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4 results

  • Popular and learnèd in Chinese dialects

  • Jerry Norman
  • Journal:
    Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society , First View
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    22 April 2025, pp. 1-13
    • Article
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  • This article classifies individual lexemes in Chinese dialects into four categories: popular, learnèd, colloquial, and literary. Popular and learnèd refer to the origins of a word: whether it has been transmitted orally or learned in an educational context. Colloquial and literary refer to usage. The traditional Chinese terms for distinguishing character readings, wén 文 and bái 白, literally ‘written’ and ‘spoken’, do not correspond neatly to the four categories that are proposed here. This article illustrates the differences between all six terms, mainly by using standard Mandarin and Běijīng dialect, and secondarily by using words from Mĭn and other dialects.

  • 1 - Chinese and Mandarin

  • from Unit I - Introduction
  • Yongping Zhu, University of Notre Dame, Indiana, Chu-Ren Huang, Hong Kong Polytechnic University
  • Book:
    A Student Grammar of Chinese
    Published online:
    27 April 2023
    Print publication:
    11 May 2023, pp 3-4

  • Summary

    This chapter introduces the term Chinese and the differences between Mandarin and Chinese dialects. There are seven major dialects: Northern dialect, Cantonese, Wu, Xiang, Gan, Min, and Hakka in China. The variation between these dialects causes comprehension problems in oral communication, and as such, Mandarin (Chinese in this book), which is based on the Northern dialect as a national standard language, has become popular in present-day China.

The Evolution of Chinese Grammar
  • Yuzhi Shi
  • Published online:
    16 March 2023
    Print publication:
    23 March 2023
  • The Chinese language has the longest well-documented history among all human languages, making it an invaluable resource for studying how languages develop and change through time. Based on a twenty-year long research project, this pioneering book is the English version of an award-winning study originally published in Chinese. It provides an evolutionary perspective on the history of Chinese grammar, tracing its development from its thirteenth-Century BC origins to the present day. It investigates all the major changes in the history of the language within contemporary linguistic frameworks, and illustrates these with a wide range of examples taken from every stage in the language's development, showing how the author's findings are relevant to contemporary descriptive, theoretical, and historical linguistics. Shedding light on the essential properties of Chinese and, ultimately, language in general, it is essential reading for academic researchers and students of Asian linguistics, historical linguistics and syntactic theory.

  • 16 - Tone and Intonation

  • from Part Three - Phonetic-phonological Issues in Chinese
  • Edited by Chu-Ren Huang, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Yen-Hwei Lin, Michigan State University, I-Hsuan Chen, University of California, Berkeley, Yu-Yin Hsu, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of Chinese Linguistics
    Published online:
    04 August 2022
    Print publication:
    18 August 2022, pp 336-360

  • Summary

    The primary goal of this chapter is to present the state of the art on Chinese intonation research, with a focus on how tone and intonation interact. To this end, the general functions and forms of intonation observed in (Mandarin) Chinese are first introduced. This is followed by a detailed discussion of the multiplexing of the f0 channel for tone and intonation in varieties of Chinese as well as the different proposals posited for intonation modeling. The secondary goal of this chapter is to highlight open issues and suggest potential points for future research on intonation in Chinese.