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Sinophone
Sinophone, which means "Chinese language, Chinese-speaking", typically refers to an individual who speaks at least one Varieties of Chinese, variety of Chinese (that is, one of the Sinitic languages). Academic writers often use the term Sinophone in two definitions: either specifically "Chinese-speaking populations where it is a minority language, excluding mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan" or generally "Chinese-speaking areas, including where it is an official language". Many authors use the collocation Sinophone world or Chinese-speaking world to mean the Chinese-speaking world itself (consisting of Greater China and Singapore) or the distribution of the Chinese diaspora outside of Greater China. Mandarin Chinese is the most commonly spoken variety of the Chinese language today, with over 1 billion total speakers (approximately 12% of the world population), of which about 900 million are native speakers, making it the List of languages by number of native speakers, m ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Shu-mei Shih
Shu-mei Shih (; born April 1, 1961) is a Taiwanese-American literary theorist. She is Professor of Comparative Literature, Asian Languages and Cultures, and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles and was the president of the American Comparative Literature Association from 2021 to 2022. In 2018, she was also appointed as Honorary Chair Professor of Taiwan Languages, Literature and Culture at National Taiwan Normal University and is the current director of the UCLA-NTNU Taiwan Studies Initiative of the UCLA Asia Pacific Center. Early life and education Shih was born in 1961 in South Korea as a Republic of China citizen to Chinese immigrant parents who escaped from Shandong around 1947 during the second phase of the Chinese Civil War (1945–49). She completed her primary and secondary education in Chinese-language schools sponsored by the Republic of China government in Korea. In 1978, Shih passed her college entrance examination and went to National T ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chinese Language
Chinese ( or ) is a group of languages spoken natively by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and List of ethnic groups in China, many minority ethnic groups in China, as well as by various communities of the Chinese diaspora. Approximately 1.39 billion people, or 17% of the global population, speak a variety of Chinese as their first language. Chinese languages form the Sinitic languages, Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. The spoken varieties of Chinese are usually considered by native speakers to be dialects of a single language. However, their lack of mutual intelligibility means they are sometimes considered to be separate languages in a Language family, family. Investigation of the historical relationships among the varieties of Chinese is ongoing. Currently, most classifications posit 7 to 13 main regional groups based on phonetic developments from Middle Chinese, of which the most spoken by far is Mandarin Chinese, Mandarin with 66%, or around 800&nb ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Greater China
In ethnogeography, "Greater China" is a loosely-defined term that refers to the region sharing cultural and economic ties with the Chinese people, often used by international enterprises or organisations in unofficial usage. The notion contains a "great deal of ambiguity in its geographical coverage and politico-economic implications", because some users use it to refer to "the commercial ties among ethnic Chinese, whereas others are more interested in cultural interactions, and still others in the prospects for political reunification". The term encompass "linkages among regional Chinese communities", but usually refers to an area encompassing the People’s Republic of China (mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau) and the Republic of China (known as Taiwan), places where the majority population is culturally Chinese. The term's usage is contested; some observers in Taiwan characterise the term as harmful or a conflation of distinct polities and markets, while the Chinese government ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chinese Literature
The history of Chinese literature extends thousands of years, and begins with the earliest recorded inscriptions, court archives, building to the major works of philosophy and history written during the Axial Age. The Han dynasty, Han (202 BC220 AD) and Tang dynasty, Tang (618–907 AD) dynasties were considered golden ages of poetry, while the Song dynasty, Song (960–1279) and Yuan dynasty, Yuan (1271–1368) were notable for their lyrics (''ci''), essays, dramas, and plays. During the Ming dynasty, Ming and Qing, mature novels were written in written vernacular Chinese, an evolution from the preeminence of Literary Chinese patterned off the language of the Chinese classics. The introduction of widespread woodblock printing during the Tang and the invention of movable type printing by Bi Sheng (990–1051) during the Song rapidly spread written knowledge throughout China. Around the turn of the 20th century, the author Lu Xun (1881–1936) is considered an influential voi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Geremie Barmé
