Chinese languages

or Sinitic languages

Family of languages comprising one of the two branches of Sino-Tibetan.

They are spoken by about 95% of the inhabitants of China and by many communities of Chinese immigrants elsewhere. Linguists regard the major dialect groups of Chinese as distinct languages, though because all Chinese write with a common system of ideograms, or characters (see Chinese writing system), and share Classical Chinese as a heritage, traditionally all varieties of Chinese are regarded as dialects. There is a primary division in Chinese languages between the so-called Mandarin dialects

which have a high degree of mutual intelligibility and cover all of the Chinese speech area north of the Yangtze River (Chang Jiang) and west of Hunan and Guangdong provinces

and a number of other dialect groups concentrated in southeastern China. Far more people

more than 885 million

speak a variety of Mandarin Chinese as a first language than any other language in the world. The northern Mandarin dialect of Beijing is the basis for Modern Standard Chinese, a spoken norm that serves as a supradialectal lingua franca. Important dialect groups other than Mandarin are Wu (spoken in Shanghai), Gan, Xiang, Min (spoken in Fujian and Taiwan), Yue (including Cantonese, spoken in Guangzhou [Canton] and Hong Kong), and Kejia (Hakka), spoken by the Hakka. The modern Chinese languages are tone languages, the number of tones varying from four in Modern Standard Chinese to nine in some dialects.

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Introduction

also called  Sinitic languages , Chinese  Han  

      principal language group of eastern Asia, belonging to the Sino-Tibetan language family (Sino-Tibetan languages). Chinese exists in a number of varieties that are popularly called dialects but that are usually classified as separate languages by scholars. More people speak a variety of Chinese as a native language than any other language in the world, and Modern Standard Chinese is one of the six official languages of the United Nations.

      The spoken varieties of Chinese are mutually unintelligible to their respective speakers. They differ from each other to about the same extent as the modern Romance languages. Most of the differences among them occur in pronunciation and vocabulary; there are few grammatical differences. These languages include Mandarin (Mandarin language) in the northern, central, and western parts of China; Wu (Wu language); Northern and Southern Min (Min languages); Gan (Gan language) (Kan); Hakka (Hakka language) (Kejia); and Xiang (Xiang language); and Cantonese (Cantonese language) (Yue) in the southeastern part of the country.

      All the Chinese languages share a common literary language (wenyan), written in characters and based on a common body of literature. This literary language has no single standard of pronunciation; a speaker of a language reads texts according to the rules of pronunciation of his own language. Before 1917 the wenyan was used for almost all writing; since that date it has become increasingly acceptable to write in the vernacular style ( baihua) instead, and the old literary language is dying out in the daily life of modern China. (Its use continues in certain literary and scholarly circles.)

      In the early 1900s a program for the unification of the national language, which is based on Mandarin, was launched; this resulted in Modern Standard Chinese. In 1956 a new system of romanization called Pinyin (Pinyin romanization), based on the pronunciation of the characters in the Beijing dialect, was adopted as an educational instrument to help in the spread of the modern standard language. Modified in 1958, the system was formally prescribed (1979) for use in all diplomatic documents and foreign-language publications in English-speaking countries.

      Some scholars divide the history of the Chinese languages into Proto-Sinitic (Proto-Chinese; until 500 BC), Archaic (Old) Chinese (8th to 3rd century BC), Ancient (Middle) Chinese (through AD 907), and Modern Chinese (from c. the 10th century to modern times). The Proto-Sinitic period is the period of the most ancient inscriptions and poetry; most loanwords in Chinese were borrowed after that period. The works of Confucius and Mencius mark the beginning of the Archaic Chinese period. Modern knowledge of the sounds of Chinese during the Ancient Chinese period is derived from a pronouncing dictionary of the language of the Ancient period published in AD 601 by the scholar Lu Fayan and also from the works of the scholar-official Sima Guang, published in the 11th century.

      The sound system of Chinese is marked by its use of tones to indicate differences of meaning between words or syllables that are otherwise identical in sound (i.e., have the same consonants and vowels). Modern Standard Chinese has four tones, while the more archaic Cantonese language uses at least six tones, as did Ancient Chinese. Chinese words often have only one syllable, although modern Chinese makes greater use of compounds than did the earlier language. In Chinese compound words, few prefixes or infixes occur, but there are a great number of suffixes. Few words end in a consonant, except in such archaic dialects as Cantonese. A Chinese word is invariable in form (i.e., it has no inflectional (inflection) markers or markers to indicate parts of speech) and, within the range allowed by its intrinsic meaning, can serve as any part of speech. Because there is no word inflection in the language, there is a fixed word order. Person and number are expressed in the pronoun rather than in the verb. Chinese has no definite article (i.e., no word meaning ‘the'), although the word meaning ‘one' and the demonstrative adjective are sometimes used as articles in the language today. Adjectives, which are probably of verbal origin, are not inflected for degree of comparison and may be used as adverbs without any change of form.

