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Sino-Japanese Words
Sino-Japanese vocabulary, also known as refers to Japanese vocabulary that had originated in Chinese or were created from elements borrowed from Chinese. Some grammatical structures and sentence patterns can also be identified as Sino-Japanese. Sino-Japanese vocabulary is referred to in Japanese as , meaning 'Chinese words'. ''Kango'' is one of three broad categories into which the Japanese vocabulary is divided. The others are native Japanese vocabulary (''yamato kotoba'') and borrowings from other, mainly Western languages (''gairaigo''). It is estimated that approximately 60% of the words contained in the modern written Japanese dictionary are ''kango'', with about 18%–20% of words being used in common speech. The usage of such ''Kango'' words also increases when they are used in formal or literary contexts, or to express abstract or complex ideas. ''Kango'', the use of Chinese-derived words in Japanese, is to be distinguished from ''kanbun'', which is historical Literary Ch ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Han Chinese
The Han Chinese () or Han people (), are an East Asian ethnic group native to China. They constitute the world's largest ethnic group, making up about 18% of the global population and consisting of various subgroups speaking distinctive varieties of the Chinese language. The estimated 1.4 billion Han Chinese people, worldwide, are primarily concentrated in the People's Republic of China (including Mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau) where they make up about 92% of the total population. In the Republic of China (Taiwan), they make up about 97% of the population. People of Han Chinese descent also make up around 75% of the total population of Singapore. Originating from Northern China, the Han Chinese trace their cultural ancestry to the Huaxia, the confederation of agricultural tribes living along the Yellow River. This collective Neolithic confederation included agricultural tribes Hua and Xia, hence the name. They settled along the Central Plains around the middle and lo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Asian Languages
A wide variety of languages are spoken throughout Asia, comprising different language families and some unrelated isolates. The major language families include Austroasiatic, Austronesian, Caucasian, Dravidian, Indo-European, Afroasiatic, Turkic, Sino-Tibetan and Kra–Dai. Most, but not all, have a long history as a written language. Language groups The major families in terms of numbers are Indo-European and Indo-Aryan languages and Dravidian languages in South Asia and Sino-Tibetan in East Asia. Several other families are regionally dominant. Sino-Tibetan Sino-Tibetan includes Chinese, Tibetan, Burmese, Karen, Boro and numerous languages of the Tibetan Plateau, southern China, Burma, and North east India. Indo-European The Indo-European languages are primarily represented by the Indo-Iranian branch. The family includes both Indic languages (Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Odia, Assamese, Punjabi, Sindhi, Kashmiri, Marathi, Gujarati, Sinhala and other languages spoken prima ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Phonological Developments
Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a particular language variety. At one time, the study of phonology related only to the study of the systems of phonemes in spoken languages, but may now relate to any linguistic analysis either: Sign languages have a phonological system equivalent to the system of sounds in spoken languages. The building blocks of signs are specifications for movement, location, and handshape. At first, a separate terminology was used for the study of sign phonology ('chereme' instead of 'phoneme', etc.), but the concepts are now considered to apply universally to all human languages. Terminology The word 'phonology' (as in 'phonology of English') can refer either to the field of study or to the phonological system of a given language. This is on ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gemination
In phonetics and phonology, gemination (), or consonant lengthening (from Latin 'doubling', itself from ''gemini'' 'twins'), is an articulation of a consonant for a longer period of time than that of a singleton consonant. It is distinct from stress. Gemination is represented in many writing systems by a doubled letter and is often perceived as a doubling of the consonant.William Ham, ''Phonetic and Phonological Aspects of Geminate Timing'', p. 1-18 Some phonological theories use "doubling" as a synonym for gemination, others describe two distinct phenomena. Consonant length is a distinctive feature in certain languages, such as Arabic, Berber, Danish, Estonian, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Punjabi, Polish and Turkish. Other languages, such as English, do not have word-internal phonemic consonant geminates. Consonant gemination and vowel length are independent in languages like Arabic, Japanese, Finnish and Estonian; however, in languages like Italian, No ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vowel Length
In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived length of a vowel sound: the corresponding physical measurement is duration. In some languages vowel length is an important phonemic factor, meaning vowel length can change the meaning of the word, for example in: Arabic, Estonian, Finnish, Fijian, Kannada, Malayalam, Japanese, Latin, Old English, Scottish Gaelic, and Vietnamese. While vowel length alone does not change word meaning in most dialects of English, it is said to do so in a few dialects, such as Australian English, Lunenburg English, New Zealand English, and South African English. It also plays a lesser phonetic role in Cantonese, unlike in other varieties of Chinese. Many languages do not distinguish vowel length phonemically, meaning that vowel length does not change meaning, and the length of a vowel is conditioned by other factors such as the phonetic characteristics of the sounds around it, for instance whether the vowel is followed by a voiced or a voiceless conso ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Length (phonetics)
