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Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb
Where did Charles-Augustin de Coulomb die?
Paris, France
data/set4/a6
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb Charles Augustin de Coulomb (born June 14, 1736, Angoulême, France - died August 23, 1806, Paris, France) was a French physicist. He is best known for developing Coulomb's law: the definition of the electrostatic force of attraction and repulsion. The SI unit of charge, the coulomb, was named after him. Coulomb was born in Angoulême, France, to a well to do family. His father, Henri Coulomb, was inspector of the Royal Fields in Montpellier. His mother, Catherine Bajet, came from a wealthy family in the wool trade. When Coulomb was a boy the family moved to Paris, and there Coulomb studied at the prestigious Collège des Quatre-Nations. The courses of mathematics there under Pierre Charles Monnier made him decide to pursue mathematics and the similar subjects as a career. From 1757 to 1759 he joined his father's family in Montpellier and took part in the work of the academy of the city, directed by the mathematician Augustin Danyzy. With his father's approval, Coulomb returned to Paris in 1759 to successfully study for the entrance examination at the military school at Mézières. At his exit from the school in 1761, he initially took part in the survey for the British coastal charts, then was sent on mission to Martinique in 1764 to take part in the construction of the Fort Bourbon under the orders of the lieutenant-colonel of Rochemore, as the French colony was insulated in the middle of the English and Spanish possessions following the Seven Years' War. Coulomb spent eight years directing the work, contracting tropical fever. He carried out several experiments on the resistance of masonries and the behaviour of the walls of escarpe (supportings), which were inspired by the ideas of Pieter van Musschenbroek on friction. Upon his return, with the rank of Captain, he was employed at La Rochelle, the Isle of Aix and Cherbourg. He discovered an inverse relationship of the force between electric charges and the square of its distance, later named after him as Coulomb's law. In 1781, he was stationed permanently at Paris. On the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789, he resigned his appointment as intendant des eaux et fontaines, and retired to a small estate which he possessed at Blois. He was recalled to Paris for a time in order to take part in the new determination of weights and measures, which had been decreed by the Revolutionary government. He was one of the first members of the National Institute; he was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802 . But his health was already very feeble, and four years later he died in Paris, France. Coulomb leaves a legacy as a hero in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design. Coulomb is distinguished in the history of mechanics and of electricity and magnetism. In 1779 he published an important investigation of the laws of friction, Théorie des machines simples, en ayant égard au frottement de leurs parties et à la roideur des cordages (Theory of simple machines with regard for the friction of their parts and the tension of the ropes), which was followed twenty years later by a memoir on viscosity. In 1784 his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l'élasticité des fils de metal Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 229-269, 1784 (Theoretical research and experimentation on torsion and the elasticity of metal wire) appeared. This memoir contained a description of different forms of his torsion balance. He used the instrument with great success for the experimental investigation of the distribution of charge on surfaces, of the laws of electrical and magnetic force, and of the mathematical theory of which he may also be regarded as the founder. Coulomb's torsion balance In 1785 Coulomb presented his three reports on Electricity and Magnetism: - Premier Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 569-577, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb describes “How to construct and use an electric balance (torsion balance) based on the property of the metal wires of having a reaction torsion force proportional to the torsion angle”. Coulomb also experimentally determined the law that explains how “two bodies electrified of the same kind of Electricity exert on each other”. - Sécond Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 578-611, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb carries out the “determination according to which laws both the Magnetic and the Electric fluids act, either by repulsion or by attraction”. - Troisième Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 612-638, 1785 . “On the quantity of Electricity that an isolated body loses in a certain time period , either by contact with less humid air, or in the supports more or less idio-electric”. Four subsequent reports were published in the following years: - Quatrième Mémoire "Where two principal properties of the electric fluid are demonstrated: first, that this fluid does not expand into any object according to a chemical affinity, or by an elective attraction, but that it divides itself between different objects brought into contact; second, that in conducting objects, the fluid, having achieved a state of stability, expands on the surface of the body and does not penetrate into the interior." (1786) - Cinquième Mémoire "On the manner in which the electric fluid divides itself between conducting objects brought into contact, and the distribution of this fluid on the different parts of the surface of this object." (1787) - Sixième Mémoire "Continuation of research into the distribution of the electric fluid between several conductors. Determination of electric density at different points on the surface of these bodies." (1788) - Septième Mémoire. "On magnetism" (1789) Coulomb explained the laws of attraction and repulsion between electric charges and magnetic poles, although he did not find any relationship between the two phenomena. He thought that the attraction and repulsion were due to different kinds of fluids. * French National Library The Mémoires of Coulomb available in pdf format. * ---- Related Wikipedia Articles Hippolyte Lecomte June 14 1736 Angoulême France August 23 1806 Paris France Coulomb's law France physicist Coulomb's law SI unit coulomb Angoulême France Henri Coulomb Royal Fields Montpellier Catherine Bajet Paris Collège des Quatre-Nations Pierre Charles Monnier Augustin Danyzy Charleville-Mézières Martinique Fort Bourbon Seven Years' War Tropical disease Pieter van Musschenbroek friction La Rochelle Isle of Aix Cherbourg electric charge Coulomb's law 1781 Paris French Revolution 1789 Blois weights and measures French revolution#The Directory .281795.E2.80.931799.29 National Institute geotechnical engineering retaining wall mechanics electricity magnetism friction viscosity torsion balance electric charge Mathematical physics torsion balance Electromagnetism Fluid theory of electricity
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb
When was Charles-Augustin de Coulomb permanently stationed in Paris?
Charles-Augustin de Coulomb was permanently stationed in Paris in 1781.
data/set4/a6
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb Charles Augustin de Coulomb (born June 14, 1736, Angoulême, France - died August 23, 1806, Paris, France) was a French physicist. He is best known for developing Coulomb's law: the definition of the electrostatic force of attraction and repulsion. The SI unit of charge, the coulomb, was named after him. Coulomb was born in Angoulême, France, to a well to do family. His father, Henri Coulomb, was inspector of the Royal Fields in Montpellier. His mother, Catherine Bajet, came from a wealthy family in the wool trade. When Coulomb was a boy the family moved to Paris, and there Coulomb studied at the prestigious Collège des Quatre-Nations. The courses of mathematics there under Pierre Charles Monnier made him decide to pursue mathematics and the similar subjects as a career. From 1757 to 1759 he joined his father's family in Montpellier and took part in the work of the academy of the city, directed by the mathematician Augustin Danyzy. With his father's approval, Coulomb returned to Paris in 1759 to successfully study for the entrance examination at the military school at Mézières. At his exit from the school in 1761, he initially took part in the survey for the British coastal charts, then was sent on mission to Martinique in 1764 to take part in the construction of the Fort Bourbon under the orders of the lieutenant-colonel of Rochemore, as the French colony was insulated in the middle of the English and Spanish possessions following the Seven Years' War. Coulomb spent eight years directing the work, contracting tropical fever. He carried out several experiments on the resistance of masonries and the behaviour of the walls of escarpe (supportings), which were inspired by the ideas of Pieter van Musschenbroek on friction. Upon his return, with the rank of Captain, he was employed at La Rochelle, the Isle of Aix and Cherbourg. He discovered an inverse relationship of the force between electric charges and the square of its distance, later named after him as Coulomb's law. In 1781, he was stationed permanently at Paris. On the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789, he resigned his appointment as intendant des eaux et fontaines, and retired to a small estate which he possessed at Blois. He was recalled to Paris for a time in order to take part in the new determination of weights and measures, which had been decreed by the Revolutionary government. He was one of the first members of the National Institute; he was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802 . But his health was already very feeble, and four years later he died in Paris, France. Coulomb leaves a legacy as a hero in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design. Coulomb is distinguished in the history of mechanics and of electricity and magnetism. In 1779 he published an important investigation of the laws of friction, Théorie des machines simples, en ayant égard au frottement de leurs parties et à la roideur des cordages (Theory of simple machines with regard for the friction of their parts and the tension of the ropes), which was followed twenty years later by a memoir on viscosity. In 1784 his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l'élasticité des fils de metal Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 229-269, 1784 (Theoretical research and experimentation on torsion and the elasticity of metal wire) appeared. This memoir contained a description of different forms of his torsion balance. He used the instrument with great success for the experimental investigation of the distribution of charge on surfaces, of the laws of electrical and magnetic force, and of the mathematical theory of which he may also be regarded as the founder. Coulomb's torsion balance In 1785 Coulomb presented his three reports on Electricity and Magnetism: - Premier Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 569-577, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb describes “How to construct and use an electric balance (torsion balance) based on the property of the metal wires of having a reaction torsion force proportional to the torsion angle”. Coulomb also experimentally determined the law that explains how “two bodies electrified of the same kind of Electricity exert on each other”. - Sécond Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 578-611, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb carries out the “determination according to which laws both the Magnetic and the Electric fluids act, either by repulsion or by attraction”. - Troisième Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 612-638, 1785 . “On the quantity of Electricity that an isolated body loses in a certain time period , either by contact with less humid air, or in the supports more or less idio-electric”. Four subsequent reports were published in the following years: - Quatrième Mémoire "Where two principal properties of the electric fluid are demonstrated: first, that this fluid does not expand into any object according to a chemical affinity, or by an elective attraction, but that it divides itself between different objects brought into contact; second, that in conducting objects, the fluid, having achieved a state of stability, expands on the surface of the body and does not penetrate into the interior." (1786) - Cinquième Mémoire "On the manner in which the electric fluid divides itself between conducting objects brought into contact, and the distribution of this fluid on the different parts of the surface of this object." (1787) - Sixième Mémoire "Continuation of research into the distribution of the electric fluid between several conductors. Determination of electric density at different points on the surface of these bodies." (1788) - Septième Mémoire. "On magnetism" (1789) Coulomb explained the laws of attraction and repulsion between electric charges and magnetic poles, although he did not find any relationship between the two phenomena. He thought that the attraction and repulsion were due to different kinds of fluids. * French National Library The Mémoires of Coulomb available in pdf format. * ---- Related Wikipedia Articles Hippolyte Lecomte June 14 1736 Angoulême France August 23 1806 Paris France Coulomb's law France physicist Coulomb's law SI unit coulomb Angoulême France Henri Coulomb Royal Fields Montpellier Catherine Bajet Paris Collège des Quatre-Nations Pierre Charles Monnier Augustin Danyzy Charleville-Mézières Martinique Fort Bourbon Seven Years' War Tropical disease Pieter van Musschenbroek friction La Rochelle Isle of Aix Cherbourg electric charge Coulomb's law 1781 Paris French Revolution 1789 Blois weights and measures French revolution#The Directory .281795.E2.80.931799.29 National Institute geotechnical engineering retaining wall mechanics electricity magnetism friction viscosity torsion balance electric charge Mathematical physics torsion balance Electromagnetism Fluid theory of electricity
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb
When was Charles-Augustin de Coulomb permanently stationed in Paris?
Yes
data/set4/a6
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb Charles Augustin de Coulomb (born June 14, 1736, Angoulême, France - died August 23, 1806, Paris, France) was a French physicist. He is best known for developing Coulomb's law: the definition of the electrostatic force of attraction and repulsion. The SI unit of charge, the coulomb, was named after him. Coulomb was born in Angoulême, France, to a well to do family. His father, Henri Coulomb, was inspector of the Royal Fields in Montpellier. His mother, Catherine Bajet, came from a wealthy family in the wool trade. When Coulomb was a boy the family moved to Paris, and there Coulomb studied at the prestigious Collège des Quatre-Nations. The courses of mathematics there under Pierre Charles Monnier made him decide to pursue mathematics and the similar subjects as a career. From 1757 to 1759 he joined his father's family in Montpellier and took part in the work of the academy of the city, directed by the mathematician Augustin Danyzy. With his father's approval, Coulomb returned to Paris in 1759 to successfully study for the entrance examination at the military school at Mézières. At his exit from the school in 1761, he initially took part in the survey for the British coastal charts, then was sent on mission to Martinique in 1764 to take part in the construction of the Fort Bourbon under the orders of the lieutenant-colonel of Rochemore, as the French colony was insulated in the middle of the English and Spanish possessions following the Seven Years' War. Coulomb spent eight years directing the work, contracting tropical fever. He carried out several experiments on the resistance of masonries and the behaviour of the walls of escarpe (supportings), which were inspired by the ideas of Pieter van Musschenbroek on friction. Upon his return, with the rank of Captain, he was employed at La Rochelle, the Isle of Aix and Cherbourg. He discovered an inverse relationship of the force between electric charges and the square of its distance, later named after him as Coulomb's law. In 1781, he was stationed permanently at Paris. On the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789, he resigned his appointment as intendant des eaux et fontaines, and retired to a small estate which he possessed at Blois. He was recalled to Paris for a time in order to take part in the new determination of weights and measures, which had been decreed by the Revolutionary government. He was one of the first members of the National Institute; he was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802 . But his health was already very feeble, and four years later he died in Paris, France. Coulomb leaves a legacy as a hero in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design. Coulomb is distinguished in the history of mechanics and of electricity and magnetism. In 1779 he published an important investigation of the laws of friction, Théorie des machines simples, en ayant égard au frottement de leurs parties et à la roideur des cordages (Theory of simple machines with regard for the friction of their parts and the tension of the ropes), which was followed twenty years later by a memoir on viscosity. In 1784 his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l'élasticité des fils de metal Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 229-269, 1784 (Theoretical research and experimentation on torsion and the elasticity of metal wire) appeared. This memoir contained a description of different forms of his torsion balance. He used the instrument with great success for the experimental investigation of the distribution of charge on surfaces, of the laws of electrical and magnetic force, and of the mathematical theory of which he may also be regarded as the founder. Coulomb's torsion balance In 1785 Coulomb presented his three reports on Electricity and Magnetism: - Premier Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 569-577, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb describes “How to construct and use an electric balance (torsion balance) based on the property of the metal wires of having a reaction torsion force proportional to the torsion angle”. Coulomb also experimentally determined the law that explains how “two bodies electrified of the same kind of Electricity exert on each other”. - Sécond Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 578-611, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb carries out the “determination according to which laws both the Magnetic and the Electric fluids act, either by repulsion or by attraction”. - Troisième Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 612-638, 1785 . “On the quantity of Electricity that an isolated body loses in a certain time period , either by contact with less humid air, or in the supports more or less idio-electric”. Four subsequent reports were published in the following years: - Quatrième Mémoire "Where two principal properties of the electric fluid are demonstrated: first, that this fluid does not expand into any object according to a chemical affinity, or by an elective attraction, but that it divides itself between different objects brought into contact; second, that in conducting objects, the fluid, having achieved a state of stability, expands on the surface of the body and does not penetrate into the interior." (1786) - Cinquième Mémoire "On the manner in which the electric fluid divides itself between conducting objects brought into contact, and the distribution of this fluid on the different parts of the surface of this object." (1787) - Sixième Mémoire "Continuation of research into the distribution of the electric fluid between several conductors. Determination of electric density at different points on the surface of these bodies." (1788) - Septième Mémoire. "On magnetism" (1789) Coulomb explained the laws of attraction and repulsion between electric charges and magnetic poles, although he did not find any relationship between the two phenomena. He thought that the attraction and repulsion were due to different kinds of fluids. * French National Library The Mémoires of Coulomb available in pdf format. * ---- Related Wikipedia Articles Hippolyte Lecomte June 14 1736 Angoulême France August 23 1806 Paris France Coulomb's law France physicist Coulomb's law SI unit coulomb Angoulême France Henri Coulomb Royal Fields Montpellier Catherine Bajet Paris Collège des Quatre-Nations Pierre Charles Monnier Augustin Danyzy Charleville-Mézières Martinique Fort Bourbon Seven Years' War Tropical disease Pieter van Musschenbroek friction La Rochelle Isle of Aix Cherbourg electric charge Coulomb's law 1781 Paris French Revolution 1789 Blois weights and measures French revolution#The Directory .281795.E2.80.931799.29 National Institute geotechnical engineering retaining wall mechanics electricity magnetism friction viscosity torsion balance electric charge Mathematical physics torsion balance Electromagnetism Fluid theory of electricity
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb
What contribution did Charles-Augustin de Coulomb make to the field of geotechnical engineering?
Retaining wall design
data/set4/a6
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb Charles Augustin de Coulomb (born June 14, 1736, Angoulême, France - died August 23, 1806, Paris, France) was a French physicist. He is best known for developing Coulomb's law: the definition of the electrostatic force of attraction and repulsion. The SI unit of charge, the coulomb, was named after him. Coulomb was born in Angoulême, France, to a well to do family. His father, Henri Coulomb, was inspector of the Royal Fields in Montpellier. His mother, Catherine Bajet, came from a wealthy family in the wool trade. When Coulomb was a boy the family moved to Paris, and there Coulomb studied at the prestigious Collège des Quatre-Nations. The courses of mathematics there under Pierre Charles Monnier made him decide to pursue mathematics and the similar subjects as a career. From 1757 to 1759 he joined his father's family in Montpellier and took part in the work of the academy of the city, directed by the mathematician Augustin Danyzy. With his father's approval, Coulomb returned to Paris in 1759 to successfully study for the entrance examination at the military school at Mézières. At his exit from the school in 1761, he initially took part in the survey for the British coastal charts, then was sent on mission to Martinique in 1764 to take part in the construction of the Fort Bourbon under the orders of the lieutenant-colonel of Rochemore, as the French colony was insulated in the middle of the English and Spanish possessions following the Seven Years' War. Coulomb spent eight years directing the work, contracting tropical fever. He carried out several experiments on the resistance of masonries and the behaviour of the walls of escarpe (supportings), which were inspired by the ideas of Pieter van Musschenbroek on friction. Upon his return, with the rank of Captain, he was employed at La Rochelle, the Isle of Aix and Cherbourg. He discovered an inverse relationship of the force between electric charges and the square of its distance, later named after him as Coulomb's law. In 1781, he was stationed permanently at Paris. On the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789, he resigned his appointment as intendant des eaux et fontaines, and retired to a small estate which he possessed at Blois. He was recalled to Paris for a time in order to take part in the new determination of weights and measures, which had been decreed by the Revolutionary government. He was one of the first members of the National Institute; he was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802 . But his health was already very feeble, and four years later he died in Paris, France. Coulomb leaves a legacy as a hero in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design. Coulomb is distinguished in the history of mechanics and of electricity and magnetism. In 1779 he published an important investigation of the laws of friction, Théorie des machines simples, en ayant égard au frottement de leurs parties et à la roideur des cordages (Theory of simple machines with regard for the friction of their parts and the tension of the ropes), which was followed twenty years later by a memoir on viscosity. In 1784 his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l'élasticité des fils de metal Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 229-269, 1784 (Theoretical research and experimentation on torsion and the elasticity of metal wire) appeared. This memoir contained a description of different forms of his torsion balance. He used the instrument with great success for the experimental investigation of the distribution of charge on surfaces, of the laws of electrical and magnetic force, and of the mathematical theory of which he may also be regarded as the founder. Coulomb's torsion balance In 1785 Coulomb presented his three reports on Electricity and Magnetism: - Premier Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 569-577, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb describes “How to construct and use an electric balance (torsion balance) based on the property of the metal wires of having a reaction torsion force proportional to the torsion angle”. Coulomb also experimentally determined the law that explains how “two bodies electrified of the same kind of Electricity exert on each other”. - Sécond Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 578-611, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb carries out the “determination according to which laws both the Magnetic and the Electric fluids act, either by repulsion or by attraction”. - Troisième Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 612-638, 1785 . “On the quantity of Electricity that an isolated body loses in a certain time period , either by contact with less humid air, or in the supports more or less idio-electric”. Four subsequent reports were published in the following years: - Quatrième Mémoire "Where two principal properties of the electric fluid are demonstrated: first, that this fluid does not expand into any object according to a chemical affinity, or by an elective attraction, but that it divides itself between different objects brought into contact; second, that in conducting objects, the fluid, having achieved a state of stability, expands on the surface of the body and does not penetrate into the interior." (1786) - Cinquième Mémoire "On the manner in which the electric fluid divides itself between conducting objects brought into contact, and the distribution of this fluid on the different parts of the surface of this object." (1787) - Sixième Mémoire "Continuation of research into the distribution of the electric fluid between several conductors. Determination of electric density at different points on the surface of these bodies." (1788) - Septième Mémoire. "On magnetism" (1789) Coulomb explained the laws of attraction and repulsion between electric charges and magnetic poles, although he did not find any relationship between the two phenomena. He thought that the attraction and repulsion were due to different kinds of fluids. * French National Library The Mémoires of Coulomb available in pdf format. * ---- Related Wikipedia Articles Hippolyte Lecomte June 14 1736 Angoulême France August 23 1806 Paris France Coulomb's law France physicist Coulomb's law SI unit coulomb Angoulême France Henri Coulomb Royal Fields Montpellier Catherine Bajet Paris Collège des Quatre-Nations Pierre Charles Monnier Augustin Danyzy Charleville-Mézières Martinique Fort Bourbon Seven Years' War Tropical disease Pieter van Musschenbroek friction La Rochelle Isle of Aix Cherbourg electric charge Coulomb's law 1781 Paris French Revolution 1789 Blois weights and measures French revolution#The Directory .281795.E2.80.931799.29 National Institute geotechnical engineering retaining wall mechanics electricity magnetism friction viscosity torsion balance electric charge Mathematical physics torsion balance Electromagnetism Fluid theory of electricity
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb
Where did the construction of Fort Bourbon take place?
The construction of Fort Bourbon took place in Martinique.
data/set4/a6
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb Charles Augustin de Coulomb (born June 14, 1736, Angoulême, France - died August 23, 1806, Paris, France) was a French physicist. He is best known for developing Coulomb's law: the definition of the electrostatic force of attraction and repulsion. The SI unit of charge, the coulomb, was named after him. Coulomb was born in Angoulême, France, to a well to do family. His father, Henri Coulomb, was inspector of the Royal Fields in Montpellier. His mother, Catherine Bajet, came from a wealthy family in the wool trade. When Coulomb was a boy the family moved to Paris, and there Coulomb studied at the prestigious Collège des Quatre-Nations. The courses of mathematics there under Pierre Charles Monnier made him decide to pursue mathematics and the similar subjects as a career. From 1757 to 1759 he joined his father's family in Montpellier and took part in the work of the academy of the city, directed by the mathematician Augustin Danyzy. With his father's approval, Coulomb returned to Paris in 1759 to successfully study for the entrance examination at the military school at Mézières. At his exit from the school in 1761, he initially took part in the survey for the British coastal charts, then was sent on mission to Martinique in 1764 to take part in the construction of the Fort Bourbon under the orders of the lieutenant-colonel of Rochemore, as the French colony was insulated in the middle of the English and Spanish possessions following the Seven Years' War. Coulomb spent eight years directing the work, contracting tropical fever. He carried out several experiments on the resistance of masonries and the behaviour of the walls of escarpe (supportings), which were inspired by the ideas of Pieter van Musschenbroek on friction. Upon his return, with the rank of Captain, he was employed at La Rochelle, the Isle of Aix and Cherbourg. He discovered an inverse relationship of the force between electric charges and the square of its distance, later named after him as Coulomb's law. In 1781, he was stationed permanently at Paris. On the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789, he resigned his appointment as intendant des eaux et fontaines, and retired to a small estate which he possessed at Blois. He was recalled to Paris for a time in order to take part in the new determination of weights and measures, which had been decreed by the Revolutionary government. He was one of the first members of the National Institute; he was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802 . But his health was already very feeble, and four years later he died in Paris, France. Coulomb leaves a legacy as a hero in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design. Coulomb is distinguished in the history of mechanics and of electricity and magnetism. In 1779 he published an important investigation of the laws of friction, Théorie des machines simples, en ayant égard au frottement de leurs parties et à la roideur des cordages (Theory of simple machines with regard for the friction of their parts and the tension of the ropes), which was followed twenty years later by a memoir on viscosity. In 1784 his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l'élasticité des fils de metal Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 229-269, 1784 (Theoretical research and experimentation on torsion and the elasticity of metal wire) appeared. This memoir contained a description of different forms of his torsion balance. He used the instrument with great success for the experimental investigation of the distribution of charge on surfaces, of the laws of electrical and magnetic force, and of the mathematical theory of which he may also be regarded as the founder. Coulomb's torsion balance In 1785 Coulomb presented his three reports on Electricity and Magnetism: - Premier Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 569-577, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb describes “How to construct and use an electric balance (torsion balance) based on the property of the metal wires of having a reaction torsion force proportional to the torsion angle”. Coulomb also experimentally determined the law that explains how “two bodies electrified of the same kind of Electricity exert on each other”. - Sécond Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 578-611, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb carries out the “determination according to which laws both the Magnetic and the Electric fluids act, either by repulsion or by attraction”. - Troisième Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 612-638, 1785 . “On the quantity of Electricity that an isolated body loses in a certain time period , either by contact with less humid air, or in the supports more or less idio-electric”. Four subsequent reports were published in the following years: - Quatrième Mémoire "Where two principal properties of the electric fluid are demonstrated: first, that this fluid does not expand into any object according to a chemical affinity, or by an elective attraction, but that it divides itself between different objects brought into contact; second, that in conducting objects, the fluid, having achieved a state of stability, expands on the surface of the body and does not penetrate into the interior." (1786) - Cinquième Mémoire "On the manner in which the electric fluid divides itself between conducting objects brought into contact, and the distribution of this fluid on the different parts of the surface of this object." (1787) - Sixième Mémoire "Continuation of research into the distribution of the electric fluid between several conductors. Determination of electric density at different points on the surface of these bodies." (1788) - Septième Mémoire. "On magnetism" (1789) Coulomb explained the laws of attraction and repulsion between electric charges and magnetic poles, although he did not find any relationship between the two phenomena. He thought that the attraction and repulsion were due to different kinds of fluids. * French National Library The Mémoires of Coulomb available in pdf format. * ---- Related Wikipedia Articles Hippolyte Lecomte June 14 1736 Angoulême France August 23 1806 Paris France Coulomb's law France physicist Coulomb's law SI unit coulomb Angoulême France Henri Coulomb Royal Fields Montpellier Catherine Bajet Paris Collège des Quatre-Nations Pierre Charles Monnier Augustin Danyzy Charleville-Mézières Martinique Fort Bourbon Seven Years' War Tropical disease Pieter van Musschenbroek friction La Rochelle Isle of Aix Cherbourg electric charge Coulomb's law 1781 Paris French Revolution 1789 Blois weights and measures French revolution#The Directory .281795.E2.80.931799.29 National Institute geotechnical engineering retaining wall mechanics electricity magnetism friction viscosity torsion balance electric charge Mathematical physics torsion balance Electromagnetism Fluid theory of electricity
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb
Where did the construction of Fort Bourbon take place?
Martinique
data/set4/a6
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb Charles Augustin de Coulomb (born June 14, 1736, Angoulême, France - died August 23, 1806, Paris, France) was a French physicist. He is best known for developing Coulomb's law: the definition of the electrostatic force of attraction and repulsion. The SI unit of charge, the coulomb, was named after him. Coulomb was born in Angoulême, France, to a well to do family. His father, Henri Coulomb, was inspector of the Royal Fields in Montpellier. His mother, Catherine Bajet, came from a wealthy family in the wool trade. When Coulomb was a boy the family moved to Paris, and there Coulomb studied at the prestigious Collège des Quatre-Nations. The courses of mathematics there under Pierre Charles Monnier made him decide to pursue mathematics and the similar subjects as a career. From 1757 to 1759 he joined his father's family in Montpellier and took part in the work of the academy of the city, directed by the mathematician Augustin Danyzy. With his father's approval, Coulomb returned to Paris in 1759 to successfully study for the entrance examination at the military school at Mézières. At his exit from the school in 1761, he initially took part in the survey for the British coastal charts, then was sent on mission to Martinique in 1764 to take part in the construction of the Fort Bourbon under the orders of the lieutenant-colonel of Rochemore, as the French colony was insulated in the middle of the English and Spanish possessions following the Seven Years' War. Coulomb spent eight years directing the work, contracting tropical fever. He carried out several experiments on the resistance of masonries and the behaviour of the walls of escarpe (supportings), which were inspired by the ideas of Pieter van Musschenbroek on friction. Upon his return, with the rank of Captain, he was employed at La Rochelle, the Isle of Aix and Cherbourg. He discovered an inverse relationship of the force between electric charges and the square of its distance, later named after him as Coulomb's law. In 1781, he was stationed permanently at Paris. On the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789, he resigned his appointment as intendant des eaux et fontaines, and retired to a small estate which he possessed at Blois. He was recalled to Paris for a time in order to take part in the new determination of weights and measures, which had been decreed by the Revolutionary government. He was one of the first members of the National Institute; he was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802 . But his health was already very feeble, and four years later he died in Paris, France. Coulomb leaves a legacy as a hero in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design. Coulomb is distinguished in the history of mechanics and of electricity and magnetism. In 1779 he published an important investigation of the laws of friction, Théorie des machines simples, en ayant égard au frottement de leurs parties et à la roideur des cordages (Theory of simple machines with regard for the friction of their parts and the tension of the ropes), which was followed twenty years later by a memoir on viscosity. In 1784 his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l'élasticité des fils de metal Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 229-269, 1784 (Theoretical research and experimentation on torsion and the elasticity of metal wire) appeared. This memoir contained a description of different forms of his torsion balance. He used the instrument with great success for the experimental investigation of the distribution of charge on surfaces, of the laws of electrical and magnetic force, and of the mathematical theory of which he may also be regarded as the founder. Coulomb's torsion balance In 1785 Coulomb presented his three reports on Electricity and Magnetism: - Premier Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 569-577, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb describes “How to construct and use an electric balance (torsion balance) based on the property of the metal wires of having a reaction torsion force proportional to the torsion angle”. Coulomb also experimentally determined the law that explains how “two bodies electrified of the same kind of Electricity exert on each other”. - Sécond Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 578-611, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb carries out the “determination according to which laws both the Magnetic and the Electric fluids act, either by repulsion or by attraction”. - Troisième Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 612-638, 1785 . “On the quantity of Electricity that an isolated body loses in a certain time period , either by contact with less humid air, or in the supports more or less idio-electric”. Four subsequent reports were published in the following years: - Quatrième Mémoire "Where two principal properties of the electric fluid are demonstrated: first, that this fluid does not expand into any object according to a chemical affinity, or by an elective attraction, but that it divides itself between different objects brought into contact; second, that in conducting objects, the fluid, having achieved a state of stability, expands on the surface of the body and does not penetrate into the interior." (1786) - Cinquième Mémoire "On the manner in which the electric fluid divides itself between conducting objects brought into contact, and the distribution of this fluid on the different parts of the surface of this object." (1787) - Sixième Mémoire "Continuation of research into the distribution of the electric fluid between several conductors. Determination of electric density at different points on the surface of these bodies." (1788) - Septième Mémoire. "On magnetism" (1789) Coulomb explained the laws of attraction and repulsion between electric charges and magnetic poles, although he did not find any relationship between the two phenomena. He thought that the attraction and repulsion were due to different kinds of fluids. * French National Library The Mémoires of Coulomb available in pdf format. * ---- Related Wikipedia Articles Hippolyte Lecomte June 14 1736 Angoulême France August 23 1806 Paris France Coulomb's law France physicist Coulomb's law SI unit coulomb Angoulême France Henri Coulomb Royal Fields Montpellier Catherine Bajet Paris Collège des Quatre-Nations Pierre Charles Monnier Augustin Danyzy Charleville-Mézières Martinique Fort Bourbon Seven Years' War Tropical disease Pieter van Musschenbroek friction La Rochelle Isle of Aix Cherbourg electric charge Coulomb's law 1781 Paris French Revolution 1789 Blois weights and measures French revolution#The Directory .281795.E2.80.931799.29 National Institute geotechnical engineering retaining wall mechanics electricity magnetism friction viscosity torsion balance electric charge Mathematical physics torsion balance Electromagnetism Fluid theory of electricity
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb
What is the definition of the electrostatic force of attraction and repulsion?
Coulomb's law is the definition of the electrostatic force of attraction and repulsion.
data/set4/a6
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb Charles Augustin de Coulomb (born June 14, 1736, Angoulême, France - died August 23, 1806, Paris, France) was a French physicist. He is best known for developing Coulomb's law: the definition of the electrostatic force of attraction and repulsion. The SI unit of charge, the coulomb, was named after him. Coulomb was born in Angoulême, France, to a well to do family. His father, Henri Coulomb, was inspector of the Royal Fields in Montpellier. His mother, Catherine Bajet, came from a wealthy family in the wool trade. When Coulomb was a boy the family moved to Paris, and there Coulomb studied at the prestigious Collège des Quatre-Nations. The courses of mathematics there under Pierre Charles Monnier made him decide to pursue mathematics and the similar subjects as a career. From 1757 to 1759 he joined his father's family in Montpellier and took part in the work of the academy of the city, directed by the mathematician Augustin Danyzy. With his father's approval, Coulomb returned to Paris in 1759 to successfully study for the entrance examination at the military school at Mézières. At his exit from the school in 1761, he initially took part in the survey for the British coastal charts, then was sent on mission to Martinique in 1764 to take part in the construction of the Fort Bourbon under the orders of the lieutenant-colonel of Rochemore, as the French colony was insulated in the middle of the English and Spanish possessions following the Seven Years' War. Coulomb spent eight years directing the work, contracting tropical fever. He carried out several experiments on the resistance of masonries and the behaviour of the walls of escarpe (supportings), which were inspired by the ideas of Pieter van Musschenbroek on friction. Upon his return, with the rank of Captain, he was employed at La Rochelle, the Isle of Aix and Cherbourg. He discovered an inverse relationship of the force between electric charges and the square of its distance, later named after him as Coulomb's law. In 1781, he was stationed permanently at Paris. On the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789, he resigned his appointment as intendant des eaux et fontaines, and retired to a small estate which he possessed at Blois. He was recalled to Paris for a time in order to take part in the new determination of weights and measures, which had been decreed by the Revolutionary government. He was one of the first members of the National Institute; he was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802 . But his health was already very feeble, and four years later he died in Paris, France. Coulomb leaves a legacy as a hero in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design. Coulomb is distinguished in the history of mechanics and of electricity and magnetism. In 1779 he published an important investigation of the laws of friction, Théorie des machines simples, en ayant égard au frottement de leurs parties et à la roideur des cordages (Theory of simple machines with regard for the friction of their parts and the tension of the ropes), which was followed twenty years later by a memoir on viscosity. In 1784 his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l'élasticité des fils de metal Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 229-269, 1784 (Theoretical research and experimentation on torsion and the elasticity of metal wire) appeared. This memoir contained a description of different forms of his torsion balance. He used the instrument with great success for the experimental investigation of the distribution of charge on surfaces, of the laws of electrical and magnetic force, and of the mathematical theory of which he may also be regarded as the founder. Coulomb's torsion balance In 1785 Coulomb presented his three reports on Electricity and Magnetism: - Premier Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 569-577, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb describes “How to construct and use an electric balance (torsion balance) based on the property of the metal wires of having a reaction torsion force proportional to the torsion angle”. Coulomb also experimentally determined the law that explains how “two bodies electrified of the same kind of Electricity exert on each other”. - Sécond Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 578-611, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb carries out the “determination according to which laws both the Magnetic and the Electric fluids act, either by repulsion or by attraction”. - Troisième Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 612-638, 1785 . “On the quantity of Electricity that an isolated body loses in a certain time period , either by contact with less humid air, or in the supports more or less idio-electric”. Four subsequent reports were published in the following years: - Quatrième Mémoire "Where two principal properties of the electric fluid are demonstrated: first, that this fluid does not expand into any object according to a chemical affinity, or by an elective attraction, but that it divides itself between different objects brought into contact; second, that in conducting objects, the fluid, having achieved a state of stability, expands on the surface of the body and does not penetrate into the interior." (1786) - Cinquième Mémoire "On the manner in which the electric fluid divides itself between conducting objects brought into contact, and the distribution of this fluid on the different parts of the surface of this object." (1787) - Sixième Mémoire "Continuation of research into the distribution of the electric fluid between several conductors. Determination of electric density at different points on the surface of these bodies." (1788) - Septième Mémoire. "On magnetism" (1789) Coulomb explained the laws of attraction and repulsion between electric charges and magnetic poles, although he did not find any relationship between the two phenomena. He thought that the attraction and repulsion were due to different kinds of fluids. * French National Library The Mémoires of Coulomb available in pdf format. * ---- Related Wikipedia Articles Hippolyte Lecomte June 14 1736 Angoulême France August 23 1806 Paris France Coulomb's law France physicist Coulomb's law SI unit coulomb Angoulême France Henri Coulomb Royal Fields Montpellier Catherine Bajet Paris Collège des Quatre-Nations Pierre Charles Monnier Augustin Danyzy Charleville-Mézières Martinique Fort Bourbon Seven Years' War Tropical disease Pieter van Musschenbroek friction La Rochelle Isle of Aix Cherbourg electric charge Coulomb's law 1781 Paris French Revolution 1789 Blois weights and measures French revolution#The Directory .281795.E2.80.931799.29 National Institute geotechnical engineering retaining wall mechanics electricity magnetism friction viscosity torsion balance electric charge Mathematical physics torsion balance Electromagnetism Fluid theory of electricity
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb
What is the definition of the electrostatic force of attraction and repulsion?
Coulomb's Law
data/set4/a6
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb Charles Augustin de Coulomb (born June 14, 1736, Angoulême, France - died August 23, 1806, Paris, France) was a French physicist. He is best known for developing Coulomb's law: the definition of the electrostatic force of attraction and repulsion. The SI unit of charge, the coulomb, was named after him. Coulomb was born in Angoulême, France, to a well to do family. His father, Henri Coulomb, was inspector of the Royal Fields in Montpellier. His mother, Catherine Bajet, came from a wealthy family in the wool trade. When Coulomb was a boy the family moved to Paris, and there Coulomb studied at the prestigious Collège des Quatre-Nations. The courses of mathematics there under Pierre Charles Monnier made him decide to pursue mathematics and the similar subjects as a career. From 1757 to 1759 he joined his father's family in Montpellier and took part in the work of the academy of the city, directed by the mathematician Augustin Danyzy. With his father's approval, Coulomb returned to Paris in 1759 to successfully study for the entrance examination at the military school at Mézières. At his exit from the school in 1761, he initially took part in the survey for the British coastal charts, then was sent on mission to Martinique in 1764 to take part in the construction of the Fort Bourbon under the orders of the lieutenant-colonel of Rochemore, as the French colony was insulated in the middle of the English and Spanish possessions following the Seven Years' War. Coulomb spent eight years directing the work, contracting tropical fever. He carried out several experiments on the resistance of masonries and the behaviour of the walls of escarpe (supportings), which were inspired by the ideas of Pieter van Musschenbroek on friction. Upon his return, with the rank of Captain, he was employed at La Rochelle, the Isle of Aix and Cherbourg. He discovered an inverse relationship of the force between electric charges and the square of its distance, later named after him as Coulomb's law. In 1781, he was stationed permanently at Paris. On the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789, he resigned his appointment as intendant des eaux et fontaines, and retired to a small estate which he possessed at Blois. He was recalled to Paris for a time in order to take part in the new determination of weights and measures, which had been decreed by the Revolutionary government. He was one of the first members of the National Institute; he was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802 . But his health was already very feeble, and four years later he died in Paris, France. Coulomb leaves a legacy as a hero in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design. Coulomb is distinguished in the history of mechanics and of electricity and magnetism. In 1779 he published an important investigation of the laws of friction, Théorie des machines simples, en ayant égard au frottement de leurs parties et à la roideur des cordages (Theory of simple machines with regard for the friction of their parts and the tension of the ropes), which was followed twenty years later by a memoir on viscosity. In 1784 his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l'élasticité des fils de metal Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 229-269, 1784 (Theoretical research and experimentation on torsion and the elasticity of metal wire) appeared. This memoir contained a description of different forms of his torsion balance. He used the instrument with great success for the experimental investigation of the distribution of charge on surfaces, of the laws of electrical and magnetic force, and of the mathematical theory of which he may also be regarded as the founder. Coulomb's torsion balance In 1785 Coulomb presented his three reports on Electricity and Magnetism: - Premier Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 569-577, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb describes “How to construct and use an electric balance (torsion balance) based on the property of the metal wires of having a reaction torsion force proportional to the torsion angle”. Coulomb also experimentally determined the law that explains how “two bodies electrified of the same kind of Electricity exert on each other”. - Sécond Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 578-611, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb carries out the “determination according to which laws both the Magnetic and the Electric fluids act, either by repulsion or by attraction”. - Troisième Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 612-638, 1785 . “On the quantity of Electricity that an isolated body loses in a certain time period , either by contact with less humid air, or in the supports more or less idio-electric”. Four subsequent reports were published in the following years: - Quatrième Mémoire "Where two principal properties of the electric fluid are demonstrated: first, that this fluid does not expand into any object according to a chemical affinity, or by an elective attraction, but that it divides itself between different objects brought into contact; second, that in conducting objects, the fluid, having achieved a state of stability, expands on the surface of the body and does not penetrate into the interior." (1786) - Cinquième Mémoire "On the manner in which the electric fluid divides itself between conducting objects brought into contact, and the distribution of this fluid on the different parts of the surface of this object." (1787) - Sixième Mémoire "Continuation of research into the distribution of the electric fluid between several conductors. Determination of electric density at different points on the surface of these bodies." (1788) - Septième Mémoire. "On magnetism" (1789) Coulomb explained the laws of attraction and repulsion between electric charges and magnetic poles, although he did not find any relationship between the two phenomena. He thought that the attraction and repulsion were due to different kinds of fluids. * French National Library The Mémoires of Coulomb available in pdf format. * ---- Related Wikipedia Articles Hippolyte Lecomte June 14 1736 Angoulême France August 23 1806 Paris France Coulomb's law France physicist Coulomb's law SI unit coulomb Angoulême France Henri Coulomb Royal Fields Montpellier Catherine Bajet Paris Collège des Quatre-Nations Pierre Charles Monnier Augustin Danyzy Charleville-Mézières Martinique Fort Bourbon Seven Years' War Tropical disease Pieter van Musschenbroek friction La Rochelle Isle of Aix Cherbourg electric charge Coulomb's law 1781 Paris French Revolution 1789 Blois weights and measures French revolution#The Directory .281795.E2.80.931799.29 National Institute geotechnical engineering retaining wall mechanics electricity magnetism friction viscosity torsion balance electric charge Mathematical physics torsion balance Electromagnetism Fluid theory of electricity
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb
When did Charles-Augustin de Coulomb retire to a small estate he possessed at Blois?
Charles-Augustin de Coulomb retired to a small estate he possessed at Blois on the outbreak of the revolution in 1789.
data/set4/a6
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb Charles Augustin de Coulomb (born June 14, 1736, Angoulême, France - died August 23, 1806, Paris, France) was a French physicist. He is best known for developing Coulomb's law: the definition of the electrostatic force of attraction and repulsion. The SI unit of charge, the coulomb, was named after him. Coulomb was born in Angoulême, France, to a well to do family. His father, Henri Coulomb, was inspector of the Royal Fields in Montpellier. His mother, Catherine Bajet, came from a wealthy family in the wool trade. When Coulomb was a boy the family moved to Paris, and there Coulomb studied at the prestigious Collège des Quatre-Nations. The courses of mathematics there under Pierre Charles Monnier made him decide to pursue mathematics and the similar subjects as a career. From 1757 to 1759 he joined his father's family in Montpellier and took part in the work of the academy of the city, directed by the mathematician Augustin Danyzy. With his father's approval, Coulomb returned to Paris in 1759 to successfully study for the entrance examination at the military school at Mézières. At his exit from the school in 1761, he initially took part in the survey for the British coastal charts, then was sent on mission to Martinique in 1764 to take part in the construction of the Fort Bourbon under the orders of the lieutenant-colonel of Rochemore, as the French colony was insulated in the middle of the English and Spanish possessions following the Seven Years' War. Coulomb spent eight years directing the work, contracting tropical fever. He carried out several experiments on the resistance of masonries and the behaviour of the walls of escarpe (supportings), which were inspired by the ideas of Pieter van Musschenbroek on friction. Upon his return, with the rank of Captain, he was employed at La Rochelle, the Isle of Aix and Cherbourg. He discovered an inverse relationship of the force between electric charges and the square of its distance, later named after him as Coulomb's law. In 1781, he was stationed permanently at Paris. On the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789, he resigned his appointment as intendant des eaux et fontaines, and retired to a small estate which he possessed at Blois. He was recalled to Paris for a time in order to take part in the new determination of weights and measures, which had been decreed by the Revolutionary government. He was one of the first members of the National Institute; he was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802 . But his health was already very feeble, and four years later he died in Paris, France. Coulomb leaves a legacy as a hero in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design. Coulomb is distinguished in the history of mechanics and of electricity and magnetism. In 1779 he published an important investigation of the laws of friction, Théorie des machines simples, en ayant égard au frottement de leurs parties et à la roideur des cordages (Theory of simple machines with regard for the friction of their parts and the tension of the ropes), which was followed twenty years later by a memoir on viscosity. In 1784 his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l'élasticité des fils de metal Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 229-269, 1784 (Theoretical research and experimentation on torsion and the elasticity of metal wire) appeared. This memoir contained a description of different forms of his torsion balance. He used the instrument with great success for the experimental investigation of the distribution of charge on surfaces, of the laws of electrical and magnetic force, and of the mathematical theory of which he may also be regarded as the founder. Coulomb's torsion balance In 1785 Coulomb presented his three reports on Electricity and Magnetism: - Premier Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 569-577, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb describes “How to construct and use an electric balance (torsion balance) based on the property of the metal wires of having a reaction torsion force proportional to the torsion angle”. Coulomb also experimentally determined the law that explains how “two bodies electrified of the same kind of Electricity exert on each other”. - Sécond Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 578-611, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb carries out the “determination according to which laws both the Magnetic and the Electric fluids act, either by repulsion or by attraction”. - Troisième Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 612-638, 1785 . “On the quantity of Electricity that an isolated body loses in a certain time period , either by contact with less humid air, or in the supports more or less idio-electric”. Four subsequent reports were published in the following years: - Quatrième Mémoire "Where two principal properties of the electric fluid are demonstrated: first, that this fluid does not expand into any object according to a chemical affinity, or by an elective attraction, but that it divides itself between different objects brought into contact; second, that in conducting objects, the fluid, having achieved a state of stability, expands on the surface of the body and does not penetrate into the interior." (1786) - Cinquième Mémoire "On the manner in which the electric fluid divides itself between conducting objects brought into contact, and the distribution of this fluid on the different parts of the surface of this object." (1787) - Sixième Mémoire "Continuation of research into the distribution of the electric fluid between several conductors. Determination of electric density at different points on the surface of these bodies." (1788) - Septième Mémoire. "On magnetism" (1789) Coulomb explained the laws of attraction and repulsion between electric charges and magnetic poles, although he did not find any relationship between the two phenomena. He thought that the attraction and repulsion were due to different kinds of fluids. * French National Library The Mémoires of Coulomb available in pdf format. * ---- Related Wikipedia Articles Hippolyte Lecomte June 14 1736 Angoulême France August 23 1806 Paris France Coulomb's law France physicist Coulomb's law SI unit coulomb Angoulême France Henri Coulomb Royal Fields Montpellier Catherine Bajet Paris Collège des Quatre-Nations Pierre Charles Monnier Augustin Danyzy Charleville-Mézières Martinique Fort Bourbon Seven Years' War Tropical disease Pieter van Musschenbroek friction La Rochelle Isle of Aix Cherbourg electric charge Coulomb's law 1781 Paris French Revolution 1789 Blois weights and measures French revolution#The Directory .281795.E2.80.931799.29 National Institute geotechnical engineering retaining wall mechanics electricity magnetism friction viscosity torsion balance electric charge Mathematical physics torsion balance Electromagnetism Fluid theory of electricity
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb
When did Charles-Augustin de Coulomb retire to a small estate he possessed at Blois?
1789
data/set4/a6
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb Charles Augustin de Coulomb (born June 14, 1736, Angoulême, France - died August 23, 1806, Paris, France) was a French physicist. He is best known for developing Coulomb's law: the definition of the electrostatic force of attraction and repulsion. The SI unit of charge, the coulomb, was named after him. Coulomb was born in Angoulême, France, to a well to do family. His father, Henri Coulomb, was inspector of the Royal Fields in Montpellier. His mother, Catherine Bajet, came from a wealthy family in the wool trade. When Coulomb was a boy the family moved to Paris, and there Coulomb studied at the prestigious Collège des Quatre-Nations. The courses of mathematics there under Pierre Charles Monnier made him decide to pursue mathematics and the similar subjects as a career. From 1757 to 1759 he joined his father's family in Montpellier and took part in the work of the academy of the city, directed by the mathematician Augustin Danyzy. With his father's approval, Coulomb returned to Paris in 1759 to successfully study for the entrance examination at the military school at Mézières. At his exit from the school in 1761, he initially took part in the survey for the British coastal charts, then was sent on mission to Martinique in 1764 to take part in the construction of the Fort Bourbon under the orders of the lieutenant-colonel of Rochemore, as the French colony was insulated in the middle of the English and Spanish possessions following the Seven Years' War. Coulomb spent eight years directing the work, contracting tropical fever. He carried out several experiments on the resistance of masonries and the behaviour of the walls of escarpe (supportings), which were inspired by the ideas of Pieter van Musschenbroek on friction. Upon his return, with the rank of Captain, he was employed at La Rochelle, the Isle of Aix and Cherbourg. He discovered an inverse relationship of the force between electric charges and the square of its distance, later named after him as Coulomb's law. In 1781, he was stationed permanently at Paris. On the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789, he resigned his appointment as intendant des eaux et fontaines, and retired to a small estate which he possessed at Blois. He was recalled to Paris for a time in order to take part in the new determination of weights and measures, which had been decreed by the Revolutionary government. He was one of the first members of the National Institute; he was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802 . But his health was already very feeble, and four years later he died in Paris, France. Coulomb leaves a legacy as a hero in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design. Coulomb is distinguished in the history of mechanics and of electricity and magnetism. In 1779 he published an important investigation of the laws of friction, Théorie des machines simples, en ayant égard au frottement de leurs parties et à la roideur des cordages (Theory of simple machines with regard for the friction of their parts and the tension of the ropes), which was followed twenty years later by a memoir on viscosity. In 1784 his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l'élasticité des fils de metal Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 229-269, 1784 (Theoretical research and experimentation on torsion and the elasticity of metal wire) appeared. This memoir contained a description of different forms of his torsion balance. He used the instrument with great success for the experimental investigation of the distribution of charge on surfaces, of the laws of electrical and magnetic force, and of the mathematical theory of which he may also be regarded as the founder. Coulomb's torsion balance In 1785 Coulomb presented his three reports on Electricity and Magnetism: - Premier Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 569-577, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb describes “How to construct and use an electric balance (torsion balance) based on the property of the metal wires of having a reaction torsion force proportional to the torsion angle”. Coulomb also experimentally determined the law that explains how “two bodies electrified of the same kind of Electricity exert on each other”. - Sécond Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 578-611, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb carries out the “determination according to which laws both the Magnetic and the Electric fluids act, either by repulsion or by attraction”. - Troisième Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 612-638, 1785 . “On the quantity of Electricity that an isolated body loses in a certain time period , either by contact with less humid air, or in the supports more or less idio-electric”. Four subsequent reports were published in the following years: - Quatrième Mémoire "Where two principal properties of the electric fluid are demonstrated: first, that this fluid does not expand into any object according to a chemical affinity, or by an elective attraction, but that it divides itself between different objects brought into contact; second, that in conducting objects, the fluid, having achieved a state of stability, expands on the surface of the body and does not penetrate into the interior." (1786) - Cinquième Mémoire "On the manner in which the electric fluid divides itself between conducting objects brought into contact, and the distribution of this fluid on the different parts of the surface of this object." (1787) - Sixième Mémoire "Continuation of research into the distribution of the electric fluid between several conductors. Determination of electric density at different points on the surface of these bodies." (1788) - Septième Mémoire. "On magnetism" (1789) Coulomb explained the laws of attraction and repulsion between electric charges and magnetic poles, although he did not find any relationship between the two phenomena. He thought that the attraction and repulsion were due to different kinds of fluids. * French National Library The Mémoires of Coulomb available in pdf format. * ---- Related Wikipedia Articles Hippolyte Lecomte June 14 1736 Angoulême France August 23 1806 Paris France Coulomb's law France physicist Coulomb's law SI unit coulomb Angoulême France Henri Coulomb Royal Fields Montpellier Catherine Bajet Paris Collège des Quatre-Nations Pierre Charles Monnier Augustin Danyzy Charleville-Mézières Martinique Fort Bourbon Seven Years' War Tropical disease Pieter van Musschenbroek friction La Rochelle Isle of Aix Cherbourg electric charge Coulomb's law 1781 Paris French Revolution 1789 Blois weights and measures French revolution#The Directory .281795.E2.80.931799.29 National Institute geotechnical engineering retaining wall mechanics electricity magnetism friction viscosity torsion balance electric charge Mathematical physics torsion balance Electromagnetism Fluid theory of electricity
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb
If Charles-Augustin de Coulomb was alive today, how old would he have been?
273
data/set4/a6
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb Charles Augustin de Coulomb (born June 14, 1736, Angoulême, France - died August 23, 1806, Paris, France) was a French physicist. He is best known for developing Coulomb's law: the definition of the electrostatic force of attraction and repulsion. The SI unit of charge, the coulomb, was named after him. Coulomb was born in Angoulême, France, to a well to do family. His father, Henri Coulomb, was inspector of the Royal Fields in Montpellier. His mother, Catherine Bajet, came from a wealthy family in the wool trade. When Coulomb was a boy the family moved to Paris, and there Coulomb studied at the prestigious Collège des Quatre-Nations. The courses of mathematics there under Pierre Charles Monnier made him decide to pursue mathematics and the similar subjects as a career. From 1757 to 1759 he joined his father's family in Montpellier and took part in the work of the academy of the city, directed by the mathematician Augustin Danyzy. With his father's approval, Coulomb returned to Paris in 1759 to successfully study for the entrance examination at the military school at Mézières. At his exit from the school in 1761, he initially took part in the survey for the British coastal charts, then was sent on mission to Martinique in 1764 to take part in the construction of the Fort Bourbon under the orders of the lieutenant-colonel of Rochemore, as the French colony was insulated in the middle of the English and Spanish possessions following the Seven Years' War. Coulomb spent eight years directing the work, contracting tropical fever. He carried out several experiments on the resistance of masonries and the behaviour of the walls of escarpe (supportings), which were inspired by the ideas of Pieter van Musschenbroek on friction. Upon his return, with the rank of Captain, he was employed at La Rochelle, the Isle of Aix and Cherbourg. He discovered an inverse relationship of the force between electric charges and the square of its distance, later named after him as Coulomb's law. In 1781, he was stationed permanently at Paris. On the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789, he resigned his appointment as intendant des eaux et fontaines, and retired to a small estate which he possessed at Blois. He was recalled to Paris for a time in order to take part in the new determination of weights and measures, which had been decreed by the Revolutionary government. He was one of the first members of the National Institute; he was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802 . But his health was already very feeble, and four years later he died in Paris, France. Coulomb leaves a legacy as a hero in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design. Coulomb is distinguished in the history of mechanics and of electricity and magnetism. In 1779 he published an important investigation of the laws of friction, Théorie des machines simples, en ayant égard au frottement de leurs parties et à la roideur des cordages (Theory of simple machines with regard for the friction of their parts and the tension of the ropes), which was followed twenty years later by a memoir on viscosity. In 1784 his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l'élasticité des fils de metal Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 229-269, 1784 (Theoretical research and experimentation on torsion and the elasticity of metal wire) appeared. This memoir contained a description of different forms of his torsion balance. He used the instrument with great success for the experimental investigation of the distribution of charge on surfaces, of the laws of electrical and magnetic force, and of the mathematical theory of which he may also be regarded as the founder. Coulomb's torsion balance In 1785 Coulomb presented his three reports on Electricity and Magnetism: - Premier Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 569-577, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb describes “How to construct and use an electric balance (torsion balance) based on the property of the metal wires of having a reaction torsion force proportional to the torsion angle”. Coulomb also experimentally determined the law that explains how “two bodies electrified of the same kind of Electricity exert on each other”. - Sécond Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 578-611, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb carries out the “determination according to which laws both the Magnetic and the Electric fluids act, either by repulsion or by attraction”. - Troisième Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 612-638, 1785 . “On the quantity of Electricity that an isolated body loses in a certain time period , either by contact with less humid air, or in the supports more or less idio-electric”. Four subsequent reports were published in the following years: - Quatrième Mémoire "Where two principal properties of the electric fluid are demonstrated: first, that this fluid does not expand into any object according to a chemical affinity, or by an elective attraction, but that it divides itself between different objects brought into contact; second, that in conducting objects, the fluid, having achieved a state of stability, expands on the surface of the body and does not penetrate into the interior." (1786) - Cinquième Mémoire "On the manner in which the electric fluid divides itself between conducting objects brought into contact, and the distribution of this fluid on the different parts of the surface of this object." (1787) - Sixième Mémoire "Continuation of research into the distribution of the electric fluid between several conductors. Determination of electric density at different points on the surface of these bodies." (1788) - Septième Mémoire. "On magnetism" (1789) Coulomb explained the laws of attraction and repulsion between electric charges and magnetic poles, although he did not find any relationship between the two phenomena. He thought that the attraction and repulsion were due to different kinds of fluids. * French National Library The Mémoires of Coulomb available in pdf format. * ---- Related Wikipedia Articles Hippolyte Lecomte June 14 1736 Angoulême France August 23 1806 Paris France Coulomb's law France physicist Coulomb's law SI unit coulomb Angoulême France Henri Coulomb Royal Fields Montpellier Catherine Bajet Paris Collège des Quatre-Nations Pierre Charles Monnier Augustin Danyzy Charleville-Mézières Martinique Fort Bourbon Seven Years' War Tropical disease Pieter van Musschenbroek friction La Rochelle Isle of Aix Cherbourg electric charge Coulomb's law 1781 Paris French Revolution 1789 Blois weights and measures French revolution#The Directory .281795.E2.80.931799.29 National Institute geotechnical engineering retaining wall mechanics electricity magnetism friction viscosity torsion balance electric charge Mathematical physics torsion balance Electromagnetism Fluid theory of electricity
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb
For how many years did Charles-Augustin de Coulomb live?
70
data/set4/a6
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb Charles Augustin de Coulomb (born June 14, 1736, Angoulême, France - died August 23, 1806, Paris, France) was a French physicist. He is best known for developing Coulomb's law: the definition of the electrostatic force of attraction and repulsion. The SI unit of charge, the coulomb, was named after him. Coulomb was born in Angoulême, France, to a well to do family. His father, Henri Coulomb, was inspector of the Royal Fields in Montpellier. His mother, Catherine Bajet, came from a wealthy family in the wool trade. When Coulomb was a boy the family moved to Paris, and there Coulomb studied at the prestigious Collège des Quatre-Nations. The courses of mathematics there under Pierre Charles Monnier made him decide to pursue mathematics and the similar subjects as a career. From 1757 to 1759 he joined his father's family in Montpellier and took part in the work of the academy of the city, directed by the mathematician Augustin Danyzy. With his father's approval, Coulomb returned to Paris in 1759 to successfully study for the entrance examination at the military school at Mézières. At his exit from the school in 1761, he initially took part in the survey for the British coastal charts, then was sent on mission to Martinique in 1764 to take part in the construction of the Fort Bourbon under the orders of the lieutenant-colonel of Rochemore, as the French colony was insulated in the middle of the English and Spanish possessions following the Seven Years' War. Coulomb spent eight years directing the work, contracting tropical fever. He carried out several experiments on the resistance of masonries and the behaviour of the walls of escarpe (supportings), which were inspired by the ideas of Pieter van Musschenbroek on friction. Upon his return, with the rank of Captain, he was employed at La Rochelle, the Isle of Aix and Cherbourg. He discovered an inverse relationship of the force between electric charges and the square of its distance, later named after him as Coulomb's law. In 1781, he was stationed permanently at Paris. On the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789, he resigned his appointment as intendant des eaux et fontaines, and retired to a small estate which he possessed at Blois. He was recalled to Paris for a time in order to take part in the new determination of weights and measures, which had been decreed by the Revolutionary government. He was one of the first members of the National Institute; he was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802 . But his health was already very feeble, and four years later he died in Paris, France. Coulomb leaves a legacy as a hero in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design. Coulomb is distinguished in the history of mechanics and of electricity and magnetism. In 1779 he published an important investigation of the laws of friction, Théorie des machines simples, en ayant égard au frottement de leurs parties et à la roideur des cordages (Theory of simple machines with regard for the friction of their parts and the tension of the ropes), which was followed twenty years later by a memoir on viscosity. In 1784 his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l'élasticité des fils de metal Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 229-269, 1784 (Theoretical research and experimentation on torsion and the elasticity of metal wire) appeared. This memoir contained a description of different forms of his torsion balance. He used the instrument with great success for the experimental investigation of the distribution of charge on surfaces, of the laws of electrical and magnetic force, and of the mathematical theory of which he may also be regarded as the founder. Coulomb's torsion balance In 1785 Coulomb presented his three reports on Electricity and Magnetism: - Premier Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 569-577, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb describes “How to construct and use an electric balance (torsion balance) based on the property of the metal wires of having a reaction torsion force proportional to the torsion angle”. Coulomb also experimentally determined the law that explains how “two bodies electrified of the same kind of Electricity exert on each other”. - Sécond Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 578-611, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb carries out the “determination according to which laws both the Magnetic and the Electric fluids act, either by repulsion or by attraction”. - Troisième Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 612-638, 1785 . “On the quantity of Electricity that an isolated body loses in a certain time period , either by contact with less humid air, or in the supports more or less idio-electric”. Four subsequent reports were published in the following years: - Quatrième Mémoire "Where two principal properties of the electric fluid are demonstrated: first, that this fluid does not expand into any object according to a chemical affinity, or by an elective attraction, but that it divides itself between different objects brought into contact; second, that in conducting objects, the fluid, having achieved a state of stability, expands on the surface of the body and does not penetrate into the interior." (1786) - Cinquième Mémoire "On the manner in which the electric fluid divides itself between conducting objects brought into contact, and the distribution of this fluid on the different parts of the surface of this object." (1787) - Sixième Mémoire "Continuation of research into the distribution of the electric fluid between several conductors. Determination of electric density at different points on the surface of these bodies." (1788) - Septième Mémoire. "On magnetism" (1789) Coulomb explained the laws of attraction and repulsion between electric charges and magnetic poles, although he did not find any relationship between the two phenomena. He thought that the attraction and repulsion were due to different kinds of fluids. * French National Library The Mémoires of Coulomb available in pdf format. * ---- Related Wikipedia Articles Hippolyte Lecomte June 14 1736 Angoulême France August 23 1806 Paris France Coulomb's law France physicist Coulomb's law SI unit coulomb Angoulême France Henri Coulomb Royal Fields Montpellier Catherine Bajet Paris Collège des Quatre-Nations Pierre Charles Monnier Augustin Danyzy Charleville-Mézières Martinique Fort Bourbon Seven Years' War Tropical disease Pieter van Musschenbroek friction La Rochelle Isle of Aix Cherbourg electric charge Coulomb's law 1781 Paris French Revolution 1789 Blois weights and measures French revolution#The Directory .281795.E2.80.931799.29 National Institute geotechnical engineering retaining wall mechanics electricity magnetism friction viscosity torsion balance electric charge Mathematical physics torsion balance Electromagnetism Fluid theory of electricity
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb
Did Charles-Augustin de Coulomb live to be 80 years old?
no
data/set4/a6
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb Charles Augustin de Coulomb (born June 14, 1736, Angoulême, France - died August 23, 1806, Paris, France) was a French physicist. He is best known for developing Coulomb's law: the definition of the electrostatic force of attraction and repulsion. The SI unit of charge, the coulomb, was named after him. Coulomb was born in Angoulême, France, to a well to do family. His father, Henri Coulomb, was inspector of the Royal Fields in Montpellier. His mother, Catherine Bajet, came from a wealthy family in the wool trade. When Coulomb was a boy the family moved to Paris, and there Coulomb studied at the prestigious Collège des Quatre-Nations. The courses of mathematics there under Pierre Charles Monnier made him decide to pursue mathematics and the similar subjects as a career. From 1757 to 1759 he joined his father's family in Montpellier and took part in the work of the academy of the city, directed by the mathematician Augustin Danyzy. With his father's approval, Coulomb returned to Paris in 1759 to successfully study for the entrance examination at the military school at Mézières. At his exit from the school in 1761, he initially took part in the survey for the British coastal charts, then was sent on mission to Martinique in 1764 to take part in the construction of the Fort Bourbon under the orders of the lieutenant-colonel of Rochemore, as the French colony was insulated in the middle of the English and Spanish possessions following the Seven Years' War. Coulomb spent eight years directing the work, contracting tropical fever. He carried out several experiments on the resistance of masonries and the behaviour of the walls of escarpe (supportings), which were inspired by the ideas of Pieter van Musschenbroek on friction. Upon his return, with the rank of Captain, he was employed at La Rochelle, the Isle of Aix and Cherbourg. He discovered an inverse relationship of the force between electric charges and the square of its distance, later named after him as Coulomb's law. In 1781, he was stationed permanently at Paris. On the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789, he resigned his appointment as intendant des eaux et fontaines, and retired to a small estate which he possessed at Blois. He was recalled to Paris for a time in order to take part in the new determination of weights and measures, which had been decreed by the Revolutionary government. He was one of the first members of the National Institute; he was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802 . But his health was already very feeble, and four years later he died in Paris, France. Coulomb leaves a legacy as a hero in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design. Coulomb is distinguished in the history of mechanics and of electricity and magnetism. In 1779 he published an important investigation of the laws of friction, Théorie des machines simples, en ayant égard au frottement de leurs parties et à la roideur des cordages (Theory of simple machines with regard for the friction of their parts and the tension of the ropes), which was followed twenty years later by a memoir on viscosity. In 1784 his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l'élasticité des fils de metal Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 229-269, 1784 (Theoretical research and experimentation on torsion and the elasticity of metal wire) appeared. This memoir contained a description of different forms of his torsion balance. He used the instrument with great success for the experimental investigation of the distribution of charge on surfaces, of the laws of electrical and magnetic force, and of the mathematical theory of which he may also be regarded as the founder. Coulomb's torsion balance In 1785 Coulomb presented his three reports on Electricity and Magnetism: - Premier Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 569-577, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb describes “How to construct and use an electric balance (torsion balance) based on the property of the metal wires of having a reaction torsion force proportional to the torsion angle”. Coulomb also experimentally determined the law that explains how “two bodies electrified of the same kind of Electricity exert on each other”. - Sécond Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 578-611, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb carries out the “determination according to which laws both the Magnetic and the Electric fluids act, either by repulsion or by attraction”. - Troisième Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 612-638, 1785 . “On the quantity of Electricity that an isolated body loses in a certain time period , either by contact with less humid air, or in the supports more or less idio-electric”. Four subsequent reports were published in the following years: - Quatrième Mémoire "Where two principal properties of the electric fluid are demonstrated: first, that this fluid does not expand into any object according to a chemical affinity, or by an elective attraction, but that it divides itself between different objects brought into contact; second, that in conducting objects, the fluid, having achieved a state of stability, expands on the surface of the body and does not penetrate into the interior." (1786) - Cinquième Mémoire "On the manner in which the electric fluid divides itself between conducting objects brought into contact, and the distribution of this fluid on the different parts of the surface of this object." (1787) - Sixième Mémoire "Continuation of research into the distribution of the electric fluid between several conductors. Determination of electric density at different points on the surface of these bodies." (1788) - Septième Mémoire. "On magnetism" (1789) Coulomb explained the laws of attraction and repulsion between electric charges and magnetic poles, although he did not find any relationship between the two phenomena. He thought that the attraction and repulsion were due to different kinds of fluids. * French National Library The Mémoires of Coulomb available in pdf format. * ---- Related Wikipedia Articles Hippolyte Lecomte June 14 1736 Angoulême France August 23 1806 Paris France Coulomb's law France physicist Coulomb's law SI unit coulomb Angoulême France Henri Coulomb Royal Fields Montpellier Catherine Bajet Paris Collège des Quatre-Nations Pierre Charles Monnier Augustin Danyzy Charleville-Mézières Martinique Fort Bourbon Seven Years' War Tropical disease Pieter van Musschenbroek friction La Rochelle Isle of Aix Cherbourg electric charge Coulomb's law 1781 Paris French Revolution 1789 Blois weights and measures French revolution#The Directory .281795.E2.80.931799.29 National Institute geotechnical engineering retaining wall mechanics electricity magnetism friction viscosity torsion balance electric charge Mathematical physics torsion balance Electromagnetism Fluid theory of electricity
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb
How old was Charles-Augustin de Coulomb when he died?
1806
data/set4/a6
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb Charles Augustin de Coulomb (born June 14, 1736, Angoulême, France - died August 23, 1806, Paris, France) was a French physicist. He is best known for developing Coulomb's law: the definition of the electrostatic force of attraction and repulsion. The SI unit of charge, the coulomb, was named after him. Coulomb was born in Angoulême, France, to a well to do family. His father, Henri Coulomb, was inspector of the Royal Fields in Montpellier. His mother, Catherine Bajet, came from a wealthy family in the wool trade. When Coulomb was a boy the family moved to Paris, and there Coulomb studied at the prestigious Collège des Quatre-Nations. The courses of mathematics there under Pierre Charles Monnier made him decide to pursue mathematics and the similar subjects as a career. From 1757 to 1759 he joined his father's family in Montpellier and took part in the work of the academy of the city, directed by the mathematician Augustin Danyzy. With his father's approval, Coulomb returned to Paris in 1759 to successfully study for the entrance examination at the military school at Mézières. At his exit from the school in 1761, he initially took part in the survey for the British coastal charts, then was sent on mission to Martinique in 1764 to take part in the construction of the Fort Bourbon under the orders of the lieutenant-colonel of Rochemore, as the French colony was insulated in the middle of the English and Spanish possessions following the Seven Years' War. Coulomb spent eight years directing the work, contracting tropical fever. He carried out several experiments on the resistance of masonries and the behaviour of the walls of escarpe (supportings), which were inspired by the ideas of Pieter van Musschenbroek on friction. Upon his return, with the rank of Captain, he was employed at La Rochelle, the Isle of Aix and Cherbourg. He discovered an inverse relationship of the force between electric charges and the square of its distance, later named after him as Coulomb's law. In 1781, he was stationed permanently at Paris. On the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789, he resigned his appointment as intendant des eaux et fontaines, and retired to a small estate which he possessed at Blois. He was recalled to Paris for a time in order to take part in the new determination of weights and measures, which had been decreed by the Revolutionary government. He was one of the first members of the National Institute; he was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802 . But his health was already very feeble, and four years later he died in Paris, France. Coulomb leaves a legacy as a hero in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design. Coulomb is distinguished in the history of mechanics and of electricity and magnetism. In 1779 he published an important investigation of the laws of friction, Théorie des machines simples, en ayant égard au frottement de leurs parties et à la roideur des cordages (Theory of simple machines with regard for the friction of their parts and the tension of the ropes), which was followed twenty years later by a memoir on viscosity. In 1784 his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l'élasticité des fils de metal Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 229-269, 1784 (Theoretical research and experimentation on torsion and the elasticity of metal wire) appeared. This memoir contained a description of different forms of his torsion balance. He used the instrument with great success for the experimental investigation of the distribution of charge on surfaces, of the laws of electrical and magnetic force, and of the mathematical theory of which he may also be regarded as the founder. Coulomb's torsion balance In 1785 Coulomb presented his three reports on Electricity and Magnetism: - Premier Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 569-577, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb describes “How to construct and use an electric balance (torsion balance) based on the property of the metal wires of having a reaction torsion force proportional to the torsion angle”. Coulomb also experimentally determined the law that explains how “two bodies electrified of the same kind of Electricity exert on each other”. - Sécond Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 578-611, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb carries out the “determination according to which laws both the Magnetic and the Electric fluids act, either by repulsion or by attraction”. - Troisième Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 612-638, 1785 . “On the quantity of Electricity that an isolated body loses in a certain time period , either by contact with less humid air, or in the supports more or less idio-electric”. Four subsequent reports were published in the following years: - Quatrième Mémoire "Where two principal properties of the electric fluid are demonstrated: first, that this fluid does not expand into any object according to a chemical affinity, or by an elective attraction, but that it divides itself between different objects brought into contact; second, that in conducting objects, the fluid, having achieved a state of stability, expands on the surface of the body and does not penetrate into the interior." (1786) - Cinquième Mémoire "On the manner in which the electric fluid divides itself between conducting objects brought into contact, and the distribution of this fluid on the different parts of the surface of this object." (1787) - Sixième Mémoire "Continuation of research into the distribution of the electric fluid between several conductors. Determination of electric density at different points on the surface of these bodies." (1788) - Septième Mémoire. "On magnetism" (1789) Coulomb explained the laws of attraction and repulsion between electric charges and magnetic poles, although he did not find any relationship between the two phenomena. He thought that the attraction and repulsion were due to different kinds of fluids. * French National Library The Mémoires of Coulomb available in pdf format. * ---- Related Wikipedia Articles Hippolyte Lecomte June 14 1736 Angoulême France August 23 1806 Paris France Coulomb's law France physicist Coulomb's law SI unit coulomb Angoulême France Henri Coulomb Royal Fields Montpellier Catherine Bajet Paris Collège des Quatre-Nations Pierre Charles Monnier Augustin Danyzy Charleville-Mézières Martinique Fort Bourbon Seven Years' War Tropical disease Pieter van Musschenbroek friction La Rochelle Isle of Aix Cherbourg electric charge Coulomb's law 1781 Paris French Revolution 1789 Blois weights and measures French revolution#The Directory .281795.E2.80.931799.29 National Institute geotechnical engineering retaining wall mechanics electricity magnetism friction viscosity torsion balance electric charge Mathematical physics torsion balance Electromagnetism Fluid theory of electricity
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb
How many years ago did he resign his appointment as intendant de eaux et fontaine ?
220
data/set4/a6
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb Charles Augustin de Coulomb (born June 14, 1736, Angoulême, France - died August 23, 1806, Paris, France) was a French physicist. He is best known for developing Coulomb's law: the definition of the electrostatic force of attraction and repulsion. The SI unit of charge, the coulomb, was named after him. Coulomb was born in Angoulême, France, to a well to do family. His father, Henri Coulomb, was inspector of the Royal Fields in Montpellier. His mother, Catherine Bajet, came from a wealthy family in the wool trade. When Coulomb was a boy the family moved to Paris, and there Coulomb studied at the prestigious Collège des Quatre-Nations. The courses of mathematics there under Pierre Charles Monnier made him decide to pursue mathematics and the similar subjects as a career. From 1757 to 1759 he joined his father's family in Montpellier and took part in the work of the academy of the city, directed by the mathematician Augustin Danyzy. With his father's approval, Coulomb returned to Paris in 1759 to successfully study for the entrance examination at the military school at Mézières. At his exit from the school in 1761, he initially took part in the survey for the British coastal charts, then was sent on mission to Martinique in 1764 to take part in the construction of the Fort Bourbon under the orders of the lieutenant-colonel of Rochemore, as the French colony was insulated in the middle of the English and Spanish possessions following the Seven Years' War. Coulomb spent eight years directing the work, contracting tropical fever. He carried out several experiments on the resistance of masonries and the behaviour of the walls of escarpe (supportings), which were inspired by the ideas of Pieter van Musschenbroek on friction. Upon his return, with the rank of Captain, he was employed at La Rochelle, the Isle of Aix and Cherbourg. He discovered an inverse relationship of the force between electric charges and the square of its distance, later named after him as Coulomb's law. In 1781, he was stationed permanently at Paris. On the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789, he resigned his appointment as intendant des eaux et fontaines, and retired to a small estate which he possessed at Blois. He was recalled to Paris for a time in order to take part in the new determination of weights and measures, which had been decreed by the Revolutionary government. He was one of the first members of the National Institute; he was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802 . But his health was already very feeble, and four years later he died in Paris, France. Coulomb leaves a legacy as a hero in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design. Coulomb is distinguished in the history of mechanics and of electricity and magnetism. In 1779 he published an important investigation of the laws of friction, Théorie des machines simples, en ayant égard au frottement de leurs parties et à la roideur des cordages (Theory of simple machines with regard for the friction of their parts and the tension of the ropes), which was followed twenty years later by a memoir on viscosity. In 1784 his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l'élasticité des fils de metal Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 229-269, 1784 (Theoretical research and experimentation on torsion and the elasticity of metal wire) appeared. This memoir contained a description of different forms of his torsion balance. He used the instrument with great success for the experimental investigation of the distribution of charge on surfaces, of the laws of electrical and magnetic force, and of the mathematical theory of which he may also be regarded as the founder. Coulomb's torsion balance In 1785 Coulomb presented his three reports on Electricity and Magnetism: - Premier Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 569-577, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb describes “How to construct and use an electric balance (torsion balance) based on the property of the metal wires of having a reaction torsion force proportional to the torsion angle”. Coulomb also experimentally determined the law that explains how “two bodies electrified of the same kind of Electricity exert on each other”. - Sécond Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 578-611, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb carries out the “determination according to which laws both the Magnetic and the Electric fluids act, either by repulsion or by attraction”. - Troisième Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 612-638, 1785 . “On the quantity of Electricity that an isolated body loses in a certain time period , either by contact with less humid air, or in the supports more or less idio-electric”. Four subsequent reports were published in the following years: - Quatrième Mémoire "Where two principal properties of the electric fluid are demonstrated: first, that this fluid does not expand into any object according to a chemical affinity, or by an elective attraction, but that it divides itself between different objects brought into contact; second, that in conducting objects, the fluid, having achieved a state of stability, expands on the surface of the body and does not penetrate into the interior." (1786) - Cinquième Mémoire "On the manner in which the electric fluid divides itself between conducting objects brought into contact, and the distribution of this fluid on the different parts of the surface of this object." (1787) - Sixième Mémoire "Continuation of research into the distribution of the electric fluid between several conductors. Determination of electric density at different points on the surface of these bodies." (1788) - Septième Mémoire. "On magnetism" (1789) Coulomb explained the laws of attraction and repulsion between electric charges and magnetic poles, although he did not find any relationship between the two phenomena. He thought that the attraction and repulsion were due to different kinds of fluids. * French National Library The Mémoires of Coulomb available in pdf format. * ---- Related Wikipedia Articles Hippolyte Lecomte June 14 1736 Angoulême France August 23 1806 Paris France Coulomb's law France physicist Coulomb's law SI unit coulomb Angoulême France Henri Coulomb Royal Fields Montpellier Catherine Bajet Paris Collège des Quatre-Nations Pierre Charles Monnier Augustin Danyzy Charleville-Mézières Martinique Fort Bourbon Seven Years' War Tropical disease Pieter van Musschenbroek friction La Rochelle Isle of Aix Cherbourg electric charge Coulomb's law 1781 Paris French Revolution 1789 Blois weights and measures French revolution#The Directory .281795.E2.80.931799.29 National Institute geotechnical engineering retaining wall mechanics electricity magnetism friction viscosity torsion balance electric charge Mathematical physics torsion balance Electromagnetism Fluid theory of electricity
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb
How many years ago did Charles-Augustin de Coulomb die?
203
data/set4/a6
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb Charles Augustin de Coulomb (born June 14, 1736, Angoulême, France - died August 23, 1806, Paris, France) was a French physicist. He is best known for developing Coulomb's law: the definition of the electrostatic force of attraction and repulsion. The SI unit of charge, the coulomb, was named after him. Coulomb was born in Angoulême, France, to a well to do family. His father, Henri Coulomb, was inspector of the Royal Fields in Montpellier. His mother, Catherine Bajet, came from a wealthy family in the wool trade. When Coulomb was a boy the family moved to Paris, and there Coulomb studied at the prestigious Collège des Quatre-Nations. The courses of mathematics there under Pierre Charles Monnier made him decide to pursue mathematics and the similar subjects as a career. From 1757 to 1759 he joined his father's family in Montpellier and took part in the work of the academy of the city, directed by the mathematician Augustin Danyzy. With his father's approval, Coulomb returned to Paris in 1759 to successfully study for the entrance examination at the military school at Mézières. At his exit from the school in 1761, he initially took part in the survey for the British coastal charts, then was sent on mission to Martinique in 1764 to take part in the construction of the Fort Bourbon under the orders of the lieutenant-colonel of Rochemore, as the French colony was insulated in the middle of the English and Spanish possessions following the Seven Years' War. Coulomb spent eight years directing the work, contracting tropical fever. He carried out several experiments on the resistance of masonries and the behaviour of the walls of escarpe (supportings), which were inspired by the ideas of Pieter van Musschenbroek on friction. Upon his return, with the rank of Captain, he was employed at La Rochelle, the Isle of Aix and Cherbourg. He discovered an inverse relationship of the force between electric charges and the square of its distance, later named after him as Coulomb's law. In 1781, he was stationed permanently at Paris. On the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789, he resigned his appointment as intendant des eaux et fontaines, and retired to a small estate which he possessed at Blois. He was recalled to Paris for a time in order to take part in the new determination of weights and measures, which had been decreed by the Revolutionary government. He was one of the first members of the National Institute; he was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802 . But his health was already very feeble, and four years later he died in Paris, France. Coulomb leaves a legacy as a hero in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design. Coulomb is distinguished in the history of mechanics and of electricity and magnetism. In 1779 he published an important investigation of the laws of friction, Théorie des machines simples, en ayant égard au frottement de leurs parties et à la roideur des cordages (Theory of simple machines with regard for the friction of their parts and the tension of the ropes), which was followed twenty years later by a memoir on viscosity. In 1784 his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l'élasticité des fils de metal Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 229-269, 1784 (Theoretical research and experimentation on torsion and the elasticity of metal wire) appeared. This memoir contained a description of different forms of his torsion balance. He used the instrument with great success for the experimental investigation of the distribution of charge on surfaces, of the laws of electrical and magnetic force, and of the mathematical theory of which he may also be regarded as the founder. Coulomb's torsion balance In 1785 Coulomb presented his three reports on Electricity and Magnetism: - Premier Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 569-577, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb describes “How to construct and use an electric balance (torsion balance) based on the property of the metal wires of having a reaction torsion force proportional to the torsion angle”. Coulomb also experimentally determined the law that explains how “two bodies electrified of the same kind of Electricity exert on each other”. - Sécond Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 578-611, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb carries out the “determination according to which laws both the Magnetic and the Electric fluids act, either by repulsion or by attraction”. - Troisième Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 612-638, 1785 . “On the quantity of Electricity that an isolated body loses in a certain time period , either by contact with less humid air, or in the supports more or less idio-electric”. Four subsequent reports were published in the following years: - Quatrième Mémoire "Where two principal properties of the electric fluid are demonstrated: first, that this fluid does not expand into any object according to a chemical affinity, or by an elective attraction, but that it divides itself between different objects brought into contact; second, that in conducting objects, the fluid, having achieved a state of stability, expands on the surface of the body and does not penetrate into the interior." (1786) - Cinquième Mémoire "On the manner in which the electric fluid divides itself between conducting objects brought into contact, and the distribution of this fluid on the different parts of the surface of this object." (1787) - Sixième Mémoire "Continuation of research into the distribution of the electric fluid between several conductors. Determination of electric density at different points on the surface of these bodies." (1788) - Septième Mémoire. "On magnetism" (1789) Coulomb explained the laws of attraction and repulsion between electric charges and magnetic poles, although he did not find any relationship between the two phenomena. He thought that the attraction and repulsion were due to different kinds of fluids. * French National Library The Mémoires of Coulomb available in pdf format. * ---- Related Wikipedia Articles Hippolyte Lecomte June 14 1736 Angoulême France August 23 1806 Paris France Coulomb's law France physicist Coulomb's law SI unit coulomb Angoulême France Henri Coulomb Royal Fields Montpellier Catherine Bajet Paris Collège des Quatre-Nations Pierre Charles Monnier Augustin Danyzy Charleville-Mézières Martinique Fort Bourbon Seven Years' War Tropical disease Pieter van Musschenbroek friction La Rochelle Isle of Aix Cherbourg electric charge Coulomb's law 1781 Paris French Revolution 1789 Blois weights and measures French revolution#The Directory .281795.E2.80.931799.29 National Institute geotechnical engineering retaining wall mechanics electricity magnetism friction viscosity torsion balance electric charge Mathematical physics torsion balance Electromagnetism Fluid theory of electricity
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb
Was The SI unit of charge , the coulomb , named after him?
yes
data/set4/a6
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb Charles Augustin de Coulomb (born June 14, 1736, Angoulême, France - died August 23, 1806, Paris, France) was a French physicist. He is best known for developing Coulomb's law: the definition of the electrostatic force of attraction and repulsion. The SI unit of charge, the coulomb, was named after him. Coulomb was born in Angoulême, France, to a well to do family. His father, Henri Coulomb, was inspector of the Royal Fields in Montpellier. His mother, Catherine Bajet, came from a wealthy family in the wool trade. When Coulomb was a boy the family moved to Paris, and there Coulomb studied at the prestigious Collège des Quatre-Nations. The courses of mathematics there under Pierre Charles Monnier made him decide to pursue mathematics and the similar subjects as a career. From 1757 to 1759 he joined his father's family in Montpellier and took part in the work of the academy of the city, directed by the mathematician Augustin Danyzy. With his father's approval, Coulomb returned to Paris in 1759 to successfully study for the entrance examination at the military school at Mézières. At his exit from the school in 1761, he initially took part in the survey for the British coastal charts, then was sent on mission to Martinique in 1764 to take part in the construction of the Fort Bourbon under the orders of the lieutenant-colonel of Rochemore, as the French colony was insulated in the middle of the English and Spanish possessions following the Seven Years' War. Coulomb spent eight years directing the work, contracting tropical fever. He carried out several experiments on the resistance of masonries and the behaviour of the walls of escarpe (supportings), which were inspired by the ideas of Pieter van Musschenbroek on friction. Upon his return, with the rank of Captain, he was employed at La Rochelle, the Isle of Aix and Cherbourg. He discovered an inverse relationship of the force between electric charges and the square of its distance, later named after him as Coulomb's law. In 1781, he was stationed permanently at Paris. On the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789, he resigned his appointment as intendant des eaux et fontaines, and retired to a small estate which he possessed at Blois. He was recalled to Paris for a time in order to take part in the new determination of weights and measures, which had been decreed by the Revolutionary government. He was one of the first members of the National Institute; he was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802 . But his health was already very feeble, and four years later he died in Paris, France. Coulomb leaves a legacy as a hero in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design. Coulomb is distinguished in the history of mechanics and of electricity and magnetism. In 1779 he published an important investigation of the laws of friction, Théorie des machines simples, en ayant égard au frottement de leurs parties et à la roideur des cordages (Theory of simple machines with regard for the friction of their parts and the tension of the ropes), which was followed twenty years later by a memoir on viscosity. In 1784 his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l'élasticité des fils de metal Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 229-269, 1784 (Theoretical research and experimentation on torsion and the elasticity of metal wire) appeared. This memoir contained a description of different forms of his torsion balance. He used the instrument with great success for the experimental investigation of the distribution of charge on surfaces, of the laws of electrical and magnetic force, and of the mathematical theory of which he may also be regarded as the founder. Coulomb's torsion balance In 1785 Coulomb presented his three reports on Electricity and Magnetism: - Premier Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 569-577, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb describes “How to construct and use an electric balance (torsion balance) based on the property of the metal wires of having a reaction torsion force proportional to the torsion angle”. Coulomb also experimentally determined the law that explains how “two bodies electrified of the same kind of Electricity exert on each other”. - Sécond Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 578-611, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb carries out the “determination according to which laws both the Magnetic and the Electric fluids act, either by repulsion or by attraction”. - Troisième Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 612-638, 1785 . “On the quantity of Electricity that an isolated body loses in a certain time period , either by contact with less humid air, or in the supports more or less idio-electric”. Four subsequent reports were published in the following years: - Quatrième Mémoire "Where two principal properties of the electric fluid are demonstrated: first, that this fluid does not expand into any object according to a chemical affinity, or by an elective attraction, but that it divides itself between different objects brought into contact; second, that in conducting objects, the fluid, having achieved a state of stability, expands on the surface of the body and does not penetrate into the interior." (1786) - Cinquième Mémoire "On the manner in which the electric fluid divides itself between conducting objects brought into contact, and the distribution of this fluid on the different parts of the surface of this object." (1787) - Sixième Mémoire "Continuation of research into the distribution of the electric fluid between several conductors. Determination of electric density at different points on the surface of these bodies." (1788) - Septième Mémoire. "On magnetism" (1789) Coulomb explained the laws of attraction and repulsion between electric charges and magnetic poles, although he did not find any relationship between the two phenomena. He thought that the attraction and repulsion were due to different kinds of fluids. * French National Library The Mémoires of Coulomb available in pdf format. * ---- Related Wikipedia Articles Hippolyte Lecomte June 14 1736 Angoulême France August 23 1806 Paris France Coulomb's law France physicist Coulomb's law SI unit coulomb Angoulême France Henri Coulomb Royal Fields Montpellier Catherine Bajet Paris Collège des Quatre-Nations Pierre Charles Monnier Augustin Danyzy Charleville-Mézières Martinique Fort Bourbon Seven Years' War Tropical disease Pieter van Musschenbroek friction La Rochelle Isle of Aix Cherbourg electric charge Coulomb's law 1781 Paris French Revolution 1789 Blois weights and measures French revolution#The Directory .281795.E2.80.931799.29 National Institute geotechnical engineering retaining wall mechanics electricity magnetism friction viscosity torsion balance electric charge Mathematical physics torsion balance Electromagnetism Fluid theory of electricity
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb
Was coulomb born in Angoulême, France , to a well to do family?
yes
data/set4/a6
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb Charles Augustin de Coulomb (born June 14, 1736, Angoulême, France - died August 23, 1806, Paris, France) was a French physicist. He is best known for developing Coulomb's law: the definition of the electrostatic force of attraction and repulsion. The SI unit of charge, the coulomb, was named after him. Coulomb was born in Angoulême, France, to a well to do family. His father, Henri Coulomb, was inspector of the Royal Fields in Montpellier. His mother, Catherine Bajet, came from a wealthy family in the wool trade. When Coulomb was a boy the family moved to Paris, and there Coulomb studied at the prestigious Collège des Quatre-Nations. The courses of mathematics there under Pierre Charles Monnier made him decide to pursue mathematics and the similar subjects as a career. From 1757 to 1759 he joined his father's family in Montpellier and took part in the work of the academy of the city, directed by the mathematician Augustin Danyzy. With his father's approval, Coulomb returned to Paris in 1759 to successfully study for the entrance examination at the military school at Mézières. At his exit from the school in 1761, he initially took part in the survey for the British coastal charts, then was sent on mission to Martinique in 1764 to take part in the construction of the Fort Bourbon under the orders of the lieutenant-colonel of Rochemore, as the French colony was insulated in the middle of the English and Spanish possessions following the Seven Years' War. Coulomb spent eight years directing the work, contracting tropical fever. He carried out several experiments on the resistance of masonries and the behaviour of the walls of escarpe (supportings), which were inspired by the ideas of Pieter van Musschenbroek on friction. Upon his return, with the rank of Captain, he was employed at La Rochelle, the Isle of Aix and Cherbourg. He discovered an inverse relationship of the force between electric charges and the square of its distance, later named after him as Coulomb's law. In 1781, he was stationed permanently at Paris. On the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789, he resigned his appointment as intendant des eaux et fontaines, and retired to a small estate which he possessed at Blois. He was recalled to Paris for a time in order to take part in the new determination of weights and measures, which had been decreed by the Revolutionary government. He was one of the first members of the National Institute; he was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802 . But his health was already very feeble, and four years later he died in Paris, France. Coulomb leaves a legacy as a hero in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design. Coulomb is distinguished in the history of mechanics and of electricity and magnetism. In 1779 he published an important investigation of the laws of friction, Théorie des machines simples, en ayant égard au frottement de leurs parties et à la roideur des cordages (Theory of simple machines with regard for the friction of their parts and the tension of the ropes), which was followed twenty years later by a memoir on viscosity. In 1784 his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l'élasticité des fils de metal Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 229-269, 1784 (Theoretical research and experimentation on torsion and the elasticity of metal wire) appeared. This memoir contained a description of different forms of his torsion balance. He used the instrument with great success for the experimental investigation of the distribution of charge on surfaces, of the laws of electrical and magnetic force, and of the mathematical theory of which he may also be regarded as the founder. Coulomb's torsion balance In 1785 Coulomb presented his three reports on Electricity and Magnetism: - Premier Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 569-577, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb describes “How to construct and use an electric balance (torsion balance) based on the property of the metal wires of having a reaction torsion force proportional to the torsion angle”. Coulomb also experimentally determined the law that explains how “two bodies electrified of the same kind of Electricity exert on each other”. - Sécond Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 578-611, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb carries out the “determination according to which laws both the Magnetic and the Electric fluids act, either by repulsion or by attraction”. - Troisième Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 612-638, 1785 . “On the quantity of Electricity that an isolated body loses in a certain time period , either by contact with less humid air, or in the supports more or less idio-electric”. Four subsequent reports were published in the following years: - Quatrième Mémoire "Where two principal properties of the electric fluid are demonstrated: first, that this fluid does not expand into any object according to a chemical affinity, or by an elective attraction, but that it divides itself between different objects brought into contact; second, that in conducting objects, the fluid, having achieved a state of stability, expands on the surface of the body and does not penetrate into the interior." (1786) - Cinquième Mémoire "On the manner in which the electric fluid divides itself between conducting objects brought into contact, and the distribution of this fluid on the different parts of the surface of this object." (1787) - Sixième Mémoire "Continuation of research into the distribution of the electric fluid between several conductors. Determination of electric density at different points on the surface of these bodies." (1788) - Septième Mémoire. "On magnetism" (1789) Coulomb explained the laws of attraction and repulsion between electric charges and magnetic poles, although he did not find any relationship between the two phenomena. He thought that the attraction and repulsion were due to different kinds of fluids. * French National Library The Mémoires of Coulomb available in pdf format. * ---- Related Wikipedia Articles Hippolyte Lecomte June 14 1736 Angoulême France August 23 1806 Paris France Coulomb's law France physicist Coulomb's law SI unit coulomb Angoulême France Henri Coulomb Royal Fields Montpellier Catherine Bajet Paris Collège des Quatre-Nations Pierre Charles Monnier Augustin Danyzy Charleville-Mézières Martinique Fort Bourbon Seven Years' War Tropical disease Pieter van Musschenbroek friction La Rochelle Isle of Aix Cherbourg electric charge Coulomb's law 1781 Paris French Revolution 1789 Blois weights and measures French revolution#The Directory .281795.E2.80.931799.29 National Institute geotechnical engineering retaining wall mechanics electricity magnetism friction viscosity torsion balance electric charge Mathematical physics torsion balance Electromagnetism Fluid theory of electricity
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb
Was his father , Henri Coulomb , inspector of the Royal Fields in Montpellier?
Yes
data/set4/a6
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb Charles Augustin de Coulomb (born June 14, 1736, Angoulême, France - died August 23, 1806, Paris, France) was a French physicist. He is best known for developing Coulomb's law: the definition of the electrostatic force of attraction and repulsion. The SI unit of charge, the coulomb, was named after him. Coulomb was born in Angoulême, France, to a well to do family. His father, Henri Coulomb, was inspector of the Royal Fields in Montpellier. His mother, Catherine Bajet, came from a wealthy family in the wool trade. When Coulomb was a boy the family moved to Paris, and there Coulomb studied at the prestigious Collège des Quatre-Nations. The courses of mathematics there under Pierre Charles Monnier made him decide to pursue mathematics and the similar subjects as a career. From 1757 to 1759 he joined his father's family in Montpellier and took part in the work of the academy of the city, directed by the mathematician Augustin Danyzy. With his father's approval, Coulomb returned to Paris in 1759 to successfully study for the entrance examination at the military school at Mézières. At his exit from the school in 1761, he initially took part in the survey for the British coastal charts, then was sent on mission to Martinique in 1764 to take part in the construction of the Fort Bourbon under the orders of the lieutenant-colonel of Rochemore, as the French colony was insulated in the middle of the English and Spanish possessions following the Seven Years' War. Coulomb spent eight years directing the work, contracting tropical fever. He carried out several experiments on the resistance of masonries and the behaviour of the walls of escarpe (supportings), which were inspired by the ideas of Pieter van Musschenbroek on friction. Upon his return, with the rank of Captain, he was employed at La Rochelle, the Isle of Aix and Cherbourg. He discovered an inverse relationship of the force between electric charges and the square of its distance, later named after him as Coulomb's law. In 1781, he was stationed permanently at Paris. On the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789, he resigned his appointment as intendant des eaux et fontaines, and retired to a small estate which he possessed at Blois. He was recalled to Paris for a time in order to take part in the new determination of weights and measures, which had been decreed by the Revolutionary government. He was one of the first members of the National Institute; he was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802 . But his health was already very feeble, and four years later he died in Paris, France. Coulomb leaves a legacy as a hero in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design. Coulomb is distinguished in the history of mechanics and of electricity and magnetism. In 1779 he published an important investigation of the laws of friction, Théorie des machines simples, en ayant égard au frottement de leurs parties et à la roideur des cordages (Theory of simple machines with regard for the friction of their parts and the tension of the ropes), which was followed twenty years later by a memoir on viscosity. In 1784 his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l'élasticité des fils de metal Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 229-269, 1784 (Theoretical research and experimentation on torsion and the elasticity of metal wire) appeared. This memoir contained a description of different forms of his torsion balance. He used the instrument with great success for the experimental investigation of the distribution of charge on surfaces, of the laws of electrical and magnetic force, and of the mathematical theory of which he may also be regarded as the founder. Coulomb's torsion balance In 1785 Coulomb presented his three reports on Electricity and Magnetism: - Premier Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 569-577, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb describes “How to construct and use an electric balance (torsion balance) based on the property of the metal wires of having a reaction torsion force proportional to the torsion angle”. Coulomb also experimentally determined the law that explains how “two bodies electrified of the same kind of Electricity exert on each other”. - Sécond Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 578-611, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb carries out the “determination according to which laws both the Magnetic and the Electric fluids act, either by repulsion or by attraction”. - Troisième Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 612-638, 1785 . “On the quantity of Electricity that an isolated body loses in a certain time period , either by contact with less humid air, or in the supports more or less idio-electric”. Four subsequent reports were published in the following years: - Quatrième Mémoire "Where two principal properties of the electric fluid are demonstrated: first, that this fluid does not expand into any object according to a chemical affinity, or by an elective attraction, but that it divides itself between different objects brought into contact; second, that in conducting objects, the fluid, having achieved a state of stability, expands on the surface of the body and does not penetrate into the interior." (1786) - Cinquième Mémoire "On the manner in which the electric fluid divides itself between conducting objects brought into contact, and the distribution of this fluid on the different parts of the surface of this object." (1787) - Sixième Mémoire "Continuation of research into the distribution of the electric fluid between several conductors. Determination of electric density at different points on the surface of these bodies." (1788) - Septième Mémoire. "On magnetism" (1789) Coulomb explained the laws of attraction and repulsion between electric charges and magnetic poles, although he did not find any relationship between the two phenomena. He thought that the attraction and repulsion were due to different kinds of fluids. * French National Library The Mémoires of Coulomb available in pdf format. * ---- Related Wikipedia Articles Hippolyte Lecomte June 14 1736 Angoulême France August 23 1806 Paris France Coulomb's law France physicist Coulomb's law SI unit coulomb Angoulême France Henri Coulomb Royal Fields Montpellier Catherine Bajet Paris Collège des Quatre-Nations Pierre Charles Monnier Augustin Danyzy Charleville-Mézières Martinique Fort Bourbon Seven Years' War Tropical disease Pieter van Musschenbroek friction La Rochelle Isle of Aix Cherbourg electric charge Coulomb's law 1781 Paris French Revolution 1789 Blois weights and measures French revolution#The Directory .281795.E2.80.931799.29 National Institute geotechnical engineering retaining wall mechanics electricity magnetism friction viscosity torsion balance electric charge Mathematical physics torsion balance Electromagnetism Fluid theory of electricity
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb
Is coulomb distinguished in the history of mechanics and of electricity and magnetism?
yes
data/set4/a6
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb Charles Augustin de Coulomb (born June 14, 1736, Angoulême, France - died August 23, 1806, Paris, France) was a French physicist. He is best known for developing Coulomb's law: the definition of the electrostatic force of attraction and repulsion. The SI unit of charge, the coulomb, was named after him. Coulomb was born in Angoulême, France, to a well to do family. His father, Henri Coulomb, was inspector of the Royal Fields in Montpellier. His mother, Catherine Bajet, came from a wealthy family in the wool trade. When Coulomb was a boy the family moved to Paris, and there Coulomb studied at the prestigious Collège des Quatre-Nations. The courses of mathematics there under Pierre Charles Monnier made him decide to pursue mathematics and the similar subjects as a career. From 1757 to 1759 he joined his father's family in Montpellier and took part in the work of the academy of the city, directed by the mathematician Augustin Danyzy. With his father's approval, Coulomb returned to Paris in 1759 to successfully study for the entrance examination at the military school at Mézières. At his exit from the school in 1761, he initially took part in the survey for the British coastal charts, then was sent on mission to Martinique in 1764 to take part in the construction of the Fort Bourbon under the orders of the lieutenant-colonel of Rochemore, as the French colony was insulated in the middle of the English and Spanish possessions following the Seven Years' War. Coulomb spent eight years directing the work, contracting tropical fever. He carried out several experiments on the resistance of masonries and the behaviour of the walls of escarpe (supportings), which were inspired by the ideas of Pieter van Musschenbroek on friction. Upon his return, with the rank of Captain, he was employed at La Rochelle, the Isle of Aix and Cherbourg. He discovered an inverse relationship of the force between electric charges and the square of its distance, later named after him as Coulomb's law. In 1781, he was stationed permanently at Paris. On the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789, he resigned his appointment as intendant des eaux et fontaines, and retired to a small estate which he possessed at Blois. He was recalled to Paris for a time in order to take part in the new determination of weights and measures, which had been decreed by the Revolutionary government. He was one of the first members of the National Institute; he was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802 . But his health was already very feeble, and four years later he died in Paris, France. Coulomb leaves a legacy as a hero in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design. Coulomb is distinguished in the history of mechanics and of electricity and magnetism. In 1779 he published an important investigation of the laws of friction, Théorie des machines simples, en ayant égard au frottement de leurs parties et à la roideur des cordages (Theory of simple machines with regard for the friction of their parts and the tension of the ropes), which was followed twenty years later by a memoir on viscosity. In 1784 his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l'élasticité des fils de metal Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 229-269, 1784 (Theoretical research and experimentation on torsion and the elasticity of metal wire) appeared. This memoir contained a description of different forms of his torsion balance. He used the instrument with great success for the experimental investigation of the distribution of charge on surfaces, of the laws of electrical and magnetic force, and of the mathematical theory of which he may also be regarded as the founder. Coulomb's torsion balance In 1785 Coulomb presented his three reports on Electricity and Magnetism: - Premier Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 569-577, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb describes “How to construct and use an electric balance (torsion balance) based on the property of the metal wires of having a reaction torsion force proportional to the torsion angle”. Coulomb also experimentally determined the law that explains how “two bodies electrified of the same kind of Electricity exert on each other”. - Sécond Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 578-611, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb carries out the “determination according to which laws both the Magnetic and the Electric fluids act, either by repulsion or by attraction”. - Troisième Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 612-638, 1785 . “On the quantity of Electricity that an isolated body loses in a certain time period , either by contact with less humid air, or in the supports more or less idio-electric”. Four subsequent reports were published in the following years: - Quatrième Mémoire "Where two principal properties of the electric fluid are demonstrated: first, that this fluid does not expand into any object according to a chemical affinity, or by an elective attraction, but that it divides itself between different objects brought into contact; second, that in conducting objects, the fluid, having achieved a state of stability, expands on the surface of the body and does not penetrate into the interior." (1786) - Cinquième Mémoire "On the manner in which the electric fluid divides itself between conducting objects brought into contact, and the distribution of this fluid on the different parts of the surface of this object." (1787) - Sixième Mémoire "Continuation of research into the distribution of the electric fluid between several conductors. Determination of electric density at different points on the surface of these bodies." (1788) - Septième Mémoire. "On magnetism" (1789) Coulomb explained the laws of attraction and repulsion between electric charges and magnetic poles, although he did not find any relationship between the two phenomena. He thought that the attraction and repulsion were due to different kinds of fluids. * French National Library The Mémoires of Coulomb available in pdf format. * ---- Related Wikipedia Articles Hippolyte Lecomte June 14 1736 Angoulême France August 23 1806 Paris France Coulomb's law France physicist Coulomb's law SI unit coulomb Angoulême France Henri Coulomb Royal Fields Montpellier Catherine Bajet Paris Collège des Quatre-Nations Pierre Charles Monnier Augustin Danyzy Charleville-Mézières Martinique Fort Bourbon Seven Years' War Tropical disease Pieter van Musschenbroek friction La Rochelle Isle of Aix Cherbourg electric charge Coulomb's law 1781 Paris French Revolution 1789 Blois weights and measures French revolution#The Directory .281795.E2.80.931799.29 National Institute geotechnical engineering retaining wall mechanics electricity magnetism friction viscosity torsion balance electric charge Mathematical physics torsion balance Electromagnetism Fluid theory of electricity
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb
Was Charles Augustin de Coulomb ( born June 14 , 1736 , Angoulême , France - died August 23 , 1806 , Paris , France ) a French physicist?
yes
data/set4/a6
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb Charles Augustin de Coulomb (born June 14, 1736, Angoulême, France - died August 23, 1806, Paris, France) was a French physicist. He is best known for developing Coulomb's law: the definition of the electrostatic force of attraction and repulsion. The SI unit of charge, the coulomb, was named after him. Coulomb was born in Angoulême, France, to a well to do family. His father, Henri Coulomb, was inspector of the Royal Fields in Montpellier. His mother, Catherine Bajet, came from a wealthy family in the wool trade. When Coulomb was a boy the family moved to Paris, and there Coulomb studied at the prestigious Collège des Quatre-Nations. The courses of mathematics there under Pierre Charles Monnier made him decide to pursue mathematics and the similar subjects as a career. From 1757 to 1759 he joined his father's family in Montpellier and took part in the work of the academy of the city, directed by the mathematician Augustin Danyzy. With his father's approval, Coulomb returned to Paris in 1759 to successfully study for the entrance examination at the military school at Mézières. At his exit from the school in 1761, he initially took part in the survey for the British coastal charts, then was sent on mission to Martinique in 1764 to take part in the construction of the Fort Bourbon under the orders of the lieutenant-colonel of Rochemore, as the French colony was insulated in the middle of the English and Spanish possessions following the Seven Years' War. Coulomb spent eight years directing the work, contracting tropical fever. He carried out several experiments on the resistance of masonries and the behaviour of the walls of escarpe (supportings), which were inspired by the ideas of Pieter van Musschenbroek on friction. Upon his return, with the rank of Captain, he was employed at La Rochelle, the Isle of Aix and Cherbourg. He discovered an inverse relationship of the force between electric charges and the square of its distance, later named after him as Coulomb's law. In 1781, he was stationed permanently at Paris. On the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789, he resigned his appointment as intendant des eaux et fontaines, and retired to a small estate which he possessed at Blois. He was recalled to Paris for a time in order to take part in the new determination of weights and measures, which had been decreed by the Revolutionary government. He was one of the first members of the National Institute; he was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802 . But his health was already very feeble, and four years later he died in Paris, France. Coulomb leaves a legacy as a hero in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design. Coulomb is distinguished in the history of mechanics and of electricity and magnetism. In 1779 he published an important investigation of the laws of friction, Théorie des machines simples, en ayant égard au frottement de leurs parties et à la roideur des cordages (Theory of simple machines with regard for the friction of their parts and the tension of the ropes), which was followed twenty years later by a memoir on viscosity. In 1784 his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l'élasticité des fils de metal Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 229-269, 1784 (Theoretical research and experimentation on torsion and the elasticity of metal wire) appeared. This memoir contained a description of different forms of his torsion balance. He used the instrument with great success for the experimental investigation of the distribution of charge on surfaces, of the laws of electrical and magnetic force, and of the mathematical theory of which he may also be regarded as the founder. Coulomb's torsion balance In 1785 Coulomb presented his three reports on Electricity and Magnetism: - Premier Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 569-577, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb describes “How to construct and use an electric balance (torsion balance) based on the property of the metal wires of having a reaction torsion force proportional to the torsion angle”. Coulomb also experimentally determined the law that explains how “two bodies electrified of the same kind of Electricity exert on each other”. - Sécond Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 578-611, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb carries out the “determination according to which laws both the Magnetic and the Electric fluids act, either by repulsion or by attraction”. - Troisième Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 612-638, 1785 . “On the quantity of Electricity that an isolated body loses in a certain time period , either by contact with less humid air, or in the supports more or less idio-electric”. Four subsequent reports were published in the following years: - Quatrième Mémoire "Where two principal properties of the electric fluid are demonstrated: first, that this fluid does not expand into any object according to a chemical affinity, or by an elective attraction, but that it divides itself between different objects brought into contact; second, that in conducting objects, the fluid, having achieved a state of stability, expands on the surface of the body and does not penetrate into the interior." (1786) - Cinquième Mémoire "On the manner in which the electric fluid divides itself between conducting objects brought into contact, and the distribution of this fluid on the different parts of the surface of this object." (1787) - Sixième Mémoire "Continuation of research into the distribution of the electric fluid between several conductors. Determination of electric density at different points on the surface of these bodies." (1788) - Septième Mémoire. "On magnetism" (1789) Coulomb explained the laws of attraction and repulsion between electric charges and magnetic poles, although he did not find any relationship between the two phenomena. He thought that the attraction and repulsion were due to different kinds of fluids. * French National Library The Mémoires of Coulomb available in pdf format. * ---- Related Wikipedia Articles Hippolyte Lecomte June 14 1736 Angoulême France August 23 1806 Paris France Coulomb's law France physicist Coulomb's law SI unit coulomb Angoulême France Henri Coulomb Royal Fields Montpellier Catherine Bajet Paris Collège des Quatre-Nations Pierre Charles Monnier Augustin Danyzy Charleville-Mézières Martinique Fort Bourbon Seven Years' War Tropical disease Pieter van Musschenbroek friction La Rochelle Isle of Aix Cherbourg electric charge Coulomb's law 1781 Paris French Revolution 1789 Blois weights and measures French revolution#The Directory .281795.E2.80.931799.29 National Institute geotechnical engineering retaining wall mechanics electricity magnetism friction viscosity torsion balance electric charge Mathematical physics torsion balance Electromagnetism Fluid theory of electricity
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb
Does Coulomb leave a legacy?
yes
data/set4/a6
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb Charles Augustin de Coulomb (born June 14, 1736, Angoulême, France - died August 23, 1806, Paris, France) was a French physicist. He is best known for developing Coulomb's law: the definition of the electrostatic force of attraction and repulsion. The SI unit of charge, the coulomb, was named after him. Coulomb was born in Angoulême, France, to a well to do family. His father, Henri Coulomb, was inspector of the Royal Fields in Montpellier. His mother, Catherine Bajet, came from a wealthy family in the wool trade. When Coulomb was a boy the family moved to Paris, and there Coulomb studied at the prestigious Collège des Quatre-Nations. The courses of mathematics there under Pierre Charles Monnier made him decide to pursue mathematics and the similar subjects as a career. From 1757 to 1759 he joined his father's family in Montpellier and took part in the work of the academy of the city, directed by the mathematician Augustin Danyzy. With his father's approval, Coulomb returned to Paris in 1759 to successfully study for the entrance examination at the military school at Mézières. At his exit from the school in 1761, he initially took part in the survey for the British coastal charts, then was sent on mission to Martinique in 1764 to take part in the construction of the Fort Bourbon under the orders of the lieutenant-colonel of Rochemore, as the French colony was insulated in the middle of the English and Spanish possessions following the Seven Years' War. Coulomb spent eight years directing the work, contracting tropical fever. He carried out several experiments on the resistance of masonries and the behaviour of the walls of escarpe (supportings), which were inspired by the ideas of Pieter van Musschenbroek on friction. Upon his return, with the rank of Captain, he was employed at La Rochelle, the Isle of Aix and Cherbourg. He discovered an inverse relationship of the force between electric charges and the square of its distance, later named after him as Coulomb's law. In 1781, he was stationed permanently at Paris. On the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789, he resigned his appointment as intendant des eaux et fontaines, and retired to a small estate which he possessed at Blois. He was recalled to Paris for a time in order to take part in the new determination of weights and measures, which had been decreed by the Revolutionary government. He was one of the first members of the National Institute; he was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802 . But his health was already very feeble, and four years later he died in Paris, France. Coulomb leaves a legacy as a hero in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design. Coulomb is distinguished in the history of mechanics and of electricity and magnetism. In 1779 he published an important investigation of the laws of friction, Théorie des machines simples, en ayant égard au frottement de leurs parties et à la roideur des cordages (Theory of simple machines with regard for the friction of their parts and the tension of the ropes), which was followed twenty years later by a memoir on viscosity. In 1784 his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l'élasticité des fils de metal Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 229-269, 1784 (Theoretical research and experimentation on torsion and the elasticity of metal wire) appeared. This memoir contained a description of different forms of his torsion balance. He used the instrument with great success for the experimental investigation of the distribution of charge on surfaces, of the laws of electrical and magnetic force, and of the mathematical theory of which he may also be regarded as the founder. Coulomb's torsion balance In 1785 Coulomb presented his three reports on Electricity and Magnetism: - Premier Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 569-577, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb describes “How to construct and use an electric balance (torsion balance) based on the property of the metal wires of having a reaction torsion force proportional to the torsion angle”. Coulomb also experimentally determined the law that explains how “two bodies electrified of the same kind of Electricity exert on each other”. - Sécond Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 578-611, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb carries out the “determination according to which laws both the Magnetic and the Electric fluids act, either by repulsion or by attraction”. - Troisième Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 612-638, 1785 . “On the quantity of Electricity that an isolated body loses in a certain time period , either by contact with less humid air, or in the supports more or less idio-electric”. Four subsequent reports were published in the following years: - Quatrième Mémoire "Where two principal properties of the electric fluid are demonstrated: first, that this fluid does not expand into any object according to a chemical affinity, or by an elective attraction, but that it divides itself between different objects brought into contact; second, that in conducting objects, the fluid, having achieved a state of stability, expands on the surface of the body and does not penetrate into the interior." (1786) - Cinquième Mémoire "On the manner in which the electric fluid divides itself between conducting objects brought into contact, and the distribution of this fluid on the different parts of the surface of this object." (1787) - Sixième Mémoire "Continuation of research into the distribution of the electric fluid between several conductors. Determination of electric density at different points on the surface of these bodies." (1788) - Septième Mémoire. "On magnetism" (1789) Coulomb explained the laws of attraction and repulsion between electric charges and magnetic poles, although he did not find any relationship between the two phenomena. He thought that the attraction and repulsion were due to different kinds of fluids. * French National Library The Mémoires of Coulomb available in pdf format. * ---- Related Wikipedia Articles Hippolyte Lecomte June 14 1736 Angoulême France August 23 1806 Paris France Coulomb's law France physicist Coulomb's law SI unit coulomb Angoulême France Henri Coulomb Royal Fields Montpellier Catherine Bajet Paris Collège des Quatre-Nations Pierre Charles Monnier Augustin Danyzy Charleville-Mézières Martinique Fort Bourbon Seven Years' War Tropical disease Pieter van Musschenbroek friction La Rochelle Isle of Aix Cherbourg electric charge Coulomb's law 1781 Paris French Revolution 1789 Blois weights and measures French revolution#The Directory .281795.E2.80.931799.29 National Institute geotechnical engineering retaining wall mechanics electricity magnetism friction viscosity torsion balance electric charge Mathematical physics torsion balance Electromagnetism Fluid theory of electricity
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb
When was Charles-Augustin de Coulomb born?
June 14, 1736
data/set4/a6
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb Charles Augustin de Coulomb (born June 14, 1736, Angoulême, France - died August 23, 1806, Paris, France) was a French physicist. He is best known for developing Coulomb's law: the definition of the electrostatic force of attraction and repulsion. The SI unit of charge, the coulomb, was named after him. Coulomb was born in Angoulême, France, to a well to do family. His father, Henri Coulomb, was inspector of the Royal Fields in Montpellier. His mother, Catherine Bajet, came from a wealthy family in the wool trade. When Coulomb was a boy the family moved to Paris, and there Coulomb studied at the prestigious Collège des Quatre-Nations. The courses of mathematics there under Pierre Charles Monnier made him decide to pursue mathematics and the similar subjects as a career. From 1757 to 1759 he joined his father's family in Montpellier and took part in the work of the academy of the city, directed by the mathematician Augustin Danyzy. With his father's approval, Coulomb returned to Paris in 1759 to successfully study for the entrance examination at the military school at Mézières. At his exit from the school in 1761, he initially took part in the survey for the British coastal charts, then was sent on mission to Martinique in 1764 to take part in the construction of the Fort Bourbon under the orders of the lieutenant-colonel of Rochemore, as the French colony was insulated in the middle of the English and Spanish possessions following the Seven Years' War. Coulomb spent eight years directing the work, contracting tropical fever. He carried out several experiments on the resistance of masonries and the behaviour of the walls of escarpe (supportings), which were inspired by the ideas of Pieter van Musschenbroek on friction. Upon his return, with the rank of Captain, he was employed at La Rochelle, the Isle of Aix and Cherbourg. He discovered an inverse relationship of the force between electric charges and the square of its distance, later named after him as Coulomb's law. In 1781, he was stationed permanently at Paris. On the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789, he resigned his appointment as intendant des eaux et fontaines, and retired to a small estate which he possessed at Blois. He was recalled to Paris for a time in order to take part in the new determination of weights and measures, which had been decreed by the Revolutionary government. He was one of the first members of the National Institute; he was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802 . But his health was already very feeble, and four years later he died in Paris, France. Coulomb leaves a legacy as a hero in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design. Coulomb is distinguished in the history of mechanics and of electricity and magnetism. In 1779 he published an important investigation of the laws of friction, Théorie des machines simples, en ayant égard au frottement de leurs parties et à la roideur des cordages (Theory of simple machines with regard for the friction of their parts and the tension of the ropes), which was followed twenty years later by a memoir on viscosity. In 1784 his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l'élasticité des fils de metal Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 229-269, 1784 (Theoretical research and experimentation on torsion and the elasticity of metal wire) appeared. This memoir contained a description of different forms of his torsion balance. He used the instrument with great success for the experimental investigation of the distribution of charge on surfaces, of the laws of electrical and magnetic force, and of the mathematical theory of which he may also be regarded as the founder. Coulomb's torsion balance In 1785 Coulomb presented his three reports on Electricity and Magnetism: - Premier Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 569-577, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb describes “How to construct and use an electric balance (torsion balance) based on the property of the metal wires of having a reaction torsion force proportional to the torsion angle”. Coulomb also experimentally determined the law that explains how “two bodies electrified of the same kind of Electricity exert on each other”. - Sécond Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 578-611, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb carries out the “determination according to which laws both the Magnetic and the Electric fluids act, either by repulsion or by attraction”. - Troisième Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 612-638, 1785 . “On the quantity of Electricity that an isolated body loses in a certain time period , either by contact with less humid air, or in the supports more or less idio-electric”. Four subsequent reports were published in the following years: - Quatrième Mémoire "Where two principal properties of the electric fluid are demonstrated: first, that this fluid does not expand into any object according to a chemical affinity, or by an elective attraction, but that it divides itself between different objects brought into contact; second, that in conducting objects, the fluid, having achieved a state of stability, expands on the surface of the body and does not penetrate into the interior." (1786) - Cinquième Mémoire "On the manner in which the electric fluid divides itself between conducting objects brought into contact, and the distribution of this fluid on the different parts of the surface of this object." (1787) - Sixième Mémoire "Continuation of research into the distribution of the electric fluid between several conductors. Determination of electric density at different points on the surface of these bodies." (1788) - Septième Mémoire. "On magnetism" (1789) Coulomb explained the laws of attraction and repulsion between electric charges and magnetic poles, although he did not find any relationship between the two phenomena. He thought that the attraction and repulsion were due to different kinds of fluids. * French National Library The Mémoires of Coulomb available in pdf format. * ---- Related Wikipedia Articles Hippolyte Lecomte June 14 1736 Angoulême France August 23 1806 Paris France Coulomb's law France physicist Coulomb's law SI unit coulomb Angoulême France Henri Coulomb Royal Fields Montpellier Catherine Bajet Paris Collège des Quatre-Nations Pierre Charles Monnier Augustin Danyzy Charleville-Mézières Martinique Fort Bourbon Seven Years' War Tropical disease Pieter van Musschenbroek friction La Rochelle Isle of Aix Cherbourg electric charge Coulomb's law 1781 Paris French Revolution 1789 Blois weights and measures French revolution#The Directory .281795.E2.80.931799.29 National Institute geotechnical engineering retaining wall mechanics electricity magnetism friction viscosity torsion balance electric charge Mathematical physics torsion balance Electromagnetism Fluid theory of electricity
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb
Did he publish an important investigation of the laws of friction?
yes
data/set4/a6
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb Charles Augustin de Coulomb (born June 14, 1736, Angoulême, France - died August 23, 1806, Paris, France) was a French physicist. He is best known for developing Coulomb's law: the definition of the electrostatic force of attraction and repulsion. The SI unit of charge, the coulomb, was named after him. Coulomb was born in Angoulême, France, to a well to do family. His father, Henri Coulomb, was inspector of the Royal Fields in Montpellier. His mother, Catherine Bajet, came from a wealthy family in the wool trade. When Coulomb was a boy the family moved to Paris, and there Coulomb studied at the prestigious Collège des Quatre-Nations. The courses of mathematics there under Pierre Charles Monnier made him decide to pursue mathematics and the similar subjects as a career. From 1757 to 1759 he joined his father's family in Montpellier and took part in the work of the academy of the city, directed by the mathematician Augustin Danyzy. With his father's approval, Coulomb returned to Paris in 1759 to successfully study for the entrance examination at the military school at Mézières. At his exit from the school in 1761, he initially took part in the survey for the British coastal charts, then was sent on mission to Martinique in 1764 to take part in the construction of the Fort Bourbon under the orders of the lieutenant-colonel of Rochemore, as the French colony was insulated in the middle of the English and Spanish possessions following the Seven Years' War. Coulomb spent eight years directing the work, contracting tropical fever. He carried out several experiments on the resistance of masonries and the behaviour of the walls of escarpe (supportings), which were inspired by the ideas of Pieter van Musschenbroek on friction. Upon his return, with the rank of Captain, he was employed at La Rochelle, the Isle of Aix and Cherbourg. He discovered an inverse relationship of the force between electric charges and the square of its distance, later named after him as Coulomb's law. In 1781, he was stationed permanently at Paris. On the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789, he resigned his appointment as intendant des eaux et fontaines, and retired to a small estate which he possessed at Blois. He was recalled to Paris for a time in order to take part in the new determination of weights and measures, which had been decreed by the Revolutionary government. He was one of the first members of the National Institute; he was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802 . But his health was already very feeble, and four years later he died in Paris, France. Coulomb leaves a legacy as a hero in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design. Coulomb is distinguished in the history of mechanics and of electricity and magnetism. In 1779 he published an important investigation of the laws of friction, Théorie des machines simples, en ayant égard au frottement de leurs parties et à la roideur des cordages (Theory of simple machines with regard for the friction of their parts and the tension of the ropes), which was followed twenty years later by a memoir on viscosity. In 1784 his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l'élasticité des fils de metal Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 229-269, 1784 (Theoretical research and experimentation on torsion and the elasticity of metal wire) appeared. This memoir contained a description of different forms of his torsion balance. He used the instrument with great success for the experimental investigation of the distribution of charge on surfaces, of the laws of electrical and magnetic force, and of the mathematical theory of which he may also be regarded as the founder. Coulomb's torsion balance In 1785 Coulomb presented his three reports on Electricity and Magnetism: - Premier Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 569-577, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb describes “How to construct and use an electric balance (torsion balance) based on the property of the metal wires of having a reaction torsion force proportional to the torsion angle”. Coulomb also experimentally determined the law that explains how “two bodies electrified of the same kind of Electricity exert on each other”. - Sécond Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 578-611, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb carries out the “determination according to which laws both the Magnetic and the Electric fluids act, either by repulsion or by attraction”. - Troisième Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 612-638, 1785 . “On the quantity of Electricity that an isolated body loses in a certain time period , either by contact with less humid air, or in the supports more or less idio-electric”. Four subsequent reports were published in the following years: - Quatrième Mémoire "Where two principal properties of the electric fluid are demonstrated: first, that this fluid does not expand into any object according to a chemical affinity, or by an elective attraction, but that it divides itself between different objects brought into contact; second, that in conducting objects, the fluid, having achieved a state of stability, expands on the surface of the body and does not penetrate into the interior." (1786) - Cinquième Mémoire "On the manner in which the electric fluid divides itself between conducting objects brought into contact, and the distribution of this fluid on the different parts of the surface of this object." (1787) - Sixième Mémoire "Continuation of research into the distribution of the electric fluid between several conductors. Determination of electric density at different points on the surface of these bodies." (1788) - Septième Mémoire. "On magnetism" (1789) Coulomb explained the laws of attraction and repulsion between electric charges and magnetic poles, although he did not find any relationship between the two phenomena. He thought that the attraction and repulsion were due to different kinds of fluids. * French National Library The Mémoires of Coulomb available in pdf format. * ---- Related Wikipedia Articles Hippolyte Lecomte June 14 1736 Angoulême France August 23 1806 Paris France Coulomb's law France physicist Coulomb's law SI unit coulomb Angoulême France Henri Coulomb Royal Fields Montpellier Catherine Bajet Paris Collège des Quatre-Nations Pierre Charles Monnier Augustin Danyzy Charleville-Mézières Martinique Fort Bourbon Seven Years' War Tropical disease Pieter van Musschenbroek friction La Rochelle Isle of Aix Cherbourg electric charge Coulomb's law 1781 Paris French Revolution 1789 Blois weights and measures French revolution#The Directory .281795.E2.80.931799.29 National Institute geotechnical engineering retaining wall mechanics electricity magnetism friction viscosity torsion balance electric charge Mathematical physics torsion balance Electromagnetism Fluid theory of electricity
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb
Was Coulomb born in Angoulême, France, to a well to do family?
yes
data/set4/a6
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb Charles Augustin de Coulomb (born June 14, 1736, Angoulême, France - died August 23, 1806, Paris, France) was a French physicist. He is best known for developing Coulomb's law: the definition of the electrostatic force of attraction and repulsion. The SI unit of charge, the coulomb, was named after him. Coulomb was born in Angoulême, France, to a well to do family. His father, Henri Coulomb, was inspector of the Royal Fields in Montpellier. His mother, Catherine Bajet, came from a wealthy family in the wool trade. When Coulomb was a boy the family moved to Paris, and there Coulomb studied at the prestigious Collège des Quatre-Nations. The courses of mathematics there under Pierre Charles Monnier made him decide to pursue mathematics and the similar subjects as a career. From 1757 to 1759 he joined his father's family in Montpellier and took part in the work of the academy of the city, directed by the mathematician Augustin Danyzy. With his father's approval, Coulomb returned to Paris in 1759 to successfully study for the entrance examination at the military school at Mézières. At his exit from the school in 1761, he initially took part in the survey for the British coastal charts, then was sent on mission to Martinique in 1764 to take part in the construction of the Fort Bourbon under the orders of the lieutenant-colonel of Rochemore, as the French colony was insulated in the middle of the English and Spanish possessions following the Seven Years' War. Coulomb spent eight years directing the work, contracting tropical fever. He carried out several experiments on the resistance of masonries and the behaviour of the walls of escarpe (supportings), which were inspired by the ideas of Pieter van Musschenbroek on friction. Upon his return, with the rank of Captain, he was employed at La Rochelle, the Isle of Aix and Cherbourg. He discovered an inverse relationship of the force between electric charges and the square of its distance, later named after him as Coulomb's law. In 1781, he was stationed permanently at Paris. On the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789, he resigned his appointment as intendant des eaux et fontaines, and retired to a small estate which he possessed at Blois. He was recalled to Paris for a time in order to take part in the new determination of weights and measures, which had been decreed by the Revolutionary government. He was one of the first members of the National Institute; he was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802 . But his health was already very feeble, and four years later he died in Paris, France. Coulomb leaves a legacy as a hero in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design. Coulomb is distinguished in the history of mechanics and of electricity and magnetism. In 1779 he published an important investigation of the laws of friction, Théorie des machines simples, en ayant égard au frottement de leurs parties et à la roideur des cordages (Theory of simple machines with regard for the friction of their parts and the tension of the ropes), which was followed twenty years later by a memoir on viscosity. In 1784 his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l'élasticité des fils de metal Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 229-269, 1784 (Theoretical research and experimentation on torsion and the elasticity of metal wire) appeared. This memoir contained a description of different forms of his torsion balance. He used the instrument with great success for the experimental investigation of the distribution of charge on surfaces, of the laws of electrical and magnetic force, and of the mathematical theory of which he may also be regarded as the founder. Coulomb's torsion balance In 1785 Coulomb presented his three reports on Electricity and Magnetism: - Premier Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 569-577, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb describes “How to construct and use an electric balance (torsion balance) based on the property of the metal wires of having a reaction torsion force proportional to the torsion angle”. Coulomb also experimentally determined the law that explains how “two bodies electrified of the same kind of Electricity exert on each other”. - Sécond Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 578-611, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb carries out the “determination according to which laws both the Magnetic and the Electric fluids act, either by repulsion or by attraction”. - Troisième Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 612-638, 1785 . “On the quantity of Electricity that an isolated body loses in a certain time period , either by contact with less humid air, or in the supports more or less idio-electric”. Four subsequent reports were published in the following years: - Quatrième Mémoire "Where two principal properties of the electric fluid are demonstrated: first, that this fluid does not expand into any object according to a chemical affinity, or by an elective attraction, but that it divides itself between different objects brought into contact; second, that in conducting objects, the fluid, having achieved a state of stability, expands on the surface of the body and does not penetrate into the interior." (1786) - Cinquième Mémoire "On the manner in which the electric fluid divides itself between conducting objects brought into contact, and the distribution of this fluid on the different parts of the surface of this object." (1787) - Sixième Mémoire "Continuation of research into the distribution of the electric fluid between several conductors. Determination of electric density at different points on the surface of these bodies." (1788) - Septième Mémoire. "On magnetism" (1789) Coulomb explained the laws of attraction and repulsion between electric charges and magnetic poles, although he did not find any relationship between the two phenomena. He thought that the attraction and repulsion were due to different kinds of fluids. * French National Library The Mémoires of Coulomb available in pdf format. * ---- Related Wikipedia Articles Hippolyte Lecomte June 14 1736 Angoulême France August 23 1806 Paris France Coulomb's law France physicist Coulomb's law SI unit coulomb Angoulême France Henri Coulomb Royal Fields Montpellier Catherine Bajet Paris Collège des Quatre-Nations Pierre Charles Monnier Augustin Danyzy Charleville-Mézières Martinique Fort Bourbon Seven Years' War Tropical disease Pieter van Musschenbroek friction La Rochelle Isle of Aix Cherbourg electric charge Coulomb's law 1781 Paris French Revolution 1789 Blois weights and measures French revolution#The Directory .281795.E2.80.931799.29 National Institute geotechnical engineering retaining wall mechanics electricity magnetism friction viscosity torsion balance electric charge Mathematical physics torsion balance Electromagnetism Fluid theory of electricity
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb
Was his father inspector of the Royal Fields?
yes
data/set4/a6
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb Charles Augustin de Coulomb (born June 14, 1736, Angoulême, France - died August 23, 1806, Paris, France) was a French physicist. He is best known for developing Coulomb's law: the definition of the electrostatic force of attraction and repulsion. The SI unit of charge, the coulomb, was named after him. Coulomb was born in Angoulême, France, to a well to do family. His father, Henri Coulomb, was inspector of the Royal Fields in Montpellier. His mother, Catherine Bajet, came from a wealthy family in the wool trade. When Coulomb was a boy the family moved to Paris, and there Coulomb studied at the prestigious Collège des Quatre-Nations. The courses of mathematics there under Pierre Charles Monnier made him decide to pursue mathematics and the similar subjects as a career. From 1757 to 1759 he joined his father's family in Montpellier and took part in the work of the academy of the city, directed by the mathematician Augustin Danyzy. With his father's approval, Coulomb returned to Paris in 1759 to successfully study for the entrance examination at the military school at Mézières. At his exit from the school in 1761, he initially took part in the survey for the British coastal charts, then was sent on mission to Martinique in 1764 to take part in the construction of the Fort Bourbon under the orders of the lieutenant-colonel of Rochemore, as the French colony was insulated in the middle of the English and Spanish possessions following the Seven Years' War. Coulomb spent eight years directing the work, contracting tropical fever. He carried out several experiments on the resistance of masonries and the behaviour of the walls of escarpe (supportings), which were inspired by the ideas of Pieter van Musschenbroek on friction. Upon his return, with the rank of Captain, he was employed at La Rochelle, the Isle of Aix and Cherbourg. He discovered an inverse relationship of the force between electric charges and the square of its distance, later named after him as Coulomb's law. In 1781, he was stationed permanently at Paris. On the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789, he resigned his appointment as intendant des eaux et fontaines, and retired to a small estate which he possessed at Blois. He was recalled to Paris for a time in order to take part in the new determination of weights and measures, which had been decreed by the Revolutionary government. He was one of the first members of the National Institute; he was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802 . But his health was already very feeble, and four years later he died in Paris, France. Coulomb leaves a legacy as a hero in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design. Coulomb is distinguished in the history of mechanics and of electricity and magnetism. In 1779 he published an important investigation of the laws of friction, Théorie des machines simples, en ayant égard au frottement de leurs parties et à la roideur des cordages (Theory of simple machines with regard for the friction of their parts and the tension of the ropes), which was followed twenty years later by a memoir on viscosity. In 1784 his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l'élasticité des fils de metal Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 229-269, 1784 (Theoretical research and experimentation on torsion and the elasticity of metal wire) appeared. This memoir contained a description of different forms of his torsion balance. He used the instrument with great success for the experimental investigation of the distribution of charge on surfaces, of the laws of electrical and magnetic force, and of the mathematical theory of which he may also be regarded as the founder. Coulomb's torsion balance In 1785 Coulomb presented his three reports on Electricity and Magnetism: - Premier Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 569-577, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb describes “How to construct and use an electric balance (torsion balance) based on the property of the metal wires of having a reaction torsion force proportional to the torsion angle”. Coulomb also experimentally determined the law that explains how “two bodies electrified of the same kind of Electricity exert on each other”. - Sécond Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 578-611, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb carries out the “determination according to which laws both the Magnetic and the Electric fluids act, either by repulsion or by attraction”. - Troisième Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 612-638, 1785 . “On the quantity of Electricity that an isolated body loses in a certain time period , either by contact with less humid air, or in the supports more or less idio-electric”. Four subsequent reports were published in the following years: - Quatrième Mémoire "Where two principal properties of the electric fluid are demonstrated: first, that this fluid does not expand into any object according to a chemical affinity, or by an elective attraction, but that it divides itself between different objects brought into contact; second, that in conducting objects, the fluid, having achieved a state of stability, expands on the surface of the body and does not penetrate into the interior." (1786) - Cinquième Mémoire "On the manner in which the electric fluid divides itself between conducting objects brought into contact, and the distribution of this fluid on the different parts of the surface of this object." (1787) - Sixième Mémoire "Continuation of research into the distribution of the electric fluid between several conductors. Determination of electric density at different points on the surface of these bodies." (1788) - Septième Mémoire. "On magnetism" (1789) Coulomb explained the laws of attraction and repulsion between electric charges and magnetic poles, although he did not find any relationship between the two phenomena. He thought that the attraction and repulsion were due to different kinds of fluids. * French National Library The Mémoires of Coulomb available in pdf format. * ---- Related Wikipedia Articles Hippolyte Lecomte June 14 1736 Angoulême France August 23 1806 Paris France Coulomb's law France physicist Coulomb's law SI unit coulomb Angoulême France Henri Coulomb Royal Fields Montpellier Catherine Bajet Paris Collège des Quatre-Nations Pierre Charles Monnier Augustin Danyzy Charleville-Mézières Martinique Fort Bourbon Seven Years' War Tropical disease Pieter van Musschenbroek friction La Rochelle Isle of Aix Cherbourg electric charge Coulomb's law 1781 Paris French Revolution 1789 Blois weights and measures French revolution#The Directory .281795.E2.80.931799.29 National Institute geotechnical engineering retaining wall mechanics electricity magnetism friction viscosity torsion balance electric charge Mathematical physics torsion balance Electromagnetism Fluid theory of electricity
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb
He discovered an inverse relationship of what?
distance and electric force
data/set4/a6
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb Charles Augustin de Coulomb (born June 14, 1736, Angoulême, France - died August 23, 1806, Paris, France) was a French physicist. He is best known for developing Coulomb's law: the definition of the electrostatic force of attraction and repulsion. The SI unit of charge, the coulomb, was named after him. Coulomb was born in Angoulême, France, to a well to do family. His father, Henri Coulomb, was inspector of the Royal Fields in Montpellier. His mother, Catherine Bajet, came from a wealthy family in the wool trade. When Coulomb was a boy the family moved to Paris, and there Coulomb studied at the prestigious Collège des Quatre-Nations. The courses of mathematics there under Pierre Charles Monnier made him decide to pursue mathematics and the similar subjects as a career. From 1757 to 1759 he joined his father's family in Montpellier and took part in the work of the academy of the city, directed by the mathematician Augustin Danyzy. With his father's approval, Coulomb returned to Paris in 1759 to successfully study for the entrance examination at the military school at Mézières. At his exit from the school in 1761, he initially took part in the survey for the British coastal charts, then was sent on mission to Martinique in 1764 to take part in the construction of the Fort Bourbon under the orders of the lieutenant-colonel of Rochemore, as the French colony was insulated in the middle of the English and Spanish possessions following the Seven Years' War. Coulomb spent eight years directing the work, contracting tropical fever. He carried out several experiments on the resistance of masonries and the behaviour of the walls of escarpe (supportings), which were inspired by the ideas of Pieter van Musschenbroek on friction. Upon his return, with the rank of Captain, he was employed at La Rochelle, the Isle of Aix and Cherbourg. He discovered an inverse relationship of the force between electric charges and the square of its distance, later named after him as Coulomb's law. In 1781, he was stationed permanently at Paris. On the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789, he resigned his appointment as intendant des eaux et fontaines, and retired to a small estate which he possessed at Blois. He was recalled to Paris for a time in order to take part in the new determination of weights and measures, which had been decreed by the Revolutionary government. He was one of the first members of the National Institute; he was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802 . But his health was already very feeble, and four years later he died in Paris, France. Coulomb leaves a legacy as a hero in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design. Coulomb is distinguished in the history of mechanics and of electricity and magnetism. In 1779 he published an important investigation of the laws of friction, Théorie des machines simples, en ayant égard au frottement de leurs parties et à la roideur des cordages (Theory of simple machines with regard for the friction of their parts and the tension of the ropes), which was followed twenty years later by a memoir on viscosity. In 1784 his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l'élasticité des fils de metal Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 229-269, 1784 (Theoretical research and experimentation on torsion and the elasticity of metal wire) appeared. This memoir contained a description of different forms of his torsion balance. He used the instrument with great success for the experimental investigation of the distribution of charge on surfaces, of the laws of electrical and magnetic force, and of the mathematical theory of which he may also be regarded as the founder. Coulomb's torsion balance In 1785 Coulomb presented his three reports on Electricity and Magnetism: - Premier Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 569-577, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb describes “How to construct and use an electric balance (torsion balance) based on the property of the metal wires of having a reaction torsion force proportional to the torsion angle”. Coulomb also experimentally determined the law that explains how “two bodies electrified of the same kind of Electricity exert on each other”. - Sécond Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 578-611, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb carries out the “determination according to which laws both the Magnetic and the Electric fluids act, either by repulsion or by attraction”. - Troisième Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 612-638, 1785 . “On the quantity of Electricity that an isolated body loses in a certain time period , either by contact with less humid air, or in the supports more or less idio-electric”. Four subsequent reports were published in the following years: - Quatrième Mémoire "Where two principal properties of the electric fluid are demonstrated: first, that this fluid does not expand into any object according to a chemical affinity, or by an elective attraction, but that it divides itself between different objects brought into contact; second, that in conducting objects, the fluid, having achieved a state of stability, expands on the surface of the body and does not penetrate into the interior." (1786) - Cinquième Mémoire "On the manner in which the electric fluid divides itself between conducting objects brought into contact, and the distribution of this fluid on the different parts of the surface of this object." (1787) - Sixième Mémoire "Continuation of research into the distribution of the electric fluid between several conductors. Determination of electric density at different points on the surface of these bodies." (1788) - Septième Mémoire. "On magnetism" (1789) Coulomb explained the laws of attraction and repulsion between electric charges and magnetic poles, although he did not find any relationship between the two phenomena. He thought that the attraction and repulsion were due to different kinds of fluids. * French National Library The Mémoires of Coulomb available in pdf format. * ---- Related Wikipedia Articles Hippolyte Lecomte June 14 1736 Angoulême France August 23 1806 Paris France Coulomb's law France physicist Coulomb's law SI unit coulomb Angoulême France Henri Coulomb Royal Fields Montpellier Catherine Bajet Paris Collège des Quatre-Nations Pierre Charles Monnier Augustin Danyzy Charleville-Mézières Martinique Fort Bourbon Seven Years' War Tropical disease Pieter van Musschenbroek friction La Rochelle Isle of Aix Cherbourg electric charge Coulomb's law 1781 Paris French Revolution 1789 Blois weights and measures French revolution#The Directory .281795.E2.80.931799.29 National Institute geotechnical engineering retaining wall mechanics electricity magnetism friction viscosity torsion balance electric charge Mathematical physics torsion balance Electromagnetism Fluid theory of electricity
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb
Is it true that coulomb leaves a legacy as a hero?
yes
data/set4/a6
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb Charles Augustin de Coulomb (born June 14, 1736, Angoulême, France - died August 23, 1806, Paris, France) was a French physicist. He is best known for developing Coulomb's law: the definition of the electrostatic force of attraction and repulsion. The SI unit of charge, the coulomb, was named after him. Coulomb was born in Angoulême, France, to a well to do family. His father, Henri Coulomb, was inspector of the Royal Fields in Montpellier. His mother, Catherine Bajet, came from a wealthy family in the wool trade. When Coulomb was a boy the family moved to Paris, and there Coulomb studied at the prestigious Collège des Quatre-Nations. The courses of mathematics there under Pierre Charles Monnier made him decide to pursue mathematics and the similar subjects as a career. From 1757 to 1759 he joined his father's family in Montpellier and took part in the work of the academy of the city, directed by the mathematician Augustin Danyzy. With his father's approval, Coulomb returned to Paris in 1759 to successfully study for the entrance examination at the military school at Mézières. At his exit from the school in 1761, he initially took part in the survey for the British coastal charts, then was sent on mission to Martinique in 1764 to take part in the construction of the Fort Bourbon under the orders of the lieutenant-colonel of Rochemore, as the French colony was insulated in the middle of the English and Spanish possessions following the Seven Years' War. Coulomb spent eight years directing the work, contracting tropical fever. He carried out several experiments on the resistance of masonries and the behaviour of the walls of escarpe (supportings), which were inspired by the ideas of Pieter van Musschenbroek on friction. Upon his return, with the rank of Captain, he was employed at La Rochelle, the Isle of Aix and Cherbourg. He discovered an inverse relationship of the force between electric charges and the square of its distance, later named after him as Coulomb's law. In 1781, he was stationed permanently at Paris. On the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789, he resigned his appointment as intendant des eaux et fontaines, and retired to a small estate which he possessed at Blois. He was recalled to Paris for a time in order to take part in the new determination of weights and measures, which had been decreed by the Revolutionary government. He was one of the first members of the National Institute; he was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802 . But his health was already very feeble, and four years later he died in Paris, France. Coulomb leaves a legacy as a hero in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design. Coulomb is distinguished in the history of mechanics and of electricity and magnetism. In 1779 he published an important investigation of the laws of friction, Théorie des machines simples, en ayant égard au frottement de leurs parties et à la roideur des cordages (Theory of simple machines with regard for the friction of their parts and the tension of the ropes), which was followed twenty years later by a memoir on viscosity. In 1784 his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l'élasticité des fils de metal Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 229-269, 1784 (Theoretical research and experimentation on torsion and the elasticity of metal wire) appeared. This memoir contained a description of different forms of his torsion balance. He used the instrument with great success for the experimental investigation of the distribution of charge on surfaces, of the laws of electrical and magnetic force, and of the mathematical theory of which he may also be regarded as the founder. Coulomb's torsion balance In 1785 Coulomb presented his three reports on Electricity and Magnetism: - Premier Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 569-577, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb describes “How to construct and use an electric balance (torsion balance) based on the property of the metal wires of having a reaction torsion force proportional to the torsion angle”. Coulomb also experimentally determined the law that explains how “two bodies electrified of the same kind of Electricity exert on each other”. - Sécond Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 578-611, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb carries out the “determination according to which laws both the Magnetic and the Electric fluids act, either by repulsion or by attraction”. - Troisième Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 612-638, 1785 . “On the quantity of Electricity that an isolated body loses in a certain time period , either by contact with less humid air, or in the supports more or less idio-electric”. Four subsequent reports were published in the following years: - Quatrième Mémoire "Where two principal properties of the electric fluid are demonstrated: first, that this fluid does not expand into any object according to a chemical affinity, or by an elective attraction, but that it divides itself between different objects brought into contact; second, that in conducting objects, the fluid, having achieved a state of stability, expands on the surface of the body and does not penetrate into the interior." (1786) - Cinquième Mémoire "On the manner in which the electric fluid divides itself between conducting objects brought into contact, and the distribution of this fluid on the different parts of the surface of this object." (1787) - Sixième Mémoire "Continuation of research into the distribution of the electric fluid between several conductors. Determination of electric density at different points on the surface of these bodies." (1788) - Septième Mémoire. "On magnetism" (1789) Coulomb explained the laws of attraction and repulsion between electric charges and magnetic poles, although he did not find any relationship between the two phenomena. He thought that the attraction and repulsion were due to different kinds of fluids. * French National Library The Mémoires of Coulomb available in pdf format. * ---- Related Wikipedia Articles Hippolyte Lecomte June 14 1736 Angoulême France August 23 1806 Paris France Coulomb's law France physicist Coulomb's law SI unit coulomb Angoulême France Henri Coulomb Royal Fields Montpellier Catherine Bajet Paris Collège des Quatre-Nations Pierre Charles Monnier Augustin Danyzy Charleville-Mézières Martinique Fort Bourbon Seven Years' War Tropical disease Pieter van Musschenbroek friction La Rochelle Isle of Aix Cherbourg electric charge Coulomb's law 1781 Paris French Revolution 1789 Blois weights and measures French revolution#The Directory .281795.E2.80.931799.29 National Institute geotechnical engineering retaining wall mechanics electricity magnetism friction viscosity torsion balance electric charge Mathematical physics torsion balance Electromagnetism Fluid theory of electricity
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb
Where is Charles-Augustin de Coulomb from?
France
data/set4/a6
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb Charles Augustin de Coulomb (born June 14, 1736, Angoulême, France - died August 23, 1806, Paris, France) was a French physicist. He is best known for developing Coulomb's law: the definition of the electrostatic force of attraction and repulsion. The SI unit of charge, the coulomb, was named after him. Coulomb was born in Angoulême, France, to a well to do family. His father, Henri Coulomb, was inspector of the Royal Fields in Montpellier. His mother, Catherine Bajet, came from a wealthy family in the wool trade. When Coulomb was a boy the family moved to Paris, and there Coulomb studied at the prestigious Collège des Quatre-Nations. The courses of mathematics there under Pierre Charles Monnier made him decide to pursue mathematics and the similar subjects as a career. From 1757 to 1759 he joined his father's family in Montpellier and took part in the work of the academy of the city, directed by the mathematician Augustin Danyzy. With his father's approval, Coulomb returned to Paris in 1759 to successfully study for the entrance examination at the military school at Mézières. At his exit from the school in 1761, he initially took part in the survey for the British coastal charts, then was sent on mission to Martinique in 1764 to take part in the construction of the Fort Bourbon under the orders of the lieutenant-colonel of Rochemore, as the French colony was insulated in the middle of the English and Spanish possessions following the Seven Years' War. Coulomb spent eight years directing the work, contracting tropical fever. He carried out several experiments on the resistance of masonries and the behaviour of the walls of escarpe (supportings), which were inspired by the ideas of Pieter van Musschenbroek on friction. Upon his return, with the rank of Captain, he was employed at La Rochelle, the Isle of Aix and Cherbourg. He discovered an inverse relationship of the force between electric charges and the square of its distance, later named after him as Coulomb's law. In 1781, he was stationed permanently at Paris. On the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789, he resigned his appointment as intendant des eaux et fontaines, and retired to a small estate which he possessed at Blois. He was recalled to Paris for a time in order to take part in the new determination of weights and measures, which had been decreed by the Revolutionary government. He was one of the first members of the National Institute; he was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802 . But his health was already very feeble, and four years later he died in Paris, France. Coulomb leaves a legacy as a hero in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design. Coulomb is distinguished in the history of mechanics and of electricity and magnetism. In 1779 he published an important investigation of the laws of friction, Théorie des machines simples, en ayant égard au frottement de leurs parties et à la roideur des cordages (Theory of simple machines with regard for the friction of their parts and the tension of the ropes), which was followed twenty years later by a memoir on viscosity. In 1784 his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l'élasticité des fils de metal Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 229-269, 1784 (Theoretical research and experimentation on torsion and the elasticity of metal wire) appeared. This memoir contained a description of different forms of his torsion balance. He used the instrument with great success for the experimental investigation of the distribution of charge on surfaces, of the laws of electrical and magnetic force, and of the mathematical theory of which he may also be regarded as the founder. Coulomb's torsion balance In 1785 Coulomb presented his three reports on Electricity and Magnetism: - Premier Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 569-577, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb describes “How to construct and use an electric balance (torsion balance) based on the property of the metal wires of having a reaction torsion force proportional to the torsion angle”. Coulomb also experimentally determined the law that explains how “two bodies electrified of the same kind of Electricity exert on each other”. - Sécond Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 578-611, 1785 . In this publication Coulomb carries out the “determination according to which laws both the Magnetic and the Electric fluids act, either by repulsion or by attraction”. - Troisième Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, 612-638, 1785 . “On the quantity of Electricity that an isolated body loses in a certain time period , either by contact with less humid air, or in the supports more or less idio-electric”. Four subsequent reports were published in the following years: - Quatrième Mémoire "Where two principal properties of the electric fluid are demonstrated: first, that this fluid does not expand into any object according to a chemical affinity, or by an elective attraction, but that it divides itself between different objects brought into contact; second, that in conducting objects, the fluid, having achieved a state of stability, expands on the surface of the body and does not penetrate into the interior." (1786) - Cinquième Mémoire "On the manner in which the electric fluid divides itself between conducting objects brought into contact, and the distribution of this fluid on the different parts of the surface of this object." (1787) - Sixième Mémoire "Continuation of research into the distribution of the electric fluid between several conductors. Determination of electric density at different points on the surface of these bodies." (1788) - Septième Mémoire. "On magnetism" (1789) Coulomb explained the laws of attraction and repulsion between electric charges and magnetic poles, although he did not find any relationship between the two phenomena. He thought that the attraction and repulsion were due to different kinds of fluids. * French National Library The Mémoires of Coulomb available in pdf format. * ---- Related Wikipedia Articles Hippolyte Lecomte June 14 1736 Angoulême France August 23 1806 Paris France Coulomb's law France physicist Coulomb's law SI unit coulomb Angoulême France Henri Coulomb Royal Fields Montpellier Catherine Bajet Paris Collège des Quatre-Nations Pierre Charles Monnier Augustin Danyzy Charleville-Mézières Martinique Fort Bourbon Seven Years' War Tropical disease Pieter van Musschenbroek friction La Rochelle Isle of Aix Cherbourg electric charge Coulomb's law 1781 Paris French Revolution 1789 Blois weights and measures French revolution#The Directory .281795.E2.80.931799.29 National Institute geotechnical engineering retaining wall mechanics electricity magnetism friction viscosity torsion balance electric charge Mathematical physics torsion balance Electromagnetism Fluid theory of electricity
Chinese_language
What was Chinese language`s profession?
null
data/set5/a7
Chinese_language Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) is a language family consisting of languages mutually unintelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. “The mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.” *Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. “The Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.” *Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. “The modern Chinese dialects are really more like a family of language. *John DeFrancis. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (1984), p.56. "To call Chinese a single language composed of dialects with varying degrees of difference is to mislead by minimizing disparities that according to Chao are as great as those between English and Dutch. To call Chinese a family of languages is to suggest extralinguistic differences that in fact do not exist and to overlook the unique linguistic situation that exists in China." Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the two branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages. About one-fifth of the world’s population, or over one billion people, speak some form of Chinese as their native language. The identification of the varieties of Chinese as "dialects" instead of "languages" is considered inappropriate by linguists and Sinologists. Spoken Chinese is distinguished by its high level of internal diversity, although all spoken varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic. There are between seven and thirteen main regional groups of Chinese (depending on classification scheme), of which the most spoken, by far, is Mandarin (about 850 million), followed by Wu (90 million), Min (70 million) and Cantonese (70 million). Most of these groups are mutually unintelligible, although some, like Xiang and the Southwest Mandarin dialects, may share common terms and some degree of intelligibility. Chinese is classified as a macrolanguage with 13 sub-languages in ISO 639-3, though the identification of the varieties of Chinese as multiple "languages" or as "dialects" of a single language is a contentious issue. The standardized form of spoken Chinese is Standard Mandarin (Putonghua / Guoyu / Huayu), based on the Beijing dialect, which is part of a larger group of North-Eastern and South-Western dialects, often taken as a separate language, see Mandarin Chinese for more, this language can be referred to as 官话 Guānhuà or 北方话 Běifānghuà in Chinese. Standard Mandarin is the official language of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC), as well as one of four official languages of Singapore. Chinese—de facto, Standard Mandarin—is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Of the other varieties, Standard Cantonese is common and influential in Guangdong Province and Cantonese-speaking overseas communities, and remains one of the official languages of Hong Kong (together with English) and of Macau (together with Portuguese). Hokkien, part of the Min language group, is widely spoken in southern Fujian, in neighbouring Taiwan (where it is known as Taiwanese or Hoklo) and in Southeast Asia (where it dominates in Singapore and Malaysia). Xinhua reported in March 2007 that 86 percent of people in the People's Republic of China spoke a Chinese variant. 全國約有53%的人能用普通話交流 As a language family, the number of Chinese speakers is 1.136 billion. The same news report indicates 53 percent of the population, or 700 million speakers, can effectively communicate in Putonghua. Sino-Tibetan language family. A map below depicts the linguistic subdivisions ("languages" or "dialect groups") within China itself. The traditionally-recognized seven main groups, in order of population size are: Chinese linguists have recently distinguished: 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. The Dungan language, spoken in Central Asia, is very closely related to Mandarin. However, it is not generally considered "Chinese" since it is written in Cyrillic and spoken by Dungan people outside China who are not considered ethnic Chinese. See List of Chinese dialects for a comprehensive listing of individual dialects within these large, broad groupings. In general, the above language-dialect groups do not have sharp boundaries, though Mandarin is the predominant Sinitic language in the North and the Southwest, and the rest are mostly spoken in Central or Southeastern China. Frequently, as in the case of the Guangdong province, native speakers of major variants overlapped. As with many areas that were linguistically diverse for a long time, it is not always clear how the speeches of various parts of China should be classified. The Ethnologue lists a total of 14, but the number varies between seven and seventeen depending on the classification scheme followed. For instance, the Min variety is often divided into Northern Min (Minbei, Fuchow) and Southern Min (Minnan, Amoy-Swatow); linguists have not determined whether their mutual intelligibility is small enough to sort them as separate languages. The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China. In general, mountainous South China displays more linguistic diversity than the flat North China. In parts of South China, a major city's dialect may only 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). Putonghua / Guoyu, often called "Mandarin", is the official standard language used by the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China, and Singapore (where it is called "Huayu"). It is based on the Beijing dialect, which is the dialect of Mandarin as spoken in Beijing. The governments intend for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. Therefore it is used in government agencies, in the media, and as a language of instruction in schools. In mainland China and Taiwan, diglossia has been a common feature: it is common for a Chinese to be able to speak two or even three varieties of the Sinitic languages (or “dialects”) together with Standard Mandarin. For example, in addition to putonghua a resident of Shanghai might speak Shanghainese and, if they did not grow up there, his or her local dialect as well. A native of Guangzhou may speak Standard Cantonese and putonghua, a resident of Taiwan, both Taiwanese and putonghua/guoyu. A person living in Taiwan 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, Standard Mandarin is beginning to take its place beside English and Standard Cantonese, the official languages. Linguists often view Chinese as a language family, though owing to China's socio-political and cultural situation, and the fact that all spoken varieties use one common written system, it is customary to refer to these generally mutually unintelligible variants as "the Chinese language". The diversity of Sinitic variants is comparable to the Romance languages. From a purely descriptive point of view, "languages" and "dialects" are simply arbitrary groups of similar idiolects, and the distinction is irrelevant to linguists who are only concerned with describing regional speeches technically. However, the idea of a single language has major overtones in politics and cultural self-identity, and explains the amount of emotion over this issue. Most Chinese and Chinese linguists refer to Chinese as a single language and its subdivisions dialects, while others call Chinese a language family. Chinese itself has a term for its unified writing system, Zhongwen (中文), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (汉语,“spoken language[s] of the Han Chinese) – this term could be translated to either “language” or “languages” since Chinese possesses no grammatical numbers. In the Chinese language, there is much less need for a uniform speech-and-writing continuum, as indicated by two separate character morphemes 语 yu and 文 wen. Ethnic Chinese often consider these spoken variations as one single language for reasons of nationality and as they inherit one common cultural and linguistic heritage in Classical Chinese. Han native speakers of Wu, Min, Hakka, and Cantonese, for instance, may consider their own linguistic varieties as separate spoken languages, but the Han Chinese race as one – albeit internally very diverse – ethnicity. To Chinese nationalists, the idea of Chinese as a language family may suggest that the Chinese identity is much more fragmentary and disunified than it actually is and as such is often looked upon as culturally and politically provocative. Additionally, in Taiwan, it is closely associated with Taiwanese independence, where some supporters of Taiwanese independence promote the local Taiwanese Minnan-based spoken language. Within the People’s Republic of China and Singapore, it is common for the government to refer to all divisions of the Sinitic language(s) beside Standard Mandarin as fangyan (“regional tongues”, often translated as “dialects”). Modern-day Chinese speakers of all kinds communicate using one formal standard written language, although this modern written standard is modeled after Mandarin, generally the modern Beijing substandard. The term sinophone, coined in analogy to anglophone and francophone, refers to those who speak the Chinese language natively, or prefer it as a medium of communication. The term is derived from Sinae, the Latin word for ancient China. :See also: Classical Chinese and Vernacular Chinese The relationship among the Chinese spoken and written languages is rather complex. Its spoken variations evolved at different rates, while written Chinese itself has changed much less. Classical Chinese literature began in the Spring and Autumn period, although written records have been discovered as far back as the 14th to 11th centuries BCE Shang dynasty oracle bones using the oracle bone scripts. The Chinese orthography centers around Chinese characters, hanzi, which are written within imaginary rectangular blocks, traditionally arranged in vertical columns, read from top to bottom down a column, and right to left across columns. Chinese characters are morphemes independent of phonetic change. Thus the number "one", yi in Mandarin, yat in Cantonese and chi̍t and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("一"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as 冇 and 係 for Cantonese and Hakka, which are considered archaic or unused in standard written Chinese. Written colloquial Cantonese has become quite popular in online chat rooms and instant messaging amongst Hong-Kongers and Cantonese-speakers elsewhere. Use of it is considered highly informal, and does not extend to any formal occasion. Also, in Hunan, some women write their local language in Nü Shu, a syllabary derived from Chinese characters. The Dungan language, considered by some 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 evolved over time from earliest forms of hieroglyphs. The idea that all Chinese characters are either pictographs or ideographs is an erroneous one: most characters contain phonetic parts, and are composites of phonetic components and semantic Radicals. Only the simplest characters, such as ren 人 (human), ri 日 (sun), shan 山 (mountain), shui 水 (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar Xǚ Shèn in the Hàn Dynasty classified characters into 6 categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80-90% as phonetic complexes consisting of a semantic element that indicates meaning, and a phonetic element that indicates the pronunciation. Generally, the phonetic element is more accurate and more important than the semantic one. There are about 214 radicals recognized in the Kangxi Dictionary. Modern characters are styled after the standard script (楷书/楷書 kǎishū) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (篆书/篆書 zhuànshū), cursive script (草书/草書 cǎoshū) and clerical script (隶书/隸書 lìshū). Calligraphy artists can write in traditional and simplified characters, but tend to use traditional characters for traditional art. Various styles of Chinese calligraphy. There are currently two systems for Chinese characters. The traditional system, still used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau and Chinese speaking communities (except Singapore and Malaysia) outside mainland China, takes its form from standardized character forms dating back to the late Han dynasty. The Simplified Chinese character system, developed by the People's Republic of China in 1954 to promote mass literacy, simplifies most complex traditional glyphs to fewer strokes, many to common caoshu shorthand variants. Singapore, which has a large Chinese communities, is the first – and at present the only – foreign nation to officially adopt simplified characters, although it has also become the de facto standard for younger ethnic Chinese in Malaysia. The Internet provides the platform to practice reading the alternative system, be it traditional or simplified. A well-educated Chinese today recognizes approximately 6,000-7,000 characters; some 3,000 characters are required to read a Mainland newspaper. The PRC government defines literacy amongst workers as a knowledge of 2,000 characters, though this would be only functional literacy. A large unabridged dictionary, like the Kangxi Dictionary, contains over 40,000 characters, including obscure, variant, rare, and archaic characters; less than a quarter of these characters are now commonly used.'' Most linguists classify all varieties of modern spoken Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family and believe that there was an original language, termed Proto-Sino-Tibetan, 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 Proto-Sino-Tibetan. 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 Indo-European languages from PIE don't apply to Chinese because of "morphological paucity" especially after Old Chinese Analysis of the concept "wave" in PST. . 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; most present systems rely heavily on Karlgren's insights and methods. Old Chinese ( ), sometimes known as "Archaic Chinese", was the language common during the early and middle Zhōu Dynasty (1122 BCE - 256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the Shījīng, the history of the Shūjīng, and portions of the Yìjīng (I Ching). The phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters 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 was still without tones. Work on reconstructing Old Chinese started with Qīng dynasty philologists. Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably 蜜 mì "honey", 獅 shī "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mǎ "horse", 犬 quǎn "dog", and 鵝 é "goose". The source says the reconstructions of old Chinese are tentative, and not definitive so no conclusions should be drawn. The reconstruction of Old Chinese can not be perfect so this hypothesis may be called into question. Encyclopedia Britannica s.v. "Chinese languages": "Old Chinese vocabulary already contained many words not generally occurring in the other Sino-Tibetan languages. The words for ‘honey' and ‘lion,' and probably also ‘horse,' ‘dog,' and ‘goose,' are connected with Indo-European and were acquired through trade and early contacts. (The nearest known Indo-European languages were Tocharian and Sogdian, a middle Iranian language.) A number of words have Austroasiatic cognates and point to early contacts with the ancestral language of Muong-Vietnamese and Mon-Khmer" ; Jan Ulenbrook, Einige Übereinstimmungen zwischen dem Chinesischen und dem Indogermanischen (1967) proposes 57 items; see also Tsung-tung Chang, 1988 Indo-European Vocabulary in Old Chinese;. 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 the Suí, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the 切韻 "Qièyùn" rhyme table (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the 廣韻 "Guǎngyùn" rhyme table. 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, 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; some scholars have argued that trying to reconstruct, say, modern Cantonese from modern Cantopop rhymes would give a fairly inaccurate picture of the present-day spoken language. The development of the spoken Chinese languages from early historical times to the present has been complex. Most Chinese people, in Sìchuān 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 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 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, though, a single standard of Mandarin did not exist. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The new 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 Standard Mandarin. As a result, Mandarin is now spoken by virtually all young and middle-aged citizens of mainland China and on Taiwan. Standard 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. Chinese was once the Lingua franca for East Asia countries for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. Throughout history Chinese culture and politics has had a great influence on unrelated languages such as Korean 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 Hán tự. It was the only available method for writing Vietnamese until the 14th century, used almost exclusively by Chinese-educated Vietnamese élites. From the 14th to the late 19th century, Vietnamese was written with Chữ nôm, a modified Chinese script incorporating sounds and syllables for native Vietnamese speakers. Chữ nôm was completely replaced by a modified Latin script created by the Jesuit missionary priest Alexander de Rhodes, which incorporates a system of diacritical marks to indicate tones, as well as modified consonants. The Vietnamese language exhibits multiple elements similar to Cantonese in regard to the specific intonations and sharp consonant endings. There is also a slight influence from Mandarin, including the sharper vowels and "kh" (IPA:x) sound 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. In derived Chinese characters or Zhuang logograms to write songs, even though Zhuang is not a Chinese dialect. Since the 1950s, the Zhuang language has been written in a modified Latin alphabet. Zhou, Minglang: Multilingualism in China: The Politics of Writing Reforms for Minority Languages, 1949-2002 (Walter de Gruyter 2003); ISBN 3-11-017896-6; p. 251–258. Languages within the influence of Chinese culture also have a very large number of loanwords from Chinese. Fifty percent or more of Korean vocabulary is of Chinese origin and the influence on Japanese and Vietnamese has been considerable. At least five percent of all words in Tagalog are of Chinese origin. Chinese has also lent a great deal of many grammatical features to these and neighboring languages, notably the lack of gender and the use of classifiers. Japanese has also a lot of loanwords from Chinese, as does Vietnamese. Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of 茶 (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 茄汁 (ke chap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 金橘 (kam kuat). :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, which is only about an eighth as many as English DeFrancis (1984) p.42 counts Chinese as having 1,277 tonal syllables, and about 398 to 418 if tones are disregarded; he cites Jespersen, Otto (1928) Monosyllabism in English; London, p.15 for a count of over 8000 syllables for English. . 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 four main tones of Standard Mandarin applied to the syllable "ma." The tones correspond to these five characters: * "mother" — high level * "hemp" or "torpid" — high rising * "horse" — low falling-rising * "scold" — high falling * "question particle" — neutral The Chinese had no uniform phonetic transcription system until the mid-20th century, although enunciation patterns were recorded in early rime books and dictionaries. Early Sanskrit and Pali Indian translators were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of the language in a foreign language. After 15th century CE Jesuits and Western court missionaries’ efforts result in some rudimentary Latin transcription systems, based on the Nanjing Mandarin dialect. Romanization is the process of transcribing a language in the Latin alphabet. There are many systems of romanization for the Chinese languages due to the Chinese's own lack of phonetic transcription until modern times. Chinese is first known to have been written in Latin characters by Western Christian missionaries in the 16th century. Today the most common romanization standard for Standard Mandarin is Hanyu Pinyin (漢語拼音/汉语拼音), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore). Pinyin is almost universally employed now for teaching standard spoken Chinese in schools and universities across America, Australia and Europe. Chinese parents also use Pinyin to teach their children the sounds and tones for words with which the child is unfamiliar. The Pinyin is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, and alongside the Pinyin is the Chinese symbol. The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859, later modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As it approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels (hence an Anglicization), it may be particularly helpful for beginner speakers of native English background. Wade-Giles is found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan (Taipei city now officially uses Hanyu Pinyin and the rest of the island officially uses Tōngyòng Pinyin 通用拼音). When used within European texts, the tone transcriptions in both pinyin and Wade-Giles are often left out for simplicity; Wade-Giles' extensive use of apostrophes is also usually omitted. Thus, most Western readers will be much more familiar with Beijing than they will be with Běijīng (pinyin), and with Taipei than T'ai²-pei³ (Wade-Giles). Here are a few examples of Hanyu Pinyin and Wade-Giles, for comparison: Other systems of romanization for Chinese include Gwoyeu Romatzyh, the French EFEO, the Yale (invented during WWII for U.S. troops), as well as separate systems for Cantonese, Minnan, Hakka, and other Chinese languages or dialects. Chinese languages have been phonetically transcribed into many other writing systems over the centuries. The 'Phags-pa script, for example, has been very helpful in reconstructing the pronunciations of pre-modern forms of Chinese. Zhuyin (注音, also known as bopomofo), a semi-syllabary is still widely used in Taiwan's elementary schools to aid standard pronunciation. Although bopomofo characters are reminiscent of katakana script, there is no source to substantiate the claim that Katakana was the basis for the zhuyin system. A comparison table of zhuyin to pinyin exists in the zhuyin article. Syllables based on pinyin and zhuyin can also be compared by looking at the following articles: *Pinyin table *Zhuyin table There are also at least two systems of cyrillization for Chinese. The most widespread is the Palladius system. Modern Chinese has often been erroneously classed as a "monosyllabic" language. While most of the morphemes are single syllable, modern Chinese today is much less a monosyllabic language in that nouns, adjectives and verbs are largely di-syllabic. The tendency to create disyllabic words in the modern Chinese languages, particularly in Mandarin, has been particularly pronounced when compared to Classical Chinese. Classical Chinese is a highly isolating language, with each idea (morpheme) generally corresponding to a single syllable and a single character; Modern Chinese though, has the tendency to form new words through disyllabic, trisyllabic and tetra-character agglutination. In fact, some linguists argue that classifying modern Chinese as an isolating language is misleading, for this reason alone. Chinese morphology is strictly bound to a set number of syllables with a fairly rigid construction which are the morphemes, the smallest blocks of the language. While many of these single-syllable morphemes ( zì, 字 in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cí (词/詞), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cí (“word”) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more. For example: *Yun 云 -“cloud” *Hanbaobao 汉堡包 –“hamburger” *Wo 我 –“I, me” *Renmin 人民 –“people” *Diqiu 地球 –“earth(globosity)” *Shandian 闪电 –“lightning” *Meng 梦 –“dream” All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphology — i.e., changes in form of a word — to indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflections – it possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English), and no gender. They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le 了, hai 还, yijing 已经, etc. 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. Chinese also has an extensive system of measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring 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. Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess 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. Official modern Mandarin has only 400 spoken monosyllables but over 10,000 written characters, so there are many homophones only distinguishable by the four tones. Even this is often not enough unless the context and exact phrase or cí is identified. The mono-syllable jī, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: 雞/鸡 chicken, 機/机 machine, 基 basic, 擊/击 (to) hit, 饑/饥 hunger, and 積/积 sum. In speech, the glyphing of a monosyllable to its meaning must be determined by context or by relation to other morphemes (e.g. "some" as in the opposite of "none"). Native speakers may state which words or phrases their names are found in, for convenience of writing: 名字叫嘉英，嘉陵江的嘉，英國的英 Míngzi jiào Jiāyīng, Jiālíng Jiāng de jiā, Yīngguó de yīng "My name is Jiāyīng, the Jia for Jialing River and the ying for the short form in Chinese of UK." Southern Chinese varieties like Cantonese and Hakka preserved more of the rimes of Middle Chinese and have more tones. The previous examples of jī, for instance, 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 multi-syllabic words. The entire Chinese character corpus since antiquity comprises well over 20,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are now commonly in use. However Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words, there are many times more Chinese words than there are characters as most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters. Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and phrases vary greatly. The Hanyu Da Zidian, an all-inclusive compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries for characters, including bone oracle versions. The Zhonghua Zihai 中华字海 (1994) contains 85,568 head entries for character definitions, and is the largest reference work based purely on character and its literary variants. The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary, the 12-volumed Hanyu Da Cidian 汉语大词典, records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters, and gives over 370,000 definitions. The 1999 revised Cihai, a multi-volume encyclopedic dictionary reference work, gives 122,836 vocabulary entry definitions under 19,485 Chinese characters, including proper names, phrases and common zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific and technical terms. The latest 2007 5th edition of Xiandai Hanyu Cidian 现代汉语词典, an authoritative one-volume dictionary on modern standard Chinese language as used in mainland China, has 65,000 entries and defines 11,000 head characters. Like any other language, Chinese has absorbed a sizeable amount of loanwords from other cultures. 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 since Old Chinese include 葡萄 "grape," 石榴 "pomegranate" and 狮子/獅子 "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including 佛 "Buddha" and 菩萨/菩薩 "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as 胡同 "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as 葡萄 "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or Pāli, the liturgical languages of North India. Words borrowed from the nomadic tribes of the Gobi, Mongolian or northeast regions generally have Altaic etymologies, such as 琵琶 "pípa", the Chinese lute, or 酪 "cheese" or "yoghurt", but from exactly which Altaic source is not always entirely clear. Foreign words continue to enter the Chinese language by transcription according to their pronunciations. This is done by employing Chinese characters with similar pronunciations. For example, "Israel" becomes 以色列 (pinyin: yǐsèliè), Paris 巴黎. A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including 沙發 shāfā "sofa," 马达/馬達 mǎdá "motor," 幽默 yōumò "humour," 逻辑/邏輯 luójí "logic," 时髦/時髦 shímáo "smart, fashionable" and 歇斯底里 xiēsīdǐlǐ "hysterics." The bulk of these words were originally coined in the Shanghainese dialect during the early 20th century and were later loaned into Mandarin, hence their pronunciations in Mandarin may be quite off from the English. For example, 沙发/沙發 and 马达/馬達 in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor." Today, 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 德律风/德律風 ( Shanghainese: télífon [ ], Standard Mandarin: délǜfēng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese 电话/電話 (diànhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include 电视/電視 (diànshì "electric vision") for television, 电脑/電腦 (diànnǎo "electric brain") for computer; 手机/手機 (shǒujī "hand machine") for cellphone, and 蓝牙/藍芽 (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. 網誌(wǎng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as 汉堡包/漢堡包 (hànbǎo bāo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as 拖拉机/拖拉機 (tuōlājī, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马利奥/馬利奧 for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example 奔腾/奔騰 (bēnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and 赛百味/賽百味 (Sàibǎiwèi "better-than hundred tastes") for Subway restaurants. Since the 20th century, another source has been Japan. Using existing kanji, which are Chinese characters used in the Japanese language, the Japanese re-moulded European concepts and inventions into wasei-kango (和製漢語, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include diànhuà (电话/電話, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社会, shakai, "society"), kēxué (科学/科學, kagaku, "science") and chōuxiàng (抽象, chūshō, "abstract"). Other terms were coined by the Japanese by giving new senses to existing Chinese terms or by referring to expressions used in classical Chinese literature. For example, jīngjì (经济/經濟, keizai), which in the original Chinese meant "the workings of the state", was narrowed to "economy" in Japanese; this narrowed definition was then reimported into Chinese. As a result, these terms are virtually indistinguishable from native Chinese words: indeed, there is some dispute over some of these terms as to whether the Japanese or Chinese coined them first. As a result of this toing-and-froing process, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese share a corpus linguistics of terms describing modern terminology, in parallel to a similar corpus of terms built from Greco-Latin terms shared among European languages. Taiwanese and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便当/便當 “lunchbox or boxed lunch” (from bento) and 料理 “prepared cuisine”, have passed into common currency. Western foreign words have great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came 芭蕾 (bāléi, "ballet"), 香槟 (xiāngbīn, "champagne"), via Italian 咖啡 (kāfēi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned 沙發 (shāfā "sofa"), 幽默 (yōumò "humour"), and 高尔夫 (gāoěrfū, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪斯科 (dísīkè, "disco"), 可乐 (kělè, "cola") and 迷你 (mínǐ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon 卡通 (cartoon), 基佬 (gay people), 的士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. 粉絲 (fěnsī, "fans"), 駭客 (hèikè, "hacker"), 部落格(bùluōgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin. Since the People's Republic of China’s economic and political rise in recent years, standard Mandarin has become an increasingly popular subject of study amongst the young in the Western world, as in the UK. BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | How hard is it to learn Chinese? In 1991 there were 2,000 foreign learners taking China's official Chinese Proficiency Test (comparable to English's Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660 . *Chinese characters *Chinese honorifics *Chinese measure word *Chinese number gestures *Chinese numerals *Chinese punctuation *Chinese exclamative particles *Four-character idiom *Han unification *Haner language *HSK test *Languages of China *North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics *Nü shu * * * * * * Keys to the Chinese Language: Book II - Google Books * A Practical Chinese Grammar - Google Books * ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawai’i Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X. * ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-08248-2975-9. * Arch Chinese free online Chinese character and Pinyin learning, Chinese English dictionary, writing worksheet generation, etc. * CHINGLISH online Chinese English Dictionary * nciku free online Chinese dictionary with handwriting recognition, pinyin, sound clips, etc. * MDBG free online Chinese-English dictionary * Chinese Characters Dictionary: supports Japanese, Korean, Cantonese, Hakka etc. * Chinese - English Dictionary: from Webster's Online Dictionary - the Rosetta Edition * CEDICT Chinese-English Dictionary Project * Stardict free (GPL) multilanguage dictionary including simplified/traditional Chinese for Unix (Linux, FreeBSD, etc.) and win32 * English-Chinese Translation Dictionary: Chinese-English-Chinese Online Dictionary (Taiwan-based; simplified characters not recognised) * CantoDict: Cantonese-English Dictionary Project * Chinese Pronunciation Dictionary Input Chinese words or sentences, get audio file of Mandarin pronunciation. Web-based tool. * Pinyin Annotator Add pinyin on top of any Chinese text. Mouse over any word to see English translation. Save output to OpenOffice Writer format. Prints nicely. Also adds pinyin to any Chinese web page. *Firefox users can install Add-ons for a pinyin annotator * Multimedia Dictionary of Chinese Characters Language Tool, Offline Chinese Dictionary. * Chinese Scholar Dictionary Chinese English dictionary with Pinyin index * A Cognitive Approach to Beginning Chinese: Interactions I and II. Margaret Mian Yan and Jennifer Li-chia Liu, Indiana University * Chinese Language Information Page A collection of Chinese language learning resources. * Learn Chinese - One At A Time * China KeyBoard Google Engine * Oneaday.org One Chinese idiom a day (simplified and traditional characters) with pinyin transliteration and English translation. * Mandarin Tone Drill Testing your knowledge of Mandarin tones. * Pinyin Practice Pinyin practice for Mandarin learners in all levels * Marjorie Chan's ChinaLinks: A large collection of Web resources by a professor of linguistics at Ohio State University * 4 words of Chinese every day * Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard * Chinese Character of the Day Learn to Read Chinese one word at a time. * Audio files with basic Chinese words * General Introduction of Chinese Language * Learn Chinese Characters * Chinese Scholar: The Free Chinese Class Learn Chinese language and culture through interactive media
Chinese_language
What is Chinese language`s first name?
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Chinese_language Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) is a language family consisting of languages mutually unintelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. “The mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.” *Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. “The Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.” *Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. “The modern Chinese dialects are really more like a family of language. *John DeFrancis. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (1984), p.56. "To call Chinese a single language composed of dialects with varying degrees of difference is to mislead by minimizing disparities that according to Chao are as great as those between English and Dutch. To call Chinese a family of languages is to suggest extralinguistic differences that in fact do not exist and to overlook the unique linguistic situation that exists in China." Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the two branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages. About one-fifth of the world’s population, or over one billion people, speak some form of Chinese as their native language. The identification of the varieties of Chinese as "dialects" instead of "languages" is considered inappropriate by linguists and Sinologists. Spoken Chinese is distinguished by its high level of internal diversity, although all spoken varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic. There are between seven and thirteen main regional groups of Chinese (depending on classification scheme), of which the most spoken, by far, is Mandarin (about 850 million), followed by Wu (90 million), Min (70 million) and Cantonese (70 million). Most of these groups are mutually unintelligible, although some, like Xiang and the Southwest Mandarin dialects, may share common terms and some degree of intelligibility. Chinese is classified as a macrolanguage with 13 sub-languages in ISO 639-3, though the identification of the varieties of Chinese as multiple "languages" or as "dialects" of a single language is a contentious issue. The standardized form of spoken Chinese is Standard Mandarin (Putonghua / Guoyu / Huayu), based on the Beijing dialect, which is part of a larger group of North-Eastern and South-Western dialects, often taken as a separate language, see Mandarin Chinese for more, this language can be referred to as 官话 Guānhuà or 北方话 Běifānghuà in Chinese. Standard Mandarin is the official language of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC), as well as one of four official languages of Singapore. Chinese—de facto, Standard Mandarin—is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Of the other varieties, Standard Cantonese is common and influential in Guangdong Province and Cantonese-speaking overseas communities, and remains one of the official languages of Hong Kong (together with English) and of Macau (together with Portuguese). Hokkien, part of the Min language group, is widely spoken in southern Fujian, in neighbouring Taiwan (where it is known as Taiwanese or Hoklo) and in Southeast Asia (where it dominates in Singapore and Malaysia). Xinhua reported in March 2007 that 86 percent of people in the People's Republic of China spoke a Chinese variant. 全國約有53%的人能用普通話交流 As a language family, the number of Chinese speakers is 1.136 billion. The same news report indicates 53 percent of the population, or 700 million speakers, can effectively communicate in Putonghua. Sino-Tibetan language family. A map below depicts the linguistic subdivisions ("languages" or "dialect groups") within China itself. The traditionally-recognized seven main groups, in order of population size are: Chinese linguists have recently distinguished: 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. The Dungan language, spoken in Central Asia, is very closely related to Mandarin. However, it is not generally considered "Chinese" since it is written in Cyrillic and spoken by Dungan people outside China who are not considered ethnic Chinese. See List of Chinese dialects for a comprehensive listing of individual dialects within these large, broad groupings. In general, the above language-dialect groups do not have sharp boundaries, though Mandarin is the predominant Sinitic language in the North and the Southwest, and the rest are mostly spoken in Central or Southeastern China. Frequently, as in the case of the Guangdong province, native speakers of major variants overlapped. As with many areas that were linguistically diverse for a long time, it is not always clear how the speeches of various parts of China should be classified. The Ethnologue lists a total of 14, but the number varies between seven and seventeen depending on the classification scheme followed. For instance, the Min variety is often divided into Northern Min (Minbei, Fuchow) and Southern Min (Minnan, Amoy-Swatow); linguists have not determined whether their mutual intelligibility is small enough to sort them as separate languages. The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China. In general, mountainous South China displays more linguistic diversity than the flat North China. In parts of South China, a major city's dialect may only 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). Putonghua / Guoyu, often called "Mandarin", is the official standard language used by the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China, and Singapore (where it is called "Huayu"). It is based on the Beijing dialect, which is the dialect of Mandarin as spoken in Beijing. The governments intend for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. Therefore it is used in government agencies, in the media, and as a language of instruction in schools. In mainland China and Taiwan, diglossia has been a common feature: it is common for a Chinese to be able to speak two or even three varieties of the Sinitic languages (or “dialects”) together with Standard Mandarin. For example, in addition to putonghua a resident of Shanghai might speak Shanghainese and, if they did not grow up there, his or her local dialect as well. A native of Guangzhou may speak Standard Cantonese and putonghua, a resident of Taiwan, both Taiwanese and putonghua/guoyu. A person living in Taiwan 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, Standard Mandarin is beginning to take its place beside English and Standard Cantonese, the official languages. Linguists often view Chinese as a language family, though owing to China's socio-political and cultural situation, and the fact that all spoken varieties use one common written system, it is customary to refer to these generally mutually unintelligible variants as "the Chinese language". The diversity of Sinitic variants is comparable to the Romance languages. From a purely descriptive point of view, "languages" and "dialects" are simply arbitrary groups of similar idiolects, and the distinction is irrelevant to linguists who are only concerned with describing regional speeches technically. However, the idea of a single language has major overtones in politics and cultural self-identity, and explains the amount of emotion over this issue. Most Chinese and Chinese linguists refer to Chinese as a single language and its subdivisions dialects, while others call Chinese a language family. Chinese itself has a term for its unified writing system, Zhongwen (中文), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (汉语,“spoken language[s] of the Han Chinese) – this term could be translated to either “language” or “languages” since Chinese possesses no grammatical numbers. In the Chinese language, there is much less need for a uniform speech-and-writing continuum, as indicated by two separate character morphemes 语 yu and 文 wen. Ethnic Chinese often consider these spoken variations as one single language for reasons of nationality and as they inherit one common cultural and linguistic heritage in Classical Chinese. Han native speakers of Wu, Min, Hakka, and Cantonese, for instance, may consider their own linguistic varieties as separate spoken languages, but the Han Chinese race as one – albeit internally very diverse – ethnicity. To Chinese nationalists, the idea of Chinese as a language family may suggest that the Chinese identity is much more fragmentary and disunified than it actually is and as such is often looked upon as culturally and politically provocative. Additionally, in Taiwan, it is closely associated with Taiwanese independence, where some supporters of Taiwanese independence promote the local Taiwanese Minnan-based spoken language. Within the People’s Republic of China and Singapore, it is common for the government to refer to all divisions of the Sinitic language(s) beside Standard Mandarin as fangyan (“regional tongues”, often translated as “dialects”). Modern-day Chinese speakers of all kinds communicate using one formal standard written language, although this modern written standard is modeled after Mandarin, generally the modern Beijing substandard. The term sinophone, coined in analogy to anglophone and francophone, refers to those who speak the Chinese language natively, or prefer it as a medium of communication. The term is derived from Sinae, the Latin word for ancient China. :See also: Classical Chinese and Vernacular Chinese The relationship among the Chinese spoken and written languages is rather complex. Its spoken variations evolved at different rates, while written Chinese itself has changed much less. Classical Chinese literature began in the Spring and Autumn period, although written records have been discovered as far back as the 14th to 11th centuries BCE Shang dynasty oracle bones using the oracle bone scripts. The Chinese orthography centers around Chinese characters, hanzi, which are written within imaginary rectangular blocks, traditionally arranged in vertical columns, read from top to bottom down a column, and right to left across columns. Chinese characters are morphemes independent of phonetic change. Thus the number "one", yi in Mandarin, yat in Cantonese and chi̍t and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("一"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as 冇 and 係 for Cantonese and Hakka, which are considered archaic or unused in standard written Chinese. Written colloquial Cantonese has become quite popular in online chat rooms and instant messaging amongst Hong-Kongers and Cantonese-speakers elsewhere. Use of it is considered highly informal, and does not extend to any formal occasion. Also, in Hunan, some women write their local language in Nü Shu, a syllabary derived from Chinese characters. The Dungan language, considered by some 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 evolved over time from earliest forms of hieroglyphs. The idea that all Chinese characters are either pictographs or ideographs is an erroneous one: most characters contain phonetic parts, and are composites of phonetic components and semantic Radicals. Only the simplest characters, such as ren 人 (human), ri 日 (sun), shan 山 (mountain), shui 水 (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar Xǚ Shèn in the Hàn Dynasty classified characters into 6 categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80-90% as phonetic complexes consisting of a semantic element that indicates meaning, and a phonetic element that indicates the pronunciation. Generally, the phonetic element is more accurate and more important than the semantic one. There are about 214 radicals recognized in the Kangxi Dictionary. Modern characters are styled after the standard script (楷书/楷書 kǎishū) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (篆书/篆書 zhuànshū), cursive script (草书/草書 cǎoshū) and clerical script (隶书/隸書 lìshū). Calligraphy artists can write in traditional and simplified characters, but tend to use traditional characters for traditional art. Various styles of Chinese calligraphy. There are currently two systems for Chinese characters. The traditional system, still used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau and Chinese speaking communities (except Singapore and Malaysia) outside mainland China, takes its form from standardized character forms dating back to the late Han dynasty. The Simplified Chinese character system, developed by the People's Republic of China in 1954 to promote mass literacy, simplifies most complex traditional glyphs to fewer strokes, many to common caoshu shorthand variants. Singapore, which has a large Chinese communities, is the first – and at present the only – foreign nation to officially adopt simplified characters, although it has also become the de facto standard for younger ethnic Chinese in Malaysia. The Internet provides the platform to practice reading the alternative system, be it traditional or simplified. A well-educated Chinese today recognizes approximately 6,000-7,000 characters; some 3,000 characters are required to read a Mainland newspaper. The PRC government defines literacy amongst workers as a knowledge of 2,000 characters, though this would be only functional literacy. A large unabridged dictionary, like the Kangxi Dictionary, contains over 40,000 characters, including obscure, variant, rare, and archaic characters; less than a quarter of these characters are now commonly used.'' Most linguists classify all varieties of modern spoken Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family and believe that there was an original language, termed Proto-Sino-Tibetan, 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 Proto-Sino-Tibetan. 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 Indo-European languages from PIE don't apply to Chinese because of "morphological paucity" especially after Old Chinese Analysis of the concept "wave" in PST. . 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; most present systems rely heavily on Karlgren's insights and methods. Old Chinese ( ), sometimes known as "Archaic Chinese", was the language common during the early and middle Zhōu Dynasty (1122 BCE - 256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the Shījīng, the history of the Shūjīng, and portions of the Yìjīng (I Ching). The phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters 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 was still without tones. Work on reconstructing Old Chinese started with Qīng dynasty philologists. Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably 蜜 mì "honey", 獅 shī "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mǎ "horse", 犬 quǎn "dog", and 鵝 é "goose". The source says the reconstructions of old Chinese are tentative, and not definitive so no conclusions should be drawn. The reconstruction of Old Chinese can not be perfect so this hypothesis may be called into question. Encyclopedia Britannica s.v. "Chinese languages": "Old Chinese vocabulary already contained many words not generally occurring in the other Sino-Tibetan languages. The words for ‘honey' and ‘lion,' and probably also ‘horse,' ‘dog,' and ‘goose,' are connected with Indo-European and were acquired through trade and early contacts. (The nearest known Indo-European languages were Tocharian and Sogdian, a middle Iranian language.) A number of words have Austroasiatic cognates and point to early contacts with the ancestral language of Muong-Vietnamese and Mon-Khmer" ; Jan Ulenbrook, Einige Übereinstimmungen zwischen dem Chinesischen und dem Indogermanischen (1967) proposes 57 items; see also Tsung-tung Chang, 1988 Indo-European Vocabulary in Old Chinese;. 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 the Suí, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the 切韻 "Qièyùn" rhyme table (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the 廣韻 "Guǎngyùn" rhyme table. 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, 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; some scholars have argued that trying to reconstruct, say, modern Cantonese from modern Cantopop rhymes would give a fairly inaccurate picture of the present-day spoken language. The development of the spoken Chinese languages from early historical times to the present has been complex. Most Chinese people, in Sìchuān 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 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 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, though, a single standard of Mandarin did not exist. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The new 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 Standard Mandarin. As a result, Mandarin is now spoken by virtually all young and middle-aged citizens of mainland China and on Taiwan. Standard 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. Chinese was once the Lingua franca for East Asia countries for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. Throughout history Chinese culture and politics has had a great influence on unrelated languages such as Korean 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 Hán tự. It was the only available method for writing Vietnamese until the 14th century, used almost exclusively by Chinese-educated Vietnamese élites. From the 14th to the late 19th century, Vietnamese was written with Chữ nôm, a modified Chinese script incorporating sounds and syllables for native Vietnamese speakers. Chữ nôm was completely replaced by a modified Latin script created by the Jesuit missionary priest Alexander de Rhodes, which incorporates a system of diacritical marks to indicate tones, as well as modified consonants. The Vietnamese language exhibits multiple elements similar to Cantonese in regard to the specific intonations and sharp consonant endings. There is also a slight influence from Mandarin, including the sharper vowels and "kh" (IPA:x) sound 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. In derived Chinese characters or Zhuang logograms to write songs, even though Zhuang is not a Chinese dialect. Since the 1950s, the Zhuang language has been written in a modified Latin alphabet. Zhou, Minglang: Multilingualism in China: The Politics of Writing Reforms for Minority Languages, 1949-2002 (Walter de Gruyter 2003); ISBN 3-11-017896-6; p. 251–258. Languages within the influence of Chinese culture also have a very large number of loanwords from Chinese. Fifty percent or more of Korean vocabulary is of Chinese origin and the influence on Japanese and Vietnamese has been considerable. At least five percent of all words in Tagalog are of Chinese origin. Chinese has also lent a great deal of many grammatical features to these and neighboring languages, notably the lack of gender and the use of classifiers. Japanese has also a lot of loanwords from Chinese, as does Vietnamese. Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of 茶 (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 茄汁 (ke chap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 金橘 (kam kuat). :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, which is only about an eighth as many as English DeFrancis (1984) p.42 counts Chinese as having 1,277 tonal syllables, and about 398 to 418 if tones are disregarded; he cites Jespersen, Otto (1928) Monosyllabism in English; London, p.15 for a count of over 8000 syllables for English. . 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 four main tones of Standard Mandarin applied to the syllable "ma." The tones correspond to these five characters: * "mother" — high level * "hemp" or "torpid" — high rising * "horse" — low falling-rising * "scold" — high falling * "question particle" — neutral The Chinese had no uniform phonetic transcription system until the mid-20th century, although enunciation patterns were recorded in early rime books and dictionaries. Early Sanskrit and Pali Indian translators were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of the language in a foreign language. After 15th century CE Jesuits and Western court missionaries’ efforts result in some rudimentary Latin transcription systems, based on the Nanjing Mandarin dialect. Romanization is the process of transcribing a language in the Latin alphabet. There are many systems of romanization for the Chinese languages due to the Chinese's own lack of phonetic transcription until modern times. Chinese is first known to have been written in Latin characters by Western Christian missionaries in the 16th century. Today the most common romanization standard for Standard Mandarin is Hanyu Pinyin (漢語拼音/汉语拼音), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore). Pinyin is almost universally employed now for teaching standard spoken Chinese in schools and universities across America, Australia and Europe. Chinese parents also use Pinyin to teach their children the sounds and tones for words with which the child is unfamiliar. The Pinyin is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, and alongside the Pinyin is the Chinese symbol. The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859, later modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As it approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels (hence an Anglicization), it may be particularly helpful for beginner speakers of native English background. Wade-Giles is found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan (Taipei city now officially uses Hanyu Pinyin and the rest of the island officially uses Tōngyòng Pinyin 通用拼音). When used within European texts, the tone transcriptions in both pinyin and Wade-Giles are often left out for simplicity; Wade-Giles' extensive use of apostrophes is also usually omitted. Thus, most Western readers will be much more familiar with Beijing than they will be with Běijīng (pinyin), and with Taipei than T'ai²-pei³ (Wade-Giles). Here are a few examples of Hanyu Pinyin and Wade-Giles, for comparison: Other systems of romanization for Chinese include Gwoyeu Romatzyh, the French EFEO, the Yale (invented during WWII for U.S. troops), as well as separate systems for Cantonese, Minnan, Hakka, and other Chinese languages or dialects. Chinese languages have been phonetically transcribed into many other writing systems over the centuries. The 'Phags-pa script, for example, has been very helpful in reconstructing the pronunciations of pre-modern forms of Chinese. Zhuyin (注音, also known as bopomofo), a semi-syllabary is still widely used in Taiwan's elementary schools to aid standard pronunciation. Although bopomofo characters are reminiscent of katakana script, there is no source to substantiate the claim that Katakana was the basis for the zhuyin system. A comparison table of zhuyin to pinyin exists in the zhuyin article. Syllables based on pinyin and zhuyin can also be compared by looking at the following articles: *Pinyin table *Zhuyin table There are also at least two systems of cyrillization for Chinese. The most widespread is the Palladius system. Modern Chinese has often been erroneously classed as a "monosyllabic" language. While most of the morphemes are single syllable, modern Chinese today is much less a monosyllabic language in that nouns, adjectives and verbs are largely di-syllabic. The tendency to create disyllabic words in the modern Chinese languages, particularly in Mandarin, has been particularly pronounced when compared to Classical Chinese. Classical Chinese is a highly isolating language, with each idea (morpheme) generally corresponding to a single syllable and a single character; Modern Chinese though, has the tendency to form new words through disyllabic, trisyllabic and tetra-character agglutination. In fact, some linguists argue that classifying modern Chinese as an isolating language is misleading, for this reason alone. Chinese morphology is strictly bound to a set number of syllables with a fairly rigid construction which are the morphemes, the smallest blocks of the language. While many of these single-syllable morphemes ( zì, 字 in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cí (词/詞), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cí (“word”) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more. For example: *Yun 云 -“cloud” *Hanbaobao 汉堡包 –“hamburger” *Wo 我 –“I, me” *Renmin 人民 –“people” *Diqiu 地球 –“earth(globosity)” *Shandian 闪电 –“lightning” *Meng 梦 –“dream” All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphology — i.e., changes in form of a word — to indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflections – it possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English), and no gender. They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le 了, hai 还, yijing 已经, etc. 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. Chinese also has an extensive system of measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring 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. Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess 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. Official modern Mandarin has only 400 spoken monosyllables but over 10,000 written characters, so there are many homophones only distinguishable by the four tones. Even this is often not enough unless the context and exact phrase or cí is identified. The mono-syllable jī, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: 雞/鸡 chicken, 機/机 machine, 基 basic, 擊/击 (to) hit, 饑/饥 hunger, and 積/积 sum. In speech, the glyphing of a monosyllable to its meaning must be determined by context or by relation to other morphemes (e.g. "some" as in the opposite of "none"). Native speakers may state which words or phrases their names are found in, for convenience of writing: 名字叫嘉英，嘉陵江的嘉，英國的英 Míngzi jiào Jiāyīng, Jiālíng Jiāng de jiā, Yīngguó de yīng "My name is Jiāyīng, the Jia for Jialing River and the ying for the short form in Chinese of UK." Southern Chinese varieties like Cantonese and Hakka preserved more of the rimes of Middle Chinese and have more tones. The previous examples of jī, for instance, 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 multi-syllabic words. The entire Chinese character corpus since antiquity comprises well over 20,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are now commonly in use. However Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words, there are many times more Chinese words than there are characters as most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters. Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and phrases vary greatly. The Hanyu Da Zidian, an all-inclusive compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries for characters, including bone oracle versions. The Zhonghua Zihai 中华字海 (1994) contains 85,568 head entries for character definitions, and is the largest reference work based purely on character and its literary variants. The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary, the 12-volumed Hanyu Da Cidian 汉语大词典, records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters, and gives over 370,000 definitions. The 1999 revised Cihai, a multi-volume encyclopedic dictionary reference work, gives 122,836 vocabulary entry definitions under 19,485 Chinese characters, including proper names, phrases and common zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific and technical terms. The latest 2007 5th edition of Xiandai Hanyu Cidian 现代汉语词典, an authoritative one-volume dictionary on modern standard Chinese language as used in mainland China, has 65,000 entries and defines 11,000 head characters. Like any other language, Chinese has absorbed a sizeable amount of loanwords from other cultures. 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 since Old Chinese include 葡萄 "grape," 石榴 "pomegranate" and 狮子/獅子 "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including 佛 "Buddha" and 菩萨/菩薩 "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as 胡同 "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as 葡萄 "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or Pāli, the liturgical languages of North India. Words borrowed from the nomadic tribes of the Gobi, Mongolian or northeast regions generally have Altaic etymologies, such as 琵琶 "pípa", the Chinese lute, or 酪 "cheese" or "yoghurt", but from exactly which Altaic source is not always entirely clear. Foreign words continue to enter the Chinese language by transcription according to their pronunciations. This is done by employing Chinese characters with similar pronunciations. For example, "Israel" becomes 以色列 (pinyin: yǐsèliè), Paris 巴黎. A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including 沙發 shāfā "sofa," 马达/馬達 mǎdá "motor," 幽默 yōumò "humour," 逻辑/邏輯 luójí "logic," 时髦/時髦 shímáo "smart, fashionable" and 歇斯底里 xiēsīdǐlǐ "hysterics." The bulk of these words were originally coined in the Shanghainese dialect during the early 20th century and were later loaned into Mandarin, hence their pronunciations in Mandarin may be quite off from the English. For example, 沙发/沙發 and 马达/馬達 in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor." Today, 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 德律风/德律風 ( Shanghainese: télífon [ ], Standard Mandarin: délǜfēng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese 电话/電話 (diànhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include 电视/電視 (diànshì "electric vision") for television, 电脑/電腦 (diànnǎo "electric brain") for computer; 手机/手機 (shǒujī "hand machine") for cellphone, and 蓝牙/藍芽 (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. 網誌(wǎng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as 汉堡包/漢堡包 (hànbǎo bāo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as 拖拉机/拖拉機 (tuōlājī, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马利奥/馬利奧 for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example 奔腾/奔騰 (bēnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and 赛百味/賽百味 (Sàibǎiwèi "better-than hundred tastes") for Subway restaurants. Since the 20th century, another source has been Japan. Using existing kanji, which are Chinese characters used in the Japanese language, the Japanese re-moulded European concepts and inventions into wasei-kango (和製漢語, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include diànhuà (电话/電話, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社会, shakai, "society"), kēxué (科学/科學, kagaku, "science") and chōuxiàng (抽象, chūshō, "abstract"). Other terms were coined by the Japanese by giving new senses to existing Chinese terms or by referring to expressions used in classical Chinese literature. For example, jīngjì (经济/經濟, keizai), which in the original Chinese meant "the workings of the state", was narrowed to "economy" in Japanese; this narrowed definition was then reimported into Chinese. As a result, these terms are virtually indistinguishable from native Chinese words: indeed, there is some dispute over some of these terms as to whether the Japanese or Chinese coined them first. As a result of this toing-and-froing process, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese share a corpus linguistics of terms describing modern terminology, in parallel to a similar corpus of terms built from Greco-Latin terms shared among European languages. Taiwanese and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便当/便當 “lunchbox or boxed lunch” (from bento) and 料理 “prepared cuisine”, have passed into common currency. Western foreign words have great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came 芭蕾 (bāléi, "ballet"), 香槟 (xiāngbīn, "champagne"), via Italian 咖啡 (kāfēi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned 沙發 (shāfā "sofa"), 幽默 (yōumò "humour"), and 高尔夫 (gāoěrfū, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪斯科 (dísīkè, "disco"), 可乐 (kělè, "cola") and 迷你 (mínǐ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon 卡通 (cartoon), 基佬 (gay people), 的士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. 粉絲 (fěnsī, "fans"), 駭客 (hèikè, "hacker"), 部落格(bùluōgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin. Since the People's Republic of China’s economic and political rise in recent years, standard Mandarin has become an increasingly popular subject of study amongst the young in the Western world, as in the UK. BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | How hard is it to learn Chinese? In 1991 there were 2,000 foreign learners taking China's official Chinese Proficiency Test (comparable to English's Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660 . *Chinese characters *Chinese honorifics *Chinese measure word *Chinese number gestures *Chinese numerals *Chinese punctuation *Chinese exclamative particles *Four-character idiom *Han unification *Haner language *HSK test *Languages of China *North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics *Nü shu * * * * * * Keys to the Chinese Language: Book II - Google Books * A Practical Chinese Grammar - Google Books * ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawai’i Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X. * ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-08248-2975-9. * Arch Chinese free online Chinese character and Pinyin learning, Chinese English dictionary, writing worksheet generation, etc. * CHINGLISH online Chinese English Dictionary * nciku free online Chinese dictionary with handwriting recognition, pinyin, sound clips, etc. * MDBG free online Chinese-English dictionary * Chinese Characters Dictionary: supports Japanese, Korean, Cantonese, Hakka etc. * Chinese - English Dictionary: from Webster's Online Dictionary - the Rosetta Edition * CEDICT Chinese-English Dictionary Project * Stardict free (GPL) multilanguage dictionary including simplified/traditional Chinese for Unix (Linux, FreeBSD, etc.) and win32 * English-Chinese Translation Dictionary: Chinese-English-Chinese Online Dictionary (Taiwan-based; simplified characters not recognised) * CantoDict: Cantonese-English Dictionary Project * Chinese Pronunciation Dictionary Input Chinese words or sentences, get audio file of Mandarin pronunciation. Web-based tool. * Pinyin Annotator Add pinyin on top of any Chinese text. Mouse over any word to see English translation. Save output to OpenOffice Writer format. Prints nicely. Also adds pinyin to any Chinese web page. *Firefox users can install Add-ons for a pinyin annotator * Multimedia Dictionary of Chinese Characters Language Tool, Offline Chinese Dictionary. * Chinese Scholar Dictionary Chinese English dictionary with Pinyin index * A Cognitive Approach to Beginning Chinese: Interactions I and II. Margaret Mian Yan and Jennifer Li-chia Liu, Indiana University * Chinese Language Information Page A collection of Chinese language learning resources. * Learn Chinese - One At A Time * China KeyBoard Google Engine * Oneaday.org One Chinese idiom a day (simplified and traditional characters) with pinyin transliteration and English translation. * Mandarin Tone Drill Testing your knowledge of Mandarin tones. * Pinyin Practice Pinyin practice for Mandarin learners in all levels * Marjorie Chan's ChinaLinks: A large collection of Web resources by a professor of linguistics at Ohio State University * 4 words of Chinese every day * Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard * Chinese Character of the Day Learn to Read Chinese one word at a time. * Audio files with basic Chinese words * General Introduction of Chinese Language * Learn Chinese Characters * Chinese Scholar: The Free Chinese Class Learn Chinese language and culture through interactive media
Chinese_language
What is Chinese language`s last name?
