Chinese Language

Travelers to China should make an effort, to learn a few key phrases and words in Chinese, even limited knowledge of the language makes visiting China much easier and more rewarding. Most Chinese do not speak even rudimentary English, especially outside BeUing and Shanghai; this is gradually changing, however, as English is increasingly taught in schools-if you need the assistance of an English speaker, your best bet is usually asking teenage or twenty-something students or urban professionals. Let's Go: China gives the pinyin and Chinese characters for most Chinese establishment and place names; if your attempts to pronounce something using pinyin as a guide fail, you can always resort to pointing and gesturing to convey your meaning. See also the pronunciation guide and phrasebook in the Appendix for help.

The official language of the People's Republic is Mandarin Chinese (Putonghua; "common language"), based on the BeUing dialect. In actuality, however, there are an astonishing number of different forms of Chinese spoken in China, collectively known by the generic term Hanyu (Han language) in Mandarin. Altogether, these varieties of Chinese have more native speakers than any other language in the world. In northern China, regional linguistic variations are usually referred to as "accents," while in southern China they are called "dialects"; many linguists would say both terms are misnomers, pointing out that many different kinds of Chinese are mutually unintelligible and, in fact, separate languages. In addition to Mandarin, Cantonese (Yue), Shanghaiese (Wu), Northern Fujianese (Minbei), Southern Fujianese-Hokkien-Talwanese (Minnan), Hunanese (Xiang), Jiangxiese (Gan), and Hakka are the main spoken forms. Minority languages like Tibetan, Uighur, Korean, Thai, and Mongolian are also widespread in provinces along China's periineter. Except for the Hui and the Manchu, today all of China's non-Han ethnicities have their own spoken languages (numbering 53), and some 23 have their own written ones. In recognition of the importance of China's minority languages, examples of major non-Chinese scripts appear on Chinese paper currency.

All forms of spoken Chinese have tones. Tones refer to the different inflections placed on syllables that have the same consonant and vowel sounds and that would thus otherwise be indistinguishable from one another. The number of tones varies; Mandarin only has four, while Cantonese has a mind-boggling, tonguetwisting, ear-wrenching six or seven, depending on who you ask. Mandarin has a high tone, a rising tone, a falling-iising tone, and a falling tone; for example, shi means "teacher," she the number "ten," shi "history," and shi the verb "to be." Another distinctive characteristic of all Chinese languages is the simplicity of their grammars. There is a fixed word order (basically, subject, time, verb, object), verbs are not corrugated (person is expressed in the pronoun), and words can serve as any part of speech within their range of meaning.

Despite the multitude of spoken forms of Chinese, there is a single, non-alphabelie Chinese writing system composed of more than 40,000 characters, although only some 6000-8000 are used in everyday language. Chinese characters first appeared as logogriphs (symbols representing entire words) on Shang dynasty oracle bones some 4000 years ago. Although most characters dating to the Shang originally appeared as pictographs (a picture of a mother and child means "love"), the long evolution of the writing system has rendered the pictographic derivations of most characters unidentifiable. Ancient Chinese also adopted the practice of using the same character to represent words with similar pronunciations, which soon led to general confusion, with too many words expressed by the same written symbol. To distinguish between homonyms, an additional element was soon added to similar-sounding characters; pronounced the same in ancient times, "red" (gT) and "river" (@ I') had the radicals for "silk" and "water" respectively, appended to the same pre-existing phonetic cypher (-I-). Thus, compound characters with one component denoting meaning and a second indicating pronunciation came into being. However, spoken Chinese has diverged so far from its ancient roots that today characters sharing a phonetic radical are not necessarily pronounced the same; "red" is said "h6ng" and "river" is said "jidng," for instance. Although government standardizations of the Chinese writing system date back as far as the Qin, the most ambitious language reform project in Chinese history is actually very modern. Post-1949, the CCP's Committee for Chinese Language Reform sought to unify and simplify language by reducing the number of strokes in Chinese characters, standardizing Mandarin as the official national language, and introducing a phonetic alphabet. The first of these reforms instituted simplified characters OiAnti; written with many fewer strokes than the traditional characters (fdnti; 'o ,f*) they replaced; traditional characters persist in Hong Kong and Taiwan, as well as in the practice of calligraphy and for other particular uses in China, but simplified characters now predominate on the mainland.

The last of these reforms established the pinyin romanization system that standardized Chinese transliteration into the Latin alphabet. Today, pinyin is used abroad to teach Mandarin to language students as well as in China to teach Mandarin pronunciation to native speakers of other kinds of Chinese; it is also used in China in dictionaries and indexes, braille for the blind, finger-spelling for the deaf, and telegraphic code. Employing Latin letters to denote consonant and vowel sounds and accent marks to indicate tones, pinyin has replaced the earlier and more confusing Wade-Giles romanization as the international standard for transliterating Chinese personal and place names. Let's Go primarily uses pinyin, except when the names of historical figures were romanized according to Wade-Giles or other romanizations and became well-known using those spellings, such as Chiang Kai-shek and Sun Yat-sen.