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93-569: Nanjing Road ( Chinese : 南京路 ; pinyin : Nánjīng Lù ; Shanghainese : Noecin Lu ) is a road in Shanghai , the eastern part of which is the main shopping district of Shanghai. It is one of the world's busiest shopping streets , along with Fifth Avenue , Oxford Street , Orchard Road , Takeshita Street and the Champs-Élysées . The street is named after Nanjing , capital of Jiangsu province and

186-547: 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

279-464: 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

372-457: 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

465-413: A 30,000 square feet (2,800 m2) Starbucks Reserve Roastery at HKRI Taikoo Hui on Nanjing Road West, the largest Starbucks branch in the world. It features its own roasting facility and Shanghai specific offerings including nitro draft lattes and alcoholic drinks. Shanghai Metro Line 2 runs along Nanjing Road, including the following stations and other stations: Shanghai Metro Line 1 and 8 include

558-505: 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

651-595: 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

744-575: A cafe, games room, billiard room and reading room. The second floor contained rooms for members and the restaurant. The Race Committee of the International Recreation Club (also called the Shanghai Recreation Fund) organised its first race meet in 1848. In 1850, five founding directors (W. Hogg, T.D. Gibb, Langley, W. W. Pakin and E. Webb) obtained a permanent lease over land at the corner of Honan Road and Nanking Road and built

837-462: 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

930-539: A committee. This agreement followed a request by the committee of Champs-Elysees in the perspective of a friendship agreement between both famous streets. In 2019–2020, the section between Middle Henan Road and the Bund (East-1 Zhongshan Road) was converted into a pedestrian-only zone, extending the pedestrian mall eastward to the Bund. Nanjing Road is the world's longest shopping district, around 5.5 km long, and attracts over 1 million visitors daily. East Nanjing Road

1023-597: 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

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1116-669: A controlling share of the racecourse at Kiang-wan (now Jiangwan ) (which was renamed the International Recreation Ground), and thereafter became the main rival to the Race Club. The Race Club prospered from the influx of migrants into Shanghai in the early 20th century and the sale of hugely popular raffle tickets from 1908. By 1938, it had purchased all of the assets of its former parent, the Shanghai Recreation Club (which had lost its major source of revenue when

1209-700: 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

1302-564: 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

1395-523: A number of upmarket malls including Plaza 66 , Jing An Kerry Centre and HKRI Taikoo Hui , office buildings such as Tian An Centre , the Shanghai Exhibition Centre , and shops. This area also previously featured a number of large mansions and estates, most of which are today either demolished or used by the government. West Nanjing Road, near Jing'an Temple , was built in 1860 as Bubbling Well Road (靜安寺路), an extra-settlement road outside

1488-464: A part of the development plan held by the local government, Nanjing Road was renovated to be a characteristic pedestrian street . The width is about 28 meters and the total length is 1,200 meters, which extends from Middle He'nan Road to Middle Xizang Road. In 2007, the Jing'an and Huangpu governments agreed to coordinate their policy to enhance the development of Nanjing Road, through a unique launching of

1581-538: 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

1674-512: A sharp rise in city centre property prices in Shanghai. In 1862, with funds realised from sale of the old racecourse and sports ground, the Race Club was able to purchase even larger grounds further to the west, and construct the third (and last) Shanghai Racecourse. The land enclosed by the race track was sold to the Recreation Club for use as sports grounds. In 1910, the Recreation Club purchased

1767-503: 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

1860-610: 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

1953-563: 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

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2046-596: 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

2139-471: Is a dedicated commercial zone. At its eastern end is the central section of the Bund, featuring the Peace Hotel . Immediately west of the Bund precinct was traditionally the hub of European-style restaurants and cafes, although in recent years these have become less of a feature as the demographics of visitors to Nanjing Road have shifted from affluent local residents to visitors from around the country. Close by

2232-485: 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,

2325-595: 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

2418-445: 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

2511-668: 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

2604-523: Is the Central Market, a century-old outdoor market today specialising in electronic components and digital media. Further west is the Nanjing Road pedestrian mall. Located here are most of Shanghai's oldest and largest department stores, as well as a variety of domestic retail outlets, and some traditional eateries with a long history. From the perspective of the historical development of Nanjing East Road,

2697-484: 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,

2790-496: 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

2883-497: 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

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2976-540: 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

3069-428: 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

3162-735: 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

3255-610: 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

3348-525: 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

3441-680: 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

3534-579: 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

3627-473: 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

3720-591: 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

3813-639: 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. Shanghai Race Club From 1862,

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3906-702: The Civil War. After the Communist takeover of Shanghai in 1949, the Trustees of the Shanghai Recreation Fund wrote to the new Communist administration to voluntarily hand over the properties of the Recreation Club, including the sports ground at the centre of the Racecourse. Because the Race Club and the Recreation Club had by now effectively become one, the government waited until the next year to officially "receive"