In phonetics, length or quantity is a feature of sounds that have distinctively extended duration compared with other sounds. There are long vowels as well as long consonants (the latter are often called ''geminates''). Many languages do not have distinctive length. Among the languages that have distinctive length, there are only a few that have both distinctive vowel length and distinctive consonant length. It is more common that there is only one or that they depend on each other. The languages that distinguish between different lengths have usually long and short sounds. The Mixe languages are widely considered to have three distinctive levels of vowel length, as do Estonian, some Low German/Low Saxon varieties in the vicinity of Hamburg and some Moselle Franconian and Ripuarian Franconian varieties. Strictly speaking, a pair of a long sound and a short sound should be identical except for their length. In certain languages, however, there are pairs of phonemes that ar ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Closed Syllable
A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological "building blocks" of words. They can influence the rhythm of a language, its prosody, its poetic metre and its stress patterns. Speech can usually be divided up into a whole number of syllables: for example, the word ''ignite'' is made of two syllables: ''ig'' and ''nite''. Syllabic writing began several hundred years before the first letters. The earliest recorded syllables are on tablets written around 2800 BC in the Sumerian city of Ur. This shift from pictograms to syllables has been called "the most important advance in the history of writing". A word that consists of a single syllable (like English ''dog'') is called a monosyllable (and is said to be ''monosyllabic''). Similar terms include disyllable (and ''disyllabic''; also ''bi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Japanese Phonology
The phonology of Japanese features about 15 consonant phonemes, the cross-linguistically typical five-vowel system of , and a relatively simple phonotactic distribution of phonemes allowing few consonant clusters. It is traditionally described as having a mora as the unit of timing, with each mora taking up about the same length of time, so that the disyllabic ("Japan") may be analyzed as and dissected into four moras, , , , and . Standard Japanese is a pitch-accent language, wherein the position or absence of a pitch drop may determine the meaning of a word: "chopsticks", "bridge", "edge" (see Japanese pitch accent). Unless otherwise noted, the following describes the standard variety of Japanese based on the Tokyo dialect. Consonants *Voiceless stops are slightly aspirated: less aspirated than English stops, but more so than Spanish. *, a remnant of Old Japanese, now occurs almost always medially in compounds, typically as a result of gemination (as in 切符 ''k ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Baxter's Transcription For Middle Chinese
William H. Baxter's transcription for Middle Chinese is an alphabetic notation recording phonological information from medieval sources, rather than a reconstruction. It was introduced by Baxter as a reference point for his reconstruction of Old Chinese phonology. Sources for Middle Chinese The centre of the study of Chinese historical phonology is the '' Qieyun'', a rime dictionary created by Lu Fayan in 601 CE as a guide to the proper reading of classic texts. The dictionary divided characters between the four tones, which were subdivided into 193 rhyme groups and then into homophone groups. The pronunciation of each homophone group is given by a fanqie formula, a pair of common characters respectively indicating the initial and final sounds of the syllable. Lu Fayan's work was very influential, and led to a series of expanded and corrected versions following the same structure. The most important of these was the '' Guangyun'' (1007–08), in which the number of rhyme group ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Middle Chinese
Middle Chinese (formerly known as Ancient Chinese) or the Qieyun system (QYS) is the historical variety of Chinese recorded in the '' Qieyun'', a rime dictionary first published in 601 and followed by several revised and expanded editions. The Swedish linguist Bernard Karlgren believed that the dictionary recorded a speech standard of the capital Chang'an of the Sui and Tang dynasties. However, based on the more recently recovered preface of the ''Qieyun'', most scholars now believe that it records a compromise between northern and southern reading and poetic traditions from the late Northern and Southern dynasties period. This composite system contains important information for the reconstruction of the preceding system of Old Chinese phonology (early 1st millennium BC). The ''fanqie'' method used to indicate pronunciation in these dictionaries, though an improvement on earlier methods, proved awkward in practice. The mid-12th-century ''Yunjing'' and other rime tables incorp ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the Roman Republic it became the dominant language in the Italian region and subsequently throughout the Roman Empire. Even after the fall of Western Rome, Latin remained the common language of international communication, science, scholarship and academia in Europe until well into the 18th century, when other regional vernaculars (including its own descendants, the Romance languages) supplanted it in common academic and political usage, and it eventually became a dead language in the modern linguistic definition. Latin is a highly inflected language, with three distinct genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter), six or seven noun cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative, and vocative), five declensions, four verb conjuga ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
