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

[Al Haraka]

Harold,

Not mutually intelligible at all, coming from someone who failed to
learn either dialect/language when in country.  Former Chinese
students did tell me that when the communist government took power and
began regulating, there was a discussion of which dialect would be
that of government and education.  I was told the debate was actually
between Guangdonghua (Cantonese) and Putonghua (Mandarin), and that
the former was a serious contender because of its socioeconomic
prestige and its relative (excuse me, very relative) higher similarity
to classical Chinese varieties (what was meant there I am not really
sure, no one gave further elaboration in the anecdote).  Can anyone
with background in the subject elaborate?  Excuse me for the
generalization and errors, but I have been out of the loop on this
particular subject for a long, long time.

Best,
_AJS

On Fri, Oct 23, 2009 at 10:11 AM, Harold Schiffman <haroldfs at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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-- 
Alexander J. Stein
Cell:  (201) 412-9479
Email: alharaka at gmail.com
Skype: alexander.j.stein
AIM:   elduderino6886

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