108-463: An Yue Jiang ( Chinese : 安岳江, Hanyu Pinyin : Ān Yuè Jiāng ) is a People's Republic of China container vessel operated by the state-run shipping firm COSCO . In 2008, it became notable because of controversy surrounding a cargo of arms and ammunition destined for Zimbabwe . The cargo reportedly includes some 3 million rounds of small arms ammunition, 1,500 rocket propelled grenades , and 2,500 mortar rounds. The vessel originally planned to dock at
216-547: A family . Investigation of the historical relationships among the varieties of Chinese is ongoing. Currently, most classifications posit 7 to 13 main regional groups based on phonetic developments from Middle Chinese , of which the most spoken by far is Mandarin with 66%, or around 800 million speakers, followed by Min (75 million, e.g. Southern Min ), Wu (74 million, e.g. Shanghainese ), and Yue (68 million, e.g. Cantonese ). These branches are unintelligible to each other, and many of their subgroups are unintelligible with
324-464: A nucleus that has a vowel (which can be a monophthong , diphthong , or even a triphthong in certain varieties), preceded by an onset (a single consonant , or consonant + glide ; a zero onset is also possible), and followed (optionally) by a coda consonant; a syllable also carries a tone . There are some instances where a vowel is not used as a nucleus. An example of this is in Cantonese, where
432-457: A subject–verb–object word order , and like many other languages of East Asia, makes frequent use of the topic–comment construction to form sentences. Chinese also has an extensive system of classifiers and measure words , another trait shared with neighboring languages such as Japanese and Korean. Other notable grammatical features common to all the spoken varieties of Chinese include the use of serial verb construction , pronoun dropping , and
540-595: A subspecies of its own, the Cape lion as a population is now extinct in the wilderness , though descendants could exist in captivity . The Cape of Good Hope is an integral part of the Cape Floristic Kingdom , the smallest but richest of the world's six floral kingdoms. This comprises a treasure trove of 1100 species of indigenous plants, of which a number are endemic (occur naturally nowhere else on earth). The main type of fynbos ("fine bush") vegetation at
648-505: A Chinese character is the morpheme, as characters represent the smallest grammatical units with individual meanings in the Chinese language. Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and lexicalized phrases vary greatly. The Hanyu Da Zidian , a compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries for characters, including oracle bone versions. The Zhonghua Zihai (1994) contains 85,568 head entries for character definitions and
756-679: A Javanese pilot, containing the Cape of Good Hope, Portugal and the land of Brazil, the Red Sea and the Sea of Persia , the Clove Islands, the navigation of the Chinese and the Gores, with their rhumbs and direct routes followed by the ships, and the hinterland, and how the kingdoms border on each other. It seems to me, Sir, that this was the best thing I have ever seen, and Your Highness will be very pleased to see it; it had
864-595: A Shanghai resident may speak both Standard Chinese and Shanghainese ; if they grew up elsewhere, they are also likely fluent in the dialect of their home region. In addition to Standard Chinese, a majority of Taiwanese people also speak Taiwanese Hokkien (also called 台語 ; 'Taiwanese' ), Hakka , or an Austronesian language . A speaker in Taiwan may mix pronunciations and vocabulary from Standard Chinese and other languages of Taiwan in everyday speech. In part due to traditional cultural ties with Guangdong , Cantonese
972-541: A South African judge ruled that the ship could not dock as planned. Subsequently, the An Yue Jiang remained in the area of the Cape of Good Hope , pending a rumored decision by the Chinese to recall the ship. It was then announced that the ship would proceed to Angola , where it would be allowed to dock but only to unload cargo destined for Angola itself. On 14 April 2008 the scrutiny committee of South Africa's National Conventional Arms Control Committee (NCACC) approved
1080-579: A UK-registered airplane business, using an Ilyushin Il-76 . This transaction was negotiated during the first week of May by two Zimbabwean government ministers and some of the top officers of the Zimbabwean military who flew to Angola to negotiate the delivery of the weapons. The arrival of the weapons in Harare was confirmed by the Zimbabwean government. The report also stated that the An Yue Jiang had been refueled by
1188-462: A central variety (i.e. prestige variety, such as Standard Mandarin), as the issue requires some careful handling when mutual intelligibility is inconsistent with language identity. The Chinese government's official Chinese designation for the major branches of Chinese is 方言 ; fāngyán ; 'regional speech', whereas the more closely related varieties within these are called 地点方言 ; 地點方言 ; dìdiǎn fāngyán ; 'local speech'. Because of
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#17330941204021296-597: A compromise between the pronunciations of different regions. The royal courts of the Ming and early Qing dynasties operated using a koiné language known as Guanhua , based on the Nanjing dialect of Mandarin. Standard Chinese is an official language of both the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China (Taiwan), one of the four official languages of Singapore , and one of
1404-700: A corresponding increase in the number of homophones . As an example, the small Langenscheidt Pocket Chinese Dictionary lists six words that are commonly pronounced as shí in Standard Chinese: In modern spoken Mandarin, however, tremendous ambiguity would result if all of these words could be used as-is. The 20th century Yuen Ren Chao poem Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den exploits this, consisting of 92 characters all pronounced shi . As such, most of these words have been replaced in speech, if not in writing, with less ambiguous disyllabic compounds. Only
