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> 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 w

• dwohnitmok 5y ago
  > I would caution against using the existence of the Fangyan as firm evidence of a single language intelligible across Han China. This is a good point. In particular it's a bit difficult to evaluate how much of 通語 was aspirational vs reality, especially as we don't have good documents outlining what the process of learning Chinese was like, but it clearly reflects a desire for a lingua franca (rather than it being a completely foreign concept). But it is clear that as soon as we have outside observers who are learning Chinese for the first time (an extremely valuable resource for tracking uniformity of language!), that at various times in China's history there was a single lingua franca. E.g. Ricci says this, which is pretty much a direct refutation of the original article's point that a unified lingua franca was a 20th century invention, > The Chinese have different languages in different provinces, to such an extent that they can not understand each other... The Chinese also have another language which is like a universal and common language...[much later] With all the varieties of languages, there is one that we call cuonhoa [官話], that is to say, the forensic language (lingua forense); it is used in audiences and tribunals; and, if one learns this, he could use it in all the provinces; in addition, even the children and women knew enough of it to be able to communicate with the people of another province. [Excerpted and translated by Paul Yang in The Portuguese-Chinese Dictionary of Matteo Ricci: A Historical and Linguistic Tradition, Proceedings of 2nd International Conference on Sinology, pg. 198-199] Even allowing for the fact that Ricci is almost certainly experiencing some sort of selection bias (probably mainly talking to people with a certain amount of educational background), it's a pretty clear statement of a single language used across all of Ming China that superseded regional languages. > Even the received literature of the Han Dynasty and Northern and Southern Dynasties is rich with extremely rare words and hapax legomena which may speak to a great regional diversity of language (there's other reasons for this too of course). The whole post-Han pre-Tang time period is a bit of a crazy minefield to get through from a language perspective because of political (and consequently linguistic) disunity. There's also a bit of craziness in the Qing with competing standards (the old Ming Mandarin standard based off the Nanjing standard and the Beijing Mandarin standard, the competition extended up all the way into Beijing itself!) that also lead to a significant amount of fragmentation (and why e.g. there was a perceived need to make what would become the 老國音). I don't mean to say that there was always a standardized, unified language, but I do mean to say that the idea of having one is very ancient, and convincing evidence that one was created and basically "worked" is also much older than the 20th century.
  • whakim 5y ago
    > In particular it's a bit difficult to evaluate how much of 通語 was aspirational vs reality. This is definitely a complicated debate with regards to all aspects of the Han, ideas about language included. There was certainly a strong tendency - particularly in the late Western Han - to take a huge variety of cultural inputs and try to synthesize them into something "canonical." (Another way of putting this is - to what extent is most of what we know about early China a reflection of what the Western Han elite believed/understood about early China?) As Yang Xiong worked at the Imperial Library with Liu Xiang and Liu Xin, he would have been part of this process. The other thing to remember about Yang Xiong and the Fangyan is that he was a real polymath - we don't necessarily have to boil his writings down to this or that political end. In particular, he claims to have strongly favored something called the "glosses and exegesis" (xungu 訓詁) approach to studying the classics, which is a bit murky but seems related to trying to understand the original meanings of words. I think there's a strong possibility that this was tied up with his philological interests, rather than some notion of a lingua franca. (I did my graduate research on Yang Xiong, FWIW.) More broadly, the problem with making any strong conclusions about early medieval China is that most of our sources are by elites, for elites, and aren't really concerned with questions like "how did ordinary folks interact with each other?" We don't even get to the level of interest found in, say, Tang chuanqi. > Even allowing for the fact that Ricci is almost certainly experiencing some sort of selection bias (probably mainly talking to people with a certain amount of educational background), it's a pretty clear statement of a single language used across all of Ming China that superseded regional languages. I'm not a political scientist and I don't know nearly as much about the last thousand years of Chinese literary history, so perhaps I'm about to step into a minefield, but I'm not 100% convinced that the average Ming peasant really conceptualized themself as a member of a "national" polity with certain customs (like an "official" language). Which is quite different from China today. I guess another way of putting this is whether a "national" language is top-down or bottom-up. > The whole post-Han pre-Tang time period is a bit of a crazy minefield to get through from a language perspective Trust me, I know :)