Is this true?

[Mark Yong]

The question of 'colloquial' words in writing is also applicable to Mandarin. If am not mistaken, quite a lot of words that were once 'colloquial' in the Northern dialect - existing only in popular writings before 4 May 1919 - became recognised as acceptable words in standard Mandarin. This includes, e.g. 別 for '勿/不要' (I suspect 別 evolved from the merging of the two separate words 不要), 幹嘛 for '做甚麼', 這 for 此 (studies indicate that 這 was a very late development), 他 for 其, 也 for 亦, 吃 for 食, 喝 for 飲, etc. You will find from dictionaries like 康熙字典 or 辭源 that these words originally did not carry the meanings that they do today in Modern Mandarin.

One can only speculate that, in the reverse situation, had some other dialect been chosen as the standard 普通話, what colloquial words from that dialect would have become acceptable standard words for writing in the vernacular. Perhaps, if Cantonese had become the standard, we would all be writing 係 instead of 是 for 'yes' (after all, 是 in Literary Chinese carried the meaning 'this', and was only used for 'yes' very late in the literary development).

In this hypothetical case, the situation in Northern China would then be reversed, with the masses writing in the grammar of the Southern dialect, and reading it using Northern pronunciation (of course, this probably would die out, since the Southern pronunciation would then supplant the Northern!).

English: He is eating rice now.

Cantonese grammar: 渠而今食緊飯 (k'ue yi-ga sik gan faan).

Pronounced in Northern dialect: qu2 er2 jin1 shi2 jin3 fan4.

Contrasting with the current:

Mandarin grammar: 他現在在吃飯 (ta4 xian1 zai4 zai4 chi4 fan4).

Pronounced in Cantonese: ta yiin joi joi haek fan.

Or in 閩南: 伊當今食飯中 (ee tong-kim chia-png diao).

Frankly, the conservative side of me still prefers the more neutral (and much more compact) Literary Chinese 文言文 version: 其今食飯!

[ombamawu]

Hi Harpoon,

You seem to know quite a lot about language. One thing I'd like to point out about your artical about the WenYan Chinese is that, it is an artifical language only existed on writing. The purpose of this is more or less similar to the Latin language in the 16-18 century Europe, i.e. to provide a relatively stable archiving tool to record important religious archieves, and latter scientific ones. In the case of WenYan Chinese, you can see that its main form, styles, and gramma haven't changed since Zhou dynasty, but it never has been an oral language in any Chinese period.

Om

[Mark Yong]

Ombamawu wrote:

"...it is an artifical language only existed on writing..., but it never has been an oral language in any Chinese period."

I was given to understand that 文言文 wenyanwen may have existed as the spoken form of Chinese during the early 周 Zhou period (though, for a very short time only).

[achiese]

In fact, 文言文 in Zhou dynisty was based on their oral language, and there were no much differece between them at that time.

You can imagine the words written in 左傳、論語 were almost the same as how people spoke in their daily usage.