A: [gazing intently at his screen] Wow this is hideous. [scanning further] Unbefu…

B: Ah, the F-bomb infixation. Something wrong on the Internets* again?

A: Plain, damn wrong and debunked over and again, [lowering voice] by folks whose prose and logic are far more incisive than anything these studios could ever muster. [Raising voice again excitedly] Wow and they’ve got their experts all lined up on point. I don’t get it. Don’t they read DeFrancis? I’ve got to get the editor to approve a post on this.

B: My poor, simple friend, I won’t let you become another sadsack blogger who falls into the correction trap. You could spend three life sentences hyper-hypercorrecting singular they problems and accomplish nothing more than to get yourself disinvited from a few more dinner parties.

A: You really don’t get it! Sometimes the sky is falling to hell in a handbasket and so on. This is in the New York Times!

B: Do they still have readership in the double digits?

A: C’mon, smartass, you just don’t want to acknowledge that we’re losing not just this battle but the entire war. Look: languages change, and language is not script. How many times does it have to be said?

B: How many times did Copernicus say the earth moves?

A: Listen to this hooey: “The Chinese Language, Ever Evolving”

B: It’s a headline, buddy. Can’t blame’em for trying to sell papers — I mean: banner ads, whatever.

A: You’re always blaming the headline writer. Fine. How about this, no further in than the second paragraph: “This is not the first attempt to modernize a sprawling and ancient language.” Both fallacies in one sentence: first that it would be possible to “modernize” a language through script reform, and second that Chinese is somehow older than any other language.

B: Easy now, tiger. For most folks, even when talking about English, let alone Chinese, “language” means “writing system.” Get over it. Just mentally make the substitution and you’ll be fine. It’s yet another case of the vernacular vs trade vocabulary. Remember how Language Log got all worked up about the popular misuse of “passive voice”? And you got so fed up with their worked-up-edness that you wrote in to support the more common interpretation that it means “vague about agency”?

A: Fair enough. But I side with Language Log when it comes to specialists: that they should try to correct popular misunderstandings. Check out their first expert, from a Boston institution that you just might’ve heard of. Bear with me and I’ll give you the entire paragraph in all its obscenity:

The utopian impulses behind standardization and simplification of a living language are always understandable. Increased literacy, administrative efficiency, and ease of communication are laudable goals. But those impulses can also strip a language of its wit, whimsy, and play, not to mention its capacity to accommodate new concepts and usages.

“Standardization and simplification of the living language”?! I’m telling you I couldn’t make this stuff up. It’s complete conflation of writing system and language, straight from the mouth of a so-called expert whose academic credentials would qualify her, in most people’s minds, to speak authoritatively on the subject.

B: Well, it is a bit ugly.

A: Ugly?! I haven’t even started. Here’s expert #2

Simplifying traditional Chinese characters was a linguistic democratization and one of China’s most successful progressive programs in the 1950s. The majority of the population was lifted out of illiteracy.

How do you like that? Through the miracle of cutting out a few strokes, hundreds of millions of people were able to achieve literacy.

B: [chuckling] Yeah, I’m sure that making education compulsory and putting students through thousands of hours of character practice had nothing to do with it. You know what your problem is? You think it matters. You think if kids spent a few hours less on their writing system that they would all have time to learn the zither or something, when in fact they would just spend more time learning how to do long division on the abacus (if their parents are Beijingers) or learning how to beat their uncles at Wii bowling (if their parents are from Minneapolis).

A: [indignant] It’s not just a few hours here and there. Look at PBS — she’s probably putting in 3-4 hours a day exclusively on characters between home and school. Think of what that time could get you!

B: Sure, she’d be able to recite the Nickelodeon programming schedule, in 15 minute chunks, for an entire week. Get real. Get over it. Or if you really care, get the boss to put his money where his mouth is. He could quit buying up property around the studios and stop work on the Olympic-sized reflecting pools and start distributing copies of  DeFrancis like Gideon Bibles throughout language departments in universities around the world.

A: [sighing] Maybe I’ll just see what’s new on pinyin.info

B: [soothingly] That’s a good fellow. Just to make you feel better, here’s a 1928 quote about Japanese from George Sansom, courtesy of DeFrancis (p.159):

One hesitates for an epithet to describe a system of writing which is so complex that it needs the aid of another system to explain it. There is no doubt that it provides for some a fascinating field of study, but as a practical instrument it is surely without inferiors

Now quit surfing and get to work on those Pleco flashcards.

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*Update: thanks, Sima, for directing to the LL link that B must have been paraphrasing. And Update #2: thanks for the comic that inspired it all, with love from xkcd:

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”
[Go to website or bottom of this post to listen to audio]

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!

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* 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.