1.
Zhulong (mythology)
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Zhulong or Zhuyin was a giant red draconic solar deity in Chinese mythology. It supposedly had a face and snakes body, created day and night by opening and closing its eyes. The keyword in the names Zhuyin and Zhulong is zhu 燭 torch, candle, shine upon, illuminate, one alternate Chuci name below writes zhu with the variant Chinese character zhuo 逴 or 趠 quarrel, squabble, distant, far. Zhuyin uses zhu as a verb illuminate, brighten with yin 陰 dark, shady, cloudy, overcast, Yin recurs below in the term jiuyin 九陰 ninefold darkness. Zhulong uses zhu as a torch, candle with long 龍 Chinese dragon. Compare the homophone zhulong 燭籠 lantern with long 籠 basket, cage, Zhuyin and Zhulong were first recorded in Chinese classic texts dating from the Han Dynasty and recording myths from the Zhou Dynasty. The Shanhaijing Classic of the Mountains and Seas records parallel myths about Zhuyin, the Classic of Regions Beyond the Seas, The North section describes Zhuyin 燭陰 on Mount Zhong 鍾山. The deity of Mount Bell is named Torch Shade, when this deitys eyes look out there is daylight, and when he shuts his eyes there is night. When he blows it is winter, and when he calls out it is summer and he neither drinks, nor eats, nor breathes. If this god does breathe, there are gales and his body is a thousand leagues long. Torch Shade is east of the country of Nolegcalf and he has a human face and a snakes body, and he is scarlet in colour. The god lives on the slopes of Mount Bell. Visser renders Zhuyin as Enlightener of the Darkness and translates the commentary of Guo Pu, Enlightener is a dragon, he enlightens the nine yin. The Classic of the Great Wilderness, The North section describes Zhulong 燭龍 living on Mount Zhangwei 章尾山, beyond the northwest seas, north of the River Scarlet there is Mount Brillianttail. There is a god-human here with a face and a snakes body. He has vertical eyes that are in a straight seam, when this deity closes his eyes, there is darkness. When the deity look with his eyes, there is light and he neither eats, nor sleeps, nor breathes. The wind and the rain are at his beck and call and this deity shines his torch over the ninefold darkness
2.
Semi-syllabary
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A semi-syllabary is a writing system that behaves partly as an alphabet and partly as a syllabary. The term has traditionally been extended to abugidas, but for the purposes of this article it will be restricted to scripts where some characters are alphabetic and others are syllabic. The Paleohispanic semi-syllabaries are a family of scripts developed in the Iberian Peninsula at least from the 5th century BCE – possibly from the 7th century, some researchers conclude that their origin lies solely with the Phoenician alphabet, while others believe the Greek alphabet also had a role. In the syllabic portions of the scripts, each stop-consonant sign stood for a different combination of consonant and vowel, so that the written form of ga displayed no resemblance to ge. The Tartessian or Southwestern script had a special behaviour, although the letter used to write a stop consonant was determined by the following vowel, some scholars treat Tartessian as a redundant semi-syllabary, others treat it as a redundant alphabet. One of these is zhuyin, a script devised for transcribing certain varieties of Chinese. Zhuyin includes several systems, such as Mandarin Phonetic Symbols for Mandarin Chinese, Taiwanese Phonetic Symbols for Taiwanese Hokkien and Hakka, zhuyin is not divided into consonants and vowels, but into onsets and rimes. Initial consonants and medials are alphabetic, but the nucleus and coda are combined as in syllabaries and that is, a syllable like kan is written k-an, and kwan is written k-u-an, the vowel is not written distinct from a final consonant. The modern Bamum script is essentially CV-syllabic, but doesnt have enough glyphs for all the CV syllables of the language, the rest are written by combining CV and V glyphs, making these effectively alphabetic. Correa, José Antonio, «Del alfabeto fenicio al semisilabario paleohispánico», Palaeohispanica 5, ferrer i Jané, Joan, «Novetats sobre el sistema dual de diferenciació gràfica de les oclusives sordes i sonores», Palaeohispanica 5, pp. 957–982. Rodríguez Ramos, Jesús, «La lectura de las inscripciones sudlusitano-tartesias», Faventia 22/1, Iberian Epigraphy – Jesús Rodríguez Ramos
3.
Syllable
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A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds. For example, the water is composed of two syllables, wa and ter. A syllable is typically made up of a nucleus with optional initial and final margins. Syllables are often considered the building blocks of words. They can influence the rhythm of a language, its prosody, its poetic meter, syllabic writing began several hundred years before the first letters. The earliest recorded syllables are on tablets written around 2800 BC in the Sumerian city of Ur and this shift from pictograms to syllables has been called the most important advance in the history of writing. A word that consists of a syllable is called a monosyllable. Syllable is an Anglo-Norman variation of Old French sillabe, from Latin syllaba, συλλαβή means what is taken together, referring to letters that are taken together to make a single sound. συλλαβή is a noun from the verb συλλαμβάνω syllambánō, a compound of the preposition σύν sýn with. The noun uses the root λαβ-, which appears in the aorist tense, the present tense stem λαμβάν- is formed by adding a nasal infix ⟨μ⟩ ⟨m⟩ before the β b and a suffix -αν -an at the end. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, the period ⟨. ⟩ marks syllable breaks, in practice, however, IPA transcription is typically divided into words by spaces, and often these spaces are also understood to be syllable breaks. When a word comes in the middle of a syllable. The liaison tie is used to join lexical words into phonological words. In the typical theory of structure, the general structure of a syllable consists of three segments. e. Nucleus and coda are grouped together as a rime and onset are only distinguished at the second level, the nucleus is usually the vowel in the middle of a syllable. The onset is the sound or sounds occurring before the nucleus, and they are sometimes collectively known as the shell. The term rime covers the nucleus plus coda, in the one-syllable English word cat, the nucleus is a, the onset c, the coda t, and the rime at. This syllable can be abstracted as a consonant-vowel-consonant syllable, abbreviated CVC, languages vary greatly in the restrictions on the sounds making up the onset, nucleus and coda of a syllable, according to what is termed a languages phonotactics
4.
Beiyang government
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The Beiyang government, also sometimes spelled Peiyang Government, refers to the government of the Republic of China, which was in place in the capital city Beijing from 1912 to 1928. It was internationally recognized as the legitimate Chinese government, the name derives from the Beiyang Army, which dominated its politics with the rise of Yuan Shikai, who was a general of the previous imperial Qing government. After his death the army fractured into competing factions, although the government and the state were nominally under civilian control under a constitution, the Beiyang generals were effectively in charge of it, with various factions vying for power. The government however enjoyed legitimacy abroad along with recognition, had access to the tax and customs revenue. Domestically, its legitimacy however was challenged by Sun Yat-sens Guangzhou-based Kuomintang government movement in 1917 and his successor Chiang Kai-shek defeated the Beiyang warlords during the Northern Expedition in 1926–28 and overthrew the government. The Kuomintang installed their Nationalist government in Nanjing and Chinas political order became a one-party regime, the relevant ministers had to countersign executive decrees for them to be binding. The most important ministries were army, finance, communications, the navy ministrys importance declined significantly after most of its ships defected to the Souths Constitutional Protection Movement in 1917. The communications ministry was responsible for transportation, mail. The interior ministry was responsible for policing and security while the weaker ministry of justice handled judicial affairs, the ministry of foreign affairs had a renowned diplomatic corps with figures such as Wellington Koo. Because the generals required their skills, the foreign ministry was given substantial independence. The ministrys greatest accomplishment was the 1922 return of German concessions in Shandong that were seized by Japan during World War I which greatly boosted the governments reputation, the foreign affairs ministry successfully denied the Souths government of any international recognition all the way until the Beiyang government collapsed. China was a member of the League of Nations. The assembly was bicameral with a senate that had six-year terms divided into two classes and a house of representatives with three year terms, the senators were chosen by the provincial assemblies and the representatives were chosen by an electoral college picked by a limited public franchise. The task of the assembly was to write a permanent constitution, draft legislation, approve the budget and treaties, ratify the cabinet, an independent judiciary with a supreme court was also provided. Early law codes were based on reforming the Great Qing Legal Code into something akin to German civil law, in reality, these institutions were undermined by strong personal and factional ties. Overall, the government was corrupt, incompetent, and tyrannical. Most of the revenue was spent on the forces of whichever faction that was currently in power. The short lived legislatures did have civilian cliques and debates but were subject to bribery, forced resignations and it was near bankruptcy several times where a mere million dollars could decide the fate of the bureaucracy
5.
