Chinese: a short portrait

Where it comes from

Chinese belongs to the Sino-Tibetan family, together with Tibetan, Burmese and hundreds of smaller languages of the Himalayas and South-East Asia. Within that family, the Chinese branch is not one language but a group: Mandarin, Cantonese, the Wu of Shanghai, the Min of Fujian and Taiwan, Hakka and others. Spoken, they can be as far apart as Spanish and Italian or further. Whether to call them dialects or languages is partly a question of definition, and Chinese speakers themselves use both words.

What has held them together is writing. A character stands for a meaning rather than a sound, so speakers of very different varieties can read the same text and pronounce it in their own way.

A short history

The oldest Chinese writing that survives is more than three thousand years old: questions to the ancestors carved on bones and turtle shells in the Shang dynasty. Many of those signs are still recognisable as the ancestors of characters in use today.

When the first emperor of Qin united the country in 221 BC, he also standardised the script. The Han dynasty that followed gave its name to the people and their writing: characters are 汉字(hànzì), “Han characters”. For about two thousand years educated people wrote in classical Chinese, a compact written language far removed from everyday speech, and it was read and written in Korea, Japan and Vietnam as well.

In the early twentieth century reformers argued that people should write the way they speak, and around 1919 the modern written language, based on spoken Mandarin, won out. In the 1950s the People’s Republic introduced simplified characters and, in 1958, pinyin.

Where it is spoken today

Mandarin is the official language of the People’s Republic of China, the main language of government and school in Taiwan, and one of the four official languages of Singapore. Chinese communities across South-East Asia, North America, Europe and Australia keep it alive — older Chinatowns often speak Cantonese, newer communities more often Mandarin. In Hong Kong and Macau, Cantonese is the everyday language, with six tones by the usual count rather than four.

Mainland and Taiwan Mandarin understand each other easily, much as British and American English do, but they differ in details. Taiwan writes traditional characters and teaches children with its own phonetic symbols, called zhuyin or bopomofo, instead of pinyin. Some words differ too: 土豆(tǔdòu) is a potato in Beijing and, in Taiwan, usually a peanut.

Inside mainland China, almost everybody now learns 普通话(pǔtōnghuà) at school, but many people also grow up speaking a local variety at home, and switch between the two without a second thought.

Characters and pinyin

A Chinese character stands for a syllable with a meaning, not for a single sound. A few began as pictures: 山(shān)a mountain人(rén)a person日(rì)the sun Most, though, are built from two parts — one that hints at the meaning and one that hints at the sound. 妈(mā), mother, is made of 女(nǚ), woman, for the meaning and 马(mǎ), horse, for the sound. Once you know the common parts, new characters stop looking like random drawings.

A large dictionary lists tens of thousands of characters, but a few thousand cover nearly everything in a newspaper. Most modern words are made of two characters: 电脑(diànnǎo), a computer, is literally “electric brain”, and 火车(huǒchē), a train, “fire vehicle”.

In the 1950s and 60s the mainland simplified a large number of characters to make them easier to learn: 马(mǎ) was once 馬(mǎ), and 门(mén), a door, was 門(mén). The mainland and Singapore use the simplified forms; Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau keep the traditional ones. This site uses simplified characters throughout.

Pinyin, introduced in 1958, writes the sounds in Latin letters, with a mark over the vowel for the tone. It is how children start reading, how place names are spelled abroad — which is why Peking became Beijing and Canton became Guangzhou — and how most people type: you write pinyin on the keyboard and pick the right character from a list.

Words it gave and words it took

English has taken a few words from Chinese: 功夫(gōngfu)kung fu风水(fēngshuǐ)feng shui叩头(kòutóu)kowtow “Tea” itself came from the south coast, where the word sounds like te; the Mandarin 茶(chá) travelled overland and became “chai” in other languages. To “lose face” is a Chinese image too.

Chinese has borrowed in its own way. Buddhism brought words from Sanskrit, among them 佛(fó), the Buddha. Around 1900 many modern terms came from Japanese, which had made them out of Chinese characters in the first place, such as 经济(jīngjì), economy. Western words are borrowed by sound, as in 咖啡(kāfēi), coffee, and 沙发(shāfā), sofa, or translated by meaning, as in 手机(shǒujī), a mobile phone, literally “hand machine”.

The neatest borrowings do both at once. Beer is 啤酒(píjiǔ): pí for the sound, jiǔ for “alcoholic drink”. And Coca-Cola is 可口(Kěkǒu)可乐(Kělè), which sounds close to the original and means, roughly, “tasty and fun”.

What surprises an English speaker

The tones come first. Every syllable has a melody, and the melody changes the word: 妈(mā) is mother, 麻(má) hemp, 马(mǎ) horse and 骂(mà) to scold. The good news is that the syllables themselves are few and simple.

The grammar surprises in the other direction: there is very little of it in the forms of words. A verb never changes — not for “I” or “she”, not for past or future. Time is said with words like “yesterday” and with small particles such as 了(le). There are no articles, no plurals on most nouns, and no gender.

Instead, Chinese has things English does not. Between a number and a noun stands a measure word: 一(yì)本(běn)书(shū), one book, uses 本(běn), the measure word for things that are bound. And everything that describes a noun comes before it, even a whole clause, so “the book I bought yesterday” is, word for word, “yesterday I bought de book”.