Re: Missee Lee would like to remind you....


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Posted by Andrew Craig-Bennett on October 18, 2003 at 12:29:12 from 195.93.32.7 user ACB.

In Reply to: Re: Missee Lee would like to remind you.... posted by Dave Thewlis on October 17, 2003 at 22:18:02:

Let's try and sort this one out.

I am a very bad Chinese scholar!

Written Chinese can be classical, as used everywhere except Mainland China, or simplified (used only in Mainland China). Any Chinese language or dialect (the question of whether they are languages or dialects is an open one) can be written in it, as, to some extent, can Korean and Japanese (the Japanese alphabet is phonetic, but they use the Chinese idiograms which they call the Kanji as well).

Chinese grammar is very simple and very regular - the corners have been knocked off by long usage! There are no tenses to the verbs, a modifier is inserted to show when the action is taking place, and so on.

It is therefore possible for two Chinese people who do not speak a word of each others' languages to communicate in writing.

This was established by the Qin Emperor, who first unified China.

Needing a way to run his empire, he standardised the idiograms. A letter, report or instruction could be written at one end of China and understood by a reader at the other.

Mandarin is not precisely the same thing as Putonghwa. Putonghwa is the RP of today's China. Mao needed everyone to understand the radio and propaganda films, not just books, newspapers and documents, so New China began a campaign to make the language of the Beijing area the national language. This has been notably sucessful in that many people can now make a stab at Putonghwa, as well as the language that they use every day.

I have been told, by elderly Chinese friends, that, strictly speaking, the term Mandarin should be reserved for Putonghwa spoken with an upper-class accent - the language of the old governing classes of the Empire.

So the answer to the question is "yes" - Chinese society does have class accents as well as regional accents.

There are two transliteration systems, neither of which is perfect from the point of view of an English speaker learning Putonghwa.

The older of the two ("Peking", "Mao Tse-Tung", "Tientsin", etc.) is the Wade-Giles system. This is a development of a French transliteration and should he spoken with a French accent to approximate to the Putonghwa.

The modern version is Pinyin ("Beijing", "Mao Zhedong", "Tianjin", etc.) This is a home grown Chinese version, but was first developed as a Cyrillic transliteration, for teaching Russians, and only later adapted to the western European alphabet.

These are both transliterations of Putonghwa.

"Hong Kong" is an English rendering of "Heung Gang" (Fragrant Harbour) in Cantonese, a language with nine tones where Putonghwa has four. In Putonghwa it is "Xianggang". Or something like that!


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