One of the major languages in the Chinese world. It belongs to Sino-Tibetan language family and is the most important language in this language family. In addition to Chinese mainland and Taiwan Province provinces, Chinese are also distributed in Singapore and Malaysia. About 940 million people's mother tongue is Chinese. Chinese is one of the working languages of the United Nations.
The standard language of Chinese is gradually formed on the basis of northern mandarin in recent hundreds of years. Its standard sound is Beijing sound. The standard language of Chinese is called Mandarin in Chinese mainland, Mandarin in Taiwan Province Province and Mandarin in Singapore and Malaysia. In a broad sense, it refers to the language of the Han nationality, and in a narrow sense, it refers to Putonghua. Besides, Mandarin, Mandarin, Chinese and other appellations refer to Chinese. Undoubtedly, Chinese is the most widely used language in the world, and about 1/5 people in the world speak Chinese as their mother tongue. Chinese has also had an important influence on the languages and characters of neighboring countries. For example, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese all retain a large number of Chinese loanwords and Chinese writing systems. Chinese is one of the working languages of the United Nations. Chinese is the language of China.
As a unique hieroglyphic language in the world, Chinese has a high degree of unity and standardization, and modern Chinese has a unified and standardized grammar. Although the pronunciation of dialects is particularly different, the written language is standardized and there is no obstacle to written communication caused by dialect differences.
Chinese belongs to independent language and analytical language. China script is a pictographic Chinese character. The written language used before the May 4th Movement is called "Classical Chinese", which is a kind of written language based on elegance used in the Confucius era. The written language popularized after the May 4th Movement is usually called "vernacular", which is a modern written language based on northern dialects. Classical Chinese is rarely used in the written language of modern Chinese.
speech sound
Chinese syllables can be divided into three parts: initials, finals and tones. The initials are initials, the rest are finals, and the tone is the pitch of the whole syllable. Tone is also considered as a part of syllables, because Chinese tones are semantic. For example, the initials of "soup, sugar, lying and scalding" are all [Tang], and the finals are all [Ang] (the international phonetic symbols are in square brackets, and the brackets are omitted in the table). Just because the tone is different, the meaning is different. They represent four different morphemes (the smallest meaningful language unit) in the language and are written as four different words.
19 18 The Phonetic Alphabet of Putonghua promulgated by the Ministry of Education at that time was a set of phonetic symbols made of Chinese characters. This set of letters combines the main vowel and the secondary vowel with one symbol (for example, ㄠ = [au], ㄢ = [an]), which embodies the traditional spirit of the dichotomy of initials and finals. Phonetic symbols are widely circulated and have great influence. Taiwan Province province has been used to this day.
1958 announced that the Chinese pinyin scheme uses Latin letters (table 2 Beijing dialect initials, table 3 Beijing dialect finals). Since 1978, all the names and place names in China have been spelled with hanyu pinyin letters, replacing various old spellings such as wade style.
grammar
Chinese morphemes are mostly monosyllabic (washing hands-losing people). Morphemes and morphemes can be combined into compound words (horse+road → road → on+off → switch). Some morphemes are words (hand washing), others are not words, and they can only form compound words with other morphemes (people → people → loss → loss). The proportion of disyllabic words in modern Chinese is the largest. Most disyllabic words are produced in the above compound way.
trait
Chinese characters have a history of 3,000 years, counting from the earliest written materials we can see at present-Oracle Bone Inscriptions in Shang Dynasty. Because Oracle Bone Inscriptions is a fairly mature writing system, we can infer that Chinese characters must have appeared as far back as 3,000 years ago. The development of Chinese characters can be divided into two main stages. From Oracle Bone Inscriptions to seal script is a stage; Judging from the official script of Qin and Han dynasties, there is still a stage. The former belongs to the category of ancient Chinese characters and the latter belongs to the category of modern Chinese characters. Generally speaking, there is not much change from official script to modern Chinese characters used now.
Judging from the relationship between Chinese characters and Chinese, Chinese characters are a kind of morpheme words. As far as the structure of Chinese characters is concerned, Chinese characters are a writing system composed of ideographic, phonetic (pictographic and phonetic) and symbols that neither ideographic nor phonetic.
