IN WHICH STAVROGIN WAS MARYA TIMOFEEVNA DISAPPOINTED IN? The only scene in the novel of Stavrogin's meeting with Marya Timofeevna alone has exclusively importance to understand the "main myth" of "Demons". The visit of Nikolai Vsevolodovich to Lebyadkina was the third and

WHAT THE ANALOGIES ARE TALKING ABOUT The plot of "Home and the World" is comparable to the plot of "Demons". In Dostoevsky's novel, a young "figure" Pyotr Verkhovensky arrives in a provincial town (the prototype of which, as is known, was Tver) with the aim of "spreading turmoil". As a result of his "activities",

WE SPEAK VYATSKIAN ALSO Let's talk, for example, with an old man from one of the distant villages of the Kirov or Vologda region. And then we will go south, to one of the deep regions of the Ryazan or Kaluga region let's try to meet the old man here too, who

languages ​​that are not related to Chinese. Chinese, like most other Sino-Tibetan languages, is characterized by the presence of semantic tones, the monosyllabism of almost all simple words, and, to a greater extent than other languages ​​of this family, the almost complete absence of inflectional affixes.

Dialects.

There are nine groups of dialects in modern Chinese. Dialects of six of these groups are common in coastal and central regions: 1) wu dialects - in the area of ​​the cities of Shanghai and Ningbo; 2) northern Min dialects - in the area of ​​the city of Fuzhou; 3) Southern Min dialects - in the area of ​​the cities of Xiamen (Amoi), Shantou (Swatou) and in Taiwan; 4) Hakka dialects - in the area of ​​the city of Meixian, in the northeast of Guangdong province and in the south of Jianxi province; 5) Cantonese - in the central and eastern part of Guangdong, including in the city of Guangzhou (Canton); 6) Xiang dialects - in Hunan province. These six groups of dialects are distributed over about a quarter of China, they are spoken by a third of the Chinese-speaking population of the country. From each other, as well as from the northern dialects spoken in the rest of the country, these groups differ to about the same extent as Dutch different from English or Italian from French.

In addition, there are three subgroups of northern dialects (in Western tradition called Mandarin): northern, including the Beijing dialect, as well as southern and central, which are spoken, in particular, in the cities of Nanjing and Chongqing. These subgroups differ in much the same way as New England English in the United States and Australia, and therefore they are often mutually intelligible. The generally accepted normative Chinese, or the national language Putonghua, is based on the dialect of Beijing (otherwise Beijing, as the name of the capital of China began to be reproduced in the West at the insistence of the Chinese).

phonetic system.

Putonghua has a fairly simple phonetic system. With few exceptions, every minimal significant unit in Chinese, it is equal to a syllable consisting of an initial (an initial syllable consonant), a final (the rest of the syllable minus the initial), and a tone. Any of the vowels i,u and b can also act as a non-syllabic vowel, or a medial - an element that occupies a position between the initial and the syllabic vowel; i and u(or o) are also possible at the very end of a syllable after a syllable-forming vowel. So there are diphthongs like ia,uo,ai,ei and triphthongs like uai and iao.

The only final syllable consonants that exist are -n and -ng, and also in relatively few words -r and -m(the presence of such words is not reflected in most dictionaries, but they are found in speech in case of loss of vowels during fluent pronunciation). In Chinese, there cannot be words whose phonetic appearance would be similar to Russian splash, bevel or fistula.

Tones.

alphabetical systems.

The first attempts to create an alphabetic script for the Chinese language were made by Christian missionaries as early as the 17th century. However, most of the alphabets created by the missionaries for specific dialects of Chinese were not widely adopted. In the first half of the 20th century the so-called "Romanized alphabet", developed in 1926-1928 by a group of leading Chinese linguists, and alphabetic writing based on the Latin script, created in the Soviet Union by Russian and Chinese scientists in 1928-1931 as part of a program to eliminate illiteracy among the Chinese population of the Far East, became famous (According to the 1926 census, about 100,000 Chinese lived in the USSR). The second of these two romanized alphabets was oriented not to the Beijing dialect, but to a group of Northern Chinese dialects that distinguish between soft and hard consonants. In the USSR, it was used until 1936. Later, most of the Chinese population of the USSR was repatriated, which meant the end of one of the most extensive experiments in the spread of Latinized writing for the Chinese language.

Of the many alphabetic systems developed for writing Chinese, long time the most common was the Wade-Giles system (which took into account previously created Latinized alphabets). In a slightly modified form, it was used in publications general, including in newspapers, atlases, etc., and until 1979 was used in the PRC in publications intended for distribution abroad. However, subsequently another Latin alphabet- pinyin, officially adopted in China in 1958, has become increasingly used for a variety of purposes: for teaching hieroglyphs; in telegraphy; in the system of reading and writing for the blind; in the press for the transfer of proper names; to record some languages ​​of national minorities; when teaching the population the national form of the Chinese language. It is believed that pinyin was the direct successor to the Latinized alphabet of the Chinese language, developed in the early 1930s by Soviet and Chinese linguists (the main difference is the mandatory designation of tones, which connects it with the national language Putonghua). Although the Wade-Giles writing system and the pinyin alphabet share the same linguistic principles, the latter attempted to reduce or eliminate the use of intra-word hyphens and diacritical marks, and wherever possible to represent the same sound with a single letter instead of using combinations consonant letters.

