Talk:Identification of the varieties of Chinese

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A better title for this article would be "Spoken Chinese: Languages or Dialects?". Linguistic theory about the distinction between "dialect" and "language" aside, the article should focus on the fundamental basis of the controversy -- which has nothing to do with linguistics and everything to do with politics.

All languages evolve over time and, given enough time and geographical distance between varities, they evolve into other languages. So, Latin became Spanish, Aragonese, French, Occitan, Romanian, etc., while Germanic became English, Swedish, Low German, German, Gothic, and so on. Given the length of time involved and the geographic spread of China, it would be absurd to think the Chinese branch of Sino-Tibetan would not evolve to produce new languages, the way every other language family on the globe has done over time. There are, however, some unique factors in the history of China that have made a difference in the evolution of Chinese languages.

First, in the course of the normal evolution of Old Chinese into Middle Chinese into Modern Mandarin, Cantonese, Wu, etc., China became culturally and, more importantly, politically unified long before the one Chinese language did what comes naturally and began to split into varieties that could be distinguished as separate languages. By timeline comparison with the Romance Languages, Chinese political unity under the Han Dynasty happened about 200 years before the Roman Empire spread Latin from Glasgow to Damascus; and while there have been many dynastic changes, the political unity of China has not changed much in the last two millenia, and the core ethnic group of China - whatever language (or dialect) they may speak - still call themselves "the people of Han."

Conversely, the peoples who were conquered by the Romans do not still call themselves "the people of Rome" (if they ever did), but no European governments have ever been successful at enforcing and reinforcing a sense of national and unified cultural identity on the same scale as China.

Second, whereas Semitic and Indo-European languages devised phonetic writing systems based on individual sounds, China - again, during the period when there was still just one Chinese language - began developing and nationally disseminating a logographic writing system that remains logographic today. The advantage of phonetic writing systems is that a small number of symbols can be used in endless combinations to spell any word, whereas logographic systems require learning thousands of characters and combinations. The advantage of logographic systems is that they can be used to represent any language - i.e., you can read Chinese whether or not you speak Chinese; and if you read Chinese, you can also read the Korean and Japanese words written using the logographic system those languages - which are not Sino-Tibetan languages - borrowed from China.

Thus, while there are several different spoken Chinese languages, there is only one written Chinese language. The latter fact did not go unnoticed by early European visitors to China, who initially thought the same words were merely pronounced differently from one part of China to another -- just as the word "tomato" is pronounced differently in different dialects of English (aside: three pronunciations are standard, according to Kenyon & Knott Pronouncing Dictionary of American English - "tuh-MAY-toh," "tuh-MAH-toh," and "tuh-MATT-oh", as nearly as I can render them without using IPA; the third pronunciation is rare, but I have heard it). It wasn't until they noticed the same logographs were used to write Korean and Japanese, etc., that they began to realise there was more to it than that. You can, in fact, use Chinese characters to write English, or French, or Arabic, or any other language under the sun - but that doesn't make those languages dialects of Chinese.

Meanwhile, from the Han Dynasty to the present, the Government of China has always insisted the people of Han all speak the same language; and they have always insisted that language is what the rest of the world knows as Mandarin. China has always taken such steps it has deemed necessary to suppress other Chinese languages, but when you have a logographic writing system that can used to represent that aren't even Sino-Tibetan, let alone Chinese, that becomes an ultimately impossible task. It's a lot easier to police a written language than it is to police a spoken language - in large part, because people can speak more than one language, whether or not they can read and write it (e.g., Low German has had no literature for 200 years, but it is still spoken). And when you use a logographic writing system, they can read and write it - and you the government can't do anything about it, because when the spoken languages are all reduced to writing, it looks like they're all using the same word -- because the common and nationally regulated writing system pre-dates the evolution of Middle Chinese into separate modern languages, so it has always been able to accommodate changes in spoken language while remaining uniform across the country.

Those are the essential points that should be made in the article, I think.

Is this a POV fork of some sort? What has motivated this article, not to mention a fully bolded link from spoken Chinese? It seems like it belongs in other articles, preferably with less verbose titles. This feels a lot like reading an essay.

Peter ^Isotalo 00:48, 16 December 2005 (UTC)

No, this is to avoid cluttering up the "Is Chinese a language or a family of languages?" section in Chinese language with a lot of verbose analogies and comparisons. The bolded link has always been there. -- ran (talk) 00:54, 16 December 2005 (UTC)

Moved from User talk:Ran:

Please stop revamping the structure of Chinese language articles with links to a "debate article". Try to solve it within the confines of existing articles. I really thought the section on this in Chinese language fit our needs quite nicely. We don't need full-blown theses-articles on this issue.

