Putonghua

The term “Chinese language” is ambiguous. Chinese (or Chinese) is one of the two main branches of the Sino-Tibetan language family . The ambiguity of the term is caused by the fact that over a large territory occupied by the so-called. " Synitic " languages, a large group of diverse dialects of the Chinese language are used. These dialects vary quite strongly even at a small distance from each other; nevertheless, their genetic connection is unambiguously traced. Therefore, in linguistic science, the question of whether these varieties of the Chinese language are languages ​​or dialects remains open.

Traditionally, Chinese dialects are divided into 7 groups; Recently, 3 more groups stand out. The largest group in terms of the number of speakers and the territory covered is the group of northern dialects . On the basis of the dialects of this group (or rather, on the basis of the dialects common in Beijing and its environs), a standard Chinese language called Putonghua (translated as “common language”; for the written standard also exists is called Baihua “everyday language”). In Taiwan, the official language is called goyu ( Chinese trade. 國語 , ex. 国语 , pinyin : guóyǔ , literally: "state language"; the same name is used for putonghua in colloquial speech in Hong Kong and Macau ), in Singapore and Malaysia - huayu ( Chinese trade 標準 華語 , exercise 标准 华语 , pinyin : biāozhǔn huáyǔ , pall .: biaochzhun huayu , literally: “standard Chinese, standard Chinese”). There are very minor phonetic and lexical differences between these options, but they are all almost completely understood , and their names are often used as synonyms.

This article is devoted to the standard version of the Chinese language - putonghua. In the text of this article, the phrase "Chinese" is used in the meaning of "standard version of the Chinese language", unless otherwise specified.

In the literature of Western countries, putonghua is usually called Mandarin ("Mandarin"), but in the Western scientific community this term is used to denote the entire northern dialect group . For greater accuracy in the West, they use the term Standard Mandarin , which corresponds to the totality of all the above norms - putonghua , goyuy and huayuy . Tracing paper from this name - “Mandarin”, “Mandarin” or “Mandarin Chinese” is not used by the Russian academic and expert community, but is rarely found in some media ^[1] . For example: “ [The BBC stops] broadcasting in Ukrainian, Azerbaijani, Turkish, Vietnamese and Chinese (Mandarin) languages ” ^[2] .

An early informal oral form of communication ( guanhua ) on a North Chinese basis supposedly began to form with the transfer in 1266 of the Chinese capital to the place of modern Beijing (then called Zhongdu , then Dadu ) before the Yuan dynasty began ^[3] . Since the beginning of the 20th century, the official standard, known in 1909 as “ goyu ” (from the Japanese term “ kokugo (国語)” - “state language”) and later renamed into putonghua in the PRC , began to include not only written, but also oral rule.

The task of disseminating putonghua as an oral standard in areas of other Chinese languages (“dialects”) is specified in the 1982 Constitution of the PRC , but its distribution is rather slow. Thus, despite the widespread use of putonghua on radio and television, according to an official survey (2004), only 53% of the population of China can be explained by putonghua; 18% speak it at home; 42% use at school and at work ^[4] .

To determine the degree of possession of Putonghua, the Exam was introduced in the PRC since 1994 on the level of possession of Putonghua ( Chinese ex. Уп 水平 п , pinyin : pǔtōnghuà shuǐpíng cèshì (PSC) ), which quickly gained popularity with the increasing urbanization of China. There are several levels of proficiency in Putonghua that are assigned after passing the exam:

• 1-A ( Chinese: 一级 甲等 , pinyin : yījí jiǎděng ; number of errors: less than 3%) - it is often believed that they are owned by neat Peking; among the other Chinese, this level is quite rare - so, according to a study conducted in 2003 by the National Working Committee on Language and Writing ( Chinese ex. уп家 语言 文字 工作 委员会 ), in large cities this level was shown: in Beijing - 90%, Tianjin - 25%, Xi'an - 12%, Dalian - 10%, Shanghai - 3%, Nanjing - 2%, Chengdu - 1%, Guangzhou - 0.5%;
• 1-B (number of errors: less than 8%) - required to work as a correspondent on television or radio;
• 2-A (error rate: less than 13%) - required to work as a teacher of Chinese literature in a comprehensive school;
• 2-B (number of errors: less than 20%);
• 3-A (number of errors: less than 30%);
• 3-B (error rate: less than 40%) - only 53% of the Chinese population (about 700 million people) were able to pass this level according to the first study of language proficiency in China conducted in December 2004 ^[4] ; for an ordinary Chinese who does not speak one of the northern dialects, even to achieve this level, special training is necessary.