In Russia, in addition to pinyin, Cyrillic transcription is often used to convey Chinese words. Thus, the name, which in the Wade-Giles system was written as Ch "ü Ch" iu-pai, and in Cyrillic transcription as Qu Qiubai, when written in pinyin looks like Qu Qiubai. At present, most scientists in the world (with the exception of the work of Taiwanese and a number of American linguists) use the pinyin alphabet to write Chinese phonetically.

The table below shows how specific finals and initials are written in pinyin, in the Wade-Giles system, and in Cyrillic transcription; in some cases, explanations are given.

Grammar.

Most Chinese sentences have a subject and a predicate, and the function of the predicate can also be an adjective and less often a noun. For example, Ni 3 lai 2 "You are coming"; Ta 1 qiong 2 "He is poor"; Zhe 4 ge ren 2 hao 3 ren 2 "This person is a good person." What is traditionally considered the subject in a Chinese sentence is primarily logical theme utterance, otherwise called a topic, and not necessarily the designation of the agent, so that the action denoted by the verb does not always come from the subject. Compare: Zhe 4 di 4 fang ke 3 yi 3 kai 1 hui 4 lit. "This place is possible to hold meetings", i.e. "This is a place where meetings can be held."

In the Chinese sentence, in addition to the subject group and the predicate group, the following important syntactic constructions are distinguished: 1) a coordinating construction, which is often not formed by any union or at least a pause, for example feng 1 hua 1 hue 3 yue 4 "wind, flower, snow (and) moon "; ta 1 men sha 1 ren 2 fang 4 huo 3 "they kill people (and) set them on fire"; 2) definitive constructions, and the definition always precedes the one being defined, for example da 4 shi 4 "big event", yi 1 ding 4 dui 4 "undoubtedly correct", kan 1 men 2 de ren 2 letters. "guarding the door man", i.e. "watchman, gatekeeper"; 3) a verb-object construction, with the verb always preceding the object: kan 4 bao 4 "read the newspaper", kan 4 shen 2 me "do what?"; 4) the “resultative verb” construction (the first component is the action, the second is the result or circumstance of this action): chi 1 wan 2 letters. "have to finish", i.e. "eat it whole".

The minimum meaningful unit is usually a syllable, which is written in one character. However, in modern spoken Chinese, and to a large extent in written Chinese, many of these units are combined into closely related combinations that enter into syntactic constructions such as those described above. Such combinations, to a greater extent than the monosyllabic elements that form them, behave like words and correspond to the words of Western languages. For example: di 4 ban 3 "ground board", i.e. "sex", fou 3 ding 4 "do not recognize", i.e. "deny", hao 3 kan 4 "look good", i.e. "beautiful", zhuo 1 z "table + noun suffix", i.e. "table", lai 2 le "come + completeness suffix", i.e. "came", shuo 1 zhe "talk + continuation suffix", i.e., for example, "talk".

In Chinese, a greater number of words than, for example, in English (not to mention Russian) can be multifunctional, i.e. appear in different sentences as different parts of speech, but the idea that any Chinese word can refer to any part of speech is far from true. For example, men 2 "door" is a noun, zou 3 "to go" is a verb, tai 4 "too" is an adverb, and so on. There is a class of enclitics, or particles, which are often considered to form a Chinese-specific part of speech. They differ from other suffixes in that they are attached not only to individual words, but also to phrases and sentences. For example, the defining indicator de may be present not only in the phrase ta 1 de shu 1 "his book", but also in ta 1 xie 3 xin 4 yong 4 de pi 3 "he writes letters using + definition indicator + pen", i.e. "the pen he uses (when) he writes letters." Although this is quite similar to English designs like Can "t a fellow touch the girl he" s in love with "s hair? "Can't a guy touch the hair of the girl he is in love with?" " is a definition for the noun hair "hair", it should be noted that in English language such constructions are still very rare, while in Chinese they are quite normal and are used constantly. There are no case, person, tense, and gender affixes in Chinese. The form plural inherent in nouns denoting persons and personal pronouns. The verb, as already noted, has the category of aspect expressed by suffixes.

Historical development.

Middle Chinese.

Most modern dialects date back to the language of the northwestern part of the Chinese territory centered in the city of Chang'an (now Xi'an, Shaanxi Province). On the basis of historical sources (over the centuries, the Chinese have always paid serious attention to their language), as well as a comparative historical study of modern dialects, it is possible to reconstruct in some detail the phonetic system of the Middle Chinese language (called Ancient Chinese in Western sinology, i.e. literally ancient Chinese, which does not correspond to the terminology adopted in Russia, cf. below) about 600 AD. Because the city of Chang'an was cultural and political center under several dynasties, the pronunciation of the area spread widely. By the time it reached the south and east, the dialects of the north had already changed a lot in the direction of simplifying the phonetic system. This is one of the reasons why modern Northern dialects are the furthest away from Central Chinese. Wu and Xiang dialects most retained the old initials: p,p",b"; t,t",d";k,k",g";ts,ts",dz" etc., and Cantonese, Amoy and Hakka are the best at preserving the old final syllable consonants: -m,-n,-ng,-p,-t,-k. Therefore, the poetry of the Tang era, such as Li Po and Du Fu, rhymes much better when read in Cantonese than in northern ones.

In Middle Chinese, as in modern, there were four tones: the old even tone gave the modern language the first tone (or the second, depending on whether the initial was voiceless or voiced); the old rising tone corresponds, roughly speaking, to the modern third tone; the old "leaving" (falling) tone - to the modern fourth tone; syllables with the old so-called entering tone, i.e. syllables ending in -p,-t,-k and did not have tone oppositions, in the modern language they can have any of the four tones - in accordance with certain patterns, with numerous exceptions.

