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The Invention of Chinese

173 points by Thevet 5y ago

KhoomeiK 5y ago
Related [1] [2]: the Han race was really only constructed in the last 100 years, along with the national mythos of several millennia of uninterrupted dynastic civilization. [1] https://www.hrichina.org/en/content/4573 https://www.hrichina.org/en/content/4573 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhFPZL2L8uM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhFPZL2L8uM
- seanmcdirmid 5y ago
  The concept of Chinese medicine was also created and promoted by Mao since they couldn’t afford much real medicine after the revolution. It simply didn’t exist as a unified thing before then.
  - justicezyx 5y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compendium_of_Materia_Medica https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compendium_of_Materia_Medica https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghan_Lun https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghan_Lun https://zh.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%B8%A9%E7%96%AB%E8%AE%BA https://zh.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%B8%A9%E7%96%AB%E8%AE%BA What's the reasoning behind this theory that Mao invented Chinese medicine, which has been in existence for more than a thousand years? Are you a fan of Mao, or are you mocking his inability to create modern medicine out of thin air? Or his manipulation of Chinese culture?
    - SeanLuke 5y ago
      I don't think he's saying that Mao invented Chinese herbology. I mean, who would seriously say that? I think he's saying that Mao pushed for the treatment of Traditional Chinese medicine as a unified discipline distinct from western medicine.
    - catlikesshrimp 5y ago
      Why are you angry? Scamming was not invented in China, it comes built in in human nature. There are Shamans in South America, and Witch doctors in Africa.
      - justicezyx 5y ago
        Oh sorry! I don't meant to be rude. Hopefully you can understand my English is not native and can have many sharp edges in communication. Chinese medicine is a good thing. Don't need to link it with scamming. And as you said, scamming is universal, but Chinese medicine is not. Making it further an inappropriate analogy.
      - jazzyjackson 5y ago
        western pharma sends chemists to talk to shamans and witch doctors in order to discover and isolate new medicines by the way, a large percentage of modern medicine started as or still is a plant extract, no need to diss old herbal medicine.
        catlikesshrimp 5y ago
        Any treatment should be considered a scam until proven effective. Chinese medicine gets people to drink urine. A Shaman spits alcohol on people. A witch doctor conjures spells. None can be considered effective until proven effective. "Proven effective" means. 1) Follows the reliable method, results are published 2) The experiment can be verified and replicated by anyone anywhere anytime. That is the difference between the scientific method (So called "western medicine") and scams. Summarizing: A fungus can be medicine, when proven effective. The older you state Chinese medicine is, the worse for its cause. So much time to show proof of effectiveness, so little they can prove.
        justicezyx 5y ago
        > Chinese medicine gets people to drink urine In extreme cases, this happens. And we also know that a lot of high impact cancer research results cannot be reproduced. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03691-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03691-0 And Chinese medicine for the most part is a discipline for nurturing human body through natural produces and elements for self healing. https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness-and-prevention/chinese-medicine https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness-and-preventi... It does not have scientific methods. The modern Chinese medicine is adopting scientific methods. https://academic.oup.com/bib/article/15/6/984/180255 https://academic.oup.com/bib/article/15/6/984/180255 Condescending argument are not wrong, they are just logically imprecise. And can easily provoke negative emotions to your readers.
    - seanmcdirmid 5y ago
      He invented the term, not the methods. Before, they were just a disparate set of folk medicine cultures spread throughout China. By unifying and standardizing them all under the umbrella of Chinese medicine and claiming that they were just as good as western medicine, they were able to stave off demand for western medicine, doctors, and hospitals that they didn’t have or couldn’t afford. See https://slate.com/technology/2013/10/traditional-chinese-medicine-origins-mao-invented-it-but-didnt-believe-in-it.html https://slate.com/technology/2013/10/traditional-chinese-med...
      - powerapple 5y ago
        Before that, the Chinese medicine was called Han Medicine, there are also other medicine. Also the Chinese medicine are collection of books.
        seanmcdirmid 5y ago
        Chinese medicine includes more than just Han medicine, and also, according to the article at least, had no institution or universities dedicated to them. What the TCM concept did was create a new field on par with other fields of study, including TCM universities and such.
  - carom 5y ago
    The Yellow Emperor would like to have a word with you. [1] TCM goes back more than 2000 years. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huangdi_Neijing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huangdi_Neijing
- justicezyx 5y ago
  > an ethnically integrated China is, in fact, a modern invention linked to the rise of nationalism at the end of the nineteenth century. This idea is a very sensible one in the context of China being forced to open up to the world. It's like a man, living in wild, has assume he was alone, and have no idea he was actually a male. Until one day he run into a similar creature that is a female. The undernote of this is that Chinese society is extremely complex. Easily orders of magnitude more complex. Comparing to the US continental, the geographical diversity and the cultural heritage shows such a vast range of changes that one should feel US is probably culturally only equivalent to a typical province in China! They eat differently, speak different in accent and words of expression, have different customs in almost every aspects of the life (child birth, birthdag, marriage, funerals etc etc)... China is indeed a humongous collective of diverse human communities that defies any singular or universal interpretation.
  - SeanLuke 5y ago
    The US is not an appropriate comparison in terms of geographical diversity. The US + Canada is unusually homogenous because of its unique and very modern history. Instead, compare China to Europe, which is far more rich and complex. Heck, there may be more dialects and recognized languages in Italy alone than in the large majority of China.
    - justicezyx 5y ago
      Is there English writings on Italian dialects? Sounds like a really interesting topic. Given Italy's linkage to anticent Roma (and Greek maybe not sure), language dialects probably have a lot to do with the history and culture. Must be full of quriks and surprises!
      - frenchy 5y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Italy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Italy
  - hker 5y ago
- another_story 5y ago
  I've never understood the fascination with these narratives. Many of my relatives are adamant about China's dynastic streak. Also, the idea that different languages are dialects of Mandarin, when in truth many of them, like Cantonese, developed earlier or in parallel.
  - yourapostasy 5y ago
    It serves the interests of a political elite to promulgate a feeling of great utility to them that “we’ve always been here, we are ever-present now, and there is no reason to suspect we will always exist into the future”. It serves to bolster legitimacy assertions upon geographic locales, based upon “ancient claims” or at least “claims older than yours”. This continuous-unbroken-culture-thousands-of-years-old notion I find peculiarly culturally specific. It is an amalgamation made up of Confucian respect-to-elders and venerate-the-dead I don’t agree with when the venerate-the-dead aspect comes at the expense of those living in the geographic locale, and those at the top peculiarly benefit in their pocketbooks to enforce this “ancient tradition”. The US and indeed most major nation states also use this kind of myth making as well, this kind of behavior isn’t specific to China. It’s just not taught in schools.
