Most linguists classify all the varieties of Chinese language as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family and believe that there was an original Proto-Sino-Tibetan language from which the Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman languages descended. The relation between Chinese and other Sino-Tibetan languages is an area of active research, as is the attempt to reconstruct the proto-language. The main difficulty in this effort is that, while there is enough documentation to allow one to reconstruct the ancient Chinese sounds, there is no written documentation that records the division between Proto-Sino-Tibetan and ancient Chinese. In addition, many of the older languages that would allow us to reconstruct Proto-Sino-Tibetan are very poorly understood and many of the techniques developed for analysis of the descent of the (fusional) Indo-European languages from Proto-Indo-European do not apply to Chinese, an analytic language, because of the paucity of inflectional morphemes in modern varieties.[5] Categorization of the development of Chinese is a subject of scholarly debate. Old Chinese was the language common during the early and middle Zhou Dynasty (1046–256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the Classic of Poetry and portions of the Book of Documents and I Ching. The rhymes of the Classic of Poetry and the phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters provide hints to their Old Chinese pronunciations. Work on reconstructing Old Chinese started with Qing dynasty philologists. The first complete reconstruction was devised by the Swedish linguist Bernhard Karlgren in the early 1900s; most present systems rely heavily on Karlgrens insights and methods. Old Chinese was not wholly uninflected. It possessed a rich sound system in which aspiration and voicing differentiated the consonants, but probably was still without tones. Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably 蜜 mì honey, 獅 shī lion, and perhaps also 馬 mǎ horse, 豬 zhū pig, 犬 quǎn dog, and 鵝 é goose. Reconstructions of Old Chinese are not definitive, so this hypothesis is tentative.[b] The source also notes that southern dialects of Chinese have more monosyllabic words than the Mandarin Chinese dialects. Middle Chinese was the language used during Southern and Northern 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 to summarize the Qieyun system. Linguists are more confident of having reconstructed how Middle Chinese sounded. The evidence for the pronunciation of Middle Chinese comes from several sources: modern dialect variations, rhyming dictionaries and tables, foreign transliterations, and Chinese phonetic translations of foreign words. The pronunciation of the borrowed Chinese words in Japanese, Vietnamese and Korean also provide valuable insights. The development of the spoken Chinese languages from early historical times to the present has been complex. Most Chinese people, in Sichuan and in a broad arc from the north-east (Manchuria) to the south-west (Yunnan), use various Mandarin dialects as their home language. The prevalence of Mandarin throughout northern China is largely due to north Chinas plains. By contrast, the mountains and rivers of middle and southern China promoted linguistic diversity. Until the mid-20th century, most southern Chinese only spoke their native local variety of Chinese. As Nanjing was the capital during the early Ming Dynasty, Nanjing Mandarin became dominant at least until the later years of the Qing Dynasty. Since the 17th century, the Qing Dynasty had set up orthoepy academies (正音书院／正音書院; Zhèngyīn Shūyuàn) to make pronunciation conform to the standard of the capital Beijing. For the general population, however, this had limited effect. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The Beijing Mandarin court standard was used solely by officials and civil servants and was thus fairly limited. This situation did not change until the mid-20th century with the creation (in both the PRC and the ROC, but not in Hong Kong) of a compulsory educational system committed to teaching Mandarin. As a result, Mandarin is now spoken by virtually all young and middle-aged citizens of mainland China and on Taiwan. Cantonese, not Mandarin, was used in Hong Kong during the time of its British colonial period (owing to its large Cantonese native and migrant populace) and remains today its official language of education, formal speech, and daily life, but Mandarin is becoming increasingly influential after the 1997 handover. The term sinophone, coined in 2005 in analogy to anglophone and francophone, refers to those who speak at least one Chinese language natively, or prefer it as a medium of communication. The term is derived from Sinae, the Latin word for ancient China.[c]
Posted on: Sun, 02 Mar 2014 14:19:48 +0000
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