Talk:Chinese language/Archive 2

message: There are way too many external links. I will be weeding them out to what actually relates to the topic and not something that is unnecessary like Cantonese lessons. Wikiacc 21:12, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: External links

message: This diversity in spoken forms and commonality in written form has created a linguistic context that is very different from that of Europe. For example, in Europe, the language of a nation-state was usually standardized to be similar to that of the capital, making it easy, for example, to classify a language as French or Spanish. This had the effect of sharpening linguistic differences. A farmer on one side of the border would start to model his speech after Paris while a farmer on the other side would model his speech after Madrid. Moreover, the written language would be modelled after the dialect of the capital, and the use of local speech or mixtures of local speech would be considered substandard and erroneous. In China, this standardization did not occur.
I consider the example of the French-Spanish border inadequate. 
*Firstly, because it was not until way after "languages commonly deemed as different from Latin" emerged that France and Spain shared any border whatsoever. This happened at the middle/end of the Middle Ages and then, on the southern side the Kingdom of Navarre and Aragon bordered other independent Lordships/semi-states/whatever in the North (actually, Aragon, or to be more precise, the Catalan area of the Kingdom of Aragon, encompassed both sides of the Pyrinees, and I guess the same could be said of Navarre). Then, the languages spoken wore Basque on the Western end, Occitan in the North and Catalan and Aragonese in the South of what nowadays would be the border.
*Secondly, because the farmers in the area did maintain their own languages (that is, neither French or Spanish) until quite recently (way after France and Spain began to exist with their current borders). In fact, although Aragonese did follow the aforementioned trend and became blurred as Spanish and Occitan was nearly wiped out (post- French Revolution), Basques and Catalan continue to (stubbornly speak) their own languages.
I must admit, though, that the paragraph at hand did clarify the idea to me (a European). And the fact that local speeches and standards were seen as wrong is undeniable: schools prohibiting patois in France, etc. There's only the small fact that I think the example is wrong because languages other than Spanish and French existed already, not merely dialects, thus what happened was not a rupture of a dialectual continuum but the imposition of "foreing" languages altogehter. However, I give in that, that as a Catalan I might be biased when dealing on the subject at hand. I would suggest changing the "frontier" between the Romance dialects becoming languages to that of Spain and Portugal, where (as far as I know) no other language was "crushed" in between (except for its norhtern part, where Galician stands. The frontier between Italy and France would be equally wrong because of Franco-Provençal and Occitan. Maybe some other bordiers concerning other family groups would also apply, I don't know (Dutch-German, Bulgarian-Serbian and, nowadays, Serbian-Croatian...). If no objections are made, I'll chage it in a few days. --80.58.35.237 00:02, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: French and Spanish as examples: inadequate

message: The article states:
:For example, in Europe, the language of a nation-state was usually standardized to be similar to that of the capital, making it easy, for example, to classify a language as French or Spanish. This had the effect of sharpening linguistic differences. A farmer on one side of the border would start to model his speech after Paris while a farmer on the other side would model his speech after Madrid.
I understand what we're trying to say, but I think this analogy demonstrates better that its author had a simplistic understanding of European linguistic variation than its intended meaning.  It wouldn't hold well in the best of cases, but the choice of Paris/Madrid is particularly problematic.
First of all, many people on the French/Spanish border speak Basque, which is completely unrelated to either French or Spanish (or indeed, any European language).  Leaving the Basque speakers alone for a moment, roughly half of Spain speaks Castillian (the language of Madrid), with the other half speaking Catalan (the language of Barcelona).  These two are certainly not the same language, as anyone who speaks one but not the other will cheerfully tell you.
Furthermore, up until very recently, pretty much all of southern France spoke Occitan, la langue d'Oc, while Parisians and other northerners spoke la langue d'Oil, which is what is typically called French.  Occitan is still widely spoken but linguists agree that the language is dying, but not because of political standardization -- because of media.
In Pas-de-Calais, and much of the north, old people still speak Chti, which while clearly a dialect of Oil is pretty much unitelligible to non-locals.  Then there's Breton, spoken in Bretagne, which is actually similar enough to Welsh that Welsh speakers can understand it.  Needless to say, French people cannot...
The truth is, linguistic homogeneity in Europe (and indeed, anywhere) is very much a recent phenomenon, tied to urbanization, standardized education, and most recently, radio and television.  It has nothing whatever to do with where the capital is: any German speaker will tell you that Germans from Berlin have an extremely strange accent, and will point to Hannover/Bremen if asked for an example of where standard German is spoken -- and even there, Plattdeutsch (Low German) is spoken by older locals.
My point here is that this attractive analogy vis-a-vis Europe is wrong.  While 20-somethings with urbanized grandparents may not believe it, as recently as the second world war pretty much every town in Europe had, at the very least, its own dialect.  Much like China today.
China, like its European counterparts, is experiencing the slow death of its local languages, as standard Beijing Putonghua is introduced in schools and on TV.  And even standard Beijing putonghua, not surprisingly, isn't standard -- Beijinghua can be so heavily retroflexed that non-locals fail to understand it, and that's just phonologically.  Grammatically, it's different too.  But even in the capital, young people are speaking more and more standard Mandarin, and less and less of the patois spoken by their parents.  This is the cummulative effect of standardized education and the exclusive use of standard Mandarin on TV and on the radio.
I currently reside in Shanghai, and while I do not speak Shanghainese, I am witness to its dwindling importance.  The influx of waidiren has forced the locals to increase their use of Mandarin, to the point where, despite the fact that I cannot speak the language, I can hear the difference between the way young people speak (excessively Mandarin-ified) and the way old people speak (more distinctive nasals, less isolating tonality, and different vocabulary).  While the Shanghainese, who are very proud, do their best to preserve this aspect of their culture, most will admit that children born in the city often do not speak the language well, if at all.  Consider: they are instructed in Mandarin at school, they hear Mandarin on TV and on the radio -- Shanghainese is China's answer to Occitan.
Yue and Min (or at least, Minnan) will likely fare better, as Hong Kong and Taiwan, respectively, seem to value their continued use.  Interestingly, Wu (of which Shanghainese is a dialect) is the second most spoken Chinese language, after Mandarin -- but its lack of representation in overseas Chinese communities sees it, at least in my estimation, eventually succumbing to the convenience of a Mandarin speaking world.
Getting around to the point, I think we should change this paragraph.  Thoughts?
:Thanks for all of this information! ;) And yes, we should change the paragraph in this case. -- ran (talk) 20:09, Feb 20, 2005 (UTC)
The sentence "China ... maintained a common written language throughout its entire history, despite the fact that its actual diversity in spoken language has always been comparable to Europe" is confusing.  Is it talking about Chinese or about the languages of China? Chinese maintained a common written language; but China did not (consider, e.g. Manchu).  Chinese is not as diverse as the languages of Europe (consider French, Hungarian, and Russian); but the languages of China are.  --Macrakis 02:59, 13 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Madrid/Paris European languages analogy 