Ancient Chinese language.

About the language of the classical period, which in Western Sinology is called Archaic Chinese, i.e. archaic Chinese, and which existed during the time of Confucius (about 550-480 BC), we know less, and the opinions of researchers here differ more. However, usually everyone agrees that in ancient Chinese there was an opposition between deaf and voiced occlusive consonants according to aspiration - non-aspiration: t,t",d,d";k,k",g,g"; etc. (cf. t,th,d,dh etc. in Sanskrit), there was a greater variety of final syllable consonants: in addition to -p,-t,-k,-m,-n,-ng more -b(rarely), -d,-g,-r; there were some initial syllable combinations of consonants: kl,gl,pl,bl and others, and there was also a slightly different distribution of words by tonal groups.

The grammar of Old and Middle Chinese differs less from modern than phonetics. Much of what has been said above about the grammar of a modern language applies to more early periods- with one caveat: polysyllabic words were formed much less often from monosyllabic root words, and the language was much closer to complete monosyllabism than in subsequent centuries. The word order is basically the same, with the difference that the adjectives of mode of action, places, etc. more often follow the main verb than precede it, whereas in modern Chinese they precede the main verb. Remains of inflection are found (for example, ngo"me" - nga"I, mine") and sound alternations that serve for word formation (for example kian"see" - g "ian"see, show"), but already in the classical period they were not productive.

book language.

Although Chinese dialects differ from each other in the pronunciation of initially the same words to the same extent as Spanish differs from French, they have never been considered different languages ​​- mainly because there is a single common bookish language called wenyan and which until recently was the only one ubiquitous and universally used form of the written language. As already mentioned, dialects differ primarily in pronunciation, less in vocabulary, and only to a small extent in grammar. Wenyan does not have its own pronunciation, but the vocabulary and grammar are the same everywhere, so that, generally speaking, it is impossible to determine where the author of a Wenyan text comes from, unless you hear him read it aloud. This is somewhat reminiscent of the situation in Europe during the early Middle Ages, when national languages ​​began to appear, but scholars continued to write in Latin, each reading and speaking Latin with a pronunciation characteristic of his own language. However, wenyan was used not only by scientists. It was used in government and business, in most newspapers and books, in personal correspondence. In the first half of the 20th century In written communication, the “common language” of Putonghua has been established (it is based on Baihua, a written language that reflects colloquial speech northern dialects), although Wenyanisms continued to be actively used.

The importance of wenyan is not only in the fact that it is written in a single nationwide writing system, but also in the fact that it is a cumulative product general literature, and its vocabulary, although dependent on style, varies little depending on the origin of the author. Therefore, even if it were not written in hieroglyphs, it would still be a common language for the whole country (pronounced differently), although hieroglyphic writing undoubtedly contributed to the preservation of its unity. This aspect of wenyan is also manifested in the fact that illiterate or blind soothsayers and storytellers who have never learned hieroglyphs quote the classics and proverbs in wenyan just as freely as those who can read and write. When schoolchildren and students wrote study essays in wenyan, they spoke or even sang their phrases to catch the rhythm, since much of what is acceptable or not acceptable in the ways of expression in wenyan depends on the rhythm. Wenyang is not spoken by anyone (the concise telegraphic style, understandable in the text, written in hieroglyphs distinguishing homonymous words, makes spoken language in Wenyan extremely ambiguous), but it is still widely used in practical purposes. Root words are drawn from wenyan in order to create terminology for different areas modern life, and it is in this way that a great many so-called new terms have come into existence, which are simply words of modern Chinese, not spoken language or Wenyan.

Chinese writing.

The oldest Chinese writings were found on shells and bones and date back to the 14th century. BC. Although some signs in these inscriptions depicted objects and concepts and were pictograms or ideograms, most of the signs already in ancient times served to record specific words. For example, the word er 4 is written with a two-stroke character, but not liang 3, although both of them mean "two"; the sign, which is a simplified image of a dog, is used to write the word quan 3 , but not the synonymous word gou 3 .

Although the style of writing the strokes that form characters has changed significantly (partly as a result of changing writing tools), the structure of most characters has remained largely unchanged since the Qin Dynasty (221–206 BC), and from the 3rd century . AD hieroglyphs became similar to modern ones. Traditionally, six categories of hieroglyphs were distinguished, which are now reduced to three groups:

1) pictograms and ideograms (about 1500 hieroglyphs). These include the oldest simple signs (for example, mu 4 "tree"; san 1 "three"), as well as combined signs indicating more abstract meanings (for example, the hieroglyph nan 2 "man" consists of tian 2 "field" and li 4 "strength"; the idea is that a man is one who uses his strength in the field);

2) phonideograms (phonograms), which make up the majority of modern hieroglyphs. This is complex signs, consisting of keys that give a hint at the meaning of a word or morpheme, and so-called phonetics, indicating the exact or approximate sound of a sign, for example, the hieroglyph tou 2 "head" consists of the key ye 4 "head" and phonetics dou 4 "beans". In Chinese dictionaries, characters are usually arranged by keys, their number is 214;

3) the so-called "borrowed" hieroglyphs - signs of different structures, originally created for certain words, and then used to write other words. For example, the hieroglyph wan 4 was originally an image of a scorpion, but then it was borrowed to write the word wan 4 that sounded exactly the same with the value "10,000".

