Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics

Chao Yuan Ren (Zhào Yuánrèn 趙元任), often abbreviated as “Y.R. Chao”, courtesy name Xuānzhòng 宣重 (3 November 1892 in Tiānjīn 天津 – 25 February 1982 in Cambridge, Mass.), was the first linguist from China to make major contributions to linguistics in both China and the West. He was born when China was still ruled by the Qīng (Manchu) Dynasty, one of his ancestors being the famous poet and criticial historiographer Zhào Yì 趙翼 (1727–1814). He thus received a traditional Confucian education, but as beneficiary of a scholarship from the “Boxer Indemnity Fund” ( gēngzǐ 庚子 [or quánluàn 拳亂] péikuǎn 賠款)…

Character amnesia (in Chinese: tíbǐwàngzì 提筆忘字 ‘lifting one’s pen but forgetting the characters’) is the name for the phenomenon that people forget how to write Chinese characters which they previously were able to write. In most cases, the characters are not forgotten completely. Some people may remember the shape of the characters, but cannot remember the exact strokes to write them. Some may write the characters incorrectly, such as placing the components within a character in the wrong positions…

The first character frequency count based on a corpus of texts written in the modern Chinese vernacular was conducted by the educator Chén Hèqín 陳鶴琴 (1892–1982) in Nánjīng 南京. Chén and his collaborators were inspired by Thorndike (1921). They counted the character frequency in a corpus of 554,478 tokens, finding 4,261 character types altogether (Chén 1928). In the 1950s, several character frequency counts were carried out in the People’s Republic of China in order to determine which traditional full-form characters most urgently needed to be simplifi…

This lemma discusses the neural correlates of Chinese character recognition and phonological access based on neuroimaging techniques. For studies linking these issues with acquired dyslexia and dysgraphia, Acquired Dyslexia and Dysgraphia. While traditional lesion studies of acquired dyslexia and dysgraphia have the potential of informing us about neural substrates underlying orthographic processing and phonological access, they are severely limited in their capacity for generalization and specification of lesion-behavior rel…

Chéngyǔ 成語 (lit. composed words) represent a peculiar form of patterned idioms in Chinese, both in the written and the spoken language. The term chéngyǔ can be traced back at least to the Táng dynasty (618–907 BCE), conveying several ideas of “structured” or “elaborated” sentences. Later on, it came to denote a field of philological study cultivated by the literati. A testimony to this effort, i.e., a list of 223 items compiled by the scholar Zhào Yì 趙翼 (1727–1814) in his Gāiyú cóngkǎo 陔餘叢考 (43:829 seq.) reveals, however, that he understood the term chéngyǔ in the sense of “well-coined …

1. Chinese Influence on Japanese The emergence of writing in Japan is inextricably linked with the Chinese writing system. From scattered earlier instances of writing produced by immigrant scribal craftsmen Japan transformed into a literate society during the 7th century following closer contacts with China and Korea, the spread of Buddhism, and attempts of the Yamato 大和 rulers to build a Chinese-style administration. From these beginnings until the modern period, the Chinese script ( kanji 漢字) remained the “ultimate basis of all Japanese writing” (Lurie 2011:170), e…

This article explores the relationship between Chinese and Korean. The ancestry of the Korean language has been and remains a matter of controversy to the present day. Altaic (Tungusic in particular) and Japanese have been the most plausible candidates for genetic affinity with Korean. Recently, however, historical phonologists have reported a number of indigenous Korean words that seem to be related with Old Chinese. These seemingly native Korean words that are nevertheless similar to Old Chine…

Thai (the official language of Thailand, also known as Siamese) has a long and complex history of linguistic interaction with Chinese, including several layers of borrowing of Chinese vocabulary resulting from various kinds of language contact and population movements. It is safe to say that Chinese and Thai have been in intense contact for many centuries. Ancestors of Chinese and Thai people have been interacting with each other since ancient times, well before what is recorded in the earliest …

During the almost thousand years of Chinese colonialism in Vietnam (111 BCE–939 CE), the languages of Vietnam have been influenced by Sinitic languages in many respects, such as vocabulary, phonology, and syntax. After gaining independence from China, the Vietnamese goverments continued to use written Chinese as the official language for most administrative documents, including annals and laws, because it was in the process of creating a nation based on the Chinese cultural and administrative model, and its Confucian ideologies. At the same time, the examination system ( kējǔ 科舉)…

Contemporary Chinese language pedagogy in the United States started its boom in the late 1990s, with the number of learners steadily increasing at the university level. The number of students learning Chinese in United States institutions of higher education jumped from 5,697 between 1998 and 2002 to 17,429 in 2006 (Furman et al. 2007:3). In 2009, the number reached 60,976 (Furman et al. 2010:3). Over the years, Chinese language pedagogy has absorbed theories from teaching English as a second/foreign language, second language acquisition, and Chinese lingu…

