[AGL] Re: "There is no Chinese language"?

[Bill Irwin]

Jon:
Where did you get the article?  It's a font of misinformation.  There are a
lot of dialects spoken in China, it must run into the hundreds.  Not only
are there a lot of different dialects spoken they are also all mixed up
geographically.  One town could be speaking one language and the neighboring
town another language and the next town down the road could be speaking an
entirely different language.  This situation came about because over the
centuries population groups have been moved from one place to another.  So
in Yunnan, probably the most diverse province in terms of language, you can
find one village speaking Tibetan, the next village speaking Mandarin, the
next speaking Cantonese, and the next village speaking a tribal minority
language, and so on.  I recently saw a story in a major American paper that
claimed that only 50% of the Chinese speak Mandarin.    I think the story is
in error and it meant to say that about 50% of the Chinese use Mandarin as
their native language.  Putonghua translated just means "the common
language".  Most people in China can speak Mandarin or at least understand
it enough to get by.  Even though there are many languages spoken the
characters remain the same so most people can read the same book and
understand it.  Many Chinese TV programs are subtitled with Chinese
characters as are Chinese movies.  Chinese money has the denomination
printed in 5 different writing systems, I have never been able to figure out
what the 5 are and any Chinese person I have asked about this don't know
either.  Throughout China there is a system of hand signs for the numbers so
that anybody can bargain in the market using hand signs, if you travel to
China it would be helpful to know this sign language.  It is also incorrect
to say that Mandarin is based on the Beijing dialect.  That is like saying
that English is based on the southern drawl dialect.  Beijing does have a
distinct accent as do other parts of China.  There is also a standard
Mandarin accent much like there is a standard American pronunciation.  Today
Mandarin is the standard language taut in schools except in minority areas
where the instruction may be done in the minority language (China has a lot
of laws and rules to preserve minority cultures).  Another error in the
article you cited is the Han people (Chinese) are much less than 92% of the
population.  Chinese characters are called han zi - "Chinese characters".
My wife can speak 3 Chinese languages - Mandarin, Cantonese, and Hainan
dialect (Hainan, an island of the south coast of China, her father's family
came from there) but she can't translate any Chinese dialect to English.
Ewie

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jon Ford" <jonmfordster at hotmail.com>
To: <austin-ghetto-list at pairlist.net>
Sent: Saturday, May 06, 2006 7:52 AM
Subject: [AGL] Re: "There is no Chinese language"?


> Harry claims there is no Chinese language per se. Here's some more precise
> information about the two major types and dialects of Chinese. Basically,
> everybody in China learns Mandarin, the official national language, and
> everyone uses the same basic writing system with characters. So they can
> communicate across regional borders (sort of):
> Jon
>
> Chinese Dialects
> >>From Jun Shan,
> Your Guide to China Online.
>
> There are many Chinese dialects in China. It is hard to guess how many
> dialects exist, but they can be roughly classified into one of the seven
> large groups, i.e., Putonghua (Mandarin), Gan, Kejia (Hakka), Min, Wu,
Xiang
> and Yue (Cantonese). Each language group contains a large number of
> dialects. These are the Chinese languages spoken mostly by the Han people,
> which represents about 92 percent of the total population. We will not get
> into the non-Chinese languages spoken by the minorities here, such as
> Tibetan, Mongolian and Miao.
>
> The dialects from the seven groups are quite different. For example, a
> Mandarin speaker in northern China usually understands little Cantonese,
but
> a non-Mandarin speaker usually can speak some Mandarin with a strong
accent.
>
>
> This is largely because Mandarin has been the official national language
> since 1913. Mandarin or Putonghua is mainly based on the Beijing dialect.
> Despite the large differences among Chinese dialects, there is one thing
in
> common for them -- they all share the same writing system based on Chinese
> characters.
>
> A distinguishing feature of the Chinese languages is tonal. Mandarin has
> four tones and Cantonese has more than four tones.
>
>
>
>