  - pphysch 5y ago
    Colonial Europeans tend to be obsessed with race -- historically it's how they rationalize imperialism and expansionism -- and may project that obsession on other groups that don't even think about race.
    - LAC-Tech 5y ago
      Do you think that's unique to Europeans, or do you think other imperialist and expansionist peoples rationalized things in a different way? Would love to see some comparisons here.
    - another_story 5y ago
      Let me clarify, my relatives are Mainland Chinese.
  - 5y ago
- ir193 5y ago
  it's not true. Han Chinese are clearly genetically distinguishable from Yamato Japanese and Koreans, and internally the different Han Chinese subgroups are genetically closer to each other than any of them are to Koreans and Japanese. Gene doesn't lie
  - KhoomeiK 5y ago
    This discussion isn't about the genetic validity of population groupings in East Asia, but rather the construction of Han identity which is a social phenomenon.
dwohnitmok 5y ago
There's a lot of complexities and politically-motivated reasons behind calling various varieties of Chinese "dialects" but this article swings way too far the other direction. There has been a single lingua franca across all of China since at least the Han Dynasty, perhaps even the Warring States period or earlier. It has variously been called 通語 (the mass/common/omnipresent/intelligible language, 通 is a bit difficult to translate here), 官話 (the official language), potentially 雅言 (elegant speech, this is more controversial and earliest mention) and now 普通话 or 國語. > Indeed, before the 20th century the idea of a singular, spoken Chinese language was a foreign concept Matteo Ricci explicitly talks about a single language he can use to talk with everyone in every province (in his time this was the 官話). And indeed he used the same language as he made his way across the entire coast of China. There is an entire Han Dynasty compendium of the vocabulary of various regions that compares it against the official lingua franca. Indeed the title of this work is exactly Fangyan! > But while Chinese thinkers frequently mentioned ‘official languages’, this was by no means synonymous with a ‘national language’ – a language unified in its sound and script used by and representative of a Chinese nation. These "official languages" were exactly unified in sound and script and representative of a Chinese nation! The language Ricci encountered was the descendent of one whose pronunciation was explicitly codified (there are some asterisks here I can elaborate on if people are interested) in the 14th century 洪武正韻 (Hongwu Proper Sound), and was passed to neighboring kingdoms as the official language (and is e.g. preserved in Korean rime books on the Chinese language). The difference in the last 100 years has been a difference in degree rather than kind. With the advent of near-universal education and literacy and the technological tools offered by mass media, the PRC, ROC, and to a lesser extent places like Singapore and Malaysia can more effectively carry out the language programs that have been attempted in the millennia past. Granted the difference in degree is vast: the tools at the disposal of political regimes today absolutely dwarfs those of the past. This also means the effects of standardization are far more keenly felt. However, the motivation and policy is one with a long and winding history. It follows a standard story of varying unification and disunity both linguistically and politically that has played out many times in China's history.
- binarysolo 5y ago
  Thanks for your's and whakim's thorough conversation about this -- some of the nuance is really hard to articulate without the historical geopolitical context and you summed it up really well!
ncmncm 5y ago
Primarily Mandarin speakers I have known were taught, and believed, that the "dialects" were basically the same as Mandarin, just with different pronunciation. They sincerely believed that when (e.g.) Cantonese speakers read and wrote, they were not wholesale translating from and to Mandarin, but simply, when writing, transcribing Cantonese using the universal ideographic calligraphy. In fact, writing in dialect languages is not taught. The extremely elaborate system dictating which of usually several, often many syllabary characters that sound identical must be used in writing a word in Mandarin (very commonly mistaken for ideographic writing) cannot work for the other sinitic languages. (Sinitic languages admit about 1200 distinct syllables, but the syllabary writing system uses many times that number, so many necessarily sound alike. Mandarin speakers are taught that the characters are not merely syllables with attached historical rules, but ideograms that represent distinct thoughts. (Numerous just-so examples are used to support the notion.) This has often led to belief that ancient documents using the characters could be read and understood without deep knowledge of the actual language and world of the writer, resulting in, at best, comical translations.)
- opensandwich 5y ago
  You are definitely correct in saying that in general people view it as simply changing the pronunciations. Though I would also say that people also appreciate the nuances. There are comedic sketches on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tK51dlpqpSE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tK51dlpqpSE (~5.30)
- tracyhenry 5y ago
  I'm a native Mandarin speaker. I don't know why you need to stress "taught" or "believe" so much. I'm not taught by anyone, nor believe that dialects are mostly similar. I experienced it. Most dialects, Cantonese included, use the same Chinese character system. In writing, we would use either simplified or traditional character sets. Note I'm only talking about modern communication. > could be read and understood without deep knowledge of the actual language and world of the writer, resulting in, at best, comical translations I don't know who you are talking about. I wouldn't say that at all. Chinese students would spent 1/3 of their high school studying complex ancient Chinese languages (文言文). Nobody would say it's not deep knowledge - it's so damn hard.
LAC-Tech 5y ago
The campaign in Singapore to wipe out 'dialects' is also interesting, as it existed outside the ROC or PRC. Presumably done for ethnic/nation building reasons, to have a dominant chinese majority speaking one language - otherwise you'd have some chinese communities being similar or size or even smaller than the Tamil or Malay speakers. Though I've also read recently that after stamping out non-Mandarin languages, even proficiency in Mandarin is now fallen behind, as English is more practical.
- dustintrex 5y ago
  One final irony in Singapore is that all Chinese are now taught Mandarin as their "mother tongue" (the official term) in school. This is despite virtually all Singaporeans being of southern Chinese descent, meaning they actually spoke Hokkien, Teochew, Hakka, Cantonese etc, but nothing even close to northern Mandarin.
  - gumby 5y ago
    In the early 80s I was amused by the posters and signs in Singapore saying “speak mandarin” in Cantonese and English. It was a smart decision for a small country to make, but jarring nonetheless.
hker 5y ago
In fact Cantonese preserves the tones (esp. 平仄) of ancient Chinese better than Mandarin, and this shows for example when reading Chinese poems [1]. Cantonese even almost became the official language of China [2]. [1]: https://www.quora.com/Do-most-ancient-Chinese-poems-rhyme-in-Cantonese-but-not-in-Mandarin https://www.quora.com/Do-most-ancient-Chinese-poems-rhyme-in... [2]: https://www.scmp.com/article/694592/cantonese-almost-became-official-language https://www.scmp.com/article/694592/cantonese-almost-became-...
- dwohnitmok 5y ago