Chinese characters originated from pictures. In the early stage of Chinese characters, the shape of pictographic characters is directly related to the meaning of morphemes it represents. Although each word has its own fixed pronunciation, the glyph itself is not a phonetic symbol, which is different from the pinyin letters. The pronunciation of hieroglyphics is transmitted to it through the morphemes it represents. With the evolution of glyphs, pictographs are becoming less and less pictographs. As a result, the glyph loses its original connection with the morpheme it represents. At this time, the glyph itself is neither phonetic nor semantic, and becomes an abstract symbol. If all morphemes in Chinese are represented by such symbols that neither express sound nor meaning, then Chinese characters can be said to be pure symbolic characters. But this is not the case. Chinese characters can be divided into single words and combined words. Only letter combinations are purely symbolic characters. Combination characters are composed of single characters. Structurally speaking, compound words are one level higher than single words. Because a single word that constitutes a combined word is itself a symbol, when it is a part of a combined word, it participates as a meaningful "word". Combination characters can be divided into the following three categories:
① pictophonetic characters. Pictophonetic characters are composed of two parts: pictophonetic characters representing meaning and phonetic characters representing pronunciation. For pictophonetic characters with the simplest structure, pictophonetic characters and homophonic characters are used as characters. As an integral part of pictophonetic characters, these letter combinations are phonetic and meaningful characters. But the shape only takes its meaning, not its sound, such as the "bird" next to the word "pigeon"; The phonetic side only takes the sound, but does not take the meaning. For example, due to the evolution of the meaning and pronunciation of the radical "nine" of the word "pigeon", some pictophonetic characters have lost the function of expressing meaning or pronunciation. For example, "ball" was originally the name of a jade, so it was shaped with "jade". Now the word "ball" doesn't refer to jade, and this shape has no function. Another example is the word "sea", which originally used "every" as the sound. Due to the change of pronunciation, the pronunciation of "sea" and "plum" is far from each other now, and the "plum" beside the sound is useless. Sometimes, the form and sound have lost their original functions, such as "giving, waiting, short". This kind of characters can no longer be regarded as pictophonetic characters.
There is no clear boundary between pictophonetic characters and non-pictophonetic characters. At the beginning of word-making, pictophonetic characters are not necessarily close to their pronunciation. With the development of modern Chinese characters, this difference is even greater. Some people take more than 7500 modern combined Chinese characters for statistics. As far as the pronunciation of Putonghua is concerned, less than 5% of compound words are completely homophonic (initials, finals and tones are the same). About 10% initials have the same vowel but different tones. Only one vowel is the same, accounting for about 20%. If only the first two categories are regarded as pictophonetic characters, then pictophonetic characters only account for 15% of commonly used Chinese characters. If the above three categories are regarded as pictophonetic characters, pictophonetic characters will probably account for 35% of popular Chinese characters. If the standard is relaxed, or the pictophonetic characters are determined completely according to their origins, the percentage of pictophonetic characters in popular Chinese characters will be much higher.
2 Fit and understand words. The ancients said, "Military strategists must contend" and "people keep their word." This explanation is wrong for the words "nothing" and "letter". However, there are indeed such words in the Chinese character system, such as "incorrect is crooked" and "bad is bad". This kind of words is characterized by combining the meaning of radicals to express the meaning of the whole combined word. There are few such words, only a few examples.
The radicals in the above two types of combined words have ideographic function and phonetic function. The following situation is different. (3) Combined marker words. The radicals of this compound word are neither ideographic nor phonological. There are two main situations. First, due to the changes in pronunciation and meaning of words, the original phonetic and pictographic characters no longer express pronunciation and meaning. For example, the words "give, wait and be short" mentioned above. Another situation can take the word "Zhang" as an example. According to Xu Shen's Shuo Wen Jie Zi in Han Dynasty, the word "Zhang" changed from "sound" to "ten". However, when people say "establish an early chapter" (to distinguish it from "bow long"), they analyze it into two parts: "establish" and "early". In fact, from the perspective of ancient Chinese characters, "Zhang" is a unique hieroglyph, which has nothing to do with "sound, ten, standing and morning".
