Features of Chinese Script Writing - Essay Example

Name Tutor Task Date Features of Chinese Script Writing; The grammar in Chinese writing Introduction Different people have different ways of expressing themselves, or rather communicating, to each other in their various languages. This is attributed to the differences in our cultural orientations, that includes our education systems, social, economic and political systems. These different languages differ in writing due to the differences in their features, character among other aspects a language can have. In addition, the writing styles of the different features and characters of these languages differ accordingly (Jerry 296). Chinese sometimes referred to as the Sinitic languages, contains a number of languages that in most cases are said to be mutually unintelligible, to a greatly varying extent. This variation in the Chinese speaking people constitute a great number of the world population, close to a billion, that have an aspect of Chinese in their language as their original or rather native language. The spoken Chinese language differs in these different dialects though there is a far much great resemblance when it comes to drafting of their characters. The Chinese language has 13 sub languages, hence considered a macro language. Linguistics, according to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, is defined as the study, scientifically, of the natural language of a nation, a people group or country. It can also be narrowly defined as the way to study a language from different approaches a scholar can have to choose from. (Jerry 296). Linguistics can further be broadly categorized into two; the critical study of how a language is structured, which mostly deals with grammar, and the study of the meaning of words. In this paper we major on the discussion of the grammar aspect of Chinese linguistics. Grammar, on the other hand goes ahead to bring together all things to do with morphology (that deals with how words of a particular language are composed and even formed), phonology (which studies how words are pronounced, that is, the sound units and systems) and syntax (the rules that dictate how to combine words into different sentences and the different phrases too). On the other hand, the other category of linguistics, study of meaning of words, contains branches like pragmatics, semantics, just to mention a few. Semantics deals with meaning, especially in language. Pragmatics, on the other hand, explains more clearly how the setting or rather the context of any given writing affects the meaning of a word, phrase and even a sentence. It also tries to elaborate on how those who use a language can be able to beat the challenge of ambiguity in language that if not carefully dealt with can easily lead to pragmatic competence. First and foremost allow me discuss phonology just a little bit. In its broad sense, phonology deal mostly with sound systems and units. Shunde Jin in his article “sound symbolism in Shanghai onomatopoeia” notices to a great extent that sound symbolism in linguistic studies has widely across the globe received little attention. He goes ahead to give a precise reason to this language problem as the viewing of the signs in linguistics, especially by the so called structuralists, as arbitrary. Just to cite a case where Saussure (1959) in his book “A course in General Linguistics,” clarifies that the connection between the signifier and his recipient, the signified as being totally arbitrary. The duration of the syllables in the Chinese dialects varies, that is according to Shunde Jin. He explains that that syllable which belongs to the traditional entering sounds category “rusheng” are always shorter in duration as compared to the other category of syllables that includes the open syllable category and those with an ending normally called velar nasal. This leads to a case whereby those syllables that belongs to the category of “rusheng” referring to sounds that are short whereas the longer duration sounds described by the other category, the velar nasal. The difference in the projection of duration according to Jin can be clearly seen in both monosyllabic (a word or an utterance that has only one syllable) and polysyllabic (words that have more than three syllables) words. Apart from the duration, another aspect of sound symbolism is the sound intensity. Intensity can on a simple scale, according to the free online dictionary by Farlex, be defined as the strength of something. The intensity of words range depending on how loud a word can be when it is being pronuonced. Shunde Jin argues that the longer sounds are far much louder than those that are short. He even goes further to add that the stress on a syllable increases the intensity of the syllable. More so he states that according to the tone in the phonology of shanghai, regardless of the structure of a syllable, the consonants always voiced as syllable-initial are in most cases associated with a tone that is low (Saussure 98). On some other occasions, these consonants may reflect a word with low pitch. Generally speaking, the much louder sounds according to Jin, are highly represented by those syllables that have either final nasals or initial voice consonants. Secondly, morphology, according to Jerome L. Packard (2000) in his books “The Morphology of Chinese”, looks at two key issues. These two issues sometimes seen as morphological problems are the how of defining a morpheme and how words are inflexed and derived. In most cases, the morpheme usually corresponds to one syllable. Definition of words in the Chinese language is very hard, as compared to the other languages like English, French, dutch, German among others, posing a great challenge on the means of dealing and studying the other morphological issue, inflection and derivation. According to Packard, “It is also worth noting that, although the linguistic tradition in China dates back to the earliest written records, the notion ‘word’ did not exist in the Chinese vocabulary until it was translated from western grammar in the 20th century”. This has resulted to quite a number of views in relation to the Chinese morphology. A word according to the free online dictionary by Farlex is, a sound or a combination of sounds, or its representation in writing or printing, that symbolizes and communicates a meaning and may consist of a single morpheme or of a combination of morphemes. It can also simply mean something said; an utterance, remark, or comment. The modern Chinese language has been mistaken as a monosyllabic language. Morphemes which are the small building units of the language at times have a single syllable and these types of morphemes can stand as