message: I can't see a link to the Chinese language wikipedia. Most languages have one; maybe m.e. 10:34, 16 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Link to wikipedia? 

message: It seems more accurate to say that the speakers of the various Chinese languages use a written form of Mandarin as a written language, rather than to say there is a single "Chinese Written Language". The written language uses Mandarin syntax, grammar and word order, and if you try to read it as Cantonese (as people do in Hong Kong), it is perhaps intelligible but invalid, in the same way as if I were to take German text and replace all the words one-by-one with their English equivalents. And since the 19th century, there has been a true written Cantonese language, with Cantonese rules, used in poetry and literature. --Erauch 20:26, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Single written language? 

message: The article seems to be growing quite rapidly, and we still have a lot left to write about. All of it is very good material and you're all doing a very good job on improving the article, but is it possible to shorten for example the Loan word section a bit? All those examples, especially all the Japanese just seems like too comprehensive. I think we need to attempt to achieve a proper balance between comprehensive and overwhelming.
What do the rest of you think about size? Peter Isotalo 11:47, Apr 7, 2005 (UTC)
:If the article being overwhelming is a problem, we can split the article sections off if necessary, and replace the large sections with smaller overviews here on this page. siafu 18:39, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Since this article is still being extensively worked on, I think for now we should keep it the way it is.  Once we have all of the main ideas we want to convey in the article, we can start to split off content into subarticles.  I already have plans to split off the morphology section I wrote, but will delay that for now until we get a better idea of what is and what is not relevant.  --Umofomia 19:28, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Going easy on article size? 

message: A recent change has added the text:
: Mandarin has been the dominent dialect spoken in the East Asian Chinese diaspora.
Actually, I don't think that is true if by "East Asian" the writer means S.E. Asia.  The dominant version of Chinese spoken in Thailand, for instance, is (or at least was in 1966) Chao2 Zhou1 regional speech. And in the same year in Malaysia, almost no Chinese spoke Mandarin as their first language. It was, however, the official language of instruction in the schools that were organized around the Chinese language rather than Malay. (At least that is what I recall hearing at the time.) 
In general, the "dominant dialect" depends on currents of emigration from China. Different parts of the world became preferred destinations for people emigrating from different parts of China. As far as I know, before recent decades at least the guan1 hua4 qu1 were not primary areas of emigration.  But it would be nice to have some well-researched demographical studies to go on. P0M 01:20, 3 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Diaspora 

message: Here's a question an anon asked on the Chinese Wikipedia that I think deserves answering: if we're to apply mutual intelligibility consistently as a standard, then wouldn't we have a lot more languages that we purport to have right now?
For example, wouldn't we split Toishanese out of Cantonese? The two southern Wu branches out of Wu? The fringe dialects of Hakka out of Hakka, and some difficult southern dialects of Mandarin out of Mandarin?
The anon is basically questioning the idea of using intelligibility as a standard, and implying (I believe) that it is unworkable to treat Chinese as anything other than a single language.
-- ran (talk) 17:27, May 31, 2005 (UTC)
There are several ways of dealing with this kind of problem. Sometimes people think things are unintelligible but then they get used to regular changes between, e.g., Beijing hua and Yunnan hua, and decide they aren't so unintelligible after all. Sometimes two people are talking and one can understand the other but not vice-versa. That may indicate a better yu3 gan3 on the part of one of the speakers, it may indicate more experience on the part of one of the speakers, it may indicate hearing difficulty on the part of one of them, etc.  So the "rule of thumb" standard of intelligibility is somewhat difficult to apply in some cases. 
On the other hand, to imply that there is no difference among the tongues spoken won't work either; the problem is how to conceptualize and categorize the tongues in the best way. After that understanding is reached, one can use rule of thumb stuff to explain things in casual discourse.
What we have, always, is language that changes from speaker to speaker and generation to generation. With increases in time and distance, languages become more and more remote from each other. Gradually, a tree-shaped structure takes form.  It is all one tree, and yet every leaf on it is different. What is most useful is to see the trunk of the tree, the major limbs that branch off from it, the branches that grow from each limb, the twigs that grow from each branch.  Once you've got that structure in mind you can try to find agreeable terms to use to name these different features.  P0M 00:23, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Mutual intelligibility as a standard 

message: Hi, over at the quotation mark article, it says that Chinese uses four pairs of quote marks. Could someone expand on when different pairs are used? Are there usage differences among Mainland, TW, HK, & Macao? —Tokek 23:26, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Quotation marks in Chinese