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"chinese" isn't one language. It's a set of many languages which share some grammar and a common logographic script I don't think that's true for any chinese l

"chinese" isn't one language. It's a set of many languages which share some grammar and a common logographic script I don't think that's true for any chinese languages other than mandarin and cantonese. I've been in Taiwan for the past few weeks and dipped my toes into Hokkien/Taiwanese/Souther Min, and the situation there is fascinating. In every day normal situations it's never written, if two native hokkien speakers want to send an email or text it will be done in mandarin. In the rare occasion Hokkien is written, it will be done haphazardly. Sometimes you'll choose a mandarin character that kind of means the same thing as a hokkien morpheme, and sometimes they'll choose the mandarin character that kind of sounds the same the same as a hokkien morpheme. Native speakers will be able to read this, but often struggle. I have read that people used to be able to write Hokkien in characters, but that's lost now. I'm confidently told by native speakers today that the language has no written component (沒有文字). There's romanisation system that seems to be able to represent every sound prefectly, and more has actually been written in romanised hokkien than by any other methods, but Taiwanese people have a bit of a phobia of the latin alphabet, and no one uses it.

Cyph0n 9y ago
So it's similar to the regional forms of Arabic in the Middle East. People will speak with each other using a dialect, but all official and educational writing is in standard Arabic. When people chat informally (e.g. on WhatsApp), they would typically use Arabic characters to build words that can usually only be understood by speakers familiar with the dialect in question.
- HumanDrivenDev 9y ago
  The different chinese languages don't seem to be dialects in any objective sense. I have no idea how it started being called that in english (bad translation of 語/話 maybe?), but Hokkien and Mandarin seem about as different from each other as English and French, maybe more. No mutual intelligibility. What's the case with Arabic dialects? I am completely ignorant there. And that's the thing, they use characters when they have to write it, but even then native speakers struggle to read it because there's no commonly used standard way to do it. In practice, they just write in mandarin.
  - Cyph0n 9y ago
    > What's the case with Arabic dialects? I am completely ignorant there. I call them dialects for lack of a better word. For example, an Algerian Arabic speaker would not be understood by an Egyptian, and a Kuwaiti Arabic speaker would not be understood by a Syrian, etc. Regional dialects may have an accent, but more importantly use different words and may even have different, informal grammatical rules. When it comes to writing, everyone uses Arabic letters, but each region may write different words depending on the regional dialect. The entry on Tunisian Arabic[1], which is my native dialect, may provide an idea on how it differs from other dialects. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunisian_Arabic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunisian_Arabic
- Manishearth 9y ago
  The different Chinese languages are not dialects.
  - Cyph0n 9y ago
    Dialects may be the wrong term, but it's the term I use. Read the first two paragraphs for a better idea of what I'm talking about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Arabic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Arabic
    - Manishearth 9y ago
      The differences between Chinese languages are often more than the differences between Romance languages. But yeah, it's similar to the Arabic situation, but the scale may be different.
Manishearth 9y ago
Yeah, I misspoke; I should have said "where some share a common logographic script". But I'm actually unclear about this. The weird thing is that certain dictionaries give pronunciations of hanzi in multiple Chinese languages (e.g. Wiktionary) including "scriptless" languages. I've also seen cases in Taiwan where e.g. a restaurant name or place name is written in hanzi and English and the romanization is clearly not using the standard Mandarin pronunciation of the term. An example of this is 淡水 which is romanized "tamsui" in Taiwan but would be "danshui" in pinyin or "tanshui" in Wade-Giles. Syllables ending with "m" are not a thing in Mandarin as far as I know, and 水 is never romanized as "sui" (though I could chalk the 水 one up to an alternate local romanization system like POJ, which I don't know anything about). Finally, I've also seen text in Taiwan with four-bopomofo ruby. From my understanding of bopomofo; for Mandarin you won't have more than three glyphs plus a tone mark -- the initial consonant, optional medial i/u, and optional final. This also gives me the impression that Min Nan can be written in hanzi. Unless Taiwanese Mandarin differs from Mandarin significantly in pronunciation (which may be the case, I don't know). All this leads me to believe that other Chinese languages can use hanzi, but do so less often, perhaps? This is something I've always been confused about but never really looked into it.
- HumanDrivenDev 9y ago
  You're bang on the money: Tamsui is a romanisation of the hokkien name, not the mandarin one. There's a few other non-mando names floating around, like Taroko (an aboriginal language). I have a Taiwanese book for school children that includes the governments romanisation, hanzi, and some kind of extended bopomofo. While the native speaker I was learning with could read hokkien-with-characters, he couldn't do it quickly, and often had to puzzle over a certain character. In cases where they had both characters and romanisation I was able to help him on the characters he was stuck on by (badly) pronouncing the romanisation. Still, I haven't met any Taiwanese hokkien speakers at all interested in romanisation. Which is a shame - it covers all the sounds, and the language does seem to be slowly dying (the fact people don't write it probably has a lot to do with it).
  - Manishearth 9y ago