individual words. Most of the words though in the spoken Chinese are polysyllabic, usually with two or more syllables (Hinton & Ohala 212). The morphology of the Chinese language has strict bounds to a given number of syllables. When writing with the Chinese writing system, each morpheme with a single syllable corresponds to one character that is commonly referred to as a zi. As discussed earlier, most words in Chinese morphology have more than one zi and are called ci, what in English is a word. A word in Chinese can have usually two, three or even more character morphemes. The Chinese language is based more on syntax rather than morphology. It has a few inflections when it comes to its grammar in that there are no voices, tenses or even numbers, that is, singular and plural as the case in the English language. In addition it has only a few articles as compared to the English language. Like other languages they use features such as subject verb object in the order of their words. They have a system of measure words and also classifier as their immediate neighbors, Korea and Japan. Another very common feature in their sentences is the dropping of pronouns, the serial construction of verbs and even the dropping of the subject in a series of related sentences. Last but not least, a brief look at the Chinese syntax in relation to its grammar will help us understand how to combine the different words in Chinese to come up with a Chinese sentence putting in considering the rules involved (Saussure 98). To begin with, the order of words in the Chinese language is subject verb object, just as is done in the English language. For example, a sentence like I love Chinese can also be written in Chinese with the same word order of subject verb object. In addition, a Chinese verb in the Chinese syntax does not change with subjects. They do not change morphologically whatsoever with changes that come from number, person, and time gender among other subjects. A very good example is seen in the sentences below; I started digging the shamba. He called. If this sentence is written in Chinese according to an online article on Chinese syntax, the particle in the sentence is suffixed to a verb to show the continuous aspect of an action. Similarly in this other example; I am a footballer. He is a nurse. The particle is suffixed to a verb to stress a completed past action. The characters in Chinese writing are usually called hanzi. There is no limit to the number of characters in any written script. One single character may have a range of one to sixty four strokes which have no order on how to write them but always written in the same direction (Hinton & Ohala 212). Traditionally, Chinese was initially in vertical columns starting from right heading towards the left. The current standard since 1949 is the horizontal writing which is common even in the local newspapers although some places have stuck to the traditional vertical system. Chinese written scripts are also divided into paragraphs where a paragraph, as also in English, should have the same thoughts, ideas and vies the writer is trying to communicate. A paragraph, according to the W3C recommendation, has to be presented in such a way that it addresses such issues as line breaking and word wrapping, justification, hyphenation, treatment of white space, its format in relation to the content surrounding the subject matter and the conventions of the written language with inclusion of the direction of the text (Jerry 296). The organization of the information though, is not affected by the mode, means or ways of presenting a paragraph. A word wrap in the computing language according to an Internet resource by Google, is the feature which permits text to be carried over to the following line so that it stays within a given set of clearly defined margins. In Chinese word wrapping can be placed before and even after a word, usually called a Han character. It is however not relevant in some special circumstances like within names that are personal for example and also in between compound words. (Ramsey 148). Word wrapping in the Chinese script writing is therefore an important wrapping as it ensures the grammar and aestheticism of the writing is maintained. Appealing work to the eye is very important and it is therefore very vital for any writer to put into consideration this aspect of the Chinese syntax. Hyphenation, simply defined as the use of the hyphen helps a writer of whatsoever language join words and separates syllables of a single word and this applies even with in Chinese writing (Xigui 88). The writer needs to justify the argument in the script paper that he intends to present so as to validate his thoughts. According to George William skinner (1973), he writes in his book “A modern Chinese society” “In the transcription of Chinese, hyphenation is limited to personal names (two syllable given names and personal names) and multi-syllabic places. ….. Apart from syllables in tittles and other bibliographic elements, capitalization is limited to personal names, place names, and within these to the first syllable of the hyphenated compound.” Furthermore, the Chinese people do not use spaces to separate their words, though the importance of a series of written characters having meaning that can be openly derived from individual parts is highly observed (Ramsey 148). In conclusion there are many linguistically aspects that one can study in a given language. It is evident in the above findings that the way of presenting a script that has been written in the Chinese language is totally different from the common English and French given the differences in the originality of languages. Therefore it is important before embarking on a script to be presented in the Chinese language format to put in consideration the important aspects of Chinese linguistics. Talk of the characters, the grammatical rules that broadly look at the phonology, syntax and morphology of linguistics. Work Cited Hinton, L., J. Nichols and J. Ohala. "Sound Symbolism." London: Cambridge University Press. 2009. P. 212. Jerome L. Packard. "The Morphology of Chinese: A linguistic and cognitive approach." . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. P. 335.  Norman N. Jerry “Chinese Writing." Cambridge University Press. 2002. P.296. Qiu, Xigui. "Chinese Writing." Sydney: Society for the Study of Early China and Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California. 2007. P 88. Ramsey, S. Robert. "The Languages of China. New York: Cengage Publishers 2006. P. 148. Saussure, Ferdinand. "Course in General Linguistics."New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company. 2007, P. 98 "http://www.thefreedictionary.com/" Read More