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The earliest historical linguistic evidence of the spoken Chinese language dates back approximately 4500 years, [1] while examples of the writing system that would become written Chinese are attested in a body of inscriptions made on bronze vessels and oracle bones during the Late Shang period (c. 1250 – 1050 BCE), [2] [3] with the very oldest dated to c. 1200 BCE.
Chinese may be viewed either as a holistic unit with great internal topological variation, or as an entire language family comprising many groupings of varieties. Written Chinese makes use of Chinese characters , one of the four independent inventions of writing agreed by scholars, and the only one of these remaining in use.
Kingdom of Characters is the third book authored by Jing Tsu, a professor of comparative literature and East Asian languages and literature at Yale University. [1] Her previous two books, Failure, Nationalism, and Literature: The Making of Modern Chinese Identity, 1895-1937 and Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora, also covered Chinese linguistic history.
The Chinese language has always consisted of a wide variety of dialects; hence prestige dialects and linguae francae have always been needed. Confucius (c. 551 – c. 479 BC) referred to yayan 'elegant speech' modeled on the dialect of the Zhou dynasty royal lands rather than regional dialects; texts authored during the Han dynasty (202 BC – 220 AD) also refer to tongyu (通語 'common ...
Modern China: Hudong: Probably the largest Chinese online encyclopedia 2006: Modern China: Baidu Baike: One of the two largest Chinese-language collaborative web-based encyclopedia 1989-2019: Modern China: Zhonghua Dadian (中华大典) Encyclopedia of Chinese classic texts, "the biggest cultural project since the founding of the People's ...
The complex relationship between spoken and written Chinese is an example of diglossia: as spoken, Chinese varieties have evolved at different rates, while the written language used throughout China changed comparatively little, crystallizing into a prestige form known as Classical or Literary Chinese.
A list of sinologists around the world, past and present. Sinology is commonly defined as the academic study of China primarily through Chinese language, literature, and history, and often refers to Western scholarship. Its origin "may be traced to the examination which Chinese scholars made of their own civilization." [1]
The Language Atlas of China (simplified Chinese: 中国语言地图集; traditional Chinese: 中國語言地圖集; pinyin: Zhōngguó yǔyán dìtú jí), published by Hong Kong Longman Publishing Company in two parts in 1987 and 1989, maps the distribution of both the varieties of Chinese and minority languages of China.