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 Language Learning Forum : Lessons in Polyglottery |  | |
| kimchicurry Super Polyglot Newbie United States Joined 5984 days ago 12 posts - 29 votes Speaks: English, Cantonese*, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Spanish, Nepali, Urdu, Taiwanese, Shanghainese, Kannada, Gujarati Studies: Biblical Hebrew, Arabic (Egyptian), Sinhalese, Swahili, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Arabic (Written), French, Persian, Bengali, Malay | Message 41 of 41 08 July 2009 at 2:56am | IP Logged |
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If you reread my post a little more carefully, you'll see that I wasn't claiming that Wikipedia is a good source to cite in scholarly articles, I am actually in agreement with you that one must find scholarly articles outside Wikipedia for academic works.
Well, to be honest the ethnic classification system currently used in PRC is rather old and needs to be updated. Sometimes where there is clear linguistic indication that two groups are unrelated, the government merges them, and sometimes where there is significantly less reason to separate two groups into one, the government still divides them. For example, I don't see why Tuvans (who speak a Turkic language) should be merged with Mongols. Of course, there's been cultural interaction between the two groups over time, but that would open up a huge can of worms, since so many ethnic groups in China have interacted with each other for such a long time. Also, Hainan Utsuls who speak an Austronesian language are merged into the Hui ethnic group, though the only link between them is the Islamic religion. Ultimately, "fangyan" is a crummy translation for "dialect," since it just refers to the speech of a place. Even Japanese and Vietnamese have been referred to as "fangyan" in the distant past (not anymore, but there are still some Chinese people who like to think that Vietnamese is a rogue Chinese "fangyan" that got Romanized and subsequently was "manipulated" by foreign powers to become split off from China and the mainstream fangyan). What's even worse is that "shuo fangyan" is also a Chinese translation for "to speak in tongues," which in my opinion goes to show that mutual UNintelligibility is part of the implicit semantic association the word fangyan gets (since most of the time, when religious people speak in tongues, it's incomprehensible to everyone, except maybe God). I think that this thread has veered way off track from its original intent. There are plenty of other threads available to discuss how to determine whether a form of speech should be considered an separate language or a dialect of another language, or even a topolect. We should all go back to helping the topic creator come up with a decent approach to tackle the various "forms" of Chinese, seeing as he has already gained fluency in Mandarin, and would like to start learning Teochew, Taiwanese, and the others. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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