Talk:Varieties of Chinese/Archive 1

message: Does anyone know of the history of the varieties? Does anyone know when for example Cantonese or Min became recognised as different kinds of Chinese? Are there explanations for the pockets of varieties far from the main area like the spot of Gan spoken in the middle of the Xiang area according to the map?
I realise the map is an oversimplification and that people mix much more than is visible. Still, there may be some records on large movements of people that explain some of the pockets. Mlewan 10:54, 20 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  History? 

message: What's this about China being several separate kingdoms prior to contact with Europeans? That makes no sense, as it would either be the Ming Dynasty, or the Machus, which would be one Empire. 132.205.44.5 23:10, 11 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Comaprison with India? 

message: I moved the article to "Varieties of Chinese" to correspond with some other articles whose titles are "Varieties of Arabic", "Varieties of French", "Varieties of Modern Greek", "Varieties of the Romanian language". ✉ Hello World! 11:07, 8 August 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: The move

message: In the text it says "Internal diversity in Chinese, with respect to grammar, vocabulary, and syntax, is comparable to the Romance languages, and greater than the Germanic and Slavic languages."
Problem is that this doesn't add up to the Germanic Languages article where it says "Germanic languages differ from each other to a greater degree than do some other language families such as the Romance or Slavic languages." 
One states clearly that north Germanic languages are more diverse and the other implies that Romance language are more diverse. 
Can somone look at this?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.209.17.70 (talk) 22:25, 1 February 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Internal diversity in Chinese 

message: I wonder if anyone could provide and add the number of Mandarin speakers as the 2nd language. Most dialect speakers, especially in cities have a good command of Mandarin. The article mentions that Mandarin is a mandatory subject but doesn't provide figures how many people know it as a 2nd language.
Are the figures up-to-date about the first language? According to The 30 Most Spoken Languages in the World it's 1,120 mln. Anyway, also look at List of languages by number of native speakers. Anatoli (talk) 03:02, 2 February 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Spoken Mandarin (官话) - 1st and 2nd language 

message: Should this article be merged with Chinese Lanaguage? Readin (talk) 16:37, 27 August 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  redundant article? 

message: Victor Mair's views are probably already well-known to most people reading this page, but in case you're interested he just made a new post on Language Log that might be helpful:
*
rʨanaɢ (talk) 11:53, 31 March 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Mair

message: The words for "man" and "woman" in the Minnan list are incorrect.Lam and Li are used only in compounds and belong to literary Chinese not spoken Minnan. The correct terms are ta-po and tsa-bɔ respectively.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Darth Dumbledore (talk • contribs) 18:38, 14 June 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Incorrect Vocabulary in List 

message: Please pardon the stupid question, I cannot seem to find a good answer anywhere. Do different dialects use different characters or do Chinese people use the same characters? Like, is it possible to say that a text is from a certain region based on what characters are being used, or is it solely a question of vocabulary? (Pronunciation doesn't interest me, as long as the same characters are being used.)
I find it interesting that Chinese is considered as ONE language, while Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian are considered as separate languages by many people. This is of course due to political reasons, but this still seems really odd and - if I may say so - far-fetched to me. I live in Switzerland, where we speak Swiss German, which is considered a dialect of German, even though the differences are considerably bigger (than between Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian). An average German doesn't understand Swiss German (although he might be able to get the main idea of a sentence). 46.126.180.120 (talk) 14:32, 11 September 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: You ask a good question. What people (including linguists) neglect is that as well as spoken dialects/languages within the Sino languages family, for the purpose of education and official communication there is one dialect of written Chinese, which in English was/ is called Mandarin. This written dialect of Chinese was/is the version taught for the purpose of education for the past several millenia to all Han Chinese of whatever dialectal group. It is this dialect of written Chinese that allowed the communication in writing amongst the different Han Chinese groups. Chinese people who speak 2 or more dialects fluently have no problems in flipping between the languages even when the spoken words in these languages use different cognates. Of course if you spoke only one dialect you may find translating it into another dialect using different cognates a bit strange, as pointed out by the Hokkien example given in contribution above. 86.180.55.126 (talk) 00:29, 25 October 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Chinese in Written Form (Questions and Remarks) 