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Chinese_language Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) is a language family consisting of languages mutually unintelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. “The mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.” *Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. “The Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.” *Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. “The modern Chinese dialects are really more like a family of language. *John DeFrancis. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (1984), p.56. "To call Chinese a single language composed of dialects with varying degrees of difference is to mislead by minimizing disparities that according to Chao are as great as those between English and Dutch. To call Chinese a family of languages is to suggest extralinguistic differences that in fact do not exist and to overlook the unique linguistic situation that exists in China." Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the two branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages. About one-fifth of the world’s population, or over one billion people, speak some form of Chinese as their native language. The identification of the varieties of Chinese as "dialects" instead of "languages" is considered inappropriate by linguists and Sinologists. Spoken Chinese is distinguished by its high level of internal diversity, although all spoken varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic. There are between seven and thirteen main regional groups of Chinese (depending on classification scheme), of which the most spoken, by far, is Mandarin (about 850 million), followed by Wu (90 million), Min (70 million) and Cantonese (70 million). Most of these groups are mutually unintelligible, although some, like Xiang and the Southwest Mandarin dialects, may share common terms and some degree of intelligibility. Chinese is classified as a macrolanguage with 13 sub-languages in ISO 639-3, though the identification of the varieties of Chinese as multiple "languages" or as "dialects" of a single language is a contentious issue. The standardized form of spoken Chinese is Standard Mandarin (Putonghua / Guoyu / Huayu), based on the Beijing dialect, which is part of a larger group of North-Eastern and South-Western dialects, often taken as a separate language, see Mandarin Chinese for more, this language can be referred to as 官话 Guānhuà or 北方话 Běifānghuà in Chinese. Standard Mandarin is the official language of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC), as well as one of four official languages of Singapore. Chinese—de facto, Standard Mandarin—is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Of the other varieties, Standard Cantonese is common and influential in Guangdong Province and Cantonese-speaking overseas communities, and remains one of the official languages of Hong Kong (together with English) and of Macau (together with Portuguese). Hokkien, part of the Min language group, is widely spoken in southern Fujian, in neighbouring Taiwan (where it is known as Taiwanese or Hoklo) and in Southeast Asia (where it dominates in Singapore and Malaysia). Xinhua reported in March 2007 that 86 percent of people in the People's Republic of China spoke a Chinese variant. 全國約有53%的人能用普通話交流 As a language family, the number of Chinese speakers is 1.136 billion. The same news report indicates 53 percent of the population, or 700 million speakers, can effectively communicate in Putonghua. Sino-Tibetan language family. A map below depicts the linguistic subdivisions ("languages" or "dialect groups") within China itself. The traditionally-recognized seven main groups, in order of population size are: Chinese linguists have recently distinguished: 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. The Dungan language, spoken in Central Asia, is very closely related to Mandarin. However, it is not generally considered "Chinese" since it is written in Cyrillic and spoken by Dungan people outside China who are not considered ethnic Chinese. See List of Chinese dialects for a comprehensive listing of individual dialects within these large, broad groupings. In general, the above language-dialect groups do not have sharp boundaries, though Mandarin is the predominant Sinitic language in the North and the Southwest, and the rest are mostly spoken in Central or Southeastern China. Frequently, as in the case of the Guangdong province, native speakers of major variants overlapped. As with many areas that were linguistically diverse for a long time, it is not always clear how the speeches of various parts of China should be classified. The Ethnologue lists a total of 14, but the number varies between seven and seventeen depending on the classification scheme followed. For instance, the Min variety is often divided into Northern Min (Minbei, Fuchow) and Southern Min (Minnan, Amoy-Swatow); linguists have not determined whether their mutual intelligibility is small enough to sort them as separate languages. The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China. In general, mountainous South China displays more linguistic diversity than the flat North China. In parts of South China, a major city's dialect may only 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). Putonghua / Guoyu, often called "Mandarin", is the official standard language used by the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China, and Singapore (where it is called "Huayu"). It is based on the Beijing dialect, which is the dialect of Mandarin as spoken in Beijing. The governments intend for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. Therefore it is used in government agencies, in the media, and as a language of instruction in schools. In mainland China and Taiwan, diglossia has been a common feature: it is common for a Chinese to be able to speak two or even three varieties of the Sinitic languages (or “dialects”) together with Standard Mandarin. For example, in addition to putonghua a resident of Shanghai might speak Shanghainese and, if they did not grow up there, his or her local dialect as well. A native of Guangzhou may speak Standard Cantonese and putonghua, a resident of Taiwan, both Taiwanese and putonghua/guoyu. A person living in Taiwan 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, Standard Mandarin is beginning to take its place beside English and Standard Cantonese, the official languages. Linguists often view Chinese as a language family, though owing to China's socio-political and cultural situation, and the fact that all spoken varieties use one common written system, it is customary to refer to these generally mutually unintelligible variants as "the Chinese language". The diversity of Sinitic variants is comparable to the Romance languages. From a purely descriptive point of view, "languages" and "dialects" are simply arbitrary groups of similar idiolects, and the distinction is irrelevant to linguists who are only concerned with describing regional speeches technically. However, the idea of a single language has major overtones in politics and cultural self-identity, and explains the amount of emotion over this issue. Most Chinese and Chinese linguists refer to Chinese as a single language and its subdivisions dialects, while others call Chinese a language family. Chinese itself has a term for its unified writing system, Zhongwen (中文), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (汉语,“spoken language[s] of the Han Chinese) – this term could be translated to either “language” or “languages” since Chinese possesses no grammatical numbers. In the Chinese language, there is much less need for a uniform speech-and-writing continuum, as indicated by two separate character morphemes 语 yu and 文 wen. Ethnic Chinese often consider these spoken variations as one single language for reasons of nationality and as they inherit one common cultural and linguistic heritage in Classical Chinese. Han native speakers of Wu, Min, Hakka, and Cantonese, for instance, may consider their own linguistic varieties as separate spoken languages, but the Han Chinese race as one – albeit internally very diverse – ethnicity. To Chinese nationalists, the idea of Chinese as a language family may suggest that the Chinese identity is much more fragmentary and disunified than it actually is and as such is often looked upon as culturally and politically provocative. Additionally, in Taiwan, it is closely associated with Taiwanese independence, where some supporters of Taiwanese independence promote the local Taiwanese Minnan-based spoken language. Within the People’s Republic of China and Singapore, it is common for the government to refer to all divisions of the Sinitic language(s) beside Standard Mandarin as fangyan (“regional tongues”, often translated as “dialects”). Modern-day Chinese speakers of all kinds communicate using one formal standard written language, although this modern written standard is modeled after Mandarin, generally the modern Beijing substandard. The term sinophone, coined in analogy to anglophone and francophone, refers to those who speak the Chinese language natively, or prefer it as a medium of communication. The term is derived from Sinae, the Latin word for ancient China. :See also: Classical Chinese and Vernacular Chinese The relationship among the Chinese spoken and written languages is rather complex. Its spoken variations evolved at different rates, while written Chinese itself has changed much less. Classical Chinese literature began in the Spring and Autumn period, although written records have been discovered as far back as the 14th to 11th centuries BCE Shang dynasty oracle bones using the oracle bone scripts. The Chinese orthography centers around Chinese characters, hanzi, which are written within imaginary rectangular blocks, traditionally arranged in vertical columns, read from top to bottom down a column, and right to left across columns. Chinese characters are morphemes independent of phonetic change. Thus the number "one", yi in Mandarin, yat in Cantonese and chi̍t and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("一"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as 冇 and 係 for Cantonese and Hakka, which are considered archaic or unused in standard written Chinese. Written colloquial Cantonese has become quite popular in online chat rooms and instant messaging amongst Hong-Kongers and Cantonese-speakers elsewhere. Use of it is considered highly informal, and does not extend to any formal occasion. Also, in Hunan, some women write their local language in Nü Shu, a syllabary derived from Chinese characters. The Dungan language, considered by some 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 evolved over time from earliest forms of hieroglyphs. The idea that all Chinese characters are either pictographs or ideographs is an erroneous one: most characters contain phonetic parts, and are composites of phonetic components and semantic Radicals. Only the simplest characters, such as ren 人 (human), ri 日 (sun), shan 山 (mountain), shui 水 (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar Xǚ Shèn in the Hàn Dynasty classified characters into 6 categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80-90% as phonetic complexes consisting of a semantic element that indicates meaning, and a phonetic element that indicates the pronunciation. Generally, the phonetic element is more accurate and more important than the semantic one. There are about 214 radicals recognized in the Kangxi Dictionary. Modern characters are styled after the standard script (楷书/楷書 kǎishū) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (篆书/篆書 zhuànshū), cursive script (草书/草書 cǎoshū) and clerical script (隶书/隸書 lìshū). Calligraphy artists can write in traditional and simplified characters, but tend to use traditional characters for traditional art. Various styles of Chinese calligraphy. There are currently two systems for Chinese characters. The traditional system, still used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau and Chinese speaking communities (except Singapore and Malaysia) outside mainland China, takes its form from standardized character forms dating back to the late Han dynasty. The Simplified Chinese character system, developed by the People's Republic of China in 1954 to promote mass literacy, simplifies most complex traditional glyphs to fewer strokes, many to common caoshu shorthand variants. Singapore, which has a large Chinese communities, is the first – and at present the only – foreign nation to officially adopt simplified characters, although it has also become the de facto standard for younger ethnic Chinese in Malaysia. The Internet provides the platform to practice reading the alternative system, be it traditional or simplified. A well-educated Chinese today recognizes approximately 6,000-7,000 characters; some 3,000 characters are required to read a Mainland newspaper. The PRC government defines literacy amongst workers as a knowledge of 2,000 characters, though this would be only functional literacy. A large unabridged dictionary, like the Kangxi Dictionary, contains over 40,000 characters, including obscure, variant, rare, and archaic characters; less than a quarter of these characters are now commonly used.'' Most linguists classify all varieties of modern spoken Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family and believe that there was an original language, termed Proto-Sino-Tibetan, 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 Proto-Sino-Tibetan. 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 Indo-European languages from PIE don't apply to Chinese because of "morphological paucity" especially after Old Chinese Analysis of the concept "wave" in PST. . 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; most present systems rely heavily on Karlgren's insights and methods. Old Chinese ( ), sometimes known as "Archaic Chinese", was the language common during the early and middle Zhōu Dynasty (1122 BCE - 256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the Shījīng, the history of the Shūjīng, and portions of the Yìjīng (I Ching). The phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters 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 was still without tones. Work on reconstructing Old Chinese started with Qīng dynasty philologists. Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably 蜜 mì "honey", 獅 shī "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mǎ "horse", 犬 quǎn "dog", and 鵝 é "goose". The source says the reconstructions of old Chinese are tentative, and not definitive so no conclusions should be drawn. The reconstruction of Old Chinese can not be perfect so this hypothesis may be called into question. Encyclopedia Britannica s.v. "Chinese languages": "Old Chinese vocabulary already contained many words not generally occurring in the other Sino-Tibetan languages. The words for ‘honey' and ‘lion,' and probably also ‘horse,' ‘dog,' and ‘goose,' are connected with Indo-European and were acquired through trade and early contacts. (The nearest known Indo-European languages were Tocharian and Sogdian, a middle Iranian language.) A number of words have Austroasiatic cognates and point to early contacts with the ancestral language of Muong-Vietnamese and Mon-Khmer" ; Jan Ulenbrook, Einige Übereinstimmungen zwischen dem Chinesischen und dem Indogermanischen (1967) proposes 57 items; see also Tsung-tung Chang, 1988 Indo-European Vocabulary in Old Chinese;. 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 the Suí, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the 切韻 "Qièyùn" rhyme table (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the 廣韻 "Guǎngyùn" rhyme table. 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, 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; some scholars have argued that trying to reconstruct, say, modern Cantonese from modern Cantopop rhymes would give a fairly inaccurate picture of the present-day spoken language. The development of the spoken Chinese languages from early historical times to the present has been complex. Most Chinese people, in Sìchuān 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 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 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, though, a single standard of Mandarin did not exist. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The new 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 Standard Mandarin. As a result, Mandarin is now spoken by virtually all young and middle-aged citizens of mainland China and on Taiwan. Standard 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. Chinese was once the Lingua franca for East Asia countries for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. Throughout history Chinese culture and politics has had a great influence on unrelated languages such as Korean 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 Hán tự. It was the only available method for writing Vietnamese until the 14th century, used almost exclusively by Chinese-educated Vietnamese élites. From the 14th to the late 19th century, Vietnamese was written with Chữ nôm, a modified Chinese script incorporating sounds and syllables for native Vietnamese speakers. Chữ nôm was completely replaced by a modified Latin script created by the Jesuit missionary priest Alexander de Rhodes, which incorporates a system of diacritical marks to indicate tones, as well as modified consonants. The Vietnamese language exhibits multiple elements similar to Cantonese in regard to the specific intonations and sharp consonant endings. There is also a slight influence from Mandarin, including the sharper vowels and "kh" (IPA:x) sound 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. In derived Chinese characters or Zhuang logograms to write songs, even though Zhuang is not a Chinese dialect. Since the 1950s, the Zhuang language has been written in a modified Latin alphabet. Zhou, Minglang: Multilingualism in China: The Politics of Writing Reforms for Minority Languages, 1949-2002 (Walter de Gruyter 2003); ISBN 3-11-017896-6; p. 251–258. Languages within the influence of Chinese culture also have a very large number of loanwords from Chinese. Fifty percent or more of Korean vocabulary is of Chinese origin and the influence on Japanese and Vietnamese has been considerable. At least five percent of all words in Tagalog are of Chinese origin. Chinese has also lent a great deal of many grammatical features to these and neighboring languages, notably the lack of gender and the use of classifiers. Japanese has also a lot of loanwords from Chinese, as does Vietnamese. Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of 茶 (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 茄汁 (ke chap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 金橘 (kam kuat). :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, which is only about an eighth as many as English DeFrancis (1984) p.42 counts Chinese as having 1,277 tonal syllables, and about 398 to 418 if tones are disregarded; he cites Jespersen, Otto (1928) Monosyllabism in English; London, p.15 for a count of over 8000 syllables for English. . 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 four main tones of Standard Mandarin applied to the syllable "ma." The tones correspond to these five characters: * "mother" — high level * "hemp" or "torpid" — high rising * "horse" — low falling-rising * "scold" — high falling * "question particle" — neutral The Chinese had no uniform phonetic transcription system until the mid-20th century, although enunciation patterns were recorded in early rime books and dictionaries. Early Sanskrit and Pali Indian translators were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of the language in a foreign language. After 15th century CE Jesuits and Western court missionaries’ efforts result in some rudimentary Latin transcription systems, based on the Nanjing Mandarin dialect. Romanization is the process of transcribing a language in the Latin alphabet. There are many systems of romanization for the Chinese languages due to the Chinese's own lack of phonetic transcription until modern times. Chinese is first known to have been written in Latin characters by Western Christian missionaries in the 16th century. Today the most common romanization standard for Standard Mandarin is Hanyu Pinyin (漢語拼音/汉语拼音), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore). Pinyin is almost universally employed now for teaching standard spoken Chinese in schools and universities across America, Australia and Europe. Chinese parents also use Pinyin to teach their children the sounds and tones for words with which the child is unfamiliar. The Pinyin is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, and alongside the Pinyin is the Chinese symbol. The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859, later modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As it approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels (hence an Anglicization), it may be particularly helpful for beginner speakers of native English background. Wade-Giles is found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan (Taipei city now officially uses Hanyu Pinyin and the rest of the island officially uses Tōngyòng Pinyin 通用拼音). When used within European texts, the tone transcriptions in both pinyin and Wade-Giles are often left out for simplicity; Wade-Giles' extensive use of apostrophes is also usually omitted. Thus, most Western readers will be much more familiar with Beijing than they will be with Běijīng (pinyin), and with Taipei than T'ai²-pei³ (Wade-Giles). Here are a few examples of Hanyu Pinyin and Wade-Giles, for comparison: Other systems of romanization for Chinese include Gwoyeu Romatzyh, the French EFEO, the Yale (invented during WWII for U.S. troops), as well as separate systems for Cantonese, Minnan, Hakka, and other Chinese languages or dialects. Chinese languages have been phonetically transcribed into many other writing systems over the centuries. The 'Phags-pa script, for example, has been very helpful in reconstructing the pronunciations of pre-modern forms of Chinese. Zhuyin (注音, also known as bopomofo), a semi-syllabary is still widely used in Taiwan's elementary schools to aid standard pronunciation. Although bopomofo characters are reminiscent of katakana script, there is no source to substantiate the claim that Katakana was the basis for the zhuyin system. A comparison table of zhuyin to pinyin exists in the zhuyin article. Syllables based on pinyin and zhuyin can also be compared by looking at the following articles: *Pinyin table *Zhuyin table There are also at least two systems of cyrillization for Chinese. The most widespread is the Palladius system. Modern Chinese has often been erroneously classed as a "monosyllabic" language. While most of the morphemes are single syllable, modern Chinese today is much less a monosyllabic language in that nouns, adjectives and verbs are largely di-syllabic. The tendency to create disyllabic words in the modern Chinese languages, particularly in Mandarin, has been particularly pronounced when compared to Classical Chinese. Classical Chinese is a highly isolating language, with each idea (morpheme) generally corresponding to a single syllable and a single character; Modern Chinese though, has the tendency to form new words through disyllabic, trisyllabic and tetra-character agglutination. In fact, some linguists argue that classifying modern Chinese as an isolating language is misleading, for this reason alone. Chinese morphology is strictly bound to a set number of syllables with a fairly rigid construction which are the morphemes, the smallest blocks of the language. While many of these single-syllable morphemes ( zì, 字 in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cí (词/詞), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cí (“word”) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more. For example: *Yun 云 -“cloud” *Hanbaobao 汉堡包 –“hamburger” *Wo 我 –“I, me” *Renmin 人民 –“people” *Diqiu 地球 –“earth(globosity)” *Shandian 闪电 –“lightning” *Meng 梦 –“dream” All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphology — i.e., changes in form of a word — to indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflections – it possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English), and no gender. They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le 了, hai 还, yijing 已经, etc. 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. Chinese also has an extensive system of measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring 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. Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess 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. Official modern Mandarin has only 400 spoken monosyllables but over 10,000 written characters, so there are many homophones only distinguishable by the four tones. Even this is often not enough unless the context and exact phrase or cí is identified. The mono-syllable jī, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: 雞/鸡 chicken, 機/机 machine, 基 basic, 擊/击 (to) hit, 饑/饥 hunger, and 積/积 sum. In speech, the glyphing of a monosyllable to its meaning must be determined by context or by relation to other morphemes (e.g. "some" as in the opposite of "none"). Native speakers may state which words or phrases their names are found in, for convenience of writing: 名字叫嘉英，嘉陵江的嘉，英國的英 Míngzi jiào Jiāyīng, Jiālíng Jiāng de jiā, Yīngguó de yīng "My name is Jiāyīng, the Jia for Jialing River and the ying for the short form in Chinese of UK." Southern Chinese varieties like Cantonese and Hakka preserved more of the rimes of Middle Chinese and have more tones. The previous examples of jī, for instance, 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 multi-syllabic words. The entire Chinese character corpus since antiquity comprises well over 20,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are now commonly in use. However Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words, there are many times more Chinese words than there are characters as most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters. Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and phrases vary greatly. The Hanyu Da Zidian, an all-inclusive compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries for characters, including bone oracle versions. The Zhonghua Zihai 中华字海 (1994) contains 85,568 head entries for character definitions, and is the largest reference work based purely on character and its literary variants. The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary, the 12-volumed Hanyu Da Cidian 汉语大词典, records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters, and gives over 370,000 definitions. The 1999 revised Cihai, a multi-volume encyclopedic dictionary reference work, gives 122,836 vocabulary entry definitions under 19,485 Chinese characters, including proper names, phrases and common zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific and technical terms. The latest 2007 5th edition of Xiandai Hanyu Cidian 现代汉语词典, an authoritative one-volume dictionary on modern standard Chinese language as used in mainland China, has 65,000 entries and defines 11,000 head characters. Like any other language, Chinese has absorbed a sizeable amount of loanwords from other cultures. 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 since Old Chinese include 葡萄 "grape," 石榴 "pomegranate" and 狮子/獅子 "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including 佛 "Buddha" and 菩萨/菩薩 "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as 胡同 "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as 葡萄 "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or Pāli, the liturgical languages of North India. Words borrowed from the nomadic tribes of the Gobi, Mongolian or northeast regions generally have Altaic etymologies, such as 琵琶 "pípa", the Chinese lute, or 酪 "cheese" or "yoghurt", but from exactly which Altaic source is not always entirely clear. Foreign words continue to enter the Chinese language by transcription according to their pronunciations. This is done by employing Chinese characters with similar pronunciations. For example, "Israel" becomes 以色列 (pinyin: yǐsèliè), Paris 巴黎. A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including 沙發 shāfā "sofa," 马达/馬達 mǎdá "motor," 幽默 yōumò "humour," 逻辑/邏輯 luójí "logic," 时髦/時髦 shímáo "smart, fashionable" and 歇斯底里 xiēsīdǐlǐ "hysterics." The bulk of these words were originally coined in the Shanghainese dialect during the early 20th century and were later loaned into Mandarin, hence their pronunciations in Mandarin may be quite off from the English. For example, 沙发/沙發 and 马达/馬達 in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor." Today, 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 德律风/德律風 ( Shanghainese: télífon [ ], Standard Mandarin: délǜfēng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese 电话/電話 (diànhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include 电视/電視 (diànshì "electric vision") for television, 电脑/電腦 (diànnǎo "electric brain") for computer; 手机/手機 (shǒujī "hand machine") for cellphone, and 蓝牙/藍芽 (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. 網誌(wǎng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as 汉堡包/漢堡包 (hànbǎo bāo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as 拖拉机/拖拉機 (tuōlājī, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马利奥/馬利奧 for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example 奔腾/奔騰 (bēnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and 赛百味/賽百味 (Sàibǎiwèi "better-than hundred tastes") for Subway restaurants. Since the 20th century, another source has been Japan. Using existing kanji, which are Chinese characters used in the Japanese language, the Japanese re-moulded European concepts and inventions into wasei-kango (和製漢語, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include diànhuà (电话/電話, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社会, shakai, "society"), kēxué (科学/科學, kagaku, "science") and chōuxiàng (抽象, chūshō, "abstract"). Other terms were coined by the Japanese by giving new senses to existing Chinese terms or by referring to expressions used in classical Chinese literature. For example, jīngjì (经济/經濟, keizai), which in the original Chinese meant "the workings of the state", was narrowed to "economy" in Japanese; this narrowed definition was then reimported into Chinese. As a result, these terms are virtually indistinguishable from native Chinese words: indeed, there is some dispute over some of these terms as to whether the Japanese or Chinese coined them first. As a result of this toing-and-froing process, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese share a corpus linguistics of terms describing modern terminology, in parallel to a similar corpus of terms built from Greco-Latin terms shared among European languages. Taiwanese and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便当/便當 “lunchbox or boxed lunch” (from bento) and 料理 “prepared cuisine”, have passed into common currency. Western foreign words have great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came 芭蕾 (bāléi, "ballet"), 香槟 (xiāngbīn, "champagne"), via Italian 咖啡 (kāfēi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned 沙發 (shāfā "sofa"), 幽默 (yōumò "humour"), and 高尔夫 (gāoěrfū, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪斯科 (dísīkè, "disco"), 可乐 (kělè, "cola") and 迷你 (mínǐ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon 卡通 (cartoon), 基佬 (gay people), 的士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. 粉絲 (fěnsī, "fans"), 駭客 (hèikè, "hacker"), 部落格(bùluōgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin. Since the People's Republic of China’s economic and political rise in recent years, standard Mandarin has become an increasingly popular subject of study amongst the young in the Western world, as in the UK. BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | How hard is it to learn Chinese? In 1991 there were 2,000 foreign learners taking China's official Chinese Proficiency Test (comparable to English's Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660 . *Chinese characters *Chinese honorifics *Chinese measure word *Chinese number gestures *Chinese numerals *Chinese punctuation *Chinese exclamative particles *Four-character idiom *Han unification *Haner language *HSK test *Languages of China *North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics *Nü shu * * * * * * Keys to the Chinese Language: Book II - Google Books * A Practical Chinese Grammar - Google Books * ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawai’i Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X. * ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-08248-2975-9. * Arch Chinese free online Chinese character and Pinyin learning, Chinese English dictionary, writing worksheet generation, etc. * CHINGLISH online Chinese English Dictionary * nciku free online Chinese dictionary with handwriting recognition, pinyin, sound clips, etc. * MDBG free online Chinese-English dictionary * Chinese Characters Dictionary: supports Japanese, Korean, Cantonese, Hakka etc. * Chinese - English Dictionary: from Webster's Online Dictionary - the Rosetta Edition * CEDICT Chinese-English Dictionary Project * Stardict free (GPL) multilanguage dictionary including simplified/traditional Chinese for Unix (Linux, FreeBSD, etc.) and win32 * English-Chinese Translation Dictionary: Chinese-English-Chinese Online Dictionary (Taiwan-based; simplified characters not recognised) * CantoDict: Cantonese-English Dictionary Project * Chinese Pronunciation Dictionary Input Chinese words or sentences, get audio file of Mandarin pronunciation. Web-based tool. * Pinyin Annotator Add pinyin on top of any Chinese text. Mouse over any word to see English translation. Save output to OpenOffice Writer format. Prints nicely. Also adds pinyin to any Chinese web page. *Firefox users can install Add-ons for a pinyin annotator * Multimedia Dictionary of Chinese Characters Language Tool, Offline Chinese Dictionary. * Chinese Scholar Dictionary Chinese English dictionary with Pinyin index * A Cognitive Approach to Beginning Chinese: Interactions I and II. Margaret Mian Yan and Jennifer Li-chia Liu, Indiana University * Chinese Language Information Page A collection of Chinese language learning resources. * Learn Chinese - One At A Time * China KeyBoard Google Engine * Oneaday.org One Chinese idiom a day (simplified and traditional characters) with pinyin transliteration and English translation. * Mandarin Tone Drill Testing your knowledge of Mandarin tones. * Pinyin Practice Pinyin practice for Mandarin learners in all levels * Marjorie Chan's ChinaLinks: A large collection of Web resources by a professor of linguistics at Ohio State University * 4 words of Chinese every day * Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard * Chinese Character of the Day Learn to Read Chinese one word at a time. * Audio files with basic Chinese words * General Introduction of Chinese Language * Learn Chinese Characters * Chinese Scholar: The Free Chinese Class Learn Chinese language and culture through interactive media
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How many offspring did Chinese language have?
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Chinese_language Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) is a language family consisting of languages mutually unintelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. “The mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.” *Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. “The Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.” *Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. “The modern Chinese dialects are really more like a family of language. *John DeFrancis. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (1984), p.56. "To call Chinese a single language composed of dialects with varying degrees of difference is to mislead by minimizing disparities that according to Chao are as great as those between English and Dutch. To call Chinese a family of languages is to suggest extralinguistic differences that in fact do not exist and to overlook the unique linguistic situation that exists in China." Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the two branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages. About one-fifth of the world’s population, or over one billion people, speak some form of Chinese as their native language. The identification of the varieties of Chinese as "dialects" instead of "languages" is considered inappropriate by linguists and Sinologists. Spoken Chinese is distinguished by its high level of internal diversity, although all spoken varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic. There are between seven and thirteen main regional groups of Chinese (depending on classification scheme), of which the most spoken, by far, is Mandarin (about 850 million), followed by Wu (90 million), Min (70 million) and Cantonese (70 million). Most of these groups are mutually unintelligible, although some, like Xiang and the Southwest Mandarin dialects, may share common terms and some degree of intelligibility. Chinese is classified as a macrolanguage with 13 sub-languages in ISO 639-3, though the identification of the varieties of Chinese as multiple "languages" or as "dialects" of a single language is a contentious issue. The standardized form of spoken Chinese is Standard Mandarin (Putonghua / Guoyu / Huayu), based on the Beijing dialect, which is part of a larger group of North-Eastern and South-Western dialects, often taken as a separate language, see Mandarin Chinese for more, this language can be referred to as 官话 Guānhuà or 北方话 Běifānghuà in Chinese. Standard Mandarin is the official language of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC), as well as one of four official languages of Singapore. Chinese—de facto, Standard Mandarin—is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Of the other varieties, Standard Cantonese is common and influential in Guangdong Province and Cantonese-speaking overseas communities, and remains one of the official languages of Hong Kong (together with English) and of Macau (together with Portuguese). Hokkien, part of the Min language group, is widely spoken in southern Fujian, in neighbouring Taiwan (where it is known as Taiwanese or Hoklo) and in Southeast Asia (where it dominates in Singapore and Malaysia). Xinhua reported in March 2007 that 86 percent of people in the People's Republic of China spoke a Chinese variant. 全國約有53%的人能用普通話交流 As a language family, the number of Chinese speakers is 1.136 billion. The same news report indicates 53 percent of the population, or 700 million speakers, can effectively communicate in Putonghua. Sino-Tibetan language family. A map below depicts the linguistic subdivisions ("languages" or "dialect groups") within China itself. The traditionally-recognized seven main groups, in order of population size are: Chinese linguists have recently distinguished: 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. The Dungan language, spoken in Central Asia, is very closely related to Mandarin. However, it is not generally considered "Chinese" since it is written in Cyrillic and spoken by Dungan people outside China who are not considered ethnic Chinese. See List of Chinese dialects for a comprehensive listing of individual dialects within these large, broad groupings. In general, the above language-dialect groups do not have sharp boundaries, though Mandarin is the predominant Sinitic language in the North and the Southwest, and the rest are mostly spoken in Central or Southeastern China. Frequently, as in the case of the Guangdong province, native speakers of major variants overlapped. As with many areas that were linguistically diverse for a long time, it is not always clear how the speeches of various parts of China should be classified. The Ethnologue lists a total of 14, but the number varies between seven and seventeen depending on the classification scheme followed. For instance, the Min variety is often divided into Northern Min (Minbei, Fuchow) and Southern Min (Minnan, Amoy-Swatow); linguists have not determined whether their mutual intelligibility is small enough to sort them as separate languages. The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China. In general, mountainous South China displays more linguistic diversity than the flat North China. In parts of South China, a major city's dialect may only 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). Putonghua / Guoyu, often called "Mandarin", is the official standard language used by the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China, and Singapore (where it is called "Huayu"). It is based on the Beijing dialect, which is the dialect of Mandarin as spoken in Beijing. The governments intend for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. Therefore it is used in government agencies, in the media, and as a language of instruction in schools. In mainland China and Taiwan, diglossia has been a common feature: it is common for a Chinese to be able to speak two or even three varieties of the Sinitic languages (or “dialects”) together with Standard Mandarin. For example, in addition to putonghua a resident of Shanghai might speak Shanghainese and, if they did not grow up there, his or her local dialect as well. A native of Guangzhou may speak Standard Cantonese and putonghua, a resident of Taiwan, both Taiwanese and putonghua/guoyu. A person living in Taiwan 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, Standard Mandarin is beginning to take its place beside English and Standard Cantonese, the official languages. Linguists often view Chinese as a language family, though owing to China's socio-political and cultural situation, and the fact that all spoken varieties use one common written system, it is customary to refer to these generally mutually unintelligible variants as "the Chinese language". The diversity of Sinitic variants is comparable to the Romance languages. From a purely descriptive point of view, "languages" and "dialects" are simply arbitrary groups of similar idiolects, and the distinction is irrelevant to linguists who are only concerned with describing regional speeches technically. However, the idea of a single language has major overtones in politics and cultural self-identity, and explains the amount of emotion over this issue. Most Chinese and Chinese linguists refer to Chinese as a single language and its subdivisions dialects, while others call Chinese a language family. Chinese itself has a term for its unified writing system, Zhongwen (中文), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (汉语,“spoken language[s] of the Han Chinese) – this term could be translated to either “language” or “languages” since Chinese possesses no grammatical numbers. In the Chinese language, there is much less need for a uniform speech-and-writing continuum, as indicated by two separate character morphemes 语 yu and 文 wen. Ethnic Chinese often consider these spoken variations as one single language for reasons of nationality and as they inherit one common cultural and linguistic heritage in Classical Chinese. Han native speakers of Wu, Min, Hakka, and Cantonese, for instance, may consider their own linguistic varieties as separate spoken languages, but the Han Chinese race as one – albeit internally very diverse – ethnicity. To Chinese nationalists, the idea of Chinese as a language family may suggest that the Chinese identity is much more fragmentary and disunified than it actually is and as such is often looked upon as culturally and politically provocative. Additionally, in Taiwan, it is closely associated with Taiwanese independence, where some supporters of Taiwanese independence promote the local Taiwanese Minnan-based spoken language. Within the People’s Republic of China and Singapore, it is common for the government to refer to all divisions of the Sinitic language(s) beside Standard Mandarin as fangyan (“regional tongues”, often translated as “dialects”). Modern-day Chinese speakers of all kinds communicate using one formal standard written language, although this modern written standard is modeled after Mandarin, generally the modern Beijing substandard. The term sinophone, coined in analogy to anglophone and francophone, refers to those who speak the Chinese language natively, or prefer it as a medium of communication. The term is derived from Sinae, the Latin word for ancient China. :See also: Classical Chinese and Vernacular Chinese The relationship among the Chinese spoken and written languages is rather complex. Its spoken variations evolved at different rates, while written Chinese itself has changed much less. Classical Chinese literature began in the Spring and Autumn period, although written records have been discovered as far back as the 14th to 11th centuries BCE Shang dynasty oracle bones using the oracle bone scripts. The Chinese orthography centers around Chinese characters, hanzi, which are written within imaginary rectangular blocks, traditionally arranged in vertical columns, read from top to bottom down a column, and right to left across columns. Chinese characters are morphemes independent of phonetic change. Thus the number "one", yi in Mandarin, yat in Cantonese and chi̍t and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("一"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as 冇 and 係 for Cantonese and Hakka, which are considered archaic or unused in standard written Chinese. Written colloquial Cantonese has become quite popular in online chat rooms and instant messaging amongst Hong-Kongers and Cantonese-speakers elsewhere. Use of it is considered highly informal, and does not extend to any formal occasion. Also, in Hunan, some women write their local language in Nü Shu, a syllabary derived from Chinese characters. The Dungan language, considered by some 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 evolved over time from earliest forms of hieroglyphs. The idea that all Chinese characters are either pictographs or ideographs is an erroneous one: most characters contain phonetic parts, and are composites of phonetic components and semantic Radicals. Only the simplest characters, such as ren 人 (human), ri 日 (sun), shan 山 (mountain), shui 水 (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar Xǚ Shèn in the Hàn Dynasty classified characters into 6 categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80-90% as phonetic complexes consisting of a semantic element that indicates meaning, and a phonetic element that indicates the pronunciation. Generally, the phonetic element is more accurate and more important than the semantic one. There are about 214 radicals recognized in the Kangxi Dictionary. Modern characters are styled after the standard script (楷书/楷書 kǎishū) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (篆书/篆書 zhuànshū), cursive script (草书/草書 cǎoshū) and clerical script (隶书/隸書 lìshū). Calligraphy artists can write in traditional and simplified characters, but tend to use traditional characters for traditional art. Various styles of Chinese calligraphy. There are currently two systems for Chinese characters. The traditional system, still used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau and Chinese speaking communities (except Singapore and Malaysia) outside mainland China, takes its form from standardized character forms dating back to the late Han dynasty. The Simplified Chinese character system, developed by the People's Republic of China in 1954 to promote mass literacy, simplifies most complex traditional glyphs to fewer strokes, many to common caoshu shorthand variants. Singapore, which has a large Chinese communities, is the first – and at present the only – foreign nation to officially adopt simplified characters, although it has also become the de facto standard for younger ethnic Chinese in Malaysia. The Internet provides the platform to practice reading the alternative system, be it traditional or simplified. A well-educated Chinese today recognizes approximately 6,000-7,000 characters; some 3,000 characters are required to read a Mainland newspaper. The PRC government defines literacy amongst workers as a knowledge of 2,000 characters, though this would be only functional literacy. A large unabridged dictionary, like the Kangxi Dictionary, contains over 40,000 characters, including obscure, variant, rare, and archaic characters; less than a quarter of these characters are now commonly used.'' Most linguists classify all varieties of modern spoken Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family and believe that there was an original language, termed Proto-Sino-Tibetan, 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 Proto-Sino-Tibetan. 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 Indo-European languages from PIE don't apply to Chinese because of "morphological paucity" especially after Old Chinese Analysis of the concept "wave" in PST. . 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; most present systems rely heavily on Karlgren's insights and methods. Old Chinese ( ), sometimes known as "Archaic Chinese", was the language common during the early and middle Zhōu Dynasty (1122 BCE - 256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the Shījīng, the history of the Shūjīng, and portions of the Yìjīng (I Ching). The phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters 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 was still without tones. Work on reconstructing Old Chinese started with Qīng dynasty philologists. Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably 蜜 mì "honey", 獅 shī "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mǎ "horse", 犬 quǎn "dog", and 鵝 é "goose". The source says the reconstructions of old Chinese are tentative, and not definitive so no conclusions should be drawn. The reconstruction of Old Chinese can not be perfect so this hypothesis may be called into question. Encyclopedia Britannica s.v. "Chinese languages": "Old Chinese vocabulary already contained many words not generally occurring in the other Sino-Tibetan languages. The words for ‘honey' and ‘lion,' and probably also ‘horse,' ‘dog,' and ‘goose,' are connected with Indo-European and were acquired through trade and early contacts. (The nearest known Indo-European languages were Tocharian and Sogdian, a middle Iranian language.) A number of words have Austroasiatic cognates and point to early contacts with the ancestral language of Muong-Vietnamese and Mon-Khmer" ; Jan Ulenbrook, Einige Übereinstimmungen zwischen dem Chinesischen und dem Indogermanischen (1967) proposes 57 items; see also Tsung-tung Chang, 1988 Indo-European Vocabulary in Old Chinese;. 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 the Suí, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the 切韻 "Qièyùn" rhyme table (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the 廣韻 "Guǎngyùn" rhyme table. 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, 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; some scholars have argued that trying to reconstruct, say, modern Cantonese from modern Cantopop rhymes would give a fairly inaccurate picture of the present-day spoken language. The development of the spoken Chinese languages from early historical times to the present has been complex. Most Chinese people, in Sìchuān 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 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 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, though, a single standard of Mandarin did not exist. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The new 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 Standard Mandarin. As a result, Mandarin is now spoken by virtually all young and middle-aged citizens of mainland China and on Taiwan. Standard 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. Chinese was once the Lingua franca for East Asia countries for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. Throughout history Chinese culture and politics has had a great influence on unrelated languages such as Korean 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 Hán tự. It was the only available method for writing Vietnamese until the 14th century, used almost exclusively by Chinese-educated Vietnamese élites. From the 14th to the late 19th century, Vietnamese was written with Chữ nôm, a modified Chinese script incorporating sounds and syllables for native Vietnamese speakers. Chữ nôm was completely replaced by a modified Latin script created by the Jesuit missionary priest Alexander de Rhodes, which incorporates a system of diacritical marks to indicate tones, as well as modified consonants. The Vietnamese language exhibits multiple elements similar to Cantonese in regard to the specific intonations and sharp consonant endings. There is also a slight influence from Mandarin, including the sharper vowels and "kh" (IPA:x) sound 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. In derived Chinese characters or Zhuang logograms to write songs, even though Zhuang is not a Chinese dialect. Since the 1950s, the Zhuang language has been written in a modified Latin alphabet. Zhou, Minglang: Multilingualism in China: The Politics of Writing Reforms for Minority Languages, 1949-2002 (Walter de Gruyter 2003); ISBN 3-11-017896-6; p. 251–258. Languages within the influence of Chinese culture also have a very large number of loanwords from Chinese. Fifty percent or more of Korean vocabulary is of Chinese origin and the influence on Japanese and Vietnamese has been considerable. At least five percent of all words in Tagalog are of Chinese origin. Chinese has also lent a great deal of many grammatical features to these and neighboring languages, notably the lack of gender and the use of classifiers. Japanese has also a lot of loanwords from Chinese, as does Vietnamese. Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of 茶 (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 茄汁 (ke chap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 金橘 (kam kuat). :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, which is only about an eighth as many as English DeFrancis (1984) p.42 counts Chinese as having 1,277 tonal syllables, and about 398 to 418 if tones are disregarded; he cites Jespersen, Otto (1928) Monosyllabism in English; London, p.15 for a count of over 8000 syllables for English. . 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 four main tones of Standard Mandarin applied to the syllable "ma." The tones correspond to these five characters: * "mother" — high level * "hemp" or "torpid" — high rising * "horse" — low falling-rising * "scold" — high falling * "question particle" — neutral The Chinese had no uniform phonetic transcription system until the mid-20th century, although enunciation patterns were recorded in early rime books and dictionaries. Early Sanskrit and Pali Indian translators were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of the language in a foreign language. After 15th century CE Jesuits and Western court missionaries’ efforts result in some rudimentary Latin transcription systems, based on the Nanjing Mandarin dialect. Romanization is the process of transcribing a language in the Latin alphabet. There are many systems of romanization for the Chinese languages due to the Chinese's own lack of phonetic transcription until modern times. Chinese is first known to have been written in Latin characters by Western Christian missionaries in the 16th century. Today the most common romanization standard for Standard Mandarin is Hanyu Pinyin (漢語拼音/汉语拼音), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore). Pinyin is almost universally employed now for teaching standard spoken Chinese in schools and universities across America, Australia and Europe. Chinese parents also use Pinyin to teach their children the sounds and tones for words with which the child is unfamiliar. The Pinyin is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, and alongside the Pinyin is the Chinese symbol. The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859, later modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As it approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels (hence an Anglicization), it may be particularly helpful for beginner speakers of native English background. Wade-Giles is found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan (Taipei city now officially uses Hanyu Pinyin and the rest of the island officially uses Tōngyòng Pinyin 通用拼音). When used within European texts, the tone transcriptions in both pinyin and Wade-Giles are often left out for simplicity; Wade-Giles' extensive use of apostrophes is also usually omitted. Thus, most Western readers will be much more familiar with Beijing than they will be with Běijīng (pinyin), and with Taipei than T'ai²-pei³ (Wade-Giles). Here are a few examples of Hanyu Pinyin and Wade-Giles, for comparison: Other systems of romanization for Chinese include Gwoyeu Romatzyh, the French EFEO, the Yale (invented during WWII for U.S. troops), as well as separate systems for Cantonese, Minnan, Hakka, and other Chinese languages or dialects. Chinese languages have been phonetically transcribed into many other writing systems over the centuries. The 'Phags-pa script, for example, has been very helpful in reconstructing the pronunciations of pre-modern forms of Chinese. Zhuyin (注音, also known as bopomofo), a semi-syllabary is still widely used in Taiwan's elementary schools to aid standard pronunciation. Although bopomofo characters are reminiscent of katakana script, there is no source to substantiate the claim that Katakana was the basis for the zhuyin system. A comparison table of zhuyin to pinyin exists in the zhuyin article. Syllables based on pinyin and zhuyin can also be compared by looking at the following articles: *Pinyin table *Zhuyin table There are also at least two systems of cyrillization for Chinese. The most widespread is the Palladius system. Modern Chinese has often been erroneously classed as a "monosyllabic" language. While most of the morphemes are single syllable, modern Chinese today is much less a monosyllabic language in that nouns, adjectives and verbs are largely di-syllabic. The tendency to create disyllabic words in the modern Chinese languages, particularly in Mandarin, has been particularly pronounced when compared to Classical Chinese. Classical Chinese is a highly isolating language, with each idea (morpheme) generally corresponding to a single syllable and a single character; Modern Chinese though, has the tendency to form new words through disyllabic, trisyllabic and tetra-character agglutination. In fact, some linguists argue that classifying modern Chinese as an isolating language is misleading, for this reason alone. Chinese morphology is strictly bound to a set number of syllables with a fairly rigid construction which are the morphemes, the smallest blocks of the language. While many of these single-syllable morphemes ( zì, 字 in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cí (词/詞), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cí (“word”) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more. For example: *Yun 云 -“cloud” *Hanbaobao 汉堡包 –“hamburger” *Wo 我 –“I, me” *Renmin 人民 –“people” *Diqiu 地球 –“earth(globosity)” *Shandian 闪电 –“lightning” *Meng 梦 –“dream” All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphology — i.e., changes in form of a word — to indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflections – it possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English), and no gender. They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le 了, hai 还, yijing 已经, etc. 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. Chinese also has an extensive system of measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring 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. Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess 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. Official modern Mandarin has only 400 spoken monosyllables but over 10,000 written characters, so there are many homophones only distinguishable by the four tones. Even this is often not enough unless the context and exact phrase or cí is identified. The mono-syllable jī, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: 雞/鸡 chicken, 機/机 machine, 基 basic, 擊/击 (to) hit, 饑/饥 hunger, and 積/积 sum. In speech, the glyphing of a monosyllable to its meaning must be determined by context or by relation to other morphemes (e.g. "some" as in the opposite of "none"). Native speakers may state which words or phrases their names are found in, for convenience of writing: 名字叫嘉英，嘉陵江的嘉，英國的英 Míngzi jiào Jiāyīng, Jiālíng Jiāng de jiā, Yīngguó de yīng "My name is Jiāyīng, the Jia for Jialing River and the ying for the short form in Chinese of UK." Southern Chinese varieties like Cantonese and Hakka preserved more of the rimes of Middle Chinese and have more tones. The previous examples of jī, for instance, 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 multi-syllabic words. The entire Chinese character corpus since antiquity comprises well over 20,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are now commonly in use. However Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words, there are many times more Chinese words than there are characters as most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters. Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and phrases vary greatly. The Hanyu Da Zidian, an all-inclusive compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries for characters, including bone oracle versions. The Zhonghua Zihai 中华字海 (1994) contains 85,568 head entries for character definitions, and is the largest reference work based purely on character and its literary variants. The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary, the 12-volumed Hanyu Da Cidian 汉语大词典, records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters, and gives over 370,000 definitions. The 1999 revised Cihai, a multi-volume encyclopedic dictionary reference work, gives 122,836 vocabulary entry definitions under 19,485 Chinese characters, including proper names, phrases and common zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific and technical terms. The latest 2007 5th edition of Xiandai Hanyu Cidian 现代汉语词典, an authoritative one-volume dictionary on modern standard Chinese language as used in mainland China, has 65,000 entries and defines 11,000 head characters. Like any other language, Chinese has absorbed a sizeable amount of loanwords from other cultures. 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 since Old Chinese include 葡萄 "grape," 石榴 "pomegranate" and 狮子/獅子 "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including 佛 "Buddha" and 菩萨/菩薩 "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as 胡同 "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as 葡萄 "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or Pāli, the liturgical languages of North India. Words borrowed from the nomadic tribes of the Gobi, Mongolian or northeast regions generally have Altaic etymologies, such as 琵琶 "pípa", the Chinese lute, or 酪 "cheese" or "yoghurt", but from exactly which Altaic source is not always entirely clear. Foreign words continue to enter the Chinese language by transcription according to their pronunciations. This is done by employing Chinese characters with similar pronunciations. For example, "Israel" becomes 以色列 (pinyin: yǐsèliè), Paris 巴黎. A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including 沙發 shāfā "sofa," 马达/馬達 mǎdá "motor," 幽默 yōumò "humour," 逻辑/邏輯 luójí "logic," 时髦/時髦 shímáo "smart, fashionable" and 歇斯底里 xiēsīdǐlǐ "hysterics." The bulk of these words were originally coined in the Shanghainese dialect during the early 20th century and were later loaned into Mandarin, hence their pronunciations in Mandarin may be quite off from the English. For example, 沙发/沙發 and 马达/馬達 in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor." Today, 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 德律风/德律風 ( Shanghainese: télífon [ ], Standard Mandarin: délǜfēng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese 电话/電話 (diànhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include 电视/電視 (diànshì "electric vision") for television, 电脑/電腦 (diànnǎo "electric brain") for computer; 手机/手機 (shǒujī "hand machine") for cellphone, and 蓝牙/藍芽 (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. 網誌(wǎng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as 汉堡包/漢堡包 (hànbǎo bāo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as 拖拉机/拖拉機 (tuōlājī, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马利奥/馬利奧 for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example 奔腾/奔騰 (bēnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and 赛百味/賽百味 (Sàibǎiwèi "better-than hundred tastes") for Subway restaurants. Since the 20th century, another source has been Japan. Using existing kanji, which are Chinese characters used in the Japanese language, the Japanese re-moulded European concepts and inventions into wasei-kango (和製漢語, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include diànhuà (电话/電話, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社会, shakai, "society"), kēxué (科学/科學, kagaku, "science") and chōuxiàng (抽象, chūshō, "abstract"). Other terms were coined by the Japanese by giving new senses to existing Chinese terms or by referring to expressions used in classical Chinese literature. For example, jīngjì (经济/經濟, keizai), which in the original Chinese meant "the workings of the state", was narrowed to "economy" in Japanese; this narrowed definition was then reimported into Chinese. As a result, these terms are virtually indistinguishable from native Chinese words: indeed, there is some dispute over some of these terms as to whether the Japanese or Chinese coined them first. As a result of this toing-and-froing process, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese share a corpus linguistics of terms describing modern terminology, in parallel to a similar corpus of terms built from Greco-Latin terms shared among European languages. Taiwanese and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便当/便當 “lunchbox or boxed lunch” (from bento) and 料理 “prepared cuisine”, have passed into common currency. Western foreign words have great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came 芭蕾 (bāléi, "ballet"), 香槟 (xiāngbīn, "champagne"), via Italian 咖啡 (kāfēi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned 沙發 (shāfā "sofa"), 幽默 (yōumò "humour"), and 高尔夫 (gāoěrfū, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪斯科 (dísīkè, "disco"), 可乐 (kělè, "cola") and 迷你 (mínǐ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon 卡通 (cartoon), 基佬 (gay people), 的士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. 粉絲 (fěnsī, "fans"), 駭客 (hèikè, "hacker"), 部落格(bùluōgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin. Since the People's Republic of China’s economic and political rise in recent years, standard Mandarin has become an increasingly popular subject of study amongst the young in the Western world, as in the UK. BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | How hard is it to learn Chinese? In 1991 there were 2,000 foreign learners taking China's official Chinese Proficiency Test (comparable to English's Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660 . *Chinese characters *Chinese honorifics *Chinese measure word *Chinese number gestures *Chinese numerals *Chinese punctuation *Chinese exclamative particles *Four-character idiom *Han unification *Haner language *HSK test *Languages of China *North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics *Nü shu * * * * * * Keys to the Chinese Language: Book II - Google Books * A Practical Chinese Grammar - Google Books * ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawai’i Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X. * ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-08248-2975-9. * Arch Chinese free online Chinese character and Pinyin learning, Chinese English dictionary, writing worksheet generation, etc. * CHINGLISH online Chinese English Dictionary * nciku free online Chinese dictionary with handwriting recognition, pinyin, sound clips, etc. * MDBG free online Chinese-English dictionary * Chinese Characters Dictionary: supports Japanese, Korean, Cantonese, Hakka etc. * Chinese - English Dictionary: from Webster's Online Dictionary - the Rosetta Edition * CEDICT Chinese-English Dictionary Project * Stardict free (GPL) multilanguage dictionary including simplified/traditional Chinese for Unix (Linux, FreeBSD, etc.) and win32 * English-Chinese Translation Dictionary: Chinese-English-Chinese Online Dictionary (Taiwan-based; simplified characters not recognised) * CantoDict: Cantonese-English Dictionary Project * Chinese Pronunciation Dictionary Input Chinese words or sentences, get audio file of Mandarin pronunciation. Web-based tool. * Pinyin Annotator Add pinyin on top of any Chinese text. Mouse over any word to see English translation. Save output to OpenOffice Writer format. Prints nicely. Also adds pinyin to any Chinese web page. *Firefox users can install Add-ons for a pinyin annotator * Multimedia Dictionary of Chinese Characters Language Tool, Offline Chinese Dictionary. * Chinese Scholar Dictionary Chinese English dictionary with Pinyin index * A Cognitive Approach to Beginning Chinese: Interactions I and II. Margaret Mian Yan and Jennifer Li-chia Liu, Indiana University * Chinese Language Information Page A collection of Chinese language learning resources. * Learn Chinese - One At A Time * China KeyBoard Google Engine * Oneaday.org One Chinese idiom a day (simplified and traditional characters) with pinyin transliteration and English translation. * Mandarin Tone Drill Testing your knowledge of Mandarin tones. * Pinyin Practice Pinyin practice for Mandarin learners in all levels * Marjorie Chan's ChinaLinks: A large collection of Web resources by a professor of linguistics at Ohio State University * 4 words of Chinese every day * Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard * Chinese Character of the Day Learn to Read Chinese one word at a time. * Audio files with basic Chinese words * General Introduction of Chinese Language * Learn Chinese Characters * Chinese Scholar: The Free Chinese Class Learn Chinese language and culture through interactive media
Chinese_language
The Mandarin dialects in which location have experienced a dramatic decrease in sounds and so have far more multisyllabic words than most other spoken varieties?
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Chinese_language Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) is a language family consisting of languages mutually unintelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. “The mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.” *Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. “The Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.” *Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. “The modern Chinese dialects are really more like a family of language. *John DeFrancis. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (1984), p.56. "To call Chinese a single language composed of dialects with varying degrees of difference is to mislead by minimizing disparities that according to Chao are as great as those between English and Dutch. To call Chinese a family of languages is to suggest extralinguistic differences that in fact do not exist and to overlook the unique linguistic situation that exists in China." Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the two branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages. About one-fifth of the world’s population, or over one billion people, speak some form of Chinese as their native language. The identification of the varieties of Chinese as "dialects" instead of "languages" is considered inappropriate by linguists and Sinologists. Spoken Chinese is distinguished by its high level of internal diversity, although all spoken varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic. There are between seven and thirteen main regional groups of Chinese (depending on classification scheme), of which the most spoken, by far, is Mandarin (about 850 million), followed by Wu (90 million), Min (70 million) and Cantonese (70 million). Most of these groups are mutually unintelligible, although some, like Xiang and the Southwest Mandarin dialects, may share common terms and some degree of intelligibility. Chinese is classified as a macrolanguage with 13 sub-languages in ISO 639-3, though the identification of the varieties of Chinese as multiple "languages" or as "dialects" of a single language is a contentious issue. The standardized form of spoken Chinese is Standard Mandarin (Putonghua / Guoyu / Huayu), based on the Beijing dialect, which is part of a larger group of North-Eastern and South-Western dialects, often taken as a separate language, see Mandarin Chinese for more, this language can be referred to as 官话 Guānhuà or 北方话 Běifānghuà in Chinese. Standard Mandarin is the official language of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC), as well as one of four official languages of Singapore. Chinese—de facto, Standard Mandarin—is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Of the other varieties, Standard Cantonese is common and influential in Guangdong Province and Cantonese-speaking overseas communities, and remains one of the official languages of Hong Kong (together with English) and of Macau (together with Portuguese). Hokkien, part of the Min language group, is widely spoken in southern Fujian, in neighbouring Taiwan (where it is known as Taiwanese or Hoklo) and in Southeast Asia (where it dominates in Singapore and Malaysia). Xinhua reported in March 2007 that 86 percent of people in the People's Republic of China spoke a Chinese variant. 全國約有53%的人能用普通話交流 As a language family, the number of Chinese speakers is 1.136 billion. The same news report indicates 53 percent of the population, or 700 million speakers, can effectively communicate in Putonghua. Sino-Tibetan language family. A map below depicts the linguistic subdivisions ("languages" or "dialect groups") within China itself. The traditionally-recognized seven main groups, in order of population size are: Chinese linguists have recently distinguished: 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. The Dungan language, spoken in Central Asia, is very closely related to Mandarin. However, it is not generally considered "Chinese" since it is written in Cyrillic and spoken by Dungan people outside China who are not considered ethnic Chinese. See List of Chinese dialects for a comprehensive listing of individual dialects within these large, broad groupings. In general, the above language-dialect groups do not have sharp boundaries, though Mandarin is the predominant Sinitic language in the North and the Southwest, and the rest are mostly spoken in Central or Southeastern China. Frequently, as in the case of the Guangdong province, native speakers of major variants overlapped. As with many areas that were linguistically diverse for a long time, it is not always clear how the speeches of various parts of China should be classified. The Ethnologue lists a total of 14, but the number varies between seven and seventeen depending on the classification scheme followed. For instance, the Min variety is often divided into Northern Min (Minbei, Fuchow) and Southern Min (Minnan, Amoy-Swatow); linguists have not determined whether their mutual intelligibility is small enough to sort them as separate languages. The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China. In general, mountainous South China displays more linguistic diversity than the flat North China. In parts of South China, a major city's dialect may only 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). Putonghua / Guoyu, often called "Mandarin", is the official standard language used by the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China, and Singapore (where it is called "Huayu"). It is based on the Beijing dialect, which is the dialect of Mandarin as spoken in Beijing. The governments intend for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. Therefore it is used in government agencies, in the media, and as a language of instruction in schools. In mainland China and Taiwan, diglossia has been a common feature: it is common for a Chinese to be able to speak two or even three varieties of the Sinitic languages (or “dialects”) together with Standard Mandarin. For example, in addition to putonghua a resident of Shanghai might speak Shanghainese and, if they did not grow up there, his or her local dialect as well. A native of Guangzhou may speak Standard Cantonese and putonghua, a resident of Taiwan, both Taiwanese and putonghua/guoyu. A person living in Taiwan 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, Standard Mandarin is beginning to take its place beside English and Standard Cantonese, the official languages. Linguists often view Chinese as a language family, though owing to China's socio-political and cultural situation, and the fact that all spoken varieties use one common written system, it is customary to refer to these generally mutually unintelligible variants as "the Chinese language". The diversity of Sinitic variants is comparable to the Romance languages. From a purely descriptive point of view, "languages" and "dialects" are simply arbitrary groups of similar idiolects, and the distinction is irrelevant to linguists who are only concerned with describing regional speeches technically. However, the idea of a single language has major overtones in politics and cultural self-identity, and explains the amount of emotion over this issue. Most Chinese and Chinese linguists refer to Chinese as a single language and its subdivisions dialects, while others call Chinese a language family. Chinese itself has a term for its unified writing system, Zhongwen (中文), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (汉语,“spoken language[s] of the Han Chinese) – this term could be translated to either “language” or “languages” since Chinese possesses no grammatical numbers. In the Chinese language, there is much less need for a uniform speech-and-writing continuum, as indicated by two separate character morphemes 语 yu and 文 wen. Ethnic Chinese often consider these spoken variations as one single language for reasons of nationality and as they inherit one common cultural and linguistic heritage in Classical Chinese. Han native speakers of Wu, Min, Hakka, and Cantonese, for instance, may consider their own linguistic varieties as separate spoken languages, but the Han Chinese race as one – albeit internally very diverse – ethnicity. To Chinese nationalists, the idea of Chinese as a language family may suggest that the Chinese identity is much more fragmentary and disunified than it actually is and as such is often looked upon as culturally and politically provocative. Additionally, in Taiwan, it is closely associated with Taiwanese independence, where some supporters of Taiwanese independence promote the local Taiwanese Minnan-based spoken language. Within the People’s Republic of China and Singapore, it is common for the government to refer to all divisions of the Sinitic language(s) beside Standard Mandarin as fangyan (“regional tongues”, often translated as “dialects”). Modern-day Chinese speakers of all kinds communicate using one formal standard written language, although this modern written standard is modeled after Mandarin, generally the modern Beijing substandard. The term sinophone, coined in analogy to anglophone and francophone, refers to those who speak the Chinese language natively, or prefer it as a medium of communication. The term is derived from Sinae, the Latin word for ancient China. :See also: Classical Chinese and Vernacular Chinese The relationship among the Chinese spoken and written languages is rather complex. Its spoken variations evolved at different rates, while written Chinese itself has changed much less. Classical Chinese literature began in the Spring and Autumn period, although written records have been discovered as far back as the 14th to 11th centuries BCE Shang dynasty oracle bones using the oracle bone scripts. The Chinese orthography centers around Chinese characters, hanzi, which are written within imaginary rectangular blocks, traditionally arranged in vertical columns, read from top to bottom down a column, and right to left across columns. Chinese characters are morphemes independent of phonetic change. Thus the number "one", yi in Mandarin, yat in Cantonese and chi̍t and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("一"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as 冇 and 係 for Cantonese and Hakka, which are considered archaic or unused in standard written Chinese. Written colloquial Cantonese has become quite popular in online chat rooms and instant messaging amongst Hong-Kongers and Cantonese-speakers elsewhere. Use of it is considered highly informal, and does not extend to any formal occasion. Also, in Hunan, some women write their local language in Nü Shu, a syllabary derived from Chinese characters. The Dungan language, considered by some 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 evolved over time from earliest forms of hieroglyphs. The idea that all Chinese characters are either pictographs or ideographs is an erroneous one: most characters contain phonetic parts, and are composites of phonetic components and semantic Radicals. Only the simplest characters, such as ren 人 (human), ri 日 (sun), shan 山 (mountain), shui 水 (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar Xǚ Shèn in the Hàn Dynasty classified characters into 6 categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80-90% as phonetic complexes consisting of a semantic element that indicates meaning, and a phonetic element that indicates the pronunciation. Generally, the phonetic element is more accurate and more important than the semantic one. There are about 214 radicals recognized in the Kangxi Dictionary. Modern characters are styled after the standard script (楷书/楷書 kǎishū) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (篆书/篆書 zhuànshū), cursive script (草书/草書 cǎoshū) and clerical script (隶书/隸書 lìshū). Calligraphy artists can write in traditional and simplified characters, but tend to use traditional characters for traditional art. Various styles of Chinese calligraphy. There are currently two systems for Chinese characters. The traditional system, still used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau and Chinese speaking communities (except Singapore and Malaysia) outside mainland China, takes its form from standardized character forms dating back to the late Han dynasty. The Simplified Chinese character system, developed by the People's Republic of China in 1954 to promote mass literacy, simplifies most complex traditional glyphs to fewer strokes, many to common caoshu shorthand variants. Singapore, which has a large Chinese communities, is the first – and at present the only – foreign nation to officially adopt simplified characters, although it has also become the de facto standard for younger ethnic Chinese in Malaysia. The Internet provides the platform to practice reading the alternative system, be it traditional or simplified. A well-educated Chinese today recognizes approximately 6,000-7,000 characters; some 3,000 characters are required to read a Mainland newspaper. The PRC government defines literacy amongst workers as a knowledge of 2,000 characters, though this would be only functional literacy. A large unabridged dictionary, like the Kangxi Dictionary, contains over 40,000 characters, including obscure, variant, rare, and archaic characters; less than a quarter of these characters are now commonly used.'' Most linguists classify all varieties of modern spoken Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family and believe that there was an original language, termed Proto-Sino-Tibetan, 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 Proto-Sino-Tibetan. 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 Indo-European languages from PIE don't apply to Chinese because of "morphological paucity" especially after Old Chinese Analysis of the concept "wave" in PST. . 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; most present systems rely heavily on Karlgren's insights and methods. Old Chinese ( ), sometimes known as "Archaic Chinese", was the language common during the early and middle Zhōu Dynasty (1122 BCE - 256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the Shījīng, the history of the Shūjīng, and portions of the Yìjīng (I Ching). The phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters 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 was still without tones. Work on reconstructing Old Chinese started with Qīng dynasty philologists. Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably 蜜 mì "honey", 獅 shī "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mǎ "horse", 犬 quǎn "dog", and 鵝 é "goose". The source says the reconstructions of old Chinese are tentative, and not definitive so no conclusions should be drawn. The reconstruction of Old Chinese can not be perfect so this hypothesis may be called into question. Encyclopedia Britannica s.v. "Chinese languages": "Old Chinese vocabulary already contained many words not generally occurring in the other Sino-Tibetan languages. The words for ‘honey' and ‘lion,' and probably also ‘horse,' ‘dog,' and ‘goose,' are connected with Indo-European and were acquired through trade and early contacts. (The nearest known Indo-European languages were Tocharian and Sogdian, a middle Iranian language.) A number of words have Austroasiatic cognates and point to early contacts with the ancestral language of Muong-Vietnamese and Mon-Khmer" ; Jan Ulenbrook, Einige Übereinstimmungen zwischen dem Chinesischen und dem Indogermanischen (1967) proposes 57 items; see also Tsung-tung Chang, 1988 Indo-European Vocabulary in Old Chinese;. 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 the Suí, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the 切韻 "Qièyùn" rhyme table (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the 廣韻 "Guǎngyùn" rhyme table. 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, 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; some scholars have argued that trying to reconstruct, say, modern Cantonese from modern Cantopop rhymes would give a fairly inaccurate picture of the present-day spoken language. The development of the spoken Chinese languages from early historical times to the present has been complex. Most Chinese people, in Sìchuān 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 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 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, though, a single standard of Mandarin did not exist. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The new 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 Standard Mandarin. As a result, Mandarin is now spoken by virtually all young and middle-aged citizens of mainland China and on Taiwan. Standard 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. Chinese was once the Lingua franca for East Asia countries for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. Throughout history Chinese culture and politics has had a great influence on unrelated languages such as Korean 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 Hán tự. It was the only available method for writing Vietnamese until the 14th century, used almost exclusively by Chinese-educated Vietnamese élites. From the 14th to the late 19th century, Vietnamese was written with Chữ nôm, a modified Chinese script incorporating sounds and syllables for native Vietnamese speakers. Chữ nôm was completely replaced by a modified Latin script created by the Jesuit missionary priest Alexander de Rhodes, which incorporates a system of diacritical marks to indicate tones, as well as modified consonants. The Vietnamese language exhibits multiple elements similar to Cantonese in regard to the specific intonations and sharp consonant endings. There is also a slight influence from Mandarin, including the sharper vowels and "kh" (IPA:x) sound 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. In derived Chinese characters or Zhuang logograms to write songs, even though Zhuang is not a Chinese dialect. Since the 1950s, the Zhuang language has been written in a modified Latin alphabet. Zhou, Minglang: Multilingualism in China: The Politics of Writing Reforms for Minority Languages, 1949-2002 (Walter de Gruyter 2003); ISBN 3-11-017896-6; p. 251–258. Languages within the influence of Chinese culture also have a very large number of loanwords from Chinese. Fifty percent or more of Korean vocabulary is of Chinese origin and the influence on Japanese and Vietnamese has been considerable. At least five percent of all words in Tagalog are of Chinese origin. Chinese has also lent a great deal of many grammatical features to these and neighboring languages, notably the lack of gender and the use of classifiers. Japanese has also a lot of loanwords from Chinese, as does Vietnamese. Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of 茶 (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 茄汁 (ke chap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 金橘 (kam kuat). :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, which is only about an eighth as many as English DeFrancis (1984) p.42 counts Chinese as having 1,277 tonal syllables, and about 398 to 418 if tones are disregarded; he cites Jespersen, Otto (1928) Monosyllabism in English; London, p.15 for a count of over 8000 syllables for English. . 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 four main tones of Standard Mandarin applied to the syllable "ma." The tones correspond to these five characters: * "mother" — high level * "hemp" or "torpid" — high rising * "horse" — low falling-rising * "scold" — high falling * "question particle" — neutral The Chinese had no uniform phonetic transcription system until the mid-20th century, although enunciation patterns were recorded in early rime books and dictionaries. Early Sanskrit and Pali Indian translators were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of the language in a foreign language. After 15th century CE Jesuits and Western court missionaries’ efforts result in some rudimentary Latin transcription systems, based on the Nanjing Mandarin dialect. Romanization is the process of transcribing a language in the Latin alphabet. There are many systems of romanization for the Chinese languages due to the Chinese's own lack of phonetic transcription until modern times. Chinese is first known to have been written in Latin characters by Western Christian missionaries in the 16th century. Today the most common romanization standard for Standard Mandarin is Hanyu Pinyin (漢語拼音/汉语拼音), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore). Pinyin is almost universally employed now for teaching standard spoken Chinese in schools and universities across America, Australia and Europe. Chinese parents also use Pinyin to teach their children the sounds and tones for words with which the child is unfamiliar. The Pinyin is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, and alongside the Pinyin is the Chinese symbol. The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859, later modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As it approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels (hence an Anglicization), it may be particularly helpful for beginner speakers of native English background. Wade-Giles is found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan (Taipei city now officially uses Hanyu Pinyin and the rest of the island officially uses Tōngyòng Pinyin 通用拼音). When used within European texts, the tone transcriptions in both pinyin and Wade-Giles are often left out for simplicity; Wade-Giles' extensive use of apostrophes is also usually omitted. Thus, most Western readers will be much more familiar with Beijing than they will be with Běijīng (pinyin), and with Taipei than T'ai²-pei³ (Wade-Giles). Here are a few examples of Hanyu Pinyin and Wade-Giles, for comparison: Other systems of romanization for Chinese include Gwoyeu Romatzyh, the French EFEO, the Yale (invented during WWII for U.S. troops), as well as separate systems for Cantonese, Minnan, Hakka, and other Chinese languages or dialects. Chinese languages have been phonetically transcribed into many other writing systems over the centuries. The 'Phags-pa script, for example, has been very helpful in reconstructing the pronunciations of pre-modern forms of Chinese. Zhuyin (注音, also known as bopomofo), a semi-syllabary is still widely used in Taiwan's elementary schools to aid standard pronunciation. Although bopomofo characters are reminiscent of katakana script, there is no source to substantiate the claim that Katakana was the basis for the zhuyin system. A comparison table of zhuyin to pinyin exists in the zhuyin article. Syllables based on pinyin and zhuyin can also be compared by looking at the following articles: *Pinyin table *Zhuyin table There are also at least two systems of cyrillization for Chinese. The most widespread is the Palladius system. Modern Chinese has often been erroneously classed as a "monosyllabic" language. While most of the morphemes are single syllable, modern Chinese today is much less a monosyllabic language in that nouns, adjectives and verbs are largely di-syllabic. The tendency to create disyllabic words in the modern Chinese languages, particularly in Mandarin, has been particularly pronounced when compared to Classical Chinese. Classical Chinese is a highly isolating language, with each idea (morpheme) generally corresponding to a single syllable and a single character; Modern Chinese though, has the tendency to form new words through disyllabic, trisyllabic and tetra-character agglutination. In fact, some linguists argue that classifying modern Chinese as an isolating language is misleading, for this reason alone. Chinese morphology is strictly bound to a set number of syllables with a fairly rigid construction which are the morphemes, the smallest blocks of the language. While many of these single-syllable morphemes ( zì, 字 in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cí (词/詞), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cí (“word”) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more. For example: *Yun 云 -“cloud” *Hanbaobao 汉堡包 –“hamburger” *Wo 我 –“I, me” *Renmin 人民 –“people” *Diqiu 地球 –“earth(globosity)” *Shandian 闪电 –“lightning” *Meng 梦 –“dream” All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphology — i.e., changes in form of a word — to indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflections – it possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English), and no gender. They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le 了, hai 还, yijing 已经, etc. 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. Chinese also has an extensive system of measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring 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. Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess 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. Official modern Mandarin has only 400 spoken monosyllables but over 10,000 written characters, so there are many homophones only distinguishable by the four tones. Even this is often not enough unless the context and exact phrase or cí is identified. The mono-syllable jī, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: 雞/鸡 chicken, 機/机 machine, 基 basic, 擊/击 (to) hit, 饑/饥 hunger, and 積/积 sum. In speech, the glyphing of a monosyllable to its meaning must be determined by context or by relation to other morphemes (e.g. "some" as in the opposite of "none"). Native speakers may state which words or phrases their names are found in, for convenience of writing: 名字叫嘉英，嘉陵江的嘉，英國的英 Míngzi jiào Jiāyīng, Jiālíng Jiāng de jiā, Yīngguó de yīng "My name is Jiāyīng, the Jia for Jialing River and the ying for the short form in Chinese of UK." Southern Chinese varieties like Cantonese and Hakka preserved more of the rimes of Middle Chinese and have more tones. The previous examples of jī, for instance, 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 multi-syllabic words. The entire Chinese character corpus since antiquity comprises well over 20,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are now commonly in use. However Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words, there are many times more Chinese words than there are characters as most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters. Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and phrases vary greatly. The Hanyu Da Zidian, an all-inclusive compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries for characters, including bone oracle versions. The Zhonghua Zihai 中华字海 (1994) contains 85,568 head entries for character definitions, and is the largest reference work based purely on character and its literary variants. The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary, the 12-volumed Hanyu Da Cidian 汉语大词典, records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters, and gives over 370,000 definitions. The 1999 revised Cihai, a multi-volume encyclopedic dictionary reference work, gives 122,836 vocabulary entry definitions under 19,485 Chinese characters, including proper names, phrases and common zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific and technical terms. The latest 2007 5th edition of Xiandai Hanyu Cidian 现代汉语词典, an authoritative one-volume dictionary on modern standard Chinese language as used in mainland China, has 65,000 entries and defines 11,000 head characters. Like any other language, Chinese has absorbed a sizeable amount of loanwords from other cultures. 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 since Old Chinese include 葡萄 "grape," 石榴 "pomegranate" and 狮子/獅子 "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including 佛 "Buddha" and 菩萨/菩薩 "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as 胡同 "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as 葡萄 "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or Pāli, the liturgical languages of North India. Words borrowed from the nomadic tribes of the Gobi, Mongolian or northeast regions generally have Altaic etymologies, such as 琵琶 "pípa", the Chinese lute, or 酪 "cheese" or "yoghurt", but from exactly which Altaic source is not always entirely clear. Foreign words continue to enter the Chinese language by transcription according to their pronunciations. This is done by employing Chinese characters with similar pronunciations. For example, "Israel" becomes 以色列 (pinyin: yǐsèliè), Paris 巴黎. A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including 沙發 shāfā "sofa," 马达/馬達 mǎdá "motor," 幽默 yōumò "humour," 逻辑/邏輯 luójí "logic," 时髦/時髦 shímáo "smart, fashionable" and 歇斯底里 xiēsīdǐlǐ "hysterics." The bulk of these words were originally coined in the Shanghainese dialect during the early 20th century and were later loaned into Mandarin, hence their pronunciations in Mandarin may be quite off from the English. For example, 沙发/沙發 and 马达/馬達 in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor." Today, 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 德律风/德律風 ( Shanghainese: télífon [ ], Standard Mandarin: délǜfēng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese 电话/電話 (diànhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include 电视/電視 (diànshì "electric vision") for television, 电脑/電腦 (diànnǎo "electric brain") for computer; 手机/手機 (shǒujī "hand machine") for cellphone, and 蓝牙/藍芽 (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. 網誌(wǎng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as 汉堡包/漢堡包 (hànbǎo bāo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as 拖拉机/拖拉機 (tuōlājī, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马利奥/馬利奧 for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example 奔腾/奔騰 (bēnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and 赛百味/賽百味 (Sàibǎiwèi "better-than hundred tastes") for Subway restaurants. Since the 20th century, another source has been Japan. Using existing kanji, which are Chinese characters used in the Japanese language, the Japanese re-moulded European concepts and inventions into wasei-kango (和製漢語, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include diànhuà (电话/電話, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社会, shakai, "society"), kēxué (科学/科學, kagaku, "science") and chōuxiàng (抽象, chūshō, "abstract"). Other terms were coined by the Japanese by giving new senses to existing Chinese terms or by referring to expressions used in classical Chinese literature. For example, jīngjì (经济/經濟, keizai), which in the original Chinese meant "the workings of the state", was narrowed to "economy" in Japanese; this narrowed definition was then reimported into Chinese. As a result, these terms are virtually indistinguishable from native Chinese words: indeed, there is some dispute over some of these terms as to whether the Japanese or Chinese coined them first. As a result of this toing-and-froing process, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese share a corpus linguistics of terms describing modern terminology, in parallel to a similar corpus of terms built from Greco-Latin terms shared among European languages. Taiwanese and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便当/便當 “lunchbox or boxed lunch” (from bento) and 料理 “prepared cuisine”, have passed into common currency. Western foreign words have great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came 芭蕾 (bāléi, "ballet"), 香槟 (xiāngbīn, "champagne"), via Italian 咖啡 (kāfēi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned 沙發 (shāfā "sofa"), 幽默 (yōumò "humour"), and 高尔夫 (gāoěrfū, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪斯科 (dísīkè, "disco"), 可乐 (kělè, "cola") and 迷你 (mínǐ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon 卡通 (cartoon), 基佬 (gay people), 的士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. 粉絲 (fěnsī, "fans"), 駭客 (hèikè, "hacker"), 部落格(bùluōgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin. Since the People's Republic of China’s economic and political rise in recent years, standard Mandarin has become an increasingly popular subject of study amongst the young in the Western world, as in the UK. BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | How hard is it to learn Chinese? In 1991 there were 2,000 foreign learners taking China's official Chinese Proficiency Test (comparable to English's Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660 . *Chinese characters *Chinese honorifics *Chinese measure word *Chinese number gestures *Chinese numerals *Chinese punctuation *Chinese exclamative particles *Four-character idiom *Han unification *Haner language *HSK test *Languages of China *North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics *Nü shu * * * * * * Keys to the Chinese Language: Book II - Google Books * A Practical Chinese Grammar - Google Books * ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawai’i Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X. * ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-08248-2975-9. * Arch Chinese free online Chinese character and Pinyin learning, Chinese English dictionary, writing worksheet generation, etc. * CHINGLISH online Chinese English Dictionary * nciku free online Chinese dictionary with handwriting recognition, pinyin, sound clips, etc. * MDBG free online Chinese-English dictionary * Chinese Characters Dictionary: supports Japanese, Korean, Cantonese, Hakka etc. * Chinese - English Dictionary: from Webster's Online Dictionary - the Rosetta Edition * CEDICT Chinese-English Dictionary Project * Stardict free (GPL) multilanguage dictionary including simplified/traditional Chinese for Unix (Linux, FreeBSD, etc.) and win32 * English-Chinese Translation Dictionary: Chinese-English-Chinese Online Dictionary (Taiwan-based; simplified characters not recognised) * CantoDict: Cantonese-English Dictionary Project * Chinese Pronunciation Dictionary Input Chinese words or sentences, get audio file of Mandarin pronunciation. Web-based tool. * Pinyin Annotator Add pinyin on top of any Chinese text. Mouse over any word to see English translation. Save output to OpenOffice Writer format. Prints nicely. Also adds pinyin to any Chinese web page. *Firefox users can install Add-ons for a pinyin annotator * Multimedia Dictionary of Chinese Characters Language Tool, Offline Chinese Dictionary. * Chinese Scholar Dictionary Chinese English dictionary with Pinyin index * A Cognitive Approach to Beginning Chinese: Interactions I and II. Margaret Mian Yan and Jennifer Li-chia Liu, Indiana University * Chinese Language Information Page A collection of Chinese language learning resources. * Learn Chinese - One At A Time * China KeyBoard Google Engine * Oneaday.org One Chinese idiom a day (simplified and traditional characters) with pinyin transliteration and English translation. * Mandarin Tone Drill Testing your knowledge of Mandarin tones. * Pinyin Practice Pinyin practice for Mandarin learners in all levels * Marjorie Chan's ChinaLinks: A large collection of Web resources by a professor of linguistics at Ohio State University * 4 words of Chinese every day * Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard * Chinese Character of the Day Learn to Read Chinese one word at a time. * Audio files with basic Chinese words * General Introduction of Chinese Language * Learn Chinese Characters * Chinese Scholar: The Free Chinese Class Learn Chinese language and culture through interactive media
Chinese_language
Was Old Chinese wholly uninflected?
no
data/set5/a7
Chinese_language Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) is a language family consisting of languages mutually unintelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. “The mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.” *Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. “The Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.” *Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. “The modern Chinese dialects are really more like a family of language. *John DeFrancis. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (1984), p.56. "To call Chinese a single language composed of dialects with varying degrees of difference is to mislead by minimizing disparities that according to Chao are as great as those between English and Dutch. To call Chinese a family of languages is to suggest extralinguistic differences that in fact do not exist and to overlook the unique linguistic situation that exists in China." Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the two branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages. About one-fifth of the world’s population, or over one billion people, speak some form of Chinese as their native language. The identification of the varieties of Chinese as "dialects" instead of "languages" is considered inappropriate by linguists and Sinologists. Spoken Chinese is distinguished by its high level of internal diversity, although all spoken varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic. There are between seven and thirteen main regional groups of Chinese (depending on classification scheme), of which the most spoken, by far, is Mandarin (about 850 million), followed by Wu (90 million), Min (70 million) and Cantonese (70 million). Most of these groups are mutually unintelligible, although some, like Xiang and the Southwest Mandarin dialects, may share common terms and some degree of intelligibility. Chinese is classified as a macrolanguage with 13 sub-languages in ISO 639-3, though the identification of the varieties of Chinese as multiple "languages" or as "dialects" of a single language is a contentious issue. The standardized form of spoken Chinese is Standard Mandarin (Putonghua / Guoyu / Huayu), based on the Beijing dialect, which is part of a larger group of North-Eastern and South-Western dialects, often taken as a separate language, see Mandarin Chinese for more, this language can be referred to as 官话 Guānhuà or 北方话 Běifānghuà in Chinese. Standard Mandarin is the official language of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC), as well as one of four official languages of Singapore. Chinese—de facto, Standard Mandarin—is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Of the other varieties, Standard Cantonese is common and influential in Guangdong Province and Cantonese-speaking overseas communities, and remains one of the official languages of Hong Kong (together with English) and of Macau (together with Portuguese). Hokkien, part of the Min language group, is widely spoken in southern Fujian, in neighbouring Taiwan (where it is known as Taiwanese or Hoklo) and in Southeast Asia (where it dominates in Singapore and Malaysia). Xinhua reported in March 2007 that 86 percent of people in the People's Republic of China spoke a Chinese variant. 全國約有53%的人能用普通話交流 As a language family, the number of Chinese speakers is 1.136 billion. The same news report indicates 53 percent of the population, or 700 million speakers, can effectively communicate in Putonghua. Sino-Tibetan language family. A map below depicts the linguistic subdivisions ("languages" or "dialect groups") within China itself. The traditionally-recognized seven main groups, in order of population size are: Chinese linguists have recently distinguished: 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. The Dungan language, spoken in Central Asia, is very closely related to Mandarin. However, it is not generally considered "Chinese" since it is written in Cyrillic and spoken by Dungan people outside China who are not considered ethnic Chinese. See List of Chinese dialects for a comprehensive listing of individual dialects within these large, broad groupings. In general, the above language-dialect groups do not have sharp boundaries, though Mandarin is the predominant Sinitic language in the North and the Southwest, and the rest are mostly spoken in Central or Southeastern China. Frequently, as in the case of the Guangdong province, native speakers of major variants overlapped. As with many areas that were linguistically diverse for a long time, it is not always clear how the speeches of various parts of China should be classified. The Ethnologue lists a total of 14, but the number varies between seven and seventeen depending on the classification scheme followed. For instance, the Min variety is often divided into Northern Min (Minbei, Fuchow) and Southern Min (Minnan, Amoy-Swatow); linguists have not determined whether their mutual intelligibility is small enough to sort them as separate languages. The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China. In general, mountainous South China displays more linguistic diversity than the flat North China. In parts of South China, a major city's dialect may only 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). Putonghua / Guoyu, often called "Mandarin", is the official standard language used by the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China, and Singapore (where it is called "Huayu"). It is based on the Beijing dialect, which is the dialect of Mandarin as spoken in Beijing. The governments intend for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. Therefore it is used in government agencies, in the media, and as a language of instruction in schools. In mainland China and Taiwan, diglossia has been a common feature: it is common for a Chinese to be able to speak two or even three varieties of the Sinitic languages (or “dialects”) together with Standard Mandarin. For example, in addition to putonghua a resident of Shanghai might speak Shanghainese and, if they did not grow up there, his or her local dialect as well. A native of Guangzhou may speak Standard Cantonese and putonghua, a resident of Taiwan, both Taiwanese and putonghua/guoyu. A person living in Taiwan 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, Standard Mandarin is beginning to take its place beside English and Standard Cantonese, the official languages. Linguists often view Chinese as a language family, though owing to China's socio-political and cultural situation, and the fact that all spoken varieties use one common written system, it is customary to refer to these generally mutually unintelligible variants as "the Chinese language". The diversity of Sinitic variants is comparable to the Romance languages. From a purely descriptive point of view, "languages" and "dialects" are simply arbitrary groups of similar idiolects, and the distinction is irrelevant to linguists who are only concerned with describing regional speeches technically. However, the idea of a single language has major overtones in politics and cultural self-identity, and explains the amount of emotion over this issue. Most Chinese and Chinese linguists refer to Chinese as a single language and its subdivisions dialects, while others call Chinese a language family. Chinese itself has a term for its unified writing system, Zhongwen (中文), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (汉语,“spoken language[s] of the Han Chinese) – this term could be translated to either “language” or “languages” since Chinese possesses no grammatical numbers. In the Chinese language, there is much less need for a uniform speech-and-writing continuum, as indicated by two separate character morphemes 语 yu and 文 wen. Ethnic Chinese often consider these spoken variations as one single language for reasons of nationality and as they inherit one common cultural and linguistic heritage in Classical Chinese. Han native speakers of Wu, Min, Hakka, and Cantonese, for instance, may consider their own linguistic varieties as separate spoken languages, but the Han Chinese race as one – albeit internally very diverse – ethnicity. To Chinese nationalists, the idea of Chinese as a language family may suggest that the Chinese identity is much more fragmentary and disunified than it actually is and as such is often looked upon as culturally and politically provocative. Additionally, in Taiwan, it is closely associated with Taiwanese independence, where some supporters of Taiwanese independence promote the local Taiwanese Minnan-based spoken language. Within the People’s Republic of China and Singapore, it is common for the government to refer to all divisions of the Sinitic language(s) beside Standard Mandarin as fangyan (“regional tongues”, often translated as “dialects”). Modern-day Chinese speakers of all kinds communicate using one formal standard written language, although this modern written standard is modeled after Mandarin, generally the modern Beijing substandard. The term sinophone, coined in analogy to anglophone and francophone, refers to those who speak the Chinese language natively, or prefer it as a medium of communication. The term is derived from Sinae, the Latin word for ancient China. :See also: Classical Chinese and Vernacular Chinese The relationship among the Chinese spoken and written languages is rather complex. Its spoken variations evolved at different rates, while written Chinese itself has changed much less. Classical Chinese literature began in the Spring and Autumn period, although written records have been discovered as far back as the 14th to 11th centuries BCE Shang dynasty oracle bones using the oracle bone scripts. The Chinese orthography centers around Chinese characters, hanzi, which are written within imaginary rectangular blocks, traditionally arranged in vertical columns, read from top to bottom down a column, and right to left across columns. Chinese characters are morphemes independent of phonetic change. Thus the number "one", yi in Mandarin, yat in Cantonese and chi̍t and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("一"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as 冇 and 係 for Cantonese and Hakka, which are considered archaic or unused in standard written Chinese. Written colloquial Cantonese has become quite popular in online chat rooms and instant messaging amongst Hong-Kongers and Cantonese-speakers elsewhere. Use of it is considered highly informal, and does not extend to any formal occasion. Also, in Hunan, some women write their local language in Nü Shu, a syllabary derived from Chinese characters. The Dungan language, considered by some 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 evolved over time from earliest forms of hieroglyphs. The idea that all Chinese characters are either pictographs or ideographs is an erroneous one: most characters contain phonetic parts, and are composites of phonetic components and semantic Radicals. Only the simplest characters, such as ren 人 (human), ri 日 (sun), shan 山 (mountain), shui 水 (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar Xǚ Shèn in the Hàn Dynasty classified characters into 6 categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80-90% as phonetic complexes consisting of a semantic element that indicates meaning, and a phonetic element that indicates the pronunciation. Generally, the phonetic element is more accurate and more important than the semantic one. There are about 214 radicals recognized in the Kangxi Dictionary. Modern characters are styled after the standard script (楷书/楷書 kǎishū) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (篆书/篆書 zhuànshū), cursive script (草书/草書 cǎoshū) and clerical script (隶书/隸書 lìshū). Calligraphy artists can write in traditional and simplified characters, but tend to use traditional characters for traditional art. Various styles of Chinese calligraphy. There are currently two systems for Chinese characters. The traditional system, still used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau and Chinese speaking communities (except Singapore and Malaysia) outside mainland China, takes its form from standardized character forms dating back to the late Han dynasty. The Simplified Chinese character system, developed by the People's Republic of China in 1954 to promote mass literacy, simplifies most complex traditional glyphs to fewer strokes, many to common caoshu shorthand variants. Singapore, which has a large Chinese communities, is the first – and at present the only – foreign nation to officially adopt simplified characters, although it has also become the de facto standard for younger ethnic Chinese in Malaysia. The Internet provides the platform to practice reading the alternative system, be it traditional or simplified. A well-educated Chinese today recognizes approximately 6,000-7,000 characters; some 3,000 characters are required to read a Mainland newspaper. The PRC government defines literacy amongst workers as a knowledge of 2,000 characters, though this would be only functional literacy. A large unabridged dictionary, like the Kangxi Dictionary, contains over 40,000 characters, including obscure, variant, rare, and archaic characters; less than a quarter of these characters are now commonly used.'' Most linguists classify all varieties of modern spoken Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family and believe that there was an original language, termed Proto-Sino-Tibetan, 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 Proto-Sino-Tibetan. 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 Indo-European languages from PIE don't apply to Chinese because of "morphological paucity" especially after Old Chinese Analysis of the concept "wave" in PST. . 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; most present systems rely heavily on Karlgren's insights and methods. Old Chinese ( ), sometimes known as "Archaic Chinese", was the language common during the early and middle Zhōu Dynasty (1122 BCE - 256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the Shījīng, the history of the Shūjīng, and portions of the Yìjīng (I Ching). The phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters 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 was still without tones. Work on reconstructing Old Chinese started with Qīng dynasty philologists. Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably 蜜 mì "honey", 獅 shī "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mǎ "horse", 犬 quǎn "dog", and 鵝 é "goose". The source says the reconstructions of old Chinese are tentative, and not definitive so no conclusions should be drawn. The reconstruction of Old Chinese can not be perfect so this hypothesis may be called into question. Encyclopedia Britannica s.v. "Chinese languages": "Old Chinese vocabulary already contained many words not generally occurring in the other Sino-Tibetan languages. The words for ‘honey' and ‘lion,' and probably also ‘horse,' ‘dog,' and ‘goose,' are connected with Indo-European and were acquired through trade and early contacts. (The nearest known Indo-European languages were Tocharian and Sogdian, a middle Iranian language.) A number of words have Austroasiatic cognates and point to early contacts with the ancestral language of Muong-Vietnamese and Mon-Khmer" ; Jan Ulenbrook, Einige Übereinstimmungen zwischen dem Chinesischen und dem Indogermanischen (1967) proposes 57 items; see also Tsung-tung Chang, 1988 Indo-European Vocabulary in Old Chinese;. 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 the Suí, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the 切韻 "Qièyùn" rhyme table (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the 廣韻 "Guǎngyùn" rhyme table. 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, 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; some scholars have argued that trying to reconstruct, say, modern Cantonese from modern Cantopop rhymes would give a fairly inaccurate picture of the present-day spoken language. The development of the spoken Chinese languages from early historical times to the present has been complex. Most Chinese people, in Sìchuān 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 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 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, though, a single standard of Mandarin did not exist. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The new 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 Standard Mandarin. As a result, Mandarin is now spoken by virtually all young and middle-aged citizens of mainland China and on Taiwan. Standard 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. Chinese was once the Lingua franca for East Asia countries for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. Throughout history Chinese culture and politics has had a great influence on unrelated languages such as Korean 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 Hán tự. It was the only available method for writing Vietnamese until the 14th century, used almost exclusively by Chinese-educated Vietnamese élites. From the 14th to the late 19th century, Vietnamese was written with Chữ nôm, a modified Chinese script incorporating sounds and syllables for native Vietnamese speakers. Chữ nôm was completely replaced by a modified Latin script created by the Jesuit missionary priest Alexander de Rhodes, which incorporates a system of diacritical marks to indicate tones, as well as modified consonants. The Vietnamese language exhibits multiple elements similar to Cantonese in regard to the specific intonations and sharp consonant endings. There is also a slight influence from Mandarin, including the sharper vowels and "kh" (IPA:x) sound 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. In derived Chinese characters or Zhuang logograms to write songs, even though Zhuang is not a Chinese dialect. Since the 1950s, the Zhuang language has been written in a modified Latin alphabet. Zhou, Minglang: Multilingualism in China: The Politics of Writing Reforms for Minority Languages, 1949-2002 (Walter de Gruyter 2003); ISBN 3-11-017896-6; p. 251–258. Languages within the influence of Chinese culture also have a very large number of loanwords from Chinese. Fifty percent or more of Korean vocabulary is of Chinese origin and the influence on Japanese and Vietnamese has been considerable. At least five percent of all words in Tagalog are of Chinese origin. Chinese has also lent a great deal of many grammatical features to these and neighboring languages, notably the lack of gender and the use of classifiers. Japanese has also a lot of loanwords from Chinese, as does Vietnamese. Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of 茶 (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 茄汁 (ke chap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 金橘 (kam kuat). :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, which is only about an eighth as many as English DeFrancis (1984) p.42 counts Chinese as having 1,277 tonal syllables, and about 398 to 418 if tones are disregarded; he cites Jespersen, Otto (1928) Monosyllabism in English; London, p.15 for a count of over 8000 syllables for English. . 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 four main tones of Standard Mandarin applied to the syllable "ma." The tones correspond to these five characters: * "mother" — high level * "hemp" or "torpid" — high rising * "horse" — low falling-rising * "scold" — high falling * "question particle" — neutral The Chinese had no uniform phonetic transcription system until the mid-20th century, although enunciation patterns were recorded in early rime books and dictionaries. Early Sanskrit and Pali Indian translators were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of the language in a foreign language. After 15th century CE Jesuits and Western court missionaries’ efforts result in some rudimentary Latin transcription systems, based on the Nanjing Mandarin dialect. Romanization is the process of transcribing a language in the Latin alphabet. There are many systems of romanization for the Chinese languages due to the Chinese's own lack of phonetic transcription until modern times. Chinese is first known to have been written in Latin characters by Western Christian missionaries in the 16th century. Today the most common romanization standard for Standard Mandarin is Hanyu Pinyin (漢語拼音/汉语拼音), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore). Pinyin is almost universally employed now for teaching standard spoken Chinese in schools and universities across America, Australia and Europe. Chinese parents also use Pinyin to teach their children the sounds and tones for words with which the child is unfamiliar. The Pinyin is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, and alongside the Pinyin is the Chinese symbol. The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859, later modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As it approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels (hence an Anglicization), it may be particularly helpful for beginner speakers of native English background. Wade-Giles is found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan (Taipei city now officially uses Hanyu Pinyin and the rest of the island officially uses Tōngyòng Pinyin 通用拼音). When used within European texts, the tone transcriptions in both pinyin and Wade-Giles are often left out for simplicity; Wade-Giles' extensive use of apostrophes is also usually omitted. Thus, most Western readers will be much more familiar with Beijing than they will be with Běijīng (pinyin), and with Taipei than T'ai²-pei³ (Wade-Giles). Here are a few examples of Hanyu Pinyin and Wade-Giles, for comparison: Other systems of romanization for Chinese include Gwoyeu Romatzyh, the French EFEO, the Yale (invented during WWII for U.S. troops), as well as separate systems for Cantonese, Minnan, Hakka, and other Chinese languages or dialects. Chinese languages have been phonetically transcribed into many other writing systems over the centuries. The 'Phags-pa script, for example, has been very helpful in reconstructing the pronunciations of pre-modern forms of Chinese. Zhuyin (注音, also known as bopomofo), a semi-syllabary is still widely used in Taiwan's elementary schools to aid standard pronunciation. Although bopomofo characters are reminiscent of katakana script, there is no source to substantiate the claim that Katakana was the basis for the zhuyin system. A comparison table of zhuyin to pinyin exists in the zhuyin article. Syllables based on pinyin and zhuyin can also be compared by looking at the following articles: *Pinyin table *Zhuyin table There are also at least two systems of cyrillization for Chinese. The most widespread is the Palladius system. Modern Chinese has often been erroneously classed as a "monosyllabic" language. While most of the morphemes are single syllable, modern Chinese today is much less a monosyllabic language in that nouns, adjectives and verbs are largely di-syllabic. The tendency to create disyllabic words in the modern Chinese languages, particularly in Mandarin, has been particularly pronounced when compared to Classical Chinese. Classical Chinese is a highly isolating language, with each idea (morpheme) generally corresponding to a single syllable and a single character; Modern Chinese though, has the tendency to form new words through disyllabic, trisyllabic and tetra-character agglutination. In fact, some linguists argue that classifying modern Chinese as an isolating language is misleading, for this reason alone. Chinese morphology is strictly bound to a set number of syllables with a fairly rigid construction which are the morphemes, the smallest blocks of the language. While many of these single-syllable morphemes ( zì, 字 in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cí (词/詞), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cí (“word”) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more. For example: *Yun 云 -“cloud” *Hanbaobao 汉堡包 –“hamburger” *Wo 我 –“I, me” *Renmin 人民 –“people” *Diqiu 地球 –“earth(globosity)” *Shandian 闪电 –“lightning” *Meng 梦 –“dream” All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphology — i.e., changes in form of a word — to indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflections – it possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English), and no gender. They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le 了, hai 还, yijing 已经, etc. 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. Chinese also has an extensive system of measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring 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. Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess 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. Official modern Mandarin has only 400 spoken monosyllables but over 10,000 written characters, so there are many homophones only distinguishable by the four tones. Even this is often not enough unless the context and exact phrase or cí is identified. The mono-syllable jī, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: 雞/鸡 chicken, 機/机 machine, 基 basic, 擊/击 (to) hit, 饑/饥 hunger, and 積/积 sum. In speech, the glyphing of a monosyllable to its meaning must be determined by context or by relation to other morphemes (e.g. "some" as in the opposite of "none"). Native speakers may state which words or phrases their names are found in, for convenience of writing: 名字叫嘉英，嘉陵江的嘉，英國的英 Míngzi jiào Jiāyīng, Jiālíng Jiāng de jiā, Yīngguó de yīng "My name is Jiāyīng, the Jia for Jialing River and the ying for the short form in Chinese of UK." Southern Chinese varieties like Cantonese and Hakka preserved more of the rimes of Middle Chinese and have more tones. The previous examples of jī, for instance, 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 multi-syllabic words. The entire Chinese character corpus since antiquity comprises well over 20,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are now commonly in use. However Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words, there are many times more Chinese words than there are characters as most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters. Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and phrases vary greatly. The Hanyu Da Zidian, an all-inclusive compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries for characters, including bone oracle versions. The Zhonghua Zihai 中华字海 (1994) contains 85,568 head entries for character definitions, and is the largest reference work based purely on character and its literary variants. The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary, the 12-volumed Hanyu Da Cidian 汉语大词典, records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters, and gives over 370,000 definitions. The 1999 revised Cihai, a multi-volume encyclopedic dictionary reference work, gives 122,836 vocabulary entry definitions under 19,485 Chinese characters, including proper names, phrases and common zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific and technical terms. The latest 2007 5th edition of Xiandai Hanyu Cidian 现代汉语词典, an authoritative one-volume dictionary on modern standard Chinese language as used in mainland China, has 65,000 entries and defines 11,000 head characters. Like any other language, Chinese has absorbed a sizeable amount of loanwords from other cultures. 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 since Old Chinese include 葡萄 "grape," 石榴 "pomegranate" and 狮子/獅子 "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including 佛 "Buddha" and 菩萨/菩薩 "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as 胡同 "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as 葡萄 "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or Pāli, the liturgical languages of North India. Words borrowed from the nomadic tribes of the Gobi, Mongolian or northeast regions generally have Altaic etymologies, such as 琵琶 "pípa", the Chinese lute, or 酪 "cheese" or "yoghurt", but from exactly which Altaic source is not always entirely clear. Foreign words continue to enter the Chinese language by transcription according to their pronunciations. This is done by employing Chinese characters with similar pronunciations. For example, "Israel" becomes 以色列 (pinyin: yǐsèliè), Paris 巴黎. A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including 沙發 shāfā "sofa," 马达/馬達 mǎdá "motor," 幽默 yōumò "humour," 逻辑/邏輯 luójí "logic," 时髦/時髦 shímáo "smart, fashionable" and 歇斯底里 xiēsīdǐlǐ "hysterics." The bulk of these words were originally coined in the Shanghainese dialect during the early 20th century and were later loaned into Mandarin, hence their pronunciations in Mandarin may be quite off from the English. For example, 沙发/沙發 and 马达/馬達 in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor." Today, 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 德律风/德律風 ( Shanghainese: télífon [ ], Standard Mandarin: délǜfēng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese 电话/電話 (diànhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include 电视/電視 (diànshì "electric vision") for television, 电脑/電腦 (diànnǎo "electric brain") for computer; 手机/手機 (shǒujī "hand machine") for cellphone, and 蓝牙/藍芽 (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. 網誌(wǎng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as 汉堡包/漢堡包 (hànbǎo bāo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as 拖拉机/拖拉機 (tuōlājī, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马利奥/馬利奧 for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example 奔腾/奔騰 (bēnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and 赛百味/賽百味 (Sàibǎiwèi "better-than hundred tastes") for Subway restaurants. Since the 20th century, another source has been Japan. Using existing kanji, which are Chinese characters used in the Japanese language, the Japanese re-moulded European concepts and inventions into wasei-kango (和製漢語, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include diànhuà (电话/電話, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社会, shakai, "society"), kēxué (科学/科學, kagaku, "science") and chōuxiàng (抽象, chūshō, "abstract"). Other terms were coined by the Japanese by giving new senses to existing Chinese terms or by referring to expressions used in classical Chinese literature. For example, jīngjì (经济/經濟, keizai), which in the original Chinese meant "the workings of the state", was narrowed to "economy" in Japanese; this narrowed definition was then reimported into Chinese. As a result, these terms are virtually indistinguishable from native Chinese words: indeed, there is some dispute over some of these terms as to whether the Japanese or Chinese coined them first. As a result of this toing-and-froing process, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese share a corpus linguistics of terms describing modern terminology, in parallel to a similar corpus of terms built from Greco-Latin terms shared among European languages. Taiwanese and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便当/便當 “lunchbox or boxed lunch” (from bento) and 料理 “prepared cuisine”, have passed into common currency. Western foreign words have great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came 芭蕾 (bāléi, "ballet"), 香槟 (xiāngbīn, "champagne"), via Italian 咖啡 (kāfēi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned 沙發 (shāfā "sofa"), 幽默 (yōumò "humour"), and 高尔夫 (gāoěrfū, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪斯科 (dísīkè, "disco"), 可乐 (kělè, "cola") and 迷你 (mínǐ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon 卡通 (cartoon), 基佬 (gay people), 的士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. 粉絲 (fěnsī, "fans"), 駭客 (hèikè, "hacker"), 部落格(bùluōgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin. Since the People's Republic of China’s economic and political rise in recent years, standard Mandarin has become an increasingly popular subject of study amongst the young in the Western world, as in the UK. BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | How hard is it to learn Chinese? In 1991 there were 2,000 foreign learners taking China's official Chinese Proficiency Test (comparable to English's Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660 . *Chinese characters *Chinese honorifics *Chinese measure word *Chinese number gestures *Chinese numerals *Chinese punctuation *Chinese exclamative particles *Four-character idiom *Han unification *Haner language *HSK test *Languages of China *North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics *Nü shu * * * * * * Keys to the Chinese Language: Book II - Google Books * A Practical Chinese Grammar - Google Books * ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawai’i Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X. * ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-08248-2975-9. * Arch Chinese free online Chinese character and Pinyin learning, Chinese English dictionary, writing worksheet generation, etc. * CHINGLISH online Chinese English Dictionary * nciku free online Chinese dictionary with handwriting recognition, pinyin, sound clips, etc. * MDBG free online Chinese-English dictionary * Chinese Characters Dictionary: supports Japanese, Korean, Cantonese, Hakka etc. * Chinese - English Dictionary: from Webster's Online Dictionary - the Rosetta Edition * CEDICT Chinese-English Dictionary Project * Stardict free (GPL) multilanguage dictionary including simplified/traditional Chinese for Unix (Linux, FreeBSD, etc.) and win32 * English-Chinese Translation Dictionary: Chinese-English-Chinese Online Dictionary (Taiwan-based; simplified characters not recognised) * CantoDict: Cantonese-English Dictionary Project * Chinese Pronunciation Dictionary Input Chinese words or sentences, get audio file of Mandarin pronunciation. Web-based tool. * Pinyin Annotator Add pinyin on top of any Chinese text. Mouse over any word to see English translation. Save output to OpenOffice Writer format. Prints nicely. Also adds pinyin to any Chinese web page. *Firefox users can install Add-ons for a pinyin annotator * Multimedia Dictionary of Chinese Characters Language Tool, Offline Chinese Dictionary. * Chinese Scholar Dictionary Chinese English dictionary with Pinyin index * A Cognitive Approach to Beginning Chinese: Interactions I and II. Margaret Mian Yan and Jennifer Li-chia Liu, Indiana University * Chinese Language Information Page A collection of Chinese language learning resources. * Learn Chinese - One At A Time * China KeyBoard Google Engine * Oneaday.org One Chinese idiom a day (simplified and traditional characters) with pinyin transliteration and English translation. * Mandarin Tone Drill Testing your knowledge of Mandarin tones. * Pinyin Practice Pinyin practice for Mandarin learners in all levels * Marjorie Chan's ChinaLinks: A large collection of Web resources by a professor of linguistics at Ohio State University * 4 words of Chinese every day * Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard * Chinese Character of the Day Learn to Read Chinese one word at a time. * Audio files with basic Chinese words * General Introduction of Chinese Language * Learn Chinese Characters * Chinese Scholar: The Free Chinese Class Learn Chinese language and culture through interactive media
Chinese_language
In North Korea, has Hanja been discontinued?
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Chinese_language Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) is a language family consisting of languages mutually unintelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. “The mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.” *Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. “The Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.” *Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. “The modern Chinese dialects are really more like a family of language. *John DeFrancis. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (1984), p.56. "To call Chinese a single language composed of dialects with varying degrees of difference is to mislead by minimizing disparities that according to Chao are as great as those between English and Dutch. To call Chinese a family of languages is to suggest extralinguistic differences that in fact do not exist and to overlook the unique linguistic situation that exists in China." Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the two branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages. About one-fifth of the world’s population, or over one billion people, speak some form of Chinese as their native language. The identification of the varieties of Chinese as "dialects" instead of "languages" is considered inappropriate by linguists and Sinologists. Spoken Chinese is distinguished by its high level of internal diversity, although all spoken varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic. There are between seven and thirteen main regional groups of Chinese (depending on classification scheme), of which the most spoken, by far, is Mandarin (about 850 million), followed by Wu (90 million), Min (70 million) and Cantonese (70 million). Most of these groups are mutually unintelligible, although some, like Xiang and the Southwest Mandarin dialects, may share common terms and some degree of intelligibility. Chinese is classified as a macrolanguage with 13 sub-languages in ISO 639-3, though the identification of the varieties of Chinese as multiple "languages" or as "dialects" of a single language is a contentious issue. The standardized form of spoken Chinese is Standard Mandarin (Putonghua / Guoyu / Huayu), based on the Beijing dialect, which is part of a larger group of North-Eastern and South-Western dialects, often taken as a separate language, see Mandarin Chinese for more, this language can be referred to as 官话 Guānhuà or 北方话 Běifānghuà in Chinese. Standard Mandarin is the official language of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC), as well as one of four official languages of Singapore. Chinese—de facto, Standard Mandarin—is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Of the other varieties, Standard Cantonese is common and influential in Guangdong Province and Cantonese-speaking overseas communities, and remains one of the official languages of Hong Kong (together with English) and of Macau (together with Portuguese). Hokkien, part of the Min language group, is widely spoken in southern Fujian, in neighbouring Taiwan (where it is known as Taiwanese or Hoklo) and in Southeast Asia (where it dominates in Singapore and Malaysia). Xinhua reported in March 2007 that 86 percent of people in the People's Republic of China spoke a Chinese variant. 全國約有53%的人能用普通話交流 As a language family, the number of Chinese speakers is 1.136 billion. The same news report indicates 53 percent of the population, or 700 million speakers, can effectively communicate in Putonghua. Sino-Tibetan language family. A map below depicts the linguistic subdivisions ("languages" or "dialect groups") within China itself. The traditionally-recognized seven main groups, in order of population size are: Chinese linguists have recently distinguished: 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. The Dungan language, spoken in Central Asia, is very closely related to Mandarin. However, it is not generally considered "Chinese" since it is written in Cyrillic and spoken by Dungan people outside China who are not considered ethnic Chinese. See List of Chinese dialects for a comprehensive listing of individual dialects within these large, broad groupings. In general, the above language-dialect groups do not have sharp boundaries, though Mandarin is the predominant Sinitic language in the North and the Southwest, and the rest are mostly spoken in Central or Southeastern China. Frequently, as in the case of the Guangdong province, native speakers of major variants overlapped. As with many areas that were linguistically diverse for a long time, it is not always clear how the speeches of various parts of China should be classified. The Ethnologue lists a total of 14, but the number varies between seven and seventeen depending on the classification scheme followed. For instance, the Min variety is often divided into Northern Min (Minbei, Fuchow) and Southern Min (Minnan, Amoy-Swatow); linguists have not determined whether their mutual intelligibility is small enough to sort them as separate languages. The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China. In general, mountainous South China displays more linguistic diversity than the flat North China. In parts of South China, a major city's dialect may only 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). Putonghua / Guoyu, often called "Mandarin", is the official standard language used by the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China, and Singapore (where it is called "Huayu"). It is based on the Beijing dialect, which is the dialect of Mandarin as spoken in Beijing. The governments intend for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. Therefore it is used in government agencies, in the media, and as a language of instruction in schools. In mainland China and Taiwan, diglossia has been a common feature: it is common for a Chinese to be able to speak two or even three varieties of the Sinitic languages (or “dialects”) together with Standard Mandarin. For example, in addition to putonghua a resident of Shanghai might speak Shanghainese and, if they did not grow up there, his or her local dialect as well. A native of Guangzhou may speak Standard Cantonese and putonghua, a resident of Taiwan, both Taiwanese and putonghua/guoyu. A person living in Taiwan 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, Standard Mandarin is beginning to take its place beside English and Standard Cantonese, the official languages. Linguists often view Chinese as a language family, though owing to China's socio-political and cultural situation, and the fact that all spoken varieties use one common written system, it is customary to refer to these generally mutually unintelligible variants as "the Chinese language". The diversity of Sinitic variants is comparable to the Romance languages. From a purely descriptive point of view, "languages" and "dialects" are simply arbitrary groups of similar idiolects, and the distinction is irrelevant to linguists who are only concerned with describing regional speeches technically. However, the idea of a single language has major overtones in politics and cultural self-identity, and explains the amount of emotion over this issue. Most Chinese and Chinese linguists refer to Chinese as a single language and its subdivisions dialects, while others call Chinese a language family. Chinese itself has a term for its unified writing system, Zhongwen (中文), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (汉语,“spoken language[s] of the Han Chinese) – this term could be translated to either “language” or “languages” since Chinese possesses no grammatical numbers. In the Chinese language, there is much less need for a uniform speech-and-writing continuum, as indicated by two separate character morphemes 语 yu and 文 wen. Ethnic Chinese often consider these spoken variations as one single language for reasons of nationality and as they inherit one common cultural and linguistic heritage in Classical Chinese. Han native speakers of Wu, Min, Hakka, and Cantonese, for instance, may consider their own linguistic varieties as separate spoken languages, but the Han Chinese race as one – albeit internally very diverse – ethnicity. To Chinese nationalists, the idea of Chinese as a language family may suggest that the Chinese identity is much more fragmentary and disunified than it actually is and as such is often looked upon as culturally and politically provocative. Additionally, in Taiwan, it is closely associated with Taiwanese independence, where some supporters of Taiwanese independence promote the local Taiwanese Minnan-based spoken language. Within the People’s Republic of China and Singapore, it is common for the government to refer to all divisions of the Sinitic language(s) beside Standard Mandarin as fangyan (“regional tongues”, often translated as “dialects”). Modern-day Chinese speakers of all kinds communicate using one formal standard written language, although this modern written standard is modeled after Mandarin, generally the modern Beijing substandard. The term sinophone, coined in analogy to anglophone and francophone, refers to those who speak the Chinese language natively, or prefer it as a medium of communication. The term is derived from Sinae, the Latin word for ancient China. :See also: Classical Chinese and Vernacular Chinese The relationship among the Chinese spoken and written languages is rather complex. Its spoken variations evolved at different rates, while written Chinese itself has changed much less. Classical Chinese literature began in the Spring and Autumn period, although written records have been discovered as far back as the 14th to 11th centuries BCE Shang dynasty oracle bones using the oracle bone scripts. The Chinese orthography centers around Chinese characters, hanzi, which are written within imaginary rectangular blocks, traditionally arranged in vertical columns, read from top to bottom down a column, and right to left across columns. Chinese characters are morphemes independent of phonetic change. Thus the number "one", yi in Mandarin, yat in Cantonese and chi̍t and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("一"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as 冇 and 係 for Cantonese and Hakka, which are considered archaic or unused in standard written Chinese. Written colloquial Cantonese has become quite popular in online chat rooms and instant messaging amongst Hong-Kongers and Cantonese-speakers elsewhere. Use of it is considered highly informal, and does not extend to any formal occasion. Also, in Hunan, some women write their local language in Nü Shu, a syllabary derived from Chinese characters. The Dungan language, considered by some 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 evolved over time from earliest forms of hieroglyphs. The idea that all Chinese characters are either pictographs or ideographs is an erroneous one: most characters contain phonetic parts, and are composites of phonetic components and semantic Radicals. Only the simplest characters, such as ren 人 (human), ri 日 (sun), shan 山 (mountain), shui 水 (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar Xǚ Shèn in the Hàn Dynasty classified characters into 6 categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80-90% as phonetic complexes consisting of a semantic element that indicates meaning, and a phonetic element that indicates the pronunciation. Generally, the phonetic element is more accurate and more important than the semantic one. There are about 214 radicals recognized in the Kangxi Dictionary. Modern characters are styled after the standard script (楷书/楷書 kǎishū) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (篆书/篆書 zhuànshū), cursive script (草书/草書 cǎoshū) and clerical script (隶书/隸書 lìshū). Calligraphy artists can write in traditional and simplified characters, but tend to use traditional characters for traditional art. Various styles of Chinese calligraphy. There are currently two systems for Chinese characters. The traditional system, still used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau and Chinese speaking communities (except Singapore and Malaysia) outside mainland China, takes its form from standardized character forms dating back to the late Han dynasty. The Simplified Chinese character system, developed by the People's Republic of China in 1954 to promote mass literacy, simplifies most complex traditional glyphs to fewer strokes, many to common caoshu shorthand variants. Singapore, which has a large Chinese communities, is the first – and at present the only – foreign nation to officially adopt simplified characters, although it has also become the de facto standard for younger ethnic Chinese in Malaysia. The Internet provides the platform to practice reading the alternative system, be it traditional or simplified. A well-educated Chinese today recognizes approximately 6,000-7,000 characters; some 3,000 characters are required to read a Mainland newspaper. The PRC government defines literacy amongst workers as a knowledge of 2,000 characters, though this would be only functional literacy. A large unabridged dictionary, like the Kangxi Dictionary, contains over 40,000 characters, including obscure, variant, rare, and archaic characters; less than a quarter of these characters are now commonly used.'' Most linguists classify all varieties of modern spoken Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family and believe that there was an original language, termed Proto-Sino-Tibetan, 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 Proto-Sino-Tibetan. 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 Indo-European languages from PIE don't apply to Chinese because of "morphological paucity" especially after Old Chinese Analysis of the concept "wave" in PST. . 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; most present systems rely heavily on Karlgren's insights and methods. Old Chinese ( ), sometimes known as "Archaic Chinese", was the language common during the early and middle Zhōu Dynasty (1122 BCE - 256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the Shījīng, the history of the Shūjīng, and portions of the Yìjīng (I Ching). The phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters 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 was still without tones. Work on reconstructing Old Chinese started with Qīng dynasty philologists. Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably 蜜 mì "honey", 獅 shī "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mǎ "horse", 犬 quǎn "dog", and 鵝 é "goose". The source says the reconstructions of old Chinese are tentative, and not definitive so no conclusions should be drawn. The reconstruction of Old Chinese can not be perfect so this hypothesis may be called into question. Encyclopedia Britannica s.v. "Chinese languages": "Old Chinese vocabulary already contained many words not generally occurring in the other Sino-Tibetan languages. The words for ‘honey' and ‘lion,' and probably also ‘horse,' ‘dog,' and ‘goose,' are connected with Indo-European and were acquired through trade and early contacts. (The nearest known Indo-European languages were Tocharian and Sogdian, a middle Iranian language.) A number of words have Austroasiatic cognates and point to early contacts with the ancestral language of Muong-Vietnamese and Mon-Khmer" ; Jan Ulenbrook, Einige Übereinstimmungen zwischen dem Chinesischen und dem Indogermanischen (1967) proposes 57 items; see also Tsung-tung Chang, 1988 Indo-European Vocabulary in Old Chinese;. 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 the Suí, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the 切韻 "Qièyùn" rhyme table (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the 廣韻 "Guǎngyùn" rhyme table. 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, 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; some scholars have argued that trying to reconstruct, say, modern Cantonese from modern Cantopop rhymes would give a fairly inaccurate picture of the present-day spoken language. The development of the spoken Chinese languages from early historical times to the present has been complex. Most Chinese people, in Sìchuān 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 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 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, though, a single standard of Mandarin did not exist. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The new 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 Standard Mandarin. As a result, Mandarin is now spoken by virtually all young and middle-aged citizens of mainland China and on Taiwan. Standard 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. Chinese was once the Lingua franca for East Asia countries for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. Throughout history Chinese culture and politics has had a great influence on unrelated languages such as Korean 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 Hán tự. It was the only available method for writing Vietnamese until the 14th century, used almost exclusively by Chinese-educated Vietnamese élites. From the 14th to the late 19th century, Vietnamese was written with Chữ nôm, a modified Chinese script incorporating sounds and syllables for native Vietnamese speakers. Chữ nôm was completely replaced by a modified Latin script created by the Jesuit missionary priest Alexander de Rhodes, which incorporates a system of diacritical marks to indicate tones, as well as modified consonants. The Vietnamese language exhibits multiple elements similar to Cantonese in regard to the specific intonations and sharp consonant endings. There is also a slight influence from Mandarin, including the sharper vowels and "kh" (IPA:x) sound 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. In derived Chinese characters or Zhuang logograms to write songs, even though Zhuang is not a Chinese dialect. Since the 1950s, the Zhuang language has been written in a modified Latin alphabet. Zhou, Minglang: Multilingualism in China: The Politics of Writing Reforms for Minority Languages, 1949-2002 (Walter de Gruyter 2003); ISBN 3-11-017896-6; p. 251–258. Languages within the influence of Chinese culture also have a very large number of loanwords from Chinese. Fifty percent or more of Korean vocabulary is of Chinese origin and the influence on Japanese and Vietnamese has been considerable. At least five percent of all words in Tagalog are of Chinese origin. Chinese has also lent a great deal of many grammatical features to these and neighboring languages, notably the lack of gender and the use of classifiers. Japanese has also a lot of loanwords from Chinese, as does Vietnamese. Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of 茶 (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 茄汁 (ke chap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 金橘 (kam kuat). :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, which is only about an eighth as many as English DeFrancis (1984) p.42 counts Chinese as having 1,277 tonal syllables, and about 398 to 418 if tones are disregarded; he cites Jespersen, Otto (1928) Monosyllabism in English; London, p.15 for a count of over 8000 syllables for English. . 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 four main tones of Standard Mandarin applied to the syllable "ma." The tones correspond to these five characters: * "mother" — high level * "hemp" or "torpid" — high rising * "horse" — low falling-rising * "scold" — high falling * "question particle" — neutral The Chinese had no uniform phonetic transcription system until the mid-20th century, although enunciation patterns were recorded in early rime books and dictionaries. Early Sanskrit and Pali Indian translators were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of the language in a foreign language. After 15th century CE Jesuits and Western court missionaries’ efforts result in some rudimentary Latin transcription systems, based on the Nanjing Mandarin dialect. Romanization is the process of transcribing a language in the Latin alphabet. There are many systems of romanization for the Chinese languages due to the Chinese's own lack of phonetic transcription until modern times. Chinese is first known to have been written in Latin characters by Western Christian missionaries in the 16th century. Today the most common romanization standard for Standard Mandarin is Hanyu Pinyin (漢語拼音/汉语拼音), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore). Pinyin is almost universally employed now for teaching standard spoken Chinese in schools and universities across America, Australia and Europe. Chinese parents also use Pinyin to teach their children the sounds and tones for words with which the child is unfamiliar. The Pinyin is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, and alongside the Pinyin is the Chinese symbol. The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859, later modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As it approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels (hence an Anglicization), it may be particularly helpful for beginner speakers of native English background. Wade-Giles is found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan (Taipei city now officially uses Hanyu Pinyin and the rest of the island officially uses Tōngyòng Pinyin 通用拼音). When used within European texts, the tone transcriptions in both pinyin and Wade-Giles are often left out for simplicity; Wade-Giles' extensive use of apostrophes is also usually omitted. Thus, most Western readers will be much more familiar with Beijing than they will be with Běijīng (pinyin), and with Taipei than T'ai²-pei³ (Wade-Giles). Here are a few examples of Hanyu Pinyin and Wade-Giles, for comparison: Other systems of romanization for Chinese include Gwoyeu Romatzyh, the French EFEO, the Yale (invented during WWII for U.S. troops), as well as separate systems for Cantonese, Minnan, Hakka, and other Chinese languages or dialects. Chinese languages have been phonetically transcribed into many other writing systems over the centuries. The 'Phags-pa script, for example, has been very helpful in reconstructing the pronunciations of pre-modern forms of Chinese. Zhuyin (注音, also known as bopomofo), a semi-syllabary is still widely used in Taiwan's elementary schools to aid standard pronunciation. Although bopomofo characters are reminiscent of katakana script, there is no source to substantiate the claim that Katakana was the basis for the zhuyin system. A comparison table of zhuyin to pinyin exists in the zhuyin article. Syllables based on pinyin and zhuyin can also be compared by looking at the following articles: *Pinyin table *Zhuyin table There are also at least two systems of cyrillization for Chinese. The most widespread is the Palladius system. Modern Chinese has often been erroneously classed as a "monosyllabic" language. While most of the morphemes are single syllable, modern Chinese today is much less a monosyllabic language in that nouns, adjectives and verbs are largely di-syllabic. The tendency to create disyllabic words in the modern Chinese languages, particularly in Mandarin, has been particularly pronounced when compared to Classical Chinese. Classical Chinese is a highly isolating language, with each idea (morpheme) generally corresponding to a single syllable and a single character; Modern Chinese though, has the tendency to form new words through disyllabic, trisyllabic and tetra-character agglutination. In fact, some linguists argue that classifying modern Chinese as an isolating language is misleading, for this reason alone. Chinese morphology is strictly bound to a set number of syllables with a fairly rigid construction which are the morphemes, the smallest blocks of the language. While many of these single-syllable morphemes ( zì, 字 in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cí (词/詞), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cí (“word”) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more. For example: *Yun 云 -“cloud” *Hanbaobao 汉堡包 –“hamburger” *Wo 我 –“I, me” *Renmin 人民 –“people” *Diqiu 地球 –“earth(globosity)” *Shandian 闪电 –“lightning” *Meng 梦 –“dream” All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphology — i.e., changes in form of a word — to indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflections – it possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English), and no gender. They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le 了, hai 还, yijing 已经, etc. 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. Chinese also has an extensive system of measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring 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. Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess 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. Official modern Mandarin has only 400 spoken monosyllables but over 10,000 written characters, so there are many homophones only distinguishable by the four tones. Even this is often not enough unless the context and exact phrase or cí is identified. The mono-syllable jī, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: 雞/鸡 chicken, 機/机 machine, 基 basic, 擊/击 (to) hit, 饑/饥 hunger, and 積/积 sum. In speech, the glyphing of a monosyllable to its meaning must be determined by context or by relation to other morphemes (e.g. "some" as in the opposite of "none"). Native speakers may state which words or phrases their names are found in, for convenience of writing: 名字叫嘉英，嘉陵江的嘉，英國的英 Míngzi jiào Jiāyīng, Jiālíng Jiāng de jiā, Yīngguó de yīng "My name is Jiāyīng, the Jia for Jialing River and the ying for the short form in Chinese of UK." Southern Chinese varieties like Cantonese and Hakka preserved more of the rimes of Middle Chinese and have more tones. The previous examples of jī, for instance, 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 multi-syllabic words. The entire Chinese character corpus since antiquity comprises well over 20,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are now commonly in use. However Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words, there are many times more Chinese words than there are characters as most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters. Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and phrases vary greatly. The Hanyu Da Zidian, an all-inclusive compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries for characters, including bone oracle versions. The Zhonghua Zihai 中华字海 (1994) contains 85,568 head entries for character definitions, and is the largest reference work based purely on character and its literary variants. The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary, the 12-volumed Hanyu Da Cidian 汉语大词典, records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters, and gives over 370,000 definitions. The 1999 revised Cihai, a multi-volume encyclopedic dictionary reference work, gives 122,836 vocabulary entry definitions under 19,485 Chinese characters, including proper names, phrases and common zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific and technical terms. The latest 2007 5th edition of Xiandai Hanyu Cidian 现代汉语词典, an authoritative one-volume dictionary on modern standard Chinese language as used in mainland China, has 65,000 entries and defines 11,000 head characters. Like any other language, Chinese has absorbed a sizeable amount of loanwords from other cultures. 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 since Old Chinese include 葡萄 "grape," 石榴 "pomegranate" and 狮子/獅子 "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including 佛 "Buddha" and 菩萨/菩薩 "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as 胡同 "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as 葡萄 "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or Pāli, the liturgical languages of North India. Words borrowed from the nomadic tribes of the Gobi, Mongolian or northeast regions generally have Altaic etymologies, such as 琵琶 "pípa", the Chinese lute, or 酪 "cheese" or "yoghurt", but from exactly which Altaic source is not always entirely clear. Foreign words continue to enter the Chinese language by transcription according to their pronunciations. This is done by employing Chinese characters with similar pronunciations. For example, "Israel" becomes 以色列 (pinyin: yǐsèliè), Paris 巴黎. A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including 沙發 shāfā "sofa," 马达/馬達 mǎdá "motor," 幽默 yōumò "humour," 逻辑/邏輯 luójí "logic," 时髦/時髦 shímáo "smart, fashionable" and 歇斯底里 xiēsīdǐlǐ "hysterics." The bulk of these words were originally coined in the Shanghainese dialect during the early 20th century and were later loaned into Mandarin, hence their pronunciations in Mandarin may be quite off from the English. For example, 沙发/沙發 and 马达/馬達 in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor." Today, 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 德律风/德律風 ( Shanghainese: télífon [ ], Standard Mandarin: délǜfēng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese 电话/電話 (diànhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include 电视/電視 (diànshì "electric vision") for television, 电脑/電腦 (diànnǎo "electric brain") for computer; 手机/手機 (shǒujī "hand machine") for cellphone, and 蓝牙/藍芽 (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. 網誌(wǎng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as 汉堡包/漢堡包 (hànbǎo bāo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as 拖拉机/拖拉機 (tuōlājī, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马利奥/馬利奧 for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example 奔腾/奔騰 (bēnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and 赛百味/賽百味 (Sàibǎiwèi "better-than hundred tastes") for Subway restaurants. Since the 20th century, another source has been Japan. Using existing kanji, which are Chinese characters used in the Japanese language, the Japanese re-moulded European concepts and inventions into wasei-kango (和製漢語, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include diànhuà (电话/電話, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社会, shakai, "society"), kēxué (科学/科學, kagaku, "science") and chōuxiàng (抽象, chūshō, "abstract"). Other terms were coined by the Japanese by giving new senses to existing Chinese terms or by referring to expressions used in classical Chinese literature. For example, jīngjì (经济/經濟, keizai), which in the original Chinese meant "the workings of the state", was narrowed to "economy" in Japanese; this narrowed definition was then reimported into Chinese. As a result, these terms are virtually indistinguishable from native Chinese words: indeed, there is some dispute over some of these terms as to whether the Japanese or Chinese coined them first. As a result of this toing-and-froing process, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese share a corpus linguistics of terms describing modern terminology, in parallel to a similar corpus of terms built from Greco-Latin terms shared among European languages. Taiwanese and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便当/便當 “lunchbox or boxed lunch” (from bento) and 料理 “prepared cuisine”, have passed into common currency. Western foreign words have great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came 芭蕾 (bāléi, "ballet"), 香槟 (xiāngbīn, "champagne"), via Italian 咖啡 (kāfēi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned 沙發 (shāfā "sofa"), 幽默 (yōumò "humour"), and 高尔夫 (gāoěrfū, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪斯科 (dísīkè, "disco"), 可乐 (kělè, "cola") and 迷你 (mínǐ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon 卡通 (cartoon), 基佬 (gay people), 的士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. 粉絲 (fěnsī, "fans"), 駭客 (hèikè, "hacker"), 部落格(bùluōgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin. Since the People's Republic of China’s economic and political rise in recent years, standard Mandarin has become an increasingly popular subject of study amongst the young in the Western world, as in the UK. BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | How hard is it to learn Chinese? In 1991 there were 2,000 foreign learners taking China's official Chinese Proficiency Test (comparable to English's Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660 . *Chinese characters *Chinese honorifics *Chinese measure word *Chinese number gestures *Chinese numerals *Chinese punctuation *Chinese exclamative particles *Four-character idiom *Han unification *Haner language *HSK test *Languages of China *North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics *Nü shu * * * * * * Keys to the Chinese Language: Book II - Google Books * A Practical Chinese Grammar - Google Books * ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawai’i Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X. * ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-08248-2975-9. * Arch Chinese free online Chinese character and Pinyin learning, Chinese English dictionary, writing worksheet generation, etc. * CHINGLISH online Chinese English Dictionary * nciku free online Chinese dictionary with handwriting recognition, pinyin, sound clips, etc. * MDBG free online Chinese-English dictionary * Chinese Characters Dictionary: supports Japanese, Korean, Cantonese, Hakka etc. * Chinese - English Dictionary: from Webster's Online Dictionary - the Rosetta Edition * CEDICT Chinese-English Dictionary Project * Stardict free (GPL) multilanguage dictionary including simplified/traditional Chinese for Unix (Linux, FreeBSD, etc.) and win32 * English-Chinese Translation Dictionary: Chinese-English-Chinese Online Dictionary (Taiwan-based; simplified characters not recognised) * CantoDict: Cantonese-English Dictionary Project * Chinese Pronunciation Dictionary Input Chinese words or sentences, get audio file of Mandarin pronunciation. Web-based tool. * Pinyin Annotator Add pinyin on top of any Chinese text. Mouse over any word to see English translation. Save output to OpenOffice Writer format. Prints nicely. Also adds pinyin to any Chinese web page. *Firefox users can install Add-ons for a pinyin annotator * Multimedia Dictionary of Chinese Characters Language Tool, Offline Chinese Dictionary. * Chinese Scholar Dictionary Chinese English dictionary with Pinyin index * A Cognitive Approach to Beginning Chinese: Interactions I and II. Margaret Mian Yan and Jennifer Li-chia Liu, Indiana University * Chinese Language Information Page A collection of Chinese language learning resources. * Learn Chinese - One At A Time * China KeyBoard Google Engine * Oneaday.org One Chinese idiom a day (simplified and traditional characters) with pinyin transliteration and English translation. * Mandarin Tone Drill Testing your knowledge of Mandarin tones. * Pinyin Practice Pinyin practice for Mandarin learners in all levels * Marjorie Chan's ChinaLinks: A large collection of Web resources by a professor of linguistics at Ohio State University * 4 words of Chinese every day * Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard * Chinese Character of the Day Learn to Read Chinese one word at a time. * Audio files with basic Chinese words * General Introduction of Chinese Language * Learn Chinese Characters * Chinese Scholar: The Free Chinese Class Learn Chinese language and culture through interactive media
Chinese_language
The most widespread is the Palladius system?
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Chinese_language Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) is a language family consisting of languages mutually unintelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. “The mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.” *Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. “The Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.” *Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. “The modern Chinese dialects are really more like a family of language. *John DeFrancis. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (1984), p.56. "To call Chinese a single language composed of dialects with varying degrees of difference is to mislead by minimizing disparities that according to Chao are as great as those between English and Dutch. To call Chinese a family of languages is to suggest extralinguistic differences that in fact do not exist and to overlook the unique linguistic situation that exists in China." Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the two branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages. About one-fifth of the world’s population, or over one billion people, speak some form of Chinese as their native language. The identification of the varieties of Chinese as "dialects" instead of "languages" is considered inappropriate by linguists and Sinologists. Spoken Chinese is distinguished by its high level of internal diversity, although all spoken varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic. There are between seven and thirteen main regional groups of Chinese (depending on classification scheme), of which the most spoken, by far, is Mandarin (about 850 million), followed by Wu (90 million), Min (70 million) and Cantonese (70 million). Most of these groups are mutually unintelligible, although some, like Xiang and the Southwest Mandarin dialects, may share common terms and some degree of intelligibility. Chinese is classified as a macrolanguage with 13 sub-languages in ISO 639-3, though the identification of the varieties of Chinese as multiple "languages" or as "dialects" of a single language is a contentious issue. The standardized form of spoken Chinese is Standard Mandarin (Putonghua / Guoyu / Huayu), based on the Beijing dialect, which is part of a larger group of North-Eastern and South-Western dialects, often taken as a separate language, see Mandarin Chinese for more, this language can be referred to as 官话 Guānhuà or 北方话 Běifānghuà in Chinese. Standard Mandarin is the official language of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC), as well as one of four official languages of Singapore. Chinese—de facto, Standard Mandarin—is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Of the other varieties, Standard Cantonese is common and influential in Guangdong Province and Cantonese-speaking overseas communities, and remains one of the official languages of Hong Kong (together with English) and of Macau (together with Portuguese). Hokkien, part of the Min language group, is widely spoken in southern Fujian, in neighbouring Taiwan (where it is known as Taiwanese or Hoklo) and in Southeast Asia (where it dominates in Singapore and Malaysia). Xinhua reported in March 2007 that 86 percent of people in the People's Republic of China spoke a Chinese variant. 全國約有53%的人能用普通話交流 As a language family, the number of Chinese speakers is 1.136 billion. The same news report indicates 53 percent of the population, or 700 million speakers, can effectively communicate in Putonghua. Sino-Tibetan language family. A map below depicts the linguistic subdivisions ("languages" or "dialect groups") within China itself. The traditionally-recognized seven main groups, in order of population size are: Chinese linguists have recently distinguished: 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. The Dungan language, spoken in Central Asia, is very closely related to Mandarin. However, it is not generally considered "Chinese" since it is written in Cyrillic and spoken by Dungan people outside China who are not considered ethnic Chinese. See List of Chinese dialects for a comprehensive listing of individual dialects within these large, broad groupings. In general, the above language-dialect groups do not have sharp boundaries, though Mandarin is the predominant Sinitic language in the North and the Southwest, and the rest are mostly spoken in Central or Southeastern China. Frequently, as in the case of the Guangdong province, native speakers of major variants overlapped. As with many areas that were linguistically diverse for a long time, it is not always clear how the speeches of various parts of China should be classified. The Ethnologue lists a total of 14, but the number varies between seven and seventeen depending on the classification scheme followed. For instance, the Min variety is often divided into Northern Min (Minbei, Fuchow) and Southern Min (Minnan, Amoy-Swatow); linguists have not determined whether their mutual intelligibility is small enough to sort them as separate languages. The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China. In general, mountainous South China displays more linguistic diversity than the flat North China. In parts of South China, a major city's dialect may only 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). Putonghua / Guoyu, often called "Mandarin", is the official standard language used by the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China, and Singapore (where it is called "Huayu"). It is based on the Beijing dialect, which is the dialect of Mandarin as spoken in Beijing. The governments intend for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. Therefore it is used in government agencies, in the media, and as a language of instruction in schools. In mainland China and Taiwan, diglossia has been a common feature: it is common for a Chinese to be able to speak two or even three varieties of the Sinitic languages (or “dialects”) together with Standard Mandarin. For example, in addition to putonghua a resident of Shanghai might speak Shanghainese and, if they did not grow up there, his or her local dialect as well. A native of Guangzhou may speak Standard Cantonese and putonghua, a resident of Taiwan, both Taiwanese and putonghua/guoyu. A person living in Taiwan 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, Standard Mandarin is beginning to take its place beside English and Standard Cantonese, the official languages. Linguists often view Chinese as a language family, though owing to China's socio-political and cultural situation, and the fact that all spoken varieties use one common written system, it is customary to refer to these generally mutually unintelligible variants as "the Chinese language". The diversity of Sinitic variants is comparable to the Romance languages. From a purely descriptive point of view, "languages" and "dialects" are simply arbitrary groups of similar idiolects, and the distinction is irrelevant to linguists who are only concerned with describing regional speeches technically. However, the idea of a single language has major overtones in politics and cultural self-identity, and explains the amount of emotion over this issue. Most Chinese and Chinese linguists refer to Chinese as a single language and its subdivisions dialects, while others call Chinese a language family. Chinese itself has a term for its unified writing system, Zhongwen (中文), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (汉语,“spoken language[s] of the Han Chinese) – this term could be translated to either “language” or “languages” since Chinese possesses no grammatical numbers. In the Chinese language, there is much less need for a uniform speech-and-writing continuum, as indicated by two separate character morphemes 语 yu and 文 wen. Ethnic Chinese often consider these spoken variations as one single language for reasons of nationality and as they inherit one common cultural and linguistic heritage in Classical Chinese. Han native speakers of Wu, Min, Hakka, and Cantonese, for instance, may consider their own linguistic varieties as separate spoken languages, but the Han Chinese race as one – albeit internally very diverse – ethnicity. To Chinese nationalists, the idea of Chinese as a language family may suggest that the Chinese identity is much more fragmentary and disunified than it actually is and as such is often looked upon as culturally and politically provocative. Additionally, in Taiwan, it is closely associated with Taiwanese independence, where some supporters of Taiwanese independence promote the local Taiwanese Minnan-based spoken language. Within the People’s Republic of China and Singapore, it is common for the government to refer to all divisions of the Sinitic language(s) beside Standard Mandarin as fangyan (“regional tongues”, often translated as “dialects”). Modern-day Chinese speakers of all kinds communicate using one formal standard written language, although this modern written standard is modeled after Mandarin, generally the modern Beijing substandard. The term sinophone, coined in analogy to anglophone and francophone, refers to those who speak the Chinese language natively, or prefer it as a medium of communication. The term is derived from Sinae, the Latin word for ancient China. :See also: Classical Chinese and Vernacular Chinese The relationship among the Chinese spoken and written languages is rather complex. Its spoken variations evolved at different rates, while written Chinese itself has changed much less. Classical Chinese literature began in the Spring and Autumn period, although written records have been discovered as far back as the 14th to 11th centuries BCE Shang dynasty oracle bones using the oracle bone scripts. The Chinese orthography centers around Chinese characters, hanzi, which are written within imaginary rectangular blocks, traditionally arranged in vertical columns, read from top to bottom down a column, and right to left across columns. Chinese characters are morphemes independent of phonetic change. Thus the number "one", yi in Mandarin, yat in Cantonese and chi̍t and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("一"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as 冇 and 係 for Cantonese and Hakka, which are considered archaic or unused in standard written Chinese. Written colloquial Cantonese has become quite popular in online chat rooms and instant messaging amongst Hong-Kongers and Cantonese-speakers elsewhere. Use of it is considered highly informal, and does not extend to any formal occasion. Also, in Hunan, some women write their local language in Nü Shu, a syllabary derived from Chinese characters. The Dungan language, considered by some 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 evolved over time from earliest forms of hieroglyphs. The idea that all Chinese characters are either pictographs or ideographs is an erroneous one: most characters contain phonetic parts, and are composites of phonetic components and semantic Radicals. Only the simplest characters, such as ren 人 (human), ri 日 (sun), shan 山 (mountain), shui 水 (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar Xǚ Shèn in the Hàn Dynasty classified characters into 6 categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80-90% as phonetic complexes consisting of a semantic element that indicates meaning, and a phonetic element that indicates the pronunciation. Generally, the phonetic element is more accurate and more important than the semantic one. There are about 214 radicals recognized in the Kangxi Dictionary. Modern characters are styled after the standard script (楷书/楷書 kǎishū) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (篆书/篆書 zhuànshū), cursive script (草书/草書 cǎoshū) and clerical script (隶书/隸書 lìshū). Calligraphy artists can write in traditional and simplified characters, but tend to use traditional characters for traditional art. Various styles of Chinese calligraphy. There are currently two systems for Chinese characters. The traditional system, still used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau and Chinese speaking communities (except Singapore and Malaysia) outside mainland China, takes its form from standardized character forms dating back to the late Han dynasty. The Simplified Chinese character system, developed by the People's Republic of China in 1954 to promote mass literacy, simplifies most complex traditional glyphs to fewer strokes, many to common caoshu shorthand variants. Singapore, which has a large Chinese communities, is the first – and at present the only – foreign nation to officially adopt simplified characters, although it has also become the de facto standard for younger ethnic Chinese in Malaysia. The Internet provides the platform to practice reading the alternative system, be it traditional or simplified. A well-educated Chinese today recognizes approximately 6,000-7,000 characters; some 3,000 characters are required to read a Mainland newspaper. The PRC government defines literacy amongst workers as a knowledge of 2,000 characters, though this would be only functional literacy. A large unabridged dictionary, like the Kangxi Dictionary, contains over 40,000 characters, including obscure, variant, rare, and archaic characters; less than a quarter of these characters are now commonly used.'' Most linguists classify all varieties of modern spoken Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family and believe that there was an original language, termed Proto-Sino-Tibetan, 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 Proto-Sino-Tibetan. 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 Indo-European languages from PIE don't apply to Chinese because of "morphological paucity" especially after Old Chinese Analysis of the concept "wave" in PST. . 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; most present systems rely heavily on Karlgren's insights and methods. Old Chinese ( ), sometimes known as "Archaic Chinese", was the language common during the early and middle Zhōu Dynasty (1122 BCE - 256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the Shījīng, the history of the Shūjīng, and portions of the Yìjīng (I Ching). The phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters 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 was still without tones. Work on reconstructing Old Chinese started with Qīng dynasty philologists. Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably 蜜 mì "honey", 獅 shī "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mǎ "horse", 犬 quǎn "dog", and 鵝 é "goose". The source says the reconstructions of old Chinese are tentative, and not definitive so no conclusions should be drawn. The reconstruction of Old Chinese can not be perfect so this hypothesis may be called into question. Encyclopedia Britannica s.v. "Chinese languages": "Old Chinese vocabulary already contained many words not generally occurring in the other Sino-Tibetan languages. The words for ‘honey' and ‘lion,' and probably also ‘horse,' ‘dog,' and ‘goose,' are connected with Indo-European and were acquired through trade and early contacts. (The nearest known Indo-European languages were Tocharian and Sogdian, a middle Iranian language.) A number of words have Austroasiatic cognates and point to early contacts with the ancestral language of Muong-Vietnamese and Mon-Khmer" ; Jan Ulenbrook, Einige Übereinstimmungen zwischen dem Chinesischen und dem Indogermanischen (1967) proposes 57 items; see also Tsung-tung Chang, 1988 Indo-European Vocabulary in Old Chinese;. 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 the Suí, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the 切韻 "Qièyùn" rhyme table (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the 廣韻 "Guǎngyùn" rhyme table. 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, 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; some scholars have argued that trying to reconstruct, say, modern Cantonese from modern Cantopop rhymes would give a fairly inaccurate picture of the present-day spoken language. The development of the spoken Chinese languages from early historical times to the present has been complex. Most Chinese people, in Sìchuān 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 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 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, though, a single standard of Mandarin did not exist. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The new 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 Standard Mandarin. As a result, Mandarin is now spoken by virtually all young and middle-aged citizens of mainland China and on Taiwan. Standard 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. Chinese was once the Lingua franca for East Asia countries for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. Throughout history Chinese culture and politics has had a great influence on unrelated languages such as Korean 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 Hán tự. It was the only available method for writing Vietnamese until the 14th century, used almost exclusively by Chinese-educated Vietnamese élites. From the 14th to the late 19th century, Vietnamese was written with Chữ nôm, a modified Chinese script incorporating sounds and syllables for native Vietnamese speakers. Chữ nôm was completely replaced by a modified Latin script created by the Jesuit missionary priest Alexander de Rhodes, which incorporates a system of diacritical marks to indicate tones, as well as modified consonants. The Vietnamese language exhibits multiple elements similar to Cantonese in regard to the specific intonations and sharp consonant endings. There is also a slight influence from Mandarin, including the sharper vowels and "kh" (IPA:x) sound 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. In derived Chinese characters or Zhuang logograms to write songs, even though Zhuang is not a Chinese dialect. Since the 1950s, the Zhuang language has been written in a modified Latin alphabet. Zhou, Minglang: Multilingualism in China: The Politics of Writing Reforms for Minority Languages, 1949-2002 (Walter de Gruyter 2003); ISBN 3-11-017896-6; p. 251–258. Languages within the influence of Chinese culture also have a very large number of loanwords from Chinese. Fifty percent or more of Korean vocabulary is of Chinese origin and the influence on Japanese and Vietnamese has been considerable. At least five percent of all words in Tagalog are of Chinese origin. Chinese has also lent a great deal of many grammatical features to these and neighboring languages, notably the lack of gender and the use of classifiers. Japanese has also a lot of loanwords from Chinese, as does Vietnamese. Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of 茶 (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 茄汁 (ke chap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 金橘 (kam kuat). :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, which is only about an eighth as many as English DeFrancis (1984) p.42 counts Chinese as having 1,277 tonal syllables, and about 398 to 418 if tones are disregarded; he cites Jespersen, Otto (1928) Monosyllabism in English; London, p.15 for a count of over 8000 syllables for English. . 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 four main tones of Standard Mandarin applied to the syllable "ma." The tones correspond to these five characters: * "mother" — high level * "hemp" or "torpid" — high rising * "horse" — low falling-rising * "scold" — high falling * "question particle" — neutral The Chinese had no uniform phonetic transcription system until the mid-20th century, although enunciation patterns were recorded in early rime books and dictionaries. Early Sanskrit and Pali Indian translators were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of the language in a foreign language. After 15th century CE Jesuits and Western court missionaries’ efforts result in some rudimentary Latin transcription systems, based on the Nanjing Mandarin dialect. Romanization is the process of transcribing a language in the Latin alphabet. There are many systems of romanization for the Chinese languages due to the Chinese's own lack of phonetic transcription until modern times. Chinese is first known to have been written in Latin characters by Western Christian missionaries in the 16th century. Today the most common romanization standard for Standard Mandarin is Hanyu Pinyin (漢語拼音/汉语拼音), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore). Pinyin is almost universally employed now for teaching standard spoken Chinese in schools and universities across America, Australia and Europe. Chinese parents also use Pinyin to teach their children the sounds and tones for words with which the child is unfamiliar. The Pinyin is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, and alongside the Pinyin is the Chinese symbol. The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859, later modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As it approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels (hence an Anglicization), it may be particularly helpful for beginner speakers of native English background. Wade-Giles is found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan (Taipei city now officially uses Hanyu Pinyin and the rest of the island officially uses Tōngyòng Pinyin 通用拼音). When used within European texts, the tone transcriptions in both pinyin and Wade-Giles are often left out for simplicity; Wade-Giles' extensive use of apostrophes is also usually omitted. Thus, most Western readers will be much more familiar with Beijing than they will be with Běijīng (pinyin), and with Taipei than T'ai²-pei³ (Wade-Giles). Here are a few examples of Hanyu Pinyin and Wade-Giles, for comparison: Other systems of romanization for Chinese include Gwoyeu Romatzyh, the French EFEO, the Yale (invented during WWII for U.S. troops), as well as separate systems for Cantonese, Minnan, Hakka, and other Chinese languages or dialects. Chinese languages have been phonetically transcribed into many other writing systems over the centuries. The 'Phags-pa script, for example, has been very helpful in reconstructing the pronunciations of pre-modern forms of Chinese. Zhuyin (注音, also known as bopomofo), a semi-syllabary is still widely used in Taiwan's elementary schools to aid standard pronunciation. Although bopomofo characters are reminiscent of katakana script, there is no source to substantiate the claim that Katakana was the basis for the zhuyin system. A comparison table of zhuyin to pinyin exists in the zhuyin article. Syllables based on pinyin and zhuyin can also be compared by looking at the following articles: *Pinyin table *Zhuyin table There are also at least two systems of cyrillization for Chinese. The most widespread is the Palladius system. Modern Chinese has often been erroneously classed as a "monosyllabic" language. While most of the morphemes are single syllable, modern Chinese today is much less a monosyllabic language in that nouns, adjectives and verbs are largely di-syllabic. The tendency to create disyllabic words in the modern Chinese languages, particularly in Mandarin, has been particularly pronounced when compared to Classical Chinese. Classical Chinese is a highly isolating language, with each idea (morpheme) generally corresponding to a single syllable and a single character; Modern Chinese though, has the tendency to form new words through disyllabic, trisyllabic and tetra-character agglutination. In fact, some linguists argue that classifying modern Chinese as an isolating language is misleading, for this reason alone. Chinese morphology is strictly bound to a set number of syllables with a fairly rigid construction which are the morphemes, the smallest blocks of the language. While many of these single-syllable morphemes ( zì, 字 in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cí (词/詞), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cí (“word”) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more. For example: *Yun 云 -“cloud” *Hanbaobao 汉堡包 –“hamburger” *Wo 我 –“I, me” *Renmin 人民 –“people” *Diqiu 地球 –“earth(globosity)” *Shandian 闪电 –“lightning” *Meng 梦 –“dream” All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphology — i.e., changes in form of a word — to indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflections – it possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English), and no gender. They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le 了, hai 还, yijing 已经, etc. 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. Chinese also has an extensive system of measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring 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. Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess 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. Official modern Mandarin has only 400 spoken monosyllables but over 10,000 written characters, so there are many homophones only distinguishable by the four tones. Even this is often not enough unless the context and exact phrase or cí is identified. The mono-syllable jī, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: 雞/鸡 chicken, 機/机 machine, 基 basic, 擊/击 (to) hit, 饑/饥 hunger, and 積/积 sum. In speech, the glyphing of a monosyllable to its meaning must be determined by context or by relation to other morphemes (e.g. "some" as in the opposite of "none"). Native speakers may state which words or phrases their names are found in, for convenience of writing: 名字叫嘉英，嘉陵江的嘉，英國的英 Míngzi jiào Jiāyīng, Jiālíng Jiāng de jiā, Yīngguó de yīng "My name is Jiāyīng, the Jia for Jialing River and the ying for the short form in Chinese of UK." Southern Chinese varieties like Cantonese and Hakka preserved more of the rimes of Middle Chinese and have more tones. The previous examples of jī, for instance, 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 multi-syllabic words. The entire Chinese character corpus since antiquity comprises well over 20,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are now commonly in use. However Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words, there are many times more Chinese words than there are characters as most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters. Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and phrases vary greatly. The Hanyu Da Zidian, an all-inclusive compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries for characters, including bone oracle versions. The Zhonghua Zihai 中华字海 (1994) contains 85,568 head entries for character definitions, and is the largest reference work based purely on character and its literary variants. The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary, the 12-volumed Hanyu Da Cidian 汉语大词典, records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters, and gives over 370,000 definitions. The 1999 revised Cihai, a multi-volume encyclopedic dictionary reference work, gives 122,836 vocabulary entry definitions under 19,485 Chinese characters, including proper names, phrases and common zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific and technical terms. The latest 2007 5th edition of Xiandai Hanyu Cidian 现代汉语词典, an authoritative one-volume dictionary on modern standard Chinese language as used in mainland China, has 65,000 entries and defines 11,000 head characters. Like any other language, Chinese has absorbed a sizeable amount of loanwords from other cultures. 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 since Old Chinese include 葡萄 "grape," 石榴 "pomegranate" and 狮子/獅子 "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including 佛 "Buddha" and 菩萨/菩薩 "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as 胡同 "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as 葡萄 "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or Pāli, the liturgical languages of North India. Words borrowed from the nomadic tribes of the Gobi, Mongolian or northeast regions generally have Altaic etymologies, such as 琵琶 "pípa", the Chinese lute, or 酪 "cheese" or "yoghurt", but from exactly which Altaic source is not always entirely clear. Foreign words continue to enter the Chinese language by transcription according to their pronunciations. This is done by employing Chinese characters with similar pronunciations. For example, "Israel" becomes 以色列 (pinyin: yǐsèliè), Paris 巴黎. A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including 沙發 shāfā "sofa," 马达/馬達 mǎdá "motor," 幽默 yōumò "humour," 逻辑/邏輯 luójí "logic," 时髦/時髦 shímáo "smart, fashionable" and 歇斯底里 xiēsīdǐlǐ "hysterics." The bulk of these words were originally coined in the Shanghainese dialect during the early 20th century and were later loaned into Mandarin, hence their pronunciations in Mandarin may be quite off from the English. For example, 沙发/沙發 and 马达/馬達 in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor." Today, 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 德律风/德律風 ( Shanghainese: télífon [ ], Standard Mandarin: délǜfēng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese 电话/電話 (diànhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include 电视/電視 (diànshì "electric vision") for television, 电脑/電腦 (diànnǎo "electric brain") for computer; 手机/手機 (shǒujī "hand machine") for cellphone, and 蓝牙/藍芽 (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. 網誌(wǎng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as 汉堡包/漢堡包 (hànbǎo bāo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as 拖拉机/拖拉機 (tuōlājī, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马利奥/馬利奧 for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example 奔腾/奔騰 (bēnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and 赛百味/賽百味 (Sàibǎiwèi "better-than hundred tastes") for Subway restaurants. Since the 20th century, another source has been Japan. Using existing kanji, which are Chinese characters used in the Japanese language, the Japanese re-moulded European concepts and inventions into wasei-kango (和製漢語, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include diànhuà (电话/電話, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社会, shakai, "society"), kēxué (科学/科學, kagaku, "science") and chōuxiàng (抽象, chūshō, "abstract"). Other terms were coined by the Japanese by giving new senses to existing Chinese terms or by referring to expressions used in classical Chinese literature. For example, jīngjì (经济/經濟, keizai), which in the original Chinese meant "the workings of the state", was narrowed to "economy" in Japanese; this narrowed definition was then reimported into Chinese. As a result, these terms are virtually indistinguishable from native Chinese words: indeed, there is some dispute over some of these terms as to whether the Japanese or Chinese coined them first. As a result of this toing-and-froing process, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese share a corpus linguistics of terms describing modern terminology, in parallel to a similar corpus of terms built from Greco-Latin terms shared among European languages. Taiwanese and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便当/便當 “lunchbox or boxed lunch” (from bento) and 料理 “prepared cuisine”, have passed into common currency. Western foreign words have great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came 芭蕾 (bāléi, "ballet"), 香槟 (xiāngbīn, "champagne"), via Italian 咖啡 (kāfēi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned 沙發 (shāfā "sofa"), 幽默 (yōumò "humour"), and 高尔夫 (gāoěrfū, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪斯科 (dísīkè, "disco"), 可乐 (kělè, "cola") and 迷你 (mínǐ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon 卡通 (cartoon), 基佬 (gay people), 的士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. 粉絲 (fěnsī, "fans"), 駭客 (hèikè, "hacker"), 部落格(bùluōgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin. Since the People's Republic of China’s economic and political rise in recent years, standard Mandarin has become an increasingly popular subject of study amongst the young in the Western world, as in the UK. BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | How hard is it to learn Chinese? In 1991 there were 2,000 foreign learners taking China's official Chinese Proficiency Test (comparable to English's Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660 . *Chinese characters *Chinese honorifics *Chinese measure word *Chinese number gestures *Chinese numerals *Chinese punctuation *Chinese exclamative particles *Four-character idiom *Han unification *Haner language *HSK test *Languages of China *North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics *Nü shu * * * * * * Keys to the Chinese Language: Book II - Google Books * A Practical Chinese Grammar - Google Books * ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawai’i Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X. * ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-08248-2975-9. * Arch Chinese free online Chinese character and Pinyin learning, Chinese English dictionary, writing worksheet generation, etc. * CHINGLISH online Chinese English Dictionary * nciku free online Chinese dictionary with handwriting recognition, pinyin, sound clips, etc. * MDBG free online Chinese-English dictionary * Chinese Characters Dictionary: supports Japanese, Korean, Cantonese, Hakka etc. * Chinese - English Dictionary: from Webster's Online Dictionary - the Rosetta Edition * CEDICT Chinese-English Dictionary Project * Stardict free (GPL) multilanguage dictionary including simplified/traditional Chinese for Unix (Linux, FreeBSD, etc.) and win32 * English-Chinese Translation Dictionary: Chinese-English-Chinese Online Dictionary (Taiwan-based; simplified characters not recognised) * CantoDict: Cantonese-English Dictionary Project * Chinese Pronunciation Dictionary Input Chinese words or sentences, get audio file of Mandarin pronunciation. Web-based tool. * Pinyin Annotator Add pinyin on top of any Chinese text. Mouse over any word to see English translation. Save output to OpenOffice Writer format. Prints nicely. Also adds pinyin to any Chinese web page. *Firefox users can install Add-ons for a pinyin annotator * Multimedia Dictionary of Chinese Characters Language Tool, Offline Chinese Dictionary. * Chinese Scholar Dictionary Chinese English dictionary with Pinyin index * A Cognitive Approach to Beginning Chinese: Interactions I and II. Margaret Mian Yan and Jennifer Li-chia Liu, Indiana University * Chinese Language Information Page A collection of Chinese language learning resources. * Learn Chinese - One At A Time * China KeyBoard Google Engine * Oneaday.org One Chinese idiom a day (simplified and traditional characters) with pinyin transliteration and English translation. * Mandarin Tone Drill Testing your knowledge of Mandarin tones. * Pinyin Practice Pinyin practice for Mandarin learners in all levels * Marjorie Chan's ChinaLinks: A large collection of Web resources by a professor of linguistics at Ohio State University * 4 words of Chinese every day * Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard * Chinese Character of the Day Learn to Read Chinese one word at a time. * Audio files with basic Chinese words * General Introduction of Chinese Language * Learn Chinese Characters * Chinese Scholar: The Free Chinese Class Learn Chinese language and culture through interactive media
Chinese_language
Is the Vietnamese term for Chinese writing Hán t?
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Chinese_language Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) is a language family consisting of languages mutually unintelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. “The mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.” *Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. “The Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.” *Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. “The modern Chinese dialects are really more like a family of language. *John DeFrancis. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (1984), p.56. "To call Chinese a single language composed of dialects with varying degrees of difference is to mislead by minimizing disparities that according to Chao are as great as those between English and Dutch. To call Chinese a family of languages is to suggest extralinguistic differences that in fact do not exist and to overlook the unique linguistic situation that exists in China." Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the two branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages. About one-fifth of the world’s population, or over one billion people, speak some form of Chinese as their native language. The identification of the varieties of Chinese as "dialects" instead of "languages" is considered inappropriate by linguists and Sinologists. Spoken Chinese is distinguished by its high level of internal diversity, although all spoken varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic. There are between seven and thirteen main regional groups of Chinese (depending on classification scheme), of which the most spoken, by far, is Mandarin (about 850 million), followed by Wu (90 million), Min (70 million) and Cantonese (70 million). Most of these groups are mutually unintelligible, although some, like Xiang and the Southwest Mandarin dialects, may share common terms and some degree of intelligibility. Chinese is classified as a macrolanguage with 13 sub-languages in ISO 639-3, though the identification of the varieties of Chinese as multiple "languages" or as "dialects" of a single language is a contentious issue. The standardized form of spoken Chinese is Standard Mandarin (Putonghua / Guoyu / Huayu), based on the Beijing dialect, which is part of a larger group of North-Eastern and South-Western dialects, often taken as a separate language, see Mandarin Chinese for more, this language can be referred to as 官话 Guānhuà or 北方话 Běifānghuà in Chinese. Standard Mandarin is the official language of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC), as well as one of four official languages of Singapore. Chinese—de facto, Standard Mandarin—is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Of the other varieties, Standard Cantonese is common and influential in Guangdong Province and Cantonese-speaking overseas communities, and remains one of the official languages of Hong Kong (together with English) and of Macau (together with Portuguese). Hokkien, part of the Min language group, is widely spoken in southern Fujian, in neighbouring Taiwan (where it is known as Taiwanese or Hoklo) and in Southeast Asia (where it dominates in Singapore and Malaysia). Xinhua reported in March 2007 that 86 percent of people in the People's Republic of China spoke a Chinese variant. 全國約有53%的人能用普通話交流 As a language family, the number of Chinese speakers is 1.136 billion. The same news report indicates 53 percent of the population, or 700 million speakers, can effectively communicate in Putonghua. Sino-Tibetan language family. A map below depicts the linguistic subdivisions ("languages" or "dialect groups") within China itself. The traditionally-recognized seven main groups, in order of population size are: Chinese linguists have recently distinguished: 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. The Dungan language, spoken in Central Asia, is very closely related to Mandarin. However, it is not generally considered "Chinese" since it is written in Cyrillic and spoken by Dungan people outside China who are not considered ethnic Chinese. See List of Chinese dialects for a comprehensive listing of individual dialects within these large, broad groupings. In general, the above language-dialect groups do not have sharp boundaries, though Mandarin is the predominant Sinitic language in the North and the Southwest, and the rest are mostly spoken in Central or Southeastern China. Frequently, as in the case of the Guangdong province, native speakers of major variants overlapped. As with many areas that were linguistically diverse for a long time, it is not always clear how the speeches of various parts of China should be classified. The Ethnologue lists a total of 14, but the number varies between seven and seventeen depending on the classification scheme followed. For instance, the Min variety is often divided into Northern Min (Minbei, Fuchow) and Southern Min (Minnan, Amoy-Swatow); linguists have not determined whether their mutual intelligibility is small enough to sort them as separate languages. The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China. In general, mountainous South China displays more linguistic diversity than the flat North China. In parts of South China, a major city's dialect may only 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). Putonghua / Guoyu, often called "Mandarin", is the official standard language used by the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China, and Singapore (where it is called "Huayu"). It is based on the Beijing dialect, which is the dialect of Mandarin as spoken in Beijing. The governments intend for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. Therefore it is used in government agencies, in the media, and as a language of instruction in schools. In mainland China and Taiwan, diglossia has been a common feature: it is common for a Chinese to be able to speak two or even three varieties of the Sinitic languages (or “dialects”) together with Standard Mandarin. For example, in addition to putonghua a resident of Shanghai might speak Shanghainese and, if they did not grow up there, his or her local dialect as well. A native of Guangzhou may speak Standard Cantonese and putonghua, a resident of Taiwan, both Taiwanese and putonghua/guoyu. A person living in Taiwan 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, Standard Mandarin is beginning to take its place beside English and Standard Cantonese, the official languages. Linguists often view Chinese as a language family, though owing to China's socio-political and cultural situation, and the fact that all spoken varieties use one common written system, it is customary to refer to these generally mutually unintelligible variants as "the Chinese language". The diversity of Sinitic variants is comparable to the Romance languages. From a purely descriptive point of view, "languages" and "dialects" are simply arbitrary groups of similar idiolects, and the distinction is irrelevant to linguists who are only concerned with describing regional speeches technically. However, the idea of a single language has major overtones in politics and cultural self-identity, and explains the amount of emotion over this issue. Most Chinese and Chinese linguists refer to Chinese as a single language and its subdivisions dialects, while others call Chinese a language family. Chinese itself has a term for its unified writing system, Zhongwen (中文), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (汉语,“spoken language[s] of the Han Chinese) – this term could be translated to either “language” or “languages” since Chinese possesses no grammatical numbers. In the Chinese language, there is much less need for a uniform speech-and-writing continuum, as indicated by two separate character morphemes 语 yu and 文 wen. Ethnic Chinese often consider these spoken variations as one single language for reasons of nationality and as they inherit one common cultural and linguistic heritage in Classical Chinese. Han native speakers of Wu, Min, Hakka, and Cantonese, for instance, may consider their own linguistic varieties as separate spoken languages, but the Han Chinese race as one – albeit internally very diverse – ethnicity. To Chinese nationalists, the idea of Chinese as a language family may suggest that the Chinese identity is much more fragmentary and disunified than it actually is and as such is often looked upon as culturally and politically provocative. Additionally, in Taiwan, it is closely associated with Taiwanese independence, where some supporters of Taiwanese independence promote the local Taiwanese Minnan-based spoken language. Within the People’s Republic of China and Singapore, it is common for the government to refer to all divisions of the Sinitic language(s) beside Standard Mandarin as fangyan (“regional tongues”, often translated as “dialects”). Modern-day Chinese speakers of all kinds communicate using one formal standard written language, although this modern written standard is modeled after Mandarin, generally the modern Beijing substandard. The term sinophone, coined in analogy to anglophone and francophone, refers to those who speak the Chinese language natively, or prefer it as a medium of communication. The term is derived from Sinae, the Latin word for ancient China. :See also: Classical Chinese and Vernacular Chinese The relationship among the Chinese spoken and written languages is rather complex. Its spoken variations evolved at different rates, while written Chinese itself has changed much less. Classical Chinese literature began in the Spring and Autumn period, although written records have been discovered as far back as the 14th to 11th centuries BCE Shang dynasty oracle bones using the oracle bone scripts. The Chinese orthography centers around Chinese characters, hanzi, which are written within imaginary rectangular blocks, traditionally arranged in vertical columns, read from top to bottom down a column, and right to left across columns. Chinese characters are morphemes independent of phonetic change. Thus the number "one", yi in Mandarin, yat in Cantonese and chi̍t and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("一"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as 冇 and 係 for Cantonese and Hakka, which are considered archaic or unused in standard written Chinese. Written colloquial Cantonese has become quite popular in online chat rooms and instant messaging amongst Hong-Kongers and Cantonese-speakers elsewhere. Use of it is considered highly informal, and does not extend to any formal occasion. Also, in Hunan, some women write their local language in Nü Shu, a syllabary derived from Chinese characters. The Dungan language, considered by some 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 evolved over time from earliest forms of hieroglyphs. The idea that all Chinese characters are either pictographs or ideographs is an erroneous one: most characters contain phonetic parts, and are composites of phonetic components and semantic Radicals. Only the simplest characters, such as ren 人 (human), ri 日 (sun), shan 山 (mountain), shui 水 (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar Xǚ Shèn in the Hàn Dynasty classified characters into 6 categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80-90% as phonetic complexes consisting of a semantic element that indicates meaning, and a phonetic element that indicates the pronunciation. Generally, the phonetic element is more accurate and more important than the semantic one. There are about 214 radicals recognized in the Kangxi Dictionary. Modern characters are styled after the standard script (楷书/楷書 kǎishū) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (篆书/篆書 zhuànshū), cursive script (草书/草書 cǎoshū) and clerical script (隶书/隸書 lìshū). Calligraphy artists can write in traditional and simplified characters, but tend to use traditional characters for traditional art. Various styles of Chinese calligraphy. There are currently two systems for Chinese characters. The traditional system, still used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau and Chinese speaking communities (except Singapore and Malaysia) outside mainland China, takes its form from standardized character forms dating back to the late Han dynasty. The Simplified Chinese character system, developed by the People's Republic of China in 1954 to promote mass literacy, simplifies most complex traditional glyphs to fewer strokes, many to common caoshu shorthand variants. Singapore, which has a large Chinese communities, is the first – and at present the only – foreign nation to officially adopt simplified characters, although it has also become the de facto standard for younger ethnic Chinese in Malaysia. The Internet provides the platform to practice reading the alternative system, be it traditional or simplified. A well-educated Chinese today recognizes approximately 6,000-7,000 characters; some 3,000 characters are required to read a Mainland newspaper. The PRC government defines literacy amongst workers as a knowledge of 2,000 characters, though this would be only functional literacy. A large unabridged dictionary, like the Kangxi Dictionary, contains over 40,000 characters, including obscure, variant, rare, and archaic characters; less than a quarter of these characters are now commonly used.'' Most linguists classify all varieties of modern spoken Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family and believe that there was an original language, termed Proto-Sino-Tibetan, 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 Proto-Sino-Tibetan. 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 Indo-European languages from PIE don't apply to Chinese because of "morphological paucity" especially after Old Chinese Analysis of the concept "wave" in PST. . 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; most present systems rely heavily on Karlgren's insights and methods. Old Chinese ( ), sometimes known as "Archaic Chinese", was the language common during the early and middle Zhōu Dynasty (1122 BCE - 256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the Shījīng, the history of the Shūjīng, and portions of the Yìjīng (I Ching). The phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters 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 was still without tones. Work on reconstructing Old Chinese started with Qīng dynasty philologists. Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably 蜜 mì "honey", 獅 shī "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mǎ "horse", 犬 quǎn "dog", and 鵝 é "goose". The source says the reconstructions of old Chinese are tentative, and not definitive so no conclusions should be drawn. The reconstruction of Old Chinese can not be perfect so this hypothesis may be called into question. Encyclopedia Britannica s.v. "Chinese languages": "Old Chinese vocabulary already contained many words not generally occurring in the other Sino-Tibetan languages. The words for ‘honey' and ‘lion,' and probably also ‘horse,' ‘dog,' and ‘goose,' are connected with Indo-European and were acquired through trade and early contacts. (The nearest known Indo-European languages were Tocharian and Sogdian, a middle Iranian language.) A number of words have Austroasiatic cognates and point to early contacts with the ancestral language of Muong-Vietnamese and Mon-Khmer" ; Jan Ulenbrook, Einige Übereinstimmungen zwischen dem Chinesischen und dem Indogermanischen (1967) proposes 57 items; see also Tsung-tung Chang, 1988 Indo-European Vocabulary in Old Chinese;. 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 the Suí, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the 切韻 "Qièyùn" rhyme table (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the 廣韻 "Guǎngyùn" rhyme table. 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, 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; some scholars have argued that trying to reconstruct, say, modern Cantonese from modern Cantopop rhymes would give a fairly inaccurate picture of the present-day spoken language. The development of the spoken Chinese languages from early historical times to the present has been complex. Most Chinese people, in Sìchuān 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 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 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, though, a single standard of Mandarin did not exist. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The new 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 Standard Mandarin. As a result, Mandarin is now spoken by virtually all young and middle-aged citizens of mainland China and on Taiwan. Standard 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. Chinese was once the Lingua franca for East Asia countries for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. Throughout history Chinese culture and politics has had a great influence on unrelated languages such as Korean 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 Hán tự. It was the only available method for writing Vietnamese until the 14th century, used almost exclusively by Chinese-educated Vietnamese élites. From the 14th to the late 19th century, Vietnamese was written with Chữ nôm, a modified Chinese script incorporating sounds and syllables for native Vietnamese speakers. Chữ nôm was completely replaced by a modified Latin script created by the Jesuit missionary priest Alexander de Rhodes, which incorporates a system of diacritical marks to indicate tones, as well as modified consonants. The Vietnamese language exhibits multiple elements similar to Cantonese in regard to the specific intonations and sharp consonant endings. There is also a slight influence from Mandarin, including the sharper vowels and "kh" (IPA:x) sound 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. In derived Chinese characters or Zhuang logograms to write songs, even though Zhuang is not a Chinese dialect. Since the 1950s, the Zhuang language has been written in a modified Latin alphabet. Zhou, Minglang: Multilingualism in China: The Politics of Writing Reforms for Minority Languages, 1949-2002 (Walter de Gruyter 2003); ISBN 3-11-017896-6; p. 251–258. Languages within the influence of Chinese culture also have a very large number of loanwords from Chinese. Fifty percent or more of Korean vocabulary is of Chinese origin and the influence on Japanese and Vietnamese has been considerable. At least five percent of all words in Tagalog are of Chinese origin. Chinese has also lent a great deal of many grammatical features to these and neighboring languages, notably the lack of gender and the use of classifiers. Japanese has also a lot of loanwords from Chinese, as does Vietnamese. Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of 茶 (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 茄汁 (ke chap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 金橘 (kam kuat). :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, which is only about an eighth as many as English DeFrancis (1984) p.42 counts Chinese as having 1,277 tonal syllables, and about 398 to 418 if tones are disregarded; he cites Jespersen, Otto (1928) Monosyllabism in English; London, p.15 for a count of over 8000 syllables for English. . 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 four main tones of Standard Mandarin applied to the syllable "ma." The tones correspond to these five characters: * "mother" — high level * "hemp" or "torpid" — high rising * "horse" — low falling-rising * "scold" — high falling * "question particle" — neutral The Chinese had no uniform phonetic transcription system until the mid-20th century, although enunciation patterns were recorded in early rime books and dictionaries. Early Sanskrit and Pali Indian translators were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of the language in a foreign language. After 15th century CE Jesuits and Western court missionaries’ efforts result in some rudimentary Latin transcription systems, based on the Nanjing Mandarin dialect. Romanization is the process of transcribing a language in the Latin alphabet. There are many systems of romanization for the Chinese languages due to the Chinese's own lack of phonetic transcription until modern times. Chinese is first known to have been written in Latin characters by Western Christian missionaries in the 16th century. Today the most common romanization standard for Standard Mandarin is Hanyu Pinyin (漢語拼音/汉语拼音), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore). Pinyin is almost universally employed now for teaching standard spoken Chinese in schools and universities across America, Australia and Europe. Chinese parents also use Pinyin to teach their children the sounds and tones for words with which the child is unfamiliar. The Pinyin is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, and alongside the Pinyin is the Chinese symbol. The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859, later modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As it approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels (hence an Anglicization), it may be particularly helpful for beginner speakers of native English background. Wade-Giles is found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan (Taipei city now officially uses Hanyu Pinyin and the rest of the island officially uses Tōngyòng Pinyin 通用拼音). When used within European texts, the tone transcriptions in both pinyin and Wade-Giles are often left out for simplicity; Wade-Giles' extensive use of apostrophes is also usually omitted. Thus, most Western readers will be much more familiar with Beijing than they will be with Běijīng (pinyin), and with Taipei than T'ai²-pei³ (Wade-Giles). Here are a few examples of Hanyu Pinyin and Wade-Giles, for comparison: Other systems of romanization for Chinese include Gwoyeu Romatzyh, the French EFEO, the Yale (invented during WWII for U.S. troops), as well as separate systems for Cantonese, Minnan, Hakka, and other Chinese languages or dialects. Chinese languages have been phonetically transcribed into many other writing systems over the centuries. The 'Phags-pa script, for example, has been very helpful in reconstructing the pronunciations of pre-modern forms of Chinese. Zhuyin (注音, also known as bopomofo), a semi-syllabary is still widely used in Taiwan's elementary schools to aid standard pronunciation. Although bopomofo characters are reminiscent of katakana script, there is no source to substantiate the claim that Katakana was the basis for the zhuyin system. A comparison table of zhuyin to pinyin exists in the zhuyin article. Syllables based on pinyin and zhuyin can also be compared by looking at the following articles: *Pinyin table *Zhuyin table There are also at least two systems of cyrillization for Chinese. The most widespread is the Palladius system. Modern Chinese has often been erroneously classed as a "monosyllabic" language. While most of the morphemes are single syllable, modern Chinese today is much less a monosyllabic language in that nouns, adjectives and verbs are largely di-syllabic. The tendency to create disyllabic words in the modern Chinese languages, particularly in Mandarin, has been particularly pronounced when compared to Classical Chinese. Classical Chinese is a highly isolating language, with each idea (morpheme) generally corresponding to a single syllable and a single character; Modern Chinese though, has the tendency to form new words through disyllabic, trisyllabic and tetra-character agglutination. In fact, some linguists argue that classifying modern Chinese as an isolating language is misleading, for this reason alone. Chinese morphology is strictly bound to a set number of syllables with a fairly rigid construction which are the morphemes, the smallest blocks of the language. While many of these single-syllable morphemes ( zì, 字 in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cí (词/詞), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cí (“word”) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more. For example: *Yun 云 -“cloud” *Hanbaobao 汉堡包 –“hamburger” *Wo 我 –“I, me” *Renmin 人民 –“people” *Diqiu 地球 –“earth(globosity)” *Shandian 闪电 –“lightning” *Meng 梦 –“dream” All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphology — i.e., changes in form of a word — to indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflections – it possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English), and no gender. They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le 了, hai 还, yijing 已经, etc. 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. Chinese also has an extensive system of measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring 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. Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess 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. Official modern Mandarin has only 400 spoken monosyllables but over 10,000 written characters, so there are many homophones only distinguishable by the four tones. Even this is often not enough unless the context and exact phrase or cí is identified. The mono-syllable jī, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: 雞/鸡 chicken, 機/机 machine, 基 basic, 擊/击 (to) hit, 饑/饥 hunger, and 積/积 sum. In speech, the glyphing of a monosyllable to its meaning must be determined by context or by relation to other morphemes (e.g. "some" as in the opposite of "none"). Native speakers may state which words or phrases their names are found in, for convenience of writing: 名字叫嘉英，嘉陵江的嘉，英國的英 Míngzi jiào Jiāyīng, Jiālíng Jiāng de jiā, Yīngguó de yīng "My name is Jiāyīng, the Jia for Jialing River and the ying for the short form in Chinese of UK." Southern Chinese varieties like Cantonese and Hakka preserved more of the rimes of Middle Chinese and have more tones. The previous examples of jī, for instance, 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 multi-syllabic words. The entire Chinese character corpus since antiquity comprises well over 20,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are now commonly in use. However Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words, there are many times more Chinese words than there are characters as most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters. Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and phrases vary greatly. The Hanyu Da Zidian, an all-inclusive compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries for characters, including bone oracle versions. The Zhonghua Zihai 中华字海 (1994) contains 85,568 head entries for character definitions, and is the largest reference work based purely on character and its literary variants. The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary, the 12-volumed Hanyu Da Cidian 汉语大词典, records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters, and gives over 370,000 definitions. The 1999 revised Cihai, a multi-volume encyclopedic dictionary reference work, gives 122,836 vocabulary entry definitions under 19,485 Chinese characters, including proper names, phrases and common zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific and technical terms. The latest 2007 5th edition of Xiandai Hanyu Cidian 现代汉语词典, an authoritative one-volume dictionary on modern standard Chinese language as used in mainland China, has 65,000 entries and defines 11,000 head characters. Like any other language, Chinese has absorbed a sizeable amount of loanwords from other cultures. 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 since Old Chinese include 葡萄 "grape," 石榴 "pomegranate" and 狮子/獅子 "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including 佛 "Buddha" and 菩萨/菩薩 "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as 胡同 "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as 葡萄 "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or Pāli, the liturgical languages of North India. Words borrowed from the nomadic tribes of the Gobi, Mongolian or northeast regions generally have Altaic etymologies, such as 琵琶 "pípa", the Chinese lute, or 酪 "cheese" or "yoghurt", but from exactly which Altaic source is not always entirely clear. Foreign words continue to enter the Chinese language by transcription according to their pronunciations. This is done by employing Chinese characters with similar pronunciations. For example, "Israel" becomes 以色列 (pinyin: yǐsèliè), Paris 巴黎. A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including 沙發 shāfā "sofa," 马达/馬達 mǎdá "motor," 幽默 yōumò "humour," 逻辑/邏輯 luójí "logic," 时髦/時髦 shímáo "smart, fashionable" and 歇斯底里 xiēsīdǐlǐ "hysterics." The bulk of these words were originally coined in the Shanghainese dialect during the early 20th century and were later loaned into Mandarin, hence their pronunciations in Mandarin may be quite off from the English. For example, 沙发/沙發 and 马达/馬達 in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor." Today, 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 德律风/德律風 ( Shanghainese: télífon [ ], Standard Mandarin: délǜfēng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese 电话/電話 (diànhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include 电视/電視 (diànshì "electric vision") for television, 电脑/電腦 (diànnǎo "electric brain") for computer; 手机/手機 (shǒujī "hand machine") for cellphone, and 蓝牙/藍芽 (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. 網誌(wǎng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as 汉堡包/漢堡包 (hànbǎo bāo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as 拖拉机/拖拉機 (tuōlājī, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马利奥/馬利奧 for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example 奔腾/奔騰 (bēnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and 赛百味/賽百味 (Sàibǎiwèi "better-than hundred tastes") for Subway restaurants. Since the 20th century, another source has been Japan. Using existing kanji, which are Chinese characters used in the Japanese language, the Japanese re-moulded European concepts and inventions into wasei-kango (和製漢語, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include diànhuà (电话/電話, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社会, shakai, "society"), kēxué (科学/科學, kagaku, "science") and chōuxiàng (抽象, chūshō, "abstract"). Other terms were coined by the Japanese by giving new senses to existing Chinese terms or by referring to expressions used in classical Chinese literature. For example, jīngjì (经济/經濟, keizai), which in the original Chinese meant "the workings of the state", was narrowed to "economy" in Japanese; this narrowed definition was then reimported into Chinese. As a result, these terms are virtually indistinguishable from native Chinese words: indeed, there is some dispute over some of these terms as to whether the Japanese or Chinese coined them first. As a result of this toing-and-froing process, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese share a corpus linguistics of terms describing modern terminology, in parallel to a similar corpus of terms built from Greco-Latin terms shared among European languages. Taiwanese and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便当/便當 “lunchbox or boxed lunch” (from bento) and 料理 “prepared cuisine”, have passed into common currency. Western foreign words have great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came 芭蕾 (bāléi, "ballet"), 香槟 (xiāngbīn, "champagne"), via Italian 咖啡 (kāfēi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned 沙發 (shāfā "sofa"), 幽默 (yōumò "humour"), and 高尔夫 (gāoěrfū, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪斯科 (dísīkè, "disco"), 可乐 (kělè, "cola") and 迷你 (mínǐ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon 卡通 (cartoon), 基佬 (gay people), 的士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. 粉絲 (fěnsī, "fans"), 駭客 (hèikè, "hacker"), 部落格(bùluōgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin. Since the People's Republic of China’s economic and political rise in recent years, standard Mandarin has become an increasingly popular subject of study amongst the young in the Western world, as in the UK. BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | How hard is it to learn Chinese? In 1991 there were 2,000 foreign learners taking China's official Chinese Proficiency Test (comparable to English's Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660 . *Chinese characters *Chinese honorifics *Chinese measure word *Chinese number gestures *Chinese numerals *Chinese punctuation *Chinese exclamative particles *Four-character idiom *Han unification *Haner language *HSK test *Languages of China *North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics *Nü shu * * * * * * Keys to the Chinese Language: Book II - Google Books * A Practical Chinese Grammar - Google Books * ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawai’i Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X. * ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-08248-2975-9. * Arch Chinese free online Chinese character and Pinyin learning, Chinese English dictionary, writing worksheet generation, etc. * CHINGLISH online Chinese English Dictionary * nciku free online Chinese dictionary with handwriting recognition, pinyin, sound clips, etc. * MDBG free online Chinese-English dictionary * Chinese Characters Dictionary: supports Japanese, Korean, Cantonese, Hakka etc. * Chinese - English Dictionary: from Webster's Online Dictionary - the Rosetta Edition * CEDICT Chinese-English Dictionary Project * Stardict free (GPL) multilanguage dictionary including simplified/traditional Chinese for Unix (Linux, FreeBSD, etc.) and win32 * English-Chinese Translation Dictionary: Chinese-English-Chinese Online Dictionary (Taiwan-based; simplified characters not recognised) * CantoDict: Cantonese-English Dictionary Project * Chinese Pronunciation Dictionary Input Chinese words or sentences, get audio file of Mandarin pronunciation. Web-based tool. * Pinyin Annotator Add pinyin on top of any Chinese text. Mouse over any word to see English translation. Save output to OpenOffice Writer format. Prints nicely. Also adds pinyin to any Chinese web page. *Firefox users can install Add-ons for a pinyin annotator * Multimedia Dictionary of Chinese Characters Language Tool, Offline Chinese Dictionary. * Chinese Scholar Dictionary Chinese English dictionary with Pinyin index * A Cognitive Approach to Beginning Chinese: Interactions I and II. Margaret Mian Yan and Jennifer Li-chia Liu, Indiana University * Chinese Language Information Page A collection of Chinese language learning resources. * Learn Chinese - One At A Time * China KeyBoard Google Engine * Oneaday.org One Chinese idiom a day (simplified and traditional characters) with pinyin transliteration and English translation. * Mandarin Tone Drill Testing your knowledge of Mandarin tones. * Pinyin Practice Pinyin practice for Mandarin learners in all levels * Marjorie Chan's ChinaLinks: A large collection of Web resources by a professor of linguistics at Ohio State University * 4 words of Chinese every day * Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard * Chinese Character of the Day Learn to Read Chinese one word at a time. * Audio files with basic Chinese words * General Introduction of Chinese Language * Learn Chinese Characters * Chinese Scholar: The Free Chinese Class Learn Chinese language and culture through interactive media
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Did the Empire have little success?
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Chinese_language Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) is a language family consisting of languages mutually unintelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. “The mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.” *Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. “The Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.” *Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. “The modern Chinese dialects are really more like a family of language. *John DeFrancis. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (1984), p.56. "To call Chinese a single language composed of dialects with varying degrees of difference is to mislead by minimizing disparities that according to Chao are as great as those between English and Dutch. To call Chinese a family of languages is to suggest extralinguistic differences that in fact do not exist and to overlook the unique linguistic situation that exists in China." Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the two branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages. About one-fifth of the world’s population, or over one billion people, speak some form of Chinese as their native language. The identification of the varieties of Chinese as "dialects" instead of "languages" is considered inappropriate by linguists and Sinologists. Spoken Chinese is distinguished by its high level of internal diversity, although all spoken varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic. There are between seven and thirteen main regional groups of Chinese (depending on classification scheme), of which the most spoken, by far, is Mandarin (about 850 million), followed by Wu (90 million), Min (70 million) and Cantonese (70 million). Most of these groups are mutually unintelligible, although some, like Xiang and the Southwest Mandarin dialects, may share common terms and some degree of intelligibility. Chinese is classified as a macrolanguage with 13 sub-languages in ISO 639-3, though the identification of the varieties of Chinese as multiple "languages" or as "dialects" of a single language is a contentious issue. The standardized form of spoken Chinese is Standard Mandarin (Putonghua / Guoyu / Huayu), based on the Beijing dialect, which is part of a larger group of North-Eastern and South-Western dialects, often taken as a separate language, see Mandarin Chinese for more, this language can be referred to as 官话 Guānhuà or 北方话 Běifānghuà in Chinese. Standard Mandarin is the official language of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC), as well as one of four official languages of Singapore. Chinese—de facto, Standard Mandarin—is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Of the other varieties, Standard Cantonese is common and influential in Guangdong Province and Cantonese-speaking overseas communities, and remains one of the official languages of Hong Kong (together with English) and of Macau (together with Portuguese). Hokkien, part of the Min language group, is widely spoken in southern Fujian, in neighbouring Taiwan (where it is known as Taiwanese or Hoklo) and in Southeast Asia (where it dominates in Singapore and Malaysia). Xinhua reported in March 2007 that 86 percent of people in the People's Republic of China spoke a Chinese variant. 全國約有53%的人能用普通話交流 As a language family, the number of Chinese speakers is 1.136 billion. The same news report indicates 53 percent of the population, or 700 million speakers, can effectively communicate in Putonghua. Sino-Tibetan language family. A map below depicts the linguistic subdivisions ("languages" or "dialect groups") within China itself. The traditionally-recognized seven main groups, in order of population size are: Chinese linguists have recently distinguished: 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. The Dungan language, spoken in Central Asia, is very closely related to Mandarin. However, it is not generally considered "Chinese" since it is written in Cyrillic and spoken by Dungan people outside China who are not considered ethnic Chinese. See List of Chinese dialects for a comprehensive listing of individual dialects within these large, broad groupings. In general, the above language-dialect groups do not have sharp boundaries, though Mandarin is the predominant Sinitic language in the North and the Southwest, and the rest are mostly spoken in Central or Southeastern China. Frequently, as in the case of the Guangdong province, native speakers of major variants overlapped. As with many areas that were linguistically diverse for a long time, it is not always clear how the speeches of various parts of China should be classified. The Ethnologue lists a total of 14, but the number varies between seven and seventeen depending on the classification scheme followed. For instance, the Min variety is often divided into Northern Min (Minbei, Fuchow) and Southern Min (Minnan, Amoy-Swatow); linguists have not determined whether their mutual intelligibility is small enough to sort them as separate languages. The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China. In general, mountainous South China displays more linguistic diversity than the flat North China. In parts of South China, a major city's dialect may only 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). Putonghua / Guoyu, often called "Mandarin", is the official standard language used by the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China, and Singapore (where it is called "Huayu"). It is based on the Beijing dialect, which is the dialect of Mandarin as spoken in Beijing. The governments intend for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. Therefore it is used in government agencies, in the media, and as a language of instruction in schools. In mainland China and Taiwan, diglossia has been a common feature: it is common for a Chinese to be able to speak two or even three varieties of the Sinitic languages (or “dialects”) together with Standard Mandarin. For example, in addition to putonghua a resident of Shanghai might speak Shanghainese and, if they did not grow up there, his or her local dialect as well. A native of Guangzhou may speak Standard Cantonese and putonghua, a resident of Taiwan, both Taiwanese and putonghua/guoyu. A person living in Taiwan 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, Standard Mandarin is beginning to take its place beside English and Standard Cantonese, the official languages. Linguists often view Chinese as a language family, though owing to China's socio-political and cultural situation, and the fact that all spoken varieties use one common written system, it is customary to refer to these generally mutually unintelligible variants as "the Chinese language". The diversity of Sinitic variants is comparable to the Romance languages. From a purely descriptive point of view, "languages" and "dialects" are simply arbitrary groups of similar idiolects, and the distinction is irrelevant to linguists who are only concerned with describing regional speeches technically. However, the idea of a single language has major overtones in politics and cultural self-identity, and explains the amount of emotion over this issue. Most Chinese and Chinese linguists refer to Chinese as a single language and its subdivisions dialects, while others call Chinese a language family. Chinese itself has a term for its unified writing system, Zhongwen (中文), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (汉语,“spoken language[s] of the Han Chinese) – this term could be translated to either “language” or “languages” since Chinese possesses no grammatical numbers. In the Chinese language, there is much less need for a uniform speech-and-writing continuum, as indicated by two separate character morphemes 语 yu and 文 wen. Ethnic Chinese often consider these spoken variations as one single language for reasons of nationality and as they inherit one common cultural and linguistic heritage in Classical Chinese. Han native speakers of Wu, Min, Hakka, and Cantonese, for instance, may consider their own linguistic varieties as separate spoken languages, but the Han Chinese race as one – albeit internally very diverse – ethnicity. To Chinese nationalists, the idea of Chinese as a language family may suggest that the Chinese identity is much more fragmentary and disunified than it actually is and as such is often looked upon as culturally and politically provocative. Additionally, in Taiwan, it is closely associated with Taiwanese independence, where some supporters of Taiwanese independence promote the local Taiwanese Minnan-based spoken language. Within the People’s Republic of China and Singapore, it is common for the government to refer to all divisions of the Sinitic language(s) beside Standard Mandarin as fangyan (“regional tongues”, often translated as “dialects”). Modern-day Chinese speakers of all kinds communicate using one formal standard written language, although this modern written standard is modeled after Mandarin, generally the modern Beijing substandard. The term sinophone, coined in analogy to anglophone and francophone, refers to those who speak the Chinese language natively, or prefer it as a medium of communication. The term is derived from Sinae, the Latin word for ancient China. :See also: Classical Chinese and Vernacular Chinese The relationship among the Chinese spoken and written languages is rather complex. Its spoken variations evolved at different rates, while written Chinese itself has changed much less. Classical Chinese literature began in the Spring and Autumn period, although written records have been discovered as far back as the 14th to 11th centuries BCE Shang dynasty oracle bones using the oracle bone scripts. The Chinese orthography centers around Chinese characters, hanzi, which are written within imaginary rectangular blocks, traditionally arranged in vertical columns, read from top to bottom down a column, and right to left across columns. Chinese characters are morphemes independent of phonetic change. Thus the number "one", yi in Mandarin, yat in Cantonese and chi̍t and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("一"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as 冇 and 係 for Cantonese and Hakka, which are considered archaic or unused in standard written Chinese. Written colloquial Cantonese has become quite popular in online chat rooms and instant messaging amongst Hong-Kongers and Cantonese-speakers elsewhere. Use of it is considered highly informal, and does not extend to any formal occasion. Also, in Hunan, some women write their local language in Nü Shu, a syllabary derived from Chinese characters. The Dungan language, considered by some 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 evolved over time from earliest forms of hieroglyphs. The idea that all Chinese characters are either pictographs or ideographs is an erroneous one: most characters contain phonetic parts, and are composites of phonetic components and semantic Radicals. Only the simplest characters, such as ren 人 (human), ri 日 (sun), shan 山 (mountain), shui 水 (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar Xǚ Shèn in the Hàn Dynasty classified characters into 6 categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80-90% as phonetic complexes consisting of a semantic element that indicates meaning, and a phonetic element that indicates the pronunciation. Generally, the phonetic element is more accurate and more important than the semantic one. There are about 214 radicals recognized in the Kangxi Dictionary. Modern characters are styled after the standard script (楷书/楷書 kǎishū) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (篆书/篆書 zhuànshū), cursive script (草书/草書 cǎoshū) and clerical script (隶书/隸書 lìshū). Calligraphy artists can write in traditional and simplified characters, but tend to use traditional characters for traditional art. Various styles of Chinese calligraphy. There are currently two systems for Chinese characters. The traditional system, still used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau and Chinese speaking communities (except Singapore and Malaysia) outside mainland China, takes its form from standardized character forms dating back to the late Han dynasty. The Simplified Chinese character system, developed by the People's Republic of China in 1954 to promote mass literacy, simplifies most complex traditional glyphs to fewer strokes, many to common caoshu shorthand variants. Singapore, which has a large Chinese communities, is the first – and at present the only – foreign nation to officially adopt simplified characters, although it has also become the de facto standard for younger ethnic Chinese in Malaysia. The Internet provides the platform to practice reading the alternative system, be it traditional or simplified. A well-educated Chinese today recognizes approximately 6,000-7,000 characters; some 3,000 characters are required to read a Mainland newspaper. The PRC government defines literacy amongst workers as a knowledge of 2,000 characters, though this would be only functional literacy. A large unabridged dictionary, like the Kangxi Dictionary, contains over 40,000 characters, including obscure, variant, rare, and archaic characters; less than a quarter of these characters are now commonly used.'' Most linguists classify all varieties of modern spoken Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family and believe that there was an original language, termed Proto-Sino-Tibetan, 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 Proto-Sino-Tibetan. 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 Indo-European languages from PIE don't apply to Chinese because of "morphological paucity" especially after Old Chinese Analysis of the concept "wave" in PST. . 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; most present systems rely heavily on Karlgren's insights and methods. Old Chinese ( ), sometimes known as "Archaic Chinese", was the language common during the early and middle Zhōu Dynasty (1122 BCE - 256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the Shījīng, the history of the Shūjīng, and portions of the Yìjīng (I Ching). The phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters 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 was still without tones. Work on reconstructing Old Chinese started with Qīng dynasty philologists. Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably 蜜 mì "honey", 獅 shī "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mǎ "horse", 犬 quǎn "dog", and 鵝 é "goose". The source says the reconstructions of old Chinese are tentative, and not definitive so no conclusions should be drawn. The reconstruction of Old Chinese can not be perfect so this hypothesis may be called into question. Encyclopedia Britannica s.v. "Chinese languages": "Old Chinese vocabulary already contained many words not generally occurring in the other Sino-Tibetan languages. The words for ‘honey' and ‘lion,' and probably also ‘horse,' ‘dog,' and ‘goose,' are connected with Indo-European and were acquired through trade and early contacts. (The nearest known Indo-European languages were Tocharian and Sogdian, a middle Iranian language.) A number of words have Austroasiatic cognates and point to early contacts with the ancestral language of Muong-Vietnamese and Mon-Khmer" ; Jan Ulenbrook, Einige Übereinstimmungen zwischen dem Chinesischen und dem Indogermanischen (1967) proposes 57 items; see also Tsung-tung Chang, 1988 Indo-European Vocabulary in Old Chinese;. 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 the Suí, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the 切韻 "Qièyùn" rhyme table (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the 廣韻 "Guǎngyùn" rhyme table. 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, 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; some scholars have argued that trying to reconstruct, say, modern Cantonese from modern Cantopop rhymes would give a fairly inaccurate picture of the present-day spoken language. The development of the spoken Chinese languages from early historical times to the present has been complex. Most Chinese people, in Sìchuān 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 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 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, though, a single standard of Mandarin did not exist. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The new 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 Standard Mandarin. As a result, Mandarin is now spoken by virtually all young and middle-aged citizens of mainland China and on Taiwan. Standard 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. Chinese was once the Lingua franca for East Asia countries for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. Throughout history Chinese culture and politics has had a great influence on unrelated languages such as Korean 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 Hán tự. It was the only available method for writing Vietnamese until the 14th century, used almost exclusively by Chinese-educated Vietnamese élites. From the 14th to the late 19th century, Vietnamese was written with Chữ nôm, a modified Chinese script incorporating sounds and syllables for native Vietnamese speakers. Chữ nôm was completely replaced by a modified Latin script created by the Jesuit missionary priest Alexander de Rhodes, which incorporates a system of diacritical marks to indicate tones, as well as modified consonants. The Vietnamese language exhibits multiple elements similar to Cantonese in regard to the specific intonations and sharp consonant endings. There is also a slight influence from Mandarin, including the sharper vowels and "kh" (IPA:x) sound 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. In derived Chinese characters or Zhuang logograms to write songs, even though Zhuang is not a Chinese dialect. Since the 1950s, the Zhuang language has been written in a modified Latin alphabet. Zhou, Minglang: Multilingualism in China: The Politics of Writing Reforms for Minority Languages, 1949-2002 (Walter de Gruyter 2003); ISBN 3-11-017896-6; p. 251–258. Languages within the influence of Chinese culture also have a very large number of loanwords from Chinese. Fifty percent or more of Korean vocabulary is of Chinese origin and the influence on Japanese and Vietnamese has been considerable. At least five percent of all words in Tagalog are of Chinese origin. Chinese has also lent a great deal of many grammatical features to these and neighboring languages, notably the lack of gender and the use of classifiers. Japanese has also a lot of loanwords from Chinese, as does Vietnamese. Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of 茶 (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 茄汁 (ke chap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 金橘 (kam kuat). :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, which is only about an eighth as many as English DeFrancis (1984) p.42 counts Chinese as having 1,277 tonal syllables, and about 398 to 418 if tones are disregarded; he cites Jespersen, Otto (1928) Monosyllabism in English; London, p.15 for a count of over 8000 syllables for English. . 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 four main tones of Standard Mandarin applied to the syllable "ma." The tones correspond to these five characters: * "mother" — high level * "hemp" or "torpid" — high rising * "horse" — low falling-rising * "scold" — high falling * "question particle" — neutral The Chinese had no uniform phonetic transcription system until the mid-20th century, although enunciation patterns were recorded in early rime books and dictionaries. Early Sanskrit and Pali Indian translators were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of the language in a foreign language. After 15th century CE Jesuits and Western court missionaries’ efforts result in some rudimentary Latin transcription systems, based on the Nanjing Mandarin dialect. Romanization is the process of transcribing a language in the Latin alphabet. There are many systems of romanization for the Chinese languages due to the Chinese's own lack of phonetic transcription until modern times. Chinese is first known to have been written in Latin characters by Western Christian missionaries in the 16th century. Today the most common romanization standard for Standard Mandarin is Hanyu Pinyin (漢語拼音/汉语拼音), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore). Pinyin is almost universally employed now for teaching standard spoken Chinese in schools and universities across America, Australia and Europe. Chinese parents also use Pinyin to teach their children the sounds and tones for words with which the child is unfamiliar. The Pinyin is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, and alongside the Pinyin is the Chinese symbol. The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859, later modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As it approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels (hence an Anglicization), it may be particularly helpful for beginner speakers of native English background. Wade-Giles is found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan (Taipei city now officially uses Hanyu Pinyin and the rest of the island officially uses Tōngyòng Pinyin 通用拼音). When used within European texts, the tone transcriptions in both pinyin and Wade-Giles are often left out for simplicity; Wade-Giles' extensive use of apostrophes is also usually omitted. Thus, most Western readers will be much more familiar with Beijing than they will be with Běijīng (pinyin), and with Taipei than T'ai²-pei³ (Wade-Giles). Here are a few examples of Hanyu Pinyin and Wade-Giles, for comparison: Other systems of romanization for Chinese include Gwoyeu Romatzyh, the French EFEO, the Yale (invented during WWII for U.S. troops), as well as separate systems for Cantonese, Minnan, Hakka, and other Chinese languages or dialects. Chinese languages have been phonetically transcribed into many other writing systems over the centuries. The 'Phags-pa script, for example, has been very helpful in reconstructing the pronunciations of pre-modern forms of Chinese. Zhuyin (注音, also known as bopomofo), a semi-syllabary is still widely used in Taiwan's elementary schools to aid standard pronunciation. Although bopomofo characters are reminiscent of katakana script, there is no source to substantiate the claim that Katakana was the basis for the zhuyin system. A comparison table of zhuyin to pinyin exists in the zhuyin article. Syllables based on pinyin and zhuyin can also be compared by looking at the following articles: *Pinyin table *Zhuyin table There are also at least two systems of cyrillization for Chinese. The most widespread is the Palladius system. Modern Chinese has often been erroneously classed as a "monosyllabic" language. While most of the morphemes are single syllable, modern Chinese today is much less a monosyllabic language in that nouns, adjectives and verbs are largely di-syllabic. The tendency to create disyllabic words in the modern Chinese languages, particularly in Mandarin, has been particularly pronounced when compared to Classical Chinese. Classical Chinese is a highly isolating language, with each idea (morpheme) generally corresponding to a single syllable and a single character; Modern Chinese though, has the tendency to form new words through disyllabic, trisyllabic and tetra-character agglutination. In fact, some linguists argue that classifying modern Chinese as an isolating language is misleading, for this reason alone. Chinese morphology is strictly bound to a set number of syllables with a fairly rigid construction which are the morphemes, the smallest blocks of the language. While many of these single-syllable morphemes ( zì, 字 in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cí (词/詞), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cí (“word”) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more. For example: *Yun 云 -“cloud” *Hanbaobao 汉堡包 –“hamburger” *Wo 我 –“I, me” *Renmin 人民 –“people” *Diqiu 地球 –“earth(globosity)” *Shandian 闪电 –“lightning” *Meng 梦 –“dream” All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphology — i.e., changes in form of a word — to indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflections – it possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English), and no gender. They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le 了, hai 还, yijing 已经, etc. 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. Chinese also has an extensive system of measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring 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. Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess 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. Official modern Mandarin has only 400 spoken monosyllables but over 10,000 written characters, so there are many homophones only distinguishable by the four tones. Even this is often not enough unless the context and exact phrase or cí is identified. The mono-syllable jī, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: 雞/鸡 chicken, 機/机 machine, 基 basic, 擊/击 (to) hit, 饑/饥 hunger, and 積/积 sum. In speech, the glyphing of a monosyllable to its meaning must be determined by context or by relation to other morphemes (e.g. "some" as in the opposite of "none"). Native speakers may state which words or phrases their names are found in, for convenience of writing: 名字叫嘉英，嘉陵江的嘉，英國的英 Míngzi jiào Jiāyīng, Jiālíng Jiāng de jiā, Yīngguó de yīng "My name is Jiāyīng, the Jia for Jialing River and the ying for the short form in Chinese of UK." Southern Chinese varieties like Cantonese and Hakka preserved more of the rimes of Middle Chinese and have more tones. The previous examples of jī, for instance, 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 multi-syllabic words. The entire Chinese character corpus since antiquity comprises well over 20,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are now commonly in use. However Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words, there are many times more Chinese words than there are characters as most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters. Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and phrases vary greatly. The Hanyu Da Zidian, an all-inclusive compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries for characters, including bone oracle versions. The Zhonghua Zihai 中华字海 (1994) contains 85,568 head entries for character definitions, and is the largest reference work based purely on character and its literary variants. The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary, the 12-volumed Hanyu Da Cidian 汉语大词典, records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters, and gives over 370,000 definitions. The 1999 revised Cihai, a multi-volume encyclopedic dictionary reference work, gives 122,836 vocabulary entry definitions under 19,485 Chinese characters, including proper names, phrases and common zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific and technical terms. The latest 2007 5th edition of Xiandai Hanyu Cidian 现代汉语词典, an authoritative one-volume dictionary on modern standard Chinese language as used in mainland China, has 65,000 entries and defines 11,000 head characters. Like any other language, Chinese has absorbed a sizeable amount of loanwords from other cultures. 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 since Old Chinese include 葡萄 "grape," 石榴 "pomegranate" and 狮子/獅子 "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including 佛 "Buddha" and 菩萨/菩薩 "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as 胡同 "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as 葡萄 "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or Pāli, the liturgical languages of North India. Words borrowed from the nomadic tribes of the Gobi, Mongolian or northeast regions generally have Altaic etymologies, such as 琵琶 "pípa", the Chinese lute, or 酪 "cheese" or "yoghurt", but from exactly which Altaic source is not always entirely clear. Foreign words continue to enter the Chinese language by transcription according to their pronunciations. This is done by employing Chinese characters with similar pronunciations. For example, "Israel" becomes 以色列 (pinyin: yǐsèliè), Paris 巴黎. A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including 沙發 shāfā "sofa," 马达/馬達 mǎdá "motor," 幽默 yōumò "humour," 逻辑/邏輯 luójí "logic," 时髦/時髦 shímáo "smart, fashionable" and 歇斯底里 xiēsīdǐlǐ "hysterics." The bulk of these words were originally coined in the Shanghainese dialect during the early 20th century and were later loaned into Mandarin, hence their pronunciations in Mandarin may be quite off from the English. For example, 沙发/沙發 and 马达/馬達 in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor." Today, 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 德律风/德律風 ( Shanghainese: télífon [ ], Standard Mandarin: délǜfēng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese 电话/電話 (diànhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include 电视/電視 (diànshì "electric vision") for television, 电脑/電腦 (diànnǎo "electric brain") for computer; 手机/手機 (shǒujī "hand machine") for cellphone, and 蓝牙/藍芽 (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. 網誌(wǎng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as 汉堡包/漢堡包 (hànbǎo bāo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as 拖拉机/拖拉機 (tuōlājī, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马利奥/馬利奧 for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example 奔腾/奔騰 (bēnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and 赛百味/賽百味 (Sàibǎiwèi "better-than hundred tastes") for Subway restaurants. Since the 20th century, another source has been Japan. Using existing kanji, which are Chinese characters used in the Japanese language, the Japanese re-moulded European concepts and inventions into wasei-kango (和製漢語, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include diànhuà (电话/電話, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社会, shakai, "society"), kēxué (科学/科學, kagaku, "science") and chōuxiàng (抽象, chūshō, "abstract"). Other terms were coined by the Japanese by giving new senses to existing Chinese terms or by referring to expressions used in classical Chinese literature. For example, jīngjì (经济/經濟, keizai), which in the original Chinese meant "the workings of the state", was narrowed to "economy" in Japanese; this narrowed definition was then reimported into Chinese. As a result, these terms are virtually indistinguishable from native Chinese words: indeed, there is some dispute over some of these terms as to whether the Japanese or Chinese coined them first. As a result of this toing-and-froing process, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese share a corpus linguistics of terms describing modern terminology, in parallel to a similar corpus of terms built from Greco-Latin terms shared among European languages. Taiwanese and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便当/便當 “lunchbox or boxed lunch” (from bento) and 料理 “prepared cuisine”, have passed into common currency. Western foreign words have great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came 芭蕾 (bāléi, "ballet"), 香槟 (xiāngbīn, "champagne"), via Italian 咖啡 (kāfēi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned 沙發 (shāfā "sofa"), 幽默 (yōumò "humour"), and 高尔夫 (gāoěrfū, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪斯科 (dísīkè, "disco"), 可乐 (kělè, "cola") and 迷你 (mínǐ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon 卡通 (cartoon), 基佬 (gay people), 的士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. 粉絲 (fěnsī, "fans"), 駭客 (hèikè, "hacker"), 部落格(bùluōgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin. Since the People's Republic of China’s economic and political rise in recent years, standard Mandarin has become an increasingly popular subject of study amongst the young in the Western world, as in the UK. BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | How hard is it to learn Chinese? In 1991 there were 2,000 foreign learners taking China's official Chinese Proficiency Test (comparable to English's Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660 . *Chinese characters *Chinese honorifics *Chinese measure word *Chinese number gestures *Chinese numerals *Chinese punctuation *Chinese exclamative particles *Four-character idiom *Han unification *Haner language *HSK test *Languages of China *North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics *Nü shu * * * * * * Keys to the Chinese Language: Book II - Google Books * A Practical Chinese Grammar - Google Books * ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawai’i Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X. * ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-08248-2975-9. * Arch Chinese free online Chinese character and Pinyin learning, Chinese English dictionary, writing worksheet generation, etc. * CHINGLISH online Chinese English Dictionary * nciku free online Chinese dictionary with handwriting recognition, pinyin, sound clips, etc. * MDBG free online Chinese-English dictionary * Chinese Characters Dictionary: supports Japanese, Korean, Cantonese, Hakka etc. * Chinese - English Dictionary: from Webster's Online Dictionary - the Rosetta Edition * CEDICT Chinese-English Dictionary Project * Stardict free (GPL) multilanguage dictionary including simplified/traditional Chinese for Unix (Linux, FreeBSD, etc.) and win32 * English-Chinese Translation Dictionary: Chinese-English-Chinese Online Dictionary (Taiwan-based; simplified characters not recognised) * CantoDict: Cantonese-English Dictionary Project * Chinese Pronunciation Dictionary Input Chinese words or sentences, get audio file of Mandarin pronunciation. Web-based tool. * Pinyin Annotator Add pinyin on top of any Chinese text. Mouse over any word to see English translation. Save output to OpenOffice Writer format. Prints nicely. Also adds pinyin to any Chinese web page. *Firefox users can install Add-ons for a pinyin annotator * Multimedia Dictionary of Chinese Characters Language Tool, Offline Chinese Dictionary. * Chinese Scholar Dictionary Chinese English dictionary with Pinyin index * A Cognitive Approach to Beginning Chinese: Interactions I and II. Margaret Mian Yan and Jennifer Li-chia Liu, Indiana University * Chinese Language Information Page A collection of Chinese language learning resources. * Learn Chinese - One At A Time * China KeyBoard Google Engine * Oneaday.org One Chinese idiom a day (simplified and traditional characters) with pinyin transliteration and English translation. * Mandarin Tone Drill Testing your knowledge of Mandarin tones. * Pinyin Practice Pinyin practice for Mandarin learners in all levels * Marjorie Chan's ChinaLinks: A large collection of Web resources by a professor of linguistics at Ohio State University * 4 words of Chinese every day * Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard * Chinese Character of the Day Learn to Read Chinese one word at a time. * Audio files with basic Chinese words * General Introduction of Chinese Language * Learn Chinese Characters * Chinese Scholar: The Free Chinese Class Learn Chinese language and culture through interactive media
Chinese_language
When are most of these groups mutually unintelligible?
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Chinese_language Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) is a language family consisting of languages mutually unintelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. “The mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.” *Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. “The Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.” *Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. “The modern Chinese dialects are really more like a family of language. *John DeFrancis. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (1984), p.56. "To call Chinese a single language composed of dialects with varying degrees of difference is to mislead by minimizing disparities that according to Chao are as great as those between English and Dutch. To call Chinese a family of languages is to suggest extralinguistic differences that in fact do not exist and to overlook the unique linguistic situation that exists in China." Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the two branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages. About one-fifth of the world’s population, or over one billion people, speak some form of Chinese as their native language. The identification of the varieties of Chinese as "dialects" instead of "languages" is considered inappropriate by linguists and Sinologists. Spoken Chinese is distinguished by its high level of internal diversity, although all spoken varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic. There are between seven and thirteen main regional groups of Chinese (depending on classification scheme), of which the most spoken, by far, is Mandarin (about 850 million), followed by Wu (90 million), Min (70 million) and Cantonese (70 million). Most of these groups are mutually unintelligible, although some, like Xiang and the Southwest Mandarin dialects, may share common terms and some degree of intelligibility. Chinese is classified as a macrolanguage with 13 sub-languages in ISO 639-3, though the identification of the varieties of Chinese as multiple "languages" or as "dialects" of a single language is a contentious issue. The standardized form of spoken Chinese is Standard Mandarin (Putonghua / Guoyu / Huayu), based on the Beijing dialect, which is part of a larger group of North-Eastern and South-Western dialects, often taken as a separate language, see Mandarin Chinese for more, this language can be referred to as 官话 Guānhuà or 北方话 Běifānghuà in Chinese. Standard Mandarin is the official language of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC), as well as one of four official languages of Singapore. Chinese—de facto, Standard Mandarin—is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Of the other varieties, Standard Cantonese is common and influential in Guangdong Province and Cantonese-speaking overseas communities, and remains one of the official languages of Hong Kong (together with English) and of Macau (together with Portuguese). Hokkien, part of the Min language group, is widely spoken in southern Fujian, in neighbouring Taiwan (where it is known as Taiwanese or Hoklo) and in Southeast Asia (where it dominates in Singapore and Malaysia). Xinhua reported in March 2007 that 86 percent of people in the People's Republic of China spoke a Chinese variant. 全國約有53%的人能用普通話交流 As a language family, the number of Chinese speakers is 1.136 billion. The same news report indicates 53 percent of the population, or 700 million speakers, can effectively communicate in Putonghua. Sino-Tibetan language family. A map below depicts the linguistic subdivisions ("languages" or "dialect groups") within China itself. The traditionally-recognized seven main groups, in order of population size are: Chinese linguists have recently distinguished: 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. The Dungan language, spoken in Central Asia, is very closely related to Mandarin. However, it is not generally considered "Chinese" since it is written in Cyrillic and spoken by Dungan people outside China who are not considered ethnic Chinese. See List of Chinese dialects for a comprehensive listing of individual dialects within these large, broad groupings. In general, the above language-dialect groups do not have sharp boundaries, though Mandarin is the predominant Sinitic language in the North and the Southwest, and the rest are mostly spoken in Central or Southeastern China. Frequently, as in the case of the Guangdong province, native speakers of major variants overlapped. As with many areas that were linguistically diverse for a long time, it is not always clear how the speeches of various parts of China should be classified. The Ethnologue lists a total of 14, but the number varies between seven and seventeen depending on the classification scheme followed. For instance, the Min variety is often divided into Northern Min (Minbei, Fuchow) and Southern Min (Minnan, Amoy-Swatow); linguists have not determined whether their mutual intelligibility is small enough to sort them as separate languages. The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China. In general, mountainous South China displays more linguistic diversity than the flat North China. In parts of South China, a major city's dialect may only 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). Putonghua / Guoyu, often called "Mandarin", is the official standard language used by the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China, and Singapore (where it is called "Huayu"). It is based on the Beijing dialect, which is the dialect of Mandarin as spoken in Beijing. The governments intend for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. Therefore it is used in government agencies, in the media, and as a language of instruction in schools. In mainland China and Taiwan, diglossia has been a common feature: it is common for a Chinese to be able to speak two or even three varieties of the Sinitic languages (or “dialects”) together with Standard Mandarin. For example, in addition to putonghua a resident of Shanghai might speak Shanghainese and, if they did not grow up there, his or her local dialect as well. A native of Guangzhou may speak Standard Cantonese and putonghua, a resident of Taiwan, both Taiwanese and putonghua/guoyu. A person living in Taiwan 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, Standard Mandarin is beginning to take its place beside English and Standard Cantonese, the official languages. Linguists often view Chinese as a language family, though owing to China's socio-political and cultural situation, and the fact that all spoken varieties use one common written system, it is customary to refer to these generally mutually unintelligible variants as "the Chinese language". The diversity of Sinitic variants is comparable to the Romance languages. From a purely descriptive point of view, "languages" and "dialects" are simply arbitrary groups of similar idiolects, and the distinction is irrelevant to linguists who are only concerned with describing regional speeches technically. However, the idea of a single language has major overtones in politics and cultural self-identity, and explains the amount of emotion over this issue. Most Chinese and Chinese linguists refer to Chinese as a single language and its subdivisions dialects, while others call Chinese a language family. Chinese itself has a term for its unified writing system, Zhongwen (中文), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (汉语,“spoken language[s] of the Han Chinese) – this term could be translated to either “language” or “languages” since Chinese possesses no grammatical numbers. In the Chinese language, there is much less need for a uniform speech-and-writing continuum, as indicated by two separate character morphemes 语 yu and 文 wen. Ethnic Chinese often consider these spoken variations as one single language for reasons of nationality and as they inherit one common cultural and linguistic heritage in Classical Chinese. Han native speakers of Wu, Min, Hakka, and Cantonese, for instance, may consider their own linguistic varieties as separate spoken languages, but the Han Chinese race as one – albeit internally very diverse – ethnicity. To Chinese nationalists, the idea of Chinese as a language family may suggest that the Chinese identity is much more fragmentary and disunified than it actually is and as such is often looked upon as culturally and politically provocative. Additionally, in Taiwan, it is closely associated with Taiwanese independence, where some supporters of Taiwanese independence promote the local Taiwanese Minnan-based spoken language. Within the People’s Republic of China and Singapore, it is common for the government to refer to all divisions of the Sinitic language(s) beside Standard Mandarin as fangyan (“regional tongues”, often translated as “dialects”). Modern-day Chinese speakers of all kinds communicate using one formal standard written language, although this modern written standard is modeled after Mandarin, generally the modern Beijing substandard. The term sinophone, coined in analogy to anglophone and francophone, refers to those who speak the Chinese language natively, or prefer it as a medium of communication. The term is derived from Sinae, the Latin word for ancient China. :See also: Classical Chinese and Vernacular Chinese The relationship among the Chinese spoken and written languages is rather complex. Its spoken variations evolved at different rates, while written Chinese itself has changed much less. Classical Chinese literature began in the Spring and Autumn period, although written records have been discovered as far back as the 14th to 11th centuries BCE Shang dynasty oracle bones using the oracle bone scripts. The Chinese orthography centers around Chinese characters, hanzi, which are written within imaginary rectangular blocks, traditionally arranged in vertical columns, read from top to bottom down a column, and right to left across columns. Chinese characters are morphemes independent of phonetic change. Thus the number "one", yi in Mandarin, yat in Cantonese and chi̍t and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("一"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as 冇 and 係 for Cantonese and Hakka, which are considered archaic or unused in standard written Chinese. Written colloquial Cantonese has become quite popular in online chat rooms and instant messaging amongst Hong-Kongers and Cantonese-speakers elsewhere. Use of it is considered highly informal, and does not extend to any formal occasion. Also, in Hunan, some women write their local language in Nü Shu, a syllabary derived from Chinese characters. The Dungan language, considered by some 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 evolved over time from earliest forms of hieroglyphs. The idea that all Chinese characters are either pictographs or ideographs is an erroneous one: most characters contain phonetic parts, and are composites of phonetic components and semantic Radicals. Only the simplest characters, such as ren 人 (human), ri 日 (sun), shan 山 (mountain), shui 水 (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar Xǚ Shèn in the Hàn Dynasty classified characters into 6 categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80-90% as phonetic complexes consisting of a semantic element that indicates meaning, and a phonetic element that indicates the pronunciation. Generally, the phonetic element is more accurate and more important than the semantic one. There are about 214 radicals recognized in the Kangxi Dictionary. Modern characters are styled after the standard script (楷书/楷書 kǎishū) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (篆书/篆書 zhuànshū), cursive script (草书/草書 cǎoshū) and clerical script (隶书/隸書 lìshū). Calligraphy artists can write in traditional and simplified characters, but tend to use traditional characters for traditional art. Various styles of Chinese calligraphy. There are currently two systems for Chinese characters. The traditional system, still used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau and Chinese speaking communities (except Singapore and Malaysia) outside mainland China, takes its form from standardized character forms dating back to the late Han dynasty. The Simplified Chinese character system, developed by the People's Republic of China in 1954 to promote mass literacy, simplifies most complex traditional glyphs to fewer strokes, many to common caoshu shorthand variants. Singapore, which has a large Chinese communities, is the first – and at present the only – foreign nation to officially adopt simplified characters, although it has also become the de facto standard for younger ethnic Chinese in Malaysia. The Internet provides the platform to practice reading the alternative system, be it traditional or simplified. A well-educated Chinese today recognizes approximately 6,000-7,000 characters; some 3,000 characters are required to read a Mainland newspaper. The PRC government defines literacy amongst workers as a knowledge of 2,000 characters, though this would be only functional literacy. A large unabridged dictionary, like the Kangxi Dictionary, contains over 40,000 characters, including obscure, variant, rare, and archaic characters; less than a quarter of these characters are now commonly used.'' Most linguists classify all varieties of modern spoken Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family and believe that there was an original language, termed Proto-Sino-Tibetan, 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 Proto-Sino-Tibetan. 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 Indo-European languages from PIE don't apply to Chinese because of "morphological paucity" especially after Old Chinese Analysis of the concept "wave" in PST. . 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; most present systems rely heavily on Karlgren's insights and methods. Old Chinese ( ), sometimes known as "Archaic Chinese", was the language common during the early and middle Zhōu Dynasty (1122 BCE - 256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the Shījīng, the history of the Shūjīng, and portions of the Yìjīng (I Ching). The phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters 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 was still without tones. Work on reconstructing Old Chinese started with Qīng dynasty philologists. Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably 蜜 mì "honey", 獅 shī "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mǎ "horse", 犬 quǎn "dog", and 鵝 é "goose". The source says the reconstructions of old Chinese are tentative, and not definitive so no conclusions should be drawn. The reconstruction of Old Chinese can not be perfect so this hypothesis may be called into question. Encyclopedia Britannica s.v. "Chinese languages": "Old Chinese vocabulary already contained many words not generally occurring in the other Sino-Tibetan languages. The words for ‘honey' and ‘lion,' and probably also ‘horse,' ‘dog,' and ‘goose,' are connected with Indo-European and were acquired through trade and early contacts. (The nearest known Indo-European languages were Tocharian and Sogdian, a middle Iranian language.) A number of words have Austroasiatic cognates and point to early contacts with the ancestral language of Muong-Vietnamese and Mon-Khmer" ; Jan Ulenbrook, Einige Übereinstimmungen zwischen dem Chinesischen und dem Indogermanischen (1967) proposes 57 items; see also Tsung-tung Chang, 1988 Indo-European Vocabulary in Old Chinese;. 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 the Suí, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the 切韻 "Qièyùn" rhyme table (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the 廣韻 "Guǎngyùn" rhyme table. 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, 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; some scholars have argued that trying to reconstruct, say, modern Cantonese from modern Cantopop rhymes would give a fairly inaccurate picture of the present-day spoken language. The development of the spoken Chinese languages from early historical times to the present has been complex. Most Chinese people, in Sìchuān 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 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 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, though, a single standard of Mandarin did not exist. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The new 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 Standard Mandarin. As a result, Mandarin is now spoken by virtually all young and middle-aged citizens of mainland China and on Taiwan. Standard 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. Chinese was once the Lingua franca for East Asia countries for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. Throughout history Chinese culture and politics has had a great influence on unrelated languages such as Korean 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 Hán tự. It was the only available method for writing Vietnamese until the 14th century, used almost exclusively by Chinese-educated Vietnamese élites. From the 14th to the late 19th century, Vietnamese was written with Chữ nôm, a modified Chinese script incorporating sounds and syllables for native Vietnamese speakers. Chữ nôm was completely replaced by a modified Latin script created by the Jesuit missionary priest Alexander de Rhodes, which incorporates a system of diacritical marks to indicate tones, as well as modified consonants. The Vietnamese language exhibits multiple elements similar to Cantonese in regard to the specific intonations and sharp consonant endings. There is also a slight influence from Mandarin, including the sharper vowels and "kh" (IPA:x) sound 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. In derived Chinese characters or Zhuang logograms to write songs, even though Zhuang is not a Chinese dialect. Since the 1950s, the Zhuang language has been written in a modified Latin alphabet. Zhou, Minglang: Multilingualism in China: The Politics of Writing Reforms for Minority Languages, 1949-2002 (Walter de Gruyter 2003); ISBN 3-11-017896-6; p. 251–258. Languages within the influence of Chinese culture also have a very large number of loanwords from Chinese. Fifty percent or more of Korean vocabulary is of Chinese origin and the influence on Japanese and Vietnamese has been considerable. At least five percent of all words in Tagalog are of Chinese origin. Chinese has also lent a great deal of many grammatical features to these and neighboring languages, notably the lack of gender and the use of classifiers. Japanese has also a lot of loanwords from Chinese, as does Vietnamese. Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of 茶 (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 茄汁 (ke chap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 金橘 (kam kuat). :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, which is only about an eighth as many as English DeFrancis (1984) p.42 counts Chinese as having 1,277 tonal syllables, and about 398 to 418 if tones are disregarded; he cites Jespersen, Otto (1928) Monosyllabism in English; London, p.15 for a count of over 8000 syllables for English. . 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 four main tones of Standard Mandarin applied to the syllable "ma." The tones correspond to these five characters: * "mother" — high level * "hemp" or "torpid" — high rising * "horse" — low falling-rising * "scold" — high falling * "question particle" — neutral The Chinese had no uniform phonetic transcription system until the mid-20th century, although enunciation patterns were recorded in early rime books and dictionaries. Early Sanskrit and Pali Indian translators were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of the language in a foreign language. After 15th century CE Jesuits and Western court missionaries’ efforts result in some rudimentary Latin transcription systems, based on the Nanjing Mandarin dialect. Romanization is the process of transcribing a language in the Latin alphabet. There are many systems of romanization for the Chinese languages due to the Chinese's own lack of phonetic transcription until modern times. Chinese is first known to have been written in Latin characters by Western Christian missionaries in the 16th century. Today the most common romanization standard for Standard Mandarin is Hanyu Pinyin (漢語拼音/汉语拼音), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore). Pinyin is almost universally employed now for teaching standard spoken Chinese in schools and universities across America, Australia and Europe. Chinese parents also use Pinyin to teach their children the sounds and tones for words with which the child is unfamiliar. The Pinyin is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, and alongside the Pinyin is the Chinese symbol. The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859, later modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As it approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels (hence an Anglicization), it may be particularly helpful for beginner speakers of native English background. Wade-Giles is found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan (Taipei city now officially uses Hanyu Pinyin and the rest of the island officially uses Tōngyòng Pinyin 通用拼音). When used within European texts, the tone transcriptions in both pinyin and Wade-Giles are often left out for simplicity; Wade-Giles' extensive use of apostrophes is also usually omitted. Thus, most Western readers will be much more familiar with Beijing than they will be with Běijīng (pinyin), and with Taipei than T'ai²-pei³ (Wade-Giles). Here are a few examples of Hanyu Pinyin and Wade-Giles, for comparison: Other systems of romanization for Chinese include Gwoyeu Romatzyh, the French EFEO, the Yale (invented during WWII for U.S. troops), as well as separate systems for Cantonese, Minnan, Hakka, and other Chinese languages or dialects. Chinese languages have been phonetically transcribed into many other writing systems over the centuries. The 'Phags-pa script, for example, has been very helpful in reconstructing the pronunciations of pre-modern forms of Chinese. Zhuyin (注音, also known as bopomofo), a semi-syllabary is still widely used in Taiwan's elementary schools to aid standard pronunciation. Although bopomofo characters are reminiscent of katakana script, there is no source to substantiate the claim that Katakana was the basis for the zhuyin system. A comparison table of zhuyin to pinyin exists in the zhuyin article. Syllables based on pinyin and zhuyin can also be compared by looking at the following articles: *Pinyin table *Zhuyin table There are also at least two systems of cyrillization for Chinese. The most widespread is the Palladius system. Modern Chinese has often been erroneously classed as a "monosyllabic" language. While most of the morphemes are single syllable, modern Chinese today is much less a monosyllabic language in that nouns, adjectives and verbs are largely di-syllabic. The tendency to create disyllabic words in the modern Chinese languages, particularly in Mandarin, has been particularly pronounced when compared to Classical Chinese. Classical Chinese is a highly isolating language, with each idea (morpheme) generally corresponding to a single syllable and a single character; Modern Chinese though, has the tendency to form new words through disyllabic, trisyllabic and tetra-character agglutination. In fact, some linguists argue that classifying modern Chinese as an isolating language is misleading, for this reason alone. Chinese morphology is strictly bound to a set number of syllables with a fairly rigid construction which are the morphemes, the smallest blocks of the language. While many of these single-syllable morphemes ( zì, 字 in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cí (词/詞), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cí (“word”) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more. For example: *Yun 云 -“cloud” *Hanbaobao 汉堡包 –“hamburger” *Wo 我 –“I, me” *Renmin 人民 –“people” *Diqiu 地球 –“earth(globosity)” *Shandian 闪电 –“lightning” *Meng 梦 –“dream” All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphology — i.e., changes in form of a word — to indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflections – it possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English), and no gender. They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le 了, hai 还, yijing 已经, etc. 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. Chinese also has an extensive system of measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring 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. Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess 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. Official modern Mandarin has only 400 spoken monosyllables but over 10,000 written characters, so there are many homophones only distinguishable by the four tones. Even this is often not enough unless the context and exact phrase or cí is identified. The mono-syllable jī, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: 雞/鸡 chicken, 機/机 machine, 基 basic, 擊/击 (to) hit, 饑/饥 hunger, and 積/积 sum. In speech, the glyphing of a monosyllable to its meaning must be determined by context or by relation to other morphemes (e.g. "some" as in the opposite of "none"). Native speakers may state which words or phrases their names are found in, for convenience of writing: 名字叫嘉英，嘉陵江的嘉，英國的英 Míngzi jiào Jiāyīng, Jiālíng Jiāng de jiā, Yīngguó de yīng "My name is Jiāyīng, the Jia for Jialing River and the ying for the short form in Chinese of UK." Southern Chinese varieties like Cantonese and Hakka preserved more of the rimes of Middle Chinese and have more tones. The previous examples of jī, for instance, 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 multi-syllabic words. The entire Chinese character corpus since antiquity comprises well over 20,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are now commonly in use. However Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words, there are many times more Chinese words than there are characters as most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters. Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and phrases vary greatly. The Hanyu Da Zidian, an all-inclusive compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries for characters, including bone oracle versions. The Zhonghua Zihai 中华字海 (1994) contains 85,568 head entries for character definitions, and is the largest reference work based purely on character and its literary variants. The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary, the 12-volumed Hanyu Da Cidian 汉语大词典, records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters, and gives over 370,000 definitions. The 1999 revised Cihai, a multi-volume encyclopedic dictionary reference work, gives 122,836 vocabulary entry definitions under 19,485 Chinese characters, including proper names, phrases and common zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific and technical terms. The latest 2007 5th edition of Xiandai Hanyu Cidian 现代汉语词典, an authoritative one-volume dictionary on modern standard Chinese language as used in mainland China, has 65,000 entries and defines 11,000 head characters. Like any other language, Chinese has absorbed a sizeable amount of loanwords from other cultures. 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 since Old Chinese include 葡萄 "grape," 石榴 "pomegranate" and 狮子/獅子 "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including 佛 "Buddha" and 菩萨/菩薩 "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as 胡同 "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as 葡萄 "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or Pāli, the liturgical languages of North India. Words borrowed from the nomadic tribes of the Gobi, Mongolian or northeast regions generally have Altaic etymologies, such as 琵琶 "pípa", the Chinese lute, or 酪 "cheese" or "yoghurt", but from exactly which Altaic source is not always entirely clear. Foreign words continue to enter the Chinese language by transcription according to their pronunciations. This is done by employing Chinese characters with similar pronunciations. For example, "Israel" becomes 以色列 (pinyin: yǐsèliè), Paris 巴黎. A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including 沙發 shāfā "sofa," 马达/馬達 mǎdá "motor," 幽默 yōumò "humour," 逻辑/邏輯 luójí "logic," 时髦/時髦 shímáo "smart, fashionable" and 歇斯底里 xiēsīdǐlǐ "hysterics." The bulk of these words were originally coined in the Shanghainese dialect during the early 20th century and were later loaned into Mandarin, hence their pronunciations in Mandarin may be quite off from the English. For example, 沙发/沙發 and 马达/馬達 in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor." Today, 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 德律风/德律風 ( Shanghainese: télífon [ ], Standard Mandarin: délǜfēng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese 电话/電話 (diànhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include 电视/電視 (diànshì "electric vision") for television, 电脑/電腦 (diànnǎo "electric brain") for computer; 手机/手機 (shǒujī "hand machine") for cellphone, and 蓝牙/藍芽 (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. 網誌(wǎng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as 汉堡包/漢堡包 (hànbǎo bāo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as 拖拉机/拖拉機 (tuōlājī, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马利奥/馬利奧 for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example 奔腾/奔騰 (bēnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and 赛百味/賽百味 (Sàibǎiwèi "better-than hundred tastes") for Subway restaurants. Since the 20th century, another source has been Japan. Using existing kanji, which are Chinese characters used in the Japanese language, the Japanese re-moulded European concepts and inventions into wasei-kango (和製漢語, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include diànhuà (电话/電話, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社会, shakai, "society"), kēxué (科学/科學, kagaku, "science") and chōuxiàng (抽象, chūshō, "abstract"). Other terms were coined by the Japanese by giving new senses to existing Chinese terms or by referring to expressions used in classical Chinese literature. For example, jīngjì (经济/經濟, keizai), which in the original Chinese meant "the workings of the state", was narrowed to "economy" in Japanese; this narrowed definition was then reimported into Chinese. As a result, these terms are virtually indistinguishable from native Chinese words: indeed, there is some dispute over some of these terms as to whether the Japanese or Chinese coined them first. As a result of this toing-and-froing process, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese share a corpus linguistics of terms describing modern terminology, in parallel to a similar corpus of terms built from Greco-Latin terms shared among European languages. Taiwanese and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便当/便當 “lunchbox or boxed lunch” (from bento) and 料理 “prepared cuisine”, have passed into common currency. Western foreign words have great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came 芭蕾 (bāléi, "ballet"), 香槟 (xiāngbīn, "champagne"), via Italian 咖啡 (kāfēi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned 沙發 (shāfā "sofa"), 幽默 (yōumò "humour"), and 高尔夫 (gāoěrfū, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪斯科 (dísīkè, "disco"), 可乐 (kělè, "cola") and 迷你 (mínǐ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon 卡通 (cartoon), 基佬 (gay people), 的士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. 粉絲 (fěnsī, "fans"), 駭客 (hèikè, "hacker"), 部落格(bùluōgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin. Since the People's Republic of China’s economic and political rise in recent years, standard Mandarin has become an increasingly popular subject of study amongst the young in the Western world, as in the UK. BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | How hard is it to learn Chinese? In 1991 there were 2,000 foreign learners taking China's official Chinese Proficiency Test (comparable to English's Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660 . *Chinese characters *Chinese honorifics *Chinese measure word *Chinese number gestures *Chinese numerals *Chinese punctuation *Chinese exclamative particles *Four-character idiom *Han unification *Haner language *HSK test *Languages of China *North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics *Nü shu * * * * * * Keys to the Chinese Language: Book II - Google Books * A Practical Chinese Grammar - Google Books * ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawai’i Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X. * ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-08248-2975-9. * Arch Chinese free online Chinese character and Pinyin learning, Chinese English dictionary, writing worksheet generation, etc. * CHINGLISH online Chinese English Dictionary * nciku free online Chinese dictionary with handwriting recognition, pinyin, sound clips, etc. * MDBG free online Chinese-English dictionary * Chinese Characters Dictionary: supports Japanese, Korean, Cantonese, Hakka etc. * Chinese - English Dictionary: from Webster's Online Dictionary - the Rosetta Edition * CEDICT Chinese-English Dictionary Project * Stardict free (GPL) multilanguage dictionary including simplified/traditional Chinese for Unix (Linux, FreeBSD, etc.) and win32 * English-Chinese Translation Dictionary: Chinese-English-Chinese Online Dictionary (Taiwan-based; simplified characters not recognised) * CantoDict: Cantonese-English Dictionary Project * Chinese Pronunciation Dictionary Input Chinese words or sentences, get audio file of Mandarin pronunciation. Web-based tool. * Pinyin Annotator Add pinyin on top of any Chinese text. Mouse over any word to see English translation. Save output to OpenOffice Writer format. Prints nicely. Also adds pinyin to any Chinese web page. *Firefox users can install Add-ons for a pinyin annotator * Multimedia Dictionary of Chinese Characters Language Tool, Offline Chinese Dictionary. * Chinese Scholar Dictionary Chinese English dictionary with Pinyin index * A Cognitive Approach to Beginning Chinese: Interactions I and II. Margaret Mian Yan and Jennifer Li-chia Liu, Indiana University * Chinese Language Information Page A collection of Chinese language learning resources. * Learn Chinese - One At A Time * China KeyBoard Google Engine * Oneaday.org One Chinese idiom a day (simplified and traditional characters) with pinyin transliteration and English translation. * Mandarin Tone Drill Testing your knowledge of Mandarin tones. * Pinyin Practice Pinyin practice for Mandarin learners in all levels * Marjorie Chan's ChinaLinks: A large collection of Web resources by a professor of linguistics at Ohio State University * 4 words of Chinese every day * Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard * Chinese Character of the Day Learn to Read Chinese one word at a time. * Audio files with basic Chinese words * General Introduction of Chinese Language * Learn Chinese Characters * Chinese Scholar: The Free Chinese Class Learn Chinese language and culture through interactive media
Chinese_language
What is the population of Chinese language?