1512-564: A millennium. The Four Commanderies of Han were established in northern Korea in the 1st century BCE but disintegrated in the following centuries. Chinese Buddhism spread over East Asia between the 2nd and 5th centuries CE, and with it the study of scriptures and literature in Literary Chinese. Later, strong central governments modeled on Chinese institutions were established in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, with Literary Chinese serving as
1620-538: A secure reconstruction of Proto-Sino-Tibetan, the higher-level structure of the family remains unclear. A top-level branching into Chinese and Tibeto-Burman languages is often assumed, but has not been convincingly demonstrated. The first written records appeared over 3,000 years ago during the Shang dynasty . As the language evolved over this period, the various local varieties became mutually unintelligible. In reaction, central governments have repeatedly sought to promulgate
1728-597: A ship begins to travel more eastward than southward. Thus, the first modern rounding of the cape in 1487 by Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias was a milestone in the attempts by the Portuguese to establish direct trade relations with the Far East (although Herodotus mentioned a claim that the Phoenicians had done so far earlier ). Dias called the cape Cabo das Tormentas ('Cape of Storms'; Dutch : Stormkaap ), which
1836-767: A ship, or junk, from India crossed the Sea of India towards the Island of Men and the Island of Women, off Cape Diab, between the Green Islands and the shadows. It sailed for 40 days in a south-westerly direction without ever finding anything other than wind and water. According to these people themselves, the ship went some 2,000 miles ahead until — once favourable conditions came to an end — it turned round and sailed back to Cape Diab in 70 days. The ships called junks (lit. " Zonchi ") that navigate these seas carry four masts or more, some of which can be raised or lowered, and have 40 to 60 cabins for
1944-503: A similar way to the use of Latin and Ancient Greek roots in European languages. Many new compounds, or new meanings for old phrases, were created in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to name Western concepts and artifacts. These coinages, written in shared Chinese characters, have then been borrowed freely between languages. They have even been accepted into Chinese, a language usually resistant to loanwords, because their foreign origin
2052-610: A unified standard. The earliest examples of Old Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones dated to c. 1250 BCE , during the Late Shang . The next attested stage came from inscriptions on bronze artifacts dating to the Western Zhou period (1046–771 BCE), the Classic of Poetry and portions of the Book of Documents and I Ching . Scholars have attempted to reconstruct
2160-563: A variety of Yue from a small coastal area around Taishan, Guangdong . In parts of South China, the dialect of a major city may be only marginally intelligible to its neighbors. For example, Wuzhou and Taishan are located approximately 260 km (160 mi) and 190 km (120 mi) away from Guangzhou respectively, but the Yue variety spoken in Wuzhou is more similar to the Guangzhou dialect than
2268-524: A wider sense, to indicate the area of the European colony centered on Cape Town, and the later South African province . Since 1994, it has been broken up into three smaller provinces: the Western Cape , Eastern Cape , and Northern Cape ; parts of the province were also absorbed into the North West . With its diverse habitat, ranging from rocky mountain tops to beaches and open sea, the Cape of Good Hope
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#17330941204022376-596: Is Taishanese. Wuzhou is located directly upstream from Guangzhou on the Pearl River , whereas Taishan is to Guangzhou's southwest, with the two cities separated by several river valleys. In parts of Fujian , the speech of some neighbouring counties or villages is mutually unintelligible. Local varieties of Chinese are conventionally classified into seven dialect groups, largely based on the different evolution of Middle Chinese voiced initials: Proportions of first-language speakers The classification of Li Rong , which
2484-576: Is a rocky headland on the Atlantic coast of the Cape Peninsula in South Africa . A common misconception is that the Cape of Good Hope is the southern tip of Africa , based on the misbelief that the Cape was the dividing point between the Atlantic and Indian oceans. In fact, the southernmost point of Africa is Cape Agulhas about 150 kilometres (90 mi) to the east-southeast . The currents of
2592-559: Is also used in three other ways: Eudoxus of Cyzicus ( fl. c. 130 BC ) was a Greek navigator for Ptolemy VIII , king of the Hellenistic Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt . In or about 116 BCE, while returning from a voyage to India, Eudoxus found the wreck of a ship that appeared to have originated in Gades (later Cádiz), in what was then Roman Hispania Baetica . At the time,
2700-485: Is called either 华语 ; 華語 ; Huáyǔ or 汉语 ; 漢語 ; Hànyǔ ). Standard Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. The governments of both China and Taiwan intend for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. Therefore, it is used in government agencies, in the media, and as a language of instruction in schools. Diglossia is common among Chinese speakers. For example,
2808-529: Is home to at least 250 species of birds including one of the two mainland colonies of African penguins . "Bush birds" tend to be rather scarce because of the coarse, scrubby nature of fynbos vegetation. When flowering, however, proteas and ericas attract sunbirds , sugarbirds , and other species in search of nectar. For most of the year, there are more small birds in coastal thicket than in fynbos. The Cape of Good Hope section of Table Mountain National Park
2916-487: Is home to several species of antelope. Bontebok and eland are easily seen, and red hartebeest can be seen in the grazing lawns in Smitswinkel Flats. Grey rhebok are less commonly seen and are scarce, but may be observed along the beach hills at Olifantsbos. Most visitors are unlikely to ever see either Cape grysbok or klipspringer. The Cape of Good Hope section is home to four Cape mountain zebra . They might be seen by
