IntroductoryLinguistics (Mandarin) Paper
A Sketch of the Mandarin Language:
Morphology and Syntax
Introduction China has always been a land of many languages and dialects. The Mandarin language, however, emerged as the language of the ruling class during the latter part of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), and is now the most widely-spoken language in the world. In the 200 census, China had a population of 840 million people, and 70% of that population spoke mandarin as their mother tongue. The Mandarin language is part of the Sino-Tibetan language group. All Chinese languages tonal, which means that the way words are pronounced varies their meanings. The mandarin language itself only has 4 different tones, whereas the other Chinese languages can have up to 10 distinct tones. To learn about the morphology and syntax structure of the mandarin language, our field project group had contacted our consultant, Amy Zhou. She is 21 years old and was born in Hong Kong, China. She had moved to San Francisco, California with her family when she was 10 years old and came to school here in Hawaii for college in 2010. She is fluent in both Mandarin and Cantonese. She is fluent in English as well, but prefers to speak in her native tongue.
Morphology
From the data we had gathered from our meetings with the consultant, our group concluded that the Mandarin language is a polysynthetic language and that the mandarin sentence structure is quite similar to the English language. The reason we came to this conclusion is because the mandarin language is structurally the same as the English language. In the English language, when you are to make a word plural, you would normally put “-s” after a word. However, in the mandarin language, there are no plural affixes used. The only irregularity to this is the use of “men” which is normally used in a very formal setting to say “peoples.” For example: 1.3 “The babies” (Omitted) Ying er men 1.4 “Some babies” Yo xie Ying er
Morphology and Syntax
Introduction China has always been a land of many languages and dialects. The Mandarin language, however, emerged as the language of the ruling class during the latter part of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), and is now the most widely-spoken language in the world. In the 200 census, China had a population of 840 million people, and 70% of that population spoke mandarin as their mother tongue. The Mandarin language is part of the Sino-Tibetan language group. All Chinese languages tonal, which means that the way words are pronounced varies their meanings. The mandarin language itself only has 4 different tones, whereas the other Chinese languages can have up to 10 distinct tones. To learn about the morphology and syntax structure of the mandarin language, our field project group had contacted our consultant, Amy Zhou. She is 21 years old and was born in Hong Kong, China. She had moved to San Francisco, California with her family when she was 10 years old and came to school here in Hawaii for college in 2010. She is fluent in both Mandarin and Cantonese. She is fluent in English as well, but prefers to speak in her native tongue.
Morphology
From the data we had gathered from our meetings with the consultant, our group concluded that the Mandarin language is a polysynthetic language and that the mandarin sentence structure is quite similar to the English language. The reason we came to this conclusion is because the mandarin language is structurally the same as the English language. In the English language, when you are to make a word plural, you would normally put “-s” after a word. However, in the mandarin language, there are no plural affixes used. The only irregularity to this is the use of “men” which is normally used in a very formal setting to say “peoples.” For example: 1.3 “The babies” (Omitted) Ying er men 1.4 “Some babies” Yo xie Ying er
Cited: Krysstal. (n.d.). The Sino-Tibetan Family of Languages. Retrieved from www.krysstal.com: http://www.kry tal.com/langfams_sinotibe.html Lewis, M. Paul (ed.), 2009. Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Sixteenth edition. Dallas, Tex.: SIL International. Online version: http://www.ethnologue.com/ ss