Linguistic characteristics

      All modern Sinitic languages—i.e., the “Chinese dialects”—share a number of important typological features. They have a maximum syllabic structure of the type consonant–semivowel–vowel–semivowel–consonant. Some languages lack one set of semivowels, and, in some, gemination (doubling) or clustering of vowels occurs. The languages also employ a system of tones (pitch and contour), with or without concomitant glottal features, and occasionally stress. For the most part, tones are lexical (i.e., they distinguish otherwise similar words); in some languages tones also carry grammatical meaning. Nontonal grammatical units (i.e., affixes) may be smaller than syllables, but usually the meaningful units consist of one or more syllables. Words can consist of one syllable, of two or more syllables each carrying an element of meaning, or of two or more syllables that individually carry no meaning. For example, Modern Standard Chinese tian ‘sky, heaven, day' is a one-syllable word; ritou ‘sun' is composed of ri ‘sun, day,' a word element that cannot occur alone as a word, and the noun suffix tou; and hudie ‘butterfly' consists of two syllables, each having no meaning in itself (this is a rare type of word formation). The Southern languages have more monosyllabic words and word elements than the Northern ones.

      The Sinitic languages distinguish nouns and verbs with some overlapping, as do Sino-Tibetan languages in general. There are noun suffixes that form different kinds of nouns (concrete nouns, diminutives, abstract nouns, and so on), particles placed after nouns indicating relationships in time and space, and verb particles for modes and aspects. Adjectives act as one of several kinds of verbs. Verbs can occur in a series (concatenation) with irreversible order (e.g., the verbs ‘take' and ‘come' placed next to one another denote the concept ‘bring'). Nouns are collective in nature, and only classifier (Sino-Tibetan languages)s can be counted and referred to singly. Specific particles are used to indicate the relationship of nominals (e.g., nouns and noun phrases) to verbs, such as transitive verb–object, agent–passive verb; in some of the languages this system forms a sentence construction called ergative, in which all nominals are marked for their function and the verb stays unchanged. Final sentence particles convey a variety of meanings (defining either the whole sentence or the predicate) that indicate ‘question, command, surprise, or new situation.' The general word order of subject–verb–object and complement and modifier–modified is the same in all the languages, but the use of the preposed particles and verbs in a series varies considerably. Grammatical elements of equal or closely related values in various languages are very often not related in sounds.

      The Sinitic languages fall into a Northern and a Southern group. The Northern languages (Mandarin dialects) are more similar to each other than are the Southern (Wu, Xiang, Gan, Hakka, Yue, Min).

Modern Standard Chinese (Mandarin (Mandarin language))

      The pronunciation of Modern Standard Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect, which is of the Northern, or Mandarin, type. It employs about 1,300 different syllables. There are 22 initial consonants, including stops (made with momentary, complete closure in the vocal tract), affricates (beginning as stops but ending with incomplete closure), aspirated consonants, nasals, fricatives, liquid sounds (l, r), and a glottal stop. The medial semivowels are y (i), ɥ (ü), and w (u). In final position, the following occur: nasal consonants, ṛ (retroflex r), the semivowels y and w, and the combinations ŋr (nasalization plus r) and wr (rounding plus r). There are nine vowel sounds, including three varieties of i (retroflex, apical, and palatal). Several vowels combine into clusters.

      There are four tones: (1) high level, (2) high rising crescendo, (3) low falling diminuendo with glottal friction (with an extra rise from low to high when final), and (4) falling diminuendo. Unstressed syllables have a neutral tone, which depends on its surroundings for pitch. Tones in sequences of syllables that belong together lexically and syntactically (“sandhi groups”) may undergo changes known as tonal sandhi, the most important of which causes a third tone before another third tone to be pronounced as a second tone. The tones influence some vowels (notably e and o), which are pronounced more open in third and fourth tones than in first and second tones.

      A surprisingly low number of the possible combinations of all the consonantal, vocalic, and tonal sounds are utilized. The vowels i and ü and the semivowels y and ɥ never occur after velar sounds (e.g., k) and occur only after the palatalized affricate and sibilant sounds (e.g., tś), which in turn occur with no other vowels and semivowels.

       Chinese romanizations: Pinyin to Wade-Giles conversionsMany alternative interpretations of the distinctive sounds of Chinese have been proposed; the interaction of consonants, vowels, semivowels, and tones sets Modern Standard Chinese apart from many other Sinitic languages and dialects and gives it a unique character among the major languages of the world. The two most widely used transcription systems (romanizations) are Wade-Giles (Wade-Giles romanization) (first propounded by Sir Thomas Francis Wade (Wade, Sir Thomas Francis) in 1859 and later modified by Herbert A. Giles (Giles, H.A.)) and the official Chinese transcription system today, known as the pinyin zimu (Pinyin romanization) (“phonetic spelling”) or simply Pinyin (adopted in 1958). For a comparison of these romanization equivalents, see the table (Chinese romanizations: Pinyin to Wade-Giles conversions). In Wade-Giles, aspiration is marked by ' (p', t', and so on). The semivowels are y, yü, and w in initial position; i, ü, and u in medial; and i and u (but o after a) in final position. Final retroflex r is written rh. The tones are indicated by raised figures after the syllables (¹, ², ³, ⁴).