Chinese characters have been used to record Chinese for more than 3000 years, and they have been used until today without interruption. In such a long historical period, Chinese characters not only serve people's real life, but also record extremely rich cultural materials; Even across national boundaries, it was borrowed by neighboring countries such as Japan, North Korea and Vietnam to record non-Chinese languages.
On the other hand, people have been criticizing the shortcomings of Chinese characters for a long time, mainly saying that Chinese characters are difficult to recognize, write and mechanize (printing, typesetting, typing, etc. Therefore, it is not as efficient as pinyin in literacy, children's literacy education and cultural communication.
Compared with Pinyin, Chinese characters have their shortcomings, but they also have their advantages. The biggest advantage of Chinese characters is that they can be beyond space and limited by time. There are great differences in pronunciation between ancient Chinese and modern Chinese. However, since 2000, the font has been quite stable and the meaning of words has not changed much, so the ancient books of the pre-Qin and Han dynasties can still be partially understood by ordinary people today. If ancient books are written in pinyin, modern people simply can't understand some dialects with different pronunciations, so they can't communicate with each other, but if they are written in Chinese characters, they can understand each other, and the reason is the same.
The work of simplifying Chinese characters began in the 1950s. 1986 republished Summary of Simplified Chinese Characters stipulates more than 2,200 simplified Chinese characters (including words analogized by simplified Chinese radicals). At present, this work has come to an end and will remain stable for some time to come, and will not continue to simplify. Because continuous simplification will destroy the stability of characters, and after simplifying a batch of characters, the original traditional Chinese characters cannot be abolished. Therefore, the total number of Chinese characters is increasing, which increases the burden on people who study and use Chinese characters.
The debate about pinyin of Chinese characters has a long history. Theoretically, any natural language can be recorded in Pinyin. However, due to the differences of Chinese dialects, it will bring great difficulties to people in dialect areas before the work of popularizing Putonghua has achieved extensive and practical results. In addition, due to the long history of Chinese characters, a large number of documents are recorded in Chinese characters. Once you change your tune, it will inevitably lead to certain difficulties in the wide use of literature, and may also cause fluctuations in social psychology and national feelings. In fact, due to the long-term use of the ideographic writing system of Chinese characters, a large number of homophones can appear in Chinese, and this phenomenon does exist. Now a syllable can correspond to dozens or hundreds of Chinese characters at most. If you use pinyin to record pronunciation, you can't understand it without reading it. Even after a long period of training, this problem cannot be completely solved. Therefore, if you really want Latin Chinese characters, it will definitely not be completed overnight. Before Chinese develops to a suitable level.
dialect
China has a vast territory, a large population and complicated dialects. Below, Chinese dialects are roughly divided into two categories: mandarin and non-mandarin. Mandarin is distributed in the area along the Yangtze River between Jiujiang and Zhenjiang in the north and south of the Yangtze River, as well as in Hubei, Sichuan, Yunnan and Guizhou provinces, including northern mandarin, Jianghuai mandarin and southwest mandarin. The area of Putonghua dialect accounts for 3/4 of the whole country, and the population accounts for 2/3 of the whole country. The internal consistency of Putonghua dialect is relatively high. It's 3000 kilometers from Harbin to Kunming, so it's not difficult for people from both places to talk. Unofficial dialects are mainly distributed in the southeast of China, including Wu dialect (southern Jiangsu and most of Zhejiang), Gan dialect (most of Jiangxi), Xiang dialect (most of Hunan and northern Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region), Yue dialect (most of Guangdong and southeastern Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region), Min dialect (Fujian, Taiwan Province, Chaozhou, Shantou and Hainan) and Hakka dialect (eastern and northern Guangdong, western Fujian and southwestern Jiangxi). The non-Mandarin area is smaller than the Mandarin area, but the dialects are quite different, so it is generally impossible to communicate with each other. Even in the same dialect area (for example, between southern Zhejiang Wu dialect and southern Jiangsu Wu dialect, and between Fuzhou dialect and Xiamen dialect), it is difficult to speak.
