Re: OT Southern Chinese dialects, was: Electric Kettle, was: Hello and Thank You


Mydnight wrote:
Sentence one there is proof that we are talking past one another. I'm
talking about Hanyu. I'm telling you that you're wrong because this is
something that I know a lot about. I did say that Hakka is diverse.

You assume I know little about Hanyu why, exactly? I can speak it,
write it, and I work using it...I also speak some Hakka.

Zhuang and Hakka are totally different languages. Zhuang is similar to
Thai and Hakka is Chinese (not putonghua, Chinese). Very few people
still speak Zhuang, and my best guess based on what you have told me is
that either a) you are attributing a false similarity to two distinct
languages or b) your Zhuang friend is in fact speaking not Zhuang but a
dialect of Chinese.

It's spoken widely by the Zhuang people in the Guangxi province and a
few different settlements in Yunnan and Guizhou. It is the one
minority language that has been the most widely studied, so it's far
from death. I never said that those two languages were the same, but I
did say that the language my friend speaks has some small similarities.

It is not commonplace to mention that Chaozhou language is a dialect of
Minnanhua. Come down to Chaozhou sometime and ask the locals there,
and see what they tell you.

Sorry, it is commonplace among the informed to state that Chaozhou is a
dialect of Minnan. I know that people in Chaozhou or Singapore are not
necessarily aware of this.

Since the local people apparently aren't aware of the language they are
speaking, whom exactly is the "informed" state. It certainly isn't the
Chinese, according to you.


Wenzhou language is also
something completely different than what we've talked about before.

Wenzhou dialect is a dialect of Minnan that is close enough to what is
spoken in Taiwan that I can understand it fairly well. See below.

The Wenzhou language and some of the other languages in Zhejiang share
very little with Minnanhua...there could be a small population of
people that speak it, but I am unaware of them. I have little
experience with the peoples in Zhejiang, but they don't think they
speak a dialect of Minnanhua.

I'm sorry, you're wrong. In northern Zhejiang people speak Wu dialects
like Shanghainese and Suzhouhua, and in Wenzhou they speak a variant of
Minnan. You can do little experiments yourself to convince yourself of
this, since you seem to have access to people from Wenzhou and Minnan;
just get each of them to count to ten and say a couple simple
sentences.

Suzhou is in Jiangsu.


Frankly, I don't know where those people got their information.

They get it from linguistics professors in PhD programs at major
universities. I get it from a BA in linguistics and anthropology and
from living and travelling in China, Taiwan and SE Asia and from
constantly pestering my Chinese friends about the dialects they speak
with their grandparents.

That is to say that my BA in lingustics isn't as good as your BA in
lingustics? ;p I also currently live in China and can speak some of
several dialects and am learning more the longer I stay here. I just
cannot agree with you assertions on the lingustic power and how
widespread Minnanhua is. I have been to and spent much time in the
places that you mentioned, and there is little that you can do, or
those lingustic PhDs, to convince me that all of those languages are
that similar to Minnan language. When I get a PhD behind my name in
the future, maybe I will be able to convince you.

You
take a person from Taiwan and put them in Zhejiang or Hainan speaking
Minnanhua, and they would only get sidelong glances and "ni shuo
shenme" (or whatever language variant equilivant relevant to that
area).

I've spoken to someone from Wenzhou in Taiwanese and she understood me
perfectly well, and as I mentioned earlier my Taiwanese is miserably
bad, so you're wrong there (although, I did get some sidelong glances).
Haven't tried it with anyone from Hainan but I hope to have the chance
someday. I got a Hainanese-American friend to count to ten and say
'hello' and 'eat rice' in Hainanese, and it was obviously a variant of
Minnan.

I have several students and people in my company from Wenzhou and they
strongly disagree with what you have just said. I have also asked my
Taiwanese student and he is not exactly sure why you are saying the
things you are saying.

That was remarkably fast considering our two posts were one hour apart
and it's eleven o'clock at night in China.

What are you talking about? I had class at 7:15.

The Minnnan language is simply not as
widespread as you think it is. The prevailing language that is spoken
in Hainan is Li hua; a minority language. Even the Han that live there
speak it; especially around the Southern areas like in Sanya city.

Look, I am not here to bicker with you about languages. I am here in
China and I can use my limited BA skills to study the languages from my
first-hand experiences though my close friends, students, business
associates, and peoples local to the places we have mentioned. It is
natural to have disagreements, but I think you should visit the places
that you are talking about before you try to form hardened ideas in
your mind about the languages spoken there.

Your telling me that I am "wrong" simply because I don't agree with you
isn't exactly that polite, is it?

It's funny that your general distrust of anything Chinese doesn't
extend to offhand comments made about languages by non-specialists.
The problem seems to be that it is very difficult to convince you of
anything. I don't feel like spending a lot of time explaining what a
dialect is and proving all my other assertions, and I suspect that,
even if I did, you wouldn't believe me, so I suggest you spend a while
reading up on this and then we can discuss it later, if you still want
to. If you can't get Ramsey in China then I would start with Hanyu
Fangyan Gaiyao by Yuan Jiahua, which is a very good overview and shows
how the methodology works.

My general distrust of most things Chinese comes from living in China
(Guangdong mostly)and seeing the way they do things. This has little
to do with my ability to understand or study their language. I have
looked at some of the texts you mentioned; are they completely 100
percent free from criticism, I think not.

Wait a minute. What texts have you looked at that I mentioned? And,
what specifically would you criticize about them? That sentence makes
me suspect you are actually full of ***, because you could not
possibly have read either Ramsey or Yuan. Please explain what you
meant.

Other than that, we're talking past each other to such a degree that
there is really no point in continuing the discussion. Aside from this
one point: Suzhou is in Jiangsu, but Suzhouhua is a prestige version of
Wu, which is the dialect family spoken in the coastal areas of southern
Jiangsu and northern Zhejiang.

.

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