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data/set5/a7
Chinese_language Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) is a language family consisting of languages mutually unintelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. “The mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.” *Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. “The Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.” *Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. “The modern Chinese dialects are really more like a family of language. *John DeFrancis. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (1984), p.56. "To call Chinese a single language composed of dialects with varying degrees of difference is to mislead by minimizing disparities that according to Chao are as great as those between English and Dutch. To call Chinese a family of languages is to suggest extralinguistic differences that in fact do not exist and to overlook the unique linguistic situation that exists in China." Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the two branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages. About one-fifth of the world’s population, or over one billion people, speak some form of Chinese as their native language. The identification of the varieties of Chinese as "dialects" instead of "languages" is considered inappropriate by linguists and Sinologists. Spoken Chinese is distinguished by its high level of internal diversity, although all spoken varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic. There are between seven and thirteen main regional groups of Chinese (depending on classification scheme), of which the most spoken, by far, is Mandarin (about 850 million), followed by Wu (90 million), Min (70 million) and Cantonese (70 million). Most of these groups are mutually unintelligible, although some, like Xiang and the Southwest Mandarin dialects, may share common terms and some degree of intelligibility. Chinese is classified as a macrolanguage with 13 sub-languages in ISO 639-3, though the identification of the varieties of Chinese as multiple "languages" or as "dialects" of a single language is a contentious issue. The standardized form of spoken Chinese is Standard Mandarin (Putonghua / Guoyu / Huayu), based on the Beijing dialect, which is part of a larger group of North-Eastern and South-Western dialects, often taken as a separate language, see Mandarin Chinese for more, this language can be referred to as 官话 Guānhuà or 北方话 Běifānghuà in Chinese. Standard Mandarin is the official language of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC), as well as one of four official languages of Singapore. Chinese—de facto, Standard Mandarin—is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Of the other varieties, Standard Cantonese is common and influential in Guangdong Province and Cantonese-speaking overseas communities, and remains one of the official languages of Hong Kong (together with English) and of Macau (together with Portuguese). Hokkien, part of the Min language group, is widely spoken in southern Fujian, in neighbouring Taiwan (where it is known as Taiwanese or Hoklo) and in Southeast Asia (where it dominates in Singapore and Malaysia). Xinhua reported in March 2007 that 86 percent of people in the People's Republic of China spoke a Chinese variant. 全國約有53%的人能用普通話交流 As a language family, the number of Chinese speakers is 1.136 billion. The same news report indicates 53 percent of the population, or 700 million speakers, can effectively communicate in Putonghua. Sino-Tibetan language family. A map below depicts the linguistic subdivisions ("languages" or "dialect groups") within China itself. The traditionally-recognized seven main groups, in order of population size are: Chinese linguists have recently distinguished: 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. The Dungan language, spoken in Central Asia, is very closely related to Mandarin. However, it is not generally considered "Chinese" since it is written in Cyrillic and spoken by Dungan people outside China who are not considered ethnic Chinese. See List of Chinese dialects for a comprehensive listing of individual dialects within these large, broad groupings. In general, the above language-dialect groups do not have sharp boundaries, though Mandarin is the predominant Sinitic language in the North and the Southwest, and the rest are mostly spoken in Central or Southeastern China. Frequently, as in the case of the Guangdong province, native speakers of major variants overlapped. As with many areas that were linguistically diverse for a long time, it is not always clear how the speeches of various parts of China should be classified. The Ethnologue lists a total of 14, but the number varies between seven and seventeen depending on the classification scheme followed. For instance, the Min variety is often divided into Northern Min (Minbei, Fuchow) and Southern Min (Minnan, Amoy-Swatow); linguists have not determined whether their mutual intelligibility is small enough to sort them as separate languages. The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China. In general, mountainous South China displays more linguistic diversity than the flat North China. In parts of South China, a major city's dialect may only 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). Putonghua / Guoyu, often called "Mandarin", is the official standard language used by the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China, and Singapore (where it is called "Huayu"). It is based on the Beijing dialect, which is the dialect of Mandarin as spoken in Beijing. The governments intend for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. Therefore it is used in government agencies, in the media, and as a language of instruction in schools. In mainland China and Taiwan, diglossia has been a common feature: it is common for a Chinese to be able to speak two or even three varieties of the Sinitic languages (or “dialects”) together with Standard Mandarin. For example, in addition to putonghua a resident of Shanghai might speak Shanghainese and, if they did not grow up there, his or her local dialect as well. A native of Guangzhou may speak Standard Cantonese and putonghua, a resident of Taiwan, both Taiwanese and putonghua/guoyu. A person living in Taiwan 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, Standard Mandarin is beginning to take its place beside English and Standard Cantonese, the official languages. Linguists often view Chinese as a language family, though owing to China's socio-political and cultural situation, and the fact that all spoken varieties use one common written system, it is customary to refer to these generally mutually unintelligible variants as "the Chinese language". The diversity of Sinitic variants is comparable to the Romance languages. From a purely descriptive point of view, "languages" and "dialects" are simply arbitrary groups of similar idiolects, and the distinction is irrelevant to linguists who are only concerned with describing regional speeches technically. However, the idea of a single language has major overtones in politics and cultural self-identity, and explains the amount of emotion over this issue. Most Chinese and Chinese linguists refer to Chinese as a single language and its subdivisions dialects, while others call Chinese a language family. Chinese itself has a term for its unified writing system, Zhongwen (中文), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (汉语,“spoken language[s] of the Han Chinese) – this term could be translated to either “language” or “languages” since Chinese possesses no grammatical numbers. In the Chinese language, there is much less need for a uniform speech-and-writing continuum, as indicated by two separate character morphemes 语 yu and 文 wen. Ethnic Chinese often consider these spoken variations as one single language for reasons of nationality and as they inherit one common cultural and linguistic heritage in Classical Chinese. Han native speakers of Wu, Min, Hakka, and Cantonese, for instance, may consider their own linguistic varieties as separate spoken languages, but the Han Chinese race as one – albeit internally very diverse – ethnicity. To Chinese nationalists, the idea of Chinese as a language family may suggest that the Chinese identity is much more fragmentary and disunified than it actually is and as such is often looked upon as culturally and politically provocative. Additionally, in Taiwan, it is closely associated with Taiwanese independence, where some supporters of Taiwanese independence promote the local Taiwanese Minnan-based spoken language. Within the People’s Republic of China and Singapore, it is common for the government to refer to all divisions of the Sinitic language(s) beside Standard Mandarin as fangyan (“regional tongues”, often translated as “dialects”). Modern-day Chinese speakers of all kinds communicate using one formal standard written language, although this modern written standard is modeled after Mandarin, generally the modern Beijing substandard. The term sinophone, coined in analogy to anglophone and francophone, refers to those who speak the Chinese language natively, or prefer it as a medium of communication. The term is derived from Sinae, the Latin word for ancient China. :See also: Classical Chinese and Vernacular Chinese The relationship among the Chinese spoken and written languages is rather complex. Its spoken variations evolved at different rates, while written Chinese itself has changed much less. Classical Chinese literature began in the Spring and Autumn period, although written records have been discovered as far back as the 14th to 11th centuries BCE Shang dynasty oracle bones using the oracle bone scripts. The Chinese orthography centers around Chinese characters, hanzi, which are written within imaginary rectangular blocks, traditionally arranged in vertical columns, read from top to bottom down a column, and right to left across columns. Chinese characters are morphemes independent of phonetic change. Thus the number "one", yi in Mandarin, yat in Cantonese and chi̍t and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("一"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as 冇 and 係 for Cantonese and Hakka, which are considered archaic or unused in standard written Chinese. Written colloquial Cantonese has become quite popular in online chat rooms and instant messaging amongst Hong-Kongers and Cantonese-speakers elsewhere. Use of it is considered highly informal, and does not extend to any formal occasion. Also, in Hunan, some women write their local language in Nü Shu, a syllabary derived from Chinese characters. The Dungan language, considered by some 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 evolved over time from earliest forms of hieroglyphs. The idea that all Chinese characters are either pictographs or ideographs is an erroneous one: most characters contain phonetic parts, and are composites of phonetic components and semantic Radicals. Only the simplest characters, such as ren 人 (human), ri 日 (sun), shan 山 (mountain), shui 水 (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar Xǚ Shèn in the Hàn Dynasty classified characters into 6 categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80-90% as phonetic complexes consisting of a semantic element that indicates meaning, and a phonetic element that indicates the pronunciation. Generally, the phonetic element is more accurate and more important than the semantic one. There are about 214 radicals recognized in the Kangxi Dictionary. Modern characters are styled after the standard script (楷书/楷書 kǎishū) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (篆书/篆書 zhuànshū), cursive script (草书/草書 cǎoshū) and clerical script (隶书/隸書 lìshū). Calligraphy artists can write in traditional and simplified characters, but tend to use traditional characters for traditional art. Various styles of Chinese calligraphy. There are currently two systems for Chinese characters. The traditional system, still used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau and Chinese speaking communities (except Singapore and Malaysia) outside mainland China, takes its form from standardized character forms dating back to the late Han dynasty. The Simplified Chinese character system, developed by the People's Republic of China in 1954 to promote mass literacy, simplifies most complex traditional glyphs to fewer strokes, many to common caoshu shorthand variants. Singapore, which has a large Chinese communities, is the first – and at present the only – foreign nation to officially adopt simplified characters, although it has also become the de facto standard for younger ethnic Chinese in Malaysia. The Internet provides the platform to practice reading the alternative system, be it traditional or simplified. A well-educated Chinese today recognizes approximately 6,000-7,000 characters; some 3,000 characters are required to read a Mainland newspaper. The PRC government defines literacy amongst workers as a knowledge of 2,000 characters, though this would be only functional literacy. A large unabridged dictionary, like the Kangxi Dictionary, contains over 40,000 characters, including obscure, variant, rare, and archaic characters; less than a quarter of these characters are now commonly used.'' Most linguists classify all varieties of modern spoken Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family and believe that there was an original language, termed Proto-Sino-Tibetan, 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 Proto-Sino-Tibetan. 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 Indo-European languages from PIE don't apply to Chinese because of "morphological paucity" especially after Old Chinese Analysis of the concept "wave" in PST. . 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; most present systems rely heavily on Karlgren's insights and methods. Old Chinese ( ), sometimes known as "Archaic Chinese", was the language common during the early and middle Zhōu Dynasty (1122 BCE - 256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the Shījīng, the history of the Shūjīng, and portions of the Yìjīng (I Ching). The phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters 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 was still without tones. Work on reconstructing Old Chinese started with Qīng dynasty philologists. Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably 蜜 mì "honey", 獅 shī "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mǎ "horse", 犬 quǎn "dog", and 鵝 é "goose". The source says the reconstructions of old Chinese are tentative, and not definitive so no conclusions should be drawn. The reconstruction of Old Chinese can not be perfect so this hypothesis may be called into question. Encyclopedia Britannica s.v. "Chinese languages": "Old Chinese vocabulary already contained many words not generally occurring in the other Sino-Tibetan languages. The words for ‘honey' and ‘lion,' and probably also ‘horse,' ‘dog,' and ‘goose,' are connected with Indo-European and were acquired through trade and early contacts. (The nearest known Indo-European languages were Tocharian and Sogdian, a middle Iranian language.) A number of words have Austroasiatic cognates and point to early contacts with the ancestral language of Muong-Vietnamese and Mon-Khmer" ; Jan Ulenbrook, Einige Übereinstimmungen zwischen dem Chinesischen und dem Indogermanischen (1967) proposes 57 items; see also Tsung-tung Chang, 1988 Indo-European Vocabulary in Old Chinese;. 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 the Suí, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the 切韻 "Qièyùn" rhyme table (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the 廣韻 "Guǎngyùn" rhyme table. 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, 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; some scholars have argued that trying to reconstruct, say, modern Cantonese from modern Cantopop rhymes would give a fairly inaccurate picture of the present-day spoken language. The development of the spoken Chinese languages from early historical times to the present has been complex. Most Chinese people, in Sìchuān 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 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 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, though, a single standard of Mandarin did not exist. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The new 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 Standard Mandarin. As a result, Mandarin is now spoken by virtually all young and middle-aged citizens of mainland China and on Taiwan. Standard 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. Chinese was once the Lingua franca for East Asia countries for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. Throughout history Chinese culture and politics has had a great influence on unrelated languages such as Korean 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 Hán tự. It was the only available method for writing Vietnamese until the 14th century, used almost exclusively by Chinese-educated Vietnamese élites. From the 14th to the late 19th century, Vietnamese was written with Chữ nôm, a modified Chinese script incorporating sounds and syllables for native Vietnamese speakers. Chữ nôm was completely replaced by a modified Latin script created by the Jesuit missionary priest Alexander de Rhodes, which incorporates a system of diacritical marks to indicate tones, as well as modified consonants. The Vietnamese language exhibits multiple elements similar to Cantonese in regard to the specific intonations and sharp consonant endings. There is also a slight influence from Mandarin, including the sharper vowels and "kh" (IPA:x) sound 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. In derived Chinese characters or Zhuang logograms to write songs, even though Zhuang is not a Chinese dialect. Since the 1950s, the Zhuang language has been written in a modified Latin alphabet. Zhou, Minglang: Multilingualism in China: The Politics of Writing Reforms for Minority Languages, 1949-2002 (Walter de Gruyter 2003); ISBN 3-11-017896-6; p. 251–258. Languages within the influence of Chinese culture also have a very large number of loanwords from Chinese. Fifty percent or more of Korean vocabulary is of Chinese origin and the influence on Japanese and Vietnamese has been considerable. At least five percent of all words in Tagalog are of Chinese origin. Chinese has also lent a great deal of many grammatical features to these and neighboring languages, notably the lack of gender and the use of classifiers. Japanese has also a lot of loanwords from Chinese, as does Vietnamese. Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of 茶 (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 茄汁 (ke chap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 金橘 (kam kuat). :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, which is only about an eighth as many as English DeFrancis (1984) p.42 counts Chinese as having 1,277 tonal syllables, and about 398 to 418 if tones are disregarded; he cites Jespersen, Otto (1928) Monosyllabism in English; London, p.15 for a count of over 8000 syllables for English. . 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 four main tones of Standard Mandarin applied to the syllable "ma." The tones correspond to these five characters: * "mother" — high level * "hemp" or "torpid" — high rising * "horse" — low falling-rising * "scold" — high falling * "question particle" — neutral The Chinese had no uniform phonetic transcription system until the mid-20th century, although enunciation patterns were recorded in early rime books and dictionaries. Early Sanskrit and Pali Indian translators were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of the language in a foreign language. After 15th century CE Jesuits and Western court missionaries’ efforts result in some rudimentary Latin transcription systems, based on the Nanjing Mandarin dialect. Romanization is the process of transcribing a language in the Latin alphabet. There are many systems of romanization for the Chinese languages due to the Chinese's own lack of phonetic transcription until modern times. Chinese is first known to have been written in Latin characters by Western Christian missionaries in the 16th century. Today the most common romanization standard for Standard Mandarin is Hanyu Pinyin (漢語拼音/汉语拼音), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore). Pinyin is almost universally employed now for teaching standard spoken Chinese in schools and universities across America, Australia and Europe. Chinese parents also use Pinyin to teach their children the sounds and tones for words with which the child is unfamiliar. The Pinyin is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, and alongside the Pinyin is the Chinese symbol. The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859, later modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As it approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels (hence an Anglicization), it may be particularly helpful for beginner speakers of native English background. Wade-Giles is found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan (Taipei city now officially uses Hanyu Pinyin and the rest of the island officially uses Tōngyòng Pinyin 通用拼音). When used within European texts, the tone transcriptions in both pinyin and Wade-Giles are often left out for simplicity; Wade-Giles' extensive use of apostrophes is also usually omitted. Thus, most Western readers will be much more familiar with Beijing than they will be with Běijīng (pinyin), and with Taipei than T'ai²-pei³ (Wade-Giles). Here are a few examples of Hanyu Pinyin and Wade-Giles, for comparison: Other systems of romanization for Chinese include Gwoyeu Romatzyh, the French EFEO, the Yale (invented during WWII for U.S. troops), as well as separate systems for Cantonese, Minnan, Hakka, and other Chinese languages or dialects. Chinese languages have been phonetically transcribed into many other writing systems over the centuries. The 'Phags-pa script, for example, has been very helpful in reconstructing the pronunciations of pre-modern forms of Chinese. Zhuyin (注音, also known as bopomofo), a semi-syllabary is still widely used in Taiwan's elementary schools to aid standard pronunciation. Although bopomofo characters are reminiscent of katakana script, there is no source to substantiate the claim that Katakana was the basis for the zhuyin system. A comparison table of zhuyin to pinyin exists in the zhuyin article. Syllables based on pinyin and zhuyin can also be compared by looking at the following articles: *Pinyin table *Zhuyin table There are also at least two systems of cyrillization for Chinese. The most widespread is the Palladius system. Modern Chinese has often been erroneously classed as a "monosyllabic" language. While most of the morphemes are single syllable, modern Chinese today is much less a monosyllabic language in that nouns, adjectives and verbs are largely di-syllabic. The tendency to create disyllabic words in the modern Chinese languages, particularly in Mandarin, has been particularly pronounced when compared to Classical Chinese. Classical Chinese is a highly isolating language, with each idea (morpheme) generally corresponding to a single syllable and a single character; Modern Chinese though, has the tendency to form new words through disyllabic, trisyllabic and tetra-character agglutination. In fact, some linguists argue that classifying modern Chinese as an isolating language is misleading, for this reason alone. Chinese morphology is strictly bound to a set number of syllables with a fairly rigid construction which are the morphemes, the smallest blocks of the language. While many of these single-syllable morphemes ( zì, 字 in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cí (词/詞), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cí (“word”) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more. For example: *Yun 云 -“cloud” *Hanbaobao 汉堡包 –“hamburger” *Wo 我 –“I, me” *Renmin 人民 –“people” *Diqiu 地球 –“earth(globosity)” *Shandian 闪电 –“lightning” *Meng 梦 –“dream” All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphology — i.e., changes in form of a word — to indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflections – it possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English), and no gender. They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le 了, hai 还, yijing 已经, etc. 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. Chinese also has an extensive system of measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring 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. Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess 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. Official modern Mandarin has only 400 spoken monosyllables but over 10,000 written characters, so there are many homophones only distinguishable by the four tones. Even this is often not enough unless the context and exact phrase or cí is identified. The mono-syllable jī, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: 雞/鸡 chicken, 機/机 machine, 基 basic, 擊/击 (to) hit, 饑/饥 hunger, and 積/积 sum. In speech, the glyphing of a monosyllable to its meaning must be determined by context or by relation to other morphemes (e.g. "some" as in the opposite of "none"). Native speakers may state which words or phrases their names are found in, for convenience of writing: 名字叫嘉英，嘉陵江的嘉，英國的英 Míngzi jiào Jiāyīng, Jiālíng Jiāng de jiā, Yīngguó de yīng "My name is Jiāyīng, the Jia for Jialing River and the ying for the short form in Chinese of UK." Southern Chinese varieties like Cantonese and Hakka preserved more of the rimes of Middle Chinese and have more tones. The previous examples of jī, for instance, 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 multi-syllabic words. The entire Chinese character corpus since antiquity comprises well over 20,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are now commonly in use. However Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words, there are many times more Chinese words than there are characters as most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters. Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and phrases vary greatly. The Hanyu Da Zidian, an all-inclusive compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries for characters, including bone oracle versions. The Zhonghua Zihai 中华字海 (1994) contains 85,568 head entries for character definitions, and is the largest reference work based purely on character and its literary variants. The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary, the 12-volumed Hanyu Da Cidian 汉语大词典, records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters, and gives over 370,000 definitions. The 1999 revised Cihai, a multi-volume encyclopedic dictionary reference work, gives 122,836 vocabulary entry definitions under 19,485 Chinese characters, including proper names, phrases and common zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific and technical terms. The latest 2007 5th edition of Xiandai Hanyu Cidian 现代汉语词典, an authoritative one-volume dictionary on modern standard Chinese language as used in mainland China, has 65,000 entries and defines 11,000 head characters. Like any other language, Chinese has absorbed a sizeable amount of loanwords from other cultures. 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 since Old Chinese include 葡萄 "grape," 石榴 "pomegranate" and 狮子/獅子 "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including 佛 "Buddha" and 菩萨/菩薩 "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as 胡同 "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as 葡萄 "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or Pāli, the liturgical languages of North India. Words borrowed from the nomadic tribes of the Gobi, Mongolian or northeast regions generally have Altaic etymologies, such as 琵琶 "pípa", the Chinese lute, or 酪 "cheese" or "yoghurt", but from exactly which Altaic source is not always entirely clear. Foreign words continue to enter the Chinese language by transcription according to their pronunciations. This is done by employing Chinese characters with similar pronunciations. For example, "Israel" becomes 以色列 (pinyin: yǐsèliè), Paris 巴黎. A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including 沙發 shāfā "sofa," 马达/馬達 mǎdá "motor," 幽默 yōumò "humour," 逻辑/邏輯 luójí "logic," 时髦/時髦 shímáo "smart, fashionable" and 歇斯底里 xiēsīdǐlǐ "hysterics." The bulk of these words were originally coined in the Shanghainese dialect during the early 20th century and were later loaned into Mandarin, hence their pronunciations in Mandarin may be quite off from the English. For example, 沙发/沙發 and 马达/馬達 in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor." Today, 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 德律风/德律風 ( Shanghainese: télífon [ ], Standard Mandarin: délǜfēng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese 电话/電話 (diànhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include 电视/電視 (diànshì "electric vision") for television, 电脑/電腦 (diànnǎo "electric brain") for computer; 手机/手機 (shǒujī "hand machine") for cellphone, and 蓝牙/藍芽 (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. 網誌(wǎng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as 汉堡包/漢堡包 (hànbǎo bāo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as 拖拉机/拖拉機 (tuōlājī, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马利奥/馬利奧 for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example 奔腾/奔騰 (bēnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and 赛百味/賽百味 (Sàibǎiwèi "better-than hundred tastes") for Subway restaurants. Since the 20th century, another source has been Japan. Using existing kanji, which are Chinese characters used in the Japanese language, the Japanese re-moulded European concepts and inventions into wasei-kango (和製漢語, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include diànhuà (电话/電話, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社会, shakai, "society"), kēxué (科学/科學, kagaku, "science") and chōuxiàng (抽象, chūshō, "abstract"). Other terms were coined by the Japanese by giving new senses to existing Chinese terms or by referring to expressions used in classical Chinese literature. For example, jīngjì (经济/經濟, keizai), which in the original Chinese meant "the workings of the state", was narrowed to "economy" in Japanese; this narrowed definition was then reimported into Chinese. As a result, these terms are virtually indistinguishable from native Chinese words: indeed, there is some dispute over some of these terms as to whether the Japanese or Chinese coined them first. As a result of this toing-and-froing process, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese share a corpus linguistics of terms describing modern terminology, in parallel to a similar corpus of terms built from Greco-Latin terms shared among European languages. Taiwanese and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便当/便當 “lunchbox or boxed lunch” (from bento) and 料理 “prepared cuisine”, have passed into common currency. Western foreign words have great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came 芭蕾 (bāléi, "ballet"), 香槟 (xiāngbīn, "champagne"), via Italian 咖啡 (kāfēi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned 沙發 (shāfā "sofa"), 幽默 (yōumò "humour"), and 高尔夫 (gāoěrfū, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪斯科 (dísīkè, "disco"), 可乐 (kělè, "cola") and 迷你 (mínǐ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon 卡通 (cartoon), 基佬 (gay people), 的士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. 粉絲 (fěnsī, "fans"), 駭客 (hèikè, "hacker"), 部落格(bùluōgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin. Since the People's Republic of China’s economic and political rise in recent years, standard Mandarin has become an increasingly popular subject of study amongst the young in the Western world, as in the UK. BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | How hard is it to learn Chinese? In 1991 there were 2,000 foreign learners taking China's official Chinese Proficiency Test (comparable to English's Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660 . *Chinese characters *Chinese honorifics *Chinese measure word *Chinese number gestures *Chinese numerals *Chinese punctuation *Chinese exclamative particles *Four-character idiom *Han unification *Haner language *HSK test *Languages of China *North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics *Nü shu * * * * * * Keys to the Chinese Language: Book II - Google Books * A Practical Chinese Grammar - Google Books * ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawai’i Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X. * ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-08248-2975-9. * Arch Chinese free online Chinese character and Pinyin learning, Chinese English dictionary, writing worksheet generation, etc. * CHINGLISH online Chinese English Dictionary * nciku free online Chinese dictionary with handwriting recognition, pinyin, sound clips, etc. * MDBG free online Chinese-English dictionary * Chinese Characters Dictionary: supports Japanese, Korean, Cantonese, Hakka etc. * Chinese - English Dictionary: from Webster's Online Dictionary - the Rosetta Edition * CEDICT Chinese-English Dictionary Project * Stardict free (GPL) multilanguage dictionary including simplified/traditional Chinese for Unix (Linux, FreeBSD, etc.) and win32 * English-Chinese Translation Dictionary: Chinese-English-Chinese Online Dictionary (Taiwan-based; simplified characters not recognised) * CantoDict: Cantonese-English Dictionary Project * Chinese Pronunciation Dictionary Input Chinese words or sentences, get audio file of Mandarin pronunciation. Web-based tool. * Pinyin Annotator Add pinyin on top of any Chinese text. Mouse over any word to see English translation. Save output to OpenOffice Writer format. Prints nicely. Also adds pinyin to any Chinese web page. *Firefox users can install Add-ons for a pinyin annotator * Multimedia Dictionary of Chinese Characters Language Tool, Offline Chinese Dictionary. * Chinese Scholar Dictionary Chinese English dictionary with Pinyin index * A Cognitive Approach to Beginning Chinese: Interactions I and II. Margaret Mian Yan and Jennifer Li-chia Liu, Indiana University * Chinese Language Information Page A collection of Chinese language learning resources. * Learn Chinese - One At A Time * China KeyBoard Google Engine * Oneaday.org One Chinese idiom a day (simplified and traditional characters) with pinyin transliteration and English translation. * Mandarin Tone Drill Testing your knowledge of Mandarin tones. * Pinyin Practice Pinyin practice for Mandarin learners in all levels * Marjorie Chan's ChinaLinks: A large collection of Web resources by a professor of linguistics at Ohio State University * 4 words of Chinese every day * Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard * Chinese Character of the Day Learn to Read Chinese one word at a time. * Audio files with basic Chinese words * General Introduction of Chinese Language * Learn Chinese Characters * Chinese Scholar: The Free Chinese Class Learn Chinese language and culture through interactive media
Chinese_language
Is the most widespread the Palladius system?
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data/set5/a7
Chinese_language Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) is a language family consisting of languages mutually unintelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. “The mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.” *Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. “The Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.” *Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. “The modern Chinese dialects are really more like a family of language. *John DeFrancis. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (1984), p.56. "To call Chinese a single language composed of dialects with varying degrees of difference is to mislead by minimizing disparities that according to Chao are as great as those between English and Dutch. To call Chinese a family of languages is to suggest extralinguistic differences that in fact do not exist and to overlook the unique linguistic situation that exists in China." Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the two branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages. About one-fifth of the world’s population, or over one billion people, speak some form of Chinese as their native language. The identification of the varieties of Chinese as "dialects" instead of "languages" is considered inappropriate by linguists and Sinologists. Spoken Chinese is distinguished by its high level of internal diversity, although all spoken varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic. There are between seven and thirteen main regional groups of Chinese (depending on classification scheme), of which the most spoken, by far, is Mandarin (about 850 million), followed by Wu (90 million), Min (70 million) and Cantonese (70 million). Most of these groups are mutually unintelligible, although some, like Xiang and the Southwest Mandarin dialects, may share common terms and some degree of intelligibility. Chinese is classified as a macrolanguage with 13 sub-languages in ISO 639-3, though the identification of the varieties of Chinese as multiple "languages" or as "dialects" of a single language is a contentious issue. The standardized form of spoken Chinese is Standard Mandarin (Putonghua / Guoyu / Huayu), based on the Beijing dialect, which is part of a larger group of North-Eastern and South-Western dialects, often taken as a separate language, see Mandarin Chinese for more, this language can be referred to as 官话 Guānhuà or 北方话 Běifānghuà in Chinese. Standard Mandarin is the official language of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC), as well as one of four official languages of Singapore. Chinese—de facto, Standard Mandarin—is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Of the other varieties, Standard Cantonese is common and influential in Guangdong Province and Cantonese-speaking overseas communities, and remains one of the official languages of Hong Kong (together with English) and of Macau (together with Portuguese). Hokkien, part of the Min language group, is widely spoken in southern Fujian, in neighbouring Taiwan (where it is known as Taiwanese or Hoklo) and in Southeast Asia (where it dominates in Singapore and Malaysia). Xinhua reported in March 2007 that 86 percent of people in the People's Republic of China spoke a Chinese variant. 全國約有53%的人能用普通話交流 As a language family, the number of Chinese speakers is 1.136 billion. The same news report indicates 53 percent of the population, or 700 million speakers, can effectively communicate in Putonghua. Sino-Tibetan language family. A map below depicts the linguistic subdivisions ("languages" or "dialect groups") within China itself. The traditionally-recognized seven main groups, in order of population size are: Chinese linguists have recently distinguished: 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. The Dungan language, spoken in Central Asia, is very closely related to Mandarin. However, it is not generally considered "Chinese" since it is written in Cyrillic and spoken by Dungan people outside China who are not considered ethnic Chinese. See List of Chinese dialects for a comprehensive listing of individual dialects within these large, broad groupings. In general, the above language-dialect groups do not have sharp boundaries, though Mandarin is the predominant Sinitic language in the North and the Southwest, and the rest are mostly spoken in Central or Southeastern China. Frequently, as in the case of the Guangdong province, native speakers of major variants overlapped. As with many areas that were linguistically diverse for a long time, it is not always clear how the speeches of various parts of China should be classified. The Ethnologue lists a total of 14, but the number varies between seven and seventeen depending on the classification scheme followed. For instance, the Min variety is often divided into Northern Min (Minbei, Fuchow) and Southern Min (Minnan, Amoy-Swatow); linguists have not determined whether their mutual intelligibility is small enough to sort them as separate languages. The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China. In general, mountainous South China displays more linguistic diversity than the flat North China. In parts of South China, a major city's dialect may only 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). Putonghua / Guoyu, often called "Mandarin", is the official standard language used by the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China, and Singapore (where it is called "Huayu"). It is based on the Beijing dialect, which is the dialect of Mandarin as spoken in Beijing. The governments intend for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. Therefore it is used in government agencies, in the media, and as a language of instruction in schools. In mainland China and Taiwan, diglossia has been a common feature: it is common for a Chinese to be able to speak two or even three varieties of the Sinitic languages (or “dialects”) together with Standard Mandarin. For example, in addition to putonghua a resident of Shanghai might speak Shanghainese and, if they did not grow up there, his or her local dialect as well. A native of Guangzhou may speak Standard Cantonese and putonghua, a resident of Taiwan, both Taiwanese and putonghua/guoyu. A person living in Taiwan 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, Standard Mandarin is beginning to take its place beside English and Standard Cantonese, the official languages. Linguists often view Chinese as a language family, though owing to China's socio-political and cultural situation, and the fact that all spoken varieties use one common written system, it is customary to refer to these generally mutually unintelligible variants as "the Chinese language". The diversity of Sinitic variants is comparable to the Romance languages. From a purely descriptive point of view, "languages" and "dialects" are simply arbitrary groups of similar idiolects, and the distinction is irrelevant to linguists who are only concerned with describing regional speeches technically. However, the idea of a single language has major overtones in politics and cultural self-identity, and explains the amount of emotion over this issue. Most Chinese and Chinese linguists refer to Chinese as a single language and its subdivisions dialects, while others call Chinese a language family. Chinese itself has a term for its unified writing system, Zhongwen (中文), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (汉语,“spoken language[s] of the Han Chinese) – this term could be translated to either “language” or “languages” since Chinese possesses no grammatical numbers. In the Chinese language, there is much less need for a uniform speech-and-writing continuum, as indicated by two separate character morphemes 语 yu and 文 wen. Ethnic Chinese often consider these spoken variations as one single language for reasons of nationality and as they inherit one common cultural and linguistic heritage in Classical Chinese. Han native speakers of Wu, Min, Hakka, and Cantonese, for instance, may consider their own linguistic varieties as separate spoken languages, but the Han Chinese race as one – albeit internally very diverse – ethnicity. To Chinese nationalists, the idea of Chinese as a language family may suggest that the Chinese identity is much more fragmentary and disunified than it actually is and as such is often looked upon as culturally and politically provocative. Additionally, in Taiwan, it is closely associated with Taiwanese independence, where some supporters of Taiwanese independence promote the local Taiwanese Minnan-based spoken language. Within the People’s Republic of China and Singapore, it is common for the government to refer to all divisions of the Sinitic language(s) beside Standard Mandarin as fangyan (“regional tongues”, often translated as “dialects”). Modern-day Chinese speakers of all kinds communicate using one formal standard written language, although this modern written standard is modeled after Mandarin, generally the modern Beijing substandard. The term sinophone, coined in analogy to anglophone and francophone, refers to those who speak the Chinese language natively, or prefer it as a medium of communication. The term is derived from Sinae, the Latin word for ancient China. :See also: Classical Chinese and Vernacular Chinese The relationship among the Chinese spoken and written languages is rather complex. Its spoken variations evolved at different rates, while written Chinese itself has changed much less. Classical Chinese literature began in the Spring and Autumn period, although written records have been discovered as far back as the 14th to 11th centuries BCE Shang dynasty oracle bones using the oracle bone scripts. The Chinese orthography centers around Chinese characters, hanzi, which are written within imaginary rectangular blocks, traditionally arranged in vertical columns, read from top to bottom down a column, and right to left across columns. Chinese characters are morphemes independent of phonetic change. Thus the number "one", yi in Mandarin, yat in Cantonese and chi̍t and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("一"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as 冇 and 係 for Cantonese and Hakka, which are considered archaic or unused in standard written Chinese. Written colloquial Cantonese has become quite popular in online chat rooms and instant messaging amongst Hong-Kongers and Cantonese-speakers elsewhere. Use of it is considered highly informal, and does not extend to any formal occasion. Also, in Hunan, some women write their local language in Nü Shu, a syllabary derived from Chinese characters. The Dungan language, considered by some 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 evolved over time from earliest forms of hieroglyphs. The idea that all Chinese characters are either pictographs or ideographs is an erroneous one: most characters contain phonetic parts, and are composites of phonetic components and semantic Radicals. Only the simplest characters, such as ren 人 (human), ri 日 (sun), shan 山 (mountain), shui 水 (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar Xǚ Shèn in the Hàn Dynasty classified characters into 6 categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80-90% as phonetic complexes consisting of a semantic element that indicates meaning, and a phonetic element that indicates the pronunciation. Generally, the phonetic element is more accurate and more important than the semantic one. There are about 214 radicals recognized in the Kangxi Dictionary. Modern characters are styled after the standard script (楷书/楷書 kǎishū) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (篆书/篆書 zhuànshū), cursive script (草书/草書 cǎoshū) and clerical script (隶书/隸書 lìshū). Calligraphy artists can write in traditional and simplified characters, but tend to use traditional characters for traditional art. Various styles of Chinese calligraphy. There are currently two systems for Chinese characters. The traditional system, still used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau and Chinese speaking communities (except Singapore and Malaysia) outside mainland China, takes its form from standardized character forms dating back to the late Han dynasty. The Simplified Chinese character system, developed by the People's Republic of China in 1954 to promote mass literacy, simplifies most complex traditional glyphs to fewer strokes, many to common caoshu shorthand variants. Singapore, which has a large Chinese communities, is the first – and at present the only – foreign nation to officially adopt simplified characters, although it has also become the de facto standard for younger ethnic Chinese in Malaysia. The Internet provides the platform to practice reading the alternative system, be it traditional or simplified. A well-educated Chinese today recognizes approximately 6,000-7,000 characters; some 3,000 characters are required to read a Mainland newspaper. The PRC government defines literacy amongst workers as a knowledge of 2,000 characters, though this would be only functional literacy. A large unabridged dictionary, like the Kangxi Dictionary, contains over 40,000 characters, including obscure, variant, rare, and archaic characters; less than a quarter of these characters are now commonly used.'' Most linguists classify all varieties of modern spoken Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family and believe that there was an original language, termed Proto-Sino-Tibetan, 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 Proto-Sino-Tibetan. 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 Indo-European languages from PIE don't apply to Chinese because of "morphological paucity" especially after Old Chinese Analysis of the concept "wave" in PST. . 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; most present systems rely heavily on Karlgren's insights and methods. Old Chinese ( ), sometimes known as "Archaic Chinese", was the language common during the early and middle Zhōu Dynasty (1122 BCE - 256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the Shījīng, the history of the Shūjīng, and portions of the Yìjīng (I Ching). The phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters 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 was still without tones. Work on reconstructing Old Chinese started with Qīng dynasty philologists. Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably 蜜 mì "honey", 獅 shī "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mǎ "horse", 犬 quǎn "dog", and 鵝 é "goose". The source says the reconstructions of old Chinese are tentative, and not definitive so no conclusions should be drawn. The reconstruction of Old Chinese can not be perfect so this hypothesis may be called into question. Encyclopedia Britannica s.v. "Chinese languages": "Old Chinese vocabulary already contained many words not generally occurring in the other Sino-Tibetan languages. The words for ‘honey' and ‘lion,' and probably also ‘horse,' ‘dog,' and ‘goose,' are connected with Indo-European and were acquired through trade and early contacts. (The nearest known Indo-European languages were Tocharian and Sogdian, a middle Iranian language.) A number of words have Austroasiatic cognates and point to early contacts with the ancestral language of Muong-Vietnamese and Mon-Khmer" ; Jan Ulenbrook, Einige Übereinstimmungen zwischen dem Chinesischen und dem Indogermanischen (1967) proposes 57 items; see also Tsung-tung Chang, 1988 Indo-European Vocabulary in Old Chinese;. 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 the Suí, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the 切韻 "Qièyùn" rhyme table (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the 廣韻 "Guǎngyùn" rhyme table. 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, 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; some scholars have argued that trying to reconstruct, say, modern Cantonese from modern Cantopop rhymes would give a fairly inaccurate picture of the present-day spoken language. The development of the spoken Chinese languages from early historical times to the present has been complex. Most Chinese people, in Sìchuān 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 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 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, though, a single standard of Mandarin did not exist. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The new 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 Standard Mandarin. As a result, Mandarin is now spoken by virtually all young and middle-aged citizens of mainland China and on Taiwan. Standard 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. Chinese was once the Lingua franca for East Asia countries for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. Throughout history Chinese culture and politics has had a great influence on unrelated languages such as Korean 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 Hán tự. It was the only available method for writing Vietnamese until the 14th century, used almost exclusively by Chinese-educated Vietnamese élites. From the 14th to the late 19th century, Vietnamese was written with Chữ nôm, a modified Chinese script incorporating sounds and syllables for native Vietnamese speakers. Chữ nôm was completely replaced by a modified Latin script created by the Jesuit missionary priest Alexander de Rhodes, which incorporates a system of diacritical marks to indicate tones, as well as modified consonants. The Vietnamese language exhibits multiple elements similar to Cantonese in regard to the specific intonations and sharp consonant endings. There is also a slight influence from Mandarin, including the sharper vowels and "kh" (IPA:x) sound 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. In derived Chinese characters or Zhuang logograms to write songs, even though Zhuang is not a Chinese dialect. Since the 1950s, the Zhuang language has been written in a modified Latin alphabet. Zhou, Minglang: Multilingualism in China: The Politics of Writing Reforms for Minority Languages, 1949-2002 (Walter de Gruyter 2003); ISBN 3-11-017896-6; p. 251–258. Languages within the influence of Chinese culture also have a very large number of loanwords from Chinese. Fifty percent or more of Korean vocabulary is of Chinese origin and the influence on Japanese and Vietnamese has been considerable. At least five percent of all words in Tagalog are of Chinese origin. Chinese has also lent a great deal of many grammatical features to these and neighboring languages, notably the lack of gender and the use of classifiers. Japanese has also a lot of loanwords from Chinese, as does Vietnamese. Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of 茶 (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 茄汁 (ke chap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 金橘 (kam kuat). :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, which is only about an eighth as many as English DeFrancis (1984) p.42 counts Chinese as having 1,277 tonal syllables, and about 398 to 418 if tones are disregarded; he cites Jespersen, Otto (1928) Monosyllabism in English; London, p.15 for a count of over 8000 syllables for English. . 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 four main tones of Standard Mandarin applied to the syllable "ma." The tones correspond to these five characters: * "mother" — high level * "hemp" or "torpid" — high rising * "horse" — low falling-rising * "scold" — high falling * "question particle" — neutral The Chinese had no uniform phonetic transcription system until the mid-20th century, although enunciation patterns were recorded in early rime books and dictionaries. Early Sanskrit and Pali Indian translators were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of the language in a foreign language. After 15th century CE Jesuits and Western court missionaries’ efforts result in some rudimentary Latin transcription systems, based on the Nanjing Mandarin dialect. Romanization is the process of transcribing a language in the Latin alphabet. There are many systems of romanization for the Chinese languages due to the Chinese's own lack of phonetic transcription until modern times. Chinese is first known to have been written in Latin characters by Western Christian missionaries in the 16th century. Today the most common romanization standard for Standard Mandarin is Hanyu Pinyin (漢語拼音/汉语拼音), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore). Pinyin is almost universally employed now for teaching standard spoken Chinese in schools and universities across America, Australia and Europe. Chinese parents also use Pinyin to teach their children the sounds and tones for words with which the child is unfamiliar. The Pinyin is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, and alongside the Pinyin is the Chinese symbol. The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859, later modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As it approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels (hence an Anglicization), it may be particularly helpful for beginner speakers of native English background. Wade-Giles is found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan (Taipei city now officially uses Hanyu Pinyin and the rest of the island officially uses Tōngyòng Pinyin 通用拼音). When used within European texts, the tone transcriptions in both pinyin and Wade-Giles are often left out for simplicity; Wade-Giles' extensive use of apostrophes is also usually omitted. Thus, most Western readers will be much more familiar with Beijing than they will be with Běijīng (pinyin), and with Taipei than T'ai²-pei³ (Wade-Giles). Here are a few examples of Hanyu Pinyin and Wade-Giles, for comparison: Other systems of romanization for Chinese include Gwoyeu Romatzyh, the French EFEO, the Yale (invented during WWII for U.S. troops), as well as separate systems for Cantonese, Minnan, Hakka, and other Chinese languages or dialects. Chinese languages have been phonetically transcribed into many other writing systems over the centuries. The 'Phags-pa script, for example, has been very helpful in reconstructing the pronunciations of pre-modern forms of Chinese. Zhuyin (注音, also known as bopomofo), a semi-syllabary is still widely used in Taiwan's elementary schools to aid standard pronunciation. Although bopomofo characters are reminiscent of katakana script, there is no source to substantiate the claim that Katakana was the basis for the zhuyin system. A comparison table of zhuyin to pinyin exists in the zhuyin article. Syllables based on pinyin and zhuyin can also be compared by looking at the following articles: *Pinyin table *Zhuyin table There are also at least two systems of cyrillization for Chinese. The most widespread is the Palladius system. Modern Chinese has often been erroneously classed as a "monosyllabic" language. While most of the morphemes are single syllable, modern Chinese today is much less a monosyllabic language in that nouns, adjectives and verbs are largely di-syllabic. The tendency to create disyllabic words in the modern Chinese languages, particularly in Mandarin, has been particularly pronounced when compared to Classical Chinese. Classical Chinese is a highly isolating language, with each idea (morpheme) generally corresponding to a single syllable and a single character; Modern Chinese though, has the tendency to form new words through disyllabic, trisyllabic and tetra-character agglutination. In fact, some linguists argue that classifying modern Chinese as an isolating language is misleading, for this reason alone. Chinese morphology is strictly bound to a set number of syllables with a fairly rigid construction which are the morphemes, the smallest blocks of the language. While many of these single-syllable morphemes ( zì, 字 in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cí (词/詞), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cí (“word”) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more. For example: *Yun 云 -“cloud” *Hanbaobao 汉堡包 –“hamburger” *Wo 我 –“I, me” *Renmin 人民 –“people” *Diqiu 地球 –“earth(globosity)” *Shandian 闪电 –“lightning” *Meng 梦 –“dream” All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphology — i.e., changes in form of a word — to indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflections – it possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English), and no gender. They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le 了, hai 还, yijing 已经, etc. 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. Chinese also has an extensive system of measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring 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. Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess 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. Official modern Mandarin has only 400 spoken monosyllables but over 10,000 written characters, so there are many homophones only distinguishable by the four tones. Even this is often not enough unless the context and exact phrase or cí is identified. The mono-syllable jī, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: 雞/鸡 chicken, 機/机 machine, 基 basic, 擊/击 (to) hit, 饑/饥 hunger, and 積/积 sum. In speech, the glyphing of a monosyllable to its meaning must be determined by context or by relation to other morphemes (e.g. "some" as in the opposite of "none"). Native speakers may state which words or phrases their names are found in, for convenience of writing: 名字叫嘉英，嘉陵江的嘉，英國的英 Míngzi jiào Jiāyīng, Jiālíng Jiāng de jiā, Yīngguó de yīng "My name is Jiāyīng, the Jia for Jialing River and the ying for the short form in Chinese of UK." Southern Chinese varieties like Cantonese and Hakka preserved more of the rimes of Middle Chinese and have more tones. The previous examples of jī, for instance, 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 multi-syllabic words. The entire Chinese character corpus since antiquity comprises well over 20,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are now commonly in use. However Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words, there are many times more Chinese words than there are characters as most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters. Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and phrases vary greatly. The Hanyu Da Zidian, an all-inclusive compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries for characters, including bone oracle versions. The Zhonghua Zihai 中华字海 (1994) contains 85,568 head entries for character definitions, and is the largest reference work based purely on character and its literary variants. The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary, the 12-volumed Hanyu Da Cidian 汉语大词典, records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters, and gives over 370,000 definitions. The 1999 revised Cihai, a multi-volume encyclopedic dictionary reference work, gives 122,836 vocabulary entry definitions under 19,485 Chinese characters, including proper names, phrases and common zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific and technical terms. The latest 2007 5th edition of Xiandai Hanyu Cidian 现代汉语词典, an authoritative one-volume dictionary on modern standard Chinese language as used in mainland China, has 65,000 entries and defines 11,000 head characters. Like any other language, Chinese has absorbed a sizeable amount of loanwords from other cultures. 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 since Old Chinese include 葡萄 "grape," 石榴 "pomegranate" and 狮子/獅子 "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including 佛 "Buddha" and 菩萨/菩薩 "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as 胡同 "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as 葡萄 "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or Pāli, the liturgical languages of North India. Words borrowed from the nomadic tribes of the Gobi, Mongolian or northeast regions generally have Altaic etymologies, such as 琵琶 "pípa", the Chinese lute, or 酪 "cheese" or "yoghurt", but from exactly which Altaic source is not always entirely clear. Foreign words continue to enter the Chinese language by transcription according to their pronunciations. This is done by employing Chinese characters with similar pronunciations. For example, "Israel" becomes 以色列 (pinyin: yǐsèliè), Paris 巴黎. A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including 沙發 shāfā "sofa," 马达/馬達 mǎdá "motor," 幽默 yōumò "humour," 逻辑/邏輯 luójí "logic," 时髦/時髦 shímáo "smart, fashionable" and 歇斯底里 xiēsīdǐlǐ "hysterics." The bulk of these words were originally coined in the Shanghainese dialect during the early 20th century and were later loaned into Mandarin, hence their pronunciations in Mandarin may be quite off from the English. For example, 沙发/沙發 and 马达/馬達 in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor." Today, 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 德律风/德律風 ( Shanghainese: télífon [ ], Standard Mandarin: délǜfēng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese 电话/電話 (diànhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include 电视/電視 (diànshì "electric vision") for television, 电脑/電腦 (diànnǎo "electric brain") for computer; 手机/手機 (shǒujī "hand machine") for cellphone, and 蓝牙/藍芽 (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. 網誌(wǎng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as 汉堡包/漢堡包 (hànbǎo bāo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as 拖拉机/拖拉機 (tuōlājī, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马利奥/馬利奧 for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example 奔腾/奔騰 (bēnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and 赛百味/賽百味 (Sàibǎiwèi "better-than hundred tastes") for Subway restaurants. Since the 20th century, another source has been Japan. Using existing kanji, which are Chinese characters used in the Japanese language, the Japanese re-moulded European concepts and inventions into wasei-kango (和製漢語, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include diànhuà (电话/電話, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社会, shakai, "society"), kēxué (科学/科學, kagaku, "science") and chōuxiàng (抽象, chūshō, "abstract"). Other terms were coined by the Japanese by giving new senses to existing Chinese terms or by referring to expressions used in classical Chinese literature. For example, jīngjì (经济/經濟, keizai), which in the original Chinese meant "the workings of the state", was narrowed to "economy" in Japanese; this narrowed definition was then reimported into Chinese. As a result, these terms are virtually indistinguishable from native Chinese words: indeed, there is some dispute over some of these terms as to whether the Japanese or Chinese coined them first. As a result of this toing-and-froing process, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese share a corpus linguistics of terms describing modern terminology, in parallel to a similar corpus of terms built from Greco-Latin terms shared among European languages. Taiwanese and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便当/便當 “lunchbox or boxed lunch” (from bento) and 料理 “prepared cuisine”, have passed into common currency. Western foreign words have great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came 芭蕾 (bāléi, "ballet"), 香槟 (xiāngbīn, "champagne"), via Italian 咖啡 (kāfēi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned 沙發 (shāfā "sofa"), 幽默 (yōumò "humour"), and 高尔夫 (gāoěrfū, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪斯科 (dísīkè, "disco"), 可乐 (kělè, "cola") and 迷你 (mínǐ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon 卡通 (cartoon), 基佬 (gay people), 的士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. 粉絲 (fěnsī, "fans"), 駭客 (hèikè, "hacker"), 部落格(bùluōgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin. Since the People's Republic of China’s economic and political rise in recent years, standard Mandarin has become an increasingly popular subject of study amongst the young in the Western world, as in the UK. BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | How hard is it to learn Chinese? In 1991 there were 2,000 foreign learners taking China's official Chinese Proficiency Test (comparable to English's Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660 . *Chinese characters *Chinese honorifics *Chinese measure word *Chinese number gestures *Chinese numerals *Chinese punctuation *Chinese exclamative particles *Four-character idiom *Han unification *Haner language *HSK test *Languages of China *North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics *Nü shu * * * * * * Keys to the Chinese Language: Book II - Google Books * A Practical Chinese Grammar - Google Books * ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawai’i Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X. * ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-08248-2975-9. * Arch Chinese free online Chinese character and Pinyin learning, Chinese English dictionary, writing worksheet generation, etc. * CHINGLISH online Chinese English Dictionary * nciku free online Chinese dictionary with handwriting recognition, pinyin, sound clips, etc. * MDBG free online Chinese-English dictionary * Chinese Characters Dictionary: supports Japanese, Korean, Cantonese, Hakka etc. * Chinese - English Dictionary: from Webster's Online Dictionary - the Rosetta Edition * CEDICT Chinese-English Dictionary Project * Stardict free (GPL) multilanguage dictionary including simplified/traditional Chinese for Unix (Linux, FreeBSD, etc.) and win32 * English-Chinese Translation Dictionary: Chinese-English-Chinese Online Dictionary (Taiwan-based; simplified characters not recognised) * CantoDict: Cantonese-English Dictionary Project * Chinese Pronunciation Dictionary Input Chinese words or sentences, get audio file of Mandarin pronunciation. Web-based tool. * Pinyin Annotator Add pinyin on top of any Chinese text. Mouse over any word to see English translation. Save output to OpenOffice Writer format. Prints nicely. Also adds pinyin to any Chinese web page. *Firefox users can install Add-ons for a pinyin annotator * Multimedia Dictionary of Chinese Characters Language Tool, Offline Chinese Dictionary. * Chinese Scholar Dictionary Chinese English dictionary with Pinyin index * A Cognitive Approach to Beginning Chinese: Interactions I and II. Margaret Mian Yan and Jennifer Li-chia Liu, Indiana University * Chinese Language Information Page A collection of Chinese language learning resources. * Learn Chinese - One At A Time * China KeyBoard Google Engine * Oneaday.org One Chinese idiom a day (simplified and traditional characters) with pinyin transliteration and English translation. * Mandarin Tone Drill Testing your knowledge of Mandarin tones. * Pinyin Practice Pinyin practice for Mandarin learners in all levels * Marjorie Chan's ChinaLinks: A large collection of Web resources by a professor of linguistics at Ohio State University * 4 words of Chinese every day * Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard * Chinese Character of the Day Learn to Read Chinese one word at a time. * Audio files with basic Chinese words * General Introduction of Chinese Language * Learn Chinese Characters * Chinese Scholar: The Free Chinese Class Learn Chinese language and culture through interactive media
Chinese_language
Are most of these groups mutually unintelligible?
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Chinese_language Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) is a language family consisting of languages mutually unintelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. “The mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.” *Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. “The Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.” *Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. “The modern Chinese dialects are really more like a family of language. *John DeFrancis. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (1984), p.56. "To call Chinese a single language composed of dialects with varying degrees of difference is to mislead by minimizing disparities that according to Chao are as great as those between English and Dutch. To call Chinese a family of languages is to suggest extralinguistic differences that in fact do not exist and to overlook the unique linguistic situation that exists in China." Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the two branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages. About one-fifth of the world’s population, or over one billion people, speak some form of Chinese as their native language. The identification of the varieties of Chinese as "dialects" instead of "languages" is considered inappropriate by linguists and Sinologists. Spoken Chinese is distinguished by its high level of internal diversity, although all spoken varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic. There are between seven and thirteen main regional groups of Chinese (depending on classification scheme), of which the most spoken, by far, is Mandarin (about 850 million), followed by Wu (90 million), Min (70 million) and Cantonese (70 million). Most of these groups are mutually unintelligible, although some, like Xiang and the Southwest Mandarin dialects, may share common terms and some degree of intelligibility. Chinese is classified as a macrolanguage with 13 sub-languages in ISO 639-3, though the identification of the varieties of Chinese as multiple "languages" or as "dialects" of a single language is a contentious issue. The standardized form of spoken Chinese is Standard Mandarin (Putonghua / Guoyu / Huayu), based on the Beijing dialect, which is part of a larger group of North-Eastern and South-Western dialects, often taken as a separate language, see Mandarin Chinese for more, this language can be referred to as 官话 Guānhuà or 北方话 Běifānghuà in Chinese. Standard Mandarin is the official language of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC), as well as one of four official languages of Singapore. Chinese—de facto, Standard Mandarin—is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Of the other varieties, Standard Cantonese is common and influential in Guangdong Province and Cantonese-speaking overseas communities, and remains one of the official languages of Hong Kong (together with English) and of Macau (together with Portuguese). Hokkien, part of the Min language group, is widely spoken in southern Fujian, in neighbouring Taiwan (where it is known as Taiwanese or Hoklo) and in Southeast Asia (where it dominates in Singapore and Malaysia). Xinhua reported in March 2007 that 86 percent of people in the People's Republic of China spoke a Chinese variant. 全國約有53%的人能用普通話交流 As a language family, the number of Chinese speakers is 1.136 billion. The same news report indicates 53 percent of the population, or 700 million speakers, can effectively communicate in Putonghua. Sino-Tibetan language family. A map below depicts the linguistic subdivisions ("languages" or "dialect groups") within China itself. The traditionally-recognized seven main groups, in order of population size are: Chinese linguists have recently distinguished: 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. The Dungan language, spoken in Central Asia, is very closely related to Mandarin. However, it is not generally considered "Chinese" since it is written in Cyrillic and spoken by Dungan people outside China who are not considered ethnic Chinese. See List of Chinese dialects for a comprehensive listing of individual dialects within these large, broad groupings. In general, the above language-dialect groups do not have sharp boundaries, though Mandarin is the predominant Sinitic language in the North and the Southwest, and the rest are mostly spoken in Central or Southeastern China. Frequently, as in the case of the Guangdong province, native speakers of major variants overlapped. As with many areas that were linguistically diverse for a long time, it is not always clear how the speeches of various parts of China should be classified. The Ethnologue lists a total of 14, but the number varies between seven and seventeen depending on the classification scheme followed. For instance, the Min variety is often divided into Northern Min (Minbei, Fuchow) and Southern Min (Minnan, Amoy-Swatow); linguists have not determined whether their mutual intelligibility is small enough to sort them as separate languages. The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China. In general, mountainous South China displays more linguistic diversity than the flat North China. In parts of South China, a major city's dialect may only 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). Putonghua / Guoyu, often called "Mandarin", is the official standard language used by the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China, and Singapore (where it is called "Huayu"). It is based on the Beijing dialect, which is the dialect of Mandarin as spoken in Beijing. The governments intend for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. Therefore it is used in government agencies, in the media, and as a language of instruction in schools. In mainland China and Taiwan, diglossia has been a common feature: it is common for a Chinese to be able to speak two or even three varieties of the Sinitic languages (or “dialects”) together with Standard Mandarin. For example, in addition to putonghua a resident of Shanghai might speak Shanghainese and, if they did not grow up there, his or her local dialect as well. A native of Guangzhou may speak Standard Cantonese and putonghua, a resident of Taiwan, both Taiwanese and putonghua/guoyu. A person living in Taiwan 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, Standard Mandarin is beginning to take its place beside English and Standard Cantonese, the official languages. Linguists often view Chinese as a language family, though owing to China's socio-political and cultural situation, and the fact that all spoken varieties use one common written system, it is customary to refer to these generally mutually unintelligible variants as "the Chinese language". The diversity of Sinitic variants is comparable to the Romance languages. From a purely descriptive point of view, "languages" and "dialects" are simply arbitrary groups of similar idiolects, and the distinction is irrelevant to linguists who are only concerned with describing regional speeches technically. However, the idea of a single language has major overtones in politics and cultural self-identity, and explains the amount of emotion over this issue. Most Chinese and Chinese linguists refer to Chinese as a single language and its subdivisions dialects, while others call Chinese a language family. Chinese itself has a term for its unified writing system, Zhongwen (中文), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (汉语,“spoken language[s] of the Han Chinese) – this term could be translated to either “language” or “languages” since Chinese possesses no grammatical numbers. In the Chinese language, there is much less need for a uniform speech-and-writing continuum, as indicated by two separate character morphemes 语 yu and 文 wen. Ethnic Chinese often consider these spoken variations as one single language for reasons of nationality and as they inherit one common cultural and linguistic heritage in Classical Chinese. Han native speakers of Wu, Min, Hakka, and Cantonese, for instance, may consider their own linguistic varieties as separate spoken languages, but the Han Chinese race as one – albeit internally very diverse – ethnicity. To Chinese nationalists, the idea of Chinese as a language family may suggest that the Chinese identity is much more fragmentary and disunified than it actually is and as such is often looked upon as culturally and politically provocative. Additionally, in Taiwan, it is closely associated with Taiwanese independence, where some supporters of Taiwanese independence promote the local Taiwanese Minnan-based spoken language. Within the People’s Republic of China and Singapore, it is common for the government to refer to all divisions of the Sinitic language(s) beside Standard Mandarin as fangyan (“regional tongues”, often translated as “dialects”). Modern-day Chinese speakers of all kinds communicate using one formal standard written language, although this modern written standard is modeled after Mandarin, generally the modern Beijing substandard. The term sinophone, coined in analogy to anglophone and francophone, refers to those who speak the Chinese language natively, or prefer it as a medium of communication. The term is derived from Sinae, the Latin word for ancient China. :See also: Classical Chinese and Vernacular Chinese The relationship among the Chinese spoken and written languages is rather complex. Its spoken variations evolved at different rates, while written Chinese itself has changed much less. Classical Chinese literature began in the Spring and Autumn period, although written records have been discovered as far back as the 14th to 11th centuries BCE Shang dynasty oracle bones using the oracle bone scripts. The Chinese orthography centers around Chinese characters, hanzi, which are written within imaginary rectangular blocks, traditionally arranged in vertical columns, read from top to bottom down a column, and right to left across columns. Chinese characters are morphemes independent of phonetic change. Thus the number "one", yi in Mandarin, yat in Cantonese and chi̍t and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("一"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as 冇 and 係 for Cantonese and Hakka, which are considered archaic or unused in standard written Chinese. Written colloquial Cantonese has become quite popular in online chat rooms and instant messaging amongst Hong-Kongers and Cantonese-speakers elsewhere. Use of it is considered highly informal, and does not extend to any formal occasion. Also, in Hunan, some women write their local language in Nü Shu, a syllabary derived from Chinese characters. The Dungan language, considered by some 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 evolved over time from earliest forms of hieroglyphs. The idea that all Chinese characters are either pictographs or ideographs is an erroneous one: most characters contain phonetic parts, and are composites of phonetic components and semantic Radicals. Only the simplest characters, such as ren 人 (human), ri 日 (sun), shan 山 (mountain), shui 水 (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar Xǚ Shèn in the Hàn Dynasty classified characters into 6 categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80-90% as phonetic complexes consisting of a semantic element that indicates meaning, and a phonetic element that indicates the pronunciation. Generally, the phonetic element is more accurate and more important than the semantic one. There are about 214 radicals recognized in the Kangxi Dictionary. Modern characters are styled after the standard script (楷书/楷書 kǎishū) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (篆书/篆書 zhuànshū), cursive script (草书/草書 cǎoshū) and clerical script (隶书/隸書 lìshū). Calligraphy artists can write in traditional and simplified characters, but tend to use traditional characters for traditional art. Various styles of Chinese calligraphy. There are currently two systems for Chinese characters. The traditional system, still used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau and Chinese speaking communities (except Singapore and Malaysia) outside mainland China, takes its form from standardized character forms dating back to the late Han dynasty. The Simplified Chinese character system, developed by the People's Republic of China in 1954 to promote mass literacy, simplifies most complex traditional glyphs to fewer strokes, many to common caoshu shorthand variants. Singapore, which has a large Chinese communities, is the first – and at present the only – foreign nation to officially adopt simplified characters, although it has also become the de facto standard for younger ethnic Chinese in Malaysia. The Internet provides the platform to practice reading the alternative system, be it traditional or simplified. A well-educated Chinese today recognizes approximately 6,000-7,000 characters; some 3,000 characters are required to read a Mainland newspaper. The PRC government defines literacy amongst workers as a knowledge of 2,000 characters, though this would be only functional literacy. A large unabridged dictionary, like the Kangxi Dictionary, contains over 40,000 characters, including obscure, variant, rare, and archaic characters; less than a quarter of these characters are now commonly used.'' Most linguists classify all varieties of modern spoken Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family and believe that there was an original language, termed Proto-Sino-Tibetan, 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 Proto-Sino-Tibetan. 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 Indo-European languages from PIE don't apply to Chinese because of "morphological paucity" especially after Old Chinese Analysis of the concept "wave" in PST. . 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; most present systems rely heavily on Karlgren's insights and methods. Old Chinese ( ), sometimes known as "Archaic Chinese", was the language common during the early and middle Zhōu Dynasty (1122 BCE - 256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the Shījīng, the history of the Shūjīng, and portions of the Yìjīng (I Ching). The phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters 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 was still without tones. Work on reconstructing Old Chinese started with Qīng dynasty philologists. Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably 蜜 mì "honey", 獅 shī "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mǎ "horse", 犬 quǎn "dog", and 鵝 é "goose". The source says the reconstructions of old Chinese are tentative, and not definitive so no conclusions should be drawn. The reconstruction of Old Chinese can not be perfect so this hypothesis may be called into question. Encyclopedia Britannica s.v. "Chinese languages": "Old Chinese vocabulary already contained many words not generally occurring in the other Sino-Tibetan languages. The words for ‘honey' and ‘lion,' and probably also ‘horse,' ‘dog,' and ‘goose,' are connected with Indo-European and were acquired through trade and early contacts. (The nearest known Indo-European languages were Tocharian and Sogdian, a middle Iranian language.) A number of words have Austroasiatic cognates and point to early contacts with the ancestral language of Muong-Vietnamese and Mon-Khmer" ; Jan Ulenbrook, Einige Übereinstimmungen zwischen dem Chinesischen und dem Indogermanischen (1967) proposes 57 items; see also Tsung-tung Chang, 1988 Indo-European Vocabulary in Old Chinese;. 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 the Suí, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the 切韻 "Qièyùn" rhyme table (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the 廣韻 "Guǎngyùn" rhyme table. 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, 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; some scholars have argued that trying to reconstruct, say, modern Cantonese from modern Cantopop rhymes would give a fairly inaccurate picture of the present-day spoken language. The development of the spoken Chinese languages from early historical times to the present has been complex. Most Chinese people, in Sìchuān 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 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 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, though, a single standard of Mandarin did not exist. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The new 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 Standard Mandarin. As a result, Mandarin is now spoken by virtually all young and middle-aged citizens of mainland China and on Taiwan. Standard 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. Chinese was once the Lingua franca for East Asia countries for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. Throughout history Chinese culture and politics has had a great influence on unrelated languages such as Korean 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 Hán tự. It was the only available method for writing Vietnamese until the 14th century, used almost exclusively by Chinese-educated Vietnamese élites. From the 14th to the late 19th century, Vietnamese was written with Chữ nôm, a modified Chinese script incorporating sounds and syllables for native Vietnamese speakers. Chữ nôm was completely replaced by a modified Latin script created by the Jesuit missionary priest Alexander de Rhodes, which incorporates a system of diacritical marks to indicate tones, as well as modified consonants. The Vietnamese language exhibits multiple elements similar to Cantonese in regard to the specific intonations and sharp consonant endings. There is also a slight influence from Mandarin, including the sharper vowels and "kh" (IPA:x) sound 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. In derived Chinese characters or Zhuang logograms to write songs, even though Zhuang is not a Chinese dialect. Since the 1950s, the Zhuang language has been written in a modified Latin alphabet. Zhou, Minglang: Multilingualism in China: The Politics of Writing Reforms for Minority Languages, 1949-2002 (Walter de Gruyter 2003); ISBN 3-11-017896-6; p. 251–258. Languages within the influence of Chinese culture also have a very large number of loanwords from Chinese. Fifty percent or more of Korean vocabulary is of Chinese origin and the influence on Japanese and Vietnamese has been considerable. At least five percent of all words in Tagalog are of Chinese origin. Chinese has also lent a great deal of many grammatical features to these and neighboring languages, notably the lack of gender and the use of classifiers. Japanese has also a lot of loanwords from Chinese, as does Vietnamese. Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of 茶 (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 茄汁 (ke chap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 金橘 (kam kuat). :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, which is only about an eighth as many as English DeFrancis (1984) p.42 counts Chinese as having 1,277 tonal syllables, and about 398 to 418 if tones are disregarded; he cites Jespersen, Otto (1928) Monosyllabism in English; London, p.15 for a count of over 8000 syllables for English. . 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 four main tones of Standard Mandarin applied to the syllable "ma." The tones correspond to these five characters: * "mother" — high level * "hemp" or "torpid" — high rising * "horse" — low falling-rising * "scold" — high falling * "question particle" — neutral The Chinese had no uniform phonetic transcription system until the mid-20th century, although enunciation patterns were recorded in early rime books and dictionaries. Early Sanskrit and Pali Indian translators were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of the language in a foreign language. After 15th century CE Jesuits and Western court missionaries’ efforts result in some rudimentary Latin transcription systems, based on the Nanjing Mandarin dialect. Romanization is the process of transcribing a language in the Latin alphabet. There are many systems of romanization for the Chinese languages due to the Chinese's own lack of phonetic transcription until modern times. Chinese is first known to have been written in Latin characters by Western Christian missionaries in the 16th century. Today the most common romanization standard for Standard Mandarin is Hanyu Pinyin (漢語拼音/汉语拼音), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore). Pinyin is almost universally employed now for teaching standard spoken Chinese in schools and universities across America, Australia and Europe. Chinese parents also use Pinyin to teach their children the sounds and tones for words with which the child is unfamiliar. The Pinyin is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, and alongside the Pinyin is the Chinese symbol. The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859, later modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As it approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels (hence an Anglicization), it may be particularly helpful for beginner speakers of native English background. Wade-Giles is found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan (Taipei city now officially uses Hanyu Pinyin and the rest of the island officially uses Tōngyòng Pinyin 通用拼音). When used within European texts, the tone transcriptions in both pinyin and Wade-Giles are often left out for simplicity; Wade-Giles' extensive use of apostrophes is also usually omitted. Thus, most Western readers will be much more familiar with Beijing than they will be with Běijīng (pinyin), and with Taipei than T'ai²-pei³ (Wade-Giles). Here are a few examples of Hanyu Pinyin and Wade-Giles, for comparison: Other systems of romanization for Chinese include Gwoyeu Romatzyh, the French EFEO, the Yale (invented during WWII for U.S. troops), as well as separate systems for Cantonese, Minnan, Hakka, and other Chinese languages or dialects. Chinese languages have been phonetically transcribed into many other writing systems over the centuries. The 'Phags-pa script, for example, has been very helpful in reconstructing the pronunciations of pre-modern forms of Chinese. Zhuyin (注音, also known as bopomofo), a semi-syllabary is still widely used in Taiwan's elementary schools to aid standard pronunciation. Although bopomofo characters are reminiscent of katakana script, there is no source to substantiate the claim that Katakana was the basis for the zhuyin system. A comparison table of zhuyin to pinyin exists in the zhuyin article. Syllables based on pinyin and zhuyin can also be compared by looking at the following articles: *Pinyin table *Zhuyin table There are also at least two systems of cyrillization for Chinese. The most widespread is the Palladius system. Modern Chinese has often been erroneously classed as a "monosyllabic" language. While most of the morphemes are single syllable, modern Chinese today is much less a monosyllabic language in that nouns, adjectives and verbs are largely di-syllabic. The tendency to create disyllabic words in the modern Chinese languages, particularly in Mandarin, has been particularly pronounced when compared to Classical Chinese. Classical Chinese is a highly isolating language, with each idea (morpheme) generally corresponding to a single syllable and a single character; Modern Chinese though, has the tendency to form new words through disyllabic, trisyllabic and tetra-character agglutination. In fact, some linguists argue that classifying modern Chinese as an isolating language is misleading, for this reason alone. Chinese morphology is strictly bound to a set number of syllables with a fairly rigid construction which are the morphemes, the smallest blocks of the language. While many of these single-syllable morphemes ( zì, 字 in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cí (词/詞), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cí (“word”) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more. For example: *Yun 云 -“cloud” *Hanbaobao 汉堡包 –“hamburger” *Wo 我 –“I, me” *Renmin 人民 –“people” *Diqiu 地球 –“earth(globosity)” *Shandian 闪电 –“lightning” *Meng 梦 –“dream” All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphology — i.e., changes in form of a word — to indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflections – it possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English), and no gender. They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le 了, hai 还, yijing 已经, etc. 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. Chinese also has an extensive system of measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring 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. Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess 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. Official modern Mandarin has only 400 spoken monosyllables but over 10,000 written characters, so there are many homophones only distinguishable by the four tones. Even this is often not enough unless the context and exact phrase or cí is identified. The mono-syllable jī, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: 雞/鸡 chicken, 機/机 machine, 基 basic, 擊/击 (to) hit, 饑/饥 hunger, and 積/积 sum. In speech, the glyphing of a monosyllable to its meaning must be determined by context or by relation to other morphemes (e.g. "some" as in the opposite of "none"). Native speakers may state which words or phrases their names are found in, for convenience of writing: 名字叫嘉英，嘉陵江的嘉，英國的英 Míngzi jiào Jiāyīng, Jiālíng Jiāng de jiā, Yīngguó de yīng "My name is Jiāyīng, the Jia for Jialing River and the ying for the short form in Chinese of UK." Southern Chinese varieties like Cantonese and Hakka preserved more of the rimes of Middle Chinese and have more tones. The previous examples of jī, for instance, 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 multi-syllabic words. The entire Chinese character corpus since antiquity comprises well over 20,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are now commonly in use. However Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words, there are many times more Chinese words than there are characters as most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters. Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and phrases vary greatly. The Hanyu Da Zidian, an all-inclusive compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries for characters, including bone oracle versions. The Zhonghua Zihai 中华字海 (1994) contains 85,568 head entries for character definitions, and is the largest reference work based purely on character and its literary variants. The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary, the 12-volumed Hanyu Da Cidian 汉语大词典, records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters, and gives over 370,000 definitions. The 1999 revised Cihai, a multi-volume encyclopedic dictionary reference work, gives 122,836 vocabulary entry definitions under 19,485 Chinese characters, including proper names, phrases and common zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific and technical terms. The latest 2007 5th edition of Xiandai Hanyu Cidian 现代汉语词典, an authoritative one-volume dictionary on modern standard Chinese language as used in mainland China, has 65,000 entries and defines 11,000 head characters. Like any other language, Chinese has absorbed a sizeable amount of loanwords from other cultures. 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 since Old Chinese include 葡萄 "grape," 石榴 "pomegranate" and 狮子/獅子 "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including 佛 "Buddha" and 菩萨/菩薩 "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as 胡同 "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as 葡萄 "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or Pāli, the liturgical languages of North India. Words borrowed from the nomadic tribes of the Gobi, Mongolian or northeast regions generally have Altaic etymologies, such as 琵琶 "pípa", the Chinese lute, or 酪 "cheese" or "yoghurt", but from exactly which Altaic source is not always entirely clear. Foreign words continue to enter the Chinese language by transcription according to their pronunciations. This is done by employing Chinese characters with similar pronunciations. For example, "Israel" becomes 以色列 (pinyin: yǐsèliè), Paris 巴黎. A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including 沙發 shāfā "sofa," 马达/馬達 mǎdá "motor," 幽默 yōumò "humour," 逻辑/邏輯 luójí "logic," 时髦/時髦 shímáo "smart, fashionable" and 歇斯底里 xiēsīdǐlǐ "hysterics." The bulk of these words were originally coined in the Shanghainese dialect during the early 20th century and were later loaned into Mandarin, hence their pronunciations in Mandarin may be quite off from the English. For example, 沙发/沙發 and 马达/馬達 in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor." Today, 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 德律风/德律風 ( Shanghainese: télífon [ ], Standard Mandarin: délǜfēng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese 电话/電話 (diànhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include 电视/電視 (diànshì "electric vision") for television, 电脑/電腦 (diànnǎo "electric brain") for computer; 手机/手機 (shǒujī "hand machine") for cellphone, and 蓝牙/藍芽 (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. 網誌(wǎng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as 汉堡包/漢堡包 (hànbǎo bāo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as 拖拉机/拖拉機 (tuōlājī, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马利奥/馬利奧 for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example 奔腾/奔騰 (bēnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and 赛百味/賽百味 (Sàibǎiwèi "better-than hundred tastes") for Subway restaurants. Since the 20th century, another source has been Japan. Using existing kanji, which are Chinese characters used in the Japanese language, the Japanese re-moulded European concepts and inventions into wasei-kango (和製漢語, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include diànhuà (电话/電話, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社会, shakai, "society"), kēxué (科学/科學, kagaku, "science") and chōuxiàng (抽象, chūshō, "abstract"). Other terms were coined by the Japanese by giving new senses to existing Chinese terms or by referring to expressions used in classical Chinese literature. For example, jīngjì (经济/經濟, keizai), which in the original Chinese meant "the workings of the state", was narrowed to "economy" in Japanese; this narrowed definition was then reimported into Chinese. As a result, these terms are virtually indistinguishable from native Chinese words: indeed, there is some dispute over some of these terms as to whether the Japanese or Chinese coined them first. As a result of this toing-and-froing process, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese share a corpus linguistics of terms describing modern terminology, in parallel to a similar corpus of terms built from Greco-Latin terms shared among European languages. Taiwanese and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便当/便當 “lunchbox or boxed lunch” (from bento) and 料理 “prepared cuisine”, have passed into common currency. Western foreign words have great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came 芭蕾 (bāléi, "ballet"), 香槟 (xiāngbīn, "champagne"), via Italian 咖啡 (kāfēi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned 沙發 (shāfā "sofa"), 幽默 (yōumò "humour"), and 高尔夫 (gāoěrfū, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪斯科 (dísīkè, "disco"), 可乐 (kělè, "cola") and 迷你 (mínǐ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon 卡通 (cartoon), 基佬 (gay people), 的士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. 粉絲 (fěnsī, "fans"), 駭客 (hèikè, "hacker"), 部落格(bùluōgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin. Since the People's Republic of China’s economic and political rise in recent years, standard Mandarin has become an increasingly popular subject of study amongst the young in the Western world, as in the UK. BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | How hard is it to learn Chinese? In 1991 there were 2,000 foreign learners taking China's official Chinese Proficiency Test (comparable to English's Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660 . *Chinese characters *Chinese honorifics *Chinese measure word *Chinese number gestures *Chinese numerals *Chinese punctuation *Chinese exclamative particles *Four-character idiom *Han unification *Haner language *HSK test *Languages of China *North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics *Nü shu * * * * * * Keys to the Chinese Language: Book II - Google Books * A Practical Chinese Grammar - Google Books * ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawai’i Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X. * ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-08248-2975-9. * Arch Chinese free online Chinese character and Pinyin learning, Chinese English dictionary, writing worksheet generation, etc. * CHINGLISH online Chinese English Dictionary * nciku free online Chinese dictionary with handwriting recognition, pinyin, sound clips, etc. * MDBG free online Chinese-English dictionary * Chinese Characters Dictionary: supports Japanese, Korean, Cantonese, Hakka etc. * Chinese - English Dictionary: from Webster's Online Dictionary - the Rosetta Edition * CEDICT Chinese-English Dictionary Project * Stardict free (GPL) multilanguage dictionary including simplified/traditional Chinese for Unix (Linux, FreeBSD, etc.) and win32 * English-Chinese Translation Dictionary: Chinese-English-Chinese Online Dictionary (Taiwan-based; simplified characters not recognised) * CantoDict: Cantonese-English Dictionary Project * Chinese Pronunciation Dictionary Input Chinese words or sentences, get audio file of Mandarin pronunciation. Web-based tool. * Pinyin Annotator Add pinyin on top of any Chinese text. Mouse over any word to see English translation. Save output to OpenOffice Writer format. Prints nicely. Also adds pinyin to any Chinese web page. *Firefox users can install Add-ons for a pinyin annotator * Multimedia Dictionary of Chinese Characters Language Tool, Offline Chinese Dictionary. * Chinese Scholar Dictionary Chinese English dictionary with Pinyin index * A Cognitive Approach to Beginning Chinese: Interactions I and II. Margaret Mian Yan and Jennifer Li-chia Liu, Indiana University * Chinese Language Information Page A collection of Chinese language learning resources. * Learn Chinese - One At A Time * China KeyBoard Google Engine * Oneaday.org One Chinese idiom a day (simplified and traditional characters) with pinyin transliteration and English translation. * Mandarin Tone Drill Testing your knowledge of Mandarin tones. * Pinyin Practice Pinyin practice for Mandarin learners in all levels * Marjorie Chan's ChinaLinks: A large collection of Web resources by a professor of linguistics at Ohio State University * 4 words of Chinese every day * Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard * Chinese Character of the Day Learn to Read Chinese one word at a time. * Audio files with basic Chinese words * General Introduction of Chinese Language * Learn Chinese Characters * Chinese Scholar: The Free Chinese Class Learn Chinese language and culture through interactive media
Chinese_language
In what country is Chinese language located?
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data/set5/a7
Chinese_language Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) is a language family consisting of languages mutually unintelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. “The mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.” *Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. “The Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.” *Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. “The modern Chinese dialects are really more like a family of language. *John DeFrancis. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (1984), p.56. "To call Chinese a single language composed of dialects with varying degrees of difference is to mislead by minimizing disparities that according to Chao are as great as those between English and Dutch. To call Chinese a family of languages is to suggest extralinguistic differences that in fact do not exist and to overlook the unique linguistic situation that exists in China." Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the two branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages. About one-fifth of the world’s population, or over one billion people, speak some form of Chinese as their native language. The identification of the varieties of Chinese as "dialects" instead of "languages" is considered inappropriate by linguists and Sinologists. Spoken Chinese is distinguished by its high level of internal diversity, although all spoken varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic. There are between seven and thirteen main regional groups of Chinese (depending on classification scheme), of which the most spoken, by far, is Mandarin (about 850 million), followed by Wu (90 million), Min (70 million) and Cantonese (70 million). Most of these groups are mutually unintelligible, although some, like Xiang and the Southwest Mandarin dialects, may share common terms and some degree of intelligibility. Chinese is classified as a macrolanguage with 13 sub-languages in ISO 639-3, though the identification of the varieties of Chinese as multiple "languages" or as "dialects" of a single language is a contentious issue. The standardized form of spoken Chinese is Standard Mandarin (Putonghua / Guoyu / Huayu), based on the Beijing dialect, which is part of a larger group of North-Eastern and South-Western dialects, often taken as a separate language, see Mandarin Chinese for more, this language can be referred to as 官话 Guānhuà or 北方话 Běifānghuà in Chinese. Standard Mandarin is the official language of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC), as well as one of four official languages of Singapore. Chinese—de facto, Standard Mandarin—is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Of the other varieties, Standard Cantonese is common and influential in Guangdong Province and Cantonese-speaking overseas communities, and remains one of the official languages of Hong Kong (together with English) and of Macau (together with Portuguese). Hokkien, part of the Min language group, is widely spoken in southern Fujian, in neighbouring Taiwan (where it is known as Taiwanese or Hoklo) and in Southeast Asia (where it dominates in Singapore and Malaysia). Xinhua reported in March 2007 that 86 percent of people in the People's Republic of China spoke a Chinese variant. 全國約有53%的人能用普通話交流 As a language family, the number of Chinese speakers is 1.136 billion. The same news report indicates 53 percent of the population, or 700 million speakers, can effectively communicate in Putonghua. Sino-Tibetan language family. A map below depicts the linguistic subdivisions ("languages" or "dialect groups") within China itself. The traditionally-recognized seven main groups, in order of population size are: Chinese linguists have recently distinguished: 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. The Dungan language, spoken in Central Asia, is very closely related to Mandarin. However, it is not generally considered "Chinese" since it is written in Cyrillic and spoken by Dungan people outside China who are not considered ethnic Chinese. See List of Chinese dialects for a comprehensive listing of individual dialects within these large, broad groupings. In general, the above language-dialect groups do not have sharp boundaries, though Mandarin is the predominant Sinitic language in the North and the Southwest, and the rest are mostly spoken in Central or Southeastern China. Frequently, as in the case of the Guangdong province, native speakers of major variants overlapped. As with many areas that were linguistically diverse for a long time, it is not always clear how the speeches of various parts of China should be classified. The Ethnologue lists a total of 14, but the number varies between seven and seventeen depending on the classification scheme followed. For instance, the Min variety is often divided into Northern Min (Minbei, Fuchow) and Southern Min (Minnan, Amoy-Swatow); linguists have not determined whether their mutual intelligibility is small enough to sort them as separate languages. The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China. In general, mountainous South China displays more linguistic diversity than the flat North China. In parts of South China, a major city's dialect may only 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). Putonghua / Guoyu, often called "Mandarin", is the official standard language used by the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China, and Singapore (where it is called "Huayu"). It is based on the Beijing dialect, which is the dialect of Mandarin as spoken in Beijing. The governments intend for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. Therefore it is used in government agencies, in the media, and as a language of instruction in schools. In mainland China and Taiwan, diglossia has been a common feature: it is common for a Chinese to be able to speak two or even three varieties of the Sinitic languages (or “dialects”) together with Standard Mandarin. For example, in addition to putonghua a resident of Shanghai might speak Shanghainese and, if they did not grow up there, his or her local dialect as well. A native of Guangzhou may speak Standard Cantonese and putonghua, a resident of Taiwan, both Taiwanese and putonghua/guoyu. A person living in Taiwan 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, Standard Mandarin is beginning to take its place beside English and Standard Cantonese, the official languages. Linguists often view Chinese as a language family, though owing to China's socio-political and cultural situation, and the fact that all spoken varieties use one common written system, it is customary to refer to these generally mutually unintelligible variants as "the Chinese language". The diversity of Sinitic variants is comparable to the Romance languages. From a purely descriptive point of view, "languages" and "dialects" are simply arbitrary groups of similar idiolects, and the distinction is irrelevant to linguists who are only concerned with describing regional speeches technically. However, the idea of a single language has major overtones in politics and cultural self-identity, and explains the amount of emotion over this issue. Most Chinese and Chinese linguists refer to Chinese as a single language and its subdivisions dialects, while others call Chinese a language family. Chinese itself has a term for its unified writing system, Zhongwen (中文), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (汉语,“spoken language[s] of the Han Chinese) – this term could be translated to either “language” or “languages” since Chinese possesses no grammatical numbers. In the Chinese language, there is much less need for a uniform speech-and-writing continuum, as indicated by two separate character morphemes 语 yu and 文 wen. Ethnic Chinese often consider these spoken variations as one single language for reasons of nationality and as they inherit one common cultural and linguistic heritage in Classical Chinese. Han native speakers of Wu, Min, Hakka, and Cantonese, for instance, may consider their own linguistic varieties as separate spoken languages, but the Han Chinese race as one – albeit internally very diverse – ethnicity. To Chinese nationalists, the idea of Chinese as a language family may suggest that the Chinese identity is much more fragmentary and disunified than it actually is and as such is often looked upon as culturally and politically provocative. Additionally, in Taiwan, it is closely associated with Taiwanese independence, where some supporters of Taiwanese independence promote the local Taiwanese Minnan-based spoken language. Within the People’s Republic of China and Singapore, it is common for the government to refer to all divisions of the Sinitic language(s) beside Standard Mandarin as fangyan (“regional tongues”, often translated as “dialects”). Modern-day Chinese speakers of all kinds communicate using one formal standard written language, although this modern written standard is modeled after Mandarin, generally the modern Beijing substandard. The term sinophone, coined in analogy to anglophone and francophone, refers to those who speak the Chinese language natively, or prefer it as a medium of communication. The term is derived from Sinae, the Latin word for ancient China. :See also: Classical Chinese and Vernacular Chinese The relationship among the Chinese spoken and written languages is rather complex. Its spoken variations evolved at different rates, while written Chinese itself has changed much less. Classical Chinese literature began in the Spring and Autumn period, although written records have been discovered as far back as the 14th to 11th centuries BCE Shang dynasty oracle bones using the oracle bone scripts. The Chinese orthography centers around Chinese characters, hanzi, which are written within imaginary rectangular blocks, traditionally arranged in vertical columns, read from top to bottom down a column, and right to left across columns. Chinese characters are morphemes independent of phonetic change. Thus the number "one", yi in Mandarin, yat in Cantonese and chi̍t and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("一"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as 冇 and 係 for Cantonese and Hakka, which are considered archaic or unused in standard written Chinese. Written colloquial Cantonese has become quite popular in online chat rooms and instant messaging amongst Hong-Kongers and Cantonese-speakers elsewhere. Use of it is considered highly informal, and does not extend to any formal occasion. Also, in Hunan, some women write their local language in Nü Shu, a syllabary derived from Chinese characters. The Dungan language, considered by some 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 evolved over time from earliest forms of hieroglyphs. The idea that all Chinese characters are either pictographs or ideographs is an erroneous one: most characters contain phonetic parts, and are composites of phonetic components and semantic Radicals. Only the simplest characters, such as ren 人 (human), ri 日 (sun), shan 山 (mountain), shui 水 (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar Xǚ Shèn in the Hàn Dynasty classified characters into 6 categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80-90% as phonetic complexes consisting of a semantic element that indicates meaning, and a phonetic element that indicates the pronunciation. Generally, the phonetic element is more accurate and more important than the semantic one. There are about 214 radicals recognized in the Kangxi Dictionary. Modern characters are styled after the standard script (楷书/楷書 kǎishū) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (篆书/篆書 zhuànshū), cursive script (草书/草書 cǎoshū) and clerical script (隶书/隸書 lìshū). Calligraphy artists can write in traditional and simplified characters, but tend to use traditional characters for traditional art. Various styles of Chinese calligraphy. There are currently two systems for Chinese characters. The traditional system, still used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau and Chinese speaking communities (except Singapore and Malaysia) outside mainland China, takes its form from standardized character forms dating back to the late Han dynasty. The Simplified Chinese character system, developed by the People's Republic of China in 1954 to promote mass literacy, simplifies most complex traditional glyphs to fewer strokes, many to common caoshu shorthand variants. Singapore, which has a large Chinese communities, is the first – and at present the only – foreign nation to officially adopt simplified characters, although it has also become the de facto standard for younger ethnic Chinese in Malaysia. The Internet provides the platform to practice reading the alternative system, be it traditional or simplified. A well-educated Chinese today recognizes approximately 6,000-7,000 characters; some 3,000 characters are required to read a Mainland newspaper. The PRC government defines literacy amongst workers as a knowledge of 2,000 characters, though this would be only functional literacy. A large unabridged dictionary, like the Kangxi Dictionary, contains over 40,000 characters, including obscure, variant, rare, and archaic characters; less than a quarter of these characters are now commonly used.'' Most linguists classify all varieties of modern spoken Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family and believe that there was an original language, termed Proto-Sino-Tibetan, 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 Proto-Sino-Tibetan. 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 Indo-European languages from PIE don't apply to Chinese because of "morphological paucity" especially after Old Chinese Analysis of the concept "wave" in PST. . 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; most present systems rely heavily on Karlgren's insights and methods. Old Chinese ( ), sometimes known as "Archaic Chinese", was the language common during the early and middle Zhōu Dynasty (1122 BCE - 256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the Shījīng, the history of the Shūjīng, and portions of the Yìjīng (I Ching). The phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters 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 was still without tones. Work on reconstructing Old Chinese started with Qīng dynasty philologists. Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably 蜜 mì "honey", 獅 shī "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mǎ "horse", 犬 quǎn "dog", and 鵝 é "goose". The source says the reconstructions of old Chinese are tentative, and not definitive so no conclusions should be drawn. The reconstruction of Old Chinese can not be perfect so this hypothesis may be called into question. Encyclopedia Britannica s.v. "Chinese languages": "Old Chinese vocabulary already contained many words not generally occurring in the other Sino-Tibetan languages. The words for ‘honey' and ‘lion,' and probably also ‘horse,' ‘dog,' and ‘goose,' are connected with Indo-European and were acquired through trade and early contacts. (The nearest known Indo-European languages were Tocharian and Sogdian, a middle Iranian language.) A number of words have Austroasiatic cognates and point to early contacts with the ancestral language of Muong-Vietnamese and Mon-Khmer" ; Jan Ulenbrook, Einige Übereinstimmungen zwischen dem Chinesischen und dem Indogermanischen (1967) proposes 57 items; see also Tsung-tung Chang, 1988 Indo-European Vocabulary in Old Chinese;. 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 the Suí, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the 切韻 "Qièyùn" rhyme table (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the 廣韻 "Guǎngyùn" rhyme table. 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, 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; some scholars have argued that trying to reconstruct, say, modern Cantonese from modern Cantopop rhymes would give a fairly inaccurate picture of the present-day spoken language. The development of the spoken Chinese languages from early historical times to the present has been complex. Most Chinese people, in Sìchuān 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 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 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, though, a single standard of Mandarin did not exist. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The new 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 Standard Mandarin. As a result, Mandarin is now spoken by virtually all young and middle-aged citizens of mainland China and on Taiwan. Standard 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. Chinese was once the Lingua franca for East Asia countries for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. Throughout history Chinese culture and politics has had a great influence on unrelated languages such as Korean 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 Hán tự. It was the only available method for writing Vietnamese until the 14th century, used almost exclusively by Chinese-educated Vietnamese élites. From the 14th to the late 19th century, Vietnamese was written with Chữ nôm, a modified Chinese script incorporating sounds and syllables for native Vietnamese speakers. Chữ nôm was completely replaced by a modified Latin script created by the Jesuit missionary priest Alexander de Rhodes, which incorporates a system of diacritical marks to indicate tones, as well as modified consonants. The Vietnamese language exhibits multiple elements similar to Cantonese in regard to the specific intonations and sharp consonant endings. There is also a slight influence from Mandarin, including the sharper vowels and "kh" (IPA:x) sound 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. In derived Chinese characters or Zhuang logograms to write songs, even though Zhuang is not a Chinese dialect. Since the 1950s, the Zhuang language has been written in a modified Latin alphabet. Zhou, Minglang: Multilingualism in China: The Politics of Writing Reforms for Minority Languages, 1949-2002 (Walter de Gruyter 2003); ISBN 3-11-017896-6; p. 251–258. Languages within the influence of Chinese culture also have a very large number of loanwords from Chinese. Fifty percent or more of Korean vocabulary is of Chinese origin and the influence on Japanese and Vietnamese has been considerable. At least five percent of all words in Tagalog are of Chinese origin. Chinese has also lent a great deal of many grammatical features to these and neighboring languages, notably the lack of gender and the use of classifiers. Japanese has also a lot of loanwords from Chinese, as does Vietnamese. Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of 茶 (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 茄汁 (ke chap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 金橘 (kam kuat). :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, which is only about an eighth as many as English DeFrancis (1984) p.42 counts Chinese as having 1,277 tonal syllables, and about 398 to 418 if tones are disregarded; he cites Jespersen, Otto (1928) Monosyllabism in English; London, p.15 for a count of over 8000 syllables for English. . 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 four main tones of Standard Mandarin applied to the syllable "ma." The tones correspond to these five characters: * "mother" — high level * "hemp" or "torpid" — high rising * "horse" — low falling-rising * "scold" — high falling * "question particle" — neutral The Chinese had no uniform phonetic transcription system until the mid-20th century, although enunciation patterns were recorded in early rime books and dictionaries. Early Sanskrit and Pali Indian translators were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of the language in a foreign language. After 15th century CE Jesuits and Western court missionaries’ efforts result in some rudimentary Latin transcription systems, based on the Nanjing Mandarin dialect. Romanization is the process of transcribing a language in the Latin alphabet. There are many systems of romanization for the Chinese languages due to the Chinese's own lack of phonetic transcription until modern times. Chinese is first known to have been written in Latin characters by Western Christian missionaries in the 16th century. Today the most common romanization standard for Standard Mandarin is Hanyu Pinyin (漢語拼音/汉语拼音), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore). Pinyin is almost universally employed now for teaching standard spoken Chinese in schools and universities across America, Australia and Europe. Chinese parents also use Pinyin to teach their children the sounds and tones for words with which the child is unfamiliar. The Pinyin is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, and alongside the Pinyin is the Chinese symbol. The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859, later modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As it approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels (hence an Anglicization), it may be particularly helpful for beginner speakers of native English background. Wade-Giles is found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan (Taipei city now officially uses Hanyu Pinyin and the rest of the island officially uses Tōngyòng Pinyin 通用拼音). When used within European texts, the tone transcriptions in both pinyin and Wade-Giles are often left out for simplicity; Wade-Giles' extensive use of apostrophes is also usually omitted. Thus, most Western readers will be much more familiar with Beijing than they will be with Běijīng (pinyin), and with Taipei than T'ai²-pei³ (Wade-Giles). Here are a few examples of Hanyu Pinyin and Wade-Giles, for comparison: Other systems of romanization for Chinese include Gwoyeu Romatzyh, the French EFEO, the Yale (invented during WWII for U.S. troops), as well as separate systems for Cantonese, Minnan, Hakka, and other Chinese languages or dialects. Chinese languages have been phonetically transcribed into many other writing systems over the centuries. The 'Phags-pa script, for example, has been very helpful in reconstructing the pronunciations of pre-modern forms of Chinese. Zhuyin (注音, also known as bopomofo), a semi-syllabary is still widely used in Taiwan's elementary schools to aid standard pronunciation. Although bopomofo characters are reminiscent of katakana script, there is no source to substantiate the claim that Katakana was the basis for the zhuyin system. A comparison table of zhuyin to pinyin exists in the zhuyin article. Syllables based on pinyin and zhuyin can also be compared by looking at the following articles: *Pinyin table *Zhuyin table There are also at least two systems of cyrillization for Chinese. The most widespread is the Palladius system. Modern Chinese has often been erroneously classed as a "monosyllabic" language. While most of the morphemes are single syllable, modern Chinese today is much less a monosyllabic language in that nouns, adjectives and verbs are largely di-syllabic. The tendency to create disyllabic words in the modern Chinese languages, particularly in Mandarin, has been particularly pronounced when compared to Classical Chinese. Classical Chinese is a highly isolating language, with each idea (morpheme) generally corresponding to a single syllable and a single character; Modern Chinese though, has the tendency to form new words through disyllabic, trisyllabic and tetra-character agglutination. In fact, some linguists argue that classifying modern Chinese as an isolating language is misleading, for this reason alone. Chinese morphology is strictly bound to a set number of syllables with a fairly rigid construction which are the morphemes, the smallest blocks of the language. While many of these single-syllable morphemes ( zì, 字 in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cí (词/詞), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cí (“word”) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more. For example: *Yun 云 -“cloud” *Hanbaobao 汉堡包 –“hamburger” *Wo 我 –“I, me” *Renmin 人民 –“people” *Diqiu 地球 –“earth(globosity)” *Shandian 闪电 –“lightning” *Meng 梦 –“dream” All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphology — i.e., changes in form of a word — to indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflections – it possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English), and no gender. They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le 了, hai 还, yijing 已经, etc. 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. Chinese also has an extensive system of measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring 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. Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess 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. Official modern Mandarin has only 400 spoken monosyllables but over 10,000 written characters, so there are many homophones only distinguishable by the four tones. Even this is often not enough unless the context and exact phrase or cí is identified. The mono-syllable jī, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: 雞/鸡 chicken, 機/机 machine, 基 basic, 擊/击 (to) hit, 饑/饥 hunger, and 積/积 sum. In speech, the glyphing of a monosyllable to its meaning must be determined by context or by relation to other morphemes (e.g. "some" as in the opposite of "none"). Native speakers may state which words or phrases their names are found in, for convenience of writing: 名字叫嘉英，嘉陵江的嘉，英國的英 Míngzi jiào Jiāyīng, Jiālíng Jiāng de jiā, Yīngguó de yīng "My name is Jiāyīng, the Jia for Jialing River and the ying for the short form in Chinese of UK." Southern Chinese varieties like Cantonese and Hakka preserved more of the rimes of Middle Chinese and have more tones. The previous examples of jī, for instance, 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 multi-syllabic words. The entire Chinese character corpus since antiquity comprises well over 20,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are now commonly in use. However Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words, there are many times more Chinese words than there are characters as most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters. Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and phrases vary greatly. The Hanyu Da Zidian, an all-inclusive compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries for characters, including bone oracle versions. The Zhonghua Zihai 中华字海 (1994) contains 85,568 head entries for character definitions, and is the largest reference work based purely on character and its literary variants. The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary, the 12-volumed Hanyu Da Cidian 汉语大词典, records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters, and gives over 370,000 definitions. The 1999 revised Cihai, a multi-volume encyclopedic dictionary reference work, gives 122,836 vocabulary entry definitions under 19,485 Chinese characters, including proper names, phrases and common zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific and technical terms. The latest 2007 5th edition of Xiandai Hanyu Cidian 现代汉语词典, an authoritative one-volume dictionary on modern standard Chinese language as used in mainland China, has 65,000 entries and defines 11,000 head characters. Like any other language, Chinese has absorbed a sizeable amount of loanwords from other cultures. 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 since Old Chinese include 葡萄 "grape," 石榴 "pomegranate" and 狮子/獅子 "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including 佛 "Buddha" and 菩萨/菩薩 "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as 胡同 "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as 葡萄 "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or Pāli, the liturgical languages of North India. Words borrowed from the nomadic tribes of the Gobi, Mongolian or northeast regions generally have Altaic etymologies, such as 琵琶 "pípa", the Chinese lute, or 酪 "cheese" or "yoghurt", but from exactly which Altaic source is not always entirely clear. Foreign words continue to enter the Chinese language by transcription according to their pronunciations. This is done by employing Chinese characters with similar pronunciations. For example, "Israel" becomes 以色列 (pinyin: yǐsèliè), Paris 巴黎. A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including 沙發 shāfā "sofa," 马达/馬達 mǎdá "motor," 幽默 yōumò "humour," 逻辑/邏輯 luójí "logic," 时髦/時髦 shímáo "smart, fashionable" and 歇斯底里 xiēsīdǐlǐ "hysterics." The bulk of these words were originally coined in the Shanghainese dialect during the early 20th century and were later loaned into Mandarin, hence their pronunciations in Mandarin may be quite off from the English. For example, 沙发/沙發 and 马达/馬達 in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor." Today, 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 德律风/德律風 ( Shanghainese: télífon [ ], Standard Mandarin: délǜfēng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese 电话/電話 (diànhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include 电视/電視 (diànshì "electric vision") for television, 电脑/電腦 (diànnǎo "electric brain") for computer; 手机/手機 (shǒujī "hand machine") for cellphone, and 蓝牙/藍芽 (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. 網誌(wǎng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as 汉堡包/漢堡包 (hànbǎo bāo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as 拖拉机/拖拉機 (tuōlājī, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马利奥/馬利奧 for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example 奔腾/奔騰 (bēnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and 赛百味/賽百味 (Sàibǎiwèi "better-than hundred tastes") for Subway restaurants. Since the 20th century, another source has been Japan. Using existing kanji, which are Chinese characters used in the Japanese language, the Japanese re-moulded European concepts and inventions into wasei-kango (和製漢語, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include diànhuà (电话/電話, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社会, shakai, "society"), kēxué (科学/科學, kagaku, "science") and chōuxiàng (抽象, chūshō, "abstract"). Other terms were coined by the Japanese by giving new senses to existing Chinese terms or by referring to expressions used in classical Chinese literature. For example, jīngjì (经济/經濟, keizai), which in the original Chinese meant "the workings of the state", was narrowed to "economy" in Japanese; this narrowed definition was then reimported into Chinese. As a result, these terms are virtually indistinguishable from native Chinese words: indeed, there is some dispute over some of these terms as to whether the Japanese or Chinese coined them first. As a result of this toing-and-froing process, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese share a corpus linguistics of terms describing modern terminology, in parallel to a similar corpus of terms built from Greco-Latin terms shared among European languages. Taiwanese and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便当/便當 “lunchbox or boxed lunch” (from bento) and 料理 “prepared cuisine”, have passed into common currency. Western foreign words have great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came 芭蕾 (bāléi, "ballet"), 香槟 (xiāngbīn, "champagne"), via Italian 咖啡 (kāfēi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned 沙發 (shāfā "sofa"), 幽默 (yōumò "humour"), and 高尔夫 (gāoěrfū, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪斯科 (dísīkè, "disco"), 可乐 (kělè, "cola") and 迷你 (mínǐ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon 卡通 (cartoon), 基佬 (gay people), 的士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. 粉絲 (fěnsī, "fans"), 駭客 (hèikè, "hacker"), 部落格(bùluōgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin. Since the People's Republic of China’s economic and political rise in recent years, standard Mandarin has become an increasingly popular subject of study amongst the young in the Western world, as in the UK. BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | How hard is it to learn Chinese? In 1991 there were 2,000 foreign learners taking China's official Chinese Proficiency Test (comparable to English's Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660 . *Chinese characters *Chinese honorifics *Chinese measure word *Chinese number gestures *Chinese numerals *Chinese punctuation *Chinese exclamative particles *Four-character idiom *Han unification *Haner language *HSK test *Languages of China *North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics *Nü shu * * * * * * Keys to the Chinese Language: Book II - Google Books * A Practical Chinese Grammar - Google Books * ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawai’i Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X. * ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-08248-2975-9. * Arch Chinese free online Chinese character and Pinyin learning, Chinese English dictionary, writing worksheet generation, etc. * CHINGLISH online Chinese English Dictionary * nciku free online Chinese dictionary with handwriting recognition, pinyin, sound clips, etc. * MDBG free online Chinese-English dictionary * Chinese Characters Dictionary: supports Japanese, Korean, Cantonese, Hakka etc. * Chinese - English Dictionary: from Webster's Online Dictionary - the Rosetta Edition * CEDICT Chinese-English Dictionary Project * Stardict free (GPL) multilanguage dictionary including simplified/traditional Chinese for Unix (Linux, FreeBSD, etc.) and win32 * English-Chinese Translation Dictionary: Chinese-English-Chinese Online Dictionary (Taiwan-based; simplified characters not recognised) * CantoDict: Cantonese-English Dictionary Project * Chinese Pronunciation Dictionary Input Chinese words or sentences, get audio file of Mandarin pronunciation. Web-based tool. * Pinyin Annotator Add pinyin on top of any Chinese text. Mouse over any word to see English translation. Save output to OpenOffice Writer format. Prints nicely. Also adds pinyin to any Chinese web page. *Firefox users can install Add-ons for a pinyin annotator * Multimedia Dictionary of Chinese Characters Language Tool, Offline Chinese Dictionary. * Chinese Scholar Dictionary Chinese English dictionary with Pinyin index * A Cognitive Approach to Beginning Chinese: Interactions I and II. Margaret Mian Yan and Jennifer Li-chia Liu, Indiana University * Chinese Language Information Page A collection of Chinese language learning resources. * Learn Chinese - One At A Time * China KeyBoard Google Engine * Oneaday.org One Chinese idiom a day (simplified and traditional characters) with pinyin transliteration and English translation. * Mandarin Tone Drill Testing your knowledge of Mandarin tones. * Pinyin Practice Pinyin practice for Mandarin learners in all levels * Marjorie Chan's ChinaLinks: A large collection of Web resources by a professor of linguistics at Ohio State University * 4 words of Chinese every day * Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard * Chinese Character of the Day Learn to Read Chinese one word at a time. * Audio files with basic Chinese words * General Introduction of Chinese Language * Learn Chinese Characters * Chinese Scholar: The Free Chinese Class Learn Chinese language and culture through interactive media
Chinese_language
Are The modern Chinese dialects more like a family?
yes
data/set5/a7
Chinese_language Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) is a language family consisting of languages mutually unintelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. “The mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.” *Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. “The Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.” *Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. “The modern Chinese dialects are really more like a family of language. *John DeFrancis. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (1984), p.56. "To call Chinese a single language composed of dialects with varying degrees of difference is to mislead by minimizing disparities that according to Chao are as great as those between English and Dutch. To call Chinese a family of languages is to suggest extralinguistic differences that in fact do not exist and to overlook the unique linguistic situation that exists in China." Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the two branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages. About one-fifth of the world’s population, or over one billion people, speak some form of Chinese as their native language. The identification of the varieties of Chinese as "dialects" instead of "languages" is considered inappropriate by linguists and Sinologists. Spoken Chinese is distinguished by its high level of internal diversity, although all spoken varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic. There are between seven and thirteen main regional groups of Chinese (depending on classification scheme), of which the most spoken, by far, is Mandarin (about 850 million), followed by Wu (90 million), Min (70 million) and Cantonese (70 million). Most of these groups are mutually unintelligible, although some, like Xiang and the Southwest Mandarin dialects, may share common terms and some degree of intelligibility. Chinese is classified as a macrolanguage with 13 sub-languages in ISO 639-3, though the identification of the varieties of Chinese as multiple "languages" or as "dialects" of a single language is a contentious issue. The standardized form of spoken Chinese is Standard Mandarin (Putonghua / Guoyu / Huayu), based on the Beijing dialect, which is part of a larger group of North-Eastern and South-Western dialects, often taken as a separate language, see Mandarin Chinese for more, this language can be referred to as 官话 Guānhuà or 北方话 Běifānghuà in Chinese. Standard Mandarin is the official language of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC), as well as one of four official languages of Singapore. Chinese—de facto, Standard Mandarin—is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Of the other varieties, Standard Cantonese is common and influential in Guangdong Province and Cantonese-speaking overseas communities, and remains one of the official languages of Hong Kong (together with English) and of Macau (together with Portuguese). Hokkien, part of the Min language group, is widely spoken in southern Fujian, in neighbouring Taiwan (where it is known as Taiwanese or Hoklo) and in Southeast Asia (where it dominates in Singapore and Malaysia). Xinhua reported in March 2007 that 86 percent of people in the People's Republic of China spoke a Chinese variant. 全國約有53%的人能用普通話交流 As a language family, the number of Chinese speakers is 1.136 billion. The same news report indicates 53 percent of the population, or 700 million speakers, can effectively communicate in Putonghua. Sino-Tibetan language family. A map below depicts the linguistic subdivisions ("languages" or "dialect groups") within China itself. The traditionally-recognized seven main groups, in order of population size are: Chinese linguists have recently distinguished: 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. The Dungan language, spoken in Central Asia, is very closely related to Mandarin. However, it is not generally considered "Chinese" since it is written in Cyrillic and spoken by Dungan people outside China who are not considered ethnic Chinese. See List of Chinese dialects for a comprehensive listing of individual dialects within these large, broad groupings. In general, the above language-dialect groups do not have sharp boundaries, though Mandarin is the predominant Sinitic language in the North and the Southwest, and the rest are mostly spoken in Central or Southeastern China. Frequently, as in the case of the Guangdong province, native speakers of major variants overlapped. As with many areas that were linguistically diverse for a long time, it is not always clear how the speeches of various parts of China should be classified. The Ethnologue lists a total of 14, but the number varies between seven and seventeen depending on the classification scheme followed. For instance, the Min variety is often divided into Northern Min (Minbei, Fuchow) and Southern Min (Minnan, Amoy-Swatow); linguists have not determined whether their mutual intelligibility is small enough to sort them as separate languages. The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China. In general, mountainous South China displays more linguistic diversity than the flat North China. In parts of South China, a major city's dialect may only 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). Putonghua / Guoyu, often called "Mandarin", is the official standard language used by the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China, and Singapore (where it is called "Huayu"). It is based on the Beijing dialect, which is the dialect of Mandarin as spoken in Beijing. The governments intend for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. Therefore it is used in government agencies, in the media, and as a language of instruction in schools. In mainland China and Taiwan, diglossia has been a common feature: it is common for a Chinese to be able to speak two or even three varieties of the Sinitic languages (or “dialects”) together with Standard Mandarin. For example, in addition to putonghua a resident of Shanghai might speak Shanghainese and, if they did not grow up there, his or her local dialect as well. A native of Guangzhou may speak Standard Cantonese and putonghua, a resident of Taiwan, both Taiwanese and putonghua/guoyu. A person living in Taiwan 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, Standard Mandarin is beginning to take its place beside English and Standard Cantonese, the official languages. Linguists often view Chinese as a language family, though owing to China's socio-political and cultural situation, and the fact that all spoken varieties use one common written system, it is customary to refer to these generally mutually unintelligible variants as "the Chinese language". The diversity of Sinitic variants is comparable to the Romance languages. From a purely descriptive point of view, "languages" and "dialects" are simply arbitrary groups of similar idiolects, and the distinction is irrelevant to linguists who are only concerned with describing regional speeches technically. However, the idea of a single language has major overtones in politics and cultural self-identity, and explains the amount of emotion over this issue. Most Chinese and Chinese linguists refer to Chinese as a single language and its subdivisions dialects, while others call Chinese a language family. Chinese itself has a term for its unified writing system, Zhongwen (中文), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (汉语,“spoken language[s] of the Han Chinese) – this term could be translated to either “language” or “languages” since Chinese possesses no grammatical numbers. In the Chinese language, there is much less need for a uniform speech-and-writing continuum, as indicated by two separate character morphemes 语 yu and 文 wen. Ethnic Chinese often consider these spoken variations as one single language for reasons of nationality and as they inherit one common cultural and linguistic heritage in Classical Chinese. Han native speakers of Wu, Min, Hakka, and Cantonese, for instance, may consider their own linguistic varieties as separate spoken languages, but the Han Chinese race as one – albeit internally very diverse – ethnicity. To Chinese nationalists, the idea of Chinese as a language family may suggest that the Chinese identity is much more fragmentary and disunified than it actually is and as such is often looked upon as culturally and politically provocative. Additionally, in Taiwan, it is closely associated with Taiwanese independence, where some supporters of Taiwanese independence promote the local Taiwanese Minnan-based spoken language. Within the People’s Republic of China and Singapore, it is common for the government to refer to all divisions of the Sinitic language(s) beside Standard Mandarin as fangyan (“regional tongues”, often translated as “dialects”). Modern-day Chinese speakers of all kinds communicate using one formal standard written language, although this modern written standard is modeled after Mandarin, generally the modern Beijing substandard. The term sinophone, coined in analogy to anglophone and francophone, refers to those who speak the Chinese language natively, or prefer it as a medium of communication. The term is derived from Sinae, the Latin word for ancient China. :See also: Classical Chinese and Vernacular Chinese The relationship among the Chinese spoken and written languages is rather complex. Its spoken variations evolved at different rates, while written Chinese itself has changed much less. Classical Chinese literature began in the Spring and Autumn period, although written records have been discovered as far back as the 14th to 11th centuries BCE Shang dynasty oracle bones using the oracle bone scripts. The Chinese orthography centers around Chinese characters, hanzi, which are written within imaginary rectangular blocks, traditionally arranged in vertical columns, read from top to bottom down a column, and right to left across columns. Chinese characters are morphemes independent of phonetic change. Thus the number "one", yi in Mandarin, yat in Cantonese and chi̍t and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("一"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as 冇 and 係 for Cantonese and Hakka, which are considered archaic or unused in standard written Chinese. Written colloquial Cantonese has become quite popular in online chat rooms and instant messaging amongst Hong-Kongers and Cantonese-speakers elsewhere. Use of it is considered highly informal, and does not extend to any formal occasion. Also, in Hunan, some women write their local language in Nü Shu, a syllabary derived from Chinese characters. The Dungan language, considered by some 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 evolved over time from earliest forms of hieroglyphs. The idea that all Chinese characters are either pictographs or ideographs is an erroneous one: most characters contain phonetic parts, and are composites of phonetic components and semantic Radicals. Only the simplest characters, such as ren 人 (human), ri 日 (sun), shan 山 (mountain), shui 水 (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar Xǚ Shèn in the Hàn Dynasty classified characters into 6 categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80-90% as phonetic complexes consisting of a semantic element that indicates meaning, and a phonetic element that indicates the pronunciation. Generally, the phonetic element is more accurate and more important than the semantic one. There are about 214 radicals recognized in the Kangxi Dictionary. Modern characters are styled after the standard script (楷书/楷書 kǎishū) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (篆书/篆書 zhuànshū), cursive script (草书/草書 cǎoshū) and clerical script (隶书/隸書 lìshū). Calligraphy artists can write in traditional and simplified characters, but tend to use traditional characters for traditional art. Various styles of Chinese calligraphy. There are currently two systems for Chinese characters. The traditional system, still used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau and Chinese speaking communities (except Singapore and Malaysia) outside mainland China, takes its form from standardized character forms dating back to the late Han dynasty. The Simplified Chinese character system, developed by the People's Republic of China in 1954 to promote mass literacy, simplifies most complex traditional glyphs to fewer strokes, many to common caoshu shorthand variants. Singapore, which has a large Chinese communities, is the first – and at present the only – foreign nation to officially adopt simplified characters, although it has also become the de facto standard for younger ethnic Chinese in Malaysia. The Internet provides the platform to practice reading the alternative system, be it traditional or simplified. A well-educated Chinese today recognizes approximately 6,000-7,000 characters; some 3,000 characters are required to read a Mainland newspaper. The PRC government defines literacy amongst workers as a knowledge of 2,000 characters, though this would be only functional literacy. A large unabridged dictionary, like the Kangxi Dictionary, contains over 40,000 characters, including obscure, variant, rare, and archaic characters; less than a quarter of these characters are now commonly used.'' Most linguists classify all varieties of modern spoken Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family and believe that there was an original language, termed Proto-Sino-Tibetan, 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 Proto-Sino-Tibetan. 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 Indo-European languages from PIE don't apply to Chinese because of "morphological paucity" especially after Old Chinese Analysis of the concept "wave" in PST. . 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; most present systems rely heavily on Karlgren's insights and methods. Old Chinese ( ), sometimes known as "Archaic Chinese", was the language common during the early and middle Zhōu Dynasty (1122 BCE - 256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the Shījīng, the history of the Shūjīng, and portions of the Yìjīng (I Ching). The phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters 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 was still without tones. Work on reconstructing Old Chinese started with Qīng dynasty philologists. Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably 蜜 mì "honey", 獅 shī "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mǎ "horse", 犬 quǎn "dog", and 鵝 é "goose". The source says the reconstructions of old Chinese are tentative, and not definitive so no conclusions should be drawn. The reconstruction of Old Chinese can not be perfect so this hypothesis may be called into question. Encyclopedia Britannica s.v. "Chinese languages": "Old Chinese vocabulary already contained many words not generally occurring in the other Sino-Tibetan languages. The words for ‘honey' and ‘lion,' and probably also ‘horse,' ‘dog,' and ‘goose,' are connected with Indo-European and were acquired through trade and early contacts. (The nearest known Indo-European languages were Tocharian and Sogdian, a middle Iranian language.) A number of words have Austroasiatic cognates and point to early contacts with the ancestral language of Muong-Vietnamese and Mon-Khmer" ; Jan Ulenbrook, Einige Übereinstimmungen zwischen dem Chinesischen und dem Indogermanischen (1967) proposes 57 items; see also Tsung-tung Chang, 1988 Indo-European Vocabulary in Old Chinese;. 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 the Suí, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the 切韻 "Qièyùn" rhyme table (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the 廣韻 "Guǎngyùn" rhyme table. 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, 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; some scholars have argued that trying to reconstruct, say, modern Cantonese from modern Cantopop rhymes would give a fairly inaccurate picture of the present-day spoken language. The development of the spoken Chinese languages from early historical times to the present has been complex. Most Chinese people, in Sìchuān 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 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 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, though, a single standard of Mandarin did not exist. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The new 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 Standard Mandarin. As a result, Mandarin is now spoken by virtually all young and middle-aged citizens of mainland China and on Taiwan. Standard 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. Chinese was once the Lingua franca for East Asia countries for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. Throughout history Chinese culture and politics has had a great influence on unrelated languages such as Korean 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 Hán tự. It was the only available method for writing Vietnamese until the 14th century, used almost exclusively by Chinese-educated Vietnamese élites. From the 14th to the late 19th century, Vietnamese was written with Chữ nôm, a modified Chinese script incorporating sounds and syllables for native Vietnamese speakers. Chữ nôm was completely replaced by a modified Latin script created by the Jesuit missionary priest Alexander de Rhodes, which incorporates a system of diacritical marks to indicate tones, as well as modified consonants. The Vietnamese language exhibits multiple elements similar to Cantonese in regard to the specific intonations and sharp consonant endings. There is also a slight influence from Mandarin, including the sharper vowels and "kh" (IPA:x) sound 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. In derived Chinese characters or Zhuang logograms to write songs, even though Zhuang is not a Chinese dialect. Since the 1950s, the Zhuang language has been written in a modified Latin alphabet. Zhou, Minglang: Multilingualism in China: The Politics of Writing Reforms for Minority Languages, 1949-2002 (Walter de Gruyter 2003); ISBN 3-11-017896-6; p. 251–258. Languages within the influence of Chinese culture also have a very large number of loanwords from Chinese. Fifty percent or more of Korean vocabulary is of Chinese origin and the influence on Japanese and Vietnamese has been considerable. At least five percent of all words in Tagalog are of Chinese origin. Chinese has also lent a great deal of many grammatical features to these and neighboring languages, notably the lack of gender and the use of classifiers. Japanese has also a lot of loanwords from Chinese, as does Vietnamese. Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of 茶 (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 茄汁 (ke chap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 金橘 (kam kuat). :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, which is only about an eighth as many as English DeFrancis (1984) p.42 counts Chinese as having 1,277 tonal syllables, and about 398 to 418 if tones are disregarded; he cites Jespersen, Otto (1928) Monosyllabism in English; London, p.15 for a count of over 8000 syllables for English. . 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 four main tones of Standard Mandarin applied to the syllable "ma." The tones correspond to these five characters: * "mother" — high level * "hemp" or "torpid" — high rising * "horse" — low falling-rising * "scold" — high falling * "question particle" — neutral The Chinese had no uniform phonetic transcription system until the mid-20th century, although enunciation patterns were recorded in early rime books and dictionaries. Early Sanskrit and Pali Indian translators were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of the language in a foreign language. After 15th century CE Jesuits and Western court missionaries’ efforts result in some rudimentary Latin transcription systems, based on the Nanjing Mandarin dialect. Romanization is the process of transcribing a language in the Latin alphabet. There are many systems of romanization for the Chinese languages due to the Chinese's own lack of phonetic transcription until modern times. Chinese is first known to have been written in Latin characters by Western Christian missionaries in the 16th century. Today the most common romanization standard for Standard Mandarin is Hanyu Pinyin (漢語拼音/汉语拼音), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore). Pinyin is almost universally employed now for teaching standard spoken Chinese in schools and universities across America, Australia and Europe. Chinese parents also use Pinyin to teach their children the sounds and tones for words with which the child is unfamiliar. The Pinyin is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, and alongside the Pinyin is the Chinese symbol. The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859, later modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As it approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels (hence an Anglicization), it may be particularly helpful for beginner speakers of native English background. Wade-Giles is found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan (Taipei city now officially uses Hanyu Pinyin and the rest of the island officially uses Tōngyòng Pinyin 通用拼音). When used within European texts, the tone transcriptions in both pinyin and Wade-Giles are often left out for simplicity; Wade-Giles' extensive use of apostrophes is also usually omitted. Thus, most Western readers will be much more familiar with Beijing than they will be with Běijīng (pinyin), and with Taipei than T'ai²-pei³ (Wade-Giles). Here are a few examples of Hanyu Pinyin and Wade-Giles, for comparison: Other systems of romanization for Chinese include Gwoyeu Romatzyh, the French EFEO, the Yale (invented during WWII for U.S. troops), as well as separate systems for Cantonese, Minnan, Hakka, and other Chinese languages or dialects. Chinese languages have been phonetically transcribed into many other writing systems over the centuries. The 'Phags-pa script, for example, has been very helpful in reconstructing the pronunciations of pre-modern forms of Chinese. Zhuyin (注音, also known as bopomofo), a semi-syllabary is still widely used in Taiwan's elementary schools to aid standard pronunciation. Although bopomofo characters are reminiscent of katakana script, there is no source to substantiate the claim that Katakana was the basis for the zhuyin system. A comparison table of zhuyin to pinyin exists in the zhuyin article. Syllables based on pinyin and zhuyin can also be compared by looking at the following articles: *Pinyin table *Zhuyin table There are also at least two systems of cyrillization for Chinese. The most widespread is the Palladius system. Modern Chinese has often been erroneously classed as a "monosyllabic" language. While most of the morphemes are single syllable, modern Chinese today is much less a monosyllabic language in that nouns, adjectives and verbs are largely di-syllabic. The tendency to create disyllabic words in the modern Chinese languages, particularly in Mandarin, has been particularly pronounced when compared to Classical Chinese. Classical Chinese is a highly isolating language, with each idea (morpheme) generally corresponding to a single syllable and a single character; Modern Chinese though, has the tendency to form new words through disyllabic, trisyllabic and tetra-character agglutination. In fact, some linguists argue that classifying modern Chinese as an isolating language is misleading, for this reason alone. Chinese morphology is strictly bound to a set number of syllables with a fairly rigid construction which are the morphemes, the smallest blocks of the language. While many of these single-syllable morphemes ( zì, 字 in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cí (词/詞), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cí (“word”) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more. For example: *Yun 云 -“cloud” *Hanbaobao 汉堡包 –“hamburger” *Wo 我 –“I, me” *Renmin 人民 –“people” *Diqiu 地球 –“earth(globosity)” *Shandian 闪电 –“lightning” *Meng 梦 –“dream” All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphology — i.e., changes in form of a word — to indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflections – it possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English), and no gender. They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le 了, hai 还, yijing 已经, etc. 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. Chinese also has an extensive system of measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring 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. Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess 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. Official modern Mandarin has only 400 spoken monosyllables but over 10,000 written characters, so there are many homophones only distinguishable by the four tones. Even this is often not enough unless the context and exact phrase or cí is identified. The mono-syllable jī, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: 雞/鸡 chicken, 機/机 machine, 基 basic, 擊/击 (to) hit, 饑/饥 hunger, and 積/积 sum. In speech, the glyphing of a monosyllable to its meaning must be determined by context or by relation to other morphemes (e.g. "some" as in the opposite of "none"). Native speakers may state which words or phrases their names are found in, for convenience of writing: 名字叫嘉英，嘉陵江的嘉，英國的英 Míngzi jiào Jiāyīng, Jiālíng Jiāng de jiā, Yīngguó de yīng "My name is Jiāyīng, the Jia for Jialing River and the ying for the short form in Chinese of UK." Southern Chinese varieties like Cantonese and Hakka preserved more of the rimes of Middle Chinese and have more tones. The previous examples of jī, for instance, 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 multi-syllabic words. The entire Chinese character corpus since antiquity comprises well over 20,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are now commonly in use. However Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words, there are many times more Chinese words than there are characters as most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters. Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and phrases vary greatly. The Hanyu Da Zidian, an all-inclusive compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries for characters, including bone oracle versions. The Zhonghua Zihai 中华字海 (1994) contains 85,568 head entries for character definitions, and is the largest reference work based purely on character and its literary variants. The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary, the 12-volumed Hanyu Da Cidian 汉语大词典, records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters, and gives over 370,000 definitions. The 1999 revised Cihai, a multi-volume encyclopedic dictionary reference work, gives 122,836 vocabulary entry definitions under 19,485 Chinese characters, including proper names, phrases and common zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific and technical terms. The latest 2007 5th edition of Xiandai Hanyu Cidian 现代汉语词典, an authoritative one-volume dictionary on modern standard Chinese language as used in mainland China, has 65,000 entries and defines 11,000 head characters. Like any other language, Chinese has absorbed a sizeable amount of loanwords from other cultures. 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 since Old Chinese include 葡萄 "grape," 石榴 "pomegranate" and 狮子/獅子 "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including 佛 "Buddha" and 菩萨/菩薩 "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as 胡同 "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as 葡萄 "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or Pāli, the liturgical languages of North India. Words borrowed from the nomadic tribes of the Gobi, Mongolian or northeast regions generally have Altaic etymologies, such as 琵琶 "pípa", the Chinese lute, or 酪 "cheese" or "yoghurt", but from exactly which Altaic source is not always entirely clear. Foreign words continue to enter the Chinese language by transcription according to their pronunciations. This is done by employing Chinese characters with similar pronunciations. For example, "Israel" becomes 以色列 (pinyin: yǐsèliè), Paris 巴黎. A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including 沙發 shāfā "sofa," 马达/馬達 mǎdá "motor," 幽默 yōumò "humour," 逻辑/邏輯 luójí "logic," 时髦/時髦 shímáo "smart, fashionable" and 歇斯底里 xiēsīdǐlǐ "hysterics." The bulk of these words were originally coined in the Shanghainese dialect during the early 20th century and were later loaned into Mandarin, hence their pronunciations in Mandarin may be quite off from the English. For example, 沙发/沙發 and 马达/馬達 in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor." Today, 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 德律风/德律風 ( Shanghainese: télífon [ ], Standard Mandarin: délǜfēng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese 电话/電話 (diànhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include 电视/電視 (diànshì "electric vision") for television, 电脑/電腦 (diànnǎo "electric brain") for computer; 手机/手機 (shǒujī "hand machine") for cellphone, and 蓝牙/藍芽 (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. 網誌(wǎng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as 汉堡包/漢堡包 (hànbǎo bāo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as 拖拉机/拖拉機 (tuōlājī, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马利奥/馬利奧 for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example 奔腾/奔騰 (bēnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and 赛百味/賽百味 (Sàibǎiwèi "better-than hundred tastes") for Subway restaurants. Since the 20th century, another source has been Japan. Using existing kanji, which are Chinese characters used in the Japanese language, the Japanese re-moulded European concepts and inventions into wasei-kango (和製漢語, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include diànhuà (电话/電話, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社会, shakai, "society"), kēxué (科学/科學, kagaku, "science") and chōuxiàng (抽象, chūshō, "abstract"). Other terms were coined by the Japanese by giving new senses to existing Chinese terms or by referring to expressions used in classical Chinese literature. For example, jīngjì (经济/經濟, keizai), which in the original Chinese meant "the workings of the state", was narrowed to "economy" in Japanese; this narrowed definition was then reimported into Chinese. As a result, these terms are virtually indistinguishable from native Chinese words: indeed, there is some dispute over some of these terms as to whether the Japanese or Chinese coined them first. As a result of this toing-and-froing process, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese share a corpus linguistics of terms describing modern terminology, in parallel to a similar corpus of terms built from Greco-Latin terms shared among European languages. Taiwanese and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便当/便當 “lunchbox or boxed lunch” (from bento) and 料理 “prepared cuisine”, have passed into common currency. Western foreign words have great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came 芭蕾 (bāléi, "ballet"), 香槟 (xiāngbīn, "champagne"), via Italian 咖啡 (kāfēi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned 沙發 (shāfā "sofa"), 幽默 (yōumò "humour"), and 高尔夫 (gāoěrfū, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪斯科 (dísīkè, "disco"), 可乐 (kělè, "cola") and 迷你 (mínǐ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon 卡通 (cartoon), 基佬 (gay people), 的士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. 粉絲 (fěnsī, "fans"), 駭客 (hèikè, "hacker"), 部落格(bùluōgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin. Since the People's Republic of China’s economic and political rise in recent years, standard Mandarin has become an increasingly popular subject of study amongst the young in the Western world, as in the UK. BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | How hard is it to learn Chinese? In 1991 there were 2,000 foreign learners taking China's official Chinese Proficiency Test (comparable to English's Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660 . *Chinese characters *Chinese honorifics *Chinese measure word *Chinese number gestures *Chinese numerals *Chinese punctuation *Chinese exclamative particles *Four-character idiom *Han unification *Haner language *HSK test *Languages of China *North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics *Nü shu * * * * * * Keys to the Chinese Language: Book II - Google Books * A Practical Chinese Grammar - Google Books * ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawai’i Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X. * ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-08248-2975-9. * Arch Chinese free online Chinese character and Pinyin learning, Chinese English dictionary, writing worksheet generation, etc. * CHINGLISH online Chinese English Dictionary * nciku free online Chinese dictionary with handwriting recognition, pinyin, sound clips, etc. * MDBG free online Chinese-English dictionary * Chinese Characters Dictionary: supports Japanese, Korean, Cantonese, Hakka etc. * Chinese - English Dictionary: from Webster's Online Dictionary - the Rosetta Edition * CEDICT Chinese-English Dictionary Project * Stardict free (GPL) multilanguage dictionary including simplified/traditional Chinese for Unix (Linux, FreeBSD, etc.) and win32 * English-Chinese Translation Dictionary: Chinese-English-Chinese Online Dictionary (Taiwan-based; simplified characters not recognised) * CantoDict: Cantonese-English Dictionary Project * Chinese Pronunciation Dictionary Input Chinese words or sentences, get audio file of Mandarin pronunciation. Web-based tool. * Pinyin Annotator Add pinyin on top of any Chinese text. Mouse over any word to see English translation. Save output to OpenOffice Writer format. Prints nicely. Also adds pinyin to any Chinese web page. *Firefox users can install Add-ons for a pinyin annotator * Multimedia Dictionary of Chinese Characters Language Tool, Offline Chinese Dictionary. * Chinese Scholar Dictionary Chinese English dictionary with Pinyin index * A Cognitive Approach to Beginning Chinese: Interactions I and II. Margaret Mian Yan and Jennifer Li-chia Liu, Indiana University * Chinese Language Information Page A collection of Chinese language learning resources. * Learn Chinese - One At A Time * China KeyBoard Google Engine * Oneaday.org One Chinese idiom a day (simplified and traditional characters) with pinyin transliteration and English translation. * Mandarin Tone Drill Testing your knowledge of Mandarin tones. * Pinyin Practice Pinyin practice for Mandarin learners in all levels * Marjorie Chan's ChinaLinks: A large collection of Web resources by a professor of linguistics at Ohio State University * 4 words of Chinese every day * Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard * Chinese Character of the Day Learn to Read Chinese one word at a time. * Audio files with basic Chinese words * General Introduction of Chinese Language * Learn Chinese Characters * Chinese Scholar: The Free Chinese Class Learn Chinese language and culture through interactive media
Chinese_language
Is it true that one-fifth of world population speak some form of Chinese?
yes
data/set5/a7
Chinese_language Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) is a language family consisting of languages mutually unintelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. “The mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.” *Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. “The Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.” *Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. “The modern Chinese dialects are really more like a family of language. *John DeFrancis. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (1984), p.56. "To call Chinese a single language composed of dialects with varying degrees of difference is to mislead by minimizing disparities that according to Chao are as great as those between English and Dutch. To call Chinese a family of languages is to suggest extralinguistic differences that in fact do not exist and to overlook the unique linguistic situation that exists in China." Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the two branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages. About one-fifth of the world’s population, or over one billion people, speak some form of Chinese as their native language. The identification of the varieties of Chinese as "dialects" instead of "languages" is considered inappropriate by linguists and Sinologists. Spoken Chinese is distinguished by its high level of internal diversity, although all spoken varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic. There are between seven and thirteen main regional groups of Chinese (depending on classification scheme), of which the most spoken, by far, is Mandarin (about 850 million), followed by Wu (90 million), Min (70 million) and Cantonese (70 million). Most of these groups are mutually unintelligible, although some, like Xiang and the Southwest Mandarin dialects, may share common terms and some degree of intelligibility. Chinese is classified as a macrolanguage with 13 sub-languages in ISO 639-3, though the identification of the varieties of Chinese as multiple "languages" or as "dialects" of a single language is a contentious issue. The standardized form of spoken Chinese is Standard Mandarin (Putonghua / Guoyu / Huayu), based on the Beijing dialect, which is part of a larger group of North-Eastern and South-Western dialects, often taken as a separate language, see Mandarin Chinese for more, this language can be referred to as 官话 Guānhuà or 北方话 Běifānghuà in Chinese. Standard Mandarin is the official language of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC), as well as one of four official languages of Singapore. Chinese—de facto, Standard Mandarin—is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Of the other varieties, Standard Cantonese is common and influential in Guangdong Province and Cantonese-speaking overseas communities, and remains one of the official languages of Hong Kong (together with English) and of Macau (together with Portuguese). Hokkien, part of the Min language group, is widely spoken in southern Fujian, in neighbouring Taiwan (where it is known as Taiwanese or Hoklo) and in Southeast Asia (where it dominates in Singapore and Malaysia). Xinhua reported in March 2007 that 86 percent of people in the People's Republic of China spoke a Chinese variant. 全國約有53%的人能用普通話交流 As a language family, the number of Chinese speakers is 1.136 billion. The same news report indicates 53 percent of the population, or 700 million speakers, can effectively communicate in Putonghua. Sino-Tibetan language family. A map below depicts the linguistic subdivisions ("languages" or "dialect groups") within China itself. The traditionally-recognized seven main groups, in order of population size are: Chinese linguists have recently distinguished: 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. The Dungan language, spoken in Central Asia, is very closely related to Mandarin. However, it is not generally considered "Chinese" since it is written in Cyrillic and spoken by Dungan people outside China who are not considered ethnic Chinese. See List of Chinese dialects for a comprehensive listing of individual dialects within these large, broad groupings. In general, the above language-dialect groups do not have sharp boundaries, though Mandarin is the predominant Sinitic language in the North and the Southwest, and the rest are mostly spoken in Central or Southeastern China. Frequently, as in the case of the Guangdong province, native speakers of major variants overlapped. As with many areas that were linguistically diverse for a long time, it is not always clear how the speeches of various parts of China should be classified. The Ethnologue lists a total of 14, but the number varies between seven and seventeen depending on the classification scheme followed. For instance, the Min variety is often divided into Northern Min (Minbei, Fuchow) and Southern Min (Minnan, Amoy-Swatow); linguists have not determined whether their mutual intelligibility is small enough to sort them as separate languages. The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China. In general, mountainous South China displays more linguistic diversity than the flat North China. In parts of South China, a major city's dialect may only 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). Putonghua / Guoyu, often called "Mandarin", is the official standard language used by the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China, and Singapore (where it is called "Huayu"). It is based on the Beijing dialect, which is the dialect of Mandarin as spoken in Beijing. The governments intend for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. Therefore it is used in government agencies, in the media, and as a language of instruction in schools. In mainland China and Taiwan, diglossia has been a common feature: it is common for a Chinese to be able to speak two or even three varieties of the Sinitic languages (or “dialects”) together with Standard Mandarin. For example, in addition to putonghua a resident of Shanghai might speak Shanghainese and, if they did not grow up there, his or her local dialect as well. A native of Guangzhou may speak Standard Cantonese and putonghua, a resident of Taiwan, both Taiwanese and putonghua/guoyu. A person living in Taiwan 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, Standard Mandarin is beginning to take its place beside English and Standard Cantonese, the official languages. Linguists often view Chinese as a language family, though owing to China's socio-political and cultural situation, and the fact that all spoken varieties use one common written system, it is customary to refer to these generally mutually unintelligible variants as "the Chinese language". The diversity of Sinitic variants is comparable to the Romance languages. From a purely descriptive point of view, "languages" and "dialects" are simply arbitrary groups of similar idiolects, and the distinction is irrelevant to linguists who are only concerned with describing regional speeches technically. However, the idea of a single language has major overtones in politics and cultural self-identity, and explains the amount of emotion over this issue. Most Chinese and Chinese linguists refer to Chinese as a single language and its subdivisions dialects, while others call Chinese a language family. Chinese itself has a term for its unified writing system, Zhongwen (中文), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (汉语,“spoken language[s] of the Han Chinese) – this term could be translated to either “language” or “languages” since Chinese possesses no grammatical numbers. In the Chinese language, there is much less need for a uniform speech-and-writing continuum, as indicated by two separate character morphemes 语 yu and 文 wen. Ethnic Chinese often consider these spoken variations as one single language for reasons of nationality and as they inherit one common cultural and linguistic heritage in Classical Chinese. Han native speakers of Wu, Min, Hakka, and Cantonese, for instance, may consider their own linguistic varieties as separate spoken languages, but the Han Chinese race as one – albeit internally very diverse – ethnicity. To Chinese nationalists, the idea of Chinese as a language family may suggest that the Chinese identity is much more fragmentary and disunified than it actually is and as such is often looked upon as culturally and politically provocative. Additionally, in Taiwan, it is closely associated with Taiwanese independence, where some supporters of Taiwanese independence promote the local Taiwanese Minnan-based spoken language. Within the People’s Republic of China and Singapore, it is common for the government to refer to all divisions of the Sinitic language(s) beside Standard Mandarin as fangyan (“regional tongues”, often translated as “dialects”). Modern-day Chinese speakers of all kinds communicate using one formal standard written language, although this modern written standard is modeled after Mandarin, generally the modern Beijing substandard. The term sinophone, coined in analogy to anglophone and francophone, refers to those who speak the Chinese language natively, or prefer it as a medium of communication. The term is derived from Sinae, the Latin word for ancient China. :See also: Classical Chinese and Vernacular Chinese The relationship among the Chinese spoken and written languages is rather complex. Its spoken variations evolved at different rates, while written Chinese itself has changed much less. Classical Chinese literature began in the Spring and Autumn period, although written records have been discovered as far back as the 14th to 11th centuries BCE Shang dynasty oracle bones using the oracle bone scripts. The Chinese orthography centers around Chinese characters, hanzi, which are written within imaginary rectangular blocks, traditionally arranged in vertical columns, read from top to bottom down a column, and right to left across columns. Chinese characters are morphemes independent of phonetic change. Thus the number "one", yi in Mandarin, yat in Cantonese and chi̍t and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("一"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as 冇 and 係 for Cantonese and Hakka, which are considered archaic or unused in standard written Chinese. Written colloquial Cantonese has become quite popular in online chat rooms and instant messaging amongst Hong-Kongers and Cantonese-speakers elsewhere. Use of it is considered highly informal, and does not extend to any formal occasion. Also, in Hunan, some women write their local language in Nü Shu, a syllabary derived from Chinese characters. The Dungan language, considered by some 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 evolved over time from earliest forms of hieroglyphs. The idea that all Chinese characters are either pictographs or ideographs is an erroneous one: most characters contain phonetic parts, and are composites of phonetic components and semantic Radicals. Only the simplest characters, such as ren 人 (human), ri 日 (sun), shan 山 (mountain), shui 水 (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar Xǚ Shèn in the Hàn Dynasty classified characters into 6 categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80-90% as phonetic complexes consisting of a semantic element that indicates meaning, and a phonetic element that indicates the pronunciation. Generally, the phonetic element is more accurate and more important than the semantic one. There are about 214 radicals recognized in the Kangxi Dictionary. Modern characters are styled after the standard script (楷书/楷書 kǎishū) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (篆书/篆書 zhuànshū), cursive script (草书/草書 cǎoshū) and clerical script (隶书/隸書 lìshū). Calligraphy artists can write in traditional and simplified characters, but tend to use traditional characters for traditional art. Various styles of Chinese calligraphy. There are currently two systems for Chinese characters. The traditional system, still used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau and Chinese speaking communities (except Singapore and Malaysia) outside mainland China, takes its form from standardized character forms dating back to the late Han dynasty. The Simplified Chinese character system, developed by the People's Republic of China in 1954 to promote mass literacy, simplifies most complex traditional glyphs to fewer strokes, many to common caoshu shorthand variants. Singapore, which has a large Chinese communities, is the first – and at present the only – foreign nation to officially adopt simplified characters, although it has also become the de facto standard for younger ethnic Chinese in Malaysia. The Internet provides the platform to practice reading the alternative system, be it traditional or simplified. A well-educated Chinese today recognizes approximately 6,000-7,000 characters; some 3,000 characters are required to read a Mainland newspaper. The PRC government defines literacy amongst workers as a knowledge of 2,000 characters, though this would be only functional literacy. A large unabridged dictionary, like the Kangxi Dictionary, contains over 40,000 characters, including obscure, variant, rare, and archaic characters; less than a quarter of these characters are now commonly used.'' Most linguists classify all varieties of modern spoken Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family and believe that there was an original language, termed Proto-Sino-Tibetan, 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 Proto-Sino-Tibetan. 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 Indo-European languages from PIE don't apply to Chinese because of "morphological paucity" especially after Old Chinese Analysis of the concept "wave" in PST. . 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; most present systems rely heavily on Karlgren's insights and methods. Old Chinese ( ), sometimes known as "Archaic Chinese", was the language common during the early and middle Zhōu Dynasty (1122 BCE - 256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the Shījīng, the history of the Shūjīng, and portions of the Yìjīng (I Ching). The phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters 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 was still without tones. Work on reconstructing Old Chinese started with Qīng dynasty philologists. Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably 蜜 mì "honey", 獅 shī "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mǎ "horse", 犬 quǎn "dog", and 鵝 é "goose". The source says the reconstructions of old Chinese are tentative, and not definitive so no conclusions should be drawn. The reconstruction of Old Chinese can not be perfect so this hypothesis may be called into question. Encyclopedia Britannica s.v. "Chinese languages": "Old Chinese vocabulary already contained many words not generally occurring in the other Sino-Tibetan languages. The words for ‘honey' and ‘lion,' and probably also ‘horse,' ‘dog,' and ‘goose,' are connected with Indo-European and were acquired through trade and early contacts. (The nearest known Indo-European languages were Tocharian and Sogdian, a middle Iranian language.) A number of words have Austroasiatic cognates and point to early contacts with the ancestral language of Muong-Vietnamese and Mon-Khmer" ; Jan Ulenbrook, Einige Übereinstimmungen zwischen dem Chinesischen und dem Indogermanischen (1967) proposes 57 items; see also Tsung-tung Chang, 1988 Indo-European Vocabulary in Old Chinese;. 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 the Suí, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the 切韻 "Qièyùn" rhyme table (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the 廣韻 "Guǎngyùn" rhyme table. 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, 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; some scholars have argued that trying to reconstruct, say, modern Cantonese from modern Cantopop rhymes would give a fairly inaccurate picture of the present-day spoken language. The development of the spoken Chinese languages from early historical times to the present has been complex. Most Chinese people, in Sìchuān 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 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 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, though, a single standard of Mandarin did not exist. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The new 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 Standard Mandarin. As a result, Mandarin is now spoken by virtually all young and middle-aged citizens of mainland China and on Taiwan. Standard 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. Chinese was once the Lingua franca for East Asia countries for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. Throughout history Chinese culture and politics has had a great influence on unrelated languages such as Korean 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 Hán tự. It was the only available method for writing Vietnamese until the 14th century, used almost exclusively by Chinese-educated Vietnamese élites. From the 14th to the late 19th century, Vietnamese was written with Chữ nôm, a modified Chinese script incorporating sounds and syllables for native Vietnamese speakers. Chữ nôm was completely replaced by a modified Latin script created by the Jesuit missionary priest Alexander de Rhodes, which incorporates a system of diacritical marks to indicate tones, as well as modified consonants. The Vietnamese language exhibits multiple elements similar to Cantonese in regard to the specific intonations and sharp consonant endings. There is also a slight influence from Mandarin, including the sharper vowels and "kh" (IPA:x) sound 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. In derived Chinese characters or Zhuang logograms to write songs, even though Zhuang is not a Chinese dialect. Since the 1950s, the Zhuang language has been written in a modified Latin alphabet. Zhou, Minglang: Multilingualism in China: The Politics of Writing Reforms for Minority Languages, 1949-2002 (Walter de Gruyter 2003); ISBN 3-11-017896-6; p. 251–258. Languages within the influence of Chinese culture also have a very large number of loanwords from Chinese. Fifty percent or more of Korean vocabulary is of Chinese origin and the influence on Japanese and Vietnamese has been considerable. At least five percent of all words in Tagalog are of Chinese origin. Chinese has also lent a great deal of many grammatical features to these and neighboring languages, notably the lack of gender and the use of classifiers. Japanese has also a lot of loanwords from Chinese, as does Vietnamese. Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of 茶 (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 茄汁 (ke chap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 金橘 (kam kuat). :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, which is only about an eighth as many as English DeFrancis (1984) p.42 counts Chinese as having 1,277 tonal syllables, and about 398 to 418 if tones are disregarded; he cites Jespersen, Otto (1928) Monosyllabism in English; London, p.15 for a count of over 8000 syllables for English. . 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 four main tones of Standard Mandarin applied to the syllable "ma." The tones correspond to these five characters: * "mother" — high level * "hemp" or "torpid" — high rising * "horse" — low falling-rising * "scold" — high falling * "question particle" — neutral The Chinese had no uniform phonetic transcription system until the mid-20th century, although enunciation patterns were recorded in early rime books and dictionaries. Early Sanskrit and Pali Indian translators were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of the language in a foreign language. After 15th century CE Jesuits and Western court missionaries’ efforts result in some rudimentary Latin transcription systems, based on the Nanjing Mandarin dialect. Romanization is the process of transcribing a language in the Latin alphabet. There are many systems of romanization for the Chinese languages due to the Chinese's own lack of phonetic transcription until modern times. Chinese is first known to have been written in Latin characters by Western Christian missionaries in the 16th century. Today the most common romanization standard for Standard Mandarin is Hanyu Pinyin (漢語拼音/汉语拼音), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore). Pinyin is almost universally employed now for teaching standard spoken Chinese in schools and universities across America, Australia and Europe. Chinese parents also use Pinyin to teach their children the sounds and tones for words with which the child is unfamiliar. The Pinyin is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, and alongside the Pinyin is the Chinese symbol. The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859, later modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As it approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels (hence an Anglicization), it may be particularly helpful for beginner speakers of native English background. Wade-Giles is found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan (Taipei city now officially uses Hanyu Pinyin and the rest of the island officially uses Tōngyòng Pinyin 通用拼音). When used within European texts, the tone transcriptions in both pinyin and Wade-Giles are often left out for simplicity; Wade-Giles' extensive use of apostrophes is also usually omitted. Thus, most Western readers will be much more familiar with Beijing than they will be with Běijīng (pinyin), and with Taipei than T'ai²-pei³ (Wade-Giles). Here are a few examples of Hanyu Pinyin and Wade-Giles, for comparison: Other systems of romanization for Chinese include Gwoyeu Romatzyh, the French EFEO, the Yale (invented during WWII for U.S. troops), as well as separate systems for Cantonese, Minnan, Hakka, and other Chinese languages or dialects. Chinese languages have been phonetically transcribed into many other writing systems over the centuries. The 'Phags-pa script, for example, has been very helpful in reconstructing the pronunciations of pre-modern forms of Chinese. Zhuyin (注音, also known as bopomofo), a semi-syllabary is still widely used in Taiwan's elementary schools to aid standard pronunciation. Although bopomofo characters are reminiscent of katakana script, there is no source to substantiate the claim that Katakana was the basis for the zhuyin system. A comparison table of zhuyin to pinyin exists in the zhuyin article. Syllables based on pinyin and zhuyin can also be compared by looking at the following articles: *Pinyin table *Zhuyin table There are also at least two systems of cyrillization for Chinese. The most widespread is the Palladius system. Modern Chinese has often been erroneously classed as a "monosyllabic" language. While most of the morphemes are single syllable, modern Chinese today is much less a monosyllabic language in that nouns, adjectives and verbs are largely di-syllabic. The tendency to create disyllabic words in the modern Chinese languages, particularly in Mandarin, has been particularly pronounced when compared to Classical Chinese. Classical Chinese is a highly isolating language, with each idea (morpheme) generally corresponding to a single syllable and a single character; Modern Chinese though, has the tendency to form new words through disyllabic, trisyllabic and tetra-character agglutination. In fact, some linguists argue that classifying modern Chinese as an isolating language is misleading, for this reason alone. Chinese morphology is strictly bound to a set number of syllables with a fairly rigid construction which are the morphemes, the smallest blocks of the language. While many of these single-syllable morphemes ( zì, 字 in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cí (词/詞), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cí (“word”) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more. For example: *Yun 云 -“cloud” *Hanbaobao 汉堡包 –“hamburger” *Wo 我 –“I, me” *Renmin 人民 –“people” *Diqiu 地球 –“earth(globosity)” *Shandian 闪电 –“lightning” *Meng 梦 –“dream” All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphology — i.e., changes in form of a word — to indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflections – it possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English), and no gender. They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le 了, hai 还, yijing 已经, etc. 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. Chinese also has an extensive system of measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring 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. Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess 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. Official modern Mandarin has only 400 spoken monosyllables but over 10,000 written characters, so there are many homophones only distinguishable by the four tones. Even this is often not enough unless the context and exact phrase or cí is identified. The mono-syllable jī, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: 雞/鸡 chicken, 機/机 machine, 基 basic, 擊/击 (to) hit, 饑/饥 hunger, and 積/积 sum. In speech, the glyphing of a monosyllable to its meaning must be determined by context or by relation to other morphemes (e.g. "some" as in the opposite of "none"). Native speakers may state which words or phrases their names are found in, for convenience of writing: 名字叫嘉英，嘉陵江的嘉，英國的英 Míngzi jiào Jiāyīng, Jiālíng Jiāng de jiā, Yīngguó de yīng "My name is Jiāyīng, the Jia for Jialing River and the ying for the short form in Chinese of UK." Southern Chinese varieties like Cantonese and Hakka preserved more of the rimes of Middle Chinese and have more tones. The previous examples of jī, for instance, 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 multi-syllabic words. The entire Chinese character corpus since antiquity comprises well over 20,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are now commonly in use. However Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words, there are many times more Chinese words than there are characters as most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters. Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and phrases vary greatly. The Hanyu Da Zidian, an all-inclusive compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries for characters, including bone oracle versions. The Zhonghua Zihai 中华字海 (1994) contains 85,568 head entries for character definitions, and is the largest reference work based purely on character and its literary variants. The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary, the 12-volumed Hanyu Da Cidian 汉语大词典, records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters, and gives over 370,000 definitions. The 1999 revised Cihai, a multi-volume encyclopedic dictionary reference work, gives 122,836 vocabulary entry definitions under 19,485 Chinese characters, including proper names, phrases and common zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific and technical terms. The latest 2007 5th edition of Xiandai Hanyu Cidian 现代汉语词典, an authoritative one-volume dictionary on modern standard Chinese language as used in mainland China, has 65,000 entries and defines 11,000 head characters. Like any other language, Chinese has absorbed a sizeable amount of loanwords from other cultures. 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 since Old Chinese include 葡萄 "grape," 石榴 "pomegranate" and 狮子/獅子 "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including 佛 "Buddha" and 菩萨/菩薩 "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as 胡同 "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as 葡萄 "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or Pāli, the liturgical languages of North India. Words borrowed from the nomadic tribes of the Gobi, Mongolian or northeast regions generally have Altaic etymologies, such as 琵琶 "pípa", the Chinese lute, or 酪 "cheese" or "yoghurt", but from exactly which Altaic source is not always entirely clear. Foreign words continue to enter the Chinese language by transcription according to their pronunciations. This is done by employing Chinese characters with similar pronunciations. For example, "Israel" becomes 以色列 (pinyin: yǐsèliè), Paris 巴黎. A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including 沙發 shāfā "sofa," 马达/馬達 mǎdá "motor," 幽默 yōumò "humour," 逻辑/邏輯 luójí "logic," 时髦/時髦 shímáo "smart, fashionable" and 歇斯底里 xiēsīdǐlǐ "hysterics." The bulk of these words were originally coined in the Shanghainese dialect during the early 20th century and were later loaned into Mandarin, hence their pronunciations in Mandarin may be quite off from the English. For example, 沙发/沙發 and 马达/馬達 in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor." Today, 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 德律风/德律風 ( Shanghainese: télífon [ ], Standard Mandarin: délǜfēng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese 电话/電話 (diànhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include 电视/電視 (diànshì "electric vision") for television, 电脑/電腦 (diànnǎo "electric brain") for computer; 手机/手機 (shǒujī "hand machine") for cellphone, and 蓝牙/藍芽 (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. 網誌(wǎng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as 汉堡包/漢堡包 (hànbǎo bāo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as 拖拉机/拖拉機 (tuōlājī, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马利奥/馬利奧 for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example 奔腾/奔騰 (bēnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and 赛百味/賽百味 (Sàibǎiwèi "better-than hundred tastes") for Subway restaurants. Since the 20th century, another source has been Japan. Using existing kanji, which are Chinese characters used in the Japanese language, the Japanese re-moulded European concepts and inventions into wasei-kango (和製漢語, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include diànhuà (电话/電話, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社会, shakai, "society"), kēxué (科学/科學, kagaku, "science") and chōuxiàng (抽象, chūshō, "abstract"). Other terms were coined by the Japanese by giving new senses to existing Chinese terms or by referring to expressions used in classical Chinese literature. For example, jīngjì (经济/經濟, keizai), which in the original Chinese meant "the workings of the state", was narrowed to "economy" in Japanese; this narrowed definition was then reimported into Chinese. As a result, these terms are virtually indistinguishable from native Chinese words: indeed, there is some dispute over some of these terms as to whether the Japanese or Chinese coined them first. As a result of this toing-and-froing process, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese share a corpus linguistics of terms describing modern terminology, in parallel to a similar corpus of terms built from Greco-Latin terms shared among European languages. Taiwanese and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便当/便當 “lunchbox or boxed lunch” (from bento) and 料理 “prepared cuisine”, have passed into common currency. Western foreign words have great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came 芭蕾 (bāléi, "ballet"), 香槟 (xiāngbīn, "champagne"), via Italian 咖啡 (kāfēi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned 沙發 (shāfā "sofa"), 幽默 (yōumò "humour"), and 高尔夫 (gāoěrfū, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪斯科 (dísīkè, "disco"), 可乐 (kělè, "cola") and 迷你 (mínǐ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon 卡通 (cartoon), 基佬 (gay people), 的士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. 粉絲 (fěnsī, "fans"), 駭客 (hèikè, "hacker"), 部落格(bùluōgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin. Since the People's Republic of China’s economic and political rise in recent years, standard Mandarin has become an increasingly popular subject of study amongst the young in the Western world, as in the UK. BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | How hard is it to learn Chinese? In 1991 there were 2,000 foreign learners taking China's official Chinese Proficiency Test (comparable to English's Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660 . *Chinese characters *Chinese honorifics *Chinese measure word *Chinese number gestures *Chinese numerals *Chinese punctuation *Chinese exclamative particles *Four-character idiom *Han unification *Haner language *HSK test *Languages of China *North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics *Nü shu * * * * * * Keys to the Chinese Language: Book II - Google Books * A Practical Chinese Grammar - Google Books * ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawai’i Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X. * ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-08248-2975-9. * Arch Chinese free online Chinese character and Pinyin learning, Chinese English dictionary, writing worksheet generation, etc. * CHINGLISH online Chinese English Dictionary * nciku free online Chinese dictionary with handwriting recognition, pinyin, sound clips, etc. * MDBG free online Chinese-English dictionary * Chinese Characters Dictionary: supports Japanese, Korean, Cantonese, Hakka etc. * Chinese - English Dictionary: from Webster's Online Dictionary - the Rosetta Edition * CEDICT Chinese-English Dictionary Project * Stardict free (GPL) multilanguage dictionary including simplified/traditional Chinese for Unix (Linux, FreeBSD, etc.) and win32 * English-Chinese Translation Dictionary: Chinese-English-Chinese Online Dictionary (Taiwan-based; simplified characters not recognised) * CantoDict: Cantonese-English Dictionary Project * Chinese Pronunciation Dictionary Input Chinese words or sentences, get audio file of Mandarin pronunciation. Web-based tool. * Pinyin Annotator Add pinyin on top of any Chinese text. Mouse over any word to see English translation. Save output to OpenOffice Writer format. Prints nicely. Also adds pinyin to any Chinese web page. *Firefox users can install Add-ons for a pinyin annotator * Multimedia Dictionary of Chinese Characters Language Tool, Offline Chinese Dictionary. * Chinese Scholar Dictionary Chinese English dictionary with Pinyin index * A Cognitive Approach to Beginning Chinese: Interactions I and II. Margaret Mian Yan and Jennifer Li-chia Liu, Indiana University * Chinese Language Information Page A collection of Chinese language learning resources. * Learn Chinese - One At A Time * China KeyBoard Google Engine * Oneaday.org One Chinese idiom a day (simplified and traditional characters) with pinyin transliteration and English translation. * Mandarin Tone Drill Testing your knowledge of Mandarin tones. * Pinyin Practice Pinyin practice for Mandarin learners in all levels * Marjorie Chan's ChinaLinks: A large collection of Web resources by a professor of linguistics at Ohio State University * 4 words of Chinese every day * Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard * Chinese Character of the Day Learn to Read Chinese one word at a time. * Audio files with basic Chinese words * General Introduction of Chinese Language * Learn Chinese Characters * Chinese Scholar: The Free Chinese Class Learn Chinese language and culture through interactive media
Chinese_language
One-fifth of world population speak some form of what?
Chinese
data/set5/a7
Chinese_language Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) is a language family consisting of languages mutually unintelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. “The mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.” *Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. “The Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.” *Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. “The modern Chinese dialects are really more like a family of language. *John DeFrancis. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (1984), p.56. "To call Chinese a single language composed of dialects with varying degrees of difference is to mislead by minimizing disparities that according to Chao are as great as those between English and Dutch. To call Chinese a family of languages is to suggest extralinguistic differences that in fact do not exist and to overlook the unique linguistic situation that exists in China." Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the two branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages. About one-fifth of the world’s population, or over one billion people, speak some form of Chinese as their native language. The identification of the varieties of Chinese as "dialects" instead of "languages" is considered inappropriate by linguists and Sinologists. Spoken Chinese is distinguished by its high level of internal diversity, although all spoken varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic. There are between seven and thirteen main regional groups of Chinese (depending on classification scheme), of which the most spoken, by far, is Mandarin (about 850 million), followed by Wu (90 million), Min (70 million) and Cantonese (70 million). Most of these groups are mutually unintelligible, although some, like Xiang and the Southwest Mandarin dialects, may share common terms and some degree of intelligibility. Chinese is classified as a macrolanguage with 13 sub-languages in ISO 639-3, though the identification of the varieties of Chinese as multiple "languages" or as "dialects" of a single language is a contentious issue. The standardized form of spoken Chinese is Standard Mandarin (Putonghua / Guoyu / Huayu), based on the Beijing dialect, which is part of a larger group of North-Eastern and South-Western dialects, often taken as a separate language, see Mandarin Chinese for more, this language can be referred to as 官话 Guānhuà or 北方话 Běifānghuà in Chinese. Standard Mandarin is the official language of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC), as well as one of four official languages of Singapore. Chinese—de facto, Standard Mandarin—is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Of the other varieties, Standard Cantonese is common and influential in Guangdong Province and Cantonese-speaking overseas communities, and remains one of the official languages of Hong Kong (together with English) and of Macau (together with Portuguese). Hokkien, part of the Min language group, is widely spoken in southern Fujian, in neighbouring Taiwan (where it is known as Taiwanese or Hoklo) and in Southeast Asia (where it dominates in Singapore and Malaysia). Xinhua reported in March 2007 that 86 percent of people in the People's Republic of China spoke a Chinese variant. 全國約有53%的人能用普通話交流 As a language family, the number of Chinese speakers is 1.136 billion. The same news report indicates 53 percent of the population, or 700 million speakers, can effectively communicate in Putonghua. Sino-Tibetan language family. A map below depicts the linguistic subdivisions ("languages" or "dialect groups") within China itself. The traditionally-recognized seven main groups, in order of population size are: Chinese linguists have recently distinguished: 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. The Dungan language, spoken in Central Asia, is very closely related to Mandarin. However, it is not generally considered "Chinese" since it is written in Cyrillic and spoken by Dungan people outside China who are not considered ethnic Chinese. See List of Chinese dialects for a comprehensive listing of individual dialects within these large, broad groupings. In general, the above language-dialect groups do not have sharp boundaries, though Mandarin is the predominant Sinitic language in the North and the Southwest, and the rest are mostly spoken in Central or Southeastern China. Frequently, as in the case of the Guangdong province, native speakers of major variants overlapped. As with many areas that were linguistically diverse for a long time, it is not always clear how the speeches of various parts of China should be classified. The Ethnologue lists a total of 14, but the number varies between seven and seventeen depending on the classification scheme followed. For instance, the Min variety is often divided into Northern Min (Minbei, Fuchow) and Southern Min (Minnan, Amoy-Swatow); linguists have not determined whether their mutual intelligibility is small enough to sort them as separate languages. The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China. In general, mountainous South China displays more linguistic diversity than the flat North China. In parts of South China, a major city's dialect may only 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). Putonghua / Guoyu, often called "Mandarin", is the official standard language used by the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China, and Singapore (where it is called "Huayu"). It is based on the Beijing dialect, which is the dialect of Mandarin as spoken in Beijing. The governments intend for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. Therefore it is used in government agencies, in the media, and as a language of instruction in schools. In mainland China and Taiwan, diglossia has been a common feature: it is common for a Chinese to be able to speak two or even three varieties of the Sinitic languages (or “dialects”) together with Standard Mandarin. For example, in addition to putonghua a resident of Shanghai might speak Shanghainese and, if they did not grow up there, his or her local dialect as well. A native of Guangzhou may speak Standard Cantonese and putonghua, a resident of Taiwan, both Taiwanese and putonghua/guoyu. A person living in Taiwan 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, Standard Mandarin is beginning to take its place beside English and Standard Cantonese, the official languages. Linguists often view Chinese as a language family, though owing to China's socio-political and cultural situation, and the fact that all spoken varieties use one common written system, it is customary to refer to these generally mutually unintelligible variants as "the Chinese language". The diversity of Sinitic variants is comparable to the Romance languages. From a purely descriptive point of view, "languages" and "dialects" are simply arbitrary groups of similar idiolects, and the distinction is irrelevant to linguists who are only concerned with describing regional speeches technically. However, the idea of a single language has major overtones in politics and cultural self-identity, and explains the amount of emotion over this issue. Most Chinese and Chinese linguists refer to Chinese as a single language and its subdivisions dialects, while others call Chinese a language family. Chinese itself has a term for its unified writing system, Zhongwen (中文), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (汉语,“spoken language[s] of the Han Chinese) – this term could be translated to either “language” or “languages” since Chinese possesses no grammatical numbers. In the Chinese language, there is much less need for a uniform speech-and-writing continuum, as indicated by two separate character morphemes 语 yu and 文 wen. Ethnic Chinese often consider these spoken variations as one single language for reasons of nationality and as they inherit one common cultural and linguistic heritage in Classical Chinese. Han native speakers of Wu, Min, Hakka, and Cantonese, for instance, may consider their own linguistic varieties as separate spoken languages, but the Han Chinese race as one – albeit internally very diverse – ethnicity. To Chinese nationalists, the idea of Chinese as a language family may suggest that the Chinese identity is much more fragmentary and disunified than it actually is and as such is often looked upon as culturally and politically provocative. Additionally, in Taiwan, it is closely associated with Taiwanese independence, where some supporters of Taiwanese independence promote the local Taiwanese Minnan-based spoken language. Within the People’s Republic of China and Singapore, it is common for the government to refer to all divisions of the Sinitic language(s) beside Standard Mandarin as fangyan (“regional tongues”, often translated as “dialects”). Modern-day Chinese speakers of all kinds communicate using one formal standard written language, although this modern written standard is modeled after Mandarin, generally the modern Beijing substandard. The term sinophone, coined in analogy to anglophone and francophone, refers to those who speak the Chinese language natively, or prefer it as a medium of communication. The term is derived from Sinae, the Latin word for ancient China. :See also: Classical Chinese and Vernacular Chinese The relationship among the Chinese spoken and written languages is rather complex. Its spoken variations evolved at different rates, while written Chinese itself has changed much less. Classical Chinese literature began in the Spring and Autumn period, although written records have been discovered as far back as the 14th to 11th centuries BCE Shang dynasty oracle bones using the oracle bone scripts. The Chinese orthography centers around Chinese characters, hanzi, which are written within imaginary rectangular blocks, traditionally arranged in vertical columns, read from top to bottom down a column, and right to left across columns. Chinese characters are morphemes independent of phonetic change. Thus the number "one", yi in Mandarin, yat in Cantonese and chi̍t and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("一"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as 冇 and 係 for Cantonese and Hakka, which are considered archaic or unused in standard written Chinese. Written colloquial Cantonese has become quite popular in online chat rooms and instant messaging amongst Hong-Kongers and Cantonese-speakers elsewhere. Use of it is considered highly informal, and does not extend to any formal occasion. Also, in Hunan, some women write their local language in Nü Shu, a syllabary derived from Chinese characters. The Dungan language, considered by some 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 evolved over time from earliest forms of hieroglyphs. The idea that all Chinese characters are either pictographs or ideographs is an erroneous one: most characters contain phonetic parts, and are composites of phonetic components and semantic Radicals. Only the simplest characters, such as ren 人 (human), ri 日 (sun), shan 山 (mountain), shui 水 (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar Xǚ Shèn in the Hàn Dynasty classified characters into 6 categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80-90% as phonetic complexes consisting of a semantic element that indicates meaning, and a phonetic element that indicates the pronunciation. Generally, the phonetic element is more accurate and more important than the semantic one. There are about 214 radicals recognized in the Kangxi Dictionary. Modern characters are styled after the standard script (楷书/楷書 kǎishū) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (篆书/篆書 zhuànshū), cursive script (草书/草書 cǎoshū) and clerical script (隶书/隸書 lìshū). Calligraphy artists can write in traditional and simplified characters, but tend to use traditional characters for traditional art. Various styles of Chinese calligraphy. There are currently two systems for Chinese characters. The traditional system, still used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau and Chinese speaking communities (except Singapore and Malaysia) outside mainland China, takes its form from standardized character forms dating back to the late Han dynasty. The Simplified Chinese character system, developed by the People's Republic of China in 1954 to promote mass literacy, simplifies most complex traditional glyphs to fewer strokes, many to common caoshu shorthand variants. Singapore, which has a large Chinese communities, is the first – and at present the only – foreign nation to officially adopt simplified characters, although it has also become the de facto standard for younger ethnic Chinese in Malaysia. The Internet provides the platform to practice reading the alternative system, be it traditional or simplified. A well-educated Chinese today recognizes approximately 6,000-7,000 characters; some 3,000 characters are required to read a Mainland newspaper. The PRC government defines literacy amongst workers as a knowledge of 2,000 characters, though this would be only functional literacy. A large unabridged dictionary, like the Kangxi Dictionary, contains over 40,000 characters, including obscure, variant, rare, and archaic characters; less than a quarter of these characters are now commonly used.'' Most linguists classify all varieties of modern spoken Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family and believe that there was an original language, termed Proto-Sino-Tibetan, 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 Proto-Sino-Tibetan. 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 Indo-European languages from PIE don't apply to Chinese because of "morphological paucity" especially after Old Chinese Analysis of the concept "wave" in PST. . 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; most present systems rely heavily on Karlgren's insights and methods. Old Chinese ( ), sometimes known as "Archaic Chinese", was the language common during the early and middle Zhōu Dynasty (1122 BCE - 256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the Shījīng, the history of the Shūjīng, and portions of the Yìjīng (I Ching). The phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters 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 was still without tones. Work on reconstructing Old Chinese started with Qīng dynasty philologists. Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably 蜜 mì "honey", 獅 shī "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mǎ "horse", 犬 quǎn "dog", and 鵝 é "goose". The source says the reconstructions of old Chinese are tentative, and not definitive so no conclusions should be drawn. The reconstruction of Old Chinese can not be perfect so this hypothesis may be called into question. Encyclopedia Britannica s.v. "Chinese languages": "Old Chinese vocabulary already contained many words not generally occurring in the other Sino-Tibetan languages. The words for ‘honey' and ‘lion,' and probably also ‘horse,' ‘dog,' and ‘goose,' are connected with Indo-European and were acquired through trade and early contacts. (The nearest known Indo-European languages were Tocharian and Sogdian, a middle Iranian language.) A number of words have Austroasiatic cognates and point to early contacts with the ancestral language of Muong-Vietnamese and Mon-Khmer" ; Jan Ulenbrook, Einige Übereinstimmungen zwischen dem Chinesischen und dem Indogermanischen (1967) proposes 57 items; see also Tsung-tung Chang, 1988 Indo-European Vocabulary in Old Chinese;. 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 the Suí, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the 切韻 "Qièyùn" rhyme table (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the 廣韻 "Guǎngyùn" rhyme table. 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, 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; some scholars have argued that trying to reconstruct, say, modern Cantonese from modern Cantopop rhymes would give a fairly inaccurate picture of the present-day spoken language. The development of the spoken Chinese languages from early historical times to the present has been complex. Most Chinese people, in Sìchuān 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 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 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, though, a single standard of Mandarin did not exist. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The new 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 Standard Mandarin. As a result, Mandarin is now spoken by virtually all young and middle-aged citizens of mainland China and on Taiwan. Standard 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. Chinese was once the Lingua franca for East Asia countries for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. Throughout history Chinese culture and politics has had a great influence on unrelated languages such as Korean 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 Hán tự. It was the only available method for writing Vietnamese until the 14th century, used almost exclusively by Chinese-educated Vietnamese élites. From the 14th to the late 19th century, Vietnamese was written with Chữ nôm, a modified Chinese script incorporating sounds and syllables for native Vietnamese speakers. Chữ nôm was completely replaced by a modified Latin script created by the Jesuit missionary priest Alexander de Rhodes, which incorporates a system of diacritical marks to indicate tones, as well as modified consonants. The Vietnamese language exhibits multiple elements similar to Cantonese in regard to the specific intonations and sharp consonant endings. There is also a slight influence from Mandarin, including the sharper vowels and "kh" (IPA:x) sound 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. In derived Chinese characters or Zhuang logograms to write songs, even though Zhuang is not a Chinese dialect. Since the 1950s, the Zhuang language has been written in a modified Latin alphabet. Zhou, Minglang: Multilingualism in China: The Politics of Writing Reforms for Minority Languages, 1949-2002 (Walter de Gruyter 2003); ISBN 3-11-017896-6; p. 251–258. Languages within the influence of Chinese culture also have a very large number of loanwords from Chinese. Fifty percent or more of Korean vocabulary is of Chinese origin and the influence on Japanese and Vietnamese has been considerable. At least five percent of all words in Tagalog are of Chinese origin. Chinese has also lent a great deal of many grammatical features to these and neighboring languages, notably the lack of gender and the use of classifiers. Japanese has also a lot of loanwords from Chinese, as does Vietnamese. Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of 茶 (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 茄汁 (ke chap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 金橘 (kam kuat). :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, which is only about an eighth as many as English DeFrancis (1984) p.42 counts Chinese as having 1,277 tonal syllables, and about 398 to 418 if tones are disregarded; he cites Jespersen, Otto (1928) Monosyllabism in English; London, p.15 for a count of over 8000 syllables for English. . 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 four main tones of Standard Mandarin applied to the syllable "ma." The tones correspond to these five characters: * "mother" — high level * "hemp" or "torpid" — high rising * "horse" — low falling-rising * "scold" — high falling * "question particle" — neutral The Chinese had no uniform phonetic transcription system until the mid-20th century, although enunciation patterns were recorded in early rime books and dictionaries. Early Sanskrit and Pali Indian translators were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of the language in a foreign language. After 15th century CE Jesuits and Western court missionaries’ efforts result in some rudimentary Latin transcription systems, based on the Nanjing Mandarin dialect. Romanization is the process of transcribing a language in the Latin alphabet. There are many systems of romanization for the Chinese languages due to the Chinese's own lack of phonetic transcription until modern times. Chinese is first known to have been written in Latin characters by Western Christian missionaries in the 16th century. Today the most common romanization standard for Standard Mandarin is Hanyu Pinyin (漢語拼音/汉语拼音), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore). Pinyin is almost universally employed now for teaching standard spoken Chinese in schools and universities across America, Australia and Europe. Chinese parents also use Pinyin to teach their children the sounds and tones for words with which the child is unfamiliar. The Pinyin is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, and alongside the Pinyin is the Chinese symbol. The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859, later modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As it approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels (hence an Anglicization), it may be particularly helpful for beginner speakers of native English background. Wade-Giles is found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan (Taipei city now officially uses Hanyu Pinyin and the rest of the island officially uses Tōngyòng Pinyin 通用拼音). When used within European texts, the tone transcriptions in both pinyin and Wade-Giles are often left out for simplicity; Wade-Giles' extensive use of apostrophes is also usually omitted. Thus, most Western readers will be much more familiar with Beijing than they will be with Běijīng (pinyin), and with Taipei than T'ai²-pei³ (Wade-Giles). Here are a few examples of Hanyu Pinyin and Wade-Giles, for comparison: Other systems of romanization for Chinese include Gwoyeu Romatzyh, the French EFEO, the Yale (invented during WWII for U.S. troops), as well as separate systems for Cantonese, Minnan, Hakka, and other Chinese languages or dialects. Chinese languages have been phonetically transcribed into many other writing systems over the centuries. The 'Phags-pa script, for example, has been very helpful in reconstructing the pronunciations of pre-modern forms of Chinese. Zhuyin (注音, also known as bopomofo), a semi-syllabary is still widely used in Taiwan's elementary schools to aid standard pronunciation. Although bopomofo characters are reminiscent of katakana script, there is no source to substantiate the claim that Katakana was the basis for the zhuyin system. A comparison table of zhuyin to pinyin exists in the zhuyin article. Syllables based on pinyin and zhuyin can also be compared by looking at the following articles: *Pinyin table *Zhuyin table There are also at least two systems of cyrillization for Chinese. The most widespread is the Palladius system. Modern Chinese has often been erroneously classed as a "monosyllabic" language. While most of the morphemes are single syllable, modern Chinese today is much less a monosyllabic language in that nouns, adjectives and verbs are largely di-syllabic. The tendency to create disyllabic words in the modern Chinese languages, particularly in Mandarin, has been particularly pronounced when compared to Classical Chinese. Classical Chinese is a highly isolating language, with each idea (morpheme) generally corresponding to a single syllable and a single character; Modern Chinese though, has the tendency to form new words through disyllabic, trisyllabic and tetra-character agglutination. In fact, some linguists argue that classifying modern Chinese as an isolating language is misleading, for this reason alone. Chinese morphology is strictly bound to a set number of syllables with a fairly rigid construction which are the morphemes, the smallest blocks of the language. While many of these single-syllable morphemes ( zì, 字 in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cí (词/詞), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cí (“word”) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more. For example: *Yun 云 -“cloud” *Hanbaobao 汉堡包 –“hamburger” *Wo 我 –“I, me” *Renmin 人民 –“people” *Diqiu 地球 –“earth(globosity)” *Shandian 闪电 –“lightning” *Meng 梦 –“dream” All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphology — i.e., changes in form of a word — to indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflections – it possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English), and no gender. They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le 了, hai 还, yijing 已经, etc. 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. Chinese also has an extensive system of measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring 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. Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess 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. Official modern Mandarin has only 400 spoken monosyllables but over 10,000 written characters, so there are many homophones only distinguishable by the four tones. Even this is often not enough unless the context and exact phrase or cí is identified. The mono-syllable jī, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: 雞/鸡 chicken, 機/机 machine, 基 basic, 擊/击 (to) hit, 饑/饥 hunger, and 積/积 sum. In speech, the glyphing of a monosyllable to its meaning must be determined by context or by relation to other morphemes (e.g. "some" as in the opposite of "none"). Native speakers may state which words or phrases their names are found in, for convenience of writing: 名字叫嘉英，嘉陵江的嘉，英國的英 Míngzi jiào Jiāyīng, Jiālíng Jiāng de jiā, Yīngguó de yīng "My name is Jiāyīng, the Jia for Jialing River and the ying for the short form in Chinese of UK." Southern Chinese varieties like Cantonese and Hakka preserved more of the rimes of Middle Chinese and have more tones. The previous examples of jī, for instance, 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 multi-syllabic words. The entire Chinese character corpus since antiquity comprises well over 20,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are now commonly in use. However Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words, there are many times more Chinese words than there are characters as most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters. Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and phrases vary greatly. The Hanyu Da Zidian, an all-inclusive compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries for characters, including bone oracle versions. The Zhonghua Zihai 中华字海 (1994) contains 85,568 head entries for character definitions, and is the largest reference work based purely on character and its literary variants. The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary, the 12-volumed Hanyu Da Cidian 汉语大词典, records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters, and gives over 370,000 definitions. The 1999 revised Cihai, a multi-volume encyclopedic dictionary reference work, gives 122,836 vocabulary entry definitions under 19,485 Chinese characters, including proper names, phrases and common zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific and technical terms. The latest 2007 5th edition of Xiandai Hanyu Cidian 现代汉语词典, an authoritative one-volume dictionary on modern standard Chinese language as used in mainland China, has 65,000 entries and defines 11,000 head characters. Like any other language, Chinese has absorbed a sizeable amount of loanwords from other cultures. 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 since Old Chinese include 葡萄 "grape," 石榴 "pomegranate" and 狮子/獅子 "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including 佛 "Buddha" and 菩萨/菩薩 "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as 胡同 "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as 葡萄 "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or Pāli, the liturgical languages of North India. Words borrowed from the nomadic tribes of the Gobi, Mongolian or northeast regions generally have Altaic etymologies, such as 琵琶 "pípa", the Chinese lute, or 酪 "cheese" or "yoghurt", but from exactly which Altaic source is not always entirely clear. Foreign words continue to enter the Chinese language by transcription according to their pronunciations. This is done by employing Chinese characters with similar pronunciations. For example, "Israel" becomes 以色列 (pinyin: yǐsèliè), Paris 巴黎. A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including 沙發 shāfā "sofa," 马达/馬達 mǎdá "motor," 幽默 yōumò "humour," 逻辑/邏輯 luójí "logic," 时髦/時髦 shímáo "smart, fashionable" and 歇斯底里 xiēsīdǐlǐ "hysterics." The bulk of these words were originally coined in the Shanghainese dialect during the early 20th century and were later loaned into Mandarin, hence their pronunciations in Mandarin may be quite off from the English. For example, 沙发/沙發 and 马达/馬達 in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor." Today, 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 德律风/德律風 ( Shanghainese: télífon [ ], Standard Mandarin: délǜfēng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese 电话/電話 (diànhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include 电视/電視 (diànshì "electric vision") for television, 电脑/電腦 (diànnǎo "electric brain") for computer; 手机/手機 (shǒujī "hand machine") for cellphone, and 蓝牙/藍芽 (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. 網誌(wǎng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as 汉堡包/漢堡包 (hànbǎo bāo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as 拖拉机/拖拉機 (tuōlājī, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马利奥/馬利奧 for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example 奔腾/奔騰 (bēnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and 赛百味/賽百味 (Sàibǎiwèi "better-than hundred tastes") for Subway restaurants. Since the 20th century, another source has been Japan. Using existing kanji, which are Chinese characters used in the Japanese language, the Japanese re-moulded European concepts and inventions into wasei-kango (和製漢語, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include diànhuà (电话/電話, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社会, shakai, "society"), kēxué (科学/科學, kagaku, "science") and chōuxiàng (抽象, chūshō, "abstract"). Other terms were coined by the Japanese by giving new senses to existing Chinese terms or by referring to expressions used in classical Chinese literature. For example, jīngjì (经济/經濟, keizai), which in the original Chinese meant "the workings of the state", was narrowed to "economy" in Japanese; this narrowed definition was then reimported into Chinese. As a result, these terms are virtually indistinguishable from native Chinese words: indeed, there is some dispute over some of these terms as to whether the Japanese or Chinese coined them first. As a result of this toing-and-froing process, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese share a corpus linguistics of terms describing modern terminology, in parallel to a similar corpus of terms built from Greco-Latin terms shared among European languages. Taiwanese and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便当/便當 “lunchbox or boxed lunch” (from bento) and 料理 “prepared cuisine”, have passed into common currency. Western foreign words have great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came 芭蕾 (bāléi, "ballet"), 香槟 (xiāngbīn, "champagne"), via Italian 咖啡 (kāfēi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned 沙發 (shāfā "sofa"), 幽默 (yōumò "humour"), and 高尔夫 (gāoěrfū, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪斯科 (dísīkè, "disco"), 可乐 (kělè, "cola") and 迷你 (mínǐ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon 卡通 (cartoon), 基佬 (gay people), 的士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. 粉絲 (fěnsī, "fans"), 駭客 (hèikè, "hacker"), 部落格(bùluōgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin. Since the People's Republic of China’s economic and political rise in recent years, standard Mandarin has become an increasingly popular subject of study amongst the young in the Western world, as in the UK. BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | How hard is it to learn Chinese? In 1991 there were 2,000 foreign learners taking China's official Chinese Proficiency Test (comparable to English's Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660 . *Chinese characters *Chinese honorifics *Chinese measure word *Chinese number gestures *Chinese numerals *Chinese punctuation *Chinese exclamative particles *Four-character idiom *Han unification *Haner language *HSK test *Languages of China *North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics *Nü shu * * * * * * Keys to the Chinese Language: Book II - Google Books * A Practical Chinese Grammar - Google Books * ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawai’i Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X. * ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-08248-2975-9. * Arch Chinese free online Chinese character and Pinyin learning, Chinese English dictionary, writing worksheet generation, etc. * CHINGLISH online Chinese English Dictionary * nciku free online Chinese dictionary with handwriting recognition, pinyin, sound clips, etc. * MDBG free online Chinese-English dictionary * Chinese Characters Dictionary: supports Japanese, Korean, Cantonese, Hakka etc. * Chinese - English Dictionary: from Webster's Online Dictionary - the Rosetta Edition * CEDICT Chinese-English Dictionary Project * Stardict free (GPL) multilanguage dictionary including simplified/traditional Chinese for Unix (Linux, FreeBSD, etc.) and win32 * English-Chinese Translation Dictionary: Chinese-English-Chinese Online Dictionary (Taiwan-based; simplified characters not recognised) * CantoDict: Cantonese-English Dictionary Project * Chinese Pronunciation Dictionary Input Chinese words or sentences, get audio file of Mandarin pronunciation. Web-based tool. * Pinyin Annotator Add pinyin on top of any Chinese text. Mouse over any word to see English translation. Save output to OpenOffice Writer format. Prints nicely. Also adds pinyin to any Chinese web page. *Firefox users can install Add-ons for a pinyin annotator * Multimedia Dictionary of Chinese Characters Language Tool, Offline Chinese Dictionary. * Chinese Scholar Dictionary Chinese English dictionary with Pinyin index * A Cognitive Approach to Beginning Chinese: Interactions I and II. Margaret Mian Yan and Jennifer Li-chia Liu, Indiana University * Chinese Language Information Page A collection of Chinese language learning resources. * Learn Chinese - One At A Time * China KeyBoard Google Engine * Oneaday.org One Chinese idiom a day (simplified and traditional characters) with pinyin transliteration and English translation. * Mandarin Tone Drill Testing your knowledge of Mandarin tones. * Pinyin Practice Pinyin practice for Mandarin learners in all levels * Marjorie Chan's ChinaLinks: A large collection of Web resources by a professor of linguistics at Ohio State University * 4 words of Chinese every day * Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard * Chinese Character of the Day Learn to Read Chinese one word at a time. * Audio files with basic Chinese words * General Introduction of Chinese Language * Learn Chinese Characters * Chinese Scholar: The Free Chinese Class Learn Chinese language and culture through interactive media
Chinese_language
Is mandarin spoken Chinese distinguished by its high level?
no, it's distinguished by diversity
data/set5/a7
Chinese_language Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) is a language family consisting of languages mutually unintelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. “The mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.” *Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. “The Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.” *Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. “The modern Chinese dialects are really more like a family of language. *John DeFrancis. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (1984), p.56. "To call Chinese a single language composed of dialects with varying degrees of difference is to mislead by minimizing disparities that according to Chao are as great as those between English and Dutch. To call Chinese a family of languages is to suggest extralinguistic differences that in fact do not exist and to overlook the unique linguistic situation that exists in China." Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the two branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages. About one-fifth of the world’s population, or over one billion people, speak some form of Chinese as their native language. The identification of the varieties of Chinese as "dialects" instead of "languages" is considered inappropriate by linguists and Sinologists. Spoken Chinese is distinguished by its high level of internal diversity, although all spoken varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic. There are between seven and thirteen main regional groups of Chinese (depending on classification scheme), of which the most spoken, by far, is Mandarin (about 850 million), followed by Wu (90 million), Min (70 million) and Cantonese (70 million). Most of these groups are mutually unintelligible, although some, like Xiang and the Southwest Mandarin dialects, may share common terms and some degree of intelligibility. Chinese is classified as a macrolanguage with 13 sub-languages in ISO 639-3, though the identification of the varieties of Chinese as multiple "languages" or as "dialects" of a single language is a contentious issue. The standardized form of spoken Chinese is Standard Mandarin (Putonghua / Guoyu / Huayu), based on the Beijing dialect, which is part of a larger group of North-Eastern and South-Western dialects, often taken as a separate language, see Mandarin Chinese for more, this language can be referred to as 官话 Guānhuà or 北方话 Běifānghuà in Chinese. Standard Mandarin is the official language of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC), as well as one of four official languages of Singapore. Chinese—de facto, Standard Mandarin—is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Of the other varieties, Standard Cantonese is common and influential in Guangdong Province and Cantonese-speaking overseas communities, and remains one of the official languages of Hong Kong (together with English) and of Macau (together with Portuguese). Hokkien, part of the Min language group, is widely spoken in southern Fujian, in neighbouring Taiwan (where it is known as Taiwanese or Hoklo) and in Southeast Asia (where it dominates in Singapore and Malaysia). Xinhua reported in March 2007 that 86 percent of people in the People's Republic of China spoke a Chinese variant. 全國約有53%的人能用普通話交流 As a language family, the number of Chinese speakers is 1.136 billion. The same news report indicates 53 percent of the population, or 700 million speakers, can effectively communicate in Putonghua. Sino-Tibetan language family. A map below depicts the linguistic subdivisions ("languages" or "dialect groups") within China itself. The traditionally-recognized seven main groups, in order of population size are: Chinese linguists have recently distinguished: 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. The Dungan language, spoken in Central Asia, is very closely related to Mandarin. However, it is not generally considered "Chinese" since it is written in Cyrillic and spoken by Dungan people outside China who are not considered ethnic Chinese. See List of Chinese dialects for a comprehensive listing of individual dialects within these large, broad groupings. In general, the above language-dialect groups do not have sharp boundaries, though Mandarin is the predominant Sinitic language in the North and the Southwest, and the rest are mostly spoken in Central or Southeastern China. Frequently, as in the case of the Guangdong province, native speakers of major variants overlapped. As with many areas that were linguistically diverse for a long time, it is not always clear how the speeches of various parts of China should be classified. The Ethnologue lists a total of 14, but the number varies between seven and seventeen depending on the classification scheme followed. For instance, the Min variety is often divided into Northern Min (Minbei, Fuchow) and Southern Min (Minnan, Amoy-Swatow); linguists have not determined whether their mutual intelligibility is small enough to sort them as separate languages. The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China. In general, mountainous South China displays more linguistic diversity than the flat North China. In parts of South China, a major city's dialect may only 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). Putonghua / Guoyu, often called "Mandarin", is the official standard language used by the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China, and Singapore (where it is called "Huayu"). It is based on the Beijing dialect, which is the dialect of Mandarin as spoken in Beijing. The governments intend for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. Therefore it is used in government agencies, in the media, and as a language of instruction in schools. In mainland China and Taiwan, diglossia has been a common feature: it is common for a Chinese to be able to speak two or even three varieties of the Sinitic languages (or “dialects”) together with Standard Mandarin. For example, in addition to putonghua a resident of Shanghai might speak Shanghainese and, if they did not grow up there, his or her local dialect as well. A native of Guangzhou may speak Standard Cantonese and putonghua, a resident of Taiwan, both Taiwanese and putonghua/guoyu. A person living in Taiwan 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, Standard Mandarin is beginning to take its place beside English and Standard Cantonese, the official languages. Linguists often view Chinese as a language family, though owing to China's socio-political and cultural situation, and the fact that all spoken varieties use one common written system, it is customary to refer to these generally mutually unintelligible variants as "the Chinese language". The diversity of Sinitic variants is comparable to the Romance languages. From a purely descriptive point of view, "languages" and "dialects" are simply arbitrary groups of similar idiolects, and the distinction is irrelevant to linguists who are only concerned with describing regional speeches technically. However, the idea of a single language has major overtones in politics and cultural self-identity, and explains the amount of emotion over this issue. Most Chinese and Chinese linguists refer to Chinese as a single language and its subdivisions dialects, while others call Chinese a language family. Chinese itself has a term for its unified writing system, Zhongwen (中文), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (汉语,“spoken language[s] of the Han Chinese) – this term could be translated to either “language” or “languages” since Chinese possesses no grammatical numbers. In the Chinese language, there is much less need for a uniform speech-and-writing continuum, as indicated by two separate character morphemes 语 yu and 文 wen. Ethnic Chinese often consider these spoken variations as one single language for reasons of nationality and as they inherit one common cultural and linguistic heritage in Classical Chinese. Han native speakers of Wu, Min, Hakka, and Cantonese, for instance, may consider their own linguistic varieties as separate spoken languages, but the Han Chinese race as one – albeit internally very diverse – ethnicity. To Chinese nationalists, the idea of Chinese as a language family may suggest that the Chinese identity is much more fragmentary and disunified than it actually is and as such is often looked upon as culturally and politically provocative. Additionally, in Taiwan, it is closely associated with Taiwanese independence, where some supporters of Taiwanese independence promote the local Taiwanese Minnan-based spoken language. Within the People’s Republic of China and Singapore, it is common for the government to refer to all divisions of the Sinitic language(s) beside Standard Mandarin as fangyan (“regional tongues”, often translated as “dialects”). Modern-day Chinese speakers of all kinds communicate using one formal standard written language, although this modern written standard is modeled after Mandarin, generally the modern Beijing substandard. The term sinophone, coined in analogy to anglophone and francophone, refers to those who speak the Chinese language natively, or prefer it as a medium of communication. The term is derived from Sinae, the Latin word for ancient China. :See also: Classical Chinese and Vernacular Chinese The relationship among the Chinese spoken and written languages is rather complex. Its spoken variations evolved at different rates, while written Chinese itself has changed much less. Classical Chinese literature began in the Spring and Autumn period, although written records have been discovered as far back as the 14th to 11th centuries BCE Shang dynasty oracle bones using the oracle bone scripts. The Chinese orthography centers around Chinese characters, hanzi, which are written within imaginary rectangular blocks, traditionally arranged in vertical columns, read from top to bottom down a column, and right to left across columns. Chinese characters are morphemes independent of phonetic change. Thus the number "one", yi in Mandarin, yat in Cantonese and chi̍t and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("一"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as 冇 and 係 for Cantonese and Hakka, which are considered archaic or unused in standard written Chinese. Written colloquial Cantonese has become quite popular in online chat rooms and instant messaging amongst Hong-Kongers and Cantonese-speakers elsewhere. Use of it is considered highly informal, and does not extend to any formal occasion. Also, in Hunan, some women write their local language in Nü Shu, a syllabary derived from Chinese characters. The Dungan language, considered by some 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 evolved over time from earliest forms of hieroglyphs. The idea that all Chinese characters are either pictographs or ideographs is an erroneous one: most characters contain phonetic parts, and are composites of phonetic components and semantic Radicals. Only the simplest characters, such as ren 人 (human), ri 日 (sun), shan 山 (mountain), shui 水 (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar Xǚ Shèn in the Hàn Dynasty classified characters into 6 categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80-90% as phonetic complexes consisting of a semantic element that indicates meaning, and a phonetic element that indicates the pronunciation. Generally, the phonetic element is more accurate and more important than the semantic one. There are about 214 radicals recognized in the Kangxi Dictionary. Modern characters are styled after the standard script (楷书/楷書 kǎishū) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (篆书/篆書 zhuànshū), cursive script (草书/草書 cǎoshū) and clerical script (隶书/隸書 lìshū). Calligraphy artists can write in traditional and simplified characters, but tend to use traditional characters for traditional art. Various styles of Chinese calligraphy. There are currently two systems for Chinese characters. The traditional system, still used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau and Chinese speaking communities (except Singapore and Malaysia) outside mainland China, takes its form from standardized character forms dating back to the late Han dynasty. The Simplified Chinese character system, developed by the People's Republic of China in 1954 to promote mass literacy, simplifies most complex traditional glyphs to fewer strokes, many to common caoshu shorthand variants. Singapore, which has a large Chinese communities, is the first – and at present the only – foreign nation to officially adopt simplified characters, although it has also become the de facto standard for younger ethnic Chinese in Malaysia. The Internet provides the platform to practice reading the alternative system, be it traditional or simplified. A well-educated Chinese today recognizes approximately 6,000-7,000 characters; some 3,000 characters are required to read a Mainland newspaper. The PRC government defines literacy amongst workers as a knowledge of 2,000 characters, though this would be only functional literacy. A large unabridged dictionary, like the Kangxi Dictionary, contains over 40,000 characters, including obscure, variant, rare, and archaic characters; less than a quarter of these characters are now commonly used.'' Most linguists classify all varieties of modern spoken Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family and believe that there was an original language, termed Proto-Sino-Tibetan, 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 Proto-Sino-Tibetan. 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 Indo-European languages from PIE don't apply to Chinese because of "morphological paucity" especially after Old Chinese Analysis of the concept "wave" in PST. . 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; most present systems rely heavily on Karlgren's insights and methods. Old Chinese ( ), sometimes known as "Archaic Chinese", was the language common during the early and middle Zhōu Dynasty (1122 BCE - 256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the Shījīng, the history of the Shūjīng, and portions of the Yìjīng (I Ching). The phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters 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 was still without tones. Work on reconstructing Old Chinese started with Qīng dynasty philologists. Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably 蜜 mì "honey", 獅 shī "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mǎ "horse", 犬 quǎn "dog", and 鵝 é "goose". The source says the reconstructions of old Chinese are tentative, and not definitive so no conclusions should be drawn. The reconstruction of Old Chinese can not be perfect so this hypothesis may be called into question. Encyclopedia Britannica s.v. "Chinese languages": "Old Chinese vocabulary already contained many words not generally occurring in the other Sino-Tibetan languages. The words for ‘honey' and ‘lion,' and probably also ‘horse,' ‘dog,' and ‘goose,' are connected with Indo-European and were acquired through trade and early contacts. (The nearest known Indo-European languages were Tocharian and Sogdian, a middle Iranian language.) A number of words have Austroasiatic cognates and point to early contacts with the ancestral language of Muong-Vietnamese and Mon-Khmer" ; Jan Ulenbrook, Einige Übereinstimmungen zwischen dem Chinesischen und dem Indogermanischen (1967) proposes 57 items; see also Tsung-tung Chang, 1988 Indo-European Vocabulary in Old Chinese;. 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 the Suí, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the 切韻 "Qièyùn" rhyme table (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the 廣韻 "Guǎngyùn" rhyme table. 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, 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; some scholars have argued that trying to reconstruct, say, modern Cantonese from modern Cantopop rhymes would give a fairly inaccurate picture of the present-day spoken language. The development of the spoken Chinese languages from early historical times to the present has been complex. Most Chinese people, in Sìchuān 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 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 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, though, a single standard of Mandarin did not exist. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The new 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 Standard Mandarin. As a result, Mandarin is now spoken by virtually all young and middle-aged citizens of mainland China and on Taiwan. Standard 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. Chinese was once the Lingua franca for East Asia countries for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. Throughout history Chinese culture and politics has had a great influence on unrelated languages such as Korean 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 Hán tự. It was the only available method for writing Vietnamese until the 14th century, used almost exclusively by Chinese-educated Vietnamese élites. From the 14th to the late 19th century, Vietnamese was written with Chữ nôm, a modified Chinese script incorporating sounds and syllables for native Vietnamese speakers. Chữ nôm was completely replaced by a modified Latin script created by the Jesuit missionary priest Alexander de Rhodes, which incorporates a system of diacritical marks to indicate tones, as well as modified consonants. The Vietnamese language exhibits multiple elements similar to Cantonese in regard to the specific intonations and sharp consonant endings. There is also a slight influence from Mandarin, including the sharper vowels and "kh" (IPA:x) sound 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. In derived Chinese characters or Zhuang logograms to write songs, even though Zhuang is not a Chinese dialect. Since the 1950s, the Zhuang language has been written in a modified Latin alphabet. Zhou, Minglang: Multilingualism in China: The Politics of Writing Reforms for Minority Languages, 1949-2002 (Walter de Gruyter 2003); ISBN 3-11-017896-6; p. 251–258. Languages within the influence of Chinese culture also have a very large number of loanwords from Chinese. Fifty percent or more of Korean vocabulary is of Chinese origin and the influence on Japanese and Vietnamese has been considerable. At least five percent of all words in Tagalog are of Chinese origin. Chinese has also lent a great deal of many grammatical features to these and neighboring languages, notably the lack of gender and the use of classifiers. Japanese has also a lot of loanwords from Chinese, as does Vietnamese. Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of 茶 (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 茄汁 (ke chap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 金橘 (kam kuat). :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, which is only about an eighth as many as English DeFrancis (1984) p.42 counts Chinese as having 1,277 tonal syllables, and about 398 to 418 if tones are disregarded; he cites Jespersen, Otto (1928) Monosyllabism in English; London, p.15 for a count of over 8000 syllables for English. . 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 four main tones of Standard Mandarin applied to the syllable "ma." The tones correspond to these five characters: * "mother" — high level * "hemp" or "torpid" — high rising * "horse" — low falling-rising * "scold" — high falling * "question particle" — neutral The Chinese had no uniform phonetic transcription system until the mid-20th century, although enunciation patterns were recorded in early rime books and dictionaries. Early Sanskrit and Pali Indian translators were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of the language in a foreign language. After 15th century CE Jesuits and Western court missionaries’ efforts result in some rudimentary Latin transcription systems, based on the Nanjing Mandarin dialect. Romanization is the process of transcribing a language in the Latin alphabet. There are many systems of romanization for the Chinese languages due to the Chinese's own lack of phonetic transcription until modern times. Chinese is first known to have been written in Latin characters by Western Christian missionaries in the 16th century. Today the most common romanization standard for Standard Mandarin is Hanyu Pinyin (漢語拼音/汉语拼音), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore). Pinyin is almost universally employed now for teaching standard spoken Chinese in schools and universities across America, Australia and Europe. Chinese parents also use Pinyin to teach their children the sounds and tones for words with which the child is unfamiliar. The Pinyin is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, and alongside the Pinyin is the Chinese symbol. The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859, later modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As it approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels (hence an Anglicization), it may be particularly helpful for beginner speakers of native English background. Wade-Giles is found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan (Taipei city now officially uses Hanyu Pinyin and the rest of the island officially uses Tōngyòng Pinyin 通用拼音). When used within European texts, the tone transcriptions in both pinyin and Wade-Giles are often left out for simplicity; Wade-Giles' extensive use of apostrophes is also usually omitted. Thus, most Western readers will be much more familiar with Beijing than they will be with Běijīng (pinyin), and with Taipei than T'ai²-pei³ (Wade-Giles). Here are a few examples of Hanyu Pinyin and Wade-Giles, for comparison: Other systems of romanization for Chinese include Gwoyeu Romatzyh, the French EFEO, the Yale (invented during WWII for U.S. troops), as well as separate systems for Cantonese, Minnan, Hakka, and other Chinese languages or dialects. Chinese languages have been phonetically transcribed into many other writing systems over the centuries. The 'Phags-pa script, for example, has been very helpful in reconstructing the pronunciations of pre-modern forms of Chinese. Zhuyin (注音, also known as bopomofo), a semi-syllabary is still widely used in Taiwan's elementary schools to aid standard pronunciation. Although bopomofo characters are reminiscent of katakana script, there is no source to substantiate the claim that Katakana was the basis for the zhuyin system. A comparison table of zhuyin to pinyin exists in the zhuyin article. Syllables based on pinyin and zhuyin can also be compared by looking at the following articles: *Pinyin table *Zhuyin table There are also at least two systems of cyrillization for Chinese. The most widespread is the Palladius system. Modern Chinese has often been erroneously classed as a "monosyllabic" language. While most of the morphemes are single syllable, modern Chinese today is much less a monosyllabic language in that nouns, adjectives and verbs are largely di-syllabic. The tendency to create disyllabic words in the modern Chinese languages, particularly in Mandarin, has been particularly pronounced when compared to Classical Chinese. Classical Chinese is a highly isolating language, with each idea (morpheme) generally corresponding to a single syllable and a single character; Modern Chinese though, has the tendency to form new words through disyllabic, trisyllabic and tetra-character agglutination. In fact, some linguists argue that classifying modern Chinese as an isolating language is misleading, for this reason alone. Chinese morphology is strictly bound to a set number of syllables with a fairly rigid construction which are the morphemes, the smallest blocks of the language. While many of these single-syllable morphemes ( zì, 字 in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cí (词/詞), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cí (“word”) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more. For example: *Yun 云 -“cloud” *Hanbaobao 汉堡包 –“hamburger” *Wo 我 –“I, me” *Renmin 人民 –“people” *Diqiu 地球 –“earth(globosity)” *Shandian 闪电 –“lightning” *Meng 梦 –“dream” All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphology — i.e., changes in form of a word — to indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflections – it possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English), and no gender. They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le 了, hai 还, yijing 已经, etc. 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. Chinese also has an extensive system of measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring 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. Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess 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. Official modern Mandarin has only 400 spoken monosyllables but over 10,000 written characters, so there are many homophones only distinguishable by the four tones. Even this is often not enough unless the context and exact phrase or cí is identified. The mono-syllable jī, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: 雞/鸡 chicken, 機/机 machine, 基 basic, 擊/击 (to) hit, 饑/饥 hunger, and 積/积 sum. In speech, the glyphing of a monosyllable to its meaning must be determined by context or by relation to other morphemes (e.g. "some" as in the opposite of "none"). Native speakers may state which words or phrases their names are found in, for convenience of writing: 名字叫嘉英，嘉陵江的嘉，英國的英 Míngzi jiào Jiāyīng, Jiālíng Jiāng de jiā, Yīngguó de yīng "My name is Jiāyīng, the Jia for Jialing River and the ying for the short form in Chinese of UK." Southern Chinese varieties like Cantonese and Hakka preserved more of the rimes of Middle Chinese and have more tones. The previous examples of jī, for instance, 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 multi-syllabic words. The entire Chinese character corpus since antiquity comprises well over 20,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are now commonly in use. However Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words, there are many times more Chinese words than there are characters as most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters. Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and phrases vary greatly. The Hanyu Da Zidian, an all-inclusive compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries for characters, including bone oracle versions. The Zhonghua Zihai 中华字海 (1994) contains 85,568 head entries for character definitions, and is the largest reference work based purely on character and its literary variants. The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary, the 12-volumed Hanyu Da Cidian 汉语大词典, records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters, and gives over 370,000 definitions. The 1999 revised Cihai, a multi-volume encyclopedic dictionary reference work, gives 122,836 vocabulary entry definitions under 19,485 Chinese characters, including proper names, phrases and common zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific and technical terms. The latest 2007 5th edition of Xiandai Hanyu Cidian 现代汉语词典, an authoritative one-volume dictionary on modern standard Chinese language as used in mainland China, has 65,000 entries and defines 11,000 head characters. Like any other language, Chinese has absorbed a sizeable amount of loanwords from other cultures. 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 since Old Chinese include 葡萄 "grape," 石榴 "pomegranate" and 狮子/獅子 "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including 佛 "Buddha" and 菩萨/菩薩 "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as 胡同 "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as 葡萄 "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or Pāli, the liturgical languages of North India. Words borrowed from the nomadic tribes of the Gobi, Mongolian or northeast regions generally have Altaic etymologies, such as 琵琶 "pípa", the Chinese lute, or 酪 "cheese" or "yoghurt", but from exactly which Altaic source is not always entirely clear. Foreign words continue to enter the Chinese language by transcription according to their pronunciations. This is done by employing Chinese characters with similar pronunciations. For example, "Israel" becomes 以色列 (pinyin: yǐsèliè), Paris 巴黎. A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including 沙發 shāfā "sofa," 马达/馬達 mǎdá "motor," 幽默 yōumò "humour," 逻辑/邏輯 luójí "logic," 时髦/時髦 shímáo "smart, fashionable" and 歇斯底里 xiēsīdǐlǐ "hysterics." The bulk of these words were originally coined in the Shanghainese dialect during the early 20th century and were later loaned into Mandarin, hence their pronunciations in Mandarin may be quite off from the English. For example, 沙发/沙發 and 马达/馬達 in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor." Today, 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 德律风/德律風 ( Shanghainese: télífon [ ], Standard Mandarin: délǜfēng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese 电话/電話 (diànhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include 电视/電視 (diànshì "electric vision") for television, 电脑/電腦 (diànnǎo "electric brain") for computer; 手机/手機 (shǒujī "hand machine") for cellphone, and 蓝牙/藍芽 (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. 網誌(wǎng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as 汉堡包/漢堡包 (hànbǎo bāo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as 拖拉机/拖拉機 (tuōlājī, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马利奥/馬利奧 for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example 奔腾/奔騰 (bēnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and 赛百味/賽百味 (Sàibǎiwèi "better-than hundred tastes") for Subway restaurants. Since the 20th century, another source has been Japan. Using existing kanji, which are Chinese characters used in the Japanese language, the Japanese re-moulded European concepts and inventions into wasei-kango (和製漢語, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include diànhuà (电话/電話, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社会, shakai, "society"), kēxué (科学/科學, kagaku, "science") and chōuxiàng (抽象, chūshō, "abstract"). Other terms were coined by the Japanese by giving new senses to existing Chinese terms or by referring to expressions used in classical Chinese literature. For example, jīngjì (经济/經濟, keizai), which in the original Chinese meant "the workings of the state", was narrowed to "economy" in Japanese; this narrowed definition was then reimported into Chinese. As a result, these terms are virtually indistinguishable from native Chinese words: indeed, there is some dispute over some of these terms as to whether the Japanese or Chinese coined them first. As a result of this toing-and-froing process, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese share a corpus linguistics of terms describing modern terminology, in parallel to a similar corpus of terms built from Greco-Latin terms shared among European languages. Taiwanese and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便当/便當 “lunchbox or boxed lunch” (from bento) and 料理 “prepared cuisine”, have passed into common currency. Western foreign words have great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came 芭蕾 (bāléi, "ballet"), 香槟 (xiāngbīn, "champagne"), via Italian 咖啡 (kāfēi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned 沙發 (shāfā "sofa"), 幽默 (yōumò "humour"), and 高尔夫 (gāoěrfū, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪斯科 (dísīkè, "disco"), 可乐 (kělè, "cola") and 迷你 (mínǐ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon 卡通 (cartoon), 基佬 (gay people), 的士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. 粉絲 (fěnsī, "fans"), 駭客 (hèikè, "hacker"), 部落格(bùluōgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin. Since the People's Republic of China’s economic and political rise in recent years, standard Mandarin has become an increasingly popular subject of study amongst the young in the Western world, as in the UK. BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | How hard is it to learn Chinese? In 1991 there were 2,000 foreign learners taking China's official Chinese Proficiency Test (comparable to English's Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660 . *Chinese characters *Chinese honorifics *Chinese measure word *Chinese number gestures *Chinese numerals *Chinese punctuation *Chinese exclamative particles *Four-character idiom *Han unification *Haner language *HSK test *Languages of China *North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics *Nü shu * * * * * * Keys to the Chinese Language: Book II - Google Books * A Practical Chinese Grammar - Google Books * ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawai’i Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X. * ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-08248-2975-9. * Arch Chinese free online Chinese character and Pinyin learning, Chinese English dictionary, writing worksheet generation, etc. * CHINGLISH online Chinese English Dictionary * nciku free online Chinese dictionary with handwriting recognition, pinyin, sound clips, etc. * MDBG free online Chinese-English dictionary * Chinese Characters Dictionary: supports Japanese, Korean, Cantonese, Hakka etc. * Chinese - English Dictionary: from Webster's Online Dictionary - the Rosetta Edition * CEDICT Chinese-English Dictionary Project * Stardict free (GPL) multilanguage dictionary including simplified/traditional Chinese for Unix (Linux, FreeBSD, etc.) and win32 * English-Chinese Translation Dictionary: Chinese-English-Chinese Online Dictionary (Taiwan-based; simplified characters not recognised) * CantoDict: Cantonese-English Dictionary Project * Chinese Pronunciation Dictionary Input Chinese words or sentences, get audio file of Mandarin pronunciation. Web-based tool. * Pinyin Annotator Add pinyin on top of any Chinese text. Mouse over any word to see English translation. Save output to OpenOffice Writer format. Prints nicely. Also adds pinyin to any Chinese web page. *Firefox users can install Add-ons for a pinyin annotator * Multimedia Dictionary of Chinese Characters Language Tool, Offline Chinese Dictionary. * Chinese Scholar Dictionary Chinese English dictionary with Pinyin index * A Cognitive Approach to Beginning Chinese: Interactions I and II. Margaret Mian Yan and Jennifer Li-chia Liu, Indiana University * Chinese Language Information Page A collection of Chinese language learning resources. * Learn Chinese - One At A Time * China KeyBoard Google Engine * Oneaday.org One Chinese idiom a day (simplified and traditional characters) with pinyin transliteration and English translation. * Mandarin Tone Drill Testing your knowledge of Mandarin tones. * Pinyin Practice Pinyin practice for Mandarin learners in all levels * Marjorie Chan's ChinaLinks: A large collection of Web resources by a professor of linguistics at Ohio State University * 4 words of Chinese every day * Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard * Chinese Character of the Day Learn to Read Chinese one word at a time. * Audio files with basic Chinese words * General Introduction of Chinese Language * Learn Chinese Characters * Chinese Scholar: The Free Chinese Class Learn Chinese language and culture through interactive media
Chinese_language
Is standard Mandarin language of People Republic?
