The East is a dark matter or when the Chinese language was created. Ch.2 (Mandarin)

Learn the four tones. Chinese is basically a tonal language. A feature of tonal languages is that, even with the same spelling and pronunciation, the tone with which the word was pronounced changes its meaning. To speak Chinese correctly, you need to learn different tones. Actually, in Northern Chinese these are the following tones:

First tone- high, even. The voice remains even, without rising or falling. If we take the word “ma” as an example, then the first tone is indicated by the symbol above the letter “a”: "mā".
Second tone- ascending. Your voice rises from low to medium, as if you were asking someone something like “huh?” or “what?”. In writing, the second tone is indicated as follows: "má".
Third tone- descending-ascending. The voice changes from medium to low to high, as when pronouncing the English letter "B". When two syllables of the third tone are next to each other, the first syllable remains in the third tone, and the second passes into the fourth. In writing, the third tone is indicated as follows: "mǎ".
fourth tone- descending. The voice quickly changes from high to low, as if giving the command “stop”. Or, for example, as if, while reading a book, you stumbled upon an interesting fragment and said “aha”. The fourth tone is indicated as follows: "mà".
Easy, right? Even if not, don't give up. It is very desirable to hear the tones performed by a native speaker, because through the text it is very difficult to understand how everything should actually sound.

Remember a few simple words. The more words you know, the sooner you master the language to a sufficient degree - this is a universal principle. Accordingly, it will be very useful to learn a few Chinese words.

It will be good to start with the times of the day (morning - zǎoshàng, day - xiawǔ, evening - wǎnshàng), body parts (head - tou, Feet - jiǎo, hands - shǒu), food (beef - niurou, chicken - jī, eggs - jīdan, pasta - miantiáo), as well as the names of colors, days, months, vehicles, weather, etc.
When you hear a word in your native language, think about how it would sound in Chinese. Do not know? Write it down, then look it up in the dictionary - for this purpose it will be very useful to carry a small notebook with you. You can stick stickers with the equivalents of their names in Chinese (in hieroglyphs, in pinyin - a system for writing Chinese words in Latin, and in transcription) on things and objects at home. The more often you see the words, the faster you remember them.
A large vocabulary is good, but an accurate vocabulary is even better. There is no point in memorizing words with entire dictionaries if you cannot pronounce them correctly. Take, for example, the mistake of using ma instead of ma, which can turn the phrase "I want a pie" into "I want cocaine."

Learn to count. Unfortunately, Northern Chinese does not have an alphabet, which is why it is difficult for people brought up in the traditions of the Indo-Germanic language family to learn it. But the counting system in Chinese is quite simple and understandable! By learning the names of the first ten digits, you can count up to 99.

Below are the numbers from one to ten, written in simplified Chinese. They are also given in pinyin and transcription. Try to immediately accustom yourself to pronounce everything in the right tone.
- 1 : written as (一) or yī, pronounced like .
- 2 : written as (二) or Er, pronounced like .
- 3 : written as (三) or san, pronounced like .
- 4 : written as (四) or sì, pronounced like .
- 5 : written as (五) or wǔ, pronounced like .
- 6 : written as (六) or iu, pronounced like .
- 7 : written as (七) or qī, pronounced like .
- 8 : written as (八) or bā, pronounced like .
- 9 : written as (九) or jiǔ, pronounced like .
- 10 : written as (十) or shi, pronounced like .
Having learned to count up to 10, you can count further by naming the number-value of the tenth place, then the word shi, and then the number-value of the one's place. For example:
48 is written as sì shi bā, that is, literally, “4 tens plus 8”. 30 is sān shi, i.e. "3 tens". 19 is yī shi jiǔ, i.e. “1 ten plus 9”. However, in most northern Chinese dialects yī sometimes omitted at the beginning of words.
The word "hundred" is written as (百) or baǐ, so 100 is yī "baǐ, 200 - er "baǐ, 300 - sān "baǐ and so on.

