JAL328H1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Standard Chinese, Beijing Dialect, Phonetic Extensions
Document Summary
Radical: contributes semantic content tells us what the meaning of the character is. Radicals + bases = bound allographs (they can only occur in a certain context, not freely) Classical chinese (wenyan): script and language kept developing. Standardized -> written language and later replaced by contemporary written language. While it was written for a long time, the spoken language changed. Modern standard chinese: based on beijing dialect. Officially regulated as main form of communication regardless of dialect. Tonal language; tones: pitch changes -> lexical contrasts. Cantonese: 6 (high, mid, 3, 4, low-falling, low-rising) Pinyin: standard roman transliteration; shape of vowel diacritics -> tone contour. Truly syllabic: one character represents one entire syllable that can"t be broken down into other parts. Not just cv units; glides (first vowel followed by another vowel) too. If the orthography is complex -> doesn"t mean the phonology etc. is complex. Pictograms got stylized into modern morphograms into more abstract concepts.
