just what is it about written Chinese anyway? (was: Celtic influence)

[Steven Schaufele]

JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:

> -- many Chinese "dialects" are actually separate languages, as distinct
> as Spanish and French.  I've personally seen Mandarin and Cantonese
> speakers try to communicate, give up, and drop into English instead.

> Of course, the _written_ Chinese language, being largely ideographic,
> was standard everywhere.  That's one reason why it's of limited value
> in reconstructing earlier stages of Chinese, of course, except for
> poetry.

> [ Moderator's note:
>   One for two:  The Chinese writing system is not ideographic, but
> logographic. This is a source of endless discussions on various
> newsgroups; the DejaNews search engine can aid anyone interested in
> following up on the point.

We're getting a little off subject (topic?) here, but just for the sake
of scholarly nit-picking i would note that even the Chinese written
language isn't as general as it is commonly cracked up to be.

One of my students, in her term paper last semester, raised the issue of
the claim that written Chinese is equally intelligible to all literate
Chinese people, but then noted that she, a native speaker of Mandarin
and Taiwanese and about as well-educated as one can reasonably expect of
a university undergraduate, found herself unable to read a Cantonese
newspaper printed in Hong Kong.  When i asked her for further
particulars, she said that (1) there were characters in the text that
she didn't recognize at all and, more importantly (2) there were a lot
of sentences in which she could recognize each individual character but
the combinations made no sense to her as a Mandarin-speaker.  From which
she concluded that the grammar of Cantonese was sufficiently different
from that of Mandarin that the writers/editors of the newspaper were
combining the morphemes she recognized in ways that would have been
impossible in Mandarin.

For what it's worth ...

Steven
--
Steven Schaufele, Ph.D., Asst. Prof. of Linguistics, English Department
Soochow University, Waishuanghsi Campus, Taipei 11102, Taiwan, ROC
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