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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.
Words of Chinese origin have entered European languages, including English. Most of these were direct loanwords from various varieties of Chinese.However, Chinese words have also entered indirectly via other languages, particularly Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese, that have all used Chinese characters at some point and contain a large number of Chinese loanwords.
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.
Because most Chinese words are made up of two or more characters, there are many more Chinese words than characters. A more accurate equivalent for a Chinese character is the morpheme, as characters represent the smallest grammatical units with individual meanings in the Chinese language.
Loanwords have entered written and spoken Chinese from many sources, including ancient peoples whose descendants now speak Chinese. In addition to phonetic differences, varieties of Chinese such as Cantonese and Shanghainese often have distinct words and phrases left from their original languages which they continue to use in daily life and sometimes even in Mandarin.
Despite the pictorial nature of the oracle bone script, it was a fully functional and mature writing system by the time of the Shang dynasty, [19] meaning it was able to record the Old Chinese language, and not merely fragments of ideas or words. This level of maturity clearly implies an earlier period of development of at least several hundred ...
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 ...
The Chinese language, both written and spoken, is primarily made up of words and phrases, not independent characters. [ 1 ] The dictionary title ciyuan 辭源 – which combines ci 辭 "take leave; decline; diction; phrase; word" and yuan 源 "source; cause; origin" – is an old variant for ciyuan 詞源 "word origin; etymology", usually ...