Chinese Language: A Part of Great Culture and Civilization

Dr. Syed Mehboob

Senior Business and Political Analyst

http://www.thenewslark.com

email:drmehboob.thenewslark@gmail.com

Language is the most effective way to communicate, and with the help of a language, one can express their sentiments, thoughts, and ideas with others. Language is a structural system of communication that uses grammar and vocabulary to convey meaning. It’s the primary way humans communicate through spoken and signed forms and can also be expressed in writing. Language is a complex communication system that uses words and phrases to create infinite combinations of utterances. There are about 7,000 languages spoken in the world today. Estimates can vary, as distinguishing between languages and dialects can be subjective. Some languages are spoken by very few people. 90% of these 7,000 languages are spoken by less than 10,000 people. Some languages are spoken by millions of people.

According to UNESCO, the most spoken languages in the world are Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, and English.

Around 1.39 billion people, or 17% of the global population, speak a variety of Chinese as their first language, and in that term, it is the largest language of the world.

Written Chinese consists of the oracle bone inscriptions created during the Shang Dynasty, C 1250 BCE. Standard Chinese is an official language of the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan, which is an integral part of China. Chinese is also one of the four official languages of Singapore. Chinese is also one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Standard Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin and was first officially adopted in the 1930s.

The first written records appeared over 3,000 years ago during the  Shang Dynasty.As the language evolved over this period, the various local varieties became mutually unintelligible. In reaction, central governments have repeatedly sought to promulgate a unified standard.

The complex relationship between spoken and written Chinese is an example of diglossia: as spoken, Chinese varieties have evolved at different rates, while the written language used throughout China changed comparatively little, crystallizing into a prestige form known as Classical or Literary. Literature written distinctly in the Classical form began to emerge during the Spring and Autumn period. After the fall of the Northern Song dynasty and subsequent reign of the Jurchen Jin and Mongol Yuan dynasties in northern China, a common speech (now called  Old Mandarin ) developed based on the dialects of the North China Plain around the capital. The 1324 Zhengyuan Yinyunwas a dictionary that codified the rhyming conventions of the new Sangu verse form in this language.Together with the slightly later MengguZiyun, this dictionary describes a language with many of the features characteristic of modern Mandarin dialects.In 1930s, a Standard National Language was adopted. The National Language Unification Commission finally settled on the Beijing dialect in 1932. The People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949, which retained this standard but renamed it PUTONGHU, common speech. The national language is used in education, the media, and formal situations in China.

The entire Chinese character corpus since antiquity comprises well over 50,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are in use, and only about 3,000 are frequently used in Chinese media and newspapers. However, Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words. Because most Chinese words are made up of two or more characters, there are many more Chinese words than characters. A more accurate equivalent for a Chinese character is the morpheme, as characters represent the smallest grammatical units with individual meanings in the Chinese language.Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and lexicalized phrases vary greatly. The Hanyu Da Zidian, a compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries for characters, including oracle bone versions.

The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary, the 12-volume Hanyu Da Cidian, 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 Chinese language is the oldest written language in the world, with at least six thousand years of history. Chinese character inscriptions have been found in turtle shells dating back to the Shang dynasty (1766-1123 BC), proving that the written language has existed for more than 3,000 years. The Chinese written language uses single distinctive symbols, or characters, to represent each word of the vocabulary. The vast majority of characters are written versions of spoken sounds that have meaning. A large dictionary usually contains 40,000 characters. One must be able to recognize 2,000 to 3,000 characters to read a newspaper. Although the written system has been altered over time due to revolutions and political changes, the principles of the language, along with the symbols and characters, have remained the same.

Grammatically speaking English and Chinese are very different languages. There is no rule that verbs, nouns, and adjectives must agree with one another in Chinese writing. There is no such thing as singular or plural in the Chinese language. Often a number or word will be added to the sentence to account for plurality. There are no verb tenses in the Chinese writing. Additional words are used to clarify the past and future tenses. These words are usually placed at the beginning of the phase to help indicate time. In a medical setting, it is important to pay particular attention to time indicators. For example: if a provider asks, ” Have you been vomiting?” the Chinese patient may answer ” No”. Actually the patient may mean “not now, but two days ago I did.” In this case, the provider is not getting the correct information. It would be clearer to ask the patient a question with a time indicator such as “Have you vomited in the last week?”

Xiang dialectis also known as Hunanese and is spoken primarily in the Hunan Province, located in southern China.

Min dialect is spoken mostly in Fujian, Taiwan and Hainan, and parts of eastern Guangdong and the LeizhouBandao Peninsula, and in areas of Southeast Asia. During World War I, a large number of Chinese emigrated from Fujian to Taiwan.Gan dialect is used mostly by the people living in Jiangxi and the southeastern corner of Hubei. They are located at the north side of China.Wu dialectis spoken by a majority of the people living in Zhijiang and the southern areas of Jiangsu and Anhui.Kejia or Hakka dialect is spoken in the northeastern Guangdong area, southwestern Fujian, southern Jiangxi, and in areas throughout southeastern China and Southeast Asia.

Chinese is one of the oldest languages in the world. Chinese characters were first seen in 1250 BC. That’s over 3,000 years ago! They were engraved in animal bones.These “oracle bone” fragments, some of which show an ancient Chinese script, are housed at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. Photo from Xinhua. More than 1.3 billion speak Chinese. This means one in six people speak the language and 15% of the world’s population use it as their mother tongue. Not even a combination of Spanish, English, French, and German can add up to that number. Aside from being a widely spoken language, here are many more reasons to learn the Chinese language. More than 40 million Chinese people reside in other Asian countries. This means that Chinese is also used in countries such as Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam and Malaysia.Like the hieroglyphics in ancient Egypt, Chinese is also a pictographic language. It is the only existing pictographic language in the world today. Chinese is represented by images or drawings of subjects that they are meant to describe.

The Chinese language doesn’t have a segmental alphabet. You learn Chinese by studying different characters. The good thing is, Chinese can be transcribed into characters with the use of Pinyin. This takes out the burden of memorizing thousands of Chinese characters. The Chinese language is composed of more than 50,000 characters. The good thing is you only need to know about 2,500 characters to read a newspaper in China. Chinese has no articles, verb inflections, or plurals.

In Pakistan, many universities and institutes are conducting the Chinese language, including Karachi University, the Confucius Institute Karachi, Axinstitute, and the Pakistan Institute of Management also provide Chinese language courses. Confucius Institute Lahore is also providing Chinese Language courses with the co-sponsorship of Jiangxi University of Science and Technology.  Greenwich University Karachi, Baluchistan University are also among the list of those that are conducting the Chinese language. nstitute at the University of the Punjab(CIPU),Lahore