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107-709: Laozi ( / ˈ l aʊ d z ə / , Chinese : 老子 ), also romanized as Lao Tzu and various other ways , is a semi-legendary ancient Chinese philosopher and author of the Tao Te Ching ( Laozi ), the foundational text of Taoism along with the Zhuangzi . A Chinese honorific typically translated as "the Old Master (zi)", the name and text were likely intended to portray an archaic anonymity that could converse with Confucianism . Modern scholarship generally regards his biographical details as later inventions, and his opus

214-464: 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

321-448: A predynastic polity with its own existing power structure, primarily organized as a set of culturally affiliated kinship groups. The defining characteristics of a noble were their ancestral temple surname ( 姓 ; xíng ), their lineage line within that ancestral surname, and seniority within that lineage line. Shortly after the Zhou conquest of Shang (1046 or 1045 BCE), the immediate goal of

428-457: 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

535-505: 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

642-595: 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

749-462: 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

856-543: A collaboration. Traditional accounts addend him as Li Er , born in the 6th century   BC state of Chu during China's Spring and Autumn period . Serving as the royal archivist for the Zhou court at Wangcheng (in modern Luoyang ), he met and impressed Confucius on one occasion, composing the Tao Te Ching in a single session before retiring into the western wilderness. A central figure in Chinese culture , Laozi

963-597: 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

1070-700: 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

1177-506: A disciple and left with Laozi, never to be seen again. In some later interpretations, the "Old Master" journeyed all the way to India and was the teacher of Siddartha Gautama, the Buddha . Others say he was the Buddha himself. The stories assert that Laozi never opened a formal school but nonetheless attracted a large number of students and loyal disciples. There are many variations of a story retelling his encounter with Confucius, most famously in

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1284-564: 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

1391-602: A person's courtesy name , as in the case of the Zheng statesman Zichan , or of Zilu , disciple of Confucius. In this sense, it can be conceptualized as carrying the meaning Sir , or "the Honourable". Zi was also used as a polite second-person pronoun, also translated sir or rarely, madam . Saliently, Zi was also used to refer to rulers of polities outside the Zhou cultural sphere, such as Chu , Wu , and Yue . In this sense, it had

1498-538: 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

1605-503: 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

1712-678: A single language. However, their lack of mutual intelligibility means they are sometimes considered to be separate languages in 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

1819-508: A small to medium domain, and as a general mark of respect. The character 陽 is yang , the solar and masculine life force in Taoist belief. Lao Dan seems to have been used more generally, however, including by Sima Qian in his Records of the Grand Historian , in the Zhuangzi , and by some modern scholars. By the mid-twentieth century, consensus had emerged among Western scholars that

1926-610: 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

2033-563: 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

2140-596: 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

2247-640: 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 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

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2354-485: 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,

2461-415: Is generally considered the founder of Taoism. He was claimed and revered as the ancestor of the 7th–10th century Tang dynasty and is similarly honored in modern China as the progenitor of the popular surname Li . In some sects of Taoism, Chinese Buddhism , Confucianism , and Chinese folk religion , it is held that he then became an immortal hermit . Certain Taoist devotees held that the Tao Te Ching

2568-402: Is generically a birth order term, signifying the eldest son. The most senior male of their lineage line was called Bo , which can be roughly encapsulated by the translation Elder . The most senior male members of ancestral temples with a different surname than the royal house were called Bo , as well as the most senior male members of the cadet lineages of the same ancestral temple surname as

2675-542: Is multifaceted, and reflected in the words' multiple meanings, even in English translation; it can mean "not doing anything", "not forcing", "not acting" in the theatrical sense, "creating nothingness", "acting spontaneously", and "flowing with the moment". This concept is used to explain ziran , or harmony with the Tao. It includes the concepts that value distinctions are ideological and seeing ambition of all sorts as originating from

2782-595: 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

2889-445: 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

2996-668: 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

3103-425: Is the Chinese word for 'ear'. Laozi is recorded bearing the courtesy name Boyang ( 伯 陽 , Bóyáng ), whose Old Chinese pronunciation has been reconstructed as *pˤrak laŋ . The character 伯 was the title of the eldest son born to the primary wife, or an uncle of the father's family who was older than one's father, also used as a noble title indicating an aristocratic lineage head with rulership over

