Chinese measure words

The Chinese language (汉语/漢語, Pinyin: Hànyǔ, 华语/華語, Huáyǔ or 中文, Zhōngwén) forms part of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. About one-fifth of the people in the world speak some form of Chinese as their native language, making it the language with the most native speakers. In general, all varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic. However, Chinese is also distinguished for a high level of internal diversity. Regional variation between different variants/dialects is comparable t ...

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The traditional numbers are used by and for young children to give their ages, instead of using the age counter sai. Some counters, notably nichi 日 and nin 人 use the traditional numerals for some low numbers; exceptional cases for these counters are given in the table below. Counters beginning with h~ (including fu~) undergo (almost) regular changes in sound, when preceded by the numerals 1, 3, 6, 8, and 10. The table below illustrates the process for hon 本 but the same changes apply to ...

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Japanese counter word, Japanese counter word - Table of the traditional numerals, Japanese counter word - List of counters, Japanese counter word - Exceptions

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The map on the right depicts the subdivisions ("languages" or "dialect groups") within Chinese. The traditionally recognized seven main groups, in order of population size are: Mandarin 北方话/北方話 or 官話/官话 (old name) Wu 吳/吴 Cantonese 粵/粤 Min 閩/闽 Xiang 湘 Hakka 客家 or 客 Gan 贛/赣 Chinese linguists have recently distinguished 3 more groups from the traditional seven: ...

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Chinese language, Chinese language - Spoken Chinese, Chinese language - Language or language family?, Chinese language - Written Chinese, Chinese language - Chinese characters, Chinese language - History, Chinese language - Influence on other languages, Chinese language - Sounds, Chinese language - Romanization, Chinese language - Other Transcriptions, Chinese language - Morphology, Chinese language - Loanwords, Chinese language - Grammar

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The map on the right depicts the subdivisions ("languages" or "dialect groups") within Chinese. The traditionally recognized seven main groups, in order of population size are: Mandarin 官話/官话 or 北方方言(old name) Wu 吳/吴 Cantonese 粵/粤 Min 閩/闽 Xiang 湘 Hakka 客家 or 客 Gan 贛/赣 In parentheses above are the culturally dominant or representativ ...

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Chinese language, Chinese language - Spoken Chinese, Chinese language - Language or language family?, Chinese language - Written Chinese, Chinese language - Chinese characters, Chinese language - History, Chinese language - Influence on other languages, Chinese language - Sounds, Chinese language - Romanization, Chinese language - Other Transcriptions, Chinese language - Morphology, Chinese language - Loanwords, Chinese language - Grammar

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The map on the right depicts the subdivisions ("languages" or "dialect groups") within Chinese. The traditionally recognized seven main groups, in order of population size are: Mandarin 北方 or 官話/官话 (old name) Wu 吳/吴 Cantonese 粵/粤 Min 閩/闽 Xiang 湘 Hakka 客家 or 客 Gan 贛/赣 Chinese linguists have recently distinguished 3 more groups from the traditional seven: Jin 晉/晋 from Mandarin Hui 徽 from Wu ...

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Chinese language, Chinese language - Spoken Chinese, Chinese language - Language or language family?, Chinese language - Written Chinese, Chinese language - Chinese characters, Chinese language - History, Chinese language - Influence on other languages, Chinese language - Sounds, Chinese language - Romanization, Chinese language - Other Transcriptions, Chinese language - Morphology, Chinese language - Loanwords, Chinese language - Grammar

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In general, all spoken varieties of Chinese are isolating languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphology (changes in the form of the word through inflection). Because they are isolating languages, they make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. Chinese features Subject Verb Object word order, and like many other languages in East Asia, makes frequent use of the topic-comment construction to form sentences. Even though Chinese has no grammatical gender, it h ...

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Chinese language, Chinese language - Spoken Chinese, Chinese language - Language or language family?, Chinese language - Written Chinese, Chinese language - Chinese characters, Chinese language - History, Chinese language - Influence on other languages, Chinese language - Sounds, Chinese language - Romanization, Chinese language - Other Transcriptions, Chinese language - Morphology, Chinese language - Loanwords, Chinese language - Grammar

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Chinese morphology is strictly bound to a set number of syllables with a fairly rigid construction which are the morphemes, the smallest building blocks, of the language. Some of these single-syllable morphemes can stand alone as individual words, but contrary to what is often claimed, Chinese is not a monosyllabic language. Most words in the modern Chinese spoken varieties are in fact multisyllabic, consisting of more than one morphem ...

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Most linguists classify all of the variations of Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family and believe that there was an original language, called Proto-Sino-Tibetan, similar to Proto-Indo-European, from which the Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman languages descended. The relations between Chinese and other Sino-Tibetan languages are an area of active research, as is the attempt to reconstruct Proto-Sino-Tibetan. The main difficulty in this effort is that, while there is very good documentation that allows us to reconstruct the ancient sou ...

