Changshahua; Hunanhua; Xiang (Specific Languages) Language Learning Forum

Changshahua; Hunanhua; Xiang
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ZombieKing
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Message 9 of 19

08 October 2012 at 12:24am | IP Logged

Ari wrote:

clumsy wrote:

If you want to learn Cantonese you may find a lot of stuff, Taiwanese and Wu also have few books, even Hakka has some textbooks, but if you want to study Xiang, Gan or Jin, then ... well... you can't.

It's really incredible to me how languages with millions and millions of speakers can be so completely neglected. Sadly the speakers themselves have often been convinced their languages are "ugly" and don't think they're worthy of study. And of course there's the official "It's not a language" position which is really damaging.

I'm not sure why the Western concepts of languages and dialects must be forced onto Chinese. Honestly. Not everything revolves around the West. If the people of Taiwan, mainland China and Hong Kong consider Cantonese, Mandarin, Taiwanese, Shanghainese, etc to be dialects of Chinese (which in my eyes, they are. And I'm Taiwanese), then who are YOU to say they're not? Are you Chinese? Just because linguists say they're distinct languages that means 100% they are and can't be classified as anything else? These are Western linguists, not Chinese linguists. Surely the Chinese know best who and what they are. Furthermore, if Norwegian, Swedish and Danish can be separate languages despite their apparent mutual intelligibility, why can't Mandarin and Cantonese be dialects of Chinese? Why are Portuguese and Spanish separate languages if speakers of Portuguese can communicate effectively with speakers of Spanish if they try to speak in a way that the other will understand?

The de facto basis for what forms a Chinese dialect is whether a speaker of that dialect can read every character in their own dialect's pronunciation. This is what is accepted among the Chinese, this is what we believe. Don't force your own Western centric views onto us, when clearly we should know best who we are.

Also, do all Canadians in Montreal learn French? Absolutely not, many of them are monolingual English speakers. How is that situation any different to the ones in mainland China?

What drives me insane is foreigners who learn Chinese, yet criticize the Chinese because of their biases on anything foreign or strange to them.

Would I go to Norway and say "Actually, you don't speak a real language, just a dialect of Danish. Everyone knows that." No! I wouldn't. That's disrespectful to Norwegians and the culture they hold dear.

Edited by ZombieKing on 08 October 2012 at 12:31am
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Ari
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Message 10 of 19

08 October 2012 at 9:45am | IP Logged

This discussion carries the risk of getting very political pretty quickly, and that's not in keeping with the forum rules. I'm not saying it's not worthy of discussion, but it's a subject to be broached carefully. At the moment, I'll just link to the excellent essay by Victor Mair, How to Forget Your Mother Tongue and Remember Your National Language. Do read it, as there's a lot of misinformation out there. I'll quote him rather than speak for myself, as he has a far greater knowledge in these matters than I do.

ZombieKing wrote:

I'm not sure why the Western concepts of languages and dialects must be forced onto Chinese. Honestly. Not everything revolves around the West.

Victor Mair wrote:

The myth that there is only a single Chinese (Han) language and that it is spoken by more than a billion people (Chen 1999: 1) is as widespread, relatively recent, persistent, and obnoxiously misleading as the myth that the Great Wall was the only man-made object on earth that could be seen from the moon. Furthermore, both of these myths were perpetrated by Westerners and foisted upon the Chinese.

See section 3.3 of the essay for more details of how the idea of "Chinese" as a single language and Cantonese, Taiwanese etc. as dialects is a recent phenomenon in China, brought about by forcing the Chinese system of classification to conform to the Western system.

ZombieKing wrote:

If the people of Taiwan, mainland China and Hong Kong consider Cantonese, Mandarin, Taiwanese, Shanghainese, etc to be dialects of Chinese (which in my eyes, they are. And I'm Taiwanese), then who are YOU to say they're not?

