Most fluent foreign Cantonese speakers

[Quest]

All Chinese dialects are closely related, so yes "Chinese" is all inclusive.

There is disagreement on whether Thai should be grouped with Sino Tibetan or Austronesian.

Linguists have a special way for categorization that usually works against common perception.

[channamasala]

Yes, I know, I was just checking - then again anyone posting on this forum could be reasonably expected to know that about Chinese and its dialects.

I'm going with linguistic categorization, not common perception, if we're going to argue semantics. Seems to me that the former has more research behind it than the latter. A lot of the grammatical bits of Lao that I learned (DISCLAIMER: I learned maybe a hundred Lao words/phrases, and all from LP's phrasebook, I am no expert in Lao) seemed similar enough to Chinese to me. Words were similar enough that would not be similar if they were only borrowings - they were the sorts of words that tend to be similar as the result of cognates (bu/baw, yaak/yao, the numbers...wait, I take that back, one of the Korean sets of numbers is based on Chinese and as I said, the two languages are unrelated, etc). And Thai is related to Lao, so I was told in linguistics and by a bunch of Lao and Thai people.

The scripts of Lao and Thai, I would like to note, are Dravidian in origin. Just to throw that in.

[Quest]

And Thai is related to Lao, so I was told in linguistics and by a bunch of Lao and Thai people.

Most Chinese will tell you Korean and Japanese are related to Chinese.

[trooper]

That's because they seem to think China was the source of all major asian culture!

[channamasala]

ah, but they are not linguists! Also we all know that the Chinese are not always so rational when it comes to matters pertaining to their own country.

That's why I am going with what linguists say and not what most people believe or perceive. People are generally wrong. I've had people in the USA ask me such questions as "So you went do India, do you speak Indian?" (There obviously - man, why am I even saying it, people here should know this - is no "Indian" language, there are about 100-200 languages across the country and not all of them are related. Most fall in to Indic or Dravidian families but you will also find Sino-Tibetan and others, including English, which is related to Hindi anyway, albeit distantly) and "So you speak Chinese. It must be really easy to learn Japanese too now, since they are so similar." I love that last one.

My Chinese students also told me that Cantonese and Mandarin were the SAME language...the conversation below is a good example of Chinese government-and-schooling-induced "logic":

"Mandarin and Cantonese are not the same language because if you go to Guangdong or Hong Kong, you won't understand what anyone is saying and they won't understand you if you speak Mandarin but not Guangdonghua."

"Yes they are, because they use the same writing."

"That doesn't mean they are the same language. They are related but not the same. You can't speak Mandarin to a person who only speaks Guangdonghua."

"Yes you can, in Guangzhou if you speak Mandarin they understand you."

"That's because they also speak Mandarin, but it is not the same as what they speak as a native language, they have to learn two."

"No they don't, because Mandarin and Guangdonghua are the same language."

"Look, French and English use the same writing system. I can write a word in French using the letters you learned to write English. Does that mean they are the same?"

"No, but Chinese is different, because it is the language of the motherland, and the letters are put differently to form different words. The characters stay the same."

"Yes, but they can represent ANY language, really. A person who speaks Mandarin has to translate those characters a different way if they are speaking Guangdonghua. One Chinese man found a way to write English in Chinese characters. Does that mean English and Chinese are the same?"

"No, because English did not come from China."

"That's not the point! The point is that you can use those characters to write two different languages because the writing is special and unique. You can write to a person in Guangdong who does not speak Mandarin, but you cannot speak to them unless you learn to speak a new language. I can use the letters we use for English ("Roman script" would be lost on these kids, I fear) to write Chinese. We call it pin yin. I know that all of you can write pin yin. Does that mean that English and Chinese are the same, because you can switch the scripts?"

"No, but our teacher in school told us that Mandarin and Guangdonghua are the same (so they are)."

Etc.

Love that country!

[Ian_Lee]

Chinese is not related to Japanese and Korean even though the latter two borrow thousands of loan words from Chinese to stock up their vocabularies.