China
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China, officially the Peoples Republic of China, is a unitary sovereign state in East Asia and the worlds most populous country, with a population of over 1.381 billion. The state is governed by the Communist Party of China and its capital is Beijing, the countrys major urban areas include Shanghai, Guangzhou, Beijing, Chongqing, Shenzhen, Tianjin and Hong Kong. China is a power and a major regional power within Asia. Chinas landscape is vast and diverse, ranging from forest steppes, the Himalaya, Karakoram, Pamir and Tian Shan mountain ranges separate China from much of South and Central Asia. The Yangtze and Yellow Rivers, the third and sixth longest in the world, respectively, Chinas coastline along the Pacific Ocean is 14,500 kilometers long and is bounded by the Bohai, Yellow, East China and South China seas. China emerged as one of the worlds earliest civilizations in the basin of the Yellow River in the North China Plain. For millennia, Chinas political system was based on hereditary monarchies known as dynasties, in 1912, the Republic of China replaced the last dynasty and ruled the Chinese mainland until 1949, when it was defeated by the communist Peoples Liberation Army in the Chinese Civil War. The Communist Party established the Peoples Republic of China in Beijing on 1 October 1949, both the ROC and PRC continue to claim to be the legitimate government of all China, though the latter has more recognition in the world and controls more territory. China had the largest economy in the world for much of the last two years, during which it has seen cycles of prosperity and decline. Since the introduction of reforms in 1978, China has become one of the worlds fastest-growing major economies. As of 2016, it is the worlds second-largest economy by nominal GDP, China is also the worlds largest exporter and second-largest importer of goods. China is a nuclear weapons state and has the worlds largest standing army. The PRC is a member of the United Nations, as it replaced the ROC as a permanent member of the U. N. Security Council in 1971. China is also a member of numerous formal and informal multilateral organizations, including the WTO, APEC, BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the BCIM, the English name China is first attested in Richard Edens 1555 translation of the 1516 journal of the Portuguese explorer Duarte Barbosa. The demonym, that is, the name for the people, Portuguese China is thought to derive from Persian Chīn, and perhaps ultimately from Sanskrit Cīna. Cīna was first used in early Hindu scripture, including the Mahābhārata, there are, however, other suggestions for the derivation of China. The official name of the state is the Peoples Republic of China. The shorter form is China Zhōngguó, from zhōng and guó and it was then applied to the area around Luoyi during the Eastern Zhou and then to Chinas Central Plain before being used as an occasional synonym for the state under the Qing
6.
Taiwan
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Taiwan, officially the Republic of China, is a state in East Asia. Neighbours include China to the west, Japan to the northeast, Taiwan is the most populous state that is not a member of the United Nations, and the one with the largest economy. The island of Taiwan, also known as Formosa, was inhabited by Taiwanese aborigines before the 17th century. After a brief rule by the Kingdom of Tungning, the island was annexed by the Qing dynasty, the Qing ceded Taiwan to Japan in 1895 after the Sino-Japanese War. While Taiwan was under Japanese rule, the Republic of China was established on the mainland in 1912 after the fall of the Qing dynasty, following the Japanese surrender to the Allies in 1945, the ROC took control of Taiwan. However, the resumption of the Chinese Civil War led to the ROCs loss of the mainland to the Communists, and the flight of the ROC government to Taiwan in 1949. As a founding member of the United Nations, the ROC continued to represent China at the United Nations until 1971, in the early 1960s, Taiwan entered a period of rapid economic growth and industrialization, creating a stable industrial economy. In the 1980s and early 1990s, it changed from a one-party military dictatorship dominated by the Kuomintang to a multi-party democracy with universal suffrage, Taiwan is the 22nd-largest economy in the world, and its high-tech industry plays a key role in the global economy. It is ranked highly in terms of freedom of the press, health care, public education, economic freedom, the PRC has consistently claimed sovereignty over Taiwan and asserted the ROC is no longer in legitimate existence. Under its One-China Policy the PRC refused diplomatic relations with any country that recognizes the ROC, the PRC has threatened the use of military force in response to any formal declaration of independence by Taiwan or if PRC leaders decide that peaceful unification is no longer possible. There are various names for the island of Taiwan in use today, the former name Formosa dates from 1542, when Portuguese sailors sighted the main island of Taiwan and named it Ilha Formosa, which means beautiful island. The name Formosa eventually replaced all others in European literature and was in use in English in the early 20th century. This name was adopted into the Chinese vernacular as the name of the sandbar. The modern word Taiwan is derived from this usage, which is seen in forms in Chinese historical records. Use of the current Chinese name was formalized as early as 1684 with the establishment of Taiwan Prefecture, through its rapid development, the entire Formosan mainland eventually became known as Taiwan. The official name of the state is the Republic of China and it was a member of the United Nations representing China until 1971, when it lost its seat to the Peoples Republic of China. Over subsequent decades, the Republic of China has become known as Taiwan. In some contexts, especially ones from the ROC government
7.
Oracle bone script
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The vast majority were found at the Yinxu site. They record pyromantic divinations of the last nine kings of the Shang dynasty, beginning with Wu Ding, whose accession is dated by different scholars at 1250 BCE or 1200 BCE. After the Shang were overthrown by the Zhou dynasty in c.1046 BCE, divining with milfoil became more common and it is also the oldest known member and ancestor of the Chinese family of scripts, preceding the bronzeware script. The term oracle bone was first coined by the American missionary Frank H. Chalfant in his 1906 book Early Chinese Writing, because turtle shells as well as bones were used, the oracle bone script is also sometimes called shell and bone script. As the majority of oracle bones bearing writing date to the late Shang dynasty and it is certain that Shang-lineage writing underwent a period of development before the Anyang oracle bone script, because of its mature nature. However, no significant quantity of clearly identifiable writing from before or during the early to middle Shang cultural period has been discovered, the oracle bone script of the late Shang appears pictographic, as does its contemporary, the Shang writing on bronzes. The earliest oracle bone script appears even more so than examples from late in the period, additionally, the writing of characters in vertical columns, from top to bottom, is for the most part carried over from the bamboo books to oracle bone inscriptions. The vertical columns of text in Chinese writing are traditionally ordered from right to left and this level of maturity clearly implies an earlier period of development of at least several hundred years. Compare, for instance, the third and fourth graphs in the row below, without careful research to compare these to later forms, one would probably not know that these represented 豕 shĭ swine and 犬 quǎn dog respectively. By the late Shang oracle bone script, the graphs had already evolved into a variety of mostly non-pictographic functions, phonetic loan graphs, semantic-phonetic compounds, and associative compounds were already common. Although it was a fully functional writing system, the oracle bone script was not fully standardized, a graph when inverted horizontally generally refers to the same word, and additional components are sometimes present without changing the meaning. These irregularities persisted until the standardization of the script in the Qin dynasty. Of the thousands of characters found from all the fragments so far. One reason for this is that components of certain oracle bone script characters may differ in later script forms, such differences may be accounted for by character simplification and/or by later generations misunderstanding the original graph, which had evolved beyond recognition. Another reason is that some characters exist only in oracle bone script, in such cases, context - when available - may be used to determine the possible meaning of the character. One good example is shown in the fragment below, labeled oracle bone script for Spring, the top left character in this image has no known modern Chinese counterpart. One of the better known characters however is shown directly beneath it looking like an isosceles triangle with a line cutting through the upper portion. This is the oracle bone script character for 王 wáng, the numbers of oracle bones with inscriptions contemporaneous with the end of Shang and the beginning of Zhou is relatively few in number compared with the entire corpus of Shang inscriptions
8.
Seal script
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Seal script is an ancient style of writing Chinese characters that was common throughout the latter half of the 1st millennium BC. It evolved organically out of the Zhou dynasty script, arising in the Warring State of Qin, there are two uses of the word seal script, the Large or Great Seal script and the lesser or Small Seal Script, the latter is also called simply seal script. The Large Seal script was originally a later, vague Han dynasty reference to writing of the Qin system similar to and it has also been used to refer to Western Zhou forms or even oracle bones as well. There were several different variants of seal script which developed in each kingdom independently during the warring state period and spring, the birds and worms script was used in the Kingdoms of Wu, Chu, and Yue. It was found on several artifacts including the Spear of Fuchai, on one side of the blade of Goujian, eight characters were written in an ancient script. The script was found to be the one called 鳥蟲文 birds and worms characters, initial analysis of the text deciphered six of the characters, 越王 and 自作用劍. As a southern state, Chu was close to the Wu-Yue influences, Chu produced broad bronze swords that were similar to Wuyue swords, but not as intricate. Chu also used the Birds and Worms style, which was borrowed by the Wu, the script of the Qin system had evolved organically from the Zhou script starting in the Spring and Autumn period. Beginning around the Warring States period, it became vertically elongated with a regular appearance and this was the period of maturation of Small Seal script, also called simply seal script. Through Chinese commentaries, it is known that Li Si compiled Cangjiepian and their form is characterized by being less rectangular and more squarish. The first known character dictionary was the 3rd century BC Erya, collated and bibliographed by Liu Xiang and his son Liu Xin, not long after, however, the Shuowen Jiezi, the lifework of Xu Shen, was written. Its 9,353 entries reproduce the standardized small-seal script variant for each entry, entries are categorized under 540 section headers. It has been anticipated that the Small Seal script will some day be encoded in Unicode, codepoints U+34000 to U+368FF have been tentatively allocated. Old Texts Phags-pa Chén Zhāoróng Research on the Qín Lineage of Writing, academia Sinica, Institute of History and Philology Monograph. Qin Yun Song, Big Seal Script Banner Script translation Richard Sears on seal script
9.
Clerical script
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Due to its high legibility to modern readers, it is still used for artistic flavor in a variety of functional applications such as headlines, signboards, and advertisements. This legibility stems from the rectilinear structure, a feature shared with modern regular script. Clerical script is popularly but mistakenly thought to have developed or been invented in the early Han dynasty from the seal script. Another traditional account is that it was invented by government scribes, in particular involved in the justice. Furthermore, rather than being established by government scribes, it has argued that clerical script was already in popular use. The popularity of this vulgar writing grew as the use of writing became more widespread. The Qín bamboo script is an example of this transition, having evolved from vulgar Qín writing. The etymology of the Chinese name for the script lìshū is uncertain, during Warring States, proto-clerical script emerged in casual, informal usage. During the Qin dynasty it appears to have also used in some scribal capacity. Thus, the evolution from clerical script to standard script was not a step as commonly supposed. Translation of 文字學概論 by Mattos and Norman, Early China Special Monograph Series No.4. Berkeley, The Society for the Study of Early China and the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley
10.
