There seems to be some confusion in the overseas chinese community that most people think that the written chinese is mandarin. Aren't the written form supposed to be neutral to all the chinese languages ? Is the written form called mandarin grammar or just chinese grammar ?

When qin shi huang united the chinese characters, did he leave out certain chinese characters ? Why is it that certain sounds exist in cantonese but have no proper chinese character equivalent like "ng" (for no) and "dei" for (us). The same goes for the min character "bai" (how many times).

While certain characters do exist for common southern languages like 伊 for min to express he/she. Other characters seem to be missing in the southern languages.

What exactly did qin shihuang do ?

There is no confusion. It is in Mandarin. Baihua is in Mandarin.

The neutrality of the written form only refers to Wenyan (Classical Chinese), which is like Formal Latin. And we don't use Wenyan anymore.

No. He united the character VARIANTS. Most of the Chinese characters we use today were created much after him. Do you really think a Mandarin question particle character like "吗" ma existed during the Qin Dynasty?

A lot of characters were created (or given additional functions) for Mandarin since the Ming, because Mandarin also didn't have the characters for it. Since Mandarin is standardized today and you see all these "classical" period-piece soap operas speaking in vernacular Mandarin, you don't realize it. But the reality is that Mandarin grammar and vocabulary are significantly different from Classical Chinese. Like 的 de means "clarity" in classical Chinese (as in 的确), not a possessive particle. 没 means "to sink" in the classical, but is now used mostly to mean "to not have" for Mandarin, although it can still be used as to sink as a suffix or prefix to another word.

Classical Chinese for "this" is 此、是、本、该、之
But today we more often use 这 zhe4, which is completely Mandarin. The character 这 means "claw" in Classical Chinese and is used as a phonetic substitute for Mandarin.

Some examples:

here: 此处 (classical), 这里 (Mandarin)
there: 彼处、其处 (classical), 那里 (Mandarin)
where: 何处 (classical), 哪里 (Mandarin)
what: 何 (classical), 什么 (Mandarin)
is, to be: 也、乃 (classical), 是 (Mandarin)
of: 之 (classical), 的 (Mandarin)

Many parts of Classical Chinese is nothing at all like what we normally use today for Putonghua/Guoyu.

An educated man from the Tang Dynasty if he time-travelled to today would have a lot of trouble reading modern Chinese. A heck lot of trouble. He would have an easier time reading formal Japanese text (which still preserves a lot of Classical Chinese in its writing).


Again, the only reason southern Chinese dialects are missing characters is because it was only Vernacular Mandarin that was standardized during the past century.

Vernacular Mandarin, what does it mean? In Cantonese, a lot of words and phrases are shortened.

It just means Putonghua, and previously Baihua and Guoyu, basically Mandarin (formal and informal). It doesn't at all mean colloquial or street-talk Mandarin. A vernacular is the regional language that is derived or influenced from a common liturgical language and may or may not have an independent written form. In the case of Mandarin, there is an independent written form from Classical Chinese.

The vernaculars (Mandarin, Cantonese, Wu, etc) are in contrast to Classical Chinese.

Just like Vulgar Latin (which became French, Italian, Spanish, etc) are in contrast to Classical Latin.

No, Mandarin is not the slang form of Classical Chinese; that would be like saying French is the slang form of Latin.

I wanted to ask about it: when mandarin Baihua was standardized, why were those characters chosen? Only phonetic value? I mean, what's the reason to choose 的, 得,地 for a sound that's phonetically exact? Is there any etimological reasoning there? Also 這, 着, etc.

My question is if there is any etimological evidence about what's the classical origin of these words, and if Baihua characters were chosen in basis of that, or just invented from scratch.

So qin shi huang did not eliminate those characters that were unique to the other chinese dialects ? Then why is it there is no proper chinese character for that ?

For example, like the "ng" for cantonese, min and hakka ? Each of them use a different chinese character but they have the same meaning for "not".

What I am trying to say is that they should have the same character.

As Nishishei said, many of the modern characters for mandarin or other dialects were invented after Qinshihuang's time.

The Cantonese "ng" is written as 唔.

But that character is not the one used in min language which would has "ng" for not. 唔 is a modern cantonese invention based on the cantonese sound and not the original character used during emperor qin's time. For min, it would sound like "go".

How can a basic character like "no" be invented after qinshi huang's time ? It is used in everyday speech.

There is actually no word in Cantonese that has the same meaning as "no" (like how it's used in English). 唔 is simply for negation like "not". The answer for a yes/no question would depend on the question itself.

....well at least not in day to day spoken language.

Chinese characters in Chinese are mostly phonetic based (unlike in Japanese), when the pronunciation becomes significantly different, a different character will be used. People tend to fantasize (wishful thinking) that Chinese characters are symbols that transcend sound, but that is certainly not true.

