ArticleTitle stringclasses 109 values | Question stringlengths 4 586 ⌀ | Answer stringlengths 1 926 ⌀ | ArticleFile stringclasses 57 values | EvidencesAvailable stringclasses 120 values |
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Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb | Was Charles-Augustin de Coulomb a Spanish Biologist? | No. | data/set4/a6 | Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb
Charles-Augustin de Coulomb (14 June 1736 â 23 August 1806) 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 he studied in mathematics there, under Pierre Charles Monnier, left him determined to pursue mathematics and 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 where he was successful in the entrance examination for the military school at Mézières.
After he left the school in 1761, Coloumb initially took part in the survey for the British coastal charts and was then sent on a 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 to France, 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 became one of the first members of the National Institute and was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802. His health was already very feeble and four years later he died in Paris.
Coulomb leaves a legacy as a pioneer in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design.
In 1784, his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l'élasticité des fils de metal Histoire de lâAcadémie Royale des Sciences, 229-269, 1784 (Theoretical research and experimentation on torsion and the elasticity of metal wire) appeared. This memoir contained the results of Coulomb's experiments on the torsional force for metal wires. His general result is,
:"... the moment of the torque is, for wires of the same metal, proportional to the torsional angle, the fourth power of the diameter and the inverse of the length of the wire..."
It also contained a detailed 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 lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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."
- Deuxieme Mémoire sur lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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 lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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.
*Coulomb friction
* Théorie des machines simples (1821)
* Collection de mémoires relatifs à la physique (1884)
* French National Library The Mémoires of Coulomb available in pdf format.
*
* Mohr-Coulomb theory
|
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb | Was Charles-Augustin de Coulomb a Spanish Biologist? | No, he was a French physicist. | data/set4/a6 | Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb
Charles-Augustin de Coulomb (14 June 1736 â 23 August 1806) 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 he studied in mathematics there, under Pierre Charles Monnier, left him determined to pursue mathematics and 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 where he was successful in the entrance examination for the military school at Mézières.
After he left the school in 1761, Coloumb initially took part in the survey for the British coastal charts and was then sent on a 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 to France, 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 became one of the first members of the National Institute and was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802. His health was already very feeble and four years later he died in Paris.
Coulomb leaves a legacy as a pioneer in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design.
In 1784, his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l'élasticité des fils de metal Histoire de lâAcadémie Royale des Sciences, 229-269, 1784 (Theoretical research and experimentation on torsion and the elasticity of metal wire) appeared. This memoir contained the results of Coulomb's experiments on the torsional force for metal wires. His general result is,
:"... the moment of the torque is, for wires of the same metal, proportional to the torsional angle, the fourth power of the diameter and the inverse of the length of the wire..."
It also contained a detailed 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 lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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."
- Deuxieme Mémoire sur lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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 lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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.
*Coulomb friction
* Théorie des machines simples (1821)
* Collection de mémoires relatifs à la physique (1884)
* French National Library The Mémoires of Coulomb available in pdf format.
*
* Mohr-Coulomb theory
|
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb | Was the SI unit of charge named after Charles-Augustin de Coulomb? | Yes. | data/set4/a6 | Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb
Charles-Augustin de Coulomb (14 June 1736 â 23 August 1806) 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 he studied in mathematics there, under Pierre Charles Monnier, left him determined to pursue mathematics and 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 where he was successful in the entrance examination for the military school at Mézières.
After he left the school in 1761, Coloumb initially took part in the survey for the British coastal charts and was then sent on a 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 to France, 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 became one of the first members of the National Institute and was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802. His health was already very feeble and four years later he died in Paris.
Coulomb leaves a legacy as a pioneer in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design.
In 1784, his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l'élasticité des fils de metal Histoire de lâAcadémie Royale des Sciences, 229-269, 1784 (Theoretical research and experimentation on torsion and the elasticity of metal wire) appeared. This memoir contained the results of Coulomb's experiments on the torsional force for metal wires. His general result is,
:"... the moment of the torque is, for wires of the same metal, proportional to the torsional angle, the fourth power of the diameter and the inverse of the length of the wire..."
It also contained a detailed 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 lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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."
- Deuxieme Mémoire sur lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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 lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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.
*Coulomb friction
* Théorie des machines simples (1821)
* Collection de mémoires relatifs à la physique (1884)
* French National Library The Mémoires of Coulomb available in pdf format.
*
* Mohr-Coulomb theory
|
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb | Was the SI unit of charge named after Charles-Augustin de Coulomb? | Yes, the SI unit of charge, the coulomb, was named after him. | data/set4/a6 | Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb
Charles-Augustin de Coulomb (14 June 1736 â 23 August 1806) 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 he studied in mathematics there, under Pierre Charles Monnier, left him determined to pursue mathematics and 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 where he was successful in the entrance examination for the military school at Mézières.
After he left the school in 1761, Coloumb initially took part in the survey for the British coastal charts and was then sent on a 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 to France, 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 became one of the first members of the National Institute and was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802. His health was already very feeble and four years later he died in Paris.
Coulomb leaves a legacy as a pioneer in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design.
In 1784, his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l'élasticité des fils de metal Histoire de lâAcadémie Royale des Sciences, 229-269, 1784 (Theoretical research and experimentation on torsion and the elasticity of metal wire) appeared. This memoir contained the results of Coulomb's experiments on the torsional force for metal wires. His general result is,
:"... the moment of the torque is, for wires of the same metal, proportional to the torsional angle, the fourth power of the diameter and the inverse of the length of the wire..."
It also contained a detailed 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 lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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."
- Deuxieme Mémoire sur lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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 lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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.
*Coulomb friction
* Théorie des machines simples (1821)
* Collection de mémoires relatifs à la physique (1884)
* French National Library The Mémoires of Coulomb available in pdf format.
*
* Mohr-Coulomb theory
|
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb | Was Charles-Augustin de Coulomb ever employed at La Rochelle? | Yes. | data/set4/a6 | Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb
Charles-Augustin de Coulomb (14 June 1736 â 23 August 1806) 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 he studied in mathematics there, under Pierre Charles Monnier, left him determined to pursue mathematics and 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 where he was successful in the entrance examination for the military school at Mézières.
After he left the school in 1761, Coloumb initially took part in the survey for the British coastal charts and was then sent on a 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 to France, 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 became one of the first members of the National Institute and was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802. His health was already very feeble and four years later he died in Paris.
Coulomb leaves a legacy as a pioneer in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design.
In 1784, his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l'élasticité des fils de metal Histoire de lâAcadémie Royale des Sciences, 229-269, 1784 (Theoretical research and experimentation on torsion and the elasticity of metal wire) appeared. This memoir contained the results of Coulomb's experiments on the torsional force for metal wires. His general result is,
:"... the moment of the torque is, for wires of the same metal, proportional to the torsional angle, the fourth power of the diameter and the inverse of the length of the wire..."
It also contained a detailed 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 lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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."
- Deuxieme Mémoire sur lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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 lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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.
*Coulomb friction
* Théorie des machines simples (1821)
* Collection de mémoires relatifs à la physique (1884)
* French National Library The Mémoires of Coulomb available in pdf format.
*
* Mohr-Coulomb theory
|
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb | Was Charles-Augustin de Coulomb ever employed at La Rochelle? | Yes, upon his return to France, with the rank of Captain, he was employed at La Rochelle. | data/set4/a6 | Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb
Charles-Augustin de Coulomb (14 June 1736 â 23 August 1806) 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 he studied in mathematics there, under Pierre Charles Monnier, left him determined to pursue mathematics and 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 where he was successful in the entrance examination for the military school at Mézières.
After he left the school in 1761, Coloumb initially took part in the survey for the British coastal charts and was then sent on a 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 to France, 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 became one of the first members of the National Institute and was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802. His health was already very feeble and four years later he died in Paris.
Coulomb leaves a legacy as a pioneer in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design.
In 1784, his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l'élasticité des fils de metal Histoire de lâAcadémie Royale des Sciences, 229-269, 1784 (Theoretical research and experimentation on torsion and the elasticity of metal wire) appeared. This memoir contained the results of Coulomb's experiments on the torsional force for metal wires. His general result is,
:"... the moment of the torque is, for wires of the same metal, proportional to the torsional angle, the fourth power of the diameter and the inverse of the length of the wire..."
It also contained a detailed 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 lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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."
- Deuxieme Mémoire sur lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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 lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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.
*Coulomb friction
* Théorie des machines simples (1821)
* Collection de mémoires relatifs à la physique (1884)
* French National Library The Mémoires of Coulomb available in pdf format.
*
* Mohr-Coulomb theory
|
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb | What is Charles-Augustin de Coulomb best known for? | He is best known for developing Coulomb's law. | data/set4/a6 | Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb
Charles-Augustin de Coulomb (14 June 1736 â 23 August 1806) 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 he studied in mathematics there, under Pierre Charles Monnier, left him determined to pursue mathematics and 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 where he was successful in the entrance examination for the military school at Mézières.
After he left the school in 1761, Coloumb initially took part in the survey for the British coastal charts and was then sent on a 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 to France, 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 became one of the first members of the National Institute and was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802. His health was already very feeble and four years later he died in Paris.
Coulomb leaves a legacy as a pioneer in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design.
In 1784, his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l'élasticité des fils de metal Histoire de lâAcadémie Royale des Sciences, 229-269, 1784 (Theoretical research and experimentation on torsion and the elasticity of metal wire) appeared. This memoir contained the results of Coulomb's experiments on the torsional force for metal wires. His general result is,
:"... the moment of the torque is, for wires of the same metal, proportional to the torsional angle, the fourth power of the diameter and the inverse of the length of the wire..."
It also contained a detailed 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 lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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."
- Deuxieme Mémoire sur lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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 lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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.
*Coulomb friction
* Théorie des machines simples (1821)
* Collection de mémoires relatifs à la physique (1884)
* French National Library The Mémoires of Coulomb available in pdf format.
*
* Mohr-Coulomb theory
|
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb | What is Charles-Augustin de Coulomb best known for? | He is best known for developing Coulomb's law. | data/set4/a6 | Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb
Charles-Augustin de Coulomb (14 June 1736 â 23 August 1806) 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 he studied in mathematics there, under Pierre Charles Monnier, left him determined to pursue mathematics and 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 where he was successful in the entrance examination for the military school at Mézières.
After he left the school in 1761, Coloumb initially took part in the survey for the British coastal charts and was then sent on a 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 to France, 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 became one of the first members of the National Institute and was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802. His health was already very feeble and four years later he died in Paris.
Coulomb leaves a legacy as a pioneer in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design.
In 1784, his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l'élasticité des fils de metal Histoire de lâAcadémie Royale des Sciences, 229-269, 1784 (Theoretical research and experimentation on torsion and the elasticity of metal wire) appeared. This memoir contained the results of Coulomb's experiments on the torsional force for metal wires. His general result is,
:"... the moment of the torque is, for wires of the same metal, proportional to the torsional angle, the fourth power of the diameter and the inverse of the length of the wire..."
It also contained a detailed 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 lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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."
- Deuxieme Mémoire sur lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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 lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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.
*Coulomb friction
* Théorie des machines simples (1821)
* Collection de mémoires relatifs à la physique (1884)
* French National Library The Mémoires of Coulomb available in pdf format.
*
* Mohr-Coulomb theory
|
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb | Whose ideas inspired Charles-Augustin de Coulomb's experiments on the resistance of masonries? | Pieter van Musschenbroek. | data/set4/a6 | Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb
Charles-Augustin de Coulomb (14 June 1736 â 23 August 1806) 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 he studied in mathematics there, under Pierre Charles Monnier, left him determined to pursue mathematics and 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 where he was successful in the entrance examination for the military school at Mézières.
After he left the school in 1761, Coloumb initially took part in the survey for the British coastal charts and was then sent on a 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 to France, 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 became one of the first members of the National Institute and was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802. His health was already very feeble and four years later he died in Paris.
Coulomb leaves a legacy as a pioneer in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design.
In 1784, his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l'élasticité des fils de metal Histoire de lâAcadémie Royale des Sciences, 229-269, 1784 (Theoretical research and experimentation on torsion and the elasticity of metal wire) appeared. This memoir contained the results of Coulomb's experiments on the torsional force for metal wires. His general result is,
:"... the moment of the torque is, for wires of the same metal, proportional to the torsional angle, the fourth power of the diameter and the inverse of the length of the wire..."
It also contained a detailed 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 lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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."
- Deuxieme Mémoire sur lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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 lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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.
*Coulomb friction
* Théorie des machines simples (1821)
* Collection de mémoires relatifs à la physique (1884)
* French National Library The Mémoires of Coulomb available in pdf format.
*
* Mohr-Coulomb theory
|
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb | Whose ideas inspired Charles-Augustin de Coulomb's experiments on the resistance of masonries? | He carried out several experiments on the resistance of masonries which were inspired by the ideas of Pieter van Musschenbroek on friction. | data/set4/a6 | Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb
Charles-Augustin de Coulomb (14 June 1736 â 23 August 1806) 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 he studied in mathematics there, under Pierre Charles Monnier, left him determined to pursue mathematics and 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 where he was successful in the entrance examination for the military school at Mézières.
After he left the school in 1761, Coloumb initially took part in the survey for the British coastal charts and was then sent on a 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 to France, 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 became one of the first members of the National Institute and was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802. His health was already very feeble and four years later he died in Paris.
Coulomb leaves a legacy as a pioneer in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design.
In 1784, his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l'élasticité des fils de metal Histoire de lâAcadémie Royale des Sciences, 229-269, 1784 (Theoretical research and experimentation on torsion and the elasticity of metal wire) appeared. This memoir contained the results of Coulomb's experiments on the torsional force for metal wires. His general result is,
:"... the moment of the torque is, for wires of the same metal, proportional to the torsional angle, the fourth power of the diameter and the inverse of the length of the wire..."
It also contained a detailed 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 lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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."
- Deuxieme Mémoire sur lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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 lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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.
*Coulomb friction
* Théorie des machines simples (1821)
* Collection de mémoires relatifs à la physique (1884)
* French National Library The Mémoires of Coulomb available in pdf format.
*
* Mohr-Coulomb theory
|
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb | When did Charles-Augustin de Coulomb join his father's family in Montpeillier? | From 1757 to 1759 he joined his father's family in Montpellier. | data/set4/a6 | Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb
Charles-Augustin de Coulomb (14 June 1736 â 23 August 1806) 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 he studied in mathematics there, under Pierre Charles Monnier, left him determined to pursue mathematics and 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 where he was successful in the entrance examination for the military school at Mézières.
After he left the school in 1761, Coloumb initially took part in the survey for the British coastal charts and was then sent on a 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 to France, 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 became one of the first members of the National Institute and was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802. His health was already very feeble and four years later he died in Paris.
Coulomb leaves a legacy as a pioneer in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design.
In 1784, his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l'élasticité des fils de metal Histoire de lâAcadémie Royale des Sciences, 229-269, 1784 (Theoretical research and experimentation on torsion and the elasticity of metal wire) appeared. This memoir contained the results of Coulomb's experiments on the torsional force for metal wires. His general result is,
:"... the moment of the torque is, for wires of the same metal, proportional to the torsional angle, the fourth power of the diameter and the inverse of the length of the wire..."
It also contained a detailed 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 lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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."
- Deuxieme Mémoire sur lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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 lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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.
*Coulomb friction
* Théorie des machines simples (1821)
* Collection de mémoires relatifs à la physique (1884)
* French National Library The Mémoires of Coulomb available in pdf format.
*
* Mohr-Coulomb theory
|
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb | Did Charles-Augustin de Coulomb come from a poor family? | No. | data/set4/a6 | Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb
Charles-Augustin de Coulomb (14 June 1736 â 23 August 1806) 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 he studied in mathematics there, under Pierre Charles Monnier, left him determined to pursue mathematics and 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 where he was successful in the entrance examination for the military school at Mézières.
After he left the school in 1761, Coloumb initially took part in the survey for the British coastal charts and was then sent on a 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 to France, 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 became one of the first members of the National Institute and was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802. His health was already very feeble and four years later he died in Paris.
Coulomb leaves a legacy as a pioneer in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design.
In 1784, his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l'élasticité des fils de metal Histoire de lâAcadémie Royale des Sciences, 229-269, 1784 (Theoretical research and experimentation on torsion and the elasticity of metal wire) appeared. This memoir contained the results of Coulomb's experiments on the torsional force for metal wires. His general result is,
:"... the moment of the torque is, for wires of the same metal, proportional to the torsional angle, the fourth power of the diameter and the inverse of the length of the wire..."
It also contained a detailed 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 lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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."
- Deuxieme Mémoire sur lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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 lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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.
*Coulomb friction
* Théorie des machines simples (1821)
* Collection de mémoires relatifs à la physique (1884)
* French National Library The Mémoires of Coulomb available in pdf format.
*
* Mohr-Coulomb theory
|
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb | Did Charles-Augustin de Coulomb come from a poor family? | No, his mother came from a wealthy family in the wool trade. | data/set4/a6 | Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb
Charles-Augustin de Coulomb (14 June 1736 â 23 August 1806) 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 he studied in mathematics there, under Pierre Charles Monnier, left him determined to pursue mathematics and 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 where he was successful in the entrance examination for the military school at Mézières.
After he left the school in 1761, Coloumb initially took part in the survey for the British coastal charts and was then sent on a 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 to France, 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 became one of the first members of the National Institute and was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802. His health was already very feeble and four years later he died in Paris.
Coulomb leaves a legacy as a pioneer in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design.
In 1784, his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l'élasticité des fils de metal Histoire de lâAcadémie Royale des Sciences, 229-269, 1784 (Theoretical research and experimentation on torsion and the elasticity of metal wire) appeared. This memoir contained the results of Coulomb's experiments on the torsional force for metal wires. His general result is,
:"... the moment of the torque is, for wires of the same metal, proportional to the torsional angle, the fourth power of the diameter and the inverse of the length of the wire..."
It also contained a detailed 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 lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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."
- Deuxieme Mémoire sur lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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 lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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.
*Coulomb friction
* Théorie des machines simples (1821)
* Collection de mémoires relatifs à la physique (1884)
* French National Library The Mémoires of Coulomb available in pdf format.
*
* Mohr-Coulomb theory
|
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb | What is Coulomb's law? | The definition of the electrostatic force of attraction and repulsion. | data/set4/a6 | Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb
Charles-Augustin de Coulomb (14 June 1736 â 23 August 1806) 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 he studied in mathematics there, under Pierre Charles Monnier, left him determined to pursue mathematics and 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 where he was successful in the entrance examination for the military school at Mézières.
After he left the school in 1761, Coloumb initially took part in the survey for the British coastal charts and was then sent on a 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 to France, 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 became one of the first members of the National Institute and was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802. His health was already very feeble and four years later he died in Paris.
Coulomb leaves a legacy as a pioneer in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design.
In 1784, his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l'élasticité des fils de metal Histoire de lâAcadémie Royale des Sciences, 229-269, 1784 (Theoretical research and experimentation on torsion and the elasticity of metal wire) appeared. This memoir contained the results of Coulomb's experiments on the torsional force for metal wires. His general result is,
:"... the moment of the torque is, for wires of the same metal, proportional to the torsional angle, the fourth power of the diameter and the inverse of the length of the wire..."
It also contained a detailed 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 lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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."
- Deuxieme Mémoire sur lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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 lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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.
*Coulomb friction
* Théorie des machines simples (1821)
* Collection de mémoires relatifs à la physique (1884)
* French National Library The Mémoires of Coulomb available in pdf format.
*
* Mohr-Coulomb theory
|
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb | What is Coulomb's law? | The definition of the electrostatic force of attraction and repulsion. | data/set4/a6 | Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb
Charles-Augustin de Coulomb (14 June 1736 â 23 August 1806) 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 he studied in mathematics there, under Pierre Charles Monnier, left him determined to pursue mathematics and 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 where he was successful in the entrance examination for the military school at Mézières.
After he left the school in 1761, Coloumb initially took part in the survey for the British coastal charts and was then sent on a 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 to France, 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 became one of the first members of the National Institute and was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802. His health was already very feeble and four years later he died in Paris.
Coulomb leaves a legacy as a pioneer in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design.
In 1784, his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l'élasticité des fils de metal Histoire de lâAcadémie Royale des Sciences, 229-269, 1784 (Theoretical research and experimentation on torsion and the elasticity of metal wire) appeared. This memoir contained the results of Coulomb's experiments on the torsional force for metal wires. His general result is,
:"... the moment of the torque is, for wires of the same metal, proportional to the torsional angle, the fourth power of the diameter and the inverse of the length of the wire..."
It also contained a detailed 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 lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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."
- Deuxieme Mémoire sur lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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 lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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.
*Coulomb friction
* Théorie des machines simples (1821)
* Collection de mémoires relatifs à la physique (1884)
* French National Library The Mémoires of Coulomb available in pdf format.
*
* Mohr-Coulomb theory
|
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb | Where is Collège des Quatre-Nations located? | In Montpellier. | data/set4/a6 | Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb
Charles-Augustin de Coulomb (14 June 1736 â 23 August 1806) 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 he studied in mathematics there, under Pierre Charles Monnier, left him determined to pursue mathematics and 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 where he was successful in the entrance examination for the military school at Mézières.
After he left the school in 1761, Coloumb initially took part in the survey for the British coastal charts and was then sent on a 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 to France, 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 became one of the first members of the National Institute and was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802. His health was already very feeble and four years later he died in Paris.
Coulomb leaves a legacy as a pioneer in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design.
In 1784, his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l'élasticité des fils de metal Histoire de lâAcadémie Royale des Sciences, 229-269, 1784 (Theoretical research and experimentation on torsion and the elasticity of metal wire) appeared. This memoir contained the results of Coulomb's experiments on the torsional force for metal wires. His general result is,
:"... the moment of the torque is, for wires of the same metal, proportional to the torsional angle, the fourth power of the diameter and the inverse of the length of the wire..."
It also contained a detailed 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 lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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."
- Deuxieme Mémoire sur lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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 lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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.
*Coulomb friction
* Théorie des machines simples (1821)
* Collection de mémoires relatifs à la physique (1884)
* French National Library The Mémoires of Coulomb available in pdf format.
*
* Mohr-Coulomb theory
|
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb | Where is Collège des Quatre-Nations located? | In Paris. | data/set4/a6 | Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb
Charles-Augustin de Coulomb (14 June 1736 â 23 August 1806) 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 he studied in mathematics there, under Pierre Charles Monnier, left him determined to pursue mathematics and 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 where he was successful in the entrance examination for the military school at Mézières.
After he left the school in 1761, Coloumb initially took part in the survey for the British coastal charts and was then sent on a 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 to France, 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 became one of the first members of the National Institute and was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802. His health was already very feeble and four years later he died in Paris.
Coulomb leaves a legacy as a pioneer in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design.
In 1784, his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l'élasticité des fils de metal Histoire de lâAcadémie Royale des Sciences, 229-269, 1784 (Theoretical research and experimentation on torsion and the elasticity of metal wire) appeared. This memoir contained the results of Coulomb's experiments on the torsional force for metal wires. His general result is,
:"... the moment of the torque is, for wires of the same metal, proportional to the torsional angle, the fourth power of the diameter and the inverse of the length of the wire..."
It also contained a detailed 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 lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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."
- Deuxieme Mémoire sur lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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 lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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.
*Coulomb friction
* Théorie des machines simples (1821)
* Collection de mémoires relatifs à la physique (1884)
* French National Library The Mémoires of Coulomb available in pdf format.
*
* Mohr-Coulomb theory
|
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb | What happened in 1785? | Coulomb presented his three reports on Electricity and Magnetism | data/set4/a6 | Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb
Charles-Augustin de Coulomb (14 June 1736 â 23 August 1806) 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 he studied in mathematics there, under Pierre Charles Monnier, left him determined to pursue mathematics and 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 where he was successful in the entrance examination for the military school at Mézières.
After he left the school in 1761, Coloumb initially took part in the survey for the British coastal charts and was then sent on a 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 to France, 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 became one of the first members of the National Institute and was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802. His health was already very feeble and four years later he died in Paris.
Coulomb leaves a legacy as a pioneer in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design.
In 1784, his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l'élasticité des fils de metal Histoire de lâAcadémie Royale des Sciences, 229-269, 1784 (Theoretical research and experimentation on torsion and the elasticity of metal wire) appeared. This memoir contained the results of Coulomb's experiments on the torsional force for metal wires. His general result is,
:"... the moment of the torque is, for wires of the same metal, proportional to the torsional angle, the fourth power of the diameter and the inverse of the length of the wire..."
It also contained a detailed 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 lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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."
- Deuxieme Mémoire sur lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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 lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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.
*Coulomb friction
* Théorie des machines simples (1821)
* Collection de mémoires relatifs à la physique (1884)
* French National Library The Mémoires of Coulomb available in pdf format.
*
* Mohr-Coulomb theory
|
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb | What happened in 1757 to 1759? | Charles-Augustin de Coulomb joined his father's family in Montpellier and took part in the work of the academy of the city. | data/set4/a6 | Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb
Charles-Augustin de Coulomb (14 June 1736 â 23 August 1806) 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 he studied in mathematics there, under Pierre Charles Monnier, left him determined to pursue mathematics and 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 where he was successful in the entrance examination for the military school at Mézières.
After he left the school in 1761, Coloumb initially took part in the survey for the British coastal charts and was then sent on a 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 to France, 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 became one of the first members of the National Institute and was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802. His health was already very feeble and four years later he died in Paris.
Coulomb leaves a legacy as a pioneer in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design.
In 1784, his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l'élasticité des fils de metal Histoire de lâAcadémie Royale des Sciences, 229-269, 1784 (Theoretical research and experimentation on torsion and the elasticity of metal wire) appeared. This memoir contained the results of Coulomb's experiments on the torsional force for metal wires. His general result is,
:"... the moment of the torque is, for wires of the same metal, proportional to the torsional angle, the fourth power of the diameter and the inverse of the length of the wire..."
It also contained a detailed 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 lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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."
- Deuxieme Mémoire sur lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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 lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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.
*Coulomb friction
* Théorie des machines simples (1821)
* Collection de mémoires relatifs à la physique (1884)
* French National Library The Mémoires of Coulomb available in pdf format.
*
* Mohr-Coulomb theory
|
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb | Regarding this topic, what did the Revolution do? | The Revolution caused Coulomb to resign his appointment as intendent des eaux et fontains and retire. | data/set4/a6 | Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb
Charles-Augustin de Coulomb (14 June 1736 â 23 August 1806) 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 he studied in mathematics there, under Pierre Charles Monnier, left him determined to pursue mathematics and 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 where he was successful in the entrance examination for the military school at Mézières.
After he left the school in 1761, Coloumb initially took part in the survey for the British coastal charts and was then sent on a 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 to France, 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 became one of the first members of the National Institute and was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802. His health was already very feeble and four years later he died in Paris.
Coulomb leaves a legacy as a pioneer in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design.
In 1784, his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l'élasticité des fils de metal Histoire de lâAcadémie Royale des Sciences, 229-269, 1784 (Theoretical research and experimentation on torsion and the elasticity of metal wire) appeared. This memoir contained the results of Coulomb's experiments on the torsional force for metal wires. His general result is,
:"... the moment of the torque is, for wires of the same metal, proportional to the torsional angle, the fourth power of the diameter and the inverse of the length of the wire..."
It also contained a detailed 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 lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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."
- Deuxieme Mémoire sur lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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 lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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.
*Coulomb friction
* Théorie des machines simples (1821)
* Collection de mémoires relatifs à la physique (1884)
* French National Library The Mémoires of Coulomb available in pdf format.
*
* Mohr-Coulomb theory
|
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb | Who determined to pursue mathematics? | Charles-Augustin de Coulomb | data/set4/a6 | Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb
Charles-Augustin de Coulomb (14 June 1736 â 23 August 1806) 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 he studied in mathematics there, under Pierre Charles Monnier, left him determined to pursue mathematics and 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 where he was successful in the entrance examination for the military school at Mézières.
After he left the school in 1761, Coloumb initially took part in the survey for the British coastal charts and was then sent on a 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 to France, 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 became one of the first members of the National Institute and was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802. His health was already very feeble and four years later he died in Paris.
Coulomb leaves a legacy as a pioneer in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design.
In 1784, his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l'élasticité des fils de metal Histoire de lâAcadémie Royale des Sciences, 229-269, 1784 (Theoretical research and experimentation on torsion and the elasticity of metal wire) appeared. This memoir contained the results of Coulomb's experiments on the torsional force for metal wires. His general result is,
:"... the moment of the torque is, for wires of the same metal, proportional to the torsional angle, the fourth power of the diameter and the inverse of the length of the wire..."
It also contained a detailed 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 lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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."
- Deuxieme Mémoire sur lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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 lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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.
*Coulomb friction
* Théorie des machines simples (1821)
* Collection de mémoires relatifs à la physique (1884)
* French National Library The Mémoires of Coulomb available in pdf format.
*
* Mohr-Coulomb theory
|
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb | When did Coulomb return to Paris? | In 1759. | data/set4/a6 | Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb
Charles-Augustin de Coulomb (14 June 1736 â 23 August 1806) 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 he studied in mathematics there, under Pierre Charles Monnier, left him determined to pursue mathematics and 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 where he was successful in the entrance examination for the military school at Mézières.
After he left the school in 1761, Coloumb initially took part in the survey for the British coastal charts and was then sent on a 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 to France, 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 became one of the first members of the National Institute and was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802. His health was already very feeble and four years later he died in Paris.
Coulomb leaves a legacy as a pioneer in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design.
In 1784, his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l'élasticité des fils de metal Histoire de lâAcadémie Royale des Sciences, 229-269, 1784 (Theoretical research and experimentation on torsion and the elasticity of metal wire) appeared. This memoir contained the results of Coulomb's experiments on the torsional force for metal wires. His general result is,
:"... the moment of the torque is, for wires of the same metal, proportional to the torsional angle, the fourth power of the diameter and the inverse of the length of the wire..."
It also contained a detailed 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 lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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."
- Deuxieme Mémoire sur lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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 lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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.
*Coulomb friction
* Théorie des machines simples (1821)
* Collection de mémoires relatifs à la physique (1884)
* French National Library The Mémoires of Coulomb available in pdf format.
*
* Mohr-Coulomb theory
|
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb | Does Coulomb leave a legacy as a pioneer in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design? | yes | data/set4/a6 | Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb
Charles-Augustin de Coulomb (14 June 1736 â 23 August 1806) 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 he studied in mathematics there, under Pierre Charles Monnier, left him determined to pursue mathematics and 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 where he was successful in the entrance examination for the military school at Mézières.
After he left the school in 1761, Coloumb initially took part in the survey for the British coastal charts and was then sent on a 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 to France, 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 became one of the first members of the National Institute and was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802. His health was already very feeble and four years later he died in Paris.
Coulomb leaves a legacy as a pioneer in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design.
In 1784, his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l'élasticité des fils de metal Histoire de lâAcadémie Royale des Sciences, 229-269, 1784 (Theoretical research and experimentation on torsion and the elasticity of metal wire) appeared. This memoir contained the results of Coulomb's experiments on the torsional force for metal wires. His general result is,
:"... the moment of the torque is, for wires of the same metal, proportional to the torsional angle, the fourth power of the diameter and the inverse of the length of the wire..."
It also contained a detailed 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 lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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."
- Deuxieme Mémoire sur lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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 lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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.
*Coulomb friction
* Théorie des machines simples (1821)
* Collection de mémoires relatifs à la physique (1884)
* French National Library The Mémoires of Coulomb available in pdf format.
*
* Mohr-Coulomb theory
|
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb | Did the family move to Paris as well as there Coulomb studied at the prestigious Collge des Quatre-Nations? | Yes | data/set4/a6 | Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb
Charles-Augustin de Coulomb (14 June 1736 â 23 August 1806) 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 he studied in mathematics there, under Pierre Charles Monnier, left him determined to pursue mathematics and 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 where he was successful in the entrance examination for the military school at Mézières.
After he left the school in 1761, Coloumb initially took part in the survey for the British coastal charts and was then sent on a 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 to France, 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 became one of the first members of the National Institute and was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802. His health was already very feeble and four years later he died in Paris.
Coulomb leaves a legacy as a pioneer in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design.
In 1784, his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l'élasticité des fils de metal Histoire de lâAcadémie Royale des Sciences, 229-269, 1784 (Theoretical research and experimentation on torsion and the elasticity of metal wire) appeared. This memoir contained the results of Coulomb's experiments on the torsional force for metal wires. His general result is,
:"... the moment of the torque is, for wires of the same metal, proportional to the torsional angle, the fourth power of the diameter and the inverse of the length of the wire..."
It also contained a detailed 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 lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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."
- Deuxieme Mémoire sur lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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 lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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.
*Coulomb friction
* Théorie des machines simples (1821)
* Collection de mémoires relatifs à la physique (1884)
* French National Library The Mémoires of Coulomb available in pdf format.
*
* Mohr-Coulomb theory
|
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb | Was Coulomb born in Angoulme France to a well-to-do family? | Coulomb was born in Angoulême, France, to a well-to-do family | data/set4/a6 | Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb
Charles-Augustin de Coulomb (14 June 1736 â 23 August 1806) 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 he studied in mathematics there, under Pierre Charles Monnier, left him determined to pursue mathematics and 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 where he was successful in the entrance examination for the military school at Mézières.
After he left the school in 1761, Coloumb initially took part in the survey for the British coastal charts and was then sent on a 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 to France, 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 became one of the first members of the National Institute and was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802. His health was already very feeble and four years later he died in Paris.
Coulomb leaves a legacy as a pioneer in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design.
In 1784, his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l'élasticité des fils de metal Histoire de lâAcadémie Royale des Sciences, 229-269, 1784 (Theoretical research and experimentation on torsion and the elasticity of metal wire) appeared. This memoir contained the results of Coulomb's experiments on the torsional force for metal wires. His general result is,
:"... the moment of the torque is, for wires of the same metal, proportional to the torsional angle, the fourth power of the diameter and the inverse of the length of the wire..."
It also contained a detailed 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 lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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."
- Deuxieme Mémoire sur lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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 lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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.
*Coulomb friction
* Théorie des machines simples (1821)
* Collection de mémoires relatifs à la physique (1884)
* French National Library The Mémoires of Coulomb available in pdf format.
*
* Mohr-Coulomb theory
|
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb | Is he best known for developing Coulomb's law, the definition of the electrostatic force of attraction and repulsion? | Yes | data/set4/a6 | Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb
Charles-Augustin de Coulomb (14 June 1736 â 23 August 1806) 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 he studied in mathematics there, under Pierre Charles Monnier, left him determined to pursue mathematics and 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 where he was successful in the entrance examination for the military school at Mézières.
After he left the school in 1761, Coloumb initially took part in the survey for the British coastal charts and was then sent on a 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 to France, 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 became one of the first members of the National Institute and was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802. His health was already very feeble and four years later he died in Paris.
Coulomb leaves a legacy as a pioneer in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design.
In 1784, his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l'élasticité des fils de metal Histoire de lâAcadémie Royale des Sciences, 229-269, 1784 (Theoretical research and experimentation on torsion and the elasticity of metal wire) appeared. This memoir contained the results of Coulomb's experiments on the torsional force for metal wires. His general result is,
:"... the moment of the torque is, for wires of the same metal, proportional to the torsional angle, the fourth power of the diameter and the inverse of the length of the wire..."
It also contained a detailed 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 lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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."
- Deuxieme Mémoire sur lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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 lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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.
*Coulomb friction
* Théorie des machines simples (1821)
* Collection de mémoires relatifs à la physique (1884)
* French National Library The Mémoires of Coulomb available in pdf format.
*
* Mohr-Coulomb theory
|
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb | The SI unit of charge, the coulomb, was named after him? | Yes | data/set4/a6 | Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb
Charles-Augustin de Coulomb (14 June 1736 â 23 August 1806) 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 he studied in mathematics there, under Pierre Charles Monnier, left him determined to pursue mathematics and 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 where he was successful in the entrance examination for the military school at Mézières.
After he left the school in 1761, Coloumb initially took part in the survey for the British coastal charts and was then sent on a 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 to France, 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 became one of the first members of the National Institute and was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802. His health was already very feeble and four years later he died in Paris.
Coulomb leaves a legacy as a pioneer in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design.
In 1784, his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l'élasticité des fils de metal Histoire de lâAcadémie Royale des Sciences, 229-269, 1784 (Theoretical research and experimentation on torsion and the elasticity of metal wire) appeared. This memoir contained the results of Coulomb's experiments on the torsional force for metal wires. His general result is,
:"... the moment of the torque is, for wires of the same metal, proportional to the torsional angle, the fourth power of the diameter and the inverse of the length of the wire..."
It also contained a detailed 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 lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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."
- Deuxieme Mémoire sur lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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 lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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.
*Coulomb friction
* Théorie des machines simples (1821)
* Collection de mémoires relatifs à la physique (1884)
* French National Library The Mémoires of Coulomb available in pdf format.
*
* Mohr-Coulomb theory
|
Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb | Did Coulomb die in Angoulême, France, to a well-to-do family? | No | data/set4/a6 | Charles-Augustin_de_Coulomb
Charles-Augustin de Coulomb (14 June 1736 â 23 August 1806) 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 he studied in mathematics there, under Pierre Charles Monnier, left him determined to pursue mathematics and 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 where he was successful in the entrance examination for the military school at Mézières.
After he left the school in 1761, Coloumb initially took part in the survey for the British coastal charts and was then sent on a 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 to France, 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 became one of the first members of the National Institute and was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802. His health was already very feeble and four years later he died in Paris.
Coulomb leaves a legacy as a pioneer in the field of geotechnical engineering for his contribution to retaining wall design.
In 1784, his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l'élasticité des fils de metal Histoire de lâAcadémie Royale des Sciences, 229-269, 1784 (Theoretical research and experimentation on torsion and the elasticity of metal wire) appeared. This memoir contained the results of Coulomb's experiments on the torsional force for metal wires. His general result is,
:"... the moment of the torque is, for wires of the same metal, proportional to the torsional angle, the fourth power of the diameter and the inverse of the length of the wire..."
It also contained a detailed 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 lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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."
- Deuxieme Mémoire sur lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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 lâElectricité et le Magnétisme Histoire de lâAcadémie 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.
*Coulomb friction
* Théorie des machines simples (1821)
* Collection de mémoires relatifs à la physique (1884)
* French National Library The Mémoires of Coulomb available in pdf format.
*
* Mohr-Coulomb theory
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Chinese_language | Are all spoken varieties of Chinese tonal and analytical? | yes | data/set5/a7 | Chinese_language
Sino-Tibetan language family
The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China and Taiwan
Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) ( ; ; ; or ) is a language family consisting of languages mutually intelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. âThe mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.â
* Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. âThe Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.â
* Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. âThe 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 worldâs 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 some 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), Cantonese (Yue) (70 million) and Min (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 å®è¯ GuÄnhuà or åæ¹è¯ BÄifÄnghuà 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. Chineseâde facto, Standard Mandarinâis 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).
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:
Disputed classifications by some Chinese linguists:
There are also some smaller groups that are not yet classified, such as: Danzhou dialect (åå·è¯), spoken in Danzhou, on Hainan Island; Xianghua (乡è¯), not to be confused with Xiang (æ¹), spoken in western Hunan; and Shaozhou Tuhua (é¶å·åè¯), 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.
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 government intends 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 âdialectsâ) 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 normal 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 (ä¸æ), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (æ±è¯,âspoken language[s] of the Han Chinese)âthis term could be translated to either âlanguageâ or âlanguagesâ 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 è¯ yu and æ 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 oneâalbeit internally very diverseâethnicity. 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 Peopleâs 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 (âregional tonguesâ, often translated as âdialectsâ). 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 dialect.
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 chiÌt and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("ä¸"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as å and ä¿ 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 many formal occasions.
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 earlier 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 æ¥ (sun), shan å±± (mountain), shui æ°´ (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar XÇ Shèn in the Hà n Dynasty classified characters into six categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80â90% 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/æ¥·æ¸ kÇishÅ«) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (ç¯ä¹¦/ç¯æ¸ zhuà nshÅ«), cursive script (è书/èæ¸ cÇoshÅ«) and clerical script (é¶ä¹¦/é¸æ¸ lìshÅ«). 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 community, is the firstâand at present the onlyâforeign 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 Zhou Dynasty (1122 BCEâ256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the ShÄ«jÄ«ng, the history of the ShÅ«jÄ«ng, and portions of the YìjÄ«ng (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 QÄ«ng dynasty philologists.
Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably è mì "honey", ç
shÄ« "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mÇ "horse", ç¬ quÇn "dog", and éµ Ã© "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 âhoney' and âlion,' and probably also âhorse,' âdog,' and âgoose,' 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 Ãbereinstimmungen 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 Southern and Northern Dynasties and the SuÃ, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the åé» "Qièyùn" rime book (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the å»£é» "GuÇngyùn" rime book. 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 SìchuÄn 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 Qing Dynasty. Since the 17th century, the Qing Dynasty had set up orthoepy academies ( ) to make pronunciation conform to the standard of the capital Beijing. For the general population, however, this had limited effect. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The Beijing Mandarin court standard was used solely by officials and civil servants and was thus fairly limited.
This situation did not change until the mid-20th century with the creation (in both the PRC and the ROC, but not in Hong Kong) of a compulsory educational system committed to teaching 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.
Classical Chinese was once the lingua franca in neighbouring East Asian countries such as Japan, Korea and Vietnam for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. *Sheng Ding and Robert A. Saunders, Talking Up China: An Analysis of China's Rising Cultural Power and Global Promotion of the Chinese Language EASTASIA, Summer 2006, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 4
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 tá»±. 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. Approximately 60% of the modern Vietnamese lexicon is recognized as Hán-Viá»t (Sino-Vietnamese), the majority of which was borrowed from Middle Chinese.
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. 251â258.
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, likewise for a significant percentage of Japanese and Vietnamese vocabulary. 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.
Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of è¶ (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Minnan pronunciation of é®æ± (koe-tsiap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of éæ© (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"âhigh level
* "hemp" or "torpid"âhigh rising
* "horse"âlow falling-rising
* "scold"âhigh falling
* "question particle"âneutral
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 Indian translators, working in Sanskrit and Pali, were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of Chinese in a foreign language. After the 15th century, the efforts of Jesuits and Western court missionaries resulted 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 lack of a native 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 (æ¼¢èªæ¼é³/æ±è¯æ¼é³), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, and later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore) and Taiwan. 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 teaching new words. The Pinyin romanization is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, with the Chinese character alongside.
The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859 and modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As this system approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels, i.e. it is an Anglicization, it may be particularly helpful for beginner Chinese speakers of an English-speaking background. Wade-Giles was found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan.
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 BÄijÄ«ng (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é³, 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, å in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cà (è¯/è©), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cà (âwordâ) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more.
For example:
* Yun é²ââcloudâ (traditional)
* Yun äºââcloudâ (simplified)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ¼¢å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡ââhamburgerâ (traditional)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ±å ¡å
/æ±å ¡â"hamburger" (simplified)
* Wo æââI, meâ
* Ren 人ââpeopleâ
* Diqiu å°çââearth (globosity)â
* Shandian éé»ââlightningâ (traditional)
* Shandian éªçµâ"lightning" (simplifed)
* Meng 夢ââdreamâ (traditional)
* Meng 梦â"dream" (simplified)
All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphologyâi.e., changes in form of a wordâto indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflectionsâit possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), and only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English). There is, however, a gender difference in the written language (ä» as "he" and 她 as "she"), but it should be noted that this is a relatively new introduction to the Chinese language in the twentieth century.
They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le äº, hai è¿, yijing å·²ç», 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 classifiers and measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring languages like Japanese and Korean. See Chinese classifiers 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 cà is identified.
The mono-syllable jÄ«, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: é/鸡 chicken, æ©/æº machine, åº basic, æ/å» (to) hit, é¥/饥 hunger, and ç©/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: ååå«åè±ï¼åéµæ±çåï¼è±åçè± MÃngzi jià o JiÄyÄ«ng, JiÄlÃng JiÄng de jiÄ, YÄ«ngguó de yÄ«ng "My name is JiÄyÄ«ng, 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; since most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters, there are many times more Chinese words than there are 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 ä¸ååæµ· (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 æ±è¯å¤§è¯å
¸, 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 ç°ä»£æ±è¯è¯å
¸, 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 è¡è "grape," ç³æ¦´ "pomegranate" and ç®å/ç
å "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including ä½ "Buddha" and è©è¨/è©è© "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as è¡å "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as è¡è "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or PÄli, 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 çµç¶ "pÃpa", the Chinese lute, or é
ª "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è²å (pinyin: yÇsèliè), "Paris" becomes å·´é» (pinyin: bÄlÃ). A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including æ²ç¼ shÄfÄ "sofa," 马达/馬é mÇdá "motor," å¹½é» yÅumò "humor," é»è¾/é輯 luójà "logic," æ¶é«¦/æ髦 shÃmáo "smart, fashionable" and ææ¯åºé xiÄsÄ«dÇlÇ "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, æ²å/æ²ç¼ and 马达/馬é in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor."
Western foreign words have had great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came èè¾ (bÄléi, "ballet"), é¦æ§ (xiÄngbÄ«n, "champagne"), via Italian åå¡ (kÄfÄi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned æ²ç¼ (shÄfÄ "sofa"), å¹½é» (yÅumò "humour"), and é«å°å¤« (gÄoÄrfÅ«, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪æ¯ç§ (dÃsÄ«kè, "disco"), å¯ä¹ (kÄlè, "cola") and è¿·ä½ (mÃnÇ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon å¡é (cartoon), åºä½¬ (gay people), ç士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. ç²çµ² (fÄnsÄ«, "fans"), é§å®¢ (hèikè, "hacker"), é¨è½æ ¼(bùluÅgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin.
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 å¾·å¾é£/å¾·å¾é¢¨ ( Shanghainese: télÃfon , Standard Mandarin: délÇfÄng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese çµè¯/é»è©± (dià nhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include çµè§/é»è¦ (dià nshì "electric vision") for television, çµè/é»è
¦ (dià nnÇo "electric brain") for computer; ææº/ææ© (shÇujÄ« "hand machine") for cellphone, and èç/èè½ (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. ç¶²èª (wÇng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as æ±å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡å
(hà nbÇo bÄo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as æææº/æææ© (tuÅlÄjÄ«, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马å©å¥¥/馬å©å¥§ for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example å¥è
¾/å¥é¨° (bÄnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and èµç¾å³/è³½ç¾å³ (Sà ibÇiwèi "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 (å製漢èª, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include dià nhuà (çµè¯/é»è©±, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社ä¼, shakai, "society"), kÄxué (ç§å¦/ç§å¸, kagaku, "science") and chÅuxià ng (æ½è±¡, chÅ«shÅ, "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, jÄ«ngjì (ç»æµ/ç¶æ¿, 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 Hokkien and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便å½/ä¾¿ç¶ âlunchbox or boxed lunchâ (from bento) and æç âprepared cuisineâ, have passed into common currency.
With the growing importance and influence of China's economy globally, Mandarin instruction is gaining popularity in schools in the USA, and 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 the English Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660.
* Chinese characters
* Chinese exclamative particles
* Chinese honorifics
* Chinese classifier
* Chinese number gestures
* Chinese numerals
* Chinese punctuation
* Classical Chinese grammar
* Four-character idiom
* Han unification
* Haner language
* HSK test
* Languages of China
* North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics
* Nü shu
*
*
*
*
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* ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawaiâi Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X.
* ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawaiâi Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-0-8248-2975-9.
* Keys to the Chinese Language: Book IIâGoogle Books
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Chinese_language | Are all spoken varieties of Chinese tonal and analytical? | yes | data/set5/a7 | Chinese_language
Sino-Tibetan language family
The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China and Taiwan
Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) ( ; ; ; or ) is a language family consisting of languages mutually intelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. âThe mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.â
* Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. âThe Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.â
* Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. âThe 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 worldâs 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 some 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), Cantonese (Yue) (70 million) and Min (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 å®è¯ GuÄnhuà or åæ¹è¯ BÄifÄnghuà 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. Chineseâde facto, Standard Mandarinâis 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).
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:
Disputed classifications by some Chinese linguists:
There are also some smaller groups that are not yet classified, such as: Danzhou dialect (åå·è¯), spoken in Danzhou, on Hainan Island; Xianghua (乡è¯), not to be confused with Xiang (æ¹), spoken in western Hunan; and Shaozhou Tuhua (é¶å·åè¯), 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.
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 government intends 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 âdialectsâ) 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 normal 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 (ä¸æ), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (æ±è¯,âspoken language[s] of the Han Chinese)âthis term could be translated to either âlanguageâ or âlanguagesâ 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 è¯ yu and æ 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 oneâalbeit internally very diverseâethnicity. 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 Peopleâs 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 (âregional tonguesâ, often translated as âdialectsâ). 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 dialect.
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 chiÌt and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("ä¸"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as å and ä¿ 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 many formal occasions.
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 earlier 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 æ¥ (sun), shan å±± (mountain), shui æ°´ (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar XÇ Shèn in the Hà n Dynasty classified characters into six categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80â90% 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/æ¥·æ¸ kÇishÅ«) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (ç¯ä¹¦/ç¯æ¸ zhuà nshÅ«), cursive script (è书/èæ¸ cÇoshÅ«) and clerical script (é¶ä¹¦/é¸æ¸ lìshÅ«). 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 community, is the firstâand at present the onlyâforeign 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 Zhou Dynasty (1122 BCEâ256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the ShÄ«jÄ«ng, the history of the ShÅ«jÄ«ng, and portions of the YìjÄ«ng (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 QÄ«ng dynasty philologists.
Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably è mì "honey", ç
shÄ« "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mÇ "horse", ç¬ quÇn "dog", and éµ Ã© "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 âhoney' and âlion,' and probably also âhorse,' âdog,' and âgoose,' 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 Ãbereinstimmungen 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 Southern and Northern Dynasties and the SuÃ, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the åé» "Qièyùn" rime book (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the å»£é» "GuÇngyùn" rime book. 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 SìchuÄn 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 Qing Dynasty. Since the 17th century, the Qing Dynasty had set up orthoepy academies ( ) to make pronunciation conform to the standard of the capital Beijing. For the general population, however, this had limited effect. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The Beijing Mandarin court standard was used solely by officials and civil servants and was thus fairly limited.
This situation did not change until the mid-20th century with the creation (in both the PRC and the ROC, but not in Hong Kong) of a compulsory educational system committed to teaching 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.
Classical Chinese was once the lingua franca in neighbouring East Asian countries such as Japan, Korea and Vietnam for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. *Sheng Ding and Robert A. Saunders, Talking Up China: An Analysis of China's Rising Cultural Power and Global Promotion of the Chinese Language EASTASIA, Summer 2006, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 4
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 tá»±. 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. Approximately 60% of the modern Vietnamese lexicon is recognized as Hán-Viá»t (Sino-Vietnamese), the majority of which was borrowed from Middle Chinese.
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. 251â258.
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, likewise for a significant percentage of Japanese and Vietnamese vocabulary. 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.
Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of è¶ (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Minnan pronunciation of é®æ± (koe-tsiap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of éæ© (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"âhigh level
* "hemp" or "torpid"âhigh rising
* "horse"âlow falling-rising
* "scold"âhigh falling
* "question particle"âneutral
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 Indian translators, working in Sanskrit and Pali, were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of Chinese in a foreign language. After the 15th century, the efforts of Jesuits and Western court missionaries resulted 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 lack of a native 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 (æ¼¢èªæ¼é³/æ±è¯æ¼é³), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, and later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore) and Taiwan. 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 teaching new words. The Pinyin romanization is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, with the Chinese character alongside.
The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859 and modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As this system approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels, i.e. it is an Anglicization, it may be particularly helpful for beginner Chinese speakers of an English-speaking background. Wade-Giles was found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan.
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 BÄijÄ«ng (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é³, 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, å in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cà (è¯/è©), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cà (âwordâ) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more.
For example:
* Yun é²ââcloudâ (traditional)
* Yun äºââcloudâ (simplified)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ¼¢å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡ââhamburgerâ (traditional)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ±å ¡å
/æ±å ¡â"hamburger" (simplified)
* Wo æââI, meâ
* Ren 人ââpeopleâ
* Diqiu å°çââearth (globosity)â
* Shandian éé»ââlightningâ (traditional)
* Shandian éªçµâ"lightning" (simplifed)
* Meng 夢ââdreamâ (traditional)
* Meng 梦â"dream" (simplified)
All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphologyâi.e., changes in form of a wordâto indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflectionsâit possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), and only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English). There is, however, a gender difference in the written language (ä» as "he" and 她 as "she"), but it should be noted that this is a relatively new introduction to the Chinese language in the twentieth century.
They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le äº, hai è¿, yijing å·²ç», 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 classifiers and measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring languages like Japanese and Korean. See Chinese classifiers 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 cà is identified.
The mono-syllable jÄ«, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: é/鸡 chicken, æ©/æº machine, åº basic, æ/å» (to) hit, é¥/饥 hunger, and ç©/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: ååå«åè±ï¼åéµæ±çåï¼è±åçè± MÃngzi jià o JiÄyÄ«ng, JiÄlÃng JiÄng de jiÄ, YÄ«ngguó de yÄ«ng "My name is JiÄyÄ«ng, 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; since most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters, there are many times more Chinese words than there are 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 ä¸ååæµ· (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 æ±è¯å¤§è¯å
¸, 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 ç°ä»£æ±è¯è¯å
¸, 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 è¡è "grape," ç³æ¦´ "pomegranate" and ç®å/ç
å "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including ä½ "Buddha" and è©è¨/è©è© "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as è¡å "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as è¡è "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or PÄli, 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 çµç¶ "pÃpa", the Chinese lute, or é
ª "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è²å (pinyin: yÇsèliè), "Paris" becomes å·´é» (pinyin: bÄlÃ). A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including æ²ç¼ shÄfÄ "sofa," 马达/馬é mÇdá "motor," å¹½é» yÅumò "humor," é»è¾/é輯 luójà "logic," æ¶é«¦/æ髦 shÃmáo "smart, fashionable" and ææ¯åºé xiÄsÄ«dÇlÇ "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, æ²å/æ²ç¼ and 马达/馬é in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor."
Western foreign words have had great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came èè¾ (bÄléi, "ballet"), é¦æ§ (xiÄngbÄ«n, "champagne"), via Italian åå¡ (kÄfÄi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned æ²ç¼ (shÄfÄ "sofa"), å¹½é» (yÅumò "humour"), and é«å°å¤« (gÄoÄrfÅ«, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪æ¯ç§ (dÃsÄ«kè, "disco"), å¯ä¹ (kÄlè, "cola") and è¿·ä½ (mÃnÇ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon å¡é (cartoon), åºä½¬ (gay people), ç士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. ç²çµ² (fÄnsÄ«, "fans"), é§å®¢ (hèikè, "hacker"), é¨è½æ ¼(bùluÅgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin.
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 å¾·å¾é£/å¾·å¾é¢¨ ( Shanghainese: télÃfon , Standard Mandarin: délÇfÄng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese çµè¯/é»è©± (dià nhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include çµè§/é»è¦ (dià nshì "electric vision") for television, çµè/é»è
¦ (dià nnÇo "electric brain") for computer; ææº/ææ© (shÇujÄ« "hand machine") for cellphone, and èç/èè½ (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. ç¶²èª (wÇng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as æ±å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡å
(hà nbÇo bÄo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as æææº/æææ© (tuÅlÄjÄ«, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马å©å¥¥/馬å©å¥§ for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example å¥è
¾/å¥é¨° (bÄnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and èµç¾å³/è³½ç¾å³ (Sà ibÇiwèi "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 (å製漢èª, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include dià nhuà (çµè¯/é»è©±, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社ä¼, shakai, "society"), kÄxué (ç§å¦/ç§å¸, kagaku, "science") and chÅuxià ng (æ½è±¡, chÅ«shÅ, "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, jÄ«ngjì (ç»æµ/ç¶æ¿, 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 Hokkien and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便å½/ä¾¿ç¶ âlunchbox or boxed lunchâ (from bento) and æç âprepared cuisineâ, have passed into common currency.
With the growing importance and influence of China's economy globally, Mandarin instruction is gaining popularity in schools in the USA, and 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 the English Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660.
* Chinese characters
* Chinese exclamative particles
* Chinese honorifics
* Chinese classifier
* Chinese number gestures
* Chinese numerals
* Chinese punctuation
* Classical Chinese grammar
* Four-character idiom
* Han unification
* Haner language
* HSK test
* Languages of China
* North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics
* Nü shu
*
*
*
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* ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawaiâi Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X.
* ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawaiâi Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-0-8248-2975-9.
* Keys to the Chinese Language: Book IIâGoogle Books
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Chinese_language | Is fifty percent or more of Korean vocabulary of Chinese origin? | Yes | data/set5/a7 | Chinese_language
Sino-Tibetan language family
The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China and Taiwan
Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) ( ; ; ; or ) is a language family consisting of languages mutually intelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. âThe mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.â
* Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. âThe Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.â
* Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. âThe 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 worldâs 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 some 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), Cantonese (Yue) (70 million) and Min (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 å®è¯ GuÄnhuà or åæ¹è¯ BÄifÄnghuà 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. Chineseâde facto, Standard Mandarinâis 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).
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:
Disputed classifications by some Chinese linguists:
There are also some smaller groups that are not yet classified, such as: Danzhou dialect (åå·è¯), spoken in Danzhou, on Hainan Island; Xianghua (乡è¯), not to be confused with Xiang (æ¹), spoken in western Hunan; and Shaozhou Tuhua (é¶å·åè¯), 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.
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 government intends 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 âdialectsâ) 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 normal 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 (ä¸æ), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (æ±è¯,âspoken language[s] of the Han Chinese)âthis term could be translated to either âlanguageâ or âlanguagesâ 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 è¯ yu and æ 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 oneâalbeit internally very diverseâethnicity. 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 Peopleâs 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 (âregional tonguesâ, often translated as âdialectsâ). 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 dialect.
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 chiÌt and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("ä¸"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as å and ä¿ 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 many formal occasions.
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 earlier 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 æ¥ (sun), shan å±± (mountain), shui æ°´ (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar XÇ Shèn in the Hà n Dynasty classified characters into six categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80â90% 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/æ¥·æ¸ kÇishÅ«) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (ç¯ä¹¦/ç¯æ¸ zhuà nshÅ«), cursive script (è书/èæ¸ cÇoshÅ«) and clerical script (é¶ä¹¦/é¸æ¸ lìshÅ«). 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 community, is the firstâand at present the onlyâforeign 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 Zhou Dynasty (1122 BCEâ256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the ShÄ«jÄ«ng, the history of the ShÅ«jÄ«ng, and portions of the YìjÄ«ng (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 QÄ«ng dynasty philologists.
Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably è mì "honey", ç
shÄ« "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mÇ "horse", ç¬ quÇn "dog", and éµ Ã© "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 âhoney' and âlion,' and probably also âhorse,' âdog,' and âgoose,' 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 Ãbereinstimmungen 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 Southern and Northern Dynasties and the SuÃ, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the åé» "Qièyùn" rime book (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the å»£é» "GuÇngyùn" rime book. 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 SìchuÄn 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 Qing Dynasty. Since the 17th century, the Qing Dynasty had set up orthoepy academies ( ) to make pronunciation conform to the standard of the capital Beijing. For the general population, however, this had limited effect. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The Beijing Mandarin court standard was used solely by officials and civil servants and was thus fairly limited.
This situation did not change until the mid-20th century with the creation (in both the PRC and the ROC, but not in Hong Kong) of a compulsory educational system committed to teaching 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.
Classical Chinese was once the lingua franca in neighbouring East Asian countries such as Japan, Korea and Vietnam for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. *Sheng Ding and Robert A. Saunders, Talking Up China: An Analysis of China's Rising Cultural Power and Global Promotion of the Chinese Language EASTASIA, Summer 2006, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 4
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 tá»±. 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. Approximately 60% of the modern Vietnamese lexicon is recognized as Hán-Viá»t (Sino-Vietnamese), the majority of which was borrowed from Middle Chinese.
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. 251â258.
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, likewise for a significant percentage of Japanese and Vietnamese vocabulary. 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.
Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of è¶ (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Minnan pronunciation of é®æ± (koe-tsiap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of éæ© (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"âhigh level
* "hemp" or "torpid"âhigh rising
* "horse"âlow falling-rising
* "scold"âhigh falling
* "question particle"âneutral
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 Indian translators, working in Sanskrit and Pali, were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of Chinese in a foreign language. After the 15th century, the efforts of Jesuits and Western court missionaries resulted 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 lack of a native 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 (æ¼¢èªæ¼é³/æ±è¯æ¼é³), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, and later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore) and Taiwan. 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 teaching new words. The Pinyin romanization is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, with the Chinese character alongside.
The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859 and modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As this system approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels, i.e. it is an Anglicization, it may be particularly helpful for beginner Chinese speakers of an English-speaking background. Wade-Giles was found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan.
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 BÄijÄ«ng (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é³, 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, å in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cà (è¯/è©), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cà (âwordâ) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more.
For example:
* Yun é²ââcloudâ (traditional)
* Yun äºââcloudâ (simplified)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ¼¢å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡ââhamburgerâ (traditional)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ±å ¡å
/æ±å ¡â"hamburger" (simplified)
* Wo æââI, meâ
* Ren 人ââpeopleâ
* Diqiu å°çââearth (globosity)â
* Shandian éé»ââlightningâ (traditional)
* Shandian éªçµâ"lightning" (simplifed)
* Meng 夢ââdreamâ (traditional)
* Meng 梦â"dream" (simplified)
All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphologyâi.e., changes in form of a wordâto indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflectionsâit possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), and only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English). There is, however, a gender difference in the written language (ä» as "he" and 她 as "she"), but it should be noted that this is a relatively new introduction to the Chinese language in the twentieth century.
They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le äº, hai è¿, yijing å·²ç», 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 classifiers and measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring languages like Japanese and Korean. See Chinese classifiers 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 cà is identified.
The mono-syllable jÄ«, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: é/鸡 chicken, æ©/æº machine, åº basic, æ/å» (to) hit, é¥/饥 hunger, and ç©/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: ååå«åè±ï¼åéµæ±çåï¼è±åçè± MÃngzi jià o JiÄyÄ«ng, JiÄlÃng JiÄng de jiÄ, YÄ«ngguó de yÄ«ng "My name is JiÄyÄ«ng, 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; since most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters, there are many times more Chinese words than there are 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 ä¸ååæµ· (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 æ±è¯å¤§è¯å
¸, 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 ç°ä»£æ±è¯è¯å
¸, 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 è¡è "grape," ç³æ¦´ "pomegranate" and ç®å/ç
å "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including ä½ "Buddha" and è©è¨/è©è© "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as è¡å "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as è¡è "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or PÄli, 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 çµç¶ "pÃpa", the Chinese lute, or é
ª "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è²å (pinyin: yÇsèliè), "Paris" becomes å·´é» (pinyin: bÄlÃ). A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including æ²ç¼ shÄfÄ "sofa," 马达/馬é mÇdá "motor," å¹½é» yÅumò "humor," é»è¾/é輯 luójà "logic," æ¶é«¦/æ髦 shÃmáo "smart, fashionable" and ææ¯åºé xiÄsÄ«dÇlÇ "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, æ²å/æ²ç¼ and 马达/馬é in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor."
Western foreign words have had great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came èè¾ (bÄléi, "ballet"), é¦æ§ (xiÄngbÄ«n, "champagne"), via Italian åå¡ (kÄfÄi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned æ²ç¼ (shÄfÄ "sofa"), å¹½é» (yÅumò "humour"), and é«å°å¤« (gÄoÄrfÅ«, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪æ¯ç§ (dÃsÄ«kè, "disco"), å¯ä¹ (kÄlè, "cola") and è¿·ä½ (mÃnÇ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon å¡é (cartoon), åºä½¬ (gay people), ç士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. ç²çµ² (fÄnsÄ«, "fans"), é§å®¢ (hèikè, "hacker"), é¨è½æ ¼(bùluÅgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin.
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 å¾·å¾é£/å¾·å¾é¢¨ ( Shanghainese: télÃfon , Standard Mandarin: délÇfÄng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese çµè¯/é»è©± (dià nhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include çµè§/é»è¦ (dià nshì "electric vision") for television, çµè/é»è
¦ (dià nnÇo "electric brain") for computer; ææº/ææ© (shÇujÄ« "hand machine") for cellphone, and èç/èè½ (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. ç¶²èª (wÇng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as æ±å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡å
(hà nbÇo bÄo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as æææº/æææ© (tuÅlÄjÄ«, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马å©å¥¥/馬å©å¥§ for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example å¥è
¾/å¥é¨° (bÄnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and èµç¾å³/è³½ç¾å³ (Sà ibÇiwèi "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 (å製漢èª, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include dià nhuà (çµè¯/é»è©±, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社ä¼, shakai, "society"), kÄxué (ç§å¦/ç§å¸, kagaku, "science") and chÅuxià ng (æ½è±¡, chÅ«shÅ, "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, jÄ«ngjì (ç»æµ/ç¶æ¿, 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 Hokkien and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便å½/ä¾¿ç¶ âlunchbox or boxed lunchâ (from bento) and æç âprepared cuisineâ, have passed into common currency.
With the growing importance and influence of China's economy globally, Mandarin instruction is gaining popularity in schools in the USA, and 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 the English Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660.
* Chinese characters
* Chinese exclamative particles
* Chinese honorifics
* Chinese classifier
* Chinese number gestures
* Chinese numerals
* Chinese punctuation
* Classical Chinese grammar
* Four-character idiom
* Han unification
* Haner language
* HSK test
* Languages of China
* North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics
* Nü shu
*
*
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* ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawaiâi Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X.
* ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawaiâi Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-0-8248-2975-9.
* Keys to the Chinese Language: Book IIâGoogle Books
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Chinese_language | Is fifty percent or more of Korean vocabulary of Chinese origin? | yes | data/set5/a7 | Chinese_language
Sino-Tibetan language family
The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China and Taiwan
Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) ( ; ; ; or ) is a language family consisting of languages mutually intelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. âThe mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.â
* Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. âThe Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.â
* Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. âThe 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 worldâs 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 some 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), Cantonese (Yue) (70 million) and Min (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 å®è¯ GuÄnhuà or åæ¹è¯ BÄifÄnghuà 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. Chineseâde facto, Standard Mandarinâis 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).
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:
Disputed classifications by some Chinese linguists:
There are also some smaller groups that are not yet classified, such as: Danzhou dialect (åå·è¯), spoken in Danzhou, on Hainan Island; Xianghua (乡è¯), not to be confused with Xiang (æ¹), spoken in western Hunan; and Shaozhou Tuhua (é¶å·åè¯), 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.
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 government intends 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 âdialectsâ) 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 normal 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 (ä¸æ), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (æ±è¯,âspoken language[s] of the Han Chinese)âthis term could be translated to either âlanguageâ or âlanguagesâ 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 è¯ yu and æ 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 oneâalbeit internally very diverseâethnicity. 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 Peopleâs 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 (âregional tonguesâ, often translated as âdialectsâ). 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 dialect.
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 chiÌt and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("ä¸"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as å and ä¿ 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 many formal occasions.
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 earlier 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 æ¥ (sun), shan å±± (mountain), shui æ°´ (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar XÇ Shèn in the Hà n Dynasty classified characters into six categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80â90% 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/æ¥·æ¸ kÇishÅ«) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (ç¯ä¹¦/ç¯æ¸ zhuà nshÅ«), cursive script (è书/èæ¸ cÇoshÅ«) and clerical script (é¶ä¹¦/é¸æ¸ lìshÅ«). 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 community, is the firstâand at present the onlyâforeign 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 Zhou Dynasty (1122 BCEâ256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the ShÄ«jÄ«ng, the history of the ShÅ«jÄ«ng, and portions of the YìjÄ«ng (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 QÄ«ng dynasty philologists.
Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably è mì "honey", ç
shÄ« "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mÇ "horse", ç¬ quÇn "dog", and éµ Ã© "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 âhoney' and âlion,' and probably also âhorse,' âdog,' and âgoose,' 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 Ãbereinstimmungen 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 Southern and Northern Dynasties and the SuÃ, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the åé» "Qièyùn" rime book (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the å»£é» "GuÇngyùn" rime book. 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 SìchuÄn 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 Qing Dynasty. Since the 17th century, the Qing Dynasty had set up orthoepy academies ( ) to make pronunciation conform to the standard of the capital Beijing. For the general population, however, this had limited effect. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The Beijing Mandarin court standard was used solely by officials and civil servants and was thus fairly limited.
This situation did not change until the mid-20th century with the creation (in both the PRC and the ROC, but not in Hong Kong) of a compulsory educational system committed to teaching 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.
Classical Chinese was once the lingua franca in neighbouring East Asian countries such as Japan, Korea and Vietnam for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. *Sheng Ding and Robert A. Saunders, Talking Up China: An Analysis of China's Rising Cultural Power and Global Promotion of the Chinese Language EASTASIA, Summer 2006, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 4
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 tá»±. 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. Approximately 60% of the modern Vietnamese lexicon is recognized as Hán-Viá»t (Sino-Vietnamese), the majority of which was borrowed from Middle Chinese.
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. 251â258.
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, likewise for a significant percentage of Japanese and Vietnamese vocabulary. 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.
Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of è¶ (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Minnan pronunciation of é®æ± (koe-tsiap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of éæ© (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"âhigh level
* "hemp" or "torpid"âhigh rising
* "horse"âlow falling-rising
* "scold"âhigh falling
* "question particle"âneutral
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 Indian translators, working in Sanskrit and Pali, were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of Chinese in a foreign language. After the 15th century, the efforts of Jesuits and Western court missionaries resulted 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 lack of a native 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 (æ¼¢èªæ¼é³/æ±è¯æ¼é³), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, and later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore) and Taiwan. 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 teaching new words. The Pinyin romanization is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, with the Chinese character alongside.
The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859 and modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As this system approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels, i.e. it is an Anglicization, it may be particularly helpful for beginner Chinese speakers of an English-speaking background. Wade-Giles was found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan.
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 BÄijÄ«ng (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é³, 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, å in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cà (è¯/è©), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cà (âwordâ) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more.
For example:
* Yun é²ââcloudâ (traditional)
* Yun äºââcloudâ (simplified)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ¼¢å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡ââhamburgerâ (traditional)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ±å ¡å
/æ±å ¡â"hamburger" (simplified)
* Wo æââI, meâ
* Ren 人ââpeopleâ
* Diqiu å°çââearth (globosity)â
* Shandian éé»ââlightningâ (traditional)
* Shandian éªçµâ"lightning" (simplifed)
* Meng 夢ââdreamâ (traditional)
* Meng 梦â"dream" (simplified)
All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphologyâi.e., changes in form of a wordâto indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflectionsâit possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), and only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English). There is, however, a gender difference in the written language (ä» as "he" and 她 as "she"), but it should be noted that this is a relatively new introduction to the Chinese language in the twentieth century.
They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le äº, hai è¿, yijing å·²ç», 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 classifiers and measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring languages like Japanese and Korean. See Chinese classifiers 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 cà is identified.
The mono-syllable jÄ«, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: é/鸡 chicken, æ©/æº machine, åº basic, æ/å» (to) hit, é¥/饥 hunger, and ç©/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: ååå«åè±ï¼åéµæ±çåï¼è±åçè± MÃngzi jià o JiÄyÄ«ng, JiÄlÃng JiÄng de jiÄ, YÄ«ngguó de yÄ«ng "My name is JiÄyÄ«ng, 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; since most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters, there are many times more Chinese words than there are 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 ä¸ååæµ· (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 æ±è¯å¤§è¯å
¸, 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 ç°ä»£æ±è¯è¯å
¸, 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 è¡è "grape," ç³æ¦´ "pomegranate" and ç®å/ç
å "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including ä½ "Buddha" and è©è¨/è©è© "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as è¡å "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as è¡è "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or PÄli, 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 çµç¶ "pÃpa", the Chinese lute, or é
ª "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è²å (pinyin: yÇsèliè), "Paris" becomes å·´é» (pinyin: bÄlÃ). A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including æ²ç¼ shÄfÄ "sofa," 马达/馬é mÇdá "motor," å¹½é» yÅumò "humor," é»è¾/é輯 luójà "logic," æ¶é«¦/æ髦 shÃmáo "smart, fashionable" and ææ¯åºé xiÄsÄ«dÇlÇ "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, æ²å/æ²ç¼ and 马达/馬é in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor."
Western foreign words have had great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came èè¾ (bÄléi, "ballet"), é¦æ§ (xiÄngbÄ«n, "champagne"), via Italian åå¡ (kÄfÄi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned æ²ç¼ (shÄfÄ "sofa"), å¹½é» (yÅumò "humour"), and é«å°å¤« (gÄoÄrfÅ«, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪æ¯ç§ (dÃsÄ«kè, "disco"), å¯ä¹ (kÄlè, "cola") and è¿·ä½ (mÃnÇ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon å¡é (cartoon), åºä½¬ (gay people), ç士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. ç²çµ² (fÄnsÄ«, "fans"), é§å®¢ (hèikè, "hacker"), é¨è½æ ¼(bùluÅgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin.
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 å¾·å¾é£/å¾·å¾é¢¨ ( Shanghainese: télÃfon , Standard Mandarin: délÇfÄng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese çµè¯/é»è©± (dià nhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include çµè§/é»è¦ (dià nshì "electric vision") for television, çµè/é»è
¦ (dià nnÇo "electric brain") for computer; ææº/ææ© (shÇujÄ« "hand machine") for cellphone, and èç/èè½ (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. ç¶²èª (wÇng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as æ±å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡å
(hà nbÇo bÄo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as æææº/æææ© (tuÅlÄjÄ«, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马å©å¥¥/馬å©å¥§ for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example å¥è
¾/å¥é¨° (bÄnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and èµç¾å³/è³½ç¾å³ (Sà ibÇiwèi "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 (å製漢èª, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include dià nhuà (çµè¯/é»è©±, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社ä¼, shakai, "society"), kÄxué (ç§å¦/ç§å¸, kagaku, "science") and chÅuxià ng (æ½è±¡, chÅ«shÅ, "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, jÄ«ngjì (ç»æµ/ç¶æ¿, 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 Hokkien and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便å½/ä¾¿ç¶ âlunchbox or boxed lunchâ (from bento) and æç âprepared cuisineâ, have passed into common currency.
With the growing importance and influence of China's economy globally, Mandarin instruction is gaining popularity in schools in the USA, and 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 the English Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660.
* Chinese characters
* Chinese exclamative particles
* Chinese honorifics
* Chinese classifier
* Chinese number gestures
* Chinese numerals
* Chinese punctuation
* Classical Chinese grammar
* Four-character idiom
* Han unification
* Haner language
* HSK test
* Languages of China
* North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics
* Nü shu
*
*
*
*
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* ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawaiâi Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X.
* ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawaiâi Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-0-8248-2975-9.
* Keys to the Chinese Language: Book IIâGoogle Books
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Chinese_language | Does "ketchup" come from the Minnan pronunciation of 鮭汁 (koe-tsiap)? | Yes | data/set5/a7 | Chinese_language
Sino-Tibetan language family
The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China and Taiwan
Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) ( ; ; ; or ) is a language family consisting of languages mutually intelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. âThe mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.â
* Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. âThe Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.â
* Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. âThe 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 worldâs 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 some 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), Cantonese (Yue) (70 million) and Min (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 å®è¯ GuÄnhuà or åæ¹è¯ BÄifÄnghuà 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. Chineseâde facto, Standard Mandarinâis 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).
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:
Disputed classifications by some Chinese linguists:
There are also some smaller groups that are not yet classified, such as: Danzhou dialect (åå·è¯), spoken in Danzhou, on Hainan Island; Xianghua (乡è¯), not to be confused with Xiang (æ¹), spoken in western Hunan; and Shaozhou Tuhua (é¶å·åè¯), 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.
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 government intends 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 âdialectsâ) 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 normal 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 (ä¸æ), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (æ±è¯,âspoken language[s] of the Han Chinese)âthis term could be translated to either âlanguageâ or âlanguagesâ 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 è¯ yu and æ 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 oneâalbeit internally very diverseâethnicity. 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 Peopleâs 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 (âregional tonguesâ, often translated as âdialectsâ). 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 dialect.
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 chiÌt and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("ä¸"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as å and ä¿ 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 many formal occasions.
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 earlier 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 æ¥ (sun), shan å±± (mountain), shui æ°´ (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar XÇ Shèn in the Hà n Dynasty classified characters into six categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80â90% 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/æ¥·æ¸ kÇishÅ«) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (ç¯ä¹¦/ç¯æ¸ zhuà nshÅ«), cursive script (è书/èæ¸ cÇoshÅ«) and clerical script (é¶ä¹¦/é¸æ¸ lìshÅ«). 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 community, is the firstâand at present the onlyâforeign 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 Zhou Dynasty (1122 BCEâ256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the ShÄ«jÄ«ng, the history of the ShÅ«jÄ«ng, and portions of the YìjÄ«ng (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 QÄ«ng dynasty philologists.
Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably è mì "honey", ç
shÄ« "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mÇ "horse", ç¬ quÇn "dog", and éµ Ã© "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 âhoney' and âlion,' and probably also âhorse,' âdog,' and âgoose,' 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 Ãbereinstimmungen 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 Southern and Northern Dynasties and the SuÃ, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the åé» "Qièyùn" rime book (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the å»£é» "GuÇngyùn" rime book. 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 SìchuÄn 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 Qing Dynasty. Since the 17th century, the Qing Dynasty had set up orthoepy academies ( ) to make pronunciation conform to the standard of the capital Beijing. For the general population, however, this had limited effect. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The Beijing Mandarin court standard was used solely by officials and civil servants and was thus fairly limited.
This situation did not change until the mid-20th century with the creation (in both the PRC and the ROC, but not in Hong Kong) of a compulsory educational system committed to teaching 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.
Classical Chinese was once the lingua franca in neighbouring East Asian countries such as Japan, Korea and Vietnam for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. *Sheng Ding and Robert A. Saunders, Talking Up China: An Analysis of China's Rising Cultural Power and Global Promotion of the Chinese Language EASTASIA, Summer 2006, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 4
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 tá»±. 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. Approximately 60% of the modern Vietnamese lexicon is recognized as Hán-Viá»t (Sino-Vietnamese), the majority of which was borrowed from Middle Chinese.
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. 251â258.
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, likewise for a significant percentage of Japanese and Vietnamese vocabulary. 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.
Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of è¶ (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Minnan pronunciation of é®æ± (koe-tsiap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of éæ© (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"âhigh level
* "hemp" or "torpid"âhigh rising
* "horse"âlow falling-rising
* "scold"âhigh falling
* "question particle"âneutral
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 Indian translators, working in Sanskrit and Pali, were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of Chinese in a foreign language. After the 15th century, the efforts of Jesuits and Western court missionaries resulted 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 lack of a native 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 (æ¼¢èªæ¼é³/æ±è¯æ¼é³), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, and later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore) and Taiwan. 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 teaching new words. The Pinyin romanization is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, with the Chinese character alongside.
The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859 and modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As this system approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels, i.e. it is an Anglicization, it may be particularly helpful for beginner Chinese speakers of an English-speaking background. Wade-Giles was found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan.
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 BÄijÄ«ng (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é³, 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, å in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cà (è¯/è©), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cà (âwordâ) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more.
For example:
* Yun é²ââcloudâ (traditional)
* Yun äºââcloudâ (simplified)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ¼¢å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡ââhamburgerâ (traditional)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ±å ¡å
/æ±å ¡â"hamburger" (simplified)
* Wo æââI, meâ
* Ren 人ââpeopleâ
* Diqiu å°çââearth (globosity)â
* Shandian éé»ââlightningâ (traditional)
* Shandian éªçµâ"lightning" (simplifed)
* Meng 夢ââdreamâ (traditional)
* Meng 梦â"dream" (simplified)
All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphologyâi.e., changes in form of a wordâto indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflectionsâit possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), and only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English). There is, however, a gender difference in the written language (ä» as "he" and 她 as "she"), but it should be noted that this is a relatively new introduction to the Chinese language in the twentieth century.
They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le äº, hai è¿, yijing å·²ç», 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 classifiers and measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring languages like Japanese and Korean. See Chinese classifiers 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 cà is identified.
The mono-syllable jÄ«, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: é/鸡 chicken, æ©/æº machine, åº basic, æ/å» (to) hit, é¥/饥 hunger, and ç©/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: ååå«åè±ï¼åéµæ±çåï¼è±åçè± MÃngzi jià o JiÄyÄ«ng, JiÄlÃng JiÄng de jiÄ, YÄ«ngguó de yÄ«ng "My name is JiÄyÄ«ng, 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; since most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters, there are many times more Chinese words than there are 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 ä¸ååæµ· (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 æ±è¯å¤§è¯å
¸, 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 ç°ä»£æ±è¯è¯å
¸, 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 è¡è "grape," ç³æ¦´ "pomegranate" and ç®å/ç
å "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including ä½ "Buddha" and è©è¨/è©è© "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as è¡å "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as è¡è "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or PÄli, 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 çµç¶ "pÃpa", the Chinese lute, or é
ª "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è²å (pinyin: yÇsèliè), "Paris" becomes å·´é» (pinyin: bÄlÃ). A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including æ²ç¼ shÄfÄ "sofa," 马达/馬é mÇdá "motor," å¹½é» yÅumò "humor," é»è¾/é輯 luójà "logic," æ¶é«¦/æ髦 shÃmáo "smart, fashionable" and ææ¯åºé xiÄsÄ«dÇlÇ "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, æ²å/æ²ç¼ and 马达/馬é in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor."
Western foreign words have had great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came èè¾ (bÄléi, "ballet"), é¦æ§ (xiÄngbÄ«n, "champagne"), via Italian åå¡ (kÄfÄi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned æ²ç¼ (shÄfÄ "sofa"), å¹½é» (yÅumò "humour"), and é«å°å¤« (gÄoÄrfÅ«, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪æ¯ç§ (dÃsÄ«kè, "disco"), å¯ä¹ (kÄlè, "cola") and è¿·ä½ (mÃnÇ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon å¡é (cartoon), åºä½¬ (gay people), ç士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. ç²çµ² (fÄnsÄ«, "fans"), é§å®¢ (hèikè, "hacker"), é¨è½æ ¼(bùluÅgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin.
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 å¾·å¾é£/å¾·å¾é¢¨ ( Shanghainese: télÃfon , Standard Mandarin: délÇfÄng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese çµè¯/é»è©± (dià nhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include çµè§/é»è¦ (dià nshì "electric vision") for television, çµè/é»è
¦ (dià nnÇo "electric brain") for computer; ææº/ææ© (shÇujÄ« "hand machine") for cellphone, and èç/èè½ (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. ç¶²èª (wÇng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as æ±å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡å
(hà nbÇo bÄo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as æææº/æææ© (tuÅlÄjÄ«, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马å©å¥¥/馬å©å¥§ for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example å¥è
¾/å¥é¨° (bÄnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and èµç¾å³/è³½ç¾å³ (Sà ibÇiwèi "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 (å製漢èª, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include dià nhuà (çµè¯/é»è©±, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社ä¼, shakai, "society"), kÄxué (ç§å¦/ç§å¸, kagaku, "science") and chÅuxià ng (æ½è±¡, chÅ«shÅ, "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, jÄ«ngjì (ç»æµ/ç¶æ¿, 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 Hokkien and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便å½/ä¾¿ç¶ âlunchbox or boxed lunchâ (from bento) and æç âprepared cuisineâ, have passed into common currency.
With the growing importance and influence of China's economy globally, Mandarin instruction is gaining popularity in schools in the USA, and 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 the English Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660.
* Chinese characters
* Chinese exclamative particles
* Chinese honorifics
* Chinese classifier
* Chinese number gestures
* Chinese numerals
* Chinese punctuation
* Classical Chinese grammar
* Four-character idiom
* Han unification
* Haner language
* HSK test
* Languages of China
* North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics
* Nü shu
*
*
*
*
*
* ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawaiâi Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X.
* ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawaiâi Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-0-8248-2975-9.
* Keys to the Chinese Language: Book IIâGoogle Books
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Chinese_language | Does "ketchup" come from the Minnan pronunciation of 鮭汁 (koe-tsiap)? | yes | data/set5/a7 | Chinese_language
Sino-Tibetan language family
The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China and Taiwan
Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) ( ; ; ; or ) is a language family consisting of languages mutually intelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. âThe mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.â
* Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. âThe Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.â
* Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. âThe 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 worldâs 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 some 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), Cantonese (Yue) (70 million) and Min (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 å®è¯ GuÄnhuà or åæ¹è¯ BÄifÄnghuà 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. Chineseâde facto, Standard Mandarinâis 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).
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:
Disputed classifications by some Chinese linguists:
There are also some smaller groups that are not yet classified, such as: Danzhou dialect (åå·è¯), spoken in Danzhou, on Hainan Island; Xianghua (乡è¯), not to be confused with Xiang (æ¹), spoken in western Hunan; and Shaozhou Tuhua (é¶å·åè¯), 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.
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 government intends 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 âdialectsâ) 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 normal 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 (ä¸æ), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (æ±è¯,âspoken language[s] of the Han Chinese)âthis term could be translated to either âlanguageâ or âlanguagesâ 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 è¯ yu and æ 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 oneâalbeit internally very diverseâethnicity. 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 Peopleâs 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 (âregional tonguesâ, often translated as âdialectsâ). 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 dialect.
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 chiÌt and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("ä¸"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as å and ä¿ 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 many formal occasions.
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 earlier 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 æ¥ (sun), shan å±± (mountain), shui æ°´ (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar XÇ Shèn in the Hà n Dynasty classified characters into six categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80â90% 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/æ¥·æ¸ kÇishÅ«) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (ç¯ä¹¦/ç¯æ¸ zhuà nshÅ«), cursive script (è书/èæ¸ cÇoshÅ«) and clerical script (é¶ä¹¦/é¸æ¸ lìshÅ«). 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 community, is the firstâand at present the onlyâforeign 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 Zhou Dynasty (1122 BCEâ256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the ShÄ«jÄ«ng, the history of the ShÅ«jÄ«ng, and portions of the YìjÄ«ng (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 QÄ«ng dynasty philologists.
Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably è mì "honey", ç
shÄ« "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mÇ "horse", ç¬ quÇn "dog", and éµ Ã© "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 âhoney' and âlion,' and probably also âhorse,' âdog,' and âgoose,' 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 Ãbereinstimmungen 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 Southern and Northern Dynasties and the SuÃ, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the åé» "Qièyùn" rime book (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the å»£é» "GuÇngyùn" rime book. 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 SìchuÄn 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 Qing Dynasty. Since the 17th century, the Qing Dynasty had set up orthoepy academies ( ) to make pronunciation conform to the standard of the capital Beijing. For the general population, however, this had limited effect. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The Beijing Mandarin court standard was used solely by officials and civil servants and was thus fairly limited.
This situation did not change until the mid-20th century with the creation (in both the PRC and the ROC, but not in Hong Kong) of a compulsory educational system committed to teaching 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.
Classical Chinese was once the lingua franca in neighbouring East Asian countries such as Japan, Korea and Vietnam for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. *Sheng Ding and Robert A. Saunders, Talking Up China: An Analysis of China's Rising Cultural Power and Global Promotion of the Chinese Language EASTASIA, Summer 2006, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 4
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 tá»±. 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. Approximately 60% of the modern Vietnamese lexicon is recognized as Hán-Viá»t (Sino-Vietnamese), the majority of which was borrowed from Middle Chinese.
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. 251â258.
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, likewise for a significant percentage of Japanese and Vietnamese vocabulary. 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.
Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of è¶ (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Minnan pronunciation of é®æ± (koe-tsiap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of éæ© (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"âhigh level
* "hemp" or "torpid"âhigh rising
* "horse"âlow falling-rising
* "scold"âhigh falling
* "question particle"âneutral
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 Indian translators, working in Sanskrit and Pali, were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of Chinese in a foreign language. After the 15th century, the efforts of Jesuits and Western court missionaries resulted 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 lack of a native 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 (æ¼¢èªæ¼é³/æ±è¯æ¼é³), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, and later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore) and Taiwan. 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 teaching new words. The Pinyin romanization is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, with the Chinese character alongside.
The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859 and modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As this system approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels, i.e. it is an Anglicization, it may be particularly helpful for beginner Chinese speakers of an English-speaking background. Wade-Giles was found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan.
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 BÄijÄ«ng (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é³, 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, å in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cà (è¯/è©), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cà (âwordâ) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more.
For example:
* Yun é²ââcloudâ (traditional)
* Yun äºââcloudâ (simplified)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ¼¢å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡ââhamburgerâ (traditional)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ±å ¡å
/æ±å ¡â"hamburger" (simplified)
* Wo æââI, meâ
* Ren 人ââpeopleâ
* Diqiu å°çââearth (globosity)â
* Shandian éé»ââlightningâ (traditional)
* Shandian éªçµâ"lightning" (simplifed)
* Meng 夢ââdreamâ (traditional)
* Meng 梦â"dream" (simplified)
All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphologyâi.e., changes in form of a wordâto indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflectionsâit possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), and only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English). There is, however, a gender difference in the written language (ä» as "he" and 她 as "she"), but it should be noted that this is a relatively new introduction to the Chinese language in the twentieth century.
They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le äº, hai è¿, yijing å·²ç», 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 classifiers and measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring languages like Japanese and Korean. See Chinese classifiers 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 cà is identified.
The mono-syllable jÄ«, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: é/鸡 chicken, æ©/æº machine, åº basic, æ/å» (to) hit, é¥/饥 hunger, and ç©/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: ååå«åè±ï¼åéµæ±çåï¼è±åçè± MÃngzi jià o JiÄyÄ«ng, JiÄlÃng JiÄng de jiÄ, YÄ«ngguó de yÄ«ng "My name is JiÄyÄ«ng, 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; since most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters, there are many times more Chinese words than there are 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 ä¸ååæµ· (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 æ±è¯å¤§è¯å
¸, 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 ç°ä»£æ±è¯è¯å
¸, 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 è¡è "grape," ç³æ¦´ "pomegranate" and ç®å/ç
å "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including ä½ "Buddha" and è©è¨/è©è© "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as è¡å "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as è¡è "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or PÄli, 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 çµç¶ "pÃpa", the Chinese lute, or é
ª "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è²å (pinyin: yÇsèliè), "Paris" becomes å·´é» (pinyin: bÄlÃ). A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including æ²ç¼ shÄfÄ "sofa," 马达/馬é mÇdá "motor," å¹½é» yÅumò "humor," é»è¾/é輯 luójà "logic," æ¶é«¦/æ髦 shÃmáo "smart, fashionable" and ææ¯åºé xiÄsÄ«dÇlÇ "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, æ²å/æ²ç¼ and 马达/馬é in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor."
Western foreign words have had great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came èè¾ (bÄléi, "ballet"), é¦æ§ (xiÄngbÄ«n, "champagne"), via Italian åå¡ (kÄfÄi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned æ²ç¼ (shÄfÄ "sofa"), å¹½é» (yÅumò "humour"), and é«å°å¤« (gÄoÄrfÅ«, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪æ¯ç§ (dÃsÄ«kè, "disco"), å¯ä¹ (kÄlè, "cola") and è¿·ä½ (mÃnÇ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon å¡é (cartoon), åºä½¬ (gay people), ç士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. ç²çµ² (fÄnsÄ«, "fans"), é§å®¢ (hèikè, "hacker"), é¨è½æ ¼(bùluÅgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin.
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 å¾·å¾é£/å¾·å¾é¢¨ ( Shanghainese: télÃfon , Standard Mandarin: délÇfÄng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese çµè¯/é»è©± (dià nhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include çµè§/é»è¦ (dià nshì "electric vision") for television, çµè/é»è
¦ (dià nnÇo "electric brain") for computer; ææº/ææ© (shÇujÄ« "hand machine") for cellphone, and èç/èè½ (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. ç¶²èª (wÇng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as æ±å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡å
(hà nbÇo bÄo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as æææº/æææ© (tuÅlÄjÄ«, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马å©å¥¥/馬å©å¥§ for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example å¥è
¾/å¥é¨° (bÄnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and èµç¾å³/è³½ç¾å³ (Sà ibÇiwèi "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 (å製漢èª, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include dià nhuà (çµè¯/é»è©±, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社ä¼, shakai, "society"), kÄxué (ç§å¦/ç§å¸, kagaku, "science") and chÅuxià ng (æ½è±¡, chÅ«shÅ, "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, jÄ«ngjì (ç»æµ/ç¶æ¿, 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 Hokkien and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便å½/ä¾¿ç¶ âlunchbox or boxed lunchâ (from bento) and æç âprepared cuisineâ, have passed into common currency.
With the growing importance and influence of China's economy globally, Mandarin instruction is gaining popularity in schools in the USA, and 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 the English Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660.
* Chinese characters
* Chinese exclamative particles
* Chinese honorifics
* Chinese classifier
* Chinese number gestures
* Chinese numerals
* Chinese punctuation
* Classical Chinese grammar
* Four-character idiom
* Han unification
* Haner language
* HSK test
* Languages of China
* North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics
* Nü shu
*
*
*
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* ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawaiâi Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X.
* ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawaiâi Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-0-8248-2975-9.
* Keys to the Chinese Language: Book IIâGoogle Books
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Chinese_language | What is the most common romanization standard for Standard Mandarin today? | Hanyu Pinyin | data/set5/a7 | Chinese_language
Sino-Tibetan language family
The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China and Taiwan
Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) ( ; ; ; or ) is a language family consisting of languages mutually intelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. âThe mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.â
* Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. âThe Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.â
* Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. âThe 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 worldâs 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 some 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), Cantonese (Yue) (70 million) and Min (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 å®è¯ GuÄnhuà or åæ¹è¯ BÄifÄnghuà 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. Chineseâde facto, Standard Mandarinâis 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).
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:
Disputed classifications by some Chinese linguists:
There are also some smaller groups that are not yet classified, such as: Danzhou dialect (åå·è¯), spoken in Danzhou, on Hainan Island; Xianghua (乡è¯), not to be confused with Xiang (æ¹), spoken in western Hunan; and Shaozhou Tuhua (é¶å·åè¯), 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.
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 government intends 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 âdialectsâ) 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 normal 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 (ä¸æ), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (æ±è¯,âspoken language[s] of the Han Chinese)âthis term could be translated to either âlanguageâ or âlanguagesâ 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 è¯ yu and æ 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 oneâalbeit internally very diverseâethnicity. 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 Peopleâs 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 (âregional tonguesâ, often translated as âdialectsâ). 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 dialect.
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 chiÌt and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("ä¸"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as å and ä¿ 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 many formal occasions.
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 earlier 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 æ¥ (sun), shan å±± (mountain), shui æ°´ (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar XÇ Shèn in the Hà n Dynasty classified characters into six categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80â90% 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/æ¥·æ¸ kÇishÅ«) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (ç¯ä¹¦/ç¯æ¸ zhuà nshÅ«), cursive script (è书/èæ¸ cÇoshÅ«) and clerical script (é¶ä¹¦/é¸æ¸ lìshÅ«). 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 community, is the firstâand at present the onlyâforeign 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 Zhou Dynasty (1122 BCEâ256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the ShÄ«jÄ«ng, the history of the ShÅ«jÄ«ng, and portions of the YìjÄ«ng (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 QÄ«ng dynasty philologists.
Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably è mì "honey", ç
shÄ« "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mÇ "horse", ç¬ quÇn "dog", and éµ Ã© "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 âhoney' and âlion,' and probably also âhorse,' âdog,' and âgoose,' 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 Ãbereinstimmungen 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 Southern and Northern Dynasties and the SuÃ, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the åé» "Qièyùn" rime book (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the å»£é» "GuÇngyùn" rime book. 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 SìchuÄn 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 Qing Dynasty. Since the 17th century, the Qing Dynasty had set up orthoepy academies ( ) to make pronunciation conform to the standard of the capital Beijing. For the general population, however, this had limited effect. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The Beijing Mandarin court standard was used solely by officials and civil servants and was thus fairly limited.
This situation did not change until the mid-20th century with the creation (in both the PRC and the ROC, but not in Hong Kong) of a compulsory educational system committed to teaching 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.
Classical Chinese was once the lingua franca in neighbouring East Asian countries such as Japan, Korea and Vietnam for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. *Sheng Ding and Robert A. Saunders, Talking Up China: An Analysis of China's Rising Cultural Power and Global Promotion of the Chinese Language EASTASIA, Summer 2006, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 4
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 tá»±. 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. Approximately 60% of the modern Vietnamese lexicon is recognized as Hán-Viá»t (Sino-Vietnamese), the majority of which was borrowed from Middle Chinese.
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. 251â258.
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, likewise for a significant percentage of Japanese and Vietnamese vocabulary. 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.
Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of è¶ (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Minnan pronunciation of é®æ± (koe-tsiap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of éæ© (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"âhigh level
* "hemp" or "torpid"âhigh rising
* "horse"âlow falling-rising
* "scold"âhigh falling
* "question particle"âneutral
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 Indian translators, working in Sanskrit and Pali, were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of Chinese in a foreign language. After the 15th century, the efforts of Jesuits and Western court missionaries resulted 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 lack of a native 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 (æ¼¢èªæ¼é³/æ±è¯æ¼é³), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, and later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore) and Taiwan. 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 teaching new words. The Pinyin romanization is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, with the Chinese character alongside.
The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859 and modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As this system approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels, i.e. it is an Anglicization, it may be particularly helpful for beginner Chinese speakers of an English-speaking background. Wade-Giles was found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan.
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 BÄijÄ«ng (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é³, 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, å in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cà (è¯/è©), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cà (âwordâ) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more.
For example:
* Yun é²ââcloudâ (traditional)
* Yun äºââcloudâ (simplified)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ¼¢å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡ââhamburgerâ (traditional)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ±å ¡å
/æ±å ¡â"hamburger" (simplified)
* Wo æââI, meâ
* Ren 人ââpeopleâ
* Diqiu å°çââearth (globosity)â
* Shandian éé»ââlightningâ (traditional)
* Shandian éªçµâ"lightning" (simplifed)
* Meng 夢ââdreamâ (traditional)
* Meng 梦â"dream" (simplified)
All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphologyâi.e., changes in form of a wordâto indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflectionsâit possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), and only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English). There is, however, a gender difference in the written language (ä» as "he" and 她 as "she"), but it should be noted that this is a relatively new introduction to the Chinese language in the twentieth century.
They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le äº, hai è¿, yijing å·²ç», 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 classifiers and measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring languages like Japanese and Korean. See Chinese classifiers 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 cà is identified.
The mono-syllable jÄ«, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: é/鸡 chicken, æ©/æº machine, åº basic, æ/å» (to) hit, é¥/饥 hunger, and ç©/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: ååå«åè±ï¼åéµæ±çåï¼è±åçè± MÃngzi jià o JiÄyÄ«ng, JiÄlÃng JiÄng de jiÄ, YÄ«ngguó de yÄ«ng "My name is JiÄyÄ«ng, 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; since most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters, there are many times more Chinese words than there are 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 ä¸ååæµ· (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 æ±è¯å¤§è¯å
¸, 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 ç°ä»£æ±è¯è¯å
¸, 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 è¡è "grape," ç³æ¦´ "pomegranate" and ç®å/ç
å "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including ä½ "Buddha" and è©è¨/è©è© "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as è¡å "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as è¡è "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or PÄli, 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 çµç¶ "pÃpa", the Chinese lute, or é
ª "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è²å (pinyin: yÇsèliè), "Paris" becomes å·´é» (pinyin: bÄlÃ). A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including æ²ç¼ shÄfÄ "sofa," 马达/馬é mÇdá "motor," å¹½é» yÅumò "humor," é»è¾/é輯 luójà "logic," æ¶é«¦/æ髦 shÃmáo "smart, fashionable" and ææ¯åºé xiÄsÄ«dÇlÇ "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, æ²å/æ²ç¼ and 马达/馬é in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor."
Western foreign words have had great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came èè¾ (bÄléi, "ballet"), é¦æ§ (xiÄngbÄ«n, "champagne"), via Italian åå¡ (kÄfÄi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned æ²ç¼ (shÄfÄ "sofa"), å¹½é» (yÅumò "humour"), and é«å°å¤« (gÄoÄrfÅ«, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪æ¯ç§ (dÃsÄ«kè, "disco"), å¯ä¹ (kÄlè, "cola") and è¿·ä½ (mÃnÇ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon å¡é (cartoon), åºä½¬ (gay people), ç士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. ç²çµ² (fÄnsÄ«, "fans"), é§å®¢ (hèikè, "hacker"), é¨è½æ ¼(bùluÅgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin.
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 å¾·å¾é£/å¾·å¾é¢¨ ( Shanghainese: télÃfon , Standard Mandarin: délÇfÄng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese çµè¯/é»è©± (dià nhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include çµè§/é»è¦ (dià nshì "electric vision") for television, çµè/é»è
¦ (dià nnÇo "electric brain") for computer; ææº/ææ© (shÇujÄ« "hand machine") for cellphone, and èç/èè½ (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. ç¶²èª (wÇng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as æ±å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡å
(hà nbÇo bÄo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as æææº/æææ© (tuÅlÄjÄ«, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马å©å¥¥/馬å©å¥§ for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example å¥è
¾/å¥é¨° (bÄnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and èµç¾å³/è³½ç¾å³ (Sà ibÇiwèi "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 (å製漢èª, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include dià nhuà (çµè¯/é»è©±, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社ä¼, shakai, "society"), kÄxué (ç§å¦/ç§å¸, kagaku, "science") and chÅuxià ng (æ½è±¡, chÅ«shÅ, "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, jÄ«ngjì (ç»æµ/ç¶æ¿, 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 Hokkien and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便å½/ä¾¿ç¶ âlunchbox or boxed lunchâ (from bento) and æç âprepared cuisineâ, have passed into common currency.
With the growing importance and influence of China's economy globally, Mandarin instruction is gaining popularity in schools in the USA, and 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 the English Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660.
* Chinese characters
* Chinese exclamative particles
* Chinese honorifics
* Chinese classifier
* Chinese number gestures
* Chinese numerals
* Chinese punctuation
* Classical Chinese grammar
* Four-character idiom
* Han unification
* Haner language
* HSK test
* Languages of China
* North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics
* Nü shu
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*
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* ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawaiâi Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X.
* ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawaiâi Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-0-8248-2975-9.
* Keys to the Chinese Language: Book IIâGoogle Books
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Chinese_language | What is the most common romanization standard for Standard Mandarin today? | Hanyu Pinyin | data/set5/a7 | Chinese_language
Sino-Tibetan language family
The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China and Taiwan
Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) ( ; ; ; or ) is a language family consisting of languages mutually intelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. âThe mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.â
* Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. âThe Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.â
* Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. âThe 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 worldâs 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 some 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), Cantonese (Yue) (70 million) and Min (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 å®è¯ GuÄnhuà or åæ¹è¯ BÄifÄnghuà 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. Chineseâde facto, Standard Mandarinâis 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).
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:
Disputed classifications by some Chinese linguists:
There are also some smaller groups that are not yet classified, such as: Danzhou dialect (åå·è¯), spoken in Danzhou, on Hainan Island; Xianghua (乡è¯), not to be confused with Xiang (æ¹), spoken in western Hunan; and Shaozhou Tuhua (é¶å·åè¯), 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.
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 government intends 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 âdialectsâ) 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 normal 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 (ä¸æ), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (æ±è¯,âspoken language[s] of the Han Chinese)âthis term could be translated to either âlanguageâ or âlanguagesâ 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 è¯ yu and æ 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 oneâalbeit internally very diverseâethnicity. 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 Peopleâs 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 (âregional tonguesâ, often translated as âdialectsâ). 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 dialect.
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 chiÌt and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("ä¸"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as å and ä¿ 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 many formal occasions.
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 earlier 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 æ¥ (sun), shan å±± (mountain), shui æ°´ (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar XÇ Shèn in the Hà n Dynasty classified characters into six categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80â90% 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/æ¥·æ¸ kÇishÅ«) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (ç¯ä¹¦/ç¯æ¸ zhuà nshÅ«), cursive script (è书/èæ¸ cÇoshÅ«) and clerical script (é¶ä¹¦/é¸æ¸ lìshÅ«). 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 community, is the firstâand at present the onlyâforeign 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 Zhou Dynasty (1122 BCEâ256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the ShÄ«jÄ«ng, the history of the ShÅ«jÄ«ng, and portions of the YìjÄ«ng (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 QÄ«ng dynasty philologists.
Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably è mì "honey", ç
shÄ« "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mÇ "horse", ç¬ quÇn "dog", and éµ Ã© "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 âhoney' and âlion,' and probably also âhorse,' âdog,' and âgoose,' 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 Ãbereinstimmungen 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 Southern and Northern Dynasties and the SuÃ, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the åé» "Qièyùn" rime book (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the å»£é» "GuÇngyùn" rime book. 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 SìchuÄn 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 Qing Dynasty. Since the 17th century, the Qing Dynasty had set up orthoepy academies ( ) to make pronunciation conform to the standard of the capital Beijing. For the general population, however, this had limited effect. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The Beijing Mandarin court standard was used solely by officials and civil servants and was thus fairly limited.
This situation did not change until the mid-20th century with the creation (in both the PRC and the ROC, but not in Hong Kong) of a compulsory educational system committed to teaching 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.
Classical Chinese was once the lingua franca in neighbouring East Asian countries such as Japan, Korea and Vietnam for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. *Sheng Ding and Robert A. Saunders, Talking Up China: An Analysis of China's Rising Cultural Power and Global Promotion of the Chinese Language EASTASIA, Summer 2006, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 4
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 tá»±. 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. Approximately 60% of the modern Vietnamese lexicon is recognized as Hán-Viá»t (Sino-Vietnamese), the majority of which was borrowed from Middle Chinese.
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. 251â258.
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, likewise for a significant percentage of Japanese and Vietnamese vocabulary. 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.
Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of è¶ (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Minnan pronunciation of é®æ± (koe-tsiap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of éæ© (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"âhigh level
* "hemp" or "torpid"âhigh rising
* "horse"âlow falling-rising
* "scold"âhigh falling
* "question particle"âneutral
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 Indian translators, working in Sanskrit and Pali, were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of Chinese in a foreign language. After the 15th century, the efforts of Jesuits and Western court missionaries resulted 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 lack of a native 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 (æ¼¢èªæ¼é³/æ±è¯æ¼é³), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, and later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore) and Taiwan. 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 teaching new words. The Pinyin romanization is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, with the Chinese character alongside.
The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859 and modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As this system approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels, i.e. it is an Anglicization, it may be particularly helpful for beginner Chinese speakers of an English-speaking background. Wade-Giles was found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan.
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 BÄijÄ«ng (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é³, 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, å in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cà (è¯/è©), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cà (âwordâ) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more.
For example:
* Yun é²ââcloudâ (traditional)
* Yun äºââcloudâ (simplified)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ¼¢å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡ââhamburgerâ (traditional)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ±å ¡å
/æ±å ¡â"hamburger" (simplified)
* Wo æââI, meâ
* Ren 人ââpeopleâ
* Diqiu å°çââearth (globosity)â
* Shandian éé»ââlightningâ (traditional)
* Shandian éªçµâ"lightning" (simplifed)
* Meng 夢ââdreamâ (traditional)
* Meng 梦â"dream" (simplified)
All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphologyâi.e., changes in form of a wordâto indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflectionsâit possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), and only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English). There is, however, a gender difference in the written language (ä» as "he" and 她 as "she"), but it should be noted that this is a relatively new introduction to the Chinese language in the twentieth century.
