Comment by cepth | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cepth | Hacker News Reader

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I don’t think the parent commenter is far off here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China#Ethnic....

Granted, Han Chinese in the modern sense is a bit of a constructed identity (https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6e312e/is_th...), but it’s a construction that has held up in China.

With the exception of Guangdong and Hong Kong, you aren’t going to find many TV stations or newspapers that are carrying content in non-Mandarin Chinese. Yes, when I visit older family in the countryside, they may still speak their local dialect, but that is becoming increasingly rare: https://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/06/on-saving-....

Unlike in the US where African and French influences produced creole, and American pop culture has strong African and Latin influences, I don’t think minority group culture in China has anywhere near the same pull. Yes, they may trot out ethnic minority performers once a year during the CCTV New Year’s Gala, but you will not find “minority” singers charting on best seller lists, or “minority” actors in leading entertainment roles.

A 90%+ majority ethnic group is on par with what we see in Western Europe. Do Europeans see themselves as primarily multi-ethnic states? The self-description of a “melting pot” that is commonly used in the US, Canada, and even Central America don’t seem to be nearly as prevalent in Europe.

>With the exception of Guangdong and Hong Kong, you aren’t going to find many TV stations or newspapers that are carrying content in non-Mandarin Chinese.

Just a quick clarification: Mandarin is a spoken form of Chinese, and therefore cannot be "printed" in a newspaper. In Guangdong, the newspapers are printed in simplified Chinese characters. In Hong Kong, the newspapers are printed in traditional Chinese characters.

Um. No. Mandarin is a language. Cantonese, which in your example is used in Hong Kong, is grammatically distinct from Mandarin. Changing from simplified to traditional characters or vice versa is not sufficient to translate from one to the other.

We don’t really have an analogue to this in the West, but Mandarin and Cantonese are very similar in their written forms, yet mutually unintelligible in their spoken forms. There are some differences due to different history and some different vocabulary, but broadly speaking, Chinese characters maintain the same meaning across dialects (and also when they’re used in Japanese), while changing their pronunciations.

Simplified vs traditional is a different issue, and all dialects can be written in either simplified or traditional. Which is more prevalent usually depends on tradition, and relations with the PRC. Singapore and the PRC use simplified, while Taiwan, HK, and Japanese Kanji use traditional.

Interesting! Is it at all comparable to how Scandinavians can read each other’s languages but most have a hard time understanding the spoken languages?

Much more divergent, less like Danish and Bokmal (Dano-Norwegian) or Swedish than French and Romanian. But Romanians write in French which they can translate on the fly into Romanian as they read though a very different form of Romanian than what people speak. And written Romanian is used for scripts, songs, transcripts and under a 100 novels. French is Mandarin, Romanian is Cantonese. None of the other topolects have a standard written form that’s used much.

"And written Romanian is used for scripts, songs, transcripts and under a 100 novels"

You meant that there are only less than 100 novels written in Romanian? If yes, that's one of the most absurd claims I've read in my life.

I meant it as an analogy where Romanian is Cantonese and French is Mandarin. I’m not certain there are less than 100 novels in Cantonese but I’d happily bet 2% of my net worth on it. The Chinese language page for written Cantonese[1] lists one author and his English language Wikipedia page doesn’t mention his writing. Irish is a dying language and it both has more written in it and a more active literary scene.

[1]https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=2&...

And if I understand right, the reason is that the written language is more distinct from the spoken one(s) than in the west. Perhaps more like written mathematics, is this a terrible analogy? Russians write the same formulae with the exact same meaning, but say them over the phone completely differently.

The situation is somewhat comparable to English and French, where a significant shared vocabulary with identical orthography allows making educated guesses. That's not enough for fluent understanding, since many words that are common in one language only appear as rare alternatives to more natural expressions in the other. For example, the Cantonese pronoun 佢 doesn't ever appear in Mandarin texts.

Except the average educated Macanese or Hong Kong person can’t write in Cantonese. They write in something much closer to Standard Mandarin, with its grammar and vocabulary, than Cantonese.

