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Chinese v. Mandarin v. Cantonese | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6915 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 33 of 47 29 January 2011 at 10:56am | IP Logged | |||||
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It's easier to state that there are over 1 billion speakers of "Chinese" if you count them all as dialects.
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| lanni Senior Member China Joined 6269 days ago 102 posts - 156 votes Speaks: Mandarin* Studies: English | Message 34 of 47 29 January 2011 at 3:15pm | IP Logged | |||||
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If you define Chinese as the language that the majority of modern Chinese people speak, that should be called 汉语, i.e. the language that Han people (汉族人) speak. But that is not end of it. With the migrations and development along these around-4000 years, 汉语 has many 方言（local varieties）. Researchers put them into 7 major categories: 北方, 吴, 湘, 赣, 客家, 闽, 粤 (I read about the statistics many years ago, it may have been updated, which I am not sure. ) , for they have distinctive features of their own. But still, they are 汉语. Because they have overwhelmingly common features phonologically, semantically and syntactically. Let alone in the sense of literature.
The trend of writing literature in the form of easier colloquial form can be as early as 1000 years back. That is why even a 10-year-old can enjoy reading 三国演义 and 水浒传 (both were written more than 600 years ago), 西游记 and 红楼梦 . It went through ups and downs, the last decisive up was in the early 1900s. Since then we have lots of excellent writers who contribute to both the written and colloquial forms of 现代汉语( modern Chinese language). 老舍 is one of the greatest modern literature writers. Mandarin(官话) is a legacy of Qing dynasty. It means the language spoken by the officials of Qing dynasty. Actually it is officialized northern dialect based on Beijing accent. Mandarin's updated version is 现代汉语普通话 or 汉语普通话 or just 普通话. It is the representative of 汉语, not because it is better than the other local varieties, but it is needed socially, economically, and politically. The reason that beijing--accent northern dialect is chosen to be universally spoken language across China is because it has the majority of speakers in the first place. Why must Beijing accent be chosen as the base? Well, there has to be a base. Beijing has the historical and political advantages. What do you recommend? Does it mean that native speakers of local varieties are really forbidden to speak their mother tongues? I don't think so. It is somewhat like English education. You learn it, that is good, you will definitely benefit from the learning. You hate learning it, that's Ok, nobody will kill you or torture you, only your loss. I never heard my fellow Chinese natives said 中文 in daily life. When my teacher of English class talked about English language and Chinese language, she always said 英语 and 汉语。 As far as I know, 中文 is mostly used in naming the department of a university( 中文系). 中文 refers to complex aspects concerning Chinese language and literature, Cantonese dialect is just a fraction of this huge lot. When I encounter someone who insists on speaking 粤语/广东话(Cantonese) or 上海话(Shanghai dialect), I would ask politely "您会说普通话吗？" I definitely would not ask "您会说中文吗？" or "您会说汉语吗？". Maybe I could have a try next time just to see how they would react, if I didn't mind being thought as cynical,or worse, mental. However, when I met a Tibetan guy a few years ago, I asked him slowly "您会说汉语吗？" It is not fair to limit Chinese language to Mandarin, or say , to limit 汉语 to 普通话. It is like calling one of the brothers "father" in front of the other brothers. No wonder that some speakers of local varieties, such as Cantonese, whine about it. I do, too, though I speak Mandarin all my life. I wonder who was the first guy that fabricated such a linguistically wrong hat and got away with it, obviously not a Chinese native. Edited by lanni on 29 January 2011 at 4:13pm 8 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7162 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 35 of 47 29 January 2011 at 6:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
Yet whom is jsun fighting against here? I'm inclined to believe that the fight should be with the central authorities or linguists in China (who if on the Party's payroll have a vested interest to insist on Cantonese's overall subordination relative to Mandarin) rather than with a bunch of language geeks from all over the world. I gather that any reasonable, informed and/or well-travelled person will see quickly the flaw of letting an ethnic group correspond to one language only. Even in Continental Europe where this idea arose (thanks to the philosopher Johann Herder who glorified the place of language in national consciousness which led to a variation that for every nation, there must be a (distinct) language), then you'd have to explain how Austrians and Germans are native speakers of German (two ethnic groups, one language). Or how Finns can be native speakers of Finnish or Swedish (one ethnic group, two languages) or how Norwegians can be native speakers of Bokmål or Nynorsk (whose divergence is roughly like that between Czech and Slovak; thus partially mutually-intelligible). This isn't a European thing either. Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu) is the native language of many Pakistanis and Indians. The same goes for the Han people. They can be united (as many choose to be) regardless of the fact that what many of them use natively isn't intelligible to many of their compatriots. I don't think it's a matter of disagreeing with the germ of jsun's cause: that is to view Cantonese as a language rather than "just" a dialect (as loaded as the terms "language" and "dialect" often are to non-linguists). The mutual unintelligibility is high enough that in practical terms (i.e. learning and use) one has to study each one carefully for some time to make him/herself reliably understood with native speakers. However I wonder who on this board really needs convincing to see this or if it's truly necessary here. Because people on this board seem to be language-learners, those learning any Chinese language will find out very quickly that passing them off as "dialects" as is common may not be ideal anyway. On the other hand I don't think that lengthy exposés with cultural and political baggage will really be that helpful when it comes time for learners to memorize characters, practice tones, or learn how to construct sentences in an understandable and idiomatic way to native speakers. Edited by Chung on 30 January 2011 at 1:39am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cthulhu Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 7229 days ago 139 posts - 235 votes Speaks: French*, English, Mandarin, Russian | Message 36 of 47 29 January 2011 at 7:03pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Merv: I'm not really sure where you've gotten this idea that the Chinese government is behind some dasterdly plot to keep its country unified by surreptitiously convincing some Westerners to refer to the different varieties of Chinese as dialects instead of languages, but you may want to consider a future as a writer. Unless of course you are in fact a writer already, in which case good for you. Same goes for your suggestion that both "India and China are large post-imperial societies that stress ethnicity along the lines of being a citizen of thestate, NOT ethnicity based on language" which is a pretty radical reinterpretation (Some would say "complete reversal") of the situation in India . And I'm not even going to touch the assertion that ethnic Hungarian Romanians aren't Romanians with the 10 foot pole I happen to have handy.