message: Spoken Chinese is better developed, and older, than this article, but it's a somewhat odd title, and it covers the same topic. Written Chinese is its own topic, since the Chinese written language has historically taken on a life of its own, but "spoken Chinese" really isn't: It's just Chinese. Merge? — kwami (talk) 12:00, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  merge 

message: Substituted at 20:57, 4 May 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: Assessment comment

message: IMO Mandarin is anachronistic - more suited to Qing officials and ducks. Can we edit the article to refer to 'standard Chinese'? After all the English speak English (not Anglo-saxon). The Italians speak Italian (not Tuscan). The Spanish speak Spanish (not Castilian), etc etc. Thanks. --Kleinzach 06:21, 8 February 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: We already do. Where are you talking about? — kwami (talk) 07:11, 8 February 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Lost? Per section title: 'Mandarin'.--Kleinzach 01:32, 9 February 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: There is no section titled 'Mandarin'. There is 'bilingualism in Mandarin', which I agree should be changed, as both lects of the 'bilingual' may be Mandarin. — kwami (talk) 01:54, 9 February 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Hmm. Let me assume good faith here. This section title (above) is entitled 'Standard Chinese or Mandarin?'. My first post contained a question. that question read "Can we edit the article to refer to 'standard Chinese'?" The rest of the short message explained the background to my suggestion. Is that clear now? --Kleinzach 02:16, 9 February 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: No. Since you are presumably not actually referring to this section, it's irrelevant. Give me an idea of where in the article, not where on this talk page. — kwami (talk) 02:24, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

text: By Standard Chinese you mean Putonghua? Dylanwhs (talk) 03:17, 9 February 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Indeed. (If you click on  Putonghua that's actually where you arrive.) Thank you. --Kleinzach 03:25, 9 February 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Standard Chinese or Mandarin?

message: According to Gan Chinese, Gan and Xiang were only carved out of the Mandarin region in 1937. 
Jin Chinese was carved out in 1985 by a single linguist, Li Rong, on the basis of a single feature, retention of the final glottal stop, even though it is retained in other areas such as Southwestern Mandarin, which apparently no prominent linguist has championed promoting to a top-level group, even though Chinese people perceive Sichuanese to be as distinctive as Xiang or Gan.
Actually Sichuan, Hunan, and Jiangxi all show stratification between more Mandarinized dialects in their northern plains and more conservative, divergent dialects farther southwest in and near the hills. Here the English Wikipedia articles are behind the Chinese Wikipedia articles in incorporating newer and more detailed evidence. These patterns are actually a good fit for the wave model which is nowhere mentioned in this article, which only talks about tree structure.
Varieties_of_Chinese#Quantitative_similarity apparently remains the only actual citation (at least in English Wikipedia) of quantitative study of distance between major Chinese dialects, as opposed to particular linguists' edicts on top-level grouping presented without supporting reasoning. Apparently the presentation of a single definite tree in this article follows the standard English-language survey textbooks like Norman and Ramsey, which are now about 25 years old, and based on Chinese sources older than that.
Various linguists' positions on top-level grouping are indeed facts we should document, but Wikipedia should not strongly endorse or reify one particular position, e.g. by providing a very prominent map, tree, or outline for one grouping, and little to nothing for others, when the situation is so indefinite. Contrast Afroasiatic_languages#Distribution_and_branches which instead prominently presents the variation and conflict between linguists' views on top-level grouping of Afroasiatic. --JWB (talk) 07:01, 10 July 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Top-level grouping is presented as misleadingly definite and discrete 

