Talk:Standard Chinese
Would it be correct to call putonghua a dialect? Or what's the proper way to refer to it? See Shantou for an example. - Fuzheado 03:04, 1 Aug 2003 (UTC)
The Chinese official language should be called as " Standard Chinese ", but not " mandarin ", because mandarin is a insult at peoples of Han .- Xuanyan.She, Tianjin, China, Mar 28, 2004.
The third tone
Here the contour is marked 214. Nevertheless it's the whole third tone (quan2san1sheng1) which is less popular than half thid tone (ban4san1sheng1). Should the contour of the half thid tone be included? Is it 21 by the way? -- 10:21, January 27, 2005, UTC
- The bansansheng is a result of tone sandhi, not the original tone itself. -- ran (talk) 13:35, Jan 27, 2005 (UTC)
- Should the bansansheng be mentioned in the article? By the way I don't agree the ban4san1sheng1 is a tone sandhi, but an alternative pronunciation to third tone, together with the quan2san1sheng1. -- 17:57, January 28, 2005, UTC
Romanization
During the 1950s, there were plans for Pinyin to supersede the Chinese characters. These plans, however, proved to be impractical due to the large number of homonyms in the Chinese language.
This is doubtful. It didn't occur to them to use diacritics, the way the Vietnamese had been doing since the 19th century? Wasn't it more the attachment to the traditional writing system? --Erauch 18:34, Mar 7, 2005 (UTC)
- While I can't judge the accuracy of the claim that there were plans to replace Chinese characters, using tone marks wouldn't come close to disambiguating all the homophones of Chinese. There are probably 20+ common characters with the pronunciation shi4, for example, and I wouldn't be surprised if there are (say) ~5 common characters on average for each syllable. (You can calculate this, I think -- about 1600 possible syllables, tones counted; and about 4000-5000 common characters. Also, not all possible syllables occur; for example we have ding1, ding3, and ding4, but not ding2.)
- Besides, pinyin already uses tone marks, they're an intrinsic part of pinyin. Not using them (as is done in English) is an absolute nightmare... and results in clunky workarounds like Shanxi/Shaanxi. -- ran (talk) 18:52, Mar 7, 2005 (UTC)
- Yes, but speakers have no problem dealing with the same ambiguity in the spoken language that's found in Pinyin. It seems more likely that they didn't want to get rid of something culturally so important as the writing system. --Erauch 23:03, Mar 7, 2005 (UTC)
- The written language, especially formal written language, is a lot more tolerant of homophones than the spoken language. In general, written language is much closer to Classical Chinese, adopting abbreviations and structures that would be odd (if not incomprehensible) in spoken Chinese.
- And there's Classical Chinese itself too, which would be completely indecipherable without a logographic writing system. -- ran (talk) 23:19, Mar 7, 2005 (UTC)