Chinese Language

The Chinese language is a group of languages descended from Old Chinese that are spoken natively by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in China, as well as by various communities of the Chinese diaspora. Chinese is commonly spoken in PRC, ROC, HK, and MC, while being relevant in Singapore and (sometimes) Malaysia. Chinese is regarded as one of the hardest if not the hardest language to learn.

A very common misconception about the Chinese Language is that he is one singular language with a variety of dialects. But in reality, he is a group of languages that have descended from Old Chinese, but not mutually intelligible. Approximately 1.39 billion people, or 17% of the global population, speak one of the Chinese languages as their first language.

歷史 (History)

The Chinese language probably evolved from the hypothetical Proto-Sino-Tibetan Language into Old Chinese around 3000 BC. The mythological Cangjie is credited with the creation of Chinese characters when he saw inspirations on a giant turtle's shell. Although many of the finer details remain unclear, most scholars agree that Old Chinese differs from the later Middle Chinese in lacking retroflex and palatal obstruents but having initial consonant clusters of some sort, and in having voiceless nasals and liquids.

The first recorded existence of Chinese is from the Oracle Bone Script, belonging to the late Shang Dynasty circa 1250 BC. The characters are pictographic but are considered a script and not random inscriptions/drawings because the characters have grammar. The next attested stage came from inscriptions on bronze artifacts dating to the Zhou Dynasty, specifically the Western Zhou period (1046 BC-771 BC), the Classic of Poetry and portions of the Book of Documents and I Ching. The script was known as the Bronze Script, which was quite diverse and all over the place.

The complex relationship between spoken and written Chinese is an example of diglossia: as spoken, Chinese varieties have evolved at different rates, while the written language used throughout China changed comparatively little, crystallizing into a prestige form known as Classical Chinese. Literature written distinctly in the Classical form began to emerge during the Spring and Autumn Period and continued to rule for almost the rest of history.

The next Chinese script was known as the Seal Script, which was more standardized and less pictographic than their Oracle predecessors. These Seal Scripts developed independently in the many feudal states of the Eastern Zhou period (771 BC-256 BC), until they were unified officially following the Qin Dynasty's unification of China in 221 BC.

During the Northern and Southern Dynasties (420-589), Middle Chinese went through several sound changes and split into several varieties following prolonged geographic and political separation. The Qieyun (601), a rhyme dictionary, recorded a compromise between the pronunciations of different regions. The evidence for the pronunciation of Middle Chinese comes from several sources: modern dialect variations, rhyme dictionaries, foreign transliterations, rhyme tables constructed by ancient Chinese philologists to summarize the phonetic system, and Chinese phonetic translations of foreign words. Middle Chinese was also used during the Sui, Tang, and Song dynasties between the 4th and 10th centuries.

After the fall of the Song dynasty and subsequent reign of the Jurchen Jin and Mongol Yuan dynasties in northern China, a common speech (now called Old Mandarin) developed based on the dialects of the North China Plain around the capital. The 1324 Zhongyuan Yinyun was a dictionary that codified the rhyming conventions of new sanqu verse form in this language. Together with the slightly later Menggu Ziyun, this dictionary describes a language with many of the features characteristic of modern Mandarin dialects.

The royal courts of the Ming (1368-1644) and early Qing (1644-1912) dynasties operated using a koiné language known as Guanhua, based on the Nanjing Dialect of Mandarin.

Classical Chinese writing style remained nearly universal until the late 19th century, culminating with the widespread adoption of Written Vernacular Chinese with the May Fourth Movement beginning in 1919.

Standard Chinese, based on the Beijing Dialect, was adopted for official use in 1930, largely shared by readers who may otherwise speak mutually unintelligible varieties. This variant is continued to be used officially by ROC and PRC today. In the 1950s, PRC pushed for the simplification of Chinese characters by removing strokes and merging multiple characters, and this campaign was successful as in modern times all of mainland uses the Simplified Script, while the rest of the Chinese ( Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau) uses the original Traditional Script (which had evolved naturally).

