Long time, no see!

How long it has been since I posted last!

In light of my impending trip to Taiwan, I'd like today to write about Chinese Language, or Zhong Wen, or Han Yu, depending on the specific thing we're talking about. (Zhōng Wén, or 中文, is the written language, and Hàn Yǔ, or 漢語 more usually refers to the spoken.)

Chinese's influence is broad and varied, and it's importance is increasingly obvious as the country gains economic and political prowess. So why not dive in?

Chinese is a tonal language, employing four tones, and one neutral tone. The tones make similarly sounding words completely different words to Chinese speakers' ears as the link will show.

As an analytic language, Chinese gets a lot of it's meaning from the word order in sentences. This is very similar to English: "The dog bit the boy," is quite a different sentence in English from "The boy bit the dog." The same goes for Chinese. Directions of verbs from subject to object are indicated by the order in which the nouns appear. So "我愛你" (wǒ aì nǐ) means "I love you," and not the other way around.

Another important thing to remember, is that Chinese has hundreds of dialects, many of which are completely unintelligible to one another. Usually when people talk about Chinese, they're talking about Mandarin Chinese, kind of the central government's dialect. Many Chinese people (and East Asians, for that matter) speak fluent Mandarin along with their local dialect.

Chinese hasn't had much interplay with the more western languages, largely because they're so different, but some words that English has from Chinese are katsup (from ke tziap for a condiment previously used in the Roman Empire), kowtow (from kou tou) and the phrase, "Long time, no see," (literally translated from hǎo jǐu bú jiàn). Notice how each word or phrase goes from a tonal and distinctly Chinese pronunciation, to an Anglicized version of the word fitting our phonetic system, and then gets smashed together as we repeat the word or phrase. This is very common, if not ubiquitous in borrowings from other languages.

Lastly, here's a vid that tries to teach a bit of basic Hàn Yǔ. You can get a feel for how Chinese sentences are formed, and hear the tonal differences in words. Keep in mind that Chinese is a language that comes with a whole different way of thinking; that's how "You Good," can mean something slightly different than the words separately. Cheers!