96-588: Wu Ming , Chinese for "anonymous", is a pseudonym for a group of Italian authors formed in 2000 from a subset of the Luther Blissett community in Bologna . Four of the group earlier wrote the novel Q (first edition 1999). Unlike the open name "Luther Blissett", "Wu Ming" stands for a defined group of writers active in literature and popular culture. The band authored several novels, some of which have been translated in many countries. Their books are seen as part of
192-464: 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
288-457: 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
384-503: A "character", a stopgap to hurriedly fill a page layout, an instrument that amplifies banality. On the other hand my voice – with its grain, with its accents, with its imprecise diction, its tonalities, rhythms, pauses and vacillations – is witness to a presence even when I'm not there; it brings me close to people and doesn't negate my transformative capacity because its presence is dynamic, alive and trembling even when seemingly still. In Wu Ming's official biographical page (Italian version),
480-505: 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
576-595: 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
672-512: A body of literary works (the "nebula", as it is frequently called in Italy) described as the New Italian Epic , a phrase that was proposed by Wu Ming. In Chinese, " wu ming " can mean "anonymous" ( traditional Chinese : 無名 ; simplified Chinese : 无名 ; pinyin : wúmíng ) or, with a different tone on the first syllable, "five people" ( Chinese : 五名 ; pinyin : wǔ míng ; 名
768-462: 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
864-695: A comeback tour, with Wu Ming 5 still on guitar, "splitting services between two bands [Wu Ming and Nabat]", as he quipped during a radio interview. The group has published several novels and non-fiction books in print and online, released under a Creative Commons license, and they are available for download on the group's website. Q , 54 , Manituana Altai and Morning Star have been translated into English. Most books are available in several European languages. Chinese language Chinese ( simplified Chinese : 汉语 ; traditional Chinese : 漢語 ; pinyin : Hànyǔ ; lit. ' Han language' or 中文 ; Zhōngwén ; 'Chinese writing')
960-597: 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
1056-700: 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
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#17328908571441152-567: A global pandemic known as "The Great Murrain". Some Italian critics described Wu Ming 5's novels as belonging to the literary subgenre known as " New Weird ". Such inclusion, however, has been questioned in weblogs and social network discussion groups devoted to science-fiction. Wu Ming 1 is the Italian translator of several Elmore Leonard novels. He translated Cat Chaser , Freaky Deaky , Tishomingo Blues and Mr Paradise , and wrote an essay on how to render Leonard's prose into Italian The essay
1248-564: 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
1344-455: A movie star. Both Alfred Hitchcock and MI6 are trying to convince him to return to acting. While Hitchcock's proposal is precise and sharply focused – the master of suspense is preparing the filming of To Catch a Thief – MI6's is vague and implausible: Grant is supposed to travel to Yugoslavia and meet up with President Josip Broz Tito , to discuss the Marshal's willingness to co-operate with
1440-411: A result, "anonymous" became the preferred interpretation of the name. The members of Wu Ming are typically known as "Wu Ming 1", "Wu Ming 2", "Wu Ming 3", "Wu Ming 4", and "Wu Ming 5". Their real names are not secret, though: The five authors do extensive book tours (which they describe as "almost gratefuldeadesque ") and frequently appear in public. However, they refuse to be photographed or filmed by
1536-538: 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
1632-503: 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
1728-678: 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
1824-610: 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
1920-563: 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
2016-596: 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
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#17328908571442112-665: Is a measure word ), the pun being part of the reason the collective adopted the name. The name is meant both as a tribute to dissidents ("Wu Ming" is a common byline among Chinese citizens demanding democracy and freedom of speech ) and as a rejection of the celebrity-making machine which turns the author into a star. "Wu Ming" is also a reference to the third sentence in the Daodejing : "Heaven and Earth's nameless origin" ( traditional Chinese : 無名天地之始 ; simplified Chinese : 无名天地之始 ; pinyin : wúmíng tiāndì zhī shǐ ). The group has since grown to include more than five members. As
2208-689: 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
2304-559: Is a novel by Wu Ming first published in Italian in 2002. Wu Ming is a collective of five authors founded in 2000. The members were formerly associated with the Luther Blissett Project, and four of them wrote the international best-selling novel Q . The novel is set in Italy, former Yugoslavia, Britain and the US during the year 1954. It has been translated into several languages. All of
2400-453: Is an allegorical tale on free jazz and the 1960s, set in 1967 New York City and constructed around John Coltrane 's final days. The French newspaper Le Monde described the book as "a choral novel, an inquiry, and a political jam-session loaded with syncopated poetry". Wu Ming 2 is the author of Guerra agli umani [War on the Humans] (2004), a satire of primitivism and survivalism set on