It’s much more similar to the sistuation with Arabic where the various “dialects” are as distinct from each other as the Romance languages, i.e. French, Spanish, Italian etc. but the only written standard is Modern Standard Arabic. Mandarin or something close to it is at least someone’s native tongue. MSA is about as close to Maghrebi or Mashreqi Arabic as Latin is to Portuguese or Romanian.

Chinese characters are hieroglyphs: they don’t have any relationship to their pronunciations.

For example, 火, the character for fire, is a (slightly) stylized brushstroke picture of a fire.

Mutually unintelligible communications that use the same pictures are distinct languages, but there are political implications to acknowledging this, so they’re “dialects”. As the saying goes, a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.

Less than 500, probably less than 200 characters are like that. Most are composed of a sound component and a meaning component, except there has been over a thousand years for sound shifts to render the sound component misleading.

If you want to learn more the Wikipedia article is a great place to start.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters

I actually read both Simplified and Traditional Chinese and can read long novels in both. Understanding the speech is another business but translating and understanding the text is much easier.

Not sure why you're getting downvoted, this is correct.

Mandarin and Cantonese are regional dialects, Mandarin gained prominence because emperors from about the 1600s resided in Northern China and in Beijing which used a lot of Mandarin Chinese, thus it spread due to being a prestige language used by the royal family and their courtiers. Cantonese is prominent in certain areas of Southern China in the Guangdong and Guangxi provinces.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_Chinese

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantonese

Hong Kong and Taiwan uses Traditional Chinese, Mainland China and Singapore/Malaysian Chinese uses Simplified Chinese for their text.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Chinese_characters

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_Chinese_characters

I personally find fangyan as a better descriptor than dialect:

http://dictionary.pinpinchinese.com/definitions/s/%E6%96%B9%...

> Not sure why you're getting downvoted, this is correct.

No it's not, because it's fundamentally confused about what it means to write a language down.

> I personally find fangyan as a better descriptor than dialect

The literal translation of fangyan is "topolect", i.e. "the way people talk in a certain place". It only came to mean "dialect" due to some weird miscommunication when Western linguistic terminology was introduced in China. So that's the translation dictionaries give, and it's correct except when it's used to describe languages within China, where the traditional meaning of "topolect" continues to be used.

Mandarin is 普通话, the common speech, standard Chinese. It is based to a very large extent on what the people of the Northern Plain speak, more specifically those of Beijing. The written form of it, which absolutely is also Mandarin is the form of Chinese which took over from Classical Chinese during the Republic of China.

Traditional and Simplified Charcters are only barely relevant to this. The only spoken varieties of Chinese with vernacular literatures are Mandarin and Cantonese. All writing in Chinese is in one or the other. Even in Hong Kong and Macau the overwhelming majority of writing is in Mandarin. It follows Mandarin grammar and vocabulary and can be read without any special difficulty by Mandarin monoglots. Written Cantonese is basically unintelligible to them. It’s used for songs, occasionally subtitling, a very small corpus of fiction and dialogue in court transcripts and scripts. This is orthogonal to the use of Traditional or Simplified characters. You can write any of the dialects of Serbo-Croatian in Latin or Cyrillic characters. That doesn’t make any of them Russian, or German.

As a native Hong Konger, I concur this is the most succinct and accurate description of the situation with Cantonese. Thank you!

It may be true that Mandarin is based to a very large extent on what the people of the Northern Plain speak, more specifically those of Beijing. I have no idea, but I've heard it said so many times that I'm willing to consider the possibility while waiting for an explanation to my question.

My question is: if this is true, why the heck is the pronunciation for standard Mandarin so different from the standard Beijing and northern accents? Seriously, especially with all the "er"s at the end of various characters. It does not sound similar to what is taught in standard Mandarin classes, and I speak as one who learned standard Mandarin for a number of years (in Canada and in China) and also lived in Beijing for a bit. I'd really like this explained to me, because the ear test tells me this is not true. But again, I've heard it said so many times that I am willing to consider it's possible.

