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0 pointsthaumasiotes12y ago0 comments

If there's not a very specific context for "Chinese", then it means Mandarin (this is true in Chinese itself: you can refer to Mandarin by its official name 普通话 putonghua, "common speech", but the most common term is 中文 zhongwen "chinese", the language of 中国 zhongguo "china").

Saying Chinese is more of the language and Mandarin the dialect is somewhat akin to calling European the language (lest you think that ridiculous, note that this precise phenomenon occurs in Africa, where european languages are often referred to generically as white-ese[1]), and Greek the dialect.

[1] http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=20

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jon2512chua12y ago· 2 in thread

I do understand that when people refer to Chinese it means Mandarin. However, if Mandarin is a language does that mean that Hokkien, Foochow, Cantonese, Hakka, etc are languages too?

I don't think the way I described it in the grandparent post above is entirely accurate as well, but how I've always seen it is that the written words forms the Chinese language, whereas the different way people pronounces it (not talking about accents here) and orders them are the dialects.

thaumasiotesOP12y ago

> if Mandarin is a language does that mean that Hokkien, Foochow, Cantonese, Hakka, etc are languages too?

What distinguishes one from the other?

> how I've always seen it is that the written words forms the Chinese language, whereas the different way people pronounces it (not talking about accents here) and orders them are the dialects

Then, before the development of kana, was Japanese also a chinese dialect? Korean before hangeul?

If I wrote the english sentence "how old are you?" as 多老是你？, would that make english a dialect of Chinese? If I wrote 你多大？ as "ni duo da?", would mandarin stop being a chinese dialect?

If you imagine two illiterate people, one of whom speaks mandarin and the other cantonese, do neither know any language at all, due to being illiterate?

jon2512chua12y ago

> What distinguishes one from the other?

The drastically different way you pronounce a word, or even the choice of words. Well for example for the sentence "I feel very cold". Mandarin: wo jue de heng leng Hokkien: wa chi tio jin na leng Teochew: wa chi tio jin nga ngang etc...

> Then, before the development of kana, was Japanese also a chinese dialect? Korean before hangeul? > If I wrote the english sentence "how old are you?" as 多老是你？, would that make english a dialect of Chinese? If > I wrote 你多大？ as "ni duo da?", would mandarin stop being a chinese dialect? > If you imagine two illiterate people, one of whom speaks mandarin and the other cantonese, do neither know any language at all, due to being illiterate?

I do understand what you're saying, and I do agree with you regarding the examples above. But then how would you explain the relationship between Chinese, Mandarin, Hokkien, Hakka, Teochew, etc in terms of language vs. dialect?

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