Mandarin v. Shanghainese v. Cantonese

[Ferno]

I don't know that too many people actually make this claim per se. Written language never exactly represents language as it's actually spoken. Modern Standard Chinese is not an accurate representation of the way any native Mandarin speaker, be they from Harbin, Beijing, or Chengdu, or even a CCTV newscaster from wherever with so-called perfect Putonghua, actually speaks the language in everyday life. This phenomenon is by no means unique to Chinese - it occurs in every language with an established written form. Compare the script of a Hollywood action movie with standard written English - there's a huge gap, and that's even with factoring in written conventions applied to the script. They way I am writing this post differs significantly to what I would actually say if we were sitting together in a bar having the same conversation. In this sense, the fact that grammar or word choice in spoken language may differ some is not so significant when it comes to writing in a common style.

Huh? Give me anything you say in English, and I can write it out in English letters. That's the bottom line. Yes we speak differently than we write, but that just depends on how formal you want to take it. A person speaking perfect Oxford English might very well have said everything you did in spoken form, and the main thing here is word choice anyway: it takes a bit longer to think of good descriptive words/phrases like "phenomenon" and "in this sense" but many people do this quite fine.

As for grammar, sure you can butcher it like in American black dialects: ie double negatives "I don't got none", modifications of tenses like "He done gone" "He gon go" "He be going", but that's just bad English.

Why would you even bring this up if in the next paragraph you talk about how younger generations simply read and write in Mandarin even if they speak another Chinese language, while older people have to change words and grammar?

and of course, the irony with ala's post:

(example, actual Shanghainese sentence taken from a forum: “阿拉么以赛了了白相拉海playstation。” --> Ala ma yeezei leila besianlahei Playstation.

The forum posters inputted this on their computers using Mandarin pinyin.

[wushijiao]

Huh? Give me anything you say in English, and I can write it out in English letters.

What about these sentences:

Look at her!

Did you want to eat?

---------------

Both of those sentences in the spoken form are very different from what they look like on paper, to the degree that many non-native learners can't understand them when heard.

Anyway, it seems that characters are such a "unifying" thing simply because no other dialects have been allowed to be standardized and popularized. If young people of Wenzhou read characters and think in Putonghua, that seems more like a political problem than anything else.

[Ferno]

Look at 'er!

Did you wanna eat?

and you don't have to say them this way.

[Mugi]

ala, thanks again for the additional info for Shanghainese speakers.

[Mugi]

Ferno,

I see now that in my inebriated state last night I made a mistake in the first line of my post: you should scratch "I don't know that too many people actually make this claim per se." My mistake.

What I wanted to say is that I don't agree with your statement that "This just destroys the argument in favor of Characters that they 'unify all the dialects under a written standard that can be pronounced in whatever language you want'".

Just because a spoken language differs over geography, class, time, etc, doesn't mean it can't share a common, unifying script. English achieves this, as does Chinese.

The fact that younger speakers of southern "dialects" understand written Chinese in Mandarin doesn't detract from the ability of Chinese characters to unify different "dialects", as is demonstrated by all the other speakers who process the written word in their minds in their own vernacular.

And once again, the fact that some people may choose to write as they speak (eg, writing "Didja wanna grabba bite?" for "Did you want to eat?" or "阿拉么以赛了了白相拉海playstation" for "我们现在正在玩playstation") does not detract from the ability to use a common script and write in a common style for everyone to understand, and have everyone read it as they see fit. Of course, with the English writing system being significantly more phonetic than the Chinese one, the English analogy doesn't hold up terribly well, but I trust you get the idea.

[ala]

The above analogy is inappropriate. Where do you draw the line? Could English orthography be argued as an offshoot of French? And that English and French in reality have a common script also? If you agree with the latter, then the discussion becomes a little meaningless, right? We can bring in Japanese orthography too (I can read Japanese and process the written word into Mandarin as well, no sarcasm intended). For example, the Japanese sentence:

僕は来年に中国へ行く (boku wa rainen-ni chuugoku-e iku) can easily be processed into the Mandarin as 我明年到

中国去. So where do you draw the line?

Just because a spoken language differs over geography, class, time, etc, doesn't mean it can't share a common, unifying script. English achieves this, as does Chinese.

I think you really meant to say: Western European languages achieves this with the Latin script.

"Didja wanna grabba bite?" vs. "Did you want to eat?" is a very minor variation (in fact "did you want to grab a bite" is perfectly okay English, merely a word choice difference, a choice of casual vs. formal). Somewhat akin to Mandarin "我们现在正在玩playstation" vs. Mandarin "俺现在在玩playstation." There are larger dialectical variations WITHIN Shanghainese than your English example. There is casual vs. formal within Shanghainese, for example "how/what" 哪哪 nana (casual) vs. 哪能 naanen (formal).

