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"Dialects" of Arabic and Chinese | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| chucknorrisman Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5449 days ago 321 posts - 435 votes  Speaks: Korean*, English, Spanish Studies: Russian, Mandarin, Lithuanian, French | Message 1 of 6 15 September 2010 at 4:42am | IP Logged | ||
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Are the dialects of Arabic and the dialects of Chinese so close to one another that they are considered dialects and not separate languages? Are Slavic languages too distant from each other to say things like "Russian dialect" or "Polish dialect" of Slavic, while the Arabic and Chinese varieties are close enough?
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| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6583 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 2 of 6 15 September 2010 at 5:52am | IP Logged | ||
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There is no generally accepted definition of what constitutes a language and what constitutes a dialect, so you can pretty much call them what you want. Many people have some sort of idea that it should be based on mutual intelligibility, but that doesn't really work with how the words are practically used. Swedish and Norwegian are very much mutually intelligible, but are seldom if ever called dialects of Scandinavian. Mandarin and Cantonese are not at all mutually intelligible but are often called dialects of Chinese. It has more to do with history and politics than linguistics.
In the case of Chinese, speakers of Cantonese who don't speak a word of Mandarin will still generally read and write Mandarin fluently, since written Cantonese is a marginal phenomenon that pretty much only exists online and in comics and gossip magazines. This is probably the reason it's often called a "dialect". In the case of Swedish and Norwegian, it's probably the case of "an army and a navy", i.e. Norway and Sweden are different countries and as such are considered to speak different languages. Look to Bosnian and Serbian or Flemish and Dutch for more of that sort of thing, I think (I'm not too knowledgeable on that subject). So, again, whether something is a language or a dialect has only a weak relationship with mutual intelligibility or genetic closeness. You can avoid the entire issue by talking about the different "varieties" of Chinese, Arabic, Slavic or Scandinavian. Edited by Ari on 15 September 2010 at 5:56am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| aldous Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5243 days ago 73 posts - 174 votes Speaks: English*, French | Message 3 of 6 16 September 2010 at 8:11pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think it's hard to say in the case of Arabic what is language and what is dialect. I don't just mean where you draw the line between a dialect and an independent language. The diglossia in the Arab speech community makes the picture more complex than that.
The grammar of Modern Standard Arabic is quite different from the grammar of Colloquial Arabic. In MSA you decline nouns, but in colloquial you don't. Colloquial Arabic has different verb conjugations than MSA does. MSA is VSO whereas the colloquial dialects are SVO. Everyday vocabulary also tends to be different between the two. There is no mutual intelligibility between the two like there is among the Scandinavian languages. Based on that, it would be reasonable to say that MSA and Colloquial Arabic are two different languages. I don't know much about the regional dialects, so I don't know if it would be accurate to call them separate languages. The two dialects I have personal experience with, Egyptian and Levantine, are similar in that they share the bulk of their vocabulary and the grammar is mostly the same. But many common words are different because they derive from different Arabic roots (e.g. the Levantine word khibiz is obviously cognate with the standard word for bread, khubz, whereas the Egyptian word for bread, `aysh, in the standard language means life), or in the case of modern loanwords, from different European languages (e.g. the word for strawberry is frez in Lebanon and farawla in Egypt; in MSA it's called tut `ardi, "earthberry"). Despite the fact that in general their grammar is quite similar, another difference between Egyptian and the other Arabic dialects is word order. In Egyptian, interrogative and demonstrative pronouns come at the end of the clause. So you say, "The bathroom where?" rather than "Where the bathroom?". This is how you ask, "What is the name of this street?" in Egyptian and in Levantine: Egyptian: Al-shari` da ismu e? (literally: "The street this its name [is] what?") Levantine: Shu ism hayda al-shari`? (literally: "What [is] the name of this street?") As you can see, the sentences are quite different. Once when I was in Beirut I reflexively asked this question in Egyptian, and I was understood. But that's because Lebanese people have heard a lot of Egyptian in movies and