Talk:Chinese spoken language

"Also the amount of "linguistic consciousness" varies between the groups. For example, a speaker of Cantonese dialect living in Hong Kong tends to feel a great deal of common identity with a speaker of Cantonese living in Taishan, even though these two varieties of Cantonese may be almost unintelligible...The Hong Kong and Taishan person would both claim to be speaking Cantonese in the first case, while in the second case only the person from Shanghai would be speaking Shanghainese."

As someone whose family originated in Taishan, I don't think this is true. We call the Taishan dialect "Taishanese" or "Taishan hua" and the Hong Kong dialect "Cantonese" or "Guangdong hua". We don't claim that the Taishan dialect is Cantonese. In Taishan, most people also know how to speak the Hong Kong dialect (or a heavily accented variation that is meant to be like that dialect). --Jiang 02:01, 16 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Cantonese and Taishanese are not comparatively "unintelligible". --Jiang 06:44, 25 Sep 2003 (UTC)

P0M: Someone added the following sentence: "Chinese dialects can be divided into a number of categories, although it is important to remember that variations within a category be uninteligible." This sentence does not make sense, and I cannot guess what the person is trying to say.

I tried to make it a bit more clear. Basically, getting at the fact that I can't understand a word that Mao Tsetung is saying even though he is theoretically speaking Mandarin. User:Roadrunner

P0M: I am not sure how the decision was made to use the word "dialect" to name the major subdivisions of the Chinese language family. Americans speak of "the Cantonese dialect," "the Taiwanese dialect," "the Cockney dialect," "the Brooklyn dialect" -- as though they are all the same distance apart.

Basically, they found the term fangyan and just translated it as dialect. The problem is that the entire system used to classify language in China is *very* different than the systen used to classify them in Europe. User:Roadrunner

But I can pick up Cockney without much trouble, and yet I could not easily understand the Mandarin of a professor at the National Taiwan University who came from Anhui. (The Han Chinese students at the University didn't find it easy either.) Much less could I pick any meaning out of Cantonese as spoken in the nearby restaurant. We need a better way to distinguish the various levels of differentiation.

Contents

1 Suggested vocabulary changes 2 Protested Revision 3 Min derivation 4 Xiang and Pinghua

Suggested vocabulary changes

P0M: I am not sure how the decision was made to use the word "dialect" to name the major subdivisions of the Chinese language family. Americans speak of "the Cantonese dialect," "the Taiwanese dialect," "the Cockney dialect," "the Brooklyn dialect" -- as though they are all the same distance apart. But I can pick up Cockney without much trouble, and yet I could not easily understand the Mandarin of a professor at the National Taiwan University who came from Anhui. (The Han Chinese students at the University didn't find it easy either.) Much less could I pick any meaning out of Cantonese as spoken in the nearby restaurant. We need a better way to distinguish the various levels of differentiation.

P0M:http://www.chinesedc.com/4WenYi/Language/sino-tibetan1.htm gives this kind of a picture:

yu3 zu2 (Sino-Tibetan);

yu3 xi4 (Sinitic);

11 qun2 (bei3 yu3 qun2, Ke-Gan qun2, Min qun2 and 4 single yu3 entries );

13 yu3 (Bei3 yu3 (Mandarin), Jin4 yu3, Dungan, Gan, Hakka, Wu, Hui, Xiang, Min Bei, Min Dong, Min Zhong, Pu Xian, Min Nan, Yue,

fang1 yan2 (e.g. Northern Mandarin, Central Mandarin, Southern Mandarin);

ci4 fang1 yan2 (e.g., Beijing hua, Si4 Chuan1 hua4, etc.).

There may be better ways to speak of these divisions in English, but how about something like the following (With a Western example this time):

Language Clans (Indo-European)

Language Families (Germanic)

Language Groups (Western German)

Languages (Low German)

Regional Variations (English)

Dialects (Englisn as spoken in the British Isles)

Sub-dialects (Cockney English)

"Low German" is a bad choice of words, I think, since that generally refers to a particular dialectal continuum. Maybe you should have ingvaeonic, instead.

You can add that to the article (this diagram above...). Add tones (http://www.fozza.com/zhongwen/converter.htm) to the pinyin though. As stated above, Taishan hua and Guangdong hua are of different names, and therefore obviously not considered the same "dialect", although there are many similarities. We call them different names. Either that, or my family is just weird. --Jiang 06:36, 8 Jan 2004 (UTC)

P0M: I think the difference between Taishan hua and Guangdong hua is about like the difference between Beijing hua and Tianjin hua, or maybe Taibei hua and Tainan hua. Anyway, the language is Yue. (One problem here is that the city name and the province name are the same, right? So it's useful to have Yue for the province-sized region designation, and Guangdong for the city-sized "metropolitan" designation.) I don't know how complex differentiation is in the Yue area (which is actually larger than Guangdong), and I don't know how substantial the difference is between Taishan and Guangdong hua. If the difference is substantial, the two might not even be two dialects. They might be two "Regional Variations." I suppose the test of whether it is one or the other is what happens when somebody from Taishan, who has never before left home, goes to Guangdong and has to ask for help getting around the city from someone who speaks only Guangdong hua. If both parties really want to communicate but can't get the job done (without writing), then I'd say it's a regional variation. I think I remember learning from my San Francisco Taishan friend that he had no great trouble getting around in Cantonese even though people teased him about his accent, so my guess is that they are both dialects of Yue or "coastal Yue" or whatever the regional differentiation may be. Are there varieties of Yue that you find much much more difficult than Cantonese?

