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Appendix:Chinese glossary

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A glossary of Chinese linguistic terms used in the body of this dictionary. See also Appendix:Glossary for terms not specific to Chinese. This page can be linked to using {{zh-glossary}} or {{zh-lg}}.

Contents: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

B

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C

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  • Cantonese – A group of Chinese lects, often considered a language or language group. The Cantonese spoken in Hong Kong forms the basis of Standard Cantonese, the only variety of Chinese other than Mandarin with a written standard that enjoys significant use.
  • character – The unit of writing in the Chinese writing system. See also hanzi. Characters are composed of components, which are usually either other simpler characters or radicals. The majority of characters are composed of a semantic component (a radical indicating the approximate semantic field of the character's meaning) and a phonetic component (usually a simpler character indicating the approximate pronunciation at the time the character was created). Since many characters are old, the phonetic component may no longer accurately represent the pronunciation of the character.
  • chengyu – Chinese traditional idiomatic expressions, usually consisting of four hanzi; typically derived from Classical Chinese.
  • Chinese lect – Any variety of Chinese; often any variety other than Standard Chinese. These lects are frequently mutually incomprehensible with Standard Chinese, making them separate languages from a linguistic standpoint, but for political and cultural reasons they are often labeled as "dialects". Wiktionary avoids the word "dialect" and uses the neutral terms "lect" or "variety" to indicate such forms.
  • Chinese variety – Same as Chinese lect.
  • Church Romanisation – Same as Pe̍h-ōe-jī.
  • Classical Chinese – The language in which the classics of Chinese literature were written, from c. the 5th century BCE through the 2nd century CE. Later imitated in the form of Literary Chinese.
  • component – One of the smaller graphic units into which a character can be analyzed. Often either a radical or a character in its own right.

D

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  • dialect – In the context of Chinese, same as a Chinese lect, but often with the implicit or explicit assertion that all Han Chinese speak the same language.

E

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  • erhua – In Beijing, Nanjing, Central Plains, and Southwestern Mandarin, an -r added onto the end of some syllables, often conveying a diminutive sense but sometimes changing the meaning in other ways. The phonological changes associated with erhua are complex but it is always written with the character 儿, transliterated as -r in pinyin. The use of erhua in Standard Chinese is generally minimal or absent entirely, achieved either by simply not pronouncing it or by replacing the term containing erhua with some other term, such as 哪儿 (nǎr, “where”) becoming 哪里 (nǎlǐ).

F

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  • four-character idiom – Same as chengyu.

H

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  • Hanyu Pinyin – Generally, same as pinyin.
  • hanzi – A single Chinese character, which almost always corresponds to a single pronounced syllable (although the erhua character of spoken Beijing Chinese is an exception).
  • historical dictionaries only – A term, sense or character found in one or more historical dictionaries but not in use any more, and often without any existing citations; sometimes a ghost word.

J

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L

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  • Literary Chinese – the predominant form of written Chinese from the end of the Classical Chinese period through the early 20th century, based on imitating the syntax and vocabulary of Classical Chinese. Generally each word is one character long, and problems arising from homophones in the spoken language are ignored.

M

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  • Mandarin – A group of Chinese lects, often considered a language or language group. The variant spoken in Beijing forms the basis of Standard Chinese.

O

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  • obsolete on its own in Standard Chinese – A character, or some sense thereof, that is no longer used in Standard Chinese except sometimes in compounds or fossilized expressions. Some of these senses or characters may still be in use in other Chinese lects.

P

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R

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S

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  • simplified Chinese – The system of Chinese characters in use in Mainland China starting in the 1950's, replacing traditional Chinese characters. The process of simplification involved in some cases reducing the number of strokes of radicals and other components (often by borrowing already-existing forms used in fluid handwriting), and in some cases merging distinct characters whose pronunciations had become homophonic in Beijing Mandarin (but not necessarily in other Chinese lects). See Simplified Chinese characters on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
  • Standard Chinese – A standardized variety of Chinese used in official contexts in China and Taiwan and in almost all written documents (outside of some documents in Hong Kong written in Cantonese, and very occasional poetry and songs in other lects). It is heavily based on spoken Beijing Mandarin but with some Beijing-specific characteristics removed, most notably the use of erhua. See Standard Chinese on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
  • stroke – A basic graphical unit out of which Chinese character components, and thus characters themselves, are composed. It nominally corresponds to a single pen stroke when writing a given character, and is usually composed of one to three straight or curved lines. The number and form of strokes and order of writing them is largely fixed and standardized for each character, making it possible to order characters according to their radical and the number of additional strokes (outside of the radical) needed to write the character. This system is in fact used in many dictionaries, including the English Wiktionary. See Chinese character strokes on Wikipedia.Wikipedia

T

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  • Tâi-lô – The official system for transliterating Hokkien in Taiwan, derived from Pe̍h-ōe-jī. See Tâi-uân Lô-má-jī Phing-im Hong-àn on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
  • Tongyong Pinyin – A system for transcribing Mandarin pronunciation of Chinese characters, formerly used in Taiwan from 2002 to 2008. See Tongyong Pinyin on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
  • traditional Chinese – The system of Chinese characters in use up through the 1950's in Mainland China (since replaced by simplified Chinese characters), and still used in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Generally, there is a many-to-one relationship between traditional and simplified characters, i.e. given a traditional character, the corresponding simplified character can generally be derived, but not vice-versa. For this reason, Wiktionary lemmatizes all Chinese terms using the traditional form. See Traditional Chinese characters on Wikipedia.Wikipedia

W

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Y

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Z

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References

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