message: Sorry if this is the wrong place to ask this question, but what's the switch called on the Chinese wiki that allows you to view different variants of Chinese? 188.29.118.236 (talk) 14:57, 16 February 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: If you mean different regional dialects, they appear as separate languages here on Wikipedia, so check under the tab "其他语言" in the left. There's one for Mandarin, Cantonese and Hakka. On the Mandarin page, you switch between traditional and simplified scripts by clicking on the button on the upper left next to "Article" and "Talk".202.171.163.7 (talk) 11:26, 10 August 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Chinese switch on zh wiki 

message: "In addition, while speaking similar dialect provides very strong group identity at the level of a city or county, the high degree of linguistic diversity limits the amount of group solidarity at larger levels. Finally, the linguistic diversity of southern China makes it likely that in any large group of Chinese, Mandarin will be the only form of speech that everyone understands." I don't really understand this segment at all. This belongs to the "Political issues" section. First, it says "while speaking similar dialect provides very strong group identity at the level of a city or county." I interpret that as speaking similar dialect is a good thing then the next clause is about linguistic diversity is bad. While something is good, something else is bad. I have no idea why the 2 totally different ideas are connected with a comma in the same sentence? Plus the "while" conjunction is not even being used correctly. The sentence simply doesn't make any sense. Second, "Finally, the linguistic diversity of southern China makes it likely that in any large group of Chinese, Mandarin will be the only form of speech that everyone understands," how is that a political issue? The second sentence shows the benefits of knowing Mandarin (I believe the Mandarin in this context means the same as "Standard Chinese" language) so why is it in the "Political issues" section? Come on, Wikipedia is only this good??75.168.140.124 (talk) 08:12, 7 December 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  ?? 

message: Regarding this revert, there was indeed a source, but it was a newspaper article from 2001 saying that UHawaii had a Hokkien course and Harvard was introducing one, wich hardly justifies "commonly taught".  Moreover, it seems that Harvard and Hawaii no longer offer Hokkien (or Cantonese).  Regarding Cantonese, my impression is that there's been a reduction in courses, particularly in the US, but it still seems to be offered in enough places to justify retaining the statement cited to Norman (1988).  Kanguole 18:25, 27 March 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: There are courses offered in Taiwan, for sure. And the same Minnan Sinitic language was spoken by more people in Singapore than Mandarin just a generation ago, and the United States Foreign Service had a course for acquiring that language. But I suppose "commonly taught" is the definitional problem here, so I'll let the latest edit stand. -- WeijiBaikeBianji (Watch my talk, How I edit) 22:01, 27 March 2016 (UTC)
replies: text:  I believe you, but do you  have a source that mentions this? I did a bit of searching for "United States Foreign Service" "hokkien" and found no evidence it ever existed.--Prisencolin (talk) 01:25, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

text: Hokkien or Minnan is or has been taught at Hawaii, Harvard, Stanford, SOAS University of London, Chiang Kai-shek College, UC Berkeley, and apparently several schools in France and Japan. I think this is enough to say it is commonly taught at universities.--Prisencolin (talk) 03:59, 30 August 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Varieties commonly taught in formal courses 

message: The "Vocabulary" section lists several Mandarin words with χ, the voiceless uvular fricative. As far as I know, Mandarin phonology does not include χ, even as an allophone of x, the voiceless velar fricative. Unless someone has a citation showing that the words in question are in fact pronounced with χ, I am going to change them all to x.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.30.27.84 (talk) 23:27, 9 May 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  IPA correction 