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data/set5/a7
Chinese_language Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) is a language family consisting of languages mutually unintelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. “The mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.” *Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. “The Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.” *Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. “The modern Chinese dialects are really more like a family of language. *John DeFrancis. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (1984), p.56. "To call Chinese a single language composed of dialects with varying degrees of difference is to mislead by minimizing disparities that according to Chao are as great as those between English and Dutch. To call Chinese a family of languages is to suggest extralinguistic differences that in fact do not exist and to overlook the unique linguistic situation that exists in China." Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the two branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages. About one-fifth of the world’s population, or over one billion people, speak some form of Chinese as their native language. The identification of the varieties of Chinese as "dialects" instead of "languages" is considered inappropriate by linguists and Sinologists. Spoken Chinese is distinguished by its high level of internal diversity, although all spoken varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic. There are between seven and thirteen main regional groups of Chinese (depending on classification scheme), of which the most spoken, by far, is Mandarin (about 850 million), followed by Wu (90 million), Min (70 million) and Cantonese (70 million). Most of these groups are mutually unintelligible, although some, like Xiang and the Southwest Mandarin dialects, may share common terms and some degree of intelligibility. Chinese is classified as a macrolanguage with 13 sub-languages in ISO 639-3, though the identification of the varieties of Chinese as multiple "languages" or as "dialects" of a single language is a contentious issue. The standardized form of spoken Chinese is Standard Mandarin (Putonghua / Guoyu / Huayu), based on the Beijing dialect, which is part of a larger group of North-Eastern and South-Western dialects, often taken as a separate language, see Mandarin Chinese for more, this language can be referred to as 官话 Guānhuà or 北方话 Běifānghuà in Chinese. Standard Mandarin is the official language of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC), as well as one of four official languages of Singapore. Chinese—de facto, Standard Mandarin—is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Of the other varieties, Standard Cantonese is common and influential in Guangdong Province and Cantonese-speaking overseas communities, and remains one of the official languages of Hong Kong (together with English) and of Macau (together with Portuguese). Hokkien, part of the Min language group, is widely spoken in southern Fujian, in neighbouring Taiwan (where it is known as Taiwanese or Hoklo) and in Southeast Asia (where it dominates in Singapore and Malaysia). Xinhua reported in March 2007 that 86 percent of people in the People's Republic of China spoke a Chinese variant. 全國約有53%的人能用普通話交流 As a language family, the number of Chinese speakers is 1.136 billion. The same news report indicates 53 percent of the population, or 700 million speakers, can effectively communicate in Putonghua. Sino-Tibetan language family. A map below depicts the linguistic subdivisions ("languages" or "dialect groups") within China itself. The traditionally-recognized seven main groups, in order of population size are: Chinese linguists have recently distinguished: 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. The Dungan language, spoken in Central Asia, is very closely related to Mandarin. However, it is not generally considered "Chinese" since it is written in Cyrillic and spoken by Dungan people outside China who are not considered ethnic Chinese. See List of Chinese dialects for a comprehensive listing of individual dialects within these large, broad groupings. In general, the above language-dialect groups do not have sharp boundaries, though Mandarin is the predominant Sinitic language in the North and the Southwest, and the rest are mostly spoken in Central or Southeastern China. Frequently, as in the case of the Guangdong province, native speakers of major variants overlapped. As with many areas that were linguistically diverse for a long time, it is not always clear how the speeches of various parts of China should be classified. The Ethnologue lists a total of 14, but the number varies between seven and seventeen depending on the classification scheme followed. For instance, the Min variety is often divided into Northern Min (Minbei, Fuchow) and Southern Min (Minnan, Amoy-Swatow); linguists have not determined whether their mutual intelligibility is small enough to sort them as separate languages. The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China. In general, mountainous South China displays more linguistic diversity than the flat North China. In parts of South China, a major city's dialect may only 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). Putonghua / Guoyu, often called "Mandarin", is the official standard language used by the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China, and Singapore (where it is called "Huayu"). It is based on the Beijing dialect, which is the dialect of Mandarin as spoken in Beijing. The governments intend for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. Therefore it is used in government agencies, in the media, and as a language of instruction in schools. In mainland China and Taiwan, diglossia has been a common feature: it is common for a Chinese to be able to speak two or even three varieties of the Sinitic languages (or “dialects”) together with Standard Mandarin. For example, in addition to putonghua a resident of Shanghai might speak Shanghainese and, if they did not grow up there, his or her local dialect as well. A native of Guangzhou may speak Standard Cantonese and putonghua, a resident of Taiwan, both Taiwanese and putonghua/guoyu. A person living in Taiwan 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, Standard Mandarin is beginning to take its place beside English and Standard Cantonese, the official languages. Linguists often view Chinese as a language family, though owing to China's socio-political and cultural situation, and the fact that all spoken varieties use one common written system, it is customary to refer to these generally mutually unintelligible variants as "the Chinese language". The diversity of Sinitic variants is comparable to the Romance languages. From a purely descriptive point of view, "languages" and "dialects" are simply arbitrary groups of similar idiolects, and the distinction is irrelevant to linguists who are only concerned with describing regional speeches technically. However, the idea of a single language has major overtones in politics and cultural self-identity, and explains the amount of emotion over this issue. Most Chinese and Chinese linguists refer to Chinese as a single language and its subdivisions dialects, while others call Chinese a language family. Chinese itself has a term for its unified writing system, Zhongwen (中文), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (汉语,“spoken language[s] of the Han Chinese) – this term could be translated to either “language” or “languages” since Chinese possesses no grammatical numbers. In the Chinese language, there is much less need for a uniform speech-and-writing continuum, as indicated by two separate character morphemes 语 yu and 文 wen. Ethnic Chinese often consider these spoken variations as one single language for reasons of nationality and as they inherit one common cultural and linguistic heritage in Classical Chinese. Han native speakers of Wu, Min, Hakka, and Cantonese, for instance, may consider their own linguistic varieties as separate spoken languages, but the Han Chinese race as one – albeit internally very diverse – ethnicity. To Chinese nationalists, the idea of Chinese as a language family may suggest that the Chinese identity is much more fragmentary and disunified than it actually is and as such is often looked upon as culturally and politically provocative. Additionally, in Taiwan, it is closely associated with Taiwanese independence, where some supporters of Taiwanese independence promote the local Taiwanese Minnan-based spoken language. Within the People’s Republic of China and Singapore, it is common for the government to refer to all divisions of the Sinitic language(s) beside Standard Mandarin as fangyan (“regional tongues”, often translated as “dialects”). Modern-day Chinese speakers of all kinds communicate using one formal standard written language, although this modern written standard is modeled after Mandarin, generally the modern Beijing substandard. The term sinophone, coined in analogy to anglophone and francophone, refers to those who speak the Chinese language natively, or prefer it as a medium of communication. The term is derived from Sinae, the Latin word for ancient China. :See also: Classical Chinese and Vernacular Chinese The relationship among the Chinese spoken and written languages is rather complex. Its spoken variations evolved at different rates, while written Chinese itself has changed much less. Classical Chinese literature began in the Spring and Autumn period, although written records have been discovered as far back as the 14th to 11th centuries BCE Shang dynasty oracle bones using the oracle bone scripts. The Chinese orthography centers around Chinese characters, hanzi, which are written within imaginary rectangular blocks, traditionally arranged in vertical columns, read from top to bottom down a column, and right to left across columns. Chinese characters are morphemes independent of phonetic change. Thus the number "one", yi in Mandarin, yat in Cantonese and chi̍t and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("一"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as 冇 and 係 for Cantonese and Hakka, which are considered archaic or unused in standard written Chinese. Written colloquial Cantonese has become quite popular in online chat rooms and instant messaging amongst Hong-Kongers and Cantonese-speakers elsewhere. Use of it is considered highly informal, and does not extend to any formal occasion. Also, in Hunan, some women write their local language in Nü Shu, a syllabary derived from Chinese characters. The Dungan language, considered by some 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 evolved over time from earliest forms of hieroglyphs. The idea that all Chinese characters are either pictographs or ideographs is an erroneous one: most characters contain phonetic parts, and are composites of phonetic components and semantic Radicals. Only the simplest characters, such as ren 人 (human), ri 日 (sun), shan 山 (mountain), shui 水 (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar Xǚ Shèn in the Hàn Dynasty classified characters into 6 categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80-90% as phonetic complexes consisting of a semantic element that indicates meaning, and a phonetic element that indicates the pronunciation. Generally, the phonetic element is more accurate and more important than the semantic one. There are about 214 radicals recognized in the Kangxi Dictionary. Modern characters are styled after the standard script (楷书/楷書 kǎishū) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (篆书/篆書 zhuànshū), cursive script (草书/草書 cǎoshū) and clerical script (隶书/隸書 lìshū). Calligraphy artists can write in traditional and simplified characters, but tend to use traditional characters for traditional art. Various styles of Chinese calligraphy. There are currently two systems for Chinese characters. The traditional system, still used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau and Chinese speaking communities (except Singapore and Malaysia) outside mainland China, takes its form from standardized character forms dating back to the late Han dynasty. The Simplified Chinese character system, developed by the People's Republic of China in 1954 to promote mass literacy, simplifies most complex traditional glyphs to fewer strokes, many to common caoshu shorthand variants. Singapore, which has a large Chinese communities, is the first – and at present the only – foreign nation to officially adopt simplified characters, although it has also become the de facto standard for younger ethnic Chinese in Malaysia. The Internet provides the platform to practice reading the alternative system, be it traditional or simplified. A well-educated Chinese today recognizes approximately 6,000-7,000 characters; some 3,000 characters are required to read a Mainland newspaper. The PRC government defines literacy amongst workers as a knowledge of 2,000 characters, though this would be only functional literacy. A large unabridged dictionary, like the Kangxi Dictionary, contains over 40,000 characters, including obscure, variant, rare, and archaic characters; less than a quarter of these characters are now commonly used.'' Most linguists classify all varieties of modern spoken Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family and believe that there was an original language, termed Proto-Sino-Tibetan, 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 Proto-Sino-Tibetan. 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 Indo-European languages from PIE don't apply to Chinese because of "morphological paucity" especially after Old Chinese Analysis of the concept "wave" in PST. . 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; most present systems rely heavily on Karlgren's insights and methods. Old Chinese ( ), sometimes known as "Archaic Chinese", was the language common during the early and middle Zhōu Dynasty (1122 BCE - 256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the Shījīng, the history of the Shūjīng, and portions of the Yìjīng (I Ching). The phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters 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 was still without tones. Work on reconstructing Old Chinese started with Qīng dynasty philologists. Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably 蜜 mì "honey", 獅 shī "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mǎ "horse", 犬 quǎn "dog", and 鵝 é "goose". The source says the reconstructions of old Chinese are tentative, and not definitive so no conclusions should be drawn. The reconstruction of Old Chinese can not be perfect so this hypothesis may be called into question. Encyclopedia Britannica s.v. "Chinese languages": "Old Chinese vocabulary already contained many words not generally occurring in the other Sino-Tibetan languages. The words for ‘honey' and ‘lion,' and probably also ‘horse,' ‘dog,' and ‘goose,' are connected with Indo-European and were acquired through trade and early contacts. (The nearest known Indo-European languages were Tocharian and Sogdian, a middle Iranian language.) A number of words have Austroasiatic cognates and point to early contacts with the ancestral language of Muong-Vietnamese and Mon-Khmer" ; Jan Ulenbrook, Einige Übereinstimmungen zwischen dem Chinesischen und dem Indogermanischen (1967) proposes 57 items; see also Tsung-tung Chang, 1988 Indo-European Vocabulary in Old Chinese;. 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 the Suí, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the 切韻 "Qièyùn" rhyme table (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the 廣韻 "Guǎngyùn" rhyme table. 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, 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; some scholars have argued that trying to reconstruct, say, modern Cantonese from modern Cantopop rhymes would give a fairly inaccurate picture of the present-day spoken language. The development of the spoken Chinese languages from early historical times to the present has been complex. Most Chinese people, in Sìchuān 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 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 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, though, a single standard of Mandarin did not exist. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The new 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 Standard Mandarin. As a result, Mandarin is now spoken by virtually all young and middle-aged citizens of mainland China and on Taiwan. Standard 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. Chinese was once the Lingua franca for East Asia countries for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. Throughout history Chinese culture and politics has had a great influence on unrelated languages such as Korean 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 Hán tự. It was the only available method for writing Vietnamese until the 14th century, used almost exclusively by Chinese-educated Vietnamese élites. From the 14th to the late 19th century, Vietnamese was written with Chữ nôm, a modified Chinese script incorporating sounds and syllables for native Vietnamese speakers. Chữ nôm was completely replaced by a modified Latin script created by the Jesuit missionary priest Alexander de Rhodes, which incorporates a system of diacritical marks to indicate tones, as well as modified consonants. The Vietnamese language exhibits multiple elements similar to Cantonese in regard to the specific intonations and sharp consonant endings. There is also a slight influence from Mandarin, including the sharper vowels and "kh" (IPA:x) sound 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. In derived Chinese characters or Zhuang logograms to write songs, even though Zhuang is not a Chinese dialect. Since the 1950s, the Zhuang language has been written in a modified Latin alphabet. Zhou, Minglang: Multilingualism in China: The Politics of Writing Reforms for Minority Languages, 1949-2002 (Walter de Gruyter 2003); ISBN 3-11-017896-6; p. 251–258. Languages within the influence of Chinese culture also have a very large number of loanwords from Chinese. Fifty percent or more of Korean vocabulary is of Chinese origin and the influence on Japanese and Vietnamese has been considerable. At least five percent of all words in Tagalog are of Chinese origin. Chinese has also lent a great deal of many grammatical features to these and neighboring languages, notably the lack of gender and the use of classifiers. Japanese has also a lot of loanwords from Chinese, as does Vietnamese. Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of 茶 (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 茄汁 (ke chap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 金橘 (kam kuat). :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, which is only about an eighth as many as English DeFrancis (1984) p.42 counts Chinese as having 1,277 tonal syllables, and about 398 to 418 if tones are disregarded; he cites Jespersen, Otto (1928) Monosyllabism in English; London, p.15 for a count of over 8000 syllables for English. . 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 four main tones of Standard Mandarin applied to the syllable "ma." The tones correspond to these five characters: * "mother" — high level * "hemp" or "torpid" — high rising * "horse" — low falling-rising * "scold" — high falling * "question particle" — neutral The Chinese had no uniform phonetic transcription system until the mid-20th century, although enunciation patterns were recorded in early rime books and dictionaries. Early Sanskrit and Pali Indian translators were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of the language in a foreign language. After 15th century CE Jesuits and Western court missionaries’ efforts result in some rudimentary Latin transcription systems, based on the Nanjing Mandarin dialect. Romanization is the process of transcribing a language in the Latin alphabet. There are many systems of romanization for the Chinese languages due to the Chinese's own lack of phonetic transcription until modern times. Chinese is first known to have been written in Latin characters by Western Christian missionaries in the 16th century. Today the most common romanization standard for Standard Mandarin is Hanyu Pinyin (漢語拼音/汉语拼音), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore). Pinyin is almost universally employed now for teaching standard spoken Chinese in schools and universities across America, Australia and Europe. Chinese parents also use Pinyin to teach their children the sounds and tones for words with which the child is unfamiliar. The Pinyin is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, and alongside the Pinyin is the Chinese symbol. The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859, later modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As it approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels (hence an Anglicization), it may be particularly helpful for beginner speakers of native English background. Wade-Giles is found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan (Taipei city now officially uses Hanyu Pinyin and the rest of the island officially uses Tōngyòng Pinyin 通用拼音). When used within European texts, the tone transcriptions in both pinyin and Wade-Giles are often left out for simplicity; Wade-Giles' extensive use of apostrophes is also usually omitted. Thus, most Western readers will be much more familiar with Beijing than they will be with Běijīng (pinyin), and with Taipei than T'ai²-pei³ (Wade-Giles). Here are a few examples of Hanyu Pinyin and Wade-Giles, for comparison: Other systems of romanization for Chinese include Gwoyeu Romatzyh, the French EFEO, the Yale (invented during WWII for U.S. troops), as well as separate systems for Cantonese, Minnan, Hakka, and other Chinese languages or dialects. Chinese languages have been phonetically transcribed into many other writing systems over the centuries. The 'Phags-pa script, for example, has been very helpful in reconstructing the pronunciations of pre-modern forms of Chinese. Zhuyin (注音, also known as bopomofo), a semi-syllabary is still widely used in Taiwan's elementary schools to aid standard pronunciation. Although bopomofo characters are reminiscent of katakana script, there is no source to substantiate the claim that Katakana was the basis for the zhuyin system. A comparison table of zhuyin to pinyin exists in the zhuyin article. Syllables based on pinyin and zhuyin can also be compared by looking at the following articles: *Pinyin table *Zhuyin table There are also at least two systems of cyrillization for Chinese. The most widespread is the Palladius system. Modern Chinese has often been erroneously classed as a "monosyllabic" language. While most of the morphemes are single syllable, modern Chinese today is much less a monosyllabic language in that nouns, adjectives and verbs are largely di-syllabic. The tendency to create disyllabic words in the modern Chinese languages, particularly in Mandarin, has been particularly pronounced when compared to Classical Chinese. Classical Chinese is a highly isolating language, with each idea (morpheme) generally corresponding to a single syllable and a single character; Modern Chinese though, has the tendency to form new words through disyllabic, trisyllabic and tetra-character agglutination. In fact, some linguists argue that classifying modern Chinese as an isolating language is misleading, for this reason alone. Chinese morphology is strictly bound to a set number of syllables with a fairly rigid construction which are the morphemes, the smallest blocks of the language. While many of these single-syllable morphemes ( zì, 字 in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cí (词/詞), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cí (“word”) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more. For example: *Yun 云 -“cloud” *Hanbaobao 汉堡包 –“hamburger” *Wo 我 –“I, me” *Renmin 人民 –“people” *Diqiu 地球 –“earth(globosity)” *Shandian 闪电 –“lightning” *Meng 梦 –“dream” All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphology — i.e., changes in form of a word — to indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflections – it possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English), and no gender. They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le 了, hai 还, yijing 已经, etc. 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. Chinese also has an extensive system of measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring 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. Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess 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. Official modern Mandarin has only 400 spoken monosyllables but over 10,000 written characters, so there are many homophones only distinguishable by the four tones. Even this is often not enough unless the context and exact phrase or cí is identified. The mono-syllable jī, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: 雞/鸡 chicken, 機/机 machine, 基 basic, 擊/击 (to) hit, 饑/饥 hunger, and 積/积 sum. In speech, the glyphing of a monosyllable to its meaning must be determined by context or by relation to other morphemes (e.g. "some" as in the opposite of "none"). Native speakers may state which words or phrases their names are found in, for convenience of writing: 名字叫嘉英，嘉陵江的嘉，英國的英 Míngzi jiào Jiāyīng, Jiālíng Jiāng de jiā, Yīngguó de yīng "My name is Jiāyīng, the Jia for Jialing River and the ying for the short form in Chinese of UK." Southern Chinese varieties like Cantonese and Hakka preserved more of the rimes of Middle Chinese and have more tones. The previous examples of jī, for instance, 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 multi-syllabic words. The entire Chinese character corpus since antiquity comprises well over 20,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are now commonly in use. However Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words, there are many times more Chinese words than there are characters as most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters. Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and phrases vary greatly. The Hanyu Da Zidian, an all-inclusive compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries for characters, including bone oracle versions. The Zhonghua Zihai 中华字海 (1994) contains 85,568 head entries for character definitions, and is the largest reference work based purely on character and its literary variants. The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary, the 12-volumed Hanyu Da Cidian 汉语大词典, records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters, and gives over 370,000 definitions. The 1999 revised Cihai, a multi-volume encyclopedic dictionary reference work, gives 122,836 vocabulary entry definitions under 19,485 Chinese characters, including proper names, phrases and common zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific and technical terms. The latest 2007 5th edition of Xiandai Hanyu Cidian 现代汉语词典, an authoritative one-volume dictionary on modern standard Chinese language as used in mainland China, has 65,000 entries and defines 11,000 head characters. Like any other language, Chinese has absorbed a sizeable amount of loanwords from other cultures. 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 since Old Chinese include 葡萄 "grape," 石榴 "pomegranate" and 狮子/獅子 "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including 佛 "Buddha" and 菩萨/菩薩 "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as 胡同 "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as 葡萄 "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or Pāli, the liturgical languages of North India. Words borrowed from the nomadic tribes of the Gobi, Mongolian or northeast regions generally have Altaic etymologies, such as 琵琶 "pípa", the Chinese lute, or 酪 "cheese" or "yoghurt", but from exactly which Altaic source is not always entirely clear. Foreign words continue to enter the Chinese language by transcription according to their pronunciations. This is done by employing Chinese characters with similar pronunciations. For example, "Israel" becomes 以色列 (pinyin: yǐsèliè), Paris 巴黎. A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including 沙發 shāfā "sofa," 马达/馬達 mǎdá "motor," 幽默 yōumò "humour," 逻辑/邏輯 luójí "logic," 时髦/時髦 shímáo "smart, fashionable" and 歇斯底里 xiēsīdǐlǐ "hysterics." The bulk of these words were originally coined in the Shanghainese dialect during the early 20th century and were later loaned into Mandarin, hence their pronunciations in Mandarin may be quite off from the English. For example, 沙发/沙發 and 马达/馬達 in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor." Today, 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 德律风/德律風 ( Shanghainese: télífon [ ], Standard Mandarin: délǜfēng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese 电话/電話 (diànhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include 电视/電視 (diànshì "electric vision") for television, 电脑/電腦 (diànnǎo "electric brain") for computer; 手机/手機 (shǒujī "hand machine") for cellphone, and 蓝牙/藍芽 (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. 網誌(wǎng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as 汉堡包/漢堡包 (hànbǎo bāo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as 拖拉机/拖拉機 (tuōlājī, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马利奥/馬利奧 for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example 奔腾/奔騰 (bēnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and 赛百味/賽百味 (Sàibǎiwèi "better-than hundred tastes") for Subway restaurants. Since the 20th century, another source has been Japan. Using existing kanji, which are Chinese characters used in the Japanese language, the Japanese re-moulded European concepts and inventions into wasei-kango (和製漢語, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include diànhuà (电话/電話, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社会, shakai, "society"), kēxué (科学/科學, kagaku, "science") and chōuxiàng (抽象, chūshō, "abstract"). Other terms were coined by the Japanese by giving new senses to existing Chinese terms or by referring to expressions used in classical Chinese literature. For example, jīngjì (经济/經濟, keizai), which in the original Chinese meant "the workings of the state", was narrowed to "economy" in Japanese; this narrowed definition was then reimported into Chinese. As a result, these terms are virtually indistinguishable from native Chinese words: indeed, there is some dispute over some of these terms as to whether the Japanese or Chinese coined them first. As a result of this toing-and-froing process, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese share a corpus linguistics of terms describing modern terminology, in parallel to a similar corpus of terms built from Greco-Latin terms shared among European languages. Taiwanese and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便当/便當 “lunchbox or boxed lunch” (from bento) and 料理 “prepared cuisine”, have passed into common currency. Western foreign words have great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came 芭蕾 (bāléi, "ballet"), 香槟 (xiāngbīn, "champagne"), via Italian 咖啡 (kāfēi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned 沙發 (shāfā "sofa"), 幽默 (yōumò "humour"), and 高尔夫 (gāoěrfū, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪斯科 (dísīkè, "disco"), 可乐 (kělè, "cola") and 迷你 (mínǐ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon 卡通 (cartoon), 基佬 (gay people), 的士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. 粉絲 (fěnsī, "fans"), 駭客 (hèikè, "hacker"), 部落格(bùluōgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin. Since the People's Republic of China’s economic and political rise in recent years, standard Mandarin has become an increasingly popular subject of study amongst the young in the Western world, as in the UK. BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | How hard is it to learn Chinese? In 1991 there were 2,000 foreign learners taking China's official Chinese Proficiency Test (comparable to English's Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660 . *Chinese characters *Chinese honorifics *Chinese measure word *Chinese number gestures *Chinese numerals *Chinese punctuation *Chinese exclamative particles *Four-character idiom *Han unification *Haner language *HSK test *Languages of China *North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics *Nü shu * * * * * * Keys to the Chinese Language: Book II - Google Books * A Practical Chinese Grammar - Google Books * ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawai’i Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X. * ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-08248-2975-9. * Arch Chinese free online Chinese character and Pinyin learning, Chinese English dictionary, writing worksheet generation, etc. * CHINGLISH online Chinese English Dictionary * nciku free online Chinese dictionary with handwriting recognition, pinyin, sound clips, etc. * MDBG free online Chinese-English dictionary * Chinese Characters Dictionary: supports Japanese, Korean, Cantonese, Hakka etc. * Chinese - English Dictionary: from Webster's Online Dictionary - the Rosetta Edition * CEDICT Chinese-English Dictionary Project * Stardict free (GPL) multilanguage dictionary including simplified/traditional Chinese for Unix (Linux, FreeBSD, etc.) and win32 * English-Chinese Translation Dictionary: Chinese-English-Chinese Online Dictionary (Taiwan-based; simplified characters not recognised) * CantoDict: Cantonese-English Dictionary Project * Chinese Pronunciation Dictionary Input Chinese words or sentences, get audio file of Mandarin pronunciation. Web-based tool. * Pinyin Annotator Add pinyin on top of any Chinese text. Mouse over any word to see English translation. Save output to OpenOffice Writer format. Prints nicely. Also adds pinyin to any Chinese web page. *Firefox users can install Add-ons for a pinyin annotator * Multimedia Dictionary of Chinese Characters Language Tool, Offline Chinese Dictionary. * Chinese Scholar Dictionary Chinese English dictionary with Pinyin index * A Cognitive Approach to Beginning Chinese: Interactions I and II. Margaret Mian Yan and Jennifer Li-chia Liu, Indiana University * Chinese Language Information Page A collection of Chinese language learning resources. * Learn Chinese - One At A Time * China KeyBoard Google Engine * Oneaday.org One Chinese idiom a day (simplified and traditional characters) with pinyin transliteration and English translation. * Mandarin Tone Drill Testing your knowledge of Mandarin tones. * Pinyin Practice Pinyin practice for Mandarin learners in all levels * Marjorie Chan's ChinaLinks: A large collection of Web resources by a professor of linguistics at Ohio State University * 4 words of Chinese every day * Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard * Chinese Character of the Day Learn to Read Chinese one word at a time. * Audio files with basic Chinese words * General Introduction of Chinese Language * Learn Chinese Characters * Chinese Scholar: The Free Chinese Class Learn Chinese language and culture through interactive media
Chinese_language
Are there many systems of romanization for the chinese languages due to the Chinese`s own lack of phonetic transcription until modern times ?
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Chinese_language Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) is a language family consisting of languages mutually unintelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. “The mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.” *Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. “The Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.” *Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. “The modern Chinese dialects are really more like a family of language. *John DeFrancis. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (1984), p.56. "To call Chinese a single language composed of dialects with varying degrees of difference is to mislead by minimizing disparities that according to Chao are as great as those between English and Dutch. To call Chinese a family of languages is to suggest extralinguistic differences that in fact do not exist and to overlook the unique linguistic situation that exists in China." Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the two branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages. About one-fifth of the world’s population, or over one billion people, speak some form of Chinese as their native language. The identification of the varieties of Chinese as "dialects" instead of "languages" is considered inappropriate by linguists and Sinologists. Spoken Chinese is distinguished by its high level of internal diversity, although all spoken varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic. There are between seven and thirteen main regional groups of Chinese (depending on classification scheme), of which the most spoken, by far, is Mandarin (about 850 million), followed by Wu (90 million), Min (70 million) and Cantonese (70 million). Most of these groups are mutually unintelligible, although some, like Xiang and the Southwest Mandarin dialects, may share common terms and some degree of intelligibility. Chinese is classified as a macrolanguage with 13 sub-languages in ISO 639-3, though the identification of the varieties of Chinese as multiple "languages" or as "dialects" of a single language is a contentious issue. The standardized form of spoken Chinese is Standard Mandarin (Putonghua / Guoyu / Huayu), based on the Beijing dialect, which is part of a larger group of North-Eastern and South-Western dialects, often taken as a separate language, see Mandarin Chinese for more, this language can be referred to as 官话 Guānhuà or 北方话 Běifānghuà in Chinese. Standard Mandarin is the official language of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC), as well as one of four official languages of Singapore. Chinese—de facto, Standard Mandarin—is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Of the other varieties, Standard Cantonese is common and influential in Guangdong Province and Cantonese-speaking overseas communities, and remains one of the official languages of Hong Kong (together with English) and of Macau (together with Portuguese). Hokkien, part of the Min language group, is widely spoken in southern Fujian, in neighbouring Taiwan (where it is known as Taiwanese or Hoklo) and in Southeast Asia (where it dominates in Singapore and Malaysia). Xinhua reported in March 2007 that 86 percent of people in the People's Republic of China spoke a Chinese variant. 全國約有53%的人能用普通話交流 As a language family, the number of Chinese speakers is 1.136 billion. The same news report indicates 53 percent of the population, or 700 million speakers, can effectively communicate in Putonghua. Sino-Tibetan language family. A map below depicts the linguistic subdivisions ("languages" or "dialect groups") within China itself. The traditionally-recognized seven main groups, in order of population size are: Chinese linguists have recently distinguished: 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. The Dungan language, spoken in Central Asia, is very closely related to Mandarin. However, it is not generally considered "Chinese" since it is written in Cyrillic and spoken by Dungan people outside China who are not considered ethnic Chinese. See List of Chinese dialects for a comprehensive listing of individual dialects within these large, broad groupings. In general, the above language-dialect groups do not have sharp boundaries, though Mandarin is the predominant Sinitic language in the North and the Southwest, and the rest are mostly spoken in Central or Southeastern China. Frequently, as in the case of the Guangdong province, native speakers of major variants overlapped. As with many areas that were linguistically diverse for a long time, it is not always clear how the speeches of various parts of China should be classified. The Ethnologue lists a total of 14, but the number varies between seven and seventeen depending on the classification scheme followed. For instance, the Min variety is often divided into Northern Min (Minbei, Fuchow) and Southern Min (Minnan, Amoy-Swatow); linguists have not determined whether their mutual intelligibility is small enough to sort them as separate languages. The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China. In general, mountainous South China displays more linguistic diversity than the flat North China. In parts of South China, a major city's dialect may only 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). Putonghua / Guoyu, often called "Mandarin", is the official standard language used by the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China, and Singapore (where it is called "Huayu"). It is based on the Beijing dialect, which is the dialect of Mandarin as spoken in Beijing. The governments intend for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. Therefore it is used in government agencies, in the media, and as a language of instruction in schools. In mainland China and Taiwan, diglossia has been a common feature: it is common for a Chinese to be able to speak two or even three varieties of the Sinitic languages (or “dialects”) together with Standard Mandarin. For example, in addition to putonghua a resident of Shanghai might speak Shanghainese and, if they did not grow up there, his or her local dialect as well. A native of Guangzhou may speak Standard Cantonese and putonghua, a resident of Taiwan, both Taiwanese and putonghua/guoyu. A person living in Taiwan 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, Standard Mandarin is beginning to take its place beside English and Standard Cantonese, the official languages. Linguists often view Chinese as a language family, though owing to China's socio-political and cultural situation, and the fact that all spoken varieties use one common written system, it is customary to refer to these generally mutually unintelligible variants as "the Chinese language". The diversity of Sinitic variants is comparable to the Romance languages. From a purely descriptive point of view, "languages" and "dialects" are simply arbitrary groups of similar idiolects, and the distinction is irrelevant to linguists who are only concerned with describing regional speeches technically. However, the idea of a single language has major overtones in politics and cultural self-identity, and explains the amount of emotion over this issue. Most Chinese and Chinese linguists refer to Chinese as a single language and its subdivisions dialects, while others call Chinese a language family. Chinese itself has a term for its unified writing system, Zhongwen (中文), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (汉语,“spoken language[s] of the Han Chinese) – this term could be translated to either “language” or “languages” since Chinese possesses no grammatical numbers. In the Chinese language, there is much less need for a uniform speech-and-writing continuum, as indicated by two separate character morphemes 语 yu and 文 wen. Ethnic Chinese often consider these spoken variations as one single language for reasons of nationality and as they inherit one common cultural and linguistic heritage in Classical Chinese. Han native speakers of Wu, Min, Hakka, and Cantonese, for instance, may consider their own linguistic varieties as separate spoken languages, but the Han Chinese race as one – albeit internally very diverse – ethnicity. To Chinese nationalists, the idea of Chinese as a language family may suggest that the Chinese identity is much more fragmentary and disunified than it actually is and as such is often looked upon as culturally and politically provocative. Additionally, in Taiwan, it is closely associated with Taiwanese independence, where some supporters of Taiwanese independence promote the local Taiwanese Minnan-based spoken language. Within the People’s Republic of China and Singapore, it is common for the government to refer to all divisions of the Sinitic language(s) beside Standard Mandarin as fangyan (“regional tongues”, often translated as “dialects”). Modern-day Chinese speakers of all kinds communicate using one formal standard written language, although this modern written standard is modeled after Mandarin, generally the modern Beijing substandard. The term sinophone, coined in analogy to anglophone and francophone, refers to those who speak the Chinese language natively, or prefer it as a medium of communication. The term is derived from Sinae, the Latin word for ancient China. :See also: Classical Chinese and Vernacular Chinese The relationship among the Chinese spoken and written languages is rather complex. Its spoken variations evolved at different rates, while written Chinese itself has changed much less. Classical Chinese literature began in the Spring and Autumn period, although written records have been discovered as far back as the 14th to 11th centuries BCE Shang dynasty oracle bones using the oracle bone scripts. The Chinese orthography centers around Chinese characters, hanzi, which are written within imaginary rectangular blocks, traditionally arranged in vertical columns, read from top to bottom down a column, and right to left across columns. Chinese characters are morphemes independent of phonetic change. Thus the number "one", yi in Mandarin, yat in Cantonese and chi̍t and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("一"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as 冇 and 係 for Cantonese and Hakka, which are considered archaic or unused in standard written Chinese. Written colloquial Cantonese has become quite popular in online chat rooms and instant messaging amongst Hong-Kongers and Cantonese-speakers elsewhere. Use of it is considered highly informal, and does not extend to any formal occasion. Also, in Hunan, some women write their local language in Nü Shu, a syllabary derived from Chinese characters. The Dungan language, considered by some 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 evolved over time from earliest forms of hieroglyphs. The idea that all Chinese characters are either pictographs or ideographs is an erroneous one: most characters contain phonetic parts, and are composites of phonetic components and semantic Radicals. Only the simplest characters, such as ren 人 (human), ri 日 (sun), shan 山 (mountain), shui 水 (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar Xǚ Shèn in the Hàn Dynasty classified characters into 6 categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80-90% as phonetic complexes consisting of a semantic element that indicates meaning, and a phonetic element that indicates the pronunciation. Generally, the phonetic element is more accurate and more important than the semantic one. There are about 214 radicals recognized in the Kangxi Dictionary. Modern characters are styled after the standard script (楷书/楷書 kǎishū) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (篆书/篆書 zhuànshū), cursive script (草书/草書 cǎoshū) and clerical script (隶书/隸書 lìshū). Calligraphy artists can write in traditional and simplified characters, but tend to use traditional characters for traditional art. Various styles of Chinese calligraphy. There are currently two systems for Chinese characters. The traditional system, still used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau and Chinese speaking communities (except Singapore and Malaysia) outside mainland China, takes its form from standardized character forms dating back to the late Han dynasty. The Simplified Chinese character system, developed by the People's Republic of China in 1954 to promote mass literacy, simplifies most complex traditional glyphs to fewer strokes, many to common caoshu shorthand variants. Singapore, which has a large Chinese communities, is the first – and at present the only – foreign nation to officially adopt simplified characters, although it has also become the de facto standard for younger ethnic Chinese in Malaysia. The Internet provides the platform to practice reading the alternative system, be it traditional or simplified. A well-educated Chinese today recognizes approximately 6,000-7,000 characters; some 3,000 characters are required to read a Mainland newspaper. The PRC government defines literacy amongst workers as a knowledge of 2,000 characters, though this would be only functional literacy. A large unabridged dictionary, like the Kangxi Dictionary, contains over 40,000 characters, including obscure, variant, rare, and archaic characters; less than a quarter of these characters are now commonly used.'' Most linguists classify all varieties of modern spoken Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family and believe that there was an original language, termed Proto-Sino-Tibetan, 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 Proto-Sino-Tibetan. 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 Indo-European languages from PIE don't apply to Chinese because of "morphological paucity" especially after Old Chinese Analysis of the concept "wave" in PST. . 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; most present systems rely heavily on Karlgren's insights and methods. Old Chinese ( ), sometimes known as "Archaic Chinese", was the language common during the early and middle Zhōu Dynasty (1122 BCE - 256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the Shījīng, the history of the Shūjīng, and portions of the Yìjīng (I Ching). The phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters 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 was still without tones. Work on reconstructing Old Chinese started with Qīng dynasty philologists. Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably 蜜 mì "honey", 獅 shī "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mǎ "horse", 犬 quǎn "dog", and 鵝 é "goose". The source says the reconstructions of old Chinese are tentative, and not definitive so no conclusions should be drawn. The reconstruction of Old Chinese can not be perfect so this hypothesis may be called into question. Encyclopedia Britannica s.v. "Chinese languages": "Old Chinese vocabulary already contained many words not generally occurring in the other Sino-Tibetan languages. The words for ‘honey' and ‘lion,' and probably also ‘horse,' ‘dog,' and ‘goose,' are connected with Indo-European and were acquired through trade and early contacts. (The nearest known Indo-European languages were Tocharian and Sogdian, a middle Iranian language.) A number of words have Austroasiatic cognates and point to early contacts with the ancestral language of Muong-Vietnamese and Mon-Khmer" ; Jan Ulenbrook, Einige Übereinstimmungen zwischen dem Chinesischen und dem Indogermanischen (1967) proposes 57 items; see also Tsung-tung Chang, 1988 Indo-European Vocabulary in Old Chinese;. 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 the Suí, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the 切韻 "Qièyùn" rhyme table (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the 廣韻 "Guǎngyùn" rhyme table. 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, 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; some scholars have argued that trying to reconstruct, say, modern Cantonese from modern Cantopop rhymes would give a fairly inaccurate picture of the present-day spoken language. The development of the spoken Chinese languages from early historical times to the present has been complex. Most Chinese people, in Sìchuān 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 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 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, though, a single standard of Mandarin did not exist. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The new 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 Standard Mandarin. As a result, Mandarin is now spoken by virtually all young and middle-aged citizens of mainland China and on Taiwan. Standard 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. Chinese was once the Lingua franca for East Asia countries for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. Throughout history Chinese culture and politics has had a great influence on unrelated languages such as Korean 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 Hán tự. It was the only available method for writing Vietnamese until the 14th century, used almost exclusively by Chinese-educated Vietnamese élites. From the 14th to the late 19th century, Vietnamese was written with Chữ nôm, a modified Chinese script incorporating sounds and syllables for native Vietnamese speakers. Chữ nôm was completely replaced by a modified Latin script created by the Jesuit missionary priest Alexander de Rhodes, which incorporates a system of diacritical marks to indicate tones, as well as modified consonants. The Vietnamese language exhibits multiple elements similar to Cantonese in regard to the specific intonations and sharp consonant endings. There is also a slight influence from Mandarin, including the sharper vowels and "kh" (IPA:x) sound 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. In derived Chinese characters or Zhuang logograms to write songs, even though Zhuang is not a Chinese dialect. Since the 1950s, the Zhuang language has been written in a modified Latin alphabet. Zhou, Minglang: Multilingualism in China: The Politics of Writing Reforms for Minority Languages, 1949-2002 (Walter de Gruyter 2003); ISBN 3-11-017896-6; p. 251–258. Languages within the influence of Chinese culture also have a very large number of loanwords from Chinese. Fifty percent or more of Korean vocabulary is of Chinese origin and the influence on Japanese and Vietnamese has been considerable. At least five percent of all words in Tagalog are of Chinese origin. Chinese has also lent a great deal of many grammatical features to these and neighboring languages, notably the lack of gender and the use of classifiers. Japanese has also a lot of loanwords from Chinese, as does Vietnamese. Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of 茶 (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 茄汁 (ke chap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 金橘 (kam kuat). :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, which is only about an eighth as many as English DeFrancis (1984) p.42 counts Chinese as having 1,277 tonal syllables, and about 398 to 418 if tones are disregarded; he cites Jespersen, Otto (1928) Monosyllabism in English; London, p.15 for a count of over 8000 syllables for English. . 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 four main tones of Standard Mandarin applied to the syllable "ma." The tones correspond to these five characters: * "mother" — high level * "hemp" or "torpid" — high rising * "horse" — low falling-rising * "scold" — high falling * "question particle" — neutral The Chinese had no uniform phonetic transcription system until the mid-20th century, although enunciation patterns were recorded in early rime books and dictionaries. Early Sanskrit and Pali Indian translators were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of the language in a foreign language. After 15th century CE Jesuits and Western court missionaries’ efforts result in some rudimentary Latin transcription systems, based on the Nanjing Mandarin dialect. Romanization is the process of transcribing a language in the Latin alphabet. There are many systems of romanization for the Chinese languages due to the Chinese's own lack of phonetic transcription until modern times. Chinese is first known to have been written in Latin characters by Western Christian missionaries in the 16th century. Today the most common romanization standard for Standard Mandarin is Hanyu Pinyin (漢語拼音/汉语拼音), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore). Pinyin is almost universally employed now for teaching standard spoken Chinese in schools and universities across America, Australia and Europe. Chinese parents also use Pinyin to teach their children the sounds and tones for words with which the child is unfamiliar. The Pinyin is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, and alongside the Pinyin is the Chinese symbol. The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859, later modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As it approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels (hence an Anglicization), it may be particularly helpful for beginner speakers of native English background. Wade-Giles is found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan (Taipei city now officially uses Hanyu Pinyin and the rest of the island officially uses Tōngyòng Pinyin 通用拼音). When used within European texts, the tone transcriptions in both pinyin and Wade-Giles are often left out for simplicity; Wade-Giles' extensive use of apostrophes is also usually omitted. Thus, most Western readers will be much more familiar with Beijing than they will be with Běijīng (pinyin), and with Taipei than T'ai²-pei³ (Wade-Giles). Here are a few examples of Hanyu Pinyin and Wade-Giles, for comparison: Other systems of romanization for Chinese include Gwoyeu Romatzyh, the French EFEO, the Yale (invented during WWII for U.S. troops), as well as separate systems for Cantonese, Minnan, Hakka, and other Chinese languages or dialects. Chinese languages have been phonetically transcribed into many other writing systems over the centuries. The 'Phags-pa script, for example, has been very helpful in reconstructing the pronunciations of pre-modern forms of Chinese. Zhuyin (注音, also known as bopomofo), a semi-syllabary is still widely used in Taiwan's elementary schools to aid standard pronunciation. Although bopomofo characters are reminiscent of katakana script, there is no source to substantiate the claim that Katakana was the basis for the zhuyin system. A comparison table of zhuyin to pinyin exists in the zhuyin article. Syllables based on pinyin and zhuyin can also be compared by looking at the following articles: *Pinyin table *Zhuyin table There are also at least two systems of cyrillization for Chinese. The most widespread is the Palladius system. Modern Chinese has often been erroneously classed as a "monosyllabic" language. While most of the morphemes are single syllable, modern Chinese today is much less a monosyllabic language in that nouns, adjectives and verbs are largely di-syllabic. The tendency to create disyllabic words in the modern Chinese languages, particularly in Mandarin, has been particularly pronounced when compared to Classical Chinese. Classical Chinese is a highly isolating language, with each idea (morpheme) generally corresponding to a single syllable and a single character; Modern Chinese though, has the tendency to form new words through disyllabic, trisyllabic and tetra-character agglutination. In fact, some linguists argue that classifying modern Chinese as an isolating language is misleading, for this reason alone. Chinese morphology is strictly bound to a set number of syllables with a fairly rigid construction which are the morphemes, the smallest blocks of the language. While many of these single-syllable morphemes ( zì, 字 in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cí (词/詞), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cí (“word”) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more. For example: *Yun 云 -“cloud” *Hanbaobao 汉堡包 –“hamburger” *Wo 我 –“I, me” *Renmin 人民 –“people” *Diqiu 地球 –“earth(globosity)” *Shandian 闪电 –“lightning” *Meng 梦 –“dream” All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphology — i.e., changes in form of a word — to indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflections – it possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English), and no gender. They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le 了, hai 还, yijing 已经, etc. 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. Chinese also has an extensive system of measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring 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. Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess 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. Official modern Mandarin has only 400 spoken monosyllables but over 10,000 written characters, so there are many homophones only distinguishable by the four tones. Even this is often not enough unless the context and exact phrase or cí is identified. The mono-syllable jī, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: 雞/鸡 chicken, 機/机 machine, 基 basic, 擊/击 (to) hit, 饑/饥 hunger, and 積/积 sum. In speech, the glyphing of a monosyllable to its meaning must be determined by context or by relation to other morphemes (e.g. "some" as in the opposite of "none"). Native speakers may state which words or phrases their names are found in, for convenience of writing: 名字叫嘉英，嘉陵江的嘉，英國的英 Míngzi jiào Jiāyīng, Jiālíng Jiāng de jiā, Yīngguó de yīng "My name is Jiāyīng, the Jia for Jialing River and the ying for the short form in Chinese of UK." Southern Chinese varieties like Cantonese and Hakka preserved more of the rimes of Middle Chinese and have more tones. The previous examples of jī, for instance, 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 multi-syllabic words. The entire Chinese character corpus since antiquity comprises well over 20,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are now commonly in use. However Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words, there are many times more Chinese words than there are characters as most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters. Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and phrases vary greatly. The Hanyu Da Zidian, an all-inclusive compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries for characters, including bone oracle versions. The Zhonghua Zihai 中华字海 (1994) contains 85,568 head entries for character definitions, and is the largest reference work based purely on character and its literary variants. The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary, the 12-volumed Hanyu Da Cidian 汉语大词典, records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters, and gives over 370,000 definitions. The 1999 revised Cihai, a multi-volume encyclopedic dictionary reference work, gives 122,836 vocabulary entry definitions under 19,485 Chinese characters, including proper names, phrases and common zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific and technical terms. The latest 2007 5th edition of Xiandai Hanyu Cidian 现代汉语词典, an authoritative one-volume dictionary on modern standard Chinese language as used in mainland China, has 65,000 entries and defines 11,000 head characters. Like any other language, Chinese has absorbed a sizeable amount of loanwords from other cultures. 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 since Old Chinese include 葡萄 "grape," 石榴 "pomegranate" and 狮子/獅子 "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including 佛 "Buddha" and 菩萨/菩薩 "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as 胡同 "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as 葡萄 "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or Pāli, the liturgical languages of North India. Words borrowed from the nomadic tribes of the Gobi, Mongolian or northeast regions generally have Altaic etymologies, such as 琵琶 "pípa", the Chinese lute, or 酪 "cheese" or "yoghurt", but from exactly which Altaic source is not always entirely clear. Foreign words continue to enter the Chinese language by transcription according to their pronunciations. This is done by employing Chinese characters with similar pronunciations. For example, "Israel" becomes 以色列 (pinyin: yǐsèliè), Paris 巴黎. A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including 沙發 shāfā "sofa," 马达/馬達 mǎdá "motor," 幽默 yōumò "humour," 逻辑/邏輯 luójí "logic," 时髦/時髦 shímáo "smart, fashionable" and 歇斯底里 xiēsīdǐlǐ "hysterics." The bulk of these words were originally coined in the Shanghainese dialect during the early 20th century and were later loaned into Mandarin, hence their pronunciations in Mandarin may be quite off from the English. For example, 沙发/沙發 and 马达/馬達 in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor." Today, 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 德律风/德律風 ( Shanghainese: télífon [ ], Standard Mandarin: délǜfēng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese 电话/電話 (diànhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include 电视/電視 (diànshì "electric vision") for television, 电脑/電腦 (diànnǎo "electric brain") for computer; 手机/手機 (shǒujī "hand machine") for cellphone, and 蓝牙/藍芽 (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. 網誌(wǎng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as 汉堡包/漢堡包 (hànbǎo bāo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as 拖拉机/拖拉機 (tuōlājī, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马利奥/馬利奧 for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example 奔腾/奔騰 (bēnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and 赛百味/賽百味 (Sàibǎiwèi "better-than hundred tastes") for Subway restaurants. Since the 20th century, another source has been Japan. Using existing kanji, which are Chinese characters used in the Japanese language, the Japanese re-moulded European concepts and inventions into wasei-kango (和製漢語, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include diànhuà (电话/電話, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社会, shakai, "society"), kēxué (科学/科學, kagaku, "science") and chōuxiàng (抽象, chūshō, "abstract"). Other terms were coined by the Japanese by giving new senses to existing Chinese terms or by referring to expressions used in classical Chinese literature. For example, jīngjì (经济/經濟, keizai), which in the original Chinese meant "the workings of the state", was narrowed to "economy" in Japanese; this narrowed definition was then reimported into Chinese. As a result, these terms are virtually indistinguishable from native Chinese words: indeed, there is some dispute over some of these terms as to whether the Japanese or Chinese coined them first. As a result of this toing-and-froing process, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese share a corpus linguistics of terms describing modern terminology, in parallel to a similar corpus of terms built from Greco-Latin terms shared among European languages. Taiwanese and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便当/便當 “lunchbox or boxed lunch” (from bento) and 料理 “prepared cuisine”, have passed into common currency. Western foreign words have great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came 芭蕾 (bāléi, "ballet"), 香槟 (xiāngbīn, "champagne"), via Italian 咖啡 (kāfēi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned 沙發 (shāfā "sofa"), 幽默 (yōumò "humour"), and 高尔夫 (gāoěrfū, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪斯科 (dísīkè, "disco"), 可乐 (kělè, "cola") and 迷你 (mínǐ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon 卡通 (cartoon), 基佬 (gay people), 的士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. 粉絲 (fěnsī, "fans"), 駭客 (hèikè, "hacker"), 部落格(bùluōgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin. Since the People's Republic of China’s economic and political rise in recent years, standard Mandarin has become an increasingly popular subject of study amongst the young in the Western world, as in the UK. BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | How hard is it to learn Chinese? In 1991 there were 2,000 foreign learners taking China's official Chinese Proficiency Test (comparable to English's Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660 . *Chinese characters *Chinese honorifics *Chinese measure word *Chinese number gestures *Chinese numerals *Chinese punctuation *Chinese exclamative particles *Four-character idiom *Han unification *Haner language *HSK test *Languages of China *North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics *Nü shu * * * * * * Keys to the Chinese Language: Book II - Google Books * A Practical Chinese Grammar - Google Books * ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawai’i Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X. * ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-08248-2975-9. * Arch Chinese free online Chinese character and Pinyin learning, Chinese English dictionary, writing worksheet generation, etc. * CHINGLISH online Chinese English Dictionary * nciku free online Chinese dictionary with handwriting recognition, pinyin, sound clips, etc. * MDBG free online Chinese-English dictionary * Chinese Characters Dictionary: supports Japanese, Korean, Cantonese, Hakka etc. * Chinese - English Dictionary: from Webster's Online Dictionary - the Rosetta Edition * CEDICT Chinese-English Dictionary Project * Stardict free (GPL) multilanguage dictionary including simplified/traditional Chinese for Unix (Linux, FreeBSD, etc.) and win32 * English-Chinese Translation Dictionary: Chinese-English-Chinese Online Dictionary (Taiwan-based; simplified characters not recognised) * CantoDict: Cantonese-English Dictionary Project * Chinese Pronunciation Dictionary Input Chinese words or sentences, get audio file of Mandarin pronunciation. Web-based tool. * Pinyin Annotator Add pinyin on top of any Chinese text. Mouse over any word to see English translation. Save output to OpenOffice Writer format. Prints nicely. Also adds pinyin to any Chinese web page. *Firefox users can install Add-ons for a pinyin annotator * Multimedia Dictionary of Chinese Characters Language Tool, Offline Chinese Dictionary. * Chinese Scholar Dictionary Chinese English dictionary with Pinyin index * A Cognitive Approach to Beginning Chinese: Interactions I and II. Margaret Mian Yan and Jennifer Li-chia Liu, Indiana University * Chinese Language Information Page A collection of Chinese language learning resources. * Learn Chinese - One At A Time * China KeyBoard Google Engine * Oneaday.org One Chinese idiom a day (simplified and traditional characters) with pinyin transliteration and English translation. * Mandarin Tone Drill Testing your knowledge of Mandarin tones. * Pinyin Practice Pinyin practice for Mandarin learners in all levels * Marjorie Chan's ChinaLinks: A large collection of Web resources by a professor of linguistics at Ohio State University * 4 words of Chinese every day * Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard * Chinese Character of the Day Learn to Read Chinese one word at a time. * Audio files with basic Chinese words * General Introduction of Chinese Language * Learn Chinese Characters * Chinese Scholar: The Free Chinese Class Learn Chinese language and culture through interactive media
Chinese_language
May the idea of Chinese as a language family suggest that the chinese identity is much more fragmentary and disunified than Chinese language actually is and as such is often looked upon as culturally and politically provocative ?
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Chinese_language Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) is a language family consisting of languages mutually unintelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. “The mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.” *Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. “The Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.” *Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. “The modern Chinese dialects are really more like a family of language. *John DeFrancis. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (1984), p.56. "To call Chinese a single language composed of dialects with varying degrees of difference is to mislead by minimizing disparities that according to Chao are as great as those between English and Dutch. To call Chinese a family of languages is to suggest extralinguistic differences that in fact do not exist and to overlook the unique linguistic situation that exists in China." Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the two branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages. About one-fifth of the world’s population, or over one billion people, speak some form of Chinese as their native language. The identification of the varieties of Chinese as "dialects" instead of "languages" is considered inappropriate by linguists and Sinologists. Spoken Chinese is distinguished by its high level of internal diversity, although all spoken varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic. There are between seven and thirteen main regional groups of Chinese (depending on classification scheme), of which the most spoken, by far, is Mandarin (about 850 million), followed by Wu (90 million), Min (70 million) and Cantonese (70 million). Most of these groups are mutually unintelligible, although some, like Xiang and the Southwest Mandarin dialects, may share common terms and some degree of intelligibility. Chinese is classified as a macrolanguage with 13 sub-languages in ISO 639-3, though the identification of the varieties of Chinese as multiple "languages" or as "dialects" of a single language is a contentious issue. The standardized form of spoken Chinese is Standard Mandarin (Putonghua / Guoyu / Huayu), based on the Beijing dialect, which is part of a larger group of North-Eastern and South-Western dialects, often taken as a separate language, see Mandarin Chinese for more, this language can be referred to as 官话 Guānhuà or 北方话 Běifānghuà in Chinese. Standard Mandarin is the official language of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC), as well as one of four official languages of Singapore. Chinese—de facto, Standard Mandarin—is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Of the other varieties, Standard Cantonese is common and influential in Guangdong Province and Cantonese-speaking overseas communities, and remains one of the official languages of Hong Kong (together with English) and of Macau (together with Portuguese). Hokkien, part of the Min language group, is widely spoken in southern Fujian, in neighbouring Taiwan (where it is known as Taiwanese or Hoklo) and in Southeast Asia (where it dominates in Singapore and Malaysia). Xinhua reported in March 2007 that 86 percent of people in the People's Republic of China spoke a Chinese variant. 全國約有53%的人能用普通話交流 As a language family, the number of Chinese speakers is 1.136 billion. The same news report indicates 53 percent of the population, or 700 million speakers, can effectively communicate in Putonghua. Sino-Tibetan language family. A map below depicts the linguistic subdivisions ("languages" or "dialect groups") within China itself. The traditionally-recognized seven main groups, in order of population size are: Chinese linguists have recently distinguished: 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. The Dungan language, spoken in Central Asia, is very closely related to Mandarin. However, it is not generally considered "Chinese" since it is written in Cyrillic and spoken by Dungan people outside China who are not considered ethnic Chinese. See List of Chinese dialects for a comprehensive listing of individual dialects within these large, broad groupings. In general, the above language-dialect groups do not have sharp boundaries, though Mandarin is the predominant Sinitic language in the North and the Southwest, and the rest are mostly spoken in Central or Southeastern China. Frequently, as in the case of the Guangdong province, native speakers of major variants overlapped. As with many areas that were linguistically diverse for a long time, it is not always clear how the speeches of various parts of China should be classified. The Ethnologue lists a total of 14, but the number varies between seven and seventeen depending on the classification scheme followed. For instance, the Min variety is often divided into Northern Min (Minbei, Fuchow) and Southern Min (Minnan, Amoy-Swatow); linguists have not determined whether their mutual intelligibility is small enough to sort them as separate languages. The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China. In general, mountainous South China displays more linguistic diversity than the flat North China. In parts of South China, a major city's dialect may only 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). Putonghua / Guoyu, often called "Mandarin", is the official standard language used by the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China, and Singapore (where it is called "Huayu"). It is based on the Beijing dialect, which is the dialect of Mandarin as spoken in Beijing. The governments intend for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. Therefore it is used in government agencies, in the media, and as a language of instruction in schools. In mainland China and Taiwan, diglossia has been a common feature: it is common for a Chinese to be able to speak two or even three varieties of the Sinitic languages (or “dialects”) together with Standard Mandarin. For example, in addition to putonghua a resident of Shanghai might speak Shanghainese and, if they did not grow up there, his or her local dialect as well. A native of Guangzhou may speak Standard Cantonese and putonghua, a resident of Taiwan, both Taiwanese and putonghua/guoyu. A person living in Taiwan 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, Standard Mandarin is beginning to take its place beside English and Standard Cantonese, the official languages. Linguists often view Chinese as a language family, though owing to China's socio-political and cultural situation, and the fact that all spoken varieties use one common written system, it is customary to refer to these generally mutually unintelligible variants as "the Chinese language". The diversity of Sinitic variants is comparable to the Romance languages. From a purely descriptive point of view, "languages" and "dialects" are simply arbitrary groups of similar idiolects, and the distinction is irrelevant to linguists who are only concerned with describing regional speeches technically. However, the idea of a single language has major overtones in politics and cultural self-identity, and explains the amount of emotion over this issue. Most Chinese and Chinese linguists refer to Chinese as a single language and its subdivisions dialects, while others call Chinese a language family. Chinese itself has a term for its unified writing system, Zhongwen (中文), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (汉语,“spoken language[s] of the Han Chinese) – this term could be translated to either “language” or “languages” since Chinese possesses no grammatical numbers. In the Chinese language, there is much less need for a uniform speech-and-writing continuum, as indicated by two separate character morphemes 语 yu and 文 wen. Ethnic Chinese often consider these spoken variations as one single language for reasons of nationality and as they inherit one common cultural and linguistic heritage in Classical Chinese. Han native speakers of Wu, Min, Hakka, and Cantonese, for instance, may consider their own linguistic varieties as separate spoken languages, but the Han Chinese race as one – albeit internally very diverse – ethnicity. To Chinese nationalists, the idea of Chinese as a language family may suggest that the Chinese identity is much more fragmentary and disunified than it actually is and as such is often looked upon as culturally and politically provocative. Additionally, in Taiwan, it is closely associated with Taiwanese independence, where some supporters of Taiwanese independence promote the local Taiwanese Minnan-based spoken language. Within the People’s Republic of China and Singapore, it is common for the government to refer to all divisions of the Sinitic language(s) beside Standard Mandarin as fangyan (“regional tongues”, often translated as “dialects”). Modern-day Chinese speakers of all kinds communicate using one formal standard written language, although this modern written standard is modeled after Mandarin, generally the modern Beijing substandard. The term sinophone, coined in analogy to anglophone and francophone, refers to those who speak the Chinese language natively, or prefer it as a medium of communication. The term is derived from Sinae, the Latin word for ancient China. :See also: Classical Chinese and Vernacular Chinese The relationship among the Chinese spoken and written languages is rather complex. Its spoken variations evolved at different rates, while written Chinese itself has changed much less. Classical Chinese literature began in the Spring and Autumn period, although written records have been discovered as far back as the 14th to 11th centuries BCE Shang dynasty oracle bones using the oracle bone scripts. The Chinese orthography centers around Chinese characters, hanzi, which are written within imaginary rectangular blocks, traditionally arranged in vertical columns, read from top to bottom down a column, and right to left across columns. Chinese characters are morphemes independent of phonetic change. Thus the number "one", yi in Mandarin, yat in Cantonese and chi̍t and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("一"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as 冇 and 係 for Cantonese and Hakka, which are considered archaic or unused in standard written Chinese. Written colloquial Cantonese has become quite popular in online chat rooms and instant messaging amongst Hong-Kongers and Cantonese-speakers elsewhere. Use of it is considered highly informal, and does not extend to any formal occasion. Also, in Hunan, some women write their local language in Nü Shu, a syllabary derived from Chinese characters. The Dungan language, considered by some 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 evolved over time from earliest forms of hieroglyphs. The idea that all Chinese characters are either pictographs or ideographs is an erroneous one: most characters contain phonetic parts, and are composites of phonetic components and semantic Radicals. Only the simplest characters, such as ren 人 (human), ri 日 (sun), shan 山 (mountain), shui 水 (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar Xǚ Shèn in the Hàn Dynasty classified characters into 6 categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80-90% as phonetic complexes consisting of a semantic element that indicates meaning, and a phonetic element that indicates the pronunciation. Generally, the phonetic element is more accurate and more important than the semantic one. There are about 214 radicals recognized in the Kangxi Dictionary. Modern characters are styled after the standard script (楷书/楷書 kǎishū) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (篆书/篆書 zhuànshū), cursive script (草书/草書 cǎoshū) and clerical script (隶书/隸書 lìshū). Calligraphy artists can write in traditional and simplified characters, but tend to use traditional characters for traditional art. Various styles of Chinese calligraphy. There are currently two systems for Chinese characters. The traditional system, still used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau and Chinese speaking communities (except Singapore and Malaysia) outside mainland China, takes its form from standardized character forms dating back to the late Han dynasty. The Simplified Chinese character system, developed by the People's Republic of China in 1954 to promote mass literacy, simplifies most complex traditional glyphs to fewer strokes, many to common caoshu shorthand variants. Singapore, which has a large Chinese communities, is the first – and at present the only – foreign nation to officially adopt simplified characters, although it has also become the de facto standard for younger ethnic Chinese in Malaysia. The Internet provides the platform to practice reading the alternative system, be it traditional or simplified. A well-educated Chinese today recognizes approximately 6,000-7,000 characters; some 3,000 characters are required to read a Mainland newspaper. The PRC government defines literacy amongst workers as a knowledge of 2,000 characters, though this would be only functional literacy. A large unabridged dictionary, like the Kangxi Dictionary, contains over 40,000 characters, including obscure, variant, rare, and archaic characters; less than a quarter of these characters are now commonly used.'' Most linguists classify all varieties of modern spoken Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family and believe that there was an original language, termed Proto-Sino-Tibetan, 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 Proto-Sino-Tibetan. 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 Indo-European languages from PIE don't apply to Chinese because of "morphological paucity" especially after Old Chinese Analysis of the concept "wave" in PST. . 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; most present systems rely heavily on Karlgren's insights and methods. Old Chinese ( ), sometimes known as "Archaic Chinese", was the language common during the early and middle Zhōu Dynasty (1122 BCE - 256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the Shījīng, the history of the Shūjīng, and portions of the Yìjīng (I Ching). The phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters 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 was still without tones. Work on reconstructing Old Chinese started with Qīng dynasty philologists. Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably 蜜 mì "honey", 獅 shī "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mǎ "horse", 犬 quǎn "dog", and 鵝 é "goose". The source says the reconstructions of old Chinese are tentative, and not definitive so no conclusions should be drawn. The reconstruction of Old Chinese can not be perfect so this hypothesis may be called into question. Encyclopedia Britannica s.v. "Chinese languages": "Old Chinese vocabulary already contained many words not generally occurring in the other Sino-Tibetan languages. The words for ‘honey' and ‘lion,' and probably also ‘horse,' ‘dog,' and ‘goose,' are connected with Indo-European and were acquired through trade and early contacts. (The nearest known Indo-European languages were Tocharian and Sogdian, a middle Iranian language.) A number of words have Austroasiatic cognates and point to early contacts with the ancestral language of Muong-Vietnamese and Mon-Khmer" ; Jan Ulenbrook, Einige Übereinstimmungen zwischen dem Chinesischen und dem Indogermanischen (1967) proposes 57 items; see also Tsung-tung Chang, 1988 Indo-European Vocabulary in Old Chinese;. 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 the Suí, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the 切韻 "Qièyùn" rhyme table (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the 廣韻 "Guǎngyùn" rhyme table. 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, 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; some scholars have argued that trying to reconstruct, say, modern Cantonese from modern Cantopop rhymes would give a fairly inaccurate picture of the present-day spoken language. The development of the spoken Chinese languages from early historical times to the present has been complex. Most Chinese people, in Sìchuān 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 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 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, though, a single standard of Mandarin did not exist. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The new 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 Standard Mandarin. As a result, Mandarin is now spoken by virtually all young and middle-aged citizens of mainland China and on Taiwan. Standard 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. Chinese was once the Lingua franca for East Asia countries for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. Throughout history Chinese culture and politics has had a great influence on unrelated languages such as Korean 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 Hán tự. It was the only available method for writing Vietnamese until the 14th century, used almost exclusively by Chinese-educated Vietnamese élites. From the 14th to the late 19th century, Vietnamese was written with Chữ nôm, a modified Chinese script incorporating sounds and syllables for native Vietnamese speakers. Chữ nôm was completely replaced by a modified Latin script created by the Jesuit missionary priest Alexander de Rhodes, which incorporates a system of diacritical marks to indicate tones, as well as modified consonants. The Vietnamese language exhibits multiple elements similar to Cantonese in regard to the specific intonations and sharp consonant endings. There is also a slight influence from Mandarin, including the sharper vowels and "kh" (IPA:x) sound 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. In derived Chinese characters or Zhuang logograms to write songs, even though Zhuang is not a Chinese dialect. Since the 1950s, the Zhuang language has been written in a modified Latin alphabet. Zhou, Minglang: Multilingualism in China: The Politics of Writing Reforms for Minority Languages, 1949-2002 (Walter de Gruyter 2003); ISBN 3-11-017896-6; p. 251–258. Languages within the influence of Chinese culture also have a very large number of loanwords from Chinese. Fifty percent or more of Korean vocabulary is of Chinese origin and the influence on Japanese and Vietnamese has been considerable. At least five percent of all words in Tagalog are of Chinese origin. Chinese has also lent a great deal of many grammatical features to these and neighboring languages, notably the lack of gender and the use of classifiers. Japanese has also a lot of loanwords from Chinese, as does Vietnamese. Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of 茶 (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 茄汁 (ke chap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 金橘 (kam kuat). :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, which is only about an eighth as many as English DeFrancis (1984) p.42 counts Chinese as having 1,277 tonal syllables, and about 398 to 418 if tones are disregarded; he cites Jespersen, Otto (1928) Monosyllabism in English; London, p.15 for a count of over 8000 syllables for English. . 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 four main tones of Standard Mandarin applied to the syllable "ma." The tones correspond to these five characters: * "mother" — high level * "hemp" or "torpid" — high rising * "horse" — low falling-rising * "scold" — high falling * "question particle" — neutral The Chinese had no uniform phonetic transcription system until the mid-20th century, although enunciation patterns were recorded in early rime books and dictionaries. Early Sanskrit and Pali Indian translators were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of the language in a foreign language. After 15th century CE Jesuits and Western court missionaries’ efforts result in some rudimentary Latin transcription systems, based on the Nanjing Mandarin dialect. Romanization is the process of transcribing a language in the Latin alphabet. There are many systems of romanization for the Chinese languages due to the Chinese's own lack of phonetic transcription until modern times. Chinese is first known to have been written in Latin characters by Western Christian missionaries in the 16th century. Today the most common romanization standard for Standard Mandarin is Hanyu Pinyin (漢語拼音/汉语拼音), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore). Pinyin is almost universally employed now for teaching standard spoken Chinese in schools and universities across America, Australia and Europe. Chinese parents also use Pinyin to teach their children the sounds and tones for words with which the child is unfamiliar. The Pinyin is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, and alongside the Pinyin is the Chinese symbol. The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859, later modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As it approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels (hence an Anglicization), it may be particularly helpful for beginner speakers of native English background. Wade-Giles is found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan (Taipei city now officially uses Hanyu Pinyin and the rest of the island officially uses Tōngyòng Pinyin 通用拼音). When used within European texts, the tone transcriptions in both pinyin and Wade-Giles are often left out for simplicity; Wade-Giles' extensive use of apostrophes is also usually omitted. Thus, most Western readers will be much more familiar with Beijing than they will be with Běijīng (pinyin), and with Taipei than T'ai²-pei³ (Wade-Giles). Here are a few examples of Hanyu Pinyin and Wade-Giles, for comparison: Other systems of romanization for Chinese include Gwoyeu Romatzyh, the French EFEO, the Yale (invented during WWII for U.S. troops), as well as separate systems for Cantonese, Minnan, Hakka, and other Chinese languages or dialects. Chinese languages have been phonetically transcribed into many other writing systems over the centuries. The 'Phags-pa script, for example, has been very helpful in reconstructing the pronunciations of pre-modern forms of Chinese. Zhuyin (注音, also known as bopomofo), a semi-syllabary is still widely used in Taiwan's elementary schools to aid standard pronunciation. Although bopomofo characters are reminiscent of katakana script, there is no source to substantiate the claim that Katakana was the basis for the zhuyin system. A comparison table of zhuyin to pinyin exists in the zhuyin article. Syllables based on pinyin and zhuyin can also be compared by looking at the following articles: *Pinyin table *Zhuyin table There are also at least two systems of cyrillization for Chinese. The most widespread is the Palladius system. Modern Chinese has often been erroneously classed as a "monosyllabic" language. While most of the morphemes are single syllable, modern Chinese today is much less a monosyllabic language in that nouns, adjectives and verbs are largely di-syllabic. The tendency to create disyllabic words in the modern Chinese languages, particularly in Mandarin, has been particularly pronounced when compared to Classical Chinese. Classical Chinese is a highly isolating language, with each idea (morpheme) generally corresponding to a single syllable and a single character; Modern Chinese though, has the tendency to form new words through disyllabic, trisyllabic and tetra-character agglutination. In fact, some linguists argue that classifying modern Chinese as an isolating language is misleading, for this reason alone. Chinese morphology is strictly bound to a set number of syllables with a fairly rigid construction which are the morphemes, the smallest blocks of the language. While many of these single-syllable morphemes ( zì, 字 in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cí (词/詞), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cí (“word”) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more. For example: *Yun 云 -“cloud” *Hanbaobao 汉堡包 –“hamburger” *Wo 我 –“I, me” *Renmin 人民 –“people” *Diqiu 地球 –“earth(globosity)” *Shandian 闪电 –“lightning” *Meng 梦 –“dream” All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphology — i.e., changes in form of a word — to indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflections – it possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English), and no gender. They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le 了, hai 还, yijing 已经, etc. 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. Chinese also has an extensive system of measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring 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. Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess 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. Official modern Mandarin has only 400 spoken monosyllables but over 10,000 written characters, so there are many homophones only distinguishable by the four tones. Even this is often not enough unless the context and exact phrase or cí is identified. The mono-syllable jī, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: 雞/鸡 chicken, 機/机 machine, 基 basic, 擊/击 (to) hit, 饑/饥 hunger, and 積/积 sum. In speech, the glyphing of a monosyllable to its meaning must be determined by context or by relation to other morphemes (e.g. "some" as in the opposite of "none"). Native speakers may state which words or phrases their names are found in, for convenience of writing: 名字叫嘉英，嘉陵江的嘉，英國的英 Míngzi jiào Jiāyīng, Jiālíng Jiāng de jiā, Yīngguó de yīng "My name is Jiāyīng, the Jia for Jialing River and the ying for the short form in Chinese of UK." Southern Chinese varieties like Cantonese and Hakka preserved more of the rimes of Middle Chinese and have more tones. The previous examples of jī, for instance, 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 multi-syllabic words. The entire Chinese character corpus since antiquity comprises well over 20,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are now commonly in use. However Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words, there are many times more Chinese words than there are characters as most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters. Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and phrases vary greatly. The Hanyu Da Zidian, an all-inclusive compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries for characters, including bone oracle versions. The Zhonghua Zihai 中华字海 (1994) contains 85,568 head entries for character definitions, and is the largest reference work based purely on character and its literary variants. The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary, the 12-volumed Hanyu Da Cidian 汉语大词典, records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters, and gives over 370,000 definitions. The 1999 revised Cihai, a multi-volume encyclopedic dictionary reference work, gives 122,836 vocabulary entry definitions under 19,485 Chinese characters, including proper names, phrases and common zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific and technical terms. The latest 2007 5th edition of Xiandai Hanyu Cidian 现代汉语词典, an authoritative one-volume dictionary on modern standard Chinese language as used in mainland China, has 65,000 entries and defines 11,000 head characters. Like any other language, Chinese has absorbed a sizeable amount of loanwords from other cultures. 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 since Old Chinese include 葡萄 "grape," 石榴 "pomegranate" and 狮子/獅子 "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including 佛 "Buddha" and 菩萨/菩薩 "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as 胡同 "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as 葡萄 "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or Pāli, the liturgical languages of North India. Words borrowed from the nomadic tribes of the Gobi, Mongolian or northeast regions generally have Altaic etymologies, such as 琵琶 "pípa", the Chinese lute, or 酪 "cheese" or "yoghurt", but from exactly which Altaic source is not always entirely clear. Foreign words continue to enter the Chinese language by transcription according to their pronunciations. This is done by employing Chinese characters with similar pronunciations. For example, "Israel" becomes 以色列 (pinyin: yǐsèliè), Paris 巴黎. A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including 沙發 shāfā "sofa," 马达/馬達 mǎdá "motor," 幽默 yōumò "humour," 逻辑/邏輯 luójí "logic," 时髦/時髦 shímáo "smart, fashionable" and 歇斯底里 xiēsīdǐlǐ "hysterics." The bulk of these words were originally coined in the Shanghainese dialect during the early 20th century and were later loaned into Mandarin, hence their pronunciations in Mandarin may be quite off from the English. For example, 沙发/沙發 and 马达/馬達 in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor." Today, 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 德律风/德律風 ( Shanghainese: télífon [ ], Standard Mandarin: délǜfēng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese 电话/電話 (diànhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include 电视/電視 (diànshì "electric vision") for television, 电脑/電腦 (diànnǎo "electric brain") for computer; 手机/手機 (shǒujī "hand machine") for cellphone, and 蓝牙/藍芽 (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. 網誌(wǎng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as 汉堡包/漢堡包 (hànbǎo bāo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as 拖拉机/拖拉機 (tuōlājī, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马利奥/馬利奧 for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example 奔腾/奔騰 (bēnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and 赛百味/賽百味 (Sàibǎiwèi "better-than hundred tastes") for Subway restaurants. Since the 20th century, another source has been Japan. Using existing kanji, which are Chinese characters used in the Japanese language, the Japanese re-moulded European concepts and inventions into wasei-kango (和製漢語, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include diànhuà (电话/電話, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社会, shakai, "society"), kēxué (科学/科學, kagaku, "science") and chōuxiàng (抽象, chūshō, "abstract"). Other terms were coined by the Japanese by giving new senses to existing Chinese terms or by referring to expressions used in classical Chinese literature. For example, jīngjì (经济/經濟, keizai), which in the original Chinese meant "the workings of the state", was narrowed to "economy" in Japanese; this narrowed definition was then reimported into Chinese. As a result, these terms are virtually indistinguishable from native Chinese words: indeed, there is some dispute over some of these terms as to whether the Japanese or Chinese coined them first. As a result of this toing-and-froing process, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese share a corpus linguistics of terms describing modern terminology, in parallel to a similar corpus of terms built from Greco-Latin terms shared among European languages. Taiwanese and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便当/便當 “lunchbox or boxed lunch” (from bento) and 料理 “prepared cuisine”, have passed into common currency. Western foreign words have great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came 芭蕾 (bāléi, "ballet"), 香槟 (xiāngbīn, "champagne"), via Italian 咖啡 (kāfēi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned 沙發 (shāfā "sofa"), 幽默 (yōumò "humour"), and 高尔夫 (gāoěrfū, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪斯科 (dísīkè, "disco"), 可乐 (kělè, "cola") and 迷你 (mínǐ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon 卡通 (cartoon), 基佬 (gay people), 的士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. 粉絲 (fěnsī, "fans"), 駭客 (hèikè, "hacker"), 部落格(bùluōgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin. Since the People's Republic of China’s economic and political rise in recent years, standard Mandarin has become an increasingly popular subject of study amongst the young in the Western world, as in the UK. BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | How hard is it to learn Chinese? In 1991 there were 2,000 foreign learners taking China's official Chinese Proficiency Test (comparable to English's Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660 . *Chinese characters *Chinese honorifics *Chinese measure word *Chinese number gestures *Chinese numerals *Chinese punctuation *Chinese exclamative particles *Four-character idiom *Han unification *Haner language *HSK test *Languages of China *North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics *Nü shu * * * * * * Keys to the Chinese Language: Book II - Google Books * A Practical Chinese Grammar - Google Books * ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawai’i Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X. * ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-08248-2975-9. * Arch Chinese free online Chinese character and Pinyin learning, Chinese English dictionary, writing worksheet generation, etc. * CHINGLISH online Chinese English Dictionary * nciku free online Chinese dictionary with handwriting recognition, pinyin, sound clips, etc. * MDBG free online Chinese-English dictionary * Chinese Characters Dictionary: supports Japanese, Korean, Cantonese, Hakka etc. * Chinese - English Dictionary: from Webster's Online Dictionary - the Rosetta Edition * CEDICT Chinese-English Dictionary Project * Stardict free (GPL) multilanguage dictionary including simplified/traditional Chinese for Unix (Linux, FreeBSD, etc.) and win32 * English-Chinese Translation Dictionary: Chinese-English-Chinese Online Dictionary (Taiwan-based; simplified characters not recognised) * CantoDict: Cantonese-English Dictionary Project * Chinese Pronunciation Dictionary Input Chinese words or sentences, get audio file of Mandarin pronunciation. Web-based tool. * Pinyin Annotator Add pinyin on top of any Chinese text. Mouse over any word to see English translation. Save output to OpenOffice Writer format. Prints nicely. Also adds pinyin to any Chinese web page. *Firefox users can install Add-ons for a pinyin annotator * Multimedia Dictionary of Chinese Characters Language Tool, Offline Chinese Dictionary. * Chinese Scholar Dictionary Chinese English dictionary with Pinyin index * A Cognitive Approach to Beginning Chinese: Interactions I and II. Margaret Mian Yan and Jennifer Li-chia Liu, Indiana University * Chinese Language Information Page A collection of Chinese language learning resources. * Learn Chinese - One At A Time * China KeyBoard Google Engine * Oneaday.org One Chinese idiom a day (simplified and traditional characters) with pinyin transliteration and English translation. * Mandarin Tone Drill Testing your knowledge of Mandarin tones. * Pinyin Practice Pinyin practice for Mandarin learners in all levels * Marjorie Chan's ChinaLinks: A large collection of Web resources by a professor of linguistics at Ohio State University * 4 words of Chinese every day * Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard * Chinese Character of the Day Learn to Read Chinese one word at a time. * Audio files with basic Chinese words * General Introduction of Chinese Language * Learn Chinese Characters * Chinese Scholar: The Free Chinese Class Learn Chinese language and culture through interactive media
Chinese_language
Are most chinese words formed out of native chinese morphemes , including words describing imported objects and ideas ?
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Chinese_language Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) is a language family consisting of languages mutually unintelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. “The mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.” *Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. “The Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.” *Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. “The modern Chinese dialects are really more like a family of language. *John DeFrancis. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (1984), p.56. "To call Chinese a single language composed of dialects with varying degrees of difference is to mislead by minimizing disparities that according to Chao are as great as those between English and Dutch. To call Chinese a family of languages is to suggest extralinguistic differences that in fact do not exist and to overlook the unique linguistic situation that exists in China." Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the two branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages. About one-fifth of the world’s population, or over one billion people, speak some form of Chinese as their native language. The identification of the varieties of Chinese as "dialects" instead of "languages" is considered inappropriate by linguists and Sinologists. Spoken Chinese is distinguished by its high level of internal diversity, although all spoken varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic. There are between seven and thirteen main regional groups of Chinese (depending on classification scheme), of which the most spoken, by far, is Mandarin (about 850 million), followed by Wu (90 million), Min (70 million) and Cantonese (70 million). Most of these groups are mutually unintelligible, although some, like Xiang and the Southwest Mandarin dialects, may share common terms and some degree of intelligibility. Chinese is classified as a macrolanguage with 13 sub-languages in ISO 639-3, though the identification of the varieties of Chinese as multiple "languages" or as "dialects" of a single language is a contentious issue. The standardized form of spoken Chinese is Standard Mandarin (Putonghua / Guoyu / Huayu), based on the Beijing dialect, which is part of a larger group of North-Eastern and South-Western dialects, often taken as a separate language, see Mandarin Chinese for more, this language can be referred to as 官话 Guānhuà or 北方话 Běifānghuà in Chinese. Standard Mandarin is the official language of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC), as well as one of four official languages of Singapore. Chinese—de facto, Standard Mandarin—is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Of the other varieties, Standard Cantonese is common and influential in Guangdong Province and Cantonese-speaking overseas communities, and remains one of the official languages of Hong Kong (together with English) and of Macau (together with Portuguese). Hokkien, part of the Min language group, is widely spoken in southern Fujian, in neighbouring Taiwan (where it is known as Taiwanese or Hoklo) and in Southeast Asia (where it dominates in Singapore and Malaysia). Xinhua reported in March 2007 that 86 percent of people in the People's Republic of China spoke a Chinese variant. 全國約有53%的人能用普通話交流 As a language family, the number of Chinese speakers is 1.136 billion. The same news report indicates 53 percent of the population, or 700 million speakers, can effectively communicate in Putonghua. Sino-Tibetan language family. A map below depicts the linguistic subdivisions ("languages" or "dialect groups") within China itself. The traditionally-recognized seven main groups, in order of population size are: Chinese linguists have recently distinguished: 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. The Dungan language, spoken in Central Asia, is very closely related to Mandarin. However, it is not generally considered "Chinese" since it is written in Cyrillic and spoken by Dungan people outside China who are not considered ethnic Chinese. See List of Chinese dialects for a comprehensive listing of individual dialects within these large, broad groupings. In general, the above language-dialect groups do not have sharp boundaries, though Mandarin is the predominant Sinitic language in the North and the Southwest, and the rest are mostly spoken in Central or Southeastern China. Frequently, as in the case of the Guangdong province, native speakers of major variants overlapped. As with many areas that were linguistically diverse for a long time, it is not always clear how the speeches of various parts of China should be classified. The Ethnologue lists a total of 14, but the number varies between seven and seventeen depending on the classification scheme followed. For instance, the Min variety is often divided into Northern Min (Minbei, Fuchow) and Southern Min (Minnan, Amoy-Swatow); linguists have not determined whether their mutual intelligibility is small enough to sort them as separate languages. The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China. In general, mountainous South China displays more linguistic diversity than the flat North China. In parts of South China, a major city's dialect may only 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). Putonghua / Guoyu, often called "Mandarin", is the official standard language used by the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China, and Singapore (where it is called "Huayu"). It is based on the Beijing dialect, which is the dialect of Mandarin as spoken in Beijing. The governments intend for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. Therefore it is used in government agencies, in the media, and as a language of instruction in schools. In mainland China and Taiwan, diglossia has been a common feature: it is common for a Chinese to be able to speak two or even three varieties of the Sinitic languages (or “dialects”) together with Standard Mandarin. For example, in addition to putonghua a resident of Shanghai might speak Shanghainese and, if they did not grow up there, his or her local dialect as well. A native of Guangzhou may speak Standard Cantonese and putonghua, a resident of Taiwan, both Taiwanese and putonghua/guoyu. A person living in Taiwan 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, Standard Mandarin is beginning to take its place beside English and Standard Cantonese, the official languages. Linguists often view Chinese as a language family, though owing to China's socio-political and cultural situation, and the fact that all spoken varieties use one common written system, it is customary to refer to these generally mutually unintelligible variants as "the Chinese language". The diversity of Sinitic variants is comparable to the Romance languages. From a purely descriptive point of view, "languages" and "dialects" are simply arbitrary groups of similar idiolects, and the distinction is irrelevant to linguists who are only concerned with describing regional speeches technically. However, the idea of a single language has major overtones in politics and cultural self-identity, and explains the amount of emotion over this issue. Most Chinese and Chinese linguists refer to Chinese as a single language and its subdivisions dialects, while others call Chinese a language family. Chinese itself has a term for its unified writing system, Zhongwen (中文), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (汉语,“spoken language[s] of the Han Chinese) – this term could be translated to either “language” or “languages” since Chinese possesses no grammatical numbers. In the Chinese language, there is much less need for a uniform speech-and-writing continuum, as indicated by two separate character morphemes 语 yu and 文 wen. Ethnic Chinese often consider these spoken variations as one single language for reasons of nationality and as they inherit one common cultural and linguistic heritage in Classical Chinese. Han native speakers of Wu, Min, Hakka, and Cantonese, for instance, may consider their own linguistic varieties as separate spoken languages, but the Han Chinese race as one – albeit internally very diverse – ethnicity. To Chinese nationalists, the idea of Chinese as a language family may suggest that the Chinese identity is much more fragmentary and disunified than it actually is and as such is often looked upon as culturally and politically provocative. Additionally, in Taiwan, it is closely associated with Taiwanese independence, where some supporters of Taiwanese independence promote the local Taiwanese Minnan-based spoken language. Within the People’s Republic of China and Singapore, it is common for the government to refer to all divisions of the Sinitic language(s) beside Standard Mandarin as fangyan (“regional tongues”, often translated as “dialects”). Modern-day Chinese speakers of all kinds communicate using one formal standard written language, although this modern written standard is modeled after Mandarin, generally the modern Beijing substandard. The term sinophone, coined in analogy to anglophone and francophone, refers to those who speak the Chinese language natively, or prefer it as a medium of communication. The term is derived from Sinae, the Latin word for ancient China. :See also: Classical Chinese and Vernacular Chinese The relationship among the Chinese spoken and written languages is rather complex. Its spoken variations evolved at different rates, while written Chinese itself has changed much less. Classical Chinese literature began in the Spring and Autumn period, although written records have been discovered as far back as the 14th to 11th centuries BCE Shang dynasty oracle bones using the oracle bone scripts. The Chinese orthography centers around Chinese characters, hanzi, which are written within imaginary rectangular blocks, traditionally arranged in vertical columns, read from top to bottom down a column, and right to left across columns. Chinese characters are morphemes independent of phonetic change. Thus the number "one", yi in Mandarin, yat in Cantonese and chi̍t and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("一"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as 冇 and 係 for Cantonese and Hakka, which are considered archaic or unused in standard written Chinese. Written colloquial Cantonese has become quite popular in online chat rooms and instant messaging amongst Hong-Kongers and Cantonese-speakers elsewhere. Use of it is considered highly informal, and does not extend to any formal occasion. Also, in Hunan, some women write their local language in Nü Shu, a syllabary derived from Chinese characters. The Dungan language, considered by some 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 evolved over time from earliest forms of hieroglyphs. The idea that all Chinese characters are either pictographs or ideographs is an erroneous one: most characters contain phonetic parts, and are composites of phonetic components and semantic Radicals. Only the simplest characters, such as ren 人 (human), ri 日 (sun), shan 山 (mountain), shui 水 (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar Xǚ Shèn in the Hàn Dynasty classified characters into 6 categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80-90% as phonetic complexes consisting of a semantic element that indicates meaning, and a phonetic element that indicates the pronunciation. Generally, the phonetic element is more accurate and more important than the semantic one. There are about 214 radicals recognized in the Kangxi Dictionary. Modern characters are styled after the standard script (楷书/楷書 kǎishū) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (篆书/篆書 zhuànshū), cursive script (草书/草書 cǎoshū) and clerical script (隶书/隸書 lìshū). Calligraphy artists can write in traditional and simplified characters, but tend to use traditional characters for traditional art. Various styles of Chinese calligraphy. There are currently two systems for Chinese characters. The traditional system, still used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau and Chinese speaking communities (except Singapore and Malaysia) outside mainland China, takes its form from standardized character forms dating back to the late Han dynasty. The Simplified Chinese character system, developed by the People's Republic of China in 1954 to promote mass literacy, simplifies most complex traditional glyphs to fewer strokes, many to common caoshu shorthand variants. Singapore, which has a large Chinese communities, is the first – and at present the only – foreign nation to officially adopt simplified characters, although it has also become the de facto standard for younger ethnic Chinese in Malaysia. The Internet provides the platform to practice reading the alternative system, be it traditional or simplified. A well-educated Chinese today recognizes approximately 6,000-7,000 characters; some 3,000 characters are required to read a Mainland newspaper. The PRC government defines literacy amongst workers as a knowledge of 2,000 characters, though this would be only functional literacy. A large unabridged dictionary, like the Kangxi Dictionary, contains over 40,000 characters, including obscure, variant, rare, and archaic characters; less than a quarter of these characters are now commonly used.'' Most linguists classify all varieties of modern spoken Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family and believe that there was an original language, termed Proto-Sino-Tibetan, 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 Proto-Sino-Tibetan. 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 Indo-European languages from PIE don't apply to Chinese because of "morphological paucity" especially after Old Chinese Analysis of the concept "wave" in PST. . 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; most present systems rely heavily on Karlgren's insights and methods. Old Chinese ( ), sometimes known as "Archaic Chinese", was the language common during the early and middle Zhōu Dynasty (1122 BCE - 256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the Shījīng, the history of the Shūjīng, and portions of the Yìjīng (I Ching). The phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters 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 was still without tones. Work on reconstructing Old Chinese started with Qīng dynasty philologists. Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably 蜜 mì "honey", 獅 shī "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mǎ "horse", 犬 quǎn "dog", and 鵝 é "goose". The source says the reconstructions of old Chinese are tentative, and not definitive so no conclusions should be drawn. The reconstruction of Old Chinese can not be perfect so this hypothesis may be called into question. Encyclopedia Britannica s.v. "Chinese languages": "Old Chinese vocabulary already contained many words not generally occurring in the other Sino-Tibetan languages. The words for ‘honey' and ‘lion,' and probably also ‘horse,' ‘dog,' and ‘goose,' are connected with Indo-European and were acquired through trade and early contacts. (The nearest known Indo-European languages were Tocharian and Sogdian, a middle Iranian language.) A number of words have Austroasiatic cognates and point to early contacts with the ancestral language of Muong-Vietnamese and Mon-Khmer" ; Jan Ulenbrook, Einige Übereinstimmungen zwischen dem Chinesischen und dem Indogermanischen (1967) proposes 57 items; see also Tsung-tung Chang, 1988 Indo-European Vocabulary in Old Chinese;. 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 the Suí, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the 切韻 "Qièyùn" rhyme table (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the 廣韻 "Guǎngyùn" rhyme table. 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, 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; some scholars have argued that trying to reconstruct, say, modern Cantonese from modern Cantopop rhymes would give a fairly inaccurate picture of the present-day spoken language. The development of the spoken Chinese languages from early historical times to the present has been complex. Most Chinese people, in Sìchuān 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 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 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, though, a single standard of Mandarin did not exist. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The new 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 Standard Mandarin. As a result, Mandarin is now spoken by virtually all young and middle-aged citizens of mainland China and on Taiwan. Standard 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. Chinese was once the Lingua franca for East Asia countries for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. Throughout history Chinese culture and politics has had a great influence on unrelated languages such as Korean 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 Hán tự. It was the only available method for writing Vietnamese until the 14th century, used almost exclusively by Chinese-educated Vietnamese élites. From the 14th to the late 19th century, Vietnamese was written with Chữ nôm, a modified Chinese script incorporating sounds and syllables for native Vietnamese speakers. Chữ nôm was completely replaced by a modified Latin script created by the Jesuit missionary priest Alexander de Rhodes, which incorporates a system of diacritical marks to indicate tones, as well as modified consonants. The Vietnamese language exhibits multiple elements similar to Cantonese in regard to the specific intonations and sharp consonant endings. There is also a slight influence from Mandarin, including the sharper vowels and "kh" (IPA:x) sound 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. In derived Chinese characters or Zhuang logograms to write songs, even though Zhuang is not a Chinese dialect. Since the 1950s, the Zhuang language has been written in a modified Latin alphabet. Zhou, Minglang: Multilingualism in China: The Politics of Writing Reforms for Minority Languages, 1949-2002 (Walter de Gruyter 2003); ISBN 3-11-017896-6; p. 251–258. Languages within the influence of Chinese culture also have a very large number of loanwords from Chinese. Fifty percent or more of Korean vocabulary is of Chinese origin and the influence on Japanese and Vietnamese has been considerable. At least five percent of all words in Tagalog are of Chinese origin. Chinese has also lent a great deal of many grammatical features to these and neighboring languages, notably the lack of gender and the use of classifiers. Japanese has also a lot of loanwords from Chinese, as does Vietnamese. Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of 茶 (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 茄汁 (ke chap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 金橘 (kam kuat). :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, which is only about an eighth as many as English DeFrancis (1984) p.42 counts Chinese as having 1,277 tonal syllables, and about 398 to 418 if tones are disregarded; he cites Jespersen, Otto (1928) Monosyllabism in English; London, p.15 for a count of over 8000 syllables for English. . 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 four main tones of Standard Mandarin applied to the syllable "ma." The tones correspond to these five characters: * "mother" — high level * "hemp" or "torpid" — high rising * "horse" — low falling-rising * "scold" — high falling * "question particle" — neutral The Chinese had no uniform phonetic transcription system until the mid-20th century, although enunciation patterns were recorded in early rime books and dictionaries. Early Sanskrit and Pali Indian translators were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of the language in a foreign language. After 15th century CE Jesuits and Western court missionaries’ efforts result in some rudimentary Latin transcription systems, based on the Nanjing Mandarin dialect. Romanization is the process of transcribing a language in the Latin alphabet. There are many systems of romanization for the Chinese languages due to the Chinese's own lack of phonetic transcription until modern times. Chinese is first known to have been written in Latin characters by Western Christian missionaries in the 16th century. Today the most common romanization standard for Standard Mandarin is Hanyu Pinyin (漢語拼音/汉语拼音), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore). Pinyin is almost universally employed now for teaching standard spoken Chinese in schools and universities across America, Australia and Europe. Chinese parents also use Pinyin to teach their children the sounds and tones for words with which the child is unfamiliar. The Pinyin is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, and alongside the Pinyin is the Chinese symbol. The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859, later modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As it approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels (hence an Anglicization), it may be particularly helpful for beginner speakers of native English background. Wade-Giles is found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan (Taipei city now officially uses Hanyu Pinyin and the rest of the island officially uses Tōngyòng Pinyin 通用拼音). When used within European texts, the tone transcriptions in both pinyin and Wade-Giles are often left out for simplicity; Wade-Giles' extensive use of apostrophes is also usually omitted. Thus, most Western readers will be much more familiar with Beijing than they will be with Běijīng (pinyin), and with Taipei than T'ai²-pei³ (Wade-Giles). Here are a few examples of Hanyu Pinyin and Wade-Giles, for comparison: Other systems of romanization for Chinese include Gwoyeu Romatzyh, the French EFEO, the Yale (invented during WWII for U.S. troops), as well as separate systems for Cantonese, Minnan, Hakka, and other Chinese languages or dialects. Chinese languages have been phonetically transcribed into many other writing systems over the centuries. The 'Phags-pa script, for example, has been very helpful in reconstructing the pronunciations of pre-modern forms of Chinese. Zhuyin (注音, also known as bopomofo), a semi-syllabary is still widely used in Taiwan's elementary schools to aid standard pronunciation. Although bopomofo characters are reminiscent of katakana script, there is no source to substantiate the claim that Katakana was the basis for the zhuyin system. A comparison table of zhuyin to pinyin exists in the zhuyin article. Syllables based on pinyin and zhuyin can also be compared by looking at the following articles: *Pinyin table *Zhuyin table There are also at least two systems of cyrillization for Chinese. The most widespread is the Palladius system. Modern Chinese has often been erroneously classed as a "monosyllabic" language. While most of the morphemes are single syllable, modern Chinese today is much less a monosyllabic language in that nouns, adjectives and verbs are largely di-syllabic. The tendency to create disyllabic words in the modern Chinese languages, particularly in Mandarin, has been particularly pronounced when compared to Classical Chinese. Classical Chinese is a highly isolating language, with each idea (morpheme) generally corresponding to a single syllable and a single character; Modern Chinese though, has the tendency to form new words through disyllabic, trisyllabic and tetra-character agglutination. In fact, some linguists argue that classifying modern Chinese as an isolating language is misleading, for this reason alone. Chinese morphology is strictly bound to a set number of syllables with a fairly rigid construction which are the morphemes, the smallest blocks of the language. While many of these single-syllable morphemes ( zì, 字 in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cí (词/詞), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cí (“word”) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more. For example: *Yun 云 -“cloud” *Hanbaobao 汉堡包 –“hamburger” *Wo 我 –“I, me” *Renmin 人民 –“people” *Diqiu 地球 –“earth(globosity)” *Shandian 闪电 –“lightning” *Meng 梦 –“dream” All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphology — i.e., changes in form of a word — to indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflections – it possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English), and no gender. They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le 了, hai 还, yijing 已经, etc. 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. Chinese also has an extensive system of measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring 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. Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess 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. Official modern Mandarin has only 400 spoken monosyllables but over 10,000 written characters, so there are many homophones only distinguishable by the four tones. Even this is often not enough unless the context and exact phrase or cí is identified. The mono-syllable jī, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: 雞/鸡 chicken, 機/机 machine, 基 basic, 擊/击 (to) hit, 饑/饥 hunger, and 積/积 sum. In speech, the glyphing of a monosyllable to its meaning must be determined by context or by relation to other morphemes (e.g. "some" as in the opposite of "none"). Native speakers may state which words or phrases their names are found in, for convenience of writing: 名字叫嘉英，嘉陵江的嘉，英國的英 Míngzi jiào Jiāyīng, Jiālíng Jiāng de jiā, Yīngguó de yīng "My name is Jiāyīng, the Jia for Jialing River and the ying for the short form in Chinese of UK." Southern Chinese varieties like Cantonese and Hakka preserved more of the rimes of Middle Chinese and have more tones. The previous examples of jī, for instance, 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 multi-syllabic words. The entire Chinese character corpus since antiquity comprises well over 20,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are now commonly in use. However Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words, there are many times more Chinese words than there are characters as most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters. Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and phrases vary greatly. The Hanyu Da Zidian, an all-inclusive compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries for characters, including bone oracle versions. The Zhonghua Zihai 中华字海 (1994) contains 85,568 head entries for character definitions, and is the largest reference work based purely on character and its literary variants. The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary, the 12-volumed Hanyu Da Cidian 汉语大词典, records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters, and gives over 370,000 definitions. The 1999 revised Cihai, a multi-volume encyclopedic dictionary reference work, gives 122,836 vocabulary entry definitions under 19,485 Chinese characters, including proper names, phrases and common zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific and technical terms. The latest 2007 5th edition of Xiandai Hanyu Cidian 现代汉语词典, an authoritative one-volume dictionary on modern standard Chinese language as used in mainland China, has 65,000 entries and defines 11,000 head characters. Like any other language, Chinese has absorbed a sizeable amount of loanwords from other cultures. 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 since Old Chinese include 葡萄 "grape," 石榴 "pomegranate" and 狮子/獅子 "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including 佛 "Buddha" and 菩萨/菩薩 "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as 胡同 "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as 葡萄 "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or Pāli, the liturgical languages of North India. Words borrowed from the nomadic tribes of the Gobi, Mongolian or northeast regions generally have Altaic etymologies, such as 琵琶 "pípa", the Chinese lute, or 酪 "cheese" or "yoghurt", but from exactly which Altaic source is not always entirely clear. Foreign words continue to enter the Chinese language by transcription according to their pronunciations. This is done by employing Chinese characters with similar pronunciations. For example, "Israel" becomes 以色列 (pinyin: yǐsèliè), Paris 巴黎. A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including 沙發 shāfā "sofa," 马达/馬達 mǎdá "motor," 幽默 yōumò "humour," 逻辑/邏輯 luójí "logic," 时髦/時髦 shímáo "smart, fashionable" and 歇斯底里 xiēsīdǐlǐ "hysterics." The bulk of these words were originally coined in the Shanghainese dialect during the early 20th century and were later loaned into Mandarin, hence their pronunciations in Mandarin may be quite off from the English. For example, 沙发/沙發 and 马达/馬達 in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor." Today, 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 德律风/德律風 ( Shanghainese: télífon [ ], Standard Mandarin: délǜfēng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese 电话/電話 (diànhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include 电视/電視 (diànshì "electric vision") for television, 电脑/電腦 (diànnǎo "electric brain") for computer; 手机/手機 (shǒujī "hand machine") for cellphone, and 蓝牙/藍芽 (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. 網誌(wǎng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as 汉堡包/漢堡包 (hànbǎo bāo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as 拖拉机/拖拉機 (tuōlājī, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马利奥/馬利奧 for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example 奔腾/奔騰 (bēnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and 赛百味/賽百味 (Sàibǎiwèi "better-than hundred tastes") for Subway restaurants. Since the 20th century, another source has been Japan. Using existing kanji, which are Chinese characters used in the Japanese language, the Japanese re-moulded European concepts and inventions into wasei-kango (和製漢語, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include diànhuà (电话/電話, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社会, shakai, "society"), kēxué (科学/科學, kagaku, "science") and chōuxiàng (抽象, chūshō, "abstract"). Other terms were coined by the Japanese by giving new senses to existing Chinese terms or by referring to expressions used in classical Chinese literature. For example, jīngjì (经济/經濟, keizai), which in the original Chinese meant "the workings of the state", was narrowed to "economy" in Japanese; this narrowed definition was then reimported into Chinese. As a result, these terms are virtually indistinguishable from native Chinese words: indeed, there is some dispute over some of these terms as to whether the Japanese or Chinese coined them first. As a result of this toing-and-froing process, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese share a corpus linguistics of terms describing modern terminology, in parallel to a similar corpus of terms built from Greco-Latin terms shared among European languages. Taiwanese and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便当/便當 “lunchbox or boxed lunch” (from bento) and 料理 “prepared cuisine”, have passed into common currency. Western foreign words have great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came 芭蕾 (bāléi, "ballet"), 香槟 (xiāngbīn, "champagne"), via Italian 咖啡 (kāfēi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned 沙發 (shāfā "sofa"), 幽默 (yōumò "humour"), and 高尔夫 (gāoěrfū, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪斯科 (dísīkè, "disco"), 可乐 (kělè, "cola") and 迷你 (mínǐ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon 卡通 (cartoon), 基佬 (gay people), 的士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. 粉絲 (fěnsī, "fans"), 駭客 (hèikè, "hacker"), 部落格(bùluōgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin. Since the People's Republic of China’s economic and political rise in recent years, standard Mandarin has become an increasingly popular subject of study amongst the young in the Western world, as in the UK. BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | How hard is it to learn Chinese? In 1991 there were 2,000 foreign learners taking China's official Chinese Proficiency Test (comparable to English's Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660 . *Chinese characters *Chinese honorifics *Chinese measure word *Chinese number gestures *Chinese numerals *Chinese punctuation *Chinese exclamative particles *Four-character idiom *Han unification *Haner language *HSK test *Languages of China *North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics *Nü shu * * * * * * Keys to the Chinese Language: Book II - Google Books * A Practical Chinese Grammar - Google Books * ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawai’i Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X. * ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-08248-2975-9. * Arch Chinese free online Chinese character and Pinyin learning, Chinese English dictionary, writing worksheet generation, etc. * CHINGLISH online Chinese English Dictionary * nciku free online Chinese dictionary with handwriting recognition, pinyin, sound clips, etc. * MDBG free online Chinese-English dictionary * Chinese Characters Dictionary: supports Japanese, Korean, Cantonese, Hakka etc. * Chinese - English Dictionary: from Webster's Online Dictionary - the Rosetta Edition * CEDICT Chinese-English Dictionary Project * Stardict free (GPL) multilanguage dictionary including simplified/traditional Chinese for Unix (Linux, FreeBSD, etc.) and win32 * English-Chinese Translation Dictionary: Chinese-English-Chinese Online Dictionary (Taiwan-based; simplified characters not recognised) * CantoDict: Cantonese-English Dictionary Project * Chinese Pronunciation Dictionary Input Chinese words or sentences, get audio file of Mandarin pronunciation. Web-based tool. * Pinyin Annotator Add pinyin on top of any Chinese text. Mouse over any word to see English translation. Save output to OpenOffice Writer format. Prints nicely. Also adds pinyin to any Chinese web page. *Firefox users can install Add-ons for a pinyin annotator * Multimedia Dictionary of Chinese Characters Language Tool, Offline Chinese Dictionary. * Chinese Scholar Dictionary Chinese English dictionary with Pinyin index * A Cognitive Approach to Beginning Chinese: Interactions I and II. Margaret Mian Yan and Jennifer Li-chia Liu, Indiana University * Chinese Language Information Page A collection of Chinese language learning resources. * Learn Chinese - One At A Time * China KeyBoard Google Engine * Oneaday.org One Chinese idiom a day (simplified and traditional characters) with pinyin transliteration and English translation. * Mandarin Tone Drill Testing your knowledge of Mandarin tones. * Pinyin Practice Pinyin practice for Mandarin learners in all levels * Marjorie Chan's ChinaLinks: A large collection of Web resources by a professor of linguistics at Ohio State University * 4 words of Chinese every day * Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard * Chinese Character of the Day Learn to Read Chinese one word at a time. * Audio files with basic Chinese words * General Introduction of Chinese Language * Learn Chinese Characters * Chinese Scholar: The Free Chinese Class Learn Chinese language and culture through interactive media
Chinese_language
May a native of Guangzhou speak Standard Cantonese and putonghua , a resident of Taiwan , both taiwanese and putonghua/guoyu ?
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Chinese_language Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) is a language family consisting of languages mutually unintelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. “The mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.” *Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. “The Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.” *Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. “The modern Chinese dialects are really more like a family of language. *John DeFrancis. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (1984), p.56. "To call Chinese a single language composed of dialects with varying degrees of difference is to mislead by minimizing disparities that according to Chao are as great as those between English and Dutch. To call Chinese a family of languages is to suggest extralinguistic differences that in fact do not exist and to overlook the unique linguistic situation that exists in China." Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the two branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages. About one-fifth of the world’s population, or over one billion people, speak some form of Chinese as their native language. The identification of the varieties of Chinese as "dialects" instead of "languages" is considered inappropriate by linguists and Sinologists. Spoken Chinese is distinguished by its high level of internal diversity, although all spoken varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic. There are between seven and thirteen main regional groups of Chinese (depending on classification scheme), of which the most spoken, by far, is Mandarin (about 850 million), followed by Wu (90 million), Min (70 million) and Cantonese (70 million). Most of these groups are mutually unintelligible, although some, like Xiang and the Southwest Mandarin dialects, may share common terms and some degree of intelligibility. Chinese is classified as a macrolanguage with 13 sub-languages in ISO 639-3, though the identification of the varieties of Chinese as multiple "languages" or as "dialects" of a single language is a contentious issue. The standardized form of spoken Chinese is Standard Mandarin (Putonghua / Guoyu / Huayu), based on the Beijing dialect, which is part of a larger group of North-Eastern and South-Western dialects, often taken as a separate language, see Mandarin Chinese for more, this language can be referred to as 官话 Guānhuà or 北方话 Běifānghuà in Chinese. Standard Mandarin is the official language of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC), as well as one of four official languages of Singapore. Chinese—de facto, Standard Mandarin—is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Of the other varieties, Standard Cantonese is common and influential in Guangdong Province and Cantonese-speaking overseas communities, and remains one of the official languages of Hong Kong (together with English) and of Macau (together with Portuguese). Hokkien, part of the Min language group, is widely spoken in southern Fujian, in neighbouring Taiwan (where it is known as Taiwanese or Hoklo) and in Southeast Asia (where it dominates in Singapore and Malaysia). Xinhua reported in March 2007 that 86 percent of people in the People's Republic of China spoke a Chinese variant. 全國約有53%的人能用普通話交流 As a language family, the number of Chinese speakers is 1.136 billion. The same news report indicates 53 percent of the population, or 700 million speakers, can effectively communicate in Putonghua. Sino-Tibetan language family. A map below depicts the linguistic subdivisions ("languages" or "dialect groups") within China itself. The traditionally-recognized seven main groups, in order of population size are: Chinese linguists have recently distinguished: 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. The Dungan language, spoken in Central Asia, is very closely related to Mandarin. However, it is not generally considered "Chinese" since it is written in Cyrillic and spoken by Dungan people outside China who are not considered ethnic Chinese. See List of Chinese dialects for a comprehensive listing of individual dialects within these large, broad groupings. In general, the above language-dialect groups do not have sharp boundaries, though Mandarin is the predominant Sinitic language in the North and the Southwest, and the rest are mostly spoken in Central or Southeastern China. Frequently, as in the case of the Guangdong province, native speakers of major variants overlapped. As with many areas that were linguistically diverse for a long time, it is not always clear how the speeches of various parts of China should be classified. The Ethnologue lists a total of 14, but the number varies between seven and seventeen depending on the classification scheme followed. For instance, the Min variety is often divided into Northern Min (Minbei, Fuchow) and Southern Min (Minnan, Amoy-Swatow); linguists have not determined whether their mutual intelligibility is small enough to sort them as separate languages. The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China. In general, mountainous South China displays more linguistic diversity than the flat North China. In parts of South China, a major city's dialect may only 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). Putonghua / Guoyu, often called "Mandarin", is the official standard language used by the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China, and Singapore (where it is called "Huayu"). It is based on the Beijing dialect, which is the dialect of Mandarin as spoken in Beijing. The governments intend for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. Therefore it is used in government agencies, in the media, and as a language of instruction in schools. In mainland China and Taiwan, diglossia has been a common feature: it is common for a Chinese to be able to speak two or even three varieties of the Sinitic languages (or “dialects”) together with Standard Mandarin. For example, in addition to putonghua a resident of Shanghai might speak Shanghainese and, if they did not grow up there, his or her local dialect as well. A native of Guangzhou may speak Standard Cantonese and putonghua, a resident of Taiwan, both Taiwanese and putonghua/guoyu. A person living in Taiwan 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, Standard Mandarin is beginning to take its place beside English and Standard Cantonese, the official languages. Linguists often view Chinese as a language family, though owing to China's socio-political and cultural situation, and the fact that all spoken varieties use one common written system, it is customary to refer to these generally mutually unintelligible variants as "the Chinese language". The diversity of Sinitic variants is comparable to the Romance languages. From a purely descriptive point of view, "languages" and "dialects" are simply arbitrary groups of similar idiolects, and the distinction is irrelevant to linguists who are only concerned with describing regional speeches technically. However, the idea of a single language has major overtones in politics and cultural self-identity, and explains the amount of emotion over this issue. Most Chinese and Chinese linguists refer to Chinese as a single language and its subdivisions dialects, while others call Chinese a language family. Chinese itself has a term for its unified writing system, Zhongwen (中文), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (汉语,“spoken language[s] of the Han Chinese) – this term could be translated to either “language” or “languages” since Chinese possesses no grammatical numbers. In the Chinese language, there is much less need for a uniform speech-and-writing continuum, as indicated by two separate character morphemes 语 yu and 文 wen. Ethnic Chinese often consider these spoken variations as one single language for reasons of nationality and as they inherit one common cultural and linguistic heritage in Classical Chinese. Han native speakers of Wu, Min, Hakka, and Cantonese, for instance, may consider their own linguistic varieties as separate spoken languages, but the Han Chinese race as one – albeit internally very diverse – ethnicity. To Chinese nationalists, the idea of Chinese as a language family may suggest that the Chinese identity is much more fragmentary and disunified than it actually is and as such is often looked upon as culturally and politically provocative. Additionally, in Taiwan, it is closely associated with Taiwanese independence, where some supporters of Taiwanese independence promote the local Taiwanese Minnan-based spoken language. Within the People’s Republic of China and Singapore, it is common for the government to refer to all divisions of the Sinitic language(s) beside Standard Mandarin as fangyan (“regional tongues”, often translated as “dialects”). Modern-day Chinese speakers of all kinds communicate using one formal standard written language, although this modern written standard is modeled after Mandarin, generally the modern Beijing substandard. The term sinophone, coined in analogy to anglophone and francophone, refers to those who speak the Chinese language natively, or prefer it as a medium of communication. The term is derived from Sinae, the Latin word for ancient China. :See also: Classical Chinese and Vernacular Chinese The relationship among the Chinese spoken and written languages is rather complex. Its spoken variations evolved at different rates, while written Chinese itself has changed much less. Classical Chinese literature began in the Spring and Autumn period, although written records have been discovered as far back as the 14th to 11th centuries BCE Shang dynasty oracle bones using the oracle bone scripts. The Chinese orthography centers around Chinese characters, hanzi, which are written within imaginary rectangular blocks, traditionally arranged in vertical columns, read from top to bottom down a column, and right to left across columns. Chinese characters are morphemes independent of phonetic change. Thus the number "one", yi in Mandarin, yat in Cantonese and chi̍t and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("一"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as 冇 and 係 for Cantonese and Hakka, which are considered archaic or unused in standard written Chinese. Written colloquial Cantonese has become quite popular in online chat rooms and instant messaging amongst Hong-Kongers and Cantonese-speakers elsewhere. Use of it is considered highly informal, and does not extend to any formal occasion. Also, in Hunan, some women write their local language in Nü Shu, a syllabary derived from Chinese characters. The Dungan language, considered by some 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 evolved over time from earliest forms of hieroglyphs. The idea that all Chinese characters are either pictographs or ideographs is an erroneous one: most characters contain phonetic parts, and are composites of phonetic components and semantic Radicals. Only the simplest characters, such as ren 人 (human), ri 日 (sun), shan 山 (mountain), shui 水 (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar Xǚ Shèn in the Hàn Dynasty classified characters into 6 categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80-90% as phonetic complexes consisting of a semantic element that indicates meaning, and a phonetic element that indicates the pronunciation. Generally, the phonetic element is more accurate and more important than the semantic one. There are about 214 radicals recognized in the Kangxi Dictionary. Modern characters are styled after the standard script (楷书/楷書 kǎishū) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (篆书/篆書 zhuànshū), cursive script (草书/草書 cǎoshū) and clerical script (隶书/隸書 lìshū). Calligraphy artists can write in traditional and simplified characters, but tend to use traditional characters for traditional art. Various styles of Chinese calligraphy. There are currently two systems for Chinese characters. The traditional system, still used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau and Chinese speaking communities (except Singapore and Malaysia) outside mainland China, takes its form from standardized character forms dating back to the late Han dynasty. The Simplified Chinese character system, developed by the People's Republic of China in 1954 to promote mass literacy, simplifies most complex traditional glyphs to fewer strokes, many to common caoshu shorthand variants. Singapore, which has a large Chinese communities, is the first – and at present the only – foreign nation to officially adopt simplified characters, although it has also become the de facto standard for younger ethnic Chinese in Malaysia. The Internet provides the platform to practice reading the alternative system, be it traditional or simplified. A well-educated Chinese today recognizes approximately 6,000-7,000 characters; some 3,000 characters are required to read a Mainland newspaper. The PRC government defines literacy amongst workers as a knowledge of 2,000 characters, though this would be only functional literacy. A large unabridged dictionary, like the Kangxi Dictionary, contains over 40,000 characters, including obscure, variant, rare, and archaic characters; less than a quarter of these characters are now commonly used.'' Most linguists classify all varieties of modern spoken Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family and believe that there was an original language, termed Proto-Sino-Tibetan, 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 Proto-Sino-Tibetan. 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 Indo-European languages from PIE don't apply to Chinese because of "morphological paucity" especially after Old Chinese Analysis of the concept "wave" in PST. . 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; most present systems rely heavily on Karlgren's insights and methods. Old Chinese ( ), sometimes known as "Archaic Chinese", was the language common during the early and middle Zhōu Dynasty (1122 BCE - 256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the Shījīng, the history of the Shūjīng, and portions of the Yìjīng (I Ching). The phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters 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 was still without tones. Work on reconstructing Old Chinese started with Qīng dynasty philologists. Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably 蜜 mì "honey", 獅 shī "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mǎ "horse", 犬 quǎn "dog", and 鵝 é "goose". The source says the reconstructions of old Chinese are tentative, and not definitive so no conclusions should be drawn. The reconstruction of Old Chinese can not be perfect so this hypothesis may be called into question. Encyclopedia Britannica s.v. "Chinese languages": "Old Chinese vocabulary already contained many words not generally occurring in the other Sino-Tibetan languages. The words for ‘honey' and ‘lion,' and probably also ‘horse,' ‘dog,' and ‘goose,' are connected with Indo-European and were acquired through trade and early contacts. (The nearest known Indo-European languages were Tocharian and Sogdian, a middle Iranian language.) A number of words have Austroasiatic cognates and point to early contacts with the ancestral language of Muong-Vietnamese and Mon-Khmer" ; Jan Ulenbrook, Einige Übereinstimmungen zwischen dem Chinesischen und dem Indogermanischen (1967) proposes 57 items; see also Tsung-tung Chang, 1988 Indo-European Vocabulary in Old Chinese;. 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 the Suí, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the 切韻 "Qièyùn" rhyme table (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the 廣韻 "Guǎngyùn" rhyme table. 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, 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; some scholars have argued that trying to reconstruct, say, modern Cantonese from modern Cantopop rhymes would give a fairly inaccurate picture of the present-day spoken language. The development of the spoken Chinese languages from early historical times to the present has been complex. Most Chinese people, in Sìchuān 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 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 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, though, a single standard of Mandarin did not exist. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The new 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 Standard Mandarin. As a result, Mandarin is now spoken by virtually all young and middle-aged citizens of mainland China and on Taiwan. Standard 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. Chinese was once the Lingua franca for East Asia countries for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. Throughout history Chinese culture and politics has had a great influence on unrelated languages such as Korean 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 Hán tự. It was the only available method for writing Vietnamese until the 14th century, used almost exclusively by Chinese-educated Vietnamese élites. From the 14th to the late 19th century, Vietnamese was written with Chữ nôm, a modified Chinese script incorporating sounds and syllables for native Vietnamese speakers. Chữ nôm was completely replaced by a modified Latin script created by the Jesuit missionary priest Alexander de Rhodes, which incorporates a system of diacritical marks to indicate tones, as well as modified consonants. The Vietnamese language exhibits multiple elements similar to Cantonese in regard to the specific intonations and sharp consonant endings. There is also a slight influence from Mandarin, including the sharper vowels and "kh" (IPA:x) sound 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. In derived Chinese characters or Zhuang logograms to write songs, even though Zhuang is not a Chinese dialect. Since the 1950s, the Zhuang language has been written in a modified Latin alphabet. Zhou, Minglang: Multilingualism in China: The Politics of Writing Reforms for Minority Languages, 1949-2002 (Walter de Gruyter 2003); ISBN 3-11-017896-6; p. 251–258. Languages within the influence of Chinese culture also have a very large number of loanwords from Chinese. Fifty percent or more of Korean vocabulary is of Chinese origin and the influence on Japanese and Vietnamese has been considerable. At least five percent of all words in Tagalog are of Chinese origin. Chinese has also lent a great deal of many grammatical features to these and neighboring languages, notably the lack of gender and the use of classifiers. Japanese has also a lot of loanwords from Chinese, as does Vietnamese. Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of 茶 (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 茄汁 (ke chap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 金橘 (kam kuat). :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, which is only about an eighth as many as English DeFrancis (1984) p.42 counts Chinese as having 1,277 tonal syllables, and about 398 to 418 if tones are disregarded; he cites Jespersen, Otto (1928) Monosyllabism in English; London, p.15 for a count of over 8000 syllables for English. . 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 four main tones of Standard Mandarin applied to the syllable "ma." The tones correspond to these five characters: * "mother" — high level * "hemp" or "torpid" — high rising * "horse" — low falling-rising * "scold" — high falling * "question particle" — neutral The Chinese had no uniform phonetic transcription system until the mid-20th century, although enunciation patterns were recorded in early rime books and dictionaries. Early Sanskrit and Pali Indian translators were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of the language in a foreign language. After 15th century CE Jesuits and Western court missionaries’ efforts result in some rudimentary Latin transcription systems, based on the Nanjing Mandarin dialect. Romanization is the process of transcribing a language in the Latin alphabet. There are many systems of romanization for the Chinese languages due to the Chinese's own lack of phonetic transcription until modern times. Chinese is first known to have been written in Latin characters by Western Christian missionaries in the 16th century. Today the most common romanization standard for Standard Mandarin is Hanyu Pinyin (漢語拼音/汉语拼音), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore). Pinyin is almost universally employed now for teaching standard spoken Chinese in schools and universities across America, Australia and Europe. Chinese parents also use Pinyin to teach their children the sounds and tones for words with which the child is unfamiliar. The Pinyin is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, and alongside the Pinyin is the Chinese symbol. The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859, later modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As it approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels (hence an Anglicization), it may be particularly helpful for beginner speakers of native English background. Wade-Giles is found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan (Taipei city now officially uses Hanyu Pinyin and the rest of the island officially uses Tōngyòng Pinyin 通用拼音). When used within European texts, the tone transcriptions in both pinyin and Wade-Giles are often left out for simplicity; Wade-Giles' extensive use of apostrophes is also usually omitted. Thus, most Western readers will be much more familiar with Beijing than they will be with Běijīng (pinyin), and with Taipei than T'ai²-pei³ (Wade-Giles). Here are a few examples of Hanyu Pinyin and Wade-Giles, for comparison: Other systems of romanization for Chinese include Gwoyeu Romatzyh, the French EFEO, the Yale (invented during WWII for U.S. troops), as well as separate systems for Cantonese, Minnan, Hakka, and other Chinese languages or dialects. Chinese languages have been phonetically transcribed into many other writing systems over the centuries. The 'Phags-pa script, for example, has been very helpful in reconstructing the pronunciations of pre-modern forms of Chinese. Zhuyin (注音, also known as bopomofo), a semi-syllabary is still widely used in Taiwan's elementary schools to aid standard pronunciation. Although bopomofo characters are reminiscent of katakana script, there is no source to substantiate the claim that Katakana was the basis for the zhuyin system. A comparison table of zhuyin to pinyin exists in the zhuyin article. Syllables based on pinyin and zhuyin can also be compared by looking at the following articles: *Pinyin table *Zhuyin table There are also at least two systems of cyrillization for Chinese. The most widespread is the Palladius system. Modern Chinese has often been erroneously classed as a "monosyllabic" language. While most of the morphemes are single syllable, modern Chinese today is much less a monosyllabic language in that nouns, adjectives and verbs are largely di-syllabic. The tendency to create disyllabic words in the modern Chinese languages, particularly in Mandarin, has been particularly pronounced when compared to Classical Chinese. Classical Chinese is a highly isolating language, with each idea (morpheme) generally corresponding to a single syllable and a single character; Modern Chinese though, has the tendency to form new words through disyllabic, trisyllabic and tetra-character agglutination. In fact, some linguists argue that classifying modern Chinese as an isolating language is misleading, for this reason alone. Chinese morphology is strictly bound to a set number of syllables with a fairly rigid construction which are the morphemes, the smallest blocks of the language. While many of these single-syllable morphemes ( zì, 字 in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cí (词/詞), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cí (“word”) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more. For example: *Yun 云 -“cloud” *Hanbaobao 汉堡包 –“hamburger” *Wo 我 –“I, me” *Renmin 人民 –“people” *Diqiu 地球 –“earth(globosity)” *Shandian 闪电 –“lightning” *Meng 梦 –“dream” All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphology — i.e., changes in form of a word — to indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflections – it possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English), and no gender. They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le 了, hai 还, yijing 已经, etc. 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. Chinese also has an extensive system of measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring 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. Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess 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. Official modern Mandarin has only 400 spoken monosyllables but over 10,000 written characters, so there are many homophones only distinguishable by the four tones. Even this is often not enough unless the context and exact phrase or cí is identified. The mono-syllable jī, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: 雞/鸡 chicken, 機/机 machine, 基 basic, 擊/击 (to) hit, 饑/饥 hunger, and 積/积 sum. In speech, the glyphing of a monosyllable to its meaning must be determined by context or by relation to other morphemes (e.g. "some" as in the opposite of "none"). Native speakers may state which words or phrases their names are found in, for convenience of writing: 名字叫嘉英，嘉陵江的嘉，英國的英 Míngzi jiào Jiāyīng, Jiālíng Jiāng de jiā, Yīngguó de yīng "My name is Jiāyīng, the Jia for Jialing River and the ying for the short form in Chinese of UK." Southern Chinese varieties like Cantonese and Hakka preserved more of the rimes of Middle Chinese and have more tones. The previous examples of jī, for instance, 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 multi-syllabic words. The entire Chinese character corpus since antiquity comprises well over 20,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are now commonly in use. However Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words, there are many times more Chinese words than there are characters as most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters. Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and phrases vary greatly. The Hanyu Da Zidian, an all-inclusive compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries for characters, including bone oracle versions. The Zhonghua Zihai 中华字海 (1994) contains 85,568 head entries for character definitions, and is the largest reference work based purely on character and its literary variants. The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary, the 12-volumed Hanyu Da Cidian 汉语大词典, records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters, and gives over 370,000 definitions. The 1999 revised Cihai, a multi-volume encyclopedic dictionary reference work, gives 122,836 vocabulary entry definitions under 19,485 Chinese characters, including proper names, phrases and common zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific and technical terms. The latest 2007 5th edition of Xiandai Hanyu Cidian 现代汉语词典, an authoritative one-volume dictionary on modern standard Chinese language as used in mainland China, has 65,000 entries and defines 11,000 head characters. Like any other language, Chinese has absorbed a sizeable amount of loanwords from other cultures. 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 since Old Chinese include 葡萄 "grape," 石榴 "pomegranate" and 狮子/獅子 "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including 佛 "Buddha" and 菩萨/菩薩 "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as 胡同 "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as 葡萄 "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or Pāli, the liturgical languages of North India. Words borrowed from the nomadic tribes of the Gobi, Mongolian or northeast regions generally have Altaic etymologies, such as 琵琶 "pípa", the Chinese lute, or 酪 "cheese" or "yoghurt", but from exactly which Altaic source is not always entirely clear. Foreign words continue to enter the Chinese language by transcription according to their pronunciations. This is done by employing Chinese characters with similar pronunciations. For example, "Israel" becomes 以色列 (pinyin: yǐsèliè), Paris 巴黎. A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including 沙發 shāfā "sofa," 马达/馬達 mǎdá "motor," 幽默 yōumò "humour," 逻辑/邏輯 luójí "logic," 时髦/時髦 shímáo "smart, fashionable" and 歇斯底里 xiēsīdǐlǐ "hysterics." The bulk of these words were originally coined in the Shanghainese dialect during the early 20th century and were later loaned into Mandarin, hence their pronunciations in Mandarin may be quite off from the English. For example, 沙发/沙發 and 马达/馬達 in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor." Today, 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 德律风/德律風 ( Shanghainese: télífon [ ], Standard Mandarin: délǜfēng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese 电话/電話 (diànhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include 电视/電視 (diànshì "electric vision") for television, 电脑/電腦 (diànnǎo "electric brain") for computer; 手机/手機 (shǒujī "hand machine") for cellphone, and 蓝牙/藍芽 (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. 網誌(wǎng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as 汉堡包/漢堡包 (hànbǎo bāo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as 拖拉机/拖拉機 (tuōlājī, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马利奥/馬利奧 for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example 奔腾/奔騰 (bēnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and 赛百味/賽百味 (Sàibǎiwèi "better-than hundred tastes") for Subway restaurants. Since the 20th century, another source has been Japan. Using existing kanji, which are Chinese characters used in the Japanese language, the Japanese re-moulded European concepts and inventions into wasei-kango (和製漢語, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include diànhuà (电话/電話, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社会, shakai, "society"), kēxué (科学/科學, kagaku, "science") and chōuxiàng (抽象, chūshō, "abstract"). Other terms were coined by the Japanese by giving new senses to existing Chinese terms or by referring to expressions used in classical Chinese literature. For example, jīngjì (经济/經濟, keizai), which in the original Chinese meant "the workings of the state", was narrowed to "economy" in Japanese; this narrowed definition was then reimported into Chinese. As a result, these terms are virtually indistinguishable from native Chinese words: indeed, there is some dispute over some of these terms as to whether the Japanese or Chinese coined them first. As a result of this toing-and-froing process, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese share a corpus linguistics of terms describing modern terminology, in parallel to a similar corpus of terms built from Greco-Latin terms shared among European languages. Taiwanese and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便当/便當 “lunchbox or boxed lunch” (from bento) and 料理 “prepared cuisine”, have passed into common currency. Western foreign words have great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came 芭蕾 (bāléi, "ballet"), 香槟 (xiāngbīn, "champagne"), via Italian 咖啡 (kāfēi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned 沙發 (shāfā "sofa"), 幽默 (yōumò "humour"), and 高尔夫 (gāoěrfū, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪斯科 (dísīkè, "disco"), 可乐 (kělè, "cola") and 迷你 (mínǐ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon 卡通 (cartoon), 基佬 (gay people), 的士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. 粉絲 (fěnsī, "fans"), 駭客 (hèikè, "hacker"), 部落格(bùluōgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin. Since the People's Republic of China’s economic and political rise in recent years, standard Mandarin has become an increasingly popular subject of study amongst the young in the Western world, as in the UK. BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | How hard is it to learn Chinese? In 1991 there were 2,000 foreign learners taking China's official Chinese Proficiency Test (comparable to English's Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660 . *Chinese characters *Chinese honorifics *Chinese measure word *Chinese number gestures *Chinese numerals *Chinese punctuation *Chinese exclamative particles *Four-character idiom *Han unification *Haner language *HSK test *Languages of China *North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics *Nü shu * * * * * * Keys to the Chinese Language: Book II - Google Books * A Practical Chinese Grammar - Google Books * ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawai’i Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X. * ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-08248-2975-9. * Arch Chinese free online Chinese character and Pinyin learning, Chinese English dictionary, writing worksheet generation, etc. * CHINGLISH online Chinese English Dictionary * nciku free online Chinese dictionary with handwriting recognition, pinyin, sound clips, etc. * MDBG free online Chinese-English dictionary * Chinese Characters Dictionary: supports Japanese, Korean, Cantonese, Hakka etc. * Chinese - English Dictionary: from Webster's Online Dictionary - the Rosetta Edition * CEDICT Chinese-English Dictionary Project * Stardict free (GPL) multilanguage dictionary including simplified/traditional Chinese for Unix (Linux, FreeBSD, etc.) and win32 * English-Chinese Translation Dictionary: Chinese-English-Chinese Online Dictionary (Taiwan-based; simplified characters not recognised) * CantoDict: Cantonese-English Dictionary Project * Chinese Pronunciation Dictionary Input Chinese words or sentences, get audio file of Mandarin pronunciation. Web-based tool. * Pinyin Annotator Add pinyin on top of any Chinese text. Mouse over any word to see English translation. Save output to OpenOffice Writer format. Prints nicely. Also adds pinyin to any Chinese web page. *Firefox users can install Add-ons for a pinyin annotator * Multimedia Dictionary of Chinese Characters Language Tool, Offline Chinese Dictionary. * Chinese Scholar Dictionary Chinese English dictionary with Pinyin index * A Cognitive Approach to Beginning Chinese: Interactions I and II. Margaret Mian Yan and Jennifer Li-chia Liu, Indiana University * Chinese Language Information Page A collection of Chinese language learning resources. * Learn Chinese - One At A Time * China KeyBoard Google Engine * Oneaday.org One Chinese idiom a day (simplified and traditional characters) with pinyin transliteration and English translation. * Mandarin Tone Drill Testing your knowledge of Mandarin tones. * Pinyin Practice Pinyin practice for Mandarin learners in all levels * Marjorie Chan's ChinaLinks: A large collection of Web resources by a professor of linguistics at Ohio State University * 4 words of Chinese every day * Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard * Chinese Character of the Day Learn to Read Chinese one word at a time. * Audio files with basic Chinese words * General Introduction of Chinese Language * Learn Chinese Characters * Chinese Scholar: The Free Chinese Class Learn Chinese language and culture through interactive media
Chinese_language
Refer most chinese and chinese linguists to chinese as a single language and Chinese language`s subdivisions dialects , while others call chinese a language family ?
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Chinese_language Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) is a language family consisting of languages mutually unintelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. “The mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.” *Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. “The Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.” *Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. “The modern Chinese dialects are really more like a family of language. *John DeFrancis. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (1984), p.56. "To call Chinese a single language composed of dialects with varying degrees of difference is to mislead by minimizing disparities that according to Chao are as great as those between English and Dutch. To call Chinese a family of languages is to suggest extralinguistic differences that in fact do not exist and to overlook the unique linguistic situation that exists in China." Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the two branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages. About one-fifth of the world’s population, or over one billion people, speak some form of Chinese as their native language. The identification of the varieties of Chinese as "dialects" instead of "languages" is considered inappropriate by linguists and Sinologists. Spoken Chinese is distinguished by its high level of internal diversity, although all spoken varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic. There are between seven and thirteen main regional groups of Chinese (depending on classification scheme), of which the most spoken, by far, is Mandarin (about 850 million), followed by Wu (90 million), Min (70 million) and Cantonese (70 million). Most of these groups are mutually unintelligible, although some, like Xiang and the Southwest Mandarin dialects, may share common terms and some degree of intelligibility. Chinese is classified as a macrolanguage with 13 sub-languages in ISO 639-3, though the identification of the varieties of Chinese as multiple "languages" or as "dialects" of a single language is a contentious issue. The standardized form of spoken Chinese is Standard Mandarin (Putonghua / Guoyu / Huayu), based on the Beijing dialect, which is part of a larger group of North-Eastern and South-Western dialects, often taken as a separate language, see Mandarin Chinese for more, this language can be referred to as 官话 Guānhuà or 北方话 Běifānghuà in Chinese. Standard Mandarin is the official language of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC), as well as one of four official languages of Singapore. Chinese—de facto, Standard Mandarin—is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Of the other varieties, Standard Cantonese is common and influential in Guangdong Province and Cantonese-speaking overseas communities, and remains one of the official languages of Hong Kong (together with English) and of Macau (together with Portuguese). Hokkien, part of the Min language group, is widely spoken in southern Fujian, in neighbouring Taiwan (where it is known as Taiwanese or Hoklo) and in Southeast Asia (where it dominates in Singapore and Malaysia). Xinhua reported in March 2007 that 86 percent of people in the People's Republic of China spoke a Chinese variant. 全國約有53%的人能用普通話交流 As a language family, the number of Chinese speakers is 1.136 billion. The same news report indicates 53 percent of the population, or 700 million speakers, can effectively communicate in Putonghua. Sino-Tibetan language family. A map below depicts the linguistic subdivisions ("languages" or "dialect groups") within China itself. The traditionally-recognized seven main groups, in order of population size are: Chinese linguists have recently distinguished: 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. The Dungan language, spoken in Central Asia, is very closely related to Mandarin. However, it is not generally considered "Chinese" since it is written in Cyrillic and spoken by Dungan people outside China who are not considered ethnic Chinese. See List of Chinese dialects for a comprehensive listing of individual dialects within these large, broad groupings. In general, the above language-dialect groups do not have sharp boundaries, though Mandarin is the predominant Sinitic language in the North and the Southwest, and the rest are mostly spoken in Central or Southeastern China. Frequently, as in the case of the Guangdong province, native speakers of major variants overlapped. As with many areas that were linguistically diverse for a long time, it is not always clear how the speeches of various parts of China should be classified. The Ethnologue lists a total of 14, but the number varies between seven and seventeen depending on the classification scheme followed. For instance, the Min variety is often divided into Northern Min (Minbei, Fuchow) and Southern Min (Minnan, Amoy-Swatow); linguists have not determined whether their mutual intelligibility is small enough to sort them as separate languages. The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China. In general, mountainous South China displays more linguistic diversity than the flat North China. In parts of South China, a major city's dialect may only 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). Putonghua / Guoyu, often called "Mandarin", is the official standard language used by the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China, and Singapore (where it is called "Huayu"). It is based on the Beijing dialect, which is the dialect of Mandarin as spoken in Beijing. The governments intend for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. Therefore it is used in government agencies, in the media, and as a language of instruction in schools. In mainland China and Taiwan, diglossia has been a common feature: it is common for a Chinese to be able to speak two or even three varieties of the Sinitic languages (or “dialects”) together with Standard Mandarin. For example, in addition to putonghua a resident of Shanghai might speak Shanghainese and, if they did not grow up there, his or her local dialect as well. A native of Guangzhou may speak Standard Cantonese and putonghua, a resident of Taiwan, both Taiwanese and putonghua/guoyu. A person living in Taiwan 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, Standard Mandarin is beginning to take its place beside English and Standard Cantonese, the official languages. Linguists often view Chinese as a language family, though owing to China's socio-political and cultural situation, and the fact that all spoken varieties use one common written system, it is customary to refer to these generally mutually unintelligible variants as "the Chinese language". The diversity of Sinitic variants is comparable to the Romance languages. From a purely descriptive point of view, "languages" and "dialects" are simply arbitrary groups of similar idiolects, and the distinction is irrelevant to linguists who are only concerned with describing regional speeches technically. However, the idea of a single language has major overtones in politics and cultural self-identity, and explains the amount of emotion over this issue. Most Chinese and Chinese linguists refer to Chinese as a single language and its subdivisions dialects, while others call Chinese a language family. Chinese itself has a term for its unified writing system, Zhongwen (中文), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (汉语,“spoken language[s] of the Han Chinese) – this term could be translated to either “language” or “languages” since Chinese possesses no grammatical numbers. In the Chinese language, there is much less need for a uniform speech-and-writing continuum, as indicated by two separate character morphemes 语 yu and 文 wen. Ethnic Chinese often consider these spoken variations as one single language for reasons of nationality and as they inherit one common cultural and linguistic heritage in Classical Chinese. Han native speakers of Wu, Min, Hakka, and Cantonese, for instance, may consider their own linguistic varieties as separate spoken languages, but the Han Chinese race as one – albeit internally very diverse – ethnicity. To Chinese nationalists, the idea of Chinese as a language family may suggest that the Chinese identity is much more fragmentary and disunified than it actually is and as such is often looked upon as culturally and politically provocative. Additionally, in Taiwan, it is closely associated with Taiwanese independence, where some supporters of Taiwanese independence promote the local Taiwanese Minnan-based spoken language. Within the People’s Republic of China and Singapore, it is common for the government to refer to all divisions of the Sinitic language(s) beside Standard Mandarin as fangyan (“regional tongues”, often translated as “dialects”). Modern-day Chinese speakers of all kinds communicate using one formal standard written language, although this modern written standard is modeled after Mandarin, generally the modern Beijing substandard. The term sinophone, coined in analogy to anglophone and francophone, refers to those who speak the Chinese language natively, or prefer it as a medium of communication. The term is derived from Sinae, the Latin word for ancient China. :See also: Classical Chinese and Vernacular Chinese The relationship among the Chinese spoken and written languages is rather complex. Its spoken variations evolved at different rates, while written Chinese itself has changed much less. Classical Chinese literature began in the Spring and Autumn period, although written records have been discovered as far back as the 14th to 11th centuries BCE Shang dynasty oracle bones using the oracle bone scripts. The Chinese orthography centers around Chinese characters, hanzi, which are written within imaginary rectangular blocks, traditionally arranged in vertical columns, read from top to bottom down a column, and right to left across columns. Chinese characters are morphemes independent of phonetic change. Thus the number "one", yi in Mandarin, yat in Cantonese and chi̍t and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("一"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as 冇 and 係 for Cantonese and Hakka, which are considered archaic or unused in standard written Chinese. Written colloquial Cantonese has become quite popular in online chat rooms and instant messaging amongst Hong-Kongers and Cantonese-speakers elsewhere. Use of it is considered highly informal, and does not extend to any formal occasion. Also, in Hunan, some women write their local language in Nü Shu, a syllabary derived from Chinese characters. The Dungan language, considered by some 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 evolved over time from earliest forms of hieroglyphs. The idea that all Chinese characters are either pictographs or ideographs is an erroneous one: most characters contain phonetic parts, and are composites of phonetic components and semantic Radicals. Only the simplest characters, such as ren 人 (human), ri 日 (sun), shan 山 (mountain), shui 水 (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar Xǚ Shèn in the Hàn Dynasty classified characters into 6 categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80-90% as phonetic complexes consisting of a semantic element that indicates meaning, and a phonetic element that indicates the pronunciation. Generally, the phonetic element is more accurate and more important than the semantic one. There are about 214 radicals recognized in the Kangxi Dictionary. Modern characters are styled after the standard script (楷书/楷書 kǎishū) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (篆书/篆書 zhuànshū), cursive script (草书/草書 cǎoshū) and clerical script (隶书/隸書 lìshū). Calligraphy artists can write in traditional and simplified characters, but tend to use traditional characters for traditional art. Various styles of Chinese calligraphy. There are currently two systems for Chinese characters. The traditional system, still used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau and Chinese speaking communities (except Singapore and Malaysia) outside mainland China, takes its form from standardized character forms dating back to the late Han dynasty. The Simplified Chinese character system, developed by the People's Republic of China in 1954 to promote mass literacy, simplifies most complex traditional glyphs to fewer strokes, many to common caoshu shorthand variants. Singapore, which has a large Chinese communities, is the first – and at present the only – foreign nation to officially adopt simplified characters, although it has also become the de facto standard for younger ethnic Chinese in Malaysia. The Internet provides the platform to practice reading the alternative system, be it traditional or simplified. A well-educated Chinese today recognizes approximately 6,000-7,000 characters; some 3,000 characters are required to read a Mainland newspaper. The PRC government defines literacy amongst workers as a knowledge of 2,000 characters, though this would be only functional literacy. A large unabridged dictionary, like the Kangxi Dictionary, contains over 40,000 characters, including obscure, variant, rare, and archaic characters; less than a quarter of these characters are now commonly used.'' Most linguists classify all varieties of modern spoken Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family and believe that there was an original language, termed Proto-Sino-Tibetan, 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 Proto-Sino-Tibetan. 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 Indo-European languages from PIE don't apply to Chinese because of "morphological paucity" especially after Old Chinese Analysis of the concept "wave" in PST. . 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; most present systems rely heavily on Karlgren's insights and methods. Old Chinese ( ), sometimes known as "Archaic Chinese", was the language common during the early and middle Zhōu Dynasty (1122 BCE - 256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the Shījīng, the history of the Shūjīng, and portions of the Yìjīng (I Ching). The phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters 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 was still without tones. Work on reconstructing Old Chinese started with Qīng dynasty philologists. Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably 蜜 mì "honey", 獅 shī "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mǎ "horse", 犬 quǎn "dog", and 鵝 é "goose". The source says the reconstructions of old Chinese are tentative, and not definitive so no conclusions should be drawn. The reconstruction of Old Chinese can not be perfect so this hypothesis may be called into question. Encyclopedia Britannica s.v. "Chinese languages": "Old Chinese vocabulary already contained many words not generally occurring in the other Sino-Tibetan languages. The words for ‘honey' and ‘lion,' and probably also ‘horse,' ‘dog,' and ‘goose,' are connected with Indo-European and were acquired through trade and early contacts. (The nearest known Indo-European languages were Tocharian and Sogdian, a middle Iranian language.) A number of words have Austroasiatic cognates and point to early contacts with the ancestral language of Muong-Vietnamese and Mon-Khmer" ; Jan Ulenbrook, Einige Übereinstimmungen zwischen dem Chinesischen und dem Indogermanischen (1967) proposes 57 items; see also Tsung-tung Chang, 1988 Indo-European Vocabulary in Old Chinese;. 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 the Suí, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the 切韻 "Qièyùn" rhyme table (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the 廣韻 "Guǎngyùn" rhyme table. 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, 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; some scholars have argued that trying to reconstruct, say, modern Cantonese from modern Cantopop rhymes would give a fairly inaccurate picture of the present-day spoken language. The development of the spoken Chinese languages from early historical times to the present has been complex. Most Chinese people, in Sìchuān 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 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 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, though, a single standard of Mandarin did not exist. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The new 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 Standard Mandarin. As a result, Mandarin is now spoken by virtually all young and middle-aged citizens of mainland China and on Taiwan. Standard 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. Chinese was once the Lingua franca for East Asia countries for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. Throughout history Chinese culture and politics has had a great influence on unrelated languages such as Korean 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 Hán tự. It was the only available method for writing Vietnamese until the 14th century, used almost exclusively by Chinese-educated Vietnamese élites. From the 14th to the late 19th century, Vietnamese was written with Chữ nôm, a modified Chinese script incorporating sounds and syllables for native Vietnamese speakers. Chữ nôm was completely replaced by a modified Latin script created by the Jesuit missionary priest Alexander de Rhodes, which incorporates a system of diacritical marks to indicate tones, as well as modified consonants. The Vietnamese language exhibits multiple elements similar to Cantonese in regard to the specific intonations and sharp consonant endings. There is also a slight influence from Mandarin, including the sharper vowels and "kh" (IPA:x) sound 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. In derived Chinese characters or Zhuang logograms to write songs, even though Zhuang is not a Chinese dialect. Since the 1950s, the Zhuang language has been written in a modified Latin alphabet. Zhou, Minglang: Multilingualism in China: The Politics of Writing Reforms for Minority Languages, 1949-2002 (Walter de Gruyter 2003); ISBN 3-11-017896-6; p. 251–258. Languages within the influence of Chinese culture also have a very large number of loanwords from Chinese. Fifty percent or more of Korean vocabulary is of Chinese origin and the influence on Japanese and Vietnamese has been considerable. At least five percent of all words in Tagalog are of Chinese origin. Chinese has also lent a great deal of many grammatical features to these and neighboring languages, notably the lack of gender and the use of classifiers. Japanese has also a lot of loanwords from Chinese, as does Vietnamese. Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of 茶 (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 茄汁 (ke chap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 金橘 (kam kuat). :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, which is only about an eighth as many as English DeFrancis (1984) p.42 counts Chinese as having 1,277 tonal syllables, and about 398 to 418 if tones are disregarded; he cites Jespersen, Otto (1928) Monosyllabism in English; London, p.15 for a count of over 8000 syllables for English. . 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 four main tones of Standard Mandarin applied to the syllable "ma." The tones correspond to these five characters: * "mother" — high level * "hemp" or "torpid" — high rising * "horse" — low falling-rising * "scold" — high falling * "question particle" — neutral The Chinese had no uniform phonetic transcription system until the mid-20th century, although enunciation patterns were recorded in early rime books and dictionaries. Early Sanskrit and Pali Indian translators were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of the language in a foreign language. After 15th century CE Jesuits and Western court missionaries’ efforts result in some rudimentary Latin transcription systems, based on the Nanjing Mandarin dialect. Romanization is the process of transcribing a language in the Latin alphabet. There are many systems of romanization for the Chinese languages due to the Chinese's own lack of phonetic transcription until modern times. Chinese is first known to have been written in Latin characters by Western Christian missionaries in the 16th century. Today the most common romanization standard for Standard Mandarin is Hanyu Pinyin (漢語拼音/汉语拼音), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore). Pinyin is almost universally employed now for teaching standard spoken Chinese in schools and universities across America, Australia and Europe. Chinese parents also use Pinyin to teach their children the sounds and tones for words with which the child is unfamiliar. The Pinyin is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, and alongside the Pinyin is the Chinese symbol. The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859, later modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As it approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels (hence an Anglicization), it may be particularly helpful for beginner speakers of native English background. Wade-Giles is found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan (Taipei city now officially uses Hanyu Pinyin and the rest of the island officially uses Tōngyòng Pinyin 通用拼音). When used within European texts, the tone transcriptions in both pinyin and Wade-Giles are often left out for simplicity; Wade-Giles' extensive use of apostrophes is also usually omitted. Thus, most Western readers will be much more familiar with Beijing than they will be with Běijīng (pinyin), and with Taipei than T'ai²-pei³ (Wade-Giles). Here are a few examples of Hanyu Pinyin and Wade-Giles, for comparison: Other systems of romanization for Chinese include Gwoyeu Romatzyh, the French EFEO, the Yale (invented during WWII for U.S. troops), as well as separate systems for Cantonese, Minnan, Hakka, and other Chinese languages or dialects. Chinese languages have been phonetically transcribed into many other writing systems over the centuries. The 'Phags-pa script, for example, has been very helpful in reconstructing the pronunciations of pre-modern forms of Chinese. Zhuyin (注音, also known as bopomofo), a semi-syllabary is still widely used in Taiwan's elementary schools to aid standard pronunciation. Although bopomofo characters are reminiscent of katakana script, there is no source to substantiate the claim that Katakana was the basis for the zhuyin system. A comparison table of zhuyin to pinyin exists in the zhuyin article. Syllables based on pinyin and zhuyin can also be compared by looking at the following articles: *Pinyin table *Zhuyin table There are also at least two systems of cyrillization for Chinese. The most widespread is the Palladius system. Modern Chinese has often been erroneously classed as a "monosyllabic" language. While most of the morphemes are single syllable, modern Chinese today is much less a monosyllabic language in that nouns, adjectives and verbs are largely di-syllabic. The tendency to create disyllabic words in the modern Chinese languages, particularly in Mandarin, has been particularly pronounced when compared to Classical Chinese. Classical Chinese is a highly isolating language, with each idea (morpheme) generally corresponding to a single syllable and a single character; Modern Chinese though, has the tendency to form new words through disyllabic, trisyllabic and tetra-character agglutination. In fact, some linguists argue that classifying modern Chinese as an isolating language is misleading, for this reason alone. Chinese morphology is strictly bound to a set number of syllables with a fairly rigid construction which are the morphemes, the smallest blocks of the language. While many of these single-syllable morphemes ( zì, 字 in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cí (词/詞), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cí (“word”) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more. For example: *Yun 云 -“cloud” *Hanbaobao 汉堡包 –“hamburger” *Wo 我 –“I, me” *Renmin 人民 –“people” *Diqiu 地球 –“earth(globosity)” *Shandian 闪电 –“lightning” *Meng 梦 –“dream” All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphology — i.e., changes in form of a word — to indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflections – it possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English), and no gender. They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le 了, hai 还, yijing 已经, etc. 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. Chinese also has an extensive system of measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring 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. Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess 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. Official modern Mandarin has only 400 spoken monosyllables but over 10,000 written characters, so there are many homophones only distinguishable by the four tones. Even this is often not enough unless the context and exact phrase or cí is identified. The mono-syllable jī, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: 雞/鸡 chicken, 機/机 machine, 基 basic, 擊/击 (to) hit, 饑/饥 hunger, and 積/积 sum. In speech, the glyphing of a monosyllable to its meaning must be determined by context or by relation to other morphemes (e.g. "some" as in the opposite of "none"). Native speakers may state which words or phrases their names are found in, for convenience of writing: 名字叫嘉英，嘉陵江的嘉，英國的英 Míngzi jiào Jiāyīng, Jiālíng Jiāng de jiā, Yīngguó de yīng "My name is Jiāyīng, the Jia for Jialing River and the ying for the short form in Chinese of UK." Southern Chinese varieties like Cantonese and Hakka preserved more of the rimes of Middle Chinese and have more tones. The previous examples of jī, for instance, 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 multi-syllabic words. The entire Chinese character corpus since antiquity comprises well over 20,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are now commonly in use. However Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words, there are many times more Chinese words than there are characters as most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters. Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and phrases vary greatly. The Hanyu Da Zidian, an all-inclusive compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries for characters, including bone oracle versions. The Zhonghua Zihai 中华字海 (1994) contains 85,568 head entries for character definitions, and is the largest reference work based purely on character and its literary variants. The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary, the 12-volumed Hanyu Da Cidian 汉语大词典, records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters, and gives over 370,000 definitions. The 1999 revised Cihai, a multi-volume encyclopedic dictionary reference work, gives 122,836 vocabulary entry definitions under 19,485 Chinese characters, including proper names, phrases and common zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific and technical terms. The latest 2007 5th edition of Xiandai Hanyu Cidian 现代汉语词典, an authoritative one-volume dictionary on modern standard Chinese language as used in mainland China, has 65,000 entries and defines 11,000 head characters. Like any other language, Chinese has absorbed a sizeable amount of loanwords from other cultures. 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 since Old Chinese include 葡萄 "grape," 石榴 "pomegranate" and 狮子/獅子 "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including 佛 "Buddha" and 菩萨/菩薩 "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as 胡同 "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as 葡萄 "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or Pāli, the liturgical languages of North India. Words borrowed from the nomadic tribes of the Gobi, Mongolian or northeast regions generally have Altaic etymologies, such as 琵琶 "pípa", the Chinese lute, or 酪 "cheese" or "yoghurt", but from exactly which Altaic source is not always entirely clear. Foreign words continue to enter the Chinese language by transcription according to their pronunciations. This is done by employing Chinese characters with similar pronunciations. For example, "Israel" becomes 以色列 (pinyin: yǐsèliè), Paris 巴黎. A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including 沙發 shāfā "sofa," 马达/馬達 mǎdá "motor," 幽默 yōumò "humour," 逻辑/邏輯 luójí "logic," 时髦/時髦 shímáo "smart, fashionable" and 歇斯底里 xiēsīdǐlǐ "hysterics." The bulk of these words were originally coined in the Shanghainese dialect during the early 20th century and were later loaned into Mandarin, hence their pronunciations in Mandarin may be quite off from the English. For example, 沙发/沙發 and 马达/馬達 in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor." Today, 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 德律风/德律風 ( Shanghainese: télífon [ ], Standard Mandarin: délǜfēng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese 电话/電話 (diànhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include 电视/電視 (diànshì "electric vision") for television, 电脑/電腦 (diànnǎo "electric brain") for computer; 手机/手機 (shǒujī "hand machine") for cellphone, and 蓝牙/藍芽 (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. 網誌(wǎng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as 汉堡包/漢堡包 (hànbǎo bāo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as 拖拉机/拖拉機 (tuōlājī, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马利奥/馬利奧 for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example 奔腾/奔騰 (bēnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and 赛百味/賽百味 (Sàibǎiwèi "better-than hundred tastes") for Subway restaurants. Since the 20th century, another source has been Japan. Using existing kanji, which are Chinese characters used in the Japanese language, the Japanese re-moulded European concepts and inventions into wasei-kango (和製漢語, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include diànhuà (电话/電話, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社会, shakai, "society"), kēxué (科学/科學, kagaku, "science") and chōuxiàng (抽象, chūshō, "abstract"). Other terms were coined by the Japanese by giving new senses to existing Chinese terms or by referring to expressions used in classical Chinese literature. For example, jīngjì (经济/經濟, keizai), which in the original Chinese meant "the workings of the state", was narrowed to "economy" in Japanese; this narrowed definition was then reimported into Chinese. As a result, these terms are virtually indistinguishable from native Chinese words: indeed, there is some dispute over some of these terms as to whether the Japanese or Chinese coined them first. As a result of this toing-and-froing process, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese share a corpus linguistics of terms describing modern terminology, in parallel to a similar corpus of terms built from Greco-Latin terms shared among European languages. Taiwanese and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便当/便當 “lunchbox or boxed lunch” (from bento) and 料理 “prepared cuisine”, have passed into common currency. Western foreign words have great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came 芭蕾 (bāléi, "ballet"), 香槟 (xiāngbīn, "champagne"), via Italian 咖啡 (kāfēi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned 沙發 (shāfā "sofa"), 幽默 (yōumò "humour"), and 高尔夫 (gāoěrfū, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪斯科 (dísīkè, "disco"), 可乐 (kělè, "cola") and 迷你 (mínǐ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon 卡通 (cartoon), 基佬 (gay people), 的士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. 粉絲 (fěnsī, "fans"), 駭客 (hèikè, "hacker"), 部落格(bùluōgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin. Since the People's Republic of China’s economic and political rise in recent years, standard Mandarin has become an increasingly popular subject of study amongst the young in the Western world, as in the UK. BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | How hard is it to learn Chinese? In 1991 there were 2,000 foreign learners taking China's official Chinese Proficiency Test (comparable to English's Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660 . *Chinese characters *Chinese honorifics *Chinese measure word *Chinese number gestures *Chinese numerals *Chinese punctuation *Chinese exclamative particles *Four-character idiom *Han unification *Haner language *HSK test *Languages of China *North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics *Nü shu * * * * * * Keys to the Chinese Language: Book II - Google Books * A Practical Chinese Grammar - Google Books * ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawai’i Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X. * ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-08248-2975-9. * Arch Chinese free online Chinese character and Pinyin learning, Chinese English dictionary, writing worksheet generation, etc. * CHINGLISH online Chinese English Dictionary * nciku free online Chinese dictionary with handwriting recognition, pinyin, sound clips, etc. * MDBG free online Chinese-English dictionary * Chinese Characters Dictionary: supports Japanese, Korean, Cantonese, Hakka etc. * Chinese - English Dictionary: from Webster's Online Dictionary - the Rosetta Edition * CEDICT Chinese-English Dictionary Project * Stardict free (GPL) multilanguage dictionary including simplified/traditional Chinese for Unix (Linux, FreeBSD, etc.) and win32 * English-Chinese Translation Dictionary: Chinese-English-Chinese Online Dictionary (Taiwan-based; simplified characters not recognised) * CantoDict: Cantonese-English Dictionary Project * Chinese Pronunciation Dictionary Input Chinese words or sentences, get audio file of Mandarin pronunciation. Web-based tool. * Pinyin Annotator Add pinyin on top of any Chinese text. Mouse over any word to see English translation. Save output to OpenOffice Writer format. Prints nicely. Also adds pinyin to any Chinese web page. *Firefox users can install Add-ons for a pinyin annotator * Multimedia Dictionary of Chinese Characters Language Tool, Offline Chinese Dictionary. * Chinese Scholar Dictionary Chinese English dictionary with Pinyin index * A Cognitive Approach to Beginning Chinese: Interactions I and II. Margaret Mian Yan and Jennifer Li-chia Liu, Indiana University * Chinese Language Information Page A collection of Chinese language learning resources. * Learn Chinese - One At A Time * China KeyBoard Google Engine * Oneaday.org One Chinese idiom a day (simplified and traditional characters) with pinyin transliteration and English translation. * Mandarin Tone Drill Testing your knowledge of Mandarin tones. * Pinyin Practice Pinyin practice for Mandarin learners in all levels * Marjorie Chan's ChinaLinks: A large collection of Web resources by a professor of linguistics at Ohio State University * 4 words of Chinese every day * Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard * Chinese Character of the Day Learn to Read Chinese one word at a time. * Audio files with basic Chinese words * General Introduction of Chinese Language * Learn Chinese Characters * Chinese Scholar: The Free Chinese Class Learn Chinese language and culture through interactive media
Chinese_language
Are there between 7 and 13 main regional groups of Chinese , of which the most spoken , by far , is about 850 million , followed by 90 million , 70 million and 70 million ?
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Chinese_language Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) is a language family consisting of languages mutually unintelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. “The mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.” *Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. “The Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.” *Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. “The modern Chinese dialects are really more like a family of language. *John DeFrancis. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (1984), p.56. "To call Chinese a single language composed of dialects with varying degrees of difference is to mislead by minimizing disparities that according to Chao are as great as those between English and Dutch. To call Chinese a family of languages is to suggest extralinguistic differences that in fact do not exist and to overlook the unique linguistic situation that exists in China." Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the two branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages. About one-fifth of the world’s population, or over one billion people, speak some form of Chinese as their native language. The identification of the varieties of Chinese as "dialects" instead of "languages" is considered inappropriate by linguists and Sinologists. Spoken Chinese is distinguished by its high level of internal diversity, although all spoken varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic. There are between seven and thirteen main regional groups of Chinese (depending on classification scheme), of which the most spoken, by far, is Mandarin (about 850 million), followed by Wu (90 million), Min (70 million) and Cantonese (70 million). Most of these groups are mutually unintelligible, although some, like Xiang and the Southwest Mandarin dialects, may share common terms and some degree of intelligibility. Chinese is classified as a macrolanguage with 13 sub-languages in ISO 639-3, though the identification of the varieties of Chinese as multiple "languages" or as "dialects" of a single language is a contentious issue. The standardized form of spoken Chinese is Standard Mandarin (Putonghua / Guoyu / Huayu), based on the Beijing dialect, which is part of a larger group of North-Eastern and South-Western dialects, often taken as a separate language, see Mandarin Chinese for more, this language can be referred to as 官话 Guānhuà or 北方话 Běifānghuà in Chinese. Standard Mandarin is the official language of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC), as well as one of four official languages of Singapore. Chinese—de facto, Standard Mandarin—is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Of the other varieties, Standard Cantonese is common and influential in Guangdong Province and Cantonese-speaking overseas communities, and remains one of the official languages of Hong Kong (together with English) and of Macau (together with Portuguese). Hokkien, part of the Min language group, is widely spoken in southern Fujian, in neighbouring Taiwan (where it is known as Taiwanese or Hoklo) and in Southeast Asia (where it dominates in Singapore and Malaysia). Xinhua reported in March 2007 that 86 percent of people in the People's Republic of China spoke a Chinese variant. 全國約有53%的人能用普通話交流 As a language family, the number of Chinese speakers is 1.136 billion. The same news report indicates 53 percent of the population, or 700 million speakers, can effectively communicate in Putonghua. Sino-Tibetan language family. A map below depicts the linguistic subdivisions ("languages" or "dialect groups") within China itself. The traditionally-recognized seven main groups, in order of population size are: Chinese linguists have recently distinguished: 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. The Dungan language, spoken in Central Asia, is very closely related to Mandarin. However, it is not generally considered "Chinese" since it is written in Cyrillic and spoken by Dungan people outside China who are not considered ethnic Chinese. See List of Chinese dialects for a comprehensive listing of individual dialects within these large, broad groupings. In general, the above language-dialect groups do not have sharp boundaries, though Mandarin is the predominant Sinitic language in the North and the Southwest, and the rest are mostly spoken in Central or Southeastern China. Frequently, as in the case of the Guangdong province, native speakers of major variants overlapped. As with many areas that were linguistically diverse for a long time, it is not always clear how the speeches of various parts of China should be classified. The Ethnologue lists a total of 14, but the number varies between seven and seventeen depending on the classification scheme followed. For instance, the Min variety is often divided into Northern Min (Minbei, Fuchow) and Southern Min (Minnan, Amoy-Swatow); linguists have not determined whether their mutual intelligibility is small enough to sort them as separate languages. The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China. In general, mountainous South China displays more linguistic diversity than the flat North China. In parts of South China, a major city's dialect may only 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). Putonghua / Guoyu, often called "Mandarin", is the official standard language used by the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China, and Singapore (where it is called "Huayu"). It is based on the Beijing dialect, which is the dialect of Mandarin as spoken in Beijing. The governments intend for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. Therefore it is used in government agencies, in the media, and as a language of instruction in schools. In mainland China and Taiwan, diglossia has been a common feature: it is common for a Chinese to be able to speak two or even three varieties of the Sinitic languages (or “dialects”) together with Standard Mandarin. For example, in addition to putonghua a resident of Shanghai might speak Shanghainese and, if they did not grow up there, his or her local dialect as well. A native of Guangzhou may speak Standard Cantonese and putonghua, a resident of Taiwan, both Taiwanese and putonghua/guoyu. A person living in Taiwan 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, Standard Mandarin is beginning to take its place beside English and Standard Cantonese, the official languages. Linguists often view Chinese as a language family, though owing to China's socio-political and cultural situation, and the fact that all spoken varieties use one common written system, it is customary to refer to these generally mutually unintelligible variants as "the Chinese language". The diversity of Sinitic variants is comparable to the Romance languages. From a purely descriptive point of view, "languages" and "dialects" are simply arbitrary groups of similar idiolects, and the distinction is irrelevant to linguists who are only concerned with describing regional speeches technically. However, the idea of a single language has major overtones in politics and cultural self-identity, and explains the amount of emotion over this issue. Most Chinese and Chinese linguists refer to Chinese as a single language and its subdivisions dialects, while others call Chinese a language family. Chinese itself has a term for its unified writing system, Zhongwen (中文), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (汉语,“spoken language[s] of the Han Chinese) – this term could be translated to either “language” or “languages” since Chinese possesses no grammatical numbers. In the Chinese language, there is much less need for a uniform speech-and-writing continuum, as indicated by two separate character morphemes 语 yu and 文 wen. Ethnic Chinese often consider these spoken variations as one single language for reasons of nationality and as they inherit one common cultural and linguistic heritage in Classical Chinese. Han native speakers of Wu, Min, Hakka, and Cantonese, for instance, may consider their own linguistic varieties as separate spoken languages, but the Han Chinese race as one – albeit internally very diverse – ethnicity. To Chinese nationalists, the idea of Chinese as a language family may suggest that the Chinese identity is much more fragmentary and disunified than it actually is and as such is often looked upon as culturally and politically provocative. Additionally, in Taiwan, it is closely associated with Taiwanese independence, where some supporters of Taiwanese independence promote the local Taiwanese Minnan-based spoken language. Within the People’s Republic of China and Singapore, it is common for the government to refer to all divisions of the Sinitic language(s) beside Standard Mandarin as fangyan (“regional tongues”, often translated as “dialects”). Modern-day Chinese speakers of all kinds communicate using one formal standard written language, although this modern written standard is modeled after Mandarin, generally the modern Beijing substandard. The term sinophone, coined in analogy to anglophone and francophone, refers to those who speak the Chinese language natively, or prefer it as a medium of communication. The term is derived from Sinae, the Latin word for ancient China. :See also: Classical Chinese and Vernacular Chinese The relationship among the Chinese spoken and written languages is rather complex. Its spoken variations evolved at different rates, while written Chinese itself has changed much less. Classical Chinese literature began in the Spring and Autumn period, although written records have been discovered as far back as the 14th to 11th centuries BCE Shang dynasty oracle bones using the oracle bone scripts. The Chinese orthography centers around Chinese characters, hanzi, which are written within imaginary rectangular blocks, traditionally arranged in vertical columns, read from top to bottom down a column, and right to left across columns. Chinese characters are morphemes independent of phonetic change. Thus the number "one", yi in Mandarin, yat in Cantonese and chi̍t and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("一"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as 冇 and 係 for Cantonese and Hakka, which are considered archaic or unused in standard written Chinese. Written colloquial Cantonese has become quite popular in online chat rooms and instant messaging amongst Hong-Kongers and Cantonese-speakers elsewhere. Use of it is considered highly informal, and does not extend to any formal occasion. Also, in Hunan, some women write their local language in Nü Shu, a syllabary derived from Chinese characters. The Dungan language, considered by some 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 evolved over time from earliest forms of hieroglyphs. The idea that all Chinese characters are either pictographs or ideographs is an erroneous one: most characters contain phonetic parts, and are composites of phonetic components and semantic Radicals. Only the simplest characters, such as ren 人 (human), ri 日 (sun), shan 山 (mountain), shui 水 (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar Xǚ Shèn in the Hàn Dynasty classified characters into 6 categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80-90% as phonetic complexes consisting of a semantic element that indicates meaning, and a phonetic element that indicates the pronunciation. Generally, the phonetic element is more accurate and more important than the semantic one. There are about 214 radicals recognized in the Kangxi Dictionary. Modern characters are styled after the standard script (楷书/楷書 kǎishū) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (篆书/篆書 zhuànshū), cursive script (草书/草書 cǎoshū) and clerical script (隶书/隸書 lìshū). Calligraphy artists can write in traditional and simplified characters, but tend to use traditional characters for traditional art. Various styles of Chinese calligraphy. There are currently two systems for Chinese characters. The traditional system, still used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau and Chinese speaking communities (except Singapore and Malaysia) outside mainland China, takes its form from standardized character forms dating back to the late Han dynasty. The Simplified Chinese character system, developed by the People's Republic of China in 1954 to promote mass literacy, simplifies most complex traditional glyphs to fewer strokes, many to common caoshu shorthand variants. Singapore, which has a large Chinese communities, is the first – and at present the only – foreign nation to officially adopt simplified characters, although it has also become the de facto standard for younger ethnic Chinese in Malaysia. The Internet provides the platform to practice reading the alternative system, be it traditional or simplified. A well-educated Chinese today recognizes approximately 6,000-7,000 characters; some 3,000 characters are required to read a Mainland newspaper. The PRC government defines literacy amongst workers as a knowledge of 2,000 characters, though this would be only functional literacy. A large unabridged dictionary, like the Kangxi Dictionary, contains over 40,000 characters, including obscure, variant, rare, and archaic characters; less than a quarter of these characters are now commonly used.'' Most linguists classify all varieties of modern spoken Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family and believe that there was an original language, termed Proto-Sino-Tibetan, 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 Proto-Sino-Tibetan. 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 Indo-European languages from PIE don't apply to Chinese because of "morphological paucity" especially after Old Chinese Analysis of the concept "wave" in PST. . 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; most present systems rely heavily on Karlgren's insights and methods. Old Chinese ( ), sometimes known as "Archaic Chinese", was the language common during the early and middle Zhōu Dynasty (1122 BCE - 256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the Shījīng, the history of the Shūjīng, and portions of the Yìjīng (I Ching). The phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters 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 was still without tones. Work on reconstructing Old Chinese started with Qīng dynasty philologists. Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably 蜜 mì "honey", 獅 shī "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mǎ "horse", 犬 quǎn "dog", and 鵝 é "goose". The source says the reconstructions of old Chinese are tentative, and not definitive so no conclusions should be drawn. The reconstruction of Old Chinese can not be perfect so this hypothesis may be called into question. Encyclopedia Britannica s.v. "Chinese languages": "Old Chinese vocabulary already contained many words not generally occurring in the other Sino-Tibetan languages. The words for ‘honey' and ‘lion,' and probably also ‘horse,' ‘dog,' and ‘goose,' are connected with Indo-European and were acquired through trade and early contacts. (The nearest known Indo-European languages were Tocharian and Sogdian, a middle Iranian language.) A number of words have Austroasiatic cognates and point to early contacts with the ancestral language of Muong-Vietnamese and Mon-Khmer" ; Jan Ulenbrook, Einige Übereinstimmungen zwischen dem Chinesischen und dem Indogermanischen (1967) proposes 57 items; see also Tsung-tung Chang, 1988 Indo-European Vocabulary in Old Chinese;. 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 the Suí, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the 切韻 "Qièyùn" rhyme table (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the 廣韻 "Guǎngyùn" rhyme table. 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, 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; some scholars have argued that trying to reconstruct, say, modern Cantonese from modern Cantopop rhymes would give a fairly inaccurate picture of the present-day spoken language. The development of the spoken Chinese languages from early historical times to the present has been complex. Most Chinese people, in Sìchuān 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 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 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, though, a single standard of Mandarin did not exist. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The new 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 Standard Mandarin. As a result, Mandarin is now spoken by virtually all young and middle-aged citizens of mainland China and on Taiwan. Standard 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. Chinese was once the Lingua franca for East Asia countries for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. Throughout history Chinese culture and politics has had a great influence on unrelated languages such as Korean 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 Hán tự. It was the only available method for writing Vietnamese until the 14th century, used almost exclusively by Chinese-educated Vietnamese élites. From the 14th to the late 19th century, Vietnamese was written with Chữ nôm, a modified Chinese script incorporating sounds and syllables for native Vietnamese speakers. Chữ nôm was completely replaced by a modified Latin script created by the Jesuit missionary priest Alexander de Rhodes, which incorporates a system of diacritical marks to indicate tones, as well as modified consonants. The Vietnamese language exhibits multiple elements similar to Cantonese in regard to the specific intonations and sharp consonant endings. There is also a slight influence from Mandarin, including the sharper vowels and "kh" (IPA:x) sound 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. In derived Chinese characters or Zhuang logograms to write songs, even though Zhuang is not a Chinese dialect. Since the 1950s, the Zhuang language has been written in a modified Latin alphabet. Zhou, Minglang: Multilingualism in China: The Politics of Writing Reforms for Minority Languages, 1949-2002 (Walter de Gruyter 2003); ISBN 3-11-017896-6; p. 251–258. Languages within the influence of Chinese culture also have a very large number of loanwords from Chinese. Fifty percent or more of Korean vocabulary is of Chinese origin and the influence on Japanese and Vietnamese has been considerable. At least five percent of all words in Tagalog are of Chinese origin. Chinese has also lent a great deal of many grammatical features to these and neighboring languages, notably the lack of gender and the use of classifiers. Japanese has also a lot of loanwords from Chinese, as does Vietnamese. Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of 茶 (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 茄汁 (ke chap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of 金橘 (kam kuat). :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, which is only about an eighth as many as English DeFrancis (1984) p.42 counts Chinese as having 1,277 tonal syllables, and about 398 to 418 if tones are disregarded; he cites Jespersen, Otto (1928) Monosyllabism in English; London, p.15 for a count of over 8000 syllables for English. . 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 four main tones of Standard Mandarin applied to the syllable "ma." The tones correspond to these five characters: * "mother" — high level * "hemp" or "torpid" — high rising * "horse" — low falling-rising * "scold" — high falling * "question particle" — neutral The Chinese had no uniform phonetic transcription system until the mid-20th century, although enunciation patterns were recorded in early rime books and dictionaries. Early Sanskrit and Pali Indian translators were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of the language in a foreign language. After 15th century CE Jesuits and Western court missionaries’ efforts result in some rudimentary Latin transcription systems, based on the Nanjing Mandarin dialect. Romanization is the process of transcribing a language in the Latin alphabet. There are many systems of romanization for the Chinese languages due to the Chinese's own lack of phonetic transcription until modern times. Chinese is first known to have been written in Latin characters by Western Christian missionaries in the 16th century. Today the most common romanization standard for Standard Mandarin is Hanyu Pinyin (漢語拼音/汉语拼音), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore). Pinyin is almost universally employed now for teaching standard spoken Chinese in schools and universities across America, Australia and Europe. Chinese parents also use Pinyin to teach their children the sounds and tones for words with which the child is unfamiliar. The Pinyin is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, and alongside the Pinyin is the Chinese symbol. The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859, later modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As it approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels (hence an Anglicization), it may be particularly helpful for beginner speakers of native English background. Wade-Giles is found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan (Taipei city now officially uses Hanyu Pinyin and the rest of the island officially uses Tōngyòng Pinyin 通用拼音). When used within European texts, the tone transcriptions in both pinyin and Wade-Giles are often left out for simplicity; Wade-Giles' extensive use of apostrophes is also usually omitted. Thus, most Western readers will be much more familiar with Beijing than they will be with Běijīng (pinyin), and with Taipei than T'ai²-pei³ (Wade-Giles). Here are a few examples of Hanyu Pinyin and Wade-Giles, for comparison: Other systems of romanization for Chinese include Gwoyeu Romatzyh, the French EFEO, the Yale (invented during WWII for U.S. troops), as well as separate systems for Cantonese, Minnan, Hakka, and other Chinese languages or dialects. Chinese languages have been phonetically transcribed into many other writing systems over the centuries. The 'Phags-pa script, for example, has been very helpful in reconstructing the pronunciations of pre-modern forms of Chinese. Zhuyin (注音, also known as bopomofo), a semi-syllabary is still widely used in Taiwan's elementary schools to aid standard pronunciation. Although bopomofo characters are reminiscent of katakana script, there is no source to substantiate the claim that Katakana was the basis for the zhuyin system. A comparison table of zhuyin to pinyin exists in the zhuyin article. Syllables based on pinyin and zhuyin can also be compared by looking at the following articles: *Pinyin table *Zhuyin table There are also at least two systems of cyrillization for Chinese. The most widespread is the Palladius system. Modern Chinese has often been erroneously classed as a "monosyllabic" language. While most of the morphemes are single syllable, modern Chinese today is much less a monosyllabic language in that nouns, adjectives and verbs are largely di-syllabic. The tendency to create disyllabic words in the modern Chinese languages, particularly in Mandarin, has been particularly pronounced when compared to Classical Chinese. Classical Chinese is a highly isolating language, with each idea (morpheme) generally corresponding to a single syllable and a single character; Modern Chinese though, has the tendency to form new words through disyllabic, trisyllabic and tetra-character agglutination. In fact, some linguists argue that classifying modern Chinese as an isolating language is misleading, for this reason alone. Chinese morphology is strictly bound to a set number of syllables with a fairly rigid construction which are the morphemes, the smallest blocks of the language. While many of these single-syllable morphemes ( zì, 字 in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cí (词/詞), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cí (“word”) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more. For example: *Yun 云 -“cloud” *Hanbaobao 汉堡包 –“hamburger” *Wo 我 –“I, me” *Renmin 人民 –“people” *Diqiu 地球 –“earth(globosity)” *Shandian 闪电 –“lightning” *Meng 梦 –“dream” All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphology — i.e., changes in form of a word — to indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflections – it possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English), and no gender. They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le 了, hai 还, yijing 已经, etc. 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. Chinese also has an extensive system of measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring 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. Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess 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. Official modern Mandarin has only 400 spoken monosyllables but over 10,000 written characters, so there are many homophones only distinguishable by the four tones. Even this is often not enough unless the context and exact phrase or cí is identified. The mono-syllable jī, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: 雞/鸡 chicken, 機/机 machine, 基 basic, 擊/击 (to) hit, 饑/饥 hunger, and 積/积 sum. In speech, the glyphing of a monosyllable to its meaning must be determined by context or by relation to other morphemes (e.g. "some" as in the opposite of "none"). Native speakers may state which words or phrases their names are found in, for convenience of writing: 名字叫嘉英，嘉陵江的嘉，英國的英 Míngzi jiào Jiāyīng, Jiālíng Jiāng de jiā, Yīngguó de yīng "My name is Jiāyīng, the Jia for Jialing River and the ying for the short form in Chinese of UK." Southern Chinese varieties like Cantonese and Hakka preserved more of the rimes of Middle Chinese and have more tones. The previous examples of jī, for instance, 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 multi-syllabic words. The entire Chinese character corpus since antiquity comprises well over 20,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are now commonly in use. However Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words, there are many times more Chinese words than there are characters as most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters. Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and phrases vary greatly. The Hanyu Da Zidian, an all-inclusive compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries for characters, including bone oracle versions. The Zhonghua Zihai 中华字海 (1994) contains 85,568 head entries for character definitions, and is the largest reference work based purely on character and its literary variants. The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary, the 12-volumed Hanyu Da Cidian 汉语大词典, records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters, and gives over 370,000 definitions. The 1999 revised Cihai, a multi-volume encyclopedic dictionary reference work, gives 122,836 vocabulary entry definitions under 19,485 Chinese characters, including proper names, phrases and common zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific and technical terms. The latest 2007 5th edition of Xiandai Hanyu Cidian 现代汉语词典, an authoritative one-volume dictionary on modern standard Chinese language as used in mainland China, has 65,000 entries and defines 11,000 head characters. Like any other language, Chinese has absorbed a sizeable amount of loanwords from other cultures. 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 since Old Chinese include 葡萄 "grape," 石榴 "pomegranate" and 狮子/獅子 "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including 佛 "Buddha" and 菩萨/菩薩 "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as 胡同 "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as 葡萄 "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or Pāli, the liturgical languages of North India. Words borrowed from the nomadic tribes of the Gobi, Mongolian or northeast regions generally have Altaic etymologies, such as 琵琶 "pípa", the Chinese lute, or 酪 "cheese" or "yoghurt", but from exactly which Altaic source is not always entirely clear. Foreign words continue to enter the Chinese language by transcription according to their pronunciations. This is done by employing Chinese characters with similar pronunciations. For example, "Israel" becomes 以色列 (pinyin: yǐsèliè), Paris 巴黎. A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including 沙發 shāfā "sofa," 马达/馬達 mǎdá "motor," 幽默 yōumò "humour," 逻辑/邏輯 luójí "logic," 时髦/時髦 shímáo "smart, fashionable" and 歇斯底里 xiēsīdǐlǐ "hysterics." The bulk of these words were originally coined in the Shanghainese dialect during the early 20th century and were later loaned into Mandarin, hence their pronunciations in Mandarin may be quite off from the English. For example, 沙发/沙發 and 马达/馬達 in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor." Today, 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 德律风/德律風 ( Shanghainese: télífon [ ], Standard Mandarin: délǜfēng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese 电话/電話 (diànhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include 电视/電視 (diànshì "electric vision") for television, 电脑/電腦 (diànnǎo "electric brain") for computer; 手机/手機 (shǒujī "hand machine") for cellphone, and 蓝牙/藍芽 (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. 網誌(wǎng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as 汉堡包/漢堡包 (hànbǎo bāo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as 拖拉机/拖拉機 (tuōlājī, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马利奥/馬利奧 for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example 奔腾/奔騰 (bēnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and 赛百味/賽百味 (Sàibǎiwèi "better-than hundred tastes") for Subway restaurants. Since the 20th century, another source has been Japan. Using existing kanji, which are Chinese characters used in the Japanese language, the Japanese re-moulded European concepts and inventions into wasei-kango (和製漢語, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include diànhuà (电话/電話, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社会, shakai, "society"), kēxué (科学/科學, kagaku, "science") and chōuxiàng (抽象, chūshō, "abstract"). Other terms were coined by the Japanese by giving new senses to existing Chinese terms or by referring to expressions used in classical Chinese literature. For example, jīngjì (经济/經濟, keizai), which in the original Chinese meant "the workings of the state", was narrowed to "economy" in Japanese; this narrowed definition was then reimported into Chinese. As a result, these terms are virtually indistinguishable from native Chinese words: indeed, there is some dispute over some of these terms as to whether the Japanese or Chinese coined them first. As a result of this toing-and-froing process, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese share a corpus linguistics of terms describing modern terminology, in parallel to a similar corpus of terms built from Greco-Latin terms shared among European languages. Taiwanese and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便当/便當 “lunchbox or boxed lunch” (from bento) and 料理 “prepared cuisine”, have passed into common currency. Western foreign words have great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came 芭蕾 (bāléi, "ballet"), 香槟 (xiāngbīn, "champagne"), via Italian 咖啡 (kāfēi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned 沙發 (shāfā "sofa"), 幽默 (yōumò "humour"), and 高尔夫 (gāoěrfū, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪斯科 (dísīkè, "disco"), 可乐 (kělè, "cola") and 迷你 (mínǐ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon 卡通 (cartoon), 基佬 (gay people), 的士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. 粉絲 (fěnsī, "fans"), 駭客 (hèikè, "hacker"), 部落格(bùluōgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin. Since the People's Republic of China’s economic and political rise in recent years, standard Mandarin has become an increasingly popular subject of study amongst the young in the Western world, as in the UK. BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | How hard is it to learn Chinese? In 1991 there were 2,000 foreign learners taking China's official Chinese Proficiency Test (comparable to English's Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660 . *Chinese characters *Chinese honorifics *Chinese measure word *Chinese number gestures *Chinese numerals *Chinese punctuation *Chinese exclamative particles *Four-character idiom *Han unification *Haner language *HSK test *Languages of China *North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics *Nü shu * * * * * * Keys to the Chinese Language: Book II - Google Books * A Practical Chinese Grammar - Google Books * ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawai’i Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X. * ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-08248-2975-9. * Arch Chinese free online Chinese character and Pinyin learning, Chinese English dictionary, writing worksheet generation, etc. * CHINGLISH online Chinese English Dictionary * nciku free online Chinese dictionary with handwriting recognition, pinyin, sound clips, etc. * MDBG free online Chinese-English dictionary * Chinese Characters Dictionary: supports Japanese, Korean, Cantonese, Hakka etc. * Chinese - English Dictionary: from Webster's Online Dictionary - the Rosetta Edition * CEDICT Chinese-English Dictionary Project * Stardict free (GPL) multilanguage dictionary including simplified/traditional Chinese for Unix (Linux, FreeBSD, etc.) and win32 * English-Chinese Translation Dictionary: Chinese-English-Chinese Online Dictionary (Taiwan-based; simplified characters not recognised) * CantoDict: Cantonese-English Dictionary Project * Chinese Pronunciation Dictionary Input Chinese words or sentences, get audio file of Mandarin pronunciation. Web-based tool. * Pinyin Annotator Add pinyin on top of any Chinese text. Mouse over any word to see English translation. Save output to OpenOffice Writer format. Prints nicely. Also adds pinyin to any Chinese web page. *Firefox users can install Add-ons for a pinyin annotator * Multimedia Dictionary of Chinese Characters Language Tool, Offline Chinese Dictionary. * Chinese Scholar Dictionary Chinese English dictionary with Pinyin index * A Cognitive Approach to Beginning Chinese: Interactions I and II. Margaret Mian Yan and Jennifer Li-chia Liu, Indiana University * Chinese Language Information Page A collection of Chinese language learning resources. * Learn Chinese - One At A Time * China KeyBoard Google Engine * Oneaday.org One Chinese idiom a day (simplified and traditional characters) with pinyin transliteration and English translation. * Mandarin Tone Drill Testing your knowledge of Mandarin tones. * Pinyin Practice Pinyin practice for Mandarin learners in all levels * Marjorie Chan's ChinaLinks: A large collection of Web resources by a professor of linguistics at Ohio State University * 4 words of Chinese every day * Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard * Chinese Character of the Day Learn to Read Chinese one word at a time. * Audio files with basic Chinese words * General Introduction of Chinese Language * Learn Chinese Characters * Chinese Scholar: The Free Chinese Class Learn Chinese language and culture through interactive media
Copenhagen
Copenhagen is the capital of what country?
