Comments on: on Mandarin/Wu intelligability

By: Alan Shaw

Alan Shaw — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 03:42:38 +0000

I think that you may have to construct your dialectal pronunciation mapping by reference to Old Chinese to achieve any regularity. Take Beijing and Guangzhou, for example, the only Chinese languages I’m pretty familiar with: the old tone classes (ping, shang, qu, and ru), in combination with whether the initial was voiced or not, map to exactly the same modern tone classes (although realized differently: yang ping, for example, is rising in Beijing and falling in Guangzhou; qusheng is falling in Beijing and level in Guangzhou), except for the rusheng class, which as it disappeared in Mandarin left its members scattered throughout the other tone classes, and left students of Mandarin wondering what the mysterious “entering tone” could have been. By analogy with the tonal collapse in Mandarin, I imagine that if you dig back in time you may find a point where (some class of characters containing) 劳 and (some class of characters containing) 落 merged in Beijing pronunciation but not elsewhere. A book in my collection, Xiandai Hanyu Fangyan (Hubei Renmin Chubanshe, 1981), has charts of all this stuff: initials, finals, and tones, and how they correlate from place to place in China.

Of course all this is independent of grammatical and vocabulary differences between the languages.

By: Kellen

Kellen — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 09:13:11 +0000

While I’ve not in any way learned enough of any two similar languages to have the problem as severely as that, I was often accused of speaking Portuguese like an Italian. Somehow I could never quite get away from the cadence I learned in Italian class many many years before.

Alternatively I have had some luck with it working out in my favour. After a few years of Arabic I decided to take a Hebrew class at the local synagogue. At least in that limited setting, the over-generalising always worked out in my favour. The only specific instance I remember now was correctly guessing כלב (kelev) as “dog” from knowing Arabic’s كلب (kalb).

Ego: sufficiently boosted.

By: John Cowan

John Cowan — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 09:00:42 +0000

Arrgh. For “Latin retains” read “Italian retains”, of course.

By: John Cowan

John Cowan — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 09:00:07 +0000

Douglas Hofstadter describes how he learned Italian (his most often used second language) as a sort of overlay on French (his first-learned second language). Having learned that the Italian for vache 'cow' was vacca, he overgeneralized and said *mucca instead of mosca for mouche 'fly'. This is a case where the trick doesn't work because French has collapsed a distinction that Latin retains. Interestingly, even after many years of speaking Italian daily and not speaking French much at all, mucca still occasionally surfaces.

By: Kellen

Kellen — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 03:20:31 +0000

I don’t doubt it. I think much of it comes down to how hard you try. I know many people who’ve moved to Wu speaking areas years ago and still can’t understand the basics and many others who can understand quite well.

Do you remember where that number came from? Love to read the source.

By: bloodmerchant

bloodmerchant — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 00:07:46 +0000

Apparently, I’ve heard that the lexical intelligibility between Mandarin and Wu is about 31%, roughly the same lexical intelligibility between English and French.
The phonological and grammatical intelligibility between Mandarin and Wu is even greater than 31%.

Just my two cents.