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Concise Dictionary Of Spoken Chinese
The ''Concise Dictionary of Spoken Chinese'' (1947), which was compiled by Yuen Ren Chao and Lien Sheng Yang, made numerous important lexicographic innovations. It was the first Chinese dictionary specifically for spoken Chinese words rather than for written Chinese characters, and one of the first to mark characters for being "free" or "bound" morphemes according to whether or not they can stand alone as a complete and independent utterance. History The compilers of the ''Concise Dictionary of Chinese'', the linguist Yuen Ren Chao (1892-1982) and the historian Yang Lien-sheng (1914-1990), were famous Chinese-American scholars who worked in Harvard University wartime Chinese language programs for the War Department. Chao was a visiting professor at Harvard from 1941 to 1946, while Yang entered the graduate program in 1940, and received an M.A. in 1942 and Ph.D. in 1946. At the beginning of World War II, the shortage of Chinese and Japanese bilingual dictionaries became an urgen ... [...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 a c ... [...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] |
Noun
A noun () is a word that generally functions as the name of a specific object or set of objects, such as living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas.Example nouns for: * Living creatures (including people, alive, dead or imaginary): ''mushrooms, dogs, Afro-Caribbeans, rosebushes, Nelson Mandela, bacteria, Klingons'', etc. * Physical objects: ''hammers, pencils, Earth, guitars, atoms, stones, boots, shadows'', etc. * Places: ''closets, temples, rivers, Antarctica, houses, Grand Canyon, utopia'', etc. * Actions: ''swimming, exercises, diffusions, explosions, flight, electrification, embezzlement'', etc. * Qualities: ''colors, lengths, deafness, weights, roundness, symmetry, warp speed,'' etc. * Mental or physical states of existence: ''jealousy, sleep, heat, joy, stomachache, confusion, mind meld,'' etc. Lexical categories ( parts of speech) are defined in terms of the ways in which their members combine with other kinds of expressions. Th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chinese Classifier
The modern Chinese varieties make frequent use of what are called classifiers or measure words. One use of classifiers is when a noun is qualified by a numeral known as a noun phrase. When a phrase such as "one person" or "three books" is translated into Chinese, it is normally necessary to insert an appropriate classifier between the numeral and the noun. For example, in Standard Mandarin,All examples given in this article are from standard Mandarin Chinese, with pronunciation indicated using the pinyin system, unless otherwise stated. The script would often be identical in other varieties of Chinese, although the pronunciation would vary. the first of these phrases would be ''yí rén'', where ''yī'' means "one",But is generally pronounced yí due to tone sandhi. ''rén'' means "person", and ''gè'' is the required classifier. There are also other grammatical contexts in which classifiers are used, including after the demonstratives 这 (這) ''zhè'' ("this") and 那 ' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Coverb
A coverb is a word or prefix that resembles a verb or co-operates with a verb. In languages that have the serial verb construction, coverbs are a type of word that shares features of verbs and prepositions. A coverb takes an object or complement and forms a phrase that appears in sequence with another verb phrase in accordance with the serial construction. A coverb appears to be subordinate to a main verb and fulfills a function similar to that of a preposition. Some words that may be classed as coverbs can also function as independent verbs, but that is not always the case. Coverbs in that sense are found in Asian languages such as Chinese and Vietnamese, and, for example, West African languages such as Yoruba. are given below. The term ''coverb'' (like ''preverb'') is also sometimes used to denote the first element in a compound verb or complex predicate. There, the coverb supplies significant semantic information, and the second element (a ''light verb'') is inflecte ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Conjunction (grammar)
In grammar, a conjunction ( abbreviated or ) is a part of speech that connects words, phrases, or clauses that are called the conjuncts of the conjunctions. That definition may overlap with that of other parts of speech and so what constitutes a "conjunction" must be defined for each language. In English, a given word may have several senses and be either a preposition or a conjunction, depending on the syntax of the sentence. For example, ''after'' is a preposition in "he left after the fight" but is a conjunction in "he left after they fought". In general, a conjunction is an invariable (non-inflected) grammatical particle that may or may not stand between the items conjoined. The definition of conjunction may also be extended to idiomatic phrases that behave as a unit with the same function, "as well as", "provided that". A simple literary example of a conjunction is "the truth of nature, ''and'' the power of giving interest" (Samuel Taylor Coleridge's ''Biographia Litera ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Intransitive Verb
