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As far as I know it's not English or any Western entity that has grouped the Chinese languages together as one, but the Chinese government, for political reason

by gpvos 2y ago

As far as I know it's not English or any Western entity that has grouped the Chinese languages together as one, but the Chinese government, for political reasons. Western linguists recognize the variants of "Chinese" as different languages.

gerdesj 2y ago
On a recent holiday to to Hong Kong {sp}, I noted the Metro announcements were in Cantonese, Mandarin and then English. I also noted that apologies and other minor social skirmishes and interactions, eg after bumping into someone, were mostly delivered in English. When in Rome, speak English: its the French language.
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
  Franco-Germanic, por favor.
- samus 2y ago
  Hong Kong is a special case where English still has higher prestige to begin with. Locals sometimes code-switch to English even if everyone present would understand Cantonese.
  - gerdesj 2y ago
    That sounds like a carefully worded response and I will respect it as such. Language is important in so many ways - it often defines who you are, regardless of where you are.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
lolinder 2y ago
There's a saying in linguistics that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy" [0]. Linguists recognize that where you draw boundaries between languages is essentially arbitrary, even more so than boundaries between biological species. It tends to be that a language is a language if and only if some sovereign state declares it to be so, otherwise it's a dialect. This is also how you get Portuguese as a distinct language from Spanish even though the two are more mutually intelligible than Scots (a "dialect") and American English are. Portugal has the sovereign government to back up its claim to having its own language where Scotland does not. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an_army_and_navy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a...
- flextheruler 2y ago
  I could believe this is true if you’re only comparing languages that have the same root or parent language such as Latin languages, etc. But I don’t see how anyone could describe the difference between Chinese and English as arbitrary or as two dialects even if the apocalyptic collapse of all major nations which spoke such languages occurred tomorrow. My understanding is that theres something called lexical similarity and if it’s over a certain percentage it’s a dialect.
  - gleenn 2y ago
    How does that work with e.g. French Creole which has French, Carribean, and English in it. What if this feels like a dialect but the percentage of any given parent is less than your cut-off percentage? You make the rule sound very easy to interpret but I think the general principle is that language classification is nuanced and the irony of the "navy and army" language requirement are it kind of has nothing to do with the actual language spoken.
    - samus 2y ago
      The "navy and army" argument is usually employed when the question arises whether something is a dialect or a separate language. IMHO such Creoles should also be classified as languages, with the caveat of dialect continuums. Creole is a weird case IMHO because English itself is pretty much a creole between Old English, Norman French, Norse, and some Gaelic and Pictish languages.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    What's arbitrary isn't that languages are different from each other, what's arbitrary is where you draw the line. When you take two languages on opposite sides of the world they're unquestionably different languages. But as you transition slowly from one language to another, how many languages you spin off and which dialects fall under which languages is arbitrary. > My understanding is that theres something called lexical similarity and if it’s over a certain percentage it’s a dialect. Even if you tried to use a method like this to draw lines, it requires you to pick a "center" dialect that you compare all other prospective dialects/languages to. Which dialect you pick as your "center" dialect will determine which dialects end up under your umbrella language, and picking a different center would yield very different results. Which language you pick as your center is inherently a political question, one which would be settled by a sovereign state. And aside from that problem, lexical similarity is not used to define languages. All it measures is how similar word sets are, and language variations are way more complicated than just vocabulary. No serious linguist would ever try to use a single metric like that to draw lines between languages (and again, most serious linguists aren't actually interested in drawing general-purpose lines because they understand that the lines are not real).
pessimizer 2y ago
They're written the same, and have basically the same grammar. The characters have hugely different readings, but people can communicate easily in writing. You can call that different languages, but that's certainly a different kind of different than people would expect when you say different. If there were a version of English where all of the letters designated completely different sounds, but was written exactly the same way, would it be a different language? Would people who said that they were dialects of the same language have to be saying this for political reasons? edit: I mean, Chinese is how you would expect it to be. How would two people living extremely far apart in China even know how each other would pronounce a particular character? How would they have communicated those sounds 500 years ago? The wide variance in the pronunciation of words even in English is also due to our dogshit orthography (largely imposed by the French), which often fails to give a decent hint for how to say something. Chinese characters are symbols of concepts that usually have a hint of what it's meant to sound like in the northern dialect, 1500 years ago, by referring to another character that there's no reason one would know what it sounded like.
- qazxcvbnm 2y ago
  The phonology differs. Vocabulary differs. Grammar differs. Speaking Cantonese and Mandarin natively, I have no idea what Hokkien or Sichuan people say, whether or not you write it down. This is especially apparent when speaking to less educated people with less exposure to the standardised, official Chinese language, which is what people do actually write down when intending for a broader audience, of course. Diglossia is real.
  - Kolya 2y ago
    Yep. Anybody who’s ever read written Cantonese or Shanghainese would realise they are often unintelligible unless you speak those languages and understand how they’re written. eg 「佢冇做乜嘢」 And yet the incorrect parent comment has been voted to the top of the thread by those who think it’s helped them.
- DiogenesKynikos 2y ago
  > How would two people living extremely far apart in China even know how each other would pronounce a particular character? China had an imperial bureaucracy for over 2000 years, which sent officials from one end of the country to the next. In fact, a predecessor of Standard Chinese (a.k.a. "Mandarin") was called "the language of officials" (官話).
ii41 2y ago
Here in China, linguists consider the different Western "languages" to be dialects, and believe that the Western governments, for political reasons, make people think they speak different languages than their neighbors, so that they cannot unite. I'm just joking, but what you say is as absurd as my joke. Western linguists don't consider the dialects different languages. If they do, they do it for political reasons. Accept that there are different ways of thinking and the real world never has to submit to how you define concepts like "a language", and not everything China surprises you with has something to do with politics. Edit: I realized that my joke was closer to reality than parent's comment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbo-Croatian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbo-Croatian
- hmry 2y ago
  Open WALS or Glottolog or any other language catalog and you will see they categorize Chinese as a language family, consisting of multiple languages like Mandarin, Wu/Hui, Min, etc. You are free to disagree of course, but "Western linguists don't consider the dialects different languages" is simply not true to my knowledge.
- lolinder 2y ago
  > Western linguists don't consider the dialects different languages. If they do, they do it for political reasons. Western linguists generally view the concept of a "language" as being a political one more than a linguistic one, and so rather than quibble about definitions they just use whichever word the people who speak the language/dialect would use. For example, from a book about Chinese dialects [0]: > The debate as to whether or not the varieties of speech used by the Chinese should be classified as separate languages or dialects of one language is a difficult one, with reasons on both sides. The main criterion according to which some scholars tend to use the English term 'language' for the varieties of Chinese, is the lack of mutual intelligibility between the various forms of speech, the fact that the "various 'Chinese dialects' are as diverse as the several Romance languages". On the other hand, since there are no extra-linguistic (political, historical, geographical, cultural) reasons to treat these dialects as individual languages, the tradition is to call them dialects of Chinese. The Chinese language varieties are dialects because it is politically expedient for them to be so. The Western Romance languages are languages because it is politically expedient for them to be. Linguists shrug and move on to more interesting (to them) questions. [0] https://books.google.com/books?id=lCgnrA7Ke3QC&pg=PA1&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=lCgnrA7Ke3QC&pg=PA1&source...
jhanschoo 2y ago
They are different languages in the sense that they are not mutually intelligible, but the prestige of Mandarin is not a CCP one. Mandarin as it evolved has always been the language of government and of the plains. Other Sinitic languages routinely borrow readings and terms from Mandarin. There's more that I want to say about the topic, but it's less relevant.

