CHINESE 352 FINAL REVIEW QUESTIONS

! Try not to ask for and memorize answers but arrive at the answers yourself.

1. How is "mutual intelligibility" not adhered to in calling Chinese languages dialects?

2. What is Chinese genetically related to and not related to?

3. Why can't we look at similarities in grammar and sounds in determining genetic relationship?

4. What do we use to determine genetic relationship?

5. What is the special role of tones in Chinese languages?

6. What is tone sandhi?

7. What is the relationship between tones and musical tunes?

8. What are initials and finals?

9. How do Mandarin, Cantonese and Shanghai differ in their finals and tones?

10. Cite some differences between English and Chinese syllable structure.

11. Why does Chinese have fewer possible syllables than English?

12. What is a homophone? What causes the extensive homophony in Chinese?

13. What is the difference between a syllable, a morpheme and a word?

14. In what senses is Chinese either monosyllabic or disyllabic?

15. What is the most important type of word formation process in Chinese?

16. What kind of grammar does Chinese NOT have? What kind of grammar does it have?

17. How is word formation in Chinese different from English?

18. How is word order in Chinese different from English?

19. Why is speech primary and writing secondary?

20. What kinds of characters are based on meaning and which are based on sound?

21. How can Chinese characters reflect culture? What characters have the most cultural information?

22. What is the most common type of characters? What is the least common?

23. Why was it necessary to turn away from a purely meaning-based writing system?

24. Which principle marked the beginning of phonetic representation in Chinese writing system?

25. Why don't phonetic components in some characters reflect the sound of the characters accurately?

26. What are oracle bones and bronze inscriptions? When were they created respectively?

27. Are simplified characters always created from scratch? What are some types of formerly existing characters?

28. Why is simplification of characters not simply a matter of the reduction of strokes?

29. Cite examples of regularization in the simplification of characters.

30. Cite examples of irregularity in the simplified characters.

31. Why aren’t simplified characters always simpler?

32. How are dialect and popular characters created?

33. What is a homograph? Cite some examples of homographs resulting from simplification.

34. Give examples of people's natural preference for phonetically-based writing.

35. What are the practical problems created by the non-alphabetic writing system of Chinese?

36. How is modern Mandarin different from Classical Chinese?

37. How is Cantonese grammar different from Mandarin?

38. Cite some examples of word meaning changes from classical Chinese to modern Chinese.

39. Cite some examples of word meaning differences in Chinese dialects.

40. What does the ease in constructing palindromes show about the grammar of Chinese, especially classical Chinese?

41. What happened to the tonal system of Middle Chinese in its evolution to modern Chinese tones?

42. What happened to the entering tones from Middle Chinese to Mandarin, Cantonese and Shanghai?

43. How can dialect pronunciations and foreign loan words be used for reconstruction?

44. What are rhyme dictionaries? What information about sound can you find there?

45. What can Fanqie spelling for a character tell us about its pronunciation?

46. How are semantic-phonetic compound characters and scribal errors used in reconstruction?

47. Before the use of romanization, how was pronunciation indicated? What are the problems?

48. In addition to Latin-based alphabets, what kind of scripts have been used to represent Chinese?

49. What are the major schemes for spelling Chinese? What are their special characteristics?

50. What are the criteria for evaluating alphabetic systems? How may the criteria be in conflict with each other?