Chinese as a Spoken Language

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Chinese as a Spoken Language

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This lecture gives a detailed introduction to modern Mandarin as a spoken language. At the hand of examples like syllables and tone usage, it explains the nature of speaking Chinese, then and now. Comparing it with other languages, it dissects the specifics of speaking Chinese through the connection of character and tone. Focusing on elements such as pronunciation, syllables, measure words, and the concept of synonym compound, it explains how spoken Chinese works in practice. Among these factors, synonym compounds, two characters that are connected in their meaning, make Chinese a more contextual language.

Introduction

This lecture gives a detailed introduction to modern Mandarin as a spoken language, explains the nature of speaking Chinese.

About The Author

Guy S. Alitto one of the best sinologists of modern times, Guy Alitto is an American academic in the History and East Asian Languages and Civilization Departments at the University of Chicago. He is known in China for revitalizing the scholarship on Chinese Confucian scholar Liang Shuming. He is best known in America for his scholarship and for his role as translator for the first official Chinese delegations to the United States after Richard Nixon’s first visits to China.

About this video

Author(s): Guy S. Alitto
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-7200-5
Online ISBN: 978-981-99-7200-5
Total duration: 18 min
Publisher: Springer, Singapore

Video Transcript

We’ve been speaking primarily of the written language so far, so how does this written language relate to the spoken language? This is indeed a complex problem. We don’t know. The first indications that we have of how characters were read come from certain instruments of rhyming dictionaries, certain other dictionaries and so on. So we do know that there has been an evolution of pronunciation of various various severe sorts over time.

The nature of the spoken language of course shares certain features with the written language. Let us talk about these features, especially in comparison to, let’s say, Indo-European languages.

Introduction

About The Author

About this video

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