3999-630: The Club still could not organise races, it did not have any significant income, and by 1954 owed large amounts of land tax and staff salary. The club had no choice but to hand over all of its properties to the government to pay these debts. On 31 May 1954, the government took over all of the club's buildings. The club house became, first, the Shanghai Museum , and later, the Shanghai Library . A number of other buildings were subsequently built and rebuilt on

4092-738: The Kiang-wan Racecourse was ransacked by invading Japanese troops), including the sport field surrounded by the racecourse. The club's activities were affected by the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Chinese Civil War . Upon the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941, Japanese forces occupied the Race Club, but racing resumed in December, 1941 and continued regularly until August 1945. The facilities were briefly used by US forces at

4185-555: 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

4278-454: The Race Club was restricted to foreign (non-Chinese) residents over the age of 21. A membership committee of 9 to 11 people would vote on each application. A unanimous approval is required for the application to succeed. If there is one disapproval vote, the application is held over until the next meeting. If there are two disapproval votes, the candidate is required to re-apply after a certain time period. If there are three disapproval votes, then

4371-529: The Shanghai Race Club was based at the race track it owned in the centre of Shanghai. The grounds later became People's Park and the adjacent People's Square in central Shanghai - which (taken together) are even today still in the shape of the original track. This racetrack, opened in 1862, was the third racecourse owned by the Shanghai Race Club. The turf was described as "smooth as a billiard table". The Race Club building, which survives to this day,

4464-497: The application fails and the candidate is not permitted to re-apply. It was not until 1908 that select Chinese nationals were permitted to join as honorary members, associate members or social members. By 1908, the Race Club had 320 full members and 500 other members. Monthly fees were 10 Imperial yuan for all membership types, but membership privileges differed significantly. Non-full members could only participate in race meets on festival days. Chinese race-goers were permitted to enter

4557-432: The beginning of the 20th century, eight big department stores were established along the street. A series of franchised stores were also set up at that time. On 23 August 1937, a Chinese warplane attempting to bomb the Japanese ship Izumo missed its target, dropping four bombs onto the crowded nearby streets, two of which landed on Nanjing Road. Around 2,000 people were killed by the four bombs collectively. In 2000, as

4650-515: The concession proper. It was once one of Shanghai's premier residential areas, but has witnessed constant development over the past ten years. This area is now host to several five star hotels, upscale shopping centers, restaurants and prime office buildings. Recently, the area has benefited from the construction of Subway Line 7 , connecting with Line 2 at Jing'an Temple station. Many luxury goods , fashion and sport brand boutiques are located on West Nanjing Road. In December 2017, Starbucks opened

4743-537: The concession proper. The two roads met on the northern edge of the Shanghai Race Club . Nanjing Road is located in the city center, running in a west–east direction. Its eastern section is in Huangpu District and extends from The Bund west to People's Square . The western section begins at People's Square and continues westward towards Jing'an District . The history of Nanjing Road can be traced back to

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4836-399: 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

4929-484: 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

5022-566: 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

5115-416: The end of the war in 1945. However, due to public outcry about this vestige of colonialism in central Shanghai and the reputation of the racecourse as a gambling den, the government did not permit race meetings to be resumed. From 1946, the Republic of China government began negotiations with the Race Club to resume the racecourse. In 1947, in the midst of negotiations with the government over acquisition of

5208-413: 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

5301-530: The first racecourse (known as the "Old Park"). The Race Club was formed the same year, and the first race meet was held the next year. By 1861, the Race Club had 25 members. In 1854, the Old Park was sold at a profit, and the racecourse was enlarged and moved west to the intersection of Chekiang Road and Nanking Road (known as the "New Park"). The influx of refugees fleeing the Taiping Revolution rebels caused

5394-481: The following station: Shanghai Metro Line 10 includes the following station: Shanghai Metro Line 12 and Shanghai Metro Line 13 include the following station: Tourists and guests often celebrate various holidays at Nanjing Road, such as the Chinese New Year , New Year's Eve, Christmas and Easter. Some parts of the buildings and shopping malls seen in front of Nanjing Road may host a fireworks display over

5487-491: 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

5580-596: The former capital of the Republic of China . Today's Nanjing Road comprises two sections, Nanjing Road East and Nanjing Road West. In some contexts, "Nanjing Road" refers only to what was pre-1945 Nanjing Road, then rendered as Nanking Road in English. The former Nanking Road lay entirely within the Shanghai International Settlement . Today's Nanjing Road West was formerly Bubbling Well Road , an extra-settlement road built by concession authorities outside

5673-599: 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

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5766-552: The grounds from 1909. Between 1863 and 1919, there were two meetings each year: the Spring race days occurred in late April and early May, and the Autumn race days were in late October and early November. Each meeting was for four days. The two race meetings were described as "The Grand Festivals of Shanghai". From 1920 onwards, further preliminary race days were added, and there were occasional additional races on weekends and holidays. Betting

