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Topic: Sinitic languages

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	Sino-Tibetan languages Summary
		Whereas the sole constituents of Sinitic are the variants of Chinese (which are mostly, but quite misleadingly, referred to as the "dialects" of Chinese), the Tibeto-Burman branch numbers several hundred often poorly known languages and language groups, the proper linguistic classification of which is still largely a task for future research.
		Newari, the language of the original inhabitants of the Kathmandu valley, was written in Devanagari script beginning in the seventeenth century (with at least one manuscript dated as early as the fourteenth century).
		On the Sinitic side, the last decades of the twentieth century saw a great deal of progress in our understanding of the phonological prehistory of Chinese, though too many details are still the subject of controversies to be able to speak of a general consensus on the sound-shape of early Chinese.
	www.bookrags.com /Sino-Tibetan_languages (2063 words)

	Chinese FAQs for Students of Chinese and PMs who handle Chinese (Chinese) (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-03)
		Therefore, the starting point must be a comparison of the modern Sinitic languages, with the view of recovering for each major language group the original common form, such as Proto-Mandarin for the Northern languages and Proto-Wu and others for the languages south of the Yangtze River.
		The New Southern stratum in Sinitic languages is characterized by early change of final articulation types into tones, extensive development of registers according to type of initial consonant, and late or no loss of final stops.
		For a long time the Ch'ieh-yün dictionary was assumed to represent the language of the capital of the Sui dynasty, Ch'ang-an (in the present province of Shensi), but research has demonstrated that its major component was the language of the present-day Nanking area with a certain attempt at compromise with other speech habits.
	www.proz.com /post/322010 (6517 words)

	Languages And Writing (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-03)
		South of the Sinitics were Austronesians and the ancestors of Austro-Asiatics (Thais and Laotians).
		Chinese languages, almost exclusively monosyllabic, are tonal--any syllable can be intoned in between four and six different ways--and they lack certain phonetic values, all of which makes characters clumsy for the transcription of non-Chinese sounds.
		Cuneiform was adaptable to other polysyllabic languages and was used for Semitic languages, such as Akkadian; for Elamite, another probably isolate; and for the Indo-European language of the Hittites.
	www.worldhistoryplus.com /articles/19_language.htm (733 words)

	Spoken Chinese Summary
		The vast majority of Sinitic language speakers (nearly 1.3 billion) are found in the People's Republic of China and Taiwan, but approximately 60 million speakers are located in Southeast Asia, North America, Europe, and elsewhere.
		The Sinitic languages are usually classified as belonging to the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family.
		In addition, the Dungan language (東干語/东干语) is a language descended from Chinese spoken in Kyrgyzstan, and is akin to northwestern dialects of Mandarin.
	www.bookrags.com /Spoken_Chinese (3104 words)

	The U of MT -- Mansfield Library LangFing Sinitic-Daic
		Sinitic and Daic are 2 of the branches comprising the Sino-Tibetan family of languages.
		Please note that this language is not to be confused with Manchu, a Tungusic language belonging to the Altaic branch of the Ural-Altaic family.
		Manchu was the language of the rulers during the Manchu Dynasty in China and Central Asia.
	www.lib.umt.edu /guide/lang/sinizhuh.htm (1159 words)

	UH Press: Books and Journals published by the University of Hawaii Press
		Sinitic is often said to have eight (or more) major fangyan ('topolects'--see the discussion of terms at the conclusion of the Preface).
		The internal development of Sinitic is equally intricate, such that historical linguists are still seriously puzzled over the relationships among the various fangyan, the phonology of their earlier stages, and the identification of the fundamental etyma for the group en masse.
		Chinese culture (including Sinitic languages) marched southward slowly during the latter part of the first millennium B.C.E., gained momentum during the first millennium C.E., and was far from reaching its culmination even by the end of the twentieth century.
	www.uhpress.hawaii.edu /books/chinesereader/intro.html (3706 words)

	Chinese Dialects FAQ
		Because of the sheer size of China and the number of various languages spoken there, teaching everybody Mandarin and making it the national standard has been a very long journey, and even now with less than 30 years to go, most of the languages and dialects are thriving.
		Or, a language that is spread out over a large area where travel between cities is difficult could cut a language up letting each area develop independently of each other.
		Compare this with European languages of separate branches: English and Russian have 24%, French and German have 29%, English and French have 27%, and two Germanic languages: English and German have 60% (source: Ethnologue), which is still twice as high as Mandarin and Wu.
	www.glossika.com /en/dict/faq.php (4536 words)

	Tibeto-Burman Languages Page
		The TB branch consists of 2-300 languages spoken primarily in the uplands of Inner, South, and Southeast Asia.
		TB languages are found from Sichuan and Qinghai in the north to the southern extremity of Myanmar, and from northwestern Vietnam in the east to northern Pakistan in the west.
		Most TB languages are identifiable as such on the basis of easily recognizable shared vocabulary, and while interesting divergences in grammatical structure are found, they are not for the most part of the gross nature found in families such as Indo-European or Afroasiatic.
	www.uoregon.edu /~delancey/tb.html (721 words)

