Hainan people
The Hainan people known as Hainanese or Hainam nang (in Hainanese dialect, are the native people who originate from Hainan, the southernmost and smallest Chinese province. The term "Hainanese" was used by Min Hainanese-speaking Han Chinese, who are the majority in the island, to identify themselves overseas. Other natives of the island such as the Li people, Danzhounese, Lingaoese and Utsuls may use the term. Most Hainanese Han people were fishers from the Chinese provinces of Guangdong and Guangxi who settled in the island of Hainan, while the Li natives came to the island earlier and were descendants of the Yue tribe, from mainland China. During the fall of the Song Dynasty, Min Hainanese-speaking colonists of scholars and military families arrived and colonized the island from the three districts of Xinghua prefecture in the centre-coast of Fujian province pushing many if not most of the local inhabitants to the impoverished areas; as a result of the assimilation of other dialect groups, many Hainanese genetically cluster with Han Chinese from Guangdong and Guangxi instead of Fujianese people.
To Fujian and Guangdong provinces, Hainan has been a source for immigrants. Towards the turn of the 20th century, many Hainanese migrated to various Southeast Asian nations, where they worked as cooks, coffee shop owners, clothesmakers and hoteliers. Chan Sing, one of the "villain" movie stars that dotted the Hong Kong movie industry was of Hainanese ancestry, as was the bartender who invented the world-famous Singapore Sling at the renowned Singapore Raffles Hotel, Mr. Ngiam Tong Boon. In Thailand, singer Nichkhun of 2PM, media mogul Sondhi Limthongkul, the politically influential Sarasin family, as well as two of the wealthiest business families, the Chirathivats and the Yoovidhyas, all trace their ancestries to Hainan. In Hainan, the local Han Chinese speak Hainanese, a Min Chinese language known as Qiongwen, as their native tongue; the dialect of Wenchang is spoken by Hainanese from the northern parts of Hainan. Numerous Wenchang Hainanese descended from Jinshi and merchants from Putian as many of their Jiapu show.
This is why they pronounce some words with the Hokkien twang. Today, many Wenchang Hainanese still return to Putian for ancestors tomb cleaning. Many Hainanese who have surnames found only in cantonese people like 麥, 鄺, 莫, 譚, 岑, 龐, 梅, etc have ancestry from cantonese immigrants who immigrated to the island in waves during the Ming dynasty as indicated in historical records and their jiapus. Standard Chinese is the lingua franca in the island province as in the rest of China; the Hainanese are known for their signature dishes such as the Hainanese chicken rice, Wenchang chicken, Hainanese pork chop, Hainanese mutton soup, Hainanese salted fish soup and beef noodle soup. Notably, in Singapore, these signature dishes are served at the various eateries located along Purvis Street, within the Hainanese enclave. Hainanese chicken rice is a recognised dish throughout Southeast Asia due to the Hainanese diaspora in these areas who famed it, it is labelled as Singapore's national dish. Hainanese opera is a passion for many Hainanese for the older generation.
Enriched with local flavours, Hainanese opera is parcel of Hainanese culture. Han Chinese Min-speaking peoples Hoklo people Teochew people Thai Chinese Singaporean Chinese Malaysian Chinese Indonesian Chinese Li people Yangpu Ancient Salt Field
Writing system
A writing system is any conventional method of visually representing verbal communication. While both writing and speech are useful in conveying messages, writing differs in being a reliable form of information storage and transfer; the processes of encoding and decoding writing systems involve shared understanding between writers and readers of the meaning behind the sets of characters that make up a script. Writing is recorded onto a durable medium, such as paper or electronic storage, although non-durable methods may be used, such as writing on a computer display, on a blackboard, in sand, or by skywriting; the general attributes of writing systems can be placed into broad categories such as alphabets, syllabaries, or logographies. Any particular system can have attributes of more than one category. In the alphabetic category, there is a standard set of letters of consonants and vowels that encode based on the general principle that the letters represent speech sounds. In a syllabary, each symbol correlates to a syllable or mora.