There are apparent grammatical differences between Chinese and Korean/Japanese:

Chinese sentence structure -- subject + verb + object

Japanese/Korean sentence structure -- subject + object + verb

[Ian_Lee]

I would say that Mandarin and Cantonese (and other hundreds of dialects) can be classified as the same language in the sense that they can be written in the same characters and grammatically identical (SVO).

But their pronunciations vary greatly and their vocabularies also vary.

On the other hand, Japanese, Vietnamese and Korean borrow heavily from Chinese (Mandarin as well as other dialects) in vocabulary but their grammars are entirely different from Chinese.

In fact, the classical Chinese which was based on Mandarin was basically shared by the Mandarin class of all these countries before the 20th century.

So there is such phenomenon:

In 1895, Li Hung Chang could communicate with Ito Hirobumi by writing and even composed poems jointly when he was in Shimonoseki.

But my dad who could communicate in only his native tongue (another dialect in Guangdong) was completely lost in Guangzhou in 1930s!

[channamasala]

I don't think the idea that Japanese and Korean are related to Chinese was ever up for debate - of course they are not.

There is a theory spinning around that Japanese and Korean are related to each other due to their similar grammar depsite a complete lack of similar vocabulary, and in turn to Hungarian and Finnish and I think Estonian (?) as well as Mongolian, as a part of the Ural-Altaic family. Yeah, uhh, I don't know if I buy it. So don't take this as me saying it is definitely true, I just heard it somewhere.

Mandarin and Cantonese grammar, I have been told, is in fact different. But I don't speak Cantonese so I'll let someone who does verify...this topic has been argued here before.

Just because languages are similar in grammar and vocabulary DOES NOT MEAN that they are the same. French and Spanish are similar in grammar and vocabulary, but they are not the same. Tamil and Malayali are similar too, but they are not the same. Bengali, Oriya, Hindi, Assamese are similar, but they are not the same.

The script a language is written in has NOTHING to do with its language family. You can transliterate however you want...the two points are often related (related languages use related scripts) but not always. Dravidian (south Indian primarily)-related scripts are used in Lao and Thai, which are not Dravidian languages. Not even remotely related to them. Oriya is written in a Dravidian script too, but it is not the same, it's Indic. Hindi and Sanskrit use the same devanagiri script, but are different. Arabic and Urdu use Arabic script, but Urdu is Indic, it is virtually identical to Hindi other than substituting Sanskritic words for Arabic ones! Please never confuse a language's writing with its relation to other languages.

Granted, Chinese languages are an exception due to the fact that they use characters and not alphabets or syllabaries, but the same rule applies. Cantonese and Mandarin are not the same language - they are not mutually intelligible so Cantonese isn't even a dialect. It is a related, but different, language.

[Quest]

channamasala, I think you've complained about all those stubborn students/people a few months back in another post. I would say it is a misunderstanding on the definition of the word "language". To them, "Zhong Wen" is THE language of China. ZhongWen includes both Mandarin and Chinese , therefore, they are the same language.

[Quest]

Ian_Lee, Ala would be upset that you still think Chinese is strictly SVO.

read his post here: http://www.chinese-forums.com/viewtopic.php?t=737

[Quest]

That's why I am going with what linguists say and not what most people believe or perceive. People are generally wrong.

It's okay to believe the linguists, I mean who else could we look to for information right? Just note that linguists have often been found wrong. Many so called linguists are really rookies in the languages they study/work on, but often their judgements and conclusions would be taken as facts, and later proven wrong.

[channamasala]

You seem so determined to argue me into a corner based on misperceptions and semantics.

Just to clarify, the debate I held with my students was Putonghua vs. Guangdonghua, not Zhongwen. The argument went towards how they seriously believed the two to be mutually intelligible, and when they couldn't win at that (though they thought they could, but none of them had really been to Guangdong) that "languages are the same if the writing is the same". They thought they could go over China SPEAKING Mandarin (Putonghua, not Zhongwen or Zhongguohua) and have it be understood by all as a native language. It's a different argument than confusing the languages of China with their perception of "Zhongwen".

