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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 ...
English words of Chinese origin usually have different characteristics, depending on precisely how the words encountered the West. Despite the increasingly widespread use of Standard Chinese—based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin—among Chinese people, English words based on Mandarin are comparatively few.
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
The names of China include the many contemporary and historical designations given in various languages for the East Asian country known as Zhōngguó (中国; 中國; 'Central State', 'Middle Kingdom') in Standard Chinese, a form based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. The English name "China" was borrowed from Portuguese during the 16th ...
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 ...
In China, letters of the English alphabet are pronounced somewhat differently because they have been adapted to the phonetics (i.e. the syllable structure) of the Chinese language. The knowledge of this spelling may be useful when spelling Western names, especially over the phone, as one may not be understood if the letters are pronounced as ...
The name mandarin orange is a calque of Swedish mandarin apelsin [apelsin from German Apfelsine (Apfel + Sina), meaning Chinese apple], first attested in the 18th century.The Imperial Chinese term "mandarine" was first adopted by the French for this fruit.
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.