Taiwanese Phonetic Symbols
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Taiwanese Phonetic Symbols is a system of phonetic notation for the transcription of Taiwanese languages, especially Taiwanese Hokkien. The system is designed by Professor Chu Chao-hsiang, a member of National Languages Committee in Taiwan, the system is derived from Mandarin Phonetic Symbols by creating additional symbols for the sounds that do not appear in Mandarin phonology. There are 49 symbols used in standard Taiwanese Hokkien, of these 49 symbols,26 are from the original Mandarin Phonetic Symbols, while 23 are additional, created for Taiwanese languages. The symbols in blue do not exist in Mandarin phonology, four voiceless consonants may be written in lower case for an unreleased coda, ㄅ, ㄉ, ㄍ, ㄏ. Some extra symbols are used in other Taiwanese dialects, ㄬ, ㄛ, ㄝ, ㆨ, the Mandarin Phonetic Symbols were added to the Unicode Standard in October 1991 with the release of version 1.0. The Unicode block for Mandarin Phonetic Symbols is U+3100, the extended phonetic symbols were added to the Unicode Standard in September 1999 with the release of version 3.0. The Unicode block for the symbols is U+31A0. However, there are errors in the extended symbols Taiwanese Hokkien Written Hokkien Pe̍h-ōe-jī Taiwanese Romanization System Taiwanese kana Bopomofo 教育部方音符號系統 華、台語注音符號簡說總表 華、台語注音符號總表
11.
Simplified Chinese characters
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Simplified Chinese characters are standardized Chinese characters prescribed in the Table of General Standard Chinese Characters for use in mainland China. Along with traditional Chinese characters, it is one of the two character sets of the contemporary Chinese written language. The government of the Peoples Republic of China in mainland China has promoted them for use in printing since the 1950s and 1960s in an attempt to increase literacy and they are officially used in the Peoples Republic of China and Singapore. Traditional Chinese characters are used in Hong Kong, Macau. Overseas Chinese communities generally tend to use traditional characters, Simplified Chinese characters may be referred to by their official name above or colloquially. Strictly, the latter refers to simplifications of character structure or body, character forms that have existed for thousands of years alongside regular, Simplified character forms were created by decreasing the number of strokes and simplifying the forms of a sizable proportion of traditional Chinese characters. Some simplifications were based on popular cursive forms embodying graphic or phonetic simplifications of the traditional forms, some characters were simplified by applying regular rules, for example, by replacing all occurrences of a certain component with a simplified version of the component. Variant characters with the pronunciation and identical meaning were reduced to a single standardized character. Finally, many characters were left untouched by simplification, and are identical between the traditional and simplified Chinese orthographies. Some simplified characters are very dissimilar to and unpredictably different from traditional characters and this often leads opponents not well-versed in the method of simplification to conclude that the overall process of character simplification is also arbitrary. In reality, the methods and rules of simplification are few, on the other hand, proponents of simplification often flaunt a few choice simplified characters as ingenious inventions, when in fact these have existed for hundreds of years as ancient variants. However, the Chinese government never officially dropped its goal of further simplification in the future, in August 2009, the PRC began collecting public comments for a modified list of simplified characters. The new Table of General Standard Chinese Characters consisting of 8,105 characters was promulgated by the State Council of the Peoples Republic of China on June 5,2013, cursive written text almost always includes character simplification. Simplified forms used in print have always existed, they date back to as early as the Qin dynasty, One of the earliest proponents of character simplification was Lubi Kui, who proposed in 1909 that simplified characters should be used in education. In the years following the May Fourth Movement in 1919, many anti-imperialist Chinese intellectuals sought ways to modernise China, Traditional culture and values such as Confucianism were challenged. Soon, people in the Movement started to cite the traditional Chinese writing system as an obstacle in modernising China and it was suggested that the Chinese writing system should be either simplified or completely abolished. Fu Sinian, a leader of the May Fourth Movement, called Chinese characters the writing of ox-demons, lu Xun, a renowned Chinese author in the 20th century, stated that, If Chinese characters are not destroyed, then China will die. Recent commentators have claimed that Chinese characters were blamed for the problems in China during that time
12.
Kanji
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Kanji, or kanji, are the adopted logographic Chinese characters that are used in the modern Japanese writing system along with hiragana and katakana. The Japanese term kanji for the Chinese characters literally means Han characters and is using the same characters as the Chinese word hànzì. Chinese characters first came to Japan on official seals, letters, swords, coins, mirrors, the earliest known instance of such an import was the King of Na gold seal given by Emperor Guangwu of Han to a Yamato emissary in 57 AD. Chinese coins from the first century AD have been found in Yayoi-period archaeological sites, however, the Japanese of that era probably had no comprehension of the script, and would remain illiterate until the fifth century AD. The earliest Japanese documents were written by bilingual Chinese or Korean officials employed at the Yamato court. For example, the correspondence from King Bu of Wa to Emperor Shun of Liu Song in 478 has been praised for its skillful use of allusion. Later, groups of people called fuhito were organized under the monarch to read, during the reign of Empress Suiko, the Yamato court began sending full-scale diplomatic missions to China, which resulted in a large increase in Chinese literacy at the Japanese court. The Japanese language had no form at the time Chinese characters were introduced. Chinese characters also came to be used to write Japanese words, around 650 CE, a writing system called manyōgana evolved that used a number of Chinese characters for their sound, rather than for their meaning. Manyōgana written in cursive style evolved into hiragana, or onna-de, that is, ladies hand, major works of Heian-era literature by women were written in hiragana. Katakana emerged via a path, monastery students simplified manyōgana to a single constituent element. Thus the two writing systems, hiragana and katakana, referred to collectively as kana, are descended from kanji. Katakana are mostly used for representing onomatopoeia, non-Japanese loanwords, the names of plants and animals, and for emphasis on certain words. In 1946, following World War II and under the Allied Occupation of Japan and this was done with the goal of facilitating learning for children and simplifying kanji use in literature and periodicals. The number of characters in circulation was reduced, and formal lists of characters to be learned during each grade of school were established, some characters were given simplified glyphs, called shinjitai. Many variant forms of characters and obscure alternatives for common characters were officially discouraged and these are simply guidelines, so many characters outside these standards are still widely known and commonly used, these are known as hyōgaiji. The kyōiku kanji are 1,006 characters that Japanese children learn in elementary school, originally the list only contained 881 characters. This was expanded to 996 characters in 1977 and it was not until 1982 the list was expanded to its current size
13.
Hanja
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Hanja is the Korean name for Chinese characters. Borrowed from Chinese and incorporated into the Korean language with Korean pronunciation, hanja-mal or hanja-eo refers to words that can be written with hanja, and hanmun refers to Classical Chinese writing, although hanja is sometimes used loosely to encompass these other concepts. Because hanja never underwent major reform, they are almost entirely identical to traditional Chinese, only a small number of hanja characters are modified or unique to Korean. By contrast, many of the Chinese characters currently in use in Japan and Mainland China have been simplified, and contain fewer strokes than the corresponding hanja characters. Today, a working knowledge of Chinese characters is still important for anyone who wishes to study older texts. Learning a certain number of hanja is very helpful for understanding the etymology of Sino-Korean words, hanja are not used to write native Korean words, which are always rendered in hangul, and even words of Chinese origin—hanja-eo —are written with the hangul alphabet most of the time. A major motivation for the introduction of Chinese characters into Korea was the spread of Buddhism, the major Chinese text that introduced hanja to Koreans, however, was not a religious text but the Chinese text, Cheonjamun. One way of adapting hanja to write Korean in such systems was to represent native Korean grammatical particles, for example, Gugyeol uses the characters 爲尼 to transcribe the Korean word hăni, in modern Korean, that means does, and so. However, in Chinese, the characters are read as the expression wéi ní. This is an example of Gugyeol words where the radical is read in Korean for its meaning. Hanja was the means of writing Korean until King Sejong the Great promoted the invention of hangul in the 15th century. However, even after the invention of hangul, most Korean scholars continued to write in hanmun and it was not until the 20th century that hangul truly replaced hanja. Officially, hanja has not been used in North Korea since June 1949, additionally, many words borrowed from Chinese have been replaced in the North with native Korean words. However, there are a number of Chinese-borrowed words in widespread usage in the North. The replacement has been less total in South Korea where, although usage has declined over time, some remains in common usage in some contexts. Each hanja is composed of one of 214 radicals plus in most cases one or more additional elements, the vast majority of hanja use the additional elements to indicate the sound of the character, but a few hanja are purely pictographic, and some were formed in other ways. This dual meaning-sound reading of a character is called eumhun, the word or words used to denote the meaning are often—though hardly always—words of native Korean origin, and are sometimes archaic words no longer commonly used. South Korean primary schools abandoned the teaching of hanja in 1971 and it is taught in separate courses in South Korean high schools, separately from the normal Korean-language curriculum
14.
