|
Sinitic Languages
The Sinitic languages (), often synonymous with the Chinese languages, are a language group, group of East Asian analytic languages that constitute a major branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. It is frequently proposed that there is a primary split between the Sinitic languages and the rest of the family (the Tibeto-Burman languages). This view is rejected by some researchers but has found phylogenetic support among others. The Macro-Bai languages, whose classification is difficult, may be an offshoot of Old Chinese and thus Sinitic; otherwise, Sinitic is defined only by the many varieties of Chinese unified by a shared historical background, and usage of the term "Sinitic" may reflect the linguistic view that Chinese language, Chinese constitutes a family of distinct languages, rather than variants of a single language. Population Over 91% of the Chinese population speaks a Sinitic language, of whom about three-quarters speak a Mandarin variety. Estimates of the number ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
East Asia
East Asia is a geocultural region of Asia. It includes China, Japan, Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea, and Taiwan, plus two special administrative regions of China, Hong Kong and Macau. The economies of Economy of China, China, Economy of Japan, Japan, Economy of South Korea, South Korea, and Economy of Taiwan, Taiwan are among the world's largest and most prosperous. East Asia borders North Asia to the north, Southeast Asia to the south, South Asia to the southwest, and Central Asia to the west. To its east is the Pacific Ocean. East Asia, especially History of China, Chinese civilization, is regarded as one of the earliest Cradle of civilization#China, cradles of civilization. Other ancient civilizations in East Asia that still exist as independent countries in the present day include the History of Japan, Japanese, History of Korea, Korean, and History of Mongolia, Mongolian civilizations. Various other civilizations existed as independent polities in East Asia in the past ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mandarin Chinese
Mandarin ( ; zh, s=, t=, p=Guānhuà, l=Mandarin (bureaucrat), officials' speech) is the largest branch of the Sinitic languages. Mandarin varieties are spoken by 70 percent of all Chinese speakers over a large geographical area that stretches from Yunnan in the southwest to Xinjiang in the northwest and Heilongjiang in the northeast. Its spread is generally attributed to the greater ease of travel and communication in the North China Plain compared to the more mountainous south, combined with the relatively recent spread of Mandarin to frontier areas. Many varieties of Mandarin, such as Southwestern Mandarin, those of the Southwest (including Sichuanese dialects, Sichuanese) and the Lower Yangtze Mandarin, Lower Yangtze, are not mutually intelligible with the Beijing dialect (or are only partially intelligible). Nevertheless, Mandarin as a group is often placed first in lists of languages by number of native speakers (with nearly one billion). Because Mandarin originated in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dialect Continuum
A dialect continuum or dialect chain is a series of Variety (linguistics), language varieties spoken across some geographical area such that neighboring varieties are Mutual intelligibility, mutually intelligible, but the differences accumulate over distance so that widely separated varieties may not be. This is a typical occurrence with widely spread languages and language families around the world, when these languages did not spread recently. Some prominent examples include the Indo-Aryan languages across large parts of India, varieties of Arabic across north Africa and southwest Asia, the Turkic languages, the varieties of Chinese, and parts of the Romance languages, Romance, Germanic languages, Germanic and Slavic languages, Slavic families in Europe. Terms used in older literature include dialect area (Leonard Bloomfield) and L-complex (Charles F. Hockett). Dialect continua typically occur in long-settled agrarian populations, as innovations spread from their various poin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jerry Norman (sinologist)
Jerry Lee Norman (July 16, 1936 – July 7, 2012) was an American sinologist and linguist known for his studies of varieties of Chinese, particularly Min varieties, and also of the Manchu language. Norman had a large impact on Chinese linguistics, and was largely responsible for establishing the importance of Min varieties in the reconstruction of Old Chinese. Life and career Jerry Norman was born on July 16, 1936, in Watsonville, California. His family were migrant farmers who had fled the Dust Bowl conditions of Oklahoma in the mid-1930s. Norman entered the University of Chicago in the autumn of 1954 and majored in Russian, but was forced to withdraw after two years because of financial problems. He was briefly a Catholic novitiate, then joined the U.S. Army and began studying at the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center in Monterey, California, where he was first introduced to the Chinese language. After completing his military service, Norman enrolled ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dungan Language
Dungan ( or ) is a Sinitic language spoken primarily in the Chu Valley of southeastern Kazakhstan and northern Kyrgyzstan. It is the native language of the Dungan people, a Hui subgroup that fled Qing China in the 19th century. It evolved from the Central Plains Mandarin variety spoken in Gansu and Shaanxi. It is the only Sino-Tibetan language to be officially written in the Cyrillic script. In addition, the Dungan language contains loanwords and archaisms not found in other modern varieties of Mandarin. History The Dungan people of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan (with smaller groups living in other post-Soviet states) are the descendants of several groups of the Hui people that migrated to the region in the 1870s and the 1880s after the defeat of the Dungan revolt in Northwestern China. The Hui of Northwestern China (often referred to as "Dungans" or "Tungani" by 19th-century western writers, as well as by some Turkic peoples) would normally speak the same Mandarin dialect a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pinghua Chinese