Thing is, this is a matter of science, and science isn't democratic. No matter how many Americans believe that the earth is 6000 years old, it doesn't change the fact that they're wrong. And linguistic science is pretty unanimous here, as far as I know. Here's another relevant quote from the essay:

Victor Mair wrote:

When one looks at language trees for Sino-Tibetan published in China, virtually all of them show an incredibly elaborate branching structure for Tibeto-Burman languages, but none whatsoever for Sinitic. Whereas there is a proliferation of scores of Tibeto-Burman branches and languages, many of which have only a few thousand to several ten thousand or a hundred thousand speakers, there is but one unbranched line for Hanyu with all of its billion and more speakers. The portrayal of Hanyu as utterly monolithic is a politico-cultural fiction. In secret, no honest linguist who has studied the huge lexical, phonological, and grammatical differences between LS and VS, and among the numerous varieties of VS, could possibly accept the diachronic and synchronic uniformity of Hanyu.

If the truth be told, there have been coded attempts to break out of the ideological straitjacket that demands acquiescence in the monolingual myth. Both in the Nationalities volume (1986: 554b) and in the Languages and Scripts volume (1988: 523b) of the authoritative Zhongguo da baike quanshu, we find the following rather weird sentence: Hànyǔ zài yǔyán xìshǔ fēnlèi zhōng xiāngdāngyú yī ge yǔzú de dìwèi (漢語在語言係屬分類中相當於一個語族的地� � "In linguistic classification, Hanyu [Sinitic] occupies a place equivalent to a language group"). Apart from its grammatical and logical defectiveness (Hanyu... is equivalent to... a position), this sentence is peculiar in many other respects. First of all, in both instances it occurs in an article on "languages of Chinese national minorities," not in an article on Sinitic or even Sino-Tibetan. Secondly, it was written not by a specialist on Sinitic, but by a well-known expert on non-Sinitic languages, Fu Maoji. Thirdly, it is very careful not to come right out and say that Hanyu is (shì 是) a language group, but only that it occupies a position equivalent to (xiāngdāng yú) a language group. Fu Maoji is bound by the fiction of a monolithic Hanyu not to admit that Hanyu really is a language group, for -- if he were to do so -- it would automatically mean that it is composed of more than a single language. At the same time, common sense and linguistic reality demand recognition of the multiplicity of constituents within Hanyu. Hence the blatantly evasive wording.

ZombieKing wrote:

Furthermore, if Norwegian, Swedish and Danish can be separate languages despite their apparent mutual intelligibility, why can't Mandarin and Cantonese be dialects of Chinese?

Actually, I don't think most linguists consider these as separate languages, though I could be wrong. This is less important, however, as the classification of Chinese as a single language does incredible harm, which I am not convinced the classification of the Scandinavian language(s) does.
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Solfrid Cristin
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Message 11 of 19

08 October 2012 at 10:28am | IP Logged

I understand the point of view that it seems unfair that outsiders should define what is a language. The thing is that sometimes in a country, languages may be defined as dialects for political reasons. When I first went to Spain, I was told that there was only one language, "Castellano", and the rest were dialects. Even Basque - which is not similar to Spanish in any way, was considered a dialect.

And I suppose we have often enough heard the " a language is a dialect with an army". If it is the language of a sovereign state, a language is more likely to be defined as a language, if it is not, it is more likely to be defined as a dialect of the main language.

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Chung
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Message 12 of 19

08 October 2012 at 11:37am | IP Logged

ZombieKing wrote:

Ari wrote:

clumsy wrote:

Most Han certainly know who and what they are, but language idenfication/classificaton is a different matter. This idea that no one but memebrs of the speech community can determine the identification or classification of a language no matter how little they draw on methods of comparative linguistics or linguistic fieldwork reminds of when some Balkan nationalists insistent on the idea that Croatian and Serbian are separate languages would try to invalidate an outsider's dissenting idea by targeting his/her lack of the requisite amount of Balkanic DNA.

Yes, everything is a big ol' conspiracy by those damned [insert your bogeyman of choice here]...

