China is a
multi-ethnic country and within its immense territory there are 55 ethnic minorities
officially recognized by the Government of the People’s Republic of China (RPC).
All these ethnic minorities have their own languages, cultural and religious
features, etc.
However, differences are
not only found among China’s ethnic minorities, the Han Chinese (the Chinese ethnic majority that comprises around 91 %
of all China’s population) is also a heterogeneous ethnic group from the
linguistic point of view. Linguistic differences among northern Chinese have
never been as perceptible as those from the South. This is due to the fact that
North China was the cradle of the Chinese civilization, but also that North
China was a region well communicated due to the orographic features. However,
in the mountainous regions of South China, inhabitants were historically more
isolated and this fact could largely explain the noticeable linguistic
differences of this region. The overwhelming majority of all Chinese dialects are
found in southern Chinese provinces where there are seven different dialect
groups that share the same origins with the ancient Chinese that was once spoken
in the plains of North China. At the same time, all these dialect groups are
subdivided in hundreds of different dialects. Although the Chinese Government
has always used the term “dialect” to play down the importance of these
language differences, the truth is that most of these dialects are in fact
totally unintelligible among them so they could be regarded as different languages.
There are two major
Chinese dialects officially recognized around the world: the Mandarin and the
Cantonese. Cantonese is the most representative dialect of the Yue dialect group and it is spoken in
the southern province of Guangdong and in the British and Portuguese ex
colonies of Hong Kong and Macao. The Guangdong (Canton) province was traditionally
a place of emigration so it is not surprising that the Cantonese has been
really widespread among Chinese Diaspora communities all around South-east Asian
countries, USA, Canada and the United Kingdom.
However, Mandarin,
which is the most spoken language in the world, is the official language of the
PRC and Taiwan (ROC). This Chinese dialect has around 900 million native
speakers that are located in the northern, central and western Chinese
provinces. Due to the official status of Mandarin, this is the language that
every Chinese person must learn at school and must use in every official or formal
situation. Mandarin is also the language of the media and the most studied
Chinese dialect all around the world. Therefore, the rest of Chinese dialects
are relegated to the sphere of family and non official situations, except for
the case of Cantonese which has an official status in Hong Kong due to the fact
that the ex British colony became an Special Administrative Region within the PRC
after Great Britain gave it back to China in 1997.
Mandarin, as well as the rest of Chinese
dialects, belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family and it is based on the
dialect spoken in Beijing. Mandarin has its own particular features that make
it totally different from the rest of the languages spoken in the world.
Firstly, one of the
most noticeable aspects of Chinese is that it has no alphabetical writing
system. Instead, it has a writing system with hundreds of different characters
that are called hanzi 汉字. Each hanzi or Chinese
character can convey different meanings and pronunciations.
Secondly, Chinese
mandarin is a tonal language with four tones. Depending on which of these four
tones a syllable is pronounced, its meaning will also change. This feature is also
shared by the rest of the Chinese dialects and it is also quite common in some
Southeast Asian languages. Chinese language really needs to be a tonal language
because it is very poor in sounds. While many European languages have around
2400 different syllables that are combined to make up words, Chinese has only
400 syllables. Taking into account this fact, it’s no wonder Chinese has a huge
quantity of homophones. Although tones help to reduce the number of homophones,
homophony still continues to be a serious problem in Chinese language,
especially if we take into account the fact that there is also an overwhelming
amount of semi-homophones which are difficult to distinguish because it only
changes the tone in which they are pronounced.
As an example, in Chinese there are many
morphemes that sound “chu” or “shi” but each one of them has a different
meaning and they are written using with different Chinese characters. On the
table below we can see some of the characters that have one of these two
pronunciations and the words that are made up with them.
出师
|
处事
|
处世
|
除湿
|
厨师
|
Go out + master
|
deal with + affair
|
Deal with +generation
|
Get rid of + humidity
|
Kitchen + master
|
To finish one’s apprenticeship
|
Deal with affairs
|
To conduct oneself in society
|
Dehumidify
|
Cook
|
出使
|
初始
|
初时
|
初十
|
初试
|
Go out + send (as an envoy)
|
Beginning+to
start
|
Beginning
+ time
|
Beginning
+ ten
|
Beginning
+ try
|
To serve as an envoy abroad
|
Initial
|
At the beginning
|
Tenth day of a lunar calendar month
|
First try
Make a debut
|
出事
|
出示
|
出世
|
出仕
|
|
Go out + affair
|
Go out + show
|
Go out +
generation
|
Go out+
to become an official
|
|
Have an accident
|
Show
|
To be born
|
To become an official
|
Homophony is one of
the most difficult aspects foreign students have to face when they study Chinese.
