The Chinese language serves as a means of communication for a huge mass of people. It is spoken by 95% of the Chinese population, as well as representatives of the Chinese people living in other Asian countries: Vietnam, Laos, Burma, Taiwan, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia. According to the latest data, this language is considered native by more than a billion people on the planet (for English, this figure is half as much).

But if in Russia representatives different areas countries perfectly understand each other, in China everything is different. The Chinese language has a huge number of dialects that are so different that many linguists treat them as separate languages. Residents of different provinces often cannot even keep up a conversation on everyday topics.

To solve this situation, in 1955 the authorities introduced an official language, which was taken as the northern dialect of Putonghua (Beijing dialect). The choice was due to the fact that the speakers of the northern branch of the dialects accounted for 70% of the country's population, and they included residents of the capital. Putonghua was actively introduced into everyday life: it was taught in schools and universities, broadcast television.

However, due to the fact that most of the country's population is made up of peasants, dialects continue to actively exist. A special mentality played a role here: the cult of ancestors and the cult of history have always flourished in China. Each dialect is part of a centuries-old culture, and to abandon it would be tantamount to death.

Reasons for the multi-dialect composition of the Chinese language

Linguists divide the territory of China into two large dialect zones: northern and southern. The North has always been a single entity and has been an arena for historical events, while in the south everything was quiet, but at the same time it was a separate isolated area. This can explain the relative similarity of the dialects of the northern branch, whose speakers, at the very least, can explain themselves to each other, which cannot be said about the southern dialects.

The main reason for the formation of many dialects was the numerous migrations of the Chinese in search of quiet life and their contacts with neighboring peoples. In the process of communication, there was an active exchange of vocabulary, elements of phonetics and writing. The speakers of ancient dialects communicated with each other and with representatives of other peoples, involuntarily forming new language systems.

Differences in language systems different dialects lie in the field of phonetics, vocabulary, and to some extent grammar. That's why when oral communication between residents of different parts of the country comes to a standstill, there is a way out - to explain in writing. Why are the speech features that formed different groups dialects, are not reflected in the written language of the Chinese?

Development of the written language

The writing of the Chinese language has about 4 thousand years. Its peculiarity lies in the fact that all the metamorphoses that it has undergone during its existence are in no way connected with oral speech. The pronunciation of hieroglyphs under the influence of various factors changed, but their outline remained unchanged. Due to this, numerous dialects of the territory of China have a single writing system.

The earliest source of ancient Chinese writing are inscriptions on fortune-telling stones, first discovered in the province of Henan in 1899. They were made with a chisel and represented graphic elements, which are images of objects, people, animals. The folding features characteristic of the modern writing of hieroglyphs were absent. The difficulty was that there were many variants of the outline of the same hieroglyph.

All subsequent periods in the development of the hieroglyphic system of the Chinese language pursued the goal of simplifying the inscription of signs, as well as introducing a single script throughout China. This task was successfully completed during the reign of the Qin Dynasty. In 221 BC Emperor Qin Shi Huang unified the country after internecine wars and began work on the unification of writing. According to researchers, the brush was invented at the same time, which is used for writing to this day.

At the beginning of the 20th century, it was proposed to simplify the structure of hieroglyphs, arguing that unnecessarily complex writing is the reason underdevelopment economy. In 1964, simplified hieroglyphs gained official status, and now they are the official script throughout China.

A unified writing system provided a common literary tradition, and that is why the Chinese dialects did not receive the status of separate languages.

How many dialects are in Chinese? Dialect groups

Most linguists recognize the traditional classification, according to which there are 7 dialect groups. These include:

• northern dialects (guanhua);
• Gan;
• Hakka (Kejia);
• Min;
• Yue (Cantonese).

AT last years an increasing number of researchers in the world recognize 3 more groups: pinghua, jin and anhui. There are also dialects that are not included in any classification, they are mixed languages.

Northern dialects (Guanhua)

This is the largest group in terms of the number of speakers (about 800 million) and the territory covered. It includes the Beijing Putonghua dialect, adopted in the 50s-60s. 20th century for the official language of China, Taiwan and Singapore. Western scholars call it Mandarin: guanhua is translated from Chinese as "official letter", and mandarin officials are called guan. Many scholars refer this name to the entire group.

Guanhua dialects have several branches depending on geographic location. Due to historical factors, they have much in common and are mutually intelligible.

