The first, sure, but wouldn’t you say money has had something to do with the generations that’ve come since then? Maybe I’m talking total BS, I’m not that hot at history or economics, but it seems reasonable to me. If we’re talking about people who do actually speak Chinese often enough that people other than their families are hearing them and taking note, we’re probably talking about immigrants that don’t go that far back since they typically don’t keep language skills for too many generations. I know Chinese who came to the US as kids who now know less Chinese than I do.
http://www.sungwh.freeserve.co.uk/chinese/ch-intro.htm
Mandarin is spoken in the north (as in, north of the Yellow River). Cantonese is the “dialect” spoken in Guangdong and Guangxi.
Again, Mandarin and Cantonese are generic terms because these two have many dialects that are mutually intelligible to a large extent.
Because of the traditional political domination of the North, a modified version of the Beijing dialect (which comes under Mandarin) is taught in schools and promoted as a national language.
Cantonese can be seen as a more “conservative” offshoot than Mandarin. While the latter has only 2 kinds of endings: “n” and “ng” (like “sing”), Cantonese has 6: “n”, “m”, “ng” (nasals), “p”, “t” and “k” (occlusives/stops).
As sounds ending with stops are pronounced differently from those ending in nasals and vowels where tone is concerned, the loss of the final stops in Mandarin has caused the loss of an entire set of tones. Cantonese has retained this. (though it doesn’t explain completely why Cantonese has 9 distinctive tones while Mandarin has 4, excluding the qing tone.)
Since Cantonese is much more complex than Mandarin, I -think- it would be just a little easier for a Cantonese-speaker to pick up Mandarin, as least from where phonetics is concerned.
As other Dopers have said, a text in Chinese will be pronounced differently in Mandarin and Cantonese. It’s a bit like reading a Latin text in Church and Classical Latin.
From what I see and hear, you can consider Mandarin as Latin during the middle ages in Europe - the language of government - and the local dialects (or whatever you want to call them) like Cantonese, Hokkien, Shanghainese, etc, etc as vulgar French, Spanish, Portuguese and so on. That doesn’t mean they are offshoots of Mandarin, but they have a less official, more vernacular status.
Standard written Chinese uses Mandarin grammar, so an educated Canto speaker can speak Mandarin by adopting Mandarin pronunciation and speaking the way he would write. A bit like a home-grown but educated Texan or Glaswegian would emulate standard English when necessary.
A Shanghai-born friend of mine who speaks perfect Mandarin can understand Cantonese quite easily after a year or two in HK, but can’t speak it to save her life. I end up “translating” for her, and if you need me to do that, you’re crap. Normally, she just speaks English to Hongkongers, which gives you an idea of how similar Mandarin and Canto are (though there might be cultural attitude problems at play as well).
I heard Shanghai people are especially bad with Cantonese; one of the watchmen at my building is Shanghainese and seems to bear this out, I’m doing context-based guesswork on almost anything he says.
Is Cantonese really widespread in Guangxi? My old girlfriend was from Guangxi, and I taught her all the Cantonese she knew.
xejkh, it’s logical to think that Cantonese’s complexity would make Mandarin a snap for them, but I’ve found that’s not necessarily the case. I’ve talked to people who whine incessently about how hard the four tones are- which is pretty mind-blowing to me, seeing as they’re always correcting me with things that, really, sound exactly like what I just said. I find some people in Hong Kong put on kind of a “baby-talk” voice when speaking Mandarin, seemingly to somehow deflect the embarrassment of totally sucking at it.
Map of China
Ethnologue - Languages of China
The major spoken languages in China are
70% Mandarin/Putonghua (N - Official Language)
7.5% Shanghaiese/Wu (E - Jiangsu and Zhejiang Provinces)
4.5% Cantonese/Yue (SE - Guangdong Province/HK/Overseas)
3.7% Min/Hokkien/Taiwanese (SE - Fujian Province and Taiwan)
3.5% Xiang (S - Hunan Province)
2.5% Hakka (Southern Provinces)
2% Gan (SE - Jiangxi Province)
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_dialect
China was a collection of smaller kingdoms with their various languages. By 221 BC, the the first emperor of the Qin Dynasty, Qin Ying Zheng united the six warring states through conquest and standardized the written language in addition to building the Great Wall. The standardized characters were attributed to the Han ethnic group, one of the conquered warring states.
In 1956 and 1964, the Peoples Republic of China introduced a simplified chinese character set to improve literacy.
First some nitpicks, Cantonese is not spoken in Guangxi Province.
With in the above Shanghaiese/Wu (Jiangsu and Zhejiang Provinces), there are many mutually incomprehensible dialects. Wuxi people are not understood unless they slow down their speech and make an attempt to sound more Shanghaiese. Or at least this is what the native Shanghaiese say. Ditto for Suzhou or Shaoxing dialects.