3210-484: 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,

3317-496: 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

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3424-497: 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

3531-540: 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

3638-428: 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

3745-735: 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

3852-487: The Zhuangzi . Alan Chan provides an example of how Laozi encouraged a change in approach, or return to "nature", rather than action. Technology may bring about a false sense of progress. The answer provided by Laozi is not the rejection of technology, but instead seeking the calm state of wu wei , free from desires. This relates to many statements by Laozi encouraging rulers to keep their people in "ignorance", or "simple-minded". Some scholars insist this explanation ignores

3959-468: The Eastern Zhou , indicating an actual historical process. A 2007 survey of bronze inscriptions from 31 states found only eight polities whose rulers used varying titles of nobility to describe themselves. It is against this backdrop of self-organizing systematization that thinkers of the traditionalist school began to conceive of a lost ideal, a strictly graded system of noble titles and enfeoffments from

4066-525: 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

4173-680: 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

4280-579: 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

4387-654: The Tao Te Ching in a complete form by itself were discovered at a tomb in Mawangdui , and date to the early 2nd century BCE. Analysis of early commentary on passages that appear in the received Tao Te Ching supports an accretionary evolution for the text rather than a singular authorship event. The earliest biographical reference to Laozi is found in the 1st‑century BC Records of the Grand Historian by Sima Qian . Multiple accounts of Laozi's biography are presented, with Sima Qian expressing various levels of doubt in his sources. In one account, Sima Qian reports that Laozi

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4494-720: The Warring States period . The Tao Te Ching is one of the most significant treatises in Chinese cosmogony . It is often called the Laozi , and has always been associated with that name. The identity of the person or people who wrote or compiled the text has been the source of considerable speculation and debate throughout history. As with many works of ancient Chinese philosophy , ideas are often explained by way of paradox, analogy, appropriation of ancient sayings, repetition, symmetry, rhyme, and rhythm. The Tao Te Ching stands as an exemplar of this literary form. Unlike most works of its genre,

4601-515: The Zhuangzi . A.C. Graham suggested that the Confucian version of the story presented in the Book of Rites was the original, which was borrowed and re-interpreted by the followers of Zhuang Zhou . His birthday is popularly held to be the 15th day of the second month of the Chinese calendar . In accounts where Laozi married, he was said to have had a son who became a celebrated soldier of Wei during

4708-407: The historicity of a person known as Laozi is doubtful and that the Tao Te Ching is "a compilation of Taoist sayings by many hands", with an author being invented afterwards. While multiple authorship over time is typical for early Chinese texts, the book's conspicuous absence of a central Master figure place it in marked contrast with nearly all other early Chinese philosophical works. As of 2024,

4815-473: 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

4922-591: 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

5029-662: 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. Zhou dynasty nobility The Zhou dynasty grew out of

5136-502: The English connotation of e.g. your Grace or his Excellency . Hou ( 侯 ; hòu ) were the regional lords, rulers of the border states, appointed from a pool of close relatives by the early Zhou court to project force and secure the dynasty. Modern English scholarship also renders this term as lord or as regional lord . They form a geographically bounded set, outside the predynastic Zhou homeland. A 2012 study found no difference in grade between Gong and Hou . Bo ( 伯 ; bó )

5243-737: The Grand Preceptor ( 太師 ; tàishī ). These men were called Gong , although their descendants did not inherit this title. The system of three was not always in effect throughout the dynasty, but there was often one or more ministers set above the rest of the government, always called Gong regardless of specific title. In their own ancestral temple, any ancestor of suitable distance and regardless of noble title in life could be referred to as Gong . This practice increased over time, with lineages "upgrading" their ancestors without discernible pattern. Within their own polity, any living ruler could be addressed as, or referred to as, Gong , which carries

5350-555: 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

5457-536: The Warrior who defeats an enemy and triumphs, and then abandons the corpses of the enemy soldiers to be eaten by vultures. By coincidence Laozi, traveling and teaching the way of the Tao, comes on the scene and is revealed to be the father of Zong, from whom he was separated in childhood. Laozi tells his son that it is better to treat respectfully a beaten enemy, and that the disrespect to their dead would cause his foes to seek revenge. Convinced, Zong orders his soldiers to bury

