Chinese pronouns
Chinese pronouns (Chinese:
Personal pronouns
[edit]In Mandarin
[edit]Person | Singular | Plural | ||
---|---|---|---|---|
1st | wǒ I, me |
wǒmen we, us (exclusive) |
咱们 / 咱們† zánmen we, us (inclusive) | |
2nd | 你 nǐ thou, you (informal) |
您 nín you (formal) |
你们 / 你們 nǐmen you (generic) |
您 nín you (formal) |
3rd | tā he, him / she, her / it |
tāmen they, them |
- *
我 们 /我 們 can be either inclusive or exclusive, depending on the circumstance where it is used. - † 咱们 / 咱們 is mainly used by northern speakers.
Following the iconoclastic May Fourth Movement in 1919, and to accommodate the translation of Western literature, written vernacular Chinese developed separate pronouns for gender-differentiated speech, and to address animals, deities, and inanimate objects.
Throughout the 1920s, a debate continued between three camps: those that preferred to preserve the preexisting use of
Other, rarer new written pronouns in the second person are nǐ (祢 "you, a deity"), nǐ (你 "you, a male"), and nǐ (妳 "you, a female"). In the third person, they are tā (牠 "it, an animal"), tā (祂 "it, a deity"), and tā (它 "it, an inanimate object"). Among users of traditional Chinese characters, these distinctions are only made in Taiwanese Mandarin; in simplified Chinese, tā (它) is the only third-person non-human form and nǐ (你) is the only second person form. The third person distinction between "he" (
In the early 21st century, some members of genderfluid and queer Chinese online communities started using X也 and TA to refer to a generic, anonymous, or non-binary third person.[4] As of June 2022, neither have been encoded as a single code point in Unicode,[5] and neither are considered standard usage. Since at least 2014, Bilibili has used TA in its user pages.[6]
Additional notes
[edit]- The first-person pronouns
俺 ǎn and 偶 ǒu "I" are infrequently used in Mandarin conversation. They are of dialectal origin. However, their usage is gaining popularity among the young, most notably in online communications. - According to Wang Li, the second person formal pronoun nín (您 "you, formal; polite") is derived from the fusion of the second person plural nǐmen (你们 "you, formal; polite"), making it somewhat analogous to the T-V distinction in Romance languages. Consistent with this hypothesized origin, *nínmen is traditionally considered to be a grammatically incorrect expression for the formal second person plural. Instead, the alternative phrases dàjiā (
大家 , "you, formal plural") and gèwèi (各位 , "you, formal plural") are used, with the latter being somewhat more formal than the former. In addition, some dialects use an analogous formal third person pronoun tān (怹, "he/she, formal; polite"). - Traditional Chinese characters, as influenced by translations from Western languages and the Bible in the nineteenth century, occasionally distinguished gender in pronouns, although that distinction is abandoned in simplified Characters. Those traditional characters developed after Western contact include both masculine and feminine forms of "you" (你 and 妳). In the simplified system, 妳 is rare.
In other Sinitic languages
[edit]There are many other pronouns in modern Sinitic languages, such as Taiwanese Hokkien 恁 (Pe̍h-ōe-jī: lín) "you" and Written Cantonese 佢哋 (keúih deih) "they." There exist many more pronouns in Classical Chinese and in literary works, including
Historical | Modern | ||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Shang and early Zhou period[7][8] | Classical Chinese[9][8] | Northern and Southern dynasties period and Tang dynasty[10] | Standard Chinese (Mandarin Chinese) | Shanghainese (Wu Chinese) | Hokkien (Min Chinese)[11] | Meixian Hakka (Hakka Chinese)[12][13] | Cantonese (Yue Chinese) | ||
Singular | 1. | 𠊎 ŋai11 | |||||||
2. | 你 nǐ | 你 n11, ŋ11, ɲi11 | 你 nei˩˧ | ||||||
3. | 厥 *kot (possessive), third person subject pronoun did not exist |
其 gi, |
佢 ɡi11, i11 | 佢 kʰɵy˩˧ | |||||
Plural | 1. | same as singular | Singular + |
Both INCL. and EXCL. INCL. 咱們 zánmen |
EXCL. 阮 goán, gún, ún INCL. 咱 lán | EXCL. 𠊎 INCL. 這兜/ |
|||
2. | 你們 nǐmen | 㑚 na˩˧ | 恁 lín | 你兜/你等 ŋ11 deu24/ŋ11 nen24 | 你哋 nei˩˧ tei˨ | ||||
3. | (not used) | 𪜶 in | 佢兜/佢等 ɡi11 deu24/i11 nen24 | 佢哋 kʰɵy˩˧ tei˨ |
Possessives
[edit]To indicate alienable possession,
In Cantonese, for possessive, 嘅 (ge3) is appended to the pronoun. It is used in the same way as
In Taiwanese Hokkien, possessive pronouns are homophonous with plural pronouns. For example, 恁 (Pe̍h-ōe-jī: lín) can mean either "your" or "you (plural)".
