In Chinese, the number of tones varies greatly, there being anything from four to nine tones in a given dialect. They are characterised both by the pitch of the voice and by the tendency to the tone steady, rising, descending or savering. Mastery of the tones presents a great stumbling-block to foreigners, who find the principle difficult to grasp.
The Chinese written language is represented by characters and is the same for all areas, which means if two Chinese cannot speak to each other because of dialect difference, they can write each other a note, even though each character has a different dialectical pronunciation for the same meaning.
A great number of Chinese characters are
pictograms, that is, they are simplified pictures of things represented. For instance, the character for "sun" 1s represented by a circle with a dot in the middle and
water is originally represented by three flowing verticle lines. (See attached). These simple concepts can be combined to form new characters. For instance, the charac- ters for sun and moon together form the character for bright". These are called ideograms or ideographs.
The number of words needed for everyday living is about 3,000, but a working vocabulary adequate for, say, reading newspapers is 7,000 characters.
No comments yet.
Private notes are available after approval.