[lg policy] "In Chinatown, Sound of the Future is Mandarin" (NYT)

[Harold Schiffman]

All,

I have forwarded this discussion to Victor Mair, here at Penn.  From what I
have experienced over the years (e.g. by serving on Ph.D. committees with
Victor and others from East Asian Lgs.), it is my impression that Cantonese and
Putonghua are indeed not mutually intelligible, but that Chinese dialects
(topolects, whatever) are treated as "dialects" of one language merely
because they use one writing system (which isn't "phonetic").  But we'll see
what Victor has to say.

That this article might contain a grain of truth is the reason I
distributed it in
the first place. I.e. it's not just some "dumb" journalist writing...

HS

2009/10/23 Slavomír Čéplö <bulbulthegreat at gmail.com>:
> Damien,
>
> in my mind, this is a question of taxonomy and the politics involved.
> China is a perfect example of what Weinreich meant in his famous
> bonmot about the difference between language and dialect. Most
> linguists recognize Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien and Wu as individual
> languages, members of the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan language
> family, much like, say German, Dutch, English and Swedish are
> individual languages and members of the Germanic branch of the
> Indo-European language family. To the PRC government, however, there
> is only one Chinese nation and therefore one Chinese language. All the
> Sinitic languages that are not pǔtōnghuà (standard Mandarin) are
> referred to as fāngyán. That word is usually translated as "dialect",
> but some scholars (notably Victor Mair, see his
> http://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp029_chinese_dialect.pdf) prefer
> the more precise "topolect" or "regionalect" (so John DeFrancis in his
> "The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy"). When discussing purely
> linguistic questions (if there is such a thing), a scholar would be
> well advised to use the precise linguistic terminology. But pressing
> the issue can have political repercussion (see this comment by Victor
> Mair himself http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1211#comment-25161)
> and so while I would normally insist on correct terminology even from
> someone as sloppy and dumb as your average journalist, due to the
> complexity of the issues involved, not to mention the somewhat
> confusing terminology, I don't think there is anything that wrong with
> using the term "dialect" in referrence to one of the Sinitic languages
> such as Cantonese in a human-interest newspaper story.
>
> Yours,
>
> bulbul
>
> On Fri, Oct 23, 2009 at 11:21 AM, Damien Hall <djh514 at york.ac.uk> wrote:
>>> Question to the list members...Do you have some recommended sources that
>>> touch on the designation/conversation of Cantonese as a "dialect"?
>>>
>>> "In Chinatown, Sound of the Future is Mandarin"
>>
>> [...]
>>
>>> Cantonese, a dialect from southern China [...]
>>
>> I don't know the sociolinguistics of China particularly, but this just looks
>> to me like the writing of a journalist who doesn't know them either! There
>> is a tendency for people from more-or-less monolingual societies who are
>> confronted with countries with complex linguistic situations (ie more than
>> one variety spoken) to call the individual varieties 'dialects', maybe
>> because they feel that they must in some way be subdivisions of some larger
>> national 'language'. So, in this case, I imagine that the journalist
>> described Cantonese as a 'dialect' because they thought of it as a
>> subdivision of 'Chinese', which is a 'language' (quotes to mark off what the
>> journalist might have thought, not to call the terms into question
>> generally). In other words, this piece in the _NYT_ doesn't mark any general
>> designation of Cantonese as a 'dialect' - it's simply sloppy writing. I
>> might have expected better from the _NYT_, but even the great Homer nods
>> occasionally, I suppose.
>>
>> Does anyone else know different?
>>
>> Damien
>>
>> --
>> Damien Hall
>>
>> University of York
>> Department of Language and Linguistic Science
>> Heslington
>> YORK
>> YO10 5DD
>> UK
>>
>> Tel. (office) +44 (0)1904 432665
>>    (mobile) +44 (0)771 853 5634
>> Fax  +44 (0)1904 432673
>>
>> BORDERS AND IDENTITIES CONFERENCE, JAN 2010:
>> http://www.york.ac.uk/res/aiseb/bic2010/
>>
>> http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/lang/people/pages/hall.htm
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-- 
=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

 Harold F. Schiffman

Professor Emeritus of
 Dravidian Linguistics and Culture
Dept. of South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Phone:  (215) 898-7475
Fax:  (215) 573-2138

Email:  haroldfs at gmail.com
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/

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