The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[rikforto]

The mutual intelligibility of the written Sinitic languages is a key assumption of your entire understanding of the COT. You have been at some pains to say that Classical Chinese is strictly a written language, and that going through and giving readings to each word in the Classical language should result in comprehensible language that The Author could then write down and read later. You have been consistent about this, and anyone casually following this thread has seen you explain a dictation scenario relying on this assumption repeatedly. I do not bring this up simply to impeach your credibility, and have been very careful to make sure that my explicit conclusions are specifically related to how you imagine the VMS was created. I have been content to keep this as a logos problem, because whether or not you know what you are talking about, the dictation scenario does not work.

However, since you raised the ethos problem to text, I will too: I do think the fact you are stubbornly repeating a well-known misconception impeaches your credibility. I think the fact that you are clinging to it in the face of evidence to the contrary impeaches your credibility. I think the fact that you keep misrepresenting what I and other people have said impeaches your credibility. I've tried to steer clear of making my responses about that, but since you brought it up, no, I do not think people would be wise to take what you say about Sinitic languages at face value.

Returning to logos, I don't think you're interpreting Victor Mair correctly. It's going to emerge that I have extra-textual reasons for thinking this, but even in the four corners of the quote I provided, it is, let's say, odd to interpret a passage about what gets written down in China as phonetic because famously that is not the kind of script that gets written down in China; it is odd that he would not distinguish if that was what he meant. Further, he says that in older times it was written down in Classical Chinese instead of Standard Mandarin, and I can only interpret the former in context as logographic. I would be curious to know what "earlier times" you think Classical Chinese was being written in a phonetic script, especially given how firm you've been that correctly understood Classical Chinese has no inherent phonetic rendering.

Beyond the four corners of the quote, it is buck wild to see Victor Mair, of all people, interpreted as advocating for the widespread mutual intelligibility of Sinitic languages in writing. This man has spent much of his professional career trying to get people to stop making this mistake in the literature, and has actually been fairly successful. The following quotes are all from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. The substance of the essay is about the term "fangyan", and explicitly the thorniness of using it in linguistics and translating it, but your use of "dialect" in this thread owes directly to English translations of "fangyan", whether you realized it or not. I've preferred "varieties of Chinese" and other such forms, directly owing to his advocacy, and "languages" where it is appropriate following him and others. With that in mind, here is what he has to say:

First of all, the vast majority of Chinese languages have never received a written form. Mandarin, Fuchow, Cantonese, Shanghai, Suchow, and the other major fangyan do not share the same written language. I have seen scattered materials written in these different Chinese fangyan, both in tetragraphs and in romanized transcription, and it is safe to say that they barely resemble each other at all. Certainly they are no closer to each other than Dutch is to English or Italian to Spanish. The discrepancies between the major Chinese fangyan in phonology, lexicon, orthography, and grammar are so great that it is impossible for a reader of one of them to make much sense of materials written in another of them. This is an entirely different matter from that of classical (wenyan), vernacular (baihua), and mixed classical-vernacular (banwen-banbai) prestige, non-local or national written styles that are read by literate individuals throughout China according to the pronunciation of their local fangyan. Written Sinitic, with exceedingly few exceptions, has been restricted to some type of Classical Chinese or Mandarin, since the other languages of the group have never developed orthographical conventions that were recognized by a substantial segment of their speakers. In sum, regardless of the fact that such statements are almost universally accepted among Western treatments of Chinese language(s), it is false (or at least dangerously misleading) to claim that all the Chinese "dialects" share the same written language.

The first thing this shows is that Mair believes the differences between the languages include lexicon and grammar, and that the differences in written forms are not solely matters of writing and phonology---though he obviously believes them salient as well. This passage also plainly says that writing is mainly restricted to Mandarin or Classical Chinese, which is my "claim [3]" in your numbering in your response.  He immediately goes on to say:

It is also frequently asserted that, while there may be enormous differences in vocabulary, pronunciation, and idiom among the major spoken Chinese fangyan, they basically share the same grammar. This assumption, too, remains to be proven, both in absolute and in comparative terms.

I don't think the quote on the blog was actually ambiguous, but in the wider context of Mair's professional work it is simply impossible to take him to mean that Chinese is unified as a written language.

In turn, the way you have added emphasis to Bill Poser's post is a good example of how [emphasis added] is a dangerous game. When you bold "some" in "some common words", it changes the emphasis; no one is saying that there are no cognates between Mandarin and Cantonese---or, to keep the relevance to the thread more immediate, between Classical and other languages. The point is that it is easy to zero in on which language you are looking at because there are frequent, prominent points of deviation that can be easily exploited to make the determination. At the same time, bolding the "of any length" turn of phrase is especially strange to me because it is saying that those divergence points will show up even in very short texts. There is no ambiguity because he says in the same post:

A widely believed myth is that even forms of Chinese that are mutually incomprehensible in their spoken forms are identical in writing. This is not true.

I debated how charitable I was going to be saying the way I clipped the quote introduced some ambiguity, but I'm sorry, your added emphasis here reveals a motivated reading and I think I should say it:

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. 

That bolded part does not apply to language Poser describes in the next sentence as "truly Cantonese", but to "Mandarin written by a Cantonese speaker" [emphasis, because I too like to live dangerously, mine]. He is saying that if someone who speaks Cantonese writes Mandarin, it can be subtle to determine it was not a native Mandarin speaker who wrote it. Your bolding serves to emphasize that it is relative to something, and as already demonstrated, that is the fact that "truly Cantonese" texts are not subtly divergent. And note there is no serious ambiguity about the writing system, unless you are going to hold Poser is describing phonetic transcriptions as "characters".

Your remark about diglossia tipped me down a rabbit hole I might post at some point because it dumped me out somewhere very relevant to this thread, but let me just say what I was going to say back when I was just going to check a few sources: What you are describing is not diglossia. If The Author did not have to formally learn the H language, if he got it "for free" by learning L language, they aren't actually two languages there and it is just "glossia". A prediction, and this is where that rabbit hole leads, is that native speakers cannot reliably recognize their own diglossia, and Chinese is a very complex example of this. The restrictions are even more severe in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., requiring the language be an older form, and by way of example he rules out Mandarin and Cantonese as diglossia, but this criterion was among the first to be relaxed as the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. I was trying to avoid the competing definitions, and as I don't think it was well-conceived to define the ability to use two languages in any situation as dichotomous with the practice of using them in mutually exclusive settings, chose the more general term "bilingualism". But if we're clear on definitions here, yes, I think this is diglossia, because readings of the Classical language are not mutually intelligible with the L language; likewise, if it can be said that Standard and Cantonese are in an H-L language configuration, and I do hold this, it is because they are not mutually intelligible. The issue, however, is not the jargon---we just don't agree on the mutual intelligibility claims.

Again, this has everything to do with your dictation scenario. If the language of the dictation is not mutually intelligible with the language you presume The Author spoke, then The Author could not understand the dictation or what he wrote down. This speaks directly to the whole idea of putting together a "Chinese" VMS. You are not wrong that I also make negative inferences when people repeat these common falsehoods and post motivated misreadings of sources, and I am relieved to finally just so, but the key point here was and remains that this dictation scenario does not work to create a readable book.