Grammar 文法 Man4 faat3 |
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In the last three units, we have learnt quite a lot of Chinese vocabularies in Romanization. The foundation work One of the major differences between Chinese and English is that we can guess the meaning from the structure Chinese characters are believed to have originated 6000 years ago. In the beginning, the characters were pictographs It is easy for us to learn words of objects at first. Let us look at the Chinese character 日 " jat6 ". It is developed from the old character " " which looks like the image of the sun. The character 月 “jyut6” is also developed from the ancient character "" which looks like the image of the moon. People drew the picture of the sun to indicate it. After thousands of years, the pictures were changed to symbols for it also means “day”; the character 月 means “month” besides “moon”. For example, When we see 三 “saam1” (three) 日 , it does not mean “three suns” since there is only one sun . Instead, it may mean “three days” or “the third day”. It is the same for the word 月. 三三 means “the third day of the third month (March)”; 一 “jat1” 年 “nin4” 有 “jau5” 十 “sap6” 二 “ji6” 個 “go3” means “There are twelve months in a year.”; 一星期 “sing1 kei4” 有七 “cat1” 日 means “There are seven days in a week.” When we put 日 and 月 together, a new character 明 with a new meaning based on the nature of the original characters |
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