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Battle Of Tumu Fortress

Battle of Tumu Fortress

The Tumu Crisis (Chinese: 土木之變; pinyin: Tŭmù zhī bìan); also called Crisis of Tumubao (土木堡之變); or Battle of Tumu (土木之役), was a frontier conflict between Mongolia and the Chinese Ming Dynasty which led to the capture of the Zhengtong Emperor on September 8 1449. This outcome was largely due to the Chinese army's remarkably bad deployment. The Ming expedition is regarded as the greatest military debacle of the dynasty. In July 1449 Esen Tayisi (也先) of the Oyirad Mongols launched a large-scale three-pronged invasion of China. He personally advanced on Datong (in northern Shanxi province) in August. The eunuch official Wang Zhen, who dominated the Ming court, encouraged the twenty-two year old Zhengtong Emperor to lead his own armies into battle against Esen. A huge army (perhaps as many as 250,000 men) was hastily assembled. Its command was made up of twenty experienced generals and a large entourage of high-ranking civil officials, with Wang Zhen acting as field marshal. On August 3, Esen's army crushed a badly supplied Chinese army at Yanghe, just inside the Great Wall. The same day the Emperor appointed his half-brother Zhu Qiyu as regent. The next day he left Beijing for Juyong Pass. The objective was a short, sharp march west to Datong via the Xuanfu garrison, a campaign into the steppe, and then to return to Beijing by a southerly route through Yuzhou. Initially the march was mired by heavy rain. At Juyong Pass, the civil officials and generals wished to halt and send the emperor back to Beijing, but their opinions were overruled by Wang Zhen. On August 12, some of the courtiers discussed assassinating Wang. On August 16, the army came upon the corpse-strewn battlefield of Yanghe. When it reached Datong on August 18, reports from garrison commanders persuaded Wang Zhen that a campaign into the steppe would be too dangerous. The "expedition" was declared to have reached a victorious conclusion and on August 20 the army set out toward Beijing. Fearing that the restless soldiers would cause damages to his estates in Yuzhou, Wang Zhen took the decision to strike northeast and return by the same exposed route as they had come. The army reached Xianfu on August 27. On August 30, the Mongols attacked the rearguard east of Xianfu and wiped it out. Soon afterwards, they also annihilated a powerful new rearguard of cavalry led by the elderly general Zhu Yong at Yaoerling. On August 31 the imperial army camped at the post station of Tumu. Wang Zhen refused his ministers' suggestion to have the emperor take refuge in the walled city of Huailai, just 45 km ahead. Esen sent an advance force to cut off access to water from a river south of the Chinese camp. By the morning of September 1, they had surrounded the Chinese army. Wang Zhen rejected any offers to negotiate and ordered the confused army to move toward the river. The Mongols attacked in force and destroyed the Chinese army, capturing large quantities of arms and armour. All the high-ranking Chinese generals and court officials were killed. According to some accounts, Wang Zhen was killed by his own officers. The emperor was captured, and on September 3 was sent to Esen's main camp near Xianfu. The entire expedition had been unnecessary, ill-conceived, and ill-prepared. The Mongol victory was won by an advance guard of only 20,000 cavalry. Esen, for his part, was quite unprepared either for the scale of his victory or for the capture of the Ming emperor. At first, Esen attempted to use the captured emperor to raise a ransom. Category:1449 Tumu Fortress 1449 Tumu Fortress 1449 ja:土木の変

Chinese language

The Chinese language (汉语/漢語, Pinyin: Hànyǔ, 华语/華語, Huáyǔ or 中文, Zhōngwén) forms part of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. About one-fifth of the people in the world speak some form of Chinese as their native language, making it the language with the most native speakers. The terms Chinese language and Chinese can both refer to spoken Chinese or written Chinese. Spoken Chinese is tonal. Regional variation between different variants/dialects is comparable to that of, for instance, the Romance language family; many variants of spoken Chinese are different enough to be mutually incomprehensible (see Is Chinese a language or family of languages? below). For spoken Chinese, there are between six and twelve main regional groups (depending on classification scheme), including Mandarin, Cantonese, Fujianese and Hakka. However, variants of spoken Chinese almost always use the same written form (with occasional dialect-specific characters, such as in Cantonese). Qin Shi Huang, the First Emperor of China, united Chinese writing in the 3rd century BC by setting standard written forms for which there had previously been many regional variations. Before the 20th century, the common written form was Literary Chinese (Classical Chinese), which no one spoke as a mother tongue. In the early 20th century, the baihuawen movement pushed the birth of the new written form, Vernacular Chinese, based on dialects of Mandarin. In the meantime, dialect-specific characters have contintued to develop primarily in Cantonese, but also occasionally in other dialects. The Chinese language, spoken in the form of Standard Mandarin, is the official language of the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China on Taiwan, as well as one of four official languages of Singapore (together with English, Malay, and Tamil). Chinese—de facto, in spoken form, Mandarin—is one of the six official languages of the United Nations (alongside English, Arabic, French, Russian, and Spanish). Spoken in the form of Standard Cantonese, Chinese is one of the official languages of Hong Kong (together with English) and of Macau (together with Portuguese). Among Chinese diaspora, Cantonese is the most common language one can hear in Chinatowns, thanks to early immigrants from Southern China. However, the rise of Northern and Taiwanese immigrants has led to the increase in the use of Mandarin and various Min dialects. Min The terms and concepts used by Chinese to separate spoken language from written language are different from those used in the West, because the political and social development was different in China compared to Europe. Whereas Europe fragmented into smaller nation-states after the fall of the Roman Empire, whose identities were often defined by language, China was able to preserve cultural and political unity through the same period, and maintained a common written language throughout its entire history, despite the fact that its actual diversity in spoken language has always been comparable to that of Europe. As a result, Chinese makes a sharp distinction between "written language" (wén; 文) and "spoken language" (yǔ; 语/語). The concept of a distinct and unified combination of written and spoken forms of language is therefore much stronger in the West than in China.

Spoken Chinese

Chinese spoken language The map on the right depicts the subdivisions ("languages" or "dialect groups") within Chinese. The traditionally recognized seven main groups, in order of population size are:
- Mandarin 北方 or 官話/官话 (shown in the map as divided into East and West groups, but also includes the Jianghuai and Huguang areas depicted in the map)
- Wu 吳/吴 (Shanghainese)
- Cantonese 粵/粤
- Min Family 閩/闽, further divided into 5 to 7 subdivisions, all mutually unintelligible.
- Xiang 湘
- Hakka 客家
- Gan 贛/赣 In parentheses above are the culturally dominant or representative dialects of each language or dialect group today. Chinese linguists have recently distinguished 3 more groups from the traditional seven:
- Jin 晉/晋 from Mandarin
- Hui 徽 from Wu
- Pinghua 平話/平话 from Cantonese There are also many smaller groups that are not yet classified, such as: Danzhou dialect, spoken in Danzhou, on Hainan Island; Xianghua (乡话), not to be confused with Xiang (湘), spoken in western Hunan; and Shaozhou Tuhua, spoken in northern Guangdong. See List of Chinese dialects for a comprehensive listing of individual dialects within these large, broad groupings. There is also Standard Mandarin, the official standard language used by the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China, and Singapore. Pronunciation of Standard Mandarin is based on the Beijing dialect, which is the dialect of Mandarin as spoken in Beijing, with vocabulary largely based on dialects of Mandarin, and grammar and syntax on vernacular Chinese. The governments intend for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. It is therefore used in government, in the media, and in instruction in schools. There is much controversy around the terminology used to describe the subdivisions of Chinese: some people call Chinese a language and its subdivisions dialects, while others call Chinese a language family and its subdivisions languages. Although Dungan is very closely related to Mandarin, not many people consider it "Chinese", because it is written in Cyrillic and spoken by people outside China who are not considered Chinese in any sense. It is common for speakers of Chinese to be able to speak several varieties of the language. Typically, in southern China, a person will be able to speak Standard Mandarin, the local dialect, and occasionally a more general regional dialect, such as Cantonese. Such polyglots frequently code switch between Standard Mandarin and the local dialect, depending on the situation. A person living in Taiwan, for example, may commonly mix pronunciations, phrases, and words from Standard Mandarin and Taiwanese, and this mixture is considered socially appropriate under many circumstances. In Hong Kong, it is not unusual for people to speak Cantonese and English, and sometimes Mandarin. In the sense that the written language is based on Standard Mandarin and the dialects are mostly spoken but not written, the situation in China is a complex and interesting case of diglossia.

Is Chinese a language or a family of languages?

Spoken Chinese comprises many regional and often mutually unintelligible variants. Linguistically, the situation is comparable to that of Romance languages, which are mutually unintelligible but all derive from Latin and so share many common underlying features. However, the socio-political context of Chinese language is quite different from that of European languages. In Europe, political fragmentation gave rise to independent states roughly the size of Chinese provinces. This generated a political desire to create separate cultural and literary standards to differentiate nation-states and standardize the language within a nation-state. In China, a single cultural and literary standard (Classical Chinese and later, Vernacular Chinese) continued to exist while the spoken language continued to diverge between different cities and counties, much as European languages diverged, due to the scale of the country, and the obstruction of communication by geography. For example, mountainous South China displays more linguistic diversity than the flat North China. In parts of south China, a major city's dialect may be marginally intelligible to close neighbours. For instance, Wuzhou is about 120 miles upstream from Guangzhou, but its dialect is more like Standard Cantonese spoken in Guangzhou, than is that of Taishan, 60 miles southwest of Guangzhou and separated by several rivers from it (Ramsey, 1987). The diverse Chinese spoken forms and common written form comprise a very different linguistic situation from that in Europe. In Europe, linguistic differences sharpened as the language of each nation-state was standardized. For example, a farmer on the French side of the border would start to model his speech and writing after Paris while his neighbour on the Spanish side after Madrid. The use of local speech became erroneous. In China, standardization of spoken dialects was weaker, and mostly due to cultural influence. Although, as with Europe, dialects of regional political or cultural capitals were still prestigious and widely used as the region's lingua franca, their linguistic influence depended more on the capital's status and wealth than entirely on the political boundaries of the region. China's linguistic situation is more similar to India's. Although India was historically not as unified as China, parts of it speaking multiple languages have long been united in various states, and many of its languages were not standardized until the last few decades through political centralization. Like Classical Chinese, Sanskrit long played a role as common written language. Unlike Classical Chinese, its descendants are recognized as separate languages, 18 of which are official national languages. Many Chinese languages do not have sharp boundaries. As with many areas that were linguistically diverse for a long time, it is not always clear whether the speech of a particular area of China should be considered a language in its own right or a dialect of another. The Ethnologue lists a total of [http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=90151 14], but the number varies between seven and seventeen depending on how strict the intelligibility criterion is. For Chinese people, regional linguistic differences are less important than cultural or nationalistic similarity. They generally consider Chinese a single language, partly because of the common written language. They refer to dialects as the speech of a location, for example Beijing dialect is (北京話/北京话), the speech of Beijing, and Shanghainese is (上海話/上海话), the speech of Shanghai. Often laypeople are not aware that various "dialects" are categorized into "languages" based on mutual intelligibility, though in areas where language varies greatly (such as the southeast) people do group dialects into categories like Wu or Hakka. There is a tendency to regard dialects as equal variations of a single Chinese language, even though many parts of north China are quite homogeneous in language, unlike parts of south China. As with the concept of Chinese language itself, the divisions among dialects are mostly geographical rather than based on linguistic distance. For example, Sichuan dialect is considered distinct from Beijing dialect in the same way that Cantonese is, although linguists consider Sichuan dialect and Beijing dialect Mandarin dialects, unlike Cantonese. The idea of single language has major political overtones, and explains the amount of emotion over this issue. The idea of Chinese as a language family may suggest that China consists of several different nations, challenge the notion of a single Han Chinese "race", and legitimize secessionist movements. This is why some Chinese are uncomfortable with it, while supporters of Taiwan independence tend to be strong promoters of Min- and Hakka-language education. Furthermore, for some, suggesting that Chinese is more correctly described as multiple languages implies that the notion of a single Chinese language and a single Chinese state or nationality is backward, oppressive, artificial, and out of touch with reality. However, the links between ethnicity, politics, and language can be complex. Many Wu, Min, Hakka, and Cantonese speakers consider their own varieties as separate spoken languages, but the Han Chinese race as one entity. They do not regard these two positions as contradictory, but consider the Han Chinese an entity of great internal diversity. Moreover, the government of the People's Republic of China officially states that China is a multinational state, and that the term "Chinese" refers to a broader concept Zhonghua Minzu that incorporates groups that do not natively speak Chinese, such as Tibetans, Uyghurs, and Mongols. (Groups that do speak Chinese and are considered "ethnic Chinese" are called Han Chinese.) This is seen as an ethnic and cultural concept, not a political one. Similarly, on Taiwan, some supporters of Chinese reunification promote the local language, while some supporters of Taiwan independence have little interest in the topic. And the Taiwanese identity incorporates Taiwanese aborigines, who are not considered Han Chinese because they speak Austronesian languages, predate Han Chinese settlement, and are culturally and genetically linked to other Austronesian-speaking peoples such as Polynesians.

Written Chinese

The relationship among the Chinese spoken and written languages is complex. It is compounded by the fact that spoken variations evolved for centuries, since at least the late Han Dynasty, while written Chinese changed much less. Until the 20th century, most formal Chinese writing was done in wényán (文言), translated as Classical Chinese or Literary Chinese, which was very different from any spoken variety of Chinese, much as Classical Latin differs from modern Romance languages. Since the May Fourth Movement of 1919, the formal standard for written Chinese was changed to báihuà (白話/白话), or Vernacular Chinese, which, while not completely identical to the grammar and vocabulary of dialects of Mandarin, was based mostly on them. The term standard written Chinese now refers to Vernacular Chinese. Chinese characters are morphemes independent of phonetic change. Thus, although the number one is "yi" in Mandarin, "yat" in Cantonese and "tsit" in Hokkien, they derive from a common ancient Chinese word and still share an identical character ("一"). Nevertheless, the orthographies of Chinese dialects are not completely identical. The vocabularies of different dialects have diverged. In addition, while literary vocabulary is mostly shared among all dialects, colloquial vocabularies are often different. Colloquially written Chinese usually involves "dialectal characters" which may not be understood in other dialects or characters that are considered archaic in standard written Chinese. Cantonese is unique among non-Mandarin regional languages in having a widely used written colloquial standard with a large number of unofficial characters for words particular to this variety of Chinese. By contrast, the other regional languages do not have such widely-used alternative written standards. Written colloquial Cantonese has become quite popular in online chat rooms and instant messaging, although for formal written communications Cantonese speakers still normally use standard written Chinese. Also, in Hunan, some women wrote their local language in Nü Shu, a syllabary derived from Chinese characters. The Dungan language, considered a dialect of Mandarin, is also nowadays written in Cyrillic, and was formerly written in the Arabic alphabet, although the Dungan people live outside China.

Chinese characters

The Chinese written language employs Chinese characters (漢字/汉字 pinyin: hànzì), which are logograms: each symbol represents a morpheme (a meaningful unit of language). They are not just pictographs (pictures of their meanings), but are highly stylized and carry much abstract meaning. Only some characters are derived from pictographs. In 100 AD, the famed scholar Xushen in the Han Dynasty classified characters into 6 categories, only 4% as pictographs, and 82% as phonetic complexes consisting of a radical element that indicates meaning, and a phonetic element that arguably once indicated the pronunciation. All modern characters derive from Kaishu. There are currently two standards for Chinese characters. One is the traditional system, essentially a streamlined styling of Kaishu, still used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau. The other is the simplified system adopted during the 1950s Chinese Cultural Revolution in Mainland China. The simplified system requires fewer strokes to write certain radicals and has fewer synonymous characters. Singapore, which has a large Chinese community, is the first and only foreign country to recognize and officially adopt the simplified characters. Singapore Various written styles are used in Chinese calligraphy, including zhuanshu (篆書, "seal-script"), caoshu (草書, "grass script" or "haste script"), lishu (隸書, "official script") and kaishu (楷書, "standard script"). Calligraphers can write in traditional and simplified characters, but they tend to use traditional characters for traditional art. As with Latin script, a wide variety of fonts exist for printed Chinese characters, a great number of which are often based on the styles of single calligraphers or schools of calligraphy. There is no concrete record of the origin of Chinese characters. Legend suggests that Cangjie, a bureaucrat of the legendary emperor Huangdi of China about 2600 BC, invented Chinese characters. But archaeological evidence, mainly the oracles found in the 19-20th centuries, only dates Chinese characters to the Shang dynasty in 1700 BC. The vast majority of oracle bone inscriptions were found in Yinxu of the Shang Dynasty, although a few Zhou dynasty-related ones were also found. The forms of the characters in the inscriptions changed over the 200 to 300 years, and scholars date the inscriptions of the Shang to the ruler by the content, particularly from the name of the diviners who inscribed the shell or bone artifacts. Contemporaneous with the end of Shang and Western Zhou periods are the bronze inscriptions. Over the last century, a great many ancient bronze artifacts have been unearthed in China which contain dedicational texts of the Zhou aristocrats where the characters show similarities and innovations compared to the oracle inscriptions. It is said that during the reign of Zhou King Xuan (宣王 827-782 BCE), the form of written characters was revised, and these became refered to as the "greater seal script" or dazhuan.