Denmark
data/set3/a8
Copenhagen Copenhagen ( ; ) is the capital and largest city of Denmark, with a population of 1,161,063. Copenhagen is situated on the Islands of Zealand and Amager. First documented in the 11th century, Copenhagen became the capital of Denmark in the beginning of the 15th century and during the 17th century under the reign of Christian IV it became an important regional centre. Copenhagen is usually ranked as one of the two largest cities of the Nordic Countries. [ LARGEST CITY Copenhagen or Stockholm ? [ Denmark in brief . With the completion of the transnational Oresund Bridge in 2000, Copenhagen has become the centre of the increasingly integrating Øresund Region with around 3.7 million inhabitants covering an area of 20,869 km² (177/km²). Within this region, Copenhagen and Malmö is in the process of growing into one common metropolitan area. Copenhagen is a major regional center of culture, business, media, and science. In 2008 Copenhagen was ranked #4 by Financial Times-owned FDi magazine on their list of Top50 European Cities of the Future after London, Paris and Berlin. In the 2008 Worldwide Centers of Commerce Index, published by MasterCard, Copenhagen was ranked 14th in the world and 1st in Scandinavia. Life science, information technology and shipping are important sectors and research & development plays a major role in the city's economy. Its strategic location and excellent infrastructure with the largest airport in Scandinavia located 14 minutes by train from the city centre, has made it a regional hub and a popular location for regional headquarters as well as conventions. Copenhagen has repeatedly been recognized as one of the cities with the best quality of life. and in 2008 it was singled out as the Most Liveable City in the World by international lifestyle magazine Monocle on their Top 25 Most Liveable Cities 2008 list. It is also considered one of the world's most environmentally friendly cities with the water in the inner harbor being so clean that it can be used for swimming and 36 % of all citizens commuting to work by bicycle, every day bicycling a total 1.1 million km. Since the turn of the millennium Copenhagen has seen a strong urban and cultural development and has been described as a boom town. This is partly due to massive investments in cultural facilities as well as infrastructure and a new wave of succesful designers, chefs and architects. Copenhagen c. 1895 The Palace during renovation. From its humble origins as a fishing village to its heyday as the glittering capital of the Danish Empire, to its current position as one of the world's premier design capitals, the stories and characters of Copenhagen's history can be discovered in its sumptuous palaces, copper-roofed town houses and atmospheric cobbled squares. From the Viking Age there was a fishing village by the name of "Havn" (harbour) at the site. Recent archeological finds indicate that by the 11th century, Copenhagen had already grown into a small town with a large estate, a church, a market, at least two wells and many smaller habitations spread over a fairly wide area. Arkæologer graver ny teori om København op af mulden (Archeologists develop new theory about Copenhagen from their digs), Videnskab.dk, 5 November 2008 From the middle of the 12th century it grew in importance after coming into the possession of the Bishop Absalon, who fortified it in 1167, the year traditionally marking the foundation of Copenhagen. The excellent harbour encouraged Copenhagen's growth until it became an important centre of commerce. The city's origin as a harbour and a place of commerce is reflected in its name. Its original designation, from which the contemporary Danish name is derived, was Køpmannæhafn, "merchants' harbor". The English name for the city is derived from its Low German name, Kopenhagen. The element hafnium is also named for Copenhagen, whose Latin name is Hafnia. Biography of George de Hevesy It was repeatedly attacked by the Hanseatic League as the Germans took notice. In 1254, it received its charter as a city under Bishop Jakob Erlandsen. During 1658-59 it withstood a severe siege by the Swedes under Charles X and successfully repelled a major assault. In 1801 a British fleet under Admiral Parker fought a major battle, the Battle of Copenhagen, with the Danish Navy in Copenhagen harbour. It was during this battle Lord Nelson famously "put the telescope to the blind eye" in order not to see Admiral Parker's signal to cease fire. When a British expeditionary force bombarded Copenhagen in 1807, to gain control of the Danish Navy, the city suffered great damage and hundreds of people were killed. The reason why the devastation was so great was that Copenhagen relied on an old defence-line rendered virtually useless by the increase in shooting range available to the British. But not until the 1850s were the ramparts of the city opened to allow new housing to be built around the lakes ("Søerne") which bordered the old defence system to the west. This dramatic increase of space was long overdue, not only because the old ramparts were out of date as a defence system, but also because of bad sanitation in the old city. Before the opening, Copenhagen Center was inhabited by approximately 125,000 people, peaking in the census of 1870 (140,000); today the figure is around 25,000. In 1901, Copenhagen expanded further, incorporating communities with 40,000 people, and in the process making Frederiksberg an enclave within Copenhagen. During World War II, Copenhagen was occupied by German troops along with the rest of the country from 9 April 1940 until 4 May 1945. In August 1943, when the government's collaboration with the occupation forces collapsed, several ships were sunk in Copenhagen Harbour by the Royal Danish Navy to prevent them being used by the Germans. The city has grown greatly since the war, in the seventies using the so-called five-finger-plan of commuter train lines to surrounding towns and suburbs. Since the summer 2000, the cities of Copenhagen and Malmö have been connected by a toll bridge/tunnel (Øresund Bridge), which allows both rail and road passengers to cross. As a result, Copenhagen has become the centre of a larger metropolitan area which spans both nations. The construction of the bridge has led to a large number of changes to the public transportation system and the extensive redevelopment of Amager, south of the main city. Location of Coppenhagen in Denmark Nørrebro seen from "Søerne" Copenhagen City Hall Copenhagen is located on the eastern shore of the island of Zealand (Sjælland) and partly on the island of Amager. Copenhagen faces the Øresund to the east, the strait of water that separates Denmark from Sweden, and that connects the North Sea with the Baltic Sea. On the Swedish side of the sound directly across from Copenhagen, lie the towns of Malmö and Landskrona. Copenhagen is also a part of the Øresund region, which consists of Zealand, Lolland-Falster and Bornholm in Denmark and Scania in Sweden. Copenhagen Municipality is an administrative unit that covers the central part of the actual city of Copenhagen. It is a fairly small part of the actual city that falles within the municipality both because it covers a very confined area and because the enclave of Frederiksberg is an independent municipality. Copenhagen consists of a number of boroughs and areas, including * Indre By * Østerbro * Nørrebro * Vesterbro * Amagerbro * Nordhavnen (North Habour) * Valby * Kongens Enghave (King's Meadow Garden), also known as Sydhavnen (meaning South Harbour) * Christianshavn * Christiania (Freetown) * Sundbyvester (Sundby West), * Sundbyøster (Sundby East) * Ørestad * Islands Brygge * Bellahøj * Brønshøj * Ryparken * Bispebjerg * Vigerslev * Vestamager * Vanløse The suffix -bro in the names Østerbro, Nørrebro, Vesterbro and Amagerbro should not be confused with the Danish word for bridge, which is also 'bro'. The term is thought to be an abbreviation or short form of the Danish word brolagt meaning paved referring to the roads paved with cobblestones leading to the city's former gates - The conurbation of Copenhagen consists of several municipalities. After Copenhagen Municipality, the second largest is Frederiksberg Municipality which is an enclave inside Copenhagen Municipality. Both are contained in the larger Capital Region of Denmark, which contains most of the Copenhagen metropolitan area. Previously, the areas of Frederiksberg, Gentofte and Copenhagen municipalities have been used to define the city of Copenhagen. This definition is now obsolete. To meet statistical needs after the latest municipal reform, which took place in the beginning of 2007, an effort has been made to work out definitions of lands (landsdele) in Denmark. A land is basically a geographical and statistical definition, and the area is not considered to be an administrative unit. The land of Copenhagen City includes the municipalities of Copenhagen, Dragør, Frederiksberg and Tårnby, with a total population of 656,582 in the beginning of 2008. Statistics Denmark, table BEF1A07: Population 1 January by region, age, sex, marital status Retrieved on 2008-03-26. Statistics Denmark, definitions of lands as of 2007-01-01 (excel-file, in danish) Retrieved on 2008-03-26. Copenhagen and Frederiksberg were two of the three last Danish municipalities not belonging to a county. On 1 January 2007, the municipalities lost their county privileges and became part of Copenhagen Capital Region. Suburban Copenhagen is planned according to the Finger Plan, fingerplanen, initiated in 1947, dividing the suburbs into five fingers. The Finger Plan, Denmark.dk The S-train lines are built according to the Finger Plan, while green wedges and highways are built in-between the fingers The Little Finger The northern suburbs form the little finger of the plan, and is traditionally the wealthiest of the suburbs. In popular language, the area is known as "The Whiskey Belt", although the area is mixed between mansions, larger houses, garden cities and mid-size houses. The area has a population of around 270,000 inhabitants. * Gentofte Municipality: Klampenborg, Skovshoved, Charlottenlund, Hellerup, Gentofte, Ordrup, Jægersborg, Dyssegård, Vangede * Lyngby-Taarbæk Municipality: Kongens Lyngby, Ulrikkenborg, Brede, Virum, Sorgenfri, Lundtofte, Hjortekær * Rudersdal Municipality: Søllerød, Holte, Øverød, Gl. Holte, Trørød, Nærum, Vedbæk, Skodsborg, Birkerød, Kajerød, Bistrup * Hørsholm Municipality: Hørsholm, Usserød, Rungsted, Vallerød, Smidstrup * Allerød Municipality: Allerød, Lillerød, Blovstrød * Fredensborg Municipality: Fredensborg, Asminderød, Humlebæk, Kokkedal, Niverød, Nivå. The Ring Finger The North-Northwestern part of the suburbs forms the ring finger. The area is to a large extent formed by detached middle-class dwellings, with some exceptions of housing projects or upper-class areas. The area has a population of around 100,000 inhabitants. * Gladsaxe Municipality: Gladsaxe, Bagsværd, Buddinge, Høje-Gladsaxe (Gladsaxe Heights), Mørkhøj, Søborg * Furesø Municipality: Værløse, Farum, Hareskovby The Middle Finger The northwestern suburbs form the middle finger, and consists of a mixed area of both detached middle-class dwellings, widespread garden cities and large, low-rise public housing projects. The area has a considerable part of the industrial areas of metropolitan Copenhagen, mostly in the traditional sectors of manufacturing. The area has a population of around 110,000 inhabitants. * Herlev Municipality: Herlev, Hjortespring * Ballerup Municipality: Skovlunde, Ballerup, Måløv, Ågerup, Jonstrup, Egebjerg * Egedal Municipality: Smørumnedre, Stenløse, Ølstykke The Index Finger The index finger forms the western suburbs, which are the suburbs with the lowest income per capita and the highest crime-rate. The suburbs vary from the petit bourgeois area of Glostrup to the widespread low housing projects of Albertslund and Taastrup. Of the total of 145,000 inhabitants, some 20% are immigrants of first or second generation. * Rødovre Municipality: Rødovre, Islev * Glostrup Municipality: Glostrup, Hvissinge, Ejby * Brøndby Municipality: Brøndbyøster, Brøndbyvester, Brøndby Nord * Albertslund Municipality * Høje-Taastrup Municipality: Taastrup, Høje-Taastrup, Tåstrupgård, Hedehusene The Thumb The southwest suburbs along the coast form the thumb of the plan. While the central parts of these suburbs are dominated by high-rise housing projects and low-income inhabitants, the distant part is dominated by detached middle-class houses. These suburbs have a population of some 215,000 inhabitants and has a sizeable number of immigrants. * Hvidovre Municipality: Avedøre, Friheden, Hvidovre * Brøndby Municipality: Brøndby Strand * Vallensbæk Municipality * Ishøj Municipality * Greve Municipality: Hundige, Karlslunde, Greve * Solrød Municipality: Solrød, Jersie * Køge municipality: Køge, Ølby The extra finger: Amager Island suburbs & Malmö When the finger plan was initially introduced, the island of Amager wasn't included as the infrastructure was inadequate for modern suburban life. Later it has been improved, and the suburbs at the island hold some 53,000 inhabitants. Amager is now one of the most modern suburbs of Copehagen with increasing wealth. With the opening of the bridge to Sweden this finger has been extended all the way to Malmö. Under an official visit of the Swedish King in 2007 at the Copenhagen City Hall, Copenhagen Lord Mayor Ritt Bjerregaard caused a minor diplomatic incident by referring to Malmö as "København M" with an allusion to the Danish system of postal codes (Nørrebro being København N and Vesterbro being København V for instance), indicating that Malmö had turned into just another Copenhagen bourough. Today 25,000 Danes live in Malmö. Malmø er blevet til København M, DR Online * Tårnby Municipality: Tårnby, Kastrup * Dragør Municipality Summers in Copenhagen are mild with average high temperatures of around 21°C (70°F) and lows of 13°C (55°F), but temperatures could sometimes exceed 25°C (77°F+) and occasional heatwaves are common during the summer. Winters are cold, with temperatures of -2 to 4°C (28 - 40°F), and it rarely drop below −10 °C (14 °F). Precipitation is moderate throughout the year, and snowfall occurs mainly in December through March, but snow cover does not remain a long time. Nørrebro seen from "Søerne" Copenhagen as seen from the City Hall at night Kongens Nytorv View from Rundetårn Gefion Fountian The city's appearance today is shaped by the key role it has played as a regional center for centuries. Copenhagen has a multitude of districts, each representing its time and with its own distinctive character, making up a dense urban fabric. Other distinctive features of the Copenhagen of today is the abundance of water, the greenness and the elaborate system of bicycle paths that line almost every major street. The oldest section of Copenhagen's inner city is often referred to as "Middelalderbyen" (The Medieval City). However, the most distinctive district of Copenhagen is Frederiksstaden developed during the reign of Frederick V. It has Amalienborg Palace at its centre and is dominated by the dome of the Marble Church as well as a number of elegant 18th century mansions. Also part of the old inner city of Copenhagen is the small island of Slotsholmen with Christiansborg Palace and Christianshavn. Around the historical city center lies a band of charming, dense and well-preserved residential bouroughs (Vesterbro, Inner Nørrebro, Inner Østerbro) dating mainly from late 19th century. They were built outside the old ramparts of the city when the city was finally allowed to expand beyond this barrier. Sometimes referred to as "the City of Spires", Copenhagen is known for its horizontal skyline, only broken by spires at churches and castles. Most characteristic is the baroque spire of Church of Our Saviour with its spiralling and narrowing external stairs that visitors can climb to the very top of the spire. Other important spires are those of Christiansborg Palace, the City Hall and the former Church of St. Nikolaj that now houses a modern art venue. A bit lower are the renaissance spires of Rosenborg Castle and the "dragon spire" of [[Christian IV of Christian IV's former stock exchange, so named because it is shaped as the tails of four dragons twined together. Recent years has seen a tremendous boom in modern architecture in Copenhagen both when it comes to Danish architecture and works by international architects. For a few hundred years, virtually no foreign architects had worked in Copenhagen but since the mid 1990s the city and its immediate sourroundings have seen buildings and projects from such international star architects as Norman Foster , Hadid , Nouvel and Liebeskind . In the same time, a number of Danish architects have achieved great success both in Copenhagen and abroad. This has led to a number of international architecture awards. Buildings in Copenhagen have won RIBA European Awards four years in a row ("Sampension" in 2005 , "Kilen" in 2006 , "Tietgenkollegiet" in 2007 and the Royal Playhouse in 2008 ). At the 2008 World Architecture Festival in Barcelona, Bjarke Ingels Group won an award for the World's Best Residential Building 2008 for a house in Ørestad. The Forum AID Award for Best building in Scandinavia went to Copenhagen buildings both in 2006 and 2008 . In 2008 British design magazine Monocle named Copenhagen the World's best design city 2008. The boom in urban development and modern architecture means that the above mentioned horizontal skyline has seen some changes. A political majority has decided to keep the historical center free of highrises. But several areas will see or have already seen massive urban development. Ørestad is the area that until now has seen most of the development. Located near Copenhagen Airport, it currently boasts the largest mall in Scandinavia and a variety of office and residential buildings as well as an IT University and a high school. The two largest hotels in Scandinavia are currently under construction (ultimo 2008). An ambitious regeneration project will create a new Carlsberg District at the historical premises of the Carlsberg Breweries that has terminated the production of beer in Copenhagen and moved it to Jutland. The district will have a total of nine highrises and seeks to mix the old industrial buildings with modern architecture to create a dense, maze-like quarter with a focus on sustainability and an active urban life. A third major area of urban development also with a focus on sustanibility is Nordhavn. The Copenhagen tradition with urban development on artificial islands that was initiated with with Christianh IV's construction of Christianshavn has recently been continued with the creation of Havneholmen as well as a "canal city" in the South Harbour. A district in Copenhagen with a very different take on modern architecture is that of Christiania whose many creative and idiosyncratic buildings are exponents of an "architecture without architects". Østre Anlæg University of Copenhagen Botanical Garden Copenhagen is a green city with many big and small parks. King's Garden, the garden of Rosenborg Castle, is the oldest and most visited park in Copenhagen. Its landscaping was commenced by Christian IV in 1606. Every year it sees more than 2,5 million visitors and in the summer months it is packed with sunbathers, picknickers and ballplayers. It also serves as a sculpture garden with a permanent display of sculptures as well as temporary exhibits during summer. Also located in the city centre are the Botanical Gardens particularly noted for their large complex of 19th century greenhouses donated by Carlsberg founder J. C. Jacobsen. Fælledparken is with its 58 hectars the largest park in Copenhagen. It is popular for sports and hosts a long array of annual events like a free opera concert at the opening of the opera season, other open-air concerts, carnival, Labour Day celebrations and Copenhagen Historic Grand Prix which is a race for antique cars. A historical green space in the northeastern part of the city is Kastellet which is a well-presserved renaissance citadel that now serves mainly as a park. Another popular park is the Frederiksberg Garden which is a 32 hectars romantic landscape park. It houses a large colony of very tame grey herons along with other waterfowls. The park also offers views of the elephants and the elephant house designed by world-famous British architect Norman Foster of the adjacent Copenhagen Zoo. Characteristic of Copenhagen is that a number of cemeteries double as parks, though only for the more quiet activities such as sunbathing, reading and meditation. Assistens Cemetery, the burrial place of Hans Christian Andersen among others, is an important green space for the district of Inner Nørrebro and a Copenhagen institution. The lesser known Vestre Kirkegaard is with its 54 hectars the largest cemetery in Denmark and offers a maze of dense groves, open lawns, winding paths, hedges, overgrown tombs, monuments, tree-lined avenues, lakes and other garden features. It is official municipal policy in Copenhagen that all citizens by 2015 must be able to reach a park or beach on foot in less than 15 minutes. In line with this policy, several new parks are under development in areas poor in green spaces. Copenhagen and the surrounding areas have 3 beaches with a total of approx. 8 km of sandy beaches within 30 minutes of bicycling from the city centre. This includes Amager Strandpark, which opened in 2005 and includes a 2 km long artificial island and a total of 4,6 km of beaches , located just 15 minutes by bicycle or a few minutes by metro from the city centre. The beaches are supplemented by a system of harbour baths along the Copenhagen waterfront. The first and most popular of these is located at Islands Brygge Harbour bath at Islands Brygge, e-architect and has won international acclaim for its design. Islands Brygge. Depending on the boundaries used, the population of Copenhagen differs. Statistics Denmark uses a measure of the contiguously built-up urban area of Copenhagen, this means the number of communities included in this statistical abstract has changed several times, in the abstracts latest edition with close to 1.2 million (1,153,615 (2008)) inhabitants. This number is not a strict result of the commonly-used measuring methods of 200 meters of continuously build-up area, as there are exceptions to the general rule in the suburbs of Dragør, Taastrup, Birkerød, Hørsholm and Farum. Statistics Denmark has never stated the geographical area of urban Copenhagen. However, we know it consists of Copenhagen Municipality, Frederiksberg and 16 of the 20 municipalities in the old counties Copenhagen and Roskilde, though 5 of them only partially. Largest cities of Denmark 2007 Statistics Denmark has worked out definitions of so-called lands (landsdele), a definition used to meet statistical needs on a lower level than regions. From this, the land of Copenhagen city (København by) is defined by the municipalities of Copenhagen, Dragør, Frederiksberg and Tårnby, with a total population of 656,582 in the beginning of 2008. The surroundings of Copenhagen is defined by another land, Copenhagen suburban (Københavns omegn), which includes the municipalities of Albertslund, Ballerup, Brøndby, Gentofte, Gladsaxe, Glostrup, Herlev, Hvidovre, Høje-Taastrup, Ishøj, Lyngby-Taarbæk, Rødovre and Vallensbæk, and with a total population of 504,481 (January 1, 2008). This gives a total population of 1,161,063 for these two lands together. The lands of Copenhagen city and Copenhagen suburban can together be used as a definition of the metropolitan area, although perhaps a somewhat narrow one. From 1 January 2008 the population of the 34 municipalities closest to and including the municipality of Copenhagen is 1,857,263 and by 1 October 2008 the population of this area had grown to 1,872,706. Statistikbanken.dk Population table BEF1A07 Land area: 2,923 km² (1,032 sq mi). (Capital Region - Bornholm + East Zealand + Stevns) Water area: 105 km² (40.5 sq mi). Orienteering fra Københavns Kommune. Statistisk Kontor.2003 nr. 25 Thus, the region comprises 6.8% of the land area of Denmark, but has 34% of Denmark's population. This gives a total of 641 inhabitants per km² or 1,660 per square mile for the region. This compares with a population density in the rest of the country of approximately 90 per km² or around 230 per square mile. Based on a 10%-isoline (data from 2002) in which at least 10% commutes into central parts of the Copenhagen area, most of Zealand would be covered and this area has a population of about 2.3 million inhabitants. /ref> Since the opening of the Øresund Bridge in 2000, commuting between and integration of Greater Malmö and Copenhagen have increased rapidly, and a combined statistical metropolitan area has formed. This metropolitan area, which has a population of 2,501,094 (2008) is expected to be officially defined by the respective statistics divisions of Denmark and Sweden in the upcoming years. A high-ranking civil servant of the Interior Ministry, Henning Strøm, who was involved in (i.e. known as "the Father of") a past municipal reform, which took effect on 1 April 1970, said on television, broadcast in connection with the recent Kommunalreformen ("The Municipal Reform" of 2007), that Copenhagen municipality would encompass an area with 1.5 million inhabitants, if the principles of the 1970 municipal reform were also applied on Copenhagen municipality. DR netnews 25-06-04 In other words: in the rest of Denmark the city occupies only part of the municipality, but in Copenhagen the municipality of Copenhagen occupies only part of the city of Copenhagen. Since the late 1990s, Copenhagen has undergone a transformation from a cozy Scandinavian capital to a cool metropolitan city of international scope in the league of cities like Barcelona and Amsterdam. This is due to massive investments in infrastructure as well as culture and wave of new successful Danish architects, designers and chefs. Between 1998 and 2008, lifestyle journalists wordwide (from Wallpaper to the NewYorkTimes) have praised Copenhagen as a cool, well-functioning creative city (see "Copenhagen In international rankings" below). Copenhagen has a wide array of museums of International standard. The National Museum, Nationalmuseet, is Denmark's largest museum of Archaeology and cultural history, comprising the histories of Danish and foreign cultures alike. The National Gallery - "Statens Museum for Kunst" - is Denmark's national art museum and contains collections dating from 12th century and all the way up to present day artists. Among artists represented in the collections are Rubens, Rembrandt, Picasso, Braque, Léger, Matisse and Emil Nolde. Another important Copenhagen art museum is the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek founded by second generation Carlsberg tycoon-philantropist Carl Jacobsen and is built around his personal collections. Its main focus is classical Egyptian, Roman and Greek sculptures and other antiquities and a collection of Rodin sculptures that is the largest outside France (Glypto-, from the Greek root glyphein, to carve and theke, a storing-place). Besides its sculpture collections, the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek also holds a comprehensive collection of paintings of impressionist and post-impressionist painters such as Monet,Renoir, Cézanne, van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec as well as Danish Golden Age painters. Loiusiana is an internationally acclaimed museum of modern art situated on the coast just north of Copenhagen. It is located in the middle of a sculpture garden on a cliff overlooking Øresund. The The museum is included in the Patricia Schultz book 1,000 Places to See Before You Die. The Danish Museum of Art & Design is housed in the 18th century former Frederiks Hospital and displays Danish design as well as international design and crafts. Other museums include: * Thorvaldsens Museum is a single-artist museum dedicated to the oeuvre,of romantic Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen who lived and worked in Rome. * Cisternerne is a small but different museum dedicated to modern glass art. It is located in some grotto-like former cisterns that come complete with Stalactites formed by the changing water levels. * The Ordrupgaard Museum is an art museum located just notth of Copenhagen in an old mansion with an extension by Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. It features 19th century French and Danish art and is particularly noted for its works by Paul Gaugin. Copenhagen Opera House The Royal Danish Theatre In January 2009 the new Copenhagen Concert Hall will open. It is designed by Jean Nouvel and will have four halls with the main auditorium seating 1800 people. It will serve as the home of the Danish National Symphony Orchestra and along with the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles the most expensive concert hall ever built. Another important venue for classical music is the Tivoli Concert Hall located in the histtrocal Tivoli Gardens. The Copenhagen Opera House (in Danish usually called Operaen) that opened in 2005 and is designed by Henning Larsen, is the national opera house of Denmark and among the most modern opera houses in the world. The old Royal Danish Theatre dating from 1748 still works as a supplementary opera scene. The Royal Danish Theatre is also home to the Royal Danish Ballet. Gounded in 1748 along with the theatre, it is one of the oldest ballet troups in Europe. It is home the the Bournonville style of ballet. Copenhagen has a significant jazz scene that has existed for many years. It developed when a number of American jazz musicians such as Ben Webster, Thad Jones, Richard Boone, Ernie Wilkins, Kenny Drew, Ed Thigpen, Bob Rockwell and others such as rock guitarist Link Wray came to live in Copenhagen during the 1960s. Every year in early July Copenhagen's streets, aquares and parks fills up with big and small jazz concerts during the Copenhagen Jazz Festival (see yearly events). The most important venue for rhythmical music in Copenhagen is Vega in Vesterbro district which has been chosen as "best concert venue in Europe" by international music magazine Live For free entertainment one can stroll along Strøget, especially between Nytorv and Højbro Plads, which in the late afternoon and evening is a bit like an impromptu three-ring circus with musicians, magicians, jugglers and other street performers. View from Amerikakaj Copenhagen has a wide variety of sport teams. The two major football teams are Brøndby IF and FC København. Brøndby IF plays at Brøndby Stadium in Brøndby and FC København plays at Parken in Østerbro, Copenhagen. Notable Copenhagen teams playing at the second highest level in Danish football (the Danish 1st Division) include Lyngby BK, AB, HIK, Frem, Brønshøj, Fremad Amager and Skjold. Copenhagen also has three ice hockey teams: Rødovre Mighty Bulls, Herlev Hornets and Nordsjælland Cobras. There are a lot of handball teams in Copenhagen. FC København owns both a women's and a men's team, which have the same name and logo. They were formerly known as FIF. Of other clubs playing in the "highest" leagues there are; Ajax Heroes, Ydun, and HIK (Hellerup). Rugby union is also played in the Danish capital with teams such as CSR-Nanok, Copenhagen Scrum, Exiles, Froggies and Rugbyklubben Speed. The Danish Australian Football League, based in Copenhagen is the largest Australian rules football competition outside of the English speaking world. Copenhagen is also home to a number of Denmark's 40-odd cricket clubs. Although Denmark has been an associate member of the International Cricket Council since 1966, the sport is not taught much in schools, and Danish cricket competes unfavourably with the much more widely followed sport of football for players, facilities, media attention and spectators. The second World Outgames will take place in Copenhagen in 2009, after Berlin refused to stage them due to the continuing rivalry between the two gay sporting organisations. It would be the largest such event hosted in Copenhagen. Copenhagen has the two oldest amusement parks in the World. World-famous Tivoli Gardens is an amusement park and pleasure garden located right in the middle of Copenhagen between the the City Hall Square and the the Central Station. Among its rides are the oldest still operating roller coaster and the oldest ferris wheel in the World. Tivoli Gardens, the rides It also function as an open-air concert venue. It opened on August 15 1843 making it the second oldest amusement park in the world. Dyrehavsbakken (in English "the Deer Garden Hill") is located in Klampenborg a little north of Copenhagen in a forested area of great natural beauty. Having been made into an amusement park complete with rides, games and restaurants by Christian IV, it is the oldest surviving amusement park in the World. Copenhagen is a centre for the New Nordic Cuisine. Nordic Cuisine, New York Times In November 2004 a Nordic Kitchen Symposium was helt in Copenhagen at the initiative of Danish chef and gastronome Claus Meyer. The symposium had attandance of top chefs from all of the Nordic countries and led to the adoption of a Manifesto for the New Nordic Cuisine. Manifesto for a New Nordic Cuisine Claus Meyer is also the co-founder of the two-Michelin star Restaurant Noma (Nordisk Madhus) which is a flagship restaurant for the new Nordic cuisine. In 2008 it was ranked as 10th best in the World by acclaimed British restaurant & fine dining magazine Restaurant at their 50 Best Restaurants of the World 2008-list. Furthermore, the users of the international website TripAdvisor with 25 million users a month rated Noma as the best restaurant in the world. TripAdvisor ranking As of 2008 Copenhagen boasts a total of 11 Michelin star restaurants. This is by far the highest number of any Nordic city. Apart from Noma they include one of only two Thai restaurants worldwide that has received a Michelin star. Due to the development, Copenhagen is increasingly being recognized internationally as a gourmet destination. The Top 10 cities to visit in 2009, TimesOnline Apart from the selection of high end restaurants, Copenhagen offers a great variety of Danish, International and ethnic restaurants and it is possible to find modest eateries with open sandwiches (called "smørrebrød"), which is the traditional and best known dish for lunch. Most restaurants, though, serve international dishes. danish pastry, another local specialty, can be sampled from the numerous bakeries found in all parts of the city. Copenhagen has long been associated with beer.Carlsberg beer has been brewed at the brewery's premises at the border between Vesterbro and Valby districts since 1847 and has long been almost synonumous with Danish beer production. However, recent years have seen an explosive growth in the number of microbreweries so that Denmark today has more than 100 breweries Nyeste artikler fra Bryggeriforeningen, Bryggeriforeningen , many of which are located in Copenhagen. Some like Nørrebro Bryghus also act as brewpubs where it is possible also to eat at the premisses. Many cafés specialize in a huge selection of quality beers and beer has also become an important ingridient in the New Nordic Cuisine. Copenhagen is the media centre of Denmark. DR, the major Danish public service broadcasting corporation collected their activities in a new headquarters, DR byen, in 2006 and 2007. Similarly has Odense based TV2 collected its Copenhagen activities in a modern media house in the South Harbour. The two national daily newspapters Politiken and Berlingske Tidende and the two tabloids Ekstra Bladet and B. T. are based in Copenhagen. Other important media corporations include Aller Press which is the largest publisher of weekly and monthly magazines in Scandinavia, the Egmont media group and Gyldendal, the largest Danish publisher of books. Copenhagen also has a sizable movie and television industry. Filmbyen, The Movie City, which is located in a former military camp in the suburg of Hvidovre and houses several movie companies and studio studios. Among the movie campanies are Zentropa co-owned by Danish movie director Lars von Trier who is behind several international movie productions as well as a founding force behind the Dogma Movement. * Copenhagen Fashion Week takes place every year in February and August. It is the largest fashion event in Northern Europe. Fashion Capital Copenhagen On the catwalks are a growing number of new and known Danish talent with a preview of their upcoming collections. And at the three trade fairs, CPH Vision, Gallery and Copenhagen International Fashion Fair, you will find an additional 1,100 exhibitors representing a total of over 2,300 international brand name collections. Danish fashion is known for its unique angle on design, innovation and aesthetics. With a more modern approach to femininity and functionality, expressed in fresh silhouettes, a focus on details and incomparable quality. These are only some of the reasons why more than 50,000 buyers, designers and global press attend Copenhagen Fashion Week twice a year. Copenhagen Fashion Week is organised by the Danish Fashion Institute - a newly founded network organisation created by and for the Danish fashion industry. Copenhagen Fashion Week * Carnival in Copenhagen takes place every year since 1982 during the Whitsun Holiday in Fælledparken and around the city. 120 bands, 2000 dancers and 100,000 spectators participate. History of Copenhagen * Copenhagen Distortion is a youth culture festival capturing the zeitgeist of the city, gathering every year (5 days up to the first weekend of June) up to 30.000 people in the streets, in shops, galleries, clubs, bars, in boats and buses, with a cultural focus on street culture, art and upfront dance music. Copenhagen Distortion * Roskilde Festival is a music festival helt every year in Roskilde west of Copenhagen. Gathering around 100,000 people every year, it is one of the four largest rock music festivals in Europe.. * Copenhagen Jazz Festival, which begins on the first Friday in July, is a popular annual event that is the result of Copenhagen's significant jazz scene. The festival takes place throughout the city in streets, squares and parks as well as in cafés and concert halls. Copenhagen Jazz Festival 3+ years, Wonderful Copenhagen It embraces around 900 concerts, 100 venues and over 200,000 guests from Denmark and around the world. It is recognized as one of the leading jazz festivals in the World. Top 10 best Jazz Festivals, TripAdvisor Copenhagen Jazz Festival * Copenhagen Pride is a gay pride festival taking place every year in August. Among the events is "Tivoli goes pink" and it ends with a parade. Copenhagen Pride * Copenhagen Cooking takes place in August every year and is a food festival with a wide array of events all over the city. * Copenhagen International Film Festival takes place in September every year with a focus on European films. The main prize is called the Golden Swan. Copenhagen International Film Festival Middelgrunden wind farm just off Copenhagen The Danish National Bank. Designed by Arne Jacobsen. Copenhagen is the economical and financial centre of Denmark Regionale regnskaber 2005 - Nyt fra Danmarks Statistik - Danmarks Statistik and also a strong business and economic centre in the entire Scandinavian-Baltic region. In 2008 Copenhagen was ranked 4th by Financial Times-owned FDi magazine on their list of Top50 European Cities of the Future after London, Paris and Berlin. Top 50 European City of the Future 2008/09 In 2006/07 FDi Magazine named Copenhagen Scandinavian City of the Future Scandinavian City of the Future 06/07 and in 2004/05 Copenhagen was named Northern European City of the Future ahead of other cities from Scandinavia, UK, Ireland and Benelux. Northern European City of the Future 2004/05 In the 2008 Worldwide Centers of Commerce Index, published by MasterCard, Copenhagen was ranked 14th in the world and 1st in Scandinavia. Copenhagen is one of the cities in Western Europe attracting most regional headquarters and distribution centers. Among the international companies that have chosen to locate their regional headquarters in Copenhagen is Microsoft.There are 2,100 foreign companies located in the Copenhagen area, of which approx. 500 are Scandinavian head offices, representing a wide range of industries. Copenhagen has a service oriented economy. An important sector is life science and research & development plays a major role in the economy of the city. The entire Oresund Region is in cooperation with Sweden being promoted as Medicon Valley. Major Danish biotech companies like Novo Nordisk and Lundbeck, both of which are among 50 largest pharmaceutical and biotech companies in the World, are located in the greater Copenhagen area. USATODAY.com The region also boasts the largest IT-cluster in Scandinavia with nearly 100,000 employees and the city of Copenhagen is home to Nokia's largest research centre outside Finland. Copenhagen - Overview Shipping is also an import business with Maersk, the World's largest shipping company, having their world headquarters in Copenhagen. Several international companies have established their regional headquarters in Copenhagen, e.g. Microsoft. Maersk, the world's largest container shipping company, has their world headquarters in Copenhagen. A substantial number of Danish pharmaceuticals such as Novo Nordisk, Ferring Pharmaceuticals and Bavarian Nordic also operate in the area, having placed their headquarters in or close to Copenhagen. USATODAY.com Copenhagen has some of the highest gross wages in the World. City Mayors: World's richest cities High taxes mean that wages are reduced after mandatory deduction. A neneficial researcher scheme with low taxation of foreigh specialists Level of salary in Denmark has made Denmark an attractive location for highly educated foreign labour to settle. Copenhagen is however also among the most expensive cities in Europe. City Mayors: World's most expensive cities (EIU) City Mayors: World's most expensive cities - Ranking Copenhagen University Copenhagen has a well-developed higher education system of public universities. Most prominent among these is the University of Copenhagen. Founded in 1479, it is the oldest university in Denmark. It is a world-renowned research and teaching institution with campuses around the city and forms part of the International Alliance of Research Universities (IARU), which is a collaboration between international top universities including Oxford, Cambridge, Yale and Berkeley. The University attracts app. 1500 international and exchange students every year. It is repeatedly ranked as one of the best universities in Europe. At the Times Higher Education's QS World University Rankings 2008 list, it was ranked as fourth best in continental Europe. TheAcademic Ranking of World Universities 2008 placesd it as number 43 worldwide and 8th in Europe. A second all-round university in the Copenhagen area is Roskilde University located in Roskilde. The Technical University of Denmark (DTU), Danmarks Tekniske Universitet, is located in Lyngby at the northern outskirts of Copenhagen. In 2008 it was ranked third highest in Europe on Times Higher Education's list of the most influential technical universities in the World. The Max Planck Institute in Germany was ranked 15, ETH Zurich in Switzerland was ranked 15 and DTU in Denmark was ranked 20. Copenhagen Business School (CBS) is an estimed and EQUIS accredited business school located on Frederiksberg. Copenhagen is rich in companies and institutions with a focus on research and development within the biotechnology , Infrastructure & logistics - Copenhagen a distribution hub, retrieved February 22, 2007. and life science sectors. Two of the 50 largest pharmaceutical and biotech companies in the World are located in the greater Copenhagen area. The biotech and life science cluster in Copenhagen and the rest of the Oresund Region is one of the strongest in Europe. Since 1995 this has been branded as the Medicon Valley in a Danish-Swedish cooperation. The aim is to strengthen the region's position and to promote cooperation between companies and academia. The German biotech giant Sartorius Stedim Biotech, which is currently creating a Nordic head office in Tåstrup on the outskirts of Copenhagen. The Øresund region is responsible for 60 percent of life science production in Scandinavia and is home to 111 biotech companies. The greater Copenhagen area has a very well established transportation infrastructure making it a hub in Northern Europe. Christianshavns Kanal Copenhagen has a large network of toll-free highways and public roads connecting different municipalities of the city together and to Northern Europe. As in many other cities in Europe traffic is increasing in Copenhagen. The radial arterial roads and highways leading to the Copenhagen city center are critically congested during peak hours. Copenhagen is known as one of the most bicycle-friendly cities in the world. Every day 1,1 million km are bicycled in Copenhagen. 36 % of all citizens are commuting to work, school or university by bicycle and it is municipal policy that this number should go up to 40 % by 2012 and 50 % in 2015. The city's bicycle paths are extensive and well-used. Bicycle paths are often separated from the main traffic lanes and sometimes have their own signal systems. The municipality is also developing a system of interconnected green bicycle routes, greenways, with the aim to facilitate fast, safe and pleasant bicycle transport from one end of the city to the other. The network will cover more than 100 km and consist of 22 routes when finished. The city provides public bicycles which can be found throughout the downtown area and used with a returnable deposit of 20 kroner. Copenhagen's well-developed bicycle culture has given rise to the term ‘copenhagenize’. This is the practice of other cities adopting Copenhagen-style bike lanes and bicycle infrastructure. In 2007 Copenhagen-based Danish urban design consultant Jan Gehl was hired by the New York City Department of Transportation to re-imagine New York City streets by introducing designs to improve life for pedestrians and cyclists. In recognition of Copenhagen's emphasis on bicycling, the city has been chosen by the Union Cycliste Internationale as their first official Bike City. Bike City Copenhagen will take place from 2008 to 2011 and consist of big cycling events for professionals as well as amateurs. The harbour of Copenhagen has largely lost its importance as an industrial harbour. In 2001 Copenhagen Harbour merged with the harbour in Malmö to create Copenhagen-Malmö Port. It has several functions, the most important being as a major cruise destination. In 2007 a record 286 cruise ships with 420,000 cruise passengers visited Copenhagen. 120 of these ships either started or ended the cruise in Copenhagen. In 2008 these numbers grew further to 310 cruise ships and 560,000 passengers. As a result of the growth in the cruise industry facilities asre being expanded and improved. At the World Travel Awards in 2008, Copenhagen Port was named the number one cruise destination in Europe for the fifth year in a row. Copenhagen is serviced by ferry lines to Oslo in Norway (called "Oslobåden") with a daily connection and to Świnoujście in Poland (called "Polensfærgerne") with five weekly connections. Copenhagen Airport is the principal airport serving Copenhagen. It is the largest in Scandinavia and the 17th largest in Europe. It is located in Kastrup on the island of Amager and has very efficient connections to downtown Copenhagen with metro trains going to Kongens Nytorv in 15 minutes with 4-6 minutes between departures and regional trains going to the Central Station in 12 minutes. Its location also makes it the most important international airport for large parts of southern Sweden. Over the Øresund Bridge trains go to Malmö South in 14 minutes or Malmö Central Station in 22 minutes. Copenhagen Airport has won the award as "The best airport in Europe" four times, and as "The best airport in the world" two times. Copenhagen Airport is the seventh best airport in the world - second best in Europe - when you ask the passengers. The British organization Skytrax is doing so every year, writes the airport in a press release. 40 criteria are employed for the ranking. The new metro S-train at Nørreport Metro entrance in FrederiksbergThe public transportation system of Copenhagen consists of commuter trains (called S-trains, S-tog), buses, and a metro. The S-trains form the basis of the transportation network, stretching to most areas of metropolitan Copenhagen, with their main hub at Copenhagen Central Station (København H). Regional trains supplement the S-train services with lines extending further such as to the Copenhagen Airport, Elsinore, and Malmö. The Danish State Railways' Intercity network has its eastern terminus and main hub at Copenhagen, with most trains extending to Copenhagen Airport. The fare system is based on 95 zones covering the capital area. Tickets are transferable from one means of transport to another within a time limit. The more zones a ticket is valid for, the longer its time validity with a maximum of two hours. Discount cards (punch cards, klippekort) and period cards are available. Ticket prices are high and have increased substantially in recent years leading to a decrease in passenger numbers. In fact, the percentage of trips made on public transportation in Copenhagen is quite low by northern European standards. The Copenhagen Metro began operation in 2002 and currently has only two lines. In April 2008, it was named Best Metro in the World by industry experts. Copenhagen Metro Best in the World |Christiansborg Palace - home of the Danish Parliament Folketinget, the Supreme Court, Office of the Prime Minister and official reception area of Queen Margrethe II |- |Børsen - the former Stock Exchange building |- |The Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen harbor |- |Amalienborg Palace - home of the Danish royal family. The central building is the domed Marble Church located behind the palace complex |- |Nyhavn |- |The Marble Church |- |Rosenborg Castle in central Copenhagen |- |Christianshavns Canal |- |The Tivoli, photographed from Eduard Spelterini's balloon on June 22, 1922 |} Copenhagen is recognized as one of the most environmentally friendly cities in the world. In 2006 Copenhagen Municipality received the European Environmental Management Award. The award was given for long-term holistic environmental planning. It is municipal policy to reduce CO2 emissions by 20% before the end of 2015. In 2001 a large offshore wind farm was built just off the coast of Copenhagen at Middelgrunden. It produces about 4 % of the city's energy. Many years of major investments in sewage treatment has improved water quality in the harbour to an extent that the inner harbour can be used for swimming and facilities for this are provided at a number of locations. Another municipal policy is that 40% of all citizens should bicycle to and from work by 2012 and a number of initiatives are being taken to implement this policy (see "bicycling above"). Copenhagen is the capital in the World where organic food has the largest market share. One in every ten purchases is organic in Copenhagen. Within the municipal sector in Copenhagen, 45 % of all food consumption is organic but the target is considerably higher. With the environmental strategy "Environment Metropolis: Our Vision 2015" the politicians wish that solely organic food is to be served in 90 per cent of the Copenhagen old-age homes and residential homes for children and young persons in 2015.. - - - Image:Christiansborg Slot.jpg| Christiansborg Slot - Image:Børsen København.jpg| Børsen- the former Stock Exchange building - Image:Littlemermaid207.jpg| The Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen harbor - Image:Copenhagen amalienborg seen from opera house.jpg| Amalienborg Palace - Image:Nyhavn 9-15 København.jpg| Nyhavn - Image:Kbh Marmorkirche 1.jpg| Frederik's Church|The Marble Church - Image:Rosenborg.jpg| Rosenborg Castle in central Copenhagen - Image:Christianshavns Kanal morning.jpg| Christianshavns Canal - Image:Amalienborgas.JPG | The Royal Residence - Image:Copenhague 108.jpg | The Round Tower - Image:Gammel_Strand_København.jpg| Gammel Strand - Image:Kbh_Stroeget_Nikolaj_Kirche.jpg | Stroget - Image:A_Copenhagen_center_street.jpg| Central Copenhagen Street - Image:Amagergade 01.jpg| Amagergade - Image:Gebauede_in_kopenhagen.jpg| Copenhagen Habour - Image:Container ship loading-700px.jpg| Copenhagen Ship Loading - Image:Christianshavns_Torv.jpg | Christianshavn Torv - Image:Copenhagen-Airport-from-air.jpg | Copenhagen Airport from the air - Image:Østre Anlæg København.jpg | Østre Anlæg - Image:Frederiksberg Slot.jpg | Frederiksberg Castle - Image:Kongens Nytorv 17.jpg | Kongens Nytorv - Image:Kopenhagen zeehaven.JPG | Copenhagen Canal Tour - Image:Den-sorte-diamant.jpg | The Black Diamond ( The Royal Library ) - Image:Tivoli Copenhagen at Night.jpg | Tivoli by Night - Image:Kopenhagen 3.jpg | View over Copenhagen - Image:Gammeltorv Copenhagen Denmark.JPG | Gammeltorv - Image:Copenhagen denmark.jpg | Nyhavn - Image:Copenhagen City Hall.jpg | Copenhagen City Hall - Image:Gefion.jpg| Gefion Fountian - Image:Christiania Exit.JPG | Christiania - Image:Gebauede in kopenhagen.jpg | Copenhagen at Night - Image:Copenhague 050.jpg | Inner City Canel - Copenhagen has placed well in a number of international rankings, some of which are mentioned below. * Copenhagen was ranked #1 as Most Livable City in the World by international lifestyle magazine Monocle on their Top 25 Most Livable Cities 2008 list Monocles page on Copenhagen * Worlds Best Design City 2008 also by Monocle. Monocles page on Copenhagen *Monocle has also stated that Copenhagen is "Scandinavia's most desirable city". By Stuart Husband Monocle Magazine Published: June 19, 2007 *Copenhagen ranked #4 by Financial Times-owned FDi magazine on their list of Top50 European Cities of the Future after London, Paris and Berlin. Top 50 European City of the Future 2008/09 In 2006/07 FDi Magazine named Copenhagen Scandinavian City of the Future Scandinavian City of the Future 06/07 and in 2004/05 Copenhagen was named Northern European City of the Future ahead of other cities from Scandinavia, UK, Ireland and Benelux. Northern European City of the Future 2004/05 * In the 2008 Worldwide Centers of Commerce Index, published by MasterCard, Copenhagen was ranked 14th in the world and 1st in Scandinavia. *Copenhagen #1 out of 254 locations in the Location Ranking Survey performed by ECA International that has asked European experts where they prefer to be stationed worldwide. Location Ranking Survey * Copenhagen was ranked #6 in Grist Magazine's "15 Green Cities" list in 2007 making Copenhagen the greenest capital of Scandinavia according to Grist Magazine. 15 Green Cities | Grist | Main Dish | 19 July 2007 * Copenhagen is the capital in the World where organic food has the largest market share. One in every ten purchases is organic in Copenhagen. World-champinions in organic food * The Copenhagen Metro has been named the Best Metro in the World by industry experts. Copenhagen Metro Best in the World * Copenhagen is the worlds #7 most expensive city and #3 most expensive in Europe on the Forbes List. Forbes-Worlds Most Expensive Cities List * Copenhagen is ranked #7 as Preferred City For Investment Projects. Preferred City For Investment Projects * Copenhagen ranked 3rd in Western Europe in terms of attracting regional headquarters and distribution centers, only surpassed by London and Paris. * Copenhagen ranks #1 in the Global Earning Ranking. [h Global earning ranking ] * Copenhagen ranks as the 5th most popular city in the world for international meetings and conferences. Style & Substance Danmark * Copenhagen ranks as one of the most attractive cities to live and work in Europe. A great place to live * Copenhagen ranks 2nd in Europe for Quality of life according to a survey from 2005 by the international consultancy firm William Mercer. A great place to live * Morten Andersen, veteran NFL kicker * Niels Bohr, physicist, Nobel laureate * Aage Bohr, physicist, Nobel laureate (son of Niels Bohr) * Victor Borge, entertainer * August Bournonville, ballet choreographer * Georg Brandes, critic * Helena Christensen, supermodel * Tove Ditlevsen, writer * Carl Theodor Dreyer, movie director * Vilhelm Hammershøi, painter * Gus Hansen, poker player * Iben Hjejle, actor * Peter Høeg, writer * Arne Jacobsen, designer * Robert Jacobsen, painter * J. C. Jacobsen, founder of Carlsberg Brewery * Mathias Lauridsen, male topmodel * Søren Kierkegaard, philosopher * Bjørn Lomborg, Academic and Author of The Skeptical Environmentalist * Lauritz Melchior, opera singer * Mads Mikkelsen, actor * Carl-Henning Pedersen, painter * Lars von Trier, movie director * Dan Turèll, writer * Lars Ulrich, drummer and songwriter of the heavy-metal band Metallica * Jørn Utzon, architect, designer of the Sydney Opera House * Michael Laudrup, former international football player, former manager of Spanish Primera Division Football team Getafe. * Peter Schmeichel, former international football player * Bertel Thorvaldsen, sculpturer Copenhagen is twinned with: * Paris in France (partner city) * Reykjavík in Iceland * Prague in Czech Republic (unofficial partner city) * San Francisco de Campeche in Mexico * Municipal statistics: NetBorger Kommunefakta, delivered from KMD, also known as Kommunedata (Municipal Data) * Municipal and county statistics: Statistics Denmark statistikbanken.dk * Demography: Statistical Yearbook of Copenhagen (part English); ISBN 87-7024-230-5 * History and demography: København Forslag til kommuneplan 1985; ISBN 87-88034-03-8 * Oresund Region * Eurovision Song Contest 2001 * Junior Eurovision Song Contest 2003 * MTV Europe Music Awards 2006 * Transportation in Denmark * Ports of the Baltic Sea * A Much Different Tourist Site and Cultural Guide about Copenhagen * Wonderful Copenhagen official tourism website * Copenhagen Capacity official investment agency of Copenhagen * * Official municipal website * City of Copenhagen Statistical Office * Krak searchable map
Copenhagen
Copenhagen is the capital of what country?
Denmark
data/set3/a8
Copenhagen Copenhagen ( ; ) is the capital and largest city of Denmark, with a population of 1,161,063. Copenhagen is situated on the Islands of Zealand and Amager. First documented in the 11th century, Copenhagen became the capital of Denmark in the beginning of the 15th century and during the 17th century under the reign of Christian IV it became an important regional centre. Copenhagen is usually ranked as one of the two largest cities of the Nordic Countries. [ LARGEST CITY Copenhagen or Stockholm ? [ Denmark in brief . With the completion of the transnational Oresund Bridge in 2000, Copenhagen has become the centre of the increasingly integrating Øresund Region with around 3.7 million inhabitants covering an area of 20,869 km² (177/km²). Within this region, Copenhagen and Malmö is in the process of growing into one common metropolitan area. Copenhagen is a major regional center of culture, business, media, and science. In 2008 Copenhagen was ranked #4 by Financial Times-owned FDi magazine on their list of Top50 European Cities of the Future after London, Paris and Berlin. In the 2008 Worldwide Centers of Commerce Index, published by MasterCard, Copenhagen was ranked 14th in the world and 1st in Scandinavia. Life science, information technology and shipping are important sectors and research & development plays a major role in the city's economy. Its strategic location and excellent infrastructure with the largest airport in Scandinavia located 14 minutes by train from the city centre, has made it a regional hub and a popular location for regional headquarters as well as conventions. Copenhagen has repeatedly been recognized as one of the cities with the best quality of life. and in 2008 it was singled out as the Most Liveable City in the World by international lifestyle magazine Monocle on their Top 25 Most Liveable Cities 2008 list. It is also considered one of the world's most environmentally friendly cities with the water in the inner harbor being so clean that it can be used for swimming and 36 % of all citizens commuting to work by bicycle, every day bicycling a total 1.1 million km. Since the turn of the millennium Copenhagen has seen a strong urban and cultural development and has been described as a boom town. This is partly due to massive investments in cultural facilities as well as infrastructure and a new wave of succesful designers, chefs and architects. Copenhagen c. 1895 The Palace during renovation. From its humble origins as a fishing village to its heyday as the glittering capital of the Danish Empire, to its current position as one of the world's premier design capitals, the stories and characters of Copenhagen's history can be discovered in its sumptuous palaces, copper-roofed town houses and atmospheric cobbled squares. From the Viking Age there was a fishing village by the name of "Havn" (harbour) at the site. Recent archeological finds indicate that by the 11th century, Copenhagen had already grown into a small town with a large estate, a church, a market, at least two wells and many smaller habitations spread over a fairly wide area. Arkæologer graver ny teori om København op af mulden (Archeologists develop new theory about Copenhagen from their digs), Videnskab.dk, 5 November 2008 From the middle of the 12th century it grew in importance after coming into the possession of the Bishop Absalon, who fortified it in 1167, the year traditionally marking the foundation of Copenhagen. The excellent harbour encouraged Copenhagen's growth until it became an important centre of commerce. The city's origin as a harbour and a place of commerce is reflected in its name. Its original designation, from which the contemporary Danish name is derived, was Køpmannæhafn, "merchants' harbor". The English name for the city is derived from its Low German name, Kopenhagen. The element hafnium is also named for Copenhagen, whose Latin name is Hafnia. Biography of George de Hevesy It was repeatedly attacked by the Hanseatic League as the Germans took notice. In 1254, it received its charter as a city under Bishop Jakob Erlandsen. During 1658-59 it withstood a severe siege by the Swedes under Charles X and successfully repelled a major assault. In 1801 a British fleet under Admiral Parker fought a major battle, the Battle of Copenhagen, with the Danish Navy in Copenhagen harbour. It was during this battle Lord Nelson famously "put the telescope to the blind eye" in order not to see Admiral Parker's signal to cease fire. When a British expeditionary force bombarded Copenhagen in 1807, to gain control of the Danish Navy, the city suffered great damage and hundreds of people were killed. The reason why the devastation was so great was that Copenhagen relied on an old defence-line rendered virtually useless by the increase in shooting range available to the British. But not until the 1850s were the ramparts of the city opened to allow new housing to be built around the lakes ("Søerne") which bordered the old defence system to the west. This dramatic increase of space was long overdue, not only because the old ramparts were out of date as a defence system, but also because of bad sanitation in the old city. Before the opening, Copenhagen Center was inhabited by approximately 125,000 people, peaking in the census of 1870 (140,000); today the figure is around 25,000. In 1901, Copenhagen expanded further, incorporating communities with 40,000 people, and in the process making Frederiksberg an enclave within Copenhagen. During World War II, Copenhagen was occupied by German troops along with the rest of the country from 9 April 1940 until 4 May 1945. In August 1943, when the government's collaboration with the occupation forces collapsed, several ships were sunk in Copenhagen Harbour by the Royal Danish Navy to prevent them being used by the Germans. The city has grown greatly since the war, in the seventies using the so-called five-finger-plan of commuter train lines to surrounding towns and suburbs. Since the summer 2000, the cities of Copenhagen and Malmö have been connected by a toll bridge/tunnel (Øresund Bridge), which allows both rail and road passengers to cross. As a result, Copenhagen has become the centre of a larger metropolitan area which spans both nations. The construction of the bridge has led to a large number of changes to the public transportation system and the extensive redevelopment of Amager, south of the main city. Location of Coppenhagen in Denmark Nørrebro seen from "Søerne" Copenhagen City Hall Copenhagen is located on the eastern shore of the island of Zealand (Sjælland) and partly on the island of Amager. Copenhagen faces the Øresund to the east, the strait of water that separates Denmark from Sweden, and that connects the North Sea with the Baltic Sea. On the Swedish side of the sound directly across from Copenhagen, lie the towns of Malmö and Landskrona. Copenhagen is also a part of the Øresund region, which consists of Zealand, Lolland-Falster and Bornholm in Denmark and Scania in Sweden. Copenhagen Municipality is an administrative unit that covers the central part of the actual city of Copenhagen. It is a fairly small part of the actual city that falles within the municipality both because it covers a very confined area and because the enclave of Frederiksberg is an independent municipality. Copenhagen consists of a number of boroughs and areas, including * Indre By * Østerbro * Nørrebro * Vesterbro * Amagerbro * Nordhavnen (North Habour) * Valby * Kongens Enghave (King's Meadow Garden), also known as Sydhavnen (meaning South Harbour) * Christianshavn * Christiania (Freetown) * Sundbyvester (Sundby West), * Sundbyøster (Sundby East) * Ørestad * Islands Brygge * Bellahøj * Brønshøj * Ryparken * Bispebjerg * Vigerslev * Vestamager * Vanløse The suffix -bro in the names Østerbro, Nørrebro, Vesterbro and Amagerbro should not be confused with the Danish word for bridge, which is also 'bro'. The term is thought to be an abbreviation or short form of the Danish word brolagt meaning paved referring to the roads paved with cobblestones leading to the city's former gates - The conurbation of Copenhagen consists of several municipalities. After Copenhagen Municipality, the second largest is Frederiksberg Municipality which is an enclave inside Copenhagen Municipality. Both are contained in the larger Capital Region of Denmark, which contains most of the Copenhagen metropolitan area. Previously, the areas of Frederiksberg, Gentofte and Copenhagen municipalities have been used to define the city of Copenhagen. This definition is now obsolete. To meet statistical needs after the latest municipal reform, which took place in the beginning of 2007, an effort has been made to work out definitions of lands (landsdele) in Denmark. A land is basically a geographical and statistical definition, and the area is not considered to be an administrative unit. The land of Copenhagen City includes the municipalities of Copenhagen, Dragør, Frederiksberg and Tårnby, with a total population of 656,582 in the beginning of 2008. Statistics Denmark, table BEF1A07: Population 1 January by region, age, sex, marital status Retrieved on 2008-03-26. Statistics Denmark, definitions of lands as of 2007-01-01 (excel-file, in danish) Retrieved on 2008-03-26. Copenhagen and Frederiksberg were two of the three last Danish municipalities not belonging to a county. On 1 January 2007, the municipalities lost their county privileges and became part of Copenhagen Capital Region. Suburban Copenhagen is planned according to the Finger Plan, fingerplanen, initiated in 1947, dividing the suburbs into five fingers. The Finger Plan, Denmark.dk The S-train lines are built according to the Finger Plan, while green wedges and highways are built in-between the fingers The Little Finger The northern suburbs form the little finger of the plan, and is traditionally the wealthiest of the suburbs. In popular language, the area is known as "The Whiskey Belt", although the area is mixed between mansions, larger houses, garden cities and mid-size houses. The area has a population of around 270,000 inhabitants. * Gentofte Municipality: Klampenborg, Skovshoved, Charlottenlund, Hellerup, Gentofte, Ordrup, Jægersborg, Dyssegård, Vangede * Lyngby-Taarbæk Municipality: Kongens Lyngby, Ulrikkenborg, Brede, Virum, Sorgenfri, Lundtofte, Hjortekær * Rudersdal Municipality: Søllerød, Holte, Øverød, Gl. Holte, Trørød, Nærum, Vedbæk, Skodsborg, Birkerød, Kajerød, Bistrup * Hørsholm Municipality: Hørsholm, Usserød, Rungsted, Vallerød, Smidstrup * Allerød Municipality: Allerød, Lillerød, Blovstrød * Fredensborg Municipality: Fredensborg, Asminderød, Humlebæk, Kokkedal, Niverød, Nivå. The Ring Finger The North-Northwestern part of the suburbs forms the ring finger. The area is to a large extent formed by detached middle-class dwellings, with some exceptions of housing projects or upper-class areas. The area has a population of around 100,000 inhabitants. * Gladsaxe Municipality: Gladsaxe, Bagsværd, Buddinge, Høje-Gladsaxe (Gladsaxe Heights), Mørkhøj, Søborg * Furesø Municipality: Værløse, Farum, Hareskovby The Middle Finger The northwestern suburbs form the middle finger, and consists of a mixed area of both detached middle-class dwellings, widespread garden cities and large, low-rise public housing projects. The area has a considerable part of the industrial areas of metropolitan Copenhagen, mostly in the traditional sectors of manufacturing. The area has a population of around 110,000 inhabitants. * Herlev Municipality: Herlev, Hjortespring * Ballerup Municipality: Skovlunde, Ballerup, Måløv, Ågerup, Jonstrup, Egebjerg * Egedal Municipality: Smørumnedre, Stenløse, Ølstykke The Index Finger The index finger forms the western suburbs, which are the suburbs with the lowest income per capita and the highest crime-rate. The suburbs vary from the petit bourgeois area of Glostrup to the widespread low housing projects of Albertslund and Taastrup. Of the total of 145,000 inhabitants, some 20% are immigrants of first or second generation. * Rødovre Municipality: Rødovre, Islev * Glostrup Municipality: Glostrup, Hvissinge, Ejby * Brøndby Municipality: Brøndbyøster, Brøndbyvester, Brøndby Nord * Albertslund Municipality * Høje-Taastrup Municipality: Taastrup, Høje-Taastrup, Tåstrupgård, Hedehusene The Thumb The southwest suburbs along the coast form the thumb of the plan. While the central parts of these suburbs are dominated by high-rise housing projects and low-income inhabitants, the distant part is dominated by detached middle-class houses. These suburbs have a population of some 215,000 inhabitants and has a sizeable number of immigrants. * Hvidovre Municipality: Avedøre, Friheden, Hvidovre * Brøndby Municipality: Brøndby Strand * Vallensbæk Municipality * Ishøj Municipality * Greve Municipality: Hundige, Karlslunde, Greve * Solrød Municipality: Solrød, Jersie * Køge municipality: Køge, Ølby The extra finger: Amager Island suburbs & Malmö When the finger plan was initially introduced, the island of Amager wasn't included as the infrastructure was inadequate for modern suburban life. Later it has been improved, and the suburbs at the island hold some 53,000 inhabitants. Amager is now one of the most modern suburbs of Copehagen with increasing wealth. With the opening of the bridge to Sweden this finger has been extended all the way to Malmö. Under an official visit of the Swedish King in 2007 at the Copenhagen City Hall, Copenhagen Lord Mayor Ritt Bjerregaard caused a minor diplomatic incident by referring to Malmö as "København M" with an allusion to the Danish system of postal codes (Nørrebro being København N and Vesterbro being København V for instance), indicating that Malmö had turned into just another Copenhagen bourough. Today 25,000 Danes live in Malmö. Malmø er blevet til København M, DR Online * Tårnby Municipality: Tårnby, Kastrup * Dragør Municipality Summers in Copenhagen are mild with average high temperatures of around 21°C (70°F) and lows of 13°C (55°F), but temperatures could sometimes exceed 25°C (77°F+) and occasional heatwaves are common during the summer. Winters are cold, with temperatures of -2 to 4°C (28 - 40°F), and it rarely drop below −10 °C (14 °F). Precipitation is moderate throughout the year, and snowfall occurs mainly in December through March, but snow cover does not remain a long time. Nørrebro seen from "Søerne" Copenhagen as seen from the City Hall at night Kongens Nytorv View from Rundetårn Gefion Fountian The city's appearance today is shaped by the key role it has played as a regional center for centuries. Copenhagen has a multitude of districts, each representing its time and with its own distinctive character, making up a dense urban fabric. Other distinctive features of the Copenhagen of today is the abundance of water, the greenness and the elaborate system of bicycle paths that line almost every major street. The oldest section of Copenhagen's inner city is often referred to as "Middelalderbyen" (The Medieval City). However, the most distinctive district of Copenhagen is Frederiksstaden developed during the reign of Frederick V. It has Amalienborg Palace at its centre and is dominated by the dome of the Marble Church as well as a number of elegant 18th century mansions. Also part of the old inner city of Copenhagen is the small island of Slotsholmen with Christiansborg Palace and Christianshavn. Around the historical city center lies a band of charming, dense and well-preserved residential bouroughs (Vesterbro, Inner Nørrebro, Inner Østerbro) dating mainly from late 19th century. They were built outside the old ramparts of the city when the city was finally allowed to expand beyond this barrier. Sometimes referred to as "the City of Spires", Copenhagen is known for its horizontal skyline, only broken by spires at churches and castles. Most characteristic is the baroque spire of Church of Our Saviour with its spiralling and narrowing external stairs that visitors can climb to the very top of the spire. Other important spires are those of Christiansborg Palace, the City Hall and the former Church of St. Nikolaj that now houses a modern art venue. A bit lower are the renaissance spires of Rosenborg Castle and the "dragon spire" of [[Christian IV of Christian IV's former stock exchange, so named because it is shaped as the tails of four dragons twined together. Recent years has seen a tremendous boom in modern architecture in Copenhagen both when it comes to Danish architecture and works by international architects. For a few hundred years, virtually no foreign architects had worked in Copenhagen but since the mid 1990s the city and its immediate sourroundings have seen buildings and projects from such international star architects as Norman Foster , Hadid , Nouvel and Liebeskind . In the same time, a number of Danish architects have achieved great success both in Copenhagen and abroad. This has led to a number of international architecture awards. Buildings in Copenhagen have won RIBA European Awards four years in a row ("Sampension" in 2005 , "Kilen" in 2006 , "Tietgenkollegiet" in 2007 and the Royal Playhouse in 2008 ). At the 2008 World Architecture Festival in Barcelona, Bjarke Ingels Group won an award for the World's Best Residential Building 2008 for a house in Ørestad. The Forum AID Award for Best building in Scandinavia went to Copenhagen buildings both in 2006 and 2008 . In 2008 British design magazine Monocle named Copenhagen the World's best design city 2008. The boom in urban development and modern architecture means that the above mentioned horizontal skyline has seen some changes. A political majority has decided to keep the historical center free of highrises. But several areas will see or have already seen massive urban development. Ørestad is the area that until now has seen most of the development. Located near Copenhagen Airport, it currently boasts the largest mall in Scandinavia and a variety of office and residential buildings as well as an IT University and a high school. The two largest hotels in Scandinavia are currently under construction (ultimo 2008). An ambitious regeneration project will create a new Carlsberg District at the historical premises of the Carlsberg Breweries that has terminated the production of beer in Copenhagen and moved it to Jutland. The district will have a total of nine highrises and seeks to mix the old industrial buildings with modern architecture to create a dense, maze-like quarter with a focus on sustainability and an active urban life. A third major area of urban development also with a focus on sustanibility is Nordhavn. The Copenhagen tradition with urban development on artificial islands that was initiated with with Christianh IV's construction of Christianshavn has recently been continued with the creation of Havneholmen as well as a "canal city" in the South Harbour. A district in Copenhagen with a very different take on modern architecture is that of Christiania whose many creative and idiosyncratic buildings are exponents of an "architecture without architects". Østre Anlæg University of Copenhagen Botanical Garden Copenhagen is a green city with many big and small parks. King's Garden, the garden of Rosenborg Castle, is the oldest and most visited park in Copenhagen. Its landscaping was commenced by Christian IV in 1606. Every year it sees more than 2,5 million visitors and in the summer months it is packed with sunbathers, picknickers and ballplayers. It also serves as a sculpture garden with a permanent display of sculptures as well as temporary exhibits during summer. Also located in the city centre are the Botanical Gardens particularly noted for their large complex of 19th century greenhouses donated by Carlsberg founder J. C. Jacobsen. Fælledparken is with its 58 hectars the largest park in Copenhagen. It is popular for sports and hosts a long array of annual events like a free opera concert at the opening of the opera season, other open-air concerts, carnival, Labour Day celebrations and Copenhagen Historic Grand Prix which is a race for antique cars. A historical green space in the northeastern part of the city is Kastellet which is a well-presserved renaissance citadel that now serves mainly as a park. Another popular park is the Frederiksberg Garden which is a 32 hectars romantic landscape park. It houses a large colony of very tame grey herons along with other waterfowls. The park also offers views of the elephants and the elephant house designed by world-famous British architect Norman Foster of the adjacent Copenhagen Zoo. Characteristic of Copenhagen is that a number of cemeteries double as parks, though only for the more quiet activities such as sunbathing, reading and meditation. Assistens Cemetery, the burrial place of Hans Christian Andersen among others, is an important green space for the district of Inner Nørrebro and a Copenhagen institution. The lesser known Vestre Kirkegaard is with its 54 hectars the largest cemetery in Denmark and offers a maze of dense groves, open lawns, winding paths, hedges, overgrown tombs, monuments, tree-lined avenues, lakes and other garden features. It is official municipal policy in Copenhagen that all citizens by 2015 must be able to reach a park or beach on foot in less than 15 minutes. In line with this policy, several new parks are under development in areas poor in green spaces. Copenhagen and the surrounding areas have 3 beaches with a total of approx. 8 km of sandy beaches within 30 minutes of bicycling from the city centre. This includes Amager Strandpark, which opened in 2005 and includes a 2 km long artificial island and a total of 4,6 km of beaches , located just 15 minutes by bicycle or a few minutes by metro from the city centre. The beaches are supplemented by a system of harbour baths along the Copenhagen waterfront. The first and most popular of these is located at Islands Brygge Harbour bath at Islands Brygge, e-architect and has won international acclaim for its design. Islands Brygge. Depending on the boundaries used, the population of Copenhagen differs. Statistics Denmark uses a measure of the contiguously built-up urban area of Copenhagen, this means the number of communities included in this statistical abstract has changed several times, in the abstracts latest edition with close to 1.2 million (1,153,615 (2008)) inhabitants. This number is not a strict result of the commonly-used measuring methods of 200 meters of continuously build-up area, as there are exceptions to the general rule in the suburbs of Dragør, Taastrup, Birkerød, Hørsholm and Farum. Statistics Denmark has never stated the geographical area of urban Copenhagen. However, we know it consists of Copenhagen Municipality, Frederiksberg and 16 of the 20 municipalities in the old counties Copenhagen and Roskilde, though 5 of them only partially. Largest cities of Denmark 2007 Statistics Denmark has worked out definitions of so-called lands (landsdele), a definition used to meet statistical needs on a lower level than regions. From this, the land of Copenhagen city (København by) is defined by the municipalities of Copenhagen, Dragør, Frederiksberg and Tårnby, with a total population of 656,582 in the beginning of 2008. The surroundings of Copenhagen is defined by another land, Copenhagen suburban (Københavns omegn), which includes the municipalities of Albertslund, Ballerup, Brøndby, Gentofte, Gladsaxe, Glostrup, Herlev, Hvidovre, Høje-Taastrup, Ishøj, Lyngby-Taarbæk, Rødovre and Vallensbæk, and with a total population of 504,481 (January 1, 2008). This gives a total population of 1,161,063 for these two lands together. The lands of Copenhagen city and Copenhagen suburban can together be used as a definition of the metropolitan area, although perhaps a somewhat narrow one. From 1 January 2008 the population of the 34 municipalities closest to and including the municipality of Copenhagen is 1,857,263 and by 1 October 2008 the population of this area had grown to 1,872,706. Statistikbanken.dk Population table BEF1A07 Land area: 2,923 km² (1,032 sq mi). (Capital Region - Bornholm + East Zealand + Stevns) Water area: 105 km² (40.5 sq mi). Orienteering fra Københavns Kommune. Statistisk Kontor.2003 nr. 25 Thus, the region comprises 6.8% of the land area of Denmark, but has 34% of Denmark's population. This gives a total of 641 inhabitants per km² or 1,660 per square mile for the region. This compares with a population density in the rest of the country of approximately 90 per km² or around 230 per square mile. Based on a 10%-isoline (data from 2002) in which at least 10% commutes into central parts of the Copenhagen area, most of Zealand would be covered and this area has a population of about 2.3 million inhabitants. /ref> Since the opening of the Øresund Bridge in 2000, commuting between and integration of Greater Malmö and Copenhagen have increased rapidly, and a combined statistical metropolitan area has formed. This metropolitan area, which has a population of 2,501,094 (2008) is expected to be officially defined by the respective statistics divisions of Denmark and Sweden in the upcoming years. A high-ranking civil servant of the Interior Ministry, Henning Strøm, who was involved in (i.e. known as "the Father of") a past municipal reform, which took effect on 1 April 1970, said on television, broadcast in connection with the recent Kommunalreformen ("The Municipal Reform" of 2007), that Copenhagen municipality would encompass an area with 1.5 million inhabitants, if the principles of the 1970 municipal reform were also applied on Copenhagen municipality. DR netnews 25-06-04 In other words: in the rest of Denmark the city occupies only part of the municipality, but in Copenhagen the municipality of Copenhagen occupies only part of the city of Copenhagen. Since the late 1990s, Copenhagen has undergone a transformation from a cozy Scandinavian capital to a cool metropolitan city of international scope in the league of cities like Barcelona and Amsterdam. This is due to massive investments in infrastructure as well as culture and wave of new successful Danish architects, designers and chefs. Between 1998 and 2008, lifestyle journalists wordwide (from Wallpaper to the NewYorkTimes) have praised Copenhagen as a cool, well-functioning creative city (see "Copenhagen In international rankings" below). Copenhagen has a wide array of museums of International standard. The National Museum, Nationalmuseet, is Denmark's largest museum of Archaeology and cultural history, comprising the histories of Danish and foreign cultures alike. The National Gallery - "Statens Museum for Kunst" - is Denmark's national art museum and contains collections dating from 12th century and all the way up to present day artists. Among artists represented in the collections are Rubens, Rembrandt, Picasso, Braque, Léger, Matisse and Emil Nolde. Another important Copenhagen art museum is the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek founded by second generation Carlsberg tycoon-philantropist Carl Jacobsen and is built around his personal collections. Its main focus is classical Egyptian, Roman and Greek sculptures and other antiquities and a collection of Rodin sculptures that is the largest outside France (Glypto-, from the Greek root glyphein, to carve and theke, a storing-place). Besides its sculpture collections, the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek also holds a comprehensive collection of paintings of impressionist and post-impressionist painters such as Monet,Renoir, Cézanne, van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec as well as Danish Golden Age painters. Loiusiana is an internationally acclaimed museum of modern art situated on the coast just north of Copenhagen. It is located in the middle of a sculpture garden on a cliff overlooking Øresund. The The museum is included in the Patricia Schultz book 1,000 Places to See Before You Die. The Danish Museum of Art & Design is housed in the 18th century former Frederiks Hospital and displays Danish design as well as international design and crafts. Other museums include: * Thorvaldsens Museum is a single-artist museum dedicated to the oeuvre,of romantic Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen who lived and worked in Rome. * Cisternerne is a small but different museum dedicated to modern glass art. It is located in some grotto-like former cisterns that come complete with Stalactites formed by the changing water levels. * The Ordrupgaard Museum is an art museum located just notth of Copenhagen in an old mansion with an extension by Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. It features 19th century French and Danish art and is particularly noted for its works by Paul Gaugin. Copenhagen Opera House The Royal Danish Theatre In January 2009 the new Copenhagen Concert Hall will open. It is designed by Jean Nouvel and will have four halls with the main auditorium seating 1800 people. It will serve as the home of the Danish National Symphony Orchestra and along with the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles the most expensive concert hall ever built. Another important venue for classical music is the Tivoli Concert Hall located in the histtrocal Tivoli Gardens. The Copenhagen Opera House (in Danish usually called Operaen) that opened in 2005 and is designed by Henning Larsen, is the national opera house of Denmark and among the most modern opera houses in the world. The old Royal Danish Theatre dating from 1748 still works as a supplementary opera scene. The Royal Danish Theatre is also home to the Royal Danish Ballet. Gounded in 1748 along with the theatre, it is one of the oldest ballet troups in Europe. It is home the the Bournonville style of ballet. Copenhagen has a significant jazz scene that has existed for many years. It developed when a number of American jazz musicians such as Ben Webster, Thad Jones, Richard Boone, Ernie Wilkins, Kenny Drew, Ed Thigpen, Bob Rockwell and others such as rock guitarist Link Wray came to live in Copenhagen during the 1960s. Every year in early July Copenhagen's streets, aquares and parks fills up with big and small jazz concerts during the Copenhagen Jazz Festival (see yearly events). The most important venue for rhythmical music in Copenhagen is Vega in Vesterbro district which has been chosen as "best concert venue in Europe" by international music magazine Live For free entertainment one can stroll along Strøget, especially between Nytorv and Højbro Plads, which in the late afternoon and evening is a bit like an impromptu three-ring circus with musicians, magicians, jugglers and other street performers. View from Amerikakaj Copenhagen has a wide variety of sport teams. The two major football teams are Brøndby IF and FC København. Brøndby IF plays at Brøndby Stadium in Brøndby and FC København plays at Parken in Østerbro, Copenhagen. Notable Copenhagen teams playing at the second highest level in Danish football (the Danish 1st Division) include Lyngby BK, AB, HIK, Frem, Brønshøj, Fremad Amager and Skjold. Copenhagen also has three ice hockey teams: Rødovre Mighty Bulls, Herlev Hornets and Nordsjælland Cobras. There are a lot of handball teams in Copenhagen. FC København owns both a women's and a men's team, which have the same name and logo. They were formerly known as FIF. Of other clubs playing in the "highest" leagues there are; Ajax Heroes, Ydun, and HIK (Hellerup). Rugby union is also played in the Danish capital with teams such as CSR-Nanok, Copenhagen Scrum, Exiles, Froggies and Rugbyklubben Speed. The Danish Australian Football League, based in Copenhagen is the largest Australian rules football competition outside of the English speaking world. Copenhagen is also home to a number of Denmark's 40-odd cricket clubs. Although Denmark has been an associate member of the International Cricket Council since 1966, the sport is not taught much in schools, and Danish cricket competes unfavourably with the much more widely followed sport of football for players, facilities, media attention and spectators. The second World Outgames will take place in Copenhagen in 2009, after Berlin refused to stage them due to the continuing rivalry between the two gay sporting organisations. It would be the largest such event hosted in Copenhagen. Copenhagen has the two oldest amusement parks in the World. World-famous Tivoli Gardens is an amusement park and pleasure garden located right in the middle of Copenhagen between the the City Hall Square and the the Central Station. Among its rides are the oldest still operating roller coaster and the oldest ferris wheel in the World. Tivoli Gardens, the rides It also function as an open-air concert venue. It opened on August 15 1843 making it the second oldest amusement park in the world. Dyrehavsbakken (in English "the Deer Garden Hill") is located in Klampenborg a little north of Copenhagen in a forested area of great natural beauty. Having been made into an amusement park complete with rides, games and restaurants by Christian IV, it is the oldest surviving amusement park in the World. Copenhagen is a centre for the New Nordic Cuisine. Nordic Cuisine, New York Times In November 2004 a Nordic Kitchen Symposium was helt in Copenhagen at the initiative of Danish chef and gastronome Claus Meyer. The symposium had attandance of top chefs from all of the Nordic countries and led to the adoption of a Manifesto for the New Nordic Cuisine. Manifesto for a New Nordic Cuisine Claus Meyer is also the co-founder of the two-Michelin star Restaurant Noma (Nordisk Madhus) which is a flagship restaurant for the new Nordic cuisine. In 2008 it was ranked as 10th best in the World by acclaimed British restaurant & fine dining magazine Restaurant at their 50 Best Restaurants of the World 2008-list. Furthermore, the users of the international website TripAdvisor with 25 million users a month rated Noma as the best restaurant in the world. TripAdvisor ranking As of 2008 Copenhagen boasts a total of 11 Michelin star restaurants. This is by far the highest number of any Nordic city. Apart from Noma they include one of only two Thai restaurants worldwide that has received a Michelin star. Due to the development, Copenhagen is increasingly being recognized internationally as a gourmet destination. The Top 10 cities to visit in 2009, TimesOnline Apart from the selection of high end restaurants, Copenhagen offers a great variety of Danish, International and ethnic restaurants and it is possible to find modest eateries with open sandwiches (called "smørrebrød"), which is the traditional and best known dish for lunch. Most restaurants, though, serve international dishes. danish pastry, another local specialty, can be sampled from the numerous bakeries found in all parts of the city. Copenhagen has long been associated with beer.Carlsberg beer has been brewed at the brewery's premises at the border between Vesterbro and Valby districts since 1847 and has long been almost synonumous with Danish beer production. However, recent years have seen an explosive growth in the number of microbreweries so that Denmark today has more than 100 breweries Nyeste artikler fra Bryggeriforeningen, Bryggeriforeningen , many of which are located in Copenhagen. Some like Nørrebro Bryghus also act as brewpubs where it is possible also to eat at the premisses. Many cafés specialize in a huge selection of quality beers and beer has also become an important ingridient in the New Nordic Cuisine. Copenhagen is the media centre of Denmark. DR, the major Danish public service broadcasting corporation collected their activities in a new headquarters, DR byen, in 2006 and 2007. Similarly has Odense based TV2 collected its Copenhagen activities in a modern media house in the South Harbour. The two national daily newspapters Politiken and Berlingske Tidende and the two tabloids Ekstra Bladet and B. T. are based in Copenhagen. Other important media corporations include Aller Press which is the largest publisher of weekly and monthly magazines in Scandinavia, the Egmont media group and Gyldendal, the largest Danish publisher of books. Copenhagen also has a sizable movie and television industry. Filmbyen, The Movie City, which is located in a former military camp in the suburg of Hvidovre and houses several movie companies and studio studios. Among the movie campanies are Zentropa co-owned by Danish movie director Lars von Trier who is behind several international movie productions as well as a founding force behind the Dogma Movement. * Copenhagen Fashion Week takes place every year in February and August. It is the largest fashion event in Northern Europe. Fashion Capital Copenhagen On the catwalks are a growing number of new and known Danish talent with a preview of their upcoming collections. And at the three trade fairs, CPH Vision, Gallery and Copenhagen International Fashion Fair, you will find an additional 1,100 exhibitors representing a total of over 2,300 international brand name collections. Danish fashion is known for its unique angle on design, innovation and aesthetics. With a more modern approach to femininity and functionality, expressed in fresh silhouettes, a focus on details and incomparable quality. These are only some of the reasons why more than 50,000 buyers, designers and global press attend Copenhagen Fashion Week twice a year. Copenhagen Fashion Week is organised by the Danish Fashion Institute - a newly founded network organisation created by and for the Danish fashion industry. Copenhagen Fashion Week * Carnival in Copenhagen takes place every year since 1982 during the Whitsun Holiday in Fælledparken and around the city. 120 bands, 2000 dancers and 100,000 spectators participate. History of Copenhagen * Copenhagen Distortion is a youth culture festival capturing the zeitgeist of the city, gathering every year (5 days up to the first weekend of June) up to 30.000 people in the streets, in shops, galleries, clubs, bars, in boats and buses, with a cultural focus on street culture, art and upfront dance music. Copenhagen Distortion * Roskilde Festival is a music festival helt every year in Roskilde west of Copenhagen. Gathering around 100,000 people every year, it is one of the four largest rock music festivals in Europe.. * Copenhagen Jazz Festival, which begins on the first Friday in July, is a popular annual event that is the result of Copenhagen's significant jazz scene. The festival takes place throughout the city in streets, squares and parks as well as in cafés and concert halls. Copenhagen Jazz Festival 3+ years, Wonderful Copenhagen It embraces around 900 concerts, 100 venues and over 200,000 guests from Denmark and around the world. It is recognized as one of the leading jazz festivals in the World. Top 10 best Jazz Festivals, TripAdvisor Copenhagen Jazz Festival * Copenhagen Pride is a gay pride festival taking place every year in August. Among the events is "Tivoli goes pink" and it ends with a parade. Copenhagen Pride * Copenhagen Cooking takes place in August every year and is a food festival with a wide array of events all over the city. * Copenhagen International Film Festival takes place in September every year with a focus on European films. The main prize is called the Golden Swan. Copenhagen International Film Festival Middelgrunden wind farm just off Copenhagen The Danish National Bank. Designed by Arne Jacobsen. Copenhagen is the economical and financial centre of Denmark Regionale regnskaber 2005 - Nyt fra Danmarks Statistik - Danmarks Statistik and also a strong business and economic centre in the entire Scandinavian-Baltic region. In 2008 Copenhagen was ranked 4th by Financial Times-owned FDi magazine on their list of Top50 European Cities of the Future after London, Paris and Berlin. Top 50 European City of the Future 2008/09 In 2006/07 FDi Magazine named Copenhagen Scandinavian City of the Future Scandinavian City of the Future 06/07 and in 2004/05 Copenhagen was named Northern European City of the Future ahead of other cities from Scandinavia, UK, Ireland and Benelux. Northern European City of the Future 2004/05 In the 2008 Worldwide Centers of Commerce Index, published by MasterCard, Copenhagen was ranked 14th in the world and 1st in Scandinavia. Copenhagen is one of the cities in Western Europe attracting most regional headquarters and distribution centers. Among the international companies that have chosen to locate their regional headquarters in Copenhagen is Microsoft.There are 2,100 foreign companies located in the Copenhagen area, of which approx. 500 are Scandinavian head offices, representing a wide range of industries. Copenhagen has a service oriented economy. An important sector is life science and research & development plays a major role in the economy of the city. The entire Oresund Region is in cooperation with Sweden being promoted as Medicon Valley. Major Danish biotech companies like Novo Nordisk and Lundbeck, both of which are among 50 largest pharmaceutical and biotech companies in the World, are located in the greater Copenhagen area. USATODAY.com The region also boasts the largest IT-cluster in Scandinavia with nearly 100,000 employees and the city of Copenhagen is home to Nokia's largest research centre outside Finland. Copenhagen - Overview Shipping is also an import business with Maersk, the World's largest shipping company, having their world headquarters in Copenhagen. Several international companies have established their regional headquarters in Copenhagen, e.g. Microsoft. Maersk, the world's largest container shipping company, has their world headquarters in Copenhagen. A substantial number of Danish pharmaceuticals such as Novo Nordisk, Ferring Pharmaceuticals and Bavarian Nordic also operate in the area, having placed their headquarters in or close to Copenhagen. USATODAY.com Copenhagen has some of the highest gross wages in the World. City Mayors: World's richest cities High taxes mean that wages are reduced after mandatory deduction. A neneficial researcher scheme with low taxation of foreigh specialists Level of salary in Denmark has made Denmark an attractive location for highly educated foreign labour to settle. Copenhagen is however also among the most expensive cities in Europe. City Mayors: World's most expensive cities (EIU) City Mayors: World's most expensive cities - Ranking Copenhagen University Copenhagen has a well-developed higher education system of public universities. Most prominent among these is the University of Copenhagen. Founded in 1479, it is the oldest university in Denmark. It is a world-renowned research and teaching institution with campuses around the city and forms part of the International Alliance of Research Universities (IARU), which is a collaboration between international top universities including Oxford, Cambridge, Yale and Berkeley. The University attracts app. 1500 international and exchange students every year. It is repeatedly ranked as one of the best universities in Europe. At the Times Higher Education's QS World University Rankings 2008 list, it was ranked as fourth best in continental Europe. TheAcademic Ranking of World Universities 2008 placesd it as number 43 worldwide and 8th in Europe. A second all-round university in the Copenhagen area is Roskilde University located in Roskilde. The Technical University of Denmark (DTU), Danmarks Tekniske Universitet, is located in Lyngby at the northern outskirts of Copenhagen. In 2008 it was ranked third highest in Europe on Times Higher Education's list of the most influential technical universities in the World. The Max Planck Institute in Germany was ranked 15, ETH Zurich in Switzerland was ranked 15 and DTU in Denmark was ranked 20. Copenhagen Business School (CBS) is an estimed and EQUIS accredited business school located on Frederiksberg. Copenhagen is rich in companies and institutions with a focus on research and development within the biotechnology , Infrastructure & logistics - Copenhagen a distribution hub, retrieved February 22, 2007. and life science sectors. Two of the 50 largest pharmaceutical and biotech companies in the World are located in the greater Copenhagen area. The biotech and life science cluster in Copenhagen and the rest of the Oresund Region is one of the strongest in Europe. Since 1995 this has been branded as the Medicon Valley in a Danish-Swedish cooperation. The aim is to strengthen the region's position and to promote cooperation between companies and academia. The German biotech giant Sartorius Stedim Biotech, which is currently creating a Nordic head office in Tåstrup on the outskirts of Copenhagen. The Øresund region is responsible for 60 percent of life science production in Scandinavia and is home to 111 biotech companies. The greater Copenhagen area has a very well established transportation infrastructure making it a hub in Northern Europe. Christianshavns Kanal Copenhagen has a large network of toll-free highways and public roads connecting different municipalities of the city together and to Northern Europe. As in many other cities in Europe traffic is increasing in Copenhagen. The radial arterial roads and highways leading to the Copenhagen city center are critically congested during peak hours. Copenhagen is known as one of the most bicycle-friendly cities in the world. Every day 1,1 million km are bicycled in Copenhagen. 36 % of all citizens are commuting to work, school or university by bicycle and it is municipal policy that this number should go up to 40 % by 2012 and 50 % in 2015. The city's bicycle paths are extensive and well-used. Bicycle paths are often separated from the main traffic lanes and sometimes have their own signal systems. The municipality is also developing a system of interconnected green bicycle routes, greenways, with the aim to facilitate fast, safe and pleasant bicycle transport from one end of the city to the other. The network will cover more than 100 km and consist of 22 routes when finished. The city provides public bicycles which can be found throughout the downtown area and used with a returnable deposit of 20 kroner. Copenhagen's well-developed bicycle culture has given rise to the term ‘copenhagenize’. This is the practice of other cities adopting Copenhagen-style bike lanes and bicycle infrastructure. In 2007 Copenhagen-based Danish urban design consultant Jan Gehl was hired by the New York City Department of Transportation to re-imagine New York City streets by introducing designs to improve life for pedestrians and cyclists. In recognition of Copenhagen's emphasis on bicycling, the city has been chosen by the Union Cycliste Internationale as their first official Bike City. Bike City Copenhagen will take place from 2008 to 2011 and consist of big cycling events for professionals as well as amateurs. The harbour of Copenhagen has largely lost its importance as an industrial harbour. In 2001 Copenhagen Harbour merged with the harbour in Malmö to create Copenhagen-Malmö Port. It has several functions, the most important being as a major cruise destination. In 2007 a record 286 cruise ships with 420,000 cruise passengers visited Copenhagen. 120 of these ships either started or ended the cruise in Copenhagen. In 2008 these numbers grew further to 310 cruise ships and 560,000 passengers. As a result of the growth in the cruise industry facilities asre being expanded and improved. At the World Travel Awards in 2008, Copenhagen Port was named the number one cruise destination in Europe for the fifth year in a row. Copenhagen is serviced by ferry lines to Oslo in Norway (called "Oslobåden") with a daily connection and to Świnoujście in Poland (called "Polensfærgerne") with five weekly connections. Copenhagen Airport is the principal airport serving Copenhagen. It is the largest in Scandinavia and the 17th largest in Europe. It is located in Kastrup on the island of Amager and has very efficient connections to downtown Copenhagen with metro trains going to Kongens Nytorv in 15 minutes with 4-6 minutes between departures and regional trains going to the Central Station in 12 minutes. Its location also makes it the most important international airport for large parts of southern Sweden. Over the Øresund Bridge trains go to Malmö South in 14 minutes or Malmö Central Station in 22 minutes. Copenhagen Airport has won the award as "The best airport in Europe" four times, and as "The best airport in the world" two times. Copenhagen Airport is the seventh best airport in the world - second best in Europe - when you ask the passengers. The British organization Skytrax is doing so every year, writes the airport in a press release. 40 criteria are employed for the ranking. The new metro S-train at Nørreport Metro entrance in FrederiksbergThe public transportation system of Copenhagen consists of commuter trains (called S-trains, S-tog), buses, and a metro. The S-trains form the basis of the transportation network, stretching to most areas of metropolitan Copenhagen, with their main hub at Copenhagen Central Station (København H). Regional trains supplement the S-train services with lines extending further such as to the Copenhagen Airport, Elsinore, and Malmö. The Danish State Railways' Intercity network has its eastern terminus and main hub at Copenhagen, with most trains extending to Copenhagen Airport. The fare system is based on 95 zones covering the capital area. Tickets are transferable from one means of transport to another within a time limit. The more zones a ticket is valid for, the longer its time validity with a maximum of two hours. Discount cards (punch cards, klippekort) and period cards are available. Ticket prices are high and have increased substantially in recent years leading to a decrease in passenger numbers. In fact, the percentage of trips made on public transportation in Copenhagen is quite low by northern European standards. The Copenhagen Metro began operation in 2002 and currently has only two lines. In April 2008, it was named Best Metro in the World by industry experts. Copenhagen Metro Best in the World |Christiansborg Palace - home of the Danish Parliament Folketinget, the Supreme Court, Office of the Prime Minister and official reception area of Queen Margrethe II |- |Børsen - the former Stock Exchange building |- |The Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen harbor |- |Amalienborg Palace - home of the Danish royal family. The central building is the domed Marble Church located behind the palace complex |- |Nyhavn |- |The Marble Church |- |Rosenborg Castle in central Copenhagen |- |Christianshavns Canal |- |The Tivoli, photographed from Eduard Spelterini's balloon on June 22, 1922 |} Copenhagen is recognized as one of the most environmentally friendly cities in the world. In 2006 Copenhagen Municipality received the European Environmental Management Award. The award was given for long-term holistic environmental planning. It is municipal policy to reduce CO2 emissions by 20% before the end of 2015. In 2001 a large offshore wind farm was built just off the coast of Copenhagen at Middelgrunden. It produces about 4 % of the city's energy. Many years of major investments in sewage treatment has improved water quality in the harbour to an extent that the inner harbour can be used for swimming and facilities for this are provided at a number of locations. Another municipal policy is that 40% of all citizens should bicycle to and from work by 2012 and a number of initiatives are being taken to implement this policy (see "bicycling above"). Copenhagen is the capital in the World where organic food has the largest market share. One in every ten purchases is organic in Copenhagen. Within the municipal sector in Copenhagen, 45 % of all food consumption is organic but the target is considerably higher. With the environmental strategy "Environment Metropolis: Our Vision 2015" the politicians wish that solely organic food is to be served in 90 per cent of the Copenhagen old-age homes and residential homes for children and young persons in 2015.. - - - Image:Christiansborg Slot.jpg| Christiansborg Slot - Image:Børsen København.jpg| Børsen- the former Stock Exchange building - Image:Littlemermaid207.jpg| The Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen harbor - Image:Copenhagen amalienborg seen from opera house.jpg| Amalienborg Palace - Image:Nyhavn 9-15 København.jpg| Nyhavn - Image:Kbh Marmorkirche 1.jpg| Frederik's Church|The Marble Church - Image:Rosenborg.jpg| Rosenborg Castle in central Copenhagen - Image:Christianshavns Kanal morning.jpg| Christianshavns Canal - Image:Amalienborgas.JPG | The Royal Residence - Image:Copenhague 108.jpg | The Round Tower - Image:Gammel_Strand_København.jpg| Gammel Strand - Image:Kbh_Stroeget_Nikolaj_Kirche.jpg | Stroget - Image:A_Copenhagen_center_street.jpg| Central Copenhagen Street - Image:Amagergade 01.jpg| Amagergade - Image:Gebauede_in_kopenhagen.jpg| Copenhagen Habour - Image:Container ship loading-700px.jpg| Copenhagen Ship Loading - Image:Christianshavns_Torv.jpg | Christianshavn Torv - Image:Copenhagen-Airport-from-air.jpg | Copenhagen Airport from the air - Image:Østre Anlæg København.jpg | Østre Anlæg - Image:Frederiksberg Slot.jpg | Frederiksberg Castle - Image:Kongens Nytorv 17.jpg | Kongens Nytorv - Image:Kopenhagen zeehaven.JPG | Copenhagen Canal Tour - Image:Den-sorte-diamant.jpg | The Black Diamond ( The Royal Library ) - Image:Tivoli Copenhagen at Night.jpg | Tivoli by Night - Image:Kopenhagen 3.jpg | View over Copenhagen - Image:Gammeltorv Copenhagen Denmark.JPG | Gammeltorv - Image:Copenhagen denmark.jpg | Nyhavn - Image:Copenhagen City Hall.jpg | Copenhagen City Hall - Image:Gefion.jpg| Gefion Fountian - Image:Christiania Exit.JPG | Christiania - Image:Gebauede in kopenhagen.jpg | Copenhagen at Night - Image:Copenhague 050.jpg | Inner City Canel - Copenhagen has placed well in a number of international rankings, some of which are mentioned below. * Copenhagen was ranked #1 as Most Livable City in the World by international lifestyle magazine Monocle on their Top 25 Most Livable Cities 2008 list Monocles page on Copenhagen * Worlds Best Design City 2008 also by Monocle. Monocles page on Copenhagen *Monocle has also stated that Copenhagen is "Scandinavia's most desirable city". By Stuart Husband Monocle Magazine Published: June 19, 2007 *Copenhagen ranked #4 by Financial Times-owned FDi magazine on their list of Top50 European Cities of the Future after London, Paris and Berlin. Top 50 European City of the Future 2008/09 In 2006/07 FDi Magazine named Copenhagen Scandinavian City of the Future Scandinavian City of the Future 06/07 and in 2004/05 Copenhagen was named Northern European City of the Future ahead of other cities from Scandinavia, UK, Ireland and Benelux. Northern European City of the Future 2004/05 * In the 2008 Worldwide Centers of Commerce Index, published by MasterCard, Copenhagen was ranked 14th in the world and 1st in Scandinavia. *Copenhagen #1 out of 254 locations in the Location Ranking Survey performed by ECA International that has asked European experts where they prefer to be stationed worldwide. Location Ranking Survey * Copenhagen was ranked #6 in Grist Magazine's "15 Green Cities" list in 2007 making Copenhagen the greenest capital of Scandinavia according to Grist Magazine. 15 Green Cities | Grist | Main Dish | 19 July 2007 * Copenhagen is the capital in the World where organic food has the largest market share. One in every ten purchases is organic in Copenhagen. World-champinions in organic food * The Copenhagen Metro has been named the Best Metro in the World by industry experts. Copenhagen Metro Best in the World * Copenhagen is the worlds #7 most expensive city and #3 most expensive in Europe on the Forbes List. Forbes-Worlds Most Expensive Cities List * Copenhagen is ranked #7 as Preferred City For Investment Projects. Preferred City For Investment Projects * Copenhagen ranked 3rd in Western Europe in terms of attracting regional headquarters and distribution centers, only surpassed by London and Paris. * Copenhagen ranks #1 in the Global Earning Ranking. [h Global earning ranking ] * Copenhagen ranks as the 5th most popular city in the world for international meetings and conferences. Style & Substance Danmark * Copenhagen ranks as one of the most attractive cities to live and work in Europe. A great place to live * Copenhagen ranks 2nd in Europe for Quality of life according to a survey from 2005 by the international consultancy firm William Mercer. A great place to live * Morten Andersen, veteran NFL kicker * Niels Bohr, physicist, Nobel laureate * Aage Bohr, physicist, Nobel laureate (son of Niels Bohr) * Victor Borge, entertainer * August Bournonville, ballet choreographer * Georg Brandes, critic * Helena Christensen, supermodel * Tove Ditlevsen, writer * Carl Theodor Dreyer, movie director * Vilhelm Hammershøi, painter * Gus Hansen, poker player * Iben Hjejle, actor * Peter Høeg, writer * Arne Jacobsen, designer * Robert Jacobsen, painter * J. C. Jacobsen, founder of Carlsberg Brewery * Mathias Lauridsen, male topmodel * Søren Kierkegaard, philosopher * Bjørn Lomborg, Academic and Author of The Skeptical Environmentalist * Lauritz Melchior, opera singer * Mads Mikkelsen, actor * Carl-Henning Pedersen, painter * Lars von Trier, movie director * Dan Turèll, writer * Lars Ulrich, drummer and songwriter of the heavy-metal band Metallica * Jørn Utzon, architect, designer of the Sydney Opera House * Michael Laudrup, former international football player, former manager of Spanish Primera Division Football team Getafe. * Peter Schmeichel, former international football player * Bertel Thorvaldsen, sculpturer Copenhagen is twinned with: * Paris in France (partner city) * Reykjavík in Iceland * Prague in Czech Republic (unofficial partner city) * San Francisco de Campeche in Mexico * Municipal statistics: NetBorger Kommunefakta, delivered from KMD, also known as Kommunedata (Municipal Data) * Municipal and county statistics: Statistics Denmark statistikbanken.dk * Demography: Statistical Yearbook of Copenhagen (part English); ISBN 87-7024-230-5 * History and demography: København Forslag til kommuneplan 1985; ISBN 87-88034-03-8 * Oresund Region * Eurovision Song Contest 2001 * Junior Eurovision Song Contest 2003 * MTV Europe Music Awards 2006 * Transportation in Denmark * Ports of the Baltic Sea * A Much Different Tourist Site and Cultural Guide about Copenhagen * Wonderful Copenhagen official tourism website * Copenhagen Capacity official investment agency of Copenhagen * * Official municipal website * City of Copenhagen Statistical Office * Krak searchable map
Copenhagen
What is the population of Copenhagen?
1,161,063
data/set3/a8
Copenhagen Copenhagen ( ; ) is the capital and largest city of Denmark, with a population of 1,161,063. Copenhagen is situated on the Islands of Zealand and Amager. First documented in the 11th century, Copenhagen became the capital of Denmark in the beginning of the 15th century and during the 17th century under the reign of Christian IV it became an important regional centre. Copenhagen is usually ranked as one of the two largest cities of the Nordic Countries. [ LARGEST CITY Copenhagen or Stockholm ? [ Denmark in brief . With the completion of the transnational Oresund Bridge in 2000, Copenhagen has become the centre of the increasingly integrating Øresund Region with around 3.7 million inhabitants covering an area of 20,869 km² (177/km²). Within this region, Copenhagen and Malmö is in the process of growing into one common metropolitan area. Copenhagen is a major regional center of culture, business, media, and science. In 2008 Copenhagen was ranked #4 by Financial Times-owned FDi magazine on their list of Top50 European Cities of the Future after London, Paris and Berlin. In the 2008 Worldwide Centers of Commerce Index, published by MasterCard, Copenhagen was ranked 14th in the world and 1st in Scandinavia. Life science, information technology and shipping are important sectors and research & development plays a major role in the city's economy. Its strategic location and excellent infrastructure with the largest airport in Scandinavia located 14 minutes by train from the city centre, has made it a regional hub and a popular location for regional headquarters as well as conventions. Copenhagen has repeatedly been recognized as one of the cities with the best quality of life. and in 2008 it was singled out as the Most Liveable City in the World by international lifestyle magazine Monocle on their Top 25 Most Liveable Cities 2008 list. It is also considered one of the world's most environmentally friendly cities with the water in the inner harbor being so clean that it can be used for swimming and 36 % of all citizens commuting to work by bicycle, every day bicycling a total 1.1 million km. Since the turn of the millennium Copenhagen has seen a strong urban and cultural development and has been described as a boom town. This is partly due to massive investments in cultural facilities as well as infrastructure and a new wave of succesful designers, chefs and architects. Copenhagen c. 1895 The Palace during renovation. From its humble origins as a fishing village to its heyday as the glittering capital of the Danish Empire, to its current position as one of the world's premier design capitals, the stories and characters of Copenhagen's history can be discovered in its sumptuous palaces, copper-roofed town houses and atmospheric cobbled squares. From the Viking Age there was a fishing village by the name of "Havn" (harbour) at the site. Recent archeological finds indicate that by the 11th century, Copenhagen had already grown into a small town with a large estate, a church, a market, at least two wells and many smaller habitations spread over a fairly wide area. Arkæologer graver ny teori om København op af mulden (Archeologists develop new theory about Copenhagen from their digs), Videnskab.dk, 5 November 2008 From the middle of the 12th century it grew in importance after coming into the possession of the Bishop Absalon, who fortified it in 1167, the year traditionally marking the foundation of Copenhagen. The excellent harbour encouraged Copenhagen's growth until it became an important centre of commerce. The city's origin as a harbour and a place of commerce is reflected in its name. Its original designation, from which the contemporary Danish name is derived, was Køpmannæhafn, "merchants' harbor". The English name for the city is derived from its Low German name, Kopenhagen. The element hafnium is also named for Copenhagen, whose Latin name is Hafnia. Biography of George de Hevesy It was repeatedly attacked by the Hanseatic League as the Germans took notice. In 1254, it received its charter as a city under Bishop Jakob Erlandsen. During 1658-59 it withstood a severe siege by the Swedes under Charles X and successfully repelled a major assault. In 1801 a British fleet under Admiral Parker fought a major battle, the Battle of Copenhagen, with the Danish Navy in Copenhagen harbour. It was during this battle Lord Nelson famously "put the telescope to the blind eye" in order not to see Admiral Parker's signal to cease fire. When a British expeditionary force bombarded Copenhagen in 1807, to gain control of the Danish Navy, the city suffered great damage and hundreds of people were killed. The reason why the devastation was so great was that Copenhagen relied on an old defence-line rendered virtually useless by the increase in shooting range available to the British. But not until the 1850s were the ramparts of the city opened to allow new housing to be built around the lakes ("Søerne") which bordered the old defence system to the west. This dramatic increase of space was long overdue, not only because the old ramparts were out of date as a defence system, but also because of bad sanitation in the old city. Before the opening, Copenhagen Center was inhabited by approximately 125,000 people, peaking in the census of 1870 (140,000); today the figure is around 25,000. In 1901, Copenhagen expanded further, incorporating communities with 40,000 people, and in the process making Frederiksberg an enclave within Copenhagen. During World War II, Copenhagen was occupied by German troops along with the rest of the country from 9 April 1940 until 4 May 1945. In August 1943, when the government's collaboration with the occupation forces collapsed, several ships were sunk in Copenhagen Harbour by the Royal Danish Navy to prevent them being used by the Germans. The city has grown greatly since the war, in the seventies using the so-called five-finger-plan of commuter train lines to surrounding towns and suburbs. Since the summer 2000, the cities of Copenhagen and Malmö have been connected by a toll bridge/tunnel (Øresund Bridge), which allows both rail and road passengers to cross. As a result, Copenhagen has become the centre of a larger metropolitan area which spans both nations. The construction of the bridge has led to a large number of changes to the public transportation system and the extensive redevelopment of Amager, south of the main city. Location of Coppenhagen in Denmark Nørrebro seen from "Søerne" Copenhagen City Hall Copenhagen is located on the eastern shore of the island of Zealand (Sjælland) and partly on the island of Amager. Copenhagen faces the Øresund to the east, the strait of water that separates Denmark from Sweden, and that connects the North Sea with the Baltic Sea. On the Swedish side of the sound directly across from Copenhagen, lie the towns of Malmö and Landskrona. Copenhagen is also a part of the Øresund region, which consists of Zealand, Lolland-Falster and Bornholm in Denmark and Scania in Sweden. Copenhagen Municipality is an administrative unit that covers the central part of the actual city of Copenhagen. It is a fairly small part of the actual city that falles within the municipality both because it covers a very confined area and because the enclave of Frederiksberg is an independent municipality. Copenhagen consists of a number of boroughs and areas, including * Indre By * Østerbro * Nørrebro * Vesterbro * Amagerbro * Nordhavnen (North Habour) * Valby * Kongens Enghave (King's Meadow Garden), also known as Sydhavnen (meaning South Harbour) * Christianshavn * Christiania (Freetown) * Sundbyvester (Sundby West), * Sundbyøster (Sundby East) * Ørestad * Islands Brygge * Bellahøj * Brønshøj * Ryparken * Bispebjerg * Vigerslev * Vestamager * Vanløse The suffix -bro in the names Østerbro, Nørrebro, Vesterbro and Amagerbro should not be confused with the Danish word for bridge, which is also 'bro'. The term is thought to be an abbreviation or short form of the Danish word brolagt meaning paved referring to the roads paved with cobblestones leading to the city's former gates - The conurbation of Copenhagen consists of several municipalities. After Copenhagen Municipality, the second largest is Frederiksberg Municipality which is an enclave inside Copenhagen Municipality. Both are contained in the larger Capital Region of Denmark, which contains most of the Copenhagen metropolitan area. Previously, the areas of Frederiksberg, Gentofte and Copenhagen municipalities have been used to define the city of Copenhagen. This definition is now obsolete. To meet statistical needs after the latest municipal reform, which took place in the beginning of 2007, an effort has been made to work out definitions of lands (landsdele) in Denmark. A land is basically a geographical and statistical definition, and the area is not considered to be an administrative unit. The land of Copenhagen City includes the municipalities of Copenhagen, Dragør, Frederiksberg and Tårnby, with a total population of 656,582 in the beginning of 2008. Statistics Denmark, table BEF1A07: Population 1 January by region, age, sex, marital status Retrieved on 2008-03-26. Statistics Denmark, definitions of lands as of 2007-01-01 (excel-file, in danish) Retrieved on 2008-03-26. Copenhagen and Frederiksberg were two of the three last Danish municipalities not belonging to a county. On 1 January 2007, the municipalities lost their county privileges and became part of Copenhagen Capital Region. Suburban Copenhagen is planned according to the Finger Plan, fingerplanen, initiated in 1947, dividing the suburbs into five fingers. The Finger Plan, Denmark.dk The S-train lines are built according to the Finger Plan, while green wedges and highways are built in-between the fingers The Little Finger The northern suburbs form the little finger of the plan, and is traditionally the wealthiest of the suburbs. In popular language, the area is known as "The Whiskey Belt", although the area is mixed between mansions, larger houses, garden cities and mid-size houses. The area has a population of around 270,000 inhabitants. * Gentofte Municipality: Klampenborg, Skovshoved, Charlottenlund, Hellerup, Gentofte, Ordrup, Jægersborg, Dyssegård, Vangede * Lyngby-Taarbæk Municipality: Kongens Lyngby, Ulrikkenborg, Brede, Virum, Sorgenfri, Lundtofte, Hjortekær * Rudersdal Municipality: Søllerød, Holte, Øverød, Gl. Holte, Trørød, Nærum, Vedbæk, Skodsborg, Birkerød, Kajerød, Bistrup * Hørsholm Municipality: Hørsholm, Usserød, Rungsted, Vallerød, Smidstrup * Allerød Municipality: Allerød, Lillerød, Blovstrød * Fredensborg Municipality: Fredensborg, Asminderød, Humlebæk, Kokkedal, Niverød, Nivå. The Ring Finger The North-Northwestern part of the suburbs forms the ring finger. The area is to a large extent formed by detached middle-class dwellings, with some exceptions of housing projects or upper-class areas. The area has a population of around 100,000 inhabitants. * Gladsaxe Municipality: Gladsaxe, Bagsværd, Buddinge, Høje-Gladsaxe (Gladsaxe Heights), Mørkhøj, Søborg * Furesø Municipality: Værløse, Farum, Hareskovby The Middle Finger The northwestern suburbs form the middle finger, and consists of a mixed area of both detached middle-class dwellings, widespread garden cities and large, low-rise public housing projects. The area has a considerable part of the industrial areas of metropolitan Copenhagen, mostly in the traditional sectors of manufacturing. The area has a population of around 110,000 inhabitants. * Herlev Municipality: Herlev, Hjortespring * Ballerup Municipality: Skovlunde, Ballerup, Måløv, Ågerup, Jonstrup, Egebjerg * Egedal Municipality: Smørumnedre, Stenløse, Ølstykke The Index Finger The index finger forms the western suburbs, which are the suburbs with the lowest income per capita and the highest crime-rate. The suburbs vary from the petit bourgeois area of Glostrup to the widespread low housing projects of Albertslund and Taastrup. Of the total of 145,000 inhabitants, some 20% are immigrants of first or second generation. * Rødovre Municipality: Rødovre, Islev * Glostrup Municipality: Glostrup, Hvissinge, Ejby * Brøndby Municipality: Brøndbyøster, Brøndbyvester, Brøndby Nord * Albertslund Municipality * Høje-Taastrup Municipality: Taastrup, Høje-Taastrup, Tåstrupgård, Hedehusene The Thumb The southwest suburbs along the coast form the thumb of the plan. While the central parts of these suburbs are dominated by high-rise housing projects and low-income inhabitants, the distant part is dominated by detached middle-class houses. These suburbs have a population of some 215,000 inhabitants and has a sizeable number of immigrants. * Hvidovre Municipality: Avedøre, Friheden, Hvidovre * Brøndby Municipality: Brøndby Strand * Vallensbæk Municipality * Ishøj Municipality * Greve Municipality: Hundige, Karlslunde, Greve * Solrød Municipality: Solrød, Jersie * Køge municipality: Køge, Ølby The extra finger: Amager Island suburbs & Malmö When the finger plan was initially introduced, the island of Amager wasn't included as the infrastructure was inadequate for modern suburban life. Later it has been improved, and the suburbs at the island hold some 53,000 inhabitants. Amager is now one of the most modern suburbs of Copehagen with increasing wealth. With the opening of the bridge to Sweden this finger has been extended all the way to Malmö. Under an official visit of the Swedish King in 2007 at the Copenhagen City Hall, Copenhagen Lord Mayor Ritt Bjerregaard caused a minor diplomatic incident by referring to Malmö as "København M" with an allusion to the Danish system of postal codes (Nørrebro being København N and Vesterbro being København V for instance), indicating that Malmö had turned into just another Copenhagen bourough. Today 25,000 Danes live in Malmö. Malmø er blevet til København M, DR Online * Tårnby Municipality: Tårnby, Kastrup * Dragør Municipality Summers in Copenhagen are mild with average high temperatures of around 21°C (70°F) and lows of 13°C (55°F), but temperatures could sometimes exceed 25°C (77°F+) and occasional heatwaves are common during the summer. Winters are cold, with temperatures of -2 to 4°C (28 - 40°F), and it rarely drop below −10 °C (14 °F). Precipitation is moderate throughout the year, and snowfall occurs mainly in December through March, but snow cover does not remain a long time. Nørrebro seen from "Søerne" Copenhagen as seen from the City Hall at night Kongens Nytorv View from Rundetårn Gefion Fountian The city's appearance today is shaped by the key role it has played as a regional center for centuries. Copenhagen has a multitude of districts, each representing its time and with its own distinctive character, making up a dense urban fabric. Other distinctive features of the Copenhagen of today is the abundance of water, the greenness and the elaborate system of bicycle paths that line almost every major street. The oldest section of Copenhagen's inner city is often referred to as "Middelalderbyen" (The Medieval City). However, the most distinctive district of Copenhagen is Frederiksstaden developed during the reign of Frederick V. It has Amalienborg Palace at its centre and is dominated by the dome of the Marble Church as well as a number of elegant 18th century mansions. Also part of the old inner city of Copenhagen is the small island of Slotsholmen with Christiansborg Palace and Christianshavn. Around the historical city center lies a band of charming, dense and well-preserved residential bouroughs (Vesterbro, Inner Nørrebro, Inner Østerbro) dating mainly from late 19th century. They were built outside the old ramparts of the city when the city was finally allowed to expand beyond this barrier. Sometimes referred to as "the City of Spires", Copenhagen is known for its horizontal skyline, only broken by spires at churches and castles. Most characteristic is the baroque spire of Church of Our Saviour with its spiralling and narrowing external stairs that visitors can climb to the very top of the spire. Other important spires are those of Christiansborg Palace, the City Hall and the former Church of St. Nikolaj that now houses a modern art venue. A bit lower are the renaissance spires of Rosenborg Castle and the "dragon spire" of [[Christian IV of Christian IV's former stock exchange, so named because it is shaped as the tails of four dragons twined together. Recent years has seen a tremendous boom in modern architecture in Copenhagen both when it comes to Danish architecture and works by international architects. For a few hundred years, virtually no foreign architects had worked in Copenhagen but since the mid 1990s the city and its immediate sourroundings have seen buildings and projects from such international star architects as Norman Foster , Hadid , Nouvel and Liebeskind . In the same time, a number of Danish architects have achieved great success both in Copenhagen and abroad. This has led to a number of international architecture awards. Buildings in Copenhagen have won RIBA European Awards four years in a row ("Sampension" in 2005 , "Kilen" in 2006 , "Tietgenkollegiet" in 2007 and the Royal Playhouse in 2008 ). At the 2008 World Architecture Festival in Barcelona, Bjarke Ingels Group won an award for the World's Best Residential Building 2008 for a house in Ørestad. The Forum AID Award for Best building in Scandinavia went to Copenhagen buildings both in 2006 and 2008 . In 2008 British design magazine Monocle named Copenhagen the World's best design city 2008. The boom in urban development and modern architecture means that the above mentioned horizontal skyline has seen some changes. A political majority has decided to keep the historical center free of highrises. But several areas will see or have already seen massive urban development. Ørestad is the area that until now has seen most of the development. Located near Copenhagen Airport, it currently boasts the largest mall in Scandinavia and a variety of office and residential buildings as well as an IT University and a high school. The two largest hotels in Scandinavia are currently under construction (ultimo 2008). An ambitious regeneration project will create a new Carlsberg District at the historical premises of the Carlsberg Breweries that has terminated the production of beer in Copenhagen and moved it to Jutland. The district will have a total of nine highrises and seeks to mix the old industrial buildings with modern architecture to create a dense, maze-like quarter with a focus on sustainability and an active urban life. A third major area of urban development also with a focus on sustanibility is Nordhavn. The Copenhagen tradition with urban development on artificial islands that was initiated with with Christianh IV's construction of Christianshavn has recently been continued with the creation of Havneholmen as well as a "canal city" in the South Harbour. A district in Copenhagen with a very different take on modern architecture is that of Christiania whose many creative and idiosyncratic buildings are exponents of an "architecture without architects". Østre Anlæg University of Copenhagen Botanical Garden Copenhagen is a green city with many big and small parks. King's Garden, the garden of Rosenborg Castle, is the oldest and most visited park in Copenhagen. Its landscaping was commenced by Christian IV in 1606. Every year it sees more than 2,5 million visitors and in the summer months it is packed with sunbathers, picknickers and ballplayers. It also serves as a sculpture garden with a permanent display of sculptures as well as temporary exhibits during summer. Also located in the city centre are the Botanical Gardens particularly noted for their large complex of 19th century greenhouses donated by Carlsberg founder J. C. Jacobsen. Fælledparken is with its 58 hectars the largest park in Copenhagen. It is popular for sports and hosts a long array of annual events like a free opera concert at the opening of the opera season, other open-air concerts, carnival, Labour Day celebrations and Copenhagen Historic Grand Prix which is a race for antique cars. A historical green space in the northeastern part of the city is Kastellet which is a well-presserved renaissance citadel that now serves mainly as a park. Another popular park is the Frederiksberg Garden which is a 32 hectars romantic landscape park. It houses a large colony of very tame grey herons along with other waterfowls. The park also offers views of the elephants and the elephant house designed by world-famous British architect Norman Foster of the adjacent Copenhagen Zoo. Characteristic of Copenhagen is that a number of cemeteries double as parks, though only for the more quiet activities such as sunbathing, reading and meditation. Assistens Cemetery, the burrial place of Hans Christian Andersen among others, is an important green space for the district of Inner Nørrebro and a Copenhagen institution. The lesser known Vestre Kirkegaard is with its 54 hectars the largest cemetery in Denmark and offers a maze of dense groves, open lawns, winding paths, hedges, overgrown tombs, monuments, tree-lined avenues, lakes and other garden features. It is official municipal policy in Copenhagen that all citizens by 2015 must be able to reach a park or beach on foot in less than 15 minutes. In line with this policy, several new parks are under development in areas poor in green spaces. Copenhagen and the surrounding areas have 3 beaches with a total of approx. 8 km of sandy beaches within 30 minutes of bicycling from the city centre. This includes Amager Strandpark, which opened in 2005 and includes a 2 km long artificial island and a total of 4,6 km of beaches , located just 15 minutes by bicycle or a few minutes by metro from the city centre. The beaches are supplemented by a system of harbour baths along the Copenhagen waterfront. The first and most popular of these is located at Islands Brygge Harbour bath at Islands Brygge, e-architect and has won international acclaim for its design. Islands Brygge. Depending on the boundaries used, the population of Copenhagen differs. Statistics Denmark uses a measure of the contiguously built-up urban area of Copenhagen, this means the number of communities included in this statistical abstract has changed several times, in the abstracts latest edition with close to 1.2 million (1,153,615 (2008)) inhabitants. This number is not a strict result of the commonly-used measuring methods of 200 meters of continuously build-up area, as there are exceptions to the general rule in the suburbs of Dragør, Taastrup, Birkerød, Hørsholm and Farum. Statistics Denmark has never stated the geographical area of urban Copenhagen. However, we know it consists of Copenhagen Municipality, Frederiksberg and 16 of the 20 municipalities in the old counties Copenhagen and Roskilde, though 5 of them only partially. Largest cities of Denmark 2007 Statistics Denmark has worked out definitions of so-called lands (landsdele), a definition used to meet statistical needs on a lower level than regions. From this, the land of Copenhagen city (København by) is defined by the municipalities of Copenhagen, Dragør, Frederiksberg and Tårnby, with a total population of 656,582 in the beginning of 2008. The surroundings of Copenhagen is defined by another land, Copenhagen suburban (Københavns omegn), which includes the municipalities of Albertslund, Ballerup, Brøndby, Gentofte, Gladsaxe, Glostrup, Herlev, Hvidovre, Høje-Taastrup, Ishøj, Lyngby-Taarbæk, Rødovre and Vallensbæk, and with a total population of 504,481 (January 1, 2008). This gives a total population of 1,161,063 for these two lands together. The lands of Copenhagen city and Copenhagen suburban can together be used as a definition of the metropolitan area, although perhaps a somewhat narrow one. From 1 January 2008 the population of the 34 municipalities closest to and including the municipality of Copenhagen is 1,857,263 and by 1 October 2008 the population of this area had grown to 1,872,706. Statistikbanken.dk Population table BEF1A07 Land area: 2,923 km² (1,032 sq mi). (Capital Region - Bornholm + East Zealand + Stevns) Water area: 105 km² (40.5 sq mi). Orienteering fra Københavns Kommune. Statistisk Kontor.2003 nr. 25 Thus, the region comprises 6.8% of the land area of Denmark, but has 34% of Denmark's population. This gives a total of 641 inhabitants per km² or 1,660 per square mile for the region. This compares with a population density in the rest of the country of approximately 90 per km² or around 230 per square mile. Based on a 10%-isoline (data from 2002) in which at least 10% commutes into central parts of the Copenhagen area, most of Zealand would be covered and this area has a population of about 2.3 million inhabitants. /ref> Since the opening of the Øresund Bridge in 2000, commuting between and integration of Greater Malmö and Copenhagen have increased rapidly, and a combined statistical metropolitan area has formed. This metropolitan area, which has a population of 2,501,094 (2008) is expected to be officially defined by the respective statistics divisions of Denmark and Sweden in the upcoming years. A high-ranking civil servant of the Interior Ministry, Henning Strøm, who was involved in (i.e. known as "the Father of") a past municipal reform, which took effect on 1 April 1970, said on television, broadcast in connection with the recent Kommunalreformen ("The Municipal Reform" of 2007), that Copenhagen municipality would encompass an area with 1.5 million inhabitants, if the principles of the 1970 municipal reform were also applied on Copenhagen municipality. DR netnews 25-06-04 In other words: in the rest of Denmark the city occupies only part of the municipality, but in Copenhagen the municipality of Copenhagen occupies only part of the city of Copenhagen. Since the late 1990s, Copenhagen has undergone a transformation from a cozy Scandinavian capital to a cool metropolitan city of international scope in the league of cities like Barcelona and Amsterdam. This is due to massive investments in infrastructure as well as culture and wave of new successful Danish architects, designers and chefs. Between 1998 and 2008, lifestyle journalists wordwide (from Wallpaper to the NewYorkTimes) have praised Copenhagen as a cool, well-functioning creative city (see "Copenhagen In international rankings" below). Copenhagen has a wide array of museums of International standard. The National Museum, Nationalmuseet, is Denmark's largest museum of Archaeology and cultural history, comprising the histories of Danish and foreign cultures alike. The National Gallery - "Statens Museum for Kunst" - is Denmark's national art museum and contains collections dating from 12th century and all the way up to present day artists. Among artists represented in the collections are Rubens, Rembrandt, Picasso, Braque, Léger, Matisse and Emil Nolde. Another important Copenhagen art museum is the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek founded by second generation Carlsberg tycoon-philantropist Carl Jacobsen and is built around his personal collections. Its main focus is classical Egyptian, Roman and Greek sculptures and other antiquities and a collection of Rodin sculptures that is the largest outside France (Glypto-, from the Greek root glyphein, to carve and theke, a storing-place). Besides its sculpture collections, the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek also holds a comprehensive collection of paintings of impressionist and post-impressionist painters such as Monet,Renoir, Cézanne, van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec as well as Danish Golden Age painters. Loiusiana is an internationally acclaimed museum of modern art situated on the coast just north of Copenhagen. It is located in the middle of a sculpture garden on a cliff overlooking Øresund. The The museum is included in the Patricia Schultz book 1,000 Places to See Before You Die. The Danish Museum of Art & Design is housed in the 18th century former Frederiks Hospital and displays Danish design as well as international design and crafts. Other museums include: * Thorvaldsens Museum is a single-artist museum dedicated to the oeuvre,of romantic Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen who lived and worked in Rome. * Cisternerne is a small but different museum dedicated to modern glass art. It is located in some grotto-like former cisterns that come complete with Stalactites formed by the changing water levels. * The Ordrupgaard Museum is an art museum located just notth of Copenhagen in an old mansion with an extension by Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. It features 19th century French and Danish art and is particularly noted for its works by Paul Gaugin. Copenhagen Opera House The Royal Danish Theatre In January 2009 the new Copenhagen Concert Hall will open. It is designed by Jean Nouvel and will have four halls with the main auditorium seating 1800 people. It will serve as the home of the Danish National Symphony Orchestra and along with the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles the most expensive concert hall ever built. Another important venue for classical music is the Tivoli Concert Hall located in the histtrocal Tivoli Gardens. The Copenhagen Opera House (in Danish usually called Operaen) that opened in 2005 and is designed by Henning Larsen, is the national opera house of Denmark and among the most modern opera houses in the world. The old Royal Danish Theatre dating from 1748 still works as a supplementary opera scene. The Royal Danish Theatre is also home to the Royal Danish Ballet. Gounded in 1748 along with the theatre, it is one of the oldest ballet troups in Europe. It is home the the Bournonville style of ballet. Copenhagen has a significant jazz scene that has existed for many years. It developed when a number of American jazz musicians such as Ben Webster, Thad Jones, Richard Boone, Ernie Wilkins, Kenny Drew, Ed Thigpen, Bob Rockwell and others such as rock guitarist Link Wray came to live in Copenhagen during the 1960s. Every year in early July Copenhagen's streets, aquares and parks fills up with big and small jazz concerts during the Copenhagen Jazz Festival (see yearly events). The most important venue for rhythmical music in Copenhagen is Vega in Vesterbro district which has been chosen as "best concert venue in Europe" by international music magazine Live For free entertainment one can stroll along Strøget, especially between Nytorv and Højbro Plads, which in the late afternoon and evening is a bit like an impromptu three-ring circus with musicians, magicians, jugglers and other street performers. View from Amerikakaj Copenhagen has a wide variety of sport teams. The two major football teams are Brøndby IF and FC København. Brøndby IF plays at Brøndby Stadium in Brøndby and FC København plays at Parken in Østerbro, Copenhagen. Notable Copenhagen teams playing at the second highest level in Danish football (the Danish 1st Division) include Lyngby BK, AB, HIK, Frem, Brønshøj, Fremad Amager and Skjold. Copenhagen also has three ice hockey teams: Rødovre Mighty Bulls, Herlev Hornets and Nordsjælland Cobras. There are a lot of handball teams in Copenhagen. FC København owns both a women's and a men's team, which have the same name and logo. They were formerly known as FIF. Of other clubs playing in the "highest" leagues there are; Ajax Heroes, Ydun, and HIK (Hellerup). Rugby union is also played in the Danish capital with teams such as CSR-Nanok, Copenhagen Scrum, Exiles, Froggies and Rugbyklubben Speed. The Danish Australian Football League, based in Copenhagen is the largest Australian rules football competition outside of the English speaking world. Copenhagen is also home to a number of Denmark's 40-odd cricket clubs. Although Denmark has been an associate member of the International Cricket Council since 1966, the sport is not taught much in schools, and Danish cricket competes unfavourably with the much more widely followed sport of football for players, facilities, media attention and spectators. The second World Outgames will take place in Copenhagen in 2009, after Berlin refused to stage them due to the continuing rivalry between the two gay sporting organisations. It would be the largest such event hosted in Copenhagen. Copenhagen has the two oldest amusement parks in the World. World-famous Tivoli Gardens is an amusement park and pleasure garden located right in the middle of Copenhagen between the the City Hall Square and the the Central Station. Among its rides are the oldest still operating roller coaster and the oldest ferris wheel in the World. Tivoli Gardens, the rides It also function as an open-air concert venue. It opened on August 15 1843 making it the second oldest amusement park in the world. Dyrehavsbakken (in English "the Deer Garden Hill") is located in Klampenborg a little north of Copenhagen in a forested area of great natural beauty. Having been made into an amusement park complete with rides, games and restaurants by Christian IV, it is the oldest surviving amusement park in the World. Copenhagen is a centre for the New Nordic Cuisine. Nordic Cuisine, New York Times In November 2004 a Nordic Kitchen Symposium was helt in Copenhagen at the initiative of Danish chef and gastronome Claus Meyer. The symposium had attandance of top chefs from all of the Nordic countries and led to the adoption of a Manifesto for the New Nordic Cuisine. Manifesto for a New Nordic Cuisine Claus Meyer is also the co-founder of the two-Michelin star Restaurant Noma (Nordisk Madhus) which is a flagship restaurant for the new Nordic cuisine. In 2008 it was ranked as 10th best in the World by acclaimed British restaurant & fine dining magazine Restaurant at their 50 Best Restaurants of the World 2008-list. Furthermore, the users of the international website TripAdvisor with 25 million users a month rated Noma as the best restaurant in the world. TripAdvisor ranking As of 2008 Copenhagen boasts a total of 11 Michelin star restaurants. This is by far the highest number of any Nordic city. Apart from Noma they include one of only two Thai restaurants worldwide that has received a Michelin star. Due to the development, Copenhagen is increasingly being recognized internationally as a gourmet destination. The Top 10 cities to visit in 2009, TimesOnline Apart from the selection of high end restaurants, Copenhagen offers a great variety of Danish, International and ethnic restaurants and it is possible to find modest eateries with open sandwiches (called "smørrebrød"), which is the traditional and best known dish for lunch. Most restaurants, though, serve international dishes. danish pastry, another local specialty, can be sampled from the numerous bakeries found in all parts of the city. Copenhagen has long been associated with beer.Carlsberg beer has been brewed at the brewery's premises at the border between Vesterbro and Valby districts since 1847 and has long been almost synonumous with Danish beer production. However, recent years have seen an explosive growth in the number of microbreweries so that Denmark today has more than 100 breweries Nyeste artikler fra Bryggeriforeningen, Bryggeriforeningen , many of which are located in Copenhagen. Some like Nørrebro Bryghus also act as brewpubs where it is possible also to eat at the premisses. Many cafés specialize in a huge selection of quality beers and beer has also become an important ingridient in the New Nordic Cuisine. Copenhagen is the media centre of Denmark. DR, the major Danish public service broadcasting corporation collected their activities in a new headquarters, DR byen, in 2006 and 2007. Similarly has Odense based TV2 collected its Copenhagen activities in a modern media house in the South Harbour. The two national daily newspapters Politiken and Berlingske Tidende and the two tabloids Ekstra Bladet and B. T. are based in Copenhagen. Other important media corporations include Aller Press which is the largest publisher of weekly and monthly magazines in Scandinavia, the Egmont media group and Gyldendal, the largest Danish publisher of books. Copenhagen also has a sizable movie and television industry. Filmbyen, The Movie City, which is located in a former military camp in the suburg of Hvidovre and houses several movie companies and studio studios. Among the movie campanies are Zentropa co-owned by Danish movie director Lars von Trier who is behind several international movie productions as well as a founding force behind the Dogma Movement. * Copenhagen Fashion Week takes place every year in February and August. It is the largest fashion event in Northern Europe. Fashion Capital Copenhagen On the catwalks are a growing number of new and known Danish talent with a preview of their upcoming collections. And at the three trade fairs, CPH Vision, Gallery and Copenhagen International Fashion Fair, you will find an additional 1,100 exhibitors representing a total of over 2,300 international brand name collections. Danish fashion is known for its unique angle on design, innovation and aesthetics. With a more modern approach to femininity and functionality, expressed in fresh silhouettes, a focus on details and incomparable quality. These are only some of the reasons why more than 50,000 buyers, designers and global press attend Copenhagen Fashion Week twice a year. Copenhagen Fashion Week is organised by the Danish Fashion Institute - a newly founded network organisation created by and for the Danish fashion industry. Copenhagen Fashion Week * Carnival in Copenhagen takes place every year since 1982 during the Whitsun Holiday in Fælledparken and around the city. 120 bands, 2000 dancers and 100,000 spectators participate. History of Copenhagen * Copenhagen Distortion is a youth culture festival capturing the zeitgeist of the city, gathering every year (5 days up to the first weekend of June) up to 30.000 people in the streets, in shops, galleries, clubs, bars, in boats and buses, with a cultural focus on street culture, art and upfront dance music. Copenhagen Distortion * Roskilde Festival is a music festival helt every year in Roskilde west of Copenhagen. Gathering around 100,000 people every year, it is one of the four largest rock music festivals in Europe.. * Copenhagen Jazz Festival, which begins on the first Friday in July, is a popular annual event that is the result of Copenhagen's significant jazz scene. The festival takes place throughout the city in streets, squares and parks as well as in cafés and concert halls. Copenhagen Jazz Festival 3+ years, Wonderful Copenhagen It embraces around 900 concerts, 100 venues and over 200,000 guests from Denmark and around the world. It is recognized as one of the leading jazz festivals in the World. Top 10 best Jazz Festivals, TripAdvisor Copenhagen Jazz Festival * Copenhagen Pride is a gay pride festival taking place every year in August. Among the events is "Tivoli goes pink" and it ends with a parade. Copenhagen Pride * Copenhagen Cooking takes place in August every year and is a food festival with a wide array of events all over the city. * Copenhagen International Film Festival takes place in September every year with a focus on European films. The main prize is called the Golden Swan. Copenhagen International Film Festival Middelgrunden wind farm just off Copenhagen The Danish National Bank. Designed by Arne Jacobsen. Copenhagen is the economical and financial centre of Denmark Regionale regnskaber 2005 - Nyt fra Danmarks Statistik - Danmarks Statistik and also a strong business and economic centre in the entire Scandinavian-Baltic region. In 2008 Copenhagen was ranked 4th by Financial Times-owned FDi magazine on their list of Top50 European Cities of the Future after London, Paris and Berlin. Top 50 European City of the Future 2008/09 In 2006/07 FDi Magazine named Copenhagen Scandinavian City of the Future Scandinavian City of the Future 06/07 and in 2004/05 Copenhagen was named Northern European City of the Future ahead of other cities from Scandinavia, UK, Ireland and Benelux. Northern European City of the Future 2004/05 In the 2008 Worldwide Centers of Commerce Index, published by MasterCard, Copenhagen was ranked 14th in the world and 1st in Scandinavia. Copenhagen is one of the cities in Western Europe attracting most regional headquarters and distribution centers. Among the international companies that have chosen to locate their regional headquarters in Copenhagen is Microsoft.There are 2,100 foreign companies located in the Copenhagen area, of which approx. 500 are Scandinavian head offices, representing a wide range of industries. Copenhagen has a service oriented economy. An important sector is life science and research & development plays a major role in the economy of the city. The entire Oresund Region is in cooperation with Sweden being promoted as Medicon Valley. Major Danish biotech companies like Novo Nordisk and Lundbeck, both of which are among 50 largest pharmaceutical and biotech companies in the World, are located in the greater Copenhagen area. USATODAY.com The region also boasts the largest IT-cluster in Scandinavia with nearly 100,000 employees and the city of Copenhagen is home to Nokia's largest research centre outside Finland. Copenhagen - Overview Shipping is also an import business with Maersk, the World's largest shipping company, having their world headquarters in Copenhagen. Several international companies have established their regional headquarters in Copenhagen, e.g. Microsoft. Maersk, the world's largest container shipping company, has their world headquarters in Copenhagen. A substantial number of Danish pharmaceuticals such as Novo Nordisk, Ferring Pharmaceuticals and Bavarian Nordic also operate in the area, having placed their headquarters in or close to Copenhagen. USATODAY.com Copenhagen has some of the highest gross wages in the World. City Mayors: World's richest cities High taxes mean that wages are reduced after mandatory deduction. A neneficial researcher scheme with low taxation of foreigh specialists Level of salary in Denmark has made Denmark an attractive location for highly educated foreign labour to settle. Copenhagen is however also among the most expensive cities in Europe. City Mayors: World's most expensive cities (EIU) City Mayors: World's most expensive cities - Ranking Copenhagen University Copenhagen has a well-developed higher education system of public universities. Most prominent among these is the University of Copenhagen. Founded in 1479, it is the oldest university in Denmark. It is a world-renowned research and teaching institution with campuses around the city and forms part of the International Alliance of Research Universities (IARU), which is a collaboration between international top universities including Oxford, Cambridge, Yale and Berkeley. The University attracts app. 1500 international and exchange students every year. It is repeatedly ranked as one of the best universities in Europe. At the Times Higher Education's QS World University Rankings 2008 list, it was ranked as fourth best in continental Europe. TheAcademic Ranking of World Universities 2008 placesd it as number 43 worldwide and 8th in Europe. A second all-round university in the Copenhagen area is Roskilde University located in Roskilde. The Technical University of Denmark (DTU), Danmarks Tekniske Universitet, is located in Lyngby at the northern outskirts of Copenhagen. In 2008 it was ranked third highest in Europe on Times Higher Education's list of the most influential technical universities in the World. The Max Planck Institute in Germany was ranked 15, ETH Zurich in Switzerland was ranked 15 and DTU in Denmark was ranked 20. Copenhagen Business School (CBS) is an estimed and EQUIS accredited business school located on Frederiksberg. Copenhagen is rich in companies and institutions with a focus on research and development within the biotechnology , Infrastructure & logistics - Copenhagen a distribution hub, retrieved February 22, 2007. and life science sectors. Two of the 50 largest pharmaceutical and biotech companies in the World are located in the greater Copenhagen area. The biotech and life science cluster in Copenhagen and the rest of the Oresund Region is one of the strongest in Europe. Since 1995 this has been branded as the Medicon Valley in a Danish-Swedish cooperation. The aim is to strengthen the region's position and to promote cooperation between companies and academia. The German biotech giant Sartorius Stedim Biotech, which is currently creating a Nordic head office in Tåstrup on the outskirts of Copenhagen. The Øresund region is responsible for 60 percent of life science production in Scandinavia and is home to 111 biotech companies. The greater Copenhagen area has a very well established transportation infrastructure making it a hub in Northern Europe. Christianshavns Kanal Copenhagen has a large network of toll-free highways and public roads connecting different municipalities of the city together and to Northern Europe. As in many other cities in Europe traffic is increasing in Copenhagen. The radial arterial roads and highways leading to the Copenhagen city center are critically congested during peak hours. Copenhagen is known as one of the most bicycle-friendly cities in the world. Every day 1,1 million km are bicycled in Copenhagen. 36 % of all citizens are commuting to work, school or university by bicycle and it is municipal policy that this number should go up to 40 % by 2012 and 50 % in 2015. The city's bicycle paths are extensive and well-used. Bicycle paths are often separated from the main traffic lanes and sometimes have their own signal systems. The municipality is also developing a system of interconnected green bicycle routes, greenways, with the aim to facilitate fast, safe and pleasant bicycle transport from one end of the city to the other. The network will cover more than 100 km and consist of 22 routes when finished. The city provides public bicycles which can be found throughout the downtown area and used with a returnable deposit of 20 kroner. Copenhagen's well-developed bicycle culture has given rise to the term ‘copenhagenize’. This is the practice of other cities adopting Copenhagen-style bike lanes and bicycle infrastructure. In 2007 Copenhagen-based Danish urban design consultant Jan Gehl was hired by the New York City Department of Transportation to re-imagine New York City streets by introducing designs to improve life for pedestrians and cyclists. In recognition of Copenhagen's emphasis on bicycling, the city has been chosen by the Union Cycliste Internationale as their first official Bike City. Bike City Copenhagen will take place from 2008 to 2011 and consist of big cycling events for professionals as well as amateurs. The harbour of Copenhagen has largely lost its importance as an industrial harbour. In 2001 Copenhagen Harbour merged with the harbour in Malmö to create Copenhagen-Malmö Port. It has several functions, the most important being as a major cruise destination. In 2007 a record 286 cruise ships with 420,000 cruise passengers visited Copenhagen. 120 of these ships either started or ended the cruise in Copenhagen. In 2008 these numbers grew further to 310 cruise ships and 560,000 passengers. As a result of the growth in the cruise industry facilities asre being expanded and improved. At the World Travel Awards in 2008, Copenhagen Port was named the number one cruise destination in Europe for the fifth year in a row. Copenhagen is serviced by ferry lines to Oslo in Norway (called "Oslobåden") with a daily connection and to Świnoujście in Poland (called "Polensfærgerne") with five weekly connections. Copenhagen Airport is the principal airport serving Copenhagen. It is the largest in Scandinavia and the 17th largest in Europe. It is located in Kastrup on the island of Amager and has very efficient connections to downtown Copenhagen with metro trains going to Kongens Nytorv in 15 minutes with 4-6 minutes between departures and regional trains going to the Central Station in 12 minutes. Its location also makes it the most important international airport for large parts of southern Sweden. Over the Øresund Bridge trains go to Malmö South in 14 minutes or Malmö Central Station in 22 minutes. Copenhagen Airport has won the award as "The best airport in Europe" four times, and as "The best airport in the world" two times. Copenhagen Airport is the seventh best airport in the world - second best in Europe - when you ask the passengers. The British organization Skytrax is doing so every year, writes the airport in a press release. 40 criteria are employed for the ranking. The new metro S-train at Nørreport Metro entrance in FrederiksbergThe public transportation system of Copenhagen consists of commuter trains (called S-trains, S-tog), buses, and a metro. The S-trains form the basis of the transportation network, stretching to most areas of metropolitan Copenhagen, with their main hub at Copenhagen Central Station (København H). Regional trains supplement the S-train services with lines extending further such as to the Copenhagen Airport, Elsinore, and Malmö. The Danish State Railways' Intercity network has its eastern terminus and main hub at Copenhagen, with most trains extending to Copenhagen Airport. The fare system is based on 95 zones covering the capital area. Tickets are transferable from one means of transport to another within a time limit. The more zones a ticket is valid for, the longer its time validity with a maximum of two hours. Discount cards (punch cards, klippekort) and period cards are available. Ticket prices are high and have increased substantially in recent years leading to a decrease in passenger numbers. In fact, the percentage of trips made on public transportation in Copenhagen is quite low by northern European standards. The Copenhagen Metro began operation in 2002 and currently has only two lines. In April 2008, it was named Best Metro in the World by industry experts. Copenhagen Metro Best in the World |Christiansborg Palace - home of the Danish Parliament Folketinget, the Supreme Court, Office of the Prime Minister and official reception area of Queen Margrethe II |- |Børsen - the former Stock Exchange building |- |The Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen harbor |- |Amalienborg Palace - home of the Danish royal family. The central building is the domed Marble Church located behind the palace complex |- |Nyhavn |- |The Marble Church |- |Rosenborg Castle in central Copenhagen |- |Christianshavns Canal |- |The Tivoli, photographed from Eduard Spelterini's balloon on June 22, 1922 |} Copenhagen is recognized as one of the most environmentally friendly cities in the world. In 2006 Copenhagen Municipality received the European Environmental Management Award. The award was given for long-term holistic environmental planning. It is municipal policy to reduce CO2 emissions by 20% before the end of 2015. In 2001 a large offshore wind farm was built just off the coast of Copenhagen at Middelgrunden. It produces about 4 % of the city's energy. Many years of major investments in sewage treatment has improved water quality in the harbour to an extent that the inner harbour can be used for swimming and facilities for this are provided at a number of locations. Another municipal policy is that 40% of all citizens should bicycle to and from work by 2012 and a number of initiatives are being taken to implement this policy (see "bicycling above"). Copenhagen is the capital in the World where organic food has the largest market share. One in every ten purchases is organic in Copenhagen. Within the municipal sector in Copenhagen, 45 % of all food consumption is organic but the target is considerably higher. With the environmental strategy "Environment Metropolis: Our Vision 2015" the politicians wish that solely organic food is to be served in 90 per cent of the Copenhagen old-age homes and residential homes for children and young persons in 2015.. - - - Image:Christiansborg Slot.jpg| Christiansborg Slot - Image:Børsen København.jpg| Børsen- the former Stock Exchange building - Image:Littlemermaid207.jpg| The Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen harbor - Image:Copenhagen amalienborg seen from opera house.jpg| Amalienborg Palace - Image:Nyhavn 9-15 København.jpg| Nyhavn - Image:Kbh Marmorkirche 1.jpg| Frederik's Church|The Marble Church - Image:Rosenborg.jpg| Rosenborg Castle in central Copenhagen - Image:Christianshavns Kanal morning.jpg| Christianshavns Canal - Image:Amalienborgas.JPG | The Royal Residence - Image:Copenhague 108.jpg | The Round Tower - Image:Gammel_Strand_København.jpg| Gammel Strand - Image:Kbh_Stroeget_Nikolaj_Kirche.jpg | Stroget - Image:A_Copenhagen_center_street.jpg| Central Copenhagen Street - Image:Amagergade 01.jpg| Amagergade - Image:Gebauede_in_kopenhagen.jpg| Copenhagen Habour - Image:Container ship loading-700px.jpg| Copenhagen Ship Loading - Image:Christianshavns_Torv.jpg | Christianshavn Torv - Image:Copenhagen-Airport-from-air.jpg | Copenhagen Airport from the air - Image:Østre Anlæg København.jpg | Østre Anlæg - Image:Frederiksberg Slot.jpg | Frederiksberg Castle - Image:Kongens Nytorv 17.jpg | Kongens Nytorv - Image:Kopenhagen zeehaven.JPG | Copenhagen Canal Tour - Image:Den-sorte-diamant.jpg | The Black Diamond ( The Royal Library ) - Image:Tivoli Copenhagen at Night.jpg | Tivoli by Night - Image:Kopenhagen 3.jpg | View over Copenhagen - Image:Gammeltorv Copenhagen Denmark.JPG | Gammeltorv - Image:Copenhagen denmark.jpg | Nyhavn - Image:Copenhagen City Hall.jpg | Copenhagen City Hall - Image:Gefion.jpg| Gefion Fountian - Image:Christiania Exit.JPG | Christiania - Image:Gebauede in kopenhagen.jpg | Copenhagen at Night - Image:Copenhague 050.jpg | Inner City Canel - Copenhagen has placed well in a number of international rankings, some of which are mentioned below. * Copenhagen was ranked #1 as Most Livable City in the World by international lifestyle magazine Monocle on their Top 25 Most Livable Cities 2008 list Monocles page on Copenhagen * Worlds Best Design City 2008 also by Monocle. Monocles page on Copenhagen *Monocle has also stated that Copenhagen is "Scandinavia's most desirable city". By Stuart Husband Monocle Magazine Published: June 19, 2007 *Copenhagen ranked #4 by Financial Times-owned FDi magazine on their list of Top50 European Cities of the Future after London, Paris and Berlin. Top 50 European City of the Future 2008/09 In 2006/07 FDi Magazine named Copenhagen Scandinavian City of the Future Scandinavian City of the Future 06/07 and in 2004/05 Copenhagen was named Northern European City of the Future ahead of other cities from Scandinavia, UK, Ireland and Benelux. Northern European City of the Future 2004/05 * In the 2008 Worldwide Centers of Commerce Index, published by MasterCard, Copenhagen was ranked 14th in the world and 1st in Scandinavia. *Copenhagen #1 out of 254 locations in the Location Ranking Survey performed by ECA International that has asked European experts where they prefer to be stationed worldwide. Location Ranking Survey * Copenhagen was ranked #6 in Grist Magazine's "15 Green Cities" list in 2007 making Copenhagen the greenest capital of Scandinavia according to Grist Magazine. 15 Green Cities | Grist | Main Dish | 19 July 2007 * Copenhagen is the capital in the World where organic food has the largest market share. One in every ten purchases is organic in Copenhagen. World-champinions in organic food * The Copenhagen Metro has been named the Best Metro in the World by industry experts. Copenhagen Metro Best in the World * Copenhagen is the worlds #7 most expensive city and #3 most expensive in Europe on the Forbes List. Forbes-Worlds Most Expensive Cities List * Copenhagen is ranked #7 as Preferred City For Investment Projects. Preferred City For Investment Projects * Copenhagen ranked 3rd in Western Europe in terms of attracting regional headquarters and distribution centers, only surpassed by London and Paris. * Copenhagen ranks #1 in the Global Earning Ranking. [h Global earning ranking ] * Copenhagen ranks as the 5th most popular city in the world for international meetings and conferences. Style & Substance Danmark * Copenhagen ranks as one of the most attractive cities to live and work in Europe. A great place to live * Copenhagen ranks 2nd in Europe for Quality of life according to a survey from 2005 by the international consultancy firm William Mercer. A great place to live * Morten Andersen, veteran NFL kicker * Niels Bohr, physicist, Nobel laureate * Aage Bohr, physicist, Nobel laureate (son of Niels Bohr) * Victor Borge, entertainer * August Bournonville, ballet choreographer * Georg Brandes, critic * Helena Christensen, supermodel * Tove Ditlevsen, writer * Carl Theodor Dreyer, movie director * Vilhelm Hammershøi, painter * Gus Hansen, poker player * Iben Hjejle, actor * Peter Høeg, writer * Arne Jacobsen, designer * Robert Jacobsen, painter * J. C. Jacobsen, founder of Carlsberg Brewery * Mathias Lauridsen, male topmodel * Søren Kierkegaard, philosopher * Bjørn Lomborg, Academic and Author of The Skeptical Environmentalist * Lauritz Melchior, opera singer * Mads Mikkelsen, actor * Carl-Henning Pedersen, painter * Lars von Trier, movie director * Dan Turèll, writer * Lars Ulrich, drummer and songwriter of the heavy-metal band Metallica * Jørn Utzon, architect, designer of the Sydney Opera House * Michael Laudrup, former international football player, former manager of Spanish Primera Division Football team Getafe. * Peter Schmeichel, former international football player * Bertel Thorvaldsen, sculpturer Copenhagen is twinned with: * Paris in France (partner city) * Reykjavík in Iceland * Prague in Czech Republic (unofficial partner city) * San Francisco de Campeche in Mexico * Municipal statistics: NetBorger Kommunefakta, delivered from KMD, also known as Kommunedata (Municipal Data) * Municipal and county statistics: Statistics Denmark statistikbanken.dk * Demography: Statistical Yearbook of Copenhagen (part English); ISBN 87-7024-230-5 * History and demography: København Forslag til kommuneplan 1985; ISBN 87-88034-03-8 * Oresund Region * Eurovision Song Contest 2001 * Junior Eurovision Song Contest 2003 * MTV Europe Music Awards 2006 * Transportation in Denmark * Ports of the Baltic Sea * A Much Different Tourist Site and Cultural Guide about Copenhagen * Wonderful Copenhagen official tourism website * Copenhagen Capacity official investment agency of Copenhagen * * Official municipal website * City of Copenhagen Statistical Office * Krak searchable map
Copenhagen
What is the population of Copenhagen?
1,153,615
data/set3/a8
Copenhagen Copenhagen ( ; ) is the capital and largest city of Denmark, with a population of 1,161,063. Copenhagen is situated on the Islands of Zealand and Amager. First documented in the 11th century, Copenhagen became the capital of Denmark in the beginning of the 15th century and during the 17th century under the reign of Christian IV it became an important regional centre. Copenhagen is usually ranked as one of the two largest cities of the Nordic Countries. [ LARGEST CITY Copenhagen or Stockholm ? [ Denmark in brief . With the completion of the transnational Oresund Bridge in 2000, Copenhagen has become the centre of the increasingly integrating Øresund Region with around 3.7 million inhabitants covering an area of 20,869 km² (177/km²). Within this region, Copenhagen and Malmö is in the process of growing into one common metropolitan area. Copenhagen is a major regional center of culture, business, media, and science. In 2008 Copenhagen was ranked #4 by Financial Times-owned FDi magazine on their list of Top50 European Cities of the Future after London, Paris and Berlin. In the 2008 Worldwide Centers of Commerce Index, published by MasterCard, Copenhagen was ranked 14th in the world and 1st in Scandinavia. Life science, information technology and shipping are important sectors and research & development plays a major role in the city's economy. Its strategic location and excellent infrastructure with the largest airport in Scandinavia located 14 minutes by train from the city centre, has made it a regional hub and a popular location for regional headquarters as well as conventions. Copenhagen has repeatedly been recognized as one of the cities with the best quality of life. and in 2008 it was singled out as the Most Liveable City in the World by international lifestyle magazine Monocle on their Top 25 Most Liveable Cities 2008 list. It is also considered one of the world's most environmentally friendly cities with the water in the inner harbor being so clean that it can be used for swimming and 36 % of all citizens commuting to work by bicycle, every day bicycling a total 1.1 million km. Since the turn of the millennium Copenhagen has seen a strong urban and cultural development and has been described as a boom town. This is partly due to massive investments in cultural facilities as well as infrastructure and a new wave of succesful designers, chefs and architects. Copenhagen c. 1895 The Palace during renovation. From its humble origins as a fishing village to its heyday as the glittering capital of the Danish Empire, to its current position as one of the world's premier design capitals, the stories and characters of Copenhagen's history can be discovered in its sumptuous palaces, copper-roofed town houses and atmospheric cobbled squares. From the Viking Age there was a fishing village by the name of "Havn" (harbour) at the site. Recent archeological finds indicate that by the 11th century, Copenhagen had already grown into a small town with a large estate, a church, a market, at least two wells and many smaller habitations spread over a fairly wide area. Arkæologer graver ny teori om København op af mulden (Archeologists develop new theory about Copenhagen from their digs), Videnskab.dk, 5 November 2008 From the middle of the 12th century it grew in importance after coming into the possession of the Bishop Absalon, who fortified it in 1167, the year traditionally marking the foundation of Copenhagen. The excellent harbour encouraged Copenhagen's growth until it became an important centre of commerce. The city's origin as a harbour and a place of commerce is reflected in its name. Its original designation, from which the contemporary Danish name is derived, was Køpmannæhafn, "merchants' harbor". The English name for the city is derived from its Low German name, Kopenhagen. The element hafnium is also named for Copenhagen, whose Latin name is Hafnia. Biography of George de Hevesy It was repeatedly attacked by the Hanseatic League as the Germans took notice. In 1254, it received its charter as a city under Bishop Jakob Erlandsen. During 1658-59 it withstood a severe siege by the Swedes under Charles X and successfully repelled a major assault. In 1801 a British fleet under Admiral Parker fought a major battle, the Battle of Copenhagen, with the Danish Navy in Copenhagen harbour. It was during this battle Lord Nelson famously "put the telescope to the blind eye" in order not to see Admiral Parker's signal to cease fire. When a British expeditionary force bombarded Copenhagen in 1807, to gain control of the Danish Navy, the city suffered great damage and hundreds of people were killed. The reason why the devastation was so great was that Copenhagen relied on an old defence-line rendered virtually useless by the increase in shooting range available to the British. But not until the 1850s were the ramparts of the city opened to allow new housing to be built around the lakes ("Søerne") which bordered the old defence system to the west. This dramatic increase of space was long overdue, not only because the old ramparts were out of date as a defence system, but also because of bad sanitation in the old city. Before the opening, Copenhagen Center was inhabited by approximately 125,000 people, peaking in the census of 1870 (140,000); today the figure is around 25,000. In 1901, Copenhagen expanded further, incorporating communities with 40,000 people, and in the process making Frederiksberg an enclave within Copenhagen. During World War II, Copenhagen was occupied by German troops along with the rest of the country from 9 April 1940 until 4 May 1945. In August 1943, when the government's collaboration with the occupation forces collapsed, several ships were sunk in Copenhagen Harbour by the Royal Danish Navy to prevent them being used by the Germans. The city has grown greatly since the war, in the seventies using the so-called five-finger-plan of commuter train lines to surrounding towns and suburbs. Since the summer 2000, the cities of Copenhagen and Malmö have been connected by a toll bridge/tunnel (Øresund Bridge), which allows both rail and road passengers to cross. As a result, Copenhagen has become the centre of a larger metropolitan area which spans both nations. The construction of the bridge has led to a large number of changes to the public transportation system and the extensive redevelopment of Amager, south of the main city. Location of Coppenhagen in Denmark Nørrebro seen from "Søerne" Copenhagen City Hall Copenhagen is located on the eastern shore of the island of Zealand (Sjælland) and partly on the island of Amager. Copenhagen faces the Øresund to the east, the strait of water that separates Denmark from Sweden, and that connects the North Sea with the Baltic Sea. On the Swedish side of the sound directly across from Copenhagen, lie the towns of Malmö and Landskrona. Copenhagen is also a part of the Øresund region, which consists of Zealand, Lolland-Falster and Bornholm in Denmark and Scania in Sweden. Copenhagen Municipality is an administrative unit that covers the central part of the actual city of Copenhagen. It is a fairly small part of the actual city that falles within the municipality both because it covers a very confined area and because the enclave of Frederiksberg is an independent municipality. Copenhagen consists of a number of boroughs and areas, including * Indre By * Østerbro * Nørrebro * Vesterbro * Amagerbro * Nordhavnen (North Habour) * Valby * Kongens Enghave (King's Meadow Garden), also known as Sydhavnen (meaning South Harbour) * Christianshavn * Christiania (Freetown) * Sundbyvester (Sundby West), * Sundbyøster (Sundby East) * Ørestad * Islands Brygge * Bellahøj * Brønshøj * Ryparken * Bispebjerg * Vigerslev * Vestamager * Vanløse The suffix -bro in the names Østerbro, Nørrebro, Vesterbro and Amagerbro should not be confused with the Danish word for bridge, which is also 'bro'. The term is thought to be an abbreviation or short form of the Danish word brolagt meaning paved referring to the roads paved with cobblestones leading to the city's former gates - The conurbation of Copenhagen consists of several municipalities. After Copenhagen Municipality, the second largest is Frederiksberg Municipality which is an enclave inside Copenhagen Municipality. Both are contained in the larger Capital Region of Denmark, which contains most of the Copenhagen metropolitan area. Previously, the areas of Frederiksberg, Gentofte and Copenhagen municipalities have been used to define the city of Copenhagen. This definition is now obsolete. To meet statistical needs after the latest municipal reform, which took place in the beginning of 2007, an effort has been made to work out definitions of lands (landsdele) in Denmark. A land is basically a geographical and statistical definition, and the area is not considered to be an administrative unit. The land of Copenhagen City includes the municipalities of Copenhagen, Dragør, Frederiksberg and Tårnby, with a total population of 656,582 in the beginning of 2008. Statistics Denmark, table BEF1A07: Population 1 January by region, age, sex, marital status Retrieved on 2008-03-26. Statistics Denmark, definitions of lands as of 2007-01-01 (excel-file, in danish) Retrieved on 2008-03-26. Copenhagen and Frederiksberg were two of the three last Danish municipalities not belonging to a county. On 1 January 2007, the municipalities lost their county privileges and became part of Copenhagen Capital Region. Suburban Copenhagen is planned according to the Finger Plan, fingerplanen, initiated in 1947, dividing the suburbs into five fingers. The Finger Plan, Denmark.dk The S-train lines are built according to the Finger Plan, while green wedges and highways are built in-between the fingers The Little Finger The northern suburbs form the little finger of the plan, and is traditionally the wealthiest of the suburbs. In popular language, the area is known as "The Whiskey Belt", although the area is mixed between mansions, larger houses, garden cities and mid-size houses. The area has a population of around 270,000 inhabitants. * Gentofte Municipality: Klampenborg, Skovshoved, Charlottenlund, Hellerup, Gentofte, Ordrup, Jægersborg, Dyssegård, Vangede * Lyngby-Taarbæk Municipality: Kongens Lyngby, Ulrikkenborg, Brede, Virum, Sorgenfri, Lundtofte, Hjortekær * Rudersdal Municipality: Søllerød, Holte, Øverød, Gl. Holte, Trørød, Nærum, Vedbæk, Skodsborg, Birkerød, Kajerød, Bistrup * Hørsholm Municipality: Hørsholm, Usserød, Rungsted, Vallerød, Smidstrup * Allerød Municipality: Allerød, Lillerød, Blovstrød * Fredensborg Municipality: Fredensborg, Asminderød, Humlebæk, Kokkedal, Niverød, Nivå. The Ring Finger The North-Northwestern part of the suburbs forms the ring finger. The area is to a large extent formed by detached middle-class dwellings, with some exceptions of housing projects or upper-class areas. The area has a population of around 100,000 inhabitants. * Gladsaxe Municipality: Gladsaxe, Bagsværd, Buddinge, Høje-Gladsaxe (Gladsaxe Heights), Mørkhøj, Søborg * Furesø Municipality: Værløse, Farum, Hareskovby The Middle Finger The northwestern suburbs form the middle finger, and consists of a mixed area of both detached middle-class dwellings, widespread garden cities and large, low-rise public housing projects. The area has a considerable part of the industrial areas of metropolitan Copenhagen, mostly in the traditional sectors of manufacturing. The area has a population of around 110,000 inhabitants. * Herlev Municipality: Herlev, Hjortespring * Ballerup Municipality: Skovlunde, Ballerup, Måløv, Ågerup, Jonstrup, Egebjerg * Egedal Municipality: Smørumnedre, Stenløse, Ølstykke The Index Finger The index finger forms the western suburbs, which are the suburbs with the lowest income per capita and the highest crime-rate. The suburbs vary from the petit bourgeois area of Glostrup to the widespread low housing projects of Albertslund and Taastrup. Of the total of 145,000 inhabitants, some 20% are immigrants of first or second generation. * Rødovre Municipality: Rødovre, Islev * Glostrup Municipality: Glostrup, Hvissinge, Ejby * Brøndby Municipality: Brøndbyøster, Brøndbyvester, Brøndby Nord * Albertslund Municipality * Høje-Taastrup Municipality: Taastrup, Høje-Taastrup, Tåstrupgård, Hedehusene The Thumb The southwest suburbs along the coast form the thumb of the plan. While the central parts of these suburbs are dominated by high-rise housing projects and low-income inhabitants, the distant part is dominated by detached middle-class houses. These suburbs have a population of some 215,000 inhabitants and has a sizeable number of immigrants. * Hvidovre Municipality: Avedøre, Friheden, Hvidovre * Brøndby Municipality: Brøndby Strand * Vallensbæk Municipality * Ishøj Municipality * Greve Municipality: Hundige, Karlslunde, Greve * Solrød Municipality: Solrød, Jersie * Køge municipality: Køge, Ølby The extra finger: Amager Island suburbs & Malmö When the finger plan was initially introduced, the island of Amager wasn't included as the infrastructure was inadequate for modern suburban life. Later it has been improved, and the suburbs at the island hold some 53,000 inhabitants. Amager is now one of the most modern suburbs of Copehagen with increasing wealth. With the opening of the bridge to Sweden this finger has been extended all the way to Malmö. Under an official visit of the Swedish King in 2007 at the Copenhagen City Hall, Copenhagen Lord Mayor Ritt Bjerregaard caused a minor diplomatic incident by referring to Malmö as "København M" with an allusion to the Danish system of postal codes (Nørrebro being København N and Vesterbro being København V for instance), indicating that Malmö had turned into just another Copenhagen bourough. Today 25,000 Danes live in Malmö. Malmø er blevet til København M, DR Online * Tårnby Municipality: Tårnby, Kastrup * Dragør Municipality Summers in Copenhagen are mild with average high temperatures of around 21°C (70°F) and lows of 13°C (55°F), but temperatures could sometimes exceed 25°C (77°F+) and occasional heatwaves are common during the summer. Winters are cold, with temperatures of -2 to 4°C (28 - 40°F), and it rarely drop below −10 °C (14 °F). Precipitation is moderate throughout the year, and snowfall occurs mainly in December through March, but snow cover does not remain a long time. Nørrebro seen from "Søerne" Copenhagen as seen from the City Hall at night Kongens Nytorv View from Rundetårn Gefion Fountian The city's appearance today is shaped by the key role it has played as a regional center for centuries. Copenhagen has a multitude of districts, each representing its time and with its own distinctive character, making up a dense urban fabric. Other distinctive features of the Copenhagen of today is the abundance of water, the greenness and the elaborate system of bicycle paths that line almost every major street. The oldest section of Copenhagen's inner city is often referred to as "Middelalderbyen" (The Medieval City). However, the most distinctive district of Copenhagen is Frederiksstaden developed during the reign of Frederick V. It has Amalienborg Palace at its centre and is dominated by the dome of the Marble Church as well as a number of elegant 18th century mansions. Also part of the old inner city of Copenhagen is the small island of Slotsholmen with Christiansborg Palace and Christianshavn. Around the historical city center lies a band of charming, dense and well-preserved residential bouroughs (Vesterbro, Inner Nørrebro, Inner Østerbro) dating mainly from late 19th century. They were built outside the old ramparts of the city when the city was finally allowed to expand beyond this barrier. Sometimes referred to as "the City of Spires", Copenhagen is known for its horizontal skyline, only broken by spires at churches and castles. Most characteristic is the baroque spire of Church of Our Saviour with its spiralling and narrowing external stairs that visitors can climb to the very top of the spire. Other important spires are those of Christiansborg Palace, the City Hall and the former Church of St. Nikolaj that now houses a modern art venue. A bit lower are the renaissance spires of Rosenborg Castle and the "dragon spire" of [[Christian IV of Christian IV's former stock exchange, so named because it is shaped as the tails of four dragons twined together. Recent years has seen a tremendous boom in modern architecture in Copenhagen both when it comes to Danish architecture and works by international architects. For a few hundred years, virtually no foreign architects had worked in Copenhagen but since the mid 1990s the city and its immediate sourroundings have seen buildings and projects from such international star architects as Norman Foster , Hadid , Nouvel and Liebeskind . In the same time, a number of Danish architects have achieved great success both in Copenhagen and abroad. This has led to a number of international architecture awards. Buildings in Copenhagen have won RIBA European Awards four years in a row ("Sampension" in 2005 , "Kilen" in 2006 , "Tietgenkollegiet" in 2007 and the Royal Playhouse in 2008 ). At the 2008 World Architecture Festival in Barcelona, Bjarke Ingels Group won an award for the World's Best Residential Building 2008 for a house in Ørestad. The Forum AID Award for Best building in Scandinavia went to Copenhagen buildings both in 2006 and 2008 . In 2008 British design magazine Monocle named Copenhagen the World's best design city 2008. The boom in urban development and modern architecture means that the above mentioned horizontal skyline has seen some changes. A political majority has decided to keep the historical center free of highrises. But several areas will see or have already seen massive urban development. Ørestad is the area that until now has seen most of the development. Located near Copenhagen Airport, it currently boasts the largest mall in Scandinavia and a variety of office and residential buildings as well as an IT University and a high school. The two largest hotels in Scandinavia are currently under construction (ultimo 2008). An ambitious regeneration project will create a new Carlsberg District at the historical premises of the Carlsberg Breweries that has terminated the production of beer in Copenhagen and moved it to Jutland. The district will have a total of nine highrises and seeks to mix the old industrial buildings with modern architecture to create a dense, maze-like quarter with a focus on sustainability and an active urban life. A third major area of urban development also with a focus on sustanibility is Nordhavn. The Copenhagen tradition with urban development on artificial islands that was initiated with with Christianh IV's construction of Christianshavn has recently been continued with the creation of Havneholmen as well as a "canal city" in the South Harbour. A district in Copenhagen with a very different take on modern architecture is that of Christiania whose many creative and idiosyncratic buildings are exponents of an "architecture without architects". Østre Anlæg University of Copenhagen Botanical Garden Copenhagen is a green city with many big and small parks. King's Garden, the garden of Rosenborg Castle, is the oldest and most visited park in Copenhagen. Its landscaping was commenced by Christian IV in 1606. Every year it sees more than 2,5 million visitors and in the summer months it is packed with sunbathers, picknickers and ballplayers. It also serves as a sculpture garden with a permanent display of sculptures as well as temporary exhibits during summer. Also located in the city centre are the Botanical Gardens particularly noted for their large complex of 19th century greenhouses donated by Carlsberg founder J. C. Jacobsen. Fælledparken is with its 58 hectars the largest park in Copenhagen. It is popular for sports and hosts a long array of annual events like a free opera concert at the opening of the opera season, other open-air concerts, carnival, Labour Day celebrations and Copenhagen Historic Grand Prix which is a race for antique cars. A historical green space in the northeastern part of the city is Kastellet which is a well-presserved renaissance citadel that now serves mainly as a park. Another popular park is the Frederiksberg Garden which is a 32 hectars romantic landscape park. It houses a large colony of very tame grey herons along with other waterfowls. The park also offers views of the elephants and the elephant house designed by world-famous British architect Norman Foster of the adjacent Copenhagen Zoo. Characteristic of Copenhagen is that a number of cemeteries double as parks, though only for the more quiet activities such as sunbathing, reading and meditation. Assistens Cemetery, the burrial place of Hans Christian Andersen among others, is an important green space for the district of Inner Nørrebro and a Copenhagen institution. The lesser known Vestre Kirkegaard is with its 54 hectars the largest cemetery in Denmark and offers a maze of dense groves, open lawns, winding paths, hedges, overgrown tombs, monuments, tree-lined avenues, lakes and other garden features. It is official municipal policy in Copenhagen that all citizens by 2015 must be able to reach a park or beach on foot in less than 15 minutes. In line with this policy, several new parks are under development in areas poor in green spaces. Copenhagen and the surrounding areas have 3 beaches with a total of approx. 8 km of sandy beaches within 30 minutes of bicycling from the city centre. This includes Amager Strandpark, which opened in 2005 and includes a 2 km long artificial island and a total of 4,6 km of beaches , located just 15 minutes by bicycle or a few minutes by metro from the city centre. The beaches are supplemented by a system of harbour baths along the Copenhagen waterfront. The first and most popular of these is located at Islands Brygge Harbour bath at Islands Brygge, e-architect and has won international acclaim for its design. Islands Brygge. Depending on the boundaries used, the population of Copenhagen differs. Statistics Denmark uses a measure of the contiguously built-up urban area of Copenhagen, this means the number of communities included in this statistical abstract has changed several times, in the abstracts latest edition with close to 1.2 million (1,153,615 (2008)) inhabitants. This number is not a strict result of the commonly-used measuring methods of 200 meters of continuously build-up area, as there are exceptions to the general rule in the suburbs of Dragør, Taastrup, Birkerød, Hørsholm and Farum. Statistics Denmark has never stated the geographical area of urban Copenhagen. However, we know it consists of Copenhagen Municipality, Frederiksberg and 16 of the 20 municipalities in the old counties Copenhagen and Roskilde, though 5 of them only partially. Largest cities of Denmark 2007 Statistics Denmark has worked out definitions of so-called lands (landsdele), a definition used to meet statistical needs on a lower level than regions. From this, the land of Copenhagen city (København by) is defined by the municipalities of Copenhagen, Dragør, Frederiksberg and Tårnby, with a total population of 656,582 in the beginning of 2008. The surroundings of Copenhagen is defined by another land, Copenhagen suburban (Københavns omegn), which includes the municipalities of Albertslund, Ballerup, Brøndby, Gentofte, Gladsaxe, Glostrup, Herlev, Hvidovre, Høje-Taastrup, Ishøj, Lyngby-Taarbæk, Rødovre and Vallensbæk, and with a total population of 504,481 (January 1, 2008). This gives a total population of 1,161,063 for these two lands together. The lands of Copenhagen city and Copenhagen suburban can together be used as a definition of the metropolitan area, although perhaps a somewhat narrow one. From 1 January 2008 the population of the 34 municipalities closest to and including the municipality of Copenhagen is 1,857,263 and by 1 October 2008 the population of this area had grown to 1,872,706. Statistikbanken.dk Population table BEF1A07 Land area: 2,923 km² (1,032 sq mi). (Capital Region - Bornholm + East Zealand + Stevns) Water area: 105 km² (40.5 sq mi). Orienteering fra Københavns Kommune. Statistisk Kontor.2003 nr. 25 Thus, the region comprises 6.8% of the land area of Denmark, but has 34% of Denmark's population. This gives a total of 641 inhabitants per km² or 1,660 per square mile for the region. This compares with a population density in the rest of the country of approximately 90 per km² or around 230 per square mile. Based on a 10%-isoline (data from 2002) in which at least 10% commutes into central parts of the Copenhagen area, most of Zealand would be covered and this area has a population of about 2.3 million inhabitants. /ref> Since the opening of the Øresund Bridge in 2000, commuting between and integration of Greater Malmö and Copenhagen have increased rapidly, and a combined statistical metropolitan area has formed. This metropolitan area, which has a population of 2,501,094 (2008) is expected to be officially defined by the respective statistics divisions of Denmark and Sweden in the upcoming years. A high-ranking civil servant of the Interior Ministry, Henning Strøm, who was involved in (i.e. known as "the Father of") a past municipal reform, which took effect on 1 April 1970, said on television, broadcast in connection with the recent Kommunalreformen ("The Municipal Reform" of 2007), that Copenhagen municipality would encompass an area with 1.5 million inhabitants, if the principles of the 1970 municipal reform were also applied on Copenhagen municipality. DR netnews 25-06-04 In other words: in the rest of Denmark the city occupies only part of the municipality, but in Copenhagen the municipality of Copenhagen occupies only part of the city of Copenhagen. Since the late 1990s, Copenhagen has undergone a transformation from a cozy Scandinavian capital to a cool metropolitan city of international scope in the league of cities like Barcelona and Amsterdam. This is due to massive investments in infrastructure as well as culture and wave of new successful Danish architects, designers and chefs. Between 1998 and 2008, lifestyle journalists wordwide (from Wallpaper to the NewYorkTimes) have praised Copenhagen as a cool, well-functioning creative city (see "Copenhagen In international rankings" below). Copenhagen has a wide array of museums of International standard. The National Museum, Nationalmuseet, is Denmark's largest museum of Archaeology and cultural history, comprising the histories of Danish and foreign cultures alike. The National Gallery - "Statens Museum for Kunst" - is Denmark's national art museum and contains collections dating from 12th century and all the way up to present day artists. Among artists represented in the collections are Rubens, Rembrandt, Picasso, Braque, Léger, Matisse and Emil Nolde. Another important Copenhagen art museum is the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek founded by second generation Carlsberg tycoon-philantropist Carl Jacobsen and is built around his personal collections. Its main focus is classical Egyptian, Roman and Greek sculptures and other antiquities and a collection of Rodin sculptures that is the largest outside France (Glypto-, from the Greek root glyphein, to carve and theke, a storing-place). Besides its sculpture collections, the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek also holds a comprehensive collection of paintings of impressionist and post-impressionist painters such as Monet,Renoir, Cézanne, van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec as well as Danish Golden Age painters. Loiusiana is an internationally acclaimed museum of modern art situated on the coast just north of Copenhagen. It is located in the middle of a sculpture garden on a cliff overlooking Øresund. The The museum is included in the Patricia Schultz book 1,000 Places to See Before You Die. The Danish Museum of Art & Design is housed in the 18th century former Frederiks Hospital and displays Danish design as well as international design and crafts. Other museums include: * Thorvaldsens Museum is a single-artist museum dedicated to the oeuvre,of romantic Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen who lived and worked in Rome. * Cisternerne is a small but different museum dedicated to modern glass art. It is located in some grotto-like former cisterns that come complete with Stalactites formed by the changing water levels. * The Ordrupgaard Museum is an art museum located just notth of Copenhagen in an old mansion with an extension by Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. It features 19th century French and Danish art and is particularly noted for its works by Paul Gaugin. Copenhagen Opera House The Royal Danish Theatre In January 2009 the new Copenhagen Concert Hall will open. It is designed by Jean Nouvel and will have four halls with the main auditorium seating 1800 people. It will serve as the home of the Danish National Symphony Orchestra and along with the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles the most expensive concert hall ever built. Another important venue for classical music is the Tivoli Concert Hall located in the histtrocal Tivoli Gardens. The Copenhagen Opera House (in Danish usually called Operaen) that opened in 2005 and is designed by Henning Larsen, is the national opera house of Denmark and among the most modern opera houses in the world. The old Royal Danish Theatre dating from 1748 still works as a supplementary opera scene. The Royal Danish Theatre is also home to the Royal Danish Ballet. Gounded in 1748 along with the theatre, it is one of the oldest ballet troups in Europe. It is home the the Bournonville style of ballet. Copenhagen has a significant jazz scene that has existed for many years. It developed when a number of American jazz musicians such as Ben Webster, Thad Jones, Richard Boone, Ernie Wilkins, Kenny Drew, Ed Thigpen, Bob Rockwell and others such as rock guitarist Link Wray came to live in Copenhagen during the 1960s. Every year in early July Copenhagen's streets, aquares and parks fills up with big and small jazz concerts during the Copenhagen Jazz Festival (see yearly events). The most important venue for rhythmical music in Copenhagen is Vega in Vesterbro district which has been chosen as "best concert venue in Europe" by international music magazine Live For free entertainment one can stroll along Strøget, especially between Nytorv and Højbro Plads, which in the late afternoon and evening is a bit like an impromptu three-ring circus with musicians, magicians, jugglers and other street performers. View from Amerikakaj Copenhagen has a wide variety of sport teams. The two major football teams are Brøndby IF and FC København. Brøndby IF plays at Brøndby Stadium in Brøndby and FC København plays at Parken in Østerbro, Copenhagen. Notable Copenhagen teams playing at the second highest level in Danish football (the Danish 1st Division) include Lyngby BK, AB, HIK, Frem, Brønshøj, Fremad Amager and Skjold. Copenhagen also has three ice hockey teams: Rødovre Mighty Bulls, Herlev Hornets and Nordsjælland Cobras. There are a lot of handball teams in Copenhagen. FC København owns both a women's and a men's team, which have the same name and logo. They were formerly known as FIF. Of other clubs playing in the "highest" leagues there are; Ajax Heroes, Ydun, and HIK (Hellerup). Rugby union is also played in the Danish capital with teams such as CSR-Nanok, Copenhagen Scrum, Exiles, Froggies and Rugbyklubben Speed. The Danish Australian Football League, based in Copenhagen is the largest Australian rules football competition outside of the English speaking world. Copenhagen is also home to a number of Denmark's 40-odd cricket clubs. Although Denmark has been an associate member of the International Cricket Council since 1966, the sport is not taught much in schools, and Danish cricket competes unfavourably with the much more widely followed sport of football for players, facilities, media attention and spectators. The second World Outgames will take place in Copenhagen in 2009, after Berlin refused to stage them due to the continuing rivalry between the two gay sporting organisations. It would be the largest such event hosted in Copenhagen. Copenhagen has the two oldest amusement parks in the World. World-famous Tivoli Gardens is an amusement park and pleasure garden located right in the middle of Copenhagen between the the City Hall Square and the the Central Station. Among its rides are the oldest still operating roller coaster and the oldest ferris wheel in the World. Tivoli Gardens, the rides It also function as an open-air concert venue. It opened on August 15 1843 making it the second oldest amusement park in the world. Dyrehavsbakken (in English "the Deer Garden Hill") is located in Klampenborg a little north of Copenhagen in a forested area of great natural beauty. Having been made into an amusement park complete with rides, games and restaurants by Christian IV, it is the oldest surviving amusement park in the World. Copenhagen is a centre for the New Nordic Cuisine. Nordic Cuisine, New York Times In November 2004 a Nordic Kitchen Symposium was helt in Copenhagen at the initiative of Danish chef and gastronome Claus Meyer. The symposium had attandance of top chefs from all of the Nordic countries and led to the adoption of a Manifesto for the New Nordic Cuisine. Manifesto for a New Nordic Cuisine Claus Meyer is also the co-founder of the two-Michelin star Restaurant Noma (Nordisk Madhus) which is a flagship restaurant for the new Nordic cuisine. In 2008 it was ranked as 10th best in the World by acclaimed British restaurant & fine dining magazine Restaurant at their 50 Best Restaurants of the World 2008-list. Furthermore, the users of the international website TripAdvisor with 25 million users a month rated Noma as the best restaurant in the world. TripAdvisor ranking As of 2008 Copenhagen boasts a total of 11 Michelin star restaurants. This is by far the highest number of any Nordic city. Apart from Noma they include one of only two Thai restaurants worldwide that has received a Michelin star. Due to the development, Copenhagen is increasingly being recognized internationally as a gourmet destination. The Top 10 cities to visit in 2009, TimesOnline Apart from the selection of high end restaurants, Copenhagen offers a great variety of Danish, International and ethnic restaurants and it is possible to find modest eateries with open sandwiches (called "smørrebrød"), which is the traditional and best known dish for lunch. Most restaurants, though, serve international dishes. danish pastry, another local specialty, can be sampled from the numerous bakeries found in all parts of the city. Copenhagen has long been associated with beer.Carlsberg beer has been brewed at the brewery's premises at the border between Vesterbro and Valby districts since 1847 and has long been almost synonumous with Danish beer production. However, recent years have seen an explosive growth in the number of microbreweries so that Denmark today has more than 100 breweries Nyeste artikler fra Bryggeriforeningen, Bryggeriforeningen , many of which are located in Copenhagen. Some like Nørrebro Bryghus also act as brewpubs where it is possible also to eat at the premisses. Many cafés specialize in a huge selection of quality beers and beer has also become an important ingridient in the New Nordic Cuisine. Copenhagen is the media centre of Denmark. DR, the major Danish public service broadcasting corporation collected their activities in a new headquarters, DR byen, in 2006 and 2007. Similarly has Odense based TV2 collected its Copenhagen activities in a modern media house in the South Harbour. The two national daily newspapters Politiken and Berlingske Tidende and the two tabloids Ekstra Bladet and B. T. are based in Copenhagen. Other important media corporations include Aller Press which is the largest publisher of weekly and monthly magazines in Scandinavia, the Egmont media group and Gyldendal, the largest Danish publisher of books. Copenhagen also has a sizable movie and television industry. Filmbyen, The Movie City, which is located in a former military camp in the suburg of Hvidovre and houses several movie companies and studio studios. Among the movie campanies are Zentropa co-owned by Danish movie director Lars von Trier who is behind several international movie productions as well as a founding force behind the Dogma Movement. * Copenhagen Fashion Week takes place every year in February and August. It is the largest fashion event in Northern Europe. Fashion Capital Copenhagen On the catwalks are a growing number of new and known Danish talent with a preview of their upcoming collections. And at the three trade fairs, CPH Vision, Gallery and Copenhagen International Fashion Fair, you will find an additional 1,100 exhibitors representing a total of over 2,300 international brand name collections. Danish fashion is known for its unique angle on design, innovation and aesthetics. With a more modern approach to femininity and functionality, expressed in fresh silhouettes, a focus on details and incomparable quality. These are only some of the reasons why more than 50,000 buyers, designers and global press attend Copenhagen Fashion Week twice a year. Copenhagen Fashion Week is organised by the Danish Fashion Institute - a newly founded network organisation created by and for the Danish fashion industry. Copenhagen Fashion Week * Carnival in Copenhagen takes place every year since 1982 during the Whitsun Holiday in Fælledparken and around the city. 120 bands, 2000 dancers and 100,000 spectators participate. History of Copenhagen * Copenhagen Distortion is a youth culture festival capturing the zeitgeist of the city, gathering every year (5 days up to the first weekend of June) up to 30.000 people in the streets, in shops, galleries, clubs, bars, in boats and buses, with a cultural focus on street culture, art and upfront dance music. Copenhagen Distortion * Roskilde Festival is a music festival helt every year in Roskilde west of Copenhagen. Gathering around 100,000 people every year, it is one of the four largest rock music festivals in Europe.. * Copenhagen Jazz Festival, which begins on the first Friday in July, is a popular annual event that is the result of Copenhagen's significant jazz scene. The festival takes place throughout the city in streets, squares and parks as well as in cafés and concert halls. Copenhagen Jazz Festival 3+ years, Wonderful Copenhagen It embraces around 900 concerts, 100 venues and over 200,000 guests from Denmark and around the world. It is recognized as one of the leading jazz festivals in the World. Top 10 best Jazz Festivals, TripAdvisor Copenhagen Jazz Festival * Copenhagen Pride is a gay pride festival taking place every year in August. Among the events is "Tivoli goes pink" and it ends with a parade. Copenhagen Pride * Copenhagen Cooking takes place in August every year and is a food festival with a wide array of events all over the city. * Copenhagen International Film Festival takes place in September every year with a focus on European films. The main prize is called the Golden Swan. Copenhagen International Film Festival Middelgrunden wind farm just off Copenhagen The Danish National Bank. Designed by Arne Jacobsen. Copenhagen is the economical and financial centre of Denmark Regionale regnskaber 2005 - Nyt fra Danmarks Statistik - Danmarks Statistik and also a strong business and economic centre in the entire Scandinavian-Baltic region. In 2008 Copenhagen was ranked 4th by Financial Times-owned FDi magazine on their list of Top50 European Cities of the Future after London, Paris and Berlin. Top 50 European City of the Future 2008/09 In 2006/07 FDi Magazine named Copenhagen Scandinavian City of the Future Scandinavian City of the Future 06/07 and in 2004/05 Copenhagen was named Northern European City of the Future ahead of other cities from Scandinavia, UK, Ireland and Benelux. Northern European City of the Future 2004/05 In the 2008 Worldwide Centers of Commerce Index, published by MasterCard, Copenhagen was ranked 14th in the world and 1st in Scandinavia. Copenhagen is one of the cities in Western Europe attracting most regional headquarters and distribution centers. Among the international companies that have chosen to locate their regional headquarters in Copenhagen is Microsoft.There are 2,100 foreign companies located in the Copenhagen area, of which approx. 500 are Scandinavian head offices, representing a wide range of industries. Copenhagen has a service oriented economy. An important sector is life science and research & development plays a major role in the economy of the city. The entire Oresund Region is in cooperation with Sweden being promoted as Medicon Valley. Major Danish biotech companies like Novo Nordisk and Lundbeck, both of which are among 50 largest pharmaceutical and biotech companies in the World, are located in the greater Copenhagen area. USATODAY.com The region also boasts the largest IT-cluster in Scandinavia with nearly 100,000 employees and the city of Copenhagen is home to Nokia's largest research centre outside Finland. Copenhagen - Overview Shipping is also an import business with Maersk, the World's largest shipping company, having their world headquarters in Copenhagen. Several international companies have established their regional headquarters in Copenhagen, e.g. Microsoft. Maersk, the world's largest container shipping company, has their world headquarters in Copenhagen. A substantial number of Danish pharmaceuticals such as Novo Nordisk, Ferring Pharmaceuticals and Bavarian Nordic also operate in the area, having placed their headquarters in or close to Copenhagen. USATODAY.com Copenhagen has some of the highest gross wages in the World. City Mayors: World's richest cities High taxes mean that wages are reduced after mandatory deduction. A neneficial researcher scheme with low taxation of foreigh specialists Level of salary in Denmark has made Denmark an attractive location for highly educated foreign labour to settle. Copenhagen is however also among the most expensive cities in Europe. City Mayors: World's most expensive cities (EIU) City Mayors: World's most expensive cities - Ranking Copenhagen University Copenhagen has a well-developed higher education system of public universities. Most prominent among these is the University of Copenhagen. Founded in 1479, it is the oldest university in Denmark. It is a world-renowned research and teaching institution with campuses around the city and forms part of the International Alliance of Research Universities (IARU), which is a collaboration between international top universities including Oxford, Cambridge, Yale and Berkeley. The University attracts app. 1500 international and exchange students every year. It is repeatedly ranked as one of the best universities in Europe. At the Times Higher Education's QS World University Rankings 2008 list, it was ranked as fourth best in continental Europe. TheAcademic Ranking of World Universities 2008 placesd it as number 43 worldwide and 8th in Europe. A second all-round university in the Copenhagen area is Roskilde University located in Roskilde. The Technical University of Denmark (DTU), Danmarks Tekniske Universitet, is located in Lyngby at the northern outskirts of Copenhagen. In 2008 it was ranked third highest in Europe on Times Higher Education's list of the most influential technical universities in the World. The Max Planck Institute in Germany was ranked 15, ETH Zurich in Switzerland was ranked 15 and DTU in Denmark was ranked 20. Copenhagen Business School (CBS) is an estimed and EQUIS accredited business school located on Frederiksberg. Copenhagen is rich in companies and institutions with a focus on research and development within the biotechnology , Infrastructure & logistics - Copenhagen a distribution hub, retrieved February 22, 2007. and life science sectors. Two of the 50 largest pharmaceutical and biotech companies in the World are located in the greater Copenhagen area. The biotech and life science cluster in Copenhagen and the rest of the Oresund Region is one of the strongest in Europe. Since 1995 this has been branded as the Medicon Valley in a Danish-Swedish cooperation. The aim is to strengthen the region's position and to promote cooperation between companies and academia. The German biotech giant Sartorius Stedim Biotech, which is currently creating a Nordic head office in Tåstrup on the outskirts of Copenhagen. The Øresund region is responsible for 60 percent of life science production in Scandinavia and is home to 111 biotech companies. The greater Copenhagen area has a very well established transportation infrastructure making it a hub in Northern Europe. Christianshavns Kanal Copenhagen has a large network of toll-free highways and public roads connecting different municipalities of the city together and to Northern Europe. As in many other cities in Europe traffic is increasing in Copenhagen. The radial arterial roads and highways leading to the Copenhagen city center are critically congested during peak hours. Copenhagen is known as one of the most bicycle-friendly cities in the world. Every day 1,1 million km are bicycled in Copenhagen. 36 % of all citizens are commuting to work, school or university by bicycle and it is municipal policy that this number should go up to 40 % by 2012 and 50 % in 2015. The city's bicycle paths are extensive and well-used. Bicycle paths are often separated from the main traffic lanes and sometimes have their own signal systems. The municipality is also developing a system of interconnected green bicycle routes, greenways, with the aim to facilitate fast, safe and pleasant bicycle transport from one end of the city to the other. The network will cover more than 100 km and consist of 22 routes when finished. The city provides public bicycles which can be found throughout the downtown area and used with a returnable deposit of 20 kroner. Copenhagen's well-developed bicycle culture has given rise to the term ‘copenhagenize’. This is the practice of other cities adopting Copenhagen-style bike lanes and bicycle infrastructure. In 2007 Copenhagen-based Danish urban design consultant Jan Gehl was hired by the New York City Department of Transportation to re-imagine New York City streets by introducing designs to improve life for pedestrians and cyclists. In recognition of Copenhagen's emphasis on bicycling, the city has been chosen by the Union Cycliste Internationale as their first official Bike City. Bike City Copenhagen will take place from 2008 to 2011 and consist of big cycling events for professionals as well as amateurs. The harbour of Copenhagen has largely lost its importance as an industrial harbour. In 2001 Copenhagen Harbour merged with the harbour in Malmö to create Copenhagen-Malmö Port. It has several functions, the most important being as a major cruise destination. In 2007 a record 286 cruise ships with 420,000 cruise passengers visited Copenhagen. 120 of these ships either started or ended the cruise in Copenhagen. In 2008 these numbers grew further to 310 cruise ships and 560,000 passengers. As a result of the growth in the cruise industry facilities asre being expanded and improved. At the World Travel Awards in 2008, Copenhagen Port was named the number one cruise destination in Europe for the fifth year in a row. Copenhagen is serviced by ferry lines to Oslo in Norway (called "Oslobåden") with a daily connection and to Świnoujście in Poland (called "Polensfærgerne") with five weekly connections. Copenhagen Airport is the principal airport serving Copenhagen. It is the largest in Scandinavia and the 17th largest in Europe. It is located in Kastrup on the island of Amager and has very efficient connections to downtown Copenhagen with metro trains going to Kongens Nytorv in 15 minutes with 4-6 minutes between departures and regional trains going to the Central Station in 12 minutes. Its location also makes it the most important international airport for large parts of southern Sweden. Over the Øresund Bridge trains go to Malmö South in 14 minutes or Malmö Central Station in 22 minutes. Copenhagen Airport has won the award as "The best airport in Europe" four times, and as "The best airport in the world" two times. Copenhagen Airport is the seventh best airport in the world - second best in Europe - when you ask the passengers. The British organization Skytrax is doing so every year, writes the airport in a press release. 40 criteria are employed for the ranking. The new metro S-train at Nørreport Metro entrance in FrederiksbergThe public transportation system of Copenhagen consists of commuter trains (called S-trains, S-tog), buses, and a metro. The S-trains form the basis of the transportation network, stretching to most areas of metropolitan Copenhagen, with their main hub at Copenhagen Central Station (København H). Regional trains supplement the S-train services with lines extending further such as to the Copenhagen Airport, Elsinore, and Malmö. The Danish State Railways' Intercity network has its eastern terminus and main hub at Copenhagen, with most trains extending to Copenhagen Airport. The fare system is based on 95 zones covering the capital area. Tickets are transferable from one means of transport to another within a time limit. The more zones a ticket is valid for, the longer its time validity with a maximum of two hours. Discount cards (punch cards, klippekort) and period cards are available. Ticket prices are high and have increased substantially in recent years leading to a decrease in passenger numbers. In fact, the percentage of trips made on public transportation in Copenhagen is quite low by northern European standards. The Copenhagen Metro began operation in 2002 and currently has only two lines. In April 2008, it was named Best Metro in the World by industry experts. Copenhagen Metro Best in the World |Christiansborg Palace - home of the Danish Parliament Folketinget, the Supreme Court, Office of the Prime Minister and official reception area of Queen Margrethe II |- |Børsen - the former Stock Exchange building |- |The Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen harbor |- |Amalienborg Palace - home of the Danish royal family. The central building is the domed Marble Church located behind the palace complex |- |Nyhavn |- |The Marble Church |- |Rosenborg Castle in central Copenhagen |- |Christianshavns Canal |- |The Tivoli, photographed from Eduard Spelterini's balloon on June 22, 1922 |} Copenhagen is recognized as one of the most environmentally friendly cities in the world. In 2006 Copenhagen Municipality received the European Environmental Management Award. The award was given for long-term holistic environmental planning. It is municipal policy to reduce CO2 emissions by 20% before the end of 2015. In 2001 a large offshore wind farm was built just off the coast of Copenhagen at Middelgrunden. It produces about 4 % of the city's energy. Many years of major investments in sewage treatment has improved water quality in the harbour to an extent that the inner harbour can be used for swimming and facilities for this are provided at a number of locations. Another municipal policy is that 40% of all citizens should bicycle to and from work by 2012 and a number of initiatives are being taken to implement this policy (see "bicycling above"). Copenhagen is the capital in the World where organic food has the largest market share. One in every ten purchases is organic in Copenhagen. Within the municipal sector in Copenhagen, 45 % of all food consumption is organic but the target is considerably higher. With the environmental strategy "Environment Metropolis: Our Vision 2015" the politicians wish that solely organic food is to be served in 90 per cent of the Copenhagen old-age homes and residential homes for children and young persons in 2015.. - - - Image:Christiansborg Slot.jpg| Christiansborg Slot - Image:Børsen København.jpg| Børsen- the former Stock Exchange building - Image:Littlemermaid207.jpg| The Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen harbor - Image:Copenhagen amalienborg seen from opera house.jpg| Amalienborg Palace - Image:Nyhavn 9-15 København.jpg| Nyhavn - Image:Kbh Marmorkirche 1.jpg| Frederik's Church|The Marble Church - Image:Rosenborg.jpg| Rosenborg Castle in central Copenhagen - Image:Christianshavns Kanal morning.jpg| Christianshavns Canal - Image:Amalienborgas.JPG | The Royal Residence - Image:Copenhague 108.jpg | The Round Tower - Image:Gammel_Strand_København.jpg| Gammel Strand - Image:Kbh_Stroeget_Nikolaj_Kirche.jpg | Stroget - Image:A_Copenhagen_center_street.jpg| Central Copenhagen Street - Image:Amagergade 01.jpg| Amagergade - Image:Gebauede_in_kopenhagen.jpg| Copenhagen Habour - Image:Container ship loading-700px.jpg| Copenhagen Ship Loading - Image:Christianshavns_Torv.jpg | Christianshavn Torv - Image:Copenhagen-Airport-from-air.jpg | Copenhagen Airport from the air - Image:Østre Anlæg København.jpg | Østre Anlæg - Image:Frederiksberg Slot.jpg | Frederiksberg Castle - Image:Kongens Nytorv 17.jpg | Kongens Nytorv - Image:Kopenhagen zeehaven.JPG | Copenhagen Canal Tour - Image:Den-sorte-diamant.jpg | The Black Diamond ( The Royal Library ) - Image:Tivoli Copenhagen at Night.jpg | Tivoli by Night - Image:Kopenhagen 3.jpg | View over Copenhagen - Image:Gammeltorv Copenhagen Denmark.JPG | Gammeltorv - Image:Copenhagen denmark.jpg | Nyhavn - Image:Copenhagen City Hall.jpg | Copenhagen City Hall - Image:Gefion.jpg| Gefion Fountian - Image:Christiania Exit.JPG | Christiania - Image:Gebauede in kopenhagen.jpg | Copenhagen at Night - Image:Copenhague 050.jpg | Inner City Canel - Copenhagen has placed well in a number of international rankings, some of which are mentioned below. * Copenhagen was ranked #1 as Most Livable City in the World by international lifestyle magazine Monocle on their Top 25 Most Livable Cities 2008 list Monocles page on Copenhagen * Worlds Best Design City 2008 also by Monocle. Monocles page on Copenhagen *Monocle has also stated that Copenhagen is "Scandinavia's most desirable city". By Stuart Husband Monocle Magazine Published: June 19, 2007 *Copenhagen ranked #4 by Financial Times-owned FDi magazine on their list of Top50 European Cities of the Future after London, Paris and Berlin. Top 50 European City of the Future 2008/09 In 2006/07 FDi Magazine named Copenhagen Scandinavian City of the Future Scandinavian City of the Future 06/07 and in 2004/05 Copenhagen was named Northern European City of the Future ahead of other cities from Scandinavia, UK, Ireland and Benelux. Northern European City of the Future 2004/05 * In the 2008 Worldwide Centers of Commerce Index, published by MasterCard, Copenhagen was ranked 14th in the world and 1st in Scandinavia. *Copenhagen #1 out of 254 locations in the Location Ranking Survey performed by ECA International that has asked European experts where they prefer to be stationed worldwide. Location Ranking Survey * Copenhagen was ranked #6 in Grist Magazine's "15 Green Cities" list in 2007 making Copenhagen the greenest capital of Scandinavia according to Grist Magazine. 15 Green Cities | Grist | Main Dish | 19 July 2007 * Copenhagen is the capital in the World where organic food has the largest market share. One in every ten purchases is organic in Copenhagen. World-champinions in organic food * The Copenhagen Metro has been named the Best Metro in the World by industry experts. Copenhagen Metro Best in the World * Copenhagen is the worlds #7 most expensive city and #3 most expensive in Europe on the Forbes List. Forbes-Worlds Most Expensive Cities List * Copenhagen is ranked #7 as Preferred City For Investment Projects. Preferred City For Investment Projects * Copenhagen ranked 3rd in Western Europe in terms of attracting regional headquarters and distribution centers, only surpassed by London and Paris. * Copenhagen ranks #1 in the Global Earning Ranking. [h Global earning ranking ] * Copenhagen ranks as the 5th most popular city in the world for international meetings and conferences. Style & Substance Danmark * Copenhagen ranks as one of the most attractive cities to live and work in Europe. A great place to live * Copenhagen ranks 2nd in Europe for Quality of life according to a survey from 2005 by the international consultancy firm William Mercer. A great place to live * Morten Andersen, veteran NFL kicker * Niels Bohr, physicist, Nobel laureate * Aage Bohr, physicist, Nobel laureate (son of Niels Bohr) * Victor Borge, entertainer * August Bournonville, ballet choreographer * Georg Brandes, critic * Helena Christensen, supermodel * Tove Ditlevsen, writer * Carl Theodor Dreyer, movie director * Vilhelm Hammershøi, painter * Gus Hansen, poker player * Iben Hjejle, actor * Peter Høeg, writer * Arne Jacobsen, designer * Robert Jacobsen, painter * J. C. Jacobsen, founder of Carlsberg Brewery * Mathias Lauridsen, male topmodel * Søren Kierkegaard, philosopher * Bjørn Lomborg, Academic and Author of The Skeptical Environmentalist * Lauritz Melchior, opera singer * Mads Mikkelsen, actor * Carl-Henning Pedersen, painter * Lars von Trier, movie director * Dan Turèll, writer * Lars Ulrich, drummer and songwriter of the heavy-metal band Metallica * Jørn Utzon, architect, designer of the Sydney Opera House * Michael Laudrup, former international football player, former manager of Spanish Primera Division Football team Getafe. * Peter Schmeichel, former international football player * Bertel Thorvaldsen, sculpturer Copenhagen is twinned with: * Paris in France (partner city) * Reykjavík in Iceland * Prague in Czech Republic (unofficial partner city) * San Francisco de Campeche in Mexico * Municipal statistics: NetBorger Kommunefakta, delivered from KMD, also known as Kommunedata (Municipal Data) * Municipal and county statistics: Statistics Denmark statistikbanken.dk * Demography: Statistical Yearbook of Copenhagen (part English); ISBN 87-7024-230-5 * History and demography: København Forslag til kommuneplan 1985; ISBN 87-88034-03-8 * Oresund Region * Eurovision Song Contest 2001 * Junior Eurovision Song Contest 2003 * MTV Europe Music Awards 2006 * Transportation in Denmark * Ports of the Baltic Sea * A Much Different Tourist Site and Cultural Guide about Copenhagen * Wonderful Copenhagen official tourism website * Copenhagen Capacity official investment agency of Copenhagen * * Official municipal website * City of Copenhagen Statistical Office * Krak searchable map
Copenhagen
What transnational bridge was completed in 2000?
Oresund Bridge
data/set3/a8
Copenhagen Copenhagen ( ; ) is the capital and largest city of Denmark, with a population of 1,161,063. Copenhagen is situated on the Islands of Zealand and Amager. First documented in the 11th century, Copenhagen became the capital of Denmark in the beginning of the 15th century and during the 17th century under the reign of Christian IV it became an important regional centre. Copenhagen is usually ranked as one of the two largest cities of the Nordic Countries. [ LARGEST CITY Copenhagen or Stockholm ? [ Denmark in brief . With the completion of the transnational Oresund Bridge in 2000, Copenhagen has become the centre of the increasingly integrating Øresund Region with around 3.7 million inhabitants covering an area of 20,869 km² (177/km²). Within this region, Copenhagen and Malmö is in the process of growing into one common metropolitan area. Copenhagen is a major regional center of culture, business, media, and science. In 2008 Copenhagen was ranked #4 by Financial Times-owned FDi magazine on their list of Top50 European Cities of the Future after London, Paris and Berlin. In the 2008 Worldwide Centers of Commerce Index, published by MasterCard, Copenhagen was ranked 14th in the world and 1st in Scandinavia. Life science, information technology and shipping are important sectors and research & development plays a major role in the city's economy. Its strategic location and excellent infrastructure with the largest airport in Scandinavia located 14 minutes by train from the city centre, has made it a regional hub and a popular location for regional headquarters as well as conventions. Copenhagen has repeatedly been recognized as one of the cities with the best quality of life. and in 2008 it was singled out as the Most Liveable City in the World by international lifestyle magazine Monocle on their Top 25 Most Liveable Cities 2008 list. It is also considered one of the world's most environmentally friendly cities with the water in the inner harbor being so clean that it can be used for swimming and 36 % of all citizens commuting to work by bicycle, every day bicycling a total 1.1 million km. Since the turn of the millennium Copenhagen has seen a strong urban and cultural development and has been described as a boom town. This is partly due to massive investments in cultural facilities as well as infrastructure and a new wave of succesful designers, chefs and architects. Copenhagen c. 1895 The Palace during renovation. From its humble origins as a fishing village to its heyday as the glittering capital of the Danish Empire, to its current position as one of the world's premier design capitals, the stories and characters of Copenhagen's history can be discovered in its sumptuous palaces, copper-roofed town houses and atmospheric cobbled squares. From the Viking Age there was a fishing village by the name of "Havn" (harbour) at the site. Recent archeological finds indicate that by the 11th century, Copenhagen had already grown into a small town with a large estate, a church, a market, at least two wells and many smaller habitations spread over a fairly wide area. Arkæologer graver ny teori om København op af mulden (Archeologists develop new theory about Copenhagen from their digs), Videnskab.dk, 5 November 2008 From the middle of the 12th century it grew in importance after coming into the possession of the Bishop Absalon, who fortified it in 1167, the year traditionally marking the foundation of Copenhagen. The excellent harbour encouraged Copenhagen's growth until it became an important centre of commerce. The city's origin as a harbour and a place of commerce is reflected in its name. Its original designation, from which the contemporary Danish name is derived, was Køpmannæhafn, "merchants' harbor". The English name for the city is derived from its Low German name, Kopenhagen. The element hafnium is also named for Copenhagen, whose Latin name is Hafnia. Biography of George de Hevesy It was repeatedly attacked by the Hanseatic League as the Germans took notice. In 1254, it received its charter as a city under Bishop Jakob Erlandsen. During 1658-59 it withstood a severe siege by the Swedes under Charles X and successfully repelled a major assault. In 1801 a British fleet under Admiral Parker fought a major battle, the Battle of Copenhagen, with the Danish Navy in Copenhagen harbour. It was during this battle Lord Nelson famously "put the telescope to the blind eye" in order not to see Admiral Parker's signal to cease fire. When a British expeditionary force bombarded Copenhagen in 1807, to gain control of the Danish Navy, the city suffered great damage and hundreds of people were killed. The reason why the devastation was so great was that Copenhagen relied on an old defence-line rendered virtually useless by the increase in shooting range available to the British. But not until the 1850s were the ramparts of the city opened to allow new housing to be built around the lakes ("Søerne") which bordered the old defence system to the west. This dramatic increase of space was long overdue, not only because the old ramparts were out of date as a defence system, but also because of bad sanitation in the old city. Before the opening, Copenhagen Center was inhabited by approximately 125,000 people, peaking in the census of 1870 (140,000); today the figure is around 25,000. In 1901, Copenhagen expanded further, incorporating communities with 40,000 people, and in the process making Frederiksberg an enclave within Copenhagen. During World War II, Copenhagen was occupied by German troops along with the rest of the country from 9 April 1940 until 4 May 1945. In August 1943, when the government's collaboration with the occupation forces collapsed, several ships were sunk in Copenhagen Harbour by the Royal Danish Navy to prevent them being used by the Germans. The city has grown greatly since the war, in the seventies using the so-called five-finger-plan of commuter train lines to surrounding towns and suburbs. Since the summer 2000, the cities of Copenhagen and Malmö have been connected by a toll bridge/tunnel (Øresund Bridge), which allows both rail and road passengers to cross. As a result, Copenhagen has become the centre of a larger metropolitan area which spans both nations. The construction of the bridge has led to a large number of changes to the public transportation system and the extensive redevelopment of Amager, south of the main city. Location of Coppenhagen in Denmark Nørrebro seen from "Søerne" Copenhagen City Hall Copenhagen is located on the eastern shore of the island of Zealand (Sjælland) and partly on the island of Amager. Copenhagen faces the Øresund to the east, the strait of water that separates Denmark from Sweden, and that connects the North Sea with the Baltic Sea. On the Swedish side of the sound directly across from Copenhagen, lie the towns of Malmö and Landskrona. Copenhagen is also a part of the Øresund region, which consists of Zealand, Lolland-Falster and Bornholm in Denmark and Scania in Sweden. Copenhagen Municipality is an administrative unit that covers the central part of the actual city of Copenhagen. It is a fairly small part of the actual city that falles within the municipality both because it covers a very confined area and because the enclave of Frederiksberg is an independent municipality. Copenhagen consists of a number of boroughs and areas, including * Indre By * Østerbro * Nørrebro * Vesterbro * Amagerbro * Nordhavnen (North Habour) * Valby * Kongens Enghave (King's Meadow Garden), also known as Sydhavnen (meaning South Harbour) * Christianshavn * Christiania (Freetown) * Sundbyvester (Sundby West), * Sundbyøster (Sundby East) * Ørestad * Islands Brygge * Bellahøj * Brønshøj * Ryparken * Bispebjerg * Vigerslev * Vestamager * Vanløse The suffix -bro in the names Østerbro, Nørrebro, Vesterbro and Amagerbro should not be confused with the Danish word for bridge, which is also 'bro'. The term is thought to be an abbreviation or short form of the Danish word brolagt meaning paved referring to the roads paved with cobblestones leading to the city's former gates - The conurbation of Copenhagen consists of several municipalities. After Copenhagen Municipality, the second largest is Frederiksberg Municipality which is an enclave inside Copenhagen Municipality. Both are contained in the larger Capital Region of Denmark, which contains most of the Copenhagen metropolitan area. Previously, the areas of Frederiksberg, Gentofte and Copenhagen municipalities have been used to define the city of Copenhagen. This definition is now obsolete. To meet statistical needs after the latest municipal reform, which took place in the beginning of 2007, an effort has been made to work out definitions of lands (landsdele) in Denmark. A land is basically a geographical and statistical definition, and the area is not considered to be an administrative unit. The land of Copenhagen City includes the municipalities of Copenhagen, Dragør, Frederiksberg and Tårnby, with a total population of 656,582 in the beginning of 2008. Statistics Denmark, table BEF1A07: Population 1 January by region, age, sex, marital status Retrieved on 2008-03-26. Statistics Denmark, definitions of lands as of 2007-01-01 (excel-file, in danish) Retrieved on 2008-03-26. Copenhagen and Frederiksberg were two of the three last Danish municipalities not belonging to a county. On 1 January 2007, the municipalities lost their county privileges and became part of Copenhagen Capital Region. Suburban Copenhagen is planned according to the Finger Plan, fingerplanen, initiated in 1947, dividing the suburbs into five fingers. The Finger Plan, Denmark.dk The S-train lines are built according to the Finger Plan, while green wedges and highways are built in-between the fingers The Little Finger The northern suburbs form the little finger of the plan, and is traditionally the wealthiest of the suburbs. In popular language, the area is known as "The Whiskey Belt", although the area is mixed between mansions, larger houses, garden cities and mid-size houses. The area has a population of around 270,000 inhabitants. * Gentofte Municipality: Klampenborg, Skovshoved, Charlottenlund, Hellerup, Gentofte, Ordrup, Jægersborg, Dyssegård, Vangede * Lyngby-Taarbæk Municipality: Kongens Lyngby, Ulrikkenborg, Brede, Virum, Sorgenfri, Lundtofte, Hjortekær * Rudersdal Municipality: Søllerød, Holte, Øverød, Gl. Holte, Trørød, Nærum, Vedbæk, Skodsborg, Birkerød, Kajerød, Bistrup * Hørsholm Municipality: Hørsholm, Usserød, Rungsted, Vallerød, Smidstrup * Allerød Municipality: Allerød, Lillerød, Blovstrød * Fredensborg Municipality: Fredensborg, Asminderød, Humlebæk, Kokkedal, Niverød, Nivå. The Ring Finger The North-Northwestern part of the suburbs forms the ring finger. The area is to a large extent formed by detached middle-class dwellings, with some exceptions of housing projects or upper-class areas. The area has a population of around 100,000 inhabitants. * Gladsaxe Municipality: Gladsaxe, Bagsværd, Buddinge, Høje-Gladsaxe (Gladsaxe Heights), Mørkhøj, Søborg * Furesø Municipality: Værløse, Farum, Hareskovby The Middle Finger The northwestern suburbs form the middle finger, and consists of a mixed area of both detached middle-class dwellings, widespread garden cities and large, low-rise public housing projects. The area has a considerable part of the industrial areas of metropolitan Copenhagen, mostly in the traditional sectors of manufacturing. The area has a population of around 110,000 inhabitants. * Herlev Municipality: Herlev, Hjortespring * Ballerup Municipality: Skovlunde, Ballerup, Måløv, Ågerup, Jonstrup, Egebjerg * Egedal Municipality: Smørumnedre, Stenløse, Ølstykke The Index Finger The index finger forms the western suburbs, which are the suburbs with the lowest income per capita and the highest crime-rate. The suburbs vary from the petit bourgeois area of Glostrup to the widespread low housing projects of Albertslund and Taastrup. Of the total of 145,000 inhabitants, some 20% are immigrants of first or second generation. * Rødovre Municipality: Rødovre, Islev * Glostrup Municipality: Glostrup, Hvissinge, Ejby * Brøndby Municipality: Brøndbyøster, Brøndbyvester, Brøndby Nord * Albertslund Municipality * Høje-Taastrup Municipality: Taastrup, Høje-Taastrup, Tåstrupgård, Hedehusene The Thumb The southwest suburbs along the coast form the thumb of the plan. While the central parts of these suburbs are dominated by high-rise housing projects and low-income inhabitants, the distant part is dominated by detached middle-class houses. These suburbs have a population of some 215,000 inhabitants and has a sizeable number of immigrants. * Hvidovre Municipality: Avedøre, Friheden, Hvidovre * Brøndby Municipality: Brøndby Strand * Vallensbæk Municipality * Ishøj Municipality * Greve Municipality: Hundige, Karlslunde, Greve * Solrød Municipality: Solrød, Jersie * Køge municipality: Køge, Ølby The extra finger: Amager Island suburbs & Malmö When the finger plan was initially introduced, the island of Amager wasn't included as the infrastructure was inadequate for modern suburban life. Later it has been improved, and the suburbs at the island hold some 53,000 inhabitants. Amager is now one of the most modern suburbs of Copehagen with increasing wealth. With the opening of the bridge to Sweden this finger has been extended all the way to Malmö. Under an official visit of the Swedish King in 2007 at the Copenhagen City Hall, Copenhagen Lord Mayor Ritt Bjerregaard caused a minor diplomatic incident by referring to Malmö as "København M" with an allusion to the Danish system of postal codes (Nørrebro being København N and Vesterbro being København V for instance), indicating that Malmö had turned into just another Copenhagen bourough. Today 25,000 Danes live in Malmö. Malmø er blevet til København M, DR Online * Tårnby Municipality: Tårnby, Kastrup * Dragør Municipality Summers in Copenhagen are mild with average high temperatures of around 21°C (70°F) and lows of 13°C (55°F), but temperatures could sometimes exceed 25°C (77°F+) and occasional heatwaves are common during the summer. Winters are cold, with temperatures of -2 to 4°C (28 - 40°F), and it rarely drop below −10 °C (14 °F). Precipitation is moderate throughout the year, and snowfall occurs mainly in December through March, but snow cover does not remain a long time. Nørrebro seen from "Søerne" Copenhagen as seen from the City Hall at night Kongens Nytorv View from Rundetårn Gefion Fountian The city's appearance today is shaped by the key role it has played as a regional center for centuries. Copenhagen has a multitude of districts, each representing its time and with its own distinctive character, making up a dense urban fabric. Other distinctive features of the Copenhagen of today is the abundance of water, the greenness and the elaborate system of bicycle paths that line almost every major street. The oldest section of Copenhagen's inner city is often referred to as "Middelalderbyen" (The Medieval City). However, the most distinctive district of Copenhagen is Frederiksstaden developed during the reign of Frederick V. It has Amalienborg Palace at its centre and is dominated by the dome of the Marble Church as well as a number of elegant 18th century mansions. Also part of the old inner city of Copenhagen is the small island of Slotsholmen with Christiansborg Palace and Christianshavn. Around the historical city center lies a band of charming, dense and well-preserved residential bouroughs (Vesterbro, Inner Nørrebro, Inner Østerbro) dating mainly from late 19th century. They were built outside the old ramparts of the city when the city was finally allowed to expand beyond this barrier. Sometimes referred to as "the City of Spires", Copenhagen is known for its horizontal skyline, only broken by spires at churches and castles. Most characteristic is the baroque spire of Church of Our Saviour with its spiralling and narrowing external stairs that visitors can climb to the very top of the spire. Other important spires are those of Christiansborg Palace, the City Hall and the former Church of St. Nikolaj that now houses a modern art venue. A bit lower are the renaissance spires of Rosenborg Castle and the "dragon spire" of [[Christian IV of Christian IV's former stock exchange, so named because it is shaped as the tails of four dragons twined together. Recent years has seen a tremendous boom in modern architecture in Copenhagen both when it comes to Danish architecture and works by international architects. For a few hundred years, virtually no foreign architects had worked in Copenhagen but since the mid 1990s the city and its immediate sourroundings have seen buildings and projects from such international star architects as Norman Foster , Hadid , Nouvel and Liebeskind . In the same time, a number of Danish architects have achieved great success both in Copenhagen and abroad. This has led to a number of international architecture awards. Buildings in Copenhagen have won RIBA European Awards four years in a row ("Sampension" in 2005 , "Kilen" in 2006 , "Tietgenkollegiet" in 2007 and the Royal Playhouse in 2008 ). At the 2008 World Architecture Festival in Barcelona, Bjarke Ingels Group won an award for the World's Best Residential Building 2008 for a house in Ørestad. The Forum AID Award for Best building in Scandinavia went to Copenhagen buildings both in 2006 and 2008 . In 2008 British design magazine Monocle named Copenhagen the World's best design city 2008. The boom in urban development and modern architecture means that the above mentioned horizontal skyline has seen some changes. A political majority has decided to keep the historical center free of highrises. But several areas will see or have already seen massive urban development. Ørestad is the area that until now has seen most of the development. Located near Copenhagen Airport, it currently boasts the largest mall in Scandinavia and a variety of office and residential buildings as well as an IT University and a high school. The two largest hotels in Scandinavia are currently under construction (ultimo 2008). An ambitious regeneration project will create a new Carlsberg District at the historical premises of the Carlsberg Breweries that has terminated the production of beer in Copenhagen and moved it to Jutland. The district will have a total of nine highrises and seeks to mix the old industrial buildings with modern architecture to create a dense, maze-like quarter with a focus on sustainability and an active urban life. A third major area of urban development also with a focus on sustanibility is Nordhavn. The Copenhagen tradition with urban development on artificial islands that was initiated with with Christianh IV's construction of Christianshavn has recently been continued with the creation of Havneholmen as well as a "canal city" in the South Harbour. A district in Copenhagen with a very different take on modern architecture is that of Christiania whose many creative and idiosyncratic buildings are exponents of an "architecture without architects". Østre Anlæg University of Copenhagen Botanical Garden Copenhagen is a green city with many big and small parks. King's Garden, the garden of Rosenborg Castle, is the oldest and most visited park in Copenhagen. Its landscaping was commenced by Christian IV in 1606. Every year it sees more than 2,5 million visitors and in the summer months it is packed with sunbathers, picknickers and ballplayers. It also serves as a sculpture garden with a permanent display of sculptures as well as temporary exhibits during summer. Also located in the city centre are the Botanical Gardens particularly noted for their large complex of 19th century greenhouses donated by Carlsberg founder J. C. Jacobsen. Fælledparken is with its 58 hectars the largest park in Copenhagen. It is popular for sports and hosts a long array of annual events like a free opera concert at the opening of the opera season, other open-air concerts, carnival, Labour Day celebrations and Copenhagen Historic Grand Prix which is a race for antique cars. A historical green space in the northeastern part of the city is Kastellet which is a well-presserved renaissance citadel that now serves mainly as a park. Another popular park is the Frederiksberg Garden which is a 32 hectars romantic landscape park. It houses a large colony of very tame grey herons along with other waterfowls. The park also offers views of the elephants and the elephant house designed by world-famous British architect Norman Foster of the adjacent Copenhagen Zoo. Characteristic of Copenhagen is that a number of cemeteries double as parks, though only for the more quiet activities such as sunbathing, reading and meditation. Assistens Cemetery, the burrial place of Hans Christian Andersen among others, is an important green space for the district of Inner Nørrebro and a Copenhagen institution. The lesser known Vestre Kirkegaard is with its 54 hectars the largest cemetery in Denmark and offers a maze of dense groves, open lawns, winding paths, hedges, overgrown tombs, monuments, tree-lined avenues, lakes and other garden features. It is official municipal policy in Copenhagen that all citizens by 2015 must be able to reach a park or beach on foot in less than 15 minutes. In line with this policy, several new parks are under development in areas poor in green spaces. Copenhagen and the surrounding areas have 3 beaches with a total of approx. 8 km of sandy beaches within 30 minutes of bicycling from the city centre. This includes Amager Strandpark, which opened in 2005 and includes a 2 km long artificial island and a total of 4,6 km of beaches , located just 15 minutes by bicycle or a few minutes by metro from the city centre. The beaches are supplemented by a system of harbour baths along the Copenhagen waterfront. The first and most popular of these is located at Islands Brygge Harbour bath at Islands Brygge, e-architect and has won international acclaim for its design. Islands Brygge. Depending on the boundaries used, the population of Copenhagen differs. Statistics Denmark uses a measure of the contiguously built-up urban area of Copenhagen, this means the number of communities included in this statistical abstract has changed several times, in the abstracts latest edition with close to 1.2 million (1,153,615 (2008)) inhabitants. This number is not a strict result of the commonly-used measuring methods of 200 meters of continuously build-up area, as there are exceptions to the general rule in the suburbs of Dragør, Taastrup, Birkerød, Hørsholm and Farum. Statistics Denmark has never stated the geographical area of urban Copenhagen. However, we know it consists of Copenhagen Municipality, Frederiksberg and 16 of the 20 municipalities in the old counties Copenhagen and Roskilde, though 5 of them only partially. Largest cities of Denmark 2007 Statistics Denmark has worked out definitions of so-called lands (landsdele), a definition used to meet statistical needs on a lower level than regions. From this, the land of Copenhagen city (København by) is defined by the municipalities of Copenhagen, Dragør, Frederiksberg and Tårnby, with a total population of 656,582 in the beginning of 2008. The surroundings of Copenhagen is defined by another land, Copenhagen suburban (Københavns omegn), which includes the municipalities of Albertslund, Ballerup, Brøndby, Gentofte, Gladsaxe, Glostrup, Herlev, Hvidovre, Høje-Taastrup, Ishøj, Lyngby-Taarbæk, Rødovre and Vallensbæk, and with a total population of 504,481 (January 1, 2008). This gives a total population of 1,161,063 for these two lands together. The lands of Copenhagen city and Copenhagen suburban can together be used as a definition of the metropolitan area, although perhaps a somewhat narrow one. From 1 January 2008 the population of the 34 municipalities closest to and including the municipality of Copenhagen is 1,857,263 and by 1 October 2008 the population of this area had grown to 1,872,706. Statistikbanken.dk Population table BEF1A07 Land area: 2,923 km² (1,032 sq mi). (Capital Region - Bornholm + East Zealand + Stevns) Water area: 105 km² (40.5 sq mi). Orienteering fra Københavns Kommune. Statistisk Kontor.2003 nr. 25 Thus, the region comprises 6.8% of the land area of Denmark, but has 34% of Denmark's population. This gives a total of 641 inhabitants per km² or 1,660 per square mile for the region. This compares with a population density in the rest of the country of approximately 90 per km² or around 230 per square mile. Based on a 10%-isoline (data from 2002) in which at least 10% commutes into central parts of the Copenhagen area, most of Zealand would be covered and this area has a population of about 2.3 million inhabitants. /ref> Since the opening of the Øresund Bridge in 2000, commuting between and integration of Greater Malmö and Copenhagen have increased rapidly, and a combined statistical metropolitan area has formed. This metropolitan area, which has a population of 2,501,094 (2008) is expected to be officially defined by the respective statistics divisions of Denmark and Sweden in the upcoming years. A high-ranking civil servant of the Interior Ministry, Henning Strøm, who was involved in (i.e. known as "the Father of") a past municipal reform, which took effect on 1 April 1970, said on television, broadcast in connection with the recent Kommunalreformen ("The Municipal Reform" of 2007), that Copenhagen municipality would encompass an area with 1.5 million inhabitants, if the principles of the 1970 municipal reform were also applied on Copenhagen municipality. DR netnews 25-06-04 In other words: in the rest of Denmark the city occupies only part of the municipality, but in Copenhagen the municipality of Copenhagen occupies only part of the city of Copenhagen. Since the late 1990s, Copenhagen has undergone a transformation from a cozy Scandinavian capital to a cool metropolitan city of international scope in the league of cities like Barcelona and Amsterdam. This is due to massive investments in infrastructure as well as culture and wave of new successful Danish architects, designers and chefs. Between 1998 and 2008, lifestyle journalists wordwide (from Wallpaper to the NewYorkTimes) have praised Copenhagen as a cool, well-functioning creative city (see "Copenhagen In international rankings" below). Copenhagen has a wide array of museums of International standard. The National Museum, Nationalmuseet, is Denmark's largest museum of Archaeology and cultural history, comprising the histories of Danish and foreign cultures alike. The National Gallery - "Statens Museum for Kunst" - is Denmark's national art museum and contains collections dating from 12th century and all the way up to present day artists. Among artists represented in the collections are Rubens, Rembrandt, Picasso, Braque, Léger, Matisse and Emil Nolde. Another important Copenhagen art museum is the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek founded by second generation Carlsberg tycoon-philantropist Carl Jacobsen and is built around his personal collections. Its main focus is classical Egyptian, Roman and Greek sculptures and other antiquities and a collection of Rodin sculptures that is the largest outside France (Glypto-, from the Greek root glyphein, to carve and theke, a storing-place). Besides its sculpture collections, the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek also holds a comprehensive collection of paintings of impressionist and post-impressionist painters such as Monet,Renoir, Cézanne, van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec as well as Danish Golden Age painters. Loiusiana is an internationally acclaimed museum of modern art situated on the coast just north of Copenhagen. It is located in the middle of a sculpture garden on a cliff overlooking Øresund. The The museum is included in the Patricia Schultz book 1,000 Places to See Before You Die. The Danish Museum of Art & Design is housed in the 18th century former Frederiks Hospital and displays Danish design as well as international design and crafts. Other museums include: * Thorvaldsens Museum is a single-artist museum dedicated to the oeuvre,of romantic Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen who lived and worked in Rome. * Cisternerne is a small but different museum dedicated to modern glass art. It is located in some grotto-like former cisterns that come complete with Stalactites formed by the changing water levels. * The Ordrupgaard Museum is an art museum located just notth of Copenhagen in an old mansion with an extension by Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. It features 19th century French and Danish art and is particularly noted for its works by Paul Gaugin. Copenhagen Opera House The Royal Danish Theatre In January 2009 the new Copenhagen Concert Hall will open. It is designed by Jean Nouvel and will have four halls with the main auditorium seating 1800 people. It will serve as the home of the Danish National Symphony Orchestra and along with the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles the most expensive concert hall ever built. Another important venue for classical music is the Tivoli Concert Hall located in the histtrocal Tivoli Gardens. The Copenhagen Opera House (in Danish usually called Operaen) that opened in 2005 and is designed by Henning Larsen, is the national opera house of Denmark and among the most modern opera houses in the world. The old Royal Danish Theatre dating from 1748 still works as a supplementary opera scene. The Royal Danish Theatre is also home to the Royal Danish Ballet. Gounded in 1748 along with the theatre, it is one of the oldest ballet troups in Europe. It is home the the Bournonville style of ballet. Copenhagen has a significant jazz scene that has existed for many years. It developed when a number of American jazz musicians such as Ben Webster, Thad Jones, Richard Boone, Ernie Wilkins, Kenny Drew, Ed Thigpen, Bob Rockwell and others such as rock guitarist Link Wray came to live in Copenhagen during the 1960s. Every year in early July Copenhagen's streets, aquares and parks fills up with big and small jazz concerts during the Copenhagen Jazz Festival (see yearly events). The most important venue for rhythmical music in Copenhagen is Vega in Vesterbro district which has been chosen as "best concert venue in Europe" by international music magazine Live For free entertainment one can stroll along Strøget, especially between Nytorv and Højbro Plads, which in the late afternoon and evening is a bit like an impromptu three-ring circus with musicians, magicians, jugglers and other street performers. View from Amerikakaj Copenhagen has a wide variety of sport teams. The two major football teams are Brøndby IF and FC København. Brøndby IF plays at Brøndby Stadium in Brøndby and FC København plays at Parken in Østerbro, Copenhagen. Notable Copenhagen teams playing at the second highest level in Danish football (the Danish 1st Division) include Lyngby BK, AB, HIK, Frem, Brønshøj, Fremad Amager and Skjold. Copenhagen also has three ice hockey teams: Rødovre Mighty Bulls, Herlev Hornets and Nordsjælland Cobras. There are a lot of handball teams in Copenhagen. FC København owns both a women's and a men's team, which have the same name and logo. They were formerly known as FIF. Of other clubs playing in the "highest" leagues there are; Ajax Heroes, Ydun, and HIK (Hellerup). Rugby union is also played in the Danish capital with teams such as CSR-Nanok, Copenhagen Scrum, Exiles, Froggies and Rugbyklubben Speed. The Danish Australian Football League, based in Copenhagen is the largest Australian rules football competition outside of the English speaking world. Copenhagen is also home to a number of Denmark's 40-odd cricket clubs. Although Denmark has been an associate member of the International Cricket Council since 1966, the sport is not taught much in schools, and Danish cricket competes unfavourably with the much more widely followed sport of football for players, facilities, media attention and spectators. The second World Outgames will take place in Copenhagen in 2009, after Berlin refused to stage them due to the continuing rivalry between the two gay sporting organisations. It would be the largest such event hosted in Copenhagen. Copenhagen has the two oldest amusement parks in the World. World-famous Tivoli Gardens is an amusement park and pleasure garden located right in the middle of Copenhagen between the the City Hall Square and the the Central Station. Among its rides are the oldest still operating roller coaster and the oldest ferris wheel in the World. Tivoli Gardens, the rides It also function as an open-air concert venue. It opened on August 15 1843 making it the second oldest amusement park in the world. Dyrehavsbakken (in English "the Deer Garden Hill") is located in Klampenborg a little north of Copenhagen in a forested area of great natural beauty. Having been made into an amusement park complete with rides, games and restaurants by Christian IV, it is the oldest surviving amusement park in the World. Copenhagen is a centre for the New Nordic Cuisine. Nordic Cuisine, New York Times In November 2004 a Nordic Kitchen Symposium was helt in Copenhagen at the initiative of Danish chef and gastronome Claus Meyer. The symposium had attandance of top chefs from all of the Nordic countries and led to the adoption of a Manifesto for the New Nordic Cuisine. Manifesto for a New Nordic Cuisine Claus Meyer is also the co-founder of the two-Michelin star Restaurant Noma (Nordisk Madhus) which is a flagship restaurant for the new Nordic cuisine. In 2008 it was ranked as 10th best in the World by acclaimed British restaurant & fine dining magazine Restaurant at their 50 Best Restaurants of the World 2008-list. Furthermore, the users of the international website TripAdvisor with 25 million users a month rated Noma as the best restaurant in the world. TripAdvisor ranking As of 2008 Copenhagen boasts a total of 11 Michelin star restaurants. This is by far the highest number of any Nordic city. Apart from Noma they include one of only two Thai restaurants worldwide that has received a Michelin star. Due to the development, Copenhagen is increasingly being recognized internationally as a gourmet destination. The Top 10 cities to visit in 2009, TimesOnline Apart from the selection of high end restaurants, Copenhagen offers a great variety of Danish, International and ethnic restaurants and it is possible to find modest eateries with open sandwiches (called "smørrebrød"), which is the traditional and best known dish for lunch. Most restaurants, though, serve international dishes. danish pastry, another local specialty, can be sampled from the numerous bakeries found in all parts of the city. Copenhagen has long been associated with beer.Carlsberg beer has been brewed at the brewery's premises at the border between Vesterbro and Valby districts since 1847 and has long been almost synonumous with Danish beer production. However, recent years have seen an explosive growth in the number of microbreweries so that Denmark today has more than 100 breweries Nyeste artikler fra Bryggeriforeningen, Bryggeriforeningen , many of which are located in Copenhagen. Some like Nørrebro Bryghus also act as brewpubs where it is possible also to eat at the premisses. Many cafés specialize in a huge selection of quality beers and beer has also become an important ingridient in the New Nordic Cuisine. Copenhagen is the media centre of Denmark. DR, the major Danish public service broadcasting corporation collected their activities in a new headquarters, DR byen, in 2006 and 2007. Similarly has Odense based TV2 collected its Copenhagen activities in a modern media house in the South Harbour. The two national daily newspapters Politiken and Berlingske Tidende and the two tabloids Ekstra Bladet and B. T. are based in Copenhagen. Other important media corporations include Aller Press which is the largest publisher of weekly and monthly magazines in Scandinavia, the Egmont media group and Gyldendal, the largest Danish publisher of books. Copenhagen also has a sizable movie and television industry. Filmbyen, The Movie City, which is located in a former military camp in the suburg of Hvidovre and houses several movie companies and studio studios. Among the movie campanies are Zentropa co-owned by Danish movie director Lars von Trier who is behind several international movie productions as well as a founding force behind the Dogma Movement. * Copenhagen Fashion Week takes place every year in February and August. It is the largest fashion event in Northern Europe. Fashion Capital Copenhagen On the catwalks are a growing number of new and known Danish talent with a preview of their upcoming collections. And at the three trade fairs, CPH Vision, Gallery and Copenhagen International Fashion Fair, you will find an additional 1,100 exhibitors representing a total of over 2,300 international brand name collections. Danish fashion is known for its unique angle on design, innovation and aesthetics. With a more modern approach to femininity and functionality, expressed in fresh silhouettes, a focus on details and incomparable quality. These are only some of the reasons why more than 50,000 buyers, designers and global press attend Copenhagen Fashion Week twice a year. Copenhagen Fashion Week is organised by the Danish Fashion Institute - a newly founded network organisation created by and for the Danish fashion industry. Copenhagen Fashion Week * Carnival in Copenhagen takes place every year since 1982 during the Whitsun Holiday in Fælledparken and around the city. 120 bands, 2000 dancers and 100,000 spectators participate. History of Copenhagen * Copenhagen Distortion is a youth culture festival capturing the zeitgeist of the city, gathering every year (5 days up to the first weekend of June) up to 30.000 people in the streets, in shops, galleries, clubs, bars, in boats and buses, with a cultural focus on street culture, art and upfront dance music. Copenhagen Distortion * Roskilde Festival is a music festival helt every year in Roskilde west of Copenhagen. Gathering around 100,000 people every year, it is one of the four largest rock music festivals in Europe.. * Copenhagen Jazz Festival, which begins on the first Friday in July, is a popular annual event that is the result of Copenhagen's significant jazz scene. The festival takes place throughout the city in streets, squares and parks as well as in cafés and concert halls. Copenhagen Jazz Festival 3+ years, Wonderful Copenhagen It embraces around 900 concerts, 100 venues and over 200,000 guests from Denmark and around the world. It is recognized as one of the leading jazz festivals in the World. Top 10 best Jazz Festivals, TripAdvisor Copenhagen Jazz Festival * Copenhagen Pride is a gay pride festival taking place every year in August. Among the events is "Tivoli goes pink" and it ends with a parade. Copenhagen Pride * Copenhagen Cooking takes place in August every year and is a food festival with a wide array of events all over the city. * Copenhagen International Film Festival takes place in September every year with a focus on European films. The main prize is called the Golden Swan. Copenhagen International Film Festival Middelgrunden wind farm just off Copenhagen The Danish National Bank. Designed by Arne Jacobsen. Copenhagen is the economical and financial centre of Denmark Regionale regnskaber 2005 - Nyt fra Danmarks Statistik - Danmarks Statistik and also a strong business and economic centre in the entire Scandinavian-Baltic region. In 2008 Copenhagen was ranked 4th by Financial Times-owned FDi magazine on their list of Top50 European Cities of the Future after London, Paris and Berlin. Top 50 European City of the Future 2008/09 In 2006/07 FDi Magazine named Copenhagen Scandinavian City of the Future Scandinavian City of the Future 06/07 and in 2004/05 Copenhagen was named Northern European City of the Future ahead of other cities from Scandinavia, UK, Ireland and Benelux. Northern European City of the Future 2004/05 In the 2008 Worldwide Centers of Commerce Index, published by MasterCard, Copenhagen was ranked 14th in the world and 1st in Scandinavia. Copenhagen is one of the cities in Western Europe attracting most regional headquarters and distribution centers. Among the international companies that have chosen to locate their regional headquarters in Copenhagen is Microsoft.There are 2,100 foreign companies located in the Copenhagen area, of which approx. 500 are Scandinavian head offices, representing a wide range of industries. Copenhagen has a service oriented economy. An important sector is life science and research & development plays a major role in the economy of the city. The entire Oresund Region is in cooperation with Sweden being promoted as Medicon Valley. Major Danish biotech companies like Novo Nordisk and Lundbeck, both of which are among 50 largest pharmaceutical and biotech companies in the World, are located in the greater Copenhagen area. USATODAY.com The region also boasts the largest IT-cluster in Scandinavia with nearly 100,000 employees and the city of Copenhagen is home to Nokia's largest research centre outside Finland. Copenhagen - Overview Shipping is also an import business with Maersk, the World's largest shipping company, having their world headquarters in Copenhagen. Several international companies have established their regional headquarters in Copenhagen, e.g. Microsoft. Maersk, the world's largest container shipping company, has their world headquarters in Copenhagen. A substantial number of Danish pharmaceuticals such as Novo Nordisk, Ferring Pharmaceuticals and Bavarian Nordic also operate in the area, having placed their headquarters in or close to Copenhagen. USATODAY.com Copenhagen has some of the highest gross wages in the World. City Mayors: World's richest cities High taxes mean that wages are reduced after mandatory deduction. A neneficial researcher scheme with low taxation of foreigh specialists Level of salary in Denmark has made Denmark an attractive location for highly educated foreign labour to settle. Copenhagen is however also among the most expensive cities in Europe. City Mayors: World's most expensive cities (EIU) City Mayors: World's most expensive cities - Ranking Copenhagen University Copenhagen has a well-developed higher education system of public universities. Most prominent among these is the University of Copenhagen. Founded in 1479, it is the oldest university in Denmark. It is a world-renowned research and teaching institution with campuses around the city and forms part of the International Alliance of Research Universities (IARU), which is a collaboration between international top universities including Oxford, Cambridge, Yale and Berkeley. The University attracts app. 1500 international and exchange students every year. It is repeatedly ranked as one of the best universities in Europe. At the Times Higher Education's QS World University Rankings 2008 list, it was ranked as fourth best in continental Europe. TheAcademic Ranking of World Universities 2008 placesd it as number 43 worldwide and 8th in Europe. A second all-round university in the Copenhagen area is Roskilde University located in Roskilde. The Technical University of Denmark (DTU), Danmarks Tekniske Universitet, is located in Lyngby at the northern outskirts of Copenhagen. In 2008 it was ranked third highest in Europe on Times Higher Education's list of the most influential technical universities in the World. The Max Planck Institute in Germany was ranked 15, ETH Zurich in Switzerland was ranked 15 and DTU in Denmark was ranked 20. Copenhagen Business School (CBS) is an estimed and EQUIS accredited business school located on Frederiksberg. Copenhagen is rich in companies and institutions with a focus on research and development within the biotechnology , Infrastructure & logistics - Copenhagen a distribution hub, retrieved February 22, 2007. and life science sectors. Two of the 50 largest pharmaceutical and biotech companies in the World are located in the greater Copenhagen area. The biotech and life science cluster in Copenhagen and the rest of the Oresund Region is one of the strongest in Europe. Since 1995 this has been branded as the Medicon Valley in a Danish-Swedish cooperation. The aim is to strengthen the region's position and to promote cooperation between companies and academia. The German biotech giant Sartorius Stedim Biotech, which is currently creating a Nordic head office in Tåstrup on the outskirts of Copenhagen. The Øresund region is responsible for 60 percent of life science production in Scandinavia and is home to 111 biotech companies. The greater Copenhagen area has a very well established transportation infrastructure making it a hub in Northern Europe. Christianshavns Kanal Copenhagen has a large network of toll-free highways and public roads connecting different municipalities of the city together and to Northern Europe. As in many other cities in Europe traffic is increasing in Copenhagen. The radial arterial roads and highways leading to the Copenhagen city center are critically congested during peak hours. Copenhagen is known as one of the most bicycle-friendly cities in the world. Every day 1,1 million km are bicycled in Copenhagen. 36 % of all citizens are commuting to work, school or university by bicycle and it is municipal policy that this number should go up to 40 % by 2012 and 50 % in 2015. The city's bicycle paths are extensive and well-used. Bicycle paths are often separated from the main traffic lanes and sometimes have their own signal systems. The municipality is also developing a system of interconnected green bicycle routes, greenways, with the aim to facilitate fast, safe and pleasant bicycle transport from one end of the city to the other. The network will cover more than 100 km and consist of 22 routes when finished. The city provides public bicycles which can be found throughout the downtown area and used with a returnable deposit of 20 kroner. Copenhagen's well-developed bicycle culture has given rise to the term ‘copenhagenize’. This is the practice of other cities adopting Copenhagen-style bike lanes and bicycle infrastructure. In 2007 Copenhagen-based Danish urban design consultant Jan Gehl was hired by the New York City Department of Transportation to re-imagine New York City streets by introducing designs to improve life for pedestrians and cyclists. In recognition of Copenhagen's emphasis on bicycling, the city has been chosen by the Union Cycliste Internationale as their first official Bike City. Bike City Copenhagen will take place from 2008 to 2011 and consist of big cycling events for professionals as well as amateurs. The harbour of Copenhagen has largely lost its importance as an industrial harbour. In 2001 Copenhagen Harbour merged with the harbour in Malmö to create Copenhagen-Malmö Port. It has several functions, the most important being as a major cruise destination. In 2007 a record 286 cruise ships with 420,000 cruise passengers visited Copenhagen. 120 of these ships either started or ended the cruise in Copenhagen. In 2008 these numbers grew further to 310 cruise ships and 560,000 passengers. As a result of the growth in the cruise industry facilities asre being expanded and improved. At the World Travel Awards in 2008, Copenhagen Port was named the number one cruise destination in Europe for the fifth year in a row. Copenhagen is serviced by ferry lines to Oslo in Norway (called "Oslobåden") with a daily connection and to Świnoujście in Poland (called "Polensfærgerne") with five weekly connections. Copenhagen Airport is the principal airport serving Copenhagen. It is the largest in Scandinavia and the 17th largest in Europe. It is located in Kastrup on the island of Amager and has very efficient connections to downtown Copenhagen with metro trains going to Kongens Nytorv in 15 minutes with 4-6 minutes between departures and regional trains going to the Central Station in 12 minutes. Its location also makes it the most important international airport for large parts of southern Sweden. Over the Øresund Bridge trains go to Malmö South in 14 minutes or Malmö Central Station in 22 minutes. Copenhagen Airport has won the award as "The best airport in Europe" four times, and as "The best airport in the world" two times. Copenhagen Airport is the seventh best airport in the world - second best in Europe - when you ask the passengers. The British organization Skytrax is doing so every year, writes the airport in a press release. 40 criteria are employed for the ranking. The new metro S-train at Nørreport Metro entrance in FrederiksbergThe public transportation system of Copenhagen consists of commuter trains (called S-trains, S-tog), buses, and a metro. The S-trains form the basis of the transportation network, stretching to most areas of metropolitan Copenhagen, with their main hub at Copenhagen Central Station (København H). Regional trains supplement the S-train services with lines extending further such as to the Copenhagen Airport, Elsinore, and Malmö. The Danish State Railways' Intercity network has its eastern terminus and main hub at Copenhagen, with most trains extending to Copenhagen Airport. The fare system is based on 95 zones covering the capital area. Tickets are transferable from one means of transport to another within a time limit. The more zones a ticket is valid for, the longer its time validity with a maximum of two hours. Discount cards (punch cards, klippekort) and period cards are available. Ticket prices are high and have increased substantially in recent years leading to a decrease in passenger numbers. In fact, the percentage of trips made on public transportation in Copenhagen is quite low by northern European standards. The Copenhagen Metro began operation in 2002 and currently has only two lines. In April 2008, it was named Best Metro in the World by industry experts. Copenhagen Metro Best in the World |Christiansborg Palace - home of the Danish Parliament Folketinget, the Supreme Court, Office of the Prime Minister and official reception area of Queen Margrethe II |- |Børsen - the former Stock Exchange building |- |The Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen harbor |- |Amalienborg Palace - home of the Danish royal family. The central building is the domed Marble Church located behind the palace complex |- |Nyhavn |- |The Marble Church |- |Rosenborg Castle in central Copenhagen |- |Christianshavns Canal |- |The Tivoli, photographed from Eduard Spelterini's balloon on June 22, 1922 |} Copenhagen is recognized as one of the most environmentally friendly cities in the world. In 2006 Copenhagen Municipality received the European Environmental Management Award. The award was given for long-term holistic environmental planning. It is municipal policy to reduce CO2 emissions by 20% before the end of 2015. In 2001 a large offshore wind farm was built just off the coast of Copenhagen at Middelgrunden. It produces about 4 % of the city's energy. Many years of major investments in sewage treatment has improved water quality in the harbour to an extent that the inner harbour can be used for swimming and facilities for this are provided at a number of locations. Another municipal policy is that 40% of all citizens should bicycle to and from work by 2012 and a number of initiatives are being taken to implement this policy (see "bicycling above"). Copenhagen is the capital in the World where organic food has the largest market share. One in every ten purchases is organic in Copenhagen. Within the municipal sector in Copenhagen, 45 % of all food consumption is organic but the target is considerably higher. With the environmental strategy "Environment Metropolis: Our Vision 2015" the politicians wish that solely organic food is to be served in 90 per cent of the Copenhagen old-age homes and residential homes for children and young persons in 2015.. - - - Image:Christiansborg Slot.jpg| Christiansborg Slot - Image:Børsen København.jpg| Børsen- the former Stock Exchange building - Image:Littlemermaid207.jpg| The Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen harbor - Image:Copenhagen amalienborg seen from opera house.jpg| Amalienborg Palace - Image:Nyhavn 9-15 København.jpg| Nyhavn - Image:Kbh Marmorkirche 1.jpg| Frederik's Church|The Marble Church - Image:Rosenborg.jpg| Rosenborg Castle in central Copenhagen - Image:Christianshavns Kanal morning.jpg| Christianshavns Canal - Image:Amalienborgas.JPG | The Royal Residence - Image:Copenhague 108.jpg | The Round Tower - Image:Gammel_Strand_København.jpg| Gammel Strand - Image:Kbh_Stroeget_Nikolaj_Kirche.jpg | Stroget - Image:A_Copenhagen_center_street.jpg| Central Copenhagen Street - Image:Amagergade 01.jpg| Amagergade - Image:Gebauede_in_kopenhagen.jpg| Copenhagen Habour - Image:Container ship loading-700px.jpg| Copenhagen Ship Loading - Image:Christianshavns_Torv.jpg | Christianshavn Torv - Image:Copenhagen-Airport-from-air.jpg | Copenhagen Airport from the air - Image:Østre Anlæg København.jpg | Østre Anlæg - Image:Frederiksberg Slot.jpg | Frederiksberg Castle - Image:Kongens Nytorv 17.jpg | Kongens Nytorv - Image:Kopenhagen zeehaven.JPG | Copenhagen Canal Tour - Image:Den-sorte-diamant.jpg | The Black Diamond ( The Royal Library ) - Image:Tivoli Copenhagen at Night.jpg | Tivoli by Night - Image:Kopenhagen 3.jpg | View over Copenhagen - Image:Gammeltorv Copenhagen Denmark.JPG | Gammeltorv - Image:Copenhagen denmark.jpg | Nyhavn - Image:Copenhagen City Hall.jpg | Copenhagen City Hall - Image:Gefion.jpg| Gefion Fountian - Image:Christiania Exit.JPG | Christiania - Image:Gebauede in kopenhagen.jpg | Copenhagen at Night - Image:Copenhague 050.jpg | Inner City Canel - Copenhagen has placed well in a number of international rankings, some of which are mentioned below. * Copenhagen was ranked #1 as Most Livable City in the World by international lifestyle magazine Monocle on their Top 25 Most Livable Cities 2008 list Monocles page on Copenhagen * Worlds Best Design City 2008 also by Monocle. Monocles page on Copenhagen *Monocle has also stated that Copenhagen is "Scandinavia's most desirable city". By Stuart Husband Monocle Magazine Published: June 19, 2007 *Copenhagen ranked #4 by Financial Times-owned FDi magazine on their list of Top50 European Cities of the Future after London, Paris and Berlin. Top 50 European City of the Future 2008/09 In 2006/07 FDi Magazine named Copenhagen Scandinavian City of the Future Scandinavian City of the Future 06/07 and in 2004/05 Copenhagen was named Northern European City of the Future ahead of other cities from Scandinavia, UK, Ireland and Benelux. Northern European City of the Future 2004/05 * In the 2008 Worldwide Centers of Commerce Index, published by MasterCard, Copenhagen was ranked 14th in the world and 1st in Scandinavia. *Copenhagen #1 out of 254 locations in the Location Ranking Survey performed by ECA International that has asked European experts where they prefer to be stationed worldwide. Location Ranking Survey * Copenhagen was ranked #6 in Grist Magazine's "15 Green Cities" list in 2007 making Copenhagen the greenest capital of Scandinavia according to Grist Magazine. 15 Green Cities | Grist | Main Dish | 19 July 2007 * Copenhagen is the capital in the World where organic food has the largest market share. One in every ten purchases is organic in Copenhagen. World-champinions in organic food * The Copenhagen Metro has been named the Best Metro in the World by industry experts. Copenhagen Metro Best in the World * Copenhagen is the worlds #7 most expensive city and #3 most expensive in Europe on the Forbes List. Forbes-Worlds Most Expensive Cities List * Copenhagen is ranked #7 as Preferred City For Investment Projects. Preferred City For Investment Projects * Copenhagen ranked 3rd in Western Europe in terms of attracting regional headquarters and distribution centers, only surpassed by London and Paris. * Copenhagen ranks #1 in the Global Earning Ranking. [h Global earning ranking ] * Copenhagen ranks as the 5th most popular city in the world for international meetings and conferences. Style & Substance Danmark * Copenhagen ranks as one of the most attractive cities to live and work in Europe. A great place to live * Copenhagen ranks 2nd in Europe for Quality of life according to a survey from 2005 by the international consultancy firm William Mercer. A great place to live * Morten Andersen, veteran NFL kicker * Niels Bohr, physicist, Nobel laureate * Aage Bohr, physicist, Nobel laureate (son of Niels Bohr) * Victor Borge, entertainer * August Bournonville, ballet choreographer * Georg Brandes, critic * Helena Christensen, supermodel * Tove Ditlevsen, writer * Carl Theodor Dreyer, movie director * Vilhelm Hammershøi, painter * Gus Hansen, poker player * Iben Hjejle, actor * Peter Høeg, writer * Arne Jacobsen, designer * Robert Jacobsen, painter * J. C. Jacobsen, founder of Carlsberg Brewery * Mathias Lauridsen, male topmodel * Søren Kierkegaard, philosopher * Bjørn Lomborg, Academic and Author of The Skeptical Environmentalist * Lauritz Melchior, opera singer * Mads Mikkelsen, actor * Carl-Henning Pedersen, painter * Lars von Trier, movie director * Dan Turèll, writer * Lars Ulrich, drummer and songwriter of the heavy-metal band Metallica * Jørn Utzon, architect, designer of the Sydney Opera House * Michael Laudrup, former international football player, former manager of Spanish Primera Division Football team Getafe. * Peter Schmeichel, former international football player * Bertel Thorvaldsen, sculpturer Copenhagen is twinned with: * Paris in France (partner city) * Reykjavík in Iceland * Prague in Czech Republic (unofficial partner city) * San Francisco de Campeche in Mexico * Municipal statistics: NetBorger Kommunefakta, delivered from KMD, also known as Kommunedata (Municipal Data) * Municipal and county statistics: Statistics Denmark statistikbanken.dk * Demography: Statistical Yearbook of Copenhagen (part English); ISBN 87-7024-230-5 * History and demography: København Forslag til kommuneplan 1985; ISBN 87-88034-03-8 * Oresund Region * Eurovision Song Contest 2001 * Junior Eurovision Song Contest 2003 * MTV Europe Music Awards 2006 * Transportation in Denmark * Ports of the Baltic Sea * A Much Different Tourist Site and Cultural Guide about Copenhagen * Wonderful Copenhagen official tourism website * Copenhagen Capacity official investment agency of Copenhagen * * Official municipal website * City of Copenhagen Statistical Office * Krak searchable map
Copenhagen
What transnational bridge was completed in 2000?