You're right though, Cantonese (Or any other dialect) speakers do naturally have the right to insist that people call what they speak a language. And, we in turn have the right to ignore them. None of this has anything to do with rights (There's no "Right to freedom from having one's language colloquially referred to as a dialect even though it's a pet peeve of yours" in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Or maybe there is; honestly I haven't checked, but I have grave doubts), and it doesn't have anything to do with pseudo-scientific definitions about the difference between a language and a dialect that people have come up with in the last few years/decades to change the meaning of words that have been in use for centuries/millennia; even if "degree of mutual intelligibility" were some straightforward, easy to determine criterion, and even if we could agree on a percentage of "mutal intelligibility" that would universally serve as the dividing line between the two words, the fact would still remain that that just doesn't reflect the way people actually use the words. So yeah, Hindi, Bengali, and Marathi could be called different dialects of Indian. They're not, but they could be; Spanish, France, Italian and all the other Romance languages could just as easily be called dialects of Roman. A rose by any other name and all that. Egill and Aineko have made very good points already, and at this point it seems to me that we're talking about the wrong things. The Chinese government has been pushing all non-Mandarin varieties of Chinese down in it's efforts to encourage a standard national language (Whoops, politics; won't happen again). This is unfortunate. Non-Mandarin varieties of Chinese have such extremely low levels of prestige among the Chinese that their speakers can actually develop inferiority complexes. This is also unfortunate. Most varieties of Chinese (In fact all of them that aren't Mandarin or Cantonese) are completely unknown in the West. Pretty unfortunate. See, there are lots of really unfair, distressing things about the Chinese linguistic situation that people could be discussing or, heaven forbid, trying to do something about. The fact that many people refer to Cantonese and Mandarin as dialects of Chinese? Really not one of them. The fact that people sometimes say Chinese when they're talking about Mandarin? Even less so. I'm sorry that things like this make people like jsun so sad, but they're getting bent out of shape over petty cosmetic issues (The equivalent of a mole perhaps? Personally I like how "Chinese dialects" sounds a lot more than I like the strictly speaking more accurate "Chinese languages" while others clearly don't, so the mole/beauty mark dichotomy seems appropriate here) which, even if they could be "solved" would do absolutely nothing to fix the underlying problems. Or does anyone here truly believe that if the small percentage of westerners who talk about Cantonese or other non-Mandarin Chinese dialects at all start calling them languages instead of dialects, the PRC will suddenly reverse its language policies and everyone in China will realize that their individual mother tongues are perfectly valid means of linguistic expression in no way inferior to the national standard? Maybe then they'll all join hands and dance and sing La Marseillaise while unicorns frolic in a newly independant Tibet. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6556 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 37 of 47 30 January 2011 at 1:15am | IP Logged | |||||
I'm willing to bet you are far more concerned about it than they are. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| mick33 Senior Member United States Joined 5930 days ago 1335 posts - 1632 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish | Message 38 of 47 30 January 2011 at 1:36am | IP Logged | |||||
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The language vs dialect question is an intellectual blind alley for language learning, because debating about whether Mandarin and Cantonese are two distinct languages or simply dialects will never help anybody learn to read, write or speak either one. The same goes for every other language/dialect debate that we could have.
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| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6588 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 39 of 47 30 January 2011 at 6:21am | IP Logged | |||||
When I'm with a number of Chinese talking about stuff, sometimes the question will turn to the subject of Cantonese (since they're curious on the reasons why I can speak it). A comment I've heard my sifu bring up several times is: "You know, some say that Cantonese and Mandarin are actually so different that you can call them separate languages! How about that?". In general, the other people in the conversation have never even considered this question. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| jimbo Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 6300 days ago 469 posts - 642 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Japanese, Latin | Message 40 of 47 30 January 2011 at 7:45am | IP Logged | |||||
Perhaps such debates should be held in the relative dialects/languages. Too much room for misunderstanding? ;-) Edited by jimbo on 30 January 2011 at 7:46am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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