yellow red ~CiaworldbOOk.com SECTION 5 Vol. Ir?" o qy~il-t :t*"'ij'J¥.:f or_~_-t J ~"t+.QlL ' f('ffi4 ~ "If'¥ o #~.!lfY-*tl' • .Jf ~ 0000 ~ 000 ~ 00.. 0 l 6 9 1. 9 S 17 £ l ~ ~ .}~. E}} {7t 4£ I~ ~ ~ ¥} lf ~ "J. =f !L+.!!+~·'/=l-~-~ffiJ~-=- CHINESE 3( HISTORICAL BACKGROUND China is believed to be one of the earliest areas of human inhabitation in Asia and possibly Europe. The remains of Peking Man date back to 500,000 years ago, the Stone Age. The Chinese claim a lineage that goes back 5,000 years. The first Dynasty was the Xia and lasted until 1700 BCE. The preceding emperors of this empire were said to have had god-like qualities and were accredited with the developments China made in the writing system, agricultural advances, production of tools and weaponry and cultural development. The Zhou period saw the emergence of Confucianism (1100-221 BCE), and with it, the mandate to rule being a divine right. Only the just had the power to rule. Under the Qin Dynasty, China became unified. This dynasty (221-207 BCE) standardized the writing system and built the Great Wall of China to keep out the invaders. The Han Dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE) saw military conflicts and the creation of the Three Kingdoms. The arts and Buddhism flowered. Unity followed under the Sui and Tang Dynasties, the latter now regarded as the Chinese Golden Age. China dealt in international trade with control over the silk routes. Zen and Pure Land Buddhism became two schools of Buddhist thought, developed in China. During the Yuan Dynasty, Marco Polo visited Kublai Khan, who established Beijing as the capital. The Portuguese were the first Europeans to arrive in China on a trade mission. The British soon followed, and, to enhance their trading, they forced China into treaties following the Opium Wars whereby Hong Kong was ceded to Britain. The last century was not kind to China. Civil war was on the horizon when the Japanese attacked. Following World War II, civil war did in fact follow, with the Communist party, under Mao Tse-Tung taking power. Both Hong Kong and Macau have been returned to China, along with Taiwan, which has agreed in theory to the "One China" principle, if not in reality. 4000 BCE, logographic Chinese (S - T, Siniticj China, Singapore, Thailand, Pg. 1 Vietnam, USA, Canada China's name for herself is Zhongguo which means Middle Kingdom, Central Nation. This comes from her early encounters with other nations that were culturally and technologically challenged; the Chinese saw themselves as superior to their "barbarian" neighbours. After all, China was npt conquered by a foreign nation until the Mongols under Genghis Khan arrived in the 13th century, 4,200 years after their first dynasty. The word China is believed to come from the name of the Qin (pronounced Chin) dynasty. LINGUISTIC BACKGROUND Mandarin Chinese is a member of the Chinese branch of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. Sino-Tibetan is the world's second-largest language family after Indo-European, and it has the most speakers of any language in the world. Sino-Tibetan has more than 300 languages and major dialects. Han Chinese is spoken by roughly 1.1 billion people in the People's Republic of China, 20 million in Taiwan, seven million in Thailand, five million in Hong Kong, five million in Malaysia, 1.75 million in Singapore and one million in Viet Nam, with large communities in the United States, Canada and England, as well as others in Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia (Java and Bali), Laos, Mauritius, Mongolia, the Philippines and Russia. The majority of people living in mainland China are the Han Chinese. They comprise 90 percent of the population and are found for the most part in the eastern two-thirds of China. The 6.7 percent that make up minorities are represented by about 50 ethnic groups. Han Chinese speak Mandarin, a northern dialect, which makes up 70 percent of the population, or they speak a regional dialect. The others speak southern dialects such as Wu, Cantonese, Hunanese (Hsiang) and Fukinese (Min). Chiang Kai Shek was a Wu speaker, and Mao Tse-Tung, a Hunanese speaker. Mandarin, or Modem Standard Chinese, is the radio and school-spoken language of the People's Republic of China (PRC) Singapore and Taiwan. Hong Kong uses Cantonese as the spoken vernacular for education and communication, and all Chinese speakers use the Modem Standard Chinese written form. Cantonese is spoken in Canton, Hong Kong and Macau. Chinese, as a writing system, was one of the first to appear in the world. Written Chinese, which links the various Chinese languages and dialects, is unique in that it is the only major modern writing system that uses thousands of ideographic-phonetic symbols, rather than a phonetic alphabet