Questions tagged [chinese]
A branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family which is mostly spoken in China and consists of many spoken varieties, including the standard and most prominent variety, Mandarin. For non-linguistic questions about the Chinese language, visit our sister site Chinese Language Stack Exchange.
129 questions
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Why is wristwatch in Chinese called 手表?
As a native French speaker studying Mandarin Chinese, I couldn't help but notice that the Chinese term for wristwatch, 手表 (hand-show), is quite similar to the French term "une montre" (a &...
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Why would Chinese ESL learners read FOR/OF alternately?
I noticed that many of my Chinese students read "of" as "for" and vice versa.
I understand that this could be a case of metathesis, but what would be the cause of this? I notice ...
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Do Chinese's time words come from its writing systems?
Chinese was traditionally written top-to-bottom. The Chinese word for next (in phrases like next week, next time, next page, etc.) is 下 (xià) which also means under.
The Chinese word for previous/last ...
user31190
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Mandarin Chinese phonology: on the issue of p/b, t/d, k/g distinction and older romanization systems
Like many people, I've found it intriguing that older Chinese romanization systems such as Wade-Giles and postal romanization seem to "confuse" certain sounds, such as p/b, k/g, and t/d. I ...
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How good is current machine translation at dissimilar languages, e.g. English and Chinese?
How good is current machine translation (in ChatGPT4, or Claude3.5) at dissimilar languages, e.g. English and Chinese? Does it work perfectly now?
If not, can you give some examples of where they ...
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Why did Japanese borrow words for simple numbers from Chinese?
I just realised that all (standalone) Japanese numbers from 1-10 are borrowed from Chinese (maybe except 4 and 7 if they're read as よん and なな instead of し and しち). Now, I understand why a language ...
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Why aren't Phonetic Components in Chinese called PHONOLOGICAL Components?
Why Phonetic, not Phonological, Components? What is wrong about calling Phonetic Components Phonological Components instead?
I perused all these posts, but they don't answer my question.
What's ...
user42207
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How does Chinese function so well without determiners and a lot of the subtle detail that English has?
I have been typing into Google Translate and Yabla all day (Yabla is basically a Chinese glossing tool), trying to get a sense at how simple English sentences with prepositions are translated into ...
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Sociolinguistics of pre-handover Hong Kong cinema and dialogue in non-Cantonese Chinese “dialects”
I have always heard that mutual intelligibility between the Sinitic languages of China is low. However, I am confused by the sociolinguistics of Hong Kong cinema in 1980s and 1990s. Films from that ...
user21126
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Are there heuristics to tell if a character is from Chinese, Kanji, or Chu Nom?
Suppose I know nothing about Chinese writing systems but some basic strokes and radicals. When given a blocky-looking character, how do I tell if it's a character only used in Kanji, in Chữ Nôm, or in ...
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Multiple-characters vocabulary acquisition by L1 Japanese/Chinese
I am looking for any evidence/reference on how L1 Japanese or L1 Chinese people acquire their multiple hanzi/kanji vocabulary. Take as simple as 折り畳み/折叠 (to fold). Words like 食べる/吃 and 飲む/喝 are not ...
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Tone vs Intonation in English -- does English use tones in any situation to convey meaning?
I took some Mandarin in college and I believe (IIRC) the concept of tones was introduced to us English speakers by showing how we use "rising tone" for questions.
But a comment to a recent ...
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Are there any scripts derived from Chinese characters that diverged before Regular Script?
The Wikipedia article on clerical script lists several child systems such as Kanji, Kana, Hanja, Zhuyin, Sawndip, Chữ Hán etc. Are there any writing systems descended from seal script or earlier?
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Is "的" (de) used in Singlish for possession or subordination? Or neither?
In Singlish (Singaporean English creole), is 的 used? And if so, is it used for simple possession ("*Jenny de dog") or for introduction of a subordinate clause? ("*Jenny found last week ...
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Do Chinese embedded clauses have C head?
It is pointed out that in Huang, Li, Li (2009:35)'s book the syntax of Chinese, the discourse functions that ma/ba/ne perform are only associated with matrix clauses.
Ba is for imperatives, ma for ...
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Difference between Cantonese /gw/ and Mandarin /gu/?
