Is Wu Sino-Tibetan?

Wu Chinese (吴语/吳語) is a member of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages.

Is Wu Chinese Shanghainese?

Wú (吴语) or "Shanghai dialect" or "Shanghainese" (上海话) is the main local language for much of East China — the municipality of Shanghai, most of Zhejiang province, and the southern parts of Jiangsu province. There are also some speakers in neighbouring Chinese provinces.

Is Wu Chinese Cantonese?

Wu (or Woo or Wou) is also the Cantonese transliteration of the Chinese surname 胡 (Mandarin Hu), used in Hong Kong, and by overseas Chinese of Cantonese-speaking areas of Guangdong, Guangxi, and/or Hong Kong/Macau origin.

What is Wu surname?

Wu (Chinese: 伍; pinyin: Wǔ; Jyutping: Ng5) is a Chinese surname. It is the 89th name on the Hundred Family Surnames poem. It means 'five' in Chinese, an alternative form of the character 五.

What is Japanese Wu?

Wu is a constructed Japanese kana.

The Sino Tibetan Family

What is the difference between Mandarin and Wu?

They are both Chinese languages but come from different branches. Standard Mandarin is based on the Beijing and northern Mandarin dialects and Shanghainese is a variety of Wu languages.

Are Wu and Mandarin mutually intelligible?

Shanghainese, like other Wu dialects, is largely not mutually intelligible with other Chinese varieties such as Mandarin.

What Wu means in Chinese?

武 [Wu] Meaning: martial, military.

Is Wu Chinese Mandarin?

The Wu dialect (Chinese: 吳方言; pinyin: Wú fāngyán), a derogatory, self-deprecating yet common academic name that belittles the status of Wu language as a dialect of "the [one] Chinese language", usually used by Mandarin-speaking academics in state-administered universities.

Who are the Wu people?

The Wu Chinese people, also known as Wuyue people (simplified Chinese: 吴越人; traditional Chinese: 吳越人; pinyin: Wúyuè rén, Shanghainese: [ɦuɦyɪʔ ɲɪɲ]), Jiang-Zhe people (江浙民系) or San Kiang (三江), are a major subgroup of the Han Chinese.

Is Wu a language or dialect?

Wu language, variety of Chinese dialects spoken in Shanghai, in southeastern Jiangsu province, and in Zhejiang province by more than 8 percent of the population of China (some 85 million people) at the turn of the 21st century.

Is Burmese Sino-Tibetan?

The Sino-Tibetan language family includes early literary languages, such as Chinese, Tibetan, and Burmese, and is represented by more than 400 modern languages spoken in China, India, Burma, and Nepal. It is one of the most diverse language families in the world, spoken by 1.4 billion speakers.

Can Mandarin speakers understand Wu?

Intelligibility and variations

Shanghainese is part of the larger Wu Chinese group of Chinese languages. It is not mutually intelligible with any dialects of Mandarin Chinese, or Cantonese, Southern Min (such as Hokkien-Taiwanese), and any other Chinese languages outside Wu.

Can a Cantonese speaker understand Mandarin?

No, they are completely different languages. Although Cantonese and Mandarin have many similarities, they are not mutually intelligible. This means that, presuming one has no significant exposure or training, a speaker of Mandarin will understand little to nothing of Cantonese and vice-versa.

Can Cantonese speakers read Mandarin?

Senior Member. According to my Cantonese-speaking friends, when they encounter structures that only exist in Mandarin, they read in Mandarin. (I've heard that when the characters are written in traditional/simplified form, native Cantonese speakers tend to read them in Cantonese/Mandarin.

What does Hakka mean in Chinese?

The word 'Hakka' in Chinese is "客家", pronounced kejia in Mandarin and meaning “guest people”. This is opposed to the word zhu "主", meaning owner, which was used to identify local or native residents.

Is Hakka a language?

Hakka dialect is a branch of Chinese dialects, mainly distributed in eastern Guangdong, southern Fujian, western Yunnan, emigrated areas, and overseas countries including Southeast Asia. The number of users is between 40 million and 50 million, and about half of them are concentrated in Guangdong.

Is Cantonese and Mandarin the same?

Different Spoken Languages

In terms of speaking, Cantonese and Mandarin are not mutually intelligible, and on that basis should be called different languages. While, in essence, the same character-syllable base is used, the pronunciation varies… sometimes radically.

Why is there no Wu hiragana?

Although kana for wi and we exist, namely hiragana ゐ and ゑ, and katakana ヰ and ヱ, they are not used in modern Japanese writing. These kana exist because the sounds they represent existed in Japanese at the time the kana were created.

Who invented kana?

Kana is traditionally said to have been invented by the Buddhist priest Kūkai in the ninth century.

Do Japanese still use wi and we?

The kana for wi and we do exist for both hiragana and katakana, but they are now obsolete in modern Japanese and rarely used.