Interesting facts about Chinese Language and Chinese New Year!

The Chinese New Year is on Saturday January 28^th and this year corresponds with the year of the Rooster. This special moment, is celebrated visiting family and friends, with good food, good company and with very old traditions. This is perhaps the most popular public holiday in China.

There are many pages in the Internet where those traditions are described. There are also descriptions about the meaning of each year according to the animal that is associated with it.

Today I am going to talk about some curious facts about Chinese Language. To create this list, I am using my own experience as student of this language, and information I gathered from different pages in English, Spanish and French.

1.- Chinese language is the language with the most native speakers in the world, According to https://www.ethnologue.com/statistics/size  there are 1.3 billion Native speakers of Chinese.

2.- Chinese is also the oldest written language in existence. It is estimated that this language has been producing written material for more than 4000 years. But more interesting is that this language does not have an alphabet. It is written using characters. There are 2 kinds of Chinese characters currently in use: Traditional and simplified. In Mainland China, Simplified characters are in use. Singapore, another country where Chinese is official language, is working now with simplified characters. Taiwan uses traditional characters. In Hong Kong, Macao and among Chinese communities overseas use traditional, however, there is a gradual switching to simplified. Here in Canada, I personally found many Chinese businesses that for different reasons use both systems.

Example:  There is a library in the University

Simplified:  在大学有一个图书官

Traditional: 在大學有一個圖書館

3.- Chinese is seen as a family of languages and dialects that belong to the Sino-Tibetan family. Dialects are grouped in 7 kinds of dialects, although in http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2015/04/infographic-chinese-language-facts/ they write about 10 kinds of dialects. https://www.ethnologue.com/statistics/size also list 10 kinds of dialects. The most spoken is Mandarin (普通话 Pŭtōnghuà) with almost 995 million speakers. Mandarin is the official dialect in China, Taiwan and Singapore and is the language used in the education, speeches, in TV and all the media. Other important dialects are: Cantonese (粤) with 63 million speakers, although some sources say that is closer to 100 million speakers, Is the most spoken dialect overseas;  Wu (吴), also known as Shanghainese, with 80 million speakers; Other dialects are Hakka, Gan, Xiang, Min. It is also interesting to note that the written forms of all dialects are almost the same, so no matter the dialect spoken, they can all understand each other by writing. Only Colloquial Cantonese has developed its own way to write that is quite different. Formal Cantonese still keeps the forms, so a reader will not notice any difference with other dialects.

4.-There are between 50,000 to 100,000 Chinese characters. No one knows all of them. It is estimated that an average speaker needs aprox 2500 to 3000 characters in his daily life. The HSK, the standard Chinese language test for non-Native speakers, http://english.hanban.org/node_8002.htm  in the level 6, that is the most difficult, requires students to know at least 5,000 characters, while level 5 requires at least 2500 characters. Level 5 of HSK is required for high studies and specialized jobs. The Number of characters is not a fixed one, new characters appear all the time depending on the demand of the language in its evolution. There is a long list of characters that are no longer in use.

5.- Not having an alphabet, many people will ask: How do dictionaries in Chinese language work? Chinese language, specifically mandarin, uses an equivalent of alphabet with roman letters called “Pinyin”. Dictionaries in mandarin use Pinyin for to reproduce mandarin words and in the dictionaries they appear in the same order they would appear in any dictionary using roman letters. However, what about the characters? How to locate a Character we would like to know the meaning? Chinese characters are grouped depending on the number of strokes needed to write it. Dictionaries then will start with characters that require one and two strokes. Chinese has very precise rules on how to write characters and which kind of strokes use. Some modern dictionaries also allow locating complex characters using common radicals. Radicals are simpler characters that can make part of a more complex one.

6.- If there are that many characters in Chinese, some of them very complex, the question is, how do we write the characters in our computers? I remember when I was a student in my MSc in London, back in 2005, public computers in the University campus had the keys programmed to be used to write roman letters, Arabic letters and Chinese strokes. Chinese students used the different keys to make strokes and compose the characters. Some years later, during my mandarin classes, my classmates and me had installed Google Pinyin in our personal computers, a program that uses Pinyin as base to write in Chinese. The user writes a syllable in pinyin and the program pops a window with different options of characters that can be represented with the same syllable and the user selects the desired character. Some programs combine traditional and simplified characters and some of them give the option to select between both systems.

7.- Chinese is a tonal language. The tone used is relevant to determine the meaning of what we want to say. Mandarin has 4 tones. In the page http://www.taiwanese-secrets.com/facts-about-mandarin-chinese.html the example of the word “Ma” and its meanings that can be horse, mother, hemp or to scold, depending on which tone is used, is fully explained with examples on how to represent the tones in Pinyin.  But if you think Mandarin has too many tones, According to the book “Manual de Traducción, Chino/Castellano” (Translation manual Chinese/Spanish) by Laureano Ramirez Bellerin, the rest of dialects have more tones: Cantonese has 9 tones, Wu, Min and Gan have 7 tones each, Xiang and Hakka have 6 tones.

8.-  Chinese is a very easy language in terms of its grammar. The page http://www.taiwanese-secrets.com/facts-about-mandarin-chinese.html has a good summarization of this: No need to conjugate verbs, no need to distinguish between singular and plural, No tenses, no genders. There are no inflections.

9.- Where Chinese presents a challenge for westerners is the use of Measure words. According to the page http://www.thechairmansbao.com/10-interesting-facts-figures-mandarin-chinese/  in Chinese we cannot say directly “There are 5 horses” (The example is mine). There are over 240 measure words in total. One of the most used measure words is 个 (gѐ) that is used to count items that can be separated individually.

Example:

五个人 (Wŭ gѐ rén) = five people

我想买四个苹果 (Wŏ xiăng măi sì gѐ píng guŏ) = I want to buy four apples.  

他要一杯咖非 (Tā yào yībēi kāfēi) = He wants a cup of coffee

Here they use the measure word 杯.  

10.- Chinese is written today from left to right, same as most languages in the west. But this was not always the case. Years ago, Chinese was written from top to bottom. In this case, the page started from the top right and columns were advancing to the left. Still is possible to find old books written in this way. The page http://www.infoidiomas.com/blog/7350/conocias-estas-10-curiosidades-del-idioma-chino explains why (But in Spanish).

11.- Numbers can be used to insult somebody, The most common is to say that somebody is a “Two”. There are other ways that Numbers can be used to insult or say inappropriate things. I learnt this one from the page in Spanish http://blog.libros.universia.es/10-curiosidades-del-idioma-chino/

My Best wishes to my readers for the Chinese New Year!!!

鸡年快乐!        

恭喜发财!

新春愉快!