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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.
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.
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 ...
In the early 20th century, a standard form based on the Beijing dialect, with elements from other Mandarin varieties, was adopted as the national language. Standard Chinese is the official language of China [4] and Taiwan, [5] one of four official languages of Singapore and one of six official languages of the United Nations. [6]
Robert Morrison (1782-1834) is credited with several historical firsts in addition to the first bidirectional Chinese and English dictionary. He was the first Protestant missionary in China, started the first Chinese-language periodical in 1815, [5] collaborated with William Milne to write the first translation of the Bible into Chinese in 1823, helped to found the English-language The Canton ...
From meaning 'cook', perhaps based on Cantonese. lit. 'to stir fry' Chow chow: Cantonese any of a breed of heavy-coated blocky dogs of Chinese origin Chow mein: Cantonese 炒麵: chau 2 mein 6: lit. 'stir fried noodle', from initial Chinese immigrants from Taishan came to the United States Confucius: Jesuit Latinization 孔夫子: kǒngfūzǐ
The Shuowen Jiezi is a Chinese dictionary compiled by Xu Shen c. 100 CE, during the Eastern Han dynasty (25–220 CE). While prefigured by earlier reference works for Chinese characters like the Erya (c. 3rd century BCE), the Shuowen Jiezi contains the first comprehensive analysis of characters in terms of their structure, where Xu attempted to provide rationales for their construction.