Khitan scripts
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There were two scripts, the large script and the small script. These were functionally independent and appear to have been used simultaneously, the Khitan scripts continued to be in use to some extent by the Jurchen people for several decades after the fall of the Liao dynasty until the Jurchens fully switched to a script of their own. Examples of the scripts appeared most often on epitaphs and monuments, many scholars recognize that the Khitan scripts have not been fully deciphered and that more research and discoveries would be necessary for a proficient understanding of them. The Khitan scripts are part of the Chinese family of scripts, knowledge of the Khitan language, which was written by the Khitan script, is quite limited as well. Although there are clues to its origins, which might point in different directions. Abaoji of the Yelü clan, founder of the Khitan, or Liao Dynasty, “Large script”, or “big characters, as it was referred to in some Chinese sources, was established to keep the record of the new Khitan state. The Khitan script was based on the idea of the Chinese script, the Khitan large script was considered to be relatively simple. The large script characters were equally spaced, in vertical columns. Although large script mostly uses logograms, it is possible that ideograms and syllabograms are used for grammatical functions, the large script has a few similarities to Chinese, with several words taken directly with or without modifications from the Chinese. Most large script characters, however, cannot be related to any Chinese characters. The meaning of most of them remains unknown, but that of a few of them has been established by analyzing dates in Khitan inscriptions, the Memorial for Yelü Yanning is one of the earliest inscriptions in Khitan large script. The Khitan small script was invented in about 924 or 925 CE by a scholar named Yelü Diela and he drew his inspiration from “the Uyghur language and script, ” which he was shown by a visiting Uyghur ambassador at the Khitan court. For this reason, Khitan small script was thought to be a daughter script of the Uyghur alphabet. Using a smaller number of symbols than large script, small script was less complex, unlike Hanguls jamo, a Khitan phonetic symbol could represent not just a single vowel or consonant, but a CV or VC pair as well. Each block could incorporate two to seven such phonetic element characters, written in pairs within the block, with the first half of the pair on the left. If there were an odd number of characters in a block, although there is some speculation, it appears there are no characters that both scripts share. Periodically, epitaphs written using small script will be using the large script method of linearity. Although small script had some similarities to Chinese, Khitan characters were used to record Chinese words
15.
Universal Character Set characters
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The Unicode Consortium and the International Organisation for Standardisation collaborate on the Universal Character Set. The UCS is a standard to map characters used in natural language, mathematics, music. By creating this mapping, the UCS enables computer software vendors to interoperate, because it is a universal map, it can be used to represent multiple languages at the same time. UCS has a capacity to encode over 1 million characters. Each UCS character is represented by a code point, which is an integer between 0 and 1,114,111, used to represent each character within the internal logic of text processing software. The number of encoded characters is made up as follows,128,019 graphical characters 218 special purpose characters for control, ISO maintains the basic mapping of characters from character name to code point. Often the terms character and code point will get used interchangeably, however, when a distinction is made, a code point refers to the integer of the character, what one might think of as its address. Input methods can be through keyboard or a character palette. The UCS can be divided in various ways, such as by plane, block, character category, the x must be lowercase in XML documents. The nnnn or hhhh may be any number of digits and may include leading zeros, the hhhh may mix uppercase and lowercase, though uppercase is the usual style. In contrast, an entity reference refers to a character by the name of an entity which has the desired character as its replacement text. The entity must either be predefined or explicitly declared in a Document Type Definition, the format is the same as for any entity reference, &name, where name is the case-sensitive name of the entity. Unicode and ISO divide the set of points into 17 planes. As of 2016 ISO and the Unicode Consortium has only allocated characters, the others remain empty and reserved for future use. Most characters are assigned to the first plane, the Basic Multilingual Plane. This is to ease the transition for legacy software since the Basic Multilingual Plane is addressable with just two octets. The characters outside the first plane usually have very specialized or rare use. Each plane corresponds with the value of the one or two hexadecimal digits preceding the four ones, hence U+24321 is in Plane 2, U+4321 is in Plane 0
16.
International Phonetic Alphabet
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The International Phonetic Alphabet is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin alphabet. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association as a representation of the sounds of spoken language. The IPA is used by lexicographers, foreign students and teachers, linguists, speech-language pathologists, singers, actors, constructed language creators. The IPA is designed to represent only those qualities of speech that are part of language, phones, phonemes, intonation. IPA symbols are composed of one or more elements of two types, letters and diacritics. For example, the sound of the English letter ⟨t⟩ may be transcribed in IPA with a letter, or with a letter plus diacritics. Often, slashes are used to signal broad or phonemic transcription, thus, /t/ is less specific than, occasionally letters or diacritics are added, removed, or modified by the International Phonetic Association. As of the most recent change in 2005, there are 107 letters,52 diacritics and these are shown in the current IPA chart, posted below in this article and at the website of the IPA. In 1886, a group of French and British language teachers, led by the French linguist Paul Passy, for example, the sound was originally represented with the letter ⟨c⟩ in English, but with the digraph ⟨ch⟩ in French. However, in 1888, the alphabet was revised so as to be uniform across languages, the idea of making the IPA was first suggested by Otto Jespersen in a letter to Paul Passy. It was developed by Alexander John Ellis, Henry Sweet, Daniel Jones, since its creation, the IPA has undergone a number of revisions. After major revisions and expansions in 1900 and 1932, the IPA remained unchanged until the International Phonetic Association Kiel Convention in 1989, a minor revision took place in 1993 with the addition of four letters for mid central vowels and the removal of letters for voiceless implosives. The alphabet was last revised in May 2005 with the addition of a letter for a labiodental flap, apart from the addition and removal of symbols, changes to the IPA have consisted largely in renaming symbols and categories and in modifying typefaces. Extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for speech pathology were created in 1990, the general principle of the IPA is to provide one letter for each distinctive sound, although this practice is not followed if the sound itself is complex. There are no letters that have context-dependent sound values, as do hard, finally, the IPA does not usually have separate letters for two sounds if no known language makes a distinction between them, a property known as selectiveness. These are organized into a chart, the chart displayed here is the chart as posted at the website of the IPA. The letters chosen for the IPA are meant to harmonize with the Latin alphabet, for this reason, most letters are either Latin or Greek, or modifications thereof. Some letters are neither, for example, the letter denoting the glottal stop, ⟨ʔ⟩, has the form of a question mark
17.
Specials (Unicode block)
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Specials is a short Unicode block allocated at the very end of the Basic Multilingual Plane, at U+FFF0–FFFF. Of these 16 codepoints, five are assigned as of Unicode 9, U+FFFD � REPLACEMENT CHARACTER used to replace an unknown, unrecognized or unrepresentable character U+FFFE <noncharacter-FFFE> not a character. FFFE and FFFF are not unassigned in the sense. They can be used to guess a texts encoding scheme, since any text containing these is by not a correctly encoded Unicode text. The replacement character � is a found in the Unicode standard at codepoint U+FFFD in the Specials table. It is used to indicate problems when a system is unable to render a stream of data to a correct symbol and it is usually seen when the data is invalid and does not match any character, Consider a text file containing the German word für in the ISO-8859-1 encoding. This file is now opened with an editor that assumes the input is UTF-8. The first and last byte are valid UTF-8 encodings of ASCII, therefore, a text editor could replace this byte with the replacement character symbol to produce a valid string of Unicode code points. The whole string now displays like this, f�r, a poorly implemented text editor might save the replacement in UTF-8 form, the text file data will then look like this, 0x66 0xEF 0xBF 0xBD 0x72, which will be displayed in ISO-8859-1 as f�r. Since the replacement is the same for all errors this makes it impossible to recover the original character, a better design is to preserve the original bytes, including the error, and only convert to the replacement when displaying the text. This will allow the text editor to save the original byte sequence and it has become increasingly common for software to interpret invalid UTF-8 by guessing the bytes are in another byte-based encoding such as ISO-8859-1. This allows correct display of both valid and invalid UTF-8 pasted together, Unicode control characters UTF-8 Mojibake Unicodes Specials table Decodeunicodes entry for the replacement character
18.
Unicode
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Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the worlds writing systems. As of June 2016, the most recent version is Unicode 9.0, the standard is maintained by the Unicode Consortium. Unicodes success at unifying character sets has led to its widespread, the standard has been implemented in many recent technologies, including modern operating systems, XML, Java, and the. NET Framework. Unicode can be implemented by different character encodings, the most commonly used encodings are UTF-8, UTF-16 and the now-obsolete UCS-2. UTF-8 uses one byte for any ASCII character, all of which have the same values in both UTF-8 and ASCII encoding, and up to four bytes for other characters. UCS-2 uses a 16-bit code unit for each character but cannot encode every character in the current Unicode standard, UTF-16 extends UCS-2, using one 16-bit unit for the characters that were representable in UCS-2 and two 16-bit units to handle each of the additional characters. Many traditional character encodings share a common problem in that they allow bilingual computer processing, Unicode, in intent, encodes the underlying characters—graphemes and grapheme-like units—rather than the variant glyphs for such characters. In the case of Chinese characters, this leads to controversies over distinguishing the underlying character from its variant glyphs. In text processing, Unicode takes the role of providing a unique code point—a number, in other words, Unicode represents a character in an abstract way and leaves the visual rendering to other software, such as a web browser or word processor. This simple aim becomes complicated, however, because of concessions made by Unicodes designers in the hope of encouraging a more rapid adoption of Unicode, the first 256 code points were made identical to the content of ISO-8859-1 so as to make it trivial to convert existing western text. For other examples, see duplicate characters in Unicode and he explained that he name Unicode is intended to suggest a unique, unified, universal encoding. In this document, entitled Unicode 88, Becker outlined a 16-bit character model, Unicode could be roughly described as wide-body ASCII that has been stretched to 16 bits to encompass the characters of all the worlds living languages. In a properly engineered design,16 bits per character are more than sufficient for this purpose, Unicode aims in the first instance at the characters published in modern text, whose number is undoubtedly far below 214 =16,384. By the end of 1990, most of the work on mapping existing character encoding standards had been completed, the Unicode Consortium was incorporated in California on January 3,1991, and in October 1991, the first volume of the Unicode standard was published. The second volume, covering Han ideographs, was published in June 1992, in 1996, a surrogate character mechanism was implemented in Unicode 2.0, so that Unicode was no longer restricted to 16 bits. The Microsoft TrueType specification version 1.0 from 1992 used the name Apple Unicode instead of Unicode for the Platform ID in the naming table, Unicode defines a codespace of 1,114,112 code points in the range 0hex to 10FFFFhex. Normally a Unicode code point is referred to by writing U+ followed by its hexadecimal number, for code points in the Basic Multilingual Plane, four digits are used, for code points outside the BMP, five or six digits are used, as required. Code points in Planes 1 through 16 are accessed as surrogate pairs in UTF-16, within each plane, characters are allocated within named blocks of related characters
19.
