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How to Forget Your Mother Tongue and Remember Your National Language (2005)
- forkLding 8y agoThe article is well-researched, however it misses several details of why people promote Mandarin so much. Mandarin has been promoted since imperial Chinese times because the emperors, their administration and all officials wanted to understand each other without translators, hence Mandarin or 官话 (language of the officials or "Mandarins") was used when you wanted to communicate properly to officials more senior or junior to you and it thus became prestigious by association. The reason why it is promoted so heavily to now and sometimes in a degrading manner towards local languages is so that Chinese people can actually communicate with each other even if they're not from the same region. If you can only speak a local language and not something like Mandarin or occasionally Cantonese, you're looked down because it is like a US person who can't speak English and only some incomprehensible "redneck" language (pardon my rudeness, just an example). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_Chinese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_Chinese
- throwaway12iii 8y agoYes, the genocide that is continuing now in the USA against the original people is very much like what is happening in China. Both are horrific and monstrous. The argument "Yeah but it's happening in the west" doesn't really work with thinking people.
- ithkuil 8y agoWhat you say is very practical but ignores a fundamental psychological trait of human behavior that is otherwise shaping the geopolitical landscape for centuries all around the world. There are plenty of small countries in the world, that differ from neighbours only on relatively minor cultural details and whose main identity trait lies in having its own language. Acknowledging the existence of the desire of self-determination and sovereignty and the link between language and ethnic identity can explain a lot, both about the desire to persevere in talking less "useful" languages and also about the efforts to repress their usage by large states (which acquired territories that are not historically culturally homogeneous)
- gpvos 8y agoThose are logical reasons, but to do that you don't need to suppress writing and education in the local language. There are enough countries where both the local and the national language are taught at school.
- avar 8y agoThere's even more countries that used to be part of a bigger nation or empire, but which split up largely by native language borders as their power waned. One way to view this sort of forced homogenization is as an insurance policy to that future eventuality.
- Karawebnetwork 8y agoI live in Québec, Canada and I can't agree enough. First we were a French colony called "Nouvelle-France", then a British colony known as "Province of Lower Canada". Now, it's a province of Canada. It has been recognized by the federal government that the Québécois form a nation within a united Canada (2006). The majority of the people here kept their language (French), the code of law (French civil laws) and the religion (Roman Catholic). Almost everyone speaks and writes English fluidly. The population is mostly bilingual. You do not need to suppress the local language and history of a region in order to live peacefully its population.
- yorwba 8y agoThere's the additional complication of the word "Mandarin" being derived from "Mǎndàrén" (满大人, i.e. Manchu lord) because it was the language used by the Manchu officials of the Qing dynasty to communicate with their Chinese subjects. But the Manchu used their own non-Sinitic language internally, and translating 官话 as "Mandarin" when it refers to the court language of prior dynasties is a weird reversal of time.
- unmole 8y agoAccording to Wikitionary: From Portuguese mandarim, mandarij, from Malay menteri, manteri, and its source, Sanskrit मन्त्रिन् (mantrin, “minister, councillor”), from मन्त्र (mantra, “counsel, maxim, mantra”) + -इन् (-in, an agent suffix). Chinese folk etymology sometimes falsely claims that the word originates from 滿大人 (Mǎndàrén, literally “Manchu important man”).
- yorwba 8y agoThanks for the correction. The Wiktionary article doesn't cite any sources, but the etymology sections are usually reliable, so I guess I'll trust it over my Chinese teacher.
- C1sc0cat 8y agoThat is an accent or a dialect
- smallnamespace 8y agoIt's difficult to write any regional Chinese language because for about two thousand years, the standard written form was Classical Chinese, which is about as close to spoken forms as Latin is to modern Romance languages. The only reason Mandarin is writable is because of a huge vernacular 白话 drive after '49. Cantonese is also writable, but is only really used for things like TV scripts, it isn't generally taught. Good luck trying to write Min (Taiwanese is a Min language), Shanghainese, or other language branches--you can write most of the vocabulary since it's almost always cognate to Mandarin or classical Chinese characters, but particles, pronouns, and other grammatical parts often have no standard character.