Learn the most basic conversational phrases. Having become acquainted with pronunciation and words, it's time to move on to the simplest dialogue phrases used in everyday speech.

Hello= nǐhǎo, pronounced like
What is your name?= nín guì xìng, pronounced like
Yes= shì, pronounced like
No= bú shì, pronounced like
Thank you= xiè xiè, pronounced like
Please= bú yòng xiè, pronounced like
Sorry= duì bu qǐ, pronounced like
I don't understand= wǒ tīng bù dǒng, pronounced like
Goodbye= zài jiàn, pronounced like

MY COMMENT : accordingly, there can be no gunpowder, no fleet, no astronomy and no science in principle. Moreover, China, under the leadership of European specialists, was just conquering its future eastern provinces in the second half of the 19th century.

Original taken from apxiv to the East

Original taken from statin to the East

Officially, China is home to 56 nationalities, each with its own language and culture. The vast majority of the population, approximately 91 percent, is attributed to the Han nation - actually Chinese. The Han language is very diverse. It consists of many hundreds of mutually incomprehensible dialects.

The Han dialects differ from each other much more than, say, the individual languages of the Romance group. In general, they began to study Chinese (Han) dialects only in the 30s of the 20th century. And by the beginning of the 60s, they were somehow systematized and classified with grief in half.

According to modern ideas, Han (Chinese proper) is divided into ten dialect groups: North Chinese dialects (in Western terminology "Mandarin dialects"), dialects: Wu, Gan, Xiang, Ming, Hakka, Yue, Jin, Huizhou, Pinghua.

The Ming dialect group is considered the most diverse. Unlike other dialect groups, which consist of many mutually incomprehensible dialects functioning in each district, within a given group, many hundreds of mutually incomprehensible dialects function in each village.

The work, however, is far from complete. Some so-called "areas of great linguistic diversity" have not yet been studied, the dialects existing there have not been described. Well, some dialects, such as Danzhou and Shaoju Tuhua, defy classification.

In general, China is a country of gigantic linguistic diversity. As mentioned in the first part, until 1909, the formal state language in the Qin Empire was the Manchu language. For the first time after the conquest of China by the Manchus, all official documents of the empire were written in this language. However, its use gradually decreased, and already in the 18-19 centuries, few people understood the Manchu language even among the courtiers.

So what language was used to manage the vast empire? With the help of the so-called "Mandarin" language. The name comes from the Portuguese word "mandarin", referring to the officials of the Chinese empire. The Chinese themselves used the term "guhua" to refer to this language, literally "the language of officials."

(Mandarin official)

The "bureaucratic language" in the Chinese Empire did not have any official status. However, his knowledge was necessary for officials to move up the career ladder. The language did not have firm rules. According to legend, in 1728, the Yongzhen Emperor, due to a specific pronunciation, did not understand anything from the reports of officials from the provinces of Guangdong and Fujian, and issued a decree on the creation of "academies of correct pronunciation." However, these academies did not last long.

Traditionally, "Mandarin" was based on the dialect of the city of Nanjing. However, in the 19th century, elements from the capital Beijing dialect, which gradually came to the forefront, penetrated into it. However, according to some reports, as early as the beginning of the 20th century, the status of "Nanjing Mandarin" was higher than that of "Beijing Mandarin". With the help of the "Mandarin language" office work was carried out, officials from different provinces of the country communicated in it. It was impossible for ordinary people even from neighboring Chinese provinces to communicate with each other.

In 1909, the waning imperial Qing Dynasty declared Guoyui, literally "national language", to be established as the state language. The creation of a “national language” will be discussed in the next part.

