I was talking with some people recently about reading Chinese. As you may know, the so-called Chinese “dialects” are actually different languages. The eight different languages (Mandarin, Hakka, Northern Min, Southern Min, Wu, Gan, Xiang, and Yue) that are referred to as Chinese are as different from each other as the various Romance languages (Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian, etc.) are from each other. When a Chinese speaker reads Chinese characters aloud, he is actually reading them in his own language, and thus what he reads sounds different from what the speaker of another Chinese language is reading. Since all the Chinese languages are isolating (i.e., they don’t have inflections), it’s only necessary to match each word (or, actually, each syllable that’s part of a word) with a character.
However, this would be somewhat screwed up if the word order differs in any way between the different Chinese languages. Does it? I know that the major sorts of word order are identical, but I recall reading that there are a few things in which the word order differs between the different languages. How does this screw up the ability of Chinese speakers to be able to all read the same thing written in characters? Also, are there cases where a word is one syllable in one language and two syllable in another?
Please don’t waste bandwidth by speculating if you don’t actually know anything about Chinese. I took a year’s course in Mandarin some years ago.
I studied Mandarin for three years. The different dialects of Chinese are NOT different languages. The written language and the grammatical structures are identical. The difference is pronounciation and local coloquialisms. It’s equivilent to a person from Australia trying desperately to understand a person from Alabama. It can be done, but requires a bit of effort.
There aren’t any dialects in the written language, any literate Chinese person can read writing written by any other person. Indeed, if two people speak very foreigh dialects and cannot understand each other, it is not uncommon to “draw” the relevant character in the air to get the meaning accross.
Also, it isn’t a straight mapping. A Catonese person who read aloud what in Mandarin is the same character doubled “xie xie” (thank you), would pronounce it as two different syllables, since their common word for thank-you is not just one character doubled like it is in Mandarin. I believe there are other examples of this sort of thing.
> The different dialects of Chinese are NOT different
> languages. The written language and the grammatical
> structures are identical
Excuse me, but you’re wrong. They are not just dialects. They differ as much as, say, Spanish and Italian. Consult any book on the subject.
Sailor writes:
> I know there are a few characters specific to Cantonese
Avumede writes:
> Also, it isn’t a straight mapping. A Catonese person who
> read aloud what in Mandarin is the same character
> doubled “xie xie” (thank you), would pronounce it as two
> different syllables, since their common word for thank
> you is not just one character doubled like it is in
> Mandarin. I believe there are other examples of this sort
> of thing.
Thank you both. This starts to answer my question. Does anyone here speak several of the Chinese languages? I think it’s going to take someone with at least that amount of proficiency to answer my question.
> The different dialects of Chinese are NOT different
> languages. The written language and the grammatical
> structures are identical
Excuse me, but you’re wrong. They are not just dialects. They differ as much as, say, Spanish and Italian. Consult any book on the subject.
[/quote]
There was just another thread about whether they are dialects or different languages. They differ slightly less than say ,Italian and Spanish in that Italian and Spanish have writing systems based on pronunciation ( more so than English), so that written Spanish is not the same as written Italian. Chinese characters are meaning based ( not syllables- I think you’re referring to the parts of a character-don’t remember for sure what they’re called-for example, the character for train may be a combination of those for “iron” and “horse”). A particular character means “sun” no matter_how_ the person reading it pronounces it.A Cantonese-only speaker can read something written by a Mandarin-only speaker,even though they couldn’t speak to each other. To give a made up example using different languages, it’s as if #$% was a character read as “dog” in English, “cane” in Italian,“perro” in Spanish and so on. Though the spoken forms are not mutually comprehensible, the written form is.My understanding is that the grammar and sentence structure of the different Chinese variants are essentially the same,as are those of the Romance languages.
Actually, the discussion in that thread you mention seems to be saying that the Chinese languages differ slightly more than Spanish and Italian.
No, I was talking about syllables, not about parts of characters. The parts of characters are called “radicals”. It was clear in the Mandarin course that I took that each character was one syllable. Many words consisted of one syllable (and hence one character), but there were words like “mei guo”, which meant America. Yes, you could break it up into the separate syllables, which meant “beautiful” and “country”, but you had to know that the entire combination meant America.
