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Mandarin belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family, which includes Cantonese, Burmese, and Tibetan. The primary regions are East Asia and southeast Asia. So it shares its ancestry with China, Myanmar and Tibet. I would have thought it shared its lineage with Korea or Japan as I often group those together culturally. What’s interesting is how Mandarin also shows contact with other cultures over time. The PDF talks about areal influence, and Mandarin definitely reflects that. I looked up some examples: words like (fó) (Buddah) come from Sanskrit through the spread of Buddhism and (kāfēi) (Coffee) comes from English. Also, a lot of modern political or technical terms entered the language through contact with Japan in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.Structurally, Mandarin is typologically analytic, meaning it has simple word forms and grammar is expressed through word order. Since grammar isn’t carrying tons of information through endings, meaning depends more on context, tone,…
Read more…The history behind the Korean language is very interesting. The document from class classifies Korean as an Asian language, part of the Altaic language family. This connects Korean with Turkish, Mongolian, and Japanese. The Korean language also has a deep connection to the Chinese language and characters.75 million people speak Korean, with 72 million of them coming from North and South Korea. It has always been the main language spoken in those areas, but in the past, the Hangul alphabet was not yet created. What historians refer to as Old Korean was written with Chinese characters. Sometimes the characters would be used to represent a word or simply used to represent a sound in Korean. Because writers had to be educated in both Korean and Chinese, most people could not read or write. Once King Sejong came to power, he helped to create Hangul in 1443. Once the alphabet was created it made it much easier to read, write, and pronounce sounds in Korean.The Chinese language has a huge…
Read more…Spanish belongs to the Indo-European language family, which is based on the genealogical classification method (also known as the historical/genetic classification method) which classifies languages based on shared ancestry and helps trace language evolution. One of the periods that contributed words to Spanish through contact with other cultures was in 476 when the Visigoths, a Germanic group, made their way into what is now France and the Iberian Peninsula. They spoke Latin, but they also spoke an East Germanic language, which ended up contributing words to modern Spanish, such as guerra ("war") from "werra" and ganso ("goose") from "gans." In 711, a Muslim army made its way from northern Africa into the southern Iberian Peninsula by crossing the Strait of Gibraltar. One of the most notable characteristics of this influence seen in the Spanish of today are the words beginning with "a-" or "-al," which is the equivalent of “the” in Arabic. In some cases, these words merged with the…
Read more…Spanish belongs to the Indo-European language family, which is based on the genealogical classification method (also known as the historical/genetic classification method) which classifies languages based on shared ancestry and helps trace language evolution. One of the periods that contributed words to Spanish through contact with other cultures was in 476 when the Visigoths, a Germanic group, made their way into what is now France and the Iberian Peninsula. They spoke Latin, but they also spoke an East Germanic language, which ended up contributing words to modern Spanish, such as guerra ("war") from "werra" and ganso ("goose") from "gans." In 711, a Muslim army made its way from northern Africa into the southern Iberian Peninsula by crossing the Strait of Gibraltar. One of the most notable characteristics of this influence seen in the Spanish of today are the words beginning with "a-" or "-al," which is the equivalent of “the” in Arabic. In some cases, these words merged with the…
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