Ruby character
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Typically called just ruby or rubi, such annotations are used as pronunciation guides for characters that are likely to be unfamiliar to the reader. Here is an example of Japanese ruby characters for Tokyo, Most furigana are written with the hiragana syllabary, alternatively, sometimes foreign words are printed with furigana implying the meaning, and vice versa. Textbooks usually write on-readings with katakana and kun-readings with hiragana, here is an example of the Chinese ruby characters for Beijing, In Taiwan, the syllabary used for Chinese ruby characters is Zhuyin fuhao, in mainland China pinyin is used. Typically, unlike the example shown above, zhuyin is used with a traditional writing. In mainland China, horizontal script is used and ruby characters are written above the Chinese characters, books with phonetic guides are popular with children and foreigners learning Chinese. Here is an example of the Korean ruby characters for Korea, Ruby characters can be quite common on signs in certain parts of South Korea. Also, ruby may be used to show the meaning, rather than pronunciation and this is generally used with spoken dialogue and applies only to Japanese publications. The most common form of ruby is called furigana or yomigana and is found in Japanese instructional books, newspapers, comics and books for children. In Japanese, certain characters, such as the sokuon that indicates a pause before the consonant it precedes, are written at about half the size of normal characters. When written as ruby, such characters are usually the size as other ruby characters. Advancements in technology now allow certain characters to render accurately, in Chinese, the practice of providing phonetic cues via ruby is rare, but does occur systematically in grade-school level text books or dictionaries. The Chinese have no name for this practice, as it is not as widespread as in Japan. In Taiwan, it is known as zhuyin, from the name of the system employed for this purpose there. It is virtually always used vertically, because publications are normally in a vertical format, where zhuyin is not used, other Chinese phonetic systems like pinyin are employed. Sometimes interlinear glosses are visually similar to ruby, appearing above or below the text in smaller type. However, this is a practice used for helping students of a foreign language by giving glosses for the words in a text. Ruby annotation can also be used in handwriting, in British typography, ruby was originally the name for type with a height of 5.5 points, which printers used for interlinear annotations in printed documents. In Japanese, rather referring to a font size, the word became the name for typeset furigana
20.
Traditional Chinese characters
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Traditional Chinese characters are Chinese characters in any character set that does not contain newly created characters or character substitutions performed after 1946. They are most commonly the characters in the character sets of Taiwan, of Hong Kong. Currently, a number of overseas Chinese online newspapers allow users to switch between both sets. In contrast, simplified Chinese characters are used in mainland China, Singapore, the debate on traditional and simplified Chinese characters has been a long-running issue among Chinese communities. Although simplified characters are taught and endorsed by the government of Mainland China, Traditional characters are used informally in regions in China primarily in handwriting and also used for inscriptions and religious text. They are often retained in logos or graphics to evoke yesteryear, nonetheless, the vast majority of media and communications in China is dominated by simplified characters. Taiwan has never adopted Simplified Chinese characters since it is ruled by the Republic of China, the use of simplified characters in official documents is even prohibited by the government in Taiwan. Simplified characters are not well understood in general, although some stroke simplifications that have incorporated into Simplified Chinese are in common use in handwriting. For example, while the name of Taiwan is written as 臺灣, similarly, in Hong Kong and Macau, Traditional Chinese has been the legal written form since colonial times. In recent years, because of the influx of mainland Chinese tourists, today, even government websites use simplified Chinese, as they answer to the Beijing government. This has led to concerns by residents to protect their local heritage. In Southeast Asia, the Chinese Filipino community continues to be one of the most conservative regarding simplification, while major public universities are teaching simplified characters, many well-established Chinese schools still use traditional characters. Publications like the Chinese Commercial News, World News, and United Daily News still use traditional characters, on the other hand, the Philippine Chinese Daily uses simplified. Aside from local newspapers, magazines from Hong Kong, such as the Yazhou Zhoukan, are found in some bookstores. In case of film or television subtitles on DVD, the Chinese dub that is used in Philippines is the same as the one used in Taiwan and this is because the DVDs belongs to DVD Region Code 3. Hence, most of the subtitles are in Traditional Characters, overseas Chinese in the United States have long used traditional characters. A major influx of Chinese immigrants to the United States occurred during the half of the 19th century. Therefore, the majority of Chinese language signage in the United States, including street signs, Traditional Chinese characters are called several different names within the Chinese-speaking world
21.
Standard Chinese
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Its pronunciation is based on the Beijing dialect, its vocabulary on the Mandarin dialects, and its grammar is based on written vernacular Chinese. Like other varieties of Chinese, Standard Chinese is a language with topic-prominent organization. It has more initial consonants but fewer vowels, final consonants, Standard Chinese is an analytic language, though with many compound words. There exist two standardised forms of the language, namely Putonghua in Mainland China and Guoyu in Taiwan, aside from a number of differences in pronunciation and vocabulary, Putonghua is written using simplified Chinese characters, while Guoyu is written using traditional Chinese characters. There are many characters that are identical between the two systems, in English, the governments of China and Hong Kong use Putonghua, Putonghua Chinese, Mandarin Chinese, and Mandarin, while those of Taiwan, Singapore, and Malaysia, use Mandarin. The name Putonghua also has a long, albeit unofficial, history and it was used as early as 1906 in writings by Zhu Wenxiong to differentiate a modern, standard Chinese from classical Chinese and other varieties of Chinese. For some linguists of the early 20th century, the Putonghua, or common tongue/speech, was different from the Guoyu. The former was a prestige variety, while the latter was the legal standard. Based on common understandings of the time, the two were, in fact, different, Guoyu was understood as formal vernacular Chinese, which is close to classical Chinese. By contrast, Putonghua was called the speech of the modern man. The use of the term Putonghua by left-leaning intellectuals such as Qu Qiubai, prior to this, the government used both terms interchangeably. In Taiwan, Guoyu continues to be the term for Standard Chinese. The term Putonghua, on the contrary, implies nothing more than the notion of a lingua franca, Huayu, or language of the Chinese nation, originally simply meant Chinese language, and was used in overseas communities to contrast Chinese with foreign languages. Over time, the desire to standardise the variety of Chinese spoken in these communities led to the adoption of the name Huayu to refer to Mandarin and it also incorporates the notion that Mandarin is usually not the national or common language of the areas in which overseas Chinese live. The term Mandarin is a translation of Guānhuà, which referred to the lingua franca of the late Chinese empire, in English, Mandarin may refer to the standard language, the dialect group as a whole, or to historic forms such as the late Imperial lingua franca. The name Modern Standard Mandarin is sometimes used by linguists who wish to distinguish the current state of the language from other northern. Chinese has long had considerable variation, hence prestige dialects have always existed. Confucius, for example, used yǎyán rather than colloquial regional dialects, rime books, which were written since the Northern and Southern dynasties, may also have reflected one or more systems of standard pronunciation during those times
22.
Pinyin
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Pinyin, or Hànyǔ Pīnyīn, is the official romanization system for Standard Chinese in mainland China, Malaysia, Singapore, and Taiwan. It is often used to teach Standard Chinese, which is written using Chinese characters. The system includes four diacritics denoting tones, Pinyin without tone marks is used to spell Chinese names and words in languages written with the Latin alphabet, and also in certain computer input methods to enter Chinese characters. The pinyin system was developed in the 1950s by many linguists, including Zhou Youguang and it was published by the Chinese government in 1958 and revised several times. The International Organization for Standardization adopted pinyin as a standard in 1982. The system was adopted as the standard in Taiwan in 2009. The word Hànyǔ means the language of the Han people. In 1605, the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci published Xizi Qiji in Beijing and this was the first book to use the Roman alphabet to write the Chinese language. Twenty years later, another Jesuit in China, Nicolas Trigault, neither book had much immediate impact on the way in which Chinese thought about their writing system, and the romanizations they described were intended more for Westerners than for the Chinese. One of the earliest Chinese thinkers to relate Western alphabets to Chinese was late Ming to early Qing Dynasty scholar-official, the first late Qing reformer to propose that China adopt a system of spelling was Song Shu. A student of the great scholars Yu Yue and Zhang Taiyan, Song had been to Japan and observed the effect of the kana syllabaries. This galvanized him into activity on a number of fronts, one of the most important being reform of the script, while Song did not himself actually create a system for spelling Sinitic languages, his discussion proved fertile and led to a proliferation of schemes for phonetic scripts. The Wade–Giles system was produced by Thomas Wade in 1859, and it was popular and used in English-language publications outside China until 1979. This Sin Wenz or New Writing was much more sophisticated than earlier alphabets. In 1940, several members attended a Border Region Sin Wenz Society convention. Mao Zedong and Zhu De, head of the army, both contributed their calligraphy for the masthead of the Sin Wenz Societys new journal. Outside the CCP, other prominent supporters included Sun Yat-sens son, Sun Fo, Cai Yuanpei, the countrys most prestigious educator, Tao Xingzhi, an educational reformer. Over thirty journals soon appeared written in Sin Wenz, plus large numbers of translations, biographies, some contemporary Chinese literature, and a spectrum of textbooks
23.