  > Cantonese even almost became the official language of China X almost became the official language of China is an urban myth that just will not die. There were votes on individual sounds and those either swung one way or another depending on votes. There was never any doubt that Mandarin would form the foundation of the spoken standard (as had been the case for > 1000 years at this point) or that its Beijing-variety would play an important (but not absolute) part. The votes were over the particulars of individual sounds and pronunciations of single characters. EDIT: the idea that Cantonese is more faithful to Middle Chinese (itself a weird, amorphous concept) and therefore better for reading ancient poems also is suspect. There are ancient poems that continue to rhyme in modern Mandarin but don't in Cantonese and vice versa. Heck you could make the case that Wu varieties are the most faithful because they preserve the voicing of the Qieyun System (note I don't believe they are the most faithful). All of these varieties have their own innovations, and there is no clear "most conservative" variety (unlike e.g. Icelandic and Norse).
  - hker 5y ago
    > Mandarin would form the foundation of the spoken standard (as had been the case for > 1000 years at this point)... The Old Mandarin had its root from Jin (1115-1234) and Yuan (Mongol) dynasties [1], coming from “foreign ethnicity” 外族 (from a Han-centric view point). The history is less than 1000 years, less than the ancient poems (唐詩) that we are discussing. One main reason for Mandarin to be the standard of Chinese is because of the influence of Mongolia (Yuan) and Manchurian (Qing), that is, non-Han ruling dynasties. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Mandarin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Mandarin > the idea that Cantonese is more faithful to Middle Chinese ... and therefore better for reading ancient poems also is suspect. The tones (esp. 平仄) are better preserved in Cantonese than Mandarin, I don’t think this is disputed.
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United857 5y ago
It's a shame that people think that having a common national language has to come at the expense of local languages/dialects. Compare the language policy of China with that of India, where even though Hindi and English are nominally the languages on a national level and all students are in theory taught at least one of them, the government doesn't try to actively suppress other local languages in schools or media. As a result, an educated Indian is often trilingual in English, Hindi, and their local language, whereas in mainland China, knowledge of non-Mandarin dialects is decreasing in the younger generations.
- dirtyid 5y ago
  Indian language / multiculturalism is exactly the basketcase PRC wants to avoid. >an educated Indian is often trilingual in English, Hindi, and their local language An uneducated Chinese is still going to be fluent in mandarin going forward, the national language. 50% of Indian youth are bilingual 20% are trilingual. That's a lingua franca failure.
  - frenchy 5y ago
    > language / multiculturalism is exactly the basketcase PRC wants to avoid And the EU is probably on the verge of collapse, seeing as trilingualism is basically expected from anyone university educated.
    - dirtyid 5y ago
      Less about collapse and more about progress. Having common language/culture facilitates rapid development which PRC did relative to India. Also facilitates common market and conditions for supporting national champions which EU struggles with relative to PRC. India/EU embrace multiculturalism because it has no choice, system is too weak / politics to fraught to meaningfully unify, even if they wanted to. They're not going to collapse or even stagnate, but they're also not going anywhere fast.
    - sudosysgen 5y ago
      You're pushing it too far. Trilingualism is expected in the EU for University educated people, which are a minority. In the Indian system not being trilingual means you are at a severe disadvantage, whereas you can do pretty well in the EU knowing only English, let alone being bilingual.
eunos 5y ago
I percept all these "save muh local dialects" and "dialects are different languages than mandarin" are just cheap attempt at devide et impera.
danieltanfh95 5y ago
I think the written Chinese language is way more flexible than what most people think it can be. The most extreme example of this is Japanese Kanji, and while Japanese is its own language, native chinese speakers would note the similarities between it and Hainanese/Cantonese dialect, and with some 文言文 knowledge, one can read Japanese without much effort, even if one cannot speak it. Contemporary Chinese has roots in the version used among the masses, it deliberately eschews the official version used in the palace to make it easier for the masses to understand and learn it. One may notice the difference between Taiwan official language and Mainland official language in official declarations, the Taiwanese one is considerably more ... "poetic" but comes at a cost of understanding for the masses who may not be educated as highly, like most of the villages in Mainland China, likewise for Hong Kong. However, one might notice how written Chinese has relatively little "hard" grammar rules that must be followed to ensure legibility. As a translator I find it easier sometimes to translate something into Chinese, which is not my first language, and then to the target language, especially for Sinitic languages, because the written language can capture most of the meaning while being flexible enough to be restructured in the target. The converse, on the other hand may be tougher, for example if Hong Kongers were to use Cantonese as a base to understand other dialects they will face a lot of problems in doing so because its not flexible enough to fit in the quirks of other languages, which is why in this sense written Putonghua is a successful invention because its minimal enough to convey meaning while being able to fit it all the weird quirks for various "dialects", which is why its used widely across the world.
- ngcc_hk 5y ago
  Cantonese is as flexible. But I think Japanese is very flexible. In fact most and still many of the chinese phrases came from japan. What base you are on?
  - danieltanfh95 5y ago
    "Chinese phrases" that come from Japan attests to how flexible written Chinese is to accept and use a foreign language while still being understandable to the native speaker once the lexicon is understood.
namelosw 5y ago
It's a long story to even make sense of this topic, especially on why Chinese governments (not only CCP, but also KMT, and all previous dynasties) have such an obsession with controlling the Chinese language. But here are some interesting historical topics worth exploring: First, according to the legend, the Chinese character was created by 仓颉[0] (2667 – 2596 BC, don't you love it when the four-eyed legend even has a birth year...), who is an official work for the ancient Yellow Emperor[1]. But the legends were well known to all the following dynasties, that an official invented the Chinese character, might give later generations the legitimacy and confidence to moderate it. The Zhou[2] dynasty (1046 – 256 BC), which laid the very foundation of the Chinese culture, occupied the vast fertile land of China, with is on par with the EU in size. It's arguably the only feudal dynasty in Chinese history. The problem of feudalism is subjects would gradually gain power, so the country would break into pieces just like Europe, or the later Eastern Zhou. As China breaks, the need for diplomacy between countless independent Duchies and Counties was booming. On paper, the King of Zhou was still their liege, so it's very natural to leverage the dialect from the capital of Zhou, plus several classics like 诗[3] (the Poetry - the first book of poetry is, of course, called the Poetry). People call it 雅言[4] which means the language of elegance. It's a bit like Latin, which European always learn because of the Vatican, but people don't use it much in real life. If China continued this way it would be more like Europe and there would be many independent languages. Then there's Qin[5] (221 - 206 BC), which was originally a subject