3 ms·

As a mandarin speaker (not from northern China though), I feel that the OP's anecdotes seem a bit extreme and appeared to imply ignorance in most speakers. Anec

by z2 5y ago

As a mandarin speaker (not from northern China though), I feel that the OP's anecdotes seem a bit extreme and appeared to imply ignorance in most speakers. Anecdotally I know none to few people who would claim that dialects can be written and then read back in another dialect. It also would strike me and all the mandarin speakers I know as fairly obvious that most dialects don't even have well-defined characters to use. Rather, written Cantonese (or Shanghainese etc.) often use characters for phonetic purposes rather than true etymological meaning (e.g., 海-sea is pronounced "hai" in many dialects, and 嗨 with a 口-mouth character hints that this is now a sound word to represent the "hai" sound, and no longer has any relation to the ocean). And that is if the dialect mainstream enough to actually have a writing convention. A lack of popular non-mandarin convention today is tough, hence the dominance of written mandarin grammar, to the extent that a lot of Cantonese news programs will actually provide captions in written mandarin.

jimworm 5y ago
> Rather, written Cantonese (or Shanghainese etc.) often use characters for phonetic purposes rather than true etymological meaning This is where the mistake is. Written Chinese does have all those characters - it is the adoption of a "standard Chinese" that caused those characters not to be taught when mass education was introduced. The people were left to transliterate or create new characters for their spoken native tongue, and the correct characters are now known only to researchers. One very annoying part of Mandarin's effect on modern Chinese is that many words are being replaced by transliterations of/in Mandarin, even when the Chinese word itself exists. Often this is because the source of the word was foreign. To a non-Mandarin speaker, written Chinese is very slowly turning into complete nonsense, and written Chinese is losing its edge in longevity by no longer being a ideograph-based language.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  It has been a very, very long time since written Chinese was a substantially ideograph-based language. It is amazing how many literate Chinese people think of it as one.
  - jimworm 5y ago
    That's merely refuting the least relevant part. The ideographs were important in that they could tie together vastly different spoken languages in the same family. Because the writing was unified, all the spoken variants had their own influence on it by way of traders and administrators, and successful changes by proxy affected the speech of other regions. This meant that all the different places effectively evolved their languages around a virtual core based on the communications of the literate class - even the phonetic-based parts; and they could do it peacefully and continuously, constantly realigning their definitions without legal or violent coercion, uninterrupted by the constant evolution of the whole group of spoken languages. For example, French has had a great influence on English, and they both use the Latin alphabet. Would such influence have been possible in the same time without violent conquest, given the alphabetic system of writing?
    - CorrectHorseBat 5y ago
      Do you have any literature backing this up? It all sounds like pseudoscience to me, but I could be wrong.
- CorrectHorseBat 5y ago
  Chinese was never an ideograph based language to begin with. Yes, most characters have that somewhere in their origin, but there's so much corruption, change of meaning and borrowing of sound going on all through history that you really don't get anywhere using ideographs. Example in Mandarin: 我不知道 : I don't know. But in ideographs: weapon flower root arrow mouth foot head.
ncmncm 5y ago
> written Cantonese (or Shanghainese etc.) often use characters for phonetic purposes rather than true etymological meaning This is the case for all Chinese writing, and has been for a very long time. But complicated rules for which character may be used to spell which Mandarin word obscure the fact.
- z2 5y ago
  It's the case for about 80% of characters by my very unscientific estimate -- there are of course some logograms and ideographs left even if the meanings have also shifted. But the difference (and maybe one awkward part) in written non-Mandarin today is the flagrant use of 口 + similar sounding word with zero meaning, just as foreign words are sometimes imported for pure sound reasons. Chinese is far from a pure language, but I'd argue that whatever "rules" that created 清，情，晴 are better attempts at capturing both sound and meaning.

by z2 5y ago

jimworm 5y ago

> Rather, written Cantonese (or Shanghainese etc.) often use characters for phonetic purposes rather than true etymological meaning This is where the mistake is. Written Chinese does have all those characters - it is the adoption of a "standard Chinese" that caused those characters not to be taught when mass education was introduced. The people were left to transliterate or create new characters for their spoken native tongue, and the correct characters are now known only to researchers. One very annoying part of Mandarin's effect on modern Chinese is that many words are being replaced by transliterations of/in Mandarin, even when the Chinese word itself exists. Often this is because the source of the word was foreign. To a non-Mandarin speaker, written Chinese is very slowly turning into complete nonsense, and written Chinese is losing its edge in longevity by no longer being a ideograph-based language.

ncmncm 5y ago
It has been a very, very long time since written Chinese was a substantially ideograph-based language. It is amazing how many literate Chinese people think of it as one.
- jimworm 5y ago
  That's merely refuting the least relevant part. The ideographs were important in that they could tie together vastly different spoken languages in the same family. Because the writing was unified, all the spoken variants had their own influence on it by way of traders and administrators, and successful changes by proxy affected the speech of other regions. This meant that all the different places effectively evolved their languages around a virtual core based on the communications of the literate class - even the phonetic-based parts; and they could do it peacefully and continuously, constantly realigning their definitions without legal or violent coercion, uninterrupted by the constant evolution of the whole group of spoken languages. For example, French has had a great influence on English, and they both use the Latin alphabet. Would such influence have been possible in the same time without violent conquest, given the alphabetic system of writing?
  - CorrectHorseBat 5y ago
    Do you have any literature backing this up? It all sounds like pseudoscience to me, but I could be wrong.
CorrectHorseBat 5y ago
Chinese was never an ideograph based language to begin with. Yes, most characters have that somewhere in their origin, but there's so much corruption, change of meaning and borrowing of sound going on all through history that you really don't get anywhere using ideographs. Example in Mandarin: 我不知道 : I don't know. But in ideographs: weapon flower root arrow mouth foot head.

ncmncm 5y ago

> written Cantonese (or Shanghainese etc.) often use characters for phonetic purposes rather than true etymological meaning This is the case for all Chinese writing, and has been for a very long time. But complicated rules for which character may be used to spell which Mandarin word obscure the fact.

z2 5y ago
It's the case for about 80% of characters by my very unscientific estimate -- there are of course some logograms and ideographs left even if the meanings have also shifted. But the difference (and maybe one awkward part) in written non-Mandarin today is the flagrant use of 口 + similar sounding word with zero meaning, just as foreign words are sometimes imported for pure sound reasons. Chinese is far from a pure language, but I'd argue that whatever "rules" that created 清，情，晴 are better attempts at capturing both sound and meaning.