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Yǒu Biān Dú Biān
''Yǒu biān dú biān'' (), or ''dú bàn biān'' (), is a rule of thumb people use to pronounce a Chinese character when they do not know its exact pronunciation. A longer version is '，' (''yǒu biān dú biān, méi biān dú zhōngjiān''; lit. "read the side if any; read the middle part if there is no side"). Around 90% of Chinese characters are phono-semantic compounds that consist of two parts: a semantic part (often the radical) that suggests a general meaning (e.g. the part hellusually indicates that a character concerns commerce, as people used shells as currency in ancient times), and a phonetic part which shows how the character is or was pronounced (e.g. the part (pinyin: ''huáng'') usually indicates that a character is pronounced ''huáng'' in Mandarin Chinese). The phonetic part represents the exact or almost-exact pronunciation of the character when the character was first created; characters sharing the same phonetic part had identical or similar readings. Li ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rule Of Thumb
In English language, English, the phrase ''rule of thumb'' refers to an approximate method for doing something, based on practical experience rather than theory. This usage of the phrase can be traced back to the 17th century and has been associated with various Trade (occupation), trades where quantities were measured by comparison to the width or length of a thumb. An erroneous folk etymology began circulating in the 1970s falsely connecting the origins of the phrase "rule of thumb" to legal doctrine on Domestic violence, domestic abuse. The error appeared in a number of law journals, and the United States Commission on Civil Rights published a report on domestic abuse titled "Under the Rule of Thumb" in 1982. Some efforts were made to discourage the phrase, which was seen as taboo owing to this false origin. During the 1990s, several authors correctly identified the spurious folk etymology; however, the connection to domestic violence was still being cited in some legal sources ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chinese Character
Chinese characters are logographs used to write the Chinese languages and others from regions historically influenced by Chinese culture. Of the four independently invented writing systems accepted by scholars, they represent the only one that has remained in continuous use. Over a documented history spanning more than three millennia, the function, style, and means of writing characters have changed greatly. Unlike letters in alphabets that reflect the sounds of speech, Chinese characters generally represent morphemes, the units of meaning in a language. Writing all of the frequently used vocabulary in a language requires roughly 2000–3000 characters; , nearly have been identified and included in '' The Unicode Standard''. Characters are created according to several principles, where aspects of shape and pronunciation may be used to indicate the character's meaning. The first attested characters are oracle bone inscriptions made during the 13th century BCE in w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chinese Character Classification
Chinese characters are generally logographs, but can be further categorized based on the manner of their creation or derivation. Some characters may be analysed structurally as compounds created from smaller components, while some are not decomposable in this way. A small number of characters originate as pictographs and ideographs, but the vast majority are what are called ''phono-semantic compounds'', which involve an element of pronunciation in their meaning. A traditional six-fold classification scheme was originally popularized in the 2nd century CE, and remained the dominant lens for analysis for almost two millennia, but with the benefit of a greater body of historical evidence, recent scholarship has variously challenged and discarded those categories. In older literature, Chinese characters are often referred to as "ideographs", inheriting a historical misconception of Egyptian hieroglyphs. Overview Chinese characters have been used in several different wri ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Radical (Chinese Character)
A radical (), or indexing component, is a visually prominent component of a Chinese character under which the character is traditionally listed in a Chinese dictionary. The radical for a character is typically a semantic component, but it can also be another structural component or an artificially extracted portion of the character. In some cases, the original semantic or phonological connection has become obscure, owing to changes in the meaning or pronunciation of the character over time. The use of the English term ''radical'' is based on an analogy between the structure of Chinese characters and the inflection of words in European languages. Radicals are also sometimes called ''classifiers'', but this name is more commonly applied to the grammatical measure words in Chinese. History In the earliest Chinese dictionaries, such as the '' Erya'' (3rd centuryBC), characters were grouped together in broad semantic categories. Because the vast majority of characters are pho ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pinyin