Gan dialects

Gan dialects are spoken by residents of the province of central and northern parts of Jiangxi, as well as inhabitants of some parts of other provinces: Fujian, Anhui, Hubei, Hunan. This group includes about 2% of the Chinese, which is more than 20 million people.

Hakka (Kejia) dialects

This branch also has distribution in Jiangxi province, but only in its southern part, as well as in central and northwestern regions Guangdong province and western Fujian. There are carriers of this group in Taiwan and Hainan. In the West, this branch is recognized as a separate language.

In terms of phonetic composition, Hakka dialects have much in common with Middle Chinese. The standard among them is the Meixian dialect, common in the province of Guangdong, whose authorities in 1960 proposed a system for its transliteration using Latin alphabet. Native speakers of the Hakka branch make up 2.5% of the total number of Chinese speakers.

Min dialects

This group is considered one of the oldest among sinologists. Min is the second name of Fujian Province and is still used today. The Min languages ​​cover the southeast of China (mostly Fujian province, as well as the eastern regions of Guangdong province), including the islands of Hainan and Taiwan. Geographically, this group is divided into southern and northern. The Taiwanese dialect has the largest number of speakers.

U dialects

One of largest groups in Chinese, second only to Putonghua in terms of the number of speakers (8% of the population), some researchers give it the status of a language. Sometimes this branch is called the Shanghai dialect. Distribution area: most of the territory of Zhejiang province, Shanghai city, southern regions of Jiangsu province. There are carriers of the Wu group in some areas of the provinces of Anhui, Jiangxi and Fujian.

The phonetics of this branch of dialects is characterized by softness and lightness. Of the dialects, Suzhou and Shanghai are considered the most popular.

Dialects of Xiang (Hunan)

The Xiang branch covers about 5% of the country's Chinese-speaking population. It is divided into Novosyansky and Starosyansky dialects. The latter is of great interest to sinologists. The Novosyansk language has undergone changes under the influence of Putonghua, whose speakers surround the area of ​​its distribution from three sides. Of the subdialects, the most typical is the dialect of the city of Changsha.

Yue (Cantonese) dialects

The group also bears the name of one of the dialects - Cantonese. The word "canton" comes from French, so the British in the era of colonization called Guangzhou. The distribution area of ​​the Yue languages ​​​​is the province of Guangdong and some regions adjacent to it. Guangzhou is the main dialect.

Pinghua, Anhui and Jin dialects

These branches do not receive a separate status for all researchers, they are usually included in groups traditional classification. Pinghua dialects are part of Cantonese and are represented by the Nanning dialect.

As for the Anhui group, the opinions of researchers differ here. Some attribute it to the Gan group, others are of the opinion that it belongs to the northern dialects, others include it in Wu. Sometimes the Anhui dialects are combined with the Hakka group.

Jin or Shanxi are usually classified as northern dialects. Select them in separate group suggested in 1985 by the researcher Li Rong, citing the presence of features that are uncharacteristic of guanhua. This concept has found both supporters and opponents, there is no consensus on this issue yet.

The division of the Chinese language into dialect groups is mainly due to geographical or historical factors, the names for them were often chosen according to the same principle, which sometimes diverged from the classification of research scientists.

Dialect groups have all the criteria to have the status of separate languages, but a single script for all of China ensures the integrity of the Chinese language. With the introduction of Putonghua as an official means of communication, many began to consider it a real language, and all other groups - dialects, which, being a huge layer of historical and cultural heritage are carefully preserved by their carriers.

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 of China, as in Chinese People's Republic as well as in 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 the expatriate communities in the South East Asia, North and South America and on Hawaiian Islands. In fact, in the world in Chinese He speaks more people than in any other language. English is the second most spoken language, and Spanish is third.

As the dominant language in East Asia, Chinese has big influence on the writing and vocabulary of neighboring languages ​​not related 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(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. The word order is even more strict than in English language, indicating the relationship of words to each other in a sentence. AT in general terms, the word order in Chinese is similar to the word order in English: 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 symbol or hieroglyph corresponds to single word in dictionary. Reading newspapers requires knowledge from 2000 to 3000 hieroglyphs. Big Chinese vocabulary contains over 40,000 hieroglyphs(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 along with 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 phonetic syllabary, which became the predecessor of the alphabet. However, due to a large number homonyms in Chinese, 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". AT rare cases When the scribes actually meant "scoop", they tried to avoid ambiguity by using a complex hieroglyph 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.