If there is not a clear context in a conversation it will be really difficult
for a foreigner to figure out what our Chinese speaker is trying to say. However,
thanks to the nature of Chinese script in which each single Chinese character
is a different semantic unit, the meanings of the different homophones are no
longer ambiguous in their written form.
The difficulty of the
oral language due to homophony is not a problem that just affects foreign
students, very often Chinese people are also confronted with this kind of
ambiguities which have to be solved by specifying which characters make up
certain words which are difficult to understand, especially when there is not a
clear context. On account of these possible ambiguities of the spoken language,
it is not surprising that almost all media and movies are subtitled in Chinese
characters, because in spite of China’s abundant language diversity, written
language is basically the same for all Chinese people. This fact has been
possible because Chinese words are not made up with the sounds of letters, but
with the meanings conveyed by Chinese characters which are not subject to any
specific pronunciation. Chinese characters have been so important in the history
of China because they helped to lessen China’s linguistic differences and at
the same time, they made possible to create a Chinese cultural identity that
was unified under a vast bureaucratic empire for more than two thousand years.
In the past, some of
China’s tributary states like Japan, Korea or Vietnam adopted the Chinese
script despite the fact that, in the end, both Koreans and Vietnamese ended up
using phonetic writing systems which suited better to the morphologic and
syntactic features of their languages. However, Japanese still continue to use
a significant part of Chinese script (kanji)
which they combine with a native syllabic writing system (kana) that was inspired from certain characters or kanji. Nowadays the Japanese language has a unique
example of hybrid writing because syllabic writing is combined with the
meanings conveyed by the characters that were imported from China.
Despite the fact that
Japanese and Chinese belong to different language families, they both share a
common writing system. Therefore, if we take into account the semantic features
of Chinese script, it should not be surprising if a Japanese person can
understand many words on a Chinese text and vice versa.
Chinese language and its phonetic transcription
At the beginning of
the 20th Century there were different attempts to transcribe Chinese
phonetically by using the letters of the Latin alphabet. Outstanding Chinese
writers like Lu Xun considered that in order to definitely overthrow the old
and backward Chinese society, it was absolutely necessary to adopt certain
reforms such as the suppression of Chinese characters.
During the early
years of the second half of the 20th Century, the Maoist China
created the pinyin phonetic system which was conceived to transcribe
Chinese by using the letters of the Latin alphabet. Without any doubt pinyin has been the most successful
attempt to transcribe the phonetics of Chinese language because it is a system
presently used all over the world to transcribe Chinese names. However, pinyin is only a tool used to
distinguish and study the sounds of the Chinese language and it can never
replace Chinese characters. If we tried to read a text written in pinyin it would be hard for us to
understand it because we wouldn’t have any way to distinguish the different
homophones. In fact, the difference between reading a text in pinyin and
reading the same text in Chinese characters lies in the fact that while the
text written in characters is understood instantly, the text written in pinyin
becomes ambiguous, difficult to understand at first glance and much more
dependent on the context.
Many Westerners think
that although Chinese script may be beautiful, it is a “backward” script and it
should be replaced by a phonetic one. However, this opinion is totally wrong
because it has already been demonstrated that the Chinese characters have a
very strong communicative power and that it would be impossible to replace them
by a totally phonetic writing system.
At present, nobody
can deny that Chinese script is totally compatible with technology because Chinese
has already become one of the most important languages on the Internet.
However, at the beginning of the Computer Era many people thought that Chinese
would be unable to adapt to the new challenges
of technology. We have to bear in mind that before the modern computers and word
processors were invented, big writing machines with more than two thousand keys
for the different characters were needed in order to type Chinese texts. Fortunately,
thanks to the modern software this problem has definitely been solved. On the
keyboard we only have the letters of the Latin alphabet that allow us to type
the words in pinyin. As we type the
words in pinyin they automatically
appear on the screen transformed into Chinese characters which are constantly
interrelating between them depending on the context of the sentences we are typing.
