Some Characteristics of Chinese
Characteristics of Chinese
To us, perhaps the most striking feature of spoken Chinese is the use of variation in tone ("tones") to distinguish the different meanings of syllables which would otherwise sound alike. All languages, and Chinese is no exception, make use of sentence intonation to indicate how whole sentences are to be understood. In English, for example, the rising pattern in "He's gone?" tells us that the sentence is meant as a. question. The Chinese tones, however, are quite a different matter. They belong to individual syllables, not to the sentence as a whole. An inherent part of each Standard Chinese syllable is one of four distinctive tones. The tone does ,just as much to distinguish the syllable as do the consonants and vowels. For example, the only difference between the verb "to buy," mäi, and the verb "to sell," È, is the Low tone and the Falling tone_(T). And yet these words are Just as distinguishable as our words "blur" and "guy," or "buy" and "boy." Apart from the tones, the sound system of Standard Chinese is no more different from English than French is.
word formation in Standard Chinese is relatively simple. For one thing, there are no conjugatíons such as are found in many European languages. Chinese verbs have fewer forms than English verbs, and nowhere near as many irregularities. Chinese grammar relies heavily on word order and often the word order is the same as in English. For these reasons Chinese is not as difficult for Americans to learn to speak as one might think.
It is often said that Chinese is a monosyllabìc language. This notion contains a good deal of truth. It has been found that, on the average, every other word in ordinary conversation is a single-syllable word. Moreover, although most words in the dictionary have two syllables, and some have more, these words can almost always be broken down into single-syllable units of meaning, many of which can stand alone as words.
Vocabulary