88-644: Zhou Qi ( Chinese : 周琦 ; pinyin : Zhōu Qí [ʈʂóʊ tɕʰǐ] ; born 16 January 1996) is a Chinese professional basketball player for the Beijing Ducks of the Chinese Basketball Association (CBA). He has been a regular member of the China men's national basketball team since 2014, winning a gold team medal in the 2015 FIBA Asia Championship and the 2018 Asian Games . A center , Zhou started his professional career playing for
176-464: 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
264-457: 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
352-635: A 129–112 game three win against the Long Island Nets , having rallied from a loss in the first game to win two straight, with Isaiah Hartenstein scoring 30 points in the clinching game to lead the Vipers to victory. The Vipers have seen two of their coaches become head coaches in the NBA, Nick Nurse and Chris Finch, with the former being the first coach to lead both an NBA and NBA G-League team to championships. On October 1, 2019, assistant coach Mahmoud Abdelfattah
440-505: 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
528-595: 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
616-462: 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
704-597: 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
792-700: 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
880-530: A fifth-place finish among all teams, they shot a whopping 2,268 three-point attempts, which averaged to 45 shots a game. On February 26, 2015, the Vipers broke ground on a new arena in Edinburg called Bert Ogden Arena , which was originally scheduled for completion in October 2016. The arena was reportedly initially designed to house 8,500 seats, along with being a venue used for entertainment. The Vipers would serve as
968-564: 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
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#17328840142461056-538: 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
1144-503: 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
1232-678: 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
1320-610: 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
1408-563: 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
1496-596: 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
1584-642: 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
1672-485: 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,
1760-595: 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
1848-445: 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
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#17328840142461936-668: 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
2024-484: 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,
2112-496: 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
2200-497: 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
2288-540: 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
2376-428: 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
2464-735: 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
2552-565: The 2022–23 NBL season . On 19 December 2022, he left the team and returned to China for family reasons. Zhou Qi joined the Guangdong Southern Tigers for the 2023-24 CBA season. Zhou made his debut with the senior Chinese national team during the 2014 Asian Games in Incheon, South Korea . He returned for the 2015 FIBA Asia Championship in Changsha, China , where he helped China win
2640-825: The Australian National Basketball League (NBL). Zhou Qi attended Fuxin Basketball School in 2005 in Fuxin, Liaoning , China. Zhou first began appearing on scouting reports when he guided China to an unlikely youth team title in Turkey at the TBF International Under-16 Tournament in 2011. At age fifteen, Zhou put up 41 points, 28 rebounds, and 15 blocks in China's semifinal win over Germany, and then went for 30 points, 17 rebounds, and 8 blocks in
2728-811: The Iowa Wolves and the Indiana Mad Ants ) to have played in every league season since 2007. The Vipers entered a single-partnership affiliation agreement with the Houston Rockets during the 2009–10 season. Previously, they were affiliated with the Cleveland Cavaliers for the 2007–08 season and the New Orleans Hornets from 2007 to 2009. In late January 2007, during the 2006–07 season, the D-League announced an expansion to Hidalgo, Texas . Months later,
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2816-525: 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
2904-680: 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
2992-609: The NBA G League based in Edinburg, Texas , and are affiliated with the Houston Rockets . The Vipers play their home games at the Bert Ogden Arena . The Vipers have won four league titles in 2010, 2013, 2019, and 2022, the most for any club in league history, and they also have made the most championship series in league history, having made it seven times to the finals. They are also the earliest champion to still play in their original city along with one of only three teams (the others being
3080-726: The NBA G League . On 17 December 2018, the Rockets waived Zhou. In August 2019, Zhou returned to the Xinjiang Flying Tigers . On 8 September 2021, Zhou signed a two-year deal with the South East Melbourne Phoenix of the Australian National Basketball League (NBL) as a Special Restricted Player, with the second year being a player option. On 27 September 2022, Zhou recommitted to the Phoenix for
3168-579: 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
3256-599: The Xinjiang Flying Tigers of the Chinese Basketball Association (CBA). In 2016, he entered the NBA draft and was selected 43rd overall by the Houston Rockets of the National Basketball Association (NBA). He played a total of 19 games across two seasons with the Rockets before being waived in 2018. Zhou returned to the Flying Tigers of the CBA soon after. In 2021, he joined the South East Melbourne Phoenix in