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Chinese language, Chinese language - Spoken Chinese, Chinese language - Language or language family?, Chinese language - Written Chinese, Chinese language - Chinese characters, Chinese language - History, Chinese language - Influence on other languages, Chinese language - Sounds, Chinese language - Romanization, Chinese language - Other Transcriptions, Chinese language - Morphology, Chinese language - Loanwords, Chinese language - Grammar

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The relationship among the Chinese spoken and written languages is complex. It is compounded by the fact that spoken variations evolved for centuries, since at least the late Han Dynasty, while written Chinese changed much less. Until the 20th century, most formal Chinese writing was done in wényán (文言), translated as Classical Chinese or Literary Chinese, which was very different from any spoken variety of Chinese, much as Classical Latin differs from modern Romance languages. Since the May Fourth Movement of 1919, the f ...

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Chinese languages have been phonetically transcribed into many other writing systems over the centuries. The phagsba script, for example, has been very helpful in reconstructing the pronunciation of pre-modern forms of Chinese. Zhuyin is still widely used in Taiwan's elementary schools. A comparison table of Zhuyin to Pinyin exists in the Zhuyin page. Syllables based on Pinyin and Zhuyin can also be compared by looking at the following pages: Pinyin table Zhuyin table There are also at least two systems of cyrillization ...

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Chinese language, Chinese language - Spoken Chinese, Chinese language - Language or language family?, Chinese language - Written Chinese, Chinese language - Chinese characters, Chinese language - History, Chinese language - Influence on other languages, Chinese language - Sounds, Chinese language - Romanization, Chinese language - Other Transcriptions, Chinese language - Morphology, Chinese language - Loanwords, Chinese language - Grammar

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Throughout history Chinese culture and politics has had a great influence on unrelated languages such as Korean, Vietnamese, and Japanese. Korean and Japanese both have writing systems employing Chinese characters (Hanzi), which are called Hanja and Kanji, respectively. The Vietnamese term for Chinese writing is Han Tu. It was the only available form to write the Vietnamese until the 14th century, used almost exclusively by Chinese-educated Vietnamese elites. From the 14th till late 19th century, Vietnamese was written with Chu Nom, a ...

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Chinese language, Chinese language - Spoken Chinese, Chinese language - Language or language family?, Chinese language - Written Chinese, Chinese language - Chinese characters, Chinese language - History, Chinese language - Influence on other languages, Chinese language - Sounds, Chinese language - Romanization, Chinese language - Other Transcriptions, Chinese language - Morphology, Chinese language - Loanwords, Chinese language - Grammar

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The phonological structure of each syllable consists of a nucleus consisting of a vowel (which can be a monophthong, diphthong, or even a triphthong in certain varieties) with an optional onset or coda consonant as well as a tone. There are some instances where a vowel is not used as a nucleus. An example of this is in Cantonese, where the nasal sonorant consonants /m/ and /ŋ/ can stand alone as their own syllable. Across all t ...

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Chinese language, Chinese language - Spoken Chinese, Chinese language - Language or language family?, Chinese language - Written Chinese, Chinese language - Chinese characters, Chinese language - History, Chinese language - Influence on other languages, Chinese language - Sounds, Chinese language - Romanization, Chinese language - Other Transcriptions, Chinese language - Morphology, Chinese language - Loanwords, Chinese language - Grammar

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Romanization is the process of transcribing a language in the Latin alphabet. There are many systems of romanization for the Chinese languages; this is due to the complex history of interaction between China and the West, and to the Chinese languages' lack of phonetic transcription until modern times. Chinese is first known to have been written in Latin characters by Western Christian missionaries of the 16th century, but may be written down by West ...

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Languages such as Ainu, Bangla (Bengali), Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Thai use measure words as the standard way of indicating the count of the number of items, rather than, as in most Indo-European languages, allowing numbers to count a noun directly. Measure word - Chinese. In Mandarin, nouns are not conjugated for singular or plural numerus; a noun without a classifier can be translated as either singular or plural. Classifiers are used when enumerating a count noun: Tā yǒu sān shuāng kuaìz ...

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Measure word, Measure word - Measure words in English, Measure word - Asian Languages, Measure word - Chinese, Measure word - Bangla Bengali, Measure word - Japanese

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In contrast to Asian languages and others, measure words are not grammatical in the case of most Indo-European languages including English. English does have a distinction between mass nouns and count nouns, and employs a small number of fixed words that can be considered semantically-oriented counters. Consider the following: five head of cattle (said by ranchers) ten stem of roses (said by florists) three pair of pants (or pairs) Note that the preceding measure words are singular in form. If they were plu ...

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Measure word, Measure word - Measure words in English, Measure word - Asian Languages, Measure word - Chinese, Measure word - Bangla Bengali, Measure word - Japanese

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