|
 |
Chinese Dialects | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Lessons in Polyglottery |  | |
| kimchicurry Super Polyglot Newbie United States Joined 5776 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 17 of 41 08 May 2009 at 6:32am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
|
Suzhou Chinese has a rather complicated tonal system, but so does Taiwanese. I personally think Shanghainese has the simplest tonal system of all forms of Chinese I've seen. You can usually predict the tone by the initial consonant.
Taiwanese tone sandhi is tricky for people to get accustomed to, but it becomes like second nature to you if you stick with it and keep practicing. So I hope the tonal system doesn't discourage anyone from tackling Taiwanese... 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| minus273 Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5546 days ago 288 posts - 346 votes  Speaks: Mandarin*, EnglishC2, French Studies: Ancient Greek, Tibetan | Message 18 of 41 08 May 2009 at 3:03pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Wow! You speak Taiwanese AND Shanghainese! So you can do the tricky Shanghainese voiced initials? I use fully voiced z and b to fake Shanghainese z and b, but they aren't that similar. I guess phrase-initially, Shanghainese b sounds like a devoiced b with murmured-voiced release? Edited by minus273 on 08 May 2009 at 3:05pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| kimchicurry Super Polyglot Newbie United States Joined 5776 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 19 of 41 10 May 2009 at 12:50am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
|
Yeah, the Shanghainese voiced initials sound almost like between fully voiced and voiceless initials, which can confuse people sometimes. Some linguists do like to transcribe them as slightly murmured, while others use the term "slack-voiced." In addition, the Shanghainesevoiceless unaspirated stops are a tiny bit harder than the equivalents in Mandarin, which is something else to keep in mind.
Nevertheless, fully voiced consonants are good enough to get by, I'd still say. The "slack" voiced Shanghainese initial consonants usually correspond to fully voiced Japanese initials in their Go-on readings. Other voiced initials in Japanese readings, particularly in the Kan-on, will correspond to Taiwanese/Minnan voiced initials, which usually correspond to their respective nasals in other forms of Chinese. That's why I believe more Chinese should pursue their Chinese studies beyond the typical Mandarin and sometimes a little Cantonese, because I think if you can get to the point where you are at least familiar with Mandarin, Cantonese, Minnan, and Wu, then you will be able to pick up Japanese and/or Korean that much faster. Knowing these four forms of Chinese will help you to be able to predict the On'yomi readings in Japanese very easily, which cannot be done by monolingual Mandarin speakers. From my personal experience, monolingual Mandarin speakers learning Japanese will be able to see the kanji word in a Japanese passage and likely understand its meaning, but not be able to make an intelligent guess at its pronunciation, due to Mandarin lacking the Middle Chinese voiced initials, Yin-yang division of tones, and Entering Tone final consonants. While Cantonese also doesn't have the Middle Chinese voiced initials, it retains the Yin-yang tonal divisions, which can be used to "reconstruct" the voiced initials. Cantonese also possesses the Entering tone finals, which is helpful in Japanese and Korean loanwords. The same trick can also be done with Minnan. Wu Chinese does preserve the Entering tone, but the three possibilities for the final (-p, -t, -k) are all merged into a glottal stop. However, Wu makes up for that by preserving the voiced initials (although the actual realized phonetic value is not fully voiced, the phoneme is still there). Therefore, for those interested in Sino-Tibetan or East Asian areal linguistics in general, the value of the various forms of Chinese, particularly in regards to polyglottery in East Asian languages, cannot be overlooked. Overall, I think that the various forms of Chinese are important not just for cultural reasons, but also because they are a good stepping stone for Chinese speakers to get used to using more than one language in the long walk towards multilingualism/ polyglottery, just like speakers of Romance languages get used to learning new languages by learning closely related sister languages. When learning a new language for the first time (besides one's native language, of course), it helps if that language is fairly similar in some ways to the native language, so for example, a Mandarin speaker could learn Cantonese a lot quicker than a totally unrelated language, such as, for example, Amharic. After getting to a fairly proficient level in Cantonese, the language learner would then have a lot more confidence in tackling another language, and so on. My hunch is that there's some trick to doing it this way which is what lets many Europeans or Indians learn so many languages compared to people from, say, Korea or Japan. The average Indian might learn his/her native language, then the state language, then Hindi and/or English, then perhaps another state language to communicate with friends or business. Many Europeans can pick up their related languages very easily (such as between Spanish/Portuguese/Catalan/Italian/French), which likely prepares their mindset for even more language learning in the future. On the other hand, students in Japan have English hammered into their heads year after year, yet comparatively few get to a competent level in English. Perhaps introducing a comparatively similar language such as Korean with more parallel structures to Japanese in a systematic approach from an reasonable age would help Japanese students understand how to adapt their brains to bilingualism in a more constructive way, which might even help them to learn English more efficiently in the future. After all, learning more languages