Cyph0n 9y ago

So it's similar to the regional forms of Arabic in the Middle East. People will speak with each other using a dialect, but all official and educational writing is in standard Arabic. When people chat informally (e.g. on WhatsApp), they would typically use Arabic characters to build words that can usually only be understood by speakers familiar with the dialect in question.

HumanDrivenDev 9y ago
The different chinese languages don't seem to be dialects in any objective sense. I have no idea how it started being called that in english (bad translation of 語/話 maybe?), but Hokkien and Mandarin seem about as different from each other as English and French, maybe more. No mutual intelligibility. What's the case with Arabic dialects? I am completely ignorant there. And that's the thing, they use characters when they have to write it, but even then native speakers struggle to read it because there's no commonly used standard way to do it. In practice, they just write in mandarin.
- Cyph0n 9y ago
  > What's the case with Arabic dialects? I am completely ignorant there. I call them dialects for lack of a better word. For example, an Algerian Arabic speaker would not be understood by an Egyptian, and a Kuwaiti Arabic speaker would not be understood by a Syrian, etc. Regional dialects may have an accent, but more importantly use different words and may even have different, informal grammatical rules. When it comes to writing, everyone uses Arabic letters, but each region may write different words depending on the regional dialect. The entry on Tunisian Arabic[1], which is my native dialect, may provide an idea on how it differs from other dialects. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunisian_Arabic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunisian_Arabic
Manishearth 9y ago
The different Chinese languages are not dialects.
- Cyph0n 9y ago
  Dialects may be the wrong term, but it's the term I use. Read the first two paragraphs for a better idea of what I'm talking about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Arabic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Arabic
  - Manishearth 9y ago
    The differences between Chinese languages are often more than the differences between Romance languages. But yeah, it's similar to the Arabic situation, but the scale may be different.

Manishearth 9y ago

Yeah, I misspoke; I should have said "where some share a common logographic script". But I'm actually unclear about this. The weird thing is that certain dictionaries give pronunciations of hanzi in multiple Chinese languages (e.g. Wiktionary) including "scriptless" languages. I've also seen cases in Taiwan where e.g. a restaurant name or place name is written in hanzi and English and the romanization is clearly not using the standard Mandarin pronunciation of the term. An example of this is 淡水 which is romanized "tamsui" in Taiwan but would be "danshui" in pinyin or "tanshui" in Wade-Giles. Syllables ending with "m" are not a thing in Mandarin as far as I know, and 水 is never romanized as "sui" (though I could chalk the 水 one up to an alternate local romanization system like POJ, which I don't know anything about). Finally, I've also seen text in Taiwan with four-bopomofo ruby. From my understanding of bopomofo; for Mandarin you won't have more than three glyphs plus a tone mark -- the initial consonant, optional medial i/u, and optional final. This also gives me the impression that Min Nan can be written in hanzi. Unless Taiwanese Mandarin differs from Mandarin significantly in pronunciation (which may be the case, I don't know). All this leads me to believe that other Chinese languages can use hanzi, but do so less often, perhaps? This is something I've always been confused about but never really looked into it.

HumanDrivenDev 9y ago
You're bang on the money: Tamsui is a romanisation of the hokkien name, not the mandarin one. There's a few other non-mando names floating around, like Taroko (an aboriginal language). I have a Taiwanese book for school children that includes the governments romanisation, hanzi, and some kind of extended bopomofo. While the native speaker I was learning with could read hokkien-with-characters, he couldn't do it quickly, and often had to puzzle over a certain character. In cases where they had both characters and romanisation I was able to help him on the characters he was stuck on by (badly) pronouncing the romanisation. Still, I haven't met any Taiwanese hokkien speakers at all interested in romanisation. Which is a shame - it covers all the sounds, and the language does seem to be slowly dying (the fact people don't write it probably has a lot to do with it).
- Manishearth 9y ago