      The Pinyin system indicates unaspirated stops and affricates by means of traditionally voiced consonants (e.g., b, d) and aspirated consonants by voiceless sounds (e.g., p, t). The semivowels are y, yu, and w initially; i, ü, and u medially; and i and u (o after a) finally. Final retroflex r is written r. The tones are indicated by accent markers, 1 = ¯, 2 = ´, 3 = ˇ, 4 = ˋ (e.g., mā, má, mǎ, mà = Wade-Giles ma¹, ma², ma³, ma⁴).

      Pinyin is used in the following discussion of Modern Standard Chinese grammar.

      The most common suffixes that indicate nouns are -zi (as in fangzi ‘house'), and -tou (as in mutou ‘wood'). A set of postposed noun particles express space and time relationships (-li ‘inside,' -hou ‘after'). An example of a verbal affix is -jian in kanjian ‘see' and tingjian ‘hear.' Important verb particles are -le (completed action), -guo (past action), and -zhe (action in progress). The directional verbal particles -lai ‘toward speaker' and -qu ‘away from speaker' and some verbal suffixes can be combined with the potential particles de ‘can' and bu ‘cannot'—e.g., na chulai ‘take out,' na bu chulai ‘cannot take out'; tingjian ‘hear,' ting de jian ‘can hear.' The particle de indicates subordination and also gives nominal value to forms for other parts of speech (e.g., wo ‘I,' wode ‘mine,' wo de shu ‘my book,' lai ‘to come,' lai de ren ‘a person who comes'). The most important sentence particle is le, indicating ‘new situation' (e.g., xiayu le ‘now it is raining,' bu lai le ‘now there is no longer any chance that he will be coming'). Ge is the most common noun classifier (i ‘one,' yi ge ren ‘one person'); others are suo (yi suo fangzi ‘one house') and ben (liang ben shu ‘two books').

      Adjectives can be defined as qualitative verbs (hao ‘to be good') or stative verbs (bing ‘to be sick'). There are equational sentences with the word order subject–predicate—e.g., wo shi Beijing ren ‘I am a Beijing-person (i.e., a native of Beijing)'—and narrative sentences with the word order subject (or topic)–verb–object (or complement)—e.g., wo chifan ‘I eat rice,' wo zhu zai Beijing ‘I live in Beijing.' The preposed object takes the particle ba (wo da ta ‘I beat him,' wo ba ta dale yidun ‘I gave him a beating'), and the agent of a passive construction takes bei (wo bei ta dale yidun ‘I was given a beating by him').

Standard Cantonese

      The most important representative of the Yue languages (Cantonese language) is Standard Cantonese of Canton, Hong Kong, and Macau. It has fewer initial consonants than Modern Standard Chinese (p, t, ts, k and the corresponding aspirated sounds ph, th, tsh, kh; m, n, ŋ; f, s, h; l, y), only one medial semivowel (w), more vowels than Modern Standard Chinese, six final consonants (p, t, k, m, n, ŋ), and two final semivowels (y and w). The nasals m and ŋ occur as syllables without a vowel.

      There are three tones (high, mid, low) in syllables ending in -p, -t, and -k; six tones occur in other types of syllables (mid level, low level, high falling, low falling, high rising, low rising). Two tones are used to modify the meaning of words (high level °, and low-to-high rising *), as in yin° “tobacco” from yin “smoke,” and nöy* “daughter” from nöy “woman.” Some special grammatical words also have the tone °. There is no neutral tone and little tonal sandhi (modification).

      There are more than 2,200 different syllables in Standard Cantonese, or almost twice as many as in Modern Standard Chinese. The word classes are the same as in Modern Standard Chinese. The grammatical words, although phonetically unrelated, generally have the same semantic value (e.g., the subordinating and nominalizing particle kɛ, Modern Standard Chinese de; mo ‘not,' Modern Standard Chinese bu; the verbal particle for ‘completed action' and the sentence particle for ‘new situation,' both le in Modern Standard Chinese, are Standard Cantonese tsɔ and lɔ, respectively). A classifier preceding a noun in subject position (before the verb) functions as a definite article (e.g., tsek sün ‘the boat').

Min languages

      The most important Min language is Amoy (Xiamen) from the Southern branch of Min. The initial consonants are the same as in Standard Cantonese with the addition of two voiced stops (b and d) and one voiced affricate (dz), developed from original nasals. There are two semivowels (y, w), six vowels and several vowel clusters, plus the syllabic nasal sounds m and ŋ functioning as vowels, the same finals as in Standard Cantonese, and, in addition, a glottal stop (ʔ) and a meaning-bearing feature of nasalization, as well as a combination of the last two features. There are two tones in syllables ending in a stop, five in other syllables. Tonal sandhi operates in many combinations.