Singapore adopted Standard Chinese in 1976.

變體 (Variants)

There are hundreds of local Chinese language varieties forming a branch of the Sino-Tibetan Language Family, many of whom are not mutually intelligible. Variation is particularly strong in the more mountainous southeast part of mainland China.

† indicates that the language is extinct.

• Old Chinese†
• Eastern Han Chinese†
• Middle Chinese†
• Mandarin Chinese
  • Old Mandarin†
  • Guanhua†
  • Standard Chinese
• Cantonese Chinese
• Hakka Chinese

聲調 (Tones)

Tones in addition to consonants and vowels are used to distinguish words from each other. There's around 3,500 commonly used Chinese characters, but only 400 sounds for them, so that's why tones are needed, and that's why everywhere in Chinese one sound can mean on average 8 to 9 different things. Mandarin has four main tones and neutral tone. First tone is high (ā), the pitch stays high; second is rising (á), with the pitch rising from middle to high; third is low/dipping (ǎ), the pitch rise high after low fall; forth is falling (à), the pitch is from sharp high to low; fifth is neutral, it's silent and doesn't use any tones. Cantonese has six tones.

特殊字的聲調 (Tones on Special Characters)

Some tones change on certain characters in certain situations, especially in Mandarin.

• 不 (bù) changes from fourth tone to second tone (bú) when followed by another fourth-tone character. For example: 不是 (bù + shì) becomes búshì.
• 一 (yī) changes from first tone to second tone (yí) when it comes before a fourth-tone character. For example: 一下 (yī + xià) becomes yíxià.

語法 (Grammar)

Chinese have probably the most simple grammar of all languages. Chinese doesn't have meaningless words that unnecessarily complicate things, like "the" or "it is".

Chinese is sometimes called a "monosyllabic" language, but this is only partly true. In Old, Middle, and Classical Chinese, most words were just one character long, and each character matched a single morpheme (a basic unit of meaning). In modern Chinese, morphemes are still mostly one syllable long, which is different from English, where many morphemes have several syllables (like seven, elephant, para- or -able). Some southern Chinese dialects still have mostly one-syllable words, especially for everyday vocabulary. But in modern Mandarin, most nouns, adjectives, and verbs are two syllables. This happened partly because the sound system shrank over time, leaving fewer distinct syllables. Today, Mandarin has only about 1,200 possible syllables (counting tones), compared to about 5,000 in Vietnamese and over 8,000 in English.

Chinese usually uses a subject–verb–object (S-V-O) sentence structure, and like many East Asian languages, Chinese often forms sentences using a topic–comment structure. Chinese also has many classifiers and measure words, similar to Japanese and Korean. Other common features across all spoken varieties include using several verbs in a row (serial verb constructions), leaving out pronouns, and sometimes dropping the subject entirely. While the spoken varieties share many of these traits, their grammars are not completely the same and do show differences.

例子 (Examples)

Example of S-V-O sentence structure:

subject verb objective
我爱苹果.
I love apples.

如何畫 (How to draw)

Flag of the Chinese language made by combining the flags of multiple Chinese speaking areas.

Chinese Language has a drawing rating of hard.

1. Draw a ball.
2. Draw a white circle in the middle.
3. Divide the rest of the ball into four parts equal using white bars.
4. Fill in red in the top left part, and draw a black 9-pointed star with yellow circles at each point.
5. Fill in blue in the bottom left part, and draw a white sun.
6. Fill in red in the top right part, and draw a white crescent moon with five 5-pointed stars.
7. Fill in green in the bottom right part, and draw a white flower.
8. Fill in the middle with red, and draw a white flower.
9. Add Chinese eyes and done.

Color Name		HEX
	China Red	#EF0000
	China Yellow	#FFEF00
	Black	#000000
	White	#FFFFFF
	Blue	#000095
	Singapore Red	#ED2939
	Green	#00785E
	Macau Yellow	#FBD116
	Hong Kong Red	#DE2910