Words from Chinese
3 words in Curio passed through Chinese on their way into English.
About Chinese
Largest branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family · spoken today
Where
Greater China → overseas Chinese communities, with Dungan and Taz speakers in Central Asia and the Russian Far East
When
Speakers
No reliable count
Wikidata gives 1,299,877,520 speakers but no date for that figure. Wikipedia gives about 1.39 billion first-language speakers.
Family path
- Chinese
- ArabicGreek
- English
Where it came from
Chinese is the largest branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages. Its earliest attested writing is the oracle bone inscriptions of the Shang dynasty, around 1250 BCE. The sounds of Old Chinese can be reconstructed from the rhymes of ancient poetry, and during the Northern and Southern dynasties Middle Chinese split into several varieties after long geographic and political separation.
Source: Wikipedia