Period+3+China+Language



About one - fifth of the worlds population, or over 1 billion people, speak some form of Chinese as their native language. Internal divisions of Chinese are usually perceived by their native speakers as dialects of a single Chinese language, rather than as seperate languages, although this identification is considered inappropriate by some linguists Sinologists. Chinese characters evolved over time from earlier forms of hieroglyphics. The idea that all Chinese characters are either pictographs or ideographs is an erroneous one: most characters contain phonetic parts, and are composites of phonetic components and semantic radicals. Chinese is written with characters which are known as 漢字 [汉字] (hànzi). The characters were originally pictures of people, animals or other things, but over the centuries they have become increasingly stylised and no longer resemble the things they represent. Many characters have been combined with others to create new ones. Until the early 20th century, Classical Chinese, 文言 (wényán), was the main form of writing in China. It was standardised during the late Han Dynasty (25-220 AD) and was also used in Korea, Japan and Vietnam before they developed their own writing systems. In Classical Chinese most words were monosyllabic and written with a single character. However, during the 1920s a new form of written Chinese modelled on spoken Mandarin. In spoken Chinese, words are made up of one, two or more syllables. Each of the syllables is written with a separate character. Each character has its own meaning, though many are used only in combination with other characters. Every character is given exactly the same amount of space, no matter how complex it is. There are no spaces between characters and the characters which make up multi-syllable words are not grouped together, so when reading Chinese, you not only have to work out what the characters mean and how to pronounce them, but also which characters belong together.