History

Most linguists classify all of the variations of Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family and believe that there was an original language, called Proto-Sino-Tibetan, similar to Proto Indo-European, from which the Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman languages descended. The relations between Chinese and other Sino-Tibetan languages are an area of active research, as is the attempt to reconstruct Proto-Sino-Tibetan. The main difficulty in this effort is that, while there is very good documentation that allows us to reconstruct the ancient sounds of Chinese, there is no written documentation of the division between proto-Sino-Tibetan and Chinese. In addition, many of the languages that would allow us to reconstruct Proto-Sino-Tibetan are very poorly documented or understood. Categorization of the development of Chinese is a subject of scholarly debate. One of the first systems was devised by the Swedish linguist Bernhard Karlgren in the early 1900s. The system was much revised, but always heavily relying on Karlgren's insights and methods. Old Chinese (), sometimes known as 'Archaic Chinese', was the language common during the early and middle Zhou Dynasty (1122 BC - 256 BC), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the Shijing, the history of the Shujing, and portions of the Yijing (I Ching). The phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters also provide hints to their Old Chinese pronunciations. The pronunciation of the borrowed Chinese characters in Japanese, Vietnamese and Korean also provide valuable insights. Old Chinese was not wholly uninflected. It possessed a rich sound system in which aspiration or rough breathing differentiated the consonants, but probably had no tones yet. Work on reconstructing Old Chinese started with Qing dynasty philologists. Middle Chinese () was the language used during the Sui, Tang, and Song dynasties (7th through 10th centuries AD). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the 切韻 'Qieyun' rhyme table (601 AD), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the 廣韻 'Guangyun' rhyme table. Linguists are confident of having a reconstructed how Middle Chinese sounded. The evidence for the pronunciation of Middle Chinese comes from several sources: modern dialect variations, rhyming dictionaries, foreign transliterations, "rhyming tables" constructed by ancient Chinese philologists to summarize the phonetic system, and Chinese phonetic translations of foreign words. However, all reconstructions are tentative; for example, scholars have shown that trying to reconstruct modern Cantonese from the rhymes of modern Cantopop would give a very inaccurate picture of the language. The development of the spoken Chinese languages from early historical times to the present has been complex. The language tree shown below indicates how the present main divisions of the Chinese language developed out of an early common language. Comparison with the map above gives some idea of the complexities left out of the tree. For instance, the Min language that is centered in Fujian Province contains five subdivisions, and the Mandarin dialects (Beifanghua) also contains nine, such as Yunnan hua and Sichuan hua.

Cantopop

Most northern Chinese people, in Sichuan and in a broad arc from the northeast (Manchuria) to the southwest (Yunnan), use various Mandarin dialects as their home language. The prevalence of Mandarin throughout northern China is largely due to north China's plains. By contrast, the mountains and rivers of southern China promoted linguistic diversity. The presence of Mandarin in Sichuan is largely due to a plague in the 12th century. This plague, which may have been related to the Black Death, depopulated the area, leading to later settlement from north China. Until the mid-20th century, most southern Chinese did not speak any Mandarin. However, despite the mix of officials and commoners speaking various Chinese dialects, Nanjing Mandarin became dominant at least during the officially Manchu-speaking Qing Empire. Since the 17th century, the Empire had set up orthoepy academies () to make pronunciation conform to the Qing capital Beijing's standard, but had little success. During the Qing's last 50 years in the late 19th century, the Beijing Mandarin finally replaced Nanjing Mandarin in the imperial court. For the general population, although variations of Mandarin were already widely spoken in China then, a single standard of Mandarin did not exist. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their regionalects for every aspect of life. The new Beijing Mandarin court standard was thus fairly limited. This situation changed with the creation (in both the PRC and the ROC) of an elementary school education system committed to teaching Mandarin. As a result, Mandarin is now spoken fluently by a majority of people in mainland China and on Taiwan. In Hong Kong, the language of education and formal speech remains Cantonese, but Mandarin is becoming increasingly influential.

Influence on other languages

Throughout history Chinese culture and politics has had a great influence on unrelated languages such as Korean, Vietnamese, and Japanese. Korean and Japanese both have writing systems employing Chinese characters (Hanzi), which are called Hanja and Kanji, respectively. The Vietnamese term for Chinese writing is Han Tu. It was the only available form to write the Vietnamese until the 14th century, used almost exclusively by Chinese-educated Vietnamese elites. From the 14th till late 19th century, Vietnamese was written with Chu Nom, a modified Chinese script incorporating sounds and syllables appropriate for native Vietnamese speakers. This is now completely replaced by a modified Latin script that incorporates a system of diacritical marks to indicate the tones, as well as modified consonants. Vietnamese language has mixed with multiple elements similar to Cantonese in regard to the specific intonations and rather sharp consonant endings. However, there is a slight influence from Mandarin due to the sharper vowels and, along with Mandarin, have the "kh" sound that missing from other Asiatic languages. In South Korea, the Hangul alphabet is generally used, but Hanja is used as a sort of boldface. (In North Korea, Hanja has been discontinued.) Since the modernization of Japan in the late 19th century, there has been debate about abandoning the use of Chinese characters, but the practical benefits of a radically new script have so far not been considered sufficient. Languages within the influence of Chinese culture also have a very large number of loanwords from Chinese. 50% or more of Korean vocabulary is of Chinese origin and the influence on Japanese and Vietnamese has been considerable. 10% of Philippine language vocabularies are of Chinese origin. Chinese also shares a great many grammatical features with these and neighboring languages, notably the lack of gender and the use of classifiers. The Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese languages seem to retain sounds of Classical Chinese that are otherwise only found in southern China.

Sounds

:For more specific information on phonology of Chinese see the respective main articles of each spoken variety. The phonological structure of each syllable consists of a nucleus consisting of a vowel (which can be a monophthong, diphthong, or even a triphthong in certain varieties) with an optional onset or coda consonant as well as a tone. There are some instances where a vowel is not used as a nucleus. An example of this is in Cantonese, where the nasal sonorant consonants and can stand alone as their own syllable. Across all the spoken varieties, most syllables tend to be open syllables, meaning they have no coda, but syllables that do have codas are restricted to , , , , , , or . Some varieties allow most of these codas, whereas others, such as Mandarin, are limited to only two, namely and . Consonant clusters do not generally occur in either the onset or coda. The onset may be an affricate or a consonant followed by a semivowel, but these are not generally considered consonant clusters. The number of sounds in the different spoken dialects varies, but in general there has been a tendency to a reduction in sounds from Middle Chinese. The Mandarin dialects in particular have experienced a dramatic decrease in sounds and so have far more multisyllabic words than most other spoken varieties. The total number of syllables in some varieties is therefore only about a thousand, including tonal variation. All varieties of spoken Chinese use tones. A few dialects of north China may have as few as three tones, while some dialects in south China have up to 6 or 10 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. A very common example used to illustrate the use of tones in Chinese are the five tones of Standard Mandarin applied to the syllable "ma". The tones correspond to these five characters:
- "mother" — high level
- "hemp" — high rising
- "horse" — low falling-rising
- "scold" — high falling
- question particle — neutral .