As a native speaker of both languages, Cantonese /gw/ like in 過gwo3 and Mandarin /gu/ like in 过guo4 sounds the same, but I've checked that the Cantonese one is [kʷɔː] while the Mandarin one is [kwo], ...
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Regex for segmentation as sentences for Thai, Khmer, Japanese, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional and Amharic languages [closed]
I am processing text samples of the following languages:
Thai
Khmer
Japanese
Chinese Simplified
Chinese Traditional &
Amharic
I need the text samples to be segmented as sentences using a regex.
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Question about Chinese stress
Does Chinese have stress, as many people suggested there’s stress on Chinese trisyllabic words?
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Is there such a thing as attributive vs. modifier uses of adj? Is un rojo carro vs. un carro rojo the same difference as 红房子 vs. 红的房子？
In teaching Spanish I often explain the difference between pre-nominal adjectives and post-nominal adjectives as the difference between an English noun phrase in which the adjective is stressed, and ...
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How is the ability of sortal classifiers to form compound words in Chinese and other Sino-Tibetan languages?
I couldn't find how in general sortal classifiers work in compound words but I notice the following myself. By sortal classifiers I mean those that actualize shape boundaries, in contrast with ...
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Are alveolo-palatal consonants more likely to be followed by high vowels, whereas retroflex consonants are more likely followed by low vowels?
It seems to me that high voles like i would more naturally follow alveolo-palatal consonants because the need to "spread the lips" (in the popular description of the latter) seem to more ...
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Why do Korean and Japanese share similar borrowed Chinese characters and is different from Chinese language?
In Japanese and Korean, "promise" is 約束 (yakusoku) and 약속 (yagsog). Both came from the Chinese characters 約束. However, 約束 in Chinese does not mean "promise" and actually means &...
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What does Axel Schuessler mean by "area word"?
My son's studying Chinese. His teacher asked how 念 semantically appertains to its components 今心. I don't speak Chinese, and he had no idea. Then we resorted to Wiktionary that refers to Axel ...
user5306
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Are there human general communication languages without a future tendency?
In Thai language there is no past tense, at least not for negative sentences:
A Thai person might say "I don't go" (ฉัน ไม่ ไป) while the listener is expected to guess from the context if ...
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Mechanism(s) as to how the pronunciations of「也」and its Old Chinese "homophones"/phonetically-derivative glyphs drifted to the modern range of sounds?
In my question on Chinese.SE, I learned that the modern character for "earth, ground"「地」(dì) used to be written in a multitude of ways, using either 「也」,「豕」, or「它」as phonetic components. ...
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Is the Greek ζ related to the Chinese 子?
I wonder whether there is any connections between the two letters. After all, they are both similar to the Phoenician Sade letter, and the Phoenicians were the dominant culture of the Mediterranean ...
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How do you distinguish verbs, nouns, and adjectives in Chinese?
I am messing around with a conlang and trying to figure out how to write sentences. Man this is hard, there are so many possibilities and I don't know where to start.
But basically, I am looking at ...
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Number of tones in Cantonese vs. Mandarin and final stops
The emergence of tones in Chinese languages (and actually most tonal languages) is, roughly speaking, due to the loss of final consonnants of syllables at an earlier stage of the language. In ...
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Are there any known linguistic patterns that cause the verb "have" to take on this additional function?
I'm a native English speaker that has been learning Mandarin.
The Mandarin equivalent to the English verb "to have" is "有". As far as I can tell these two words are a 1 to 1 ...
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Generic name for Hànzì/Kanji/Hanja/Chữ nôm/Sawndip?
So I was thinking about how to talk about these characters in a culturally-neutral way. Chinese seems to be used, but it implies a particular way of writing characters (not to mention it makes it ...
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About the "ᵊ" superscript in IPA
I apologize for a diletant question but does "ə" in "piᵊŋ" indicate a secondary articulation? I couldn't find it in the list of "Co-articulation diacritics" on Wikipedia'...
user31981
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How mutually intelligible are the different Mandarin dialects?
This is a question about dialects placed under the umbrella of "Mandarin", not languages which are considered separate from Mandarin like Cantonese or Wu.
Wikipedia says that "Southwest ...
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Why do Chinese and Hindi have more terms for relatives than English does?