Written and oral language
The difference between written language and spoken language has always been considerable. Before the May 4th vernacular movement, the difference between written language and spoken language was actually the difference between ancient and modern languages. Take the Tang and Song Dynasties as an example. The population at that time spoke vernacular. He wrote classical Chinese, that is, ancient Chinese based on the famous works widely read by pre-Qin philosophers, Zuo Zhuan and Historical Records. This situation can probably be pushed to the Han Dynasty. Until the beginning of the 20th century. 1925 Sun Yat-sen's will was written in classical Chinese. However, since 2000, as a written language, classical Chinese itself has also changed. Antique is hard to confuse after all, and it is impossible for later generations to imitate the old saying without being influenced by spoken language at that time. It has been pointed out that there are obvious inconsistencies in Han Yu's articles with the pre-Qin grammar. The ancient writers of Tongcheng School in Qing Dynasty imitated the articles of ancient writers of pre-Qin and Tang and Song Dynasties, and the result was certainly more complicated. Liang Qichao wrote political essays in plain classical Chinese in the late Qing Dynasty. Because it is easy to understand, it is widely used in newspapers and magazines. At present, most Chinese newspapers and periodicals in Taiwan Province Province, Hongkong and overseas still use this style.
Historical dialects reflect history. There are great differences in pronunciation between Chinese dialects, but relatively small differences in grammar and vocabulary. Similarly, there are great differences between ancient Chinese and modern Chinese in pronunciation, but there are little differences in grammar and vocabulary. On the whole, from the ancient sound (pre-Qin era) to the medieval sound (Sui and Tang dynasties) and then to the modern Beijing sound, it has gone through a process of gradual simplification. There were three sets of initials in the pre-Qin period: voiced consonants, voiced consonants and voiced consonants. Nasal initials are also divided into two groups: voiced and voiced. There are probably consonants in the form of [kl-, pl-, gl-, bl-, sn-, st-, sk-]. All syllables end with consonants, and there is no opening syllable. Modern dialects (such as Guangzhou dialect) all have consonant endings except [m, n, □, p, t, k] and [b, d, g]. By the Sui and Tang Dynasties, the consonants of complex consonants and voiced consonants had already disappeared, and only [m, n, □, p, t, k] remained in the consonant vowels. Only fricative and fricative are divided into three sets according to the different pronunciation parts: tongue, tongue surface and tongue rolling. In modern Beijing dialect, voiced stops and voiced fricatives are unvoiced, with only [n] and [□] consonants at the end.
The evolution of tone is another case. During the Sui and Tang Dynasties, there were only four tones: Ping, Shang, Qu and Jin. In modern dialects, the same ancient tune is sometimes divided into yin and yang under the condition of voiced initials. Therefore, the number of tones in some dialects is more than that in Sui and Tang Dynasties, and so are dialects in many unofficial areas.
Since the Sui and Tang Dynasties, two major events have taken place in the division and combination of genre. First, in many dialects, the initials of the ancient voiced consonants and the initials of the ancient voiced consonants are a group. Second, after the ending of entering tone in Mandarin disappears, entering tone can be divided into three categories: ping, Shang and Qu. This is the case in Beijing dialect.
By analyzing homophones and classical phonetic notation, we can find that in ancient Chinese, tone sandhi and/or voiced initials were used as a means to change parts of speech (including automatic words and verbs respectively). Syntactically, an obvious feature of pre-Qin Chinese is that pronoun objects in negative sentences and interrogative sentences should be mentioned before verbs (I bully │ I don't bully).
Some important changes have taken place in Chinese grammar during the Song and Yuan Dynasties. For example, the generation of verb endings "le" and "zhe", the generation of verb-complement structure and so on. "Le" and "Zhe" were both verbs at first, then their meanings gradually blurred and finally evolved into suffixes. The verb-complement structure (including "without" (dyed red) and "with" (dyed red)) was also shaped in this period.
