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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 Shuowen Jiezi is a Chinese dictionary compiled by Xu Shen c. 100 CE, during the Eastern Han dynasty (25–220 CE). While prefigured by earlier reference works for Chinese characters like the Erya (c. 3rd century BCE), the Shuowen Jiezi contains the first comprehensive analysis of characters in terms of their structure, where Xu attempted to provide rationales for their construction.
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.
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 ...
The jian (Mandarin Chinese:, Chinese: 劍, English approximation: / dʒ j ɛ n / jyehn, Cantonese:) is a double-edged straight sword used during the last 2,500 years in China. The first Chinese sources that mention the jian date to the 7th century BCE, during the Spring and Autumn period, [1] one of the earliest specimens being the Sword of Goujian.
'Comprehensive Chinese Word Dictionary'), also known as the Grand Chinese Dictionary, is the most inclusive available Chinese dictionary. Lexicographically comparable to the Oxford English Dictionary , it has diachronic coverage of the Chinese language , and traces usage over three millennia from Chinese classic texts to modern slang.
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 ...
Xiang or Hsiang (Chinese: 湘; Changsha Xiang: [sian˧ y˦˩], [2] Mandarin: [ɕi̯aŋ˥ y˨˩˦]), also known as Hunanese, is a group of linguistically similar and historically related Sinitic languages, spoken mainly in Hunan province but also in northern Guangxi and parts of neighboring Guizhou, Guangdong, Sichuan, Jiangxi and Hubei provinces.