I was thinking about labels we assign family members (like cousin, grand mother etc.) and it struck me that in my native language of Hindi, we have different labels for maternal and paternal family ...
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Measuring lexical similarity between two arbitrary languages
Pardon me if this question is naive, but I am wondering if there is a way to quantify lexical similarity between two corpora of text, each written in different languages whose alphabets differ greatly....
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What exactly is Minimal Distance Principle and how is it applied here?
In my previous question, I referred to the analysis of indirect passives in Chinese from "The Syntax of Chinese". They mention "Minimal Distance Principle":
In this structure, the verb dasi ‘kill’ ...
user31981
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Difference between PRO and OP
What's the difference between PRO and OP? For example, on p. 142, the book "The Syntax of Chinese" presents the following tree (which is an analysis of indirect passives in Chinese):
In this ...
user31981
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What does 'MSP' stand for in the context of Chinese parts of speech?
The Part-Of-Speech Tagging Guidelines for the PennChineseTreebank(3.0) uses several acronyms without defining them. I am a hobbyist student of Chinese linguistics as part of my study of Chinese.
I ...
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How does 小 get the Sino-Vietnamse as "tiểu"?
I'm trying to re-construct the Sino-Vietnamese word of 小 (tiểu) from fanqie method mentioned here.
At first, I looked up fanqie of the word from this dictionary.
小 has fanqie 私兆 which is "tư triệu" ...
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Is there a relatively systematic way to converter from pinyin to Sino Vietnamese words (Hán Việt) or vice versa?
I'm wondering if there's a relatively systematic way to convert from pinyin to Sino Vietnamese words (Hán Việt) or vice versa or not.
For example:
国(guó) --> quốc
大(dà) --> đại
小(xiǎo) --> tiểu ...
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Similarities between Proto-Austronesian and Chinese?
Proto-Austronesian was a language that was spoken about 5,000 years ago near Taiwan. I am just curious about, partly because of the geographic connection, if Chinese is related to the Austronesian ...
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What do these subscripts/superscripts mean in IPA?
Here is an example of a sentence from the Glossika course in Taiwanese Hokkien:
The "Phonics" line is the IPA line. (The "Typing" line is the Tâi-lô romanization; I don't know where the "...
user31981
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Is there an aggregation of Oracle Bone Script glyphs?
I am looking for something that might take a raw resource like this and instead provide a list of the discovered oracle bone script glyphs, like you would find for the CJK Unicode block for example. ...
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Why hasn't English borrowed more words from China? [closed]
Why hasn't English (or Latin/Greek/others from which English arrived) borrowed more words from China? I am looking at Wikipedia and there's probably only 30 words there out of the millions of words ...
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Did the Portuguese influence how days of the week are named in Vietnamese and Chinese?
The Portuguese were some of the first colonizers / missionaries in the Far East. In the case of Vietnam, they created the first phonetic transcription of the language. Interestingly, nowadays the ...
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Chinese writing system as a universal writing system
As an extension to my question about the "phonetic languages" I'd like to open a topic about the writing systems. As far as I understand the Chinese writing system has literally no connection at all ...
user19729
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Why does anger has something to do with spleen in both Chinese and English?
The English word spleen has two meanings in Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary,
an organ near the stomach which produces and cleans the body's
blood.
a feeling of anger and disagreement.
...
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What language/script did Japan during the Yamato period and earlier have?
The Yamato period (300 - 710) had an organized ruler, civilozation, etc. However, only in Nara period (710 - 794), which existed along with the Tang dynasty of China, a Japanese script and language ...
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Subordination. Chinese vs English
Linguists claim that subordination is universal across the world languages.
Subordination in English looks can be understood by looking into these examples:
I know a person who has a dog
I know a ...
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Chinese linguistics: Could anyone give me pointers to the Traditional-Simplified Chinese translated corpora?
I am a computational linguist and I need some datasets to evaluate my Simplified to Traditional Chinese converter.
Could anyone point to datasets which have pairs of Simplified-Traditional Chinese ...
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Did the removal of Chinese characters have an impact on Korean and Vietnamese?
Korean and Vietnamese used to have Chinese characters but no longer do; there has been talk (e.g. here) of doing the same in Japanese. Has there been an impact on the language? for instance
changed ...
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