of Zhou, but eventually became too powerful and unified China. Qin was very radical, it killed feudalism, and launched massive standardization like unifying administrative units, all kinds of measurements, and even the wheelbases (there were no train but they did anyway), and of course the Chinese Characters. It's doable because 1) Chinese is hieroglyphic, the character and the sound are not coupled 2) writing was still a practice of elites, and elites are fewer in number and can afford education. As vast as China is, and as many dialects there are/were, people can always perfectly communicate with the written language throughout most Chinese history. Because of the hieroglyphic nature of the language, most of the characters from the Qin dynasty, still make sense even today if you know modern traditional Chinese and to a lesser extent simplified Chinese. (aka. The single-responsibility principle[6] in software engineering, the pronunciation, and the graphical representation are different reasons to change, so the decoupling makes the characters less screwed when the pronunciation changes). It's so powerful so that Chinese and Japanese may have some quasi-understanding to each other by writing Hanzi/Kanji. To understand what does a regnal year of Japanese Emperor means, people often have to go back to ancient Chinese texts - the most difficult part of the Japanese and Korean for western people, sometimes are easiest for Chinese. And for the following millenniums, those practices almost became a tradition: the dialect of the capital of that time would be the official language. And from time to time there were attempts to unify the vocal dialects during dynasties, but it was too hard because how people speak was always changing, until modern days that Guoyu[7] and Putonghua[7] could achieve the impossible through technologies. So: 1) The language is not only seen by governments as a tool of communication but also a tie that binds everything together - loosening that tie might come with risks. 2) It's more or less a tradition so there are substantially fewer pushbacks than other countries, and legitimate Chinese governments throughout history see no reason to not leverage that. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cangjie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cangjie [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Emperor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Emperor [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhou_dynasty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhou_dynasty [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_of_Poetry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_of_Poetry [4] Unfortunately, there's no English translation to this Wiki yet: https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%9B%85%E9%9F%B3 https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%9B%85%E9%9F%B3 [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qin_dynasty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qin_dynasty [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-responsibility_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-responsibility_principl... [7] & [8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Chinese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Chinese
posix86 5y ago
Linguistically, the distinction between languages and dialects is debated; often, reasonably so, all languages are simply dialects of each other. The reason is that if you have two languages which don't understand each other, you can find "intermediary steps" between the two that each understand each other, s.t. you reach the other language. And often, you have two "languages" that are clearly dialects but considered different languages because they each have their own army and navy. [1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an_army_and_navy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with...
powerapple 5y ago
There are a lot lost in translation. When Chinese people say "fangyan" it could mean anything, as long as it is a language used in specific region, as opposite to Mandarin, which is the official language used in the country. And that's what it is. It does not say a language is close to Mandarin or not. Of course, in translation, everything is lost. I have a lot problem with translations. For example, Chinese "loong" is translated into dragon, which are very different thing. It would be better people do not translate and find a close approximation for words, rather, introduce a new word. Like Banzai, Sushi, those words are good translations. Unfortunately it happened too many times in the history, now we are stuck with many words don't mean the same thing in two cultures.
- powerapple 5y ago
  In Arabic region, news organisations start to use MSA (Modern Standard Arabic) so that news can be broadcast to different regions, and schools are teaching in MSA, so that knowledge can be shared more effectively. There aren't much about which dialect is superior than others, any for or against discussion about these are super political, not about the use of the language at all.
leemailll 5y ago
A lot of the discussions here seem to forget one thing for the Chinese language. The written and spoken Chinese were different from early on, and the spoken spoken language for the administration or office was not the same as that for locals' chitchat.
morpheos137 5y ago
As somebody that does not speak or read Chinese I am surprised that a simpler script has not been developed and widely used. Is it fast to read? I can understand to an extent if reading speed is at par with simpler alphabetic or phonetic scripts. But surely writing speed must be slower. How do chinese people even type?
- thuccess129 5y ago
  > How do chinese people even type? Emacs has 25 kinds of Chinese input methods. A speaker at Stanford on the topic of early keyboards used for Chinese noted graph structure such as the one you find in Canjie input method was what they used before soundspelling. Today, hypergraphtext autocompletion influences message contruction on flatscreen devices in a kind of mind-machine blend mode on a massive scale.
- FabHK 5y ago
  That's a political hornets' nest that you're poking there. There is Pinyin, the official romanisation of Mandarin Chinese, in which for example "汉语拼音" becomes "hànyǔ pīnyīn". So, one could write using that. The argument typically is that Chinese has too many homonyms to make that practicable. I'm not sure I buy that, as spoken Mandarin is presumably intellegible, despite those homonyms. There's a lot of info in the informative book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy by John DeFrancis, and on this website: http://www.pinyin.info http://www.pinyin.info > But surely writing speed must be slower. I've found that that is not the case. While a typical character is more complex than a typical letter, you need fewer of them. At uni, I tested that with a native Chinese speaker and a native German speaker. We chose several random English sentences, they translated them into their respective language, and then we timed how long they took to write them down (by hand, in Chinese, German, English). It was basically the same, no systematic difference. > How do chinese people even type? There are several input systems, some based on pronunciation, some based on the shape or strokes. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_input_methods_for_computers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_input_methods_for_comp... or https://www.hackingchinese.com/chinese-input-methods-a-guide-for-second-language-learners/ https://www.hackingchinese.com/chinese-input-methods-a-guide...
est 5y ago
The Han script was really a unified VM bytecode and serialization format, not a language spec. The fangyans are various languages compiles to it. The Chinese standardized its written form very early, and is the only "language" survived today without an alphabet, many native speakers learn "Chinese" as the text rather than a spoken tone. Even Cantonese and Hakka are really a family of mutually unintelligible dialects clustered by geographic proximity.
qalmakka 5y ago
As the adage goes, "A language is a dialect with a flag and an army"