Whenever we have a homophone that cannot be disambiguated by the context of the
sentence, we have the option to display a menu where we can see all the
different homophones, so we only have to choose the one that suits with the context.
Chinese characters
In ancient times,
long before the first phonetic or alphabetic writing systems were conceived, there
had been different pictographic and ideographic writing systems (Egyptian,
Sumerian, Chinese, etc.) that did not expressed the sounds of the language but
the concepts or ideas. Nevertheless, Chinese writing has been the only
pictographic and ideographic writing system that still survives.
Until the 19th
Century linguists and historians knew little about how the Chinese characters
had been formed or how they had evolved. Nevertheless, at the turn of the 20th
Century, a series of archeological findings in North China helped to have a
better understanding of the Chinese script which was dated back to the Bronze
Age, historical period that coincides with the ancient Shang dynasty (1600-1046 BC). At these archeological sites,
thousands of animal bones (especially scapulas and turtle shells) were found.
On the surface of these bones, archeologists discovered strange inscriptions
that were identified as the most ancient written forms of Chinese characters. This
script was already quite developed. In fact, some of the characters could
easily be identified with their modern counterparts as they had changed little through
the centuries. These archeological discoveries not only helped to have a better
understanding about the formation of Chinese characters, they also helped to learn
more about China’s Bronze Age which historians
only knew through what was told in the Five Chinese Classics that were written
centuries after the Shang dynasty was
overthrown.
The inscriptions on
the oracular bones had a ritual function and through them, shamans made their
rituals of divination and prediction of future such as the outcome of a battle,
the good or bad evolution of crops, droughts and floods or any other subject
that monarchs thought was important for them or for their realm. Therefore,
Chinese script had in its origins a strong ritualistic and elitist character.
Many centuries later, the elitism of Chinese characters was perpetuated by the
Confucian tradition through the imperial examinations and the art of
calligraphy for the next two millennia.
It was not until the
second half of the 20th Century that China, under the leadership of
Mao Zedong, carried out important reforms on education such as the
simplification of Chinese script. This simplification consisted on reducing the
number of strokes on many characters in order to make the writing process
easier and quicker. Besides, thanks to the massive literacy campaigns carried
out during the mandate of Mao, for the first time in the history of China, Chinese
script was used by the masses and it ceased to be a tool only used by a privileged
few.
The Chinese
characters have always been quite unknown out of China and many Westerners have
always been fascinated by their beauty and their difficulty in learning them.
However, exoticism is not a good ally when it comes to look at things from an
objective point of view because it often drives us away from reality. The
following examples are just some of the most common widespread myths about
Chinese language.
Firstly, many people
think that the Chinese characters are like drawings. In fact, in Chinese script
there are pictograms which originally were more or less abstract drawings of
objects and phenomena. However, pictograms are only a very small percentage
among all Chinese character.
Secondly, many people
also believe that that each Chinese character is equivalent to a single word,
but in fact words and characters are not always the same thing. Although there
are words that are made up of one single character, the truth is that most of
the words in modern Chinese are made up of two or more characters. Therefore,
the fact that we can recognize and read many characters on a text doesn’t necessarily
mean that we know the words on that text.
Thirdly, another
aspect that has been too much exaggerated is the number of characters needed to
read and write Chinese. It is true that there around fifty thousand Chinese
characters, but the truth is that only a tiny part of all these characters are
presently used because most of them are names that are no longer in use.
Nowadays, modern publications such as books and newspapers only use around 2500
characters. In fact, when students of Chinese master the 1000 most common
Chinese characters, they will already be able to recognize and read around 70
or 80 per cent of all characters written on modern publications. However, as it
has been said, this doesn’t mean that they can understand what’s written on
these publications, on the contrary, they will still have to learn the hundreds
and hundreds of words that are made up with those characters.