Geremie R. Barmé (born 1954) is an Australian sinologist and film-maker on modern and traditional China. He was formerly Director, Australian Centre on China in the World and Chair Professor of Chinese History at Australian National University College of Asia and the Pacific in Canberra. His films include ''The Gate of Heavenly Peace'' (1995), which depicts the spring of 1989 in China leading up to the events of June Fourth, and ''Morning Sun'', on the Cultural Revolution. His book ''An Artistic Exile: A Life of Feng Zikai'' was awarded the Joseph Levenson Book Prize for Modern China, 2004. He was editor of the ANU based e-journal ''China Heritage Quarterly''from 2005 to 2012, and is the editor of ''China Heritage''. In 2016, he founded The Wairarapa Academy for New Sinology in collaboration with sinologist John Minford. Education and career Barmé took his B.A. Asian Studies from the Australian National University, majoring in Chinese and Sanskrit, then studied at univ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mandarin Chinese
Mandarin ( ; zh, s=, t=, p=Guānhuà, l=Mandarin (bureaucrat), officials' speech) is the largest branch of the Sinitic languages. Mandarin varieties are spoken by 70 percent of all Chinese speakers over a large geographical area that stretches from Yunnan in the southwest to Xinjiang in the northwest and Heilongjiang in the northeast. Its spread is generally attributed to the greater ease of travel and communication in the North China Plain compared to the more mountainous south, combined with the relatively recent spread of Mandarin to frontier areas. Many varieties of Mandarin, such as Southwestern Mandarin, those of the Southwest (including Sichuanese dialects, Sichuanese) and the Lower Yangtze Mandarin, Lower Yangtze, are not mutually intelligible with the Beijing dialect (or are only partially intelligible). Nevertheless, Mandarin as a group is often placed first in lists of languages by number of native speakers (with nearly one billion). Because Mandarin originated in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Etymology
Etymology ( ) is the study of the origin and evolution of words—including their constituent units of sound and meaning—across time. In the 21st century a subfield within linguistics, etymology has become a more rigorously scientific study. Most directly tied to historical linguistics, philology, and semiotics, it additionally draws upon comparative semantics, morphology, pragmatics, and phonetics in order to attempt a comprehensive and chronological catalogue of all meanings and changes that a word (and its related parts) carries throughout its history. The origin of any particular word is also known as its ''etymology''. For languages with a long written history, etymologists make use of texts, particularly texts about the language itself, to gather knowledge about how words were used during earlier periods, how they developed in meaning and form, or when and how they entered the language. Etymologists also apply the methods of comparative linguistics to reconstruct in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sino-
The names of China include the many contemporary and historical designations given in various languages for the East Asian country known as in Standard Chinese, a form based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. The English name "China" was borrowed from Portuguese during the 16th century, and its direct cognates became common in the subsequent centuries in the West. It is believed to be a borrowing from Middle Persian, and some have traced it further back to the Sanskrit word () for the nation. It is also thought that the ultimate source of the name China is the Chinese word , the name of the Qin dynasty that ultimately unified China after existing as a state within the Zhou dynasty for many centuries prior. However, there are alternative suggestions for the etymology of this word. Chinese names for China, aside from , include , , and . While official notions of Chinese nationality do not make any particular reference to ethnicity, common names for the largest ethnic group ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sinology
Sinology, also referred to as China studies, is a subfield of area studies or East Asian studies involved in social sciences and humanities research on China. It is an academic discipline that focuses on the study of the Chinese civilization primarily through Chinese language, History of China, history, Chinese culture, culture, Chinese literature, literature, Chinese philosophy, philosophy, Chinese art, art, Music of China, music, Cinema of China, cinema, and Science and technology in China, science. Its origin "may be traced to the examination which Chinese scholars made of their own civilization." The academic field of sinology often refers to Western scholarship. Until the 20th century, it was historically seen as equivalent to philology concerning the Chinese classics and other Chinese literature, literature written in the Chinese language. Since then, the scope of sinology has expanded to include Chinese history and Ancient Chinese literature, palaeography, among other su ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
