China Guy: I’m no expert. I speak a little Mandarin, and none of the other Chinese languages. I’ve never been there, and I certainly wouldn’t imagine contradicting your experience. I am merely relating the common linguistic description of the country, based on extensive reading. In linguistic literature, Sichuanese is treated as a variety of Mandarin; note that while a standard form of Mandarin exists, and a fairly standard form of Cantonese exists, both exist in a multitude of varieties aside from the standard, and those varieties are sometimes mutually incomprehensible. China is very large and very old, and speakers of Chinese languages spread out long before modern communications. The normal situation in China - as in much of the world, actually - is dialect continuum, in which people speak a local variety of the language which is easily mutually comprehensible with varieties spoken nearby, a bit harder to understand if you travel a few villages away, and impossible to understand if you travel much farther than that. Amongst single Chinese “languages” like Mandarin or Wu or Xiang or Cantonese, there tend not to be sharp dividing lines but rather gradual change over distance. Note that Sichuan is quite far from most of the area treated as “Mandarin-speaking”; the variety of Mandarin spoken there would be expected to have diverged greatly from what’s spoken in the north.
The trouble with trying to classify each variety of any of the Chinese languages as a language in its own right is that quickly the number of “Chinese languages” would be so large as to be impractical, and (again) those crisp lines that people imagine exist between languages simply don’t. There’s no way to somehow divide up “Chinese” into varieties that are both mutually comprehensible across the variety, and not mutually comprehensible with other varieties - such groups simply don’t exist. The linguistic approach in this case is essentially historical. Even though Sichuanese is radically different from Standard Mandarin, they are historical relatives and diverged from each other long after the major dialect groups - Min, Mandarin, Cantonese, etc. diverged. Even Sichuanese and Standard Mandarin are not terribly different; most of the difference is limited to phonology - certain historical changes in the pronunciation of certain sounds that occurred in Standard Mandarin didn’t occur in Sichuan (and probably the other way around as well). But they don’t have the grammatical and lexical differences that exist between the main “Chinese languages” or dialect groupings.
[QUOTE=kawaiitentaclebeast]
Excalibre, I would agree with China Guy, as I often do, and his classification of the various Chinese dialects as distinct languages in a language family with a similar grammar.
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Of course that’s the case. I used the term “dialect” simply because it’s the term customarily used in reference to the different Chinese languages. I assume you are aware of that.
Actually, the written forms of different Chinese languages are not identical either. In fact, in the case of Cantonese, there exists (once again) a fairly standardized form used in Hong Kong, though it’s largely limited to informal usage. But it’s important to remember that the different Chinese languages don’t differ only in sound but also in vocabulary - in many instances, a sentence spoken in Mandarin will use completely different words - and thus different characters - if written down in another dialect. (Assuming, that is, that there are characters corresponding to the vocabulary of that dialect; that’s not always the case.) The “Standardized Written Language” basically amounted, prior to this century, to people doing their writing in Classical Chinese; nowadays it generally boils down to writing in baihua - which is a vernacular standard based exclusively on Mandarin.
The notion that a piece of writing translates seemlessly between dialects is not baseless, but it’s a tad exaggerated.
