Chinese language

Vytenis   Thursday, February 10, 2005, 21:25 GMT
So we can be right in assuming the Mandarin is accepted lingua franca for all educated Chinese worldwide? Just like Classical Arabic is for arabs from different countries and dialects?
ke   Thursday, February 10, 2005, 21:39 GMT
You are right. However, it's not necessary to be educated if you wanna learn Mandarin. Mandarin is much easier to learn compared to other dialects of Chinese. Actually Cantonese has a great deal of amount of speaking population as well. In Chinatowns in the US, Canada and Aussie, you can possibly hear both Mandarin and Cantonese. Cantonese is likely to be the last Chinese dialect alive before Mandarin actually becomes the only Chinese spoken language in the entire world.
Ved   Thursday, February 10, 2005, 22:48 GMT
"Lighten up Ke, you are not going to dictate to people what to think and say although I know that is the habit in China."


This was very low. It implies that the Chinese somehow like, naturally evoke and most certainly deserve their authoritarian government. Bollocks.
Steve K   Friday, February 11, 2005, 04:12 GMT
Ke and Ved

This is not the first time I have had Chinese people tell me that the terms Peking or Canton were not acceptable. Unfortunately there is a conformism of thought in China today and a presumption to tell people what to think on everything that relates to China from Taiwan to Tibet to what to call their cities, to their oft stated but historically irrelevant claim to 5000 years of history etc. all of which I am allergic to.

This attitude is also prevalent amongst overseas Chinese. I sat down to dinner with a Chinese group the other day when an educated man
( Traditional Chinese Doctor) told me that using chopsticks makes you more intelligent, and that China's greatest contribution to the world was Chinese food and Chinese medicine! (forget paper, printing, and the compass).

Beiping means Northern Plains or Northern Flats which was what the Kuomintang called it when Nanking or Nanjing, if your prefer, was the Capital of China. To call Peking Beiping has definite political overtones and is disrepectful to the government and people who live there now, and is inaccurate. The term Peking has none of these problems.

Ke as for your other bits of wisdom, Korea is known as Hanguk in Korea Hanguo in Chinese which therefore is a better reflection of what the Koreans call their country today. The term Korea comes from the ancient Koryo kingdom but has been accepted by the Koreans as the official foreign term for their country just like the term China is for Zhongguo.

Seoul was known as Hancheng in Chinese until very recently, and this was a throw back to Imperial times. So for the Chinese to call the place Seoul or the equivalent in Chinese characters is long overdue. To call it Hancheng was arrogant and in a way the equivalent of calling Peking "Beiping".
evilnerd   Friday, February 11, 2005, 16:53 GMT
To Vytenis:
«what language do the Chinese people from Beijing, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand, Malaisia, USA and other Chinese communities use if they meet together?»

They are likely to use a piece of paper, a pen, and write Chinese :-)
I've actually witnessed that in China between people who did not speak the same 'dialect'.

the evil nerd
nishishei   Saturday, February 12, 2005, 22:24 GMT
Shanghainese is a Wu Chinese dialect, which has a very different tonal system from Mandarin, Cantonese, Taiwanese, Thai, etc.

There is no definite tone in Shanghainese, the same character can be pronounced with high pitch or low pitch depending on the word it is in. It is really really similar to the Japanese pitch accent system.

[img]http://zanhe.com/accent.gif[/img]
nishishei   Saturday, February 12, 2005, 22:27 GMT
Ed   Sunday, February 13, 2005, 03:52 GMT
I've been told by a Shanghainese person that almost everybpdy in China speaks Mandarin, even those who also speak Cantonese.
nishishei   Sunday, February 13, 2005, 04:12 GMT
And most Europeans speak English too.
Steve K   Sunday, February 13, 2005, 05:02 GMT
Nishishei,

Are you Shanghainese? If not I will take your comments about Shanghainess with a pinch of salt.

Similarly, only a minority of continental Europeans speak English well even in the major cities of Germany, France, Spain, Italy and eslewhere other than Scandinavia and the Benelux. On the othe hand the majority of city dwellers in China speak Mandarin well enough to carry on a conversation. There is no relationship between the position of English in Europe and Mandarin in China.
Mr. Wu   Sunday, February 13, 2005, 05:33 GMT
I come from China, and so let me try to answer your questions.

May I point out a misatke in what Vytenis says, please? Since both Hong Kong and Taiwan belong to the People's Republic of China, I suggest that it be "...Taiwan and Hong kong use traditional characters which are unintelligible to the MAINLAND residents..."
Actually, however, people in mainland China have almost no difficulty reading the traditional characters used in Hongkong, Macao and Taiwan, and vice versa.

It's true that there are different languages spoken in China because the Chinese nation includes more than 50 national minorities besides the Hans and different minority areas use different languages. So Mandarin Chinese is actually ONE OF THE MANY languages spoken in China. In fact, people in the Tibet Autonomous Region and the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region have their own spoken and written languages, which people in central and eastern China can't speak or read or undersatnd at all.

To be exact, the so-called Mandarin is known as Han Yu (which means the Han Language) in China, because it used to be spoken exclusively by the Hans in ancient times. Nowadays Han Yu is taught in schools as Common Spoken Chinese (known as Pu Tong Hua in China) throughout the country, including minority areas such as Tibet and Inner Mongolia, but one should be aware that the central government in Beijing attaches great importance to minority languages. For example, both Han Yu and the Tibetan language can be seen on RMB notes.

