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Chinese Character Sounds
Chinese character sounds ( zh, p=hànzì zìyīn, t=漢字字音, s=汉字字音) are the pronunciations of Chinese characters. The standard sounds of Chinese characters are based on the phonetic system of the Beijing dialect. Normally a Chinese character is read with one syllable. Some Chinese characters have more than one pronunciation (polyphonic characters). Some syllables correspond to more than one character (homophonic characters). Pronunciation standards of modern Chinese characters Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation and the Old National Pronunciation The common language of China was called ''Guanhua'' (Guānhuà, 官話, 官话, Official language) during the Ming and Qing Dynasties. ''Guanhua'' had no clear pronunciation standards and basically followed the traditional readings reflected in the official rhyme books (韵書, 韵书). At the end of the 19th century, influenced by Japan's Meiji Restoration, the new term ''Mandarin'' (guóyǔ, 國語, 国语, Nati ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Beijing Dialect
The Beijing dialect (), also known as Pekingese and Beijingese, is the prestige dialect of Mandarin spoken in the urban area of Beijing, China. It is the phonological basis of Standard Chinese, the official language in the People's Republic of China and Republic of China (Taiwan) and one of the official languages in Singapore. Despite the similarity to Standard Chinese, it is characterized by some "iconic" differences, including the addition of a final rhotic -r / 儿 to some words (e.g. 哪儿). During the Ming, southern dialectal influences were also introduced into the dialect. History Status as prestige dialect As the political and cultural capital of China, Beijing has held much historical significance as a city, and its speech has held sway as a lingua franca. Being officially selected to form the basis of the phonology of Standard Mandarin has further contributed to its status as a prestige dialect, or sometimes ''the'' prestige dialect of Chinese. Other scholars ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Qiu Xigui
Qiu Xigui (; born 13July 1935) is a Chinese historian, palaeographer, and professor of Fudan University. His book ''Chinese Writing'' is considered the "single most influential study of Chinese palaeography". Early life and education Qiu Xigui was born in July 1935 in Shanghai of Ningbo ancestry. In 1952 he was admitted to the history department of Fudan University, and was interested in pre-Qin dynasty Chinese history. Under the influence of the renowned oracle bones expert Hu Houxuan (), he took interest in the oracle bones and Chinese bronze inscriptions. After graduating in 1956, he became a graduate student of oracle bones and Shang dynasty history, studying under Professor Hu. The same year, Hu was transferred to the Institute of History of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, and Qiu followed Hu to the institute. Career After finishing his graduate studies in 1960, Qiu was assigned to be a teaching assistant in the Department of Chinese of Peking University (PKU). ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
China Science Publishing & Media
China Science Publishing & Media (CSPM, traditional Chinese: 科學出版社; simplified Chinese: 科学出版社), also translated into English as Sciences Press, Science Publishing House, or China Science Publishing, is a People's Republic of China-based publishing house, which mainly publishes academic books and journals, headquartered in Beijing. It is the largest comprehensive scientific, technical and professional publisher in China. The Science Press was officially established on 1 August 1954 as the part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, following a merger between the former Compilation and Translation Bureau of Chinese Academy of Sciences (中国科学院编译局) and Longmen United Company (龙门联合书局), which was founded in the 1930s. Important published books * Thomas Henry Huxley. ''Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays'' (进化论与伦理学), 1971. * George Gamow. ''One Two Three...Infinity: Facts and Speculations of Science'' (从一到无穷大 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Modern Chinese Characters
Modern Chinese characters () are the Chinese characters used in modern languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese. Chinese characters are composed of components, which are in turn composed of strokes. The 100 most frequently-used characters cover (i.e., having an accumulated frequency of) over 40% of modern Chinese texts. The 1000 most frequently-used characters cover approximately 90% of the texts. There are a variety of novel aspects of modern Chinese characters, including that of orthography, phonology, and semantics, as well as matters of collation and organization and statistical analysis, computer processing, and pedagogy. Background Historical development Since maturing as a complete writing system, Chinese characters have had an uninterrupted history of development over more than 3,000 years, with stages including * Oracle bone script, * Bronze script, * Seal script, * Clerical script, and * Regular script, leading to the modern written forms, as il ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chinese Character Meanings
Chinese character meanings () are the meanings of the morphemes the characters represent, including the original meanings, extended meanings and phonetic-loan meanings. Some characters only have single meanings, some have multiple meanings, and some share a common meaning. In modern Chinese, a character may represent a word, a morpheme in compound word, or a meaningless syllable combined with other syllables or characters to form a morpheme. A single-character word has a meaning equal to the meaning of the character. A multi-character word has a meaning that is usually derived from the meanings of the characters according to various processes of word formation. Character meanings and morphemes Morphemes are the minimal units of meaning in a language. Chinese characters are morpheme characters, and the meanings of Chinese characters come from the morphemes they record. Most Chinese characters represent only one morpheme, and in that case the meaning of the character is the meaning ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chinese Character Forms