message: This is article is very helpful in describing modern varieties, that is, "hundreds of local language varieties," but only mentions the historical varieties in passing (but not "Classical Chinese") and you have to skim through to find Written vernacular Chinese.
Could some of you Chinese languages gurus work up a short section giving an overview? I see  and  as major contributors to this article who could do such a section without new research. Presumably it would just give a one or two sentence description of the biggies, with links and "See also"s. 
Maybe there is such an overview in another article, but I can't find it. Written vernacular Chinese is helpful, and it links to Mandarin Chinese, among others, but again, no overview starting from describing classical written Chinese, vernacular written Chinese, and vernacular spoken Chinese. Chinese language and History of the Chinese language have much of the relevant information, but not in summary form. Languages of China doesn't concern itself with the history.
Among other uses, this section would help editors like me to use appropriate Wikipedia terms.
Many thanks!ch (talk) 16:12, 21 July 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: I think the focus on forms of modern speech is appropriate for this article.  There's certainly plenty of room for expansion in the History of the Chinese language article.  Kanguole 16:38, 21 July 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Could we add a section on historical varieties? 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: When reading through the table that shows selected varieties, it seems that a "group of columns" could be categorized to show initials, which are common to the 3 language-groupings shown. At present (2019 Jan 27), there are columns in the table, which are not clearly associated with one of the three language groups listed in the table. For example, there is no subcolumn for plosives listed for the Beijing (Mandarin) language group in the table, but there is a column for plosives just before the Fuzhou (Min) language group in the table. (A straightforward fix, would be to include a language group column, that is labeled "Shared by the following", and include only the initials that are shared by all 3 language groups in the table as of 2019 Jan 27. One would also need to remove-or-reassign any other initials that are not assigned to any of the language groups)
Leexixue (talk) 20:16, 27 January 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: I see no "column for plosives".  Are you referring to the row headings on the left of the table?  Kanguole 20:46, 27 January 2019 (UTC)
thread_title: Table in "Phonology - Initials" needs some cleanup 

message: It’s only confusing to have a Sinitic languages article and this one. This article seems like an attempt to not differ the Chinese languages from each other in falsely calling them dialects.
The confusing is probably also in the translation of the languages and dialects from Chinese (Sinitic languages). 
But this is English Wikipedia where they are classified as different languages. At least for Cantonese and mandarin. It doesn’t make any sense that fx the Iberian Romance languages are considered as different languages if Cantonese and Mandarin ain’t. Since Cantonese and Mandarin are a lot more different in lexical.
--Betabobby (talk) 16:33, 4 July 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: The way we have it now, it does look a lot like a content fork, though at Wikipedia we try to be neutral as to whether Mandarin, Cantonese, etc. are dialects of one language or separate languages. — Æµ§œš¹ [lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt] 17:13, 4 July 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: There is indeed a content fork, but it is Sinitic languages that is the fork. If this article is to be renamed, the proper approach would be to start an RM.  Also, this article does not say that Mandarin, Cantonese, etc. are dialects.  Kanguole 17:24, 4 July 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  This whole article should be merged with Sinitic languages 

message: This article seems to confuse languages for dialects throughout the article. Chinese is a sub group of the Sinitic language family and has many sub-languages within that group, including Mandarin. Ergzay (talk) 22:38, 4 February 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: "Language" vs "Dialect" is a somewhat arbitrary and vague categorization. Some people propose objective categorizations like intelligibility, and the "Chinese language" definitely fails this. However there are also other groups out there that call themselves "language" that have within them "dialects" that are mutually unintelligible. Chinese is just the largest such grouping. The subject is inherently political, people who push the "Chinese language" usually have a preference for Chinese unity and nationalism, people pushing to promote the "dialects" to "languages" are often anti-Chinese unity, or wish for a partition of China. It is notable that even the dialects themselves fail the test of mutual intelligibility in many cases, yet Hakka still insist they speak Hakka rather than an independent language that is not Hakka.2601:140:8900:61D0:95A6:FD9C:C34B:4655 (talk) 02:52, 1 October 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  This article needs to be rewritten 

message: — Assignment last updated by KauiLeFuJie (talk) 18:05, 13 September 2022 (UTC)
thread_title: Wiki Education assignment: CHIN 330 Introduction to Chinese Linguistics