Chinese Language Day

With at least six thousand years of history, Chinese is the oldest written language in the world. In turtle shells from the Shang Dynasty1 (1766-1123 BC), Chinese inscriptions of character have been found to demonstrate the existence of written language in excess of 3,000 years. The dominant language group in East Asia, Chinese Han, also known as Sinitic languages, belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family. Chinese is the only current pictographic language created using pictures. Some of the Chinese characters we use today come from ancient sketches of the things to identify. This can be very helpful for first time learning Chinese. A common example is the mountain word “shan, 山.” Character’s three points are meant to represent the three mountain ridge peaks. The written Chinese language uses single symbols, or characters, to represent each vocabulary word. Even thought the written Chinese language has been modified because of political changes and revolutions, the basic principles of the language and their characters and symbols remain the same. There are several dialects of Chinese language, but the written language is more or less same. You might find it strange that the Chinese people from different provinces find it difficult to communicate verbally, but they can understand the written language. The written language has three forms: traditional, simplified and phonetic or informal slang. ‘pin-yin’ form of Chinese language is transliterated using roman spellings. Like all other languages, has seen several changes in history; it has undergone various incarnations. A language family known as Sino-Tibetan is the mother of Chinese, but their relationship is a matter of controversy and active research. The basic difficulty in restructuring Proto-Sino-Tibetan is that even after having strong documentation for reformation of ancient Chinese sounds, there are no

documents to prove the point of division of Chinese from other Sino-Tibetan languages.

The earliest Chinese written records are Shang dynasty-era oracle inscriptions, which can be traced back to 1250 BCE. The phonetic categories of Archaic Chinese can be reconstructed from the rhymes of ancient poetry. During the Northern and Southern dynasties period, Middle Chinese went through several sound changes and split into several varieties following prolonged geographic and political separation. Qieyun, a rime dictionary, recorded a compromise between the pronunciations of different regions. The royal courts of the Ming and early Qing dynasties operated using a koiné language (Guanhua) based on Nanjing dialect of Lower Yangtze Mandarin. Standard Chinese was adopted in the 1930s, and is now an official language of both the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China on Taiwan. Approximately 1.2 billion people, about 16% of the world’s population, speak first-language as Chinese. While there are many Chinese dialects, the written language is common. Even if people can not communicate verbally in different provinces, they can understand each other in writing. Yet written language may be further subdivided into three forms: simplified slang or phonetic, conventional and informal. Standard Chinese is a simplified form of spoken Chinese based on Mandarin’s Beijing dialect. It is an official language of China, identical to one of Taiwan’s national languages and one of Singapore’s four official languages. This is one of the United Nations’ six official languages. The official language of China is the Mandarin, which is the very name of 'Hanyu' or 'Putonghua', belonging to Sino-Tibetan. Putonghua is a parlance in mainland China. It is the common language of all modern Han nationality people. In Taiwan Province and Hong Kong, it is called 'Guoyu' while in Singapore and Malaysia, it is often called 'Huayu'.

Mandarin is shaped and based on the Beijing dialect and other dialects spoken in the northern areas of China. Students are often taught mandarin as 'Yuwen' in their schoolbooks. It is beyond all doubt that mandarin is used as a mother tongue by the most people accounting for about one fifth of the world's population. Chinese once had very great influence on some peripheral countries with their languages and characters, such as Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese.

Why UN observes Chinese Language Day? United Nations Language Days aims to celebrate multilingualism and cultural diversity and encourage fair use of all six official languages in the organization. UN work stations around the world celebrate six different days, each devoted to one of the six official languages of the Organization. Why April 20 is selected for Chinese Language Day? The date for the Chinese day was chosen from Guyu (“Rain of Millet”), the 6th of 24 solar terms in conventional East Asian calendars, to pay homage to Cangjie. Cangjie is a very iconic figure in ancient China, believed to be an official Yellow Emperor historian, creator of Chinese characters. It is believed that when he invented the characters, he had four eyes and four pupils, the deities and spirits screamed and the sky started raining millet. Since then on, Chinese people celebrate Cangjie’s Guyu Day. The Gregorian calendar typically begins around April 20.

History

Earliest examples of Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones from around 1250 BC, in the late Shang dynasty. Bronze inscriptions became plentiful during the following Zhou dynasty. The latter part of the Zhou period saw a flowering of literature, including classical works such as the Analects, the Mencius, and the Zuo zhuan.

PERIODIZATION OF THE CHINESE LANGUAGE

Old Chinese was written with several early forms of Chinese characters, including Oracle Bone, Bronze, and Seal scripts. Only half of the 4,000 characters used have been identified with certainty. Little is known about the grammar of this language, but it seems much less reliant on grammatical particles than Classical Chinese. From early in the Western Zhou period, around 1000 BC, the most important recovered texts are bronze inscriptions, many of considerable length.

Middle Chinese was the language used during Northern and Southern dynasties and the Sui, Tang, and Song dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the Qieyun rime book (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by rhyme tables such as the Yunjing constructed by ancient Chinese philologists as a guide to the Qieyun system.

Chinese scholars of the Northern and Southern dynasties period were concerned with the correct recitation of the classics. Various schools produced dictionaries to codify reading pronunciations and the associated rhyme conventions of regulated verse. It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the Qieyun rime book (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by rhyme tables such as the Yunjing constructed by ancient Chinese philologists as a guide to the Qieyun system. Up to the early 20th century, most of the people in China spoke only their local variety. As a practical measure, officials of the Ming and Qing dynasties carried out the administration of the empire using a common language based on Mandarin varieties, known as Guānhuà ( 官 话 / 官話, literally "language of officials"). By the middle of the 19th century, the Beijing dialect had become dominant and was essential for any business with the imperial court. In the 1930s a standard national language Guóyǔ ( 国 语 / 國語 "national language") was adopted. After much dispute between proponents of northern and southern dialects and an abortive attempt at an artificial pronunciation, the National Language Unification Commission finally settled on the Beijing dialect in 1932. The People's Republic founded in 1949 retained this standard, calling it pǔtōnghuà (普通话/普通話 "common speech"). The national language is now used in education, the media, and formal situations in both Mainland China and Taiwan. In Hong Kong and Macau, because of their colonial and linguistic history, the language used in education, the media, formal speech, and everyday life remains the local Cantonese, although the standard language has become very influential and is being taught in schools. Tones All varieties of spoken Chinese use tones to distinguish words. A few dialects of north China may have as few as three tones, while some dialects in south China have up to 6 or 12 tones, depending on how one counts. One exception from this is Shanghainese which has reduced the set of tones to a two-toned pitch accent system much like modern Japanese. Chinese characters There are currently two systems for Chinese characters. The traditional system, used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau and Chinese speaking communities (except Singapore and Malaysia) outside mainland China, takes its form from standardized character forms dating back to the late Han dynasty. The Simplified Chinese character system, introduced by the People's Republic of China in 1954 to promote mass literacy, simplifies most complex traditional glyphs to fewer strokes, many to common cursive shorthand variants. Singapore, which has a large Chinese community, was the second nation to officially adopt simplified characters, although it has also become the de facto standard for younger ethnic Chinese in Malaysia.