ABOUT CHINESE

We find it perfectly natural to talk about a language called 'Chinese.' We say, for example, that the people of China speak different dialects of Chinese, and that Confucius wrote in an ancient form of Chinese. On the other hand, we would never think of saying that the people of Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal speak dialects of one language, and that Julius Caesar wrote in an ancient form of that language, but the facts are almost exactly parallel. In terms, then, of what we think of as a language when closer to home, 'Chinese' is not one language, but a family of languages. The language of Confucius is part-way up the stem of the family tree. Like Latin, it is a language which lived on as a literary language long after its death as the language of the classics. The seven modern languages of China, traditionally the 'dialects,' are on the branches of the tree. They share as strong a family resemblance as do Italian, French, Spanish, and Portuguese, and are about as different from one another. The predominant language o£ China is now known as pǔtōnghuà, or 'Standard Chinese' literally 'the common speech.' The more traditional term, still used in Taiwan, is Guóyǔ, or 'Mandarin', literally 'the national language.' Standard Chinese is spoken natively by almost two-thirds of the population and throughout :te greater part of the country.

Standard Chinese The term 'Standard Chinese' is often used more narrowly to refer to the true national language which is emerging. This national language, which is already the language of all national broadcasting, is based primarily on the Peking dialect but takes on elements from other dialects of Standard Chinese and even from other Chinese languages. Like many national languages, it is more widely understood than spoken, and often spoken with some concessions to local speech,particularly in pronunciation. The Chinese languages and their dialects differ far more in pronunciation than in grammar or vocabulary. What distinguishes Standard Chinese most from the other Chinese languages, for example, is that it has the fewest tones and the fewest final consonants. The remaining six Chinese languages, together spoken by approximately a quarter of the population, are tightly grouped in the southeast, below the Yangtze River. These are: the wú language (吴),including the ' Shanghai dialect.' Hunanese (湘 xiāng)； the Gan language (籍 gàn), spoken in Kangsi province; Cantonese (粤 yuè), the language of Kuangtong province and widely spoken in Chinese communities in the United States; Fukienese (闽 mǐn), a variant of which is spoken by the majority of Taiwan and hence called Taiwanese; and Hakka (客家 kèjiā), spoken in a belt above the Cantonese area, as well as by a minority on Taiwan. Cantonese, Fukienese, and Hakka are also widely spoken throughout Southeast Asia. In addition to these Chinese languages, there are also non-Chinese languages spoken by minority ethnic groups. Some of these, such as Tibetan, are distantly related to the Chinese languages. Others, such as Mongolian, are entirely unrelated.

Some Characteristics of Chinese Perhaps the most striking feature of Chinese to us is the use of 'tones' to distinguish the meaning of individual syllables. All languages, and Chinese is no exception, make use of sentence intonation to indicate how whole sentences are to be understood. In English, for example, the rising pattern in 'He's gone?' tells us that it is meant as a question. The Chinese tones, however, are quite a different matter. They belong to individual syllables, not to the sentence as a whole. Each syllable of Standard Chinese has one of four distinctive tones as an inherent part. The tone does just as much to distinguish the syllable from other possible syllables as do the consonants and vowels. For example, the only difference between the verb 'to buy,' 买 mǎi, and the verb 'to sell,' 卖 mài, is the difference between the Low Tone and the Falling Tone, And yet these words are just as distinguishable as our words 'buy' and 'guy,' or 'buy' and 'boy.' Apart from the tones, the sound system of Standard Chinese is no more different from English than French is. The grammar of Standard Chinese is relatively simple. For one thing, it has no conjugations such as are found in many European languages. Chinese verbs have fewer forms than English verbs, and nowhere near as many irregularities. Chinese grammar relies heavily on word order, and often the word order is the same as in English: 'John loves Mary' versus 'Mary loves John.' For these reasons Chinese is not as difficult for Americans to learn to speak as one might think. It is often said that Chinese is a monosyllabic language. This notion contains a good deal of truth. It has been found that, on the average, every other word in ordinary conversation is a single-syllable word. Moreover, although most words in the dictionary have two syllables, and some have more, these words can almost always be broken down into single-syllable units of meaning, many of which can stand alone as words themselves

Written Chinese Most languages with which we are familiar are written with an alphabet. The letters may be different from ours, as in the Greek alphabet, but the principle is the same: One letter for each consonant or vowel sound, more or less. Chinese, however, is written with 'characters' which stand for whole syllables. In fact, for whole syllables with particular meanings. There are only about thirteen hundred phonetically distinct syllables in everyday use, essentially one for each single-syllable unit of meaning. Chinese characters are often referred to as 'ideographs,' which suggests that they stand directly for ideas. But this is misleading; it is better to think of them as standing for the meaningful syllables of the spoken language. Minimal literacy in Chinese calls for knowing about a thousand characters. These thousand characters, in combination, give a reading vocabulary of several thousand words. Full literacy calls for knowing some three thousand characters. In order to reduce the amount of time needed to learn characters, there has been a vast extension in the People's Republic of China of the principle of character simplification, which has reduced the average number of strokes per character by half. One reason often given for the retention of characters is that they can be read, with the local pronunciation, by speakers of all the Chinese languages. Probably a stronger reason for their retention is that the characters help keep alive distinctions of meaning between words, which are fading in the spoken language. Against this, however, is the consideration that a Cantonese could learn to speak Standard Chinese, and read it alphabetically, at least as easily as he can learn several thousand characters. pīnyīn is used throughout this course to provide a simple written representation of pronunciation.