For Expression modern concepts in Chinese, native equivalents are usually invented from meaningful syllables, or transmission occurs through a phonetically close sound. 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 styles of writing 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 a common practice in the People's Republic of China. 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(excluding personal names and geographical names) are usually transliterated according to a phonetic spelling system 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 this is unlikely to be fully implemented due to the threat that this replacement poses to literature and historical documents classical Chinese. The simplification over time of the sound system, which resulted in many homonyms, 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 to foreign countries. The US government, many scientific publications, and newspapers such as the New York Times have also adopted the pinyin system, as have New Encyclopedia Funk & Wagnall's.

Almost three hundred languages ​​and dialects are listed in circulation in the People's Republic of China, but only one is officially recognized as a state language. The language of China, in which it is customary to sign documents, conduct business negotiations and go on air federal channels called Putonghua.

Some statistics and facts

• According to accurate data, 56 recognized ethnic groups in China speak 292 languages.
• Standard official language PRC is the official language of the mainland only.
• Official status in Tibetan autonomous region It has Tibetan, and in the territories of Inner Mongolia - Mongolian.
• Spoken languages ​​in the republic belong to at least 9 families.
• Not all Chinese languages ​​use the Chinese script.
• On banknotes of the People's Republic of China, in addition to Chinese writing, Arabic, Latin, Mongolian and Tibetan letters are used. This is done for those groups of the country's population that do not use hieroglyphs when writing.

Chinese Mandarin

Western people call Mandarin Chinese, which is officially adopted as the state language in China. The vocabulary and phonetics of Putonghua is based on the norms of the Beijing dialect, which refers to northern group numerous dialects in the territory of the Celestial Empire. His written standard is called "baihua".
However, the island territories of the PRC have completely different official languages ​​and in Taiwan, for example, it is called "goyu".

Exam in the Middle Kingdom

In 1994, the PRC authorities introduced an examination for the level of Putonghua proficiency, according to the results of which only native Beijingers make less than 3% of errors in writing and in speech. To work as a correspondent on the radio, for example, no more than 8% of errors are permissible, for teaching Chinese at school - no more than 13%. The level of Mandarin proficiency with the number of errors less than 40% was able to pass only a little more than half of the inhabitants of the Celestial Empire.

Note to the tourist

Going on a trip to China, remember that you will not have problems communicating only in the territories bordering Russia, in the capital, Shanghai, Hong Kong and a couple of other large cities. The whole province does not even speak English at all, and only in large hotels can you find a porter or waiter who can help solve a foreigner's problems.
Have a business card with the name of the hotel in Chinese with you to show it to the taxi driver. They do not differ in knowledge of English even in the capital.

Republic of China
Singapore
UN
SCO Total number of speakers: Rating : Classification Category : Writing : Language codes GOST 7.75–97: ISO 639-1 : ISO 639-2:

chi (B); zho (T)

ISO 639-3: See also: Project:Linguistics

This page is proposed to be merged with The current situation with the introduction of the Chinese state language. Explanation of reasons and discussion - on the page Wikipedia:Unification/July 5, 2012. The discussion lasts one week (or longer if it goes slowly). Discussion start date - 2012-07-05. If discussion is not required (obvious case), use other templates. Do not delete the template until after the discussion has been concluded.

Chinese (whale. trad. 漢語, ex. 汉语, pinyin: hanyǔ, pall. : hanyu, or whale. ex. 中文, pinyin: zhongwen, pall. : zhongwen- if you mean writing) - the most common modern language ( a set of Chinese “dialects” that are very different from each other) is considered by most linguists as an independent language group consisting of separate, albeit related, languages); belongs to the Sino-Tibetan (Sino-Tibetan) language superfamily. Originally the language of China's main ethnic group - han.

In its standard form, Chinese is the official language of the PRC and Taiwan, and one of the six official and working languages ​​of the United Nations.

Linguogeography

Range and abundance

Distribution of the Chinese language in the world:
Countries where Chinese is primary or official Countries with over 5 million Chinese speakers Countries with more than 1 million Chinese speakers Countries with more than 0.5 million Chinese speakers Countries with more than 0.1 million Chinese speakers Cities with significant numbers of Chinese speakers

Chinese is the official language of the PRC, Taiwan and Singapore. It is spoken by over 1.3 billion people worldwide.