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5564-407: The base meaning "male" or "adult human male", is attested in two cases of rulers of Zhou cultural polities: Xu ( 許 ) and Su ( 宿 ). A 2012 study found no difference in grade between Zi and Nan . The title Dian ( 甸 ; diàn ) appears in the received literature, but is not epigraphically attested as a title as of 2008 . It does appear as a common noun. Wang ( 王 ; wáng ; 'King')

5671-445: The book conspicuously lacks a central "master" character and seldom references historical people or events, giving it an air of timelessness. The Tao Te Ching describes the Tao as the source and ideal of all existence: it is unseen, but not transcendent, immensely powerful yet supremely humble, being the root of all things. People have desires and free will (and thus are able to alter their own nature). Many act "unnaturally", upsetting

5778-529: The boundary between the two halves of the Zhou dynasty saw central authority and power dramatically weaken, and the movement of people out of the old Zhou homeland has been archaeologically established. Culture groups outside the Zhou sphere began to adopt pieces of state apparatus similar to those used by the Zhou, and refer to themselves in the same kind of terms. The new geopolitical situation put regional states and minor polities in direct contact with each other, where previously they had interacted mostly through

5885-435: The central government and their relation to the royal house. Under this new regime, they self-organized into a much more systematized structure. One individual who is well attested in this process was the previously mentioned Zichan, who both submitted a memorial to the king of Chu informing him of the proposed new system in 538 BCE, and argued at a 529 BCE interstate conference that tributes should be graded based on rank, given

5992-400: The city (or kingdom), he was recognized by the guard Yinxi . The sentry asked the old master to record his wisdom for the good of the country before he would be permitted to pass. The text Laozi wrote was said to be the Tao Te Ching , although the present version of the text includes additions from later periods. In some versions of the tale, the sentry was so touched by the work that he became

6099-399: 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

6206-484: 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

6313-409: The disparity in available resources. Alongside this development, there was precedent of Zhou kings "upgrading" noble ranks as a reward for service to the throne, giving the recipients a bit more diplomatic prestige without costing the royal house any land. Archaeologically excavated primary sources and received literature agree to a high degree of systematization and stability in noble titles during

6420-566: 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

6527-519: The enemy dead. Funeral mourning is held for the dead of both parties and a lasting peace is made. In a third, he was the court astrologer Lao Dan who lived during the 4th century   BC reign of the Duke Xian of Qin who grew weary of the moral decay of life in Chengzhou and noted the kingdom's decline. He ventured west to live as a hermit in the unsettled frontier at the age of 80. At the western gate of

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6634-475: The field of early Chinese studies, or criticize the use of such terminology without calling for their elimination and others continue to employ it as a rough and pedagogically neutral heuristic. Unlike the preceding Shang dynasty, which featured women such as Fu Hao and Xiao Chen Tao in positions of authority in military and religious institutions, the highly patriarchal Zhou appear by all accounts to have concentrated official political power exclusively in

6741-413: 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

6848-491: 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

6955-599: 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

7062-403: The hands of men. With a handful of rare exceptions, women appear in the epigraphic record in the context of dowries, instruments for building alliances between powerful families. Apart from birth order terms, the only noble titles they are associated with are zi, in its sense of "child of a powerful man", and more commonly, sheng ( 甥 ; shēng ), a term without close analogue that indicates

7169-581: 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

7276-516: 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

7383-434: The leaders of polities outside the Zhou cultural sphere. This complicated set of dynamics gave rise to the following set of terms. Gong ( 公 ; gōng ) was a term of highest respect, and can be rendered in English as Lord to a high level of accuracy. The original meaning seems to have been "senior lineage male", cognate with wēng ( 翁 ; 'respected elder'). The leaders of existing Zhou cultural polities within

7490-463: The meaning Ruler or unratified lord , in that the Zhou king did not recognize the ruler's sovereignty. In most cases (including all three examples), these men referred to themselves as King ( 王 ; wáng ). As a final wrinkle to understanding this word in this topic area, it was also the lineage surname of the kings of the preceding Shang dynasty . It has many other meanings in Chinese, some quite ancient. The noble title Nan ( 男 ; nán ), with

