ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with two important areas: Chinese culture and Chinese language, and both are not identical. Examples of borrowings by means of writing are numerous in Chinese. Thousands of words have been borrowed from Japanese and are functioning with Chinese phonetics in Modern Standard Chinese (MSC). While MSC also includes dialectal borrowings, their situation is unlike that in other languages. A loan word taken from a Chinese dialect always enters MSC through the medium of Chinese writing. Before presenting the actual state of our knowledge about the earliest phases of the Chinese language, the chapter discusses the relationship between language and writing. When compared with other writing codes, Chinese writing is not only distinguished by the fact that it practically never took phonetics into consideration, but also by the fact that it never evolved towards a phonetic notation.