(to be continued)

In the East it is a dark matter or when the Chinese language was created. Ch.2 (Mandarin)

(Mandarin official)

(to be continued)

The term "Chinese" has many meanings. The Chinese language (or Chinese languages) refers to one of the two main branches of the Sino-Tibetan language family. The ambiguity of the term is due to the fact that on a large territory occupied by the so-called. "sinitic" languages, a large group of diverse dialects of the Chinese language is used. These dialects vary quite a lot even within a short distance from each other; nevertheless, their genetic connection is unequivocally traced. Therefore, in linguistics, the question of whether these varieties of Chinese are languages or dialects remains open.

Scope of use

An early informal oral form of communication ( guanhua) on a northern Chinese basis presumably began to take shape with the transfer of the Chinese capital in 1266 to the site of modern Beijing (then called Zhongdu, then Dadu) before the start of the Yuan Dynasty. Since the beginning of the 20th century, the official standard, which in 1909 received the name " goyu" (from the Japanese term " kokugo(国語)" - "state language") and later renamed Putonghua in the People's Republic of China, began to include not only the written, but also the oral norm.

To determine the degree of proficiency in Putonghua, since 1994, the PRC introduced the Putonghua Proficiency Exam (Chinese exercise 普通话水平测试, pinyin: pǔtōnghuà shuǐpíng cèshì (PSC)), which quickly gained popularity as China increasingly urbanized. There are several levels of Mandarin proficiency assigned after passing the exam:

However, many Chinese are able to understand Mandarin to some degree without even being able to speak it.

Genealogical and areal information

Chinese (Putonghua) belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family; in a broad sense, Chinese is one of its two main branches, which is sometimes called "sinitic". It is mainly distributed in the Beijing region, the capital of the PRC, but is also used throughout China as the state language. In addition, it is one of the 4 official languages of Singapore.

Sociolinguistic Information

Chinese in a broad sense holds the record for the number of speakers in the world: 1,074,000,000 speakers in the PRC, among which 896,000,000 speak it as their mother tongue (70% of them speak the standard dialect) and 178,000,000 as a second language. The total number of speakers in the world is 1,107,162,230 people.

With a large number of hardly mutually intelligible dialects, Standard Chinese is a supra-dialectal variant of the language, the state language of the People's Republic of China and the language of interethnic communication among the peoples of China. It is used in all spheres of life in China, and is one of the official languages of the UN.

Based on the Chinese language, there is a Russian-Chinese pidgin - the so-called. "Kyakhta language", which borrows Russian vocabulary, but uses the rules of Chinese grammar.

Typological parameters

Type (degree of freedom) of expression of grammatical meanings

For minor members of a sentence in Chinese, a strict word order is fixed:

It is worth noting that word order is tied not so much to the grammatical or syntactic characteristics of secondary members, but to their semantics:

Language features

Graphic

Speakers of all dialects of the Chinese language use hieroglyphic (ideographic) logosyllabic writing (a way of graphic representation of sounding speech, in which each sign conveys one syllable), developed from pictographic signs. There is a romanization system for putonghua - pinyin, as well as a system for transcribing Chinese into Russian - the Palladium system.

Phonological

In Mandarin, depending on the nature of the change in the frequency of the main voice tone over time, 4 tones are distinguished: 1st ( smooth), 2nd ( ascending), 3rd ( descending-ascending) and 4th ( descending) tones (in the practice of teaching Chinese in Russian schools, they are sometimes characterized as melodious, asking, satisfied And abusive intonation). Tone acts as one of the main distinctive sound means to distinguish lexical meanings. Examples: 失 shī("to lose") - 十 shi("ten") - 史 shǐ("history") - 事 shim("case"); 媽 ma("mother") - 麻 ma("hemp") - 马 mǎ("horse") - 骂 ma("scold") .

Statistical studies have shown that the functional "load" of tones in Mandarin is about as high as that of vowels.

