Talk:Mandarin Chinese

Singapore standardizes on Mandarin

I don't know enough about it to write myself, but the 'Speak Mandarin!' campaign in Singapore is an interesting example of language standardizing where the local dialect of Chinese was not Mandarin.

It is hard to standardize on a dialect. People in Hong Kong speak Cantonese. But when they got to know about 1997 a couple of decades ago, people started taking Mandarin classes on their own. Many grade schools and high schools started to include Mandarin as one of their subjects. It is now almost 20 years since the negotiations about China taking back Hong Kong in 1997, but Cantonese still is the dialect people speak in Hong Kong. However, many more people, especially the young and educated, now know Mandarin.

Why "Mandarin Chinese"? That makes no sense; this article should be either under "Mandarin" or under "Mandarin language". Mkweise 06:20 Mar 7, 2003 (UTC)

Fixed some items:

I'm using Mandarin Chinese because that's what it is usually called.

Mandarin Chinese uses the sounds of Beijing, but it's a mistake to say that it is based on Beijing dialect. Beijing dialect contains some non-standard vocabulary.

P0M:Being "based on" something is different from being (nearly) "identical with" something. The explanation I have heard is that the Ministry of Education back in the 1920s had to decide on a single standard pronunciation so that a dictionary and other educational materials could be prepared for use as the language of education throughout China. They decided to use the Chinese regional language (fang1 yan2) with the greatest geographical scope. At that time, that regional language was called "guan1 hua4", or "language of the officials" because that was the regional language that had been used to conduct official business in the imperial court. However, deciding to use that regional language did not end the process because its area reaches from Manchuria in the north-eastern part of China to Yun Nan in the south-western part of China, and there are dialect differences as great as the dialect differences among varieties of English within that area.

P0M:As I understand it, the mother tongue of most people who live in Yun Nan is a dialect of the same language that includes the mother tongue of most people who live in Beijing. I can understand educated speakers from Beijing well, but I could not understand anything said to me in the dialect of Yun Nan -- until somebody repeated it in the Beijing dialect. Then it became clear that if I learned the regularities of phonetic drift (like British "med-cine" vs. U.S. "med-i-cine" or "al-u-min-i-um" vs. "a-loom-i-num") I would easily be able to deal with Yun Nan dialect without much trouble. I would face the same problem if I moved to the outback of Australia, and the time-frame for adapting to all the changes would probably be similar -- a matter of weeks or months. Learning to speak the regional language called Taiwanese, however, would not be a matter of months for me but a matter of years.

P0M: The educational planners originally tried for a kind of compromise pronunciation but fairly rapidly backpedaled to a version of the Beijing dialect that had been shorn of most of its regional quirks. (For instance, Beijing speakers will say something that sounds like "meer gha" (I believe that is a compressed form of "ming2 ri4 ge") for "tomorrow.")

P0M: With the rise to power of the CCP, there appears to have been a reaction against "elitism", and educational authorities were more permissive in regard to regionalisms -- or perhaps they were simply more candid about what passed for "the single language of instruction" in schools whose teachers frequently retained much of their regional accents. At least in the 60s in Taiwan, it was fairly rare for teachers to have a standard pronunciation. But there was at that time strong offical emphasis on raising the level of adherance to the standard pronunciation as defined in the 1920s Guo2 Yu3 Ci2 Dian3 and other educational materials based on that standard.

P0M: Theory and politics aside, comparison of dictionaries produced in mainland China and on Taiwan will show few differences in pronunciation, and most of those differences will be differences in tones. For instance, xing1 qi1 san1 vs. xing1 qi2 san1 for "Wednesday," differs solely in the tone indicated for "qi".

Pekingese is not wades-giles.