	IIAS - The Syntax of the languages of Southern China (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-03)
		In view of the aim of the enterprise as a whole (gaining insight in the structure of human language in general), combined with the fact that languages the world over can be very different, this situation is not really acceptable.
		Furthermore in the nominal domain, the way in which nouns are modified in these languages, especially when possession is concerned, is very interesting, also because of the role the classifiers play in a subset of these languages.
		As to the Sinitic languages these factors lead us to pick one from each of the three main sub-groupings: Yue from the southern group, Wu from the middle group, Mandarin from the northern group; most Chinese living in the Netherlands come from Yue and Wu speaking areas (Hong Kong and Wenzhou respectively).
	www.iias.nl /iias/show/id=44676/frameid=41513 (1332 words)

	Sinitic
		In her "Introduction," the editor lays out the rationale for the whole book, which is to take a synchronic and diachronic look at Sinitic languages, with the emphasis definitely on the plural.
		I have been using the word "Sinitic" for decades as an umbrella term to refer to all the languages spoken by the people who style themselves "Han," both in their modern forms and in their earlier stages.
		The organizers of the conference where the papers were first presented and the editor of Sinitic Grammar, together with the individual authors, are to be warmly congratulated for making a major contribution to our understanding of the nature and history of the Sinitic language group.
	www.sino-platonic.org /abstracts/spp145_sinitic.html (1817 words)

	China History Forum, chinese history forum > Thai language is sino-tibetan
		Jan 7 2006, 09:27 AM The thai language is placed as one of the 3 branches of the sino-tibetan language family by some linguist ie.
		Languages within the same language family means that it is easier to learn than a language outside the language family.
		Languages within the same language family means that it is easier to learn than a language outside the language.
	www.chinahistoryforum.com /lofiversion/index.php/t9247.html (7404 words)

	Chinese language - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Cantonese is unique among non-Mandarin regional languages in having a written colloquial standard, used in Hong Kong and by non-Standard Mandarin speaking Cantonese speakers overseas, with a large number of unofficial characters for words particular to this variety of Chinese.
		The Dungan language, considered a dialect of Mandarin, is also nowadays written in Cyrillic, and was formerly written in the Arabic alphabet, although the Dungan people live outside China.
		Old Chinese (T:上古漢語S:上古汉语P:Shànggǔ Hànyǔ), sometimes known as "Archaic Chinese," was the language common during the early and middle Zhōu Dynasty (1122 BC - 256 BC), texts of which include inscriptions on bronze artifacts, the poetry of the Shījīng, the history of the Shūjīng, and portions of the Yìjīng (I Ching).
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Chinese_languages (6630 words)

	Shanghai Dialect Introduction
		The Chinese Common Language (Putonghua) is derived from the Beijing dialect of Mandarin.
		Supporters of language status also argue that the universality of Classical Literary Chinese (no longer practically used today) was no more different than that of formal Latin used in Western Europe after the fall of Rome, and that the characters today only create the illusion (through cultural identity) of uniting the various regionalects.
		Due to the existing large population size of Mandarin speakers in China (70% of all Chinese), its relative phonological simplicity, and its adoption as the court language of the Ming and Qing dynasties, Mandarin (specifically the Beijing dialect) was selected as the base for the new national common language.
	www.zanhei.com /intro.html (2355 words)

	Results \| Languages (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-03)
		This is probably due to the use of a homogeneous elite language medium in the texts that happen to be preserved for us to read, and not to any genuine linguistic uniformity at the time.
		There is no doubt that Sinitic tended to occlude or replace other local languages; we are here concerned with the survivals of non-Sinitic words desipte that assimilation process.
		There is a special section in the latter category for the Indo-European vocabulary of whatever group it was that introduced the Mesopotamian war chariot into China during Shang, thus producing a permanent shift in the power structure in East Asia.
	www.umass.edu /wsp/results/languages/index.html (202 words)

	Taiwanese, Mandarin, and Taiwan's language situation
		Mandarin is not native to Taiwan, yet it is the national language of Taiwan's citizens and is the sole official written language.
		The Fundamental Unwritability of the Nonstandard Sinitic Languages
		Their belief is premised on the notion that words lacking characters are actually old usages that have survived in the spoken language and that all one has to do to remedy the deficiency is assiduously comb early lexicons and rhyme books for characters that sound more or less right and mean approximately the same thing.
	pinyin.info /readings/mair/taiwanese.html (11512 words)

	Chinese Translation and Localization Services- Mandarin, Cantonese, Traditional, Simplified. Facts and information ...
		A common misconception is that Chinese is a single language, when in fact it is the name given to a vast group of languages spoken in the region of China.
		Like the Romance Languages, Chinese is the name of a group of closely related languages of which speakers of one cannot necessarily understand speakers of another.
		The mixed use of Sinitic languages is complex and yet forms a national unity of the language, and thus the common name: Chinese.
	www.advancedlanguage.com /chinese.htm (1947 words)