Demonstrative pronouns
[edit]The demonstrative pronouns work the same as in English.
Singular | Plural | |
---|---|---|
Proximal | 这个 / 這個 zhège this |
这些 / 這些 zhèxiē these |
Distal | nàge that |
nàxiē those |
The distinction between singular and plural are made by the classifier 个/
Interrogative pronouns
[edit]Pronoun | Alternative HÉ-system | English |
---|---|---|
谁 / shéi |
hérén (what person) |
who |
哪个 / 哪個 nǎge |
hége (what one) |
which one |
shénme |
hé / héwù (what) |
what |
哪裡 / 哪里 nǎlǐ 哪兒 / 哪儿 nǎr |
héchù hédì (what location) |
where |
shénme shíhou |
héshí (what time) |
when |
为什么 / wèi shénme |
wèihé (for what) |
why |
怎么 / 怎麼 zěnme |
rúhé (what to follow) |
how |
duōshǎo 几 / jǐ |
几何 / jǐhé (what the amount) |
how much |
Indefinite pronouns
[edit]Pronoun | English |
---|---|
everyone | |
谁都 shéidōu | |
谁也 shéiyě | anybody |
谁都 |
no one |
谁也 |
nobody |
Pronouns in imperial times
[edit]- See also Chinese honorifics.
In imperial times, the pronoun for "I" was commonly omitted when speaking politely or to someone with higher social status. "I" was usually replaced with special pronouns to address specific situations. Examples include guǎrén (寡人) during early Chinese history and zhèn (
In modern times, the practice of self-deprecatory terms is still used in specific formal situations. In résumés, the term guì (贵/
See also
[edit]References
[edit]- ^ Zhang, Yun. "A Cultural History of the Chinese Character "Ta (She)"—On the invention and identification of a new female pronoun | Harvard-Yenching Institute". Harvard-Yenching Institute. Retrieved 21 August 2020.
- ^ Sun, pp. 166-167.
- ^ Shei, Chris (2019). The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Discourse Analysis. Routledge. p. 200.
- ^ "
他 /TA/X也: What Pronouns Do Chinese Queer People Use?". RADII | Stories from the center of China’s youth culture. 2021-06-25. Retrieved 2022-06-06. - ^ "Unicode 14.0.0". www.unicode.org. Retrieved 2022-06-06.
- ^ "bishi
的 空 间". web.archive.org (in Chinese). 2014-10-24. - ^ Laurent Sagart: The Roots of Old Chinese. (Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science, Series IV, Volume 184) John Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia 1999. ISBN 90-272-3690-9, S. 142–147; W. A. C. H. Dobson: Early Archaic Chinese. A Descriptive Grammar. University of Toronto Press, Toronto 1962, S. 112–114.
- ^ a b Ancient Chinese reconstructions according to Baxter and Sagart Archived September 27, 2013, at the Wayback Machine.
- ^ Note: The specified forms represent only a small selection.
- ^ Note: Middle Chinese pronunciations given in Baxter's notation.
- ^ Shi, Q.-S. (2016). Personal Pronouns in Southern Min Dialect. In P.-H. Ting et al. (Eds.). New Horizons in the Study of Chinese: Dialectology, Grammar, and Philology (pp. 181-190). Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press.
- ^ Mataro J. Hashimoto: The Hakka Dialect. A linguistic study of Its Phonology, Syntax and Lexicon. University Press, Cambridge 1973. ISBN 0-521-20037-7
- ^ Hakka Affairs Council. (2017). Vocabulary Words for the Hakka Proficiency Test: Elementary (Sixian Dialect) [
客語 能力 認證 基本 辭彙 -初級 (四 縣 腔)]. Retrieved from https://elearning.hakka.gov.tw/ver2015
Bibliography
[edit]- Kane, Daniel (2006). The Chinese Language: Its History and Usage. North Clarendon, VT: Tuttle. ISBN 0-8048-3853-4. OCLC 77522617.
- Sun, Chaofen (2006). Chinese: A Linguistic Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 166–169. ISBN 0-521-82380-3. OCLC 70671780.
- Yip, Po-Ching; Rimmington, Don (2004). Chinese: A Comprehensive Grammar. London; New York: Routledge. pp. 47–58. ISBN 978-0-415-15031-6. OCLC 52178249.