      Fuzhou is the most important language of the Northern branch of Min. The very extensive sandhi affects not only tones but also consonants and vowels, so that the phonetic manifestation of a syllable depends entirely on interaction with the surroundings. There are three initial labial sounds (p, ph, m), five dental sounds (t, th, s, l, n), three palatal sounds (tś, tśh, ń), and five velars (k, kh, h, ʔ, and ŋ). Syllables can end in -k, -ŋ, ʔ (glottal stop), a semivowel, or a vowel. The tones fall into two classes: a comparatively high class comprising high, mid, high falling, and high rising (only in sandhi forms) and a rather low one, comprising low rising and low rising-falling (circumflex). Certain vowels and diphthongs occur only with the high class, others occur only with the low class, and the vowel a occurs with both classes. Sandhi rules can cause tone to change from low class to high class, in which case the vowel also changes.

Other Sinitic languages or dialects

Hakka (Hakka language)

      Of the different Hakka dialects, Hakka of Meizhou (formerly Meixian) in Guangdong is best known. It has the same initial consonants, final consonants, and syllabic nasals as Standard Cantonese; the vowels are similar to those of Modern Standard Chinese. Medial and final semivowels are y and w. There are two tones in syllables with final stops, four in the other syllabic types.

Suzhou

      Suzhou vernacular is usually quoted as representative of the Wu languages. It is rich in initial consonants, with a contrast of voiced and voiceless stops as well as palatalized and nonpalatalized dental affricates, making 26 consonants in all. (Palatalized sounds are formed from nonpalatal sounds by simultaneous movement of the tongue toward the hard palate. Dental affricates are sounds produced with the tongue tip at first touching the teeth and then drawing slightly away to allow air to pass through, producing a hissing sound.) Medial semivowels are as in Modern Standard Chinese. In addition, there are also 10 vowels and 4 syllabic consonants (l, m, n, ŋ); -n and -ŋ occur in final position, as do the glottal stop and nasalization.

Shanghai dialect

      The Shanghai dialect belongs to Wu. The use of only two tones or registers (high and low) is prevalent; these are related in an automatic way to the initial consonant type (voiceless and voiced).

Xiang languages (Xiang language)

      The Xiang languages, spoken only in Hunan, are divided into New Xiang, which is under heavy influence from Mandarin and includes the language of the capital Changsha, and Old Xiang, more similar to the Wu languages, as spoken for instance in Shuangfeng. Old Xiang has 28 initial consonants, the highest number for any major Sinitic language, and 11 vowels, plus the syllabic consonants m and n. It also uses five tones, final -n and -ŋ, and nasalization, but no final stops.

Historical survey of Chinese

The early contacts

      Old Chinese vocabulary already contained many words not generally occurring in the other Sino-Tibetan languages. The words for ‘honey' and ‘lion,' and probably also ‘horse,' ‘dog,' and ‘goose,' are connected with Indo-European and were acquired through trade and early contacts. (The nearest known Indo-European languages were Tocharian (Tocharian languages) and Sogdian, a middle Iranian language.) A number of words have Austroasiatic (Austroasiatic languages) cognates and point to early contacts with the ancestral language of Muong-Vietnamese (Viet-Muong languages) and Mon-Khmer (Mon-Khmer languages)—e.g., the name of the Yangtze River, *kruŋ, is still the word for ‘river'—Cantonese kɔŋ, Modern Standard Chinese jiang, pronounced kroŋ and kloŋ in some modern Mon-Khmer languages. Words for ‘tiger,' ‘ivory,' and ‘crossbow' are also Austroasiatic. The names of the key terms of the Chinese calendar (“the branches”) have this same non-Chinese origin. It has been suggested that a great many cultural words that are shared by Chinese and Tai (Tai languages) are Chinese loanwords from Tai. Clearly, the Chinese received many aspects of culture and many concepts from the Austroasiatic and Austro-Tai peoples whom they gradually conquered and absorbed or expelled.

      From the 1st century AD, China's contacts with India, especially through the adoption of Buddhism, led to Chinese borrowing from Indo-Aryan (Indic) languages (Indo-Aryan languages), but, very early, native Chinese equivalents were invented. Sinitic languages have been remarkably resistant to direct borrowing of foreign words. In modern times this has led to an enormous increase in Chinese vocabulary without a corresponding increase in basic meaningful syllables. For instance, tielu ‘railroad' is based on the same concept expressed in the French chemin de fer, using tie ‘iron' and lu ‘road'; likewise, dianhua ‘telephone' is a compound of dian ‘lightning, electricity' and hua ‘speech.' A number of such words were coined first in Japanese (Japanese language) by means of Chinese elements and then borrowed back into Chinese. The reason that China has avoided the incorporation of foreign words is first and foremost a phonetic one; such words fit very badly into the Chinese (Chinese writing) pattern of pronunciation. A contributing factor has been the Chinese script (Chinese writing), which is ill-adapted to the process of phonetic loans. In creating new words for new ideas, the characters have sometimes been determined first and forms have arisen that cannot be spoken without ambiguity (‘sulfur' and ‘lutecium' coalesced as liu, ‘nitrogen' and ‘tantalum' as dan). It is characteristic of Modern Standard Chinese that the language from which it most freely borrows is one from its own past: Classical Chinese. In recent years it has borrowed from Southern Sinitic languages under the influence of statesmen and revolutionaries ( Chiang Kai-shek was originally a Wu speaker and Mao Zedong a Xiang speaker). Influence from English and Russian (in word formation and syntax) has been increasingly felt.