Mandarin is based on the Northern topolect 北方话 but not identical with it. It’s a koiné[1] a dialect that emerged from communication between people who spoke mutually intelligible dialects, like Shamghainese for its river delta. That’s one reason it’s different. The other is the substantial influence from Nanjing Mandarin which would have been considered higher prestige than Beijing Mandarin into the 1800s. Beijing is the biggest influence but Mandarin is really the lingua franca of educated Inperial officials, many of whom would have come from areas where Mandarin doesn’t have retroflex r and of people for whom any variety of Mandarin was a foreign language, learned in adulthood. Lots of these people would just think the 儿话 is for peasants.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koiné_language

This is quite interesting. I'd like to do more research to confirm the veracity, but it would make sense, thanks.

I think you should form your opinion after hearing what Cantonese (and other regional "dialects") sound like. Then you should be able to appreciate just how close the Northern speech is to Standard Chinese.

I'm not sure why you think I don't know what other dialects sound like. I know what various languages and dialects in China sound like, and am most familiar with Cantonese, Sichuanese, Hunanese, Hakka, Shanghainese, and Yi. Yi sounds positively African and is not a fair comparison, given that it doesn't even share the same writing system and is probably an actually completely different language family. Sichuanese sounds fairly close to standard Mandarin in many respects, and I'm not confident that it's more different from standard Mandarin pronunciation than the northern speech is. My opinion stands after extensive travel throughout northern, southern, eastern, and western China.

Is this the Yi you speak of?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_language

It appears to be a Tai Chinese creole or mixed language (like a creole but without the massive simplification in grammar).

Yi(Loloish) is definitely a different language family though that wouldn’t stop people writing in Mandarin if they really wanted to. Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese were all written as if they were Classical Chinese to greater or lesser extents until relatively recently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loloish_languages

I’ve heard Sichuanese described as Mandarin without tones. All of Sìchuān speaks different forms of Mandarin for the same reason Manchurians do, recent massive resettlement, though not as recent as in 东北.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sichuanese_dialects

No, it's the language of the Nuosu people to which I'm referring. Yeah, them being a different language family wouldn't stop them from writing in Mandarin. I know that, having learned Japanese and Korean. My point is that if the original written language is different between two languages, it is a strong indicator that they come from different language families. This does not stop them from starting to use the same writing system at some point in history, especially if one of the languages has no original written form.

If Sichuanese sounds similar to Mandarin due to migration, it would certainly explain a lot. Thanks for that bit of information. But I would say that the differences between Sichuanese and standard Mandarin would be more from pronunciation differences than tonal differences.

It looks like Nuosu and Loloish are different ways of referring to the same language (group) with Lolo being the Chinese name and Nuosu being their name for themselves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuosu_language

> Nuosu is one of several often mutually unintelligible varieties known as Yi, Lolo, Moso, or Noso; the six Yi languages recognized by the Chinese government hold only 25% to 50% of their vocabulary in common. They share a common traditional writing system, though this is used for shamanism rather than daily accounting.

I bow to your superior expertise when it comes to the differences between Sichuanese and Mandarin but all of Sìchuān is definitely part of the Mandarin speaking area.

The book to buy if you’re interested in this is the Language Atlas of China.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_Atlas_of_China

China is racially diverse but culturally homogeneous. For reasons that are millennia-old, China has pursued a policy of promoting Mandarin language and culture; while it might celebrate the traditional clothing of the Hui or the music of the Uyghur, it makes damned sure that they all speak Mandarin in school and learn Han literature and Han values. Non-Han culture is tolerated, but only within very strict state-controlled parameters.

Europe is very much a melting pot, to a degree that would surprise many Americans. We don't necessarily have as many black or brown faces, but our cities often have very large populations of recent immigrants with strikingly different cultural values. Britain has about the same number of Muslims as the United States, despite having about a fifth of the overall population.

Fox News ran stories about "no-go areas for non-Muslims" in Britain, which is completely bogus and hugely incendiary but reflects the large and concentrated population of Muslims. The cities of Blackburn, Birmingham, Bradford and Leicester all have Muslim populations of over 20%; it's not unusual to find primary (elementary) schools that are >90% Muslim. There are neighbourhoods where the majority of women wear headscarves and the majority of restaurants and supermarkets sell Halal food. Choosing not to integrate is very much an option in most of Europe, so a lot of places feel very foreign.

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