Chinese, Zhongwen, Hanyu

China, as a name of language in English, refers to the subgroup Sinitic languages Sino-Tibetan in Asia. But it can be translated to several Chinese names for the language that covers many different ideas depending on the context.

Firstly, China can be translated as zhongwen generally referring to the language. Zhongwen is also the correct term for the academic discipline in the study of Chinese language and literature, such as zhongwenxi for the Department of Chinese at a university environment.

Secondly, the hanyu word "Han language" used in the context contrasting languages spoken by the nationality of have that 92% of 1.300 million Chinese citizens of the people's Republic with all languages have not spoken in China and the rest of the world. Therefore, foreign students who are now learning Chinese say to go learn hanyu.

Thirdly, when hanyu is a general term for the languages, many of which are mutually unintelligible between speakers of different varieties of language have, by default refers to the standard dialect of the country known as putonghua literally means "common language" in the people's Republic. Putonghua is a constructed language-based standard, a variety of Chinese North, spoken in the capital city, Beijing. On the other hand, China corresponds to a number of Chinese equivalent on the basis of the given speech community.

Traditionally, the Chinese have are divided into seven main groups dialect, Mandarin (or beifanghua of northern China), Wu, Xiang, Gan, Kejia (Hakka), Yue (Cantonese), Min. Although sharing a large number of cognates or words of common origin, Chinese dialects vary considerably more in their sound systems. All Chinese dialects have tones with contours of different tone for each syllable.

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Chinese writing system

The first fully developed Chinese writing as we know it today the inscriptions on tortoise shells and ox shoulder blades, commonly known as script of Oracle bone that appeared in the mid-Millennium BC, during the late Shang dynasty.

Unlike a phonographic writing as that of English where each letter of the alphabet encoded a telephone, write China is a logographic with each grapheme (or character) system simultaneously encoding sounds and what it means that the level of the syllable. As a logographic system, Chinese script has the great advantage that is not necessary for a person who knows how to decode the writing system to learn how to pronounce the characters to be able to read messages written on them.

Writing Chinese, however, it is not only a system of Visual cues or ideograms, which represent various concepts or ideas that are completely divorced from the pronunciation. A literary speaker in any Chinese dialect may immediately pronounce a Chinese character in its own dialect. The character, as a logographic with a simple graphic structure, makes do not represent any phone determined within a Word, but a syllable associated with a Chinese morpheme written as a representation of the morpheme-syllable system is systematically phoneticized, i.e., the characters are readable.

In modern Chinese, characters, or graphemes are known as hanzi, literally "Have characters" is named after the dynasty have (206 BCE-220 CE). It was during the dynasty have said written Chinese was largely standardized at a time when writing brushes, ink, ink and paper, stone wenfang sibao "four treasures in a Studio", became standard tools of Chinese writing.

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