In a logography, each character represents morpheme, or other semantic units. Other categories include abjads, which differ from alphabets in that vowels are not indicated, abugidas or alphasyllabaries, with each character representing a consonant–vowel pairing. Alphabets use a set of 20-to-35 symbols to express a language, whereas syllabaries can have 80-to-100, logographies can have several hundreds of symbols. Most systems will have an ordering of its symbol elements so that groups of them can be coded into larger clusters like words or acronyms, giving rise to many more possibilities in meanings than the symbols can convey by themselves. Systems will enable the stringing together of these smaller groupings in order to enable a full expression of the language; the reading step expressed orally. A special set of symbols known as punctuation is used to aid in structure and organization of many writing systems and can be used to help capture nuances and variations in the message's meaning that are communicated verbally by cues in timing, accent, inflection or intonation.
A writing system will typically have a method for formatting recorded messages that follows the spoken version's rules like its grammar and syntax so that the reader will have the meaning of the intended message preserved. Writing systems were preceded by proto-writing, which used pictograms and other mnemonic symbols. Proto-writing lacked the ability to express a full range of thoughts and ideas; the invention of writing systems, which dates back to the beginning of the Bronze Age in the late Neolithic Era of the late 4th millennium BC, enabled the accurate durable recording of human history in a manner, not prone to the same types of error to which oral history is vulnerable. Soon after, writing provided a reliable form of long distance communication. With the advent of publishing, it provided the medium for an early form of mass communication; the creation of a new alphabetic writing system for a language with an existing logographic writing system is called alphabetization, as when the People's Republic of China studied the prospect of alphabetizing the Chinese languages with Latin script, Cyrillic script, Arabic script, numbers, although the most common instance of it, converting to Latin script, is called romanization.
Writing systems are distinguished from other possible symbolic communication systems in that a writing system is always associated with at least one spoken language. In contrast, visual representations such as drawings and non-verbal items on maps, such as contour lines, are not language-related; some symbols on information signs, such as the symbols for male and female, are not language related, but can grow to become part of language if they are used in conjunction with other language elements. Some other symbols, such as numerals and the ampersand, are not directly linked to any specific language, but are used in writing and thus must be considered part of writing systems; every human community possesses language, which many regard as an innate and defining condition of humanity. However, the development of writing systems, the process by which they have supplanted traditional oral systems of communication, have been sporadic and slow. Once established, writing systems change more than their spoken counterparts.
Thus they preserve features and expressions which are no longer current in the spoken language. One of the great benefits of writing systems is that they can preserve a permanent record of information expressed in a language. All writing systems require: at least one set of defined base elements or symbols, individually termed signs and collectively called a script. In the examination of individual scripts, the study of writing systems has developed along independent lines. Thus, the terminology employed differs somewhat from field to field; the generic term text refers to an instance of writte
Simplified Chinese characters
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, they are one of the two standard character sets of the contemporary Chinese written language; the government of the People's Republic of China in mainland China has promoted them for use in printing since the 1950s and 1960s to encourage literacy. They are used in the People's Republic of China and Singapore. Traditional Chinese characters are used in Hong Kong and the Republic of China. While traditional characters can still be read and understood by many mainland Chinese and the Chinese community in Malaysia and Singapore, these groups retain their use of simplified characters. Overseas Chinese communities tend to use traditional characters. Simplified Chinese characters may be referred to by their official name colloquially; the latter refers to simplifications of character "structure" or "body", character forms that have existed for thousands of years alongside regular, more complicated forms.
On the other hand, the official name refers to the modern systematically simplified character set, which includes not only structural simplification but substantial reduction in the total number of standardized Chinese characters. Simplified character forms were created by reducing the number of strokes and simplifying the forms of a sizable proportion of 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 same pronunciation and identical meaning were reduced to a single standardized character the simplest amongst all variants in form. Many characters were left untouched by simplification, are thus identical between the traditional and simplified Chinese orthographies; some simplified characters are dissimilar to and unpredictably different from traditional characters in those where a component is replaced by a simple symbol.
This has led some opponents of simplification to complain that the'overall process' of character simplification is arbitrary. Proponents counter that the system of simplification is internally consistent. Proponents have emphasized a some particular simplified characters as innovative and useful improvements, although many of these have existed for centuries as longstanding and widespread variants. A second round of simplifications was promulgated in 1977, but was retracted in 1986 for a variety of reasons due to the confusion caused and the unpopularity of the second round simplifications. However, the Chinese government never 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 implemented for use by the State Council of the People's Republic of China on June 5, 2013. Although most of the simplified Chinese characters in use today are the result of the works moderated by the government of the People's Republic of China in the 1950s and 60s, character simplification predates the PRC's formation in 1949.