2496-485: 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,
2592-595: 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
2688-445: 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
2784-668: 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
2880-534: Is the author of Stella del mattino [Morning Star] (2008). The novel is set in 1919 Oxford and centered around T.E. Lawrence suffering writer's block while working on The Seven Pillars of Wisdom . Among the characters Lawrence encounters in the book, important roles are played by writers J.R.R. Tolkien , C.S. Lewis and, most notably, Robert Graves . Wu Ming themselves described Stella del mattino as "the best solo novel ever manufactured in our smithy" and "a bridge between our collective and solo novels". Wu Ming 5
2976-518: Is the author of both Havana Glam (2001) and Free Karma Food (2007). Havana Glam is set in an alternate 1970s world where David Bowie is a communist sympathizer and has a "Cuban period" instead of a " Berlin period ". This causes some turmoil in Havana, as the Cuban intelligence suspect the rockstar to be an infiltrator. Free Karma Food describes a future society where all kinds of cattle have been killed by
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3072-484: 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,
3168-637: Is the third of Wu Ming's collectively authored novels. It was written in the 2003–07 period and published in Italy in 2007. It is the first episode of an 18th-century pan-Atlantic trilogy which the authors call "the Atlantic Triptych". All novels will be set in the 1770s, all across the Atlantic Ocean (North America, Europe, the West Indies and Africa), before and during the American Revolution. In
3264-496: 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
3360-497: 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
3456-540: 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
3552-428: 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
3648-564: Is widespread among former members of the Resistance , as the Christian Democrat government has allowed many top figures of the Fascist regime to re-enter public and institutional life, and several former partisans are being persecuted as their guerrilla activities are taken out of their context and regarded as criminal actions. In Naples , mob boss Lucky Luciano is supervising the creation of
3744-735: 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
3840-623: The 11 September attacks , on the eve of the war in Afghanistan . These two wars are explicitly referred to in the novel's End Titles : "Begun in May 1999, during the Nato bombings of Belgrade. Delivered to the Italian publishers on 21 September 2001, awaiting the escalation." The events leading to (and following) 11 September are also allegorically described in the book's forenote: "Post-war" means nothing. What fools called "peace" simply meant moving away from
3936-457: The Apennines in an undefined year. The main character and narrator is called Marco, but he nicknames himself "Marco Walden", after Thoreau's Walden . At the beginning of the book, Marco quits his job as a restroom cleaner at a big cemetery, because he wants to leave the city (presumably Bologna, although it remains unnamed), go to the mountains and become a "hunter-gatherer superhero". Wu Ming 4
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4032-531: The Italian Resistance , and the relationship between Europe and America. Background research began in 1999, after the publication of the group's previous novel Q . Plots were outlined in the aftermath of the Kosovo war . Actual writing work ended ten days after 11 September , on the eve of the war in Afghanistan . These two wars are explicitly referred to in the novel's End Titles : "Begun in May 1999, during
4128-525: 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
4224-680: 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
4320-579: 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
4416-473: 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
4512-591: 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
4608-666: 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. 54 (novel)#Contemporary context and interpretations 54
4704-439: The Atlantic Triptych." Later on, they explained: We felt the urge to go back to the "crime scene" (our 1999 debut) after the collective lost a member, in the springtime of 2008. After months of crisis and conflict, we needed a new beginning. We needed a peculiar self-managed group therapy... Gert-from-the-Well appeared and told us: “I can help you, if you bring me back to life!”. And that’s what we did. The novel, entitled Altai ,
4800-555: 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
4896-840: The Mohawk nation, and Molly Brant , a matron of the Wolf clan in the Iroquois Six Nations. In Italy Manituana was awarded the Premio Sergio Leone 2007 and the Premio Emilio Salgari 2008. In November 2010 it was nominated for International Dublin Literary Award . In May 2009 Wu Ming announced that they had almost finished writing a new book, entitled Altai , set "in [their debut novel] Q's world and historical continuum". "After this accomplishment", they added, "we'll go back to
