Re: Not to mention hairy potters

On Mon, 24 Sep 2007 03:00:19 GMT, jsavard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
(John Savard) wrote:

On Sun, 23 Sep 2007 21:09:26 -0400, Lawrence Watt-Evans <lwe@xxxxxxx>
wrote, in part:
Chinese, of course, is the extreme example of that -- Chinese is a
written language representing at least a dozen separate (albeit
related) spoken languages, and even within those spoken languages,
there are lots of dialects. Your typical Mandarin-speaking peasant
from the western reaches of Hebei probably can't understand a word a
Beijing laborer says. (Beijing has two very distinct dialects, the
official one and the working-class one. The working-class one has a
strong R glide and slurred consonants that render it virtually
unintelligible to many other Mandarin speakers.)

Although you have written this from a greater knowledge of Chinese than
my own, you have phrased it in a way that could be confusing to the
layperson.

I'm not sure it's a _greater_ knowledge so much as a _different_
knowledge; I know very little about Chinese linguistics, but my
daughter lived in China for a year and a half -- a year in
Shijiazhuang and half a year in Shanghai -- and I visited her there,
and picked up a lot of practical information. I have a good ear, and
so does Kiri, so we had several discussions about regional variations;
she traveled all over China (she had a "foreign expert" internal
passport that let her go anywhere except parts of Tibet), and heard a
wide variety of Chinese.

So you probably know more theory than I do, but I may well have more
immediate experience.

Most people, when they think of dialects of the Chinese language, think
of Mandarin, Cantonese, Southern Min (Amoy or Taiwan dialect), Wu
(Shanghai dialect) and so on. You correctly refer to these as distinct,
although related, spoken languages - they are mutually unintelligible.

Although there's a language -- I forget whether it's Min or Gan or
which -- whose speakers can more or less converse with both Wu and
Mandarin speakers.

And there are dialect variations within each one; for example, the
dialect spoken in Shanghai is not even actually a typical dialect of
Northern Wu in one important respect the nature of which I don't recall
offhand.

I'm not sure what that respect is, but yes, Shanghainese is a distinct
dialect within Wu. I noticed that people in Shanghai are sloppier
about tones than most Chinese speakers, but very careful to enunciate
initial consonants; maybe that's it?

And the other confusing point in what you have written is that the
Chinese written language doesn't really _represent_ multiple forms of
Chinese. It is possible to write non-Mandarin dialects in Chinese
characters; this requires making up some extra characters to indicate
words not present in Mandarin.

Yeah. Cantonese uses a bunch of them; they also have a lot of their
own idioms. Kiri used to have a heck of a time dealing with one
person, a Cantonese speaker, who had trouble with that. She would
compose her sentences in Cantonese, then translate word-for-word into
Mandarin, which sometimes resulted in really bizarre word choices.

(Kiri speaks some Mandarin and just a little bit of Wu, can't
understand a word of Cantonese.)





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My webpage is at http://www.watt-evans.com
The fifth issue of Helix is at http://www.helixsf.com
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