P0M: Wade was one person, and Giles another. The "Wade-Giles" mentioned above is a system of romanization. In Giles's dictionary (1892), he gives honor of place to the pronunciation of Beijing in his own system of romanization -- but he also gives detailed records of the pronunciations used in other regional languages. The Chinese-English dictionary produced by Mathews (1931), however, is rather difficult to use because it does not adhere to the same standard of pronunciation as used by Giles. The pronunciations given by Giles are almost always exactly what one will find in modern dictionaries of "Mandarin." Not so for Mathews Chinese-English Dictionary.

Mandarin Chinese has not been the official language of China for centuries. Mandarin was only made the official language in the 1920's, and before then one could argue that the official language of China was classical Chinese.

P0M: China did not have an official language of instruction during imperial times because there was no universal system of compulsory education such as now exists in the U.S., in China, in Taiwan... However, there was a de facto standard language, "guan1 hua4" because an official from Guang1 Dong1 could not expect the Emperor or his ministers to learn Cantonese to save the official the trouble of learning what was spoken at court. If you wanted to conduct business at court you needed to be able to speak the language of the people in power there.

P0M: Classical Chinese is not a spoken language. It is a written language, and anyone who speaks any regional Chinese language can read classical Chinese in their own regional pronunciation. To function in government, one had to be able to read and write classical Chinese. In fact, one could not even take an entry level civil service exam without being fluent in classical Chinese.

--- The pronunciation of Hanja in Korean and Kanji in Japanese are closer to Cantonese than Mandarin. Since Japanese and Korean adopted these Chinese writing long time ago, similar pronunciation in Japanese, Korean and Cantonese may reflect what ancient Chinese once sounded like, which may also imply ancient Chinese does not sound like today's Mandarin. Can some linguists and historians try to explain what happened to Mandarin?

P0M: I'm not a linguist, nor am I a historian, but I can try to pass along the gist of what I have learned. Both Japanese and Korean are as different from Chinese as Chinese is from English -- except that they each (in different ways) borrowed their writing systems from China. Not only that, they also borrowed a great deal of cultural and technological vocabulary items, and these borrowed items tended to retain their Chinese names. In the case of Japan, wholesale importation of Chinese vocabulary items happened more than once, so many time a Chinese character will have two different pronunciations in Japanese relating to the time and the place from which the vocabulary item in question was imported. (Because many Chinese vocabulary items are multi-character units, the same single character could get "imported" at different times in different compounds.) And very frequently the Chinese character will also have a pronunciation that relates solely to the native Japanese word for whatever the character represents. For instance, the word for "home" in Chinese (jia1) becomes used to write "uchi" (house) in Japanese.

P0M: Languages do not hold still. As time passes the pronunciations in any given region will change. So it is risky to argue from the pronunciations of today that they must have come from the region in China that now uses a similar pronunciation. For instance, in current Taiwanese the word for University is (roughly) pronounced "dai hak" and the Japanese for that term is "dai gaku", and that is just one example out of many. But linguists tell me that such terms were not imported from Taiwan or Fujian but from other parts of China, that the Taiwanese pronunciation must have changed over the intervening hundreds of years, etc., etc. So it gets extremely complicated, and non-experts are likely to get tricked.

Vote for Deletion?

This was the discussion when this page was proposed for deletion. The consensus was to keep the page or rename it

Mandarin language needs to be deleted, so that the article currently at Mandarin Language can be moved back there. (Someone had moved it to Mandarin (linguistics) for unknown reasons.) Mkweise 08:14, 22 Oct 2003 (UTC)
- Oppose; See the discussion at Talk:Hakka (linguistics). This was also announced at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (Chinese). Mandarin cannot be considered a "language", but rather a dialect of the Chinese language. We chose this format for all Chinese dialects to prevent taking sides on this issue. Please discuss before you move things next time. --Jiang 08:16, 22 Oct 2003 (UTC)
- I know nothing about it, but if Mandarin is not a language, should the article start by stating "Mandarin is the official language of..." - Marshman 09:08, 22 Oct 2003 (UTC)
  - It can be considered a language. See the points made by Patrick0Moran at Talk:Hakka (linguistics). The current naming convention is intended to be neutral. --Jiang 09:21, 22 Oct 2003 (UTC)
- Keep. As Jiang said. -- Jake 14:43, 24 Oct 2003 (UTC)
- This seems like a technical issue that needs more thought. -Nydigoveth
- Keep. We should definitely have an article on the language! Panochik 03:16, 28 Oct 2003 (UTC)

