If you can't find what you're looking for, try the Search box. A significant cause of this is phonological attrition. Thus, most Western readers will be much more familiar with Beijing than they will be with Běijīng (pinyin), and with Taipei than T'ai²-pei³ (Wade–Giles). Its spoken varieties have evolved at different rates, while written Chinese itself has changed much less. [15], Middle Chinese was the language used during Northern and Southern dynasties and the Sui, Tang, and Song dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE).

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The earliest Chinese written records are Shang dynasty-era oracle inscriptions, which can be traced back to 1250 BCE. The Chinese orthography centers on Chinese characters, which are written within imaginary square blocks, traditionally arranged in vertical columns, read from top to bottom down a column, and right to left across columns, despite alternative arrangement with rows of characters from left to right within a row and from top to bottom across rows having become more popular since the 20th century (like English and other Western writing system). [76] However, vocabularies from different Chinese-speaking area have diverged, and the divergence can be observed in written Chinese. [54][better source needed] Jerry Norman called this practice misleading, pointing out that Wu, which itself contains many mutually unintelligible varieties, could not be properly called a single language under the same criterion, and that the same is true for each of the other groups. One exception from this is Shanghainese which has reduced the set of tones to a two-toned pitch accent system much like modern Japanese. ... Investigation of the historical relationships among the Sinitic languages is just getting started. Language borrowing Why so little Chinese in English? Ancient words borrowed from along the Silk Road since Old Chinese include 葡萄 pútáo "grape", 石榴 shíliu/shíliú "pomegranate" and 狮子/獅子 shīzi "lion". So move on to the rest of the alphabet to see what's out there to try.

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The Zhongyuan Yinyun (1324) was a dictionary that codified the rhyming conventions of new sanqu verse form in this language. [42] Generally, mountainous South China exhibits more linguistic diversity than the North China Plain. [31] Later Korea, Japan, and Vietnam developed strong central governments modeled on Chinese institutions, with Literary Chinese as the language of administration and scholarship, a position it would retain until the late 19th century in Korea and (to a lesser extent) Japan, and the early 20th century in Vietnam. They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. From French came 芭蕾 bālěi "ballet" and 香槟/香檳 xiāngbīn, "champagne"; from Italian, 咖啡 kāfēi "caffè".

By the middle of the 19th century, the Beijing dialect had become dominant and was essential for any business with the imperial court. Chinese surnames not found in the Hundred Family Surnames, Lists of empresses dowager sharing a surname, Template:100 Most Common Family Names in Mainland China, Template:101-200 Most Common Family Names in Mainland China, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:Chinese-language_surnames&oldid=954672772, Template Category TOC via CatAutoTOC on category with 301–600 pages, CatAutoTOC generates standard Category TOC, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 3 May 2020, at 17:52. The following 200 pages are in this category, out of approximately 332 total. Chinese morphology is strictly bound to a set number of syllables with a fairly rigid construction. It is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. [11] Scholars have attempted to reconstruct the phonology of Old Chinese by comparing later varieties of Chinese with the rhyming practice of the Classic of Poetry and the phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters. Chinese is first known to have been written in Latin characters by Western Christian missionaries in the 16th century.

They have even been accepted into Chinese, a language usually resistant to loanwords, because their foreign origin was hidden by their written form.

As a practical measure, officials of the Ming and Qing dynasties carried out the administration of the empire using a common language based on Mandarin varieties, known as Guānhuà (官话/官話, literally "language of officials"). Get started with free lessons, exclusive discounts, and more.

After much dispute between proponents of northern and southern dialects and an abortive attempt at an artificial pronunciation, the National Language Unification Commission finally settled on the Beijing dialect in 1932. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or Pāli, the liturgical languages of North India.