My Cantonese is very bad. If I try to speak it, I have a massive Mandarin accent. I would say that I pick up 75% of conversational Guangdong hua, but only 25% of Taishan hua. The city is Guangzhou, the province is Guangdong, so there's a distinction. But in English, Canton refers usually to the city, so I think that's the confusion. --Jiang 00:19, 9 Jan 2004 (UTC)

There are a couple of problems.

The first is that the classifications that people use socially are just not linguistically consistent. To give a rather jarring example, no one considers Dungan (which is written in Cyrillic) to be even Chinese, even though it is linguistically closer to Mandarin than Cantonese is. The second is that the dialects often do not fit in a nice tree structure because of borrow back and forth.

-- User:Roadrunner

The problem is that this classification scheme really isn't the only way it's done: the terminology that I'm more familiar with are:

Chinese language

fang1yan2 qu1 (dialect groups, lit. dialect areas) - Mandarin, Wu, etc.

ci4fang1yan2 qu1 (sub-dialect groups) - Northern Mandarin, Southwestern Mandarin, Minbei, Minnan

pian4 (sub-sub-dialect groups) - e.g. Wu is divided into pian4; I'm not sure if other dialects, e.g. Cantonese, are usually divided in this way

xiao3pian4 (sub-sub-sub-dialect groups)

Terms like "beijing hua", "sichuan hua" etc. fit at some level in this scheme, but in reality there is no such thing as a unified linguistic entity called "sichuan hua" -- "chengdu hua" or "chongqing hua", for example, are more accurate; but even those can be infinitely divided into more sub-varieties. There is no "lowest level" classification here.

Finally: I can't say I've ever seen "yu3 qun2" as a consistently-applied "level" in the classification of Chinese. Usually the first level people come to are the "yu3" or "fang1yan2 qu1" -- Mandarin, Jin, etc; "yu3 qun2" seems to be a attempt by the author of that particular tree to "regroup" some of the "yu3" together into larger entities.

I've edited the Chinese language article , btw., to try to take out terms that suggest one exclusive way of thinking about Chinese -- either as a "language" or as "languages" -- without making the article too abstruse. Also: I suggest that this entire article should be moved over into the Chinese language article, and be reorganized into a "tree structure" classification - the sort that you see on the Romance languages page. There really is no reason why this article should exist independently, now that the Chinese language article is becoming a "catch-all" article to describe all varieties of Chinese. -- Ran 19:49, 11 Jan 2004 (UTC)

P0M: I think it might work better if you would discuss changes instead of just jumping in and doing things according to your own preferred system. I agree that the whole things is messed up in some sense because of the word "dialect" getting used by Western people who had no clear idea of the phenomena they were trying to describe. Top-down planning would be a good idea, i.e., starting with a general article on "the" Chinese language. That article should start by taking into consideration the misinformation that most Western readers will already be burdened with. They need to know that there is not a majority language that has the position that English has in the U.S., that it's more like Canada where lots of people speak French as their first language. Then the tree idea seems to me the right way to go. It isn't important what the various branches and twigs are called as long as someone can see that, e.g., Dungan is closer to Beijing hua than is Cantonese.

Sorry about the hasty edit: I was hoping to make the article a little more NPOV. In any case, I think the problem can be more easily resolved if we set aside a separate section to explain the language/dialect issue in the Chinese language article. (On a totally unrelated note: that's a nice map that you made for the Chinese dialects, btw, but you need to tweak the area that you showed for Jin; it's not exactly spoken in a circle around Taiyuan.) -- Ran 2004.01.12 06:35

Protested Revision

P0M: Somebody has written "Although dialect is often used to translate the Chinese term (fangyan), the linguistic difference between the spoken versions of the dialects are greater than what would be considered separate languages in Europe." Separate languages in Europe can be really separate. Not all languages spoken in Europe are Indo-European. Hungarian is one example, and Basque is another. Maybe the writer of the sentence quoted above was thinking of situations like that of Norwegian and Swedish where so-called languages are really (IMHO) dialects. But the average reader will read the sentence to mean that, e.g., Sichuan hua and Beijing hua are more different than are German and Spanish -- which is clearly false. So I am planning on changing this sentence. (It would be nice if we could grab a "linguistic distance" meter somewhere and just whip it out to measure the difference between any two speakers.)

