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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 ...
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.
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 ...
Robert Morrison (1782-1834) is credited with several historical firsts in addition to the first bidirectional Chinese and English dictionary. He was the first Protestant missionary in China, started the first Chinese-language periodical in 1815, [5] collaborated with William Milne to write the first translation of the Bible into Chinese in 1823, helped to found the English-language The Canton ...
The English term comes from the Portuguese mandarim (spelled in Old Portuguese as mandarin, pronounced [ˌmɐ̃dɐˈɾĩ]).The Portuguese word was used in one of the earliest Portuguese reports about China: letters from the imprisoned survivors of the Tomé Pires embassy, most likely written in 1524, [1] and in Castanheda's História do descobrimento e conquista da Índia pelos portugueses (c ...
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.
Lin's Chinese-English Dictionary of Modern Usage comprises approximately 8,100 character head entries and 110,000 word and phrase entries. [10] It includes both modern Chinese neologisms such as xǐnǎo 洗腦 "brainwash" and many Chinese loanwords from English such as yáogǔn 搖滾 "rock 'n' roll" and xīpí 嬉皮 "hippie".
Mandarin (bureaucrat), a bureaucrat of Imperial China (the original meaning of the word) by extension, any senior government bureaucrat; Mandarin cuisine, another name for Beijing cuisine; Mandarin (Jacksonville), a 19th-century community, since absorbed into the city limits of Jacksonville, United States