Romanization

Romanization is the process of transcribing a language in the Latin alphabet. There are many systems of romanization for the Chinese languages; this is due to the complex history of interaction between China and the West, and to the Chinese languages' lack of phonetic transcription until modern times. Chinese is first known to have been written in Latin characters by Western Christian missionaries of the 16th century, but may be written down by Western travelers of missionaries of earlier periods. At present, the most common romanization system for Standard Mandarin is Hanyu Pinyin, also known simply as Pinyin. Pinyin is the official Mandarin romanization system for the People's Republic of China, and the official one used in Singapore (see also Chinese language romanisation in Singapore). Pinyin is also very commonly used when teaching Mandarin in schools and universities of North America and Europe. Perhaps the second-most common system of romanization for Mandarin is Wade-Giles. This system was probably the most common system of romanization for Mandarin before Hanyu Pinyin was developmed. Wade-Giles is often found in academic use in the U.S., and is widely used in Taiwan. Here are a few examples of Hanyu Pinyin and Wade-Giles, for comparison: Regardless of system, tone transcription is often left out, either due to difficulties of typesetting or propriety for audience. Wade-Giles' extensive use of easily-forgotten apostrophes adds to the confusion. Thus, most Western readers will be much more familiar with Beijing than they will be with Běijīng, and with Taipei than with T'ai²-pei³. Regardless of romanization, the words are pronounced the same. Learning a system of romanization requires occasional deviations from the learner's own language, so, for example, Hanyu Pinyin uses "q" for very different values than an English speaker would probably be used to; the sound represented is similar to the English "ch", but is further back. This is a cause of confusion but is unavoidable, as Mandarin (and any language transcribed) will have phonemes different from those of the learner's own. On the other hand, this can be beneficial, since the learner knows immediately that he will have to learn a new pronunciation. Often with languages like Spanish, the pronunciation is similar enough to English that a learner will often revert to his habitual pronunciation when he sees the letters in Spanish words. There are many other systems of romanization for Mandarin, as well as systems for Cantonese, Minnan, Hakka, and other Chinese languages. Also there are at least two systems of cyrillization of Chinese. The most widespread is the Palladius system.

Morphology

Chinese morphology is strictly bound to a set number of syllables with a fairly rigid construction which are the morphemes, the smallest building blocks, of the language. Some of these single-syllable morphemes can stand alone as individual words, but contrary to what is often claimed, Chinese is not a monosyllabic language. Most words in the modern Chinese spoken varieties are in fact multisyllabic, consisting of more than one morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more. The confusion arises in how one thinks about the language. In the Chinese writing system, each individual single-syllable morpheme corresponds to a single character, referred to as a zì (字). Most Chinese speakers think of words as being zì, but this view is not entirely accurate. Many words are multisyllabic, and are composed of more than one zì. This composition is what is known as a cí (詞), and more closely resembles the traditional Western definition of a word. However, the concept of cí was historically a technical linguistic term that until only the past century, the average Chinese speaker was not aware of. Even today, most Chinese speakers think of words as being zì. This can be illustrated in the following Mandarin Chinese sentence (romanized using pinyin): :Jīguāng, zhè liǎngge zì shì shéme yìsi? :激光, 這兩個字是甚麼意思? :激光, 这两个字是什么意思? The sentence literally translates to, "Jī 激 and guāng 光, these two zì 字, what do they mean?" However, the more natural English translation would probably be, "Laser, this word, what does it mean?" Even though jīguāng 激光 is a single word, speakers tend to think of its constituents as being separate (Ramsey, 1987). Old Chinese and Middle Chinese had many more monosyllabic words due to greater variability in possible sounds. The modern Chinese varieties lost many of these sound distinctions, leading to homonyms in words that were once distinct. Multisyllabic words arose in order to compensate for this loss. Most natively derived multisyllabic words still feature these original monosyllabic morpheme roots. Many Chinese morphemes still have associated meaning, even though many of them no longer can stand alone as individual words. This situation is analogous to the use of the English prefix pre-. Even though pre- can never stand alone by itself as an individual word, it is commonly understood by English speakers to mean "before," such as in the words predawn, previous, and premonition. Taking the previous example, jīguāng, jī and guāng literally mean "stimulated light," resulting in the meaning, "laser." However, jī is never found as a single word by itself, because there are too many other morphemes that are also pronounced in the same way. For instance, the morphemes that correspond to the meanings "chicken" 雞/鸡, "machine" 機/机, "basic" 基, "hit" 擊/击, "hunger" 饑/饥, and "sum" 積/积 are also pronounced jī in Mandarin. It is only in the context of other morphemes can an exact meaning of a zì be known. In certain ways, the logographic writing system helps to reinforce meaning in zì that are homophonous, since even though several morphemes may be pronounced the same way, they are written using different characters. Continuing with the example, we have: For this reason, it is very common for Mandarin speakers to put characters in context as a natural part of conversation. For example, when telling each other their names (which are often rare, or at least non-colloquial, combinations of zì), Mandarin speakers often state which words their names are found in. As a specific example, a speakers might say 名字叫嘉英，嘉陵江的嘉，英國的英 Míngzi jiào Jiāyíng, Jiālíngjiāng de jiā, Yíngguó de yíng "My name is Jiāyíng, the Jia of Jialing River and the Ying in England." The problem of homonyms also exists but is less severe in southern Chinese varieties like Cantonese and Taiwanese, which preserved more of the rimes of Middle Chinese. For instance, the previous examples of jī for "stimulated," "chicken," and "machine" have distinct pronunciations in Cantonese (romanized using jyutping): gik1, gai1, and gei1, respectively. For this reason, southern varieties tend to employ fewer multisyllabic words. There are a few morphemes in Chinese, many of them loanwords, that consist of more than one syllable. These words cannot be further divided into single-syllable meaningful units, however in writing each syllable is still written as separate zì. One example is the word for "spider," zhīzhū, which is written as 蜘蛛. Even in this case, Chinese tend to try to make some kind of meaning out of the constituent syllables. For this reason, the two characters 蜘 and 蛛 each have an associated meaning of "spider" when seen alone as individual characters. When spoken though, they can never occur apart.

Loanwords

Most Chinese words are formed out of native Chinese morphemes, including words describing imported objects and ideas. However, direct phonetic borrowing of foreign words has gone on since ancient times. Words borrowed from along the Silk Road in ancient times include 葡萄 "grape", 石榴 "pomegranate" and 獅子 "lion". Other words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including 佛 "Buddha" and 菩薩 "bodhisattva". Foreign words continue to enter the Chinese language by transcription according to their pronunciations. This is done by employing Chinese characters with similar pronunciations; characters in this case are usually taken strictly for their phonetic values. For example, "Israel" becomes 以色列 (pinyin: yǐsèliè). The Chinese characters used here literally mean "using-colour-rank", or "ranking using colour", but the sense is automatically ignored because it is understood that the characters are used for their phonetic values only. Characters which are used nearly exclusively in the transcription of foreign words are present in Chinese; many of these characters date back to Middle Chinese when they were used to translate Sanskrit phonemes. For example, 斯 sī and 爾 ěr, which are Classical Chinese words for "this" and "you", are never used in their original senses (except in a limited number of idiomatic expressions) and more often used to transcribe the sounds /s/ and /l/ in foreign words. Nevertheless, this method tends to yield somewhat strange results, and is therefore overwhelmingly used to transcribe foreign names only. A rather small number of direct phonetic borrowings have survived as common words, including 幽默 yōumò "humour", 邏輯 luójí "logic", 時髦 shímáo "smart, fashionable", 麥克風 màikèfēng "microphone", and 歇斯底里 xiēsīdǐlǐ "hysterics". It is much more common to use existing Chinese morphemes to coin new words in order to represent imported concepts, such as technical expressions. Any Latin or Greek etymologies are dropped, making them more comprehensible for Chinese but introducing more difficulties in understanding foreign texts. For example, the word telephone was loaned phonetically as 德律風 (Standard Mandarin: délǜfēng) during the 1920s, but later 電話 (diànhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include 電視 (diànshì "electric vision") for television, 電腦 (diànnǎo "electric brain") for computer; 手機 (shǒujī "hand machine") for cellphone, and 藍牙 (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as 漢堡包 (hànbǎo bāo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example 奔騰 (bēnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and 賽百味 (sàibǎiwèi "better-than hundred tastes") for Subway restaurants. Another important source came from a related writing system, kanji, which are Chinese characters used in the Japanese language. The Japanese used kanji to translate many European words in the late 19th century and early 20th century. These words are called wasei-kango in Japanese (和製漢語 literally Japanese-made Chinese), and many of these words were then loaned into Chinese. Examples include lìchǎng (立場, たちば, stance), zhéxué (哲學, てつがく, philosophy), chōuxiàng (抽象, ちゅうしょう, abstract), guóyǔ (國語, こくご, national language), zhǔyì (主義, しゅぎ, -ism) and làngmàn (浪漫、ロマンス、romance). Some of these terms were coined by the Japanese by giving new senses to existing Chinese terms or by referring to expressions used in classical Chinese literature. As a result, these terms are virtually indistinguishable from native Chinese words: indeed, there is dispute over some of these terms as to whether the Japanese or Chinese coined them first. As a result of this to-and-fro process, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese continue to share many terms describing modern terminology, in parallel to a similar corpus of terms built from Greco-Latin terms shared among European languages.

