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| Language |
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In
modern China, the principal spoken language is Modern
Standard Chinese, based on the dialects of north
China, especially Mandarin. It is distinctive by
virtue of its tones. The Chinese script goes back to
4000 or 5000 BC, is justifiably claimed, and has a
staggering 50,000 characters. |
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| Pictographs |
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Chinese script has evolved from comparatively
straight-forward, miniature representations of the object
in question, to highly stylized designs that need to be
unraveled in order to understand them. It is thought that
the original pictographs became more sophisticated as
attempts were made to convey a meaning that could not be
drawn. So, for example, the character for “to arrive at
derives from a picture of an arrow hitting a target. The
next stage was to combining two characters: thus the
characters for sun and moon placed together became the
character Ming, meaning “bright” or “brightness.” |
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| Pronunciation |
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| By the Han dynasty the written language
had evolved to the point that a modern Chinese person
would be able to read it aloud, although the meaning might
be obscure. Chinese character convey little clue to their
pronunciation, so the advantage of the script is that it
is the same throughout the country and thus permits
written communication between speakers of different
dialects. There is almost nothing in common between spoken
Cantonese, for example, thought by some to have p0reserved
Tang dynasty pronunciation, and Mandarin. The government
has promoted a simplified version of Mandarin, with some
success, as official Chinese , and in efforts to improve
literacy introduced both a common system for writing the
language with a Latin alphabet, known as pinyin, and a
system for simplifying the most commonly used characters,
now the norm in mainland China. |
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