I happen to have a Chinese friend and so I’ve talked to him about something like this:
As I recall - he speaks Cantonese and she speaks Shang-Hai-Nese. (They are from different provinces obviously.) At home they communicate in Mandarin since it is the great universal Chinese language. The interesting part is that when they visit his Cantonese parents, she cannot understand anything except the Mandarin that they speak. On the flip side when they visit her parents who speak Shang-Hai-Nese, my friend can understand about 70% of what they say - I think its because the Cantonese dialect is so much stronger that its easier to understand hers.
Thanks for the replies! I guess from ruadh’s link that lack of mutual intelligibility isn’t enough (neither necessary nor sufficient) to prevent one idiolect from being a dialect of another.
Re: doreen and Doobieous comments: I think it likely that my father can’t fluently read Japanese, but the written forms of the two are closer than you think. The ideograms were borrowed from the Chinese by the Japanese. (Although, I would believe that a physics text in Chinese would mostly be English since that’s the scientific lingua franca!)
Doobieous is wrong, however, in implying that the Chinese ideograms have any suitability to the spoken form of any languages including the Chinese dialects. That’s why they’re called ideograms not phonograms. Katakana and Hirigana are recent developments while the Kanji ideograms were adopted centuries ago.
My understanding is that Katakana is able to exist because all Japanese phonemes are also Japanese words, which isn’t true of most other languages including Chinese and English. So, its possible to phonetically spell Japanese words using the Kanji ideograms for the base phonemes, which is the Katakana used on computer keyboards to enter the Kanji words. You would never see Katakana in a written form except in Hirigana, where foreign borrow words are spelled using the Katakana for the phonemes of the borrowed words.
Correction on the Scandinavian thing: Norwegians do not call “one of their languages” a form of Danish. First of all, Norwegians consider Norwegian to be a single language. (Because of a large degree of mutual intelligibility with Danish and Swedish, you could also consider it to be a particular group of dialects of a larger Scandinavian language, but that’s another issue.) However, there are many dialects of Norwegian and no one writing system could suit them all equally well. Because of the complex historical situation the Norwegian language has been through, there are two written forms, bokmål (“book language”) and nynorsk (“new Norwegian” - a misnomer!). Bokmål was created from written Danish and adapted to spoken Norwegian, primarily the spoken Norwegian of educated city dwellers. Nynorsk was created from a variety of rural dialects, mostly in the west of the country.
However - I can generally identify bokmål versus Danish from a single sentence. While there is some overlap, and people who can read one can usually read the other, they are also easily identifiable. Some English language books translate bokmål as “Dano-Norwegian” - which makes most bokmål users roll their eyes. It ain’t that simple. And spoken… well, Norwegians as a rule find it easier to understand spoken Swedish than spoken Danish, no matter what form they choose for their writing.
I’m not entirely sure just what you are saying here Wong. A lot of it looks like youre confusing Hanzi/Kanji with Katakana and Hiragana in many of your examples…
Pardon me, but I’ve read quite a bit on the three scripts. Hanzi is NOT an ideographic script! It’s classified as logosyllabic (logo - word, syllabic - pertaining to syllables) Each character generally represents a word. ideographic means each character represents a picture rather than an actual word or sound. From what i’ve read only about 200 or so characters represent actual pictures of things. The rest are combinations of characters designed to represent a word (the way they are formed is too long to post here). I’m well aware of the fact that hanzi are not phonograms (i have two books on Chinese characters, Quailles practical Chinese dictionary, and an etymology dictionary).
And yes, the script does have suitability for the spoken languages in the Chinese language family (which tend to be monosyllabic (not studying anything more than the script i’m not sure)), but a speaker from Beijing can write to a speaker from Shanghai and be understood because the characters are representing words/syllables NOT just syllables.
I’m not sure what you’re talking about here. Katakana and Hiragana represent syllables (they are syllabaries), not words. Hanzi represents syllables AND words (refer to the above paragraph). I think you have hanzi and katakana switched around. But, you may be thinking of the poem Iroha, which is an old ordering of the script which forms a Buddhist poem (but, each syllable does not represent a word)
You also dont seem to know what phoneme means. A phoneme is the basic unit of sound which make up morphemes. Phonemes are for example b, p, a, e, etc. So, no, the phonemes of Japanese are NOT words. Maybe you mean morpheme, but still no, the syllables katakana and hiragana dont represent words.
Yes, it’s possible to phonetically spell Japanese words with * katakana and hiragana* because they are syllabaries. You can write Japanese entirely in hiragana, in fact the Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu was written all in hiragana. However, a lot of ambiguity happens this way, and that’s one reason why the Japanese keep Kanji, the kanji help you to figure out what word it is you are looking at. Kanji are NOT used to represent the syllables in Japanese. This was tried, and it was difficult and hard (scholars basically had to learn Chinese (whatever language at the time) in order to use the scrpt to write their native language (happened in Korea also, IIRC). That is the reason why buddhist monks invented the two systems, because hanzi does NOT fit any other languages but the Chinese languages well (if you disagree, i can ask on one of my mailing lists and send the responses back to you). Hanzi, since each character represents a word, does not work well with Japanese at all, which uses inflections (Chinese does not, generally. Look up chinese and isolating sometime), as I said before.
Hiragana is used to represent particles, inflections, and also words that don’t have a Kanji equivalent. Katakana is used for foreign words (besuboru - baseball), and also emphasis. Kanji are used to represent the basic idea of the word, as well as the roots.
In any case, to cease sounding like a hippie and get on point, I would say that if you want to study the genesis of a language (as opposed to a dialect), you should look to the states of Central Asia that are developing out of the former Soviet Union.