They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le äº, hai è¿, yijing å·²ç», 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 classifiers and measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring languages like Japanese and Korean. See Chinese classifiers 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 cà is identified.
The mono-syllable jÄ«, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: é/鸡 chicken, æ©/æº machine, åº basic, æ/å» (to) hit, é¥/饥 hunger, and ç©/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: ååå«åè±ï¼åéµæ±çåï¼è±åçè± MÃngzi jià o JiÄyÄ«ng, JiÄlÃng JiÄng de jiÄ, YÄ«ngguó de yÄ«ng "My name is JiÄyÄ«ng, 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; since most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters, there are many times more Chinese words than there are 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 ä¸ååæµ· (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 æ±è¯å¤§è¯å
¸, 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 ç°ä»£æ±è¯è¯å
¸, 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 è¡è "grape," ç³æ¦´ "pomegranate" and ç®å/ç
å "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including ä½ "Buddha" and è©è¨/è©è© "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as è¡å "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as è¡è "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or PÄli, 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 çµç¶ "pÃpa", the Chinese lute, or é
ª "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è²å (pinyin: yÇsèliè), "Paris" becomes å·´é» (pinyin: bÄlÃ). A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including æ²ç¼ shÄfÄ "sofa," 马达/馬é mÇdá "motor," å¹½é» yÅumò "humor," é»è¾/é輯 luójà "logic," æ¶é«¦/æ髦 shÃmáo "smart, fashionable" and ææ¯åºé xiÄsÄ«dÇlÇ "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, æ²å/æ²ç¼ and 马达/馬é in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor."
Western foreign words have had great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came èè¾ (bÄléi, "ballet"), é¦æ§ (xiÄngbÄ«n, "champagne"), via Italian åå¡ (kÄfÄi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned æ²ç¼ (shÄfÄ "sofa"), å¹½é» (yÅumò "humour"), and é«å°å¤« (gÄoÄrfÅ«, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪æ¯ç§ (dÃsÄ«kè, "disco"), å¯ä¹ (kÄlè, "cola") and è¿·ä½ (mÃnÇ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon å¡é (cartoon), åºä½¬ (gay people), ç士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. ç²çµ² (fÄnsÄ«, "fans"), é§å®¢ (hèikè, "hacker"), é¨è½æ ¼(bùluÅgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin.
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 å¾·å¾é£/å¾·å¾é¢¨ ( Shanghainese: télÃfon , Standard Mandarin: délÇfÄng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese çµè¯/é»è©± (dià nhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include çµè§/é»è¦ (dià nshì "electric vision") for television, çµè/é»è
¦ (dià nnÇo "electric brain") for computer; ææº/ææ© (shÇujÄ« "hand machine") for cellphone, and èç/èè½ (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. ç¶²èª (wÇng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as æ±å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡å
(hà nbÇo bÄo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as æææº/æææ© (tuÅlÄjÄ«, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马å©å¥¥/馬å©å¥§ for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example å¥è
¾/å¥é¨° (bÄnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and èµç¾å³/è³½ç¾å³ (Sà ibÇiwèi "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 (å製漢èª, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include dià nhuà (çµè¯/é»è©±, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社ä¼, shakai, "society"), kÄxué (ç§å¦/ç§å¸, kagaku, "science") and chÅuxià ng (æ½è±¡, chÅ«shÅ, "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, jÄ«ngjì (ç»æµ/ç¶æ¿, 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 Hokkien and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便å½/ä¾¿ç¶ âlunchbox or boxed lunchâ (from bento) and æç âprepared cuisineâ, have passed into common currency.
With the growing importance and influence of China's economy globally, Mandarin instruction is gaining popularity in schools in the USA, and 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 the English Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660.
* Chinese characters
* Chinese exclamative particles
* Chinese honorifics
* Chinese classifier
* Chinese number gestures
* Chinese numerals
* Chinese punctuation
* Classical Chinese grammar
* Four-character idiom
* Han unification
* Haner language
* HSK test
* Languages of China
* North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics
* Nü shu
*
*
*
*
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* ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawaiâi Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X.
* ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawaiâi Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-0-8248-2975-9.
* Keys to the Chinese Language: Book IIâGoogle Books
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Chinese_language | What is the official standard language used by the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China, and Singapore (where it is called "Huayu")? | Putonghua / Guoyu, often called "Mandarin" | data/set5/a7 | Chinese_language
Sino-Tibetan language family
The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China and Taiwan
Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) ( ; ; ; or ) is a language family consisting of languages mutually intelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. âThe mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.â
* Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. âThe Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.â
* Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. âThe 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 worldâs 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 some 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), Cantonese (Yue) (70 million) and Min (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 å®è¯ GuÄnhuà or åæ¹è¯ BÄifÄnghuà 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. Chineseâde facto, Standard Mandarinâis 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).
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:
Disputed classifications by some Chinese linguists:
There are also some smaller groups that are not yet classified, such as: Danzhou dialect (åå·è¯), spoken in Danzhou, on Hainan Island; Xianghua (乡è¯), not to be confused with Xiang (æ¹), spoken in western Hunan; and Shaozhou Tuhua (é¶å·åè¯), 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.
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 government intends 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 âdialectsâ) 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 normal 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 (ä¸æ), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (æ±è¯,âspoken language[s] of the Han Chinese)âthis term could be translated to either âlanguageâ or âlanguagesâ 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 è¯ yu and æ 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 oneâalbeit internally very diverseâethnicity. 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 Peopleâs 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 (âregional tonguesâ, often translated as âdialectsâ). 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 dialect.
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 chiÌt and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("ä¸"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as å and ä¿ 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 many formal occasions.
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 earlier 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 æ¥ (sun), shan å±± (mountain), shui æ°´ (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar XÇ Shèn in the Hà n Dynasty classified characters into six categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80â90% 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/æ¥·æ¸ kÇishÅ«) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (ç¯ä¹¦/ç¯æ¸ zhuà nshÅ«), cursive script (è书/èæ¸ cÇoshÅ«) and clerical script (é¶ä¹¦/é¸æ¸ lìshÅ«). 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 community, is the firstâand at present the onlyâforeign 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 Zhou Dynasty (1122 BCEâ256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the ShÄ«jÄ«ng, the history of the ShÅ«jÄ«ng, and portions of the YìjÄ«ng (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 QÄ«ng dynasty philologists.
Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably è mì "honey", ç
shÄ« "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mÇ "horse", ç¬ quÇn "dog", and éµ Ã© "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 âhoney' and âlion,' and probably also âhorse,' âdog,' and âgoose,' 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 Ãbereinstimmungen 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 Southern and Northern Dynasties and the SuÃ, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the åé» "Qièyùn" rime book (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the å»£é» "GuÇngyùn" rime book. 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 SìchuÄn 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 Qing Dynasty. Since the 17th century, the Qing Dynasty had set up orthoepy academies ( ) to make pronunciation conform to the standard of the capital Beijing. For the general population, however, this had limited effect. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The Beijing Mandarin court standard was used solely by officials and civil servants and was thus fairly limited.
This situation did not change until the mid-20th century with the creation (in both the PRC and the ROC, but not in Hong Kong) of a compulsory educational system committed to teaching 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.
Classical Chinese was once the lingua franca in neighbouring East Asian countries such as Japan, Korea and Vietnam for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. *Sheng Ding and Robert A. Saunders, Talking Up China: An Analysis of China's Rising Cultural Power and Global Promotion of the Chinese Language EASTASIA, Summer 2006, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 4
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 tá»±. 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. Approximately 60% of the modern Vietnamese lexicon is recognized as Hán-Viá»t (Sino-Vietnamese), the majority of which was borrowed from Middle Chinese.
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. 251â258.
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, likewise for a significant percentage of Japanese and Vietnamese vocabulary. 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.
Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of è¶ (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Minnan pronunciation of é®æ± (koe-tsiap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of éæ© (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"âhigh level
* "hemp" or "torpid"âhigh rising
* "horse"âlow falling-rising
* "scold"âhigh falling
* "question particle"âneutral
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 Indian translators, working in Sanskrit and Pali, were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of Chinese in a foreign language. After the 15th century, the efforts of Jesuits and Western court missionaries resulted 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 lack of a native 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 (æ¼¢èªæ¼é³/æ±è¯æ¼é³), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, and later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore) and Taiwan. 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 teaching new words. The Pinyin romanization is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, with the Chinese character alongside.
The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859 and modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As this system approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels, i.e. it is an Anglicization, it may be particularly helpful for beginner Chinese speakers of an English-speaking background. Wade-Giles was found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan.
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 BÄijÄ«ng (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é³, 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, å in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cà (è¯/è©), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cà (âwordâ) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more.
For example:
* Yun é²ââcloudâ (traditional)
* Yun äºââcloudâ (simplified)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ¼¢å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡ââhamburgerâ (traditional)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ±å ¡å
/æ±å ¡â"hamburger" (simplified)
* Wo æââI, meâ
* Ren 人ââpeopleâ
* Diqiu å°çââearth (globosity)â
* Shandian éé»ââlightningâ (traditional)
* Shandian éªçµâ"lightning" (simplifed)
* Meng 夢ââdreamâ (traditional)
* Meng 梦â"dream" (simplified)
All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphologyâi.e., changes in form of a wordâto indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflectionsâit possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), and only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English). There is, however, a gender difference in the written language (ä» as "he" and 她 as "she"), but it should be noted that this is a relatively new introduction to the Chinese language in the twentieth century.
They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le äº, hai è¿, yijing å·²ç», 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 classifiers and measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring languages like Japanese and Korean. See Chinese classifiers 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 cà is identified.
The mono-syllable jÄ«, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: é/鸡 chicken, æ©/æº machine, åº basic, æ/å» (to) hit, é¥/饥 hunger, and ç©/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: ååå«åè±ï¼åéµæ±çåï¼è±åçè± MÃngzi jià o JiÄyÄ«ng, JiÄlÃng JiÄng de jiÄ, YÄ«ngguó de yÄ«ng "My name is JiÄyÄ«ng, 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; since most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters, there are many times more Chinese words than there are 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 ä¸ååæµ· (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 æ±è¯å¤§è¯å
¸, 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 ç°ä»£æ±è¯è¯å
¸, 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 è¡è "grape," ç³æ¦´ "pomegranate" and ç®å/ç
å "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including ä½ "Buddha" and è©è¨/è©è© "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as è¡å "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as è¡è "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or PÄli, 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 çµç¶ "pÃpa", the Chinese lute, or é
ª "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è²å (pinyin: yÇsèliè), "Paris" becomes å·´é» (pinyin: bÄlÃ). A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including æ²ç¼ shÄfÄ "sofa," 马达/馬é mÇdá "motor," å¹½é» yÅumò "humor," é»è¾/é輯 luójà "logic," æ¶é«¦/æ髦 shÃmáo "smart, fashionable" and ææ¯åºé xiÄsÄ«dÇlÇ "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, æ²å/æ²ç¼ and 马达/馬é in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor."
Western foreign words have had great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came èè¾ (bÄléi, "ballet"), é¦æ§ (xiÄngbÄ«n, "champagne"), via Italian åå¡ (kÄfÄi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned æ²ç¼ (shÄfÄ "sofa"), å¹½é» (yÅumò "humour"), and é«å°å¤« (gÄoÄrfÅ«, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪æ¯ç§ (dÃsÄ«kè, "disco"), å¯ä¹ (kÄlè, "cola") and è¿·ä½ (mÃnÇ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon å¡é (cartoon), åºä½¬ (gay people), ç士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. ç²çµ² (fÄnsÄ«, "fans"), é§å®¢ (hèikè, "hacker"), é¨è½æ ¼(bùluÅgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin.
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 å¾·å¾é£/å¾·å¾é¢¨ ( Shanghainese: télÃfon , Standard Mandarin: délÇfÄng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese çµè¯/é»è©± (dià nhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include çµè§/é»è¦ (dià nshì "electric vision") for television, çµè/é»è
¦ (dià nnÇo "electric brain") for computer; ææº/ææ© (shÇujÄ« "hand machine") for cellphone, and èç/èè½ (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. ç¶²èª (wÇng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as æ±å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡å
(hà nbÇo bÄo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as æææº/æææ© (tuÅlÄjÄ«, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马å©å¥¥/馬å©å¥§ for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example å¥è
¾/å¥é¨° (bÄnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and èµç¾å³/è³½ç¾å³ (Sà ibÇiwèi "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 (å製漢èª, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include dià nhuà (çµè¯/é»è©±, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社ä¼, shakai, "society"), kÄxué (ç§å¦/ç§å¸, kagaku, "science") and chÅuxià ng (æ½è±¡, chÅ«shÅ, "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, jÄ«ngjì (ç»æµ/ç¶æ¿, 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 Hokkien and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便å½/ä¾¿ç¶ âlunchbox or boxed lunchâ (from bento) and æç âprepared cuisineâ, have passed into common currency.
With the growing importance and influence of China's economy globally, Mandarin instruction is gaining popularity in schools in the USA, and 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 the English Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660.
* Chinese characters
* Chinese exclamative particles
* Chinese honorifics
* Chinese classifier
* Chinese number gestures
* Chinese numerals
* Chinese punctuation
* Classical Chinese grammar
* Four-character idiom
* Han unification
* Haner language
* HSK test
* Languages of China
* North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics
* Nü shu
*
*
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* ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawaiâi Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X.
* ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawaiâi Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-0-8248-2975-9.
* Keys to the Chinese Language: Book IIâGoogle Books
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Chinese_language | What is the official standard language used by the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China, and Singapore (where it is called "Huayu")? | Standard Mandarin | data/set5/a7 | Chinese_language
Sino-Tibetan language family
The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China and Taiwan
Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) ( ; ; ; or ) is a language family consisting of languages mutually intelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. âThe mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.â
* Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. âThe Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.â
* Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. âThe 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 worldâs 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 some 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), Cantonese (Yue) (70 million) and Min (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 å®è¯ GuÄnhuà or åæ¹è¯ BÄifÄnghuà 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. Chineseâde facto, Standard Mandarinâis 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).
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:
Disputed classifications by some Chinese linguists:
There are also some smaller groups that are not yet classified, such as: Danzhou dialect (åå·è¯), spoken in Danzhou, on Hainan Island; Xianghua (乡è¯), not to be confused with Xiang (æ¹), spoken in western Hunan; and Shaozhou Tuhua (é¶å·åè¯), 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.
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 government intends 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 âdialectsâ) 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 normal 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 (ä¸æ), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (æ±è¯,âspoken language[s] of the Han Chinese)âthis term could be translated to either âlanguageâ or âlanguagesâ 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 è¯ yu and æ 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 oneâalbeit internally very diverseâethnicity. 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 Peopleâs 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 (âregional tonguesâ, often translated as âdialectsâ). 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 dialect.
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 chiÌt and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("ä¸"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as å and ä¿ 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 many formal occasions.
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 earlier 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 æ¥ (sun), shan å±± (mountain), shui æ°´ (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar XÇ Shèn in the Hà n Dynasty classified characters into six categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80â90% 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/æ¥·æ¸ kÇishÅ«) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (ç¯ä¹¦/ç¯æ¸ zhuà nshÅ«), cursive script (è书/èæ¸ cÇoshÅ«) and clerical script (é¶ä¹¦/é¸æ¸ lìshÅ«). 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 community, is the firstâand at present the onlyâforeign 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 Zhou Dynasty (1122 BCEâ256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the ShÄ«jÄ«ng, the history of the ShÅ«jÄ«ng, and portions of the YìjÄ«ng (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 QÄ«ng dynasty philologists.
Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably è mì "honey", ç
shÄ« "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mÇ "horse", ç¬ quÇn "dog", and éµ Ã© "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 âhoney' and âlion,' and probably also âhorse,' âdog,' and âgoose,' 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 Ãbereinstimmungen 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 Southern and Northern Dynasties and the SuÃ, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the åé» "Qièyùn" rime book (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the å»£é» "GuÇngyùn" rime book. 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 SìchuÄn 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 Qing Dynasty. Since the 17th century, the Qing Dynasty had set up orthoepy academies ( ) to make pronunciation conform to the standard of the capital Beijing. For the general population, however, this had limited effect. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The Beijing Mandarin court standard was used solely by officials and civil servants and was thus fairly limited.
This situation did not change until the mid-20th century with the creation (in both the PRC and the ROC, but not in Hong Kong) of a compulsory educational system committed to teaching 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.
Classical Chinese was once the lingua franca in neighbouring East Asian countries such as Japan, Korea and Vietnam for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. *Sheng Ding and Robert A. Saunders, Talking Up China: An Analysis of China's Rising Cultural Power and Global Promotion of the Chinese Language EASTASIA, Summer 2006, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 4
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 tá»±. 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. Approximately 60% of the modern Vietnamese lexicon is recognized as Hán-Viá»t (Sino-Vietnamese), the majority of which was borrowed from Middle Chinese.
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. 251â258.
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, likewise for a significant percentage of Japanese and Vietnamese vocabulary. 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.
Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of è¶ (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Minnan pronunciation of é®æ± (koe-tsiap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of éæ© (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"âhigh level
* "hemp" or "torpid"âhigh rising
* "horse"âlow falling-rising
* "scold"âhigh falling
* "question particle"âneutral
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 Indian translators, working in Sanskrit and Pali, were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of Chinese in a foreign language. After the 15th century, the efforts of Jesuits and Western court missionaries resulted 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 lack of a native 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 (æ¼¢èªæ¼é³/æ±è¯æ¼é³), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, and later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore) and Taiwan. 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 teaching new words. The Pinyin romanization is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, with the Chinese character alongside.
The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859 and modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As this system approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels, i.e. it is an Anglicization, it may be particularly helpful for beginner Chinese speakers of an English-speaking background. Wade-Giles was found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan.
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 BÄijÄ«ng (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é³, 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, å in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cà (è¯/è©), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cà (âwordâ) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more.
For example:
* Yun é²ââcloudâ (traditional)
* Yun äºââcloudâ (simplified)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ¼¢å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡ââhamburgerâ (traditional)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ±å ¡å
/æ±å ¡â"hamburger" (simplified)
* Wo æââI, meâ
* Ren 人ââpeopleâ
* Diqiu å°çââearth (globosity)â
* Shandian éé»ââlightningâ (traditional)
* Shandian éªçµâ"lightning" (simplifed)
* Meng 夢ââdreamâ (traditional)
* Meng 梦â"dream" (simplified)
All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphologyâi.e., changes in form of a wordâto indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflectionsâit possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), and only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English). There is, however, a gender difference in the written language (ä» as "he" and 她 as "she"), but it should be noted that this is a relatively new introduction to the Chinese language in the twentieth century.
They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le äº, hai è¿, yijing å·²ç», 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 classifiers and measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring languages like Japanese and Korean. See Chinese classifiers 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 cà is identified.
The mono-syllable jÄ«, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: é/鸡 chicken, æ©/æº machine, åº basic, æ/å» (to) hit, é¥/饥 hunger, and ç©/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: ååå«åè±ï¼åéµæ±çåï¼è±åçè± MÃngzi jià o JiÄyÄ«ng, JiÄlÃng JiÄng de jiÄ, YÄ«ngguó de yÄ«ng "My name is JiÄyÄ«ng, 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; since most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters, there are many times more Chinese words than there are 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 ä¸ååæµ· (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 æ±è¯å¤§è¯å
¸, 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 ç°ä»£æ±è¯è¯å
¸, 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 è¡è "grape," ç³æ¦´ "pomegranate" and ç®å/ç
å "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including ä½ "Buddha" and è©è¨/è©è© "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as è¡å "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as è¡è "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or PÄli, 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 çµç¶ "pÃpa", the Chinese lute, or é
ª "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è²å (pinyin: yÇsèliè), "Paris" becomes å·´é» (pinyin: bÄlÃ). A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including æ²ç¼ shÄfÄ "sofa," 马达/馬é mÇdá "motor," å¹½é» yÅumò "humor," é»è¾/é輯 luójà "logic," æ¶é«¦/æ髦 shÃmáo "smart, fashionable" and ææ¯åºé xiÄsÄ«dÇlÇ "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, æ²å/æ²ç¼ and 马达/馬é in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor."
Western foreign words have had great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came èè¾ (bÄléi, "ballet"), é¦æ§ (xiÄngbÄ«n, "champagne"), via Italian åå¡ (kÄfÄi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned æ²ç¼ (shÄfÄ "sofa"), å¹½é» (yÅumò "humour"), and é«å°å¤« (gÄoÄrfÅ«, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪æ¯ç§ (dÃsÄ«kè, "disco"), å¯ä¹ (kÄlè, "cola") and è¿·ä½ (mÃnÇ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon å¡é (cartoon), åºä½¬ (gay people), ç士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. ç²çµ² (fÄnsÄ«, "fans"), é§å®¢ (hèikè, "hacker"), é¨è½æ ¼(bùluÅgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin.
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 å¾·å¾é£/å¾·å¾é¢¨ ( Shanghainese: télÃfon , Standard Mandarin: délÇfÄng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese çµè¯/é»è©± (dià nhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include çµè§/é»è¦ (dià nshì "electric vision") for television, çµè/é»è
¦ (dià nnÇo "electric brain") for computer; ææº/ææ© (shÇujÄ« "hand machine") for cellphone, and èç/èè½ (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. ç¶²èª (wÇng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as æ±å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡å
(hà nbÇo bÄo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as æææº/æææ© (tuÅlÄjÄ«, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马å©å¥¥/馬å©å¥§ for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example å¥è
¾/å¥é¨° (bÄnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and èµç¾å³/è³½ç¾å³ (Sà ibÇiwèi "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 (å製漢èª, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include dià nhuà (çµè¯/é»è©±, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社ä¼, shakai, "society"), kÄxué (ç§å¦/ç§å¸, kagaku, "science") and chÅuxià ng (æ½è±¡, chÅ«shÅ, "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, jÄ«ngjì (ç»æµ/ç¶æ¿, 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 Hokkien and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便å½/ä¾¿ç¶ âlunchbox or boxed lunchâ (from bento) and æç âprepared cuisineâ, have passed into common currency.
With the growing importance and influence of China's economy globally, Mandarin instruction is gaining popularity in schools in the USA, and 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 the English Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660.
* Chinese characters
* Chinese exclamative particles
* Chinese honorifics
* Chinese classifier
* Chinese number gestures
* Chinese numerals
* Chinese punctuation
* Classical Chinese grammar
* Four-character idiom
* Han unification
* Haner language
* HSK test
* Languages of China
* North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics
* Nü shu
*
*
*
*
*
* ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawaiâi Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X.
* ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawaiâi Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-0-8248-2975-9.
* Keys to the Chinese Language: Book IIâGoogle Books
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Chinese_language | How many head entries for character definitions does the Zhonghua Zihai 中华字海 (1994) contain? | 85,568 head entries | data/set5/a7 | Chinese_language
Sino-Tibetan language family
The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China and Taiwan
Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) ( ; ; ; or ) is a language family consisting of languages mutually intelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. âThe mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.â
* Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. âThe Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.â
* Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. âThe 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 worldâs 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 some 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), Cantonese (Yue) (70 million) and Min (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 å®è¯ GuÄnhuà or åæ¹è¯ BÄifÄnghuà 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. Chineseâde facto, Standard Mandarinâis 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).
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:
Disputed classifications by some Chinese linguists:
There are also some smaller groups that are not yet classified, such as: Danzhou dialect (åå·è¯), spoken in Danzhou, on Hainan Island; Xianghua (乡è¯), not to be confused with Xiang (æ¹), spoken in western Hunan; and Shaozhou Tuhua (é¶å·åè¯), 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.
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 government intends 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 âdialectsâ) 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 normal 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 (ä¸æ), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (æ±è¯,âspoken language[s] of the Han Chinese)âthis term could be translated to either âlanguageâ or âlanguagesâ 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 è¯ yu and æ 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 oneâalbeit internally very diverseâethnicity. 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 Peopleâs 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 (âregional tonguesâ, often translated as âdialectsâ). 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 dialect.
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 chiÌt and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("ä¸"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as å and ä¿ 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 many formal occasions.
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 earlier 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 æ¥ (sun), shan å±± (mountain), shui æ°´ (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar XÇ Shèn in the Hà n Dynasty classified characters into six categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80â90% 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/æ¥·æ¸ kÇishÅ«) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (ç¯ä¹¦/ç¯æ¸ zhuà nshÅ«), cursive script (è书/èæ¸ cÇoshÅ«) and clerical script (é¶ä¹¦/é¸æ¸ lìshÅ«). 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 community, is the firstâand at present the onlyâforeign 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 Zhou Dynasty (1122 BCEâ256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the ShÄ«jÄ«ng, the history of the ShÅ«jÄ«ng, and portions of the YìjÄ«ng (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 QÄ«ng dynasty philologists.
Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably è mì "honey", ç
shÄ« "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mÇ "horse", ç¬ quÇn "dog", and éµ Ã© "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 âhoney' and âlion,' and probably also âhorse,' âdog,' and âgoose,' 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 Ãbereinstimmungen 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 Southern and Northern Dynasties and the SuÃ, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the åé» "Qièyùn" rime book (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the å»£é» "GuÇngyùn" rime book. 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 SìchuÄn 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 Qing Dynasty. Since the 17th century, the Qing Dynasty had set up orthoepy academies ( ) to make pronunciation conform to the standard of the capital Beijing. For the general population, however, this had limited effect. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The Beijing Mandarin court standard was used solely by officials and civil servants and was thus fairly limited.
This situation did not change until the mid-20th century with the creation (in both the PRC and the ROC, but not in Hong Kong) of a compulsory educational system committed to teaching 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.
Classical Chinese was once the lingua franca in neighbouring East Asian countries such as Japan, Korea and Vietnam for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. *Sheng Ding and Robert A. Saunders, Talking Up China: An Analysis of China's Rising Cultural Power and Global Promotion of the Chinese Language EASTASIA, Summer 2006, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 4
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 tá»±. 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. Approximately 60% of the modern Vietnamese lexicon is recognized as Hán-Viá»t (Sino-Vietnamese), the majority of which was borrowed from Middle Chinese.
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. 251â258.
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, likewise for a significant percentage of Japanese and Vietnamese vocabulary. 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.
Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of è¶ (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Minnan pronunciation of é®æ± (koe-tsiap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of éæ© (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"âhigh level
* "hemp" or "torpid"âhigh rising
* "horse"âlow falling-rising
* "scold"âhigh falling
* "question particle"âneutral
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 Indian translators, working in Sanskrit and Pali, were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of Chinese in a foreign language. After the 15th century, the efforts of Jesuits and Western court missionaries resulted 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 lack of a native 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 (æ¼¢èªæ¼é³/æ±è¯æ¼é³), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, and later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore) and Taiwan. 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 teaching new words. The Pinyin romanization is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, with the Chinese character alongside.
The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859 and modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As this system approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels, i.e. it is an Anglicization, it may be particularly helpful for beginner Chinese speakers of an English-speaking background. Wade-Giles was found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan.
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 BÄijÄ«ng (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é³, 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, å in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cà (è¯/è©), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cà (âwordâ) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more.
For example:
* Yun é²ââcloudâ (traditional)
* Yun äºââcloudâ (simplified)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ¼¢å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡ââhamburgerâ (traditional)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ±å ¡å
/æ±å ¡â"hamburger" (simplified)
* Wo æââI, meâ
* Ren 人ââpeopleâ
* Diqiu å°çââearth (globosity)â
* Shandian éé»ââlightningâ (traditional)
* Shandian éªçµâ"lightning" (simplifed)
* Meng 夢ââdreamâ (traditional)
* Meng 梦â"dream" (simplified)
All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphologyâi.e., changes in form of a wordâto indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflectionsâit possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), and only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English). There is, however, a gender difference in the written language (ä» as "he" and 她 as "she"), but it should be noted that this is a relatively new introduction to the Chinese language in the twentieth century.
They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le äº, hai è¿, yijing å·²ç», 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 classifiers and measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring languages like Japanese and Korean. See Chinese classifiers 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 cà is identified.
The mono-syllable jÄ«, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: é/鸡 chicken, æ©/æº machine, åº basic, æ/å» (to) hit, é¥/饥 hunger, and ç©/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: ååå«åè±ï¼åéµæ±çåï¼è±åçè± MÃngzi jià o JiÄyÄ«ng, JiÄlÃng JiÄng de jiÄ, YÄ«ngguó de yÄ«ng "My name is JiÄyÄ«ng, 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; since most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters, there are many times more Chinese words than there are 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 ä¸ååæµ· (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 æ±è¯å¤§è¯å
¸, 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 ç°ä»£æ±è¯è¯å
¸, 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 è¡è "grape," ç³æ¦´ "pomegranate" and ç®å/ç
å "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including ä½ "Buddha" and è©è¨/è©è© "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as è¡å "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as è¡è "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or PÄli, 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 çµç¶ "pÃpa", the Chinese lute, or é
ª "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è²å (pinyin: yÇsèliè), "Paris" becomes å·´é» (pinyin: bÄlÃ). A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including æ²ç¼ shÄfÄ "sofa," 马达/馬é mÇdá "motor," å¹½é» yÅumò "humor," é»è¾/é輯 luójà "logic," æ¶é«¦/æ髦 shÃmáo "smart, fashionable" and ææ¯åºé xiÄsÄ«dÇlÇ "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, æ²å/æ²ç¼ and 马达/馬é in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor."
Western foreign words have had great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came èè¾ (bÄléi, "ballet"), é¦æ§ (xiÄngbÄ«n, "champagne"), via Italian åå¡ (kÄfÄi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned æ²ç¼ (shÄfÄ "sofa"), å¹½é» (yÅumò "humour"), and é«å°å¤« (gÄoÄrfÅ«, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪æ¯ç§ (dÃsÄ«kè, "disco"), å¯ä¹ (kÄlè, "cola") and è¿·ä½ (mÃnÇ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon å¡é (cartoon), åºä½¬ (gay people), ç士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. ç²çµ² (fÄnsÄ«, "fans"), é§å®¢ (hèikè, "hacker"), é¨è½æ ¼(bùluÅgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin.
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 å¾·å¾é£/å¾·å¾é¢¨ ( Shanghainese: télÃfon , Standard Mandarin: délÇfÄng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese çµè¯/é»è©± (dià nhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include çµè§/é»è¦ (dià nshì "electric vision") for television, çµè/é»è
¦ (dià nnÇo "electric brain") for computer; ææº/ææ© (shÇujÄ« "hand machine") for cellphone, and èç/èè½ (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. ç¶²èª (wÇng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as æ±å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡å
(hà nbÇo bÄo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as æææº/æææ© (tuÅlÄjÄ«, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马å©å¥¥/馬å©å¥§ for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example å¥è
¾/å¥é¨° (bÄnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and èµç¾å³/è³½ç¾å³ (Sà ibÇiwèi "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 (å製漢èª, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include dià nhuà (çµè¯/é»è©±, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社ä¼, shakai, "society"), kÄxué (ç§å¦/ç§å¸, kagaku, "science") and chÅuxià ng (æ½è±¡, chÅ«shÅ, "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, jÄ«ngjì (ç»æµ/ç¶æ¿, 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 Hokkien and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便å½/ä¾¿ç¶ âlunchbox or boxed lunchâ (from bento) and æç âprepared cuisineâ, have passed into common currency.
With the growing importance and influence of China's economy globally, Mandarin instruction is gaining popularity in schools in the USA, and 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 the English Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660.
* Chinese characters
* Chinese exclamative particles
* Chinese honorifics
* Chinese classifier
* Chinese number gestures
* Chinese numerals
* Chinese punctuation
* Classical Chinese grammar
* Four-character idiom
* Han unification
* Haner language
* HSK test
* Languages of China
* North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics
* Nü shu
*
*
*
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* ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawaiâi Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X.
* ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawaiâi Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-0-8248-2975-9.
* Keys to the Chinese Language: Book IIâGoogle Books
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Chinese_language | How many head entries for character definitions does the Zhonghua Zihai 中华字海 (1994) contain? | 54,678 | data/set5/a7 | Chinese_language
Sino-Tibetan language family
The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China and Taiwan
Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) ( ; ; ; or ) is a language family consisting of languages mutually intelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. âThe mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.â
* Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. âThe Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.â
* Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. âThe 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 worldâs 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 some 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), Cantonese (Yue) (70 million) and Min (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 å®è¯ GuÄnhuà or åæ¹è¯ BÄifÄnghuà 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. Chineseâde facto, Standard Mandarinâis 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).
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:
Disputed classifications by some Chinese linguists:
There are also some smaller groups that are not yet classified, such as: Danzhou dialect (åå·è¯), spoken in Danzhou, on Hainan Island; Xianghua (乡è¯), not to be confused with Xiang (æ¹), spoken in western Hunan; and Shaozhou Tuhua (é¶å·åè¯), 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.
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 government intends 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 âdialectsâ) 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 normal 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 (ä¸æ), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (æ±è¯,âspoken language[s] of the Han Chinese)âthis term could be translated to either âlanguageâ or âlanguagesâ 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 è¯ yu and æ 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 oneâalbeit internally very diverseâethnicity. 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 Peopleâs 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 (âregional tonguesâ, often translated as âdialectsâ). 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 dialect.
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 chiÌt and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("ä¸"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as å and ä¿ 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 many formal occasions.
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 earlier 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 æ¥ (sun), shan å±± (mountain), shui æ°´ (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar XÇ Shèn in the Hà n Dynasty classified characters into six categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80â90% 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/æ¥·æ¸ kÇishÅ«) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (ç¯ä¹¦/ç¯æ¸ zhuà nshÅ«), cursive script (è书/èæ¸ cÇoshÅ«) and clerical script (é¶ä¹¦/é¸æ¸ lìshÅ«). 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 community, is the firstâand at present the onlyâforeign 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 Zhou Dynasty (1122 BCEâ256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the ShÄ«jÄ«ng, the history of the ShÅ«jÄ«ng, and portions of the YìjÄ«ng (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 QÄ«ng dynasty philologists.
Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably è mì "honey", ç
shÄ« "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mÇ "horse", ç¬ quÇn "dog", and éµ Ã© "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 âhoney' and âlion,' and probably also âhorse,' âdog,' and âgoose,' 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 Ãbereinstimmungen 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 Southern and Northern Dynasties and the SuÃ, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the åé» "Qièyùn" rime book (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the å»£é» "GuÇngyùn" rime book. 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 SìchuÄn 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 Qing Dynasty. Since the 17th century, the Qing Dynasty had set up orthoepy academies ( ) to make pronunciation conform to the standard of the capital Beijing. For the general population, however, this had limited effect. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The Beijing Mandarin court standard was used solely by officials and civil servants and was thus fairly limited.
This situation did not change until the mid-20th century with the creation (in both the PRC and the ROC, but not in Hong Kong) of a compulsory educational system committed to teaching 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.
Classical Chinese was once the lingua franca in neighbouring East Asian countries such as Japan, Korea and Vietnam for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. *Sheng Ding and Robert A. Saunders, Talking Up China: An Analysis of China's Rising Cultural Power and Global Promotion of the Chinese Language EASTASIA, Summer 2006, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 4
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 tá»±. 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. Approximately 60% of the modern Vietnamese lexicon is recognized as Hán-Viá»t (Sino-Vietnamese), the majority of which was borrowed from Middle Chinese.
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. 251â258.
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, likewise for a significant percentage of Japanese and Vietnamese vocabulary. 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.
Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of è¶ (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Minnan pronunciation of é®æ± (koe-tsiap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of éæ© (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"âhigh level
* "hemp" or "torpid"âhigh rising
* "horse"âlow falling-rising
* "scold"âhigh falling
* "question particle"âneutral
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 Indian translators, working in Sanskrit and Pali, were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of Chinese in a foreign language. After the 15th century, the efforts of Jesuits and Western court missionaries resulted 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 lack of a native 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 (æ¼¢èªæ¼é³/æ±è¯æ¼é³), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, and later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore) and Taiwan. 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 teaching new words. The Pinyin romanization is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, with the Chinese character alongside.
The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859 and modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As this system approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels, i.e. it is an Anglicization, it may be particularly helpful for beginner Chinese speakers of an English-speaking background. Wade-Giles was found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan.
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 BÄijÄ«ng (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é³, 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, å in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cà (è¯/è©), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cà (âwordâ) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more.
For example:
* Yun é²ââcloudâ (traditional)
* Yun äºââcloudâ (simplified)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ¼¢å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡ââhamburgerâ (traditional)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ±å ¡å
/æ±å ¡â"hamburger" (simplified)
* Wo æââI, meâ
* Ren 人ââpeopleâ
* Diqiu å°çââearth (globosity)â
* Shandian éé»ââlightningâ (traditional)
* Shandian éªçµâ"lightning" (simplifed)
* Meng 夢ââdreamâ (traditional)
* Meng 梦â"dream" (simplified)
All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphologyâi.e., changes in form of a wordâto indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflectionsâit possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), and only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English). There is, however, a gender difference in the written language (ä» as "he" and 她 as "she"), but it should be noted that this is a relatively new introduction to the Chinese language in the twentieth century.
They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le äº, hai è¿, yijing å·²ç», 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 classifiers and measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring languages like Japanese and Korean. See Chinese classifiers 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 cà is identified.
The mono-syllable jÄ«, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: é/鸡 chicken, æ©/æº machine, åº basic, æ/å» (to) hit, é¥/饥 hunger, and ç©/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: ååå«åè±ï¼åéµæ±çåï¼è±åçè± MÃngzi jià o JiÄyÄ«ng, JiÄlÃng JiÄng de jiÄ, YÄ«ngguó de yÄ«ng "My name is JiÄyÄ«ng, 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; since most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters, there are many times more Chinese words than there are 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 ä¸ååæµ· (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 æ±è¯å¤§è¯å
¸, 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 ç°ä»£æ±è¯è¯å
¸, 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 è¡è "grape," ç³æ¦´ "pomegranate" and ç®å/ç
å "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including ä½ "Buddha" and è©è¨/è©è© "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as è¡å "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as è¡è "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or PÄli, 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 çµç¶ "pÃpa", the Chinese lute, or é
ª "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è²å (pinyin: yÇsèliè), "Paris" becomes å·´é» (pinyin: bÄlÃ). A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including æ²ç¼ shÄfÄ "sofa," 马达/馬é mÇdá "motor," å¹½é» yÅumò "humor," é»è¾/é輯 luójà "logic," æ¶é«¦/æ髦 shÃmáo "smart, fashionable" and ææ¯åºé xiÄsÄ«dÇlÇ "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, æ²å/æ²ç¼ and 马达/馬é in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor."
Western foreign words have had great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came èè¾ (bÄléi, "ballet"), é¦æ§ (xiÄngbÄ«n, "champagne"), via Italian åå¡ (kÄfÄi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned æ²ç¼ (shÄfÄ "sofa"), å¹½é» (yÅumò "humour"), and é«å°å¤« (gÄoÄrfÅ«, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪æ¯ç§ (dÃsÄ«kè, "disco"), å¯ä¹ (kÄlè, "cola") and è¿·ä½ (mÃnÇ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon å¡é (cartoon), åºä½¬ (gay people), ç士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. ç²çµ² (fÄnsÄ«, "fans"), é§å®¢ (hèikè, "hacker"), é¨è½æ ¼(bùluÅgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin.
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 å¾·å¾é£/å¾·å¾é¢¨ ( Shanghainese: télÃfon , Standard Mandarin: délÇfÄng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese çµè¯/é»è©± (dià nhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include çµè§/é»è¦ (dià nshì "electric vision") for television, çµè/é»è
¦ (dià nnÇo "electric brain") for computer; ææº/ææ© (shÇujÄ« "hand machine") for cellphone, and èç/èè½ (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. ç¶²èª (wÇng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as æ±å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡å
(hà nbÇo bÄo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as æææº/æææ© (tuÅlÄjÄ«, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马å©å¥¥/馬å©å¥§ for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example å¥è
¾/å¥é¨° (bÄnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and èµç¾å³/è³½ç¾å³ (Sà ibÇiwèi "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 (å製漢èª, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include dià nhuà (çµè¯/é»è©±, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社ä¼, shakai, "society"), kÄxué (ç§å¦/ç§å¸, kagaku, "science") and chÅuxià ng (æ½è±¡, chÅ«shÅ, "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, jÄ«ngjì (ç»æµ/ç¶æ¿, 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 Hokkien and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便å½/ä¾¿ç¶ âlunchbox or boxed lunchâ (from bento) and æç âprepared cuisineâ, have passed into common currency.
With the growing importance and influence of China's economy globally, Mandarin instruction is gaining popularity in schools in the USA, and 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 the English Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660.
* Chinese characters
* Chinese exclamative particles
* Chinese honorifics
* Chinese classifier
* Chinese number gestures
* Chinese numerals
* Chinese punctuation
* Classical Chinese grammar
* Four-character idiom
* Han unification
* Haner language
* HSK test
* Languages of China
* North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics
* Nü shu
*
*
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* ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawaiâi Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X.
* ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawaiâi Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-0-8248-2975-9.
* Keys to the Chinese Language: Book IIâGoogle Books
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Chinese_language | What does the PRC government classify as literacy amongst workers? | knowledge of 2,000 characters | data/set5/a7 | Chinese_language
Sino-Tibetan language family
The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China and Taiwan
Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) ( ; ; ; or ) is a language family consisting of languages mutually intelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. âThe mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.â
* Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. âThe Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.â
* Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. âThe 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 worldâs 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 some 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), Cantonese (Yue) (70 million) and Min (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 å®è¯ GuÄnhuà or åæ¹è¯ BÄifÄnghuà 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. Chineseâde facto, Standard Mandarinâis 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).
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:
Disputed classifications by some Chinese linguists:
There are also some smaller groups that are not yet classified, such as: Danzhou dialect (åå·è¯), spoken in Danzhou, on Hainan Island; Xianghua (乡è¯), not to be confused with Xiang (æ¹), spoken in western Hunan; and Shaozhou Tuhua (é¶å·åè¯), 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.
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 government intends 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 âdialectsâ) 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 normal 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 (ä¸æ), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (æ±è¯,âspoken language[s] of the Han Chinese)âthis term could be translated to either âlanguageâ or âlanguagesâ 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 è¯ yu and æ 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 oneâalbeit internally very diverseâethnicity. 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 Peopleâs 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 (âregional tonguesâ, often translated as âdialectsâ). 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 dialect.
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 chiÌt and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("ä¸"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as å and ä¿ 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 many formal occasions.
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 earlier 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 æ¥ (sun), shan å±± (mountain), shui æ°´ (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar XÇ Shèn in the Hà n Dynasty classified characters into six categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80â90% 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/æ¥·æ¸ kÇishÅ«) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (ç¯ä¹¦/ç¯æ¸ zhuà nshÅ«), cursive script (è书/èæ¸ cÇoshÅ«) and clerical script (é¶ä¹¦/é¸æ¸ lìshÅ«). 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 community, is the firstâand at present the onlyâforeign 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 Zhou Dynasty (1122 BCEâ256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the ShÄ«jÄ«ng, the history of the ShÅ«jÄ«ng, and portions of the YìjÄ«ng (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 QÄ«ng dynasty philologists.
Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably è mì "honey", ç
shÄ« "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mÇ "horse", ç¬ quÇn "dog", and éµ Ã© "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 âhoney' and âlion,' and probably also âhorse,' âdog,' and âgoose,' 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 Ãbereinstimmungen 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 Southern and Northern Dynasties and the SuÃ, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the åé» "Qièyùn" rime book (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the å»£é» "GuÇngyùn" rime book. 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 SìchuÄn 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 Qing Dynasty. Since the 17th century, the Qing Dynasty had set up orthoepy academies ( ) to make pronunciation conform to the standard of the capital Beijing. For the general population, however, this had limited effect. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The Beijing Mandarin court standard was used solely by officials and civil servants and was thus fairly limited.
This situation did not change until the mid-20th century with the creation (in both the PRC and the ROC, but not in Hong Kong) of a compulsory educational system committed to teaching 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.
Classical Chinese was once the lingua franca in neighbouring East Asian countries such as Japan, Korea and Vietnam for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. *Sheng Ding and Robert A. Saunders, Talking Up China: An Analysis of China's Rising Cultural Power and Global Promotion of the Chinese Language EASTASIA, Summer 2006, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 4
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 tá»±. 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. Approximately 60% of the modern Vietnamese lexicon is recognized as Hán-Viá»t (Sino-Vietnamese), the majority of which was borrowed from Middle Chinese.
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. 251â258.
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, likewise for a significant percentage of Japanese and Vietnamese vocabulary. 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.
Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of è¶ (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Minnan pronunciation of é®æ± (koe-tsiap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of éæ© (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"âhigh level
* "hemp" or "torpid"âhigh rising
* "horse"âlow falling-rising
* "scold"âhigh falling
* "question particle"âneutral
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 Indian translators, working in Sanskrit and Pali, were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of Chinese in a foreign language. After the 15th century, the efforts of Jesuits and Western court missionaries resulted 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 lack of a native 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 (æ¼¢èªæ¼é³/æ±è¯æ¼é³), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, and later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore) and Taiwan. 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 teaching new words. The Pinyin romanization is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, with the Chinese character alongside.
The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859 and modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As this system approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels, i.e. it is an Anglicization, it may be particularly helpful for beginner Chinese speakers of an English-speaking background. Wade-Giles was found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan.
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 BÄijÄ«ng (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é³, 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, å in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cà (è¯/è©), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cà (âwordâ) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more.
For example:
* Yun é²ââcloudâ (traditional)
* Yun äºââcloudâ (simplified)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ¼¢å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡ââhamburgerâ (traditional)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ±å ¡å
/æ±å ¡â"hamburger" (simplified)
* Wo æââI, meâ
* Ren 人ââpeopleâ
* Diqiu å°çââearth (globosity)â
* Shandian éé»ââlightningâ (traditional)
* Shandian éªçµâ"lightning" (simplifed)
* Meng 夢ââdreamâ (traditional)
* Meng 梦â"dream" (simplified)
All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphologyâi.e., changes in form of a wordâto indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflectionsâit possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), and only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English). There is, however, a gender difference in the written language (ä» as "he" and 她 as "she"), but it should be noted that this is a relatively new introduction to the Chinese language in the twentieth century.
They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le äº, hai è¿, yijing å·²ç», 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 classifiers and measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring languages like Japanese and Korean. See Chinese classifiers 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 cà is identified.
The mono-syllable jÄ«, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: é/鸡 chicken, æ©/æº machine, åº basic, æ/å» (to) hit, é¥/饥 hunger, and ç©/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: ååå«åè±ï¼åéµæ±çåï¼è±åçè± MÃngzi jià o JiÄyÄ«ng, JiÄlÃng JiÄng de jiÄ, YÄ«ngguó de yÄ«ng "My name is JiÄyÄ«ng, 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; since most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters, there are many times more Chinese words than there are 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 ä¸ååæµ· (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 æ±è¯å¤§è¯å
¸, 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 ç°ä»£æ±è¯è¯å
¸, 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 è¡è "grape," ç³æ¦´ "pomegranate" and ç®å/ç
å "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including ä½ "Buddha" and è©è¨/è©è© "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as è¡å "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as è¡è "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or PÄli, 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 çµç¶ "pÃpa", the Chinese lute, or é
ª "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è²å (pinyin: yÇsèliè), "Paris" becomes å·´é» (pinyin: bÄlÃ). A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including æ²ç¼ shÄfÄ "sofa," 马达/馬é mÇdá "motor," å¹½é» yÅumò "humor," é»è¾/é輯 luójà "logic," æ¶é«¦/æ髦 shÃmáo "smart, fashionable" and ææ¯åºé xiÄsÄ«dÇlÇ "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, æ²å/æ²ç¼ and 马达/馬é in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor."
Western foreign words have had great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came èè¾ (bÄléi, "ballet"), é¦æ§ (xiÄngbÄ«n, "champagne"), via Italian åå¡ (kÄfÄi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned æ²ç¼ (shÄfÄ "sofa"), å¹½é» (yÅumò "humour"), and é«å°å¤« (gÄoÄrfÅ«, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪æ¯ç§ (dÃsÄ«kè, "disco"), å¯ä¹ (kÄlè, "cola") and è¿·ä½ (mÃnÇ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon å¡é (cartoon), åºä½¬ (gay people), ç士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. ç²çµ² (fÄnsÄ«, "fans"), é§å®¢ (hèikè, "hacker"), é¨è½æ ¼(bùluÅgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin.
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 å¾·å¾é£/å¾·å¾é¢¨ ( Shanghainese: télÃfon , Standard Mandarin: délÇfÄng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese çµè¯/é»è©± (dià nhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include çµè§/é»è¦ (dià nshì "electric vision") for television, çµè/é»è
¦ (dià nnÇo "electric brain") for computer; ææº/ææ© (shÇujÄ« "hand machine") for cellphone, and èç/èè½ (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. ç¶²èª (wÇng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as æ±å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡å
(hà nbÇo bÄo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as æææº/æææ© (tuÅlÄjÄ«, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马å©å¥¥/馬å©å¥§ for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example å¥è
¾/å¥é¨° (bÄnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and èµç¾å³/è³½ç¾å³ (Sà ibÇiwèi "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 (å製漢èª, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include dià nhuà (çµè¯/é»è©±, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社ä¼, shakai, "society"), kÄxué (ç§å¦/ç§å¸, kagaku, "science") and chÅuxià ng (æ½è±¡, chÅ«shÅ, "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, jÄ«ngjì (ç»æµ/ç¶æ¿, 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 Hokkien and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便å½/ä¾¿ç¶ âlunchbox or boxed lunchâ (from bento) and æç âprepared cuisineâ, have passed into common currency.
With the growing importance and influence of China's economy globally, Mandarin instruction is gaining popularity in schools in the USA, and 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 the English Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660.
* Chinese characters
* Chinese exclamative particles
* Chinese honorifics
* Chinese classifier
* Chinese number gestures
* Chinese numerals
* Chinese punctuation
* Classical Chinese grammar
* Four-character idiom
* Han unification
* Haner language
* HSK test
* Languages of China
* North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics
* Nü shu
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* ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawaiâi Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X.
* ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawaiâi Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-0-8248-2975-9.
* Keys to the Chinese Language: Book IIâGoogle Books
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Chinese_language | What does the PRC government classify as literacy amongst workers? | a knowledge of 2000 characters | data/set5/a7 | Chinese_language
Sino-Tibetan language family
The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China and Taiwan
Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) ( ; ; ; or ) is a language family consisting of languages mutually intelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. âThe mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.â
* Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. âThe Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.â
* Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. âThe 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 worldâs 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 some 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), Cantonese (Yue) (70 million) and Min (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 å®è¯ GuÄnhuà or åæ¹è¯ BÄifÄnghuà 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. Chineseâde facto, Standard Mandarinâis 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).
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:
Disputed classifications by some Chinese linguists:
There are also some smaller groups that are not yet classified, such as: Danzhou dialect (åå·è¯), spoken in Danzhou, on Hainan Island; Xianghua (乡è¯), not to be confused with Xiang (æ¹), spoken in western Hunan; and Shaozhou Tuhua (é¶å·åè¯), 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.
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 government intends 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 âdialectsâ) 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 normal 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 (ä¸æ), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (æ±è¯,âspoken language[s] of the Han Chinese)âthis term could be translated to either âlanguageâ or âlanguagesâ 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 è¯ yu and æ 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 oneâalbeit internally very diverseâethnicity. 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 Peopleâs 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 (âregional tonguesâ, often translated as âdialectsâ). 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 dialect.
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 chiÌt and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("ä¸"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as å and ä¿ 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 many formal occasions.
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 earlier 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 æ¥ (sun), shan å±± (mountain), shui æ°´ (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar XÇ Shèn in the Hà n Dynasty classified characters into six categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80â90% 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/æ¥·æ¸ kÇishÅ«) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (ç¯ä¹¦/ç¯æ¸ zhuà nshÅ«), cursive script (è书/èæ¸ cÇoshÅ«) and clerical script (é¶ä¹¦/é¸æ¸ lìshÅ«). 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 community, is the firstâand at present the onlyâforeign 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 Zhou Dynasty (1122 BCEâ256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the ShÄ«jÄ«ng, the history of the ShÅ«jÄ«ng, and portions of the YìjÄ«ng (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 QÄ«ng dynasty philologists.
Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably è mì "honey", ç
shÄ« "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mÇ "horse", ç¬ quÇn "dog", and éµ Ã© "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 âhoney' and âlion,' and probably also âhorse,' âdog,' and âgoose,' 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 Ãbereinstimmungen 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 Southern and Northern Dynasties and the SuÃ, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the åé» "Qièyùn" rime book (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the å»£é» "GuÇngyùn" rime book. 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 SìchuÄn 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 Qing Dynasty. Since the 17th century, the Qing Dynasty had set up orthoepy academies ( ) to make pronunciation conform to the standard of the capital Beijing. For the general population, however, this had limited effect. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The Beijing Mandarin court standard was used solely by officials and civil servants and was thus fairly limited.
This situation did not change until the mid-20th century with the creation (in both the PRC and the ROC, but not in Hong Kong) of a compulsory educational system committed to teaching 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.
Classical Chinese was once the lingua franca in neighbouring East Asian countries such as Japan, Korea and Vietnam for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. *Sheng Ding and Robert A. Saunders, Talking Up China: An Analysis of China's Rising Cultural Power and Global Promotion of the Chinese Language EASTASIA, Summer 2006, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 4
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 tá»±. 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. Approximately 60% of the modern Vietnamese lexicon is recognized as Hán-Viá»t (Sino-Vietnamese), the majority of which was borrowed from Middle Chinese.
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. 251â258.
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, likewise for a significant percentage of Japanese and Vietnamese vocabulary. 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.
Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of è¶ (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Minnan pronunciation of é®æ± (koe-tsiap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of éæ© (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"âhigh level
* "hemp" or "torpid"âhigh rising
* "horse"âlow falling-rising
* "scold"âhigh falling
* "question particle"âneutral
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 Indian translators, working in Sanskrit and Pali, were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of Chinese in a foreign language. After the 15th century, the efforts of Jesuits and Western court missionaries resulted 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 lack of a native 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 (æ¼¢èªæ¼é³/æ±è¯æ¼é³), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, and later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore) and Taiwan. 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 teaching new words. The Pinyin romanization is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, with the Chinese character alongside.
The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859 and modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As this system approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels, i.e. it is an Anglicization, it may be particularly helpful for beginner Chinese speakers of an English-speaking background. Wade-Giles was found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan.
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 BÄijÄ«ng (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é³, 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, å in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cà (è¯/è©), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cà (âwordâ) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more.
For example:
* Yun é²ââcloudâ (traditional)
* Yun äºââcloudâ (simplified)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ¼¢å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡ââhamburgerâ (traditional)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ±å ¡å
/æ±å ¡â"hamburger" (simplified)
* Wo æââI, meâ
* Ren 人ââpeopleâ
* Diqiu å°çââearth (globosity)â
* Shandian éé»ââlightningâ (traditional)
* Shandian éªçµâ"lightning" (simplifed)
* Meng 夢ââdreamâ (traditional)
* Meng 梦â"dream" (simplified)
All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphologyâi.e., changes in form of a wordâto indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflectionsâit possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), and only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English). There is, however, a gender difference in the written language (ä» as "he" and 她 as "she"), but it should be noted that this is a relatively new introduction to the Chinese language in the twentieth century.
They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le äº, hai è¿, yijing å·²ç», 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 classifiers and measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring languages like Japanese and Korean. See Chinese classifiers 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 cà is identified.
The mono-syllable jÄ«, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: é/鸡 chicken, æ©/æº machine, åº basic, æ/å» (to) hit, é¥/饥 hunger, and ç©/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: ååå«åè±ï¼åéµæ±çåï¼è±åçè± MÃngzi jià o JiÄyÄ«ng, JiÄlÃng JiÄng de jiÄ, YÄ«ngguó de yÄ«ng "My name is JiÄyÄ«ng, 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; since most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters, there are many times more Chinese words than there are 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 ä¸ååæµ· (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 æ±è¯å¤§è¯å
¸, 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 ç°ä»£æ±è¯è¯å
¸, 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 è¡è "grape," ç³æ¦´ "pomegranate" and ç®å/ç
å "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including ä½ "Buddha" and è©è¨/è©è© "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as è¡å "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as è¡è "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or PÄli, 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 çµç¶ "pÃpa", the Chinese lute, or é
ª "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è²å (pinyin: yÇsèliè), "Paris" becomes å·´é» (pinyin: bÄlÃ). A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including æ²ç¼ shÄfÄ "sofa," 马达/馬é mÇdá "motor," å¹½é» yÅumò "humor," é»è¾/é輯 luójà "logic," æ¶é«¦/æ髦 shÃmáo "smart, fashionable" and ææ¯åºé xiÄsÄ«dÇlÇ "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, æ²å/æ²ç¼ and 马达/馬é in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor."
Western foreign words have had great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came èè¾ (bÄléi, "ballet"), é¦æ§ (xiÄngbÄ«n, "champagne"), via Italian åå¡ (kÄfÄi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned æ²ç¼ (shÄfÄ "sofa"), å¹½é» (yÅumò "humour"), and é«å°å¤« (gÄoÄrfÅ«, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪æ¯ç§ (dÃsÄ«kè, "disco"), å¯ä¹ (kÄlè, "cola") and è¿·ä½ (mÃnÇ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon å¡é (cartoon), åºä½¬ (gay people), ç士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. ç²çµ² (fÄnsÄ«, "fans"), é§å®¢ (hèikè, "hacker"), é¨è½æ ¼(bùluÅgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin.
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 å¾·å¾é£/å¾·å¾é¢¨ ( Shanghainese: télÃfon , Standard Mandarin: délÇfÄng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese çµè¯/é»è©± (dià nhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include çµè§/é»è¦ (dià nshì "electric vision") for television, çµè/é»è
¦ (dià nnÇo "electric brain") for computer; ææº/ææ© (shÇujÄ« "hand machine") for cellphone, and èç/èè½ (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. ç¶²èª (wÇng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as æ±å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡å
(hà nbÇo bÄo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as æææº/æææ© (tuÅlÄjÄ«, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马å©å¥¥/馬å©å¥§ for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example å¥è
¾/å¥é¨° (bÄnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and èµç¾å³/è³½ç¾å³ (Sà ibÇiwèi "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 (å製漢èª, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include dià nhuà (çµè¯/é»è©±, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社ä¼, shakai, "society"), kÄxué (ç§å¦/ç§å¸, kagaku, "science") and chÅuxià ng (æ½è±¡, chÅ«shÅ, "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, jÄ«ngjì (ç»æµ/ç¶æ¿, 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 Hokkien and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便å½/ä¾¿ç¶ âlunchbox or boxed lunchâ (from bento) and æç âprepared cuisineâ, have passed into common currency.
With the growing importance and influence of China's economy globally, Mandarin instruction is gaining popularity in schools in the USA, and 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 the English Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660.
* Chinese characters
* Chinese exclamative particles
* Chinese honorifics
* Chinese classifier
* Chinese number gestures
* Chinese numerals
* Chinese punctuation
* Classical Chinese grammar
* Four-character idiom
* Han unification
* Haner language
* HSK test
* Languages of China
* North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics
* Nü shu
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*
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* ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawaiâi Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X.
* ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawaiâi Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-0-8248-2975-9.
* Keys to the Chinese Language: Book IIâGoogle Books
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Chinese_language | How is South China linguistically different from North China? | South China displays more linguistic diversity | data/set5/a7 | Chinese_language
Sino-Tibetan language family
The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China and Taiwan
Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) ( ; ; ; or ) is a language family consisting of languages mutually intelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. âThe mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.â
* Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. âThe Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.â
* Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. âThe 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 worldâs 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 some 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), Cantonese (Yue) (70 million) and Min (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 å®è¯ GuÄnhuà or åæ¹è¯ BÄifÄnghuà 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. Chineseâde facto, Standard Mandarinâis 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).
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:
Disputed classifications by some Chinese linguists:
There are also some smaller groups that are not yet classified, such as: Danzhou dialect (åå·è¯), spoken in Danzhou, on Hainan Island; Xianghua (乡è¯), not to be confused with Xiang (æ¹), spoken in western Hunan; and Shaozhou Tuhua (é¶å·åè¯), 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.
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 government intends 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 âdialectsâ) 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 normal 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 (ä¸æ), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (æ±è¯,âspoken language[s] of the Han Chinese)âthis term could be translated to either âlanguageâ or âlanguagesâ 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 è¯ yu and æ 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 oneâalbeit internally very diverseâethnicity. 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 Peopleâs 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 (âregional tonguesâ, often translated as âdialectsâ). 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 dialect.
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 chiÌt and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("ä¸"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as å and ä¿ 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 many formal occasions.
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 earlier 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 æ¥ (sun), shan å±± (mountain), shui æ°´ (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar XÇ Shèn in the Hà n Dynasty classified characters into six categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80â90% 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/æ¥·æ¸ kÇishÅ«) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (ç¯ä¹¦/ç¯æ¸ zhuà nshÅ«), cursive script (è书/èæ¸ cÇoshÅ«) and clerical script (é¶ä¹¦/é¸æ¸ lìshÅ«). 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 community, is the firstâand at present the onlyâforeign 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 Zhou Dynasty (1122 BCEâ256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the ShÄ«jÄ«ng, the history of the ShÅ«jÄ«ng, and portions of the YìjÄ«ng (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 QÄ«ng dynasty philologists.
Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably è mì "honey", ç
shÄ« "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mÇ "horse", ç¬ quÇn "dog", and éµ Ã© "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 âhoney' and âlion,' and probably also âhorse,' âdog,' and âgoose,' 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 Ãbereinstimmungen 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 Southern and Northern Dynasties and the SuÃ, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the åé» "Qièyùn" rime book (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the å»£é» "GuÇngyùn" rime book. 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 SìchuÄn 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 Qing Dynasty. Since the 17th century, the Qing Dynasty had set up orthoepy academies ( ) to make pronunciation conform to the standard of the capital Beijing. For the general population, however, this had limited effect. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The Beijing Mandarin court standard was used solely by officials and civil servants and was thus fairly limited.
This situation did not change until the mid-20th century with the creation (in both the PRC and the ROC, but not in Hong Kong) of a compulsory educational system committed to teaching 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.
Classical Chinese was once the lingua franca in neighbouring East Asian countries such as Japan, Korea and Vietnam for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. *Sheng Ding and Robert A. Saunders, Talking Up China: An Analysis of China's Rising Cultural Power and Global Promotion of the Chinese Language EASTASIA, Summer 2006, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 4
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 tá»±. 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. Approximately 60% of the modern Vietnamese lexicon is recognized as Hán-Viá»t (Sino-Vietnamese), the majority of which was borrowed from Middle Chinese.
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. 251â258.
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, likewise for a significant percentage of Japanese and Vietnamese vocabulary. 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.
Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of è¶ (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Minnan pronunciation of é®æ± (koe-tsiap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of éæ© (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"âhigh level
* "hemp" or "torpid"âhigh rising
* "horse"âlow falling-rising
* "scold"âhigh falling
* "question particle"âneutral
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 Indian translators, working in Sanskrit and Pali, were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of Chinese in a foreign language. After the 15th century, the efforts of Jesuits and Western court missionaries resulted 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 lack of a native 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 (æ¼¢èªæ¼é³/æ±è¯æ¼é³), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, and later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore) and Taiwan. 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 teaching new words. The Pinyin romanization is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, with the Chinese character alongside.
The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859 and modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As this system approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels, i.e. it is an Anglicization, it may be particularly helpful for beginner Chinese speakers of an English-speaking background. Wade-Giles was found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan.
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 BÄijÄ«ng (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é³, 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, å in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cà (è¯/è©), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cà (âwordâ) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more.
For example:
* Yun é²ââcloudâ (traditional)
* Yun äºââcloudâ (simplified)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ¼¢å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡ââhamburgerâ (traditional)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ±å ¡å
/æ±å ¡â"hamburger" (simplified)
* Wo æââI, meâ
* Ren 人ââpeopleâ
* Diqiu å°çââearth (globosity)â
* Shandian éé»ââlightningâ (traditional)
* Shandian éªçµâ"lightning" (simplifed)
* Meng 夢ââdreamâ (traditional)
* Meng 梦â"dream" (simplified)
All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphologyâi.e., changes in form of a wordâto indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflectionsâit possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), and only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English). There is, however, a gender difference in the written language (ä» as "he" and 她 as "she"), but it should be noted that this is a relatively new introduction to the Chinese language in the twentieth century.
They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le äº, hai è¿, yijing å·²ç», 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 classifiers and measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring languages like Japanese and Korean. See Chinese classifiers 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 cà is identified.
The mono-syllable jÄ«, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: é/鸡 chicken, æ©/æº machine, åº basic, æ/å» (to) hit, é¥/饥 hunger, and ç©/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: ååå«åè±ï¼åéµæ±çåï¼è±åçè± MÃngzi jià o JiÄyÄ«ng, JiÄlÃng JiÄng de jiÄ, YÄ«ngguó de yÄ«ng "My name is JiÄyÄ«ng, 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; since most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters, there are many times more Chinese words than there are 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 ä¸ååæµ· (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 æ±è¯å¤§è¯å
¸, 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 ç°ä»£æ±è¯è¯å
¸, 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 è¡è "grape," ç³æ¦´ "pomegranate" and ç®å/ç
å "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including ä½ "Buddha" and è©è¨/è©è© "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as è¡å "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as è¡è "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or PÄli, 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 çµç¶ "pÃpa", the Chinese lute, or é
ª "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è²å (pinyin: yÇsèliè), "Paris" becomes å·´é» (pinyin: bÄlÃ). A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including æ²ç¼ shÄfÄ "sofa," 马达/馬é mÇdá "motor," å¹½é» yÅumò "humor," é»è¾/é輯 luójà "logic," æ¶é«¦/æ髦 shÃmáo "smart, fashionable" and ææ¯åºé xiÄsÄ«dÇlÇ "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, æ²å/æ²ç¼ and 马达/馬é in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor."
Western foreign words have had great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came èè¾ (bÄléi, "ballet"), é¦æ§ (xiÄngbÄ«n, "champagne"), via Italian åå¡ (kÄfÄi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned æ²ç¼ (shÄfÄ "sofa"), å¹½é» (yÅumò "humour"), and é«å°å¤« (gÄoÄrfÅ«, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪æ¯ç§ (dÃsÄ«kè, "disco"), å¯ä¹ (kÄlè, "cola") and è¿·ä½ (mÃnÇ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon å¡é (cartoon), åºä½¬ (gay people), ç士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. ç²çµ² (fÄnsÄ«, "fans"), é§å®¢ (hèikè, "hacker"), é¨è½æ ¼(bùluÅgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin.
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 å¾·å¾é£/å¾·å¾é¢¨ ( Shanghainese: télÃfon , Standard Mandarin: délÇfÄng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese çµè¯/é»è©± (dià nhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include çµè§/é»è¦ (dià nshì "electric vision") for television, çµè/é»è
¦ (dià nnÇo "electric brain") for computer; ææº/ææ© (shÇujÄ« "hand machine") for cellphone, and èç/èè½ (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. ç¶²èª (wÇng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as æ±å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡å
(hà nbÇo bÄo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as æææº/æææ© (tuÅlÄjÄ«, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马å©å¥¥/馬å©å¥§ for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example å¥è
¾/å¥é¨° (bÄnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and èµç¾å³/è³½ç¾å³ (Sà ibÇiwèi "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 (å製漢èª, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include dià nhuà (çµè¯/é»è©±, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社ä¼, shakai, "society"), kÄxué (ç§å¦/ç§å¸, kagaku, "science") and chÅuxià ng (æ½è±¡, chÅ«shÅ, "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, jÄ«ngjì (ç»æµ/ç¶æ¿, 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 Hokkien and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便å½/ä¾¿ç¶ âlunchbox or boxed lunchâ (from bento) and æç âprepared cuisineâ, have passed into common currency.
With the growing importance and influence of China's economy globally, Mandarin instruction is gaining popularity in schools in the USA, and 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 the English Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660.
* Chinese characters
* Chinese exclamative particles
* Chinese honorifics
* Chinese classifier
* Chinese number gestures
* Chinese numerals
* Chinese punctuation
* Classical Chinese grammar
* Four-character idiom
* Han unification
* Haner language
* HSK test
* Languages of China
* North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics
* Nü shu
*
*
*
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* ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawaiâi Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X.
* ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawaiâi Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-0-8248-2975-9.
* Keys to the Chinese Language: Book IIâGoogle Books
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Chinese_language | 便当/便當 lunchbox or boxed lunch (from bento) and 料理 prepared cuisine are loan words from which language? | Japanese | data/set5/a7 | Chinese_language
Sino-Tibetan language family
The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China and Taiwan
Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) ( ; ; ; or ) is a language family consisting of languages mutually intelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. âThe mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.â
* Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. âThe Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.â
* Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. âThe 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 worldâs 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 some 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), Cantonese (Yue) (70 million) and Min (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 å®è¯ GuÄnhuà or åæ¹è¯ BÄifÄnghuà 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. Chineseâde facto, Standard Mandarinâis 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).
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:
Disputed classifications by some Chinese linguists:
There are also some smaller groups that are not yet classified, such as: Danzhou dialect (åå·è¯), spoken in Danzhou, on Hainan Island; Xianghua (乡è¯), not to be confused with Xiang (æ¹), spoken in western Hunan; and Shaozhou Tuhua (é¶å·åè¯), 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.
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 government intends 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 âdialectsâ) 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 normal 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 (ä¸æ), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (æ±è¯,âspoken language[s] of the Han Chinese)âthis term could be translated to either âlanguageâ or âlanguagesâ 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 è¯ yu and æ 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 oneâalbeit internally very diverseâethnicity. 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 Peopleâs 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 (âregional tonguesâ, often translated as âdialectsâ). 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 dialect.
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 chiÌt and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("ä¸"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as å and ä¿ 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 many formal occasions.
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 earlier 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 æ¥ (sun), shan å±± (mountain), shui æ°´ (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar XÇ Shèn in the Hà n Dynasty classified characters into six categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80â90% 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/æ¥·æ¸ kÇishÅ«) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (ç¯ä¹¦/ç¯æ¸ zhuà nshÅ«), cursive script (è书/èæ¸ cÇoshÅ«) and clerical script (é¶ä¹¦/é¸æ¸ lìshÅ«). 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 community, is the firstâand at present the onlyâforeign 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 Zhou Dynasty (1122 BCEâ256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the ShÄ«jÄ«ng, the history of the ShÅ«jÄ«ng, and portions of the YìjÄ«ng (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 QÄ«ng dynasty philologists.
Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably è mì "honey", ç
shÄ« "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mÇ "horse", ç¬ quÇn "dog", and éµ Ã© "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 âhoney' and âlion,' and probably also âhorse,' âdog,' and âgoose,' 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 Ãbereinstimmungen 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 Southern and Northern Dynasties and the SuÃ, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the åé» "Qièyùn" rime book (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the å»£é» "GuÇngyùn" rime book. 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 SìchuÄn 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 Qing Dynasty. Since the 17th century, the Qing Dynasty had set up orthoepy academies ( ) to make pronunciation conform to the standard of the capital Beijing. For the general population, however, this had limited effect. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The Beijing Mandarin court standard was used solely by officials and civil servants and was thus fairly limited.
This situation did not change until the mid-20th century with the creation (in both the PRC and the ROC, but not in Hong Kong) of a compulsory educational system committed to teaching 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.
Classical Chinese was once the lingua franca in neighbouring East Asian countries such as Japan, Korea and Vietnam for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. *Sheng Ding and Robert A. Saunders, Talking Up China: An Analysis of China's Rising Cultural Power and Global Promotion of the Chinese Language EASTASIA, Summer 2006, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 4
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 tá»±. 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. Approximately 60% of the modern Vietnamese lexicon is recognized as Hán-Viá»t (Sino-Vietnamese), the majority of which was borrowed from Middle Chinese.
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. 251â258.
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, likewise for a significant percentage of Japanese and Vietnamese vocabulary. 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.
Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of è¶ (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Minnan pronunciation of é®æ± (koe-tsiap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of éæ© (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"âhigh level
* "hemp" or "torpid"âhigh rising
* "horse"âlow falling-rising
* "scold"âhigh falling
* "question particle"âneutral
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 Indian translators, working in Sanskrit and Pali, were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of Chinese in a foreign language. After the 15th century, the efforts of Jesuits and Western court missionaries resulted 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 lack of a native 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 (æ¼¢èªæ¼é³/æ±è¯æ¼é³), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, and later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore) and Taiwan. 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 teaching new words. The Pinyin romanization is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, with the Chinese character alongside.
The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859 and modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As this system approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels, i.e. it is an Anglicization, it may be particularly helpful for beginner Chinese speakers of an English-speaking background. Wade-Giles was found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan.
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 BÄijÄ«ng (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é³, 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, å in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cà (è¯/è©), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cà (âwordâ) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more.
For example:
* Yun é²ââcloudâ (traditional)
* Yun äºââcloudâ (simplified)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ¼¢å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡ââhamburgerâ (traditional)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ±å ¡å
/æ±å ¡â"hamburger" (simplified)
* Wo æââI, meâ
* Ren 人ââpeopleâ
* Diqiu å°çââearth (globosity)â
* Shandian éé»ââlightningâ (traditional)
* Shandian éªçµâ"lightning" (simplifed)
* Meng 夢ââdreamâ (traditional)
* Meng 梦â"dream" (simplified)
All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphologyâi.e., changes in form of a wordâto indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflectionsâit possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), and only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English). There is, however, a gender difference in the written language (ä» as "he" and 她 as "she"), but it should be noted that this is a relatively new introduction to the Chinese language in the twentieth century.
They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le äº, hai è¿, yijing å·²ç», 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 classifiers and measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring languages like Japanese and Korean. See Chinese classifiers 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 cà is identified.
The mono-syllable jÄ«, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: é/鸡 chicken, æ©/æº machine, åº basic, æ/å» (to) hit, é¥/饥 hunger, and ç©/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: ååå«åè±ï¼åéµæ±çåï¼è±åçè± MÃngzi jià o JiÄyÄ«ng, JiÄlÃng JiÄng de jiÄ, YÄ«ngguó de yÄ«ng "My name is JiÄyÄ«ng, 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; since most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters, there are many times more Chinese words than there are 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 ä¸ååæµ· (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 æ±è¯å¤§è¯å
¸, 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 ç°ä»£æ±è¯è¯å
¸, 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 è¡è "grape," ç³æ¦´ "pomegranate" and ç®å/ç
å "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including ä½ "Buddha" and è©è¨/è©è© "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as è¡å "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as è¡è "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or PÄli, 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 çµç¶ "pÃpa", the Chinese lute, or é
ª "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è²å (pinyin: yÇsèliè), "Paris" becomes å·´é» (pinyin: bÄlÃ). A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including æ²ç¼ shÄfÄ "sofa," 马达/馬é mÇdá "motor," å¹½é» yÅumò "humor," é»è¾/é輯 luójà "logic," æ¶é«¦/æ髦 shÃmáo "smart, fashionable" and ææ¯åºé xiÄsÄ«dÇlÇ "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, æ²å/æ²ç¼ and 马达/馬é in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor."
Western foreign words have had great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came èè¾ (bÄléi, "ballet"), é¦æ§ (xiÄngbÄ«n, "champagne"), via Italian åå¡ (kÄfÄi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned æ²ç¼ (shÄfÄ "sofa"), å¹½é» (yÅumò "humour"), and é«å°å¤« (gÄoÄrfÅ«, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪æ¯ç§ (dÃsÄ«kè, "disco"), å¯ä¹ (kÄlè, "cola") and è¿·ä½ (mÃnÇ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon å¡é (cartoon), åºä½¬ (gay people), ç士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. ç²çµ² (fÄnsÄ«, "fans"), é§å®¢ (hèikè, "hacker"), é¨è½æ ¼(bùluÅgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin.
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 å¾·å¾é£/å¾·å¾é¢¨ ( Shanghainese: télÃfon , Standard Mandarin: délÇfÄng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese çµè¯/é»è©± (dià nhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include çµè§/é»è¦ (dià nshì "electric vision") for television, çµè/é»è
¦ (dià nnÇo "electric brain") for computer; ææº/ææ© (shÇujÄ« "hand machine") for cellphone, and èç/èè½ (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. ç¶²èª (wÇng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as æ±å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡å
(hà nbÇo bÄo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as æææº/æææ© (tuÅlÄjÄ«, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马å©å¥¥/馬å©å¥§ for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example å¥è
¾/å¥é¨° (bÄnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and èµç¾å³/è³½ç¾å³ (Sà ibÇiwèi "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 (å製漢èª, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include dià nhuà (çµè¯/é»è©±, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社ä¼, shakai, "society"), kÄxué (ç§å¦/ç§å¸, kagaku, "science") and chÅuxià ng (æ½è±¡, chÅ«shÅ, "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, jÄ«ngjì (ç»æµ/ç¶æ¿, 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 Hokkien and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便å½/ä¾¿ç¶ âlunchbox or boxed lunchâ (from bento) and æç âprepared cuisineâ, have passed into common currency.
With the growing importance and influence of China's economy globally, Mandarin instruction is gaining popularity in schools in the USA, and 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 the English Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660.
* Chinese characters
* Chinese exclamative particles
* Chinese honorifics
* Chinese classifier
* Chinese number gestures
* Chinese numerals
* Chinese punctuation
* Classical Chinese grammar
* Four-character idiom
* Han unification
* Haner language
* HSK test
* Languages of China
* North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics
* Nü shu
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*
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* ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawaiâi Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X.
* ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawaiâi Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-0-8248-2975-9.
* Keys to the Chinese Language: Book IIâGoogle Books
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Chinese_language | 便当/便當 lunchbox or boxed lunch (from bento) and 料理 prepared cuisine are loan words from which language? | Chinese | data/set5/a7 | Chinese_language
Sino-Tibetan language family
The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China and Taiwan
Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) ( ; ; ; or ) is a language family consisting of languages mutually intelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. âThe mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.â
* Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. âThe Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.â
* Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. âThe 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 worldâs 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 some 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), Cantonese (Yue) (70 million) and Min (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 å®è¯ GuÄnhuà or åæ¹è¯ BÄifÄnghuà 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. Chineseâde facto, Standard Mandarinâis 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).
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:
Disputed classifications by some Chinese linguists:
There are also some smaller groups that are not yet classified, such as: Danzhou dialect (åå·è¯), spoken in Danzhou, on Hainan Island; Xianghua (乡è¯), not to be confused with Xiang (æ¹), spoken in western Hunan; and Shaozhou Tuhua (é¶å·åè¯), 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.
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 government intends 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 âdialectsâ) 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 normal 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 (ä¸æ), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (æ±è¯,âspoken language[s] of the Han Chinese)âthis term could be translated to either âlanguageâ or âlanguagesâ 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 è¯ yu and æ 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 oneâalbeit internally very diverseâethnicity. 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 Peopleâs 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 (âregional tonguesâ, often translated as âdialectsâ). 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 dialect.
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 chiÌt and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("ä¸"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as å and ä¿ 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 many formal occasions.
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 earlier 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 æ¥ (sun), shan å±± (mountain), shui æ°´ (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar XÇ Shèn in the Hà n Dynasty classified characters into six categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80â90% 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/æ¥·æ¸ kÇishÅ«) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (ç¯ä¹¦/ç¯æ¸ zhuà nshÅ«), cursive script (è书/èæ¸ cÇoshÅ«) and clerical script (é¶ä¹¦/é¸æ¸ lìshÅ«). 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 community, is the firstâand at present the onlyâforeign 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 Zhou Dynasty (1122 BCEâ256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the ShÄ«jÄ«ng, the history of the ShÅ«jÄ«ng, and portions of the YìjÄ«ng (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 QÄ«ng dynasty philologists.
Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably è mì "honey", ç
shÄ« "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mÇ "horse", ç¬ quÇn "dog", and éµ Ã© "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 âhoney' and âlion,' and probably also âhorse,' âdog,' and âgoose,' 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 Ãbereinstimmungen 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 Southern and Northern Dynasties and the SuÃ, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the åé» "Qièyùn" rime book (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the å»£é» "GuÇngyùn" rime book. 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 SìchuÄn 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 Qing Dynasty. Since the 17th century, the Qing Dynasty had set up orthoepy academies ( ) to make pronunciation conform to the standard of the capital Beijing. For the general population, however, this had limited effect. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The Beijing Mandarin court standard was used solely by officials and civil servants and was thus fairly limited.
This situation did not change until the mid-20th century with the creation (in both the PRC and the ROC, but not in Hong Kong) of a compulsory educational system committed to teaching 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.
Classical Chinese was once the lingua franca in neighbouring East Asian countries such as Japan, Korea and Vietnam for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. *Sheng Ding and Robert A. Saunders, Talking Up China: An Analysis of China's Rising Cultural Power and Global Promotion of the Chinese Language EASTASIA, Summer 2006, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 4
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 tá»±. 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. Approximately 60% of the modern Vietnamese lexicon is recognized as Hán-Viá»t (Sino-Vietnamese), the majority of which was borrowed from Middle Chinese.
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. 251â258.
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, likewise for a significant percentage of Japanese and Vietnamese vocabulary. 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.
Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of è¶ (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Minnan pronunciation of é®æ± (koe-tsiap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of éæ© (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"âhigh level
* "hemp" or "torpid"âhigh rising
* "horse"âlow falling-rising
* "scold"âhigh falling
* "question particle"âneutral
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 Indian translators, working in Sanskrit and Pali, were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of Chinese in a foreign language. After the 15th century, the efforts of Jesuits and Western court missionaries resulted 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 lack of a native 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 (æ¼¢èªæ¼é³/æ±è¯æ¼é³), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, and later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore) and Taiwan. 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 teaching new words. The Pinyin romanization is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, with the Chinese character alongside.
The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859 and modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As this system approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels, i.e. it is an Anglicization, it may be particularly helpful for beginner Chinese speakers of an English-speaking background. Wade-Giles was found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan.
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 BÄijÄ«ng (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é³, 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, å in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cà (è¯/è©), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cà (âwordâ) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more.
For example:
* Yun é²ââcloudâ (traditional)
* Yun äºââcloudâ (simplified)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ¼¢å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡ââhamburgerâ (traditional)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ±å ¡å
/æ±å ¡â"hamburger" (simplified)
* Wo æââI, meâ
* Ren 人ââpeopleâ
* Diqiu å°çââearth (globosity)â
* Shandian éé»ââlightningâ (traditional)
* Shandian éªçµâ"lightning" (simplifed)
* Meng 夢ââdreamâ (traditional)
* Meng 梦â"dream" (simplified)
All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphologyâi.e., changes in form of a wordâto indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflectionsâit possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), and only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English). There is, however, a gender difference in the written language (ä» as "he" and 她 as "she"), but it should be noted that this is a relatively new introduction to the Chinese language in the twentieth century.
They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le äº, hai è¿, yijing å·²ç», 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 classifiers and measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring languages like Japanese and Korean. See Chinese classifiers 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 cà is identified.
The mono-syllable jÄ«, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: é/鸡 chicken, æ©/æº machine, åº basic, æ/å» (to) hit, é¥/饥 hunger, and ç©/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: ååå«åè±ï¼åéµæ±çåï¼è±åçè± MÃngzi jià o JiÄyÄ«ng, JiÄlÃng JiÄng de jiÄ, YÄ«ngguó de yÄ«ng "My name is JiÄyÄ«ng, 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; since most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters, there are many times more Chinese words than there are 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 ä¸ååæµ· (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 æ±è¯å¤§è¯å
¸, 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 ç°ä»£æ±è¯è¯å
¸, 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 è¡è "grape," ç³æ¦´ "pomegranate" and ç®å/ç
å "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including ä½ "Buddha" and è©è¨/è©è© "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as è¡å "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as è¡è "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or PÄli, 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 çµç¶ "pÃpa", the Chinese lute, or é
ª "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è²å (pinyin: yÇsèliè), "Paris" becomes å·´é» (pinyin: bÄlÃ). A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including æ²ç¼ shÄfÄ "sofa," 马达/馬é mÇdá "motor," å¹½é» yÅumò "humor," é»è¾/é輯 luójà "logic," æ¶é«¦/æ髦 shÃmáo "smart, fashionable" and ææ¯åºé xiÄsÄ«dÇlÇ "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, æ²å/æ²ç¼ and 马达/馬é in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor."
Western foreign words have had great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came èè¾ (bÄléi, "ballet"), é¦æ§ (xiÄngbÄ«n, "champagne"), via Italian åå¡ (kÄfÄi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned æ²ç¼ (shÄfÄ "sofa"), å¹½é» (yÅumò "humour"), and é«å°å¤« (gÄoÄrfÅ«, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪æ¯ç§ (dÃsÄ«kè, "disco"), å¯ä¹ (kÄlè, "cola") and è¿·ä½ (mÃnÇ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon å¡é (cartoon), åºä½¬ (gay people), ç士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. ç²çµ² (fÄnsÄ«, "fans"), é§å®¢ (hèikè, "hacker"), é¨è½æ ¼(bùluÅgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin.
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 å¾·å¾é£/å¾·å¾é¢¨ ( Shanghainese: télÃfon , Standard Mandarin: délÇfÄng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese çµè¯/é»è©± (dià nhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include çµè§/é»è¦ (dià nshì "electric vision") for television, çµè/é»è
¦ (dià nnÇo "electric brain") for computer; ææº/ææ© (shÇujÄ« "hand machine") for cellphone, and èç/èè½ (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. ç¶²èª (wÇng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as æ±å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡å
(hà nbÇo bÄo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as æææº/æææ© (tuÅlÄjÄ«, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马å©å¥¥/馬å©å¥§ for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example å¥è
¾/å¥é¨° (bÄnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and èµç¾å³/è³½ç¾å³ (Sà ibÇiwèi "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 (å製漢èª, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include dià nhuà (çµè¯/é»è©±, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社ä¼, shakai, "society"), kÄxué (ç§å¦/ç§å¸, kagaku, "science") and chÅuxià ng (æ½è±¡, chÅ«shÅ, "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, jÄ«ngjì (ç»æµ/ç¶æ¿, 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 Hokkien and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便å½/ä¾¿ç¶ âlunchbox or boxed lunchâ (from bento) and æç âprepared cuisineâ, have passed into common currency.
With the growing importance and influence of China's economy globally, Mandarin instruction is gaining popularity in schools in the USA, and 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 the English Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660.
* Chinese characters
* Chinese exclamative particles
* Chinese honorifics
* Chinese classifier
* Chinese number gestures
* Chinese numerals
* Chinese punctuation
* Classical Chinese grammar
* Four-character idiom
* Han unification
* Haner language
* HSK test
* Languages of China
* North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics
* Nü shu
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*
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* ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawaiâi Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X.
* ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawaiâi Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-0-8248-2975-9.
* Keys to the Chinese Language: Book IIâGoogle Books
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Chinese_language | What is the standardized form of spoken chinese? | The standardized form of spoken Chinese is Standard Mandarin. | data/set5/a7 | Chinese_language
Sino-Tibetan language family
The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China and Taiwan
Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) ( ; ; ; or ) is a language family consisting of languages mutually intelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. âThe mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.â
* Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. âThe Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.â
* Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. âThe 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 worldâs 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 some 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), Cantonese (Yue) (70 million) and Min (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 å®è¯ GuÄnhuà or åæ¹è¯ BÄifÄnghuà 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. Chineseâde facto, Standard Mandarinâis 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).
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:
Disputed classifications by some Chinese linguists:
There are also some smaller groups that are not yet classified, such as: Danzhou dialect (åå·è¯), spoken in Danzhou, on Hainan Island; Xianghua (乡è¯), not to be confused with Xiang (æ¹), spoken in western Hunan; and Shaozhou Tuhua (é¶å·åè¯), 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.
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 government intends 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 âdialectsâ) 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 normal 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 (ä¸æ), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (æ±è¯,âspoken language[s] of the Han Chinese)âthis term could be translated to either âlanguageâ or âlanguagesâ 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 è¯ yu and æ 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 oneâalbeit internally very diverseâethnicity. 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 Peopleâs 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 (âregional tonguesâ, often translated as âdialectsâ). 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 dialect.
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 chiÌt and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("ä¸"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as å and ä¿ 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 many formal occasions.
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 earlier 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 æ¥ (sun), shan å±± (mountain), shui æ°´ (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar XÇ Shèn in the Hà n Dynasty classified characters into six categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80â90% 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/æ¥·æ¸ kÇishÅ«) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (ç¯ä¹¦/ç¯æ¸ zhuà nshÅ«), cursive script (è书/èæ¸ cÇoshÅ«) and clerical script (é¶ä¹¦/é¸æ¸ lìshÅ«). 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 community, is the firstâand at present the onlyâforeign 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 Zhou Dynasty (1122 BCEâ256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the ShÄ«jÄ«ng, the history of the ShÅ«jÄ«ng, and portions of the YìjÄ«ng (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 QÄ«ng dynasty philologists.
Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably è mì "honey", ç
shÄ« "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mÇ "horse", ç¬ quÇn "dog", and éµ Ã© "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 âhoney' and âlion,' and probably also âhorse,' âdog,' and âgoose,' 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 Ãbereinstimmungen 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 Southern and Northern Dynasties and the SuÃ, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the åé» "Qièyùn" rime book (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the å»£é» "GuÇngyùn" rime book. 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 SìchuÄn 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 Qing Dynasty. Since the 17th century, the Qing Dynasty had set up orthoepy academies ( ) to make pronunciation conform to the standard of the capital Beijing. For the general population, however, this had limited effect. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The Beijing Mandarin court standard was used solely by officials and civil servants and was thus fairly limited.
This situation did not change until the mid-20th century with the creation (in both the PRC and the ROC, but not in Hong Kong) of a compulsory educational system committed to teaching 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.
Classical Chinese was once the lingua franca in neighbouring East Asian countries such as Japan, Korea and Vietnam for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. *Sheng Ding and Robert A. Saunders, Talking Up China: An Analysis of China's Rising Cultural Power and Global Promotion of the Chinese Language EASTASIA, Summer 2006, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 4
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 tá»±. 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. Approximately 60% of the modern Vietnamese lexicon is recognized as Hán-Viá»t (Sino-Vietnamese), the majority of which was borrowed from Middle Chinese.
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. 251â258.
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, likewise for a significant percentage of Japanese and Vietnamese vocabulary. 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.
Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of è¶ (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Minnan pronunciation of é®æ± (koe-tsiap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of éæ© (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"âhigh level
* "hemp" or "torpid"âhigh rising
* "horse"âlow falling-rising
* "scold"âhigh falling
* "question particle"âneutral
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 Indian translators, working in Sanskrit and Pali, were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of Chinese in a foreign language. After the 15th century, the efforts of Jesuits and Western court missionaries resulted 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 lack of a native 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 (æ¼¢èªæ¼é³/æ±è¯æ¼é³), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, and later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore) and Taiwan. 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 teaching new words. The Pinyin romanization is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, with the Chinese character alongside.
The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859 and modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As this system approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels, i.e. it is an Anglicization, it may be particularly helpful for beginner Chinese speakers of an English-speaking background. Wade-Giles was found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan.
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 BÄijÄ«ng (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é³, 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, å in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cà (è¯/è©), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cà (âwordâ) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more.
For example:
* Yun é²ââcloudâ (traditional)
* Yun äºââcloudâ (simplified)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ¼¢å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡ââhamburgerâ (traditional)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ±å ¡å
/æ±å ¡â"hamburger" (simplified)
* Wo æââI, meâ
* Ren 人ââpeopleâ
* Diqiu å°çââearth (globosity)â
* Shandian éé»ââlightningâ (traditional)
* Shandian éªçµâ"lightning" (simplifed)
* Meng 夢ââdreamâ (traditional)
* Meng 梦â"dream" (simplified)
All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphologyâi.e., changes in form of a wordâto indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflectionsâit possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), and only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English). There is, however, a gender difference in the written language (ä» as "he" and 她 as "she"), but it should be noted that this is a relatively new introduction to the Chinese language in the twentieth century.
They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le äº, hai è¿, yijing å·²ç», 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 classifiers and measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring languages like Japanese and Korean. See Chinese classifiers 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 cà is identified.
The mono-syllable jÄ«, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: é/鸡 chicken, æ©/æº machine, åº basic, æ/å» (to) hit, é¥/饥 hunger, and ç©/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: ååå«åè±ï¼åéµæ±çåï¼è±åçè± MÃngzi jià o JiÄyÄ«ng, JiÄlÃng JiÄng de jiÄ, YÄ«ngguó de yÄ«ng "My name is JiÄyÄ«ng, 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; since most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters, there are many times more Chinese words than there are 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 ä¸ååæµ· (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 æ±è¯å¤§è¯å
¸, 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 ç°ä»£æ±è¯è¯å
¸, 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 è¡è "grape," ç³æ¦´ "pomegranate" and ç®å/ç
å "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including ä½ "Buddha" and è©è¨/è©è© "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as è¡å "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as è¡è "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or PÄli, 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 çµç¶ "pÃpa", the Chinese lute, or é
ª "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è²å (pinyin: yÇsèliè), "Paris" becomes å·´é» (pinyin: bÄlÃ). A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including æ²ç¼ shÄfÄ "sofa," 马达/馬é mÇdá "motor," å¹½é» yÅumò "humor," é»è¾/é輯 luójà "logic," æ¶é«¦/æ髦 shÃmáo "smart, fashionable" and ææ¯åºé xiÄsÄ«dÇlÇ "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, æ²å/æ²ç¼ and 马达/馬é in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor."
Western foreign words have had great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came èè¾ (bÄléi, "ballet"), é¦æ§ (xiÄngbÄ«n, "champagne"), via Italian åå¡ (kÄfÄi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned æ²ç¼ (shÄfÄ "sofa"), å¹½é» (yÅumò "humour"), and é«å°å¤« (gÄoÄrfÅ«, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪æ¯ç§ (dÃsÄ«kè, "disco"), å¯ä¹ (kÄlè, "cola") and è¿·ä½ (mÃnÇ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon å¡é (cartoon), åºä½¬ (gay people), ç士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. ç²çµ² (fÄnsÄ«, "fans"), é§å®¢ (hèikè, "hacker"), é¨è½æ ¼(bùluÅgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin.
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 å¾·å¾é£/å¾·å¾é¢¨ ( Shanghainese: télÃfon , Standard Mandarin: délÇfÄng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese çµè¯/é»è©± (dià nhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include çµè§/é»è¦ (dià nshì "electric vision") for television, çµè/é»è
¦ (dià nnÇo "electric brain") for computer; ææº/ææ© (shÇujÄ« "hand machine") for cellphone, and èç/èè½ (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. ç¶²èª (wÇng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as æ±å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡å
(hà nbÇo bÄo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as æææº/æææ© (tuÅlÄjÄ«, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马å©å¥¥/馬å©å¥§ for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example å¥è
¾/å¥é¨° (bÄnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and èµç¾å³/è³½ç¾å³ (Sà ibÇiwèi "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 (å製漢èª, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include dià nhuà (çµè¯/é»è©±, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社ä¼, shakai, "society"), kÄxué (ç§å¦/ç§å¸, kagaku, "science") and chÅuxià ng (æ½è±¡, chÅ«shÅ, "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, jÄ«ngjì (ç»æµ/ç¶æ¿, 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 Hokkien and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便å½/ä¾¿ç¶ âlunchbox or boxed lunchâ (from bento) and æç âprepared cuisineâ, have passed into common currency.
With the growing importance and influence of China's economy globally, Mandarin instruction is gaining popularity in schools in the USA, and 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 the English Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660.
* Chinese characters
* Chinese exclamative particles
* Chinese honorifics
* Chinese classifier
* Chinese number gestures
* Chinese numerals
* Chinese punctuation
* Classical Chinese grammar
* Four-character idiom
* Han unification
* Haner language
* HSK test
* Languages of China
* North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics
* Nü shu
*
*
*
*
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* ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawaiâi Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X.
* ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawaiâi Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-0-8248-2975-9.
* Keys to the Chinese Language: Book IIâGoogle Books
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Chinese_language | What is the standardized form of spoken chinese? | The standardized from of spoken Chinese is Standard Mandarin. | data/set5/a7 | Chinese_language
Sino-Tibetan language family
The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China and Taiwan
Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) ( ; ; ; or ) is a language family consisting of languages mutually intelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. âThe mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.â
* Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. âThe Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.â
* Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. âThe 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 worldâs 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 some 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), Cantonese (Yue) (70 million) and Min (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 å®è¯ GuÄnhuà or åæ¹è¯ BÄifÄnghuà 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. Chineseâde facto, Standard Mandarinâis 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).
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:
Disputed classifications by some Chinese linguists:
There are also some smaller groups that are not yet classified, such as: Danzhou dialect (åå·è¯), spoken in Danzhou, on Hainan Island; Xianghua (乡è¯), not to be confused with Xiang (æ¹), spoken in western Hunan; and Shaozhou Tuhua (é¶å·åè¯), 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.
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 government intends 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 âdialectsâ) 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 normal 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 (ä¸æ), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (æ±è¯,âspoken language[s] of the Han Chinese)âthis term could be translated to either âlanguageâ or âlanguagesâ 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 è¯ yu and æ 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 oneâalbeit internally very diverseâethnicity. 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 Peopleâs 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 (âregional tonguesâ, often translated as âdialectsâ). 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 dialect.
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 chiÌt and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("ä¸"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as å and ä¿ 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 many formal occasions.
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 earlier 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 æ¥ (sun), shan å±± (mountain), shui æ°´ (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar XÇ Shèn in the Hà n Dynasty classified characters into six categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80â90% 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/æ¥·æ¸ kÇishÅ«) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (ç¯ä¹¦/ç¯æ¸ zhuà nshÅ«), cursive script (è书/èæ¸ cÇoshÅ«) and clerical script (é¶ä¹¦/é¸æ¸ lìshÅ«). 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 community, is the firstâand at present the onlyâforeign 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 Zhou Dynasty (1122 BCEâ256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the ShÄ«jÄ«ng, the history of the ShÅ«jÄ«ng, and portions of the YìjÄ«ng (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 QÄ«ng dynasty philologists.
Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably è mì "honey", ç
shÄ« "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mÇ "horse", ç¬ quÇn "dog", and éµ Ã© "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 âhoney' and âlion,' and probably also âhorse,' âdog,' and âgoose,' 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 Ãbereinstimmungen 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 Southern and Northern Dynasties and the SuÃ, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the åé» "Qièyùn" rime book (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the å»£é» "GuÇngyùn" rime book. 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 SìchuÄn 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 Qing Dynasty. Since the 17th century, the Qing Dynasty had set up orthoepy academies ( ) to make pronunciation conform to the standard of the capital Beijing. For the general population, however, this had limited effect. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The Beijing Mandarin court standard was used solely by officials and civil servants and was thus fairly limited.
This situation did not change until the mid-20th century with the creation (in both the PRC and the ROC, but not in Hong Kong) of a compulsory educational system committed to teaching 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.
Classical Chinese was once the lingua franca in neighbouring East Asian countries such as Japan, Korea and Vietnam for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. *Sheng Ding and Robert A. Saunders, Talking Up China: An Analysis of China's Rising Cultural Power and Global Promotion of the Chinese Language EASTASIA, Summer 2006, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 4
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 tá»±. 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. Approximately 60% of the modern Vietnamese lexicon is recognized as Hán-Viá»t (Sino-Vietnamese), the majority of which was borrowed from Middle Chinese.
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. 251â258.
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, likewise for a significant percentage of Japanese and Vietnamese vocabulary. 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.
Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of è¶ (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Minnan pronunciation of é®æ± (koe-tsiap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of éæ© (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"âhigh level
* "hemp" or "torpid"âhigh rising
* "horse"âlow falling-rising
* "scold"âhigh falling
* "question particle"âneutral
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 Indian translators, working in Sanskrit and Pali, were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of Chinese in a foreign language. After the 15th century, the efforts of Jesuits and Western court missionaries resulted 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 lack of a native 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 (æ¼¢èªæ¼é³/æ±è¯æ¼é³), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, and later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore) and Taiwan. 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 teaching new words. The Pinyin romanization is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, with the Chinese character alongside.
The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859 and modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As this system approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels, i.e. it is an Anglicization, it may be particularly helpful for beginner Chinese speakers of an English-speaking background. Wade-Giles was found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan.
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 BÄijÄ«ng (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é³, 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, å in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cà (è¯/è©), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cà (âwordâ) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more.
For example:
* Yun é²ââcloudâ (traditional)
* Yun äºââcloudâ (simplified)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ¼¢å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡ââhamburgerâ (traditional)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ±å ¡å
/æ±å ¡â"hamburger" (simplified)
* Wo æââI, meâ
* Ren 人ââpeopleâ
* Diqiu å°çââearth (globosity)â
* Shandian éé»ââlightningâ (traditional)
* Shandian éªçµâ"lightning" (simplifed)
* Meng 夢ââdreamâ (traditional)
* Meng 梦â"dream" (simplified)
All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphologyâi.e., changes in form of a wordâto indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflectionsâit possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), and only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English). There is, however, a gender difference in the written language (ä» as "he" and 她 as "she"), but it should be noted that this is a relatively new introduction to the Chinese language in the twentieth century.
They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le äº, hai è¿, yijing å·²ç», 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 classifiers and measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring languages like Japanese and Korean. See Chinese classifiers 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 cà is identified.
The mono-syllable jÄ«, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: é/鸡 chicken, æ©/æº machine, åº basic, æ/å» (to) hit, é¥/饥 hunger, and ç©/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: ååå«åè±ï¼åéµæ±çåï¼è±åçè± MÃngzi jià o JiÄyÄ«ng, JiÄlÃng JiÄng de jiÄ, YÄ«ngguó de yÄ«ng "My name is JiÄyÄ«ng, 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; since most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters, there are many times more Chinese words than there are 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 ä¸ååæµ· (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 æ±è¯å¤§è¯å
¸, 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 ç°ä»£æ±è¯è¯å
¸, 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 è¡è "grape," ç³æ¦´ "pomegranate" and ç®å/ç
å "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including ä½ "Buddha" and è©è¨/è©è© "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as è¡å "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as è¡è "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or PÄli, 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 çµç¶ "pÃpa", the Chinese lute, or é
ª "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è²å (pinyin: yÇsèliè), "Paris" becomes å·´é» (pinyin: bÄlÃ). A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including æ²ç¼ shÄfÄ "sofa," 马达/馬é mÇdá "motor," å¹½é» yÅumò "humor," é»è¾/é輯 luójà "logic," æ¶é«¦/æ髦 shÃmáo "smart, fashionable" and ææ¯åºé xiÄsÄ«dÇlÇ "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, æ²å/æ²ç¼ and 马达/馬é in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor."
Western foreign words have had great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came èè¾ (bÄléi, "ballet"), é¦æ§ (xiÄngbÄ«n, "champagne"), via Italian åå¡ (kÄfÄi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned æ²ç¼ (shÄfÄ "sofa"), å¹½é» (yÅumò "humour"), and é«å°å¤« (gÄoÄrfÅ«, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪æ¯ç§ (dÃsÄ«kè, "disco"), å¯ä¹ (kÄlè, "cola") and è¿·ä½ (mÃnÇ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon å¡é (cartoon), åºä½¬ (gay people), ç士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. ç²çµ² (fÄnsÄ«, "fans"), é§å®¢ (hèikè, "hacker"), é¨è½æ ¼(bùluÅgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin.
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 å¾·å¾é£/å¾·å¾é¢¨ ( Shanghainese: télÃfon , Standard Mandarin: délÇfÄng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese çµè¯/é»è©± (dià nhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include çµè§/é»è¦ (dià nshì "electric vision") for television, çµè/é»è
¦ (dià nnÇo "electric brain") for computer; ææº/ææ© (shÇujÄ« "hand machine") for cellphone, and èç/èè½ (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. ç¶²èª (wÇng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as æ±å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡å
(hà nbÇo bÄo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as æææº/æææ© (tuÅlÄjÄ«, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马å©å¥¥/馬å©å¥§ for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example å¥è
¾/å¥é¨° (bÄnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and èµç¾å³/è³½ç¾å³ (Sà ibÇiwèi "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 (å製漢èª, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include dià nhuà (çµè¯/é»è©±, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社ä¼, shakai, "society"), kÄxué (ç§å¦/ç§å¸, kagaku, "science") and chÅuxià ng (æ½è±¡, chÅ«shÅ, "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, jÄ«ngjì (ç»æµ/ç¶æ¿, 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 Hokkien and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便å½/ä¾¿ç¶ âlunchbox or boxed lunchâ (from bento) and æç âprepared cuisineâ, have passed into common currency.
With the growing importance and influence of China's economy globally, Mandarin instruction is gaining popularity in schools in the USA, and 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 the English Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660.
* Chinese characters
* Chinese exclamative particles
* Chinese honorifics
* Chinese classifier
* Chinese number gestures
* Chinese numerals
* Chinese punctuation
* Classical Chinese grammar
* Four-character idiom
* Han unification
* Haner language
* HSK test
* Languages of China
* North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics
* Nü shu
*
*
*
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* ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawaiâi Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X.
* ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawaiâi Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-0-8248-2975-9.
* Keys to the Chinese Language: Book IIâGoogle Books
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Chinese_language | Is diglossia a common feature in mainland China and Taiwan? | Yes, diglossia is a common feature in mainland China and Taiwan. | data/set5/a7 | Chinese_language
Sino-Tibetan language family
The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China and Taiwan
Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) ( ; ; ; or ) is a language family consisting of languages mutually intelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. âThe mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.â
* Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. âThe Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.â
* Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. âThe 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 worldâs 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 some 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), Cantonese (Yue) (70 million) and Min (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 å®è¯ GuÄnhuà or åæ¹è¯ BÄifÄnghuà 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. Chineseâde facto, Standard Mandarinâis 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).
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:
Disputed classifications by some Chinese linguists:
There are also some smaller groups that are not yet classified, such as: Danzhou dialect (åå·è¯), spoken in Danzhou, on Hainan Island; Xianghua (乡è¯), not to be confused with Xiang (æ¹), spoken in western Hunan; and Shaozhou Tuhua (é¶å·åè¯), 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.
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 government intends 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 âdialectsâ) 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 normal 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 (ä¸æ), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (æ±è¯,âspoken language[s] of the Han Chinese)âthis term could be translated to either âlanguageâ or âlanguagesâ 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 è¯ yu and æ 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 oneâalbeit internally very diverseâethnicity. 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 Peopleâs 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 (âregional tonguesâ, often translated as âdialectsâ). 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 dialect.
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 chiÌt and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("ä¸"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as å and ä¿ 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 many formal occasions.
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 earlier 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 æ¥ (sun), shan å±± (mountain), shui æ°´ (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar XÇ Shèn in the Hà n Dynasty classified characters into six categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80â90% 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/æ¥·æ¸ kÇishÅ«) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (ç¯ä¹¦/ç¯æ¸ zhuà nshÅ«), cursive script (è书/èæ¸ cÇoshÅ«) and clerical script (é¶ä¹¦/é¸æ¸ lìshÅ«). 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 community, is the firstâand at present the onlyâforeign 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 Zhou Dynasty (1122 BCEâ256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the ShÄ«jÄ«ng, the history of the ShÅ«jÄ«ng, and portions of the YìjÄ«ng (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 QÄ«ng dynasty philologists.
Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably è mì "honey", ç
shÄ« "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mÇ "horse", ç¬ quÇn "dog", and éµ Ã© "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 âhoney' and âlion,' and probably also âhorse,' âdog,' and âgoose,' 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 Ãbereinstimmungen 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 Southern and Northern Dynasties and the SuÃ, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the åé» "Qièyùn" rime book (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the å»£é» "GuÇngyùn" rime book. 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 SìchuÄn 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 Qing Dynasty. Since the 17th century, the Qing Dynasty had set up orthoepy academies ( ) to make pronunciation conform to the standard of the capital Beijing. For the general population, however, this had limited effect. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The Beijing Mandarin court standard was used solely by officials and civil servants and was thus fairly limited.
This situation did not change until the mid-20th century with the creation (in both the PRC and the ROC, but not in Hong Kong) of a compulsory educational system committed to teaching 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.
Classical Chinese was once the lingua franca in neighbouring East Asian countries such as Japan, Korea and Vietnam for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. *Sheng Ding and Robert A. Saunders, Talking Up China: An Analysis of China's Rising Cultural Power and Global Promotion of the Chinese Language EASTASIA, Summer 2006, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 4
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 tá»±. 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. Approximately 60% of the modern Vietnamese lexicon is recognized as Hán-Viá»t (Sino-Vietnamese), the majority of which was borrowed from Middle Chinese.
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. 251â258.
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, likewise for a significant percentage of Japanese and Vietnamese vocabulary. 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.
Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of è¶ (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Minnan pronunciation of é®æ± (koe-tsiap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of éæ© (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"âhigh level
* "hemp" or "torpid"âhigh rising
* "horse"âlow falling-rising
* "scold"âhigh falling
* "question particle"âneutral
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 Indian translators, working in Sanskrit and Pali, were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of Chinese in a foreign language. After the 15th century, the efforts of Jesuits and Western court missionaries resulted 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 lack of a native 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 (æ¼¢èªæ¼é³/æ±è¯æ¼é³), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, and later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore) and Taiwan. 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 teaching new words. The Pinyin romanization is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, with the Chinese character alongside.
The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859 and modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As this system approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels, i.e. it is an Anglicization, it may be particularly helpful for beginner Chinese speakers of an English-speaking background. Wade-Giles was found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan.
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 BÄijÄ«ng (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é³, 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, å in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cà (è¯/è©), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cà (âwordâ) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more.
For example:
* Yun é²ââcloudâ (traditional)
* Yun äºââcloudâ (simplified)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ¼¢å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡ââhamburgerâ (traditional)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ±å ¡å
/æ±å ¡â"hamburger" (simplified)
* Wo æââI, meâ
* Ren 人ââpeopleâ
* Diqiu å°çââearth (globosity)â
* Shandian éé»ââlightningâ (traditional)
* Shandian éªçµâ"lightning" (simplifed)
* Meng 夢ââdreamâ (traditional)
* Meng 梦â"dream" (simplified)
All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphologyâi.e., changes in form of a wordâto indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflectionsâit possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), and only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English). There is, however, a gender difference in the written language (ä» as "he" and 她 as "she"), but it should be noted that this is a relatively new introduction to the Chinese language in the twentieth century.
They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le äº, hai è¿, yijing å·²ç», 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 classifiers and measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring languages like Japanese and Korean. See Chinese classifiers 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 cà is identified.
The mono-syllable jÄ«, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: é/鸡 chicken, æ©/æº machine, åº basic, æ/å» (to) hit, é¥/饥 hunger, and ç©/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: ååå«åè±ï¼åéµæ±çåï¼è±åçè± MÃngzi jià o JiÄyÄ«ng, JiÄlÃng JiÄng de jiÄ, YÄ«ngguó de yÄ«ng "My name is JiÄyÄ«ng, 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; since most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters, there are many times more Chinese words than there are 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 ä¸ååæµ· (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 æ±è¯å¤§è¯å
¸, 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 ç°ä»£æ±è¯è¯å
¸, 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 è¡è "grape," ç³æ¦´ "pomegranate" and ç®å/ç
å "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including ä½ "Buddha" and è©è¨/è©è© "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as è¡å "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as è¡è "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or PÄli, 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 çµç¶ "pÃpa", the Chinese lute, or é
ª "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è²å (pinyin: yÇsèliè), "Paris" becomes å·´é» (pinyin: bÄlÃ). A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including æ²ç¼ shÄfÄ "sofa," 马达/馬é mÇdá "motor," å¹½é» yÅumò "humor," é»è¾/é輯 luójà "logic," æ¶é«¦/æ髦 shÃmáo "smart, fashionable" and ææ¯åºé xiÄsÄ«dÇlÇ "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, æ²å/æ²ç¼ and 马达/馬é in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor."
Western foreign words have had great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came èè¾ (bÄléi, "ballet"), é¦æ§ (xiÄngbÄ«n, "champagne"), via Italian åå¡ (kÄfÄi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned æ²ç¼ (shÄfÄ "sofa"), å¹½é» (yÅumò "humour"), and é«å°å¤« (gÄoÄrfÅ«, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪æ¯ç§ (dÃsÄ«kè, "disco"), å¯ä¹ (kÄlè, "cola") and è¿·ä½ (mÃnÇ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon å¡é (cartoon), åºä½¬ (gay people), ç士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. ç²çµ² (fÄnsÄ«, "fans"), é§å®¢ (hèikè, "hacker"), é¨è½æ ¼(bùluÅgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin.
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 å¾·å¾é£/å¾·å¾é¢¨ ( Shanghainese: télÃfon , Standard Mandarin: délÇfÄng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese çµè¯/é»è©± (dià nhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include çµè§/é»è¦ (dià nshì "electric vision") for television, çµè/é»è
¦ (dià nnÇo "electric brain") for computer; ææº/ææ© (shÇujÄ« "hand machine") for cellphone, and èç/èè½ (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. ç¶²èª (wÇng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as æ±å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡å
(hà nbÇo bÄo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as æææº/æææ© (tuÅlÄjÄ«, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马å©å¥¥/馬å©å¥§ for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example å¥è
¾/å¥é¨° (bÄnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and èµç¾å³/è³½ç¾å³ (Sà ibÇiwèi "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 (å製漢èª, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include dià nhuà (çµè¯/é»è©±, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社ä¼, shakai, "society"), kÄxué (ç§å¦/ç§å¸, kagaku, "science") and chÅuxià ng (æ½è±¡, chÅ«shÅ, "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, jÄ«ngjì (ç»æµ/ç¶æ¿, 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 Hokkien and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便å½/ä¾¿ç¶ âlunchbox or boxed lunchâ (from bento) and æç âprepared cuisineâ, have passed into common currency.
With the growing importance and influence of China's economy globally, Mandarin instruction is gaining popularity in schools in the USA, and 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 the English Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660.
* Chinese characters
* Chinese exclamative particles
* Chinese honorifics
* Chinese classifier
* Chinese number gestures
* Chinese numerals
* Chinese punctuation
* Classical Chinese grammar
* Four-character idiom
* Han unification
* Haner language
* HSK test
* Languages of China
* North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics
* Nü shu
*
*
*
*
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* ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawaiâi Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X.
* ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawaiâi Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-0-8248-2975-9.
* Keys to the Chinese Language: Book IIâGoogle Books
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Chinese_language | Is diglossia a common feature in mainland China and Taiwan? | Yes, diglossia is a common feature in mainland China and Taiwan. | data/set5/a7 | Chinese_language
Sino-Tibetan language family
The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China and Taiwan
Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) ( ; ; ; or ) is a language family consisting of languages mutually intelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. âThe mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.â
* Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. âThe Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.â
* Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. âThe 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 worldâs 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 some 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), Cantonese (Yue) (70 million) and Min (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 å®è¯ GuÄnhuà or åæ¹è¯ BÄifÄnghuà 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. Chineseâde facto, Standard Mandarinâis 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).
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:
Disputed classifications by some Chinese linguists:
There are also some smaller groups that are not yet classified, such as: Danzhou dialect (åå·è¯), spoken in Danzhou, on Hainan Island; Xianghua (乡è¯), not to be confused with Xiang (æ¹), spoken in western Hunan; and Shaozhou Tuhua (é¶å·åè¯), 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.
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 government intends 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 âdialectsâ) 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 normal 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 (ä¸æ), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (æ±è¯,âspoken language[s] of the Han Chinese)âthis term could be translated to either âlanguageâ or âlanguagesâ 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 è¯ yu and æ 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 oneâalbeit internally very diverseâethnicity. 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 Peopleâs 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 (âregional tonguesâ, often translated as âdialectsâ). 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 dialect.
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 chiÌt and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("ä¸"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as å and ä¿ 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 many formal occasions.
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 earlier 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 æ¥ (sun), shan å±± (mountain), shui æ°´ (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar XÇ Shèn in the Hà n Dynasty classified characters into six categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80â90% 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/æ¥·æ¸ kÇishÅ«) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (ç¯ä¹¦/ç¯æ¸ zhuà nshÅ«), cursive script (è书/èæ¸ cÇoshÅ«) and clerical script (é¶ä¹¦/é¸æ¸ lìshÅ«). 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 community, is the firstâand at present the onlyâforeign 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 Zhou Dynasty (1122 BCEâ256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the ShÄ«jÄ«ng, the history of the ShÅ«jÄ«ng, and portions of the YìjÄ«ng (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 QÄ«ng dynasty philologists.
Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably è mì "honey", ç
shÄ« "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mÇ "horse", ç¬ quÇn "dog", and éµ Ã© "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 âhoney' and âlion,' and probably also âhorse,' âdog,' and âgoose,' 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 Ãbereinstimmungen 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 Southern and Northern Dynasties and the SuÃ, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the åé» "Qièyùn" rime book (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the å»£é» "GuÇngyùn" rime book. 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 SìchuÄn 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 Qing Dynasty. Since the 17th century, the Qing Dynasty had set up orthoepy academies ( ) to make pronunciation conform to the standard of the capital Beijing. For the general population, however, this had limited effect. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The Beijing Mandarin court standard was used solely by officials and civil servants and was thus fairly limited.
This situation did not change until the mid-20th century with the creation (in both the PRC and the ROC, but not in Hong Kong) of a compulsory educational system committed to teaching 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.
Classical Chinese was once the lingua franca in neighbouring East Asian countries such as Japan, Korea and Vietnam for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. *Sheng Ding and Robert A. Saunders, Talking Up China: An Analysis of China's Rising Cultural Power and Global Promotion of the Chinese Language EASTASIA, Summer 2006, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 4
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 tá»±. 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. Approximately 60% of the modern Vietnamese lexicon is recognized as Hán-Viá»t (Sino-Vietnamese), the majority of which was borrowed from Middle Chinese.
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. 251â258.
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, likewise for a significant percentage of Japanese and Vietnamese vocabulary. 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.
Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of è¶ (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Minnan pronunciation of é®æ± (koe-tsiap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of éæ© (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"âhigh level
* "hemp" or "torpid"âhigh rising
* "horse"âlow falling-rising
* "scold"âhigh falling
* "question particle"âneutral
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 Indian translators, working in Sanskrit and Pali, were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of Chinese in a foreign language. After the 15th century, the efforts of Jesuits and Western court missionaries resulted 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 lack of a native 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 (æ¼¢èªæ¼é³/æ±è¯æ¼é³), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, and later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore) and Taiwan. 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 teaching new words. The Pinyin romanization is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, with the Chinese character alongside.
The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859 and modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As this system approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels, i.e. it is an Anglicization, it may be particularly helpful for beginner Chinese speakers of an English-speaking background. Wade-Giles was found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan.
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 BÄijÄ«ng (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é³, 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, å in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cà (è¯/è©), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cà (âwordâ) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more.
For example:
* Yun é²ââcloudâ (traditional)
* Yun äºââcloudâ (simplified)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ¼¢å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡ââhamburgerâ (traditional)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ±å ¡å
/æ±å ¡â"hamburger" (simplified)
* Wo æââI, meâ
* Ren 人ââpeopleâ
* Diqiu å°çââearth (globosity)â
* Shandian éé»ââlightningâ (traditional)
* Shandian éªçµâ"lightning" (simplifed)
* Meng 夢ââdreamâ (traditional)
* Meng 梦â"dream" (simplified)
All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphologyâi.e., changes in form of a wordâto indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflectionsâit possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), and only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English). There is, however, a gender difference in the written language (ä» as "he" and 她 as "she"), but it should be noted that this is a relatively new introduction to the Chinese language in the twentieth century.
They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le äº, hai è¿, yijing å·²ç», 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 classifiers and measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring languages like Japanese and Korean. See Chinese classifiers 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 cà is identified.
The mono-syllable jÄ«, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: é/鸡 chicken, æ©/æº machine, åº basic, æ/å» (to) hit, é¥/饥 hunger, and ç©/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: ååå«åè±ï¼åéµæ±çåï¼è±åçè± MÃngzi jià o JiÄyÄ«ng, JiÄlÃng JiÄng de jiÄ, YÄ«ngguó de yÄ«ng "My name is JiÄyÄ«ng, 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; since most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters, there are many times more Chinese words than there are 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 ä¸ååæµ· (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 æ±è¯å¤§è¯å
¸, 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 ç°ä»£æ±è¯è¯å
¸, 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 è¡è "grape," ç³æ¦´ "pomegranate" and ç®å/ç
å "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including ä½ "Buddha" and è©è¨/è©è© "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as è¡å "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as è¡è "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or PÄli, 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 çµç¶ "pÃpa", the Chinese lute, or é
ª "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è²å (pinyin: yÇsèliè), "Paris" becomes å·´é» (pinyin: bÄlÃ). A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including æ²ç¼ shÄfÄ "sofa," 马达/馬é mÇdá "motor," å¹½é» yÅumò "humor," é»è¾/é輯 luójà "logic," æ¶é«¦/æ髦 shÃmáo "smart, fashionable" and ææ¯åºé xiÄsÄ«dÇlÇ "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, æ²å/æ²ç¼ and 马达/馬é in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor."
Western foreign words have had great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came èè¾ (bÄléi, "ballet"), é¦æ§ (xiÄngbÄ«n, "champagne"), via Italian åå¡ (kÄfÄi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned æ²ç¼ (shÄfÄ "sofa"), å¹½é» (yÅumò "humour"), and é«å°å¤« (gÄoÄrfÅ«, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪æ¯ç§ (dÃsÄ«kè, "disco"), å¯ä¹ (kÄlè, "cola") and è¿·ä½ (mÃnÇ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon å¡é (cartoon), åºä½¬ (gay people), ç士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. ç²çµ² (fÄnsÄ«, "fans"), é§å®¢ (hèikè, "hacker"), é¨è½æ ¼(bùluÅgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin.
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 å¾·å¾é£/å¾·å¾é¢¨ ( Shanghainese: télÃfon , Standard Mandarin: délÇfÄng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese çµè¯/é»è©± (dià nhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include çµè§/é»è¦ (dià nshì "electric vision") for television, çµè/é»è
¦ (dià nnÇo "electric brain") for computer; ææº/ææ© (shÇujÄ« "hand machine") for cellphone, and èç/èè½ (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. ç¶²èª (wÇng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as æ±å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡å
(hà nbÇo bÄo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as æææº/æææ© (tuÅlÄjÄ«, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马å©å¥¥/馬å©å¥§ for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example å¥è
¾/å¥é¨° (bÄnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and èµç¾å³/è³½ç¾å³ (Sà ibÇiwèi "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 (å製漢èª, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include dià nhuà (çµè¯/é»è©±, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社ä¼, shakai, "society"), kÄxué (ç§å¦/ç§å¸, kagaku, "science") and chÅuxià ng (æ½è±¡, chÅ«shÅ, "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, jÄ«ngjì (ç»æµ/ç¶æ¿, 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 Hokkien and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便å½/ä¾¿ç¶ âlunchbox or boxed lunchâ (from bento) and æç âprepared cuisineâ, have passed into common currency.
With the growing importance and influence of China's economy globally, Mandarin instruction is gaining popularity in schools in the USA, and 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 the English Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660.
* Chinese characters
* Chinese exclamative particles
* Chinese honorifics
* Chinese classifier
* Chinese number gestures
* Chinese numerals
* Chinese punctuation
* Classical Chinese grammar
* Four-character idiom
* Han unification
* Haner language
* HSK test
* Languages of China
* North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics
* Nü shu
*
*
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* ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawaiâi Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X.
* ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawaiâi Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-0-8248-2975-9.
* Keys to the Chinese Language: Book IIâGoogle Books
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Chinese_language | Do linguists often view Chinese as a language family? | Yes, linguists often view Chinese as a language family. | data/set5/a7 | Chinese_language
Sino-Tibetan language family
The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China and Taiwan
Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) ( ; ; ; or ) is a language family consisting of languages mutually intelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. âThe mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.â
* Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. âThe Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.â
* Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. âThe 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 worldâs 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 some 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), Cantonese (Yue) (70 million) and Min (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 å®è¯ GuÄnhuà or åæ¹è¯ BÄifÄnghuà 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. Chineseâde facto, Standard Mandarinâis 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).
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:
Disputed classifications by some Chinese linguists:
There are also some smaller groups that are not yet classified, such as: Danzhou dialect (åå·è¯), spoken in Danzhou, on Hainan Island; Xianghua (乡è¯), not to be confused with Xiang (æ¹), spoken in western Hunan; and Shaozhou Tuhua (é¶å·åè¯), 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.
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 government intends 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 âdialectsâ) 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 normal 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 (ä¸æ), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (æ±è¯,âspoken language[s] of the Han Chinese)âthis term could be translated to either âlanguageâ or âlanguagesâ 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 è¯ yu and æ 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 oneâalbeit internally very diverseâethnicity. 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 Peopleâs 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 (âregional tonguesâ, often translated as âdialectsâ). 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 dialect.
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 chiÌt and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("ä¸"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as å and ä¿ 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 many formal occasions.
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 earlier 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 æ¥ (sun), shan å±± (mountain), shui æ°´ (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar XÇ Shèn in the Hà n Dynasty classified characters into six categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80â90% 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/æ¥·æ¸ kÇishÅ«) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (ç¯ä¹¦/ç¯æ¸ zhuà nshÅ«), cursive script (è书/èæ¸ cÇoshÅ«) and clerical script (é¶ä¹¦/é¸æ¸ lìshÅ«). 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 community, is the firstâand at present the onlyâforeign 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 Zhou Dynasty (1122 BCEâ256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the ShÄ«jÄ«ng, the history of the ShÅ«jÄ«ng, and portions of the YìjÄ«ng (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 QÄ«ng dynasty philologists.
Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably è mì "honey", ç
shÄ« "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mÇ "horse", ç¬ quÇn "dog", and éµ Ã© "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 âhoney' and âlion,' and probably also âhorse,' âdog,' and âgoose,' 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 Ãbereinstimmungen 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 Southern and Northern Dynasties and the SuÃ, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the åé» "Qièyùn" rime book (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the å»£é» "GuÇngyùn" rime book. 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 SìchuÄn 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 Qing Dynasty. Since the 17th century, the Qing Dynasty had set up orthoepy academies ( ) to make pronunciation conform to the standard of the capital Beijing. For the general population, however, this had limited effect. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The Beijing Mandarin court standard was used solely by officials and civil servants and was thus fairly limited.
This situation did not change until the mid-20th century with the creation (in both the PRC and the ROC, but not in Hong Kong) of a compulsory educational system committed to teaching 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.
Classical Chinese was once the lingua franca in neighbouring East Asian countries such as Japan, Korea and Vietnam for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. *Sheng Ding and Robert A. Saunders, Talking Up China: An Analysis of China's Rising Cultural Power and Global Promotion of the Chinese Language EASTASIA, Summer 2006, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 4
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 tá»±. 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. Approximately 60% of the modern Vietnamese lexicon is recognized as Hán-Viá»t (Sino-Vietnamese), the majority of which was borrowed from Middle Chinese.
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. 251â258.
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, likewise for a significant percentage of Japanese and Vietnamese vocabulary. 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.
Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of è¶ (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Minnan pronunciation of é®æ± (koe-tsiap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of éæ© (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"âhigh level
* "hemp" or "torpid"âhigh rising
* "horse"âlow falling-rising
* "scold"âhigh falling
* "question particle"âneutral
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 Indian translators, working in Sanskrit and Pali, were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of Chinese in a foreign language. After the 15th century, the efforts of Jesuits and Western court missionaries resulted 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 lack of a native 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 (æ¼¢èªæ¼é³/æ±è¯æ¼é³), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, and later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore) and Taiwan. 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 teaching new words. The Pinyin romanization is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, with the Chinese character alongside.
The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859 and modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As this system approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels, i.e. it is an Anglicization, it may be particularly helpful for beginner Chinese speakers of an English-speaking background. Wade-Giles was found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan.
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 BÄijÄ«ng (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é³, 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, å in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cà (è¯/è©), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cà (âwordâ) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more.
For example:
* Yun é²ââcloudâ (traditional)
* Yun äºââcloudâ (simplified)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ¼¢å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡ââhamburgerâ (traditional)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ±å ¡å
/æ±å ¡â"hamburger" (simplified)
* Wo æââI, meâ
* Ren 人ââpeopleâ
* Diqiu å°çââearth (globosity)â
* Shandian éé»ââlightningâ (traditional)
* Shandian éªçµâ"lightning" (simplifed)
* Meng 夢ââdreamâ (traditional)
* Meng 梦â"dream" (simplified)
All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphologyâi.e., changes in form of a wordâto indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflectionsâit possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), and only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English). There is, however, a gender difference in the written language (ä» as "he" and 她 as "she"), but it should be noted that this is a relatively new introduction to the Chinese language in the twentieth century.
They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le äº, hai è¿, yijing å·²ç», 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 classifiers and measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring languages like Japanese and Korean. See Chinese classifiers 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 cà is identified.
The mono-syllable jÄ«, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: é/鸡 chicken, æ©/æº machine, åº basic, æ/å» (to) hit, é¥/饥 hunger, and ç©/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: ååå«åè±ï¼åéµæ±çåï¼è±åçè± MÃngzi jià o JiÄyÄ«ng, JiÄlÃng JiÄng de jiÄ, YÄ«ngguó de yÄ«ng "My name is JiÄyÄ«ng, 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; since most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters, there are many times more Chinese words than there are 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 ä¸ååæµ· (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 æ±è¯å¤§è¯å
¸, 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 ç°ä»£æ±è¯è¯å
¸, 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 è¡è "grape," ç³æ¦´ "pomegranate" and ç®å/ç
å "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including ä½ "Buddha" and è©è¨/è©è© "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as è¡å "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as è¡è "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or PÄli, 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 çµç¶ "pÃpa", the Chinese lute, or é
ª "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è²å (pinyin: yÇsèliè), "Paris" becomes å·´é» (pinyin: bÄlÃ). A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including æ²ç¼ shÄfÄ "sofa," 马达/馬é mÇdá "motor," å¹½é» yÅumò "humor," é»è¾/é輯 luójà "logic," æ¶é«¦/æ髦 shÃmáo "smart, fashionable" and ææ¯åºé xiÄsÄ«dÇlÇ "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, æ²å/æ²ç¼ and 马达/馬é in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor."
Western foreign words have had great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came èè¾ (bÄléi, "ballet"), é¦æ§ (xiÄngbÄ«n, "champagne"), via Italian åå¡ (kÄfÄi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned æ²ç¼ (shÄfÄ "sofa"), å¹½é» (yÅumò "humour"), and é«å°å¤« (gÄoÄrfÅ«, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪æ¯ç§ (dÃsÄ«kè, "disco"), å¯ä¹ (kÄlè, "cola") and è¿·ä½ (mÃnÇ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon å¡é (cartoon), åºä½¬ (gay people), ç士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. ç²çµ² (fÄnsÄ«, "fans"), é§å®¢ (hèikè, "hacker"), é¨è½æ ¼(bùluÅgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin.
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 å¾·å¾é£/å¾·å¾é¢¨ ( Shanghainese: télÃfon , Standard Mandarin: délÇfÄng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese çµè¯/é»è©± (dià nhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include çµè§/é»è¦ (dià nshì "electric vision") for television, çµè/é»è
¦ (dià nnÇo "electric brain") for computer; ææº/ææ© (shÇujÄ« "hand machine") for cellphone, and èç/èè½ (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. ç¶²èª (wÇng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as æ±å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡å
(hà nbÇo bÄo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as æææº/æææ© (tuÅlÄjÄ«, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马å©å¥¥/馬å©å¥§ for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example å¥è
¾/å¥é¨° (bÄnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and èµç¾å³/è³½ç¾å³ (Sà ibÇiwèi "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 (å製漢èª, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include dià nhuà (çµè¯/é»è©±, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社ä¼, shakai, "society"), kÄxué (ç§å¦/ç§å¸, kagaku, "science") and chÅuxià ng (æ½è±¡, chÅ«shÅ, "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, jÄ«ngjì (ç»æµ/ç¶æ¿, 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 Hokkien and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便å½/ä¾¿ç¶ âlunchbox or boxed lunchâ (from bento) and æç âprepared cuisineâ, have passed into common currency.
With the growing importance and influence of China's economy globally, Mandarin instruction is gaining popularity in schools in the USA, and 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 the English Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660.
* Chinese characters
* Chinese exclamative particles
* Chinese honorifics
* Chinese classifier
* Chinese number gestures
* Chinese numerals
* Chinese punctuation
* Classical Chinese grammar
* Four-character idiom
* Han unification
* Haner language
* HSK test
* Languages of China
* North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics
* Nü shu
*
*
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* ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawaiâi Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X.
* ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawaiâi Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-0-8248-2975-9.
* Keys to the Chinese Language: Book IIâGoogle Books
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Chinese_language | Do linguists often view Chinese as a language family? | Yes, linguists often view Chinese as a language family. | data/set5/a7 | Chinese_language
Sino-Tibetan language family
The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China and Taiwan
Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) ( ; ; ; or ) is a language family consisting of languages mutually intelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. âThe mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.â
* Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. âThe Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.â
* Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. âThe 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 worldâs 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 some 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), Cantonese (Yue) (70 million) and Min (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 å®è¯ GuÄnhuà or åæ¹è¯ BÄifÄnghuà 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. Chineseâde facto, Standard Mandarinâis 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).
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:
Disputed classifications by some Chinese linguists:
There are also some smaller groups that are not yet classified, such as: Danzhou dialect (åå·è¯), spoken in Danzhou, on Hainan Island; Xianghua (乡è¯), not to be confused with Xiang (æ¹), spoken in western Hunan; and Shaozhou Tuhua (é¶å·åè¯), 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.
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 government intends 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 âdialectsâ) 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 normal 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 (ä¸æ), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (æ±è¯,âspoken language[s] of the Han Chinese)âthis term could be translated to either âlanguageâ or âlanguagesâ 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 è¯ yu and æ 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 oneâalbeit internally very diverseâethnicity. 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 Peopleâs 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 (âregional tonguesâ, often translated as âdialectsâ). 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 dialect.
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 chiÌt and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("ä¸"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as å and ä¿ 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 many formal occasions.
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 earlier 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 æ¥ (sun), shan å±± (mountain), shui æ°´ (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar XÇ Shèn in the Hà n Dynasty classified characters into six categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80â90% 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/æ¥·æ¸ kÇishÅ«) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (ç¯ä¹¦/ç¯æ¸ zhuà nshÅ«), cursive script (è书/èæ¸ cÇoshÅ«) and clerical script (é¶ä¹¦/é¸æ¸ lìshÅ«). 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 community, is the firstâand at present the onlyâforeign 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 Zhou Dynasty (1122 BCEâ256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the ShÄ«jÄ«ng, the history of the ShÅ«jÄ«ng, and portions of the YìjÄ«ng (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 QÄ«ng dynasty philologists.
Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably è mì "honey", ç
shÄ« "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mÇ "horse", ç¬ quÇn "dog", and éµ Ã© "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 âhoney' and âlion,' and probably also âhorse,' âdog,' and âgoose,' 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 Ãbereinstimmungen 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 Southern and Northern Dynasties and the SuÃ, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the åé» "Qièyùn" rime book (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the å»£é» "GuÇngyùn" rime book. 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 SìchuÄn 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 Qing Dynasty. Since the 17th century, the Qing Dynasty had set up orthoepy academies ( ) to make pronunciation conform to the standard of the capital Beijing. For the general population, however, this had limited effect. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The Beijing Mandarin court standard was used solely by officials and civil servants and was thus fairly limited.
This situation did not change until the mid-20th century with the creation (in both the PRC and the ROC, but not in Hong Kong) of a compulsory educational system committed to teaching 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.
Classical Chinese was once the lingua franca in neighbouring East Asian countries such as Japan, Korea and Vietnam for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. *Sheng Ding and Robert A. Saunders, Talking Up China: An Analysis of China's Rising Cultural Power and Global Promotion of the Chinese Language EASTASIA, Summer 2006, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 4
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 tá»±. 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. Approximately 60% of the modern Vietnamese lexicon is recognized as Hán-Viá»t (Sino-Vietnamese), the majority of which was borrowed from Middle Chinese.
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. 251â258.
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, likewise for a significant percentage of Japanese and Vietnamese vocabulary. 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.
Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of è¶ (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Minnan pronunciation of é®æ± (koe-tsiap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of éæ© (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"âhigh level
* "hemp" or "torpid"âhigh rising
* "horse"âlow falling-rising
* "scold"âhigh falling
* "question particle"âneutral
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 Indian translators, working in Sanskrit and Pali, were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of Chinese in a foreign language. After the 15th century, the efforts of Jesuits and Western court missionaries resulted 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 lack of a native 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 (æ¼¢èªæ¼é³/æ±è¯æ¼é³), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, and later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore) and Taiwan. 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 teaching new words. The Pinyin romanization is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, with the Chinese character alongside.
The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859 and modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As this system approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels, i.e. it is an Anglicization, it may be particularly helpful for beginner Chinese speakers of an English-speaking background. Wade-Giles was found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan.
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 BÄijÄ«ng (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é³, 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, å in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cà (è¯/è©), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cà (âwordâ) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more.
For example:
* Yun é²ââcloudâ (traditional)
* Yun äºââcloudâ (simplified)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ¼¢å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡ââhamburgerâ (traditional)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ±å ¡å
/æ±å ¡â"hamburger" (simplified)
* Wo æââI, meâ
* Ren 人ââpeopleâ
* Diqiu å°çââearth (globosity)â
* Shandian éé»ââlightningâ (traditional)
* Shandian éªçµâ"lightning" (simplifed)
* Meng 夢ââdreamâ (traditional)
* Meng 梦â"dream" (simplified)
All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphologyâi.e., changes in form of a wordâto indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflectionsâit possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), and only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English). There is, however, a gender difference in the written language (ä» as "he" and 她 as "she"), but it should be noted that this is a relatively new introduction to the Chinese language in the twentieth century.
They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le äº, hai è¿, yijing å·²ç», 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 classifiers and measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring languages like Japanese and Korean. See Chinese classifiers 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 cà is identified.
The mono-syllable jÄ«, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: é/鸡 chicken, æ©/æº machine, åº basic, æ/å» (to) hit, é¥/饥 hunger, and ç©/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: ååå«åè±ï¼åéµæ±çåï¼è±åçè± MÃngzi jià o JiÄyÄ«ng, JiÄlÃng JiÄng de jiÄ, YÄ«ngguó de yÄ«ng "My name is JiÄyÄ«ng, 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; since most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters, there are many times more Chinese words than there are 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 ä¸ååæµ· (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 æ±è¯å¤§è¯å
¸, 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 ç°ä»£æ±è¯è¯å
¸, 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 è¡è "grape," ç³æ¦´ "pomegranate" and ç®å/ç
å "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including ä½ "Buddha" and è©è¨/è©è© "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as è¡å "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as è¡è "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or PÄli, 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 çµç¶ "pÃpa", the Chinese lute, or é
ª "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è²å (pinyin: yÇsèliè), "Paris" becomes å·´é» (pinyin: bÄlÃ). A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including æ²ç¼ shÄfÄ "sofa," 马达/馬é mÇdá "motor," å¹½é» yÅumò "humor," é»è¾/é輯 luójà "logic," æ¶é«¦/æ髦 shÃmáo "smart, fashionable" and ææ¯åºé xiÄsÄ«dÇlÇ "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, æ²å/æ²ç¼ and 马达/馬é in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor."
Western foreign words have had great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came èè¾ (bÄléi, "ballet"), é¦æ§ (xiÄngbÄ«n, "champagne"), via Italian åå¡ (kÄfÄi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned æ²ç¼ (shÄfÄ "sofa"), å¹½é» (yÅumò "humour"), and é«å°å¤« (gÄoÄrfÅ«, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪æ¯ç§ (dÃsÄ«kè, "disco"), å¯ä¹ (kÄlè, "cola") and è¿·ä½ (mÃnÇ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon å¡é (cartoon), åºä½¬ (gay people), ç士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. ç²çµ² (fÄnsÄ«, "fans"), é§å®¢ (hèikè, "hacker"), é¨è½æ ¼(bùluÅgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin.
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 å¾·å¾é£/å¾·å¾é¢¨ ( Shanghainese: télÃfon , Standard Mandarin: délÇfÄng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese çµè¯/é»è©± (dià nhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include çµè§/é»è¦ (dià nshì "electric vision") for television, çµè/é»è
¦ (dià nnÇo "electric brain") for computer; ææº/ææ© (shÇujÄ« "hand machine") for cellphone, and èç/èè½ (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. ç¶²èª (wÇng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as æ±å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡å
(hà nbÇo bÄo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as æææº/æææ© (tuÅlÄjÄ«, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马å©å¥¥/馬å©å¥§ for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example å¥è
¾/å¥é¨° (bÄnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and èµç¾å³/è³½ç¾å³ (Sà ibÇiwèi "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 (å製漢èª, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include dià nhuà (çµè¯/é»è©±, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社ä¼, shakai, "society"), kÄxué (ç§å¦/ç§å¸, kagaku, "science") and chÅuxià ng (æ½è±¡, chÅ«shÅ, "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, jÄ«ngjì (ç»æµ/ç¶æ¿, 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 Hokkien and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便å½/ä¾¿ç¶ âlunchbox or boxed lunchâ (from bento) and æç âprepared cuisineâ, have passed into common currency.
With the growing importance and influence of China's economy globally, Mandarin instruction is gaining popularity in schools in the USA, and 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 the English Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660.
* Chinese characters
* Chinese exclamative particles
* Chinese honorifics
* Chinese classifier
* Chinese number gestures
* Chinese numerals
* Chinese punctuation
* Classical Chinese grammar
* Four-character idiom
* Han unification
* Haner language
* HSK test
* Languages of China
* North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics
* Nü shu
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* ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawaiâi Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X.
* ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawaiâi Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-0-8248-2975-9.
* Keys to the Chinese Language: Book IIâGoogle Books
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Chinese_language | When did classical Chinese literature begin? | Classical Chinese literature began in the Spring and Autumn period. | data/set5/a7 | Chinese_language
Sino-Tibetan language family
The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China and Taiwan
Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) ( ; ; ; or ) is a language family consisting of languages mutually intelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. âThe mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.â
* Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. âThe Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.â
* Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. âThe 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 worldâs 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 some 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), Cantonese (Yue) (70 million) and Min (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 å®è¯ GuÄnhuà or åæ¹è¯ BÄifÄnghuà 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. Chineseâde facto, Standard Mandarinâis 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).
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:
Disputed classifications by some Chinese linguists:
There are also some smaller groups that are not yet classified, such as: Danzhou dialect (åå·è¯), spoken in Danzhou, on Hainan Island; Xianghua (乡è¯), not to be confused with Xiang (æ¹), spoken in western Hunan; and Shaozhou Tuhua (é¶å·åè¯), 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.
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 government intends 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 âdialectsâ) 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 normal 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 (ä¸æ), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (æ±è¯,âspoken language[s] of the Han Chinese)âthis term could be translated to either âlanguageâ or âlanguagesâ 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 è¯ yu and æ 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 oneâalbeit internally very diverseâethnicity. 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 Peopleâs 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 (âregional tonguesâ, often translated as âdialectsâ). 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 dialect.
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 chiÌt and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("ä¸"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as å and ä¿ 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 many formal occasions.
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 earlier 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 æ¥ (sun), shan å±± (mountain), shui æ°´ (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar XÇ Shèn in the Hà n Dynasty classified characters into six categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80â90% 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/æ¥·æ¸ kÇishÅ«) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (ç¯ä¹¦/ç¯æ¸ zhuà nshÅ«), cursive script (è书/èæ¸ cÇoshÅ«) and clerical script (é¶ä¹¦/é¸æ¸ lìshÅ«). 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 community, is the firstâand at present the onlyâforeign 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 Zhou Dynasty (1122 BCEâ256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the ShÄ«jÄ«ng, the history of the ShÅ«jÄ«ng, and portions of the YìjÄ«ng (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 QÄ«ng dynasty philologists.
Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably è mì "honey", ç
shÄ« "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mÇ "horse", ç¬ quÇn "dog", and éµ Ã© "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 âhoney' and âlion,' and probably also âhorse,' âdog,' and âgoose,' 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 Ãbereinstimmungen 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 Southern and Northern Dynasties and the SuÃ, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the åé» "Qièyùn" rime book (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the å»£é» "GuÇngyùn" rime book. 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 SìchuÄn 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 Qing Dynasty. Since the 17th century, the Qing Dynasty had set up orthoepy academies ( ) to make pronunciation conform to the standard of the capital Beijing. For the general population, however, this had limited effect. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The Beijing Mandarin court standard was used solely by officials and civil servants and was thus fairly limited.
This situation did not change until the mid-20th century with the creation (in both the PRC and the ROC, but not in Hong Kong) of a compulsory educational system committed to teaching 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.
Classical Chinese was once the lingua franca in neighbouring East Asian countries such as Japan, Korea and Vietnam for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. *Sheng Ding and Robert A. Saunders, Talking Up China: An Analysis of China's Rising Cultural Power and Global Promotion of the Chinese Language EASTASIA, Summer 2006, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 4
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 tá»±. 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. Approximately 60% of the modern Vietnamese lexicon is recognized as Hán-Viá»t (Sino-Vietnamese), the majority of which was borrowed from Middle Chinese.
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. 251â258.
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, likewise for a significant percentage of Japanese and Vietnamese vocabulary. 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.
Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of è¶ (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Minnan pronunciation of é®æ± (koe-tsiap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of éæ© (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"âhigh level
* "hemp" or "torpid"âhigh rising
* "horse"âlow falling-rising
* "scold"âhigh falling
* "question particle"âneutral
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 Indian translators, working in Sanskrit and Pali, were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of Chinese in a foreign language. After the 15th century, the efforts of Jesuits and Western court missionaries resulted 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 lack of a native 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 (æ¼¢èªæ¼é³/æ±è¯æ¼é³), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, and later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore) and Taiwan. 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 teaching new words. The Pinyin romanization is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, with the Chinese character alongside.
The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859 and modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As this system approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels, i.e. it is an Anglicization, it may be particularly helpful for beginner Chinese speakers of an English-speaking background. Wade-Giles was found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan.
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 BÄijÄ«ng (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é³, 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, å in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cà (è¯/è©), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cà (âwordâ) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more.
For example:
* Yun é²ââcloudâ (traditional)
* Yun äºââcloudâ (simplified)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ¼¢å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡ââhamburgerâ (traditional)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ±å ¡å
/æ±å ¡â"hamburger" (simplified)
* Wo æââI, meâ
* Ren 人ââpeopleâ
* Diqiu å°çââearth (globosity)â
* Shandian éé»ââlightningâ (traditional)
* Shandian éªçµâ"lightning" (simplifed)
* Meng 夢ââdreamâ (traditional)
* Meng 梦â"dream" (simplified)
All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphologyâi.e., changes in form of a wordâto indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflectionsâit possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), and only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English). There is, however, a gender difference in the written language (ä» as "he" and 她 as "she"), but it should be noted that this is a relatively new introduction to the Chinese language in the twentieth century.
They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le äº, hai è¿, yijing å·²ç», 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 classifiers and measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring languages like Japanese and Korean. See Chinese classifiers 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 cà is identified.
The mono-syllable jÄ«, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: é/鸡 chicken, æ©/æº machine, åº basic, æ/å» (to) hit, é¥/饥 hunger, and ç©/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: ååå«åè±ï¼åéµæ±çåï¼è±åçè± MÃngzi jià o JiÄyÄ«ng, JiÄlÃng JiÄng de jiÄ, YÄ«ngguó de yÄ«ng "My name is JiÄyÄ«ng, 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; since most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters, there are many times more Chinese words than there are 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 ä¸ååæµ· (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 æ±è¯å¤§è¯å
¸, 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 ç°ä»£æ±è¯è¯å
¸, 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 è¡è "grape," ç³æ¦´ "pomegranate" and ç®å/ç
å "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including ä½ "Buddha" and è©è¨/è©è© "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as è¡å "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as è¡è "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or PÄli, 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 çµç¶ "pÃpa", the Chinese lute, or é
ª "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è²å (pinyin: yÇsèliè), "Paris" becomes å·´é» (pinyin: bÄlÃ). A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including æ²ç¼ shÄfÄ "sofa," 马达/馬é mÇdá "motor," å¹½é» yÅumò "humor," é»è¾/é輯 luójà "logic," æ¶é«¦/æ髦 shÃmáo "smart, fashionable" and ææ¯åºé xiÄsÄ«dÇlÇ "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, æ²å/æ²ç¼ and 马达/馬é in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor."
Western foreign words have had great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came èè¾ (bÄléi, "ballet"), é¦æ§ (xiÄngbÄ«n, "champagne"), via Italian åå¡ (kÄfÄi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned æ²ç¼ (shÄfÄ "sofa"), å¹½é» (yÅumò "humour"), and é«å°å¤« (gÄoÄrfÅ«, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪æ¯ç§ (dÃsÄ«kè, "disco"), å¯ä¹ (kÄlè, "cola") and è¿·ä½ (mÃnÇ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon å¡é (cartoon), åºä½¬ (gay people), ç士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. ç²çµ² (fÄnsÄ«, "fans"), é§å®¢ (hèikè, "hacker"), é¨è½æ ¼(bùluÅgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin.
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 å¾·å¾é£/å¾·å¾é¢¨ ( Shanghainese: télÃfon , Standard Mandarin: délÇfÄng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese çµè¯/é»è©± (dià nhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include çµè§/é»è¦ (dià nshì "electric vision") for television, çµè/é»è
¦ (dià nnÇo "electric brain") for computer; ææº/ææ© (shÇujÄ« "hand machine") for cellphone, and èç/èè½ (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. ç¶²èª (wÇng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as æ±å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡å
(hà nbÇo bÄo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as æææº/æææ© (tuÅlÄjÄ«, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马å©å¥¥/馬å©å¥§ for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example å¥è
¾/å¥é¨° (bÄnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and èµç¾å³/è³½ç¾å³ (Sà ibÇiwèi "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 (å製漢èª, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include dià nhuà (çµè¯/é»è©±, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社ä¼, shakai, "society"), kÄxué (ç§å¦/ç§å¸, kagaku, "science") and chÅuxià ng (æ½è±¡, chÅ«shÅ, "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, jÄ«ngjì (ç»æµ/ç¶æ¿, 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 Hokkien and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便å½/ä¾¿ç¶ âlunchbox or boxed lunchâ (from bento) and æç âprepared cuisineâ, have passed into common currency.
With the growing importance and influence of China's economy globally, Mandarin instruction is gaining popularity in schools in the USA, and 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 the English Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660.
* Chinese characters
* Chinese exclamative particles
* Chinese honorifics
* Chinese classifier
* Chinese number gestures
* Chinese numerals
* Chinese punctuation
* Classical Chinese grammar
* Four-character idiom
* Han unification
* Haner language
* HSK test
* Languages of China
* North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics
* Nü shu
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*
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* ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawaiâi Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X.
* ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawaiâi Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-0-8248-2975-9.
* Keys to the Chinese Language: Book IIâGoogle Books
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Chinese_language | When did classical Chinese literature begin? | Classical Chinese literature began in the 14th to 11th centuires BCE. | data/set5/a7 | Chinese_language
Sino-Tibetan language family
The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China and Taiwan
Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) ( ; ; ; or ) is a language family consisting of languages mutually intelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. âThe mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.â
* Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. âThe Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.â
* Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. âThe 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 worldâs 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 some 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), Cantonese (Yue) (70 million) and Min (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 å®è¯ GuÄnhuà or åæ¹è¯ BÄifÄnghuà 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. Chineseâde facto, Standard Mandarinâis 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).
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:
Disputed classifications by some Chinese linguists:
There are also some smaller groups that are not yet classified, such as: Danzhou dialect (åå·è¯), spoken in Danzhou, on Hainan Island; Xianghua (乡è¯), not to be confused with Xiang (æ¹), spoken in western Hunan; and Shaozhou Tuhua (é¶å·åè¯), 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.
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 government intends 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 âdialectsâ) 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 normal 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 (ä¸æ), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (æ±è¯,âspoken language[s] of the Han Chinese)âthis term could be translated to either âlanguageâ or âlanguagesâ 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 è¯ yu and æ 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 oneâalbeit internally very diverseâethnicity. 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 Peopleâs 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 (âregional tonguesâ, often translated as âdialectsâ). 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 dialect.
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 chiÌt and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("ä¸"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as å and ä¿ 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 many formal occasions.
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 earlier 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 æ¥ (sun), shan å±± (mountain), shui æ°´ (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar XÇ Shèn in the Hà n Dynasty classified characters into six categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80â90% 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/æ¥·æ¸ kÇishÅ«) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (ç¯ä¹¦/ç¯æ¸ zhuà nshÅ«), cursive script (è书/èæ¸ cÇoshÅ«) and clerical script (é¶ä¹¦/é¸æ¸ lìshÅ«). 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 community, is the firstâand at present the onlyâforeign 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 Zhou Dynasty (1122 BCEâ256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the ShÄ«jÄ«ng, the history of the ShÅ«jÄ«ng, and portions of the YìjÄ«ng (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 QÄ«ng dynasty philologists.
Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably è mì "honey", ç
shÄ« "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mÇ "horse", ç¬ quÇn "dog", and éµ Ã© "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 âhoney' and âlion,' and probably also âhorse,' âdog,' and âgoose,' 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 Ãbereinstimmungen 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 Southern and Northern Dynasties and the SuÃ, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the åé» "Qièyùn" rime book (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the å»£é» "GuÇngyùn" rime book. 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 SìchuÄn 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 Qing Dynasty. Since the 17th century, the Qing Dynasty had set up orthoepy academies ( ) to make pronunciation conform to the standard of the capital Beijing. For the general population, however, this had limited effect. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The Beijing Mandarin court standard was used solely by officials and civil servants and was thus fairly limited.
This situation did not change until the mid-20th century with the creation (in both the PRC and the ROC, but not in Hong Kong) of a compulsory educational system committed to teaching 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.
Classical Chinese was once the lingua franca in neighbouring East Asian countries such as Japan, Korea and Vietnam for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. *Sheng Ding and Robert A. Saunders, Talking Up China: An Analysis of China's Rising Cultural Power and Global Promotion of the Chinese Language EASTASIA, Summer 2006, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 4
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 tá»±. 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. Approximately 60% of the modern Vietnamese lexicon is recognized as Hán-Viá»t (Sino-Vietnamese), the majority of which was borrowed from Middle Chinese.
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. 251â258.
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, likewise for a significant percentage of Japanese and Vietnamese vocabulary. 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.
Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of è¶ (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Minnan pronunciation of é®æ± (koe-tsiap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of éæ© (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"âhigh level
* "hemp" or "torpid"âhigh rising
* "horse"âlow falling-rising
* "scold"âhigh falling
* "question particle"âneutral
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 Indian translators, working in Sanskrit and Pali, were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of Chinese in a foreign language. After the 15th century, the efforts of Jesuits and Western court missionaries resulted 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 lack of a native 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 (æ¼¢èªæ¼é³/æ±è¯æ¼é³), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, and later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore) and Taiwan. 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 teaching new words. The Pinyin romanization is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, with the Chinese character alongside.
The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859 and modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As this system approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels, i.e. it is an Anglicization, it may be particularly helpful for beginner Chinese speakers of an English-speaking background. Wade-Giles was found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan.
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 BÄijÄ«ng (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é³, 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, å in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cà (è¯/è©), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cà (âwordâ) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more.
For example:
* Yun é²ââcloudâ (traditional)
* Yun äºââcloudâ (simplified)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ¼¢å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡ââhamburgerâ (traditional)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ±å ¡å
/æ±å ¡â"hamburger" (simplified)
* Wo æââI, meâ
* Ren 人ââpeopleâ
* Diqiu å°çââearth (globosity)â
* Shandian éé»ââlightningâ (traditional)
* Shandian éªçµâ"lightning" (simplifed)
* Meng 夢ââdreamâ (traditional)
* Meng 梦â"dream" (simplified)
All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphologyâi.e., changes in form of a wordâto indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflectionsâit possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), and only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English). There is, however, a gender difference in the written language (ä» as "he" and 她 as "she"), but it should be noted that this is a relatively new introduction to the Chinese language in the twentieth century.
They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le äº, hai è¿, yijing å·²ç», 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 classifiers and measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring languages like Japanese and Korean. See Chinese classifiers 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 cà is identified.
The mono-syllable jÄ«, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: é/鸡 chicken, æ©/æº machine, åº basic, æ/å» (to) hit, é¥/饥 hunger, and ç©/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: ååå«åè±ï¼åéµæ±çåï¼è±åçè± MÃngzi jià o JiÄyÄ«ng, JiÄlÃng JiÄng de jiÄ, YÄ«ngguó de yÄ«ng "My name is JiÄyÄ«ng, 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; since most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters, there are many times more Chinese words than there are 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 ä¸ååæµ· (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 æ±è¯å¤§è¯å
¸, 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 ç°ä»£æ±è¯è¯å
¸, 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 è¡è "grape," ç³æ¦´ "pomegranate" and ç®å/ç
å "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including ä½ "Buddha" and è©è¨/è©è© "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as è¡å "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as è¡è "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or PÄli, 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 çµç¶ "pÃpa", the Chinese lute, or é
ª "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è²å (pinyin: yÇsèliè), "Paris" becomes å·´é» (pinyin: bÄlÃ). A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including æ²ç¼ shÄfÄ "sofa," 马达/馬é mÇdá "motor," å¹½é» yÅumò "humor," é»è¾/é輯 luójà "logic," æ¶é«¦/æ髦 shÃmáo "smart, fashionable" and ææ¯åºé xiÄsÄ«dÇlÇ "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, æ²å/æ²ç¼ and 马达/馬é in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor."
Western foreign words have had great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came èè¾ (bÄléi, "ballet"), é¦æ§ (xiÄngbÄ«n, "champagne"), via Italian åå¡ (kÄfÄi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned æ²ç¼ (shÄfÄ "sofa"), å¹½é» (yÅumò "humour"), and é«å°å¤« (gÄoÄrfÅ«, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪æ¯ç§ (dÃsÄ«kè, "disco"), å¯ä¹ (kÄlè, "cola") and è¿·ä½ (mÃnÇ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon å¡é (cartoon), åºä½¬ (gay people), ç士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. ç²çµ² (fÄnsÄ«, "fans"), é§å®¢ (hèikè, "hacker"), é¨è½æ ¼(bùluÅgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin.
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 å¾·å¾é£/å¾·å¾é¢¨ ( Shanghainese: télÃfon , Standard Mandarin: délÇfÄng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese çµè¯/é»è©± (dià nhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include çµè§/é»è¦ (dià nshì "electric vision") for television, çµè/é»è
¦ (dià nnÇo "electric brain") for computer; ææº/ææ© (shÇujÄ« "hand machine") for cellphone, and èç/èè½ (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. ç¶²èª (wÇng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as æ±å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡å
(hà nbÇo bÄo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as æææº/æææ© (tuÅlÄjÄ«, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马å©å¥¥/馬å©å¥§ for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example å¥è
¾/å¥é¨° (bÄnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and èµç¾å³/è³½ç¾å³ (Sà ibÇiwèi "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 (å製漢èª, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include dià nhuà (çµè¯/é»è©±, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社ä¼, shakai, "society"), kÄxué (ç§å¦/ç§å¸, kagaku, "science") and chÅuxià ng (æ½è±¡, chÅ«shÅ, "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, jÄ«ngjì (ç»æµ/ç¶æ¿, 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 Hokkien and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便å½/ä¾¿ç¶ âlunchbox or boxed lunchâ (from bento) and æç âprepared cuisineâ, have passed into common currency.
With the growing importance and influence of China's economy globally, Mandarin instruction is gaining popularity in schools in the USA, and 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 the English Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660.
* Chinese characters
* Chinese exclamative particles
* Chinese honorifics
* Chinese classifier
* Chinese number gestures
* Chinese numerals
* Chinese punctuation
* Classical Chinese grammar
* Four-character idiom
* Han unification
* Haner language
* HSK test
* Languages of China
* North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics
* Nü shu
*
*
*
*
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* ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawaiâi Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X.
* ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawaiâi Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-0-8248-2975-9.
* Keys to the Chinese Language: Book IIâGoogle Books
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Chinese_language | How does the government of the People's Republic of China often refer to all divisions of the Sinitic language(s) besides Standard Mandarin? | The government of the People's Republic of China refers to all divisions of the Sinitic language(s) besides Standard Mandarin as fangyan. | data/set5/a7 | Chinese_language
Sino-Tibetan language family
The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China and Taiwan
Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) ( ; ; ; or ) is a language family consisting of languages mutually intelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. âThe mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.â
* Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. âThe Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.â
* Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. âThe 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 worldâs 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 some 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), Cantonese (Yue) (70 million) and Min (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 å®è¯ GuÄnhuà or åæ¹è¯ BÄifÄnghuà 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. Chineseâde facto, Standard Mandarinâis 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).
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:
Disputed classifications by some Chinese linguists:
There are also some smaller groups that are not yet classified, such as: Danzhou dialect (åå·è¯), spoken in Danzhou, on Hainan Island; Xianghua (乡è¯), not to be confused with Xiang (æ¹), spoken in western Hunan; and Shaozhou Tuhua (é¶å·åè¯), 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.
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 government intends 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 âdialectsâ) 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 normal 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 (ä¸æ), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (æ±è¯,âspoken language[s] of the Han Chinese)âthis term could be translated to either âlanguageâ or âlanguagesâ 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 è¯ yu and æ 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 oneâalbeit internally very diverseâethnicity. 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 Peopleâs 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 (âregional tonguesâ, often translated as âdialectsâ). 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 dialect.
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 chiÌt and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("ä¸"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as å and ä¿ 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 many formal occasions.
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 earlier 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 æ¥ (sun), shan å±± (mountain), shui æ°´ (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar XÇ Shèn in the Hà n Dynasty classified characters into six categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80â90% 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/æ¥·æ¸ kÇishÅ«) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (ç¯ä¹¦/ç¯æ¸ zhuà nshÅ«), cursive script (è书/èæ¸ cÇoshÅ«) and clerical script (é¶ä¹¦/é¸æ¸ lìshÅ«). 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 community, is the firstâand at present the onlyâforeign 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 Zhou Dynasty (1122 BCEâ256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the ShÄ«jÄ«ng, the history of the ShÅ«jÄ«ng, and portions of the YìjÄ«ng (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 QÄ«ng dynasty philologists.
Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably è mì "honey", ç
shÄ« "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mÇ "horse", ç¬ quÇn "dog", and éµ Ã© "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 âhoney' and âlion,' and probably also âhorse,' âdog,' and âgoose,' 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 Ãbereinstimmungen 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 Southern and Northern Dynasties and the SuÃ, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the åé» "Qièyùn" rime book (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the å»£é» "GuÇngyùn" rime book. 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 SìchuÄn 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 Qing Dynasty. Since the 17th century, the Qing Dynasty had set up orthoepy academies ( ) to make pronunciation conform to the standard of the capital Beijing. For the general population, however, this had limited effect. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The Beijing Mandarin court standard was used solely by officials and civil servants and was thus fairly limited.
This situation did not change until the mid-20th century with the creation (in both the PRC and the ROC, but not in Hong Kong) of a compulsory educational system committed to teaching 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.
Classical Chinese was once the lingua franca in neighbouring East Asian countries such as Japan, Korea and Vietnam for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. *Sheng Ding and Robert A. Saunders, Talking Up China: An Analysis of China's Rising Cultural Power and Global Promotion of the Chinese Language EASTASIA, Summer 2006, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 4
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 tá»±. 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. Approximately 60% of the modern Vietnamese lexicon is recognized as Hán-Viá»t (Sino-Vietnamese), the majority of which was borrowed from Middle Chinese.
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. 251â258.
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, likewise for a significant percentage of Japanese and Vietnamese vocabulary. 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.
Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of è¶ (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Minnan pronunciation of é®æ± (koe-tsiap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of éæ© (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"âhigh level
* "hemp" or "torpid"âhigh rising
* "horse"âlow falling-rising
* "scold"âhigh falling
* "question particle"âneutral
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 Indian translators, working in Sanskrit and Pali, were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of Chinese in a foreign language. After the 15th century, the efforts of Jesuits and Western court missionaries resulted 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 lack of a native 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 (æ¼¢èªæ¼é³/æ±è¯æ¼é³), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, and later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore) and Taiwan. 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 teaching new words. The Pinyin romanization is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, with the Chinese character alongside.
The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859 and modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As this system approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels, i.e. it is an Anglicization, it may be particularly helpful for beginner Chinese speakers of an English-speaking background. Wade-Giles was found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan.
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 BÄijÄ«ng (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é³, 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, å in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cà (è¯/è©), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cà (âwordâ) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more.
For example:
* Yun é²ââcloudâ (traditional)
* Yun äºââcloudâ (simplified)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ¼¢å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡ââhamburgerâ (traditional)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ±å ¡å
/æ±å ¡â"hamburger" (simplified)
* Wo æââI, meâ
* Ren 人ââpeopleâ
* Diqiu å°çââearth (globosity)â
* Shandian éé»ââlightningâ (traditional)
* Shandian éªçµâ"lightning" (simplifed)
* Meng 夢ââdreamâ (traditional)
* Meng 梦â"dream" (simplified)
All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphologyâi.e., changes in form of a wordâto indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflectionsâit possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), and only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English). There is, however, a gender difference in the written language (ä» as "he" and 她 as "she"), but it should be noted that this is a relatively new introduction to the Chinese language in the twentieth century.
They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le äº, hai è¿, yijing å·²ç», 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 classifiers and measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring languages like Japanese and Korean. See Chinese classifiers 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 cà is identified.
The mono-syllable jÄ«, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: é/鸡 chicken, æ©/æº machine, åº basic, æ/å» (to) hit, é¥/饥 hunger, and ç©/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: ååå«åè±ï¼åéµæ±çåï¼è±åçè± MÃngzi jià o JiÄyÄ«ng, JiÄlÃng JiÄng de jiÄ, YÄ«ngguó de yÄ«ng "My name is JiÄyÄ«ng, 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; since most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters, there are many times more Chinese words than there are 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 ä¸ååæµ· (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 æ±è¯å¤§è¯å
¸, 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 ç°ä»£æ±è¯è¯å
¸, 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 è¡è "grape," ç³æ¦´ "pomegranate" and ç®å/ç
å "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including ä½ "Buddha" and è©è¨/è©è© "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as è¡å "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as è¡è "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or PÄli, 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 çµç¶ "pÃpa", the Chinese lute, or é
ª "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è²å (pinyin: yÇsèliè), "Paris" becomes å·´é» (pinyin: bÄlÃ). A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including æ²ç¼ shÄfÄ "sofa," 马达/馬é mÇdá "motor," å¹½é» yÅumò "humor," é»è¾/é輯 luójà "logic," æ¶é«¦/æ髦 shÃmáo "smart, fashionable" and ææ¯åºé xiÄsÄ«dÇlÇ "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, æ²å/æ²ç¼ and 马达/馬é in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor."
Western foreign words have had great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came èè¾ (bÄléi, "ballet"), é¦æ§ (xiÄngbÄ«n, "champagne"), via Italian åå¡ (kÄfÄi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned æ²ç¼ (shÄfÄ "sofa"), å¹½é» (yÅumò "humour"), and é«å°å¤« (gÄoÄrfÅ«, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪æ¯ç§ (dÃsÄ«kè, "disco"), å¯ä¹ (kÄlè, "cola") and è¿·ä½ (mÃnÇ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon å¡é (cartoon), åºä½¬ (gay people), ç士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. ç²çµ² (fÄnsÄ«, "fans"), é§å®¢ (hèikè, "hacker"), é¨è½æ ¼(bùluÅgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin.
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 å¾·å¾é£/å¾·å¾é¢¨ ( Shanghainese: télÃfon , Standard Mandarin: délÇfÄng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese çµè¯/é»è©± (dià nhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include çµè§/é»è¦ (dià nshì "electric vision") for television, çµè/é»è
¦ (dià nnÇo "electric brain") for computer; ææº/ææ© (shÇujÄ« "hand machine") for cellphone, and èç/èè½ (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. ç¶²èª (wÇng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as æ±å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡å
(hà nbÇo bÄo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as æææº/æææ© (tuÅlÄjÄ«, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马å©å¥¥/馬å©å¥§ for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example å¥è
¾/å¥é¨° (bÄnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and èµç¾å³/è³½ç¾å³ (Sà ibÇiwèi "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 (å製漢èª, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include dià nhuà (çµè¯/é»è©±, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社ä¼, shakai, "society"), kÄxué (ç§å¦/ç§å¸, kagaku, "science") and chÅuxià ng (æ½è±¡, chÅ«shÅ, "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, jÄ«ngjì (ç»æµ/ç¶æ¿, 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 Hokkien and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便å½/ä¾¿ç¶ âlunchbox or boxed lunchâ (from bento) and æç âprepared cuisineâ, have passed into common currency.
With the growing importance and influence of China's economy globally, Mandarin instruction is gaining popularity in schools in the USA, and 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 the English Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660.
* Chinese characters
* Chinese exclamative particles
* Chinese honorifics
* Chinese classifier
* Chinese number gestures
* Chinese numerals
* Chinese punctuation
* Classical Chinese grammar
* Four-character idiom
* Han unification
* Haner language
* HSK test
* Languages of China
* North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics
* Nü shu
*
*
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* ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawaiâi Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X.
* ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawaiâi Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-0-8248-2975-9.
* Keys to the Chinese Language: Book IIâGoogle Books
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Chinese_language | How does the government of the People's Republic of China often refer to all divisions of the Sinitic language(s) besides Standard Mandarin? | The PRC commonly refers to all divisons of the Sinitic language(s) beside Standard Mandarin as fangyan, or "regional tongues." | data/set5/a7 | Chinese_language
Sino-Tibetan language family
The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China and Taiwan
Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) ( ; ; ; or ) is a language family consisting of languages mutually intelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. âThe mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.â
* Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. âThe Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.â
* Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. âThe 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 worldâs 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 some 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), Cantonese (Yue) (70 million) and Min (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 å®è¯ GuÄnhuà or åæ¹è¯ BÄifÄnghuà 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. Chineseâde facto, Standard Mandarinâis 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).
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:
Disputed classifications by some Chinese linguists:
There are also some smaller groups that are not yet classified, such as: Danzhou dialect (åå·è¯), spoken in Danzhou, on Hainan Island; Xianghua (乡è¯), not to be confused with Xiang (æ¹), spoken in western Hunan; and Shaozhou Tuhua (é¶å·åè¯), 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.
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 government intends 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 âdialectsâ) 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 normal 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 (ä¸æ), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (æ±è¯,âspoken language[s] of the Han Chinese)âthis term could be translated to either âlanguageâ or âlanguagesâ 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 è¯ yu and æ 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 oneâalbeit internally very diverseâethnicity. 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 Peopleâs 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 (âregional tonguesâ, often translated as âdialectsâ). 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 dialect.
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 chiÌt and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("ä¸"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as å and ä¿ 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 many formal occasions.
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 earlier 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 æ¥ (sun), shan å±± (mountain), shui æ°´ (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar XÇ Shèn in the Hà n Dynasty classified characters into six categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80â90% 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/æ¥·æ¸ kÇishÅ«) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (ç¯ä¹¦/ç¯æ¸ zhuà nshÅ«), cursive script (è书/èæ¸ cÇoshÅ«) and clerical script (é¶ä¹¦/é¸æ¸ lìshÅ«). 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 community, is the firstâand at present the onlyâforeign 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 Zhou Dynasty (1122 BCEâ256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the ShÄ«jÄ«ng, the history of the ShÅ«jÄ«ng, and portions of the YìjÄ«ng (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 QÄ«ng dynasty philologists.
Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably è mì "honey", ç
shÄ« "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mÇ "horse", ç¬ quÇn "dog", and éµ Ã© "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 âhoney' and âlion,' and probably also âhorse,' âdog,' and âgoose,' 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 Ãbereinstimmungen 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 Southern and Northern Dynasties and the SuÃ, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the åé» "Qièyùn" rime book (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the å»£é» "GuÇngyùn" rime book. 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 SìchuÄn 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 Qing Dynasty. Since the 17th century, the Qing Dynasty had set up orthoepy academies ( ) to make pronunciation conform to the standard of the capital Beijing. For the general population, however, this had limited effect. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The Beijing Mandarin court standard was used solely by officials and civil servants and was thus fairly limited.
This situation did not change until the mid-20th century with the creation (in both the PRC and the ROC, but not in Hong Kong) of a compulsory educational system committed to teaching 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.
Classical Chinese was once the lingua franca in neighbouring East Asian countries such as Japan, Korea and Vietnam for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. *Sheng Ding and Robert A. Saunders, Talking Up China: An Analysis of China's Rising Cultural Power and Global Promotion of the Chinese Language EASTASIA, Summer 2006, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 4
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 tá»±. 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. Approximately 60% of the modern Vietnamese lexicon is recognized as Hán-Viá»t (Sino-Vietnamese), the majority of which was borrowed from Middle Chinese.
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. 251â258.
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, likewise for a significant percentage of Japanese and Vietnamese vocabulary. 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.
Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of è¶ (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Minnan pronunciation of é®æ± (koe-tsiap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of éæ© (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"âhigh level
* "hemp" or "torpid"âhigh rising
* "horse"âlow falling-rising
* "scold"âhigh falling
* "question particle"âneutral
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 Indian translators, working in Sanskrit and Pali, were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of Chinese in a foreign language. After the 15th century, the efforts of Jesuits and Western court missionaries resulted 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 lack of a native 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 (æ¼¢èªæ¼é³/æ±è¯æ¼é³), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, and later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore) and Taiwan. 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 teaching new words. The Pinyin romanization is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, with the Chinese character alongside.
The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859 and modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As this system approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels, i.e. it is an Anglicization, it may be particularly helpful for beginner Chinese speakers of an English-speaking background. Wade-Giles was found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan.
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 BÄijÄ«ng (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é³, 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, å in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cà (è¯/è©), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cà (âwordâ) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more.
For example:
* Yun é²ââcloudâ (traditional)
* Yun äºââcloudâ (simplified)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ¼¢å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡ââhamburgerâ (traditional)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ±å ¡å
/æ±å ¡â"hamburger" (simplified)
* Wo æââI, meâ
* Ren 人ââpeopleâ
* Diqiu å°çââearth (globosity)â
* Shandian éé»ââlightningâ (traditional)
* Shandian éªçµâ"lightning" (simplifed)
* Meng 夢ââdreamâ (traditional)
* Meng 梦â"dream" (simplified)
All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphologyâi.e., changes in form of a wordâto indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflectionsâit possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), and only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English). There is, however, a gender difference in the written language (ä» as "he" and 她 as "she"), but it should be noted that this is a relatively new introduction to the Chinese language in the twentieth century.
They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le äº, hai è¿, yijing å·²ç», 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 classifiers and measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring languages like Japanese and Korean. See Chinese classifiers 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 cà is identified.
The mono-syllable jÄ«, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: é/鸡 chicken, æ©/æº machine, åº basic, æ/å» (to) hit, é¥/饥 hunger, and ç©/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: ååå«åè±ï¼åéµæ±çåï¼è±åçè± MÃngzi jià o JiÄyÄ«ng, JiÄlÃng JiÄng de jiÄ, YÄ«ngguó de yÄ«ng "My name is JiÄyÄ«ng, 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; since most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters, there are many times more Chinese words than there are 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 ä¸ååæµ· (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 æ±è¯å¤§è¯å
¸, 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 ç°ä»£æ±è¯è¯å
¸, 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 è¡è "grape," ç³æ¦´ "pomegranate" and ç®å/ç
å "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including ä½ "Buddha" and è©è¨/è©è© "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as è¡å "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as è¡è "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or PÄli, 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 çµç¶ "pÃpa", the Chinese lute, or é
ª "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è²å (pinyin: yÇsèliè), "Paris" becomes å·´é» (pinyin: bÄlÃ). A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including æ²ç¼ shÄfÄ "sofa," 马达/馬é mÇdá "motor," å¹½é» yÅumò "humor," é»è¾/é輯 luójà "logic," æ¶é«¦/æ髦 shÃmáo "smart, fashionable" and ææ¯åºé xiÄsÄ«dÇlÇ "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, æ²å/æ²ç¼ and 马达/馬é in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor."
Western foreign words have had great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came èè¾ (bÄléi, "ballet"), é¦æ§ (xiÄngbÄ«n, "champagne"), via Italian åå¡ (kÄfÄi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned æ²ç¼ (shÄfÄ "sofa"), å¹½é» (yÅumò "humour"), and é«å°å¤« (gÄoÄrfÅ«, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪æ¯ç§ (dÃsÄ«kè, "disco"), å¯ä¹ (kÄlè, "cola") and è¿·ä½ (mÃnÇ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon å¡é (cartoon), åºä½¬ (gay people), ç士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. ç²çµ² (fÄnsÄ«, "fans"), é§å®¢ (hèikè, "hacker"), é¨è½æ ¼(bùluÅgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin.
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 å¾·å¾é£/å¾·å¾é¢¨ ( Shanghainese: télÃfon , Standard Mandarin: délÇfÄng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese çµè¯/é»è©± (dià nhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include çµè§/é»è¦ (dià nshì "electric vision") for television, çµè/é»è
¦ (dià nnÇo "electric brain") for computer; ææº/ææ© (shÇujÄ« "hand machine") for cellphone, and èç/èè½ (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. ç¶²èª (wÇng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as æ±å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡å
(hà nbÇo bÄo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as æææº/æææ© (tuÅlÄjÄ«, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马å©å¥¥/馬å©å¥§ for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example å¥è
¾/å¥é¨° (bÄnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and èµç¾å³/è³½ç¾å³ (Sà ibÇiwèi "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 (å製漢èª, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include dià nhuà (çµè¯/é»è©±, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社ä¼, shakai, "society"), kÄxué (ç§å¦/ç§å¸, kagaku, "science") and chÅuxià ng (æ½è±¡, chÅ«shÅ, "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, jÄ«ngjì (ç»æµ/ç¶æ¿, 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 Hokkien and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便å½/ä¾¿ç¶ âlunchbox or boxed lunchâ (from bento) and æç âprepared cuisineâ, have passed into common currency.
With the growing importance and influence of China's economy globally, Mandarin instruction is gaining popularity in schools in the USA, and 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 the English Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660.
* Chinese characters
* Chinese exclamative particles
* Chinese honorifics
* Chinese classifier
* Chinese number gestures
* Chinese numerals
* Chinese punctuation
* Classical Chinese grammar
* Four-character idiom
* Han unification
* Haner language
* HSK test
* Languages of China
* North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics
* Nü shu
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*
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* ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawaiâi Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X.
* ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawaiâi Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-0-8248-2975-9.
* Keys to the Chinese Language: Book IIâGoogle Books
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Chinese_language | When was Middle Chinese used? | Middle Chinese was used during Southern and Northern Dynasties and the Sua, Tang, and Sang dynasties. | data/set5/a7 | Chinese_language
Sino-Tibetan language family
The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China and Taiwan
Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) ( ; ; ; or ) is a language family consisting of languages mutually intelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. âThe mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.â
* Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. âThe Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.â
* Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. âThe 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 worldâs 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 some 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), Cantonese (Yue) (70 million) and Min (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 å®è¯ GuÄnhuà or åæ¹è¯ BÄifÄnghuà 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. Chineseâde facto, Standard Mandarinâis 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).
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:
Disputed classifications by some Chinese linguists:
There are also some smaller groups that are not yet classified, such as: Danzhou dialect (åå·è¯), spoken in Danzhou, on Hainan Island; Xianghua (乡è¯), not to be confused with Xiang (æ¹), spoken in western Hunan; and Shaozhou Tuhua (é¶å·åè¯), 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.
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 government intends 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 âdialectsâ) 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 normal 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 (ä¸æ), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (æ±è¯,âspoken language[s] of the Han Chinese)âthis term could be translated to either âlanguageâ or âlanguagesâ 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 è¯ yu and æ 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 oneâalbeit internally very diverseâethnicity. 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 Peopleâs 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 (âregional tonguesâ, often translated as âdialectsâ). 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 dialect.
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 chiÌt and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("ä¸"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as å and ä¿ 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 many formal occasions.
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 earlier 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 æ¥ (sun), shan å±± (mountain), shui æ°´ (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar XÇ Shèn in the Hà n Dynasty classified characters into six categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80â90% 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/æ¥·æ¸ kÇishÅ«) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (ç¯ä¹¦/ç¯æ¸ zhuà nshÅ«), cursive script (è书/èæ¸ cÇoshÅ«) and clerical script (é¶ä¹¦/é¸æ¸ lìshÅ«). 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 community, is the firstâand at present the onlyâforeign 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 Zhou Dynasty (1122 BCEâ256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the ShÄ«jÄ«ng, the history of the ShÅ«jÄ«ng, and portions of the YìjÄ«ng (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 QÄ«ng dynasty philologists.
Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably è mì "honey", ç
shÄ« "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mÇ "horse", ç¬ quÇn "dog", and éµ Ã© "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 âhoney' and âlion,' and probably also âhorse,' âdog,' and âgoose,' 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 Ãbereinstimmungen 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 Southern and Northern Dynasties and the SuÃ, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the åé» "Qièyùn" rime book (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the å»£é» "GuÇngyùn" rime book. 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 SìchuÄn 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 Qing Dynasty. Since the 17th century, the Qing Dynasty had set up orthoepy academies ( ) to make pronunciation conform to the standard of the capital Beijing. For the general population, however, this had limited effect. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The Beijing Mandarin court standard was used solely by officials and civil servants and was thus fairly limited.
This situation did not change until the mid-20th century with the creation (in both the PRC and the ROC, but not in Hong Kong) of a compulsory educational system committed to teaching 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.
Classical Chinese was once the lingua franca in neighbouring East Asian countries such as Japan, Korea and Vietnam for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. *Sheng Ding and Robert A. Saunders, Talking Up China: An Analysis of China's Rising Cultural Power and Global Promotion of the Chinese Language EASTASIA, Summer 2006, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 4
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 tá»±. 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. Approximately 60% of the modern Vietnamese lexicon is recognized as Hán-Viá»t (Sino-Vietnamese), the majority of which was borrowed from Middle Chinese.
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. 251â258.
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, likewise for a significant percentage of Japanese and Vietnamese vocabulary. 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.
Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of è¶ (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Minnan pronunciation of é®æ± (koe-tsiap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of éæ© (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"âhigh level
* "hemp" or "torpid"âhigh rising
* "horse"âlow falling-rising
* "scold"âhigh falling
* "question particle"âneutral
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 Indian translators, working in Sanskrit and Pali, were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of Chinese in a foreign language. After the 15th century, the efforts of Jesuits and Western court missionaries resulted 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 lack of a native 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 (æ¼¢èªæ¼é³/æ±è¯æ¼é³), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, and later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore) and Taiwan. 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 teaching new words. The Pinyin romanization is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, with the Chinese character alongside.
The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859 and modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As this system approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels, i.e. it is an Anglicization, it may be particularly helpful for beginner Chinese speakers of an English-speaking background. Wade-Giles was found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan.
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 BÄijÄ«ng (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é³, 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, å in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cà (è¯/è©), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cà (âwordâ) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more.
For example:
* Yun é²ââcloudâ (traditional)
* Yun äºââcloudâ (simplified)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ¼¢å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡ââhamburgerâ (traditional)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ±å ¡å
/æ±å ¡â"hamburger" (simplified)
* Wo æââI, meâ
* Ren 人ââpeopleâ
* Diqiu å°çââearth (globosity)â
* Shandian éé»ââlightningâ (traditional)
* Shandian éªçµâ"lightning" (simplifed)
* Meng 夢ââdreamâ (traditional)
* Meng 梦â"dream" (simplified)
All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphologyâi.e., changes in form of a wordâto indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflectionsâit possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), and only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English). There is, however, a gender difference in the written language (ä» as "he" and 她 as "she"), but it should be noted that this is a relatively new introduction to the Chinese language in the twentieth century.
They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le äº, hai è¿, yijing å·²ç», 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 classifiers and measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring languages like Japanese and Korean. See Chinese classifiers 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 cà is identified.
The mono-syllable jÄ«, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: é/鸡 chicken, æ©/æº machine, åº basic, æ/å» (to) hit, é¥/饥 hunger, and ç©/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: ååå«åè±ï¼åéµæ±çåï¼è±åçè± MÃngzi jià o JiÄyÄ«ng, JiÄlÃng JiÄng de jiÄ, YÄ«ngguó de yÄ«ng "My name is JiÄyÄ«ng, 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; since most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters, there are many times more Chinese words than there are 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 ä¸ååæµ· (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 æ±è¯å¤§è¯å
¸, 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 ç°ä»£æ±è¯è¯å
¸, 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 è¡è "grape," ç³æ¦´ "pomegranate" and ç®å/ç
å "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including ä½ "Buddha" and è©è¨/è©è© "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as è¡å "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as è¡è "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or PÄli, 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 çµç¶ "pÃpa", the Chinese lute, or é
ª "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è²å (pinyin: yÇsèliè), "Paris" becomes å·´é» (pinyin: bÄlÃ). A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including æ²ç¼ shÄfÄ "sofa," 马达/馬é mÇdá "motor," å¹½é» yÅumò "humor," é»è¾/é輯 luójà "logic," æ¶é«¦/æ髦 shÃmáo "smart, fashionable" and ææ¯åºé xiÄsÄ«dÇlÇ "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, æ²å/æ²ç¼ and 马达/馬é in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor."
Western foreign words have had great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came èè¾ (bÄléi, "ballet"), é¦æ§ (xiÄngbÄ«n, "champagne"), via Italian åå¡ (kÄfÄi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned æ²ç¼ (shÄfÄ "sofa"), å¹½é» (yÅumò "humour"), and é«å°å¤« (gÄoÄrfÅ«, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪æ¯ç§ (dÃsÄ«kè, "disco"), å¯ä¹ (kÄlè, "cola") and è¿·ä½ (mÃnÇ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon å¡é (cartoon), åºä½¬ (gay people), ç士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. ç²çµ² (fÄnsÄ«, "fans"), é§å®¢ (hèikè, "hacker"), é¨è½æ ¼(bùluÅgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin.
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 å¾·å¾é£/å¾·å¾é¢¨ ( Shanghainese: télÃfon , Standard Mandarin: délÇfÄng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese çµè¯/é»è©± (dià nhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include çµè§/é»è¦ (dià nshì "electric vision") for television, çµè/é»è
¦ (dià nnÇo "electric brain") for computer; ææº/ææ© (shÇujÄ« "hand machine") for cellphone, and èç/èè½ (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. ç¶²èª (wÇng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as æ±å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡å
(hà nbÇo bÄo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as æææº/æææ© (tuÅlÄjÄ«, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马å©å¥¥/馬å©å¥§ for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example å¥è
¾/å¥é¨° (bÄnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and èµç¾å³/è³½ç¾å³ (Sà ibÇiwèi "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 (å製漢èª, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include dià nhuà (çµè¯/é»è©±, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社ä¼, shakai, "society"), kÄxué (ç§å¦/ç§å¸, kagaku, "science") and chÅuxià ng (æ½è±¡, chÅ«shÅ, "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, jÄ«ngjì (ç»æµ/ç¶æ¿, 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 Hokkien and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便å½/ä¾¿ç¶ âlunchbox or boxed lunchâ (from bento) and æç âprepared cuisineâ, have passed into common currency.
With the growing importance and influence of China's economy globally, Mandarin instruction is gaining popularity in schools in the USA, and 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 the English Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660.
* Chinese characters
* Chinese exclamative particles
* Chinese honorifics
* Chinese classifier
* Chinese number gestures
* Chinese numerals
* Chinese punctuation
* Classical Chinese grammar
* Four-character idiom
* Han unification
* Haner language
* HSK test
* Languages of China
* North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics
* Nü shu
*
*
*
*
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* ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawaiâi Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X.
* ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawaiâi Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-0-8248-2975-9.
* Keys to the Chinese Language: Book IIâGoogle Books
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Chinese_language | When was Middle Chinese used? | Middle Chinese was the language used in the 6th through 1-th centuries CE. | data/set5/a7 | Chinese_language
Sino-Tibetan language family
The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China and Taiwan
Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) ( ; ; ; or ) is a language family consisting of languages mutually intelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. âThe mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.â
* Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. âThe Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.â
* Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. âThe 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 worldâs 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 some 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), Cantonese (Yue) (70 million) and Min (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 å®è¯ GuÄnhuà or åæ¹è¯ BÄifÄnghuà 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. Chineseâde facto, Standard Mandarinâis 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).
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:
Disputed classifications by some Chinese linguists:
There are also some smaller groups that are not yet classified, such as: Danzhou dialect (åå·è¯), spoken in Danzhou, on Hainan Island; Xianghua (乡è¯), not to be confused with Xiang (æ¹), spoken in western Hunan; and Shaozhou Tuhua (é¶å·åè¯), 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.
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 government intends 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 âdialectsâ) 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 normal 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 (ä¸æ), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (æ±è¯,âspoken language[s] of the Han Chinese)âthis term could be translated to either âlanguageâ or âlanguagesâ 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 è¯ yu and æ 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 oneâalbeit internally very diverseâethnicity. 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 Peopleâs 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 (âregional tonguesâ, often translated as âdialectsâ). 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 dialect.
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 chiÌt and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("ä¸"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as å and ä¿ 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 many formal occasions.
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 earlier 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 æ¥ (sun), shan å±± (mountain), shui æ°´ (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar XÇ Shèn in the Hà n Dynasty classified characters into six categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80â90% 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/æ¥·æ¸ kÇishÅ«) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (ç¯ä¹¦/ç¯æ¸ zhuà nshÅ«), cursive script (è书/èæ¸ cÇoshÅ«) and clerical script (é¶ä¹¦/é¸æ¸ lìshÅ«). 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 community, is the firstâand at present the onlyâforeign 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 Zhou Dynasty (1122 BCEâ256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the ShÄ«jÄ«ng, the history of the ShÅ«jÄ«ng, and portions of the YìjÄ«ng (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 QÄ«ng dynasty philologists.
Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably è mì "honey", ç
shÄ« "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mÇ "horse", ç¬ quÇn "dog", and éµ Ã© "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 âhoney' and âlion,' and probably also âhorse,' âdog,' and âgoose,' 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 Ãbereinstimmungen 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 Southern and Northern Dynasties and the SuÃ, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the åé» "Qièyùn" rime book (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the å»£é» "GuÇngyùn" rime book. 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 SìchuÄn 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 Qing Dynasty. Since the 17th century, the Qing Dynasty had set up orthoepy academies ( ) to make pronunciation conform to the standard of the capital Beijing. For the general population, however, this had limited effect. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The Beijing Mandarin court standard was used solely by officials and civil servants and was thus fairly limited.
This situation did not change until the mid-20th century with the creation (in both the PRC and the ROC, but not in Hong Kong) of a compulsory educational system committed to teaching 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.
Classical Chinese was once the lingua franca in neighbouring East Asian countries such as Japan, Korea and Vietnam for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. *Sheng Ding and Robert A. Saunders, Talking Up China: An Analysis of China's Rising Cultural Power and Global Promotion of the Chinese Language EASTASIA, Summer 2006, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 4
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 tá»±. 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. Approximately 60% of the modern Vietnamese lexicon is recognized as Hán-Viá»t (Sino-Vietnamese), the majority of which was borrowed from Middle Chinese.
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. 251â258.
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, likewise for a significant percentage of Japanese and Vietnamese vocabulary. 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.
Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of è¶ (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Minnan pronunciation of é®æ± (koe-tsiap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of éæ© (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"âhigh level
* "hemp" or "torpid"âhigh rising
* "horse"âlow falling-rising
* "scold"âhigh falling
* "question particle"âneutral
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 Indian translators, working in Sanskrit and Pali, were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of Chinese in a foreign language. After the 15th century, the efforts of Jesuits and Western court missionaries resulted 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 lack of a native 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 (æ¼¢èªæ¼é³/æ±è¯æ¼é³), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, and later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore) and Taiwan. 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 teaching new words. The Pinyin romanization is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, with the Chinese character alongside.
The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859 and modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As this system approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels, i.e. it is an Anglicization, it may be particularly helpful for beginner Chinese speakers of an English-speaking background. Wade-Giles was found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan.
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 BÄijÄ«ng (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é³, 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, å in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cà (è¯/è©), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cà (âwordâ) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more.
For example:
* Yun é²ââcloudâ (traditional)
* Yun äºââcloudâ (simplified)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ¼¢å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡ââhamburgerâ (traditional)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ±å ¡å
/æ±å ¡â"hamburger" (simplified)
* Wo æââI, meâ
* Ren 人ââpeopleâ
* Diqiu å°çââearth (globosity)â
* Shandian éé»ââlightningâ (traditional)
* Shandian éªçµâ"lightning" (simplifed)
* Meng 夢ââdreamâ (traditional)
* Meng 梦â"dream" (simplified)
All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphologyâi.e., changes in form of a wordâto indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflectionsâit possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), and only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English). There is, however, a gender difference in the written language (ä» as "he" and 她 as "she"), but it should be noted that this is a relatively new introduction to the Chinese language in the twentieth century.
They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le äº, hai è¿, yijing å·²ç», 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 classifiers and measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring languages like Japanese and Korean. See Chinese classifiers 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 cà is identified.
The mono-syllable jÄ«, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: é/鸡 chicken, æ©/æº machine, åº basic, æ/å» (to) hit, é¥/饥 hunger, and ç©/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: ååå«åè±ï¼åéµæ±çåï¼è±åçè± MÃngzi jià o JiÄyÄ«ng, JiÄlÃng JiÄng de jiÄ, YÄ«ngguó de yÄ«ng "My name is JiÄyÄ«ng, 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; since most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters, there are many times more Chinese words than there are 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 ä¸ååæµ· (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 æ±è¯å¤§è¯å
¸, 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 ç°ä»£æ±è¯è¯å
¸, 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 è¡è "grape," ç³æ¦´ "pomegranate" and ç®å/ç
å "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including ä½ "Buddha" and è©è¨/è©è© "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as è¡å "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as è¡è "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or PÄli, 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 çµç¶ "pÃpa", the Chinese lute, or é
ª "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è²å (pinyin: yÇsèliè), "Paris" becomes å·´é» (pinyin: bÄlÃ). A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including æ²ç¼ shÄfÄ "sofa," 马达/馬é mÇdá "motor," å¹½é» yÅumò "humor," é»è¾/é輯 luójà "logic," æ¶é«¦/æ髦 shÃmáo "smart, fashionable" and ææ¯åºé xiÄsÄ«dÇlÇ "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, æ²å/æ²ç¼ and 马达/馬é in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor."
Western foreign words have had great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came èè¾ (bÄléi, "ballet"), é¦æ§ (xiÄngbÄ«n, "champagne"), via Italian åå¡ (kÄfÄi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned æ²ç¼ (shÄfÄ "sofa"), å¹½é» (yÅumò "humour"), and é«å°å¤« (gÄoÄrfÅ«, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪æ¯ç§ (dÃsÄ«kè, "disco"), å¯ä¹ (kÄlè, "cola") and è¿·ä½ (mÃnÇ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon å¡é (cartoon), åºä½¬ (gay people), ç士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. ç²çµ² (fÄnsÄ«, "fans"), é§å®¢ (hèikè, "hacker"), é¨è½æ ¼(bùluÅgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin.
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 å¾·å¾é£/å¾·å¾é¢¨ ( Shanghainese: télÃfon , Standard Mandarin: délÇfÄng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese çµè¯/é»è©± (dià nhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include çµè§/é»è¦ (dià nshì "electric vision") for television, çµè/é»è
¦ (dià nnÇo "electric brain") for computer; ææº/ææ© (shÇujÄ« "hand machine") for cellphone, and èç/èè½ (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. ç¶²èª (wÇng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as æ±å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡å
(hà nbÇo bÄo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as æææº/æææ© (tuÅlÄjÄ«, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马å©å¥¥/馬å©å¥§ for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example å¥è
¾/å¥é¨° (bÄnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and èµç¾å³/è³½ç¾å³ (Sà ibÇiwèi "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 (å製漢èª, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include dià nhuà (çµè¯/é»è©±, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社ä¼, shakai, "society"), kÄxué (ç§å¦/ç§å¸, kagaku, "science") and chÅuxià ng (æ½è±¡, chÅ«shÅ, "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, jÄ«ngjì (ç»æµ/ç¶æ¿, 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 Hokkien and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便å½/ä¾¿ç¶ âlunchbox or boxed lunchâ (from bento) and æç âprepared cuisineâ, have passed into common currency.
With the growing importance and influence of China's economy globally, Mandarin instruction is gaining popularity in schools in the USA, and 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 the English Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660.
* Chinese characters
* Chinese exclamative particles
* Chinese honorifics
* Chinese classifier
* Chinese number gestures
* Chinese numerals
* Chinese punctuation
* Classical Chinese grammar
* Four-character idiom
* Han unification
* Haner language
* HSK test
* Languages of China
* North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics
* Nü shu
*
*
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* ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawaiâi Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X.
* ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawaiâi Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-0-8248-2975-9.
* Keys to the Chinese Language: Book IIâGoogle Books
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Chinese_language | How is the pronunciation of foreign words determined? | The pronunciation of foreign words is done by employing Chinese characters with similar pronuncations. | data/set5/a7 | Chinese_language
Sino-Tibetan language family
The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China and Taiwan
Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) ( ; ; ; or ) is a language family consisting of languages mutually intelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. âThe mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.â
* Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. âThe Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.â
* Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. âThe 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 worldâs 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 some 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), Cantonese (Yue) (70 million) and Min (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 å®è¯ GuÄnhuà or åæ¹è¯ BÄifÄnghuà 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. Chineseâde facto, Standard Mandarinâis 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).
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:
Disputed classifications by some Chinese linguists:
There are also some smaller groups that are not yet classified, such as: Danzhou dialect (åå·è¯), spoken in Danzhou, on Hainan Island; Xianghua (乡è¯), not to be confused with Xiang (æ¹), spoken in western Hunan; and Shaozhou Tuhua (é¶å·åè¯), 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.
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 government intends 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 âdialectsâ) 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 normal 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 (ä¸æ), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (æ±è¯,âspoken language[s] of the Han Chinese)âthis term could be translated to either âlanguageâ or âlanguagesâ 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 è¯ yu and æ 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 oneâalbeit internally very diverseâethnicity. 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 Peopleâs 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 (âregional tonguesâ, often translated as âdialectsâ). 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 dialect.
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 chiÌt and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("ä¸"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as å and ä¿ 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 many formal occasions.
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 earlier 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 æ¥ (sun), shan å±± (mountain), shui æ°´ (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar XÇ Shèn in the Hà n Dynasty classified characters into six categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80â90% 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/æ¥·æ¸ kÇishÅ«) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (ç¯ä¹¦/ç¯æ¸ zhuà nshÅ«), cursive script (è书/èæ¸ cÇoshÅ«) and clerical script (é¶ä¹¦/é¸æ¸ lìshÅ«). 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 community, is the firstâand at present the onlyâforeign 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 Zhou Dynasty (1122 BCEâ256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the ShÄ«jÄ«ng, the history of the ShÅ«jÄ«ng, and portions of the YìjÄ«ng (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 QÄ«ng dynasty philologists.
Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably è mì "honey", ç
shÄ« "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mÇ "horse", ç¬ quÇn "dog", and éµ Ã© "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 âhoney' and âlion,' and probably also âhorse,' âdog,' and âgoose,' 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 Ãbereinstimmungen 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 Southern and Northern Dynasties and the SuÃ, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the åé» "Qièyùn" rime book (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the å»£é» "GuÇngyùn" rime book. 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 SìchuÄn 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 Qing Dynasty. Since the 17th century, the Qing Dynasty had set up orthoepy academies ( ) to make pronunciation conform to the standard of the capital Beijing. For the general population, however, this had limited effect. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The Beijing Mandarin court standard was used solely by officials and civil servants and was thus fairly limited.
This situation did not change until the mid-20th century with the creation (in both the PRC and the ROC, but not in Hong Kong) of a compulsory educational system committed to teaching 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.
Classical Chinese was once the lingua franca in neighbouring East Asian countries such as Japan, Korea and Vietnam for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. *Sheng Ding and Robert A. Saunders, Talking Up China: An Analysis of China's Rising Cultural Power and Global Promotion of the Chinese Language EASTASIA, Summer 2006, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 4
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 tá»±. 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. Approximately 60% of the modern Vietnamese lexicon is recognized as Hán-Viá»t (Sino-Vietnamese), the majority of which was borrowed from Middle Chinese.
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. 251â258.
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, likewise for a significant percentage of Japanese and Vietnamese vocabulary. 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.
Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of è¶ (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Minnan pronunciation of é®æ± (koe-tsiap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of éæ© (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"âhigh level
* "hemp" or "torpid"âhigh rising
* "horse"âlow falling-rising
* "scold"âhigh falling
* "question particle"âneutral
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 Indian translators, working in Sanskrit and Pali, were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of Chinese in a foreign language. After the 15th century, the efforts of Jesuits and Western court missionaries resulted 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 lack of a native 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 (æ¼¢èªæ¼é³/æ±è¯æ¼é³), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, and later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore) and Taiwan. 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 teaching new words. The Pinyin romanization is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, with the Chinese character alongside.
The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859 and modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As this system approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels, i.e. it is an Anglicization, it may be particularly helpful for beginner Chinese speakers of an English-speaking background. Wade-Giles was found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan.
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 BÄijÄ«ng (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é³, 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, å in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cà (è¯/è©), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cà (âwordâ) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more.
For example:
* Yun é²ââcloudâ (traditional)
* Yun äºââcloudâ (simplified)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ¼¢å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡ââhamburgerâ (traditional)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ±å ¡å
/æ±å ¡â"hamburger" (simplified)
* Wo æââI, meâ
* Ren 人ââpeopleâ
* Diqiu å°çââearth (globosity)â
* Shandian éé»ââlightningâ (traditional)
* Shandian éªçµâ"lightning" (simplifed)
* Meng 夢ââdreamâ (traditional)
* Meng 梦â"dream" (simplified)
All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphologyâi.e., changes in form of a wordâto indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflectionsâit possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), and only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English). There is, however, a gender difference in the written language (ä» as "he" and 她 as "she"), but it should be noted that this is a relatively new introduction to the Chinese language in the twentieth century.
They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le äº, hai è¿, yijing å·²ç», 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 classifiers and measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring languages like Japanese and Korean. See Chinese classifiers 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 cà is identified.
The mono-syllable jÄ«, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: é/鸡 chicken, æ©/æº machine, åº basic, æ/å» (to) hit, é¥/饥 hunger, and ç©/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: ååå«åè±ï¼åéµæ±çåï¼è±åçè± MÃngzi jià o JiÄyÄ«ng, JiÄlÃng JiÄng de jiÄ, YÄ«ngguó de yÄ«ng "My name is JiÄyÄ«ng, 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; since most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters, there are many times more Chinese words than there are 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 ä¸ååæµ· (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 æ±è¯å¤§è¯å
¸, 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 ç°ä»£æ±è¯è¯å
¸, 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 è¡è "grape," ç³æ¦´ "pomegranate" and ç®å/ç
å "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including ä½ "Buddha" and è©è¨/è©è© "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as è¡å "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as è¡è "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or PÄli, 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 çµç¶ "pÃpa", the Chinese lute, or é
ª "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è²å (pinyin: yÇsèliè), "Paris" becomes å·´é» (pinyin: bÄlÃ). A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including æ²ç¼ shÄfÄ "sofa," 马达/馬é mÇdá "motor," å¹½é» yÅumò "humor," é»è¾/é輯 luójà "logic," æ¶é«¦/æ髦 shÃmáo "smart, fashionable" and ææ¯åºé xiÄsÄ«dÇlÇ "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, æ²å/æ²ç¼ and 马达/馬é in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor."
Western foreign words have had great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came èè¾ (bÄléi, "ballet"), é¦æ§ (xiÄngbÄ«n, "champagne"), via Italian åå¡ (kÄfÄi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned æ²ç¼ (shÄfÄ "sofa"), å¹½é» (yÅumò "humour"), and é«å°å¤« (gÄoÄrfÅ«, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪æ¯ç§ (dÃsÄ«kè, "disco"), å¯ä¹ (kÄlè, "cola") and è¿·ä½ (mÃnÇ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon å¡é (cartoon), åºä½¬ (gay people), ç士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. ç²çµ² (fÄnsÄ«, "fans"), é§å®¢ (hèikè, "hacker"), é¨è½æ ¼(bùluÅgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin.
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 å¾·å¾é£/å¾·å¾é¢¨ ( Shanghainese: télÃfon , Standard Mandarin: délÇfÄng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese çµè¯/é»è©± (dià nhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include çµè§/é»è¦ (dià nshì "electric vision") for television, çµè/é»è
¦ (dià nnÇo "electric brain") for computer; ææº/ææ© (shÇujÄ« "hand machine") for cellphone, and èç/èè½ (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. ç¶²èª (wÇng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as æ±å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡å
(hà nbÇo bÄo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as æææº/æææ© (tuÅlÄjÄ«, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马å©å¥¥/馬å©å¥§ for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example å¥è
¾/å¥é¨° (bÄnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and èµç¾å³/è³½ç¾å³ (Sà ibÇiwèi "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 (å製漢èª, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include dià nhuà (çµè¯/é»è©±, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社ä¼, shakai, "society"), kÄxué (ç§å¦/ç§å¸, kagaku, "science") and chÅuxià ng (æ½è±¡, chÅ«shÅ, "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, jÄ«ngjì (ç»æµ/ç¶æ¿, 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 Hokkien and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便å½/ä¾¿ç¶ âlunchbox or boxed lunchâ (from bento) and æç âprepared cuisineâ, have passed into common currency.
With the growing importance and influence of China's economy globally, Mandarin instruction is gaining popularity in schools in the USA, and 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 the English Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660.
* Chinese characters
* Chinese exclamative particles
* Chinese honorifics
* Chinese classifier
* Chinese number gestures
* Chinese numerals
* Chinese punctuation
* Classical Chinese grammar
* Four-character idiom
* Han unification
* Haner language
* HSK test
* Languages of China
* North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics
* Nü shu
*
*
*
*
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* ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawaiâi Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X.
* ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawaiâi Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-0-8248-2975-9.
* Keys to the Chinese Language: Book IIâGoogle Books
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Chinese_language | How is the pronunciation of foreign words determined? | Foreign words are transliterated into close-match existing Chinese morphemes. | data/set5/a7 | Chinese_language
Sino-Tibetan language family
The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China and Taiwan
Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) ( ; ; ; or ) is a language family consisting of languages mutually intelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. âThe mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.â
* Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. âThe Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.â
* Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. âThe 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 worldâs 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 some 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), Cantonese (Yue) (70 million) and Min (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 å®è¯ GuÄnhuà or åæ¹è¯ BÄifÄnghuà 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. Chineseâde facto, Standard Mandarinâis 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).
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:
Disputed classifications by some Chinese linguists:
There are also some smaller groups that are not yet classified, such as: Danzhou dialect (åå·è¯), spoken in Danzhou, on Hainan Island; Xianghua (乡è¯), not to be confused with Xiang (æ¹), spoken in western Hunan; and Shaozhou Tuhua (é¶å·åè¯), 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.
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 government intends 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 âdialectsâ) 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 normal 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 (ä¸æ), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (æ±è¯,âspoken language[s] of the Han Chinese)âthis term could be translated to either âlanguageâ or âlanguagesâ 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 è¯ yu and æ 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 oneâalbeit internally very diverseâethnicity. 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 Peopleâs 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 (âregional tonguesâ, often translated as âdialectsâ). 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 dialect.
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 chiÌt and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("ä¸"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as å and ä¿ 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 many formal occasions.
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 earlier 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 æ¥ (sun), shan å±± (mountain), shui æ°´ (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar XÇ Shèn in the Hà n Dynasty classified characters into six categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80â90% 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/æ¥·æ¸ kÇishÅ«) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (ç¯ä¹¦/ç¯æ¸ zhuà nshÅ«), cursive script (è书/èæ¸ cÇoshÅ«) and clerical script (é¶ä¹¦/é¸æ¸ lìshÅ«). 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 community, is the firstâand at present the onlyâforeign 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 Zhou Dynasty (1122 BCEâ256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the ShÄ«jÄ«ng, the history of the ShÅ«jÄ«ng, and portions of the YìjÄ«ng (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 QÄ«ng dynasty philologists.
Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably è mì "honey", ç
shÄ« "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mÇ "horse", ç¬ quÇn "dog", and éµ Ã© "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 âhoney' and âlion,' and probably also âhorse,' âdog,' and âgoose,' 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 Ãbereinstimmungen 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 Southern and Northern Dynasties and the SuÃ, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the åé» "Qièyùn" rime book (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the å»£é» "GuÇngyùn" rime book. 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 SìchuÄn 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 Qing Dynasty. Since the 17th century, the Qing Dynasty had set up orthoepy academies ( ) to make pronunciation conform to the standard of the capital Beijing. For the general population, however, this had limited effect. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The Beijing Mandarin court standard was used solely by officials and civil servants and was thus fairly limited.
This situation did not change until the mid-20th century with the creation (in both the PRC and the ROC, but not in Hong Kong) of a compulsory educational system committed to teaching 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.
Classical Chinese was once the lingua franca in neighbouring East Asian countries such as Japan, Korea and Vietnam for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. *Sheng Ding and Robert A. Saunders, Talking Up China: An Analysis of China's Rising Cultural Power and Global Promotion of the Chinese Language EASTASIA, Summer 2006, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 4
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 tá»±. 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. Approximately 60% of the modern Vietnamese lexicon is recognized as Hán-Viá»t (Sino-Vietnamese), the majority of which was borrowed from Middle Chinese.
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. 251â258.
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, likewise for a significant percentage of Japanese and Vietnamese vocabulary. 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.
Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of è¶ (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Minnan pronunciation of é®æ± (koe-tsiap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of éæ© (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"âhigh level
* "hemp" or "torpid"âhigh rising
* "horse"âlow falling-rising
* "scold"âhigh falling
* "question particle"âneutral
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 Indian translators, working in Sanskrit and Pali, were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of Chinese in a foreign language. After the 15th century, the efforts of Jesuits and Western court missionaries resulted 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 lack of a native 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 (æ¼¢èªæ¼é³/æ±è¯æ¼é³), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, and later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore) and Taiwan. 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 teaching new words. The Pinyin romanization is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, with the Chinese character alongside.
The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859 and modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As this system approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels, i.e. it is an Anglicization, it may be particularly helpful for beginner Chinese speakers of an English-speaking background. Wade-Giles was found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan.
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 BÄijÄ«ng (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é³, 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, å in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cà (è¯/è©), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cà (âwordâ) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more.
For example:
* Yun é²ââcloudâ (traditional)
* Yun äºââcloudâ (simplified)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ¼¢å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡ââhamburgerâ (traditional)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ±å ¡å
/æ±å ¡â"hamburger" (simplified)
* Wo æââI, meâ
* Ren 人ââpeopleâ
* Diqiu å°çââearth (globosity)â
* Shandian éé»ââlightningâ (traditional)
* Shandian éªçµâ"lightning" (simplifed)
* Meng 夢ââdreamâ (traditional)
* Meng 梦â"dream" (simplified)
All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphologyâi.e., changes in form of a wordâto indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflectionsâit possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), and only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English). There is, however, a gender difference in the written language (ä» as "he" and 她 as "she"), but it should be noted that this is a relatively new introduction to the Chinese language in the twentieth century.
They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le äº, hai è¿, yijing å·²ç», 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 classifiers and measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring languages like Japanese and Korean. See Chinese classifiers 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 cà is identified.
The mono-syllable jÄ«, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: é/鸡 chicken, æ©/æº machine, åº basic, æ/å» (to) hit, é¥/饥 hunger, and ç©/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: ååå«åè±ï¼åéµæ±çåï¼è±åçè± MÃngzi jià o JiÄyÄ«ng, JiÄlÃng JiÄng de jiÄ, YÄ«ngguó de yÄ«ng "My name is JiÄyÄ«ng, 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; since most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters, there are many times more Chinese words than there are 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 ä¸ååæµ· (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 æ±è¯å¤§è¯å
¸, 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 ç°ä»£æ±è¯è¯å
¸, 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 è¡è "grape," ç³æ¦´ "pomegranate" and ç®å/ç
å "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including ä½ "Buddha" and è©è¨/è©è© "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as è¡å "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as è¡è "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or PÄli, 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 çµç¶ "pÃpa", the Chinese lute, or é
ª "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è²å (pinyin: yÇsèliè), "Paris" becomes å·´é» (pinyin: bÄlÃ). A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including æ²ç¼ shÄfÄ "sofa," 马达/馬é mÇdá "motor," å¹½é» yÅumò "humor," é»è¾/é輯 luójà "logic," æ¶é«¦/æ髦 shÃmáo "smart, fashionable" and ææ¯åºé xiÄsÄ«dÇlÇ "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, æ²å/æ²ç¼ and 马达/馬é in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor."
Western foreign words have had great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came èè¾ (bÄléi, "ballet"), é¦æ§ (xiÄngbÄ«n, "champagne"), via Italian åå¡ (kÄfÄi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned æ²ç¼ (shÄfÄ "sofa"), å¹½é» (yÅumò "humour"), and é«å°å¤« (gÄoÄrfÅ«, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪æ¯ç§ (dÃsÄ«kè, "disco"), å¯ä¹ (kÄlè, "cola") and è¿·ä½ (mÃnÇ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon å¡é (cartoon), åºä½¬ (gay people), ç士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. ç²çµ² (fÄnsÄ«, "fans"), é§å®¢ (hèikè, "hacker"), é¨è½æ ¼(bùluÅgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin.
