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Many Chinese take great delight in using the large amount of homophones in the language to form puns, and they have become an important component of Chinese culture. [3] In Chinese, homophones are used for a variety of purposes from rhetoric and poetry to advertisement and humor, and are also common in Chinese loans , for example phono-semantic ...
Exclamative particles are used as a method of recording aspects of human speech which may not be based entirely on meaning and definition. Specific characters are used to record exclamations, as with any other form of Chinese vocabulary, some characters exclusively representing the expression (such as 哼), others sharing characters with alternate words and meanings (such as 可).
The first book devoted to the study of Chinese particles, 《語助》, was written by Lu Yi-Wei (盧以緯) in the period of the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368). Later important works include 《助字辨略》 (Some Notes on the Helping Words) by Liu Qi (劉淇) and 《經傳釋詞》 (Explanations of the Articles Found in the Classics) by Wang Yin-Zhi (王引之), both published during the Qing ...
Characters for plant and animal names. For example: 猫 (cat), 鯉 (carp), 榕 (banyan). Characters for surnames and place names. For example: 劉 (Liu), 邢 (Xing), 鑫 (Xin). The meaning assigned to a character when it was created is the original meaning (simplified Chinese: 本义; traditional Chinese: 本義; pinyin: běnyì) of the ...
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.
A Chinese-English Dictionary: 1892: Herbert Allen Giles' bestselling dictionary, 2nd ed. 1912 A Dictionary of the Chinese Language: 1815–1823: First Chinese-English, English-Chinese dictionary, Robert Morrison: A Syllabic Dictionary of the Chinese Language: 1874: First Chinese-English dictionary to include regional pronunciations, Samuel ...
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.
'Irony' comes from the Greek eironeia (εἰρωνεία) and dates back to the 5th century BCE.This term itself was coined in reference to a stock-character from Old Comedy (such as that of Aristophanes) known as the eiron, who dissimulates and affects less intelligence than he has—and so ultimately triumphs over his opposite, the alazon, a vain-glorious braggart.