Talk:Standard Mandarin

Would it be correct to call putonghua a dialect? Or what's the proper way to refer to it? See Shantou for an example. - Fuzheado 03:04, 1 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Contents

1 The third tone 2 Romanization 3 Terminology 4 Interwiki 5 Terminology II

The third tone

Here the contour is marked 214. Nevertheless it's the whole third tone (quan2san1sheng1) which is less popular than half thid tone (ban4san1sheng1). Should the contour of the half thid tone be included? Is it 21 by the way? -- 10:21, January 27, 2005, UTC

The bansansheng is a result of tone sandhi, not the original tone itself. -- ran (talk) 13:35, Jan 27, 2005 (UTC)

Should the bansansheng be mentioned in the article? By the way I don't agree the ban4san1sheng1 is a tone sandhi, but an alternative pronunciation to third tone, together with the quan2san1sheng1. -- 17:57, January 28, 2005, UTC

Yeah, we can put that interpretation in too. -- ran (talk) 02:08, Jan 29, 2005 (UTC)

Romanization

During the 1950s, there were plans for Pinyin to supersede the Chinese characters. These plans, however, proved to be impractical due to the large number of homonyms in the Chinese language.

This is doubtful. It didn't occur to them to use diacritics, the way the Vietnamese had been doing since the 19th century? Wasn't it more the attachment to the traditional writing system? --Erauch 18:34, Mar 7, 2005 (UTC)

While I can't judge the accuracy of the claim that there were plans to replace Chinese characters, using tone marks wouldn't come close to disambiguating all the homophones of Chinese. There are probably 20+ common characters with the pronunciation shi4, for example, and I wouldn't be surprised if there are (say) ~5 common characters on average for each syllable. (You can calculate this, I think -- about 1600 possible syllables, tones counted; and about 4000-5000 common characters. Also, not all possible syllables occur; for example we have ding1, ding3, and ding4, but not ding2.)

Besides, pinyin already uses tone marks, they're an intrinsic part of pinyin. Not using them (as is done in English) is an absolute nightmare... and results in clunky workarounds like Shanxi/Shaanxi. -- ran (talk) 18:52, Mar 7, 2005 (UTC)

The claim is true. I came across a 1960s' textbook on Chinese language when I was back in China this February, in which I read a quote by Mao Zedong: The written language must be revolutionized, it must follow the common trend of pinyinization of all world's languages. ("文字必须改革，要走世界文字共同的拼音方向") along others. There were no doubt attempts during that period, although not necessarily serious in today's sense. -- Alaz (talk) 22:41, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Yes, but speakers have no problem dealing with the same ambiguity in the spoken language that's found in Pinyin. It seems more likely that they didn't want to get rid of something culturally so important as the writing system. --Erauch 23:03, Mar 7, 2005 (UTC)

The written language, especially formal written language, is a lot more tolerant of homophones than the spoken language. In general, written language is much closer to Classical Chinese, adopting abbreviations and structures that would be odd (if not incomprehensible) in spoken Chinese.

And there's Classical Chinese itself too, which would be completely indecipherable without a logographic writing system.

It is absolutely true that people didn't want to ditch the logographic system because it is too culturally important — and practically important, as well. This is because ditching it would render incomprehensible anything that was written before the 1900's (i.e. anything in Classical Chinese or early Vernacular), plus a good deal of what was written after, too. -- ran (talk) 23:19, Mar 7, 2005 (UTC)

In addition, I think what was more influential was that most of southern China could not speak Mandarin (this has changed only in the past few decades, though there are still many places in the south where less than a majority know Mandarin). Completely pinyinifying spoken Chinese would essentially make southern Chinese people illiterate. It was already controversial enough when Mandarin was adopted as the national language... many southern Chinese were afraid they would end up being second-class citizens because of that, but they were eventually overruled. With a logographic writing system at least, those who didn't know how to speak Mandarin could at least read and write. --Umofomia 23:47, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I can assure you that Chinese people find pinyin texts difficult to understand, especially when tones are not used in which case it would be almost incomprehensible. This applies even to people speaking only Mandarin such as myself. I don't think I'll need to cite the importance of culture to reject total pinyinization :). -- Alaz (talk) 23:02, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Yes.... and considering that there is no tradition of separatism among southern Han Chinese (with the notable exception of Taiwan), it's not particularly wise to foment its creation ... -- ran (talk) 23:59, Mar 7, 2005 (UTC)