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 å¾·å¾é£/å¾·å¾é¢¨ ( Shanghainese: télÃfon , Standard Mandarin: délÇfÄng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese çµè¯/é»è©± (dià nhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include çµè§/é»è¦ (dià nshì "electric vision") for television, çµè/é»è
¦ (dià nnÇo "electric brain") for computer; ææº/ææ© (shÇujÄ« "hand machine") for cellphone, and èç/èè½ (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. ç¶²èª (wÇng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as æ±å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡å
(hà nbÇo bÄo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as æææº/æææ© (tuÅlÄjÄ«, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马å©å¥¥/馬å©å¥§ for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example å¥è
¾/å¥é¨° (bÄnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and èµç¾å³/è³½ç¾å³ (Sà ibÇiwèi "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 (å製漢èª, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include dià nhuà (çµè¯/é»è©±, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社ä¼, shakai, "society"), kÄxué (ç§å¦/ç§å¸, kagaku, "science") and chÅuxià ng (æ½è±¡, chÅ«shÅ, "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, jÄ«ngjì (ç»æµ/ç¶æ¿, 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 Hokkien and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便å½/ä¾¿ç¶ âlunchbox or boxed lunchâ (from bento) and æç âprepared cuisineâ, have passed into common currency.
With the growing importance and influence of China's economy globally, Mandarin instruction is gaining popularity in schools in the USA, and 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 the English Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660.
* Chinese characters
* Chinese exclamative particles
* Chinese honorifics
* Chinese classifier
* Chinese number gestures
* Chinese numerals
* Chinese punctuation
* Classical Chinese grammar
* Four-character idiom
* Han unification
* Haner language
* HSK test
* Languages of China
* North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics
* Nü shu
*
*
*
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* ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawaiâi Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X.
* ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawaiâi Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-0-8248-2975-9.
* Keys to the Chinese Language: Book IIâGoogle Books
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Chinese_language | What is the total number of Chinese words? | The Hanyu Da Zidian includes 54,678 head entries for characters. | data/set5/a7 | Chinese_language
Sino-Tibetan language family
The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China and Taiwan
Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) ( ; ; ; or ) is a language family consisting of languages mutually intelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. âThe mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.â
* Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. âThe Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.â
* Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. âThe 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 worldâs 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 some 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), Cantonese (Yue) (70 million) and Min (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 å®è¯ GuÄnhuà or åæ¹è¯ BÄifÄnghuà 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. Chineseâde facto, Standard Mandarinâis 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).
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:
Disputed classifications by some Chinese linguists:
There are also some smaller groups that are not yet classified, such as: Danzhou dialect (åå·è¯), spoken in Danzhou, on Hainan Island; Xianghua (乡è¯), not to be confused with Xiang (æ¹), spoken in western Hunan; and Shaozhou Tuhua (é¶å·åè¯), 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.
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 government intends 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 âdialectsâ) 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 normal 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 (ä¸æ), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (æ±è¯,âspoken language[s] of the Han Chinese)âthis term could be translated to either âlanguageâ or âlanguagesâ 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 è¯ yu and æ 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 oneâalbeit internally very diverseâethnicity. 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 Peopleâs 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 (âregional tonguesâ, often translated as âdialectsâ). 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 dialect.
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 chiÌt and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("ä¸"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as å and ä¿ 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 many formal occasions.
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 earlier 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 æ¥ (sun), shan å±± (mountain), shui æ°´ (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar XÇ Shèn in the Hà n Dynasty classified characters into six categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80â90% 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/æ¥·æ¸ kÇishÅ«) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (ç¯ä¹¦/ç¯æ¸ zhuà nshÅ«), cursive script (è书/èæ¸ cÇoshÅ«) and clerical script (é¶ä¹¦/é¸æ¸ lìshÅ«). 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 community, is the firstâand at present the onlyâforeign 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 Zhou Dynasty (1122 BCEâ256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the ShÄ«jÄ«ng, the history of the ShÅ«jÄ«ng, and portions of the YìjÄ«ng (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 QÄ«ng dynasty philologists.
Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably è mì "honey", ç
shÄ« "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mÇ "horse", ç¬ quÇn "dog", and éµ Ã© "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 âhoney' and âlion,' and probably also âhorse,' âdog,' and âgoose,' 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 Ãbereinstimmungen 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 Southern and Northern Dynasties and the SuÃ, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the åé» "Qièyùn" rime book (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the å»£é» "GuÇngyùn" rime book. 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 SìchuÄn 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 Qing Dynasty. Since the 17th century, the Qing Dynasty had set up orthoepy academies ( ) to make pronunciation conform to the standard of the capital Beijing. For the general population, however, this had limited effect. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The Beijing Mandarin court standard was used solely by officials and civil servants and was thus fairly limited.
This situation did not change until the mid-20th century with the creation (in both the PRC and the ROC, but not in Hong Kong) of a compulsory educational system committed to teaching 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.
Classical Chinese was once the lingua franca in neighbouring East Asian countries such as Japan, Korea and Vietnam for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. *Sheng Ding and Robert A. Saunders, Talking Up China: An Analysis of China's Rising Cultural Power and Global Promotion of the Chinese Language EASTASIA, Summer 2006, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 4
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 tá»±. 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. Approximately 60% of the modern Vietnamese lexicon is recognized as Hán-Viá»t (Sino-Vietnamese), the majority of which was borrowed from Middle Chinese.
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. 251â258.
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, likewise for a significant percentage of Japanese and Vietnamese vocabulary. 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.
Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of è¶ (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Minnan pronunciation of é®æ± (koe-tsiap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of éæ© (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"âhigh level
* "hemp" or "torpid"âhigh rising
* "horse"âlow falling-rising
* "scold"âhigh falling
* "question particle"âneutral
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 Indian translators, working in Sanskrit and Pali, were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of Chinese in a foreign language. After the 15th century, the efforts of Jesuits and Western court missionaries resulted 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 lack of a native 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 (æ¼¢èªæ¼é³/æ±è¯æ¼é³), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, and later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore) and Taiwan. 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 teaching new words. The Pinyin romanization is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, with the Chinese character alongside.
The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859 and modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As this system approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels, i.e. it is an Anglicization, it may be particularly helpful for beginner Chinese speakers of an English-speaking background. Wade-Giles was found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan.
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 BÄijÄ«ng (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é³, 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, å in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cà (è¯/è©), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cà (âwordâ) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more.
For example:
* Yun é²ââcloudâ (traditional)
* Yun äºââcloudâ (simplified)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ¼¢å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡ââhamburgerâ (traditional)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ±å ¡å
/æ±å ¡â"hamburger" (simplified)
* Wo æââI, meâ
* Ren 人ââpeopleâ
* Diqiu å°çââearth (globosity)â
* Shandian éé»ââlightningâ (traditional)
* Shandian éªçµâ"lightning" (simplifed)
* Meng 夢ââdreamâ (traditional)
* Meng 梦â"dream" (simplified)
All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphologyâi.e., changes in form of a wordâto indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflectionsâit possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), and only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English). There is, however, a gender difference in the written language (ä» as "he" and 她 as "she"), but it should be noted that this is a relatively new introduction to the Chinese language in the twentieth century.
They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le äº, hai è¿, yijing å·²ç», 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 classifiers and measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring languages like Japanese and Korean. See Chinese classifiers 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 cà is identified.
The mono-syllable jÄ«, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: é/鸡 chicken, æ©/æº machine, åº basic, æ/å» (to) hit, é¥/饥 hunger, and ç©/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: ååå«åè±ï¼åéµæ±çåï¼è±åçè± MÃngzi jià o JiÄyÄ«ng, JiÄlÃng JiÄng de jiÄ, YÄ«ngguó de yÄ«ng "My name is JiÄyÄ«ng, 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; since most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters, there are many times more Chinese words than there are 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 ä¸ååæµ· (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 æ±è¯å¤§è¯å
¸, 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 ç°ä»£æ±è¯è¯å
¸, 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 è¡è "grape," ç³æ¦´ "pomegranate" and ç®å/ç
å "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including ä½ "Buddha" and è©è¨/è©è© "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as è¡å "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as è¡è "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or PÄli, 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 çµç¶ "pÃpa", the Chinese lute, or é
ª "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è²å (pinyin: yÇsèliè), "Paris" becomes å·´é» (pinyin: bÄlÃ). A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including æ²ç¼ shÄfÄ "sofa," 马达/馬é mÇdá "motor," å¹½é» yÅumò "humor," é»è¾/é輯 luójà "logic," æ¶é«¦/æ髦 shÃmáo "smart, fashionable" and ææ¯åºé xiÄsÄ«dÇlÇ "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, æ²å/æ²ç¼ and 马达/馬é in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor."
Western foreign words have had great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came èè¾ (bÄléi, "ballet"), é¦æ§ (xiÄngbÄ«n, "champagne"), via Italian åå¡ (kÄfÄi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned æ²ç¼ (shÄfÄ "sofa"), å¹½é» (yÅumò "humour"), and é«å°å¤« (gÄoÄrfÅ«, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪æ¯ç§ (dÃsÄ«kè, "disco"), å¯ä¹ (kÄlè, "cola") and è¿·ä½ (mÃnÇ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon å¡é (cartoon), åºä½¬ (gay people), ç士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. ç²çµ² (fÄnsÄ«, "fans"), é§å®¢ (hèikè, "hacker"), é¨è½æ ¼(bùluÅgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin.
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 å¾·å¾é£/å¾·å¾é¢¨ ( Shanghainese: télÃfon , Standard Mandarin: délÇfÄng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese çµè¯/é»è©± (dià nhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include çµè§/é»è¦ (dià nshì "electric vision") for television, çµè/é»è
¦ (dià nnÇo "electric brain") for computer; ææº/ææ© (shÇujÄ« "hand machine") for cellphone, and èç/èè½ (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. ç¶²èª (wÇng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as æ±å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡å
(hà nbÇo bÄo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as æææº/æææ© (tuÅlÄjÄ«, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马å©å¥¥/馬å©å¥§ for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example å¥è
¾/å¥é¨° (bÄnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and èµç¾å³/è³½ç¾å³ (Sà ibÇiwèi "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 (å製漢èª, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include dià nhuà (çµè¯/é»è©±, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社ä¼, shakai, "society"), kÄxué (ç§å¦/ç§å¸, kagaku, "science") and chÅuxià ng (æ½è±¡, chÅ«shÅ, "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, jÄ«ngjì (ç»æµ/ç¶æ¿, 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 Hokkien and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便å½/ä¾¿ç¶ âlunchbox or boxed lunchâ (from bento) and æç âprepared cuisineâ, have passed into common currency.
With the growing importance and influence of China's economy globally, Mandarin instruction is gaining popularity in schools in the USA, and 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 the English Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660.
* Chinese characters
* Chinese exclamative particles
* Chinese honorifics
* Chinese classifier
* Chinese number gestures
* Chinese numerals
* Chinese punctuation
* Classical Chinese grammar
* Four-character idiom
* Han unification
* Haner language
* HSK test
* Languages of China
* North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics
* Nü shu
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*
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* ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawaiâi Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X.
* ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawaiâi Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-0-8248-2975-9.
* Keys to the Chinese Language: Book IIâGoogle Books
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Chinese_language | What language was used in the Zhou and Southern Dynasties? | Old Chinese was the language common during the early and middle Zhou Dynasty. | data/set5/a7 | Chinese_language
Sino-Tibetan language family
The varieties of spoken Chinese in Eastern China and Taiwan
Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) ( ; ; ; or ) is a language family consisting of languages mutually intelligible to varying degrees. *David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. âThe mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages.â
* Charles N. Li, Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1989), p 2. âThe Chinese language family is genetically classified as an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.â
* Jerry Norman. Chinese (1988), p.1. âThe 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 worldâs 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 some 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), Cantonese (Yue) (70 million) and Min (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 å®è¯ GuÄnhuà or åæ¹è¯ BÄifÄnghuà 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. Chineseâde facto, Standard Mandarinâis 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).
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:
Disputed classifications by some Chinese linguists:
There are also some smaller groups that are not yet classified, such as: Danzhou dialect (åå·è¯), spoken in Danzhou, on Hainan Island; Xianghua (乡è¯), not to be confused with Xiang (æ¹), spoken in western Hunan; and Shaozhou Tuhua (é¶å·åè¯), 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.
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 government intends 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 âdialectsâ) 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 normal 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 (ä¸æ), while the closest equivalent used to describe its spoken variants would be Hanyu (æ±è¯,âspoken language[s] of the Han Chinese)âthis term could be translated to either âlanguageâ or âlanguagesâ 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 è¯ yu and æ 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 oneâalbeit internally very diverseâethnicity. 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 Peopleâs 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 (âregional tonguesâ, often translated as âdialectsâ). 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 dialect.
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 chiÌt and "yit = first" in Hokkien (form of Min), all share an identical character ("ä¸"). Vocabularies from different major Chinese variants have diverged, and colloquial non-standard written Chinese often makes use of unique "dialectal characters", such as å and ä¿ 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 many formal occasions.
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 earlier 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 æ¥ (sun), shan å±± (mountain), shui æ°´ (water), may be wholly pictorial in origin. In 100 CE, the famed scholar XÇ Shèn in the Hà n Dynasty classified characters into six categories, namely pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, and 80â90% 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/æ¥·æ¸ kÇishÅ«) (see styles, below). Various other written styles are also used in East Asian calligraphy, including seal script (ç¯ä¹¦/ç¯æ¸ zhuà nshÅ«), cursive script (è书/èæ¸ cÇoshÅ«) and clerical script (é¶ä¹¦/é¸æ¸ lìshÅ«). 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 community, is the firstâand at present the onlyâforeign 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 Zhou Dynasty (1122 BCEâ256 BCE), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the ShÄ«jÄ«ng, the history of the ShÅ«jÄ«ng, and portions of the YìjÄ«ng (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 QÄ«ng dynasty philologists.
Some early Indo-European loan-words in Chinese have been proposed, notably è mì "honey", ç
shÄ« "lion," and perhaps also 馬 mÇ "horse", ç¬ quÇn "dog", and éµ Ã© "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 âhoney' and âlion,' and probably also âhorse,' âdog,' and âgoose,' 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 Ãbereinstimmungen 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 Southern and Northern Dynasties and the SuÃ, Táng, and Sòng dynasties (6th through 10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by the åé» "Qièyùn" rime book (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by the å»£é» "GuÇngyùn" rime book. 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 SìchuÄn 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 Qing Dynasty. Since the 17th century, the Qing Dynasty had set up orthoepy academies ( ) to make pronunciation conform to the standard of the capital Beijing. For the general population, however, this had limited effect. The non-Mandarin speakers in southern China also continued to use their various languages for every aspect of life. The Beijing Mandarin court standard was used solely by officials and civil servants and was thus fairly limited.
This situation did not change until the mid-20th century with the creation (in both the PRC and the ROC, but not in Hong Kong) of a compulsory educational system committed to teaching 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.
Classical Chinese was once the lingua franca in neighbouring East Asian countries such as Japan, Korea and Vietnam for centuries, before the rise of European influences in 19th century. *Sheng Ding and Robert A. Saunders, Talking Up China: An Analysis of China's Rising Cultural Power and Global Promotion of the Chinese Language EASTASIA, Summer 2006, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 4
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 tá»±. 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. Approximately 60% of the modern Vietnamese lexicon is recognized as Hán-Viá»t (Sino-Vietnamese), the majority of which was borrowed from Middle Chinese.
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. 251â258.
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, likewise for a significant percentage of Japanese and Vietnamese vocabulary. 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.
Loan words from Chinese also exist in European languages such as English. Examples of such words are "tea" from the Minnan pronunciation of è¶ (POJ: tê), "ketchup" from the Minnan pronunciation of é®æ± (koe-tsiap), and "kumquat" from the Cantonese pronunciation of éæ© (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"âhigh level
* "hemp" or "torpid"âhigh rising
* "horse"âlow falling-rising
* "scold"âhigh falling
* "question particle"âneutral
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 Indian translators, working in Sanskrit and Pali, were the first to attempt describing the sounds and enunciation patterns of Chinese in a foreign language. After the 15th century, the efforts of Jesuits and Western court missionaries resulted 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 lack of a native 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 (æ¼¢èªæ¼é³/æ±è¯æ¼é³), often known simply as pinyin, introduced in 1956 by the People's Republic of China, and later adopted by Singapore (see Chinese language romanisation in Singapore) and Taiwan. 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 teaching new words. The Pinyin romanization is usually shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, with the Chinese character alongside.
The second-most common romanization system, the Wade-Giles, was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859 and modified by Herbert Giles in 1892. As this system approximates the phonology of Mandarin Chinese into English consonants and vowels, i.e. it is an Anglicization, it may be particularly helpful for beginner Chinese speakers of an English-speaking background. Wade-Giles was found in academic use in the United States, particularly before the 1980s, and until recently was widely used in Taiwan.
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 BÄijÄ«ng (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é³, 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, å in Chinese) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllabic compounds, known as cà (è¯/è©), which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cà (âwordâ) can consist of more than one character-morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more.
For example:
* Yun é²ââcloudâ (traditional)
* Yun äºââcloudâ (simplified)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ¼¢å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡ââhamburgerâ (traditional)
* Hanbaobao/Hanbao æ±å ¡å
/æ±å ¡â"hamburger" (simplified)
* Wo æââI, meâ
* Ren 人ââpeopleâ
* Diqiu å°çââearth (globosity)â
* Shandian éé»ââlightningâ (traditional)
* Shandian éªçµâ"lightning" (simplifed)
* Meng 夢ââdreamâ (traditional)
* Meng 梦â"dream" (simplified)
All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphologyâi.e., changes in form of a wordâto indicate the word's function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflectionsâit possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), and only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to "the, a, an" in English). There is, however, a gender difference in the written language (ä» as "he" and 她 as "she"), but it should be noted that this is a relatively new introduction to the Chinese language in the twentieth century.
They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin Chinese, this involves the use of particles like le äº, hai è¿, yijing å·²ç», 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 classifiers and measure words, another trait shared with neighbouring languages like Japanese and Korean. See Chinese classifiers 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 cà is identified.
The mono-syllable jÄ«, first tone in standard Mandarin, corresponds to the following characters: é/鸡 chicken, æ©/æº machine, åº basic, æ/å» (to) hit, é¥/饥 hunger, and ç©/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: ååå«åè±ï¼åéµæ±çåï¼è±åçè± MÃngzi jià o JiÄyÄ«ng, JiÄlÃng JiÄng de jiÄ, YÄ«ngguó de yÄ«ng "My name is JiÄyÄ«ng, 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; since most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters, there are many times more Chinese words than there are 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 ä¸ååæµ· (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 æ±è¯å¤§è¯å
¸, 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 ç°ä»£æ±è¯è¯å
¸, 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 è¡è "grape," ç³æ¦´ "pomegranate" and ç®å/ç
å "lion." Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including ä½ "Buddha" and è©è¨/è©è© "bodhisattva." Other words came from nomadic peoples to the north, such as è¡å "hutong." Words borrowed from the peoples along the Silk Road, such as è¡è "grape" (pútáo in Mandarin) generally have Persian etymologies. Buddhist terminology is generally derived from Sanskrit or PÄli, 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 çµç¶ "pÃpa", the Chinese lute, or é
ª "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è²å (pinyin: yÇsèliè), "Paris" becomes å·´é» (pinyin: bÄlÃ). A rather small number of direct transliterations have survived as common words, including æ²ç¼ shÄfÄ "sofa," 马达/馬é mÇdá "motor," å¹½é» yÅumò "humor," é»è¾/é輯 luójà "logic," æ¶é«¦/æ髦 shÃmáo "smart, fashionable" and ææ¯åºé xiÄsÄ«dÇlÇ "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, æ²å/æ²ç¼ and 马达/馬é in Shanghainese actually sound more like the English "sofa" and "motor."
Western foreign words have had great influence on Chinese language since the 20th century, through transliterations. From French came èè¾ (bÄléi, "ballet"), é¦æ§ (xiÄngbÄ«n, "champagne"), via Italian åå¡ (kÄfÄi, "caffè"). The English influence is particularly pronounced. From early 20th century Shanghainese, many English words are borrowed .eg. the above-mentioned æ²ç¼ (shÄfÄ "sofa"), å¹½é» (yÅumò "humour"), and é«å°å¤« (gÄoÄrfÅ«, "golf"). Later United States soft influences gave rise to 迪æ¯ç§ (dÃsÄ«kè, "disco"), å¯ä¹ (kÄlè, "cola") and è¿·ä½ (mÃnÇ, "mini(skirt)"). Contemporary colloquial Cantonese has distinct loanwords from English like cartoon å¡é (cartoon), åºä½¬ (gay people), ç士 (taxi), 巴士 (bus). With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, eg. ç²çµ² (fÄnsÄ«, "fans"), é§å®¢ (hèikè, "hacker"), é¨è½æ ¼(bùluÅgé,blog) in Taiwanese Mandarin.
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 å¾·å¾é£/å¾·å¾é¢¨ ( Shanghainese: télÃfon , Standard Mandarin: délÇfÄng) during the 1920s and widely used in Shanghai, but later the Japanese çµè¯/é»è©± (dià nhuà "electric speech"), built out of native Chinese morphemes, became prevalent. Other examples include çµè§/é»è¦ (dià nshì "electric vision") for television, çµè/é»è
¦ (dià nnÇo "electric brain") for computer; ææº/ææ© (shÇujÄ« "hand machine") for cellphone, and èç/èè½ (lányá "blue tooth") for Bluetooth. ç¶²èª (wÇng zhì"internet logbook") for blog in Cantonese or people in Hong Kong and Macau. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as æ±å ¡å
/æ¼¢å ¡å
(hà nbÇo bÄo, "Hamburg bun") for hamburger. Sometimes translations are designed so that they sound like the original while incorporating Chinese morphemes, such as æææº/æææ© (tuÅlÄjÄ«, "tractor," literally "dragging-pulling machine"), or 马å©å¥¥/馬å©å¥§ for the video game character Mario. This is often done for commercial purposes, for example å¥è
¾/å¥é¨° (bÄnténg "running leaping") for Pentium and èµç¾å³/è³½ç¾å³ (Sà ibÇiwèi "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 (å製漢èª, literally Japanese-made Chinese), and re-loaned many of these into modern Chinese. Examples include dià nhuà (çµè¯/é»è©±, denwa, "telephone"), shèhuì (社ä¼, shakai, "society"), kÄxué (ç§å¦/ç§å¸, kagaku, "science") and chÅuxià ng (æ½è±¡, chÅ«shÅ, "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, jÄ«ngjì (ç»æµ/ç¶æ¿, 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 Hokkien and Taiwanese Mandarin continue to be influenced by Japanese eg. 便å½/ä¾¿ç¶ âlunchbox or boxed lunchâ (from bento) and æç âprepared cuisineâ, have passed into common currency.
With the growing importance and influence of China's economy globally, Mandarin instruction is gaining popularity in schools in the USA, and 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 the English Cambridge Certificate), while in 2005, the number of candidates had risen sharply to 117,660.
* Chinese characters
* Chinese exclamative particles
* Chinese honorifics
* Chinese classifier
* Chinese number gestures
* Chinese numerals
* Chinese punctuation
* Classical Chinese grammar
* Four-character idiom
* Han unification
* Haner language
* HSK test
* Languages of China
* North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics
* Nü shu
*
*
*
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* ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary. Editor: John de Francis. (2003) University of Hawaiâi Press. ISBN 0-8248-2766-X.
* ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Axel Schuessler. 2007. University of Hawaiâi Press, Honolulu. ISBN 978-0-8248-2975-9.
* Keys to the Chinese Language: Book IIâGoogle Books
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Cougar | Is a cougar also known as a mountain lion? | A cougar is also known as a mountain lion. | data/set1/a2 | Cougar
The cougar (Puma concolor), also known as puma, mountain lion, mountain cat, catamount or panther, depending on the region, is a mammal of the family Felidae, native to the Americas. This large, solitary cat has the greatest range of any large wild terrestrial mammal in the Western Hemisphere, extending from Yukon in Canada to the southern Andes of South America. An adaptable, generalist species, the cougar is found in every major American habitat type. It is the second heaviest cat in the American continents after the jaguar, and the fourth heaviest in the world, after the tiger, lion, and jaguar. Although large, the cougar is most closely related to smaller felines.
A capable stalk-and-ambush predator, the cougar pursues a wide variety of prey. Primary food sources include ungulates such as deer, elk, and bighorn sheep, as well as domestic cattle, horses and sheep, particularly in the northern part of its range. It will also hunt species as small as insects and rodents. This cat prefers habitats with dense underbrush and rocky areas for stalking, but it can also live in open areas. The cougar is territorial and persists at low population densities. Individual territory sizes depend on terrain, vegetation, and abundance of prey. While it is a large predator, it is not always the dominant species in its range, as when it competes for prey with other predators such as the jaguar, grey wolf, American Black Bear, and the grizzly bear. It is a reclusive cat and usually avoids people. Attacks on humans remain rare, despite a recent increase in frequency.
Due to excessive hunting following the European colonization of the Americas, and continuing human development of cougar habitat, populations have dropped in most parts of its historical range. In particular, the cougar was extirpated in eastern North America, except for an isolated sub-population in Florida; the animal may be recolonizing parts of its former eastern territory, such as Maine and northern Michigan, /ref> where there have been recent sightings. With its vast range, the cougar has dozens of names and various references in the mythology of the indigenous Americans and in contemporary culture. The cougar has recently made a comeback in the state of Wyoming, where it presently has the largest population in North America .
The cougar has numerous names in English, of which puma and mountain lion are popular. Other names include catamount, panther, mountain screamer and painter. Lexicographers regard painter as a primarily upper-Southern U.S. regional variant on "panther", but a folk etymology, fancying a resemblance between the typically dark tip of its tail and a paintbrush dipped in dark paint, has some currency.
The cougar holds the Guinness record for the animal with the highest number of names, presumably due to its wide distribution across North and South America. It has over 40 names in English alone.
"Cougar" may be borrowed from the Portuguese çuçuarana, via French; the term was originally derived from the Tupi language. A current form in Brazil is suçuarana. It may also be borrowed from the Guaranà language term guaçu ara or guazu ara. "Puma" comes, via Spanish, from the Quechua language. Cougar, Puma and
The cougar is the largest of the small cats. It is placed in the subfamily Felinae, although its bulk characteristics are similar to those of the big cats in the subfamily Pantherinae. The family Felidae is believed to have originated in Asia approximately 11 million years ago. Taxonomic research on felids remains partial and much of what is known about their evolutionary history is based on mitochondrial DNA analysis, as cats are poorly represented in the fossil record, and there are significant confidence intervals with suggested dates.
Although large, the cougar is closely related to small felines.
In the latest genomic study of Felidae, the common ancestor of today's Leopardus, Lynx, Puma, Prionailurus, and Felis lineages migrated across the Bering land bridge into the Americas approximately 8 to 8.5 million years (Ma) ago. The lineages subsequently diverged in that order. North American felids then invaded South America 3 Ma ago as part of the Great American Interchange, following formation of the Isthmus of Panama. The cougar was originally thought to belong in Felis (Felis concolor), the genus which includes the domestic cat. As of 1993, it is now placed in Puma along with the jaguarundi, a cat just a little more than a tenth its weight.
Studies have indicated that the cougar and jaguarundi are most closely related to the modern cheetah of Africa and western Asia, but the relationship is unresolved. It has been suggested that the cheetah lineage diverged from the Puma lineage in the Americas (see American cheetah) and migrated back to Asia and Africa, while other research suggests the cheetah diverged in the Old World itself. The outline of small feline migration to the Americas is thus unclear.
Recent studies have demonstrated a high level of genetic similarity among the North American cougar populations, suggesting that they are all fairly recent descendants of a small ancestral group. Culver et al. suggest that the original North American population of Puma concolor was extirpated during the Pleistocene extinctions some 10,000 years ago, when other large mammals such as Smilodon also disappeared. North America was then repopulated by a group of South American cougars.
Until the late 1990s, as many as 32 subspecies were recorded; however, a recent genetic study of mitochondrial DNA found that many of these are too similar to be recognized as distinct at a molecular level. Following the research, the canonical Mammal Species of the World (3rd edition) recognizes six subspecies, five of which are solely found in Latin America:
; Argentine puma : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms hudsonii and puma (Marcelli, 1922);
; Costa Rican Cougar
; Eastern South American cougar : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms acrocodia, borbensis, capricornensis, concolor (Pelzeln, 1883), greeni and nigra;
; North American Cougar : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms arundivaga, aztecus, browni, californica, coryi, floridana, hippolestes, improcera, kaibabensis, mayensis, missoulensis, olympus, oregonensis, schorgeri, stanleyana, vancouverensis and youngi;
; Northern South American cougar : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms bangsi, incarum, osgoodi, soasoaranna, sussuarana, soderstromii, sucuacuara and wavula;
; Southern South American puma : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms araucanus, concolor (Gay, 1847), patagonica, pearsoni and puma (Trouessart, 1904)
The status of the Florida panther, here collapsed into the North American Cougar, remains uncertain. It is still regularly listed as subspecies Puma concolor coryi in research works, including those directly concerned with its conservation. Culver et al. themselves noted low microsatellite variation in the Florida panther, possibly due to inbreeding; responding to the research, one conservation team suggests "the degree to which the scientific community has accepted the results of Culver et al. and the proposed change in taxonomy is not resolved at this time."
Cougars are slender and agile cats. Adults stand about 60 to 76 centimeters (2.0 to 2.5 ft) tall at the shoulders. The length of adult males is around 2.4 meters (8 ft) long nose to tail, with overall ranges between 1.5 and 2.75 m (5 and 9 ft) nose to tail suggested for the species in general. Males typically weigh 53 to 90 kilograms (115 to 198 pounds), averaging 62 kg (137 lb). In rare cases, some may reach over 120 kg (264 lb). Females typically weigh between 29 and 64 kg (64 and 141 lb), averaging 42 kg (93 lb). /ref> /ref> Cougar size is smallest close to the equator, and larger towards the poles.
Although cougars resemble the domestic cat, they are about the same size as an adult human.
The head of the cat is round and the ears erect. Its powerful forequarters, neck, and jaw serve to grasp and hold large prey. It has five retractable claws on its forepaws (one a dewclaw) and four on its hind paws. The larger front feet and claws are adaptations to clutching prey.
Cougars can be almost as large as jaguars, but are less muscular and not as powerful; where their ranges overlap, the cougar tends to be smaller than average. The cougar is on average as heavy as the leopard. Despite its size, it is not typically classified among the "big cats," as it cannot roar, lacking the specialized larynx and hyoid apparatus of Panthera. Like domestic cats, cougars vocalize low-pitched hisses, growls, and purrs, as well as chirps and whistles. They are well known for their screams, as referenced in some of their common names, although these screams are often misinterpreted to be the calls of other animals.
Rear paw of a cougar
Cougar coloring is plain (hence the Latin concolor) but can vary greatly between individuals and even between siblings. The coat is typically tawny, but ranges to silvery-grey or reddish, with lighter patches on the under body including the jaws, chin, and throat. Infants are spotted and born with blue eyes and rings on their tails; juveniles are pale, and dark spots remain on their flanks. Despite anecdotes to the contrary, all-black coloring (melanism) has never been documented in cougars. The term "black panther" is used colloquially to refer to melanistic individuals of other species, particularly jaguars and leopards.
Cougars have large paws and proportionally the largest hind legs in the cat family. This physique allows it great leaping and short-sprint ability. An exceptional vertical leap of 5.4 m (18 ft) is reported for the cougar. Horizontal jumping capability from standing position is suggested anywhere from 6 to 12 m (20 to 40 ft). The cougar can run as fast as 55 to 72 km/h (35 to 45 mi/h), but is best adapted for short, powerful sprints rather than long chases. It is adept at climbing, which allows it to evade canine competitors. Although it is not strongly associated with water, it can swim.
A successful generalist predator, the cougar will eat any animal it can catch, from insects to large ungulates (over 500 kg). Like all cats, it is an obligate carnivore, feeding only on meat. The Mean weight of vertebrate prey (MWVP) was positively correlated (r=0.875) with puma body weight and inversely correlated (r=-0.836) with food niche breadth in all America. In general, MWVP was lower in areas closer to the Equator. Its most important prey species are various deer species, particularly in North America; mule deer, white-tailed deer, elk, and even large moose are taken by the cat. Other species such as Bighorn Sheep, wild horses of Arizona, domestic horses, and domestic livestock such as cattle and sheep are also primary food bases in many areas. A survey of North America research found 68% of prey items were ungulates, especially deer. Only the Florida Panther showed variation, often preferring feral hogs and armadillos.
Shown eating. Cougars are ambush predators, feeding mostly on deer and other mammals.
Investigation in Yellowstone National Park showed that elk, followed by mule deer, were the cougar's primary targets; the prey base is shared with the park's gray wolves, with whom the cougar competes for resources.
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* Another study on winter kills (NovemberâApril) in Alberta showed that ungulates accounted for greater than 99% of the cougar diet. Learned, individual prey recognition was observed, as some cougars rarely killed bighorn sheep, while others relied heavily on the species.
In the Central and South American cougar range, the ratio of deer in the diet declines. Small to mid-size mammals are preferred, including large rodents such as the capybara. Ungulates accounted for only 35% of prey items in one survey, approximately half that of North America. Competition with the larger jaguar has been suggested for the decline in the size of prey items. Other listed prey species of the cougar include mice, porcupine, and hares. Birds and small reptiles are sometimes preyed upon in the south, but this is rarely recorded in North America.
Though capable of sprinting, the cougar is typically an ambush predator. It stalks through brush and trees, across ledges, or other covered spots, before delivering a powerful leap onto the back of its prey and a suffocating neck bite. The cougar is capable of breaking the neck of some of its smaller prey with a strong bite and momentum bearing the animal to the ground.
Kills are generally estimated at around one large ungulate every two weeks. The period shrinks for females raising young, and may be as short as one kill every three days when cubs are nearly mature at around 15 months. The cat drags a kill to a preferred spot, covers it with brush, and returns to feed over a period of days. It is generally reported that the cougar is a non-scavenger and will rarely consume prey it has not killed; but deer carcasses left exposed for study were scavenged by cougars in California, suggesting more opportunistic behavior.
Females reach sexual maturity between one-and-a-half to three years of age. They typically average one litter every two to three years throughout their reproductive life, though the period can be as short as one year. Females are in estrus for approximately 8 days of a 23-day cycle; the gestation period is approximately 91 days. Females are sometimes reported as monogamous, but this is uncertain and polygyny may be more common. Copulation is brief but frequent.
Cougar kittens
Only females are involved in parenting. Female cougars are fiercely protective of their kittens, and have been seen to successfully fight off animals as large as grizzly bears in their defense. Litter size is between one and six kittens; typically two or three. Caves and other alcoves that offer protection are used as litter dens. Born blind, kittens are completely dependent on their mother at first, and begin to be weaned at around three months of age. As they grow, they begin to go out on forays with their mother, first visiting kill sites, and after six months beginning to hunt small prey on their own. Kitten survival rates are just over one per litter.
Sub-adults leave their mother to attempt to establish their own territory at around two years of age and sometimes earlier; males tend to leave sooner. One study has shown high morbidity amongst cougars that travel farthest from the maternal range, often due to conflicts with other cougars ("intraspecific" conflict). Research in New Mexico has shown that "males dispersed significantly farther than females, were more likely to traverse large expanses of non-cougar habitat, and were probably most responsible for nuclear gene flow between habitat patches."
Life expectancy in the wild is reported at between 8 to 13 years, and probably averages 8 to 10; a female of at least 18 years was reported killed by hunters on Vancouver Island. Cougars may live as long as 20 years in captivity. One male North American cougar, named Scratch, was two months short of his 30th birthday when he died in 2007. Causes of death in the wild include disability and disease, competition with other cougars, starvation, accidents, and, where allowed, human hunting. Feline immunodeficiency virus, an endemic AIDS-like disease in cats, is well-adapted to the cougar.
Like almost all cats, the cougar is a solitary animal. Only mothers and kittens live in groups, with adults meeting only to mate. It is secretive and crepuscular, being most active around dawn and dusk.
Estimates of territory sizes vary greatly.
Canadian Geographic reports large male territories of 150 to 1000 square kilometers (58 to 386 sq mi) with female ranges half the size. Other research suggests a much smaller lower limit of 25 km 2 (10 sq mi) but an even greater upper limit of 1300 km 2 (500 sq mi) for males. In the United States, very large ranges have been reported in Texas and the Black Hills of the northern Great Plains, in excess of 775 km 2 (300 sq mi). Male ranges may include or overlap with those of females but, at least where studied, not with those of other males, which serves to reduce conflict between cougars. Ranges of females may overlap slightly with each other. Scrape marks, urine, and feces are used to mark territory and attract mates. Males may scrape together a small pile of leaves and grasses and then urinate on it as a way of marking territory.
Home range sizes and overall cougar abundance depend on terrain, vegetation, and prey abundance. One female adjacent to the San Andres Mountains, for instance, was found with a large range of 215 km 2 (83 sq mi), necessitated by poor prey abundance. Research has shown cougar abundances from 0.5 animals to as much as 7 (in one study in South America) per 100 km 2 (38 sq mi).
Because males disperse further than females and compete more directly for mates and territory, they are most likely to be involved in conflict. Where a sub-adult fails to leave his maternal range, for example, he may be killed by his father. When males encounter each other, they hiss, spit, and may engage in violent conflict if neither backs down. Hunting or relocation of the cougar may increase aggressive encounters by disrupting territories and bringing young, transient animals into conflict with established individuals.
The cougar has the largest range of any wild land animal in the Americas. Its range spans 110 degrees of latitude, from northern Yukon in Canada to the southern Andes. It is one of only three cat species, along with the bobcat and Canadian lynx, native to Canada. Its wide distribution stems from its adaptability to virtually every habitat type: it is found in all forest types as well as in lowland and mountainous deserts. Studies show that the Cougar prefers regions with dense underbrush, but can live with little vegetation in open areas. Its preferred habitats include precipitous canyons, escarpments, rim rocks, and dense brush.
Cougar, photographed in the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, Tucson, Arizona.
The cougar was extirpated across much of its eastern North American range (with the exception of Florida) in the two centuries after European colonization, and faced grave threats in the remainder of its territory. Currently, it ranges across most western American states, the Canadian provinces of Alberta and British Columbia, and the Canadian Yukon Territory. There have been widely debated reports of possible recolonization of eastern North America. DNA evidence has suggested its presence in eastern North America, , while a consolidated map of cougar sightings shows numerous reports, from the mid-western Great Plains through to Eastern Canada. The Cougar Network methodology is recognized by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The Quebec wildlife services (known locally as MRNF) also considers Cougar to be present in the province as a threatened species after multiple DNA tests confirmed cougar hair in Lynx mating sites. Ministry of Wildlife and natural resources Wildlife Service. The only unequivocally known eastern population is the Florida panther, which is critically endangered. There have also been sightings in Elliotsville, Maine (in the central part of the state); and in New Hampshire, there have been recent sightings as early as 1997. In 2009, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources confirmed a cougar sighting in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Skinner, Victor. 2009. Photo shows cougar presence in Michigan. The Grand Rapids Press. November 15, 2009 Typically, extreme-range sightings of cougars involve young males, who can travel great distances to establish ranges away from established males; all four confirmed cougar kills in Iowa since 2000 involved males.
On April 14, 2008 police shot and killed a cougar on the north side of Chicago, Illinois. DNA tests were consistent with cougars from the Black Hills. Less than one year later, on March 5, 2009, a cougar was photographed and unsuccessfully tranquilized by state wildlife biologists in a tree near Spooner, Wisconsin in the northwestern part of the state.
South of the Rio Grande, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) lists the cat in every Central and South American country except Costa Rica and Panama. While specific state and provincial statistics are often available in North America, much less is known about the cat in its southern range.
The cougar's total breeding population is estimated at less than 50,000 by the IUCN, with a declining trend. U.S. state-level statistics are often more optimistic, suggesting cougar populations have rebounded. In Oregon, a healthy population of 5,000 was reported in 2006, exceeding a target of 3,000. California has actively sought to protect the cat and a similar number of cougars has been suggested, between 4,000 and 6,000.
Aside from humans, no species preys upon mature cougars in the wild. The cat is not, however, the apex predator throughout much of its range. In its northern range, the cougar interacts with other powerful predators such as the brown bear and gray wolf. In the south, the cougar must compete with the larger jaguar. In Florida it encounters the American Alligator.
thumbFront paw print of a cougar. An adult paw print is approximately 10 cm (4 inches) long.
The Yellowstone National Park ecosystem provides a fruitful microcosm to study inter-predator interaction in North America. Of the three large predators, the massive brown bear appears dominant, often although not always able to drive both the gray wolf pack and the cougar off their kills. One study found that Brown or American Black Bears visited 24% of cougar kills in Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks, usurping 10% of carcasses.
The gray wolf and the cougar compete more directly for prey, especially in winter. While individually more powerful than the gray wolf, a solitary cougar may be dominated by the pack structure of the canines. Wolves can steal kills and occasionally kill the cat. One report describes a large pack of fourteen wolves killing a female cougar and her kittens. Conversely, lone wolves are at a disadvantage, and have been reported killed by cougars. Wolves more broadly affect cougar population dynamics and distribution by dominating territory and prey opportunities, and disrupting the feline's behavior. Preliminary research in Yellowstone, for instance, has shown displacement of the cougar by wolves. One researcher in Oregon notes: "When there is a pack around, cougars are not comfortable around their kills or raising kittens ... A lot of times a big cougar will kill a wolf, but the pack phenomenon changes the table." Both species, meanwhile, are capable of killing mid-sized predators such as bobcats and coyotes and tend to suppress their numbers.
In the southern portion of its range, the cougar and jaguar share overlapping territory. The jaguar tends to take larger prey and the cougar smaller where they overlap, reducing the cougar's size. Of the two felines, the cougar appears best able to exploit a broader prey niche and smaller prey.
As with any predator at or near the top of its food chain, the cougar impacts the population of prey species. Predation by cougars has been linked to changes in the species mix of deer in a region. For example, a study in British Columbia observed that the population of mule deer, a favored cougar prey, was declining while the population of the less frequently preyed-upon white-tailed deer was increasing. The Vancouver Island Marmot, an endangered species endemic to one region of dense cougar population, has seen decreased numbers due to cougar and gray wolf predation.
In the southern part of South America the Puma is a top level predator that has controlled the population of Guanaco and other species since prehistoric times.
Pumapard, taken in 1904
A pumapard is a hybrid animal resulting from a union between a cougar and a leopard. Three sets of these hybrids were bred in the late 1890s and early 1900s by Carl Hagenbeck at his animal park in Hamburg, Germany. Most did not reach adulthood. One of these was purchased in 1898 by Berlin Zoo. A similar hybrid in Berlin Zoo purchased from Hagenbeck was a cross between a male leopard and a female puma. Hamburg Zoo's specimen was the reverse pairing, the one in the black and white photo, fathered by a puma bred to an Indian leopardess.
Whether born to a female puma mated to a male leopard, or to a male puma mated to a female leopard, pumapards inherit a form of dwarfism. Those reported grew to only half the size of the parents. They have a puma-like long body (proportional to the limbs, but nevertheless shorter than either parent), but short legs. The coat is variously described as sandy, tawny or greyish with brown, chestnut or "faded" rosettes.
The World Conservation Union (IUCN) currently lists the cougar as a "least concern" species. The cougar is regulated under Appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), rendering illegal international trade in specimens or parts.
Cougar conservation depends on preservation of their habitat.
In the United States east of the Mississippi River, the only unequivocally known cougar population is the Florida panther. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service recognizes both an Eastern cougar and the Florida panther, affording protection under the Endangered Species Act. Certain taxonomic authorities have collapsed both designations into the North American Cougar, with Eastern or Florida subspecies not recognized, while a subspecies designation remains recognized by some conservation scientists. The most recent documented count for the Florida sub-population is 87 individuals, reported by recovery agencies in 2003.
The cougar is also protected across much of the rest of their range. As of 1996, cougar hunting was prohibited in Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, French Guiana, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Suriname, Venezuela, and Uruguay. (Costa Rica and Panama are not listed as current range countries by the IUCN.) The cat had no reported legal protection in Ecuador, El Salvador, and Guyana. Regulated cougar hunting is still common in the United States and Canada, although they are protected from all hunting in the Yukon.; it is permitted in every U.S. state from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, with the exception of California. Texas is the only state in the United States with a viable population of cougars that does not protect, in some way, of its cougar population. In Texas, cougars are listed as nuisance wildlife and any person holding a hunting or a trapping permit can kill a cougar regardless of the season, number killed, sex or age of the animal. Killed animals are not required to be reported to Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. Conservation work in Texas is the effort of a non profit organization, Balanced Ecology Inc. (BEI), as part of their Texas Mountain Lion Conservation Project . Cougars are generally hunted with packs of dogs, until the animal is 'treed'. When the hunter arrives on the scene, he shoots the cat from the tree at close range. The Cougar cannot be legally killed in California except under very specific circumstances, such as when an individual is declared a public safety threat. However statistics from the Department of Fish and Game indicate that cougar killings in California have been on the rise since 1970s with an average of over 112 cats killed per year from 2000 to 2006 compared to six per year in the 1970s. The Bay Area Puma Project aims to obtain information on cougar populations in the San Francisco Bay area and the animals' interactions with habitat, prey, humans, and residential communities.
Conservation threats to the species include persecution as a pest animal, degradation and fragmentation of their habitat, and depletion of their prey base. Wildlife corridor and sufficient range areas are critical to the sustainability of cougar populations. Research simulations have shown that the animal faces a low extinction risk in areas of 2200 km 2 (850 sq mi) or more. As few as one to four new animals entering a population per decade markedly increases persistence, foregrounding the importance of habitat corridors.
Moche puma, Larco Museum collection
The grace and power of the cougar have been widely admired in the cultures of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. The Inca city of Cusco is reported to have been designed in the shape of a cougar, and the animal also gave its name to both Inca regions and people. The Moche people represented the puma often in their ceramics. Berrin, Katherine & Larco Museum. The Spirit of Ancient Peru:Treasures from the Museo Arqueológico Rafael Larco Herrera. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1997. The sky and thunder god of the Inca, Viracocha, has been associated with the animal.
In North America, mythological descriptions of the cougar have appeared in the stories of the HocÄ
k language ("Ho-Chunk" or "Winnebago") of Wisconsin and Illinois Cougars, The Encyclopedia of HoÄÄ
k (Winnebago) Mythology. Retrieved: 2009/12/08. and the Cheyenne, amongst others. To the Apache and Walapai of Arizona, the wail of the Cougar was a harbinger of death.
During the early years of ranching, cougars were considered on par with wolves in destructiveness. According to figures in Texas in 1990, 86 calves (0.0006% of a total of 13.4 million cattle & calves in Texas), 253 Mohair goats, 302 Mohair kids, 445 sheep (0.02% of a total of 2.0 million sheep & lambs in Texas) and 562 lambs (0.04% of 1.2 million lambs in Texas) were confirmed to have been killed by cougars that year. In Nevada in 1992, cougars were confirmed to have killed 9 calves, 1 horse, 4 colts, 5 goats, 318 sheep and 400 lambs. In both cases, sheep were the most frequently attacked. Some instances of surplus killing have resulted in the deaths of 20 sheep in one attack. Cougars frequently kill calves, sheep and goats by biting the top of the neck or head, differing greatly from the throat bite used by coyotes and indiscriminate mutilation by feral dogs. The size of the tooth puncture marks also helps distinguish kills made by cougars from those made by smaller predators.
Mountain Lion warning sign
Due to the expanding human population, cougar ranges increasingly overlap with areas inhabited by humans. Attacks on humans are rare, as cougar prey recognition is a learned behavior and they do not generally recognize humans as prey. Attacks on people, livestock, and pets may occur when the cat habituates to humans or is in a condition of severe starvation. Attacks are most frequent during late spring and summer, when juvenile cougars leave their mothers and search for new territory.
Between 1890 and 1990, in North America there were 53 reported, confirmed attacks on humans, resulting in 48 nonfatal injuries and 10 deaths of humans (the total is greater than 53 because some attacks had more than one victim). By 2004, the count had climbed to 88 attacks and 20 deaths.
Within North America, the distribution of attacks is not uniform. The heavily populated state of California has seen a dozen attacks since 1986 (after just three from 1890 to 1985), including three fatalities. Lightly populated New Mexico reported an attack in 2008, the first there since 1974. Search continues for mountain lion that killed Pinos Altos man, New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, press release June 23, 2008]; Wounded mountain lion captured, killed near Pinos Altos, New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, press release June 25, 2008]; Second mountain lion captured near Pinos Altos, New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, press release July 1, 2008]
As with many predators, a cougar may attack if cornered, if a fleeing human stimulates their instinct to chase, or if a person "plays dead." Exaggerating the threat to the animal through intense eye contact, loud but calm shouting, and any other action to appear larger and more menacing, may make the animal retreat. Fighting back with sticks and rocks, or even bare hands, is often effective in persuading an attacking cougar to disengage.
When cougars do attack, they usually employ their characteristic neck bite, attempting to position their teeth between the vertebrae and into the spinal cord. Neck, head, and spinal injuries are common and sometimes fatal. Children are at greatest risk of attack, and least likely to survive an encounter. Detailed research into attacks prior to 1991 showed that 64% of all victims and almost all fatalities were children. The same study showed the highest proportion of attacks to have occurred in British Columbia, particularly on Vancouver Island where cougar populations are especially dense.
*List of fatal cougar attacks in North America
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* Video, Pictures and Information on Mountain Lions
* A Definitive Resource About Cougars Comprehensive, non-profit site with extensive information about cougars, from how to live safely in cougar country, to science abstracts, hunting regulations, state-by-state cougar management/policy info, and rare photos and videos of wild cougars.
* Description of a Cougar attack
* Cougar Facts and Photos â NatureMapping Program
* No Place for Predators? Liza Gross, PLoS Biology, explains how Washington State wildlife officials implemented a hunting policy, in response to a state measure passed to protect wildlife, that led to the highest rates of human-caused cougar mortality since the height of the bounty era
* Cougar Tracks: How to identify cougar tracks in the wild
* The sound of a cougar screaming
* Link to Worldwide Wild Cat Conservation site
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Cougar | Is a cougar also known as a mountain lion? | yes | data/set1/a2 | Cougar
The cougar (Puma concolor), also known as puma, mountain lion, mountain cat, catamount or panther, depending on the region, is a mammal of the family Felidae, native to the Americas. This large, solitary cat has the greatest range of any large wild terrestrial mammal in the Western Hemisphere, extending from Yukon in Canada to the southern Andes of South America. An adaptable, generalist species, the cougar is found in every major American habitat type. It is the second heaviest cat in the American continents after the jaguar, and the fourth heaviest in the world, after the tiger, lion, and jaguar. Although large, the cougar is most closely related to smaller felines.
A capable stalk-and-ambush predator, the cougar pursues a wide variety of prey. Primary food sources include ungulates such as deer, elk, and bighorn sheep, as well as domestic cattle, horses and sheep, particularly in the northern part of its range. It will also hunt species as small as insects and rodents. This cat prefers habitats with dense underbrush and rocky areas for stalking, but it can also live in open areas. The cougar is territorial and persists at low population densities. Individual territory sizes depend on terrain, vegetation, and abundance of prey. While it is a large predator, it is not always the dominant species in its range, as when it competes for prey with other predators such as the jaguar, grey wolf, American Black Bear, and the grizzly bear. It is a reclusive cat and usually avoids people. Attacks on humans remain rare, despite a recent increase in frequency.
Due to excessive hunting following the European colonization of the Americas, and continuing human development of cougar habitat, populations have dropped in most parts of its historical range. In particular, the cougar was extirpated in eastern North America, except for an isolated sub-population in Florida; the animal may be recolonizing parts of its former eastern territory, such as Maine and northern Michigan, /ref> where there have been recent sightings. With its vast range, the cougar has dozens of names and various references in the mythology of the indigenous Americans and in contemporary culture. The cougar has recently made a comeback in the state of Wyoming, where it presently has the largest population in North America .
The cougar has numerous names in English, of which puma and mountain lion are popular. Other names include catamount, panther, mountain screamer and painter. Lexicographers regard painter as a primarily upper-Southern U.S. regional variant on "panther", but a folk etymology, fancying a resemblance between the typically dark tip of its tail and a paintbrush dipped in dark paint, has some currency.
The cougar holds the Guinness record for the animal with the highest number of names, presumably due to its wide distribution across North and South America. It has over 40 names in English alone.
"Cougar" may be borrowed from the Portuguese çuçuarana, via French; the term was originally derived from the Tupi language. A current form in Brazil is suçuarana. It may also be borrowed from the Guaranà language term guaçu ara or guazu ara. "Puma" comes, via Spanish, from the Quechua language. Cougar, Puma and
The cougar is the largest of the small cats. It is placed in the subfamily Felinae, although its bulk characteristics are similar to those of the big cats in the subfamily Pantherinae. The family Felidae is believed to have originated in Asia approximately 11 million years ago. Taxonomic research on felids remains partial and much of what is known about their evolutionary history is based on mitochondrial DNA analysis, as cats are poorly represented in the fossil record, and there are significant confidence intervals with suggested dates.
Although large, the cougar is closely related to small felines.
In the latest genomic study of Felidae, the common ancestor of today's Leopardus, Lynx, Puma, Prionailurus, and Felis lineages migrated across the Bering land bridge into the Americas approximately 8 to 8.5 million years (Ma) ago. The lineages subsequently diverged in that order. North American felids then invaded South America 3 Ma ago as part of the Great American Interchange, following formation of the Isthmus of Panama. The cougar was originally thought to belong in Felis (Felis concolor), the genus which includes the domestic cat. As of 1993, it is now placed in Puma along with the jaguarundi, a cat just a little more than a tenth its weight.
Studies have indicated that the cougar and jaguarundi are most closely related to the modern cheetah of Africa and western Asia, but the relationship is unresolved. It has been suggested that the cheetah lineage diverged from the Puma lineage in the Americas (see American cheetah) and migrated back to Asia and Africa, while other research suggests the cheetah diverged in the Old World itself. The outline of small feline migration to the Americas is thus unclear.
Recent studies have demonstrated a high level of genetic similarity among the North American cougar populations, suggesting that they are all fairly recent descendants of a small ancestral group. Culver et al. suggest that the original North American population of Puma concolor was extirpated during the Pleistocene extinctions some 10,000 years ago, when other large mammals such as Smilodon also disappeared. North America was then repopulated by a group of South American cougars.
Until the late 1990s, as many as 32 subspecies were recorded; however, a recent genetic study of mitochondrial DNA found that many of these are too similar to be recognized as distinct at a molecular level. Following the research, the canonical Mammal Species of the World (3rd edition) recognizes six subspecies, five of which are solely found in Latin America:
; Argentine puma : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms hudsonii and puma (Marcelli, 1922);
; Costa Rican Cougar
; Eastern South American cougar : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms acrocodia, borbensis, capricornensis, concolor (Pelzeln, 1883), greeni and nigra;
; North American Cougar : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms arundivaga, aztecus, browni, californica, coryi, floridana, hippolestes, improcera, kaibabensis, mayensis, missoulensis, olympus, oregonensis, schorgeri, stanleyana, vancouverensis and youngi;
; Northern South American cougar : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms bangsi, incarum, osgoodi, soasoaranna, sussuarana, soderstromii, sucuacuara and wavula;
; Southern South American puma : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms araucanus, concolor (Gay, 1847), patagonica, pearsoni and puma (Trouessart, 1904)
The status of the Florida panther, here collapsed into the North American Cougar, remains uncertain. It is still regularly listed as subspecies Puma concolor coryi in research works, including those directly concerned with its conservation. Culver et al. themselves noted low microsatellite variation in the Florida panther, possibly due to inbreeding; responding to the research, one conservation team suggests "the degree to which the scientific community has accepted the results of Culver et al. and the proposed change in taxonomy is not resolved at this time."
Cougars are slender and agile cats. Adults stand about 60 to 76 centimeters (2.0 to 2.5 ft) tall at the shoulders. The length of adult males is around 2.4 meters (8 ft) long nose to tail, with overall ranges between 1.5 and 2.75 m (5 and 9 ft) nose to tail suggested for the species in general. Males typically weigh 53 to 90 kilograms (115 to 198 pounds), averaging 62 kg (137 lb). In rare cases, some may reach over 120 kg (264 lb). Females typically weigh between 29 and 64 kg (64 and 141 lb), averaging 42 kg (93 lb). /ref> /ref> Cougar size is smallest close to the equator, and larger towards the poles.
Although cougars resemble the domestic cat, they are about the same size as an adult human.
The head of the cat is round and the ears erect. Its powerful forequarters, neck, and jaw serve to grasp and hold large prey. It has five retractable claws on its forepaws (one a dewclaw) and four on its hind paws. The larger front feet and claws are adaptations to clutching prey.
Cougars can be almost as large as jaguars, but are less muscular and not as powerful; where their ranges overlap, the cougar tends to be smaller than average. The cougar is on average as heavy as the leopard. Despite its size, it is not typically classified among the "big cats," as it cannot roar, lacking the specialized larynx and hyoid apparatus of Panthera. Like domestic cats, cougars vocalize low-pitched hisses, growls, and purrs, as well as chirps and whistles. They are well known for their screams, as referenced in some of their common names, although these screams are often misinterpreted to be the calls of other animals.
Rear paw of a cougar
Cougar coloring is plain (hence the Latin concolor) but can vary greatly between individuals and even between siblings. The coat is typically tawny, but ranges to silvery-grey or reddish, with lighter patches on the under body including the jaws, chin, and throat. Infants are spotted and born with blue eyes and rings on their tails; juveniles are pale, and dark spots remain on their flanks. Despite anecdotes to the contrary, all-black coloring (melanism) has never been documented in cougars. The term "black panther" is used colloquially to refer to melanistic individuals of other species, particularly jaguars and leopards.
Cougars have large paws and proportionally the largest hind legs in the cat family. This physique allows it great leaping and short-sprint ability. An exceptional vertical leap of 5.4 m (18 ft) is reported for the cougar. Horizontal jumping capability from standing position is suggested anywhere from 6 to 12 m (20 to 40 ft). The cougar can run as fast as 55 to 72 km/h (35 to 45 mi/h), but is best adapted for short, powerful sprints rather than long chases. It is adept at climbing, which allows it to evade canine competitors. Although it is not strongly associated with water, it can swim.
A successful generalist predator, the cougar will eat any animal it can catch, from insects to large ungulates (over 500 kg). Like all cats, it is an obligate carnivore, feeding only on meat. The Mean weight of vertebrate prey (MWVP) was positively correlated (r=0.875) with puma body weight and inversely correlated (r=-0.836) with food niche breadth in all America. In general, MWVP was lower in areas closer to the Equator. Its most important prey species are various deer species, particularly in North America; mule deer, white-tailed deer, elk, and even large moose are taken by the cat. Other species such as Bighorn Sheep, wild horses of Arizona, domestic horses, and domestic livestock such as cattle and sheep are also primary food bases in many areas. A survey of North America research found 68% of prey items were ungulates, especially deer. Only the Florida Panther showed variation, often preferring feral hogs and armadillos.
Shown eating. Cougars are ambush predators, feeding mostly on deer and other mammals.
Investigation in Yellowstone National Park showed that elk, followed by mule deer, were the cougar's primary targets; the prey base is shared with the park's gray wolves, with whom the cougar competes for resources.
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* Another study on winter kills (NovemberâApril) in Alberta showed that ungulates accounted for greater than 99% of the cougar diet. Learned, individual prey recognition was observed, as some cougars rarely killed bighorn sheep, while others relied heavily on the species.
In the Central and South American cougar range, the ratio of deer in the diet declines. Small to mid-size mammals are preferred, including large rodents such as the capybara. Ungulates accounted for only 35% of prey items in one survey, approximately half that of North America. Competition with the larger jaguar has been suggested for the decline in the size of prey items. Other listed prey species of the cougar include mice, porcupine, and hares. Birds and small reptiles are sometimes preyed upon in the south, but this is rarely recorded in North America.
Though capable of sprinting, the cougar is typically an ambush predator. It stalks through brush and trees, across ledges, or other covered spots, before delivering a powerful leap onto the back of its prey and a suffocating neck bite. The cougar is capable of breaking the neck of some of its smaller prey with a strong bite and momentum bearing the animal to the ground.
Kills are generally estimated at around one large ungulate every two weeks. The period shrinks for females raising young, and may be as short as one kill every three days when cubs are nearly mature at around 15 months. The cat drags a kill to a preferred spot, covers it with brush, and returns to feed over a period of days. It is generally reported that the cougar is a non-scavenger and will rarely consume prey it has not killed; but deer carcasses left exposed for study were scavenged by cougars in California, suggesting more opportunistic behavior.
Females reach sexual maturity between one-and-a-half to three years of age. They typically average one litter every two to three years throughout their reproductive life, though the period can be as short as one year. Females are in estrus for approximately 8 days of a 23-day cycle; the gestation period is approximately 91 days. Females are sometimes reported as monogamous, but this is uncertain and polygyny may be more common. Copulation is brief but frequent.
Cougar kittens
Only females are involved in parenting. Female cougars are fiercely protective of their kittens, and have been seen to successfully fight off animals as large as grizzly bears in their defense. Litter size is between one and six kittens; typically two or three. Caves and other alcoves that offer protection are used as litter dens. Born blind, kittens are completely dependent on their mother at first, and begin to be weaned at around three months of age. As they grow, they begin to go out on forays with their mother, first visiting kill sites, and after six months beginning to hunt small prey on their own. Kitten survival rates are just over one per litter.
Sub-adults leave their mother to attempt to establish their own territory at around two years of age and sometimes earlier; males tend to leave sooner. One study has shown high morbidity amongst cougars that travel farthest from the maternal range, often due to conflicts with other cougars ("intraspecific" conflict). Research in New Mexico has shown that "males dispersed significantly farther than females, were more likely to traverse large expanses of non-cougar habitat, and were probably most responsible for nuclear gene flow between habitat patches."
Life expectancy in the wild is reported at between 8 to 13 years, and probably averages 8 to 10; a female of at least 18 years was reported killed by hunters on Vancouver Island. Cougars may live as long as 20 years in captivity. One male North American cougar, named Scratch, was two months short of his 30th birthday when he died in 2007. Causes of death in the wild include disability and disease, competition with other cougars, starvation, accidents, and, where allowed, human hunting. Feline immunodeficiency virus, an endemic AIDS-like disease in cats, is well-adapted to the cougar.
Like almost all cats, the cougar is a solitary animal. Only mothers and kittens live in groups, with adults meeting only to mate. It is secretive and crepuscular, being most active around dawn and dusk.
Estimates of territory sizes vary greatly.
Canadian Geographic reports large male territories of 150 to 1000 square kilometers (58 to 386 sq mi) with female ranges half the size. Other research suggests a much smaller lower limit of 25 km 2 (10 sq mi) but an even greater upper limit of 1300 km 2 (500 sq mi) for males. In the United States, very large ranges have been reported in Texas and the Black Hills of the northern Great Plains, in excess of 775 km 2 (300 sq mi). Male ranges may include or overlap with those of females but, at least where studied, not with those of other males, which serves to reduce conflict between cougars. Ranges of females may overlap slightly with each other. Scrape marks, urine, and feces are used to mark territory and attract mates. Males may scrape together a small pile of leaves and grasses and then urinate on it as a way of marking territory.
Home range sizes and overall cougar abundance depend on terrain, vegetation, and prey abundance. One female adjacent to the San Andres Mountains, for instance, was found with a large range of 215 km 2 (83 sq mi), necessitated by poor prey abundance. Research has shown cougar abundances from 0.5 animals to as much as 7 (in one study in South America) per 100 km 2 (38 sq mi).
Because males disperse further than females and compete more directly for mates and territory, they are most likely to be involved in conflict. Where a sub-adult fails to leave his maternal range, for example, he may be killed by his father. When males encounter each other, they hiss, spit, and may engage in violent conflict if neither backs down. Hunting or relocation of the cougar may increase aggressive encounters by disrupting territories and bringing young, transient animals into conflict with established individuals.
The cougar has the largest range of any wild land animal in the Americas. Its range spans 110 degrees of latitude, from northern Yukon in Canada to the southern Andes. It is one of only three cat species, along with the bobcat and Canadian lynx, native to Canada. Its wide distribution stems from its adaptability to virtually every habitat type: it is found in all forest types as well as in lowland and mountainous deserts. Studies show that the Cougar prefers regions with dense underbrush, but can live with little vegetation in open areas. Its preferred habitats include precipitous canyons, escarpments, rim rocks, and dense brush.
Cougar, photographed in the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, Tucson, Arizona.
The cougar was extirpated across much of its eastern North American range (with the exception of Florida) in the two centuries after European colonization, and faced grave threats in the remainder of its territory. Currently, it ranges across most western American states, the Canadian provinces of Alberta and British Columbia, and the Canadian Yukon Territory. There have been widely debated reports of possible recolonization of eastern North America. DNA evidence has suggested its presence in eastern North America, , while a consolidated map of cougar sightings shows numerous reports, from the mid-western Great Plains through to Eastern Canada. The Cougar Network methodology is recognized by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The Quebec wildlife services (known locally as MRNF) also considers Cougar to be present in the province as a threatened species after multiple DNA tests confirmed cougar hair in Lynx mating sites. Ministry of Wildlife and natural resources Wildlife Service. The only unequivocally known eastern population is the Florida panther, which is critically endangered. There have also been sightings in Elliotsville, Maine (in the central part of the state); and in New Hampshire, there have been recent sightings as early as 1997. In 2009, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources confirmed a cougar sighting in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Skinner, Victor. 2009. Photo shows cougar presence in Michigan. The Grand Rapids Press. November 15, 2009 Typically, extreme-range sightings of cougars involve young males, who can travel great distances to establish ranges away from established males; all four confirmed cougar kills in Iowa since 2000 involved males.
On April 14, 2008 police shot and killed a cougar on the north side of Chicago, Illinois. DNA tests were consistent with cougars from the Black Hills. Less than one year later, on March 5, 2009, a cougar was photographed and unsuccessfully tranquilized by state wildlife biologists in a tree near Spooner, Wisconsin in the northwestern part of the state.
South of the Rio Grande, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) lists the cat in every Central and South American country except Costa Rica and Panama. While specific state and provincial statistics are often available in North America, much less is known about the cat in its southern range.
The cougar's total breeding population is estimated at less than 50,000 by the IUCN, with a declining trend. U.S. state-level statistics are often more optimistic, suggesting cougar populations have rebounded. In Oregon, a healthy population of 5,000 was reported in 2006, exceeding a target of 3,000. California has actively sought to protect the cat and a similar number of cougars has been suggested, between 4,000 and 6,000.
Aside from humans, no species preys upon mature cougars in the wild. The cat is not, however, the apex predator throughout much of its range. In its northern range, the cougar interacts with other powerful predators such as the brown bear and gray wolf. In the south, the cougar must compete with the larger jaguar. In Florida it encounters the American Alligator.
thumbFront paw print of a cougar. An adult paw print is approximately 10 cm (4 inches) long.
The Yellowstone National Park ecosystem provides a fruitful microcosm to study inter-predator interaction in North America. Of the three large predators, the massive brown bear appears dominant, often although not always able to drive both the gray wolf pack and the cougar off their kills. One study found that Brown or American Black Bears visited 24% of cougar kills in Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks, usurping 10% of carcasses.
The gray wolf and the cougar compete more directly for prey, especially in winter. While individually more powerful than the gray wolf, a solitary cougar may be dominated by the pack structure of the canines. Wolves can steal kills and occasionally kill the cat. One report describes a large pack of fourteen wolves killing a female cougar and her kittens. Conversely, lone wolves are at a disadvantage, and have been reported killed by cougars. Wolves more broadly affect cougar population dynamics and distribution by dominating territory and prey opportunities, and disrupting the feline's behavior. Preliminary research in Yellowstone, for instance, has shown displacement of the cougar by wolves. One researcher in Oregon notes: "When there is a pack around, cougars are not comfortable around their kills or raising kittens ... A lot of times a big cougar will kill a wolf, but the pack phenomenon changes the table." Both species, meanwhile, are capable of killing mid-sized predators such as bobcats and coyotes and tend to suppress their numbers.
In the southern portion of its range, the cougar and jaguar share overlapping territory. The jaguar tends to take larger prey and the cougar smaller where they overlap, reducing the cougar's size. Of the two felines, the cougar appears best able to exploit a broader prey niche and smaller prey.
As with any predator at or near the top of its food chain, the cougar impacts the population of prey species. Predation by cougars has been linked to changes in the species mix of deer in a region. For example, a study in British Columbia observed that the population of mule deer, a favored cougar prey, was declining while the population of the less frequently preyed-upon white-tailed deer was increasing. The Vancouver Island Marmot, an endangered species endemic to one region of dense cougar population, has seen decreased numbers due to cougar and gray wolf predation.
In the southern part of South America the Puma is a top level predator that has controlled the population of Guanaco and other species since prehistoric times.
Pumapard, taken in 1904
A pumapard is a hybrid animal resulting from a union between a cougar and a leopard. Three sets of these hybrids were bred in the late 1890s and early 1900s by Carl Hagenbeck at his animal park in Hamburg, Germany. Most did not reach adulthood. One of these was purchased in 1898 by Berlin Zoo. A similar hybrid in Berlin Zoo purchased from Hagenbeck was a cross between a male leopard and a female puma. Hamburg Zoo's specimen was the reverse pairing, the one in the black and white photo, fathered by a puma bred to an Indian leopardess.
Whether born to a female puma mated to a male leopard, or to a male puma mated to a female leopard, pumapards inherit a form of dwarfism. Those reported grew to only half the size of the parents. They have a puma-like long body (proportional to the limbs, but nevertheless shorter than either parent), but short legs. The coat is variously described as sandy, tawny or greyish with brown, chestnut or "faded" rosettes.
The World Conservation Union (IUCN) currently lists the cougar as a "least concern" species. The cougar is regulated under Appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), rendering illegal international trade in specimens or parts.
Cougar conservation depends on preservation of their habitat.
In the United States east of the Mississippi River, the only unequivocally known cougar population is the Florida panther. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service recognizes both an Eastern cougar and the Florida panther, affording protection under the Endangered Species Act. Certain taxonomic authorities have collapsed both designations into the North American Cougar, with Eastern or Florida subspecies not recognized, while a subspecies designation remains recognized by some conservation scientists. The most recent documented count for the Florida sub-population is 87 individuals, reported by recovery agencies in 2003.
The cougar is also protected across much of the rest of their range. As of 1996, cougar hunting was prohibited in Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, French Guiana, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Suriname, Venezuela, and Uruguay. (Costa Rica and Panama are not listed as current range countries by the IUCN.) The cat had no reported legal protection in Ecuador, El Salvador, and Guyana. Regulated cougar hunting is still common in the United States and Canada, although they are protected from all hunting in the Yukon.; it is permitted in every U.S. state from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, with the exception of California. Texas is the only state in the United States with a viable population of cougars that does not protect, in some way, of its cougar population. In Texas, cougars are listed as nuisance wildlife and any person holding a hunting or a trapping permit can kill a cougar regardless of the season, number killed, sex or age of the animal. Killed animals are not required to be reported to Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. Conservation work in Texas is the effort of a non profit organization, Balanced Ecology Inc. (BEI), as part of their Texas Mountain Lion Conservation Project . Cougars are generally hunted with packs of dogs, until the animal is 'treed'. When the hunter arrives on the scene, he shoots the cat from the tree at close range. The Cougar cannot be legally killed in California except under very specific circumstances, such as when an individual is declared a public safety threat. However statistics from the Department of Fish and Game indicate that cougar killings in California have been on the rise since 1970s with an average of over 112 cats killed per year from 2000 to 2006 compared to six per year in the 1970s. The Bay Area Puma Project aims to obtain information on cougar populations in the San Francisco Bay area and the animals' interactions with habitat, prey, humans, and residential communities.
Conservation threats to the species include persecution as a pest animal, degradation and fragmentation of their habitat, and depletion of their prey base. Wildlife corridor and sufficient range areas are critical to the sustainability of cougar populations. Research simulations have shown that the animal faces a low extinction risk in areas of 2200 km 2 (850 sq mi) or more. As few as one to four new animals entering a population per decade markedly increases persistence, foregrounding the importance of habitat corridors.
Moche puma, Larco Museum collection
The grace and power of the cougar have been widely admired in the cultures of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. The Inca city of Cusco is reported to have been designed in the shape of a cougar, and the animal also gave its name to both Inca regions and people. The Moche people represented the puma often in their ceramics. Berrin, Katherine & Larco Museum. The Spirit of Ancient Peru:Treasures from the Museo Arqueológico Rafael Larco Herrera. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1997. The sky and thunder god of the Inca, Viracocha, has been associated with the animal.
In North America, mythological descriptions of the cougar have appeared in the stories of the HocÄ
k language ("Ho-Chunk" or "Winnebago") of Wisconsin and Illinois Cougars, The Encyclopedia of HoÄÄ
k (Winnebago) Mythology. Retrieved: 2009/12/08. and the Cheyenne, amongst others. To the Apache and Walapai of Arizona, the wail of the Cougar was a harbinger of death.
During the early years of ranching, cougars were considered on par with wolves in destructiveness. According to figures in Texas in 1990, 86 calves (0.0006% of a total of 13.4 million cattle & calves in Texas), 253 Mohair goats, 302 Mohair kids, 445 sheep (0.02% of a total of 2.0 million sheep & lambs in Texas) and 562 lambs (0.04% of 1.2 million lambs in Texas) were confirmed to have been killed by cougars that year. In Nevada in 1992, cougars were confirmed to have killed 9 calves, 1 horse, 4 colts, 5 goats, 318 sheep and 400 lambs. In both cases, sheep were the most frequently attacked. Some instances of surplus killing have resulted in the deaths of 20 sheep in one attack. Cougars frequently kill calves, sheep and goats by biting the top of the neck or head, differing greatly from the throat bite used by coyotes and indiscriminate mutilation by feral dogs. The size of the tooth puncture marks also helps distinguish kills made by cougars from those made by smaller predators.
Mountain Lion warning sign
Due to the expanding human population, cougar ranges increasingly overlap with areas inhabited by humans. Attacks on humans are rare, as cougar prey recognition is a learned behavior and they do not generally recognize humans as prey. Attacks on people, livestock, and pets may occur when the cat habituates to humans or is in a condition of severe starvation. Attacks are most frequent during late spring and summer, when juvenile cougars leave their mothers and search for new territory.
Between 1890 and 1990, in North America there were 53 reported, confirmed attacks on humans, resulting in 48 nonfatal injuries and 10 deaths of humans (the total is greater than 53 because some attacks had more than one victim). By 2004, the count had climbed to 88 attacks and 20 deaths.
Within North America, the distribution of attacks is not uniform. The heavily populated state of California has seen a dozen attacks since 1986 (after just three from 1890 to 1985), including three fatalities. Lightly populated New Mexico reported an attack in 2008, the first there since 1974. Search continues for mountain lion that killed Pinos Altos man, New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, press release June 23, 2008]; Wounded mountain lion captured, killed near Pinos Altos, New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, press release June 25, 2008]; Second mountain lion captured near Pinos Altos, New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, press release July 1, 2008]
As with many predators, a cougar may attack if cornered, if a fleeing human stimulates their instinct to chase, or if a person "plays dead." Exaggerating the threat to the animal through intense eye contact, loud but calm shouting, and any other action to appear larger and more menacing, may make the animal retreat. Fighting back with sticks and rocks, or even bare hands, is often effective in persuading an attacking cougar to disengage.
When cougars do attack, they usually employ their characteristic neck bite, attempting to position their teeth between the vertebrae and into the spinal cord. Neck, head, and spinal injuries are common and sometimes fatal. Children are at greatest risk of attack, and least likely to survive an encounter. Detailed research into attacks prior to 1991 showed that 64% of all victims and almost all fatalities were children. The same study showed the highest proportion of attacks to have occurred in British Columbia, particularly on Vancouver Island where cougar populations are especially dense.
*List of fatal cougar attacks in North America
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* Video, Pictures and Information on Mountain Lions
* A Definitive Resource About Cougars Comprehensive, non-profit site with extensive information about cougars, from how to live safely in cougar country, to science abstracts, hunting regulations, state-by-state cougar management/policy info, and rare photos and videos of wild cougars.
* Description of a Cougar attack
* Cougar Facts and Photos â NatureMapping Program
* No Place for Predators? Liza Gross, PLoS Biology, explains how Washington State wildlife officials implemented a hunting policy, in response to a state measure passed to protect wildlife, that led to the highest rates of human-caused cougar mortality since the height of the bounty era
* Cougar Tracks: How to identify cougar tracks in the wild
* The sound of a cougar screaming
* Link to Worldwide Wild Cat Conservation site
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Cougar | Are cougars larger than jaguars? | Cougars are not larger than jaguars. | data/set1/a2 | Cougar
The cougar (Puma concolor), also known as puma, mountain lion, mountain cat, catamount or panther, depending on the region, is a mammal of the family Felidae, native to the Americas. This large, solitary cat has the greatest range of any large wild terrestrial mammal in the Western Hemisphere, extending from Yukon in Canada to the southern Andes of South America. An adaptable, generalist species, the cougar is found in every major American habitat type. It is the second heaviest cat in the American continents after the jaguar, and the fourth heaviest in the world, after the tiger, lion, and jaguar. Although large, the cougar is most closely related to smaller felines.
A capable stalk-and-ambush predator, the cougar pursues a wide variety of prey. Primary food sources include ungulates such as deer, elk, and bighorn sheep, as well as domestic cattle, horses and sheep, particularly in the northern part of its range. It will also hunt species as small as insects and rodents. This cat prefers habitats with dense underbrush and rocky areas for stalking, but it can also live in open areas. The cougar is territorial and persists at low population densities. Individual territory sizes depend on terrain, vegetation, and abundance of prey. While it is a large predator, it is not always the dominant species in its range, as when it competes for prey with other predators such as the jaguar, grey wolf, American Black Bear, and the grizzly bear. It is a reclusive cat and usually avoids people. Attacks on humans remain rare, despite a recent increase in frequency.
Due to excessive hunting following the European colonization of the Americas, and continuing human development of cougar habitat, populations have dropped in most parts of its historical range. In particular, the cougar was extirpated in eastern North America, except for an isolated sub-population in Florida; the animal may be recolonizing parts of its former eastern territory, such as Maine and northern Michigan, /ref> where there have been recent sightings. With its vast range, the cougar has dozens of names and various references in the mythology of the indigenous Americans and in contemporary culture. The cougar has recently made a comeback in the state of Wyoming, where it presently has the largest population in North America .
The cougar has numerous names in English, of which puma and mountain lion are popular. Other names include catamount, panther, mountain screamer and painter. Lexicographers regard painter as a primarily upper-Southern U.S. regional variant on "panther", but a folk etymology, fancying a resemblance between the typically dark tip of its tail and a paintbrush dipped in dark paint, has some currency.
The cougar holds the Guinness record for the animal with the highest number of names, presumably due to its wide distribution across North and South America. It has over 40 names in English alone.
"Cougar" may be borrowed from the Portuguese çuçuarana, via French; the term was originally derived from the Tupi language. A current form in Brazil is suçuarana. It may also be borrowed from the Guaranà language term guaçu ara or guazu ara. "Puma" comes, via Spanish, from the Quechua language. Cougar, Puma and
The cougar is the largest of the small cats. It is placed in the subfamily Felinae, although its bulk characteristics are similar to those of the big cats in the subfamily Pantherinae. The family Felidae is believed to have originated in Asia approximately 11 million years ago. Taxonomic research on felids remains partial and much of what is known about their evolutionary history is based on mitochondrial DNA analysis, as cats are poorly represented in the fossil record, and there are significant confidence intervals with suggested dates.
Although large, the cougar is closely related to small felines.
In the latest genomic study of Felidae, the common ancestor of today's Leopardus, Lynx, Puma, Prionailurus, and Felis lineages migrated across the Bering land bridge into the Americas approximately 8 to 8.5 million years (Ma) ago. The lineages subsequently diverged in that order. North American felids then invaded South America 3 Ma ago as part of the Great American Interchange, following formation of the Isthmus of Panama. The cougar was originally thought to belong in Felis (Felis concolor), the genus which includes the domestic cat. As of 1993, it is now placed in Puma along with the jaguarundi, a cat just a little more than a tenth its weight.
Studies have indicated that the cougar and jaguarundi are most closely related to the modern cheetah of Africa and western Asia, but the relationship is unresolved. It has been suggested that the cheetah lineage diverged from the Puma lineage in the Americas (see American cheetah) and migrated back to Asia and Africa, while other research suggests the cheetah diverged in the Old World itself. The outline of small feline migration to the Americas is thus unclear.
Recent studies have demonstrated a high level of genetic similarity among the North American cougar populations, suggesting that they are all fairly recent descendants of a small ancestral group. Culver et al. suggest that the original North American population of Puma concolor was extirpated during the Pleistocene extinctions some 10,000 years ago, when other large mammals such as Smilodon also disappeared. North America was then repopulated by a group of South American cougars.
Until the late 1990s, as many as 32 subspecies were recorded; however, a recent genetic study of mitochondrial DNA found that many of these are too similar to be recognized as distinct at a molecular level. Following the research, the canonical Mammal Species of the World (3rd edition) recognizes six subspecies, five of which are solely found in Latin America:
; Argentine puma : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms hudsonii and puma (Marcelli, 1922);
; Costa Rican Cougar
; Eastern South American cougar : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms acrocodia, borbensis, capricornensis, concolor (Pelzeln, 1883), greeni and nigra;
; North American Cougar : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms arundivaga, aztecus, browni, californica, coryi, floridana, hippolestes, improcera, kaibabensis, mayensis, missoulensis, olympus, oregonensis, schorgeri, stanleyana, vancouverensis and youngi;
; Northern South American cougar : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms bangsi, incarum, osgoodi, soasoaranna, sussuarana, soderstromii, sucuacuara and wavula;
; Southern South American puma : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms araucanus, concolor (Gay, 1847), patagonica, pearsoni and puma (Trouessart, 1904)
The status of the Florida panther, here collapsed into the North American Cougar, remains uncertain. It is still regularly listed as subspecies Puma concolor coryi in research works, including those directly concerned with its conservation. Culver et al. themselves noted low microsatellite variation in the Florida panther, possibly due to inbreeding; responding to the research, one conservation team suggests "the degree to which the scientific community has accepted the results of Culver et al. and the proposed change in taxonomy is not resolved at this time."
Cougars are slender and agile cats. Adults stand about 60 to 76 centimeters (2.0 to 2.5 ft) tall at the shoulders. The length of adult males is around 2.4 meters (8 ft) long nose to tail, with overall ranges between 1.5 and 2.75 m (5 and 9 ft) nose to tail suggested for the species in general. Males typically weigh 53 to 90 kilograms (115 to 198 pounds), averaging 62 kg (137 lb). In rare cases, some may reach over 120 kg (264 lb). Females typically weigh between 29 and 64 kg (64 and 141 lb), averaging 42 kg (93 lb). /ref> /ref> Cougar size is smallest close to the equator, and larger towards the poles.
Although cougars resemble the domestic cat, they are about the same size as an adult human.
The head of the cat is round and the ears erect. Its powerful forequarters, neck, and jaw serve to grasp and hold large prey. It has five retractable claws on its forepaws (one a dewclaw) and four on its hind paws. The larger front feet and claws are adaptations to clutching prey.
Cougars can be almost as large as jaguars, but are less muscular and not as powerful; where their ranges overlap, the cougar tends to be smaller than average. The cougar is on average as heavy as the leopard. Despite its size, it is not typically classified among the "big cats," as it cannot roar, lacking the specialized larynx and hyoid apparatus of Panthera. Like domestic cats, cougars vocalize low-pitched hisses, growls, and purrs, as well as chirps and whistles. They are well known for their screams, as referenced in some of their common names, although these screams are often misinterpreted to be the calls of other animals.
Rear paw of a cougar
Cougar coloring is plain (hence the Latin concolor) but can vary greatly between individuals and even between siblings. The coat is typically tawny, but ranges to silvery-grey or reddish, with lighter patches on the under body including the jaws, chin, and throat. Infants are spotted and born with blue eyes and rings on their tails; juveniles are pale, and dark spots remain on their flanks. Despite anecdotes to the contrary, all-black coloring (melanism) has never been documented in cougars. The term "black panther" is used colloquially to refer to melanistic individuals of other species, particularly jaguars and leopards.
Cougars have large paws and proportionally the largest hind legs in the cat family. This physique allows it great leaping and short-sprint ability. An exceptional vertical leap of 5.4 m (18 ft) is reported for the cougar. Horizontal jumping capability from standing position is suggested anywhere from 6 to 12 m (20 to 40 ft). The cougar can run as fast as 55 to 72 km/h (35 to 45 mi/h), but is best adapted for short, powerful sprints rather than long chases. It is adept at climbing, which allows it to evade canine competitors. Although it is not strongly associated with water, it can swim.
A successful generalist predator, the cougar will eat any animal it can catch, from insects to large ungulates (over 500 kg). Like all cats, it is an obligate carnivore, feeding only on meat. The Mean weight of vertebrate prey (MWVP) was positively correlated (r=0.875) with puma body weight and inversely correlated (r=-0.836) with food niche breadth in all America. In general, MWVP was lower in areas closer to the Equator. Its most important prey species are various deer species, particularly in North America; mule deer, white-tailed deer, elk, and even large moose are taken by the cat. Other species such as Bighorn Sheep, wild horses of Arizona, domestic horses, and domestic livestock such as cattle and sheep are also primary food bases in many areas. A survey of North America research found 68% of prey items were ungulates, especially deer. Only the Florida Panther showed variation, often preferring feral hogs and armadillos.
Shown eating. Cougars are ambush predators, feeding mostly on deer and other mammals.
Investigation in Yellowstone National Park showed that elk, followed by mule deer, were the cougar's primary targets; the prey base is shared with the park's gray wolves, with whom the cougar competes for resources.
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* Another study on winter kills (NovemberâApril) in Alberta showed that ungulates accounted for greater than 99% of the cougar diet. Learned, individual prey recognition was observed, as some cougars rarely killed bighorn sheep, while others relied heavily on the species.
In the Central and South American cougar range, the ratio of deer in the diet declines. Small to mid-size mammals are preferred, including large rodents such as the capybara. Ungulates accounted for only 35% of prey items in one survey, approximately half that of North America. Competition with the larger jaguar has been suggested for the decline in the size of prey items. Other listed prey species of the cougar include mice, porcupine, and hares. Birds and small reptiles are sometimes preyed upon in the south, but this is rarely recorded in North America.
Though capable of sprinting, the cougar is typically an ambush predator. It stalks through brush and trees, across ledges, or other covered spots, before delivering a powerful leap onto the back of its prey and a suffocating neck bite. The cougar is capable of breaking the neck of some of its smaller prey with a strong bite and momentum bearing the animal to the ground.
Kills are generally estimated at around one large ungulate every two weeks. The period shrinks for females raising young, and may be as short as one kill every three days when cubs are nearly mature at around 15 months. The cat drags a kill to a preferred spot, covers it with brush, and returns to feed over a period of days. It is generally reported that the cougar is a non-scavenger and will rarely consume prey it has not killed; but deer carcasses left exposed for study were scavenged by cougars in California, suggesting more opportunistic behavior.
Females reach sexual maturity between one-and-a-half to three years of age. They typically average one litter every two to three years throughout their reproductive life, though the period can be as short as one year. Females are in estrus for approximately 8 days of a 23-day cycle; the gestation period is approximately 91 days. Females are sometimes reported as monogamous, but this is uncertain and polygyny may be more common. Copulation is brief but frequent.
Cougar kittens
Only females are involved in parenting. Female cougars are fiercely protective of their kittens, and have been seen to successfully fight off animals as large as grizzly bears in their defense. Litter size is between one and six kittens; typically two or three. Caves and other alcoves that offer protection are used as litter dens. Born blind, kittens are completely dependent on their mother at first, and begin to be weaned at around three months of age. As they grow, they begin to go out on forays with their mother, first visiting kill sites, and after six months beginning to hunt small prey on their own. Kitten survival rates are just over one per litter.
Sub-adults leave their mother to attempt to establish their own territory at around two years of age and sometimes earlier; males tend to leave sooner. One study has shown high morbidity amongst cougars that travel farthest from the maternal range, often due to conflicts with other cougars ("intraspecific" conflict). Research in New Mexico has shown that "males dispersed significantly farther than females, were more likely to traverse large expanses of non-cougar habitat, and were probably most responsible for nuclear gene flow between habitat patches."
Life expectancy in the wild is reported at between 8 to 13 years, and probably averages 8 to 10; a female of at least 18 years was reported killed by hunters on Vancouver Island. Cougars may live as long as 20 years in captivity. One male North American cougar, named Scratch, was two months short of his 30th birthday when he died in 2007. Causes of death in the wild include disability and disease, competition with other cougars, starvation, accidents, and, where allowed, human hunting. Feline immunodeficiency virus, an endemic AIDS-like disease in cats, is well-adapted to the cougar.
Like almost all cats, the cougar is a solitary animal. Only mothers and kittens live in groups, with adults meeting only to mate. It is secretive and crepuscular, being most active around dawn and dusk.
Estimates of territory sizes vary greatly.
Canadian Geographic reports large male territories of 150 to 1000 square kilometers (58 to 386 sq mi) with female ranges half the size. Other research suggests a much smaller lower limit of 25 km 2 (10 sq mi) but an even greater upper limit of 1300 km 2 (500 sq mi) for males. In the United States, very large ranges have been reported in Texas and the Black Hills of the northern Great Plains, in excess of 775 km 2 (300 sq mi). Male ranges may include or overlap with those of females but, at least where studied, not with those of other males, which serves to reduce conflict between cougars. Ranges of females may overlap slightly with each other. Scrape marks, urine, and feces are used to mark territory and attract mates. Males may scrape together a small pile of leaves and grasses and then urinate on it as a way of marking territory.
Home range sizes and overall cougar abundance depend on terrain, vegetation, and prey abundance. One female adjacent to the San Andres Mountains, for instance, was found with a large range of 215 km 2 (83 sq mi), necessitated by poor prey abundance. Research has shown cougar abundances from 0.5 animals to as much as 7 (in one study in South America) per 100 km 2 (38 sq mi).
Because males disperse further than females and compete more directly for mates and territory, they are most likely to be involved in conflict. Where a sub-adult fails to leave his maternal range, for example, he may be killed by his father. When males encounter each other, they hiss, spit, and may engage in violent conflict if neither backs down. Hunting or relocation of the cougar may increase aggressive encounters by disrupting territories and bringing young, transient animals into conflict with established individuals.
The cougar has the largest range of any wild land animal in the Americas. Its range spans 110 degrees of latitude, from northern Yukon in Canada to the southern Andes. It is one of only three cat species, along with the bobcat and Canadian lynx, native to Canada. Its wide distribution stems from its adaptability to virtually every habitat type: it is found in all forest types as well as in lowland and mountainous deserts. Studies show that the Cougar prefers regions with dense underbrush, but can live with little vegetation in open areas. Its preferred habitats include precipitous canyons, escarpments, rim rocks, and dense brush.
Cougar, photographed in the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, Tucson, Arizona.
The cougar was extirpated across much of its eastern North American range (with the exception of Florida) in the two centuries after European colonization, and faced grave threats in the remainder of its territory. Currently, it ranges across most western American states, the Canadian provinces of Alberta and British Columbia, and the Canadian Yukon Territory. There have been widely debated reports of possible recolonization of eastern North America. DNA evidence has suggested its presence in eastern North America, , while a consolidated map of cougar sightings shows numerous reports, from the mid-western Great Plains through to Eastern Canada. The Cougar Network methodology is recognized by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The Quebec wildlife services (known locally as MRNF) also considers Cougar to be present in the province as a threatened species after multiple DNA tests confirmed cougar hair in Lynx mating sites. Ministry of Wildlife and natural resources Wildlife Service. The only unequivocally known eastern population is the Florida panther, which is critically endangered. There have also been sightings in Elliotsville, Maine (in the central part of the state); and in New Hampshire, there have been recent sightings as early as 1997. In 2009, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources confirmed a cougar sighting in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Skinner, Victor. 2009. Photo shows cougar presence in Michigan. The Grand Rapids Press. November 15, 2009 Typically, extreme-range sightings of cougars involve young males, who can travel great distances to establish ranges away from established males; all four confirmed cougar kills in Iowa since 2000 involved males.
On April 14, 2008 police shot and killed a cougar on the north side of Chicago, Illinois. DNA tests were consistent with cougars from the Black Hills. Less than one year later, on March 5, 2009, a cougar was photographed and unsuccessfully tranquilized by state wildlife biologists in a tree near Spooner, Wisconsin in the northwestern part of the state.
South of the Rio Grande, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) lists the cat in every Central and South American country except Costa Rica and Panama. While specific state and provincial statistics are often available in North America, much less is known about the cat in its southern range.
The cougar's total breeding population is estimated at less than 50,000 by the IUCN, with a declining trend. U.S. state-level statistics are often more optimistic, suggesting cougar populations have rebounded. In Oregon, a healthy population of 5,000 was reported in 2006, exceeding a target of 3,000. California has actively sought to protect the cat and a similar number of cougars has been suggested, between 4,000 and 6,000.
Aside from humans, no species preys upon mature cougars in the wild. The cat is not, however, the apex predator throughout much of its range. In its northern range, the cougar interacts with other powerful predators such as the brown bear and gray wolf. In the south, the cougar must compete with the larger jaguar. In Florida it encounters the American Alligator.
thumbFront paw print of a cougar. An adult paw print is approximately 10 cm (4 inches) long.
The Yellowstone National Park ecosystem provides a fruitful microcosm to study inter-predator interaction in North America. Of the three large predators, the massive brown bear appears dominant, often although not always able to drive both the gray wolf pack and the cougar off their kills. One study found that Brown or American Black Bears visited 24% of cougar kills in Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks, usurping 10% of carcasses.
The gray wolf and the cougar compete more directly for prey, especially in winter. While individually more powerful than the gray wolf, a solitary cougar may be dominated by the pack structure of the canines. Wolves can steal kills and occasionally kill the cat. One report describes a large pack of fourteen wolves killing a female cougar and her kittens. Conversely, lone wolves are at a disadvantage, and have been reported killed by cougars. Wolves more broadly affect cougar population dynamics and distribution by dominating territory and prey opportunities, and disrupting the feline's behavior. Preliminary research in Yellowstone, for instance, has shown displacement of the cougar by wolves. One researcher in Oregon notes: "When there is a pack around, cougars are not comfortable around their kills or raising kittens ... A lot of times a big cougar will kill a wolf, but the pack phenomenon changes the table." Both species, meanwhile, are capable of killing mid-sized predators such as bobcats and coyotes and tend to suppress their numbers.
In the southern portion of its range, the cougar and jaguar share overlapping territory. The jaguar tends to take larger prey and the cougar smaller where they overlap, reducing the cougar's size. Of the two felines, the cougar appears best able to exploit a broader prey niche and smaller prey.
As with any predator at or near the top of its food chain, the cougar impacts the population of prey species. Predation by cougars has been linked to changes in the species mix of deer in a region. For example, a study in British Columbia observed that the population of mule deer, a favored cougar prey, was declining while the population of the less frequently preyed-upon white-tailed deer was increasing. The Vancouver Island Marmot, an endangered species endemic to one region of dense cougar population, has seen decreased numbers due to cougar and gray wolf predation.
In the southern part of South America the Puma is a top level predator that has controlled the population of Guanaco and other species since prehistoric times.
Pumapard, taken in 1904
A pumapard is a hybrid animal resulting from a union between a cougar and a leopard. Three sets of these hybrids were bred in the late 1890s and early 1900s by Carl Hagenbeck at his animal park in Hamburg, Germany. Most did not reach adulthood. One of these was purchased in 1898 by Berlin Zoo. A similar hybrid in Berlin Zoo purchased from Hagenbeck was a cross between a male leopard and a female puma. Hamburg Zoo's specimen was the reverse pairing, the one in the black and white photo, fathered by a puma bred to an Indian leopardess.
Whether born to a female puma mated to a male leopard, or to a male puma mated to a female leopard, pumapards inherit a form of dwarfism. Those reported grew to only half the size of the parents. They have a puma-like long body (proportional to the limbs, but nevertheless shorter than either parent), but short legs. The coat is variously described as sandy, tawny or greyish with brown, chestnut or "faded" rosettes.
The World Conservation Union (IUCN) currently lists the cougar as a "least concern" species. The cougar is regulated under Appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), rendering illegal international trade in specimens or parts.
Cougar conservation depends on preservation of their habitat.
In the United States east of the Mississippi River, the only unequivocally known cougar population is the Florida panther. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service recognizes both an Eastern cougar and the Florida panther, affording protection under the Endangered Species Act. Certain taxonomic authorities have collapsed both designations into the North American Cougar, with Eastern or Florida subspecies not recognized, while a subspecies designation remains recognized by some conservation scientists. The most recent documented count for the Florida sub-population is 87 individuals, reported by recovery agencies in 2003.
The cougar is also protected across much of the rest of their range. As of 1996, cougar hunting was prohibited in Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, French Guiana, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Suriname, Venezuela, and Uruguay. (Costa Rica and Panama are not listed as current range countries by the IUCN.) The cat had no reported legal protection in Ecuador, El Salvador, and Guyana. Regulated cougar hunting is still common in the United States and Canada, although they are protected from all hunting in the Yukon.; it is permitted in every U.S. state from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, with the exception of California. Texas is the only state in the United States with a viable population of cougars that does not protect, in some way, of its cougar population. In Texas, cougars are listed as nuisance wildlife and any person holding a hunting or a trapping permit can kill a cougar regardless of the season, number killed, sex or age of the animal. Killed animals are not required to be reported to Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. Conservation work in Texas is the effort of a non profit organization, Balanced Ecology Inc. (BEI), as part of their Texas Mountain Lion Conservation Project . Cougars are generally hunted with packs of dogs, until the animal is 'treed'. When the hunter arrives on the scene, he shoots the cat from the tree at close range. The Cougar cannot be legally killed in California except under very specific circumstances, such as when an individual is declared a public safety threat. However statistics from the Department of Fish and Game indicate that cougar killings in California have been on the rise since 1970s with an average of over 112 cats killed per year from 2000 to 2006 compared to six per year in the 1970s. The Bay Area Puma Project aims to obtain information on cougar populations in the San Francisco Bay area and the animals' interactions with habitat, prey, humans, and residential communities.
Conservation threats to the species include persecution as a pest animal, degradation and fragmentation of their habitat, and depletion of their prey base. Wildlife corridor and sufficient range areas are critical to the sustainability of cougar populations. Research simulations have shown that the animal faces a low extinction risk in areas of 2200 km 2 (850 sq mi) or more. As few as one to four new animals entering a population per decade markedly increases persistence, foregrounding the importance of habitat corridors.
Moche puma, Larco Museum collection
The grace and power of the cougar have been widely admired in the cultures of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. The Inca city of Cusco is reported to have been designed in the shape of a cougar, and the animal also gave its name to both Inca regions and people. The Moche people represented the puma often in their ceramics. Berrin, Katherine & Larco Museum. The Spirit of Ancient Peru:Treasures from the Museo Arqueológico Rafael Larco Herrera. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1997. The sky and thunder god of the Inca, Viracocha, has been associated with the animal.
In North America, mythological descriptions of the cougar have appeared in the stories of the HocÄ
k language ("Ho-Chunk" or "Winnebago") of Wisconsin and Illinois Cougars, The Encyclopedia of HoÄÄ
k (Winnebago) Mythology. Retrieved: 2009/12/08. and the Cheyenne, amongst others. To the Apache and Walapai of Arizona, the wail of the Cougar was a harbinger of death.
During the early years of ranching, cougars were considered on par with wolves in destructiveness. According to figures in Texas in 1990, 86 calves (0.0006% of a total of 13.4 million cattle & calves in Texas), 253 Mohair goats, 302 Mohair kids, 445 sheep (0.02% of a total of 2.0 million sheep & lambs in Texas) and 562 lambs (0.04% of 1.2 million lambs in Texas) were confirmed to have been killed by cougars that year. In Nevada in 1992, cougars were confirmed to have killed 9 calves, 1 horse, 4 colts, 5 goats, 318 sheep and 400 lambs. In both cases, sheep were the most frequently attacked. Some instances of surplus killing have resulted in the deaths of 20 sheep in one attack. Cougars frequently kill calves, sheep and goats by biting the top of the neck or head, differing greatly from the throat bite used by coyotes and indiscriminate mutilation by feral dogs. The size of the tooth puncture marks also helps distinguish kills made by cougars from those made by smaller predators.
Mountain Lion warning sign
Due to the expanding human population, cougar ranges increasingly overlap with areas inhabited by humans. Attacks on humans are rare, as cougar prey recognition is a learned behavior and they do not generally recognize humans as prey. Attacks on people, livestock, and pets may occur when the cat habituates to humans or is in a condition of severe starvation. Attacks are most frequent during late spring and summer, when juvenile cougars leave their mothers and search for new territory.
Between 1890 and 1990, in North America there were 53 reported, confirmed attacks on humans, resulting in 48 nonfatal injuries and 10 deaths of humans (the total is greater than 53 because some attacks had more than one victim). By 2004, the count had climbed to 88 attacks and 20 deaths.
Within North America, the distribution of attacks is not uniform. The heavily populated state of California has seen a dozen attacks since 1986 (after just three from 1890 to 1985), including three fatalities. Lightly populated New Mexico reported an attack in 2008, the first there since 1974. Search continues for mountain lion that killed Pinos Altos man, New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, press release June 23, 2008]; Wounded mountain lion captured, killed near Pinos Altos, New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, press release June 25, 2008]; Second mountain lion captured near Pinos Altos, New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, press release July 1, 2008]
As with many predators, a cougar may attack if cornered, if a fleeing human stimulates their instinct to chase, or if a person "plays dead." Exaggerating the threat to the animal through intense eye contact, loud but calm shouting, and any other action to appear larger and more menacing, may make the animal retreat. Fighting back with sticks and rocks, or even bare hands, is often effective in persuading an attacking cougar to disengage.
When cougars do attack, they usually employ their characteristic neck bite, attempting to position their teeth between the vertebrae and into the spinal cord. Neck, head, and spinal injuries are common and sometimes fatal. Children are at greatest risk of attack, and least likely to survive an encounter. Detailed research into attacks prior to 1991 showed that 64% of all victims and almost all fatalities were children. The same study showed the highest proportion of attacks to have occurred in British Columbia, particularly on Vancouver Island where cougar populations are especially dense.
*List of fatal cougar attacks in North America
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* Video, Pictures and Information on Mountain Lions
* A Definitive Resource About Cougars Comprehensive, non-profit site with extensive information about cougars, from how to live safely in cougar country, to science abstracts, hunting regulations, state-by-state cougar management/policy info, and rare photos and videos of wild cougars.
* Description of a Cougar attack
* Cougar Facts and Photos â NatureMapping Program
* No Place for Predators? Liza Gross, PLoS Biology, explains how Washington State wildlife officials implemented a hunting policy, in response to a state measure passed to protect wildlife, that led to the highest rates of human-caused cougar mortality since the height of the bounty era
* Cougar Tracks: How to identify cougar tracks in the wild
* The sound of a cougar screaming
* Link to Worldwide Wild Cat Conservation site
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Cougar | Are cougars larger than jaguars? | no | data/set1/a2 | Cougar
The cougar (Puma concolor), also known as puma, mountain lion, mountain cat, catamount or panther, depending on the region, is a mammal of the family Felidae, native to the Americas. This large, solitary cat has the greatest range of any large wild terrestrial mammal in the Western Hemisphere, extending from Yukon in Canada to the southern Andes of South America. An adaptable, generalist species, the cougar is found in every major American habitat type. It is the second heaviest cat in the American continents after the jaguar, and the fourth heaviest in the world, after the tiger, lion, and jaguar. Although large, the cougar is most closely related to smaller felines.
A capable stalk-and-ambush predator, the cougar pursues a wide variety of prey. Primary food sources include ungulates such as deer, elk, and bighorn sheep, as well as domestic cattle, horses and sheep, particularly in the northern part of its range. It will also hunt species as small as insects and rodents. This cat prefers habitats with dense underbrush and rocky areas for stalking, but it can also live in open areas. The cougar is territorial and persists at low population densities. Individual territory sizes depend on terrain, vegetation, and abundance of prey. While it is a large predator, it is not always the dominant species in its range, as when it competes for prey with other predators such as the jaguar, grey wolf, American Black Bear, and the grizzly bear. It is a reclusive cat and usually avoids people. Attacks on humans remain rare, despite a recent increase in frequency.
Due to excessive hunting following the European colonization of the Americas, and continuing human development of cougar habitat, populations have dropped in most parts of its historical range. In particular, the cougar was extirpated in eastern North America, except for an isolated sub-population in Florida; the animal may be recolonizing parts of its former eastern territory, such as Maine and northern Michigan, /ref> where there have been recent sightings. With its vast range, the cougar has dozens of names and various references in the mythology of the indigenous Americans and in contemporary culture. The cougar has recently made a comeback in the state of Wyoming, where it presently has the largest population in North America .
The cougar has numerous names in English, of which puma and mountain lion are popular. Other names include catamount, panther, mountain screamer and painter. Lexicographers regard painter as a primarily upper-Southern U.S. regional variant on "panther", but a folk etymology, fancying a resemblance between the typically dark tip of its tail and a paintbrush dipped in dark paint, has some currency.
The cougar holds the Guinness record for the animal with the highest number of names, presumably due to its wide distribution across North and South America. It has over 40 names in English alone.
"Cougar" may be borrowed from the Portuguese çuçuarana, via French; the term was originally derived from the Tupi language. A current form in Brazil is suçuarana. It may also be borrowed from the Guaranà language term guaçu ara or guazu ara. "Puma" comes, via Spanish, from the Quechua language. Cougar, Puma and
The cougar is the largest of the small cats. It is placed in the subfamily Felinae, although its bulk characteristics are similar to those of the big cats in the subfamily Pantherinae. The family Felidae is believed to have originated in Asia approximately 11 million years ago. Taxonomic research on felids remains partial and much of what is known about their evolutionary history is based on mitochondrial DNA analysis, as cats are poorly represented in the fossil record, and there are significant confidence intervals with suggested dates.
Although large, the cougar is closely related to small felines.
In the latest genomic study of Felidae, the common ancestor of today's Leopardus, Lynx, Puma, Prionailurus, and Felis lineages migrated across the Bering land bridge into the Americas approximately 8 to 8.5 million years (Ma) ago. The lineages subsequently diverged in that order. North American felids then invaded South America 3 Ma ago as part of the Great American Interchange, following formation of the Isthmus of Panama. The cougar was originally thought to belong in Felis (Felis concolor), the genus which includes the domestic cat. As of 1993, it is now placed in Puma along with the jaguarundi, a cat just a little more than a tenth its weight.
Studies have indicated that the cougar and jaguarundi are most closely related to the modern cheetah of Africa and western Asia, but the relationship is unresolved. It has been suggested that the cheetah lineage diverged from the Puma lineage in the Americas (see American cheetah) and migrated back to Asia and Africa, while other research suggests the cheetah diverged in the Old World itself. The outline of small feline migration to the Americas is thus unclear.
Recent studies have demonstrated a high level of genetic similarity among the North American cougar populations, suggesting that they are all fairly recent descendants of a small ancestral group. Culver et al. suggest that the original North American population of Puma concolor was extirpated during the Pleistocene extinctions some 10,000 years ago, when other large mammals such as Smilodon also disappeared. North America was then repopulated by a group of South American cougars.
