LING 1020 Lecture Notes - Lecture 16: Shanghainese, Beijing Dialect, Standard Chinese
18 Oct 2016
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Document Summary
Of world population speak hanyu (aka mandarin) One of the working language of the u. n. Natural language with artificial qualities: artificial because it"s been standardized (pronunciation, grammar, prescriptions) Tonal language: changing the tones changes the words. Vowels are predominant and takes the tones. One syllable has at most two consonants (usually have only one or no consonant) No consonant clusters (examples do not happen) Pinyin combination of roman alphabet and tone diacritics: not a formal writing system. Traditional characters used in taiwan and hong kong. Simplified characters used in mainland china and singapore. No space between the characters in modern chinese. Morpheme in chinese = one syllable (usually a character: free morpheme: can be used as a word by itself, bound morpheme: used only as an attachment to another morpheme. Most words are disyllabic consist of two characters. Topic-prominent: sentence tends to start with the topic.