I do agree that the statement currently in the article needs to be changed though. The homonym argument is a bit of a red herring. There is no confusion in normal spoken Mandarin since formal written constructions are not normally used, and there's no reason why a pinyin writing system couldn't be the same way. However, such a system would still be impractical because of the reasons stated above: (1) texts written prior to the early twentieth century would all be unreadable, and (2) many southern Chinese do not know how to speak Mandarin. --Umofomia 00:27, 8 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Not just pre-twentieth century writing... formal and semiformal constructions pop up everywhere in writing, even today (e.g. all over the Chinese Wikipedia). Sure, a pinyin writing system would dictate a purely vernacular writing style, but the resulting loss of comprehension wouldn't just be in existing Classical Chinese texts, it would happen to some extent in written "Vernacular" Chinese as well. -- ran (talk) 00:34, Mar 8, 2005 (UTC)

Right... there's no doubt formal constructions are used everywhere today, though I was talking about the reasons for not doing it back in the 1910s-50s when they were considering it. These reasons still have not changed much though. --Umofomia 00:43, 8 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Completely pinyinifying spoken Chinese would essentially make southern Chinese people illiterate... With a logographic writing system at least, those who didn't know how to speak Mandarin could at least read and write.

I don't see how you can say this. Vernacular Chinese is a second language to a native speaker of a language of the south. It's a different language with different grammar and vocabulary. If Romanization was adopted, they would have to learn this second langauge, just as they now learn Vernacular Chinese in addition to their home language. The writing system doesn't change this fact.

One could argue that Pinyin would make literacy easier for a Cantonese speaker, because then he would only have to learn the sounds of the Mandarin-based standard language, rather than its sounds plus ideographs.

The only reason for preserving the ancient writing system that really holds up is that it was too dear to be thrown away. --Erauch 01:49, Mar 8, 2005 (UTC)

The Chinese languages aren't completely different. The grammar and vocabulary are similar enough (roughly 80% spoken vocabulary are cognates) that southerners have no trouble substituting the written form when writing. A pinyin system would require learning the sounds of Mandarin, which is much easier said than done... that essentially amounts to learning a whole new language, which is happening in schools today, but as you can see, it is still not an easy task since so many southerners still don't know Mandarin after roughly 50 years of Mandarin education. With a logographic writing system, people can continue to learn to read and write with their own local pronunciations since so much of the vocabulary and grammar are shared. Any differences between Mandarin and their own dialect are just learned as special rules or vocabulary to remember (for instance in Cantonese, one would always write 的 instead of the colloquially spoken 嘅). People have a much easier time learning new rules and conventions than learning a whole new language. --Umofomia 02:04, 8 Mar 2005 (UTC)

BTW, in case you need a source, here's a link to a paper with a table showing the percentage of shared vocabulary between the Chinese dialects/languages: [1] (http://sunzi1.lib.hku.hk/hkjo/view/9/900007.pdf). As you can see, with the exception of the speech from Xiamen (part of the Min group), the vocabulary shared among them is between 70-90%. Min falls below 70% because it is considered to be the only group that did not directly decend from Middle Chinese. --Umofomia 02:24, 8 Mar 2005 (UTC)

The only reason for preserving the ancient writing system that really holds up is that it was too dear to be thrown away. You make it sound like it's purely a matter of sentimentality. But it's a matter of practicality too. Pinyinifying would render incomprehensible all writing done in Classical Chinese, and create a lot of ambiguity even in writing done in "Vernacular" Chinese. -- ran (talk) 03:07, Mar 8, 2005 (UTC)

As you can see, with the exception of the speech from Xiamen (part of the Min group), the vocabulary shared among them is between 70-90%.

That's about the level of the Romance or Germanic languages.

