Chinese language
The term chinese language is used for the languages that are the mother tongues of people in most regions of China, as well as some nearby regions.[1] Linguists distinguish between languages and dialects by whether they have a literature. A dialect may diverge from a language, or another dialect, to such an extent they become mutually indistinguishable. The Chinese language is a special case. China is so large, and has such a long history, that the dialects spoken in different regions grew mutually indistinguishable a very long time ago, but all the dialects are written using a single written language.
The Chinese language developed a complicated written language using tens of thousands of pictograms.[1] This places a burden on those wishing to master a large vocabulary. So a simplified set of pictograms was developed in the 20th century.
During the 19th century foreign powers, interfering in China, like the United Kingdom and France, developed transliteration schemes, for writing the Chinese names using the Latin character set. However, since all those European transliteration schemes used slightly different pronunciations for the letters in the Latin character set, their transliterations were inconsistent.[1] In 1958 Chou en-Lai tapped a friend, economist Zhou Youguang, to develop another transliteration scheme, now known as Pinyin.
Major dialects of China
[edit | edit source]The Major dialects of China include: Mandarin, Cantonese, Wu, Hokkien, Hakka, Xiang, Gan. Mandarin, the version of Chinese spoken in the region around China's current capital of Peking, is the pre-eminent version, today. Cantonese is the version of Chinese spoken in the region around Hong Kong, so most immigrants from China are from that region, and it was the best known version, outside of China, until the late 20th Century. The Chinese language relies on the tone of each phoneme to distinguish between words that otherwise sound the same. Mandarin speakers distinguish just four tones, while Cantonese speakers distinguish eight tones.
Wu is the version of the Chinese language spoken around Shanghai. Hokkien is spoken in many coastal regions, including Taiwan.
Transliteration and romanization schemes for Chinese
[edit | edit source]While Pinyin is now, by far, the most important method for writing Chinese using Latin characters, the legacy of earlier schemes remain, and remain sources of confusion. The name of the first, and most important leader of the Chinese Communist Party had his name written as Mao Tse Tung, in the Wade-Giles scheme -- not Mao Zedong. During its century of weakness Imperial China's Post Office was run by foreign government's, and the names of some major Chinese cities, like Shanghai and Hong Kong, is still written in the Post office scheme they chose. Beijing, the capital, is still written of as Peking. Chinese scholars at Yale University developed not one, but two transliteration schemes, in parallel with other schemes for English speakers, one for Mandarin, and one for Cantonese.
The old Soviet Union had enough Chinese ethnic citizens, whose mother tongue was a variety of Chinese, to start to develop a Latin transliteration scheme for them, called Latinxua Sin Wenz.
Importance of PinYin
[edit | edit source]PinYin importance was multiplied by the development of smart phone technology. It is used by Chinese language speakers to enter information in Chinese into their smart phones.
References
[edit | edit source]- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2
Margalit Fox (2017-01-14). "Zhou Youguang, Who Made Writing Chinese as Simple as ABC, Dies at 111". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 2017-01-15. Retrieved 2026-01-15.
Traditional Chinese writing, conceived more than two thousand years ago, is a logographic system, in which each word of the language is represented by a separate character. To the reader, each character conveys mainly semantic, rather than phonetic, information.