What may seem confusing is that Han Yu (known as Mandarin Chinese for most foreigners) has many, say hundreds of, dialects. I have to say that in China dialect differs from region to region, person to person although they all speak the same language.
The dialect spoken on national television in China is Common Spoken Chinese, which is a STANDARD DIALECT of Han Yu based on the Beijing dialect, just like BBC English in the U.K. and Mid-western Standard in the U.S.

As I mentioned above, there may be hundreds of dialects of Han Yu, but they use the SAME written language, known as the Chinese characters. The difference lies in pronunciation and slangs ONLY!
It is a common phenomenon in China that people in different parts have great difficulty understanding each other if they talk in their own dialects which differ a lot. For instance, people from Shanghai speak the Shanghai Dialect which is rather difficult for people from Beijing. And people from Wuhan (the largest city in central China) can't understand Cantonese spoken in South China.

It even surprises us Chinese that sometimes two men from the same province may have difficulty understading each other due to difference in pronunciation (if they don't speak Common Spoken Chinese).
Let me make an analogy so that you can see how great such difference can be. When one speaks "guide many", he may mean "good morning." And when one wants to say," I can help you", he might pronounce "Ah con hope yeah."
But the fact is that most Chinese can at least understand Common Spoken Chinese, which is taught in schools and used in TV and radio programs throughout the conutry. So when people from different places get together, they speak Common Spoken Chinese (though with some accent). And that's why Common Spoken Chinese is so important in China.
Mr. Wu   Sunday, February 13, 2005, 05:53 GMT
1. Mandarin Chinese is only one of the many languages spoken in PRC because the Chinese nation includes more than 50 national minorities besides the Hans and different minority areas use different languages.
2. Mandarin Chinese (known as Han Yu in China) has a great number of dialects. The dialect taught in schools thoughout the conutry and used on national TV is Common Spoken Chinese (known as Pu Tong Hua in China)
3. Most people in mainland China can speak Common Spoken Chinese though with some accent, and that is the dialect they use to communicate IN MOST CASES. If one has the opportunity to meet people from different places in China, he has to master Common Spoken Chinese. One exception is that in the early 1990s, many people in mainland China learned to speak Cantonese, because they wanted to do business with people from Guangdong Province and Hong kong.
Mr. Wu   Sunday, February 13, 2005, 06:14 GMT
Personally, I think it's Okay if people prefer to say Peking, Nanking and Canton, although these names are indeed a little bit out-dated.

As we can see, the official names of the two best Chinese universities are Peking University and Tsinghua University, but not Beijing University and Qinghua Univeristy.
So we don't have to tell people to change their own habits of addressing Chinese cities as long as the names they use are not offending.

Any habit or custom takes time to change, but won't change at the moment people are told to change.

Any way, I think it's Okay...
nishishei   Sunday, February 13, 2005, 07:00 GMT
>>>&#12288;Are you Shanghainese? <<

You bet.



>>> Similarly, only a minority of continental Europeans speak English well even in the major cities of Germany, France, Spain, Italy and eslewhere other than Scandinavia and the Benelux. On the othe hand the majority of city dwellers in China speak Mandarin well enough to carry on a conversation. There is no relationship between the position of English in Europe and Mandarin in China. <<<

My comment was a tongue in cheek response to Ed's statement of the obvious. Of course most Chinese CAN speak Mandarin, it has been the official common language of China since the Republican era, and strongly enforced since the 70's. Whereas English has no such official position in the EU. In fact, Chinese dialects (with the exception of Cantonese and Taiwanese, guess why) are banned in schools, in newspapers, and *strongly* discouraged from broadcasting.
nishishei   Sunday, February 13, 2005, 07:18 GMT
>> Mr. Wu wrote: To be exact, the so-called Mandarin is known as Han Yu (which means the Han Language) in China, because it used to be spoken exclusively by the Hans in ancient times. <<

Mandarin didn't exist during the Han Dynasty, but formed nearly half a millennium afterwards. Proto-Mandarin, also called Han'er, has STRONG northern nomadic influences. Cantonese is in no way a dialect of Mandarin, although both are more closely related than to either Taiwanese or Wu (Shanghainese). Hanyu doesn't refer to just Mandarin, as Mandarin is just one subset of Hanyu (like French is a Romance language).



>>As I mentioned above, there may be hundreds of dialects of Han Yu, but they use the SAME written language, known as the Chinese characters. The difference lies in pronunciation and slangs ONLY!
It is a common phenomenon in China that people in different parts have great difficulty understanding each other if they talk in their own dialects which differ a lot. For instance, people from Shanghai speak the Shanghai Dialect which is rather difficult for people from Beijing. And people from Wuhan (the largest city in central China) can't understand Cantonese spoken in South China. <<

No, the difference is also in the grammar and core vocabularies. In fact, Wu dialects (Shanghainese) only have 30% lexcial similarity with Mandarin; Taiwanese is even lower compared to Mandarin. This is lower than the difference between most European languages. The Chinese dialects won't have the same written language if they HAVE written languages. The current vernacular Chinese written language is based solely on Mandarin, not the other Chinese dialects. If I wrote a sentence in Taiwanese using Chinese characters, you would still not understand me (different word order, particle usages, aspects, moods, lexicon). It would be like reading Japanese; at the most you get an idea.



>>It even surprises us Chinese that sometimes two men from the same province may have difficulty understading each other <<

It shouldn't surprise you. The Chinese dialects are really languages, but forced into this dialect classification due to politics and nationalism. And you clearly have taken bait.