Pinghua is a pair of Sinitic languages spoken mainly in parts of Guangxi, with some speakers in Hunan. Pinghua is a trade language in some areas of Guangxi, spoken as a second language by speakers of Zhuang languages. Some speakers are officially classified as Zhuang, and many are genetically distinct from most other Han Chinese. The northern subgroup is centered on Guilin and the southern subgroup around Nanning. The Southern dialect has several notable features such as having four distinct checked tones, and using various loanwords from the Zhuang languages, such as the final particle '' wei'' for imperative sentences. History Historically, Pinghua is associated with the earliest Han Chinese migrants who entered Guangxi via Hunan in the 1st millennium AD. The name is said to derive from the Pingnan Jun (平南軍, "Pacify the South Army"), a Northern Song-era army led by Di Qing in the 11th century. Classification Language surveys in Guangxi during the 1950s recorded va ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Huizhou Chinese
Huizhou (), or the Hui dialect (), is a group of Sinitic languages spoken in and around the historical region of Huizhou (for which it is named), in about ten or so mountainous counties in southern Anhui, plus a few more in neighbouring Zhejiang and Jiangxi. Although the Hui area is small compared with other Chinese dialect groups, it displays a very high degree of internal variation, and the lect is also situated near many mutually unintelligible varieties, making its classification difficult. It has been previously grouped with Huai, Wu, and Gan, and some even believe that it does not even constitute a singular language family. Classification Huizhou Chinese was originally classified as Lower Yangtze Mandarin but it is currently classified separately from it. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences supported the separation of Huizhou from Lower Yangtze Mandarin in 1987. Its classification is disputed, with some linguists, such as Matisoff classifying it as Wu Chinese, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gan Chinese
Gan, Gann or Kan is a group of Sinitic languages spoken natively by many people in the Jiangxi province of China, as well as significant populations in surrounding regions such as Hunan, Hubei, Anhui, and Fujian. Gan is a member of the Sinitic languages of the Sino-Tibetan language family, and Hakka is the closest Chinese variety to Gan in terms of phonetics. There are different dialects of Gan; the Nanchang dialect is the prestige dialect. Classification Like all other varieties of Chinese, there is a large amount of mutual unintelligibility between Gan Chinese and other varieties. Within the variation of Chinese dialects, Gan has more similarities with Mandarin than with Yue or Min. However, Gan clusters more with Xiang than Mandarin. Gan and other Southern Chinese languages can be distinguished from Northern Chinese by their placement of direct objects before indirect objects. Gan's ditransitive verbs introduce the theme right after the verb, while Mandarin's ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Xiang Chinese
Xiang or Hsiang ( Chinese: 湘; Changsha Xiang: , Mandarin: ), also known as Hunanese, is a group of linguistically similar and historically related Sinitic languages, spoken mainly in Hunan province but also in northern Guangxi and parts of neighboring Guizhou, Guangdong, Sichuan, Jiangxi and Hubei provinces. Scholars divided Xiang into five subgroups: Lou–Shao (Old Xiang), Chang–Yi (New Xiang), Chen–Xu or Ji–Xu, Hengzhou, and Yong–Quan. Among those, Lou–Shao, or Old Xiang, still exhibits the three-way distinction of Middle Chinese obstruents, preserving the voiced stops, fricatives, and affricates. Xiang has also been heavily influenced by Mandarin, which adjoins three of the four sides of the Xiang-speaking territory, and Gan in Jiangxi Province, from where a large population immigrated to Hunan during the Ming dynasty. Xiang-speaking Hunanese people have played an important role in Modern Chinese history, especially in those reformatory and revolutionary m ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hakka Chinese
Hakka ( zh, c=, p=Kèjiāhuà; '' Pha̍k-fa-sṳ: '', zh, c=, p=Kèjiāyǔ; '' Pha̍k-fa-sṳ: '') forms a language group of varieties of Chinese, spoken natively by the Hakka people in parts of Southern China, Taiwan, some diaspora areas of Southeast Asia and in overseas Chinese communities around the world. Due to its primary usage in isolated regions where communication is limited to the local area, Hakka has developed numerous varieties or dialects, spoken in different provinces, such as Guangdong, Guangxi, Hainan, Fujian, Sichuan, Hunan, Jiangxi, Guizhou, as well as in Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia. Hakka is not mutually intelligible with Yue, Wu, Min, Mandarin or other branches of Chinese, and itself contains a few mutually unintelligible varieties. It is most closely related to Gan and is sometimes classified as a variety of Gan, with a few northern Hakka varieties even being partially mutually intelligible with southern Gan. There is also ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jin Chinese
Jin () is a group of Chinese linguistic varieties spoken by roughly 48 million people in northern China, including most of Shanxi province, much of central Inner Mongolia, and adjoining areas in Hebei, Henan, and Shaanxi provinces. The status of Jin is disputed among linguists; some prefer to include it within Mandarin, but others set it apart as a closely related but separate sister group. Classification After the concept of Mandarin Chinese was proposed, the Jin dialects were universally included within it, mainly because Chinese linguists paid little attention to these dialects at the time. In order to promote Standard Mandarin in the early days of People's Republic of China, linguists started to research various dialects in Shanxi, comparing these dialects with Standard Mandarin for helping the locals to learn it more quickly. During this period, a few linguists discovered some unique features of Jin Chinese that do not exist in other northern Mandarin dialects, planting t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