People have a much easier time learning new rules and conventions than learning a whole new language.

But this comes at the cost of learning several thousand ideographs.

You make it sound like it's purely a matter of sentimentality.

I am not criticizing it, just trying to get at the real reason. That the writing system has been associated with a great literature for so long is a good reason. --Erauch 04:48, Mar 8, 2005 (UTC)

That was my point... it's not just a "great literature" that needs to be thrown out and replaced — it's the entire written language that I'm talking about. To make an analogy (perhaps not the most apt but it illustrates my point): it's not just Shakespeare at stake, it's also the U.S. Constitution. My point is that practicality and sentimentality are both important reasons for keeping the system. -- ran (talk) 05:17, Mar 8, 2005 (UTC)

That's about the level of the Romance or Germanic languages.

Exactly my point... you wouldn't expect, for instance, a modern-day Spanish speaker to be forced to read and write only in Latin, right? This is why Latin fell into disuse in favor of the vernacular Romance Languages. The speakers would basically have to learn how to speak Latin in order to be able to write as well since Latin spelling relies mostly on sounds. This is not necessarily so with a logographically written language. Because southern Chinese speakers can rely on the large proportion of cognates in a logographically written system, they don't need to learn a whole other language in order to be able to read and write. They can continue to learn to read and write in their own language while remembering that special rules need to be applied in certain cases to correct for the differences between their dialect and Standard Written Chinese.

But this comes at the cost of learning several thousand ideographs.

You make it sound like it's an impossible feat to accomplish. The ~95% literacy rates in Hong Kong show this not to be the case. Basically the entire population there speaks Cantonese, and many of them don't know or even care to learn Mandarin. Yet they all read and write Standard Written Chinese and can communicate with Mandarin speakers. It is true that the Chinese writing system is not entirely systematic, but it gives enough semantic and phonetic cues such that learners don't find it to be a big problem. I doubt Hong Kong's handover back to China would have been as easy if the logographic writing system were no longer in place (imagine Spain being returned to Italy... the difference in writing systems had basically severed many cultural ties to the point that Spanish speakers don't feel any connection with Rome). --Umofomia 08:24, 8 Mar 2005 (UTC)

You haven't demonstrated the practical advantage of the ideographic system. My point is that for the purposes of literacy of non-Mandarin speakers, it's no easier to learn a written language with thousands of symbols than to learn a written language with a phonetic alphabet that has sounds different from your own. Sure, under the ideographic system you could pronounce the words in Cantonese, but you could do this with Pinyin too.

I never said anything about "sentimentality". I think it was wise to preserve the traditional writing system. --Erauch 01:59, Mar 9, 2005 (UTC)

I'm not really using "sentimentality" in a disparaging sense. What I'm saying is that it's not purely a matter of trying to "preserve culture and tradition". -- ran (talk) 02:12, Mar 9, 2005 (UTC)

Sure, under the ideographic system you could pronounce the words in Cantonese, but you could do this with Pinyin too.

How would it be possible to do this? Even though a large percentage of the vocabulary are cognates, the phonological differences between Mandarin and Cantonese are radically different. Many of the tones and sounds that still exist in Cantonese have merged in Mandarin. In addition, Mandarin also has retroflex sounds that Cantonese doesn't. Learning how to spell in a pinyin system for someone who knows only Cantonese would be nigh impossible. With a logographic system at least, there are more cues as to what pronunciation is the correct one because there are more variations in phonetic components. Take the following characters, which are all pronounced xī in Mandarin but pronounced differently in Cantonese:

• 稀 hei1 - the phonetic shows that it's pronounced the same as or similar to 希 hei1
• 吸 kap1 - the phonetic shows that it's pronounced the same as or similar to 及 kap6
• 惜 sik1 - the phonetic shows that it's pronounced the same as or similar to 昔 sik1

Forcing a Cantonese speaker to figure out which pronunciation he/she is supposed to use when they encounter xī would be terribly confusing. Having them learn how to write it as well would be even harder. This is only one example... there are many more.