popular music. Without that exposure, I don't think the sentence would have been intelligible to them. But in general it seems, based on my limited knowledge of the colloquial dialects, that they mainly differ from each other in terms of their everyday vocabulary rather than in grammar. That is, they're all SVO, they all have the same basic conjugation patterns (with some minor differences), and they all lost the same elements of Classical grammar, like the dual number and noun declension. But there's another wrinkle to this picture: the diglossia. As is well known, in Arabic there's Modern Standard Arabic and there's (various examples of) Colloquial Arabic. But MSA and Colloquial are not two distinct languages existing side by side. Rather, they are two poles on a continuum and shade into each other. When an Arab is speaking, he often slides back and forth between MSA and Colloquial, even in the same utterance. One moment he conjugates his verb MSA-style, the next moment he conjugates colloquially. He'll start a sentence in one and finish it in the other. He'll pepper his MSA with colloquial words and phrases, and vice versa. This all depends on the Standard-Colloquial continuum based on the social context and the subject being discussed. In certain settings he'll speak almost pure Colloquial (if there is such a thing), and in certain other settings his speech (depending on his education) will approach "pure" MSA asymptotically, but often he speaks in a mixture. So are Egyptian and Levantine Arabic dialects of each other, or are they separate languages? Are Modern Standard Arabic and Egyptian Colloquial Arabic separate languages, or is Egyptian a dialect of MSA, or are they different registers of the same language? It depends on how you look at it. 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| jeeb Groupie Joined 5161 days ago 49 posts - 80 votes | Message 4 of 6 29 October 2010 at 10:37am | IP Logged | ||
"Mandarin and Cantonese are not at all mutually intelligible" Cantonese and Mandarin are mutually unintelligible. My mother has never received education. Hence, she has not received any Mandarin education. She can't understand a word of Mandarin, not even a syllable. You get it all wrong. Cantonese have to learn to write in Mandarin grammar and vocabulary. That is like English write in French vocabulary and grammar but they read French with English pronunciation. Cantonese only shares 60% grammatical similarity with Mandarin. Written Cantonese doesn't exist in official documents not because it doesn't exist. IT IS BECAUSE THE GOVERNMENT DON'T ALLOW CANTONESE TO BE WRITTEN OUT OFFICIALLY. 
Japanese used to have no characters. English used to write in French. Please don't spread wrong info about a language you don't know. "dialects of Chinese " Right Analogy. "Chinese" - Germanic Mandarin - English I put Mandarin into English analogy besides it has the prestigious status but also Mandarin shares less similarity with other Chinese languages. Other Chinese languages are like Germanic languages in the European continent. Cantonese and Hakka are very similar. Cantonese and Hakka shares great similarity in vocabulary but still not very intelligible. There are some languages in Guangdong/Guangxi are hybrid between Hakka and Cantonese and even Teochew (Min Branch). Min is the oldest of all the Chinese language. Shanghaiese (Wu) and Hakka are quite similar in pronunciation but Shanghaiese preserves the voiced consonant. Some Wu parts have Hakka people live in. Still, they are unintelligible. Edited by jeeb on 29 October 2010 at 11:20am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6583 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 5 of 6 30 October 2010 at 3:34am | IP Logged | ||
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Jeeb, you misunderstood my post. My sentence "Mandarin and Cantonese are not at all mutually intelligible" means the same thing as your sentence "Cantonese and Mandarin are mutually unintelligible". You didn't disagree with anything I said.
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| clumsy Octoglot Senior Member Poland lang-8.com/6715Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5179 days ago 1116 posts - 1367 votes Speaks: Polish*, English, Japanese, Korean, French, Mandarin, Italian, Vietnamese Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swedish Studies: Danish, Dari, Kirundi | Message 6 of 6 31 October 2010 at 1:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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I agree, I think why cannot Chinese simply start saying: we are one nation, but we speak different languages"
. If Americans can be separate nationality when speaking English! No American would say: "I don't speak English! it's actually American!" But a lot of people do it, like they claim there is language like Croatian or even Montenegrin :S Nothing wrong with Croatia, It's not like I don't support your independence, but come one, language is language. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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