Grammar

In general, all spoken varieties of Chinese are isolating languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphology (changes in the form of the word through inflection). Because they are isolating languages, they make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. Chinese features Subject Verb Object word order, and like many other languages in East Asia, makes frequent use of the topic-comment construction to form sentences. Even though Chinese has no grammatical gender, it has an extensive system of measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring (but not related) languages like Japanese and Korean. See Chinese measure words for an extensive coverage of this subject. Other notable grammatical features common to all the spoken varieties of Chinese include the use of serial verb construction, pronoun dropping (and the related subject dropping), and the use of aspect rather than tense. Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess various differences. See Chinese grammar for the grammar of Standard Mandarin (the standardized Chinese spoken language), and the articles on other varieties of Chinese for their respective grammars.

References

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External links

Dictionaries

- [http://www.dict.cn Free Online Chinese - English Dictionary] 1,000,000 English and Chinese words
- [http://www.zhongwen.com Zhongwen.com:] Chinese to English dictionary and other resources presented in English; searchable by English meanings; Chinese text displayed as graphics (i.e. does not require any Chinese font)
- [http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php?page=chardict MDBG free online Chinese-English dictionary]
- [http://www.chineselanguage.org/CCDICT/index.html Chinese Characters Dictionary]: supports Japanese, Korean, Cantonese, Hakka etc.
- [http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org/definition/Chinese-english/ Chinese - English Dictionary]: from [http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org Webster's Online Dictionary] - the Rosetta Edition
- [http://www.chinese-tools.com/tools/chinese-french-dictionary.html Chinese - French Dictionary] search Chinese, pinyin or French
- [http://www.mandarintools.com/cedict.html CEDICT] Chinese-English Dictionary Project
- [http://www.online-dictionary.biz/english/chinese Chinese dictionary] Free Chinese-English-Chinese dictionary
- [http://stardict.sourceforge.net Stardict] free (GPL) multilanguage dictionary including simplified/traditional Chinese for Unix (Linux, FreeBSD, etc.) and win32
- [http://cdict.giga.net.tw English-Chinese Translation Dictionary]: Chinese-English-Chinese Online Dictionary (Taiwan-based; simplified characters not recognised)
- [http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/scripts/wordsearch.php CantoDict]: Cantonese-English Dictionary Project

Resources for students of Chinese

- [http://www.chinese-forums.com Chinese Forums:]Discussion of Chinese language and culture with some very knowledgable participants, mostly intermediate or advanced learners of Chinese but also many native speakers / overseas Chinese.
- [http://www.oneaday.org Oneaday.org] One Chinese idiom a day (simplified and traditional characters) with pinyin transliteration and English translation.
- [http://www.shufawest.us/language/tonedrill.html Mandarin Tone Drill] Testing your knowledge of Mandarin tones.
- [http://www.mandarin123.com/pronunciation.html Mandarin Tone Quizzes] Useful practices on Mandarin tones.
- [http://www.pinyinpractice.com/tones.htm Pinyin Practice] Pinyin practice for Mandarin learners in all level

Pinyin

Pinyin (Chinese: 拼音, pīnyīn) literally means "join (together) sounds" (a less literal translation being "phoneticize", "spell" or "transcription") in Chinese and usually refers to Hànyǔ Pīnyīn (汉语拼音, literal meaning: "Han language pinyin"), which is a system of romanization (phonemic notation and transcription to Roman script) for Standard Mandarin. Pinyin was approved in 1958 and adopted in 1979 by the government in the People's Republic of China. It superseded older transcriptions like the Wade-Giles system (1859; modified 1912) or Bopomofo. Similar systems have been designed for other Chinese spoken variants and non-Han minority languages in the PRC. Since then, pinyin has been accepted by the Government of Singapore, the Library of Congress, the American Library Association, and most international institutions as the preferred transcription system for Mandarin. In 1979 the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) adopted pinyin as the standard romanization for modern Chinese. It is important to maintain the distinction that pinyin is a romanization and not an anglicization; that is, it is equally applicable for transcription into any language that uses a Roman alphabet, but that the precise pronunciation need not match that of any of these languages. For example, the sounds indicated in pinyin by b and p are distinguished from each other (by aspiration) in a manner different from that of both English (which has voicing and aspiration) and of French (which has voicing alone). Other letters, like j or q indicate a combination of sounds that do not correspond to any exact sound in English. Some of the transcriptions in pinyin such as the ang ending, do not correspond to English pronunciations, either. Pinyin has also become a useful tool for entering Chinese language text into computers.

Pronunciation

The primary purpose of pinyin in Chinese schools is to teach Mandarin pronunciation. Many in the West are under the mistaken belief that pinyin is used to help children associate characters with spoken words which they already know, but this is incorrect as many Chinese do not use Mandarin at home, and therefore do not know the Mandarin pronunciation of words until they learn them in elementary school through the use of pinyin. Pinyin uses the Roman alphabet, hence the pronunciation is relatively straightforward for Westerners. A pitfall for English-speaking novices is, however, the unusual pronunciation x, q, c and z (and sometimes i) and the unvoiced pronunciation of d, b, g, j. More information on the pronunciation of all pinyin letters in terms of English approximations is given further below. The pronunciation of Chinese is generally given in terms of initials and finals, which represent the segmental phonemic portion of the language. Initials are initial consonants, while finals are all possible combinations of medials (semivowels coming before the vowel), the nucleus vowel, and coda (final vowel or consonant).

Initials

In each cell below, the first line indicates IPA, the second indicates pinyin. ^- and are interchangeable.

Finals

In each cell below, the first line indicates IPA, the second indicates pinyin for a standalone (no-initial) form, and the third indicates pinyin for a combination with an initial. Other than finals modified by an -r, which are omitted, the following is an exhaustive table of all possible finals. ¹ It is of interest to point out that the only syllable-final consonants in standard Mandarin are -n and -ng, and -r which is attached as a grammatical suffix. If you see a Chinese syllable ending with any other consonant, it is either a dialect (notably Cantonese), or a non-Pinyin Romanization system (where final consonants are used to indicate tones) is being used. ¹ /ər/ (而, 二, etc.) is written as er. For other finals formed by the suffix -r, pinyin does not use special orthography; one simply appends -r to the final that it is added to, without regard for any sound changes that may take place along the way. For information on sound changes related to final -r, please see Standard Mandarin.
² "ü" is written as "u" after j, q, or x.
³ "uo" is written as "o" after b, p, m, or f.
⁴ It is pronounced when it follows an initial, and pinyin reflects this difference.
In addition, ê is used to represent certain interjections.

Rules given in terms of English pronunciation

All rules given here in terms of English pronunciation are approximate.

Pronunciation of initials

Pronunciation of finals

The following is an exhaustive list of all finals, with or without final -r. To find the pronunciation of a final: #Look for the entire combination rather than the individual letters. For example, look for ian, not i + a + n. #For syllables starting with y- or w-, change the y- to i- and w- to u-, then take the i- and u- as part of the final. (E.g. yan -> ian, where "ian" is the final.) If this results in ii-, uu-, and iu-, change those to i-, u-, and ü- respectively. (E.g. yin -> in, wu -> u, yue -> üe) #If the initial is j-, q-, and x-, and the final starts with -u-, then change the -u- to -ü-.

Orthographic features

Pinyin differs from other romanizations in several aspects, such as:
- w is placed before syllables starting with u.
- y is placed before syllables starting with i and ü.
- ü is written as u when there is no ambiguity (such as ju, qu, and xu), but written as ü when there are corresponding u syllables (such as lü and nü)
- When preceded by a consonant, iou, uei, and uen are simplified as iu, ui, and un (which do not represent the actual pronunciation).
- Like zhuyin, what are actually pronounced as buo, puo, muo, and fuo are given a separate representation: bo, po, mo, and fo.
- The apostrophe (') is used before ɑ, o, and e to separate syllables in a word where ambiguity could arise, e.g., pi'ao (皮襖) vs. piao (票), and Xi'an (西安) vs. xian (先).
- Eh! alone is written as ê; elsewhere as e. Schwa is always written as e.
- zh, ch, and sh can be abbreviated as ẑ, ĉ, and ŝ. However, the shorthands are rarely used due to difficulty of entering them on computers.
- ng has the uncommon shorthand of ŋ.