I guess you could argue that they can learn which context under which they would use alternate pronunciations, just like there are numerous exceptions in English spelling rules; however when you have to make exceptions for almost every single instance (since Cantonese pronunciation is so different), it no longer becomes practical. --Umofomia 02:48, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)

it's no easier to learn a written language with thousands of symbols than to learn a written language with a phonetic alphabet that has sounds different from your own

I would argue that because the Chinese writing system incorporates phonetics like I illustrated above, learning the symbols is actually easier than learning a phonetic alphabet. With the phonetics in the Chinese characters, in conjunction with the semantic information from the radicals, you can make a pretty good guess as to how characters are pronounced. With a phonetic alphabet that has little correlation with your own language, it is extremely difficult to do that because the semantic information and distinguishing phonetics are lost. --Umofomia 02:56, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I took a look at the current update of the passage:

These plans, however, were abandoned, due to the prevalence of homonymic morphemes in Chinese (as well as the reliance of written Chinese forms, especially Classical Chinese, on disambiguation of homonyms via different logographs)...

As I said before, I think homonyms are a non-issue. No one said anything about pinyinifying all old works verbatim. Of course all old works will have too many homonyms, but they can be translated with modern-day spoken words that aren't homonyms (just like Chaucer was translated from Middle English to Modern English). Any new writing would also avoid homonyms. In any case, I've stated above why pinyin is still impractical. --Umofomia 03:20, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)

That's retarded. why would one want to read literature in translation when one can read it in the original? A deeper issue is, why MUST writing be the encoding of spoken sounds? We have tape recorders for that. Besides, writing has never worked that way save for a short period of history -- at first writing was pictographic, then it was phonetic. Logographic is what all written languages become -- unless you can somehow arrest speech changes OR keep updating the writing system. Those are both social engineering projects requiring government intervention in the educational system. Writing can stand perfectly well as its own (and universal) language in the extreme case. But I find the existing compromise for Chinese just fine.

Terminology

The Chinese official language should be called as " Standard Chinese ", but not " mandarin ", because mandarin is a insult at peoples of Han .- Xuanyan.She, Tianjin, China, Mar 28, 2004.

I am a 汉族人 (Han Chinese) and I don't feel insulted at all. The Qing Dynasty is over and I have Manchu friends (I'm sure you do too). The etymology of the word is past, what matters is that when we use it today we don't mean anything demeaning. So get over it! -- ran (talk) 00:56, Jun 8, 2005 (UTC)

Actually, the word "Mandarin" doesn't have anything to do with the Manchu people, at least according to most people who have researched the origin of the word. (I know there is one explanation that says it is a distortion of "man da ren", but that seems to have been a fanciful invention or a wild guess.) My dictionary traces it back to Sanskrit and then to an Indo-European root. The only problem I would have with it is that it's a little like calling Yu4 Shan1 in Taiwan "Mt. McKinley," or how about calling Taiwanese "Formosan." I always feel a little weird about the English names for some countries that are totally different from what those countries put on their own maps. To me it smacks of a certain kind of ethnocentrism -- but I suspect that in many cases there are good historical reasons for what is said in English and it's just that we're a few centuries out of date. P0M 01:52, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Interwiki

Some of the interwiki links are linked to articles that are actually about Mandarin as a Chinese dialect. If you go to the German article and click the English link over there, you wind up at Mandarin (linguistics). I'm guessing a lot of the other articles are the same.

Is this proper or should articles only link to proper counterparts? Peter Isotalo 22:19, Mar 18, 2005 (UTC)

No, this is not proper at all. But we have to wait for the other Wikipedias to figure out that Mandarin (big group) and Mnadarin (standard) are different things and separate them, before we can do anything. (The Chinese Wikipedia did this from the outset, not surprisingly, so the interwikis with zh: are fine.) -- ran (talk) 00:55, Jun 8, 2005 (UTC)

