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Jiayou in Standard Mandarin or Gayau in Cantonese (Chinese: 加油) is a ubiquitous Chinese expression of encouragement and support. The phrase is commonly used at sporting events and competitions by groups as a rallying cheer and can also be used at a personal level as a motivating phrase to the partner in the conversation.
Historical Chinese phonology deals with reconstructing the sounds of Chinese from the past. As Chinese is written with logographic characters, not alphabetic or syllabary, the methods employed in Historical Chinese phonology differ considerably from those employed in, for example, Indo-European linguistics; reconstruction is more difficult because, unlike Indo-European languages, no phonetic ...
It was then used as an "all purpose cheer", and used exclusively in both Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese Chinese. [6] The romanized Cantonese ga yau and literal translation phrase add oil was commonly used since then due to the large number of bilingual Hongkongers. Instead of using the romanised Cantonese, it is reported that the English phrase ...
Although many authors have projected the Middle Chinese palatal medial -j-back to a medial *-j-in Old Chinese, others have suggested that the Middle Chinese medial was a secondary development not present in Old Chinese. Evidence includes the use of type B syllables to transcribe foreign words lacking any such medial, the lack of the medial in ...
Normally, the sound of one Chinese character is one syllable. Mandarin Chinese totally has about 1,300 different syllables with tones (only over 400 syllables if the tones are not taken into account). And modern Chinese has more than 10,000 characters, with an average of over 7.5 characters per syllable. That means homophonic characters widely ...
An early transference in meaning was to hospitality or entertainment, and hence to food and drink, good cheer. The sense of a shout of encouragement or applause is a late use. Defoe ( Captain Singleton ) speaks of it as a sailor's word, and the meaning does not appear in Johnson's Dictionary .
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.
"Old Chinese was a toneless language. Tones arose between Old Chinese and Early Middle Chinese (that is between 500 BCE and 500 CE) as a result of the loss of final laryngeals." The four tones of Middle Chinese, 平 píng level, 上 shǎng rising, 去 qù departing, and 入 rù entering, all