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The
Languages of China
Chinese = (汉语/漢語,
Pinyin: Hànyǔ; 中文,
Zhōngwén; 华语/華語,
Huáyǔ; or 华文/華文,
Huáwén)
The
Han people have their own spoken and written language.
Chinese belongs to the Han-Tibetan language family. It
is the most commonly used language in China, and one of the
most commonly used languages in the world.
Written Chinese emerged in its embryonic form of carved
symbols approximately 6,000 years ago. The Chinese
characters used today evolved from those used in bone and
tortoise shell inscriptions more than 3,000 years ago and
the bronze inscriptions produced soon after.
Drawn figures were gradually reduced to patterned stroke,
pictographs were reduced to symbols, and the complicated
graphs became simpler. Early pictographs and
ideographs were joined by pictophonetic characters.
In
fact, there are six categories of Chinese characters:
pictographs, self-explanatory characters, associative
compounds, pictophonetic characters, phonetic loan
characters, and mutually explanatory characters.
Chinese
words are monosyllabic. A large proportion of Chinese
characters are composed of an ideogramatic element combined
with a phonetic element.
Many
non-Chinese sometimes get the feeling that there are an
unlimited number of Chinese characters. There are
about 56,000 characters, of which only about 3,000 are in
common use. In addition to their functional value as
symbols for records and communication, Chinese characters
have an aesthetic value as calligraphy.
All
of China's 55 minority people have their own languages,
except the Hui and Manchu, who use Chinese; 23 of these have
a written form. Nowadays, classes in schools in
predominantly national minority areas are taught in the
local language, using local language textbooks.
The most popular dialect by far is
Mandarin ( 800 million), followed by Wu ( 90 million),
and Cantonese ( 70 million).
Numbers
0 1
2
3 4
5 6
7 8
9 10
Chinese 〇
一 二
三 四
五 六
七 八
九 十
pinyin líng
yī èr sān
sì wǔ liù
qī bā jiǔ
shí Pinyin
is a system of romanization (phonemic notation and
transcription to Roman script) for Standard Mandarin, where pin
means "spell" and yin means
"sound".
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