P0M: What is really needed is a "language tree" like the one inside the front cover of my Webster's New World Dictionary of the English Language -- something that would show the relations among the regional languages. That general approach is taken in Chinese linguistics books where one speaks not of "languages", "regional languages," or "dialects" but of "yu3 xi4" or "language family ties" (or something like that, it's a bit hard to translate on a word-for-word basis).

P0M: What would also be useful is a comparison of the "Chinese languages" to the "Romance languages". I don't know how one would quantify things, but my general sense is that Cantonese, Fukkienese, Shanghainese, etc. (sorry for using their old names) are about as far from each other as are Spanish, French, Italian, and so forth. Then for a discussion of the regional variations of Mandarin (AKA Guo2 Yu3, AKA pu3 tong1 hua4), it would be extremely useful to get some careful transliterations into IPA or something of the way the most incomprehensible (to me) speakers of Australian English and the most "correct and natural" (to me) speakers of English from somewhere around Des Moines, Iowa, say the same thing. Or perhaps a rich Cockney English compared to the gentle drawl of Georgia in byegone days would be instructive.

P0M: Ees zan Innuit, innit? ;-) Eye doughn wanna maykya giss! But tay. ;-)

Straying from subject.

Stuff about the Chinese language in general would belong in that article instead of this one. --Jia ng 07:56, 25 Dec 2003 (UTC)

P0M:I do not know anything about the history of the decision to speak of Chinese "dialects" within the Wikipedia community, but historically the decision to refer to Cantonese and other such major divisions as "dialects" was not one that promoted clarity on how the various forms of Chinese are related. I am still tinkering a bit with the maps that show the extend of Mandarin (or the 3 Mandarins), and with the chart that shows the "family tree" of the Chinese language(s). As a practical matter, it costs nothing to put links to these images in more than one place. When discussing how, e.g., Si4 chuan1 hua4 is related to the national language of instruction vs. how Cantonese is related t the national language of instruction, a glance at a map and a chart will probably do the general more good than a paragraph or two of explanation using terms that are muddy because they have been used to represent different meanings.

P0M: It is fairly clear that even though different authorities use different terms in Chinese to discuss the relations between the various kinds of Chinese, they are much clearer in their discussions than most of what has been written in English by people who have not experienced the similarities and differences for themselves. And within the Chinese community it is my impression that a great many people have a clear awareness that, e.g., Tai2 Wan1 hua4 is a little different from the version of Min2 nan2 hua4 spoken across the Straits of Taiwan, and that it is much more different from Hakka and from Guo2 yu3 (Pu3 tong1 hua4). But I suspect that it is rare among non-specialists to realize that Cantonese is closer to Mandarin than is Min2 nan2 hua4.

P0M: I had never heard of the Jin4 language until I started doing these maps and charts, and I think nobody had ever mentioned it to me as a meaningful variety of Chinese. In fact, I had to go back and modify a map to add it in, since the work I was basing my chart on seems to have regarded it as a variation of Mandarin -- despite the fact that it retains archaic elements such as the entering tone. So I think it may be useful to get the basic information down somewhere and then decide how best to discuss the similarities and differences in English.

That tree of languages is Chinese-general, not Mandarin-specific. Mandarin itself could have a tree of dialects. --Menchi (Talk)â 08:22, 27 Dec 2003 (UTC)

P0M: Right. My next job will be to add some "topiary" to the top of the tree. It is getting a bit crowded, so maybe I should "blow up" that part of the diagram and remove the rest of it to somewhere more suited to a discussion of the whole language.