Cantonese
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Cantonese, or Standard Cantonese, is a variety of Chinese spoken in the city of Guangzhou in southeastern China. It is the prestige variety of Yue, one of the major subdivisions of Chinese. In mainland China, it is the lingua franca of the province of Guangdong and some neighbouring areas such as Guangxi. In Hong Kong and Macau, Cantonese serves as one of their official languages and it is also spoken amongst overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia and throughout the Western World. When Cantonese and the closely related Yuehai dialects are classified together, Cantonese is viewed as vital part of the cultural identity for its native speakers across large swathes of southeastern China, Hong Kong and Macau. Although Cantonese shares some vocabulary with Mandarin, the two varieties are mutually unintelligible because of differences in pronunciation, grammar and lexicon, sentence structure, in particular the placement of verbs, sometimes differs between the two varieties. This results in the situation in which a Cantonese and a Mandarin text may look similar, in English, the term Cantonese is ambiguous. Cantonese proper is the variety native to the city of Canton and this narrow sense may be specified as Canton language or Guangzhou language in English. However, Cantonese may also refer to the branch of Cantonese that contains Cantonese proper as well as Taishanese and Gaoyang. In this article, Cantonese is used for Cantonese proper, historically, speakers called this variety Canton speech or Guangzhou speech, although this term is now seldom used outside mainland China. In Guangdong province, people call it provincial capital speech or plain speech. In Hong Kong and Macau, as well as among overseas Chinese communities, in mainland China, the term Guangdong speech is also increasingly being used among both native and non-native speakers. Due to its status as a prestige dialect among all the dialects of the Cantonese or Yue branch of Chinese varieties, the official languages of Hong Kong are Chinese and English, as defined in the Hong Kong Basic Law. The Chinese language has different varieties, of which Cantonese is one. Given the traditional predominance of Cantonese within Hong Kong, it is the de facto official spoken form of the Chinese language used in the Hong Kong Government and all courts and it is also used as the medium of instruction in schools, alongside English. A similar situation exists in neighboring Macau, where Chinese is an official language along with Portuguese. As in Hong Kong, Cantonese is the predominant spoken variety of Chinese used in life and is thus the official form of Chinese used in the government. The variant spoken in Hong Kong and Macau is known as Hong Kong Cantonese, Cantonese first developed around the port city of Guangzhou in the Pearl River Delta region of southeastern China
24.
Jyutping
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Jyutping is a romanisation system for Cantonese developed by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong, an academic group, in 1993. Its formal name is The Linguistic Society of Hong Kong Cantonese Romanisation Scheme, the LSHK promotes the use of this romanisation system. The name Jyutping is a contraction consisting of the first Chinese characters of the terms Jyut6jyu5, only the finals m and ng can be used as standalone nasal syllables. ^ ^ ^ Referring to the pronunciation of these words. There are nine tones in six distinct tone contours in Cantonese, however, as three of the nine are entering tones, which only appear in syllables ending with p, t, and k, they do not have separate tone numbers in Jyutping. Jyutping and the Yale Romanisation of Cantonese represent Cantonese pronunciations with the letters in, The initials, b, p, m, f, d, t, n, l, g, k, ng, h, s, gw, kw. The vowel, aa, a, e, i, o, u, the coda, i, u, m, n, ng, p, t, k. But they differ in the following, The vowels eo and oe represent /ɵ/ and /œː/ respectively in Jyutping, the initial j represents /j/ in Jyutping whereas y is used instead in Yale. The initial z represents /ts/ in Jyutping whereas j is used instead in Yale, the initial c represents /tsʰ/ in Jyutping whereas ch is used instead in Yale. In Jyutping, if no consonant precedes the vowel yu, then the initial j is appended before the vowel, in Yale, the corresponding initial y is never appended before yu under any circumstances. Jyutping defines three finals not in Yale, eu /ɛːu/, em /ɛːm/, and ep /ɛːp/ and these three finals are used in colloquial Cantonese words, such as deu6, lem2, and gep6. To represent tones, only tone numbers are used in Jyutping whereas Yale traditionally uses tone marks together with the letter h. Jyutping and Cantonese Pinyin represent Cantonese pronunciations with the letters in, The initials, b, p, m, f, d, t, n, l, g, k, ng, h, s, gw, kw. The vowel, aa, a, e, i, o, u, the coda, i, u, m, n, ng, p, t, k. But they have differences, The vowel oe represents both /ɵ/ and /œː/ in Cantonese Pinyin whereas eo and oe represent /ɵ/ and /œː/ respectively in Jyutping. The vowel y represents /y/ in Cantonese Pinyin whereas both yu and i are used in Jyutping, the initial dz represents /ts/ in Cantonese Pinyin whereas z is used instead in Jyutping. The initial ts represents /tsʰ/ in Cantonese Pinyin whereas c is used instead in Jyutping. To represent tones, the numbers 1 to 9 are usually used in Cantonese Pinyin, however, only the numbers 1 to 6 are used in Jyutping
25.
Southern Min
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Southern Min, or Minnan, is a branch of Min Chinese spoken in certain parts of China including southern Fujian, eastern Guangdong, Hainan, and southern Zhejiang, and in Taiwan. The Min Nan dialects are spoken by descendants of emigrants from these areas in diaspora, most notably the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia. In common parlance, Southern Min usually refers to Hokkien, including Amoy and Taiwanese Hokkien, the Southern Min dialect group also includes Teochew, though Teochew has limited mutual intelligibility with Hokkien. Hainanese is not mutually intellgible with other Southern Min and is considered a separate branch of Min. Southern Min is not mutually intelligible with Eastern Min, Pu-Xian Min, any other Min branch, Hakka, Cantonese, Shanghainese or Mandarin. Southern Min dialects are spoken in the part of Fujian. The variant spoken in Leizhou, Guangdong as well as Hainan is Hainanese and is not mutually intelligible with other Southern Min or Teochew, Hainanese is classified in some schemes as part of Southern Min and in other schemes as separate. Puxian Min was originally based on the Quanzhou dialect, but over time became heavily influenced by Eastern Min, eventually losing intellegility with Minnan. A forms of Southern Min spoken in Taiwan, collectively known as Taiwanese, Southern Min is a first language for most of the Hoklo people, the main ethnicity of Taiwan. The correspondence between language and ethnicity is not absolute, as some Hoklo have very limited proficiency in Southern Min while some non-Hoklo speak Southern Min fluently, there are many Southern Min speakers also among Overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia. Many ethnic Chinese immigrants to the region were Hoklo from southern Fujian and brought the language to what is now Burma, Indonesia and present-day Malaysia and Singapore. In general, Southern Min from southern Fujian is known as Hokkien, Hokkienese, many Southeast Asian ethnic Chinese also originated in the Chaoshan region of Guangdong and speak Teochew language, the variant of Southern Min from that region. Southern Min-speakers form the majority of Chinese in Singapore, with the largest group being Hokkien, despite the similarities the two groups are rarely seen as part of the same Minnan Chinese subgroups. The variants of Southern Min spoken in Zhejiang province are most akin to that spoken in Quanzhou, the variants spoken in Taiwan are similar to the three Fujian variants and are collectively known as Taiwanese. Those Southern Min variants that are known as Hokkien in Southeast Asia also originate from these variants. The variants of Southern Min in the Chaoshan region of eastern Guangdong province are known as Teochew or Chaozhou. Teochew is of importance in the Southeast Asian Chinese diaspora, particularly in Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Sumatra. The Philippines variant is mostly from the Quanzhou area as most of their forefathers are from the aforementioned area, the Southern Min language variant spoken around Shanwei and Haifeng differs markedly from Teochew and may represent a later migration from Zhangzhou
26.