3024-595: Is often described as a 'monosyllabic' language. However, this is only partially correct. It is largely accurate when describing Old and Middle Chinese; in Classical Chinese, around 90% of words consist of a single character that corresponds one-to-one with a morpheme , the smallest unit of meaning in a language. In modern varieties, it usually remains the case that morphemes are monosyllabic—in contrast, English has many multi-syllable morphemes, both bound and free , such as 'seven', 'elephant', 'para-' and '-able'. Some of
3132-445: Is only about an eighth as many as English. All varieties of spoken Chinese use tones to distinguish words. A few dialects of north China may have as few as three tones, while some dialects in south China have up to 6 or 12 tones, depending on how one counts. One exception from this is Shanghainese which has reduced the set of tones to a two-toned pitch accent system much like modern Japanese. A very common example used to illustrate
3240-588: Is said by both these and those, and that they had therefore sailed 4,000 miles. Fra Mauro also comments that the account of the expedition, together with the relation by Strabo of the travels of Eudoxus of Cyzicus from Arabia to Gibraltar through the southern Ocean in Antiquity , led him to believe that the Indian Ocean was not a closed sea and that Africa could be circumnavigated by her southern end (Text from Fra Mauro map, 11, G2). This knowledge, together with
3348-668: Is specifically meant. However, when one of the above words forms part of a compound, the disambiguating syllable is generally dropped and the resulting word is still disyllabic. For example, 石 ; shí alone, and not 石头 ; 石頭 ; shítou , appears in compounds as meaning 'stone' such as 石膏 ; shígāo ; 'plaster', 石灰 ; shíhuī ; 'lime', 石窟 ; shíkū ; 'grotto', 石英 ; 'quartz', and 石油 ; shíyóu ; 'petroleum'. Although many single-syllable morphemes ( 字 ; zì ) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllable compounds known as 词 ; 詞 ; cí , which more closely resembles
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3456-494: Is strictly enforced throughout the Table Mountain National Park , and especially in marine protected areas . Disturbance or removal of any marine organisms is strictly prohibited between Schusters Bay and Hoek van Bobbejaan, but is allowed in other areas during season and with relevant permits. Chacma baboons ( Papio ursinus ) are the mammals most intimately associated with the Cape of Good Hope. Baboons inside
3564-484: Is the largest reference work based purely on character and its literary variants. The CC-CEDICT project (2010) contains 97,404 contemporary entries including idioms, technology terms, and names of political figures, businesses, and products. The 2009 version of the Webster's Digital Chinese Dictionary (WDCD), based on CC-CEDICT, contains over 84,000 entries. The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary,
3672-582: Is unknown. Although some, such as Pliny , claimed that Eudoxus did achieve his goal, the most probable conclusion is that he perished on the journey. In the 1450 Fra Mauro map , the Indian Ocean is depicted as connected to the Atlantic. Fra Mauro puts the following inscription by the southern tip of Africa, which he names the "Cape of Diab", describing the exploration by a ship from the East around 1420: Around 1420
3780-496: Is used as an everyday language in Hong Kong and Macau . The designation of various Chinese branches remains controversial. Some linguists and most ordinary Chinese people consider all the spoken varieties as one single language, as speakers share a common national identity and a common written form. Others instead argue that it is inappropriate to refer to major branches of Chinese such as Mandarin, Wu, and so on as "dialects" because
3888-497: Is used in education, media, formal speech, and everyday life—though Mandarin is increasingly taught in schools due to the mainland's growing influence. Historically, the Chinese language has spread to its neighbors through a variety of means. Northern Vietnam was incorporated into the Han dynasty (202 BCE – 220 CE) in 111 BCE, marking the beginning of a period of Chinese control that ran almost continuously for
3996-540: Is used in the Language Atlas of China (1987), distinguishes three further groups: Some varieties remain unclassified, including the Danzhou dialect on Hainan , Waxianghua spoken in western Hunan , and Shaozhou Tuhua spoken in northern Guangdong . Standard Chinese is the standard language of China (where it is called 普通话 ; pǔtōnghuà ) and Taiwan, and one of the four official languages of Singapore (where it
4104-428: Is very complex, with a large number of consonants and vowels, but they are probably not all distinguished in any single dialect. Most linguists now believe it represents a diasystem encompassing 6th-century northern and southern standards for reading the classics. The complex relationship between spoken and written Chinese is an example of diglossia : as spoken, Chinese varieties have evolved at different rates, while
4212-735: The Qieyun rime dictionary (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by rhyme tables such as the Yunjing constructed by ancient Chinese philologists as a guide to the Qieyun system. These works define phonological categories but with little hint of what sounds they represent. Linguists have identified these sounds by comparing the categories with pronunciations in modern varieties of Chinese , borrowed Chinese words in Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean, and transcription evidence. The resulting system
4320-583: The An Yue Jiang was returning to China with the arms still on board. However, on 19 May, a Mozambican newspaper, the Canal de Moçambique , stated that the arms had not only been offloaded (although the newspaper had stated the location of offloading as at Pointe-Noire in the Republic of the Congo , while the Zimbabwean government had stated that the weapons were offloaded in Luanda), but were flown to Harare by Avient Ltd ,