Oresund Bridge
data/set3/a8
Copenhagen Copenhagen ( ; ) is the capital and largest city of Denmark, with a population of 1,161,063. Copenhagen is situated on the Islands of Zealand and Amager. First documented in the 11th century, Copenhagen became the capital of Denmark in the beginning of the 15th century and during the 17th century under the reign of Christian IV it became an important regional centre. Copenhagen is usually ranked as one of the two largest cities of the Nordic Countries. [ LARGEST CITY Copenhagen or Stockholm ? [ Denmark in brief . With the completion of the transnational Oresund Bridge in 2000, Copenhagen has become the centre of the increasingly integrating Øresund Region with around 3.7 million inhabitants covering an area of 20,869 km² (177/km²). Within this region, Copenhagen and Malmö is in the process of growing into one common metropolitan area. Copenhagen is a major regional center of culture, business, media, and science. In 2008 Copenhagen was ranked #4 by Financial Times-owned FDi magazine on their list of Top50 European Cities of the Future after London, Paris and Berlin. In the 2008 Worldwide Centers of Commerce Index, published by MasterCard, Copenhagen was ranked 14th in the world and 1st in Scandinavia. Life science, information technology and shipping are important sectors and research & development plays a major role in the city's economy. Its strategic location and excellent infrastructure with the largest airport in Scandinavia located 14 minutes by train from the city centre, has made it a regional hub and a popular location for regional headquarters as well as conventions. Copenhagen has repeatedly been recognized as one of the cities with the best quality of life. and in 2008 it was singled out as the Most Liveable City in the World by international lifestyle magazine Monocle on their Top 25 Most Liveable Cities 2008 list. It is also considered one of the world's most environmentally friendly cities with the water in the inner harbor being so clean that it can be used for swimming and 36 % of all citizens commuting to work by bicycle, every day bicycling a total 1.1 million km. Since the turn of the millennium Copenhagen has seen a strong urban and cultural development and has been described as a boom town. This is partly due to massive investments in cultural facilities as well as infrastructure and a new wave of succesful designers, chefs and architects. Copenhagen c. 1895 The Palace during renovation. From its humble origins as a fishing village to its heyday as the glittering capital of the Danish Empire, to its current position as one of the world's premier design capitals, the stories and characters of Copenhagen's history can be discovered in its sumptuous palaces, copper-roofed town houses and atmospheric cobbled squares. From the Viking Age there was a fishing village by the name of "Havn" (harbour) at the site. Recent archeological finds indicate that by the 11th century, Copenhagen had already grown into a small town with a large estate, a church, a market, at least two wells and many smaller habitations spread over a fairly wide area. Arkæologer graver ny teori om København op af mulden (Archeologists develop new theory about Copenhagen from their digs), Videnskab.dk, 5 November 2008 From the middle of the 12th century it grew in importance after coming into the possession of the Bishop Absalon, who fortified it in 1167, the year traditionally marking the foundation of Copenhagen. The excellent harbour encouraged Copenhagen's growth until it became an important centre of commerce. The city's origin as a harbour and a place of commerce is reflected in its name. Its original designation, from which the contemporary Danish name is derived, was Køpmannæhafn, "merchants' harbor". The English name for the city is derived from its Low German name, Kopenhagen. The element hafnium is also named for Copenhagen, whose Latin name is Hafnia. Biography of George de Hevesy It was repeatedly attacked by the Hanseatic League as the Germans took notice. In 1254, it received its charter as a city under Bishop Jakob Erlandsen. During 1658-59 it withstood a severe siege by the Swedes under Charles X and successfully repelled a major assault. In 1801 a British fleet under Admiral Parker fought a major battle, the Battle of Copenhagen, with the Danish Navy in Copenhagen harbour. It was during this battle Lord Nelson famously "put the telescope to the blind eye" in order not to see Admiral Parker's signal to cease fire. When a British expeditionary force bombarded Copenhagen in 1807, to gain control of the Danish Navy, the city suffered great damage and hundreds of people were killed. The reason why the devastation was so great was that Copenhagen relied on an old defence-line rendered virtually useless by the increase in shooting range available to the British. But not until the 1850s were the ramparts of the city opened to allow new housing to be built around the lakes ("Søerne") which bordered the old defence system to the west. This dramatic increase of space was long overdue, not only because the old ramparts were out of date as a defence system, but also because of bad sanitation in the old city. Before the opening, Copenhagen Center was inhabited by approximately 125,000 people, peaking in the census of 1870 (140,000); today the figure is around 25,000. In 1901, Copenhagen expanded further, incorporating communities with 40,000 people, and in the process making Frederiksberg an enclave within Copenhagen. During World War II, Copenhagen was occupied by German troops along with the rest of the country from 9 April 1940 until 4 May 1945. In August 1943, when the government's collaboration with the occupation forces collapsed, several ships were sunk in Copenhagen Harbour by the Royal Danish Navy to prevent them being used by the Germans. The city has grown greatly since the war, in the seventies using the so-called five-finger-plan of commuter train lines to surrounding towns and suburbs. Since the summer 2000, the cities of Copenhagen and Malmö have been connected by a toll bridge/tunnel (Øresund Bridge), which allows both rail and road passengers to cross. As a result, Copenhagen has become the centre of a larger metropolitan area which spans both nations. The construction of the bridge has led to a large number of changes to the public transportation system and the extensive redevelopment of Amager, south of the main city. Location of Coppenhagen in Denmark Nørrebro seen from "Søerne" Copenhagen City Hall Copenhagen is located on the eastern shore of the island of Zealand (Sjælland) and partly on the island of Amager. Copenhagen faces the Øresund to the east, the strait of water that separates Denmark from Sweden, and that connects the North Sea with the Baltic Sea. On the Swedish side of the sound directly across from Copenhagen, lie the towns of Malmö and Landskrona. Copenhagen is also a part of the Øresund region, which consists of Zealand, Lolland-Falster and Bornholm in Denmark and Scania in Sweden. Copenhagen Municipality is an administrative unit that covers the central part of the actual city of Copenhagen. It is a fairly small part of the actual city that falles within the municipality both because it covers a very confined area and because the enclave of Frederiksberg is an independent municipality. Copenhagen consists of a number of boroughs and areas, including * Indre By * Østerbro * Nørrebro * Vesterbro * Amagerbro * Nordhavnen (North Habour) * Valby * Kongens Enghave (King's Meadow Garden), also known as Sydhavnen (meaning South Harbour) * Christianshavn * Christiania (Freetown) * Sundbyvester (Sundby West), * Sundbyøster (Sundby East) * Ørestad * Islands Brygge * Bellahøj * Brønshøj * Ryparken * Bispebjerg * Vigerslev * Vestamager * Vanløse The suffix -bro in the names Østerbro, Nørrebro, Vesterbro and Amagerbro should not be confused with the Danish word for bridge, which is also 'bro'. The term is thought to be an abbreviation or short form of the Danish word brolagt meaning paved referring to the roads paved with cobblestones leading to the city's former gates - The conurbation of Copenhagen consists of several municipalities. After Copenhagen Municipality, the second largest is Frederiksberg Municipality which is an enclave inside Copenhagen Municipality. Both are contained in the larger Capital Region of Denmark, which contains most of the Copenhagen metropolitan area. Previously, the areas of Frederiksberg, Gentofte and Copenhagen municipalities have been used to define the city of Copenhagen. This definition is now obsolete. To meet statistical needs after the latest municipal reform, which took place in the beginning of 2007, an effort has been made to work out definitions of lands (landsdele) in Denmark. A land is basically a geographical and statistical definition, and the area is not considered to be an administrative unit. The land of Copenhagen City includes the municipalities of Copenhagen, Dragør, Frederiksberg and Tårnby, with a total population of 656,582 in the beginning of 2008. Statistics Denmark, table BEF1A07: Population 1 January by region, age, sex, marital status Retrieved on 2008-03-26. Statistics Denmark, definitions of lands as of 2007-01-01 (excel-file, in danish) Retrieved on 2008-03-26. Copenhagen and Frederiksberg were two of the three last Danish municipalities not belonging to a county. On 1 January 2007, the municipalities lost their county privileges and became part of Copenhagen Capital Region. Suburban Copenhagen is planned according to the Finger Plan, fingerplanen, initiated in 1947, dividing the suburbs into five fingers. The Finger Plan, Denmark.dk The S-train lines are built according to the Finger Plan, while green wedges and highways are built in-between the fingers The Little Finger The northern suburbs form the little finger of the plan, and is traditionally the wealthiest of the suburbs. In popular language, the area is known as "The Whiskey Belt", although the area is mixed between mansions, larger houses, garden cities and mid-size houses. The area has a population of around 270,000 inhabitants. * Gentofte Municipality: Klampenborg, Skovshoved, Charlottenlund, Hellerup, Gentofte, Ordrup, Jægersborg, Dyssegård, Vangede * Lyngby-Taarbæk Municipality: Kongens Lyngby, Ulrikkenborg, Brede, Virum, Sorgenfri, Lundtofte, Hjortekær * Rudersdal Municipality: Søllerød, Holte, Øverød, Gl. Holte, Trørød, Nærum, Vedbæk, Skodsborg, Birkerød, Kajerød, Bistrup * Hørsholm Municipality: Hørsholm, Usserød, Rungsted, Vallerød, Smidstrup * Allerød Municipality: Allerød, Lillerød, Blovstrød * Fredensborg Municipality: Fredensborg, Asminderød, Humlebæk, Kokkedal, Niverød, Nivå. The Ring Finger The North-Northwestern part of the suburbs forms the ring finger. The area is to a large extent formed by detached middle-class dwellings, with some exceptions of housing projects or upper-class areas. The area has a population of around 100,000 inhabitants. * Gladsaxe Municipality: Gladsaxe, Bagsværd, Buddinge, Høje-Gladsaxe (Gladsaxe Heights), Mørkhøj, Søborg * Furesø Municipality: Værløse, Farum, Hareskovby The Middle Finger The northwestern suburbs form the middle finger, and consists of a mixed area of both detached middle-class dwellings, widespread garden cities and large, low-rise public housing projects. The area has a considerable part of the industrial areas of metropolitan Copenhagen, mostly in the traditional sectors of manufacturing. The area has a population of around 110,000 inhabitants. * Herlev Municipality: Herlev, Hjortespring * Ballerup Municipality: Skovlunde, Ballerup, Måløv, Ågerup, Jonstrup, Egebjerg * Egedal Municipality: Smørumnedre, Stenløse, Ølstykke The Index Finger The index finger forms the western suburbs, which are the suburbs with the lowest income per capita and the highest crime-rate. The suburbs vary from the petit bourgeois area of Glostrup to the widespread low housing projects of Albertslund and Taastrup. Of the total of 145,000 inhabitants, some 20% are immigrants of first or second generation. * Rødovre Municipality: Rødovre, Islev * Glostrup Municipality: Glostrup, Hvissinge, Ejby * Brøndby Municipality: Brøndbyøster, Brøndbyvester, Brøndby Nord * Albertslund Municipality * Høje-Taastrup Municipality: Taastrup, Høje-Taastrup, Tåstrupgård, Hedehusene The Thumb The southwest suburbs along the coast form the thumb of the plan. While the central parts of these suburbs are dominated by high-rise housing projects and low-income inhabitants, the distant part is dominated by detached middle-class houses. These suburbs have a population of some 215,000 inhabitants and has a sizeable number of immigrants. * Hvidovre Municipality: Avedøre, Friheden, Hvidovre * Brøndby Municipality: Brøndby Strand * Vallensbæk Municipality * Ishøj Municipality * Greve Municipality: Hundige, Karlslunde, Greve * Solrød Municipality: Solrød, Jersie * Køge municipality: Køge, Ølby The extra finger: Amager Island suburbs & Malmö When the finger plan was initially introduced, the island of Amager wasn't included as the infrastructure was inadequate for modern suburban life. Later it has been improved, and the suburbs at the island hold some 53,000 inhabitants. Amager is now one of the most modern suburbs of Copehagen with increasing wealth. With the opening of the bridge to Sweden this finger has been extended all the way to Malmö. Under an official visit of the Swedish King in 2007 at the Copenhagen City Hall, Copenhagen Lord Mayor Ritt Bjerregaard caused a minor diplomatic incident by referring to Malmö as "København M" with an allusion to the Danish system of postal codes (Nørrebro being København N and Vesterbro being København V for instance), indicating that Malmö had turned into just another Copenhagen bourough. Today 25,000 Danes live in Malmö. Malmø er blevet til København M, DR Online * Tårnby Municipality: Tårnby, Kastrup * Dragør Municipality Summers in Copenhagen are mild with average high temperatures of around 21°C (70°F) and lows of 13°C (55°F), but temperatures could sometimes exceed 25°C (77°F+) and occasional heatwaves are common during the summer. Winters are cold, with temperatures of -2 to 4°C (28 - 40°F), and it rarely drop below −10 °C (14 °F). Precipitation is moderate throughout the year, and snowfall occurs mainly in December through March, but snow cover does not remain a long time. Nørrebro seen from "Søerne" Copenhagen as seen from the City Hall at night Kongens Nytorv View from Rundetårn Gefion Fountian The city's appearance today is shaped by the key role it has played as a regional center for centuries. Copenhagen has a multitude of districts, each representing its time and with its own distinctive character, making up a dense urban fabric. Other distinctive features of the Copenhagen of today is the abundance of water, the greenness and the elaborate system of bicycle paths that line almost every major street. The oldest section of Copenhagen's inner city is often referred to as "Middelalderbyen" (The Medieval City). However, the most distinctive district of Copenhagen is Frederiksstaden developed during the reign of Frederick V. It has Amalienborg Palace at its centre and is dominated by the dome of the Marble Church as well as a number of elegant 18th century mansions. Also part of the old inner city of Copenhagen is the small island of Slotsholmen with Christiansborg Palace and Christianshavn. Around the historical city center lies a band of charming, dense and well-preserved residential bouroughs (Vesterbro, Inner Nørrebro, Inner Østerbro) dating mainly from late 19th century. They were built outside the old ramparts of the city when the city was finally allowed to expand beyond this barrier. Sometimes referred to as "the City of Spires", Copenhagen is known for its horizontal skyline, only broken by spires at churches and castles. Most characteristic is the baroque spire of Church of Our Saviour with its spiralling and narrowing external stairs that visitors can climb to the very top of the spire. Other important spires are those of Christiansborg Palace, the City Hall and the former Church of St. Nikolaj that now houses a modern art venue. A bit lower are the renaissance spires of Rosenborg Castle and the "dragon spire" of [[Christian IV of Christian IV's former stock exchange, so named because it is shaped as the tails of four dragons twined together. Recent years has seen a tremendous boom in modern architecture in Copenhagen both when it comes to Danish architecture and works by international architects. For a few hundred years, virtually no foreign architects had worked in Copenhagen but since the mid 1990s the city and its immediate sourroundings have seen buildings and projects from such international star architects as Norman Foster , Hadid , Nouvel and Liebeskind . In the same time, a number of Danish architects have achieved great success both in Copenhagen and abroad. This has led to a number of international architecture awards. Buildings in Copenhagen have won RIBA European Awards four years in a row ("Sampension" in 2005 , "Kilen" in 2006 , "Tietgenkollegiet" in 2007 and the Royal Playhouse in 2008 ). At the 2008 World Architecture Festival in Barcelona, Bjarke Ingels Group won an award for the World's Best Residential Building 2008 for a house in Ørestad. The Forum AID Award for Best building in Scandinavia went to Copenhagen buildings both in 2006 and 2008 . In 2008 British design magazine Monocle named Copenhagen the World's best design city 2008. The boom in urban development and modern architecture means that the above mentioned horizontal skyline has seen some changes. A political majority has decided to keep the historical center free of highrises. But several areas will see or have already seen massive urban development. Ørestad is the area that until now has seen most of the development. Located near Copenhagen Airport, it currently boasts the largest mall in Scandinavia and a variety of office and residential buildings as well as an IT University and a high school. The two largest hotels in Scandinavia are currently under construction (ultimo 2008). An ambitious regeneration project will create a new Carlsberg District at the historical premises of the Carlsberg Breweries that has terminated the production of beer in Copenhagen and moved it to Jutland. The district will have a total of nine highrises and seeks to mix the old industrial buildings with modern architecture to create a dense, maze-like quarter with a focus on sustainability and an active urban life. A third major area of urban development also with a focus on sustanibility is Nordhavn. The Copenhagen tradition with urban development on artificial islands that was initiated with with Christianh IV's construction of Christianshavn has recently been continued with the creation of Havneholmen as well as a "canal city" in the South Harbour. A district in Copenhagen with a very different take on modern architecture is that of Christiania whose many creative and idiosyncratic buildings are exponents of an "architecture without architects". Østre Anlæg University of Copenhagen Botanical Garden Copenhagen is a green city with many big and small parks. King's Garden, the garden of Rosenborg Castle, is the oldest and most visited park in Copenhagen. Its landscaping was commenced by Christian IV in 1606. Every year it sees more than 2,5 million visitors and in the summer months it is packed with sunbathers, picknickers and ballplayers. It also serves as a sculpture garden with a permanent display of sculptures as well as temporary exhibits during summer. Also located in the city centre are the Botanical Gardens particularly noted for their large complex of 19th century greenhouses donated by Carlsberg founder J. C. Jacobsen. Fælledparken is with its 58 hectars the largest park in Copenhagen. It is popular for sports and hosts a long array of annual events like a free opera concert at the opening of the opera season, other open-air concerts, carnival, Labour Day celebrations and Copenhagen Historic Grand Prix which is a race for antique cars. A historical green space in the northeastern part of the city is Kastellet which is a well-presserved renaissance citadel that now serves mainly as a park. Another popular park is the Frederiksberg Garden which is a 32 hectars romantic landscape park. It houses a large colony of very tame grey herons along with other waterfowls. The park also offers views of the elephants and the elephant house designed by world-famous British architect Norman Foster of the adjacent Copenhagen Zoo. Characteristic of Copenhagen is that a number of cemeteries double as parks, though only for the more quiet activities such as sunbathing, reading and meditation. Assistens Cemetery, the burrial place of Hans Christian Andersen among others, is an important green space for the district of Inner Nørrebro and a Copenhagen institution. The lesser known Vestre Kirkegaard is with its 54 hectars the largest cemetery in Denmark and offers a maze of dense groves, open lawns, winding paths, hedges, overgrown tombs, monuments, tree-lined avenues, lakes and other garden features. It is official municipal policy in Copenhagen that all citizens by 2015 must be able to reach a park or beach on foot in less than 15 minutes. In line with this policy, several new parks are under development in areas poor in green spaces. Copenhagen and the surrounding areas have 3 beaches with a total of approx. 8 km of sandy beaches within 30 minutes of bicycling from the city centre. This includes Amager Strandpark, which opened in 2005 and includes a 2 km long artificial island and a total of 4,6 km of beaches , located just 15 minutes by bicycle or a few minutes by metro from the city centre. The beaches are supplemented by a system of harbour baths along the Copenhagen waterfront. The first and most popular of these is located at Islands Brygge Harbour bath at Islands Brygge, e-architect and has won international acclaim for its design. Islands Brygge. Depending on the boundaries used, the population of Copenhagen differs. Statistics Denmark uses a measure of the contiguously built-up urban area of Copenhagen, this means the number of communities included in this statistical abstract has changed several times, in the abstracts latest edition with close to 1.2 million (1,153,615 (2008)) inhabitants. This number is not a strict result of the commonly-used measuring methods of 200 meters of continuously build-up area, as there are exceptions to the general rule in the suburbs of Dragør, Taastrup, Birkerød, Hørsholm and Farum. Statistics Denmark has never stated the geographical area of urban Copenhagen. However, we know it consists of Copenhagen Municipality, Frederiksberg and 16 of the 20 municipalities in the old counties Copenhagen and Roskilde, though 5 of them only partially. Largest cities of Denmark 2007 Statistics Denmark has worked out definitions of so-called lands (landsdele), a definition used to meet statistical needs on a lower level than regions. From this, the land of Copenhagen city (København by) is defined by the municipalities of Copenhagen, Dragør, Frederiksberg and Tårnby, with a total population of 656,582 in the beginning of 2008. The surroundings of Copenhagen is defined by another land, Copenhagen suburban (Københavns omegn), which includes the municipalities of Albertslund, Ballerup, Brøndby, Gentofte, Gladsaxe, Glostrup, Herlev, Hvidovre, Høje-Taastrup, Ishøj, Lyngby-Taarbæk, Rødovre and Vallensbæk, and with a total population of 504,481 (January 1, 2008). This gives a total population of 1,161,063 for these two lands together. The lands of Copenhagen city and Copenhagen suburban can together be used as a definition of the metropolitan area, although perhaps a somewhat narrow one. From 1 January 2008 the population of the 34 municipalities closest to and including the municipality of Copenhagen is 1,857,263 and by 1 October 2008 the population of this area had grown to 1,872,706. Statistikbanken.dk Population table BEF1A07 Land area: 2,923 km² (1,032 sq mi). (Capital Region - Bornholm + East Zealand + Stevns) Water area: 105 km² (40.5 sq mi). Orienteering fra Københavns Kommune. Statistisk Kontor.2003 nr. 25 Thus, the region comprises 6.8% of the land area of Denmark, but has 34% of Denmark's population. This gives a total of 641 inhabitants per km² or 1,660 per square mile for the region. This compares with a population density in the rest of the country of approximately 90 per km² or around 230 per square mile. Based on a 10%-isoline (data from 2002) in which at least 10% commutes into central parts of the Copenhagen area, most of Zealand would be covered and this area has a population of about 2.3 million inhabitants. /ref> Since the opening of the Øresund Bridge in 2000, commuting between and integration of Greater Malmö and Copenhagen have increased rapidly, and a combined statistical metropolitan area has formed. This metropolitan area, which has a population of 2,501,094 (2008) is expected to be officially defined by the respective statistics divisions of Denmark and Sweden in the upcoming years. A high-ranking civil servant of the Interior Ministry, Henning Strøm, who was involved in (i.e. known as "the Father of") a past municipal reform, which took effect on 1 April 1970, said on television, broadcast in connection with the recent Kommunalreformen ("The Municipal Reform" of 2007), that Copenhagen municipality would encompass an area with 1.5 million inhabitants, if the principles of the 1970 municipal reform were also applied on Copenhagen municipality. DR netnews 25-06-04 In other words: in the rest of Denmark the city occupies only part of the municipality, but in Copenhagen the municipality of Copenhagen occupies only part of the city of Copenhagen. Since the late 1990s, Copenhagen has undergone a transformation from a cozy Scandinavian capital to a cool metropolitan city of international scope in the league of cities like Barcelona and Amsterdam. This is due to massive investments in infrastructure as well as culture and wave of new successful Danish architects, designers and chefs. Between 1998 and 2008, lifestyle journalists wordwide (from Wallpaper to the NewYorkTimes) have praised Copenhagen as a cool, well-functioning creative city (see "Copenhagen In international rankings" below). Copenhagen has a wide array of museums of International standard. The National Museum, Nationalmuseet, is Denmark's largest museum of Archaeology and cultural history, comprising the histories of Danish and foreign cultures alike. The National Gallery - "Statens Museum for Kunst" - is Denmark's national art museum and contains collections dating from 12th century and all the way up to present day artists. Among artists represented in the collections are Rubens, Rembrandt, Picasso, Braque, Léger, Matisse and Emil Nolde. Another important Copenhagen art museum is the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek founded by second generation Carlsberg tycoon-philantropist Carl Jacobsen and is built around his personal collections. Its main focus is classical Egyptian, Roman and Greek sculptures and other antiquities and a collection of Rodin sculptures that is the largest outside France (Glypto-, from the Greek root glyphein, to carve and theke, a storing-place). Besides its sculpture collections, the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek also holds a comprehensive collection of paintings of impressionist and post-impressionist painters such as Monet,Renoir, Cézanne, van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec as well as Danish Golden Age painters. Loiusiana is an internationally acclaimed museum of modern art situated on the coast just north of Copenhagen. It is located in the middle of a sculpture garden on a cliff overlooking Øresund. The The museum is included in the Patricia Schultz book 1,000 Places to See Before You Die. The Danish Museum of Art & Design is housed in the 18th century former Frederiks Hospital and displays Danish design as well as international design and crafts. Other museums include: * Thorvaldsens Museum is a single-artist museum dedicated to the oeuvre,of romantic Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen who lived and worked in Rome. * Cisternerne is a small but different museum dedicated to modern glass art. It is located in some grotto-like former cisterns that come complete with Stalactites formed by the changing water levels. * The Ordrupgaard Museum is an art museum located just notth of Copenhagen in an old mansion with an extension by Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. It features 19th century French and Danish art and is particularly noted for its works by Paul Gaugin. Copenhagen Opera House The Royal Danish Theatre In January 2009 the new Copenhagen Concert Hall will open. It is designed by Jean Nouvel and will have four halls with the main auditorium seating 1800 people. It will serve as the home of the Danish National Symphony Orchestra and along with the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles the most expensive concert hall ever built. Another important venue for classical music is the Tivoli Concert Hall located in the histtrocal Tivoli Gardens. The Copenhagen Opera House (in Danish usually called Operaen) that opened in 2005 and is designed by Henning Larsen, is the national opera house of Denmark and among the most modern opera houses in the world. The old Royal Danish Theatre dating from 1748 still works as a supplementary opera scene. The Royal Danish Theatre is also home to the Royal Danish Ballet. Gounded in 1748 along with the theatre, it is one of the oldest ballet troups in Europe. It is home the the Bournonville style of ballet. Copenhagen has a significant jazz scene that has existed for many years. It developed when a number of American jazz musicians such as Ben Webster, Thad Jones, Richard Boone, Ernie Wilkins, Kenny Drew, Ed Thigpen, Bob Rockwell and others such as rock guitarist Link Wray came to live in Copenhagen during the 1960s. Every year in early July Copenhagen's streets, aquares and parks fills up with big and small jazz concerts during the Copenhagen Jazz Festival (see yearly events). The most important venue for rhythmical music in Copenhagen is Vega in Vesterbro district which has been chosen as "best concert venue in Europe" by international music magazine Live For free entertainment one can stroll along Strøget, especially between Nytorv and Højbro Plads, which in the late afternoon and evening is a bit like an impromptu three-ring circus with musicians, magicians, jugglers and other street performers. View from Amerikakaj Copenhagen has a wide variety of sport teams. The two major football teams are Brøndby IF and FC København. Brøndby IF plays at Brøndby Stadium in Brøndby and FC København plays at Parken in Østerbro, Copenhagen. Notable Copenhagen teams playing at the second highest level in Danish football (the Danish 1st Division) include Lyngby BK, AB, HIK, Frem, Brønshøj, Fremad Amager and Skjold. Copenhagen also has three ice hockey teams: Rødovre Mighty Bulls, Herlev Hornets and Nordsjælland Cobras. There are a lot of handball teams in Copenhagen. FC København owns both a women's and a men's team, which have the same name and logo. They were formerly known as FIF. Of other clubs playing in the "highest" leagues there are; Ajax Heroes, Ydun, and HIK (Hellerup). Rugby union is also played in the Danish capital with teams such as CSR-Nanok, Copenhagen Scrum, Exiles, Froggies and Rugbyklubben Speed. The Danish Australian Football League, based in Copenhagen is the largest Australian rules football competition outside of the English speaking world. Copenhagen is also home to a number of Denmark's 40-odd cricket clubs. Although Denmark has been an associate member of the International Cricket Council since 1966, the sport is not taught much in schools, and Danish cricket competes unfavourably with the much more widely followed sport of football for players, facilities, media attention and spectators. The second World Outgames will take place in Copenhagen in 2009, after Berlin refused to stage them due to the continuing rivalry between the two gay sporting organisations. It would be the largest such event hosted in Copenhagen. Copenhagen has the two oldest amusement parks in the World. World-famous Tivoli Gardens is an amusement park and pleasure garden located right in the middle of Copenhagen between the the City Hall Square and the the Central Station. Among its rides are the oldest still operating roller coaster and the oldest ferris wheel in the World. Tivoli Gardens, the rides It also function as an open-air concert venue. It opened on August 15 1843 making it the second oldest amusement park in the world. Dyrehavsbakken (in English "the Deer Garden Hill") is located in Klampenborg a little north of Copenhagen in a forested area of great natural beauty. Having been made into an amusement park complete with rides, games and restaurants by Christian IV, it is the oldest surviving amusement park in the World. Copenhagen is a centre for the New Nordic Cuisine. Nordic Cuisine, New York Times In November 2004 a Nordic Kitchen Symposium was helt in Copenhagen at the initiative of Danish chef and gastronome Claus Meyer. The symposium had attandance of top chefs from all of the Nordic countries and led to the adoption of a Manifesto for the New Nordic Cuisine. Manifesto for a New Nordic Cuisine Claus Meyer is also the co-founder of the two-Michelin star Restaurant Noma (Nordisk Madhus) which is a flagship restaurant for the new Nordic cuisine. In 2008 it was ranked as 10th best in the World by acclaimed British restaurant & fine dining magazine Restaurant at their 50 Best Restaurants of the World 2008-list. Furthermore, the users of the international website TripAdvisor with 25 million users a month rated Noma as the best restaurant in the world. TripAdvisor ranking As of 2008 Copenhagen boasts a total of 11 Michelin star restaurants. This is by far the highest number of any Nordic city. Apart from Noma they include one of only two Thai restaurants worldwide that has received a Michelin star. Due to the development, Copenhagen is increasingly being recognized internationally as a gourmet destination. The Top 10 cities to visit in 2009, TimesOnline Apart from the selection of high end restaurants, Copenhagen offers a great variety of Danish, International and ethnic restaurants and it is possible to find modest eateries with open sandwiches (called "smørrebrød"), which is the traditional and best known dish for lunch. Most restaurants, though, serve international dishes. danish pastry, another local specialty, can be sampled from the numerous bakeries found in all parts of the city. Copenhagen has long been associated with beer.Carlsberg beer has been brewed at the brewery's premises at the border between Vesterbro and Valby districts since 1847 and has long been almost synonumous with Danish beer production. However, recent years have seen an explosive growth in the number of microbreweries so that Denmark today has more than 100 breweries Nyeste artikler fra Bryggeriforeningen, Bryggeriforeningen , many of which are located in Copenhagen. Some like Nørrebro Bryghus also act as brewpubs where it is possible also to eat at the premisses. Many cafés specialize in a huge selection of quality beers and beer has also become an important ingridient in the New Nordic Cuisine. Copenhagen is the media centre of Denmark. DR, the major Danish public service broadcasting corporation collected their activities in a new headquarters, DR byen, in 2006 and 2007. Similarly has Odense based TV2 collected its Copenhagen activities in a modern media house in the South Harbour. The two national daily newspapters Politiken and Berlingske Tidende and the two tabloids Ekstra Bladet and B. T. are based in Copenhagen. Other important media corporations include Aller Press which is the largest publisher of weekly and monthly magazines in Scandinavia, the Egmont media group and Gyldendal, the largest Danish publisher of books. Copenhagen also has a sizable movie and television industry. Filmbyen, The Movie City, which is located in a former military camp in the suburg of Hvidovre and houses several movie companies and studio studios. Among the movie campanies are Zentropa co-owned by Danish movie director Lars von Trier who is behind several international movie productions as well as a founding force behind the Dogma Movement. * Copenhagen Fashion Week takes place every year in February and August. It is the largest fashion event in Northern Europe. Fashion Capital Copenhagen On the catwalks are a growing number of new and known Danish talent with a preview of their upcoming collections. And at the three trade fairs, CPH Vision, Gallery and Copenhagen International Fashion Fair, you will find an additional 1,100 exhibitors representing a total of over 2,300 international brand name collections. Danish fashion is known for its unique angle on design, innovation and aesthetics. With a more modern approach to femininity and functionality, expressed in fresh silhouettes, a focus on details and incomparable quality. These are only some of the reasons why more than 50,000 buyers, designers and global press attend Copenhagen Fashion Week twice a year. Copenhagen Fashion Week is organised by the Danish Fashion Institute - a newly founded network organisation created by and for the Danish fashion industry. Copenhagen Fashion Week * Carnival in Copenhagen takes place every year since 1982 during the Whitsun Holiday in Fælledparken and around the city. 120 bands, 2000 dancers and 100,000 spectators participate. History of Copenhagen * Copenhagen Distortion is a youth culture festival capturing the zeitgeist of the city, gathering every year (5 days up to the first weekend of June) up to 30.000 people in the streets, in shops, galleries, clubs, bars, in boats and buses, with a cultural focus on street culture, art and upfront dance music. Copenhagen Distortion * Roskilde Festival is a music festival helt every year in Roskilde west of Copenhagen. Gathering around 100,000 people every year, it is one of the four largest rock music festivals in Europe.. * Copenhagen Jazz Festival, which begins on the first Friday in July, is a popular annual event that is the result of Copenhagen's significant jazz scene. The festival takes place throughout the city in streets, squares and parks as well as in cafés and concert halls. Copenhagen Jazz Festival 3+ years, Wonderful Copenhagen It embraces around 900 concerts, 100 venues and over 200,000 guests from Denmark and around the world. It is recognized as one of the leading jazz festivals in the World. Top 10 best Jazz Festivals, TripAdvisor Copenhagen Jazz Festival * Copenhagen Pride is a gay pride festival taking place every year in August. Among the events is "Tivoli goes pink" and it ends with a parade. Copenhagen Pride * Copenhagen Cooking takes place in August every year and is a food festival with a wide array of events all over the city. * Copenhagen International Film Festival takes place in September every year with a focus on European films. The main prize is called the Golden Swan. Copenhagen International Film Festival Middelgrunden wind farm just off Copenhagen The Danish National Bank. Designed by Arne Jacobsen. Copenhagen is the economical and financial centre of Denmark Regionale regnskaber 2005 - Nyt fra Danmarks Statistik - Danmarks Statistik and also a strong business and economic centre in the entire Scandinavian-Baltic region. In 2008 Copenhagen was ranked 4th by Financial Times-owned FDi magazine on their list of Top50 European Cities of the Future after London, Paris and Berlin. Top 50 European City of the Future 2008/09 In 2006/07 FDi Magazine named Copenhagen Scandinavian City of the Future Scandinavian City of the Future 06/07 and in 2004/05 Copenhagen was named Northern European City of the Future ahead of other cities from Scandinavia, UK, Ireland and Benelux. Northern European City of the Future 2004/05 In the 2008 Worldwide Centers of Commerce Index, published by MasterCard, Copenhagen was ranked 14th in the world and 1st in Scandinavia. Copenhagen is one of the cities in Western Europe attracting most regional headquarters and distribution centers. Among the international companies that have chosen to locate their regional headquarters in Copenhagen is Microsoft.There are 2,100 foreign companies located in the Copenhagen area, of which approx. 500 are Scandinavian head offices, representing a wide range of industries. Copenhagen has a service oriented economy. An important sector is life science and research & development plays a major role in the economy of the city. The entire Oresund Region is in cooperation with Sweden being promoted as Medicon Valley. Major Danish biotech companies like Novo Nordisk and Lundbeck, both of which are among 50 largest pharmaceutical and biotech companies in the World, are located in the greater Copenhagen area. USATODAY.com The region also boasts the largest IT-cluster in Scandinavia with nearly 100,000 employees and the city of Copenhagen is home to Nokia's largest research centre outside Finland. Copenhagen - Overview Shipping is also an import business with Maersk, the World's largest shipping company, having their world headquarters in Copenhagen. Several international companies have established their regional headquarters in Copenhagen, e.g. Microsoft. Maersk, the world's largest container shipping company, has their world headquarters in Copenhagen. A substantial number of Danish pharmaceuticals such as Novo Nordisk, Ferring Pharmaceuticals and Bavarian Nordic also operate in the area, having placed their headquarters in or close to Copenhagen. USATODAY.com Copenhagen has some of the highest gross wages in the World. City Mayors: World's richest cities High taxes mean that wages are reduced after mandatory deduction. A neneficial researcher scheme with low taxation of foreigh specialists Level of salary in Denmark has made Denmark an attractive location for highly educated foreign labour to settle. Copenhagen is however also among the most expensive cities in Europe. City Mayors: World's most expensive cities (EIU) City Mayors: World's most expensive cities - Ranking Copenhagen University Copenhagen has a well-developed higher education system of public universities. Most prominent among these is the University of Copenhagen. Founded in 1479, it is the oldest university in Denmark. It is a world-renowned research and teaching institution with campuses around the city and forms part of the International Alliance of Research Universities (IARU), which is a collaboration between international top universities including Oxford, Cambridge, Yale and Berkeley. The University attracts app. 1500 international and exchange students every year. It is repeatedly ranked as one of the best universities in Europe. At the Times Higher Education's QS World University Rankings 2008 list, it was ranked as fourth best in continental Europe. TheAcademic Ranking of World Universities 2008 placesd it as number 43 worldwide and 8th in Europe. A second all-round university in the Copenhagen area is Roskilde University located in Roskilde. The Technical University of Denmark (DTU), Danmarks Tekniske Universitet, is located in Lyngby at the northern outskirts of Copenhagen. In 2008 it was ranked third highest in Europe on Times Higher Education's list of the most influential technical universities in the World. The Max Planck Institute in Germany was ranked 15, ETH Zurich in Switzerland was ranked 15 and DTU in Denmark was ranked 20. Copenhagen Business School (CBS) is an estimed and EQUIS accredited business school located on Frederiksberg. Copenhagen is rich in companies and institutions with a focus on research and development within the biotechnology , Infrastructure & logistics - Copenhagen a distribution hub, retrieved February 22, 2007. and life science sectors. Two of the 50 largest pharmaceutical and biotech companies in the World are located in the greater Copenhagen area. The biotech and life science cluster in Copenhagen and the rest of the Oresund Region is one of the strongest in Europe. Since 1995 this has been branded as the Medicon Valley in a Danish-Swedish cooperation. The aim is to strengthen the region's position and to promote cooperation between companies and academia. The German biotech giant Sartorius Stedim Biotech, which is currently creating a Nordic head office in Tåstrup on the outskirts of Copenhagen. The Øresund region is responsible for 60 percent of life science production in Scandinavia and is home to 111 biotech companies. The greater Copenhagen area has a very well established transportation infrastructure making it a hub in Northern Europe. Christianshavns Kanal Copenhagen has a large network of toll-free highways and public roads connecting different municipalities of the city together and to Northern Europe. As in many other cities in Europe traffic is increasing in Copenhagen. The radial arterial roads and highways leading to the Copenhagen city center are critically congested during peak hours. Copenhagen is known as one of the most bicycle-friendly cities in the world. Every day 1,1 million km are bicycled in Copenhagen. 36 % of all citizens are commuting to work, school or university by bicycle and it is municipal policy that this number should go up to 40 % by 2012 and 50 % in 2015. The city's bicycle paths are extensive and well-used. Bicycle paths are often separated from the main traffic lanes and sometimes have their own signal systems. The municipality is also developing a system of interconnected green bicycle routes, greenways, with the aim to facilitate fast, safe and pleasant bicycle transport from one end of the city to the other. The network will cover more than 100 km and consist of 22 routes when finished. The city provides public bicycles which can be found throughout the downtown area and used with a returnable deposit of 20 kroner. Copenhagen's well-developed bicycle culture has given rise to the term ‘copenhagenize’. This is the practice of other cities adopting Copenhagen-style bike lanes and bicycle infrastructure. In 2007 Copenhagen-based Danish urban design consultant Jan Gehl was hired by the New York City Department of Transportation to re-imagine New York City streets by introducing designs to improve life for pedestrians and cyclists. In recognition of Copenhagen's emphasis on bicycling, the city has been chosen by the Union Cycliste Internationale as their first official Bike City. Bike City Copenhagen will take place from 2008 to 2011 and consist of big cycling events for professionals as well as amateurs. The harbour of Copenhagen has largely lost its importance as an industrial harbour. In 2001 Copenhagen Harbour merged with the harbour in Malmö to create Copenhagen-Malmö Port. It has several functions, the most important being as a major cruise destination. In 2007 a record 286 cruise ships with 420,000 cruise passengers visited Copenhagen. 120 of these ships either started or ended the cruise in Copenhagen. In 2008 these numbers grew further to 310 cruise ships and 560,000 passengers. As a result of the growth in the cruise industry facilities asre being expanded and improved. At the World Travel Awards in 2008, Copenhagen Port was named the number one cruise destination in Europe for the fifth year in a row. Copenhagen is serviced by ferry lines to Oslo in Norway (called "Oslobåden") with a daily connection and to Świnoujście in Poland (called "Polensfærgerne") with five weekly connections. Copenhagen Airport is the principal airport serving Copenhagen. It is the largest in Scandinavia and the 17th largest in Europe. It is located in Kastrup on the island of Amager and has very efficient connections to downtown Copenhagen with metro trains going to Kongens Nytorv in 15 minutes with 4-6 minutes between departures and regional trains going to the Central Station in 12 minutes. Its location also makes it the most important international airport for large parts of southern Sweden. Over the Øresund Bridge trains go to Malmö South in 14 minutes or Malmö Central Station in 22 minutes. Copenhagen Airport has won the award as "The best airport in Europe" four times, and as "The best airport in the world" two times. Copenhagen Airport is the seventh best airport in the world - second best in Europe - when you ask the passengers. The British organization Skytrax is doing so every year, writes the airport in a press release. 40 criteria are employed for the ranking. The new metro S-train at Nørreport Metro entrance in FrederiksbergThe public transportation system of Copenhagen consists of commuter trains (called S-trains, S-tog), buses, and a metro. The S-trains form the basis of the transportation network, stretching to most areas of metropolitan Copenhagen, with their main hub at Copenhagen Central Station (København H). Regional trains supplement the S-train services with lines extending further such as to the Copenhagen Airport, Elsinore, and Malmö. The Danish State Railways' Intercity network has its eastern terminus and main hub at Copenhagen, with most trains extending to Copenhagen Airport. The fare system is based on 95 zones covering the capital area. Tickets are transferable from one means of transport to another within a time limit. The more zones a ticket is valid for, the longer its time validity with a maximum of two hours. Discount cards (punch cards, klippekort) and period cards are available. Ticket prices are high and have increased substantially in recent years leading to a decrease in passenger numbers. In fact, the percentage of trips made on public transportation in Copenhagen is quite low by northern European standards. The Copenhagen Metro began operation in 2002 and currently has only two lines. In April 2008, it was named Best Metro in the World by industry experts. Copenhagen Metro Best in the World |Christiansborg Palace - home of the Danish Parliament Folketinget, the Supreme Court, Office of the Prime Minister and official reception area of Queen Margrethe II |- |Børsen - the former Stock Exchange building |- |The Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen harbor |- |Amalienborg Palace - home of the Danish royal family. The central building is the domed Marble Church located behind the palace complex |- |Nyhavn |- |The Marble Church |- |Rosenborg Castle in central Copenhagen |- |Christianshavns Canal |- |The Tivoli, photographed from Eduard Spelterini's balloon on June 22, 1922 |} Copenhagen is recognized as one of the most environmentally friendly cities in the world. In 2006 Copenhagen Municipality received the European Environmental Management Award. The award was given for long-term holistic environmental planning. It is municipal policy to reduce CO2 emissions by 20% before the end of 2015. In 2001 a large offshore wind farm was built just off the coast of Copenhagen at Middelgrunden. It produces about 4 % of the city's energy. Many years of major investments in sewage treatment has improved water quality in the harbour to an extent that the inner harbour can be used for swimming and facilities for this are provided at a number of locations. Another municipal policy is that 40% of all citizens should bicycle to and from work by 2012 and a number of initiatives are being taken to implement this policy (see "bicycling above"). Copenhagen is the capital in the World where organic food has the largest market share. One in every ten purchases is organic in Copenhagen. Within the municipal sector in Copenhagen, 45 % of all food consumption is organic but the target is considerably higher. With the environmental strategy "Environment Metropolis: Our Vision 2015" the politicians wish that solely organic food is to be served in 90 per cent of the Copenhagen old-age homes and residential homes for children and young persons in 2015.. - - - Image:Christiansborg Slot.jpg| Christiansborg Slot - Image:Børsen København.jpg| Børsen- the former Stock Exchange building - Image:Littlemermaid207.jpg| The Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen harbor - Image:Copenhagen amalienborg seen from opera house.jpg| Amalienborg Palace - Image:Nyhavn 9-15 København.jpg| Nyhavn - Image:Kbh Marmorkirche 1.jpg| Frederik's Church|The Marble Church - Image:Rosenborg.jpg| Rosenborg Castle in central Copenhagen - Image:Christianshavns Kanal morning.jpg| Christianshavns Canal - Image:Amalienborgas.JPG | The Royal Residence - Image:Copenhague 108.jpg | The Round Tower - Image:Gammel_Strand_København.jpg| Gammel Strand - Image:Kbh_Stroeget_Nikolaj_Kirche.jpg | Stroget - Image:A_Copenhagen_center_street.jpg| Central Copenhagen Street - Image:Amagergade 01.jpg| Amagergade - Image:Gebauede_in_kopenhagen.jpg| Copenhagen Habour - Image:Container ship loading-700px.jpg| Copenhagen Ship Loading - Image:Christianshavns_Torv.jpg | Christianshavn Torv - Image:Copenhagen-Airport-from-air.jpg | Copenhagen Airport from the air - Image:Østre Anlæg København.jpg | Østre Anlæg - Image:Frederiksberg Slot.jpg | Frederiksberg Castle - Image:Kongens Nytorv 17.jpg | Kongens Nytorv - Image:Kopenhagen zeehaven.JPG | Copenhagen Canal Tour - Image:Den-sorte-diamant.jpg | The Black Diamond ( The Royal Library ) - Image:Tivoli Copenhagen at Night.jpg | Tivoli by Night - Image:Kopenhagen 3.jpg | View over Copenhagen - Image:Gammeltorv Copenhagen Denmark.JPG | Gammeltorv - Image:Copenhagen denmark.jpg | Nyhavn - Image:Copenhagen City Hall.jpg | Copenhagen City Hall - Image:Gefion.jpg| Gefion Fountian - Image:Christiania Exit.JPG | Christiania - Image:Gebauede in kopenhagen.jpg | Copenhagen at Night - Image:Copenhague 050.jpg | Inner City Canel - Copenhagen has placed well in a number of international rankings, some of which are mentioned below. * Copenhagen was ranked #1 as Most Livable City in the World by international lifestyle magazine Monocle on their Top 25 Most Livable Cities 2008 list Monocles page on Copenhagen * Worlds Best Design City 2008 also by Monocle. Monocles page on Copenhagen *Monocle has also stated that Copenhagen is "Scandinavia's most desirable city". By Stuart Husband Monocle Magazine Published: June 19, 2007 *Copenhagen ranked #4 by Financial Times-owned FDi magazine on their list of Top50 European Cities of the Future after London, Paris and Berlin. Top 50 European City of the Future 2008/09 In 2006/07 FDi Magazine named Copenhagen Scandinavian City of the Future Scandinavian City of the Future 06/07 and in 2004/05 Copenhagen was named Northern European City of the Future ahead of other cities from Scandinavia, UK, Ireland and Benelux. Northern European City of the Future 2004/05 * In the 2008 Worldwide Centers of Commerce Index, published by MasterCard, Copenhagen was ranked 14th in the world and 1st in Scandinavia. *Copenhagen #1 out of 254 locations in the Location Ranking Survey performed by ECA International that has asked European experts where they prefer to be stationed worldwide. Location Ranking Survey * Copenhagen was ranked #6 in Grist Magazine's "15 Green Cities" list in 2007 making Copenhagen the greenest capital of Scandinavia according to Grist Magazine. 15 Green Cities | Grist | Main Dish | 19 July 2007 * Copenhagen is the capital in the World where organic food has the largest market share. One in every ten purchases is organic in Copenhagen. World-champinions in organic food * The Copenhagen Metro has been named the Best Metro in the World by industry experts. Copenhagen Metro Best in the World * Copenhagen is the worlds #7 most expensive city and #3 most expensive in Europe on the Forbes List. Forbes-Worlds Most Expensive Cities List * Copenhagen is ranked #7 as Preferred City For Investment Projects. Preferred City For Investment Projects * Copenhagen ranked 3rd in Western Europe in terms of attracting regional headquarters and distribution centers, only surpassed by London and Paris. * Copenhagen ranks #1 in the Global Earning Ranking. [h Global earning ranking ] * Copenhagen ranks as the 5th most popular city in the world for international meetings and conferences. Style & Substance Danmark * Copenhagen ranks as one of the most attractive cities to live and work in Europe. A great place to live * Copenhagen ranks 2nd in Europe for Quality of life according to a survey from 2005 by the international consultancy firm William Mercer. A great place to live * Morten Andersen, veteran NFL kicker * Niels Bohr, physicist, Nobel laureate * Aage Bohr, physicist, Nobel laureate (son of Niels Bohr) * Victor Borge, entertainer * August Bournonville, ballet choreographer * Georg Brandes, critic * Helena Christensen, supermodel * Tove Ditlevsen, writer * Carl Theodor Dreyer, movie director * Vilhelm Hammershøi, painter * Gus Hansen, poker player * Iben Hjejle, actor * Peter Høeg, writer * Arne Jacobsen, designer * Robert Jacobsen, painter * J. C. Jacobsen, founder of Carlsberg Brewery * Mathias Lauridsen, male topmodel * Søren Kierkegaard, philosopher * Bjørn Lomborg, Academic and Author of The Skeptical Environmentalist * Lauritz Melchior, opera singer * Mads Mikkelsen, actor * Carl-Henning Pedersen, painter * Lars von Trier, movie director * Dan Turèll, writer * Lars Ulrich, drummer and songwriter of the heavy-metal band Metallica * Jørn Utzon, architect, designer of the Sydney Opera House * Michael Laudrup, former international football player, former manager of Spanish Primera Division Football team Getafe. * Peter Schmeichel, former international football player * Bertel Thorvaldsen, sculpturer Copenhagen is twinned with: * Paris in France (partner city) * Reykjavík in Iceland * Prague in Czech Republic (unofficial partner city) * San Francisco de Campeche in Mexico * Municipal statistics: NetBorger Kommunefakta, delivered from KMD, also known as Kommunedata (Municipal Data) * Municipal and county statistics: Statistics Denmark statistikbanken.dk * Demography: Statistical Yearbook of Copenhagen (part English); ISBN 87-7024-230-5 * History and demography: København Forslag til kommuneplan 1985; ISBN 87-88034-03-8 * Oresund Region * Eurovision Song Contest 2001 * Junior Eurovision Song Contest 2003 * MTV Europe Music Awards 2006 * Transportation in Denmark * Ports of the Baltic Sea * A Much Different Tourist Site and Cultural Guide about Copenhagen * Wonderful Copenhagen official tourism website * Copenhagen Capacity official investment agency of Copenhagen * * Official municipal website * City of Copenhagen Statistical Office * Krak searchable map
Copenhagen
Why is Copenhagen a regional hub?
Its strategic location and excellent infrastructure
data/set3/a8
Copenhagen Copenhagen ( ; ) is the capital and largest city of Denmark, with a population of 1,161,063. Copenhagen is situated on the Islands of Zealand and Amager. First documented in the 11th century, Copenhagen became the capital of Denmark in the beginning of the 15th century and during the 17th century under the reign of Christian IV it became an important regional centre. Copenhagen is usually ranked as one of the two largest cities of the Nordic Countries. [ LARGEST CITY Copenhagen or Stockholm ? [ Denmark in brief . With the completion of the transnational Oresund Bridge in 2000, Copenhagen has become the centre of the increasingly integrating Øresund Region with around 3.7 million inhabitants covering an area of 20,869 km² (177/km²). Within this region, Copenhagen and Malmö is in the process of growing into one common metropolitan area. Copenhagen is a major regional center of culture, business, media, and science. In 2008 Copenhagen was ranked #4 by Financial Times-owned FDi magazine on their list of Top50 European Cities of the Future after London, Paris and Berlin. In the 2008 Worldwide Centers of Commerce Index, published by MasterCard, Copenhagen was ranked 14th in the world and 1st in Scandinavia. Life science, information technology and shipping are important sectors and research & development plays a major role in the city's economy. Its strategic location and excellent infrastructure with the largest airport in Scandinavia located 14 minutes by train from the city centre, has made it a regional hub and a popular location for regional headquarters as well as conventions. Copenhagen has repeatedly been recognized as one of the cities with the best quality of life. and in 2008 it was singled out as the Most Liveable City in the World by international lifestyle magazine Monocle on their Top 25 Most Liveable Cities 2008 list. It is also considered one of the world's most environmentally friendly cities with the water in the inner harbor being so clean that it can be used for swimming and 36 % of all citizens commuting to work by bicycle, every day bicycling a total 1.1 million km. Since the turn of the millennium Copenhagen has seen a strong urban and cultural development and has been described as a boom town. This is partly due to massive investments in cultural facilities as well as infrastructure and a new wave of succesful designers, chefs and architects. Copenhagen c. 1895 The Palace during renovation. From its humble origins as a fishing village to its heyday as the glittering capital of the Danish Empire, to its current position as one of the world's premier design capitals, the stories and characters of Copenhagen's history can be discovered in its sumptuous palaces, copper-roofed town houses and atmospheric cobbled squares. From the Viking Age there was a fishing village by the name of "Havn" (harbour) at the site. Recent archeological finds indicate that by the 11th century, Copenhagen had already grown into a small town with a large estate, a church, a market, at least two wells and many smaller habitations spread over a fairly wide area. Arkæologer graver ny teori om København op af mulden (Archeologists develop new theory about Copenhagen from their digs), Videnskab.dk, 5 November 2008 From the middle of the 12th century it grew in importance after coming into the possession of the Bishop Absalon, who fortified it in 1167, the year traditionally marking the foundation of Copenhagen. The excellent harbour encouraged Copenhagen's growth until it became an important centre of commerce. The city's origin as a harbour and a place of commerce is reflected in its name. Its original designation, from which the contemporary Danish name is derived, was Køpmannæhafn, "merchants' harbor". The English name for the city is derived from its Low German name, Kopenhagen. The element hafnium is also named for Copenhagen, whose Latin name is Hafnia. Biography of George de Hevesy It was repeatedly attacked by the Hanseatic League as the Germans took notice. In 1254, it received its charter as a city under Bishop Jakob Erlandsen. During 1658-59 it withstood a severe siege by the Swedes under Charles X and successfully repelled a major assault. In 1801 a British fleet under Admiral Parker fought a major battle, the Battle of Copenhagen, with the Danish Navy in Copenhagen harbour. It was during this battle Lord Nelson famously "put the telescope to the blind eye" in order not to see Admiral Parker's signal to cease fire. When a British expeditionary force bombarded Copenhagen in 1807, to gain control of the Danish Navy, the city suffered great damage and hundreds of people were killed. The reason why the devastation was so great was that Copenhagen relied on an old defence-line rendered virtually useless by the increase in shooting range available to the British. But not until the 1850s were the ramparts of the city opened to allow new housing to be built around the lakes ("Søerne") which bordered the old defence system to the west. This dramatic increase of space was long overdue, not only because the old ramparts were out of date as a defence system, but also because of bad sanitation in the old city. Before the opening, Copenhagen Center was inhabited by approximately 125,000 people, peaking in the census of 1870 (140,000); today the figure is around 25,000. In 1901, Copenhagen expanded further, incorporating communities with 40,000 people, and in the process making Frederiksberg an enclave within Copenhagen. During World War II, Copenhagen was occupied by German troops along with the rest of the country from 9 April 1940 until 4 May 1945. In August 1943, when the government's collaboration with the occupation forces collapsed, several ships were sunk in Copenhagen Harbour by the Royal Danish Navy to prevent them being used by the Germans. The city has grown greatly since the war, in the seventies using the so-called five-finger-plan of commuter train lines to surrounding towns and suburbs. Since the summer 2000, the cities of Copenhagen and Malmö have been connected by a toll bridge/tunnel (Øresund Bridge), which allows both rail and road passengers to cross. As a result, Copenhagen has become the centre of a larger metropolitan area which spans both nations. The construction of the bridge has led to a large number of changes to the public transportation system and the extensive redevelopment of Amager, south of the main city. Location of Coppenhagen in Denmark Nørrebro seen from "Søerne" Copenhagen City Hall Copenhagen is located on the eastern shore of the island of Zealand (Sjælland) and partly on the island of Amager. Copenhagen faces the Øresund to the east, the strait of water that separates Denmark from Sweden, and that connects the North Sea with the Baltic Sea. On the Swedish side of the sound directly across from Copenhagen, lie the towns of Malmö and Landskrona. Copenhagen is also a part of the Øresund region, which consists of Zealand, Lolland-Falster and Bornholm in Denmark and Scania in Sweden. Copenhagen Municipality is an administrative unit that covers the central part of the actual city of Copenhagen. It is a fairly small part of the actual city that falles within the municipality both because it covers a very confined area and because the enclave of Frederiksberg is an independent municipality. Copenhagen consists of a number of boroughs and areas, including * Indre By * Østerbro * Nørrebro * Vesterbro * Amagerbro * Nordhavnen (North Habour) * Valby * Kongens Enghave (King's Meadow Garden), also known as Sydhavnen (meaning South Harbour) * Christianshavn * Christiania (Freetown) * Sundbyvester (Sundby West), * Sundbyøster (Sundby East) * Ørestad * Islands Brygge * Bellahøj * Brønshøj * Ryparken * Bispebjerg * Vigerslev * Vestamager * Vanløse The suffix -bro in the names Østerbro, Nørrebro, Vesterbro and Amagerbro should not be confused with the Danish word for bridge, which is also 'bro'. The term is thought to be an abbreviation or short form of the Danish word brolagt meaning paved referring to the roads paved with cobblestones leading to the city's former gates - The conurbation of Copenhagen consists of several municipalities. After Copenhagen Municipality, the second largest is Frederiksberg Municipality which is an enclave inside Copenhagen Municipality. Both are contained in the larger Capital Region of Denmark, which contains most of the Copenhagen metropolitan area. Previously, the areas of Frederiksberg, Gentofte and Copenhagen municipalities have been used to define the city of Copenhagen. This definition is now obsolete. To meet statistical needs after the latest municipal reform, which took place in the beginning of 2007, an effort has been made to work out definitions of lands (landsdele) in Denmark. A land is basically a geographical and statistical definition, and the area is not considered to be an administrative unit. The land of Copenhagen City includes the municipalities of Copenhagen, Dragør, Frederiksberg and Tårnby, with a total population of 656,582 in the beginning of 2008. Statistics Denmark, table BEF1A07: Population 1 January by region, age, sex, marital status Retrieved on 2008-03-26. Statistics Denmark, definitions of lands as of 2007-01-01 (excel-file, in danish) Retrieved on 2008-03-26. Copenhagen and Frederiksberg were two of the three last Danish municipalities not belonging to a county. On 1 January 2007, the municipalities lost their county privileges and became part of Copenhagen Capital Region. Suburban Copenhagen is planned according to the Finger Plan, fingerplanen, initiated in 1947, dividing the suburbs into five fingers. The Finger Plan, Denmark.dk The S-train lines are built according to the Finger Plan, while green wedges and highways are built in-between the fingers The Little Finger The northern suburbs form the little finger of the plan, and is traditionally the wealthiest of the suburbs. In popular language, the area is known as "The Whiskey Belt", although the area is mixed between mansions, larger houses, garden cities and mid-size houses. The area has a population of around 270,000 inhabitants. * Gentofte Municipality: Klampenborg, Skovshoved, Charlottenlund, Hellerup, Gentofte, Ordrup, Jægersborg, Dyssegård, Vangede * Lyngby-Taarbæk Municipality: Kongens Lyngby, Ulrikkenborg, Brede, Virum, Sorgenfri, Lundtofte, Hjortekær * Rudersdal Municipality: Søllerød, Holte, Øverød, Gl. Holte, Trørød, Nærum, Vedbæk, Skodsborg, Birkerød, Kajerød, Bistrup * Hørsholm Municipality: Hørsholm, Usserød, Rungsted, Vallerød, Smidstrup * Allerød Municipality: Allerød, Lillerød, Blovstrød * Fredensborg Municipality: Fredensborg, Asminderød, Humlebæk, Kokkedal, Niverød, Nivå. The Ring Finger The North-Northwestern part of the suburbs forms the ring finger. The area is to a large extent formed by detached middle-class dwellings, with some exceptions of housing projects or upper-class areas. The area has a population of around 100,000 inhabitants. * Gladsaxe Municipality: Gladsaxe, Bagsværd, Buddinge, Høje-Gladsaxe (Gladsaxe Heights), Mørkhøj, Søborg * Furesø Municipality: Værløse, Farum, Hareskovby The Middle Finger The northwestern suburbs form the middle finger, and consists of a mixed area of both detached middle-class dwellings, widespread garden cities and large, low-rise public housing projects. The area has a considerable part of the industrial areas of metropolitan Copenhagen, mostly in the traditional sectors of manufacturing. The area has a population of around 110,000 inhabitants. * Herlev Municipality: Herlev, Hjortespring * Ballerup Municipality: Skovlunde, Ballerup, Måløv, Ågerup, Jonstrup, Egebjerg * Egedal Municipality: Smørumnedre, Stenløse, Ølstykke The Index Finger The index finger forms the western suburbs, which are the suburbs with the lowest income per capita and the highest crime-rate. The suburbs vary from the petit bourgeois area of Glostrup to the widespread low housing projects of Albertslund and Taastrup. Of the total of 145,000 inhabitants, some 20% are immigrants of first or second generation. * Rødovre Municipality: Rødovre, Islev * Glostrup Municipality: Glostrup, Hvissinge, Ejby * Brøndby Municipality: Brøndbyøster, Brøndbyvester, Brøndby Nord * Albertslund Municipality * Høje-Taastrup Municipality: Taastrup, Høje-Taastrup, Tåstrupgård, Hedehusene The Thumb The southwest suburbs along the coast form the thumb of the plan. While the central parts of these suburbs are dominated by high-rise housing projects and low-income inhabitants, the distant part is dominated by detached middle-class houses. These suburbs have a population of some 215,000 inhabitants and has a sizeable number of immigrants. * Hvidovre Municipality: Avedøre, Friheden, Hvidovre * Brøndby Municipality: Brøndby Strand * Vallensbæk Municipality * Ishøj Municipality * Greve Municipality: Hundige, Karlslunde, Greve * Solrød Municipality: Solrød, Jersie * Køge municipality: Køge, Ølby The extra finger: Amager Island suburbs & Malmö When the finger plan was initially introduced, the island of Amager wasn't included as the infrastructure was inadequate for modern suburban life. Later it has been improved, and the suburbs at the island hold some 53,000 inhabitants. Amager is now one of the most modern suburbs of Copehagen with increasing wealth. With the opening of the bridge to Sweden this finger has been extended all the way to Malmö. Under an official visit of the Swedish King in 2007 at the Copenhagen City Hall, Copenhagen Lord Mayor Ritt Bjerregaard caused a minor diplomatic incident by referring to Malmö as "København M" with an allusion to the Danish system of postal codes (Nørrebro being København N and Vesterbro being København V for instance), indicating that Malmö had turned into just another Copenhagen bourough. Today 25,000 Danes live in Malmö. Malmø er blevet til København M, DR Online * Tårnby Municipality: Tårnby, Kastrup * Dragør Municipality Summers in Copenhagen are mild with average high temperatures of around 21°C (70°F) and lows of 13°C (55°F), but temperatures could sometimes exceed 25°C (77°F+) and occasional heatwaves are common during the summer. Winters are cold, with temperatures of -2 to 4°C (28 - 40°F), and it rarely drop below −10 °C (14 °F). Precipitation is moderate throughout the year, and snowfall occurs mainly in December through March, but snow cover does not remain a long time. Nørrebro seen from "Søerne" Copenhagen as seen from the City Hall at night Kongens Nytorv View from Rundetårn Gefion Fountian The city's appearance today is shaped by the key role it has played as a regional center for centuries. Copenhagen has a multitude of districts, each representing its time and with its own distinctive character, making up a dense urban fabric. Other distinctive features of the Copenhagen of today is the abundance of water, the greenness and the elaborate system of bicycle paths that line almost every major street. The oldest section of Copenhagen's inner city is often referred to as "Middelalderbyen" (The Medieval City). However, the most distinctive district of Copenhagen is Frederiksstaden developed during the reign of Frederick V. It has Amalienborg Palace at its centre and is dominated by the dome of the Marble Church as well as a number of elegant 18th century mansions. Also part of the old inner city of Copenhagen is the small island of Slotsholmen with Christiansborg Palace and Christianshavn. Around the historical city center lies a band of charming, dense and well-preserved residential bouroughs (Vesterbro, Inner Nørrebro, Inner Østerbro) dating mainly from late 19th century. They were built outside the old ramparts of the city when the city was finally allowed to expand beyond this barrier. Sometimes referred to as "the City of Spires", Copenhagen is known for its horizontal skyline, only broken by spires at churches and castles. Most characteristic is the baroque spire of Church of Our Saviour with its spiralling and narrowing external stairs that visitors can climb to the very top of the spire. Other important spires are those of Christiansborg Palace, the City Hall and the former Church of St. Nikolaj that now houses a modern art venue. A bit lower are the renaissance spires of Rosenborg Castle and the "dragon spire" of [[Christian IV of Christian IV's former stock exchange, so named because it is shaped as the tails of four dragons twined together. Recent years has seen a tremendous boom in modern architecture in Copenhagen both when it comes to Danish architecture and works by international architects. For a few hundred years, virtually no foreign architects had worked in Copenhagen but since the mid 1990s the city and its immediate sourroundings have seen buildings and projects from such international star architects as Norman Foster , Hadid , Nouvel and Liebeskind . In the same time, a number of Danish architects have achieved great success both in Copenhagen and abroad. This has led to a number of international architecture awards. Buildings in Copenhagen have won RIBA European Awards four years in a row ("Sampension" in 2005 , "Kilen" in 2006 , "Tietgenkollegiet" in 2007 and the Royal Playhouse in 2008 ). At the 2008 World Architecture Festival in Barcelona, Bjarke Ingels Group won an award for the World's Best Residential Building 2008 for a house in Ørestad. The Forum AID Award for Best building in Scandinavia went to Copenhagen buildings both in 2006 and 2008 . In 2008 British design magazine Monocle named Copenhagen the World's best design city 2008. The boom in urban development and modern architecture means that the above mentioned horizontal skyline has seen some changes. A political majority has decided to keep the historical center free of highrises. But several areas will see or have already seen massive urban development. Ørestad is the area that until now has seen most of the development. Located near Copenhagen Airport, it currently boasts the largest mall in Scandinavia and a variety of office and residential buildings as well as an IT University and a high school. The two largest hotels in Scandinavia are currently under construction (ultimo 2008). An ambitious regeneration project will create a new Carlsberg District at the historical premises of the Carlsberg Breweries that has terminated the production of beer in Copenhagen and moved it to Jutland. The district will have a total of nine highrises and seeks to mix the old industrial buildings with modern architecture to create a dense, maze-like quarter with a focus on sustainability and an active urban life. A third major area of urban development also with a focus on sustanibility is Nordhavn. The Copenhagen tradition with urban development on artificial islands that was initiated with with Christianh IV's construction of Christianshavn has recently been continued with the creation of Havneholmen as well as a "canal city" in the South Harbour. A district in Copenhagen with a very different take on modern architecture is that of Christiania whose many creative and idiosyncratic buildings are exponents of an "architecture without architects". Østre Anlæg University of Copenhagen Botanical Garden Copenhagen is a green city with many big and small parks. King's Garden, the garden of Rosenborg Castle, is the oldest and most visited park in Copenhagen. Its landscaping was commenced by Christian IV in 1606. Every year it sees more than 2,5 million visitors and in the summer months it is packed with sunbathers, picknickers and ballplayers. It also serves as a sculpture garden with a permanent display of sculptures as well as temporary exhibits during summer. Also located in the city centre are the Botanical Gardens particularly noted for their large complex of 19th century greenhouses donated by Carlsberg founder J. C. Jacobsen. Fælledparken is with its 58 hectars the largest park in Copenhagen. It is popular for sports and hosts a long array of annual events like a free opera concert at the opening of the opera season, other open-air concerts, carnival, Labour Day celebrations and Copenhagen Historic Grand Prix which is a race for antique cars. A historical green space in the northeastern part of the city is Kastellet which is a well-presserved renaissance citadel that now serves mainly as a park. Another popular park is the Frederiksberg Garden which is a 32 hectars romantic landscape park. It houses a large colony of very tame grey herons along with other waterfowls. The park also offers views of the elephants and the elephant house designed by world-famous British architect Norman Foster of the adjacent Copenhagen Zoo. Characteristic of Copenhagen is that a number of cemeteries double as parks, though only for the more quiet activities such as sunbathing, reading and meditation. Assistens Cemetery, the burrial place of Hans Christian Andersen among others, is an important green space for the district of Inner Nørrebro and a Copenhagen institution. The lesser known Vestre Kirkegaard is with its 54 hectars the largest cemetery in Denmark and offers a maze of dense groves, open lawns, winding paths, hedges, overgrown tombs, monuments, tree-lined avenues, lakes and other garden features. It is official municipal policy in Copenhagen that all citizens by 2015 must be able to reach a park or beach on foot in less than 15 minutes. In line with this policy, several new parks are under development in areas poor in green spaces. Copenhagen and the surrounding areas have 3 beaches with a total of approx. 8 km of sandy beaches within 30 minutes of bicycling from the city centre. This includes Amager Strandpark, which opened in 2005 and includes a 2 km long artificial island and a total of 4,6 km of beaches , located just 15 minutes by bicycle or a few minutes by metro from the city centre. The beaches are supplemented by a system of harbour baths along the Copenhagen waterfront. The first and most popular of these is located at Islands Brygge Harbour bath at Islands Brygge, e-architect and has won international acclaim for its design. Islands Brygge. Depending on the boundaries used, the population of Copenhagen differs. Statistics Denmark uses a measure of the contiguously built-up urban area of Copenhagen, this means the number of communities included in this statistical abstract has changed several times, in the abstracts latest edition with close to 1.2 million (1,153,615 (2008)) inhabitants. This number is not a strict result of the commonly-used measuring methods of 200 meters of continuously build-up area, as there are exceptions to the general rule in the suburbs of Dragør, Taastrup, Birkerød, Hørsholm and Farum. Statistics Denmark has never stated the geographical area of urban Copenhagen. However, we know it consists of Copenhagen Municipality, Frederiksberg and 16 of the 20 municipalities in the old counties Copenhagen and Roskilde, though 5 of them only partially. Largest cities of Denmark 2007 Statistics Denmark has worked out definitions of so-called lands (landsdele), a definition used to meet statistical needs on a lower level than regions. From this, the land of Copenhagen city (København by) is defined by the municipalities of Copenhagen, Dragør, Frederiksberg and Tårnby, with a total population of 656,582 in the beginning of 2008. The surroundings of Copenhagen is defined by another land, Copenhagen suburban (Københavns omegn), which includes the municipalities of Albertslund, Ballerup, Brøndby, Gentofte, Gladsaxe, Glostrup, Herlev, Hvidovre, Høje-Taastrup, Ishøj, Lyngby-Taarbæk, Rødovre and Vallensbæk, and with a total population of 504,481 (January 1, 2008). This gives a total population of 1,161,063 for these two lands together. The lands of Copenhagen city and Copenhagen suburban can together be used as a definition of the metropolitan area, although perhaps a somewhat narrow one. From 1 January 2008 the population of the 34 municipalities closest to and including the municipality of Copenhagen is 1,857,263 and by 1 October 2008 the population of this area had grown to 1,872,706. Statistikbanken.dk Population table BEF1A07 Land area: 2,923 km² (1,032 sq mi). (Capital Region - Bornholm + East Zealand + Stevns) Water area: 105 km² (40.5 sq mi). Orienteering fra Københavns Kommune. Statistisk Kontor.2003 nr. 25 Thus, the region comprises 6.8% of the land area of Denmark, but has 34% of Denmark's population. This gives a total of 641 inhabitants per km² or 1,660 per square mile for the region. This compares with a population density in the rest of the country of approximately 90 per km² or around 230 per square mile. Based on a 10%-isoline (data from 2002) in which at least 10% commutes into central parts of the Copenhagen area, most of Zealand would be covered and this area has a population of about 2.3 million inhabitants. /ref> Since the opening of the Øresund Bridge in 2000, commuting between and integration of Greater Malmö and Copenhagen have increased rapidly, and a combined statistical metropolitan area has formed. This metropolitan area, which has a population of 2,501,094 (2008) is expected to be officially defined by the respective statistics divisions of Denmark and Sweden in the upcoming years. A high-ranking civil servant of the Interior Ministry, Henning Strøm, who was involved in (i.e. known as "the Father of") a past municipal reform, which took effect on 1 April 1970, said on television, broadcast in connection with the recent Kommunalreformen ("The Municipal Reform" of 2007), that Copenhagen municipality would encompass an area with 1.5 million inhabitants, if the principles of the 1970 municipal reform were also applied on Copenhagen municipality. DR netnews 25-06-04 In other words: in the rest of Denmark the city occupies only part of the municipality, but in Copenhagen the municipality of Copenhagen occupies only part of the city of Copenhagen. Since the late 1990s, Copenhagen has undergone a transformation from a cozy Scandinavian capital to a cool metropolitan city of international scope in the league of cities like Barcelona and Amsterdam. This is due to massive investments in infrastructure as well as culture and wave of new successful Danish architects, designers and chefs. Between 1998 and 2008, lifestyle journalists wordwide (from Wallpaper to the NewYorkTimes) have praised Copenhagen as a cool, well-functioning creative city (see "Copenhagen In international rankings" below). Copenhagen has a wide array of museums of International standard. The National Museum, Nationalmuseet, is Denmark's largest museum of Archaeology and cultural history, comprising the histories of Danish and foreign cultures alike. The National Gallery - "Statens Museum for Kunst" - is Denmark's national art museum and contains collections dating from 12th century and all the way up to present day artists. Among artists represented in the collections are Rubens, Rembrandt, Picasso, Braque, Léger, Matisse and Emil Nolde. Another important Copenhagen art museum is the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek founded by second generation Carlsberg tycoon-philantropist Carl Jacobsen and is built around his personal collections. Its main focus is classical Egyptian, Roman and Greek sculptures and other antiquities and a collection of Rodin sculptures that is the largest outside France (Glypto-, from the Greek root glyphein, to carve and theke, a storing-place). Besides its sculpture collections, the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek also holds a comprehensive collection of paintings of impressionist and post-impressionist painters such as Monet,Renoir, Cézanne, van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec as well as Danish Golden Age painters. Loiusiana is an internationally acclaimed museum of modern art situated on the coast just north of Copenhagen. It is located in the middle of a sculpture garden on a cliff overlooking Øresund. The The museum is included in the Patricia Schultz book 1,000 Places to See Before You Die. The Danish Museum of Art & Design is housed in the 18th century former Frederiks Hospital and displays Danish design as well as international design and crafts. Other museums include: * Thorvaldsens Museum is a single-artist museum dedicated to the oeuvre,of romantic Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen who lived and worked in Rome. * Cisternerne is a small but different museum dedicated to modern glass art. It is located in some grotto-like former cisterns that come complete with Stalactites formed by the changing water levels. * The Ordrupgaard Museum is an art museum located just notth of Copenhagen in an old mansion with an extension by Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. It features 19th century French and Danish art and is particularly noted for its works by Paul Gaugin. Copenhagen Opera House The Royal Danish Theatre In January 2009 the new Copenhagen Concert Hall will open. It is designed by Jean Nouvel and will have four halls with the main auditorium seating 1800 people. It will serve as the home of the Danish National Symphony Orchestra and along with the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles the most expensive concert hall ever built. Another important venue for classical music is the Tivoli Concert Hall located in the histtrocal Tivoli Gardens. The Copenhagen Opera House (in Danish usually called Operaen) that opened in 2005 and is designed by Henning Larsen, is the national opera house of Denmark and among the most modern opera houses in the world. The old Royal Danish Theatre dating from 1748 still works as a supplementary opera scene. The Royal Danish Theatre is also home to the Royal Danish Ballet. Gounded in 1748 along with the theatre, it is one of the oldest ballet troups in Europe. It is home the the Bournonville style of ballet. Copenhagen has a significant jazz scene that has existed for many years. It developed when a number of American jazz musicians such as Ben Webster, Thad Jones, Richard Boone, Ernie Wilkins, Kenny Drew, Ed Thigpen, Bob Rockwell and others such as rock guitarist Link Wray came to live in Copenhagen during the 1960s. Every year in early July Copenhagen's streets, aquares and parks fills up with big and small jazz concerts during the Copenhagen Jazz Festival (see yearly events). The most important venue for rhythmical music in Copenhagen is Vega in Vesterbro district which has been chosen as "best concert venue in Europe" by international music magazine Live For free entertainment one can stroll along Strøget, especially between Nytorv and Højbro Plads, which in the late afternoon and evening is a bit like an impromptu three-ring circus with musicians, magicians, jugglers and other street performers. View from Amerikakaj Copenhagen has a wide variety of sport teams. The two major football teams are Brøndby IF and FC København. Brøndby IF plays at Brøndby Stadium in Brøndby and FC København plays at Parken in Østerbro, Copenhagen. Notable Copenhagen teams playing at the second highest level in Danish football (the Danish 1st Division) include Lyngby BK, AB, HIK, Frem, Brønshøj, Fremad Amager and Skjold. Copenhagen also has three ice hockey teams: Rødovre Mighty Bulls, Herlev Hornets and Nordsjælland Cobras. There are a lot of handball teams in Copenhagen. FC København owns both a women's and a men's team, which have the same name and logo. They were formerly known as FIF. Of other clubs playing in the "highest" leagues there are; Ajax Heroes, Ydun, and HIK (Hellerup). Rugby union is also played in the Danish capital with teams such as CSR-Nanok, Copenhagen Scrum, Exiles, Froggies and Rugbyklubben Speed. The Danish Australian Football League, based in Copenhagen is the largest Australian rules football competition outside of the English speaking world. Copenhagen is also home to a number of Denmark's 40-odd cricket clubs. Although Denmark has been an associate member of the International Cricket Council since 1966, the sport is not taught much in schools, and Danish cricket competes unfavourably with the much more widely followed sport of football for players, facilities, media attention and spectators. The second World Outgames will take place in Copenhagen in 2009, after Berlin refused to stage them due to the continuing rivalry between the two gay sporting organisations. It would be the largest such event hosted in Copenhagen. Copenhagen has the two oldest amusement parks in the World. World-famous Tivoli Gardens is an amusement park and pleasure garden located right in the middle of Copenhagen between the the City Hall Square and the the Central Station. Among its rides are the oldest still operating roller coaster and the oldest ferris wheel in the World. Tivoli Gardens, the rides It also function as an open-air concert venue. It opened on August 15 1843 making it the second oldest amusement park in the world. Dyrehavsbakken (in English "the Deer Garden Hill") is located in Klampenborg a little north of Copenhagen in a forested area of great natural beauty. Having been made into an amusement park complete with rides, games and restaurants by Christian IV, it is the oldest surviving amusement park in the World. Copenhagen is a centre for the New Nordic Cuisine. Nordic Cuisine, New York Times In November 2004 a Nordic Kitchen Symposium was helt in Copenhagen at the initiative of Danish chef and gastronome Claus Meyer. The symposium had attandance of top chefs from all of the Nordic countries and led to the adoption of a Manifesto for the New Nordic Cuisine. Manifesto for a New Nordic Cuisine Claus Meyer is also the co-founder of the two-Michelin star Restaurant Noma (Nordisk Madhus) which is a flagship restaurant for the new Nordic cuisine. In 2008 it was ranked as 10th best in the World by acclaimed British restaurant & fine dining magazine Restaurant at their 50 Best Restaurants of the World 2008-list. Furthermore, the users of the international website TripAdvisor with 25 million users a month rated Noma as the best restaurant in the world. TripAdvisor ranking As of 2008 Copenhagen boasts a total of 11 Michelin star restaurants. This is by far the highest number of any Nordic city. Apart from Noma they include one of only two Thai restaurants worldwide that has received a Michelin star. Due to the development, Copenhagen is increasingly being recognized internationally as a gourmet destination. The Top 10 cities to visit in 2009, TimesOnline Apart from the selection of high end restaurants, Copenhagen offers a great variety of Danish, International and ethnic restaurants and it is possible to find modest eateries with open sandwiches (called "smørrebrød"), which is the traditional and best known dish for lunch. Most restaurants, though, serve international dishes. danish pastry, another local specialty, can be sampled from the numerous bakeries found in all parts of the city. Copenhagen has long been associated with beer.Carlsberg beer has been brewed at the brewery's premises at the border between Vesterbro and Valby districts since 1847 and has long been almost synonumous with Danish beer production. However, recent years have seen an explosive growth in the number of microbreweries so that Denmark today has more than 100 breweries Nyeste artikler fra Bryggeriforeningen, Bryggeriforeningen , many of which are located in Copenhagen. Some like Nørrebro Bryghus also act as brewpubs where it is possible also to eat at the premisses. Many cafés specialize in a huge selection of quality beers and beer has also become an important ingridient in the New Nordic Cuisine. Copenhagen is the media centre of Denmark. DR, the major Danish public service broadcasting corporation collected their activities in a new headquarters, DR byen, in 2006 and 2007. Similarly has Odense based TV2 collected its Copenhagen activities in a modern media house in the South Harbour. The two national daily newspapters Politiken and Berlingske Tidende and the two tabloids Ekstra Bladet and B. T. are based in Copenhagen. Other important media corporations include Aller Press which is the largest publisher of weekly and monthly magazines in Scandinavia, the Egmont media group and Gyldendal, the largest Danish publisher of books. Copenhagen also has a sizable movie and television industry. Filmbyen, The Movie City, which is located in a former military camp in the suburg of Hvidovre and houses several movie companies and studio studios. Among the movie campanies are Zentropa co-owned by Danish movie director Lars von Trier who is behind several international movie productions as well as a founding force behind the Dogma Movement. * Copenhagen Fashion Week takes place every year in February and August. It is the largest fashion event in Northern Europe. Fashion Capital Copenhagen On the catwalks are a growing number of new and known Danish talent with a preview of their upcoming collections. And at the three trade fairs, CPH Vision, Gallery and Copenhagen International Fashion Fair, you will find an additional 1,100 exhibitors representing a total of over 2,300 international brand name collections. Danish fashion is known for its unique angle on design, innovation and aesthetics. With a more modern approach to femininity and functionality, expressed in fresh silhouettes, a focus on details and incomparable quality. These are only some of the reasons why more than 50,000 buyers, designers and global press attend Copenhagen Fashion Week twice a year. Copenhagen Fashion Week is organised by the Danish Fashion Institute - a newly founded network organisation created by and for the Danish fashion industry. Copenhagen Fashion Week * Carnival in Copenhagen takes place every year since 1982 during the Whitsun Holiday in Fælledparken and around the city. 120 bands, 2000 dancers and 100,000 spectators participate. History of Copenhagen * Copenhagen Distortion is a youth culture festival capturing the zeitgeist of the city, gathering every year (5 days up to the first weekend of June) up to 30.000 people in the streets, in shops, galleries, clubs, bars, in boats and buses, with a cultural focus on street culture, art and upfront dance music. Copenhagen Distortion * Roskilde Festival is a music festival helt every year in Roskilde west of Copenhagen. Gathering around 100,000 people every year, it is one of the four largest rock music festivals in Europe.. * Copenhagen Jazz Festival, which begins on the first Friday in July, is a popular annual event that is the result of Copenhagen's significant jazz scene. The festival takes place throughout the city in streets, squares and parks as well as in cafés and concert halls. Copenhagen Jazz Festival 3+ years, Wonderful Copenhagen It embraces around 900 concerts, 100 venues and over 200,000 guests from Denmark and around the world. It is recognized as one of the leading jazz festivals in the World. Top 10 best Jazz Festivals, TripAdvisor Copenhagen Jazz Festival * Copenhagen Pride is a gay pride festival taking place every year in August. Among the events is "Tivoli goes pink" and it ends with a parade. Copenhagen Pride * Copenhagen Cooking takes place in August every year and is a food festival with a wide array of events all over the city. * Copenhagen International Film Festival takes place in September every year with a focus on European films. The main prize is called the Golden Swan. Copenhagen International Film Festival Middelgrunden wind farm just off Copenhagen The Danish National Bank. Designed by Arne Jacobsen. Copenhagen is the economical and financial centre of Denmark Regionale regnskaber 2005 - Nyt fra Danmarks Statistik - Danmarks Statistik and also a strong business and economic centre in the entire Scandinavian-Baltic region. In 2008 Copenhagen was ranked 4th by Financial Times-owned FDi magazine on their list of Top50 European Cities of the Future after London, Paris and Berlin. Top 50 European City of the Future 2008/09 In 2006/07 FDi Magazine named Copenhagen Scandinavian City of the Future Scandinavian City of the Future 06/07 and in 2004/05 Copenhagen was named Northern European City of the Future ahead of other cities from Scandinavia, UK, Ireland and Benelux. Northern European City of the Future 2004/05 In the 2008 Worldwide Centers of Commerce Index, published by MasterCard, Copenhagen was ranked 14th in the world and 1st in Scandinavia. Copenhagen is one of the cities in Western Europe attracting most regional headquarters and distribution centers. Among the international companies that have chosen to locate their regional headquarters in Copenhagen is Microsoft.There are 2,100 foreign companies located in the Copenhagen area, of which approx. 500 are Scandinavian head offices, representing a wide range of industries. Copenhagen has a service oriented economy. An important sector is life science and research & development plays a major role in the economy of the city. The entire Oresund Region is in cooperation with Sweden being promoted as Medicon Valley. Major Danish biotech companies like Novo Nordisk and Lundbeck, both of which are among 50 largest pharmaceutical and biotech companies in the World, are located in the greater Copenhagen area. USATODAY.com The region also boasts the largest IT-cluster in Scandinavia with nearly 100,000 employees and the city of Copenhagen is home to Nokia's largest research centre outside Finland. Copenhagen - Overview Shipping is also an import business with Maersk, the World's largest shipping company, having their world headquarters in Copenhagen. Several international companies have established their regional headquarters in Copenhagen, e.g. Microsoft. Maersk, the world's largest container shipping company, has their world headquarters in Copenhagen. A substantial number of Danish pharmaceuticals such as Novo Nordisk, Ferring Pharmaceuticals and Bavarian Nordic also operate in the area, having placed their headquarters in or close to Copenhagen. USATODAY.com Copenhagen has some of the highest gross wages in the World. City Mayors: World's richest cities High taxes mean that wages are reduced after mandatory deduction. A neneficial researcher scheme with low taxation of foreigh specialists Level of salary in Denmark has made Denmark an attractive location for highly educated foreign labour to settle. Copenhagen is however also among the most expensive cities in Europe. City Mayors: World's most expensive cities (EIU) City Mayors: World's most expensive cities - Ranking Copenhagen University Copenhagen has a well-developed higher education system of public universities. Most prominent among these is the University of Copenhagen. Founded in 1479, it is the oldest university in Denmark. It is a world-renowned research and teaching institution with campuses around the city and forms part of the International Alliance of Research Universities (IARU), which is a collaboration between international top universities including Oxford, Cambridge, Yale and Berkeley. The University attracts app. 1500 international and exchange students every year. It is repeatedly ranked as one of the best universities in Europe. At the Times Higher Education's QS World University Rankings 2008 list, it was ranked as fourth best in continental Europe. TheAcademic Ranking of World Universities 2008 placesd it as number 43 worldwide and 8th in Europe. A second all-round university in the Copenhagen area is Roskilde University located in Roskilde. The Technical University of Denmark (DTU), Danmarks Tekniske Universitet, is located in Lyngby at the northern outskirts of Copenhagen. In 2008 it was ranked third highest in Europe on Times Higher Education's list of the most influential technical universities in the World. The Max Planck Institute in Germany was ranked 15, ETH Zurich in Switzerland was ranked 15 and DTU in Denmark was ranked 20. Copenhagen Business School (CBS) is an estimed and EQUIS accredited business school located on Frederiksberg. Copenhagen is rich in companies and institutions with a focus on research and development within the biotechnology , Infrastructure & logistics - Copenhagen a distribution hub, retrieved February 22, 2007. and life science sectors. Two of the 50 largest pharmaceutical and biotech companies in the World are located in the greater Copenhagen area. The biotech and life science cluster in Copenhagen and the rest of the Oresund Region is one of the strongest in Europe. Since 1995 this has been branded as the Medicon Valley in a Danish-Swedish cooperation. The aim is to strengthen the region's position and to promote cooperation between companies and academia. The German biotech giant Sartorius Stedim Biotech, which is currently creating a Nordic head office in Tåstrup on the outskirts of Copenhagen. The Øresund region is responsible for 60 percent of life science production in Scandinavia and is home to 111 biotech companies. The greater Copenhagen area has a very well established transportation infrastructure making it a hub in Northern Europe. Christianshavns Kanal Copenhagen has a large network of toll-free highways and public roads connecting different municipalities of the city together and to Northern Europe. As in many other cities in Europe traffic is increasing in Copenhagen. The radial arterial roads and highways leading to the Copenhagen city center are critically congested during peak hours. Copenhagen is known as one of the most bicycle-friendly cities in the world. Every day 1,1 million km are bicycled in Copenhagen. 36 % of all citizens are commuting to work, school or university by bicycle and it is municipal policy that this number should go up to 40 % by 2012 and 50 % in 2015. The city's bicycle paths are extensive and well-used. Bicycle paths are often separated from the main traffic lanes and sometimes have their own signal systems. The municipality is also developing a system of interconnected green bicycle routes, greenways, with the aim to facilitate fast, safe and pleasant bicycle transport from one end of the city to the other. The network will cover more than 100 km and consist of 22 routes when finished. The city provides public bicycles which can be found throughout the downtown area and used with a returnable deposit of 20 kroner. Copenhagen's well-developed bicycle culture has given rise to the term ‘copenhagenize’. This is the practice of other cities adopting Copenhagen-style bike lanes and bicycle infrastructure. In 2007 Copenhagen-based Danish urban design consultant Jan Gehl was hired by the New York City Department of Transportation to re-imagine New York City streets by introducing designs to improve life for pedestrians and cyclists. In recognition of Copenhagen's emphasis on bicycling, the city has been chosen by the Union Cycliste Internationale as their first official Bike City. Bike City Copenhagen will take place from 2008 to 2011 and consist of big cycling events for professionals as well as amateurs. The harbour of Copenhagen has largely lost its importance as an industrial harbour. In 2001 Copenhagen Harbour merged with the harbour in Malmö to create Copenhagen-Malmö Port. It has several functions, the most important being as a major cruise destination. In 2007 a record 286 cruise ships with 420,000 cruise passengers visited Copenhagen. 120 of these ships either started or ended the cruise in Copenhagen. In 2008 these numbers grew further to 310 cruise ships and 560,000 passengers. As a result of the growth in the cruise industry facilities asre being expanded and improved. At the World Travel Awards in 2008, Copenhagen Port was named the number one cruise destination in Europe for the fifth year in a row. Copenhagen is serviced by ferry lines to Oslo in Norway (called "Oslobåden") with a daily connection and to Świnoujście in Poland (called "Polensfærgerne") with five weekly connections. Copenhagen Airport is the principal airport serving Copenhagen. It is the largest in Scandinavia and the 17th largest in Europe. It is located in Kastrup on the island of Amager and has very efficient connections to downtown Copenhagen with metro trains going to Kongens Nytorv in 15 minutes with 4-6 minutes between departures and regional trains going to the Central Station in 12 minutes. Its location also makes it the most important international airport for large parts of southern Sweden. Over the Øresund Bridge trains go to Malmö South in 14 minutes or Malmö Central Station in 22 minutes. Copenhagen Airport has won the award as "The best airport in Europe" four times, and as "The best airport in the world" two times. Copenhagen Airport is the seventh best airport in the world - second best in Europe - when you ask the passengers. The British organization Skytrax is doing so every year, writes the airport in a press release. 40 criteria are employed for the ranking. The new metro S-train at Nørreport Metro entrance in FrederiksbergThe public transportation system of Copenhagen consists of commuter trains (called S-trains, S-tog), buses, and a metro. The S-trains form the basis of the transportation network, stretching to most areas of metropolitan Copenhagen, with their main hub at Copenhagen Central Station (København H). Regional trains supplement the S-train services with lines extending further such as to the Copenhagen Airport, Elsinore, and Malmö. The Danish State Railways' Intercity network has its eastern terminus and main hub at Copenhagen, with most trains extending to Copenhagen Airport. The fare system is based on 95 zones covering the capital area. Tickets are transferable from one means of transport to another within a time limit. The more zones a ticket is valid for, the longer its time validity with a maximum of two hours. Discount cards (punch cards, klippekort) and period cards are available. Ticket prices are high and have increased substantially in recent years leading to a decrease in passenger numbers. In fact, the percentage of trips made on public transportation in Copenhagen is quite low by northern European standards. The Copenhagen Metro began operation in 2002 and currently has only two lines. In April 2008, it was named Best Metro in the World by industry experts. Copenhagen Metro Best in the World |Christiansborg Palace - home of the Danish Parliament Folketinget, the Supreme Court, Office of the Prime Minister and official reception area of Queen Margrethe II |- |Børsen - the former Stock Exchange building |- |The Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen harbor |- |Amalienborg Palace - home of the Danish royal family. The central building is the domed Marble Church located behind the palace complex |- |Nyhavn |- |The Marble Church |- |Rosenborg Castle in central Copenhagen |- |Christianshavns Canal |- |The Tivoli, photographed from Eduard Spelterini's balloon on June 22, 1922 |} Copenhagen is recognized as one of the most environmentally friendly cities in the world. In 2006 Copenhagen Municipality received the European Environmental Management Award. The award was given for long-term holistic environmental planning. It is municipal policy to reduce CO2 emissions by 20% before the end of 2015. In 2001 a large offshore wind farm was built just off the coast of Copenhagen at Middelgrunden. It produces about 4 % of the city's energy. Many years of major investments in sewage treatment has improved water quality in the harbour to an extent that the inner harbour can be used for swimming and facilities for this are provided at a number of locations. Another municipal policy is that 40% of all citizens should bicycle to and from work by 2012 and a number of initiatives are being taken to implement this policy (see "bicycling above"). Copenhagen is the capital in the World where organic food has the largest market share. One in every ten purchases is organic in Copenhagen. Within the municipal sector in Copenhagen, 45 % of all food consumption is organic but the target is considerably higher. With the environmental strategy "Environment Metropolis: Our Vision 2015" the politicians wish that solely organic food is to be served in 90 per cent of the Copenhagen old-age homes and residential homes for children and young persons in 2015.. - - - Image:Christiansborg Slot.jpg| Christiansborg Slot - Image:Børsen København.jpg| Børsen- the former Stock Exchange building - Image:Littlemermaid207.jpg| The Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen harbor - Image:Copenhagen amalienborg seen from opera house.jpg| Amalienborg Palace - Image:Nyhavn 9-15 København.jpg| Nyhavn - Image:Kbh Marmorkirche 1.jpg| Frederik's Church|The Marble Church - Image:Rosenborg.jpg| Rosenborg Castle in central Copenhagen - Image:Christianshavns Kanal morning.jpg| Christianshavns Canal - Image:Amalienborgas.JPG | The Royal Residence - Image:Copenhague 108.jpg | The Round Tower - Image:Gammel_Strand_København.jpg| Gammel Strand - Image:Kbh_Stroeget_Nikolaj_Kirche.jpg | Stroget - Image:A_Copenhagen_center_street.jpg| Central Copenhagen Street - Image:Amagergade 01.jpg| Amagergade - Image:Gebauede_in_kopenhagen.jpg| Copenhagen Habour - Image:Container ship loading-700px.jpg| Copenhagen Ship Loading - Image:Christianshavns_Torv.jpg | Christianshavn Torv - Image:Copenhagen-Airport-from-air.jpg | Copenhagen Airport from the air - Image:Østre Anlæg København.jpg | Østre Anlæg - Image:Frederiksberg Slot.jpg | Frederiksberg Castle - Image:Kongens Nytorv 17.jpg | Kongens Nytorv - Image:Kopenhagen zeehaven.JPG | Copenhagen Canal Tour - Image:Den-sorte-diamant.jpg | The Black Diamond ( The Royal Library ) - Image:Tivoli Copenhagen at Night.jpg | Tivoli by Night - Image:Kopenhagen 3.jpg | View over Copenhagen - Image:Gammeltorv Copenhagen Denmark.JPG | Gammeltorv - Image:Copenhagen denmark.jpg | Nyhavn - Image:Copenhagen City Hall.jpg | Copenhagen City Hall - Image:Gefion.jpg| Gefion Fountian - Image:Christiania Exit.JPG | Christiania - Image:Gebauede in kopenhagen.jpg | Copenhagen at Night - Image:Copenhague 050.jpg | Inner City Canel - Copenhagen has placed well in a number of international rankings, some of which are mentioned below. * Copenhagen was ranked #1 as Most Livable City in the World by international lifestyle magazine Monocle on their Top 25 Most Livable Cities 2008 list Monocles page on Copenhagen * Worlds Best Design City 2008 also by Monocle. Monocles page on Copenhagen *Monocle has also stated that Copenhagen is "Scandinavia's most desirable city". By Stuart Husband Monocle Magazine Published: June 19, 2007 *Copenhagen ranked #4 by Financial Times-owned FDi magazine on their list of Top50 European Cities of the Future after London, Paris and Berlin. Top 50 European City of the Future 2008/09 In 2006/07 FDi Magazine named Copenhagen Scandinavian City of the Future Scandinavian City of the Future 06/07 and in 2004/05 Copenhagen was named Northern European City of the Future ahead of other cities from Scandinavia, UK, Ireland and Benelux. Northern European City of the Future 2004/05 * In the 2008 Worldwide Centers of Commerce Index, published by MasterCard, Copenhagen was ranked 14th in the world and 1st in Scandinavia. *Copenhagen #1 out of 254 locations in the Location Ranking Survey performed by ECA International that has asked European experts where they prefer to be stationed worldwide. Location Ranking Survey * Copenhagen was ranked #6 in Grist Magazine's "15 Green Cities" list in 2007 making Copenhagen the greenest capital of Scandinavia according to Grist Magazine. 15 Green Cities | Grist | Main Dish | 19 July 2007 * Copenhagen is the capital in the World where organic food has the largest market share. One in every ten purchases is organic in Copenhagen. World-champinions in organic food * The Copenhagen Metro has been named the Best Metro in the World by industry experts. Copenhagen Metro Best in the World * Copenhagen is the worlds #7 most expensive city and #3 most expensive in Europe on the Forbes List. Forbes-Worlds Most Expensive Cities List * Copenhagen is ranked #7 as Preferred City For Investment Projects. Preferred City For Investment Projects * Copenhagen ranked 3rd in Western Europe in terms of attracting regional headquarters and distribution centers, only surpassed by London and Paris. * Copenhagen ranks #1 in the Global Earning Ranking. [h Global earning ranking ] * Copenhagen ranks as the 5th most popular city in the world for international meetings and conferences. Style & Substance Danmark * Copenhagen ranks as one of the most attractive cities to live and work in Europe. A great place to live * Copenhagen ranks 2nd in Europe for Quality of life according to a survey from 2005 by the international consultancy firm William Mercer. A great place to live * Morten Andersen, veteran NFL kicker * Niels Bohr, physicist, Nobel laureate * Aage Bohr, physicist, Nobel laureate (son of Niels Bohr) * Victor Borge, entertainer * August Bournonville, ballet choreographer * Georg Brandes, critic * Helena Christensen, supermodel * Tove Ditlevsen, writer * Carl Theodor Dreyer, movie director * Vilhelm Hammershøi, painter * Gus Hansen, poker player * Iben Hjejle, actor * Peter Høeg, writer * Arne Jacobsen, designer * Robert Jacobsen, painter * J. C. Jacobsen, founder of Carlsberg Brewery * Mathias Lauridsen, male topmodel * Søren Kierkegaard, philosopher * Bjørn Lomborg, Academic and Author of The Skeptical Environmentalist * Lauritz Melchior, opera singer * Mads Mikkelsen, actor * Carl-Henning Pedersen, painter * Lars von Trier, movie director * Dan Turèll, writer * Lars Ulrich, drummer and songwriter of the heavy-metal band Metallica * Jørn Utzon, architect, designer of the Sydney Opera House * Michael Laudrup, former international football player, former manager of Spanish Primera Division Football team Getafe. * Peter Schmeichel, former international football player * Bertel Thorvaldsen, sculpturer Copenhagen is twinned with: * Paris in France (partner city) * Reykjavík in Iceland * Prague in Czech Republic (unofficial partner city) * San Francisco de Campeche in Mexico * Municipal statistics: NetBorger Kommunefakta, delivered from KMD, also known as Kommunedata (Municipal Data) * Municipal and county statistics: Statistics Denmark statistikbanken.dk * Demography: Statistical Yearbook of Copenhagen (part English); ISBN 87-7024-230-5 * History and demography: København Forslag til kommuneplan 1985; ISBN 87-88034-03-8 * Oresund Region * Eurovision Song Contest 2001 * Junior Eurovision Song Contest 2003 * MTV Europe Music Awards 2006 * Transportation in Denmark * Ports of the Baltic Sea * A Much Different Tourist Site and Cultural Guide about Copenhagen * Wonderful Copenhagen official tourism website * Copenhagen Capacity official investment agency of Copenhagen * * Official municipal website * City of Copenhagen Statistical Office * Krak searchable map
Copenhagen
Why is Copenhagen a regional hub?
Its strategic location and excellent infrastructure with the largest airport in Scandinavia[6] located 14 minutes by train from the city centre
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Copenhagen Copenhagen ( ; ) is the capital and largest city of Denmark, with a population of 1,161,063. Copenhagen is situated on the Islands of Zealand and Amager. First documented in the 11th century, Copenhagen became the capital of Denmark in the beginning of the 15th century and during the 17th century under the reign of Christian IV it became an important regional centre. Copenhagen is usually ranked as one of the two largest cities of the Nordic Countries. [ LARGEST CITY Copenhagen or Stockholm ? [ Denmark in brief . With the completion of the transnational Oresund Bridge in 2000, Copenhagen has become the centre of the increasingly integrating Øresund Region with around 3.7 million inhabitants covering an area of 20,869 km² (177/km²). Within this region, Copenhagen and Malmö is in the process of growing into one common metropolitan area. Copenhagen is a major regional center of culture, business, media, and science. In 2008 Copenhagen was ranked #4 by Financial Times-owned FDi magazine on their list of Top50 European Cities of the Future after London, Paris and Berlin. In the 2008 Worldwide Centers of Commerce Index, published by MasterCard, Copenhagen was ranked 14th in the world and 1st in Scandinavia. Life science, information technology and shipping are important sectors and research & development plays a major role in the city's economy. Its strategic location and excellent infrastructure with the largest airport in Scandinavia located 14 minutes by train from the city centre, has made it a regional hub and a popular location for regional headquarters as well as conventions. Copenhagen has repeatedly been recognized as one of the cities with the best quality of life. and in 2008 it was singled out as the Most Liveable City in the World by international lifestyle magazine Monocle on their Top 25 Most Liveable Cities 2008 list. It is also considered one of the world's most environmentally friendly cities with the water in the inner harbor being so clean that it can be used for swimming and 36 % of all citizens commuting to work by bicycle, every day bicycling a total 1.1 million km. Since the turn of the millennium Copenhagen has seen a strong urban and cultural development and has been described as a boom town. This is partly due to massive investments in cultural facilities as well as infrastructure and a new wave of succesful designers, chefs and architects. Copenhagen c. 1895 The Palace during renovation. From its humble origins as a fishing village to its heyday as the glittering capital of the Danish Empire, to its current position as one of the world's premier design capitals, the stories and characters of Copenhagen's history can be discovered in its sumptuous palaces, copper-roofed town houses and atmospheric cobbled squares. From the Viking Age there was a fishing village by the name of "Havn" (harbour) at the site. Recent archeological finds indicate that by the 11th century, Copenhagen had already grown into a small town with a large estate, a church, a market, at least two wells and many smaller habitations spread over a fairly wide area. Arkæologer graver ny teori om København op af mulden (Archeologists develop new theory about Copenhagen from their digs), Videnskab.dk, 5 November 2008 From the middle of the 12th century it grew in importance after coming into the possession of the Bishop Absalon, who fortified it in 1167, the year traditionally marking the foundation of Copenhagen. The excellent harbour encouraged Copenhagen's growth until it became an important centre of commerce. The city's origin as a harbour and a place of commerce is reflected in its name. Its original designation, from which the contemporary Danish name is derived, was Køpmannæhafn, "merchants' harbor". The English name for the city is derived from its Low German name, Kopenhagen. The element hafnium is also named for Copenhagen, whose Latin name is Hafnia. Biography of George de Hevesy It was repeatedly attacked by the Hanseatic League as the Germans took notice. In 1254, it received its charter as a city under Bishop Jakob Erlandsen. During 1658-59 it withstood a severe siege by the Swedes under Charles X and successfully repelled a major assault. In 1801 a British fleet under Admiral Parker fought a major battle, the Battle of Copenhagen, with the Danish Navy in Copenhagen harbour. It was during this battle Lord Nelson famously "put the telescope to the blind eye" in order not to see Admiral Parker's signal to cease fire. When a British expeditionary force bombarded Copenhagen in 1807, to gain control of the Danish Navy, the city suffered great damage and hundreds of people were killed. The reason why the devastation was so great was that Copenhagen relied on an old defence-line rendered virtually useless by the increase in shooting range available to the British. But not until the 1850s were the ramparts of the city opened to allow new housing to be built around the lakes ("Søerne") which bordered the old defence system to the west. This dramatic increase of space was long overdue, not only because the old ramparts were out of date as a defence system, but also because of bad sanitation in the old city. Before the opening, Copenhagen Center was inhabited by approximately 125,000 people, peaking in the census of 1870 (140,000); today the figure is around 25,000. In 1901, Copenhagen expanded further, incorporating communities with 40,000 people, and in the process making Frederiksberg an enclave within Copenhagen. During World War II, Copenhagen was occupied by German troops along with the rest of the country from 9 April 1940 until 4 May 1945. In August 1943, when the government's collaboration with the occupation forces collapsed, several ships were sunk in Copenhagen Harbour by the Royal Danish Navy to prevent them being used by the Germans. The city has grown greatly since the war, in the seventies using the so-called five-finger-plan of commuter train lines to surrounding towns and suburbs. Since the summer 2000, the cities of Copenhagen and Malmö have been connected by a toll bridge/tunnel (Øresund Bridge), which allows both rail and road passengers to cross. As a result, Copenhagen has become the centre of a larger metropolitan area which spans both nations. The construction of the bridge has led to a large number of changes to the public transportation system and the extensive redevelopment of Amager, south of the main city. Location of Coppenhagen in Denmark Nørrebro seen from "Søerne" Copenhagen City Hall Copenhagen is located on the eastern shore of the island of Zealand (Sjælland) and partly on the island of Amager. Copenhagen faces the Øresund to the east, the strait of water that separates Denmark from Sweden, and that connects the North Sea with the Baltic Sea. On the Swedish side of the sound directly across from Copenhagen, lie the towns of Malmö and Landskrona. Copenhagen is also a part of the Øresund region, which consists of Zealand, Lolland-Falster and Bornholm in Denmark and Scania in Sweden. Copenhagen Municipality is an administrative unit that covers the central part of the actual city of Copenhagen. It is a fairly small part of the actual city that falles within the municipality both because it covers a very confined area and because the enclave of Frederiksberg is an independent municipality. Copenhagen consists of a number of boroughs and areas, including * Indre By * Østerbro * Nørrebro * Vesterbro * Amagerbro * Nordhavnen (North Habour) * Valby * Kongens Enghave (King's Meadow Garden), also known as Sydhavnen (meaning South Harbour) * Christianshavn * Christiania (Freetown) * Sundbyvester (Sundby West), * Sundbyøster (Sundby East) * Ørestad * Islands Brygge * Bellahøj * Brønshøj * Ryparken * Bispebjerg * Vigerslev * Vestamager * Vanløse The suffix -bro in the names Østerbro, Nørrebro, Vesterbro and Amagerbro should not be confused with the Danish word for bridge, which is also 'bro'. The term is thought to be an abbreviation or short form of the Danish word brolagt meaning paved referring to the roads paved with cobblestones leading to the city's former gates - The conurbation of Copenhagen consists of several municipalities. After Copenhagen Municipality, the second largest is Frederiksberg Municipality which is an enclave inside Copenhagen Municipality. Both are contained in the larger Capital Region of Denmark, which contains most of the Copenhagen metropolitan area. Previously, the areas of Frederiksberg, Gentofte and Copenhagen municipalities have been used to define the city of Copenhagen. This definition is now obsolete. To meet statistical needs after the latest municipal reform, which took place in the beginning of 2007, an effort has been made to work out definitions of lands (landsdele) in Denmark. A land is basically a geographical and statistical definition, and the area is not considered to be an administrative unit. The land of Copenhagen City includes the municipalities of Copenhagen, Dragør, Frederiksberg and Tårnby, with a total population of 656,582 in the beginning of 2008. Statistics Denmark, table BEF1A07: Population 1 January by region, age, sex, marital status Retrieved on 2008-03-26. Statistics Denmark, definitions of lands as of 2007-01-01 (excel-file, in danish) Retrieved on 2008-03-26. Copenhagen and Frederiksberg were two of the three last Danish municipalities not belonging to a county. On 1 January 2007, the municipalities lost their county privileges and became part of Copenhagen Capital Region. Suburban Copenhagen is planned according to the Finger Plan, fingerplanen, initiated in 1947, dividing the suburbs into five fingers. The Finger Plan, Denmark.dk The S-train lines are built according to the Finger Plan, while green wedges and highways are built in-between the fingers The Little Finger The northern suburbs form the little finger of the plan, and is traditionally the wealthiest of the suburbs. In popular language, the area is known as "The Whiskey Belt", although the area is mixed between mansions, larger houses, garden cities and mid-size houses. The area has a population of around 270,000 inhabitants. * Gentofte Municipality: Klampenborg, Skovshoved, Charlottenlund, Hellerup, Gentofte, Ordrup, Jægersborg, Dyssegård, Vangede * Lyngby-Taarbæk Municipality: Kongens Lyngby, Ulrikkenborg, Brede, Virum, Sorgenfri, Lundtofte, Hjortekær * Rudersdal Municipality: Søllerød, Holte, Øverød, Gl. Holte, Trørød, Nærum, Vedbæk, Skodsborg, Birkerød, Kajerød, Bistrup * Hørsholm Municipality: Hørsholm, Usserød, Rungsted, Vallerød, Smidstrup * Allerød Municipality: Allerød, Lillerød, Blovstrød * Fredensborg Municipality: Fredensborg, Asminderød, Humlebæk, Kokkedal, Niverød, Nivå. The Ring Finger The North-Northwestern part of the suburbs forms the ring finger. The area is to a large extent formed by detached middle-class dwellings, with some exceptions of housing projects or upper-class areas. The area has a population of around 100,000 inhabitants. * Gladsaxe Municipality: Gladsaxe, Bagsværd, Buddinge, Høje-Gladsaxe (Gladsaxe Heights), Mørkhøj, Søborg * Furesø Municipality: Værløse, Farum, Hareskovby The Middle Finger The northwestern suburbs form the middle finger, and consists of a mixed area of both detached middle-class dwellings, widespread garden cities and large, low-rise public housing projects. The area has a considerable part of the industrial areas of metropolitan Copenhagen, mostly in the traditional sectors of manufacturing. The area has a population of around 110,000 inhabitants. * Herlev Municipality: Herlev, Hjortespring * Ballerup Municipality: Skovlunde, Ballerup, Måløv, Ågerup, Jonstrup, Egebjerg * Egedal Municipality: Smørumnedre, Stenløse, Ølstykke The Index Finger The index finger forms the western suburbs, which are the suburbs with the lowest income per capita and the highest crime-rate. The suburbs vary from the petit bourgeois area of Glostrup to the widespread low housing projects of Albertslund and Taastrup. Of the total of 145,000 inhabitants, some 20% are immigrants of first or second generation. * Rødovre Municipality: Rødovre, Islev * Glostrup Municipality: Glostrup, Hvissinge, Ejby * Brøndby Municipality: Brøndbyøster, Brøndbyvester, Brøndby Nord * Albertslund Municipality * Høje-Taastrup Municipality: Taastrup, Høje-Taastrup, Tåstrupgård, Hedehusene The Thumb The southwest suburbs along the coast form the thumb of the plan. While the central parts of these suburbs are dominated by high-rise housing projects and low-income inhabitants, the distant part is dominated by detached middle-class houses. These suburbs have a population of some 215,000 inhabitants and has a sizeable number of immigrants. * Hvidovre Municipality: Avedøre, Friheden, Hvidovre * Brøndby Municipality: Brøndby Strand * Vallensbæk Municipality * Ishøj Municipality * Greve Municipality: Hundige, Karlslunde, Greve * Solrød Municipality: Solrød, Jersie * Køge municipality: Køge, Ølby The extra finger: Amager Island suburbs & Malmö When the finger plan was initially introduced, the island of Amager wasn't included as the infrastructure was inadequate for modern suburban life. Later it has been improved, and the suburbs at the island hold some 53,000 inhabitants. Amager is now one of the most modern suburbs of Copehagen with increasing wealth. With the opening of the bridge to Sweden this finger has been extended all the way to Malmö. Under an official visit of the Swedish King in 2007 at the Copenhagen City Hall, Copenhagen Lord Mayor Ritt Bjerregaard caused a minor diplomatic incident by referring to Malmö as "København M" with an allusion to the Danish system of postal codes (Nørrebro being København N and Vesterbro being København V for instance), indicating that Malmö had turned into just another Copenhagen bourough. Today 25,000 Danes live in Malmö. Malmø er blevet til København M, DR Online * Tårnby Municipality: Tårnby, Kastrup * Dragør Municipality Summers in Copenhagen are mild with average high temperatures of around 21°C (70°F) and lows of 13°C (55°F), but temperatures could sometimes exceed 25°C (77°F+) and occasional heatwaves are common during the summer. Winters are cold, with temperatures of -2 to 4°C (28 - 40°F), and it rarely drop below −10 °C (14 °F). Precipitation is moderate throughout the year, and snowfall occurs mainly in December through March, but snow cover does not remain a long time. Nørrebro seen from "Søerne" Copenhagen as seen from the City Hall at night Kongens Nytorv View from Rundetårn Gefion Fountian The city's appearance today is shaped by the key role it has played as a regional center for centuries. Copenhagen has a multitude of districts, each representing its time and with its own distinctive character, making up a dense urban fabric. Other distinctive features of the Copenhagen of today is the abundance of water, the greenness and the elaborate system of bicycle paths that line almost every major street. The oldest section of Copenhagen's inner city is often referred to as "Middelalderbyen" (The Medieval City). However, the most distinctive district of Copenhagen is Frederiksstaden developed during the reign of Frederick V. It has Amalienborg Palace at its centre and is dominated by the dome of the Marble Church as well as a number of elegant 18th century mansions. Also part of the old inner city of Copenhagen is the small island of Slotsholmen with Christiansborg Palace and Christianshavn. Around the historical city center lies a band of charming, dense and well-preserved residential bouroughs (Vesterbro, Inner Nørrebro, Inner Østerbro) dating mainly from late 19th century. They were built outside the old ramparts of the city when the city was finally allowed to expand beyond this barrier. Sometimes referred to as "the City of Spires", Copenhagen is known for its horizontal skyline, only broken by spires at churches and castles. Most characteristic is the baroque spire of Church of Our Saviour with its spiralling and narrowing external stairs that visitors can climb to the very top of the spire. Other important spires are those of Christiansborg Palace, the City Hall and the former Church of St. Nikolaj that now houses a modern art venue. A bit lower are the renaissance spires of Rosenborg Castle and the "dragon spire" of [[Christian IV of Christian IV's former stock exchange, so named because it is shaped as the tails of four dragons twined together. Recent years has seen a tremendous boom in modern architecture in Copenhagen both when it comes to Danish architecture and works by international architects. For a few hundred years, virtually no foreign architects had worked in Copenhagen but since the mid 1990s the city and its immediate sourroundings have seen buildings and projects from such international star architects as Norman Foster , Hadid , Nouvel and Liebeskind . In the same time, a number of Danish architects have achieved great success both in Copenhagen and abroad. This has led to a number of international architecture awards. Buildings in Copenhagen have won RIBA European Awards four years in a row ("Sampension" in 2005 , "Kilen" in 2006 , "Tietgenkollegiet" in 2007 and the Royal Playhouse in 2008 ). At the 2008 World Architecture Festival in Barcelona, Bjarke Ingels Group won an award for the World's Best Residential Building 2008 for a house in Ørestad. The Forum AID Award for Best building in Scandinavia went to Copenhagen buildings both in 2006 and 2008 . In 2008 British design magazine Monocle named Copenhagen the World's best design city 2008. The boom in urban development and modern architecture means that the above mentioned horizontal skyline has seen some changes. A political majority has decided to keep the historical center free of highrises. But several areas will see or have already seen massive urban development. Ørestad is the area that until now has seen most of the development. Located near Copenhagen Airport, it currently boasts the largest mall in Scandinavia and a variety of office and residential buildings as well as an IT University and a high school. The two largest hotels in Scandinavia are currently under construction (ultimo 2008). An ambitious regeneration project will create a new Carlsberg District at the historical premises of the Carlsberg Breweries that has terminated the production of beer in Copenhagen and moved it to Jutland. The district will have a total of nine highrises and seeks to mix the old industrial buildings with modern architecture to create a dense, maze-like quarter with a focus on sustainability and an active urban life. A third major area of urban development also with a focus on sustanibility is Nordhavn. The Copenhagen tradition with urban development on artificial islands that was initiated with with Christianh IV's construction of Christianshavn has recently been continued with the creation of Havneholmen as well as a "canal city" in the South Harbour. A district in Copenhagen with a very different take on modern architecture is that of Christiania whose many creative and idiosyncratic buildings are exponents of an "architecture without architects". Østre Anlæg University of Copenhagen Botanical Garden Copenhagen is a green city with many big and small parks. King's Garden, the garden of Rosenborg Castle, is the oldest and most visited park in Copenhagen. Its landscaping was commenced by Christian IV in 1606. Every year it sees more than 2,5 million visitors and in the summer months it is packed with sunbathers, picknickers and ballplayers. It also serves as a sculpture garden with a permanent display of sculptures as well as temporary exhibits during summer. Also located in the city centre are the Botanical Gardens particularly noted for their large complex of 19th century greenhouses donated by Carlsberg founder J. C. Jacobsen. Fælledparken is with its 58 hectars the largest park in Copenhagen. It is popular for sports and hosts a long array of annual events like a free opera concert at the opening of the opera season, other open-air concerts, carnival, Labour Day celebrations and Copenhagen Historic Grand Prix which is a race for antique cars. A historical green space in the northeastern part of the city is Kastellet which is a well-presserved renaissance citadel that now serves mainly as a park. Another popular park is the Frederiksberg Garden which is a 32 hectars romantic landscape park. It houses a large colony of very tame grey herons along with other waterfowls. The park also offers views of the elephants and the elephant house designed by world-famous British architect Norman Foster of the adjacent Copenhagen Zoo. Characteristic of Copenhagen is that a number of cemeteries double as parks, though only for the more quiet activities such as sunbathing, reading and meditation. Assistens Cemetery, the burrial place of Hans Christian Andersen among others, is an important green space for the district of Inner Nørrebro and a Copenhagen institution. The lesser known Vestre Kirkegaard is with its 54 hectars the largest cemetery in Denmark and offers a maze of dense groves, open lawns, winding paths, hedges, overgrown tombs, monuments, tree-lined avenues, lakes and other garden features. It is official municipal policy in Copenhagen that all citizens by 2015 must be able to reach a park or beach on foot in less than 15 minutes. In line with this policy, several new parks are under development in areas poor in green spaces. Copenhagen and the surrounding areas have 3 beaches with a total of approx. 8 km of sandy beaches within 30 minutes of bicycling from the city centre. This includes Amager Strandpark, which opened in 2005 and includes a 2 km long artificial island and a total of 4,6 km of beaches , located just 15 minutes by bicycle or a few minutes by metro from the city centre. The beaches are supplemented by a system of harbour baths along the Copenhagen waterfront. The first and most popular of these is located at Islands Brygge Harbour bath at Islands Brygge, e-architect and has won international acclaim for its design. Islands Brygge. Depending on the boundaries used, the population of Copenhagen differs. Statistics Denmark uses a measure of the contiguously built-up urban area of Copenhagen, this means the number of communities included in this statistical abstract has changed several times, in the abstracts latest edition with close to 1.2 million (1,153,615 (2008)) inhabitants. This number is not a strict result of the commonly-used measuring methods of 200 meters of continuously build-up area, as there are exceptions to the general rule in the suburbs of Dragør, Taastrup, Birkerød, Hørsholm and Farum. Statistics Denmark has never stated the geographical area of urban Copenhagen. However, we know it consists of Copenhagen Municipality, Frederiksberg and 16 of the 20 municipalities in the old counties Copenhagen and Roskilde, though 5 of them only partially. Largest cities of Denmark 2007 Statistics Denmark has worked out definitions of so-called lands (landsdele), a definition used to meet statistical needs on a lower level than regions. From this, the land of Copenhagen city (København by) is defined by the municipalities of Copenhagen, Dragør, Frederiksberg and Tårnby, with a total population of 656,582 in the beginning of 2008. The surroundings of Copenhagen is defined by another land, Copenhagen suburban (Københavns omegn), which includes the municipalities of Albertslund, Ballerup, Brøndby, Gentofte, Gladsaxe, Glostrup, Herlev, Hvidovre, Høje-Taastrup, Ishøj, Lyngby-Taarbæk, Rødovre and Vallensbæk, and with a total population of 504,481 (January 1, 2008). This gives a total population of 1,161,063 for these two lands together. The lands of Copenhagen city and Copenhagen suburban can together be used as a definition of the metropolitan area, although perhaps a somewhat narrow one. From 1 January 2008 the population of the 34 municipalities closest to and including the municipality of Copenhagen is 1,857,263 and by 1 October 2008 the population of this area had grown to 1,872,706. Statistikbanken.dk Population table BEF1A07 Land area: 2,923 km² (1,032 sq mi). (Capital Region - Bornholm + East Zealand + Stevns) Water area: 105 km² (40.5 sq mi). Orienteering fra Københavns Kommune. Statistisk Kontor.2003 nr. 25 Thus, the region comprises 6.8% of the land area of Denmark, but has 34% of Denmark's population. This gives a total of 641 inhabitants per km² or 1,660 per square mile for the region. This compares with a population density in the rest of the country of approximately 90 per km² or around 230 per square mile. Based on a 10%-isoline (data from 2002) in which at least 10% commutes into central parts of the Copenhagen area, most of Zealand would be covered and this area has a population of about 2.3 million inhabitants. /ref> Since the opening of the Øresund Bridge in 2000, commuting between and integration of Greater Malmö and Copenhagen have increased rapidly, and a combined statistical metropolitan area has formed. This metropolitan area, which has a population of 2,501,094 (2008) is expected to be officially defined by the respective statistics divisions of Denmark and Sweden in the upcoming years. A high-ranking civil servant of the Interior Ministry, Henning Strøm, who was involved in (i.e. known as "the Father of") a past municipal reform, which took effect on 1 April 1970, said on television, broadcast in connection with the recent Kommunalreformen ("The Municipal Reform" of 2007), that Copenhagen municipality would encompass an area with 1.5 million inhabitants, if the principles of the 1970 municipal reform were also applied on Copenhagen municipality. DR netnews 25-06-04 In other words: in the rest of Denmark the city occupies only part of the municipality, but in Copenhagen the municipality of Copenhagen occupies only part of the city of Copenhagen. Since the late 1990s, Copenhagen has undergone a transformation from a cozy Scandinavian capital to a cool metropolitan city of international scope in the league of cities like Barcelona and Amsterdam. This is due to massive investments in infrastructure as well as culture and wave of new successful Danish architects, designers and chefs. Between 1998 and 2008, lifestyle journalists wordwide (from Wallpaper to the NewYorkTimes) have praised Copenhagen as a cool, well-functioning creative city (see "Copenhagen In international rankings" below). Copenhagen has a wide array of museums of International standard. The National Museum, Nationalmuseet, is Denmark's largest museum of Archaeology and cultural history, comprising the histories of Danish and foreign cultures alike. The National Gallery - "Statens Museum for Kunst" - is Denmark's national art museum and contains collections dating from 12th century and all the way up to present day artists. Among artists represented in the collections are Rubens, Rembrandt, Picasso, Braque, Léger, Matisse and Emil Nolde. Another important Copenhagen art museum is the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek founded by second generation Carlsberg tycoon-philantropist Carl Jacobsen and is built around his personal collections. Its main focus is classical Egyptian, Roman and Greek sculptures and other antiquities and a collection of Rodin sculptures that is the largest outside France (Glypto-, from the Greek root glyphein, to carve and theke, a storing-place). Besides its sculpture collections, the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek also holds a comprehensive collection of paintings of impressionist and post-impressionist painters such as Monet,Renoir, Cézanne, van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec as well as Danish Golden Age painters. Loiusiana is an internationally acclaimed museum of modern art situated on the coast just north of Copenhagen. It is located in the middle of a sculpture garden on a cliff overlooking Øresund. The The museum is included in the Patricia Schultz book 1,000 Places to See Before You Die. The Danish Museum of Art & Design is housed in the 18th century former Frederiks Hospital and displays Danish design as well as international design and crafts. Other museums include: * Thorvaldsens Museum is a single-artist museum dedicated to the oeuvre,of romantic Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen who lived and worked in Rome. * Cisternerne is a small but different museum dedicated to modern glass art. It is located in some grotto-like former cisterns that come complete with Stalactites formed by the changing water levels. * The Ordrupgaard Museum is an art museum located just notth of Copenhagen in an old mansion with an extension by Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. It features 19th century French and Danish art and is particularly noted for its works by Paul Gaugin. Copenhagen Opera House The Royal Danish Theatre In January 2009 the new Copenhagen Concert Hall will open. It is designed by Jean Nouvel and will have four halls with the main auditorium seating 1800 people. It will serve as the home of the Danish National Symphony Orchestra and along with the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles the most expensive concert hall ever built. Another important venue for classical music is the Tivoli Concert Hall located in the histtrocal Tivoli Gardens. The Copenhagen Opera House (in Danish usually called Operaen) that opened in 2005 and is designed by Henning Larsen, is the national opera house of Denmark and among the most modern opera houses in the world. The old Royal Danish Theatre dating from 1748 still works as a supplementary opera scene. The Royal Danish Theatre is also home to the Royal Danish Ballet. Gounded in 1748 along with the theatre, it is one of the oldest ballet troups in Europe. It is home the the Bournonville style of ballet. Copenhagen has a significant jazz scene that has existed for many years. It developed when a number of American jazz musicians such as Ben Webster, Thad Jones, Richard Boone, Ernie Wilkins, Kenny Drew, Ed Thigpen, Bob Rockwell and others such as rock guitarist Link Wray came to live in Copenhagen during the 1960s. Every year in early July Copenhagen's streets, aquares and parks fills up with big and small jazz concerts during the Copenhagen Jazz Festival (see yearly events). The most important venue for rhythmical music in Copenhagen is Vega in Vesterbro district which has been chosen as "best concert venue in Europe" by international music magazine Live For free entertainment one can stroll along Strøget, especially between Nytorv and Højbro Plads, which in the late afternoon and evening is a bit like an impromptu three-ring circus with musicians, magicians, jugglers and other street performers. View from Amerikakaj Copenhagen has a wide variety of sport teams. The two major football teams are Brøndby IF and FC København. Brøndby IF plays at Brøndby Stadium in Brøndby and FC København plays at Parken in Østerbro, Copenhagen. Notable Copenhagen teams playing at the second highest level in Danish football (the Danish 1st Division) include Lyngby BK, AB, HIK, Frem, Brønshøj, Fremad Amager and Skjold. Copenhagen also has three ice hockey teams: Rødovre Mighty Bulls, Herlev Hornets and Nordsjælland Cobras. There are a lot of handball teams in Copenhagen. FC København owns both a women's and a men's team, which have the same name and logo. They were formerly known as FIF. Of other clubs playing in the "highest" leagues there are; Ajax Heroes, Ydun, and HIK (Hellerup). Rugby union is also played in the Danish capital with teams such as CSR-Nanok, Copenhagen Scrum, Exiles, Froggies and Rugbyklubben Speed. The Danish Australian Football League, based in Copenhagen is the largest Australian rules football competition outside of the English speaking world. Copenhagen is also home to a number of Denmark's 40-odd cricket clubs. Although Denmark has been an associate member of the International Cricket Council since 1966, the sport is not taught much in schools, and Danish cricket competes unfavourably with the much more widely followed sport of football for players, facilities, media attention and spectators. The second World Outgames will take place in Copenhagen in 2009, after Berlin refused to stage them due to the continuing rivalry between the two gay sporting organisations. It would be the largest such event hosted in Copenhagen. Copenhagen has the two oldest amusement parks in the World. World-famous Tivoli Gardens is an amusement park and pleasure garden located right in the middle of Copenhagen between the the City Hall Square and the the Central Station. Among its rides are the oldest still operating roller coaster and the oldest ferris wheel in the World. Tivoli Gardens, the rides It also function as an open-air concert venue. It opened on August 15 1843 making it the second oldest amusement park in the world. Dyrehavsbakken (in English "the Deer Garden Hill") is located in Klampenborg a little north of Copenhagen in a forested area of great natural beauty. Having been made into an amusement park complete with rides, games and restaurants by Christian IV, it is the oldest surviving amusement park in the World. Copenhagen is a centre for the New Nordic Cuisine. Nordic Cuisine, New York Times In November 2004 a Nordic Kitchen Symposium was helt in Copenhagen at the initiative of Danish chef and gastronome Claus Meyer. The symposium had attandance of top chefs from all of the Nordic countries and led to the adoption of a Manifesto for the New Nordic Cuisine. Manifesto for a New Nordic Cuisine Claus Meyer is also the co-founder of the two-Michelin star Restaurant Noma (Nordisk Madhus) which is a flagship restaurant for the new Nordic cuisine. In 2008 it was ranked as 10th best in the World by acclaimed British restaurant & fine dining magazine Restaurant at their 50 Best Restaurants of the World 2008-list. Furthermore, the users of the international website TripAdvisor with 25 million users a month rated Noma as the best restaurant in the world. TripAdvisor ranking As of 2008 Copenhagen boasts a total of 11 Michelin star restaurants. This is by far the highest number of any Nordic city. Apart from Noma they include one of only two Thai restaurants worldwide that has received a Michelin star. Due to the development, Copenhagen is increasingly being recognized internationally as a gourmet destination. The Top 10 cities to visit in 2009, TimesOnline Apart from the selection of high end restaurants, Copenhagen offers a great variety of Danish, International and ethnic restaurants and it is possible to find modest eateries with open sandwiches (called "smørrebrød"), which is the traditional and best known dish for lunch. Most restaurants, though, serve international dishes. danish pastry, another local specialty, can be sampled from the numerous bakeries found in all parts of the city. Copenhagen has long been associated with beer.Carlsberg beer has been brewed at the brewery's premises at the border between Vesterbro and Valby districts since 1847 and has long been almost synonumous with Danish beer production. However, recent years have seen an explosive growth in the number of microbreweries so that Denmark today has more than 100 breweries Nyeste artikler fra Bryggeriforeningen, Bryggeriforeningen , many of which are located in Copenhagen. Some like Nørrebro Bryghus also act as brewpubs where it is possible also to eat at the premisses. Many cafés specialize in a huge selection of quality beers and beer has also become an important ingridient in the New Nordic Cuisine. Copenhagen is the media centre of Denmark. DR, the major Danish public service broadcasting corporation collected their activities in a new headquarters, DR byen, in 2006 and 2007. Similarly has Odense based TV2 collected its Copenhagen activities in a modern media house in the South Harbour. The two national daily newspapters Politiken and Berlingske Tidende and the two tabloids Ekstra Bladet and B. T. are based in Copenhagen. Other important media corporations include Aller Press which is the largest publisher of weekly and monthly magazines in Scandinavia, the Egmont media group and Gyldendal, the largest Danish publisher of books. Copenhagen also has a sizable movie and television industry. Filmbyen, The Movie City, which is located in a former military camp in the suburg of Hvidovre and houses several movie companies and studio studios. Among the movie campanies are Zentropa co-owned by Danish movie director Lars von Trier who is behind several international movie productions as well as a founding force behind the Dogma Movement. * Copenhagen Fashion Week takes place every year in February and August. It is the largest fashion event in Northern Europe. Fashion Capital Copenhagen On the catwalks are a growing number of new and known Danish talent with a preview of their upcoming collections. And at the three trade fairs, CPH Vision, Gallery and Copenhagen International Fashion Fair, you will find an additional 1,100 exhibitors representing a total of over 2,300 international brand name collections. Danish fashion is known for its unique angle on design, innovation and aesthetics. With a more modern approach to femininity and functionality, expressed in fresh silhouettes, a focus on details and incomparable quality. These are only some of the reasons why more than 50,000 buyers, designers and global press attend Copenhagen Fashion Week twice a year. Copenhagen Fashion Week is organised by the Danish Fashion Institute - a newly founded network organisation created by and for the Danish fashion industry. Copenhagen Fashion Week * Carnival in Copenhagen takes place every year since 1982 during the Whitsun Holiday in Fælledparken and around the city. 120 bands, 2000 dancers and 100,000 spectators participate. History of Copenhagen * Copenhagen Distortion is a youth culture festival capturing the zeitgeist of the city, gathering every year (5 days up to the first weekend of June) up to 30.000 people in the streets, in shops, galleries, clubs, bars, in boats and buses, with a cultural focus on street culture, art and upfront dance music. Copenhagen Distortion * Roskilde Festival is a music festival helt every year in Roskilde west of Copenhagen. Gathering around 100,000 people every year, it is one of the four largest rock music festivals in Europe.. * Copenhagen Jazz Festival, which begins on the first Friday in July, is a popular annual event that is the result of Copenhagen's significant jazz scene. The festival takes place throughout the city in streets, squares and parks as well as in cafés and concert halls. Copenhagen Jazz Festival 3+ years, Wonderful Copenhagen It embraces around 900 concerts, 100 venues and over 200,000 guests from Denmark and around the world. It is recognized as one of the leading jazz festivals in the World. Top 10 best Jazz Festivals, TripAdvisor Copenhagen Jazz Festival * Copenhagen Pride is a gay pride festival taking place every year in August. Among the events is "Tivoli goes pink" and it ends with a parade. Copenhagen Pride * Copenhagen Cooking takes place in August every year and is a food festival with a wide array of events all over the city. * Copenhagen International Film Festival takes place in September every year with a focus on European films. The main prize is called the Golden Swan. Copenhagen International Film Festival Middelgrunden wind farm just off Copenhagen The Danish National Bank. Designed by Arne Jacobsen. Copenhagen is the economical and financial centre of Denmark Regionale regnskaber 2005 - Nyt fra Danmarks Statistik - Danmarks Statistik and also a strong business and economic centre in the entire Scandinavian-Baltic region. In 2008 Copenhagen was ranked 4th by Financial Times-owned FDi magazine on their list of Top50 European Cities of the Future after London, Paris and Berlin. Top 50 European City of the Future 2008/09 In 2006/07 FDi Magazine named Copenhagen Scandinavian City of the Future Scandinavian City of the Future 06/07 and in 2004/05 Copenhagen was named Northern European City of the Future ahead of other cities from Scandinavia, UK, Ireland and Benelux. Northern European City of the Future 2004/05 In the 2008 Worldwide Centers of Commerce Index, published by MasterCard, Copenhagen was ranked 14th in the world and 1st in Scandinavia. Copenhagen is one of the cities in Western Europe attracting most regional headquarters and distribution centers. Among the international companies that have chosen to locate their regional headquarters in Copenhagen is Microsoft.There are 2,100 foreign companies located in the Copenhagen area, of which approx. 500 are Scandinavian head offices, representing a wide range of industries. Copenhagen has a service oriented economy. An important sector is life science and research & development plays a major role in the economy of the city. The entire Oresund Region is in cooperation with Sweden being promoted as Medicon Valley. Major Danish biotech companies like Novo Nordisk and Lundbeck, both of which are among 50 largest pharmaceutical and biotech companies in the World, are located in the greater Copenhagen area. USATODAY.com The region also boasts the largest IT-cluster in Scandinavia with nearly 100,000 employees and the city of Copenhagen is home to Nokia's largest research centre outside Finland. Copenhagen - Overview Shipping is also an import business with Maersk, the World's largest shipping company, having their world headquarters in Copenhagen. Several international companies have established their regional headquarters in Copenhagen, e.g. Microsoft. Maersk, the world's largest container shipping company, has their world headquarters in Copenhagen. A substantial number of Danish pharmaceuticals such as Novo Nordisk, Ferring Pharmaceuticals and Bavarian Nordic also operate in the area, having placed their headquarters in or close to Copenhagen. USATODAY.com Copenhagen has some of the highest gross wages in the World. City Mayors: World's richest cities High taxes mean that wages are reduced after mandatory deduction. A neneficial researcher scheme with low taxation of foreigh specialists Level of salary in Denmark has made Denmark an attractive location for highly educated foreign labour to settle. Copenhagen is however also among the most expensive cities in Europe. City Mayors: World's most expensive cities (EIU) City Mayors: World's most expensive cities - Ranking Copenhagen University Copenhagen has a well-developed higher education system of public universities. Most prominent among these is the University of Copenhagen. Founded in 1479, it is the oldest university in Denmark. It is a world-renowned research and teaching institution with campuses around the city and forms part of the International Alliance of Research Universities (IARU), which is a collaboration between international top universities including Oxford, Cambridge, Yale and Berkeley. The University attracts app. 1500 international and exchange students every year. It is repeatedly ranked as one of the best universities in Europe. At the Times Higher Education's QS World University Rankings 2008 list, it was ranked as fourth best in continental Europe. TheAcademic Ranking of World Universities 2008 placesd it as number 43 worldwide and 8th in Europe. A second all-round university in the Copenhagen area is Roskilde University located in Roskilde. The Technical University of Denmark (DTU), Danmarks Tekniske Universitet, is located in Lyngby at the northern outskirts of Copenhagen. In 2008 it was ranked third highest in Europe on Times Higher Education's list of the most influential technical universities in the World. The Max Planck Institute in Germany was ranked 15, ETH Zurich in Switzerland was ranked 15 and DTU in Denmark was ranked 20. Copenhagen Business School (CBS) is an estimed and EQUIS accredited business school located on Frederiksberg. Copenhagen is rich in companies and institutions with a focus on research and development within the biotechnology , Infrastructure & logistics - Copenhagen a distribution hub, retrieved February 22, 2007. and life science sectors. Two of the 50 largest pharmaceutical and biotech companies in the World are located in the greater Copenhagen area. The biotech and life science cluster in Copenhagen and the rest of the Oresund Region is one of the strongest in Europe. Since 1995 this has been branded as the Medicon Valley in a Danish-Swedish cooperation. The aim is to strengthen the region's position and to promote cooperation between companies and academia. The German biotech giant Sartorius Stedim Biotech, which is currently creating a Nordic head office in Tåstrup on the outskirts of Copenhagen. The Øresund region is responsible for 60 percent of life science production in Scandinavia and is home to 111 biotech companies. The greater Copenhagen area has a very well established transportation infrastructure making it a hub in Northern Europe. Christianshavns Kanal Copenhagen has a large network of toll-free highways and public roads connecting different municipalities of the city together and to Northern Europe. As in many other cities in Europe traffic is increasing in Copenhagen. The radial arterial roads and highways leading to the Copenhagen city center are critically congested during peak hours. Copenhagen is known as one of the most bicycle-friendly cities in the world. Every day 1,1 million km are bicycled in Copenhagen. 36 % of all citizens are commuting to work, school or university by bicycle and it is municipal policy that this number should go up to 40 % by 2012 and 50 % in 2015. The city's bicycle paths are extensive and well-used. Bicycle paths are often separated from the main traffic lanes and sometimes have their own signal systems. The municipality is also developing a system of interconnected green bicycle routes, greenways, with the aim to facilitate fast, safe and pleasant bicycle transport from one end of the city to the other. The network will cover more than 100 km and consist of 22 routes when finished. The city provides public bicycles which can be found throughout the downtown area and used with a returnable deposit of 20 kroner. Copenhagen's well-developed bicycle culture has given rise to the term ‘copenhagenize’. This is the practice of other cities adopting Copenhagen-style bike lanes and bicycle infrastructure. In 2007 Copenhagen-based Danish urban design consultant Jan Gehl was hired by the New York City Department of Transportation to re-imagine New York City streets by introducing designs to improve life for pedestrians and cyclists. In recognition of Copenhagen's emphasis on bicycling, the city has been chosen by the Union Cycliste Internationale as their first official Bike City. Bike City Copenhagen will take place from 2008 to 2011 and consist of big cycling events for professionals as well as amateurs. The harbour of Copenhagen has largely lost its importance as an industrial harbour. In 2001 Copenhagen Harbour merged with the harbour in Malmö to create Copenhagen-Malmö Port. It has several functions, the most important being as a major cruise destination. In 2007 a record 286 cruise ships with 420,000 cruise passengers visited Copenhagen. 120 of these ships either started or ended the cruise in Copenhagen. In 2008 these numbers grew further to 310 cruise ships and 560,000 passengers. As a result of the growth in the cruise industry facilities asre being expanded and improved. At the World Travel Awards in 2008, Copenhagen Port was named the number one cruise destination in Europe for the fifth year in a row. Copenhagen is serviced by ferry lines to Oslo in Norway (called "Oslobåden") with a daily connection and to Świnoujście in Poland (called "Polensfærgerne") with five weekly connections. Copenhagen Airport is the principal airport serving Copenhagen. It is the largest in Scandinavia and the 17th largest in Europe. It is located in Kastrup on the island of Amager and has very efficient connections to downtown Copenhagen with metro trains going to Kongens Nytorv in 15 minutes with 4-6 minutes between departures and regional trains going to the Central Station in 12 minutes. Its location also makes it the most important international airport for large parts of southern Sweden. Over the Øresund Bridge trains go to Malmö South in 14 minutes or Malmö Central Station in 22 minutes. Copenhagen Airport has won the award as "The best airport in Europe" four times, and as "The best airport in the world" two times. Copenhagen Airport is the seventh best airport in the world - second best in Europe - when you ask the passengers. The British organization Skytrax is doing so every year, writes the airport in a press release. 40 criteria are employed for the ranking. The new metro S-train at Nørreport Metro entrance in FrederiksbergThe public transportation system of Copenhagen consists of commuter trains (called S-trains, S-tog), buses, and a metro. The S-trains form the basis of the transportation network, stretching to most areas of metropolitan Copenhagen, with their main hub at Copenhagen Central Station (København H). Regional trains supplement the S-train services with lines extending further such as to the Copenhagen Airport, Elsinore, and Malmö. The Danish State Railways' Intercity network has its eastern terminus and main hub at Copenhagen, with most trains extending to Copenhagen Airport. The fare system is based on 95 zones covering the capital area. Tickets are transferable from one means of transport to another within a time limit. The more zones a ticket is valid for, the longer its time validity with a maximum of two hours. Discount cards (punch cards, klippekort) and period cards are available. Ticket prices are high and have increased substantially in recent years leading to a decrease in passenger numbers. In fact, the percentage of trips made on public transportation in Copenhagen is quite low by northern European standards. The Copenhagen Metro began operation in 2002 and currently has only two lines. In April 2008, it was named Best Metro in the World by industry experts. Copenhagen Metro Best in the World |Christiansborg Palace - home of the Danish Parliament Folketinget, the Supreme Court, Office of the Prime Minister and official reception area of Queen Margrethe II |- |Børsen - the former Stock Exchange building |- |The Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen harbor |- |Amalienborg Palace - home of the Danish royal family. The central building is the domed Marble Church located behind the palace complex |- |Nyhavn |- |The Marble Church |- |Rosenborg Castle in central Copenhagen |- |Christianshavns Canal |- |The Tivoli, photographed from Eduard Spelterini's balloon on June 22, 1922 |} Copenhagen is recognized as one of the most environmentally friendly cities in the world. In 2006 Copenhagen Municipality received the European Environmental Management Award. The award was given for long-term holistic environmental planning. It is municipal policy to reduce CO2 emissions by 20% before the end of 2015. In 2001 a large offshore wind farm was built just off the coast of Copenhagen at Middelgrunden. It produces about 4 % of the city's energy. Many years of major investments in sewage treatment has improved water quality in the harbour to an extent that the inner harbour can be used for swimming and facilities for this are provided at a number of locations. Another municipal policy is that 40% of all citizens should bicycle to and from work by 2012 and a number of initiatives are being taken to implement this policy (see "bicycling above"). Copenhagen is the capital in the World where organic food has the largest market share. One in every ten purchases is organic in Copenhagen. Within the municipal sector in Copenhagen, 45 % of all food consumption is organic but the target is considerably higher. With the environmental strategy "Environment Metropolis: Our Vision 2015" the politicians wish that solely organic food is to be served in 90 per cent of the Copenhagen old-age homes and residential homes for children and young persons in 2015.. - - - Image:Christiansborg Slot.jpg| Christiansborg Slot - Image:Børsen København.jpg| Børsen- the former Stock Exchange building - Image:Littlemermaid207.jpg| The Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen harbor - Image:Copenhagen amalienborg seen from opera house.jpg| Amalienborg Palace - Image:Nyhavn 9-15 København.jpg| Nyhavn - Image:Kbh Marmorkirche 1.jpg| Frederik's Church|The Marble Church - Image:Rosenborg.jpg| Rosenborg Castle in central Copenhagen - Image:Christianshavns Kanal morning.jpg| Christianshavns Canal - Image:Amalienborgas.JPG | The Royal Residence - Image:Copenhague 108.jpg | The Round Tower - Image:Gammel_Strand_København.jpg| Gammel Strand - Image:Kbh_Stroeget_Nikolaj_Kirche.jpg | Stroget - Image:A_Copenhagen_center_street.jpg| Central Copenhagen Street - Image:Amagergade 01.jpg| Amagergade - Image:Gebauede_in_kopenhagen.jpg| Copenhagen Habour - Image:Container ship loading-700px.jpg| Copenhagen Ship Loading - Image:Christianshavns_Torv.jpg | Christianshavn Torv - Image:Copenhagen-Airport-from-air.jpg | Copenhagen Airport from the air - Image:Østre Anlæg København.jpg | Østre Anlæg - Image:Frederiksberg Slot.jpg | Frederiksberg Castle - Image:Kongens Nytorv 17.jpg | Kongens Nytorv - Image:Kopenhagen zeehaven.JPG | Copenhagen Canal Tour - Image:Den-sorte-diamant.jpg | The Black Diamond ( The Royal Library ) - Image:Tivoli Copenhagen at Night.jpg | Tivoli by Night - Image:Kopenhagen 3.jpg | View over Copenhagen - Image:Gammeltorv Copenhagen Denmark.JPG | Gammeltorv - Image:Copenhagen denmark.jpg | Nyhavn - Image:Copenhagen City Hall.jpg | Copenhagen City Hall - Image:Gefion.jpg| Gefion Fountian - Image:Christiania Exit.JPG | Christiania - Image:Gebauede in kopenhagen.jpg | Copenhagen at Night - Image:Copenhague 050.jpg | Inner City Canel - Copenhagen has placed well in a number of international rankings, some of which are mentioned below. * Copenhagen was ranked #1 as Most Livable City in the World by international lifestyle magazine Monocle on their Top 25 Most Livable Cities 2008 list Monocles page on Copenhagen * Worlds Best Design City 2008 also by Monocle. Monocles page on Copenhagen *Monocle has also stated that Copenhagen is "Scandinavia's most desirable city". By Stuart Husband Monocle Magazine Published: June 19, 2007 *Copenhagen ranked #4 by Financial Times-owned FDi magazine on their list of Top50 European Cities of the Future after London, Paris and Berlin. Top 50 European City of the Future 2008/09 In 2006/07 FDi Magazine named Copenhagen Scandinavian City of the Future Scandinavian City of the Future 06/07 and in 2004/05 Copenhagen was named Northern European City of the Future ahead of other cities from Scandinavia, UK, Ireland and Benelux. Northern European City of the Future 2004/05 * In the 2008 Worldwide Centers of Commerce Index, published by MasterCard, Copenhagen was ranked 14th in the world and 1st in Scandinavia. *Copenhagen #1 out of 254 locations in the Location Ranking Survey performed by ECA International that has asked European experts where they prefer to be stationed worldwide. Location Ranking Survey * Copenhagen was ranked #6 in Grist Magazine's "15 Green Cities" list in 2007 making Copenhagen the greenest capital of Scandinavia according to Grist Magazine. 15 Green Cities | Grist | Main Dish | 19 July 2007 * Copenhagen is the capital in the World where organic food has the largest market share. One in every ten purchases is organic in Copenhagen. World-champinions in organic food * The Copenhagen Metro has been named the Best Metro in the World by industry experts. Copenhagen Metro Best in the World * Copenhagen is the worlds #7 most expensive city and #3 most expensive in Europe on the Forbes List. Forbes-Worlds Most Expensive Cities List * Copenhagen is ranked #7 as Preferred City For Investment Projects. Preferred City For Investment Projects * Copenhagen ranked 3rd in Western Europe in terms of attracting regional headquarters and distribution centers, only surpassed by London and Paris. * Copenhagen ranks #1 in the Global Earning Ranking. [h Global earning ranking ] * Copenhagen ranks as the 5th most popular city in the world for international meetings and conferences. Style & Substance Danmark * Copenhagen ranks as one of the most attractive cities to live and work in Europe. A great place to live * Copenhagen ranks 2nd in Europe for Quality of life according to a survey from 2005 by the international consultancy firm William Mercer. A great place to live * Morten Andersen, veteran NFL kicker * Niels Bohr, physicist, Nobel laureate * Aage Bohr, physicist, Nobel laureate (son of Niels Bohr) * Victor Borge, entertainer * August Bournonville, ballet choreographer * Georg Brandes, critic * Helena Christensen, supermodel * Tove Ditlevsen, writer * Carl Theodor Dreyer, movie director * Vilhelm Hammershøi, painter * Gus Hansen, poker player * Iben Hjejle, actor * Peter Høeg, writer * Arne Jacobsen, designer * Robert Jacobsen, painter * J. C. Jacobsen, founder of Carlsberg Brewery * Mathias Lauridsen, male topmodel * Søren Kierkegaard, philosopher * Bjørn Lomborg, Academic and Author of The Skeptical Environmentalist * Lauritz Melchior, opera singer * Mads Mikkelsen, actor * Carl-Henning Pedersen, painter * Lars von Trier, movie director * Dan Turèll, writer * Lars Ulrich, drummer and songwriter of the heavy-metal band Metallica * Jørn Utzon, architect, designer of the Sydney Opera House * Michael Laudrup, former international football player, former manager of Spanish Primera Division Football team Getafe. * Peter Schmeichel, former international football player * Bertel Thorvaldsen, sculpturer Copenhagen is twinned with: * Paris in France (partner city) * Reykjavík in Iceland * Prague in Czech Republic (unofficial partner city) * San Francisco de Campeche in Mexico * Municipal statistics: NetBorger Kommunefakta, delivered from KMD, also known as Kommunedata (Municipal Data) * Municipal and county statistics: Statistics Denmark statistikbanken.dk * Demography: Statistical Yearbook of Copenhagen (part English); ISBN 87-7024-230-5 * History and demography: København Forslag til kommuneplan 1985; ISBN 87-88034-03-8 * Oresund Region * Eurovision Song Contest 2001 * Junior Eurovision Song Contest 2003 * MTV Europe Music Awards 2006 * Transportation in Denmark * Ports of the Baltic Sea * A Much Different Tourist Site and Cultural Guide about Copenhagen * Wonderful Copenhagen official tourism website * Copenhagen Capacity official investment agency of Copenhagen * * Official municipal website * City of Copenhagen Statistical Office * Krak searchable map
Copenhagen
What happened to Copenhagen between 1251 and 1255?
a bunch of things
data/set3/a8
Copenhagen Copenhagen ( ; ) is the capital and largest city of Denmark, with a population of 1,161,063. Copenhagen is situated on the Islands of Zealand and Amager. First documented in the 11th century, Copenhagen became the capital of Denmark in the beginning of the 15th century and during the 17th century under the reign of Christian IV it became an important regional centre. Copenhagen is usually ranked as one of the two largest cities of the Nordic Countries. [ LARGEST CITY Copenhagen or Stockholm ? [ Denmark in brief . With the completion of the transnational Oresund Bridge in 2000, Copenhagen has become the centre of the increasingly integrating Øresund Region with around 3.7 million inhabitants covering an area of 20,869 km² (177/km²). Within this region, Copenhagen and Malmö is in the process of growing into one common metropolitan area. Copenhagen is a major regional center of culture, business, media, and science. In 2008 Copenhagen was ranked #4 by Financial Times-owned FDi magazine on their list of Top50 European Cities of the Future after London, Paris and Berlin. In the 2008 Worldwide Centers of Commerce Index, published by MasterCard, Copenhagen was ranked 14th in the world and 1st in Scandinavia. Life science, information technology and shipping are important sectors and research & development plays a major role in the city's economy. Its strategic location and excellent infrastructure with the largest airport in Scandinavia located 14 minutes by train from the city centre, has made it a regional hub and a popular location for regional headquarters as well as conventions. Copenhagen has repeatedly been recognized as one of the cities with the best quality of life. and in 2008 it was singled out as the Most Liveable City in the World by international lifestyle magazine Monocle on their Top 25 Most Liveable Cities 2008 list. It is also considered one of the world's most environmentally friendly cities with the water in the inner harbor being so clean that it can be used for swimming and 36 % of all citizens commuting to work by bicycle, every day bicycling a total 1.1 million km. Since the turn of the millennium Copenhagen has seen a strong urban and cultural development and has been described as a boom town. This is partly due to massive investments in cultural facilities as well as infrastructure and a new wave of succesful designers, chefs and architects. Copenhagen c. 1895 The Palace during renovation. From its humble origins as a fishing village to its heyday as the glittering capital of the Danish Empire, to its current position as one of the world's premier design capitals, the stories and characters of Copenhagen's history can be discovered in its sumptuous palaces, copper-roofed town houses and atmospheric cobbled squares. From the Viking Age there was a fishing village by the name of "Havn" (harbour) at the site. Recent archeological finds indicate that by the 11th century, Copenhagen had already grown into a small town with a large estate, a church, a market, at least two wells and many smaller habitations spread over a fairly wide area. Arkæologer graver ny teori om København op af mulden (Archeologists develop new theory about Copenhagen from their digs), Videnskab.dk, 5 November 2008 From the middle of the 12th century it grew in importance after coming into the possession of the Bishop Absalon, who fortified it in 1167, the year traditionally marking the foundation of Copenhagen. The excellent harbour encouraged Copenhagen's growth until it became an important centre of commerce. The city's origin as a harbour and a place of commerce is reflected in its name. Its original designation, from which the contemporary Danish name is derived, was Køpmannæhafn, "merchants' harbor". The English name for the city is derived from its Low German name, Kopenhagen. The element hafnium is also named for Copenhagen, whose Latin name is Hafnia. Biography of George de Hevesy It was repeatedly attacked by the Hanseatic League as the Germans took notice. In 1254, it received its charter as a city under Bishop Jakob Erlandsen. During 1658-59 it withstood a severe siege by the Swedes under Charles X and successfully repelled a major assault. In 1801 a British fleet under Admiral Parker fought a major battle, the Battle of Copenhagen, with the Danish Navy in Copenhagen harbour. It was during this battle Lord Nelson famously "put the telescope to the blind eye" in order not to see Admiral Parker's signal to cease fire. When a British expeditionary force bombarded Copenhagen in 1807, to gain control of the Danish Navy, the city suffered great damage and hundreds of people were killed. The reason why the devastation was so great was that Copenhagen relied on an old defence-line rendered virtually useless by the increase in shooting range available to the British. But not until the 1850s were the ramparts of the city opened to allow new housing to be built around the lakes ("Søerne") which bordered the old defence system to the west. This dramatic increase of space was long overdue, not only because the old ramparts were out of date as a defence system, but also because of bad sanitation in the old city. Before the opening, Copenhagen Center was inhabited by approximately 125,000 people, peaking in the census of 1870 (140,000); today the figure is around 25,000. In 1901, Copenhagen expanded further, incorporating communities with 40,000 people, and in the process making Frederiksberg an enclave within Copenhagen. During World War II, Copenhagen was occupied by German troops along with the rest of the country from 9 April 1940 until 4 May 1945. In August 1943, when the government's collaboration with the occupation forces collapsed, several ships were sunk in Copenhagen Harbour by the Royal Danish Navy to prevent them being used by the Germans. The city has grown greatly since the war, in the seventies using the so-called five-finger-plan of commuter train lines to surrounding towns and suburbs. Since the summer 2000, the cities of Copenhagen and Malmö have been connected by a toll bridge/tunnel (Øresund Bridge), which allows both rail and road passengers to cross. As a result, Copenhagen has become the centre of a larger metropolitan area which spans both nations. The construction of the bridge has led to a large number of changes to the public transportation system and the extensive redevelopment of Amager, south of the main city. Location of Coppenhagen in Denmark Nørrebro seen from "Søerne" Copenhagen City Hall Copenhagen is located on the eastern shore of the island of Zealand (Sjælland) and partly on the island of Amager. Copenhagen faces the Øresund to the east, the strait of water that separates Denmark from Sweden, and that connects the North Sea with the Baltic Sea. On the Swedish side of the sound directly across from Copenhagen, lie the towns of Malmö and Landskrona. Copenhagen is also a part of the Øresund region, which consists of Zealand, Lolland-Falster and Bornholm in Denmark and Scania in Sweden. Copenhagen Municipality is an administrative unit that covers the central part of the actual city of Copenhagen. It is a fairly small part of the actual city that falles within the municipality both because it covers a very confined area and because the enclave of Frederiksberg is an independent municipality. Copenhagen consists of a number of boroughs and areas, including * Indre By * Østerbro * Nørrebro * Vesterbro * Amagerbro * Nordhavnen (North Habour) * Valby * Kongens Enghave (King's Meadow Garden), also known as Sydhavnen (meaning South Harbour) * Christianshavn * Christiania (Freetown) * Sundbyvester (Sundby West), * Sundbyøster (Sundby East) * Ørestad * Islands Brygge * Bellahøj * Brønshøj * Ryparken * Bispebjerg * Vigerslev * Vestamager * Vanløse The suffix -bro in the names Østerbro, Nørrebro, Vesterbro and Amagerbro should not be confused with the Danish word for bridge, which is also 'bro'. The term is thought to be an abbreviation or short form of the Danish word brolagt meaning paved referring to the roads paved with cobblestones leading to the city's former gates - The conurbation of Copenhagen consists of several municipalities. After Copenhagen Municipality, the second largest is Frederiksberg Municipality which is an enclave inside Copenhagen Municipality. Both are contained in the larger Capital Region of Denmark, which contains most of the Copenhagen metropolitan area. Previously, the areas of Frederiksberg, Gentofte and Copenhagen municipalities have been used to define the city of Copenhagen. This definition is now obsolete. To meet statistical needs after the latest municipal reform, which took place in the beginning of 2007, an effort has been made to work out definitions of lands (landsdele) in Denmark. A land is basically a geographical and statistical definition, and the area is not considered to be an administrative unit. The land of Copenhagen City includes the municipalities of Copenhagen, Dragør, Frederiksberg and Tårnby, with a total population of 656,582 in the beginning of 2008. Statistics Denmark, table BEF1A07: Population 1 January by region, age, sex, marital status Retrieved on 2008-03-26. Statistics Denmark, definitions of lands as of 2007-01-01 (excel-file, in danish) Retrieved on 2008-03-26. Copenhagen and Frederiksberg were two of the three last Danish municipalities not belonging to a county. On 1 January 2007, the municipalities lost their county privileges and became part of Copenhagen Capital Region. Suburban Copenhagen is planned according to the Finger Plan, fingerplanen, initiated in 1947, dividing the suburbs into five fingers. The Finger Plan, Denmark.dk The S-train lines are built according to the Finger Plan, while green wedges and highways are built in-between the fingers The Little Finger The northern suburbs form the little finger of the plan, and is traditionally the wealthiest of the suburbs. In popular language, the area is known as "The Whiskey Belt", although the area is mixed between mansions, larger houses, garden cities and mid-size houses. The area has a population of around 270,000 inhabitants. * Gentofte Municipality: Klampenborg, Skovshoved, Charlottenlund, Hellerup, Gentofte, Ordrup, Jægersborg, Dyssegård, Vangede * Lyngby-Taarbæk Municipality: Kongens Lyngby, Ulrikkenborg, Brede, Virum, Sorgenfri, Lundtofte, Hjortekær * Rudersdal Municipality: Søllerød, Holte, Øverød, Gl. Holte, Trørød, Nærum, Vedbæk, Skodsborg, Birkerød, Kajerød, Bistrup * Hørsholm Municipality: Hørsholm, Usserød, Rungsted, Vallerød, Smidstrup * Allerød Municipality: Allerød, Lillerød, Blovstrød * Fredensborg Municipality: Fredensborg, Asminderød, Humlebæk, Kokkedal, Niverød, Nivå. The Ring Finger The North-Northwestern part of the suburbs forms the ring finger. The area is to a large extent formed by detached middle-class dwellings, with some exceptions of housing projects or upper-class areas. The area has a population of around 100,000 inhabitants. * Gladsaxe Municipality: Gladsaxe, Bagsværd, Buddinge, Høje-Gladsaxe (Gladsaxe Heights), Mørkhøj, Søborg * Furesø Municipality: Værløse, Farum, Hareskovby The Middle Finger The northwestern suburbs form the middle finger, and consists of a mixed area of both detached middle-class dwellings, widespread garden cities and large, low-rise public housing projects. The area has a considerable part of the industrial areas of metropolitan Copenhagen, mostly in the traditional sectors of manufacturing. The area has a population of around 110,000 inhabitants. * Herlev Municipality: Herlev, Hjortespring * Ballerup Municipality: Skovlunde, Ballerup, Måløv, Ågerup, Jonstrup, Egebjerg * Egedal Municipality: Smørumnedre, Stenløse, Ølstykke The Index Finger The index finger forms the western suburbs, which are the suburbs with the lowest income per capita and the highest crime-rate. The suburbs vary from the petit bourgeois area of Glostrup to the widespread low housing projects of Albertslund and Taastrup. Of the total of 145,000 inhabitants, some 20% are immigrants of first or second generation. * Rødovre Municipality: Rødovre, Islev * Glostrup Municipality: Glostrup, Hvissinge, Ejby * Brøndby Municipality: Brøndbyøster, Brøndbyvester, Brøndby Nord * Albertslund Municipality * Høje-Taastrup Municipality: Taastrup, Høje-Taastrup, Tåstrupgård, Hedehusene The Thumb The southwest suburbs along the coast form the thumb of the plan. While the central parts of these suburbs are dominated by high-rise housing projects and low-income inhabitants, the distant part is dominated by detached middle-class houses. These suburbs have a population of some 215,000 inhabitants and has a sizeable number of immigrants. * Hvidovre Municipality: Avedøre, Friheden, Hvidovre * Brøndby Municipality: Brøndby Strand * Vallensbæk Municipality * Ishøj Municipality * Greve Municipality: Hundige, Karlslunde, Greve * Solrød Municipality: Solrød, Jersie * Køge municipality: Køge, Ølby The extra finger: Amager Island suburbs & Malmö When the finger plan was initially introduced, the island of Amager wasn't included as the infrastructure was inadequate for modern suburban life. Later it has been improved, and the suburbs at the island hold some 53,000 inhabitants. Amager is now one of the most modern suburbs of Copehagen with increasing wealth. With the opening of the bridge to Sweden this finger has been extended all the way to Malmö. Under an official visit of the Swedish King in 2007 at the Copenhagen City Hall, Copenhagen Lord Mayor Ritt Bjerregaard caused a minor diplomatic incident by referring to Malmö as "København M" with an allusion to the Danish system of postal codes (Nørrebro being København N and Vesterbro being København V for instance), indicating that Malmö had turned into just another Copenhagen bourough. Today 25,000 Danes live in Malmö. Malmø er blevet til København M, DR Online * Tårnby Municipality: Tårnby, Kastrup * Dragør Municipality Summers in Copenhagen are mild with average high temperatures of around 21°C (70°F) and lows of 13°C (55°F), but temperatures could sometimes exceed 25°C (77°F+) and occasional heatwaves are common during the summer. Winters are cold, with temperatures of -2 to 4°C (28 - 40°F), and it rarely drop below −10 °C (14 °F). Precipitation is moderate throughout the year, and snowfall occurs mainly in December through March, but snow cover does not remain a long time. Nørrebro seen from "Søerne" Copenhagen as seen from the City Hall at night Kongens Nytorv View from Rundetårn Gefion Fountian The city's appearance today is shaped by the key role it has played as a regional center for centuries. Copenhagen has a multitude of districts, each representing its time and with its own distinctive character, making up a dense urban fabric. Other distinctive features of the Copenhagen of today is the abundance of water, the greenness and the elaborate system of bicycle paths that line almost every major street. The oldest section of Copenhagen's inner city is often referred to as "Middelalderbyen" (The Medieval City). However, the most distinctive district of Copenhagen is Frederiksstaden developed during the reign of Frederick V. It has Amalienborg Palace at its centre and is dominated by the dome of the Marble Church as well as a number of elegant 18th century mansions. Also part of the old inner city of Copenhagen is the small island of Slotsholmen with Christiansborg Palace and Christianshavn. Around the historical city center lies a band of charming, dense and well-preserved residential bouroughs (Vesterbro, Inner Nørrebro, Inner Østerbro) dating mainly from late 19th century. They were built outside the old ramparts of the city when the city was finally allowed to expand beyond this barrier. Sometimes referred to as "the City of Spires", Copenhagen is known for its horizontal skyline, only broken by spires at churches and castles. Most characteristic is the baroque spire of Church of Our Saviour with its spiralling and narrowing external stairs that visitors can climb to the very top of the spire. Other important spires are those of Christiansborg Palace, the City Hall and the former Church of St. Nikolaj that now houses a modern art venue. A bit lower are the renaissance spires of Rosenborg Castle and the "dragon spire" of [[Christian IV of Christian IV's former stock exchange, so named because it is shaped as the tails of four dragons twined together. Recent years has seen a tremendous boom in modern architecture in Copenhagen both when it comes to Danish architecture and works by international architects. For a few hundred years, virtually no foreign architects had worked in Copenhagen but since the mid 1990s the city and its immediate sourroundings have seen buildings and projects from such international star architects as Norman Foster , Hadid , Nouvel and Liebeskind . In the same time, a number of Danish architects have achieved great success both in Copenhagen and abroad. This has led to a number of international architecture awards. Buildings in Copenhagen have won RIBA European Awards four years in a row ("Sampension" in 2005 , "Kilen" in 2006 , "Tietgenkollegiet" in 2007 and the Royal Playhouse in 2008 ). At the 2008 World Architecture Festival in Barcelona, Bjarke Ingels Group won an award for the World's Best Residential Building 2008 for a house in Ørestad. The Forum AID Award for Best building in Scandinavia went to Copenhagen buildings both in 2006 and 2008 . In 2008 British design magazine Monocle named Copenhagen the World's best design city 2008. The boom in urban development and modern architecture means that the above mentioned horizontal skyline has seen some changes. A political majority has decided to keep the historical center free of highrises. But several areas will see or have already seen massive urban development. Ørestad is the area that until now has seen most of the development. Located near Copenhagen Airport, it currently boasts the largest mall in Scandinavia and a variety of office and residential buildings as well as an IT University and a high school. The two largest hotels in Scandinavia are currently under construction (ultimo 2008). An ambitious regeneration project will create a new Carlsberg District at the historical premises of the Carlsberg Breweries that has terminated the production of beer in Copenhagen and moved it to Jutland. The district will have a total of nine highrises and seeks to mix the old industrial buildings with modern architecture to create a dense, maze-like quarter with a focus on sustainability and an active urban life. A third major area of urban development also with a focus on sustanibility is Nordhavn. The Copenhagen tradition with urban development on artificial islands that was initiated with with Christianh IV's construction of Christianshavn has recently been continued with the creation of Havneholmen as well as a "canal city" in the South Harbour. A district in Copenhagen with a very different take on modern architecture is that of Christiania whose many creative and idiosyncratic buildings are exponents of an "architecture without architects". Østre Anlæg University of Copenhagen Botanical Garden Copenhagen is a green city with many big and small parks. King's Garden, the garden of Rosenborg Castle, is the oldest and most visited park in Copenhagen. Its landscaping was commenced by Christian IV in 1606. Every year it sees more than 2,5 million visitors and in the summer months it is packed with sunbathers, picknickers and ballplayers. It also serves as a sculpture garden with a permanent display of sculptures as well as temporary exhibits during summer. Also located in the city centre are the Botanical Gardens particularly noted for their large complex of 19th century greenhouses donated by Carlsberg founder J. C. Jacobsen. Fælledparken is with its 58 hectars the largest park in Copenhagen. It is popular for sports and hosts a long array of annual events like a free opera concert at the opening of the opera season, other open-air concerts, carnival, Labour Day celebrations and Copenhagen Historic Grand Prix which is a race for antique cars. A historical green space in the northeastern part of the city is Kastellet which is a well-presserved renaissance citadel that now serves mainly as a park. Another popular park is the Frederiksberg Garden which is a 32 hectars romantic landscape park. It houses a large colony of very tame grey herons along with other waterfowls. The park also offers views of the elephants and the elephant house designed by world-famous British architect Norman Foster of the adjacent Copenhagen Zoo. Characteristic of Copenhagen is that a number of cemeteries double as parks, though only for the more quiet activities such as sunbathing, reading and meditation. Assistens Cemetery, the burrial place of Hans Christian Andersen among others, is an important green space for the district of Inner Nørrebro and a Copenhagen institution. The lesser known Vestre Kirkegaard is with its 54 hectars the largest cemetery in Denmark and offers a maze of dense groves, open lawns, winding paths, hedges, overgrown tombs, monuments, tree-lined avenues, lakes and other garden features. It is official municipal policy in Copenhagen that all citizens by 2015 must be able to reach a park or beach on foot in less than 15 minutes. In line with this policy, several new parks are under development in areas poor in green spaces. Copenhagen and the surrounding areas have 3 beaches with a total of approx. 8 km of sandy beaches within 30 minutes of bicycling from the city centre. This includes Amager Strandpark, which opened in 2005 and includes a 2 km long artificial island and a total of 4,6 km of beaches , located just 15 minutes by bicycle or a few minutes by metro from the city centre. The beaches are supplemented by a system of harbour baths along the Copenhagen waterfront. The first and most popular of these is located at Islands Brygge Harbour bath at Islands Brygge, e-architect and has won international acclaim for its design. Islands Brygge. Depending on the boundaries used, the population of Copenhagen differs. Statistics Denmark uses a measure of the contiguously built-up urban area of Copenhagen, this means the number of communities included in this statistical abstract has changed several times, in the abstracts latest edition with close to 1.2 million (1,153,615 (2008)) inhabitants. This number is not a strict result of the commonly-used measuring methods of 200 meters of continuously build-up area, as there are exceptions to the general rule in the suburbs of Dragør, Taastrup, Birkerød, Hørsholm and Farum. Statistics Denmark has never stated the geographical area of urban Copenhagen. However, we know it consists of Copenhagen Municipality, Frederiksberg and 16 of the 20 municipalities in the old counties Copenhagen and Roskilde, though 5 of them only partially. Largest cities of Denmark 2007 Statistics Denmark has worked out definitions of so-called lands (landsdele), a definition used to meet statistical needs on a lower level than regions. From this, the land of Copenhagen city (København by) is defined by the municipalities of Copenhagen, Dragør, Frederiksberg and Tårnby, with a total population of 656,582 in the beginning of 2008. The surroundings of Copenhagen is defined by another land, Copenhagen suburban (Københavns omegn), which includes the municipalities of Albertslund, Ballerup, Brøndby, Gentofte, Gladsaxe, Glostrup, Herlev, Hvidovre, Høje-Taastrup, Ishøj, Lyngby-Taarbæk, Rødovre and Vallensbæk, and with a total population of 504,481 (January 1, 2008). This gives a total population of 1,161,063 for these two lands together. The lands of Copenhagen city and Copenhagen suburban can together be used as a definition of the metropolitan area, although perhaps a somewhat narrow one. From 1 January 2008 the population of the 34 municipalities closest to and including the municipality of Copenhagen is 1,857,263 and by 1 October 2008 the population of this area had grown to 1,872,706. Statistikbanken.dk Population table BEF1A07 Land area: 2,923 km² (1,032 sq mi). (Capital Region - Bornholm + East Zealand + Stevns) Water area: 105 km² (40.5 sq mi). Orienteering fra Københavns Kommune. Statistisk Kontor.2003 nr. 25 Thus, the region comprises 6.8% of the land area of Denmark, but has 34% of Denmark's population. This gives a total of 641 inhabitants per km² or 1,660 per square mile for the region. This compares with a population density in the rest of the country of approximately 90 per km² or around 230 per square mile. Based on a 10%-isoline (data from 2002) in which at least 10% commutes into central parts of the Copenhagen area, most of Zealand would be covered and this area has a population of about 2.3 million inhabitants. /ref> Since the opening of the Øresund Bridge in 2000, commuting between and integration of Greater Malmö and Copenhagen have increased rapidly, and a combined statistical metropolitan area has formed. This metropolitan area, which has a population of 2,501,094 (2008) is expected to be officially defined by the respective statistics divisions of Denmark and Sweden in the upcoming years. A high-ranking civil servant of the Interior Ministry, Henning Strøm, who was involved in (i.e. known as "the Father of") a past municipal reform, which took effect on 1 April 1970, said on television, broadcast in connection with the recent Kommunalreformen ("The Municipal Reform" of 2007), that Copenhagen municipality would encompass an area with 1.5 million inhabitants, if the principles of the 1970 municipal reform were also applied on Copenhagen municipality. DR netnews 25-06-04 In other words: in the rest of Denmark the city occupies only part of the municipality, but in Copenhagen the municipality of Copenhagen occupies only part of the city of Copenhagen. Since the late 1990s, Copenhagen has undergone a transformation from a cozy Scandinavian capital to a cool metropolitan city of international scope in the league of cities like Barcelona and Amsterdam. This is due to massive investments in infrastructure as well as culture and wave of new successful Danish architects, designers and chefs. Between 1998 and 2008, lifestyle journalists wordwide (from Wallpaper to the NewYorkTimes) have praised Copenhagen as a cool, well-functioning creative city (see "Copenhagen In international rankings" below). Copenhagen has a wide array of museums of International standard. The National Museum, Nationalmuseet, is Denmark's largest museum of Archaeology and cultural history, comprising the histories of Danish and foreign cultures alike. The National Gallery - "Statens Museum for Kunst" - is Denmark's national art museum and contains collections dating from 12th century and all the way up to present day artists. Among artists represented in the collections are Rubens, Rembrandt, Picasso, Braque, Léger, Matisse and Emil Nolde. Another important Copenhagen art museum is the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek founded by second generation Carlsberg tycoon-philantropist Carl Jacobsen and is built around his personal collections. Its main focus is classical Egyptian, Roman and Greek sculptures and other antiquities and a collection of Rodin sculptures that is the largest outside France (Glypto-, from the Greek root glyphein, to carve and theke, a storing-place). Besides its sculpture collections, the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek also holds a comprehensive collection of paintings of impressionist and post-impressionist painters such as Monet,Renoir, Cézanne, van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec as well as Danish Golden Age painters. Loiusiana is an internationally acclaimed museum of modern art situated on the coast just north of Copenhagen. It is located in the middle of a sculpture garden on a cliff overlooking Øresund. The The museum is included in the Patricia Schultz book 1,000 Places to See Before You Die. The Danish Museum of Art & Design is housed in the 18th century former Frederiks Hospital and displays Danish design as well as international design and crafts. Other museums include: * Thorvaldsens Museum is a single-artist museum dedicated to the oeuvre,of romantic Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen who lived and worked in Rome. * Cisternerne is a small but different museum dedicated to modern glass art. It is located in some grotto-like former cisterns that come complete with Stalactites formed by the changing water levels. * The Ordrupgaard Museum is an art museum located just notth of Copenhagen in an old mansion with an extension by Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. It features 19th century French and Danish art and is particularly noted for its works by Paul Gaugin. Copenhagen Opera House The Royal Danish Theatre In January 2009 the new Copenhagen Concert Hall will open. It is designed by Jean Nouvel and will have four halls with the main auditorium seating 1800 people. It will serve as the home of the Danish National Symphony Orchestra and along with the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles the most expensive concert hall ever built. Another important venue for classical music is the Tivoli Concert Hall located in the histtrocal Tivoli Gardens. The Copenhagen Opera House (in Danish usually called Operaen) that opened in 2005 and is designed by Henning Larsen, is the national opera house of Denmark and among the most modern opera houses in the world. The old Royal Danish Theatre dating from 1748 still works as a supplementary opera scene. The Royal Danish Theatre is also home to the Royal Danish Ballet. Gounded in 1748 along with the theatre, it is one of the oldest ballet troups in Europe. It is home the the Bournonville style of ballet. Copenhagen has a significant jazz scene that has existed for many years. It developed when a number of American jazz musicians such as Ben Webster, Thad Jones, Richard Boone, Ernie Wilkins, Kenny Drew, Ed Thigpen, Bob Rockwell and others such as rock guitarist Link Wray came to live in Copenhagen during the 1960s. Every year in early July Copenhagen's streets, aquares and parks fills up with big and small jazz concerts during the Copenhagen Jazz Festival (see yearly events). The most important venue for rhythmical music in Copenhagen is Vega in Vesterbro district which has been chosen as "best concert venue in Europe" by international music magazine Live For free entertainment one can stroll along Strøget, especially between Nytorv and Højbro Plads, which in the late afternoon and evening is a bit like an impromptu three-ring circus with musicians, magicians, jugglers and other street performers. View from Amerikakaj Copenhagen has a wide variety of sport teams. The two major football teams are Brøndby IF and FC København. Brøndby IF plays at Brøndby Stadium in Brøndby and FC København plays at Parken in Østerbro, Copenhagen. Notable Copenhagen teams playing at the second highest level in Danish football (the Danish 1st Division) include Lyngby BK, AB, HIK, Frem, Brønshøj, Fremad Amager and Skjold. Copenhagen also has three ice hockey teams: Rødovre Mighty Bulls, Herlev Hornets and Nordsjælland Cobras. There are a lot of handball teams in Copenhagen. FC København owns both a women's and a men's team, which have the same name and logo. They were formerly known as FIF. Of other clubs playing in the "highest" leagues there are; Ajax Heroes, Ydun, and HIK (Hellerup). Rugby union is also played in the Danish capital with teams such as CSR-Nanok, Copenhagen Scrum, Exiles, Froggies and Rugbyklubben Speed. The Danish Australian Football League, based in Copenhagen is the largest Australian rules football competition outside of the English speaking world. Copenhagen is also home to a number of Denmark's 40-odd cricket clubs. Although Denmark has been an associate member of the International Cricket Council since 1966, the sport is not taught much in schools, and Danish cricket competes unfavourably with the much more widely followed sport of football for players, facilities, media attention and spectators. The second World Outgames will take place in Copenhagen in 2009, after Berlin refused to stage them due to the continuing rivalry between the two gay sporting organisations. It would be the largest such event hosted in Copenhagen. Copenhagen has the two oldest amusement parks in the World. World-famous Tivoli Gardens is an amusement park and pleasure garden located right in the middle of Copenhagen between the the City Hall Square and the the Central Station. Among its rides are the oldest still operating roller coaster and the oldest ferris wheel in the World. Tivoli Gardens, the rides It also function as an open-air concert venue. It opened on August 15 1843 making it the second oldest amusement park in the world. Dyrehavsbakken (in English "the Deer Garden Hill") is located in Klampenborg a little north of Copenhagen in a forested area of great natural beauty. Having been made into an amusement park complete with rides, games and restaurants by Christian IV, it is the oldest surviving amusement park in the World. Copenhagen is a centre for the New Nordic Cuisine. Nordic Cuisine, New York Times In November 2004 a Nordic Kitchen Symposium was helt in Copenhagen at the initiative of Danish chef and gastronome Claus Meyer. The symposium had attandance of top chefs from all of the Nordic countries and led to the adoption of a Manifesto for the New Nordic Cuisine. Manifesto for a New Nordic Cuisine Claus Meyer is also the co-founder of the two-Michelin star Restaurant Noma (Nordisk Madhus) which is a flagship restaurant for the new Nordic cuisine. In 2008 it was ranked as 10th best in the World by acclaimed British restaurant & fine dining magazine Restaurant at their 50 Best Restaurants of the World 2008-list. Furthermore, the users of the international website TripAdvisor with 25 million users a month rated Noma as the best restaurant in the world. TripAdvisor ranking As of 2008 Copenhagen boasts a total of 11 Michelin star restaurants. This is by far the highest number of any Nordic city. Apart from Noma they include one of only two Thai restaurants worldwide that has received a Michelin star. Due to the development, Copenhagen is increasingly being recognized internationally as a gourmet destination. The Top 10 cities to visit in 2009, TimesOnline Apart from the selection of high end restaurants, Copenhagen offers a great variety of Danish, International and ethnic restaurants and it is possible to find modest eateries with open sandwiches (called "smørrebrød"), which is the traditional and best known dish for lunch. Most restaurants, though, serve international dishes. danish pastry, another local specialty, can be sampled from the numerous bakeries found in all parts of the city. Copenhagen has long been associated with beer.Carlsberg beer has been brewed at the brewery's premises at the border between Vesterbro and Valby districts since 1847 and has long been almost synonumous with Danish beer production. However, recent years have seen an explosive growth in the number of microbreweries so that Denmark today has more than 100 breweries Nyeste artikler fra Bryggeriforeningen, Bryggeriforeningen , many of which are located in Copenhagen. Some like Nørrebro Bryghus also act as brewpubs where it is possible also to eat at the premisses. Many cafés specialize in a huge selection of quality beers and beer has also become an important ingridient in the New Nordic Cuisine. Copenhagen is the media centre of Denmark. DR, the major Danish public service broadcasting corporation collected their activities in a new headquarters, DR byen, in 2006 and 2007. Similarly has Odense based TV2 collected its Copenhagen activities in a modern media house in the South Harbour. The two national daily newspapters Politiken and Berlingske Tidende and the two tabloids Ekstra Bladet and B. T. are based in Copenhagen. Other important media corporations include Aller Press which is the largest publisher of weekly and monthly magazines in Scandinavia, the Egmont media group and Gyldendal, the largest Danish publisher of books. Copenhagen also has a sizable movie and television industry. Filmbyen, The Movie City, which is located in a former military camp in the suburg of Hvidovre and houses several movie companies and studio studios. Among the movie campanies are Zentropa co-owned by Danish movie director Lars von Trier who is behind several international movie productions as well as a founding force behind the Dogma Movement. * Copenhagen Fashion Week takes place every year in February and August. It is the largest fashion event in Northern Europe. Fashion Capital Copenhagen On the catwalks are a growing number of new and known Danish talent with a preview of their upcoming collections. And at the three trade fairs, CPH Vision, Gallery and Copenhagen International Fashion Fair, you will find an additional 1,100 exhibitors representing a total of over 2,300 international brand name collections. Danish fashion is known for its unique angle on design, innovation and aesthetics. With a more modern approach to femininity and functionality, expressed in fresh silhouettes, a focus on details and incomparable quality. These are only some of the reasons why more than 50,000 buyers, designers and global press attend Copenhagen Fashion Week twice a year. Copenhagen Fashion Week is organised by the Danish Fashion Institute - a newly founded network organisation created by and for the Danish fashion industry. Copenhagen Fashion Week * Carnival in Copenhagen takes place every year since 1982 during the Whitsun Holiday in Fælledparken and around the city. 120 bands, 2000 dancers and 100,000 spectators participate. History of Copenhagen * Copenhagen Distortion is a youth culture festival capturing the zeitgeist of the city, gathering every year (5 days up to the first weekend of June) up to 30.000 people in the streets, in shops, galleries, clubs, bars, in boats and buses, with a cultural focus on street culture, art and upfront dance music. Copenhagen Distortion * Roskilde Festival is a music festival helt every year in Roskilde west of Copenhagen. Gathering around 100,000 people every year, it is one of the four largest rock music festivals in Europe.. * Copenhagen Jazz Festival, which begins on the first Friday in July, is a popular annual event that is the result of Copenhagen's significant jazz scene. The festival takes place throughout the city in streets, squares and parks as well as in cafés and concert halls. Copenhagen Jazz Festival 3+ years, Wonderful Copenhagen It embraces around 900 concerts, 100 venues and over 200,000 guests from Denmark and around the world. It is recognized as one of the leading jazz festivals in the World. Top 10 best Jazz Festivals, TripAdvisor Copenhagen Jazz Festival * Copenhagen Pride is a gay pride festival taking place every year in August. Among the events is "Tivoli goes pink" and it ends with a parade. Copenhagen Pride * Copenhagen Cooking takes place in August every year and is a food festival with a wide array of events all over the city. * Copenhagen International Film Festival takes place in September every year with a focus on European films. The main prize is called the Golden Swan. Copenhagen International Film Festival Middelgrunden wind farm just off Copenhagen The Danish National Bank. Designed by Arne Jacobsen. Copenhagen is the economical and financial centre of Denmark Regionale regnskaber 2005 - Nyt fra Danmarks Statistik - Danmarks Statistik and also a strong business and economic centre in the entire Scandinavian-Baltic region. In 2008 Copenhagen was ranked 4th by Financial Times-owned FDi magazine on their list of Top50 European Cities of the Future after London, Paris and Berlin. Top 50 European City of the Future 2008/09 In 2006/07 FDi Magazine named Copenhagen Scandinavian City of the Future Scandinavian City of the Future 06/07 and in 2004/05 Copenhagen was named Northern European City of the Future ahead of other cities from Scandinavia, UK, Ireland and Benelux. Northern European City of the Future 2004/05 In the 2008 Worldwide Centers of Commerce Index, published by MasterCard, Copenhagen was ranked 14th in the world and 1st in Scandinavia. Copenhagen is one of the cities in Western Europe attracting most regional headquarters and distribution centers. Among the international companies that have chosen to locate their regional headquarters in Copenhagen is Microsoft.There are 2,100 foreign companies located in the Copenhagen area, of which approx. 500 are Scandinavian head offices, representing a wide range of industries. Copenhagen has a service oriented economy. An important sector is life science and research & development plays a major role in the economy of the city. The entire Oresund Region is in cooperation with Sweden being promoted as Medicon Valley. Major Danish biotech companies like Novo Nordisk and Lundbeck, both of which are among 50 largest pharmaceutical and biotech companies in the World, are located in the greater Copenhagen area. USATODAY.com The region also boasts the largest IT-cluster in Scandinavia with nearly 100,000 employees and the city of Copenhagen is home to Nokia's largest research centre outside Finland. Copenhagen - Overview Shipping is also an import business with Maersk, the World's largest shipping company, having their world headquarters in Copenhagen. Several international companies have established their regional headquarters in Copenhagen, e.g. Microsoft. Maersk, the world's largest container shipping company, has their world headquarters in Copenhagen. A substantial number of Danish pharmaceuticals such as Novo Nordisk, Ferring Pharmaceuticals and Bavarian Nordic also operate in the area, having placed their headquarters in or close to Copenhagen. USATODAY.com Copenhagen has some of the highest gross wages in the World. City Mayors: World's richest cities High taxes mean that wages are reduced after mandatory deduction. A neneficial researcher scheme with low taxation of foreigh specialists Level of salary in Denmark has made Denmark an attractive location for highly educated foreign labour to settle. Copenhagen is however also among the most expensive cities in Europe. City Mayors: World's most expensive cities (EIU) City Mayors: World's most expensive cities - Ranking Copenhagen University Copenhagen has a well-developed higher education system of public universities. Most prominent among these is the University of Copenhagen. Founded in 1479, it is the oldest university in Denmark. It is a world-renowned research and teaching institution with campuses around the city and forms part of the International Alliance of Research Universities (IARU), which is a collaboration between international top universities including Oxford, Cambridge, Yale and Berkeley. The University attracts app. 1500 international and exchange students every year. It is repeatedly ranked as one of the best universities in Europe. At the Times Higher Education's QS World University Rankings 2008 list, it was ranked as fourth best in continental Europe. TheAcademic Ranking of World Universities 2008 placesd it as number 43 worldwide and 8th in Europe. A second all-round university in the Copenhagen area is Roskilde University located in Roskilde. The Technical University of Denmark (DTU), Danmarks Tekniske Universitet, is located in Lyngby at the northern outskirts of Copenhagen. In 2008 it was ranked third highest in Europe on Times Higher Education's list of the most influential technical universities in the World. The Max Planck Institute in Germany was ranked 15, ETH Zurich in Switzerland was ranked 15 and DTU in Denmark was ranked 20. Copenhagen Business School (CBS) is an estimed and EQUIS accredited business school located on Frederiksberg. Copenhagen is rich in companies and institutions with a focus on research and development within the biotechnology , Infrastructure & logistics - Copenhagen a distribution hub, retrieved February 22, 2007. and life science sectors. Two of the 50 largest pharmaceutical and biotech companies in the World are located in the greater Copenhagen area. The biotech and life science cluster in Copenhagen and the rest of the Oresund Region is one of the strongest in Europe. Since 1995 this has been branded as the Medicon Valley in a Danish-Swedish cooperation. The aim is to strengthen the region's position and to promote cooperation between companies and academia. The German biotech giant Sartorius Stedim Biotech, which is currently creating a Nordic head office in Tåstrup on the outskirts of Copenhagen. The Øresund region is responsible for 60 percent of life science production in Scandinavia and is home to 111 biotech companies. The greater Copenhagen area has a very well established transportation infrastructure making it a hub in Northern Europe. Christianshavns Kanal Copenhagen has a large network of toll-free highways and public roads connecting different municipalities of the city together and to Northern Europe. As in many other cities in Europe traffic is increasing in Copenhagen. The radial arterial roads and highways leading to the Copenhagen city center are critically congested during peak hours. Copenhagen is known as one of the most bicycle-friendly cities in the world. Every day 1,1 million km are bicycled in Copenhagen. 36 % of all citizens are commuting to work, school or university by bicycle and it is municipal policy that this number should go up to 40 % by 2012 and 50 % in 2015. The city's bicycle paths are extensive and well-used. Bicycle paths are often separated from the main traffic lanes and sometimes have their own signal systems. The municipality is also developing a system of interconnected green bicycle routes, greenways, with the aim to facilitate fast, safe and pleasant bicycle transport from one end of the city to the other. The network will cover more than 100 km and consist of 22 routes when finished. The city provides public bicycles which can be found throughout the downtown area and used with a returnable deposit of 20 kroner. Copenhagen's well-developed bicycle culture has given rise to the term ‘copenhagenize’. This is the practice of other cities adopting Copenhagen-style bike lanes and bicycle infrastructure. In 2007 Copenhagen-based Danish urban design consultant Jan Gehl was hired by the New York City Department of Transportation to re-imagine New York City streets by introducing designs to improve life for pedestrians and cyclists. In recognition of Copenhagen's emphasis on bicycling, the city has been chosen by the Union Cycliste Internationale as their first official Bike City. Bike City Copenhagen will take place from 2008 to 2011 and consist of big cycling events for professionals as well as amateurs. The harbour of Copenhagen has largely lost its importance as an industrial harbour. In 2001 Copenhagen Harbour merged with the harbour in Malmö to create Copenhagen-Malmö Port. It has several functions, the most important being as a major cruise destination. In 2007 a record 286 cruise ships with 420,000 cruise passengers visited Copenhagen. 120 of these ships either started or ended the cruise in Copenhagen. In 2008 these numbers grew further to 310 cruise ships and 560,000 passengers. As a result of the growth in the cruise industry facilities asre being expanded and improved. At the World Travel Awards in 2008, Copenhagen Port was named the number one cruise destination in Europe for the fifth year in a row. Copenhagen is serviced by ferry lines to Oslo in Norway (called "Oslobåden") with a daily connection and to Świnoujście in Poland (called "Polensfærgerne") with five weekly connections. Copenhagen Airport is the principal airport serving Copenhagen. It is the largest in Scandinavia and the 17th largest in Europe. It is located in Kastrup on the island of Amager and has very efficient connections to downtown Copenhagen with metro trains going to Kongens Nytorv in 15 minutes with 4-6 minutes between departures and regional trains going to the Central Station in 12 minutes. Its location also makes it the most important international airport for large parts of southern Sweden. Over the Øresund Bridge trains go to Malmö South in 14 minutes or Malmö Central Station in 22 minutes. Copenhagen Airport has won the award as "The best airport in Europe" four times, and as "The best airport in the world" two times. Copenhagen Airport is the seventh best airport in the world - second best in Europe - when you ask the passengers. The British organization Skytrax is doing so every year, writes the airport in a press release. 40 criteria are employed for the ranking. The new metro S-train at Nørreport Metro entrance in FrederiksbergThe public transportation system of Copenhagen consists of commuter trains (called S-trains, S-tog), buses, and a metro. The S-trains form the basis of the transportation network, stretching to most areas of metropolitan Copenhagen, with their main hub at Copenhagen Central Station (København H). Regional trains supplement the S-train services with lines extending further such as to the Copenhagen Airport, Elsinore, and Malmö. The Danish State Railways' Intercity network has its eastern terminus and main hub at Copenhagen, with most trains extending to Copenhagen Airport. The fare system is based on 95 zones covering the capital area. Tickets are transferable from one means of transport to another within a time limit. The more zones a ticket is valid for, the longer its time validity with a maximum of two hours. Discount cards (punch cards, klippekort) and period cards are available. Ticket prices are high and have increased substantially in recent years leading to a decrease in passenger numbers. In fact, the percentage of trips made on public transportation in Copenhagen is quite low by northern European standards. The Copenhagen Metro began operation in 2002 and currently has only two lines. In April 2008, it was named Best Metro in the World by industry experts. Copenhagen Metro Best in the World |Christiansborg Palace - home of the Danish Parliament Folketinget, the Supreme Court, Office of the Prime Minister and official reception area of Queen Margrethe II |- |Børsen - the former Stock Exchange building |- |The Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen harbor |- |Amalienborg Palace - home of the Danish royal family. The central building is the domed Marble Church located behind the palace complex |- |Nyhavn |- |The Marble Church |- |Rosenborg Castle in central Copenhagen |- |Christianshavns Canal |- |The Tivoli, photographed from Eduard Spelterini's balloon on June 22, 1922 |} Copenhagen is recognized as one of the most environmentally friendly cities in the world. In 2006 Copenhagen Municipality received the European Environmental Management Award. The award was given for long-term holistic environmental planning. It is municipal policy to reduce CO2 emissions by 20% before the end of 2015. In 2001 a large offshore wind farm was built just off the coast of Copenhagen at Middelgrunden. It produces about 4 % of the city's energy. Many years of major investments in sewage treatment has improved water quality in the harbour to an extent that the inner harbour can be used for swimming and facilities for this are provided at a number of locations. Another municipal policy is that 40% of all citizens should bicycle to and from work by 2012 and a number of initiatives are being taken to implement this policy (see "bicycling above"). Copenhagen is the capital in the World where organic food has the largest market share. One in every ten purchases is organic in Copenhagen. Within the municipal sector in Copenhagen, 45 % of all food consumption is organic but the target is considerably higher. With the environmental strategy "Environment Metropolis: Our Vision 2015" the politicians wish that solely organic food is to be served in 90 per cent of the Copenhagen old-age homes and residential homes for children and young persons in 2015.. - - - Image:Christiansborg Slot.jpg| Christiansborg Slot - Image:Børsen København.jpg| Børsen- the former Stock Exchange building - Image:Littlemermaid207.jpg| The Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen harbor - Image:Copenhagen amalienborg seen from opera house.jpg| Amalienborg Palace - Image:Nyhavn 9-15 København.jpg| Nyhavn - Image:Kbh Marmorkirche 1.jpg| Frederik's Church|The Marble Church - Image:Rosenborg.jpg| Rosenborg Castle in central Copenhagen - Image:Christianshavns Kanal morning.jpg| Christianshavns Canal - Image:Amalienborgas.JPG | The Royal Residence - Image:Copenhague 108.jpg | The Round Tower - Image:Gammel_Strand_København.jpg| Gammel Strand - Image:Kbh_Stroeget_Nikolaj_Kirche.jpg | Stroget - Image:A_Copenhagen_center_street.jpg| Central Copenhagen Street - Image:Amagergade 01.jpg| Amagergade - Image:Gebauede_in_kopenhagen.jpg| Copenhagen Habour - Image:Container ship loading-700px.jpg| Copenhagen Ship Loading - Image:Christianshavns_Torv.jpg | Christianshavn Torv - Image:Copenhagen-Airport-from-air.jpg | Copenhagen Airport from the air - Image:Østre Anlæg København.jpg | Østre Anlæg - Image:Frederiksberg Slot.jpg | Frederiksberg Castle - Image:Kongens Nytorv 17.jpg | Kongens Nytorv - Image:Kopenhagen zeehaven.JPG | Copenhagen Canal Tour - Image:Den-sorte-diamant.jpg | The Black Diamond ( The Royal Library ) - Image:Tivoli Copenhagen at Night.jpg | Tivoli by Night - Image:Kopenhagen 3.jpg | View over Copenhagen - Image:Gammeltorv Copenhagen Denmark.JPG | Gammeltorv - Image:Copenhagen denmark.jpg | Nyhavn - Image:Copenhagen City Hall.jpg | Copenhagen City Hall - Image:Gefion.jpg| Gefion Fountian - Image:Christiania Exit.JPG | Christiania - Image:Gebauede in kopenhagen.jpg | Copenhagen at Night - Image:Copenhague 050.jpg | Inner City Canel - Copenhagen has placed well in a number of international rankings, some of which are mentioned below. * Copenhagen was ranked #1 as Most Livable City in the World by international lifestyle magazine Monocle on their Top 25 Most Livable Cities 2008 list Monocles page on Copenhagen * Worlds Best Design City 2008 also by Monocle. Monocles page on Copenhagen *Monocle has also stated that Copenhagen is "Scandinavia's most desirable city". By Stuart Husband Monocle Magazine Published: June 19, 2007 *Copenhagen ranked #4 by Financial Times-owned FDi magazine on their list of Top50 European Cities of the Future after London, Paris and Berlin. Top 50 European City of the Future 2008/09 In 2006/07 FDi Magazine named Copenhagen Scandinavian City of the Future Scandinavian City of the Future 06/07 and in 2004/05 Copenhagen was named Northern European City of the Future ahead of other cities from Scandinavia, UK, Ireland and Benelux. Northern European City of the Future 2004/05 * In the 2008 Worldwide Centers of Commerce Index, published by MasterCard, Copenhagen was ranked 14th in the world and 1st in Scandinavia. *Copenhagen #1 out of 254 locations in the Location Ranking Survey performed by ECA International that has asked European experts where they prefer to be stationed worldwide. Location Ranking Survey * Copenhagen was ranked #6 in Grist Magazine's "15 Green Cities" list in 2007 making Copenhagen the greenest capital of Scandinavia according to Grist Magazine. 15 Green Cities | Grist | Main Dish | 19 July 2007 * Copenhagen is the capital in the World where organic food has the largest market share. One in every ten purchases is organic in Copenhagen. World-champinions in organic food * The Copenhagen Metro has been named the Best Metro in the World by industry experts. Copenhagen Metro Best in the World * Copenhagen is the worlds #7 most expensive city and #3 most expensive in Europe on the Forbes List. Forbes-Worlds Most Expensive Cities List * Copenhagen is ranked #7 as Preferred City For Investment Projects. Preferred City For Investment Projects * Copenhagen ranked 3rd in Western Europe in terms of attracting regional headquarters and distribution centers, only surpassed by London and Paris. * Copenhagen ranks #1 in the Global Earning Ranking. [h Global earning ranking ] * Copenhagen ranks as the 5th most popular city in the world for international meetings and conferences. Style & Substance Danmark * Copenhagen ranks as one of the most attractive cities to live and work in Europe. A great place to live * Copenhagen ranks 2nd in Europe for Quality of life according to a survey from 2005 by the international consultancy firm William Mercer. A great place to live * Morten Andersen, veteran NFL kicker * Niels Bohr, physicist, Nobel laureate * Aage Bohr, physicist, Nobel laureate (son of Niels Bohr) * Victor Borge, entertainer * August Bournonville, ballet choreographer * Georg Brandes, critic * Helena Christensen, supermodel * Tove Ditlevsen, writer * Carl Theodor Dreyer, movie director * Vilhelm Hammershøi, painter * Gus Hansen, poker player * Iben Hjejle, actor * Peter Høeg, writer * Arne Jacobsen, designer * Robert Jacobsen, painter * J. C. Jacobsen, founder of Carlsberg Brewery * Mathias Lauridsen, male topmodel * Søren Kierkegaard, philosopher * Bjørn Lomborg, Academic and Author of The Skeptical Environmentalist * Lauritz Melchior, opera singer * Mads Mikkelsen, actor * Carl-Henning Pedersen, painter * Lars von Trier, movie director * Dan Turèll, writer * Lars Ulrich, drummer and songwriter of the heavy-metal band Metallica * Jørn Utzon, architect, designer of the Sydney Opera House * Michael Laudrup, former international football player, former manager of Spanish Primera Division Football team Getafe. * Peter Schmeichel, former international football player * Bertel Thorvaldsen, sculpturer Copenhagen is twinned with: * Paris in France (partner city) * Reykjavík in Iceland * Prague in Czech Republic (unofficial partner city) * San Francisco de Campeche in Mexico * Municipal statistics: NetBorger Kommunefakta, delivered from KMD, also known as Kommunedata (Municipal Data) * Municipal and county statistics: Statistics Denmark statistikbanken.dk * Demography: Statistical Yearbook of Copenhagen (part English); ISBN 87-7024-230-5 * History and demography: København Forslag til kommuneplan 1985; ISBN 87-88034-03-8 * Oresund Region * Eurovision Song Contest 2001 * Junior Eurovision Song Contest 2003 * MTV Europe Music Awards 2006 * Transportation in Denmark * Ports of the Baltic Sea * A Much Different Tourist Site and Cultural Guide about Copenhagen * Wonderful Copenhagen official tourism website * Copenhagen Capacity official investment agency of Copenhagen * * Official municipal website * City of Copenhagen Statistical Office * Krak searchable map
Copenhagen
Is Copenhagen completely surrounded with water?
