方言的e言 The Great Dialect Deception

[Randy W]

I haven't watched this all the way through yet, but it looks interesting if you want to learn more about the Chinese language, including things that your Chinese better half may not know.

From the Speak Hokien Campaign on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/SpeakHokkienCampaign/videos/721360251394798/

講福建話運動 Speak Hokkien Campaign

 

方言的e言 The Great Dialect Deception

Quote

把AZ(北方)成了母Z，是е赂＝ㄔ(}南Z)žlR缤龅脑蛑弧Ｆ鹨蚴W校不教，大家ψ约旱恼Z言、v史不了解，把母Z成比AZ低一的方言Υ？赐赀@演v包你茅塞D_，一次^搞清楚W校]告V你的真相。 #}南白文 #Z白文 #北方白文

Conflating the terms "Mandarin" and "Chinese" has led many to believe that Mandarin and Chinese are the same thing, and that Hokkien is "just" a dialect of Mandarin. This confusion is convenient for those who wish to perpetuate the myth with the motive of denigrating Hokkien and other Chinese languages. This presentation will challenge your long-held assumptions and expose the facts that your teachers didn't tell you.

Lán tsiong Huâ-gú (Pak-hong-uā) tng-tsoh pēe-bó-uā, tsò-kàu Hok-kiàn-uā (Bân-lâm-uā) beh bia̍t-bông khì. Guân-in sī o̍h-tn̂g bô kà, tāi-kee tuì ka-kī ê gú-giân, le̍k-sú bô liáu-kái, tsiong pēe-bó-uā tng-tsoh pí Huâ-gú kēe tsi̍t-kip ê hong-giân lâi tuì-thāi. Khuànn--liáu tsit-ê ián-káng pau lú má-siōng kak-tshénn, tsi̍t-táu kuè bêng-pe̍h kà-liáu o̍h-tn̂g bô ka lú kóng ê sū-si̍t.

https://www.speakhokkien.org/

 

 

Edited February 2, 2021 by Randy W (see edit history)

[Randy W]

If you're interested in linguistics, this may be of interest. A bit dry reading, but you can easily look for a specific dialect of interest. Free signup required.

 

I just found out yesterday something I didn't know - Yulinhua does not have a written character set - it DOESN'T use the Chinese characters.

 

A Reworking of Chinese Language Classification

Robert Lindsay

Chinese languages were reanalyzed to determine the number of languages in the family. The 90% intelligibility metric was used, and anything under 90% was considered to be evidence of a structurally separate language.

Results: The Chinese languages were expanded from Ethnologue's 14 to 708 languages, and there may be many more. The standard linguistic classification scheme grossly underestimates the number of Chinese languages.

 

 

 

 

A couple of snippets from the pdf download

 

 

Putonghua is Standard Mandarin, based on the Beijing Mandarin

dialect as of 1949, but it has since diverged wildly, and many

Putonghua speakers today cannot understand Beijinghua. Putonghua

is being promoted as the national language of China. In addition to

Putonghua, there 1,500 other dialects of Mandarin spoken in China. In

general, other Mandarin dialects are not intelligible to Putonghua

speakers (Campbell 2009). However, the Northeastern Mandarin

dialects and the dialects around Beijing are more intelligible with

Putonghua than the Mandarin dialects in the rest of the country.

The implication is that there may be over 1,500 Mandarin languages

in China. However, many of these Mandarin dialects are intelligible

with at least some other Mandarin varieties. Hence, despite the lack

of intelligibility with Putonghua, there is a lot of potential lumping

within Mandarin.

The degree to which Mandarin dialects are intelligible to each other is

very much an open question and in general is poorly investigated.

We should also note here that even Putonghua, the language that was

meant to tie the nation together, seems to be evolving into regional

languages.

Guangdong Putonghua is not fully intelligible to speakers of the

Putonghuas of Northern China and hence is probably a separate

language.

Shanghai Putonghua is often not intelligible with Putonghua from

other regions. It has heavy interference from Shanghaihua, which

seriously effects the Putonghua accent. Even after four years of

exposure, Standard Putonghua speakers often have problems with it.

 

. . .

 

Curiously, Nanning Cantonese is intelligible with Standard Cantonese.

