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我 wǒ I 给 gěi give 你 nǐ you 一本 yìběn a 书 shū book [我給你一本書] 我 给 你 一本 书 wǒ gěi nǐ yìběn shū I give you a book In southern dialects, as well as many southwestern and Lower Yangtze dialects, the objects occur in the reverse order. Most varieties of Chinese use post-verbal particles to indicate aspect, but the particles used vary. Most Mandarin ...
The earliest historical linguistic evidence of the spoken Chinese language dates back approximately 4500 years, [1] while examples of the writing system that would become written Chinese are attested in a body of inscriptions made on bronze vessels and oracle bones during the Late Shang period (c. 1250 – 1050 BCE), [2] [3] with the very oldest dated to c. 1200 BCE.
Among linguists, Standard Chinese has been referred to as Standard Northern Mandarin [8] [9] [10] or Standard Beijing Mandarin. [11] [12] It is colloquially referred to as simply Mandarin, [13] though this term may also refer to the Mandarin dialect group as a whole, or the late imperial form used as a lingua franca.
Old Mandarin or Early Mandarin was the speech of northern China during the Jurchen-ruled Jin dynasty and the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty (12th to 14th centuries). New genres of vernacular literature were based on this language, including verse, drama and story forms, such as the qu and sanqu .
The Chinese language has always consisted of a wide variety of dialects; hence prestige dialects and linguae francae have always been needed. Confucius (c. 551 – c. 479 BC) referred to yayan 'elegant speech' modeled on the dialect of the Zhou dynasty royal lands rather than regional dialects; texts authored during the Han dynasty (202 BC – 220 AD) also refer to tongyu (通語 'common ...
The proportion of vocabulary of Chinese origin thus tends to be greater in technical, abstract, or formal language. For example, in Japan, Sino-Japanese words account for about 35% of the words in entertainment magazines, over half the words in newspapers, and 60% of the words in science magazines. [40]
The Middle Chinese level tone had split into two registers conditioned by voicing of the initial, as in modern Mandarin dialects. [ 22 ] In comparison with Shin's standard readings, the major changes in the late Ming language that were described by European missionaries were the loss of the voiced initials and the merger of [-m] finals with [-n ...
Mandarin Chinese, branch of Chinese originally spoken in northern parts of the country Standard Chinese or Modern Standard Mandarin, the official language of China; Taiwanese Mandarin, Standard Chinese as spoken in Taiwan; Mandarin (late imperial lingua franca), the spoken standard of the Ming and Qing dynasties of China