“Anatomy” of Chinese characters
The majority of Chinese characters can be
decomposed in different smaller elements except those pictograms that form a
single unity of meaning, that is to say that they are pictograms and radicals
at the same time. Of all strokes which compose each Chinese character, radicals
are an essential part because they convey the essence of meaning. For example, we
will find the water radical 氵on all those
characters that describe liquid substances such as “soup 汤” ， “juice 汁”, on words such as “sea 海”, “river 江” and “lake 湖”, and even on
characters that mean “clear 清” or “clean 洁”. There are 214 radicals in modern Chinese. Radicals, a part from
giving us clues of a characters’ meaning, are also indispensable elements when
we have to look up new characters and words in the dictionary. Inside any
modern Chinese dictionary, characters are arranged in alphabetical order
according to their pinyin
pronunciation. However, if we find a character we don’t know, it would be a
colossal waste of time and efforts if we had to look it up page by page in the
dictionary. Fortunately this problem can be solved very quickly and easily.
Inside any Chinese dictionary there is a table with the 214 radicals arranged
according to their number of strokes. On the next pages there is another table
with all characters listed and arranged according to their radical and the
remaining number of strokes. Whenever we have to look up a new character, we
will have to look it up inside this table-list according to two essential
parameters: the characters’ radical and the remaining number of strokes. Once
we have found the character, this list will tell us in which page we can find
the character we are looking for. Once we are on that page we will be able to know
how to pronounce that character, what it means and which are the words that
begin with it.
Besides radicals, the
rest of elements of which characters are composed of have mainly a phonetic
function rather than a pictographic or an ideographic one.
Finally, we have to
bear in mind that we cannot write Chinese characters in our own way, there are
some basic rules that we have to follow in order to write them down, these
rules fix the order and direction in which we have to write the different
strokes. In fact, these rules are logical because when we follow them we
realize that writing characters becomes much easier than if we wrote them in
our own way.
Next I emphasize the
most common sorts of Chinese characters:
Pictograms
Pictograms originally
were like drawings of objects o phenomena that evolved towards more abstracted
forms throughout the centuries. Nevertheless, if we observe them in detail and
try to give free rein to our imagination, we still can see in them the real
nature of what they originally evoked.
龜
|
山
|
火
|
水
|
||||
Turtle
|
Mountain
|
Fire
|
Water
|
||||
A turtle with its head, legs, shell and tail.
|
It represents a mountain range
|
It represents the flames of a fire.
|
It represents a river flow.
|
||||
力
|
日
|
月
|
禾
|
||||
Strength
|
Sun
|
Moon
|
Grain,
cereal
|
||||
In its origins this pictogram represented a plough and to plough the
land a farmer needed a lot of strength.
|
This pictogram represents the sun. In its origins it was represented
by a circle with a dot in the middle that probably represented a solar stain.
|
This pictogram was the representation of a waning moon. It is quite
likely that the two strokes in the middle originally represented the lunar
craters.
|
In its origins this pictogram represented a spike of wheat or another
cereal.
|
||||
人
|
大
|
天
|
木
|
田
|
|||
Person
|
Big
|
Sky
|
Tree, wood
|
Field
|
|||
A person walking
|
A person with his arms stretched.
|
A person with his arms stretched and above his head: the sky
|
It represents a tree with its trunk and branches.
|
It represents a field divided into plots.
|
|||
Semantic compounds
Because not all
concepts could be expressed with pictograms, these ones were combined between
them to form new characters which expressed new ideas, these were the semantic
compounds.
秋
|
森
|
明
|
男
|
Autumn,
fall
|
Forest
|
Bright
|
Man
|
Cereal + fire
|
Three trees together
|
Sun + moon
|
Field + strength
|
In autumn the wheat stubbles of the fields are
burned in order to sow the fields again.
|
Many trees together form a forest.
|
A sun and a moon put together bright a lot.
|
Men need a lot of strength to plough a field.
|
Ideograms
The shape of the
ideograms tells us what they intend to express.
下
|
It means “under”, “below”, “down” and it represents a line below the
horizon.
|
上
|
It means “over”, “top”, “up” and it represents a line over the
horizon.
|
Phonetic and semantic compounds
More than a 70 per
cent of all Chinese characters are formed by a phonetic element which gives us an
approximate idea of how the character should be pronounced, and also a semantic
element or radical which conveys the character’s meaning. As an example, the
character 相, which is pronounced xiang, can
be found as phonetic element of other characters with different radicals and
meanings.