- gumby 8y ago> Cantonese is also writable, but is only really used for things like TV scripts, it isn't generally taught. Are you speaking of the PRC and ROC only? Or has this spread to HK and SG? I remember a big mandarin movement in SG in the 80s but have hardly been back since then, and when I was was mostly around Cantonese speakers.
- barry-cotter 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Singapore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Singapore > It can be observed that the percentage of the population which speaks English and Mandarin has increased, while the percentage of those who speak other Chinese varieties has collapsed and is now limited mainly to the elderly. More recently, English is starting to displace Mandarin among the new generation of Singapore Chinese due to long term effects of the dominant usage of English in most official settings over Mandarin, the dominant usage of English as the medium of instruction in Singapore schools, colleges and universities, and the limited and lower standards of local mother education system over the years in Singapore.
- jpatokal 8y agoCantonese is still dominant in Hong Kong, but Mandarin has long since taken over in Singapore in all official contexts and, increasingly, in the private sphere as well. Unlike comparatively homogenous HK, Singaporeans speak a whole slew of dialects (Hokkien/Minnan, Teochew, Hakka, Cantonese, etc) and Mandarin also serves as a unifying factor.
- gumby 8y agoThis explains an oddity from my mother who said she’d never seen a written hokien but found written Cantonese unremarkable. In parallel to the colonization of Taiwan by the RoC, in her case the language of government was English, but hardly anyone could speak or read it. She spoke none of the above at home, though could read and writer her mother tongue. But by her 70s only English was left.
- tpyi123 8y agopoorly disguised christian church propaganda to divide and conquer or is that embrace and extinguish a few years ago such articles would have been very puzzling as to why westerners get so worked up about another cultures success now it is apparent that non abrahamic cultures are treated as existential threats by some people who have the mission of confining them to history books and dead museums
- PakG1 8y agoI'm quite confident you actually didn't read the article....
- tpyi123 8y agoi did
- Apocryphon 8y agoThe article barely mentions religion, much less Abrahamic vs. non-Abrahamic ones.
- tpyi123 8y agocommon tactics obvious to people on the receiving end
- dang 8y agoPlease don't break the site guidelines by replying to egregious comments instead of flagging them and moving on. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Also, please don't do the "did you read the article" thing. It's a tedious trope that never adds value. That's in the guidelines too!
- pertymcpert 8y agoThis is from 2005...
- throwawy32434 8y ago(Greater) China atleast has mandarin. If you're to get anywhere in India, you're stuck with the old imperial tongue: English. Hindi, Tamil, Sanskrit and many others have roads that lead to little other than penury. Some independence this has been; it's not surprising that it took mindless brown-sepoys to fulfil the mandate of the colonial government. Sigh.
- tpyi123 8y agochange in india is slow but in the case of sanskrit revival is happening partly due to recent western desire to claim ownership of it and partly due to realization that it was once as widespread as syria to vietnam and gobi to bali actually even the the volga river name is considered to be derived from sanskrit
- selimthegrim 8y agoI’m gonna need a source for that Syria claim
- tpyi123 8y agoyou can look up the mitanni kingdom who worshipped vedic deities mentioned in treaties with pharaohs of egypt also the first known horse training manual by kikkuli of mitanni used sanskrit terms even though written in another language
- jcranmer 8y agoThis looks to be a standard Indian/Hindu nationalist historian revision practice. As conventional historians and anthropologists agree, Indo-Europeans originate as a nomadic pastoralist population from somewhere on the steppes around Ukraine and Kazakhstan. The major European branches of Celtic, Germanic, Italic, Balto-Slavic, Hellenic, and Anatolian (e.g. Hittite) spread into Europe, virtually extinguishing all the other existing languages (Basque is the only one to survive to the modern day). It's thought that this spread didn't involve any sort of violence of conquest. The Indo-Iranian (and Indo-Aryan subbranch underneath it) is generally understood to originate from Indo-European migrations across the steppes, which would eventually come to dominate the settled regions of modern Iran through modern India as the language of the rulers and, much more slowly, eventually the language of the commoners as well. The similarities between Vedic texts and Zoroastrianism also allows us to trace the development of Zoroastrianism and Hinduism from a common set of Indo-Iranian religious beliefs. The revisionism comes from those who do not want to believe that Hinduism arose from non-native Indian traditions. For these people, Indo-Aryans are indigenous Indian people, perhaps a continuation of the Harappan civilization. And so Indo-Aryan is Sanskrit is Vedic is Hindu is Indian, and the discovery of a culture in Syria that may have a ruling Indo-Aryan population (I should note that recent scholarship tends to believe that it did not) is therefore evidence of a commonality of culture as distant as Syria that originated in India.
