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tā He 打 dǎ hit 人。 rén person 他 打 人。 tā dǎ rén He hit person He hits someone. Chinese can also be considered a topic-prominent language: there is a strong preference for sentences that begin with the topic, usually "given" or "old" information; and end with the comment, or "new" information. Certain modifications of the basic subject–verb–object order are permissible and ...
The English word "mandarin" (from Portuguese mandarim, from Malay menteri, from Sanskrit mantrī, mantrin, meaning 'minister or counsellor') originally meant an official of the Ming and Qing empires. [ 7 ] [ 8 ] [ a ] Since their native varieties were often mutually unintelligible, these officials communicated using a koiné language based on ...
In the tables, the first two columns contain the Chinese characters representing the classifier, in traditional and simplified versions when they differ. The next four columns give pronunciations in Standard (Mandarin) Chinese, using pinyin; Cantonese, in Jyutping and Yale, respectively; and Minnan (Taiwan).
Chinese adjectives (simplified Chinese: 形容词; traditional Chinese: 形容詞; pinyin: xíngróngcí) differ from adjectives in English in that they can be used as verbs [1] (for example 天 黑 了; tiān hēi le; lit. "sky black perfective") and thus linguists sometimes prefer to use the terms static or stative verb to describe them.
Standard Chinese takes its phonology from the Beijing dialect, with vocabulary from the Mandarin group and grammar based on literature in the modern written vernacular. It is one of the official languages of China and one of the four official languages of Singapore .
The bulk of these words were originally coined in Shanghai during the early 20th century and later loaned from there into Mandarin, hence their Mandarin pronunciations occasionally being quite divergent from the English. For example, in Shanghainese 沙发; 沙發 (sofa) and 马达; 馬達 ('motor') sound more like their English counterparts.
Standard Chinese (simplified Chinese: 现代标准汉语; traditional Chinese: 現代標準漢語; pinyin: Xiàndài biāozhǔn hànyǔ; lit. 'modern standard Han speech') is a modern standard form of Mandarin Chinese that was first codified during the republican era (1912–1949).
English also has some words and phrases that act somewhat like sentence final particles, but primarily only in colloquial speech. However, there are others, called tag questions, which are less colloquial and can be used for any situation. All are generally discourse particles rather than modal particles. For example: "man" in "Don't do it, man."