IMHO the cantonese are among the worst linguists in China. There is a phrase “tian bu pa, di bu pa, jiu pa guangdong ren shuo putonghua” aka "don’t fear heaven, don’t fear hell, only fear Cantonese speaking Mandarin.
Of the above, 70% of the people in China may be able to understand/speak a generally recognized form of Mandarin, few of them speak it as a native language.
Hemlock, that is a pretty good analogy for the various Chinese languages/dialects. Heck, I always explain that China is more diverse than Europe as a way to break the mindset of one homogeneous proletarian blue perception of this country.
hemlock - would an appropriate analogy for Mandarin be like Classic Arabic (fusha sp?) here - used eg for broadcast, but not spoken in everyday conversation, with every Arab country having quite a different dialect?
I know several native Arabic speakers who have failed to get jobs in Arabic media because their command of Classical (formal) Arabic wasn’t good enough. Does the same situation occur in China, with people speaking dialect but not formal Mandarin?
Glad you identified that as an opinion. I’m curious, though, if that opinion extends to just certain select Cantonese or do you think those Cantonese who actually happen to be professional linguists fall into the group of “worst linguists in China?”
Yeah, and there’re a million other prejudiced sayings floating around. How many happen to actually be worth repeating?
Not only IMHO but the Cantonese, especially those from Hong Kong, are infamous throughout China for speaking Mandarin with a horrendous accent. That is when they speak Mandarin at all. Most people from Hong Kong will generally admit that this is a reasonably fair sweeping generalization.
I did however use the word “linguist” inappropriately.
On multi-lingual packaging, signs, etc. around these parts, I often notice differences of vocabulary and phrasing between the simplified and traditional character versions of the texts. The traditional versions always looking less familiar than what is obviously putong-hua, I always assumed it was Cantonese. Surely, I haven’t been the only one to notice. Am I wrong in my guess? Or have I underestimated the regional differences between China, Taiwan and Singapore Mandarin?
Can you give some examples?
To pick even finer, my daughter was born (or actually found) in Guangxi province, in Wuzhou, which is right near the Guangdong border. We were told that her foster mom spoke Cantonese in the home. She’s learning Mandarin now (in my bad, American accent). She sure likes it when the waitresses speak Cantonese, so I tend to believe that some Cantonese is spoken in Guangxi.
PS China Guy, sorry to mis-name you over in that other thread (where I called you ChinaBoy). I must have confused you with AstroBoy.
PPS Is there any chance you can find me a Mandarin-dubbed copy of the Lord of the Rings DVDs (or VCDs)? I’d be happy to pay shipping and etc. I got VCD copies with Chinese sub-titles, but I couldn’t find dubbed versions.
I do believe you’re making very sweeping generalizations, there, China Guy.
NoCoolUserName, actually I’ve been to Wuzhou at least 5 times and it is on the border between Guangdong and Guangxi. That is the first city during the trip by boat from Guangzhou where it is noticeable that Cantonese is not spoken. I’m sure there are Cantonese people there, and some of the population speaks Cantonese, but the lingua franca of Wuzhou is not Cantonese nor something that sounds like a Cantonese derivative to my amateur ears. If you ever go back to wuzhou, make sure you check out the snake factory. Watching the staff throw around cobras was pretty wild.
I’ll try to keep an eye out for LOTR.
Monty, the Cantonese and especially the Hong Kongese are infamous throughout China as speaking horribly accented Mandarin. Regardless of whether that is a sweeping generalization or not. Just a wag, but probably 9 times out of 10 I can hear if someone is cantonese and it is a painful accent. During the last two weeks I went to Hong Kong and then later in Beijing had interaction with my Hong Kongese colleagues. Everyone of the them said I spoke better Mandarin than they did (and if you could hear their Mandarin you would understand that this is not really a complement).
Any of our Cantonese speaking dopers can chime in here.
A Hong Kong delegate to a Beijing conference on SARS 2 weeks ago or so started his presentation by adapting the phrase “tian bu pa, di bu pa, jiu pa guangdong ren shuo putonghua”. He said something like, “You might have thought SARS was bad, but now you’re going to get a Cantonese speaking Putonghua.”
Istara - I guess it is a bit like Arabic, except AFAIK Classical Arabic is not actually a mother tongue for anyone, whereas Mandarin is the native language in Beijing.
Well, the Wikipedia has this to say about Guoyu (or Kuo-yü, depending on which romanization system you use), the Taiwanese version of Mandarin:
So, it seems possible that this could account for the differences you see. As for Singapore, I was under the (possibly mistaken) impression that most of the Chinese speakers there are actually speakers of dialect languages like Fujian and Cantonese instead of ‘pure’ Mandarin Chinese.