3344-473: 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
3432-591: 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
3520-713: 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. Rio Grande Valley Vipers The Rio Grande Valley Vipers are an American professional basketball team of
3608-516: The Energy) about coaching the team, and Nurse, intrigued by the analytics that the Vipers and Rockets were "kind of at the forefront … of the Moneyball, analytics stuff", soon accepted the coaching position with RGV. In his two seasons as coach, the Vipers would lead the league in attempted three-point shots. In the 2012–13 season, the Vipers went 35–15 on the heels of a 10-game winning streak to close out
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3696-645: The Houston Rockets. He made his NBA debut on 21 October 2017, playing eight minutes in the fourth quarter of the Rockets' 107–91 win over the Dallas Mavericks , posting three rebounds and one block. On 1 November 2017, Zhou scored his first NBA points, finishing with three points against the New York Knicks . During his rookie season, Zhou had multiple assignments to the Rio Grande Valley Vipers of
3784-555: 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
3872-421: The NBA in 2017. After much back and forth, Zhou's representation in China and the U.S. secured a buyout that would allow him out of his contract after the 2016–17 season for the maximum league-mandated amount permitted, which is $ 675,000. In 2016–17, Zhou averaged 16.0 points and 10.0 rebounds while shooting 58.6% from the floor. He also ranked second in the CBA in blocks (2.3 bpg) and was named Defensive Player of
3960-485: The Tigers' roster at the time, and the club was forced to publicly deny those stories. In 2015–16, Xinjiang lost in the semifinals of the CBA playoffs. Zhou led the CBA in blocked shots in each of his first two seasons at 3.3 and 3.2 per game, respectively, while shooting 65 percent from two-point range in 73 total games. In June 2016, Zhou reached an agreement with Xinjiang that would allow him to buy out his contract and join
4048-488: The Year. Zhou hit 20 3-pointers in 2016–17 after having 10 in his first two seasons combined. He also helped Xinjiang win its first championship in 2016–17. After his second season with Xinjiang, Zhou declared for the 2016 NBA draft . He had the longest wingspan during the 2016 NBA Draft Combine at 7'7¾" (2.33 m). On 23 June 2016, he was selected with the 43rd overall pick by the Houston Rockets . On 6 July 2017, Zhou signed with
4136-537: The business affairs would be handled by owner Alonzo Cantu . On August 18, 2009, the Rockets fired Clay Moser as coach, and named Chris Finch as coach on September 29. The result paid immediate dividends in the 2009–10 season, as the Vipers enjoyed their most successful season. Led by league MVP Mike Harris , and coach of the year in Chris Finch, the Vipers went 34–16 to lead the Western Conference and earned
4224-526: The buzzer that resulted in a three-point attempt by Craig Winder that went in to provide a 94–91 victory to win the first championship in team history, which was also the first championship for the region since the Edinburg Roadrunners in 2004. The Vipers made the 2011 D League Finals, losing to the Iowa Wolves . On July 14, 2011, Finch was hired as an assistant coach for the Houston Rockets . Rockets GM Daryl Morey approached Nick Nurse (coach of
4312-553: The championship with a win over the Philippines in the final. Zhou had 16 points and 14 rebounds in the championship game. He was subsequently named to the 2015 FIBA Asia Championship All-Star Five. Zhou later competed in the 2016 Summer Olympics with the Chinese national team. Chinese language Chinese ( simplified Chinese : 汉语 ; traditional Chinese : 漢語 ; pinyin : Hànyǔ ; lit. ' Han language' or 中文 ; Zhōngwén ; 'Chinese writing')
4400-399: 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
4488-484: 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
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#17328840142464576-566: 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
4664-484: The final against the host nation. A year later at the 2012 Albert Schweitzer Tournament , a traditional testing ground for the best teenage players in international basketball, Zhou reinforced his reputation as one to watch by averaging 16.2 points, 7.8 rebounds, and 4.2 blocks in 28.2 minutes per game. In January 2014, Zhou left his boyhood team, the Liaoning Jaguars, to join the Xinjiang Flying Tigers . However, he
4752-413: 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
4840-491: 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
4928-776: The franchise's first playoff berth. In the playoffs, the Vipers beat both the Reno Bighorns and Austin Toros in three games each to reach the D League Finals. They then met the Tulsa 66ers in the Finals. They won Game 1 on April 25 by a score of 124–107 in Tulsa before returning home for Game 2 on April 27, which had an attendance of 6,198 to see them at the Arena, the most to see a Vipers game in their history. Harris led all scorers with 26 points, but it came down to
5016-413: The general manager and Nevada Smith as the new head coach. Smith's teams received notice for their fast pace and eclectic shooting from the three-point line, continuing a trend set in 2009 (under previous coach Chris Finch) where the Vipers outpaced their NBA counterpart in the Houston Rockets each time, while shooting at a three-point rate higher than them all but once from 2009 to 2014); this reflected
5104-599: 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
5192-531: 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
5280-408: 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