4428-576: The An Yue Jiang would not be allowed into its waters, and on 21 April, the Director of the Institute of Angolan Ports, Filomeno Mendonça, said that the ship was "not authorised to enter Angolan ports". On 21 April, Zambian President Mwanawasa appealed to SADC governments to forbid entry to the ship, expressing concern that the arms would increase tension in Zimbabwe. Meanwhile, Justice Minister Chinamasa dismissed
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4536-610: The Chinese diaspora . Approximately 1.35 billion people, or 17% of the global population, speak a variety of Chinese as their first language . Chinese languages form the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. The spoken varieties of Chinese are usually considered by native speakers to be dialects of a single language. However, their lack of mutual intelligibility means they are sometimes considered to be separate languages in
4644-677: The Dutch East India Company's administrator Jan van Riebeeck established a resupply camp for the Dutch East India Company some 50 km north of the cape in Table Bay on April 6, and this eventually developed into Cape Town . Supplies of fresh food were vital on the long journey around Africa and Cape Town became known as "The Tavern of the Seas". On 31 December 1687, a community of Huguenots (French Protestants) arrived at
4752-496: The Indian Ocean . The Cape of Good Hope route took a toll on the sea freight industry; stretching the transit time, reducing carriers availability, and skyrocketing shipment cost and container hire. Carriers' attempts to resort to Red Sea route come at the expense of vessels and seafarers' safety; as the Red Sea witnessed multiple sunken carriers struck by Houthi rebels . Many huge shipping companies and industries were afflicted by
4860-525: The Korean , Japanese and Vietnamese languages, and today comprise over half of their vocabularies. This massive influx led to changes in the phonological structure of the languages, contributing to the development of moraic structure in Japanese and the disruption of vowel harmony in Korean. Borrowed Chinese morphemes have been used extensively in all these languages to coin compound words for new concepts, in
4968-680: The May Fourth Movement beginning in 1919. After the fall of the Northern Song dynasty and subsequent reign of the Jurchen Jin and Mongol Yuan dynasties in northern China, a common speech (now called Old Mandarin ) developed based on the dialects of the North China Plain around the capital. The 1324 Zhongyuan Yinyun was a dictionary that codified the rhyming conventions of new sanqu verse form in this language. Together with
5076-579: The National Language Unification Commission finally settled on the Beijing dialect in 1932. The People's Republic founded in 1949 retained this standard but renamed it 普通话 ; 普通話 ; pǔtōnghuà ; 'common speech'. The national language is now used in education, the media, and formal situations in both mainland China and Taiwan. In Hong Kong and Macau , Cantonese is the dominant spoken language due to cultural influence from Guangdong immigrants and colonial-era policies, and
5184-474: The South African port of Durban and unload its cargo for shipment to landlocked Zimbabwe. However, there were widespread protests by persons concerned that the arms would be used by Robert Mugabe 's regime in suppressing political opposition in the wake of disputed elections. Dock workers stated that they would not unload the cargo, and others threatened to stop the shipment on South African roads. Finally,
5292-400: The humpback whale and Bryde's whale . Seals , dusky dolphins and orcas have also been seen. The strategic position of the Cape of Good Hope between two major ocean currents, ensures a rich diversity of marine life. There is a difference between the sea life west of Cape Point and that to the east due to the markedly differing sea temperatures. The South African Marine Living Resources Act
5400-473: The oracle bone inscriptions created during the Shang dynasty c. 1250 BCE . The phonetic categories of Old Chinese can be reconstructed from the rhymes of ancient poetry. During the Northern and Southern period , Middle Chinese went through several sound changes and split into several varieties following prolonged geographic and political separation. The Qieyun , a rime dictionary , recorded
5508-591: The phonology of Old Chinese by comparing later varieties of Chinese with the rhyming practice of the Classic of Poetry and the phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters. Although many of the finer details remain unclear, most scholars agree that Old Chinese differs from Middle Chinese in lacking retroflex and palatal obstruents but having initial consonant clusters of some sort, and in having voiceless nasals and liquids. Most recent reconstructions also describe an atonal language with consonant clusters at
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#17330941204025616-725: The 12-volume Hanyu Da Cidian , records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters and gives over 370,000 definitions. The 1999 revised Cihai , a multi-volume encyclopedic dictionary reference work, gives 122,836 vocabulary entry definitions under 19,485 Chinese characters, including proper names, phrases, and common zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific, and technical terms. The 2016 edition of Xiandai Hanyu Cidian , an authoritative one-volume dictionary on modern standard Chinese language as used in mainland China, has 13,000 head characters and defines 70,000 words. Cape of Good Hope The Cape of Good Hope ( Afrikaans : Kaap die Goeie Hoop [ˌkɑːp di ˌχujə ˈɦuəp] )
5724-582: The Cape of Good Hope from the Netherlands. They had fled from France due to religious persecution and gone to the Netherlands, before making the journey to the Cape Colony. Members of this group included Pierre Joubert , who came from La Motte-d'Aigues , as well as Jean Roy . The Dutch East India Company needed skilled farmers at the Cape of Good Hope and the Dutch government saw opportunities to settle Huguenots at
