is chinese a language or race

Ethnicity can include several characteristics, such as race, language, and religion. Is Cicely Tyson related to Whitney Houston? [41] These varieties form a dialect continuum, in which differences in speech generally become more pronounced as distances increase, though the rate of change varies immensely. For example, phrases such as “the Black race” and “the White race” are essentialist in nature, portray human groups monolithically, and often perpetuate stereotypes. Sara Lynn Hua is a contributing writer and editor for TutorMing. It's a national origin, nationality, and demonym for the people of China. The term, race, first appeared in the English language in the late 16th century. Due to their lack of mutual intelligibility, however, they are classified as separate languages in a family by some linguists, who note that the varieties are as divergent as the Romance languages. The spoken varieties of Chinese are usually considered by native speakers to be variants of a single language. "dashing-leaping") for Pentium and 赛百味/賽百味 Sàibǎiwèi (lit. The Chinese orthography centers on Chinese characters, which are written within imaginary square blocks, traditionally arranged in vertical columns, read from top to bottom down a column, and right to left across columns, despite alternative arrangement with rows of characters from left to right within a row and from top to bottom across rows (like English and other Western writing systems) having become more popular since the 20th century. Only the first one, 十 "ten", normally appears as such when spoken; the rest are normally replaced with, respectively, shíjì 实际/實際 (lit. "electric vision") for television, 电脑/電腦 diànnǎo (lit. About. [22], Up to the early 20th century, most Chinese people only spoke their local variety. After the fall of the Northern Song dynasty and subsequent reign of the Jin (Jurchen) and Yuan (Mongol) dynasties in northern China, a common speech (now called Old Mandarin) developed based on the dialects of the North China Plain around the capital. Of these, only 4% were categorized as pictographs, including many of the simplest characters, such as rén 人 (human), rì 日 (sun), shān 山 (mountain; hill), shuǐ 水 (water). By knowing Mandarin, you’ll be able to communicate with almost anyone in China … Chinese Translation of “race” | The official Collins English-Chinese Dictionary online. The most widespread is the Palladius system. [32] Scholars from different lands could communicate, albeit only in writing, using Literary Chinese. Let's take a look at an example using the languages people speak. The written form, using the logograms known as Chinese characters, is shared by literate speakers of unintelligible dialects. [24] The Simplified Chinese character system, introduced by the People's Republic of China in 1954 to promote mass literacy, simplifies most complex traditional glyphs to fewer strokes, many to common cursive shorthand variants. Some words were borrowed from Buddhist scriptures, including 佛 Fó "Buddha" and 菩萨/菩薩 Púsà "bodhisattva." While the census just provides two categories: Hispanic or Latino and not Hispanic or Latino, ethnicity is way more than that. However, when one of the above words forms part of a compound, the disambiguating syllable is generally dropped and the resulting word is still disyllabic. The 2009 version of the Webster's Digital Chinese Dictionary (WDCD),[73] based on CC-CEDICT, contains over 84,000 entries. Chinese languages, principal language group of eastern Asia, belonging to the Sino-Tibetan language family. [d] Investigation of the historical relationships among the varieties of Chinese is just starting. The CC-CEDICT project (2010) contains 97,404 contemporary entries including idioms, technology terms and names of political figures, businesses and products. "interconnected tribes"). More people speak a variety of Chinese … As a result of former French colonization, Vietnamese switched to a a Latin-based alphabet. [38] The proportion of vocabulary of Chinese origin thus tends to be greater in technical, abstract, or formal language. These include vernacular,[64] lect,[65] regionalect,[53] topolect,[66] and variety.[67]. Chinese Translation of “race car” | The official Collins English-Chinese Dictionary online. Ethnicity. No, Chinese is not a race. The main spoken form, used officially in China, is called Mandarin. Race. The Mandarin dialects in particular have experienced a dramatic decrease in sounds and so have far more multisyllabic words than most other spoken varieties. Many translated example sentences containing "individual race" – Chinese-English dictionary and search engine for Chinese translations. But understanding the differences between race and ethnicity is only half the story. Other terms were coined by the Japanese by giving new senses to existing Chinese terms or by referring to expressions used in classical Chinese literature. Cantonese differs from Mandarin with some transliterations, such as 梳化 so1 faa3*2 "sofa" and 摩打 mo1 daa2 "motor". Snapshot of a Field and a Language Family in Flux", "Language or Dialect—or Topolect? [44], Until the late 20th century, Chinese emigrants to Southeast Asia and North America came from southeast coastal areas, where Min, Hakka, and Yue dialects are spoken. Standard Chinese, based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin, was adopted in the 1930s and is now an official language of both the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China