Putonghua is characterized by combinatorial transformations of tones that occur during word formation when syllables with a certain tone are combined: tones can change or neutralize. Such transformations can be both regular and irregular. So, the syllable 一 yī"one" in an isolated position is pronounced under the 1st tone, but in a phrase before syllables of the 1st, 2nd or 3rd tone it is pronounced under the 4th tone (for example, 一 yī + 年 nian goes into yinian), and before the 4th tone syllable - under the 2nd (for example, 一 yī + 定 dìng goes into yidìng) .

Morphological

Syntactic

Count words

A feature of the structure of the nominal group in Putonghua is the presence of counter words, which necessarily appear before a noun when combined with a numeral, demonstrative pronoun or quantifier (except when the noun denotes the measure of something; such a noun may well act as a classifier itself). The choice of a classifier is determined by the noun itself; there are several dozen classifiers in the language.

Types of classifiers:

counting words (measures of length, weight, etc.; collective ( aggregate) - stack, herd; "containers" - box, bottle);
abstract ("several");
body parts (with a meaning like "___, full of something"), etc.

classifier ge refers to noun phrases denoting people, but in modern Mandarin ge is moving towards the status of a universal classifier, and many speakers use it for other non-human noun phrases.

Topic-comment structure

One of the characteristic features of the syntax of the Chinese language is that, in addition to a number of traditional syntactic roles (subject, direct object, etc.), communicative units stand out in the sentence structure - topic and comment.

Phrase particles

In Chinese, as in an analytic language, particles are widely used to express morphological (for example, verbal form), syntactic (for example, belonging - see the section “Marking locus in a possessive noun phrase”), discursive and other meanings.

Among the particles of interest are the so-called "sentence-ending".

Notes

BBC Russian service will transfer broadcasting to the Internet
Zavyalova O. I. Chinese language // Great Russian Encyclopedia. T. 14. - M .: BRE Publishing House, 2009.

According to , there are 10 main dialects of Chinese in total. I will not rewrite the article here, you can read it yourself on Wikipedia.

Official Chinese or 普通话 - is the so-called Standard, Common or "Plain" Chinese. The same dialect of Chinese that, according to the Chinese government, every person with Chinese citizenship should know. Books are published in this dialect, TV announcers speak it, it is taught in all schools in China.

Mandarin is a Beijing dialect spoken by the people of Beijing. In principle, we can say that pǔtōnghuà is a Mandarin dialect, but still there are several striking differences between Mandarin and pǔtōnghuà.

Firstly this is the so-called "erization" - 儿化, érhuà. Residents of Beijing add the ending 儿 "-er" wherever possible. For example, the adverb "a little", which sounds like "idyen" in pǔtōnghuà, would sound like "idyar" in Mandarin. And it will be written differently:
idien 一点 yídiǎn to pǔtōnghuà
with the addition of 儿 -er in Mandarin - Yidyar 一点儿 yídiǎnr.
Therefore, if you are not going to live or study in Beijing, you do not need this erization.

Secondly. Tones in mandarin are much more pronounced. Pekingese tone their syllables very carefully. But this is rather a plus for language learners.

Third. There are a lot of different slang expressions in Mandarin that are not used anywhere except in Beijing. And yes, erization is present in almost all of these slangs.

What is the result. If you are not going to Beijing, learn the standard pǔtōnghuà. Do not memorize words with erization. Knowing pǔtōnghuà, you can communicate with any more or less literate Chinese. Books that promise to teach you how to speak Mandarin are good for learning, just take the erization out of there.

In my translated lessons and exercises, I remove erization everywhere, as I consider it superfluous. Adding it to speech is much easier than relearning what has already been learned.

There is another dialect that is worth attention - this is Cantonese. This dialect is spoken in Hong Kong and in China, in the province of Guangdong (southern China). This dialect is also spoken by the majority of Chinese living outside of China - in the US, UK, Australia and Canada. Cantonese is completely different from Mandarin or pǔtōnghuà. It has 6 base tones (not 4, as in Mandarin), a lot of slang and set expressions, as well as much less hissing sounds. So if you're interested in Chinese while living among English speakers, learn Cantonese.