does seem to help one easily pick up others. I think the reasons for monolingualism in Korea/Japan are different from the reasons for monolingualism in the USA. It is fair to say that many Japanese are sincerely interested in becoming proficient in English, and walking along anywhere in Tokyo, you will see various advertisements for English schools. Also, English is introduced in the schooling system from a very early age, I've even heard of some kindergartens where English lessons are already offered. On the other hand, most Americans start learning a foreign language only in high school (unless they already learned another language at home), and the vast majority of these students coming out of these high school foreign language classes quickly forget what they have learned upon graduation (or earlier). Most are very complacent and do not really care, perhaps because English-language natives don't seem to have as much incentive to learn other languages as other people around the world have incentive to learn English. I think these are the main reasons for why English-speaking Americans have difficulty even learning related languages such as Spanish, German, or French, which is why I still feel that learning related or similar languages (if available) is a good way to jumpstart foreign language learning. This is my longwinded opinion of why forms of Chinese other than Mandarin are also very important, as these are the closest languages to Mandarin (all the other related languages, such as Tibetan or Burmese, are comparatively very far-removed from Mandarin in various aspects, so they probably wouldn't provide the "similarity" advantage to aid the language-learning process in the way that many Romance, Germanic, or Indo-Aryan languages provide for their respective sisters (for example, English and Sinhala are distantly related, but they are probably distant enough so that it is no more easier for an Englishman to learn Sinhala than a language that isn't related, such as Malay). Anyway, I'm by no means any sort of expert when it comes to language development or foreign language learning, this is just some of my speculation on how languages similar to one's native language might possibly be utilized in order to aid foreign language learning, from my personal observations of both Europeans and East Asians in the language learning process. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| glossika Super Polyglot Pro Member China english.glossika.com Joined 6317 days ago 45 posts - 72 votes Speaks: Mandarin, English*, German, Italian, Russian, Taiwanese, Shanghainese, Tok Pisin, Malay, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Romanian, Croatian, Serbian, Icelandic, Georgian, Indonesian Studies: Czech, Vietnamese, Mongolian, Latvian, Persian, Arabic (Written) Personal Language Map | Message 20 of 41 05 July 2009 at 11:35am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
|
kimchicurry,
You wrote: Teochew is quite similar to Taiwanese and other Minnan dialects, but it also has great Cantonese influence due to being located in Guangdong province. Teochew doesn't have Cantonese influence simply from the fact that it is located in Guangdong province. It is located in a strip descending from Fujian into Guangdong and is just part of the dialect continuum. Actually, it is separated from any Cantonese by a large margin of Hakka-speaking land. You wrote: Suzhou Chinese has a rather complicated tonal system...Shanghainese has the simplest tonal system of all forms Actually Suzhou and Shanghai share the same tonal system, so you're contradicting yourself. The two are actually very similar. The difference between Suzhou and Shanghai is merely phonological and some lexical. Budz, You wrote: I'd be happy to hear otherwise, but I know one sure way to make someone from China angry - tell them that Cantonese (or any other 'dialect' of Chinese probably) is not a dialect, but a language. They will go off their head. Actually a lot of the great research in this area is coming from Chinese linguists, but you are the right, the layman does not understand his own language situation well. The term fangyan really should be translated into English as topolect. Because "fang" refers to location and not to the relationship of a speech variety. Likewise, translating English "dialect" into Chinese as "fangyan" is also misleading. The semantics don't line up. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Linguistics Diglot Groupie Finland Joined 5409 days ago 59 posts - 62 votes Speaks: Mandarin*, English Studies: German, Finnish | Message 21 of 41 05 July 2009 at 3:27pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Mandarin and Cantonese are both the official languages in China, the rest are simply categorized as "dialects". Actually Pu Tong Hua is translated as "Standard Mandarin", and "mandarin" is just an "abbreviation" of it. Not every native Chinese can speak standard Mandarin due to the "accents" gained through their daily "dialects". Mandarin is the "lingua franca" in China, because it enables people from all over the nation to understand each other. Personally, "dialects" as Shanghai Hua, Sichuan Hua, Cantonese and so on all sound like foreign languages to a Mandarin speaker like me, which, not being exaggerating here, is more as German, Spanish, French to an English speaker. I'm not here to define whether they should be called "dialects" or "languages", because languages are also associated with historical, political and cultural aspects, which we cannot ignore at all. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Budz Octoglot Senior Member Australia languagepump.com Joined 6154 days ago 118 posts - 171 votes Speaks: German*, English, Russian, Esperanto, Ukrainian, Mandarin, Cantonese, French Studies: Italian, Spanish, Korean, Portuguese, Bulgarian, Persian, Hungarian, Kazakh, Swahili, Vietnamese, Polish | Message 22 of 41 05 July 2009 at 4:28pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
|
Where's the logic in Cantonese being a language and Shanghainese being a dialect?