173 points by Thevet 5y ago

Related [1] [2]: the Han race was really only constructed in the last 100 years, along with the national mythos of several millennia of uninterrupted dynastic civilization. [1] https://www.hrichina.org/en/content/4573 https://www.hrichina.org/en/content/4573 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhFPZL2L8uM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhFPZL2L8uM

seanmcdirmid 5y ago
The concept of Chinese medicine was also created and promoted by Mao since they couldn’t afford much real medicine after the revolution. It simply didn’t exist as a unified thing before then.
- justicezyx 5y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compendium_of_Materia_Medica https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compendium_of_Materia_Medica https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghan_Lun https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghan_Lun https://zh.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%B8%A9%E7%96%AB%E8%AE%BA https://zh.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%B8%A9%E7%96%AB%E8%AE%BA What's the reasoning behind this theory that Mao invented Chinese medicine, which has been in existence for more than a thousand years? Are you a fan of Mao, or are you mocking his inability to create modern medicine out of thin air? Or his manipulation of Chinese culture?
  - SeanLuke 5y ago
    I don't think he's saying that Mao invented Chinese herbology. I mean, who would seriously say that? I think he's saying that Mao pushed for the treatment of Traditional Chinese medicine as a unified discipline distinct from western medicine.
  - catlikesshrimp 5y ago
    Why are you angry? Scamming was not invented in China, it comes built in in human nature. There are Shamans in South America, and Witch doctors in Africa.
    - justicezyx 5y ago
      Oh sorry! I don't meant to be rude. Hopefully you can understand my English is not native and can have many sharp edges in communication. Chinese medicine is a good thing. Don't need to link it with scamming. And as you said, scamming is universal, but Chinese medicine is not. Making it further an inappropriate analogy.
    - jazzyjackson 5y ago
      western pharma sends chemists to talk to shamans and witch doctors in order to discover and isolate new medicines by the way, a large percentage of modern medicine started as or still is a plant extract, no need to diss old herbal medicine.
      - catlikesshrimp 5y ago
        Any treatment should be considered a scam until proven effective. Chinese medicine gets people to drink urine. A Shaman spits alcohol on people. A witch doctor conjures spells. None can be considered effective until proven effective. "Proven effective" means. 1) Follows the reliable method, results are published 2) The experiment can be verified and replicated by anyone anywhere anytime. That is the difference between the scientific method (So called "western medicine") and scams. Summarizing: A fungus can be medicine, when proven effective. The older you state Chinese medicine is, the worse for its cause. So much time to show proof of effectiveness, so little they can prove.
        justicezyx 5y ago
        > Chinese medicine gets people to drink urine In extreme cases, this happens. And we also know that a lot of high impact cancer research results cannot be reproduced. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03691-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03691-0 And Chinese medicine for the most part is a discipline for nurturing human body through natural produces and elements for self healing. https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness-and-prevention/chinese-medicine https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness-and-preventi... It does not have scientific methods. The modern Chinese medicine is adopting scientific methods. https://academic.oup.com/bib/article/15/6/984/180255 https://academic.oup.com/bib/article/15/6/984/180255 Condescending argument are not wrong, they are just logically imprecise. And can easily provoke negative emotions to your readers.
  - seanmcdirmid 5y ago
    He invented the term, not the methods. Before, they were just a disparate set of folk medicine cultures spread throughout China. By unifying and standardizing them all under the umbrella of Chinese medicine and claiming that they were just as good as western medicine, they were able to stave off demand for western medicine, doctors, and hospitals that they didn’t have or couldn’t afford. See https://slate.com/technology/2013/10/traditional-chinese-medicine-origins-mao-invented-it-but-didnt-believe-in-it.html https://slate.com/technology/2013/10/traditional-chinese-med...
    - powerapple 5y ago
      Before that, the Chinese medicine was called Han Medicine, there are also other medicine. Also the Chinese medicine are collection of books.
      - seanmcdirmid 5y ago
        Chinese medicine includes more than just Han medicine, and also, according to the article at least, had no institution or universities dedicated to them. What the TCM concept did was create a new field on par with other fields of study, including TCM universities and such.
- carom 5y ago
  The Yellow Emperor would like to have a word with you. [1] TCM goes back more than 2000 years. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huangdi_Neijing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huangdi_Neijing
justicezyx 5y ago
> an ethnically integrated China is, in fact, a modern invention linked to the rise of nationalism at the end of the nineteenth century. This idea is a very sensible one in the context of China being forced to open up to the world. It's like a man, living in wild, has assume he was alone, and have no idea he was actually a male. Until one day he run into a similar creature that is a female. The undernote of this is that Chinese society is extremely complex. Easily orders of magnitude more complex. Comparing to the US continental, the geographical diversity and the cultural heritage shows such a vast range of changes that one should feel US is probably culturally only equivalent to a typical province in China! They eat differently, speak different in accent and words of expression, have different customs in almost every aspects of the life (child birth, birthdag, marriage, funerals etc etc)... China is indeed a humongous collective of diverse human communities that defies any singular or universal interpretation.
- SeanLuke 5y ago
  The US is not an appropriate comparison in terms of geographical diversity. The US + Canada is unusually homogenous because of its unique and very modern history. Instead, compare China to Europe, which is far more rich and complex. Heck, there may be more dialects and recognized languages in Italy alone than in the large majority of China.
  - justicezyx 5y ago
    Is there English writings on Italian dialects? Sounds like a really interesting topic. Given Italy's linkage to anticent Roma (and Greek maybe not sure), language dialects probably have a lot to do with the history and culture. Must be full of quriks and surprises!
    - frenchy 5y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Italy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Italy
- hker 5y ago
another_story 5y ago
I've never understood the fascination with these narratives. Many of my relatives are adamant about China's dynastic streak. Also, the idea that different languages are dialects of Mandarin, when in truth many of them, like Cantonese, developed earlier or in parallel.
- yourapostasy 5y ago
  It serves the interests of a political elite to promulgate a feeling of great utility to them that “we’ve always been here, we are ever-present now, and there is no reason to suspect we will always exist into the future”. It serves to bolster legitimacy assertions upon geographic locales, based upon “ancient claims” or at least “claims older than yours”. This continuous-unbroken-culture-thousands-of-years-old notion I find peculiarly culturally specific. It is an amalgamation made up of Confucian respect-to-elders and venerate-the-dead I don’t agree with when the venerate-the-dead aspect comes at the expense of those living in the geographic locale, and those at the top peculiarly benefit in their pocketbooks to enforce this “ancient tradition”. The US and indeed most major nation states also use this kind of myth making as well, this kind of behavior isn’t specific to China. It’s just not taught in schools.
- pphysch 5y ago
  Colonial Europeans tend to be obsessed with race -- historically it's how they rationalize imperialism and expansionism -- and may project that obsession on other groups that don't even think about race.
  - LAC-Tech 5y ago
    Do you think that's unique to Europeans, or do you think other imperialist and expansionist peoples rationalized things in a different way? Would love to see some comparisons here.
  - another_story 5y ago
    Let me clarify, my relatives are Mainland Chinese.
- 5y ago
ir193 5y ago
it's not true. Han Chinese are clearly genetically distinguishable from Yamato Japanese and Koreans, and internally the different Han Chinese subgroups are genetically closer to each other than any of them are to Koreans and Japanese. Gene doesn't lie
- KhoomeiK 5y ago
  This discussion isn't about the genetic validity of population groupings in East Asia, but rather the construction of Han identity which is a social phenomenon.

