On living vicariously through a new blog by Kellen Parker
What is Chinese? You know it’s not just Mandarin, of course, maybe because you’ve read John DeFrancis, or maybe because your one-time Minnesota neighbor, a spry Hong Kongese gentleman of 139 who spent 13 hours a day caring for his voluptuous jade carpet of a lawn, spent the remainder of his waking hours trying to converse with your family (whenever they ventured outside the house) in what could fairly be called “Chinese”, but with only the dimmest success.
He spoke Cantonese, which YU swore was completely unintelligible to her. She spoke her Beijing Mandarin back to him, and he appeared to understand occasionally, although any conversation of more than the idlest pleasantry was inevitably interrupted by a trip back into the house to grab a scrap of paper onto which they would scrawl the hànzì (汉字 = Chinese characters) which allowed them to communicate a bit of real content.
PBS also said she didn’t understand a thing. But interestingly, that assessment might not have been entirely accurate — she occasionally appeared to respond to his requests to perform some small task or another.
Syz, unfortunately, didn’t spend enough time with him to pick up even a cognate or two, which should have been easy. The blame lies mostly with his own sloth, although it should be noted that most of the good neighbor’s instructions about how to care for the Beijing Sounds studio’s dessicated and ailing lawn came in the form of rapid gesticulation rather than actual language.
The whole experience was enough to make a Zhonglish speaker wonder if all those rumors about other “dialects” of Chinese (e.g. Cantonese, Wu, etc.) could be true, such as that…
- They all have the same grammar
- They all have the same written language
- Only the pronunciation of each character is different
Sure, we know that most of the trustworthy literature says that the answers are false, false and false. But the interesting question is — to what extent might they kind of be true? In other words if you softened up the assertions a bit, something like
- The grammar is only occasionally different
- The written language is pretty close to the same as well, because pronunciation differences aren’t visible
- The pronunciation is quite different, but follows mostly predictable patterns
… would you then find some truth in them and would you find yourself comfortable with saying that Mandarin and Cantonese, for example, are pretty similar, arguably more similar than other close neighbors such as Spanish and Portuguese?*
If it weren’t for the aforementioned sloth factor, Beijing Sounds might engage some of the studio’s research assistants to explore the issue. It would be fun to document — right down to the naked morpheme — what differences exist. And if that was the task at hand, what better variant to start with than Wu, since it seems to be in greater need of respect from the outside world. For most Americans, at least, the “other” (i.e. non-Mandarin) Chinese is almost always Cantonese, the language spoken in the general vicinity of Hong Kong. The reasons are political and social — the emigration and interaction of Cantonese speakers with the West having raised the prominence of their language. But in pure numbers, Wu (of which Shanghainese is a dialect) takes the day with 77 million speakers versus “only” 55 million for Yue / Cantonese — the world’s 10th most commonly spoken language. Criminy!
Intriguing? Sure, but all that work…
Hang on, though. Maybe you can grab that bag of chips and settle down on the sofa again, because Kellen Parker has now launched a new blog, the Annals of Wu — voices from the yangzi delta, dedicated exclusively to learning Wu. His opening salvo:
In the coming months I will be adding a number of recordings of various things spoken in Wu, mostly that spoken in the south of Jiangsu province since that’s where I’m currently living. I’ll be keeping track of the speakers with information that would affect their pronunciation, including other languages spoken and when they first had to speak Mandarin. I’m using Praat for graphic tones, which I hope to make some sense of, so expect a number of visual aids to go with the sound clips.
The fact that this is a KP undertaking** makes it doubly exciting. If you follow his xiaoerjing blog, you know that he holds himself to high standards and manages to be prolific at the same time. Go check out the six substantive posts he’s done in barely over two weeks. But if you just have to have a little appetizer, check out this sound clip pirated from a post on “greetings in Wu”
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
And before you click over to his blog to see the answer, listen carefully and see if, with those hints, you can figure out what the phrase is. No problem, right? It’s all Chinese!
————-
* For the record, my guess on the basis of very limited knowledge is that, no, they aren’t really that similar. But I’d really like to see how the mutual unintelligibility manifests itself: grammar, lexicon, pronunciation shifts…
**And on no less a domain than bjshengr.com. The Beijing Sounds studio is proud to have him as a neighbor and is hoping that some of his diligence bleeds over into the /bjs area.
