|
Chinese Character Meanings
Chinese character meanings () are the meanings of the morphemes the characters represent, including the original meanings, extended meanings and phonetic-loan meanings. Some characters only have single meanings, some have multiple meanings, and some share a common meaning. In modern Chinese, a character may represent a word, a morpheme in compound word, or a meaningless syllable combined with other syllables or characters to form a morpheme. A single-character word has a meaning equal to the meaning of the character. A multi-character word has a meaning that is usually derived from the meanings of the characters according to various processes of word formation. Character meanings and morphemes Morphemes are the minimal units of meaning in a language. Chinese characters are morpheme characters, and the meanings of Chinese characters come from the morphemes they record. Most Chinese characters represent only one morpheme, and in that case the meaning of the character is the meaning ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Morpheme
A morpheme is any of the smallest meaningful constituents within a linguistic expression and particularly within a word. Many words are themselves standalone morphemes, while other words contain multiple morphemes; in linguistic terminology, this is the distinction, respectively, between free and bound morphemes. The field of linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. In English, inside a word with multiple morphemes, the main morpheme that gives the word its basic meaning is called a root (such as ''cat'' inside the word ''cats''), which can be bound or free. Meanwhile, additional bound morphemes, called affixes, may be added before or after the root, like the ''-s'' in ''cats'', which indicates plurality but is always bound to a root noun and is not regarded as a word on its own. However, in some languages, including English and Latin Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European langua ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Simplified Chinese Characters
Simplified Chinese characters are one of two standardized Chinese characters, character sets widely used to write the Chinese language, with the other being traditional characters. Their mass standardization during the 20th century was part of an initiative by the People's Republic of China (PRC) to promote literacy, and their use in ordinary circumstances on the mainland has been encouraged by the Chinese government since the 1950s. They are the official forms used in mainland China, Malaysia, and Singapore, while traditional characters are officially used in Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan. Simplification of a component—either a character or a sub-component called a Radical (Chinese characters), radical—usually involves either a reduction in its total number of Chinese character strokes, strokes, or an apparent streamlining of which strokes are chosen in what places—for example, the radical used in the traditional character is simplified to to form the simplified charac ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gender Neutrality In Languages With Gendered Third-person Pronouns
A third-person pronoun is a pronoun that refers to an entity other than the speaker or listener. Some languages, such as Slavic, with gender-specific pronouns have them as part of a grammatical gender system, a system of agreement where most or all nouns have a value for this grammatical category. A few languages with gender-specific pronouns, such as English, Afrikaans, Defaka, Khmu, Malayalam, Tamil, and Yazgulyam, lack grammatical gender; in such languages, gender usually adheres to "natural gender", which is often based on biological sex. Other languages, including most Austronesian languages, lack gender distinctions in personal pronouns entirely, as well as any system of grammatical gender. In languages with pronominal gender, problems of usage may arise in contexts where a person of unspecified or unknown social gender is being referred to but commonly available pronouns are gender-specific. Different solutions to this issue have been proposed and used in various lang ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
May Fourth Movement
The May Fourth Movement was a Chinese cultural and anti-imperialist political movement which grew out of student protests in Beijing on May 4, 1919. Students gathered in front of Tiananmen to protest the Chinese government's weak response to the Treaty of Versailles decision to allow the Empire of Japan to retain territories in Shandong that had been surrendered by the German Empire after the Siege of Tsingtao in 1914. The demonstrations sparked nationwide protests and spurred an upsurge in Chinese nationalism, a shift towards political mobilization, away from cultural activities, and a move towards a populist base, away from traditional intellectual and political elites. The May Fourth demonstrations marked a turning point in a broader anti-traditional New Culture Movement (1915–1921) that sought to replace traditional Confucian values and was itself a continuation of late Qing reforms. Even after 1919, these educated "new youths" still defined their role with a tradi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chinese Grammar
The grammar of Standard Chinese shares many features with other varieties of Chinese. The language almost entirely lacks inflection; words typically have only one grammatical form. Categories such as Grammatical number, number (singular or plural) and verb Grammatical tense, tense are often not expressed by grammatical means, but there are several Chinese particles, particles that serve to express verbal grammatical aspect, aspect and, to some extent, grammatical mood, mood. The basic word order is subject–verb–object (SVO), as in English. Otherwise, Chinese is chiefly a head-final language, meaning that modifiers precede the words that they modify. In a noun phrase, for example, the head (linguistics), head noun comes last, and all modifiers, including relative clauses, come in front of it. This phenomenon, however, is more typically found in subject–object–verb languages, such as Turkish language, Turkish and Japanese language, Japanese. Chinese frequently uses serial ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chinese Character Forms
Chinese character forms () are the shapes and structures of Chinese characters. They are the physical carriers of written Chinese. Modern Chinese characters appear in the form of square blocks. There are two methods to analyze the forms of Chinese characters, ''source tracing analysis'' () and ''current status analysis'' (, ). Source tracing analysis is also called the method of character creation (). It takes the form of a character when it was created as the object of analysis. Current status (or current situation) analysis takes the current regular script standard form (, ) as the object. As an academic subject, ''modern Chinese characters'' pay more attention to current status analysis. Current status analysis studies how the writing units are combined level by level into a complete Chinese character. There are three levels of structural units of Chinese characters: ''strokes'' (), ''components'' (), and ''whole characters'' (). For example, character (character) is composed of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chinese Character Sounds
Chinese character sounds ( zh, p=hànzì zìyīn, t=漢字字音, s=汉字字音) are the pronunciations of Chinese characters. The standard sounds of Chinese characters are based on the phonetic system of the Beijing dialect. Normally a Chinese character is read with one syllable. Some Chinese characters have more than one pronunciation (polyphonic characters). Some syllables correspond to more than one character (homophonic characters). Pronunciation standards of modern Chinese characters Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation and the Old National Pronunciation The common language of China was called ''Guanhua'' (Guānhuà, 官話, 官话, Official language) during the Ming and Qing Dynasties. ''Guanhua'' had no clear pronunciation standards and basically followed the traditional readings reflected in the official rhyme books (韵書, 韵书). At the end of the 19th century, influenced by Japan's Meiji Restoration, the new term ''Mandarin'' (guóyǔ, 國語, 国语, Nati ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Modern Chinese Characters
Modern Chinese characters () are the Chinese characters used in modern languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese. Chinese characters are composed of components, which are in turn composed of strokes. The 100 most frequently used characters cover (i.e., having an accumulated frequency of) over 40% of modern Chinese texts. The 1000 most frequently used characters cover approximately 90% of the texts. There are a variety of novel aspects of modern Chinese characters, including that of orthography, phonology, and semantics, as well as matters of collation and organization and statistical analysis, computer processing, and pedagogy. Background Historical development Since maturing as a complete writing system, Chinese characters have had an uninterrupted history of development over more than 3,000 years, with stages including * Oracle bone script, * Bronze script, * Seal script, * Clerical script, and * Regular script, leading to the modern written forms, as illust ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