7597-627: The meaning of scion . Living rulers could be referred to as Zi while still in their ritually stipulated mourning periods for their recently deceased fathers. More frequently, zi signifies a sense of respect. It is commonly found appended to the names of nobles when they are referred to posthumously. This use found its way to the names of influential thinkers of later periods, giving us Kong zi ( Confucius ), Lao zi ( Lao Tzu ), Zhuangzi , and many others. In this sense, it has been fruitfully rendered as master , and lent its name in this sense to an entire literary genre. Zi could also be prepended to

7704-455: 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

7811-425: 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

7918-583: 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

8025-581: The nascent dynasty was to consolidate its power over its newly expanded geographical range, especially in light of the Rebellion of the Three Guards following the death of the conquering King Wu of Zhou . To this end, royal relatives were granted lands outside the old Zhou homeland, and given relatively sovereign authority over those spaces. The Zhou government thus had multiple dimensions of relationship with different sorts of powerful men. The lineage elders of

8132-413: The natural balance of the Tao. The Tao Te Ching intends to lead students to a "return" to their natural state, in harmony with Tao. Language and conventional wisdom are critically assessed. Taoism views them as inherently biased and artificial, widely using paradoxes to sharpen the point. Wu wei , literally 'non-action' or 'not acting', is a central concept of the Tao Te Ching . The concept of wu wei

8239-472: The old homelands were related to the royal house mostly through the pre-existing kinship structure, and not all were politically subservient. The regional lords were established to provide a screen to the royal lands and exert control over culturally distinct polities and were mostly defined by that responsibility, but this was also embedded in the kinship groups. Some few high government ministers had special, non-hereditary titles of nobility. Lastly, there were

8346-519: The oldest manuscript containing text from the Tao Te Ching dates to the late 4th century BC, written on bamboo slips excavated as part of the Guodian Chu Slips . These passages correspond with roughly one third of the received text, and some are placed in the same order. These are mixed in with passages not carried by the transmitted Tao Te Ching , indicating that its makeup was still undergoing revisions and modifications. The oldest manuscripts of

8453-538: 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

8560-520: The personal name Li Er ( 李 耳 , Lǐ Ěr ), whose Old Chinese pronunciation has been reconstructed as *C.rəʔ C.nəʔ . Li is a common Chinese surname which also has the meaning meaning ' plum ' or plum tree when used as a common noun; there is a legend tying Laozi's birth to a plum tree. Laozi has long been identified with the persona Lao Dan ( 老 聃 , Lǎo Dān ). Dan similarly means "Long-Ear" or "the Long-Eared One". The character 耳

8667-404: 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 ,

8774-548: The received literature in the Rites of Zhou and the Liji . In the Eastern Han and Western Jin dynasties, the "traditional" Confucian five-rank system was actually put into practice with minor modifications, finally manifesting this historical fiction as political fact. Qing dynasty Empress Dowager Cixi inveighed upon visitors to translate the five ranks into English. Working with

8881-476: The received text of the Tao Te Ching was not composed until the 4th century   BC Warring States period , and was the product of multiple authors. Laozi / ˈ l aʊ d z ə / is the modern pinyin romanization of 老子 . It is not a personal name, but rather an honorific title , meaning 'old' or 'venerable'. Its structure matches that of other ancient Chinese philosophers, such as Kongzi , Mengzi , and Zhuangzi . Traditional accounts give Laozi

8988-552: 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

9095-509: 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

9202-416: The religious context, and others question it as an apologetic of the philosophical coherence of the text. It would not be unusual political advice if Laozi literally intended to tell rulers to keep their people ignorant. However, some terms in the text, such as "valley spirit" ( 谷神 , gǔshén ) and 'soul' ( 魄 , pò ), bear a metaphysical context and cannot be easily reconciled with a purely ethical reading of

9309-528: The royal Zhou court. This reportedly allowed him broad access to the works of the Yellow Emperor and other classics of the time, and wrote a book in two parts before departing to the west. In another, Laozi was a different contemporary of Confucius called Lao Laizi  [ zh ] ( 老莱子 ), one of the Twenty-four Filial Exemplars , and wrote a book in 15 parts. The story tells of Zong

9416-410: The royal house. Although these men had land and power, their relationship to the aristocracy was foremost conceptualized as one of extended kinship. In the old Zhou homeland, less senior members of their lineage branch referred to themselves by the appropriate birth order term: 仲 ; zhōng ; 'second', 叔 ; shū ; 'younger', or 季 ; jī ; 'youngest'. Complicating matters,

