From: chou@cs.washington.edu (Pai Hsiang Chou)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.taiwan
Subject: Re: BSR and WSR
Date: 13 Sep 92 17:08:38 GMT
Article-I.D.: beaver.1992Sep13.170838.13965
Organization: Computer Science & Engineering, U. of Washington, Seattle

In article <2AB31452.15342@news.service.uci.edu> tao@balboa.eng.uci.edu (Eric Yihching Tao) writes:
>Holo is a elegent and ancient dialect of Chinese.

There have been arguments about this "ancient dialect."
At most I will only claim that it contains a fossilized
set of pronunciations of the Hanzi.  But it is debatable
if this is really the ancient language of Chinese
(i.e. mainstream Han).


>I am all for people speak
>any language they prefer in their private conversation, however, I strongly
>believe every chinese should use Mandarine in formal occassions, because it
>is the official language for a long timethat more people could understand.

If you regard Taiwanese as China's citizens.

People from all over China voted to pick an official language
in 1913.  Taiwan was not part of China, and Taiwanese did not
get to vote.  After WWII, the Mandarin policy was imposed w/out
Taiwanese vote.

The "more people could understand" is true only for northern
China.  In Taiwan however, prior to Mandarin, H"ol"o served
as the common language.

I am not opposed to people who speak Mandarin as their mothertongue,
but I believe all mothertongues should be respected in formal
situations AS WELL AS private situations.  We can follow Switzerland
as an example.  It will only serve to enrich our culture and
perspectives, It will also help us develop the democratic attitude
of respecting each other's differences, instead of pretending we are
all the same when we know we are different.


>Being in U.S. for many years, I am quite dismayed whe I have to use English
>to communicate with some chinese who only speak chinese dialect.
>
>Mandarine has been established as the official language for a long time, and
>it is the written language as well. Unlike cantonese or Taiwanese, those are
>more  spoken languages.


Again, the actual vote was in 1913.  The written form for colloquial
Mandarin had many missing characters that had to be invented (e.g.
[men] as in [wo3men0] "we"), or overloaded using an existing character
([de0] as in the adjective -> manner adverb prefix).

H"ol"o has two sublanguages, an academic language and a colloquial
language.  The academic language is a set of pronunciation rules
for the Han character, and is used for sounding out formal, written
text.  The colloquial language is what people actually speak.
So you can't claim that H"ol"o is "defective" in any way.


>I don't think BSR wants to expel WSR, but a lot of polictians want to exploit
>the language differece and provoke hatray between groups, that is rather 
>distasteful. For example, couple of years ago when I was in New York, in one
>of the TI meeting, people spoke mandarine are rediculed and forced out of the
>building violently, I hope those kind of thing won't happen again.
>
>Eric


I am no politician, and I have no intention to ridicule anybody
in any distasteful ways.  But have you thought about why some
people would react this way, other than political motivations?
I have watched the show Lien2Huan2Pau4 (CTS) on the local TV,
and for two weeks in a roll they portrayed a clown type character
named Chuan1Bang1Mei4, or an "exhibitionist slut" played by a
man speaking with a heavy H"ol"o accent.  He would sprinkle his
add H"ol"o words to enhance his 38'ness as well as making him
exaggerately low-class.

For decades, H"ol"o and other non-Mandarin mothertongue speakers
have been ridiculed, degraded, portrayed as people with no class
not only by the mass media (even to this date!!), but also by
their youngsters who embrace this stereotype and feel ashamed
about their parents, grandparents, and their heritage.

So you ask why these people reject Mandarin with such sentiment.
My explanation is that when they speak Mandarin, they are
associated with the clown-type character that TV has been
portraying.  While I don't agree with the "an eye for an eye"
attitude, I believe they acted this way as a result of decades
of language suppression and media humiliation.

Pai
Newsgroups: soc.culture.taiwan