Tones

ŋ The Pinyin system also incorporates suprasegmental phonemes to represent the four tones of Mandarin. Each tone is indicated by a diacritical mark above a non-medial vowel. Many books printed in China mix fonts, with vowels with tone marks rendered in a different font than the surrounding text, a practice that tends to give such Pinyin texts a typographically ungainly appearance. This style, most likely rooted in early technical limitations, has led many to believe that Pinyin's rules call for this practice and also for the use of "" (with no curl over the top) rather than the standard style of the letter "a" found in most fonts. The official rules of Hanyu Pinyin, however, specify no such practice. Note that tone marks can also appear on consonants in certain vowelless exclamations. # The first tone is represented by a macron (ˉ) added to the pinyin vowel: #:
# The second tone is denoted by an acute accent (ˊ): #:
# The third tone is symbolized by a caron (ˇ, also known as a reverse circumflex). Note, it is officially not a breve (˘, lacking a downward angle), although this misuse is somewhat common on the Internet. #:
# The fourth tone is represented by a grave accent (ˋ): #:
# The fifth or neutral tone is represented by a normal vowel without any accent mark: #:

:(In some cases, this is also written with a dot before the syllable; for example, ·ma.) Since most computer fonts do not contain the macron or caron accents, a common convention is to postfix the individual syllables with a digit representing their tone (e.g., "tóng" (tong with the rising tone) is written "tong2"). The digit is numbered as the order listed above, except the "fifth tone", which, in addition to being numbered 5, is also either not numbered or numbered zero, as in ma0 (吗/嗎, an interrogative marker). These tone marks normally are only used in Mandarin textbooks or in foreign learning texts, but they are essential for correct pronunciation of Mandarin syllables, as exemplified by the following classical example of five characters whose pronunciations differ only in their tones: The words are "mother", "hemp", "horse", "admonish" and a question particle, respectively.

Rules for placing the tone mark

The rules for determining on which vowel the tone mark appears are as follows: # If there is more than one vowel and the first vowel is i, u, or ü, then the tone mark appears on the second vowel. # In all other cases, the tone mark appears on the first vowel (y and w are not considered vowels for these rules.) The reasoning behind these rules is in the case of diphthongs and triphthongs, i, u, and ü (and their orthographic equivalents y and w when there is no initial consonant) are considered medial glides rather than part of the syllable nucleus in Chinese phonology. The rules ensure that the tone mark always appears on the nucleus of a syllable.

Miscellanea

An umlaut is placed over the letter u when it occurs after the initials l and n in order to represent the sound [y]. This is necessary in order to distinguish the front high rounded vowel in lü (e.g. 驴/驢 donkey) from the back high rounded vowel in lu (e.g. 炉/爐 oven). Tonal markers are added on top of the umlaut, as in lǘ. However, the ü is not used in other contexts where it represents a front high rounded vowel, namely after the letters j, q, x and y. For example, the sound of the word 鱼/魚 (fish) is transcribed in pinyin simply as yú, not as yǘ. This practice is opposed to Wade-Giles, which always uses ü, and Tongyong Pinyin, which always uses yu. Whereas Wade-Giles needs to use the umlaut to distinguish between chü (pinyin ju) and chu (pinyin zhu), this ambiguity cannot arise with pinyin, so the more convenient form ju is used instead of jü. Genuine ambiguities only happen with nu/nü and lu/lü, which are then distinguished by an umlaut diacritic. Many fonts or output methods do not support an umlaut for ü or cannot place tone marks on top of ü. Likewise, using ü in input methods is difficult because it is not present as a simple key on many keyboard layouts. For these reasons v is sometimes used instead by convention. Occasionally, uu (double u) or U (capital u) is used in its place. See also:
- Postal System Pinyin (unrelated)
- Combining diacritic marks Unicode #U0300

Pinyin in Taiwan

The Republic of China on Taiwan is in the process of adopting a modified version of pinyin (currently Tongyong Pinyin). For elementary education it has used zhuyin (also known as bopomofo), and for romanization there is no standard system in general use in Taiwan despite many efforts to standardize on one system. In the late-1990s, the government of Taiwan formally decided to move from zhuyin to pinyin. This has triggered a very heated discussion of which pinyin system to use: hanyu pinyin of People's Republic of China or some other system. Much of the controversy centers on issues of national identity because of political interests. Proponents for adopting pinyin maintain that it is an international standard that is already used throughout the world. Proponents for adopting a new system maintain that Taiwan should have its own identity and culture separate from the People's Republic of China. A new system Tongyong Pinyin was created in Taiwan in 1998. Tongyong Pinyin is mostly similar to Hanyu Pinyin with a number of changes in the letters and digraphs representing certain sounds. In October 2002, the ROC government adopted Tongyong Pinyin through an administrative order that local governments can override. Localities with governments controlled by the Kuomintang, most notably Taipei City, have overridden the order and converted to Hanyu Pinyin (although with a slightly different capitialization convention than the Mainland). As a result, English signs have inconsistent romanization in Taiwan, with many places using Tongyong Pinyin but some using Hanyu Pinyin, and still others not yet having had the resources to replace older Wade-Giles or MPS2 signage. This has resulted in the odd situation in Taipei City in which inconsistent pinyin are shown in freeway directions, with freeway signs, which are under the control of the national government, using one pinyin, but surface street signs, which are under the control of the city government, using the other. As of 2003, no form of pinyin is used in elementary education on Taiwan to teach pronunciation. Although the ROC government has stated the desire to use romanization rather than zhuyin in education, the lack of agreement on which form of pinyin to use and the huge logistical challenge of teacher training has stalled these efforts.

Other languages

Pinyin-like systems have been devised for other variants of Chinese. Guangdong Romanization is a set of romanizations devised by the government of Guangdong province for Cantonese, Teochew, Hakka (Moiyen dialect), and Hainanese. All of these are designed to use letters in a similar way to Pinyin. In addition, in accordance to the "Regulation of Phonetic Transcription in Hanyu Pinyin Letters of Place Names in Minority Nationality Languages" (《少数民族语地名汉语拼音字母音译转写法》) promulgated in 1976, place names in non-Chinese languages like Mongol, Uyghur, and Tibetan are also officially transcribed using Pinyin. The pinyin letters (26 Roman letters, ü, and ê) are used to approximate the non-Chinese language in question as closely as possible. This results in spellings that are different from both the customary spelling of the place name, and the Pinyin spelling of the name in Chinese:

Controversy

Debate continues about the actual suitability of pinyin as a Chinese romanization method. This argument revolves around pinyin's unconventional use of Roman letters, of which the phonological values of some phonemes are quite different from that of most languages utilizing the Roman alphabet. Some sinologists praise this as pinyin's flexibility in that it allows the entire Roman alphabet to be adapted to the Chinese sound system (compared to Wade-Giles, which leaves out or underuses many letters). Others point out that pinyin letter values are so unconventional that for a person unfamiliar with Chinese, they result in a larger number of mispronunciations when compared to Wade-Giles. However, as not only the PRC but by now most institutions and publications have adopted it, the debate seems increasingly obsolete. Pinyin, like all systems of romanization, has certain limitations that users should be aware of:
- Like the spelling systems of any other language, pinyin does not represent English pronunciation and should not be pronounced according to English conventions. Readers are advised to learn pinyin phonetic conventions, bearing in mind that many sounds have no equivalents in English.
- Chinese characters can indicate semantic cues. But since pinyin is based on the sounds of Mandarin alone, these semantic cues are no longer preserved. For speakers of other Chinese spoken variants, it becomes unsuitable for use in reading and writing because these sounds do not necessarily correspond to their speech.
- The phonotactics of spoken Mandarin dictate a relatively small set of possible syllables and there is a potential for homonyms. Because of this, pinyin can be ambiguous, especially when transcribing Standard Written Chinese, which uses formal constructions not often found in speech. However, this should not be an issue in the transcription of normal spoken Mandarin conversation since speakers would not use such ambiguous constructions in speech. Computer systems long provided the most convincing argument in favor of pinyin; early computers were able to display nothing but 7-bit ASCII (essentially the 26 letters, the 10 digits, and a handful of punctuation marks). Most contemporary computer systems are now able to readily display characters from not only Chinese, but from many other writing systems as well. In addition, multiple input method editors exist that use standard keyboards to type them (pinyin being one such method). Now, PDAs and digitizing tablets allow users to write characters with a stylus, which can then be stored and edited like any text. Thus, this justification is no longer as strong as it used to be. Nonetheless, pinyin has gained wide acceptance, and supporters believe it is useful for students of Chinese as a second language.

