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The word oakum derives from Middle English okome, from Old English ācumba, from ā-(separative and perfective prefix) + -cumba (akin to Old English camb, "comb")—literally "off-combings". Oakum was at one time recycled from old tarry ropes and cordage, which were painstakingly unravelled and reduced to fibre, termed "picking".
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 following is a list of countries and territories where Chinese is an official language.While those countries or territories that designate any variety of Chinese as an official language, as the term "Chinese" is considered a group of related language varieties rather than a homogeneous language, of which many are not mutually intelligible, in the context of the spoken language such ...
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 Zhongwen Da Cidian, also known in English as the Encyclopaedic Dictionary of the Chinese Language, is an unabridged Chinese dictionary, edited by Zhang Qiyun and others. The first edition had 40 volumes including its radical index in volume 39 and stroke index in volume 40. It was published from 1962 through 1968. [1]
In China, letters of the English alphabet are pronounced somewhat differently because they have been adapted to the phonetics (i.e. the syllable structure) of the Chinese language. The knowledge of this spelling may be useful when spelling Western names, especially over the phone, as one may not be understood if the letters are pronounced as ...
Modern Han Chinese consists of about 412 syllables [1] in 5 tones, so homophones abound and most non-Han words have multiple possible transcriptions. This is particularly true since Chinese is written as monosyllabic logograms, and consonant clusters foreign to Chinese must be broken into their constituent sounds (or omitted), despite being thought of as a single unit in their original language.