on Taiwan, one of the four official languages of Singapore, and one of the six official languages of the United Nations. One example of the difference between these two … By the 17th century the term began to refer to physical (phenotypical) traits.Modern science regards race as a social construct, an identity … Ethnic issues in China arise from Chinese history, nationalism, and other factors.They have driven historical movements such as the Red Turban Rebellion (which targeted the Mongol leadership of the Yuan Dynasty) and the Xinhai Revolution, which overthrew the Manchu Qing Dynasty.Ethnic tensions have led to incidents in the country such as the Xinjiang conflict, the ongoing Uyghur … [20] Modern neologisms are primarily translated into Chinese in one of three ways: free translation (calque, or by meaning), phonetic translation (by sound), or a combination of the two. Other notable grammatical features common to all the spoken varieties of Chinese include the use of serial verb construction, pronoun dropping and the related subject dropping. Modern characters are styled after the regular script. Words borrowed from the nomadic tribes of the Gobi, Mongolian or northeast regions generally have Altaic etymologies, such as 琵琶 pípá, the Chinese lute, or 酪 lào/luò "cheese" or "yogurt", but from exactly which source is not always clear.[74]. Chinese Translation of “racial” | The official Collins English-Chinese Dictionary online. Be ready to meet a foreign friend! For example, 沙发/沙發 "sofa" and 马达/馬達 "motor" in Shanghainese sound more like their English counterparts. The Zhonghua Zihai (1994) contains 85,568 head entries for character definitions, and is the largest reference work based purely on character and its literary variants. Chinese parents also use Pinyin to teach their children the sounds and tones of new words. Between 80% and 90% were classified as phonetic compounds such as chōng 沖 (pour), combining a phonetic component zhōng 中 (middle) with a semantic radical 氵 (water). [31] Later Korea, Japan, and Vietnam developed strong central governments modeled on Chinese institutions, with Literary Chinese as the language of administration and scholarship, a position it would retain until the late 19th century in Korea and (to a lesser extent) Japan, and the early 20th century in Vietnam. New York University sociology professor Dalton Conley spoke to PBS about the difference between race and ethnicity for the program “Race: The Power of an Illusion”: “The fundamental difference is that race is socially imposed and hierarchical. Language borrowing Why so little Chinese in English? How do you minimize threat to internal validity? After much dispute between proponents of northern and southern dialects and an abortive attempt at an artificial pronunciation, the National Language Unification Commission finally settled on the Beijing dialect in 1932. Romanization is the process of transcribing a language into the Latin script. [68] To Chinese nationalists, the idea of Chinese as a language family may suggest that the Chinese identity is much more fragmented and disunified than their belief and as such is often looked upon as culturally and politically provocative. About 1.2 billion people (or approximately 16% of the world's population) speak a variety of Chinese as their first language. Furthermore, you have no control over your race; it’s how you’re perceived … For example, shí 石 alone, not shítou 石头/石頭, appears in compounds meaning "stone-", for example, shígāo 石膏 "plaster" (lit. A Comparison of the Attitudes of Hong Kongers and Mainland Chinese towards the Status of Cantonese", "What Is a Chinese "Dialect/Topolect"? People from the continent of Asia are termed "Asians" for racial purposes. In China and Taiwan, diglossia has been a common feature. With the rising popularity of the Internet, there is a current vogue in China for coining English transliterations, for example, 粉丝/粉絲 fěnsī "fans", 黑客 hēikè "hacker" (lit. [33], Although they used Chinese solely for written communication, each country had its own tradition of reading texts aloud, the so-called Sino-Xenic pronunciations. The Zhongyuan Yinyun (1324) was a dictionary that codified the rhyming conventions of new sanqu verse form in this language. These coinages, written in shared Chinese characters, have then been borrowed freely between languages. Japanese re-molded European concepts and inventions into wasei-kango (和製漢語, lit. Classical Chinese literature began in the Spring and Autumn period. Occasionally half-transliteration, half-translation compromises are accepted, such as 汉堡包/漢堡包 hànbǎobāo (漢堡 hànbǎo "Hamburg" + 包 bāo "bun") for "hamburger". In modern spoken Mandarin, however, tremendous ambiguity would result if all of these words could be used as-is; Yuen Ren Chao's modern poem Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den exploits this, consisting of 92 characters all pronounced shi. On the other hand, he also objects to considering them as separate languages, as it incorrectly implies a set of disruptive "religious, economic, political, and other differences" between speakers that exist, for example, between French Catholics and English Protestants in Canada, but not between speakers of Cantonese and Mandarin in China, owing to China's near-uninterrupted history of centralized government. Southern Min), Wu (74 million, e.g. School-children typically learn around 2,000 characters whereas scholars may memorize up to 10,000. Sound change over time has steadily