Cursive written text always includes character simplification. Simplified forms used in print are attested as early as the Qin dynasty. One of the earliest proponents of character simplification was Lufei 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 therefore proposed that a reform be initiated, it was suggested that the Chinese writing system should be either simplified or abolished. Lu Xun, a renowned Chinese author in the 20th century, stated that, "If Chinese characters are not destroyed China will die". Recent commentators have claimed that Chinese characters were blamed for the economic problems in China during that time. In the 1930s and 1940s, discussions on character simplification took place within the Kuomintang government, a large number of Chinese intellectuals and writers maintained that character simplification would help boost literacy in China.
In 1935, 324 simplified characters collected by Qian Xuantong were introduced as the table of first batch of simplified characters, but they were suspended in 1936. The PRC issued its first round of official character simplifications in two documents, the first in 1956 and the second in 1964. Within the PRC, further character simplification became associated with the leftists of the Cultural Revolution, culminating with the second-round simplified characters, which were promulgated in 1977. In part due to the shock and unease felt in the wake of the Cultural Revolution and Mao's death, the second-round of simplifications was poorly received. In 1986 the authorities retracted the second round completely. In the same year, the authorities promulgated a final list of simplifications, identical to the 1964 list except for six changes (including the restoration of three characters, simplified in the First Round: 叠, 覆, 像.
Teochew dialect
Teochew is a Southern Min dialect spoken by the Teochew people in the Chaoshan region of eastern Guangdong and by their diaspora around the world. It is sometimes referred to as Chiuchow, its Cantonese name, due to the english romanisation by English colonial officials and explorers, it is related to some dialects of Hokkien, as it shares some cognates and phonology with it, though both are not mutually intelligible. Teochew preserves many Old Chinese pronunciations and vocabulary that have been lost in some of the other modern varieties of Chinese; as such, many linguists consider Teochew one of the most conservative Chinese dialects. Teochew is a variety of Southern Min, which in turn constitutes a part of Min Chinese, one of the seven major language groups of Chinese; as with other varieties of Chinese, it is not mutually intelligible with Mandarin, Cantonese and other Chinese varieties. However, it has limited intelligibility with the Hokkien dialects, such as those of Amoy, Quanzhou and Taiwanese.
Within the Teochew dialects, there is substantial variation in phonology between different regions of Chaoshan and between different Teochew communities overseas. The Chaoshan dialects in China be divided into three sub-groups defined by physically proximate areas: Chaozhou sub-group: including Chaozhou, Jieyang, Nan'ao County and Raoping. Parts of the Hakka-speaking regions of Jiexi County, Dabu County and Fengshun contain pocket communities of Teochew speakers; as Chaoshan was one of the major sources of Chinese emigration to Southeast Asia during the 18th to 20th centuries, a considerable Overseas Chinese community in that region is Teochew-speaking. In particular, the Teochew people settled in significant numbers in Cambodia and Laos, where they form the largest Chinese sub-language group. You will find many Teochew-speakers among Chinese communities in Vietnam, Singapore and Indonesia. Waves of migration from Chaoshan to Hong Kong after the communist victory of the Chinese Civil War in 1949, has resulted in the formation of a community there, although most descendants now speak Cantonese and English.
Teochew speakers are found among overseas Chinese communities in Japan and the Western world, a result of both direct emigration from Chaoshan to these nations and secondary emigration from Southeast Asia. In Singapore, Teochew remains the ancestral language of many Chinese Singaporeans, with the Teochews making up second largest Chinese group in Singapore, after the Hokkiens. Despite this many Teochew the younger generations are shifting towards English and Mandarin as their main spoken language; this is due to the Singapore government's stringent bilingual policy that promotes English as the official language of education and commerce and promotes Mandarin at the expense of other Chinese varieties. Some Teochews assimilated with the larger Hokkien community and speak Hokkien rather than Teochew due to Hokkien's prominent role as a lingua franca among the Singaporean Chinese community and the similarities between the two varieties. Teochew is indigenous language and was predominant in Bangkok, until after World War II, government force assimilation the Teochews who be Thai citizen, cause them language shift into Central Thai quickly.