In grammar, an intransitive verb is a verb whose context does not entail a direct object. That lack of transitivity distinguishes intransitive verbs from transitive verbs, which entail one or more objects. Additionally, intransitive verbs are typically considered within a class apart from modal verbs and defective verbs. Examples In the following sentences, verbs are used without a direct object: *"Rivers flow." *"I sneezed." *"My dog ran." *"Water evaporates when it's hot." *"You've grown since I last saw you!" *"I wonder how old I will be when I die." The following sentences contain transitive verbs (they entail one or more objects): *"We watched ''a movie'' last night." *"She's making ''promises''." *"When I said that, my sister smacked ''me''." *"Santa gave ''me'' ''a present''." *"He continuously clicked ''his pen'' and it was incredibly annoying to me." Some verbs, called ambitransitive verbs, may entail objects but do not always require one. Such a verb may be used as ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Adverb
An adverb is a word or an expression that generally modifies a verb, adjective, another adverb, determiner, clause, preposition, or sentence. Adverbs typically express manner, place, time, frequency, degree, level of certainty, etc., answering questions such as ''how'', ''in what way'', ''when'', ''where'', ''to what extent''. This is called the adverbial function and may be performed by single words (adverbs) or by multi-word adverbial phrases and adverbial clauses. Adverbs are traditionally regarded as one of the parts of speech. Modern linguists note that the term "adverb" has come to be used as a kind of "catch-all" category, used to classify words with various types of syntactic behavior, not necessarily having much in common except that they do not fit into any of the other available categories (noun, adjective, preposition, etc.) Functions The English word ''adverb'' derives (through French) from Latin ''adverbium'', from ''ad-'' ("to"), ''verbum'' ("word", "verb"), ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Demonstrative
Demonstratives ( abbreviated ) are words, such as ''this'' and ''that'', used to indicate which entities are being referred to and to distinguish those entities from others. They are typically deictic; their meaning depending on a particular frame of reference and cannot be understood without context. Demonstratives are often used in spatial deixis (where the speaker or sometimes the listener are to provide context), but also in intra-discourse reference (including abstract concepts) or anaphora, where the meaning is dependent on something other than the relative physical location of the speaker, for example whether something is currently being said or was said earlier. Demonstrative constructions include demonstrative adjectives or demonstrative determiners, which qualify nouns (as in ''Put that coat on''); and demonstrative pronouns, which stand independently (as in ''Put that on''). The demonstratives in English are ''this'', ''that'', ''these'', ''those'', and the archaic ' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Adjective
In linguistics, an adjective (abbreviated ) is a word that generally modifies a noun or noun phrase or describes its referent. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun. Traditionally, adjectives were considered one of the main parts of speech of the English language, although historically they were classed together with nouns. Nowadays, certain words that usually had been classified as adjectives, including ''the'', ''this'', ''my'', etc., typically are classed separately, as determiners. Here are some examples: * That's a funny idea. ( attributive) * That idea is funny. ( predicative) * * The good, the bad, and the funny. ( substantive) Etymology ''Adjective'' comes from Latin ', a calque of grc, ἐπίθετον ὄνομα, epítheton ónoma, additional noun (whence also English '' epithet''). In the grammatical tradition of Latin and Greek, because adjectives were inflected for gender, number, and case like nouns (a process called declension), th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Grammatical Categories
In linguistics, a grammatical category or grammatical feature is a property of items within the grammar of a language. Within each category there are two or more possible values (sometimes called grammemes), which are normally mutually exclusive. Frequently encountered grammatical categories include: * Tense, the placing of a verb in a time frame, which can take values such as present and past * Number, with values such as singular, plural, and sometimes dual, trial, paucal, uncountable or partitive, inclusive or exclusive * Gender, with values such as masculine, feminine and neuter * Noun classes, which are more general than just gender, and include additional classes like: animated, humane, plants, animals, things, and immaterial for concepts and verbal nouns/actions, sometimes as well shapes * Locative relations, which some languages would represent using grammatical cases or tenses, or by adding a possibly agglutinated lexeme such as a preposition, adjective, or particle ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Yale Romanization Of Mandarin
The Yale romanization of Mandarin is a system for transcribing the sounds of Standard Chinese, based on Mandarin Chinese varieties spoken in and around Beijing. It was devised in 1943 by the Yale sinologist George Kennedy for a course teaching Chinese to American soldiers, and popularized by continued development of that course at Yale. The system approximated Chinese sounds using English spelling conventions in order to accelerate acquisition of pronunciation by English speakers.Fenn and Tewksbury (1967), p. xii. The Yale romanization was widely used in Western textbooks until the late 1970s; in fact, during the height of the Cold War, the use of the pinyin system over Yale romanization outside of China was regarded as a political statement or identification with the communist Chinese regime. The situation was reversed once the relations between the People's Republic of China and the West had improved. Communist China (PRC) became a member of the United Nations in 1971 by replaci ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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