Mandarin Chinese belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family. Languages can change over time in diverse ways: the meanings of certain words can either be transformed or dropped as common patterns or new senses of words arise. Sounds can change across speakers and lead to new pronunciations, and the transmission of language across place and generation can continue the process of language’s evolution and shifts. Today, facilitated global communication is also contributing to the sharing and adaptation of new words. My Dutch relatives have described this in relation to the Internet (many of the words they use to describe actions like “googling” are cognates of English words used to describe the processes).
One important change I have learned about is the creation of the Simplified Chinese script under Mao Zedong to promote better literacy; this has led to some differences between China and Taiwan, which uses the Traditional script. I have not learned a large vocabulary yet, but the word 沙发 (“shāfā”) is a phonetic version of the English word “sofa” and may come originally from British contact with China. I also noticed that one of the first words I learned, 茶, or chá, was similar to the word chai (both meant “tea”). A quick search revealed several sites saying that most of the world only uses a few words for tea, either similar to chá (chai in Hindi, shay in Arabic, and chay in Russian) or to tea (té in Spanish, thee in Dutch, or thé in French) depending on the word’s travel through the Silk Road (chá) or through merchant trade, possibly because a certain region of China had a closer pronunciation to “té”. I found a chart comparing Japanese, Chinese, and Korean words; one example is “library”: tosho-kan in Japanese, túshū guǎn in Chinese, and doseogwan in Korean. Understanding comparisons like these can help me consider when these words were shared and point to the significance of that contact for people in different regions and countries (as well as communication between them), and I can gain a better understanding of the historical development of my target language by researching and considering them. Linguists can track language changes by identifying similarities and differences in sentence structure, pronunciation, and cognates shared. They often create maps of languages and connections between dialects and can in some cases use statistics to compare variables across languages.
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