Hanyu Pinyin, or simply pinyin, officially the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet, is the most common romanization system for Standard Chinese. ''Hanyu'' () literally means 'Han Chinese, Han language'—that is, the Chinese language—while ''pinyin'' literally means 'spelled sounds'. Pinyin is the official romanization system used in China, Singapore, Taiwan, and by the United Nations. Its use has become common when transliterating Standard Chinese mostly regardless of region, though it is less ubiquitous in Taiwan. It is used to teach Standard Chinese, normally written with Chinese characters, to students in mainland China and Singapore. Pinyin is also used by various Chinese input method, input methods on computers and to lexicographic ordering, categorize entries in some Chinese dictionaries. In pinyin, each Chinese syllable is spelled in terms of an optional initial (linguistics), initial and a final (linguistics), final, each of which is represented by one or more letters. Initi ... [...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] |
Historical Chinese Phonology
Historical Chinese phonology deals with reconstructing the sounds of Chinese from the past. As Chinese is written with logographic characters, not alphabetic or syllabary, the methods employed in Historical Chinese phonology differ considerably from those employed in, for example, Indo-European linguistics; reconstruction is more difficult because, unlike Indo-European languages, no phonetic spellings were used. Chinese is documented over a long period of time, with the earliest oracle bone writings dated to c. 1250 BC. However, since the writing is mostly with logographic characters, which do not directly specify the phonology of the language, reconstruction is in general quite difficult, and depends to a large extent on ancillary sources that more directly document the language's phonology. On the basis of these sources, historical Chinese is divided into the following basic periods: *Old Chinese, broadly from about 1250 BC to 25 AD, when the Han dynasty came back to power a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sound Change
In historical linguistics, a sound change is a change in the pronunciation of a language. A sound change can involve the replacement of one speech sound (or, more generally, one phonetic feature value) by a different one (called phonetic change) or a more general change to the speech sounds that exist (''phonological change''), such as the merger of two sounds or the creation of a new sound. A sound change can eliminate the affected sound, or a new sound can be added. Sound changes can be environmentally conditioned if the change occurs in only some sound environments, and not others. The term "sound change" refers to diachronic changes, which occur in a language's sound system. On the other hand, " alternation" refers to changes that happen synchronically (within the language of an individual speaker, depending on the neighbouring sounds) and do not change the language's underlying system (for example, the ''-s'' in the English plural can be pronounced differently depend ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Qiu Xigui
Qiu Xigui (; (13 July 1935 – 8 May 2025) was a Chinese historian, palaeographer, and professor of Fudan University. His book ''Chinese Writing'' is considered the "single most influential study of Chinese palaeography". Early life and education Qiu Xigui was born in July 1935 in Shanghai, of Ningbo ancestry. In 1952, he was admitted to the history department of Fudan University and was interested in pre- Qin dynasty Chinese history. Under the influence of the renowned oracle bone expert Hu Houxuan, he took interest in the oracle bones and Chinese bronze inscriptions. After graduating in 1956, he became a graduate student of oracle bones and Shang dynasty history, studying under Professor Hu. The same year, Hu was transferred to the Institute of History of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, and Qiu followed Hu to the institute. Career After finishing his graduate studies in 1960, Qiu was assigned to be a teaching assistant in the Department of Chinese of Peking Un ... [...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] |
Chinese Dictionary
There are two types of dictionaries regularly used in the Chinese language: list individual Chinese characters, and list words and phrases. Because tens of thousands of characters have been used in written Chinese, Chinese lexicographers have developed a number of methods to order and sort characters to facilitate more convenient reference. Chinese dictionaries have been published for over two millennia, beginning in the Han dynasty. This is the longest lexicographical history of any language. In addition to works for Mandarin Chinese, beginning with the 1st-century CE '' Fangyan'' dictionaries also been created for the many varieties of Chinese. One of the most influential Chinese dictionaries ever published was the '' Kangxi Dictionary'', finished in 1716 during the Qing dynasty, with the list of 214 Kangxi radicals it popularized are still widely used. Terminology The general term ''cishu'' ( zh, links=no, t=辭書, p=císhū, l=lexicographic books) semantically encompasse ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ximending
Ximending is a neighborhood and shopping district in the Wanhua District of Taipei, Taiwan. The Ximending Pedestrian Area was the first pedestrian zone constructed in Taipei and remains the largest in Taiwan. History Name The area is named after the administrative division , which existed during the Japanese rule, referring to an area outside the west gate of the city. The area of Seimon-chō included modern-day Chengdu Road (), Xining South Road (), Kunming Street (), and Kangding Road (). Today, the Ximending Pedestrian Area not only includes Seimon-chō but also Wakatake-chō () and Shinki-chō (). The historical spelling of this area was Hsimenting, which is based on the Wade–Giles romanization of Standard Chinese. The use of the character is unusual in a Chinese context: it denotes a chō (a part of a ward) in the Japanese municipality system. Theater street Ximending became a well-known theater street in Taipei in the 1930s and grew even more prosperous after the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
