Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Chinese
T
hough you'll certainly hear the local Shanghai dialect being spoken,
Mandarin Chinese
, derived from the language of officialdom in
the Beijing area, is the city's primary tongue. It's been systematically
promoted over the past hundred years as the official, unifying language
of the Chinese people, much as modern French, for example, is based on
the original Parisian dialect. It is known in mainland China as
putonghua
,
“common language”.
Chinese
grammar
is delightfully simple. There is no need to conjugate verbs,
decline nouns or make adjectives agree - Chinese characters are immutable, so
Chinese words simply cannot have different “endings”. Instead, context and
fairly rigid rules about word order are relied on to make those distinctions
of time, number and gender that Indo-European languages are so concerned
with. Instead of cumbersome tenses, the Chinese make use of words such as
“yesterday” or “tomorrow” to indicate when things happen; instead of plural
endings they simply state how many things there are. For English speakers,
Chinese word order is very familiar, and you'll find that by simply stringing
words together you'll be producing perfectly grammatical Chinese. Basic
sentences follow the subject-verb-object format; adjectives, as well as all quali-
fying and describing phrases, precede nouns.
From the point of view of foreigners, the main thing that distinguishes
Mandarin from familiar languages is that it's a
tonal language
. In order to
pronounce a word correctly, it is necessary to know not only the sounds of
its consonants and vowels but also its correct tone - though with the help of
context, intelligent listeners should be able to work out what you are trying to
say even if you don't get the tones quite right.
Pinyin
Back in the 1950s it was hoped eventually to replace Chinese characters with
an alphabet of Roman letters, and to this end the
pinyin system
, a precise and
exact means of representing all the sounds of Mandarin Chinese, was devised. I t
comprises all the Roman letters of the English alphabet (except “v”), with the four
tones represented by diacritical marks, or accents, which appear above each syllable.
The old aim of replacing Chinese characters with
pinyin
was abandoned long
n
ago, but in the meantime
pinyin
has one very important function, that of helping
foreigners pronounce Chinese words. However, there is the added complication
that in
pinyin
the letters don't all have the sounds you would expect, and you'll
n
need to spend an hour or two learning the correct sounds (see p.188).
You'll often see
pinyin
in Shanghai, on street signs and shop displays, but only
well-educated locals know the system very well. T The Chinese names in this
book have been given both in characters and in
pinyin
; the pronunciation guide
below is your first step to making yourself comprehensible. For more informa-
tion, see the
Rough Guide Mandarin Chinese Phrasebook
or
Pocket Interpreter
(FLP,
187
Beijing; it's available at Shanghai's Foreign Language Bookstore).
