Tag: Mandarin

Learning Chinese characters An on line

Chineasy is a brand that sells products for learning Chinese characters. Chineasy has recently released a beta version of ‘Chineasy Atlas’, a web-based tool. The home page displays a 3-dimensional character cloud. Holding the cursor over any character displays basic information about the character: character pronunciation meaning for compound characters, the components and their meaning…… Continue reading Learning Chinese characters An on line

Days of the week in East Asia

Japanese and Korean name 5 days of the week using words for traditional elements (fire, water, wood, metal, earth) and use the words for moon and sun in naming Sunday and Monday. Both languages combine those components with a 2nd component meaning day of the week. Table 1 shows the Japanese and Korean names in…… Continue reading Days of the week in East Asia

Language or dialect

Two language varieties are often regarded as separate languages if they differ greatly and if speakers of each variety cannot easily understand the other variety.  They are often viewed as dialects of a single language if they differ little and if their speakers can readily understand each other. In between those extremes, there is no clear distinction between a…… Continue reading Language or dialect

Numbers in Japanese and Chinese

Japanese has 2 series of words for numbers: words borrowed from Chinese many centuries ago (Sino-Japanese numbers); and native Japanese numbers Table 1 shows the numbers from 1 to 10, as well as the words for zero, 100, 1,000, 10,000, 100 million, 1012 and 1016. For comparison, I have included the pronunciations of the numbers…… Continue reading Numbers in Japanese and Chinese

Some traditional and simplified Chinese characters

Some Chinese characters have 2 versions, a simplified version (used particularly in mainland China) and a traditional version (used particularly in Taiwan and some overseas Chinese communities). TK Ann (1987) lists 13 of these pairs of characters. Ann lists them because they feature as parts of many other Chinese characters and for space reasons Ann…… Continue reading Some traditional and simplified Chinese characters

Some Mandarin names for countries

For a few countries, Mandarin uses names made up of a morpheme that sounds like the first syllable in the country’s native name, followed by the symbol 国 (guó) meaning country. Table 1 lists some of those countries, with the Mandarin character (simplified, rather than traditional), the official pinyin transcription and the literal meaning of…… Continue reading Some Mandarin names for countries

Museums of language and languages

Did you know there is a museum about language? Actually, there are several. There is a list of them in online book Language museums of the world, edited by Ottar Grepstad and published in 2018 by the Centre for Norwegian Language and Literature. https://languagemuseum.org/wp-content/uploads/Language-museums-of-the-World.pdf The oldest language museum in the world is the Ivar Aasen…… Continue reading Museums of language and languages

18 dragons

I recently discovered a second place with a Chinese name that means 9 dragons. I already knew about the Kowloon (九龍) peninsula in Hong. Apparently, the name refers to eight mountains and a Chinese emperor. Kowloon – Wikipedia I’ve now discovered that the Mekong Delta is known in Vietnamese as Nine Dragons (Cửu Long) River.…… Continue reading 18 dragons

Mainland Southeast Asian languages

Mainland Southeast Asia is home to speakers of around 280 languages spread across 5 families: the Mon-Khmer branch of Austroasiatic (including Vietnamese and Khmer) Sino-Tibetan (including Mandarin and other Sinitic languages, and Burmese and other Tibeto-Burman languages) Tai-Kadai (including Thai and Lao) Hmong-Mien (languages of southwest China) Austronesian (languages spoken mainly in Oceania, but represented…… Continue reading Mainland Southeast Asian languages