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Thread: Is the Chinese language dead?
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[quote=ROGERINCA,36539]Fact. The Chinese language is alive and well and very dynamic in its growth and transformation. As a language, Chinese is the single most commonly spoken language on the planet. It is spoken in China, Singapore, and Malaysia. As well as by ethnic Chinese throughout the world. It is usually said that about 3,000 characters are needed for basic literacy in Chinese, and a well-educated person will know well in excess of 4,000 to 5,000 characters. Note that it is not necessary to know a character for every known word of Chinese, as the majority of modern Chinese words are bimorphemic compounds, that is, they are made up of two, usually common, characters. The complete Chinese writing system consists of from 40,000-70,000 characters (accurate estimates are difficult) each representing a one-syllable word. Modern dictionaries contain only up to about 8500 characters. Because Chinese is not an alphabetic language, composing a Chinese dictionary is a substantial challenge for lexicographers. Point, not every word is yet represented in the dictionary. Some characters have died out as the words that they represented have become obsolete. New characters and new combinations of characters are continually being created to express new words that have entered into the vocabulary. Common Chinese words are particularly flexible. In many cases, Chinese characters shed their meaning because they are used to transliterate foreign words and names. Also, as in English, a few Chinese characters represent more than one morpheme. Further, there are two other principles which have governed how existing characters might assume new meanings/words. One is 轉注, literally "transfer into," which covered characters whose original meanings were extended, typically metaphorically, into newer, often more general senses. The other principle is 假借 , literally "false borrowing": In these cases, a character with an already established meaning was "borrowed" to cover a second unrelated morpheme for which there existed as yet no written character. As China changes, the language of daily life is also changing dramatically. Some scholars say 1,000 new words are added yearly – a mix of global pop-speak, creative Internet usage, Western business terms, and new advertising phrases. I am quoting a TV broadcaster in Shanghai, who says, "The language is changing so fast, that it changes nearly every week, friends use so many new words that when we meet, that is practically all we talk about." The 2006 Dictionary of Modern Chinese contains a thick pack of pink addendum sheets – 48 pages of new words added to the Chinese lexicon. Therefore, it should be obvious, that the Chinese language is very much alive and it is very dynamic with respect to a mechanism for change and for keeping up with the rest of the modern world. I think Chinese will always share the stage with English as a dominant world language. [/quote]
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