Chinese Demystified

The notion of Chinese as referring to both the language and the people is quite misleading. From a linguistic point of view, the term of Chinese covers a group of languages, including Mandarin and Cantonese, among others. They are, to a great extent, mutually unintelligible, perhaps more so than Italian and French. In addition to phonological differences, they have also some lexical and grammatical variations.

However, Chinese people themselves prefer to call these languages dialects, or in their own words, FangYan (literally, regional speech). Why so? Well, Chinese makes a distinction between langue and parole. Langue is referred to as Yu whereas parole as Yan. Together Yuyan means language. Now how do Chinese call Chinese? They call it Hanyu. Han refers to the most populous nationality of Chinese people - over 90% of Chinese are Han. Very often Chinese is synonymous with Han. When a Chinese says "Hanyu you ba da fangyan", it means "Chinese has eight major regional dialects." Bear in mind, though, each so-called (regional) dialect also has many sub-dialects.

While we continue to use the term Chinese, it should be understood that we are using it to refer to the Han language. To facilitate better communication, China has established a standard official language based on the Mandarin dialect spoken in the Beijing area. In the old days, it was called Guanhua (literally, official speech). Nowadays, it is better known as Putonghua (literally, common speech) in mainland China and Guoyu (literally, national language) in Taiwan and other Chinese-speaking communities.

There is another word in Chinese referring to the Chinese language, i.e. Zhongwen. The first morpheme, Zhong, meaning 'central', is also the first morpheme in Zhongguo, the Chinese word for the country of China, which literally means 'central kingdom' or 'central country'. The morpheme Wen can mean either written language or literature. In this sense, Zhongwen really means the written language of Chinese. However, it is not uncommon to hear the question "Can you speak Zhongwen?". Here Zhongwen can mean any language or dialect of Chinese.

Chinese Writing System

All Chinese dialects (or languages if you insist on being linguistically correct) share a common writing system. This common writing system makes it possible for speakers of mutually unintelligible dialects of Chinese to be able to communicate with each other by writing.

Chinese is written in characters, known as Hanzi in Chinese. Each character corresponds to one syllable (but not vice versa of course). There are literally tens of thousands of Chinese characters, though knowledge of 2 or 3 thousand is good enough for everyday use of writing Chinese. Chinese characters are written in strokes such as dots, horizontal and vertical lines, etc, and the number of strokes in a any given character can vary from one to over twenty. These strokes are not randomly organized, of course. Chinese characters can be classified into 4 basic types:

• Pictographs(): picture-like characters such as   for 'man'. The number of pictographs is really small - only a couple of hundred, and some of them have changed their shape so much over the time that their meaning is hardly discernible.
• Ideographs(): those that suggest abstract meaning such as for 'one'. Again there is only a small number of them.
• Logical aggregates(): those that combine the meanings of two or more characters to form a new meaning. For example, ('daughter') and ('son') are combined to form the character , meaning 'good'.
• Phonetic complexes(): the largest percentage of Chinese characters. They combine the meaning of one character with the sound of another. For example, in the character , meaning 'squid', the meaning of 'fish' is associated with the left character while the right character provides the pronunciation - and are pronounced the same.

Because the majority of Chinese characters are phonetic complexes, learning to pronounce them is not as difficult as one would think.

A term that you may frequently encounter is the radical. A radical can be either a semantic or phonetic part of a Chinese characters. In a typical Chinese dictionary, Chinese characters are grouped according to their radicals. Under each radical, characters are arranged according to the number of strokes they contain (usually excluding the radical). If you want to look up a Chinese character for pronunciation in a Chinese dictionary, you must know its radical to quickly find it.

There is no space between words in Chinese writing. While this may look strange to a speaker whose native language is written alphabetically, putting a space between words will actually slow down the reading speed of a Chinese reader. Maybe this has something to do with the writing and reading habit.

Simplified vs. Traditional Characters

In the 1950's and 1960's mainland China 'simplified' many Chinese characters (mostly common characters) by reducing the number of strokes they contain as an attempt to ease the burden of education (perhaps with some political motivation as well). It is, however, a misconception that mainland China 'coined' those simplified characters. In fact, many of those simplified forms had been in use but were not considered standard.

Simplified characters are used in mainland China and Singapore whereas traditional characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong and most other Chinese-speaking communities.

Romanization

Several systems of transcribing Chinese characters into the Roman alphabet have been developed. The Wade-Giles system was designed in the 19th century to help foreigners to learn how to pronounce Chinese characters. Most libraries outside of China still uses this system.

In 1950's mainland China adopted a new system, often known as Pinyin (literally meaning 'putting together the sounds'). Pinyin is used to transcribe the standard Mandarin, i.e., Putonghua. Therefore, it is widely used in China's schools to teach children the correct pronunciation of Putonghua. It has now become an international standard for transcribing Chinese into the Roman alphabet. Most Chinese dictionaries published in mainland China and oversees are arranged in the Pinyin order, making it much easier to look up a word if you already know the pronunciation.

In 1913 the Republic of China adopted a non-Roman alphabetic system, which somewhat looks like the Japanese alphabets. This system, often known as 'bopomofo' (referring to the first four letters in the system), is still used in Taiwan.

Chines Morphology and Phonology

While it might be true that ancient Chinese was mono-morphemic, modern Chinese words are often of two or more morphemes. The majority of Chinese words are bi-morphemic.

Most Chinese morphemes are mono-syllabic. Multi-syllabic words are very often loan words, borrowed from foreign languages in both ancient and modern times.

The syllable structure of Mandarin Chinese is (CG)V(X) where C is the initial consonant, G is the medial glide, V is the nuclear vowel, and the X can be a glide or one of the two velar and alveolar nasals. When X is a glide, VX is actually a diphthong. Traditionally, C is called the initial, and the rest is called the final.

Chinese is a tonal language. In the standard Mandarin, there are four tones, high level, high rising, fall-rising, and high falling. Several systems exist to represent the tones. In the Pinyin system, diacritics are used on each syllable to indicate the tone. Another way is to represent the pitch register according to a scale of five levels, with 5 being the highest and 1 the lowest. Nowadays, it has become a common practice to simply use the numbers 1 to 4 to represent the four tones (in that order). Some syllables (usually light syllables) do not have inherent tones - the actual pitch is affected by the surrounding tones (usually the preceding syllable's tone). In the Pinyin, they do not have any diacritics. In the simple number system, 5 is often used.