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Taz Language
Taz is a dialect of Northeastern Mandarin formerly spoken by the Taz people of the Russian Far East. There are a few loanwords from Tungusic languages, but no obvious Tungusic effect on the grammar. Taz is not a distinct language. In 1992, some Chinese bought ginseng from the Taz. They spoke Standard Chinese and Taz, respectively, and could understand one other. What they did not understand were mainly place names and social terms. History The Taz are descendants of the intermarriage of Han Chinese immigrants and local Tungusic peoples. In the early to middle 19th century, Han Chinese from Northeast China moved to the Ussuri River basin and engaged in ginseng harvesting, fishing and hunting. The immigrants were mostly men, and they married the local Udege and Nanai peoples. Their language, while remaining completely Chinese grammatically, adopted some loan words from Nanai and Udege. There is a 400-word dictionary, but the language otherwise has no writing system and is a p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Russian Far East
The Russian Far East (russian: Дальний Восток России, r=Dal'niy Vostok Rossii, p=ˈdalʲnʲɪj vɐˈstok rɐˈsʲiɪ) is a region in Northeast Asia. It is the easternmost part of Russia and the Asian continent; and is administered as part of the Far Eastern Federal District, which is located between Lake Baikal in eastern Siberia and the Pacific Ocean. The area's largest city is Khabarovsk, followed by Vladivostok. The region shares land borders with the countries of Mongolia, China, and North Korea to its south, as well as maritime boundaries with Japan to its southeast, and with the United States along the Bering Strait to its northeast. The Russian Far East is often considered as a part of Siberia (previously during the Soviet era when it was called the Soviet Far East). Terminology In Russia, the region is usually referred to as just "Far East" (). What is known in English as the Far East is usually referred to as "the Asia-Pacific Region" (, abbrevia ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nanai Language
The Nanai language (also called Gold, Goldi, or Hezhen) is spoken by the Nanai people in Siberia, and to a much smaller extent in China's Heilongjiang province, where it is known as Hezhe. The language has about 1,400 speakers out of 17,000 ethnic Nanai, but most (especially the younger generations) are also fluent in Russian or Chinese, and mostly use one of those languages for communication. Nomenclature In China, the language is referred to as ''Hèzhéyǔ'' (Chinese: ). The Nanai people there variously refer to themselves as /na nio/, , /na nai/ (which all mean "local people"), , and , the last being the source of the Chinese ethnonym ''Hezhe''. Distribution The language is distributed across several distantly-located areas: * Middle/lower Amur dialects (Naykhin, Dzhuen, Bolon, Ekon, etc.): the areas along the Amur River below Khabarovsk (Nanai, Amursk, Solnechny and Komsomolsk districts of Khabarovsk Krai); * Kur-Urmi dialect: the area around the city of Khabarovsk (the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cyrillicized Chinese
The Cyrillization of Chinese (''Hanyu Cyril Pinyin'') is the transcription of Chinese characters into the Cyrillic alphabet. The Palladius System is the official Russian standard for transcribing Chinese into Russian, with variants existing for Ukrainian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, and other languages that use the Cyrillic alphabet. It was created by Palladius Kafarov, a Russian sinologist and monk who spent thirty years in China in the nineteenth century. Russian system Initials Note that because the Russian version of the Cyrillic alphabet has no letters for ''dz'' or ''dzh'' (although дз and дж are found in Bulgarian, and also ѕ and џ are found in Serbian and Macedonian Cyrillic), the digraphs цз and чж are used respectively. Finals In composites, coda ''ng'' is transcribed нъ when the following syllable starts with a vowel. For example, the names of the cities of ''Chang'an'' and ''Hengyang'' are transcribed as Чанъань and Хэнъян. In syllables wi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Neutral Tone
This article summarizes the phonology (the sound system, or in more general terms, the pronunciation) of Standard Chinese (Standard Mandarin). Standard Chinese phonology is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. Actual production varies widely among speakers, as they introduce elements of their native varieties (although television and radio announcers are chosen for their ability to produce the standard variety). Elements of the sound system include not only the segments – the vowels and consonants – of the language but also the tones that are applied to each syllable. Standard Chinese has four main tones, in addition to a neutral tone used on weak syllables. This article represents phonetic values using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), noting correspondences chiefly with the Pinyin system for transcription of Chinese text. For correspondences with other systems, see the relevant articles, such as Wade–Giles, Bopomofo (Zhuyin), Gwoyeu Romatzyh, etc., and R ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nasal Vowel
