From: chou@cs.washington.edu (Pai Hsiang Chou)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.taiwan
Subject: Re: Language
Date: 29 Aug 92 20:17:48 GMT
Article-I.D.: beaver.1992Aug29.201748.19832
Organization: Computer Science & Engineering, U. of Washington, Seattle

In article <1992Aug29.182500.23926@engage.pko.dec.com> li@sicvax.enet.dec.com (Tong-Kang Li) writes:
>Taiwanese should not feel Holo inferior to Mandarin at all.

This goes without saying.  But my point is that many speakers
today still do.  And this inferiority complex is what's killing
the language.

>I heard Holo is
>authentic Han/Chinese dialect (ancestor of Mandarin??). Holo and Mandrain
>is the same language but different dialect.


This is a completely false statement.

Prior to sinitization, H"ol"o was not a Han language.
In fact, it was not even in the Sino-Tibetan family.
H"ol"o is _syntactically_toned_ (still is today),
while Sino-Tibetan famly is _lexically_toned_.

H"ol"o fossilized Han Chinese sounds from two eras.
The first influx of Han influence came in the Jin
dynasty, through intermarriage.  It acquired many
Han colloquial words.  The second wave came during
the Song dynasty, through official contact but no
intermarriage.  As a result the vocabulary acquired
was limited to academic reading of Han characters,
but it never entered the colloquial language.
This is to say, you can sound out Han characters the
way Japanese can with onyomi, but the speakers would
either not understand or feel very stilted.

Mandarin is a family of largely mutually intelligible
languages in northern China, stretching from Sichuan to
Manchuria.  The north is a great plane and people were
mobile due to easy invasions and flood.  As a result of
many mixing and multiple standardizations, the Mandarin
family loses many of the original Han language features
such as the enter tone, post-consonants, and shifted
meaning of the characters (e.g. run => walk).

H"ol"o and Mandarin are far from mutually intelligible.
H"ol"o uses many sets of tone rules to mark morphology and
syntax (sandhi, triplet, diminished, diminutive, neutral,
comparative neutral, ...) and has no sentence-final question
particles (Mandarin has ne, ba).  The difference is far
greater than Spanish and Italian.


>In the early 30s, Beijing dialect was chosen among many different ones as
>our common language (and still is in the Mainland China, Canton and FuJin
>people did not complain).

False.  The decision was made in 1913, and it was after many
ugly fights.  The Mandarin group won simply because they
outnumbered everybody else.  They had to make a compromise
by artificially adding the enter tone back to Peking Mandarin
which they later gave up because no instructor could produce
it.

Even to this day it still remains a North vs. South battle.
Especially Cantonese today (not just Hong Kong, but all Contonese
speaking area) are resisting Mandarin.


>This dialect-unification policy continues after KMT retreated to Taiwan.
>The policy has no intension to discriminate 
>different dialects and customs but to let us understand each other easily.
>The way of promoting policy in Taiwan has been openly criticized recently, 
>for example, one retired Taiwanese officer remembered he was working hard 
>but hardly got promoted because of his bad Mandarin. That was mistakes.


If a language is not mutually intelligible with Mandarin, then
it is not a "dialect" of Mandarin.

The language policy has been cruelly implemented in Taiwan.
After Taiwan was kicked out of U.N., the non-Mandarin mothertongues
became the target of blame, and since 1972 broadcast codes were
written to eliminate non-Mandarin languages.  Total air time
of all non-Mandarin mothertongues were allocated less than half
the quota as foreign languages like English.  Non-Mandarin speakers
have also been portrayed very negatively in TV drama.

H"ol"o was already the language most speakers understood prior to
Mandarin.  In fact, President Lee is Hakka.  His father is able
to speak fluent H"ol"o but not Mandarin.  To say Mandarin was
intended to enable communication is just a bad excuse.
On the very contrary, it completely disabled communication between
generations, like many grandparents and their grandchildren.

Even today, there's bilingual Mandarin-Cantonese TV news, but
Cantonese isn't even one of the Taiwanese mothertongues!


>Personally, I think we should continue this policy but all dialects should
>coexist peacefully.


This policy is cruel, destructive, and damaging to people's pride
and dignity.  It should be changed now or else our languages will
die and be lost forever.  Merely lifting the oppression is not
sufficient because the damage is too severe.  It will take a lot
of people's awareness and participation to heal this wound.


>BTW, just heard Holo Opera is coming to New York City in September and will 
>perform at Taipei Theater which owned by Taiwan government.


So what?
Xref: sparky soc.culture.taiwan:12438 soc.culture.korean:3969