Until the late 1990s, as many as 32 subspecies were recorded; however, a recent genetic study of mitochondrial DNA found that many of these are too similar to be recognized as distinct at a molecular level. Following the research, the canonical Mammal Species of the World (3rd edition) recognizes six subspecies, five of which are solely found in Latin America:
; Argentine puma : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms hudsonii and puma (Marcelli, 1922);
; Costa Rican Cougar
; Eastern South American cougar : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms acrocodia, borbensis, capricornensis, concolor (Pelzeln, 1883), greeni and nigra;
; North American Cougar : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms arundivaga, aztecus, browni, californica, coryi, floridana, hippolestes, improcera, kaibabensis, mayensis, missoulensis, olympus, oregonensis, schorgeri, stanleyana, vancouverensis and youngi;
; Northern South American cougar : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms bangsi, incarum, osgoodi, soasoaranna, sussuarana, soderstromii, sucuacuara and wavula;
; Southern South American puma : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms araucanus, concolor (Gay, 1847), patagonica, pearsoni and puma (Trouessart, 1904)
The status of the Florida panther, here collapsed into the North American Cougar, remains uncertain. It is still regularly listed as subspecies Puma concolor coryi in research works, including those directly concerned with its conservation. Culver et al. themselves noted low microsatellite variation in the Florida panther, possibly due to inbreeding; responding to the research, one conservation team suggests "the degree to which the scientific community has accepted the results of Culver et al. and the proposed change in taxonomy is not resolved at this time."
Cougars are slender and agile cats. Adults stand about 60 to 76 centimeters (2.0 to 2.5 ft) tall at the shoulders. The length of adult males is around 2.4 meters (8 ft) long nose to tail, with overall ranges between 1.5 and 2.75 m (5 and 9 ft) nose to tail suggested for the species in general. Males typically weigh 53 to 90 kilograms (115 to 198 pounds), averaging 62 kg (137 lb). In rare cases, some may reach over 120 kg (264 lb). Females typically weigh between 29 and 64 kg (64 and 141 lb), averaging 42 kg (93 lb). /ref> /ref> Cougar size is smallest close to the equator, and larger towards the poles.
Although cougars resemble the domestic cat, they are about the same size as an adult human.
The head of the cat is round and the ears erect. Its powerful forequarters, neck, and jaw serve to grasp and hold large prey. It has five retractable claws on its forepaws (one a dewclaw) and four on its hind paws. The larger front feet and claws are adaptations to clutching prey.
Cougars can be almost as large as jaguars, but are less muscular and not as powerful; where their ranges overlap, the cougar tends to be smaller than average. The cougar is on average as heavy as the leopard. Despite its size, it is not typically classified among the "big cats," as it cannot roar, lacking the specialized larynx and hyoid apparatus of Panthera. Like domestic cats, cougars vocalize low-pitched hisses, growls, and purrs, as well as chirps and whistles. They are well known for their screams, as referenced in some of their common names, although these screams are often misinterpreted to be the calls of other animals.
Rear paw of a cougar
Cougar coloring is plain (hence the Latin concolor) but can vary greatly between individuals and even between siblings. The coat is typically tawny, but ranges to silvery-grey or reddish, with lighter patches on the under body including the jaws, chin, and throat. Infants are spotted and born with blue eyes and rings on their tails; juveniles are pale, and dark spots remain on their flanks. Despite anecdotes to the contrary, all-black coloring (melanism) has never been documented in cougars. The term "black panther" is used colloquially to refer to melanistic individuals of other species, particularly jaguars and leopards.
Cougars have large paws and proportionally the largest hind legs in the cat family. This physique allows it great leaping and short-sprint ability. An exceptional vertical leap of 5.4 m (18 ft) is reported for the cougar. Horizontal jumping capability from standing position is suggested anywhere from 6 to 12 m (20 to 40 ft). The cougar can run as fast as 55 to 72 km/h (35 to 45 mi/h), but is best adapted for short, powerful sprints rather than long chases. It is adept at climbing, which allows it to evade canine competitors. Although it is not strongly associated with water, it can swim.
A successful generalist predator, the cougar will eat any animal it can catch, from insects to large ungulates (over 500 kg). Like all cats, it is an obligate carnivore, feeding only on meat. The Mean weight of vertebrate prey (MWVP) was positively correlated (r=0.875) with puma body weight and inversely correlated (r=-0.836) with food niche breadth in all America. In general, MWVP was lower in areas closer to the Equator. Its most important prey species are various deer species, particularly in North America; mule deer, white-tailed deer, elk, and even large moose are taken by the cat. Other species such as Bighorn Sheep, wild horses of Arizona, domestic horses, and domestic livestock such as cattle and sheep are also primary food bases in many areas. A survey of North America research found 68% of prey items were ungulates, especially deer. Only the Florida Panther showed variation, often preferring feral hogs and armadillos.
Shown eating. Cougars are ambush predators, feeding mostly on deer and other mammals.
Investigation in Yellowstone National Park showed that elk, followed by mule deer, were the cougar's primary targets; the prey base is shared with the park's gray wolves, with whom the cougar competes for resources.
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* Another study on winter kills (NovemberâApril) in Alberta showed that ungulates accounted for greater than 99% of the cougar diet. Learned, individual prey recognition was observed, as some cougars rarely killed bighorn sheep, while others relied heavily on the species.
In the Central and South American cougar range, the ratio of deer in the diet declines. Small to mid-size mammals are preferred, including large rodents such as the capybara. Ungulates accounted for only 35% of prey items in one survey, approximately half that of North America. Competition with the larger jaguar has been suggested for the decline in the size of prey items. Other listed prey species of the cougar include mice, porcupine, and hares. Birds and small reptiles are sometimes preyed upon in the south, but this is rarely recorded in North America.
Though capable of sprinting, the cougar is typically an ambush predator. It stalks through brush and trees, across ledges, or other covered spots, before delivering a powerful leap onto the back of its prey and a suffocating neck bite. The cougar is capable of breaking the neck of some of its smaller prey with a strong bite and momentum bearing the animal to the ground.
Kills are generally estimated at around one large ungulate every two weeks. The period shrinks for females raising young, and may be as short as one kill every three days when cubs are nearly mature at around 15 months. The cat drags a kill to a preferred spot, covers it with brush, and returns to feed over a period of days. It is generally reported that the cougar is a non-scavenger and will rarely consume prey it has not killed; but deer carcasses left exposed for study were scavenged by cougars in California, suggesting more opportunistic behavior.
Females reach sexual maturity between one-and-a-half to three years of age. They typically average one litter every two to three years throughout their reproductive life, though the period can be as short as one year. Females are in estrus for approximately 8 days of a 23-day cycle; the gestation period is approximately 91 days. Females are sometimes reported as monogamous, but this is uncertain and polygyny may be more common. Copulation is brief but frequent.
Cougar kittens
Only females are involved in parenting. Female cougars are fiercely protective of their kittens, and have been seen to successfully fight off animals as large as grizzly bears in their defense. Litter size is between one and six kittens; typically two or three. Caves and other alcoves that offer protection are used as litter dens. Born blind, kittens are completely dependent on their mother at first, and begin to be weaned at around three months of age. As they grow, they begin to go out on forays with their mother, first visiting kill sites, and after six months beginning to hunt small prey on their own. Kitten survival rates are just over one per litter.
Sub-adults leave their mother to attempt to establish their own territory at around two years of age and sometimes earlier; males tend to leave sooner. One study has shown high morbidity amongst cougars that travel farthest from the maternal range, often due to conflicts with other cougars ("intraspecific" conflict). Research in New Mexico has shown that "males dispersed significantly farther than females, were more likely to traverse large expanses of non-cougar habitat, and were probably most responsible for nuclear gene flow between habitat patches."
Life expectancy in the wild is reported at between 8 to 13 years, and probably averages 8 to 10; a female of at least 18 years was reported killed by hunters on Vancouver Island. Cougars may live as long as 20 years in captivity. One male North American cougar, named Scratch, was two months short of his 30th birthday when he died in 2007. Causes of death in the wild include disability and disease, competition with other cougars, starvation, accidents, and, where allowed, human hunting. Feline immunodeficiency virus, an endemic AIDS-like disease in cats, is well-adapted to the cougar.
Like almost all cats, the cougar is a solitary animal. Only mothers and kittens live in groups, with adults meeting only to mate. It is secretive and crepuscular, being most active around dawn and dusk.
Estimates of territory sizes vary greatly.
Canadian Geographic reports large male territories of 150 to 1000 square kilometers (58 to 386 sq mi) with female ranges half the size. Other research suggests a much smaller lower limit of 25 km 2 (10 sq mi) but an even greater upper limit of 1300 km 2 (500 sq mi) for males. In the United States, very large ranges have been reported in Texas and the Black Hills of the northern Great Plains, in excess of 775 km 2 (300 sq mi). Male ranges may include or overlap with those of females but, at least where studied, not with those of other males, which serves to reduce conflict between cougars. Ranges of females may overlap slightly with each other. Scrape marks, urine, and feces are used to mark territory and attract mates. Males may scrape together a small pile of leaves and grasses and then urinate on it as a way of marking territory.
Home range sizes and overall cougar abundance depend on terrain, vegetation, and prey abundance. One female adjacent to the San Andres Mountains, for instance, was found with a large range of 215 km 2 (83 sq mi), necessitated by poor prey abundance. Research has shown cougar abundances from 0.5 animals to as much as 7 (in one study in South America) per 100 km 2 (38 sq mi).
Because males disperse further than females and compete more directly for mates and territory, they are most likely to be involved in conflict. Where a sub-adult fails to leave his maternal range, for example, he may be killed by his father. When males encounter each other, they hiss, spit, and may engage in violent conflict if neither backs down. Hunting or relocation of the cougar may increase aggressive encounters by disrupting territories and bringing young, transient animals into conflict with established individuals.
The cougar has the largest range of any wild land animal in the Americas. Its range spans 110 degrees of latitude, from northern Yukon in Canada to the southern Andes. It is one of only three cat species, along with the bobcat and Canadian lynx, native to Canada. Its wide distribution stems from its adaptability to virtually every habitat type: it is found in all forest types as well as in lowland and mountainous deserts. Studies show that the Cougar prefers regions with dense underbrush, but can live with little vegetation in open areas. Its preferred habitats include precipitous canyons, escarpments, rim rocks, and dense brush.
Cougar, photographed in the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, Tucson, Arizona.
The cougar was extirpated across much of its eastern North American range (with the exception of Florida) in the two centuries after European colonization, and faced grave threats in the remainder of its territory. Currently, it ranges across most western American states, the Canadian provinces of Alberta and British Columbia, and the Canadian Yukon Territory. There have been widely debated reports of possible recolonization of eastern North America. DNA evidence has suggested its presence in eastern North America, , while a consolidated map of cougar sightings shows numerous reports, from the mid-western Great Plains through to Eastern Canada. The Cougar Network methodology is recognized by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The Quebec wildlife services (known locally as MRNF) also considers Cougar to be present in the province as a threatened species after multiple DNA tests confirmed cougar hair in Lynx mating sites. Ministry of Wildlife and natural resources Wildlife Service. The only unequivocally known eastern population is the Florida panther, which is critically endangered. There have also been sightings in Elliotsville, Maine (in the central part of the state); and in New Hampshire, there have been recent sightings as early as 1997. In 2009, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources confirmed a cougar sighting in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Skinner, Victor. 2009. Photo shows cougar presence in Michigan. The Grand Rapids Press. November 15, 2009 Typically, extreme-range sightings of cougars involve young males, who can travel great distances to establish ranges away from established males; all four confirmed cougar kills in Iowa since 2000 involved males.
On April 14, 2008 police shot and killed a cougar on the north side of Chicago, Illinois. DNA tests were consistent with cougars from the Black Hills. Less than one year later, on March 5, 2009, a cougar was photographed and unsuccessfully tranquilized by state wildlife biologists in a tree near Spooner, Wisconsin in the northwestern part of the state.
South of the Rio Grande, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) lists the cat in every Central and South American country except Costa Rica and Panama. While specific state and provincial statistics are often available in North America, much less is known about the cat in its southern range.
The cougar's total breeding population is estimated at less than 50,000 by the IUCN, with a declining trend. U.S. state-level statistics are often more optimistic, suggesting cougar populations have rebounded. In Oregon, a healthy population of 5,000 was reported in 2006, exceeding a target of 3,000. California has actively sought to protect the cat and a similar number of cougars has been suggested, between 4,000 and 6,000.
Aside from humans, no species preys upon mature cougars in the wild. The cat is not, however, the apex predator throughout much of its range. In its northern range, the cougar interacts with other powerful predators such as the brown bear and gray wolf. In the south, the cougar must compete with the larger jaguar. In Florida it encounters the American Alligator.
thumbFront paw print of a cougar. An adult paw print is approximately 10 cm (4 inches) long.
The Yellowstone National Park ecosystem provides a fruitful microcosm to study inter-predator interaction in North America. Of the three large predators, the massive brown bear appears dominant, often although not always able to drive both the gray wolf pack and the cougar off their kills. One study found that Brown or American Black Bears visited 24% of cougar kills in Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks, usurping 10% of carcasses.
The gray wolf and the cougar compete more directly for prey, especially in winter. While individually more powerful than the gray wolf, a solitary cougar may be dominated by the pack structure of the canines. Wolves can steal kills and occasionally kill the cat. One report describes a large pack of fourteen wolves killing a female cougar and her kittens. Conversely, lone wolves are at a disadvantage, and have been reported killed by cougars. Wolves more broadly affect cougar population dynamics and distribution by dominating territory and prey opportunities, and disrupting the feline's behavior. Preliminary research in Yellowstone, for instance, has shown displacement of the cougar by wolves. One researcher in Oregon notes: "When there is a pack around, cougars are not comfortable around their kills or raising kittens ... A lot of times a big cougar will kill a wolf, but the pack phenomenon changes the table." Both species, meanwhile, are capable of killing mid-sized predators such as bobcats and coyotes and tend to suppress their numbers.
In the southern portion of its range, the cougar and jaguar share overlapping territory. The jaguar tends to take larger prey and the cougar smaller where they overlap, reducing the cougar's size. Of the two felines, the cougar appears best able to exploit a broader prey niche and smaller prey.
As with any predator at or near the top of its food chain, the cougar impacts the population of prey species. Predation by cougars has been linked to changes in the species mix of deer in a region. For example, a study in British Columbia observed that the population of mule deer, a favored cougar prey, was declining while the population of the less frequently preyed-upon white-tailed deer was increasing. The Vancouver Island Marmot, an endangered species endemic to one region of dense cougar population, has seen decreased numbers due to cougar and gray wolf predation.
In the southern part of South America the Puma is a top level predator that has controlled the population of Guanaco and other species since prehistoric times.
Pumapard, taken in 1904
A pumapard is a hybrid animal resulting from a union between a cougar and a leopard. Three sets of these hybrids were bred in the late 1890s and early 1900s by Carl Hagenbeck at his animal park in Hamburg, Germany. Most did not reach adulthood. One of these was purchased in 1898 by Berlin Zoo. A similar hybrid in Berlin Zoo purchased from Hagenbeck was a cross between a male leopard and a female puma. Hamburg Zoo's specimen was the reverse pairing, the one in the black and white photo, fathered by a puma bred to an Indian leopardess.
Whether born to a female puma mated to a male leopard, or to a male puma mated to a female leopard, pumapards inherit a form of dwarfism. Those reported grew to only half the size of the parents. They have a puma-like long body (proportional to the limbs, but nevertheless shorter than either parent), but short legs. The coat is variously described as sandy, tawny or greyish with brown, chestnut or "faded" rosettes.
The World Conservation Union (IUCN) currently lists the cougar as a "least concern" species. The cougar is regulated under Appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), rendering illegal international trade in specimens or parts.
Cougar conservation depends on preservation of their habitat.
In the United States east of the Mississippi River, the only unequivocally known cougar population is the Florida panther. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service recognizes both an Eastern cougar and the Florida panther, affording protection under the Endangered Species Act. Certain taxonomic authorities have collapsed both designations into the North American Cougar, with Eastern or Florida subspecies not recognized, while a subspecies designation remains recognized by some conservation scientists. The most recent documented count for the Florida sub-population is 87 individuals, reported by recovery agencies in 2003.
The cougar is also protected across much of the rest of their range. As of 1996, cougar hunting was prohibited in Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, French Guiana, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Suriname, Venezuela, and Uruguay. (Costa Rica and Panama are not listed as current range countries by the IUCN.) The cat had no reported legal protection in Ecuador, El Salvador, and Guyana. Regulated cougar hunting is still common in the United States and Canada, although they are protected from all hunting in the Yukon.; it is permitted in every U.S. state from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, with the exception of California. Texas is the only state in the United States with a viable population of cougars that does not protect, in some way, of its cougar population. In Texas, cougars are listed as nuisance wildlife and any person holding a hunting or a trapping permit can kill a cougar regardless of the season, number killed, sex or age of the animal. Killed animals are not required to be reported to Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. Conservation work in Texas is the effort of a non profit organization, Balanced Ecology Inc. (BEI), as part of their Texas Mountain Lion Conservation Project . Cougars are generally hunted with packs of dogs, until the animal is 'treed'. When the hunter arrives on the scene, he shoots the cat from the tree at close range. The Cougar cannot be legally killed in California except under very specific circumstances, such as when an individual is declared a public safety threat. However statistics from the Department of Fish and Game indicate that cougar killings in California have been on the rise since 1970s with an average of over 112 cats killed per year from 2000 to 2006 compared to six per year in the 1970s. The Bay Area Puma Project aims to obtain information on cougar populations in the San Francisco Bay area and the animals' interactions with habitat, prey, humans, and residential communities.
Conservation threats to the species include persecution as a pest animal, degradation and fragmentation of their habitat, and depletion of their prey base. Wildlife corridor and sufficient range areas are critical to the sustainability of cougar populations. Research simulations have shown that the animal faces a low extinction risk in areas of 2200 km 2 (850 sq mi) or more. As few as one to four new animals entering a population per decade markedly increases persistence, foregrounding the importance of habitat corridors.
Moche puma, Larco Museum collection
The grace and power of the cougar have been widely admired in the cultures of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. The Inca city of Cusco is reported to have been designed in the shape of a cougar, and the animal also gave its name to both Inca regions and people. The Moche people represented the puma often in their ceramics. Berrin, Katherine & Larco Museum. The Spirit of Ancient Peru:Treasures from the Museo Arqueológico Rafael Larco Herrera. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1997. The sky and thunder god of the Inca, Viracocha, has been associated with the animal.
In North America, mythological descriptions of the cougar have appeared in the stories of the HocÄ
k language ("Ho-Chunk" or "Winnebago") of Wisconsin and Illinois Cougars, The Encyclopedia of HoÄÄ
k (Winnebago) Mythology. Retrieved: 2009/12/08. and the Cheyenne, amongst others. To the Apache and Walapai of Arizona, the wail of the Cougar was a harbinger of death.
During the early years of ranching, cougars were considered on par with wolves in destructiveness. According to figures in Texas in 1990, 86 calves (0.0006% of a total of 13.4 million cattle & calves in Texas), 253 Mohair goats, 302 Mohair kids, 445 sheep (0.02% of a total of 2.0 million sheep & lambs in Texas) and 562 lambs (0.04% of 1.2 million lambs in Texas) were confirmed to have been killed by cougars that year. In Nevada in 1992, cougars were confirmed to have killed 9 calves, 1 horse, 4 colts, 5 goats, 318 sheep and 400 lambs. In both cases, sheep were the most frequently attacked. Some instances of surplus killing have resulted in the deaths of 20 sheep in one attack. Cougars frequently kill calves, sheep and goats by biting the top of the neck or head, differing greatly from the throat bite used by coyotes and indiscriminate mutilation by feral dogs. The size of the tooth puncture marks also helps distinguish kills made by cougars from those made by smaller predators.
Mountain Lion warning sign
Due to the expanding human population, cougar ranges increasingly overlap with areas inhabited by humans. Attacks on humans are rare, as cougar prey recognition is a learned behavior and they do not generally recognize humans as prey. Attacks on people, livestock, and pets may occur when the cat habituates to humans or is in a condition of severe starvation. Attacks are most frequent during late spring and summer, when juvenile cougars leave their mothers and search for new territory.
Between 1890 and 1990, in North America there were 53 reported, confirmed attacks on humans, resulting in 48 nonfatal injuries and 10 deaths of humans (the total is greater than 53 because some attacks had more than one victim). By 2004, the count had climbed to 88 attacks and 20 deaths.
Within North America, the distribution of attacks is not uniform. The heavily populated state of California has seen a dozen attacks since 1986 (after just three from 1890 to 1985), including three fatalities. Lightly populated New Mexico reported an attack in 2008, the first there since 1974. Search continues for mountain lion that killed Pinos Altos man, New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, press release June 23, 2008]; Wounded mountain lion captured, killed near Pinos Altos, New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, press release June 25, 2008]; Second mountain lion captured near Pinos Altos, New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, press release July 1, 2008]
As with many predators, a cougar may attack if cornered, if a fleeing human stimulates their instinct to chase, or if a person "plays dead." Exaggerating the threat to the animal through intense eye contact, loud but calm shouting, and any other action to appear larger and more menacing, may make the animal retreat. Fighting back with sticks and rocks, or even bare hands, is often effective in persuading an attacking cougar to disengage.
When cougars do attack, they usually employ their characteristic neck bite, attempting to position their teeth between the vertebrae and into the spinal cord. Neck, head, and spinal injuries are common and sometimes fatal. Children are at greatest risk of attack, and least likely to survive an encounter. Detailed research into attacks prior to 1991 showed that 64% of all victims and almost all fatalities were children. The same study showed the highest proportion of attacks to have occurred in British Columbia, particularly on Vancouver Island where cougar populations are especially dense.
*List of fatal cougar attacks in North America
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* Video, Pictures and Information on Mountain Lions
* A Definitive Resource About Cougars Comprehensive, non-profit site with extensive information about cougars, from how to live safely in cougar country, to science abstracts, hunting regulations, state-by-state cougar management/policy info, and rare photos and videos of wild cougars.
* Description of a Cougar attack
* Cougar Facts and Photos â NatureMapping Program
* No Place for Predators? Liza Gross, PLoS Biology, explains how Washington State wildlife officials implemented a hunting policy, in response to a state measure passed to protect wildlife, that led to the highest rates of human-caused cougar mortality since the height of the bounty era
* Cougar Tracks: How to identify cougar tracks in the wild
* The sound of a cougar screaming
* Link to Worldwide Wild Cat Conservation site
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Cougar | Does the World Conservation Union consider the cougar a "least concern" species? | The World Conservation Union (IUCN) currently lists the cougar as a "least concern" species. | data/set1/a2 | Cougar
The cougar (Puma concolor), also known as puma, mountain lion, mountain cat, catamount or panther, depending on the region, is a mammal of the family Felidae, native to the Americas. This large, solitary cat has the greatest range of any large wild terrestrial mammal in the Western Hemisphere, extending from Yukon in Canada to the southern Andes of South America. An adaptable, generalist species, the cougar is found in every major American habitat type. It is the second heaviest cat in the American continents after the jaguar, and the fourth heaviest in the world, after the tiger, lion, and jaguar. Although large, the cougar is most closely related to smaller felines.
A capable stalk-and-ambush predator, the cougar pursues a wide variety of prey. Primary food sources include ungulates such as deer, elk, and bighorn sheep, as well as domestic cattle, horses and sheep, particularly in the northern part of its range. It will also hunt species as small as insects and rodents. This cat prefers habitats with dense underbrush and rocky areas for stalking, but it can also live in open areas. The cougar is territorial and persists at low population densities. Individual territory sizes depend on terrain, vegetation, and abundance of prey. While it is a large predator, it is not always the dominant species in its range, as when it competes for prey with other predators such as the jaguar, grey wolf, American Black Bear, and the grizzly bear. It is a reclusive cat and usually avoids people. Attacks on humans remain rare, despite a recent increase in frequency.
Due to excessive hunting following the European colonization of the Americas, and continuing human development of cougar habitat, populations have dropped in most parts of its historical range. In particular, the cougar was extirpated in eastern North America, except for an isolated sub-population in Florida; the animal may be recolonizing parts of its former eastern territory, such as Maine and northern Michigan, /ref> where there have been recent sightings. With its vast range, the cougar has dozens of names and various references in the mythology of the indigenous Americans and in contemporary culture. The cougar has recently made a comeback in the state of Wyoming, where it presently has the largest population in North America .
The cougar has numerous names in English, of which puma and mountain lion are popular. Other names include catamount, panther, mountain screamer and painter. Lexicographers regard painter as a primarily upper-Southern U.S. regional variant on "panther", but a folk etymology, fancying a resemblance between the typically dark tip of its tail and a paintbrush dipped in dark paint, has some currency.
The cougar holds the Guinness record for the animal with the highest number of names, presumably due to its wide distribution across North and South America. It has over 40 names in English alone.
"Cougar" may be borrowed from the Portuguese çuçuarana, via French; the term was originally derived from the Tupi language. A current form in Brazil is suçuarana. It may also be borrowed from the Guaranà language term guaçu ara or guazu ara. "Puma" comes, via Spanish, from the Quechua language. Cougar, Puma and
The cougar is the largest of the small cats. It is placed in the subfamily Felinae, although its bulk characteristics are similar to those of the big cats in the subfamily Pantherinae. The family Felidae is believed to have originated in Asia approximately 11 million years ago. Taxonomic research on felids remains partial and much of what is known about their evolutionary history is based on mitochondrial DNA analysis, as cats are poorly represented in the fossil record, and there are significant confidence intervals with suggested dates.
Although large, the cougar is closely related to small felines.
In the latest genomic study of Felidae, the common ancestor of today's Leopardus, Lynx, Puma, Prionailurus, and Felis lineages migrated across the Bering land bridge into the Americas approximately 8 to 8.5 million years (Ma) ago. The lineages subsequently diverged in that order. North American felids then invaded South America 3 Ma ago as part of the Great American Interchange, following formation of the Isthmus of Panama. The cougar was originally thought to belong in Felis (Felis concolor), the genus which includes the domestic cat. As of 1993, it is now placed in Puma along with the jaguarundi, a cat just a little more than a tenth its weight.
Studies have indicated that the cougar and jaguarundi are most closely related to the modern cheetah of Africa and western Asia, but the relationship is unresolved. It has been suggested that the cheetah lineage diverged from the Puma lineage in the Americas (see American cheetah) and migrated back to Asia and Africa, while other research suggests the cheetah diverged in the Old World itself. The outline of small feline migration to the Americas is thus unclear.
Recent studies have demonstrated a high level of genetic similarity among the North American cougar populations, suggesting that they are all fairly recent descendants of a small ancestral group. Culver et al. suggest that the original North American population of Puma concolor was extirpated during the Pleistocene extinctions some 10,000 years ago, when other large mammals such as Smilodon also disappeared. North America was then repopulated by a group of South American cougars.
Until the late 1990s, as many as 32 subspecies were recorded; however, a recent genetic study of mitochondrial DNA found that many of these are too similar to be recognized as distinct at a molecular level. Following the research, the canonical Mammal Species of the World (3rd edition) recognizes six subspecies, five of which are solely found in Latin America:
; Argentine puma : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms hudsonii and puma (Marcelli, 1922);
; Costa Rican Cougar
; Eastern South American cougar : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms acrocodia, borbensis, capricornensis, concolor (Pelzeln, 1883), greeni and nigra;
; North American Cougar : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms arundivaga, aztecus, browni, californica, coryi, floridana, hippolestes, improcera, kaibabensis, mayensis, missoulensis, olympus, oregonensis, schorgeri, stanleyana, vancouverensis and youngi;
; Northern South American cougar : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms bangsi, incarum, osgoodi, soasoaranna, sussuarana, soderstromii, sucuacuara and wavula;
; Southern South American puma : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms araucanus, concolor (Gay, 1847), patagonica, pearsoni and puma (Trouessart, 1904)
The status of the Florida panther, here collapsed into the North American Cougar, remains uncertain. It is still regularly listed as subspecies Puma concolor coryi in research works, including those directly concerned with its conservation. Culver et al. themselves noted low microsatellite variation in the Florida panther, possibly due to inbreeding; responding to the research, one conservation team suggests "the degree to which the scientific community has accepted the results of Culver et al. and the proposed change in taxonomy is not resolved at this time."
Cougars are slender and agile cats. Adults stand about 60 to 76 centimeters (2.0 to 2.5 ft) tall at the shoulders. The length of adult males is around 2.4 meters (8 ft) long nose to tail, with overall ranges between 1.5 and 2.75 m (5 and 9 ft) nose to tail suggested for the species in general. Males typically weigh 53 to 90 kilograms (115 to 198 pounds), averaging 62 kg (137 lb). In rare cases, some may reach over 120 kg (264 lb). Females typically weigh between 29 and 64 kg (64 and 141 lb), averaging 42 kg (93 lb). /ref> /ref> Cougar size is smallest close to the equator, and larger towards the poles.
Although cougars resemble the domestic cat, they are about the same size as an adult human.
The head of the cat is round and the ears erect. Its powerful forequarters, neck, and jaw serve to grasp and hold large prey. It has five retractable claws on its forepaws (one a dewclaw) and four on its hind paws. The larger front feet and claws are adaptations to clutching prey.
Cougars can be almost as large as jaguars, but are less muscular and not as powerful; where their ranges overlap, the cougar tends to be smaller than average. The cougar is on average as heavy as the leopard. Despite its size, it is not typically classified among the "big cats," as it cannot roar, lacking the specialized larynx and hyoid apparatus of Panthera. Like domestic cats, cougars vocalize low-pitched hisses, growls, and purrs, as well as chirps and whistles. They are well known for their screams, as referenced in some of their common names, although these screams are often misinterpreted to be the calls of other animals.
Rear paw of a cougar
Cougar coloring is plain (hence the Latin concolor) but can vary greatly between individuals and even between siblings. The coat is typically tawny, but ranges to silvery-grey or reddish, with lighter patches on the under body including the jaws, chin, and throat. Infants are spotted and born with blue eyes and rings on their tails; juveniles are pale, and dark spots remain on their flanks. Despite anecdotes to the contrary, all-black coloring (melanism) has never been documented in cougars. The term "black panther" is used colloquially to refer to melanistic individuals of other species, particularly jaguars and leopards.
Cougars have large paws and proportionally the largest hind legs in the cat family. This physique allows it great leaping and short-sprint ability. An exceptional vertical leap of 5.4 m (18 ft) is reported for the cougar. Horizontal jumping capability from standing position is suggested anywhere from 6 to 12 m (20 to 40 ft). The cougar can run as fast as 55 to 72 km/h (35 to 45 mi/h), but is best adapted for short, powerful sprints rather than long chases. It is adept at climbing, which allows it to evade canine competitors. Although it is not strongly associated with water, it can swim.
A successful generalist predator, the cougar will eat any animal it can catch, from insects to large ungulates (over 500 kg). Like all cats, it is an obligate carnivore, feeding only on meat. The Mean weight of vertebrate prey (MWVP) was positively correlated (r=0.875) with puma body weight and inversely correlated (r=-0.836) with food niche breadth in all America. In general, MWVP was lower in areas closer to the Equator. Its most important prey species are various deer species, particularly in North America; mule deer, white-tailed deer, elk, and even large moose are taken by the cat. Other species such as Bighorn Sheep, wild horses of Arizona, domestic horses, and domestic livestock such as cattle and sheep are also primary food bases in many areas. A survey of North America research found 68% of prey items were ungulates, especially deer. Only the Florida Panther showed variation, often preferring feral hogs and armadillos.
Shown eating. Cougars are ambush predators, feeding mostly on deer and other mammals.
Investigation in Yellowstone National Park showed that elk, followed by mule deer, were the cougar's primary targets; the prey base is shared with the park's gray wolves, with whom the cougar competes for resources.
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* Another study on winter kills (NovemberâApril) in Alberta showed that ungulates accounted for greater than 99% of the cougar diet. Learned, individual prey recognition was observed, as some cougars rarely killed bighorn sheep, while others relied heavily on the species.
In the Central and South American cougar range, the ratio of deer in the diet declines. Small to mid-size mammals are preferred, including large rodents such as the capybara. Ungulates accounted for only 35% of prey items in one survey, approximately half that of North America. Competition with the larger jaguar has been suggested for the decline in the size of prey items. Other listed prey species of the cougar include mice, porcupine, and hares. Birds and small reptiles are sometimes preyed upon in the south, but this is rarely recorded in North America.
Though capable of sprinting, the cougar is typically an ambush predator. It stalks through brush and trees, across ledges, or other covered spots, before delivering a powerful leap onto the back of its prey and a suffocating neck bite. The cougar is capable of breaking the neck of some of its smaller prey with a strong bite and momentum bearing the animal to the ground.
Kills are generally estimated at around one large ungulate every two weeks. The period shrinks for females raising young, and may be as short as one kill every three days when cubs are nearly mature at around 15 months. The cat drags a kill to a preferred spot, covers it with brush, and returns to feed over a period of days. It is generally reported that the cougar is a non-scavenger and will rarely consume prey it has not killed; but deer carcasses left exposed for study were scavenged by cougars in California, suggesting more opportunistic behavior.
Females reach sexual maturity between one-and-a-half to three years of age. They typically average one litter every two to three years throughout their reproductive life, though the period can be as short as one year. Females are in estrus for approximately 8 days of a 23-day cycle; the gestation period is approximately 91 days. Females are sometimes reported as monogamous, but this is uncertain and polygyny may be more common. Copulation is brief but frequent.
Cougar kittens
Only females are involved in parenting. Female cougars are fiercely protective of their kittens, and have been seen to successfully fight off animals as large as grizzly bears in their defense. Litter size is between one and six kittens; typically two or three. Caves and other alcoves that offer protection are used as litter dens. Born blind, kittens are completely dependent on their mother at first, and begin to be weaned at around three months of age. As they grow, they begin to go out on forays with their mother, first visiting kill sites, and after six months beginning to hunt small prey on their own. Kitten survival rates are just over one per litter.
Sub-adults leave their mother to attempt to establish their own territory at around two years of age and sometimes earlier; males tend to leave sooner. One study has shown high morbidity amongst cougars that travel farthest from the maternal range, often due to conflicts with other cougars ("intraspecific" conflict). Research in New Mexico has shown that "males dispersed significantly farther than females, were more likely to traverse large expanses of non-cougar habitat, and were probably most responsible for nuclear gene flow between habitat patches."
Life expectancy in the wild is reported at between 8 to 13 years, and probably averages 8 to 10; a female of at least 18 years was reported killed by hunters on Vancouver Island. Cougars may live as long as 20 years in captivity. One male North American cougar, named Scratch, was two months short of his 30th birthday when he died in 2007. Causes of death in the wild include disability and disease, competition with other cougars, starvation, accidents, and, where allowed, human hunting. Feline immunodeficiency virus, an endemic AIDS-like disease in cats, is well-adapted to the cougar.
Like almost all cats, the cougar is a solitary animal. Only mothers and kittens live in groups, with adults meeting only to mate. It is secretive and crepuscular, being most active around dawn and dusk.
Estimates of territory sizes vary greatly.
Canadian Geographic reports large male territories of 150 to 1000 square kilometers (58 to 386 sq mi) with female ranges half the size. Other research suggests a much smaller lower limit of 25 km 2 (10 sq mi) but an even greater upper limit of 1300 km 2 (500 sq mi) for males. In the United States, very large ranges have been reported in Texas and the Black Hills of the northern Great Plains, in excess of 775 km 2 (300 sq mi). Male ranges may include or overlap with those of females but, at least where studied, not with those of other males, which serves to reduce conflict between cougars. Ranges of females may overlap slightly with each other. Scrape marks, urine, and feces are used to mark territory and attract mates. Males may scrape together a small pile of leaves and grasses and then urinate on it as a way of marking territory.
Home range sizes and overall cougar abundance depend on terrain, vegetation, and prey abundance. One female adjacent to the San Andres Mountains, for instance, was found with a large range of 215 km 2 (83 sq mi), necessitated by poor prey abundance. Research has shown cougar abundances from 0.5 animals to as much as 7 (in one study in South America) per 100 km 2 (38 sq mi).
Because males disperse further than females and compete more directly for mates and territory, they are most likely to be involved in conflict. Where a sub-adult fails to leave his maternal range, for example, he may be killed by his father. When males encounter each other, they hiss, spit, and may engage in violent conflict if neither backs down. Hunting or relocation of the cougar may increase aggressive encounters by disrupting territories and bringing young, transient animals into conflict with established individuals.
The cougar has the largest range of any wild land animal in the Americas. Its range spans 110 degrees of latitude, from northern Yukon in Canada to the southern Andes. It is one of only three cat species, along with the bobcat and Canadian lynx, native to Canada. Its wide distribution stems from its adaptability to virtually every habitat type: it is found in all forest types as well as in lowland and mountainous deserts. Studies show that the Cougar prefers regions with dense underbrush, but can live with little vegetation in open areas. Its preferred habitats include precipitous canyons, escarpments, rim rocks, and dense brush.
Cougar, photographed in the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, Tucson, Arizona.
The cougar was extirpated across much of its eastern North American range (with the exception of Florida) in the two centuries after European colonization, and faced grave threats in the remainder of its territory. Currently, it ranges across most western American states, the Canadian provinces of Alberta and British Columbia, and the Canadian Yukon Territory. There have been widely debated reports of possible recolonization of eastern North America. DNA evidence has suggested its presence in eastern North America, , while a consolidated map of cougar sightings shows numerous reports, from the mid-western Great Plains through to Eastern Canada. The Cougar Network methodology is recognized by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The Quebec wildlife services (known locally as MRNF) also considers Cougar to be present in the province as a threatened species after multiple DNA tests confirmed cougar hair in Lynx mating sites. Ministry of Wildlife and natural resources Wildlife Service. The only unequivocally known eastern population is the Florida panther, which is critically endangered. There have also been sightings in Elliotsville, Maine (in the central part of the state); and in New Hampshire, there have been recent sightings as early as 1997. In 2009, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources confirmed a cougar sighting in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Skinner, Victor. 2009. Photo shows cougar presence in Michigan. The Grand Rapids Press. November 15, 2009 Typically, extreme-range sightings of cougars involve young males, who can travel great distances to establish ranges away from established males; all four confirmed cougar kills in Iowa since 2000 involved males.
On April 14, 2008 police shot and killed a cougar on the north side of Chicago, Illinois. DNA tests were consistent with cougars from the Black Hills. Less than one year later, on March 5, 2009, a cougar was photographed and unsuccessfully tranquilized by state wildlife biologists in a tree near Spooner, Wisconsin in the northwestern part of the state.
South of the Rio Grande, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) lists the cat in every Central and South American country except Costa Rica and Panama. While specific state and provincial statistics are often available in North America, much less is known about the cat in its southern range.
The cougar's total breeding population is estimated at less than 50,000 by the IUCN, with a declining trend. U.S. state-level statistics are often more optimistic, suggesting cougar populations have rebounded. In Oregon, a healthy population of 5,000 was reported in 2006, exceeding a target of 3,000. California has actively sought to protect the cat and a similar number of cougars has been suggested, between 4,000 and 6,000.
Aside from humans, no species preys upon mature cougars in the wild. The cat is not, however, the apex predator throughout much of its range. In its northern range, the cougar interacts with other powerful predators such as the brown bear and gray wolf. In the south, the cougar must compete with the larger jaguar. In Florida it encounters the American Alligator.
thumbFront paw print of a cougar. An adult paw print is approximately 10 cm (4 inches) long.
The Yellowstone National Park ecosystem provides a fruitful microcosm to study inter-predator interaction in North America. Of the three large predators, the massive brown bear appears dominant, often although not always able to drive both the gray wolf pack and the cougar off their kills. One study found that Brown or American Black Bears visited 24% of cougar kills in Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks, usurping 10% of carcasses.
The gray wolf and the cougar compete more directly for prey, especially in winter. While individually more powerful than the gray wolf, a solitary cougar may be dominated by the pack structure of the canines. Wolves can steal kills and occasionally kill the cat. One report describes a large pack of fourteen wolves killing a female cougar and her kittens. Conversely, lone wolves are at a disadvantage, and have been reported killed by cougars. Wolves more broadly affect cougar population dynamics and distribution by dominating territory and prey opportunities, and disrupting the feline's behavior. Preliminary research in Yellowstone, for instance, has shown displacement of the cougar by wolves. One researcher in Oregon notes: "When there is a pack around, cougars are not comfortable around their kills or raising kittens ... A lot of times a big cougar will kill a wolf, but the pack phenomenon changes the table." Both species, meanwhile, are capable of killing mid-sized predators such as bobcats and coyotes and tend to suppress their numbers.
In the southern portion of its range, the cougar and jaguar share overlapping territory. The jaguar tends to take larger prey and the cougar smaller where they overlap, reducing the cougar's size. Of the two felines, the cougar appears best able to exploit a broader prey niche and smaller prey.
As with any predator at or near the top of its food chain, the cougar impacts the population of prey species. Predation by cougars has been linked to changes in the species mix of deer in a region. For example, a study in British Columbia observed that the population of mule deer, a favored cougar prey, was declining while the population of the less frequently preyed-upon white-tailed deer was increasing. The Vancouver Island Marmot, an endangered species endemic to one region of dense cougar population, has seen decreased numbers due to cougar and gray wolf predation.
In the southern part of South America the Puma is a top level predator that has controlled the population of Guanaco and other species since prehistoric times.
Pumapard, taken in 1904
A pumapard is a hybrid animal resulting from a union between a cougar and a leopard. Three sets of these hybrids were bred in the late 1890s and early 1900s by Carl Hagenbeck at his animal park in Hamburg, Germany. Most did not reach adulthood. One of these was purchased in 1898 by Berlin Zoo. A similar hybrid in Berlin Zoo purchased from Hagenbeck was a cross between a male leopard and a female puma. Hamburg Zoo's specimen was the reverse pairing, the one in the black and white photo, fathered by a puma bred to an Indian leopardess.
Whether born to a female puma mated to a male leopard, or to a male puma mated to a female leopard, pumapards inherit a form of dwarfism. Those reported grew to only half the size of the parents. They have a puma-like long body (proportional to the limbs, but nevertheless shorter than either parent), but short legs. The coat is variously described as sandy, tawny or greyish with brown, chestnut or "faded" rosettes.
The World Conservation Union (IUCN) currently lists the cougar as a "least concern" species. The cougar is regulated under Appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), rendering illegal international trade in specimens or parts.
Cougar conservation depends on preservation of their habitat.
In the United States east of the Mississippi River, the only unequivocally known cougar population is the Florida panther. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service recognizes both an Eastern cougar and the Florida panther, affording protection under the Endangered Species Act. Certain taxonomic authorities have collapsed both designations into the North American Cougar, with Eastern or Florida subspecies not recognized, while a subspecies designation remains recognized by some conservation scientists. The most recent documented count for the Florida sub-population is 87 individuals, reported by recovery agencies in 2003.
The cougar is also protected across much of the rest of their range. As of 1996, cougar hunting was prohibited in Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, French Guiana, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Suriname, Venezuela, and Uruguay. (Costa Rica and Panama are not listed as current range countries by the IUCN.) The cat had no reported legal protection in Ecuador, El Salvador, and Guyana. Regulated cougar hunting is still common in the United States and Canada, although they are protected from all hunting in the Yukon.; it is permitted in every U.S. state from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, with the exception of California. Texas is the only state in the United States with a viable population of cougars that does not protect, in some way, of its cougar population. In Texas, cougars are listed as nuisance wildlife and any person holding a hunting or a trapping permit can kill a cougar regardless of the season, number killed, sex or age of the animal. Killed animals are not required to be reported to Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. Conservation work in Texas is the effort of a non profit organization, Balanced Ecology Inc. (BEI), as part of their Texas Mountain Lion Conservation Project . Cougars are generally hunted with packs of dogs, until the animal is 'treed'. When the hunter arrives on the scene, he shoots the cat from the tree at close range. The Cougar cannot be legally killed in California except under very specific circumstances, such as when an individual is declared a public safety threat. However statistics from the Department of Fish and Game indicate that cougar killings in California have been on the rise since 1970s with an average of over 112 cats killed per year from 2000 to 2006 compared to six per year in the 1970s. The Bay Area Puma Project aims to obtain information on cougar populations in the San Francisco Bay area and the animals' interactions with habitat, prey, humans, and residential communities.
Conservation threats to the species include persecution as a pest animal, degradation and fragmentation of their habitat, and depletion of their prey base. Wildlife corridor and sufficient range areas are critical to the sustainability of cougar populations. Research simulations have shown that the animal faces a low extinction risk in areas of 2200 km 2 (850 sq mi) or more. As few as one to four new animals entering a population per decade markedly increases persistence, foregrounding the importance of habitat corridors.
Moche puma, Larco Museum collection
The grace and power of the cougar have been widely admired in the cultures of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. The Inca city of Cusco is reported to have been designed in the shape of a cougar, and the animal also gave its name to both Inca regions and people. The Moche people represented the puma often in their ceramics. Berrin, Katherine & Larco Museum. The Spirit of Ancient Peru:Treasures from the Museo Arqueológico Rafael Larco Herrera. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1997. The sky and thunder god of the Inca, Viracocha, has been associated with the animal.
In North America, mythological descriptions of the cougar have appeared in the stories of the HocÄ
k language ("Ho-Chunk" or "Winnebago") of Wisconsin and Illinois Cougars, The Encyclopedia of HoÄÄ
k (Winnebago) Mythology. Retrieved: 2009/12/08. and the Cheyenne, amongst others. To the Apache and Walapai of Arizona, the wail of the Cougar was a harbinger of death.
During the early years of ranching, cougars were considered on par with wolves in destructiveness. According to figures in Texas in 1990, 86 calves (0.0006% of a total of 13.4 million cattle & calves in Texas), 253 Mohair goats, 302 Mohair kids, 445 sheep (0.02% of a total of 2.0 million sheep & lambs in Texas) and 562 lambs (0.04% of 1.2 million lambs in Texas) were confirmed to have been killed by cougars that year. In Nevada in 1992, cougars were confirmed to have killed 9 calves, 1 horse, 4 colts, 5 goats, 318 sheep and 400 lambs. In both cases, sheep were the most frequently attacked. Some instances of surplus killing have resulted in the deaths of 20 sheep in one attack. Cougars frequently kill calves, sheep and goats by biting the top of the neck or head, differing greatly from the throat bite used by coyotes and indiscriminate mutilation by feral dogs. The size of the tooth puncture marks also helps distinguish kills made by cougars from those made by smaller predators.
Mountain Lion warning sign
Due to the expanding human population, cougar ranges increasingly overlap with areas inhabited by humans. Attacks on humans are rare, as cougar prey recognition is a learned behavior and they do not generally recognize humans as prey. Attacks on people, livestock, and pets may occur when the cat habituates to humans or is in a condition of severe starvation. Attacks are most frequent during late spring and summer, when juvenile cougars leave their mothers and search for new territory.
Between 1890 and 1990, in North America there were 53 reported, confirmed attacks on humans, resulting in 48 nonfatal injuries and 10 deaths of humans (the total is greater than 53 because some attacks had more than one victim). By 2004, the count had climbed to 88 attacks and 20 deaths.
Within North America, the distribution of attacks is not uniform. The heavily populated state of California has seen a dozen attacks since 1986 (after just three from 1890 to 1985), including three fatalities. Lightly populated New Mexico reported an attack in 2008, the first there since 1974. Search continues for mountain lion that killed Pinos Altos man, New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, press release June 23, 2008]; Wounded mountain lion captured, killed near Pinos Altos, New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, press release June 25, 2008]; Second mountain lion captured near Pinos Altos, New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, press release July 1, 2008]
As with many predators, a cougar may attack if cornered, if a fleeing human stimulates their instinct to chase, or if a person "plays dead." Exaggerating the threat to the animal through intense eye contact, loud but calm shouting, and any other action to appear larger and more menacing, may make the animal retreat. Fighting back with sticks and rocks, or even bare hands, is often effective in persuading an attacking cougar to disengage.
When cougars do attack, they usually employ their characteristic neck bite, attempting to position their teeth between the vertebrae and into the spinal cord. Neck, head, and spinal injuries are common and sometimes fatal. Children are at greatest risk of attack, and least likely to survive an encounter. Detailed research into attacks prior to 1991 showed that 64% of all victims and almost all fatalities were children. The same study showed the highest proportion of attacks to have occurred in British Columbia, particularly on Vancouver Island where cougar populations are especially dense.
*List of fatal cougar attacks in North America
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* Video, Pictures and Information on Mountain Lions
* A Definitive Resource About Cougars Comprehensive, non-profit site with extensive information about cougars, from how to live safely in cougar country, to science abstracts, hunting regulations, state-by-state cougar management/policy info, and rare photos and videos of wild cougars.
* Description of a Cougar attack
* Cougar Facts and Photos â NatureMapping Program
* No Place for Predators? Liza Gross, PLoS Biology, explains how Washington State wildlife officials implemented a hunting policy, in response to a state measure passed to protect wildlife, that led to the highest rates of human-caused cougar mortality since the height of the bounty era
* Cougar Tracks: How to identify cougar tracks in the wild
* The sound of a cougar screaming
* Link to Worldwide Wild Cat Conservation site
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Cougar | Does the World Conservation Union consider the cougar a "least concern" species? | yes | data/set1/a2 | Cougar
The cougar (Puma concolor), also known as puma, mountain lion, mountain cat, catamount or panther, depending on the region, is a mammal of the family Felidae, native to the Americas. This large, solitary cat has the greatest range of any large wild terrestrial mammal in the Western Hemisphere, extending from Yukon in Canada to the southern Andes of South America. An adaptable, generalist species, the cougar is found in every major American habitat type. It is the second heaviest cat in the American continents after the jaguar, and the fourth heaviest in the world, after the tiger, lion, and jaguar. Although large, the cougar is most closely related to smaller felines.
A capable stalk-and-ambush predator, the cougar pursues a wide variety of prey. Primary food sources include ungulates such as deer, elk, and bighorn sheep, as well as domestic cattle, horses and sheep, particularly in the northern part of its range. It will also hunt species as small as insects and rodents. This cat prefers habitats with dense underbrush and rocky areas for stalking, but it can also live in open areas. The cougar is territorial and persists at low population densities. Individual territory sizes depend on terrain, vegetation, and abundance of prey. While it is a large predator, it is not always the dominant species in its range, as when it competes for prey with other predators such as the jaguar, grey wolf, American Black Bear, and the grizzly bear. It is a reclusive cat and usually avoids people. Attacks on humans remain rare, despite a recent increase in frequency.
Due to excessive hunting following the European colonization of the Americas, and continuing human development of cougar habitat, populations have dropped in most parts of its historical range. In particular, the cougar was extirpated in eastern North America, except for an isolated sub-population in Florida; the animal may be recolonizing parts of its former eastern territory, such as Maine and northern Michigan, /ref> where there have been recent sightings. With its vast range, the cougar has dozens of names and various references in the mythology of the indigenous Americans and in contemporary culture. The cougar has recently made a comeback in the state of Wyoming, where it presently has the largest population in North America .
The cougar has numerous names in English, of which puma and mountain lion are popular. Other names include catamount, panther, mountain screamer and painter. Lexicographers regard painter as a primarily upper-Southern U.S. regional variant on "panther", but a folk etymology, fancying a resemblance between the typically dark tip of its tail and a paintbrush dipped in dark paint, has some currency.
The cougar holds the Guinness record for the animal with the highest number of names, presumably due to its wide distribution across North and South America. It has over 40 names in English alone.
"Cougar" may be borrowed from the Portuguese çuçuarana, via French; the term was originally derived from the Tupi language. A current form in Brazil is suçuarana. It may also be borrowed from the Guaranà language term guaçu ara or guazu ara. "Puma" comes, via Spanish, from the Quechua language. Cougar, Puma and
The cougar is the largest of the small cats. It is placed in the subfamily Felinae, although its bulk characteristics are similar to those of the big cats in the subfamily Pantherinae. The family Felidae is believed to have originated in Asia approximately 11 million years ago. Taxonomic research on felids remains partial and much of what is known about their evolutionary history is based on mitochondrial DNA analysis, as cats are poorly represented in the fossil record, and there are significant confidence intervals with suggested dates.
Although large, the cougar is closely related to small felines.
In the latest genomic study of Felidae, the common ancestor of today's Leopardus, Lynx, Puma, Prionailurus, and Felis lineages migrated across the Bering land bridge into the Americas approximately 8 to 8.5 million years (Ma) ago. The lineages subsequently diverged in that order. North American felids then invaded South America 3 Ma ago as part of the Great American Interchange, following formation of the Isthmus of Panama. The cougar was originally thought to belong in Felis (Felis concolor), the genus which includes the domestic cat. As of 1993, it is now placed in Puma along with the jaguarundi, a cat just a little more than a tenth its weight.
Studies have indicated that the cougar and jaguarundi are most closely related to the modern cheetah of Africa and western Asia, but the relationship is unresolved. It has been suggested that the cheetah lineage diverged from the Puma lineage in the Americas (see American cheetah) and migrated back to Asia and Africa, while other research suggests the cheetah diverged in the Old World itself. The outline of small feline migration to the Americas is thus unclear.
Recent studies have demonstrated a high level of genetic similarity among the North American cougar populations, suggesting that they are all fairly recent descendants of a small ancestral group. Culver et al. suggest that the original North American population of Puma concolor was extirpated during the Pleistocene extinctions some 10,000 years ago, when other large mammals such as Smilodon also disappeared. North America was then repopulated by a group of South American cougars.
Until the late 1990s, as many as 32 subspecies were recorded; however, a recent genetic study of mitochondrial DNA found that many of these are too similar to be recognized as distinct at a molecular level. Following the research, the canonical Mammal Species of the World (3rd edition) recognizes six subspecies, five of which are solely found in Latin America:
; Argentine puma : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms hudsonii and puma (Marcelli, 1922);
; Costa Rican Cougar
; Eastern South American cougar : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms acrocodia, borbensis, capricornensis, concolor (Pelzeln, 1883), greeni and nigra;
; North American Cougar : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms arundivaga, aztecus, browni, californica, coryi, floridana, hippolestes, improcera, kaibabensis, mayensis, missoulensis, olympus, oregonensis, schorgeri, stanleyana, vancouverensis and youngi;
; Northern South American cougar : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms bangsi, incarum, osgoodi, soasoaranna, sussuarana, soderstromii, sucuacuara and wavula;
; Southern South American puma : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms araucanus, concolor (Gay, 1847), patagonica, pearsoni and puma (Trouessart, 1904)
The status of the Florida panther, here collapsed into the North American Cougar, remains uncertain. It is still regularly listed as subspecies Puma concolor coryi in research works, including those directly concerned with its conservation. Culver et al. themselves noted low microsatellite variation in the Florida panther, possibly due to inbreeding; responding to the research, one conservation team suggests "the degree to which the scientific community has accepted the results of Culver et al. and the proposed change in taxonomy is not resolved at this time."
Cougars are slender and agile cats. Adults stand about 60 to 76 centimeters (2.0 to 2.5 ft) tall at the shoulders. The length of adult males is around 2.4 meters (8 ft) long nose to tail, with overall ranges between 1.5 and 2.75 m (5 and 9 ft) nose to tail suggested for the species in general. Males typically weigh 53 to 90 kilograms (115 to 198 pounds), averaging 62 kg (137 lb). In rare cases, some may reach over 120 kg (264 lb). Females typically weigh between 29 and 64 kg (64 and 141 lb), averaging 42 kg (93 lb). /ref> /ref> Cougar size is smallest close to the equator, and larger towards the poles.
Although cougars resemble the domestic cat, they are about the same size as an adult human.
The head of the cat is round and the ears erect. Its powerful forequarters, neck, and jaw serve to grasp and hold large prey. It has five retractable claws on its forepaws (one a dewclaw) and four on its hind paws. The larger front feet and claws are adaptations to clutching prey.
Cougars can be almost as large as jaguars, but are less muscular and not as powerful; where their ranges overlap, the cougar tends to be smaller than average. The cougar is on average as heavy as the leopard. Despite its size, it is not typically classified among the "big cats," as it cannot roar, lacking the specialized larynx and hyoid apparatus of Panthera. Like domestic cats, cougars vocalize low-pitched hisses, growls, and purrs, as well as chirps and whistles. They are well known for their screams, as referenced in some of their common names, although these screams are often misinterpreted to be the calls of other animals.
Rear paw of a cougar
Cougar coloring is plain (hence the Latin concolor) but can vary greatly between individuals and even between siblings. The coat is typically tawny, but ranges to silvery-grey or reddish, with lighter patches on the under body including the jaws, chin, and throat. Infants are spotted and born with blue eyes and rings on their tails; juveniles are pale, and dark spots remain on their flanks. Despite anecdotes to the contrary, all-black coloring (melanism) has never been documented in cougars. The term "black panther" is used colloquially to refer to melanistic individuals of other species, particularly jaguars and leopards.
Cougars have large paws and proportionally the largest hind legs in the cat family. This physique allows it great leaping and short-sprint ability. An exceptional vertical leap of 5.4 m (18 ft) is reported for the cougar. Horizontal jumping capability from standing position is suggested anywhere from 6 to 12 m (20 to 40 ft). The cougar can run as fast as 55 to 72 km/h (35 to 45 mi/h), but is best adapted for short, powerful sprints rather than long chases. It is adept at climbing, which allows it to evade canine competitors. Although it is not strongly associated with water, it can swim.
A successful generalist predator, the cougar will eat any animal it can catch, from insects to large ungulates (over 500 kg). Like all cats, it is an obligate carnivore, feeding only on meat. The Mean weight of vertebrate prey (MWVP) was positively correlated (r=0.875) with puma body weight and inversely correlated (r=-0.836) with food niche breadth in all America. In general, MWVP was lower in areas closer to the Equator. Its most important prey species are various deer species, particularly in North America; mule deer, white-tailed deer, elk, and even large moose are taken by the cat. Other species such as Bighorn Sheep, wild horses of Arizona, domestic horses, and domestic livestock such as cattle and sheep are also primary food bases in many areas. A survey of North America research found 68% of prey items were ungulates, especially deer. Only the Florida Panther showed variation, often preferring feral hogs and armadillos.
Shown eating. Cougars are ambush predators, feeding mostly on deer and other mammals.
Investigation in Yellowstone National Park showed that elk, followed by mule deer, were the cougar's primary targets; the prey base is shared with the park's gray wolves, with whom the cougar competes for resources.
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* Another study on winter kills (NovemberâApril) in Alberta showed that ungulates accounted for greater than 99% of the cougar diet. Learned, individual prey recognition was observed, as some cougars rarely killed bighorn sheep, while others relied heavily on the species.
In the Central and South American cougar range, the ratio of deer in the diet declines. Small to mid-size mammals are preferred, including large rodents such as the capybara. Ungulates accounted for only 35% of prey items in one survey, approximately half that of North America. Competition with the larger jaguar has been suggested for the decline in the size of prey items. Other listed prey species of the cougar include mice, porcupine, and hares. Birds and small reptiles are sometimes preyed upon in the south, but this is rarely recorded in North America.
Though capable of sprinting, the cougar is typically an ambush predator. It stalks through brush and trees, across ledges, or other covered spots, before delivering a powerful leap onto the back of its prey and a suffocating neck bite. The cougar is capable of breaking the neck of some of its smaller prey with a strong bite and momentum bearing the animal to the ground.
Kills are generally estimated at around one large ungulate every two weeks. The period shrinks for females raising young, and may be as short as one kill every three days when cubs are nearly mature at around 15 months. The cat drags a kill to a preferred spot, covers it with brush, and returns to feed over a period of days. It is generally reported that the cougar is a non-scavenger and will rarely consume prey it has not killed; but deer carcasses left exposed for study were scavenged by cougars in California, suggesting more opportunistic behavior.
Females reach sexual maturity between one-and-a-half to three years of age. They typically average one litter every two to three years throughout their reproductive life, though the period can be as short as one year. Females are in estrus for approximately 8 days of a 23-day cycle; the gestation period is approximately 91 days. Females are sometimes reported as monogamous, but this is uncertain and polygyny may be more common. Copulation is brief but frequent.
Cougar kittens
Only females are involved in parenting. Female cougars are fiercely protective of their kittens, and have been seen to successfully fight off animals as large as grizzly bears in their defense. Litter size is between one and six kittens; typically two or three. Caves and other alcoves that offer protection are used as litter dens. Born blind, kittens are completely dependent on their mother at first, and begin to be weaned at around three months of age. As they grow, they begin to go out on forays with their mother, first visiting kill sites, and after six months beginning to hunt small prey on their own. Kitten survival rates are just over one per litter.
Sub-adults leave their mother to attempt to establish their own territory at around two years of age and sometimes earlier; males tend to leave sooner. One study has shown high morbidity amongst cougars that travel farthest from the maternal range, often due to conflicts with other cougars ("intraspecific" conflict). Research in New Mexico has shown that "males dispersed significantly farther than females, were more likely to traverse large expanses of non-cougar habitat, and were probably most responsible for nuclear gene flow between habitat patches."
Life expectancy in the wild is reported at between 8 to 13 years, and probably averages 8 to 10; a female of at least 18 years was reported killed by hunters on Vancouver Island. Cougars may live as long as 20 years in captivity. One male North American cougar, named Scratch, was two months short of his 30th birthday when he died in 2007. Causes of death in the wild include disability and disease, competition with other cougars, starvation, accidents, and, where allowed, human hunting. Feline immunodeficiency virus, an endemic AIDS-like disease in cats, is well-adapted to the cougar.
Like almost all cats, the cougar is a solitary animal. Only mothers and kittens live in groups, with adults meeting only to mate. It is secretive and crepuscular, being most active around dawn and dusk.
Estimates of territory sizes vary greatly.
Canadian Geographic reports large male territories of 150 to 1000 square kilometers (58 to 386 sq mi) with female ranges half the size. Other research suggests a much smaller lower limit of 25 km 2 (10 sq mi) but an even greater upper limit of 1300 km 2 (500 sq mi) for males. In the United States, very large ranges have been reported in Texas and the Black Hills of the northern Great Plains, in excess of 775 km 2 (300 sq mi). Male ranges may include or overlap with those of females but, at least where studied, not with those of other males, which serves to reduce conflict between cougars. Ranges of females may overlap slightly with each other. Scrape marks, urine, and feces are used to mark territory and attract mates. Males may scrape together a small pile of leaves and grasses and then urinate on it as a way of marking territory.
Home range sizes and overall cougar abundance depend on terrain, vegetation, and prey abundance. One female adjacent to the San Andres Mountains, for instance, was found with a large range of 215 km 2 (83 sq mi), necessitated by poor prey abundance. Research has shown cougar abundances from 0.5 animals to as much as 7 (in one study in South America) per 100 km 2 (38 sq mi).
Because males disperse further than females and compete more directly for mates and territory, they are most likely to be involved in conflict. Where a sub-adult fails to leave his maternal range, for example, he may be killed by his father. When males encounter each other, they hiss, spit, and may engage in violent conflict if neither backs down. Hunting or relocation of the cougar may increase aggressive encounters by disrupting territories and bringing young, transient animals into conflict with established individuals.
The cougar has the largest range of any wild land animal in the Americas. Its range spans 110 degrees of latitude, from northern Yukon in Canada to the southern Andes. It is one of only three cat species, along with the bobcat and Canadian lynx, native to Canada. Its wide distribution stems from its adaptability to virtually every habitat type: it is found in all forest types as well as in lowland and mountainous deserts. Studies show that the Cougar prefers regions with dense underbrush, but can live with little vegetation in open areas. Its preferred habitats include precipitous canyons, escarpments, rim rocks, and dense brush.
Cougar, photographed in the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, Tucson, Arizona.
The cougar was extirpated across much of its eastern North American range (with the exception of Florida) in the two centuries after European colonization, and faced grave threats in the remainder of its territory. Currently, it ranges across most western American states, the Canadian provinces of Alberta and British Columbia, and the Canadian Yukon Territory. There have been widely debated reports of possible recolonization of eastern North America. DNA evidence has suggested its presence in eastern North America, , while a consolidated map of cougar sightings shows numerous reports, from the mid-western Great Plains through to Eastern Canada. The Cougar Network methodology is recognized by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The Quebec wildlife services (known locally as MRNF) also considers Cougar to be present in the province as a threatened species after multiple DNA tests confirmed cougar hair in Lynx mating sites. Ministry of Wildlife and natural resources Wildlife Service. The only unequivocally known eastern population is the Florida panther, which is critically endangered. There have also been sightings in Elliotsville, Maine (in the central part of the state); and in New Hampshire, there have been recent sightings as early as 1997. In 2009, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources confirmed a cougar sighting in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Skinner, Victor. 2009. Photo shows cougar presence in Michigan. The Grand Rapids Press. November 15, 2009 Typically, extreme-range sightings of cougars involve young males, who can travel great distances to establish ranges away from established males; all four confirmed cougar kills in Iowa since 2000 involved males.
On April 14, 2008 police shot and killed a cougar on the north side of Chicago, Illinois. DNA tests were consistent with cougars from the Black Hills. Less than one year later, on March 5, 2009, a cougar was photographed and unsuccessfully tranquilized by state wildlife biologists in a tree near Spooner, Wisconsin in the northwestern part of the state.
South of the Rio Grande, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) lists the cat in every Central and South American country except Costa Rica and Panama. While specific state and provincial statistics are often available in North America, much less is known about the cat in its southern range.
The cougar's total breeding population is estimated at less than 50,000 by the IUCN, with a declining trend. U.S. state-level statistics are often more optimistic, suggesting cougar populations have rebounded. In Oregon, a healthy population of 5,000 was reported in 2006, exceeding a target of 3,000. California has actively sought to protect the cat and a similar number of cougars has been suggested, between 4,000 and 6,000.
Aside from humans, no species preys upon mature cougars in the wild. The cat is not, however, the apex predator throughout much of its range. In its northern range, the cougar interacts with other powerful predators such as the brown bear and gray wolf. In the south, the cougar must compete with the larger jaguar. In Florida it encounters the American Alligator.
thumbFront paw print of a cougar. An adult paw print is approximately 10 cm (4 inches) long.
The Yellowstone National Park ecosystem provides a fruitful microcosm to study inter-predator interaction in North America. Of the three large predators, the massive brown bear appears dominant, often although not always able to drive both the gray wolf pack and the cougar off their kills. One study found that Brown or American Black Bears visited 24% of cougar kills in Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks, usurping 10% of carcasses.
The gray wolf and the cougar compete more directly for prey, especially in winter. While individually more powerful than the gray wolf, a solitary cougar may be dominated by the pack structure of the canines. Wolves can steal kills and occasionally kill the cat. One report describes a large pack of fourteen wolves killing a female cougar and her kittens. Conversely, lone wolves are at a disadvantage, and have been reported killed by cougars. Wolves more broadly affect cougar population dynamics and distribution by dominating territory and prey opportunities, and disrupting the feline's behavior. Preliminary research in Yellowstone, for instance, has shown displacement of the cougar by wolves. One researcher in Oregon notes: "When there is a pack around, cougars are not comfortable around their kills or raising kittens ... A lot of times a big cougar will kill a wolf, but the pack phenomenon changes the table." Both species, meanwhile, are capable of killing mid-sized predators such as bobcats and coyotes and tend to suppress their numbers.
In the southern portion of its range, the cougar and jaguar share overlapping territory. The jaguar tends to take larger prey and the cougar smaller where they overlap, reducing the cougar's size. Of the two felines, the cougar appears best able to exploit a broader prey niche and smaller prey.
As with any predator at or near the top of its food chain, the cougar impacts the population of prey species. Predation by cougars has been linked to changes in the species mix of deer in a region. For example, a study in British Columbia observed that the population of mule deer, a favored cougar prey, was declining while the population of the less frequently preyed-upon white-tailed deer was increasing. The Vancouver Island Marmot, an endangered species endemic to one region of dense cougar population, has seen decreased numbers due to cougar and gray wolf predation.
In the southern part of South America the Puma is a top level predator that has controlled the population of Guanaco and other species since prehistoric times.
Pumapard, taken in 1904
A pumapard is a hybrid animal resulting from a union between a cougar and a leopard. Three sets of these hybrids were bred in the late 1890s and early 1900s by Carl Hagenbeck at his animal park in Hamburg, Germany. Most did not reach adulthood. One of these was purchased in 1898 by Berlin Zoo. A similar hybrid in Berlin Zoo purchased from Hagenbeck was a cross between a male leopard and a female puma. Hamburg Zoo's specimen was the reverse pairing, the one in the black and white photo, fathered by a puma bred to an Indian leopardess.
Whether born to a female puma mated to a male leopard, or to a male puma mated to a female leopard, pumapards inherit a form of dwarfism. Those reported grew to only half the size of the parents. They have a puma-like long body (proportional to the limbs, but nevertheless shorter than either parent), but short legs. The coat is variously described as sandy, tawny or greyish with brown, chestnut or "faded" rosettes.
The World Conservation Union (IUCN) currently lists the cougar as a "least concern" species. The cougar is regulated under Appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), rendering illegal international trade in specimens or parts.
Cougar conservation depends on preservation of their habitat.
In the United States east of the Mississippi River, the only unequivocally known cougar population is the Florida panther. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service recognizes both an Eastern cougar and the Florida panther, affording protection under the Endangered Species Act. Certain taxonomic authorities have collapsed both designations into the North American Cougar, with Eastern or Florida subspecies not recognized, while a subspecies designation remains recognized by some conservation scientists. The most recent documented count for the Florida sub-population is 87 individuals, reported by recovery agencies in 2003.
The cougar is also protected across much of the rest of their range. As of 1996, cougar hunting was prohibited in Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, French Guiana, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Suriname, Venezuela, and Uruguay. (Costa Rica and Panama are not listed as current range countries by the IUCN.) The cat had no reported legal protection in Ecuador, El Salvador, and Guyana. Regulated cougar hunting is still common in the United States and Canada, although they are protected from all hunting in the Yukon.; it is permitted in every U.S. state from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, with the exception of California. Texas is the only state in the United States with a viable population of cougars that does not protect, in some way, of its cougar population. In Texas, cougars are listed as nuisance wildlife and any person holding a hunting or a trapping permit can kill a cougar regardless of the season, number killed, sex or age of the animal. Killed animals are not required to be reported to Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. Conservation work in Texas is the effort of a non profit organization, Balanced Ecology Inc. (BEI), as part of their Texas Mountain Lion Conservation Project . Cougars are generally hunted with packs of dogs, until the animal is 'treed'. When the hunter arrives on the scene, he shoots the cat from the tree at close range. The Cougar cannot be legally killed in California except under very specific circumstances, such as when an individual is declared a public safety threat. However statistics from the Department of Fish and Game indicate that cougar killings in California have been on the rise since 1970s with an average of over 112 cats killed per year from 2000 to 2006 compared to six per year in the 1970s. The Bay Area Puma Project aims to obtain information on cougar populations in the San Francisco Bay area and the animals' interactions with habitat, prey, humans, and residential communities.
Conservation threats to the species include persecution as a pest animal, degradation and fragmentation of their habitat, and depletion of their prey base. Wildlife corridor and sufficient range areas are critical to the sustainability of cougar populations. Research simulations have shown that the animal faces a low extinction risk in areas of 2200 km 2 (850 sq mi) or more. As few as one to four new animals entering a population per decade markedly increases persistence, foregrounding the importance of habitat corridors.
Moche puma, Larco Museum collection
The grace and power of the cougar have been widely admired in the cultures of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. The Inca city of Cusco is reported to have been designed in the shape of a cougar, and the animal also gave its name to both Inca regions and people. The Moche people represented the puma often in their ceramics. Berrin, Katherine & Larco Museum. The Spirit of Ancient Peru:Treasures from the Museo Arqueológico Rafael Larco Herrera. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1997. The sky and thunder god of the Inca, Viracocha, has been associated with the animal.
In North America, mythological descriptions of the cougar have appeared in the stories of the HocÄ
k language ("Ho-Chunk" or "Winnebago") of Wisconsin and Illinois Cougars, The Encyclopedia of HoÄÄ
k (Winnebago) Mythology. Retrieved: 2009/12/08. and the Cheyenne, amongst others. To the Apache and Walapai of Arizona, the wail of the Cougar was a harbinger of death.
During the early years of ranching, cougars were considered on par with wolves in destructiveness. According to figures in Texas in 1990, 86 calves (0.0006% of a total of 13.4 million cattle & calves in Texas), 253 Mohair goats, 302 Mohair kids, 445 sheep (0.02% of a total of 2.0 million sheep & lambs in Texas) and 562 lambs (0.04% of 1.2 million lambs in Texas) were confirmed to have been killed by cougars that year. In Nevada in 1992, cougars were confirmed to have killed 9 calves, 1 horse, 4 colts, 5 goats, 318 sheep and 400 lambs. In both cases, sheep were the most frequently attacked. Some instances of surplus killing have resulted in the deaths of 20 sheep in one attack. Cougars frequently kill calves, sheep and goats by biting the top of the neck or head, differing greatly from the throat bite used by coyotes and indiscriminate mutilation by feral dogs. The size of the tooth puncture marks also helps distinguish kills made by cougars from those made by smaller predators.
Mountain Lion warning sign
Due to the expanding human population, cougar ranges increasingly overlap with areas inhabited by humans. Attacks on humans are rare, as cougar prey recognition is a learned behavior and they do not generally recognize humans as prey. Attacks on people, livestock, and pets may occur when the cat habituates to humans or is in a condition of severe starvation. Attacks are most frequent during late spring and summer, when juvenile cougars leave their mothers and search for new territory.
Between 1890 and 1990, in North America there were 53 reported, confirmed attacks on humans, resulting in 48 nonfatal injuries and 10 deaths of humans (the total is greater than 53 because some attacks had more than one victim). By 2004, the count had climbed to 88 attacks and 20 deaths.
Within North America, the distribution of attacks is not uniform. The heavily populated state of California has seen a dozen attacks since 1986 (after just three from 1890 to 1985), including three fatalities. Lightly populated New Mexico reported an attack in 2008, the first there since 1974. Search continues for mountain lion that killed Pinos Altos man, New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, press release June 23, 2008]; Wounded mountain lion captured, killed near Pinos Altos, New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, press release June 25, 2008]; Second mountain lion captured near Pinos Altos, New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, press release July 1, 2008]
As with many predators, a cougar may attack if cornered, if a fleeing human stimulates their instinct to chase, or if a person "plays dead." Exaggerating the threat to the animal through intense eye contact, loud but calm shouting, and any other action to appear larger and more menacing, may make the animal retreat. Fighting back with sticks and rocks, or even bare hands, is often effective in persuading an attacking cougar to disengage.
When cougars do attack, they usually employ their characteristic neck bite, attempting to position their teeth between the vertebrae and into the spinal cord. Neck, head, and spinal injuries are common and sometimes fatal. Children are at greatest risk of attack, and least likely to survive an encounter. Detailed research into attacks prior to 1991 showed that 64% of all victims and almost all fatalities were children. The same study showed the highest proportion of attacks to have occurred in British Columbia, particularly on Vancouver Island where cougar populations are especially dense.
*List of fatal cougar attacks in North America
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* Video, Pictures and Information on Mountain Lions
* A Definitive Resource About Cougars Comprehensive, non-profit site with extensive information about cougars, from how to live safely in cougar country, to science abstracts, hunting regulations, state-by-state cougar management/policy info, and rare photos and videos of wild cougars.
* Description of a Cougar attack
* Cougar Facts and Photos â NatureMapping Program
* No Place for Predators? Liza Gross, PLoS Biology, explains how Washington State wildlife officials implemented a hunting policy, in response to a state measure passed to protect wildlife, that led to the highest rates of human-caused cougar mortality since the height of the bounty era
* Cougar Tracks: How to identify cougar tracks in the wild
* The sound of a cougar screaming
* Link to Worldwide Wild Cat Conservation site
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Cougar | What are some of the cougar's primary food sources? | The cougar's primary food sources include ungulates such as deer, elk, and bighorn sheep, as well as domestic cattle, horses and sheep, particularly in the northern part of its range. | data/set1/a2 | Cougar
The cougar (Puma concolor), also known as puma, mountain lion, mountain cat, catamount or panther, depending on the region, is a mammal of the family Felidae, native to the Americas. This large, solitary cat has the greatest range of any large wild terrestrial mammal in the Western Hemisphere, extending from Yukon in Canada to the southern Andes of South America. An adaptable, generalist species, the cougar is found in every major American habitat type. It is the second heaviest cat in the American continents after the jaguar, and the fourth heaviest in the world, after the tiger, lion, and jaguar. Although large, the cougar is most closely related to smaller felines.
A capable stalk-and-ambush predator, the cougar pursues a wide variety of prey. Primary food sources include ungulates such as deer, elk, and bighorn sheep, as well as domestic cattle, horses and sheep, particularly in the northern part of its range. It will also hunt species as small as insects and rodents. This cat prefers habitats with dense underbrush and rocky areas for stalking, but it can also live in open areas. The cougar is territorial and persists at low population densities. Individual territory sizes depend on terrain, vegetation, and abundance of prey. While it is a large predator, it is not always the dominant species in its range, as when it competes for prey with other predators such as the jaguar, grey wolf, American Black Bear, and the grizzly bear. It is a reclusive cat and usually avoids people. Attacks on humans remain rare, despite a recent increase in frequency.
Due to excessive hunting following the European colonization of the Americas, and continuing human development of cougar habitat, populations have dropped in most parts of its historical range. In particular, the cougar was extirpated in eastern North America, except for an isolated sub-population in Florida; the animal may be recolonizing parts of its former eastern territory, such as Maine and northern Michigan, /ref> where there have been recent sightings. With its vast range, the cougar has dozens of names and various references in the mythology of the indigenous Americans and in contemporary culture. The cougar has recently made a comeback in the state of Wyoming, where it presently has the largest population in North America .
The cougar has numerous names in English, of which puma and mountain lion are popular. Other names include catamount, panther, mountain screamer and painter. Lexicographers regard painter as a primarily upper-Southern U.S. regional variant on "panther", but a folk etymology, fancying a resemblance between the typically dark tip of its tail and a paintbrush dipped in dark paint, has some currency.
The cougar holds the Guinness record for the animal with the highest number of names, presumably due to its wide distribution across North and South America. It has over 40 names in English alone.
"Cougar" may be borrowed from the Portuguese çuçuarana, via French; the term was originally derived from the Tupi language. A current form in Brazil is suçuarana. It may also be borrowed from the Guaranà language term guaçu ara or guazu ara. "Puma" comes, via Spanish, from the Quechua language. Cougar, Puma and
The cougar is the largest of the small cats. It is placed in the subfamily Felinae, although its bulk characteristics are similar to those of the big cats in the subfamily Pantherinae. The family Felidae is believed to have originated in Asia approximately 11 million years ago. Taxonomic research on felids remains partial and much of what is known about their evolutionary history is based on mitochondrial DNA analysis, as cats are poorly represented in the fossil record, and there are significant confidence intervals with suggested dates.
Although large, the cougar is closely related to small felines.
In the latest genomic study of Felidae, the common ancestor of today's Leopardus, Lynx, Puma, Prionailurus, and Felis lineages migrated across the Bering land bridge into the Americas approximately 8 to 8.5 million years (Ma) ago. The lineages subsequently diverged in that order. North American felids then invaded South America 3 Ma ago as part of the Great American Interchange, following formation of the Isthmus of Panama. The cougar was originally thought to belong in Felis (Felis concolor), the genus which includes the domestic cat. As of 1993, it is now placed in Puma along with the jaguarundi, a cat just a little more than a tenth its weight.
Studies have indicated that the cougar and jaguarundi are most closely related to the modern cheetah of Africa and western Asia, but the relationship is unresolved. It has been suggested that the cheetah lineage diverged from the Puma lineage in the Americas (see American cheetah) and migrated back to Asia and Africa, while other research suggests the cheetah diverged in the Old World itself. The outline of small feline migration to the Americas is thus unclear.
Recent studies have demonstrated a high level of genetic similarity among the North American cougar populations, suggesting that they are all fairly recent descendants of a small ancestral group. Culver et al. suggest that the original North American population of Puma concolor was extirpated during the Pleistocene extinctions some 10,000 years ago, when other large mammals such as Smilodon also disappeared. North America was then repopulated by a group of South American cougars.
Until the late 1990s, as many as 32 subspecies were recorded; however, a recent genetic study of mitochondrial DNA found that many of these are too similar to be recognized as distinct at a molecular level. Following the research, the canonical Mammal Species of the World (3rd edition) recognizes six subspecies, five of which are solely found in Latin America:
; Argentine puma : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms hudsonii and puma (Marcelli, 1922);
; Costa Rican Cougar
; Eastern South American cougar : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms acrocodia, borbensis, capricornensis, concolor (Pelzeln, 1883), greeni and nigra;
; North American Cougar : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms arundivaga, aztecus, browni, californica, coryi, floridana, hippolestes, improcera, kaibabensis, mayensis, missoulensis, olympus, oregonensis, schorgeri, stanleyana, vancouverensis and youngi;
; Northern South American cougar : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms bangsi, incarum, osgoodi, soasoaranna, sussuarana, soderstromii, sucuacuara and wavula;
; Southern South American puma : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms araucanus, concolor (Gay, 1847), patagonica, pearsoni and puma (Trouessart, 1904)
The status of the Florida panther, here collapsed into the North American Cougar, remains uncertain. It is still regularly listed as subspecies Puma concolor coryi in research works, including those directly concerned with its conservation. Culver et al. themselves noted low microsatellite variation in the Florida panther, possibly due to inbreeding; responding to the research, one conservation team suggests "the degree to which the scientific community has accepted the results of Culver et al. and the proposed change in taxonomy is not resolved at this time."
Cougars are slender and agile cats. Adults stand about 60 to 76 centimeters (2.0 to 2.5 ft) tall at the shoulders. The length of adult males is around 2.4 meters (8 ft) long nose to tail, with overall ranges between 1.5 and 2.75 m (5 and 9 ft) nose to tail suggested for the species in general. Males typically weigh 53 to 90 kilograms (115 to 198 pounds), averaging 62 kg (137 lb). In rare cases, some may reach over 120 kg (264 lb). Females typically weigh between 29 and 64 kg (64 and 141 lb), averaging 42 kg (93 lb). /ref> /ref> Cougar size is smallest close to the equator, and larger towards the poles.
Although cougars resemble the domestic cat, they are about the same size as an adult human.
The head of the cat is round and the ears erect. Its powerful forequarters, neck, and jaw serve to grasp and hold large prey. It has five retractable claws on its forepaws (one a dewclaw) and four on its hind paws. The larger front feet and claws are adaptations to clutching prey.
Cougars can be almost as large as jaguars, but are less muscular and not as powerful; where their ranges overlap, the cougar tends to be smaller than average. The cougar is on average as heavy as the leopard. Despite its size, it is not typically classified among the "big cats," as it cannot roar, lacking the specialized larynx and hyoid apparatus of Panthera. Like domestic cats, cougars vocalize low-pitched hisses, growls, and purrs, as well as chirps and whistles. They are well known for their screams, as referenced in some of their common names, although these screams are often misinterpreted to be the calls of other animals.
Rear paw of a cougar
Cougar coloring is plain (hence the Latin concolor) but can vary greatly between individuals and even between siblings. The coat is typically tawny, but ranges to silvery-grey or reddish, with lighter patches on the under body including the jaws, chin, and throat. Infants are spotted and born with blue eyes and rings on their tails; juveniles are pale, and dark spots remain on their flanks. Despite anecdotes to the contrary, all-black coloring (melanism) has never been documented in cougars. The term "black panther" is used colloquially to refer to melanistic individuals of other species, particularly jaguars and leopards.
Cougars have large paws and proportionally the largest hind legs in the cat family. This physique allows it great leaping and short-sprint ability. An exceptional vertical leap of 5.4 m (18 ft) is reported for the cougar. Horizontal jumping capability from standing position is suggested anywhere from 6 to 12 m (20 to 40 ft). The cougar can run as fast as 55 to 72 km/h (35 to 45 mi/h), but is best adapted for short, powerful sprints rather than long chases. It is adept at climbing, which allows it to evade canine competitors. Although it is not strongly associated with water, it can swim.
A successful generalist predator, the cougar will eat any animal it can catch, from insects to large ungulates (over 500 kg). Like all cats, it is an obligate carnivore, feeding only on meat. The Mean weight of vertebrate prey (MWVP) was positively correlated (r=0.875) with puma body weight and inversely correlated (r=-0.836) with food niche breadth in all America. In general, MWVP was lower in areas closer to the Equator. Its most important prey species are various deer species, particularly in North America; mule deer, white-tailed deer, elk, and even large moose are taken by the cat. Other species such as Bighorn Sheep, wild horses of Arizona, domestic horses, and domestic livestock such as cattle and sheep are also primary food bases in many areas. A survey of North America research found 68% of prey items were ungulates, especially deer. Only the Florida Panther showed variation, often preferring feral hogs and armadillos.
Shown eating. Cougars are ambush predators, feeding mostly on deer and other mammals.
Investigation in Yellowstone National Park showed that elk, followed by mule deer, were the cougar's primary targets; the prey base is shared with the park's gray wolves, with whom the cougar competes for resources.
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* Another study on winter kills (NovemberâApril) in Alberta showed that ungulates accounted for greater than 99% of the cougar diet. Learned, individual prey recognition was observed, as some cougars rarely killed bighorn sheep, while others relied heavily on the species.
In the Central and South American cougar range, the ratio of deer in the diet declines. Small to mid-size mammals are preferred, including large rodents such as the capybara. Ungulates accounted for only 35% of prey items in one survey, approximately half that of North America. Competition with the larger jaguar has been suggested for the decline in the size of prey items. Other listed prey species of the cougar include mice, porcupine, and hares. Birds and small reptiles are sometimes preyed upon in the south, but this is rarely recorded in North America.
Though capable of sprinting, the cougar is typically an ambush predator. It stalks through brush and trees, across ledges, or other covered spots, before delivering a powerful leap onto the back of its prey and a suffocating neck bite. The cougar is capable of breaking the neck of some of its smaller prey with a strong bite and momentum bearing the animal to the ground.
Kills are generally estimated at around one large ungulate every two weeks. The period shrinks for females raising young, and may be as short as one kill every three days when cubs are nearly mature at around 15 months. The cat drags a kill to a preferred spot, covers it with brush, and returns to feed over a period of days. It is generally reported that the cougar is a non-scavenger and will rarely consume prey it has not killed; but deer carcasses left exposed for study were scavenged by cougars in California, suggesting more opportunistic behavior.
Females reach sexual maturity between one-and-a-half to three years of age. They typically average one litter every two to three years throughout their reproductive life, though the period can be as short as one year. Females are in estrus for approximately 8 days of a 23-day cycle; the gestation period is approximately 91 days. Females are sometimes reported as monogamous, but this is uncertain and polygyny may be more common. Copulation is brief but frequent.
Cougar kittens
Only females are involved in parenting. Female cougars are fiercely protective of their kittens, and have been seen to successfully fight off animals as large as grizzly bears in their defense. Litter size is between one and six kittens; typically two or three. Caves and other alcoves that offer protection are used as litter dens. Born blind, kittens are completely dependent on their mother at first, and begin to be weaned at around three months of age. As they grow, they begin to go out on forays with their mother, first visiting kill sites, and after six months beginning to hunt small prey on their own. Kitten survival rates are just over one per litter.
Sub-adults leave their mother to attempt to establish their own territory at around two years of age and sometimes earlier; males tend to leave sooner. One study has shown high morbidity amongst cougars that travel farthest from the maternal range, often due to conflicts with other cougars ("intraspecific" conflict). Research in New Mexico has shown that "males dispersed significantly farther than females, were more likely to traverse large expanses of non-cougar habitat, and were probably most responsible for nuclear gene flow between habitat patches."
Life expectancy in the wild is reported at between 8 to 13 years, and probably averages 8 to 10; a female of at least 18 years was reported killed by hunters on Vancouver Island. Cougars may live as long as 20 years in captivity. One male North American cougar, named Scratch, was two months short of his 30th birthday when he died in 2007. Causes of death in the wild include disability and disease, competition with other cougars, starvation, accidents, and, where allowed, human hunting. Feline immunodeficiency virus, an endemic AIDS-like disease in cats, is well-adapted to the cougar.
Like almost all cats, the cougar is a solitary animal. Only mothers and kittens live in groups, with adults meeting only to mate. It is secretive and crepuscular, being most active around dawn and dusk.
Estimates of territory sizes vary greatly.
Canadian Geographic reports large male territories of 150 to 1000 square kilometers (58 to 386 sq mi) with female ranges half the size. Other research suggests a much smaller lower limit of 25 km 2 (10 sq mi) but an even greater upper limit of 1300 km 2 (500 sq mi) for males. In the United States, very large ranges have been reported in Texas and the Black Hills of the northern Great Plains, in excess of 775 km 2 (300 sq mi). Male ranges may include or overlap with those of females but, at least where studied, not with those of other males, which serves to reduce conflict between cougars. Ranges of females may overlap slightly with each other. Scrape marks, urine, and feces are used to mark territory and attract mates. Males may scrape together a small pile of leaves and grasses and then urinate on it as a way of marking territory.
Home range sizes and overall cougar abundance depend on terrain, vegetation, and prey abundance. One female adjacent to the San Andres Mountains, for instance, was found with a large range of 215 km 2 (83 sq mi), necessitated by poor prey abundance. Research has shown cougar abundances from 0.5 animals to as much as 7 (in one study in South America) per 100 km 2 (38 sq mi).
Because males disperse further than females and compete more directly for mates and territory, they are most likely to be involved in conflict. Where a sub-adult fails to leave his maternal range, for example, he may be killed by his father. When males encounter each other, they hiss, spit, and may engage in violent conflict if neither backs down. Hunting or relocation of the cougar may increase aggressive encounters by disrupting territories and bringing young, transient animals into conflict with established individuals.
The cougar has the largest range of any wild land animal in the Americas. Its range spans 110 degrees of latitude, from northern Yukon in Canada to the southern Andes. It is one of only three cat species, along with the bobcat and Canadian lynx, native to Canada. Its wide distribution stems from its adaptability to virtually every habitat type: it is found in all forest types as well as in lowland and mountainous deserts. Studies show that the Cougar prefers regions with dense underbrush, but can live with little vegetation in open areas. Its preferred habitats include precipitous canyons, escarpments, rim rocks, and dense brush.
Cougar, photographed in the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, Tucson, Arizona.
The cougar was extirpated across much of its eastern North American range (with the exception of Florida) in the two centuries after European colonization, and faced grave threats in the remainder of its territory. Currently, it ranges across most western American states, the Canadian provinces of Alberta and British Columbia, and the Canadian Yukon Territory. There have been widely debated reports of possible recolonization of eastern North America. DNA evidence has suggested its presence in eastern North America, , while a consolidated map of cougar sightings shows numerous reports, from the mid-western Great Plains through to Eastern Canada. The Cougar Network methodology is recognized by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The Quebec wildlife services (known locally as MRNF) also considers Cougar to be present in the province as a threatened species after multiple DNA tests confirmed cougar hair in Lynx mating sites. Ministry of Wildlife and natural resources Wildlife Service. The only unequivocally known eastern population is the Florida panther, which is critically endangered. There have also been sightings in Elliotsville, Maine (in the central part of the state); and in New Hampshire, there have been recent sightings as early as 1997. In 2009, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources confirmed a cougar sighting in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Skinner, Victor. 2009. Photo shows cougar presence in Michigan. The Grand Rapids Press. November 15, 2009 Typically, extreme-range sightings of cougars involve young males, who can travel great distances to establish ranges away from established males; all four confirmed cougar kills in Iowa since 2000 involved males.
On April 14, 2008 police shot and killed a cougar on the north side of Chicago, Illinois. DNA tests were consistent with cougars from the Black Hills. Less than one year later, on March 5, 2009, a cougar was photographed and unsuccessfully tranquilized by state wildlife biologists in a tree near Spooner, Wisconsin in the northwestern part of the state.
South of the Rio Grande, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) lists the cat in every Central and South American country except Costa Rica and Panama. While specific state and provincial statistics are often available in North America, much less is known about the cat in its southern range.
The cougar's total breeding population is estimated at less than 50,000 by the IUCN, with a declining trend. U.S. state-level statistics are often more optimistic, suggesting cougar populations have rebounded. In Oregon, a healthy population of 5,000 was reported in 2006, exceeding a target of 3,000. California has actively sought to protect the cat and a similar number of cougars has been suggested, between 4,000 and 6,000.
Aside from humans, no species preys upon mature cougars in the wild. The cat is not, however, the apex predator throughout much of its range. In its northern range, the cougar interacts with other powerful predators such as the brown bear and gray wolf. In the south, the cougar must compete with the larger jaguar. In Florida it encounters the American Alligator.
thumbFront paw print of a cougar. An adult paw print is approximately 10 cm (4 inches) long.
The Yellowstone National Park ecosystem provides a fruitful microcosm to study inter-predator interaction in North America. Of the three large predators, the massive brown bear appears dominant, often although not always able to drive both the gray wolf pack and the cougar off their kills. One study found that Brown or American Black Bears visited 24% of cougar kills in Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks, usurping 10% of carcasses.
The gray wolf and the cougar compete more directly for prey, especially in winter. While individually more powerful than the gray wolf, a solitary cougar may be dominated by the pack structure of the canines. Wolves can steal kills and occasionally kill the cat. One report describes a large pack of fourteen wolves killing a female cougar and her kittens. Conversely, lone wolves are at a disadvantage, and have been reported killed by cougars. Wolves more broadly affect cougar population dynamics and distribution by dominating territory and prey opportunities, and disrupting the feline's behavior. Preliminary research in Yellowstone, for instance, has shown displacement of the cougar by wolves. One researcher in Oregon notes: "When there is a pack around, cougars are not comfortable around their kills or raising kittens ... A lot of times a big cougar will kill a wolf, but the pack phenomenon changes the table." Both species, meanwhile, are capable of killing mid-sized predators such as bobcats and coyotes and tend to suppress their numbers.
In the southern portion of its range, the cougar and jaguar share overlapping territory. The jaguar tends to take larger prey and the cougar smaller where they overlap, reducing the cougar's size. Of the two felines, the cougar appears best able to exploit a broader prey niche and smaller prey.
As with any predator at or near the top of its food chain, the cougar impacts the population of prey species. Predation by cougars has been linked to changes in the species mix of deer in a region. For example, a study in British Columbia observed that the population of mule deer, a favored cougar prey, was declining while the population of the less frequently preyed-upon white-tailed deer was increasing. The Vancouver Island Marmot, an endangered species endemic to one region of dense cougar population, has seen decreased numbers due to cougar and gray wolf predation.
In the southern part of South America the Puma is a top level predator that has controlled the population of Guanaco and other species since prehistoric times.
Pumapard, taken in 1904
A pumapard is a hybrid animal resulting from a union between a cougar and a leopard. Three sets of these hybrids were bred in the late 1890s and early 1900s by Carl Hagenbeck at his animal park in Hamburg, Germany. Most did not reach adulthood. One of these was purchased in 1898 by Berlin Zoo. A similar hybrid in Berlin Zoo purchased from Hagenbeck was a cross between a male leopard and a female puma. Hamburg Zoo's specimen was the reverse pairing, the one in the black and white photo, fathered by a puma bred to an Indian leopardess.
Whether born to a female puma mated to a male leopard, or to a male puma mated to a female leopard, pumapards inherit a form of dwarfism. Those reported grew to only half the size of the parents. They have a puma-like long body (proportional to the limbs, but nevertheless shorter than either parent), but short legs. The coat is variously described as sandy, tawny or greyish with brown, chestnut or "faded" rosettes.
The World Conservation Union (IUCN) currently lists the cougar as a "least concern" species. The cougar is regulated under Appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), rendering illegal international trade in specimens or parts.
Cougar conservation depends on preservation of their habitat.
In the United States east of the Mississippi River, the only unequivocally known cougar population is the Florida panther. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service recognizes both an Eastern cougar and the Florida panther, affording protection under the Endangered Species Act. Certain taxonomic authorities have collapsed both designations into the North American Cougar, with Eastern or Florida subspecies not recognized, while a subspecies designation remains recognized by some conservation scientists. The most recent documented count for the Florida sub-population is 87 individuals, reported by recovery agencies in 2003.
The cougar is also protected across much of the rest of their range. As of 1996, cougar hunting was prohibited in Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, French Guiana, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Suriname, Venezuela, and Uruguay. (Costa Rica and Panama are not listed as current range countries by the IUCN.) The cat had no reported legal protection in Ecuador, El Salvador, and Guyana. Regulated cougar hunting is still common in the United States and Canada, although they are protected from all hunting in the Yukon.; it is permitted in every U.S. state from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, with the exception of California. Texas is the only state in the United States with a viable population of cougars that does not protect, in some way, of its cougar population. In Texas, cougars are listed as nuisance wildlife and any person holding a hunting or a trapping permit can kill a cougar regardless of the season, number killed, sex or age of the animal. Killed animals are not required to be reported to Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. Conservation work in Texas is the effort of a non profit organization, Balanced Ecology Inc. (BEI), as part of their Texas Mountain Lion Conservation Project . Cougars are generally hunted with packs of dogs, until the animal is 'treed'. When the hunter arrives on the scene, he shoots the cat from the tree at close range. The Cougar cannot be legally killed in California except under very specific circumstances, such as when an individual is declared a public safety threat. However statistics from the Department of Fish and Game indicate that cougar killings in California have been on the rise since 1970s with an average of over 112 cats killed per year from 2000 to 2006 compared to six per year in the 1970s. The Bay Area Puma Project aims to obtain information on cougar populations in the San Francisco Bay area and the animals' interactions with habitat, prey, humans, and residential communities.
Conservation threats to the species include persecution as a pest animal, degradation and fragmentation of their habitat, and depletion of their prey base. Wildlife corridor and sufficient range areas are critical to the sustainability of cougar populations. Research simulations have shown that the animal faces a low extinction risk in areas of 2200 km 2 (850 sq mi) or more. As few as one to four new animals entering a population per decade markedly increases persistence, foregrounding the importance of habitat corridors.
Moche puma, Larco Museum collection
The grace and power of the cougar have been widely admired in the cultures of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. The Inca city of Cusco is reported to have been designed in the shape of a cougar, and the animal also gave its name to both Inca regions and people. The Moche people represented the puma often in their ceramics. Berrin, Katherine & Larco Museum. The Spirit of Ancient Peru:Treasures from the Museo Arqueológico Rafael Larco Herrera. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1997. The sky and thunder god of the Inca, Viracocha, has been associated with the animal.
In North America, mythological descriptions of the cougar have appeared in the stories of the HocÄ
k language ("Ho-Chunk" or "Winnebago") of Wisconsin and Illinois Cougars, The Encyclopedia of HoÄÄ
k (Winnebago) Mythology. Retrieved: 2009/12/08. and the Cheyenne, amongst others. To the Apache and Walapai of Arizona, the wail of the Cougar was a harbinger of death.
During the early years of ranching, cougars were considered on par with wolves in destructiveness. According to figures in Texas in 1990, 86 calves (0.0006% of a total of 13.4 million cattle & calves in Texas), 253 Mohair goats, 302 Mohair kids, 445 sheep (0.02% of a total of 2.0 million sheep & lambs in Texas) and 562 lambs (0.04% of 1.2 million lambs in Texas) were confirmed to have been killed by cougars that year. In Nevada in 1992, cougars were confirmed to have killed 9 calves, 1 horse, 4 colts, 5 goats, 318 sheep and 400 lambs. In both cases, sheep were the most frequently attacked. Some instances of surplus killing have resulted in the deaths of 20 sheep in one attack. Cougars frequently kill calves, sheep and goats by biting the top of the neck or head, differing greatly from the throat bite used by coyotes and indiscriminate mutilation by feral dogs. The size of the tooth puncture marks also helps distinguish kills made by cougars from those made by smaller predators.
Mountain Lion warning sign
Due to the expanding human population, cougar ranges increasingly overlap with areas inhabited by humans. Attacks on humans are rare, as cougar prey recognition is a learned behavior and they do not generally recognize humans as prey. Attacks on people, livestock, and pets may occur when the cat habituates to humans or is in a condition of severe starvation. Attacks are most frequent during late spring and summer, when juvenile cougars leave their mothers and search for new territory.
Between 1890 and 1990, in North America there were 53 reported, confirmed attacks on humans, resulting in 48 nonfatal injuries and 10 deaths of humans (the total is greater than 53 because some attacks had more than one victim). By 2004, the count had climbed to 88 attacks and 20 deaths.
Within North America, the distribution of attacks is not uniform. The heavily populated state of California has seen a dozen attacks since 1986 (after just three from 1890 to 1985), including three fatalities. Lightly populated New Mexico reported an attack in 2008, the first there since 1974. Search continues for mountain lion that killed Pinos Altos man, New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, press release June 23, 2008]; Wounded mountain lion captured, killed near Pinos Altos, New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, press release June 25, 2008]; Second mountain lion captured near Pinos Altos, New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, press release July 1, 2008]
As with many predators, a cougar may attack if cornered, if a fleeing human stimulates their instinct to chase, or if a person "plays dead." Exaggerating the threat to the animal through intense eye contact, loud but calm shouting, and any other action to appear larger and more menacing, may make the animal retreat. Fighting back with sticks and rocks, or even bare hands, is often effective in persuading an attacking cougar to disengage.
When cougars do attack, they usually employ their characteristic neck bite, attempting to position their teeth between the vertebrae and into the spinal cord. Neck, head, and spinal injuries are common and sometimes fatal. Children are at greatest risk of attack, and least likely to survive an encounter. Detailed research into attacks prior to 1991 showed that 64% of all victims and almost all fatalities were children. The same study showed the highest proportion of attacks to have occurred in British Columbia, particularly on Vancouver Island where cougar populations are especially dense.
*List of fatal cougar attacks in North America
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* Video, Pictures and Information on Mountain Lions
* A Definitive Resource About Cougars Comprehensive, non-profit site with extensive information about cougars, from how to live safely in cougar country, to science abstracts, hunting regulations, state-by-state cougar management/policy info, and rare photos and videos of wild cougars.
* Description of a Cougar attack
* Cougar Facts and Photos â NatureMapping Program
* No Place for Predators? Liza Gross, PLoS Biology, explains how Washington State wildlife officials implemented a hunting policy, in response to a state measure passed to protect wildlife, that led to the highest rates of human-caused cougar mortality since the height of the bounty era
* Cougar Tracks: How to identify cougar tracks in the wild
* The sound of a cougar screaming
* Link to Worldwide Wild Cat Conservation site
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Cougar | What are some of the cougar's primary food sources? | ungulates such as deer, elk, and bighorn sheep, as well as domestic cattle, horses, and sheep | data/set1/a2 | Cougar
The cougar (Puma concolor), also known as puma, mountain lion, mountain cat, catamount or panther, depending on the region, is a mammal of the family Felidae, native to the Americas. This large, solitary cat has the greatest range of any large wild terrestrial mammal in the Western Hemisphere, extending from Yukon in Canada to the southern Andes of South America. An adaptable, generalist species, the cougar is found in every major American habitat type. It is the second heaviest cat in the American continents after the jaguar, and the fourth heaviest in the world, after the tiger, lion, and jaguar. Although large, the cougar is most closely related to smaller felines.
A capable stalk-and-ambush predator, the cougar pursues a wide variety of prey. Primary food sources include ungulates such as deer, elk, and bighorn sheep, as well as domestic cattle, horses and sheep, particularly in the northern part of its range. It will also hunt species as small as insects and rodents. This cat prefers habitats with dense underbrush and rocky areas for stalking, but it can also live in open areas. The cougar is territorial and persists at low population densities. Individual territory sizes depend on terrain, vegetation, and abundance of prey. While it is a large predator, it is not always the dominant species in its range, as when it competes for prey with other predators such as the jaguar, grey wolf, American Black Bear, and the grizzly bear. It is a reclusive cat and usually avoids people. Attacks on humans remain rare, despite a recent increase in frequency.
Due to excessive hunting following the European colonization of the Americas, and continuing human development of cougar habitat, populations have dropped in most parts of its historical range. In particular, the cougar was extirpated in eastern North America, except for an isolated sub-population in Florida; the animal may be recolonizing parts of its former eastern territory, such as Maine and northern Michigan, /ref> where there have been recent sightings. With its vast range, the cougar has dozens of names and various references in the mythology of the indigenous Americans and in contemporary culture. The cougar has recently made a comeback in the state of Wyoming, where it presently has the largest population in North America .
The cougar has numerous names in English, of which puma and mountain lion are popular. Other names include catamount, panther, mountain screamer and painter. Lexicographers regard painter as a primarily upper-Southern U.S. regional variant on "panther", but a folk etymology, fancying a resemblance between the typically dark tip of its tail and a paintbrush dipped in dark paint, has some currency.
The cougar holds the Guinness record for the animal with the highest number of names, presumably due to its wide distribution across North and South America. It has over 40 names in English alone.
"Cougar" may be borrowed from the Portuguese çuçuarana, via French; the term was originally derived from the Tupi language. A current form in Brazil is suçuarana. It may also be borrowed from the Guaranà language term guaçu ara or guazu ara. "Puma" comes, via Spanish, from the Quechua language. Cougar, Puma and
The cougar is the largest of the small cats. It is placed in the subfamily Felinae, although its bulk characteristics are similar to those of the big cats in the subfamily Pantherinae. The family Felidae is believed to have originated in Asia approximately 11 million years ago. Taxonomic research on felids remains partial and much of what is known about their evolutionary history is based on mitochondrial DNA analysis, as cats are poorly represented in the fossil record, and there are significant confidence intervals with suggested dates.
Although large, the cougar is closely related to small felines.
In the latest genomic study of Felidae, the common ancestor of today's Leopardus, Lynx, Puma, Prionailurus, and Felis lineages migrated across the Bering land bridge into the Americas approximately 8 to 8.5 million years (Ma) ago. The lineages subsequently diverged in that order. North American felids then invaded South America 3 Ma ago as part of the Great American Interchange, following formation of the Isthmus of Panama. The cougar was originally thought to belong in Felis (Felis concolor), the genus which includes the domestic cat. As of 1993, it is now placed in Puma along with the jaguarundi, a cat just a little more than a tenth its weight.
Studies have indicated that the cougar and jaguarundi are most closely related to the modern cheetah of Africa and western Asia, but the relationship is unresolved. It has been suggested that the cheetah lineage diverged from the Puma lineage in the Americas (see American cheetah) and migrated back to Asia and Africa, while other research suggests the cheetah diverged in the Old World itself. The outline of small feline migration to the Americas is thus unclear.
Recent studies have demonstrated a high level of genetic similarity among the North American cougar populations, suggesting that they are all fairly recent descendants of a small ancestral group. Culver et al. suggest that the original North American population of Puma concolor was extirpated during the Pleistocene extinctions some 10,000 years ago, when other large mammals such as Smilodon also disappeared. North America was then repopulated by a group of South American cougars.