Pre-Classical Chinese

      The history of the Chinese language can be divided into three periods, pre-Classical (c. 1500 BC–c. AD 200), Classical (c. 200–c. 1920), and post-Classical Chinese (with important forerunners as far back as the Tang dynasty).

      The pre-Classical period is further divided into Oracular Chinese ( Shang dynasty [18th–12th centuries BC]), Archaic Chinese (Zhou and Qin dynasties [1046–207 BC]), and Han Chinese (Han dynasty [206 BC–AD 220]).

 Oracular Chinese is known only from rather brief oracle inscriptions on bones and tortoise shells. Archaic Chinese falls into Early, Middle (c. 800–c. 400 BC), and Late Archaic. Early Archaic is represented by bronze inscriptions, parts of the Shujing (“Classic of History”), and parts of the Shijing (“Classic of Poetry”). From this period on, many important features of the pronunciation of the Chinese characters have been reconstructed. The grammar depended to a certain extent on unwritten affixes. The writing system kept apart forms with or without medial consonants, which in some cases were meaningful infixes. Early Archaic Chinese possessed a third-person personal pronoun in three cases (nominative and genitive gyəg, accusative tyəg, and another special genitive kywat, used only with concepts intimately connected with the owner). No other kind of written Chinese until the post-Classical period possessed a nominative of the third-person pronoun, but the old form survived in Cantonese (khöy) and is probably also found in Tai (Modern Thai khăw).

      Middle Archaic Chinese is the language of some of the earliest writings of the Confucian (Confucianism) school. Important linguistic changes that had occurred between the Early and Middle phases became still more pronounced in Late Archaic, the language of the two major Confucian and Daoist writers, Mencius (Mengzi) and Zhuangzi, as well as of other important philosophers. The grammar by then had become more explicit in the writing system, with a number of well-defined grammatical particles, and it can also be assumed that the use of grammatical affixes had similarly declined. The process used in verb formation and verb inflection that later appeared as tonal differences may at this stage have been manifested as final consonants or as suprasegmental features, such as different types of laryngeal phonation. The word classes included nouns, verbs, and pronouns (each with several subclasses), and particles. The use of a consistent system of grammatical particles to form noun modifiers, verb modifiers, and several types of embedded sentences (i.e., sentences that are made to become parts of another independent sentence) became blurred in Han Chinese and was gone from written Chinese until the emergence of post-Classical Chinese. In Modern Standard Chinese the subordinating particle de combines the functions of several Late Archaic Chinese particles, and the verb particle le and the homophonous sentence particle le have taken over for other Late Archaic forms.

Han and Classical Chinese

      Han Chinese developed more polysyllabic words and more specific verbal and nominal (noun) categories of words. Most traces of verb formation and verb conjugation began to disappear. An independent Southern tradition (on the Yangtze River), simultaneous with Late Archaic Chinese, developed a special style, used in the poetry Chuci (“Elegies of Chu”), which was the main source for the refined fu (prose poetry). Late Han Chinese developed into Classical Chinese, which as a written idiom underwent few changes during the long span of time it was used. It was an artificial construct, which for different styles and occasions borrowed freely and heavily from any period of pre-Classical Chinese but in numerous cases without real understanding for the meaning and function of the words borrowed.

      At the same time the spoken language changed continually, as did the conventions for pronouncing the written characters. Soon Classical Chinese made little sense when read aloud. It depended heavily on fixed word order and on rhythmical and parallel passages. It has sometimes been denied the status of a real language, but it was certainly one of the most successful means of communication in human history. It was the medium in which the poets Li Bai (701–762) and Du Fu (712–770) and the prose writer Han Yu (768–824) created some of the greatest masterpieces of all times and was the language of Neo-Confucianist philosophy (especially of Zhu Xi [1130–1200]), which was to influence the West deeply. Classical Chinese was also the language in which the Italian Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci (Ricci, Matteo) (1552–1610) wrote in his attempt to convert the Chinese empire to Christianity.

Post-Classical Chinese

      Post-Classical Chinese, based on dialects very similar to the language now spoken in North China, probably owes its origin to the Buddhist (Buddhism) storytelling tradition; the tales appeared in translations from Sanskrit during the Tang dynasty (618–907). During the Song dynasty (960–1279) this vernacular language was used by both Buddhists and Confucianists for polemic writings; it also appeared in indigenous Chinese novels based on popular storytelling. During and after the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368) the vernacular was used also in the theatre.