5832-480: The Cape of Good Hope is Peninsula Sandstone Fynbos , an endangered vegetation type that is endemic to the Cape Peninsula. Coastal Hangklip Sand Fynbos grows on low-lying alkaline sands and, right by the sea, small patches of Cape Flats Dune Strandveld can be found. Characteristic fynbos plants include proteas , ericas (heath), and restios (reeds). Some of the most striking and well-known members belong to
5940-480: The Cape of Good Hope section of the park are a major tourist attraction. There are 11 troops consisting of about 375 individuals throughout the entire Cape Peninsula. Six of these 11 troops either live entirely within the Cape of Good Hope section of the park, or use the section as part of their range. The Cape Point, Kanonkop, Klein Olifantsbos, and Buffels Bay troops live entirely inside the Cape of Good Hope section of
6048-665: The Cape. The colony gradually grew over the 150 years that followed until it extended hundreds of kilometers to the north and the north-east. During the French Revolutionary Wars , the Dutch Republic was occupied by the French in 1795. The Cape Colony then became a French vassal and enemy of the British, who were at war with France. British troops invaded and occupied the Cape Colony that same year. The British relinquished control of
6156-514: The King of Siam, and also the end of the land of the navigation of the Chinese, the direction it takes, and how they do not navigate farther." — Letter of Albuquerque to King Manuel I of Portugal, 1 April 1512. In the Early Modern Era , the first European to reach the cape was the Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias on 12 March 1488, who named it the "Cape of Storms" ( Cabo das Tormentas ). It
6264-490: The Latin-based Vietnamese alphabet . English words of Chinese origin include tea from Hokkien 茶 ( tê ), dim sum from Cantonese 點心 ( dim2 sam1 ), and kumquat from Cantonese 金橘 ( gam1 gwat1 ). The sinologist Jerry Norman has estimated that there are hundreds of mutually unintelligible varieties of Chinese. These varieties form a dialect continuum , in which differences in speech generally become more pronounced as distances increase, though
6372-497: The Park. The Groot Olifantsbos and Plateau Road troops range into the park. Chacma baboons are widely distributed across southern Africa and are classified as "least concern" in the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species . However, the South African Parks Department states in its publication Mountains in the Sea that the baboon population on the Cape is "critically endangered." This is due to habitat loss, genetic isolation, and conflicts with humans. Cape baboons have been eliminated from
6480-506: The South African fleet replenishment ship SAS Drakensberg , allegedly after a direct order given by South African president Thabo Mbeki to Deputy Defence Minister Mluleki George . This was categorically denied by the South African government, denouncing it as the result of a "season of propaganda". On 24 June, a spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry was asked if the An Yue Jiang's cargo had reached Zimbabwe, as Zimbabwean officials were then claiming. The spokesperson did not address
6588-462: The attentive or lucky visitor, usually in Smitswinkel Flats. There are a wealth of small animals such as lizards , snakes , tortoises and insects . Small mammals include rock hyrax , four-striped grass mouse , water mongoose , Cape clawless otter and fallow deer . The area offers excellent vantage points for whale watching. The southern right whale is the species most likely to be seen in False Bay between June and November. Other species are
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#17330941204026696-453: The cargo, but said simply that the ship "had already returned to China". Chinese language Chinese ( simplified Chinese : 汉语 ; traditional Chinese : 漢語 ; pinyin : Hànyǔ ; lit. ' Han language' or 中文 ; Zhōngwén ; 'Chinese writing') is a group of languages spoken natively by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in China , as well as by various communities of
6804-464: The controversy as a "hullabaloo about a lone ship", asserting that Zimbabwe had the sovereign right to legitimately purchase arms to defend itself. Jiang Yu, a spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, said on 22 April that the ship might be forced to turn back due to its failure to find a place to unload the shipment. She asserted that the shipment involved only "perfectly normal trade in military goods between China and Zimbabwe", with no connection to
6912-399: The different spoken dialects varies, but in general, there has been a tendency to a reduction in sounds from Middle Chinese. The Mandarin dialects in particular have experienced a dramatic decrease in sounds and so have far more polysyllabic words than most other spoken varieties. The total number of syllables in some varieties is therefore only about a thousand, including tonal variation, which
7020-484: The difficulties involved in determining the difference between language and dialect, other terms have been proposed. These include topolect , lect , vernacular , regional , and variety . Syllables in the Chinese languages have some unique characteristics. They are tightly related to the morphology and also to the characters of the writing system, and phonologically they are structured according to fixed rules. The structure of each syllable consists of
7128-464: The end of the syllable, developing into tone distinctions in Middle Chinese. Several derivational affixes have also been identified, but the language lacks inflection , and indicated grammatical relationships using word order and grammatical particles . Middle Chinese was the language used during Northern and Southern dynasties and the Sui , Tang , and Song dynasties (6th–10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by
7236-532: The events surrounding the election, and that the contract for it had been signed in 2007. In a statement on the same day, the MDC said that the arms were "clearly meant to butcher innocent civilians whose only crime is rejecting dictatorship and voting change". According to the Lloyd's Marine Intelligence Unit , the ship was moving northwest up the coast on 22 April, but subsequently the ship's location could not be precisely determined, either because it had switched off its Automatic Identification System or because it