This is why 此处 ("here", Mandarin pronunciation: cichu) is now written 这里 (zheli). They are just simply different words and 此处 for general use is now archaic.

The reason why "ng"/"m" is written differently in Min and Cantonese is also because these dialects are not standardized and they were probably developed within the last five hundred years. There is also the possibility that they came from different etymologies but became pronounced the same. "那" in Mandarin was simply chosen out of many possible characters and just became standardized through common usage and officialization, the character originally referred to a kingdom in Sichuan. The Japanese had used it to substitute "nani" (what).

Does that make sense? characters for "no/not" existed in Qin Shihuang's time （不、弗 etc）, but they had significantly different pronunciations from Cantonese 唔, or Minnan 呒. The Minnan 呒 is most likely derived from 无, but became grammatically different. Chinese is not an ideographic script though, so characters must maintain a reasonable pronunciation. You can't just substitute 不 or 弗 for every Cantonese m.

Qin Shihuang didn't do much, he basically standardized how you wrote a Chinese character, much like the Simplified Chinese movement in the PRC.

"Mostly"? Care to give a percentage and some evidence to back up the claim?


I'm not sure what your point is but 那裡 nali means "there" not "here".//


In Japanese, "nani" is 何... I still don't see your point...

Sometimes, but I think that's more the exception than the rule. Often pronunciation changes radically over the centuries but the character does not. Thus Chinese phonetics has become very inefficient over the centuries.

The prior author, in my opinion, is correct: there's very significant phonetic content in written Chinese. Most words have both phonetic and semantic components. Exactly what percentage of written Chinese may be described as phonetic depends on your exact definition of "phonetic" and the method of analysis used. However, it is safe to say, that by most reasonable estimates a very large majority of written Chinese characters have phonetic components. For an excellent, detailed discussion see The Chinese language: fact and fantasy by John DeFrancis.

In addition, part of another recent post of mine that goes into a bit of detail follows. I hasten to add, however, that Chinese phonetics has become very inefficient over the centuries. As pronunciation has changed, characters usually haven't. As a result, today the pronunciation of words bears little practical resemblance to the sound indicated by the phonetic components. In my experience in teaching myself Chinese I have so far found the phonetic components are helpful with regard to pronunciation, but only in a very minimal way.

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For example, 喻 (yu4, explain, make known) may be decomposed into the semantic element 口 (kou3, mouth [and by extension speech, etc.]) and the phonetic element 俞 (yu2, a surname). In other words, 口 tells us that the word concerns mouth, speech, etc. and 俞 tells us that it is pronounced similar to yu2. Put it all together, you get 喻 (yu4, explain, make known).

For example, 紡 (fang3, to spin yarn) may be decomposed into the semantic element 糸 (mi3, thread) and the phonetic element 方 (fang1, direction, region, etc.). Therefore, 糸 tells us that 紡 concerns thread and 方 tells us that its pronunciation is similar to fang1.

That's because 何 has been standardized. If you read classical Japanese texts, 那 is often used as a phonetic character for nani "what". Try to think a little beyond modern standardized usages. There weren't national language standardizing academies 500 years ago, this is a development of the modern nation-state. A little superficial knowledge like you have without knowing the context and background is a dangerous thing.

Oops, got mixed up with my example, I changed the Classical Chinese example but forgot to change the Mandarin example. I obviously meant 这里.

Yeah, sure. 94-97% of Chinese characters have a phonetic element. Although high frequency first grade characters like 一、二、好、大、小 don't (but this does not mean they can be pronounced anyway you see fit, they still have a SET reading depending on the dialect. In a way, characters without phonetic elements are a phonetic element of themselves.)

My point is to address xnq's question on why there isn't a Qin-era character for "no/not" in Cantonese. The answer is, the Chinese script is vastly phonetic, and when the sound deviates from the character's phonetics too much, people create new characters or give other more phonetically accurate characters new functions. Maybe you could try answering xnq for me, instead of repeating "I don't see your point," you might be a little more constructive to the topic then.


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True, there is a conservative element to Chinese characters, because the phonetic elements often "evolve" ALONG with the language phonology, thereby not needing you to completely develop a new set of characters for new phonologies. Although Mandarin and Cantonese phonologies are vastly different, Mandarin still has Mandarin phonetic elements (like 米 mi、迷 mi), while Cantonese has Cantonese phonetic elements (like 米 mai、迷 mai), etc. A kind of systematic parallel development.

Each character is assigned a reading (up to about 3 in some dialects per character); again, when a new reading comes about and is very different from the existing readings, either a new character is created or another character with identical reading (but can be semantically different) is given a new semantic meaning. This is the basic principle of Chinese characters in Chinese. In Japanese it is a little different, because of kunyomi.