The Goulou Group of Cantonese is a separate from all of the rest of

Cantonese and is linked with Ping and Tuhua. It is made up of Yulin

Cantonese, Baobai Cantonese, Lizhou Cantonese, Guangning

Cantonese, Huaiji Cantonese, Fengkai Cantonese, Deqing Cantonese,

Shanglin Cantonese, Binyang Cantonese, Yangshan Cantonese, Ertang

Cantonese, Shuishan Cantonese, Yunan Cantonese, and Tengxian

Cantonese.

Ertang Cantonese, Shuishan Cantonese and Yunan Cantonese are all

spoken in Guilin City in Guangxi Province. They are under Ping

influence. Ertang and Shuishan arrived in Guangxi 100 years ago from

the Yangshan region of Guangdong.

Yulin Cantonese is a representative language in Goulou Cantonese

and is the existing form of Chinese that is closest to Old Chinese.

Baobai Cantonese is spoken in Baobai south of Yulin. Yulin and Baobai

are mutually intelligible, but they are not intelligible with the rest of

Goulou Cantonese.

 

 

[Randy W]

The Yulin dialect is still going strong - my wife will almost always speak Yulin-hua with others.

 

Other dialects, maybe not so much. Ironically, we have Qin Shi Huangdi, the Chinese emperor behind the terra-cotta warriors, to blame. Qin Shi Huangdi, the first Qin Emperor, was a brutal ruler who unified ancient China and laid the foundation for the Great Wall.

 

see CFL topic - the Chinese emperor behind the terra-cotta warriors

 

 

The emperor ordered Chinese writing made uniform, such that all words with the same meaning in the country’s varied languages would be represented by the same characters.

 

 

 

What happens is that children these days are taught Mandarin FIRST, and then learn the local dialect as they increasingly talk with outside neighbors and friends.

 

But where there's a one-to-one-to-one correspondence between the Chinese character set, the local dialect, and Mandarin, there is not much incentive to use the local dialect.

 

I read an article that I can't find right now about how an iPhone app was designed to "preserve" the local apps by being able to translate from one to another, but I expect that it simply takes advantage of the one-to-one-to-one correspondence to convert one Chinese word at a time. That would only serve to illustrate why the local dialects are dying.

 

Even Cantonese, at least in China. Overseas, Cantonese is usually all you'll hear in the Chinatowns.

 

From GoldThread

 

The activist fighting to keep Cantonese alive in its homeland

He Huifeng

OCT 29, 2018

Some grandchildren have reportedly refused to speak in Cantonese with grandparents who can only communicate in it, while young parents often switch between Cantonese and Mandarin when talking with their children.

“It’s a pity, but it’s necessary because most kids nowadays don’t like speaking Cantonese even though they were born here and are growing up here,” says Luo Bihua, the mother of an 8-year-old boy. “The schools and government have been discouraging Cantonese in the community for a long time.”Lao says the reasons for Cantonese’s marginalization are complex and linked to political and economic changes over the past decade.

. . .

From the early 1990s to late 2000s, millions of migrant workers flocked to Guangdong from Mandarin-speaking provinces.

The new arrivals were keen to learn Cantonese, viewing fluency as a way to get ahead in business. Films and television shows from Hong Kong became popular as a result.

“At that time, speaking Cantonese made us feel more international and that we had more in common with international cities like Hong Kong or New York than with people from the hinterlands who could usually only speak Mandarin,” says Jade Xu, a 36-year-old teacher in Shenzhen, a city just north of Hong Kong.

But economic development in other regions of China has made Cantonese less influential and necessary for business.

The Chinese government has been keen on making Mandarin the primary medium of instruction in schools.

Last year, the Ministry of Education and State Language Commission said they wanted 80 percent of China’s population to be able to speak Mandarin by 2020.

As of 2015, about 73 percent of Chinese people could speak Mandarin, up from 53 percent in 2000, according to official statistics.

 

 

[Allon]

19 languages and 54 dialects. The study of language in China is fascinating to me. My first major was philosophy and concentration in language/logic. I still love it.

 

The stuff you posted is not dry at all to me. And many thanks for it.

 

If you have heard Mao speak (Hunan) and know anything of Mandarin as is taught in the north (Beijing, Shenyang), you would cringe at how he sounds. My wife does. But I smile. There are so many nuances to people who speak in China and so many different sounds. I think of how the Silk Road made it all happen.

 

When my wife went to Guangzhou for her interview she could not wait to get out. She felt like an alien to another planet. She is from Liaoning, old Manchuria, and strictly Mandarin.