Of the types listed above, categories 1 and 2 more or less correspond to the European idea of ​​\u200b\u200bcharacter Chinese writing. Category 3 is the most important in terms of the history of writing, since writing a word according to its sound and using phonetics regardless of its semantic meaning is the first step towards the alphabet. The next logical step, which was never really taken, would be to write each syllable with exactly one character, which would lead to the emergence of a syllabary. But development in the direction phonetic writing was stopped by the wide distribution of phonograms, which now include most of all hieroglyphs.

Two more categories should be mentioned, which are not distinguished in traditional classification. One of them is the category of "extended" hieroglyphs. For example, cai 2 "material" is clearly a phonoidogram consisting of the semantic element mu 4 "tree" and the phonetics cai 2 "talent". But between "talent" and "material" there was a semantic connection, and the "extended" hieroglyph has an expanded meaning "wood, material, natural data." This is somewhat reminiscent of the differentiation of the words check and check in English, with the difference that in Chinese such cases are extremely numerous. The other category is a hybrid of categories 3 (loans) and 2 (phonideograms). For example, it is a slightly modified form of the image of a dancing figure and, as a phonetic borrowing, is used to write the word wu 2 "not to have." Later, a differentiating element was added to this hieroglyph, so that the word wu 3 "to dance" began to be written , and the hieroglyph ceased to be used in this original meaning. Some scholars consider such hieroglyphs to be derivatives.

As a result of the fact that the number of hieroglyphs began to exceed the number of root words, an abundance of variant forms of hieroglyphs arose, not to mention variations in the writing of strokes and other graphic variants. The largest dictionary in terms of the number of hieroglyphs contains about 50 thousand hieroglyphs. The directory of telegraph codes, in which each hieroglyph is assigned a combination of four Arabic numerals (from 0000 to 9999), of course, is limited to no more than 10 thousand hieroglyphs, but it includes all widely used hieroglyphs, except for rare proper names - most proper names are formed from ordinary words. A modern newspaper uses 6-7 thousand hieroglyphs.

Modern development.

The Chinese language, like the language of any other people, was constantly undergoing changes, but three processes that took place in the current period in the PRC should be especially noted: the unification of the national language, the movement for literature in the spoken language, and the reform of writing. For about four centuries, the language northern capital, called Beiping, Beijing and Beijing, became more and more prestigious and widely used and was called guanhua "official, official language" (hence the Western name "Mandarin"), guoyu "national language" and putonghua "common (i.e. not local) language". It is based on the Beijing dialect. Radio stations always employ men and women born and educated in Beijing as announcers.

The vernacular literature movement aims to use the language spoken in Everyday life and which is called baihua, instead of wenyan, which was considered the only acceptable language for writing serious texts until Hu Shih proclaimed the baihua movement in 1917. With the exception of Buddhist teachings from the Tang Dynasty (618–907) and some philosophical texts from the Song Dynasty (960–1269), all writing in the spoken language of the local population was limited to popular stories. Now baihua publishes books and periodicals, and it is increasingly crowding out wenyan.

The third process is the reform of writing. Chinese system writing has not undergone radical structural changes since the 2nd century. BC. The existing hieroglyphs were perfect for writing wenyan, in which almost all words are monosyllabic. With the spread of baihua and the change in the phonetic shape of words, many of the old phonetic differences disappeared, and this is one of the reasons why wenyan is never spoken by speakers of Chinese dialects. The sentence , meaning "The meaning is even stranger", was understandable both in writing and by ear in the past when it was pronounced (the sign indicates a glottal stop); but in Mandarin it now sounds yi 4 yi 4 yi 4 yi 4 and is incomprehensible to the ear even in context, although in written form it remains a completely flawless Wenyang phrase. (See the illustration for an extreme case of this kind.) The overlap in pronunciation of words that differed in the past was unconsciously compensated in colloquial baihua mainly through the use of polysyllabic words. However, in written baihua, there was inevitably redundancy in hieroglyphs. For example, the hieroglyph zhong 1 "devotee" consists of zhong 1 "middle" and xin 1 "heart", which is graphically quite legitimate, but such a word cannot be unambiguously understood by ear. Therefore, in baihua the word "devotee" will be zhong 1 xin 1 (literally "devotee of the heart"), which is more understandable by ear, but when it is written in hieroglyphs, redundancy immediately becomes noticeable - the repetition of the hieroglyph "heart". So everything greater use baihua in writing provides an additional reason - in addition to the difficulty of learning hieroglyphs - for creating a phonetic writing system. From 1910 to the present, there have been various literacy campaigns, usually combined with the teaching of Mandarin and the teaching of unified standard pronunciation. For this purpose, to record the reading of hieroglyphs, a system of 37 national phonetic signs was used, created on the basis of the features of Chinese hieroglyphs. Until now, in China, under no government, not one official action did not set out to immediately adopt a phonetic writing system to replace hieroglyphs, although individuals and the government took steps to prepare for reform. At the same time, various measures were taken to simplify the writing of hieroglyphs, which, however, did not always lead to a greater order in their graphic structure.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the tendency to form polysyllabic words was stimulated in part by the influx of foreign terms, while concise wenyan continued to serve as a source for numerous political slogans. The simplification of hieroglyphs was steadily carried out, reaching a point where further simplification seems unlikely. Putonghua was successfully introduced, although it was never intended to replace local dialects in everyday oral communication. (Furthermore, there are marked differences in pronunciation in different areas when people speak Putonghua. In the process of becoming the state language, Putonghua loses close ties with the Beijing dialect, having been influenced by the language various leaders states originally from the province.)