I know that the grammar is mostly the same between the different Chinese languages, but I’ve also read that it’s not completely the same, so there are small differences between the order of words in the different languages. I want to know how this affects reading Chinese.
Please don’t post to this thread unless you’re actually an expert on Chinese. I really suspect this question can only be answered by someone who knows a great deal about the subject, not someone with a vague knowledge of it.
Sorry Wendell, but I have to correct you on one point. If one syllable means beautiful and the other means country, they are not just syllables, they are words.“Mei guo” is not a word, it is two words, which combined mean what is commonly expressed in one word (or five) in English.I don’t need any knowledge of Chinese to say that,and it will happen in translations between other languages also.
Good luck finding an expert,but your best bet would be a foreign language department, not here.
A word is anything that needs to be separately looked up in a dictionary. “Mei guo” is a word because its meaning cannot be deduced from the individual syllables. For instance, “barbell” in English is a separate word from “bar” and “bell”. “Woodwork” is a separate word from “wood” and “work”. The fact that each syllable has a meaning doesn’t change the fact that the meaning of the whole word cannot be deduced from its components.
And how would you say beautiful country if the thought you wanted to express is " I live in a beautiful country" ? If it’s still “mei guo” , then it’s an idiommatic expression, not a word.
You would know from context whether it meant “America” or “beautiful country”. “Dong xi”, the word for chopstick was another example. Each separate syllable had a meaning but what you learned was the meaning of the whole word. In some sense, there isn’t a clear distinction between a word and an idiomatic expression. It wasn’t any harder for the Chinese than it is for us to learn that you can’t guess “barbell”, “woodwork”, or “chopstick” from the meaning of each of the syllables.
Also, “meiguo” is definitely a word of its own, and you would almost never hear it in a sentence with the meaning, “beautiful country”. “Beautiful country” is “meilide guojia”.
Doreen you are mistaken. MeiGuo is a phonetic approximation to “America” and totally unrelated to the components, America is MeiGuo whether it is beautiful or ugly.
Spain is XiBanYa, an approximation to Hispania, but the three signs mean West, Class, Tooth. Xibanya is ONE word with three syllables.
When you see ATTENTION! it is formed by two characters with individual meanings “small” and “heart”
and so on
Doreen, Chinese just like English is full of words that mean more than one thing and people can understand from context what is meant. Isolated words thought are often difficult to translate. You really do not know any Chinese and you are irritating Wendell.
OTOH Wendell, this board is open to everyone and I do not think it is polite to ask people not to post unless they are experts. All threads are open to everyone who cares to contribute or ask further and Wendell is also allowed to learn from her misconceptions. If you want only expert opinions you can go find an expert easily in Netmeeting or Irc Chat. I have several Chinese friends online and there are plenty of Chinese people online for you to consult. This is not your private turf. If you feel people should not be posting you can ask the moderator to advise them.
Can you tell me what Netmeeting or IRC Chat is and how I would use them to ask the question I am trying to ask? My apologies for seeming to be so nasty, but I tried to signal that I wanted expert knowledge by the title of the thread. My memory of learning Chinese is pretty vague at this point, as you can tell by the fact that I couldn’t even correctly remember the word for chopstick. Where can I find some experts on Chinese?
well, I would say any chinese person online would qualify as “expert” for your purposes. I have met loads of them on line and have even made a few good friendships.
You can get any IRC chat program (I use microsoft’s) and look for any chat rooms with the words China or Asia or HongKong or whatever.
In Netmeeting there are many servers where chinese people congregate. If my memory serves me right ils.vol.net is one. I don’t remember well as the one I use most often is ils.rapidsex.com they are easy to find online
you can download netmeeting and chat at http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com/ if you do not have them already and you possibly do. Search your disk for Chat and for netmeeting.
Chat is (as the name implies) a chat program. Netmeeting allows you to use voice and video but it really does not work too well and Chat is a better way to meet people. Netmeeting can get frustrating as you call people and get no response. With chat you will be chatting with people right away.
