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> For example, Cantonese pop music is often written in Mandarin, but sung in Cantonese, which means that each Mandarin character has a proper Cantonese pronunci

> For example, Cantonese pop music is often written in Mandarin, but sung in Cantonese, which means that each Mandarin character has a proper Cantonese pronunciation. I don't think that's quite correct. It is true that many older Cantonese pop songs were not written in Cantonese, but they were not written in Mandarin either; instead they were in what's called Written Vernacular Chinese (白話文)[1], which is based on a subset of Mandarin. As an example of the top of my head, 咱們 is a very common word in spoken Mandarin, but it is never used in formal documents (written vernacular), and a Cantonese only speaker would have trouble pronouncing it. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_vernacular_Chinese https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_vernacular_Chinese

dwohnitmok 9y ago
Oh man... there's a long way to go down this rabbit hole... Maybe I've lost touch with the current Canto-pop scene, but I seem to recall quite a lot of modern-ish Canto-pop (late 2000s) being written in Mandarin. 白话文 is sort of ill-defined. It really just means "vernacular written language" as opposed to Classical Chinese (文言文). There is a Yue vernacular (粤语白话文), Wu vernacular (吴语白话文), etc. There is also a Mandarin vernacular (which is what 白话文 usually refers to by itself in Mandarin) that you can further specify as 官话白话文 (although that term is getting quite specialized and not every native speaker is necessarily going to have heard of that), but that is exactly what it sounds like, the semi-formal written Mandarin vernacular. This is exactly the same situation as standard written English. While this is a restriction of "English" in some sense (does this include regional-specific terms such as "yous?"), it still is more or less equivalent to what most people think of when they think of "English." 咱们 is common in Northern dialects of Mandarin, but used to be a pretty strong marker for a Northern Chinese speaker. That's changed somewhat over time due to broadcast media and the primacy of some Northern Chinese accents, but you're still not going to hear a ton of older Southern Chinese speakers use 咱们 when speaking Mandarin (and when I mean south I mean essentially anyone from Jiangsu/Zhejiang on down) even if they speak pitch-perfect Standard Mandarin. They almost exclusively use 我们 instead (which is also valid Standard Mandarin, everywhere you would use 咱们 you could also use 我们 although not vice versa). I think this is the phenomenon you're picking up on, that a lot of Northern Chinese Mandarin terms don't show up in Southern Chinese Mandarin. More broadly, I think what you're pointing out is that "Mandarin" is really itself a fuzzy category that starts falling apart when you poke a its seams, but really that's just the nature of language. "English" starts falling apart when you poke too hard at its particular words as well. The central point about the embedding of Mandarin though is that it reads completely fluently to a Mandarin speaker. It's not a pidgin, it's not a situation where the Mandarin speaker can understand it in bits and pieces. It reads like anything a Mandarin speaker would have written.
- spacehunt 9y ago
  I totally agree with you that all these terms are ill-defined and falls apart once you "poke at its seams" as you put it. I think my point was that 1) the formal written form across various regions have slowly converged into roughly the same form over the past century or so; and 2) this "formal written form" might be based on Mandarin, and reads like everyday modern, spoken Mandarin, but is not exactly 100% Mandarin. For modern Cantopop, the recent putsch to match more closely to spoken Cantonese is due to an increasing dislike of Mandarin among the young in Hong Kong.
  - dwohnitmok 9y ago
    Ah, but therein lies the rub. What is "100% Mandarin?" :). Is it broadcast news Chinese? Which essentially is just the written vernacular standard just read out loud? Is it the Mandarin that a Northern shop-keeper uses to talk to (Chinese) out-of-towners? Is it the Mandarin that he uses among his friends? Is it the Mandarin that kids learn in public school curriculum? Once these questions start to be relevant, I'd say that it's all just "Mandarin" for the purposes of this discussion. Ooo... that's interesting. I knew that there's been a rise in regional dialect pride in general and that Hong Kong in general has never really been too fond of the Mandarin-speaking Chinese tourist masses, but hadn't realized it'd spread to modern Canto-pop. Might have to take a gander at some of the latest songs.
    - spacehunt 9y ago
      Indeed I should have been more careful and said "100% Beijingese" or "100% Mandarin as spoken around Beijing" instead. :)

dwohnitmok 9y ago

Oh man... there's a long way to go down this rabbit hole... Maybe I've lost touch with the current Canto-pop scene, but I seem to recall quite a lot of modern-ish Canto-pop (late 2000s) being written in Mandarin. 白话文 is sort of ill-defined. It really just means "vernacular written language" as opposed to Classical Chinese (文言文). There is a Yue vernacular (粤语白话文), Wu vernacular (吴语白话文), etc. There is also a Mandarin vernacular (which is what 白话文 usually refers to by itself in Mandarin) that you can further specify as 官话白话文 (although that term is getting quite specialized and not every native speaker is necessarily going to have heard of that), but that is exactly what it sounds like, the semi-formal written Mandarin vernacular. This is exactly the same situation as standard written English. While this is a restriction of "English" in some sense (does this include regional-specific terms such as "yous?"), it still is more or less equivalent to what most people think of when they think of "English." 咱们 is common in Northern dialects of Mandarin, but used to be a pretty strong marker for a Northern Chinese speaker. That's changed somewhat over time due to broadcast media and the primacy of some Northern Chinese accents, but you're still not going to hear a ton of older Southern Chinese speakers use 咱们 when speaking Mandarin (and when I mean south I mean essentially anyone from Jiangsu/Zhejiang on down) even if they speak pitch-perfect Standard Mandarin. They almost exclusively use 我们 instead (which is also valid Standard Mandarin, everywhere you would use 咱们 you could also use 我们 although not vice versa). I think this is the phenomenon you're picking up on, that a lot of Northern Chinese Mandarin terms don't show up in Southern Chinese Mandarin. More broadly, I think what you're pointing out is that "Mandarin" is really itself a fuzzy category that starts falling apart when you poke a its seams, but really that's just the nature of language. "English" starts falling apart when you poke too hard at its particular words as well. The central point about the embedding of Mandarin though is that it reads completely fluently to a Mandarin speaker. It's not a pidgin, it's not a situation where the Mandarin speaker can understand it in bits and pieces. It reads like anything a Mandarin speaker would have written.

spacehunt 9y ago
I totally agree with you that all these terms are ill-defined and falls apart once you "poke at its seams" as you put it. I think my point was that 1) the formal written form across various regions have slowly converged into roughly the same form over the past century or so; and 2) this "formal written form" might be based on Mandarin, and reads like everyday modern, spoken Mandarin, but is not exactly 100% Mandarin. For modern Cantopop, the recent putsch to match more closely to spoken Cantonese is due to an increasing dislike of Mandarin among the young in Hong Kong.
- dwohnitmok 9y ago
  Ah, but therein lies the rub. What is "100% Mandarin?" :). Is it broadcast news Chinese? Which essentially is just the written vernacular standard just read out loud? Is it the Mandarin that a Northern shop-keeper uses to talk to (Chinese) out-of-towners? Is it the Mandarin that he uses among his friends? Is it the Mandarin that kids learn in public school curriculum? Once these questions start to be relevant, I'd say that it's all just "Mandarin" for the purposes of this discussion. Ooo... that's interesting. I knew that there's been a rise in regional dialect pride in general and that Hong Kong in general has never really been too fond of the Mandarin-speaking Chinese tourist masses, but hadn't realized it'd spread to modern Canto-pop. Might have to take a gander at some of the latest songs.
  - spacehunt 9y ago
    Indeed I should have been more careful and said "100% Beijingese" or "100% Mandarin as spoken around Beijing" instead. :)