Increased attention to the pinyin system was attracted by the decision taken in the PRC in 1979 to use it in publications intended for distribution abroad. AT long term In the PRC, they aim to replace the characters with pinyin, which should become the generally accepted system of Chinese writing.

Literature:

Dragunov A.A. . Studies in Modern Chinese Grammar. M. - L., 1952
Solntsev V.M. Essays on Modern Chinese. M., 1957
Yakhontov S.E. Category of the verb in Chinese. L., 1957
Lu Shu-hsiang. Chinese Grammar Outline, tt. 1–2. M., 1961–1965
Yakhontov S.E. ancient chinese. M., 1965
Korotkov N.N. . The main features of the morphological structure of the Chinese language. M., 1968
Zograf I.T. Middle Chinese. M., 1979
Sofronov M.V. Chinese language and Chinese society. M., 1979
Big Chinese-Russian Dictionary, tt. 1–4. Ed. I.M. Oshanina. M., 1983–1984
Large Russian-Chinese dictionary . Beijing, 1985
Bibliography on Chinese Linguistics, tt. 1–2. M., 1991–1993

Chinese is one of ancient languages peace. The first written monuments belong to the era of the Shang-Yin dynasty (XVI-XI centuries BC, or rather, XIII-XI centuries BC). They were divinatory inscriptions on shields made of cow shoulder blades and tortoise shells. Later, divinatory inscriptions were also made on bronze vessels. Then, in the seventh century BC e., the first artistic written monuments appeared, which reflected oral speech. Created during the Western Zhou Dynasty (11th century - 770 BC), the Book of Songs (Shijing) was the earliest anthology of poetry in China. It contains 305 poems, most of of which date from this period.

In the V-III centuries. BC e. written speech ceases to reflect the changes that have occurred over the centuries in oral speech. Therefore, during this period, the literary language is formed wenyan based on the norms of the ancient Chinese language. Wenyan functioned continuously throughout the subsequent history of China, but by the 7th-9th centuries. it ceases to reflect oral speech, remaining the language of science, technology, politics and administration. At this time, China is forming new language, closer to oral speech, - baihua. Appeared by the XIV century. Chinese drama and Chinese novel are written in baihua. As for philosophical prose and short stories, they are traditionally written in Wenyang. Thus, starting from the Xiongnu era (X-XIII centuries), a situation of a kind of bilingualism developed in China: written wenyan and oral-written baihua existed in parallel.

The formation of the new baihua language was accompanied by the emergence of new morphological features - the development of a two-syllable (and, accordingly, two-morphemic) word norm, the appearance of derivational and formative affisks that developed from significant words. Simultaneously simplified sound composition syllable (disappearance of consonant clusters, drop of almost all finite-syllabic consonants, etc.).

By the XIV century. a relatively common colloquial language was also being developed, based on the Peking dialect. He got the name guanhua, or Mandarin.

At the beginning of the 20th century, namely by 1919, Baihua defeated Wenyan and became the only literary language, but this affected primarily fiction, while in many areas of official communication, the influence of Wenyan continued to persist in the subsequent period. In addition to China, wenyan was widely used outside the country - in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam.

As for the common spoken language, after Xinhai Revolution 1911, the modern spoken language began to be intensively introduced in the country - goyu. The language policy of all governments was aimed at creating a single language based on the Beijing dialect.

After the formation of the People's Republic of China, the government defined the goal of its language policy as "the unification of the dialects of the Chinese language", which was announced by Premier of the State Council Zhou Enlai in a report at a meeting convened by the People's Political Consultative Council of China on January 10, 1958. As the main means to achieve this goal, he called teaching the national language. The main goal in spreading the national language, according to Zhou Enlai, was to play his teaching at school. In 1955, the unified state national language received a new name - "common language", or putonghua. According to the official definition, Putonghua is “the common language of the Chinese nation, based on the northern dialects, the standard pronunciation is the pronunciation of Beijing, grammatical norm are exemplary works of modern baihua.”

The spread of Putonghua began in 1956, when its norms were just being created, and actively continued until 1960, after which, due to internal turmoil, it began to decline.

At present, Mandarin is state language China. The task of spreading Putonghua turned out to be so important that in 1982 a mention of it was included in the Constitution of the People's Republic of China. In 1986, a new Putonghua dissemination program was adopted. It provided for its transformation by the beginning of the new millennium into a common Chinese language of oral communication and education. His knowledge is recognized as important in such areas public life and departmental structures, such as the central party and state apparatus, the army, large-scale industrial production, schools, central radio and television, cinema. This is the language of modern Chinese socio-political, scientific and fiction literature. In the field of agricultural and small-scale industrial production, in everyday communication still dominated by local dialects. A significant part of the urban population, especially residents major cities, usually to a greater or lesser degree speaks Mandarin. As of the end of 1998, only a fifth of the Chinese are ready to consider Putonghua as their mother tongue, and 80% of the population speak it only at the most simple conversational level. It is no coincidence, therefore, that the law (if we are not talking about radio or television) allows the use of dialects "if necessary" or "in case of emergency". Since 1998, every September, the authorities have regularly held Mandarin Propaganda Week, officials, teachers, radio and television journalists, and actors must take an exam (test) on the level of knowledge of the national language. For example, in Shanghai, one of the largest metropolises and a large dialectal center of China, by January 1, 2004, all 100,000 officials were required to have a certificate of knowledge of Putonghua. All applicants for public service Since 2002, they have been passing an examination on knowledge of Putonghua.