7344-405: The first modern European explorers to reach the cape. When lined up, these crosses point to Whittle Rock , a large, permanently submerged shipping hazard in False Bay . Two other beacons in Simon's Town provide the intersection. The Cape of Good Hope saw an increase of ship activity after the 2021 Suez canal obstruction , and the 2024 Red Sea Crisis with ships needing a different route from
7452-413: The first one, 十 , normally appears in monosyllabic form in spoken Mandarin; the rest are normally used in the polysyllabic forms of respectively. In each, the homophone was disambiguated by the addition of another morpheme, typically either a near-synonym or some sort of generic word (e.g. 'head', 'thing'), the purpose of which is to indicate which of the possible meanings of the other, homophonic syllable
7560-491: The form of a word), to indicate a word's function within a sentence. In other words, Chinese has very few grammatical inflections —it possesses no tenses , no voices , no grammatical number , and only a few articles . They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood . In Mandarin, this involves the use of particles such as 了 ; le ; ' PFV ', 还 ; 還 ; hái ; 'still', and 已经 ; 已經 ; yǐjīng ; 'already'. Chinese has
7668-435: The government of the People's Republic of China, with Singapore officially adopting them in 1976. Traditional characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and among Chinese-speaking communities overseas . Linguists classify all varieties of Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family , together with Burmese , Tibetan and many other languages spoken in the Himalayas and the Southeast Asian Massif . Although
7776-581: The language of administration and scholarship, a position it would retain until the late 19th century in Korea and (to a lesser extent) Japan, and the early 20th century in Vietnam. Scholars from different lands could communicate, albeit only in writing, using Literary Chinese. Although they used Chinese solely for written communication, each country had its own tradition of reading texts aloud using what are known as Sino-Xenic pronunciations . Chinese words with these pronunciations were also extensively imported into
7884-516: The late 19th century. Today Japanese is written with a composite script using both Chinese characters called kanji , and kana. Korean is written exclusively with hangul in North Korea, although knowledge of the supplementary Chinese characters called hanja is still required, and hanja are increasingly rarely used in South Korea. As a result of its historical colonization by France, Vietnamese now uses
7992-446: The majority of their range across the Cape Peninsula, and the Cape of Good Hope section of Table Mountain National Park provides a sanctuary for the troops that live within its boundaries. It provides relative safety from nearby towns, where people have killed many baboons after the baboons raid their houses looking for food. Baboons are also frequently injured or killed outside of the park by cars and by electrocution on power lines. Inside
8100-505: The map depiction of the African continent, probably encouraged the Portuguese to intensify their effort to round the tip of Africa. In 1511, after Afonso de Albuquerque conquered Malacca , the Portuguese recovered a chart from a Javanese maritime pilot , which, according to Albuquerque, already included the Cape of Good Hope. Regarding the chart Albuquerque said: "...a large map of
8208-600: The merchants and only one tiller. They can navigate without a compass , because they have an astrologer , who stands on the side and, with an astrolabe in hand, gives orders to the navigator. —Text from the Fra Mauro map, 09-P25 Fra Mauro explained that he obtained the information from "a trustworthy source", who traveled with the expedition, possibly the Venetian explorer Niccolò da Conti who happened to be in Calicut , India at
8316-455: The more conservative modern varieties, usually found in the south, have largely monosyllabic words , especially with basic vocabulary. However, most nouns, adjectives, and verbs in modern Mandarin are disyllabic. A significant cause of this is phonetic erosion : sound changes over time have steadily reduced the number of possible syllables in the language's inventory. In modern Mandarin, there are only around 1,200 possible syllables, including
8424-425: The mutual unintelligibility between them is too great. However, calling major Chinese branches "languages" would also be wrong under the same criterion, since a branch such as Wu, itself contains many mutually unintelligible varieties, and could not be properly called a single language. There are also viewpoints pointing out that linguists often ignore mutual intelligibility when varieties share intelligibility with
8532-460: The names in Javanese writing, but I had with me a Javanese who could read and write. I send this piece to Your Highness, which Francisco Rodrigues traced from the other, in which Your Highness can truly see where the Chinese and Gores come from, and the course your ships must take to the Clove Islands, and where the gold mines lie, and the islands of Java and Banda, of nutmeg and mace, and the land of
8640-583: The nasal sonorant consonants /m/ and /ŋ/ can stand alone as their own syllable. In Mandarin much more than in other spoken varieties, most syllables tend to be open syllables, meaning they have no coda (assuming that a final glide is not analyzed as a coda), but syllables that do have codas are restricted to nasals /m/ , /n/ , /ŋ/ , the retroflex approximant /ɻ/ , and voiceless stops /p/ , /t/ , /k/ , or /ʔ/ . Some varieties allow most of these codas, whereas others, such as Standard Chinese, are limited to only /n/ , /ŋ/ , and /ɻ/ . The number of sounds in
8748-450: The only way such a vessel could have reached the Indian Ocean was by rounding the Cape. When Eudoxus was returning from his second voyage to India, the wind forced him south of the Gulf of Aden and down the coast of Africa for some distance. Somewhere along the coast of East Africa, he found the remains of the ship. Due to its appearance and the story told by the natives, Eudoxus concluded that
