Talk:Chinese language

Move Proposal

Per Wikipedia:Naming_conventions#Languages.2C_both_natural_and_programming I propose we move this page to Chinese Languages. Readin (talk) 09:11, 31 July 2009 (UTC)

I agree and support the idea; see also bottom of talk page at "Cannot be one language" --MarsmanRom (talk) 15:35, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

I changed "New words" to "Loanwords"

I changed "New words" to "Loanwords" because some of the so-called "new words" are two thousand years old! BettyJJ (talk) 09:04, 5 August 2009 (UTC)

Request for more info in the article

"Foreign words continue to enter the Chinese language by transcription according to their pronunciations. This is done by employing Chinese characters with similar pronunciations."

In cases where there is no attempt to match meaning (which is dicussed later in the article), how is it determined which characters are chosen? Is there a set "alphabet" of characters that are always used, or is the choice arbitrary? How is a "colouring" of the meaning of imported word by the literal meaning of the characters avoided?

Intro

Just came here from the front page, and am very confused by the parenthesised list in the first paragraph. What is this list and why does for example a wikilinked 'Simplified Chinese' appear multiple times? If it's the equivalent of 'Sinitic Language' in examples of those languages then it is a) not clear and b) not very useful to an english speaker. Move to later in the article? 88.138.208.133 (talk) 14:55, 3 October 2009 (UTC)

Dispute about the wording about "fangyan"

 "it is common for the government to refer to all divisions of the 
 Sinitic language(s) beside Standard Mandarin as fangyan 
 (“regional tongues”, often translated as “dialects”). "

I take the statement in parentheses above incorrect - "fangyan" is actually the direct equivalent of the English word "dialect" in Chinese(go to the Dialect article on en.wp, click on the Chinese version link and it gets you to the "fangyan" article on zh.wp), instead of "translated as", which sounds misleading to me. In fact, "regional tongues" is transliteration("fang","regional", and "yan", "speech/language/tongue").

"("dialects", literally "regional tongues")" would probably sound better. Blodance (talk) 06:55, 22 December 2009 (UTC)

• • Just because the articles translate this way doesn't constitute the meaning to be directly related. Taking the words themselves, fang yan really means "regional verse". Of course, "regional verse" basically translates to dialect, but doesn't have to be the case by English custom. For instance, Shanghainese is a dialect, but it is technically one of the Wu regional dialects or regional verses, which also includes Ningbo and Wenzhou dialects. Kou Ying might be closer, but this is dangerous because Kou ying in Chinese can also mean accent. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 222.70.150.54 (talk) 07:42, 23 February 2010 (UTC)

Hey I think that Chinese isn't a language at all, it's just a writing system and even then it's split into traditional and simplified. If they are to be considered the same language, they must have some mutual intelligibility. Take my friend who is forced to use English in Mainland China (except Guangdong, so obviously he speaks Cantonese but not Mandarin)...he can only read/write in Traditional and has no knowledge of Simplified (can't even read), his Mandarin is next to useless. Anyway Ethologue already classifies the "dialects" (not really dialects) of Chinese as different languages, it's basically calling English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Catalan, Dutch etc "dialects" of Latin because they use the Latin alphabet!!! Ridiculous.I would assume when it comes to linguistic matters ethologue would be sourced above all...what do you guys think?

Obviously you have no knowledge of Chinese. Cantonese and Mandarin are same language, but different pronunciation, you could use the word "accent" to describe the situation. its like the English spoken by Indian, which is very hard for the British to understand. I agree some of the dialects are more like an independent language, but not a single dialect have enough differences to form an independent language. vocabulary and grammar between these dialects only varies little, in comparison with the Romance languages, which have very much different grammar and vocabulary. you can't just judge language by the sound. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 123.113.180.221 (talk) 13:45, 7 March 2011 (UTC)

Verbal communication preceeded written communication. As such, writing should not be confused with an orally transmitted means of communication. Mutual intelligibility of spoken communication means that both the speaker and the listener has a reasonable idea about what the other is speaking of. Consider if you will two old ladies from the same community, they have the same speech, they have similar backgrounds, lets say they are illiterate, poor and cannot afford television or radio, and they are also not bombarded by the words of national broadcasts in the country's official language. These two ladies would be speaking and understanding each other without any problems. Suppose we take one of these old ladies to meet someone of a similar socio-economic background but who speech is very different and lives on the other side of the country, many thousands of miles apart. As each old lady from different far flung areas have never been exposed to the other's speech, they will not understand each other. Now, if you then choose two literate old ladies from the same socio-economic background but living thousands of miles apart, and they are educated with the country's national language, then they will write in the standard language, and communicate thus.

Back in the renaissance, scholars in Europe used Latin as their lingua franca even though their native speech maybe different to readers in another country.