by gpvos 2y ago

gerdesj 2y ago

On a recent holiday to to Hong Kong {sp}, I noted the Metro announcements were in Cantonese, Mandarin and then English. I also noted that apologies and other minor social skirmishes and interactions, eg after bumping into someone, were mostly delivered in English. When in Rome, speak English: its the French language.

PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
Franco-Germanic, por favor.
samus 2y ago
Hong Kong is a special case where English still has higher prestige to begin with. Locals sometimes code-switch to English even if everyone present would understand Cantonese.
- gerdesj 2y ago
  That sounds like a carefully worded response and I will respect it as such. Language is important in so many ways - it often defines who you are, regardless of where you are.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

lolinder 2y ago

There's a saying in linguistics that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy" [0]. Linguists recognize that where you draw boundaries between languages is essentially arbitrary, even more so than boundaries between biological species. It tends to be that a language is a language if and only if some sovereign state declares it to be so, otherwise it's a dialect. This is also how you get Portuguese as a distinct language from Spanish even though the two are more mutually intelligible than Scots (a "dialect") and American English are. Portugal has the sovereign government to back up its claim to having its own language where Scotland does not. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an_army_and_navy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a...

flextheruler 2y ago
I could believe this is true if you’re only comparing languages that have the same root or parent language such as Latin languages, etc. But I don’t see how anyone could describe the difference between Chinese and English as arbitrary or as two dialects even if the apocalyptic collapse of all major nations which spoke such languages occurred tomorrow. My understanding is that theres something called lexical similarity and if it’s over a certain percentage it’s a dialect.
- gleenn 2y ago
  How does that work with e.g. French Creole which has French, Carribean, and English in it. What if this feels like a dialect but the percentage of any given parent is less than your cut-off percentage? You make the rule sound very easy to interpret but I think the general principle is that language classification is nuanced and the irony of the "navy and army" language requirement are it kind of has nothing to do with the actual language spoken.
  - samus 2y ago
    The "navy and army" argument is usually employed when the question arises whether something is a dialect or a separate language. IMHO such Creoles should also be classified as languages, with the caveat of dialect continuums. Creole is a weird case IMHO because English itself is pretty much a creole between Old English, Norman French, Norse, and some Gaelic and Pictish languages.
- lolinder 2y ago
  What's arbitrary isn't that languages are different from each other, what's arbitrary is where you draw the line. When you take two languages on opposite sides of the world they're unquestionably different languages. But as you transition slowly from one language to another, how many languages you spin off and which dialects fall under which languages is arbitrary. > My understanding is that theres something called lexical similarity and if it’s over a certain percentage it’s a dialect. Even if you tried to use a method like this to draw lines, it requires you to pick a "center" dialect that you compare all other prospective dialects/languages to. Which dialect you pick as your "center" dialect will determine which dialects end up under your umbrella language, and picking a different center would yield very different results. Which language you pick as your center is inherently a political question, one which would be settled by a sovereign state. And aside from that problem, lexical similarity is not used to define languages. All it measures is how similar word sets are, and language variations are way more complicated than just vocabulary. No serious linguist would ever try to use a single metric like that to draw lines between languages (and again, most serious linguists aren't actually interested in drawing general-purpose lines because they understand that the lines are not real).