For more on this matter, see "Chinese v. Mandarin v. Cantonese" and "Why no "Chinese" in the language name?".
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zhanglong
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Message 13 of 19

08 October 2012 at 11:42am | IP Logged

As fascinated as I am with all of the Sinitic tongues, all I will add to this discussion is, not everyone in China believes that their language is a dialect of Mandarin. While they may seem to hold the minority opinion, some local people are quite proud of their local language and will literally take to the streets to defend it.

Chinese Protestors Assert Right to Speak Cantonese

So it's not only outsiders or foreigners who may have a different view of what constitutes a "language" or a "dialect". While many people believe that their local language is not useful or as valuable as or even different from the national language, there are still internal debates about this issue.

As Ari rightly mentioned, issues of language, culture, history, and politics can quickly become messy...

Now as for the original poster's concerns: a cute, inexpensive guide is published by The Lonely Planet. Entitled simply "China" (ISBN 978-1-74179-6), it lists fourteen different tongues spoken in China and contains very useful practical, geographical, phonological, and linguistic information. It covers "Mandarin, Cantonese, Chaozhou Hua, Dongbei Hua, Hakka, Hunanese, Shanghainese, Sichuanese, Xi'an Hua, Yunnan Hua, Zhuang Hua, Mongolian, Tibetan, and Uighur" and even includes the local script used to transcribe these languages --(it's not always 汉字.)

It's small enough to be placed in a back pocket and handy enough to use as a reference point for more serious or intensive study. It's fun to talk to people about their local tongues and evaluate how accurate the book is. Usually people are astonished that anyone knows about where they are from if their hometown is not Beijing, Shanghai or Guangzhou.
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Ari
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Message 14 of 19

08 October 2012 at 12:40pm | IP Logged

zhanglong wrote:

For a (very limited) study on these attitudes, check out Language or Dialect—or Topolect? A Comparison of the Attitudes of Hong Kongers and Mainland Chinese towards the Status of Cantonese. In the survey, about half of Hong Kong Canto speakers and only two fifths of Mainland Canto speakers felt that Cantonese is "clearly a dialect".

Julie M. Groves wrote:

There were significant and unexpected differences between all three groups in their categorization of Cantonese. The majority of Mainland Putonghua speakers judged it to be a dialect, on both the two-way distinction (93.1%) and the five-point scale (62.5%). The Hong Kong Cantonese speakers were less sure. Around three-quarters (77.4%) chose dialect on the Julie M. Groves “Language or Dialect—or Topolect?” Sino-Platonic Papers, 179 (February, 2008) 64 two-way distinction and only just over half (52.8%) chose dialect on the five-point scale. The Mainland Cantonese speakers’ attitudes diverged even more, with the relative proportions dropping to half (50%) and just over two-fifths (38.9%). It is significant that on the five-point scale question, this left the Mainland Cantonese speakers fairly evenly distributed over the language-dialect spectrum, ranging from 27.8% (language), to 33.3% (in between a language and a dialect) and 38.9% (dialect).

It's clear that it's not a tiny minority of speakers that consider it a dialect, although it's hardly the majority opinion. The fact that the "dialect" view is so much strongly held by Mandarin speakers than by Cantonese speakers is telling to me.
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ZombieKing
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Message 15 of 19

08 October 2012 at 10:03pm | IP Logged

Perhaps I was being too argumentative. Thanks everyone for being civil with me despite my rudeness. I guess we can agree to disagree about what forms a Chinese dialect. In Chinese, we have something called 方言 (fang1yan2), which is not the exact equivalent of dialect in English. It's a special word that when describing Chinese, describes a certain kind of dialect. As in, not a dialect in the traditional sense. This is I guess a cultural as well linguistic difference that's hard for me to explain. Anyways, sorry again.
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Chung
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Message 16 of 19

08 October 2012 at 10:20pm | IP Logged

No hard feelings. As some of the posts in those links in my post indicate, this is not the first time that we've dealt with the treatment of Sinitic including the (mis)translation of the pertinent terms into English.

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