- petecox 8y agoThe fangyan/topolect distinction reminds me of Italy. The Tuscan language of the renaissance and Dante was deemed "Italian" following unification in the mid 19th century. Yet the regional topolects of Italy derive not from a unified standard Italian but dating back two millennia to the time of Caesar. Here in Australia, children will learn standard Italian as a foreign language, if only to communicate with their grandparents speaking a fossilized 1940-50s "dialect" from the villages they fled post the war, with an implied stigma that said octogenarians aren't speaking 'properly'. Here's an interesting clip sampling regional Italian languages: [0] This article was written last decade, before the age of the ubiquitous smartphone in which the Latin alphabet is used to suggest Chinese characters [1]. Perhaps then a new application of Taiwanese 'church romanization' emerges, with character suggestions specific to that romanization - though not if the prevailing low prestige of fangyan languages remains. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEEPyE-nR58 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEEPyE-nR58 [1] http://pinpinchinese.com/blog/how-to-type-chinese-with-pinyin-android/ http://pinpinchinese.com/blog/how-to-type-chinese-with-pinyi...
- billfruit 8y agoHasn't something like that happened with French and France, whereby a multicultural nation was politically engineered into a monoculture.
- rockinghigh 8y agoYes, it did. Local dialects were banned in school and at home in favor of “French” in the early 1900s. It was successful in that almost no one speaks the local dialects anymore. Unlike in Spain, for example, where the same dialects and languages survived (Basque, Catalán).
- madhadron 8y agoFor context, Victor Mair is one of the foremost Sinologists in the English speaking world. > An impressive amount of traffic on the internet in these areas is being carried out in English, and parents are eager to have their children start learning English at younger and younger ages. This was also true in the 1920's. Lin Yu Tang is probably the best known example: a Chinese author, living in China, who wrote his essays and novels in English. He was also heavily involved in the Romanization projects of the day. Like modern attempts, it foundered because of the forces that wanted one Chinese language in spite of reality (I had a good citation for this that I cannot find right now, I apologize). You either a) accept that there are lots of languages that have a place at the table in such an endeavor, b) bar everyone from the table except for a specific language and impose that everywhere, or c) give up and continue the ruse hidden behind the ideograms. What's really weird is that the Japanese continue to use the kanji, hiragana, and katakana when they do have one language, most of their population knows the Roman alphabet, and the language fits better in the Roman alphabet than in the native syllabaries. But then, who am I to talk? English's spelling hasn't made sense for centuries.
- sempron64 8y agoIt's very difficult if not impossible to move Japanese to Romanized spelling completely as most complex compound words are constructed out of Chinese ideograms, and make sense only based on their spelling. The On-yomi (chinese reading) for many characters is identical to that of entirely unrelated characters, because Japanese has no tonality. Most of these words cease to make sense if spelled phonetically in Latin characters -- their spelling is their definition. As an aside, this phonetic ambiguity allows for very entertaining untranslatable puns.
- madhadron 8y agoAnd yet they manage when speaking, and we manage in English with lots of homonyms as well. And French manages with so much verbal ambiguity that they have dictation bees the way English speakers have spelling bees.