Eric Shepherd Chinese 3500 Fall 2012 University of South Florida

Refers to a group of related languages that

exhibit significant variation; tremendous diversity bilingual environment

Everywhere in China is always at least a

Language Families in China (over 1.4 billion speakers) Sino-Tibetan Language Family: e.g. Mandarin, Tibetan, Burmese, Miao, Yak Altaic Language Family: e.g. Mongolian, Turkic, Tungusic Manchu, Korean Austro-Asiatic: e.g. Mon-Khmer, Vietnamese, Tai Indo-European (Iranian, Slavic) Others: e.g. Blang (in Yunnan Province)

Called Putonghua-literally common speech (Mainland China) Also known as guoyu-national language (Taiwan, Hong Kong) Now referred to as huayu-language of the Chinese peoples outside of China

National standard

Heard in schools, on TV (in south also Cantonese TV), radio Intellectual movement after the fall of Qing Dynasty (1911) To unify languages of China and eliminate characters/Romanize writing system One of the factors deterring Chinas development was its difficult language

 Developed from a koine that grew out of an

environment in which government officials and traders of multiple regions interacted during the reign of several foreign dynasties who all had their capitals in Beijing beginning with the Liao (9071125), Jin (1115-1234), and Yuan (Mongols) (12061368)

It is NOT Beijing speech, which is a distinct dialect

Monosyllabic phonemes-smallest units of meaning Examples: (lo) elder/older + (sh) master of trade/craft = (losh) teacher

(z) foot + (qu) ball = (zqu) football/soccer

(jio) to teach + (yun) one who= (jioyun) instructor (ti) iron + (l) = (til) railroad

Genuinely polysyllabic morphemes are minority

Subcomponent characters have no meaning on own

(zhzhu) spider (dla) hang down (gda) lump (shnh) coral

Modern Chinese increase in polysyllabic words

When speaking, reading, or listening to one another Chinese do not process individual morphemes separately Burden on memory too heavy to process each individually Larger chunks of meaning-combinations roughly equivalent to words But, because each individual unit has meaning facilitates variety of combinations

 Each syllable characterized by a fixed pitch

pattern

Tones function like English consonants and vowels

in distinguishing meaning in Chinese

# of tones varies across dialects 4 tones in standard Mandarin (5 with an unstressed syllable-qingsheng)
More in many southern dialects (9 in Taiwanese), only 3 in Shandong dialects

Example 1: m-mother m-hemp m-horse m-to scold Example 2: sh-teacher sh- time Sh-excrement Sh-louse

Tremendous number of homonyms meaning distinguished by context and tones

sh: wet / teacher/ poem/ lion sh: true/ stone/ ten/ time/ to eat/food sh: history/ excrement/ to start/ to use/

to drive/pilot sh: to be/ to look/ clan/family/ city/municipality/ louse / gentry

(losh) teacher

Tones shift in combination: 2 third tones together = 2nd + 3rd n ho sounds like n ho

Alone: y Before 1st tones: y

Before 2nd/3rd tones: y Before 4th tones: y

Isolating language
A word is coterminous with a morpheme

No internal changes in words (suffixes, prefixes) No verb conjugation!

Modifiers precede what they describe in Chinese English-we can say my book or a book of mine Chinese-can only say:
w de sh I + possessive marker + book

Used in counting but primarily serve a descriptive function (iconicity) (ge) generic measure (wei) people (zhang) flat, thin objects (paper, table, ticket, picture) (zhi) slender items, military contingents, songs (zhi) slender items (zhi) animals, vessels, utensils, one of a pair of things, cylindrical objects (gen) long and thin things (smaller than ) (hair, string, fur) (men) course, cannons, artillery, branches of science (liang) vehicles (bikes, cars) (bu) film, large books, and machines (jia) planes, radios

(sou) boats (tiao) pants, long and narrow things (jian) articles, news items, clothes (shuang) chopsticks, shoes, socks, pairs of things (fu) sets of things or facial expressions (ben) bound objects, files (suo) houses, schools, research institutes (dong) houses, buildings (tai) computers, machines, things with engines, performances (pai) cliques, scenery (ba) keys, things with handles, abstract things, hand movements

Increasing # of Sinicized foreign loan words Phonetic Borrowing-proper nouns, names, people and places Michael Jordan (qaodn), Florida (f lu l d), Iowa (i h hu), Ohio (hi), Washington (hu shng dn) Technologies or phenomena not originating in China (yi mei er), (lei da), (mo te er), (bang), (da) Phonetic shift to meaning Tilfng-telephone shifts to (dinhu) electric speech

SVO language Topic Comment Language Main thing being talked about stated and then commented upon

Example 1: Zhi wi xinsheng n jin guo mi you? This + (measure) + man + you + see + ever (aspect) + not + have As for this man, have you ever seen him? Example 2: Zhi b dinyng n kn le mi you? This + (measure) + movie + you + see + ever (aspect) + not + have As for this movie, have you ever seen it?