dwohnitmok 5y ago

There's a lot of complexities and politically-motivated reasons behind calling various varieties of Chinese "dialects" but this article swings way too far the other direction. There has been a single lingua franca across all of China since at least the Han Dynasty, perhaps even the Warring States period or earlier. It has variously been called 通語 (the mass/common/omnipresent/intelligible language, 通 is a bit difficult to translate here), 官話 (the official language), potentially 雅言 (elegant speech, this is more controversial and earliest mention) and now 普通话 or 國語. > Indeed, before the 20th century the idea of a singular, spoken Chinese language was a foreign concept Matteo Ricci explicitly talks about a single language he can use to talk with everyone in every province (in his time this was the 官話). And indeed he used the same language as he made his way across the entire coast of China. There is an entire Han Dynasty compendium of the vocabulary of various regions that compares it against the official lingua franca. Indeed the title of this work is exactly Fangyan! > But while Chinese thinkers frequently mentioned ‘official languages’, this was by no means synonymous with a ‘national language’ – a language unified in its sound and script used by and representative of a Chinese nation. These "official languages" were exactly unified in sound and script and representative of a Chinese nation! The language Ricci encountered was the descendent of one whose pronunciation was explicitly codified (there are some asterisks here I can elaborate on if people are interested) in the 14th century 洪武正韻 (Hongwu Proper Sound), and was passed to neighboring kingdoms as the official language (and is e.g. preserved in Korean rime books on the Chinese language). The difference in the last 100 years has been a difference in degree rather than kind. With the advent of near-universal education and literacy and the technological tools offered by mass media, the PRC, ROC, and to a lesser extent places like Singapore and Malaysia can more effectively carry out the language programs that have been attempted in the millennia past. Granted the difference in degree is vast: the tools at the disposal of political regimes today absolutely dwarfs those of the past. This also means the effects of standardization are far more keenly felt. However, the motivation and policy is one with a long and winding history. It follows a standard story of varying unification and disunity both linguistically and politically that has played out many times in China's history.

binarysolo 5y ago
Thanks for your's and whakim's thorough conversation about this -- some of the nuance is really hard to articulate without the historical geopolitical context and you summed it up really well!

ncmncm 5y ago

Primarily Mandarin speakers I have known were taught, and believed, that the "dialects" were basically the same as Mandarin, just with different pronunciation. They sincerely believed that when (e.g.) Cantonese speakers read and wrote, they were not wholesale translating from and to Mandarin, but simply, when writing, transcribing Cantonese using the universal ideographic calligraphy. In fact, writing in dialect languages is not taught. The extremely elaborate system dictating which of usually several, often many syllabary characters that sound identical must be used in writing a word in Mandarin (very commonly mistaken for ideographic writing) cannot work for the other sinitic languages. (Sinitic languages admit about 1200 distinct syllables, but the syllabary writing system uses many times that number, so many necessarily sound alike. Mandarin speakers are taught that the characters are not merely syllables with attached historical rules, but ideograms that represent distinct thoughts. (Numerous just-so examples are used to support the notion.) This has often led to belief that ancient documents using the characters could be read and understood without deep knowledge of the actual language and world of the writer, resulting in, at best, comical translations.)

opensandwich 5y ago
You are definitely correct in saying that in general people view it as simply changing the pronunciations. Though I would also say that people also appreciate the nuances. There are comedic sketches on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tK51dlpqpSE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tK51dlpqpSE (~5.30)
tracyhenry 5y ago
I'm a native Mandarin speaker. I don't know why you need to stress "taught" or "believe" so much. I'm not taught by anyone, nor believe that dialects are mostly similar. I experienced it. Most dialects, Cantonese included, use the same Chinese character system. In writing, we would use either simplified or traditional character sets. Note I'm only talking about modern communication. > could be read and understood without deep knowledge of the actual language and world of the writer, resulting in, at best, comical translations I don't know who you are talking about. I wouldn't say that at all. Chinese students would spent 1/3 of their high school studying complex ancient Chinese languages (文言文). Nobody would say it's not deep knowledge - it's so damn hard.

LAC-Tech 5y ago

The campaign in Singapore to wipe out 'dialects' is also interesting, as it existed outside the ROC or PRC. Presumably done for ethnic/nation building reasons, to have a dominant chinese majority speaking one language - otherwise you'd have some chinese communities being similar or size or even smaller than the Tamil or Malay speakers. Though I've also read recently that after stamping out non-Mandarin languages, even proficiency in Mandarin is now fallen behind, as English is more practical.

dustintrex 5y ago
One final irony in Singapore is that all Chinese are now taught Mandarin as their "mother tongue" (the official term) in school. This is despite virtually all Singaporeans being of southern Chinese descent, meaning they actually spoke Hokkien, Teochew, Hakka, Cantonese etc, but nothing even close to northern Mandarin.
- gumby 5y ago
  In the early 80s I was amused by the posters and signs in Singapore saying “speak mandarin” in Cantonese and English. It was a smart decision for a small country to make, but jarring nonetheless.