Reference

Yin Binyong 尹斌庸, Mary Felley: Chinese Romanization. Pronunciation and Orthography (Hanyu pinyin he zhengcifa 汉语拼音和正词法; Sinolingua, Beijing 1990), ISBN 7-80052-148-6 / ISBN 0-8351-1930-0.

External links

Auto-converters

- [http://www.chinese-tools.com/tools/annotation.html Chinese characters to Pinyin (with tone marks and English meaning)]
- [http://www.pinyin.info/unicode/marks3.html Pinyin with tone numbers to Pinyin with tone marks] (can handle 5 for neutral tone)
- [http://www.foolsworkshop.com/ptou/index.html Pinyin with tone numbers to Pinyin with tone marks]
- [http://www.rikai.com/perl/HomePage.pl?Language=Zh Rikai.com] A web-mediator that adds mouseover pinyin readings to Chinese web-pages.
- [http://www.mandarintools.com/dimsum.html DimSum Chinese Reading Assistant] Add pinyin (or bopomofo, etc.) to text, web pages, or RTF files. Includes dictionary, flashcards.

Other

- [http://www.pinyin.info/ Pinyin.info] — very complete explanation of Unicode pinyin.
- [http://www.pinyin.info/unicode/unicode_test.html Pinyin info Unicode testpage]
- [http://www.math.nus.edu.sg/aslaksen/read.shtml Read/Write using Unicode]
- [http://research.chtsai.org/papers/pinyin-comparison.html Tongyong and Hanyu Pinyin]
- [http://www.sinosplice.com/lang/pronunciation.html Sinosplice - Pronunciation of Mandarin Chinese]
- [http://www.fdicts.com/dictlist1.php?k1=126 Fdicts] Simplified Chinese Dictionary
- [http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php MDBG free online Chinese-English dictionary]
- [http://www.mandarintools.com/pyconverter.html Chinese Romanization Converter] - Convert between Hanyu Pinyin, Wade-Giles, Gwoyeu Romatzyh, and other common Romanization systems. Category:Chinese language romanization Category:Latin-derived alphabets Category:Mandarin terms ko:병음 ja:ピン音 th:พินอิน

Mongolia

:For the region of the same name, see Mongolia (region) Mongolia (Khalkh Mongol: Монгол Улс) is a landlocked nation in central Asia, bordered by Russia to the north and the People's Republic of China to the south. It was the center of the Mongol Empire of the 13th century, but was ruled by the Manchu Qing dynasty from the end of the 18th century until an independent government was formed with Soviet assistance in 1921. Following the fall of the Soviet Union, Mongolia adopted electoral politics. The 18th largest country in the world by area, Mongolia has very little arable land: much of its area is grassland, with mountains in the north and west and the Gobi Desert in the south. A little over 30 percent of the population are nomadic or semi-nomadic Tibetan Buddhists of the Mongol ethnicity. Over fifty per cent of the population reside in the capital city Ulaanbaatar.

History

Main article: History of Mongolia In the 13th century, Mongolia was the center of the Mongol Empire, the largest contiguous land empire in world history. After more than a century of power, the Mongol Empire ended and Mongolia fell back into a state of internal struggle and feuds, which paved the way for the Manchu conquest of Inner Mongolia in 1636 and the submission of Outer Mongolia in 1691. Both Inner and Outer Mongolia declared independence in 1911, but only Outer Mongolia succeeded, with Russian help. After the October Revolution in Russia, Chinese troops re-occupied Outer Mongolia in 1919, but were caught in the middle when White and Red Russian armies extended the Russian Civil War into (Outer) Mongolian territory, and were driven out in 1921. In 1924, the Mongolian People's Republic was proclaimed. Mongolia was aligned closely with the Soviet Union. Politicians who demanded a more independent course, like Bodoo or Dandzan, were quickly toppled and executed. In 1928 Horloogiyn Choybalsan rose to power. Under his rule, forced collectivisation, purges, and the destruction of the Lamaist monasteries in 1937 left more than 10,000 people dead. During World War II, the USSR defended Mongolia against Japan during the Battle of Halhin Gol. Mongolian forces also took part in the Soviet offensive against Japanese forces in Inner Mongolia of August 1945 (see Operation August Storm). The threat of Mongolian forces seizing parts of Inner Mongolia induced the Republic of China to recognize Outer Mongolia's independence, provided that a referendum was held. The referendum took place on October 20, 1945, with, according to official numbers, 100% of the electorate voting for independence. After the establishment of the People's Republic of China, both countries recognized each other on October 6, 1949. After Choybalsan died in Moscow on January 26 1952, Yumjaagiyn Tsedenbal took power. In 1956 and again in 1962, Choybalsan's 'personality cult' was condemned. Mongolia continued to closely align itself with the Soviet Union, especially after the Sino-Soviet split of the late 1950s. While Tsedenbal visited Moscow in August 1984, being very ill, the parliament announced his retirement and replaced him with Jambyn Batmonh. In 1990, the Communist Party relinquished control over the government, paving the way for a new constitution in 1992 that abolished the People's Republic and created a hybrid parliamentary/presidential state.

Politics

Main article: Politics of Mongolia Until June 27, 2004 the predominant party in Mongolia was the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party or MPRP, which was formed by Mongolia's communist leaders after the end of the Cold War. The main opposition party was the Democratic Party or DP, which controlled a governing coalition from 1996 to 2000. From 2000 to 2004 MPRP was back in power, but results of the 2004 elections required the establishing of the first ever coalition government in Mongolia between the MPRP and MDC (Motherland Democratic Coalition). The state employs a dual executive system with an elected president as head of state and a prime minister as head of government. The legislature, or State Great Khural, has one chamber with 76 seats and is chaired by the speaker of the house.

Provinces

Main article: Provinces of Mongolia
Mongolia is split in to 21 provinces (aimag), Ulaanbaatar (the capital) is a municipality with provincial status. Provinces of Mongolia
- Arhangay
- Bayan-Ölgiy
- Bayanhongor
- Bulgan
- Darhan-Uul
- Dornod
- Dornogovĭ
- Dundgovĭ
- Govĭ-Altay
- Govĭsümber
- Hentiy
- Hovd
- Hövsgöl
- Ömnögovĭ
- Orhon
- Övörhangay
- Selenge
- Sühbaatar
- Töv
- Ulaanbaatar (municipality)
- Uvs
- Zavhan

Geography

Zavhan Main article: Geography of Mongolia The Mongolian heartland consists of relatively flat steppes. The southern portion of the country is taken up by the Gobi Desert, while the northern and western portions are mountainous. Uvs Nuur Lake, shared with Tuva Republic of the Russian Federation, is a natural World Heritage Site. Most of the country is hot in the summer and extremely cold in the winter, with January averages dropping as low as -30°C (-22°F). The country is also subject to occasional harsh climactic conditions known as zud or dzud. Ulaanbaatar has the coldest average temperature of any national capital in the world.

Economy

Main article: Economy of Mongolia Mongolia's economy is centered on agriculture and mining. Mongolia's main mining products are petroleum, coal and copper, with smaller industries in molybdenum, tungsten, and phosphate mining. Following decades of state-run enterprise, the economy has undergone an often-painful transition to capitalism; many industrial facilities were closed down with the end of the Soviet Union, which supported the largely loss-making factories. There are currently over 30,000 independent businesses in Mongolia, chiefly centered around the capital city. The majority of the population outside the cities subsists on sustenance herding; livestock typically consists of cows, sheep, goats, horses and Bactrian camels. GDP per capita is about $602 in nominal terms, but adjusted for purchasing power this comes to around $2,046. Although GDP has risen steadily since 2002, the state is still working to overcome a sizable trade deficit. A massive ($11 billion) foreign debt to Russia was settled by the Mongolian government in 2004 with a $300 million payment; this reduced value was accepted due to Mongolian hardship and losses of human lives during the Soviet Era. Mongolia joined the World Trade Organization in 1997 and now exports cashmere, minerals, and food products to Russia, the United States, China, Japan, Italy, and other countries.