[blob]

Perhaps it would be safe to say that spoken mandarin and cantonese can be treated as different languages (despite their sharing of some stuff). However, formal written mandarin and cantonese are the same language?

Blob

[smithsgj]

Quest, most of this kind of linguistics involves extensive fieldwork. Native speakers are consulted!

Blob, I agree, almost.

Channa, French and English share 26 letters (and some vocabulary, but that wasn't your point). Your students would have claimed that Cantonese and Mandarin share thousands upon thousands of characters/morphemes, and that in the vast bulk of cases these are clustered to form words in exactly the same way.

Where you students went wrong is that they forgot, or didn't know, that Cantonese speakers write *in Mandarin*. The two fangyan differ in pronunciation (which doesn't matter for writing) and to a lesser extent in grammar and vocabulary. Cantonese speakers can either master the differences (ie learn Mandarin but not the pronunciation) or write badly. Luckily, Cantonese and Mandarin are close enough for it not to really matter a lot of the time.

Thus, an Englishman can communicate perfectly in writing with a monolingual Frenchman. All he needs to know is the alphabet and, er, French.

[Ian_Lee]

This Indian guy appeared in 殘酷一叮 (HK version of "American Idol") and won top scores by singing Cantopop:

http://hk.news.yahoo.com/050406/12/1b44z.html

印裔懲教員盼叮亮仕途 兩屆《殘酷一叮》台主

29歲的喬保羅，廣東話地道又鬼馬，懂得謙稱一己歌藝僅屬「有限公司」。喬在港土生土長，入職懲教署近10年，早已融入香港社會。連參加《殘酷一叮》，也是同事代他報名﹔比賽時使用的藝名「喬寶寶」，亦是同事替他改的，寓意他是友儕間的「寶貝」——試想一個在朋友婚宴會搶獻唱，機構周年聚餐肯犧牲色相，穿旗袍露腳毛扮女人的6呎大男人，還不是眾人的「開心果」﹖

「小時候發過明星夢，但印度人又怎能闖入香港娛樂圈﹖只好躲起來唱唱《愛情陷阱》算了。」家住佐敦唐樓的喬保羅，家裏老是播放印度音樂，難得廟街傳來譚詠麟(相關新聞 - 網站)的《愛情陷阱》（《殘酷一叮》的參賽歌），是他人生第一首廣東歌，令他聽出耳油，還偷偷研究舞步，成為「飲歌」。可惜表演細胞無從發揮，直至95年進入懲教署學堂，為他帶來首個機會。

「學堂舉辦歌唱比賽，我穿了紅色魚網衫和紅色波鞋，唱《愛情陷阱》，還贏得冠軍。」自此懲教署同事不時找他表演，古靈精怪的他更精心計算﹕「《殘酷一叮》用的假髮和服飾，全在廟街買的，愈誇張愈騎呢愈好。」鬈髮造型為他帶來「勁舞馬勒當拿」的稱號。

他贏得一萬三千大元獎金，早宴客花光了﹕「人們覺得印度人很孤寒，我不想這樣，要豪爽一點，生活最緊要開心嘛﹗」

[skylee]

When he said his job was 當差, I thought he was a cop. Then he said he worked in the correctional. I didn't know that they considered that they were 當差 too (but why not). BTW, 當差 is such a 古典 term.

[Ian_Lee]

I watched the episode that he beat the 6-yr old girl who was challenging him. They got the same time scores and the result was determined by the clapping sound.

[Quest]

such an old topic...

It's hard for someone to remain on the throne, since the person gets assigned a random song, and he/she has to compete against well prepared performers. Also, after a few episodes, the audience usually gets tired. The rules were evilly designed.

[Ian_Lee]

So far I have only watched 4 episodes but I found it more interesting than its counterpart in US -- "American Idols".

Moreover, I never know that people in HK have such great desire for performance and many of them are really 出位, i.e. that guy who put two red heart shaped paper on his nipples of the naked breast.......

But I cannot stand 9-10 year old girls singing love songs