Shanghainese "阿拉么以赛了了白相拉海playstation" vs Mandarin "我们现在正在玩playstation" is different in vocabulary, phonology, sentence structure and grammar. It's not merely a choice in vocabulary or tone as in your English example. If I directly pronounced the Mandarin sentence "我们现在正在玩playstation" in the Shanghainese ("ngoumen yeezei tsenzei woe playstation"), it would be gibberish.

There are published Shanghainese grammar books hundreds of pages thick.

Even if Chinese characters can be used to write Shanghainese, it does a very poor job, is difficult to standardize and difficult to input (via Hanyu Pinyin would be a joke). Of course this could be seen as a good thing too, as it prevents the establishment of fully independent writing traditions amongst the dialects.

[Ferno]

well there we go, and that's from an actual native speaker - and I was unsure about the significant grammar differences, but now we see that the do exist.

[Quest]

ala, is that an extreme example, or is Shanghaiese generally more different than Cantonese from Mandarin. In Cantonese we would just say 我哋（宜家）玩紧playstation (ngodei yeega wan-gun playstation). 我们现在正在玩playstation -- "ngomuin yeendzoi dzingdzoi wan playstation" is perfectly understandable in Cantonese.

[nipponman]

"Didja wanna grabba bite?" vs. "Did you want to eat?" is a very minor variation (in fact "did you want to grab a bite" is perfectly okay English, merely a word choice difference, a choice of casual vs. formal).

True, but that first sentence is really just lazy English. I.e. you can say that anywhere people speak english well. But ebonics is different from english in grammar (or lack thereof really). Would you like to grab a bite to eat? is much different from eiyo, u tryna' geccho grub on dog? Don't you agree:mrgreen:

[zixingche]

"is Shanghaiese generally more different than Cantonese from Mandarin. In Cantonese we would just say 我哋（宜家）玩紧playstation (ngodei yeega wan-gun playstation). 我们现在正在玩playstation -- "ngomuin yeendzoi dzingdzoi wan playstation" is perfectly understandable in Cantonese."

I can speak very basic Cantonese ( learnt as a child ), if someone said 我们现在正在玩playstation(ngomuin yeendzoi dzingdzoi wan playstation) to me I wouldn't understand them but I would understand 我哋（宜家）玩紧playstation (ngodei yeega wan-gun playstation).

Isn't 我们现在正在玩playstation(ngomuin yeendzoi dzingdzoi wan playstation) a Cantonese reading of Mandarin? I think the difference between Cantonese and Shanghaiese is that in some Cantonese speaking areas it is common and standard for Mandarin to be pronounced in Cantonese, whereas in Shanghai Mandarin is always pronounced in Mandarin.

[Quest]

I think 宜家 (yeega/yijia) is a distortion of 现在 (yeenzoi/xianzai). The present progressive particle 紧(gun/jin) is related to 着(zhe) in Mandarin. So, 我哋宜家玩紧playstation can be mapped to 我们现在玩着playstation; of course, for whatever reason the 着 particle in modern Mandarin does not function like 紧 in this way.

[Mugi]

ala,

The above analogy is inappropriate.

Not the best analogy, I admit. Hence, qualifying my post with: "with the English writing system being significantly more phonetic than the Chinese one, the English analogy doesn't hold up terribly well." But given that Chinese and English are the only two common languages to this forum, I felt compelled to try and draw a parallel between the two.

My understanding is that Ferno was refuting that a single, standard Chinese writing system can be employed across all “dialects,” where people read and understand the same text according to the phonology of their own “dialect” – i.e. only the pronunciation of the characters differs. This is a Straw Man argument. Nobody actually makes the claim that a single, standard Chinese writing system can be employed across all “dialects,” where only the pronunciation of the characters differs. So refuting this is pointless. What I suspect Ferno actually wanted to refute, and what some people do claim (myself included) is that a single, standard Chinese writing system can be employed across all “dialects” as a common form of communication.

I think you really meant to say: Western European languages achieves this with the Latin script.

No, I didn't mean to say that. My point is that the spoken form of any given language is always more diverse than the written form, and that the written language serves to smooth out the differences across geography, class, time, etc. The written language seldom represents the language exactly as it’s spoken. This is true of English as it is of Chinese. English has a myriad of different dialects, but its written form is relatively stable across any given English speaking region, or indeed all English speaking regions. Modern English employs a common set of characters to represent its phonology (and note that a given character/letter (particularly those representing vowels) may have a different pronunciation depending on the accent of the speaker), a common spelling system (for the most part - the odd American vs British type spelling differences aside), and a relatively stable style.

A similar situation exists in Chinese.