Oh, after I searched the dictionary, 那 only what in Japanese, not 'that'. I thought Japanese had 哪 but it's Mandarin invention.

?? So there're so many Xing-Sheng words in Chinese?
Yeah, there are many strange Xing-Sheng today, like 首-道, 弋-代, only logical in older version of Chinese.


Yeah, kun-yomi is very (not little) different from Chinese because they belong to different family. Kun-yomi is (I think) never assign reading to be similar to its phonetic component, only assigning Japanese words into Chinese Characters.

I just found a japanese kanji that I cannot find in modern chinese character (as far as I know). It is similar to this character 躍 except the radical on the left is replaced by the "sun" radical to denote monday, tuesday etc.

Why is it that these characters are not present in modern chinese and why are some of the characters in southern dialects missing ? Meaning they can be spoken but not written without inventing FALSE characters based on phonetics ?

曜 yao4 has just fallen out of common use.

It might help for everyone to reread a lot of what nishishei has been saying and to start taking seriously the scale of the massive timeframes we're talking about here. Languages change far more than we usually give them credit for, and to give a lame example, written or reconstructed spoken English from about half as long ago as Shihuangdi is for all intents and purposes incomprehensible. The relative stability of the form of the characters, and the extent of their use among speakers of languages outside of an idealized, pure 'Mandarin' stretching across great physical distances and time, gives an illusion of permanence that probably isn't real realistic. There's another level on which it's doubtful that classical Chinese through most of its history was necessarily connected to anything spoken by anyone, which was part of reasoning behind the emergence of the apparently still imperfect but essentially 'Mandarin'-oriented baihua movements.

How about this character: 込 Have you ever seen this before in Chinese?

I've seen this character in someone's name.

込 yu1 shows up every now and then in the Shiji.
Any help with "斩込?"

When I saw 躍, I thought of a Mandarin word 跳躍, I wondered why 躍 was considered 'missing' by .
After searching the dictionary, I found that 躍 has been simplified to 跃.

As far as I know it's never found in Chinese dictionaries.
What's the meaning of "込" (I don't have it in my dictionary)?

Is it 二簡化? And what is "shiji"? Japanese or Chinese?

i find them simular, sometimes i use classical chinese too.

I've searched my dictionary. What I find in 辶部 and sounds yū is 迂, not 込.

"dei" is a contraction of "deng" 等. The actual phrase is "我等". You will find a vestige of it in the Hakka 客家 dialect "ngai-ding-ngin" 我等人.

As for "bai", the character is 擺.

This is an interesting statement. Does this mean that in formal Japanese writing, the Kanji vs. hiragana proportion is greater compared to informal writing which uses more hiragana/katagana? If so, would a formal Japanese text be somewhat comprehensible to a Chinese reader who has a fairly strong grounding in Classical Chinese? I am interested to know, as I am currently investigating the commonalities between Chinese and Japanese vocabulary.

Kanas tend to dominate informal writing. Since they're phonetic and they correspond to vernacular speech, they're easy to understand for those who already speak Japanese. This is why you rarely have a lot of Kanji in Japanese comics. But for those who already know Chinese, it's the opposite: Kanji, not Kana, are the easy part. What poses difficulties is Japanese grammar, which is very different from that of both modern and classical Chinese. You can probably understand some texts by reading only the Kanji, but you will need a grasp of Japanese grammar to make sense of more sophisticated texts (newspaper or scholarly articles, for example).

On a slightly different note, you can consult this thread on Kanbun, the kind of classical Chinese texts that was once used in Japan:

http://www.chinahistoryforum.com/index.php?showtopic=26574

Interestingly (but tangentially), when Chinese students and scholars started going to Japan in large numbers at the end of the 19th century (and when Japanese people visited China around the same time), since they couldn't talk to each other, they usually wrote to each other in classical Chinese. It was called "Brush talks" (bitan 筆談), I think.

You, you are right, it was called 筆談 bitan, or hitsudan in Japanese. As a matter of fact, I once used it to communicate with a Japanese tourist in Zürich - the gentleman spoke only Japanese and French. He asked me if I was a kakyojin - I had no idea what he meant, until he wrote it down for me: 華僑人.

Glad to see that these age-old practices are taking place in new contexts. In a way, it's too bad that the Koreans and Vietnamese dropped Chinese characters.

I remember when I tried to communicate with an elderly women from china and she could not understand mandarin and I could not understand her non mandarin dialect.

I had to use chinese characters to communicate with her.

I once met a japanese tourist who came to Malaysia and he could read those chinese signboards when ordering food.