Demographics

Main article: Demographics of Mongolia Most Mongolians are Mongol in descent: there are also smaller populations of Kazakh and Tungus people. The predominant religion is Tibetan Buddhism. As in many developing countries, Mongolia's young and rapidly growing population has put great strains on its economy.

Culture

Main article: Culture of Mongolia See also: Music of Mongolia

Miscellaneous topics

- Communications in Mongolia
- Foreign relations of Mongolia
- Military of Mongolia
- Mongoliyn Skautiyn Holboo
- Public holidays in Mongolia
- Transportation in Mongolia see also: Inner Mongolia

External links

General

- [http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/mg.html CIA World Factbook - Mongolia]
- [http://www.photoglobe.info/ebooks/mongolia/ Country Studies - Mongolia] offers background information on Mongolia
- [http://dmoz.org/Regional/Asia/Mongolia/ Dmoz - Mongolia Links]
- [http://www.tanemahuta.com/mongolia2004/ Plants of Mongolia]
- [http://www.gateway.mn/index.php?newlang=english Mongolia Gateway portal]
- [http://www.mongoliatoday.com/ Mongolia Today Magazine]
- [http://www.open-government.mn Mongolian Open Government] (in Mongolian and English)
- [http://www.mongoliatourism.gov.mn/ Mongolian Tourist Board]
- [http://mongoluls.net/ Mongoluls.net - Information on Mongolia]
- [http://www.mnlibrary.org Mongolia and Social Development]
- [http://ubpost.mongolnews.mn/ The UB Post] Mongolia's Independent English Weekly News
- [http://www.21DaysInMongolia.co.uk/ 21 Days In Mongolia] Backpacking in Mongolia
- [http://www.slackertravel.com/pictures/Mongolia/mongolia.html Collection of pictures from Mongolia sorted by province]
- [http://www.mongoliaphoto.com/ Photo session In Mongolia] Mongolia photo
- [http://www.altaimongolia.com/ Tourism In Mongolia] Tourism In Mongolia
- [http://www.willgoto.com/328/1/categories.aspx Travel guide to Mongolia]
- [http://www.geocities.com/ulsuud Flags and arms of the aymags of Mongolia] Category:Central Asian countries Category:Landlocked countries
- category:Disputed territories zh-min-nan:Bông-kó· ko:몽골 ms:Mongolia ja:モンゴル国 th:ประเทศมองโกเลีย

China

to protect the north from nomadic invaders and has been rebuilt several times since.]] China () refers to a number of states and cultures that have existed and are viewed as having succeeded one another in continental East Asia, dating back at least 3,500 years. China as it exists today has been variously described in different points of view as a single civilization or multiple civilizations, as a single state or multiple states, and as a single nation or multiple nations. With one of the world's longest periods of mostly uninterrupted civilization and the world's longest continuously used written language system, China's history has been largely characterized by repeated divisions and reunifications amid alternating periods of peace and war, and violent imperial dynastic change. The country's territorial extent expanded outwards from a core area in the North China Plain, and varied according to its moving fortunes to include multiple regions of East, Northeast, and Central Asia. For centuries, Imperial China was also one of the world's most technologically advanced civilizations, and East Asia's dominant cultural influence, with an impact lasting to the present day throughout the region. By the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, China's political, economic, and military influence declined relative to growing regional power Japan and the influence of Western powers. Semi-colonialism developed by the late nineteenth century in parts of China, and the country was invaded by the Empire of Japan during World War II. The imperial system in China ended with the establishment of the Republic of China (ROC) under Sun Yat-sen in 1912; however, the next four decades of ROC rule were marred by warlord control, the Second Sino-Japanese War (WWII), and the Chinese Civil War which pitted Chinese Nationalists against the Communist forces. After its victory in the Chinese Civil War, the Communist Party of China under Mao Zedong established the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, forcing the Republic of China (ROC) to retreat to the island of Taiwan, which it had governed since the end of World War II. Since then, the ROC has maintained administrative control over Taiwan, the Pescadores, several islands off the coast of Fujian province, and some islands in the South China Sea.

Terminology

"Zhongguo"

South China Sea China is called Zhongguo in Mandarin Chinese (Simplified: 中国, Traditional: 中國; also romanized as Jhongguo or Chung-kuo), which is usually translated as "Middle Kingdom", but could also be translated as "Central State" or "Central Country". Zhong (中) means "middle" or "center" while guo (国 or 國) means "country," "kingdom," "state," or "land", referring to the claim that China stood at the centre of that society's "known world", surrounded by lesser tributary states. The term has not been used consistently throughout Chinese history, however, and carries certain cultural and political connotations both positive and negative, some ideological, and early states considered part of Chinese history are not called "Zhongguo". During the Spring and Autumn Period, it was used only to describe the states politically descended from the Western Zhou Dynasty, in the Yellow River (Huang He) valley, to the exclusion of states such as Chu and Qin. The "Chinese" thus defined their nation as culturally and politically distinct from - and as the axis mundi of surrounding nations; a concept that continued well into the Qing Dynasty, although being continually redefined while the central political influence expanded territorially, and its culture assimilated alien influences. Thus Zhongguo quickly came to include areas farther south, as the cultural and political unit (not yet a "nation" or "country" in the modern sense) spread in a southerly direction, including the Yangtze River and Pearl River systems, and by the Tang Dynasty it even included "barbarian" regimes such as the Xianbei and Xiongnu. Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet, and the island of Taiwan, over time, came to be dominated (to a greater or lesser extent) by, or officially ruled by, imperial China, and are often included as a part of Zhongguo, though acceptance or denial of such claims remains politically controversial, especially where Zhongguo means PRC. During the Han Dynasty and before, Zhongguo had three distinctive meanings: # The area around the capital or imperial domain. The Book of Poetry explicitly gives this definition. # Territories under the direct authority of the "central" authorities. The Historical Records states: "Eight mountains are famed in the empire. Three are with the Man and Yi barbarians. Five are in Zhongguo." # The area now called the North China Plain. The Sanguo Zhi records the following monologue: "If we can lead the host of Wu and Yue (the area of southern Jiangsu and northern Zhejiang) to oppose Zhongguo, then we should break off relations with them soon." In this sense, the term is synonymous with Hua (華) and Xia (夏). During the period of division after the fall of the Han Dynasty, the term Zhongguo was subjected to transformation as a result of the surge of nomadic peoples from the northern frontier. This was doubly so after the loss of the Yellow River valley, the cradle of Chinese civilization, to these peoples. For example, the Xianbei called their Northern Wei regime Zhongguo, contrasting it with the Southern Dynasties, which they called the Yi (夷), meaning "barbarian". The southern dynasties, for their part, recently exiled from the north, called the Northern Wei Lu (虏), meaning "criminal" or "prisoner". In this way Zhongguo came to represent political legitimacy. It was used in this manner from the tenth century onwards by the competing dynasties of Liao, Jin and Song. The term Zhongguo came to be related to geographic, cultural and political identity and less to ethnic origin. The Republic of China, as it controlled mainland China, and later, the People's Republic of China, have used Zhongguo as an entity existing theoretically to mean all the territories and peoples within their political control as well as those outside of it (people in the Republic of China on Taiwan now usually use Zhongguo to refer to the PRC and use Taiwan to refer to itself). Thus it is asserted that all 56 officially recognized ethnic groups are Zhongguo ren (中國人), or Zhongguo people. Their disparate histories are collectively the history of Zhongguo.

"China"

Song in ancient times, was the imperial capital of 13 different historical dynasties (including the Han and Tang dynasties) in China.]] English and many other languages use forms of the name China (and the prefix Sino-), which is believed to have derived from the name of the Qin dynasty that first unified the country, even though it is not completely resolved and the origins are still controversial to an extent [http://www.bartleby.com/61/80/C0298000.html]. Despite the fact that the Qin dynasty was short-lived and was often regarded as overly tyrannical it unified the written language in China and gave the supreme ruler of China the title of "Emperor", hence, the subsequent Silk Road traders would identify themselves by that name. Alternate theories on the origin of the word "China" exist. In any circumstance, the word China passed through many languages along the Silk Road before it finally reached Europe and England. The Western "China", transliterated to Shina (支那) has also been used by