Why are the Chinese language variants considered “dialects” even though they are mutually unintelligble, while Danish and Swedish, or Italian and Spanish, are considered separate “languages”, yet speakers of them can easily understand each other.
Actually, I know the latter examples are separate languages because while many of the words have the same roots, which are easily derivable to the speakers in the different languages, they are pronounced differently enough to be considered separate.
One claim for commonality of Chinese is that they all use the same written language, but I know Japanese uses many of the same ideograms, enough so that my father can claim that he can read it. And I also know that Japanese and the Chinese languages are completely unrelated (except for some borrowing) in the spoken forms.
So, what gives? Is it simply a political definition to define Chinese as “dialects”? (We’re all Chinese, damn it, and we speak the same “language”.) Or, is there a technical reason that linguist classify them as such?
The OP says Japanese and Chinese use enough of the same ideograms that his father can claim to read Japanese, but I have to ask, what can his father read in Japanese? By that, I mean if his father can read an advertisement or store sign, etc in Japanese, that’s a much different claim than if his father can read Japanese as well as he can read Chinese.To give a different example, when I was much more fluent in Italian than I am now, I could understand a certain amount of written Spanish ( store signs, ads,bumper stickers,menus, etc} but I never could have read the Inferno in Spanish ( which I did in Italian).My understanding of written Chinese is that it is written exactly the samr throughout China, so that one edition of a physics textbook could be used throughout China. I don’t think that’s true of Chinese and Japanese.
I posted a list of criteria that linguists use to distinguish a language from a dialect in this thread.
It’s not an exact process by any means and linguists often disagree on which category specific languages/dialects fall into. And yes, politics does play a role in it.
Can he truly understand Japanese? Or does he just understand the idea of most of what he sees (the difference between understanding a language, and getting a general idea)? Japanese and Chinese are completely unrelated and the Han script was never suited for any language but the chinese languages (i’ll call them languages). Which is why katakana and hiragana were invented, so the Japanese could do the inflections, particles, etc. that their language has.
I believe most of the difference between language and dialect is political. There’s a saying: “The difference between a language and a dialect is that languages have armies” (or something to that effect). An example of the political side is Norwegian and Swedish. The dividing line politically is north/south, but on a list i’m on devoted to languages, someone mentioned the difference really is more east/west (the border between Norway and Sweden runs north/south).
Also, Spanish and Italian are truly separate languages. There is quite a big difference in how each handles things, and also, while I can understand a decent amount of written Italian, i cant barely understand a thing when I hear it spoken. I dont think my friends who are fluent in Spanish would understand that much if they heard it.
OK. If you’re a Chomskian, like I am, you don’t think there are, scientifically speaking(*), any such things as languages or dialects, but rather individual languages (idiolects) that are mutually intelligible to a greater or lesser degree.
That said, the usual dividing line between a language and a dialect is mutual intelligibility. However, this leads to problems, the least of which is the “a language is a dialect with an army” routine.
If you look at Germany and the Netherlands, for example, a Dutch person from Nijmegen can understand a German from across the border. Likewise, the Dutch person can understand the Dutch of Amsterdam, and the German person can understand the German of Berlin. But a German from Berlin cannot understand the Dutch of Amsterdam, and vice versa. Hm.
(*I know there are languages. Obviously French exists. But that doesn’t mean it’s a scientific concept.)
An extreme example of language division on a cultural basis might be Hindi vs. Urdu. Fundamentally the same language with different cultural traditions and represented using different alphabets (Devanagari vs. Arabic script). The Hindi-speaking Indian and Urdu-speaking Pakistani are mutually intelligible to each other. Understanding each other is a whole different kettle of fish.
wong, who exactly is calling Cantonese and Mandarin dialects of the same language? I literally don’t know a single word of either language, but I can instantly tell if someone is speaking one or the other. (I live in California, where most Chinese people and descendants speak Cantonese and call it simply “Chinese”, although in general, that term refers to Mandarin.) The two languages don’t even sound similar, even to me. People who speak one or the other have assured me that the two languages are completely different.
FWIW, when I was in Italy, I spoke to people in Spanish and they always got at least my meaning, although if they replied in Italian, I was completely lost. I can read French and Italian well enough to decipher the meaning of a newspaper article (lots of papers lying around on trains), but I can’t understand either, especially French, which sounds to me like baby talk.
At the library where I work, there used to be a collection of books with an “S-C” designation on them to indicate that they were written in “Serbo-Croatian.”
A few years back somebody went through all the books (about 1000) and put little “Serbian” and “Croatian” tags on them.
Kyla, Cantonese and Mandarin may sound completely different when spoken at a conversational pace, but they are more similar than you might think. Although each dialect (yes, I subscribe to the dialect school of thought, no not for any great reason) has idioms that don’t translate well, and Cantonese has its own set of recently-invented (mid-20th century, I’m told) set of characters that make words that don’t have 1-to-1 Mandarin equivalents, the grammatical patterns are essentially the same, and while spoken sentences in one dialect will be unintelligible to a speaker of another, some individual words sound almost the same, and a a greater number sound close enough to be recognizable, ie “ho” vs. “hao” and “cheh” vs. “chuh.”(That’s phonetic.)