Chinese character forms () are the shapes and structures of Chinese characters. They are the physical carriers of written Chinese. Modern Chinese characters appear in the form of square blocks. There are two methods to analyze the forms of Chinese characters, ''source tracing analysis'' () and ''current status analysis'' (, ). Source tracing analysis is also called the method of character creation (). It takes the form of a character when it was created as the object of analysis. Current status (or current situation) analysis takes the current regular script standard form (, ) as the object. As an academic subject, ''modern Chinese characters'' pay more attention to current status analysis. Current status analysis studies how the writing units are combined level by level into a complete Chinese character. There are three levels of structural units of Chinese characters: ''strokes'' (), ''components'' (), and ''whole characters'' (). For example, character (character) is composed of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Yuen Ren Chao
Yuen Ren Chao (; 3 November 1892 – 25 February 1982), also known as Zhao Yuanren, was a Chinese-American linguist, educator, scholar, poet, and composer, who contributed to the modern study of Chinese phonology and grammar. Chao was born and raised in China, then attended university in the United States, where he earned degrees from Cornell University and Harvard University. A naturally gifted polyglot and linguist, his ''Mandarin Primer'' was one of the most widely used Mandarin Chinese textbooks in the 20th century. He invented the Gwoyeu Romatzyh romanization scheme, which, unlike pinyin and other romanization systems, transcribes Mandarin Chinese pronunciation without diacritics or numbers to indicate tones. Early life Chao was born in Tianjin in 1892, though his family's ancestral home was in Changzhou, Jiangsu province. In 1910, Chao went to the United States with a Boxer Indemnity Scholarship to study mathematics and physics at Cornell University, where he was ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lion-Eating Poet In The Stone Den
"Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den" () is a short narrative poem written in Classical Chinese that is composed of about 94 characters (depending on the specific version) in which every word is pronounced ''shi'' () when read in present-day Standard Mandarin, with only the tones differing. The poem was written in the 1930s by the Chinese linguist Yuen Ren Chao as a linguistic demonstration. The poem is coherent and grammatical in Classical Chinese, but due to the number of Chinese homophones, it becomes difficult to understand in oral speech. In Mandarin, the poem is incomprehensible when read aloud, since only four syllables cover all the words of the poem. The poem is more comprehensible—but still not very intelligible—when read in other varieties of Chinese such as Cantonese, in which it has 22 different syllables, or Hokkien Chinese, in which it has 15 different syllables. The poem is an example of a one-syllable article, a form of constrained writing possible in tonal ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chinese Character Orders
Chinese character order, or ''Chinese character indexing'', ''Chinese character collation'' and ''Chinese character sorting'' (), is the way in which a Chinese character set is sorted into a sequence for the convenience of information retrieval. It may also refer to the sequence so produced. English dictionaries and indexes are normally arranged in alphabetical order for quick lookup, but Chinese is written in tens of thousands of different characters, not just dozens of letters in an alphabet, and that makes the sorting job much more challenging. The orders or sorting methods of Chinese dictionaries are traditionally divided into three categories: * Form-based orders, including stroke-based orders and component-based orders, which further includes radical-based orders, etc. * Sound-based orders, including Pinyin-based order and Bopomofo-based order * Meaning-based orders In modern Chinese, people also use frequency orders, where words or characters are sorted by their frequencie ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kanji
are the logographic Chinese characters taken from the Chinese script and used in the writing of Japanese. They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese and are still used, along with the subsequently-derived syllabic scripts of '' hiragana'' and '' katakana''. The characters have Japanese pronunciations; most have two, with one based on the Chinese sound. A few characters were invented in Japan by constructing character components derived from other Chinese characters. After World War II, Japan made its own efforts to simplify the characters, now known as shinjitai, by a process similar to China's simplification efforts, with the intention to increase literacy among the common folk. Since the 1920s, the Japanese government has published character lists periodically to help direct the education of its citizenry through the myriad Chinese characters that exist. There are nearly 3,000 kanji used in Japanese names and in comm ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Meiji Restoration
The , referred to at the time as the , and also known as the Meiji Renovation, Revolution, Regeneration, Reform, or Renewal, was a political event that restored practical imperial rule to Japan in 1868 under Emperor Meiji. Although there were ruling emperors before the Meiji Restoration, the events restored practical abilities and consolidated the political system under the Emperor of Japan. The goals of the restored government were expressed by the new emperor in the Charter Oath. The Restoration led to enormous changes in Japan's political and social structure and spanned both the late Edo period (often called the Bakumatsu) and the beginning of the Meiji era, during which time Japan rapidly industrialized and adopted Western ideas and production methods. Foreign influence The Japanese knew they were behind the Western powers when US Commodore Matthew C. Perry came to Japan in 1853 in large warships with armaments and technology that far outclassed those of Japan, wit ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pinyin
Hanyu Pinyin (), often shortened to just pinyin, is the official romanization system for Standard Mandarin Chinese in China, and to some extent, in Singapore and Malaysia. It is often used to teach Mandarin, normally written in Chinese form, to learners already familiar with the Latin alphabet. The system includes four diacritics denoting tones, but pinyin without tone marks is used to spell Chinese names and words in languages written in the Latin script, and is also used in certain computer input methods to enter Chinese characters. The word ' () literally means " Han language" (i.e. Chinese language), while ' () means "spelled sounds". The pinyin system was developed in the 1950s by a group of Chinese linguists including Zhou Youguang and was based on earlier forms of romanizations of Chinese. It was published by the Chinese Government in 1958 and revised several times. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) adopted pinyin as an international st ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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