9523-450: The rulers of some smaller polities such as Qin , Zheng , and Cao were also called Bo , in which case the term did have overtly political meaning. Zi ( 子 ; zǐ ) carried a number of meanings highly dependent upon use case. Its base meaning is "child" or "son". The sons of rulers could be referred to with zi appended to their personal name. In this sense, zi also appeared in compound words such as Wangzi or Gongzi , where it has

9630-515: The same ancestral temple surname as the royal house ( Jī ; 姬 ), such as Guo ( 虢 ), were rarely called Gong , in which case, it also carried the meaning patriarch . The rulers of Song , descended from the royal house of Shang, also bore this title. The three highest government ministers in the early Zhou were the Grand Tutor ( 太傅 ; tàifù ), the Grand Protector ( 太保 ; tàibǎo ), and

9737-407: The same source. Tao Te Ching used the term broadly with simplicity and humility as key virtues, often in contrast to selfish action. On a political level, it means avoiding such circumstances as war, harsh laws and heavy taxes. Some Taoists see a connection between wu wei and esoteric practices, such as zuowang ('sitting in oblivion': emptying the mind of bodily awareness and thought) found in

9844-505: 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

9951-557: 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

10058-464: The term fengjian to articulate it, has further muddied historical understanding of the organization of aristocratic power structures in early China. Modern scholarship of Zhou-era China has focused on the examination of bronze inscriptions and other archaeologically excavated records as primary sources to establish a more accurate picture of political dynamics. Some scholars have written at length in an attempt to deprecate fully any feudal terminology in

10165-464: The terminology of European feudalism , they gave us the familiar "duke" for gong , "marquess" for hou , "earl" for bo , "viscount" for zi , and "baron" for nan . This scheme has persisted in the English literature ever since. A Marxist interpretation of history (particularly fashionable in China during the middle of the twentieth century), with its distinct concept of "feudal" and inapposite adoption of

10272-411: The time of the early Western Zhou. First articulated by Mencius , this fiction found its way into important classical works, which were subsequently canonized in the Han dynasty , becoming accepted historical truth in the process. Under this scheme, the "five ranks" were ordered as gong , hou , bo , zi , nan . Each was apportioned a set amount of land. This unsubstantiated hypothesis survives in

10379-559: 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

10486-547: 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

10593-512: 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

10700-452: 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

10807-818: The work. Confucianism Persons Topics Neo Confucianism New Confucianism Daoism Persons Topics Legalism Mohism Military and Strategy Han Buddhism Tibetan Buddhism Maoism General topics Vedic philosophy Mimamsa Vedanta Samkhya Yoga Nyaya Navya-Nyāya Vaisheshika Nāstika (heterodox) Tamil Other General topics Jainism Buddhism Traditions Topics Japanese Buddhism Chinese language Chinese ( simplified Chinese : 汉语 ; traditional Chinese : 漢語 ; pinyin : Hànyǔ ; lit. ' Han language' or 中文 ; Zhōngwén ; 'Chinese writing')

10914-508: 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

11021-453: 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,

11128-446: Was also sometimes used as a self-identifier of rulers within the Zhou homeland whose position in the ancestral temple kinship group was senior to that of the Zhou royal ancestor, King Wen . In this case, the polity in question was neither entirely within the cultural sphere nor completely distinct from it, but the adoption of the title Wang signified that it did not recognize royal authority over it. The political upheavals that marked

11235-481: 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

11342-613: Was said to be a contemporary of Confucius during the 6th or 5th century   BC. His personal name was Er or Dan. He was born in the village of Quren ( 曲仁里 , Qūrén lǐ ) in the southern state of Chu , within present-day Luyi in Henan . He was said to be the son of the Censor-in-Chief of the Zhou dynasty and Lady Yishou ( 益壽氏 ), and was a scholar who worked as the Keeper of the Archives for

11449-530: Was the avatar – embodied as a book – of the god Laojun , one of the Three Pure Ones of the Taoist pantheon, though few philosophers believe this. The Tao Te Ching had a profound influence on Chinese religious movements and on subsequent Chinese philosophers, who annotated, commended, and criticized the texts extensively. In the 20th century, textual criticism by modern historians led to theories questioning Laozi's timing or even existence, positing that

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