5859-581: 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

5952-516: 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

6045-455: 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

6138-425: 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

6231-583: 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

6324-538: 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

6417-400: The properties of both the Race Club and the Recreation Club at the Racecourse. The Racecourse was placed under military administration on 31 May 1951. The land occupied by the Racecourse was resumed by the government, the club's buildings remained in its hands, but it had to pay land tax. In September, the government began reconstruction of the race course as People's Park and People's Square. As

6510-413: The racecourse, the Club incorporated as three companies, registered in Hong Kong , which respectively held various parts of the club's buildings and facilities; the Recreation Club was also nominally maintained, holding the sports ground surrounded by the race track. Negotiations to exchange the racecourse for a larger plot of suburban land to build a new racecourse never concluded due to the intervention of

6603-520: The raffles were very accessible and proved extremely popular with Chinese residents, and also attracted criticism of the Race Club from social commentators for running essentially a pure gambling scheme. In the 1860s the most notable trophy was the Champions Stakes, a forced entry race for all winners during the fall and spring race meeting. In 1884 it was renamed the Mafoo and Champions' race. In 1927, it

6696-404: 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 ,

6789-552: 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

6882-509: 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

6975-642: The site of the race course and club buildings. In 1997, Shanghai Library moved out to Huaihai Road , and the Shanghai Art Museum moved into the former club house. The Shanghai Art Museum moved out in 2012 to become the China Art Museum in 2012, and the former clubhouse building became the home of the Shanghai History Museum in 2018, which had been left without a base due to redevelopment of its former site since 1999. At first, membership of

7068-505: 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

7161-557: 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

7254-486: The start and redevelopment of this road were driven by the pursuit of commerce and image. The commercialization of Nanjing East Road has both a promotion and a restrictive effect. The pedestrian mall, and East Nanjing Road, ends at People's Park, formerly the Shanghai Race Course . Opposite the park are some of Shanghai's prestigious historic hotels, including Park Hotel . West Nanjing Road begins here, and features

7347-554: The street. 31°14′05″N 121°28′28″E  /  31.23472°N 121.47444°E  / 31.23472; 121.47444 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

7440-559: 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

7533-547: 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

7626-512: 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

7719-452: 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

7812-508: 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

7905-579: The year 1845. At that time it was called "Park Lane", which stretched from the Bund to He'nan Road. In 1854, it was extended to Zhejiang Road, and eight years later, once more extended to Xizang Road. In 1862, it was named formally "Nanking Road" by the Municipal Council, which administered the International Settlement . In Chinese it was usually referred to as the Main Road (大马路). Around 1930 it

7998-486: Was 100ft by 47ft with a huge fireplace, most certainly ranked as the most sumptuous club of its kind yet built in any country. The clubhouse's exterior has a neo-classical structure, with eclectic details. A loggia which ran along the second floor of the building was used as the members' stand. The ground floor was the box office and betting hall. A mezzanine level between the ground and first floor contained bowling lanes. The first floor contained club facilities, including

8091-481: Was a bustling street with at least one reported casino (probably at nr. 181). In 1943 the International Settlement was annulled, and after World War II the government changed its name from Nanking Road to "East Nanjing Road", meanwhile they also renamed the former Bubbling Well Road "West Nanjing Road", and the general name of the two roads became "Nanjing Road", comprising five kilometres total length. At

8184-453: 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,

8277-510: Was always a feature of the Shanghai Racecourse. Prior to 1909, this primarily occurred via bookmakers who set up stalls at the course. After 1909, the sale of raffle tickets were introduced, and quickly outstripped betting on horses as the primary source of revenue for the Shanghai Race Club. Horse racing-themed raffle tickets issued by the Race Club were sold across China. Purely a game of chance and not requiring any knowledge of racing,

8370-465: Was built in 1934 on the western side of the race track. Its imposing, 10-storey tall tower was long a landmark of central Shanghai. It included a 100-metre (330 ft) long grand stand, with three to five levels. The 1934 building has been described thus: The grandstand was thought at the time to be the largest in the world, and probably was, while the Race Club, with its marble staircases, teak-panelled rooms, oak parquet floors, and its coffee room which

8463-410: Was dissolved in 2009. A British IT entrepreneur, Byron Constable, purchased brand name rights to "Shanghai Race Club" and started a business called " Shanghai Race Club " in 2008. The business operates in mainland China , and concentrates on showcasing European horse racing as a prestige lifestyle. Constable's Shanghai Race Club also hosts an annual Royal Ascot dinner in Shanghai which is followed by

8556-481: 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

8649-831: Was renamed the Shaforce Challenge Cup and Champions' Stakes. Champions Day—the day of the Champions' Stakes—was a holiday in Shanghai's International Settlement and drew crowds in excess of 20,000 spectators. The November 12, 1941 Champions Day was the last one under the direction of the British directors of the Shanghai Race Club, just three weeks before the Japanese army occupied the International Settlement. The Japanese occupiers conducted an additional Champions' Stakes in May, 1942. The original Shanghai Race Club Limited, registered in Hong Kong,

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