      Modern Standard Chinese has a threefold origin: the written post-Classical language, the spoken standard of Imperial times (Mandarin), and the vernacular language of Beijing. These idioms were clearly related originally, and combining them for the purpose of creating a practical national language was a task that largely solved itself once the signal had been given. The term National Language (guoyu) had been borrowed from Japanese at the beginning of the 20th century, and, from 1915, various committees considered the practical implications of promoting it. The deciding event was the action of the May Fourth Movement of 1919; at the instigation of the liberal savant Hu Shi (Hu Shih), Classical Chinese (also known as wenyan) was rejected as the standard written language. (Hu Shi also led the vernacular literature movement of 1917; his program for literary reform appeared on Jan. 1, 1917.) The new written idiom has gained ground faster in literature than in science, but there can be no doubt that the days of Classical Chinese as a living medium are numbered. After the establishment of the People's Republic of China, some government regulation was applied successfully, and the tremendous task of making Modern Standard Chinese understood throughout China was effectively undertaken. In what must have been the largest-scale linguistic plan in history, untold millions of Chinese, whose mother tongues were divergent Mandarin or non-Mandarin languages or non-Chinese languages, learned to speak and understand the National Language, or Putonghua, a name it is now commonly called; with this effort, literacy was imparted to great numbers of people in all age groups.

The writing system (Chinese writing)

      The Chinese writing system is non-alphabetic. It applies a specific character to write each meaningful syllable or each nonmeaningful syllabic that is part of a polysyllabic word.

Pre-Classical characters

      When the Chinese script first appeared, as used for writing Oracular Chinese (from c. 1500 BC), it must already have undergone considerable development. Although many of the characters can be recognized as originally depicting some object, many are no longer recognizable. The characters did not indicate the object in a primitive nonlinguistic way but only represented a specific word of the Chinese language (e.g., a picture of the phallic altar to the earth is used only to write the word earth). It is therefore misleading to characterize the Chinese script as pictographic or ideographic; nor is it truly syllabic, for syllables that sound alike but have different meanings are written differently. Logographic (i.e., marked by a letter, symbol, or sign used to represent an entire word) is the term that best describes the nature of the Chinese writing system.

      Verbs and nouns are written by what are or were formerly pictures, often consisting of several elements (e.g., the character for ‘to love' depicts a woman and a child; the character for ‘beautiful' is a picture of a man with a huge headdress with ram's horns on top). The exact meaning of the word is rarely deducible from even a clearly recognizable picture, because the connotations are either too broad or too narrow for the word's precise meaning. For example, the picture ‘relationship of mother to child' includes more facets than ‘love,' a concept that, of course, is not restricted to the mother-child relation, and a man adorned with ram's horns undoubtedly had other functions than that of being handsome to look at, whereas the concept ‘beautiful' is applicable also to men in other situations, as well as to women. Abstract nouns are indicated by means of concrete associations. The character for ‘peace, tranquility' consists of a somewhat stylized form of the elements ‘roof,' ‘heart,' and ‘(wine) cup.' Abstract symbols have been used to indicate numbers and local relationships.

      Related words with similar pronunciations were usually written by one and the same character (the character for ‘to love, to consider someone good' is a derivative of a similarly written word ‘to be good'). This gave rise to the most important invention in the development of the Chinese script—that of writing a word by means of another one with the same or similar pronunciation. A picture of a carpenter's square was primarily used for writing ‘work, craftsman; to work' and was pronounced kuŋ; secondarily it was used to write kuŋ- (the hyphen stands for an element that was perhaps s) ‘to present,' guŋ ‘red,' kuŋ ‘rainbow,' and kruŋ ‘river.' During the Archaic period this practice was developed to such a degree that too many words came to be written as one and the same character. In imitation of the characters that already consisted of several components an element was added for each meaning of a character to distinguish words from each other. Thus ‘red' was no longer written with a single component but acquired an additional component that added the element ‘silk' on the left; ‘river' acquired an additional component of ‘water.' The original part of the character is referred to as its phonetic and the added element as its radical.

Qin dynasty standardization

      During the Qin dynasty (221–207 BC) the first government standardization of the characters took place, carried out by the statesman Li Si. A new, somewhat formalized style known as seals was introduced—a form that generally has survived until now, with only such minor modifications as were necessitated by the introduction of the writing brush about the beginning of the 1st century AD and printing about AD 600. As times progressed, other styles of writing appeared, such as the regular handwritten form kai (kaishu) (as opposed to the formal or scribe style li), the running hand xing (xingshu), and the cursive hand cao (caoshu), all of which in their various degrees of blurredness are explicable only in terms of the seal characters.

      The Qin dynasty standardization comprised more than 3,000 characters. In addition to archaeological finds, the most important source for the early history of Chinese characters is the huge dictionary Shuowen jiezi, compiled by Xu Shen about AD 100. This work contains 9,353 characters, a number that certainly exceeds that which it was or ever became necessary to know offhand. Still, a great proliferation of characters took place at special times and for special purposes. The Guangyun dictionary of 1008 had 26,194 characters (representing 3,877 different syllables in pronunciation). The Kangxi zidian, a dictionary of 1716, contains 40,545 characters, of which, however, fewer than one-fourth were in actual use at the time. The number of absolutely necessary characters has probably never been much more than 4,000–5,000 and is today estimated at fewer than that.

