Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics
Largest Sino-Tibetan language, which is actually a group of at least six languages: Mandarin (in the form Putenghua the official language of the People’s Republic of China, in the form Guoyu the official language of Taiwan; with 613 million speakers the most widely spoken language in the world), Wu (on the Yangtze, 84 million), Yue (in South China, along with Cantonese, 54 million), Min (Taiwan and offshore coast, 77 million), Kan-Hakka (South China, 67 million), and Hsiang (Hunan, 49 million). The beginnings of the ideographic writing system date back 4,000 years; today it is the oldest writing system in use.
Characteristics: all are tonal languages (Mandarin: four tones: high, rising, falling-rising, falling; Cantonese: nine tones) with somewhat complex tone-sandhi rules (combinations of tones). Simple syllable structure. Morphology: no inflection, but frequent derivations and compounds; in contrast to Classical Chinese, modern Chinese is not a strictly isolating language. Example of compounding: fù-mǔ ‘father-mother’=‘parents’; zhěn-tóu ‘rest-head’=‘pillow’ (
classifying language). Word order: topic-comment; the placement of the object depends on, among other things, definiteness. Serial verb constructions are frequent, where certain verbs take on the function of prepositions.
References
Baxter, W.H. 1992. A handbook of Old Chinese phonology. Berlin and New York.
Chao, Y.-R. 1968. A grammar of spoken Chinese. Berkeley, CA.
Henne, H. et al. 1977. A handbook of Chinese language structure. Oslo.
Killingley, S.-Y. 1994. Cantonese. Munich.
Kratochvil, P. 1968.
The Chinese language today. London.
Li, C.N. and S.Thompson. 1981. Mandarin Chinese: a functional reference grammar. Berkeley, CA.
Matthews, S. and V.Yip. 1994. Cantonese: a comprehensive grammar. London.
Norman, J. 1988. Chinese. Cambridge.
Dictionaries
Chi, W. 1977. Chinese—English dictionary of contemporary usage. Berkeley, CA.
A classified and illustrated Chinese—English dictionary. 1981. By the compiling group, Guangzhou Institute of Foreign languages. Hong Kong.
Hornby, A.S. 1989. Oxford advanced learner’s English—Chinese dictionary, 3rd edn. Hong Kong.
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