Hokkien
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Hokkien /hɒˈkiɛn/ is a group of Southern Min dialects spoken throughout Southeastern China, Taiwan, Southeast Asia and by other overseas Chinese. Hokkien originated in southern Fujian, the Min-speaking province and it is closely related to Teochew, though there is limited mutual intelligibility, and is somewhat more distantly related to Hainanese and Leizhou dialect. Besides Hokkien, there are also other Min and Hakka dialects in Fujian province, the term Hokkien is etymologically derived from the Southern Min pronunciation for Fujian, the province from which the language hails. The variety is known by other terms such as the more general Min Nan or Southern Min. Fujianese and Fukienese are also used, although they are somewhat imprecise, the term Hokkien is not usually used in Mainland China or Taiwan. Conversely Hokkien is the name in Southeast Asia in both English, Chinese or other languages. Speakers of Hokkien, particularly those in Southeast Asia, typically refer to Hokkien as a dialect, people in Taiwan most often refer to Hokkien as the Taiwanese language, with Minnan and Holo also being used and 福建話 is not as common. Hokkien originated in the area of Fujian province, an important center for trade and migration. The major pole of Hokkien varieties outside of Fujian is Taiwan, the Taiwanese version mostly have origins with the Quanzhou and Zhangzhou variants, but since then, the Amoy dialect is becoming the modern prestige standard for the language. There are many Hokkien speakers among overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia as well as in the United States, many ethnic Han Chinese emigrants to the region were Hoklo from southern Fujian, and brought the language to what is now Burma, Indonesia and present day Malaysia and Singapore. Many of the Hokkien dialects of this region are similar to Taiwanese and Amoynese. Hokkien is reportedly the native language of up to 80% of the Chinese people in the Philippines, Hokkien speakers form the largest group of overseas Chinese in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Philippines. Southern and part of western Fujian is home to four principal Hokkien dialects, Chinchew, Amoy, Chiangchew and Longyan, originating from the cities of Quanzhou, Xiamen, Zhangzhou and Longyan. As Xiamen is the city of southern Fujian, Amoy is considered the most important, or even the prestige dialect. It is a hybrid of the Quanzhou and Zhangzhou dialects, same as Amoy dialect, the varieties of Hokkien spoken in Taiwan are hybrids of the Quanzhou and Zhangzhou dialects, and are collectively known as Taiwanese Hokkien or just Taiwanese. Used by a majority of the population, it bears much importance from a socio-political perspective, the varieties of Hokkien in Southeast Asia originate from these dialects. The Singaporeans, Southern Malaysians and people in Indonesias Riau and surrounding islands variant is from the Quanzhou area and they speak a distinct form of Quanzhou Hokkien called Southern Peninsular Malaysian Hokkien. Among ethnic Chinese inhabitants of Penang, and other states in Northern Malaysia and Medan, with areas in North Sumatra, Indonesia
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Taiwanese Romanization System
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The Taiwanese Romanization System is a transcription system for Taiwanese Hokkien. It is derived from Pe̍h-ōe-jī and since 2006 has been promoted by Taiwans Ministry of Education. It is nearly identical to Taiwanese Language Phonetic Alphabet Romanization for Hakka apart from using ts tsh j instead of c ch j for the fricatives /ts tsʰ dz/, Taiwanese Romanization System uses 16 basic Latin letters,7 digraphs and a trigraph. In addition, it uses 6 diacritics to represent tones, nn is only used after a vowel to express nasalization, so it has no capital letter. Palatalization occurs when J, S, Ts, Tsh followed by i, so Ji, Si, Tsi, of the 10 unused basic Latin letters, R is sometimes used to express dialectal vowels, while the others are only used in loanwords. O pronounced ㄜ in general dialect in Kaohsiung and Tainan, ㄛ in Taipei, -nn forms the nasal vowels There is also syllabic m and ng. ing pronounced, ik pronounced. A hyphen links elements of a compound word, a double hyphen indicates that the following syllable has a neutral tone and therefore that the preceding syllable does not undergo tone sandhi. 臺灣閩南語羅馬拼音及其發音學習網, Taiwanese Romanization System learning site by Ministry of Education, Taiwan
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Romanization of Chinese
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The Romanization of Chinese is the use of the Latin alphabet to write Chinese. Chinese uses a script, and its characters do not represent phonemes directly. There have been many systems using Roman characters to represent Chinese throughout history, linguist Daniel Kane recalls, It used to be said that sinologists had to be like musicians, who might compose in one key and readily transcribe into other keys. However, Hanyu Pinyin has become the standard since 1982. Other well-known systems include Wade-Giles and Yale Romanization, there are many uses for Chinese Romanization. Most broadly, it used to provide a way for foreigners who are not skilled at recognizing Chinese script a means to read. Apart from this role, it serves as a useful tool for foreign learners of Chinese by indicating the pronunciation of unfamiliar characters. It can also be helpful for clarifying pronunciation—Chinese pronunciation is an issue for some speakers of mutually unintelligible Chinese varieties who do not speak Mandarin fluently. Standard keyboards such as QWERTY are designed for the Latin alphabet, Chinese dictionaries have complex and competing sorting rules for characters, and romanization systems can simplify the problem by listing the characters by their Latin form alphabetically. Romanization systems for other Chinese varieties are indicated in the box on the right side of this page. This understanding is reflected in the precise Fanqie system, and it is the principle of all modern systems. Aside from syllable structure, it is necessary to indicate tones in Chinese romanization. Tones distinguish the definition of all morphemes in Chinese, and the definition of a word is ambiguous in the absence of tones. Certain systems such as Wade-Giles indicate tone with a following the syllable, ma1, ma2, ma3. Others, like Pinyin, indicate the tone diacritics, mā, má, mǎ. Making the actual pronunciation conventions of spoken Chinese intelligible to non-Chinese-speaking students, making the syntactic structure of Chinese intelligible to those only familiar with Latin grammar. Allowing instant communication in colloquial Chinese between Chinese and non-Chinese speakers via a phrase-book, identifying the specific pronunciation of a character within a specific context. Such a system has to work vertically down the page, right-to-left, reciting a Chinese text in Mandarin for some literate speakers of another mutually unintelligible Chinese varieties, such as Cantonese, who do not speak Mandarin fluently
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Mandarin Chinese
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Mandarin is a group of related varieties of Chinese spoken across most of northern and southwestern China. The group includes the Beijing dialect, the basis of Standard Mandarin or Standard Chinese, because most Mandarin dialects are found in the north, the group is sometimes referred to as the Northern dialects. Many local Mandarin varieties are not mutually intelligible, nevertheless, Mandarin is often placed first in any list of languages by number of native speakers. Most Mandarin varieties have four tones, the final stops of Middle Chinese have disappeared in most of these varieties, but some have merged them as a final glottal stop. Many Mandarin varieties, including the Beijing dialect, retain retroflex initial consonants, the capital has been within the Mandarin area for most of the last millennium, making these dialects very influential. Some form of Mandarin has served as a lingua franca since the 14th century. In the early 20th century, a form based on the Beijing dialect. Standard Chinese is the language of the Peoples Republic of China and Taiwan. It is also one of the most frequently used varieties of Chinese among Chinese diaspora communities internationally, the English word mandarin originally meant an official of the Ming and Qing empires. Since their native varieties were often mutually unintelligible, these officials communicated using a Koiné language based on various northern varieties, when Jesuit missionaries learned this standard language in the 16th century, they called it Mandarin, from its Chinese name Guānhuà, or language of the officials. In everyday English, Mandarin refers to Standard Chinese, which is called simply Chinese. Standard Chinese is based on the particular Mandarin dialect spoken in Beijing, with some lexical and it is the official spoken language of the Peoples Republic of China, the official language of the Republic of China, and one of the four official languages of the Republic of Singapore. It also functions as the language of instruction in Mainland China and it is one of the six official languages of the United Nations, under the name Chinese. Chinese speakers refer to the standard language as Pǔtōnghuà in Mainland China, Guóyǔ in Taiwan, or Huáyǔ in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Philippines. Linguists use the term Mandarin to refer to the group of dialects spoken in northern and southwestern China. The alternative term Běifānghuà, or Northern dialects, is used less and less among Chinese linguists, by extension, the term Old Mandarin or Early Mandarin is used by linguists to refer to the northern dialects recorded in materials from the Yuan dynasty. Native speakers who are not academic linguists may not recognize that the variants they speak are classified in linguistics as members of Mandarin in a broader sense, the hundreds of modern local varieties of Chinese developed from regional variants of Old Chinese and Middle Chinese. Traditionally, seven groups of dialects have been recognized
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Gwoyeu Romatzyh
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Gwoyeu Romatzyh, abbreviated GR, is a system for writing Mandarin Chinese in the Latin alphabet. The system was conceived by Yuen Ren Chao and developed by a group of linguists including Chao, Chao himself later published influential works in linguistics using GR. In addition a number of other textbooks and dictionaries in GR were published in Hong Kong. GR is the better known of the two systems which indicate the four tones of Mandarin by varying the spelling of syllables. These tones are as fundamental to the Chinese language as vowels are to English, other systems indicate the tones with either diacritics or numbers. GR spells the same four tones ai, air, ae and these spellings, which follow specific rules, indicate the tones while retaining the pronunciation of the syllable ai. Chao claimed that, because GR embeds the tone of each syllable in its spelling, one study however, found the opposite to be true in a study of GR. In 1928 China adopted GR as the official romanization system. GR was used to indicate pronunciations in dictionaries of the National Language and its proponents hoped one day to establish it as a writing system for a reformed Chinese script. But despite support from a number of trained linguists in China and overseas, GR met with public indifference. Another obstacle preventing its widespread adoption was its basis on the Beijing dialect. Eventually GR lost ground to Pinyin and other later romanization systems, however, its influence is still evident, as several of the principles introduced by its creators have been used in romanization systems that followed it. Its pattern of tone spelling was retained in the spelling of the Chinese province of Shaanxi. Tonal spelling, Gwoyeu Romatzyhs most distinctive feature, was first suggested to Y. R, by 1922 Chao had already established the main principles of GR. In 1928 GR was officially adopted by the government, GR was intended to be used alongside the existing Juhin phonetic symbols, hence the alternative name for GR, Second Pattern of the National Alphabet. Both systems were used to indicate the revised standard of pronunciation in the new official Vocabulary of National Pronunciation for Everyday Use of 1932, the designers of GR had greater ambitions, their aim was complete reform of the script, using GR as a practical system of writing. In the 1930s two shortlived attempts were made to teach GR to railway workers and peasants in Hénán and Shāndōng provinces, support for GR, being confined to a small number of trained linguists and Sinologists, was distinguished more for its quality than its quantity. During this period GR faced increasing hostility because of the complexity of its tonal spelling, conversely, Sinologist Bernhard Karlgren criticised GR for its lack of phonetic rigour
