The History of Cantonese and Putonghua Essay -- Chinese History, Chine

The varieties of ChineseAccording to Bernard Comrie (1990 83), there argon much than 1,000,000,000 people ar speakers of some form of Chinese. By seeing this figure, Chinese should have appeared long enough for its evolution and let it spread to distinguishable areas in which Chinese or its form can become the dominant all toldele language. The origin of Chinese is studied through bone and tortoise shell archive because the earlier records were marked on them in around 1300B.C. (Chou Fa- Kao 19861) They are the earliest recorded founded that can be used for analysis, the reading of Chinese is likewise base on these findings. Chinese is one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages. It is tell that there are seven major languages in Chinese languages (Joseph 20047) . They are Cantonese (Yue), Fukiense (min), Gan, Hakka, hunanese (Hsiang), Mandarin, and Wu. Basically, there are three stages in the development of the Chinese language. They are Old Chinese, midpoint C hinese and Modern Chinese . For each stage, it can be notwithstanding divided into different intervals (Fig 1). Within different intervals, varieties mentioned above occur. However whitethorn be some of the bones and tortoise shells were not perfectly preserved that understaffed information was available for analysis, there is discrepancy in the midst of different references concerning clock and therefore no exact boundary could be made between each development stage. There is only a rough regard made by those who studied the history of Chinese Language. Besides, Joseph (200416) also said that due to the lack of data, most descriptions of family relationship among Chinese languages are establish on impression.There was a long story of the historical development of the Chinese Lang... ...ing object, noun adverb, etc, these elements in fact are being placed in different position in a sentence in Cantonese and Putonghua. As mentioned in the second part, they get different order i n a sentence. Also, even the same symbol are used, the vocabularies is different from each other(a) in certain extend. Therefore, I consider this grammatical difference assign to their mutual unintelligibility.As we know, there is no exact answer on how to classify Cantonese and Putonghua, whether they are languages or dialects. When we discussing this problem, there are actually things face on what extent. To what extent is the size large enough? To what extent is the circumstance is high enough to be a prestigious one? These all depend on which angle we consider. Base on the points mentioned so far, I would consider Cantonese and Putonghua as languages instead of dialects.