A nasal vowel is a vowel that is produced with a lowering of the soft palate (or velum) so that the air flow escapes through the nose and the mouth simultaneously, as in the French vowel or Amoy []. By contrast, oral vowels are produced without nasalization. Nasalized vowels are vowels under the influence of neighbouring sounds. For instance, the [] of the word ''hand'' is affected by the following nasal consonant. In most languages, vowels adjacent to nasal consonants are produced partially or fully with a lowered velum in a natural process of assimilation and are therefore technically nasal, but few speakers would notice. That is the case in English: vowels preceding nasal consonants are nasalized, but there is no phonemic distinction between nasal and oral vowels, and all vowels are considered phonemically oral. The nasality of nasal vowels, however, is a distinctive feature of certain languages. In other words, a language may contrast oral vowels and nasalized vowels ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Standard Chinese
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 Standard language, standardized form of Mandarin Chinese that was first developed during the Republic of China (1912–1949), Republican Era (1912‒1949). It is designated as the official language of Languages of China, mainland China and a major language in the United Nations languages, United Nations, Languages of Singapore, Singapore, and Languages of Taiwan, 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 Sinit ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Erhua
Erhua ( ); also called erization or rhotacization of syllable finals) is a phonological process that adds r-coloring or the "er" (注音：, common words: 、、) sound (transcribed in IPA as ) to syllables in spoken Mandarin Chinese. Erhuayin () is the pronunciation of "er" after rhotacization of syllable finals. It is most common in the speech varieties of North China, especially in the Beijing dialect, as a diminutive suffix for nouns, though some dialects also use it for other grammatical purposes. The Standard Chinese spoken in government-produced educational and examination recordings features erhua to some extent, as in ''nǎr'' ("where"), ''yìdiǎnr'' ("a little"), and ''hǎowánr'' ("fun"). Colloquial speech in many northern dialects has more extensive erhua than the standardized language. Southwestern Mandarin dialects such as those of Chongqing and Chengdu also have erhua. By contrast, many Southern Chinese who speak their own languages may have difficulty pronounci ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Retroflex
A retroflex ( /ˈɹɛtʃɹoːflɛks/), apico-domal ( /əpɪkoːˈdɔmɪnəl/), or cacuminal () consonant is a coronal consonant where the tongue has a flat, concave, or even curled shape, and is articulated between the alveolar ridge and the hard palate. They are sometimes referred to as cerebral consonants—especially in Indology. The Latin-derived word ''retroflex'' means "bent back"; some retroflex consonants are pronounced with the tongue fully curled back so that articulation involves the underside of the tongue tip ( subapical). These sounds are sometimes described as "true" retroflex consonants. However, retroflexes are commonly taken to include other consonants having a similar place of articulation without such extreme curling of the tongue; these may be articulated with the tongue tip (apical) or the tongue blade (laminal). Types Retroflex consonants, like other coronal consonants, come in several varieties, depending on the shape of the tongue. The tongue may be ei ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Udege Language
The Udege language (also Udihe language, Udekhe language, Udeghe language) is the language of the Udege people. It is a member of the Tungusic family. History Previously an oral language, in 1931 an alphabet was created for writing Udege as a part of latinisation in the Soviet Union. In 1938 the policy of latinisation was reversed and the written Udige language was banned by Soviet authorities. Books in Udihe were collected and burned. , an Udige language author and translator was declared an enemy of the people and executed. Vocabulary Udege contains a variety of loanwords from the closely related Nanai language, which have supplanted some older Udege vocabulary, such as: * anixe(thank you), from Nanai anixa instead of Udege sasa!-- are these also IPA?--> * (work), from Nanai , instead of Udege * (book) from Nanai , itself a loanword from zh, 檔子 (Pinyin: ), which actually means "file, records, archives" In general, a large degree of mutual assimilation of the two la ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nanai People
The Nanai people are a Tungusic people of East Asia who have traditionally lived along Heilongjiang (Amur), Songhuajiang (Sunggari) and Wusuli River on the Middle Amur Basin. The ancestors of the Nanai were the Jurchens of northernmost Manchuria (Outer Manchuria). The Nanai/Hezhe language belongs to the Manchu-Tungusic languages. According to the 2010 census there were 12,003 Nanai in Russia. Name Common names for these people include нанай/Nanai (meaning 'natives, locals, people of the land/earth'); self-designation Hezhen (means 'people of the Orient'); russian: нанайцы ; ; . There are also terms formerly in use: Goldi, Golds, Goldes, Heje, and Samagir. Own names are ( and ) and (). means 'land, earth, ground, country' or, in this context, 'native, local' and , , means 'people' in different dialects. The Russian linguist L. I. Sem gives the self-name in the Cyrillic form, ''хэǯэ най'' (''Hezhe nai'') or ''хэǯэны'' (''Hezheni''), and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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