hker 5y ago

In fact Cantonese preserves the tones (esp. 平仄) of ancient Chinese better than Mandarin, and this shows for example when reading Chinese poems [1]. Cantonese even almost became the official language of China [2]. [1]: https://www.quora.com/Do-most-ancient-Chinese-poems-rhyme-in-Cantonese-but-not-in-Mandarin https://www.quora.com/Do-most-ancient-Chinese-poems-rhyme-in... [2]: https://www.scmp.com/article/694592/cantonese-almost-became-official-language https://www.scmp.com/article/694592/cantonese-almost-became-...

dwohnitmok 5y ago
> Cantonese even almost became the official language of China X almost became the official language of China is an urban myth that just will not die. There were votes on individual sounds and those either swung one way or another depending on votes. There was never any doubt that Mandarin would form the foundation of the spoken standard (as had been the case for > 1000 years at this point) or that its Beijing-variety would play an important (but not absolute) part. The votes were over the particulars of individual sounds and pronunciations of single characters. EDIT: the idea that Cantonese is more faithful to Middle Chinese (itself a weird, amorphous concept) and therefore better for reading ancient poems also is suspect. There are ancient poems that continue to rhyme in modern Mandarin but don't in Cantonese and vice versa. Heck you could make the case that Wu varieties are the most faithful because they preserve the voicing of the Qieyun System (note I don't believe they are the most faithful). All of these varieties have their own innovations, and there is no clear "most conservative" variety (unlike e.g. Icelandic and Norse).
- hker 5y ago
  > Mandarin would form the foundation of the spoken standard (as had been the case for > 1000 years at this point)... The Old Mandarin had its root from Jin (1115-1234) and Yuan (Mongol) dynasties [1], coming from “foreign ethnicity” 外族 (from a Han-centric view point). The history is less than 1000 years, less than the ancient poems (唐詩) that we are discussing. One main reason for Mandarin to be the standard of Chinese is because of the influence of Mongolia (Yuan) and Manchurian (Qing), that is, non-Han ruling dynasties. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Mandarin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Mandarin > the idea that Cantonese is more faithful to Middle Chinese ... and therefore better for reading ancient poems also is suspect. The tones (esp. 平仄) are better preserved in Cantonese than Mandarin, I don’t think this is disputed.

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United857 5y ago

It's a shame that people think that having a common national language has to come at the expense of local languages/dialects. Compare the language policy of China with that of India, where even though Hindi and English are nominally the languages on a national level and all students are in theory taught at least one of them, the government doesn't try to actively suppress other local languages in schools or media. As a result, an educated Indian is often trilingual in English, Hindi, and their local language, whereas in mainland China, knowledge of non-Mandarin dialects is decreasing in the younger generations.

dirtyid 5y ago
Indian language / multiculturalism is exactly the basketcase PRC wants to avoid. >an educated Indian is often trilingual in English, Hindi, and their local language An uneducated Chinese is still going to be fluent in mandarin going forward, the national language. 50% of Indian youth are bilingual 20% are trilingual. That's a lingua franca failure.
- frenchy 5y ago
  > language / multiculturalism is exactly the basketcase PRC wants to avoid And the EU is probably on the verge of collapse, seeing as trilingualism is basically expected from anyone university educated.
  - dirtyid 5y ago
    Less about collapse and more about progress. Having common language/culture facilitates rapid development which PRC did relative to India. Also facilitates common market and conditions for supporting national champions which EU struggles with relative to PRC. India/EU embrace multiculturalism because it has no choice, system is too weak / politics to fraught to meaningfully unify, even if they wanted to. They're not going to collapse or even stagnate, but they're also not going anywhere fast.
  - sudosysgen 5y ago
    You're pushing it too far. Trilingualism is expected in the EU for University educated people, which are a minority. In the Indian system not being trilingual means you are at a severe disadvantage, whereas you can do pretty well in the EU knowing only English, let alone being bilingual.

eunos 5y ago

I percept all these "save muh local dialects" and "dialects are different languages than mandarin" are just cheap attempt at devide et impera.

danieltanfh95 5y ago

I think the written Chinese language is way more flexible than what most people think it can be. The most extreme example of this is Japanese Kanji, and while Japanese is its own language, native chinese speakers would note the similarities between it and Hainanese/Cantonese dialect, and with some 文言文 knowledge, one can read Japanese without much effort, even if one cannot speak it. Contemporary Chinese has roots in the version used among the masses, it deliberately eschews the official version used in the palace to make it easier for the masses to understand and learn it. One may notice the difference between Taiwan official language and Mainland official language in official declarations, the Taiwanese one is considerably more ... "poetic" but comes at a cost of understanding for the masses who may not be educated as highly, like most of the villages in Mainland China, likewise for Hong Kong. However, one might notice how written Chinese has relatively little "hard" grammar rules that must be followed to ensure legibility. As a translator I find it easier sometimes to translate something into Chinese, which is not my first language, and then to the target language, especially for Sinitic languages, because the written language can capture most of the meaning while being flexible enough to be restructured in the target. The converse, on the other hand may be tougher, for example if Hong Kongers were to use Cantonese as a base to understand other dialects they will face a lot of problems in doing so because its not flexible enough to fit in the quirks of other languages, which is why in this sense written Putonghua is a successful invention because its minimal enough to convey meaning while being able to fit it all the weird quirks for various "dialects", which is why its used widely across the world.

ngcc_hk 5y ago
Cantonese is as flexible. But I think Japanese is very flexible. In fact most and still many of the chinese phrases came from japan. What base you are on?
- danieltanfh95 5y ago
  "Chinese phrases" that come from Japan attests to how flexible written Chinese is to accept and use a foreign language while still being understandable to the native speaker once the lexicon is understood.