The main trend of vocabulary evolution is the continuous growth of disyllabic words. Monosyllabic words, which were originally dominant in pre-Qin Chinese, gradually became disyllabic words. This trend was particularly evident in the last century. According to statistics, there are 654.38+08,000 words in modern literature, and there are more than 30,000 variants, of which more than 70% are disyllabic words.
In the field of traditional linguistics in China, Chinese studies have made brilliant achievements in phonology, philology and exegetics. Erya is the earliest dictionary arranged by word meaning, which was compiled in the Warring States period. Xu Shen's Shuo Wen Jie Zi in the Eastern Han Dynasty is the earliest dictionary arranged according to the radicals of Chinese characters, and it is also the first book to comprehensively and systematically analyze the structure of Chinese characters. Among the ancient rhyme books, Lu Fayan's Yun Qi (60 1) is particularly important. The study of modern dialects and the introduction of phonetic system before Qieyun are important materials. Rhyme chart (rhyme mirror, seven rhymes, Yun Qi finger chart, etc.). ), which appeared in the 9th century, is a table showing the whole phonological system and the harmonious relationship between phonology and intonation. From the perspective of modern linguistics, it is essential to describe the phonology of Chinese. Great progress has been made in the study of ancient sounds in the Qing Dynasty. Duan Yucai first pointed out that the homophonic word system is basically consistent with the rhyme in The Book of Songs. According to these two kinds of materials, scholars in Qing Dynasty have made remarkable achievements in the division of ancient vowels. Among the patents of Wang Niansun and Jiangyou, this work has almost reached its peak, and there are not many places to supplement and modify it. In exegetics, Qing scholars also made great contributions. Duan Yucai's Shuo Wen Jie Zi Zhu and Wang Niansun's Guang Shu Ya Zheng Can can be said to be representative works in this respect.
Grammar, China scholars have always paid attention to the study of function words. Jing Ci by Wang in Qing Dynasty is one of the most influential works. Ma Shi Wen Tong by Ma Jianzhong (1845 ~ 1900) was published in 1898. This is the first book that systematically studies Chinese grammar.
In the first half of the 20th century, great progress was made in the study of archaic sounds. The main achievement is the construction of middle ancient sound and ancient sound. The pioneer of this work is Swedish scholar Gao Benhan. Later, Fang Guili also made important contributions to the study of ancient sounds.
The research object of Ma Shi Wen Tong is ancient Chinese. The study of modern Chinese grammar began in the 20th century. Lv Shuxiang's An Introduction to China Grammar (1942 ~ 1944) and Wang Li's Modern Grammar of China (1943) reflect the level of Chinese grammar research in the first half century. Ding Shengshu's Speech on Modern Chinese Grammar (1952) is a popular work, but it has certain influence on grammar research in recent years. Since the 1960s, the study of Chinese grammar has made great progress. Zhao Yuanren's Chinese Grammar (1968) is an important work in this period.
In terms of historical grammar, Lv Shuxiang's Essays on Chinese Grammar (1955; Some papers in the revised edition (1984) pioneered the study of modern Chinese grammar. Wang Li's Draft History of China (1958) and Chen Fu's Historical Grammar of China (1958) are also influential works in this field.
Zhao Yuanren's Study of Modern Wu Dialect (1928) is the first report to study dialects with modern linguistic methods. This book has an important influence on the future dialect investigation. 1956 to 1957 conducted a nationwide dialect survey. From 65438 to 0979, a special dialect publication Dialect was founded, which promoted dialect investigation and dialect research.
The great archaeological discovery in the 20th century-bamboo slips and silks unearthed in Oracle Bone Inscriptions in Shang Dynasty and the Warring States Period, Qin and Han Dynasties, provided a lot of precious materials for the study of ancient Chinese characters and promoted the development of this discipline.
philology
Li Rong: Phonetic Common Sense, Culture and Education Press, Beijing, 1955.
Zhu: Grammar Q&A, Commercial Press, Beijing, 1985.
Zhao Yuanren, Grammar of Spoken Chinese, University of California Press, 1968.