	Peking / Beijing
		This leads to one of the greatest conceptual difficulties in dealing with Chinese (or Sinitic) languages, namely the fact that there is not just one of them.
		Among Sinitic languages, there are at least seven or eight major branches that are mutually unintelligible.
		One of the causes for this obfuscation concerning Sinitic languages is the fact that there is only a single Sinitic script, normally referred to by the quaint expression "Chinese characters," but better designated by the English equivalent of the native term fangkuaizi ("tetragraphs," i.e.
	www.sino-platonic.org /abstracts/spp019_peking_beijing.html (545 words)

	China - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		The Qin Dynasty unified the written language in China and gave the supreme ruler of China the title of "Emperor" instead of "King," thus the subsequent Silk Road traders might have identified themselves by that name.
		Putonghua (Standard Mandarin, literally Common Speech) is the official language and is based on the Beijing dialect of the Mandarin group of dialects spoken in northern and southwestern China.
		It is the language used in the media, for formal purposes, and by the government.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Sinitic (5189 words)

	Global London - Chinese
		Various languages are spoken in China, all of which share a common logographic written form.
		There is thus a single written language which can legitimately be called Chinese but this word cannot be applied unambiguously to any single language spoken in China.
		The most important Sinitic languages of China are Mandarin (which has official status and for which the government prefers the name Putonghua, ‘commonly understood language’), Wu, Cantonese (known as Yue within China), Hokkien, Xiang and Hakka.
	www.global-london.com /chinese/languages.htm (169 words)

	Study Chinese Abroad with StudyAbroad.com - The Study Abroad Information Source
		Chinese languages, also called the Sinitic languages, are categorized into numerous dialects; however, modern scholars usually classify them as separate languages.
		One element common in all the Chinese dialects is their written language called wen-yen, which consists of characters and is based on a common body of literature.
		Other unique features of the language include: few prefixes, but many suffixes; a word can act as any part of speech (noun, verb, etc.); there is no word inflection (emphasis placed on a particular word in a sentence); and the language has no definite article ('the').
	www.studyabroad.com /lom/chinese.html (687 words)

	LANGUAGES
		Official home page of Lojban, an artificial language designed in the late 1980s as a further development from a language called Loglan, with the particular design requirements of being culturally neutral, based on the principles of logic, having an unambiguous grammar and suitable eventually for communication between people and computers.
		Tariq Rahman, Asian Studies at the University of Texas, Austin, TX Scholarly article claiming to demonstrate that the language of the prehistoric Indus Valley Civilization belonged to the Dravidian family.
		A rather unsytematic collection of data on the language that is the mother tongue of the majority of inhabitants of Taiwan.
	www.tundria.com /LANGLANG.HTM (2134 words)

	Pinyin news » Blog Archive » toneless whispers and tonal languages
		John at Sinosplice discusses how speakers of Sinitic languages, which are tonal, can understand whispered speech, which is not tonal.
		It turns out that when people whisper a tonal language such as Chinese, they naturally compensate for the lack of tones.
		This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 22nd, 2006 at 5:21 pm and is filed under Chinese, languages, psycholinguistics, Mandarin.
	pinyin.info /news/2006/toneless-whispers-and-tonal-languages (342 words)

	Pinyin Orthographical Rules for Libraries
		If they are familiar with any of the Sinitic languages, they must have been given extremely bad advice by software designers who are totally ignorant of any Sinitic language(s).
		Computers have a devil of a time making sense of Mandarin (or any other Sinitic language) when it is written out syllable by syllable, but they do infinitely better when users are kind to them and feed them whole words.
		So it is obtuse and obstructionist to pretend that Sinitic languages consist only of syllables and lack words.
	www.white-clouds.com /iclc/cliej/cl10mair.htm (1106 words)

	Amazon.com: "Northern Sinitic": Key Phrase page (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-03)
		1 7.1.3 Northern Sinitic style p-not-p polar questions Northern Sinitic languages provide a further method of polar question formation, with a preferred pattern p-not-p,...
		languages, the Sinitic languages (or Chinese dialects) are the most important and best known.
		These may broadly be divided into Northern Sinitic and Southern Sinitic languages.
	www.amazon.com /phrase/Northern-Sinitic (421 words)

	sci.lang: Re: Origin of Chinese spoken languages - 7th evidence
		Re: Origin of Chinese spoken languages - 7th evidence
		have said or assumed that Sinitic languages are...
		languages across the Old World, we may see there are two main bundles...
	sci.tech-archive.net /Archive/sci.lang/2004-10/2902.html (1244 words)

	Stephen Matthews (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-03)
		Stephen Matthews specialises in language typology, syntax and semantics.
		His current interests include the word order typology of Chinese; the grammar of Chinese dialects, notably Cantonese, Chaozhou and other Minnan dialects; language contact and bilingualism, with particular reference to Sinitic languages.
		Matthews, S. Verb fronting in French and Sinitic vernaculars: a comparative study inspired by Chris Corne.
	www.hku.hk /linguist/staff/sjm.html (463 words)

	Thai numbers come from Cantonese?
		I know Thai is not related to the Sinitic languages, but I can't help
		I think there is some difference of opinion as to whether or not Thai is related to the Sinitic
		Benedict found vocabulary correspondences between Thai and Austronesian, but there are
	www.groupsrv.com /science/about6778.html (749 words)

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