Talk:Standard Chinese/Archive 1

message: 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)
thread_title: (Item)

message: 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)
::I don’t think half third tone (ban4san1sheng1) is tone sandhi, it’s how the third tone is commonly pronounced in continuous speech. LDHan 14:15, 19 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: The third tone

message: From the article:
In Singapore, the government has heavily promoted a "Speak Mandarin" campaign to adopt a common language among its diverse Chinese population. The use of non-Mandarin dialects in broadcast media is prohibited and the use of dialect in any context is officially discouraged. This has led to some resentment, as Singapore's Chinese community is almost entirely of southern Chinese descent and thus considers Mandarin a foreign language.
First, the article states Singapore has a diverse population, than the article states it's made up almost entirely of southern Chinese. What's correct? --Abdull 18:57, 15 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Look at the map of Chinese regional languages and you will understand. The southern part of China includes speakers of Wu, Min (several mutually incomprehensible subvarieties here), Hakka, Cantonese... The practical problem for not specifying Mandarin would be that none of the other regional languages would please everybody either. Some people would automatically be given favor and some would be disadvantaged.  I don't know what the original writer used as proof that they regard Mandarin as a "foreign language."  I think everybody there knows that Mandarin is only as "foreign" as is Cantonese. But, anyway, the practical advantages it gives for business are complemented by the advantage that it privileges only the relatively rare native speaker of Mandarin. The same selection of Mandarin as language of instruction occurs also within the Chinese community in Malaysia, perhaps for all of the above reasons. P0M 01:56, 16 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Singapore diverse or not? 

message: :Since then, the standards used in mainland China and Taiwan have diverged somewhat, though they continue to remain essentially identical.
So they diverged somewhat or remain essentially identical ?
:They've diverged in terms of what vocabulary to use in politically sensitive areas and in areas where new compounds were made to describe new things (e.g., laser). It's the kind of situation we have with English where some people say they have gas and other people say they have petrol. 
:Everybody's language differs slightly from the next person's language, so I guess technically the sentence above couldn't be changed to say that two language standards remain identical. So how might the statement be improved? By saying changing the part after to the comma to "but not enough to matter"? P0M 04:59, 14 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Identically divergent