Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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 ...
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.
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 ...
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.
Written vernacular Chinese (白话; 白話; báihuà), refers to written Chinese that is based on the vernacular language used during the period between imperial China and the early 20th century. [8] The use of particles in vernacular Chinese differs from that of Classical Chinese, as can be seen in the following examples.
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.
Chinese – particularly classical Chinese – is thus a form of scriptio continua and it is common for words to be split between lines with no marking in the text equivalent to the English hyphen. When a space is used, it is also fullwidth (U+3000 IDEOGRAPHIC SPACE). One instance of its usage is as an honorific marker.
However, when only one of the plural pronouns is related to the singular, that may be the case for either one. In some dialects of Mandarin Chinese, for example, inclusive or exclusive 我們 ／ 我们 wǒmen is the plural form of singular 我 wǒ "I", and inclusive 咱們 ／ 咱们 zánmen is a separate root.