Original
character
|
Radical: Heart 心
|
Radical: water氵
|
Radical: bamboo 竹
|
Radical:
wide 厂
|
Radical:
Silk纟
|
||
相
|
想
|
湘
|
箱
|
厢
|
缃
|
||
xiāng
|
xiǎng
|
xiāng
|
xiāng
|
xiāng
|
xiāng
|
||
Each other
Mutual
Look at
Appearance
|
Think
Feel
Consider
|
Name of a river in China
|
Chest
Box
Case
Trunk
|
Wing of a house
|
Light yellow
Brown
|
||
In Chinese culture, heart has always been an organ
associated with feelings as well as thought.
|
Water is the essential element in a river.
|
Bamboo was a material very used in China to do all
kinds of things such as boxes and cases.
|
The wing of a house or the house itself conveys the
idea that it is something “wide”
|
Before it is woven and dyed, silk has rather a brown
or light yellow color.
|
|||
If we take into
account this last aspect of Chinese characters, we can see that the widespread
idea that Chinese writing is wholly pictographic is wrong because it would be
impossible to represent every idea or concept with a drawing. The Chinese of the
Antiquity soon realized that combining sound and meaning was a very productive
system to create new characters. However, although this could have been the
first step towards a totally phonetic writing system, in the case of China,
this evolution did not take place, perhaps because of the high amount of homophones
and the need to distinguish them by writing.
Simplification of Chinese characters
As it has already
been said, in the mid 50s and until the 60s, China, under the leadership of
Mao, carried out a reform in the Chinese script which consisted in reducing the
number of strokes on many characters in order that it was easier to write them
and to memorize them. Besides, some of the characters that already had a
simplified form in the past were also used and compiled in an official
characters’ list.
Meanwhile, in Hong
Kong and Taiwan, as well as in the most ancient communities of the Chinese
Diaspora, the traditional non-simplified characters have continued to be in
use. Nowadays in the Chinese world two different systems of Chinese script coexist:
the traditional one and the simplified one. Although we can find many
simplified characters which are completely different from their traditional
forms, we also have to bear in mind that both systems are not as different as
we might think because not all Chinese characters were simplified. In many
cases, we can find characters in which only a small element such as the radical
has been simplified. However, these characters can still be perfectly
recognizable in both systems. Here we have an example of traditional and
simplified characters.
Traditional
|
Simplified
|
Meaning
|
中國
|
中国
|
China
|
Strokes: 11
|
Strokes: 8
|
|
客廳
|
客厅
|
Drawing room, parlor
|
Strokes: 25
|
Strokes: 4
|
|
認識
|
认识
|
Know, recognize
|
Strokes: 14 and 19
|
Strokes: 4 and 7
|
Transcription of foreign names into Chinese
Very often students
of Chinese are asked to write down someone’s name in Chinese but people who ask
this kind of questions don’t know that this is a very complex matter because as
it has already been said, Chinese has no letters. For example if we wanted to
transcribe the name “Maria”, we neither have any character that represents the
sound “m” nor the sounds “a”, “i” or “r”. Therefore, the transcription will
have to be done by using the phonetic value of Chinese characters. However, we
also have to bear in mind that there are many characters that have the same
pronunciation and that Chinese characters have meanings which will influence the
transcription of the name. Therefore, apart from choosing the characters for
their phonetic value, the meaning of the characters will have to be positive
and it will have to be suitable for the name we want to transcribe. For
example, the name “Maria” would be 玛丽亚 (Maliya) which means “agate
(mineral)”, “beautiful” and “Asia”. Thus, the name “Maria” could be literally
translated as “Beautiful agate of Asia” or something like this. However,
“Maria” is a very common name in many countries and it has already been given
an official transcription into Chinese. The problem arises when we have to
transcribe names that haven’t been given an official Chinese transcription yet.
In these cases, we will need the help of a native Chinese person and there will
be two options:
First, our name can
be transcribed by using the characters’ phonetic values but also by using those
characters that have good meanings. Nevertheless, we have to bear in mind that
there are no fixed rules for the transcription of foreign names into Chinese
because there are many characters that can be employed and so there many
possible ways to transcribe them. Therefore, except for the foreign names that
have already been given an official transcription into Chinese, concerning the
rest of foreign names, we could likely find them transcribed in different ways.