Until the late 1990s, as many as 32 subspecies were recorded; however, a recent genetic study of mitochondrial DNA found that many of these are too similar to be recognized as distinct at a molecular level. Following the research, the canonical Mammal Species of the World (3rd edition) recognizes six subspecies, five of which are solely found in Latin America:
; Argentine puma : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms hudsonii and puma (Marcelli, 1922);
; Costa Rican Cougar
; Eastern South American cougar : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms acrocodia, borbensis, capricornensis, concolor (Pelzeln, 1883), greeni and nigra;
; North American Cougar : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms arundivaga, aztecus, browni, californica, coryi, floridana, hippolestes, improcera, kaibabensis, mayensis, missoulensis, olympus, oregonensis, schorgeri, stanleyana, vancouverensis and youngi;
; Northern South American cougar : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms bangsi, incarum, osgoodi, soasoaranna, sussuarana, soderstromii, sucuacuara and wavula;
; Southern South American puma : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms araucanus, concolor (Gay, 1847), patagonica, pearsoni and puma (Trouessart, 1904)
The status of the Florida panther, here collapsed into the North American Cougar, remains uncertain. It is still regularly listed as subspecies Puma concolor coryi in research works, including those directly concerned with its conservation. Culver et al. themselves noted low microsatellite variation in the Florida panther, possibly due to inbreeding; responding to the research, one conservation team suggests "the degree to which the scientific community has accepted the results of Culver et al. and the proposed change in taxonomy is not resolved at this time."
Cougars are slender and agile cats. Adults stand about 60 to 76 centimeters (2.0 to 2.5 ft) tall at the shoulders. The length of adult males is around 2.4 meters (8 ft) long nose to tail, with overall ranges between 1.5 and 2.75 m (5 and 9 ft) nose to tail suggested for the species in general. Males typically weigh 53 to 90 kilograms (115 to 198 pounds), averaging 62 kg (137 lb). In rare cases, some may reach over 120 kg (264 lb). Females typically weigh between 29 and 64 kg (64 and 141 lb), averaging 42 kg (93 lb). /ref> /ref> Cougar size is smallest close to the equator, and larger towards the poles.
Although cougars resemble the domestic cat, they are about the same size as an adult human.
The head of the cat is round and the ears erect. Its powerful forequarters, neck, and jaw serve to grasp and hold large prey. It has five retractable claws on its forepaws (one a dewclaw) and four on its hind paws. The larger front feet and claws are adaptations to clutching prey.
Cougars can be almost as large as jaguars, but are less muscular and not as powerful; where their ranges overlap, the cougar tends to be smaller than average. The cougar is on average as heavy as the leopard. Despite its size, it is not typically classified among the "big cats," as it cannot roar, lacking the specialized larynx and hyoid apparatus of Panthera. Like domestic cats, cougars vocalize low-pitched hisses, growls, and purrs, as well as chirps and whistles. They are well known for their screams, as referenced in some of their common names, although these screams are often misinterpreted to be the calls of other animals.
Rear paw of a cougar
Cougar coloring is plain (hence the Latin concolor) but can vary greatly between individuals and even between siblings. The coat is typically tawny, but ranges to silvery-grey or reddish, with lighter patches on the under body including the jaws, chin, and throat. Infants are spotted and born with blue eyes and rings on their tails; juveniles are pale, and dark spots remain on their flanks. Despite anecdotes to the contrary, all-black coloring (melanism) has never been documented in cougars. The term "black panther" is used colloquially to refer to melanistic individuals of other species, particularly jaguars and leopards.
Cougars have large paws and proportionally the largest hind legs in the cat family. This physique allows it great leaping and short-sprint ability. An exceptional vertical leap of 5.4 m (18 ft) is reported for the cougar. Horizontal jumping capability from standing position is suggested anywhere from 6 to 12 m (20 to 40 ft). The cougar can run as fast as 55 to 72 km/h (35 to 45 mi/h), but is best adapted for short, powerful sprints rather than long chases. It is adept at climbing, which allows it to evade canine competitors. Although it is not strongly associated with water, it can swim.
A successful generalist predator, the cougar will eat any animal it can catch, from insects to large ungulates (over 500 kg). Like all cats, it is an obligate carnivore, feeding only on meat. The Mean weight of vertebrate prey (MWVP) was positively correlated (r=0.875) with puma body weight and inversely correlated (r=-0.836) with food niche breadth in all America. In general, MWVP was lower in areas closer to the Equator. Its most important prey species are various deer species, particularly in North America; mule deer, white-tailed deer, elk, and even large moose are taken by the cat. Other species such as Bighorn Sheep, wild horses of Arizona, domestic horses, and domestic livestock such as cattle and sheep are also primary food bases in many areas. A survey of North America research found 68% of prey items were ungulates, especially deer. Only the Florida Panther showed variation, often preferring feral hogs and armadillos.
Shown eating. Cougars are ambush predators, feeding mostly on deer and other mammals.
Investigation in Yellowstone National Park showed that elk, followed by mule deer, were the cougar's primary targets; the prey base is shared with the park's gray wolves, with whom the cougar competes for resources.
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* Another study on winter kills (NovemberâApril) in Alberta showed that ungulates accounted for greater than 99% of the cougar diet. Learned, individual prey recognition was observed, as some cougars rarely killed bighorn sheep, while others relied heavily on the species.
In the Central and South American cougar range, the ratio of deer in the diet declines. Small to mid-size mammals are preferred, including large rodents such as the capybara. Ungulates accounted for only 35% of prey items in one survey, approximately half that of North America. Competition with the larger jaguar has been suggested for the decline in the size of prey items. Other listed prey species of the cougar include mice, porcupine, and hares. Birds and small reptiles are sometimes preyed upon in the south, but this is rarely recorded in North America.
Though capable of sprinting, the cougar is typically an ambush predator. It stalks through brush and trees, across ledges, or other covered spots, before delivering a powerful leap onto the back of its prey and a suffocating neck bite. The cougar is capable of breaking the neck of some of its smaller prey with a strong bite and momentum bearing the animal to the ground.
Kills are generally estimated at around one large ungulate every two weeks. The period shrinks for females raising young, and may be as short as one kill every three days when cubs are nearly mature at around 15 months. The cat drags a kill to a preferred spot, covers it with brush, and returns to feed over a period of days. It is generally reported that the cougar is a non-scavenger and will rarely consume prey it has not killed; but deer carcasses left exposed for study were scavenged by cougars in California, suggesting more opportunistic behavior.
Females reach sexual maturity between one-and-a-half to three years of age. They typically average one litter every two to three years throughout their reproductive life, though the period can be as short as one year. Females are in estrus for approximately 8 days of a 23-day cycle; the gestation period is approximately 91 days. Females are sometimes reported as monogamous, but this is uncertain and polygyny may be more common. Copulation is brief but frequent.
Cougar kittens
Only females are involved in parenting. Female cougars are fiercely protective of their kittens, and have been seen to successfully fight off animals as large as grizzly bears in their defense. Litter size is between one and six kittens; typically two or three. Caves and other alcoves that offer protection are used as litter dens. Born blind, kittens are completely dependent on their mother at first, and begin to be weaned at around three months of age. As they grow, they begin to go out on forays with their mother, first visiting kill sites, and after six months beginning to hunt small prey on their own. Kitten survival rates are just over one per litter.
Sub-adults leave their mother to attempt to establish their own territory at around two years of age and sometimes earlier; males tend to leave sooner. One study has shown high morbidity amongst cougars that travel farthest from the maternal range, often due to conflicts with other cougars ("intraspecific" conflict). Research in New Mexico has shown that "males dispersed significantly farther than females, were more likely to traverse large expanses of non-cougar habitat, and were probably most responsible for nuclear gene flow between habitat patches."
Life expectancy in the wild is reported at between 8 to 13 years, and probably averages 8 to 10; a female of at least 18 years was reported killed by hunters on Vancouver Island. Cougars may live as long as 20 years in captivity. One male North American cougar, named Scratch, was two months short of his 30th birthday when he died in 2007. Causes of death in the wild include disability and disease, competition with other cougars, starvation, accidents, and, where allowed, human hunting. Feline immunodeficiency virus, an endemic AIDS-like disease in cats, is well-adapted to the cougar.
Like almost all cats, the cougar is a solitary animal. Only mothers and kittens live in groups, with adults meeting only to mate. It is secretive and crepuscular, being most active around dawn and dusk.
Estimates of territory sizes vary greatly.
Canadian Geographic reports large male territories of 150 to 1000 square kilometers (58 to 386 sq mi) with female ranges half the size. Other research suggests a much smaller lower limit of 25 km 2 (10 sq mi) but an even greater upper limit of 1300 km 2 (500 sq mi) for males. In the United States, very large ranges have been reported in Texas and the Black Hills of the northern Great Plains, in excess of 775 km 2 (300 sq mi). Male ranges may include or overlap with those of females but, at least where studied, not with those of other males, which serves to reduce conflict between cougars. Ranges of females may overlap slightly with each other. Scrape marks, urine, and feces are used to mark territory and attract mates. Males may scrape together a small pile of leaves and grasses and then urinate on it as a way of marking territory.
Home range sizes and overall cougar abundance depend on terrain, vegetation, and prey abundance. One female adjacent to the San Andres Mountains, for instance, was found with a large range of 215 km 2 (83 sq mi), necessitated by poor prey abundance. Research has shown cougar abundances from 0.5 animals to as much as 7 (in one study in South America) per 100 km 2 (38 sq mi).
Because males disperse further than females and compete more directly for mates and territory, they are most likely to be involved in conflict. Where a sub-adult fails to leave his maternal range, for example, he may be killed by his father. When males encounter each other, they hiss, spit, and may engage in violent conflict if neither backs down. Hunting or relocation of the cougar may increase aggressive encounters by disrupting territories and bringing young, transient animals into conflict with established individuals.
The cougar has the largest range of any wild land animal in the Americas. Its range spans 110 degrees of latitude, from northern Yukon in Canada to the southern Andes. It is one of only three cat species, along with the bobcat and Canadian lynx, native to Canada. Its wide distribution stems from its adaptability to virtually every habitat type: it is found in all forest types as well as in lowland and mountainous deserts. Studies show that the Cougar prefers regions with dense underbrush, but can live with little vegetation in open areas. Its preferred habitats include precipitous canyons, escarpments, rim rocks, and dense brush.
Cougar, photographed in the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, Tucson, Arizona.
The cougar was extirpated across much of its eastern North American range (with the exception of Florida) in the two centuries after European colonization, and faced grave threats in the remainder of its territory. Currently, it ranges across most western American states, the Canadian provinces of Alberta and British Columbia, and the Canadian Yukon Territory. There have been widely debated reports of possible recolonization of eastern North America. DNA evidence has suggested its presence in eastern North America, , while a consolidated map of cougar sightings shows numerous reports, from the mid-western Great Plains through to Eastern Canada. The Cougar Network methodology is recognized by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The Quebec wildlife services (known locally as MRNF) also considers Cougar to be present in the province as a threatened species after multiple DNA tests confirmed cougar hair in Lynx mating sites. Ministry of Wildlife and natural resources Wildlife Service. The only unequivocally known eastern population is the Florida panther, which is critically endangered. There have also been sightings in Elliotsville, Maine (in the central part of the state); and in New Hampshire, there have been recent sightings as early as 1997. In 2009, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources confirmed a cougar sighting in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Skinner, Victor. 2009. Photo shows cougar presence in Michigan. The Grand Rapids Press. November 15, 2009 Typically, extreme-range sightings of cougars involve young males, who can travel great distances to establish ranges away from established males; all four confirmed cougar kills in Iowa since 2000 involved males.
On April 14, 2008 police shot and killed a cougar on the north side of Chicago, Illinois. DNA tests were consistent with cougars from the Black Hills. Less than one year later, on March 5, 2009, a cougar was photographed and unsuccessfully tranquilized by state wildlife biologists in a tree near Spooner, Wisconsin in the northwestern part of the state.
South of the Rio Grande, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) lists the cat in every Central and South American country except Costa Rica and Panama. While specific state and provincial statistics are often available in North America, much less is known about the cat in its southern range.
The cougar's total breeding population is estimated at less than 50,000 by the IUCN, with a declining trend. U.S. state-level statistics are often more optimistic, suggesting cougar populations have rebounded. In Oregon, a healthy population of 5,000 was reported in 2006, exceeding a target of 3,000. California has actively sought to protect the cat and a similar number of cougars has been suggested, between 4,000 and 6,000.
Aside from humans, no species preys upon mature cougars in the wild. The cat is not, however, the apex predator throughout much of its range. In its northern range, the cougar interacts with other powerful predators such as the brown bear and gray wolf. In the south, the cougar must compete with the larger jaguar. In Florida it encounters the American Alligator.
thumbFront paw print of a cougar. An adult paw print is approximately 10 cm (4 inches) long.
The Yellowstone National Park ecosystem provides a fruitful microcosm to study inter-predator interaction in North America. Of the three large predators, the massive brown bear appears dominant, often although not always able to drive both the gray wolf pack and the cougar off their kills. One study found that Brown or American Black Bears visited 24% of cougar kills in Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks, usurping 10% of carcasses.
The gray wolf and the cougar compete more directly for prey, especially in winter. While individually more powerful than the gray wolf, a solitary cougar may be dominated by the pack structure of the canines. Wolves can steal kills and occasionally kill the cat. One report describes a large pack of fourteen wolves killing a female cougar and her kittens. Conversely, lone wolves are at a disadvantage, and have been reported killed by cougars. Wolves more broadly affect cougar population dynamics and distribution by dominating territory and prey opportunities, and disrupting the feline's behavior. Preliminary research in Yellowstone, for instance, has shown displacement of the cougar by wolves. One researcher in Oregon notes: "When there is a pack around, cougars are not comfortable around their kills or raising kittens ... A lot of times a big cougar will kill a wolf, but the pack phenomenon changes the table." Both species, meanwhile, are capable of killing mid-sized predators such as bobcats and coyotes and tend to suppress their numbers.
In the southern portion of its range, the cougar and jaguar share overlapping territory. The jaguar tends to take larger prey and the cougar smaller where they overlap, reducing the cougar's size. Of the two felines, the cougar appears best able to exploit a broader prey niche and smaller prey.
As with any predator at or near the top of its food chain, the cougar impacts the population of prey species. Predation by cougars has been linked to changes in the species mix of deer in a region. For example, a study in British Columbia observed that the population of mule deer, a favored cougar prey, was declining while the population of the less frequently preyed-upon white-tailed deer was increasing. The Vancouver Island Marmot, an endangered species endemic to one region of dense cougar population, has seen decreased numbers due to cougar and gray wolf predation.
In the southern part of South America the Puma is a top level predator that has controlled the population of Guanaco and other species since prehistoric times.
Pumapard, taken in 1904
A pumapard is a hybrid animal resulting from a union between a cougar and a leopard. Three sets of these hybrids were bred in the late 1890s and early 1900s by Carl Hagenbeck at his animal park in Hamburg, Germany. Most did not reach adulthood. One of these was purchased in 1898 by Berlin Zoo. A similar hybrid in Berlin Zoo purchased from Hagenbeck was a cross between a male leopard and a female puma. Hamburg Zoo's specimen was the reverse pairing, the one in the black and white photo, fathered by a puma bred to an Indian leopardess.
Whether born to a female puma mated to a male leopard, or to a male puma mated to a female leopard, pumapards inherit a form of dwarfism. Those reported grew to only half the size of the parents. They have a puma-like long body (proportional to the limbs, but nevertheless shorter than either parent), but short legs. The coat is variously described as sandy, tawny or greyish with brown, chestnut or "faded" rosettes.
The World Conservation Union (IUCN) currently lists the cougar as a "least concern" species. The cougar is regulated under Appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), rendering illegal international trade in specimens or parts.
Cougar conservation depends on preservation of their habitat.
In the United States east of the Mississippi River, the only unequivocally known cougar population is the Florida panther. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service recognizes both an Eastern cougar and the Florida panther, affording protection under the Endangered Species Act. Certain taxonomic authorities have collapsed both designations into the North American Cougar, with Eastern or Florida subspecies not recognized, while a subspecies designation remains recognized by some conservation scientists. The most recent documented count for the Florida sub-population is 87 individuals, reported by recovery agencies in 2003.
The cougar is also protected across much of the rest of their range. As of 1996, cougar hunting was prohibited in Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, French Guiana, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Suriname, Venezuela, and Uruguay. (Costa Rica and Panama are not listed as current range countries by the IUCN.) The cat had no reported legal protection in Ecuador, El Salvador, and Guyana. Regulated cougar hunting is still common in the United States and Canada, although they are protected from all hunting in the Yukon.; it is permitted in every U.S. state from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, with the exception of California. Texas is the only state in the United States with a viable population of cougars that does not protect, in some way, of its cougar population. In Texas, cougars are listed as nuisance wildlife and any person holding a hunting or a trapping permit can kill a cougar regardless of the season, number killed, sex or age of the animal. Killed animals are not required to be reported to Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. Conservation work in Texas is the effort of a non profit organization, Balanced Ecology Inc. (BEI), as part of their Texas Mountain Lion Conservation Project . Cougars are generally hunted with packs of dogs, until the animal is 'treed'. When the hunter arrives on the scene, he shoots the cat from the tree at close range. The Cougar cannot be legally killed in California except under very specific circumstances, such as when an individual is declared a public safety threat. However statistics from the Department of Fish and Game indicate that cougar killings in California have been on the rise since 1970s with an average of over 112 cats killed per year from 2000 to 2006 compared to six per year in the 1970s. The Bay Area Puma Project aims to obtain information on cougar populations in the San Francisco Bay area and the animals' interactions with habitat, prey, humans, and residential communities.
Conservation threats to the species include persecution as a pest animal, degradation and fragmentation of their habitat, and depletion of their prey base. Wildlife corridor and sufficient range areas are critical to the sustainability of cougar populations. Research simulations have shown that the animal faces a low extinction risk in areas of 2200 km 2 (850 sq mi) or more. As few as one to four new animals entering a population per decade markedly increases persistence, foregrounding the importance of habitat corridors.
Moche puma, Larco Museum collection
The grace and power of the cougar have been widely admired in the cultures of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. The Inca city of Cusco is reported to have been designed in the shape of a cougar, and the animal also gave its name to both Inca regions and people. The Moche people represented the puma often in their ceramics. Berrin, Katherine & Larco Museum. The Spirit of Ancient Peru:Treasures from the Museo Arqueológico Rafael Larco Herrera. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1997. The sky and thunder god of the Inca, Viracocha, has been associated with the animal.
In North America, mythological descriptions of the cougar have appeared in the stories of the HocÄ
k language ("Ho-Chunk" or "Winnebago") of Wisconsin and Illinois Cougars, The Encyclopedia of HoÄÄ
k (Winnebago) Mythology. Retrieved: 2009/12/08. and the Cheyenne, amongst others. To the Apache and Walapai of Arizona, the wail of the Cougar was a harbinger of death.
During the early years of ranching, cougars were considered on par with wolves in destructiveness. According to figures in Texas in 1990, 86 calves (0.0006% of a total of 13.4 million cattle & calves in Texas), 253 Mohair goats, 302 Mohair kids, 445 sheep (0.02% of a total of 2.0 million sheep & lambs in Texas) and 562 lambs (0.04% of 1.2 million lambs in Texas) were confirmed to have been killed by cougars that year. In Nevada in 1992, cougars were confirmed to have killed 9 calves, 1 horse, 4 colts, 5 goats, 318 sheep and 400 lambs. In both cases, sheep were the most frequently attacked. Some instances of surplus killing have resulted in the deaths of 20 sheep in one attack. Cougars frequently kill calves, sheep and goats by biting the top of the neck or head, differing greatly from the throat bite used by coyotes and indiscriminate mutilation by feral dogs. The size of the tooth puncture marks also helps distinguish kills made by cougars from those made by smaller predators.
Mountain Lion warning sign
Due to the expanding human population, cougar ranges increasingly overlap with areas inhabited by humans. Attacks on humans are rare, as cougar prey recognition is a learned behavior and they do not generally recognize humans as prey. Attacks on people, livestock, and pets may occur when the cat habituates to humans or is in a condition of severe starvation. Attacks are most frequent during late spring and summer, when juvenile cougars leave their mothers and search for new territory.
Between 1890 and 1990, in North America there were 53 reported, confirmed attacks on humans, resulting in 48 nonfatal injuries and 10 deaths of humans (the total is greater than 53 because some attacks had more than one victim). By 2004, the count had climbed to 88 attacks and 20 deaths.
Within North America, the distribution of attacks is not uniform. The heavily populated state of California has seen a dozen attacks since 1986 (after just three from 1890 to 1985), including three fatalities. Lightly populated New Mexico reported an attack in 2008, the first there since 1974. Search continues for mountain lion that killed Pinos Altos man, New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, press release June 23, 2008]; Wounded mountain lion captured, killed near Pinos Altos, New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, press release June 25, 2008]; Second mountain lion captured near Pinos Altos, New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, press release July 1, 2008]
As with many predators, a cougar may attack if cornered, if a fleeing human stimulates their instinct to chase, or if a person "plays dead." Exaggerating the threat to the animal through intense eye contact, loud but calm shouting, and any other action to appear larger and more menacing, may make the animal retreat. Fighting back with sticks and rocks, or even bare hands, is often effective in persuading an attacking cougar to disengage.
When cougars do attack, they usually employ their characteristic neck bite, attempting to position their teeth between the vertebrae and into the spinal cord. Neck, head, and spinal injuries are common and sometimes fatal. Children are at greatest risk of attack, and least likely to survive an encounter. Detailed research into attacks prior to 1991 showed that 64% of all victims and almost all fatalities were children. The same study showed the highest proportion of attacks to have occurred in British Columbia, particularly on Vancouver Island where cougar populations are especially dense.
*List of fatal cougar attacks in North America
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* Video, Pictures and Information on Mountain Lions
* A Definitive Resource About Cougars Comprehensive, non-profit site with extensive information about cougars, from how to live safely in cougar country, to science abstracts, hunting regulations, state-by-state cougar management/policy info, and rare photos and videos of wild cougars.
* Description of a Cougar attack
* Cougar Facts and Photos â NatureMapping Program
* No Place for Predators? Liza Gross, PLoS Biology, explains how Washington State wildlife officials implemented a hunting policy, in response to a state measure passed to protect wildlife, that led to the highest rates of human-caused cougar mortality since the height of the bounty era
* Cougar Tracks: How to identify cougar tracks in the wild
* The sound of a cougar screaming
* Link to Worldwide Wild Cat Conservation site
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Cougar | How long are cougar adult males (from nose to tail)? | The length of adult males is around 2.4 meters (8 ft) long nose to tail. | data/set1/a2 | Cougar
The cougar (Puma concolor), also known as puma, mountain lion, mountain cat, catamount or panther, depending on the region, is a mammal of the family Felidae, native to the Americas. This large, solitary cat has the greatest range of any large wild terrestrial mammal in the Western Hemisphere, extending from Yukon in Canada to the southern Andes of South America. An adaptable, generalist species, the cougar is found in every major American habitat type. It is the second heaviest cat in the American continents after the jaguar, and the fourth heaviest in the world, after the tiger, lion, and jaguar. Although large, the cougar is most closely related to smaller felines.
A capable stalk-and-ambush predator, the cougar pursues a wide variety of prey. Primary food sources include ungulates such as deer, elk, and bighorn sheep, as well as domestic cattle, horses and sheep, particularly in the northern part of its range. It will also hunt species as small as insects and rodents. This cat prefers habitats with dense underbrush and rocky areas for stalking, but it can also live in open areas. The cougar is territorial and persists at low population densities. Individual territory sizes depend on terrain, vegetation, and abundance of prey. While it is a large predator, it is not always the dominant species in its range, as when it competes for prey with other predators such as the jaguar, grey wolf, American Black Bear, and the grizzly bear. It is a reclusive cat and usually avoids people. Attacks on humans remain rare, despite a recent increase in frequency.
Due to excessive hunting following the European colonization of the Americas, and continuing human development of cougar habitat, populations have dropped in most parts of its historical range. In particular, the cougar was extirpated in eastern North America, except for an isolated sub-population in Florida; the animal may be recolonizing parts of its former eastern territory, such as Maine and northern Michigan, /ref> where there have been recent sightings. With its vast range, the cougar has dozens of names and various references in the mythology of the indigenous Americans and in contemporary culture. The cougar has recently made a comeback in the state of Wyoming, where it presently has the largest population in North America .
The cougar has numerous names in English, of which puma and mountain lion are popular. Other names include catamount, panther, mountain screamer and painter. Lexicographers regard painter as a primarily upper-Southern U.S. regional variant on "panther", but a folk etymology, fancying a resemblance between the typically dark tip of its tail and a paintbrush dipped in dark paint, has some currency.
The cougar holds the Guinness record for the animal with the highest number of names, presumably due to its wide distribution across North and South America. It has over 40 names in English alone.
"Cougar" may be borrowed from the Portuguese çuçuarana, via French; the term was originally derived from the Tupi language. A current form in Brazil is suçuarana. It may also be borrowed from the Guaranà language term guaçu ara or guazu ara. "Puma" comes, via Spanish, from the Quechua language. Cougar, Puma and
The cougar is the largest of the small cats. It is placed in the subfamily Felinae, although its bulk characteristics are similar to those of the big cats in the subfamily Pantherinae. The family Felidae is believed to have originated in Asia approximately 11 million years ago. Taxonomic research on felids remains partial and much of what is known about their evolutionary history is based on mitochondrial DNA analysis, as cats are poorly represented in the fossil record, and there are significant confidence intervals with suggested dates.
Although large, the cougar is closely related to small felines.
In the latest genomic study of Felidae, the common ancestor of today's Leopardus, Lynx, Puma, Prionailurus, and Felis lineages migrated across the Bering land bridge into the Americas approximately 8 to 8.5 million years (Ma) ago. The lineages subsequently diverged in that order. North American felids then invaded South America 3 Ma ago as part of the Great American Interchange, following formation of the Isthmus of Panama. The cougar was originally thought to belong in Felis (Felis concolor), the genus which includes the domestic cat. As of 1993, it is now placed in Puma along with the jaguarundi, a cat just a little more than a tenth its weight.
Studies have indicated that the cougar and jaguarundi are most closely related to the modern cheetah of Africa and western Asia, but the relationship is unresolved. It has been suggested that the cheetah lineage diverged from the Puma lineage in the Americas (see American cheetah) and migrated back to Asia and Africa, while other research suggests the cheetah diverged in the Old World itself. The outline of small feline migration to the Americas is thus unclear.
Recent studies have demonstrated a high level of genetic similarity among the North American cougar populations, suggesting that they are all fairly recent descendants of a small ancestral group. Culver et al. suggest that the original North American population of Puma concolor was extirpated during the Pleistocene extinctions some 10,000 years ago, when other large mammals such as Smilodon also disappeared. North America was then repopulated by a group of South American cougars.
Until the late 1990s, as many as 32 subspecies were recorded; however, a recent genetic study of mitochondrial DNA found that many of these are too similar to be recognized as distinct at a molecular level. Following the research, the canonical Mammal Species of the World (3rd edition) recognizes six subspecies, five of which are solely found in Latin America:
; Argentine puma : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms hudsonii and puma (Marcelli, 1922);
; Costa Rican Cougar
; Eastern South American cougar : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms acrocodia, borbensis, capricornensis, concolor (Pelzeln, 1883), greeni and nigra;
; North American Cougar : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms arundivaga, aztecus, browni, californica, coryi, floridana, hippolestes, improcera, kaibabensis, mayensis, missoulensis, olympus, oregonensis, schorgeri, stanleyana, vancouverensis and youngi;
; Northern South American cougar : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms bangsi, incarum, osgoodi, soasoaranna, sussuarana, soderstromii, sucuacuara and wavula;
; Southern South American puma : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms araucanus, concolor (Gay, 1847), patagonica, pearsoni and puma (Trouessart, 1904)
The status of the Florida panther, here collapsed into the North American Cougar, remains uncertain. It is still regularly listed as subspecies Puma concolor coryi in research works, including those directly concerned with its conservation. Culver et al. themselves noted low microsatellite variation in the Florida panther, possibly due to inbreeding; responding to the research, one conservation team suggests "the degree to which the scientific community has accepted the results of Culver et al. and the proposed change in taxonomy is not resolved at this time."
Cougars are slender and agile cats. Adults stand about 60 to 76 centimeters (2.0 to 2.5 ft) tall at the shoulders. The length of adult males is around 2.4 meters (8 ft) long nose to tail, with overall ranges between 1.5 and 2.75 m (5 and 9 ft) nose to tail suggested for the species in general. Males typically weigh 53 to 90 kilograms (115 to 198 pounds), averaging 62 kg (137 lb). In rare cases, some may reach over 120 kg (264 lb). Females typically weigh between 29 and 64 kg (64 and 141 lb), averaging 42 kg (93 lb). /ref> /ref> Cougar size is smallest close to the equator, and larger towards the poles.
Although cougars resemble the domestic cat, they are about the same size as an adult human.
The head of the cat is round and the ears erect. Its powerful forequarters, neck, and jaw serve to grasp and hold large prey. It has five retractable claws on its forepaws (one a dewclaw) and four on its hind paws. The larger front feet and claws are adaptations to clutching prey.
Cougars can be almost as large as jaguars, but are less muscular and not as powerful; where their ranges overlap, the cougar tends to be smaller than average. The cougar is on average as heavy as the leopard. Despite its size, it is not typically classified among the "big cats," as it cannot roar, lacking the specialized larynx and hyoid apparatus of Panthera. Like domestic cats, cougars vocalize low-pitched hisses, growls, and purrs, as well as chirps and whistles. They are well known for their screams, as referenced in some of their common names, although these screams are often misinterpreted to be the calls of other animals.
Rear paw of a cougar
Cougar coloring is plain (hence the Latin concolor) but can vary greatly between individuals and even between siblings. The coat is typically tawny, but ranges to silvery-grey or reddish, with lighter patches on the under body including the jaws, chin, and throat. Infants are spotted and born with blue eyes and rings on their tails; juveniles are pale, and dark spots remain on their flanks. Despite anecdotes to the contrary, all-black coloring (melanism) has never been documented in cougars. The term "black panther" is used colloquially to refer to melanistic individuals of other species, particularly jaguars and leopards.
Cougars have large paws and proportionally the largest hind legs in the cat family. This physique allows it great leaping and short-sprint ability. An exceptional vertical leap of 5.4 m (18 ft) is reported for the cougar. Horizontal jumping capability from standing position is suggested anywhere from 6 to 12 m (20 to 40 ft). The cougar can run as fast as 55 to 72 km/h (35 to 45 mi/h), but is best adapted for short, powerful sprints rather than long chases. It is adept at climbing, which allows it to evade canine competitors. Although it is not strongly associated with water, it can swim.
A successful generalist predator, the cougar will eat any animal it can catch, from insects to large ungulates (over 500 kg). Like all cats, it is an obligate carnivore, feeding only on meat. The Mean weight of vertebrate prey (MWVP) was positively correlated (r=0.875) with puma body weight and inversely correlated (r=-0.836) with food niche breadth in all America. In general, MWVP was lower in areas closer to the Equator. Its most important prey species are various deer species, particularly in North America; mule deer, white-tailed deer, elk, and even large moose are taken by the cat. Other species such as Bighorn Sheep, wild horses of Arizona, domestic horses, and domestic livestock such as cattle and sheep are also primary food bases in many areas. A survey of North America research found 68% of prey items were ungulates, especially deer. Only the Florida Panther showed variation, often preferring feral hogs and armadillos.
Shown eating. Cougars are ambush predators, feeding mostly on deer and other mammals.
Investigation in Yellowstone National Park showed that elk, followed by mule deer, were the cougar's primary targets; the prey base is shared with the park's gray wolves, with whom the cougar competes for resources.
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* Another study on winter kills (NovemberâApril) in Alberta showed that ungulates accounted for greater than 99% of the cougar diet. Learned, individual prey recognition was observed, as some cougars rarely killed bighorn sheep, while others relied heavily on the species.
In the Central and South American cougar range, the ratio of deer in the diet declines. Small to mid-size mammals are preferred, including large rodents such as the capybara. Ungulates accounted for only 35% of prey items in one survey, approximately half that of North America. Competition with the larger jaguar has been suggested for the decline in the size of prey items. Other listed prey species of the cougar include mice, porcupine, and hares. Birds and small reptiles are sometimes preyed upon in the south, but this is rarely recorded in North America.
Though capable of sprinting, the cougar is typically an ambush predator. It stalks through brush and trees, across ledges, or other covered spots, before delivering a powerful leap onto the back of its prey and a suffocating neck bite. The cougar is capable of breaking the neck of some of its smaller prey with a strong bite and momentum bearing the animal to the ground.
Kills are generally estimated at around one large ungulate every two weeks. The period shrinks for females raising young, and may be as short as one kill every three days when cubs are nearly mature at around 15 months. The cat drags a kill to a preferred spot, covers it with brush, and returns to feed over a period of days. It is generally reported that the cougar is a non-scavenger and will rarely consume prey it has not killed; but deer carcasses left exposed for study were scavenged by cougars in California, suggesting more opportunistic behavior.
Females reach sexual maturity between one-and-a-half to three years of age. They typically average one litter every two to three years throughout their reproductive life, though the period can be as short as one year. Females are in estrus for approximately 8 days of a 23-day cycle; the gestation period is approximately 91 days. Females are sometimes reported as monogamous, but this is uncertain and polygyny may be more common. Copulation is brief but frequent.
Cougar kittens
Only females are involved in parenting. Female cougars are fiercely protective of their kittens, and have been seen to successfully fight off animals as large as grizzly bears in their defense. Litter size is between one and six kittens; typically two or three. Caves and other alcoves that offer protection are used as litter dens. Born blind, kittens are completely dependent on their mother at first, and begin to be weaned at around three months of age. As they grow, they begin to go out on forays with their mother, first visiting kill sites, and after six months beginning to hunt small prey on their own. Kitten survival rates are just over one per litter.
Sub-adults leave their mother to attempt to establish their own territory at around two years of age and sometimes earlier; males tend to leave sooner. One study has shown high morbidity amongst cougars that travel farthest from the maternal range, often due to conflicts with other cougars ("intraspecific" conflict). Research in New Mexico has shown that "males dispersed significantly farther than females, were more likely to traverse large expanses of non-cougar habitat, and were probably most responsible for nuclear gene flow between habitat patches."
Life expectancy in the wild is reported at between 8 to 13 years, and probably averages 8 to 10; a female of at least 18 years was reported killed by hunters on Vancouver Island. Cougars may live as long as 20 years in captivity. One male North American cougar, named Scratch, was two months short of his 30th birthday when he died in 2007. Causes of death in the wild include disability and disease, competition with other cougars, starvation, accidents, and, where allowed, human hunting. Feline immunodeficiency virus, an endemic AIDS-like disease in cats, is well-adapted to the cougar.
Like almost all cats, the cougar is a solitary animal. Only mothers and kittens live in groups, with adults meeting only to mate. It is secretive and crepuscular, being most active around dawn and dusk.
Estimates of territory sizes vary greatly.
Canadian Geographic reports large male territories of 150 to 1000 square kilometers (58 to 386 sq mi) with female ranges half the size. Other research suggests a much smaller lower limit of 25 km 2 (10 sq mi) but an even greater upper limit of 1300 km 2 (500 sq mi) for males. In the United States, very large ranges have been reported in Texas and the Black Hills of the northern Great Plains, in excess of 775 km 2 (300 sq mi). Male ranges may include or overlap with those of females but, at least where studied, not with those of other males, which serves to reduce conflict between cougars. Ranges of females may overlap slightly with each other. Scrape marks, urine, and feces are used to mark territory and attract mates. Males may scrape together a small pile of leaves and grasses and then urinate on it as a way of marking territory.
Home range sizes and overall cougar abundance depend on terrain, vegetation, and prey abundance. One female adjacent to the San Andres Mountains, for instance, was found with a large range of 215 km 2 (83 sq mi), necessitated by poor prey abundance. Research has shown cougar abundances from 0.5 animals to as much as 7 (in one study in South America) per 100 km 2 (38 sq mi).
Because males disperse further than females and compete more directly for mates and territory, they are most likely to be involved in conflict. Where a sub-adult fails to leave his maternal range, for example, he may be killed by his father. When males encounter each other, they hiss, spit, and may engage in violent conflict if neither backs down. Hunting or relocation of the cougar may increase aggressive encounters by disrupting territories and bringing young, transient animals into conflict with established individuals.
The cougar has the largest range of any wild land animal in the Americas. Its range spans 110 degrees of latitude, from northern Yukon in Canada to the southern Andes. It is one of only three cat species, along with the bobcat and Canadian lynx, native to Canada. Its wide distribution stems from its adaptability to virtually every habitat type: it is found in all forest types as well as in lowland and mountainous deserts. Studies show that the Cougar prefers regions with dense underbrush, but can live with little vegetation in open areas. Its preferred habitats include precipitous canyons, escarpments, rim rocks, and dense brush.
Cougar, photographed in the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, Tucson, Arizona.
The cougar was extirpated across much of its eastern North American range (with the exception of Florida) in the two centuries after European colonization, and faced grave threats in the remainder of its territory. Currently, it ranges across most western American states, the Canadian provinces of Alberta and British Columbia, and the Canadian Yukon Territory. There have been widely debated reports of possible recolonization of eastern North America. DNA evidence has suggested its presence in eastern North America, , while a consolidated map of cougar sightings shows numerous reports, from the mid-western Great Plains through to Eastern Canada. The Cougar Network methodology is recognized by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The Quebec wildlife services (known locally as MRNF) also considers Cougar to be present in the province as a threatened species after multiple DNA tests confirmed cougar hair in Lynx mating sites. Ministry of Wildlife and natural resources Wildlife Service. The only unequivocally known eastern population is the Florida panther, which is critically endangered. There have also been sightings in Elliotsville, Maine (in the central part of the state); and in New Hampshire, there have been recent sightings as early as 1997. In 2009, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources confirmed a cougar sighting in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Skinner, Victor. 2009. Photo shows cougar presence in Michigan. The Grand Rapids Press. November 15, 2009 Typically, extreme-range sightings of cougars involve young males, who can travel great distances to establish ranges away from established males; all four confirmed cougar kills in Iowa since 2000 involved males.
On April 14, 2008 police shot and killed a cougar on the north side of Chicago, Illinois. DNA tests were consistent with cougars from the Black Hills. Less than one year later, on March 5, 2009, a cougar was photographed and unsuccessfully tranquilized by state wildlife biologists in a tree near Spooner, Wisconsin in the northwestern part of the state.
South of the Rio Grande, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) lists the cat in every Central and South American country except Costa Rica and Panama. While specific state and provincial statistics are often available in North America, much less is known about the cat in its southern range.
The cougar's total breeding population is estimated at less than 50,000 by the IUCN, with a declining trend. U.S. state-level statistics are often more optimistic, suggesting cougar populations have rebounded. In Oregon, a healthy population of 5,000 was reported in 2006, exceeding a target of 3,000. California has actively sought to protect the cat and a similar number of cougars has been suggested, between 4,000 and 6,000.
Aside from humans, no species preys upon mature cougars in the wild. The cat is not, however, the apex predator throughout much of its range. In its northern range, the cougar interacts with other powerful predators such as the brown bear and gray wolf. In the south, the cougar must compete with the larger jaguar. In Florida it encounters the American Alligator.
thumbFront paw print of a cougar. An adult paw print is approximately 10 cm (4 inches) long.
The Yellowstone National Park ecosystem provides a fruitful microcosm to study inter-predator interaction in North America. Of the three large predators, the massive brown bear appears dominant, often although not always able to drive both the gray wolf pack and the cougar off their kills. One study found that Brown or American Black Bears visited 24% of cougar kills in Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks, usurping 10% of carcasses.
The gray wolf and the cougar compete more directly for prey, especially in winter. While individually more powerful than the gray wolf, a solitary cougar may be dominated by the pack structure of the canines. Wolves can steal kills and occasionally kill the cat. One report describes a large pack of fourteen wolves killing a female cougar and her kittens. Conversely, lone wolves are at a disadvantage, and have been reported killed by cougars. Wolves more broadly affect cougar population dynamics and distribution by dominating territory and prey opportunities, and disrupting the feline's behavior. Preliminary research in Yellowstone, for instance, has shown displacement of the cougar by wolves. One researcher in Oregon notes: "When there is a pack around, cougars are not comfortable around their kills or raising kittens ... A lot of times a big cougar will kill a wolf, but the pack phenomenon changes the table." Both species, meanwhile, are capable of killing mid-sized predators such as bobcats and coyotes and tend to suppress their numbers.
In the southern portion of its range, the cougar and jaguar share overlapping territory. The jaguar tends to take larger prey and the cougar smaller where they overlap, reducing the cougar's size. Of the two felines, the cougar appears best able to exploit a broader prey niche and smaller prey.
As with any predator at or near the top of its food chain, the cougar impacts the population of prey species. Predation by cougars has been linked to changes in the species mix of deer in a region. For example, a study in British Columbia observed that the population of mule deer, a favored cougar prey, was declining while the population of the less frequently preyed-upon white-tailed deer was increasing. The Vancouver Island Marmot, an endangered species endemic to one region of dense cougar population, has seen decreased numbers due to cougar and gray wolf predation.
In the southern part of South America the Puma is a top level predator that has controlled the population of Guanaco and other species since prehistoric times.
Pumapard, taken in 1904
A pumapard is a hybrid animal resulting from a union between a cougar and a leopard. Three sets of these hybrids were bred in the late 1890s and early 1900s by Carl Hagenbeck at his animal park in Hamburg, Germany. Most did not reach adulthood. One of these was purchased in 1898 by Berlin Zoo. A similar hybrid in Berlin Zoo purchased from Hagenbeck was a cross between a male leopard and a female puma. Hamburg Zoo's specimen was the reverse pairing, the one in the black and white photo, fathered by a puma bred to an Indian leopardess.
Whether born to a female puma mated to a male leopard, or to a male puma mated to a female leopard, pumapards inherit a form of dwarfism. Those reported grew to only half the size of the parents. They have a puma-like long body (proportional to the limbs, but nevertheless shorter than either parent), but short legs. The coat is variously described as sandy, tawny or greyish with brown, chestnut or "faded" rosettes.
The World Conservation Union (IUCN) currently lists the cougar as a "least concern" species. The cougar is regulated under Appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), rendering illegal international trade in specimens or parts.
Cougar conservation depends on preservation of their habitat.
In the United States east of the Mississippi River, the only unequivocally known cougar population is the Florida panther. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service recognizes both an Eastern cougar and the Florida panther, affording protection under the Endangered Species Act. Certain taxonomic authorities have collapsed both designations into the North American Cougar, with Eastern or Florida subspecies not recognized, while a subspecies designation remains recognized by some conservation scientists. The most recent documented count for the Florida sub-population is 87 individuals, reported by recovery agencies in 2003.
The cougar is also protected across much of the rest of their range. As of 1996, cougar hunting was prohibited in Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, French Guiana, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Suriname, Venezuela, and Uruguay. (Costa Rica and Panama are not listed as current range countries by the IUCN.) The cat had no reported legal protection in Ecuador, El Salvador, and Guyana. Regulated cougar hunting is still common in the United States and Canada, although they are protected from all hunting in the Yukon.; it is permitted in every U.S. state from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, with the exception of California. Texas is the only state in the United States with a viable population of cougars that does not protect, in some way, of its cougar population. In Texas, cougars are listed as nuisance wildlife and any person holding a hunting or a trapping permit can kill a cougar regardless of the season, number killed, sex or age of the animal. Killed animals are not required to be reported to Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. Conservation work in Texas is the effort of a non profit organization, Balanced Ecology Inc. (BEI), as part of their Texas Mountain Lion Conservation Project . Cougars are generally hunted with packs of dogs, until the animal is 'treed'. When the hunter arrives on the scene, he shoots the cat from the tree at close range. The Cougar cannot be legally killed in California except under very specific circumstances, such as when an individual is declared a public safety threat. However statistics from the Department of Fish and Game indicate that cougar killings in California have been on the rise since 1970s with an average of over 112 cats killed per year from 2000 to 2006 compared to six per year in the 1970s. The Bay Area Puma Project aims to obtain information on cougar populations in the San Francisco Bay area and the animals' interactions with habitat, prey, humans, and residential communities.
Conservation threats to the species include persecution as a pest animal, degradation and fragmentation of their habitat, and depletion of their prey base. Wildlife corridor and sufficient range areas are critical to the sustainability of cougar populations. Research simulations have shown that the animal faces a low extinction risk in areas of 2200 km 2 (850 sq mi) or more. As few as one to four new animals entering a population per decade markedly increases persistence, foregrounding the importance of habitat corridors.
Moche puma, Larco Museum collection
The grace and power of the cougar have been widely admired in the cultures of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. The Inca city of Cusco is reported to have been designed in the shape of a cougar, and the animal also gave its name to both Inca regions and people. The Moche people represented the puma often in their ceramics. Berrin, Katherine & Larco Museum. The Spirit of Ancient Peru:Treasures from the Museo Arqueológico Rafael Larco Herrera. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1997. The sky and thunder god of the Inca, Viracocha, has been associated with the animal.
In North America, mythological descriptions of the cougar have appeared in the stories of the HocÄ
k language ("Ho-Chunk" or "Winnebago") of Wisconsin and Illinois Cougars, The Encyclopedia of HoÄÄ
k (Winnebago) Mythology. Retrieved: 2009/12/08. and the Cheyenne, amongst others. To the Apache and Walapai of Arizona, the wail of the Cougar was a harbinger of death.
During the early years of ranching, cougars were considered on par with wolves in destructiveness. According to figures in Texas in 1990, 86 calves (0.0006% of a total of 13.4 million cattle & calves in Texas), 253 Mohair goats, 302 Mohair kids, 445 sheep (0.02% of a total of 2.0 million sheep & lambs in Texas) and 562 lambs (0.04% of 1.2 million lambs in Texas) were confirmed to have been killed by cougars that year. In Nevada in 1992, cougars were confirmed to have killed 9 calves, 1 horse, 4 colts, 5 goats, 318 sheep and 400 lambs. In both cases, sheep were the most frequently attacked. Some instances of surplus killing have resulted in the deaths of 20 sheep in one attack. Cougars frequently kill calves, sheep and goats by biting the top of the neck or head, differing greatly from the throat bite used by coyotes and indiscriminate mutilation by feral dogs. The size of the tooth puncture marks also helps distinguish kills made by cougars from those made by smaller predators.
Mountain Lion warning sign
Due to the expanding human population, cougar ranges increasingly overlap with areas inhabited by humans. Attacks on humans are rare, as cougar prey recognition is a learned behavior and they do not generally recognize humans as prey. Attacks on people, livestock, and pets may occur when the cat habituates to humans or is in a condition of severe starvation. Attacks are most frequent during late spring and summer, when juvenile cougars leave their mothers and search for new territory.
Between 1890 and 1990, in North America there were 53 reported, confirmed attacks on humans, resulting in 48 nonfatal injuries and 10 deaths of humans (the total is greater than 53 because some attacks had more than one victim). By 2004, the count had climbed to 88 attacks and 20 deaths.
Within North America, the distribution of attacks is not uniform. The heavily populated state of California has seen a dozen attacks since 1986 (after just three from 1890 to 1985), including three fatalities. Lightly populated New Mexico reported an attack in 2008, the first there since 1974. Search continues for mountain lion that killed Pinos Altos man, New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, press release June 23, 2008]; Wounded mountain lion captured, killed near Pinos Altos, New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, press release June 25, 2008]; Second mountain lion captured near Pinos Altos, New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, press release July 1, 2008]
As with many predators, a cougar may attack if cornered, if a fleeing human stimulates their instinct to chase, or if a person "plays dead." Exaggerating the threat to the animal through intense eye contact, loud but calm shouting, and any other action to appear larger and more menacing, may make the animal retreat. Fighting back with sticks and rocks, or even bare hands, is often effective in persuading an attacking cougar to disengage.
When cougars do attack, they usually employ their characteristic neck bite, attempting to position their teeth between the vertebrae and into the spinal cord. Neck, head, and spinal injuries are common and sometimes fatal. Children are at greatest risk of attack, and least likely to survive an encounter. Detailed research into attacks prior to 1991 showed that 64% of all victims and almost all fatalities were children. The same study showed the highest proportion of attacks to have occurred in British Columbia, particularly on Vancouver Island where cougar populations are especially dense.
*List of fatal cougar attacks in North America
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* Video, Pictures and Information on Mountain Lions
* A Definitive Resource About Cougars Comprehensive, non-profit site with extensive information about cougars, from how to live safely in cougar country, to science abstracts, hunting regulations, state-by-state cougar management/policy info, and rare photos and videos of wild cougars.
* Description of a Cougar attack
* Cougar Facts and Photos â NatureMapping Program
* No Place for Predators? Liza Gross, PLoS Biology, explains how Washington State wildlife officials implemented a hunting policy, in response to a state measure passed to protect wildlife, that led to the highest rates of human-caused cougar mortality since the height of the bounty era
* Cougar Tracks: How to identify cougar tracks in the wild
* The sound of a cougar screaming
* Link to Worldwide Wild Cat Conservation site
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Cougar | How long are cougar adult males (from nose to tail)? | 2.4 meters | data/set1/a2 | Cougar
The cougar (Puma concolor), also known as puma, mountain lion, mountain cat, catamount or panther, depending on the region, is a mammal of the family Felidae, native to the Americas. This large, solitary cat has the greatest range of any large wild terrestrial mammal in the Western Hemisphere, extending from Yukon in Canada to the southern Andes of South America. An adaptable, generalist species, the cougar is found in every major American habitat type. It is the second heaviest cat in the American continents after the jaguar, and the fourth heaviest in the world, after the tiger, lion, and jaguar. Although large, the cougar is most closely related to smaller felines.
A capable stalk-and-ambush predator, the cougar pursues a wide variety of prey. Primary food sources include ungulates such as deer, elk, and bighorn sheep, as well as domestic cattle, horses and sheep, particularly in the northern part of its range. It will also hunt species as small as insects and rodents. This cat prefers habitats with dense underbrush and rocky areas for stalking, but it can also live in open areas. The cougar is territorial and persists at low population densities. Individual territory sizes depend on terrain, vegetation, and abundance of prey. While it is a large predator, it is not always the dominant species in its range, as when it competes for prey with other predators such as the jaguar, grey wolf, American Black Bear, and the grizzly bear. It is a reclusive cat and usually avoids people. Attacks on humans remain rare, despite a recent increase in frequency.
Due to excessive hunting following the European colonization of the Americas, and continuing human development of cougar habitat, populations have dropped in most parts of its historical range. In particular, the cougar was extirpated in eastern North America, except for an isolated sub-population in Florida; the animal may be recolonizing parts of its former eastern territory, such as Maine and northern Michigan, /ref> where there have been recent sightings. With its vast range, the cougar has dozens of names and various references in the mythology of the indigenous Americans and in contemporary culture. The cougar has recently made a comeback in the state of Wyoming, where it presently has the largest population in North America .
The cougar has numerous names in English, of which puma and mountain lion are popular. Other names include catamount, panther, mountain screamer and painter. Lexicographers regard painter as a primarily upper-Southern U.S. regional variant on "panther", but a folk etymology, fancying a resemblance between the typically dark tip of its tail and a paintbrush dipped in dark paint, has some currency.
The cougar holds the Guinness record for the animal with the highest number of names, presumably due to its wide distribution across North and South America. It has over 40 names in English alone.
"Cougar" may be borrowed from the Portuguese çuçuarana, via French; the term was originally derived from the Tupi language. A current form in Brazil is suçuarana. It may also be borrowed from the Guaranà language term guaçu ara or guazu ara. "Puma" comes, via Spanish, from the Quechua language. Cougar, Puma and
The cougar is the largest of the small cats. It is placed in the subfamily Felinae, although its bulk characteristics are similar to those of the big cats in the subfamily Pantherinae. The family Felidae is believed to have originated in Asia approximately 11 million years ago. Taxonomic research on felids remains partial and much of what is known about their evolutionary history is based on mitochondrial DNA analysis, as cats are poorly represented in the fossil record, and there are significant confidence intervals with suggested dates.
Although large, the cougar is closely related to small felines.
In the latest genomic study of Felidae, the common ancestor of today's Leopardus, Lynx, Puma, Prionailurus, and Felis lineages migrated across the Bering land bridge into the Americas approximately 8 to 8.5 million years (Ma) ago. The lineages subsequently diverged in that order. North American felids then invaded South America 3 Ma ago as part of the Great American Interchange, following formation of the Isthmus of Panama. The cougar was originally thought to belong in Felis (Felis concolor), the genus which includes the domestic cat. As of 1993, it is now placed in Puma along with the jaguarundi, a cat just a little more than a tenth its weight.
Studies have indicated that the cougar and jaguarundi are most closely related to the modern cheetah of Africa and western Asia, but the relationship is unresolved. It has been suggested that the cheetah lineage diverged from the Puma lineage in the Americas (see American cheetah) and migrated back to Asia and Africa, while other research suggests the cheetah diverged in the Old World itself. The outline of small feline migration to the Americas is thus unclear.
Recent studies have demonstrated a high level of genetic similarity among the North American cougar populations, suggesting that they are all fairly recent descendants of a small ancestral group. Culver et al. suggest that the original North American population of Puma concolor was extirpated during the Pleistocene extinctions some 10,000 years ago, when other large mammals such as Smilodon also disappeared. North America was then repopulated by a group of South American cougars.
Until the late 1990s, as many as 32 subspecies were recorded; however, a recent genetic study of mitochondrial DNA found that many of these are too similar to be recognized as distinct at a molecular level. Following the research, the canonical Mammal Species of the World (3rd edition) recognizes six subspecies, five of which are solely found in Latin America:
; Argentine puma : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms hudsonii and puma (Marcelli, 1922);
; Costa Rican Cougar
; Eastern South American cougar : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms acrocodia, borbensis, capricornensis, concolor (Pelzeln, 1883), greeni and nigra;
; North American Cougar : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms arundivaga, aztecus, browni, californica, coryi, floridana, hippolestes, improcera, kaibabensis, mayensis, missoulensis, olympus, oregonensis, schorgeri, stanleyana, vancouverensis and youngi;
; Northern South American cougar : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms bangsi, incarum, osgoodi, soasoaranna, sussuarana, soderstromii, sucuacuara and wavula;
; Southern South American puma : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms araucanus, concolor (Gay, 1847), patagonica, pearsoni and puma (Trouessart, 1904)
The status of the Florida panther, here collapsed into the North American Cougar, remains uncertain. It is still regularly listed as subspecies Puma concolor coryi in research works, including those directly concerned with its conservation. Culver et al. themselves noted low microsatellite variation in the Florida panther, possibly due to inbreeding; responding to the research, one conservation team suggests "the degree to which the scientific community has accepted the results of Culver et al. and the proposed change in taxonomy is not resolved at this time."
Cougars are slender and agile cats. Adults stand about 60 to 76 centimeters (2.0 to 2.5 ft) tall at the shoulders. The length of adult males is around 2.4 meters (8 ft) long nose to tail, with overall ranges between 1.5 and 2.75 m (5 and 9 ft) nose to tail suggested for the species in general. Males typically weigh 53 to 90 kilograms (115 to 198 pounds), averaging 62 kg (137 lb). In rare cases, some may reach over 120 kg (264 lb). Females typically weigh between 29 and 64 kg (64 and 141 lb), averaging 42 kg (93 lb). /ref> /ref> Cougar size is smallest close to the equator, and larger towards the poles.
Although cougars resemble the domestic cat, they are about the same size as an adult human.
The head of the cat is round and the ears erect. Its powerful forequarters, neck, and jaw serve to grasp and hold large prey. It has five retractable claws on its forepaws (one a dewclaw) and four on its hind paws. The larger front feet and claws are adaptations to clutching prey.
Cougars can be almost as large as jaguars, but are less muscular and not as powerful; where their ranges overlap, the cougar tends to be smaller than average. The cougar is on average as heavy as the leopard. Despite its size, it is not typically classified among the "big cats," as it cannot roar, lacking the specialized larynx and hyoid apparatus of Panthera. Like domestic cats, cougars vocalize low-pitched hisses, growls, and purrs, as well as chirps and whistles. They are well known for their screams, as referenced in some of their common names, although these screams are often misinterpreted to be the calls of other animals.
Rear paw of a cougar
Cougar coloring is plain (hence the Latin concolor) but can vary greatly between individuals and even between siblings. The coat is typically tawny, but ranges to silvery-grey or reddish, with lighter patches on the under body including the jaws, chin, and throat. Infants are spotted and born with blue eyes and rings on their tails; juveniles are pale, and dark spots remain on their flanks. Despite anecdotes to the contrary, all-black coloring (melanism) has never been documented in cougars. The term "black panther" is used colloquially to refer to melanistic individuals of other species, particularly jaguars and leopards.
Cougars have large paws and proportionally the largest hind legs in the cat family. This physique allows it great leaping and short-sprint ability. An exceptional vertical leap of 5.4 m (18 ft) is reported for the cougar. Horizontal jumping capability from standing position is suggested anywhere from 6 to 12 m (20 to 40 ft). The cougar can run as fast as 55 to 72 km/h (35 to 45 mi/h), but is best adapted for short, powerful sprints rather than long chases. It is adept at climbing, which allows it to evade canine competitors. Although it is not strongly associated with water, it can swim.
A successful generalist predator, the cougar will eat any animal it can catch, from insects to large ungulates (over 500 kg). Like all cats, it is an obligate carnivore, feeding only on meat. The Mean weight of vertebrate prey (MWVP) was positively correlated (r=0.875) with puma body weight and inversely correlated (r=-0.836) with food niche breadth in all America. In general, MWVP was lower in areas closer to the Equator. Its most important prey species are various deer species, particularly in North America; mule deer, white-tailed deer, elk, and even large moose are taken by the cat. Other species such as Bighorn Sheep, wild horses of Arizona, domestic horses, and domestic livestock such as cattle and sheep are also primary food bases in many areas. A survey of North America research found 68% of prey items were ungulates, especially deer. Only the Florida Panther showed variation, often preferring feral hogs and armadillos.
Shown eating. Cougars are ambush predators, feeding mostly on deer and other mammals.
Investigation in Yellowstone National Park showed that elk, followed by mule deer, were the cougar's primary targets; the prey base is shared with the park's gray wolves, with whom the cougar competes for resources.
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* Another study on winter kills (NovemberâApril) in Alberta showed that ungulates accounted for greater than 99% of the cougar diet. Learned, individual prey recognition was observed, as some cougars rarely killed bighorn sheep, while others relied heavily on the species.
In the Central and South American cougar range, the ratio of deer in the diet declines. Small to mid-size mammals are preferred, including large rodents such as the capybara. Ungulates accounted for only 35% of prey items in one survey, approximately half that of North America. Competition with the larger jaguar has been suggested for the decline in the size of prey items. Other listed prey species of the cougar include mice, porcupine, and hares. Birds and small reptiles are sometimes preyed upon in the south, but this is rarely recorded in North America.
Though capable of sprinting, the cougar is typically an ambush predator. It stalks through brush and trees, across ledges, or other covered spots, before delivering a powerful leap onto the back of its prey and a suffocating neck bite. The cougar is capable of breaking the neck of some of its smaller prey with a strong bite and momentum bearing the animal to the ground.
Kills are generally estimated at around one large ungulate every two weeks. The period shrinks for females raising young, and may be as short as one kill every three days when cubs are nearly mature at around 15 months. The cat drags a kill to a preferred spot, covers it with brush, and returns to feed over a period of days. It is generally reported that the cougar is a non-scavenger and will rarely consume prey it has not killed; but deer carcasses left exposed for study were scavenged by cougars in California, suggesting more opportunistic behavior.
Females reach sexual maturity between one-and-a-half to three years of age. They typically average one litter every two to three years throughout their reproductive life, though the period can be as short as one year. Females are in estrus for approximately 8 days of a 23-day cycle; the gestation period is approximately 91 days. Females are sometimes reported as monogamous, but this is uncertain and polygyny may be more common. Copulation is brief but frequent.
Cougar kittens
Only females are involved in parenting. Female cougars are fiercely protective of their kittens, and have been seen to successfully fight off animals as large as grizzly bears in their defense. Litter size is between one and six kittens; typically two or three. Caves and other alcoves that offer protection are used as litter dens. Born blind, kittens are completely dependent on their mother at first, and begin to be weaned at around three months of age. As they grow, they begin to go out on forays with their mother, first visiting kill sites, and after six months beginning to hunt small prey on their own. Kitten survival rates are just over one per litter.
Sub-adults leave their mother to attempt to establish their own territory at around two years of age and sometimes earlier; males tend to leave sooner. One study has shown high morbidity amongst cougars that travel farthest from the maternal range, often due to conflicts with other cougars ("intraspecific" conflict). Research in New Mexico has shown that "males dispersed significantly farther than females, were more likely to traverse large expanses of non-cougar habitat, and were probably most responsible for nuclear gene flow between habitat patches."
Life expectancy in the wild is reported at between 8 to 13 years, and probably averages 8 to 10; a female of at least 18 years was reported killed by hunters on Vancouver Island. Cougars may live as long as 20 years in captivity. One male North American cougar, named Scratch, was two months short of his 30th birthday when he died in 2007. Causes of death in the wild include disability and disease, competition with other cougars, starvation, accidents, and, where allowed, human hunting. Feline immunodeficiency virus, an endemic AIDS-like disease in cats, is well-adapted to the cougar.
Like almost all cats, the cougar is a solitary animal. Only mothers and kittens live in groups, with adults meeting only to mate. It is secretive and crepuscular, being most active around dawn and dusk.
Estimates of territory sizes vary greatly.
Canadian Geographic reports large male territories of 150 to 1000 square kilometers (58 to 386 sq mi) with female ranges half the size. Other research suggests a much smaller lower limit of 25 km 2 (10 sq mi) but an even greater upper limit of 1300 km 2 (500 sq mi) for males. In the United States, very large ranges have been reported in Texas and the Black Hills of the northern Great Plains, in excess of 775 km 2 (300 sq mi). Male ranges may include or overlap with those of females but, at least where studied, not with those of other males, which serves to reduce conflict between cougars. Ranges of females may overlap slightly with each other. Scrape marks, urine, and feces are used to mark territory and attract mates. Males may scrape together a small pile of leaves and grasses and then urinate on it as a way of marking territory.
Home range sizes and overall cougar abundance depend on terrain, vegetation, and prey abundance. One female adjacent to the San Andres Mountains, for instance, was found with a large range of 215 km 2 (83 sq mi), necessitated by poor prey abundance. Research has shown cougar abundances from 0.5 animals to as much as 7 (in one study in South America) per 100 km 2 (38 sq mi).
Because males disperse further than females and compete more directly for mates and territory, they are most likely to be involved in conflict. Where a sub-adult fails to leave his maternal range, for example, he may be killed by his father. When males encounter each other, they hiss, spit, and may engage in violent conflict if neither backs down. Hunting or relocation of the cougar may increase aggressive encounters by disrupting territories and bringing young, transient animals into conflict with established individuals.
The cougar has the largest range of any wild land animal in the Americas. Its range spans 110 degrees of latitude, from northern Yukon in Canada to the southern Andes. It is one of only three cat species, along with the bobcat and Canadian lynx, native to Canada. Its wide distribution stems from its adaptability to virtually every habitat type: it is found in all forest types as well as in lowland and mountainous deserts. Studies show that the Cougar prefers regions with dense underbrush, but can live with little vegetation in open areas. Its preferred habitats include precipitous canyons, escarpments, rim rocks, and dense brush.
Cougar, photographed in the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, Tucson, Arizona.
The cougar was extirpated across much of its eastern North American range (with the exception of Florida) in the two centuries after European colonization, and faced grave threats in the remainder of its territory. Currently, it ranges across most western American states, the Canadian provinces of Alberta and British Columbia, and the Canadian Yukon Territory. There have been widely debated reports of possible recolonization of eastern North America. DNA evidence has suggested its presence in eastern North America, , while a consolidated map of cougar sightings shows numerous reports, from the mid-western Great Plains through to Eastern Canada. The Cougar Network methodology is recognized by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The Quebec wildlife services (known locally as MRNF) also considers Cougar to be present in the province as a threatened species after multiple DNA tests confirmed cougar hair in Lynx mating sites. Ministry of Wildlife and natural resources Wildlife Service. The only unequivocally known eastern population is the Florida panther, which is critically endangered. There have also been sightings in Elliotsville, Maine (in the central part of the state); and in New Hampshire, there have been recent sightings as early as 1997. In 2009, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources confirmed a cougar sighting in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Skinner, Victor. 2009. Photo shows cougar presence in Michigan. The Grand Rapids Press. November 15, 2009 Typically, extreme-range sightings of cougars involve young males, who can travel great distances to establish ranges away from established males; all four confirmed cougar kills in Iowa since 2000 involved males.
On April 14, 2008 police shot and killed a cougar on the north side of Chicago, Illinois. DNA tests were consistent with cougars from the Black Hills. Less than one year later, on March 5, 2009, a cougar was photographed and unsuccessfully tranquilized by state wildlife biologists in a tree near Spooner, Wisconsin in the northwestern part of the state.
South of the Rio Grande, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) lists the cat in every Central and South American country except Costa Rica and Panama. While specific state and provincial statistics are often available in North America, much less is known about the cat in its southern range.
The cougar's total breeding population is estimated at less than 50,000 by the IUCN, with a declining trend. U.S. state-level statistics are often more optimistic, suggesting cougar populations have rebounded. In Oregon, a healthy population of 5,000 was reported in 2006, exceeding a target of 3,000. California has actively sought to protect the cat and a similar number of cougars has been suggested, between 4,000 and 6,000.
Aside from humans, no species preys upon mature cougars in the wild. The cat is not, however, the apex predator throughout much of its range. In its northern range, the cougar interacts with other powerful predators such as the brown bear and gray wolf. In the south, the cougar must compete with the larger jaguar. In Florida it encounters the American Alligator.
thumbFront paw print of a cougar. An adult paw print is approximately 10 cm (4 inches) long.
The Yellowstone National Park ecosystem provides a fruitful microcosm to study inter-predator interaction in North America. Of the three large predators, the massive brown bear appears dominant, often although not always able to drive both the gray wolf pack and the cougar off their kills. One study found that Brown or American Black Bears visited 24% of cougar kills in Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks, usurping 10% of carcasses.
The gray wolf and the cougar compete more directly for prey, especially in winter. While individually more powerful than the gray wolf, a solitary cougar may be dominated by the pack structure of the canines. Wolves can steal kills and occasionally kill the cat. One report describes a large pack of fourteen wolves killing a female cougar and her kittens. Conversely, lone wolves are at a disadvantage, and have been reported killed by cougars. Wolves more broadly affect cougar population dynamics and distribution by dominating territory and prey opportunities, and disrupting the feline's behavior. Preliminary research in Yellowstone, for instance, has shown displacement of the cougar by wolves. One researcher in Oregon notes: "When there is a pack around, cougars are not comfortable around their kills or raising kittens ... A lot of times a big cougar will kill a wolf, but the pack phenomenon changes the table." Both species, meanwhile, are capable of killing mid-sized predators such as bobcats and coyotes and tend to suppress their numbers.
In the southern portion of its range, the cougar and jaguar share overlapping territory. The jaguar tends to take larger prey and the cougar smaller where they overlap, reducing the cougar's size. Of the two felines, the cougar appears best able to exploit a broader prey niche and smaller prey.
As with any predator at or near the top of its food chain, the cougar impacts the population of prey species. Predation by cougars has been linked to changes in the species mix of deer in a region. For example, a study in British Columbia observed that the population of mule deer, a favored cougar prey, was declining while the population of the less frequently preyed-upon white-tailed deer was increasing. The Vancouver Island Marmot, an endangered species endemic to one region of dense cougar population, has seen decreased numbers due to cougar and gray wolf predation.
In the southern part of South America the Puma is a top level predator that has controlled the population of Guanaco and other species since prehistoric times.
Pumapard, taken in 1904
A pumapard is a hybrid animal resulting from a union between a cougar and a leopard. Three sets of these hybrids were bred in the late 1890s and early 1900s by Carl Hagenbeck at his animal park in Hamburg, Germany. Most did not reach adulthood. One of these was purchased in 1898 by Berlin Zoo. A similar hybrid in Berlin Zoo purchased from Hagenbeck was a cross between a male leopard and a female puma. Hamburg Zoo's specimen was the reverse pairing, the one in the black and white photo, fathered by a puma bred to an Indian leopardess.
Whether born to a female puma mated to a male leopard, or to a male puma mated to a female leopard, pumapards inherit a form of dwarfism. Those reported grew to only half the size of the parents. They have a puma-like long body (proportional to the limbs, but nevertheless shorter than either parent), but short legs. The coat is variously described as sandy, tawny or greyish with brown, chestnut or "faded" rosettes.
The World Conservation Union (IUCN) currently lists the cougar as a "least concern" species. The cougar is regulated under Appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), rendering illegal international trade in specimens or parts.
Cougar conservation depends on preservation of their habitat.
In the United States east of the Mississippi River, the only unequivocally known cougar population is the Florida panther. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service recognizes both an Eastern cougar and the Florida panther, affording protection under the Endangered Species Act. Certain taxonomic authorities have collapsed both designations into the North American Cougar, with Eastern or Florida subspecies not recognized, while a subspecies designation remains recognized by some conservation scientists. The most recent documented count for the Florida sub-population is 87 individuals, reported by recovery agencies in 2003.
The cougar is also protected across much of the rest of their range. As of 1996, cougar hunting was prohibited in Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, French Guiana, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Suriname, Venezuela, and Uruguay. (Costa Rica and Panama are not listed as current range countries by the IUCN.) The cat had no reported legal protection in Ecuador, El Salvador, and Guyana. Regulated cougar hunting is still common in the United States and Canada, although they are protected from all hunting in the Yukon.; it is permitted in every U.S. state from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, with the exception of California. Texas is the only state in the United States with a viable population of cougars that does not protect, in some way, of its cougar population. In Texas, cougars are listed as nuisance wildlife and any person holding a hunting or a trapping permit can kill a cougar regardless of the season, number killed, sex or age of the animal. Killed animals are not required to be reported to Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. Conservation work in Texas is the effort of a non profit organization, Balanced Ecology Inc. (BEI), as part of their Texas Mountain Lion Conservation Project . Cougars are generally hunted with packs of dogs, until the animal is 'treed'. When the hunter arrives on the scene, he shoots the cat from the tree at close range. The Cougar cannot be legally killed in California except under very specific circumstances, such as when an individual is declared a public safety threat. However statistics from the Department of Fish and Game indicate that cougar killings in California have been on the rise since 1970s with an average of over 112 cats killed per year from 2000 to 2006 compared to six per year in the 1970s. The Bay Area Puma Project aims to obtain information on cougar populations in the San Francisco Bay area and the animals' interactions with habitat, prey, humans, and residential communities.
Conservation threats to the species include persecution as a pest animal, degradation and fragmentation of their habitat, and depletion of their prey base. Wildlife corridor and sufficient range areas are critical to the sustainability of cougar populations. Research simulations have shown that the animal faces a low extinction risk in areas of 2200 km 2 (850 sq mi) or more. As few as one to four new animals entering a population per decade markedly increases persistence, foregrounding the importance of habitat corridors.
Moche puma, Larco Museum collection
The grace and power of the cougar have been widely admired in the cultures of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. The Inca city of Cusco is reported to have been designed in the shape of a cougar, and the animal also gave its name to both Inca regions and people. The Moche people represented the puma often in their ceramics. Berrin, Katherine & Larco Museum. The Spirit of Ancient Peru:Treasures from the Museo Arqueológico Rafael Larco Herrera. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1997. The sky and thunder god of the Inca, Viracocha, has been associated with the animal.
In North America, mythological descriptions of the cougar have appeared in the stories of the HocÄ
k language ("Ho-Chunk" or "Winnebago") of Wisconsin and Illinois Cougars, The Encyclopedia of HoÄÄ
k (Winnebago) Mythology. Retrieved: 2009/12/08. and the Cheyenne, amongst others. To the Apache and Walapai of Arizona, the wail of the Cougar was a harbinger of death.
During the early years of ranching, cougars were considered on par with wolves in destructiveness. According to figures in Texas in 1990, 86 calves (0.0006% of a total of 13.4 million cattle & calves in Texas), 253 Mohair goats, 302 Mohair kids, 445 sheep (0.02% of a total of 2.0 million sheep & lambs in Texas) and 562 lambs (0.04% of 1.2 million lambs in Texas) were confirmed to have been killed by cougars that year. In Nevada in 1992, cougars were confirmed to have killed 9 calves, 1 horse, 4 colts, 5 goats, 318 sheep and 400 lambs. In both cases, sheep were the most frequently attacked. Some instances of surplus killing have resulted in the deaths of 20 sheep in one attack. Cougars frequently kill calves, sheep and goats by biting the top of the neck or head, differing greatly from the throat bite used by coyotes and indiscriminate mutilation by feral dogs. The size of the tooth puncture marks also helps distinguish kills made by cougars from those made by smaller predators.
Mountain Lion warning sign
Due to the expanding human population, cougar ranges increasingly overlap with areas inhabited by humans. Attacks on humans are rare, as cougar prey recognition is a learned behavior and they do not generally recognize humans as prey. Attacks on people, livestock, and pets may occur when the cat habituates to humans or is in a condition of severe starvation. Attacks are most frequent during late spring and summer, when juvenile cougars leave their mothers and search for new territory.
Between 1890 and 1990, in North America there were 53 reported, confirmed attacks on humans, resulting in 48 nonfatal injuries and 10 deaths of humans (the total is greater than 53 because some attacks had more than one victim). By 2004, the count had climbed to 88 attacks and 20 deaths.
Within North America, the distribution of attacks is not uniform. The heavily populated state of California has seen a dozen attacks since 1986 (after just three from 1890 to 1985), including three fatalities. Lightly populated New Mexico reported an attack in 2008, the first there since 1974. Search continues for mountain lion that killed Pinos Altos man, New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, press release June 23, 2008]; Wounded mountain lion captured, killed near Pinos Altos, New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, press release June 25, 2008]; Second mountain lion captured near Pinos Altos, New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, press release July 1, 2008]
As with many predators, a cougar may attack if cornered, if a fleeing human stimulates their instinct to chase, or if a person "plays dead." Exaggerating the threat to the animal through intense eye contact, loud but calm shouting, and any other action to appear larger and more menacing, may make the animal retreat. Fighting back with sticks and rocks, or even bare hands, is often effective in persuading an attacking cougar to disengage.
When cougars do attack, they usually employ their characteristic neck bite, attempting to position their teeth between the vertebrae and into the spinal cord. Neck, head, and spinal injuries are common and sometimes fatal. Children are at greatest risk of attack, and least likely to survive an encounter. Detailed research into attacks prior to 1991 showed that 64% of all victims and almost all fatalities were children. The same study showed the highest proportion of attacks to have occurred in British Columbia, particularly on Vancouver Island where cougar populations are especially dense.
*List of fatal cougar attacks in North America
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* Video, Pictures and Information on Mountain Lions
* A Definitive Resource About Cougars Comprehensive, non-profit site with extensive information about cougars, from how to live safely in cougar country, to science abstracts, hunting regulations, state-by-state cougar management/policy info, and rare photos and videos of wild cougars.
* Description of a Cougar attack
* Cougar Facts and Photos â NatureMapping Program
* No Place for Predators? Liza Gross, PLoS Biology, explains how Washington State wildlife officials implemented a hunting policy, in response to a state measure passed to protect wildlife, that led to the highest rates of human-caused cougar mortality since the height of the bounty era
* Cougar Tracks: How to identify cougar tracks in the wild
* The sound of a cougar screaming
* Link to Worldwide Wild Cat Conservation site
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Cougar | How long is an adult cougar's paw print? | An adult cougar's paw print is approximately 10 cm (4 inches) long. | data/set1/a2 | Cougar
The cougar (Puma concolor), also known as puma, mountain lion, mountain cat, catamount or panther, depending on the region, is a mammal of the family Felidae, native to the Americas. This large, solitary cat has the greatest range of any large wild terrestrial mammal in the Western Hemisphere, extending from Yukon in Canada to the southern Andes of South America. An adaptable, generalist species, the cougar is found in every major American habitat type. It is the second heaviest cat in the American continents after the jaguar, and the fourth heaviest in the world, after the tiger, lion, and jaguar. Although large, the cougar is most closely related to smaller felines.
A capable stalk-and-ambush predator, the cougar pursues a wide variety of prey. Primary food sources include ungulates such as deer, elk, and bighorn sheep, as well as domestic cattle, horses and sheep, particularly in the northern part of its range. It will also hunt species as small as insects and rodents. This cat prefers habitats with dense underbrush and rocky areas for stalking, but it can also live in open areas. The cougar is territorial and persists at low population densities. Individual territory sizes depend on terrain, vegetation, and abundance of prey. While it is a large predator, it is not always the dominant species in its range, as when it competes for prey with other predators such as the jaguar, grey wolf, American Black Bear, and the grizzly bear. It is a reclusive cat and usually avoids people. Attacks on humans remain rare, despite a recent increase in frequency.
Due to excessive hunting following the European colonization of the Americas, and continuing human development of cougar habitat, populations have dropped in most parts of its historical range. In particular, the cougar was extirpated in eastern North America, except for an isolated sub-population in Florida; the animal may be recolonizing parts of its former eastern territory, such as Maine and northern Michigan, /ref> where there have been recent sightings. With its vast range, the cougar has dozens of names and various references in the mythology of the indigenous Americans and in contemporary culture. The cougar has recently made a comeback in the state of Wyoming, where it presently has the largest population in North America .
The cougar has numerous names in English, of which puma and mountain lion are popular. Other names include catamount, panther, mountain screamer and painter. Lexicographers regard painter as a primarily upper-Southern U.S. regional variant on "panther", but a folk etymology, fancying a resemblance between the typically dark tip of its tail and a paintbrush dipped in dark paint, has some currency.
The cougar holds the Guinness record for the animal with the highest number of names, presumably due to its wide distribution across North and South America. It has over 40 names in English alone.
"Cougar" may be borrowed from the Portuguese çuçuarana, via French; the term was originally derived from the Tupi language. A current form in Brazil is suçuarana. It may also be borrowed from the Guaranà language term guaçu ara or guazu ara. "Puma" comes, via Spanish, from the Quechua language. Cougar, Puma and
The cougar is the largest of the small cats. It is placed in the subfamily Felinae, although its bulk characteristics are similar to those of the big cats in the subfamily Pantherinae. The family Felidae is believed to have originated in Asia approximately 11 million years ago. Taxonomic research on felids remains partial and much of what is known about their evolutionary history is based on mitochondrial DNA analysis, as cats are poorly represented in the fossil record, and there are significant confidence intervals with suggested dates.
Although large, the cougar is closely related to small felines.
In the latest genomic study of Felidae, the common ancestor of today's Leopardus, Lynx, Puma, Prionailurus, and Felis lineages migrated across the Bering land bridge into the Americas approximately 8 to 8.5 million years (Ma) ago. The lineages subsequently diverged in that order. North American felids then invaded South America 3 Ma ago as part of the Great American Interchange, following formation of the Isthmus of Panama. The cougar was originally thought to belong in Felis (Felis concolor), the genus which includes the domestic cat. As of 1993, it is now placed in Puma along with the jaguarundi, a cat just a little more than a tenth its weight.
Studies have indicated that the cougar and jaguarundi are most closely related to the modern cheetah of Africa and western Asia, but the relationship is unresolved. It has been suggested that the cheetah lineage diverged from the Puma lineage in the Americas (see American cheetah) and migrated back to Asia and Africa, while other research suggests the cheetah diverged in the Old World itself. The outline of small feline migration to the Americas is thus unclear.
Recent studies have demonstrated a high level of genetic similarity among the North American cougar populations, suggesting that they are all fairly recent descendants of a small ancestral group. Culver et al. suggest that the original North American population of Puma concolor was extirpated during the Pleistocene extinctions some 10,000 years ago, when other large mammals such as Smilodon also disappeared. North America was then repopulated by a group of South American cougars.
Until the late 1990s, as many as 32 subspecies were recorded; however, a recent genetic study of mitochondrial DNA found that many of these are too similar to be recognized as distinct at a molecular level. Following the research, the canonical Mammal Species of the World (3rd edition) recognizes six subspecies, five of which are solely found in Latin America:
; Argentine puma : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms hudsonii and puma (Marcelli, 1922);
; Costa Rican Cougar
; Eastern South American cougar : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms acrocodia, borbensis, capricornensis, concolor (Pelzeln, 1883), greeni and nigra;
; North American Cougar : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms arundivaga, aztecus, browni, californica, coryi, floridana, hippolestes, improcera, kaibabensis, mayensis, missoulensis, olympus, oregonensis, schorgeri, stanleyana, vancouverensis and youngi;
; Northern South American cougar : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms bangsi, incarum, osgoodi, soasoaranna, sussuarana, soderstromii, sucuacuara and wavula;
; Southern South American puma : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms araucanus, concolor (Gay, 1847), patagonica, pearsoni and puma (Trouessart, 1904)
The status of the Florida panther, here collapsed into the North American Cougar, remains uncertain. It is still regularly listed as subspecies Puma concolor coryi in research works, including those directly concerned with its conservation. Culver et al. themselves noted low microsatellite variation in the Florida panther, possibly due to inbreeding; responding to the research, one conservation team suggests "the degree to which the scientific community has accepted the results of Culver et al. and the proposed change in taxonomy is not resolved at this time."
Cougars are slender and agile cats. Adults stand about 60 to 76 centimeters (2.0 to 2.5 ft) tall at the shoulders. The length of adult males is around 2.4 meters (8 ft) long nose to tail, with overall ranges between 1.5 and 2.75 m (5 and 9 ft) nose to tail suggested for the species in general. Males typically weigh 53 to 90 kilograms (115 to 198 pounds), averaging 62 kg (137 lb). In rare cases, some may reach over 120 kg (264 lb). Females typically weigh between 29 and 64 kg (64 and 141 lb), averaging 42 kg (93 lb). /ref> /ref> Cougar size is smallest close to the equator, and larger towards the poles.
Although cougars resemble the domestic cat, they are about the same size as an adult human.
The head of the cat is round and the ears erect. Its powerful forequarters, neck, and jaw serve to grasp and hold large prey. It has five retractable claws on its forepaws (one a dewclaw) and four on its hind paws. The larger front feet and claws are adaptations to clutching prey.
Cougars can be almost as large as jaguars, but are less muscular and not as powerful; where their ranges overlap, the cougar tends to be smaller than average. The cougar is on average as heavy as the leopard. Despite its size, it is not typically classified among the "big cats," as it cannot roar, lacking the specialized larynx and hyoid apparatus of Panthera. Like domestic cats, cougars vocalize low-pitched hisses, growls, and purrs, as well as chirps and whistles. They are well known for their screams, as referenced in some of their common names, although these screams are often misinterpreted to be the calls of other animals.
Rear paw of a cougar
Cougar coloring is plain (hence the Latin concolor) but can vary greatly between individuals and even between siblings. The coat is typically tawny, but ranges to silvery-grey or reddish, with lighter patches on the under body including the jaws, chin, and throat. Infants are spotted and born with blue eyes and rings on their tails; juveniles are pale, and dark spots remain on their flanks. Despite anecdotes to the contrary, all-black coloring (melanism) has never been documented in cougars. The term "black panther" is used colloquially to refer to melanistic individuals of other species, particularly jaguars and leopards.
Cougars have large paws and proportionally the largest hind legs in the cat family. This physique allows it great leaping and short-sprint ability. An exceptional vertical leap of 5.4 m (18 ft) is reported for the cougar. Horizontal jumping capability from standing position is suggested anywhere from 6 to 12 m (20 to 40 ft). The cougar can run as fast as 55 to 72 km/h (35 to 45 mi/h), but is best adapted for short, powerful sprints rather than long chases. It is adept at climbing, which allows it to evade canine competitors. Although it is not strongly associated with water, it can swim.
A successful generalist predator, the cougar will eat any animal it can catch, from insects to large ungulates (over 500 kg). Like all cats, it is an obligate carnivore, feeding only on meat. The Mean weight of vertebrate prey (MWVP) was positively correlated (r=0.875) with puma body weight and inversely correlated (r=-0.836) with food niche breadth in all America. In general, MWVP was lower in areas closer to the Equator. Its most important prey species are various deer species, particularly in North America; mule deer, white-tailed deer, elk, and even large moose are taken by the cat. Other species such as Bighorn Sheep, wild horses of Arizona, domestic horses, and domestic livestock such as cattle and sheep are also primary food bases in many areas. A survey of North America research found 68% of prey items were ungulates, especially deer. Only the Florida Panther showed variation, often preferring feral hogs and armadillos.
Shown eating. Cougars are ambush predators, feeding mostly on deer and other mammals.
Investigation in Yellowstone National Park showed that elk, followed by mule deer, were the cougar's primary targets; the prey base is shared with the park's gray wolves, with whom the cougar competes for resources.
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* Another study on winter kills (NovemberâApril) in Alberta showed that ungulates accounted for greater than 99% of the cougar diet. Learned, individual prey recognition was observed, as some cougars rarely killed bighorn sheep, while others relied heavily on the species.
In the Central and South American cougar range, the ratio of deer in the diet declines. Small to mid-size mammals are preferred, including large rodents such as the capybara. Ungulates accounted for only 35% of prey items in one survey, approximately half that of North America. Competition with the larger jaguar has been suggested for the decline in the size of prey items. Other listed prey species of the cougar include mice, porcupine, and hares. Birds and small reptiles are sometimes preyed upon in the south, but this is rarely recorded in North America.
Though capable of sprinting, the cougar is typically an ambush predator. It stalks through brush and trees, across ledges, or other covered spots, before delivering a powerful leap onto the back of its prey and a suffocating neck bite. The cougar is capable of breaking the neck of some of its smaller prey with a strong bite and momentum bearing the animal to the ground.
Kills are generally estimated at around one large ungulate every two weeks. The period shrinks for females raising young, and may be as short as one kill every three days when cubs are nearly mature at around 15 months. The cat drags a kill to a preferred spot, covers it with brush, and returns to feed over a period of days. It is generally reported that the cougar is a non-scavenger and will rarely consume prey it has not killed; but deer carcasses left exposed for study were scavenged by cougars in California, suggesting more opportunistic behavior.
Females reach sexual maturity between one-and-a-half to three years of age. They typically average one litter every two to three years throughout their reproductive life, though the period can be as short as one year. Females are in estrus for approximately 8 days of a 23-day cycle; the gestation period is approximately 91 days. Females are sometimes reported as monogamous, but this is uncertain and polygyny may be more common. Copulation is brief but frequent.
Cougar kittens
Only females are involved in parenting. Female cougars are fiercely protective of their kittens, and have been seen to successfully fight off animals as large as grizzly bears in their defense. Litter size is between one and six kittens; typically two or three. Caves and other alcoves that offer protection are used as litter dens. Born blind, kittens are completely dependent on their mother at first, and begin to be weaned at around three months of age. As they grow, they begin to go out on forays with their mother, first visiting kill sites, and after six months beginning to hunt small prey on their own. Kitten survival rates are just over one per litter.
Sub-adults leave their mother to attempt to establish their own territory at around two years of age and sometimes earlier; males tend to leave sooner. One study has shown high morbidity amongst cougars that travel farthest from the maternal range, often due to conflicts with other cougars ("intraspecific" conflict). Research in New Mexico has shown that "males dispersed significantly farther than females, were more likely to traverse large expanses of non-cougar habitat, and were probably most responsible for nuclear gene flow between habitat patches."
Life expectancy in the wild is reported at between 8 to 13 years, and probably averages 8 to 10; a female of at least 18 years was reported killed by hunters on Vancouver Island. Cougars may live as long as 20 years in captivity. One male North American cougar, named Scratch, was two months short of his 30th birthday when he died in 2007. Causes of death in the wild include disability and disease, competition with other cougars, starvation, accidents, and, where allowed, human hunting. Feline immunodeficiency virus, an endemic AIDS-like disease in cats, is well-adapted to the cougar.
Like almost all cats, the cougar is a solitary animal. Only mothers and kittens live in groups, with adults meeting only to mate. It is secretive and crepuscular, being most active around dawn and dusk.
Estimates of territory sizes vary greatly.
Canadian Geographic reports large male territories of 150 to 1000 square kilometers (58 to 386 sq mi) with female ranges half the size. Other research suggests a much smaller lower limit of 25 km 2 (10 sq mi) but an even greater upper limit of 1300 km 2 (500 sq mi) for males. In the United States, very large ranges have been reported in Texas and the Black Hills of the northern Great Plains, in excess of 775 km 2 (300 sq mi). Male ranges may include or overlap with those of females but, at least where studied, not with those of other males, which serves to reduce conflict between cougars. Ranges of females may overlap slightly with each other. Scrape marks, urine, and feces are used to mark territory and attract mates. Males may scrape together a small pile of leaves and grasses and then urinate on it as a way of marking territory.
Home range sizes and overall cougar abundance depend on terrain, vegetation, and prey abundance. One female adjacent to the San Andres Mountains, for instance, was found with a large range of 215 km 2 (83 sq mi), necessitated by poor prey abundance. Research has shown cougar abundances from 0.5 animals to as much as 7 (in one study in South America) per 100 km 2 (38 sq mi).
Because males disperse further than females and compete more directly for mates and territory, they are most likely to be involved in conflict. Where a sub-adult fails to leave his maternal range, for example, he may be killed by his father. When males encounter each other, they hiss, spit, and may engage in violent conflict if neither backs down. Hunting or relocation of the cougar may increase aggressive encounters by disrupting territories and bringing young, transient animals into conflict with established individuals.
The cougar has the largest range of any wild land animal in the Americas. Its range spans 110 degrees of latitude, from northern Yukon in Canada to the southern Andes. It is one of only three cat species, along with the bobcat and Canadian lynx, native to Canada. Its wide distribution stems from its adaptability to virtually every habitat type: it is found in all forest types as well as in lowland and mountainous deserts. Studies show that the Cougar prefers regions with dense underbrush, but can live with little vegetation in open areas. Its preferred habitats include precipitous canyons, escarpments, rim rocks, and dense brush.
Cougar, photographed in the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, Tucson, Arizona.
The cougar was extirpated across much of its eastern North American range (with the exception of Florida) in the two centuries after European colonization, and faced grave threats in the remainder of its territory. Currently, it ranges across most western American states, the Canadian provinces of Alberta and British Columbia, and the Canadian Yukon Territory. There have been widely debated reports of possible recolonization of eastern North America. DNA evidence has suggested its presence in eastern North America, , while a consolidated map of cougar sightings shows numerous reports, from the mid-western Great Plains through to Eastern Canada. The Cougar Network methodology is recognized by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The Quebec wildlife services (known locally as MRNF) also considers Cougar to be present in the province as a threatened species after multiple DNA tests confirmed cougar hair in Lynx mating sites. Ministry of Wildlife and natural resources Wildlife Service. The only unequivocally known eastern population is the Florida panther, which is critically endangered. There have also been sightings in Elliotsville, Maine (in the central part of the state); and in New Hampshire, there have been recent sightings as early as 1997. In 2009, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources confirmed a cougar sighting in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Skinner, Victor. 2009. Photo shows cougar presence in Michigan. The Grand Rapids Press. November 15, 2009 Typically, extreme-range sightings of cougars involve young males, who can travel great distances to establish ranges away from established males; all four confirmed cougar kills in Iowa since 2000 involved males.
On April 14, 2008 police shot and killed a cougar on the north side of Chicago, Illinois. DNA tests were consistent with cougars from the Black Hills. Less than one year later, on March 5, 2009, a cougar was photographed and unsuccessfully tranquilized by state wildlife biologists in a tree near Spooner, Wisconsin in the northwestern part of the state.
South of the Rio Grande, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) lists the cat in every Central and South American country except Costa Rica and Panama. While specific state and provincial statistics are often available in North America, much less is known about the cat in its southern range.
The cougar's total breeding population is estimated at less than 50,000 by the IUCN, with a declining trend. U.S. state-level statistics are often more optimistic, suggesting cougar populations have rebounded. In Oregon, a healthy population of 5,000 was reported in 2006, exceeding a target of 3,000. California has actively sought to protect the cat and a similar number of cougars has been suggested, between 4,000 and 6,000.
Aside from humans, no species preys upon mature cougars in the wild. The cat is not, however, the apex predator throughout much of its range. In its northern range, the cougar interacts with other powerful predators such as the brown bear and gray wolf. In the south, the cougar must compete with the larger jaguar. In Florida it encounters the American Alligator.
thumbFront paw print of a cougar. An adult paw print is approximately 10 cm (4 inches) long.
The Yellowstone National Park ecosystem provides a fruitful microcosm to study inter-predator interaction in North America. Of the three large predators, the massive brown bear appears dominant, often although not always able to drive both the gray wolf pack and the cougar off their kills. One study found that Brown or American Black Bears visited 24% of cougar kills in Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks, usurping 10% of carcasses.
The gray wolf and the cougar compete more directly for prey, especially in winter. While individually more powerful than the gray wolf, a solitary cougar may be dominated by the pack structure of the canines. Wolves can steal kills and occasionally kill the cat. One report describes a large pack of fourteen wolves killing a female cougar and her kittens. Conversely, lone wolves are at a disadvantage, and have been reported killed by cougars. Wolves more broadly affect cougar population dynamics and distribution by dominating territory and prey opportunities, and disrupting the feline's behavior. Preliminary research in Yellowstone, for instance, has shown displacement of the cougar by wolves. One researcher in Oregon notes: "When there is a pack around, cougars are not comfortable around their kills or raising kittens ... A lot of times a big cougar will kill a wolf, but the pack phenomenon changes the table." Both species, meanwhile, are capable of killing mid-sized predators such as bobcats and coyotes and tend to suppress their numbers.
In the southern portion of its range, the cougar and jaguar share overlapping territory. The jaguar tends to take larger prey and the cougar smaller where they overlap, reducing the cougar's size. Of the two felines, the cougar appears best able to exploit a broader prey niche and smaller prey.
As with any predator at or near the top of its food chain, the cougar impacts the population of prey species. Predation by cougars has been linked to changes in the species mix of deer in a region. For example, a study in British Columbia observed that the population of mule deer, a favored cougar prey, was declining while the population of the less frequently preyed-upon white-tailed deer was increasing. The Vancouver Island Marmot, an endangered species endemic to one region of dense cougar population, has seen decreased numbers due to cougar and gray wolf predation.
In the southern part of South America the Puma is a top level predator that has controlled the population of Guanaco and other species since prehistoric times.
Pumapard, taken in 1904
A pumapard is a hybrid animal resulting from a union between a cougar and a leopard. Three sets of these hybrids were bred in the late 1890s and early 1900s by Carl Hagenbeck at his animal park in Hamburg, Germany. Most did not reach adulthood. One of these was purchased in 1898 by Berlin Zoo. A similar hybrid in Berlin Zoo purchased from Hagenbeck was a cross between a male leopard and a female puma. Hamburg Zoo's specimen was the reverse pairing, the one in the black and white photo, fathered by a puma bred to an Indian leopardess.
Whether born to a female puma mated to a male leopard, or to a male puma mated to a female leopard, pumapards inherit a form of dwarfism. Those reported grew to only half the size of the parents. They have a puma-like long body (proportional to the limbs, but nevertheless shorter than either parent), but short legs. The coat is variously described as sandy, tawny or greyish with brown, chestnut or "faded" rosettes.
The World Conservation Union (IUCN) currently lists the cougar as a "least concern" species. The cougar is regulated under Appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), rendering illegal international trade in specimens or parts.
Cougar conservation depends on preservation of their habitat.
In the United States east of the Mississippi River, the only unequivocally known cougar population is the Florida panther. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service recognizes both an Eastern cougar and the Florida panther, affording protection under the Endangered Species Act. Certain taxonomic authorities have collapsed both designations into the North American Cougar, with Eastern or Florida subspecies not recognized, while a subspecies designation remains recognized by some conservation scientists. The most recent documented count for the Florida sub-population is 87 individuals, reported by recovery agencies in 2003.
The cougar is also protected across much of the rest of their range. As of 1996, cougar hunting was prohibited in Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, French Guiana, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Suriname, Venezuela, and Uruguay. (Costa Rica and Panama are not listed as current range countries by the IUCN.) The cat had no reported legal protection in Ecuador, El Salvador, and Guyana. Regulated cougar hunting is still common in the United States and Canada, although they are protected from all hunting in the Yukon.; it is permitted in every U.S. state from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, with the exception of California. Texas is the only state in the United States with a viable population of cougars that does not protect, in some way, of its cougar population. In Texas, cougars are listed as nuisance wildlife and any person holding a hunting or a trapping permit can kill a cougar regardless of the season, number killed, sex or age of the animal. Killed animals are not required to be reported to Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. Conservation work in Texas is the effort of a non profit organization, Balanced Ecology Inc. (BEI), as part of their Texas Mountain Lion Conservation Project . Cougars are generally hunted with packs of dogs, until the animal is 'treed'. When the hunter arrives on the scene, he shoots the cat from the tree at close range. The Cougar cannot be legally killed in California except under very specific circumstances, such as when an individual is declared a public safety threat. However statistics from the Department of Fish and Game indicate that cougar killings in California have been on the rise since 1970s with an average of over 112 cats killed per year from 2000 to 2006 compared to six per year in the 1970s. The Bay Area Puma Project aims to obtain information on cougar populations in the San Francisco Bay area and the animals' interactions with habitat, prey, humans, and residential communities.
Conservation threats to the species include persecution as a pest animal, degradation and fragmentation of their habitat, and depletion of their prey base. Wildlife corridor and sufficient range areas are critical to the sustainability of cougar populations. Research simulations have shown that the animal faces a low extinction risk in areas of 2200 km 2 (850 sq mi) or more. As few as one to four new animals entering a population per decade markedly increases persistence, foregrounding the importance of habitat corridors.
Moche puma, Larco Museum collection
The grace and power of the cougar have been widely admired in the cultures of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. The Inca city of Cusco is reported to have been designed in the shape of a cougar, and the animal also gave its name to both Inca regions and people. The Moche people represented the puma often in their ceramics. Berrin, Katherine & Larco Museum. The Spirit of Ancient Peru:Treasures from the Museo Arqueológico Rafael Larco Herrera. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1997. The sky and thunder god of the Inca, Viracocha, has been associated with the animal.
In North America, mythological descriptions of the cougar have appeared in the stories of the HocÄ
k language ("Ho-Chunk" or "Winnebago") of Wisconsin and Illinois Cougars, The Encyclopedia of HoÄÄ
k (Winnebago) Mythology. Retrieved: 2009/12/08. and the Cheyenne, amongst others. To the Apache and Walapai of Arizona, the wail of the Cougar was a harbinger of death.
During the early years of ranching, cougars were considered on par with wolves in destructiveness. According to figures in Texas in 1990, 86 calves (0.0006% of a total of 13.4 million cattle & calves in Texas), 253 Mohair goats, 302 Mohair kids, 445 sheep (0.02% of a total of 2.0 million sheep & lambs in Texas) and 562 lambs (0.04% of 1.2 million lambs in Texas) were confirmed to have been killed by cougars that year. In Nevada in 1992, cougars were confirmed to have killed 9 calves, 1 horse, 4 colts, 5 goats, 318 sheep and 400 lambs. In both cases, sheep were the most frequently attacked. Some instances of surplus killing have resulted in the deaths of 20 sheep in one attack. Cougars frequently kill calves, sheep and goats by biting the top of the neck or head, differing greatly from the throat bite used by coyotes and indiscriminate mutilation by feral dogs. The size of the tooth puncture marks also helps distinguish kills made by cougars from those made by smaller predators.
Mountain Lion warning sign
Due to the expanding human population, cougar ranges increasingly overlap with areas inhabited by humans. Attacks on humans are rare, as cougar prey recognition is a learned behavior and they do not generally recognize humans as prey. Attacks on people, livestock, and pets may occur when the cat habituates to humans or is in a condition of severe starvation. Attacks are most frequent during late spring and summer, when juvenile cougars leave their mothers and search for new territory.
Between 1890 and 1990, in North America there were 53 reported, confirmed attacks on humans, resulting in 48 nonfatal injuries and 10 deaths of humans (the total is greater than 53 because some attacks had more than one victim). By 2004, the count had climbed to 88 attacks and 20 deaths.
Within North America, the distribution of attacks is not uniform. The heavily populated state of California has seen a dozen attacks since 1986 (after just three from 1890 to 1985), including three fatalities. Lightly populated New Mexico reported an attack in 2008, the first there since 1974. Search continues for mountain lion that killed Pinos Altos man, New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, press release June 23, 2008]; Wounded mountain lion captured, killed near Pinos Altos, New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, press release June 25, 2008]; Second mountain lion captured near Pinos Altos, New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, press release July 1, 2008]
As with many predators, a cougar may attack if cornered, if a fleeing human stimulates their instinct to chase, or if a person "plays dead." Exaggerating the threat to the animal through intense eye contact, loud but calm shouting, and any other action to appear larger and more menacing, may make the animal retreat. Fighting back with sticks and rocks, or even bare hands, is often effective in persuading an attacking cougar to disengage.
When cougars do attack, they usually employ their characteristic neck bite, attempting to position their teeth between the vertebrae and into the spinal cord. Neck, head, and spinal injuries are common and sometimes fatal. Children are at greatest risk of attack, and least likely to survive an encounter. Detailed research into attacks prior to 1991 showed that 64% of all victims and almost all fatalities were children. The same study showed the highest proportion of attacks to have occurred in British Columbia, particularly on Vancouver Island where cougar populations are especially dense.
*List of fatal cougar attacks in North America
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* Video, Pictures and Information on Mountain Lions
* A Definitive Resource About Cougars Comprehensive, non-profit site with extensive information about cougars, from how to live safely in cougar country, to science abstracts, hunting regulations, state-by-state cougar management/policy info, and rare photos and videos of wild cougars.
* Description of a Cougar attack
* Cougar Facts and Photos â NatureMapping Program
* No Place for Predators? Liza Gross, PLoS Biology, explains how Washington State wildlife officials implemented a hunting policy, in response to a state measure passed to protect wildlife, that led to the highest rates of human-caused cougar mortality since the height of the bounty era
* Cougar Tracks: How to identify cougar tracks in the wild
* The sound of a cougar screaming
* Link to Worldwide Wild Cat Conservation site
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Cougar | How long is an adult cougar's paw print? | 4 inches | data/set1/a2 | Cougar
The cougar (Puma concolor), also known as puma, mountain lion, mountain cat, catamount or panther, depending on the region, is a mammal of the family Felidae, native to the Americas. This large, solitary cat has the greatest range of any large wild terrestrial mammal in the Western Hemisphere, extending from Yukon in Canada to the southern Andes of South America. An adaptable, generalist species, the cougar is found in every major American habitat type. It is the second heaviest cat in the American continents after the jaguar, and the fourth heaviest in the world, after the tiger, lion, and jaguar. Although large, the cougar is most closely related to smaller felines.
A capable stalk-and-ambush predator, the cougar pursues a wide variety of prey. Primary food sources include ungulates such as deer, elk, and bighorn sheep, as well as domestic cattle, horses and sheep, particularly in the northern part of its range. It will also hunt species as small as insects and rodents. This cat prefers habitats with dense underbrush and rocky areas for stalking, but it can also live in open areas. The cougar is territorial and persists at low population densities. Individual territory sizes depend on terrain, vegetation, and abundance of prey. While it is a large predator, it is not always the dominant species in its range, as when it competes for prey with other predators such as the jaguar, grey wolf, American Black Bear, and the grizzly bear. It is a reclusive cat and usually avoids people. Attacks on humans remain rare, despite a recent increase in frequency.
Due to excessive hunting following the European colonization of the Americas, and continuing human development of cougar habitat, populations have dropped in most parts of its historical range. In particular, the cougar was extirpated in eastern North America, except for an isolated sub-population in Florida; the animal may be recolonizing parts of its former eastern territory, such as Maine and northern Michigan, /ref> where there have been recent sightings. With its vast range, the cougar has dozens of names and various references in the mythology of the indigenous Americans and in contemporary culture. The cougar has recently made a comeback in the state of Wyoming, where it presently has the largest population in North America .
The cougar has numerous names in English, of which puma and mountain lion are popular. Other names include catamount, panther, mountain screamer and painter. Lexicographers regard painter as a primarily upper-Southern U.S. regional variant on "panther", but a folk etymology, fancying a resemblance between the typically dark tip of its tail and a paintbrush dipped in dark paint, has some currency.
The cougar holds the Guinness record for the animal with the highest number of names, presumably due to its wide distribution across North and South America. It has over 40 names in English alone.
"Cougar" may be borrowed from the Portuguese çuçuarana, via French; the term was originally derived from the Tupi language. A current form in Brazil is suçuarana. It may also be borrowed from the Guaranà language term guaçu ara or guazu ara. "Puma" comes, via Spanish, from the Quechua language. Cougar, Puma and
The cougar is the largest of the small cats. It is placed in the subfamily Felinae, although its bulk characteristics are similar to those of the big cats in the subfamily Pantherinae. The family Felidae is believed to have originated in Asia approximately 11 million years ago. Taxonomic research on felids remains partial and much of what is known about their evolutionary history is based on mitochondrial DNA analysis, as cats are poorly represented in the fossil record, and there are significant confidence intervals with suggested dates.
Although large, the cougar is closely related to small felines.
In the latest genomic study of Felidae, the common ancestor of today's Leopardus, Lynx, Puma, Prionailurus, and Felis lineages migrated across the Bering land bridge into the Americas approximately 8 to 8.5 million years (Ma) ago. The lineages subsequently diverged in that order. North American felids then invaded South America 3 Ma ago as part of the Great American Interchange, following formation of the Isthmus of Panama. The cougar was originally thought to belong in Felis (Felis concolor), the genus which includes the domestic cat. As of 1993, it is now placed in Puma along with the jaguarundi, a cat just a little more than a tenth its weight.
Studies have indicated that the cougar and jaguarundi are most closely related to the modern cheetah of Africa and western Asia, but the relationship is unresolved. It has been suggested that the cheetah lineage diverged from the Puma lineage in the Americas (see American cheetah) and migrated back to Asia and Africa, while other research suggests the cheetah diverged in the Old World itself. The outline of small feline migration to the Americas is thus unclear.
Recent studies have demonstrated a high level of genetic similarity among the North American cougar populations, suggesting that they are all fairly recent descendants of a small ancestral group. Culver et al. suggest that the original North American population of Puma concolor was extirpated during the Pleistocene extinctions some 10,000 years ago, when other large mammals such as Smilodon also disappeared. North America was then repopulated by a group of South American cougars.
Until the late 1990s, as many as 32 subspecies were recorded; however, a recent genetic study of mitochondrial DNA found that many of these are too similar to be recognized as distinct at a molecular level. Following the research, the canonical Mammal Species of the World (3rd edition) recognizes six subspecies, five of which are solely found in Latin America:
; Argentine puma : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms hudsonii and puma (Marcelli, 1922);
; Costa Rican Cougar
; Eastern South American cougar : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms acrocodia, borbensis, capricornensis, concolor (Pelzeln, 1883), greeni and nigra;
; North American Cougar : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms arundivaga, aztecus, browni, californica, coryi, floridana, hippolestes, improcera, kaibabensis, mayensis, missoulensis, olympus, oregonensis, schorgeri, stanleyana, vancouverensis and youngi;
; Northern South American cougar : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms bangsi, incarum, osgoodi, soasoaranna, sussuarana, soderstromii, sucuacuara and wavula;
; Southern South American puma : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms araucanus, concolor (Gay, 1847), patagonica, pearsoni and puma (Trouessart, 1904)
The status of the Florida panther, here collapsed into the North American Cougar, remains uncertain. It is still regularly listed as subspecies Puma concolor coryi in research works, including those directly concerned with its conservation. Culver et al. themselves noted low microsatellite variation in the Florida panther, possibly due to inbreeding; responding to the research, one conservation team suggests "the degree to which the scientific community has accepted the results of Culver et al. and the proposed change in taxonomy is not resolved at this time."