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#17328908571444992-413: The Nato bombings of Belgrade. Delivered to the Italian publishers on September 21, 2001, awaiting the escalation". The events leading to (and following) 11 September are also allegorically described in the book's forenote . 54 was published in Italy in the springtime of 2002. In the following months, Wu Ming collaborated with Italian folk-rock band Yo Yo Mundi , whose ensuing concept album 54 (2004)
5088-490: The book was serendipitous and due to a mistake. As a member of the Wu Ming collective explained it in an interview: 'leafing through a 1954 magazine, [WM2] found an article on the film stars female readers loved the most. Gary Cooper topped the list. [He] jotted in a hurry "G.C." on his notebook. A few weeks later, going through his scrawls he read "C.G." instead of "G.C." and thought: Cary Grant. At our meeting he told us: "Cary Grant
5184-471: The collective denies rumors they once beat up a press photographer: The dates and places vary, but the core of all versions stays the same. Well, it never ever happened, but it's true that, like Auda abu Tayi in Lawrence of Arabia or King Kong in the famous gala opening scene, we're no camera-mongers. We don't go on TV either. We are shy. 54 is a complex novel about popular culture, the shattered dreams of
5280-446: The coming of television, the balance of political power, and how the effects knock on down the line" Red Pepper magazine noted that the book contains a "mockery of Berlusconi 's media and political excesses" According to The Independent , the novel tries to "explain how Europe's postwar quest for social justice was thwarted by rampant consumerism and a surrender to American power" The novel has also been seen as an elegy for
5376-527: The desert, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, George W. Bush winning his second term thanks to the Christian right in 2004, Silvio Burlesquoni conquering the hearts and minds of the majority of Italians etc. The novel is set in the years 1775–1783 in New York's Mohawk Valley , Quebec and London (UK). Among the many real historical chapters that populate the book, the most important ones are Joseph Brant , war chief of
5472-399: 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
5568-484: 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
5664-546: The editions keep the original copyright statement, which allows for non-commercial reproduction of the book. The novel presents a vast multitude of characters and sub-plots. It's 1954, Joseph Stalin is dead, Yugoslavia is the only socialist country to have broken relationships with the Soviet Union , and the Free Territory of Trieste is contended between Italy and her bordering neighbor country. In Italy, dissatisfaction
5760-566: 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
5856-413: 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
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#17328908571445952-491: 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
6048-415: The front. Fools defended peace by supporting the armed wing of money. Beyond the next dune the clashes continued. The fangs of chimerical beasts sinking into flesh, the heavens full of steel and smoke, whole cultures uprooted from the earth. Fools fought the enemies of today by bankrolling those of tomorrow. Fools swelled their chests, talked of "freedom", "democracy", "in our country", as they devoured
6144-421: The fruits of riots and looting. They were defending civilisation against Chinese shadows of dinosaurs. They were defending the planet against fake images of asteroids. They were defending the Chinese shadow of a civilisation. They were defending the fake image of a planet. (translated by Shaun Whiteside ) The Observer wrote that 54 is a skilled book "about narcotics, the cheap potency of Hollywood,
6240-538: The global heroin trade. In Italian Communist Party -controlled Bologna , a group of grumpy communists hang out at the Bar Aurora. The place is run by the young Capponi Brothers, whose father fought in Yugoslavia and decided to stay there after the war. In the US, Joseph McCarthy 's anti-communist witch hunt has reached its peak. In Hollywood, Cary Grant is utterly bored with his new life after retiring from his career as
6336-599: 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
6432-463: The hospital / Where there's no bed left / And you may even die. / Work slowly / And effortlessly / Health is priceless. " (Translated by Wu Ming) The film is set during a student uprising that paralysed Bologna for several days in March 1977. Several narrative threads are woven around Radio Alice , the station run by the "creative wing" (the so-called "Mao-Dadaists") of the radical Autonomia movement. In
6528-581: 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
6624-516: 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
6720-484: The media. Even on their official website, they do not provide any pictures of themselves. Here is how Wu Ming 1 explained the group's stance in a 2007 interview: Once the writer becomes a face... it's a cannibalistic jumble: that face appears everywhere, almost always out of context. A photo is witness to my absence; it's a banner of distance and solitude. A photo paralyses me, it freezes my life into an instant, it negates my ability to transform into something else. I become
6816-455: 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
6912-441: The morning of 11 March a brawl involving radical and catholic students escalated to a full-scale riot in the university district. The Carabinieri riot squad attacked and shot down a 25-year-old student called Francesco Lorusso. As a result, thousands of students and activists stormed the centre of the town, clashing with the police and throwing molotov cocktails . On 13 March the premises of Radio Alice were invaded and vandalised by