Add "Learn Chinese" to iGoogle
Comments 23
syz: You should take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diglossia#Chinese. I wrote pretty much that entire section and it touches upon the differences in grammar and vocabulary one might encounter when comparing Mandarin and Cantonese.
Posted 08 Feb 2009 at 10:32 pm ¶Claw, very cool example. It’s that kind of detail and examples that my brain really needs. To say that “M̀h-gōi béi kéuih bún syū ngóh” is just a little bit different from “Qǐng gěi wǒ tā de shū”… well, it’s hardly worth responding to, although I have heard folks say roughly that.
Is it honest ignorance, or willful?
Could you ever get sound files into the wikipedia stuff?
Posted 08 Feb 2009 at 10:51 pm ¶Well, a quick adding of my two sense and experience with the topolects. They used to be basically independent languages and took in enough ancient/middle oral/written chinese to muck them up. Pronunciations are all over the map and grammar holds solid in the sense that all european languages have grammars that are ‘roughly similar’. Aside from written cantonese, which has about as much follwing as say, writing english in chinese characters, (hence we need not mention written shangainese and taiwanese), the dialects aren’t and really can’t be written in any systematic way by their speakers. They write a version of baihuawen (standard mandarin) that becomes their written standard. That written standard, with regional variations, is the the thing you as a foreigner were taught not only to speak, but also to write.
Posted 08 Feb 2009 at 11:01 pm ¶syz: Note that I specifically chose that example to highlight the differences between the two. In other scenarios, the difference might not be as huge, especially as the speech becomes more formal or technical.
I have a book about the sociolinguistic aspects of Written Cantonese that notes a study illustrating the continuum. Analyzing a Hong Kong radio news bulletin, the occurance of distinct Cantonese words was pretty low, only 12%. All the other words were cognate to those found in Mandarin (and from my own personal experience, there is a pretty regular correspondence in pronunciation between the two, albeit with many exceptions of course; also I find it a lot easier to map Cantonese pronunciation to Mandarin rather than the other way around due to the fact that Mandarin merged many more sounds).
Of the 12% that were distinctly Cantonese, 42% were accounted for by just three words: 嘅 (means the same as Mandarin 的), 係 (means the same as Mandarin 是), and 喺 (means the same as Mandarin 在). Often, it’s the most common words in languages that end up diverging the most.
However, when they analyzed an informal Cantonese talk show, the percentage of distinct Cantonese words increased markedly to 42%.
Despite the fact that many Cantonese speakers themselves can see the differences between Mandarin and Cantonese, there’s still a tendency for them to regard them as similar due to the fact that as Cantonese speech becomes more formal, it ends up resembling Standard Written Chinese (which is based on Mandarin) more and more. This is not a coincidence of course; generally standard written languages influence what speakers regard as formal. These speakers end up regarding their own normal speech patterns as “slang” (and I really hate it when they use that word) and non-standard. For this reason, I would say it’s honest ignorance.
And yes, it is possible to add sound samples to Wikipedia. I didn’t do it for that article, but it’s something I could do if I get the chance.
Posted 08 Feb 2009 at 11:25 pm ¶hsknotes: Written Cantonese actually is pretty prevalent nowadays. You’ll see it quite often in Hong Kong on billboards, various advertisments, magazines, and even newspapers (though most of the content in these newspapers are still in standard written Chinese). In addition, just go onto any online forum with a lot of Cantonese speakers and you’ll see Written Cantonese almost exclusively.
I also disagree with your view that they used to be independent languages. Although it’s visible that each language contains different substratums from other language groups, most linguists agree that they evolved from a common Sinitic language or close group of dialects. If they really were from independent language groups, then the sound correspondences between them would not be nearly so regular.
