciation and vocabulary among Mandarin Dialects (Std. Mandarin, Sichuan Mandarin and NE Mandarin) and Cantonese. The following is a list of Sinitic languages and their dialects.
The List of Commonly Used Standard Chinese Characters with Mandarin readings; Pinyin reading index for the List of Commonly Used Standard Chinese Characters; Table of Comparison between Standard, Traditional and Variant Chinese Characters; The First Series of Standardized Forms of Words with Non-standardized Variant Forms
In particular, whereas Mandarin has one general character to refer to the first-person pronoun, Literary Chinese has several, many of which are used as part of honorific language, and several of which have different grammatical uses (first-person collective, first-person possessive, etc.). [citation needed]
Swadesh's final list, published in 1971, [5] contains 100 terms. Explanations of the terms can be found in Swadesh 1952 [ 3 ] or, where noted by a dagger ( † ), in Swadesh 1955. Note that only this original sequence clarifies the correct meaning which is lost in an alphabetical order, e.g., in the case "27. bark" (originally without the ...
The vocabulary of Mandarin dialects in general, excepting what are deemed to be slang and regionalisms. The vocabulary of all Chinese varieties, especially in more technical fields like science, law, and government, is very similar—akin to the profusion of Latin and Greek vocabulary in European languages. This means that much of the ...