Chinese serves as one of the 6 official and working languages ​​of the UN. Historically, it is the language of the Han people, which dominates in national composition PRC (more than 90% of the country's population). In addition, tens of millions of Chinese who retain their language live in almost all countries of Southeast Asia (in Singapore, making up more than 75% of the population); a significant Chinese diaspora is scattered throughout the world.

Discussion

According to some Western linguists, Chinese is not common language, but a family of languages, and what traditionalists call dialects of Chinese, in fact - various languages.

Chinese letter

In Chinese writing, each character stands for a separate syllable and a separate morpheme. Total hieroglyphs exceeds 80 thousand, but most of them can be found only in the monuments of classical Chinese literature.

• Knowledge of the 500 most frequent characters is enough to understand 80% of the usual modern Chinese text, knowledge of 1000 and 2400 characters makes it possible to understand 91% and 99% of such a text, respectively.
• 3000 characters are enough to read newspapers and non-specialized magazines.
• Large one-volume bilingual dictionaries include, as a rule, 6000-8000 hieroglyphs. Among this volume, there are already quite a few very rarely used hieroglyphs, for example, those used in the names of ritual objects of antiquity or medicines of traditional Chinese medicine.
• Most complete dictionary hieroglyphs zhonghua zihai("The Sea of ​​Chinese Characters" 中華字海) of the 1994 edition contains 87,019 characters.

Chinese characters consist of graphemes, there are about 316 graphemes in total, and graphemes, in turn, consist of strokes - from one to 24.

Currently Chinese characters exist in 2 versions: simplified, adopted in mainland China, and traditional - in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and in some other countries.

Traditionally, Chinese people wrote from top to bottom, with columns going from right to left. At present, the PRC predominantly writes horizontally, from left to right, following the pattern of European languages; vertical writing continues to be used in Taiwan along with horizontal writing. However, in mainland China, vertical writing and pre-reform hieroglyphics are still used as a semantic reference to traditional Chinese culture - in art history publications, art periodicals, etc.

Due to political reasons, the northern dialects, which were more uniform in comparison with the southern ones, acquired the dominant importance in the Chinese language. On their basis, the "language of officials" was formed, guanhua, which acquired the status of the official language of the empire. Together with him, the so-called. baihua- spoken language of the common people.

A major turning point in the history of Chinese culture was the written use of the spoken language; it is believed that the primacy in this belongs to Jin Shengtan ( whale. trad. 金聖歎, ex. 金圣叹, 1610?-1661). The literacy democratization movement in the early 20th century marked the revolutionary transition to baihua as the main language of written communication and the beginning of the unification of Chinese dialects.

The vocabulary of the Chinese language has gone through two stages of transformation: the adaptation of a new semantic layer that arose with the penetration of Buddhism into China in the 1st century AD. e. - and merging with the world lexicon of the New Age, the most accessible carrier of which was Japanese: since the beginning of the 20th century. the penetration of many Western concepts begins, adapted by means of once borrowed Chinese characters, but already formed in Japan and, thus, are borrowings for the Chinese language.

Linguistic characteristic

Phonetics and phonology

The consonants and vowels of Chinese are organized into a limited number of toned syllables of a fixed composition. There are 414 syllables in Mandarin Chinese, including tone variants - 1332 (Mandarin has 4 semantic tones, each syllable can have from 1 to 4 tone variants + neutral tone). Syllable division is morphologically significant, that is, each syllable is the sound shell of a morpheme or a simple word. The tonal system has reading rules: tones can change or neutralize.

Modern tables, which are used when accepting the state test for the level of knowledge of Putonghua ("Putonghua shuiping zeshi"), include 400 syllables without tone differences. The tables are based on modern normative phonetic dictionary"Xinhua Zidian" (Beijing, 1987), from the list of syllables of which 18 interjections and rare readings hieroglyphs considered to be dialect or obsolete book characters.

Morphology

The morpheme is usually monosyllabic. Part of the old monosyllabic words syntactically not independent - they are used only as components of complex and derivative words. Two-syllable (two-morphemic) words dominate. As terminology develops, the number of more than disyllabic words.

Word formation is carried out by the methods of composition, affixation and conversion.

