The Mandarin Language
Mandarin-or Putonghua (poo-tong-wah) “common language”-is the most widely spoken language in the China per capita (followed by Cantonese). It is also the (1) official language of the People’s Republic of China (mainland China), the Republic of China (Taiwan), and is one of the four official languages of Singapore. The language got its name in English from the Portuguese word, Mandarin meaning “an official of China”. It is a (2) tonal language, which means that it used different tones (pitches) to (3) distinguish between words. English, for example, has tones but it isn’t considered a tonal language since, in English, tones are used to indicate a generic yes-or-no question (rising tone on the last word of the sentence, i.e. “Did you eat (↑)?), among other uses.
Mandarin has four tones, which are classified in the following manner: the first tone (1) is flat, the second tone (2) is rising, the third tone (3) is falling then rising, and the fourth tone (4) is falling. There is also a neutral tone, which is similar to the first tone, but shorter.
In English, if you took the word “Ma” and gave it the different tones, it wouldn’t change the meaning of the word, it would still mean “mother.” Saying “Ma” in a different tone would change the melody of the word, but not the word itself. But in Mandarin the way tones distinguish words can be seen with the following: Ma (1) is mother, Ma (2) is a Sichuan pepper that leaves a numbing (4) sensation on the tongue, ma (3) is horse, and ma (4) is used when describing the verb (5) to scold. It is because of the tones in Mandarin that it is often erroneously considered “the most difficult language to learn.”
The word “official”, in bold after the (1), is closest in meaning to