No
data/set3/a8
Copenhagen Copenhagen ( ; ) is the capital and largest city of Denmark, with a population of 1,161,063. Copenhagen is situated on the Islands of Zealand and Amager. First documented in the 11th century, Copenhagen became the capital of Denmark in the beginning of the 15th century and during the 17th century under the reign of Christian IV it became an important regional centre. Copenhagen is usually ranked as one of the two largest cities of the Nordic Countries. [ LARGEST CITY Copenhagen or Stockholm ? [ Denmark in brief . With the completion of the transnational Oresund Bridge in 2000, Copenhagen has become the centre of the increasingly integrating Øresund Region with around 3.7 million inhabitants covering an area of 20,869 km² (177/km²). Within this region, Copenhagen and Malmö is in the process of growing into one common metropolitan area. Copenhagen is a major regional center of culture, business, media, and science. In 2008 Copenhagen was ranked #4 by Financial Times-owned FDi magazine on their list of Top50 European Cities of the Future after London, Paris and Berlin. In the 2008 Worldwide Centers of Commerce Index, published by MasterCard, Copenhagen was ranked 14th in the world and 1st in Scandinavia. Life science, information technology and shipping are important sectors and research & development plays a major role in the city's economy. Its strategic location and excellent infrastructure with the largest airport in Scandinavia located 14 minutes by train from the city centre, has made it a regional hub and a popular location for regional headquarters as well as conventions. Copenhagen has repeatedly been recognized as one of the cities with the best quality of life. and in 2008 it was singled out as the Most Liveable City in the World by international lifestyle magazine Monocle on their Top 25 Most Liveable Cities 2008 list. It is also considered one of the world's most environmentally friendly cities with the water in the inner harbor being so clean that it can be used for swimming and 36 % of all citizens commuting to work by bicycle, every day bicycling a total 1.1 million km. Since the turn of the millennium Copenhagen has seen a strong urban and cultural development and has been described as a boom town. This is partly due to massive investments in cultural facilities as well as infrastructure and a new wave of succesful designers, chefs and architects. Copenhagen c. 1895 The Palace during renovation. From its humble origins as a fishing village to its heyday as the glittering capital of the Danish Empire, to its current position as one of the world's premier design capitals, the stories and characters of Copenhagen's history can be discovered in its sumptuous palaces, copper-roofed town houses and atmospheric cobbled squares. From the Viking Age there was a fishing village by the name of "Havn" (harbour) at the site. Recent archeological finds indicate that by the 11th century, Copenhagen had already grown into a small town with a large estate, a church, a market, at least two wells and many smaller habitations spread over a fairly wide area. Arkæologer graver ny teori om København op af mulden (Archeologists develop new theory about Copenhagen from their digs), Videnskab.dk, 5 November 2008 From the middle of the 12th century it grew in importance after coming into the possession of the Bishop Absalon, who fortified it in 1167, the year traditionally marking the foundation of Copenhagen. The excellent harbour encouraged Copenhagen's growth until it became an important centre of commerce. The city's origin as a harbour and a place of commerce is reflected in its name. Its original designation, from which the contemporary Danish name is derived, was Køpmannæhafn, "merchants' harbor". The English name for the city is derived from its Low German name, Kopenhagen. The element hafnium is also named for Copenhagen, whose Latin name is Hafnia. Biography of George de Hevesy It was repeatedly attacked by the Hanseatic League as the Germans took notice. In 1254, it received its charter as a city under Bishop Jakob Erlandsen. During 1658-59 it withstood a severe siege by the Swedes under Charles X and successfully repelled a major assault. In 1801 a British fleet under Admiral Parker fought a major battle, the Battle of Copenhagen, with the Danish Navy in Copenhagen harbour. It was during this battle Lord Nelson famously "put the telescope to the blind eye" in order not to see Admiral Parker's signal to cease fire. When a British expeditionary force bombarded Copenhagen in 1807, to gain control of the Danish Navy, the city suffered great damage and hundreds of people were killed. The reason why the devastation was so great was that Copenhagen relied on an old defence-line rendered virtually useless by the increase in shooting range available to the British. But not until the 1850s were the ramparts of the city opened to allow new housing to be built around the lakes ("Søerne") which bordered the old defence system to the west. This dramatic increase of space was long overdue, not only because the old ramparts were out of date as a defence system, but also because of bad sanitation in the old city. Before the opening, Copenhagen Center was inhabited by approximately 125,000 people, peaking in the census of 1870 (140,000); today the figure is around 25,000. In 1901, Copenhagen expanded further, incorporating communities with 40,000 people, and in the process making Frederiksberg an enclave within Copenhagen. During World War II, Copenhagen was occupied by German troops along with the rest of the country from 9 April 1940 until 4 May 1945. In August 1943, when the government's collaboration with the occupation forces collapsed, several ships were sunk in Copenhagen Harbour by the Royal Danish Navy to prevent them being used by the Germans. The city has grown greatly since the war, in the seventies using the so-called five-finger-plan of commuter train lines to surrounding towns and suburbs. Since the summer 2000, the cities of Copenhagen and Malmö have been connected by a toll bridge/tunnel (Øresund Bridge), which allows both rail and road passengers to cross. As a result, Copenhagen has become the centre of a larger metropolitan area which spans both nations. The construction of the bridge has led to a large number of changes to the public transportation system and the extensive redevelopment of Amager, south of the main city. Location of Coppenhagen in Denmark Nørrebro seen from "Søerne" Copenhagen City Hall Copenhagen is located on the eastern shore of the island of Zealand (Sjælland) and partly on the island of Amager. Copenhagen faces the Øresund to the east, the strait of water that separates Denmark from Sweden, and that connects the North Sea with the Baltic Sea. On the Swedish side of the sound directly across from Copenhagen, lie the towns of Malmö and Landskrona. Copenhagen is also a part of the Øresund region, which consists of Zealand, Lolland-Falster and Bornholm in Denmark and Scania in Sweden. Copenhagen Municipality is an administrative unit that covers the central part of the actual city of Copenhagen. It is a fairly small part of the actual city that falles within the municipality both because it covers a very confined area and because the enclave of Frederiksberg is an independent municipality. Copenhagen consists of a number of boroughs and areas, including * Indre By * Østerbro * Nørrebro * Vesterbro * Amagerbro * Nordhavnen (North Habour) * Valby * Kongens Enghave (King's Meadow Garden), also known as Sydhavnen (meaning South Harbour) * Christianshavn * Christiania (Freetown) * Sundbyvester (Sundby West), * Sundbyøster (Sundby East) * Ørestad * Islands Brygge * Bellahøj * Brønshøj * Ryparken * Bispebjerg * Vigerslev * Vestamager * Vanløse The suffix -bro in the names Østerbro, Nørrebro, Vesterbro and Amagerbro should not be confused with the Danish word for bridge, which is also 'bro'. The term is thought to be an abbreviation or short form of the Danish word brolagt meaning paved referring to the roads paved with cobblestones leading to the city's former gates - The conurbation of Copenhagen consists of several municipalities. After Copenhagen Municipality, the second largest is Frederiksberg Municipality which is an enclave inside Copenhagen Municipality. Both are contained in the larger Capital Region of Denmark, which contains most of the Copenhagen metropolitan area. Previously, the areas of Frederiksberg, Gentofte and Copenhagen municipalities have been used to define the city of Copenhagen. This definition is now obsolete. To meet statistical needs after the latest municipal reform, which took place in the beginning of 2007, an effort has been made to work out definitions of lands (landsdele) in Denmark. A land is basically a geographical and statistical definition, and the area is not considered to be an administrative unit. The land of Copenhagen City includes the municipalities of Copenhagen, Dragør, Frederiksberg and Tårnby, with a total population of 656,582 in the beginning of 2008. Statistics Denmark, table BEF1A07: Population 1 January by region, age, sex, marital status Retrieved on 2008-03-26. Statistics Denmark, definitions of lands as of 2007-01-01 (excel-file, in danish) Retrieved on 2008-03-26. Copenhagen and Frederiksberg were two of the three last Danish municipalities not belonging to a county. On 1 January 2007, the municipalities lost their county privileges and became part of Copenhagen Capital Region. Suburban Copenhagen is planned according to the Finger Plan, fingerplanen, initiated in 1947, dividing the suburbs into five fingers. The Finger Plan, Denmark.dk The S-train lines are built according to the Finger Plan, while green wedges and highways are built in-between the fingers The Little Finger The northern suburbs form the little finger of the plan, and is traditionally the wealthiest of the suburbs. In popular language, the area is known as "The Whiskey Belt", although the area is mixed between mansions, larger houses, garden cities and mid-size houses. The area has a population of around 270,000 inhabitants. * Gentofte Municipality: Klampenborg, Skovshoved, Charlottenlund, Hellerup, Gentofte, Ordrup, Jægersborg, Dyssegård, Vangede * Lyngby-Taarbæk Municipality: Kongens Lyngby, Ulrikkenborg, Brede, Virum, Sorgenfri, Lundtofte, Hjortekær * Rudersdal Municipality: Søllerød, Holte, Øverød, Gl. Holte, Trørød, Nærum, Vedbæk, Skodsborg, Birkerød, Kajerød, Bistrup * Hørsholm Municipality: Hørsholm, Usserød, Rungsted, Vallerød, Smidstrup * Allerød Municipality: Allerød, Lillerød, Blovstrød * Fredensborg Municipality: Fredensborg, Asminderød, Humlebæk, Kokkedal, Niverød, Nivå. The Ring Finger The North-Northwestern part of the suburbs forms the ring finger. The area is to a large extent formed by detached middle-class dwellings, with some exceptions of housing projects or upper-class areas. The area has a population of around 100,000 inhabitants. * Gladsaxe Municipality: Gladsaxe, Bagsværd, Buddinge, Høje-Gladsaxe (Gladsaxe Heights), Mørkhøj, Søborg * Furesø Municipality: Værløse, Farum, Hareskovby The Middle Finger The northwestern suburbs form the middle finger, and consists of a mixed area of both detached middle-class dwellings, widespread garden cities and large, low-rise public housing projects. The area has a considerable part of the industrial areas of metropolitan Copenhagen, mostly in the traditional sectors of manufacturing. The area has a population of around 110,000 inhabitants. * Herlev Municipality: Herlev, Hjortespring * Ballerup Municipality: Skovlunde, Ballerup, Måløv, Ågerup, Jonstrup, Egebjerg * Egedal Municipality: Smørumnedre, Stenløse, Ølstykke The Index Finger The index finger forms the western suburbs, which are the suburbs with the lowest income per capita and the highest crime-rate. The suburbs vary from the petit bourgeois area of Glostrup to the widespread low housing projects of Albertslund and Taastrup. Of the total of 145,000 inhabitants, some 20% are immigrants of first or second generation. * Rødovre Municipality: Rødovre, Islev * Glostrup Municipality: Glostrup, Hvissinge, Ejby * Brøndby Municipality: Brøndbyøster, Brøndbyvester, Brøndby Nord * Albertslund Municipality * Høje-Taastrup Municipality: Taastrup, Høje-Taastrup, Tåstrupgård, Hedehusene The Thumb The southwest suburbs along the coast form the thumb of the plan. While the central parts of these suburbs are dominated by high-rise housing projects and low-income inhabitants, the distant part is dominated by detached middle-class houses. These suburbs have a population of some 215,000 inhabitants and has a sizeable number of immigrants. * Hvidovre Municipality: Avedøre, Friheden, Hvidovre * Brøndby Municipality: Brøndby Strand * Vallensbæk Municipality * Ishøj Municipality * Greve Municipality: Hundige, Karlslunde, Greve * Solrød Municipality: Solrød, Jersie * Køge municipality: Køge, Ølby The extra finger: Amager Island suburbs & Malmö When the finger plan was initially introduced, the island of Amager wasn't included as the infrastructure was inadequate for modern suburban life. Later it has been improved, and the suburbs at the island hold some 53,000 inhabitants. Amager is now one of the most modern suburbs of Copehagen with increasing wealth. With the opening of the bridge to Sweden this finger has been extended all the way to Malmö. Under an official visit of the Swedish King in 2007 at the Copenhagen City Hall, Copenhagen Lord Mayor Ritt Bjerregaard caused a minor diplomatic incident by referring to Malmö as "København M" with an allusion to the Danish system of postal codes (Nørrebro being København N and Vesterbro being København V for instance), indicating that Malmö had turned into just another Copenhagen bourough. Today 25,000 Danes live in Malmö. Malmø er blevet til København M, DR Online * Tårnby Municipality: Tårnby, Kastrup * Dragør Municipality Summers in Copenhagen are mild with average high temperatures of around 21°C (70°F) and lows of 13°C (55°F), but temperatures could sometimes exceed 25°C (77°F+) and occasional heatwaves are common during the summer. Winters are cold, with temperatures of -2 to 4°C (28 - 40°F), and it rarely drop below −10 °C (14 °F). Precipitation is moderate throughout the year, and snowfall occurs mainly in December through March, but snow cover does not remain a long time. Nørrebro seen from "Søerne" Copenhagen as seen from the City Hall at night Kongens Nytorv View from Rundetårn Gefion Fountian The city's appearance today is shaped by the key role it has played as a regional center for centuries. Copenhagen has a multitude of districts, each representing its time and with its own distinctive character, making up a dense urban fabric. Other distinctive features of the Copenhagen of today is the abundance of water, the greenness and the elaborate system of bicycle paths that line almost every major street. The oldest section of Copenhagen's inner city is often referred to as "Middelalderbyen" (The Medieval City). However, the most distinctive district of Copenhagen is Frederiksstaden developed during the reign of Frederick V. It has Amalienborg Palace at its centre and is dominated by the dome of the Marble Church as well as a number of elegant 18th century mansions. Also part of the old inner city of Copenhagen is the small island of Slotsholmen with Christiansborg Palace and Christianshavn. Around the historical city center lies a band of charming, dense and well-preserved residential bouroughs (Vesterbro, Inner Nørrebro, Inner Østerbro) dating mainly from late 19th century. They were built outside the old ramparts of the city when the city was finally allowed to expand beyond this barrier. Sometimes referred to as "the City of Spires", Copenhagen is known for its horizontal skyline, only broken by spires at churches and castles. Most characteristic is the baroque spire of Church of Our Saviour with its spiralling and narrowing external stairs that visitors can climb to the very top of the spire. Other important spires are those of Christiansborg Palace, the City Hall and the former Church of St. Nikolaj that now houses a modern art venue. A bit lower are the renaissance spires of Rosenborg Castle and the "dragon spire" of [[Christian IV of Christian IV's former stock exchange, so named because it is shaped as the tails of four dragons twined together. Recent years has seen a tremendous boom in modern architecture in Copenhagen both when it comes to Danish architecture and works by international architects. For a few hundred years, virtually no foreign architects had worked in Copenhagen but since the mid 1990s the city and its immediate sourroundings have seen buildings and projects from such international star architects as Norman Foster , Hadid , Nouvel and Liebeskind . In the same time, a number of Danish architects have achieved great success both in Copenhagen and abroad. This has led to a number of international architecture awards. Buildings in Copenhagen have won RIBA European Awards four years in a row ("Sampension" in 2005 , "Kilen" in 2006 , "Tietgenkollegiet" in 2007 and the Royal Playhouse in 2008 ). At the 2008 World Architecture Festival in Barcelona, Bjarke Ingels Group won an award for the World's Best Residential Building 2008 for a house in Ørestad. The Forum AID Award for Best building in Scandinavia went to Copenhagen buildings both in 2006 and 2008 . In 2008 British design magazine Monocle named Copenhagen the World's best design city 2008. The boom in urban development and modern architecture means that the above mentioned horizontal skyline has seen some changes. A political majority has decided to keep the historical center free of highrises. But several areas will see or have already seen massive urban development. Ørestad is the area that until now has seen most of the development. Located near Copenhagen Airport, it currently boasts the largest mall in Scandinavia and a variety of office and residential buildings as well as an IT University and a high school. The two largest hotels in Scandinavia are currently under construction (ultimo 2008). An ambitious regeneration project will create a new Carlsberg District at the historical premises of the Carlsberg Breweries that has terminated the production of beer in Copenhagen and moved it to Jutland. The district will have a total of nine highrises and seeks to mix the old industrial buildings with modern architecture to create a dense, maze-like quarter with a focus on sustainability and an active urban life. A third major area of urban development also with a focus on sustanibility is Nordhavn. The Copenhagen tradition with urban development on artificial islands that was initiated with with Christianh IV's construction of Christianshavn has recently been continued with the creation of Havneholmen as well as a "canal city" in the South Harbour. A district in Copenhagen with a very different take on modern architecture is that of Christiania whose many creative and idiosyncratic buildings are exponents of an "architecture without architects". Østre Anlæg University of Copenhagen Botanical Garden Copenhagen is a green city with many big and small parks. King's Garden, the garden of Rosenborg Castle, is the oldest and most visited park in Copenhagen. Its landscaping was commenced by Christian IV in 1606. Every year it sees more than 2,5 million visitors and in the summer months it is packed with sunbathers, picknickers and ballplayers. It also serves as a sculpture garden with a permanent display of sculptures as well as temporary exhibits during summer. Also located in the city centre are the Botanical Gardens particularly noted for their large complex of 19th century greenhouses donated by Carlsberg founder J. C. Jacobsen. Fælledparken is with its 58 hectars the largest park in Copenhagen. It is popular for sports and hosts a long array of annual events like a free opera concert at the opening of the opera season, other open-air concerts, carnival, Labour Day celebrations and Copenhagen Historic Grand Prix which is a race for antique cars. A historical green space in the northeastern part of the city is Kastellet which is a well-presserved renaissance citadel that now serves mainly as a park. Another popular park is the Frederiksberg Garden which is a 32 hectars romantic landscape park. It houses a large colony of very tame grey herons along with other waterfowls. The park also offers views of the elephants and the elephant house designed by world-famous British architect Norman Foster of the adjacent Copenhagen Zoo. Characteristic of Copenhagen is that a number of cemeteries double as parks, though only for the more quiet activities such as sunbathing, reading and meditation. Assistens Cemetery, the burrial place of Hans Christian Andersen among others, is an important green space for the district of Inner Nørrebro and a Copenhagen institution. The lesser known Vestre Kirkegaard is with its 54 hectars the largest cemetery in Denmark and offers a maze of dense groves, open lawns, winding paths, hedges, overgrown tombs, monuments, tree-lined avenues, lakes and other garden features. It is official municipal policy in Copenhagen that all citizens by 2015 must be able to reach a park or beach on foot in less than 15 minutes. In line with this policy, several new parks are under development in areas poor in green spaces. Copenhagen and the surrounding areas have 3 beaches with a total of approx. 8 km of sandy beaches within 30 minutes of bicycling from the city centre. This includes Amager Strandpark, which opened in 2005 and includes a 2 km long artificial island and a total of 4,6 km of beaches , located just 15 minutes by bicycle or a few minutes by metro from the city centre. The beaches are supplemented by a system of harbour baths along the Copenhagen waterfront. The first and most popular of these is located at Islands Brygge Harbour bath at Islands Brygge, e-architect and has won international acclaim for its design. Islands Brygge. Depending on the boundaries used, the population of Copenhagen differs. Statistics Denmark uses a measure of the contiguously built-up urban area of Copenhagen, this means the number of communities included in this statistical abstract has changed several times, in the abstracts latest edition with close to 1.2 million (1,153,615 (2008)) inhabitants. This number is not a strict result of the commonly-used measuring methods of 200 meters of continuously build-up area, as there are exceptions to the general rule in the suburbs of Dragør, Taastrup, Birkerød, Hørsholm and Farum. Statistics Denmark has never stated the geographical area of urban Copenhagen. However, we know it consists of Copenhagen Municipality, Frederiksberg and 16 of the 20 municipalities in the old counties Copenhagen and Roskilde, though 5 of them only partially. Largest cities of Denmark 2007 Statistics Denmark has worked out definitions of so-called lands (landsdele), a definition used to meet statistical needs on a lower level than regions. From this, the land of Copenhagen city (København by) is defined by the municipalities of Copenhagen, Dragør, Frederiksberg and Tårnby, with a total population of 656,582 in the beginning of 2008. The surroundings of Copenhagen is defined by another land, Copenhagen suburban (Københavns omegn), which includes the municipalities of Albertslund, Ballerup, Brøndby, Gentofte, Gladsaxe, Glostrup, Herlev, Hvidovre, Høje-Taastrup, Ishøj, Lyngby-Taarbæk, Rødovre and Vallensbæk, and with a total population of 504,481 (January 1, 2008). This gives a total population of 1,161,063 for these two lands together. The lands of Copenhagen city and Copenhagen suburban can together be used as a definition of the metropolitan area, although perhaps a somewhat narrow one. From 1 January 2008 the population of the 34 municipalities closest to and including the municipality of Copenhagen is 1,857,263 and by 1 October 2008 the population of this area had grown to 1,872,706. Statistikbanken.dk Population table BEF1A07 Land area: 2,923 km² (1,032 sq mi). (Capital Region - Bornholm + East Zealand + Stevns) Water area: 105 km² (40.5 sq mi). Orienteering fra Københavns Kommune. Statistisk Kontor.2003 nr. 25 Thus, the region comprises 6.8% of the land area of Denmark, but has 34% of Denmark's population. This gives a total of 641 inhabitants per km² or 1,660 per square mile for the region. This compares with a population density in the rest of the country of approximately 90 per km² or around 230 per square mile. Based on a 10%-isoline (data from 2002) in which at least 10% commutes into central parts of the Copenhagen area, most of Zealand would be covered and this area has a population of about 2.3 million inhabitants. /ref> Since the opening of the Øresund Bridge in 2000, commuting between and integration of Greater Malmö and Copenhagen have increased rapidly, and a combined statistical metropolitan area has formed. This metropolitan area, which has a population of 2,501,094 (2008) is expected to be officially defined by the respective statistics divisions of Denmark and Sweden in the upcoming years. A high-ranking civil servant of the Interior Ministry, Henning Strøm, who was involved in (i.e. known as "the Father of") a past municipal reform, which took effect on 1 April 1970, said on television, broadcast in connection with the recent Kommunalreformen ("The Municipal Reform" of 2007), that Copenhagen municipality would encompass an area with 1.5 million inhabitants, if the principles of the 1970 municipal reform were also applied on Copenhagen municipality. DR netnews 25-06-04 In other words: in the rest of Denmark the city occupies only part of the municipality, but in Copenhagen the municipality of Copenhagen occupies only part of the city of Copenhagen. Since the late 1990s, Copenhagen has undergone a transformation from a cozy Scandinavian capital to a cool metropolitan city of international scope in the league of cities like Barcelona and Amsterdam. This is due to massive investments in infrastructure as well as culture and wave of new successful Danish architects, designers and chefs. Between 1998 and 2008, lifestyle journalists wordwide (from Wallpaper to the NewYorkTimes) have praised Copenhagen as a cool, well-functioning creative city (see "Copenhagen In international rankings" below). Copenhagen has a wide array of museums of International standard. The National Museum, Nationalmuseet, is Denmark's largest museum of Archaeology and cultural history, comprising the histories of Danish and foreign cultures alike. The National Gallery - "Statens Museum for Kunst" - is Denmark's national art museum and contains collections dating from 12th century and all the way up to present day artists. Among artists represented in the collections are Rubens, Rembrandt, Picasso, Braque, Léger, Matisse and Emil Nolde. Another important Copenhagen art museum is the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek founded by second generation Carlsberg tycoon-philantropist Carl Jacobsen and is built around his personal collections. Its main focus is classical Egyptian, Roman and Greek sculptures and other antiquities and a collection of Rodin sculptures that is the largest outside France (Glypto-, from the Greek root glyphein, to carve and theke, a storing-place). Besides its sculpture collections, the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek also holds a comprehensive collection of paintings of impressionist and post-impressionist painters such as Monet,Renoir, Cézanne, van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec as well as Danish Golden Age painters. Loiusiana is an internationally acclaimed museum of modern art situated on the coast just north of Copenhagen. It is located in the middle of a sculpture garden on a cliff overlooking Øresund. The The museum is included in the Patricia Schultz book 1,000 Places to See Before You Die. The Danish Museum of Art & Design is housed in the 18th century former Frederiks Hospital and displays Danish design as well as international design and crafts. Other museums include: * Thorvaldsens Museum is a single-artist museum dedicated to the oeuvre,of romantic Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen who lived and worked in Rome. * Cisternerne is a small but different museum dedicated to modern glass art. It is located in some grotto-like former cisterns that come complete with Stalactites formed by the changing water levels. * The Ordrupgaard Museum is an art museum located just notth of Copenhagen in an old mansion with an extension by Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. It features 19th century French and Danish art and is particularly noted for its works by Paul Gaugin. Copenhagen Opera House The Royal Danish Theatre In January 2009 the new Copenhagen Concert Hall will open. It is designed by Jean Nouvel and will have four halls with the main auditorium seating 1800 people. It will serve as the home of the Danish National Symphony Orchestra and along with the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles the most expensive concert hall ever built. Another important venue for classical music is the Tivoli Concert Hall located in the histtrocal Tivoli Gardens. The Copenhagen Opera House (in Danish usually called Operaen) that opened in 2005 and is designed by Henning Larsen, is the national opera house of Denmark and among the most modern opera houses in the world. The old Royal Danish Theatre dating from 1748 still works as a supplementary opera scene. The Royal Danish Theatre is also home to the Royal Danish Ballet. Gounded in 1748 along with the theatre, it is one of the oldest ballet troups in Europe. It is home the the Bournonville style of ballet. Copenhagen has a significant jazz scene that has existed for many years. It developed when a number of American jazz musicians such as Ben Webster, Thad Jones, Richard Boone, Ernie Wilkins, Kenny Drew, Ed Thigpen, Bob Rockwell and others such as rock guitarist Link Wray came to live in Copenhagen during the 1960s. Every year in early July Copenhagen's streets, aquares and parks fills up with big and small jazz concerts during the Copenhagen Jazz Festival (see yearly events). The most important venue for rhythmical music in Copenhagen is Vega in Vesterbro district which has been chosen as "best concert venue in Europe" by international music magazine Live For free entertainment one can stroll along Strøget, especially between Nytorv and Højbro Plads, which in the late afternoon and evening is a bit like an impromptu three-ring circus with musicians, magicians, jugglers and other street performers. View from Amerikakaj Copenhagen has a wide variety of sport teams. The two major football teams are Brøndby IF and FC København. Brøndby IF plays at Brøndby Stadium in Brøndby and FC København plays at Parken in Østerbro, Copenhagen. Notable Copenhagen teams playing at the second highest level in Danish football (the Danish 1st Division) include Lyngby BK, AB, HIK, Frem, Brønshøj, Fremad Amager and Skjold. Copenhagen also has three ice hockey teams: Rødovre Mighty Bulls, Herlev Hornets and Nordsjælland Cobras. There are a lot of handball teams in Copenhagen. FC København owns both a women's and a men's team, which have the same name and logo. They were formerly known as FIF. Of other clubs playing in the "highest" leagues there are; Ajax Heroes, Ydun, and HIK (Hellerup). Rugby union is also played in the Danish capital with teams such as CSR-Nanok, Copenhagen Scrum, Exiles, Froggies and Rugbyklubben Speed. The Danish Australian Football League, based in Copenhagen is the largest Australian rules football competition outside of the English speaking world. Copenhagen is also home to a number of Denmark's 40-odd cricket clubs. Although Denmark has been an associate member of the International Cricket Council since 1966, the sport is not taught much in schools, and Danish cricket competes unfavourably with the much more widely followed sport of football for players, facilities, media attention and spectators. The second World Outgames will take place in Copenhagen in 2009, after Berlin refused to stage them due to the continuing rivalry between the two gay sporting organisations. It would be the largest such event hosted in Copenhagen. Copenhagen has the two oldest amusement parks in the World. World-famous Tivoli Gardens is an amusement park and pleasure garden located right in the middle of Copenhagen between the the City Hall Square and the the Central Station. Among its rides are the oldest still operating roller coaster and the oldest ferris wheel in the World. Tivoli Gardens, the rides It also function as an open-air concert venue. It opened on August 15 1843 making it the second oldest amusement park in the world. Dyrehavsbakken (in English "the Deer Garden Hill") is located in Klampenborg a little north of Copenhagen in a forested area of great natural beauty. Having been made into an amusement park complete with rides, games and restaurants by Christian IV, it is the oldest surviving amusement park in the World. Copenhagen is a centre for the New Nordic Cuisine. Nordic Cuisine, New York Times In November 2004 a Nordic Kitchen Symposium was helt in Copenhagen at the initiative of Danish chef and gastronome Claus Meyer. The symposium had attandance of top chefs from all of the Nordic countries and led to the adoption of a Manifesto for the New Nordic Cuisine. Manifesto for a New Nordic Cuisine Claus Meyer is also the co-founder of the two-Michelin star Restaurant Noma (Nordisk Madhus) which is a flagship restaurant for the new Nordic cuisine. In 2008 it was ranked as 10th best in the World by acclaimed British restaurant & fine dining magazine Restaurant at their 50 Best Restaurants of the World 2008-list. Furthermore, the users of the international website TripAdvisor with 25 million users a month rated Noma as the best restaurant in the world. TripAdvisor ranking As of 2008 Copenhagen boasts a total of 11 Michelin star restaurants. This is by far the highest number of any Nordic city. Apart from Noma they include one of only two Thai restaurants worldwide that has received a Michelin star. Due to the development, Copenhagen is increasingly being recognized internationally as a gourmet destination. The Top 10 cities to visit in 2009, TimesOnline Apart from the selection of high end restaurants, Copenhagen offers a great variety of Danish, International and ethnic restaurants and it is possible to find modest eateries with open sandwiches (called "smørrebrød"), which is the traditional and best known dish for lunch. Most restaurants, though, serve international dishes. danish pastry, another local specialty, can be sampled from the numerous bakeries found in all parts of the city. Copenhagen has long been associated with beer.Carlsberg beer has been brewed at the brewery's premises at the border between Vesterbro and Valby districts since 1847 and has long been almost synonumous with Danish beer production. However, recent years have seen an explosive growth in the number of microbreweries so that Denmark today has more than 100 breweries Nyeste artikler fra Bryggeriforeningen, Bryggeriforeningen , many of which are located in Copenhagen. Some like Nørrebro Bryghus also act as brewpubs where it is possible also to eat at the premisses. Many cafés specialize in a huge selection of quality beers and beer has also become an important ingridient in the New Nordic Cuisine. Copenhagen is the media centre of Denmark. DR, the major Danish public service broadcasting corporation collected their activities in a new headquarters, DR byen, in 2006 and 2007. Similarly has Odense based TV2 collected its Copenhagen activities in a modern media house in the South Harbour. The two national daily newspapters Politiken and Berlingske Tidende and the two tabloids Ekstra Bladet and B. T. are based in Copenhagen. Other important media corporations include Aller Press which is the largest publisher of weekly and monthly magazines in Scandinavia, the Egmont media group and Gyldendal, the largest Danish publisher of books. Copenhagen also has a sizable movie and television industry. Filmbyen, The Movie City, which is located in a former military camp in the suburg of Hvidovre and houses several movie companies and studio studios. Among the movie campanies are Zentropa co-owned by Danish movie director Lars von Trier who is behind several international movie productions as well as a founding force behind the Dogma Movement. * Copenhagen Fashion Week takes place every year in February and August. It is the largest fashion event in Northern Europe. Fashion Capital Copenhagen On the catwalks are a growing number of new and known Danish talent with a preview of their upcoming collections. And at the three trade fairs, CPH Vision, Gallery and Copenhagen International Fashion Fair, you will find an additional 1,100 exhibitors representing a total of over 2,300 international brand name collections. Danish fashion is known for its unique angle on design, innovation and aesthetics. With a more modern approach to femininity and functionality, expressed in fresh silhouettes, a focus on details and incomparable quality. These are only some of the reasons why more than 50,000 buyers, designers and global press attend Copenhagen Fashion Week twice a year. Copenhagen Fashion Week is organised by the Danish Fashion Institute - a newly founded network organisation created by and for the Danish fashion industry. Copenhagen Fashion Week * Carnival in Copenhagen takes place every year since 1982 during the Whitsun Holiday in Fælledparken and around the city. 120 bands, 2000 dancers and 100,000 spectators participate. History of Copenhagen * Copenhagen Distortion is a youth culture festival capturing the zeitgeist of the city, gathering every year (5 days up to the first weekend of June) up to 30.000 people in the streets, in shops, galleries, clubs, bars, in boats and buses, with a cultural focus on street culture, art and upfront dance music. Copenhagen Distortion * Roskilde Festival is a music festival helt every year in Roskilde west of Copenhagen. Gathering around 100,000 people every year, it is one of the four largest rock music festivals in Europe.. * Copenhagen Jazz Festival, which begins on the first Friday in July, is a popular annual event that is the result of Copenhagen's significant jazz scene. The festival takes place throughout the city in streets, squares and parks as well as in cafés and concert halls. Copenhagen Jazz Festival 3+ years, Wonderful Copenhagen It embraces around 900 concerts, 100 venues and over 200,000 guests from Denmark and around the world. It is recognized as one of the leading jazz festivals in the World. Top 10 best Jazz Festivals, TripAdvisor Copenhagen Jazz Festival * Copenhagen Pride is a gay pride festival taking place every year in August. Among the events is "Tivoli goes pink" and it ends with a parade. Copenhagen Pride * Copenhagen Cooking takes place in August every year and is a food festival with a wide array of events all over the city. * Copenhagen International Film Festival takes place in September every year with a focus on European films. The main prize is called the Golden Swan. Copenhagen International Film Festival Middelgrunden wind farm just off Copenhagen The Danish National Bank. Designed by Arne Jacobsen. Copenhagen is the economical and financial centre of Denmark Regionale regnskaber 2005 - Nyt fra Danmarks Statistik - Danmarks Statistik and also a strong business and economic centre in the entire Scandinavian-Baltic region. In 2008 Copenhagen was ranked 4th by Financial Times-owned FDi magazine on their list of Top50 European Cities of the Future after London, Paris and Berlin. Top 50 European City of the Future 2008/09 In 2006/07 FDi Magazine named Copenhagen Scandinavian City of the Future Scandinavian City of the Future 06/07 and in 2004/05 Copenhagen was named Northern European City of the Future ahead of other cities from Scandinavia, UK, Ireland and Benelux. Northern European City of the Future 2004/05 In the 2008 Worldwide Centers of Commerce Index, published by MasterCard, Copenhagen was ranked 14th in the world and 1st in Scandinavia. Copenhagen is one of the cities in Western Europe attracting most regional headquarters and distribution centers. Among the international companies that have chosen to locate their regional headquarters in Copenhagen is Microsoft.There are 2,100 foreign companies located in the Copenhagen area, of which approx. 500 are Scandinavian head offices, representing a wide range of industries. Copenhagen has a service oriented economy. An important sector is life science and research & development plays a major role in the economy of the city. The entire Oresund Region is in cooperation with Sweden being promoted as Medicon Valley. Major Danish biotech companies like Novo Nordisk and Lundbeck, both of which are among 50 largest pharmaceutical and biotech companies in the World, are located in the greater Copenhagen area. USATODAY.com The region also boasts the largest IT-cluster in Scandinavia with nearly 100,000 employees and the city of Copenhagen is home to Nokia's largest research centre outside Finland. Copenhagen - Overview Shipping is also an import business with Maersk, the World's largest shipping company, having their world headquarters in Copenhagen. Several international companies have established their regional headquarters in Copenhagen, e.g. Microsoft. Maersk, the world's largest container shipping company, has their world headquarters in Copenhagen. A substantial number of Danish pharmaceuticals such as Novo Nordisk, Ferring Pharmaceuticals and Bavarian Nordic also operate in the area, having placed their headquarters in or close to Copenhagen. USATODAY.com Copenhagen has some of the highest gross wages in the World. City Mayors: World's richest cities High taxes mean that wages are reduced after mandatory deduction. A neneficial researcher scheme with low taxation of foreigh specialists Level of salary in Denmark has made Denmark an attractive location for highly educated foreign labour to settle. Copenhagen is however also among the most expensive cities in Europe. City Mayors: World's most expensive cities (EIU) City Mayors: World's most expensive cities - Ranking Copenhagen University Copenhagen has a well-developed higher education system of public universities. Most prominent among these is the University of Copenhagen. Founded in 1479, it is the oldest university in Denmark. It is a world-renowned research and teaching institution with campuses around the city and forms part of the International Alliance of Research Universities (IARU), which is a collaboration between international top universities including Oxford, Cambridge, Yale and Berkeley. The University attracts app. 1500 international and exchange students every year. It is repeatedly ranked as one of the best universities in Europe. At the Times Higher Education's QS World University Rankings 2008 list, it was ranked as fourth best in continental Europe. TheAcademic Ranking of World Universities 2008 placesd it as number 43 worldwide and 8th in Europe. A second all-round university in the Copenhagen area is Roskilde University located in Roskilde. The Technical University of Denmark (DTU), Danmarks Tekniske Universitet, is located in Lyngby at the northern outskirts of Copenhagen. In 2008 it was ranked third highest in Europe on Times Higher Education's list of the most influential technical universities in the World. The Max Planck Institute in Germany was ranked 15, ETH Zurich in Switzerland was ranked 15 and DTU in Denmark was ranked 20. Copenhagen Business School (CBS) is an estimed and EQUIS accredited business school located on Frederiksberg. Copenhagen is rich in companies and institutions with a focus on research and development within the biotechnology , Infrastructure & logistics - Copenhagen a distribution hub, retrieved February 22, 2007. and life science sectors. Two of the 50 largest pharmaceutical and biotech companies in the World are located in the greater Copenhagen area. The biotech and life science cluster in Copenhagen and the rest of the Oresund Region is one of the strongest in Europe. Since 1995 this has been branded as the Medicon Valley in a Danish-Swedish cooperation. The aim is to strengthen the region's position and to promote cooperation between companies and academia. The German biotech giant Sartorius Stedim Biotech, which is currently creating a Nordic head office in Tåstrup on the outskirts of Copenhagen. The Øresund region is responsible for 60 percent of life science production in Scandinavia and is home to 111 biotech companies. The greater Copenhagen area has a very well established transportation infrastructure making it a hub in Northern Europe. Christianshavns Kanal Copenhagen has a large network of toll-free highways and public roads connecting different municipalities of the city together and to Northern Europe. As in many other cities in Europe traffic is increasing in Copenhagen. The radial arterial roads and highways leading to the Copenhagen city center are critically congested during peak hours. Copenhagen is known as one of the most bicycle-friendly cities in the world. Every day 1,1 million km are bicycled in Copenhagen. 36 % of all citizens are commuting to work, school or university by bicycle and it is municipal policy that this number should go up to 40 % by 2012 and 50 % in 2015. The city's bicycle paths are extensive and well-used. Bicycle paths are often separated from the main traffic lanes and sometimes have their own signal systems. The municipality is also developing a system of interconnected green bicycle routes, greenways, with the aim to facilitate fast, safe and pleasant bicycle transport from one end of the city to the other. The network will cover more than 100 km and consist of 22 routes when finished. The city provides public bicycles which can be found throughout the downtown area and used with a returnable deposit of 20 kroner. Copenhagen's well-developed bicycle culture has given rise to the term ‘copenhagenize’. This is the practice of other cities adopting Copenhagen-style bike lanes and bicycle infrastructure. In 2007 Copenhagen-based Danish urban design consultant Jan Gehl was hired by the New York City Department of Transportation to re-imagine New York City streets by introducing designs to improve life for pedestrians and cyclists. In recognition of Copenhagen's emphasis on bicycling, the city has been chosen by the Union Cycliste Internationale as their first official Bike City. Bike City Copenhagen will take place from 2008 to 2011 and consist of big cycling events for professionals as well as amateurs. The harbour of Copenhagen has largely lost its importance as an industrial harbour. In 2001 Copenhagen Harbour merged with the harbour in Malmö to create Copenhagen-Malmö Port. It has several functions, the most important being as a major cruise destination. In 2007 a record 286 cruise ships with 420,000 cruise passengers visited Copenhagen. 120 of these ships either started or ended the cruise in Copenhagen. In 2008 these numbers grew further to 310 cruise ships and 560,000 passengers. As a result of the growth in the cruise industry facilities asre being expanded and improved. At the World Travel Awards in 2008, Copenhagen Port was named the number one cruise destination in Europe for the fifth year in a row. Copenhagen is serviced by ferry lines to Oslo in Norway (called "Oslobåden") with a daily connection and to Świnoujście in Poland (called "Polensfærgerne") with five weekly connections. Copenhagen Airport is the principal airport serving Copenhagen. It is the largest in Scandinavia and the 17th largest in Europe. It is located in Kastrup on the island of Amager and has very efficient connections to downtown Copenhagen with metro trains going to Kongens Nytorv in 15 minutes with 4-6 minutes between departures and regional trains going to the Central Station in 12 minutes. Its location also makes it the most important international airport for large parts of southern Sweden. Over the Øresund Bridge trains go to Malmö South in 14 minutes or Malmö Central Station in 22 minutes. Copenhagen Airport has won the award as "The best airport in Europe" four times, and as "The best airport in the world" two times. Copenhagen Airport is the seventh best airport in the world - second best in Europe - when you ask the passengers. The British organization Skytrax is doing so every year, writes the airport in a press release. 40 criteria are employed for the ranking. The new metro S-train at Nørreport Metro entrance in FrederiksbergThe public transportation system of Copenhagen consists of commuter trains (called S-trains, S-tog), buses, and a metro. The S-trains form the basis of the transportation network, stretching to most areas of metropolitan Copenhagen, with their main hub at Copenhagen Central Station (København H). Regional trains supplement the S-train services with lines extending further such as to the Copenhagen Airport, Elsinore, and Malmö. The Danish State Railways' Intercity network has its eastern terminus and main hub at Copenhagen, with most trains extending to Copenhagen Airport. The fare system is based on 95 zones covering the capital area. Tickets are transferable from one means of transport to another within a time limit. The more zones a ticket is valid for, the longer its time validity with a maximum of two hours. Discount cards (punch cards, klippekort) and period cards are available. Ticket prices are high and have increased substantially in recent years leading to a decrease in passenger numbers. In fact, the percentage of trips made on public transportation in Copenhagen is quite low by northern European standards. The Copenhagen Metro began operation in 2002 and currently has only two lines. In April 2008, it was named Best Metro in the World by industry experts. Copenhagen Metro Best in the World |Christiansborg Palace - home of the Danish Parliament Folketinget, the Supreme Court, Office of the Prime Minister and official reception area of Queen Margrethe II |- |Børsen - the former Stock Exchange building |- |The Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen harbor |- |Amalienborg Palace - home of the Danish royal family. The central building is the domed Marble Church located behind the palace complex |- |Nyhavn |- |The Marble Church |- |Rosenborg Castle in central Copenhagen |- |Christianshavns Canal |- |The Tivoli, photographed from Eduard Spelterini's balloon on June 22, 1922 |} Copenhagen is recognized as one of the most environmentally friendly cities in the world. In 2006 Copenhagen Municipality received the European Environmental Management Award. The award was given for long-term holistic environmental planning. It is municipal policy to reduce CO2 emissions by 20% before the end of 2015. In 2001 a large offshore wind farm was built just off the coast of Copenhagen at Middelgrunden. It produces about 4 % of the city's energy. Many years of major investments in sewage treatment has improved water quality in the harbour to an extent that the inner harbour can be used for swimming and facilities for this are provided at a number of locations. Another municipal policy is that 40% of all citizens should bicycle to and from work by 2012 and a number of initiatives are being taken to implement this policy (see "bicycling above"). Copenhagen is the capital in the World where organic food has the largest market share. One in every ten purchases is organic in Copenhagen. Within the municipal sector in Copenhagen, 45 % of all food consumption is organic but the target is considerably higher. With the environmental strategy "Environment Metropolis: Our Vision 2015" the politicians wish that solely organic food is to be served in 90 per cent of the Copenhagen old-age homes and residential homes for children and young persons in 2015.. - - - Image:Christiansborg Slot.jpg| Christiansborg Slot - Image:Børsen København.jpg| Børsen- the former Stock Exchange building - Image:Littlemermaid207.jpg| The Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen harbor - Image:Copenhagen amalienborg seen from opera house.jpg| Amalienborg Palace - Image:Nyhavn 9-15 København.jpg| Nyhavn - Image:Kbh Marmorkirche 1.jpg| Frederik's Church|The Marble Church - Image:Rosenborg.jpg| Rosenborg Castle in central Copenhagen - Image:Christianshavns Kanal morning.jpg| Christianshavns Canal - Image:Amalienborgas.JPG | The Royal Residence - Image:Copenhague 108.jpg | The Round Tower - Image:Gammel_Strand_København.jpg| Gammel Strand - Image:Kbh_Stroeget_Nikolaj_Kirche.jpg | Stroget - Image:A_Copenhagen_center_street.jpg| Central Copenhagen Street - Image:Amagergade 01.jpg| Amagergade - Image:Gebauede_in_kopenhagen.jpg| Copenhagen Habour - Image:Container ship loading-700px.jpg| Copenhagen Ship Loading - Image:Christianshavns_Torv.jpg | Christianshavn Torv - Image:Copenhagen-Airport-from-air.jpg | Copenhagen Airport from the air - Image:Østre Anlæg København.jpg | Østre Anlæg - Image:Frederiksberg Slot.jpg | Frederiksberg Castle - Image:Kongens Nytorv 17.jpg | Kongens Nytorv - Image:Kopenhagen zeehaven.JPG | Copenhagen Canal Tour - Image:Den-sorte-diamant.jpg | The Black Diamond ( The Royal Library ) - Image:Tivoli Copenhagen at Night.jpg | Tivoli by Night - Image:Kopenhagen 3.jpg | View over Copenhagen - Image:Gammeltorv Copenhagen Denmark.JPG | Gammeltorv - Image:Copenhagen denmark.jpg | Nyhavn - Image:Copenhagen City Hall.jpg | Copenhagen City Hall - Image:Gefion.jpg| Gefion Fountian - Image:Christiania Exit.JPG | Christiania - Image:Gebauede in kopenhagen.jpg | Copenhagen at Night - Image:Copenhague 050.jpg | Inner City Canel - Copenhagen has placed well in a number of international rankings, some of which are mentioned below. * Copenhagen was ranked #1 as Most Livable City in the World by international lifestyle magazine Monocle on their Top 25 Most Livable Cities 2008 list Monocles page on Copenhagen * Worlds Best Design City 2008 also by Monocle. Monocles page on Copenhagen *Monocle has also stated that Copenhagen is "Scandinavia's most desirable city". By Stuart Husband Monocle Magazine Published: June 19, 2007 *Copenhagen ranked #4 by Financial Times-owned FDi magazine on their list of Top50 European Cities of the Future after London, Paris and Berlin. Top 50 European City of the Future 2008/09 In 2006/07 FDi Magazine named Copenhagen Scandinavian City of the Future Scandinavian City of the Future 06/07 and in 2004/05 Copenhagen was named Northern European City of the Future ahead of other cities from Scandinavia, UK, Ireland and Benelux. Northern European City of the Future 2004/05 * In the 2008 Worldwide Centers of Commerce Index, published by MasterCard, Copenhagen was ranked 14th in the world and 1st in Scandinavia. *Copenhagen #1 out of 254 locations in the Location Ranking Survey performed by ECA International that has asked European experts where they prefer to be stationed worldwide. Location Ranking Survey * Copenhagen was ranked #6 in Grist Magazine's "15 Green Cities" list in 2007 making Copenhagen the greenest capital of Scandinavia according to Grist Magazine. 15 Green Cities | Grist | Main Dish | 19 July 2007 * Copenhagen is the capital in the World where organic food has the largest market share. One in every ten purchases is organic in Copenhagen. World-champinions in organic food * The Copenhagen Metro has been named the Best Metro in the World by industry experts. Copenhagen Metro Best in the World * Copenhagen is the worlds #7 most expensive city and #3 most expensive in Europe on the Forbes List. Forbes-Worlds Most Expensive Cities List * Copenhagen is ranked #7 as Preferred City For Investment Projects. Preferred City For Investment Projects * Copenhagen ranked 3rd in Western Europe in terms of attracting regional headquarters and distribution centers, only surpassed by London and Paris. * Copenhagen ranks #1 in the Global Earning Ranking. [h Global earning ranking ] * Copenhagen ranks as the 5th most popular city in the world for international meetings and conferences. Style & Substance Danmark * Copenhagen ranks as one of the most attractive cities to live and work in Europe. A great place to live * Copenhagen ranks 2nd in Europe for Quality of life according to a survey from 2005 by the international consultancy firm William Mercer. A great place to live * Morten Andersen, veteran NFL kicker * Niels Bohr, physicist, Nobel laureate * Aage Bohr, physicist, Nobel laureate (son of Niels Bohr) * Victor Borge, entertainer * August Bournonville, ballet choreographer * Georg Brandes, critic * Helena Christensen, supermodel * Tove Ditlevsen, writer * Carl Theodor Dreyer, movie director * Vilhelm Hammershøi, painter * Gus Hansen, poker player * Iben Hjejle, actor * Peter Høeg, writer * Arne Jacobsen, designer * Robert Jacobsen, painter * J. C. Jacobsen, founder of Carlsberg Brewery * Mathias Lauridsen, male topmodel * Søren Kierkegaard, philosopher * Bjørn Lomborg, Academic and Author of The Skeptical Environmentalist * Lauritz Melchior, opera singer * Mads Mikkelsen, actor * Carl-Henning Pedersen, painter * Lars von Trier, movie director * Dan Turèll, writer * Lars Ulrich, drummer and songwriter of the heavy-metal band Metallica * Jørn Utzon, architect, designer of the Sydney Opera House * Michael Laudrup, former international football player, former manager of Spanish Primera Division Football team Getafe. * Peter Schmeichel, former international football player * Bertel Thorvaldsen, sculpturer Copenhagen is twinned with: * Paris in France (partner city) * Reykjavík in Iceland * Prague in Czech Republic (unofficial partner city) * San Francisco de Campeche in Mexico * Municipal statistics: NetBorger Kommunefakta, delivered from KMD, also known as Kommunedata (Municipal Data) * Municipal and county statistics: Statistics Denmark statistikbanken.dk * Demography: Statistical Yearbook of Copenhagen (part English); ISBN 87-7024-230-5 * History and demography: København Forslag til kommuneplan 1985; ISBN 87-88034-03-8 * Oresund Region * Eurovision Song Contest 2001 * Junior Eurovision Song Contest 2003 * MTV Europe Music Awards 2006 * Transportation in Denmark * Ports of the Baltic Sea * A Much Different Tourist Site and Cultural Guide about Copenhagen * Wonderful Copenhagen official tourism website * Copenhagen Capacity official investment agency of Copenhagen * * Official municipal website * City of Copenhagen Statistical Office * Krak searchable map
Copenhagen
Copenhagen is ranked number one worldwide for which things?
Most Livable City in the World,
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Copenhagen Copenhagen ( ; ) is the capital and largest city of Denmark, with a population of 1,161,063. Copenhagen is situated on the Islands of Zealand and Amager. First documented in the 11th century, Copenhagen became the capital of Denmark in the beginning of the 15th century and during the 17th century under the reign of Christian IV it became an important regional centre. Copenhagen is usually ranked as one of the two largest cities of the Nordic Countries. [ LARGEST CITY Copenhagen or Stockholm ? [ Denmark in brief . With the completion of the transnational Oresund Bridge in 2000, Copenhagen has become the centre of the increasingly integrating Øresund Region with around 3.7 million inhabitants covering an area of 20,869 km² (177/km²). Within this region, Copenhagen and Malmö is in the process of growing into one common metropolitan area. Copenhagen is a major regional center of culture, business, media, and science. In 2008 Copenhagen was ranked #4 by Financial Times-owned FDi magazine on their list of Top50 European Cities of the Future after London, Paris and Berlin. In the 2008 Worldwide Centers of Commerce Index, published by MasterCard, Copenhagen was ranked 14th in the world and 1st in Scandinavia. Life science, information technology and shipping are important sectors and research & development plays a major role in the city's economy. Its strategic location and excellent infrastructure with the largest airport in Scandinavia located 14 minutes by train from the city centre, has made it a regional hub and a popular location for regional headquarters as well as conventions. Copenhagen has repeatedly been recognized as one of the cities with the best quality of life. and in 2008 it was singled out as the Most Liveable City in the World by international lifestyle magazine Monocle on their Top 25 Most Liveable Cities 2008 list. It is also considered one of the world's most environmentally friendly cities with the water in the inner harbor being so clean that it can be used for swimming and 36 % of all citizens commuting to work by bicycle, every day bicycling a total 1.1 million km. Since the turn of the millennium Copenhagen has seen a strong urban and cultural development and has been described as a boom town. This is partly due to massive investments in cultural facilities as well as infrastructure and a new wave of succesful designers, chefs and architects. Copenhagen c. 1895 The Palace during renovation. From its humble origins as a fishing village to its heyday as the glittering capital of the Danish Empire, to its current position as one of the world's premier design capitals, the stories and characters of Copenhagen's history can be discovered in its sumptuous palaces, copper-roofed town houses and atmospheric cobbled squares. From the Viking Age there was a fishing village by the name of "Havn" (harbour) at the site. Recent archeological finds indicate that by the 11th century, Copenhagen had already grown into a small town with a large estate, a church, a market, at least two wells and many smaller habitations spread over a fairly wide area. Arkæologer graver ny teori om København op af mulden (Archeologists develop new theory about Copenhagen from their digs), Videnskab.dk, 5 November 2008 From the middle of the 12th century it grew in importance after coming into the possession of the Bishop Absalon, who fortified it in 1167, the year traditionally marking the foundation of Copenhagen. The excellent harbour encouraged Copenhagen's growth until it became an important centre of commerce. The city's origin as a harbour and a place of commerce is reflected in its name. Its original designation, from which the contemporary Danish name is derived, was Køpmannæhafn, "merchants' harbor". The English name for the city is derived from its Low German name, Kopenhagen. The element hafnium is also named for Copenhagen, whose Latin name is Hafnia. Biography of George de Hevesy It was repeatedly attacked by the Hanseatic League as the Germans took notice. In 1254, it received its charter as a city under Bishop Jakob Erlandsen. During 1658-59 it withstood a severe siege by the Swedes under Charles X and successfully repelled a major assault. In 1801 a British fleet under Admiral Parker fought a major battle, the Battle of Copenhagen, with the Danish Navy in Copenhagen harbour. It was during this battle Lord Nelson famously "put the telescope to the blind eye" in order not to see Admiral Parker's signal to cease fire. When a British expeditionary force bombarded Copenhagen in 1807, to gain control of the Danish Navy, the city suffered great damage and hundreds of people were killed. The reason why the devastation was so great was that Copenhagen relied on an old defence-line rendered virtually useless by the increase in shooting range available to the British. But not until the 1850s were the ramparts of the city opened to allow new housing to be built around the lakes ("Søerne") which bordered the old defence system to the west. This dramatic increase of space was long overdue, not only because the old ramparts were out of date as a defence system, but also because of bad sanitation in the old city. Before the opening, Copenhagen Center was inhabited by approximately 125,000 people, peaking in the census of 1870 (140,000); today the figure is around 25,000. In 1901, Copenhagen expanded further, incorporating communities with 40,000 people, and in the process making Frederiksberg an enclave within Copenhagen. During World War II, Copenhagen was occupied by German troops along with the rest of the country from 9 April 1940 until 4 May 1945. In August 1943, when the government's collaboration with the occupation forces collapsed, several ships were sunk in Copenhagen Harbour by the Royal Danish Navy to prevent them being used by the Germans. The city has grown greatly since the war, in the seventies using the so-called five-finger-plan of commuter train lines to surrounding towns and suburbs. Since the summer 2000, the cities of Copenhagen and Malmö have been connected by a toll bridge/tunnel (Øresund Bridge), which allows both rail and road passengers to cross. As a result, Copenhagen has become the centre of a larger metropolitan area which spans both nations. The construction of the bridge has led to a large number of changes to the public transportation system and the extensive redevelopment of Amager, south of the main city. Location of Coppenhagen in Denmark Nørrebro seen from "Søerne" Copenhagen City Hall Copenhagen is located on the eastern shore of the island of Zealand (Sjælland) and partly on the island of Amager. Copenhagen faces the Øresund to the east, the strait of water that separates Denmark from Sweden, and that connects the North Sea with the Baltic Sea. On the Swedish side of the sound directly across from Copenhagen, lie the towns of Malmö and Landskrona. Copenhagen is also a part of the Øresund region, which consists of Zealand, Lolland-Falster and Bornholm in Denmark and Scania in Sweden. Copenhagen Municipality is an administrative unit that covers the central part of the actual city of Copenhagen. It is a fairly small part of the actual city that falles within the municipality both because it covers a very confined area and because the enclave of Frederiksberg is an independent municipality. Copenhagen consists of a number of boroughs and areas, including * Indre By * Østerbro * Nørrebro * Vesterbro * Amagerbro * Nordhavnen (North Habour) * Valby * Kongens Enghave (King's Meadow Garden), also known as Sydhavnen (meaning South Harbour) * Christianshavn * Christiania (Freetown) * Sundbyvester (Sundby West), * Sundbyøster (Sundby East) * Ørestad * Islands Brygge * Bellahøj * Brønshøj * Ryparken * Bispebjerg * Vigerslev * Vestamager * Vanløse The suffix -bro in the names Østerbro, Nørrebro, Vesterbro and Amagerbro should not be confused with the Danish word for bridge, which is also 'bro'. The term is thought to be an abbreviation or short form of the Danish word brolagt meaning paved referring to the roads paved with cobblestones leading to the city's former gates - The conurbation of Copenhagen consists of several municipalities. After Copenhagen Municipality, the second largest is Frederiksberg Municipality which is an enclave inside Copenhagen Municipality. Both are contained in the larger Capital Region of Denmark, which contains most of the Copenhagen metropolitan area. Previously, the areas of Frederiksberg, Gentofte and Copenhagen municipalities have been used to define the city of Copenhagen. This definition is now obsolete. To meet statistical needs after the latest municipal reform, which took place in the beginning of 2007, an effort has been made to work out definitions of lands (landsdele) in Denmark. A land is basically a geographical and statistical definition, and the area is not considered to be an administrative unit. The land of Copenhagen City includes the municipalities of Copenhagen, Dragør, Frederiksberg and Tårnby, with a total population of 656,582 in the beginning of 2008. Statistics Denmark, table BEF1A07: Population 1 January by region, age, sex, marital status Retrieved on 2008-03-26. Statistics Denmark, definitions of lands as of 2007-01-01 (excel-file, in danish) Retrieved on 2008-03-26. Copenhagen and Frederiksberg were two of the three last Danish municipalities not belonging to a county. On 1 January 2007, the municipalities lost their county privileges and became part of Copenhagen Capital Region. Suburban Copenhagen is planned according to the Finger Plan, fingerplanen, initiated in 1947, dividing the suburbs into five fingers. The Finger Plan, Denmark.dk The S-train lines are built according to the Finger Plan, while green wedges and highways are built in-between the fingers The Little Finger The northern suburbs form the little finger of the plan, and is traditionally the wealthiest of the suburbs. In popular language, the area is known as "The Whiskey Belt", although the area is mixed between mansions, larger houses, garden cities and mid-size houses. The area has a population of around 270,000 inhabitants. * Gentofte Municipality: Klampenborg, Skovshoved, Charlottenlund, Hellerup, Gentofte, Ordrup, Jægersborg, Dyssegård, Vangede * Lyngby-Taarbæk Municipality: Kongens Lyngby, Ulrikkenborg, Brede, Virum, Sorgenfri, Lundtofte, Hjortekær * Rudersdal Municipality: Søllerød, Holte, Øverød, Gl. Holte, Trørød, Nærum, Vedbæk, Skodsborg, Birkerød, Kajerød, Bistrup * Hørsholm Municipality: Hørsholm, Usserød, Rungsted, Vallerød, Smidstrup * Allerød Municipality: Allerød, Lillerød, Blovstrød * Fredensborg Municipality: Fredensborg, Asminderød, Humlebæk, Kokkedal, Niverød, Nivå. The Ring Finger The North-Northwestern part of the suburbs forms the ring finger. The area is to a large extent formed by detached middle-class dwellings, with some exceptions of housing projects or upper-class areas. The area has a population of around 100,000 inhabitants. * Gladsaxe Municipality: Gladsaxe, Bagsværd, Buddinge, Høje-Gladsaxe (Gladsaxe Heights), Mørkhøj, Søborg * Furesø Municipality: Værløse, Farum, Hareskovby The Middle Finger The northwestern suburbs form the middle finger, and consists of a mixed area of both detached middle-class dwellings, widespread garden cities and large, low-rise public housing projects. The area has a considerable part of the industrial areas of metropolitan Copenhagen, mostly in the traditional sectors of manufacturing. The area has a population of around 110,000 inhabitants. * Herlev Municipality: Herlev, Hjortespring * Ballerup Municipality: Skovlunde, Ballerup, Måløv, Ågerup, Jonstrup, Egebjerg * Egedal Municipality: Smørumnedre, Stenløse, Ølstykke The Index Finger The index finger forms the western suburbs, which are the suburbs with the lowest income per capita and the highest crime-rate. The suburbs vary from the petit bourgeois area of Glostrup to the widespread low housing projects of Albertslund and Taastrup. Of the total of 145,000 inhabitants, some 20% are immigrants of first or second generation. * Rødovre Municipality: Rødovre, Islev * Glostrup Municipality: Glostrup, Hvissinge, Ejby * Brøndby Municipality: Brøndbyøster, Brøndbyvester, Brøndby Nord * Albertslund Municipality * Høje-Taastrup Municipality: Taastrup, Høje-Taastrup, Tåstrupgård, Hedehusene The Thumb The southwest suburbs along the coast form the thumb of the plan. While the central parts of these suburbs are dominated by high-rise housing projects and low-income inhabitants, the distant part is dominated by detached middle-class houses. These suburbs have a population of some 215,000 inhabitants and has a sizeable number of immigrants. * Hvidovre Municipality: Avedøre, Friheden, Hvidovre * Brøndby Municipality: Brøndby Strand * Vallensbæk Municipality * Ishøj Municipality * Greve Municipality: Hundige, Karlslunde, Greve * Solrød Municipality: Solrød, Jersie * Køge municipality: Køge, Ølby The extra finger: Amager Island suburbs & Malmö When the finger plan was initially introduced, the island of Amager wasn't included as the infrastructure was inadequate for modern suburban life. Later it has been improved, and the suburbs at the island hold some 53,000 inhabitants. Amager is now one of the most modern suburbs of Copehagen with increasing wealth. With the opening of the bridge to Sweden this finger has been extended all the way to Malmö. Under an official visit of the Swedish King in 2007 at the Copenhagen City Hall, Copenhagen Lord Mayor Ritt Bjerregaard caused a minor diplomatic incident by referring to Malmö as "København M" with an allusion to the Danish system of postal codes (Nørrebro being København N and Vesterbro being København V for instance), indicating that Malmö had turned into just another Copenhagen bourough. Today 25,000 Danes live in Malmö. Malmø er blevet til København M, DR Online * Tårnby Municipality: Tårnby, Kastrup * Dragør Municipality Summers in Copenhagen are mild with average high temperatures of around 21°C (70°F) and lows of 13°C (55°F), but temperatures could sometimes exceed 25°C (77°F+) and occasional heatwaves are common during the summer. Winters are cold, with temperatures of -2 to 4°C (28 - 40°F), and it rarely drop below −10 °C (14 °F). Precipitation is moderate throughout the year, and snowfall occurs mainly in December through March, but snow cover does not remain a long time. Nørrebro seen from "Søerne" Copenhagen as seen from the City Hall at night Kongens Nytorv View from Rundetårn Gefion Fountian The city's appearance today is shaped by the key role it has played as a regional center for centuries. Copenhagen has a multitude of districts, each representing its time and with its own distinctive character, making up a dense urban fabric. Other distinctive features of the Copenhagen of today is the abundance of water, the greenness and the elaborate system of bicycle paths that line almost every major street. The oldest section of Copenhagen's inner city is often referred to as "Middelalderbyen" (The Medieval City). However, the most distinctive district of Copenhagen is Frederiksstaden developed during the reign of Frederick V. It has Amalienborg Palace at its centre and is dominated by the dome of the Marble Church as well as a number of elegant 18th century mansions. Also part of the old inner city of Copenhagen is the small island of Slotsholmen with Christiansborg Palace and Christianshavn. Around the historical city center lies a band of charming, dense and well-preserved residential bouroughs (Vesterbro, Inner Nørrebro, Inner Østerbro) dating mainly from late 19th century. They were built outside the old ramparts of the city when the city was finally allowed to expand beyond this barrier. Sometimes referred to as "the City of Spires", Copenhagen is known for its horizontal skyline, only broken by spires at churches and castles. Most characteristic is the baroque spire of Church of Our Saviour with its spiralling and narrowing external stairs that visitors can climb to the very top of the spire. Other important spires are those of Christiansborg Palace, the City Hall and the former Church of St. Nikolaj that now houses a modern art venue. A bit lower are the renaissance spires of Rosenborg Castle and the "dragon spire" of [[Christian IV of Christian IV's former stock exchange, so named because it is shaped as the tails of four dragons twined together. Recent years has seen a tremendous boom in modern architecture in Copenhagen both when it comes to Danish architecture and works by international architects. For a few hundred years, virtually no foreign architects had worked in Copenhagen but since the mid 1990s the city and its immediate sourroundings have seen buildings and projects from such international star architects as Norman Foster , Hadid , Nouvel and Liebeskind . In the same time, a number of Danish architects have achieved great success both in Copenhagen and abroad. This has led to a number of international architecture awards. Buildings in Copenhagen have won RIBA European Awards four years in a row ("Sampension" in 2005 , "Kilen" in 2006 , "Tietgenkollegiet" in 2007 and the Royal Playhouse in 2008 ). At the 2008 World Architecture Festival in Barcelona, Bjarke Ingels Group won an award for the World's Best Residential Building 2008 for a house in Ørestad. The Forum AID Award for Best building in Scandinavia went to Copenhagen buildings both in 2006 and 2008 . In 2008 British design magazine Monocle named Copenhagen the World's best design city 2008. The boom in urban development and modern architecture means that the above mentioned horizontal skyline has seen some changes. A political majority has decided to keep the historical center free of highrises. But several areas will see or have already seen massive urban development. Ørestad is the area that until now has seen most of the development. Located near Copenhagen Airport, it currently boasts the largest mall in Scandinavia and a variety of office and residential buildings as well as an IT University and a high school. The two largest hotels in Scandinavia are currently under construction (ultimo 2008). An ambitious regeneration project will create a new Carlsberg District at the historical premises of the Carlsberg Breweries that has terminated the production of beer in Copenhagen and moved it to Jutland. The district will have a total of nine highrises and seeks to mix the old industrial buildings with modern architecture to create a dense, maze-like quarter with a focus on sustainability and an active urban life. A third major area of urban development also with a focus on sustanibility is Nordhavn. The Copenhagen tradition with urban development on artificial islands that was initiated with with Christianh IV's construction of Christianshavn has recently been continued with the creation of Havneholmen as well as a "canal city" in the South Harbour. A district in Copenhagen with a very different take on modern architecture is that of Christiania whose many creative and idiosyncratic buildings are exponents of an "architecture without architects". Østre Anlæg University of Copenhagen Botanical Garden Copenhagen is a green city with many big and small parks. King's Garden, the garden of Rosenborg Castle, is the oldest and most visited park in Copenhagen. Its landscaping was commenced by Christian IV in 1606. Every year it sees more than 2,5 million visitors and in the summer months it is packed with sunbathers, picknickers and ballplayers. It also serves as a sculpture garden with a permanent display of sculptures as well as temporary exhibits during summer. Also located in the city centre are the Botanical Gardens particularly noted for their large complex of 19th century greenhouses donated by Carlsberg founder J. C. Jacobsen. Fælledparken is with its 58 hectars the largest park in Copenhagen. It is popular for sports and hosts a long array of annual events like a free opera concert at the opening of the opera season, other open-air concerts, carnival, Labour Day celebrations and Copenhagen Historic Grand Prix which is a race for antique cars. A historical green space in the northeastern part of the city is Kastellet which is a well-presserved renaissance citadel that now serves mainly as a park. Another popular park is the Frederiksberg Garden which is a 32 hectars romantic landscape park. It houses a large colony of very tame grey herons along with other waterfowls. The park also offers views of the elephants and the elephant house designed by world-famous British architect Norman Foster of the adjacent Copenhagen Zoo. Characteristic of Copenhagen is that a number of cemeteries double as parks, though only for the more quiet activities such as sunbathing, reading and meditation. Assistens Cemetery, the burrial place of Hans Christian Andersen among others, is an important green space for the district of Inner Nørrebro and a Copenhagen institution. The lesser known Vestre Kirkegaard is with its 54 hectars the largest cemetery in Denmark and offers a maze of dense groves, open lawns, winding paths, hedges, overgrown tombs, monuments, tree-lined avenues, lakes and other garden features. It is official municipal policy in Copenhagen that all citizens by 2015 must be able to reach a park or beach on foot in less than 15 minutes. In line with this policy, several new parks are under development in areas poor in green spaces. Copenhagen and the surrounding areas have 3 beaches with a total of approx. 8 km of sandy beaches within 30 minutes of bicycling from the city centre. This includes Amager Strandpark, which opened in 2005 and includes a 2 km long artificial island and a total of 4,6 km of beaches , located just 15 minutes by bicycle or a few minutes by metro from the city centre. The beaches are supplemented by a system of harbour baths along the Copenhagen waterfront. The first and most popular of these is located at Islands Brygge Harbour bath at Islands Brygge, e-architect and has won international acclaim for its design. Islands Brygge. Depending on the boundaries used, the population of Copenhagen differs. Statistics Denmark uses a measure of the contiguously built-up urban area of Copenhagen, this means the number of communities included in this statistical abstract has changed several times, in the abstracts latest edition with close to 1.2 million (1,153,615 (2008)) inhabitants. This number is not a strict result of the commonly-used measuring methods of 200 meters of continuously build-up area, as there are exceptions to the general rule in the suburbs of Dragør, Taastrup, Birkerød, Hørsholm and Farum. Statistics Denmark has never stated the geographical area of urban Copenhagen. However, we know it consists of Copenhagen Municipality, Frederiksberg and 16 of the 20 municipalities in the old counties Copenhagen and Roskilde, though 5 of them only partially. Largest cities of Denmark 2007 Statistics Denmark has worked out definitions of so-called lands (landsdele), a definition used to meet statistical needs on a lower level than regions. From this, the land of Copenhagen city (København by) is defined by the municipalities of Copenhagen, Dragør, Frederiksberg and Tårnby, with a total population of 656,582 in the beginning of 2008. The surroundings of Copenhagen is defined by another land, Copenhagen suburban (Københavns omegn), which includes the municipalities of Albertslund, Ballerup, Brøndby, Gentofte, Gladsaxe, Glostrup, Herlev, Hvidovre, Høje-Taastrup, Ishøj, Lyngby-Taarbæk, Rødovre and Vallensbæk, and with a total population of 504,481 (January 1, 2008). This gives a total population of 1,161,063 for these two lands together. The lands of Copenhagen city and Copenhagen suburban can together be used as a definition of the metropolitan area, although perhaps a somewhat narrow one. From 1 January 2008 the population of the 34 municipalities closest to and including the municipality of Copenhagen is 1,857,263 and by 1 October 2008 the population of this area had grown to 1,872,706. Statistikbanken.dk Population table BEF1A07 Land area: 2,923 km² (1,032 sq mi). (Capital Region - Bornholm + East Zealand + Stevns) Water area: 105 km² (40.5 sq mi). Orienteering fra Københavns Kommune. Statistisk Kontor.2003 nr. 25 Thus, the region comprises 6.8% of the land area of Denmark, but has 34% of Denmark's population. This gives a total of 641 inhabitants per km² or 1,660 per square mile for the region. This compares with a population density in the rest of the country of approximately 90 per km² or around 230 per square mile. Based on a 10%-isoline (data from 2002) in which at least 10% commutes into central parts of the Copenhagen area, most of Zealand would be covered and this area has a population of about 2.3 million inhabitants. /ref> Since the opening of the Øresund Bridge in 2000, commuting between and integration of Greater Malmö and Copenhagen have increased rapidly, and a combined statistical metropolitan area has formed. This metropolitan area, which has a population of 2,501,094 (2008) is expected to be officially defined by the respective statistics divisions of Denmark and Sweden in the upcoming years. A high-ranking civil servant of the Interior Ministry, Henning Strøm, who was involved in (i.e. known as "the Father of") a past municipal reform, which took effect on 1 April 1970, said on television, broadcast in connection with the recent Kommunalreformen ("The Municipal Reform" of 2007), that Copenhagen municipality would encompass an area with 1.5 million inhabitants, if the principles of the 1970 municipal reform were also applied on Copenhagen municipality. DR netnews 25-06-04 In other words: in the rest of Denmark the city occupies only part of the municipality, but in Copenhagen the municipality of Copenhagen occupies only part of the city of Copenhagen. Since the late 1990s, Copenhagen has undergone a transformation from a cozy Scandinavian capital to a cool metropolitan city of international scope in the league of cities like Barcelona and Amsterdam. This is due to massive investments in infrastructure as well as culture and wave of new successful Danish architects, designers and chefs. Between 1998 and 2008, lifestyle journalists wordwide (from Wallpaper to the NewYorkTimes) have praised Copenhagen as a cool, well-functioning creative city (see "Copenhagen In international rankings" below). Copenhagen has a wide array of museums of International standard. The National Museum, Nationalmuseet, is Denmark's largest museum of Archaeology and cultural history, comprising the histories of Danish and foreign cultures alike. The National Gallery - "Statens Museum for Kunst" - is Denmark's national art museum and contains collections dating from 12th century and all the way up to present day artists. Among artists represented in the collections are Rubens, Rembrandt, Picasso, Braque, Léger, Matisse and Emil Nolde. Another important Copenhagen art museum is the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek founded by second generation Carlsberg tycoon-philantropist Carl Jacobsen and is built around his personal collections. Its main focus is classical Egyptian, Roman and Greek sculptures and other antiquities and a collection of Rodin sculptures that is the largest outside France (Glypto-, from the Greek root glyphein, to carve and theke, a storing-place). Besides its sculpture collections, the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek also holds a comprehensive collection of paintings of impressionist and post-impressionist painters such as Monet,Renoir, Cézanne, van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec as well as Danish Golden Age painters. Loiusiana is an internationally acclaimed museum of modern art situated on the coast just north of Copenhagen. It is located in the middle of a sculpture garden on a cliff overlooking Øresund. The The museum is included in the Patricia Schultz book 1,000 Places to See Before You Die. The Danish Museum of Art & Design is housed in the 18th century former Frederiks Hospital and displays Danish design as well as international design and crafts. Other museums include: * Thorvaldsens Museum is a single-artist museum dedicated to the oeuvre,of romantic Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen who lived and worked in Rome. * Cisternerne is a small but different museum dedicated to modern glass art. It is located in some grotto-like former cisterns that come complete with Stalactites formed by the changing water levels. * The Ordrupgaard Museum is an art museum located just notth of Copenhagen in an old mansion with an extension by Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. It features 19th century French and Danish art and is particularly noted for its works by Paul Gaugin. Copenhagen Opera House The Royal Danish Theatre In January 2009 the new Copenhagen Concert Hall will open. It is designed by Jean Nouvel and will have four halls with the main auditorium seating 1800 people. It will serve as the home of the Danish National Symphony Orchestra and along with the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles the most expensive concert hall ever built. Another important venue for classical music is the Tivoli Concert Hall located in the histtrocal Tivoli Gardens. The Copenhagen Opera House (in Danish usually called Operaen) that opened in 2005 and is designed by Henning Larsen, is the national opera house of Denmark and among the most modern opera houses in the world. The old Royal Danish Theatre dating from 1748 still works as a supplementary opera scene. The Royal Danish Theatre is also home to the Royal Danish Ballet. Gounded in 1748 along with the theatre, it is one of the oldest ballet troups in Europe. It is home the the Bournonville style of ballet. Copenhagen has a significant jazz scene that has existed for many years. It developed when a number of American jazz musicians such as Ben Webster, Thad Jones, Richard Boone, Ernie Wilkins, Kenny Drew, Ed Thigpen, Bob Rockwell and others such as rock guitarist Link Wray came to live in Copenhagen during the 1960s. Every year in early July Copenhagen's streets, aquares and parks fills up with big and small jazz concerts during the Copenhagen Jazz Festival (see yearly events). The most important venue for rhythmical music in Copenhagen is Vega in Vesterbro district which has been chosen as "best concert venue in Europe" by international music magazine Live For free entertainment one can stroll along Strøget, especially between Nytorv and Højbro Plads, which in the late afternoon and evening is a bit like an impromptu three-ring circus with musicians, magicians, jugglers and other street performers. View from Amerikakaj Copenhagen has a wide variety of sport teams. The two major football teams are Brøndby IF and FC København. Brøndby IF plays at Brøndby Stadium in Brøndby and FC København plays at Parken in Østerbro, Copenhagen. Notable Copenhagen teams playing at the second highest level in Danish football (the Danish 1st Division) include Lyngby BK, AB, HIK, Frem, Brønshøj, Fremad Amager and Skjold. Copenhagen also has three ice hockey teams: Rødovre Mighty Bulls, Herlev Hornets and Nordsjælland Cobras. There are a lot of handball teams in Copenhagen. FC København owns both a women's and a men's team, which have the same name and logo. They were formerly known as FIF. Of other clubs playing in the "highest" leagues there are; Ajax Heroes, Ydun, and HIK (Hellerup). Rugby union is also played in the Danish capital with teams such as CSR-Nanok, Copenhagen Scrum, Exiles, Froggies and Rugbyklubben Speed. The Danish Australian Football League, based in Copenhagen is the largest Australian rules football competition outside of the English speaking world. Copenhagen is also home to a number of Denmark's 40-odd cricket clubs. Although Denmark has been an associate member of the International Cricket Council since 1966, the sport is not taught much in schools, and Danish cricket competes unfavourably with the much more widely followed sport of football for players, facilities, media attention and spectators. The second World Outgames will take place in Copenhagen in 2009, after Berlin refused to stage them due to the continuing rivalry between the two gay sporting organisations. It would be the largest such event hosted in Copenhagen. Copenhagen has the two oldest amusement parks in the World. World-famous Tivoli Gardens is an amusement park and pleasure garden located right in the middle of Copenhagen between the the City Hall Square and the the Central Station. Among its rides are the oldest still operating roller coaster and the oldest ferris wheel in the World. Tivoli Gardens, the rides It also function as an open-air concert venue. It opened on August 15 1843 making it the second oldest amusement park in the world. Dyrehavsbakken (in English "the Deer Garden Hill") is located in Klampenborg a little north of Copenhagen in a forested area of great natural beauty. Having been made into an amusement park complete with rides, games and restaurants by Christian IV, it is the oldest surviving amusement park in the World. Copenhagen is a centre for the New Nordic Cuisine. Nordic Cuisine, New York Times In November 2004 a Nordic Kitchen Symposium was helt in Copenhagen at the initiative of Danish chef and gastronome Claus Meyer. The symposium had attandance of top chefs from all of the Nordic countries and led to the adoption of a Manifesto for the New Nordic Cuisine. Manifesto for a New Nordic Cuisine Claus Meyer is also the co-founder of the two-Michelin star Restaurant Noma (Nordisk Madhus) which is a flagship restaurant for the new Nordic cuisine. In 2008 it was ranked as 10th best in the World by acclaimed British restaurant & fine dining magazine Restaurant at their 50 Best Restaurants of the World 2008-list. Furthermore, the users of the international website TripAdvisor with 25 million users a month rated Noma as the best restaurant in the world. TripAdvisor ranking As of 2008 Copenhagen boasts a total of 11 Michelin star restaurants. This is by far the highest number of any Nordic city. Apart from Noma they include one of only two Thai restaurants worldwide that has received a Michelin star. Due to the development, Copenhagen is increasingly being recognized internationally as a gourmet destination. The Top 10 cities to visit in 2009, TimesOnline Apart from the selection of high end restaurants, Copenhagen offers a great variety of Danish, International and ethnic restaurants and it is possible to find modest eateries with open sandwiches (called "smørrebrød"), which is the traditional and best known dish for lunch. Most restaurants, though, serve international dishes. danish pastry, another local specialty, can be sampled from the numerous bakeries found in all parts of the city. Copenhagen has long been associated with beer.Carlsberg beer has been brewed at the brewery's premises at the border between Vesterbro and Valby districts since 1847 and has long been almost synonumous with Danish beer production. However, recent years have seen an explosive growth in the number of microbreweries so that Denmark today has more than 100 breweries Nyeste artikler fra Bryggeriforeningen, Bryggeriforeningen , many of which are located in Copenhagen. Some like Nørrebro Bryghus also act as brewpubs where it is possible also to eat at the premisses. Many cafés specialize in a huge selection of quality beers and beer has also become an important ingridient in the New Nordic Cuisine. Copenhagen is the media centre of Denmark. DR, the major Danish public service broadcasting corporation collected their activities in a new headquarters, DR byen, in 2006 and 2007. Similarly has Odense based TV2 collected its Copenhagen activities in a modern media house in the South Harbour. The two national daily newspapters Politiken and Berlingske Tidende and the two tabloids Ekstra Bladet and B. T. are based in Copenhagen. Other important media corporations include Aller Press which is the largest publisher of weekly and monthly magazines in Scandinavia, the Egmont media group and Gyldendal, the largest Danish publisher of books. Copenhagen also has a sizable movie and television industry. Filmbyen, The Movie City, which is located in a former military camp in the suburg of Hvidovre and houses several movie companies and studio studios. Among the movie campanies are Zentropa co-owned by Danish movie director Lars von Trier who is behind several international movie productions as well as a founding force behind the Dogma Movement. * Copenhagen Fashion Week takes place every year in February and August. It is the largest fashion event in Northern Europe. Fashion Capital Copenhagen On the catwalks are a growing number of new and known Danish talent with a preview of their upcoming collections. And at the three trade fairs, CPH Vision, Gallery and Copenhagen International Fashion Fair, you will find an additional 1,100 exhibitors representing a total of over 2,300 international brand name collections. Danish fashion is known for its unique angle on design, innovation and aesthetics. With a more modern approach to femininity and functionality, expressed in fresh silhouettes, a focus on details and incomparable quality. These are only some of the reasons why more than 50,000 buyers, designers and global press attend Copenhagen Fashion Week twice a year. Copenhagen Fashion Week is organised by the Danish Fashion Institute - a newly founded network organisation created by and for the Danish fashion industry. Copenhagen Fashion Week * Carnival in Copenhagen takes place every year since 1982 during the Whitsun Holiday in Fælledparken and around the city. 120 bands, 2000 dancers and 100,000 spectators participate. History of Copenhagen * Copenhagen Distortion is a youth culture festival capturing the zeitgeist of the city, gathering every year (5 days up to the first weekend of June) up to 30.000 people in the streets, in shops, galleries, clubs, bars, in boats and buses, with a cultural focus on street culture, art and upfront dance music. Copenhagen Distortion * Roskilde Festival is a music festival helt every year in Roskilde west of Copenhagen. Gathering around 100,000 people every year, it is one of the four largest rock music festivals in Europe.. * Copenhagen Jazz Festival, which begins on the first Friday in July, is a popular annual event that is the result of Copenhagen's significant jazz scene. The festival takes place throughout the city in streets, squares and parks as well as in cafés and concert halls. Copenhagen Jazz Festival 3+ years, Wonderful Copenhagen It embraces around 900 concerts, 100 venues and over 200,000 guests from Denmark and around the world. It is recognized as one of the leading jazz festivals in the World. Top 10 best Jazz Festivals, TripAdvisor Copenhagen Jazz Festival * Copenhagen Pride is a gay pride festival taking place every year in August. Among the events is "Tivoli goes pink" and it ends with a parade. Copenhagen Pride * Copenhagen Cooking takes place in August every year and is a food festival with a wide array of events all over the city. * Copenhagen International Film Festival takes place in September every year with a focus on European films. The main prize is called the Golden Swan. Copenhagen International Film Festival Middelgrunden wind farm just off Copenhagen The Danish National Bank. Designed by Arne Jacobsen. Copenhagen is the economical and financial centre of Denmark Regionale regnskaber 2005 - Nyt fra Danmarks Statistik - Danmarks Statistik and also a strong business and economic centre in the entire Scandinavian-Baltic region. In 2008 Copenhagen was ranked 4th by Financial Times-owned FDi magazine on their list of Top50 European Cities of the Future after London, Paris and Berlin. Top 50 European City of the Future 2008/09 In 2006/07 FDi Magazine named Copenhagen Scandinavian City of the Future Scandinavian City of the Future 06/07 and in 2004/05 Copenhagen was named Northern European City of the Future ahead of other cities from Scandinavia, UK, Ireland and Benelux. Northern European City of the Future 2004/05 In the 2008 Worldwide Centers of Commerce Index, published by MasterCard, Copenhagen was ranked 14th in the world and 1st in Scandinavia. Copenhagen is one of the cities in Western Europe attracting most regional headquarters and distribution centers. Among the international companies that have chosen to locate their regional headquarters in Copenhagen is Microsoft.There are 2,100 foreign companies located in the Copenhagen area, of which approx. 500 are Scandinavian head offices, representing a wide range of industries. Copenhagen has a service oriented economy. An important sector is life science and research & development plays a major role in the economy of the city. The entire Oresund Region is in cooperation with Sweden being promoted as Medicon Valley. Major Danish biotech companies like Novo Nordisk and Lundbeck, both of which are among 50 largest pharmaceutical and biotech companies in the World, are located in the greater Copenhagen area. USATODAY.com The region also boasts the largest IT-cluster in Scandinavia with nearly 100,000 employees and the city of Copenhagen is home to Nokia's largest research centre outside Finland. Copenhagen - Overview Shipping is also an import business with Maersk, the World's largest shipping company, having their world headquarters in Copenhagen. Several international companies have established their regional headquarters in Copenhagen, e.g. Microsoft. Maersk, the world's largest container shipping company, has their world headquarters in Copenhagen. A substantial number of Danish pharmaceuticals such as Novo Nordisk, Ferring Pharmaceuticals and Bavarian Nordic also operate in the area, having placed their headquarters in or close to Copenhagen. USATODAY.com Copenhagen has some of the highest gross wages in the World. City Mayors: World's richest cities High taxes mean that wages are reduced after mandatory deduction. A neneficial researcher scheme with low taxation of foreigh specialists Level of salary in Denmark has made Denmark an attractive location for highly educated foreign labour to settle. Copenhagen is however also among the most expensive cities in Europe. City Mayors: World's most expensive cities (EIU) City Mayors: World's most expensive cities - Ranking Copenhagen University Copenhagen has a well-developed higher education system of public universities. Most prominent among these is the University of Copenhagen. Founded in 1479, it is the oldest university in Denmark. It is a world-renowned research and teaching institution with campuses around the city and forms part of the International Alliance of Research Universities (IARU), which is a collaboration between international top universities including Oxford, Cambridge, Yale and Berkeley. The University attracts app. 1500 international and exchange students every year. It is repeatedly ranked as one of the best universities in Europe. At the Times Higher Education's QS World University Rankings 2008 list, it was ranked as fourth best in continental Europe. TheAcademic Ranking of World Universities 2008 placesd it as number 43 worldwide and 8th in Europe. A second all-round university in the Copenhagen area is Roskilde University located in Roskilde. The Technical University of Denmark (DTU), Danmarks Tekniske Universitet, is located in Lyngby at the northern outskirts of Copenhagen. In 2008 it was ranked third highest in Europe on Times Higher Education's list of the most influential technical universities in the World. The Max Planck Institute in Germany was ranked 15, ETH Zurich in Switzerland was ranked 15 and DTU in Denmark was ranked 20. Copenhagen Business School (CBS) is an estimed and EQUIS accredited business school located on Frederiksberg. Copenhagen is rich in companies and institutions with a focus on research and development within the biotechnology , Infrastructure & logistics - Copenhagen a distribution hub, retrieved February 22, 2007. and life science sectors. Two of the 50 largest pharmaceutical and biotech companies in the World are located in the greater Copenhagen area. The biotech and life science cluster in Copenhagen and the rest of the Oresund Region is one of the strongest in Europe. Since 1995 this has been branded as the Medicon Valley in a Danish-Swedish cooperation. The aim is to strengthen the region's position and to promote cooperation between companies and academia. The German biotech giant Sartorius Stedim Biotech, which is currently creating a Nordic head office in Tåstrup on the outskirts of Copenhagen. The Øresund region is responsible for 60 percent of life science production in Scandinavia and is home to 111 biotech companies. The greater Copenhagen area has a very well established transportation infrastructure making it a hub in Northern Europe. Christianshavns Kanal Copenhagen has a large network of toll-free highways and public roads connecting different municipalities of the city together and to Northern Europe. As in many other cities in Europe traffic is increasing in Copenhagen. The radial arterial roads and highways leading to the Copenhagen city center are critically congested during peak hours. Copenhagen is known as one of the most bicycle-friendly cities in the world. Every day 1,1 million km are bicycled in Copenhagen. 36 % of all citizens are commuting to work, school or university by bicycle and it is municipal policy that this number should go up to 40 % by 2012 and 50 % in 2015. The city's bicycle paths are extensive and well-used. Bicycle paths are often separated from the main traffic lanes and sometimes have their own signal systems. The municipality is also developing a system of interconnected green bicycle routes, greenways, with the aim to facilitate fast, safe and pleasant bicycle transport from one end of the city to the other. The network will cover more than 100 km and consist of 22 routes when finished. The city provides public bicycles which can be found throughout the downtown area and used with a returnable deposit of 20 kroner. Copenhagen's well-developed bicycle culture has given rise to the term ‘copenhagenize’. This is the practice of other cities adopting Copenhagen-style bike lanes and bicycle infrastructure. In 2007 Copenhagen-based Danish urban design consultant Jan Gehl was hired by the New York City Department of Transportation to re-imagine New York City streets by introducing designs to improve life for pedestrians and cyclists. In recognition of Copenhagen's emphasis on bicycling, the city has been chosen by the Union Cycliste Internationale as their first official Bike City. Bike City Copenhagen will take place from 2008 to 2011 and consist of big cycling events for professionals as well as amateurs. The harbour of Copenhagen has largely lost its importance as an industrial harbour. In 2001 Copenhagen Harbour merged with the harbour in Malmö to create Copenhagen-Malmö Port. It has several functions, the most important being as a major cruise destination. In 2007 a record 286 cruise ships with 420,000 cruise passengers visited Copenhagen. 120 of these ships either started or ended the cruise in Copenhagen. In 2008 these numbers grew further to 310 cruise ships and 560,000 passengers. As a result of the growth in the cruise industry facilities asre being expanded and improved. At the World Travel Awards in 2008, Copenhagen Port was named the number one cruise destination in Europe for the fifth year in a row. Copenhagen is serviced by ferry lines to Oslo in Norway (called "Oslobåden") with a daily connection and to Świnoujście in Poland (called "Polensfærgerne") with five weekly connections. Copenhagen Airport is the principal airport serving Copenhagen. It is the largest in Scandinavia and the 17th largest in Europe. It is located in Kastrup on the island of Amager and has very efficient connections to downtown Copenhagen with metro trains going to Kongens Nytorv in 15 minutes with 4-6 minutes between departures and regional trains going to the Central Station in 12 minutes. Its location also makes it the most important international airport for large parts of southern Sweden. Over the Øresund Bridge trains go to Malmö South in 14 minutes or Malmö Central Station in 22 minutes. Copenhagen Airport has won the award as "The best airport in Europe" four times, and as "The best airport in the world" two times. Copenhagen Airport is the seventh best airport in the world - second best in Europe - when you ask the passengers. The British organization Skytrax is doing so every year, writes the airport in a press release. 40 criteria are employed for the ranking. The new metro S-train at Nørreport Metro entrance in FrederiksbergThe public transportation system of Copenhagen consists of commuter trains (called S-trains, S-tog), buses, and a metro. The S-trains form the basis of the transportation network, stretching to most areas of metropolitan Copenhagen, with their main hub at Copenhagen Central Station (København H). Regional trains supplement the S-train services with lines extending further such as to the Copenhagen Airport, Elsinore, and Malmö. The Danish State Railways' Intercity network has its eastern terminus and main hub at Copenhagen, with most trains extending to Copenhagen Airport. The fare system is based on 95 zones covering the capital area. Tickets are transferable from one means of transport to another within a time limit. The more zones a ticket is valid for, the longer its time validity with a maximum of two hours. Discount cards (punch cards, klippekort) and period cards are available. Ticket prices are high and have increased substantially in recent years leading to a decrease in passenger numbers. In fact, the percentage of trips made on public transportation in Copenhagen is quite low by northern European standards. The Copenhagen Metro began operation in 2002 and currently has only two lines. In April 2008, it was named Best Metro in the World by industry experts. Copenhagen Metro Best in the World |Christiansborg Palace - home of the Danish Parliament Folketinget, the Supreme Court, Office of the Prime Minister and official reception area of Queen Margrethe II |- |Børsen - the former Stock Exchange building |- |The Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen harbor |- |Amalienborg Palace - home of the Danish royal family. The central building is the domed Marble Church located behind the palace complex |- |Nyhavn |- |The Marble Church |- |Rosenborg Castle in central Copenhagen |- |Christianshavns Canal |- |The Tivoli, photographed from Eduard Spelterini's balloon on June 22, 1922 |} Copenhagen is recognized as one of the most environmentally friendly cities in the world. In 2006 Copenhagen Municipality received the European Environmental Management Award. The award was given for long-term holistic environmental planning. It is municipal policy to reduce CO2 emissions by 20% before the end of 2015. In 2001 a large offshore wind farm was built just off the coast of Copenhagen at Middelgrunden. It produces about 4 % of the city's energy. Many years of major investments in sewage treatment has improved water quality in the harbour to an extent that the inner harbour can be used for swimming and facilities for this are provided at a number of locations. Another municipal policy is that 40% of all citizens should bicycle to and from work by 2012 and a number of initiatives are being taken to implement this policy (see "bicycling above"). Copenhagen is the capital in the World where organic food has the largest market share. One in every ten purchases is organic in Copenhagen. Within the municipal sector in Copenhagen, 45 % of all food consumption is organic but the target is considerably higher. With the environmental strategy "Environment Metropolis: Our Vision 2015" the politicians wish that solely organic food is to be served in 90 per cent of the Copenhagen old-age homes and residential homes for children and young persons in 2015.. - - - Image:Christiansborg Slot.jpg| Christiansborg Slot - Image:Børsen København.jpg| Børsen- the former Stock Exchange building - Image:Littlemermaid207.jpg| The Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen harbor - Image:Copenhagen amalienborg seen from opera house.jpg| Amalienborg Palace - Image:Nyhavn 9-15 København.jpg| Nyhavn - Image:Kbh Marmorkirche 1.jpg| Frederik's Church|The Marble Church - Image:Rosenborg.jpg| Rosenborg Castle in central Copenhagen - Image:Christianshavns Kanal morning.jpg| Christianshavns Canal - Image:Amalienborgas.JPG | The Royal Residence - Image:Copenhague 108.jpg | The Round Tower - Image:Gammel_Strand_København.jpg| Gammel Strand - Image:Kbh_Stroeget_Nikolaj_Kirche.jpg | Stroget - Image:A_Copenhagen_center_street.jpg| Central Copenhagen Street - Image:Amagergade 01.jpg| Amagergade - Image:Gebauede_in_kopenhagen.jpg| Copenhagen Habour - Image:Container ship loading-700px.jpg| Copenhagen Ship Loading - Image:Christianshavns_Torv.jpg | Christianshavn Torv - Image:Copenhagen-Airport-from-air.jpg | Copenhagen Airport from the air - Image:Østre Anlæg København.jpg | Østre Anlæg - Image:Frederiksberg Slot.jpg | Frederiksberg Castle - Image:Kongens Nytorv 17.jpg | Kongens Nytorv - Image:Kopenhagen zeehaven.JPG | Copenhagen Canal Tour - Image:Den-sorte-diamant.jpg | The Black Diamond ( The Royal Library ) - Image:Tivoli Copenhagen at Night.jpg | Tivoli by Night - Image:Kopenhagen 3.jpg | View over Copenhagen - Image:Gammeltorv Copenhagen Denmark.JPG | Gammeltorv - Image:Copenhagen denmark.jpg | Nyhavn - Image:Copenhagen City Hall.jpg | Copenhagen City Hall - Image:Gefion.jpg| Gefion Fountian - Image:Christiania Exit.JPG | Christiania - Image:Gebauede in kopenhagen.jpg | Copenhagen at Night - Image:Copenhague 050.jpg | Inner City Canel - Copenhagen has placed well in a number of international rankings, some of which are mentioned below. * Copenhagen was ranked #1 as Most Livable City in the World by international lifestyle magazine Monocle on their Top 25 Most Livable Cities 2008 list Monocles page on Copenhagen * Worlds Best Design City 2008 also by Monocle. Monocles page on Copenhagen *Monocle has also stated that Copenhagen is "Scandinavia's most desirable city". By Stuart Husband Monocle Magazine Published: June 19, 2007 *Copenhagen ranked #4 by Financial Times-owned FDi magazine on their list of Top50 European Cities of the Future after London, Paris and Berlin. Top 50 European City of the Future 2008/09 In 2006/07 FDi Magazine named Copenhagen Scandinavian City of the Future Scandinavian City of the Future 06/07 and in 2004/05 Copenhagen was named Northern European City of the Future ahead of other cities from Scandinavia, UK, Ireland and Benelux. Northern European City of the Future 2004/05 * In the 2008 Worldwide Centers of Commerce Index, published by MasterCard, Copenhagen was ranked 14th in the world and 1st in Scandinavia. *Copenhagen #1 out of 254 locations in the Location Ranking Survey performed by ECA International that has asked European experts where they prefer to be stationed worldwide. Location Ranking Survey * Copenhagen was ranked #6 in Grist Magazine's "15 Green Cities" list in 2007 making Copenhagen the greenest capital of Scandinavia according to Grist Magazine. 15 Green Cities | Grist | Main Dish | 19 July 2007 * Copenhagen is the capital in the World where organic food has the largest market share. One in every ten purchases is organic in Copenhagen. World-champinions in organic food * The Copenhagen Metro has been named the Best Metro in the World by industry experts. Copenhagen Metro Best in the World * Copenhagen is the worlds #7 most expensive city and #3 most expensive in Europe on the Forbes List. Forbes-Worlds Most Expensive Cities List * Copenhagen is ranked #7 as Preferred City For Investment Projects. Preferred City For Investment Projects * Copenhagen ranked 3rd in Western Europe in terms of attracting regional headquarters and distribution centers, only surpassed by London and Paris. * Copenhagen ranks #1 in the Global Earning Ranking. [h Global earning ranking ] * Copenhagen ranks as the 5th most popular city in the world for international meetings and conferences. Style & Substance Danmark * Copenhagen ranks as one of the most attractive cities to live and work in Europe. A great place to live * Copenhagen ranks 2nd in Europe for Quality of life according to a survey from 2005 by the international consultancy firm William Mercer. A great place to live * Morten Andersen, veteran NFL kicker * Niels Bohr, physicist, Nobel laureate * Aage Bohr, physicist, Nobel laureate (son of Niels Bohr) * Victor Borge, entertainer * August Bournonville, ballet choreographer * Georg Brandes, critic * Helena Christensen, supermodel * Tove Ditlevsen, writer * Carl Theodor Dreyer, movie director * Vilhelm Hammershøi, painter * Gus Hansen, poker player * Iben Hjejle, actor * Peter Høeg, writer * Arne Jacobsen, designer * Robert Jacobsen, painter * J. C. Jacobsen, founder of Carlsberg Brewery * Mathias Lauridsen, male topmodel * Søren Kierkegaard, philosopher * Bjørn Lomborg, Academic and Author of The Skeptical Environmentalist * Lauritz Melchior, opera singer * Mads Mikkelsen, actor * Carl-Henning Pedersen, painter * Lars von Trier, movie director * Dan Turèll, writer * Lars Ulrich, drummer and songwriter of the heavy-metal band Metallica * Jørn Utzon, architect, designer of the Sydney Opera House * Michael Laudrup, former international football player, former manager of Spanish Primera Division Football team Getafe. * Peter Schmeichel, former international football player * Bertel Thorvaldsen, sculpturer Copenhagen is twinned with: * Paris in France (partner city) * Reykjavík in Iceland * Prague in Czech Republic (unofficial partner city) * San Francisco de Campeche in Mexico * Municipal statistics: NetBorger Kommunefakta, delivered from KMD, also known as Kommunedata (Municipal Data) * Municipal and county statistics: Statistics Denmark statistikbanken.dk * Demography: Statistical Yearbook of Copenhagen (part English); ISBN 87-7024-230-5 * History and demography: København Forslag til kommuneplan 1985; ISBN 87-88034-03-8 * Oresund Region * Eurovision Song Contest 2001 * Junior Eurovision Song Contest 2003 * MTV Europe Music Awards 2006 * Transportation in Denmark * Ports of the Baltic Sea * A Much Different Tourist Site and Cultural Guide about Copenhagen * Wonderful Copenhagen official tourism website * Copenhagen Capacity official investment agency of Copenhagen * * Official municipal website * City of Copenhagen Statistical Office * Krak searchable map
Copenhagen
Copenhagen is ranked number one worldwide for which things?
Most Livable City, Location Ranking Survey
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Copenhagen Copenhagen ( ; ) is the capital and largest city of Denmark, with a population of 1,161,063. Copenhagen is situated on the Islands of Zealand and Amager. First documented in the 11th century, Copenhagen became the capital of Denmark in the beginning of the 15th century and during the 17th century under the reign of Christian IV it became an important regional centre. Copenhagen is usually ranked as one of the two largest cities of the Nordic Countries. [ LARGEST CITY Copenhagen or Stockholm ? [ Denmark in brief . With the completion of the transnational Oresund Bridge in 2000, Copenhagen has become the centre of the increasingly integrating Øresund Region with around 3.7 million inhabitants covering an area of 20,869 km² (177/km²). Within this region, Copenhagen and Malmö is in the process of growing into one common metropolitan area. Copenhagen is a major regional center of culture, business, media, and science. In 2008 Copenhagen was ranked #4 by Financial Times-owned FDi magazine on their list of Top50 European Cities of the Future after London, Paris and Berlin. In the 2008 Worldwide Centers of Commerce Index, published by MasterCard, Copenhagen was ranked 14th in the world and 1st in Scandinavia. Life science, information technology and shipping are important sectors and research & development plays a major role in the city's economy. Its strategic location and excellent infrastructure with the largest airport in Scandinavia located 14 minutes by train from the city centre, has made it a regional hub and a popular location for regional headquarters as well as conventions. Copenhagen has repeatedly been recognized as one of the cities with the best quality of life. and in 2008 it was singled out as the Most Liveable City in the World by international lifestyle magazine Monocle on their Top 25 Most Liveable Cities 2008 list. It is also considered one of the world's most environmentally friendly cities with the water in the inner harbor being so clean that it can be used for swimming and 36 % of all citizens commuting to work by bicycle, every day bicycling a total 1.1 million km. Since the turn of the millennium Copenhagen has seen a strong urban and cultural development and has been described as a boom town. This is partly due to massive investments in cultural facilities as well as infrastructure and a new wave of succesful designers, chefs and architects. Copenhagen c. 1895 The Palace during renovation. From its humble origins as a fishing village to its heyday as the glittering capital of the Danish Empire, to its current position as one of the world's premier design capitals, the stories and characters of Copenhagen's history can be discovered in its sumptuous palaces, copper-roofed town houses and atmospheric cobbled squares. From the Viking Age there was a fishing village by the name of "Havn" (harbour) at the site. Recent archeological finds indicate that by the 11th century, Copenhagen had already grown into a small town with a large estate, a church, a market, at least two wells and many smaller habitations spread over a fairly wide area. Arkæologer graver ny teori om København op af mulden (Archeologists develop new theory about Copenhagen from their digs), Videnskab.dk, 5 November 2008 From the middle of the 12th century it grew in importance after coming into the possession of the Bishop Absalon, who fortified it in 1167, the year traditionally marking the foundation of Copenhagen. The excellent harbour encouraged Copenhagen's growth until it became an important centre of commerce. The city's origin as a harbour and a place of commerce is reflected in its name. Its original designation, from which the contemporary Danish name is derived, was Køpmannæhafn, "merchants' harbor". The English name for the city is derived from its Low German name, Kopenhagen. The element hafnium is also named for Copenhagen, whose Latin name is Hafnia. Biography of George de Hevesy It was repeatedly attacked by the Hanseatic League as the Germans took notice. In 1254, it received its charter as a city under Bishop Jakob Erlandsen. During 1658-59 it withstood a severe siege by the Swedes under Charles X and successfully repelled a major assault. In 1801 a British fleet under Admiral Parker fought a major battle, the Battle of Copenhagen, with the Danish Navy in Copenhagen harbour. It was during this battle Lord Nelson famously "put the telescope to the blind eye" in order not to see Admiral Parker's signal to cease fire. When a British expeditionary force bombarded Copenhagen in 1807, to gain control of the Danish Navy, the city suffered great damage and hundreds of people were killed. The reason why the devastation was so great was that Copenhagen relied on an old defence-line rendered virtually useless by the increase in shooting range available to the British. But not until the 1850s were the ramparts of the city opened to allow new housing to be built around the lakes ("Søerne") which bordered the old defence system to the west. This dramatic increase of space was long overdue, not only because the old ramparts were out of date as a defence system, but also because of bad sanitation in the old city. Before the opening, Copenhagen Center was inhabited by approximately 125,000 people, peaking in the census of 1870 (140,000); today the figure is around 25,000. In 1901, Copenhagen expanded further, incorporating communities with 40,000 people, and in the process making Frederiksberg an enclave within Copenhagen. During World War II, Copenhagen was occupied by German troops along with the rest of the country from 9 April 1940 until 4 May 1945. In August 1943, when the government's collaboration with the occupation forces collapsed, several ships were sunk in Copenhagen Harbour by the Royal Danish Navy to prevent them being used by the Germans. The city has grown greatly since the war, in the seventies using the so-called five-finger-plan of commuter train lines to surrounding towns and suburbs. Since the summer 2000, the cities of Copenhagen and Malmö have been connected by a toll bridge/tunnel (Øresund Bridge), which allows both rail and road passengers to cross. As a result, Copenhagen has become the centre of a larger metropolitan area which spans both nations. The construction of the bridge has led to a large number of changes to the public transportation system and the extensive redevelopment of Amager, south of the main city. Location of Coppenhagen in Denmark Nørrebro seen from "Søerne" Copenhagen City Hall Copenhagen is located on the eastern shore of the island of Zealand (Sjælland) and partly on the island of Amager. Copenhagen faces the Øresund to the east, the strait of water that separates Denmark from Sweden, and that connects the North Sea with the Baltic Sea. On the Swedish side of the sound directly across from Copenhagen, lie the towns of Malmö and Landskrona. Copenhagen is also a part of the Øresund region, which consists of Zealand, Lolland-Falster and Bornholm in Denmark and Scania in Sweden. Copenhagen Municipality is an administrative unit that covers the central part of the actual city of Copenhagen. It is a fairly small part of the actual city that falles within the municipality both because it covers a very confined area and because the enclave of Frederiksberg is an independent municipality. Copenhagen consists of a number of boroughs and areas, including * Indre By * Østerbro * Nørrebro * Vesterbro * Amagerbro * Nordhavnen (North Habour) * Valby * Kongens Enghave (King's Meadow Garden), also known as Sydhavnen (meaning South Harbour) * Christianshavn * Christiania (Freetown) * Sundbyvester (Sundby West), * Sundbyøster (Sundby East) * Ørestad * Islands Brygge * Bellahøj * Brønshøj * Ryparken * Bispebjerg * Vigerslev * Vestamager * Vanløse The suffix -bro in the names Østerbro, Nørrebro, Vesterbro and Amagerbro should not be confused with the Danish word for bridge, which is also 'bro'. The term is thought to be an abbreviation or short form of the Danish word brolagt meaning paved referring to the roads paved with cobblestones leading to the city's former gates - The conurbation of Copenhagen consists of several municipalities. After Copenhagen Municipality, the second largest is Frederiksberg Municipality which is an enclave inside Copenhagen Municipality. Both are contained in the larger Capital Region of Denmark, which contains most of the Copenhagen metropolitan area. Previously, the areas of Frederiksberg, Gentofte and Copenhagen municipalities have been used to define the city of Copenhagen. This definition is now obsolete. To meet statistical needs after the latest municipal reform, which took place in the beginning of 2007, an effort has been made to work out definitions of lands (landsdele) in Denmark. A land is basically a geographical and statistical definition, and the area is not considered to be an administrative unit. The land of Copenhagen City includes the municipalities of Copenhagen, Dragør, Frederiksberg and Tårnby, with a total population of 656,582 in the beginning of 2008. Statistics Denmark, table BEF1A07: Population 1 January by region, age, sex, marital status Retrieved on 2008-03-26. Statistics Denmark, definitions of lands as of 2007-01-01 (excel-file, in danish) Retrieved on 2008-03-26. Copenhagen and Frederiksberg were two of the three last Danish municipalities not belonging to a county. On 1 January 2007, the municipalities lost their county privileges and became part of Copenhagen Capital Region. Suburban Copenhagen is planned according to the Finger Plan, fingerplanen, initiated in 1947, dividing the suburbs into five fingers. The Finger Plan, Denmark.dk The S-train lines are built according to the Finger Plan, while green wedges and highways are built in-between the fingers The Little Finger The northern suburbs form the little finger of the plan, and is traditionally the wealthiest of the suburbs. In popular language, the area is known as "The Whiskey Belt", although the area is mixed between mansions, larger houses, garden cities and mid-size houses. The area has a population of around 270,000 inhabitants. * Gentofte Municipality: Klampenborg, Skovshoved, Charlottenlund, Hellerup, Gentofte, Ordrup, Jægersborg, Dyssegård, Vangede * Lyngby-Taarbæk Municipality: Kongens Lyngby, Ulrikkenborg, Brede, Virum, Sorgenfri, Lundtofte, Hjortekær * Rudersdal Municipality: Søllerød, Holte, Øverød, Gl. Holte, Trørød, Nærum, Vedbæk, Skodsborg, Birkerød, Kajerød, Bistrup * Hørsholm Municipality: Hørsholm, Usserød, Rungsted, Vallerød, Smidstrup * Allerød Municipality: Allerød, Lillerød, Blovstrød * Fredensborg Municipality: Fredensborg, Asminderød, Humlebæk, Kokkedal, Niverød, Nivå. The Ring Finger The North-Northwestern part of the suburbs forms the ring finger. The area is to a large extent formed by detached middle-class dwellings, with some exceptions of housing projects or upper-class areas. The area has a population of around 100,000 inhabitants. * Gladsaxe Municipality: Gladsaxe, Bagsværd, Buddinge, Høje-Gladsaxe (Gladsaxe Heights), Mørkhøj, Søborg * Furesø Municipality: Værløse, Farum, Hareskovby The Middle Finger The northwestern suburbs form the middle finger, and consists of a mixed area of both detached middle-class dwellings, widespread garden cities and large, low-rise public housing projects. The area has a considerable part of the industrial areas of metropolitan Copenhagen, mostly in the traditional sectors of manufacturing. The area has a population of around 110,000 inhabitants. * Herlev Municipality: Herlev, Hjortespring * Ballerup Municipality: Skovlunde, Ballerup, Måløv, Ågerup, Jonstrup, Egebjerg * Egedal Municipality: Smørumnedre, Stenløse, Ølstykke The Index Finger The index finger forms the western suburbs, which are the suburbs with the lowest income per capita and the highest crime-rate. The suburbs vary from the petit bourgeois area of Glostrup to the widespread low housing projects of Albertslund and Taastrup. Of the total of 145,000 inhabitants, some 20% are immigrants of first or second generation. * Rødovre Municipality: Rødovre, Islev * Glostrup Municipality: Glostrup, Hvissinge, Ejby * Brøndby Municipality: Brøndbyøster, Brøndbyvester, Brøndby Nord * Albertslund Municipality * Høje-Taastrup Municipality: Taastrup, Høje-Taastrup, Tåstrupgård, Hedehusene The Thumb The southwest suburbs along the coast form the thumb of the plan. While the central parts of these suburbs are dominated by high-rise housing projects and low-income inhabitants, the distant part is dominated by detached middle-class houses. These suburbs have a population of some 215,000 inhabitants and has a sizeable number of immigrants. * Hvidovre Municipality: Avedøre, Friheden, Hvidovre * Brøndby Municipality: Brøndby Strand * Vallensbæk Municipality * Ishøj Municipality * Greve Municipality: Hundige, Karlslunde, Greve * Solrød Municipality: Solrød, Jersie * Køge municipality: Køge, Ølby The extra finger: Amager Island suburbs & Malmö When the finger plan was initially introduced, the island of Amager wasn't included as the infrastructure was inadequate for modern suburban life. Later it has been improved, and the suburbs at the island hold some 53,000 inhabitants. Amager is now one of the most modern suburbs of Copehagen with increasing wealth. With the opening of the bridge to Sweden this finger has been extended all the way to Malmö. Under an official visit of the Swedish King in 2007 at the Copenhagen City Hall, Copenhagen Lord Mayor Ritt Bjerregaard caused a minor diplomatic incident by referring to Malmö as "København M" with an allusion to the Danish system of postal codes (Nørrebro being København N and Vesterbro being København V for instance), indicating that Malmö had turned into just another Copenhagen bourough. Today 25,000 Danes live in Malmö. Malmø er blevet til København M, DR Online * Tårnby Municipality: Tårnby, Kastrup * Dragør Municipality Summers in Copenhagen are mild with average high temperatures of around 21°C (70°F) and lows of 13°C (55°F), but temperatures could sometimes exceed 25°C (77°F+) and occasional heatwaves are common during the summer. Winters are cold, with temperatures of -2 to 4°C (28 - 40°F), and it rarely drop below −10 °C (14 °F). Precipitation is moderate throughout the year, and snowfall occurs mainly in December through March, but snow cover does not remain a long time. Nørrebro seen from "Søerne" Copenhagen as seen from the City Hall at night Kongens Nytorv View from Rundetårn Gefion Fountian The city's appearance today is shaped by the key role it has played as a regional center for centuries. Copenhagen has a multitude of districts, each representing its time and with its own distinctive character, making up a dense urban fabric. Other distinctive features of the Copenhagen of today is the abundance of water, the greenness and the elaborate system of bicycle paths that line almost every major street. The oldest section of Copenhagen's inner city is often referred to as "Middelalderbyen" (The Medieval City). However, the most distinctive district of Copenhagen is Frederiksstaden developed during the reign of Frederick V. It has Amalienborg Palace at its centre and is dominated by the dome of the Marble Church as well as a number of elegant 18th century mansions. Also part of the old inner city of Copenhagen is the small island of Slotsholmen with Christiansborg Palace and Christianshavn. Around the historical city center lies a band of charming, dense and well-preserved residential bouroughs (Vesterbro, Inner Nørrebro, Inner Østerbro) dating mainly from late 19th century. They were built outside the old ramparts of the city when the city was finally allowed to expand beyond this barrier. Sometimes referred to as "the City of Spires", Copenhagen is known for its horizontal skyline, only broken by spires at churches and castles. Most characteristic is the baroque spire of Church of Our Saviour with its spiralling and narrowing external stairs that visitors can climb to the very top of the spire. Other important spires are those of Christiansborg Palace, the City Hall and the former Church of St. Nikolaj that now houses a modern art venue. A bit lower are the renaissance spires of Rosenborg Castle and the "dragon spire" of [[Christian IV of Christian IV's former stock exchange, so named because it is shaped as the tails of four dragons twined together. Recent years has seen a tremendous boom in modern architecture in Copenhagen both when it comes to Danish architecture and works by international architects. For a few hundred years, virtually no foreign architects had worked in Copenhagen but since the mid 1990s the city and its immediate sourroundings have seen buildings and projects from such international star architects as Norman Foster , Hadid , Nouvel and Liebeskind . In the same time, a number of Danish architects have achieved great success both in Copenhagen and abroad. This has led to a number of international architecture awards. Buildings in Copenhagen have won RIBA European Awards four years in a row ("Sampension" in 2005 , "Kilen" in 2006 , "Tietgenkollegiet" in 2007 and the Royal Playhouse in 2008 ). At the 2008 World Architecture Festival in Barcelona, Bjarke Ingels Group won an award for the World's Best Residential Building 2008 for a house in Ørestad. The Forum AID Award for Best building in Scandinavia went to Copenhagen buildings both in 2006 and 2008 . In 2008 British design magazine Monocle named Copenhagen the World's best design city 2008. The boom in urban development and modern architecture means that the above mentioned horizontal skyline has seen some changes. A political majority has decided to keep the historical center free of highrises. But several areas will see or have already seen massive urban development. Ørestad is the area that until now has seen most of the development. Located near Copenhagen Airport, it currently boasts the largest mall in Scandinavia and a variety of office and residential buildings as well as an IT University and a high school. The two largest hotels in Scandinavia are currently under construction (ultimo 2008). An ambitious regeneration project will create a new Carlsberg District at the historical premises of the Carlsberg Breweries that has terminated the production of beer in Copenhagen and moved it to Jutland. The district will have a total of nine highrises and seeks to mix the old industrial buildings with modern architecture to create a dense, maze-like quarter with a focus on sustainability and an active urban life. A third major area of urban development also with a focus on sustanibility is Nordhavn. The Copenhagen tradition with urban development on artificial islands that was initiated with with Christianh IV's construction of Christianshavn has recently been continued with the creation of Havneholmen as well as a "canal city" in the South Harbour. A district in Copenhagen with a very different take on modern architecture is that of Christiania whose many creative and idiosyncratic buildings are exponents of an "architecture without architects". Østre Anlæg University of Copenhagen Botanical Garden Copenhagen is a green city with many big and small parks. King's Garden, the garden of Rosenborg Castle, is the oldest and most visited park in Copenhagen. Its landscaping was commenced by Christian IV in 1606. Every year it sees more than 2,5 million visitors and in the summer months it is packed with sunbathers, picknickers and ballplayers. It also serves as a sculpture garden with a permanent display of sculptures as well as temporary exhibits during summer. Also located in the city centre are the Botanical Gardens particularly noted for their large complex of 19th century greenhouses donated by Carlsberg founder J. C. Jacobsen. Fælledparken is with its 58 hectars the largest park in Copenhagen. It is popular for sports and hosts a long array of annual events like a free opera concert at the opening of the opera season, other open-air concerts, carnival, Labour Day celebrations and Copenhagen Historic Grand Prix which is a race for antique cars. A historical green space in the northeastern part of the city is Kastellet which is a well-presserved renaissance citadel that now serves mainly as a park. Another popular park is the Frederiksberg Garden which is a 32 hectars romantic landscape park. It houses a large colony of very tame grey herons along with other waterfowls. The park also offers views of the elephants and the elephant house designed by world-famous British architect Norman Foster of the adjacent Copenhagen Zoo. Characteristic of Copenhagen is that a number of cemeteries double as parks, though only for the more quiet activities such as sunbathing, reading and meditation. Assistens Cemetery, the burrial place of Hans Christian Andersen among others, is an important green space for the district of Inner Nørrebro and a Copenhagen institution. The lesser known Vestre Kirkegaard is with its 54 hectars the largest cemetery in Denmark and offers a maze of dense groves, open lawns, winding paths, hedges, overgrown tombs, monuments, tree-lined avenues, lakes and other garden features. It is official municipal policy in Copenhagen that all citizens by 2015 must be able to reach a park or beach on foot in less than 15 minutes. In line with this policy, several new parks are under development in areas poor in green spaces. Copenhagen and the surrounding areas have 3 beaches with a total of approx. 8 km of sandy beaches within 30 minutes of bicycling from the city centre. This includes Amager Strandpark, which opened in 2005 and includes a 2 km long artificial island and a total of 4,6 km of beaches , located just 15 minutes by bicycle or a few minutes by metro from the city centre. The beaches are supplemented by a system of harbour baths along the Copenhagen waterfront. The first and most popular of these is located at Islands Brygge Harbour bath at Islands Brygge, e-architect and has won international acclaim for its design. Islands Brygge. Depending on the boundaries used, the population of Copenhagen differs. Statistics Denmark uses a measure of the contiguously built-up urban area of Copenhagen, this means the number of communities included in this statistical abstract has changed several times, in the abstracts latest edition with close to 1.2 million (1,153,615 (2008)) inhabitants. This number is not a strict result of the commonly-used measuring methods of 200 meters of continuously build-up area, as there are exceptions to the general rule in the suburbs of Dragør, Taastrup, Birkerød, Hørsholm and Farum. Statistics Denmark has never stated the geographical area of urban Copenhagen. However, we know it consists of Copenhagen Municipality, Frederiksberg and 16 of the 20 municipalities in the old counties Copenhagen and Roskilde, though 5 of them only partially. Largest cities of Denmark 2007 Statistics Denmark has worked out definitions of so-called lands (landsdele), a definition used to meet statistical needs on a lower level than regions. From this, the land of Copenhagen city (København by) is defined by the municipalities of Copenhagen, Dragør, Frederiksberg and Tårnby, with a total population of 656,582 in the beginning of 2008. The surroundings of Copenhagen is defined by another land, Copenhagen suburban (Københavns omegn), which includes the municipalities of Albertslund, Ballerup, Brøndby, Gentofte, Gladsaxe, Glostrup, Herlev, Hvidovre, Høje-Taastrup, Ishøj, Lyngby-Taarbæk, Rødovre and Vallensbæk, and with a total population of 504,481 (January 1, 2008). This gives a total population of 1,161,063 for these two lands together. The lands of Copenhagen city and Copenhagen suburban can together be used as a definition of the metropolitan area, although perhaps a somewhat narrow one. From 1 January 2008 the population of the 34 municipalities closest to and including the municipality of Copenhagen is 1,857,263 and by 1 October 2008 the population of this area had grown to 1,872,706. Statistikbanken.dk Population table BEF1A07 Land area: 2,923 km² (1,032 sq mi). (Capital Region - Bornholm + East Zealand + Stevns) Water area: 105 km² (40.5 sq mi). Orienteering fra Københavns Kommune. Statistisk Kontor.2003 nr. 25 Thus, the region comprises 6.8% of the land area of Denmark, but has 34% of Denmark's population. This gives a total of 641 inhabitants per km² or 1,660 per square mile for the region. This compares with a population density in the rest of the country of approximately 90 per km² or around 230 per square mile. Based on a 10%-isoline (data from 2002) in which at least 10% commutes into central parts of the Copenhagen area, most of Zealand would be covered and this area has a population of about 2.3 million inhabitants. /ref> Since the opening of the Øresund Bridge in 2000, commuting between and integration of Greater Malmö and Copenhagen have increased rapidly, and a combined statistical metropolitan area has formed. This metropolitan area, which has a population of 2,501,094 (2008) is expected to be officially defined by the respective statistics divisions of Denmark and Sweden in the upcoming years. A high-ranking civil servant of the Interior Ministry, Henning Strøm, who was involved in (i.e. known as "the Father of") a past municipal reform, which took effect on 1 April 1970, said on television, broadcast in connection with the recent Kommunalreformen ("The Municipal Reform" of 2007), that Copenhagen municipality would encompass an area with 1.5 million inhabitants, if the principles of the 1970 municipal reform were also applied on Copenhagen municipality. DR netnews 25-06-04 In other words: in the rest of Denmark the city occupies only part of the municipality, but in Copenhagen the municipality of Copenhagen occupies only part of the city of Copenhagen. Since the late 1990s, Copenhagen has undergone a transformation from a cozy Scandinavian capital to a cool metropolitan city of international scope in the league of cities like Barcelona and Amsterdam. This is due to massive investments in infrastructure as well as culture and wave of new successful Danish architects, designers and chefs. Between 1998 and 2008, lifestyle journalists wordwide (from Wallpaper to the NewYorkTimes) have praised Copenhagen as a cool, well-functioning creative city (see "Copenhagen In international rankings" below). Copenhagen has a wide array of museums of International standard. The National Museum, Nationalmuseet, is Denmark's largest museum of Archaeology and cultural history, comprising the histories of Danish and foreign cultures alike. The National Gallery - "Statens Museum for Kunst" - is Denmark's national art museum and contains collections dating from 12th century and all the way up to present day artists. Among artists represented in the collections are Rubens, Rembrandt, Picasso, Braque, Léger, Matisse and Emil Nolde. Another important Copenhagen art museum is the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek founded by second generation Carlsberg tycoon-philantropist Carl Jacobsen and is built around his personal collections. Its main focus is classical Egyptian, Roman and Greek sculptures and other antiquities and a collection of Rodin sculptures that is the largest outside France (Glypto-, from the Greek root glyphein, to carve and theke, a storing-place). Besides its sculpture collections, the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek also holds a comprehensive collection of paintings of impressionist and post-impressionist painters such as Monet,Renoir, Cézanne, van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec as well as Danish Golden Age painters. Loiusiana is an internationally acclaimed museum of modern art situated on the coast just north of Copenhagen. It is located in the middle of a sculpture garden on a cliff overlooking Øresund. The The museum is included in the Patricia Schultz book 1,000 Places to See Before You Die. The Danish Museum of Art & Design is housed in the 18th century former Frederiks Hospital and displays Danish design as well as international design and crafts. Other museums include: * Thorvaldsens Museum is a single-artist museum dedicated to the oeuvre,of romantic Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen who lived and worked in Rome. * Cisternerne is a small but different museum dedicated to modern glass art. It is located in some grotto-like former cisterns that come complete with Stalactites formed by the changing water levels. * The Ordrupgaard Museum is an art museum located just notth of Copenhagen in an old mansion with an extension by Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. It features 19th century French and Danish art and is particularly noted for its works by Paul Gaugin. Copenhagen Opera House The Royal Danish Theatre In January 2009 the new Copenhagen Concert Hall will open. It is designed by Jean Nouvel and will have four halls with the main auditorium seating 1800 people. It will serve as the home of the Danish National Symphony Orchestra and along with the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles the most expensive concert hall ever built. Another important venue for classical music is the Tivoli Concert Hall located in the histtrocal Tivoli Gardens. The Copenhagen Opera House (in Danish usually called Operaen) that opened in 2005 and is designed by Henning Larsen, is the national opera house of Denmark and among the most modern opera houses in the world. The old Royal Danish Theatre dating from 1748 still works as a supplementary opera scene. The Royal Danish Theatre is also home to the Royal Danish Ballet. Gounded in 1748 along with the theatre, it is one of the oldest ballet troups in Europe. It is home the the Bournonville style of ballet. Copenhagen has a significant jazz scene that has existed for many years. It developed when a number of American jazz musicians such as Ben Webster, Thad Jones, Richard Boone, Ernie Wilkins, Kenny Drew, Ed Thigpen, Bob Rockwell and others such as rock guitarist Link Wray came to live in Copenhagen during the 1960s. Every year in early July Copenhagen's streets, aquares and parks fills up with big and small jazz concerts during the Copenhagen Jazz Festival (see yearly events). The most important venue for rhythmical music in Copenhagen is Vega in Vesterbro district which has been chosen as "best concert venue in Europe" by international music magazine Live For free entertainment one can stroll along Strøget, especially between Nytorv and Højbro Plads, which in the late afternoon and evening is a bit like an impromptu three-ring circus with musicians, magicians, jugglers and other street performers. View from Amerikakaj Copenhagen has a wide variety of sport teams. The two major football teams are Brøndby IF and FC København. Brøndby IF plays at Brøndby Stadium in Brøndby and FC København plays at Parken in Østerbro, Copenhagen. Notable Copenhagen teams playing at the second highest level in Danish football (the Danish 1st Division) include Lyngby BK, AB, HIK, Frem, Brønshøj, Fremad Amager and Skjold. Copenhagen also has three ice hockey teams: Rødovre Mighty Bulls, Herlev Hornets and Nordsjælland Cobras. There are a lot of handball teams in Copenhagen. FC København owns both a women's and a men's team, which have the same name and logo. They were formerly known as FIF. Of other clubs playing in the "highest" leagues there are; Ajax Heroes, Ydun, and HIK (Hellerup). Rugby union is also played in the Danish capital with teams such as CSR-Nanok, Copenhagen Scrum, Exiles, Froggies and Rugbyklubben Speed. The Danish Australian Football League, based in Copenhagen is the largest Australian rules football competition outside of the English speaking world. Copenhagen is also home to a number of Denmark's 40-odd cricket clubs. Although Denmark has been an associate member of the International Cricket Council since 1966, the sport is not taught much in schools, and Danish cricket competes unfavourably with the much more widely followed sport of football for players, facilities, media attention and spectators. The second World Outgames will take place in Copenhagen in 2009, after Berlin refused to stage them due to the continuing rivalry between the two gay sporting organisations. It would be the largest such event hosted in Copenhagen. Copenhagen has the two oldest amusement parks in the World. World-famous Tivoli Gardens is an amusement park and pleasure garden located right in the middle of Copenhagen between the the City Hall Square and the the Central Station. Among its rides are the oldest still operating roller coaster and the oldest ferris wheel in the World. Tivoli Gardens, the rides It also function as an open-air concert venue. It opened on August 15 1843 making it the second oldest amusement park in the world. Dyrehavsbakken (in English "the Deer Garden Hill") is located in Klampenborg a little north of Copenhagen in a forested area of great natural beauty. Having been made into an amusement park complete with rides, games and restaurants by Christian IV, it is the oldest surviving amusement park in the World. Copenhagen is a centre for the New Nordic Cuisine. Nordic Cuisine, New York Times In November 2004 a Nordic Kitchen Symposium was helt in Copenhagen at the initiative of Danish chef and gastronome Claus Meyer. The symposium had attandance of top chefs from all of the Nordic countries and led to the adoption of a Manifesto for the New Nordic Cuisine. Manifesto for a New Nordic Cuisine Claus Meyer is also the co-founder of the two-Michelin star Restaurant Noma (Nordisk Madhus) which is a flagship restaurant for the new Nordic cuisine. In 2008 it was ranked as 10th best in the World by acclaimed British restaurant & fine dining magazine Restaurant at their 50 Best Restaurants of the World 2008-list. Furthermore, the users of the international website TripAdvisor with 25 million users a month rated Noma as the best restaurant in the world. TripAdvisor ranking As of 2008 Copenhagen boasts a total of 11 Michelin star restaurants. This is by far the highest number of any Nordic city. Apart from Noma they include one of only two Thai restaurants worldwide that has received a Michelin star. Due to the development, Copenhagen is increasingly being recognized internationally as a gourmet destination. The Top 10 cities to visit in 2009, TimesOnline Apart from the selection of high end restaurants, Copenhagen offers a great variety of Danish, International and ethnic restaurants and it is possible to find modest eateries with open sandwiches (called "smørrebrød"), which is the traditional and best known dish for lunch. Most restaurants, though, serve international dishes. danish pastry, another local specialty, can be sampled from the numerous bakeries found in all parts of the city. Copenhagen has long been associated with beer.Carlsberg beer has been brewed at the brewery's premises at the border between Vesterbro and Valby districts since 1847 and has long been almost synonumous with Danish beer production. However, recent years have seen an explosive growth in the number of microbreweries so that Denmark today has more than 100 breweries Nyeste artikler fra Bryggeriforeningen, Bryggeriforeningen , many of which are located in Copenhagen. Some like Nørrebro Bryghus also act as brewpubs where it is possible also to eat at the premisses. Many cafés specialize in a huge selection of quality beers and beer has also become an important ingridient in the New Nordic Cuisine. Copenhagen is the media centre of Denmark. DR, the major Danish public service broadcasting corporation collected their activities in a new headquarters, DR byen, in 2006 and 2007. Similarly has Odense based TV2 collected its Copenhagen activities in a modern media house in the South Harbour. The two national daily newspapters Politiken and Berlingske Tidende and the two tabloids Ekstra Bladet and B. T. are based in Copenhagen. Other important media corporations include Aller Press which is the largest publisher of weekly and monthly magazines in Scandinavia, the Egmont media group and Gyldendal, the largest Danish publisher of books. Copenhagen also has a sizable movie and television industry. Filmbyen, The Movie City, which is located in a former military camp in the suburg of Hvidovre and houses several movie companies and studio studios. Among the movie campanies are Zentropa co-owned by Danish movie director Lars von Trier who is behind several international movie productions as well as a founding force behind the Dogma Movement. * Copenhagen Fashion Week takes place every year in February and August. It is the largest fashion event in Northern Europe. Fashion Capital Copenhagen On the catwalks are a growing number of new and known Danish talent with a preview of their upcoming collections. And at the three trade fairs, CPH Vision, Gallery and Copenhagen International Fashion Fair, you will find an additional 1,100 exhibitors representing a total of over 2,300 international brand name collections. Danish fashion is known for its unique angle on design, innovation and aesthetics. With a more modern approach to femininity and functionality, expressed in fresh silhouettes, a focus on details and incomparable quality. These are only some of the reasons why more than 50,000 buyers, designers and global press attend Copenhagen Fashion Week twice a year. Copenhagen Fashion Week is organised by the Danish Fashion Institute - a newly founded network organisation created by and for the Danish fashion industry. Copenhagen Fashion Week * Carnival in Copenhagen takes place every year since 1982 during the Whitsun Holiday in Fælledparken and around the city. 120 bands, 2000 dancers and 100,000 spectators participate. History of Copenhagen * Copenhagen Distortion is a youth culture festival capturing the zeitgeist of the city, gathering every year (5 days up to the first weekend of June) up to 30.000 people in the streets, in shops, galleries, clubs, bars, in boats and buses, with a cultural focus on street culture, art and upfront dance music. Copenhagen Distortion * Roskilde Festival is a music festival helt every year in Roskilde west of Copenhagen. Gathering around 100,000 people every year, it is one of the four largest rock music festivals in Europe.. * Copenhagen Jazz Festival, which begins on the first Friday in July, is a popular annual event that is the result of Copenhagen's significant jazz scene. The festival takes place throughout the city in streets, squares and parks as well as in cafés and concert halls. Copenhagen Jazz Festival 3+ years, Wonderful Copenhagen It embraces around 900 concerts, 100 venues and over 200,000 guests from Denmark and around the world. It is recognized as one of the leading jazz festivals in the World. Top 10 best Jazz Festivals, TripAdvisor Copenhagen Jazz Festival * Copenhagen Pride is a gay pride festival taking place every year in August. Among the events is "Tivoli goes pink" and it ends with a parade. Copenhagen Pride * Copenhagen Cooking takes place in August every year and is a food festival with a wide array of events all over the city. * Copenhagen International Film Festival takes place in September every year with a focus on European films. The main prize is called the Golden Swan. Copenhagen International Film Festival Middelgrunden wind farm just off Copenhagen The Danish National Bank. Designed by Arne Jacobsen. Copenhagen is the economical and financial centre of Denmark Regionale regnskaber 2005 - Nyt fra Danmarks Statistik - Danmarks Statistik and also a strong business and economic centre in the entire Scandinavian-Baltic region. In 2008 Copenhagen was ranked 4th by Financial Times-owned FDi magazine on their list of Top50 European Cities of the Future after London, Paris and Berlin. Top 50 European City of the Future 2008/09 In 2006/07 FDi Magazine named Copenhagen Scandinavian City of the Future Scandinavian City of the Future 06/07 and in 2004/05 Copenhagen was named Northern European City of the Future ahead of other cities from Scandinavia, UK, Ireland and Benelux. Northern European City of the Future 2004/05 In the 2008 Worldwide Centers of Commerce Index, published by MasterCard, Copenhagen was ranked 14th in the world and 1st in Scandinavia. Copenhagen is one of the cities in Western Europe attracting most regional headquarters and distribution centers. Among the international companies that have chosen to locate their regional headquarters in Copenhagen is Microsoft.There are 2,100 foreign companies located in the Copenhagen area, of which approx. 500 are Scandinavian head offices, representing a wide range of industries. Copenhagen has a service oriented economy. An important sector is life science and research & development plays a major role in the economy of the city. The entire Oresund Region is in cooperation with Sweden being promoted as Medicon Valley. Major Danish biotech companies like Novo Nordisk and Lundbeck, both of which are among 50 largest pharmaceutical and biotech companies in the World, are located in the greater Copenhagen area. USATODAY.com The region also boasts the largest IT-cluster in Scandinavia with nearly 100,000 employees and the city of Copenhagen is home to Nokia's largest research centre outside Finland. Copenhagen - Overview Shipping is also an import business with Maersk, the World's largest shipping company, having their world headquarters in Copenhagen. Several international companies have established their regional headquarters in Copenhagen, e.g. Microsoft. Maersk, the world's largest container shipping company, has their world headquarters in Copenhagen. A substantial number of Danish pharmaceuticals such as Novo Nordisk, Ferring Pharmaceuticals and Bavarian Nordic also operate in the area, having placed their headquarters in or close to Copenhagen. USATODAY.com Copenhagen has some of the highest gross wages in the World. City Mayors: World's richest cities High taxes mean that wages are reduced after mandatory deduction. A neneficial researcher scheme with low taxation of foreigh specialists Level of salary in Denmark has made Denmark an attractive location for highly educated foreign labour to settle. Copenhagen is however also among the most expensive cities in Europe. City Mayors: World's most expensive cities (EIU) City Mayors: World's most expensive cities - Ranking Copenhagen University Copenhagen has a well-developed higher education system of public universities. Most prominent among these is the University of Copenhagen. Founded in 1479, it is the oldest university in Denmark. It is a world-renowned research and teaching institution with campuses around the city and forms part of the International Alliance of Research Universities (IARU), which is a collaboration between international top universities including Oxford, Cambridge, Yale and Berkeley. The University attracts app. 1500 international and exchange students every year. It is repeatedly ranked as one of the best universities in Europe. At the Times Higher Education's QS World University Rankings 2008 list, it was ranked as fourth best in continental Europe. TheAcademic Ranking of World Universities 2008 placesd it as number 43 worldwide and 8th in Europe. A second all-round university in the Copenhagen area is Roskilde University located in Roskilde. The Technical University of Denmark (DTU), Danmarks Tekniske Universitet, is located in Lyngby at the northern outskirts of Copenhagen. In 2008 it was ranked third highest in Europe on Times Higher Education's list of the most influential technical universities in the World. The Max Planck Institute in Germany was ranked 15, ETH Zurich in Switzerland was ranked 15 and DTU in Denmark was ranked 20. Copenhagen Business School (CBS) is an estimed and EQUIS accredited business school located on Frederiksberg. Copenhagen is rich in companies and institutions with a focus on research and development within the biotechnology , Infrastructure & logistics - Copenhagen a distribution hub, retrieved February 22, 2007. and life science sectors. Two of the 50 largest pharmaceutical and biotech companies in the World are located in the greater Copenhagen area. The biotech and life science cluster in Copenhagen and the rest of the Oresund Region is one of the strongest in Europe. Since 1995 this has been branded as the Medicon Valley in a Danish-Swedish cooperation. The aim is to strengthen the region's position and to promote cooperation between companies and academia. The German biotech giant Sartorius Stedim Biotech, which is currently creating a Nordic head office in Tåstrup on the outskirts of Copenhagen. The Øresund region is responsible for 60 percent of life science production in Scandinavia and is home to 111 biotech companies. The greater Copenhagen area has a very well established transportation infrastructure making it a hub in Northern Europe. Christianshavns Kanal Copenhagen has a large network of toll-free highways and public roads connecting different municipalities of the city together and to Northern Europe. As in many other cities in Europe traffic is increasing in Copenhagen. The radial arterial roads and highways leading to the Copenhagen city center are critically congested during peak hours. Copenhagen is known as one of the most bicycle-friendly cities in the world. Every day 1,1 million km are bicycled in Copenhagen. 36 % of all citizens are commuting to work, school or university by bicycle and it is municipal policy that this number should go up to 40 % by 2012 and 50 % in 2015. The city's bicycle paths are extensive and well-used. Bicycle paths are often separated from the main traffic lanes and sometimes have their own signal systems. The municipality is also developing a system of interconnected green bicycle routes, greenways, with the aim to facilitate fast, safe and pleasant bicycle transport from one end of the city to the other. The network will cover more than 100 km and consist of 22 routes when finished. The city provides public bicycles which can be found throughout the downtown area and used with a returnable deposit of 20 kroner. Copenhagen's well-developed bicycle culture has given rise to the term ‘copenhagenize’. This is the practice of other cities adopting Copenhagen-style bike lanes and bicycle infrastructure. In 2007 Copenhagen-based Danish urban design consultant Jan Gehl was hired by the New York City Department of Transportation to re-imagine New York City streets by introducing designs to improve life for pedestrians and cyclists. In recognition of Copenhagen's emphasis on bicycling, the city has been chosen by the Union Cycliste Internationale as their first official Bike City. Bike City Copenhagen will take place from 2008 to 2011 and consist of big cycling events for professionals as well as amateurs. The harbour of Copenhagen has largely lost its importance as an industrial harbour. In 2001 Copenhagen Harbour merged with the harbour in Malmö to create Copenhagen-Malmö Port. It has several functions, the most important being as a major cruise destination. In 2007 a record 286 cruise ships with 420,000 cruise passengers visited Copenhagen. 120 of these ships either started or ended the cruise in Copenhagen. In 2008 these numbers grew further to 310 cruise ships and 560,000 passengers. As a result of the growth in the cruise industry facilities asre being expanded and improved. At the World Travel Awards in 2008, Copenhagen Port was named the number one cruise destination in Europe for the fifth year in a row. Copenhagen is serviced by ferry lines to Oslo in Norway (called "Oslobåden") with a daily connection and to Świnoujście in Poland (called "Polensfærgerne") with five weekly connections. Copenhagen Airport is the principal airport serving Copenhagen. It is the largest in Scandinavia and the 17th largest in Europe. It is located in Kastrup on the island of Amager and has very efficient connections to downtown Copenhagen with metro trains going to Kongens Nytorv in 15 minutes with 4-6 minutes between departures and regional trains going to the Central Station in 12 minutes. Its location also makes it the most important international airport for large parts of southern Sweden. Over the Øresund Bridge trains go to Malmö South in 14 minutes or Malmö Central Station in 22 minutes. Copenhagen Airport has won the award as "The best airport in Europe" four times, and as "The best airport in the world" two times. Copenhagen Airport is the seventh best airport in the world - second best in Europe - when you ask the passengers. The British organization Skytrax is doing so every year, writes the airport in a press release. 40 criteria are employed for the ranking. The new metro S-train at Nørreport Metro entrance in FrederiksbergThe public transportation system of Copenhagen consists of commuter trains (called S-trains, S-tog), buses, and a metro. The S-trains form the basis of the transportation network, stretching to most areas of metropolitan Copenhagen, with their main hub at Copenhagen Central Station (København H). Regional trains supplement the S-train services with lines extending further such as to the Copenhagen Airport, Elsinore, and Malmö. The Danish State Railways' Intercity network has its eastern terminus and main hub at Copenhagen, with most trains extending to Copenhagen Airport. The fare system is based on 95 zones covering the capital area. Tickets are transferable from one means of transport to another within a time limit. The more zones a ticket is valid for, the longer its time validity with a maximum of two hours. Discount cards (punch cards, klippekort) and period cards are available. Ticket prices are high and have increased substantially in recent years leading to a decrease in passenger numbers. In fact, the percentage of trips made on public transportation in Copenhagen is quite low by northern European standards. The Copenhagen Metro began operation in 2002 and currently has only two lines. In April 2008, it was named Best Metro in the World by industry experts. Copenhagen Metro Best in the World |Christiansborg Palace - home of the Danish Parliament Folketinget, the Supreme Court, Office of the Prime Minister and official reception area of Queen Margrethe II |- |Børsen - the former Stock Exchange building |- |The Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen harbor |- |Amalienborg Palace - home of the Danish royal family. The central building is the domed Marble Church located behind the palace complex |- |Nyhavn |- |The Marble Church |- |Rosenborg Castle in central Copenhagen |- |Christianshavns Canal |- |The Tivoli, photographed from Eduard Spelterini's balloon on June 22, 1922 |} Copenhagen is recognized as one of the most environmentally friendly cities in the world. In 2006 Copenhagen Municipality received the European Environmental Management Award. The award was given for long-term holistic environmental planning. It is municipal policy to reduce CO2 emissions by 20% before the end of 2015. In 2001 a large offshore wind farm was built just off the coast of Copenhagen at Middelgrunden. It produces about 4 % of the city's energy. Many years of major investments in sewage treatment has improved water quality in the harbour to an extent that the inner harbour can be used for swimming and facilities for this are provided at a number of locations. Another municipal policy is that 40% of all citizens should bicycle to and from work by 2012 and a number of initiatives are being taken to implement this policy (see "bicycling above"). Copenhagen is the capital in the World where organic food has the largest market share. One in every ten purchases is organic in Copenhagen. Within the municipal sector in Copenhagen, 45 % of all food consumption is organic but the target is considerably higher. With the environmental strategy "Environment Metropolis: Our Vision 2015" the politicians wish that solely organic food is to be served in 90 per cent of the Copenhagen old-age homes and residential homes for children and young persons in 2015.. - - - Image:Christiansborg Slot.jpg| Christiansborg Slot - Image:Børsen København.jpg| Børsen- the former Stock Exchange building - Image:Littlemermaid207.jpg| The Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen harbor - Image:Copenhagen amalienborg seen from opera house.jpg| Amalienborg Palace - Image:Nyhavn 9-15 København.jpg| Nyhavn - Image:Kbh Marmorkirche 1.jpg| Frederik's Church|The Marble Church - Image:Rosenborg.jpg| Rosenborg Castle in central Copenhagen - Image:Christianshavns Kanal morning.jpg| Christianshavns Canal - Image:Amalienborgas.JPG | The Royal Residence - Image:Copenhague 108.jpg | The Round Tower - Image:Gammel_Strand_København.jpg| Gammel Strand - Image:Kbh_Stroeget_Nikolaj_Kirche.jpg | Stroget - Image:A_Copenhagen_center_street.jpg| Central Copenhagen Street - Image:Amagergade 01.jpg| Amagergade - Image:Gebauede_in_kopenhagen.jpg| Copenhagen Habour - Image:Container ship loading-700px.jpg| Copenhagen Ship Loading - Image:Christianshavns_Torv.jpg | Christianshavn Torv - Image:Copenhagen-Airport-from-air.jpg | Copenhagen Airport from the air - Image:Østre Anlæg København.jpg | Østre Anlæg - Image:Frederiksberg Slot.jpg | Frederiksberg Castle - Image:Kongens Nytorv 17.jpg | Kongens Nytorv - Image:Kopenhagen zeehaven.JPG | Copenhagen Canal Tour - Image:Den-sorte-diamant.jpg | The Black Diamond ( The Royal Library ) - Image:Tivoli Copenhagen at Night.jpg | Tivoli by Night - Image:Kopenhagen 3.jpg | View over Copenhagen - Image:Gammeltorv Copenhagen Denmark.JPG | Gammeltorv - Image:Copenhagen denmark.jpg | Nyhavn - Image:Copenhagen City Hall.jpg | Copenhagen City Hall - Image:Gefion.jpg| Gefion Fountian - Image:Christiania Exit.JPG | Christiania - Image:Gebauede in kopenhagen.jpg | Copenhagen at Night - Image:Copenhague 050.jpg | Inner City Canel - Copenhagen has placed well in a number of international rankings, some of which are mentioned below. * Copenhagen was ranked #1 as Most Livable City in the World by international lifestyle magazine Monocle on their Top 25 Most Livable Cities 2008 list Monocles page on Copenhagen * Worlds Best Design City 2008 also by Monocle. Monocles page on Copenhagen *Monocle has also stated that Copenhagen is "Scandinavia's most desirable city". By Stuart Husband Monocle Magazine Published: June 19, 2007 *Copenhagen ranked #4 by Financial Times-owned FDi magazine on their list of Top50 European Cities of the Future after London, Paris and Berlin. Top 50 European City of the Future 2008/09 In 2006/07 FDi Magazine named Copenhagen Scandinavian City of the Future Scandinavian City of the Future 06/07 and in 2004/05 Copenhagen was named Northern European City of the Future ahead of other cities from Scandinavia, UK, Ireland and Benelux. Northern European City of the Future 2004/05 * In the 2008 Worldwide Centers of Commerce Index, published by MasterCard, Copenhagen was ranked 14th in the world and 1st in Scandinavia. *Copenhagen #1 out of 254 locations in the Location Ranking Survey performed by ECA International that has asked European experts where they prefer to be stationed worldwide. Location Ranking Survey * Copenhagen was ranked #6 in Grist Magazine's "15 Green Cities" list in 2007 making Copenhagen the greenest capital of Scandinavia according to Grist Magazine. 15 Green Cities | Grist | Main Dish | 19 July 2007 * Copenhagen is the capital in the World where organic food has the largest market share. One in every ten purchases is organic in Copenhagen. World-champinions in organic food * The Copenhagen Metro has been named the Best Metro in the World by industry experts. Copenhagen Metro Best in the World * Copenhagen is the worlds #7 most expensive city and #3 most expensive in Europe on the Forbes List. Forbes-Worlds Most Expensive Cities List * Copenhagen is ranked #7 as Preferred City For Investment Projects. Preferred City For Investment Projects * Copenhagen ranked 3rd in Western Europe in terms of attracting regional headquarters and distribution centers, only surpassed by London and Paris. * Copenhagen ranks #1 in the Global Earning Ranking. [h Global earning ranking ] * Copenhagen ranks as the 5th most popular city in the world for international meetings and conferences. Style & Substance Danmark * Copenhagen ranks as one of the most attractive cities to live and work in Europe. A great place to live * Copenhagen ranks 2nd in Europe for Quality of life according to a survey from 2005 by the international consultancy firm William Mercer. A great place to live * Morten Andersen, veteran NFL kicker * Niels Bohr, physicist, Nobel laureate * Aage Bohr, physicist, Nobel laureate (son of Niels Bohr) * Victor Borge, entertainer * August Bournonville, ballet choreographer * Georg Brandes, critic * Helena Christensen, supermodel * Tove Ditlevsen, writer * Carl Theodor Dreyer, movie director * Vilhelm Hammershøi, painter * Gus Hansen, poker player * Iben Hjejle, actor * Peter Høeg, writer * Arne Jacobsen, designer * Robert Jacobsen, painter * J. C. Jacobsen, founder of Carlsberg Brewery * Mathias Lauridsen, male topmodel * Søren Kierkegaard, philosopher * Bjørn Lomborg, Academic and Author of The Skeptical Environmentalist * Lauritz Melchior, opera singer * Mads Mikkelsen, actor * Carl-Henning Pedersen, painter * Lars von Trier, movie director * Dan Turèll, writer * Lars Ulrich, drummer and songwriter of the heavy-metal band Metallica * Jørn Utzon, architect, designer of the Sydney Opera House * Michael Laudrup, former international football player, former manager of Spanish Primera Division Football team Getafe. * Peter Schmeichel, former international football player * Bertel Thorvaldsen, sculpturer Copenhagen is twinned with: * Paris in France (partner city) * Reykjavík in Iceland * Prague in Czech Republic (unofficial partner city) * San Francisco de Campeche in Mexico * Municipal statistics: NetBorger Kommunefakta, delivered from KMD, also known as Kommunedata (Municipal Data) * Municipal and county statistics: Statistics Denmark statistikbanken.dk * Demography: Statistical Yearbook of Copenhagen (part English); ISBN 87-7024-230-5 * History and demography: København Forslag til kommuneplan 1985; ISBN 87-88034-03-8 * Oresund Region * Eurovision Song Contest 2001 * Junior Eurovision Song Contest 2003 * MTV Europe Music Awards 2006 * Transportation in Denmark * Ports of the Baltic Sea * A Much Different Tourist Site and Cultural Guide about Copenhagen * Wonderful Copenhagen official tourism website * Copenhagen Capacity official investment agency of Copenhagen * * Official municipal website * City of Copenhagen Statistical Office * Krak searchable map
Copenhagen
Why did German troops occupy Copenhagen?
Because it was WW2
data/set3/a8
Copenhagen Copenhagen ( ; ) is the capital and largest city of Denmark, with a population of 1,161,063. Copenhagen is situated on the Islands of Zealand and Amager. First documented in the 11th century, Copenhagen became the capital of Denmark in the beginning of the 15th century and during the 17th century under the reign of Christian IV it became an important regional centre. Copenhagen is usually ranked as one of the two largest cities of the Nordic Countries. [ LARGEST CITY Copenhagen or Stockholm ? [ Denmark in brief . With the completion of the transnational Oresund Bridge in 2000, Copenhagen has become the centre of the increasingly integrating Øresund Region with around 3.7 million inhabitants covering an area of 20,869 km² (177/km²). Within this region, Copenhagen and Malmö is in the process of growing into one common metropolitan area. Copenhagen is a major regional center of culture, business, media, and science. In 2008 Copenhagen was ranked #4 by Financial Times-owned FDi magazine on their list of Top50 European Cities of the Future after London, Paris and Berlin. In the 2008 Worldwide Centers of Commerce Index, published by MasterCard, Copenhagen was ranked 14th in the world and 1st in Scandinavia. Life science, information technology and shipping are important sectors and research & development plays a major role in the city's economy. Its strategic location and excellent infrastructure with the largest airport in Scandinavia located 14 minutes by train from the city centre, has made it a regional hub and a popular location for regional headquarters as well as conventions. Copenhagen has repeatedly been recognized as one of the cities with the best quality of life. and in 2008 it was singled out as the Most Liveable City in the World by international lifestyle magazine Monocle on their Top 25 Most Liveable Cities 2008 list. It is also considered one of the world's most environmentally friendly cities with the water in the inner harbor being so clean that it can be used for swimming and 36 % of all citizens commuting to work by bicycle, every day bicycling a total 1.1 million km. Since the turn of the millennium Copenhagen has seen a strong urban and cultural development and has been described as a boom town. This is partly due to massive investments in cultural facilities as well as infrastructure and a new wave of succesful designers, chefs and architects. Copenhagen c. 1895 The Palace during renovation. From its humble origins as a fishing village to its heyday as the glittering capital of the Danish Empire, to its current position as one of the world's premier design capitals, the stories and characters of Copenhagen's history can be discovered in its sumptuous palaces, copper-roofed town houses and atmospheric cobbled squares. From the Viking Age there was a fishing village by the name of "Havn" (harbour) at the site. Recent archeological finds indicate that by the 11th century, Copenhagen had already grown into a small town with a large estate, a church, a market, at least two wells and many smaller habitations spread over a fairly wide area. Arkæologer graver ny teori om København op af mulden (Archeologists develop new theory about Copenhagen from their digs), Videnskab.dk, 5 November 2008 From the middle of the 12th century it grew in importance after coming into the possession of the Bishop Absalon, who fortified it in 1167, the year traditionally marking the foundation of Copenhagen. The excellent harbour encouraged Copenhagen's growth until it became an important centre of commerce. The city's origin as a harbour and a place of commerce is reflected in its name. Its original designation, from which the contemporary Danish name is derived, was Køpmannæhafn, "merchants' harbor". The English name for the city is derived from its Low German name, Kopenhagen. The element hafnium is also named for Copenhagen, whose Latin name is Hafnia. Biography of George de Hevesy It was repeatedly attacked by the Hanseatic League as the Germans took notice. In 1254, it received its charter as a city under Bishop Jakob Erlandsen. During 1658-59 it withstood a severe siege by the Swedes under Charles X and successfully repelled a major assault. In 1801 a British fleet under Admiral Parker fought a major battle, the Battle of Copenhagen, with the Danish Navy in Copenhagen harbour. It was during this battle Lord Nelson famously "put the telescope to the blind eye" in order not to see Admiral Parker's signal to cease fire. When a British expeditionary force bombarded Copenhagen in 1807, to gain control of the Danish Navy, the city suffered great damage and hundreds of people were killed. The reason why the devastation was so great was that Copenhagen relied on an old defence-line rendered virtually useless by the increase in shooting range available to the British. But not until the 1850s were the ramparts of the city opened to allow new housing to be built around the lakes ("Søerne") which bordered the old defence system to the west. This dramatic increase of space was long overdue, not only because the old ramparts were out of date as a defence system, but also because of bad sanitation in the old city. Before the opening, Copenhagen Center was inhabited by approximately 125,000 people, peaking in the census of 1870 (140,000); today the figure is around 25,000. In 1901, Copenhagen expanded further, incorporating communities with 40,000 people, and in the process making Frederiksberg an enclave within Copenhagen. During World War II, Copenhagen was occupied by German troops along with the rest of the country from 9 April 1940 until 4 May 1945. In August 1943, when the government's collaboration with the occupation forces collapsed, several ships were sunk in Copenhagen Harbour by the Royal Danish Navy to prevent them being used by the Germans. The city has grown greatly since the war, in the seventies using the so-called five-finger-plan of commuter train lines to surrounding towns and suburbs. Since the summer 2000, the cities of Copenhagen and Malmö have been connected by a toll bridge/tunnel (Øresund Bridge), which allows both rail and road passengers to cross. As a result, Copenhagen has become the centre of a larger metropolitan area which spans both nations. The construction of the bridge has led to a large number of changes to the public transportation system and the extensive redevelopment of Amager, south of the main city. Location of Coppenhagen in Denmark Nørrebro seen from "Søerne" Copenhagen City Hall Copenhagen is located on the eastern shore of the island of Zealand (Sjælland) and partly on the island of Amager. Copenhagen faces the Øresund to the east, the strait of water that separates Denmark from Sweden, and that connects the North Sea with the Baltic Sea. On the Swedish side of the sound directly across from Copenhagen, lie the towns of Malmö and Landskrona. Copenhagen is also a part of the Øresund region, which consists of Zealand, Lolland-Falster and Bornholm in Denmark and Scania in Sweden. Copenhagen Municipality is an administrative unit that covers the central part of the actual city of Copenhagen. It is a fairly small part of the actual city that falles within the municipality both because it covers a very confined area and because the enclave of Frederiksberg is an independent municipality. Copenhagen consists of a number of boroughs and areas, including * Indre By * Østerbro * Nørrebro * Vesterbro * Amagerbro * Nordhavnen (North Habour) * Valby * Kongens Enghave (King's Meadow Garden), also known as Sydhavnen (meaning South Harbour) * Christianshavn * Christiania (Freetown) * Sundbyvester (Sundby West), * Sundbyøster (Sundby East) * Ørestad * Islands Brygge * Bellahøj * Brønshøj * Ryparken * Bispebjerg * Vigerslev * Vestamager * Vanløse The suffix -bro in the names Østerbro, Nørrebro, Vesterbro and Amagerbro should not be confused with the Danish word for bridge, which is also 'bro'. The term is thought to be an abbreviation or short form of the Danish word brolagt meaning paved referring to the roads paved with cobblestones leading to the city's former gates - The conurbation of Copenhagen consists of several municipalities. After Copenhagen Municipality, the second largest is Frederiksberg Municipality which is an enclave inside Copenhagen Municipality. Both are contained in the larger Capital Region of Denmark, which contains most of the Copenhagen metropolitan area. Previously, the areas of Frederiksberg, Gentofte and Copenhagen municipalities have been used to define the city of Copenhagen. This definition is now obsolete. To meet statistical needs after the latest municipal reform, which took place in the beginning of 2007, an effort has been made to work out definitions of lands (landsdele) in Denmark. A land is basically a geographical and statistical definition, and the area is not considered to be an administrative unit. The land of Copenhagen City includes the municipalities of Copenhagen, Dragør, Frederiksberg and Tårnby, with a total population of 656,582 in the beginning of 2008. Statistics Denmark, table BEF1A07: Population 1 January by region, age, sex, marital status Retrieved on 2008-03-26. Statistics Denmark, definitions of lands as of 2007-01-01 (excel-file, in danish) Retrieved on 2008-03-26. Copenhagen and Frederiksberg were two of the three last Danish municipalities not belonging to a county. On 1 January 2007, the municipalities lost their county privileges and became part of Copenhagen Capital Region. Suburban Copenhagen is planned according to the Finger Plan, fingerplanen, initiated in 1947, dividing the suburbs into five fingers. The Finger Plan, Denmark.dk The S-train lines are built according to the Finger Plan, while green wedges and highways are built in-between the fingers The Little Finger The northern suburbs form the little finger of the plan, and is traditionally the wealthiest of the suburbs. In popular language, the area is known as "The Whiskey Belt", although the area is mixed between mansions, larger houses, garden cities and mid-size houses. The area has a population of around 270,000 inhabitants. * Gentofte Municipality: Klampenborg, Skovshoved, Charlottenlund, Hellerup, Gentofte, Ordrup, Jægersborg, Dyssegård, Vangede * Lyngby-Taarbæk Municipality: Kongens Lyngby, Ulrikkenborg, Brede, Virum, Sorgenfri, Lundtofte, Hjortekær * Rudersdal Municipality: Søllerød, Holte, Øverød, Gl. Holte, Trørød, Nærum, Vedbæk, Skodsborg, Birkerød, Kajerød, Bistrup * Hørsholm Municipality: Hørsholm, Usserød, Rungsted, Vallerød, Smidstrup * Allerød Municipality: Allerød, Lillerød, Blovstrød * Fredensborg Municipality: Fredensborg, Asminderød, Humlebæk, Kokkedal, Niverød, Nivå. The Ring Finger The North-Northwestern part of the suburbs forms the ring finger. The area is to a large extent formed by detached middle-class dwellings, with some exceptions of housing projects or upper-class areas. The area has a population of around 100,000 inhabitants. * Gladsaxe Municipality: Gladsaxe, Bagsværd, Buddinge, Høje-Gladsaxe (Gladsaxe Heights), Mørkhøj, Søborg * Furesø Municipality: Værløse, Farum, Hareskovby The Middle Finger The northwestern suburbs form the middle finger, and consists of a mixed area of both detached middle-class dwellings, widespread garden cities and large, low-rise public housing projects. The area has a considerable part of the industrial areas of metropolitan Copenhagen, mostly in the traditional sectors of manufacturing. The area has a population of around 110,000 inhabitants. * Herlev Municipality: Herlev, Hjortespring * Ballerup Municipality: Skovlunde, Ballerup, Måløv, Ågerup, Jonstrup, Egebjerg * Egedal Municipality: Smørumnedre, Stenløse, Ølstykke The Index Finger The index finger forms the western suburbs, which are the suburbs with the lowest income per capita and the highest crime-rate. The suburbs vary from the petit bourgeois area of Glostrup to the widespread low housing projects of Albertslund and Taastrup. Of the total of 145,000 inhabitants, some 20% are immigrants of first or second generation. * Rødovre Municipality: Rødovre, Islev * Glostrup Municipality: Glostrup, Hvissinge, Ejby * Brøndby Municipality: Brøndbyøster, Brøndbyvester, Brøndby Nord * Albertslund Municipality * Høje-Taastrup Municipality: Taastrup, Høje-Taastrup, Tåstrupgård, Hedehusene The Thumb The southwest suburbs along the coast form the thumb of the plan. While the central parts of these suburbs are dominated by high-rise housing projects and low-income inhabitants, the distant part is dominated by detached middle-class houses. These suburbs have a population of some 215,000 inhabitants and has a sizeable number of immigrants. * Hvidovre Municipality: Avedøre, Friheden, Hvidovre * Brøndby Municipality: Brøndby Strand * Vallensbæk Municipality * Ishøj Municipality * Greve Municipality: Hundige, Karlslunde, Greve * Solrød Municipality: Solrød, Jersie * Køge municipality: Køge, Ølby The extra finger: Amager Island suburbs & Malmö When the finger plan was initially introduced, the island of Amager wasn't included as the infrastructure was inadequate for modern suburban life. Later it has been improved, and the suburbs at the island hold some 53,000 inhabitants. Amager is now one of the most modern suburbs of Copehagen with increasing wealth. With the opening of the bridge to Sweden this finger has been extended all the way to Malmö. Under an official visit of the Swedish King in 2007 at the Copenhagen City Hall, Copenhagen Lord Mayor Ritt Bjerregaard caused a minor diplomatic incident by referring to Malmö as "København M" with an allusion to the Danish system of postal codes (Nørrebro being København N and Vesterbro being København V for instance), indicating that Malmö had turned into just another Copenhagen bourough. Today 25,000 Danes live in Malmö. Malmø er blevet til København M, DR Online * Tårnby Municipality: Tårnby, Kastrup * Dragør Municipality Summers in Copenhagen are mild with average high temperatures of around 21°C (70°F) and lows of 13°C (55°F), but temperatures could sometimes exceed 25°C (77°F+) and occasional heatwaves are common during the summer. Winters are cold, with temperatures of -2 to 4°C (28 - 40°F), and it rarely drop below −10 °C (14 °F). Precipitation is moderate throughout the year, and snowfall occurs mainly in December through March, but snow cover does not remain a long time. Nørrebro seen from "Søerne" Copenhagen as seen from the City Hall at night Kongens Nytorv View from Rundetårn Gefion Fountian The city's appearance today is shaped by the key role it has played as a regional center for centuries. Copenhagen has a multitude of districts, each representing its time and with its own distinctive character, making up a dense urban fabric. Other distinctive features of the Copenhagen of today is the abundance of water, the greenness and the elaborate system of bicycle paths that line almost every major street. The oldest section of Copenhagen's inner city is often referred to as "Middelalderbyen" (The Medieval City). However, the most distinctive district of Copenhagen is Frederiksstaden developed during the reign of Frederick V. It has Amalienborg Palace at its centre and is dominated by the dome of the Marble Church as well as a number of elegant 18th century mansions. Also part of the old inner city of Copenhagen is the small island of Slotsholmen with Christiansborg Palace and Christianshavn. Around the historical city center lies a band of charming, dense and well-preserved residential bouroughs (Vesterbro, Inner Nørrebro, Inner Østerbro) dating mainly from late 19th century. They were built outside the old ramparts of the city when the city was finally allowed to expand beyond this barrier. Sometimes referred to as "the City of Spires", Copenhagen is known for its horizontal skyline, only broken by spires at churches and castles. Most characteristic is the baroque spire of Church of Our Saviour with its spiralling and narrowing external stairs that visitors can climb to the very top of the spire. Other important spires are those of Christiansborg Palace, the City Hall and the former Church of St. Nikolaj that now houses a modern art venue. A bit lower are the renaissance spires of Rosenborg Castle and the "dragon spire" of [[Christian IV of Christian IV's former stock exchange, so named because it is shaped as the tails of four dragons twined together. Recent years has seen a tremendous boom in modern architecture in Copenhagen both when it comes to Danish architecture and works by international architects. For a few hundred years, virtually no foreign architects had worked in Copenhagen but since the mid 1990s the city and its immediate sourroundings have seen buildings and projects from such international star architects as Norman Foster , Hadid , Nouvel and Liebeskind . In the same time, a number of Danish architects have achieved great success both in Copenhagen and abroad. This has led to a number of international architecture awards. Buildings in Copenhagen have won RIBA European Awards four years in a row ("Sampension" in 2005 , "Kilen" in 2006 , "Tietgenkollegiet" in 2007 and the Royal Playhouse in 2008 ). At the 2008 World Architecture Festival in Barcelona, Bjarke Ingels Group won an award for the World's Best Residential Building 2008 for a house in Ørestad. The Forum AID Award for Best building in Scandinavia went to Copenhagen buildings both in 2006 and 2008 . In 2008 British design magazine Monocle named Copenhagen the World's best design city 2008. The boom in urban development and modern architecture means that the above mentioned horizontal skyline has seen some changes. A political majority has decided to keep the historical center free of highrises. But several areas will see or have already seen massive urban development. Ørestad is the area that until now has seen most of the development. Located near Copenhagen Airport, it currently boasts the largest mall in Scandinavia and a variety of office and residential buildings as well as an IT University and a high school. The two largest hotels in Scandinavia are currently under construction (ultimo 2008). An ambitious regeneration project will create a new Carlsberg District at the historical premises of the Carlsberg Breweries that has terminated the production of beer in Copenhagen and moved it to Jutland. The district will have a total of nine highrises and seeks to mix the old industrial buildings with modern architecture to create a dense, maze-like quarter with a focus on sustainability and an active urban life. A third major area of urban development also with a focus on sustanibility is Nordhavn. The Copenhagen tradition with urban development on artificial islands that was initiated with with Christianh IV's construction of Christianshavn has recently been continued with the creation of Havneholmen as well as a "canal city" in the South Harbour. A district in Copenhagen with a very different take on modern architecture is that of Christiania whose many creative and idiosyncratic buildings are exponents of an "architecture without architects". Østre Anlæg University of Copenhagen Botanical Garden Copenhagen is a green city with many big and small parks. King's Garden, the garden of Rosenborg Castle, is the oldest and most visited park in Copenhagen. Its landscaping was commenced by Christian IV in 1606. Every year it sees more than 2,5 million visitors and in the summer months it is packed with sunbathers, picknickers and ballplayers. It also serves as a sculpture garden with a permanent display of sculptures as well as temporary exhibits during summer. Also located in the city centre are the Botanical Gardens particularly noted for their large complex of 19th century greenhouses donated by Carlsberg founder J. C. Jacobsen. Fælledparken is with its 58 hectars the largest park in Copenhagen. It is popular for sports and hosts a long array of annual events like a free opera concert at the opening of the opera season, other open-air concerts, carnival, Labour Day celebrations and Copenhagen Historic Grand Prix which is a race for antique cars. A historical green space in the northeastern part of the city is Kastellet which is a well-presserved renaissance citadel that now serves mainly as a park. Another popular park is the Frederiksberg Garden which is a 32 hectars romantic landscape park. It houses a large colony of very tame grey herons along with other waterfowls. The park also offers views of the elephants and the elephant house designed by world-famous British architect Norman Foster of the adjacent Copenhagen Zoo. Characteristic of Copenhagen is that a number of cemeteries double as parks, though only for the more quiet activities such as sunbathing, reading and meditation. Assistens Cemetery, the burrial place of Hans Christian Andersen among others, is an important green space for the district of Inner Nørrebro and a Copenhagen institution. The lesser known Vestre Kirkegaard is with its 54 hectars the largest cemetery in Denmark and offers a maze of dense groves, open lawns, winding paths, hedges, overgrown tombs, monuments, tree-lined avenues, lakes and other garden features. It is official municipal policy in Copenhagen that all citizens by 2015 must be able to reach a park or beach on foot in less than 15 minutes. In line with this policy, several new parks are under development in areas poor in green spaces. Copenhagen and the surrounding areas have 3 beaches with a total of approx. 8 km of sandy beaches within 30 minutes of bicycling from the city centre. This includes Amager Strandpark, which opened in 2005 and includes a 2 km long artificial island and a total of 4,6 km of beaches , located just 15 minutes by bicycle or a few minutes by metro from the city centre. The beaches are supplemented by a system of harbour baths along the Copenhagen waterfront. The first and most popular of these is located at Islands Brygge Harbour bath at Islands Brygge, e-architect and has won international acclaim for its design. Islands Brygge. Depending on the boundaries used, the population of Copenhagen differs. Statistics Denmark uses a measure of the contiguously built-up urban area of Copenhagen, this means the number of communities included in this statistical abstract has changed several times, in the abstracts latest edition with close to 1.2 million (1,153,615 (2008)) inhabitants. This number is not a strict result of the commonly-used measuring methods of 200 meters of continuously build-up area, as there are exceptions to the general rule in the suburbs of Dragør, Taastrup, Birkerød, Hørsholm and Farum. Statistics Denmark has never stated the geographical area of urban Copenhagen. However, we know it consists of Copenhagen Municipality, Frederiksberg and 16 of the 20 municipalities in the old counties Copenhagen and Roskilde, though 5 of them only partially. Largest cities of Denmark 2007 Statistics Denmark has worked out definitions of so-called lands (landsdele), a definition used to meet statistical needs on a lower level than regions. From this, the land of Copenhagen city (København by) is defined by the municipalities of Copenhagen, Dragør, Frederiksberg and Tårnby, with a total population of 656,582 in the beginning of 2008. The surroundings of Copenhagen is defined by another land, Copenhagen suburban (Københavns omegn), which includes the municipalities of Albertslund, Ballerup, Brøndby, Gentofte, Gladsaxe, Glostrup, Herlev, Hvidovre, Høje-Taastrup, Ishøj, Lyngby-Taarbæk, Rødovre and Vallensbæk, and with a total population of 504,481 (January 1, 2008). This gives a total population of 1,161,063 for these two lands together. The lands of Copenhagen city and Copenhagen suburban can together be used as a definition of the metropolitan area, although perhaps a somewhat narrow one. From 1 January 2008 the population of the 34 municipalities closest to and including the municipality of Copenhagen is 1,857,263 and by 1 October 2008 the population of this area had grown to 1,872,706. Statistikbanken.dk Population table BEF1A07 Land area: 2,923 km² (1,032 sq mi). (Capital Region - Bornholm + East Zealand + Stevns) Water area: 105 km² (40.5 sq mi). Orienteering fra Københavns Kommune. Statistisk Kontor.2003 nr. 25 Thus, the region comprises 6.8% of the land area of Denmark, but has 34% of Denmark's population. This gives a total of 641 inhabitants per km² or 1,660 per square mile for the region. This compares with a population density in the rest of the country of approximately 90 per km² or around 230 per square mile. Based on a 10%-isoline (data from 2002) in which at least 10% commutes into central parts of the Copenhagen area, most of Zealand would be covered and this area has a population of about 2.3 million inhabitants. /ref> Since the opening of the Øresund Bridge in 2000, commuting between and integration of Greater Malmö and Copenhagen have increased rapidly, and a combined statistical metropolitan area has formed. This metropolitan area, which has a population of 2,501,094 (2008) is expected to be officially defined by the respective statistics divisions of Denmark and Sweden in the upcoming years. A high-ranking civil servant of the Interior Ministry, Henning Strøm, who was involved in (i.e. known as "the Father of") a past municipal reform, which took effect on 1 April 1970, said on television, broadcast in connection with the recent Kommunalreformen ("The Municipal Reform" of 2007), that Copenhagen municipality would encompass an area with 1.5 million inhabitants, if the principles of the 1970 municipal reform were also applied on Copenhagen municipality. DR netnews 25-06-04 In other words: in the rest of Denmark the city occupies only part of the municipality, but in Copenhagen the municipality of Copenhagen occupies only part of the city of Copenhagen. Since the late 1990s, Copenhagen has undergone a transformation from a cozy Scandinavian capital to a cool metropolitan city of international scope in the league of cities like Barcelona and Amsterdam. This is due to massive investments in infrastructure as well as culture and wave of new successful Danish architects, designers and chefs. Between 1998 and 2008, lifestyle journalists wordwide (from Wallpaper to the NewYorkTimes) have praised Copenhagen as a cool, well-functioning creative city (see "Copenhagen In international rankings" below). Copenhagen has a wide array of museums of International standard. The National Museum, Nationalmuseet, is Denmark's largest museum of Archaeology and cultural history, comprising the histories of Danish and foreign cultures alike. The National Gallery - "Statens Museum for Kunst" - is Denmark's national art museum and contains collections dating from 12th century and all the way up to present day artists. Among artists represented in the collections are Rubens, Rembrandt, Picasso, Braque, Léger, Matisse and Emil Nolde. Another important Copenhagen art museum is the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek founded by second generation Carlsberg tycoon-philantropist Carl Jacobsen and is built around his personal collections. Its main focus is classical Egyptian, Roman and Greek sculptures and other antiquities and a collection of Rodin sculptures that is the largest outside France (Glypto-, from the Greek root glyphein, to carve and theke, a storing-place). Besides its sculpture collections, the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek also holds a comprehensive collection of paintings of impressionist and post-impressionist painters such as Monet,Renoir, Cézanne, van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec as well as Danish Golden Age painters. Loiusiana is an internationally acclaimed museum of modern art situated on the coast just north of Copenhagen. It is located in the middle of a sculpture garden on a cliff overlooking Øresund. The The museum is included in the Patricia Schultz book 1,000 Places to See Before You Die. The Danish Museum of Art & Design is housed in the 18th century former Frederiks Hospital and displays Danish design as well as international design and crafts. Other museums include: * Thorvaldsens Museum is a single-artist museum dedicated to the oeuvre,of romantic Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen who lived and worked in Rome. * Cisternerne is a small but different museum dedicated to modern glass art. It is located in some grotto-like former cisterns that come complete with Stalactites formed by the changing water levels. * The Ordrupgaard Museum is an art museum located just notth of Copenhagen in an old mansion with an extension by Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. It features 19th century French and Danish art and is particularly noted for its works by Paul Gaugin. Copenhagen Opera House The Royal Danish Theatre In January 2009 the new Copenhagen Concert Hall will open. It is designed by Jean Nouvel and will have four halls with the main auditorium seating 1800 people. It will serve as the home of the Danish National Symphony Orchestra and along with the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles the most expensive concert hall ever built. Another important venue for classical music is the Tivoli Concert Hall located in the histtrocal Tivoli Gardens. The Copenhagen Opera House (in Danish usually called Operaen) that opened in 2005 and is designed by Henning Larsen, is the national opera house of Denmark and among the most modern opera houses in the world. The old Royal Danish Theatre dating from 1748 still works as a supplementary opera scene. The Royal Danish Theatre is also home to the Royal Danish Ballet. Gounded in 1748 along with the theatre, it is one of the oldest ballet troups in Europe. It is home the the Bournonville style of ballet. Copenhagen has a significant jazz scene that has existed for many years. It developed when a number of American jazz musicians such as Ben Webster, Thad Jones, Richard Boone, Ernie Wilkins, Kenny Drew, Ed Thigpen, Bob Rockwell and others such as rock guitarist Link Wray came to live in Copenhagen during the 1960s. Every year in early July Copenhagen's streets, aquares and parks fills up with big and small jazz concerts during the Copenhagen Jazz Festival (see yearly events). The most important venue for rhythmical music in Copenhagen is Vega in Vesterbro district which has been chosen as "best concert venue in Europe" by international music magazine Live For free entertainment one can stroll along Strøget, especially between Nytorv and Højbro Plads, which in the late afternoon and evening is a bit like an impromptu three-ring circus with musicians, magicians, jugglers and other street performers. View from Amerikakaj Copenhagen has a wide variety of sport teams. The two major football teams are Brøndby IF and FC København. Brøndby IF plays at Brøndby Stadium in Brøndby and FC København plays at Parken in Østerbro, Copenhagen. Notable Copenhagen teams playing at the second highest level in Danish football (the Danish 1st Division) include Lyngby BK, AB, HIK, Frem, Brønshøj, Fremad Amager and Skjold. Copenhagen also has three ice hockey teams: Rødovre Mighty Bulls, Herlev Hornets and Nordsjælland Cobras. There are a lot of handball teams in Copenhagen. FC København owns both a women's and a men's team, which have the same name and logo. They were formerly known as FIF. Of other clubs playing in the "highest" leagues there are; Ajax Heroes, Ydun, and HIK (Hellerup). Rugby union is also played in the Danish capital with teams such as CSR-Nanok, Copenhagen Scrum, Exiles, Froggies and Rugbyklubben Speed. The Danish Australian Football League, based in Copenhagen is the largest Australian rules football competition outside of the English speaking world. Copenhagen is also home to a number of Denmark's 40-odd cricket clubs. Although Denmark has been an associate member of the International Cricket Council since 1966, the sport is not taught much in schools, and Danish cricket competes unfavourably with the much more widely followed sport of football for players, facilities, media attention and spectators. The second World Outgames will take place in Copenhagen in 2009, after Berlin refused to stage them due to the continuing rivalry between the two gay sporting organisations. It would be the largest such event hosted in Copenhagen. Copenhagen has the two oldest amusement parks in the World. World-famous Tivoli Gardens is an amusement park and pleasure garden located right in the middle of Copenhagen between the the City Hall Square and the the Central Station. Among its rides are the oldest still operating roller coaster and the oldest ferris wheel in the World. Tivoli Gardens, the rides It also function as an open-air concert venue. It opened on August 15 1843 making it the second oldest amusement park in the world. Dyrehavsbakken (in English "the Deer Garden Hill") is located in Klampenborg a little north of Copenhagen in a forested area of great natural beauty. Having been made into an amusement park complete with rides, games and restaurants by Christian IV, it is the oldest surviving amusement park in the World. Copenhagen is a centre for the New Nordic Cuisine. Nordic Cuisine, New York Times In November 2004 a Nordic Kitchen Symposium was helt in Copenhagen at the initiative of Danish chef and gastronome Claus Meyer. The symposium had attandance of top chefs from all of the Nordic countries and led to the adoption of a Manifesto for the New Nordic Cuisine. Manifesto for a New Nordic Cuisine Claus Meyer is also the co-founder of the two-Michelin star Restaurant Noma (Nordisk Madhus) which is a flagship restaurant for the new Nordic cuisine. In 2008 it was ranked as 10th best in the World by acclaimed British restaurant & fine dining magazine Restaurant at their 50 Best Restaurants of the World 2008-list. Furthermore, the users of the international website TripAdvisor with 25 million users a month rated Noma as the best restaurant in the world. TripAdvisor ranking As of 2008 Copenhagen boasts a total of 11 Michelin star restaurants. This is by far the highest number of any Nordic city. Apart from Noma they include one of only two Thai restaurants worldwide that has received a Michelin star. Due to the development, Copenhagen is increasingly being recognized internationally as a gourmet destination. The Top 10 cities to visit in 2009, TimesOnline Apart from the selection of high end restaurants, Copenhagen offers a great variety of Danish, International and ethnic restaurants and it is possible to find modest eateries with open sandwiches (called "smørrebrød"), which is the traditional and best known dish for lunch. Most restaurants, though, serve international dishes. danish pastry, another local specialty, can be sampled from the numerous bakeries found in all parts of the city. Copenhagen has long been associated with beer.Carlsberg beer has been brewed at the brewery's premises at the border between Vesterbro and Valby districts since 1847 and has long been almost synonumous with Danish beer production. However, recent years have seen an explosive growth in the number of microbreweries so that Denmark today has more than 100 breweries Nyeste artikler fra Bryggeriforeningen, Bryggeriforeningen , many of which are located in Copenhagen. Some like Nørrebro Bryghus also act as brewpubs where it is possible also to eat at the premisses. Many cafés specialize in a huge selection of quality beers and beer has also become an important ingridient in the New Nordic Cuisine. Copenhagen is the media centre of Denmark. DR, the major Danish public service broadcasting corporation collected their activities in a new headquarters, DR byen, in 2006 and 2007. Similarly has Odense based TV2 collected its Copenhagen activities in a modern media house in the South Harbour. The two national daily newspapters Politiken and Berlingske Tidende and the two tabloids Ekstra Bladet and B. T. are based in Copenhagen. Other important media corporations include Aller Press which is the largest publisher of weekly and monthly magazines in Scandinavia, the Egmont media group and Gyldendal, the largest Danish publisher of books. Copenhagen also has a sizable movie and television industry. Filmbyen, The Movie City, which is located in a former military camp in the suburg of Hvidovre and houses several movie companies and studio studios. Among the movie campanies are Zentropa co-owned by Danish movie director Lars von Trier who is behind several international movie productions as well as a founding force behind the Dogma Movement. * Copenhagen Fashion Week takes place every year in February and August. It is the largest fashion event in Northern Europe. Fashion Capital Copenhagen On the catwalks are a growing number of new and known Danish talent with a preview of their upcoming collections. And at the three trade fairs, CPH Vision, Gallery and Copenhagen International Fashion Fair, you will find an additional 1,100 exhibitors representing a total of over 2,300 international brand name collections. Danish fashion is known for its unique angle on design, innovation and aesthetics. With a more modern approach to femininity and functionality, expressed in fresh silhouettes, a focus on details and incomparable quality. These are only some of the reasons why more than 50,000 buyers, designers and global press attend Copenhagen Fashion Week twice a year. Copenhagen Fashion Week is organised by the Danish Fashion Institute - a newly founded network organisation created by and for the Danish fashion industry. Copenhagen Fashion Week * Carnival in Copenhagen takes place every year since 1982 during the Whitsun Holiday in Fælledparken and around the city. 120 bands, 2000 dancers and 100,000 spectators participate. History of Copenhagen * Copenhagen Distortion is a youth culture festival capturing the zeitgeist of the city, gathering every year (5 days up to the first weekend of June) up to 30.000 people in the streets, in shops, galleries, clubs, bars, in boats and buses, with a cultural focus on street culture, art and upfront dance music. Copenhagen Distortion * Roskilde Festival is a music festival helt every year in Roskilde west of Copenhagen. Gathering around 100,000 people every year, it is one of the four largest rock music festivals in Europe.. * Copenhagen Jazz Festival, which begins on the first Friday in July, is a popular annual event that is the result of Copenhagen's significant jazz scene. The festival takes place throughout the city in streets, squares and parks as well as in cafés and concert halls. Copenhagen Jazz Festival 3+ years, Wonderful Copenhagen It embraces around 900 concerts, 100 venues and over 200,000 guests from Denmark and around the world. It is recognized as one of the leading jazz festivals in the World. Top 10 best Jazz Festivals, TripAdvisor Copenhagen Jazz Festival * Copenhagen Pride is a gay pride festival taking place every year in August. Among the events is "Tivoli goes pink" and it ends with a parade. Copenhagen Pride * Copenhagen Cooking takes place in August every year and is a food festival with a wide array of events all over the city. * Copenhagen International Film Festival takes place in September every year with a focus on European films. The main prize is called the Golden Swan. Copenhagen International Film Festival Middelgrunden wind farm just off Copenhagen The Danish National Bank. Designed by Arne Jacobsen. Copenhagen is the economical and financial centre of Denmark Regionale regnskaber 2005 - Nyt fra Danmarks Statistik - Danmarks Statistik and also a strong business and economic centre in the entire Scandinavian-Baltic region. In 2008 Copenhagen was ranked 4th by Financial Times-owned FDi magazine on their list of Top50 European Cities of the Future after London, Paris and Berlin. Top 50 European City of the Future 2008/09 In 2006/07 FDi Magazine named Copenhagen Scandinavian City of the Future Scandinavian City of the Future 06/07 and in 2004/05 Copenhagen was named Northern European City of the Future ahead of other cities from Scandinavia, UK, Ireland and Benelux. Northern European City of the Future 2004/05 In the 2008 Worldwide Centers of Commerce Index, published by MasterCard, Copenhagen was ranked 14th in the world and 1st in Scandinavia. Copenhagen is one of the cities in Western Europe attracting most regional headquarters and distribution centers. Among the international companies that have chosen to locate their regional headquarters in Copenhagen is Microsoft.There are 2,100 foreign companies located in the Copenhagen area, of which approx. 500 are Scandinavian head offices, representing a wide range of industries. Copenhagen has a service oriented economy. An important sector is life science and research & development plays a major role in the economy of the city. The entire Oresund Region is in cooperation with Sweden being promoted as Medicon Valley. Major Danish biotech companies like Novo Nordisk and Lundbeck, both of which are among 50 largest pharmaceutical and biotech companies in the World, are located in the greater Copenhagen area. USATODAY.com The region also boasts the largest IT-cluster in Scandinavia with nearly 100,000 employees and the city of Copenhagen is home to Nokia's largest research centre outside Finland. Copenhagen - Overview Shipping is also an import business with Maersk, the World's largest shipping company, having their world headquarters in Copenhagen. Several international companies have established their regional headquarters in Copenhagen, e.g. Microsoft. Maersk, the world's largest container shipping company, has their world headquarters in Copenhagen. A substantial number of Danish pharmaceuticals such as Novo Nordisk, Ferring Pharmaceuticals and Bavarian Nordic also operate in the area, having placed their headquarters in or close to Copenhagen. USATODAY.com Copenhagen has some of the highest gross wages in the World. City Mayors: World's richest cities High taxes mean that wages are reduced after mandatory deduction. A neneficial researcher scheme with low taxation of foreigh specialists Level of salary in Denmark has made Denmark an attractive location for highly educated foreign labour to settle. Copenhagen is however also among the most expensive cities in Europe. City Mayors: World's most expensive cities (EIU) City Mayors: World's most expensive cities - Ranking Copenhagen University Copenhagen has a well-developed higher education system of public universities. Most prominent among these is the University of Copenhagen. Founded in 1479, it is the oldest university in Denmark. It is a world-renowned research and teaching institution with campuses around the city and forms part of the International Alliance of Research Universities (IARU), which is a collaboration between international top universities including Oxford, Cambridge, Yale and Berkeley. The University attracts app. 1500 international and exchange students every year. It is repeatedly ranked as one of the best universities in Europe. At the Times Higher Education's QS World University Rankings 2008 list, it was ranked as fourth best in continental Europe. TheAcademic Ranking of World Universities 2008 placesd it as number 43 worldwide and 8th in Europe. A second all-round university in the Copenhagen area is Roskilde University located in Roskilde. The Technical University of Denmark (DTU), Danmarks Tekniske Universitet, is located in Lyngby at the northern outskirts of Copenhagen. In 2008 it was ranked third highest in Europe on Times Higher Education's list of the most influential technical universities in the World. The Max Planck Institute in Germany was ranked 15, ETH Zurich in Switzerland was ranked 15 and DTU in Denmark was ranked 20. Copenhagen Business School (CBS) is an estimed and EQUIS accredited business school located on Frederiksberg. Copenhagen is rich in companies and institutions with a focus on research and development within the biotechnology , Infrastructure & logistics - Copenhagen a distribution hub, retrieved February 22, 2007. and life science sectors. Two of the 50 largest pharmaceutical and biotech companies in the World are located in the greater Copenhagen area. The biotech and life science cluster in Copenhagen and the rest of the Oresund Region is one of the strongest in Europe. Since 1995 this has been branded as the Medicon Valley in a Danish-Swedish cooperation. The aim is to strengthen the region's position and to promote cooperation between companies and academia. The German biotech giant Sartorius Stedim Biotech, which is currently creating a Nordic head office in Tåstrup on the outskirts of Copenhagen. The Øresund region is responsible for 60 percent of life science production in Scandinavia and is home to 111 biotech companies. The greater Copenhagen area has a very well established transportation infrastructure making it a hub in Northern Europe. Christianshavns Kanal Copenhagen has a large network of toll-free highways and public roads connecting different municipalities of the city together and to Northern Europe. As in many other cities in Europe traffic is increasing in Copenhagen. The radial arterial roads and highways leading to the Copenhagen city center are critically congested during peak hours. Copenhagen is known as one of the most bicycle-friendly cities in the world. Every day 1,1 million km are bicycled in Copenhagen. 36 % of all citizens are commuting to work, school or university by bicycle and it is municipal policy that this number should go up to 40 % by 2012 and 50 % in 2015. The city's bicycle paths are extensive and well-used. Bicycle paths are often separated from the main traffic lanes and sometimes have their own signal systems. The municipality is also developing a system of interconnected green bicycle routes, greenways, with the aim to facilitate fast, safe and pleasant bicycle transport from one end of the city to the other. The network will cover more than 100 km and consist of 22 routes when finished. The city provides public bicycles which can be found throughout the downtown area and used with a returnable deposit of 20 kroner. Copenhagen's well-developed bicycle culture has given rise to the term ‘copenhagenize’. This is the practice of other cities adopting Copenhagen-style bike lanes and bicycle infrastructure. In 2007 Copenhagen-based Danish urban design consultant Jan Gehl was hired by the New York City Department of Transportation to re-imagine New York City streets by introducing designs to improve life for pedestrians and cyclists. In recognition of Copenhagen's emphasis on bicycling, the city has been chosen by the Union Cycliste Internationale as their first official Bike City. Bike City Copenhagen will take place from 2008 to 2011 and consist of big cycling events for professionals as well as amateurs. The harbour of Copenhagen has largely lost its importance as an industrial harbour. In 2001 Copenhagen Harbour merged with the harbour in Malmö to create Copenhagen-Malmö Port. It has several functions, the most important being as a major cruise destination. In 2007 a record 286 cruise ships with 420,000 cruise passengers visited Copenhagen. 120 of these ships either started or ended the cruise in Copenhagen. In 2008 these numbers grew further to 310 cruise ships and 560,000 passengers. As a result of the growth in the cruise industry facilities asre being expanded and improved. At the World Travel Awards in 2008, Copenhagen Port was named the number one cruise destination in Europe for the fifth year in a row. Copenhagen is serviced by ferry lines to Oslo in Norway (called "Oslobåden") with a daily connection and to Świnoujście in Poland (called "Polensfærgerne") with five weekly connections. Copenhagen Airport is the principal airport serving Copenhagen. It is the largest in Scandinavia and the 17th largest in Europe. It is located in Kastrup on the island of Amager and has very efficient connections to downtown Copenhagen with metro trains going to Kongens Nytorv in 15 minutes with 4-6 minutes between departures and regional trains going to the Central Station in 12 minutes. Its location also makes it the most important international airport for large parts of southern Sweden. Over the Øresund Bridge trains go to Malmö South in 14 minutes or Malmö Central Station in 22 minutes. Copenhagen Airport has won the award as "The best airport in Europe" four times, and as "The best airport in the world" two times. Copenhagen Airport is the seventh best airport in the world - second best in Europe - when you ask the passengers. The British organization Skytrax is doing so every year, writes the airport in a press release. 40 criteria are employed for the ranking. The new metro S-train at Nørreport Metro entrance in FrederiksbergThe public transportation system of Copenhagen consists of commuter trains (called S-trains, S-tog), buses, and a metro. The S-trains form the basis of the transportation network, stretching to most areas of metropolitan Copenhagen, with their main hub at Copenhagen Central Station (København H). Regional trains supplement the S-train services with lines extending further such as to the Copenhagen Airport, Elsinore, and Malmö. The Danish State Railways' Intercity network has its eastern terminus and main hub at Copenhagen, with most trains extending to Copenhagen Airport. The fare system is based on 95 zones covering the capital area. Tickets are transferable from one means of transport to another within a time limit. The more zones a ticket is valid for, the longer its time validity with a maximum of two hours. Discount cards (punch cards, klippekort) and period cards are available. Ticket prices are high and have increased substantially in recent years leading to a decrease in passenger numbers. In fact, the percentage of trips made on public transportation in Copenhagen is quite low by northern European standards. The Copenhagen Metro began operation in 2002 and currently has only two lines. In April 2008, it was named Best Metro in the World by industry experts. Copenhagen Metro Best in the World |Christiansborg Palace - home of the Danish Parliament Folketinget, the Supreme Court, Office of the Prime Minister and official reception area of Queen Margrethe II |- |Børsen - the former Stock Exchange building |- |The Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen harbor |- |Amalienborg Palace - home of the Danish royal family. The central building is the domed Marble Church located behind the palace complex |- |Nyhavn |- |The Marble Church |- |Rosenborg Castle in central Copenhagen |- |Christianshavns Canal |- |The Tivoli, photographed from Eduard Spelterini's balloon on June 22, 1922 |} Copenhagen is recognized as one of the most environmentally friendly cities in the world. In 2006 Copenhagen Municipality received the European Environmental Management Award. The award was given for long-term holistic environmental planning. It is municipal policy to reduce CO2 emissions by 20% before the end of 2015. In 2001 a large offshore wind farm was built just off the coast of Copenhagen at Middelgrunden. It produces about 4 % of the city's energy. Many years of major investments in sewage treatment has improved water quality in the harbour to an extent that the inner harbour can be used for swimming and facilities for this are provided at a number of locations. Another municipal policy is that 40% of all citizens should bicycle to and from work by 2012 and a number of initiatives are being taken to implement this policy (see "bicycling above"). Copenhagen is the capital in the World where organic food has the largest market share. One in every ten purchases is organic in Copenhagen. Within the municipal sector in Copenhagen, 45 % of all food consumption is organic but the target is considerably higher. With the environmental strategy "Environment Metropolis: Our Vision 2015" the politicians wish that solely organic food is to be served in 90 per cent of the Copenhagen old-age homes and residential homes for children and young persons in 2015.. - - - Image:Christiansborg Slot.jpg| Christiansborg Slot - Image:Børsen København.jpg| Børsen- the former Stock Exchange building - Image:Littlemermaid207.jpg| The Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen harbor - Image:Copenhagen amalienborg seen from opera house.jpg| Amalienborg Palace - Image:Nyhavn 9-15 København.jpg| Nyhavn - Image:Kbh Marmorkirche 1.jpg| Frederik's Church|The Marble Church - Image:Rosenborg.jpg| Rosenborg Castle in central Copenhagen - Image:Christianshavns Kanal morning.jpg| Christianshavns Canal - Image:Amalienborgas.JPG | The Royal Residence - Image:Copenhague 108.jpg | The Round Tower - Image:Gammel_Strand_København.jpg| Gammel Strand - Image:Kbh_Stroeget_Nikolaj_Kirche.jpg | Stroget - Image:A_Copenhagen_center_street.jpg| Central Copenhagen Street - Image:Amagergade 01.jpg| Amagergade - Image:Gebauede_in_kopenhagen.jpg| Copenhagen Habour - Image:Container ship loading-700px.jpg| Copenhagen Ship Loading - Image:Christianshavns_Torv.jpg | Christianshavn Torv - Image:Copenhagen-Airport-from-air.jpg | Copenhagen Airport from the air - Image:Østre Anlæg København.jpg | Østre Anlæg - Image:Frederiksberg Slot.jpg | Frederiksberg Castle - Image:Kongens Nytorv 17.jpg | Kongens Nytorv - Image:Kopenhagen zeehaven.JPG | Copenhagen Canal Tour - Image:Den-sorte-diamant.jpg | The Black Diamond ( The Royal Library ) - Image:Tivoli Copenhagen at Night.jpg | Tivoli by Night - Image:Kopenhagen 3.jpg | View over Copenhagen - Image:Gammeltorv Copenhagen Denmark.JPG | Gammeltorv - Image:Copenhagen denmark.jpg | Nyhavn - Image:Copenhagen City Hall.jpg | Copenhagen City Hall - Image:Gefion.jpg| Gefion Fountian - Image:Christiania Exit.JPG | Christiania - Image:Gebauede in kopenhagen.jpg | Copenhagen at Night - Image:Copenhague 050.jpg | Inner City Canel - Copenhagen has placed well in a number of international rankings, some of which are mentioned below. * Copenhagen was ranked #1 as Most Livable City in the World by international lifestyle magazine Monocle on their Top 25 Most Livable Cities 2008 list Monocles page on Copenhagen * Worlds Best Design City 2008 also by Monocle. Monocles page on Copenhagen *Monocle has also stated that Copenhagen is "Scandinavia's most desirable city". By Stuart Husband Monocle Magazine Published: June 19, 2007 *Copenhagen ranked #4 by Financial Times-owned FDi magazine on their list of Top50 European Cities of the Future after London, Paris and Berlin. Top 50 European City of the Future 2008/09 In 2006/07 FDi Magazine named Copenhagen Scandinavian City of the Future Scandinavian City of the Future 06/07 and in 2004/05 Copenhagen was named Northern European City of the Future ahead of other cities from Scandinavia, UK, Ireland and Benelux. Northern European City of the Future 2004/05 * In the 2008 Worldwide Centers of Commerce Index, published by MasterCard, Copenhagen was ranked 14th in the world and 1st in Scandinavia. *Copenhagen #1 out of 254 locations in the Location Ranking Survey performed by ECA International that has asked European experts where they prefer to be stationed worldwide. Location Ranking Survey * Copenhagen was ranked #6 in Grist Magazine's "15 Green Cities" list in 2007 making Copenhagen the greenest capital of Scandinavia according to Grist Magazine. 15 Green Cities | Grist | Main Dish | 19 July 2007 * Copenhagen is the capital in the World where organic food has the largest market share. One in every ten purchases is organic in Copenhagen. World-champinions in organic food * The Copenhagen Metro has been named the Best Metro in the World by industry experts. Copenhagen Metro Best in the World * Copenhagen is the worlds #7 most expensive city and #3 most expensive in Europe on the Forbes List. Forbes-Worlds Most Expensive Cities List * Copenhagen is ranked #7 as Preferred City For Investment Projects. Preferred City For Investment Projects * Copenhagen ranked 3rd in Western Europe in terms of attracting regional headquarters and distribution centers, only surpassed by London and Paris. * Copenhagen ranks #1 in the Global Earning Ranking. [h Global earning ranking ] * Copenhagen ranks as the 5th most popular city in the world for international meetings and conferences. Style & Substance Danmark * Copenhagen ranks as one of the most attractive cities to live and work in Europe. A great place to live * Copenhagen ranks 2nd in Europe for Quality of life according to a survey from 2005 by the international consultancy firm William Mercer. A great place to live * Morten Andersen, veteran NFL kicker * Niels Bohr, physicist, Nobel laureate * Aage Bohr, physicist, Nobel laureate (son of Niels Bohr) * Victor Borge, entertainer * August Bournonville, ballet choreographer * Georg Brandes, critic * Helena Christensen, supermodel * Tove Ditlevsen, writer * Carl Theodor Dreyer, movie director * Vilhelm Hammershøi, painter * Gus Hansen, poker player * Iben Hjejle, actor * Peter Høeg, writer * Arne Jacobsen, designer * Robert Jacobsen, painter * J. C. Jacobsen, founder of Carlsberg Brewery * Mathias Lauridsen, male topmodel * Søren Kierkegaard, philosopher * Bjørn Lomborg, Academic and Author of The Skeptical Environmentalist * Lauritz Melchior, opera singer * Mads Mikkelsen, actor * Carl-Henning Pedersen, painter * Lars von Trier, movie director * Dan Turèll, writer * Lars Ulrich, drummer and songwriter of the heavy-metal band Metallica * Jørn Utzon, architect, designer of the Sydney Opera House * Michael Laudrup, former international football player, former manager of Spanish Primera Division Football team Getafe. * Peter Schmeichel, former international football player * Bertel Thorvaldsen, sculpturer Copenhagen is twinned with: * Paris in France (partner city) * Reykjavík in Iceland * Prague in Czech Republic (unofficial partner city) * San Francisco de Campeche in Mexico * Municipal statistics: NetBorger Kommunefakta, delivered from KMD, also known as Kommunedata (Municipal Data) * Municipal and county statistics: Statistics Denmark statistikbanken.dk * Demography: Statistical Yearbook of Copenhagen (part English); ISBN 87-7024-230-5 * History and demography: København Forslag til kommuneplan 1985; ISBN 87-88034-03-8 * Oresund Region * Eurovision Song Contest 2001 * Junior Eurovision Song Contest 2003 * MTV Europe Music Awards 2006 * Transportation in Denmark * Ports of the Baltic Sea * A Much Different Tourist Site and Cultural Guide about Copenhagen * Wonderful Copenhagen official tourism website * Copenhagen Capacity official investment agency of Copenhagen * * Official municipal website * City of Copenhagen Statistical Office * Krak searchable map
Cymbal
Have cymbals been used historically to suggest bacchanal?
Yes
data/set2/a6
Cymbal Cymbals are a modern percussion instrument. Cymbals consist of thin, normally round plates of various cymbal alloys; see cymbal making for a discussion of their manufacture. Most modern cymbals are of indefinite pitch (tuned sets have been manufactured but are rare), whereas small cup-shaped cymbals based on ancient designs sound a definite note (''see: crotales). Cymbals are used in modern orchestras and many military, marching, concert and other bands. They are one of the two instrument types that form the modern drum kit, the other being the drum, and are a basic part of much contemporary music. The most basic drum kit normally contains at least one suspended cymbal and a pair of hi-hat cymbals. The origins of cymbals can be traced back to prehistoric times. The ancient Egyptian cymbals closely resembled our own. The British Museum possesses two pairs, thirteen centimetres in diameter, one of which was found in the coffin of the mummy of Ankhhape, a sacred musician. Those used by the Assyrians were both plate- and cup-shaped, those of the Ancient Persians large-sized plates, made of brass, known as Sanj. The Greek cymbals were cup- or bell-shaped, and may be seen in the hands of innumerable fauns and satyrs in sculptures and on painted vases. The word cymbal is derived from the Latin cymbalum, which itself derives from the Greek word kumbalom, meaning a small bowl. * Bell- The center of a Cymbal. When hit with the side or shoulder of a drum stick, it causes a sound which is in a higher register than the rest of the cymbal. * Bow- The remaining surface of the Cymbal. This is where you get a "ping" sound. * Edge or rim- This is where you get the best "crash". Hitting the edge causes the cymbal to vibrate more, thus being louder. The most common Cymbals are the Hi-Hats, Crash, Splash, Ride, and China. Although cymbals are not often required they form part of every orchestra; their chief use is for marking the rhythm, producing effects, or adding military color. Their unique timbre allows them to project even against a full orchestra and through the heaviest of orhestrations. Cymbals have been utilized historically to suggest frenzy, fury or bacchanalian revels, as seen in the Venus music in Wagner's Tannhäuser, Grieg's Peer Gynt suite, and Osmin's aria "O wie will ich triumphieren" from Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail. A pair of clash cymbals in profile. The bell is in green and the straps are in red. Orchestral crash cymbals are traditionally used in pairs, each one having a strap set in the bell of the cymbal by which they are held. Such a pair is known technically as a pair of clash cymbals, although this term is rarely used, see clash cymbals. They are confusingly sometimes referred to simply as crash cymbals, although this term properly applies also to some suspended cymbals. The sound can be obtained by rubbing their edges together in a sliding movement for a "sizzle", striking them against each other in what is called a "crash", tapping the edge of one against the body of the other in what is called a "tap-crash", scraping the edge of one from the inside of the bell to the edge for a "scrape" or "zishend," or shutting the cymbals together and choking the sound in what is called a "hi-hat chick." A skilled player can obtain an enormous dynamic range from such a pair of cymbals. For example, in Beethoven's ninth symphony, one of their first appearances in an orchestral work, they make their entry pianissimo, adding a touch of colour rather than an almighty crash. Clash cymbals are usually damped by pressing them against the player's body. A composer may write laissez vibrer, "Let vibrate" (usually abbreviated l.v.), secco (dry), or equivalent indications on the score; more usually, the player must judge exactly when to damp the cymbals based on the written duration of crash and the context in which it occurs. Clash cymbals have traditionally been accompanied by the bass drum playing an identical part. This combination, played loudly, is an effective way to accentuate a note since the two instruments together contribute to both very low and very high frequency ranges and provide a satisfying "crash-bang-wallop". In older music the composer sometimes provided just one part for this pair of instruments, writing senza piatti or piatti soli (Italian: "without cymbals" or "cymbals only") if the bass drum is to remain silent. However, the modern convention is for the instruments to have independent parts. Clash cymbals evolved into the low-sock and from this to the modern hi-hat. Even in a modern drum kit, they remain paired with the bass drum as the two instruments which are played with the player's feet. However, hi-hat cymbals tend to be heavy with little taper, more similar to a ride cymbal than to a crash cymbal as found in a drum kit, and perform a ride rather than a crash function. The second main orchestral use of cymbals is the suspended cymbal. This instrument takes its name from the traditional method of suspending the cymbal by means of a leather strap or rope, thus allowing the cymbal to vibrate as freely as possible for maximum musical effect. Early jazz drumming pioneers borrowed this style of cymbal mounting during the early 1900s and later drummers further developed this instrument in to the mounted horizontal or nearly horizontally mounted "crash" cymbals of a modern drum kit. Suspended cymbals are most often played with yarn wrapped mallets. However, some composers request other types of mallets like felt mallets or timpani beaters for different attack and sustain qualities. Suspended cymbals can produce bright and slicing tones when forcefully struck, and give an eerie transparent "windy" sound when played quietly. A tremolo, or roll (played with two mallets alternately striking on opposing sides of the cymbal) can build in volume from almost inaudible to an overwhelming climax in a satisfyingly smooth manner (as in Humperdink's Mother Goose Suite). Furthermore, the edge of a suspended cymbal may be hit with shoulder of a drum stick to obtain a sound somewhat akin to that of a pair of clash cymbals. Other methods of playing include scraping a coin or a triangle beater rapidly across the ridges on the top of the cymbal, giving a "zing" sound (as in the fourth movement of Dvořák's Symphony No. 9). Other effects that can be used include drawing a cello or bass bow across the edge of the cymbal for a sound not unlike squealing car brakes. On another note, in highschool marching bands, a "pit" may use a suspended cymbal for a song. This is held on a tree-like structure, similar to how it would be placed by a drumset. Also known as a high-top, the instrument's music will read it as a "sus. cym. or cymb." Ancient cymbals or tuned cymbals are much more rarely called for. Their timbre is entirely different, more like that of small hand-bells or of the notes of the keyed harmonica. They are not struck full against each other, but by one of their edges, and the note given in by them is higher in proportion as they are thicker and smaller. Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet calls for two pairs of cymbals, modelled on some old Pompeian instruments no larger than the hand (some are no larger than a crown piece), and tuned to F and B flat. The modern instruments descended from this line are the crotales. * China cymbals * crash cymbals * hi-hat cymbals * Persian cymbals * ride cymbals * Swish and pang cymbals * Sizzle cymbals * Splash cymbals * Trash Hats (Hi-Hat cymbal / china cymbal hybrid setup) * Clash cymbals * Finger cymbals - Zill * Suspended cymbals *Cymbal alloys *Cymbal making *Drum *Drum kit *Percussion instrument *Avedis Zildjian Company *Saluda Cymbals *Italian Bellotti Cymbals *Agean Cymbals *Bosphorus Cymbals *Meinl *Paiste *Sabian *Stagg *UFIP *Yamaha *Wuhan *Istanbul cymbals *Istanbul Agop *Turk Masters Cymbals :See also . * CymbalPlanet.com Welcome to the World of Cymbals * Accessory Fetish A Complete List of Cymbal Manufacturers * Cymbal Forum Discussion forum about cymbals. * Orchestral cymbal playing, with an excellent short history of cymbals *
Cymbal
Have cymbals been used historically to suggest bacchanal?