5368-400: The main tenant and operator (with the City of Edinburg acting as owner of the arena), complete with a 40-by-20 foot jumbotron , the largest in the league. The arena was half-funded by sales taxes to go with private funding that resulted in an initial estimated cost of $ 68 million. On August 18 of that year, the Vipers named Matt Brase their new head coach. After a few delays, the new arena
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#17328840142465456-405: The major three G League awards: the NBA G League Coach of the Year Award for Mahmoud Abdelfattah (just the second Vipers coach to win the award), NBA G League Most Valuable Player Award for Trevelin Queen (the third Viper to win the award), and the NBA G League Team Executive of the Year Award for general manager Travis Stockbridge (the second Vipers executive to win the award). They reached
5544-455: 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
5632-425: 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
5720-583: 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
5808-538: 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
5896-409: The postseason for the tenth time in their fifteen-season history, becoming the fourth team in league history to reach the postseason ten times; they reached the NBA G League Finals for the sixth time, doing so with victories over the Texas Legends in the Conference Semifinal and the Agua Caliente Clippers in the Conference Final. On April 12, they won 145–128 in Game 1; the points scored by the Vipers
5984-404: 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 ,
6072-552: 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
6160-509: 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
6248-422: The season ended, inaugural head coach Bob Hoffman announced his resignation, as he decided to pursue a coaching job in college basketball. The next season, they finished with the same record, failing to advance to the playoffs for the second year in a row. In 2009, the Vipers and the Houston Rockets entered into a single-affiliation partnership in which the Rockets controlled the team's basketball operations, while
6336-583: The season, and it was second-best among all D-League teams. In the postseason, they beat the Maine Red Claws and the Tulsa 66ers in two-game sweeps to reach the finals for the third time in four seasons. The Vipers faced the Santa Cruz Warriors , doing so in a two-game sweep that had them win Game 1 112–102 on April 25 before winning at home 102–91 on April 27 to win their second league title while also becoming
6424-628: The second team (and first since the 2008-09 playoffs ) in the best-of-three era to go undefeated in D-League postseason play. Andrew Goudelock won the NBA Development League Most Valuable Player Award and got called up by the Los Angeles Lakers . After the season ended, Nurse left for an assistant coaching position eith the Toronto Raptors . In November of that year, the Vipers announced Gianluca Pascucci as
6512-505: 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
6600-557: 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
6688-469: The team was christened the "Rio Grande Valley Vipers", becoming the 14th team in league history, and they would play at Dodge Arena . The Vipers played their first game as a franchise on November 23, 2007, where they beat the Austin Toros 104–97 in front of over 5,000 fans at home. In their debut season, they finished with a 21–29 record, failing to qualify for the playoffs. In March 2008, four games before
6776-609: 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
6864-547: 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
6952-512: 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
7040-410: The vision of Rockets general manager Daryl Morey in seeing the Vipers as a laboratory for potential strategies to grow in the NBA. The 2013–14 team started on a hot streak, winning their first 9 games of the season; the 10 wins from the previous season combined with the nine here made for a 19-game winning streak, the longest streak in D-League regular-season history. While the Vipers finished 30–20 for
7128-452: 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
7216-508: 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
7304-453: 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,
7392-457: Was an NBA G League Finals record, and the 44 points scored by Trevelin Queen is second-most in finals history. Daishen Nix (31 points, 12 rebounds, 11 assists) and Anthony Lamb (10 points, 10 rebounds, and 10 assists) each recorded triple-doubles, which is the first occasion of a triple-double since 2013 and the first ever G League Finals game to feature two triple doubles. On April 14, they defeated
7480-483: Was announced to have a grand opening in June 2018, with the Vipers beginning play in the arena for the 2018–19 season , with an end cost of $ 88 million. The 2017–18 season was the 11th and final season for the team at their original arena (originally known as Dodge Arena before rebranding to State Farm Arena), and they were the longest tenant to ever play in the venue. On April 12, 2019, the Vipers won their third championship in
7568-481: 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
7656-514: Was promoted to head coach after Joseph Blair left for an assistant job with the Philadelphia 76ers ; Abdelfattah became the first Palestinian and Muslim head coach in NBA/NBA G League history. Travis Stockbridge was named general manager, becoming the youngest general manager in NBA G League history at the age of 25. In the 2021–22 season, the Vipers became the second team in league history to sweep
7744-424: Was unable to play for Xinjiang until the 2014–15 season due to being underaged. Although there were rumors that several U.S. college teams were courting him, the teenager decided to stay in China, and his move to the cash-flush Xinjiang team caused a firestorm of speculation within the local media. Initially, it was claimed Zhou had accepted a three-year, $ 744,000 deal that would have made him better paid than most of
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