What are the characteristics of Chinese language and writing, cultural functions

I. Modern Chinese has many features that distinguish it from Indo-European languages.

(1) Phonetics

Syllable boundaries are clearly defined, and there are more musical notes, together with changes in the pitch of the voice and the intonation of the intonation of the iambic pentameter

, which makes it characterized by a high degree of musicality. The specific performance is as follows:

(1) There are no compound consonants in a syllable, no matter at the beginning or at the end, there is no phenomenon of two or three consonants being linked together. Therefore, the boundaries of Chinese syllables are clearly defined, and the structural form of syllables is relatively neat.

(2) Vowel dominanceChinese syllables can have no consonants, but not no vowels. A syllable can be composed of only one single vowel or one compound vowel, at the same time, the syllable composed of compound vowels is also more, because the vowel is a musical sound, so the proportion of musical components of Chinese speech is large.

(3) Each syllable has a tone, and the tone can make the boundary between the syllable and the syllable clear, and rich in the changes of height and elevation, thus forming a special style of Chinese music.

(2) Vocabulary

(1) Chinese morphemes take monosyllables as their basic form. Since Chinese has many monophonic morphemes, there are more monophonic and diphthongic words, and the word forms are shorter. Meanwhile, monosyllables in Chinese are basically semantic bearers. These monosyllables can be used as morphemes to form a large number of monosyllabic words, or they can be combined to form synthetic words.

(2) Widely use the root compound method to form new words. Since almost all the meaningful monosyllabic morphemes in Chinese can act as root morphemes, and there are fewer affix morphemes and their word-making ability is weaker, the composite method of combining root morphemes to form synonyms is most often used in Chinese.

(3) Bisyllabic words are dominant in Chinese vocabulary in the process of development gradually tend to bisyllabic. Some monosyllabic words have been replaced by disyllabic words, such as "eye - eye", "stone - stone". Some multi-syllabic phrases were also reduced to two-syllabic words, such as "foreign minister - foreign minister", "color television - color television ". Newly coined words are also mostly two-syllable, such as "mentally retarded" and "retired". Three-syllable words have also developed in the modern Chinese vocabulary, but

two-syllable words are still the majority.

(3) Grammatical Aspects

Chinese lacks morphology, i.e., it lacks changes in word forms that indicate grammatical meanings. For example, the English words "She loves me" and "I love her" are the same pronoun "she" (or "I"), which can be used as the pronoun of "she" (or "I"), or as the pronoun of "she" (or "I"), which can be used as the pronoun of "she" (or "I"). "), as the subject and as the object when the word form is different; the same verb "love", the subject is the third person to add "s", the subject is the first person is not added. In Chinese, "she loves me" and "I love her", the two pronouns "she" and "I", no matter The two pronouns "she" and "I" in "she loves me" and "I love her", no matter whether they are the subject or the object, do not change; the verb "love", no matter whether the subject is the first person or the third person, there is no corresponding morphological change. In contrast, Chinese presents a series of analytic language features.

(1) The order of the words and the virtual words are the main means of expressing grammatical meanings. For example, the words "not very good" and "very bad" have different meanings depending on the order of the words. In "my brother and I" and "my brother", "and" expresses a parallel relationship, and "of" expresses a partial relationship.

(2) The structural principles of words, phrases and sentences are basically the same regardless of whether the lexeme is composed of words, words are composed of phrases, or phrases are composed of sentences, there are subject-predicate, verb-object, complementary, bias, and union of the five basic grammatical structural relationships, for example, the word "earthquake", the phrase "good health", and the sentence "earthquake", and the sentence "health". "and the sentence "the train started" are subject-predicate structure.

(3) word class and syntactic component is not a simple correspondence between the Chinese word class and sentence components of the relationship is more complex, the same word class can serve as a variety of syntactic components, the word in the grammatical aspects of the multifunctionality; on the other hand, the same kind of sentence components can be used by a number of types of words, and the two have a certain degree of flexibility, so there is not a simple correspondence between the word class and the syntactic components of the Indo-European language as the same. So there is no simple correspondence between word classes and syntactic constituents like in Indo-European.

(4) the word is very rich, there are inflectional words when the combination of number words and nouns, usually need to add a measure word after the number words. Different nouns tend to use different quantifiers. For example, "a man, a cow, a piece of paper, a grain of rice" and so on. Inflectional words often appear at the end of sentences to indicate various nuances of tone, such as "Is it him?" "It's him, isn't it?" , "It's him."

The Cultural Function of Chinese Characters

Chinese characters have the same function as other characters, but they also have a special function that is different from other characters.

The cultural function is one of the special functions.

The special function comes from the special structure of Chinese characters.

People, in the practice of communicating with Chinese characters,

find the special value of Chinese characters in many fields such as literature and art,

folklore and entertainment,

and through the splitting of the characters, they have triggered all kinds of specific cultural phenomena. They are rich in genres, varied in forms, and ingenious in conception, and they have a prominent

national character.

Chinese characters have a long history,

and are the only ideographic system in the world that has survived to this day without interruption.