A Portugese friend told me that he can understand Spanish speakers but it sounds to him like they are speaking with a mouth full of bubblegum.
That sounds like the Hokkien ‘dialect’ to me.
If you are visiting China or intend to work there, learn Mandarin, it’s the official language. If it’s Hong Kong, then Cantonese.
Yep, this is a kind of ‘short-hand’ for ‘he sounds like he’s from Hong Kong", or "looks like a Hong Konger’
That’s not surprising. Both Hokkien and Taiwanese are just dialects of the Min Nan language.
Heh: coincidentally, after I first went to Portugal I said Portuguese sounded like drunk Irish people speaking Spanish with a Russian accent.
Indeed, as you can see:
http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=nan
Min Nan has the following six main dialects:
Xiamen, Leizhou, Chao-Shan, Hainan, Longdu, and Zhenan Min
Xiamen has two subdialects:
Amoy and Fujian
It appears that Hokkien and Taiwanese are either just other names for Fujian or else they are sub-subdialects of Fujian.
If I read the entry correctly, Taiwanese itself has two sub-sub-subdialects:
Sanso and Chaenzo
Taiwanese in the north and south part of Taiwan can understand each other, but claim that it’s really obvious who is from where. And it’s more or less mutually intelligible.
I think the Taiwanese and Xiamen (?) dialects are also mutually comprehensible.
(My own knowledge of Taiwanese is limited to a few phrases and a fair amount of swear words).
It has also been explained to me that Chiu Chou dialect also has Min Nan roots.
I had a roommate who was Malaysian Chinese whose parents had come from Fujian. They spoke something that sounded completely different to Taiwanese to my ears.
Taiwanese (the dialect) also picked up quite a bit of vocabulary from Japanese, which I’m pretty sure was never introduced into its mainland counterparts.
E.g., old(er) man = ojisan; old(er) woman = obasan.
How much has survived into the younger generation though? Just curious.
Most older Taiwanese speak pretty good Japanese from the colonial period. When I went to S Taiwan in the late 1980’s, the older folks out of the city couldn’t speak or understand a lick of Mandarin, but seriously would get a big smile and start speaking Japanese the second they learned I was a beginning Japanese language student.
Plenty, I think. Obasan, ojisan, “bian dang” (lunchbox) – my wife occassionally warns me that some word or other we use every day in Taiwan wouldn’t be understood by mainlanders or HK’ers when I encounter them on a business trip or something.
ETA: which isn’t to say that younger people can speak Japanese to any extent – just that there are loan words that have been handed down from 50 years of being colonized by the Japanese. It would be pretty funny if that wasn’t the case, I’d think.
Japanese can be written in Chinese characters, and Japanese is not a dialect of Chinese. They’re not even in the same language family.
Japanese can be written entirely in Chinese characters? :dubious:
Yeah, but the exchange mostly takes the form of shouting and hand gestures.
Justices Scalia and Sotomayor are sure to bring some entertainment value to the new Supreme Court.
Many words, phrases, and proverbs can be written entirely in Chinese characters. Most personal names are entirely Chinese characters. But your doubt is mostly correct; complete and natural Japanese generally can’t be written entirely in Chinese characters. Plus, the characters often have a different appearance and usage than they do in modern Chinese.
If we take Chinese characters as pure ideograms, it is arguable that an orthography could be generated to write any language in Chinese characters.
You’re right, Anne Neville. I wasn’t claiming that only related languages can be written in a language with the same characters. I was only saying that it’s easier to write related languages with the same characters. In a strained way, you can write unrelated languages like Chinese and Japanese with the same characters.
I don’t think this is quite accurate: not to be nitpicky, but Chinese characters aren’t pure ideograms–pure ideograms are only a subset of six or more types of characters. So not even Chinese itself is written in the way you describe.
I have camping friends* who speak Swiss-German, and others that speak German. The Swiss-Germans seem to adjust and speak ‘plain’ German to the German couples. I can’t understand any of it, but they seem able to communicate fine among themselves.
*We’re part of a group that go camping together with kids several times a year. My wife and I and our son seem to be the only ones who aren’t bilingual, so it’s interesting to hear the families, kids and adults, speak with each other in German, Swiss-German, Spanish, Bulgarian, etc. Around the campfire we tend to all speak English as the common tongue.
Hence the reason I used the qualifier “if we take…” them all as idiograms. Some actually argue that other extreme, that in fact no Chinese characters are ideograms at all.
There’s a simple explanation of why the Swiss-German speakers decided to speak Standard German to the other German speakers in the camping group. Let me post again the Ethnologue entry on German:
http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=208-16
As you can see, German is actually a set of 19 related languages. However, it is rare for any speaker of any other language to learn anything except Standard German when they are taught the language. It’s called Standard German, not because it’s better in any obvious sense, but because it’s the standard that is the basis for most written German and for how outsiders are taught to speak. It’s not surprising then that Swiss-German speakers would decide to use it in a mixed group of German speakers.
Someone is going to ask, “Are these so-called German languages really 19 different languages as opposed to 19 different dialects?” Well, let’s move up a couple levels to the West Germanic subbranch of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages:
http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=207-16
As you can see, in comparison there are only two varieties that are considered different languages in the English sub-subbranch: Scots, which is spoken in parts of Scotland and a little bit of Northern Ireland, and English, which is spoken in all the rest of the U.K. and in all the rest of the English-speaking countries of the world. In other words, the differences between all the dialects of English spoken around the world (assuming we don’t count Scots as part of English) are smaller than the differences between the 19 different languages that are lumped together into German.