The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

...

We should stop this discussion since at this point it is no longer relevant to the Chinese Theory or the VMS.  But you implied that I don't know what I am talking about, so I must respond to that.  Starting with your quote:

It is commonly claimed that there is only one "Chinese" language, and that all of the variants of that language are dialects of it.  This conception of there being only one "Chinese" language plays havoc with efforts to classify the countless varieties of Sinitic speech forms into meaningful groups, branches, languages, and dialects, as is normal for other large families or groups of languages.

He is clearly referring to the spoken languages here, and rejecting the claim the spoken languages are just "dialects" of Mandarin.  Which is what I have been saying all along too.

The old canard that "when the dialects are written down they are the same" is simply untrue, since what gets written down are not the regional variants but standard Mandarin (and in earlier times Classical Chinese, a dead language for at least two thousand years).  If one, as a tour de force, does contrive to write unadulterated Cantonese or Taiwanese, for example, they will be as hard for a reader of Mandarin to understand as spoken Cantonese or Taiwanese is for a speaker of Mandarin to understand.

And here he is clearly referring to phonetic transcriptions of Taiwanese, Cantonese, and Mandarin.  Which of course would be as mutually unintelligible as the spoken languages are.He is not referring to texts written in hanzi.  

Again, I have been saying this all along myself. See my examples of how a certain bit of the SBJ would be read in  Mandarin, Cantonese, and Hokkien.

The reason a person in Guangzhou can read a newspaper from Beijing and vice versa is that [1] there is mostly one written language in China, [2] based on Mandarin, and [2] literacy is synonymous with knowing Mandarin.

Claim [1] is true.  Claim [2] is uncertain because it depends on what "based on" means.  Claim [3] is false.  To be literate, a Cantonese speaker needs to know the meaning of each hanzi and compounds, and the syntax of Mandarin.  He does not need to know the Mandarin readings of the hanzi, and does not need to speak or understand spoken Mandarin.  

The standardization and adoption of written Mandarin preempted the development and standardization of vernaculars based on other varieties of Chinese. No matter which dialect one spoke, they still wrote in standardized Mandarin for everyday writing. ... Still, Cantonese speakers must use standard written Chinese, or even literary Chinese, in most formal written communications, since written Cantonese may be unintelligible to speakers of other varieties of Chinese.

Much of the time "written Cantonese" is "Mandarin written by a Cantonese speaker" and so can only be distinguished from native Mandarin by relatively subtle cues. However, if what is written is truly Cantonese, it is easily distinguished from Mandarin if it is of any length because some common words are not cognate and are therefore written with different characters.

What these quotes are describing is not bilingualism -- like German speakers writing in English -- but diglossia -- when speakers of a single language use noticeably different vocabulary and syntax depending on the situation, or when writing versus speaking.  Often without even noticing.  

Diglossia is slight in the US because children are generally taught to write as they speak.  It seems more significant in the UK, where speakers of local varieties of English, like Scots English, will still use the same "Standard English" vocabulary and grammar when writing a business letter or newspaper article.  It is very pronounced here in Brazil, where everyday spoken "Portuguese" is very different in grammar and vocabulary from the "Portuguese" that is taught in schools -- yet everybody will still use the latter when writing anything.

You surely know that the teaching of some "Standard Written Chinese" -- hanzi with some "centrally defined" syntax -- and its use as the written language is not a modern thing, but has been the norm for more than 2000 years,and has been extremely important for the governance of the country since ever.  Thus it has been part of the writing culture of all Chinese languages. 

the language of instruction in [Mainland?] Chinese classrooms is not the vernacular, but rather Standard Mandarin.

The use of the spoken Mandarin  (not just hanzi with Mandarin syntax) in classrooms would be a modern thing.  Much like the use of spoken Standard Italian ("Tuscan") in Italian classrooms, independently of the local language.  And similar policies in other countries.  

You might notice a parallel with your description of medieval Latin

Again, the situation of the Chinese languages is completely different from the situation of Romance languages, modern or medieval.   Since the Latin-based scripts were phonetic, people who learned Latin in order to write automatically learned spoken Latin as well; and spoken Latin would be different from both the local vernacular and from Vulgar Latin.  No one writing in Latin would think that he was writing the vernacular language with some "classical orthography".

I would not encourage you to describe living people using a lingua franca as speaking "brokenly".

A lingua franca is a distinct language used by speakers of different languages to communicate.  It must be learned, and converting an expression from a local language to the lingua franca is translation, not just "reading".

it is deeply amusing to me, a native English speaker, to consider the Latin script as having an inherent phonology, even if that's slightly different from what you are saying. If you fix the spelling of words instead of phonemes in the time of Cicero, and then write French with that orthography, what you get is, "Illi non me placet passum de totus."  ...

Hm, is that boldface the root of our disagreement?  The last sentence would never be French written with a different orthography.  This term does not apply to any arbitrary mapping of spoken to written words.   There must be some systematic relation between the written form and the pronunciation, even if irregular.  In fact, that is true even in English, whose written form is usually said to be "not phonetic"...

your statistical arguments are all undercut if you try and imagine the Dictator was accommodating him that way. The SBJ translated into Cantonese, a thing that would have been extremely out of step ...It is a commonly printed error in the West that Chinese speakers can all understand each other's written languages, a fact that is well-known among people informed about the actual linguistic situation in China.

Google Translate can translate a text in hanzi to spoken Cantonese and vice-versa, and can give the Mandarin reading of a text in hanzi. 

So, could you please show an example of a typical text in hanzi, as would be written by a Mandarin speaker, whose translation into Cantonese is not a one-by-one reading of the hanzi into Cantonese syllables?  Or whose one-by-one reading of the hanzi into Cantonese syllables would be incomprehensible to a Cantonese speaker who does not speak Mandarin?

All the best, --stolfi