Cougars are slender and agile cats. Adults stand about 60 to 76 centimeters (2.0 to 2.5 ft) tall at the shoulders. The length of adult males is around 2.4 meters (8 ft) long nose to tail, with overall ranges between 1.5 and 2.75 m (5 and 9 ft) nose to tail suggested for the species in general. Males typically weigh 53 to 90 kilograms (115 to 198 pounds), averaging 62 kg (137 lb). In rare cases, some may reach over 120 kg (264 lb). Females typically weigh between 29 and 64 kg (64 and 141 lb), averaging 42 kg (93 lb). /ref> /ref> Cougar size is smallest close to the equator, and larger towards the poles.
Although cougars resemble the domestic cat, they are about the same size as an adult human.
The head of the cat is round and the ears erect. Its powerful forequarters, neck, and jaw serve to grasp and hold large prey. It has five retractable claws on its forepaws (one a dewclaw) and four on its hind paws. The larger front feet and claws are adaptations to clutching prey.
Cougars can be almost as large as jaguars, but are less muscular and not as powerful; where their ranges overlap, the cougar tends to be smaller than average. The cougar is on average as heavy as the leopard. Despite its size, it is not typically classified among the "big cats," as it cannot roar, lacking the specialized larynx and hyoid apparatus of Panthera. Like domestic cats, cougars vocalize low-pitched hisses, growls, and purrs, as well as chirps and whistles. They are well known for their screams, as referenced in some of their common names, although these screams are often misinterpreted to be the calls of other animals.
Rear paw of a cougar
Cougar coloring is plain (hence the Latin concolor) but can vary greatly between individuals and even between siblings. The coat is typically tawny, but ranges to silvery-grey or reddish, with lighter patches on the under body including the jaws, chin, and throat. Infants are spotted and born with blue eyes and rings on their tails; juveniles are pale, and dark spots remain on their flanks. Despite anecdotes to the contrary, all-black coloring (melanism) has never been documented in cougars. The term "black panther" is used colloquially to refer to melanistic individuals of other species, particularly jaguars and leopards.
Cougars have large paws and proportionally the largest hind legs in the cat family. This physique allows it great leaping and short-sprint ability. An exceptional vertical leap of 5.4 m (18 ft) is reported for the cougar. Horizontal jumping capability from standing position is suggested anywhere from 6 to 12 m (20 to 40 ft). The cougar can run as fast as 55 to 72 km/h (35 to 45 mi/h), but is best adapted for short, powerful sprints rather than long chases. It is adept at climbing, which allows it to evade canine competitors. Although it is not strongly associated with water, it can swim.
A successful generalist predator, the cougar will eat any animal it can catch, from insects to large ungulates (over 500 kg). Like all cats, it is an obligate carnivore, feeding only on meat. The Mean weight of vertebrate prey (MWVP) was positively correlated (r=0.875) with puma body weight and inversely correlated (r=-0.836) with food niche breadth in all America. In general, MWVP was lower in areas closer to the Equator. Its most important prey species are various deer species, particularly in North America; mule deer, white-tailed deer, elk, and even large moose are taken by the cat. Other species such as Bighorn Sheep, wild horses of Arizona, domestic horses, and domestic livestock such as cattle and sheep are also primary food bases in many areas. A survey of North America research found 68% of prey items were ungulates, especially deer. Only the Florida Panther showed variation, often preferring feral hogs and armadillos.
Shown eating. Cougars are ambush predators, feeding mostly on deer and other mammals.
Investigation in Yellowstone National Park showed that elk, followed by mule deer, were the cougar's primary targets; the prey base is shared with the park's gray wolves, with whom the cougar competes for resources.
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* Another study on winter kills (NovemberâApril) in Alberta showed that ungulates accounted for greater than 99% of the cougar diet. Learned, individual prey recognition was observed, as some cougars rarely killed bighorn sheep, while others relied heavily on the species.
In the Central and South American cougar range, the ratio of deer in the diet declines. Small to mid-size mammals are preferred, including large rodents such as the capybara. Ungulates accounted for only 35% of prey items in one survey, approximately half that of North America. Competition with the larger jaguar has been suggested for the decline in the size of prey items. Other listed prey species of the cougar include mice, porcupine, and hares. Birds and small reptiles are sometimes preyed upon in the south, but this is rarely recorded in North America.
Though capable of sprinting, the cougar is typically an ambush predator. It stalks through brush and trees, across ledges, or other covered spots, before delivering a powerful leap onto the back of its prey and a suffocating neck bite. The cougar is capable of breaking the neck of some of its smaller prey with a strong bite and momentum bearing the animal to the ground.
Kills are generally estimated at around one large ungulate every two weeks. The period shrinks for females raising young, and may be as short as one kill every three days when cubs are nearly mature at around 15 months. The cat drags a kill to a preferred spot, covers it with brush, and returns to feed over a period of days. It is generally reported that the cougar is a non-scavenger and will rarely consume prey it has not killed; but deer carcasses left exposed for study were scavenged by cougars in California, suggesting more opportunistic behavior.
Females reach sexual maturity between one-and-a-half to three years of age. They typically average one litter every two to three years throughout their reproductive life, though the period can be as short as one year. Females are in estrus for approximately 8 days of a 23-day cycle; the gestation period is approximately 91 days. Females are sometimes reported as monogamous, but this is uncertain and polygyny may be more common. Copulation is brief but frequent.
Cougar kittens
Only females are involved in parenting. Female cougars are fiercely protective of their kittens, and have been seen to successfully fight off animals as large as grizzly bears in their defense. Litter size is between one and six kittens; typically two or three. Caves and other alcoves that offer protection are used as litter dens. Born blind, kittens are completely dependent on their mother at first, and begin to be weaned at around three months of age. As they grow, they begin to go out on forays with their mother, first visiting kill sites, and after six months beginning to hunt small prey on their own. Kitten survival rates are just over one per litter.
Sub-adults leave their mother to attempt to establish their own territory at around two years of age and sometimes earlier; males tend to leave sooner. One study has shown high morbidity amongst cougars that travel farthest from the maternal range, often due to conflicts with other cougars ("intraspecific" conflict). Research in New Mexico has shown that "males dispersed significantly farther than females, were more likely to traverse large expanses of non-cougar habitat, and were probably most responsible for nuclear gene flow between habitat patches."
Life expectancy in the wild is reported at between 8 to 13 years, and probably averages 8 to 10; a female of at least 18 years was reported killed by hunters on Vancouver Island. Cougars may live as long as 20 years in captivity. One male North American cougar, named Scratch, was two months short of his 30th birthday when he died in 2007. Causes of death in the wild include disability and disease, competition with other cougars, starvation, accidents, and, where allowed, human hunting. Feline immunodeficiency virus, an endemic AIDS-like disease in cats, is well-adapted to the cougar.
Like almost all cats, the cougar is a solitary animal. Only mothers and kittens live in groups, with adults meeting only to mate. It is secretive and crepuscular, being most active around dawn and dusk.
Estimates of territory sizes vary greatly.
Canadian Geographic reports large male territories of 150 to 1000 square kilometers (58 to 386 sq mi) with female ranges half the size. Other research suggests a much smaller lower limit of 25 km 2 (10 sq mi) but an even greater upper limit of 1300 km 2 (500 sq mi) for males. In the United States, very large ranges have been reported in Texas and the Black Hills of the northern Great Plains, in excess of 775 km 2 (300 sq mi). Male ranges may include or overlap with those of females but, at least where studied, not with those of other males, which serves to reduce conflict between cougars. Ranges of females may overlap slightly with each other. Scrape marks, urine, and feces are used to mark territory and attract mates. Males may scrape together a small pile of leaves and grasses and then urinate on it as a way of marking territory.
Home range sizes and overall cougar abundance depend on terrain, vegetation, and prey abundance. One female adjacent to the San Andres Mountains, for instance, was found with a large range of 215 km 2 (83 sq mi), necessitated by poor prey abundance. Research has shown cougar abundances from 0.5 animals to as much as 7 (in one study in South America) per 100 km 2 (38 sq mi).
Because males disperse further than females and compete more directly for mates and territory, they are most likely to be involved in conflict. Where a sub-adult fails to leave his maternal range, for example, he may be killed by his father. When males encounter each other, they hiss, spit, and may engage in violent conflict if neither backs down. Hunting or relocation of the cougar may increase aggressive encounters by disrupting territories and bringing young, transient animals into conflict with established individuals.
The cougar has the largest range of any wild land animal in the Americas. Its range spans 110 degrees of latitude, from northern Yukon in Canada to the southern Andes. It is one of only three cat species, along with the bobcat and Canadian lynx, native to Canada. Its wide distribution stems from its adaptability to virtually every habitat type: it is found in all forest types as well as in lowland and mountainous deserts. Studies show that the Cougar prefers regions with dense underbrush, but can live with little vegetation in open areas. Its preferred habitats include precipitous canyons, escarpments, rim rocks, and dense brush.
Cougar, photographed in the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, Tucson, Arizona.
The cougar was extirpated across much of its eastern North American range (with the exception of Florida) in the two centuries after European colonization, and faced grave threats in the remainder of its territory. Currently, it ranges across most western American states, the Canadian provinces of Alberta and British Columbia, and the Canadian Yukon Territory. There have been widely debated reports of possible recolonization of eastern North America. DNA evidence has suggested its presence in eastern North America, , while a consolidated map of cougar sightings shows numerous reports, from the mid-western Great Plains through to Eastern Canada. The Cougar Network methodology is recognized by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The Quebec wildlife services (known locally as MRNF) also considers Cougar to be present in the province as a threatened species after multiple DNA tests confirmed cougar hair in Lynx mating sites. Ministry of Wildlife and natural resources Wildlife Service. The only unequivocally known eastern population is the Florida panther, which is critically endangered. There have also been sightings in Elliotsville, Maine (in the central part of the state); and in New Hampshire, there have been recent sightings as early as 1997. In 2009, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources confirmed a cougar sighting in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Skinner, Victor. 2009. Photo shows cougar presence in Michigan. The Grand Rapids Press. November 15, 2009 Typically, extreme-range sightings of cougars involve young males, who can travel great distances to establish ranges away from established males; all four confirmed cougar kills in Iowa since 2000 involved males.
On April 14, 2008 police shot and killed a cougar on the north side of Chicago, Illinois. DNA tests were consistent with cougars from the Black Hills. Less than one year later, on March 5, 2009, a cougar was photographed and unsuccessfully tranquilized by state wildlife biologists in a tree near Spooner, Wisconsin in the northwestern part of the state.
South of the Rio Grande, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) lists the cat in every Central and South American country except Costa Rica and Panama. While specific state and provincial statistics are often available in North America, much less is known about the cat in its southern range.
The cougar's total breeding population is estimated at less than 50,000 by the IUCN, with a declining trend. U.S. state-level statistics are often more optimistic, suggesting cougar populations have rebounded. In Oregon, a healthy population of 5,000 was reported in 2006, exceeding a target of 3,000. California has actively sought to protect the cat and a similar number of cougars has been suggested, between 4,000 and 6,000.
Aside from humans, no species preys upon mature cougars in the wild. The cat is not, however, the apex predator throughout much of its range. In its northern range, the cougar interacts with other powerful predators such as the brown bear and gray wolf. In the south, the cougar must compete with the larger jaguar. In Florida it encounters the American Alligator.
thumbFront paw print of a cougar. An adult paw print is approximately 10 cm (4 inches) long.
The Yellowstone National Park ecosystem provides a fruitful microcosm to study inter-predator interaction in North America. Of the three large predators, the massive brown bear appears dominant, often although not always able to drive both the gray wolf pack and the cougar off their kills. One study found that Brown or American Black Bears visited 24% of cougar kills in Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks, usurping 10% of carcasses.
The gray wolf and the cougar compete more directly for prey, especially in winter. While individually more powerful than the gray wolf, a solitary cougar may be dominated by the pack structure of the canines. Wolves can steal kills and occasionally kill the cat. One report describes a large pack of fourteen wolves killing a female cougar and her kittens. Conversely, lone wolves are at a disadvantage, and have been reported killed by cougars. Wolves more broadly affect cougar population dynamics and distribution by dominating territory and prey opportunities, and disrupting the feline's behavior. Preliminary research in Yellowstone, for instance, has shown displacement of the cougar by wolves. One researcher in Oregon notes: "When there is a pack around, cougars are not comfortable around their kills or raising kittens ... A lot of times a big cougar will kill a wolf, but the pack phenomenon changes the table." Both species, meanwhile, are capable of killing mid-sized predators such as bobcats and coyotes and tend to suppress their numbers.
In the southern portion of its range, the cougar and jaguar share overlapping territory. The jaguar tends to take larger prey and the cougar smaller where they overlap, reducing the cougar's size. Of the two felines, the cougar appears best able to exploit a broader prey niche and smaller prey.
As with any predator at or near the top of its food chain, the cougar impacts the population of prey species. Predation by cougars has been linked to changes in the species mix of deer in a region. For example, a study in British Columbia observed that the population of mule deer, a favored cougar prey, was declining while the population of the less frequently preyed-upon white-tailed deer was increasing. The Vancouver Island Marmot, an endangered species endemic to one region of dense cougar population, has seen decreased numbers due to cougar and gray wolf predation.
In the southern part of South America the Puma is a top level predator that has controlled the population of Guanaco and other species since prehistoric times.
Pumapard, taken in 1904
A pumapard is a hybrid animal resulting from a union between a cougar and a leopard. Three sets of these hybrids were bred in the late 1890s and early 1900s by Carl Hagenbeck at his animal park in Hamburg, Germany. Most did not reach adulthood. One of these was purchased in 1898 by Berlin Zoo. A similar hybrid in Berlin Zoo purchased from Hagenbeck was a cross between a male leopard and a female puma. Hamburg Zoo's specimen was the reverse pairing, the one in the black and white photo, fathered by a puma bred to an Indian leopardess.
Whether born to a female puma mated to a male leopard, or to a male puma mated to a female leopard, pumapards inherit a form of dwarfism. Those reported grew to only half the size of the parents. They have a puma-like long body (proportional to the limbs, but nevertheless shorter than either parent), but short legs. The coat is variously described as sandy, tawny or greyish with brown, chestnut or "faded" rosettes.
The World Conservation Union (IUCN) currently lists the cougar as a "least concern" species. The cougar is regulated under Appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), rendering illegal international trade in specimens or parts.
Cougar conservation depends on preservation of their habitat.
In the United States east of the Mississippi River, the only unequivocally known cougar population is the Florida panther. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service recognizes both an Eastern cougar and the Florida panther, affording protection under the Endangered Species Act. Certain taxonomic authorities have collapsed both designations into the North American Cougar, with Eastern or Florida subspecies not recognized, while a subspecies designation remains recognized by some conservation scientists. The most recent documented count for the Florida sub-population is 87 individuals, reported by recovery agencies in 2003.
The cougar is also protected across much of the rest of their range. As of 1996, cougar hunting was prohibited in Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, French Guiana, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Suriname, Venezuela, and Uruguay. (Costa Rica and Panama are not listed as current range countries by the IUCN.) The cat had no reported legal protection in Ecuador, El Salvador, and Guyana. Regulated cougar hunting is still common in the United States and Canada, although they are protected from all hunting in the Yukon.; it is permitted in every U.S. state from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, with the exception of California. Texas is the only state in the United States with a viable population of cougars that does not protect, in some way, of its cougar population. In Texas, cougars are listed as nuisance wildlife and any person holding a hunting or a trapping permit can kill a cougar regardless of the season, number killed, sex or age of the animal. Killed animals are not required to be reported to Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. Conservation work in Texas is the effort of a non profit organization, Balanced Ecology Inc. (BEI), as part of their Texas Mountain Lion Conservation Project . Cougars are generally hunted with packs of dogs, until the animal is 'treed'. When the hunter arrives on the scene, he shoots the cat from the tree at close range. The Cougar cannot be legally killed in California except under very specific circumstances, such as when an individual is declared a public safety threat. However statistics from the Department of Fish and Game indicate that cougar killings in California have been on the rise since 1970s with an average of over 112 cats killed per year from 2000 to 2006 compared to six per year in the 1970s. The Bay Area Puma Project aims to obtain information on cougar populations in the San Francisco Bay area and the animals' interactions with habitat, prey, humans, and residential communities.
Conservation threats to the species include persecution as a pest animal, degradation and fragmentation of their habitat, and depletion of their prey base. Wildlife corridor and sufficient range areas are critical to the sustainability of cougar populations. Research simulations have shown that the animal faces a low extinction risk in areas of 2200 km 2 (850 sq mi) or more. As few as one to four new animals entering a population per decade markedly increases persistence, foregrounding the importance of habitat corridors.
Moche puma, Larco Museum collection
The grace and power of the cougar have been widely admired in the cultures of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. The Inca city of Cusco is reported to have been designed in the shape of a cougar, and the animal also gave its name to both Inca regions and people. The Moche people represented the puma often in their ceramics. Berrin, Katherine & Larco Museum. The Spirit of Ancient Peru:Treasures from the Museo Arqueológico Rafael Larco Herrera. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1997. The sky and thunder god of the Inca, Viracocha, has been associated with the animal.
In North America, mythological descriptions of the cougar have appeared in the stories of the HocÄ
k language ("Ho-Chunk" or "Winnebago") of Wisconsin and Illinois Cougars, The Encyclopedia of HoÄÄ
k (Winnebago) Mythology. Retrieved: 2009/12/08. and the Cheyenne, amongst others. To the Apache and Walapai of Arizona, the wail of the Cougar was a harbinger of death.
During the early years of ranching, cougars were considered on par with wolves in destructiveness. According to figures in Texas in 1990, 86 calves (0.0006% of a total of 13.4 million cattle & calves in Texas), 253 Mohair goats, 302 Mohair kids, 445 sheep (0.02% of a total of 2.0 million sheep & lambs in Texas) and 562 lambs (0.04% of 1.2 million lambs in Texas) were confirmed to have been killed by cougars that year. In Nevada in 1992, cougars were confirmed to have killed 9 calves, 1 horse, 4 colts, 5 goats, 318 sheep and 400 lambs. In both cases, sheep were the most frequently attacked. Some instances of surplus killing have resulted in the deaths of 20 sheep in one attack. Cougars frequently kill calves, sheep and goats by biting the top of the neck or head, differing greatly from the throat bite used by coyotes and indiscriminate mutilation by feral dogs. The size of the tooth puncture marks also helps distinguish kills made by cougars from those made by smaller predators.
Mountain Lion warning sign
Due to the expanding human population, cougar ranges increasingly overlap with areas inhabited by humans. Attacks on humans are rare, as cougar prey recognition is a learned behavior and they do not generally recognize humans as prey. Attacks on people, livestock, and pets may occur when the cat habituates to humans or is in a condition of severe starvation. Attacks are most frequent during late spring and summer, when juvenile cougars leave their mothers and search for new territory.
Between 1890 and 1990, in North America there were 53 reported, confirmed attacks on humans, resulting in 48 nonfatal injuries and 10 deaths of humans (the total is greater than 53 because some attacks had more than one victim). By 2004, the count had climbed to 88 attacks and 20 deaths.
Within North America, the distribution of attacks is not uniform. The heavily populated state of California has seen a dozen attacks since 1986 (after just three from 1890 to 1985), including three fatalities. Lightly populated New Mexico reported an attack in 2008, the first there since 1974. Search continues for mountain lion that killed Pinos Altos man, New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, press release June 23, 2008]; Wounded mountain lion captured, killed near Pinos Altos, New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, press release June 25, 2008]; Second mountain lion captured near Pinos Altos, New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, press release July 1, 2008]
As with many predators, a cougar may attack if cornered, if a fleeing human stimulates their instinct to chase, or if a person "plays dead." Exaggerating the threat to the animal through intense eye contact, loud but calm shouting, and any other action to appear larger and more menacing, may make the animal retreat. Fighting back with sticks and rocks, or even bare hands, is often effective in persuading an attacking cougar to disengage.
When cougars do attack, they usually employ their characteristic neck bite, attempting to position their teeth between the vertebrae and into the spinal cord. Neck, head, and spinal injuries are common and sometimes fatal. Children are at greatest risk of attack, and least likely to survive an encounter. Detailed research into attacks prior to 1991 showed that 64% of all victims and almost all fatalities were children. The same study showed the highest proportion of attacks to have occurred in British Columbia, particularly on Vancouver Island where cougar populations are especially dense.
*List of fatal cougar attacks in North America
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* Video, Pictures and Information on Mountain Lions
* A Definitive Resource About Cougars Comprehensive, non-profit site with extensive information about cougars, from how to live safely in cougar country, to science abstracts, hunting regulations, state-by-state cougar management/policy info, and rare photos and videos of wild cougars.
* Description of a Cougar attack
* Cougar Facts and Photos â NatureMapping Program
* No Place for Predators? Liza Gross, PLoS Biology, explains how Washington State wildlife officials implemented a hunting policy, in response to a state measure passed to protect wildlife, that led to the highest rates of human-caused cougar mortality since the height of the bounty era
* Cougar Tracks: How to identify cougar tracks in the wild
* The sound of a cougar screaming
* Link to Worldwide Wild Cat Conservation site
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Cougar | What are the three heaviest cats in the world? | The three heaviest cats in the world are the tiger, lion and jaguar. | data/set1/a2 | Cougar
The cougar (Puma concolor), also known as puma, mountain lion, mountain cat, catamount or panther, depending on the region, is a mammal of the family Felidae, native to the Americas. This large, solitary cat has the greatest range of any large wild terrestrial mammal in the Western Hemisphere, extending from Yukon in Canada to the southern Andes of South America. An adaptable, generalist species, the cougar is found in every major American habitat type. It is the second heaviest cat in the American continents after the jaguar, and the fourth heaviest in the world, after the tiger, lion, and jaguar. Although large, the cougar is most closely related to smaller felines.
A capable stalk-and-ambush predator, the cougar pursues a wide variety of prey. Primary food sources include ungulates such as deer, elk, and bighorn sheep, as well as domestic cattle, horses and sheep, particularly in the northern part of its range. It will also hunt species as small as insects and rodents. This cat prefers habitats with dense underbrush and rocky areas for stalking, but it can also live in open areas. The cougar is territorial and persists at low population densities. Individual territory sizes depend on terrain, vegetation, and abundance of prey. While it is a large predator, it is not always the dominant species in its range, as when it competes for prey with other predators such as the jaguar, grey wolf, American Black Bear, and the grizzly bear. It is a reclusive cat and usually avoids people. Attacks on humans remain rare, despite a recent increase in frequency.
Due to excessive hunting following the European colonization of the Americas, and continuing human development of cougar habitat, populations have dropped in most parts of its historical range. In particular, the cougar was extirpated in eastern North America, except for an isolated sub-population in Florida; the animal may be recolonizing parts of its former eastern territory, such as Maine and northern Michigan, /ref> where there have been recent sightings. With its vast range, the cougar has dozens of names and various references in the mythology of the indigenous Americans and in contemporary culture. The cougar has recently made a comeback in the state of Wyoming, where it presently has the largest population in North America .
The cougar has numerous names in English, of which puma and mountain lion are popular. Other names include catamount, panther, mountain screamer and painter. Lexicographers regard painter as a primarily upper-Southern U.S. regional variant on "panther", but a folk etymology, fancying a resemblance between the typically dark tip of its tail and a paintbrush dipped in dark paint, has some currency.
The cougar holds the Guinness record for the animal with the highest number of names, presumably due to its wide distribution across North and South America. It has over 40 names in English alone.
"Cougar" may be borrowed from the Portuguese çuçuarana, via French; the term was originally derived from the Tupi language. A current form in Brazil is suçuarana. It may also be borrowed from the Guaranà language term guaçu ara or guazu ara. "Puma" comes, via Spanish, from the Quechua language. Cougar, Puma and
The cougar is the largest of the small cats. It is placed in the subfamily Felinae, although its bulk characteristics are similar to those of the big cats in the subfamily Pantherinae. The family Felidae is believed to have originated in Asia approximately 11 million years ago. Taxonomic research on felids remains partial and much of what is known about their evolutionary history is based on mitochondrial DNA analysis, as cats are poorly represented in the fossil record, and there are significant confidence intervals with suggested dates.
Although large, the cougar is closely related to small felines.
In the latest genomic study of Felidae, the common ancestor of today's Leopardus, Lynx, Puma, Prionailurus, and Felis lineages migrated across the Bering land bridge into the Americas approximately 8 to 8.5 million years (Ma) ago. The lineages subsequently diverged in that order. North American felids then invaded South America 3 Ma ago as part of the Great American Interchange, following formation of the Isthmus of Panama. The cougar was originally thought to belong in Felis (Felis concolor), the genus which includes the domestic cat. As of 1993, it is now placed in Puma along with the jaguarundi, a cat just a little more than a tenth its weight.
Studies have indicated that the cougar and jaguarundi are most closely related to the modern cheetah of Africa and western Asia, but the relationship is unresolved. It has been suggested that the cheetah lineage diverged from the Puma lineage in the Americas (see American cheetah) and migrated back to Asia and Africa, while other research suggests the cheetah diverged in the Old World itself. The outline of small feline migration to the Americas is thus unclear.
Recent studies have demonstrated a high level of genetic similarity among the North American cougar populations, suggesting that they are all fairly recent descendants of a small ancestral group. Culver et al. suggest that the original North American population of Puma concolor was extirpated during the Pleistocene extinctions some 10,000 years ago, when other large mammals such as Smilodon also disappeared. North America was then repopulated by a group of South American cougars.
Until the late 1990s, as many as 32 subspecies were recorded; however, a recent genetic study of mitochondrial DNA found that many of these are too similar to be recognized as distinct at a molecular level. Following the research, the canonical Mammal Species of the World (3rd edition) recognizes six subspecies, five of which are solely found in Latin America:
; Argentine puma : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms hudsonii and puma (Marcelli, 1922);
; Costa Rican Cougar
; Eastern South American cougar : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms acrocodia, borbensis, capricornensis, concolor (Pelzeln, 1883), greeni and nigra;
; North American Cougar : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms arundivaga, aztecus, browni, californica, coryi, floridana, hippolestes, improcera, kaibabensis, mayensis, missoulensis, olympus, oregonensis, schorgeri, stanleyana, vancouverensis and youngi;
; Northern South American cougar : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms bangsi, incarum, osgoodi, soasoaranna, sussuarana, soderstromii, sucuacuara and wavula;
; Southern South American puma : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms araucanus, concolor (Gay, 1847), patagonica, pearsoni and puma (Trouessart, 1904)
The status of the Florida panther, here collapsed into the North American Cougar, remains uncertain. It is still regularly listed as subspecies Puma concolor coryi in research works, including those directly concerned with its conservation. Culver et al. themselves noted low microsatellite variation in the Florida panther, possibly due to inbreeding; responding to the research, one conservation team suggests "the degree to which the scientific community has accepted the results of Culver et al. and the proposed change in taxonomy is not resolved at this time."
Cougars are slender and agile cats. Adults stand about 60 to 76 centimeters (2.0 to 2.5 ft) tall at the shoulders. The length of adult males is around 2.4 meters (8 ft) long nose to tail, with overall ranges between 1.5 and 2.75 m (5 and 9 ft) nose to tail suggested for the species in general. Males typically weigh 53 to 90 kilograms (115 to 198 pounds), averaging 62 kg (137 lb). In rare cases, some may reach over 120 kg (264 lb). Females typically weigh between 29 and 64 kg (64 and 141 lb), averaging 42 kg (93 lb). /ref> /ref> Cougar size is smallest close to the equator, and larger towards the poles.
Although cougars resemble the domestic cat, they are about the same size as an adult human.
The head of the cat is round and the ears erect. Its powerful forequarters, neck, and jaw serve to grasp and hold large prey. It has five retractable claws on its forepaws (one a dewclaw) and four on its hind paws. The larger front feet and claws are adaptations to clutching prey.
Cougars can be almost as large as jaguars, but are less muscular and not as powerful; where their ranges overlap, the cougar tends to be smaller than average. The cougar is on average as heavy as the leopard. Despite its size, it is not typically classified among the "big cats," as it cannot roar, lacking the specialized larynx and hyoid apparatus of Panthera. Like domestic cats, cougars vocalize low-pitched hisses, growls, and purrs, as well as chirps and whistles. They are well known for their screams, as referenced in some of their common names, although these screams are often misinterpreted to be the calls of other animals.
Rear paw of a cougar
Cougar coloring is plain (hence the Latin concolor) but can vary greatly between individuals and even between siblings. The coat is typically tawny, but ranges to silvery-grey or reddish, with lighter patches on the under body including the jaws, chin, and throat. Infants are spotted and born with blue eyes and rings on their tails; juveniles are pale, and dark spots remain on their flanks. Despite anecdotes to the contrary, all-black coloring (melanism) has never been documented in cougars. The term "black panther" is used colloquially to refer to melanistic individuals of other species, particularly jaguars and leopards.
Cougars have large paws and proportionally the largest hind legs in the cat family. This physique allows it great leaping and short-sprint ability. An exceptional vertical leap of 5.4 m (18 ft) is reported for the cougar. Horizontal jumping capability from standing position is suggested anywhere from 6 to 12 m (20 to 40 ft). The cougar can run as fast as 55 to 72 km/h (35 to 45 mi/h), but is best adapted for short, powerful sprints rather than long chases. It is adept at climbing, which allows it to evade canine competitors. Although it is not strongly associated with water, it can swim.
A successful generalist predator, the cougar will eat any animal it can catch, from insects to large ungulates (over 500 kg). Like all cats, it is an obligate carnivore, feeding only on meat. The Mean weight of vertebrate prey (MWVP) was positively correlated (r=0.875) with puma body weight and inversely correlated (r=-0.836) with food niche breadth in all America. In general, MWVP was lower in areas closer to the Equator. Its most important prey species are various deer species, particularly in North America; mule deer, white-tailed deer, elk, and even large moose are taken by the cat. Other species such as Bighorn Sheep, wild horses of Arizona, domestic horses, and domestic livestock such as cattle and sheep are also primary food bases in many areas. A survey of North America research found 68% of prey items were ungulates, especially deer. Only the Florida Panther showed variation, often preferring feral hogs and armadillos.
Shown eating. Cougars are ambush predators, feeding mostly on deer and other mammals.
Investigation in Yellowstone National Park showed that elk, followed by mule deer, were the cougar's primary targets; the prey base is shared with the park's gray wolves, with whom the cougar competes for resources.
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* Another study on winter kills (NovemberâApril) in Alberta showed that ungulates accounted for greater than 99% of the cougar diet. Learned, individual prey recognition was observed, as some cougars rarely killed bighorn sheep, while others relied heavily on the species.
In the Central and South American cougar range, the ratio of deer in the diet declines. Small to mid-size mammals are preferred, including large rodents such as the capybara. Ungulates accounted for only 35% of prey items in one survey, approximately half that of North America. Competition with the larger jaguar has been suggested for the decline in the size of prey items. Other listed prey species of the cougar include mice, porcupine, and hares. Birds and small reptiles are sometimes preyed upon in the south, but this is rarely recorded in North America.
Though capable of sprinting, the cougar is typically an ambush predator. It stalks through brush and trees, across ledges, or other covered spots, before delivering a powerful leap onto the back of its prey and a suffocating neck bite. The cougar is capable of breaking the neck of some of its smaller prey with a strong bite and momentum bearing the animal to the ground.
Kills are generally estimated at around one large ungulate every two weeks. The period shrinks for females raising young, and may be as short as one kill every three days when cubs are nearly mature at around 15 months. The cat drags a kill to a preferred spot, covers it with brush, and returns to feed over a period of days. It is generally reported that the cougar is a non-scavenger and will rarely consume prey it has not killed; but deer carcasses left exposed for study were scavenged by cougars in California, suggesting more opportunistic behavior.
Females reach sexual maturity between one-and-a-half to three years of age. They typically average one litter every two to three years throughout their reproductive life, though the period can be as short as one year. Females are in estrus for approximately 8 days of a 23-day cycle; the gestation period is approximately 91 days. Females are sometimes reported as monogamous, but this is uncertain and polygyny may be more common. Copulation is brief but frequent.
Cougar kittens
Only females are involved in parenting. Female cougars are fiercely protective of their kittens, and have been seen to successfully fight off animals as large as grizzly bears in their defense. Litter size is between one and six kittens; typically two or three. Caves and other alcoves that offer protection are used as litter dens. Born blind, kittens are completely dependent on their mother at first, and begin to be weaned at around three months of age. As they grow, they begin to go out on forays with their mother, first visiting kill sites, and after six months beginning to hunt small prey on their own. Kitten survival rates are just over one per litter.
Sub-adults leave their mother to attempt to establish their own territory at around two years of age and sometimes earlier; males tend to leave sooner. One study has shown high morbidity amongst cougars that travel farthest from the maternal range, often due to conflicts with other cougars ("intraspecific" conflict). Research in New Mexico has shown that "males dispersed significantly farther than females, were more likely to traverse large expanses of non-cougar habitat, and were probably most responsible for nuclear gene flow between habitat patches."
Life expectancy in the wild is reported at between 8 to 13 years, and probably averages 8 to 10; a female of at least 18 years was reported killed by hunters on Vancouver Island. Cougars may live as long as 20 years in captivity. One male North American cougar, named Scratch, was two months short of his 30th birthday when he died in 2007. Causes of death in the wild include disability and disease, competition with other cougars, starvation, accidents, and, where allowed, human hunting. Feline immunodeficiency virus, an endemic AIDS-like disease in cats, is well-adapted to the cougar.
Like almost all cats, the cougar is a solitary animal. Only mothers and kittens live in groups, with adults meeting only to mate. It is secretive and crepuscular, being most active around dawn and dusk.
Estimates of territory sizes vary greatly.
Canadian Geographic reports large male territories of 150 to 1000 square kilometers (58 to 386 sq mi) with female ranges half the size. Other research suggests a much smaller lower limit of 25 km 2 (10 sq mi) but an even greater upper limit of 1300 km 2 (500 sq mi) for males. In the United States, very large ranges have been reported in Texas and the Black Hills of the northern Great Plains, in excess of 775 km 2 (300 sq mi). Male ranges may include or overlap with those of females but, at least where studied, not with those of other males, which serves to reduce conflict between cougars. Ranges of females may overlap slightly with each other. Scrape marks, urine, and feces are used to mark territory and attract mates. Males may scrape together a small pile of leaves and grasses and then urinate on it as a way of marking territory.
Home range sizes and overall cougar abundance depend on terrain, vegetation, and prey abundance. One female adjacent to the San Andres Mountains, for instance, was found with a large range of 215 km 2 (83 sq mi), necessitated by poor prey abundance. Research has shown cougar abundances from 0.5 animals to as much as 7 (in one study in South America) per 100 km 2 (38 sq mi).
Because males disperse further than females and compete more directly for mates and territory, they are most likely to be involved in conflict. Where a sub-adult fails to leave his maternal range, for example, he may be killed by his father. When males encounter each other, they hiss, spit, and may engage in violent conflict if neither backs down. Hunting or relocation of the cougar may increase aggressive encounters by disrupting territories and bringing young, transient animals into conflict with established individuals.
The cougar has the largest range of any wild land animal in the Americas. Its range spans 110 degrees of latitude, from northern Yukon in Canada to the southern Andes. It is one of only three cat species, along with the bobcat and Canadian lynx, native to Canada. Its wide distribution stems from its adaptability to virtually every habitat type: it is found in all forest types as well as in lowland and mountainous deserts. Studies show that the Cougar prefers regions with dense underbrush, but can live with little vegetation in open areas. Its preferred habitats include precipitous canyons, escarpments, rim rocks, and dense brush.
Cougar, photographed in the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, Tucson, Arizona.
The cougar was extirpated across much of its eastern North American range (with the exception of Florida) in the two centuries after European colonization, and faced grave threats in the remainder of its territory. Currently, it ranges across most western American states, the Canadian provinces of Alberta and British Columbia, and the Canadian Yukon Territory. There have been widely debated reports of possible recolonization of eastern North America. DNA evidence has suggested its presence in eastern North America, , while a consolidated map of cougar sightings shows numerous reports, from the mid-western Great Plains through to Eastern Canada. The Cougar Network methodology is recognized by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The Quebec wildlife services (known locally as MRNF) also considers Cougar to be present in the province as a threatened species after multiple DNA tests confirmed cougar hair in Lynx mating sites. Ministry of Wildlife and natural resources Wildlife Service. The only unequivocally known eastern population is the Florida panther, which is critically endangered. There have also been sightings in Elliotsville, Maine (in the central part of the state); and in New Hampshire, there have been recent sightings as early as 1997. In 2009, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources confirmed a cougar sighting in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Skinner, Victor. 2009. Photo shows cougar presence in Michigan. The Grand Rapids Press. November 15, 2009 Typically, extreme-range sightings of cougars involve young males, who can travel great distances to establish ranges away from established males; all four confirmed cougar kills in Iowa since 2000 involved males.
On April 14, 2008 police shot and killed a cougar on the north side of Chicago, Illinois. DNA tests were consistent with cougars from the Black Hills. Less than one year later, on March 5, 2009, a cougar was photographed and unsuccessfully tranquilized by state wildlife biologists in a tree near Spooner, Wisconsin in the northwestern part of the state.
South of the Rio Grande, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) lists the cat in every Central and South American country except Costa Rica and Panama. While specific state and provincial statistics are often available in North America, much less is known about the cat in its southern range.
The cougar's total breeding population is estimated at less than 50,000 by the IUCN, with a declining trend. U.S. state-level statistics are often more optimistic, suggesting cougar populations have rebounded. In Oregon, a healthy population of 5,000 was reported in 2006, exceeding a target of 3,000. California has actively sought to protect the cat and a similar number of cougars has been suggested, between 4,000 and 6,000.
Aside from humans, no species preys upon mature cougars in the wild. The cat is not, however, the apex predator throughout much of its range. In its northern range, the cougar interacts with other powerful predators such as the brown bear and gray wolf. In the south, the cougar must compete with the larger jaguar. In Florida it encounters the American Alligator.
thumbFront paw print of a cougar. An adult paw print is approximately 10 cm (4 inches) long.
The Yellowstone National Park ecosystem provides a fruitful microcosm to study inter-predator interaction in North America. Of the three large predators, the massive brown bear appears dominant, often although not always able to drive both the gray wolf pack and the cougar off their kills. One study found that Brown or American Black Bears visited 24% of cougar kills in Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks, usurping 10% of carcasses.
The gray wolf and the cougar compete more directly for prey, especially in winter. While individually more powerful than the gray wolf, a solitary cougar may be dominated by the pack structure of the canines. Wolves can steal kills and occasionally kill the cat. One report describes a large pack of fourteen wolves killing a female cougar and her kittens. Conversely, lone wolves are at a disadvantage, and have been reported killed by cougars. Wolves more broadly affect cougar population dynamics and distribution by dominating territory and prey opportunities, and disrupting the feline's behavior. Preliminary research in Yellowstone, for instance, has shown displacement of the cougar by wolves. One researcher in Oregon notes: "When there is a pack around, cougars are not comfortable around their kills or raising kittens ... A lot of times a big cougar will kill a wolf, but the pack phenomenon changes the table." Both species, meanwhile, are capable of killing mid-sized predators such as bobcats and coyotes and tend to suppress their numbers.
In the southern portion of its range, the cougar and jaguar share overlapping territory. The jaguar tends to take larger prey and the cougar smaller where they overlap, reducing the cougar's size. Of the two felines, the cougar appears best able to exploit a broader prey niche and smaller prey.
As with any predator at or near the top of its food chain, the cougar impacts the population of prey species. Predation by cougars has been linked to changes in the species mix of deer in a region. For example, a study in British Columbia observed that the population of mule deer, a favored cougar prey, was declining while the population of the less frequently preyed-upon white-tailed deer was increasing. The Vancouver Island Marmot, an endangered species endemic to one region of dense cougar population, has seen decreased numbers due to cougar and gray wolf predation.
In the southern part of South America the Puma is a top level predator that has controlled the population of Guanaco and other species since prehistoric times.
Pumapard, taken in 1904
A pumapard is a hybrid animal resulting from a union between a cougar and a leopard. Three sets of these hybrids were bred in the late 1890s and early 1900s by Carl Hagenbeck at his animal park in Hamburg, Germany. Most did not reach adulthood. One of these was purchased in 1898 by Berlin Zoo. A similar hybrid in Berlin Zoo purchased from Hagenbeck was a cross between a male leopard and a female puma. Hamburg Zoo's specimen was the reverse pairing, the one in the black and white photo, fathered by a puma bred to an Indian leopardess.
Whether born to a female puma mated to a male leopard, or to a male puma mated to a female leopard, pumapards inherit a form of dwarfism. Those reported grew to only half the size of the parents. They have a puma-like long body (proportional to the limbs, but nevertheless shorter than either parent), but short legs. The coat is variously described as sandy, tawny or greyish with brown, chestnut or "faded" rosettes.
The World Conservation Union (IUCN) currently lists the cougar as a "least concern" species. The cougar is regulated under Appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), rendering illegal international trade in specimens or parts.
Cougar conservation depends on preservation of their habitat.
In the United States east of the Mississippi River, the only unequivocally known cougar population is the Florida panther. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service recognizes both an Eastern cougar and the Florida panther, affording protection under the Endangered Species Act. Certain taxonomic authorities have collapsed both designations into the North American Cougar, with Eastern or Florida subspecies not recognized, while a subspecies designation remains recognized by some conservation scientists. The most recent documented count for the Florida sub-population is 87 individuals, reported by recovery agencies in 2003.
The cougar is also protected across much of the rest of their range. As of 1996, cougar hunting was prohibited in Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, French Guiana, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Suriname, Venezuela, and Uruguay. (Costa Rica and Panama are not listed as current range countries by the IUCN.) The cat had no reported legal protection in Ecuador, El Salvador, and Guyana. Regulated cougar hunting is still common in the United States and Canada, although they are protected from all hunting in the Yukon.; it is permitted in every U.S. state from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, with the exception of California. Texas is the only state in the United States with a viable population of cougars that does not protect, in some way, of its cougar population. In Texas, cougars are listed as nuisance wildlife and any person holding a hunting or a trapping permit can kill a cougar regardless of the season, number killed, sex or age of the animal. Killed animals are not required to be reported to Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. Conservation work in Texas is the effort of a non profit organization, Balanced Ecology Inc. (BEI), as part of their Texas Mountain Lion Conservation Project . Cougars are generally hunted with packs of dogs, until the animal is 'treed'. When the hunter arrives on the scene, he shoots the cat from the tree at close range. The Cougar cannot be legally killed in California except under very specific circumstances, such as when an individual is declared a public safety threat. However statistics from the Department of Fish and Game indicate that cougar killings in California have been on the rise since 1970s with an average of over 112 cats killed per year from 2000 to 2006 compared to six per year in the 1970s. The Bay Area Puma Project aims to obtain information on cougar populations in the San Francisco Bay area and the animals' interactions with habitat, prey, humans, and residential communities.
Conservation threats to the species include persecution as a pest animal, degradation and fragmentation of their habitat, and depletion of their prey base. Wildlife corridor and sufficient range areas are critical to the sustainability of cougar populations. Research simulations have shown that the animal faces a low extinction risk in areas of 2200 km 2 (850 sq mi) or more. As few as one to four new animals entering a population per decade markedly increases persistence, foregrounding the importance of habitat corridors.
Moche puma, Larco Museum collection
The grace and power of the cougar have been widely admired in the cultures of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. The Inca city of Cusco is reported to have been designed in the shape of a cougar, and the animal also gave its name to both Inca regions and people. The Moche people represented the puma often in their ceramics. Berrin, Katherine & Larco Museum. The Spirit of Ancient Peru:Treasures from the Museo Arqueológico Rafael Larco Herrera. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1997. The sky and thunder god of the Inca, Viracocha, has been associated with the animal.
In North America, mythological descriptions of the cougar have appeared in the stories of the HocÄ
k language ("Ho-Chunk" or "Winnebago") of Wisconsin and Illinois Cougars, The Encyclopedia of HoÄÄ
k (Winnebago) Mythology. Retrieved: 2009/12/08. and the Cheyenne, amongst others. To the Apache and Walapai of Arizona, the wail of the Cougar was a harbinger of death.
During the early years of ranching, cougars were considered on par with wolves in destructiveness. According to figures in Texas in 1990, 86 calves (0.0006% of a total of 13.4 million cattle & calves in Texas), 253 Mohair goats, 302 Mohair kids, 445 sheep (0.02% of a total of 2.0 million sheep & lambs in Texas) and 562 lambs (0.04% of 1.2 million lambs in Texas) were confirmed to have been killed by cougars that year. In Nevada in 1992, cougars were confirmed to have killed 9 calves, 1 horse, 4 colts, 5 goats, 318 sheep and 400 lambs. In both cases, sheep were the most frequently attacked. Some instances of surplus killing have resulted in the deaths of 20 sheep in one attack. Cougars frequently kill calves, sheep and goats by biting the top of the neck or head, differing greatly from the throat bite used by coyotes and indiscriminate mutilation by feral dogs. The size of the tooth puncture marks also helps distinguish kills made by cougars from those made by smaller predators.
Mountain Lion warning sign
Due to the expanding human population, cougar ranges increasingly overlap with areas inhabited by humans. Attacks on humans are rare, as cougar prey recognition is a learned behavior and they do not generally recognize humans as prey. Attacks on people, livestock, and pets may occur when the cat habituates to humans or is in a condition of severe starvation. Attacks are most frequent during late spring and summer, when juvenile cougars leave their mothers and search for new territory.
Between 1890 and 1990, in North America there were 53 reported, confirmed attacks on humans, resulting in 48 nonfatal injuries and 10 deaths of humans (the total is greater than 53 because some attacks had more than one victim). By 2004, the count had climbed to 88 attacks and 20 deaths.
Within North America, the distribution of attacks is not uniform. The heavily populated state of California has seen a dozen attacks since 1986 (after just three from 1890 to 1985), including three fatalities. Lightly populated New Mexico reported an attack in 2008, the first there since 1974. Search continues for mountain lion that killed Pinos Altos man, New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, press release June 23, 2008]; Wounded mountain lion captured, killed near Pinos Altos, New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, press release June 25, 2008]; Second mountain lion captured near Pinos Altos, New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, press release July 1, 2008]
As with many predators, a cougar may attack if cornered, if a fleeing human stimulates their instinct to chase, or if a person "plays dead." Exaggerating the threat to the animal through intense eye contact, loud but calm shouting, and any other action to appear larger and more menacing, may make the animal retreat. Fighting back with sticks and rocks, or even bare hands, is often effective in persuading an attacking cougar to disengage.
When cougars do attack, they usually employ their characteristic neck bite, attempting to position their teeth between the vertebrae and into the spinal cord. Neck, head, and spinal injuries are common and sometimes fatal. Children are at greatest risk of attack, and least likely to survive an encounter. Detailed research into attacks prior to 1991 showed that 64% of all victims and almost all fatalities were children. The same study showed the highest proportion of attacks to have occurred in British Columbia, particularly on Vancouver Island where cougar populations are especially dense.
*List of fatal cougar attacks in North America
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* Video, Pictures and Information on Mountain Lions
* A Definitive Resource About Cougars Comprehensive, non-profit site with extensive information about cougars, from how to live safely in cougar country, to science abstracts, hunting regulations, state-by-state cougar management/policy info, and rare photos and videos of wild cougars.
* Description of a Cougar attack
* Cougar Facts and Photos â NatureMapping Program
* No Place for Predators? Liza Gross, PLoS Biology, explains how Washington State wildlife officials implemented a hunting policy, in response to a state measure passed to protect wildlife, that led to the highest rates of human-caused cougar mortality since the height of the bounty era
* Cougar Tracks: How to identify cougar tracks in the wild
* The sound of a cougar screaming
* Link to Worldwide Wild Cat Conservation site
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Cougar | What are the three heaviest cats in the world? | tiger, lion, and jaguar | data/set1/a2 | Cougar
The cougar (Puma concolor), also known as puma, mountain lion, mountain cat, catamount or panther, depending on the region, is a mammal of the family Felidae, native to the Americas. This large, solitary cat has the greatest range of any large wild terrestrial mammal in the Western Hemisphere, extending from Yukon in Canada to the southern Andes of South America. An adaptable, generalist species, the cougar is found in every major American habitat type. It is the second heaviest cat in the American continents after the jaguar, and the fourth heaviest in the world, after the tiger, lion, and jaguar. Although large, the cougar is most closely related to smaller felines.
A capable stalk-and-ambush predator, the cougar pursues a wide variety of prey. Primary food sources include ungulates such as deer, elk, and bighorn sheep, as well as domestic cattle, horses and sheep, particularly in the northern part of its range. It will also hunt species as small as insects and rodents. This cat prefers habitats with dense underbrush and rocky areas for stalking, but it can also live in open areas. The cougar is territorial and persists at low population densities. Individual territory sizes depend on terrain, vegetation, and abundance of prey. While it is a large predator, it is not always the dominant species in its range, as when it competes for prey with other predators such as the jaguar, grey wolf, American Black Bear, and the grizzly bear. It is a reclusive cat and usually avoids people. Attacks on humans remain rare, despite a recent increase in frequency.
Due to excessive hunting following the European colonization of the Americas, and continuing human development of cougar habitat, populations have dropped in most parts of its historical range. In particular, the cougar was extirpated in eastern North America, except for an isolated sub-population in Florida; the animal may be recolonizing parts of its former eastern territory, such as Maine and northern Michigan, /ref> where there have been recent sightings. With its vast range, the cougar has dozens of names and various references in the mythology of the indigenous Americans and in contemporary culture. The cougar has recently made a comeback in the state of Wyoming, where it presently has the largest population in North America .
The cougar has numerous names in English, of which puma and mountain lion are popular. Other names include catamount, panther, mountain screamer and painter. Lexicographers regard painter as a primarily upper-Southern U.S. regional variant on "panther", but a folk etymology, fancying a resemblance between the typically dark tip of its tail and a paintbrush dipped in dark paint, has some currency.
The cougar holds the Guinness record for the animal with the highest number of names, presumably due to its wide distribution across North and South America. It has over 40 names in English alone.
"Cougar" may be borrowed from the Portuguese çuçuarana, via French; the term was originally derived from the Tupi language. A current form in Brazil is suçuarana. It may also be borrowed from the Guaranà language term guaçu ara or guazu ara. "Puma" comes, via Spanish, from the Quechua language. Cougar, Puma and
The cougar is the largest of the small cats. It is placed in the subfamily Felinae, although its bulk characteristics are similar to those of the big cats in the subfamily Pantherinae. The family Felidae is believed to have originated in Asia approximately 11 million years ago. Taxonomic research on felids remains partial and much of what is known about their evolutionary history is based on mitochondrial DNA analysis, as cats are poorly represented in the fossil record, and there are significant confidence intervals with suggested dates.
Although large, the cougar is closely related to small felines.
In the latest genomic study of Felidae, the common ancestor of today's Leopardus, Lynx, Puma, Prionailurus, and Felis lineages migrated across the Bering land bridge into the Americas approximately 8 to 8.5 million years (Ma) ago. The lineages subsequently diverged in that order. North American felids then invaded South America 3 Ma ago as part of the Great American Interchange, following formation of the Isthmus of Panama. The cougar was originally thought to belong in Felis (Felis concolor), the genus which includes the domestic cat. As of 1993, it is now placed in Puma along with the jaguarundi, a cat just a little more than a tenth its weight.
Studies have indicated that the cougar and jaguarundi are most closely related to the modern cheetah of Africa and western Asia, but the relationship is unresolved. It has been suggested that the cheetah lineage diverged from the Puma lineage in the Americas (see American cheetah) and migrated back to Asia and Africa, while other research suggests the cheetah diverged in the Old World itself. The outline of small feline migration to the Americas is thus unclear.
Recent studies have demonstrated a high level of genetic similarity among the North American cougar populations, suggesting that they are all fairly recent descendants of a small ancestral group. Culver et al. suggest that the original North American population of Puma concolor was extirpated during the Pleistocene extinctions some 10,000 years ago, when other large mammals such as Smilodon also disappeared. North America was then repopulated by a group of South American cougars.
Until the late 1990s, as many as 32 subspecies were recorded; however, a recent genetic study of mitochondrial DNA found that many of these are too similar to be recognized as distinct at a molecular level. Following the research, the canonical Mammal Species of the World (3rd edition) recognizes six subspecies, five of which are solely found in Latin America:
; Argentine puma : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms hudsonii and puma (Marcelli, 1922);
; Costa Rican Cougar
; Eastern South American cougar : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms acrocodia, borbensis, capricornensis, concolor (Pelzeln, 1883), greeni and nigra;
; North American Cougar : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms arundivaga, aztecus, browni, californica, coryi, floridana, hippolestes, improcera, kaibabensis, mayensis, missoulensis, olympus, oregonensis, schorgeri, stanleyana, vancouverensis and youngi;
; Northern South American cougar : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms bangsi, incarum, osgoodi, soasoaranna, sussuarana, soderstromii, sucuacuara and wavula;
; Southern South American puma : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms araucanus, concolor (Gay, 1847), patagonica, pearsoni and puma (Trouessart, 1904)
The status of the Florida panther, here collapsed into the North American Cougar, remains uncertain. It is still regularly listed as subspecies Puma concolor coryi in research works, including those directly concerned with its conservation. Culver et al. themselves noted low microsatellite variation in the Florida panther, possibly due to inbreeding; responding to the research, one conservation team suggests "the degree to which the scientific community has accepted the results of Culver et al. and the proposed change in taxonomy is not resolved at this time."
Cougars are slender and agile cats. Adults stand about 60 to 76 centimeters (2.0 to 2.5 ft) tall at the shoulders. The length of adult males is around 2.4 meters (8 ft) long nose to tail, with overall ranges between 1.5 and 2.75 m (5 and 9 ft) nose to tail suggested for the species in general. Males typically weigh 53 to 90 kilograms (115 to 198 pounds), averaging 62 kg (137 lb). In rare cases, some may reach over 120 kg (264 lb). Females typically weigh between 29 and 64 kg (64 and 141 lb), averaging 42 kg (93 lb). /ref> /ref> Cougar size is smallest close to the equator, and larger towards the poles.
Although cougars resemble the domestic cat, they are about the same size as an adult human.
The head of the cat is round and the ears erect. Its powerful forequarters, neck, and jaw serve to grasp and hold large prey. It has five retractable claws on its forepaws (one a dewclaw) and four on its hind paws. The larger front feet and claws are adaptations to clutching prey.
Cougars can be almost as large as jaguars, but are less muscular and not as powerful; where their ranges overlap, the cougar tends to be smaller than average. The cougar is on average as heavy as the leopard. Despite its size, it is not typically classified among the "big cats," as it cannot roar, lacking the specialized larynx and hyoid apparatus of Panthera. Like domestic cats, cougars vocalize low-pitched hisses, growls, and purrs, as well as chirps and whistles. They are well known for their screams, as referenced in some of their common names, although these screams are often misinterpreted to be the calls of other animals.
Rear paw of a cougar
Cougar coloring is plain (hence the Latin concolor) but can vary greatly between individuals and even between siblings. The coat is typically tawny, but ranges to silvery-grey or reddish, with lighter patches on the under body including the jaws, chin, and throat. Infants are spotted and born with blue eyes and rings on their tails; juveniles are pale, and dark spots remain on their flanks. Despite anecdotes to the contrary, all-black coloring (melanism) has never been documented in cougars. The term "black panther" is used colloquially to refer to melanistic individuals of other species, particularly jaguars and leopards.
Cougars have large paws and proportionally the largest hind legs in the cat family. This physique allows it great leaping and short-sprint ability. An exceptional vertical leap of 5.4 m (18 ft) is reported for the cougar. Horizontal jumping capability from standing position is suggested anywhere from 6 to 12 m (20 to 40 ft). The cougar can run as fast as 55 to 72 km/h (35 to 45 mi/h), but is best adapted for short, powerful sprints rather than long chases. It is adept at climbing, which allows it to evade canine competitors. Although it is not strongly associated with water, it can swim.
A successful generalist predator, the cougar will eat any animal it can catch, from insects to large ungulates (over 500 kg). Like all cats, it is an obligate carnivore, feeding only on meat. The Mean weight of vertebrate prey (MWVP) was positively correlated (r=0.875) with puma body weight and inversely correlated (r=-0.836) with food niche breadth in all America. In general, MWVP was lower in areas closer to the Equator. Its most important prey species are various deer species, particularly in North America; mule deer, white-tailed deer, elk, and even large moose are taken by the cat. Other species such as Bighorn Sheep, wild horses of Arizona, domestic horses, and domestic livestock such as cattle and sheep are also primary food bases in many areas. A survey of North America research found 68% of prey items were ungulates, especially deer. Only the Florida Panther showed variation, often preferring feral hogs and armadillos.
Shown eating. Cougars are ambush predators, feeding mostly on deer and other mammals.
Investigation in Yellowstone National Park showed that elk, followed by mule deer, were the cougar's primary targets; the prey base is shared with the park's gray wolves, with whom the cougar competes for resources.
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* Another study on winter kills (NovemberâApril) in Alberta showed that ungulates accounted for greater than 99% of the cougar diet. Learned, individual prey recognition was observed, as some cougars rarely killed bighorn sheep, while others relied heavily on the species.
In the Central and South American cougar range, the ratio of deer in the diet declines. Small to mid-size mammals are preferred, including large rodents such as the capybara. Ungulates accounted for only 35% of prey items in one survey, approximately half that of North America. Competition with the larger jaguar has been suggested for the decline in the size of prey items. Other listed prey species of the cougar include mice, porcupine, and hares. Birds and small reptiles are sometimes preyed upon in the south, but this is rarely recorded in North America.
Though capable of sprinting, the cougar is typically an ambush predator. It stalks through brush and trees, across ledges, or other covered spots, before delivering a powerful leap onto the back of its prey and a suffocating neck bite. The cougar is capable of breaking the neck of some of its smaller prey with a strong bite and momentum bearing the animal to the ground.
Kills are generally estimated at around one large ungulate every two weeks. The period shrinks for females raising young, and may be as short as one kill every three days when cubs are nearly mature at around 15 months. The cat drags a kill to a preferred spot, covers it with brush, and returns to feed over a period of days. It is generally reported that the cougar is a non-scavenger and will rarely consume prey it has not killed; but deer carcasses left exposed for study were scavenged by cougars in California, suggesting more opportunistic behavior.
Females reach sexual maturity between one-and-a-half to three years of age. They typically average one litter every two to three years throughout their reproductive life, though the period can be as short as one year. Females are in estrus for approximately 8 days of a 23-day cycle; the gestation period is approximately 91 days. Females are sometimes reported as monogamous, but this is uncertain and polygyny may be more common. Copulation is brief but frequent.
Cougar kittens
Only females are involved in parenting. Female cougars are fiercely protective of their kittens, and have been seen to successfully fight off animals as large as grizzly bears in their defense. Litter size is between one and six kittens; typically two or three. Caves and other alcoves that offer protection are used as litter dens. Born blind, kittens are completely dependent on their mother at first, and begin to be weaned at around three months of age. As they grow, they begin to go out on forays with their mother, first visiting kill sites, and after six months beginning to hunt small prey on their own. Kitten survival rates are just over one per litter.
Sub-adults leave their mother to attempt to establish their own territory at around two years of age and sometimes earlier; males tend to leave sooner. One study has shown high morbidity amongst cougars that travel farthest from the maternal range, often due to conflicts with other cougars ("intraspecific" conflict). Research in New Mexico has shown that "males dispersed significantly farther than females, were more likely to traverse large expanses of non-cougar habitat, and were probably most responsible for nuclear gene flow between habitat patches."
Life expectancy in the wild is reported at between 8 to 13 years, and probably averages 8 to 10; a female of at least 18 years was reported killed by hunters on Vancouver Island. Cougars may live as long as 20 years in captivity. One male North American cougar, named Scratch, was two months short of his 30th birthday when he died in 2007. Causes of death in the wild include disability and disease, competition with other cougars, starvation, accidents, and, where allowed, human hunting. Feline immunodeficiency virus, an endemic AIDS-like disease in cats, is well-adapted to the cougar.
Like almost all cats, the cougar is a solitary animal. Only mothers and kittens live in groups, with adults meeting only to mate. It is secretive and crepuscular, being most active around dawn and dusk.
Estimates of territory sizes vary greatly.
Canadian Geographic reports large male territories of 150 to 1000 square kilometers (58 to 386 sq mi) with female ranges half the size. Other research suggests a much smaller lower limit of 25 km 2 (10 sq mi) but an even greater upper limit of 1300 km 2 (500 sq mi) for males. In the United States, very large ranges have been reported in Texas and the Black Hills of the northern Great Plains, in excess of 775 km 2 (300 sq mi). Male ranges may include or overlap with those of females but, at least where studied, not with those of other males, which serves to reduce conflict between cougars. Ranges of females may overlap slightly with each other. Scrape marks, urine, and feces are used to mark territory and attract mates. Males may scrape together a small pile of leaves and grasses and then urinate on it as a way of marking territory.
Home range sizes and overall cougar abundance depend on terrain, vegetation, and prey abundance. One female adjacent to the San Andres Mountains, for instance, was found with a large range of 215 km 2 (83 sq mi), necessitated by poor prey abundance. Research has shown cougar abundances from 0.5 animals to as much as 7 (in one study in South America) per 100 km 2 (38 sq mi).
Because males disperse further than females and compete more directly for mates and territory, they are most likely to be involved in conflict. Where a sub-adult fails to leave his maternal range, for example, he may be killed by his father. When males encounter each other, they hiss, spit, and may engage in violent conflict if neither backs down. Hunting or relocation of the cougar may increase aggressive encounters by disrupting territories and bringing young, transient animals into conflict with established individuals.
The cougar has the largest range of any wild land animal in the Americas. Its range spans 110 degrees of latitude, from northern Yukon in Canada to the southern Andes. It is one of only three cat species, along with the bobcat and Canadian lynx, native to Canada. Its wide distribution stems from its adaptability to virtually every habitat type: it is found in all forest types as well as in lowland and mountainous deserts. Studies show that the Cougar prefers regions with dense underbrush, but can live with little vegetation in open areas. Its preferred habitats include precipitous canyons, escarpments, rim rocks, and dense brush.
Cougar, photographed in the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, Tucson, Arizona.
The cougar was extirpated across much of its eastern North American range (with the exception of Florida) in the two centuries after European colonization, and faced grave threats in the remainder of its territory. Currently, it ranges across most western American states, the Canadian provinces of Alberta and British Columbia, and the Canadian Yukon Territory. There have been widely debated reports of possible recolonization of eastern North America. DNA evidence has suggested its presence in eastern North America, , while a consolidated map of cougar sightings shows numerous reports, from the mid-western Great Plains through to Eastern Canada. The Cougar Network methodology is recognized by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The Quebec wildlife services (known locally as MRNF) also considers Cougar to be present in the province as a threatened species after multiple DNA tests confirmed cougar hair in Lynx mating sites. Ministry of Wildlife and natural resources Wildlife Service. The only unequivocally known eastern population is the Florida panther, which is critically endangered. There have also been sightings in Elliotsville, Maine (in the central part of the state); and in New Hampshire, there have been recent sightings as early as 1997. In 2009, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources confirmed a cougar sighting in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Skinner, Victor. 2009. Photo shows cougar presence in Michigan. The Grand Rapids Press. November 15, 2009 Typically, extreme-range sightings of cougars involve young males, who can travel great distances to establish ranges away from established males; all four confirmed cougar kills in Iowa since 2000 involved males.
On April 14, 2008 police shot and killed a cougar on the north side of Chicago, Illinois. DNA tests were consistent with cougars from the Black Hills. Less than one year later, on March 5, 2009, a cougar was photographed and unsuccessfully tranquilized by state wildlife biologists in a tree near Spooner, Wisconsin in the northwestern part of the state.
South of the Rio Grande, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) lists the cat in every Central and South American country except Costa Rica and Panama. While specific state and provincial statistics are often available in North America, much less is known about the cat in its southern range.
The cougar's total breeding population is estimated at less than 50,000 by the IUCN, with a declining trend. U.S. state-level statistics are often more optimistic, suggesting cougar populations have rebounded. In Oregon, a healthy population of 5,000 was reported in 2006, exceeding a target of 3,000. California has actively sought to protect the cat and a similar number of cougars has been suggested, between 4,000 and 6,000.
Aside from humans, no species preys upon mature cougars in the wild. The cat is not, however, the apex predator throughout much of its range. In its northern range, the cougar interacts with other powerful predators such as the brown bear and gray wolf. In the south, the cougar must compete with the larger jaguar. In Florida it encounters the American Alligator.
thumbFront paw print of a cougar. An adult paw print is approximately 10 cm (4 inches) long.
The Yellowstone National Park ecosystem provides a fruitful microcosm to study inter-predator interaction in North America. Of the three large predators, the massive brown bear appears dominant, often although not always able to drive both the gray wolf pack and the cougar off their kills. One study found that Brown or American Black Bears visited 24% of cougar kills in Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks, usurping 10% of carcasses.
The gray wolf and the cougar compete more directly for prey, especially in winter. While individually more powerful than the gray wolf, a solitary cougar may be dominated by the pack structure of the canines. Wolves can steal kills and occasionally kill the cat. One report describes a large pack of fourteen wolves killing a female cougar and her kittens. Conversely, lone wolves are at a disadvantage, and have been reported killed by cougars. Wolves more broadly affect cougar population dynamics and distribution by dominating territory and prey opportunities, and disrupting the feline's behavior. Preliminary research in Yellowstone, for instance, has shown displacement of the cougar by wolves. One researcher in Oregon notes: "When there is a pack around, cougars are not comfortable around their kills or raising kittens ... A lot of times a big cougar will kill a wolf, but the pack phenomenon changes the table." Both species, meanwhile, are capable of killing mid-sized predators such as bobcats and coyotes and tend to suppress their numbers.
In the southern portion of its range, the cougar and jaguar share overlapping territory. The jaguar tends to take larger prey and the cougar smaller where they overlap, reducing the cougar's size. Of the two felines, the cougar appears best able to exploit a broader prey niche and smaller prey.
As with any predator at or near the top of its food chain, the cougar impacts the population of prey species. Predation by cougars has been linked to changes in the species mix of deer in a region. For example, a study in British Columbia observed that the population of mule deer, a favored cougar prey, was declining while the population of the less frequently preyed-upon white-tailed deer was increasing. The Vancouver Island Marmot, an endangered species endemic to one region of dense cougar population, has seen decreased numbers due to cougar and gray wolf predation.
In the southern part of South America the Puma is a top level predator that has controlled the population of Guanaco and other species since prehistoric times.
Pumapard, taken in 1904
A pumapard is a hybrid animal resulting from a union between a cougar and a leopard. Three sets of these hybrids were bred in the late 1890s and early 1900s by Carl Hagenbeck at his animal park in Hamburg, Germany. Most did not reach adulthood. One of these was purchased in 1898 by Berlin Zoo. A similar hybrid in Berlin Zoo purchased from Hagenbeck was a cross between a male leopard and a female puma. Hamburg Zoo's specimen was the reverse pairing, the one in the black and white photo, fathered by a puma bred to an Indian leopardess.
Whether born to a female puma mated to a male leopard, or to a male puma mated to a female leopard, pumapards inherit a form of dwarfism. Those reported grew to only half the size of the parents. They have a puma-like long body (proportional to the limbs, but nevertheless shorter than either parent), but short legs. The coat is variously described as sandy, tawny or greyish with brown, chestnut or "faded" rosettes.
The World Conservation Union (IUCN) currently lists the cougar as a "least concern" species. The cougar is regulated under Appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), rendering illegal international trade in specimens or parts.
Cougar conservation depends on preservation of their habitat.
In the United States east of the Mississippi River, the only unequivocally known cougar population is the Florida panther. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service recognizes both an Eastern cougar and the Florida panther, affording protection under the Endangered Species Act. Certain taxonomic authorities have collapsed both designations into the North American Cougar, with Eastern or Florida subspecies not recognized, while a subspecies designation remains recognized by some conservation scientists. The most recent documented count for the Florida sub-population is 87 individuals, reported by recovery agencies in 2003.
The cougar is also protected across much of the rest of their range. As of 1996, cougar hunting was prohibited in Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, French Guiana, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Suriname, Venezuela, and Uruguay. (Costa Rica and Panama are not listed as current range countries by the IUCN.) The cat had no reported legal protection in Ecuador, El Salvador, and Guyana. Regulated cougar hunting is still common in the United States and Canada, although they are protected from all hunting in the Yukon.; it is permitted in every U.S. state from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, with the exception of California. Texas is the only state in the United States with a viable population of cougars that does not protect, in some way, of its cougar population. In Texas, cougars are listed as nuisance wildlife and any person holding a hunting or a trapping permit can kill a cougar regardless of the season, number killed, sex or age of the animal. Killed animals are not required to be reported to Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. Conservation work in Texas is the effort of a non profit organization, Balanced Ecology Inc. (BEI), as part of their Texas Mountain Lion Conservation Project . Cougars are generally hunted with packs of dogs, until the animal is 'treed'. When the hunter arrives on the scene, he shoots the cat from the tree at close range. The Cougar cannot be legally killed in California except under very specific circumstances, such as when an individual is declared a public safety threat. However statistics from the Department of Fish and Game indicate that cougar killings in California have been on the rise since 1970s with an average of over 112 cats killed per year from 2000 to 2006 compared to six per year in the 1970s. The Bay Area Puma Project aims to obtain information on cougar populations in the San Francisco Bay area and the animals' interactions with habitat, prey, humans, and residential communities.
Conservation threats to the species include persecution as a pest animal, degradation and fragmentation of their habitat, and depletion of their prey base. Wildlife corridor and sufficient range areas are critical to the sustainability of cougar populations. Research simulations have shown that the animal faces a low extinction risk in areas of 2200 km 2 (850 sq mi) or more. As few as one to four new animals entering a population per decade markedly increases persistence, foregrounding the importance of habitat corridors.
Moche puma, Larco Museum collection
The grace and power of the cougar have been widely admired in the cultures of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. The Inca city of Cusco is reported to have been designed in the shape of a cougar, and the animal also gave its name to both Inca regions and people. The Moche people represented the puma often in their ceramics. Berrin, Katherine & Larco Museum. The Spirit of Ancient Peru:Treasures from the Museo Arqueológico Rafael Larco Herrera. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1997. The sky and thunder god of the Inca, Viracocha, has been associated with the animal.
In North America, mythological descriptions of the cougar have appeared in the stories of the HocÄ
k language ("Ho-Chunk" or "Winnebago") of Wisconsin and Illinois Cougars, The Encyclopedia of HoÄÄ
k (Winnebago) Mythology. Retrieved: 2009/12/08. and the Cheyenne, amongst others. To the Apache and Walapai of Arizona, the wail of the Cougar was a harbinger of death.
During the early years of ranching, cougars were considered on par with wolves in destructiveness. According to figures in Texas in 1990, 86 calves (0.0006% of a total of 13.4 million cattle & calves in Texas), 253 Mohair goats, 302 Mohair kids, 445 sheep (0.02% of a total of 2.0 million sheep & lambs in Texas) and 562 lambs (0.04% of 1.2 million lambs in Texas) were confirmed to have been killed by cougars that year. In Nevada in 1992, cougars were confirmed to have killed 9 calves, 1 horse, 4 colts, 5 goats, 318 sheep and 400 lambs. In both cases, sheep were the most frequently attacked. Some instances of surplus killing have resulted in the deaths of 20 sheep in one attack. Cougars frequently kill calves, sheep and goats by biting the top of the neck or head, differing greatly from the throat bite used by coyotes and indiscriminate mutilation by feral dogs. The size of the tooth puncture marks also helps distinguish kills made by cougars from those made by smaller predators.
Mountain Lion warning sign
Due to the expanding human population, cougar ranges increasingly overlap with areas inhabited by humans. Attacks on humans are rare, as cougar prey recognition is a learned behavior and they do not generally recognize humans as prey. Attacks on people, livestock, and pets may occur when the cat habituates to humans or is in a condition of severe starvation. Attacks are most frequent during late spring and summer, when juvenile cougars leave their mothers and search for new territory.
Between 1890 and 1990, in North America there were 53 reported, confirmed attacks on humans, resulting in 48 nonfatal injuries and 10 deaths of humans (the total is greater than 53 because some attacks had more than one victim). By 2004, the count had climbed to 88 attacks and 20 deaths.
Within North America, the distribution of attacks is not uniform. The heavily populated state of California has seen a dozen attacks since 1986 (after just three from 1890 to 1985), including three fatalities. Lightly populated New Mexico reported an attack in 2008, the first there since 1974. Search continues for mountain lion that killed Pinos Altos man, New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, press release June 23, 2008]; Wounded mountain lion captured, killed near Pinos Altos, New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, press release June 25, 2008]; Second mountain lion captured near Pinos Altos, New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, press release July 1, 2008]
As with many predators, a cougar may attack if cornered, if a fleeing human stimulates their instinct to chase, or if a person "plays dead." Exaggerating the threat to the animal through intense eye contact, loud but calm shouting, and any other action to appear larger and more menacing, may make the animal retreat. Fighting back with sticks and rocks, or even bare hands, is often effective in persuading an attacking cougar to disengage.
When cougars do attack, they usually employ their characteristic neck bite, attempting to position their teeth between the vertebrae and into the spinal cord. Neck, head, and spinal injuries are common and sometimes fatal. Children are at greatest risk of attack, and least likely to survive an encounter. Detailed research into attacks prior to 1991 showed that 64% of all victims and almost all fatalities were children. The same study showed the highest proportion of attacks to have occurred in British Columbia, particularly on Vancouver Island where cougar populations are especially dense.
*List of fatal cougar attacks in North America
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* Video, Pictures and Information on Mountain Lions
* A Definitive Resource About Cougars Comprehensive, non-profit site with extensive information about cougars, from how to live safely in cougar country, to science abstracts, hunting regulations, state-by-state cougar management/policy info, and rare photos and videos of wild cougars.
* Description of a Cougar attack
* Cougar Facts and Photos â NatureMapping Program
* No Place for Predators? Liza Gross, PLoS Biology, explains how Washington State wildlife officials implemented a hunting policy, in response to a state measure passed to protect wildlife, that led to the highest rates of human-caused cougar mortality since the height of the bounty era
* Cougar Tracks: How to identify cougar tracks in the wild
* The sound of a cougar screaming
* Link to Worldwide Wild Cat Conservation site
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Cougar | On average, are cougar males heavier than females? | On average, cougar males are heavier than females. | data/set1/a2 | Cougar
The cougar (Puma concolor), also known as puma, mountain lion, mountain cat, catamount or panther, depending on the region, is a mammal of the family Felidae, native to the Americas. This large, solitary cat has the greatest range of any large wild terrestrial mammal in the Western Hemisphere, extending from Yukon in Canada to the southern Andes of South America. An adaptable, generalist species, the cougar is found in every major American habitat type. It is the second heaviest cat in the American continents after the jaguar, and the fourth heaviest in the world, after the tiger, lion, and jaguar. Although large, the cougar is most closely related to smaller felines.
A capable stalk-and-ambush predator, the cougar pursues a wide variety of prey. Primary food sources include ungulates such as deer, elk, and bighorn sheep, as well as domestic cattle, horses and sheep, particularly in the northern part of its range. It will also hunt species as small as insects and rodents. This cat prefers habitats with dense underbrush and rocky areas for stalking, but it can also live in open areas. The cougar is territorial and persists at low population densities. Individual territory sizes depend on terrain, vegetation, and abundance of prey. While it is a large predator, it is not always the dominant species in its range, as when it competes for prey with other predators such as the jaguar, grey wolf, American Black Bear, and the grizzly bear. It is a reclusive cat and usually avoids people. Attacks on humans remain rare, despite a recent increase in frequency.
Due to excessive hunting following the European colonization of the Americas, and continuing human development of cougar habitat, populations have dropped in most parts of its historical range. In particular, the cougar was extirpated in eastern North America, except for an isolated sub-population in Florida; the animal may be recolonizing parts of its former eastern territory, such as Maine and northern Michigan, /ref> where there have been recent sightings. With its vast range, the cougar has dozens of names and various references in the mythology of the indigenous Americans and in contemporary culture. The cougar has recently made a comeback in the state of Wyoming, where it presently has the largest population in North America .
The cougar has numerous names in English, of which puma and mountain lion are popular. Other names include catamount, panther, mountain screamer and painter. Lexicographers regard painter as a primarily upper-Southern U.S. regional variant on "panther", but a folk etymology, fancying a resemblance between the typically dark tip of its tail and a paintbrush dipped in dark paint, has some currency.
The cougar holds the Guinness record for the animal with the highest number of names, presumably due to its wide distribution across North and South America. It has over 40 names in English alone.
"Cougar" may be borrowed from the Portuguese çuçuarana, via French; the term was originally derived from the Tupi language. A current form in Brazil is suçuarana. It may also be borrowed from the Guaranà language term guaçu ara or guazu ara. "Puma" comes, via Spanish, from the Quechua language. Cougar, Puma and
The cougar is the largest of the small cats. It is placed in the subfamily Felinae, although its bulk characteristics are similar to those of the big cats in the subfamily Pantherinae. The family Felidae is believed to have originated in Asia approximately 11 million years ago. Taxonomic research on felids remains partial and much of what is known about their evolutionary history is based on mitochondrial DNA analysis, as cats are poorly represented in the fossil record, and there are significant confidence intervals with suggested dates.
Although large, the cougar is closely related to small felines.
In the latest genomic study of Felidae, the common ancestor of today's Leopardus, Lynx, Puma, Prionailurus, and Felis lineages migrated across the Bering land bridge into the Americas approximately 8 to 8.5 million years (Ma) ago. The lineages subsequently diverged in that order. North American felids then invaded South America 3 Ma ago as part of the Great American Interchange, following formation of the Isthmus of Panama. The cougar was originally thought to belong in Felis (Felis concolor), the genus which includes the domestic cat. As of 1993, it is now placed in Puma along with the jaguarundi, a cat just a little more than a tenth its weight.
Studies have indicated that the cougar and jaguarundi are most closely related to the modern cheetah of Africa and western Asia, but the relationship is unresolved. It has been suggested that the cheetah lineage diverged from the Puma lineage in the Americas (see American cheetah) and migrated back to Asia and Africa, while other research suggests the cheetah diverged in the Old World itself. The outline of small feline migration to the Americas is thus unclear.
Recent studies have demonstrated a high level of genetic similarity among the North American cougar populations, suggesting that they are all fairly recent descendants of a small ancestral group. Culver et al. suggest that the original North American population of Puma concolor was extirpated during the Pleistocene extinctions some 10,000 years ago, when other large mammals such as Smilodon also disappeared. North America was then repopulated by a group of South American cougars.
Until the late 1990s, as many as 32 subspecies were recorded; however, a recent genetic study of mitochondrial DNA found that many of these are too similar to be recognized as distinct at a molecular level. Following the research, the canonical Mammal Species of the World (3rd edition) recognizes six subspecies, five of which are solely found in Latin America:
; Argentine puma : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms hudsonii and puma (Marcelli, 1922);
; Costa Rican Cougar
; Eastern South American cougar : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms acrocodia, borbensis, capricornensis, concolor (Pelzeln, 1883), greeni and nigra;
; North American Cougar : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms arundivaga, aztecus, browni, californica, coryi, floridana, hippolestes, improcera, kaibabensis, mayensis, missoulensis, olympus, oregonensis, schorgeri, stanleyana, vancouverensis and youngi;
; Northern South American cougar : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms bangsi, incarum, osgoodi, soasoaranna, sussuarana, soderstromii, sucuacuara and wavula;
; Southern South American puma : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms araucanus, concolor (Gay, 1847), patagonica, pearsoni and puma (Trouessart, 1904)
The status of the Florida panther, here collapsed into the North American Cougar, remains uncertain. It is still regularly listed as subspecies Puma concolor coryi in research works, including those directly concerned with its conservation. Culver et al. themselves noted low microsatellite variation in the Florida panther, possibly due to inbreeding; responding to the research, one conservation team suggests "the degree to which the scientific community has accepted the results of Culver et al. and the proposed change in taxonomy is not resolved at this time."
Cougars are slender and agile cats. Adults stand about 60 to 76 centimeters (2.0 to 2.5 ft) tall at the shoulders. The length of adult males is around 2.4 meters (8 ft) long nose to tail, with overall ranges between 1.5 and 2.75 m (5 and 9 ft) nose to tail suggested for the species in general. Males typically weigh 53 to 90 kilograms (115 to 198 pounds), averaging 62 kg (137 lb). In rare cases, some may reach over 120 kg (264 lb). Females typically weigh between 29 and 64 kg (64 and 141 lb), averaging 42 kg (93 lb). /ref> /ref> Cougar size is smallest close to the equator, and larger towards the poles.
Although cougars resemble the domestic cat, they are about the same size as an adult human.
The head of the cat is round and the ears erect. Its powerful forequarters, neck, and jaw serve to grasp and hold large prey. It has five retractable claws on its forepaws (one a dewclaw) and four on its hind paws. The larger front feet and claws are adaptations to clutching prey.
Cougars can be almost as large as jaguars, but are less muscular and not as powerful; where their ranges overlap, the cougar tends to be smaller than average. The cougar is on average as heavy as the leopard. Despite its size, it is not typically classified among the "big cats," as it cannot roar, lacking the specialized larynx and hyoid apparatus of Panthera. Like domestic cats, cougars vocalize low-pitched hisses, growls, and purrs, as well as chirps and whistles. They are well known for their screams, as referenced in some of their common names, although these screams are often misinterpreted to be the calls of other animals.
Rear paw of a cougar
Cougar coloring is plain (hence the Latin concolor) but can vary greatly between individuals and even between siblings. The coat is typically tawny, but ranges to silvery-grey or reddish, with lighter patches on the under body including the jaws, chin, and throat. Infants are spotted and born with blue eyes and rings on their tails; juveniles are pale, and dark spots remain on their flanks. Despite anecdotes to the contrary, all-black coloring (melanism) has never been documented in cougars. The term "black panther" is used colloquially to refer to melanistic individuals of other species, particularly jaguars and leopards.
Cougars have large paws and proportionally the largest hind legs in the cat family. This physique allows it great leaping and short-sprint ability. An exceptional vertical leap of 5.4 m (18 ft) is reported for the cougar. Horizontal jumping capability from standing position is suggested anywhere from 6 to 12 m (20 to 40 ft). The cougar can run as fast as 55 to 72 km/h (35 to 45 mi/h), but is best adapted for short, powerful sprints rather than long chases. It is adept at climbing, which allows it to evade canine competitors. Although it is not strongly associated with water, it can swim.
A successful generalist predator, the cougar will eat any animal it can catch, from insects to large ungulates (over 500 kg). Like all cats, it is an obligate carnivore, feeding only on meat. The Mean weight of vertebrate prey (MWVP) was positively correlated (r=0.875) with puma body weight and inversely correlated (r=-0.836) with food niche breadth in all America. In general, MWVP was lower in areas closer to the Equator. Its most important prey species are various deer species, particularly in North America; mule deer, white-tailed deer, elk, and even large moose are taken by the cat. Other species such as Bighorn Sheep, wild horses of Arizona, domestic horses, and domestic livestock such as cattle and sheep are also primary food bases in many areas. A survey of North America research found 68% of prey items were ungulates, especially deer. Only the Florida Panther showed variation, often preferring feral hogs and armadillos.
Shown eating. Cougars are ambush predators, feeding mostly on deer and other mammals.
Investigation in Yellowstone National Park showed that elk, followed by mule deer, were the cougar's primary targets; the prey base is shared with the park's gray wolves, with whom the cougar competes for resources.
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* Another study on winter kills (NovemberâApril) in Alberta showed that ungulates accounted for greater than 99% of the cougar diet. Learned, individual prey recognition was observed, as some cougars rarely killed bighorn sheep, while others relied heavily on the species.
In the Central and South American cougar range, the ratio of deer in the diet declines. Small to mid-size mammals are preferred, including large rodents such as the capybara. Ungulates accounted for only 35% of prey items in one survey, approximately half that of North America. Competition with the larger jaguar has been suggested for the decline in the size of prey items. Other listed prey species of the cougar include mice, porcupine, and hares. Birds and small reptiles are sometimes preyed upon in the south, but this is rarely recorded in North America.
Though capable of sprinting, the cougar is typically an ambush predator. It stalks through brush and trees, across ledges, or other covered spots, before delivering a powerful leap onto the back of its prey and a suffocating neck bite. The cougar is capable of breaking the neck of some of its smaller prey with a strong bite and momentum bearing the animal to the ground.
Kills are generally estimated at around one large ungulate every two weeks. The period shrinks for females raising young, and may be as short as one kill every three days when cubs are nearly mature at around 15 months. The cat drags a kill to a preferred spot, covers it with brush, and returns to feed over a period of days. It is generally reported that the cougar is a non-scavenger and will rarely consume prey it has not killed; but deer carcasses left exposed for study were scavenged by cougars in California, suggesting more opportunistic behavior.
Females reach sexual maturity between one-and-a-half to three years of age. They typically average one litter every two to three years throughout their reproductive life, though the period can be as short as one year. Females are in estrus for approximately 8 days of a 23-day cycle; the gestation period is approximately 91 days. Females are sometimes reported as monogamous, but this is uncertain and polygyny may be more common. Copulation is brief but frequent.
Cougar kittens
Only females are involved in parenting. Female cougars are fiercely protective of their kittens, and have been seen to successfully fight off animals as large as grizzly bears in their defense. Litter size is between one and six kittens; typically two or three. Caves and other alcoves that offer protection are used as litter dens. Born blind, kittens are completely dependent on their mother at first, and begin to be weaned at around three months of age. As they grow, they begin to go out on forays with their mother, first visiting kill sites, and after six months beginning to hunt small prey on their own. Kitten survival rates are just over one per litter.
Sub-adults leave their mother to attempt to establish their own territory at around two years of age and sometimes earlier; males tend to leave sooner. One study has shown high morbidity amongst cougars that travel farthest from the maternal range, often due to conflicts with other cougars ("intraspecific" conflict). Research in New Mexico has shown that "males dispersed significantly farther than females, were more likely to traverse large expanses of non-cougar habitat, and were probably most responsible for nuclear gene flow between habitat patches."
Life expectancy in the wild is reported at between 8 to 13 years, and probably averages 8 to 10; a female of at least 18 years was reported killed by hunters on Vancouver Island. Cougars may live as long as 20 years in captivity. One male North American cougar, named Scratch, was two months short of his 30th birthday when he died in 2007. Causes of death in the wild include disability and disease, competition with other cougars, starvation, accidents, and, where allowed, human hunting. Feline immunodeficiency virus, an endemic AIDS-like disease in cats, is well-adapted to the cougar.
Like almost all cats, the cougar is a solitary animal. Only mothers and kittens live in groups, with adults meeting only to mate. It is secretive and crepuscular, being most active around dawn and dusk.
Estimates of territory sizes vary greatly.
Canadian Geographic reports large male territories of 150 to 1000 square kilometers (58 to 386 sq mi) with female ranges half the size. Other research suggests a much smaller lower limit of 25 km 2 (10 sq mi) but an even greater upper limit of 1300 km 2 (500 sq mi) for males. In the United States, very large ranges have been reported in Texas and the Black Hills of the northern Great Plains, in excess of 775 km 2 (300 sq mi). Male ranges may include or overlap with those of females but, at least where studied, not with those of other males, which serves to reduce conflict between cougars. Ranges of females may overlap slightly with each other. Scrape marks, urine, and feces are used to mark territory and attract mates. Males may scrape together a small pile of leaves and grasses and then urinate on it as a way of marking territory.
Home range sizes and overall cougar abundance depend on terrain, vegetation, and prey abundance. One female adjacent to the San Andres Mountains, for instance, was found with a large range of 215 km 2 (83 sq mi), necessitated by poor prey abundance. Research has shown cougar abundances from 0.5 animals to as much as 7 (in one study in South America) per 100 km 2 (38 sq mi).
Because males disperse further than females and compete more directly for mates and territory, they are most likely to be involved in conflict. Where a sub-adult fails to leave his maternal range, for example, he may be killed by his father. When males encounter each other, they hiss, spit, and may engage in violent conflict if neither backs down. Hunting or relocation of the cougar may increase aggressive encounters by disrupting territories and bringing young, transient animals into conflict with established individuals.
The cougar has the largest range of any wild land animal in the Americas. Its range spans 110 degrees of latitude, from northern Yukon in Canada to the southern Andes. It is one of only three cat species, along with the bobcat and Canadian lynx, native to Canada. Its wide distribution stems from its adaptability to virtually every habitat type: it is found in all forest types as well as in lowland and mountainous deserts. Studies show that the Cougar prefers regions with dense underbrush, but can live with little vegetation in open areas. Its preferred habitats include precipitous canyons, escarpments, rim rocks, and dense brush.
Cougar, photographed in the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, Tucson, Arizona.
The cougar was extirpated across much of its eastern North American range (with the exception of Florida) in the two centuries after European colonization, and faced grave threats in the remainder of its territory. Currently, it ranges across most western American states, the Canadian provinces of Alberta and British Columbia, and the Canadian Yukon Territory. There have been widely debated reports of possible recolonization of eastern North America. DNA evidence has suggested its presence in eastern North America, , while a consolidated map of cougar sightings shows numerous reports, from the mid-western Great Plains through to Eastern Canada. The Cougar Network methodology is recognized by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The Quebec wildlife services (known locally as MRNF) also considers Cougar to be present in the province as a threatened species after multiple DNA tests confirmed cougar hair in Lynx mating sites. Ministry of Wildlife and natural resources Wildlife Service. The only unequivocally known eastern population is the Florida panther, which is critically endangered. There have also been sightings in Elliotsville, Maine (in the central part of the state); and in New Hampshire, there have been recent sightings as early as 1997. In 2009, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources confirmed a cougar sighting in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Skinner, Victor. 2009. Photo shows cougar presence in Michigan. The Grand Rapids Press. November 15, 2009 Typically, extreme-range sightings of cougars involve young males, who can travel great distances to establish ranges away from established males; all four confirmed cougar kills in Iowa since 2000 involved males.
On April 14, 2008 police shot and killed a cougar on the north side of Chicago, Illinois. DNA tests were consistent with cougars from the Black Hills. Less than one year later, on March 5, 2009, a cougar was photographed and unsuccessfully tranquilized by state wildlife biologists in a tree near Spooner, Wisconsin in the northwestern part of the state.
South of the Rio Grande, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) lists the cat in every Central and South American country except Costa Rica and Panama. While specific state and provincial statistics are often available in North America, much less is known about the cat in its southern range.
The cougar's total breeding population is estimated at less than 50,000 by the IUCN, with a declining trend. U.S. state-level statistics are often more optimistic, suggesting cougar populations have rebounded. In Oregon, a healthy population of 5,000 was reported in 2006, exceeding a target of 3,000. California has actively sought to protect the cat and a similar number of cougars has been suggested, between 4,000 and 6,000.
Aside from humans, no species preys upon mature cougars in the wild. The cat is not, however, the apex predator throughout much of its range. In its northern range, the cougar interacts with other powerful predators such as the brown bear and gray wolf. In the south, the cougar must compete with the larger jaguar. In Florida it encounters the American Alligator.
thumbFront paw print of a cougar. An adult paw print is approximately 10 cm (4 inches) long.
The Yellowstone National Park ecosystem provides a fruitful microcosm to study inter-predator interaction in North America. Of the three large predators, the massive brown bear appears dominant, often although not always able to drive both the gray wolf pack and the cougar off their kills. One study found that Brown or American Black Bears visited 24% of cougar kills in Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks, usurping 10% of carcasses.
The gray wolf and the cougar compete more directly for prey, especially in winter. While individually more powerful than the gray wolf, a solitary cougar may be dominated by the pack structure of the canines. Wolves can steal kills and occasionally kill the cat. One report describes a large pack of fourteen wolves killing a female cougar and her kittens. Conversely, lone wolves are at a disadvantage, and have been reported killed by cougars. Wolves more broadly affect cougar population dynamics and distribution by dominating territory and prey opportunities, and disrupting the feline's behavior. Preliminary research in Yellowstone, for instance, has shown displacement of the cougar by wolves. One researcher in Oregon notes: "When there is a pack around, cougars are not comfortable around their kills or raising kittens ... A lot of times a big cougar will kill a wolf, but the pack phenomenon changes the table." Both species, meanwhile, are capable of killing mid-sized predators such as bobcats and coyotes and tend to suppress their numbers.
In the southern portion of its range, the cougar and jaguar share overlapping territory. The jaguar tends to take larger prey and the cougar smaller where they overlap, reducing the cougar's size. Of the two felines, the cougar appears best able to exploit a broader prey niche and smaller prey.
As with any predator at or near the top of its food chain, the cougar impacts the population of prey species. Predation by cougars has been linked to changes in the species mix of deer in a region. For example, a study in British Columbia observed that the population of mule deer, a favored cougar prey, was declining while the population of the less frequently preyed-upon white-tailed deer was increasing. The Vancouver Island Marmot, an endangered species endemic to one region of dense cougar population, has seen decreased numbers due to cougar and gray wolf predation.
In the southern part of South America the Puma is a top level predator that has controlled the population of Guanaco and other species since prehistoric times.
Pumapard, taken in 1904
A pumapard is a hybrid animal resulting from a union between a cougar and a leopard. Three sets of these hybrids were bred in the late 1890s and early 1900s by Carl Hagenbeck at his animal park in Hamburg, Germany. Most did not reach adulthood. One of these was purchased in 1898 by Berlin Zoo. A similar hybrid in Berlin Zoo purchased from Hagenbeck was a cross between a male leopard and a female puma. Hamburg Zoo's specimen was the reverse pairing, the one in the black and white photo, fathered by a puma bred to an Indian leopardess.
Whether born to a female puma mated to a male leopard, or to a male puma mated to a female leopard, pumapards inherit a form of dwarfism. Those reported grew to only half the size of the parents. They have a puma-like long body (proportional to the limbs, but nevertheless shorter than either parent), but short legs. The coat is variously described as sandy, tawny or greyish with brown, chestnut or "faded" rosettes.
The World Conservation Union (IUCN) currently lists the cougar as a "least concern" species. The cougar is regulated under Appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), rendering illegal international trade in specimens or parts.
Cougar conservation depends on preservation of their habitat.
In the United States east of the Mississippi River, the only unequivocally known cougar population is the Florida panther. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service recognizes both an Eastern cougar and the Florida panther, affording protection under the Endangered Species Act. Certain taxonomic authorities have collapsed both designations into the North American Cougar, with Eastern or Florida subspecies not recognized, while a subspecies designation remains recognized by some conservation scientists. The most recent documented count for the Florida sub-population is 87 individuals, reported by recovery agencies in 2003.
The cougar is also protected across much of the rest of their range. As of 1996, cougar hunting was prohibited in Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, French Guiana, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Suriname, Venezuela, and Uruguay. (Costa Rica and Panama are not listed as current range countries by the IUCN.) The cat had no reported legal protection in Ecuador, El Salvador, and Guyana. Regulated cougar hunting is still common in the United States and Canada, although they are protected from all hunting in the Yukon.; it is permitted in every U.S. state from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, with the exception of California. Texas is the only state in the United States with a viable population of cougars that does not protect, in some way, of its cougar population. In Texas, cougars are listed as nuisance wildlife and any person holding a hunting or a trapping permit can kill a cougar regardless of the season, number killed, sex or age of the animal. Killed animals are not required to be reported to Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. Conservation work in Texas is the effort of a non profit organization, Balanced Ecology Inc. (BEI), as part of their Texas Mountain Lion Conservation Project . Cougars are generally hunted with packs of dogs, until the animal is 'treed'. When the hunter arrives on the scene, he shoots the cat from the tree at close range. The Cougar cannot be legally killed in California except under very specific circumstances, such as when an individual is declared a public safety threat. However statistics from the Department of Fish and Game indicate that cougar killings in California have been on the rise since 1970s with an average of over 112 cats killed per year from 2000 to 2006 compared to six per year in the 1970s. The Bay Area Puma Project aims to obtain information on cougar populations in the San Francisco Bay area and the animals' interactions with habitat, prey, humans, and residential communities.
Conservation threats to the species include persecution as a pest animal, degradation and fragmentation of their habitat, and depletion of their prey base. Wildlife corridor and sufficient range areas are critical to the sustainability of cougar populations. Research simulations have shown that the animal faces a low extinction risk in areas of 2200 km 2 (850 sq mi) or more. As few as one to four new animals entering a population per decade markedly increases persistence, foregrounding the importance of habitat corridors.
Moche puma, Larco Museum collection
The grace and power of the cougar have been widely admired in the cultures of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. The Inca city of Cusco is reported to have been designed in the shape of a cougar, and the animal also gave its name to both Inca regions and people. The Moche people represented the puma often in their ceramics. Berrin, Katherine & Larco Museum. The Spirit of Ancient Peru:Treasures from the Museo Arqueológico Rafael Larco Herrera. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1997. The sky and thunder god of the Inca, Viracocha, has been associated with the animal.
In North America, mythological descriptions of the cougar have appeared in the stories of the HocÄ
k language ("Ho-Chunk" or "Winnebago") of Wisconsin and Illinois Cougars, The Encyclopedia of HoÄÄ
k (Winnebago) Mythology. Retrieved: 2009/12/08. and the Cheyenne, amongst others. To the Apache and Walapai of Arizona, the wail of the Cougar was a harbinger of death.
During the early years of ranching, cougars were considered on par with wolves in destructiveness. According to figures in Texas in 1990, 86 calves (0.0006% of a total of 13.4 million cattle & calves in Texas), 253 Mohair goats, 302 Mohair kids, 445 sheep (0.02% of a total of 2.0 million sheep & lambs in Texas) and 562 lambs (0.04% of 1.2 million lambs in Texas) were confirmed to have been killed by cougars that year. In Nevada in 1992, cougars were confirmed to have killed 9 calves, 1 horse, 4 colts, 5 goats, 318 sheep and 400 lambs. In both cases, sheep were the most frequently attacked. Some instances of surplus killing have resulted in the deaths of 20 sheep in one attack. Cougars frequently kill calves, sheep and goats by biting the top of the neck or head, differing greatly from the throat bite used by coyotes and indiscriminate mutilation by feral dogs. The size of the tooth puncture marks also helps distinguish kills made by cougars from those made by smaller predators.
Mountain Lion warning sign
Due to the expanding human population, cougar ranges increasingly overlap with areas inhabited by humans. Attacks on humans are rare, as cougar prey recognition is a learned behavior and they do not generally recognize humans as prey. Attacks on people, livestock, and pets may occur when the cat habituates to humans or is in a condition of severe starvation. Attacks are most frequent during late spring and summer, when juvenile cougars leave their mothers and search for new territory.
Between 1890 and 1990, in North America there were 53 reported, confirmed attacks on humans, resulting in 48 nonfatal injuries and 10 deaths of humans (the total is greater than 53 because some attacks had more than one victim). By 2004, the count had climbed to 88 attacks and 20 deaths.
Within North America, the distribution of attacks is not uniform. The heavily populated state of California has seen a dozen attacks since 1986 (after just three from 1890 to 1985), including three fatalities. Lightly populated New Mexico reported an attack in 2008, the first there since 1974. Search continues for mountain lion that killed Pinos Altos man, New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, press release June 23, 2008]; Wounded mountain lion captured, killed near Pinos Altos, New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, press release June 25, 2008]; Second mountain lion captured near Pinos Altos, New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, press release July 1, 2008]
As with many predators, a cougar may attack if cornered, if a fleeing human stimulates their instinct to chase, or if a person "plays dead." Exaggerating the threat to the animal through intense eye contact, loud but calm shouting, and any other action to appear larger and more menacing, may make the animal retreat. Fighting back with sticks and rocks, or even bare hands, is often effective in persuading an attacking cougar to disengage.
When cougars do attack, they usually employ their characteristic neck bite, attempting to position their teeth between the vertebrae and into the spinal cord. Neck, head, and spinal injuries are common and sometimes fatal. Children are at greatest risk of attack, and least likely to survive an encounter. Detailed research into attacks prior to 1991 showed that 64% of all victims and almost all fatalities were children. The same study showed the highest proportion of attacks to have occurred in British Columbia, particularly on Vancouver Island where cougar populations are especially dense.
*List of fatal cougar attacks in North America
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* Video, Pictures and Information on Mountain Lions
* A Definitive Resource About Cougars Comprehensive, non-profit site with extensive information about cougars, from how to live safely in cougar country, to science abstracts, hunting regulations, state-by-state cougar management/policy info, and rare photos and videos of wild cougars.
* Description of a Cougar attack
* Cougar Facts and Photos â NatureMapping Program
* No Place for Predators? Liza Gross, PLoS Biology, explains how Washington State wildlife officials implemented a hunting policy, in response to a state measure passed to protect wildlife, that led to the highest rates of human-caused cougar mortality since the height of the bounty era
* Cougar Tracks: How to identify cougar tracks in the wild
* The sound of a cougar screaming
* Link to Worldwide Wild Cat Conservation site
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Cougar | On average, are cougar males heavier than females? | yes | data/set1/a2 | Cougar
The cougar (Puma concolor), also known as puma, mountain lion, mountain cat, catamount or panther, depending on the region, is a mammal of the family Felidae, native to the Americas. This large, solitary cat has the greatest range of any large wild terrestrial mammal in the Western Hemisphere, extending from Yukon in Canada to the southern Andes of South America. An adaptable, generalist species, the cougar is found in every major American habitat type. It is the second heaviest cat in the American continents after the jaguar, and the fourth heaviest in the world, after the tiger, lion, and jaguar. Although large, the cougar is most closely related to smaller felines.
A capable stalk-and-ambush predator, the cougar pursues a wide variety of prey. Primary food sources include ungulates such as deer, elk, and bighorn sheep, as well as domestic cattle, horses and sheep, particularly in the northern part of its range. It will also hunt species as small as insects and rodents. This cat prefers habitats with dense underbrush and rocky areas for stalking, but it can also live in open areas. The cougar is territorial and persists at low population densities. Individual territory sizes depend on terrain, vegetation, and abundance of prey. While it is a large predator, it is not always the dominant species in its range, as when it competes for prey with other predators such as the jaguar, grey wolf, American Black Bear, and the grizzly bear. It is a reclusive cat and usually avoids people. Attacks on humans remain rare, despite a recent increase in frequency.
Due to excessive hunting following the European colonization of the Americas, and continuing human development of cougar habitat, populations have dropped in most parts of its historical range. In particular, the cougar was extirpated in eastern North America, except for an isolated sub-population in Florida; the animal may be recolonizing parts of its former eastern territory, such as Maine and northern Michigan, /ref> where there have been recent sightings. With its vast range, the cougar has dozens of names and various references in the mythology of the indigenous Americans and in contemporary culture. The cougar has recently made a comeback in the state of Wyoming, where it presently has the largest population in North America .
The cougar has numerous names in English, of which puma and mountain lion are popular. Other names include catamount, panther, mountain screamer and painter. Lexicographers regard painter as a primarily upper-Southern U.S. regional variant on "panther", but a folk etymology, fancying a resemblance between the typically dark tip of its tail and a paintbrush dipped in dark paint, has some currency.
The cougar holds the Guinness record for the animal with the highest number of names, presumably due to its wide distribution across North and South America. It has over 40 names in English alone.
"Cougar" may be borrowed from the Portuguese çuçuarana, via French; the term was originally derived from the Tupi language. A current form in Brazil is suçuarana. It may also be borrowed from the Guaranà language term guaçu ara or guazu ara. "Puma" comes, via Spanish, from the Quechua language. Cougar, Puma and
The cougar is the largest of the small cats. It is placed in the subfamily Felinae, although its bulk characteristics are similar to those of the big cats in the subfamily Pantherinae. The family Felidae is believed to have originated in Asia approximately 11 million years ago. Taxonomic research on felids remains partial and much of what is known about their evolutionary history is based on mitochondrial DNA analysis, as cats are poorly represented in the fossil record, and there are significant confidence intervals with suggested dates.
Although large, the cougar is closely related to small felines.
In the latest genomic study of Felidae, the common ancestor of today's Leopardus, Lynx, Puma, Prionailurus, and Felis lineages migrated across the Bering land bridge into the Americas approximately 8 to 8.5 million years (Ma) ago. The lineages subsequently diverged in that order. North American felids then invaded South America 3 Ma ago as part of the Great American Interchange, following formation of the Isthmus of Panama. The cougar was originally thought to belong in Felis (Felis concolor), the genus which includes the domestic cat. As of 1993, it is now placed in Puma along with the jaguarundi, a cat just a little more than a tenth its weight.
Studies have indicated that the cougar and jaguarundi are most closely related to the modern cheetah of Africa and western Asia, but the relationship is unresolved. It has been suggested that the cheetah lineage diverged from the Puma lineage in the Americas (see American cheetah) and migrated back to Asia and Africa, while other research suggests the cheetah diverged in the Old World itself. The outline of small feline migration to the Americas is thus unclear.
Recent studies have demonstrated a high level of genetic similarity among the North American cougar populations, suggesting that they are all fairly recent descendants of a small ancestral group. Culver et al. suggest that the original North American population of Puma concolor was extirpated during the Pleistocene extinctions some 10,000 years ago, when other large mammals such as Smilodon also disappeared. North America was then repopulated by a group of South American cougars.
Until the late 1990s, as many as 32 subspecies were recorded; however, a recent genetic study of mitochondrial DNA found that many of these are too similar to be recognized as distinct at a molecular level. Following the research, the canonical Mammal Species of the World (3rd edition) recognizes six subspecies, five of which are solely found in Latin America:
; Argentine puma : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms hudsonii and puma (Marcelli, 1922);
; Costa Rican Cougar
; Eastern South American cougar : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms acrocodia, borbensis, capricornensis, concolor (Pelzeln, 1883), greeni and nigra;
; North American Cougar : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms arundivaga, aztecus, browni, californica, coryi, floridana, hippolestes, improcera, kaibabensis, mayensis, missoulensis, olympus, oregonensis, schorgeri, stanleyana, vancouverensis and youngi;
; Northern South American cougar : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms bangsi, incarum, osgoodi, soasoaranna, sussuarana, soderstromii, sucuacuara and wavula;
; Southern South American puma : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms araucanus, concolor (Gay, 1847), patagonica, pearsoni and puma (Trouessart, 1904)
The status of the Florida panther, here collapsed into the North American Cougar, remains uncertain. It is still regularly listed as subspecies Puma concolor coryi in research works, including those directly concerned with its conservation. Culver et al. themselves noted low microsatellite variation in the Florida panther, possibly due to inbreeding; responding to the research, one conservation team suggests "the degree to which the scientific community has accepted the results of Culver et al. and the proposed change in taxonomy is not resolved at this time."
