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Changed Tone
Cantonese changed tones (also called pinjam; ) occur when a word's tone becomes a different tone due to a particular context or meaning. A "changed" tone is the tone of the word when it is read in a particular lexical or grammatical context, while the base (or underlying) tone is usually the tone of the word when read in citation. It is thus distinct from tone sandhi, which are automatic modifications of tone created by their phonetic environment, without regard to meaning. In its most common form, it occurs on the final syllable of either a compound word, a reduplicated word, or certain vocative examples, especially in direct address to people such as family members. There are a limited set of semantic domains where changed tone occurs, generally associated with small things, familiarity, food and disease. A changed tone usually takes the form of a non-high level, non-mid rising tone (i.e. tones 3, 4, 5, and 6 in Jyutping and Yale; see Cantonese phonology for further informa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cantonese
Cantonese ( zh, t=廣東話, s=广东话, first=t, cy=Gwóngdūng wá) is a language within the Chinese (Sinitic) branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages originating from the city of Guangzhou (historically known as Canton) and its surrounding area in Southeastern China. It is the traditional prestige variety of the Yue Chinese dialect group, which has over 80 million native speakers. While the term ''Cantonese'' specifically refers to the prestige variety, it is often used to refer to the entire Yue subgroup of Chinese, including related but largely mutually unintelligible languages and dialects such as Taishanese. Cantonese is viewed as a vital and inseparable part of the cultural identity for its native speakers across large swaths of Southeastern China, Hong Kong and Macau, as well as in overseas communities. In mainland China, it is the '' lingua franca'' of the province of Guangdong (being the majority language of the Pearl River Delta) and neighbouring areas such a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tone Sandhi
Tone sandhi is a phonological change occurring in tonal languages, in which the tones assigned to individual words or morphemes change based on the pronunciation of adjacent words or morphemes. It usually simplifies a bidirectional tone into a one-direction tone. It is a type of sandhi, or fusional change, from the Sanskrit word for "joining". Languages with tone sandhi Tone sandhi occurs to some extent in nearly all tonal languages, manifesting itself in different ways. Tonal languages, characterized by their use of pitch to affect meaning, appear all over the world, especially in the Niger-Congo language family of Africa, and the Sino-Tibetan language family of East Asia, as well as other East Asian languages such as Kra-Dai, Vietnamese, and Papuan languages. Tonal languages are also found in many Oto-Manguean and other languages of Central America, as well as in parts of North America (such as Athabaskan in British Columbia, Canada), and Europe. Many North Americ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Semantic Domain
A semantic domain is a specific place that shares a set of meanings, or a language that holds its meaning, within the given context of the place. Harriet Ottenheimer (2006), a writer in Linguistic Anthropology, defines a semantic domain as a “specific area of cultural emphasis”. In lexicography a semantic domain or semantic field is defined as "an area of meaning and the words used to talk about it ... For instance English has a domain ‘Rain’, which includes words such as rain, drizzle, downpour, raindrop, puddle.". Semantic domains are the foundational concept for initial stages of vernacular dictionary building projects. This uses techniques such as SIL International's ''Dictionary Development Process'' (DDP)RapidWords or software such aWeSayoFLEx These techniques rely on extensive lists of semantic domains that are relevant to vernacular languages. In the social sciences, the concept of semantic domains stemmed from the ideas of cognitive anthropology. The quest was orig ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tone (linguistics)
Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning – that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information and to convey emphasis, contrast and other such features in what is called intonation, but not all languages use tones to distinguish words or their inflections, analogously to consonants and vowels. Languages that have this feature are called tonal languages; the distinctive tone patterns of such a language are sometimes called tonemes, by analogy with '' phoneme''. Tonal languages are common in East and Southeast Asia, Africa, the Americas and the Pacific. Tonal languages are different from pitch-accent languages in that tonal languages can have each syllable with an independent tone whilst pitch-accent languages may have one syllable in a word or morpheme that is more prominent than the others. Mechanics Most languages use pitch as intonation to co ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cantonese Phonology
The standard pronunciation of Cantonese is that of Guangzhou, also known as Canton, the capital of Guangdong Province. Hong Kong Cantonese is related to the Guangzhou dialect, and the two diverge only slightly. Yue dialects in other parts of Guangdong and Guangxi provinces, such as Taishanese, may be considered divergent to a greater degree. Syllables A syllable generally corresponds to a word or a character. Most syllables are etymologically associated with either standard Chinese characters or colloquial Cantonese characters. Modern linguists have discovered that about 1,760 syllables are used in Cantonese and cover the pronunciations of more than 10,000 Chinese characters. Therefore, there is an average of six homophonous characters per syllable. Phonetically, a Cantonese syllable has only two parts: the sound and the tone. Sounds A Cantonese syllable usually consists of an initial (onset) and a final ( rime/rhyme). There are about 630 syllables in the Cantonese syllabary. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vocative Case