7008-425: 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
7104-583: 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
7200-557: The next as no-one is able to make it work. "McGuffin" is a real, sentient character, the authors address him as a "he" and follow "his" stream of consciousness throughout the book, as he reasons about the rough way the Italians are treating him. Background research for the book began in 1999, after the publication of the group's previous novel Q . Plots were outlined in the aftermath of the Kosovo War . Actual writing work ended ten days after
7296-538: 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
7392-677: The police, the station was shut down and every member of the staff was arrested. The film tells the story mixing real anecdotes with semi-fictional characters. Radio Alice has won several awards and prizes at movie festivals all over Europe, including the Marcello Mastroianni Award for the Best Young Actors at the 2004 Venice Film Festival and the First Prize at the 2005 Festival de Cinema Politic in Barcelona , Spain. Manituana
7488-404: 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 ,
7584-552: 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
7680-509: 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
7776-601: The shattered dreams of the Resistance movement, as well as a depiction of everyday life after the failure of a revolution. In a 2008 speech given at Middlebury College, VT, Wu Ming 1 described the forenote to 54 as an "encrypted guide" to the poetics and allegories underlying many literary works produced in Italy in recent years, a heterogeneous narrative current which he called " New Italian Epic ". The following are printed editions. Downloadable online editions in several languages can be found here . The inclusion of Grant in
7872-505: 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
7968-557: 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
8064-611: The springtime of 2007, Manituana reached No. 4 in the Italian best-seller charts The English translation was published in the UK and the US by Verso Books in the Fall of 2009. In an entry on their weblog, Wu Ming wrote that Manituana was written between 2003 and 2007, and it soaked up all the tensions of that period: S11, the Neoconservative hegemony on US foreign policy, the lies on Saddam allegedly keeping weapons of mass destruction hidden in
8160-433: The story of Giorgio Marincola, a partisan from World War II, a dark-skinned Italian who is the son of a Somalian mother and an Italian father, born in 1923 near Mogadishu. Wu Ming 5 was guitar player in it:Nabat , one of the first Oi! bands to reach a cult following in Italy during the early 1980s. The band broke up in 1987 but got together again in the early 1990s, only to break up again in 1998. Nabat reunited in 2010 for
8256-609: The tonal distinctions, compared with about 5,000 in Vietnamese (still a largely monosyllabic language), and over 8,000 in English. Most modern varieties tend to form new words through polysyllabic compounds . In some cases, monosyllabic words have become disyllabic formed from different characters without the use of compounding, as in 窟窿 ; kūlong from 孔 ; kǒng ; this is especially common in Jin varieties. This phonological collapse has led to
8352-547: 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
8448-512: 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
8544-635: The western movie industry. MI6 reckon that a biopic on Tito's leading role in the Balkan Resistance would be a good weapon of psychological warfare on the USSR. A key role in the parallel unfolding of these sub-plots is played by an American television set, a McGuffin Electric DeLuxe which is stolen from an Allied military base in Southern Italy, sold on the black market and then passed from one buyer to
8640-452: 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
8736-508: 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
8832-453: 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,
8928-408: Was directly inspired from the novel. Wu Ming is also credited as co-writers for the screenplay of the Italian film Working Slowly (Radio Alice) (aka Radio Alice ), directed by Guido Chiesa , released in Italy in 2004. The original title means "Working slowly" and cites a protest song, a popular leftist anthem in the 1970s: " Work slowly / And effortlessly / Work may hurt you / And send you to
9024-481: 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
9120-421: Was published in Italy on 20 November 2009 and immediately reached No. 5 in the national list of best-sellers. Starting from 2001, each individual member of Wu Ming also authored one or more "solo" novels. Some of them have been translated into other languages, but not yet in English. Wu Ming 1 is the author of New Thing (2004), an " unidentified narrative object " blending fiction, journalism and free verse. It
9216-617: Was published in the catalogue of the 2006 Courmayer Noir in Festival , at which Leonard was presented with the Raymond Chandler Award . Wu Ming 1 also translated one Walter Mosley novel, Little Scarlet . In 2010 he became the Italian translator of Stephen King 's books. Wu Ming 2 has written the theater play Razza Partigiana in 2013; he is also participating on stage, with musical support from Paul Pieretto, Federico Oppi (Settlefish) and Egle Sommacal (Massimo Volume). The plot follows
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