Cougars are slender and agile cats. Adults stand about 60 to 76 centimeters (2.0 to 2.5 ft) tall at the shoulders. The length of adult males is around 2.4 meters (8 ft) long nose to tail, with overall ranges between 1.5 and 2.75 m (5 and 9 ft) nose to tail suggested for the species in general. Males typically weigh 53 to 90 kilograms (115 to 198 pounds), averaging 62 kg (137 lb). In rare cases, some may reach over 120 kg (264 lb). Females typically weigh between 29 and 64 kg (64 and 141 lb), averaging 42 kg (93 lb). /ref> /ref> Cougar size is smallest close to the equator, and larger towards the poles.
Although cougars resemble the domestic cat, they are about the same size as an adult human.
The head of the cat is round and the ears erect. Its powerful forequarters, neck, and jaw serve to grasp and hold large prey. It has five retractable claws on its forepaws (one a dewclaw) and four on its hind paws. The larger front feet and claws are adaptations to clutching prey.
Cougars can be almost as large as jaguars, but are less muscular and not as powerful; where their ranges overlap, the cougar tends to be smaller than average. The cougar is on average as heavy as the leopard. Despite its size, it is not typically classified among the "big cats," as it cannot roar, lacking the specialized larynx and hyoid apparatus of Panthera. Like domestic cats, cougars vocalize low-pitched hisses, growls, and purrs, as well as chirps and whistles. They are well known for their screams, as referenced in some of their common names, although these screams are often misinterpreted to be the calls of other animals.
Rear paw of a cougar
Cougar coloring is plain (hence the Latin concolor) but can vary greatly between individuals and even between siblings. The coat is typically tawny, but ranges to silvery-grey or reddish, with lighter patches on the under body including the jaws, chin, and throat. Infants are spotted and born with blue eyes and rings on their tails; juveniles are pale, and dark spots remain on their flanks. Despite anecdotes to the contrary, all-black coloring (melanism) has never been documented in cougars. The term "black panther" is used colloquially to refer to melanistic individuals of other species, particularly jaguars and leopards.
Cougars have large paws and proportionally the largest hind legs in the cat family. This physique allows it great leaping and short-sprint ability. An exceptional vertical leap of 5.4 m (18 ft) is reported for the cougar. Horizontal jumping capability from standing position is suggested anywhere from 6 to 12 m (20 to 40 ft). The cougar can run as fast as 55 to 72 km/h (35 to 45 mi/h), but is best adapted for short, powerful sprints rather than long chases. It is adept at climbing, which allows it to evade canine competitors. Although it is not strongly associated with water, it can swim.
A successful generalist predator, the cougar will eat any animal it can catch, from insects to large ungulates (over 500 kg). Like all cats, it is an obligate carnivore, feeding only on meat. The Mean weight of vertebrate prey (MWVP) was positively correlated (r=0.875) with puma body weight and inversely correlated (r=-0.836) with food niche breadth in all America. In general, MWVP was lower in areas closer to the Equator. Its most important prey species are various deer species, particularly in North America; mule deer, white-tailed deer, elk, and even large moose are taken by the cat. Other species such as Bighorn Sheep, wild horses of Arizona, domestic horses, and domestic livestock such as cattle and sheep are also primary food bases in many areas. A survey of North America research found 68% of prey items were ungulates, especially deer. Only the Florida Panther showed variation, often preferring feral hogs and armadillos.
Shown eating. Cougars are ambush predators, feeding mostly on deer and other mammals.
Investigation in Yellowstone National Park showed that elk, followed by mule deer, were the cougar's primary targets; the prey base is shared with the park's gray wolves, with whom the cougar competes for resources.
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* Another study on winter kills (NovemberâApril) in Alberta showed that ungulates accounted for greater than 99% of the cougar diet. Learned, individual prey recognition was observed, as some cougars rarely killed bighorn sheep, while others relied heavily on the species.
In the Central and South American cougar range, the ratio of deer in the diet declines. Small to mid-size mammals are preferred, including large rodents such as the capybara. Ungulates accounted for only 35% of prey items in one survey, approximately half that of North America. Competition with the larger jaguar has been suggested for the decline in the size of prey items. Other listed prey species of the cougar include mice, porcupine, and hares. Birds and small reptiles are sometimes preyed upon in the south, but this is rarely recorded in North America.
Though capable of sprinting, the cougar is typically an ambush predator. It stalks through brush and trees, across ledges, or other covered spots, before delivering a powerful leap onto the back of its prey and a suffocating neck bite. The cougar is capable of breaking the neck of some of its smaller prey with a strong bite and momentum bearing the animal to the ground.
Kills are generally estimated at around one large ungulate every two weeks. The period shrinks for females raising young, and may be as short as one kill every three days when cubs are nearly mature at around 15 months. The cat drags a kill to a preferred spot, covers it with brush, and returns to feed over a period of days. It is generally reported that the cougar is a non-scavenger and will rarely consume prey it has not killed; but deer carcasses left exposed for study were scavenged by cougars in California, suggesting more opportunistic behavior.
Females reach sexual maturity between one-and-a-half to three years of age. They typically average one litter every two to three years throughout their reproductive life, though the period can be as short as one year. Females are in estrus for approximately 8 days of a 23-day cycle; the gestation period is approximately 91 days. Females are sometimes reported as monogamous, but this is uncertain and polygyny may be more common. Copulation is brief but frequent.
Cougar kittens
Only females are involved in parenting. Female cougars are fiercely protective of their kittens, and have been seen to successfully fight off animals as large as grizzly bears in their defense. Litter size is between one and six kittens; typically two or three. Caves and other alcoves that offer protection are used as litter dens. Born blind, kittens are completely dependent on their mother at first, and begin to be weaned at around three months of age. As they grow, they begin to go out on forays with their mother, first visiting kill sites, and after six months beginning to hunt small prey on their own. Kitten survival rates are just over one per litter.
Sub-adults leave their mother to attempt to establish their own territory at around two years of age and sometimes earlier; males tend to leave sooner. One study has shown high morbidity amongst cougars that travel farthest from the maternal range, often due to conflicts with other cougars ("intraspecific" conflict). Research in New Mexico has shown that "males dispersed significantly farther than females, were more likely to traverse large expanses of non-cougar habitat, and were probably most responsible for nuclear gene flow between habitat patches."
Life expectancy in the wild is reported at between 8 to 13 years, and probably averages 8 to 10; a female of at least 18 years was reported killed by hunters on Vancouver Island. Cougars may live as long as 20 years in captivity. One male North American cougar, named Scratch, was two months short of his 30th birthday when he died in 2007. Causes of death in the wild include disability and disease, competition with other cougars, starvation, accidents, and, where allowed, human hunting. Feline immunodeficiency virus, an endemic AIDS-like disease in cats, is well-adapted to the cougar.
Like almost all cats, the cougar is a solitary animal. Only mothers and kittens live in groups, with adults meeting only to mate. It is secretive and crepuscular, being most active around dawn and dusk.
Estimates of territory sizes vary greatly.
Canadian Geographic reports large male territories of 150 to 1000 square kilometers (58 to 386 sq mi) with female ranges half the size. Other research suggests a much smaller lower limit of 25 km 2 (10 sq mi) but an even greater upper limit of 1300 km 2 (500 sq mi) for males. In the United States, very large ranges have been reported in Texas and the Black Hills of the northern Great Plains, in excess of 775 km 2 (300 sq mi). Male ranges may include or overlap with those of females but, at least where studied, not with those of other males, which serves to reduce conflict between cougars. Ranges of females may overlap slightly with each other. Scrape marks, urine, and feces are used to mark territory and attract mates. Males may scrape together a small pile of leaves and grasses and then urinate on it as a way of marking territory.
Home range sizes and overall cougar abundance depend on terrain, vegetation, and prey abundance. One female adjacent to the San Andres Mountains, for instance, was found with a large range of 215 km 2 (83 sq mi), necessitated by poor prey abundance. Research has shown cougar abundances from 0.5 animals to as much as 7 (in one study in South America) per 100 km 2 (38 sq mi).
Because males disperse further than females and compete more directly for mates and territory, they are most likely to be involved in conflict. Where a sub-adult fails to leave his maternal range, for example, he may be killed by his father. When males encounter each other, they hiss, spit, and may engage in violent conflict if neither backs down. Hunting or relocation of the cougar may increase aggressive encounters by disrupting territories and bringing young, transient animals into conflict with established individuals.
The cougar has the largest range of any wild land animal in the Americas. Its range spans 110 degrees of latitude, from northern Yukon in Canada to the southern Andes. It is one of only three cat species, along with the bobcat and Canadian lynx, native to Canada. Its wide distribution stems from its adaptability to virtually every habitat type: it is found in all forest types as well as in lowland and mountainous deserts. Studies show that the Cougar prefers regions with dense underbrush, but can live with little vegetation in open areas. Its preferred habitats include precipitous canyons, escarpments, rim rocks, and dense brush.
Cougar, photographed in the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, Tucson, Arizona.
The cougar was extirpated across much of its eastern North American range (with the exception of Florida) in the two centuries after European colonization, and faced grave threats in the remainder of its territory. Currently, it ranges across most western American states, the Canadian provinces of Alberta and British Columbia, and the Canadian Yukon Territory. There have been widely debated reports of possible recolonization of eastern North America. DNA evidence has suggested its presence in eastern North America, , while a consolidated map of cougar sightings shows numerous reports, from the mid-western Great Plains through to Eastern Canada. The Cougar Network methodology is recognized by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The Quebec wildlife services (known locally as MRNF) also considers Cougar to be present in the province as a threatened species after multiple DNA tests confirmed cougar hair in Lynx mating sites. Ministry of Wildlife and natural resources Wildlife Service. The only unequivocally known eastern population is the Florida panther, which is critically endangered. There have also been sightings in Elliotsville, Maine (in the central part of the state); and in New Hampshire, there have been recent sightings as early as 1997. In 2009, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources confirmed a cougar sighting in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Skinner, Victor. 2009. Photo shows cougar presence in Michigan. The Grand Rapids Press. November 15, 2009 Typically, extreme-range sightings of cougars involve young males, who can travel great distances to establish ranges away from established males; all four confirmed cougar kills in Iowa since 2000 involved males.
On April 14, 2008 police shot and killed a cougar on the north side of Chicago, Illinois. DNA tests were consistent with cougars from the Black Hills. Less than one year later, on March 5, 2009, a cougar was photographed and unsuccessfully tranquilized by state wildlife biologists in a tree near Spooner, Wisconsin in the northwestern part of the state.
South of the Rio Grande, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) lists the cat in every Central and South American country except Costa Rica and Panama. While specific state and provincial statistics are often available in North America, much less is known about the cat in its southern range.
The cougar's total breeding population is estimated at less than 50,000 by the IUCN, with a declining trend. U.S. state-level statistics are often more optimistic, suggesting cougar populations have rebounded. In Oregon, a healthy population of 5,000 was reported in 2006, exceeding a target of 3,000. California has actively sought to protect the cat and a similar number of cougars has been suggested, between 4,000 and 6,000.
Aside from humans, no species preys upon mature cougars in the wild. The cat is not, however, the apex predator throughout much of its range. In its northern range, the cougar interacts with other powerful predators such as the brown bear and gray wolf. In the south, the cougar must compete with the larger jaguar. In Florida it encounters the American Alligator.
thumbFront paw print of a cougar. An adult paw print is approximately 10 cm (4 inches) long.
The Yellowstone National Park ecosystem provides a fruitful microcosm to study inter-predator interaction in North America. Of the three large predators, the massive brown bear appears dominant, often although not always able to drive both the gray wolf pack and the cougar off their kills. One study found that Brown or American Black Bears visited 24% of cougar kills in Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks, usurping 10% of carcasses.
The gray wolf and the cougar compete more directly for prey, especially in winter. While individually more powerful than the gray wolf, a solitary cougar may be dominated by the pack structure of the canines. Wolves can steal kills and occasionally kill the cat. One report describes a large pack of fourteen wolves killing a female cougar and her kittens. Conversely, lone wolves are at a disadvantage, and have been reported killed by cougars. Wolves more broadly affect cougar population dynamics and distribution by dominating territory and prey opportunities, and disrupting the feline's behavior. Preliminary research in Yellowstone, for instance, has shown displacement of the cougar by wolves. One researcher in Oregon notes: "When there is a pack around, cougars are not comfortable around their kills or raising kittens ... A lot of times a big cougar will kill a wolf, but the pack phenomenon changes the table." Both species, meanwhile, are capable of killing mid-sized predators such as bobcats and coyotes and tend to suppress their numbers.
In the southern portion of its range, the cougar and jaguar share overlapping territory. The jaguar tends to take larger prey and the cougar smaller where they overlap, reducing the cougar's size. Of the two felines, the cougar appears best able to exploit a broader prey niche and smaller prey.
As with any predator at or near the top of its food chain, the cougar impacts the population of prey species. Predation by cougars has been linked to changes in the species mix of deer in a region. For example, a study in British Columbia observed that the population of mule deer, a favored cougar prey, was declining while the population of the less frequently preyed-upon white-tailed deer was increasing. The Vancouver Island Marmot, an endangered species endemic to one region of dense cougar population, has seen decreased numbers due to cougar and gray wolf predation.
In the southern part of South America the Puma is a top level predator that has controlled the population of Guanaco and other species since prehistoric times.
Pumapard, taken in 1904
A pumapard is a hybrid animal resulting from a union between a cougar and a leopard. Three sets of these hybrids were bred in the late 1890s and early 1900s by Carl Hagenbeck at his animal park in Hamburg, Germany. Most did not reach adulthood. One of these was purchased in 1898 by Berlin Zoo. A similar hybrid in Berlin Zoo purchased from Hagenbeck was a cross between a male leopard and a female puma. Hamburg Zoo's specimen was the reverse pairing, the one in the black and white photo, fathered by a puma bred to an Indian leopardess.
Whether born to a female puma mated to a male leopard, or to a male puma mated to a female leopard, pumapards inherit a form of dwarfism. Those reported grew to only half the size of the parents. They have a puma-like long body (proportional to the limbs, but nevertheless shorter than either parent), but short legs. The coat is variously described as sandy, tawny or greyish with brown, chestnut or "faded" rosettes.
The World Conservation Union (IUCN) currently lists the cougar as a "least concern" species. The cougar is regulated under Appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), rendering illegal international trade in specimens or parts.
Cougar conservation depends on preservation of their habitat.
In the United States east of the Mississippi River, the only unequivocally known cougar population is the Florida panther. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service recognizes both an Eastern cougar and the Florida panther, affording protection under the Endangered Species Act. Certain taxonomic authorities have collapsed both designations into the North American Cougar, with Eastern or Florida subspecies not recognized, while a subspecies designation remains recognized by some conservation scientists. The most recent documented count for the Florida sub-population is 87 individuals, reported by recovery agencies in 2003.
The cougar is also protected across much of the rest of their range. As of 1996, cougar hunting was prohibited in Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, French Guiana, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Suriname, Venezuela, and Uruguay. (Costa Rica and Panama are not listed as current range countries by the IUCN.) The cat had no reported legal protection in Ecuador, El Salvador, and Guyana. Regulated cougar hunting is still common in the United States and Canada, although they are protected from all hunting in the Yukon.; it is permitted in every U.S. state from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, with the exception of California. Texas is the only state in the United States with a viable population of cougars that does not protect, in some way, of its cougar population. In Texas, cougars are listed as nuisance wildlife and any person holding a hunting or a trapping permit can kill a cougar regardless of the season, number killed, sex or age of the animal. Killed animals are not required to be reported to Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. Conservation work in Texas is the effort of a non profit organization, Balanced Ecology Inc. (BEI), as part of their Texas Mountain Lion Conservation Project . Cougars are generally hunted with packs of dogs, until the animal is 'treed'. When the hunter arrives on the scene, he shoots the cat from the tree at close range. The Cougar cannot be legally killed in California except under very specific circumstances, such as when an individual is declared a public safety threat. However statistics from the Department of Fish and Game indicate that cougar killings in California have been on the rise since 1970s with an average of over 112 cats killed per year from 2000 to 2006 compared to six per year in the 1970s. The Bay Area Puma Project aims to obtain information on cougar populations in the San Francisco Bay area and the animals' interactions with habitat, prey, humans, and residential communities.
Conservation threats to the species include persecution as a pest animal, degradation and fragmentation of their habitat, and depletion of their prey base. Wildlife corridor and sufficient range areas are critical to the sustainability of cougar populations. Research simulations have shown that the animal faces a low extinction risk in areas of 2200 km 2 (850 sq mi) or more. As few as one to four new animals entering a population per decade markedly increases persistence, foregrounding the importance of habitat corridors.
Moche puma, Larco Museum collection
The grace and power of the cougar have been widely admired in the cultures of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. The Inca city of Cusco is reported to have been designed in the shape of a cougar, and the animal also gave its name to both Inca regions and people. The Moche people represented the puma often in their ceramics. Berrin, Katherine & Larco Museum. The Spirit of Ancient Peru:Treasures from the Museo Arqueológico Rafael Larco Herrera. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1997. The sky and thunder god of the Inca, Viracocha, has been associated with the animal.
In North America, mythological descriptions of the cougar have appeared in the stories of the HocÄ
k language ("Ho-Chunk" or "Winnebago") of Wisconsin and Illinois Cougars, The Encyclopedia of HoÄÄ
k (Winnebago) Mythology. Retrieved: 2009/12/08. and the Cheyenne, amongst others. To the Apache and Walapai of Arizona, the wail of the Cougar was a harbinger of death.
During the early years of ranching, cougars were considered on par with wolves in destructiveness. According to figures in Texas in 1990, 86 calves (0.0006% of a total of 13.4 million cattle & calves in Texas), 253 Mohair goats, 302 Mohair kids, 445 sheep (0.02% of a total of 2.0 million sheep & lambs in Texas) and 562 lambs (0.04% of 1.2 million lambs in Texas) were confirmed to have been killed by cougars that year. In Nevada in 1992, cougars were confirmed to have killed 9 calves, 1 horse, 4 colts, 5 goats, 318 sheep and 400 lambs. In both cases, sheep were the most frequently attacked. Some instances of surplus killing have resulted in the deaths of 20 sheep in one attack. Cougars frequently kill calves, sheep and goats by biting the top of the neck or head, differing greatly from the throat bite used by coyotes and indiscriminate mutilation by feral dogs. The size of the tooth puncture marks also helps distinguish kills made by cougars from those made by smaller predators.
Mountain Lion warning sign
Due to the expanding human population, cougar ranges increasingly overlap with areas inhabited by humans. Attacks on humans are rare, as cougar prey recognition is a learned behavior and they do not generally recognize humans as prey. Attacks on people, livestock, and pets may occur when the cat habituates to humans or is in a condition of severe starvation. Attacks are most frequent during late spring and summer, when juvenile cougars leave their mothers and search for new territory.
Between 1890 and 1990, in North America there were 53 reported, confirmed attacks on humans, resulting in 48 nonfatal injuries and 10 deaths of humans (the total is greater than 53 because some attacks had more than one victim). By 2004, the count had climbed to 88 attacks and 20 deaths.
Within North America, the distribution of attacks is not uniform. The heavily populated state of California has seen a dozen attacks since 1986 (after just three from 1890 to 1985), including three fatalities. Lightly populated New Mexico reported an attack in 2008, the first there since 1974. Search continues for mountain lion that killed Pinos Altos man, New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, press release June 23, 2008]; Wounded mountain lion captured, killed near Pinos Altos, New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, press release June 25, 2008]; Second mountain lion captured near Pinos Altos, New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, press release July 1, 2008]
As with many predators, a cougar may attack if cornered, if a fleeing human stimulates their instinct to chase, or if a person "plays dead." Exaggerating the threat to the animal through intense eye contact, loud but calm shouting, and any other action to appear larger and more menacing, may make the animal retreat. Fighting back with sticks and rocks, or even bare hands, is often effective in persuading an attacking cougar to disengage.
When cougars do attack, they usually employ their characteristic neck bite, attempting to position their teeth between the vertebrae and into the spinal cord. Neck, head, and spinal injuries are common and sometimes fatal. Children are at greatest risk of attack, and least likely to survive an encounter. Detailed research into attacks prior to 1991 showed that 64% of all victims and almost all fatalities were children. The same study showed the highest proportion of attacks to have occurred in British Columbia, particularly on Vancouver Island where cougar populations are especially dense.
*List of fatal cougar attacks in North America
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* Video, Pictures and Information on Mountain Lions
* A Definitive Resource About Cougars Comprehensive, non-profit site with extensive information about cougars, from how to live safely in cougar country, to science abstracts, hunting regulations, state-by-state cougar management/policy info, and rare photos and videos of wild cougars.
* Description of a Cougar attack
* Cougar Facts and Photos â NatureMapping Program
* No Place for Predators? Liza Gross, PLoS Biology, explains how Washington State wildlife officials implemented a hunting policy, in response to a state measure passed to protect wildlife, that led to the highest rates of human-caused cougar mortality since the height of the bounty era
* Cougar Tracks: How to identify cougar tracks in the wild
* The sound of a cougar screaming
* Link to Worldwide Wild Cat Conservation site
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Cougar | What are the three cat species that are native to Canada? | The three cat species that are native to Canada are the cougar, the bobcat and the Canadian lynx. | data/set1/a2 | Cougar
The cougar (Puma concolor), also known as puma, mountain lion, mountain cat, catamount or panther, depending on the region, is a mammal of the family Felidae, native to the Americas. This large, solitary cat has the greatest range of any large wild terrestrial mammal in the Western Hemisphere, extending from Yukon in Canada to the southern Andes of South America. An adaptable, generalist species, the cougar is found in every major American habitat type. It is the second heaviest cat in the American continents after the jaguar, and the fourth heaviest in the world, after the tiger, lion, and jaguar. Although large, the cougar is most closely related to smaller felines.
A capable stalk-and-ambush predator, the cougar pursues a wide variety of prey. Primary food sources include ungulates such as deer, elk, and bighorn sheep, as well as domestic cattle, horses and sheep, particularly in the northern part of its range. It will also hunt species as small as insects and rodents. This cat prefers habitats with dense underbrush and rocky areas for stalking, but it can also live in open areas. The cougar is territorial and persists at low population densities. Individual territory sizes depend on terrain, vegetation, and abundance of prey. While it is a large predator, it is not always the dominant species in its range, as when it competes for prey with other predators such as the jaguar, grey wolf, American Black Bear, and the grizzly bear. It is a reclusive cat and usually avoids people. Attacks on humans remain rare, despite a recent increase in frequency.
Due to excessive hunting following the European colonization of the Americas, and continuing human development of cougar habitat, populations have dropped in most parts of its historical range. In particular, the cougar was extirpated in eastern North America, except for an isolated sub-population in Florida; the animal may be recolonizing parts of its former eastern territory, such as Maine and northern Michigan, /ref> where there have been recent sightings. With its vast range, the cougar has dozens of names and various references in the mythology of the indigenous Americans and in contemporary culture. The cougar has recently made a comeback in the state of Wyoming, where it presently has the largest population in North America .
The cougar has numerous names in English, of which puma and mountain lion are popular. Other names include catamount, panther, mountain screamer and painter. Lexicographers regard painter as a primarily upper-Southern U.S. regional variant on "panther", but a folk etymology, fancying a resemblance between the typically dark tip of its tail and a paintbrush dipped in dark paint, has some currency.
The cougar holds the Guinness record for the animal with the highest number of names, presumably due to its wide distribution across North and South America. It has over 40 names in English alone.
"Cougar" may be borrowed from the Portuguese çuçuarana, via French; the term was originally derived from the Tupi language. A current form in Brazil is suçuarana. It may also be borrowed from the Guaranà language term guaçu ara or guazu ara. "Puma" comes, via Spanish, from the Quechua language. Cougar, Puma and
The cougar is the largest of the small cats. It is placed in the subfamily Felinae, although its bulk characteristics are similar to those of the big cats in the subfamily Pantherinae. The family Felidae is believed to have originated in Asia approximately 11 million years ago. Taxonomic research on felids remains partial and much of what is known about their evolutionary history is based on mitochondrial DNA analysis, as cats are poorly represented in the fossil record, and there are significant confidence intervals with suggested dates.
Although large, the cougar is closely related to small felines.
In the latest genomic study of Felidae, the common ancestor of today's Leopardus, Lynx, Puma, Prionailurus, and Felis lineages migrated across the Bering land bridge into the Americas approximately 8 to 8.5 million years (Ma) ago. The lineages subsequently diverged in that order. North American felids then invaded South America 3 Ma ago as part of the Great American Interchange, following formation of the Isthmus of Panama. The cougar was originally thought to belong in Felis (Felis concolor), the genus which includes the domestic cat. As of 1993, it is now placed in Puma along with the jaguarundi, a cat just a little more than a tenth its weight.
Studies have indicated that the cougar and jaguarundi are most closely related to the modern cheetah of Africa and western Asia, but the relationship is unresolved. It has been suggested that the cheetah lineage diverged from the Puma lineage in the Americas (see American cheetah) and migrated back to Asia and Africa, while other research suggests the cheetah diverged in the Old World itself. The outline of small feline migration to the Americas is thus unclear.
Recent studies have demonstrated a high level of genetic similarity among the North American cougar populations, suggesting that they are all fairly recent descendants of a small ancestral group. Culver et al. suggest that the original North American population of Puma concolor was extirpated during the Pleistocene extinctions some 10,000 years ago, when other large mammals such as Smilodon also disappeared. North America was then repopulated by a group of South American cougars.
Until the late 1990s, as many as 32 subspecies were recorded; however, a recent genetic study of mitochondrial DNA found that many of these are too similar to be recognized as distinct at a molecular level. Following the research, the canonical Mammal Species of the World (3rd edition) recognizes six subspecies, five of which are solely found in Latin America:
; Argentine puma : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms hudsonii and puma (Marcelli, 1922);
; Costa Rican Cougar
; Eastern South American cougar : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms acrocodia, borbensis, capricornensis, concolor (Pelzeln, 1883), greeni and nigra;
; North American Cougar : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms arundivaga, aztecus, browni, californica, coryi, floridana, hippolestes, improcera, kaibabensis, mayensis, missoulensis, olympus, oregonensis, schorgeri, stanleyana, vancouverensis and youngi;
; Northern South American cougar : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms bangsi, incarum, osgoodi, soasoaranna, sussuarana, soderstromii, sucuacuara and wavula;
; Southern South American puma : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms araucanus, concolor (Gay, 1847), patagonica, pearsoni and puma (Trouessart, 1904)
The status of the Florida panther, here collapsed into the North American Cougar, remains uncertain. It is still regularly listed as subspecies Puma concolor coryi in research works, including those directly concerned with its conservation. Culver et al. themselves noted low microsatellite variation in the Florida panther, possibly due to inbreeding; responding to the research, one conservation team suggests "the degree to which the scientific community has accepted the results of Culver et al. and the proposed change in taxonomy is not resolved at this time."
Cougars are slender and agile cats. Adults stand about 60 to 76 centimeters (2.0 to 2.5 ft) tall at the shoulders. The length of adult males is around 2.4 meters (8 ft) long nose to tail, with overall ranges between 1.5 and 2.75 m (5 and 9 ft) nose to tail suggested for the species in general. Males typically weigh 53 to 90 kilograms (115 to 198 pounds), averaging 62 kg (137 lb). In rare cases, some may reach over 120 kg (264 lb). Females typically weigh between 29 and 64 kg (64 and 141 lb), averaging 42 kg (93 lb). /ref> /ref> Cougar size is smallest close to the equator, and larger towards the poles.
Although cougars resemble the domestic cat, they are about the same size as an adult human.
The head of the cat is round and the ears erect. Its powerful forequarters, neck, and jaw serve to grasp and hold large prey. It has five retractable claws on its forepaws (one a dewclaw) and four on its hind paws. The larger front feet and claws are adaptations to clutching prey.
Cougars can be almost as large as jaguars, but are less muscular and not as powerful; where their ranges overlap, the cougar tends to be smaller than average. The cougar is on average as heavy as the leopard. Despite its size, it is not typically classified among the "big cats," as it cannot roar, lacking the specialized larynx and hyoid apparatus of Panthera. Like domestic cats, cougars vocalize low-pitched hisses, growls, and purrs, as well as chirps and whistles. They are well known for their screams, as referenced in some of their common names, although these screams are often misinterpreted to be the calls of other animals.
Rear paw of a cougar
Cougar coloring is plain (hence the Latin concolor) but can vary greatly between individuals and even between siblings. The coat is typically tawny, but ranges to silvery-grey or reddish, with lighter patches on the under body including the jaws, chin, and throat. Infants are spotted and born with blue eyes and rings on their tails; juveniles are pale, and dark spots remain on their flanks. Despite anecdotes to the contrary, all-black coloring (melanism) has never been documented in cougars. The term "black panther" is used colloquially to refer to melanistic individuals of other species, particularly jaguars and leopards.
Cougars have large paws and proportionally the largest hind legs in the cat family. This physique allows it great leaping and short-sprint ability. An exceptional vertical leap of 5.4 m (18 ft) is reported for the cougar. Horizontal jumping capability from standing position is suggested anywhere from 6 to 12 m (20 to 40 ft). The cougar can run as fast as 55 to 72 km/h (35 to 45 mi/h), but is best adapted for short, powerful sprints rather than long chases. It is adept at climbing, which allows it to evade canine competitors. Although it is not strongly associated with water, it can swim.
A successful generalist predator, the cougar will eat any animal it can catch, from insects to large ungulates (over 500 kg). Like all cats, it is an obligate carnivore, feeding only on meat. The Mean weight of vertebrate prey (MWVP) was positively correlated (r=0.875) with puma body weight and inversely correlated (r=-0.836) with food niche breadth in all America. In general, MWVP was lower in areas closer to the Equator. Its most important prey species are various deer species, particularly in North America; mule deer, white-tailed deer, elk, and even large moose are taken by the cat. Other species such as Bighorn Sheep, wild horses of Arizona, domestic horses, and domestic livestock such as cattle and sheep are also primary food bases in many areas. A survey of North America research found 68% of prey items were ungulates, especially deer. Only the Florida Panther showed variation, often preferring feral hogs and armadillos.
Shown eating. Cougars are ambush predators, feeding mostly on deer and other mammals.
Investigation in Yellowstone National Park showed that elk, followed by mule deer, were the cougar's primary targets; the prey base is shared with the park's gray wolves, with whom the cougar competes for resources.
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* Another study on winter kills (NovemberâApril) in Alberta showed that ungulates accounted for greater than 99% of the cougar diet. Learned, individual prey recognition was observed, as some cougars rarely killed bighorn sheep, while others relied heavily on the species.
In the Central and South American cougar range, the ratio of deer in the diet declines. Small to mid-size mammals are preferred, including large rodents such as the capybara. Ungulates accounted for only 35% of prey items in one survey, approximately half that of North America. Competition with the larger jaguar has been suggested for the decline in the size of prey items. Other listed prey species of the cougar include mice, porcupine, and hares. Birds and small reptiles are sometimes preyed upon in the south, but this is rarely recorded in North America.
Though capable of sprinting, the cougar is typically an ambush predator. It stalks through brush and trees, across ledges, or other covered spots, before delivering a powerful leap onto the back of its prey and a suffocating neck bite. The cougar is capable of breaking the neck of some of its smaller prey with a strong bite and momentum bearing the animal to the ground.
Kills are generally estimated at around one large ungulate every two weeks. The period shrinks for females raising young, and may be as short as one kill every three days when cubs are nearly mature at around 15 months. The cat drags a kill to a preferred spot, covers it with brush, and returns to feed over a period of days. It is generally reported that the cougar is a non-scavenger and will rarely consume prey it has not killed; but deer carcasses left exposed for study were scavenged by cougars in California, suggesting more opportunistic behavior.
Females reach sexual maturity between one-and-a-half to three years of age. They typically average one litter every two to three years throughout their reproductive life, though the period can be as short as one year. Females are in estrus for approximately 8 days of a 23-day cycle; the gestation period is approximately 91 days. Females are sometimes reported as monogamous, but this is uncertain and polygyny may be more common. Copulation is brief but frequent.
Cougar kittens
Only females are involved in parenting. Female cougars are fiercely protective of their kittens, and have been seen to successfully fight off animals as large as grizzly bears in their defense. Litter size is between one and six kittens; typically two or three. Caves and other alcoves that offer protection are used as litter dens. Born blind, kittens are completely dependent on their mother at first, and begin to be weaned at around three months of age. As they grow, they begin to go out on forays with their mother, first visiting kill sites, and after six months beginning to hunt small prey on their own. Kitten survival rates are just over one per litter.
Sub-adults leave their mother to attempt to establish their own territory at around two years of age and sometimes earlier; males tend to leave sooner. One study has shown high morbidity amongst cougars that travel farthest from the maternal range, often due to conflicts with other cougars ("intraspecific" conflict). Research in New Mexico has shown that "males dispersed significantly farther than females, were more likely to traverse large expanses of non-cougar habitat, and were probably most responsible for nuclear gene flow between habitat patches."
Life expectancy in the wild is reported at between 8 to 13 years, and probably averages 8 to 10; a female of at least 18 years was reported killed by hunters on Vancouver Island. Cougars may live as long as 20 years in captivity. One male North American cougar, named Scratch, was two months short of his 30th birthday when he died in 2007. Causes of death in the wild include disability and disease, competition with other cougars, starvation, accidents, and, where allowed, human hunting. Feline immunodeficiency virus, an endemic AIDS-like disease in cats, is well-adapted to the cougar.
Like almost all cats, the cougar is a solitary animal. Only mothers and kittens live in groups, with adults meeting only to mate. It is secretive and crepuscular, being most active around dawn and dusk.
Estimates of territory sizes vary greatly.
Canadian Geographic reports large male territories of 150 to 1000 square kilometers (58 to 386 sq mi) with female ranges half the size. Other research suggests a much smaller lower limit of 25 km 2 (10 sq mi) but an even greater upper limit of 1300 km 2 (500 sq mi) for males. In the United States, very large ranges have been reported in Texas and the Black Hills of the northern Great Plains, in excess of 775 km 2 (300 sq mi). Male ranges may include or overlap with those of females but, at least where studied, not with those of other males, which serves to reduce conflict between cougars. Ranges of females may overlap slightly with each other. Scrape marks, urine, and feces are used to mark territory and attract mates. Males may scrape together a small pile of leaves and grasses and then urinate on it as a way of marking territory.
Home range sizes and overall cougar abundance depend on terrain, vegetation, and prey abundance. One female adjacent to the San Andres Mountains, for instance, was found with a large range of 215 km 2 (83 sq mi), necessitated by poor prey abundance. Research has shown cougar abundances from 0.5 animals to as much as 7 (in one study in South America) per 100 km 2 (38 sq mi).
Because males disperse further than females and compete more directly for mates and territory, they are most likely to be involved in conflict. Where a sub-adult fails to leave his maternal range, for example, he may be killed by his father. When males encounter each other, they hiss, spit, and may engage in violent conflict if neither backs down. Hunting or relocation of the cougar may increase aggressive encounters by disrupting territories and bringing young, transient animals into conflict with established individuals.
The cougar has the largest range of any wild land animal in the Americas. Its range spans 110 degrees of latitude, from northern Yukon in Canada to the southern Andes. It is one of only three cat species, along with the bobcat and Canadian lynx, native to Canada. Its wide distribution stems from its adaptability to virtually every habitat type: it is found in all forest types as well as in lowland and mountainous deserts. Studies show that the Cougar prefers regions with dense underbrush, but can live with little vegetation in open areas. Its preferred habitats include precipitous canyons, escarpments, rim rocks, and dense brush.
Cougar, photographed in the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, Tucson, Arizona.
The cougar was extirpated across much of its eastern North American range (with the exception of Florida) in the two centuries after European colonization, and faced grave threats in the remainder of its territory. Currently, it ranges across most western American states, the Canadian provinces of Alberta and British Columbia, and the Canadian Yukon Territory. There have been widely debated reports of possible recolonization of eastern North America. DNA evidence has suggested its presence in eastern North America, , while a consolidated map of cougar sightings shows numerous reports, from the mid-western Great Plains through to Eastern Canada. The Cougar Network methodology is recognized by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The Quebec wildlife services (known locally as MRNF) also considers Cougar to be present in the province as a threatened species after multiple DNA tests confirmed cougar hair in Lynx mating sites. Ministry of Wildlife and natural resources Wildlife Service. The only unequivocally known eastern population is the Florida panther, which is critically endangered. There have also been sightings in Elliotsville, Maine (in the central part of the state); and in New Hampshire, there have been recent sightings as early as 1997. In 2009, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources confirmed a cougar sighting in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Skinner, Victor. 2009. Photo shows cougar presence in Michigan. The Grand Rapids Press. November 15, 2009 Typically, extreme-range sightings of cougars involve young males, who can travel great distances to establish ranges away from established males; all four confirmed cougar kills in Iowa since 2000 involved males.
On April 14, 2008 police shot and killed a cougar on the north side of Chicago, Illinois. DNA tests were consistent with cougars from the Black Hills. Less than one year later, on March 5, 2009, a cougar was photographed and unsuccessfully tranquilized by state wildlife biologists in a tree near Spooner, Wisconsin in the northwestern part of the state.
South of the Rio Grande, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) lists the cat in every Central and South American country except Costa Rica and Panama. While specific state and provincial statistics are often available in North America, much less is known about the cat in its southern range.
The cougar's total breeding population is estimated at less than 50,000 by the IUCN, with a declining trend. U.S. state-level statistics are often more optimistic, suggesting cougar populations have rebounded. In Oregon, a healthy population of 5,000 was reported in 2006, exceeding a target of 3,000. California has actively sought to protect the cat and a similar number of cougars has been suggested, between 4,000 and 6,000.
Aside from humans, no species preys upon mature cougars in the wild. The cat is not, however, the apex predator throughout much of its range. In its northern range, the cougar interacts with other powerful predators such as the brown bear and gray wolf. In the south, the cougar must compete with the larger jaguar. In Florida it encounters the American Alligator.
thumbFront paw print of a cougar. An adult paw print is approximately 10 cm (4 inches) long.
The Yellowstone National Park ecosystem provides a fruitful microcosm to study inter-predator interaction in North America. Of the three large predators, the massive brown bear appears dominant, often although not always able to drive both the gray wolf pack and the cougar off their kills. One study found that Brown or American Black Bears visited 24% of cougar kills in Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks, usurping 10% of carcasses.
The gray wolf and the cougar compete more directly for prey, especially in winter. While individually more powerful than the gray wolf, a solitary cougar may be dominated by the pack structure of the canines. Wolves can steal kills and occasionally kill the cat. One report describes a large pack of fourteen wolves killing a female cougar and her kittens. Conversely, lone wolves are at a disadvantage, and have been reported killed by cougars. Wolves more broadly affect cougar population dynamics and distribution by dominating territory and prey opportunities, and disrupting the feline's behavior. Preliminary research in Yellowstone, for instance, has shown displacement of the cougar by wolves. One researcher in Oregon notes: "When there is a pack around, cougars are not comfortable around their kills or raising kittens ... A lot of times a big cougar will kill a wolf, but the pack phenomenon changes the table." Both species, meanwhile, are capable of killing mid-sized predators such as bobcats and coyotes and tend to suppress their numbers.
In the southern portion of its range, the cougar and jaguar share overlapping territory. The jaguar tends to take larger prey and the cougar smaller where they overlap, reducing the cougar's size. Of the two felines, the cougar appears best able to exploit a broader prey niche and smaller prey.
As with any predator at or near the top of its food chain, the cougar impacts the population of prey species. Predation by cougars has been linked to changes in the species mix of deer in a region. For example, a study in British Columbia observed that the population of mule deer, a favored cougar prey, was declining while the population of the less frequently preyed-upon white-tailed deer was increasing. The Vancouver Island Marmot, an endangered species endemic to one region of dense cougar population, has seen decreased numbers due to cougar and gray wolf predation.
In the southern part of South America the Puma is a top level predator that has controlled the population of Guanaco and other species since prehistoric times.
Pumapard, taken in 1904
A pumapard is a hybrid animal resulting from a union between a cougar and a leopard. Three sets of these hybrids were bred in the late 1890s and early 1900s by Carl Hagenbeck at his animal park in Hamburg, Germany. Most did not reach adulthood. One of these was purchased in 1898 by Berlin Zoo. A similar hybrid in Berlin Zoo purchased from Hagenbeck was a cross between a male leopard and a female puma. Hamburg Zoo's specimen was the reverse pairing, the one in the black and white photo, fathered by a puma bred to an Indian leopardess.
Whether born to a female puma mated to a male leopard, or to a male puma mated to a female leopard, pumapards inherit a form of dwarfism. Those reported grew to only half the size of the parents. They have a puma-like long body (proportional to the limbs, but nevertheless shorter than either parent), but short legs. The coat is variously described as sandy, tawny or greyish with brown, chestnut or "faded" rosettes.
The World Conservation Union (IUCN) currently lists the cougar as a "least concern" species. The cougar is regulated under Appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), rendering illegal international trade in specimens or parts.
Cougar conservation depends on preservation of their habitat.
In the United States east of the Mississippi River, the only unequivocally known cougar population is the Florida panther. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service recognizes both an Eastern cougar and the Florida panther, affording protection under the Endangered Species Act. Certain taxonomic authorities have collapsed both designations into the North American Cougar, with Eastern or Florida subspecies not recognized, while a subspecies designation remains recognized by some conservation scientists. The most recent documented count for the Florida sub-population is 87 individuals, reported by recovery agencies in 2003.
The cougar is also protected across much of the rest of their range. As of 1996, cougar hunting was prohibited in Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, French Guiana, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Suriname, Venezuela, and Uruguay. (Costa Rica and Panama are not listed as current range countries by the IUCN.) The cat had no reported legal protection in Ecuador, El Salvador, and Guyana. Regulated cougar hunting is still common in the United States and Canada, although they are protected from all hunting in the Yukon.; it is permitted in every U.S. state from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, with the exception of California. Texas is the only state in the United States with a viable population of cougars that does not protect, in some way, of its cougar population. In Texas, cougars are listed as nuisance wildlife and any person holding a hunting or a trapping permit can kill a cougar regardless of the season, number killed, sex or age of the animal. Killed animals are not required to be reported to Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. Conservation work in Texas is the effort of a non profit organization, Balanced Ecology Inc. (BEI), as part of their Texas Mountain Lion Conservation Project . Cougars are generally hunted with packs of dogs, until the animal is 'treed'. When the hunter arrives on the scene, he shoots the cat from the tree at close range. The Cougar cannot be legally killed in California except under very specific circumstances, such as when an individual is declared a public safety threat. However statistics from the Department of Fish and Game indicate that cougar killings in California have been on the rise since 1970s with an average of over 112 cats killed per year from 2000 to 2006 compared to six per year in the 1970s. The Bay Area Puma Project aims to obtain information on cougar populations in the San Francisco Bay area and the animals' interactions with habitat, prey, humans, and residential communities.
Conservation threats to the species include persecution as a pest animal, degradation and fragmentation of their habitat, and depletion of their prey base. Wildlife corridor and sufficient range areas are critical to the sustainability of cougar populations. Research simulations have shown that the animal faces a low extinction risk in areas of 2200 km 2 (850 sq mi) or more. As few as one to four new animals entering a population per decade markedly increases persistence, foregrounding the importance of habitat corridors.
Moche puma, Larco Museum collection
The grace and power of the cougar have been widely admired in the cultures of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. The Inca city of Cusco is reported to have been designed in the shape of a cougar, and the animal also gave its name to both Inca regions and people. The Moche people represented the puma often in their ceramics. Berrin, Katherine & Larco Museum. The Spirit of Ancient Peru:Treasures from the Museo Arqueológico Rafael Larco Herrera. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1997. The sky and thunder god of the Inca, Viracocha, has been associated with the animal.
In North America, mythological descriptions of the cougar have appeared in the stories of the HocÄ
k language ("Ho-Chunk" or "Winnebago") of Wisconsin and Illinois Cougars, The Encyclopedia of HoÄÄ
k (Winnebago) Mythology. Retrieved: 2009/12/08. and the Cheyenne, amongst others. To the Apache and Walapai of Arizona, the wail of the Cougar was a harbinger of death.
During the early years of ranching, cougars were considered on par with wolves in destructiveness. According to figures in Texas in 1990, 86 calves (0.0006% of a total of 13.4 million cattle & calves in Texas), 253 Mohair goats, 302 Mohair kids, 445 sheep (0.02% of a total of 2.0 million sheep & lambs in Texas) and 562 lambs (0.04% of 1.2 million lambs in Texas) were confirmed to have been killed by cougars that year. In Nevada in 1992, cougars were confirmed to have killed 9 calves, 1 horse, 4 colts, 5 goats, 318 sheep and 400 lambs. In both cases, sheep were the most frequently attacked. Some instances of surplus killing have resulted in the deaths of 20 sheep in one attack. Cougars frequently kill calves, sheep and goats by biting the top of the neck or head, differing greatly from the throat bite used by coyotes and indiscriminate mutilation by feral dogs. The size of the tooth puncture marks also helps distinguish kills made by cougars from those made by smaller predators.
Mountain Lion warning sign
Due to the expanding human population, cougar ranges increasingly overlap with areas inhabited by humans. Attacks on humans are rare, as cougar prey recognition is a learned behavior and they do not generally recognize humans as prey. Attacks on people, livestock, and pets may occur when the cat habituates to humans or is in a condition of severe starvation. Attacks are most frequent during late spring and summer, when juvenile cougars leave their mothers and search for new territory.
Between 1890 and 1990, in North America there were 53 reported, confirmed attacks on humans, resulting in 48 nonfatal injuries and 10 deaths of humans (the total is greater than 53 because some attacks had more than one victim). By 2004, the count had climbed to 88 attacks and 20 deaths.
Within North America, the distribution of attacks is not uniform. The heavily populated state of California has seen a dozen attacks since 1986 (after just three from 1890 to 1985), including three fatalities. Lightly populated New Mexico reported an attack in 2008, the first there since 1974. Search continues for mountain lion that killed Pinos Altos man, New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, press release June 23, 2008]; Wounded mountain lion captured, killed near Pinos Altos, New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, press release June 25, 2008]; Second mountain lion captured near Pinos Altos, New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, press release July 1, 2008]
As with many predators, a cougar may attack if cornered, if a fleeing human stimulates their instinct to chase, or if a person "plays dead." Exaggerating the threat to the animal through intense eye contact, loud but calm shouting, and any other action to appear larger and more menacing, may make the animal retreat. Fighting back with sticks and rocks, or even bare hands, is often effective in persuading an attacking cougar to disengage.
When cougars do attack, they usually employ their characteristic neck bite, attempting to position their teeth between the vertebrae and into the spinal cord. Neck, head, and spinal injuries are common and sometimes fatal. Children are at greatest risk of attack, and least likely to survive an encounter. Detailed research into attacks prior to 1991 showed that 64% of all victims and almost all fatalities were children. The same study showed the highest proportion of attacks to have occurred in British Columbia, particularly on Vancouver Island where cougar populations are especially dense.
*List of fatal cougar attacks in North America
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* Video, Pictures and Information on Mountain Lions
* A Definitive Resource About Cougars Comprehensive, non-profit site with extensive information about cougars, from how to live safely in cougar country, to science abstracts, hunting regulations, state-by-state cougar management/policy info, and rare photos and videos of wild cougars.
* Description of a Cougar attack
* Cougar Facts and Photos â NatureMapping Program
* No Place for Predators? Liza Gross, PLoS Biology, explains how Washington State wildlife officials implemented a hunting policy, in response to a state measure passed to protect wildlife, that led to the highest rates of human-caused cougar mortality since the height of the bounty era
* Cougar Tracks: How to identify cougar tracks in the wild
* The sound of a cougar screaming
* Link to Worldwide Wild Cat Conservation site
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Cougar | What are the three cat species that are native to Canada? | cougar, bobcat, Canadian lynx | data/set1/a2 | Cougar
The cougar (Puma concolor), also known as puma, mountain lion, mountain cat, catamount or panther, depending on the region, is a mammal of the family Felidae, native to the Americas. This large, solitary cat has the greatest range of any large wild terrestrial mammal in the Western Hemisphere, extending from Yukon in Canada to the southern Andes of South America. An adaptable, generalist species, the cougar is found in every major American habitat type. It is the second heaviest cat in the American continents after the jaguar, and the fourth heaviest in the world, after the tiger, lion, and jaguar. Although large, the cougar is most closely related to smaller felines.
A capable stalk-and-ambush predator, the cougar pursues a wide variety of prey. Primary food sources include ungulates such as deer, elk, and bighorn sheep, as well as domestic cattle, horses and sheep, particularly in the northern part of its range. It will also hunt species as small as insects and rodents. This cat prefers habitats with dense underbrush and rocky areas for stalking, but it can also live in open areas. The cougar is territorial and persists at low population densities. Individual territory sizes depend on terrain, vegetation, and abundance of prey. While it is a large predator, it is not always the dominant species in its range, as when it competes for prey with other predators such as the jaguar, grey wolf, American Black Bear, and the grizzly bear. It is a reclusive cat and usually avoids people. Attacks on humans remain rare, despite a recent increase in frequency.
Due to excessive hunting following the European colonization of the Americas, and continuing human development of cougar habitat, populations have dropped in most parts of its historical range. In particular, the cougar was extirpated in eastern North America, except for an isolated sub-population in Florida; the animal may be recolonizing parts of its former eastern territory, such as Maine and northern Michigan, /ref> where there have been recent sightings. With its vast range, the cougar has dozens of names and various references in the mythology of the indigenous Americans and in contemporary culture. The cougar has recently made a comeback in the state of Wyoming, where it presently has the largest population in North America .
The cougar has numerous names in English, of which puma and mountain lion are popular. Other names include catamount, panther, mountain screamer and painter. Lexicographers regard painter as a primarily upper-Southern U.S. regional variant on "panther", but a folk etymology, fancying a resemblance between the typically dark tip of its tail and a paintbrush dipped in dark paint, has some currency.
The cougar holds the Guinness record for the animal with the highest number of names, presumably due to its wide distribution across North and South America. It has over 40 names in English alone.
"Cougar" may be borrowed from the Portuguese çuçuarana, via French; the term was originally derived from the Tupi language. A current form in Brazil is suçuarana. It may also be borrowed from the Guaranà language term guaçu ara or guazu ara. "Puma" comes, via Spanish, from the Quechua language. Cougar, Puma and
The cougar is the largest of the small cats. It is placed in the subfamily Felinae, although its bulk characteristics are similar to those of the big cats in the subfamily Pantherinae. The family Felidae is believed to have originated in Asia approximately 11 million years ago. Taxonomic research on felids remains partial and much of what is known about their evolutionary history is based on mitochondrial DNA analysis, as cats are poorly represented in the fossil record, and there are significant confidence intervals with suggested dates.
Although large, the cougar is closely related to small felines.
In the latest genomic study of Felidae, the common ancestor of today's Leopardus, Lynx, Puma, Prionailurus, and Felis lineages migrated across the Bering land bridge into the Americas approximately 8 to 8.5 million years (Ma) ago. The lineages subsequently diverged in that order. North American felids then invaded South America 3 Ma ago as part of the Great American Interchange, following formation of the Isthmus of Panama. The cougar was originally thought to belong in Felis (Felis concolor), the genus which includes the domestic cat. As of 1993, it is now placed in Puma along with the jaguarundi, a cat just a little more than a tenth its weight.
Studies have indicated that the cougar and jaguarundi are most closely related to the modern cheetah of Africa and western Asia, but the relationship is unresolved. It has been suggested that the cheetah lineage diverged from the Puma lineage in the Americas (see American cheetah) and migrated back to Asia and Africa, while other research suggests the cheetah diverged in the Old World itself. The outline of small feline migration to the Americas is thus unclear.
Recent studies have demonstrated a high level of genetic similarity among the North American cougar populations, suggesting that they are all fairly recent descendants of a small ancestral group. Culver et al. suggest that the original North American population of Puma concolor was extirpated during the Pleistocene extinctions some 10,000 years ago, when other large mammals such as Smilodon also disappeared. North America was then repopulated by a group of South American cougars.
Until the late 1990s, as many as 32 subspecies were recorded; however, a recent genetic study of mitochondrial DNA found that many of these are too similar to be recognized as distinct at a molecular level. Following the research, the canonical Mammal Species of the World (3rd edition) recognizes six subspecies, five of which are solely found in Latin America:
; Argentine puma : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms hudsonii and puma (Marcelli, 1922);
; Costa Rican Cougar
; Eastern South American cougar : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms acrocodia, borbensis, capricornensis, concolor (Pelzeln, 1883), greeni and nigra;
; North American Cougar : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms arundivaga, aztecus, browni, californica, coryi, floridana, hippolestes, improcera, kaibabensis, mayensis, missoulensis, olympus, oregonensis, schorgeri, stanleyana, vancouverensis and youngi;
; Northern South American cougar : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms bangsi, incarum, osgoodi, soasoaranna, sussuarana, soderstromii, sucuacuara and wavula;
; Southern South American puma : includes the previous subspecies and synonyms araucanus, concolor (Gay, 1847), patagonica, pearsoni and puma (Trouessart, 1904)
The status of the Florida panther, here collapsed into the North American Cougar, remains uncertain. It is still regularly listed as subspecies Puma concolor coryi in research works, including those directly concerned with its conservation. Culver et al. themselves noted low microsatellite variation in the Florida panther, possibly due to inbreeding; responding to the research, one conservation team suggests "the degree to which the scientific community has accepted the results of Culver et al. and the proposed change in taxonomy is not resolved at this time."
Cougars are slender and agile cats. Adults stand about 60 to 76 centimeters (2.0 to 2.5 ft) tall at the shoulders. The length of adult males is around 2.4 meters (8 ft) long nose to tail, with overall ranges between 1.5 and 2.75 m (5 and 9 ft) nose to tail suggested for the species in general. Males typically weigh 53 to 90 kilograms (115 to 198 pounds), averaging 62 kg (137 lb). In rare cases, some may reach over 120 kg (264 lb). Females typically weigh between 29 and 64 kg (64 and 141 lb), averaging 42 kg (93 lb). /ref> /ref> Cougar size is smallest close to the equator, and larger towards the poles.
Although cougars resemble the domestic cat, they are about the same size as an adult human.
The head of the cat is round and the ears erect. Its powerful forequarters, neck, and jaw serve to grasp and hold large prey. It has five retractable claws on its forepaws (one a dewclaw) and four on its hind paws. The larger front feet and claws are adaptations to clutching prey.
Cougars can be almost as large as jaguars, but are less muscular and not as powerful; where their ranges overlap, the cougar tends to be smaller than average. The cougar is on average as heavy as the leopard. Despite its size, it is not typically classified among the "big cats," as it cannot roar, lacking the specialized larynx and hyoid apparatus of Panthera. Like domestic cats, cougars vocalize low-pitched hisses, growls, and purrs, as well as chirps and whistles. They are well known for their screams, as referenced in some of their common names, although these screams are often misinterpreted to be the calls of other animals.
Rear paw of a cougar
Cougar coloring is plain (hence the Latin concolor) but can vary greatly between individuals and even between siblings. The coat is typically tawny, but ranges to silvery-grey or reddish, with lighter patches on the under body including the jaws, chin, and throat. Infants are spotted and born with blue eyes and rings on their tails; juveniles are pale, and dark spots remain on their flanks. Despite anecdotes to the contrary, all-black coloring (melanism) has never been documented in cougars. The term "black panther" is used colloquially to refer to melanistic individuals of other species, particularly jaguars and leopards.
Cougars have large paws and proportionally the largest hind legs in the cat family. This physique allows it great leaping and short-sprint ability. An exceptional vertical leap of 5.4 m (18 ft) is reported for the cougar. Horizontal jumping capability from standing position is suggested anywhere from 6 to 12 m (20 to 40 ft). The cougar can run as fast as 55 to 72 km/h (35 to 45 mi/h), but is best adapted for short, powerful sprints rather than long chases. It is adept at climbing, which allows it to evade canine competitors. Although it is not strongly associated with water, it can swim.
A successful generalist predator, the cougar will eat any animal it can catch, from insects to large ungulates (over 500 kg). Like all cats, it is an obligate carnivore, feeding only on meat. The Mean weight of vertebrate prey (MWVP) was positively correlated (r=0.875) with puma body weight and inversely correlated (r=-0.836) with food niche breadth in all America. In general, MWVP was lower in areas closer to the Equator. Its most important prey species are various deer species, particularly in North America; mule deer, white-tailed deer, elk, and even large moose are taken by the cat. Other species such as Bighorn Sheep, wild horses of Arizona, domestic horses, and domestic livestock such as cattle and sheep are also primary food bases in many areas. A survey of North America research found 68% of prey items were ungulates, especially deer. Only the Florida Panther showed variation, often preferring feral hogs and armadillos.
Shown eating. Cougars are ambush predators, feeding mostly on deer and other mammals.
Investigation in Yellowstone National Park showed that elk, followed by mule deer, were the cougar's primary targets; the prey base is shared with the park's gray wolves, with whom the cougar competes for resources.
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* Another study on winter kills (NovemberâApril) in Alberta showed that ungulates accounted for greater than 99% of the cougar diet. Learned, individual prey recognition was observed, as some cougars rarely killed bighorn sheep, while others relied heavily on the species.
In the Central and South American cougar range, the ratio of deer in the diet declines. Small to mid-size mammals are preferred, including large rodents such as the capybara. Ungulates accounted for only 35% of prey items in one survey, approximately half that of North America. Competition with the larger jaguar has been suggested for the decline in the size of prey items. Other listed prey species of the cougar include mice, porcupine, and hares. Birds and small reptiles are sometimes preyed upon in the south, but this is rarely recorded in North America.
Though capable of sprinting, the cougar is typically an ambush predator. It stalks through brush and trees, across ledges, or other covered spots, before delivering a powerful leap onto the back of its prey and a suffocating neck bite. The cougar is capable of breaking the neck of some of its smaller prey with a strong bite and momentum bearing the animal to the ground.
Kills are generally estimated at around one large ungulate every two weeks. The period shrinks for females raising young, and may be as short as one kill every three days when cubs are nearly mature at around 15 months. The cat drags a kill to a preferred spot, covers it with brush, and returns to feed over a period of days. It is generally reported that the cougar is a non-scavenger and will rarely consume prey it has not killed; but deer carcasses left exposed for study were scavenged by cougars in California, suggesting more opportunistic behavior.
Females reach sexual maturity between one-and-a-half to three years of age. They typically average one litter every two to three years throughout their reproductive life, though the period can be as short as one year. Females are in estrus for approximately 8 days of a 23-day cycle; the gestation period is approximately 91 days. Females are sometimes reported as monogamous, but this is uncertain and polygyny may be more common. Copulation is brief but frequent.
Cougar kittens
Only females are involved in parenting. Female cougars are fiercely protective of their kittens, and have been seen to successfully fight off animals as large as grizzly bears in their defense. Litter size is between one and six kittens; typically two or three. Caves and other alcoves that offer protection are used as litter dens. Born blind, kittens are completely dependent on their mother at first, and begin to be weaned at around three months of age. As they grow, they begin to go out on forays with their mother, first visiting kill sites, and after six months beginning to hunt small prey on their own. Kitten survival rates are just over one per litter.
Sub-adults leave their mother to attempt to establish their own territory at around two years of age and sometimes earlier; males tend to leave sooner. One study has shown high morbidity amongst cougars that travel farthest from the maternal range, often due to conflicts with other cougars ("intraspecific" conflict). Research in New Mexico has shown that "males dispersed significantly farther than females, were more likely to traverse large expanses of non-cougar habitat, and were probably most responsible for nuclear gene flow between habitat patches."
Life expectancy in the wild is reported at between 8 to 13 years, and probably averages 8 to 10; a female of at least 18 years was reported killed by hunters on Vancouver Island. Cougars may live as long as 20 years in captivity. One male North American cougar, named Scratch, was two months short of his 30th birthday when he died in 2007. Causes of death in the wild include disability and disease, competition with other cougars, starvation, accidents, and, where allowed, human hunting. Feline immunodeficiency virus, an endemic AIDS-like disease in cats, is well-adapted to the cougar.
Like almost all cats, the cougar is a solitary animal. Only mothers and kittens live in groups, with adults meeting only to mate. It is secretive and crepuscular, being most active around dawn and dusk.
Estimates of territory sizes vary greatly.
Canadian Geographic reports large male territories of 150 to 1000 square kilometers (58 to 386 sq mi) with female ranges half the size. Other research suggests a much smaller lower limit of 25 km 2 (10 sq mi) but an even greater upper limit of 1300 km 2 (500 sq mi) for males. In the United States, very large ranges have been reported in Texas and the Black Hills of the northern Great Plains, in excess of 775 km 2 (300 sq mi). Male ranges may include or overlap with those of females but, at least where studied, not with those of other males, which serves to reduce conflict between cougars. Ranges of females may overlap slightly with each other. Scrape marks, urine, and feces are used to mark territory and attract mates. Males may scrape together a small pile of leaves and grasses and then urinate on it as a way of marking territory.
Home range sizes and overall cougar abundance depend on terrain, vegetation, and prey abundance. One female adjacent to the San Andres Mountains, for instance, was found with a large range of 215 km 2 (83 sq mi), necessitated by poor prey abundance. Research has shown cougar abundances from 0.5 animals to as much as 7 (in one study in South America) per 100 km 2 (38 sq mi).
Because males disperse further than females and compete more directly for mates and territory, they are most likely to be involved in conflict. Where a sub-adult fails to leave his maternal range, for example, he may be killed by his father. When males encounter each other, they hiss, spit, and may engage in violent conflict if neither backs down. Hunting or relocation of the cougar may increase aggressive encounters by disrupting territories and bringing young, transient animals into conflict with established individuals.
The cougar has the largest range of any wild land animal in the Americas. Its range spans 110 degrees of latitude, from northern Yukon in Canada to the southern Andes. It is one of only three cat species, along with the bobcat and Canadian lynx, native to Canada. Its wide distribution stems from its adaptability to virtually every habitat type: it is found in all forest types as well as in lowland and mountainous deserts. Studies show that the Cougar prefers regions with dense underbrush, but can live with little vegetation in open areas. Its preferred habitats include precipitous canyons, escarpments, rim rocks, and dense brush.
Cougar, photographed in the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, Tucson, Arizona.
The cougar was extirpated across much of its eastern North American range (with the exception of Florida) in the two centuries after European colonization, and faced grave threats in the remainder of its territory. Currently, it ranges across most western American states, the Canadian provinces of Alberta and British Columbia, and the Canadian Yukon Territory. There have been widely debated reports of possible recolonization of eastern North America. DNA evidence has suggested its presence in eastern North America, , while a consolidated map of cougar sightings shows numerous reports, from the mid-western Great Plains through to Eastern Canada. The Cougar Network methodology is recognized by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The Quebec wildlife services (known locally as MRNF) also considers Cougar to be present in the province as a threatened species after multiple DNA tests confirmed cougar hair in Lynx mating sites. Ministry of Wildlife and natural resources Wildlife Service. The only unequivocally known eastern population is the Florida panther, which is critically endangered. There have also been sightings in Elliotsville, Maine (in the central part of the state); and in New Hampshire, there have been recent sightings as early as 1997. In 2009, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources confirmed a cougar sighting in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Skinner, Victor. 2009. Photo shows cougar presence in Michigan. The Grand Rapids Press. November 15, 2009 Typically, extreme-range sightings of cougars involve young males, who can travel great distances to establish ranges away from established males; all four confirmed cougar kills in Iowa since 2000 involved males.
On April 14, 2008 police shot and killed a cougar on the north side of Chicago, Illinois. DNA tests were consistent with cougars from the Black Hills. Less than one year later, on March 5, 2009, a cougar was photographed and unsuccessfully tranquilized by state wildlife biologists in a tree near Spooner, Wisconsin in the northwestern part of the state.
South of the Rio Grande, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) lists the cat in every Central and South American country except Costa Rica and Panama. While specific state and provincial statistics are often available in North America, much less is known about the cat in its southern range.
The cougar's total breeding population is estimated at less than 50,000 by the IUCN, with a declining trend. U.S. state-level statistics are often more optimistic, suggesting cougar populations have rebounded. In Oregon, a healthy population of 5,000 was reported in 2006, exceeding a target of 3,000. California has actively sought to protect the cat and a similar number of cougars has been suggested, between 4,000 and 6,000.
Aside from humans, no species preys upon mature cougars in the wild. The cat is not, however, the apex predator throughout much of its range. In its northern range, the cougar interacts with other powerful predators such as the brown bear and gray wolf. In the south, the cougar must compete with the larger jaguar. In Florida it encounters the American Alligator.
thumbFront paw print of a cougar. An adult paw print is approximately 10 cm (4 inches) long.
The Yellowstone National Park ecosystem provides a fruitful microcosm to study inter-predator interaction in North America. Of the three large predators, the massive brown bear appears dominant, often although not always able to drive both the gray wolf pack and the cougar off their kills. One study found that Brown or American Black Bears visited 24% of cougar kills in Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks, usurping 10% of carcasses.
The gray wolf and the cougar compete more directly for prey, especially in winter. While individually more powerful than the gray wolf, a solitary cougar may be dominated by the pack structure of the canines. Wolves can steal kills and occasionally kill the cat. One report describes a large pack of fourteen wolves killing a female cougar and her kittens. Conversely, lone wolves are at a disadvantage, and have been reported killed by cougars. Wolves more broadly affect cougar population dynamics and distribution by dominating territory and prey opportunities, and disrupting the feline's behavior. Preliminary research in Yellowstone, for instance, has shown displacement of the cougar by wolves. One researcher in Oregon notes: "When there is a pack around, cougars are not comfortable around their kills or raising kittens ... A lot of times a big cougar will kill a wolf, but the pack phenomenon changes the table." Both species, meanwhile, are capable of killing mid-sized predators such as bobcats and coyotes and tend to suppress their numbers.
In the southern portion of its range, the cougar and jaguar share overlapping territory. The jaguar tends to take larger prey and the cougar smaller where they overlap, reducing the cougar's size. Of the two felines, the cougar appears best able to exploit a broader prey niche and smaller prey.
As with any predator at or near the top of its food chain, the cougar impacts the population of prey species. Predation by cougars has been linked to changes in the species mix of deer in a region. For example, a study in British Columbia observed that the population of mule deer, a favored cougar prey, was declining while the population of the less frequently preyed-upon white-tailed deer was increasing. The Vancouver Island Marmot, an endangered species endemic to one region of dense cougar population, has seen decreased numbers due to cougar and gray wolf predation.
In the southern part of South America the Puma is a top level predator that has controlled the population of Guanaco and other species since prehistoric times.
Pumapard, taken in 1904
A pumapard is a hybrid animal resulting from a union between a cougar and a leopard. Three sets of these hybrids were bred in the late 1890s and early 1900s by Carl Hagenbeck at his animal park in Hamburg, Germany. Most did not reach adulthood. One of these was purchased in 1898 by Berlin Zoo. A similar hybrid in Berlin Zoo purchased from Hagenbeck was a cross between a male leopard and a female puma. Hamburg Zoo's specimen was the reverse pairing, the one in the black and white photo, fathered by a puma bred to an Indian leopardess.
Whether born to a female puma mated to a male leopard, or to a male puma mated to a female leopard, pumapards inherit a form of dwarfism. Those reported grew to only half the size of the parents. They have a puma-like long body (proportional to the limbs, but nevertheless shorter than either parent), but short legs. The coat is variously described as sandy, tawny or greyish with brown, chestnut or "faded" rosettes.
The World Conservation Union (IUCN) currently lists the cougar as a "least concern" species. The cougar is regulated under Appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), rendering illegal international trade in specimens or parts.
Cougar conservation depends on preservation of their habitat.
In the United States east of the Mississippi River, the only unequivocally known cougar population is the Florida panther. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service recognizes both an Eastern cougar and the Florida panther, affording protection under the Endangered Species Act. Certain taxonomic authorities have collapsed both designations into the North American Cougar, with Eastern or Florida subspecies not recognized, while a subspecies designation remains recognized by some conservation scientists. The most recent documented count for the Florida sub-population is 87 individuals, reported by recovery agencies in 2003.
The cougar is also protected across much of the rest of their range. As of 1996, cougar hunting was prohibited in Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, French Guiana, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Suriname, Venezuela, and Uruguay. (Costa Rica and Panama are not listed as current range countries by the IUCN.) The cat had no reported legal protection in Ecuador, El Salvador, and Guyana. Regulated cougar hunting is still common in the United States and Canada, although they are protected from all hunting in the Yukon.; it is permitted in every U.S. state from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, with the exception of California. Texas is the only state in the United States with a viable population of cougars that does not protect, in some way, of its cougar population. In Texas, cougars are listed as nuisance wildlife and any person holding a hunting or a trapping permit can kill a cougar regardless of the season, number killed, sex or age of the animal. Killed animals are not required to be reported to Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. Conservation work in Texas is the effort of a non profit organization, Balanced Ecology Inc. (BEI), as part of their Texas Mountain Lion Conservation Project . Cougars are generally hunted with packs of dogs, until the animal is 'treed'. When the hunter arrives on the scene, he shoots the cat from the tree at close range. The Cougar cannot be legally killed in California except under very specific circumstances, such as when an individual is declared a public safety threat. However statistics from the Department of Fish and Game indicate that cougar killings in California have been on the rise since 1970s with an average of over 112 cats killed per year from 2000 to 2006 compared to six per year in the 1970s. The Bay Area Puma Project aims to obtain information on cougar populations in the San Francisco Bay area and the animals' interactions with habitat, prey, humans, and residential communities.
Conservation threats to the species include persecution as a pest animal, degradation and fragmentation of their habitat, and depletion of their prey base. Wildlife corridor and sufficient range areas are critical to the sustainability of cougar populations. Research simulations have shown that the animal faces a low extinction risk in areas of 2200 km 2 (850 sq mi) or more. As few as one to four new animals entering a population per decade markedly increases persistence, foregrounding the importance of habitat corridors.
Moche puma, Larco Museum collection
The grace and power of the cougar have been widely admired in the cultures of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. The Inca city of Cusco is reported to have been designed in the shape of a cougar, and the animal also gave its name to both Inca regions and people. The Moche people represented the puma often in their ceramics. Berrin, Katherine & Larco Museum. The Spirit of Ancient Peru:Treasures from the Museo Arqueológico Rafael Larco Herrera. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1997. The sky and thunder god of the Inca, Viracocha, has been associated with the animal.
In North America, mythological descriptions of the cougar have appeared in the stories of the HocÄ
k language ("Ho-Chunk" or "Winnebago") of Wisconsin and Illinois Cougars, The Encyclopedia of HoÄÄ
k (Winnebago) Mythology. Retrieved: 2009/12/08. and the Cheyenne, amongst others. To the Apache and Walapai of Arizona, the wail of the Cougar was a harbinger of death.
During the early years of ranching, cougars were considered on par with wolves in destructiveness. According to figures in Texas in 1990, 86 calves (0.0006% of a total of 13.4 million cattle & calves in Texas), 253 Mohair goats, 302 Mohair kids, 445 sheep (0.02% of a total of 2.0 million sheep & lambs in Texas) and 562 lambs (0.04% of 1.2 million lambs in Texas) were confirmed to have been killed by cougars that year. In Nevada in 1992, cougars were confirmed to have killed 9 calves, 1 horse, 4 colts, 5 goats, 318 sheep and 400 lambs. In both cases, sheep were the most frequently attacked. Some instances of surplus killing have resulted in the deaths of 20 sheep in one attack. Cougars frequently kill calves, sheep and goats by biting the top of the neck or head, differing greatly from the throat bite used by coyotes and indiscriminate mutilation by feral dogs. The size of the tooth puncture marks also helps distinguish kills made by cougars from those made by smaller predators.
Mountain Lion warning sign
Due to the expanding human population, cougar ranges increasingly overlap with areas inhabited by humans. Attacks on humans are rare, as cougar prey recognition is a learned behavior and they do not generally recognize humans as prey. Attacks on people, livestock, and pets may occur when the cat habituates to humans or is in a condition of severe starvation. Attacks are most frequent during late spring and summer, when juvenile cougars leave their mothers and search for new territory.
Between 1890 and 1990, in North America there were 53 reported, confirmed attacks on humans, resulting in 48 nonfatal injuries and 10 deaths of humans (the total is greater than 53 because some attacks had more than one victim). By 2004, the count had climbed to 88 attacks and 20 deaths.
Within North America, the distribution of attacks is not uniform. The heavily populated state of California has seen a dozen attacks since 1986 (after just three from 1890 to 1985), including three fatalities. Lightly populated New Mexico reported an attack in 2008, the first there since 1974. Search continues for mountain lion that killed Pinos Altos man, New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, press release June 23, 2008]; Wounded mountain lion captured, killed near Pinos Altos, New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, press release June 25, 2008]; Second mountain lion captured near Pinos Altos, New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, press release July 1, 2008]
As with many predators, a cougar may attack if cornered, if a fleeing human stimulates their instinct to chase, or if a person "plays dead." Exaggerating the threat to the animal through intense eye contact, loud but calm shouting, and any other action to appear larger and more menacing, may make the animal retreat. Fighting back with sticks and rocks, or even bare hands, is often effective in persuading an attacking cougar to disengage.
When cougars do attack, they usually employ their characteristic neck bite, attempting to position their teeth between the vertebrae and into the spinal cord. Neck, head, and spinal injuries are common and sometimes fatal. Children are at greatest risk of attack, and least likely to survive an encounter. Detailed research into attacks prior to 1991 showed that 64% of all victims and almost all fatalities were children. The same study showed the highest proportion of attacks to have occurred in British Columbia, particularly on Vancouver Island where cougar populations are especially dense.
*List of fatal cougar attacks in North America
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* Video, Pictures and Information on Mountain Lions
* A Definitive Resource About Cougars Comprehensive, non-profit site with extensive information about cougars, from how to live safely in cougar country, to science abstracts, hunting regulations, state-by-state cougar management/policy info, and rare photos and videos of wild cougars.
* Description of a Cougar attack
* Cougar Facts and Photos â NatureMapping Program
* No Place for Predators? Liza Gross, PLoS Biology, explains how Washington State wildlife officials implemented a hunting policy, in response to a state measure passed to protect wildlife, that led to the highest rates of human-caused cougar mortality since the height of the bounty era
* Cougar Tracks: How to identify cougar tracks in the wild
* The sound of a cougar screaming
* Link to Worldwide Wild Cat Conservation site
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Cymbal | Is one of the parts of a cymbal called a disc? | 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 DvoÅák'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 one of the parts of a cymbal called a disc? | null | 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 DvoÅák'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 ride cymbals very common? | 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 DvoÅák'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 ride cymbals very common? | null | 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 DvoÅák'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 | Does Fender make cymbals? | 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 DvoÅák'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 | Does Fender make cymbals? | null | 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 DvoÅák'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 is the bell? | The center of a 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 DvoÅák'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 is the bell? | null | 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 DvoÅák'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's the timber of ancient cimbals like? disfluent | like that of small hand-bells or of the notes of the keyed harmonica | 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 DvoÅák'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's the timber of ancient cimbals like? disfluent | null | 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 DvoÅák'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 does it sound like to play cymbals with a cello bow? | squealing car brakes | 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 DvoÅák'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 does it sound like to play cymbals with a cello bow? | null | 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 DvoÅák'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 cymbals made of? | brass | 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 DvoÅák'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 cymbals made of? | null | 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 DvoÅák'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 | How many cymbals typically go in a drum kit? | at least 3 | 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 DvoÅák'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 | How many cymbals typically go in a drum kit? | null | 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 DvoÅák'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 kinds of musical groups use cymbals? | Cymbals are used in modern orchestras and many military, marching, concert and other bands | 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 DvoÅák'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 kinds of musical groups use cymbals? | null | 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 DvoÅák'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
*
|
Dragonfly | null | null | data/set1/a7 | Dragonfly
Dragonfly emerging as an adult
Pair of Yellow Striped Hunters mating
A dragonfly is a type of insect belonging to the order Odonata, the suborder Epiprocta or, in the strict sense, the infraorder Anisoptera. It is characterized by large multifaceted eyes, two pairs of strong transparent wings, and an elongated body. Dragonflies are similar to damselflies, but the adults can be differentiated by the fact that the wings of most dragonflies are held away from, and perpendicular to, the body when at rest. Even though dragonflies possess 6 legs like any other insect, they are not capable of walking.
Dragonflies are valuable predators that eat mosquitoes, and other small insects like flies, bees, ants, and butterflies. They are usually found around lakes, ponds, streams and wetlands because their larvae, known as "nymphs", are aquatic.
Female dragonflies lay eggs in or near water, often on floating or emergent plants. When laying eggs, some species will submerge themselves completely in order to lay their eggs on a good surface. The eggs then hatch into nymphs. Most of a dragonfly's life is spent in the naiad (that is, nymph) form, beneath the water's surface, using extendable jaws to catch other invertebrates or even vertebrates such as tadpoles and fish. They breathe through gills in their rectum, and can rapidly propel themselves by suddenly expelling water through the anus. /ref> Some nymphs even hunt on land, an aptitude which could easily have been more common in ancient times when terrestrial predators were clumsier.
The larval stage of large dragonflies may last as long as five years. In smaller species, this stage may last between two months and three years. When the larva is ready to metamorphose into an adult, it climbs up a reed or other emergent plant. Exposure to air causes the larva to begin breathing. The skin splits at a weak spot behind the head and the adult dragonfly crawls out of its old larval skin, pumps up its wings, and flies off to feed on midges and flies. In flight the adult dragonfly can propel itself in six directions; upward, downward, forward, back, and side to side. The adult stage of larger species of dragonfly can last as long as five or six months.
Formerly, the Anisoptera were given suborder rank beside the "ancient dragonflies" (Anisozygoptera) which were believed to contain the two living species of the genus Epiophlebia and numerous fossil ones. More recently it turned out that the "anisozygopterans" form a paraphyletic assemblage of morphologically primitive relatives of the Anisoptera. Thus, the Anisoptera (true dragonflies) are reduced to an infraorder in the new suborder Epiprocta (dragonflies in general). The artificial grouping Anisozygoptera is disbanded, its members being largely recognized as extinct offshoots at various stages of dragonfly evolution. The two living species formerly placed there â the Asian relict dragonflies â form the infraorder Epiophlebioptera alongside the Anisoptera.
Unusually for a damselfly, the Sydney Flatwing hold their wings horizontal (perpendicular) to their body
Damselflies (suborder Zygoptera) are often confused with newly moulted dragonflies but once a dragonfly molts it is fully grown. There are other distinctions that set them apart: most damselflies hold their wings at rest together above the torso or held slightly open above (such as in the family Lestidae), whereas most dragonflies at rest hold their wings horizontally or occasionally slightly down and forward. Also, the back wing of the dragonfly broadens near the base, caudal to the connecting point at the body, while the back wing of the damselfly is similar to the front wing. The eyes on a damselfly are apart; in most dragonflies the eyes touch. Notable exceptions are the Petaluridae (Petaltails) and the Gomphidae (Clubtails).
Broad-bodied Chaser
A Tau Emerald (Hemicordulia tau) in mid flight
Kirby's Dropwing (Trithemis kirbyi) in Tsumeb, Namibia.
Flame Skimmer
In Europe, dragonflies have often been seen as sinister. Some English vernacular names, such as "devil's darning needle" and "ear cutter", link them with evil or injury. A Romanian folk tale says that the dragonfly was once a horse possessed by the devil. Swedish folklore holds that the devil uses dragonflies to weigh people's souls. Another Swedish legend holds that trolls use the dragonflies as spindles when weaving their clothes (hence the Swedish word for dragonfly trollslända, lit. "troll's spindle") as well as sending them to poke out the eyes of their enemies. The Norwegian name for dragonflies is "Ãyenstikker", which literally means Eye Poker and in Portugal they are sometimes called "Tira-olhos" (Eye snatcher). They are often associated with snakes, as in the Welsh name gwas-y-neidr, "adder's servant". The Southern United States term "snake doctor" refers to a folk belief that dragonflies follow snakes around and stitch them back together if they are injured. The Lithuanian word "Laum žirgis" is a composite word meaning "the Lauma's horse", while in Dutch, Aeshna mixta is called "Paardenbijter" or "horse biter". In some South American countries, dragonflies are also called matacaballo (horse killer), or caballito del diablo (devil's little horse), since they were perceived as harmful, some species being quite large for an insect.
In East Asia and among Native Americans, dragonflies have a far better reputation, one that can also be said to have positively influenced modern day views about dragonflies in most countries, in the same vein as the insect's namesake, the dragon, which has a positive image in the east, but initially had an association with evil in the west.
Dragonfly symbol on a Hopi bowl from Sikyatki archaeological site.
For some Native American tribes they represent swiftness and activity, and for the Navajo they symbolize pure water. Dragonflies are a common motif in Zuni pottery; stylized as a double-barred cross, they appear in Hopi rock art and on Pueblo necklaces. Mitchell and Lasswell, 20-26. It is said in some Native American beliefs that dragonflies are a symbol of renewal after a time of great hardship.
They also have traditional uses as medicine in Japan and China. In some parts of the world they are a food source, eaten either as adults or larvae; in Indonesia, for example, they are caught on poles made sticky with birdlime, then fried in oil as a delicacy.
Vietnamese people have a traditional way to forecast rain by seeing dragonflies: "Chuá»n chuá»n bay thấp thì mÆ°a, bay cao thì nắng, bay vừa thì râm" (Dragonflies fly at low level, it is rainy; dragonflies fly at high level, it is sunny; dragonflies fly at medium level, it is shadowy).
In some parts of the world it is considered lucky to have a dragonfly land on you, even to the point of yielding seven years of good luck.
In the United States dragonflies and damselflies are sought out as a hobby similar to birding and butterflying, known as oding, from the dragonfly's Latin species name, odonata. Oding is especially popular in Texas, where 225 out of a total of 457 known species of odonates in the world have been observed. With care, dragonflies can be handled and released by Oders, like butterflies. "Dragonflying: The new birding" by Tracy Hobson Lehmann San Antonio Express-News June 19, 2008
Images of dragonflies were common in Art Nouveau, especially in jewelry designs. They also appear in posters by modern artists such as Maeve Harris. They have also been used as a decorative motif on fabrics and home furnishings.
In Japan dragonflies symbolize "martial success," due to similarity in the sound of the word "dragonfly" and "victory" in Japanese. As a seasonal symbol, the dragonfly is associated with late summer and early autumn.
More generally, in Japan dragonflies are symbols of courage, strength, and happiness, and they often appear in art and literature, especially haiku. In ancient mythology, Japan was known as Akitsushima, which means "Land of the Dragonflies". The love for dragonflies is reflected by the fact that there are traditional names for almost all of the 200 species of dragonflies found in and around Japan. Japanese children catch large dragonflies as a game, using a hair with a small pebble tied to each end, which they throw into the air. The dragonfly mistakes the pebbles for prey, gets tangled in the hair, and is dragged to the ground by the weight. Mitchell and Lasswell, 38.
Also, in Japan, amongst the Three Great Spears of Japan is one which is called the Tonbogiri, which when translated is called 'The Dragon Fly Cutter'. The spear is an important part of Japan's imperial regalia - the spear itself was once wielded by the legendary Samurai, Honda Tadakatsu. Its name is derived from the story that the blade is so sharp, a dragonfly once landed on it and was instantly cut in half.
In drug references, several drugs have been synthesized that have molecule structures resembling Dragonflies. For instance Bromo-dragonfly and 2C-B-FLY. The names reflect the dragonfly appearance.
Image:Red_dragon_fly.jpg|Red Dragonfly from California
Image:Dragonfly_(2413057204).jpg|Dragonfly from Florida.
Image:Aust blue dragonfly02.jpg|Australian blue dragonfly
Image:Dragonfly on leaf.jpg|African dragonfly perched on a leaf
Image:Anax_withmeal.jpg|Green Darner Dragonfly feeding on honey bee
Image:Yellow-striped hunter dragonfly05.jpg|Austrogomphus guerini
Image:RubyMeadowhawkDragonfly.jpg|Flame Skimmer dragonfly, Libellula saturata
Image:Dragonfly midair.jpg|Dragonfly in midflight over a creek
Image:Dragonfly eye 3811.jpg|The compound eyes of a dragonfly
Image:Cherry-faced meadowhawk pair.jpg|Cherry-faced Meadowhawk,
Sympetrum internum
Image:Aeshna mixta6.jpg|Dragonflies mating
Image:Mating_dragon1.jpg|Mating
Image:Mating_dragon_2.jpg|Mating
Image:Aeshnid-ovipositing-800x600.jpg|Dragonfly depositing eggs
File:Darter August 2007-20.jpg|Sympetrum fonscolombii
Image:Polish_dragonfly.jpg| Dragonfly from Lower Silesia - top
Image:A Perched Dragonfly.jpg|A perched dragonfly Widow Skimmer
Image:Cali spreadwing2.jpg|California Spreadwing Archilestes californicus
Image:Pied paddy skimmer female.JPG|Indian pied paddy skimmer female
Image:Pied paddy skimmer male(Neurothemis tullia tullia).jpg| Indian pied paddy skimmer male
Image:Blue Dragonfly Resting on Water.jpg|in Brazos Bend State Park, Texas, USA
Image:Blue_dragonfly_Kamakura_Japan.jpg|Blue Dragonfly in Kamakura, Japan
Image:Sardinian_Dragonfly.JPG|Sardinian Dragonfly
Image:Darter August 2007-19.jpg|Female Red-veined darter. Lisboa, Portugal
Image:EmperorDragonfly.JPG|Emperor dragonfly in Greece
Image:Eye of dragonfly.jpg|Dragonfly, Kolkata India
Image:Dragonfly by Nabarun.JPG|Dragonfly, Kolkata India
File:Dragonfly001.jpg|Red Dragonfly (Trithemis annulata), Israel
* Elliot Pinhey
* List of British dragonflies
* Obelisk posture
* Tree of Life Odonata
*
* Identification key to dragonflies found in Ireland
* British Dragonfly Society
* Dragonflies and Damselflies (Odonata) of the United States
* PHAON (Pinhey's Heritage African Odonata Network)
* Dragonflies in folklore and art
* dragonflies and damselflies on the UF / IFAS Featured Creatures Web site
* Photos of dragonflies from Asia, Africa, America, and Russia
|
Dragonfly | null | null | data/set1/a7 | Dragonfly
Dragonfly emerging as an adult
Pair of Yellow Striped Hunters mating
A dragonfly is a type of insect belonging to the order Odonata, the suborder Epiprocta or, in the strict sense, the infraorder Anisoptera. It is characterized by large multifaceted eyes, two pairs of strong transparent wings, and an elongated body. Dragonflies are similar to damselflies, but the adults can be differentiated by the fact that the wings of most dragonflies are held away from, and perpendicular to, the body when at rest. Even though dragonflies possess 6 legs like any other insect, they are not capable of walking.
Dragonflies are valuable predators that eat mosquitoes, and other small insects like flies, bees, ants, and butterflies. They are usually found around lakes, ponds, streams and wetlands because their larvae, known as "nymphs", are aquatic.
Female dragonflies lay eggs in or near water, often on floating or emergent plants. When laying eggs, some species will submerge themselves completely in order to lay their eggs on a good surface. The eggs then hatch into nymphs. Most of a dragonfly's life is spent in the naiad (that is, nymph) form, beneath the water's surface, using extendable jaws to catch other invertebrates or even vertebrates such as tadpoles and fish. They breathe through gills in their rectum, and can rapidly propel themselves by suddenly expelling water through the anus. /ref> Some nymphs even hunt on land, an aptitude which could easily have been more common in ancient times when terrestrial predators were clumsier.
The larval stage of large dragonflies may last as long as five years. In smaller species, this stage may last between two months and three years. When the larva is ready to metamorphose into an adult, it climbs up a reed or other emergent plant. Exposure to air causes the larva to begin breathing. The skin splits at a weak spot behind the head and the adult dragonfly crawls out of its old larval skin, pumps up its wings, and flies off to feed on midges and flies. In flight the adult dragonfly can propel itself in six directions; upward, downward, forward, back, and side to side. The adult stage of larger species of dragonfly can last as long as five or six months.
Formerly, the Anisoptera were given suborder rank beside the "ancient dragonflies" (Anisozygoptera) which were believed to contain the two living species of the genus Epiophlebia and numerous fossil ones. More recently it turned out that the "anisozygopterans" form a paraphyletic assemblage of morphologically primitive relatives of the Anisoptera. Thus, the Anisoptera (true dragonflies) are reduced to an infraorder in the new suborder Epiprocta (dragonflies in general). The artificial grouping Anisozygoptera is disbanded, its members being largely recognized as extinct offshoots at various stages of dragonfly evolution. The two living species formerly placed there â the Asian relict dragonflies â form the infraorder Epiophlebioptera alongside the Anisoptera.
Unusually for a damselfly, the Sydney Flatwing hold their wings horizontal (perpendicular) to their body
Damselflies (suborder Zygoptera) are often confused with newly moulted dragonflies but once a dragonfly molts it is fully grown. There are other distinctions that set them apart: most damselflies hold their wings at rest together above the torso or held slightly open above (such as in the family Lestidae), whereas most dragonflies at rest hold their wings horizontally or occasionally slightly down and forward. Also, the back wing of the dragonfly broadens near the base, caudal to the connecting point at the body, while the back wing of the damselfly is similar to the front wing. The eyes on a damselfly are apart; in most dragonflies the eyes touch. Notable exceptions are the Petaluridae (Petaltails) and the Gomphidae (Clubtails).
Broad-bodied Chaser
A Tau Emerald (Hemicordulia tau) in mid flight
Kirby's Dropwing (Trithemis kirbyi) in Tsumeb, Namibia.
Flame Skimmer
In Europe, dragonflies have often been seen as sinister. Some English vernacular names, such as "devil's darning needle" and "ear cutter", link them with evil or injury. A Romanian folk tale says that the dragonfly was once a horse possessed by the devil. Swedish folklore holds that the devil uses dragonflies to weigh people's souls. Another Swedish legend holds that trolls use the dragonflies as spindles when weaving their clothes (hence the Swedish word for dragonfly trollslända, lit. "troll's spindle") as well as sending them to poke out the eyes of their enemies. The Norwegian name for dragonflies is "Ãyenstikker", which literally means Eye Poker and in Portugal they are sometimes called "Tira-olhos" (Eye snatcher). They are often associated with snakes, as in the Welsh name gwas-y-neidr, "adder's servant". The Southern United States term "snake doctor" refers to a folk belief that dragonflies follow snakes around and stitch them back together if they are injured. The Lithuanian word "Laum žirgis" is a composite word meaning "the Lauma's horse", while in Dutch, Aeshna mixta is called "Paardenbijter" or "horse biter". In some South American countries, dragonflies are also called matacaballo (horse killer), or caballito del diablo (devil's little horse), since they were perceived as harmful, some species being quite large for an insect.
In East Asia and among Native Americans, dragonflies have a far better reputation, one that can also be said to have positively influenced modern day views about dragonflies in most countries, in the same vein as the insect's namesake, the dragon, which has a positive image in the east, but initially had an association with evil in the west.
Dragonfly symbol on a Hopi bowl from Sikyatki archaeological site.
For some Native American tribes they represent swiftness and activity, and for the Navajo they symbolize pure water. Dragonflies are a common motif in Zuni pottery; stylized as a double-barred cross, they appear in Hopi rock art and on Pueblo necklaces. Mitchell and Lasswell, 20-26. It is said in some Native American beliefs that dragonflies are a symbol of renewal after a time of great hardship.
They also have traditional uses as medicine in Japan and China. In some parts of the world they are a food source, eaten either as adults or larvae; in Indonesia, for example, they are caught on poles made sticky with birdlime, then fried in oil as a delicacy.
Vietnamese people have a traditional way to forecast rain by seeing dragonflies: "Chuá»n chuá»n bay thấp thì mÆ°a, bay cao thì nắng, bay vừa thì râm" (Dragonflies fly at low level, it is rainy; dragonflies fly at high level, it is sunny; dragonflies fly at medium level, it is shadowy).
In some parts of the world it is considered lucky to have a dragonfly land on you, even to the point of yielding seven years of good luck.
In the United States dragonflies and damselflies are sought out as a hobby similar to birding and butterflying, known as oding, from the dragonfly's Latin species name, odonata. Oding is especially popular in Texas, where 225 out of a total of 457 known species of odonates in the world have been observed. With care, dragonflies can be handled and released by Oders, like butterflies. "Dragonflying: The new birding" by Tracy Hobson Lehmann San Antonio Express-News June 19, 2008
Images of dragonflies were common in Art Nouveau, especially in jewelry designs. They also appear in posters by modern artists such as Maeve Harris. They have also been used as a decorative motif on fabrics and home furnishings.
In Japan dragonflies symbolize "martial success," due to similarity in the sound of the word "dragonfly" and "victory" in Japanese. As a seasonal symbol, the dragonfly is associated with late summer and early autumn.
More generally, in Japan dragonflies are symbols of courage, strength, and happiness, and they often appear in art and literature, especially haiku. In ancient mythology, Japan was known as Akitsushima, which means "Land of the Dragonflies". The love for dragonflies is reflected by the fact that there are traditional names for almost all of the 200 species of dragonflies found in and around Japan. Japanese children catch large dragonflies as a game, using a hair with a small pebble tied to each end, which they throw into the air. The dragonfly mistakes the pebbles for prey, gets tangled in the hair, and is dragged to the ground by the weight. Mitchell and Lasswell, 38.
Also, in Japan, amongst the Three Great Spears of Japan is one which is called the Tonbogiri, which when translated is called 'The Dragon Fly Cutter'. The spear is an important part of Japan's imperial regalia - the spear itself was once wielded by the legendary Samurai, Honda Tadakatsu. Its name is derived from the story that the blade is so sharp, a dragonfly once landed on it and was instantly cut in half.
In drug references, several drugs have been synthesized that have molecule structures resembling Dragonflies. For instance Bromo-dragonfly and 2C-B-FLY. The names reflect the dragonfly appearance.
Image:Red_dragon_fly.jpg|Red Dragonfly from California
Image:Dragonfly_(2413057204).jpg|Dragonfly from Florida.
Image:Aust blue dragonfly02.jpg|Australian blue dragonfly
Image:Dragonfly on leaf.jpg|African dragonfly perched on a leaf
Image:Anax_withmeal.jpg|Green Darner Dragonfly feeding on honey bee
Image:Yellow-striped hunter dragonfly05.jpg|Austrogomphus guerini
Image:RubyMeadowhawkDragonfly.jpg|Flame Skimmer dragonfly, Libellula saturata
Image:Dragonfly midair.jpg|Dragonfly in midflight over a creek
Image:Dragonfly eye 3811.jpg|The compound eyes of a dragonfly
Image:Cherry-faced meadowhawk pair.jpg|Cherry-faced Meadowhawk,
Sympetrum internum
Image:Aeshna mixta6.jpg|Dragonflies mating
Image:Mating_dragon1.jpg|Mating
Image:Mating_dragon_2.jpg|Mating
Image:Aeshnid-ovipositing-800x600.jpg|Dragonfly depositing eggs
File:Darter August 2007-20.jpg|Sympetrum fonscolombii
Image:Polish_dragonfly.jpg| Dragonfly from Lower Silesia - top
Image:A Perched Dragonfly.jpg|A perched dragonfly Widow Skimmer
Image:Cali spreadwing2.jpg|California Spreadwing Archilestes californicus
Image:Pied paddy skimmer female.JPG|Indian pied paddy skimmer female
Image:Pied paddy skimmer male(Neurothemis tullia tullia).jpg| Indian pied paddy skimmer male
Image:Blue Dragonfly Resting on Water.jpg|in Brazos Bend State Park, Texas, USA
Image:Blue_dragonfly_Kamakura_Japan.jpg|Blue Dragonfly in Kamakura, Japan
Image:Sardinian_Dragonfly.JPG|Sardinian Dragonfly
Image:Darter August 2007-19.jpg|Female Red-veined darter. Lisboa, Portugal
Image:EmperorDragonfly.JPG|Emperor dragonfly in Greece
Image:Eye of dragonfly.jpg|Dragonfly, Kolkata India
Image:Dragonfly by Nabarun.JPG|Dragonfly, Kolkata India
File:Dragonfly001.jpg|Red Dragonfly (Trithemis annulata), Israel
* Elliot Pinhey
* List of British dragonflies
* Obelisk posture
* Tree of Life Odonata
*
* Identification key to dragonflies found in Ireland
* British Dragonfly Society
* Dragonflies and Damselflies (Odonata) of the United States
* PHAON (Pinhey's Heritage African Odonata Network)
* Dragonflies in folklore and art
* dragonflies and damselflies on the UF / IFAS Featured Creatures Web site
* Photos of dragonflies from Asia, Africa, America, and Russia
|
Dragonfly | null | null | data/set1/a7 | Dragonfly
Dragonfly emerging as an adult
Pair of Yellow Striped Hunters mating
A dragonfly is a type of insect belonging to the order Odonata, the suborder Epiprocta or, in the strict sense, the infraorder Anisoptera. It is characterized by large multifaceted eyes, two pairs of strong transparent wings, and an elongated body. Dragonflies are similar to damselflies, but the adults can be differentiated by the fact that the wings of most dragonflies are held away from, and perpendicular to, the body when at rest. Even though dragonflies possess 6 legs like any other insect, they are not capable of walking.
Dragonflies are valuable predators that eat mosquitoes, and other small insects like flies, bees, ants, and butterflies. They are usually found around lakes, ponds, streams and wetlands because their larvae, known as "nymphs", are aquatic.
Female dragonflies lay eggs in or near water, often on floating or emergent plants. When laying eggs, some species will submerge themselves completely in order to lay their eggs on a good surface. The eggs then hatch into nymphs. Most of a dragonfly's life is spent in the naiad (that is, nymph) form, beneath the water's surface, using extendable jaws to catch other invertebrates or even vertebrates such as tadpoles and fish. They breathe through gills in their rectum, and can rapidly propel themselves by suddenly expelling water through the anus. /ref> Some nymphs even hunt on land, an aptitude which could easily have been more common in ancient times when terrestrial predators were clumsier.
The larval stage of large dragonflies may last as long as five years. In smaller species, this stage may last between two months and three years. When the larva is ready to metamorphose into an adult, it climbs up a reed or other emergent plant. Exposure to air causes the larva to begin breathing. The skin splits at a weak spot behind the head and the adult dragonfly crawls out of its old larval skin, pumps up its wings, and flies off to feed on midges and flies. In flight the adult dragonfly can propel itself in six directions; upward, downward, forward, back, and side to side. The adult stage of larger species of dragonfly can last as long as five or six months.
Formerly, the Anisoptera were given suborder rank beside the "ancient dragonflies" (Anisozygoptera) which were believed to contain the two living species of the genus Epiophlebia and numerous fossil ones. More recently it turned out that the "anisozygopterans" form a paraphyletic assemblage of morphologically primitive relatives of the Anisoptera. Thus, the Anisoptera (true dragonflies) are reduced to an infraorder in the new suborder Epiprocta (dragonflies in general). The artificial grouping Anisozygoptera is disbanded, its members being largely recognized as extinct offshoots at various stages of dragonfly evolution. The two living species formerly placed there â the Asian relict dragonflies â form the infraorder Epiophlebioptera alongside the Anisoptera.
Unusually for a damselfly, the Sydney Flatwing hold their wings horizontal (perpendicular) to their body
Damselflies (suborder Zygoptera) are often confused with newly moulted dragonflies but once a dragonfly molts it is fully grown. There are other distinctions that set them apart: most damselflies hold their wings at rest together above the torso or held slightly open above (such as in the family Lestidae), whereas most dragonflies at rest hold their wings horizontally or occasionally slightly down and forward. Also, the back wing of the dragonfly broadens near the base, caudal to the connecting point at the body, while the back wing of the damselfly is similar to the front wing. The eyes on a damselfly are apart; in most dragonflies the eyes touch. Notable exceptions are the Petaluridae (Petaltails) and the Gomphidae (Clubtails).
Broad-bodied Chaser
A Tau Emerald (Hemicordulia tau) in mid flight
Kirby's Dropwing (Trithemis kirbyi) in Tsumeb, Namibia.
Flame Skimmer
In Europe, dragonflies have often been seen as sinister. Some English vernacular names, such as "devil's darning needle" and "ear cutter", link them with evil or injury. A Romanian folk tale says that the dragonfly was once a horse possessed by the devil. Swedish folklore holds that the devil uses dragonflies to weigh people's souls. Another Swedish legend holds that trolls use the dragonflies as spindles when weaving their clothes (hence the Swedish word for dragonfly trollslända, lit. "troll's spindle") as well as sending them to poke out the eyes of their enemies. The Norwegian name for dragonflies is "Ãyenstikker", which literally means Eye Poker and in Portugal they are sometimes called "Tira-olhos" (Eye snatcher). They are often associated with snakes, as in the Welsh name gwas-y-neidr, "adder's servant". The Southern United States term "snake doctor" refers to a folk belief that dragonflies follow snakes around and stitch them back together if they are injured. The Lithuanian word "Laum žirgis" is a composite word meaning "the Lauma's horse", while in Dutch, Aeshna mixta is called "Paardenbijter" or "horse biter". In some South American countries, dragonflies are also called matacaballo (horse killer), or caballito del diablo (devil's little horse), since they were perceived as harmful, some species being quite large for an insect.
In East Asia and among Native Americans, dragonflies have a far better reputation, one that can also be said to have positively influenced modern day views about dragonflies in most countries, in the same vein as the insect's namesake, the dragon, which has a positive image in the east, but initially had an association with evil in the west.
Dragonfly symbol on a Hopi bowl from Sikyatki archaeological site.
For some Native American tribes they represent swiftness and activity, and for the Navajo they symbolize pure water. Dragonflies are a common motif in Zuni pottery; stylized as a double-barred cross, they appear in Hopi rock art and on Pueblo necklaces. Mitchell and Lasswell, 20-26. It is said in some Native American beliefs that dragonflies are a symbol of renewal after a time of great hardship.
They also have traditional uses as medicine in Japan and China. In some parts of the world they are a food source, eaten either as adults or larvae; in Indonesia, for example, they are caught on poles made sticky with birdlime, then fried in oil as a delicacy.
Vietnamese people have a traditional way to forecast rain by seeing dragonflies: "Chuá»n chuá»n bay thấp thì mÆ°a, bay cao thì nắng, bay vừa thì râm" (Dragonflies fly at low level, it is rainy; dragonflies fly at high level, it is sunny; dragonflies fly at medium level, it is shadowy).
In some parts of the world it is considered lucky to have a dragonfly land on you, even to the point of yielding seven years of good luck.
In the United States dragonflies and damselflies are sought out as a hobby similar to birding and butterflying, known as oding, from the dragonfly's Latin species name, odonata. Oding is especially popular in Texas, where 225 out of a total of 457 known species of odonates in the world have been observed. With care, dragonflies can be handled and released by Oders, like butterflies. "Dragonflying: The new birding" by Tracy Hobson Lehmann San Antonio Express-News June 19, 2008
Images of dragonflies were common in Art Nouveau, especially in jewelry designs. They also appear in posters by modern artists such as Maeve Harris. They have also been used as a decorative motif on fabrics and home furnishings.
In Japan dragonflies symbolize "martial success," due to similarity in the sound of the word "dragonfly" and "victory" in Japanese. As a seasonal symbol, the dragonfly is associated with late summer and early autumn.
More generally, in Japan dragonflies are symbols of courage, strength, and happiness, and they often appear in art and literature, especially haiku. In ancient mythology, Japan was known as Akitsushima, which means "Land of the Dragonflies". The love for dragonflies is reflected by the fact that there are traditional names for almost all of the 200 species of dragonflies found in and around Japan. Japanese children catch large dragonflies as a game, using a hair with a small pebble tied to each end, which they throw into the air. The dragonfly mistakes the pebbles for prey, gets tangled in the hair, and is dragged to the ground by the weight. Mitchell and Lasswell, 38.
Also, in Japan, amongst the Three Great Spears of Japan is one which is called the Tonbogiri, which when translated is called 'The Dragon Fly Cutter'. The spear is an important part of Japan's imperial regalia - the spear itself was once wielded by the legendary Samurai, Honda Tadakatsu. Its name is derived from the story that the blade is so sharp, a dragonfly once landed on it and was instantly cut in half.
In drug references, several drugs have been synthesized that have molecule structures resembling Dragonflies. For instance Bromo-dragonfly and 2C-B-FLY. The names reflect the dragonfly appearance.
Image:Red_dragon_fly.jpg|Red Dragonfly from California
Image:Dragonfly_(2413057204).jpg|Dragonfly from Florida.
Image:Aust blue dragonfly02.jpg|Australian blue dragonfly
Image:Dragonfly on leaf.jpg|African dragonfly perched on a leaf
Image:Anax_withmeal.jpg|Green Darner Dragonfly feeding on honey bee
Image:Yellow-striped hunter dragonfly05.jpg|Austrogomphus guerini
Image:RubyMeadowhawkDragonfly.jpg|Flame Skimmer dragonfly, Libellula saturata
Image:Dragonfly midair.jpg|Dragonfly in midflight over a creek
Image:Dragonfly eye 3811.jpg|The compound eyes of a dragonfly
Image:Cherry-faced meadowhawk pair.jpg|Cherry-faced Meadowhawk,
Sympetrum internum
Image:Aeshna mixta6.jpg|Dragonflies mating
Image:Mating_dragon1.jpg|Mating
Image:Mating_dragon_2.jpg|Mating
Image:Aeshnid-ovipositing-800x600.jpg|Dragonfly depositing eggs
File:Darter August 2007-20.jpg|Sympetrum fonscolombii
Image:Polish_dragonfly.jpg| Dragonfly from Lower Silesia - top
Image:A Perched Dragonfly.jpg|A perched dragonfly Widow Skimmer
Image:Cali spreadwing2.jpg|California Spreadwing Archilestes californicus
Image:Pied paddy skimmer female.JPG|Indian pied paddy skimmer female
Image:Pied paddy skimmer male(Neurothemis tullia tullia).jpg| Indian pied paddy skimmer male
Image:Blue Dragonfly Resting on Water.jpg|in Brazos Bend State Park, Texas, USA
Image:Blue_dragonfly_Kamakura_Japan.jpg|Blue Dragonfly in Kamakura, Japan
Image:Sardinian_Dragonfly.JPG|Sardinian Dragonfly
Image:Darter August 2007-19.jpg|Female Red-veined darter. Lisboa, Portugal
Image:EmperorDragonfly.JPG|Emperor dragonfly in Greece
Image:Eye of dragonfly.jpg|Dragonfly, Kolkata India
Image:Dragonfly by Nabarun.JPG|Dragonfly, Kolkata India
File:Dragonfly001.jpg|Red Dragonfly (Trithemis annulata), Israel
* Elliot Pinhey
* List of British dragonflies
* Obelisk posture
* Tree of Life Odonata
*
* Identification key to dragonflies found in Ireland
* British Dragonfly Society
* Dragonflies and Damselflies (Odonata) of the United States
* PHAON (Pinhey's Heritage African Odonata Network)
* Dragonflies in folklore and art
* dragonflies and damselflies on the UF / IFAS Featured Creatures Web site
* Photos of dragonflies from Asia, Africa, America, and Russia
|
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