---

I added a paragraph on how people learn dialects. -- Roadrunner

P0M: I'm sorry. I removed it. It is quite inaccurate, and groundless. Mainland people who live in Taiwan for decades can remain unable to speak Taiwanese.

And this is as much a function of motivation and opportunity as anything else.

The difference between Taiwanese and Mandarin is about like the difference between German and English or maybe even between Irish and English. I think that no speaker of English who lives in a German-speaking area or an Irish-speaking area just "picks it up."

I know of people in the Peace Corps who pick up a language very quickly when they are just dumped in an area and forced to sink or swim.

Nobody in the U.S. who decides to learn German just "picks it up" either. U.S. high school students who want to get their language requirement out of the way generally take Spanish because it is grammatically simpler. German is hard! Taiwanese is hard!

The sociolinguistics of China is vastly different from the United States. U.S. high school students are not exposed to German 24/7 and there isn't a linguistic continuum between English and German.

Also I think it's a linguistic consensus that no language is inherently easy or hard.

(And, like German, it has some sounds that are hard for adults to learn to produce.) And, for Taiwanese speakers, Mandarin is hard (If you don't believe it, try figuring out the Mandarin of somebody over 65 who was not taught Mandarin formally because under the occupation he was taught Japanese.)

Note that I didn't say it was easy to pick up a dialect via osmosis (it's actually total hell).

Roadrunner 09:48, 11 May 2004 (UTC)

P0M: It is possible, according to my Chinese friends, for a Beijing speaker to go to Sichuan and learn that dialect of Mandarin by osmosis in a fairly short time.

Any I personally know people who have picked up Wu, Min-Nan, and Cantonese by osmosis. It takes a few years, but it can be done.

But some of the Chinese who have written in the Wikipedia talk pages say that they require an interpreter whenever they go to Sichuan. Since I, as an Anglophone, can pick up Sichuan hua without difficulty I think they are just suffering from the "suddenly dropped in the cold sea" phenomenon, and would do o.k. if they could get relaxed about it. That is what the Chinese friend I asked about it on last Saturday said, anyway.

Something to keep in mind here. There is no particular reason to think that you as a Mandarin second language speaker ought to have a harder time picking up Sichuanese than a native Mandarin speaker from Beijing. Among other things, your brain is already tuned to learning a new language, and its likely that your standard for comprehension is a bit lower. Also, its possible that somewhere along the way, that you might have gotten in contact with people from Sichuan that allowed to you tune your ear.

Roadrunner 09:48, 11 May 2004 (UTC)

§ A major problem: "In the past, it was viewed as closely related to Hakka dialects, because of the way Middle Chinese voiced initials have become voiceless aspirated initials, that those in Hakka." The last phrase is totally meaningless to me. Something must have dropped out, but I have no idea what the intended meaning was. Could the original writer of that sentence please fix it? P0M 07:18, 27 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Oops, my bad. Hopefully, reads better now. Dylanwhs 22:34, 27 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Roadrunner 09:11, 11 May 2004 (UTC)

---

Changed the statement that linguists generally classify languages by intelligibility. Most of the linguistic literature I've read uses self-identification and in general tries to duck the language-dialect issue entirely. Also, I don't know of any linguistic that would for example classify Hindi and Urdu or Dutch and Afrikaans as single languages, not withstanding the fact that they are easily intelligible.

Roadrunner 12:54, 11 May 2004 (UTC)

Min derivation

I'm rather curious about this statement:

Min is the only group of Chinese dialects that cannot be directly derived from Middle Chinese.

Is there a source for this? Looking at the Chinese language tree, it looks as though Wu, Hui, and Xiang are more distant than Min. How does this reconcile with the statement above? --Umofomia 09:28, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Doubtlessly most Chinese dialects have very ancient roots, predating Middle Chinese or even Old Chinese. But a standardizing influence has been strong enough throughout history that all languages/dialects except Min, such as Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese, etc. can now be "taken as" directly derived from Middle Chinese.

What I mean by this is that: other than a few odd exceptions and traces here and there that reflect earlier influences, the modern phonology of these languages can generally be explained as either retentions of or innovations upon the Middle Chinese system, represented in rime books like the Guangyun. But Min is different, in that it has systematically retained features that predate the system of Middle Chinese.

This is why there are two versions of the Chinese language family tree, one version showing Min splitting off before everyone else, and the other showing everyone splitting off together.

Here's something I found: [1] (http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/tm17/paper423.htm). Except for Wen-chou, which has been classified as Wu, the others are Min dialects, and the generally accepted view that Min branched off directly fro Old Chinese makes it easy to understand why the final glottal stop turns up in these dialects but hardly anywhere else.-- ran (talk) 17:31, Mar 1, 2005 (UTC)

Xiang and Pinghua

Someone might want to pick up the two articles I threw together, Xiang (linguistics) and Pinghua (linguistics). I know little about Chinese, but it seemed to be a conspicious omission and I was able to find some information on the internet which I collated together. Daniel Quinlan 03:22, Mar 14, 2005 (UTC)