Posted 08 Feb 2009 at 11:38 pm ¶BTW, if you’ve got the time, here’s another interesting article to read about how Chinese speakers view Cantonese: http://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp179_cantonese.pdf
Posted 09 Feb 2009 at 12:05 am ¶Ok, admittedly I went overboard with the disavowal of written topolects, and there is no denying that of the other major written topolects (taiwanese and shanghainese) it is the most prevalent, it’s use is still fairly restricted and not really taken that ’seriously’ both at a governmental level or level of the people. Even though it’s written, it still seems to be given fangyan status. I did know that written cantonese was growing in popularity and use, like in taiwan and shanghai, and I did know it was used in bbs’s but perhaps I underestimated it’s use. I tend to think of BBS speak as something almost restricted to that set of users. If you go read a subculture chatroom in the US, say hip-hop, you’ll probably see somewhat like a unique lexicon emerging both from the outer culture and from the web element, but that language is oftentimes only on the web. With ads and headlines and stuff, I saw that in Taiwan, I took that more as how you see actual ’slang’, or colloquialisms making their way into the mainstream than as heralding the arrival of a true, accepted and used written standard.
I’ve found HK newspapers that aren’t steadfast in their checking to full of HK mandarin and cantonese that a mandarin speaker not from HK would not understand or know how to pronounce. Once again, same in Taiwan but not common in the major media outlets.
And I didn’t really mean fully independent languages, I knew when I typed that it would get response. But, it’s clear, let’s say, that Fujianhua used to be a whole other thing (dialect, whatever) and got with a big dose of middle and classical chinese.
Cantonese is not representative of all the topolects and some people mistakenly think becuase of the close correspondence there, all the topolects are more or less like that.
Posted 09 Feb 2009 at 1:57 am ¶How did I predict exactly what the greeting was in the sound clip without even hearing it?
HOT TIP: whenever you ask someone, “Can you say something for us in (insert fangyan)?” they will always (and I do mean always) say, “Chifan le ma.” Now I just bluffing my way though saying, “Oh yeah, I can understand that. ‘Have you eaten?’ right?” and their eyes grow big as they start to doubt everything they ever believed about the universe. Luckily, there was also the clue here that it is a greeting.
Anyway, enough about me. Very interesting post. I’m still not really sure what the answer is to the question: “So, can all these fangyan-s be represented in hanzi?” The answer seems to be drifting toward, “no.” So, why do locals always resort to writing the characters to communicate when all else fails?
Posted 09 Feb 2009 at 7:48 am ¶well first, thanks for the compliments syz, though i’m not sure i’m deserving of such.
@ albert, the real trick is knowing what words were actually said in the greeting
. no joke on it being the most cited example of “hey say something in ___”
@ everyone,
re writing in 汉字: I can’t say for all the chinese languages or dialect, but Wu most definitely is written in hanzi quite often, though not the hanzi used for Mandarin. 别 is 覅, 不 is typically written with 佛, 洲 is 贼, 勿 is 朆 et cetera, all based on the sound of the word in Wu (as 不 and Buddha have little connection otherwise). But of course Mandarin is the standard language. So even if someone in Shanghai says 侬 as the second person singular pronoun, they still know 你 is standard. If someone from Rio wanted to say “night” to an Italian, spoken “noĩtsh*” may not do it but written ‘noite’ and ‘notte’ are a bit easier to match.
re differences: i think the spanish/portuguese comparison is pretty accurate in many cases. maybe even spanish/italian or even to french given the greater extent that sounds have changed in italian and spanish vs how they’ve changed in french. it’s thrown around on wikipedia in a couple places that Mandarin is SVO and Wu can be SOV or even OVS. of course mandarin isn’t always SVO and Wu, in my experience, has yet to appear as OVS.
But there are some definite word order changes and changes in vocabulary. I’m sure there are better examples but this is the one I thought of given the content.
Beijing: 你吃饭了吗?
Shanghai: 你饭吃过了吗?
Changzhou: 你吃饭没?
I’d compare it to “thank you” in romance languages. Grazie and gracias in Italian and Spanish, but in Portuguese it’s obrigado. Gracious vs. obliged. We can find the cognates in English but between the three, it’s 2 different cognates. and then there’s merci.
And i’d echo what Claw said about disagreeing on them being different languages. Historical linguistics would seem to say otherwise. Altaic influences can be reasonably determined as can divergence from Middle Chinese, e.g. the voiced initials in Wu that were to be found in MC but then dropped by Jin, Yue and Mandarin.
—
Posted 09 Feb 2009 at 10:51 am ¶* yeah that’s a terrible transcription of carioca portuguese. of anything really. sorry for that.