I’m no great expert on Chinese, but I would still beg to differ. Any two languages in which basic words such as numerals are completely different (2: Cantonese yi = Mandarin er; 5: C. ng M. wu, etc.) I would not seriously take to be dialects of each other. Other striking differences such as the number of tones in the tonal systems (4/5 in M., and 8 in C. IIRC, please correct me) would add to the argument.
Also as far as Chinese friends of mine have told me in the past, they cannot understand each other’s “dialects” in the least, i.e. Spanish and Italian would be better candidates for dialect status.
But let us live and let live, as convention has them to be dialects due to the unique common writing system.
As for other languages being dialects of each other, I would argue for the hard-to-solidify definition that if two people’s ideolects are (to a significant degree) mutually intelligible that they are (dia)lects of each other. The dia- part would refer to geographical distribution of some sort.
SpaceVampire, couldn’t you say the same thing about English and German? Or some even closer languages, like Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese? Additionally, these similarities exist in Hebrew and Arabic; although these languages use different alphabets, they do have a like word order, and there are a number of words that are identical, or can be deciphered by following simple rules (“s” in Arabic becomes a “sh”, and voila, that’s a Hebrew word).
So what DOES make these languages distinct and Mandarin and Cantonese dialects?
No comment re English/French/German etc… I’m not too up on my romance languages. If you’re going to bring in the similarities that other supposedly distinct “languages” have as an argument for Chinese dialects being considered different languages, I guess the best I can do is to say that it probably mostly has to do with geography. Weak and illogical, maybe, but since when does everything, or even most things, make sense?
As for numerals, TheThill, while you are correct, you neglected 3,4,6,7 and 8, which are all somewhat to very similar.
I actually started an identical thread about a year ago. Long and short of it is there is NO one single definition for dialect. I still say right or wrong. If two people can understand each other it is the same language.
I mean it wasn’t till like 15 years ago the Belgians stopped calling their language Flemish and said it was Dutch. The Norwegians call one of their languages a Norwegian form of Danish.
I recall the press saying when the Macedonians demanded an interpeter when they met with the Bulgarians as akin to the British needing an interpeter to speak to an American.
I know that Serbian and Croatian are the same. But now since they have achieved political status the Croations are insisting their language is seperate and different.
I know people I work with that speak only Spanish yet easily carry on conversations with our Portugese clientele(sp?)
One of them from Argentina said she can speak Italian and understand it as Argentian Spanish is really not Spanish but a mixture of Spanish and Italian.
The point is that it would be very odd for two dialects of a language to have different words for something as basic as numbers (or kin terms, or what have you). Even the separate Romance languages have closer numbers than “yi” and “er” - compare cinq, cinco, cinque, quinque, cinc, and cinci.
Well, since now. I’m sorry, you made a statement, and then you were unable to back it up, and are now saying that you don’t have to make sense anyway. Nuh uh.
Huh. I studied Argentinian Spanish in high school (my Spanish teacher learned the language as a Mormon missionary in Argentina), and can that while the language is not the same as the Mexican Spanish I usually hear in California, it’s significantly closer than Italian. It does seem to be more similar to Castilian Spanish, which might make it closer to Italian, though, as well as other Romance languages. I dunno, really. One thing I CAN say is that Argentine Spanish is an accent, not a dialect, and is mutually intelligble to other accents of Spanish. (FTR, the most noticeable facet of the Argentine accent is that “y” and “ll” are pronounced with a “zh” sound.)
I suscribe to the idea that a language is a set of mutually intelligible idiolects, as Matt said. I speak slightly different than you do, but we speak similarly enough to be understood.
I brought up the “a language is a dialect with an army” thing just to illustrate the difference can be political (even if that example is weak :)).
Personally, I feel it’s a bit weak to call two languages dialects just for political reasons or that they “sound the same” or whatever. I know my friend Irene can’t understand Cantonese, and she speaks Mandarin. She illustrated the differences between Mandarin from Beijing and Mandarin from Taiwan…dont ask me to reproduce it here, but the example she gave was the difference between how Beijing and Taiwanese speakers pronounce “shi” (said like “shr”).
Space Vampire, I of course only listed those numerals that seem to be completely different. I didn’t mean to say that the numerals are all different, since the two dialects/languages are obviously related, but rather that if such basic words as numbers (which I happen to more or less know in both Cantonese and Mandarin) are different, that we need to speak of two different languages.
I find this particularly striking, since numerals are often quite similar in languages that are even remotely related. As an example, the number 3 in a few Indo-European languages: three, drei, tre, trys, tri, triah… (English, German, Italian, Lithuanian, Russian, Sanskrit) and there are plenty more examples of the same.