Second, we can be
given a new name, that is to say a genuine Chinese name that doesn’t imitate
the sound of a foreign word.
Traditionally, in
Spain as well as in other Catholic countries, parents have always chosen the
names for their children from the hagiography (the Saints’ names). However, in
China, children’s names have always been made up by parents. We have to bear in
mind that most of the Chinese names are made up of two characters, and these
characters normally reflect parents’ wishes, that is to say that parents choose
these characters in order that they express good qualities that they would like
their children to have when they grow up. But Chinese names can also describe
some feature of the date of birth such as the weather. For example, if a baby
daughter is born in a rainy or a snowy day, it would be perfectly normal that
her parents chose the character for “rain” 雨 or the character for “snow” 雪 for their daughter. Furthermore, we also have to bear in mind that
natural phenomenon are closely related with the yin yang theory. Humid, cold and dark natural phenomenon such as
rain, snow, the night and the moon, are all phenomenon that belongs to yin, and therefore they are related to
the feminine sex. On the other hand, dry and warm phenomenon such as the “day”
and the “sun” belong to the yang,
therefore they have to do with everything which is masculine.
Traditionally, many
names were also chosen according to the theory of the Five Phases or Five Elements
of Chinese astrology (wood, fire, earth, metal and water). Many parents contracted
the services of a fortune teller who made an astrological prediction. The results
of the prediction would determine the child’s name. For instance, if the
fortune teller foretold that the child would be lacking one of the Five
Elements, in order to compensate this shortage, at least of the characters of
the child’s name had to have one wood, fire, earth, metal or water radical
depending on which was the lacking element.
As China’s market has
steadily opened to foreign investment since the Chinese economic reform of
1978, many western companies that wanted to establish factories in China had to
transcribe the names of their brands into Chinese in order to attract Chinese
consumers. The American company Coca Cola transcribed its name using characters
that conveyed a good meaning for the Chinese consumers. Thus Coca Cola was
transcribed as 可口可乐 (kekou kele) that could be
translated as “it can give you good taste, it can give you happiness”. On the
other hand, the Spanish company Cola Cao, which produces chocolate powder,
transcribed its brand name as高乐高 (gao le gao)
that literally means “tall, happy, tall”. This meaning was clearly addressed to
the parents whose children consumed Cola Cao and it transmitted the idea that
if their children consumed Cola Cao they would grow up happily.
Superstitions relating to Chinese language
Chinese people have
always been very superstitious and some of these superstitions can be found in
their language, especially in certain homophones and characters. For example,
during Chinese New Year celebrations it is very typical to eat fish just
because the word “fish” 鱼 (yú) and the word “surplus” 余 (yú) are homophones.
Chinese people believe that if they eat fish for the New Year’s meal there will
be a surplus in that year.
Chinese people are
also very superstitious with the numbers four and eight. In the Chinese
culture, number four has a very bad connotation, it is believed that it brings
bad luck because its pronunciation 四 (sì) is very similar to that of the word “death” 死 (sǐ), the only
difference between them is the change of tone. Chinese people are very
superstitious with this number and anyone who goes to China will notice that
buildings have no 4th floor (from the 3rd floor you
directly go to de 5th one). Besides, number eight is considered to
be the number that brings fortune and good luck because its pronunciation 八 (bā) is very similar to that of the first character 发 (fā) of the word 发财 (fācái), which means
“to get rich”. Despite the initial sounds of both characters differ, the ending
sound is exactly the same and both characters are pronounced in the same tone
so it seems like if they were homophones. Chinese people worship this number
because they believe it will help them to get rich and to be lucky, that’s why everyone
wants to have it on their mobile phone number, on their license plate, etc. The
fact that Beijing submitted bids to host the 2008 Olympic Games and that the
Opening Ceremony of the Games was celebrated on the 8th of august (8th
month) at 8 o’clock in the evening wasn’t a casualty, the date and the time
were chosen on purpose due to the superstition Chinese people have with number
eight.
Websites About Chinese Language In English
Spanish Websites About Chinese Language
No comments:
Post a Comment