Lack of tense/presence of aspect markers (zhe) on going action, (le) completed action, (guo) experienced action Wo chi zhe fan./I am in the process of eating. Wo chi le fan./I ate rice and the action is completed. Wo chi fan le./I ate and the action is completed. Wo chi guo fan./I have eaten at some point in my life or some specified time period. Wo mingtian chi le fan jiu hui jia./Tomorrow, after eating I will go home. Frequency and importance of time words

Context-based language as opposed to sentence based (English)

(dng le ma?) understanding + completed action + question marker Has understanding occurred?/Do you understand? (chfn le ma?) to eat + rice/food + completed action + question

Example 1:

Example 2:

marker Has eating been completed?/Have you eaten?

Ellipsis-elements known to speaker and listener left out (w)-I/me Have you eaten? Eaten. Have you been to the US? Been there. American speakers who frequently translate from English use I as a subject too much so project arrogant and self centered image

(chfn le ma?) Have you eaten?

Greeting Way to start small talk Inquiry about well being Invitation to eat together Question whether you have eaten or not

What is not said is often what is most important

(nn ho) honorific you + well/good = Hello (person of higher social status)! (n ho) unmarked you + well/good = Hello (person of equal or lower social status)!

(nn guxng?) Honorific you + esteemed + to be surnamed? What is your name (polite)? (w min gu xng xi.) I + avoid/not allowed + esteemed + to be surnamed + name. My not so esteemed name is Xie (humble).

Regionalects-environment and way of life; way of thinking, values all different and influenced by language Range from quite similar to mutually unintelligible Languages of Europe-206 China 8,000 counties probably 8,000 dialects
Qingdao-7 dialects Yantai-Muping (10 kilometers)

Mandarin 70% (over 900,000,000 speakers) Northern Northwestern Southwestern River Dialects

Wu (e.g. Shanghai) (77.1 million) Cantonese (52 million) Min (Fujianese, including Taiwanese) (49 million) Jin (spoken in Shanxi Province) (45 million) Hakka (33 million) Xiang (spoken in Hunan Province) (25 million) Gan (spoken in Jiangxi Province) (20.5 million) Population of: US-301 million; Japan-127 million; France-63 million; Germany-83 million; Italy-58 million

Major north/south division Northern/Mandarin Dialects differences in intonation, tonal systems, initials, finals and usage grammatical structure and word order basically the same Retroflex marks northern speech; no m, p, b, x endings Southern/non-Mandarin Dialects different linguistic systems, tonal differences, grammatical structure different, pronunciation differences, usage differences Research on regional dialects began with Yang Xiongs (53 BC-18 AD) Fangyan Absence of retroflex sounds; m, p, b, x endings Minority Languages

China has never been a homogeneous, mono-ethnic country It is a multicultural and ethnically diverse place Its population size, vast area, ethnic diversity and wide range of physical terrains combine to foster tremendous diversity within the Han majority Customs, diets, ways of life and levels of development vary tremendously from region to region Unifying thread is written language

Significant gap between written language and spoken language-not only characters but structure Writing system traced to 2000 BCE Oracle Bones Shang Dynasty divinatory texts (ox scapula, tortoise shells) Precursor was pottery shards (Banpo, Da wenkou, Longshan, Yangshao-all names of locations of prehistoric archaeological dig sites) Cang Jie-scribe for Yellow Emperor who created writing based on the tracks of birds and animals; in order to rule more efficiently Zhou Dynasty (11th-3rd Century BC)-bronze inscriptions called jinwen (literally gold writing) and classics (Analects of Confucius and Mencius)

Shang oracle bone

Non-alphabetic Over 150,000 characters Average literate person recognizes 3-4,000 characters College educated person recognizes around 10,000 Romanization systems Pinyin (PRC) National phonetic alphabet (ROC) others (Wade-Giles, Yale)

From Xu Shens Shuo Wen Jie Zi-1st dictionary of Chinese characters (121 AD) 1. Xingsheng (form and sound: semantic and phonetic elements mixed)

2. Zhi shi (indicate things: ideographic-symbolize complex notions) (a dot on sharp part of knife blade) edge of blade/sword \ (above and below primary stroke) above/below (the number three) 3. Hui yi (joining meaning: 2 or 3 characters make up one; compound with semantic notion) (wine) use the type of vessel that wine is brewed in and water (separate/divide) use knife to separate ox and horn (the sound of birds chirping) mouth and bird (one person behind another) to follow

4. Zhuanzhu (interchangeable notation: establish category; characters with similar meaning, rhyme, radical) / kao and lao 5. Xiangxing (imitate form: pictographic) very small number , , 6. Jiajie (loan borrowing: borrowed from character with similar meaning) (north-no shape for it, use something that sounds similar) Others: , , , , , , , , , ,

N ho! N ho!

Nn gu xng? W min gu xng Wng. Nn ne? W xng Chn.