Nevertheless, many Chinese people are able to some extent understand the putonghua, even without being able to speak it.

The Chinese language (putonghua) belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family; broadly speaking, the Chinese language is one of its two main branches, which is sometimes called "synitic." It is mainly distributed in the Beijing area - the capital of China, but is also used throughout China as the official language. In addition, it is one of the 4 official languages ​​of Singapore .

The Chinese language in the broad sense is the record holder for the number of speakers in the world: 1,074,000,000 speakers in China, among which 896,000,000 speak it as their native language ( 70% of them speak the standard dialect) and 178,000,000 as the second language. The total number of carriers in the world is 1 107 162 230 people.

With a large number of hard-to-understand dialects, the standard Chinese language is a sub-dialect version of the language, the state language of the People’s Republic of China and the language of interethnic communication of the peoples of China. It is used in all spheres of life of the PRC, is one of the official languages ​​of the UN .

On the basis of the Chinese language there is a Russian-Chinese pidgin - the so-called. “ Kyakhta language ”, which borrows Russian vocabulary, but uses the rules of Chinese grammar.

Type (degree of freedom) of expression of grammatical meanings

A typical word form in putonghua consists of 1-2 morphemes bearing only lexical meaning, and grammatical meanings are expressed analytically , that is, using service words . A way of expressing grammatical meaning characteristic of Putonghua is with the help of phrasal particles , in which morphological or syntactic meanings are often expressed.

The nature of the boundary between morphemes

Putonghua is an isolating language (inflectional morphemes are almost never used), although there are cases of agglutinative affixation and even contact changes between morphemes, for example:

• phonetic: certain combinations in two-syllable words regularly receive tone transformations (for example, when a combination of two syllables with a descending-ascending tone, the tone of the first changes to ascending);
• with suffixation (for example, with the so-called “ retroflex suffix ” -er ), fusion phenomena can occur:

• Words with historical suffixes -zi and -tou omit these suffixes when joining others, but without suffixes these morphemes do not constitute the word:

Marking locus in a possessive noun phrase and predication

There is no vertex and dependent marking in predication :

In a possessive noun phrase , dependent marking is observed: an indicator (a particle de的, which is regularly used to grammatically define definitions in noun phrases) is attached to the dependent member of the noun phrase:

When expressing closely related relations, the particle de的 is omitted:

Role Encoding Type

Nouns are not marked with semantic and syntactic roles, therefore role coding is neutral:

Basic Word Order

The basic word order is SVO .

For minor members of the sentence in Chinese, a strict word order is fixed:

It is worth noting that the word order is tied not so much to the grammatical or syntactic characteristics of the secondary members as to their semantics :

Graphic

Speakers of all dialects of the Chinese language use hieroglyphic (ideographic) logosyllabic writing (a way of graphically representing sounding speech in which each character conveys one syllable), developed from pictographic characters . There is a Romanization system for putonghua - pinyin , as well as a system for transcribing the Chinese language into Russian - the Palladium system .

Phonological

Putonghua is an isolating tone language . Consonants and vowels form a limited number of tinted syllables of constant composition (excluding tones in Putonghua, there are only 414 different syllables, and taking tones into account, 1324). Each syllable in a word, as a rule, is a morpheme (rare exceptions are syllables in the composition of etymologically indistinguishable words ^[5] ). Moreover, morphemes that would be phonologically smaller than the syllable are absent in putonghua (the exception is the suffix 儿er , which does not form its own syllable) ^{[6] [7]} .

In putonghua, depending on the nature of the change in the frequency of the main voice tone in time, 4 tones are distinguished: 1st ( even ), 2nd ( ascending ), 3rd ( descending-ascending ) and 4th ( descending ) tone (in practice Teaching the Chinese language in Russian schools is sometimes characterized as a tuneful , inquiring , contented and abusive intonation ^[8] ). Tone acts as one of the main distinguishing sound means for distinguishing lexical meanings . Examples: 失shī (“lose”) - 十shí (“ten”) - 史shǐ (“history”) - 事shì (“business”); 媽mā ("mother") - 麻má ("hemp") - 马mǎ ("horse") - 骂mà ("scold") ^{[9] [10]} .

Statistical studies have shown that the functional “load” of tones in Putonghua is about as high as that of vowels ^[11] .