You might want to do an internet search about these programs or start anew thread here asking about these two programs. I do not use them too much lately.
This is actually what I was trying to say in my first post when I wrote
[/quote]
Chinese characters are meaning based ( not syllables- I think you’re referring to the parts of a character-don’t remember for sure what they’re called-for example, the character for train may be a combination of those for “iron” and “horse”).
[/quote]
althought you did it better. I wasn’t thinking of phonetic approximations of foreign language names at first.
I know that the meaning would be understood by the context, but I asked Wendell the question because the answer does make a difference. If ,as he more or less implied in his answer, “beautiful country” in a sentence was also said “mei guo” then it would be an idiom. If, as Zarathustra said, “beautiful country” in a sentence is said differently ,that’s another story.
Now sailor, I’m going to ask you a couple of questions for my own understanding.
1] Are the two different individual characters used for “attention” written separately or combined into one character? ( just wondering)
2] Is attention pronounced the same as or differently from the phrase "small heart"or “heart small”?
The reason I’m asking is because if “attention” is not pronounced the same as one of the phrases, you can’t really say that the characters represent syllables, which are units of sound, not meaning or writing.( which was really what I was disagreeing with Wendell about to begin with)To use one of Wendell’s examples, “barbell” doesn’t have the same meaning as “bar bell”,but they are pronounced the same,contain the same syllables,and are spelled the same, except for the space. The sound represented by “bar” will nearly always ( might be an exception, English isn’t perfectly phonetic) be spelled that way, whether the word is bar, barbell or barbeque. However, in Cantonese ( haven’t got any Mandarin speakers around, only my husband whose first language was Cantonese) the syllable that would be represented in English as “may” can mean at least four completely different things ( not, tail, flavor, major). If characters represented syllables, they’d all be written the same way,but he says they’re not.If those four meanings don’t share a common sound in Mandarin, they couldn’t be written the same way if the written language is understood by both Cantonese and Mandarin speakers.
Each character has a pronounciation. It’s a single syllable, so it’s a consonant (or in some cases, the lack of a consonant), a vowel, and a tone. However, for each consonant/vowel/tone combination there are several characters which are pronounced that way. In some cases, there are more than a dozen characters which have the same pronounciation.
Each character only sort of has a meaning associated with it. You have to memorize that the character which is pronounced /mei/ (sorry, I don’t remember the tone) is one which is used as the first syllable in “meiguo” meaning America and also the word “meilide” meaning beautiful. There are other characters with the same pronounciation (including the tone), but they are not used in that word. Similarly, the character for the syllable /guo/ used in “meiguo” meaning America is the same as the character used in “guojia” meaning country. There are historical reasons why that is true, but that doesn’t help you. You still have to memorize every word (like “meiguo”, “meilide”, and “guojia”) separately
Is there any way to ask this question without going into a chatroom? I would really rather not go into one of those. Is there a message board or a mailing list where I can ask this question? I’ve never tried chat, but I’m sure I could never conceivably type fast enough to stay up with the conversation there. I much prefer to have carefully prepared questions before I try to ask someone something.
Excuse my stupidity, but your explanations leave me lost. I went to that Microsoft URL you give, but I couldn’t find anything about Netmeeting or IRC Chat. I tried ils.vol.net, but it wasn’t a working URL. On the other hand, ils.rapidsex.com works, but it’s apparently for adult sex talk.
Wendell, chat rooms are full of people chatting and babbling and generally wasting time. You do not need to be concerned about your typing skills. Most of them are teenagers with too much time.
I get the impression you give up too easily. have you searched the web for chinese forums? There have to be hundreds. I did a quick search and turned up dozens of links. Keep looking and you’ll find plenty more stuff
Doreen, trying to dissect “Attention” in Chinese Xiao Xin (small + heart) is like saying in English the word “understand” is composed of under+stand or outstanding as out+standing. Literally they make no sense and only a foreigner would analyze them that way.
Meiguo means America. Period. Forget about analyzing the components because it makes no sense. The origin of Meiguo is a phonetic aproximation and is not connected to the meanings of its components.
they are easy to find online