Yes
data/set2/a6
Cymbal Cymbals are a modern percussion instrument. Cymbals consist of thin, normally round plates of various cymbal alloys; see cymbal making for a discussion of their manufacture. Most modern cymbals are of indefinite pitch (tuned sets have been manufactured but are rare), whereas small cup-shaped cymbals based on ancient designs sound a definite note (''see: crotales). Cymbals are used in modern orchestras and many military, marching, concert and other bands. They are one of the two instrument types that form the modern drum kit, the other being the drum, and are a basic part of much contemporary music. The most basic drum kit normally contains at least one suspended cymbal and a pair of hi-hat cymbals. The origins of cymbals can be traced back to prehistoric times. The ancient Egyptian cymbals closely resembled our own. The British Museum possesses two pairs, thirteen centimetres in diameter, one of which was found in the coffin of the mummy of Ankhhape, a sacred musician. Those used by the Assyrians were both plate- and cup-shaped, those of the Ancient Persians large-sized plates, made of brass, known as Sanj. The Greek cymbals were cup- or bell-shaped, and may be seen in the hands of innumerable fauns and satyrs in sculptures and on painted vases. The word cymbal is derived from the Latin cymbalum, which itself derives from the Greek word kumbalom, meaning a small bowl. * Bell- The center of a Cymbal. When hit with the side or shoulder of a drum stick, it causes a sound which is in a higher register than the rest of the cymbal. * Bow- The remaining surface of the Cymbal. This is where you get a "ping" sound. * Edge or rim- This is where you get the best "crash". Hitting the edge causes the cymbal to vibrate more, thus being louder. The most common Cymbals are the Hi-Hats, Crash, Splash, Ride, and China. Although cymbals are not often required they form part of every orchestra; their chief use is for marking the rhythm, producing effects, or adding military color. Their unique timbre allows them to project even against a full orchestra and through the heaviest of orhestrations. Cymbals have been utilized historically to suggest frenzy, fury or bacchanalian revels, as seen in the Venus music in Wagner's Tannhäuser, Grieg's Peer Gynt suite, and Osmin's aria "O wie will ich triumphieren" from Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail. A pair of clash cymbals in profile. The bell is in green and the straps are in red. Orchestral crash cymbals are traditionally used in pairs, each one having a strap set in the bell of the cymbal by which they are held. Such a pair is known technically as a pair of clash cymbals, although this term is rarely used, see clash cymbals. They are confusingly sometimes referred to simply as crash cymbals, although this term properly applies also to some suspended cymbals. The sound can be obtained by rubbing their edges together in a sliding movement for a "sizzle", striking them against each other in what is called a "crash", tapping the edge of one against the body of the other in what is called a "tap-crash", scraping the edge of one from the inside of the bell to the edge for a "scrape" or "zishend," or shutting the cymbals together and choking the sound in what is called a "hi-hat chick." A skilled player can obtain an enormous dynamic range from such a pair of cymbals. For example, in Beethoven's ninth symphony, one of their first appearances in an orchestral work, they make their entry pianissimo, adding a touch of colour rather than an almighty crash. Clash cymbals are usually damped by pressing them against the player's body. A composer may write laissez vibrer, "Let vibrate" (usually abbreviated l.v.), secco (dry), or equivalent indications on the score; more usually, the player must judge exactly when to damp the cymbals based on the written duration of crash and the context in which it occurs. Clash cymbals have traditionally been accompanied by the bass drum playing an identical part. This combination, played loudly, is an effective way to accentuate a note since the two instruments together contribute to both very low and very high frequency ranges and provide a satisfying "crash-bang-wallop". In older music the composer sometimes provided just one part for this pair of instruments, writing senza piatti or piatti soli (Italian: "without cymbals" or "cymbals only") if the bass drum is to remain silent. However, the modern convention is for the instruments to have independent parts. Clash cymbals evolved into the low-sock and from this to the modern hi-hat. Even in a modern drum kit, they remain paired with the bass drum as the two instruments which are played with the player's feet. However, hi-hat cymbals tend to be heavy with little taper, more similar to a ride cymbal than to a crash cymbal as found in a drum kit, and perform a ride rather than a crash function. The second main orchestral use of cymbals is the suspended cymbal. This instrument takes its name from the traditional method of suspending the cymbal by means of a leather strap or rope, thus allowing the cymbal to vibrate as freely as possible for maximum musical effect. Early jazz drumming pioneers borrowed this style of cymbal mounting during the early 1900s and later drummers further developed this instrument in to the mounted horizontal or nearly horizontally mounted "crash" cymbals of a modern drum kit. Suspended cymbals are most often played with yarn wrapped mallets. However, some composers request other types of mallets like felt mallets or timpani beaters for different attack and sustain qualities. Suspended cymbals can produce bright and slicing tones when forcefully struck, and give an eerie transparent "windy" sound when played quietly. A tremolo, or roll (played with two mallets alternately striking on opposing sides of the cymbal) can build in volume from almost inaudible to an overwhelming climax in a satisfyingly smooth manner (as in Humperdink's Mother Goose Suite). Furthermore, the edge of a suspended cymbal may be hit with shoulder of a drum stick to obtain a sound somewhat akin to that of a pair of clash cymbals. Other methods of playing include scraping a coin or a triangle beater rapidly across the ridges on the top of the cymbal, giving a "zing" sound (as in the fourth movement of Dvořák's Symphony No. 9). Other effects that can be used include drawing a cello or bass bow across the edge of the cymbal for a sound not unlike squealing car brakes. On another note, in highschool marching bands, a "pit" may use a suspended cymbal for a song. This is held on a tree-like structure, similar to how it would be placed by a drumset. Also known as a high-top, the instrument's music will read it as a "sus. cym. or cymb." Ancient cymbals or tuned cymbals are much more rarely called for. Their timbre is entirely different, more like that of small hand-bells or of the notes of the keyed harmonica. They are not struck full against each other, but by one of their edges, and the note given in by them is higher in proportion as they are thicker and smaller. Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet calls for two pairs of cymbals, modelled on some old Pompeian instruments no larger than the hand (some are no larger than a crown piece), and tuned to F and B flat. The modern instruments descended from this line are the crotales. * China cymbals * crash cymbals * hi-hat cymbals * Persian cymbals * ride cymbals * Swish and pang cymbals * Sizzle cymbals * Splash cymbals * Trash Hats (Hi-Hat cymbal / china cymbal hybrid setup) * Clash cymbals * Finger cymbals - Zill * Suspended cymbals *Cymbal alloys *Cymbal making *Drum *Drum kit *Percussion instrument *Avedis Zildjian Company *Saluda Cymbals *Italian Bellotti Cymbals *Agean Cymbals *Bosphorus Cymbals *Meinl *Paiste *Sabian *Stagg *UFIP *Yamaha *Wuhan *Istanbul cymbals *Istanbul Agop *Turk Masters Cymbals :See also . * CymbalPlanet.com Welcome to the World of Cymbals * Accessory Fetish A Complete List of Cymbal Manufacturers * Cymbal Forum Discussion forum about cymbals. * Orchestral cymbal playing, with an excellent short history of cymbals *
Cymbal
Can the origins of cymbals be traced to prehistoric times?
Yes
data/set2/a6
Cymbal Cymbals are a modern percussion instrument. Cymbals consist of thin, normally round plates of various cymbal alloys; see cymbal making for a discussion of their manufacture. Most modern cymbals are of indefinite pitch (tuned sets have been manufactured but are rare), whereas small cup-shaped cymbals based on ancient designs sound a definite note (''see: crotales). Cymbals are used in modern orchestras and many military, marching, concert and other bands. They are one of the two instrument types that form the modern drum kit, the other being the drum, and are a basic part of much contemporary music. The most basic drum kit normally contains at least one suspended cymbal and a pair of hi-hat cymbals. The origins of cymbals can be traced back to prehistoric times. The ancient Egyptian cymbals closely resembled our own. The British Museum possesses two pairs, thirteen centimetres in diameter, one of which was found in the coffin of the mummy of Ankhhape, a sacred musician. Those used by the Assyrians were both plate- and cup-shaped, those of the Ancient Persians large-sized plates, made of brass, known as Sanj. The Greek cymbals were cup- or bell-shaped, and may be seen in the hands of innumerable fauns and satyrs in sculptures and on painted vases. The word cymbal is derived from the Latin cymbalum, which itself derives from the Greek word kumbalom, meaning a small bowl. * Bell- The center of a Cymbal. When hit with the side or shoulder of a drum stick, it causes a sound which is in a higher register than the rest of the cymbal. * Bow- The remaining surface of the Cymbal. This is where you get a "ping" sound. * Edge or rim- This is where you get the best "crash". Hitting the edge causes the cymbal to vibrate more, thus being louder. The most common Cymbals are the Hi-Hats, Crash, Splash, Ride, and China. Although cymbals are not often required they form part of every orchestra; their chief use is for marking the rhythm, producing effects, or adding military color. Their unique timbre allows them to project even against a full orchestra and through the heaviest of orhestrations. Cymbals have been utilized historically to suggest frenzy, fury or bacchanalian revels, as seen in the Venus music in Wagner's Tannhäuser, Grieg's Peer Gynt suite, and Osmin's aria "O wie will ich triumphieren" from Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail. A pair of clash cymbals in profile. The bell is in green and the straps are in red. Orchestral crash cymbals are traditionally used in pairs, each one having a strap set in the bell of the cymbal by which they are held. Such a pair is known technically as a pair of clash cymbals, although this term is rarely used, see clash cymbals. They are confusingly sometimes referred to simply as crash cymbals, although this term properly applies also to some suspended cymbals. The sound can be obtained by rubbing their edges together in a sliding movement for a "sizzle", striking them against each other in what is called a "crash", tapping the edge of one against the body of the other in what is called a "tap-crash", scraping the edge of one from the inside of the bell to the edge for a "scrape" or "zishend," or shutting the cymbals together and choking the sound in what is called a "hi-hat chick." A skilled player can obtain an enormous dynamic range from such a pair of cymbals. For example, in Beethoven's ninth symphony, one of their first appearances in an orchestral work, they make their entry pianissimo, adding a touch of colour rather than an almighty crash. Clash cymbals are usually damped by pressing them against the player's body. A composer may write laissez vibrer, "Let vibrate" (usually abbreviated l.v.), secco (dry), or equivalent indications on the score; more usually, the player must judge exactly when to damp the cymbals based on the written duration of crash and the context in which it occurs. Clash cymbals have traditionally been accompanied by the bass drum playing an identical part. This combination, played loudly, is an effective way to accentuate a note since the two instruments together contribute to both very low and very high frequency ranges and provide a satisfying "crash-bang-wallop". In older music the composer sometimes provided just one part for this pair of instruments, writing senza piatti or piatti soli (Italian: "without cymbals" or "cymbals only") if the bass drum is to remain silent. However, the modern convention is for the instruments to have independent parts. Clash cymbals evolved into the low-sock and from this to the modern hi-hat. Even in a modern drum kit, they remain paired with the bass drum as the two instruments which are played with the player's feet. However, hi-hat cymbals tend to be heavy with little taper, more similar to a ride cymbal than to a crash cymbal as found in a drum kit, and perform a ride rather than a crash function. The second main orchestral use of cymbals is the suspended cymbal. This instrument takes its name from the traditional method of suspending the cymbal by means of a leather strap or rope, thus allowing the cymbal to vibrate as freely as possible for maximum musical effect. Early jazz drumming pioneers borrowed this style of cymbal mounting during the early 1900s and later drummers further developed this instrument in to the mounted horizontal or nearly horizontally mounted "crash" cymbals of a modern drum kit. Suspended cymbals are most often played with yarn wrapped mallets. However, some composers request other types of mallets like felt mallets or timpani beaters for different attack and sustain qualities. Suspended cymbals can produce bright and slicing tones when forcefully struck, and give an eerie transparent "windy" sound when played quietly. A tremolo, or roll (played with two mallets alternately striking on opposing sides of the cymbal) can build in volume from almost inaudible to an overwhelming climax in a satisfyingly smooth manner (as in Humperdink's Mother Goose Suite). Furthermore, the edge of a suspended cymbal may be hit with shoulder of a drum stick to obtain a sound somewhat akin to that of a pair of clash cymbals. Other methods of playing include scraping a coin or a triangle beater rapidly across the ridges on the top of the cymbal, giving a "zing" sound (as in the fourth movement of Dvořák's Symphony No. 9). Other effects that can be used include drawing a cello or bass bow across the edge of the cymbal for a sound not unlike squealing car brakes. On another note, in highschool marching bands, a "pit" may use a suspended cymbal for a song. This is held on a tree-like structure, similar to how it would be placed by a drumset. Also known as a high-top, the instrument's music will read it as a "sus. cym. or cymb." Ancient cymbals or tuned cymbals are much more rarely called for. Their timbre is entirely different, more like that of small hand-bells or of the notes of the keyed harmonica. They are not struck full against each other, but by one of their edges, and the note given in by them is higher in proportion as they are thicker and smaller. Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet calls for two pairs of cymbals, modelled on some old Pompeian instruments no larger than the hand (some are no larger than a crown piece), and tuned to F and B flat. The modern instruments descended from this line are the crotales. * China cymbals * crash cymbals * hi-hat cymbals * Persian cymbals * ride cymbals * Swish and pang cymbals * Sizzle cymbals * Splash cymbals * Trash Hats (Hi-Hat cymbal / china cymbal hybrid setup) * Clash cymbals * Finger cymbals - Zill * Suspended cymbals *Cymbal alloys *Cymbal making *Drum *Drum kit *Percussion instrument *Avedis Zildjian Company *Saluda Cymbals *Italian Bellotti Cymbals *Agean Cymbals *Bosphorus Cymbals *Meinl *Paiste *Sabian *Stagg *UFIP *Yamaha *Wuhan *Istanbul cymbals *Istanbul Agop *Turk Masters Cymbals :See also . * CymbalPlanet.com Welcome to the World of Cymbals * Accessory Fetish A Complete List of Cymbal Manufacturers * Cymbal Forum Discussion forum about cymbals. * Orchestral cymbal playing, with an excellent short history of cymbals *
Cymbal
Can the origins of cymbals be traced to prehistoric times?
Yes
data/set2/a6
Cymbal Cymbals are a modern percussion instrument. Cymbals consist of thin, normally round plates of various cymbal alloys; see cymbal making for a discussion of their manufacture. Most modern cymbals are of indefinite pitch (tuned sets have been manufactured but are rare), whereas small cup-shaped cymbals based on ancient designs sound a definite note (''see: crotales). Cymbals are used in modern orchestras and many military, marching, concert and other bands. They are one of the two instrument types that form the modern drum kit, the other being the drum, and are a basic part of much contemporary music. The most basic drum kit normally contains at least one suspended cymbal and a pair of hi-hat cymbals. The origins of cymbals can be traced back to prehistoric times. The ancient Egyptian cymbals closely resembled our own. The British Museum possesses two pairs, thirteen centimetres in diameter, one of which was found in the coffin of the mummy of Ankhhape, a sacred musician. Those used by the Assyrians were both plate- and cup-shaped, those of the Ancient Persians large-sized plates, made of brass, known as Sanj. The Greek cymbals were cup- or bell-shaped, and may be seen in the hands of innumerable fauns and satyrs in sculptures and on painted vases. The word cymbal is derived from the Latin cymbalum, which itself derives from the Greek word kumbalom, meaning a small bowl. * Bell- The center of a Cymbal. When hit with the side or shoulder of a drum stick, it causes a sound which is in a higher register than the rest of the cymbal. * Bow- The remaining surface of the Cymbal. This is where you get a "ping" sound. * Edge or rim- This is where you get the best "crash". Hitting the edge causes the cymbal to vibrate more, thus being louder. The most common Cymbals are the Hi-Hats, Crash, Splash, Ride, and China. Although cymbals are not often required they form part of every orchestra; their chief use is for marking the rhythm, producing effects, or adding military color. Their unique timbre allows them to project even against a full orchestra and through the heaviest of orhestrations. Cymbals have been utilized historically to suggest frenzy, fury or bacchanalian revels, as seen in the Venus music in Wagner's Tannhäuser, Grieg's Peer Gynt suite, and Osmin's aria "O wie will ich triumphieren" from Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail. A pair of clash cymbals in profile. The bell is in green and the straps are in red. Orchestral crash cymbals are traditionally used in pairs, each one having a strap set in the bell of the cymbal by which they are held. Such a pair is known technically as a pair of clash cymbals, although this term is rarely used, see clash cymbals. They are confusingly sometimes referred to simply as crash cymbals, although this term properly applies also to some suspended cymbals. The sound can be obtained by rubbing their edges together in a sliding movement for a "sizzle", striking them against each other in what is called a "crash", tapping the edge of one against the body of the other in what is called a "tap-crash", scraping the edge of one from the inside of the bell to the edge for a "scrape" or "zishend," or shutting the cymbals together and choking the sound in what is called a "hi-hat chick." A skilled player can obtain an enormous dynamic range from such a pair of cymbals. For example, in Beethoven's ninth symphony, one of their first appearances in an orchestral work, they make their entry pianissimo, adding a touch of colour rather than an almighty crash. Clash cymbals are usually damped by pressing them against the player's body. A composer may write laissez vibrer, "Let vibrate" (usually abbreviated l.v.), secco (dry), or equivalent indications on the score; more usually, the player must judge exactly when to damp the cymbals based on the written duration of crash and the context in which it occurs. Clash cymbals have traditionally been accompanied by the bass drum playing an identical part. This combination, played loudly, is an effective way to accentuate a note since the two instruments together contribute to both very low and very high frequency ranges and provide a satisfying "crash-bang-wallop". In older music the composer sometimes provided just one part for this pair of instruments, writing senza piatti or piatti soli (Italian: "without cymbals" or "cymbals only") if the bass drum is to remain silent. However, the modern convention is for the instruments to have independent parts. Clash cymbals evolved into the low-sock and from this to the modern hi-hat. Even in a modern drum kit, they remain paired with the bass drum as the two instruments which are played with the player's feet. However, hi-hat cymbals tend to be heavy with little taper, more similar to a ride cymbal than to a crash cymbal as found in a drum kit, and perform a ride rather than a crash function. The second main orchestral use of cymbals is the suspended cymbal. This instrument takes its name from the traditional method of suspending the cymbal by means of a leather strap or rope, thus allowing the cymbal to vibrate as freely as possible for maximum musical effect. Early jazz drumming pioneers borrowed this style of cymbal mounting during the early 1900s and later drummers further developed this instrument in to the mounted horizontal or nearly horizontally mounted "crash" cymbals of a modern drum kit. Suspended cymbals are most often played with yarn wrapped mallets. However, some composers request other types of mallets like felt mallets or timpani beaters for different attack and sustain qualities. Suspended cymbals can produce bright and slicing tones when forcefully struck, and give an eerie transparent "windy" sound when played quietly. A tremolo, or roll (played with two mallets alternately striking on opposing sides of the cymbal) can build in volume from almost inaudible to an overwhelming climax in a satisfyingly smooth manner (as in Humperdink's Mother Goose Suite). Furthermore, the edge of a suspended cymbal may be hit with shoulder of a drum stick to obtain a sound somewhat akin to that of a pair of clash cymbals. Other methods of playing include scraping a coin or a triangle beater rapidly across the ridges on the top of the cymbal, giving a "zing" sound (as in the fourth movement of Dvořák's Symphony No. 9). Other effects that can be used include drawing a cello or bass bow across the edge of the cymbal for a sound not unlike squealing car brakes. On another note, in highschool marching bands, a "pit" may use a suspended cymbal for a song. This is held on a tree-like structure, similar to how it would be placed by a drumset. Also known as a high-top, the instrument's music will read it as a "sus. cym. or cymb." Ancient cymbals or tuned cymbals are much more rarely called for. Their timbre is entirely different, more like that of small hand-bells or of the notes of the keyed harmonica. They are not struck full against each other, but by one of their edges, and the note given in by them is higher in proportion as they are thicker and smaller. Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet calls for two pairs of cymbals, modelled on some old Pompeian instruments no larger than the hand (some are no larger than a crown piece), and tuned to F and B flat. The modern instruments descended from this line are the crotales. * China cymbals * crash cymbals * hi-hat cymbals * Persian cymbals * ride cymbals * Swish and pang cymbals * Sizzle cymbals * Splash cymbals * Trash Hats (Hi-Hat cymbal / china cymbal hybrid setup) * Clash cymbals * Finger cymbals - Zill * Suspended cymbals *Cymbal alloys *Cymbal making *Drum *Drum kit *Percussion instrument *Avedis Zildjian Company *Saluda Cymbals *Italian Bellotti Cymbals *Agean Cymbals *Bosphorus Cymbals *Meinl *Paiste *Sabian *Stagg *UFIP *Yamaha *Wuhan *Istanbul cymbals *Istanbul Agop *Turk Masters Cymbals :See also . * CymbalPlanet.com Welcome to the World of Cymbals * Accessory Fetish A Complete List of Cymbal Manufacturers * Cymbal Forum Discussion forum about cymbals. * Orchestral cymbal playing, with an excellent short history of cymbals *
Cymbal
Are cymbals used in moden orchestras?
Yes
data/set2/a6
Cymbal Cymbals are a modern percussion instrument. Cymbals consist of thin, normally round plates of various cymbal alloys; see cymbal making for a discussion of their manufacture. Most modern cymbals are of indefinite pitch (tuned sets have been manufactured but are rare), whereas small cup-shaped cymbals based on ancient designs sound a definite note (''see: crotales). Cymbals are used in modern orchestras and many military, marching, concert and other bands. They are one of the two instrument types that form the modern drum kit, the other being the drum, and are a basic part of much contemporary music. The most basic drum kit normally contains at least one suspended cymbal and a pair of hi-hat cymbals. The origins of cymbals can be traced back to prehistoric times. The ancient Egyptian cymbals closely resembled our own. The British Museum possesses two pairs, thirteen centimetres in diameter, one of which was found in the coffin of the mummy of Ankhhape, a sacred musician. Those used by the Assyrians were both plate- and cup-shaped, those of the Ancient Persians large-sized plates, made of brass, known as Sanj. The Greek cymbals were cup- or bell-shaped, and may be seen in the hands of innumerable fauns and satyrs in sculptures and on painted vases. The word cymbal is derived from the Latin cymbalum, which itself derives from the Greek word kumbalom, meaning a small bowl. * Bell- The center of a Cymbal. When hit with the side or shoulder of a drum stick, it causes a sound which is in a higher register than the rest of the cymbal. * Bow- The remaining surface of the Cymbal. This is where you get a "ping" sound. * Edge or rim- This is where you get the best "crash". Hitting the edge causes the cymbal to vibrate more, thus being louder. The most common Cymbals are the Hi-Hats, Crash, Splash, Ride, and China. Although cymbals are not often required they form part of every orchestra; their chief use is for marking the rhythm, producing effects, or adding military color. Their unique timbre allows them to project even against a full orchestra and through the heaviest of orhestrations. Cymbals have been utilized historically to suggest frenzy, fury or bacchanalian revels, as seen in the Venus music in Wagner's Tannhäuser, Grieg's Peer Gynt suite, and Osmin's aria "O wie will ich triumphieren" from Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail. A pair of clash cymbals in profile. The bell is in green and the straps are in red. Orchestral crash cymbals are traditionally used in pairs, each one having a strap set in the bell of the cymbal by which they are held. Such a pair is known technically as a pair of clash cymbals, although this term is rarely used, see clash cymbals. They are confusingly sometimes referred to simply as crash cymbals, although this term properly applies also to some suspended cymbals. The sound can be obtained by rubbing their edges together in a sliding movement for a "sizzle", striking them against each other in what is called a "crash", tapping the edge of one against the body of the other in what is called a "tap-crash", scraping the edge of one from the inside of the bell to the edge for a "scrape" or "zishend," or shutting the cymbals together and choking the sound in what is called a "hi-hat chick." A skilled player can obtain an enormous dynamic range from such a pair of cymbals. For example, in Beethoven's ninth symphony, one of their first appearances in an orchestral work, they make their entry pianissimo, adding a touch of colour rather than an almighty crash. Clash cymbals are usually damped by pressing them against the player's body. A composer may write laissez vibrer, "Let vibrate" (usually abbreviated l.v.), secco (dry), or equivalent indications on the score; more usually, the player must judge exactly when to damp the cymbals based on the written duration of crash and the context in which it occurs. Clash cymbals have traditionally been accompanied by the bass drum playing an identical part. This combination, played loudly, is an effective way to accentuate a note since the two instruments together contribute to both very low and very high frequency ranges and provide a satisfying "crash-bang-wallop". In older music the composer sometimes provided just one part for this pair of instruments, writing senza piatti or piatti soli (Italian: "without cymbals" or "cymbals only") if the bass drum is to remain silent. However, the modern convention is for the instruments to have independent parts. Clash cymbals evolved into the low-sock and from this to the modern hi-hat. Even in a modern drum kit, they remain paired with the bass drum as the two instruments which are played with the player's feet. However, hi-hat cymbals tend to be heavy with little taper, more similar to a ride cymbal than to a crash cymbal as found in a drum kit, and perform a ride rather than a crash function. The second main orchestral use of cymbals is the suspended cymbal. This instrument takes its name from the traditional method of suspending the cymbal by means of a leather strap or rope, thus allowing the cymbal to vibrate as freely as possible for maximum musical effect. Early jazz drumming pioneers borrowed this style of cymbal mounting during the early 1900s and later drummers further developed this instrument in to the mounted horizontal or nearly horizontally mounted "crash" cymbals of a modern drum kit. Suspended cymbals are most often played with yarn wrapped mallets. However, some composers request other types of mallets like felt mallets or timpani beaters for different attack and sustain qualities. Suspended cymbals can produce bright and slicing tones when forcefully struck, and give an eerie transparent "windy" sound when played quietly. A tremolo, or roll (played with two mallets alternately striking on opposing sides of the cymbal) can build in volume from almost inaudible to an overwhelming climax in a satisfyingly smooth manner (as in Humperdink's Mother Goose Suite). Furthermore, the edge of a suspended cymbal may be hit with shoulder of a drum stick to obtain a sound somewhat akin to that of a pair of clash cymbals. Other methods of playing include scraping a coin or a triangle beater rapidly across the ridges on the top of the cymbal, giving a "zing" sound (as in the fourth movement of Dvořák's Symphony No. 9). Other effects that can be used include drawing a cello or bass bow across the edge of the cymbal for a sound not unlike squealing car brakes. On another note, in highschool marching bands, a "pit" may use a suspended cymbal for a song. This is held on a tree-like structure, similar to how it would be placed by a drumset. Also known as a high-top, the instrument's music will read it as a "sus. cym. or cymb." Ancient cymbals or tuned cymbals are much more rarely called for. Their timbre is entirely different, more like that of small hand-bells or of the notes of the keyed harmonica. They are not struck full against each other, but by one of their edges, and the note given in by them is higher in proportion as they are thicker and smaller. Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet calls for two pairs of cymbals, modelled on some old Pompeian instruments no larger than the hand (some are no larger than a crown piece), and tuned to F and B flat. The modern instruments descended from this line are the crotales. * China cymbals * crash cymbals * hi-hat cymbals * Persian cymbals * ride cymbals * Swish and pang cymbals * Sizzle cymbals * Splash cymbals * Trash Hats (Hi-Hat cymbal / china cymbal hybrid setup) * Clash cymbals * Finger cymbals - Zill * Suspended cymbals *Cymbal alloys *Cymbal making *Drum *Drum kit *Percussion instrument *Avedis Zildjian Company *Saluda Cymbals *Italian Bellotti Cymbals *Agean Cymbals *Bosphorus Cymbals *Meinl *Paiste *Sabian *Stagg *UFIP *Yamaha *Wuhan *Istanbul cymbals *Istanbul Agop *Turk Masters Cymbals :See also . * CymbalPlanet.com Welcome to the World of Cymbals * Accessory Fetish A Complete List of Cymbal Manufacturers * Cymbal Forum Discussion forum about cymbals. * Orchestral cymbal playing, with an excellent short history of cymbals *
Cymbal
Are cymbals used in moden orchestras?
Yes
data/set2/a6
Cymbal Cymbals are a modern percussion instrument. Cymbals consist of thin, normally round plates of various cymbal alloys; see cymbal making for a discussion of their manufacture. Most modern cymbals are of indefinite pitch (tuned sets have been manufactured but are rare), whereas small cup-shaped cymbals based on ancient designs sound a definite note (''see: crotales). Cymbals are used in modern orchestras and many military, marching, concert and other bands. They are one of the two instrument types that form the modern drum kit, the other being the drum, and are a basic part of much contemporary music. The most basic drum kit normally contains at least one suspended cymbal and a pair of hi-hat cymbals. The origins of cymbals can be traced back to prehistoric times. The ancient Egyptian cymbals closely resembled our own. The British Museum possesses two pairs, thirteen centimetres in diameter, one of which was found in the coffin of the mummy of Ankhhape, a sacred musician. Those used by the Assyrians were both plate- and cup-shaped, those of the Ancient Persians large-sized plates, made of brass, known as Sanj. The Greek cymbals were cup- or bell-shaped, and may be seen in the hands of innumerable fauns and satyrs in sculptures and on painted vases. The word cymbal is derived from the Latin cymbalum, which itself derives from the Greek word kumbalom, meaning a small bowl. * Bell- The center of a Cymbal. When hit with the side or shoulder of a drum stick, it causes a sound which is in a higher register than the rest of the cymbal. * Bow- The remaining surface of the Cymbal. This is where you get a "ping" sound. * Edge or rim- This is where you get the best "crash". Hitting the edge causes the cymbal to vibrate more, thus being louder. The most common Cymbals are the Hi-Hats, Crash, Splash, Ride, and China. Although cymbals are not often required they form part of every orchestra; their chief use is for marking the rhythm, producing effects, or adding military color. Their unique timbre allows them to project even against a full orchestra and through the heaviest of orhestrations. Cymbals have been utilized historically to suggest frenzy, fury or bacchanalian revels, as seen in the Venus music in Wagner's Tannhäuser, Grieg's Peer Gynt suite, and Osmin's aria "O wie will ich triumphieren" from Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail. A pair of clash cymbals in profile. The bell is in green and the straps are in red. Orchestral crash cymbals are traditionally used in pairs, each one having a strap set in the bell of the cymbal by which they are held. Such a pair is known technically as a pair of clash cymbals, although this term is rarely used, see clash cymbals. They are confusingly sometimes referred to simply as crash cymbals, although this term properly applies also to some suspended cymbals. The sound can be obtained by rubbing their edges together in a sliding movement for a "sizzle", striking them against each other in what is called a "crash", tapping the edge of one against the body of the other in what is called a "tap-crash", scraping the edge of one from the inside of the bell to the edge for a "scrape" or "zishend," or shutting the cymbals together and choking the sound in what is called a "hi-hat chick." A skilled player can obtain an enormous dynamic range from such a pair of cymbals. For example, in Beethoven's ninth symphony, one of their first appearances in an orchestral work, they make their entry pianissimo, adding a touch of colour rather than an almighty crash. Clash cymbals are usually damped by pressing them against the player's body. A composer may write laissez vibrer, "Let vibrate" (usually abbreviated l.v.), secco (dry), or equivalent indications on the score; more usually, the player must judge exactly when to damp the cymbals based on the written duration of crash and the context in which it occurs. Clash cymbals have traditionally been accompanied by the bass drum playing an identical part. This combination, played loudly, is an effective way to accentuate a note since the two instruments together contribute to both very low and very high frequency ranges and provide a satisfying "crash-bang-wallop". In older music the composer sometimes provided just one part for this pair of instruments, writing senza piatti or piatti soli (Italian: "without cymbals" or "cymbals only") if the bass drum is to remain silent. However, the modern convention is for the instruments to have independent parts. Clash cymbals evolved into the low-sock and from this to the modern hi-hat. Even in a modern drum kit, they remain paired with the bass drum as the two instruments which are played with the player's feet. However, hi-hat cymbals tend to be heavy with little taper, more similar to a ride cymbal than to a crash cymbal as found in a drum kit, and perform a ride rather than a crash function. The second main orchestral use of cymbals is the suspended cymbal. This instrument takes its name from the traditional method of suspending the cymbal by means of a leather strap or rope, thus allowing the cymbal to vibrate as freely as possible for maximum musical effect. Early jazz drumming pioneers borrowed this style of cymbal mounting during the early 1900s and later drummers further developed this instrument in to the mounted horizontal or nearly horizontally mounted "crash" cymbals of a modern drum kit. Suspended cymbals are most often played with yarn wrapped mallets. However, some composers request other types of mallets like felt mallets or timpani beaters for different attack and sustain qualities. Suspended cymbals can produce bright and slicing tones when forcefully struck, and give an eerie transparent "windy" sound when played quietly. A tremolo, or roll (played with two mallets alternately striking on opposing sides of the cymbal) can build in volume from almost inaudible to an overwhelming climax in a satisfyingly smooth manner (as in Humperdink's Mother Goose Suite). Furthermore, the edge of a suspended cymbal may be hit with shoulder of a drum stick to obtain a sound somewhat akin to that of a pair of clash cymbals. Other methods of playing include scraping a coin or a triangle beater rapidly across the ridges on the top of the cymbal, giving a "zing" sound (as in the fourth movement of Dvořák's Symphony No. 9). Other effects that can be used include drawing a cello or bass bow across the edge of the cymbal for a sound not unlike squealing car brakes. On another note, in highschool marching bands, a "pit" may use a suspended cymbal for a song. This is held on a tree-like structure, similar to how it would be placed by a drumset. Also known as a high-top, the instrument's music will read it as a "sus. cym. or cymb." Ancient cymbals or tuned cymbals are much more rarely called for. Their timbre is entirely different, more like that of small hand-bells or of the notes of the keyed harmonica. They are not struck full against each other, but by one of their edges, and the note given in by them is higher in proportion as they are thicker and smaller. Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet calls for two pairs of cymbals, modelled on some old Pompeian instruments no larger than the hand (some are no larger than a crown piece), and tuned to F and B flat. The modern instruments descended from this line are the crotales. * China cymbals * crash cymbals * hi-hat cymbals * Persian cymbals * ride cymbals * Swish and pang cymbals * Sizzle cymbals * Splash cymbals * Trash Hats (Hi-Hat cymbal / china cymbal hybrid setup) * Clash cymbals * Finger cymbals - Zill * Suspended cymbals *Cymbal alloys *Cymbal making *Drum *Drum kit *Percussion instrument *Avedis Zildjian Company *Saluda Cymbals *Italian Bellotti Cymbals *Agean Cymbals *Bosphorus Cymbals *Meinl *Paiste *Sabian *Stagg *UFIP *Yamaha *Wuhan *Istanbul cymbals *Istanbul Agop *Turk Masters Cymbals :See also . * CymbalPlanet.com Welcome to the World of Cymbals * Accessory Fetish A Complete List of Cymbal Manufacturers * Cymbal Forum Discussion forum about cymbals. * Orchestral cymbal playing, with an excellent short history of cymbals *
Cymbal
What are the most common Cymbals?
The most common Cymbals are the Hi-Hats, Crash, Splash, Ride, and China.
data/set2/a6
Cymbal Cymbals are a modern percussion instrument. Cymbals consist of thin, normally round plates of various cymbal alloys; see cymbal making for a discussion of their manufacture. Most modern cymbals are of indefinite pitch (tuned sets have been manufactured but are rare), whereas small cup-shaped cymbals based on ancient designs sound a definite note (''see: crotales). Cymbals are used in modern orchestras and many military, marching, concert and other bands. They are one of the two instrument types that form the modern drum kit, the other being the drum, and are a basic part of much contemporary music. The most basic drum kit normally contains at least one suspended cymbal and a pair of hi-hat cymbals. The origins of cymbals can be traced back to prehistoric times. The ancient Egyptian cymbals closely resembled our own. The British Museum possesses two pairs, thirteen centimetres in diameter, one of which was found in the coffin of the mummy of Ankhhape, a sacred musician. Those used by the Assyrians were both plate- and cup-shaped, those of the Ancient Persians large-sized plates, made of brass, known as Sanj. The Greek cymbals were cup- or bell-shaped, and may be seen in the hands of innumerable fauns and satyrs in sculptures and on painted vases. The word cymbal is derived from the Latin cymbalum, which itself derives from the Greek word kumbalom, meaning a small bowl. * Bell- The center of a Cymbal. When hit with the side or shoulder of a drum stick, it causes a sound which is in a higher register than the rest of the cymbal. * Bow- The remaining surface of the Cymbal. This is where you get a "ping" sound. * Edge or rim- This is where you get the best "crash". Hitting the edge causes the cymbal to vibrate more, thus being louder. The most common Cymbals are the Hi-Hats, Crash, Splash, Ride, and China. Although cymbals are not often required they form part of every orchestra; their chief use is for marking the rhythm, producing effects, or adding military color. Their unique timbre allows them to project even against a full orchestra and through the heaviest of orhestrations. Cymbals have been utilized historically to suggest frenzy, fury or bacchanalian revels, as seen in the Venus music in Wagner's Tannhäuser, Grieg's Peer Gynt suite, and Osmin's aria "O wie will ich triumphieren" from Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail. A pair of clash cymbals in profile. The bell is in green and the straps are in red. Orchestral crash cymbals are traditionally used in pairs, each one having a strap set in the bell of the cymbal by which they are held. Such a pair is known technically as a pair of clash cymbals, although this term is rarely used, see clash cymbals. They are confusingly sometimes referred to simply as crash cymbals, although this term properly applies also to some suspended cymbals. The sound can be obtained by rubbing their edges together in a sliding movement for a "sizzle", striking them against each other in what is called a "crash", tapping the edge of one against the body of the other in what is called a "tap-crash", scraping the edge of one from the inside of the bell to the edge for a "scrape" or "zishend," or shutting the cymbals together and choking the sound in what is called a "hi-hat chick." A skilled player can obtain an enormous dynamic range from such a pair of cymbals. For example, in Beethoven's ninth symphony, one of their first appearances in an orchestral work, they make their entry pianissimo, adding a touch of colour rather than an almighty crash. Clash cymbals are usually damped by pressing them against the player's body. A composer may write laissez vibrer, "Let vibrate" (usually abbreviated l.v.), secco (dry), or equivalent indications on the score; more usually, the player must judge exactly when to damp the cymbals based on the written duration of crash and the context in which it occurs. Clash cymbals have traditionally been accompanied by the bass drum playing an identical part. This combination, played loudly, is an effective way to accentuate a note since the two instruments together contribute to both very low and very high frequency ranges and provide a satisfying "crash-bang-wallop". In older music the composer sometimes provided just one part for this pair of instruments, writing senza piatti or piatti soli (Italian: "without cymbals" or "cymbals only") if the bass drum is to remain silent. However, the modern convention is for the instruments to have independent parts. Clash cymbals evolved into the low-sock and from this to the modern hi-hat. Even in a modern drum kit, they remain paired with the bass drum as the two instruments which are played with the player's feet. However, hi-hat cymbals tend to be heavy with little taper, more similar to a ride cymbal than to a crash cymbal as found in a drum kit, and perform a ride rather than a crash function. The second main orchestral use of cymbals is the suspended cymbal. This instrument takes its name from the traditional method of suspending the cymbal by means of a leather strap or rope, thus allowing the cymbal to vibrate as freely as possible for maximum musical effect. Early jazz drumming pioneers borrowed this style of cymbal mounting during the early 1900s and later drummers further developed this instrument in to the mounted horizontal or nearly horizontally mounted "crash" cymbals of a modern drum kit. Suspended cymbals are most often played with yarn wrapped mallets. However, some composers request other types of mallets like felt mallets or timpani beaters for different attack and sustain qualities. Suspended cymbals can produce bright and slicing tones when forcefully struck, and give an eerie transparent "windy" sound when played quietly. A tremolo, or roll (played with two mallets alternately striking on opposing sides of the cymbal) can build in volume from almost inaudible to an overwhelming climax in a satisfyingly smooth manner (as in Humperdink's Mother Goose Suite). Furthermore, the edge of a suspended cymbal may be hit with shoulder of a drum stick to obtain a sound somewhat akin to that of a pair of clash cymbals. Other methods of playing include scraping a coin or a triangle beater rapidly across the ridges on the top of the cymbal, giving a "zing" sound (as in the fourth movement of Dvořák's Symphony No. 9). Other effects that can be used include drawing a cello or bass bow across the edge of the cymbal for a sound not unlike squealing car brakes. On another note, in highschool marching bands, a "pit" may use a suspended cymbal for a song. This is held on a tree-like structure, similar to how it would be placed by a drumset. Also known as a high-top, the instrument's music will read it as a "sus. cym. or cymb." Ancient cymbals or tuned cymbals are much more rarely called for. Their timbre is entirely different, more like that of small hand-bells or of the notes of the keyed harmonica. They are not struck full against each other, but by one of their edges, and the note given in by them is higher in proportion as they are thicker and smaller. Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet calls for two pairs of cymbals, modelled on some old Pompeian instruments no larger than the hand (some are no larger than a crown piece), and tuned to F and B flat. The modern instruments descended from this line are the crotales. * China cymbals * crash cymbals * hi-hat cymbals * Persian cymbals * ride cymbals * Swish and pang cymbals * Sizzle cymbals * Splash cymbals * Trash Hats (Hi-Hat cymbal / china cymbal hybrid setup) * Clash cymbals * Finger cymbals - Zill * Suspended cymbals *Cymbal alloys *Cymbal making *Drum *Drum kit *Percussion instrument *Avedis Zildjian Company *Saluda Cymbals *Italian Bellotti Cymbals *Agean Cymbals *Bosphorus Cymbals *Meinl *Paiste *Sabian *Stagg *UFIP *Yamaha *Wuhan *Istanbul cymbals *Istanbul Agop *Turk Masters Cymbals :See also . * CymbalPlanet.com Welcome to the World of Cymbals * Accessory Fetish A Complete List of Cymbal Manufacturers * Cymbal Forum Discussion forum about cymbals. * Orchestral cymbal playing, with an excellent short history of cymbals *
Cymbal
What are the most common Cymbals?
Hi-Hats, Crash, Splash, Ride, and China
data/set2/a6
Cymbal Cymbals are a modern percussion instrument. Cymbals consist of thin, normally round plates of various cymbal alloys; see cymbal making for a discussion of their manufacture. Most modern cymbals are of indefinite pitch (tuned sets have been manufactured but are rare), whereas small cup-shaped cymbals based on ancient designs sound a definite note (''see: crotales). Cymbals are used in modern orchestras and many military, marching, concert and other bands. They are one of the two instrument types that form the modern drum kit, the other being the drum, and are a basic part of much contemporary music. The most basic drum kit normally contains at least one suspended cymbal and a pair of hi-hat cymbals. The origins of cymbals can be traced back to prehistoric times. The ancient Egyptian cymbals closely resembled our own. The British Museum possesses two pairs, thirteen centimetres in diameter, one of which was found in the coffin of the mummy of Ankhhape, a sacred musician. Those used by the Assyrians were both plate- and cup-shaped, those of the Ancient Persians large-sized plates, made of brass, known as Sanj. The Greek cymbals were cup- or bell-shaped, and may be seen in the hands of innumerable fauns and satyrs in sculptures and on painted vases. The word cymbal is derived from the Latin cymbalum, which itself derives from the Greek word kumbalom, meaning a small bowl. * Bell- The center of a Cymbal. When hit with the side or shoulder of a drum stick, it causes a sound which is in a higher register than the rest of the cymbal. * Bow- The remaining surface of the Cymbal. This is where you get a "ping" sound. * Edge or rim- This is where you get the best "crash". Hitting the edge causes the cymbal to vibrate more, thus being louder. The most common Cymbals are the Hi-Hats, Crash, Splash, Ride, and China. Although cymbals are not often required they form part of every orchestra; their chief use is for marking the rhythm, producing effects, or adding military color. Their unique timbre allows them to project even against a full orchestra and through the heaviest of orhestrations. Cymbals have been utilized historically to suggest frenzy, fury or bacchanalian revels, as seen in the Venus music in Wagner's Tannhäuser, Grieg's Peer Gynt suite, and Osmin's aria "O wie will ich triumphieren" from Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail. A pair of clash cymbals in profile. The bell is in green and the straps are in red. Orchestral crash cymbals are traditionally used in pairs, each one having a strap set in the bell of the cymbal by which they are held. Such a pair is known technically as a pair of clash cymbals, although this term is rarely used, see clash cymbals. They are confusingly sometimes referred to simply as crash cymbals, although this term properly applies also to some suspended cymbals. The sound can be obtained by rubbing their edges together in a sliding movement for a "sizzle", striking them against each other in what is called a "crash", tapping the edge of one against the body of the other in what is called a "tap-crash", scraping the edge of one from the inside of the bell to the edge for a "scrape" or "zishend," or shutting the cymbals together and choking the sound in what is called a "hi-hat chick." A skilled player can obtain an enormous dynamic range from such a pair of cymbals. For example, in Beethoven's ninth symphony, one of their first appearances in an orchestral work, they make their entry pianissimo, adding a touch of colour rather than an almighty crash. Clash cymbals are usually damped by pressing them against the player's body. A composer may write laissez vibrer, "Let vibrate" (usually abbreviated l.v.), secco (dry), or equivalent indications on the score; more usually, the player must judge exactly when to damp the cymbals based on the written duration of crash and the context in which it occurs. Clash cymbals have traditionally been accompanied by the bass drum playing an identical part. This combination, played loudly, is an effective way to accentuate a note since the two instruments together contribute to both very low and very high frequency ranges and provide a satisfying "crash-bang-wallop". In older music the composer sometimes provided just one part for this pair of instruments, writing senza piatti or piatti soli (Italian: "without cymbals" or "cymbals only") if the bass drum is to remain silent. However, the modern convention is for the instruments to have independent parts. Clash cymbals evolved into the low-sock and from this to the modern hi-hat. Even in a modern drum kit, they remain paired with the bass drum as the two instruments which are played with the player's feet. However, hi-hat cymbals tend to be heavy with little taper, more similar to a ride cymbal than to a crash cymbal as found in a drum kit, and perform a ride rather than a crash function. The second main orchestral use of cymbals is the suspended cymbal. This instrument takes its name from the traditional method of suspending the cymbal by means of a leather strap or rope, thus allowing the cymbal to vibrate as freely as possible for maximum musical effect. Early jazz drumming pioneers borrowed this style of cymbal mounting during the early 1900s and later drummers further developed this instrument in to the mounted horizontal or nearly horizontally mounted "crash" cymbals of a modern drum kit. Suspended cymbals are most often played with yarn wrapped mallets. However, some composers request other types of mallets like felt mallets or timpani beaters for different attack and sustain qualities. Suspended cymbals can produce bright and slicing tones when forcefully struck, and give an eerie transparent "windy" sound when played quietly. A tremolo, or roll (played with two mallets alternately striking on opposing sides of the cymbal) can build in volume from almost inaudible to an overwhelming climax in a satisfyingly smooth manner (as in Humperdink's Mother Goose Suite). Furthermore, the edge of a suspended cymbal may be hit with shoulder of a drum stick to obtain a sound somewhat akin to that of a pair of clash cymbals. Other methods of playing include scraping a coin or a triangle beater rapidly across the ridges on the top of the cymbal, giving a "zing" sound (as in the fourth movement of Dvořák's Symphony No. 9). Other effects that can be used include drawing a cello or bass bow across the edge of the cymbal for a sound not unlike squealing car brakes. On another note, in highschool marching bands, a "pit" may use a suspended cymbal for a song. This is held on a tree-like structure, similar to how it would be placed by a drumset. Also known as a high-top, the instrument's music will read it as a "sus. cym. or cymb." Ancient cymbals or tuned cymbals are much more rarely called for. Their timbre is entirely different, more like that of small hand-bells or of the notes of the keyed harmonica. They are not struck full against each other, but by one of their edges, and the note given in by them is higher in proportion as they are thicker and smaller. Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet calls for two pairs of cymbals, modelled on some old Pompeian instruments no larger than the hand (some are no larger than a crown piece), and tuned to F and B flat. The modern instruments descended from this line are the crotales. * China cymbals * crash cymbals * hi-hat cymbals * Persian cymbals * ride cymbals * Swish and pang cymbals * Sizzle cymbals * Splash cymbals * Trash Hats (Hi-Hat cymbal / china cymbal hybrid setup) * Clash cymbals * Finger cymbals - Zill * Suspended cymbals *Cymbal alloys *Cymbal making *Drum *Drum kit *Percussion instrument *Avedis Zildjian Company *Saluda Cymbals *Italian Bellotti Cymbals *Agean Cymbals *Bosphorus Cymbals *Meinl *Paiste *Sabian *Stagg *UFIP *Yamaha *Wuhan *Istanbul cymbals *Istanbul Agop *Turk Masters Cymbals :See also . * CymbalPlanet.com Welcome to the World of Cymbals * Accessory Fetish A Complete List of Cymbal Manufacturers * Cymbal Forum Discussion forum about cymbals. * Orchestral cymbal playing, with an excellent short history of cymbals *
Cymbal
What is the second main orchestral use of cymbals?
The suspended cymbal is the second main orchestral use of symbals.
data/set2/a6
Cymbal Cymbals are a modern percussion instrument. Cymbals consist of thin, normally round plates of various cymbal alloys; see cymbal making for a discussion of their manufacture. Most modern cymbals are of indefinite pitch (tuned sets have been manufactured but are rare), whereas small cup-shaped cymbals based on ancient designs sound a definite note (''see: crotales). Cymbals are used in modern orchestras and many military, marching, concert and other bands. They are one of the two instrument types that form the modern drum kit, the other being the drum, and are a basic part of much contemporary music. The most basic drum kit normally contains at least one suspended cymbal and a pair of hi-hat cymbals. The origins of cymbals can be traced back to prehistoric times. The ancient Egyptian cymbals closely resembled our own. The British Museum possesses two pairs, thirteen centimetres in diameter, one of which was found in the coffin of the mummy of Ankhhape, a sacred musician. Those used by the Assyrians were both plate- and cup-shaped, those of the Ancient Persians large-sized plates, made of brass, known as Sanj. The Greek cymbals were cup- or bell-shaped, and may be seen in the hands of innumerable fauns and satyrs in sculptures and on painted vases. The word cymbal is derived from the Latin cymbalum, which itself derives from the Greek word kumbalom, meaning a small bowl. * Bell- The center of a Cymbal. When hit with the side or shoulder of a drum stick, it causes a sound which is in a higher register than the rest of the cymbal. * Bow- The remaining surface of the Cymbal. This is where you get a "ping" sound. * Edge or rim- This is where you get the best "crash". Hitting the edge causes the cymbal to vibrate more, thus being louder. The most common Cymbals are the Hi-Hats, Crash, Splash, Ride, and China. Although cymbals are not often required they form part of every orchestra; their chief use is for marking the rhythm, producing effects, or adding military color. Their unique timbre allows them to project even against a full orchestra and through the heaviest of orhestrations. Cymbals have been utilized historically to suggest frenzy, fury or bacchanalian revels, as seen in the Venus music in Wagner's Tannhäuser, Grieg's Peer Gynt suite, and Osmin's aria "O wie will ich triumphieren" from Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail. A pair of clash cymbals in profile. The bell is in green and the straps are in red. Orchestral crash cymbals are traditionally used in pairs, each one having a strap set in the bell of the cymbal by which they are held. Such a pair is known technically as a pair of clash cymbals, although this term is rarely used, see clash cymbals. They are confusingly sometimes referred to simply as crash cymbals, although this term properly applies also to some suspended cymbals. The sound can be obtained by rubbing their edges together in a sliding movement for a "sizzle", striking them against each other in what is called a "crash", tapping the edge of one against the body of the other in what is called a "tap-crash", scraping the edge of one from the inside of the bell to the edge for a "scrape" or "zishend," or shutting the cymbals together and choking the sound in what is called a "hi-hat chick." A skilled player can obtain an enormous dynamic range from such a pair of cymbals. For example, in Beethoven's ninth symphony, one of their first appearances in an orchestral work, they make their entry pianissimo, adding a touch of colour rather than an almighty crash. Clash cymbals are usually damped by pressing them against the player's body. A composer may write laissez vibrer, "Let vibrate" (usually abbreviated l.v.), secco (dry), or equivalent indications on the score; more usually, the player must judge exactly when to damp the cymbals based on the written duration of crash and the context in which it occurs. Clash cymbals have traditionally been accompanied by the bass drum playing an identical part. This combination, played loudly, is an effective way to accentuate a note since the two instruments together contribute to both very low and very high frequency ranges and provide a satisfying "crash-bang-wallop". In older music the composer sometimes provided just one part for this pair of instruments, writing senza piatti or piatti soli (Italian: "without cymbals" or "cymbals only") if the bass drum is to remain silent. However, the modern convention is for the instruments to have independent parts. Clash cymbals evolved into the low-sock and from this to the modern hi-hat. Even in a modern drum kit, they remain paired with the bass drum as the two instruments which are played with the player's feet. However, hi-hat cymbals tend to be heavy with little taper, more similar to a ride cymbal than to a crash cymbal as found in a drum kit, and perform a ride rather than a crash function. The second main orchestral use of cymbals is the suspended cymbal. This instrument takes its name from the traditional method of suspending the cymbal by means of a leather strap or rope, thus allowing the cymbal to vibrate as freely as possible for maximum musical effect. Early jazz drumming pioneers borrowed this style of cymbal mounting during the early 1900s and later drummers further developed this instrument in to the mounted horizontal or nearly horizontally mounted "crash" cymbals of a modern drum kit. Suspended cymbals are most often played with yarn wrapped mallets. However, some composers request other types of mallets like felt mallets or timpani beaters for different attack and sustain qualities. Suspended cymbals can produce bright and slicing tones when forcefully struck, and give an eerie transparent "windy" sound when played quietly. A tremolo, or roll (played with two mallets alternately striking on opposing sides of the cymbal) can build in volume from almost inaudible to an overwhelming climax in a satisfyingly smooth manner (as in Humperdink's Mother Goose Suite). Furthermore, the edge of a suspended cymbal may be hit with shoulder of a drum stick to obtain a sound somewhat akin to that of a pair of clash cymbals. Other methods of playing include scraping a coin or a triangle beater rapidly across the ridges on the top of the cymbal, giving a "zing" sound (as in the fourth movement of Dvořák's Symphony No. 9). Other effects that can be used include drawing a cello or bass bow across the edge of the cymbal for a sound not unlike squealing car brakes. On another note, in highschool marching bands, a "pit" may use a suspended cymbal for a song. This is held on a tree-like structure, similar to how it would be placed by a drumset. Also known as a high-top, the instrument's music will read it as a "sus. cym. or cymb." Ancient cymbals or tuned cymbals are much more rarely called for. Their timbre is entirely different, more like that of small hand-bells or of the notes of the keyed harmonica. They are not struck full against each other, but by one of their edges, and the note given in by them is higher in proportion as they are thicker and smaller. Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet calls for two pairs of cymbals, modelled on some old Pompeian instruments no larger than the hand (some are no larger than a crown piece), and tuned to F and B flat. The modern instruments descended from this line are the crotales. * China cymbals * crash cymbals * hi-hat cymbals * Persian cymbals * ride cymbals * Swish and pang cymbals * Sizzle cymbals * Splash cymbals * Trash Hats (Hi-Hat cymbal / china cymbal hybrid setup) * Clash cymbals * Finger cymbals - Zill * Suspended cymbals *Cymbal alloys *Cymbal making *Drum *Drum kit *Percussion instrument *Avedis Zildjian Company *Saluda Cymbals *Italian Bellotti Cymbals *Agean Cymbals *Bosphorus Cymbals *Meinl *Paiste *Sabian *Stagg *UFIP *Yamaha *Wuhan *Istanbul cymbals *Istanbul Agop *Turk Masters Cymbals :See also . * CymbalPlanet.com Welcome to the World of Cymbals * Accessory Fetish A Complete List of Cymbal Manufacturers * Cymbal Forum Discussion forum about cymbals. * Orchestral cymbal playing, with an excellent short history of cymbals *
Cymbal
What is the second main orchestral use of cymbals?
The suspended cymbal
data/set2/a6
Cymbal Cymbals are a modern percussion instrument. Cymbals consist of thin, normally round plates of various cymbal alloys; see cymbal making for a discussion of their manufacture. Most modern cymbals are of indefinite pitch (tuned sets have been manufactured but are rare), whereas small cup-shaped cymbals based on ancient designs sound a definite note (''see: crotales). Cymbals are used in modern orchestras and many military, marching, concert and other bands. They are one of the two instrument types that form the modern drum kit, the other being the drum, and are a basic part of much contemporary music. The most basic drum kit normally contains at least one suspended cymbal and a pair of hi-hat cymbals. The origins of cymbals can be traced back to prehistoric times. The ancient Egyptian cymbals closely resembled our own. The British Museum possesses two pairs, thirteen centimetres in diameter, one of which was found in the coffin of the mummy of Ankhhape, a sacred musician. Those used by the Assyrians were both plate- and cup-shaped, those of the Ancient Persians large-sized plates, made of brass, known as Sanj. The Greek cymbals were cup- or bell-shaped, and may be seen in the hands of innumerable fauns and satyrs in sculptures and on painted vases. The word cymbal is derived from the Latin cymbalum, which itself derives from the Greek word kumbalom, meaning a small bowl. * Bell- The center of a Cymbal. When hit with the side or shoulder of a drum stick, it causes a sound which is in a higher register than the rest of the cymbal. * Bow- The remaining surface of the Cymbal. This is where you get a "ping" sound. * Edge or rim- This is where you get the best "crash". Hitting the edge causes the cymbal to vibrate more, thus being louder. The most common Cymbals are the Hi-Hats, Crash, Splash, Ride, and China. Although cymbals are not often required they form part of every orchestra; their chief use is for marking the rhythm, producing effects, or adding military color. Their unique timbre allows them to project even against a full orchestra and through the heaviest of orhestrations. Cymbals have been utilized historically to suggest frenzy, fury or bacchanalian revels, as seen in the Venus music in Wagner's Tannhäuser, Grieg's Peer Gynt suite, and Osmin's aria "O wie will ich triumphieren" from Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail. A pair of clash cymbals in profile. The bell is in green and the straps are in red. Orchestral crash cymbals are traditionally used in pairs, each one having a strap set in the bell of the cymbal by which they are held. Such a pair is known technically as a pair of clash cymbals, although this term is rarely used, see clash cymbals. They are confusingly sometimes referred to simply as crash cymbals, although this term properly applies also to some suspended cymbals. The sound can be obtained by rubbing their edges together in a sliding movement for a "sizzle", striking them against each other in what is called a "crash", tapping the edge of one against the body of the other in what is called a "tap-crash", scraping the edge of one from the inside of the bell to the edge for a "scrape" or "zishend," or shutting the cymbals together and choking the sound in what is called a "hi-hat chick." A skilled player can obtain an enormous dynamic range from such a pair of cymbals. For example, in Beethoven's ninth symphony, one of their first appearances in an orchestral work, they make their entry pianissimo, adding a touch of colour rather than an almighty crash. Clash cymbals are usually damped by pressing them against the player's body. A composer may write laissez vibrer, "Let vibrate" (usually abbreviated l.v.), secco (dry), or equivalent indications on the score; more usually, the player must judge exactly when to damp the cymbals based on the written duration of crash and the context in which it occurs. Clash cymbals have traditionally been accompanied by the bass drum playing an identical part. This combination, played loudly, is an effective way to accentuate a note since the two instruments together contribute to both very low and very high frequency ranges and provide a satisfying "crash-bang-wallop". In older music the composer sometimes provided just one part for this pair of instruments, writing senza piatti or piatti soli (Italian: "without cymbals" or "cymbals only") if the bass drum is to remain silent. However, the modern convention is for the instruments to have independent parts. Clash cymbals evolved into the low-sock and from this to the modern hi-hat. Even in a modern drum kit, they remain paired with the bass drum as the two instruments which are played with the player's feet. However, hi-hat cymbals tend to be heavy with little taper, more similar to a ride cymbal than to a crash cymbal as found in a drum kit, and perform a ride rather than a crash function. The second main orchestral use of cymbals is the suspended cymbal. This instrument takes its name from the traditional method of suspending the cymbal by means of a leather strap or rope, thus allowing the cymbal to vibrate as freely as possible for maximum musical effect. Early jazz drumming pioneers borrowed this style of cymbal mounting during the early 1900s and later drummers further developed this instrument in to the mounted horizontal or nearly horizontally mounted "crash" cymbals of a modern drum kit. Suspended cymbals are most often played with yarn wrapped mallets. However, some composers request other types of mallets like felt mallets or timpani beaters for different attack and sustain qualities. Suspended cymbals can produce bright and slicing tones when forcefully struck, and give an eerie transparent "windy" sound when played quietly. A tremolo, or roll (played with two mallets alternately striking on opposing sides of the cymbal) can build in volume from almost inaudible to an overwhelming climax in a satisfyingly smooth manner (as in Humperdink's Mother Goose Suite). Furthermore, the edge of a suspended cymbal may be hit with shoulder of a drum stick to obtain a sound somewhat akin to that of a pair of clash cymbals. Other methods of playing include scraping a coin or a triangle beater rapidly across the ridges on the top of the cymbal, giving a "zing" sound (as in the fourth movement of Dvořák's Symphony No. 9). Other effects that can be used include drawing a cello or bass bow across the edge of the cymbal for a sound not unlike squealing car brakes. On another note, in highschool marching bands, a "pit" may use a suspended cymbal for a song. This is held on a tree-like structure, similar to how it would be placed by a drumset. Also known as a high-top, the instrument's music will read it as a "sus. cym. or cymb." Ancient cymbals or tuned cymbals are much more rarely called for. Their timbre is entirely different, more like that of small hand-bells or of the notes of the keyed harmonica. They are not struck full against each other, but by one of their edges, and the note given in by them is higher in proportion as they are thicker and smaller. Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet calls for two pairs of cymbals, modelled on some old Pompeian instruments no larger than the hand (some are no larger than a crown piece), and tuned to F and B flat. The modern instruments descended from this line are the crotales. * China cymbals * crash cymbals * hi-hat cymbals * Persian cymbals * ride cymbals * Swish and pang cymbals * Sizzle cymbals * Splash cymbals * Trash Hats (Hi-Hat cymbal / china cymbal hybrid setup) * Clash cymbals * Finger cymbals - Zill * Suspended cymbals *Cymbal alloys *Cymbal making *Drum *Drum kit *Percussion instrument *Avedis Zildjian Company *Saluda Cymbals *Italian Bellotti Cymbals *Agean Cymbals *Bosphorus Cymbals *Meinl *Paiste *Sabian *Stagg *UFIP *Yamaha *Wuhan *Istanbul cymbals *Istanbul Agop *Turk Masters Cymbals :See also . * CymbalPlanet.com Welcome to the World of Cymbals * Accessory Fetish A Complete List of Cymbal Manufacturers * Cymbal Forum Discussion forum about cymbals. * Orchestral cymbal playing, with an excellent short history of cymbals *
Cymbal
What have clash cymbals traditionally been accompanied by?
Clash cymbals have traditionally been accompanied by the bass drum playing an identical part.
data/set2/a6
Cymbal Cymbals are a modern percussion instrument. Cymbals consist of thin, normally round plates of various cymbal alloys; see cymbal making for a discussion of their manufacture. Most modern cymbals are of indefinite pitch (tuned sets have been manufactured but are rare), whereas small cup-shaped cymbals based on ancient designs sound a definite note (''see: crotales). Cymbals are used in modern orchestras and many military, marching, concert and other bands. They are one of the two instrument types that form the modern drum kit, the other being the drum, and are a basic part of much contemporary music. The most basic drum kit normally contains at least one suspended cymbal and a pair of hi-hat cymbals. The origins of cymbals can be traced back to prehistoric times. The ancient Egyptian cymbals closely resembled our own. The British Museum possesses two pairs, thirteen centimetres in diameter, one of which was found in the coffin of the mummy of Ankhhape, a sacred musician. Those used by the Assyrians were both plate- and cup-shaped, those of the Ancient Persians large-sized plates, made of brass, known as Sanj. The Greek cymbals were cup- or bell-shaped, and may be seen in the hands of innumerable fauns and satyrs in sculptures and on painted vases. The word cymbal is derived from the Latin cymbalum, which itself derives from the Greek word kumbalom, meaning a small bowl. * Bell- The center of a Cymbal. When hit with the side or shoulder of a drum stick, it causes a sound which is in a higher register than the rest of the cymbal. * Bow- The remaining surface of the Cymbal. This is where you get a "ping" sound. * Edge or rim- This is where you get the best "crash". Hitting the edge causes the cymbal to vibrate more, thus being louder. The most common Cymbals are the Hi-Hats, Crash, Splash, Ride, and China. Although cymbals are not often required they form part of every orchestra; their chief use is for marking the rhythm, producing effects, or adding military color. Their unique timbre allows them to project even against a full orchestra and through the heaviest of orhestrations. Cymbals have been utilized historically to suggest frenzy, fury or bacchanalian revels, as seen in the Venus music in Wagner's Tannhäuser, Grieg's Peer Gynt suite, and Osmin's aria "O wie will ich triumphieren" from Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail. A pair of clash cymbals in profile. The bell is in green and the straps are in red. Orchestral crash cymbals are traditionally used in pairs, each one having a strap set in the bell of the cymbal by which they are held. Such a pair is known technically as a pair of clash cymbals, although this term is rarely used, see clash cymbals. They are confusingly sometimes referred to simply as crash cymbals, although this term properly applies also to some suspended cymbals. The sound can be obtained by rubbing their edges together in a sliding movement for a "sizzle", striking them against each other in what is called a "crash", tapping the edge of one against the body of the other in what is called a "tap-crash", scraping the edge of one from the inside of the bell to the edge for a "scrape" or "zishend," or shutting the cymbals together and choking the sound in what is called a "hi-hat chick." A skilled player can obtain an enormous dynamic range from such a pair of cymbals. For example, in Beethoven's ninth symphony, one of their first appearances in an orchestral work, they make their entry pianissimo, adding a touch of colour rather than an almighty crash. Clash cymbals are usually damped by pressing them against the player's body. A composer may write laissez vibrer, "Let vibrate" (usually abbreviated l.v.), secco (dry), or equivalent indications on the score; more usually, the player must judge exactly when to damp the cymbals based on the written duration of crash and the context in which it occurs. Clash cymbals have traditionally been accompanied by the bass drum playing an identical part. This combination, played loudly, is an effective way to accentuate a note since the two instruments together contribute to both very low and very high frequency ranges and provide a satisfying "crash-bang-wallop". In older music the composer sometimes provided just one part for this pair of instruments, writing senza piatti or piatti soli (Italian: "without cymbals" or "cymbals only") if the bass drum is to remain silent. However, the modern convention is for the instruments to have independent parts. Clash cymbals evolved into the low-sock and from this to the modern hi-hat. Even in a modern drum kit, they remain paired with the bass drum as the two instruments which are played with the player's feet. However, hi-hat cymbals tend to be heavy with little taper, more similar to a ride cymbal than to a crash cymbal as found in a drum kit, and perform a ride rather than a crash function. The second main orchestral use of cymbals is the suspended cymbal. This instrument takes its name from the traditional method of suspending the cymbal by means of a leather strap or rope, thus allowing the cymbal to vibrate as freely as possible for maximum musical effect. Early jazz drumming pioneers borrowed this style of cymbal mounting during the early 1900s and later drummers further developed this instrument in to the mounted horizontal or nearly horizontally mounted "crash" cymbals of a modern drum kit. Suspended cymbals are most often played with yarn wrapped mallets. However, some composers request other types of mallets like felt mallets or timpani beaters for different attack and sustain qualities. Suspended cymbals can produce bright and slicing tones when forcefully struck, and give an eerie transparent "windy" sound when played quietly. A tremolo, or roll (played with two mallets alternately striking on opposing sides of the cymbal) can build in volume from almost inaudible to an overwhelming climax in a satisfyingly smooth manner (as in Humperdink's Mother Goose Suite). Furthermore, the edge of a suspended cymbal may be hit with shoulder of a drum stick to obtain a sound somewhat akin to that of a pair of clash cymbals. Other methods of playing include scraping a coin or a triangle beater rapidly across the ridges on the top of the cymbal, giving a "zing" sound (as in the fourth movement of Dvořák's Symphony No. 9). Other effects that can be used include drawing a cello or bass bow across the edge of the cymbal for a sound not unlike squealing car brakes. On another note, in highschool marching bands, a "pit" may use a suspended cymbal for a song. This is held on a tree-like structure, similar to how it would be placed by a drumset. Also known as a high-top, the instrument's music will read it as a "sus. cym. or cymb." Ancient cymbals or tuned cymbals are much more rarely called for. Their timbre is entirely different, more like that of small hand-bells or of the notes of the keyed harmonica. They are not struck full against each other, but by one of their edges, and the note given in by them is higher in proportion as they are thicker and smaller. Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet calls for two pairs of cymbals, modelled on some old Pompeian instruments no larger than the hand (some are no larger than a crown piece), and tuned to F and B flat. The modern instruments descended from this line are the crotales. * China cymbals * crash cymbals * hi-hat cymbals * Persian cymbals * ride cymbals * Swish and pang cymbals * Sizzle cymbals * Splash cymbals * Trash Hats (Hi-Hat cymbal / china cymbal hybrid setup) * Clash cymbals * Finger cymbals - Zill * Suspended cymbals *Cymbal alloys *Cymbal making *Drum *Drum kit *Percussion instrument *Avedis Zildjian Company *Saluda Cymbals *Italian Bellotti Cymbals *Agean Cymbals *Bosphorus Cymbals *Meinl *Paiste *Sabian *Stagg *UFIP *Yamaha *Wuhan *Istanbul cymbals *Istanbul Agop *Turk Masters Cymbals :See also . * CymbalPlanet.com Welcome to the World of Cymbals * Accessory Fetish A Complete List of Cymbal Manufacturers * Cymbal Forum Discussion forum about cymbals. * Orchestral cymbal playing, with an excellent short history of cymbals *
Cymbal
What have clash cymbals traditionally been accompanied by?
The bass drum playing an identical part
data/set2/a6
Cymbal Cymbals are a modern percussion instrument. Cymbals consist of thin, normally round plates of various cymbal alloys; see cymbal making for a discussion of their manufacture. Most modern cymbals are of indefinite pitch (tuned sets have been manufactured but are rare), whereas small cup-shaped cymbals based on ancient designs sound a definite note (''see: crotales). Cymbals are used in modern orchestras and many military, marching, concert and other bands. They are one of the two instrument types that form the modern drum kit, the other being the drum, and are a basic part of much contemporary music. The most basic drum kit normally contains at least one suspended cymbal and a pair of hi-hat cymbals. The origins of cymbals can be traced back to prehistoric times. The ancient Egyptian cymbals closely resembled our own. The British Museum possesses two pairs, thirteen centimetres in diameter, one of which was found in the coffin of the mummy of Ankhhape, a sacred musician. Those used by the Assyrians were both plate- and cup-shaped, those of the Ancient Persians large-sized plates, made of brass, known as Sanj. The Greek cymbals were cup- or bell-shaped, and may be seen in the hands of innumerable fauns and satyrs in sculptures and on painted vases. The word cymbal is derived from the Latin cymbalum, which itself derives from the Greek word kumbalom, meaning a small bowl. * Bell- The center of a Cymbal. When hit with the side or shoulder of a drum stick, it causes a sound which is in a higher register than the rest of the cymbal. * Bow- The remaining surface of the Cymbal. This is where you get a "ping" sound. * Edge or rim- This is where you get the best "crash". Hitting the edge causes the cymbal to vibrate more, thus being louder. The most common Cymbals are the Hi-Hats, Crash, Splash, Ride, and China. Although cymbals are not often required they form part of every orchestra; their chief use is for marking the rhythm, producing effects, or adding military color. Their unique timbre allows them to project even against a full orchestra and through the heaviest of orhestrations. Cymbals have been utilized historically to suggest frenzy, fury or bacchanalian revels, as seen in the Venus music in Wagner's Tannhäuser, Grieg's Peer Gynt suite, and Osmin's aria "O wie will ich triumphieren" from Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail. A pair of clash cymbals in profile. The bell is in green and the straps are in red. Orchestral crash cymbals are traditionally used in pairs, each one having a strap set in the bell of the cymbal by which they are held. Such a pair is known technically as a pair of clash cymbals, although this term is rarely used, see clash cymbals. They are confusingly sometimes referred to simply as crash cymbals, although this term properly applies also to some suspended cymbals. The sound can be obtained by rubbing their edges together in a sliding movement for a "sizzle", striking them against each other in what is called a "crash", tapping the edge of one against the body of the other in what is called a "tap-crash", scraping the edge of one from the inside of the bell to the edge for a "scrape" or "zishend," or shutting the cymbals together and choking the sound in what is called a "hi-hat chick." A skilled player can obtain an enormous dynamic range from such a pair of cymbals. For example, in Beethoven's ninth symphony, one of their first appearances in an orchestral work, they make their entry pianissimo, adding a touch of colour rather than an almighty crash. Clash cymbals are usually damped by pressing them against the player's body. A composer may write laissez vibrer, "Let vibrate" (usually abbreviated l.v.), secco (dry), or equivalent indications on the score; more usually, the player must judge exactly when to damp the cymbals based on the written duration of crash and the context in which it occurs. Clash cymbals have traditionally been accompanied by the bass drum playing an identical part. This combination, played loudly, is an effective way to accentuate a note since the two instruments together contribute to both very low and very high frequency ranges and provide a satisfying "crash-bang-wallop". In older music the composer sometimes provided just one part for this pair of instruments, writing senza piatti or piatti soli (Italian: "without cymbals" or "cymbals only") if the bass drum is to remain silent. However, the modern convention is for the instruments to have independent parts. Clash cymbals evolved into the low-sock and from this to the modern hi-hat. Even in a modern drum kit, they remain paired with the bass drum as the two instruments which are played with the player's feet. However, hi-hat cymbals tend to be heavy with little taper, more similar to a ride cymbal than to a crash cymbal as found in a drum kit, and perform a ride rather than a crash function. The second main orchestral use of cymbals is the suspended cymbal. This instrument takes its name from the traditional method of suspending the cymbal by means of a leather strap or rope, thus allowing the cymbal to vibrate as freely as possible for maximum musical effect. Early jazz drumming pioneers borrowed this style of cymbal mounting during the early 1900s and later drummers further developed this instrument in to the mounted horizontal or nearly horizontally mounted "crash" cymbals of a modern drum kit. Suspended cymbals are most often played with yarn wrapped mallets. However, some composers request other types of mallets like felt mallets or timpani beaters for different attack and sustain qualities. Suspended cymbals can produce bright and slicing tones when forcefully struck, and give an eerie transparent "windy" sound when played quietly. A tremolo, or roll (played with two mallets alternately striking on opposing sides of the cymbal) can build in volume from almost inaudible to an overwhelming climax in a satisfyingly smooth manner (as in Humperdink's Mother Goose Suite). Furthermore, the edge of a suspended cymbal may be hit with shoulder of a drum stick to obtain a sound somewhat akin to that of a pair of clash cymbals. Other methods of playing include scraping a coin or a triangle beater rapidly across the ridges on the top of the cymbal, giving a "zing" sound (as in the fourth movement of Dvořák's Symphony No. 9). Other effects that can be used include drawing a cello or bass bow across the edge of the cymbal for a sound not unlike squealing car brakes. On another note, in highschool marching bands, a "pit" may use a suspended cymbal for a song. This is held on a tree-like structure, similar to how it would be placed by a drumset. Also known as a high-top, the instrument's music will read it as a "sus. cym. or cymb." Ancient cymbals or tuned cymbals are much more rarely called for. Their timbre is entirely different, more like that of small hand-bells or of the notes of the keyed harmonica. They are not struck full against each other, but by one of their edges, and the note given in by them is higher in proportion as they are thicker and smaller. Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet calls for two pairs of cymbals, modelled on some old Pompeian instruments no larger than the hand (some are no larger than a crown piece), and tuned to F and B flat. The modern instruments descended from this line are the crotales. * China cymbals * crash cymbals * hi-hat cymbals * Persian cymbals * ride cymbals * Swish and pang cymbals * Sizzle cymbals * Splash cymbals * Trash Hats (Hi-Hat cymbal / china cymbal hybrid setup) * Clash cymbals * Finger cymbals - Zill * Suspended cymbals *Cymbal alloys *Cymbal making *Drum *Drum kit *Percussion instrument *Avedis Zildjian Company *Saluda Cymbals *Italian Bellotti Cymbals *Agean Cymbals *Bosphorus Cymbals *Meinl *Paiste *Sabian *Stagg *UFIP *Yamaha *Wuhan *Istanbul cymbals *Istanbul Agop *Turk Masters Cymbals :See also . * CymbalPlanet.com Welcome to the World of Cymbals * Accessory Fetish A Complete List of Cymbal Manufacturers * Cymbal Forum Discussion forum about cymbals. * Orchestral cymbal playing, with an excellent short history of cymbals *
Cymbal
What happens when the center of a Cymbal is hit?
It causes a sound which is in a higher register than the rest of the symbal.
data/set2/a6
Cymbal Cymbals are a modern percussion instrument. Cymbals consist of thin, normally round plates of various cymbal alloys; see cymbal making for a discussion of their manufacture. Most modern cymbals are of indefinite pitch (tuned sets have been manufactured but are rare), whereas small cup-shaped cymbals based on ancient designs sound a definite note (''see: crotales). Cymbals are used in modern orchestras and many military, marching, concert and other bands. They are one of the two instrument types that form the modern drum kit, the other being the drum, and are a basic part of much contemporary music. The most basic drum kit normally contains at least one suspended cymbal and a pair of hi-hat cymbals. The origins of cymbals can be traced back to prehistoric times. The ancient Egyptian cymbals closely resembled our own. The British Museum possesses two pairs, thirteen centimetres in diameter, one of which was found in the coffin of the mummy of Ankhhape, a sacred musician. Those used by the Assyrians were both plate- and cup-shaped, those of the Ancient Persians large-sized plates, made of brass, known as Sanj. The Greek cymbals were cup- or bell-shaped, and may be seen in the hands of innumerable fauns and satyrs in sculptures and on painted vases. The word cymbal is derived from the Latin cymbalum, which itself derives from the Greek word kumbalom, meaning a small bowl. * Bell- The center of a Cymbal. When hit with the side or shoulder of a drum stick, it causes a sound which is in a higher register than the rest of the cymbal. * Bow- The remaining surface of the Cymbal. This is where you get a "ping" sound. * Edge or rim- This is where you get the best "crash". Hitting the edge causes the cymbal to vibrate more, thus being louder. The most common Cymbals are the Hi-Hats, Crash, Splash, Ride, and China. Although cymbals are not often required they form part of every orchestra; their chief use is for marking the rhythm, producing effects, or adding military color. Their unique timbre allows them to project even against a full orchestra and through the heaviest of orhestrations. Cymbals have been utilized historically to suggest frenzy, fury or bacchanalian revels, as seen in the Venus music in Wagner's Tannhäuser, Grieg's Peer Gynt suite, and Osmin's aria "O wie will ich triumphieren" from Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail. A pair of clash cymbals in profile. The bell is in green and the straps are in red. Orchestral crash cymbals are traditionally used in pairs, each one having a strap set in the bell of the cymbal by which they are held. Such a pair is known technically as a pair of clash cymbals, although this term is rarely used, see clash cymbals. They are confusingly sometimes referred to simply as crash cymbals, although this term properly applies also to some suspended cymbals. The sound can be obtained by rubbing their edges together in a sliding movement for a "sizzle", striking them against each other in what is called a "crash", tapping the edge of one against the body of the other in what is called a "tap-crash", scraping the edge of one from the inside of the bell to the edge for a "scrape" or "zishend," or shutting the cymbals together and choking the sound in what is called a "hi-hat chick." A skilled player can obtain an enormous dynamic range from such a pair of cymbals. For example, in Beethoven's ninth symphony, one of their first appearances in an orchestral work, they make their entry pianissimo, adding a touch of colour rather than an almighty crash. Clash cymbals are usually damped by pressing them against the player's body. A composer may write laissez vibrer, "Let vibrate" (usually abbreviated l.v.), secco (dry), or equivalent indications on the score; more usually, the player must judge exactly when to damp the cymbals based on the written duration of crash and the context in which it occurs. Clash cymbals have traditionally been accompanied by the bass drum playing an identical part. This combination, played loudly, is an effective way to accentuate a note since the two instruments together contribute to both very low and very high frequency ranges and provide a satisfying "crash-bang-wallop". In older music the composer sometimes provided just one part for this pair of instruments, writing senza piatti or piatti soli (Italian: "without cymbals" or "cymbals only") if the bass drum is to remain silent. However, the modern convention is for the instruments to have independent parts. Clash cymbals evolved into the low-sock and from this to the modern hi-hat. Even in a modern drum kit, they remain paired with the bass drum as the two instruments which are played with the player's feet. However, hi-hat cymbals tend to be heavy with little taper, more similar to a ride cymbal than to a crash cymbal as found in a drum kit, and perform a ride rather than a crash function. The second main orchestral use of cymbals is the suspended cymbal. This instrument takes its name from the traditional method of suspending the cymbal by means of a leather strap or rope, thus allowing the cymbal to vibrate as freely as possible for maximum musical effect. Early jazz drumming pioneers borrowed this style of cymbal mounting during the early 1900s and later drummers further developed this instrument in to the mounted horizontal or nearly horizontally mounted "crash" cymbals of a modern drum kit. Suspended cymbals are most often played with yarn wrapped mallets. However, some composers request other types of mallets like felt mallets or timpani beaters for different attack and sustain qualities. Suspended cymbals can produce bright and slicing tones when forcefully struck, and give an eerie transparent "windy" sound when played quietly. A tremolo, or roll (played with two mallets alternately striking on opposing sides of the cymbal) can build in volume from almost inaudible to an overwhelming climax in a satisfyingly smooth manner (as in Humperdink's Mother Goose Suite). Furthermore, the edge of a suspended cymbal may be hit with shoulder of a drum stick to obtain a sound somewhat akin to that of a pair of clash cymbals. Other methods of playing include scraping a coin or a triangle beater rapidly across the ridges on the top of the cymbal, giving a "zing" sound (as in the fourth movement of Dvořák's Symphony No. 9). Other effects that can be used include drawing a cello or bass bow across the edge of the cymbal for a sound not unlike squealing car brakes. On another note, in highschool marching bands, a "pit" may use a suspended cymbal for a song. This is held on a tree-like structure, similar to how it would be placed by a drumset. Also known as a high-top, the instrument's music will read it as a "sus. cym. or cymb." Ancient cymbals or tuned cymbals are much more rarely called for. Their timbre is entirely different, more like that of small hand-bells or of the notes of the keyed harmonica. They are not struck full against each other, but by one of their edges, and the note given in by them is higher in proportion as they are thicker and smaller. Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet calls for two pairs of cymbals, modelled on some old Pompeian instruments no larger than the hand (some are no larger than a crown piece), and tuned to F and B flat. The modern instruments descended from this line are the crotales. * China cymbals * crash cymbals * hi-hat cymbals * Persian cymbals * ride cymbals * Swish and pang cymbals * Sizzle cymbals * Splash cymbals * Trash Hats (Hi-Hat cymbal / china cymbal hybrid setup) * Clash cymbals * Finger cymbals - Zill * Suspended cymbals *Cymbal alloys *Cymbal making *Drum *Drum kit *Percussion instrument *Avedis Zildjian Company *Saluda Cymbals *Italian Bellotti Cymbals *Agean Cymbals *Bosphorus Cymbals *Meinl *Paiste *Sabian *Stagg *UFIP *Yamaha *Wuhan *Istanbul cymbals *Istanbul Agop *Turk Masters Cymbals :See also . * CymbalPlanet.com Welcome to the World of Cymbals * Accessory Fetish A Complete List of Cymbal Manufacturers * Cymbal Forum Discussion forum about cymbals. * Orchestral cymbal playing, with an excellent short history of cymbals *
Cymbal
What happens when the center of a Cymbal is hit?
It causes a sound which is in a higher register than the rest of the cymbal
data/set2/a6
Cymbal Cymbals are a modern percussion instrument. Cymbals consist of thin, normally round plates of various cymbal alloys; see cymbal making for a discussion of their manufacture. Most modern cymbals are of indefinite pitch (tuned sets have been manufactured but are rare), whereas small cup-shaped cymbals based on ancient designs sound a definite note (''see: crotales). Cymbals are used in modern orchestras and many military, marching, concert and other bands. They are one of the two instrument types that form the modern drum kit, the other being the drum, and are a basic part of much contemporary music. The most basic drum kit normally contains at least one suspended cymbal and a pair of hi-hat cymbals. The origins of cymbals can be traced back to prehistoric times. The ancient Egyptian cymbals closely resembled our own. The British Museum possesses two pairs, thirteen centimetres in diameter, one of which was found in the coffin of the mummy of Ankhhape, a sacred musician. Those used by the Assyrians were both plate- and cup-shaped, those of the Ancient Persians large-sized plates, made of brass, known as Sanj. The Greek cymbals were cup- or bell-shaped, and may be seen in the hands of innumerable fauns and satyrs in sculptures and on painted vases. The word cymbal is derived from the Latin cymbalum, which itself derives from the Greek word kumbalom, meaning a small bowl. * Bell- The center of a Cymbal. When hit with the side or shoulder of a drum stick, it causes a sound which is in a higher register than the rest of the cymbal. * Bow- The remaining surface of the Cymbal. This is where you get a "ping" sound. * Edge or rim- This is where you get the best "crash". Hitting the edge causes the cymbal to vibrate more, thus being louder. The most common Cymbals are the Hi-Hats, Crash, Splash, Ride, and China. Although cymbals are not often required they form part of every orchestra; their chief use is for marking the rhythm, producing effects, or adding military color. Their unique timbre allows them to project even against a full orchestra and through the heaviest of orhestrations. Cymbals have been utilized historically to suggest frenzy, fury or bacchanalian revels, as seen in the Venus music in Wagner's Tannhäuser, Grieg's Peer Gynt suite, and Osmin's aria "O wie will ich triumphieren" from Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail. A pair of clash cymbals in profile. The bell is in green and the straps are in red. Orchestral crash cymbals are traditionally used in pairs, each one having a strap set in the bell of the cymbal by which they are held. Such a pair is known technically as a pair of clash cymbals, although this term is rarely used, see clash cymbals. They are confusingly sometimes referred to simply as crash cymbals, although this term properly applies also to some suspended cymbals. The sound can be obtained by rubbing their edges together in a sliding movement for a "sizzle", striking them against each other in what is called a "crash", tapping the edge of one against the body of the other in what is called a "tap-crash", scraping the edge of one from the inside of the bell to the edge for a "scrape" or "zishend," or shutting the cymbals together and choking the sound in what is called a "hi-hat chick." A skilled player can obtain an enormous dynamic range from such a pair of cymbals. For example, in Beethoven's ninth symphony, one of their first appearances in an orchestral work, they make their entry pianissimo, adding a touch of colour rather than an almighty crash. Clash cymbals are usually damped by pressing them against the player's body. A composer may write laissez vibrer, "Let vibrate" (usually abbreviated l.v.), secco (dry), or equivalent indications on the score; more usually, the player must judge exactly when to damp the cymbals based on the written duration of crash and the context in which it occurs. Clash cymbals have traditionally been accompanied by the bass drum playing an identical part. This combination, played loudly, is an effective way to accentuate a note since the two instruments together contribute to both very low and very high frequency ranges and provide a satisfying "crash-bang-wallop". In older music the composer sometimes provided just one part for this pair of instruments, writing senza piatti or piatti soli (Italian: "without cymbals" or "cymbals only") if the bass drum is to remain silent. However, the modern convention is for the instruments to have independent parts. Clash cymbals evolved into the low-sock and from this to the modern hi-hat. Even in a modern drum kit, they remain paired with the bass drum as the two instruments which are played with the player's feet. However, hi-hat cymbals tend to be heavy with little taper, more similar to a ride cymbal than to a crash cymbal as found in a drum kit, and perform a ride rather than a crash function. The second main orchestral use of cymbals is the suspended cymbal. This instrument takes its name from the traditional method of suspending the cymbal by means of a leather strap or rope, thus allowing the cymbal to vibrate as freely as possible for maximum musical effect. Early jazz drumming pioneers borrowed this style of cymbal mounting during the early 1900s and later drummers further developed this instrument in to the mounted horizontal or nearly horizontally mounted "crash" cymbals of a modern drum kit. Suspended cymbals are most often played with yarn wrapped mallets. However, some composers request other types of mallets like felt mallets or timpani beaters for different attack and sustain qualities. Suspended cymbals can produce bright and slicing tones when forcefully struck, and give an eerie transparent "windy" sound when played quietly. A tremolo, or roll (played with two mallets alternately striking on opposing sides of the cymbal) can build in volume from almost inaudible to an overwhelming climax in a satisfyingly smooth manner (as in Humperdink's Mother Goose Suite). Furthermore, the edge of a suspended cymbal may be hit with shoulder of a drum stick to obtain a sound somewhat akin to that of a pair of clash cymbals. Other methods of playing include scraping a coin or a triangle beater rapidly across the ridges on the top of the cymbal, giving a "zing" sound (as in the fourth movement of Dvořák's Symphony No. 9). Other effects that can be used include drawing a cello or bass bow across the edge of the cymbal for a sound not unlike squealing car brakes. On another note, in highschool marching bands, a "pit" may use a suspended cymbal for a song. This is held on a tree-like structure, similar to how it would be placed by a drumset. Also known as a high-top, the instrument's music will read it as a "sus. cym. or cymb." Ancient cymbals or tuned cymbals are much more rarely called for. Their timbre is entirely different, more like that of small hand-bells or of the notes of the keyed harmonica. They are not struck full against each other, but by one of their edges, and the note given in by them is higher in proportion as they are thicker and smaller. Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet calls for two pairs of cymbals, modelled on some old Pompeian instruments no larger than the hand (some are no larger than a crown piece), and tuned to F and B flat. The modern instruments descended from this line are the crotales. * China cymbals * crash cymbals * hi-hat cymbals * Persian cymbals * ride cymbals * Swish and pang cymbals * Sizzle cymbals * Splash cymbals * Trash Hats (Hi-Hat cymbal / china cymbal hybrid setup) * Clash cymbals * Finger cymbals - Zill * Suspended cymbals *Cymbal alloys *Cymbal making *Drum *Drum kit *Percussion instrument *Avedis Zildjian Company *Saluda Cymbals *Italian Bellotti Cymbals *Agean Cymbals *Bosphorus Cymbals *Meinl *Paiste *Sabian *Stagg *UFIP *Yamaha *Wuhan *Istanbul cymbals *Istanbul Agop *Turk Masters Cymbals :See also . * CymbalPlanet.com Welcome to the World of Cymbals * Accessory Fetish A Complete List of Cymbal Manufacturers * Cymbal Forum Discussion forum about cymbals. * Orchestral cymbal playing, with an excellent short history of cymbals *
Cymbal
What is an effective way to accentuate a note?
Playing a bass drum playing an identical part is an effective way to accentuate a note.
data/set2/a6
Cymbal Cymbals are a modern percussion instrument. Cymbals consist of thin, normally round plates of various cymbal alloys; see cymbal making for a discussion of their manufacture. Most modern cymbals are of indefinite pitch (tuned sets have been manufactured but are rare), whereas small cup-shaped cymbals based on ancient designs sound a definite note (''see: crotales). Cymbals are used in modern orchestras and many military, marching, concert and other bands. They are one of the two instrument types that form the modern drum kit, the other being the drum, and are a basic part of much contemporary music. The most basic drum kit normally contains at least one suspended cymbal and a pair of hi-hat cymbals. The origins of cymbals can be traced back to prehistoric times. The ancient Egyptian cymbals closely resembled our own. The British Museum possesses two pairs, thirteen centimetres in diameter, one of which was found in the coffin of the mummy of Ankhhape, a sacred musician. Those used by the Assyrians were both plate- and cup-shaped, those of the Ancient Persians large-sized plates, made of brass, known as Sanj. The Greek cymbals were cup- or bell-shaped, and may be seen in the hands of innumerable fauns and satyrs in sculptures and on painted vases. The word cymbal is derived from the Latin cymbalum, which itself derives from the Greek word kumbalom, meaning a small bowl. * Bell- The center of a Cymbal. When hit with the side or shoulder of a drum stick, it causes a sound which is in a higher register than the rest of the cymbal. * Bow- The remaining surface of the Cymbal. This is where you get a "ping" sound. * Edge or rim- This is where you get the best "crash". Hitting the edge causes the cymbal to vibrate more, thus being louder. The most common Cymbals are the Hi-Hats, Crash, Splash, Ride, and China. Although cymbals are not often required they form part of every orchestra; their chief use is for marking the rhythm, producing effects, or adding military color. Their unique timbre allows them to project even against a full orchestra and through the heaviest of orhestrations. Cymbals have been utilized historically to suggest frenzy, fury or bacchanalian revels, as seen in the Venus music in Wagner's Tannhäuser, Grieg's Peer Gynt suite, and Osmin's aria "O wie will ich triumphieren" from Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail. A pair of clash cymbals in profile. The bell is in green and the straps are in red. Orchestral crash cymbals are traditionally used in pairs, each one having a strap set in the bell of the cymbal by which they are held. Such a pair is known technically as a pair of clash cymbals, although this term is rarely used, see clash cymbals. They are confusingly sometimes referred to simply as crash cymbals, although this term properly applies also to some suspended cymbals. The sound can be obtained by rubbing their edges together in a sliding movement for a "sizzle", striking them against each other in what is called a "crash", tapping the edge of one against the body of the other in what is called a "tap-crash", scraping the edge of one from the inside of the bell to the edge for a "scrape" or "zishend," or shutting the cymbals together and choking the sound in what is called a "hi-hat chick." A skilled player can obtain an enormous dynamic range from such a pair of cymbals. For example, in Beethoven's ninth symphony, one of their first appearances in an orchestral work, they make their entry pianissimo, adding a touch of colour rather than an almighty crash. Clash cymbals are usually damped by pressing them against the player's body. A composer may write laissez vibrer, "Let vibrate" (usually abbreviated l.v.), secco (dry), or equivalent indications on the score; more usually, the player must judge exactly when to damp the cymbals based on the written duration of crash and the context in which it occurs. Clash cymbals have traditionally been accompanied by the bass drum playing an identical part. This combination, played loudly, is an effective way to accentuate a note since the two instruments together contribute to both very low and very high frequency ranges and provide a satisfying "crash-bang-wallop". In older music the composer sometimes provided just one part for this pair of instruments, writing senza piatti or piatti soli (Italian: "without cymbals" or "cymbals only") if the bass drum is to remain silent. However, the modern convention is for the instruments to have independent parts. Clash cymbals evolved into the low-sock and from this to the modern hi-hat. Even in a modern drum kit, they remain paired with the bass drum as the two instruments which are played with the player's feet. However, hi-hat cymbals tend to be heavy with little taper, more similar to a ride cymbal than to a crash cymbal as found in a drum kit, and perform a ride rather than a crash function. The second main orchestral use of cymbals is the suspended cymbal. This instrument takes its name from the traditional method of suspending the cymbal by means of a leather strap or rope, thus allowing the cymbal to vibrate as freely as possible for maximum musical effect. Early jazz drumming pioneers borrowed this style of cymbal mounting during the early 1900s and later drummers further developed this instrument in to the mounted horizontal or nearly horizontally mounted "crash" cymbals of a modern drum kit. Suspended cymbals are most often played with yarn wrapped mallets. However, some composers request other types of mallets like felt mallets or timpani beaters for different attack and sustain qualities. Suspended cymbals can produce bright and slicing tones when forcefully struck, and give an eerie transparent "windy" sound when played quietly. A tremolo, or roll (played with two mallets alternately striking on opposing sides of the cymbal) can build in volume from almost inaudible to an overwhelming climax in a satisfyingly smooth manner (as in Humperdink's Mother Goose Suite). Furthermore, the edge of a suspended cymbal may be hit with shoulder of a drum stick to obtain a sound somewhat akin to that of a pair of clash cymbals. Other methods of playing include scraping a coin or a triangle beater rapidly across the ridges on the top of the cymbal, giving a "zing" sound (as in the fourth movement of Dvořák's Symphony No. 9). Other effects that can be used include drawing a cello or bass bow across the edge of the cymbal for a sound not unlike squealing car brakes. On another note, in highschool marching bands, a "pit" may use a suspended cymbal for a song. This is held on a tree-like structure, similar to how it would be placed by a drumset. Also known as a high-top, the instrument's music will read it as a "sus. cym. or cymb." Ancient cymbals or tuned cymbals are much more rarely called for. Their timbre is entirely different, more like that of small hand-bells or of the notes of the keyed harmonica. They are not struck full against each other, but by one of their edges, and the note given in by them is higher in proportion as they are thicker and smaller. Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet calls for two pairs of cymbals, modelled on some old Pompeian instruments no larger than the hand (some are no larger than a crown piece), and tuned to F and B flat. The modern instruments descended from this line are the crotales. * China cymbals * crash cymbals * hi-hat cymbals * Persian cymbals * ride cymbals * Swish and pang cymbals * Sizzle cymbals * Splash cymbals * Trash Hats (Hi-Hat cymbal / china cymbal hybrid setup) * Clash cymbals * Finger cymbals - Zill * Suspended cymbals *Cymbal alloys *Cymbal making *Drum *Drum kit *Percussion instrument *Avedis Zildjian Company *Saluda Cymbals *Italian Bellotti Cymbals *Agean Cymbals *Bosphorus Cymbals *Meinl *Paiste *Sabian *Stagg *UFIP *Yamaha *Wuhan *Istanbul cymbals *Istanbul Agop *Turk Masters Cymbals :See also . * CymbalPlanet.com Welcome to the World of Cymbals * Accessory Fetish A Complete List of Cymbal Manufacturers * Cymbal Forum Discussion forum about cymbals. * Orchestral cymbal playing, with an excellent short history of cymbals *
Cymbal
What is an effective way to accentuate a note?
The combination of a clash cymbol being accompanied by a bass drum playing an identical part, played loudly
data/set2/a6
Cymbal Cymbals are a modern percussion instrument. Cymbals consist of thin, normally round plates of various cymbal alloys; see cymbal making for a discussion of their manufacture. Most modern cymbals are of indefinite pitch (tuned sets have been manufactured but are rare), whereas small cup-shaped cymbals based on ancient designs sound a definite note (''see: crotales). Cymbals are used in modern orchestras and many military, marching, concert and other bands. They are one of the two instrument types that form the modern drum kit, the other being the drum, and are a basic part of much contemporary music. The most basic drum kit normally contains at least one suspended cymbal and a pair of hi-hat cymbals. The origins of cymbals can be traced back to prehistoric times. The ancient Egyptian cymbals closely resembled our own. The British Museum possesses two pairs, thirteen centimetres in diameter, one of which was found in the coffin of the mummy of Ankhhape, a sacred musician. Those used by the Assyrians were both plate- and cup-shaped, those of the Ancient Persians large-sized plates, made of brass, known as Sanj. The Greek cymbals were cup- or bell-shaped, and may be seen in the hands of innumerable fauns and satyrs in sculptures and on painted vases. The word cymbal is derived from the Latin cymbalum, which itself derives from the Greek word kumbalom, meaning a small bowl. * Bell- The center of a Cymbal. When hit with the side or shoulder of a drum stick, it causes a sound which is in a higher register than the rest of the cymbal. * Bow- The remaining surface of the Cymbal. This is where you get a "ping" sound. * Edge or rim- This is where you get the best "crash". Hitting the edge causes the cymbal to vibrate more, thus being louder. The most common Cymbals are the Hi-Hats, Crash, Splash, Ride, and China. Although cymbals are not often required they form part of every orchestra; their chief use is for marking the rhythm, producing effects, or adding military color. Their unique timbre allows them to project even against a full orchestra and through the heaviest of orhestrations. Cymbals have been utilized historically to suggest frenzy, fury or bacchanalian revels, as seen in the Venus music in Wagner's Tannhäuser, Grieg's Peer Gynt suite, and Osmin's aria "O wie will ich triumphieren" from Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail. A pair of clash cymbals in profile. The bell is in green and the straps are in red. Orchestral crash cymbals are traditionally used in pairs, each one having a strap set in the bell of the cymbal by which they are held. Such a pair is known technically as a pair of clash cymbals, although this term is rarely used, see clash cymbals. They are confusingly sometimes referred to simply as crash cymbals, although this term properly applies also to some suspended cymbals. The sound can be obtained by rubbing their edges together in a sliding movement for a "sizzle", striking them against each other in what is called a "crash", tapping the edge of one against the body of the other in what is called a "tap-crash", scraping the edge of one from the inside of the bell to the edge for a "scrape" or "zishend," or shutting the cymbals together and choking the sound in what is called a "hi-hat chick." A skilled player can obtain an enormous dynamic range from such a pair of cymbals. For example, in Beethoven's ninth symphony, one of their first appearances in an orchestral work, they make their entry pianissimo, adding a touch of colour rather than an almighty crash. Clash cymbals are usually damped by pressing them against the player's body. A composer may write laissez vibrer, "Let vibrate" (usually abbreviated l.v.), secco (dry), or equivalent indications on the score; more usually, the player must judge exactly when to damp the cymbals based on the written duration of crash and the context in which it occurs. Clash cymbals have traditionally been accompanied by the bass drum playing an identical part. This combination, played loudly, is an effective way to accentuate a note since the two instruments together contribute to both very low and very high frequency ranges and provide a satisfying "crash-bang-wallop". In older music the composer sometimes provided just one part for this pair of instruments, writing senza piatti or piatti soli (Italian: "without cymbals" or "cymbals only") if the bass drum is to remain silent. However, the modern convention is for the instruments to have independent parts. Clash cymbals evolved into the low-sock and from this to the modern hi-hat. Even in a modern drum kit, they remain paired with the bass drum as the two instruments which are played with the player's feet. However, hi-hat cymbals tend to be heavy with little taper, more similar to a ride cymbal than to a crash cymbal as found in a drum kit, and perform a ride rather than a crash function. The second main orchestral use of cymbals is the suspended cymbal. This instrument takes its name from the traditional method of suspending the cymbal by means of a leather strap or rope, thus allowing the cymbal to vibrate as freely as possible for maximum musical effect. Early jazz drumming pioneers borrowed this style of cymbal mounting during the early 1900s and later drummers further developed this instrument in to the mounted horizontal or nearly horizontally mounted "crash" cymbals of a modern drum kit. Suspended cymbals are most often played with yarn wrapped mallets. However, some composers request other types of mallets like felt mallets or timpani beaters for different attack and sustain qualities. Suspended cymbals can produce bright and slicing tones when forcefully struck, and give an eerie transparent "windy" sound when played quietly. A tremolo, or roll (played with two mallets alternately striking on opposing sides of the cymbal) can build in volume from almost inaudible to an overwhelming climax in a satisfyingly smooth manner (as in Humperdink's Mother Goose Suite). Furthermore, the edge of a suspended cymbal may be hit with shoulder of a drum stick to obtain a sound somewhat akin to that of a pair of clash cymbals. Other methods of playing include scraping a coin or a triangle beater rapidly across the ridges on the top of the cymbal, giving a "zing" sound (as in the fourth movement of Dvořák's Symphony No. 9). Other effects that can be used include drawing a cello or bass bow across the edge of the cymbal for a sound not unlike squealing car brakes. On another note, in highschool marching bands, a "pit" may use a suspended cymbal for a song. This is held on a tree-like structure, similar to how it would be placed by a drumset. Also known as a high-top, the instrument's music will read it as a "sus. cym. or cymb." Ancient cymbals or tuned cymbals are much more rarely called for. Their timbre is entirely different, more like that of small hand-bells or of the notes of the keyed harmonica. They are not struck full against each other, but by one of their edges, and the note given in by them is higher in proportion as they are thicker and smaller. Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet calls for two pairs of cymbals, modelled on some old Pompeian instruments no larger than the hand (some are no larger than a crown piece), and tuned to F and B flat. The modern instruments descended from this line are the crotales. * China cymbals * crash cymbals * hi-hat cymbals * Persian cymbals * ride cymbals * Swish and pang cymbals * Sizzle cymbals * Splash cymbals * Trash Hats (Hi-Hat cymbal / china cymbal hybrid setup) * Clash cymbals * Finger cymbals - Zill * Suspended cymbals *Cymbal alloys *Cymbal making *Drum *Drum kit *Percussion instrument *Avedis Zildjian Company *Saluda Cymbals *Italian Bellotti Cymbals *Agean Cymbals *Bosphorus Cymbals *Meinl *Paiste *Sabian *Stagg *UFIP *Yamaha *Wuhan *Istanbul cymbals *Istanbul Agop *Turk Masters Cymbals :See also . * CymbalPlanet.com Welcome to the World of Cymbals * Accessory Fetish A Complete List of Cymbal Manufacturers * Cymbal Forum Discussion forum about cymbals. * Orchestral cymbal playing, with an excellent short history of cymbals *
Cymbal
From what type of Cymbals can a expert player obtain an enormous dynamic range?
An expert player can obtain an enormous dynamic range from crash cymbals.
data/set2/a6
Cymbal Cymbals are a modern percussion instrument. Cymbals consist of thin, normally round plates of various cymbal alloys; see cymbal making for a discussion of their manufacture. Most modern cymbals are of indefinite pitch (tuned sets have been manufactured but are rare), whereas small cup-shaped cymbals based on ancient designs sound a definite note (''see: crotales). Cymbals are used in modern orchestras and many military, marching, concert and other bands. They are one of the two instrument types that form the modern drum kit, the other being the drum, and are a basic part of much contemporary music. The most basic drum kit normally contains at least one suspended cymbal and a pair of hi-hat cymbals. The origins of cymbals can be traced back to prehistoric times. The ancient Egyptian cymbals closely resembled our own. The British Museum possesses two pairs, thirteen centimetres in diameter, one of which was found in the coffin of the mummy of Ankhhape, a sacred musician. Those used by the Assyrians were both plate- and cup-shaped, those of the Ancient Persians large-sized plates, made of brass, known as Sanj. The Greek cymbals were cup- or bell-shaped, and may be seen in the hands of innumerable fauns and satyrs in sculptures and on painted vases. The word cymbal is derived from the Latin cymbalum, which itself derives from the Greek word kumbalom, meaning a small bowl. * Bell- The center of a Cymbal. When hit with the side or shoulder of a drum stick, it causes a sound which is in a higher register than the rest of the cymbal. * Bow- The remaining surface of the Cymbal. This is where you get a "ping" sound. * Edge or rim- This is where you get the best "crash". Hitting the edge causes the cymbal to vibrate more, thus being louder. The most common Cymbals are the Hi-Hats, Crash, Splash, Ride, and China. Although cymbals are not often required they form part of every orchestra; their chief use is for marking the rhythm, producing effects, or adding military color. Their unique timbre allows them to project even against a full orchestra and through the heaviest of orhestrations. Cymbals have been utilized historically to suggest frenzy, fury or bacchanalian revels, as seen in the Venus music in Wagner's Tannhäuser, Grieg's Peer Gynt suite, and Osmin's aria "O wie will ich triumphieren" from Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail. A pair of clash cymbals in profile. The bell is in green and the straps are in red. Orchestral crash cymbals are traditionally used in pairs, each one having a strap set in the bell of the cymbal by which they are held. Such a pair is known technically as a pair of clash cymbals, although this term is rarely used, see clash cymbals. They are confusingly sometimes referred to simply as crash cymbals, although this term properly applies also to some suspended cymbals. The sound can be obtained by rubbing their edges together in a sliding movement for a "sizzle", striking them against each other in what is called a "crash", tapping the edge of one against the body of the other in what is called a "tap-crash", scraping the edge of one from the inside of the bell to the edge for a "scrape" or "zishend," or shutting the cymbals together and choking the sound in what is called a "hi-hat chick." A skilled player can obtain an enormous dynamic range from such a pair of cymbals. For example, in Beethoven's ninth symphony, one of their first appearances in an orchestral work, they make their entry pianissimo, adding a touch of colour rather than an almighty crash. Clash cymbals are usually damped by pressing them against the player's body. A composer may write laissez vibrer, "Let vibrate" (usually abbreviated l.v.), secco (dry), or equivalent indications on the score; more usually, the player must judge exactly when to damp the cymbals based on the written duration of crash and the context in which it occurs. Clash cymbals have traditionally been accompanied by the bass drum playing an identical part. This combination, played loudly, is an effective way to accentuate a note since the two instruments together contribute to both very low and very high frequency ranges and provide a satisfying "crash-bang-wallop". In older music the composer sometimes provided just one part for this pair of instruments, writing senza piatti or piatti soli (Italian: "without cymbals" or "cymbals only") if the bass drum is to remain silent. However, the modern convention is for the instruments to have independent parts. Clash cymbals evolved into the low-sock and from this to the modern hi-hat. Even in a modern drum kit, they remain paired with the bass drum as the two instruments which are played with the player's feet. However, hi-hat cymbals tend to be heavy with little taper, more similar to a ride cymbal than to a crash cymbal as found in a drum kit, and perform a ride rather than a crash function. The second main orchestral use of cymbals is the suspended cymbal. This instrument takes its name from the traditional method of suspending the cymbal by means of a leather strap or rope, thus allowing the cymbal to vibrate as freely as possible for maximum musical effect. Early jazz drumming pioneers borrowed this style of cymbal mounting during the early 1900s and later drummers further developed this instrument in to the mounted horizontal or nearly horizontally mounted "crash" cymbals of a modern drum kit. Suspended cymbals are most often played with yarn wrapped mallets. However, some composers request other types of mallets like felt mallets or timpani beaters for different attack and sustain qualities. Suspended cymbals can produce bright and slicing tones when forcefully struck, and give an eerie transparent "windy" sound when played quietly. A tremolo, or roll (played with two mallets alternately striking on opposing sides of the cymbal) can build in volume from almost inaudible to an overwhelming climax in a satisfyingly smooth manner (as in Humperdink's Mother Goose Suite). Furthermore, the edge of a suspended cymbal may be hit with shoulder of a drum stick to obtain a sound somewhat akin to that of a pair of clash cymbals. Other methods of playing include scraping a coin or a triangle beater rapidly across the ridges on the top of the cymbal, giving a "zing" sound (as in the fourth movement of Dvořák's Symphony No. 9). Other effects that can be used include drawing a cello or bass bow across the edge of the cymbal for a sound not unlike squealing car brakes. On another note, in highschool marching bands, a "pit" may use a suspended cymbal for a song. This is held on a tree-like structure, similar to how it would be placed by a drumset. Also known as a high-top, the instrument's music will read it as a "sus. cym. or cymb." Ancient cymbals or tuned cymbals are much more rarely called for. Their timbre is entirely different, more like that of small hand-bells or of the notes of the keyed harmonica. They are not struck full against each other, but by one of their edges, and the note given in by them is higher in proportion as they are thicker and smaller. Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet calls for two pairs of cymbals, modelled on some old Pompeian instruments no larger than the hand (some are no larger than a crown piece), and tuned to F and B flat. The modern instruments descended from this line are the crotales. * China cymbals * crash cymbals * hi-hat cymbals * Persian cymbals * ride cymbals * Swish and pang cymbals * Sizzle cymbals * Splash cymbals * Trash Hats (Hi-Hat cymbal / china cymbal hybrid setup) * Clash cymbals * Finger cymbals - Zill * Suspended cymbals *Cymbal alloys *Cymbal making *Drum *Drum kit *Percussion instrument *Avedis Zildjian Company *Saluda Cymbals *Italian Bellotti Cymbals *Agean Cymbals *Bosphorus Cymbals *Meinl *Paiste *Sabian *Stagg *UFIP *Yamaha *Wuhan *Istanbul cymbals *Istanbul Agop *Turk Masters Cymbals :See also . * CymbalPlanet.com Welcome to the World of Cymbals * Accessory Fetish A Complete List of Cymbal Manufacturers * Cymbal Forum Discussion forum about cymbals. * Orchestral cymbal playing, with an excellent short history of cymbals *
Cymbal
From what type of Cymbals can a expert player obtain an enormous dynamic range?
Crash cymbals
data/set2/a6
Cymbal Cymbals are a modern percussion instrument. Cymbals consist of thin, normally round plates of various cymbal alloys; see cymbal making for a discussion of their manufacture. Most modern cymbals are of indefinite pitch (tuned sets have been manufactured but are rare), whereas small cup-shaped cymbals based on ancient designs sound a definite note (''see: crotales). Cymbals are used in modern orchestras and many military, marching, concert and other bands. They are one of the two instrument types that form the modern drum kit, the other being the drum, and are a basic part of much contemporary music. The most basic drum kit normally contains at least one suspended cymbal and a pair of hi-hat cymbals. The origins of cymbals can be traced back to prehistoric times. The ancient Egyptian cymbals closely resembled our own. The British Museum possesses two pairs, thirteen centimetres in diameter, one of which was found in the coffin of the mummy of Ankhhape, a sacred musician. Those used by the Assyrians were both plate- and cup-shaped, those of the Ancient Persians large-sized plates, made of brass, known as Sanj. The Greek cymbals were cup- or bell-shaped, and may be seen in the hands of innumerable fauns and satyrs in sculptures and on painted vases. The word cymbal is derived from the Latin cymbalum, which itself derives from the Greek word kumbalom, meaning a small bowl. * Bell- The center of a Cymbal. When hit with the side or shoulder of a drum stick, it causes a sound which is in a higher register than the rest of the cymbal. * Bow- The remaining surface of the Cymbal. This is where you get a "ping" sound. * Edge or rim- This is where you get the best "crash". Hitting the edge causes the cymbal to vibrate more, thus being louder. The most common Cymbals are the Hi-Hats, Crash, Splash, Ride, and China. Although cymbals are not often required they form part of every orchestra; their chief use is for marking the rhythm, producing effects, or adding military color. Their unique timbre allows them to project even against a full orchestra and through the heaviest of orhestrations. Cymbals have been utilized historically to suggest frenzy, fury or bacchanalian revels, as seen in the Venus music in Wagner's Tannhäuser, Grieg's Peer Gynt suite, and Osmin's aria "O wie will ich triumphieren" from Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail. A pair of clash cymbals in profile. The bell is in green and the straps are in red. Orchestral crash cymbals are traditionally used in pairs, each one having a strap set in the bell of the cymbal by which they are held. Such a pair is known technically as a pair of clash cymbals, although this term is rarely used, see clash cymbals. They are confusingly sometimes referred to simply as crash cymbals, although this term properly applies also to some suspended cymbals. The sound can be obtained by rubbing their edges together in a sliding movement for a "sizzle", striking them against each other in what is called a "crash", tapping the edge of one against the body of the other in what is called a "tap-crash", scraping the edge of one from the inside of the bell to the edge for a "scrape" or "zishend," or shutting the cymbals together and choking the sound in what is called a "hi-hat chick." A skilled player can obtain an enormous dynamic range from such a pair of cymbals. For example, in Beethoven's ninth symphony, one of their first appearances in an orchestral work, they make their entry pianissimo, adding a touch of colour rather than an almighty crash. Clash cymbals are usually damped by pressing them against the player's body. A composer may write laissez vibrer, "Let vibrate" (usually abbreviated l.v.), secco (dry), or equivalent indications on the score; more usually, the player must judge exactly when to damp the cymbals based on the written duration of crash and the context in which it occurs. Clash cymbals have traditionally been accompanied by the bass drum playing an identical part. This combination, played loudly, is an effective way to accentuate a note since the two instruments together contribute to both very low and very high frequency ranges and provide a satisfying "crash-bang-wallop". In older music the composer sometimes provided just one part for this pair of instruments, writing senza piatti or piatti soli (Italian: "without cymbals" or "cymbals only") if the bass drum is to remain silent. However, the modern convention is for the instruments to have independent parts. Clash cymbals evolved into the low-sock and from this to the modern hi-hat. Even in a modern drum kit, they remain paired with the bass drum as the two instruments which are played with the player's feet. However, hi-hat cymbals tend to be heavy with little taper, more similar to a ride cymbal than to a crash cymbal as found in a drum kit, and perform a ride rather than a crash function. The second main orchestral use of cymbals is the suspended cymbal. This instrument takes its name from the traditional method of suspending the cymbal by means of a leather strap or rope, thus allowing the cymbal to vibrate as freely as possible for maximum musical effect. Early jazz drumming pioneers borrowed this style of cymbal mounting during the early 1900s and later drummers further developed this instrument in to the mounted horizontal or nearly horizontally mounted "crash" cymbals of a modern drum kit. Suspended cymbals are most often played with yarn wrapped mallets. However, some composers request other types of mallets like felt mallets or timpani beaters for different attack and sustain qualities. Suspended cymbals can produce bright and slicing tones when forcefully struck, and give an eerie transparent "windy" sound when played quietly. A tremolo, or roll (played with two mallets alternately striking on opposing sides of the cymbal) can build in volume from almost inaudible to an overwhelming climax in a satisfyingly smooth manner (as in Humperdink's Mother Goose Suite). Furthermore, the edge of a suspended cymbal may be hit with shoulder of a drum stick to obtain a sound somewhat akin to that of a pair of clash cymbals. Other methods of playing include scraping a coin or a triangle beater rapidly across the ridges on the top of the cymbal, giving a "zing" sound (as in the fourth movement of Dvořák's Symphony No. 9). Other effects that can be used include drawing a cello or bass bow across the edge of the cymbal for a sound not unlike squealing car brakes. On another note, in highschool marching bands, a "pit" may use a suspended cymbal for a song. This is held on a tree-like structure, similar to how it would be placed by a drumset. Also known as a high-top, the instrument's music will read it as a "sus. cym. or cymb." Ancient cymbals or tuned cymbals are much more rarely called for. Their timbre is entirely different, more like that of small hand-bells or of the notes of the keyed harmonica. They are not struck full against each other, but by one of their edges, and the note given in by them is higher in proportion as they are thicker and smaller. Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet calls for two pairs of cymbals, modelled on some old Pompeian instruments no larger than the hand (some are no larger than a crown piece), and tuned to F and B flat. The modern instruments descended from this line are the crotales. * China cymbals * crash cymbals * hi-hat cymbals * Persian cymbals * ride cymbals * Swish and pang cymbals * Sizzle cymbals * Splash cymbals * Trash Hats (Hi-Hat cymbal / china cymbal hybrid setup) * Clash cymbals * Finger cymbals - Zill * Suspended cymbals *Cymbal alloys *Cymbal making *Drum *Drum kit *Percussion instrument *Avedis Zildjian Company *Saluda Cymbals *Italian Bellotti Cymbals *Agean Cymbals *Bosphorus Cymbals *Meinl *Paiste *Sabian *Stagg *UFIP *Yamaha *Wuhan *Istanbul cymbals *Istanbul Agop *Turk Masters Cymbals :See also . * CymbalPlanet.com Welcome to the World of Cymbals * Accessory Fetish A Complete List of Cymbal Manufacturers * Cymbal Forum Discussion forum about cymbals. * Orchestral cymbal playing, with an excellent short history of cymbals *
Cymbal
Can the origins of cymbals be traced back to prehistoric times?
yes
data/set2/a6
Cymbal Cymbals are a modern percussion instrument. Cymbals consist of thin, normally round plates of various cymbal alloys; see cymbal making for a discussion of their manufacture. Most modern cymbals are of indefinite pitch (tuned sets have been manufactured but are rare), whereas small cup-shaped cymbals based on ancient designs sound a definite note (''see: crotales). Cymbals are used in modern orchestras and many military, marching, concert and other bands. They are one of the two instrument types that form the modern drum kit, the other being the drum, and are a basic part of much contemporary music. The most basic drum kit normally contains at least one suspended cymbal and a pair of hi-hat cymbals. The origins of cymbals can be traced back to prehistoric times. The ancient Egyptian cymbals closely resembled our own. The British Museum possesses two pairs, thirteen centimetres in diameter, one of which was found in the coffin of the mummy of Ankhhape, a sacred musician. Those used by the Assyrians were both plate- and cup-shaped, those of the Ancient Persians large-sized plates, made of brass, known as Sanj. The Greek cymbals were cup- or bell-shaped, and may be seen in the hands of innumerable fauns and satyrs in sculptures and on painted vases. The word cymbal is derived from the Latin cymbalum, which itself derives from the Greek word kumbalom, meaning a small bowl. * Bell- The center of a Cymbal. When hit with the side or shoulder of a drum stick, it causes a sound which is in a higher register than the rest of the cymbal. * Bow- The remaining surface of the Cymbal. This is where you get a "ping" sound. * Edge or rim- This is where you get the best "crash". Hitting the edge causes the cymbal to vibrate more, thus being louder. The most common Cymbals are the Hi-Hats, Crash, Splash, Ride, and China. Although cymbals are not often required they form part of every orchestra; their chief use is for marking the rhythm, producing effects, or adding military color. Their unique timbre allows them to project even against a full orchestra and through the heaviest of orhestrations. Cymbals have been utilized historically to suggest frenzy, fury or bacchanalian revels, as seen in the Venus music in Wagner's Tannhäuser, Grieg's Peer Gynt suite, and Osmin's aria "O wie will ich triumphieren" from Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail. A pair of clash cymbals in profile. The bell is in green and the straps are in red. Orchestral crash cymbals are traditionally used in pairs, each one having a strap set in the bell of the cymbal by which they are held. Such a pair is known technically as a pair of clash cymbals, although this term is rarely used, see clash cymbals. They are confusingly sometimes referred to simply as crash cymbals, although this term properly applies also to some suspended cymbals. The sound can be obtained by rubbing their edges together in a sliding movement for a "sizzle", striking them against each other in what is called a "crash", tapping the edge of one against the body of the other in what is called a "tap-crash", scraping the edge of one from the inside of the bell to the edge for a "scrape" or "zishend," or shutting the cymbals together and choking the sound in what is called a "hi-hat chick." A skilled player can obtain an enormous dynamic range from such a pair of cymbals. For example, in Beethoven's ninth symphony, one of their first appearances in an orchestral work, they make their entry pianissimo, adding a touch of colour rather than an almighty crash. Clash cymbals are usually damped by pressing them against the player's body. A composer may write laissez vibrer, "Let vibrate" (usually abbreviated l.v.), secco (dry), or equivalent indications on the score; more usually, the player must judge exactly when to damp the cymbals based on the written duration of crash and the context in which it occurs. Clash cymbals have traditionally been accompanied by the bass drum playing an identical part. This combination, played loudly, is an effective way to accentuate a note since the two instruments together contribute to both very low and very high frequency ranges and provide a satisfying "crash-bang-wallop". In older music the composer sometimes provided just one part for this pair of instruments, writing senza piatti or piatti soli (Italian: "without cymbals" or "cymbals only") if the bass drum is to remain silent. However, the modern convention is for the instruments to have independent parts. Clash cymbals evolved into the low-sock and from this to the modern hi-hat. Even in a modern drum kit, they remain paired with the bass drum as the two instruments which are played with the player's feet. However, hi-hat cymbals tend to be heavy with little taper, more similar to a ride cymbal than to a crash cymbal as found in a drum kit, and perform a ride rather than a crash function. The second main orchestral use of cymbals is the suspended cymbal. This instrument takes its name from the traditional method of suspending the cymbal by means of a leather strap or rope, thus allowing the cymbal to vibrate as freely as possible for maximum musical effect. Early jazz drumming pioneers borrowed this style of cymbal mounting during the early 1900s and later drummers further developed this instrument in to the mounted horizontal or nearly horizontally mounted "crash" cymbals of a modern drum kit. Suspended cymbals are most often played with yarn wrapped mallets. However, some composers request other types of mallets like felt mallets or timpani beaters for different attack and sustain qualities. Suspended cymbals can produce bright and slicing tones when forcefully struck, and give an eerie transparent "windy" sound when played quietly. A tremolo, or roll (played with two mallets alternately striking on opposing sides of the cymbal) can build in volume from almost inaudible to an overwhelming climax in a satisfyingly smooth manner (as in Humperdink's Mother Goose Suite). Furthermore, the edge of a suspended cymbal may be hit with shoulder of a drum stick to obtain a sound somewhat akin to that of a pair of clash cymbals. Other methods of playing include scraping a coin or a triangle beater rapidly across the ridges on the top of the cymbal, giving a "zing" sound (as in the fourth movement of Dvořák's Symphony No. 9). Other effects that can be used include drawing a cello or bass bow across the edge of the cymbal for a sound not unlike squealing car brakes. On another note, in highschool marching bands, a "pit" may use a suspended cymbal for a song. This is held on a tree-like structure, similar to how it would be placed by a drumset. Also known as a high-top, the instrument's music will read it as a "sus. cym. or cymb." Ancient cymbals or tuned cymbals are much more rarely called for. Their timbre is entirely different, more like that of small hand-bells or of the notes of the keyed harmonica. They are not struck full against each other, but by one of their edges, and the note given in by them is higher in proportion as they are thicker and smaller. Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet calls for two pairs of cymbals, modelled on some old Pompeian instruments no larger than the hand (some are no larger than a crown piece), and tuned to F and B flat. The modern instruments descended from this line are the crotales. * China cymbals * crash cymbals * hi-hat cymbals * Persian cymbals * ride cymbals * Swish and pang cymbals * Sizzle cymbals * Splash cymbals * Trash Hats (Hi-Hat cymbal / china cymbal hybrid setup) * Clash cymbals * Finger cymbals - Zill * Suspended cymbals *Cymbal alloys *Cymbal making *Drum *Drum kit *Percussion instrument *Avedis Zildjian Company *Saluda Cymbals *Italian Bellotti Cymbals *Agean Cymbals *Bosphorus Cymbals *Meinl *Paiste *Sabian *Stagg *UFIP *Yamaha *Wuhan *Istanbul cymbals *Istanbul Agop *Turk Masters Cymbals :See also . * CymbalPlanet.com Welcome to the World of Cymbals * Accessory Fetish A Complete List of Cymbal Manufacturers * Cymbal Forum Discussion forum about cymbals. * Orchestral cymbal playing, with an excellent short history of cymbals *
Cymbal
Can the origins of cymbals be traced back to prehistoric times?
Yes
data/set2/a6
Cymbal Cymbals are a modern percussion instrument. Cymbals consist of thin, normally round plates of various cymbal alloys; see cymbal making for a discussion of their manufacture. Most modern cymbals are of indefinite pitch (tuned sets have been manufactured but are rare), whereas small cup-shaped cymbals based on ancient designs sound a definite note (''see: crotales). Cymbals are used in modern orchestras and many military, marching, concert and other bands. They are one of the two instrument types that form the modern drum kit, the other being the drum, and are a basic part of much contemporary music. The most basic drum kit normally contains at least one suspended cymbal and a pair of hi-hat cymbals. The origins of cymbals can be traced back to prehistoric times. The ancient Egyptian cymbals closely resembled our own. The British Museum possesses two pairs, thirteen centimetres in diameter, one of which was found in the coffin of the mummy of Ankhhape, a sacred musician. Those used by the Assyrians were both plate- and cup-shaped, those of the Ancient Persians large-sized plates, made of brass, known as Sanj. The Greek cymbals were cup- or bell-shaped, and may be seen in the hands of innumerable fauns and satyrs in sculptures and on painted vases. The word cymbal is derived from the Latin cymbalum, which itself derives from the Greek word kumbalom, meaning a small bowl. * Bell- The center of a Cymbal. When hit with the side or shoulder of a drum stick, it causes a sound which is in a higher register than the rest of the cymbal. * Bow- The remaining surface of the Cymbal. This is where you get a "ping" sound. * Edge or rim- This is where you get the best "crash". Hitting the edge causes the cymbal to vibrate more, thus being louder. The most common Cymbals are the Hi-Hats, Crash, Splash, Ride, and China. Although cymbals are not often required they form part of every orchestra; their chief use is for marking the rhythm, producing effects, or adding military color. Their unique timbre allows them to project even against a full orchestra and through the heaviest of orhestrations. Cymbals have been utilized historically to suggest frenzy, fury or bacchanalian revels, as seen in the Venus music in Wagner's Tannhäuser, Grieg's Peer Gynt suite, and Osmin's aria "O wie will ich triumphieren" from Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail. A pair of clash cymbals in profile. The bell is in green and the straps are in red. Orchestral crash cymbals are traditionally used in pairs, each one having a strap set in the bell of the cymbal by which they are held. Such a pair is known technically as a pair of clash cymbals, although this term is rarely used, see clash cymbals. They are confusingly sometimes referred to simply as crash cymbals, although this term properly applies also to some suspended cymbals. The sound can be obtained by rubbing their edges together in a sliding movement for a "sizzle", striking them against each other in what is called a "crash", tapping the edge of one against the body of the other in what is called a "tap-crash", scraping the edge of one from the inside of the bell to the edge for a "scrape" or "zishend," or shutting the cymbals together and choking the sound in what is called a "hi-hat chick." A skilled player can obtain an enormous dynamic range from such a pair of cymbals. For example, in Beethoven's ninth symphony, one of their first appearances in an orchestral work, they make their entry pianissimo, adding a touch of colour rather than an almighty crash. Clash cymbals are usually damped by pressing them against the player's body. A composer may write laissez vibrer, "Let vibrate" (usually abbreviated l.v.), secco (dry), or equivalent indications on the score; more usually, the player must judge exactly when to damp the cymbals based on the written duration of crash and the context in which it occurs. Clash cymbals have traditionally been accompanied by the bass drum playing an identical part. This combination, played loudly, is an effective way to accentuate a note since the two instruments together contribute to both very low and very high frequency ranges and provide a satisfying "crash-bang-wallop". In older music the composer sometimes provided just one part for this pair of instruments, writing senza piatti or piatti soli (Italian: "without cymbals" or "cymbals only") if the bass drum is to remain silent. However, the modern convention is for the instruments to have independent parts. Clash cymbals evolved into the low-sock and from this to the modern hi-hat. Even in a modern drum kit, they remain paired with the bass drum as the two instruments which are played with the player's feet. However, hi-hat cymbals tend to be heavy with little taper, more similar to a ride cymbal than to a crash cymbal as found in a drum kit, and perform a ride rather than a crash function. The second main orchestral use of cymbals is the suspended cymbal. This instrument takes its name from the traditional method of suspending the cymbal by means of a leather strap or rope, thus allowing the cymbal to vibrate as freely as possible for maximum musical effect. Early jazz drumming pioneers borrowed this style of cymbal mounting during the early 1900s and later drummers further developed this instrument in to the mounted horizontal or nearly horizontally mounted "crash" cymbals of a modern drum kit. Suspended cymbals are most often played with yarn wrapped mallets. However, some composers request other types of mallets like felt mallets or timpani beaters for different attack and sustain qualities. Suspended cymbals can produce bright and slicing tones when forcefully struck, and give an eerie transparent "windy" sound when played quietly. A tremolo, or roll (played with two mallets alternately striking on opposing sides of the cymbal) can build in volume from almost inaudible to an overwhelming climax in a satisfyingly smooth manner (as in Humperdink's Mother Goose Suite). Furthermore, the edge of a suspended cymbal may be hit with shoulder of a drum stick to obtain a sound somewhat akin to that of a pair of clash cymbals. Other methods of playing include scraping a coin or a triangle beater rapidly across the ridges on the top of the cymbal, giving a "zing" sound (as in the fourth movement of Dvořák's Symphony No. 9). Other effects that can be used include drawing a cello or bass bow across the edge of the cymbal for a sound not unlike squealing car brakes. On another note, in highschool marching bands, a "pit" may use a suspended cymbal for a song. This is held on a tree-like structure, similar to how it would be placed by a drumset. Also known as a high-top, the instrument's music will read it as a "sus. cym. or cymb." Ancient cymbals or tuned cymbals are much more rarely called for. Their timbre is entirely different, more like that of small hand-bells or of the notes of the keyed harmonica. They are not struck full against each other, but by one of their edges, and the note given in by them is higher in proportion as they are thicker and smaller. Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet calls for two pairs of cymbals, modelled on some old Pompeian instruments no larger than the hand (some are no larger than a crown piece), and tuned to F and B flat. The modern instruments descended from this line are the crotales. * China cymbals * crash cymbals * hi-hat cymbals * Persian cymbals * ride cymbals * Swish and pang cymbals * Sizzle cymbals * Splash cymbals * Trash Hats (Hi-Hat cymbal / china cymbal hybrid setup) * Clash cymbals * Finger cymbals - Zill * Suspended cymbals *Cymbal alloys *Cymbal making *Drum *Drum kit *Percussion instrument *Avedis Zildjian Company *Saluda Cymbals *Italian Bellotti Cymbals *Agean Cymbals *Bosphorus Cymbals *Meinl *Paiste *Sabian *Stagg *UFIP *Yamaha *Wuhan *Istanbul cymbals *Istanbul Agop *Turk Masters Cymbals :See also . * CymbalPlanet.com Welcome to the World of Cymbals * Accessory Fetish A Complete List of Cymbal Manufacturers * Cymbal Forum Discussion forum about cymbals. * Orchestral cymbal playing, with an excellent short history of cymbals *
Cymbal
Did the modern hi-hat evolve from clash cymbals?
yes
data/set2/a6
Cymbal Cymbals are a modern percussion instrument. Cymbals consist of thin, normally round plates of various cymbal alloys; see cymbal making for a discussion of their manufacture. Most modern cymbals are of indefinite pitch (tuned sets have been manufactured but are rare), whereas small cup-shaped cymbals based on ancient designs sound a definite note (''see: crotales). Cymbals are used in modern orchestras and many military, marching, concert and other bands. They are one of the two instrument types that form the modern drum kit, the other being the drum, and are a basic part of much contemporary music. The most basic drum kit normally contains at least one suspended cymbal and a pair of hi-hat cymbals. The origins of cymbals can be traced back to prehistoric times. The ancient Egyptian cymbals closely resembled our own. The British Museum possesses two pairs, thirteen centimetres in diameter, one of which was found in the coffin of the mummy of Ankhhape, a sacred musician. Those used by the Assyrians were both plate- and cup-shaped, those of the Ancient Persians large-sized plates, made of brass, known as Sanj. The Greek cymbals were cup- or bell-shaped, and may be seen in the hands of innumerable fauns and satyrs in sculptures and on painted vases. The word cymbal is derived from the Latin cymbalum, which itself derives from the Greek word kumbalom, meaning a small bowl. * Bell- The center of a Cymbal. When hit with the side or shoulder of a drum stick, it causes a sound which is in a higher register than the rest of the cymbal. * Bow- The remaining surface of the Cymbal. This is where you get a "ping" sound. * Edge or rim- This is where you get the best "crash". Hitting the edge causes the cymbal to vibrate more, thus being louder. The most common Cymbals are the Hi-Hats, Crash, Splash, Ride, and China. Although cymbals are not often required they form part of every orchestra; their chief use is for marking the rhythm, producing effects, or adding military color. Their unique timbre allows them to project even against a full orchestra and through the heaviest of orhestrations. Cymbals have been utilized historically to suggest frenzy, fury or bacchanalian revels, as seen in the Venus music in Wagner's Tannhäuser, Grieg's Peer Gynt suite, and Osmin's aria "O wie will ich triumphieren" from Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail. A pair of clash cymbals in profile. The bell is in green and the straps are in red. Orchestral crash cymbals are traditionally used in pairs, each one having a strap set in the bell of the cymbal by which they are held. Such a pair is known technically as a pair of clash cymbals, although this term is rarely used, see clash cymbals. They are confusingly sometimes referred to simply as crash cymbals, although this term properly applies also to some suspended cymbals. The sound can be obtained by rubbing their edges together in a sliding movement for a "sizzle", striking them against each other in what is called a "crash", tapping the edge of one against the body of the other in what is called a "tap-crash", scraping the edge of one from the inside of the bell to the edge for a "scrape" or "zishend," or shutting the cymbals together and choking the sound in what is called a "hi-hat chick." A skilled player can obtain an enormous dynamic range from such a pair of cymbals. For example, in Beethoven's ninth symphony, one of their first appearances in an orchestral work, they make their entry pianissimo, adding a touch of colour rather than an almighty crash. Clash cymbals are usually damped by pressing them against the player's body. A composer may write laissez vibrer, "Let vibrate" (usually abbreviated l.v.), secco (dry), or equivalent indications on the score; more usually, the player must judge exactly when to damp the cymbals based on the written duration of crash and the context in which it occurs. Clash cymbals have traditionally been accompanied by the bass drum playing an identical part. This combination, played loudly, is an effective way to accentuate a note since the two instruments together contribute to both very low and very high frequency ranges and provide a satisfying "crash-bang-wallop". In older music the composer sometimes provided just one part for this pair of instruments, writing senza piatti or piatti soli (Italian: "without cymbals" or "cymbals only") if the bass drum is to remain silent. However, the modern convention is for the instruments to have independent parts. Clash cymbals evolved into the low-sock and from this to the modern hi-hat. Even in a modern drum kit, they remain paired with the bass drum as the two instruments which are played with the player's feet. However, hi-hat cymbals tend to be heavy with little taper, more similar to a ride cymbal than to a crash cymbal as found in a drum kit, and perform a ride rather than a crash function. The second main orchestral use of cymbals is the suspended cymbal. This instrument takes its name from the traditional method of suspending the cymbal by means of a leather strap or rope, thus allowing the cymbal to vibrate as freely as possible for maximum musical effect. Early jazz drumming pioneers borrowed this style of cymbal mounting during the early 1900s and later drummers further developed this instrument in to the mounted horizontal or nearly horizontally mounted "crash" cymbals of a modern drum kit. Suspended cymbals are most often played with yarn wrapped mallets. However, some composers request other types of mallets like felt mallets or timpani beaters for different attack and sustain qualities. Suspended cymbals can produce bright and slicing tones when forcefully struck, and give an eerie transparent "windy" sound when played quietly. A tremolo, or roll (played with two mallets alternately striking on opposing sides of the cymbal) can build in volume from almost inaudible to an overwhelming climax in a satisfyingly smooth manner (as in Humperdink's Mother Goose Suite). Furthermore, the edge of a suspended cymbal may be hit with shoulder of a drum stick to obtain a sound somewhat akin to that of a pair of clash cymbals. Other methods of playing include scraping a coin or a triangle beater rapidly across the ridges on the top of the cymbal, giving a "zing" sound (as in the fourth movement of Dvořák's Symphony No. 9). Other effects that can be used include drawing a cello or bass bow across the edge of the cymbal for a sound not unlike squealing car brakes. On another note, in highschool marching bands, a "pit" may use a suspended cymbal for a song. This is held on a tree-like structure, similar to how it would be placed by a drumset. Also known as a high-top, the instrument's music will read it as a "sus. cym. or cymb." Ancient cymbals or tuned cymbals are much more rarely called for. Their timbre is entirely different, more like that of small hand-bells or of the notes of the keyed harmonica. They are not struck full against each other, but by one of their edges, and the note given in by them is higher in proportion as they are thicker and smaller. Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet calls for two pairs of cymbals, modelled on some old Pompeian instruments no larger than the hand (some are no larger than a crown piece), and tuned to F and B flat. The modern instruments descended from this line are the crotales. * China cymbals * crash cymbals * hi-hat cymbals * Persian cymbals * ride cymbals * Swish and pang cymbals * Sizzle cymbals * Splash cymbals * Trash Hats (Hi-Hat cymbal / china cymbal hybrid setup) * Clash cymbals * Finger cymbals - Zill * Suspended cymbals *Cymbal alloys *Cymbal making *Drum *Drum kit *Percussion instrument *Avedis Zildjian Company *Saluda Cymbals *Italian Bellotti Cymbals *Agean Cymbals *Bosphorus Cymbals *Meinl *Paiste *Sabian *Stagg *UFIP *Yamaha *Wuhan *Istanbul cymbals *Istanbul Agop *Turk Masters Cymbals :See also . * CymbalPlanet.com Welcome to the World of Cymbals * Accessory Fetish A Complete List of Cymbal Manufacturers * Cymbal Forum Discussion forum about cymbals. * Orchestral cymbal playing, with an excellent short history of cymbals *
Cymbal
Did the modern hi-hat evolve from clash cymbals?
Yes
data/set2/a6
Cymbal Cymbals are a modern percussion instrument. Cymbals consist of thin, normally round plates of various cymbal alloys; see cymbal making for a discussion of their manufacture. Most modern cymbals are of indefinite pitch (tuned sets have been manufactured but are rare), whereas small cup-shaped cymbals based on ancient designs sound a definite note (''see: crotales). Cymbals are used in modern orchestras and many military, marching, concert and other bands. They are one of the two instrument types that form the modern drum kit, the other being the drum, and are a basic part of much contemporary music. The most basic drum kit normally contains at least one suspended cymbal and a pair of hi-hat cymbals. The origins of cymbals can be traced back to prehistoric times. The ancient Egyptian cymbals closely resembled our own. The British Museum possesses two pairs, thirteen centimetres in diameter, one of which was found in the coffin of the mummy of Ankhhape, a sacred musician. Those used by the Assyrians were both plate- and cup-shaped, those of the Ancient Persians large-sized plates, made of brass, known as Sanj. The Greek cymbals were cup- or bell-shaped, and may be seen in the hands of innumerable fauns and satyrs in sculptures and on painted vases. The word cymbal is derived from the Latin cymbalum, which itself derives from the Greek word kumbalom, meaning a small bowl. * Bell- The center of a Cymbal. When hit with the side or shoulder of a drum stick, it causes a sound which is in a higher register than the rest of the cymbal. * Bow- The remaining surface of the Cymbal. This is where you get a "ping" sound. * Edge or rim- This is where you get the best "crash". Hitting the edge causes the cymbal to vibrate more, thus being louder. The most common Cymbals are the Hi-Hats, Crash, Splash, Ride, and China. Although cymbals are not often required they form part of every orchestra; their chief use is for marking the rhythm, producing effects, or adding military color. Their unique timbre allows them to project even against a full orchestra and through the heaviest of orhestrations. Cymbals have been utilized historically to suggest frenzy, fury or bacchanalian revels, as seen in the Venus music in Wagner's Tannhäuser, Grieg's Peer Gynt suite, and Osmin's aria "O wie will ich triumphieren" from Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail. A pair of clash cymbals in profile. The bell is in green and the straps are in red. Orchestral crash cymbals are traditionally used in pairs, each one having a strap set in the bell of the cymbal by which they are held. Such a pair is known technically as a pair of clash cymbals, although this term is rarely used, see clash cymbals. They are confusingly sometimes referred to simply as crash cymbals, although this term properly applies also to some suspended cymbals. The sound can be obtained by rubbing their edges together in a sliding movement for a "sizzle", striking them against each other in what is called a "crash", tapping the edge of one against the body of the other in what is called a "tap-crash", scraping the edge of one from the inside of the bell to the edge for a "scrape" or "zishend," or shutting the cymbals together and choking the sound in what is called a "hi-hat chick." A skilled player can obtain an enormous dynamic range from such a pair of cymbals. For example, in Beethoven's ninth symphony, one of their first appearances in an orchestral work, they make their entry pianissimo, adding a touch of colour rather than an almighty crash. Clash cymbals are usually damped by pressing them against the player's body. A composer may write laissez vibrer, "Let vibrate" (usually abbreviated l.v.), secco (dry), or equivalent indications on the score; more usually, the player must judge exactly when to damp the cymbals based on the written duration of crash and the context in which it occurs. Clash cymbals have traditionally been accompanied by the bass drum playing an identical part. This combination, played loudly, is an effective way to accentuate a note since the two instruments together contribute to both very low and very high frequency ranges and provide a satisfying "crash-bang-wallop". In older music the composer sometimes provided just one part for this pair of instruments, writing senza piatti or piatti soli (Italian: "without cymbals" or "cymbals only") if the bass drum is to remain silent. However, the modern convention is for the instruments to have independent parts. Clash cymbals evolved into the low-sock and from this to the modern hi-hat. Even in a modern drum kit, they remain paired with the bass drum as the two instruments which are played with the player's feet. However, hi-hat cymbals tend to be heavy with little taper, more similar to a ride cymbal than to a crash cymbal as found in a drum kit, and perform a ride rather than a crash function. The second main orchestral use of cymbals is the suspended cymbal. This instrument takes its name from the traditional method of suspending the cymbal by means of a leather strap or rope, thus allowing the cymbal to vibrate as freely as possible for maximum musical effect. Early jazz drumming pioneers borrowed this style of cymbal mounting during the early 1900s and later drummers further developed this instrument in to the mounted horizontal or nearly horizontally mounted "crash" cymbals of a modern drum kit. Suspended cymbals are most often played with yarn wrapped mallets. However, some composers request other types of mallets like felt mallets or timpani beaters for different attack and sustain qualities. Suspended cymbals can produce bright and slicing tones when forcefully struck, and give an eerie transparent "windy" sound when played quietly. A tremolo, or roll (played with two mallets alternately striking on opposing sides of the cymbal) can build in volume from almost inaudible to an overwhelming climax in a satisfyingly smooth manner (as in Humperdink's Mother Goose Suite). Furthermore, the edge of a suspended cymbal may be hit with shoulder of a drum stick to obtain a sound somewhat akin to that of a pair of clash cymbals. Other methods of playing include scraping a coin or a triangle beater rapidly across the ridges on the top of the cymbal, giving a "zing" sound (as in the fourth movement of Dvořák's Symphony No. 9). Other effects that can be used include drawing a cello or bass bow across the edge of the cymbal for a sound not unlike squealing car brakes. On another note, in highschool marching bands, a "pit" may use a suspended cymbal for a song. This is held on a tree-like structure, similar to how it would be placed by a drumset. Also known as a high-top, the instrument's music will read it as a "sus. cym. or cymb." Ancient cymbals or tuned cymbals are much more rarely called for. Their timbre is entirely different, more like that of small hand-bells or of the notes of the keyed harmonica. They are not struck full against each other, but by one of their edges, and the note given in by them is higher in proportion as they are thicker and smaller. Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet calls for two pairs of cymbals, modelled on some old Pompeian instruments no larger than the hand (some are no larger than a crown piece), and tuned to F and B flat. The modern instruments descended from this line are the crotales. * China cymbals * crash cymbals * hi-hat cymbals * Persian cymbals * ride cymbals * Swish and pang cymbals * Sizzle cymbals * Splash cymbals * Trash Hats (Hi-Hat cymbal / china cymbal hybrid setup) * Clash cymbals * Finger cymbals - Zill * Suspended cymbals *Cymbal alloys *Cymbal making *Drum *Drum kit *Percussion instrument *Avedis Zildjian Company *Saluda Cymbals *Italian Bellotti Cymbals *Agean Cymbals *Bosphorus Cymbals *Meinl *Paiste *Sabian *Stagg *UFIP *Yamaha *Wuhan *Istanbul cymbals *Istanbul Agop *Turk Masters Cymbals :See also . * CymbalPlanet.com Welcome to the World of Cymbals * Accessory Fetish A Complete List of Cymbal Manufacturers * Cymbal Forum Discussion forum about cymbals. * Orchestral cymbal playing, with an excellent short history of cymbals *
Cymbal
Is the word cymbal derived from a Germanic word?
No
data/set2/a6
Cymbal Cymbals are a modern percussion instrument. Cymbals consist of thin, normally round plates of various cymbal alloys; see cymbal making for a discussion of their manufacture. Most modern cymbals are of indefinite pitch (tuned sets have been manufactured but are rare), whereas small cup-shaped cymbals based on ancient designs sound a definite note (''see: crotales). Cymbals are used in modern orchestras and many military, marching, concert and other bands. They are one of the two instrument types that form the modern drum kit, the other being the drum, and are a basic part of much contemporary music. The most basic drum kit normally contains at least one suspended cymbal and a pair of hi-hat cymbals. The origins of cymbals can be traced back to prehistoric times. The ancient Egyptian cymbals closely resembled our own. The British Museum possesses two pairs, thirteen centimetres in diameter, one of which was found in the coffin of the mummy of Ankhhape, a sacred musician. Those used by the Assyrians were both plate- and cup-shaped, those of the Ancient Persians large-sized plates, made of brass, known as Sanj. The Greek cymbals were cup- or bell-shaped, and may be seen in the hands of innumerable fauns and satyrs in sculptures and on painted vases. The word cymbal is derived from the Latin cymbalum, which itself derives from the Greek word kumbalom, meaning a small bowl. * Bell- The center of a Cymbal. When hit with the side or shoulder of a drum stick, it causes a sound which is in a higher register than the rest of the cymbal. * Bow- The remaining surface of the Cymbal. This is where you get a "ping" sound. * Edge or rim- This is where you get the best "crash". Hitting the edge causes the cymbal to vibrate more, thus being louder. The most common Cymbals are the Hi-Hats, Crash, Splash, Ride, and China. Although cymbals are not often required they form part of every orchestra; their chief use is for marking the rhythm, producing effects, or adding military color. Their unique timbre allows them to project even against a full orchestra and through the heaviest of orhestrations. Cymbals have been utilized historically to suggest frenzy, fury or bacchanalian revels, as seen in the Venus music in Wagner's Tannhäuser, Grieg's Peer Gynt suite, and Osmin's aria "O wie will ich triumphieren" from Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail. A pair of clash cymbals in profile. The bell is in green and the straps are in red. Orchestral crash cymbals are traditionally used in pairs, each one having a strap set in the bell of the cymbal by which they are held. Such a pair is known technically as a pair of clash cymbals, although this term is rarely used, see clash cymbals. They are confusingly sometimes referred to simply as crash cymbals, although this term properly applies also to some suspended cymbals. The sound can be obtained by rubbing their edges together in a sliding movement for a "sizzle", striking them against each other in what is called a "crash", tapping the edge of one against the body of the other in what is called a "tap-crash", scraping the edge of one from the inside of the bell to the edge for a "scrape" or "zishend," or shutting the cymbals together and choking the sound in what is called a "hi-hat chick." A skilled player can obtain an enormous dynamic range from such a pair of cymbals. For example, in Beethoven's ninth symphony, one of their first appearances in an orchestral work, they make their entry pianissimo, adding a touch of colour rather than an almighty crash. Clash cymbals are usually damped by pressing them against the player's body. A composer may write laissez vibrer, "Let vibrate" (usually abbreviated l.v.), secco (dry), or equivalent indications on the score; more usually, the player must judge exactly when to damp the cymbals based on the written duration of crash and the context in which it occurs. Clash cymbals have traditionally been accompanied by the bass drum playing an identical part. This combination, played loudly, is an effective way to accentuate a note since the two instruments together contribute to both very low and very high frequency ranges and provide a satisfying "crash-bang-wallop". In older music the composer sometimes provided just one part for this pair of instruments, writing senza piatti or piatti soli (Italian: "without cymbals" or "cymbals only") if the bass drum is to remain silent. However, the modern convention is for the instruments to have independent parts. Clash cymbals evolved into the low-sock and from this to the modern hi-hat. Even in a modern drum kit, they remain paired with the bass drum as the two instruments which are played with the player's feet. However, hi-hat cymbals tend to be heavy with little taper, more similar to a ride cymbal than to a crash cymbal as found in a drum kit, and perform a ride rather than a crash function. The second main orchestral use of cymbals is the suspended cymbal. This instrument takes its name from the traditional method of suspending the cymbal by means of a leather strap or rope, thus allowing the cymbal to vibrate as freely as possible for maximum musical effect. Early jazz drumming pioneers borrowed this style of cymbal mounting during the early 1900s and later drummers further developed this instrument in to the mounted horizontal or nearly horizontally mounted "crash" cymbals of a modern drum kit. Suspended cymbals are most often played with yarn wrapped mallets. However, some composers request other types of mallets like felt mallets or timpani beaters for different attack and sustain qualities. Suspended cymbals can produce bright and slicing tones when forcefully struck, and give an eerie transparent "windy" sound when played quietly. A tremolo, or roll (played with two mallets alternately striking on opposing sides of the cymbal) can build in volume from almost inaudible to an overwhelming climax in a satisfyingly smooth manner (as in Humperdink's Mother Goose Suite). Furthermore, the edge of a suspended cymbal may be hit with shoulder of a drum stick to obtain a sound somewhat akin to that of a pair of clash cymbals. Other methods of playing include scraping a coin or a triangle beater rapidly across the ridges on the top of the cymbal, giving a "zing" sound (as in the fourth movement of Dvořák's Symphony No. 9). Other effects that can be used include drawing a cello or bass bow across the edge of the cymbal for a sound not unlike squealing car brakes. On another note, in highschool marching bands, a "pit" may use a suspended cymbal for a song. This is held on a tree-like structure, similar to how it would be placed by a drumset. Also known as a high-top, the instrument's music will read it as a "sus. cym. or cymb." Ancient cymbals or tuned cymbals are much more rarely called for. Their timbre is entirely different, more like that of small hand-bells or of the notes of the keyed harmonica. They are not struck full against each other, but by one of their edges, and the note given in by them is higher in proportion as they are thicker and smaller. Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet calls for two pairs of cymbals, modelled on some old Pompeian instruments no larger than the hand (some are no larger than a crown piece), and tuned to F and B flat. The modern instruments descended from this line are the crotales. * China cymbals * crash cymbals * hi-hat cymbals * Persian cymbals * ride cymbals * Swish and pang cymbals * Sizzle cymbals * Splash cymbals * Trash Hats (Hi-Hat cymbal / china cymbal hybrid setup) * Clash cymbals * Finger cymbals - Zill * Suspended cymbals *Cymbal alloys *Cymbal making *Drum *Drum kit *Percussion instrument *Avedis Zildjian Company *Saluda Cymbals *Italian Bellotti Cymbals *Agean Cymbals *Bosphorus Cymbals *Meinl *Paiste *Sabian *Stagg *UFIP *Yamaha *Wuhan *Istanbul cymbals *Istanbul Agop *Turk Masters Cymbals :See also . * CymbalPlanet.com Welcome to the World of Cymbals * Accessory Fetish A Complete List of Cymbal Manufacturers * Cymbal Forum Discussion forum about cymbals. * Orchestral cymbal playing, with an excellent short history of cymbals *
Cymbal
Is the word cymbal derived from a Germanic word?
No
data/set2/a6
Cymbal Cymbals are a modern percussion instrument. Cymbals consist of thin, normally round plates of various cymbal alloys; see cymbal making for a discussion of their manufacture. Most modern cymbals are of indefinite pitch (tuned sets have been manufactured but are rare), whereas small cup-shaped cymbals based on ancient designs sound a definite note (''see: crotales). Cymbals are used in modern orchestras and many military, marching, concert and other bands. They are one of the two instrument types that form the modern drum kit, the other being the drum, and are a basic part of much contemporary music. The most basic drum kit normally contains at least one suspended cymbal and a pair of hi-hat cymbals. The origins of cymbals can be traced back to prehistoric times. The ancient Egyptian cymbals closely resembled our own. The British Museum possesses two pairs, thirteen centimetres in diameter, one of which was found in the coffin of the mummy of Ankhhape, a sacred musician. Those used by the Assyrians were both plate- and cup-shaped, those of the Ancient Persians large-sized plates, made of brass, known as Sanj. The Greek cymbals were cup- or bell-shaped, and may be seen in the hands of innumerable fauns and satyrs in sculptures and on painted vases. The word cymbal is derived from the Latin cymbalum, which itself derives from the Greek word kumbalom, meaning a small bowl. * Bell- The center of a Cymbal. When hit with the side or shoulder of a drum stick, it causes a sound which is in a higher register than the rest of the cymbal. * Bow- The remaining surface of the Cymbal. This is where you get a "ping" sound. * Edge or rim- This is where you get the best "crash". Hitting the edge causes the cymbal to vibrate more, thus being louder. The most common Cymbals are the Hi-Hats, Crash, Splash, Ride, and China. Although cymbals are not often required they form part of every orchestra; their chief use is for marking the rhythm, producing effects, or adding military color. Their unique timbre allows them to project even against a full orchestra and through the heaviest of orhestrations. Cymbals have been utilized historically to suggest frenzy, fury or bacchanalian revels, as seen in the Venus music in Wagner's Tannhäuser, Grieg's Peer Gynt suite, and Osmin's aria "O wie will ich triumphieren" from Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail. A pair of clash cymbals in profile. The bell is in green and the straps are in red. Orchestral crash cymbals are traditionally used in pairs, each one having a strap set in the bell of the cymbal by which they are held. Such a pair is known technically as a pair of clash cymbals, although this term is rarely used, see clash cymbals. They are confusingly sometimes referred to simply as crash cymbals, although this term properly applies also to some suspended cymbals. The sound can be obtained by rubbing their edges together in a sliding movement for a "sizzle", striking them against each other in what is called a "crash", tapping the edge of one against the body of the other in what is called a "tap-crash", scraping the edge of one from the inside of the bell to the edge for a "scrape" or "zishend," or shutting the cymbals together and choking the sound in what is called a "hi-hat chick." A skilled player can obtain an enormous dynamic range from such a pair of cymbals. For example, in Beethoven's ninth symphony, one of their first appearances in an orchestral work, they make their entry pianissimo, adding a touch of colour rather than an almighty crash. Clash cymbals are usually damped by pressing them against the player's body. A composer may write laissez vibrer, "Let vibrate" (usually abbreviated l.v.), secco (dry), or equivalent indications on the score; more usually, the player must judge exactly when to damp the cymbals based on the written duration of crash and the context in which it occurs. Clash cymbals have traditionally been accompanied by the bass drum playing an identical part. This combination, played loudly, is an effective way to accentuate a note since the two instruments together contribute to both very low and very high frequency ranges and provide a satisfying "crash-bang-wallop". In older music the composer sometimes provided just one part for this pair of instruments, writing senza piatti or piatti soli (Italian: "without cymbals" or "cymbals only") if the bass drum is to remain silent. However, the modern convention is for the instruments to have independent parts. Clash cymbals evolved into the low-sock and from this to the modern hi-hat. Even in a modern drum kit, they remain paired with the bass drum as the two instruments which are played with the player's feet. However, hi-hat cymbals tend to be heavy with little taper, more similar to a ride cymbal than to a crash cymbal as found in a drum kit, and perform a ride rather than a crash function. The second main orchestral use of cymbals is the suspended cymbal. This instrument takes its name from the traditional method of suspending the cymbal by means of a leather strap or rope, thus allowing the cymbal to vibrate as freely as possible for maximum musical effect. Early jazz drumming pioneers borrowed this style of cymbal mounting during the early 1900s and later drummers further developed this instrument in to the mounted horizontal or nearly horizontally mounted "crash" cymbals of a modern drum kit. Suspended cymbals are most often played with yarn wrapped mallets. However, some composers request other types of mallets like felt mallets or timpani beaters for different attack and sustain qualities. Suspended cymbals can produce bright and slicing tones when forcefully struck, and give an eerie transparent "windy" sound when played quietly. A tremolo, or roll (played with two mallets alternately striking on opposing sides of the cymbal) can build in volume from almost inaudible to an overwhelming climax in a satisfyingly smooth manner (as in Humperdink's Mother Goose Suite). Furthermore, the edge of a suspended cymbal may be hit with shoulder of a drum stick to obtain a sound somewhat akin to that of a pair of clash cymbals. Other methods of playing include scraping a coin or a triangle beater rapidly across the ridges on the top of the cymbal, giving a "zing" sound (as in the fourth movement of Dvořák's Symphony No. 9). Other effects that can be used include drawing a cello or bass bow across the edge of the cymbal for a sound not unlike squealing car brakes. On another note, in highschool marching bands, a "pit" may use a suspended cymbal for a song. This is held on a tree-like structure, similar to how it would be placed by a drumset. Also known as a high-top, the instrument's music will read it as a "sus. cym. or cymb." Ancient cymbals or tuned cymbals are much more rarely called for. Their timbre is entirely different, more like that of small hand-bells or of the notes of the keyed harmonica. They are not struck full against each other, but by one of their edges, and the note given in by them is higher in proportion as they are thicker and smaller. Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet calls for two pairs of cymbals, modelled on some old Pompeian instruments no larger than the hand (some are no larger than a crown piece), and tuned to F and B flat. The modern instruments descended from this line are the crotales. * China cymbals * crash cymbals * hi-hat cymbals * Persian cymbals * ride cymbals * Swish and pang cymbals * Sizzle cymbals * Splash cymbals * Trash Hats (Hi-Hat cymbal / china cymbal hybrid setup) * Clash cymbals * Finger cymbals - Zill * Suspended cymbals *Cymbal alloys *Cymbal making *Drum *Drum kit *Percussion instrument *Avedis Zildjian Company *Saluda Cymbals *Italian Bellotti Cymbals *Agean Cymbals *Bosphorus Cymbals *Meinl *Paiste *Sabian *Stagg *UFIP *Yamaha *Wuhan *Istanbul cymbals *Istanbul Agop *Turk Masters Cymbals :See also . * CymbalPlanet.com Welcome to the World of Cymbals * Accessory Fetish A Complete List of Cymbal Manufacturers * Cymbal Forum Discussion forum about cymbals. * Orchestral cymbal playing, with an excellent short history of cymbals *
Cymbal
What is the center of a cymbal called?
Bell
data/set2/a6
Cymbal Cymbals are a modern percussion instrument. Cymbals consist of thin, normally round plates of various cymbal alloys; see cymbal making for a discussion of their manufacture. Most modern cymbals are of indefinite pitch (tuned sets have been manufactured but are rare), whereas small cup-shaped cymbals based on ancient designs sound a definite note (''see: crotales). Cymbals are used in modern orchestras and many military, marching, concert and other bands. They are one of the two instrument types that form the modern drum kit, the other being the drum, and are a basic part of much contemporary music. The most basic drum kit normally contains at least one suspended cymbal and a pair of hi-hat cymbals. The origins of cymbals can be traced back to prehistoric times. The ancient Egyptian cymbals closely resembled our own. The British Museum possesses two pairs, thirteen centimetres in diameter, one of which was found in the coffin of the mummy of Ankhhape, a sacred musician. Those used by the Assyrians were both plate- and cup-shaped, those of the Ancient Persians large-sized plates, made of brass, known as Sanj. The Greek cymbals were cup- or bell-shaped, and may be seen in the hands of innumerable fauns and satyrs in sculptures and on painted vases. The word cymbal is derived from the Latin cymbalum, which itself derives from the Greek word kumbalom, meaning a small bowl. * Bell- The center of a Cymbal. When hit with the side or shoulder of a drum stick, it causes a sound which is in a higher register than the rest of the cymbal. * Bow- The remaining surface of the Cymbal. This is where you get a "ping" sound. * Edge or rim- This is where you get the best "crash". Hitting the edge causes the cymbal to vibrate more, thus being louder. The most common Cymbals are the Hi-Hats, Crash, Splash, Ride, and China. Although cymbals are not often required they form part of every orchestra; their chief use is for marking the rhythm, producing effects, or adding military color. Their unique timbre allows them to project even against a full orchestra and through the heaviest of orhestrations. Cymbals have been utilized historically to suggest frenzy, fury or bacchanalian revels, as seen in the Venus music in Wagner's Tannhäuser, Grieg's Peer Gynt suite, and Osmin's aria "O wie will ich triumphieren" from Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail. A pair of clash cymbals in profile. The bell is in green and the straps are in red. Orchestral crash cymbals are traditionally used in pairs, each one having a strap set in the bell of the cymbal by which they are held. Such a pair is known technically as a pair of clash cymbals, although this term is rarely used, see clash cymbals. They are confusingly sometimes referred to simply as crash cymbals, although this term properly applies also to some suspended cymbals. The sound can be obtained by rubbing their edges together in a sliding movement for a "sizzle", striking them against each other in what is called a "crash", tapping the edge of one against the body of the other in what is called a "tap-crash", scraping the edge of one from the inside of the bell to the edge for a "scrape" or "zishend," or shutting the cymbals together and choking the sound in what is called a "hi-hat chick." A skilled player can obtain an enormous dynamic range from such a pair of cymbals. For example, in Beethoven's ninth symphony, one of their first appearances in an orchestral work, they make their entry pianissimo, adding a touch of colour rather than an almighty crash. Clash cymbals are usually damped by pressing them against the player's body. A composer may write laissez vibrer, "Let vibrate" (usually abbreviated l.v.), secco (dry), or equivalent indications on the score; more usually, the player must judge exactly when to damp the cymbals based on the written duration of crash and the context in which it occurs. Clash cymbals have traditionally been accompanied by the bass drum playing an identical part. This combination, played loudly, is an effective way to accentuate a note since the two instruments together contribute to both very low and very high frequency ranges and provide a satisfying "crash-bang-wallop". In older music the composer sometimes provided just one part for this pair of instruments, writing senza piatti or piatti soli (Italian: "without cymbals" or "cymbals only") if the bass drum is to remain silent. However, the modern convention is for the instruments to have independent parts. Clash cymbals evolved into the low-sock and from this to the modern hi-hat. Even in a modern drum kit, they remain paired with the bass drum as the two instruments which are played with the player's feet. However, hi-hat cymbals tend to be heavy with little taper, more similar to a ride cymbal than to a crash cymbal as found in a drum kit, and perform a ride rather than a crash function. The second main orchestral use of cymbals is the suspended cymbal. This instrument takes its name from the traditional method of suspending the cymbal by means of a leather strap or rope, thus allowing the cymbal to vibrate as freely as possible for maximum musical effect. Early jazz drumming pioneers borrowed this style of cymbal mounting during the early 1900s and later drummers further developed this instrument in to the mounted horizontal or nearly horizontally mounted "crash" cymbals of a modern drum kit. Suspended cymbals are most often played with yarn wrapped mallets. However, some composers request other types of mallets like felt mallets or timpani beaters for different attack and sustain qualities. Suspended cymbals can produce bright and slicing tones when forcefully struck, and give an eerie transparent "windy" sound when played quietly. A tremolo, or roll (played with two mallets alternately striking on opposing sides of the cymbal) can build in volume from almost inaudible to an overwhelming climax in a satisfyingly smooth manner (as in Humperdink's Mother Goose Suite). Furthermore, the edge of a suspended cymbal may be hit with shoulder of a drum stick to obtain a sound somewhat akin to that of a pair of clash cymbals. Other methods of playing include scraping a coin or a triangle beater rapidly across the ridges on the top of the cymbal, giving a "zing" sound (as in the fourth movement of Dvořák's Symphony No. 9). Other effects that can be used include drawing a cello or bass bow across the edge of the cymbal for a sound not unlike squealing car brakes. On another note, in highschool marching bands, a "pit" may use a suspended cymbal for a song. This is held on a tree-like structure, similar to how it would be placed by a drumset. Also known as a high-top, the instrument's music will read it as a "sus. cym. or cymb." Ancient cymbals or tuned cymbals are much more rarely called for. Their timbre is entirely different, more like that of small hand-bells or of the notes of the keyed harmonica. They are not struck full against each other, but by one of their edges, and the note given in by them is higher in proportion as they are thicker and smaller. Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet calls for two pairs of cymbals, modelled on some old Pompeian instruments no larger than the hand (some are no larger than a crown piece), and tuned to F and B flat. The modern instruments descended from this line are the crotales. * China cymbals * crash cymbals * hi-hat cymbals * Persian cymbals * ride cymbals * Swish and pang cymbals * Sizzle cymbals * Splash cymbals * Trash Hats (Hi-Hat cymbal / china cymbal hybrid setup) * Clash cymbals * Finger cymbals - Zill * Suspended cymbals *Cymbal alloys *Cymbal making *Drum *Drum kit *Percussion instrument *Avedis Zildjian Company *Saluda Cymbals *Italian Bellotti Cymbals *Agean Cymbals *Bosphorus Cymbals *Meinl *Paiste *Sabian *Stagg *UFIP *Yamaha *Wuhan *Istanbul cymbals *Istanbul Agop *Turk Masters Cymbals :See also . * CymbalPlanet.com Welcome to the World of Cymbals * Accessory Fetish A Complete List of Cymbal Manufacturers * Cymbal Forum Discussion forum about cymbals. * Orchestral cymbal playing, with an excellent short history of cymbals *
Cymbal
What is the center of a cymbal called?
bell
data/set2/a6
Cymbal Cymbals are a modern percussion instrument. Cymbals consist of thin, normally round plates of various cymbal alloys; see cymbal making for a discussion of their manufacture. Most modern cymbals are of indefinite pitch (tuned sets have been manufactured but are rare), whereas small cup-shaped cymbals based on ancient designs sound a definite note (''see: crotales). Cymbals are used in modern orchestras and many military, marching, concert and other bands. They are one of the two instrument types that form the modern drum kit, the other being the drum, and are a basic part of much contemporary music. The most basic drum kit normally contains at least one suspended cymbal and a pair of hi-hat cymbals. The origins of cymbals can be traced back to prehistoric times. The ancient Egyptian cymbals closely resembled our own. The British Museum possesses two pairs, thirteen centimetres in diameter, one of which was found in the coffin of the mummy of Ankhhape, a sacred musician. Those used by the Assyrians were both plate- and cup-shaped, those of the Ancient Persians large-sized plates, made of brass, known as Sanj. The Greek cymbals were cup- or bell-shaped, and may be seen in the hands of innumerable fauns and satyrs in sculptures and on painted vases. The word cymbal is derived from the Latin cymbalum, which itself derives from the Greek word kumbalom, meaning a small bowl. * Bell- The center of a Cymbal. When hit with the side or shoulder of a drum stick, it causes a sound which is in a higher register than the rest of the cymbal. * Bow- The remaining surface of the Cymbal. This is where you get a "ping" sound. * Edge or rim- This is where you get the best "crash". Hitting the edge causes the cymbal to vibrate more, thus being louder. The most common Cymbals are the Hi-Hats, Crash, Splash, Ride, and China. Although cymbals are not often required they form part of every orchestra; their chief use is for marking the rhythm, producing effects, or adding military color. Their unique timbre allows them to project even against a full orchestra and through the heaviest of orhestrations. Cymbals have been utilized historically to suggest frenzy, fury or bacchanalian revels, as seen in the Venus music in Wagner's Tannhäuser, Grieg's Peer Gynt suite, and Osmin's aria "O wie will ich triumphieren" from Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail. A pair of clash cymbals in profile. The bell is in green and the straps are in red. Orchestral crash cymbals are traditionally used in pairs, each one having a strap set in the bell of the cymbal by which they are held. Such a pair is known technically as a pair of clash cymbals, although this term is rarely used, see clash cymbals. They are confusingly sometimes referred to simply as crash cymbals, although this term properly applies also to some suspended cymbals. The sound can be obtained by rubbing their edges together in a sliding movement for a "sizzle", striking them against each other in what is called a "crash", tapping the edge of one against the body of the other in what is called a "tap-crash", scraping the edge of one from the inside of the bell to the edge for a "scrape" or "zishend," or shutting the cymbals together and choking the sound in what is called a "hi-hat chick." A skilled player can obtain an enormous dynamic range from such a pair of cymbals. For example, in Beethoven's ninth symphony, one of their first appearances in an orchestral work, they make their entry pianissimo, adding a touch of colour rather than an almighty crash. Clash cymbals are usually damped by pressing them against the player's body. A composer may write laissez vibrer, "Let vibrate" (usually abbreviated l.v.), secco (dry), or equivalent indications on the score; more usually, the player must judge exactly when to damp the cymbals based on the written duration of crash and the context in which it occurs. Clash cymbals have traditionally been accompanied by the bass drum playing an identical part. This combination, played loudly, is an effective way to accentuate a note since the two instruments together contribute to both very low and very high frequency ranges and provide a satisfying "crash-bang-wallop". In older music the composer sometimes provided just one part for this pair of instruments, writing senza piatti or piatti soli (Italian: "without cymbals" or "cymbals only") if the bass drum is to remain silent. However, the modern convention is for the instruments to have independent parts. Clash cymbals evolved into the low-sock and from this to the modern hi-hat. Even in a modern drum kit, they remain paired with the bass drum as the two instruments which are played with the player's feet. However, hi-hat cymbals tend to be heavy with little taper, more similar to a ride cymbal than to a crash cymbal as found in a drum kit, and perform a ride rather than a crash function. The second main orchestral use of cymbals is the suspended cymbal. This instrument takes its name from the traditional method of suspending the cymbal by means of a leather strap or rope, thus allowing the cymbal to vibrate as freely as possible for maximum musical effect. Early jazz drumming pioneers borrowed this style of cymbal mounting during the early 1900s and later drummers further developed this instrument in to the mounted horizontal or nearly horizontally mounted "crash" cymbals of a modern drum kit. Suspended cymbals are most often played with yarn wrapped mallets. However, some composers request other types of mallets like felt mallets or timpani beaters for different attack and sustain qualities. Suspended cymbals can produce bright and slicing tones when forcefully struck, and give an eerie transparent "windy" sound when played quietly. A tremolo, or roll (played with two mallets alternately striking on opposing sides of the cymbal) can build in volume from almost inaudible to an overwhelming climax in a satisfyingly smooth manner (as in Humperdink's Mother Goose Suite). Furthermore, the edge of a suspended cymbal may be hit with shoulder of a drum stick to obtain a sound somewhat akin to that of a pair of clash cymbals. Other methods of playing include scraping a coin or a triangle beater rapidly across the ridges on the top of the cymbal, giving a "zing" sound (as in the fourth movement of Dvořák's Symphony No. 9). Other effects that can be used include drawing a cello or bass bow across the edge of the cymbal for a sound not unlike squealing car brakes. On another note, in highschool marching bands, a "pit" may use a suspended cymbal for a song. This is held on a tree-like structure, similar to how it would be placed by a drumset. Also known as a high-top, the instrument's music will read it as a "sus. cym. or cymb." Ancient cymbals or tuned cymbals are much more rarely called for. Their timbre is entirely different, more like that of small hand-bells or of the notes of the keyed harmonica. They are not struck full against each other, but by one of their edges, and the note given in by them is higher in proportion as they are thicker and smaller. Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet calls for two pairs of cymbals, modelled on some old Pompeian instruments no larger than the hand (some are no larger than a crown piece), and tuned to F and B flat. The modern instruments descended from this line are the crotales. * China cymbals * crash cymbals * hi-hat cymbals * Persian cymbals * ride cymbals * Swish and pang cymbals * Sizzle cymbals * Splash cymbals * Trash Hats (Hi-Hat cymbal / china cymbal hybrid setup) * Clash cymbals * Finger cymbals - Zill * Suspended cymbals *Cymbal alloys *Cymbal making *Drum *Drum kit *Percussion instrument *Avedis Zildjian Company *Saluda Cymbals *Italian Bellotti Cymbals *Agean Cymbals *Bosphorus Cymbals *Meinl *Paiste *Sabian *Stagg *UFIP *Yamaha *Wuhan *Istanbul cymbals *Istanbul Agop *Turk Masters Cymbals :See also . * CymbalPlanet.com Welcome to the World of Cymbals * Accessory Fetish A Complete List of Cymbal Manufacturers * Cymbal Forum Discussion forum about cymbals. * Orchestral cymbal playing, with an excellent short history of cymbals *
Cymbal
What part of the cymbal gets the best "crash"?
Edge or rim
data/set2/a6
Cymbal Cymbals are a modern percussion instrument. Cymbals consist of thin, normally round plates of various cymbal alloys; see cymbal making for a discussion of their manufacture. Most modern cymbals are of indefinite pitch (tuned sets have been manufactured but are rare), whereas small cup-shaped cymbals based on ancient designs sound a definite note (''see: crotales). Cymbals are used in modern orchestras and many military, marching, concert and other bands. They are one of the two instrument types that form the modern drum kit, the other being the drum, and are a basic part of much contemporary music. The most basic drum kit normally contains at least one suspended cymbal and a pair of hi-hat cymbals. The origins of cymbals can be traced back to prehistoric times. The ancient Egyptian cymbals closely resembled our own. The British Museum possesses two pairs, thirteen centimetres in diameter, one of which was found in the coffin of the mummy of Ankhhape, a sacred musician. Those used by the Assyrians were both plate- and cup-shaped, those of the Ancient Persians large-sized plates, made of brass, known as Sanj. The Greek cymbals were cup- or bell-shaped, and may be seen in the hands of innumerable fauns and satyrs in sculptures and on painted vases. The word cymbal is derived from the Latin cymbalum, which itself derives from the Greek word kumbalom, meaning a small bowl. * Bell- The center of a Cymbal. When hit with the side or shoulder of a drum stick, it causes a sound which is in a higher register than the rest of the cymbal. * Bow- The remaining surface of the Cymbal. This is where you get a "ping" sound. * Edge or rim- This is where you get the best "crash". Hitting the edge causes the cymbal to vibrate more, thus being louder. The most common Cymbals are the Hi-Hats, Crash, Splash, Ride, and China. Although cymbals are not often required they form part of every orchestra; their chief use is for marking the rhythm, producing effects, or adding military color. Their unique timbre allows them to project even against a full orchestra and through the heaviest of orhestrations. Cymbals have been utilized historically to suggest frenzy, fury or bacchanalian revels, as seen in the Venus music in Wagner's Tannhäuser, Grieg's Peer Gynt suite, and Osmin's aria "O wie will ich triumphieren" from Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail. A pair of clash cymbals in profile. The bell is in green and the straps are in red. Orchestral crash cymbals are traditionally used in pairs, each one having a strap set in the bell of the cymbal by which they are held. Such a pair is known technically as a pair of clash cymbals, although this term is rarely used, see clash cymbals. They are confusingly sometimes referred to simply as crash cymbals, although this term properly applies also to some suspended cymbals. The sound can be obtained by rubbing their edges together in a sliding movement for a "sizzle", striking them against each other in what is called a "crash", tapping the edge of one against the body of the other in what is called a "tap-crash", scraping the edge of one from the inside of the bell to the edge for a "scrape" or "zishend," or shutting the cymbals together and choking the sound in what is called a "hi-hat chick." A skilled player can obtain an enormous dynamic range from such a pair of cymbals. For example, in Beethoven's ninth symphony, one of their first appearances in an orchestral work, they make their entry pianissimo, adding a touch of colour rather than an almighty crash. Clash cymbals are usually damped by pressing them against the player's body. A composer may write laissez vibrer, "Let vibrate" (usually abbreviated l.v.), secco (dry), or equivalent indications on the score; more usually, the player must judge exactly when to damp the cymbals based on the written duration of crash and the context in which it occurs. Clash cymbals have traditionally been accompanied by the bass drum playing an identical part. This combination, played loudly, is an effective way to accentuate a note since the two instruments together contribute to both very low and very high frequency ranges and provide a satisfying "crash-bang-wallop". In older music the composer sometimes provided just one part for this pair of instruments, writing senza piatti or piatti soli (Italian: "without cymbals" or "cymbals only") if the bass drum is to remain silent. However, the modern convention is for the instruments to have independent parts. Clash cymbals evolved into the low-sock and from this to the modern hi-hat. Even in a modern drum kit, they remain paired with the bass drum as the two instruments which are played with the player's feet. However, hi-hat cymbals tend to be heavy with little taper, more similar to a ride cymbal than to a crash cymbal as found in a drum kit, and perform a ride rather than a crash function. The second main orchestral use of cymbals is the suspended cymbal. This instrument takes its name from the traditional method of suspending the cymbal by means of a leather strap or rope, thus allowing the cymbal to vibrate as freely as possible for maximum musical effect. Early jazz drumming pioneers borrowed this style of cymbal mounting during the early 1900s and later drummers further developed this instrument in to the mounted horizontal or nearly horizontally mounted "crash" cymbals of a modern drum kit. Suspended cymbals are most often played with yarn wrapped mallets. However, some composers request other types of mallets like felt mallets or timpani beaters for different attack and sustain qualities. Suspended cymbals can produce bright and slicing tones when forcefully struck, and give an eerie transparent "windy" sound when played quietly. A tremolo, or roll (played with two mallets alternately striking on opposing sides of the cymbal) can build in volume from almost inaudible to an overwhelming climax in a satisfyingly smooth manner (as in Humperdink's Mother Goose Suite). Furthermore, the edge of a suspended cymbal may be hit with shoulder of a drum stick to obtain a sound somewhat akin to that of a pair of clash cymbals. Other methods of playing include scraping a coin or a triangle beater rapidly across the ridges on the top of the cymbal, giving a "zing" sound (as in the fourth movement of Dvořák's Symphony No. 9). Other effects that can be used include drawing a cello or bass bow across the edge of the cymbal for a sound not unlike squealing car brakes. On another note, in highschool marching bands, a "pit" may use a suspended cymbal for a song. This is held on a tree-like structure, similar to how it would be placed by a drumset. Also known as a high-top, the instrument's music will read it as a "sus. cym. or cymb." Ancient cymbals or tuned cymbals are much more rarely called for. Their timbre is entirely different, more like that of small hand-bells or of the notes of the keyed harmonica. They are not struck full against each other, but by one of their edges, and the note given in by them is higher in proportion as they are thicker and smaller. Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet calls for two pairs of cymbals, modelled on some old Pompeian instruments no larger than the hand (some are no larger than a crown piece), and tuned to F and B flat. The modern instruments descended from this line are the crotales. * China cymbals * crash cymbals * hi-hat cymbals * Persian cymbals * ride cymbals * Swish and pang cymbals * Sizzle cymbals * Splash cymbals * Trash Hats (Hi-Hat cymbal / china cymbal hybrid setup) * Clash cymbals * Finger cymbals - Zill * Suspended cymbals *Cymbal alloys *Cymbal making *Drum *Drum kit *Percussion instrument *Avedis Zildjian Company *Saluda Cymbals *Italian Bellotti Cymbals *Agean Cymbals *Bosphorus Cymbals *Meinl *Paiste *Sabian *Stagg *UFIP *Yamaha *Wuhan *Istanbul cymbals *Istanbul Agop *Turk Masters Cymbals :See also . * CymbalPlanet.com Welcome to the World of Cymbals * Accessory Fetish A Complete List of Cymbal Manufacturers * Cymbal Forum Discussion forum about cymbals. * Orchestral cymbal playing, with an excellent short history of cymbals *
Cymbal
What part of the cymbal gets the best "crash"?
edge or rim
data/set2/a6
Cymbal Cymbals are a modern percussion instrument. Cymbals consist of thin, normally round plates of various cymbal alloys; see cymbal making for a discussion of their manufacture. Most modern cymbals are of indefinite pitch (tuned sets have been manufactured but are rare), whereas small cup-shaped cymbals based on ancient designs sound a definite note (''see: crotales). Cymbals are used in modern orchestras and many military, marching, concert and other bands. They are one of the two instrument types that form the modern drum kit, the other being the drum, and are a basic part of much contemporary music. The most basic drum kit normally contains at least one suspended cymbal and a pair of hi-hat cymbals. The origins of cymbals can be traced back to prehistoric times. The ancient Egyptian cymbals closely resembled our own. The British Museum possesses two pairs, thirteen centimetres in diameter, one of which was found in the coffin of the mummy of Ankhhape, a sacred musician. Those used by the Assyrians were both plate- and cup-shaped, those of the Ancient Persians large-sized plates, made of brass, known as Sanj. The Greek cymbals were cup- or bell-shaped, and may be seen in the hands of innumerable fauns and satyrs in sculptures and on painted vases. The word cymbal is derived from the Latin cymbalum, which itself derives from the Greek word kumbalom, meaning a small bowl. * Bell- The center of a Cymbal. When hit with the side or shoulder of a drum stick, it causes a sound which is in a higher register than the rest of the cymbal. * Bow- The remaining surface of the Cymbal. This is where you get a "ping" sound. * Edge or rim- This is where you get the best "crash". Hitting the edge causes the cymbal to vibrate more, thus being louder. The most common Cymbals are the Hi-Hats, Crash, Splash, Ride, and China. Although cymbals are not often required they form part of every orchestra; their chief use is for marking the rhythm, producing effects, or adding military color. Their unique timbre allows them to project even against a full orchestra and through the heaviest of orhestrations. Cymbals have been utilized historically to suggest frenzy, fury or bacchanalian revels, as seen in the Venus music in Wagner's Tannhäuser, Grieg's Peer Gynt suite, and Osmin's aria "O wie will ich triumphieren" from Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail. A pair of clash cymbals in profile. The bell is in green and the straps are in red. Orchestral crash cymbals are traditionally used in pairs, each one having a strap set in the bell of the cymbal by which they are held. Such a pair is known technically as a pair of clash cymbals, although this term is rarely used, see clash cymbals. They are confusingly sometimes referred to simply as crash cymbals, although this term properly applies also to some suspended cymbals. The sound can be obtained by rubbing their edges together in a sliding movement for a "sizzle", striking them against each other in what is called a "crash", tapping the edge of one against the body of the other in what is called a "tap-crash", scraping the edge of one from the inside of the bell to the edge for a "scrape" or "zishend," or shutting the cymbals together and choking the sound in what is called a "hi-hat chick." A skilled player can obtain an enormous dynamic range from such a pair of cymbals. For example, in Beethoven's ninth symphony, one of their first appearances in an orchestral work, they make their entry pianissimo, adding a touch of colour rather than an almighty crash. Clash cymbals are usually damped by pressing them against the player's body. A composer may write laissez vibrer, "Let vibrate" (usually abbreviated l.v.), secco (dry), or equivalent indications on the score; more usually, the player must judge exactly when to damp the cymbals based on the written duration of crash and the context in which it occurs. Clash cymbals have traditionally been accompanied by the bass drum playing an identical part. This combination, played loudly, is an effective way to accentuate a note since the two instruments together contribute to both very low and very high frequency ranges and provide a satisfying "crash-bang-wallop". In older music the composer sometimes provided just one part for this pair of instruments, writing senza piatti or piatti soli (Italian: "without cymbals" or "cymbals only") if the bass drum is to remain silent. However, the modern convention is for the instruments to have independent parts. Clash cymbals evolved into the low-sock and from this to the modern hi-hat. Even in a modern drum kit, they remain paired with the bass drum as the two instruments which are played with the player's feet. However, hi-hat cymbals tend to be heavy with little taper, more similar to a ride cymbal than to a crash cymbal as found in a drum kit, and perform a ride rather than a crash function. The second main orchestral use of cymbals is the suspended cymbal. This instrument takes its name from the traditional method of suspending the cymbal by means of a leather strap or rope, thus allowing the cymbal to vibrate as freely as possible for maximum musical effect. Early jazz drumming pioneers borrowed this style of cymbal mounting during the early 1900s and later drummers further developed this instrument in to the mounted horizontal or nearly horizontally mounted "crash" cymbals of a modern drum kit. Suspended cymbals are most often played with yarn wrapped mallets. However, some composers request other types of mallets like felt mallets or timpani beaters for different attack and sustain qualities. Suspended cymbals can produce bright and slicing tones when forcefully struck, and give an eerie transparent "windy" sound when played quietly. A tremolo, or roll (played with two mallets alternately striking on opposing sides of the cymbal) can build in volume from almost inaudible to an overwhelming climax in a satisfyingly smooth manner (as in Humperdink's Mother Goose Suite). Furthermore, the edge of a suspended cymbal may be hit with shoulder of a drum stick to obtain a sound somewhat akin to that of a pair of clash cymbals. Other methods of playing include scraping a coin or a triangle beater rapidly across the ridges on the top of the cymbal, giving a "zing" sound (as in the fourth movement of Dvořák's Symphony No. 9). Other effects that can be used include drawing a cello or bass bow across the edge of the cymbal for a sound not unlike squealing car brakes. On another note, in highschool marching bands, a "pit" may use a suspended cymbal for a song. This is held on a tree-like structure, similar to how it would be placed by a drumset. Also known as a high-top, the instrument's music will read it as a "sus. cym. or cymb." Ancient cymbals or tuned cymbals are much more rarely called for. Their timbre is entirely different, more like that of small hand-bells or of the notes of the keyed harmonica. They are not struck full against each other, but by one of their edges, and the note given in by them is higher in proportion as they are thicker and smaller. Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet calls for two pairs of cymbals, modelled on some old Pompeian instruments no larger than the hand (some are no larger than a crown piece), and tuned to F and B flat. The modern instruments descended from this line are the crotales. * China cymbals * crash cymbals * hi-hat cymbals * Persian cymbals * ride cymbals * Swish and pang cymbals * Sizzle cymbals * Splash cymbals * Trash Hats (Hi-Hat cymbal / china cymbal hybrid setup) * Clash cymbals * Finger cymbals - Zill * Suspended cymbals *Cymbal alloys *Cymbal making *Drum *Drum kit *Percussion instrument *Avedis Zildjian Company *Saluda Cymbals *Italian Bellotti Cymbals *Agean Cymbals *Bosphorus Cymbals *Meinl *Paiste *Sabian *Stagg *UFIP *Yamaha *Wuhan *Istanbul cymbals *Istanbul Agop *Turk Masters Cymbals :See also . * CymbalPlanet.com Welcome to the World of Cymbals * Accessory Fetish A Complete List of Cymbal Manufacturers * Cymbal Forum Discussion forum about cymbals. * Orchestral cymbal playing, with an excellent short history of cymbals *
Cymbal
What is the second main orchestral use of cymbals?
the suspended cymbal
data/set2/a6
Cymbal Cymbals are a modern percussion instrument. Cymbals consist of thin, normally round plates of various cymbal alloys; see cymbal making for a discussion of their manufacture. Most modern cymbals are of indefinite pitch (tuned sets have been manufactured but are rare), whereas small cup-shaped cymbals based on ancient designs sound a definite note (''see: crotales). Cymbals are used in modern orchestras and many military, marching, concert and other bands. They are one of the two instrument types that form the modern drum kit, the other being the drum, and are a basic part of much contemporary music. The most basic drum kit normally contains at least one suspended cymbal and a pair of hi-hat cymbals. The origins of cymbals can be traced back to prehistoric times. The ancient Egyptian cymbals closely resembled our own. The British Museum possesses two pairs, thirteen centimetres in diameter, one of which was found in the coffin of the mummy of Ankhhape, a sacred musician. Those used by the Assyrians were both plate- and cup-shaped, those of the Ancient Persians large-sized plates, made of brass, known as Sanj. The Greek cymbals were cup- or bell-shaped, and may be seen in the hands of innumerable fauns and satyrs in sculptures and on painted vases. The word cymbal is derived from the Latin cymbalum, which itself derives from the Greek word kumbalom, meaning a small bowl. * Bell- The center of a Cymbal. When hit with the side or shoulder of a drum stick, it causes a sound which is in a higher register than the rest of the cymbal. * Bow- The remaining surface of the Cymbal. This is where you get a "ping" sound. * Edge or rim- This is where you get the best "crash". Hitting the edge causes the cymbal to vibrate more, thus being louder. The most common Cymbals are the Hi-Hats, Crash, Splash, Ride, and China. Although cymbals are not often required they form part of every orchestra; their chief use is for marking the rhythm, producing effects, or adding military color. Their unique timbre allows them to project even against a full orchestra and through the heaviest of orhestrations. Cymbals have been utilized historically to suggest frenzy, fury or bacchanalian revels, as seen in the Venus music in Wagner's Tannhäuser, Grieg's Peer Gynt suite, and Osmin's aria "O wie will ich triumphieren" from Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail. A pair of clash cymbals in profile. The bell is in green and the straps are in red. Orchestral crash cymbals are traditionally used in pairs, each one having a strap set in the bell of the cymbal by which they are held. Such a pair is known technically as a pair of clash cymbals, although this term is rarely used, see clash cymbals. They are confusingly sometimes referred to simply as crash cymbals, although this term properly applies also to some suspended cymbals. The sound can be obtained by rubbing their edges together in a sliding movement for a "sizzle", striking them against each other in what is called a "crash", tapping the edge of one against the body of the other in what is called a "tap-crash", scraping the edge of one from the inside of the bell to the edge for a "scrape" or "zishend," or shutting the cymbals together and choking the sound in what is called a "hi-hat chick." A skilled player can obtain an enormous dynamic range from such a pair of cymbals. For example, in Beethoven's ninth symphony, one of their first appearances in an orchestral work, they make their entry pianissimo, adding a touch of colour rather than an almighty crash. Clash cymbals are usually damped by pressing them against the player's body. A composer may write laissez vibrer, "Let vibrate" (usually abbreviated l.v.), secco (dry), or equivalent indications on the score; more usually, the player must judge exactly when to damp the cymbals based on the written duration of crash and the context in which it occurs. Clash cymbals have traditionally been accompanied by the bass drum playing an identical part. This combination, played loudly, is an effective way to accentuate a note since the two instruments together contribute to both very low and very high frequency ranges and provide a satisfying "crash-bang-wallop". In older music the composer sometimes provided just one part for this pair of instruments, writing senza piatti or piatti soli (Italian: "without cymbals" or "cymbals only") if the bass drum is to remain silent. However, the modern convention is for the instruments to have independent parts. Clash cymbals evolved into the low-sock and from this to the modern hi-hat. Even in a modern drum kit, they remain paired with the bass drum as the two instruments which are played with the player's feet. However, hi-hat cymbals tend to be heavy with little taper, more similar to a ride cymbal than to a crash cymbal as found in a drum kit, and perform a ride rather than a crash function. The second main orchestral use of cymbals is the suspended cymbal. This instrument takes its name from the traditional method of suspending the cymbal by means of a leather strap or rope, thus allowing the cymbal to vibrate as freely as possible for maximum musical effect. Early jazz drumming pioneers borrowed this style of cymbal mounting during the early 1900s and later drummers further developed this instrument in to the mounted horizontal or nearly horizontally mounted "crash" cymbals of a modern drum kit. Suspended cymbals are most often played with yarn wrapped mallets. However, some composers request other types of mallets like felt mallets or timpani beaters for different attack and sustain qualities. Suspended cymbals can produce bright and slicing tones when forcefully struck, and give an eerie transparent "windy" sound when played quietly. A tremolo, or roll (played with two mallets alternately striking on opposing sides of the cymbal) can build in volume from almost inaudible to an overwhelming climax in a satisfyingly smooth manner (as in Humperdink's Mother Goose Suite). Furthermore, the edge of a suspended cymbal may be hit with shoulder of a drum stick to obtain a sound somewhat akin to that of a pair of clash cymbals. Other methods of playing include scraping a coin or a triangle beater rapidly across the ridges on the top of the cymbal, giving a "zing" sound (as in the fourth movement of Dvořák's Symphony No. 9). Other effects that can be used include drawing a cello or bass bow across the edge of the cymbal for a sound not unlike squealing car brakes. On another note, in highschool marching bands, a "pit" may use a suspended cymbal for a song. This is held on a tree-like structure, similar to how it would be placed by a drumset. Also known as a high-top, the instrument's music will read it as a "sus. cym. or cymb." Ancient cymbals or tuned cymbals are much more rarely called for. Their timbre is entirely different, more like that of small hand-bells or of the notes of the keyed harmonica. They are not struck full against each other, but by one of their edges, and the note given in by them is higher in proportion as they are thicker and smaller. Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet calls for two pairs of cymbals, modelled on some old Pompeian instruments no larger than the hand (some are no larger than a crown piece), and tuned to F and B flat. The modern instruments descended from this line are the crotales. * China cymbals * crash cymbals * hi-hat cymbals * Persian cymbals * ride cymbals * Swish and pang cymbals * Sizzle cymbals * Splash cymbals * Trash Hats (Hi-Hat cymbal / china cymbal hybrid setup) * Clash cymbals * Finger cymbals - Zill * Suspended cymbals *Cymbal alloys *Cymbal making *Drum *Drum kit *Percussion instrument *Avedis Zildjian Company *Saluda Cymbals *Italian Bellotti Cymbals *Agean Cymbals *Bosphorus Cymbals *Meinl *Paiste *Sabian *Stagg *UFIP *Yamaha *Wuhan *Istanbul cymbals *Istanbul Agop *Turk Masters Cymbals :See also . * CymbalPlanet.com Welcome to the World of Cymbals * Accessory Fetish A Complete List of Cymbal Manufacturers * Cymbal Forum Discussion forum about cymbals. * Orchestral cymbal playing, with an excellent short history of cymbals *
Cymbal
What is the second main orchestral use of cymbals?
the suspended cymbal
data/set2/a6
Cymbal Cymbals are a modern percussion instrument. Cymbals consist of thin, normally round plates of various cymbal alloys; see cymbal making for a discussion of their manufacture. Most modern cymbals are of indefinite pitch (tuned sets have been manufactured but are rare), whereas small cup-shaped cymbals based on ancient designs sound a definite note (''see: crotales). Cymbals are used in modern orchestras and many military, marching, concert and other bands. They are one of the two instrument types that form the modern drum kit, the other being the drum, and are a basic part of much contemporary music. The most basic drum kit normally contains at least one suspended cymbal and a pair of hi-hat cymbals. The origins of cymbals can be traced back to prehistoric times. The ancient Egyptian cymbals closely resembled our own. The British Museum possesses two pairs, thirteen centimetres in diameter, one of which was found in the coffin of the mummy of Ankhhape, a sacred musician. Those used by the Assyrians were both plate- and cup-shaped, those of the Ancient Persians large-sized plates, made of brass, known as Sanj. The Greek cymbals were cup- or bell-shaped, and may be seen in the hands of innumerable fauns and satyrs in sculptures and on painted vases. The word cymbal is derived from the Latin cymbalum, which itself derives from the Greek word kumbalom, meaning a small bowl. * Bell- The center of a Cymbal. When hit with the side or shoulder of a drum stick, it causes a sound which is in a higher register than the rest of the cymbal. * Bow- The remaining surface of the Cymbal. This is where you get a "ping" sound. * Edge or rim- This is where you get the best "crash". Hitting the edge causes the cymbal to vibrate more, thus being louder. The most common Cymbals are the Hi-Hats, Crash, Splash, Ride, and China. Although cymbals are not often required they form part of every orchestra; their chief use is for marking the rhythm, producing effects, or adding military color. Their unique timbre allows them to project even against a full orchestra and through the heaviest of orhestrations. Cymbals have been utilized historically to suggest frenzy, fury or bacchanalian revels, as seen in the Venus music in Wagner's Tannhäuser, Grieg's Peer Gynt suite, and Osmin's aria "O wie will ich triumphieren" from Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail. A pair of clash cymbals in profile. The bell is in green and the straps are in red. Orchestral crash cymbals are traditionally used in pairs, each one having a strap set in the bell of the cymbal by which they are held. Such a pair is known technically as a pair of clash cymbals, although this term is rarely used, see clash cymbals. They are confusingly sometimes referred to simply as crash cymbals, although this term properly applies also to some suspended cymbals. The sound can be obtained by rubbing their edges together in a sliding movement for a "sizzle", striking them against each other in what is called a "crash", tapping the edge of one against the body of the other in what is called a "tap-crash", scraping the edge of one from the inside of the bell to the edge for a "scrape" or "zishend," or shutting the cymbals together and choking the sound in what is called a "hi-hat chick." A skilled player can obtain an enormous dynamic range from such a pair of cymbals. For example, in Beethoven's ninth symphony, one of their first appearances in an orchestral work, they make their entry pianissimo, adding a touch of colour rather than an almighty crash. Clash cymbals are usually damped by pressing them against the player's body. A composer may write laissez vibrer, "Let vibrate" (usually abbreviated l.v.), secco (dry), or equivalent indications on the score; more usually, the player must judge exactly when to damp the cymbals based on the written duration of crash and the context in which it occurs. Clash cymbals have traditionally been accompanied by the bass drum playing an identical part. This combination, played loudly, is an effective way to accentuate a note since the two instruments together contribute to both very low and very high frequency ranges and provide a satisfying "crash-bang-wallop". In older music the composer sometimes provided just one part for this pair of instruments, writing senza piatti or piatti soli (Italian: "without cymbals" or "cymbals only") if the bass drum is to remain silent. However, the modern convention is for the instruments to have independent parts. Clash cymbals evolved into the low-sock and from this to the modern hi-hat. Even in a modern drum kit, they remain paired with the bass drum as the two instruments which are played with the player's feet. However, hi-hat cymbals tend to be heavy with little taper, more similar to a ride cymbal than to a crash cymbal as found in a drum kit, and perform a ride rather than a crash function. The second main orchestral use of cymbals is the suspended cymbal. This instrument takes its name from the traditional method of suspending the cymbal by means of a leather strap or rope, thus allowing the cymbal to vibrate as freely as possible for maximum musical effect. Early jazz drumming pioneers borrowed this style of cymbal mounting during the early 1900s and later drummers further developed this instrument in to the mounted horizontal or nearly horizontally mounted "crash" cymbals of a modern drum kit. Suspended cymbals are most often played with yarn wrapped mallets. However, some composers request other types of mallets like felt mallets or timpani beaters for different attack and sustain qualities. Suspended cymbals can produce bright and slicing tones when forcefully struck, and give an eerie transparent "windy" sound when played quietly. A tremolo, or roll (played with two mallets alternately striking on opposing sides of the cymbal) can build in volume from almost inaudible to an overwhelming climax in a satisfyingly smooth manner (as in Humperdink's Mother Goose Suite). Furthermore, the edge of a suspended cymbal may be hit with shoulder of a drum stick to obtain a sound somewhat akin to that of a pair of clash cymbals. Other methods of playing include scraping a coin or a triangle beater rapidly across the ridges on the top of the cymbal, giving a "zing" sound (as in the fourth movement of Dvořák's Symphony No. 9). Other effects that can be used include drawing a cello or bass bow across the edge of the cymbal for a sound not unlike squealing car brakes. On another note, in highschool marching bands, a "pit" may use a suspended cymbal for a song. This is held on a tree-like structure, similar to how it would be placed by a drumset. Also known as a high-top, the instrument's music will read it as a "sus. cym. or cymb." Ancient cymbals or tuned cymbals are much more rarely called for. Their timbre is entirely different, more like that of small hand-bells or of the notes of the keyed harmonica. They are not struck full against each other, but by one of their edges, and the note given in by them is higher in proportion as they are thicker and smaller. Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet calls for two pairs of cymbals, modelled on some old Pompeian instruments no larger than the hand (some are no larger than a crown piece), and tuned to F and B flat. The modern instruments descended from this line are the crotales. * China cymbals * crash cymbals * hi-hat cymbals * Persian cymbals * ride cymbals * Swish and pang cymbals * Sizzle cymbals * Splash cymbals * Trash Hats (Hi-Hat cymbal / china cymbal hybrid setup) * Clash cymbals * Finger cymbals - Zill * Suspended cymbals *Cymbal alloys *Cymbal making *Drum *Drum kit *Percussion instrument *Avedis Zildjian Company *Saluda Cymbals *Italian Bellotti Cymbals *Agean Cymbals *Bosphorus Cymbals *Meinl *Paiste *Sabian *Stagg *UFIP *Yamaha *Wuhan *Istanbul cymbals *Istanbul Agop *Turk Masters Cymbals :See also . * CymbalPlanet.com Welcome to the World of Cymbals * Accessory Fetish A Complete List of Cymbal Manufacturers * Cymbal Forum Discussion forum about cymbals. * Orchestral cymbal playing, with an excellent short history of cymbals *
Cymbal
What two instruments form the modern drum kit?
the cymbals and the drum
data/set2/a6
Cymbal Cymbals are a modern percussion instrument. Cymbals consist of thin, normally round plates of various cymbal alloys; see cymbal making for a discussion of their manufacture. Most modern cymbals are of indefinite pitch (tuned sets have been manufactured but are rare), whereas small cup-shaped cymbals based on ancient designs sound a definite note (''see: crotales). Cymbals are used in modern orchestras and many military, marching, concert and other bands. They are one of the two instrument types that form the modern drum kit, the other being the drum, and are a basic part of much contemporary music. The most basic drum kit normally contains at least one suspended cymbal and a pair of hi-hat cymbals. The origins of cymbals can be traced back to prehistoric times. The ancient Egyptian cymbals closely resembled our own. The British Museum possesses two pairs, thirteen centimetres in diameter, one of which was found in the coffin of the mummy of Ankhhape, a sacred musician. Those used by the Assyrians were both plate- and cup-shaped, those of the Ancient Persians large-sized plates, made of brass, known as Sanj. The Greek cymbals were cup- or bell-shaped, and may be seen in the hands of innumerable fauns and satyrs in sculptures and on painted vases. The word cymbal is derived from the Latin cymbalum, which itself derives from the Greek word kumbalom, meaning a small bowl. * Bell- The center of a Cymbal. When hit with the side or shoulder of a drum stick, it causes a sound which is in a higher register than the rest of the cymbal. * Bow- The remaining surface of the Cymbal. This is where you get a "ping" sound. * Edge or rim- This is where you get the best "crash". Hitting the edge causes the cymbal to vibrate more, thus being louder. The most common Cymbals are the Hi-Hats, Crash, Splash, Ride, and China. Although cymbals are not often required they form part of every orchestra; their chief use is for marking the rhythm, producing effects, or adding military color. Their unique timbre allows them to project even against a full orchestra and through the heaviest of orhestrations. Cymbals have been utilized historically to suggest frenzy, fury or bacchanalian revels, as seen in the Venus music in Wagner's Tannhäuser, Grieg's Peer Gynt suite, and Osmin's aria "O wie will ich triumphieren" from Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail. A pair of clash cymbals in profile. The bell is in green and the straps are in red. Orchestral crash cymbals are traditionally used in pairs, each one having a strap set in the bell of the cymbal by which they are held. Such a pair is known technically as a pair of clash cymbals, although this term is rarely used, see clash cymbals. They are confusingly sometimes referred to simply as crash cymbals, although this term properly applies also to some suspended cymbals. The sound can be obtained by rubbing their edges together in a sliding movement for a "sizzle", striking them against each other in what is called a "crash", tapping the edge of one against the body of the other in what is called a "tap-crash", scraping the edge of one from the inside of the bell to the edge for a "scrape" or "zishend," or shutting the cymbals together and choking the sound in what is called a "hi-hat chick." A skilled player can obtain an enormous dynamic range from such a pair of cymbals. For example, in Beethoven's ninth symphony, one of their first appearances in an orchestral work, they make their entry pianissimo, adding a touch of colour rather than an almighty crash. Clash cymbals are usually damped by pressing them against the player's body. A composer may write laissez vibrer, "Let vibrate" (usually abbreviated l.v.), secco (dry), or equivalent indications on the score; more usually, the player must judge exactly when to damp the cymbals based on the written duration of crash and the context in which it occurs. Clash cymbals have traditionally been accompanied by the bass drum playing an identical part. This combination, played loudly, is an effective way to accentuate a note since the two instruments together contribute to both very low and very high frequency ranges and provide a satisfying "crash-bang-wallop". In older music the composer sometimes provided just one part for this pair of instruments, writing senza piatti or piatti soli (Italian: "without cymbals" or "cymbals only") if the bass drum is to remain silent. However, the modern convention is for the instruments to have independent parts. Clash cymbals evolved into the low-sock and from this to the modern hi-hat. Even in a modern drum kit, they remain paired with the bass drum as the two instruments which are played with the player's feet. However, hi-hat cymbals tend to be heavy with little taper, more similar to a ride cymbal than to a crash cymbal as found in a drum kit, and perform a ride rather than a crash function. The second main orchestral use of cymbals is the suspended cymbal. This instrument takes its name from the traditional method of suspending the cymbal by means of a leather strap or rope, thus allowing the cymbal to vibrate as freely as possible for maximum musical effect. Early jazz drumming pioneers borrowed this style of cymbal mounting during the early 1900s and later drummers further developed this instrument in to the mounted horizontal or nearly horizontally mounted "crash" cymbals of a modern drum kit. Suspended cymbals are most often played with yarn wrapped mallets. However, some composers request other types of mallets like felt mallets or timpani beaters for different attack and sustain qualities. Suspended cymbals can produce bright and slicing tones when forcefully struck, and give an eerie transparent "windy" sound when played quietly. A tremolo, or roll (played with two mallets alternately striking on opposing sides of the cymbal) can build in volume from almost inaudible to an overwhelming climax in a satisfyingly smooth manner (as in Humperdink's Mother Goose Suite). Furthermore, the edge of a suspended cymbal may be hit with shoulder of a drum stick to obtain a sound somewhat akin to that of a pair of clash cymbals. Other methods of playing include scraping a coin or a triangle beater rapidly across the ridges on the top of the cymbal, giving a "zing" sound (as in the fourth movement of Dvořák's Symphony No. 9). Other effects that can be used include drawing a cello or bass bow across the edge of the cymbal for a sound not unlike squealing car brakes. On another note, in highschool marching bands, a "pit" may use a suspended cymbal for a song. This is held on a tree-like structure, similar to how it would be placed by a drumset. Also known as a high-top, the instrument's music will read it as a "sus. cym. or cymb." Ancient cymbals or tuned cymbals are much more rarely called for. Their timbre is entirely different, more like that of small hand-bells or of the notes of the keyed harmonica. They are not struck full against each other, but by one of their edges, and the note given in by them is higher in proportion as they are thicker and smaller. Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet calls for two pairs of cymbals, modelled on some old Pompeian instruments no larger than the hand (some are no larger than a crown piece), and tuned to F and B flat. The modern instruments descended from this line are the crotales. * China cymbals * crash cymbals * hi-hat cymbals * Persian cymbals * ride cymbals * Swish and pang cymbals * Sizzle cymbals * Splash cymbals * Trash Hats (Hi-Hat cymbal / china cymbal hybrid setup) * Clash cymbals * Finger cymbals - Zill * Suspended cymbals *Cymbal alloys *Cymbal making *Drum *Drum kit *Percussion instrument *Avedis Zildjian Company *Saluda Cymbals *Italian Bellotti Cymbals *Agean Cymbals *Bosphorus Cymbals *Meinl *Paiste *Sabian *Stagg *UFIP *Yamaha *Wuhan *Istanbul cymbals *Istanbul Agop *Turk Masters Cymbals :See also . * CymbalPlanet.com Welcome to the World of Cymbals * Accessory Fetish A Complete List of Cymbal Manufacturers * Cymbal Forum Discussion forum about cymbals. * Orchestral cymbal playing, with an excellent short history of cymbals *
Cymbal
What Greek mythical creatures were depicted holding cymbals?
fauns and satyrs
data/set2/a6
Cymbal Cymbals are a modern percussion instrument. Cymbals consist of thin, normally round plates of various cymbal alloys; see cymbal making for a discussion of their manufacture. Most modern cymbals are of indefinite pitch (tuned sets have been manufactured but are rare), whereas small cup-shaped cymbals based on ancient designs sound a definite note (''see: crotales). Cymbals are used in modern orchestras and many military, marching, concert and other bands. They are one of the two instrument types that form the modern drum kit, the other being the drum, and are a basic part of much contemporary music. The most basic drum kit normally contains at least one suspended cymbal and a pair of hi-hat cymbals. The origins of cymbals can be traced back to prehistoric times. The ancient Egyptian cymbals closely resembled our own. The British Museum possesses two pairs, thirteen centimetres in diameter, one of which was found in the coffin of the mummy of Ankhhape, a sacred musician. Those used by the Assyrians were both plate- and cup-shaped, those of the Ancient Persians large-sized plates, made of brass, known as Sanj. The Greek cymbals were cup- or bell-shaped, and may be seen in the hands of innumerable fauns and satyrs in sculptures and on painted vases. The word cymbal is derived from the Latin cymbalum, which itself derives from the Greek word kumbalom, meaning a small bowl. * Bell- The center of a Cymbal. When hit with the side or shoulder of a drum stick, it causes a sound which is in a higher register than the rest of the cymbal. * Bow- The remaining surface of the Cymbal. This is where you get a "ping" sound. * Edge or rim- This is where you get the best "crash". Hitting the edge causes the cymbal to vibrate more, thus being louder. The most common Cymbals are the Hi-Hats, Crash, Splash, Ride, and China. Although cymbals are not often required they form part of every orchestra; their chief use is for marking the rhythm, producing effects, or adding military color. Their unique timbre allows them to project even against a full orchestra and through the heaviest of orhestrations. Cymbals have been utilized historically to suggest frenzy, fury or bacchanalian revels, as seen in the Venus music in Wagner's Tannhäuser, Grieg's Peer Gynt suite, and Osmin's aria "O wie will ich triumphieren" from Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail. A pair of clash cymbals in profile. The bell is in green and the straps are in red. Orchestral crash cymbals are traditionally used in pairs, each one having a strap set in the bell of the cymbal by which they are held. Such a pair is known technically as a pair of clash cymbals, although this term is rarely used, see clash cymbals. They are confusingly sometimes referred to simply as crash cymbals, although this term properly applies also to some suspended cymbals. The sound can be obtained by rubbing their edges together in a sliding movement for a "sizzle", striking them against each other in what is called a "crash", tapping the edge of one against the body of the other in what is called a "tap-crash", scraping the edge of one from the inside of the bell to the edge for a "scrape" or "zishend," or shutting the cymbals together and choking the sound in what is called a "hi-hat chick." A skilled player can obtain an enormous dynamic range from such a pair of cymbals. For example, in Beethoven's ninth symphony, one of their first appearances in an orchestral work, they make their entry pianissimo, adding a touch of colour rather than an almighty crash. Clash cymbals are usually damped by pressing them against the player's body. A composer may write laissez vibrer, "Let vibrate" (usually abbreviated l.v.), secco (dry), or equivalent indications on the score; more usually, the player must judge exactly when to damp the cymbals based on the written duration of crash and the context in which it occurs. Clash cymbals have traditionally been accompanied by the bass drum playing an identical part. This combination, played loudly, is an effective way to accentuate a note since the two instruments together contribute to both very low and very high frequency ranges and provide a satisfying "crash-bang-wallop". In older music the composer sometimes provided just one part for this pair of instruments, writing senza piatti or piatti soli (Italian: "without cymbals" or "cymbals only") if the bass drum is to remain silent. However, the modern convention is for the instruments to have independent parts. Clash cymbals evolved into the low-sock and from this to the modern hi-hat. Even in a modern drum kit, they remain paired with the bass drum as the two instruments which are played with the player's feet. However, hi-hat cymbals tend to be heavy with little taper, more similar to a ride cymbal than to a crash cymbal as found in a drum kit, and perform a ride rather than a crash function. The second main orchestral use of cymbals is the suspended cymbal. This instrument takes its name from the traditional method of suspending the cymbal by means of a leather strap or rope, thus allowing the cymbal to vibrate as freely as possible for maximum musical effect. Early jazz drumming pioneers borrowed this style of cymbal mounting during the early 1900s and later drummers further developed this instrument in to the mounted horizontal or nearly horizontally mounted "crash" cymbals of a modern drum kit. Suspended cymbals are most often played with yarn wrapped mallets. However, some composers request other types of mallets like felt mallets or timpani beaters for different attack and sustain qualities. Suspended cymbals can produce bright and slicing tones when forcefully struck, and give an eerie transparent "windy" sound when played quietly. A tremolo, or roll (played with two mallets alternately striking on opposing sides of the cymbal) can build in volume from almost inaudible to an overwhelming climax in a satisfyingly smooth manner (as in Humperdink's Mother Goose Suite). Furthermore, the edge of a suspended cymbal may be hit with shoulder of a drum stick to obtain a sound somewhat akin to that of a pair of clash cymbals. Other methods of playing include scraping a coin or a triangle beater rapidly across the ridges on the top of the cymbal, giving a "zing" sound (as in the fourth movement of Dvořák's Symphony No. 9). Other effects that can be used include drawing a cello or bass bow across the edge of the cymbal for a sound not unlike squealing car brakes. On another note, in highschool marching bands, a "pit" may use a suspended cymbal for a song. This is held on a tree-like structure, similar to how it would be placed by a drumset. Also known as a high-top, the instrument's music will read it as a "sus. cym. or cymb." Ancient cymbals or tuned cymbals are much more rarely called for. Their timbre is entirely different, more like that of small hand-bells or of the notes of the keyed harmonica. They are not struck full against each other, but by one of their edges, and the note given in by them is higher in proportion as they are thicker and smaller. Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet calls for two pairs of cymbals, modelled on some old Pompeian instruments no larger than the hand (some are no larger than a crown piece), and tuned to F and B flat. The modern instruments descended from this line are the crotales. * China cymbals * crash cymbals * hi-hat cymbals * Persian cymbals * ride cymbals * Swish and pang cymbals * Sizzle cymbals * Splash cymbals * Trash Hats (Hi-Hat cymbal / china cymbal hybrid setup) * Clash cymbals * Finger cymbals - Zill * Suspended cymbals *Cymbal alloys *Cymbal making *Drum *Drum kit *Percussion instrument *Avedis Zildjian Company *Saluda Cymbals *Italian Bellotti Cymbals *Agean Cymbals *Bosphorus Cymbals *Meinl *Paiste *Sabian *Stagg *UFIP *Yamaha *Wuhan *Istanbul cymbals *Istanbul Agop *Turk Masters Cymbals :See also . * CymbalPlanet.com Welcome to the World of Cymbals * Accessory Fetish A Complete List of Cymbal Manufacturers * Cymbal Forum Discussion forum about cymbals. * Orchestral cymbal playing, with an excellent short history of cymbals *