Many speak Turkic languages, that for the past 80 years or more, since the regions came under the yoke of the Soviets or of the Romanovs, have been spelled with cyrillic characters. The most powerful country that speaks a turkic language today, Turkey, uses a modified romanic alphabet. But a hundred years ago, the Ottoman Empire used an alphabet that was modified from the Arabic. Similarly, in Central Asia a hundred years ago, most educated people wrote things using a similar alphabet. Knowing none of the languages, I can’t say whether the literature that was produced was in Arabic or the indigenous turkic language.
So did a true language exist? I don’t know. But just today, one of the republics that is still part of Russia in which most people speak a Turkic language, announced that it would teach its students using a modified roman alphabet?
Why? I suspect it is because roman is considered the modern, the western way of doing things. Does that now mean that a new language has been created? I’m not certain.
Serbs and Croats, after all, moments before they fire a bullet, can tell one another, “I am about to kill you.” The person about to die will not say, “Huh?” Does that mean they speak one language or two?
From a Swedish point of view I can only add that most Swedes are of the opinion that (spoken) Danish is a totally incomprehensible throat disease (I don’t, it’s just a matter of making an effort to understand, although it takes some training), whereas (still spoken) Norwegian is much easier to understand.
This also, for some reason, spills over to written Danish and Norwegian (ie bokmål). When I attended library school one of our teachers advised us that if a customer wanted some information that was only available in Danish, which he, by definition, would not understand we could just tell him that it was Norwegian as the average Swede would not be able to tell the difference.
I once heard a linguist stating this (and I quite agree, I often say that “this is the way to say it in Scandinavian” rather than Swedish when communicating with non Scandinavians, a habit I picked up from a Norwegian friend), but for all practical reasons: if the Scandinavians themselves concider them to be three different languages, why make a fuss about it?
Floater “Att tänka innan man talar är som att torka sig i röven innan man skiter” (Arne Anka)
Or’n’y Oscar: You seem to be confusing language with orthography. A language can exist without a written form at all. And English is still English, whether you write it with the Roman or the Braille alphabets. If we decided, arbitratily, that everyone has to start writing English in Braille as of noon on December 31st, we wouldn’t be creating a new language. (Just a major logistical headache.)
As for the case of the Serbs and the Croats, well, see what I said above. Ten years ago, before the current round of shooting began, Serbian and Croatian were treated as (groups of) dialects of a language called Serbo-Croatian. Now, however, Serbian and Croatian are treated as separate languages - not for any particular linguistic reason, but because to do otherwise would cause large numbers of people to have a collective hissy fit.
The reason that I raised the issue of Serbian and Croatian is that Ruadh had linked to an earlier thread in which he had laid out criteria for languages. Two of them,
-Lack of mutual intelligibility.
-Significant syntactical differences.
seem to be in violation in the case of these two languages. The other three,
-Association with a particular nation.
-Standardization, a/k/a formal rules.
-Existence of a formal literary language distinct from the spoken.
seem to stand up, though.
If we want to consider Serbian and Croatian separate languages because all who speak them, and all the political entities involved, want them to be considered discrete, that’s fine with me. That is why I raised the issue of Central Asia. For so long the Soviets and, I suspect, later the Russians, had distinct political motivations for stifiling the development of independent languages. Does that mean that they didn’t exist, though? In my opinion, no, and in that, I think we are in accordance.
Nevertheless, I still have difficulty accepting the notion that two languages exist when two people can meet on a street corner and they can discuss the weather, or the fortunes of the local soccer team, or how they are to kill each other’s children and rape the other’s mothers and sisters and then burn the other’s house down, without any misunderstanding. But maybe I’m just being obtuse.
All right, Doobieous’ response has goaded me into finding out the answers! It was on-line all the time at ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA: Chinese languages.
To quote:
and
So, that answers my question.
Per Kanji, Hirigana, Katakana, for the most part, I’m willing to defer to Doobieous. He’s right that I confused Katakana and Hirigana, and that I meant morpheme when I wrote phoneme.
I have also been enlightened as to the nature of the two kanas; I was only aware of the syllabic aspect used to select and enter Kanji from computer keyboards.
Doobious is not correct, however, in deducing that the Chinese script is somehow necessarily “more suitable” to the Chinese languages than it is to other languages. It was, after all, adopted by several other languages including Japanese, as their (perhaps incomplete) written language.
The Chinese logograms represent words not word/syllables. The Chinese languages have different syllables just as the different languages (Japanese, Korean) do, but the character representing “horse” is the same across all.
Given that, my father, and any person literate in Chinese, can read at least some if not a major part of Kanji.
Yes it WAS adopted but MOSTLY because these cultures didn’t have writing systems of their own. It was also because countries that adopted Hanzi thought that China was superior, therefore they tried to adopt the writing system to fit their language. In fact, as I have said a couple of times Chinese writing is NOT suitable for languages that use inflecting systems! I have read that often, scholars would basically have to learn Chinese in order to be able to write things out in their own languages. Just because a language adopts a writing system does NOT mean that writing system is well suited for that language. Take the Latin alphabet for instance. It was only really suitable for Latin languages. Now, apply it to say, Vietnamese. Does it fit well? No, it does not, diacritics had to be invented to represent the Vietnamese language well. Do NOT mistake a language adopting a writing system as meaning it’s well suited for languages other than the ones the inventors spoke.
I will say that, from re-researching, you seem to be right here. However, many of the symbols when used to write out foreign names are used phonetically, and also, many of the characters are created from a radical and a phonetic complement.