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Spoken
and Written Languages
The
Han people have their own spoken and written languages. Chinese
belongs to the Han-Tibetan language family. It is the most commonly
used language in China, and one of the most commonly used languages
in the world. Written Chinese emerged in its embryonic form of carved
symbols approximately 6,000 years ago. The Chinese characters used
today evolved from those used in bone and tortoise shell inscriptions
more than 3,000 years ago and the bronze inscriptions produced soon
after. Drawn figures were gradually reduced to patterned strokes,
pictographs were reduced to symbols, and the complicated graphs
became simpler. Early pictographs and ideographs were joined by
pictophonetic characters. In fact, there are six categories of Chinese
characters: pictographs, self-explanatory characters, associative
compounds, pictophonetic characters, phonetic loan characters, and
mutually explanatory characters. Chinese words are monosyllabic.
A large proportion of Chinese characters are composed of an ideogramatic
element combined with a phonetic element. Many non-Chinese sometimes
get the feeling that there are an unlimited number of Chinese characters.
How many Chinese characters are there exactly? The Qing Dynasty
Kang Xi Dictionary, completed in 1716, contains more than 47,000
characters. The eight-volume Hanyu Da Cidian (Chinese Lexicon) published
in 1986-1990 contains over 56,000 characters. However, only about
3,000 characters are in common use. In addition to their functional
value as symbols for records and communications, Chinese characters
have an aesthetic value as calligraphy.
All
China??s 55 minority peoples have their own languages except the Hui
and Manchu, who use Chinese; 21 of these have a written form, using
27 kinds of languages. Five language families are represented in China:
29, including Zhuang, Dai, Tibetan, Yi, Miao and Yao, are within the
Han-Tibetan language family; 17, including Uygur, Kazak, Mongolian
and Korean, are within the Altaic language family; three, the Va,
Deang and Blang, are within the South Asian language family; Tajik
and Russian belong to the Indo-European language family; and Gaoshan
is an Austronesian language. The Jing language has yet to be classified
typologically. Nowadays, classes in schools in predominantly national
minority areas are taught in the local language, using local language
textbooks. |