And where's the evidence that Cantonese is an official language? I've been told that in Canton, all school teaching has to be in Pu Tong Hua just as in the rest of China. How can that be if it's an official language??? No way. If it were an official language it would mean that a Cantonese speaker could go anywhere in China and expect to be able to use Cantonese. Oh, and Mandarin is not an abbreviation for Pu Tong Hua (for starters they both have three syllables). Yes, they are both exactly the same, but the names are there for different reasons. Correct me if I'm wrong but I thought the communist Peking government frowns upon the term Mandarin as it points to an era when higher officials spoke 'Mandarin' i.e. the mandarins, so they coined the term Pu Tong Hua as a more equal term. Lastly 'hey glossika! see what I mean? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Linguistics Diglot Groupie Finland Joined 5409 days ago 59 posts - 62 votes Speaks: Mandarin*, English Studies: German, Finnish | Message 23 of 41 05 July 2009 at 5:57pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Because Cantonese is spoken much more widely than Shanghai Hua?! A simple google will answer it: "...Of the other varieties, Standard Cantonese is common and influential in Guangdong Province and Cantonese-speaking overseas communities, and remains one of the official languages of Hong Kong (together with English) and of Macau (together with Portuguese)."
The evidence is as above, and there are many more if you do want to see them. A nation with two official languages doesn't necessarily mean both of them are spoken 50 to 50. I don't see all Canadians speak English AND French, or all Finns speak both Finnish and Swedish fluently. Not that hard to understand, is it?
I said Mandarin is an abbreviation for Standard Mandarin (in a narrower interpretation), and your statements completely lost me: What did you mean "yes" to and "no" to again?
Many high officials come from places where they speak dialects, so according to your theory, why wouldn't they make their own "dialect" the official one other than following Mandarin all these years along?! The main reason behind it is to maintain such a huge country with so many diversities, everyone has to compromise somehow. Establishing one or two official languages only helps people communicate better and more effective, however, their "dialects" will still remain so. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Budz Octoglot Senior Member Australia languagepump.com Joined 6154 days ago 118 posts - 171 votes Speaks: German*, English, Russian, Esperanto, Ukrainian, Mandarin, Cantonese, French Studies: Italian, Spanish, Korean, Portuguese, Bulgarian, Persian, Hungarian, Kazakh, Swahili, Vietnamese, Polish | Message 24 of 41 06 July 2009 at 1:38am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
|
Yes, I forgot about Hong Kong. But if the British hadn't owned Hong Kong for 99 years or whatever it was, then Cantonese would not be official anywhere either.
My question: Where's the logic in Cantonese being a language and Shanghainese being a dialect? Your answer: Because Cantonese is spoken much more widely than Shanghai Hua?! Totally illogical. Cantonese being a language has nothing to do with how widely spoken it is. Possibly there are minorities in China that live in one village only with a language that is nothing to do with Chinese. But they are languages. Oh... if Shanghainese were more widely spoken suddenly it would be a language? As glossika pointed out, Chinese have a different understanding of the word 'language'. Calling Cantonese a language simply because it's official in Hong Kong (purely historical chance) and calling Shanghainese a dialect simply because it's spoken mainly in one city is ridiculous and only illustrates my initial post about the attitude of mainland Chinese to language, dialect and the Chinese language. Could someone make a comment please on the mutual intelligibility of Cantonese, Shanghainese and Mandarin. Surely that's more to do with what determines languages than how widely spoken it is? Lastly, since when does anyone use the term 'Standard Mandarin'? Is there a university in the world that teaches, specifically, 'Standard Mandarin' v. just 'Mandarin'? Though I've just looked it up in wikipedia and yes, they refer to 'Standard Mandarin'. On the other hand in another entry on official languages they just call it 'Mandarin'. Either way, it's only called putonghua because of the negative overtones of the term Mandarin and the officials of court. Oh, and by your logic Norwegian and Danish and Swedish are dialects of some other language group. 1 person has voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