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Latinxua Sin Wenz
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Latinxua Sin Wenz is a little-used romanization system for Mandarin Chinese. It was usually written without tones under the assumption that the proper tones could be understood from context, Latinxua is historically notable as being the first romanization system used in place of Chinese characters by native Chinese speakers. It was originally developed by groups of Chinese and Russian scholars in the Soviet Union and used by Chinese immigrants there until the majority of them left the country. Later, it was revived for some time in Northern China where it was used in over 300 publications before its usage was ended by the Peoples Republic of China. S. S. R, could be made literate, facilitating their further education. They decided to use the Latin alphabet because they thought that it would serve their purpose better than Cyrillic, unlike Gwoyeu Romatzyh, with its complex method of indicating tones, Latinxua Sin Wenz system does not indicate tones at all. The eminent Moscow-based Chinese scholar Qu Qiubai and the Russian linguist V. S, kolokolov devised a prototype romanization system in 1929. In 1931 a coordinated effort between the Soviet sinologists V. M, dragunov and A. G. Shrprintsin, and the Moscow-based Chinese scholars Qu Qiubai, Wu Yuzhang, Lin Boqu, Xiao San, Wang Xiangbao, and Xu Teli established the Latinxua Sin Wenz system. In November 1949, the railways in Chinas north-east adopted the Latinxua Sin Wenz system for all their telecommunications, for a time, the system was very important in spreading literacy in Northern China, and more than 300 publications totaling half a million issues appeared in Latinxua Sin Wenz. However, In 1944 the latinization movement was officially curtailed in the areas on the pretext that there were insufficient trained cadres capable of teaching the system. Sin Wenz was designed so that every dialect had its own form of the alphabet, the letters below represent only one of the thirteen possible schemes present, the below form being that for Northern Mandarin. Much of Sin Wenz is similar to Pinyin in its orthography, however, palatal affricates are written with the same letters as velar stops, so Beijing is written as Beiging in Sin Wenz. Other differences include the usage of x for both the sounds and, so the characters 畫 and 下 are written as xua and xia. Key, Sin Wenz differs from Pinyin Sin Wenz exhibits some interchangeability symbol for alveolo-palatal between g, k, x z, c, s. For example, 新 can be written as xin or sin in Sin Wenz and this is because Sin Wenz generally distinguishes sequences from, which distinction is lost in Standard Mandarin and not made by Pinyin. Key, Sin Wenz differs from Pinyin 1e and ye is written as o, for example, gogo, xyosheng 2The word 有 is written as iou. Other words with the sound is written as iu. As in pinyin, spacing in Sin Wenz is based on whole words, except for u, others syllables starting with u is always written with a w replacing the u. The syllable u is only preceded by a w when it occurs in the middle of a word, for syllables starting with i, the i is replaced by a j only in the middle of a word
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Chinese postal romanization
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Postal romanization was a system of transliterating Chinese place names developed by the Imperial Post Office in the early 1900s. The system was in use until the 1980s. For major cities and other places that already had widely accepted European names, with regard to other place names, the post office revised policy several times. Spellings given could reflect the pronunciation, Nanjing pronunciation, or Beijing pronunciation. At a conference held in 1906 in Shanghai, the post office selected a system of romanization developed by Herbert Giles called Nanking syllabary, although Beijing dialect had served as a national standard since the mid-19th century, the system adopted was based on Nanjing pronunciation. The system corresponded to traditional romanizations that were adopted in the 18th century when Nanjing dialect was considered standard. French-appointed administrators ran the post office at time, and they sought a less anglicized alternative to Wade-Giles. An imperial edict issued in 1896 renamed the Maritime Customs Post, reorganized this agency as a postal service. In 1899, Robert Hart, as general of posts. Although Hart asked for transliterations according to the pronunciation, most postmasters were reluctant to play lexicographer. The spellings that they submitted generally followed a system created by Thomas Francis Wade, the system had been developed in 1859 and was based on the Beijing pronunciation. It became the method of romanizing Chinese after Herbert Giles published a dictionary, using the system. The post office published a draft romanization map in 1903, disappointed with the Wade-based map, Hart made another attempt to promote localism in 1905. He directed the postmasters to submit romanizations not as directed by Wade, local missionaries could be consulted, Hart suggested. However, Wades system reflected pronunciation in most areas served by the post office, a more serious disadvantage was that the French viewed Wades system as anglophone. The top position in the post office was held by Postal Secretary Théophile Piry, until 1911, the post office remained part of the Maritime Customs Service. As customs inspector general, Hart was Pirys boss, but French backing effectively gave Piry a postal fiefdom, Piry responded to Harts moves by organising an Imperial Postal Joint-Session Conference in Shanghai in the spring of 1906. As it was a joint postal and telegraphic conference, it allowed Piry to go over Harts head, the conference resolved that existing spellings would be retained for all names already transliterated
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Sichuanese dialects
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In addition, because Sichuanese is the lingua franca in Sichuan, Chongqing and part of Tibet, it is also used by many Tibetan, Yi, Qiang and other ethnic minority groups as a second language. Sichuanese is more similar to Standard Chinese than southeastern Chinese varieties but is quite divergent in phonology, vocabulary. The Minjiang dialect is difficult for speakers of other Mandarin dialects to understand. Sichuanese can be divided into a number of dialects, Chengdu–Chongqing dialect, Minjiang dialect, Renshou–Fushun dialect. The influence of Sichuanese has resulted in a form of Standard Chinese that is often confused with real Sichuanese. Sichuanese, spoken by about 120 million people, would rank 10th among languages by number of speakers if counted as a separate language. Sichuanese is mainly spoken in and around the Sichuan Basin, which includes almost all of Sichuan Province and Chongqing Municipality except for some Tibetan and it is also spoken in the border regions of Sichuans neighboring provinces, northern Yunnan and Guizhou, southern Shaanxi and western Hubei. Thus, these dialects are referred as Old Sichuanese, as the preserve many characteristics of Bashu. The Chengdu-Chongqing dialect, named after the two largest cities in greater Sichuan, are spoken in an area mainly in North. It is often referred as New Sichuanese because it exhibits characteristics of the Bashu language. Like many of the provinces in China, Sichuan was fully sinicized by the end of the Tang Dynasty. The modern variety of Chinese spoken in the region formed relatively recently, in the thirteenth century, the population of Sichuan dropped precipitously, suspected to be due in part to a series of plagues and Mongol invasions. The population did not recover until it was replenished by subsequent migrations from Hubei, as well as Xiang, Gan and these varieties largely supplanted the earlier varieties of Chinese in Sichuan, known as Ba-Shu Chinese or Old Sichuanese. There are five phonemic tones in Sichuanese, dark tone, light level tone, rising tone, departing tone. According to Phonology of Sichuan dialect, among all the 150 Sichuanese-speaking cities and counties,48 keep the tone while the other 102 have only 4 tones. Particularly, in some sub-dialects of Minjiang dialect, the tone has developed into two different tones, a colloquial tone and a literary tone. The tone contours of the Sichuanese dialects are highly and quite different from those of Beijing Mandarin, in the areas which keep the entering tone, the five tones of Sichuanese are nearly identical to the values of 5 of the 6 tones of the indigenous Southern Qiang language. Initials are initial consonants of possible syllables, there are 21 initials in the Chengdu dialect of Sichuanese
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Sichuanese Pinyin
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Sichuanese Pinyin, is a romanization system specifically designed for the Chengdu dialect of Sichuanese. It is mostly used in selected Sichuanese dictionaries, such as the Sichuan Dialect Dictionary, Sichuan Dialects Vocabulary Explanation, Sichuanese Pinyin is based on Hanyu Pinyin, the only Chinese romanization system officially instructed within the Peoples Republic of China, for convenience amongst users. The number is placed on the top corner of every syllable, where 1 stands for the first tone,2 stands for the second tone. The rules of Sichuanese Pinyin are based on those of Hanyu Pinyin, the following sample text is a selection of Sichuanese idioms in Sichuanese Pinyin, Scuanxua Ladinxua Xin Wenz and Hanyu Pinyin, for comparative purposes
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Wu Chinese
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Wu is a group of linguistically similar and historically related varieties of Chinese primarily spoken in the whole city of Shanghai, Zhejiang province, southern Jiangsu province and bordering areas. Major Wu varieties include those of Shanghai, Suzhou, Ningbo, Wuxi, Wenzhou/Oujiang, Hangzhou, Shaoxing, Jinhua, Wu speakers, such as Chiang Kai-shek, Lu Xun and Cai Yuanpei, occupied positions of great importance in modern Chinese culture and politics. Wu can also be found being used in Shaoxing opera, which is only in national popularity to Peking opera, as well as in the performances of the popular entertainer. Wu is also spoken in a number of diaspora communities, with significant centers of immigration originating from Shanghai, Qingtian. Suzhou has traditionally been the center of Wu and was likely the first place the distinct variety of Sinitic known as Wu developed. Suzhou dialect is considered to be the most linguistically representative of the family. Due to the influence of Shanghainese, Wu as a whole is incorrectly labelled in English as simply, Shanghainese, among speakers of other Sinitic languages, Wu is often subjectively judged to be soft, light, and flowing. There is an idiom in Mandarin that specifically describes these qualities of Wu speech, Ngu nung nioe ngiu, Wu varieties have the largest vowel quality inventories in the world. The Jinhui dialect spoken in Shanghais Fengxian District has 20 vowel qualities, Wu Chinese, along with Min, is also of great significance to historical linguists due to their retention of many ancient features. These two languages have proven pivotal in determining the history of the Chinese languages. More pressing concerns of the present are those of language preservation, however, many analysts believe that a stable state of diglossia will endure for at least several generations if not indefinitely. Saying one speaks Wu is akin to saying one speaks a Romance language and it is not a particularly defined entity like Standard Mandarin or Hochdeutsch. They do this by affixing 話 Wo to their locations endonym, for example, 溫州話 Wēnzhōuhuà is used for Wenzhounese. Affixing 閒話 xiánhuà is also common and more typical of the Taihu division, Wu, the formal name and standard reference in dialectology literature. Northern Wu, Wu typically spoken in the north of Zhejiang and it by default includes the Xuanzhou division in Anhui as well, however this division is often neglected in Northern Wu discussions. Southern Wu, Wu spoken in southern Zhejiang and periphery, comprising the Oujiang, Wuzhou, Western Wu, A term gaining in usage as a synonym for the Xuanzhou division and modeled after the previous two terms since the Xuanzhou division is less representative of Northern Wu. Shanghainese, is also a common name, used because Shanghai is the most well-known city in the Wu-speaking region. The term Shanghainese is never used by linguists to refer to anything
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and 
in seal script)[7]
/𠄎, ancient form of 乃 nǎi
/㞢, archaic form of 之 zhī.
and seal-script 
.