I had an interesting discussion at dinner last night that got into the topic of dialects. My girlfriend is from the northern part of Nantong country and the other Chinese girl present was from Gaochun, which is about an hour south of Nanjing, right where the Wu dialect ‘begins’.
One thing I find strange is that my gf’s dialect is technically in the ‘mandarin family’ just WAY south. Right where it ends. So is Nantong city’s. Well, her dialect, as well as Nantong city’s are complete unintelligible from standard Mandarin and from each other.
What then makes them in the ‘Mandarin’ family?
Also, to note, her dialect isn’t simply a swap different pronunciations for each character system. There’s a lot of variation in word order, words that can’t be translated directly into standard Chinese, multi-syllabic stuff (了 is guh-le) etc…
Posted 09 Feb 2009 at 2:11 pm ¶And in Beijing it is often shortened to 吃了吗？ In Beijing’s Yanqing County, that would more likely be 吃了没？ 没 being a common subsitute for (but certainly not meaning the same as) 吗. Just for the sake of throwing in a little more confusion.
Posted 09 Feb 2009 at 5:17 pm ¶@hsknotes: While many of the other dialect groups did come almost directly from Middle Chinese, you are correct that Fujianhua did not. However, that doesn’t mean it was its own independent group either. It just means that the Min dialect group (of which Fujianhua is part of) just diverged from the other Sinitic languages much earlier, and in fact Min preserves some of the features of Old Chinese that are not preserved in the dialects that derived from Middle Chinese. You are right that Min subsequently got an influx of Middle Chinese that ‘mucked up’ a lot of the pronunciation, leading to the Min dialects being a group that has the greatest amount of 文白异读 (I don’t know if there’s a term for this in English).
@Albert: “So, can all these fangyan-s be represented in hanzi?” I would say the answer is yes. There’s really nothing that stops you from representing any analytic language using hanzi. As Kellen noted, Wu represents many of its words with it’s own invented or borrowed characters, just like Written Cantonese does. But also note that the present Mandarin-based written standard is also made up of invented and borrowed characters that were adopted in the early 20th century (though they were in use informally before their adoption, just as the writing systems of the non-official dialects are in informal non-standardized usage today). Characters like 们 did not exist in the previous Classical Chinese written standard. Characters like 没 originally meant something completely different, but were borrowed to represent the méi in méiyǒu, even though this word arguably originally derived from 未 (which, in most of the other dialect groups, retains its m- initial).
I think the real question you meant to ask is, “can you represent them all in a unified written standard that all such groups can read?” It is the answer to this that I think is no. The characters used by other dialect groups are generally unreadable to others only familiar with Standard Written Chinese, and even if you were to somehow incorporate them into the written standard there would be too many of them to remember because you would arguably not see the ones not in use by your own dialect very often. The issue of grammatical differences also compound the problem.
“So, why do locals always resort to writing the characters to communicate when all else fails?” Because at the present, there is at least the Mandarin-based standard written language that all Chinese speakers learn, regardless of whether they speak Mandarin. As long as they are able to write using the standard, they should be able to communicate using its characters.
@Jason: Even though not all of the Mandarin dialects are mutually intelligible, they are classed as Mandarin dialects because they consistently share a set of common features, the main one being the pronoun system (我, 你, 他, with 们 as the pluralizer). They also share the merger of Middle Chinese final -m into final -n, and the loss of the final stops -p, -t, and -k, though I believe the dialect that your girlfriend speaks merged those three stops into -ʔ rather than losing them completely. Most of the Mandarin dialects also merged initial kj-, kʰj-, and xj- (if you construe them into pinyin, they would be: gi-, ki-, and hi-) into tɕ-, tɕʰ-, and ɕ (pinyin: ji-, qi-, and xi-). This last change only happened in the last 200-400 years actually, which is why Beijing was originally romanized as Peking by French missionaries 400 years ago (if you construe the pronunciation of Peking into the pinyin system, it would be Beiging). The other dialect groups did not undergo this change.
Posted 09 Feb 2009 at 9:19 pm ¶@Kellen: A lot of the word order differences can be attributed to dislocation. This Wikipedia article mentions dislocation in Cantonese, but it can apply to Mandarin, and probably many of the other Sinitic languages too.