Traditionally, the Chinese language had almost no direct borrowings, however, it widely used semantic calques, for example, 电 - electricity, letters. lightning, 电脑 - computer, lit. electric brain, 笔记本电脑 - laptop, lit. notebook-computer. These days, phonetic borrowings are becoming more common, such as 克隆 ( kelong) "clone". Some new borrowings are beginning to replace existing calques, such as 巴士 (bāshì) "bus" (from English. bus) displaces 公共汽车, lit. public, gas wagon.

In Chinese, in many cases it is impossible to distinguish compound word from a phrase. Formation is represented mainly by verbal aspectual suffixes. Optional form plural, formed by the suffix 们 (men), is inherent in nouns denoting persons and personal pronouns.

One affix can be used for a "group" design, that is, it can refer to a number of significant words. Affixes are few, sometimes optional, and have an agglutinative character. Agglutination in Chinese does not serve to express relationships between words, and the structure of the language remains predominantly isolating.

Chinese syntax is characterized by a nominative system, a relatively fixed word order: the definition always precedes the defined, no matter how it (the definition) is expressed: from one word to the whole sentence. Circumstances, expressed in adverbs degrees, etc., are placed before the verb; the so-called "additions" (time, result) - usually follow the verb.

The offer may take the form of an active and passive design; 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.

Significant parts of speech are conventionally divided into "names" and "predicates". The latter also includes adjectives. For many words, multifunctional use is possible. Modern Chinese distinguishes between present-future and past tense, there is an inventory of aspectual indicators and a complex system of modal particles.

The Chinese language has a developed system service words. The main ones are: prepositions, postpositions, conjunctions, particles, counter words, indicators of sentence members, predicative neutralizers.

In terms of the relationship between subject and object, Chinese is an active language, but the differences between active and stative verbs are not expressed morphologically, but syntactically.

Anthroponymy

Typically, Chinese people have one- or two-syllable first names that are written after the family name. There is a rule that a Chinese name must be translatable into Putonghua. A well-known case is associated with this rule, when the father, an avid Internet user, was denied registration of his son in the name "".

Previously, the Chinese had several names throughout their lives: in childhood - "milk", or baby name(xiao-ming, whale. ex. 小名, pinyin: xiǎo ming), adults received legal name(min, whale. ex. 名, pinyin: ming), employees among relatives had a middle name (zi, whale. ex. 字, pinyin: zì), some also took a pseudonym (hao, whale. ex. 号, pinyin: hao). However, by the mid-1980s, it had become common for adults to have only one official name, min, although "milk" names in childhood were still common:164-165.

In Russian, a space is usually placed between the Chinese surname and given name: Surname Name, while the name is written together. In old sources, Chinese names were written with a hyphen (Feng Yu-hsiang), but later it became accepted continuous spelling:167 (correct - Feng Yuxiang). The most common Chinese surnames: Li ( whale. ex. 李, pinyin: Lǐ), Van ( whale. ex. 王, pinyin: Wang), Zhang ( whale. ex. 张, pinyin: Zhang) :164 .

Chinese women generally keep their maiden names when they marry and do not take their husband's surname (almost universally in the People's Republic of China), but children tend to inherit their father's surname.

Phraseologisms

Relationship between various types phraseological units and their place in the range " oral speech - written language» (discharge 谚语 merged with 俗语)

Currently, in Chinese phraseology, the most common classification is proposed by the Chinese linguist Ma Guofan (马国凡), consisting of five digits:

1. Chengyu ( whale. trad. 成語, ex. 成语, pinyin: chengyŭ, literally: "ready-made expression") is an idiom.
2. Yanyu ( whale. trad. 諺語, ex. 谚语, pinyin: yanyŭ) - proverb
3. Sehouyu ( whale. trad. 歇後語, ex. 歇后语, pinyin: xiēhòuyǔ, literally: “a saying with a truncated ending”) - an understatement-allegory
4. Guanyunyu ( whale. trad. 慣用語, ex. 惯用语, pinyin: guanyòngyŭ, literally: "habitual expression") - phraseological combination
5. Suyu ( whale. trad. 俗語, ex. 俗语, pinyin: suyǔ, literally: "colloquial expression") - saying

The Chinese language is listed in the Guinness Book of Records as one of the most difficult languages ​​in the world. In the record list, it is mentioned in the same row with the Chippewa languages,

Watching the Chinese. Hidden rules of behavior Alexey Maslov

What language do the Chinese speak

What language do the Chinese speak? A strange question - of course, in Chinese! In fact, everything is not so simple - in fact, it is by no means a single language.