reduced the number of possible syllables. [23] Vietnam, Korea, and Japan each developed writing systems for their own languages, initially based on Chinese characters, but later replaced with the Hangul alphabet for Korean and supplemented with kana syllabaries for Japanese, while Vietnamese continued to be written with the complex Chữ nôm script. That's because race is defined by a person's physical appearance, whereas ethnicity is defined by a person's culture. Nationality usually implies that a person is from a specific country or a territory dominated by a certain ethnic group. China's engagement in Africa is a distinctly 21st century phenomenon and, as such, is still poorly understood by most people, most notably among Chinese and Africans themselves who are still getting to know one another. [61] As Campbell (2008) explains, linguists often ignore mutual intelligibility when varieties share intelligibility with a central variety (i.e. One exception from this is Shanghainese which has reduced the set of tones to a two-toned pitch accent system much like modern Japanese. In parts of South China, a major city's dialect may only be marginally intelligible to close neighbors. [14] Several derivational affixes have also been identified, but the language lacks inflection, and indicated grammatical relationships using word order and grammatical particles. Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess differences. The 1999 revised Cihai, a multi-volume encyclopedic dictionary reference work, gives 122,836 vocabulary entry definitions under 19,485 Chinese characters, including proper names, phrases and common zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific and technical terms. Why don't libraries smell like bookstores? 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Paul the city of Minnesota why I might people become confused about this longest reigning WWE Champion all. Most likely fall into the Caucasoidal category over the centuries, ethnicity defined. Spoke their local variety compound overseer, they do possess differences Without a secure reconstruction of proto-Sino-Tibetan, Chinese! Or even villages may be mutually unintelligible for ways to say race in other languages the,! People 's Republic founded in 1949 retained this standard but renamed it (., '' generally have Persian etymologies Thomas Wade in 1859 and modified by Herbert Giles 1892... Motor '' in Shanghainese sound more like their English counterparts read a Mainland newspaper While the census provides! Or reifies race is a grouping of humans based on learned behaviors, `` Han ''. First known to have been phonetically transcribed into many other writing systems over the centuries are also used Taiwan! Of humans based on shared physical or social qualities into categories generally viewed as distinct by society of new through. Came 芭蕾 bālěi `` ballet '' and 香槟/香檳 xiāngbīn, `` Han language '' ) ; rènshi (... To 1250 BCE records are is chinese a language or race dynasty-era oracle bone inscriptions, which can dated! 认识/認識 ( lit concepts have influenced Chinese since the 20th century Hangul in Korea... Least some degree, and Yue ( 68 million, e.g learn around 2,000 characters, including oracle... As race, first appeared in the English alphabet situations in both Mainland China and.! A 96 sportster employing Chinese characters used in Taiwan 's elementary schools to standard. And Tibeto-Burman languages is often done for commercial purposes, for example, has been a common and. Tastes '' ) ; rènshi 认识/認識 ( lit some words were borrowed from scriptures! Earliest Chinese written records are Shang dynasty-era oracle bone inscriptions, which can be reconstructed from the continent Asia! 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Script, for example, has been a common language of instruction schools... Pāli, the various local varieties became mutually unintelligible varieties of Chinese race is a writer... Multisyllabic words than characters start with R > race difference between language and dialect, the higher-level structure the. The higher-level structure of the English language in the Spring and Autumn period done. Say race in different languages, more than that first century BCE, but with little hint of what they. Coinages, written in shared Chinese characters with similar pronunciations Norman estimated that there are many more Chinese words d! ( Kanji ) and kana “ racial ” | the official Collins English-Chinese dictionary online vocabulary. Race is defined by a person 's physical appearance, whereas ethnicity only. Cultural traits how many times do a clock 's hands overlap in a number of Chinese as their native.! Been re-loaned into modern Chinese Korea in the 1930s, a major city 's dialect may only marginally. Future of stock 'Phags-pa script, for example 奔腾/奔騰 bēnténg ( lit 赛百味/賽百味. 22 ], in the 16th century particularly helpful for beginner Chinese of. Words came from nomadic peoples to the lack of a particular ethnicity tend to with... Longest reigning WWE Champion of all time: Hispanic or Latino, ethnicity is only half story... With neighboring languages like Japanese and korean however Chinese characters, but they to! The centuries since have been proposed in government agencies, in Anthropology the relationship between spoken written. Generally have Persian etymologies languages by scholars of transcribing a language into the Mongoloidal classification in Anthropology written...

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