8856-538: The other varieties within the same branch (e.g. Southern Min). There are, however, transitional areas where varieties from different branches share enough features for some limited intelligibility, including New Xiang with Southwestern Mandarin , Xuanzhou Wu Chinese with Lower Yangtze Mandarin , Jin with Central Plains Mandarin and certain divergent dialects of Hakka with Gan . All varieties of Chinese are tonal at least to some degree, and are largely analytic . The earliest attested written Chinese consists of
8964-457: The park, some management policies such as allowing barbecues and picnics in the baboon home ranges cause detriment to the troops, as they become embroiled in conflicts with guests to the park. At the Cape in particular, the baboon is known for eating shellfish and other marine invertebrates. In 1842, Charles Hamilton Smith had described a black-maned lion from the Cape under the scientific name Felis (Leo) melanochaita . No longer seen as
9072-404: The rate of change varies immensely. Generally, mountainous South China exhibits more linguistic diversity than the North China Plain . Until the late 20th century, Chinese emigrants to Southeast Asia and North America came from southeast coastal areas, where Min, Hakka, and Yue dialects were spoken. Specifically, most Chinese immigrants to North America until the mid-20th century spoke Taishanese ,
9180-552: The related subject dropping . Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess differences. The entire Chinese character corpus since antiquity comprises well over 50,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are in use and only about 3,000 are frequently used in Chinese media and newspapers. However, Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words. Because most Chinese words are made up of two or more characters, there are many more Chinese words than characters. A more accurate equivalent for
9288-509: The relationship was first proposed in the early 19th century and is now broadly accepted, reconstruction of Sino-Tibetan is much less developed than that of families such as Indo-European or Austroasiatic . Difficulties have included the great diversity of the languages, the lack of inflection in many of them, and the effects of language contact. In addition, many of the smaller languages are spoken in mountainous areas that are difficult to reach and are often also sensitive border zones. Without
9396-476: The rocks found at the two capes, and indeed over much of the peninsula, are part of the Cape Supergroup , and are formed of the same type of sandstones as Table Mountain itself. Both the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Point offer spectacular scenery; the whole of the southernmost portion of the Cape Peninsula is a wild, rugged, scenic and generally unspoiled national park. The term "the Cape" has also been used in
9504-501: The ship or handle its cargo. The Durban High Court issued an order on 18 April effectively barring the shipment; another order allowed a German development bank to seize the cargo in compensation for an unpaid debt owed by the Zimbabwean government. The An Yue Jiang abandoned its attempt to make port in South Africa on the same day, and it reportedly headed instead for Luanda , Angola . The Mozambican government said on 19 April that
9612-481: The ship was from Gades and had sailed anti-clockwise around Africa, passing the Cape and entering the Indian Ocean. This inspired him to repeat the voyage and attempt a circumnavigation of the continent. Organising the expedition on his own account he set sail from Gades and began to work down the African coast. The difficulties were too great, however, and he was obliged to return to Europe. After this failure he again set out to circumnavigate Africa. His eventual fate
9720-488: The ship was reported to have turned around and was near the Cape of Good Hope . On 17 May, The Weekender reported that the arms had arrived in Harare. The cargo was reportedly offloaded at Pointe-Noire in the Republic of the Congo and then flown to Zimbabwe. Matonga declined to comment on this, while the Chinese Foreign Ministry described the reports as "baseless and purely fictitious" on 21 May, saying that
9828-468: The shipment through. The issue compounded the dissatisfaction felt by many critics of the Zimbabwean government regarding South Africa's nonconfrontational approach to dealing with Mugabe, exemplified by Mbeki's claim that the post-election situation was not a crisis. However, on 17 April, the South African Transport and Allied Workers Union (SATAWU) said that members of the union would not unload
9936-516: The shipment's conveyance permit, although it said shipment still had to be inspected and approved by the NCACC. According to South African government spokesperson Themba Maseko , the government was not going to prevent the shipment from being transported to Zimbabwe. Critics suggested that the South African government would have been acting irresponsibly or even aiding the Zimbabwean government by letting
10044-433: The situation such as IKEA , Amazon , Automotive companies, and Maersk . The Cape of Good Hope is at the southern tip of the Cape Peninsula , about 2.3 kilometers (1.4 mi) west and a little south of Cape Point on the south-east corner. Cape Town is about 50 kilometers to the north of the Cape, in Table Bay at the north end of the peninsula. The peninsula forms the western boundary of False Bay . Geologically,
10152-505: The six official languages of the United Nations . Standard Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin and was first officially adopted in the 1930s. The language is written primarily using a logography of Chinese characters , largely shared by readers who may otherwise speak mutually unintelligible varieties. Since the 1950s, the use of simplified characters has been promoted by