1. Definition and Aims Foreign Language Acquisition in general is a rather complex discipline that acts in between linguistics, educational sciences, psychology and cultural studies, with the aim to find effective ways to teach and learn a certain foreign language. Until the 1990s, this discipline remained mainly within the scope of European languages. Globalization and the rise of China and the Chinese language (with Arabic and Japanese as other non-Indo-european foreign languages becoming popular)…

Acquisition of Chinese as a second language (CSL or L2 Chinese) is a newly developed discipline that aims to study the process by which non-Chinese speakers learn Chinese as a second or foreign language. The language produced by CSL learners is interlanguage in CSL. According to Selinker’s interlanguage theory (Selinker 1972, Selinker et al. 1975), interlanguage is a separate linguistic system, which is distinct from both the first and the target language and evolves over time as learners employ various cognitive strategies to make sense of the target language input. 1. History Large-s…

The systematic study of foreign language acquisition involves a multidisciplinary approach of which linguistics is but one component, along with psychology, neuroscience, social science, cultural studies, computer science, and other fields. This article foregrounds linguistic issues involved in the teaching and learning of Chinese by non-native learners. For the sake of brevity, some limitations and generalizations are inevitable. First, non-native learners in this article are understood as Western learners. Questions surrounding heritage learners, i.e., ethnic…

1. The Resurgence of China’s Economy and the Rise of Chinese Phrases such as “China Rising”, “China’s Century”, and “China Threat” are ubiquitous in both academic and mass media headlines and reports in the 21st century, reflecting the increasing economic power and political clout of China in relation to other nations whose economies seem to be declining rather than rising. In 2010, China’s GDP was valued at $5.87 trillion, surpassing Japan’s $5.47 trillion. China became the world’s second largest economy.…

Heritage language (HL) has been associated with a variety of terms and definitions, depending on the context it is situated in or the perspective it is viewed from. It is called home language in bilingual education, ancestral/ethnic language in immigrant/indigenous communities, and heritage language in relation to one’s family heritage. In educational settings, HL is often defined by learner proficiency. For instance, in the United States, it is defined as follows: “A heritage learner is a stude…

1. Introduction From the 17th to the 20th century, it was generally assumed that Chinese was a monosyllabic language. Ineichen (1987:268) traces the origin of this idea back to the 17th century, to the works of Jesuits Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) and Joseph Henri Marie de Prémare (1666-1736). In the following centuries, linguists, sinologists, and missionaries all referred to Chinese as monosyllabic as can be seen in Webb (1669:191), Doolittle (1865:62–63), Giles (1902:10–11), Williams (1913:609–610), Saunders (1921:27–28), Jespersen (1922:369), and Karlgren (1923:24). Criticis…

Chinese characters are the indigenous writing system of China. That writing system is among the handful of independent inventions of writing by human beings, along with Sumerian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Mayan hieroglyphs. But Chinese characters are unique in being the only such writing system to have been in continuous use up to the present day. For thousands of years, they have not only functioned to write Sinitic languages, they have been borrowed and adapted to write many other languages of Asia. They remain a component of other modern writing systems, most notably (as kan…

Xià dynastyXià 夏ca. 2100–1600 BCEShāng dynastyShāng 商ca. 1600–1046 BCEZhōu dynastyZhōu 周ca. 1046–256 BCE Western Zhōu dynastyXī Zhōu 西周ca. 1046–771 BCE Eastern Zhōu dynastyDōng Zhōu 東周770–256 BCE Spring and Autumn periodChūnqiū 春秋770–476 BCE Warring States periodZhànguó 戰國475–221 BCEQín dynastyQín 秦221–207 BCEHàn dynastyHàn 漢206 BCE–220 CE Western Hàn dynastyXī Hàn 西漢206 BCE–9 CE Xīn dynastyXīn 新9–23 Eastern Hàn dynastyDōng Hàn 東漢25–220Six DynastiesLiù Cháo 六朝220–589 Three KingdomsSān Guó 三國220–280 Wèi dynastyWèi 魏220–265 Shǔ dynastyShǔ 蜀221–263 Wú dynastyWú 吳222–280 …

The history of Chinese immigration to Australia dates back to the earliest days of the British Colony, not long after Australia was established in 1788. The earliest recorded Chinese immigrant in Australia was Mak Sai Ying in 1818. But early 19th-century Chinese immigration was sporadic and limited to arrivals on trading ships that had passed through Asia on their way to Sydney Cove (Cushman 1984). In the 1840s when Australia faced the curtailing of the supply of convict labor, the Colonial authorities experimented with the importation of coolie labor mainly …

There were only 1,618 Chinese migrants in Italy in the mid 1980s (Ceccagno 2001), with some 500 living in Milan (Cologna and Farina 1997). Since the early 1980s, however, a novel situation had emerged in China of renewed migratory movements after a halt of more than 30 years. As a result of China’s growing integration into the global market economy and into the framework of the larger world migration patterns, international mobility from China soared. Growing numbers of so-called “new Chinese migrants” settled in the Americas, Australasia, and Europe. Europe became an attractive des…