namelosw 5y ago

It's a long story to even make sense of this topic, especially on why Chinese governments (not only CCP, but also KMT, and all previous dynasties) have such an obsession with controlling the Chinese language. But here are some interesting historical topics worth exploring: First, according to the legend, the Chinese character was created by 仓颉[0] (2667 – 2596 BC, don't you love it when the four-eyed legend even has a birth year...), who is an official work for the ancient Yellow Emperor[1]. But the legends were well known to all the following dynasties, that an official invented the Chinese character, might give later generations the legitimacy and confidence to moderate it. The Zhou[2] dynasty (1046 – 256 BC), which laid the very foundation of the Chinese culture, occupied the vast fertile land of China, with is on par with the EU in size. It's arguably the only feudal dynasty in Chinese history. The problem of feudalism is subjects would gradually gain power, so the country would break into pieces just like Europe, or the later Eastern Zhou. As China breaks, the need for diplomacy between countless independent Duchies and Counties was booming. On paper, the King of Zhou was still their liege, so it's very natural to leverage the dialect from the capital of Zhou, plus several classics like 诗[3] (the Poetry - the first book of poetry is, of course, called the Poetry). People call it 雅言[4] which means the language of elegance. It's a bit like Latin, which European always learn because of the Vatican, but people don't use it much in real life. If China continued this way it would be more like Europe and there would be many independent languages. Then there's Qin[5] (221 - 206 BC), which was originally a subject of Zhou, but eventually became too powerful and unified China. Qin was very radical, it killed feudalism, and launched massive standardization like unifying administrative units, all kinds of measurements, and even the wheelbases (there were no train but they did anyway), and of course the Chinese Characters. It's doable because 1) Chinese is hieroglyphic, the character and the sound are not coupled 2) writing was still a practice of elites, and elites are fewer in number and can afford education. As vast as China is, and as many dialects there are/were, people can always perfectly communicate with the written language throughout most Chinese history. Because of the hieroglyphic nature of the language, most of the characters from the Qin dynasty, still make sense even today if you know modern traditional Chinese and to a lesser extent simplified Chinese. (aka. The single-responsibility principle[6] in software engineering, the pronunciation, and the graphical representation are different reasons to change, so the decoupling makes the characters less screwed when the pronunciation changes). It's so powerful so that Chinese and Japanese may have some quasi-understanding to each other by writing Hanzi/Kanji. To understand what does a regnal year of Japanese Emperor means, people often have to go back to ancient Chinese texts - the most difficult part of the Japanese and Korean for western people, sometimes are easiest for Chinese. And for the following millenniums, those practices almost became a tradition: the dialect of the capital of that time would be the official language. And from time to time there were attempts to unify the vocal dialects during dynasties, but it was too hard because how people speak was always changing, until modern days that Guoyu[7] and Putonghua[7] could achieve the impossible through technologies. So: 1) The language is not only seen by governments as a tool of communication but also a tie that binds everything together - loosening that tie might come with risks. 2) It's more or less a tradition so there are substantially fewer pushbacks than other countries, and legitimate Chinese governments throughout history see no reason to not leverage that. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cangjie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cangjie [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Emperor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Emperor [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhou_dynasty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhou_dynasty [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_of_Poetry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_of_Poetry [4] Unfortunately, there's no English translation to this Wiki yet: https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%9B%85%E9%9F%B3 https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%9B%85%E9%9F%B3 [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qin_dynasty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qin_dynasty [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-responsibility_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-responsibility_principl... [7] & [8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Chinese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Chinese

posix86 5y ago

Linguistically, the distinction between languages and dialects is debated; often, reasonably so, all languages are simply dialects of each other. The reason is that if you have two languages which don't understand each other, you can find "intermediary steps" between the two that each understand each other, s.t. you reach the other language. And often, you have two "languages" that are clearly dialects but considered different languages because they each have their own army and navy. [1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an_army_and_navy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with...

powerapple 5y ago

There are a lot lost in translation. When Chinese people say "fangyan" it could mean anything, as long as it is a language used in specific region, as opposite to Mandarin, which is the official language used in the country. And that's what it is. It does not say a language is close to Mandarin or not. Of course, in translation, everything is lost. I have a lot problem with translations. For example, Chinese "loong" is translated into dragon, which are very different thing. It would be better people do not translate and find a close approximation for words, rather, introduce a new word. Like Banzai, Sushi, those words are good translations. Unfortunately it happened too many times in the history, now we are stuck with many words don't mean the same thing in two cultures.

powerapple 5y ago
In Arabic region, news organisations start to use MSA (Modern Standard Arabic) so that news can be broadcast to different regions, and schools are teaching in MSA, so that knowledge can be shared more effectively. There aren't much about which dialect is superior than others, any for or against discussion about these are super political, not about the use of the language at all.

leemailll 5y ago

A lot of the discussions here seem to forget one thing for the Chinese language. The written and spoken Chinese were different from early on, and the spoken spoken language for the administration or office was not the same as that for locals' chitchat.

morpheos137 5y ago

As somebody that does not speak or read Chinese I am surprised that a simpler script has not been developed and widely used. Is it fast to read? I can understand to an extent if reading speed is at par with simpler alphabetic or phonetic scripts. But surely writing speed must be slower. How do chinese people even type?

thuccess129 5y ago
> How do chinese people even type? Emacs has 25 kinds of Chinese input methods. A speaker at Stanford on the topic of early keyboards used for Chinese noted graph structure such as the one you find in Canjie input method was what they used before soundspelling. Today, hypergraphtext autocompletion influences message contruction on flatscreen devices in a kind of mind-machine blend mode on a massive scale.
FabHK 5y ago
That's a political hornets' nest that you're poking there. There is Pinyin, the official romanisation of Mandarin Chinese, in which for example "汉语拼音" becomes "hànyǔ pīnyīn". So, one could write using that. The argument typically is that Chinese has too many homonyms to make that practicable. I'm not sure I buy that, as spoken Mandarin is presumably intellegible, despite those homonyms. There's a lot of info in the informative book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy by John DeFrancis, and on this website: http://www.pinyin.info http://www.pinyin.info > But surely writing speed must be slower. I've found that that is not the case. While a typical character is more complex than a typical letter, you need fewer of them. At uni, I tested that with a native Chinese speaker and a native German speaker. We chose several random English sentences, they translated them into their respective language, and then we timed how long they took to write them down (by hand, in Chinese, German, English). It was basically the same, no systematic difference. > How do chinese people even type? There are several input systems, some based on pronunciation, some based on the shape or strokes. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_input_methods_for_computers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_input_methods_for_comp... or https://www.hackingchinese.com/chinese-input-methods-a-guide-for-second-language-learners/ https://www.hackingchinese.com/chinese-input-methods-a-guide...

est 5y ago

The Han script was really a unified VM bytecode and serialization format, not a language spec. The fangyans are various languages compiles to it. The Chinese standardized its written form very early, and is the only "language" survived today without an alphabet, many native speakers learn "Chinese" as the text rather than a spoken tone. Even Cantonese and Hakka are really a family of mutually unintelligible dialects clustered by geographic proximity.

qalmakka 5y ago

As the adage goes, "A language is a dialect with a flag and an army"