Chinese
TAGS: Chinese, Language
Exploring Chinese and Chinese words.
Intro
The Chinese language (Zhongwen) has a fairly consistent written language (wen) but many different dialects (yu or fangyan).
Standard Mandarin (Putonghua) is the official spoken dialect of the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China on Taiwan, Malaysia and Singapore. Standard Mandarin is based upon the Mandarin (Beifanghua "Northern speech" or Beifang fangyan "Northern dialects") group of dialects. There are many other Chinese dialects and dialect groups, but the next two largest groups are Wu and Cantonese (Yue).
Vernacular Chinese (baihua "plain language") is based upon Standard Mandarin. Historically Vernacular Chinese followed Classical Chinese (wenyan) which followed Old/Archaic Chinese.
A Chinese word or phrase (ci) is a unit of meaning that is represented by one or more characters (zi). Chinese characters or Han characters (Hanji. Kanji in Japanese. Hanja or hamun in Korean. Han tu in Vietnamese) are logographs that are either pictograms (pictorial representations of a word or morpheme) or ideograms are graphical approximations of abstract ideas.
Chinese has no syllabic symbols such as the Hiragana and Katakana of Japanese. Chinese has no alphabetic symbols such as the alphabet of English.
Most Chinese words are now Romanized using Pinyin (usu. Hanyu Pinyin, i.e. Romanization of Standard Mandarin). The older Wade-Giles (WG) Romanization system was widely influential and many common Chinese words are popularly known by the WG Romanization instead of the Pinyin Romanization. Other Romanization systems for Chinese include Yale, Guoinll, Zhuyin Fuhao (aka BoPoMoFo), and Gwoyeu Romatzyh (aka GR). Of course there are many people and entities who Romanized Chinese, but were are not linguists.
Tone is very important as this great Pinyin example from Wikipedia [Ref] shows:
- 妈, mā, ma with macron (ˉ), ma1,, "mother"
- 麻, má, ma with acute accent (ˊ), ma2, "hemp"
- 马, mǎ, ma with caron (ˇ), ma3, "horse"
- 骂, mà, ma with grave accent (ˋ), ma4, "insult"
- 吗, ma, ma with no accent or diacritical mark, ma5, a question particle
Here are the most popular character encodings used for Chinese:
- Unicode. Probably utf-8 or utf-16 (i.e. utf-16LE).
- Traditional Chinese. big5.
- Simplified Chinese. gb; gbk; hz;
Glossary
Chinese Numbers
| Traditional [or Simplified] | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 100 | 1,000 | 10,000 | 100,000,000 |
| Regular |  or 0 |
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 or  |
 or  |
| Formal (Daxie) | or 0 |
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 or  |
 or  |
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 or  |
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or |
or |
| Pinyin | ling2 | yi1 | er4 | san1 | si4 | wu3 | liu4 | qi1 | ba1 | jiu3 | shi2 | bai3 | qian1 | wan4 | yi4 |
Some shorthand: 
(nian4) for twenty and 
(sa4) for thirty.
See more at Chinese Numbers [MandarinTools.com/numbers.html].
Miscellany
- ching
- ying (Pinyin). "classic", usu. a classical work. EG: I Ching.
- di (ti)
- Fraternal love. The cultivated feeling toward one's contemporaries.
- feng shui
- \fung schway\. Interior design and landscaping that utilizes Chinese chi concepts.
- I Ching
-
易经 (Simplified), 易經 (Traditional), Yi4 Jing1 (Pinyin). Aka I Jing; Yi Ching; Yi King; The Book of Changes; Classic of Changes. A pre-Confucian book, the oldest of the Chinese classical texts. I Ching theory is roughly the balance of opposites (Yin (陰 or 阴) and Yang (陽 or 阳)) and acceptance of change. I have to verify the concept of Wuji (balanced Yin and Yang) because some major Yin Yang sources don't mention Wuji at all. The I Ching is often associated with the Tai Chi Symbol (太極圖, tàijítú (Pinyin), Unicode x262F (9775): ☯).
Yin Yang broken or open line
¦ -- :unbroken or solid line
| —moon sun night day dark light cool warm rest active feminine masculine north south west east winter summer autumn spring right left introversion extroversion earth heaven - jen
- ren (Pinyin). Human-heartedness. Natural and humanistic love, based upon spontaneous feelings cultivated through education. Intuition, a kind of moral insight that results from ethical education and life experience that provides a reliable evaluation of the scene of life.
- junzi (chun-tzu)
- Superior or perfect person.
- li
- Social norms. Rituals, rites, and proprieties. The behavioral norms in terms of which one's cultivated feelings is expressed.
- Lunyu (Lun-yu)
- Analects. A collection of notes and quotations written by the disciples of Confucius.
- Tao Te Ching
- Dao De Ching (Pinyin), Classic of the Way and Virtue.
- wúcháng
- Buddhist impermanence. The bittersweet impermanence of things.
- wuwei (wu-wei)
- Non-action.
- yi (i)
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(1) Righteousness or proper character. The habitual practice of expressing one's cultivated feeling at the right times and in the right places.
(2)易. Yì. As an adjective, "easy" or "simple". As a verb, "to change". - xiao (hsiao)
- Filial piety. The cultivated feeling towards one's parents.
- yuhangyuan
- "travelers of the universe". An astronaut. A popular English variation is taikonaut, after taikong, the Chinese word for space.
- zhengming (cheng ming)
- Rectification of names. The enforcement of yi in the use of li.
- zhong (chung)
- Loyalty. The cultivated feeling toward one's superiors, lord, emperor, employers, or one's own country.
Links
Here are links that lead to off-site pages about Chinese.
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Travel
- TheBeijingGuide.com. 'The Beijing Guide uses 360° panoramas, original Chinese music, audio of Chinese phrases, video, photography and humor to actively show travelers aspects of Chinese culture in which they can participate.'
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Miscellany
- Chinese Character Sets [geocities.com/dtmcbride/tech/charsets/chinese.html].
- Chinese Cultural Studies: Pinyin/Wade-Giles Names [http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~phalsall/texts/chinlng3.html]
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Lingo24.com. A translation company with some free online services. Good use of unicode on their site.
- ContexTrans. As of 2007-01: 'Our system currently supports English to Arabic, Arabic to English, English to Chinese, and Chinese to English translations. More language combinations will be available in the future.'
- MandarinTools.com. "These pages hope to provide tools to assist people in learning and using the beautiful Chinese language."
- Wade-Giles and Pinyin Equivalents [http://www.m.isar.de/denner/neijia/romanisation/wpeAll.html]. Seems to have a martial arts emphasis.
- Wikipedia.org
- Zhongwen.com. "Zhongwen.com contains the complete text of Amazon's bestselling Chinese-English dictionary, : Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary, which uses the new zipu system of character trees."
2007-10-23 01:21:02Z