But you raise a very valid question - where do you draw the line? This perhaps comes to the crux of my initial criticism of the comment based on the very brief and simplistic comparison of Mandarin, Shanghainese and Cantonese on ChinesePod that "This just destroys the argument in favor of Characters that they 'unify all the dialects under a written standard that can be pronounced in whatever language you want'." To me the examples given (你好 ni3 hao3 vs 侬好 non(g) ho vs 你好 lei5 hou2; 再见 zai4 jian4 vs 再会 ze (h)ue vs 再见 zoi3 gin3; 谢谢 xie4 xie4 vs 谢谢 xia ja vs 多谢 do1 ze6; 没关系 mei2 guan1 xi vs 没关系 me gue xi vs 唔使 m4 sai2) aren't significantly different. Even as is, with the possible exception of the 侬 in 侬好 and 唔使, practically any literate Chinese person anywhere can read and understand these words, pronouncing them in their own vernacular.

I called Ferno on his comment because (1) the ChinesePod data clearly doesn’t bear out his assertion (although I’ll concede that it’s common for someone not familiar with sinitic languages besides Mandarin to at first feel the differences are much greater than they really are), (2) I don’t believe the assertion is necessarily true even on a much broader scale (i.e. when data other than that presented on ChinesePod is taken into account), and (3) coming back to my poor analogy, and your point about line drawing, if one is going to draw the line between “dialects” (Mandarin, Shanghainese, Cantonese, etc), one can make almost as convincing an argument to draw lines within “dialects”, given their respective phonological, lexical and even grammatical diversity.

I think some people contributing to this thread are confusing (perhaps unknowingly) the ability of a written standard (employing Chinese characters) to unify various “dialects” with its desirability to do so.

Are the various “dialects” different from each other in terms of phonology, lexicon and grammar? Yes – to greater and lesser degrees.

Can standard written Chinese accurately reflect how the speakers of different “dialects” actually speak? No – irrespective of whether we’re talking about Cantonese, Shanghainese or even Mandarin itself.

Is it desirable to have a unifying standard? Strong arguments can be made both for and against.

Do any of the above three questions have any relevance to a standard written system being able to cross “dialects” in a reasonably successful way? No!

While some people here may choose to disagree with me, the fact of the matter is, a standard written system has unified the Chinese “dialects” for centuries, if not millennia, and continues to do so on a daily basis.

[ala]

While some people here may choose to disagree with me, the fact of the matter is, a standard written system has unified the Chinese “dialects” for centuries, if not millennia, and continues to do so on a daily basis.

Japanese also, and Korean, Vietnamese in the past.

[Ncao]

Ala, I heard to eat rice in Shanghainese was chu ve (something like that). Is it written like吃飯 or is it different?

[anonymoose]

In my opinion, characters are not very suitable for unifying the various dialects of chinese. In fact, I don't think that the dialects are particularly amenable to unification anyway, at least no more so than, say, french, spanish and italian are.

Fundamentally, letters of the alphabet have a sound value, but no meaning in isolation. Chinese characters, on the other hand, have a meaning at their core, and the pronunciation is of secondary significance. So in the case of alphabetic scripts, there is no problem using the same symbols to represent words in different languages, but it does not mean the written languages are mutually intelligible. With chinese characters, it is much easier to ascribe different pronunciations to each character depending on dialect, so on the surface of it, it would seem that any dialect can be written in characters. However, this overlooks the fact that vocabulary and grammar also differ between dialects, so using characters to represent mandarin, shanghainese and cantonese is, in my opinion, analogous to using letters to represent french, spanish and italian. Just because a sentence has been written using characters does not mean that it is necessarily intelligible to anyone literate in mandarin.

When I started to learn mandarin, I did so from a book using characters. I had no cassettes, and apart from the pinyin, had no clue as to the pronunciation of the characters. Nevertheless, I was able to read and write sentences without knowing how to say them. In a sense, I was using english pronunciation to decode chinese characters. Thus a sentence such as 小猫坐在地毯上 was perfectly understandable, but I just knew 小猫 as kitten, 坐 as sit, 在...上 as on, and 地毯 as carpet. So, if it can be said that shanghainese and cantonese can be unified with mandarin by virtue of characters, then by the same token, english can be unified along with them.

[ala]

Ala, I heard to eat rice in Shanghainese was chu ve (something like that). Is it written like吃飯 or is it different?

To eat food/rice is "chie vae" [tS'iI? vE]; it's written the same but the orthodox characters should be 喫飯. The Shanghainese 喫 can be used to for "to drink", "to love", "to bully", "to take", "to experience" in addition to "to eat". So in Mandarin you say 喝茶 (drink tea), in Shanghainese you would say 喫茶葉茶 (chie zooyezoo)。

[Ncao]

To eat food/rice is "chie vae" [tS'iI? vE]; it's written the same but the orthodox characters should be 喫飯. The Shanghainese 喫 can be used to for "to drink", "to love", "to bully", "to take", "to experience" in addition to "to eat". So in Mandarin you say 喝茶 (drink tea), in Shanghainese you would say 喫茶葉茶 (chie zooyezoo)。

Thanks ala. I find it interesting how 飯(fan4) becomes vae in shanghainese. It's completely different from Mandarin.