or syllabary. The earliest examples of Chinese writing were found on 3,500-year-old "oracle bones". These were used for divining purposes to question the gods. The oracle bones were made of turtle shells or ox shoulder blades. Heat was applied and the patterns of cracks were "read". The Chinese writing system itself has been in use for more than 3,000 years and could be as old as 6,000. This system uses characters that, at one point, resembled the object they represented. In 1716 CE, a Chinese dictionary contained 40,545 characters. Since then, attempts have been made to simplify the system to reflect the 4-5,000 characters in common use today. In 1919, a phonetic script, much like the Japanese kana, was developed for Mandarin. Then, in 1929, a National Romanization alphabet was developed. Latinxua was also developed by the Communists. However, an attempt to reduce the number of characters to 1,000 met with difficulties as it could not produce a basic form of Chinese to reflect Chinese vocabulary. All these methods failed, and Modern Standard Chinese is accepted. 4000 BCE, logographic Chinese (S - T, Sinitic) China, Singapore, Thailand, Pg.2 Vietnam, USA, Canada Modern Standard Chinese, thus, is a result of a combination of three factors: 1. written post-Classical language 2. spoken standard language of Imperial times (Mandarin) 3. the vernacular of BeijIng On May 4, 1919, Hu Shih rejected Classical Chinese as the written standard in favour of this new standard which was applied across China in an effort to boost the literacy rate. In 1958, the last stage of development was pinyin zimu (pinyin phonetics). It is a Romanized script that phonetically transcribes Modern Standard Chinese. This script is used to teach non-Chinese nationals and foreigners Modern Standard Chinese, and it is used in schools to teach reading. It is thought that pinyin may replace characters in the future. Writing System Written Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect, but has been heavily influenced by other varieties of Northern Mandarin. Putonghua is the official form taught in schools. • Handwriting The pict09raph category was the earliest to appear. Chinese writing, as did the Egyptian hieroglyphics, .originated with increasingly stylized drawings of concrete objects. Ideographs of more abstract notions accompanied the pictographs. Phonetic borrowings and phonetic ideographs were used to a far lesser extent. Over time, the form changed so that the original part of the character is now referred to as its phonetic, and the added element, the radical. Calligraphy is seen as the highest form of visual art. A person's character is judged on the elegance of his or her handwriting. Chinese calligraphy displays a varied collection of stroke and script styles. It uses the regular, running and cursive. These are added to the other two: small seal and scribal. Since the second century BCE, the large seal script has been the standard script used in carving a name chop, a block of wood with a character on it. The small seal style was later developed, based on a combination of ancient and large seal script styles. The small seal style is characterized by thin, meticulously rendered lines. A less-complicated script style, the plainer official script style, was used for clerical purposes to speed up the processing of official documents. In contrast, the fancier cursive script emerged as a more artistic alternative. Later, the regular script, based on the official script, was developed in the second century CEo The regular script dispensed with the wavy, thickened stroke of the official script and established a standard, despite the increasingly fanciful cursive scripts. It is the standard script used today. The running script was developed in the second century CEo It is a flowing style that falls somewhere between the regular and cursive scripts. • Script All Chinese script characters are made up of eight r~ulated basic strokes. Thus, a Chinese speaker may carry over this regulated manner in "drawing English letters. EX: t - English 1. I 2. t - Chinese 1. - 2. t = the bar is drawn first 4000 BCE, logographic Chinese (S - T, Sinitic) China, Singapore, Thailand, Pg.3 Vietnam, USA, Canada The strokes are drawn from top to bottom, left to right and outside to inside, similar to most English letter formations. • Characters There are eight basic strokes of a Chinese character, hanzl , which orginated during the Han dynasty. (For this reason, Mandarin is called Han Chinese.) Variations of the stroke patterns bring the total to 17. A character, though, can consist of up to 48 strokes. Dictionaries organize the characters by the number of strokes they have. Each character is given the same amount of space to be written, regardless of the number of strokes.