Introduction

AT Chinese about 70,000 hieroglyphs and phonetic sounds. The average Chinese needs to know about 3,000 characters to be able to read newspapers. 5000 hieroglyphs are taught in secondary schools.

This article provides a brief overview Chinese, the language of the Han people, the main ethnic group China, both in the People's Republic of China and Taiwan. China has over 1 billion inhabitants, or about 95 percent speak in Chinese. There are also languages ​​of other groups, such as Tibetan, Mongolian, Lolo, Miao, Tai, etc., which are spoken by small peoples. Chinese is also spoken by immigrant communities in Southeast Asia, North and South America and in the Hawaiian Islands. In fact, in the world in Chinese more people speak than any other language. English is the second most spoken language, and Spanish is third.

As the dominant language in East Asia, Chinese has a great influence on the writing and vocabulary of neighboring languages ​​unrelated to it by origin, such as Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese. It has been estimated that before the 18th century, more than half of the books in the world were printed by the Chinese.

General features of the Chinese language

Chinese, together with Tibetan, Burmese and the languages ​​of many tribes in South and Southeast Asia, refers to Sino-Tibetan language family. In addition to basic vocabulary and sounds, Chinese and most related languages have a number of features that distinguish them from most European languages: They are monosyllabic and tonal. To indicate differences in meaning between similar-sounding words, in tone languages ​​each syllable has a distinctive characteristic pitch, high or low, or a distinctive slope contour, rise or fall.

Development of the Chinese language

Language and dialects

Spoken Chinese includes many dialects that can be classified into seven main groups. Although they use a common written form, their speech is mutually incomprehensible, and for this reason they are sometimes called languages. The differences between Chinese dialects are similar to the differences in pronunciation and vocabulary among Romance languages. However, in fact, most Chinese speak one dialect (dialect), which in the West is called Mandarin, taken as the basis of the Beijing dialect, the pronunciation standard. Mandarin is also the basis of the modern written language of the common people. baihua(the language of the Bai people of southwest China), which supplanted Classical Chinese in schools after 1917, and the official spoken language, putonghua , which was introduced for teaching as a nationwide school language in 1956. For this reason, in the West they usually speak of one Chinese language.

Modern Chinese dialects (beginning in the 11th century AD) are descended from ancient chinese(or Archaic Chinese)language(8th-3rd century BC), the alleged sounds of which have been reconstructed. Although the words in ancient chinese were monosyllabic, it was changeable. The next stage in the development of the Chinese language, which has been carefully analyzed - Middle Chinese ( or Old Chinese) language(until about the 11th century AD). By this time, the rich sound system of Old Chinese had moved far in the direction of the oversimplification we see in modern dialects. For example, ancient Chinese had a series of consonants such as p, ph, b, bh (where h means panting or labored breathing). AT Middle Chinese they moved to p, ph, bh; in modern standard language only R and ph(currently spelled b and p).

The modern syllable of the Mandarin dialect consists of at least the so-called finite element (finals), namely, the vowel ( a, e) or semivowel ( i,u) or combinations thereof (diphthong or triphthong), with a tone (neutral, raised, lowered or falling), and sometimes a final consonant, which, however, can only be n, ng, or r. In Old Chinese, however, in addition to this, the final consonants could be p,t,k,b,d,g and m. The final element may be preceded by an initial consonant, but not by a cluster of consonants. Probably there were clusters in Old Chinese, as at the beginning of the words klam and glam. With the reduction of sound differences, for example, when the final n is absorbed by the final m, so that syllables such as lam and lan simply become lan, the number of syllables in Mandarin that differ from each other in sound increased to about 1300. There were no fewer words , but most of them were homonyms. Thus, the words "poetry", "reward", "moist", "lose", "corpse" and "louse" were pronounced differently in Middle Chinese, in Mandarin they all became one word "shi" with a neutral tone. In fact, so many homonymous words have appeared that it would become unacceptable for the language if compound words did not develop simultaneously with them. Thus "poetry" became shi-ge: "poetry-song"; teacher - shi-zhang, "senior teacher". Although the vocabulary of modern Chinese contains many more such compound words, in relation to monosyllabic expressions, most compound words still break down into independently meaningful syllables.

Written Chinese

Grammar Highly inflectional languages ​​such as Latin and Russian are characterized by the fact that a change is made in the composition of the word to indicate grammatical differences. Modern Chinese, on the other hand, never changes and no additional sounds are added to words in this regard. Because there is no declension of nouns to indicate, for example, subject or object, just as there is no indication that verbs, nouns and adjectives agree with each other in number and case. Word order is even more strict than in English, indicating the relationship of words to each other in a sentence. In general terms, Chinese word order is similar to English word order: subject-verb-object, circumstance. On closer examination, the grammar reveals great differences between these languages. In English, the subject is always the doer of the action, but in Chinese it is most often just the subject followed by some kind of commentary. An example is the following sentence: "Nei-ke shu yezi hen da" - that in literally means: "The leaves of that tree are very large," that is, "that tree has very large leaves."
Furthermore grammatical features of the Chinese language are that the verb does not have tense.

