Mike Ayers said:
> > Um, Han doesn't mean Chinese. It means the Han dynasty and its
> > cultural and ethnic successors. These are *Han* characters in all
> > three languages.
> >
> > > Jungshik Shin
> >
> > "Chinese" would be
> >
> > zhongguohua zhongguoren zhongwen
> > jungkgukmal jungkuksalam
> > chukokugo chukokujin
> >
> > or perhaps baihua, putonghua, or some other variation of
> > Beijing/"Mandarin" Chinese. Or, of course, the names for the
> > Cantonese, Hokkien, etc. dialects/languages as spoken or written in
> > each or any.
> >
> > The term "Chinese character", literally "zhongguozi" "jungkukja"
> > "chukokuji" is not used.
>
> You are making distinctions that the Chinese do not make. As far as
> I've been able to tell (this includes directly asking), "Han" means
> "Chinese" unless one is talking specifically about ethnic groups, so
> translating "Hanzi" as "Chinese characters" is not only generally correct,
> it is *specifically* correct. Note that "zhongwen" is the usual way to
> refer to Chinese literature, and "zhongguoren" is the usual way to refer to
> Chinese people (by country, not ethnicity). "Zhongguohua" is, I believe,
> gramatically incorrect, if such is possible in Chinese
Zhong1guo2hua4 is correct, and means approximately what we mean
in English by "Chinese." For a standard Mandarin (pu3tong1hua4) speaker,
it more directly connotes Mandarin to them, i.e., the "Chinese"
that they speak, as opposed to guang3dong1hua4 ("Cantonese"),
min2nan2hua4 ("Fukienese"), etc. The Mandarin speaker I consulted
also considered it likely that the Cantonese version of
Zhong1guo2hua4 (for which I don't know the exact pronunciation)
might connote "Cantonese" to a Cantonese speaker, i.e., the "Chinese"
that they speak.
There is also a more Taiwan-specific term, Guo2yu3, literally
"national language", that means approximately the same thing
as pu3tong1hua4 -- the standard Mandarin taught in schools.
Both terms are politically freighted, as they refer to standard
uses on the opposite sides of the straits. PRC dictionaries
often call Guo2yu3 the old term for pu3tong1hua4. The Japanese
reading of Guo2yu3 is kokugo, and means, literally "the
national language (of Japan)", i.e. "Japanese"!
Han4 means "Chinese", as Mike said. Han4zu2 (or Han4min2) is
the "Han nationality" or "Han ethnic
group", i.e. all the "Chinese" ethnic and cultural descendants
from the Han dynasty, as Jungshik suggested, although as for any
ethnic label, the boundaries are pretty fuzzy. Like the
United States today, China has long been a cosmopolitan
mixture of many peoples, and many of the conquering minorities
over time became sinified and came to identify themselves, too,
as Han4. Basically, the non-Han4zu3 minority groups in China
today constitute any group that ethnically and culturally
distinguishes itself from the Han4. (Mongolians, Yi, Tai,
Tibetans, Uighurs, etc., etc.)
Han4ren2, literally "Han person", is either a somewhat
old-fashioned, somewhat purple word for a Chinese person,
i.e. a person of the Han4zu2, or in a second sense, it
means literally a personage from the Han dynasty in
particular.
Han4yu3 is another word for the Chinese language. It is the
more technical term -- what we might use to translate the
literal phrase "the Chinese language", as opposed to just
"Chinese" for the ordinary speech of ordinary Chinese people.
Interestingly, the Japanese reading for Han4yu3, kango,
also means "Chinese", but is not the ordinary word for
"Chinese" in the language -- that is chuugokugo. Kango,
instead, means "a Chinese word" or "a Chinese expression",
i.e. a lexical item, written in kanji, that is recognized
as being derived from China, as opposed to being a
Japanese innovation.
Then there is zhong1wen2, which means roughly any written
Chinese form or Chinese literature. han4wen2 is more reserved
for Classical Chinese. The Japanese reading, kanbun,
denotes old classical Chinese text, often
poetry, that is marked up with an elaborate system of
indicating the order of characters and phrases in reading,
so that the SVO order of Chinese can be read off in
Japanese SOV order, with the additional Japanese word
endings and particles added to make it read *as if* it
were Japanese. (cf. U+3190..U+319F) *wheels within wheels*
--Ken
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