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Romanization Of Chinese
Romanization of Chinese () is the use of the Latin alphabet to transliterate Chinese. Chinese uses a logographic script and its characters do not represent phonemes directly. There have been many systems using Roman characters to represent Chinese throughout history. Linguist Daniel Kane wrote, "It used to be said that sinologists had to be like musicians, who might compose in one key and readily transcribe into other keys." The dominant international standard for Standard Mandarin since about 1982 has been Hanyu Pinyin, invented by a group of Chinese linguists in the 1950s including Zhou Youguang. Other well-known systems include Wade–Giles (Mandarin) and Yale Romanization (Mandarin and Cantonese). There are many uses for Chinese Romanization. Most broadly, it is used to provide a useful way for foreigners who are not skilled at recognizing Chinese script to read and recognize Chinese. It can also be helpful for clarifying pronunciation among Chinese speakers who speak ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gwoyu
Standard Chinese ()—in linguistics Standard Northern Mandarin or Standard Beijing Mandarin, in common speech simply Mandarin, better qualified as Standard Mandarin, Modern Standard Mandarin or Standard Mandarin Chinese—is a modern standardized form of Mandarin Chinese that was first developed during the Republican Era (1912‒1949). It is designated as the official language of mainland China and a major language in the United Nations, Singapore, and Taiwan. It is largely based on the Beijing dialect. Standard Chinese is a pluricentric language with local standards in mainland China, Taiwan and Singapore that mainly differ in their lexicon. Hong Kong written Chinese, used for formal written communication in Hong Kong and Macau, is a form of Standard Chinese that is read aloud with the Cantonese reading of characters. Like other Sinitic languages, Standard Chinese is a tonal language with topic-prominent organization and subject–verb–object (SVO) word order. Compare ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
QWERTY
QWERTY () is a keyboard layout for Latin-script alphabets. The name comes from the order of the first six keys on the top left letter row of the keyboard ( ). The QWERTY design is based on a layout created for the Sholes and Glidden typewriter and sold to E. Remington and Sons in 1873. It became popular with the success of the Remington No. 2 of 1878, and remains in ubiquitous use. History The QWERTY layout was devised and created in the early 1870s by Christopher Latham Sholes, a newspaper editor and printer who lived in Kenosha, Wisconsin. In October 1867, Sholes filed a patent application for his early writing machine he developed with the assistance of his friends Carlos Glidden and Samuel W. Soulé. The first model constructed by Sholes used a piano-like keyboard with two rows of characters arranged alphabetically as shown below: - 3 5 7 9 N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z 2 4 6 8 . A B C D E F G H I J K L M Sholes struggled for the next five years to perfect his in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cantonese
Cantonese ( zh, t=廣東話, s=广东话, first=t, cy=Gwóngdūng wá) is a language within the Chinese (Sinitic) branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages originating from the city of Guangzhou (historically known as Canton) and its surrounding area in Southeastern China. It is the traditional prestige variety of the Yue Chinese dialect group, which has over 80 million native speakers. While the term ''Cantonese'' specifically refers to the prestige variety, it is often used to refer to the entire Yue subgroup of Chinese, including related but largely mutually unintelligible languages and dialects such as Taishanese. Cantonese is viewed as a vital and inseparable part of the cultural identity for its native speakers across large swaths of Southeastern China, Hong Kong and Macau, as well as in overseas communities. In mainland China, it is the '' lingua franca'' of the province of Guangdong (being the majority language of the Pearl River Delta) and neighbouring areas such as Gu ... [...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] |
Chinese Character Classification
All Chinese characters are logograms, but several different types can be identified, based on the manner in which they are formed or derived. There are a handful which derive from pictographs () and a number which are ideographic () in origin, including compound ideographs (), but the vast majority originated as phono-semantic compounds (). The other categories in the traditional system of classification are rebus or phonetic loan characters () and "derivative cognates" (). Modern scholars have proposed various revised systems, rejecting some of the traditional categories. In older literature, Chinese characters in general may be referred to as ideograms, due to the misconception that characters represented ideas directly, whereas some people assert that they do so only through association with the spoken word. Traditional classification Traditional Chinese lexicography divided characters into six categories (). This classification is known from Xu Shen's second century dictio ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Syntax