Putonghua is characterized by combinatorial tone transformations that occur during word formation when syllables with a certain tone are combined: tones can change or neutralize . Such transformations can be both regular and irregular. So, the syllable 一yī “one” in an isolated position is pronounced under the 1st tone, but in the phrase before the syllables of the 1st, 2nd or 3rd tone it is pronounced under the 4th tone (for example, 一yī + 年nián goes into yìnián ), and before the syllable of the 4th tone, under the 2nd tone (for example, 一yī + 定dìng goes into yídìng ) ^[12] .

Morphological

If in the ancient Chinese language the overwhelming majority of words were monosyllables, then in putonghua, according to the calculations of Chinese linguists, polysyllables prevail over monosyllables (75.4% and 24.6%, respectively); however, about 85% of polysyllabic words consist of two syllables, so the two-morphemic form of the word prevails. A monosyllabic word (also called a simple word ) is the primary lexical unit and has in its composition only one morpheme. The main way of word formation is word-combination (for example, 屏píng “obscure” + 風fēng “wind” gives 屏風píngfēng “screen, screen”); affixing is also common (relatively few affixes are agglutinative ) and conversion . A part of monosyllables that goes back to the ancient Chinese language is used only as components of polysyllabic words ^{[6] [13]} .

The inflectional word in putonghua is poorly developed and is represented mainly by verbal species suffixes. Nouns and personal pronouns have the form of collective plurality , formed using the suffix 们men , but for nouns this form has limited use (can be used for nouns denoting people, less often animals and birds) ^[14] .

Among the significant parts of speech in putonghua, a noun , an adjective , a numeral , a pronoun , a verb and an adverb are distinguished; among the service words are prepositions , postpositions , conjunctions , particles , classifiers , indicators of sentence members, neutralizers of predicativity. Special lexical elements and modal words are especially considered. This classification is not completely accepted, and there is no complete agreement between the representatives of various linguistic traditions ^[15] .

Syntax

Counting words

A peculiarity of the structure of a noun group in putonghua is the presence of countable words that necessarily appear before a noun when connecting it with a numeral, demonstrative pronoun or quantifier (except for cases when a noun denotes a measure of something; such a noun may well act as a classifier). The choice of classifier is determined by the noun, there are several dozen classifiers in the language.

Types of classifiers:

• counting words (measures of length, weight, etc.; collective ( aggregate ) - stack, herd; "containers" - box, bottle);
• abstract ("few");
• body parts (with a value like "___, full of something"), etc.

Классификатор ge относится к именным группам, обозначающим людей, но в современном путунхуа ge движется к статусу универсального классификатора, и многие носители используют его для других именных групп, не относящихся к людям.

Топико-комментариевая структура

Одной из характерных черт синтаксиса китайского языка является то, что, помимо ряда традиционных синтаксических ролей (подлежащее, прямое дополнение и т. д.), в структуре предложения выделяются коммуникативные единицы — топик и комментарий .

Фразовые частицы

В китайском, как в аналитическом языке, широко используются частицы для выражения морфологических (например, глагольного вида), синтаксических (например, принадлежности — см. раздел «Локус маркирования в посессивной именной группе»), дискурсивных и других значений.

Среди частиц интересны так называемые «оканчивающие предложение».

• Горелов В. И. Теоретическая грамматика китайского языка. — М. : Просвещение , 1989. — 318 с. — ISBN 5-09-002914-8 .
• Завьялова О. И. Путунхуа и диалекты: новые реалии китайского мира // Проблемы Дальнего Востока . — 2012. — № 6 . — С. 130—138 .
• Лу Динь, Орусбаев А. Китайский язык как язык межнационального общения в Китае // Вестник КРСУ . — 2003. — Т. 3, № 1 . — С. 130—138 . Архивировано 17 февраля 2012 года. (Проверено 6 ноября 2015)
• Софронов М. В. Китайский язык и китайское общество. — М. : Наука , 1979. — 312 с.
• 'Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar', Charles N. Li, Sandra A.. Thompson, Sandra A. Thompson, University of California Press, 18 июл. 1981 г.
• «Практический курс китайского языка», А. Ф. Кондрашевский, М. В. Румянцева, М. Г. Фролова, 12-е изд., 2016

• Завьялова О. И. Языковая ситуация и языковая политика в КНР (неопр.) . // Сайт Института Дальнего Востока РАН . Дата обращения 6 ноября 2015.
• 普通话 — статья из Байдупедии (кит.)