The 20th century

      By the 20th century the feeling had become very strong that the script was too cumbersome and an impediment to progress. The desire to obtain a new writing system necessarily worked hand in hand with the growing wish to develop a written language that in grammar and vocabulary approached modern spoken Chinese. If a phonetic writing system were to be introduced, the classical language could not be used at all because it deviates so markedly from the modern language. None of the earlier attempts gained any following, but in 1919 a system of phonetic letters (inspired by the Japanese syllabaries called kana) was devised for writing Mandarin. (In 1937 it received formal backing from the government, but World War II stopped further progress.) In 1929 a National Romanization, worked out by the author and language scholar Lin Yutang, the linguist Zhao Yuanren, and others, was adopted. This attempt also was halted by war and revolution. A rival Communist effort known as Latinxua, or Latinization of 1930, fared no better. An attempt to simplify the language by reducing the number of characters to about 1,000 failed because it did not solve the problems of creating a corresponding “basic Chinese” that could profitably be written by the reduced number of symbols.

      The government of China has taken several important steps toward solving the problems of the Chinese writing system. The first and basic step of making one language, Modern Standard Chinese, known throughout the country has been described above. In 1956 a simplification of the characters was introduced that made them easier to learn and faster to write. Most of the abridged characters were well-known unofficial variants, used in handwriting but previously not in printing; some were innovations. In 1958 the previously mentioned romanization known as pinyin zimu (Pinyin romanization) was introduced. This system is widely taught in the schools and is used for many transcription purposes and for teaching Modern Standard Chinese to non-Han Chinese peoples in China and to foreigners. Pinyin romanization, however, is not intended to replace the Chinese characters but to help teach pronunciation and popularize the Beijing-dialect-based Putonghua. (For information on Chinese calligraphy, see calligraphy (writing).)

Reconstruction of Chinese protolanguages

      For reconstructing the pronunciation of older stages of Sinitic, the Chinese writing system offers much less help than the alphabetic systems of such languages as Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit within Indo-European or Tibetan and Burmese within Sino-Tibetan. Therefore, the starting point must be a comparison of the modern Sinitic languages, with the view of recovering for each major language group the original common form, such as Proto-Mandarin for the Northern languages and Proto-Wu and others for the languages south of the Yangtze River. Because data are still lacking from a great many places, the once-standard approach was to compare major representatives of each group for the purpose of reconstructing the language of the important dictionary Qieyun of AD 601 (Sui dynasty), which mainly represents a Southern language type. One difficulty is that the language in a given area represents a mixture of at least two layers: an older one of the original local type, antedating the language of the Qieyun, and a younger one that is descended from the Qieyun language or a slightly younger but closely related tongue—the so-called Tang koine, the standard spoken language of the Tang dynasty. The relationship of the protolanguages is further complicated by the different substrata of non-Chinese stock that underlie many if not most of the major languages.

      The degree to which the Sinitic languages have been influenced by the Tang (or Middle Chinese) layer varies. In the North the Old Chinese layer still dominates in phonology; in Min the two layers are kept clearly apart from each other, and the Middle Chinese layer is most important in the reading pronunciation of the characters; Yue has two Chinese layers of the Southern type and is typologically similar to a Tai substratum.

      The Old Chinese layer is characterized by early decay of final consonants, late development of tones from sounds or suprasegmental features located toward the end of the syllable, change of final articulation type because of similar initial type (as in syllables with more than one voiced activity, which may change or lose one of these; phenomena later manifested as a tonal change), and influence of sounds and tones in a syllable on those of surrounding ones (sandhi).

      The New Southern stratum in Sinitic languages is characterized by early change of final articulation types into tones, extensive development of registers according to type of initial consonant, and late or no loss of final stops. The Old layer cannot be the direct ancestor of the New layer. The division into Northern and Southern dialects must be very old. It might be better to speak of a Tang and a pre-Tang layer, or a Tang and a Han layer (the Han dynasty was characterized by extensive settlement in most parts of what is now China proper).

The Qieyun dictionary

      For a long time the Qieyun dictionary was assumed to represent the language of the capital of the Sui dynasty, Chang'an (in the present province of Shaanxi), but research has demonstrated that its major component was the language of the present-day Nanjing area with a certain attempt at compromise with other speech habits. As its first criterion for classifying syllables, the Qieyun takes the tones, of which it has four: ping, shang (here transcribed with a colon, as in pa:), qu (here transcribed with a hyphen, as in pa-), and ru, or even, rising, falling, and entering (“checked”) tones. The entering tone comprised those syllables that ended in a stop (-p, -t, -k). The rising and falling tones may have retained traces of the phonetic conditioning factor of their origin, voiced and voiceless glottal or laryngeal features, respectively. The even tone probably was negatively defined as possessing no final stop and no tonal contour.

      Next, the dictionary is divided according to rhymes, of which there are 61, and, finally, according to initial consonants. Inside each rhyme an interlocking spelling system known as fanqie was used to subdivide the rhymes. There were 32 initial consonants and 136 finals. The number of vowels is not certain, perhaps six plus i and u, which served also as medial semivowels. The dictionary contained probably more vowels than either Archaic Chinese or Modern Standard Chinese, another indication that the development of the Northern Chinese phonology did not pass the stage represented by Qieyun.