Chinese writing bears the features of antiquity and conservatism: each distinctive character or hieroglyph corresponds to a separate word in the dictionary. Reading newspapers requires knowledge from 2000 to 3000 hieroglyphs. Large Chinese dictionary contains over 40,000 characters(arranged by shape or sound). The most ancient discovered Chinese texts are fortune telling, carved on tortoise shells and shoulder blades of cattle, by soothsayers shang dynasty relating to early 14th century BC. These are the so-called inscriptions on fortune-telling bones. Although the writing system has since been standardized and stylistically modified, its principles and many of its characters remain fundamentally unchanged. Like other ancient scripts, Chinese was created on the basis of pictures. She then moved on to the word-by-word representation of language when people realized that many words are too abstract, and are easier to express through a certain sound, rather than by conveying their meaning through a picture. However, unlike other scripts, pictography is still used in Chinese as well as phonetic word formation. In addition, sound designations have not been adapted to changes in pronunciation and have retained the key to the pronunciation that was 3000 years ago. Building blocks of Chinese writing system- these are several hundred pictograms, meaning such basic words as: "man", "horse", "axe". In addition, there are compound pictograms. For example, the hieroglyph, which indicates a person carrying grain, means "harvest", or "year" (nian).

Written Chinese

(continued) Phonetic borrowings are pictograms of specific words taken to indicate abstract words with the same or similar sound. The principle of the rebus, or visual pun, is used. So, for example, the pictogram for the word "garbage scoop" (ji) was borrowed to represent the words "this", "his", "her" (qi or ji). Many hieroglyphs in the Zhou era (11th-3rd century BC) had such a double meaning. If at that time the scribes had decided that only the pictogram of the word "scoop" would stand for any syllable pronounced as ji, they would have discovered the principle of the phonetic syllabary that became the precursor of the alphabet. However, due to the large number of homonyms in the Chinese language, the scribes preserved the script in the form of pictures. The image of the scoop began to be used exclusively for the words "his", "her". On the rare occasions when scribes actually meant "garbage scoop", they tried to avoid ambiguity by using complex character, in which the pictogram "bamboo" was added to the word "scoop", meaning the material from which the scoops were made. This is the process by which any pictogram taken to indicate a sound could be attached to any other chosen to indicate a meaning, forming a phonetic union. Thus, the word "scoop" in combination with the word "earth", instead of "bamboo", pronounced as ji, means "foundation". Today, simple and complex pictograms are still used for some of the basic words: "house", "mother", "child", "rice", and "fire". However, probably 95 percent of the words in Chinese are written using phonetic conjunctions.

To express modern concepts in Chinese, native equivalents are usually invented from significant syllables, or transmission occurs through phonetically close sounds. For example, the word "chemistry" is expressed in Chinese as "the study of transformations."

Written Chinese

Shi Huangdi, the first emperor of a unified China, suppressed the spread of many regional scripts by introducing a simplified, standardized script called small seal. At Han dynasty(206 BC-220 AD) this letter gave rise to stationery, running, draft, and standard. Printed Chinese writing is modeled into standard writing. Cursive, running or speed writing contains many abbreviated characters used in artistic calligraphy and in commercial and private correspondence, so it has long been banned from use in official documents. Over the past 3000 years, the main writing styles have been:
1.Printed style,
2.Regular brush style,
3. Driving style,
4. "Herbal" style.

The printing of abbreviated characters is still banned in Taiwan, but has become common practice in the?Chinese?People's Republic. Non-abbreviated hieroglyphs are called traditional. Many old people in the People's Republic of China still use traditional characters, and some have difficulty with abbreviated characters. The abbreviated characters are sometimes referred to as "simplified".

Transliteration methods

In the English-speaking world, since 1892, Chinese words(with the exception of personal names and geographical names) are usually transliterated according to phonetic system spelling called romanization of Wade Giles. She was proposed to sir Thomas Wade(1818-95) and Herbert Giles(1845-1935). However, personal names have been romanized according to individual wishes, and toponyms follow the non-systematic spelling rule introduced by the China Postal Administration. Since 1958, another system of phonetic romanization has been officially introduced in the People's Republic of China known as pinyin("spelling"), where it is used for telegrams and in primary education. The replacement of traditional characters by pinyin has been proposed, but it is unlikely to be fully implemented due to the threat that this replacement poses to the literature and historical documents of classical Chinese. Simplify over time sound system, as a result of which many homonyms appeared, led to the fact that the brief classical style became incomprehensible when transmitted in alphabetical transcription. On January 1, 1979, Xinhua (New China News Agency) began to use pinyin in all shipments in foreign countries. The US government, many scientific publications and newspapers such as the New York Times also adopted the pinyin system, as did New Encyclopedia Funk & Wagnall's.

Chinese is related to Sino-Tibetan family languages, which, in addition to Chinese, includes Dungan, Burmese, Tibetan and some others. Chinese is spoken by more than 95% of the Chinese population and about 24 million ethnic Chinese living in Laos, Vietnam, Kampuchea, Myanmar, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippine Islands, as well as an increasing number of immigrants in North America, Western Europe and in Russia.

Chinese is one of the official and working languages ​​of the UN. There are 7 dialect groups in Chinese : northern (北, the most numerous - over 800 million speakers), wu (吴), xiang (湘), gan (赣), Hakka (客家), yue (粤), min (闽).

