Talk:Varieties of Chinese/Archive 2

"Also the amount of "linguistic consciousness" varies between the groups. For example, a speaker of Cantonese dialect living in Hong Kong tends to feel a great deal of common identity with a speaker of Cantonese living in Taishan, even though these two varieties of Cantonese may be almost unintelligible...The Hong Kong and Taishan person would both claim to be speaking Cantonese in the first case, while in the second case only the person from Shanghai would be speaking Shanghainese."

As someone whose family originated in Taishan, I don't think this is true. We call the Taishan dialect "Taishanese" or "Taishan hua" and the Hong Kong dialect "Cantonese" or "Guangdong hua". We don't claim that the Taishan dialect is Cantonese. In Taishan, most people also know how to speak the Hong Kong dialect (or a heavily accented variation that is meant to be like that dialect). --Jiang 02:01, 16 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Cantonese and Taishanese are not comparatively "unintelligible". --Jiang 06:44, 25 Sep 2003 (UTC)

P0M: Someone added the following sentence: "Chinese dialects can be divided into a number of categories, although it is important to remember that variations within a category be uninteligible." This sentence does not make sense, and I cannot guess what the person is trying to say.

P0M: I am not sure how the decision was made to use the word "dialect" to name the major subdivisions of the Chinese language family. Americans speak of "the Cantonese dialect," "the Taiwanese dialect," "the Cockney dialect," "the Brooklyn dialect" -- as though they are all the same distance apart. But I can pick up Cockney without much trouble, and yet I could not easily understand the Mandarin of a professor at the National Taiwan University who came from Anhui. (The Han Chinese students at the University didn't find it easy either.) Much less could I pick any meaning out of Cantonese as spoken in the nearby restaurant. We need a better way to distinguish the various levels of differentiation.

Suggested vocabulary changes

P0M: I am not sure how the decision was made to use the word "dialect" to name the major subdivisions of the Chinese language family. Americans speak of "the Cantonese dialect," "the Taiwanese dialect," "the Cockney dialect," "the Brooklyn dialect" -- as though they are all the same distance apart. But I can pick up Cockney without much trouble, and yet I could not easily understand the Mandarin of a professor at the National Taiwan University who came from Anhui. (The Han Chinese students at the University didn't find it easy either.) Much less could I pick any meaning out of Cantonese as spoken in the nearby restaurant. We need a better way to distinguish the various levels of differentiation.

P0M:http://www.chinesedc.com/4WenYi/Language/sino-tibetan1.htm gives this kind of a picture:

yu3 zu2 (Sino-Tibetan);

yu3 xi4 (Sinitic);

11 qun2 (bei3 yu3 qun2, Ke-Gan qun2, Min qun2 and 4 single yu3 entries );

13 yu3 (Bei3 yu3 (Mandarin), Jin4 yu3, Dungan, Gan, Hakka, Wu, Hui, Xiang, Min Bei, Min Dong, Min Zhong, Pu Xian, Min Nan, Yue,

fang1 yan2 (e.g. Northern Mandarin, Central Mandarin, Southern Mandarin);

ci4 fang1 yan2 (e.g., Beijing hua, Si4 Chuan1 hua4, etc.).

There may be better ways to speak of these divisions in English, but how about something like the following (With a Western example this time):

Language Clans (Indo-European)

Language Families (Germanic)

Language Groups (Western German)

Languages (Low German)

Regional Variations (English)

Dialects (Englisn as spoken in the British Isles)

Sub-dialects (Cockney English)

You can add that to the article (this diagram above...). Add tones to the pinyin though. As stated above, Taishan hua and Guangdong hua are of different names, and therefore obviously not considered the same "dialect", although there are many similarities. We call them different names. Either that, or my family is just weird. --Jiang 06:36, 8 Jan 2004 (UTC)

P0M: I think the difference between Taishan hua and Guangdong hua is about like the difference between Beijing hua and Tianjin hua, or maybe Taibei hua and Tainan hua. Anyway, the language is Yue. (One problem here is that the city name and the province name are the same, right? So it's useful to have Yue for the province-sized region designation, and Guangdong for the city-sized "metropolitan" designation.) I don't know how complex differentiation is in the Yue area (which is actually larger than Guangdong), and I don't know how substantial the difference is between Taishan and Guangdong hua. If the difference is substantial, the two might not even be two dialects. They might be two "Regional Variations." I suppose the test of whether it is one or the other is what happens when somebody from Taishan, who has never before left home, goes to Guangdong and has to ask for help getting around the city from someone who speaks only Guangdong hua. If both parties really want to communicate but can't get the job done (without writing), then I'd say it's a regional variation. I think I remember learning from my San Francisco Taishan friend that he had no great trouble getting around in Cantonese even though people teased him about his accent, so my guess is that they are both dialects of Yue or "coastal Yue" or whatever the regional differentiation may be. Are there varieties of Yue that you find much much more difficult than Cantonese?