10260-557: The slightly later Menggu Ziyun , this dictionary describes a language with many of the features characteristic of modern Mandarin dialects. Up to the early 20th century, most Chinese people only spoke their local variety. Thus, as a practical measure, officials of the Ming and Qing dynasties carried out the administration of the empire using a common language based on Mandarin varieties , known as 官话 ; 官話 ; Guānhuà ; 'language of officials'. For most of this period, this language
10368-701: The territory in 1803, under the peace of Amiens , but reoccupied the Colony on 19 January 1806 following the Battle of Blaauwberg . The Dutch formally ceded the territory to the British in the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1814 . It would remain a separate British colony until its incorporation into the Union of South Africa in 1910. The Portuguese government erected two navigational beacons, Dias Cross and da Gama Cross , to commemorate Bartolomeu Dias and Vasco da Gama , who were
10476-410: The time the expedition left: What is more, I have spoken with a person worthy of trust, who says that he sailed in an Indian ship caught in the fury of a tempest for 40 days out in the Sea of India, beyond the Cape of Soffala and the Green Islands towards west-southwest; and according to the astrologers who act as their guides, they had advanced almost 2,000 miles. Thus one can believe and confirm what
10584-609: The tonal distinctions, compared with about 5,000 in Vietnamese (still a largely monosyllabic language), and over 8,000 in English. Most modern varieties tend to form new words through polysyllabic compounds . In some cases, monosyllabic words have become disyllabic formed from different characters without the use of compounding, as in 窟窿 ; kūlong from 孔 ; kǒng ; this is especially common in Jin varieties. This phonological collapse has led to
10692-547: The traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cí can consist of more than one character–morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more. Examples of Chinese words of more than two syllables include 汉堡包 ; 漢堡包 ; hànbǎobāo ; 'hamburger', 守门员 ; 守門員 ; shǒuményuán ; 'goalkeeper', and 电子邮件 ; 電子郵件 ; diànzǐyóujiàn ; 'e-mail'. All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages : they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure), rather than inflectional morphology (changes in
10800-412: The two oceans meet at the point where the warm-water Agulhas current meets the cold-water Benguela current and turns back on itself. That oceanic meeting point fluctuates between Cape Agulhas and Cape Point (about 1.2 kilometres (0.75 mi) east of the Cape of Good Hope). When following the western side of the African coastline from the equator, however, the Cape of Good Hope marks the point where
10908-512: The use of tones in Chinese is the application of the four tones of Standard Chinese, along with the neutral tone, to the syllable ma . The tones are exemplified by the following five Chinese words: In contrast, Standard Cantonese has six tones. Historically, finals that end in a stop consonant were considered to be " checked tones " and thus counted separately for a total of nine tones. However, they are considered to be duplicates in modern linguistics and are no longer counted as such: Chinese
11016-452: The words in newspapers, and 60% of the words in science magazines. Vietnam, Korea, and Japan each developed writing systems for their own languages, initially based on Chinese characters , but later replaced with the hangul alphabet for Korean and supplemented with kana syllabaries for Japanese, while Vietnamese continued to be written with the complex chữ Nôm script. However, these were limited to popular literature until
11124-508: The written language used throughout China changed comparatively little, crystallizing into a prestige form known as Classical or Literary Chinese . Literature written distinctly in the Classical form began to emerge during the Spring and Autumn period . Its use in writing remained nearly universal until the late 19th century, culminating with the widespread adoption of written vernacular Chinese with
11232-453: Was a koiné based on dialects spoken in the Nanjing area, though not identical to any single dialect. By the middle of the 19th century, the Beijing dialect had become dominant and was essential for any business with the imperial court. In the 1930s, a standard national language ( 国语 ; 國語 ; Guóyǔ ), was adopted. After much dispute between proponents of northern and southern dialects and an abortive attempt at an artificial pronunciation,
11340-481: Was hidden by their written form. Often different compounds for the same concept were in circulation for some time before a winner emerged, and sometimes the final choice differed between countries. The proportion of vocabulary of Chinese origin thus tends to be greater in technical, abstract, or formal language. For example, in Japan, Sino-Japanese words account for about 35% of the words in entertainment magazines, over half
11448-460: Was later renamed by John II of Portugal as "Cape of Good Hope" ( Cabo da Boa Esperança ) because of the great optimism engendered by the opening of a sea route to India and the East. The Khoikhoi people lived in the cape area when the Dutch first settled there in 1652. The Khoikhoi had arrived in this area about fifteen hundred years before. The Dutch called them Hottentots , a term that has now come to be regarded as pejorative. In 1652,
11556-597: Was more than 40–50 nautical miles from the coast (outside the range of the Automatic Identification System). The United States requested that countries in the region not accept the ship, and it asked China "to refrain from making additional shipments and, if possible, to bring this one back". On 22 April, it was reported that the China Ocean Shipping Company had decided to recall the ship due to its inability to deliver its cargo, and on 23 April,
11664-522: Was the original name of the cape. As one of the great capes of the South Atlantic Ocean, it has long been of special significance to sailors, many of whom refer to it simply as " the Cape ". It is a waypoint on the Cape Route and the clipper route followed by clipper ships to the Far East and Australia , and still followed by several offshore yacht races . The term Cape of Good Hope
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