In linguistics, syntax () is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure ( constituency), agreement, the nature of crosslinguistic variation, and the relationship between form and meaning (semantics). There are numerous approaches to syntax that differ in their central assumptions and goals. Etymology The word ''syntax'' comes from Ancient Greek roots: "coordination", which consists of ''syn'', "together", and ''táxis'', "ordering". Topics The field of syntax contains a number of various topics that a syntactic theory is often designed to handle. The relation between the topics is treated differently in different theories, and some of them may not be considered to be distinct but instead to be derived from one another (i.e. word order can be seen as the result of movement rules derived from grammatical relations). ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Diacritic
A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacritic'' is a noun, though it is sometimes used in an attributive sense, whereas ''diacritical'' is only an adjective. Some diacritics, such as the acute ( ◌́ ) and grave ( ◌̀ ), are often called ''accents''. Diacritics may appear above or below a letter or in some other position such as within the letter or between two letters. The main use of diacritics in Latin script is to change the sound-values of the letters to which they are added. Historically, English has used the diaeresis diacritic to indicate the correct pronunciation of ambiguous words, such as "coöperate", without which the letter sequence could be misinterpreted to be pronounced . Other examples are the acute and grave accents, which can i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Morpheme
A morpheme is the smallest meaningful constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. In English, morphemes are often but not necessarily words. Morphemes that stand alone are considered roots (such as the morpheme ''cat''); other morphemes, called affixes, are found only in combination with other morphemes. For example, the ''-s'' in ''cats'' indicates the concept of plurality but is always bound to another concept to indicate a specific kind of plurality. This distinction is not universal and does not apply to, for example, Latin, in which many roots cannot stand alone. For instance, the Latin root ''reg-'' (‘king’) must always be suffixed with a case marker: ''rex'' (''reg-s''), ''reg-is'', ''reg-i'', etc. For a language like Latin, a root can be defined as the main lexical morpheme of a word. These sample English words have the following morphological analyses: * "Unbreakable" is composed of three mor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tonal Language
Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning – that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information and to convey emphasis, contrast and other such features in what is called intonation, but not all languages use tones to distinguish words or their inflections, analogously to consonants and vowels. Languages that have this feature are called tonal languages; the distinctive tone patterns of such a language are sometimes called tonemes, by analogy with ''phoneme''. Tonal languages are common in East and Southeast Asia, Africa, the Americas and the Pacific. Tonal languages are different from pitch-accent languages in that tonal languages can have each syllable with an independent tone whilst pitch-accent languages may have one syllable in a word or morpheme that is more prominent than the others. Mechanics Most languages use pitch as intonation to conv ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Classical Chinese
Classical Chinese, also known as Literary Chinese (古文 ''gǔwén'' "ancient text", or 文言 ''wényán'' "text speak", meaning "literary language/speech"; modern vernacular: 文言文 ''wényánwén'' "text speak text", meaning "literary language writing"), is the language of the classic literature from the end of the Spring and Autumn period through to the either the start of the Qin dynasty or the end of the Han dynasty, a written form of Old Chinese (上古漢語, ''Shànɡɡǔ Hànyǔ''). Classical Chinese is a traditional style of written Chinese that evolved from the classical language, making it different from any modern spoken form of Chinese. Literary Chinese was used for almost all formal writing in China until the early 20th century, and also, during various periods, in Japan, Ryukyu, Korea and Vietnam. Among Chinese speakers, Literary Chinese has been largely replaced by written vernacular Chinese, a style of writing that is similar to modern spoken ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fanqie
''Fanqie'' ( zh, t= 反切, p=fǎnqiè) is a method in traditional Chinese lexicography to indicate the pronunciation of a monosyllabic character by using two other characters, one with the same initial consonant as the desired syllable and one with the same rest of the syllable (the final). The method was introduced in the 3rd century AD and used in dictionaries and commentaries on the classics until the early 20th century. History Early dictionaries such as the '' Erya'' (3rd century BC) indicated the pronunciation of a character by the ''dúruò'' (讀若, "read as") method, giving another character with the same pronunciation. The introduction of Buddhism to China around the 1st century brought Indian phonetic knowledge, which may have inspired the idea of ''fanqie''. According to the 6th-century scholar Yan Zhitui, ''fanqie'' were first used by Sun Yan (孫炎), of the state of Wei during the Three Kingdoms period (220–280 AD), in his ''Erya Yinyi'' (爾雅音義, "So ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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