Posted 09 Feb 2009 at 9:47 pm ¶ah good to see IPA works here.
@ Jason: “了 is guh-le” but could it be that 了is actually 过了? 常州话 does that a bit as well. And when it’s not, it seem it’s more like the other pronunciation of 了 liao.
@ Claw: yep. certainly it would make sense as an explanation for the OVS claims.
Posted 09 Feb 2009 at 10:07 pm ¶Actually, the example I was thinking of if is the 海安话 version of 晓得了. It comes out as something like ’shou de guh le’. The ‘guh’ isn’t 过 according to Jess (that wouldn’t really make much sense anyway) and has no meaning in 普通话. So, who knows?
Posted 10 Feb 2009 at 1:52 am ¶The greeting posted sounds to me virtually like the Mandarin “Ni3 chi1 mei2you3 fan4?” (It’s ungrammatical but the colloquial Mandarin where I’m from is generally like that.)
Posted 27 Mar 2009 at 6:50 am ¶Hi johnleemk,
you might want to click over to Kellen’s site. I sort of had the same idea the first time I heard the quote [i.e. that it is pretty close to ni chi mei fan]. But according to him what you are hearing as mei is actually the word for fan:
ɲʒɛə tɕɛ vɛiː vʌn
你 吃 饭 没
And not to be pedantic, but calling the word order “ungrammatical” would be kind of odd. More like the grammar simply tolerates (or requires) a different word order.
Where are you, by the way? I’m curious about what region’s Mandarin would accept such a word order.
Posted 27 Mar 2009 at 8:55 pm ¶That makes sense, syz — I was actually split 60-40 on whether it was ni3 chi1 mei2you3 fan4 or ni3 chi1 fan4 mei2you3. I’m from Malaysia, where languages steal words and grammar from each other like nobody’s business. I learned Mandarin in the US and at first I could barely understand what everyone back home was saying. (An excellent example of Malaysian Zhonglish: instead of duo1shao, people say ji3duo1 — literally, “how much.”) The accent is extremely odd and the grammar sometimes eludes comprehension, at least for someone who has learned Mandarin based on the Beijing accent.
Posted 28 Mar 2009 at 5:13 am ¶Heh, listening to the clip again, I must have been extremely sleepy when I was split on what it sounds like…to my Zhonglish ears this still definitely sounds like someone saying ni3 chi1 mei2you3 fan4 very quickly.
Posted 28 Mar 2009 at 5:14 am ¶@johnleemk: ji3duo1 (几多) is probably due to Cantonese influence, which doesn’t use duo1shao3 (多少) at all.
Posted 28 Mar 2009 at 5:20 am ¶So, could you tell me how much “discount” can someone gets if she/he is already able to speak cantonese and want to learn mandarin (pu tong hua)?
I’ve noticed that a friend of mine who is able to speak cantonese (raised in a family who is able to speak cantonese), he has a higher speed in learning mandarin. Is it true that mandarin is easy to master when you already fluent in one of chinese dialects? he is the only friend I have who could speak cantonese at the intermediate level in my class, so I don’t know how to compare him with other people.
Another question, I’m currently learning mandarin, if one day, I could call myself fluent enough in mandarin (speaking, writing, fluent enough to speak mandarin as a second language…) Will it help me to learn cantonese? Considering that I m not the native speaker for both languages.
Sorry, this might be out of the topics, but thanks for sharing your ideas…
Posted 01 Jun 2010 at 10:55 am ¶I’m not a native english speaker myself, pardon my awful english..
deany,
Those are great questions. I’m living in Guangzhou (Cantonese-speaking land) right now, and I’m actually surprised that most of the students from outside Guangdong can’t learn Cantonese very quickly (or at all). It’s probably more a matter of not needing to, but it seems that the tones are the main barrier.
I myself would like to find the following resource (though I admit it would be a very VERY small market): A Cantonese instruction book for foreigners who already speak Mandarin.
I, like you, would love to see an overview of the differences to get an idea of what kind of “discount” I’d get if I actually tried to learn Cantonese.
Posted 01 Jun 2010 at 9:49 pm ¶@Deany & Albert: I’ve put your questions into a Sinoglot post. Hope they get some response!
Posted 06 Jun 2010 at 6:56 pm ¶Post a Comment