Origin of
Chinese Language
Chinese script is
not an alphabetic language. In fact, Chinese characters as referred
to as 'squared characters'. Although it may seem very complicated,
and hard to learn, Chinese is one of the most beautiful languages.
The origin of
Chinese characters can be traced back to about 4,500 years. The
Chinese language has several dialects. There are quite a few
variations between these dialects. However, Mandarin, which is based
on the pronunciation of people in Beijing, is considered as the
standard. This is spoken by about two-thirds of the population.
Some of the other
dialects of the Chinese language are (1) Wu, which is spoken by
people in the Shanghai area, (2) Cantonese, spoken by people from
the extreme southern provinces of Guangdong and Guangxi, and (3)
Xiang, which is popular with people hailing from the Hunan Province.
Besides this, there are few other dialects such as Fukienese and
Hakka which are spoken by people from different areas.
In the United
States, most of the Chinese speak the Cantonese dialect, whereas in
Malaysia and Singapore, the Fukienese dialect is more commonly used.
Chinese language is
a tonal language which implies that in order to discern words that
are pronounced in a similar manner, different tones are used. The
majority of Chinese characters are made up of two elements: a
signific and a phonetic. While the signific signifies the meaning of
the word, the phonetic, provides the sound.
The Chinese script
consists of thousands of distinctive characters. A large Chinese
dictionary will consist of anywhere between 40,000 - 50,000
characters. These characters are referred to as ideographs.
Ideographs have no relation to the sound of a word.
A certain type of
Chinese typewriter consists of a whooping 5,400 characters whereas a
certain Chinese character may require somewhere as up to 36 strokes.
Chinese language
has evolved from the olden days. The earlier Chinese script was made
up of pictographs. For example, the sun was represented by a circle
with a dot in the center. This then gave way to non-pictorial
ideographs. Non-pictorial ideographs made use of tangible objects
along with abstract concepts. Today, two similar or dissimilar
characters are used in conjunction to represent a third character.
Thus a forest can be represented by two "tree" characters side by
side.
Over time, several attempts have been made to simplify the Chinese
script. The Chinese People's Republic, a few years back, came up
with a plan to simplify more than 1,700 characters. But for Chinese
to become a language that is easily readable, the only hope is for
it to appear in alphabetic script.
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