![]() ![]() The perfective aspect is marked by the suffix – le, e.g., wŏ chī-le sān-wăn fàn ‘I eat three rice’. The most important verb category is aspect. Mandarin verbs are not marked for person and number. ![]() The possessive marker – de is used with personal pronouns, turning them into possessive pronouns, e.g., wŏ-de ‘I + possessive = my’. Locative markers occur with prepositions and nouns to specify location, e.g., wŏ zài chuáng-shàn ‘I in bed on’. As an example, the classifier for books is bĕn, e.g., yī-bĕn shū ‘one book’. There are dozens of classifiers, and one has to learn which classifier goes with which noun. In general, a noun in Chinese can occur with only one classifier. There is one general classifier – ge which occurs with most nouns, e.g., sān-ge chēzi ‘three cars’. Below are some of the most frequent noun markers.Ĭlassifiers are noun markers that are attached to quantifiers and demonstratives. Mandarin nouns are not marked for number, gender or case. Because of the lack of inflections, Chinese grammar may appear quite simple compared to that of Indo-European languages. Grammatical functions are expressed through word order, particles, prepositions, and discourse, rather than by suffixes attached to nouns or verbs, such as in Indo-European languages. Mandarin, like all other Chinese languages, is predominantly an isolating, or analytic, language, meaning that for the most part, words have only one grammatical form. As you can see, tones make a difference in the meaning of these otherwise identical syllables. Thus, for Mandarin which has four tones, the syllable ma can be written in the following four ways that indicate tones. The romanization system adopted by the government of the People’s Republic of China, called Pīnyīn, represents tones by diacritical marks over vowels. Pitch distinguishes one syllable from another syllable that consists of the same consonants and vowels.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |