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Modern Han Chinese consists of about 412 syllables [1] in 5 tones, so homophones abound and most non-Han words have multiple possible transcriptions. This is particularly true since Chinese is written as monosyllabic logograms, and consonant clusters foreign to Chinese must be broken into their constituent sounds (or omitted), despite being thought of as a single unit in their original language.
Chinese character meanings (traditional Chinese: 漢字字義; simplified Chinese: 汉字字义; pinyin: hànzì zìyì) are the meanings of the morphemes the characters represent, including the original meanings, extended meanings and phonetic-loan meanings. Some characters only have single meanings, some have multiple meanings, and some share ...
[1] [2] Chinese symbols often have auspicious meanings associated to them, such as good fortune, happiness, and also represent what would be considered as human virtues, such as filial piety, loyalty, and wisdom, [1] and can even convey the desires or wishes of the Chinese people to experience the good things in life. [2]
Exclamative particles are used as a method of recording aspects of human speech which may not be based entirely on meaning and definition. Specific characters are used to record exclamations, as with any other form of Chinese vocabulary, some characters exclusively representing the expression (such as 哼), others sharing characters with alternate words and meanings (such as 可).
This dual meaning-sound reading of a character is called eumhun (음훈; 音訓; from 音 'sound' + 訓 'meaning,' 'teaching'). The word or words used to denote the meaning are often—though hardly always—words of native Korean (i.e., non-Chinese) origin, and are sometimes archaic words no longer commonly used.
The Dungan language, a variety of Mandarin, was once written in the Latin script, but now employs Cyrillic. Some use the Cyrillic alphabet to shorten pinyin—e.g. 是; shì as [ш] Error: {{Transliteration}}: transliteration text not Latin script (pos 1: ш) . Various other countries employ bespoke systems for cyrillising Chinese.
In particular, whereas Mandarin has one general character to refer to the first-person pronoun, Literary Chinese has several, many of which are used as part of honorific language, and several of which have different grammatical uses (first-person collective, first-person possessive, etc.). [citation needed]
Character amnesia is a phenomenon where experienced speakers of some East Asian languages forget how to write Chinese characters previously well-known to them. The phenomenon is specifically tied to prolonged and extensive use of input methods, such as those that use romanizations of characters, and is documented to be a significant issue in China and Japan.