The "official" Chinese language, spoken by TV and radio announcers and studied in the world's universities, is putonghua(

) - "general language". The basics of Putonghua were developed in the 1950s. 20th century as the main means of interethnic and interregional communication of the population of China. It is based on the Beijing dialect of Chinese. Today Mandarin is taught in Chinese schools, and the vast majority of Chinese, wherever they live, either speak Mandarin or at least understand it. In fact, many Chinese, especially in the south of the country, are bilingual: they speak their native local language, for example, in Guangdong or Cantonese, plus Mandarin.

The name "Chinese" contains a paradox: for example, although a Pekingese and a Shanghainese are formally native speakers of the same Chinese language, they will not understand each other if they speak their own language. The same applies to the opposition "Guangdong resident - Sichuan resident" or "Fujian resident - Northern China resident", etc.

Today, Chinese is the native language of more than 1 billion people - it is the most widely spoken language on the planet, and belongs to the Sino-Tibetan group of languages. It is called by native speakers hanyu(

) or zhongwen(

), for residents of southern China, the name huayu (

), for Taiwan - guohua(lit. national, or state, language). There is still a lot of discussion about what to call different forms Chinese language - dialects or different languages. Today, experts based different systems typologies number from six to twelve various groups inside Chinese. According to another classification, Chinese is considered a macro language with thirteen separate sub-languages. In general, there is no linguistic unity.

The concept of a single Chinese language is for China a symbolic and political concept rather than a philological and scientifically based one. In fact, the only thing that unites these languages ​​is a common hieroglyphic system, in everything else they differ: in pronunciation, grammatical constructions, intonations.

The most common Chinese sublanguage is Northern, which is usually called in English transcription mandarin. Officially, it is called differently - "northern dialect", or "beifang hua" (

), "official language" - "guan hua" (

), goyu(

) - "state" or "national language". It is spoken by 850 million people, but it is also not uniform, there are at least six dialect groups in it. This is what you will hear when you arrive in Beijing or Harbin.

After northern Chinese, the most common is "wu" (

), which is spoken by more than 90 million people mainly in Zhejiang province, in the cities of Shanghai, Suzhou and Hangzhou, in the southern part of Jiangsu province.

One of the most famous in the world has become the Cantonese dialect - or, more correctly, the Guangdong language. Its official name is "Yue language" (

It is distributed in the south of China, primarily in Hong Kong and the province of Guangzhou, in almost all countries of Southeast Asia. It is believed that about 80 million people speak it today, but exact number is not known, since its carriers are settled almost all over the world. It was from the south of China that the most active emigration took place in Western countries, primarily in the US and the UK, so if you go to a Chinese restaurant in these countries, you will surely hear Cantonese. Today, in Cantonese, thanks to close intercultural contacts, there are a lot of borrowings from Western languages.

In the Xiang language

), which is widespread in the central and southwestern parts of Hunan province, as well as in almost twenty counties of Sichuan, is spoken by about 36 million people. By the way, Mao Zedong, who came from Hunan province, also spoke it.

In yet another southern Chinese sublanguage, "ming" (

) is spoken by nearly 50 million people in Fujian, Fujian in neighboring Guangdong, and Taiwan. On the tongue Hakka (

) is spoken by about 35 million people in the very south of China. Representatives of the Hakka believe that it was their language that was the most early language population of China.

In fact, languages ​​differ not only in pronunciation, but even lexical composition, the form of construction of speech, dialect turns. Moreover, in some areas, such as southern Fujian, there are words that do not have a direct hieroglyphic correspondence in northern China. As you can see, many languages ​​are hidden under the single name "Chinese".

In the 50s. XX in the PRC, a reform of hieroglyphs was carried out, as a result of which a simplified spelling of many hieroglyphs was adopted. Thus, today there are two sets of hieroglyphs - complete, or complex (fanti tzu

), and simplified ( jianti zi

). In the PRC, only simplified characters are used, while in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and among overseas Chinese, the old spelling is still used. Because of this, the younger generation of Chinese in the PRC cannot properly read newspapers published in other countries, as well as works written before the 50s. XX century, if they are not translated into simplified hieroglyphs, that is, Confucius in the original is not available to them. The old generation as well good specialists in China, both versions of hieroglyphs are understood.

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