Dialects of Chinese differ phonetically, making inter-dialect communication difficult. (and sometimes makes it so difficult that it actually makes it impossible), also sometimes differ in vocabulary, partly in grammar , but at the same time the basics of their grammar and vocabulary are the same.

Media communication tool different dialects serves as the normative Chinese language - putonghua(普通话), which is considered literary Chinese and a phonetic norm. It is he who is taught in Russia to all students. In Singapore, huayu (华语), in Hong Kong and Taiwan - goyu (国语).

As mentioned a little earlier, there are minor differences in phonetics between dialects (which, however, become more significant as you move south or west). Mandarin and Huayu use abbreviated hieroglyphs , and in goyu - full hieroglyphs. In some cases, a full understanding between the Chinese speakers of different dialects is possible only when both sides switch to putonghua or writing.

Therefore, despite the fact that dialects are a manifestation of the richness of the Chinese language and the originality of the great national culture Celestial, they still impede the movement of China to a national language that would be spoken by all the inhabitants of China, both in the north and in the south, and in the east and west.

Chinese, like most other Sino-Tibetan languages, is characterized by the presence of meaningful tones.

Chinese characters

Chinese characters being one of the oldest writing systems on Earth significantly different from the writing systems of other languages.

Each hieroglyphic sign (Chinese characters) - this is not a letter, but a whole word, or a syllable-morpheme. For all my centuries of history Chinese characters have undergone significant changes.

Various books on Chinese characters say that Chinese characters were invented by Cang Jie(倉頡 cāng jié) is the court historiographer of the mythical emperor 皇帝 (huáng dì). Often he was depicted with four eyes, which symbolized his clairvoyance. Before the invention of hieroglyphics, the Chinese used knot writing. It is even mentioned in 道德经 (dào dé jīng) and commentary on 易经 (yì jīng).

Evolution of Chinese characters, after going through several more stages, (until 200 BC there was a style 隶书 (lìshū), which was considered the style of business writing), including through unification during the time of the emperor 秦始皇 (Qín ShǐHuáng), ended with the allocation in the 4th century of three normative calligraphic styles: 楷书 (kǎishū), 行书 (xíngshū) and 草书 (cǎoshū).

Kaishu style楷书 (kǎishū) was a statutory letter used when writing or compiling official documents.

Xingshu style(Italic writing 行书 - xíngshū ) allowed some abbreviations of elements in the character, and the Caoshu style (Cursive writing 草书 - cǎoshū ) could be used in private correspondence or in actual calligraphy.

The last item in the change of Chinese characters there was a transition to simplified characters (简体字 jiǎntǐ zì). This happened in the 60s and 70s. 20th century. Full characters are still in use, for example, in Taiwan, Macau and Hong Kong.

The oldest written monuments of Chinese writing

The oldest written monuments (divinary inscriptions on bronze, stones, bones and turtle shells) apparently date back to the 2nd half of the 2nd millennium BC. e. The oldest literary monuments- “Shujing” (“Book of History”) and “Shijing” (“Book of Songs”) (1st half of the 1st millennium BC).

Based on the living dialects of that time, a literary ancient Chinese - wenyan , which over time diverged from the language of oral communication and became (already in the 1st millennium AD) incomprehensible to the ear.

This written language, reflecting the norms of the ancient Chinese language, was used as literary language until the 20th century, although it underwent significant changes over the centuries (in particular, it was replenished with terminology).

Phonetics of the Chinese language

The sound composition of the Chinese language in the field of phonetics is characterized by the fact that its consonants and vowels (data on the number of phonemes differ) are organized into a limited number of toned syllables of a fixed (constant) composition.

There are 414 syllables in Mandarin Chinese, including 1324 tone variants (in Mandarin there are 4 semantic tones, each syllable can have from 2 to 4 tone variants). Syllable division is morphologically significant, that is, each syllable is the sound shell of a morpheme or a simple word. A separate phoneme, as a carrier of meaning (usually a vowel), is toned and is a special case of a syllable.

Morpheme

The morpheme is usually monosyllabic . Lot monosyllabic words. Some of the old monosyllabic words are not syntactically independent, they are used only as components of complex and derivative words. The two-syllable (two-morpheme) norm of the word dominates. In connection with the growth of terminology, the number of more than two-syllable words is growing. Due to the peculiarities of the phonetic-morphological structure of the Chinese language, there are almost no direct borrowings, but it widely uses semantic borrowings, forming tracing papers.

The rapid growth of polysyllabic vocabulary reinforces the characterization of modern Chinese as a polysyllabic one. Word formation is carried out due to word formation, affixation and conversion.

Composition models are analogues of word combination models. In Chinese, in many cases it is impossible to distinguish a compound word from a phrase. Formation is represented mainly by verbal aspectual suffixes . The plural form is inherent in nouns denoting persons and personal pronouns.

One affix can be used for a “group” design, i.e. it can refer to a number of significant words. Affixes are not numerous, in some cases optional, have an agglutinative character. Agglutination in Chinese does not serve to express the relationship between words, and the structure of the Chinese language remains predominantly isolating.

Syntax of Chinese

The syntax of the Chinese language is characterized by a nominative system , in a relatively fixed word order, the definition always precedes the one being defined. A sentence can take the form of an active and a passive construction; possible permutations of words (within certain limits) that do not change them syntactic role. The Chinese language has a developed system complex sentences formed by allied and non-union composition and subordination.

Chinese is an interesting language and it is possible to learn it. Over a billion Chinese know this. Go ahead - keep it up!

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