Today Teochew status is endangered, still spoken among older ethnic Chinese Thai citizens, by the younger Thai Chinese is Central Thai native speaker. Teochew was never spoken among Chinese communities in Japan and South Korea, since most of the Teochew people who migrated to these countries are secondary immigrants from Hong Kong and Taiwan. Most of them are second-generation people from Hong Kong and Taiwan who speak Cantonese and Mandarin, as well as Korean and Japanese, leaving Teochew to be spoken by elders. Teochew is a variety of Southern Min and is one of the more well known Min Chinese varieties, together with Hokkien, spoken in southern Fujian, the Fuzhou dialect, a dialect of Eastern Min, spoken in Fujian's capital, Fuzhou. Due to historical influence, it shares many phonetic similarities to Hokkien but has low lexical similarity. Although Teochew shares some cognates with Hokkien, there are pronounced differences in most vowels with some consonant and tone shifts. Many of its vocabulary and phrases are distinct from Hokkien.
For example while Hokkien use the word beh to mean'want' in Teochew the word ai which means'love' in Teochew is used to mean'want' in Teochew. Hokkien uses the word ia to mean'very' while Teochews use the word kue which means'to cross or to pass' in their language to mean'very'. Other than the -p final found in both dialects, Hokkien retains the different finals of -n, -ng, -t and -k while Teochew only has -ng and -k finals as a result of final merging; this caused many Teochews to be unable to properly pronounce the final -n in english words and in replacement they pronounce it as -ng instead. Teochew has only 51% intelligibility with the Hokkien variant of Tong'an Xiamen dialect the same as the percentage of intelligibity between Russian and Ukrainian languages, while it has an lower mutual intelligibilty language with o
Traditional Chinese characters
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 the characters in the standardized character sets of Taiwan, of Hong Kong and Macau, in the Kangxi Dictionary; the modern shapes of traditional Chinese characters first appeared with the emergence of the clerical script during the Han Dynasty, have been more or less stable since the 5th century. The retronym "traditional Chinese" is used to contrast traditional characters with Simplified Chinese characters, a standardized character set introduced by the government of the People's Republic of China on Mainland China in the 1950s. Traditional Chinese characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau. In contrast, Simplified Chinese characters are used in mainland China and Malaysia in official publications. However, several countries – such as Australia, the US and Canada – are increasing their number of printed materials in Simplified Chinese, to better accommodate citizens from mainland China.
The debate on traditional and simplified Chinese characters has been a long-running issue among Chinese communities. A large number of overseas Chinese online newspapers allow users to switch between both character sets. Although simplified characters are taught and endorsed by the government of China, there is no prohibition against the use of traditional characters. Traditional characters are used informally in regions in China in handwriting and used for inscriptions and religious text, they are retained in logos or graphics to evoke yesteryear. Nonetheless, the vast majority of media and communications in China is dominated by simplified characters. In Hong Kong and Macau, Traditional Chinese has been the legal written form since colonial times. In recent years, simplified Chinese characters in Hong Kong and Macau has appeared to accommodate Mainland Chinese tourists and immigrants; this has led to concerns by many residents to protect their local heritage. Taiwan has never adopted simplified characters.
The use of simplified characters in official documents is prohibited by the government of Taiwan. Simplified characters are understood to a certain extent by any educated Taiwanese, learning to read them takes little effort; some stroke simplifications that have been incorporated into Simplified Chinese are in common use in handwriting. For example, while the name of Taiwan is written as 臺灣, the semi-simplified name 台灣 is acceptable to write in official documents. 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, 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, used in Philippines is the same as the one used in Taiwan. 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 latter half of the 19th century, before the standardization of simplified characters. Therefore, United States public notices and signage in Chinese are in Traditional Chinese. Traditional Chinese characters are called several different names within the Chinese-speaking world; the government of Taiwan calls traditional Chinese characters standard characters or orthodox characters. However, the same term is used outside Taiwan to distinguish standard and traditional characters from variant and idiomatic characters. In contrast, users of traditional characters outside Taiwan, such as those in Hong Kong and overseas Chinese communities, users of simplified Chinese characters, call them complex characters.
