Ad
related to: mandarin chinese origin
Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Standard Mandarin Chinese is based on Beijing dialect, with some lexical and syntactic influence from other Mandarin dialects. It is the official spoken language of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and Taiwan (Republic of China, ROC), as well as one of the four official languages of Singapore , and a high-prestige minority language [ 11 ...
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.
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 ...
English words of Chinese origin usually have different characteristics, depending on precisely how the words encountered the West. Despite the increasingly widespread use of Standard Chinese—based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin—among Chinese people, English words based on Mandarin are comparatively few.
Among linguists, Standard Chinese has been referred to as Standard Northern Mandarin [8] [9] [10] or Standard Beijing Mandarin. [11] [12] It is colloquially referred to as simply Mandarin, [13] though this term may also refer to the Mandarin dialect group as a whole, or the late imperial form used as a lingua franca.
On the history of the standardization of Mandarin as the Chinese primary national dialect. Hannas, William C. (1997), Asia's Orthographic Dilemma , University of Hawaii Press, ISBN 978-0-8248-1892-0 .
Gui–Liu Mandarin (simplified Chinese: 桂柳官话; traditional Chinese: 桂柳官話) is a group of Southwestern Mandarin varieties spoken predominantly in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. It is named after the cities of Guilin and Liuzhou , two main cities in the northeast of the province.
Old Mandarin or Early Mandarin was the speech of northern China during the Jurchen-ruled Jin dynasty and the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty (12th to 14th centuries). New genres of vernacular literature were based on this language, including verse, drama and story forms, such as the qu and sanqu .