Terminology II

It is strongly suggested for purposes of disambiguation to change all references of "Standard Mandarin" to "standard Chinese," "standardized Chinese," "standard spoken Chinese," "standard Chinese speech" or variations such as these. This is a descriptive term, since the original terms putonghua/guoyu are Chinese terms. Mandarin is what it is called in English, but it has many meanings. The best way is to say "Mandarin refers to X, Y, Z, and a form of standardized Chinese speech known as putonghua/guoyu." There is no such thing as "Standard Mandarin" and it is highly misleading. - anon June 6, 2005

You have a good point, and in fact I think Standard Chinese was one of the terms suggested when we decided to separate the concept of putonghua/guoyu out of Mandarin. There are pros and cons to both names (Cantonese speakers might not like to call Mandarin "Standard Chinese", for example; and we might want to keep the "Mandarin" in the name to make it clear to readers that this is what is usually referred to as "Mandarin".) Certainly more discussion with other participants would be helpful. -- ran (talk) 00:58, Jun 8, 2005 (UTC)

[Cantonese speakers might not like to call Mandarin "Standard Chinese", for example]

Well, you see, that's exactly the problem created by calling "standard Chinese" "Mandarin." The "standard" happens to be chosen with aspects from Mandarin (the dialect group), but it is meant to be a form of Chinese, not a form of Mandarin (the dialect group). Standard Chinese is standard Chinese. People should be able to say, "I speak Cantonese and standard Chinese" as well as "I speak Mandarin and standard Chinese" without drawing strange looks.

The trouble with this suggestion, as Ran suggests, is that "Chinese" has a much broader meaning than does putonghua or guoyu. Both putonghua and guoyu are artificial constructs, i.e., they are standards for pronunciation and grammar that have been imposed by two different ministries of education. So there are political sensitivities involved. Technically, a native speaker of Chinese from Siquan probably does not speak "guoyu" any more than I speak "the Queen's English." In dealing with these departures from the artificial standard, speakers of Chinese in Taiwan refer to some of their compatriots as speaking "Siquan guoyu," "Taiwan guoyu," etc.

"Standard Chinese" is too broad and "putonghua" or "guoyu" is too narrow to use as a term for a tongue that is spoken from Yunnan in the SW to Manchuria in the NE, but "Mandarin" is fortunately sufficiently flexible and fuzzy to cover the whole ground. One way or another, it probably was chosen as a translation for the term "guan1 hua4" which is still used to cover the whole area mentioned above but which most people regard as rather archaic.

There is another term, "biaozhun guoyu" (standard guoyu), which might be translated as "standard Chinese national language." Maybe "standardized spoken Chinese" would work. P0M 03:21, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)

No, you see, Mandarin IS the term for a tongue that is spoken from Yunnan to Manchuria and "standard Chinese" IS "putonghua" and "guoyu." "Standardized spoken Chinese" is good. If it weren't for the whole other can of worms of the "putonghua"/"guoyu" politics, I would say even just use "Putonghua Chinese" in the fine English loanword tradition. In fact, Putonghua really hits it right on the spot to call itself literally the "common interchange speech." "Putonghua" isn't "simple speech" you see -- this is the beauty of multi-level parsing in Chinese.

I think you may want to re-read the paragraph before the paragraph you have criticized.

Even though I think "Mandarin" is "sufficiently flexible and fuzzy to cover the whole [guan hua qu]," I would prefer not to be dogmatic about what "Mandarin" means. My Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Languagehas a definition: "the dialect of Chinese spoken by officials and the educated classes," which is certainly different from your definition. I think that the dictionary definition has serious problems with it. On the other hand it probably reflects the general level of (mis)understanding of the average well-informed reader on what "the Chinese language" is. "Mandarin" is problematical for two reasons: (1) It may be regarded as offensive, a Western kluge stretched to fit Chinese things. (2) Being flexible and fuzzy suggests that "Mandarin" may have so many different meanings for the general public that we risk confusing folks by using it. I think that was perhaps the motivation for suggesting that the article be re-titled.P0M 01:38, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)

By the way, please sign your postings. Otherwise you risk arguing with yourself at some later date. ;-) (Besides, the rest of us get confused and don't know how many people are saying inconsistent things.) You sign by adding four tilde symbols (upper left corner of your keyboard, usually) P0M 01:56, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)