An informal name sometimes used by users of simplified characters is "old characters". Users of traditional characters sometimes refer them as "Full Chinese characters" to distinguish them from simplified Chinese characters; some traditional character users argue that traditional characters are the original form of the Chinese characters and cannot be called "complex". Simplified characters cannot be "standard" because they are not used in all Chinese-speaking regions. Conversely, supporters of simplified Chinese characters object to the description of traditional characters as "standard," since they view the new simplified characters as the contemporary standard used by the vast majority of Chinese speakers, they point out that traditional characters are not traditional as many Chinese characters have been made more elaborate over time. Some people refer to traditional characters as "proper characters" and modernized characters as "simplified-stroke characters" (sim
Chinese characters
Chinese characters are logograms developed for the writing of Chinese. They have been adapted to write a number of other Asian languages, they remain a key component of the Japanese writing system and are used in the writing of Korean. They were used in Vietnamese and Zhuang. Collectively, they are known as CJK characters. Vietnamese is sometimes included, making the abbreviation CJKV. Chinese characters constitute. By virtue of their widespread current use in East Asia, historic use throughout the Sinosphere, Chinese characters are among the most adopted writing systems in the world by number of users. Chinese characters number in the tens of thousands, though most of them are minor graphic variants encountered only in historical texts. Studies in China have shown that functional literacy in written Chinese requires a knowledge of between three and four thousand characters. In Japan, 2,136 are taught through secondary school. Due to post-WWII simplifications of Kanji in Japan as well as the post-WWII simplifications of characters in China, the Chinese characters used in Japan today are distinct from those used in China in several respects.
There are various national standard lists of characters and pronunciations. Simplified forms of certain characters are used in mainland China and Malaysia. In Japan, common characters are written in post-WWII Japan-specific simplified forms, while uncommon characters are written in Japanese traditional forms, which are identical to Chinese traditional forms. In South Korea, when Chinese characters are used, they are in traditional form identical to those used in Taiwan and Hong Kong where the official writing system is traditional Chinese. Teaching of Chinese characters in South Korea starts in the 7th grade and continues until the 12th grade. In Old Chinese including Classical Chinese, most words were monosyllabic and there was a close correspondence between characters and words. In modern Chinese, the majority of Chinese words today consist of two or more characters. Rather, a character always corresponds to a single syllable, a morpheme. However, there are a few exceptions to this general correspondence, including bisyllabic morphemes, bimorphemic syllables and cases where a single character represents a polysyllabic word or phrase.
Modern Chinese has many homophones. A single character may have a range of meanings, or sometimes quite distinct meanings. Cognates in the several varieties of Chinese are written with the same character, they have similar meanings, but quite different pronunciations. In other languages, most today in Japanese and sometimes in Korean, characters are used to represent Chinese loanwords, to represent native words independently of the Chinese pronunciation, as purely phonetic elements based on their pronunciation in the historical variety of Chinese from which they were acquired; these foreign adaptations of Chinese pronunciation are known as Sino-Xenic pronunciations and have been useful in the reconstruction of Middle Chinese. When the script was first used in the late 2nd millennium BC, words of Old Chinese were monosyllabic, each character denoted a single word. Increasing numbers of polysyllabic words have entered the language from the Western Zhou period to the present day, it is estimated that about 25–30% of the vocabulary of classic texts from the Warring States period was polysyllabic, though these words were used far less than monosyllables, which accounted for 80–90% of occurrences in these texts.
The process has accelerated over the centuries as phonetic change has increased the number of homophones. It has been estimated that over two thirds of the 3,000 most common words in modern Standard Chinese are polysyllables, the vast majority of those being disyllables; the most common process has been to form compounds of existing words, written with the characters of the constituent words. Words have been created by adding affixes and borrowing from other languages. Polysyllabic words are written with one character per syllable. In most cases the character denotes. Many characters have multiple readings, with instances denoting different morphemes, sometimes with different pronunciations. In modern Standard Chinese, one fifth of the 2,400 most common characters have multiple pronunciations. For the 500 most common characters, the proportion rises to 30%; these readings are similar in sound and related in meaning. In the Old Chinese period, affixes could be added to a word to form a new word, written with the same character.
In many cases the pronunciations diverged due to subsequent sound change. For example, many additional readings have the Middle Chinese departing tone, the major sour
Hainanese phrasebook travel guide from Wikivoyage