pessimizer 2y ago

They're written the same, and have basically the same grammar. The characters have hugely different readings, but people can communicate easily in writing. You can call that different languages, but that's certainly a different kind of different than people would expect when you say different. If there were a version of English where all of the letters designated completely different sounds, but was written exactly the same way, would it be a different language? Would people who said that they were dialects of the same language have to be saying this for political reasons? edit: I mean, Chinese is how you would expect it to be. How would two people living extremely far apart in China even know how each other would pronounce a particular character? How would they have communicated those sounds 500 years ago? The wide variance in the pronunciation of words even in English is also due to our dogshit orthography (largely imposed by the French), which often fails to give a decent hint for how to say something. Chinese characters are symbols of concepts that usually have a hint of what it's meant to sound like in the northern dialect, 1500 years ago, by referring to another character that there's no reason one would know what it sounded like.

qazxcvbnm 2y ago
The phonology differs. Vocabulary differs. Grammar differs. Speaking Cantonese and Mandarin natively, I have no idea what Hokkien or Sichuan people say, whether or not you write it down. This is especially apparent when speaking to less educated people with less exposure to the standardised, official Chinese language, which is what people do actually write down when intending for a broader audience, of course. Diglossia is real.
- Kolya 2y ago
  Yep. Anybody who’s ever read written Cantonese or Shanghainese would realise they are often unintelligible unless you speak those languages and understand how they’re written. eg 「佢冇做乜嘢」 And yet the incorrect parent comment has been voted to the top of the thread by those who think it’s helped them.
DiogenesKynikos 2y ago
> How would two people living extremely far apart in China even know how each other would pronounce a particular character? China had an imperial bureaucracy for over 2000 years, which sent officials from one end of the country to the next. In fact, a predecessor of Standard Chinese (a.k.a. "Mandarin") was called "the language of officials" (官話).

ii41 2y ago

Here in China, linguists consider the different Western "languages" to be dialects, and believe that the Western governments, for political reasons, make people think they speak different languages than their neighbors, so that they cannot unite. I'm just joking, but what you say is as absurd as my joke. Western linguists don't consider the dialects different languages. If they do, they do it for political reasons. Accept that there are different ways of thinking and the real world never has to submit to how you define concepts like "a language", and not everything China surprises you with has something to do with politics. Edit: I realized that my joke was closer to reality than parent's comment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbo-Croatian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbo-Croatian

hmry 2y ago
Open WALS or Glottolog or any other language catalog and you will see they categorize Chinese as a language family, consisting of multiple languages like Mandarin, Wu/Hui, Min, etc. You are free to disagree of course, but "Western linguists don't consider the dialects different languages" is simply not true to my knowledge.
lolinder 2y ago
> Western linguists don't consider the dialects different languages. If they do, they do it for political reasons. Western linguists generally view the concept of a "language" as being a political one more than a linguistic one, and so rather than quibble about definitions they just use whichever word the people who speak the language/dialect would use. For example, from a book about Chinese dialects [0]: > The debate as to whether or not the varieties of speech used by the Chinese should be classified as separate languages or dialects of one language is a difficult one, with reasons on both sides. The main criterion according to which some scholars tend to use the English term 'language' for the varieties of Chinese, is the lack of mutual intelligibility between the various forms of speech, the fact that the "various 'Chinese dialects' are as diverse as the several Romance languages". On the other hand, since there are no extra-linguistic (political, historical, geographical, cultural) reasons to treat these dialects as individual languages, the tradition is to call them dialects of Chinese. The Chinese language varieties are dialects because it is politically expedient for them to be so. The Western Romance languages are languages because it is politically expedient for them to be. Linguists shrug and move on to more interesting (to them) questions. [0] https://books.google.com/books?id=lCgnrA7Ke3QC&pg=PA1&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=lCgnrA7Ke3QC&pg=PA1&source...

jhanschoo 2y ago

They are different languages in the sense that they are not mutually intelligible, but the prestige of Mandarin is not a CCP one. Mandarin as it evolved has always been the language of government and of the plains. Other Sinitic languages routinely borrow readings and terms from Mandarin. There's more that I want to say about the topic, but it's less relevant.