Since Shanghainese has been tossed around a bit in this thread, here’s my two cents as someone whose sig. other is a Chinese from Hangzhou. (For those not fluent in Chinese geography, it’s about a two-hour train ride SW of Shanghai.) She grew up speaking a sort of mishmash of Shanghainese and Mandarin, but was taught ‘pure’ Mandarin in school. But while the vocabulary and grammar of Mandarin may be the same throughout China, pronounciation varies wildly. When she went to Beijing for university, she was actually laughed at by the locals because of her thick Zhejiang accent for the first few weeks, until she learned how to better imitate the Beijing pronounciations.
One of her pastimes here in the states is keeping up with a Cantonese soap opera that airs on one of the cable channels. Despite being intelligent and highly trained in foreign languages, she can only understand bits here and there. She’s able to follow along effortlessly via the Chinese subtitles, though, despite the differences between the two spoken languages, since as has already been noted the written versions are more or less identical.
Originally, when Chinese immigrants came to Singapore, they brought along with them their dialects, Fukien, Cantonese, Hakka etc.
However, in the 1980s, the government decided on a Speak Mandrin campaign that phased out all dialect use and encouraged the younger generation to speak only Mandrin. As a result, pick anyone under 20, chances are that they’ll only understand Mandrin. Dialects are still understood, especially among the older generation, but are increasingly rarer.
I’d like to reply to someone’s point that there’s only one way of writing Chinese (but many ways of prouncing). FWIW, that’s actually not true. There’s da kai, xiao zhuan, etc…(historically) and modern script is divided into fan ti and jian ti. Beijing officially adopted the jian ti. In Singapore, the use of jian ti is also widespread. However, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan remain using fan ti.
Which brings me to my next point. Basically, i grew up using jian ti, but i can read fan ti proficiently. It just takes some getting used to. The same with the dialects. Mandrin’s fine for me, and i can understand Fukien as well as some Cantonese. So i believe that to some extent, the dialects are linked ie. they are not separate languages as some suggest.
Actually, in dialects, there exist the use of some words not commonly found in daily mandarin conversations. Using Fukien as an example: ‘You’ in Mandrin can be translated as ‘ni’, but in fukien, the use of ‘ni’ is avoided. Instead, the character ‘yi’ (mandrin pronounciation, as i have no idea how to romanise the Fukien pronounciation) is used as a widespread substitute.
So in essence, the dictionaries for both dialects are the same, but it’s just that in a particular dialect, level of usage is different.
My company’s rep in Beijing is from Hong Kong. He feels that everyone’s Mandarin, even westerners’, is better than his because he sees a character and his first instinct is to pronounce it in Cantonese. He has to make a concious effort to change his pronounciation of each syllable. 'Course, he didn’t have to go out and learn the darn characters from scratch like the rest of us, so maybe he’s just a whiner. 
Thanks!
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAAHAHAHAHAHA!
Written Chinese is not the same. Try reading a newspaper in Taiwan, Hong Kong, China and Singapore. They use different words and phases. The vocab is different. For an analogy, try working an English crossword puzzle if you’re an American and vice versa. Non-native people like me really struggle with a newspaper first off, and switching to another country’s newspaper (forget the simplified or traditional version of the characters, I’m talking vocabulary here) is real tough. Native speakers have to really work through the differences.
The Cantonese in Hong Kong also have some homegrown characters. For example “mo” or not have. In Mandarin one says “mei you” but in Cantonese they use a different word. I love this word though. The character “you” or “to have” is a pictogram of a hand holding a piece of meat (back in a poor agrarian society that represented having something!). Everywhere but Hong Kong, then you write the word “mei” or “not” in front of the “have.” Now the Hong Kongese did something I love, they took the character “to have” and redrew it as a hand holding something empty instead of a piece of meat. Again, this signifies not having. Cool in my book but only used in Hong Kong.
Singapore is interesting because most of the 20 something and under Chinese all can speak Mandarin, but it is a rare exception when that is the native language as opposed to Fukien, Canto or Hakka or one of the more rare dialects.
Beijing is interesting in that most of the people there speak to each other in a rough native dialect. It is not broadcast Mandarin by any stretch of the imagination. Actually, it takes some effort to get used to the sounds and pronunciations. Quite a shock to study Mandarin for 20 years and then finally go to Beijing and struggling to understand the vernacular.
To our Honky dopers, I’m traveling to HK at least once a month. Maybe in Nov we should try have a dopefest lunch or dinner.
Please don’t let this weird you out, but I quite admire your experience, and as someone who recently obtained a Chinese degree and is feeling sort of useless I just might be up for picking your brain. I am usually not into the net-meet thing, but these days I don’t always have a lot of options for meeting like-minded people.