Peter ^Isotalo 00:55, 16 December 2005 (UTC)

Moved from user talk:Peter Isotalo:

No, the existing section in Chinese language was verbose, disorganized, disjointed, lacked logical flow, and had a few sections in it that appeared to have been paradropped from other sections. I was spending the better part of the last two hours getting it to read more like an encyclopedia article and less like an aimless monologue. The section was getting ridiculously long anyways, and it is better to provide an overview in Chinese language and details in a separate article, as is customary. Moreover, many articles link to that section, which is not very good Wikipedia practice; it is better to link to a separate article. -- ran (talk) 00:58, 16 December 2005 (UTC)

The problem might be that there's too much linking to begin with. This problem can be solved simply by mentioning that there is a complication and then settling for that. Transfering the verbosity to a separate article doesn't feel like a good solution to the problem. The title especially feels extremely obscure and elusive and very unencyclopedic.

Peter ^Isotalo 01:05, 16 December 2005 (UTC)

There's a lot of complexity to this issue and it has to be explained somewhere. It can either be explained once in a central location (i.e. here), or ten times in ten different POV, contradictory ways in the Mandarin, Cantonese, Min etc. articles. I agree that the title is not the best and you're welcome to suggest a better one. -- ran (talk) 01:08, 16 December 2005 (UTC)

I suggest that you take this up in spoken Chinese and link to it when needed. Creating a separate "see thisandthatpage for a more detailed debate"-article seems wholly uncalled for when it's actually about the Chinese dialect-languages, not a subject separate from them.

Also, please try to keep in mind that most readers aren't quite as caught up in the minutiae of the Chinese dialect/langauge debate as the most active China- or Chinese-editors are and are usually better served with a very brief summary. Most of the time it's enough to write that "opinions on whether Chinese is one language or several differ considerably" or something like it instead of being refered to an all-out explanation on each and every occcasion. Some repetition within articles on the same topic is unavoidable.

Peter ^Isotalo 11:23, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

The see thisandthatpage for a more detailed debate thing has always existed. Spoken Chinese and all of the first level divisions (Mandarin, Wu etc. have always contained a separate link to a debates page. I'm not "creating" the debates arrangement, I'm moving the debate section out of Chinese language to avoid linking to a section within an article. As for the people who aren't quite caught up in the minutiae of the debate -- well, this is an encyclopedia. If they want to find out more about the sociopolitical aspects of the Chinese language then they should get very caught up about the debate. We should be making sure that they are given the opportunity to see the complete issue for themselves (by having a link to the full debate), rather than writing 10 different short and inadequate explanations for each "dialect-language" page.

As for merging this article into Spoken Chinese, well since a lot of articles link to it specifically, it is better to set it apart as its own article. -- ran (talk) 17:17, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

No one "should" do anything. We are not in the business of forcing people to read a certain amount of text just so they can be privvy to the fact that linguistic controversies exist. If we were doing that we wouldn't have a stated goal of keeping a summary style. Assuming that your own needs for information are equally applicable to everyone is not a good premise for writing texts that can be understood and appreciated by the widest possible audience. In fact, I'd say this is probably one of Wikipedias biggest problems right now, rather than the lack of factual accuracy. Too many people are filling articles to the brim with super-specific facts until they are that much difficult for outsiders to appreciate and then fiercly protecting it against anything that is considered "dumbing down".

Yes, the links have existed, but linking to the wrong article. What you're suggesting is that rather than taking this up at Chinese dialects (or whatever the title should be), which is the topic at hand, we have to create a separate debate article about an issue which really isn't all that hard to summarize or even to present in a neutral fashion. In it's proper context, even.

Peter ^Isotalo 13:58, 26 December 2005 (UTC)

Habing a seperate article is in fact a good solution to the problem of articles being filled with minutiae and with the problem of articles otherwise being dumbed down. All that minutiae can be moved elsewhere so that it does not interfere with the flow of the main article, but at the same time exploring the subject as thoroughly as possible. There should of course be some sort of summary in the main article as well, but not in depth. Theshibboleth 01:08, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Comparison with Arabic

Perhaps another good example would be a comparison with Arabic? Like Chinese, Arabic has split into mutually unintelligible variants, but is mostly considered a single "language", and still retains only a single written standard. And like classical Chinese, it has also been historically used even among non-Arabic peoples as a lingua franca in Islamic states.--Yuje 06:28, 12 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] History?

Does anyone know of the history of the varieties? Does anyone know when for example Cantonese or Min became recognised as different kinds of Chinese? Are there explanations for the pockets of varieties far from the main area like the spot of Gan spoken in the middle of the Xiang area according to the map?

I realise the map is an oversimplification and that people mix much more than is visible. Still, there may be some records on large movements of people that explain some of the pockets. Mlewan 10:54, 20 July 2006 (UTC)