In grammar, the vocative case ( abbreviated ) is a grammatical case which is used for a noun that identifies a person (animal, object, etc.) being addressed, or occasionally for the noun modifiers (determiners, adjectives, participles, and numerals) of that noun; the comma that should be applied in such a context is referred to as a vocative comma. The usage of vocative case in the English language (and many others where commas are used) necessitates a comma to help clarify the writer's intent; failure to strictly adhere to this rule can lead to confusion over the writer's intent. A vocative expression is an expression of direct address by which the identity of the party spoken to is set forth expressly within a sentence. For example, in the sentence "I don't know, John," ''John'' is a vocative expression that indicates the party being addressed, as opposed to the sentence "I don't know John" in which "John" is the direct object of the verb "know". In simple terms, the first sent ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Taishanese
Taishanese (), alternatively romanized in Cantonese as Toishanese or Toisanese, in local dialect as Hoisanese or Hoisan-wa, is a dialect of Yue Chinese native to Taishan, Guangdong. Although it is related to Cantonese, Taishanese has little mutual intelligibility with the latter. Taishanese is also spoken throughout Sze Yup (which includes Taishan), located on the western fringe of the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong China. In the late 19th century and early 20th century, most of the Chinese emigration to North America originated from Sze Yup (or Siyi in the pinyin romanization of Standard Mandarin Chinese), the area where this variety is natively spoken. Thus, up to the mid-20th century, Taishanese was the dominant variety of the Chinese language spoken in Chinatowns in Canada and the United States. It was formerly the lingua franca of the overseas Chinese residing in the United States. Names The earliest linguistic studies refer to the dialect of Llin-nen or Xin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Floating Tone
A floating tone is a morpheme or element of a morpheme that contains neither consonants nor vowels, but only tone. It cannot be pronounced by itself but affects the tones of neighboring morphemes. An example occurs in Bambara, a Mande language of Mali that has two phonemic tones, ''high'' and ''low.'' The definite article is a floating low tone, and with a noun in isolation, it is associated with the preceding vowel and turns a high tone into a falling tone: á''river;'' â''the river''. When it occurs between two high tones, it downsteps the following tone: * ''it's not a river'' * (or ) ''it's not the river'' Also common are floating tones associated with a segmental morpheme such as an affix. For example, in Okphela, an Edoid language The Edoid languages are a few dozen languages spoken in Southern Nigeria, predominantly in the former Bendel State. The name ''Edoid'' derives from its most widely spoken member, Edo, the language of Benin City, which has 25 million nati ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Yue Chinese
Yue () is a group of similar Sinitic languages spoken in Southern China, particularly in Liangguang (the Guangdong and Guangxi provinces). The name Cantonese is often used for the whole group, but linguists prefer to reserve that name for the variety used in Guangzhou (Canton), Wuzhou (Ngchow), Hong Kong and Macau, which is the prestige dialect. Taishanese, from the coastal area of Jiangmen (Kongmoon) located southwest of Guangzhou, was the language of most of the 19th-century emigrants from Guangdong to Southeast Asia and North America. Most later migrants have been speakers of Cantonese. Yue varieties are not mutually intelligible with other varieties of Chinese. They are among the most conservative varieties with regard to the final consonants and tonal categories of Middle Chinese, but have lost several distinctions in the initial consonants and medial glides that other Chinese varieties have retained. Naming The prototypical use of the name ''Cantonese'' in Engl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Erhua
Erhua ( ); also called erization or rhotacization of syllable finals) is a phonological process that adds r-coloring or the "er" (注音：, common words: 、、) sound (transcribed in IPA as ) to syllables in spoken Mandarin Chinese. Erhuayin () is the pronunciation of "er" after rhotacization of syllable finals. It is most common in the speech varieties of North China, especially in the Beijing dialect, as a diminutive suffix for nouns, though some dialects also use it for other grammatical purposes. The Standard Chinese spoken in government-produced educational and examination recordings features erhua to some extent, as in ''nǎr'' ("where"), ''yìdiǎnr'' ("a little"), and ''hǎowánr'' ("fun"). Colloquial speech in many northern dialects has more extensive erhua than the standardized language. Southwestern Mandarin dialects such as those of Chongqing and Chengdu also have erhua. By contrast, many Southern Chinese who speak their own languages may have difficulty pronoun ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Standard Mandarin
Standard Chinese ()—in linguistics Standard Northern Mandarin or Standard Beijing Mandarin, in common speech simply Mandarin, better qualified as Standard Mandarin, Modern Standard Mandarin or Standard Mandarin Chinese—is a modern standardized form of Mandarin Chinese that was first developed during the Republican Era (1912‒1949). It is designated as the official language of mainland China and a major language in the United Nations, Singapore, and Taiwan. It is largely based on the Beijing dialect. Standard Chinese is a pluricentric language with local standards in mainland China, Taiwan and Singapore that mainly differ in their lexicon. Hong Kong written Chinese, used for formal written communication in Hong Kong and Macau, is a form of Standard Chinese that is read aloud with the Cantonese reading of characters. Like other Sinitic languages, Standard Chinese is a tonal language with topic-prominent organization and subject–verb–object (SVO) word order. C ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Beijing Dialect
The Beijing dialect (), also known as Pekingese and Beijingese, is the prestige dialect of Mandarin spoken in the urban area of Beijing, China. It is the phonological basis of Standard Chinese, the official language in the People's Republic of China and Republic of China (Taiwan) and one of the official languages in Singapore. Despite the similarity to Standard Chinese, it is characterized by some "iconic" differences, including the addition of a final rhotic -r / 儿 to some words (e.g. 哪儿). During the Ming, southern dialectal influences were also introduced into the dialect. History Status as prestige dialect As the political and cultural capital of China, Beijing has held much historical significance as a city, and its speech has held sway as a lingua franca. Being officially selected to form the basis of the phonology of Standard Mandarin has further contributed to its status as a prestige dialect, or sometimes ''the'' prestige dialect of Chinese. Other scholars ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