Additional sources

      There are additional sources for reconstructing the Qieyun language: Chinese loanwords in Vietnamese, Korean, and Japanese (Japan has two different traditions—Go-on, slightly older than Qieyun but representing a Southern language type like Qieyun, and Kan-on, contemporary with Qieyun but more similar to the Northern tradition) and Chinese renderings of Indo-Aryan (Indic) words. Voiced stops are recovered through Wu, Xiang, and Go-on (e.g., Modern Standard Chinese tian ‘field,' Wu and Xiang di, Go-on den, Qieyun dhien), final stops especially through Yue and Japanese (e.g., Modern Standard Chinese mu ‘wood,' Yue muk, Go-on mok [moku], Qieyun muk), and retroflex initial sounds from Northern Chinese (e.g., Modern Standard Chinese sheng ‘to live,' Qieyun ṣʌŋ [the ṣ is a retroflex]).

      Early Archaic Chinese is the old stage for which the most information is known about the pronunciation of characters. The very system of borrowing characters to write phonetically related words gives important clues, and the rhymes and alliteration of the Shijing furnish a wealth of details. Even though scholars cannot always be sure that prefixes and infixes are correctly recovered, and though the order in which recoverable features were pronounced in the syllable is not always certain (rk- or kr-, -wk or -kw, and so on), enough details can be obtained to determine the typology of Old Chinese and to undertake comparative work with the Tibeto-Burman (Tibeto-Burman languages) and Karenic (Karen languages) languages. The method employed in this part of the reconstruction of Chinese has been predominantly internal reconstruction, the use of variation of word forms within a language to construct an older form. As knowledge of the old layer of modern languages and dialects increases, however, the comparative method, which draws on similarities in several related tongues, gains importance. Through further internal reconstruction, features of the Proto-Sinitic stage, antedating Archaic Chinese, can then be restored.

Søren Christian Egerod

Additional Reading

Three pertinent essays on Chinese are found in Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), Current Trends in Linguistics, vol. 2 (1967): Nicholas C. Bodman, “Historical Linguistics,” pp. 3–58; Kun Chang, “Descriptive Linguistics,” pp. 59–90; and the technical work by Søren Egerod, “Dialectology,” pp. 91–129. Grammars include Yuen Ren Chao, Mandarin Primer (1948, reissued 1976), excellent chapters on script and grammar; Yuen Ren Chao and Lien Sheng Yang, Concise Dictionary of Spoken Chinese (1947, reissued 1970), with an excellent introduction; Yuen Ren Chao, A Grammar of Spoken Chinese (1968), a reliable standard reference work; W.A.C.H. Dobson, Late Archaic Chinese (1959), and Early Archaic Chinese (1962), useful but not always trustworthy guides to Old Chinese grammar; Edwin G. Pulleyblank, Outline of Classical Chinese Grammar (1995), a concise guide to usage in the texts; and Christoph Harbsmeier, Aspects of Classical Chinese Syntax (1981), an important, pioneering contribution. Language reform is addressed in John DeFrancis, Nationalism and Language Reform in China (1950, reissued 1972), informative and readable, and “Language and Script Reform,” in Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), Current Trends in Linguistics, vol. 2 (1967), pp. 130–150. R.A.D. Forrest, The Chinese Language, 3rd ed. (1973), a standard reference work, also treats related and contiguous languages. A variety of topics is covered in these works of Bernhard Karlgren: Études sur la phonologie chinoise (1915–26), an epoch-making work but very technical, Compendium of Phonetics in Ancient and Archaic Chinese (1954), also technical, Grammata Serica: Script and Phonetics in Chinese and Sino-Japanese (1940, reissued 1971), the standard dictionary of Old Chinese characters, Sound and Symbol in Chinese, rev. ed. (1962, reissued 1971), very readable, but somewhat out of date, The Chinese Language: An Essay on Its Nature and History, trans. from Swedish (1949), a popular account of phonetic reconstructions, and Easy Lessons in Chinese Writing (1958), an interesting account of the etymology of Chinese characters. Paul Kratochvil, The Chinese Language Today: Features of an Emerging Standard (1968), is very readable. A more detailed description of the language is found in Jerry Norman, Chinese (1988). Mantaro J. Hashimoto, Phonology of Ancient Chinese, 2 vol. (1978–79), is rather technical. Edwin G. Pulleyblank, Middle Chinese: A Study in Historical Phonology (1984), is very important but not easily read, and information on the earlier pronunciations of specific characters can be found in his Lexicon of Reconstructed Pronunciation in Early Middle Chinese, Late Middle Chinese, and Early Mandarin (1991). An important and very readable statement on Old Chinese is Fang Kuei Li, “Archaic Chinese,” in David N. Keightley (ed.), The Origins of Chinese Civilization (1983), pp. 393–408.Søren Christian Egerod

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