In China, Guangzhou in southern China is several thousand miles away from Peking/Beijing in the north-east. Native speakers in each area will communicate with their own local people in the local speech. However, nowadays, with education, everyone of a certain age will be conversant with the national language. To communicate they would switch to using putonghua. Even though putonghua is based upon the sounds of Beijing, Beijing speech is rich in local idioms, differences in vocabulary and other eccentricities that mark it as being different to the national standardised language. Cantonese inventory of sounds differ to that found in Beijing and hence Putonghua. Were the two illerate old ladies from Guangzhou and Beijing respectively who write to each other, they would know a common form of writing to understand each other, even if the written characters are read locally in different ways - this relies on reading, not spoken communication. But if the standard language to frame the conversation but each were speaking in their native local speech rather than in the sounds of putonghua, there is a reduced chance of inteligibility based on the pronunication difference of each speaker's sounds. This mutual intellegibility problem marks the two speech forms as different languages.

Writing characters which can be pronounced in different local pronunciations as a test of whether they are 'dialects' or 'language' fails as human language is first and foremost a spoken form of communication. If you're resorting to having to learn a standard language which is different in syntax, vocabulary, and grammar from your local colloquial speech, then it is like learning a different language altogether. Often cited, Swedish, Norwegian and Danish share a high degree of mutual intelligibility. They ought to be termed dialects, but for geopolitical reasons (country and sovereignty issues) they're all different so called languages. Chinese languages differ more greatly than the scandinavian case, but consigned to realm of being dialects for whatever reason.... Dylanwhs (talk) 00:54, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

Origin of writing system

I just read something that said the writing system developed along the rebus principle ("The Languages of China" by Robert Ramsey), if anyone knows if this is generally accepted by linguists something should be added to the article. Historian932 (talk) 16:48, 24 December 2009 (UTC)

The origins of "ketchup"

I always thought it was from Cantonese 茄汁 "ke2 zap1/7".

Any sources to prove this or the Minnan one?

Micro01 (talk) 23:57, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Wiktionary says it's both...http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ketchup --71.111.229.19 (talk) 17:37, 16 April 2010 (UTC)

"A" vs. "the"

I changed "The" standardized form of spoken Chinese to "a" standardized form of spoken Chinese. In the lede section, third paragraph. Does the consensus of editors on this article have an argument for why it is "the" standardized form rather than "a" standardized form? If we want to say it is "the" standardized form we should include in the same sentence the government(s) that recognize it as a standardized form otherwise the definitive article doesn't make sense. What about Standard Cantonese and the standardized forms of Minnan, Shanghainese, etc. which by now have many textbooks and dictionaries written about them...? --达伟 (talk) 18:26, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Though Minnan, Shanghainese, other Chinese languages' dialects, etc. have gone into many books, the government does not officially standardize their phonology and grammar and such, and neither does any politically recognized organization. Lack of a standard character set for writing and Mandarin promotion are major obstacles of their standardization, I believe. Micro01 (talk) 22:48, 16 May 2010 (UTC)

Perhaps this could be avoided entirely by changing it to "the standardized form of spoken Mandarin" which would be both more accurate and more neutral. 128.208.150.188 (talk) 05:22, 15 July 2010 (UTC)

Number of speakers for each dialect

The number of speakers for each dialect in the introduction does not at all match the listing in the table further on in the article.

For example, it says at the beginning there are about 850 million Mandarin speakers, and later it says there are well over a billion. 128.100.71.45 (talk) 18:18, 8 June 2010 (UTC)

There's a difference between ""first language"/native speakers, and total speakers.--TheLeopard (talk) 07:44, 18 July 2010 (UTC)

Still, this figure does not seem right. Not just the dialects, but all of them as a whole. How can there be 1.3 billion people living in China and then 1.3 billion speakers total? I would say there's slightly more, when you weigh in the Overseas Chinese communities. ★Dasani★ 06:09, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

No because you also need to figure in the Tai languages, Tibetan and Mongolian and a few others. Munci (talk) 04:58, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

WP:WikiProject Cryptozoology

We need someone to translate the above Project into Chinese. Is there any interest in this or is it too Fringe amongst the community?

"To lie" changed to "To be lying down"

In the vocab compariaon section the English phrase is vague as 'to lie' could be "to tell a falsehood" or "to be laying down horizonatally", I've changed the entry as above. Dylanwhs (talk) 23:59, 21 July 2010 (UTC)

ากธ —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.142.125.195 (talk) 05:06, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

Suggested removal of diagram

Sino-Tibetan language family

"Primarily based on Graham Thurgood, Randy J. LaPolla (2003) The Sino-Tibetan Languages"

Primarily based on... this ought to be removed as it seems to be original research material, as no such representation is shown in Thurgood's book. Besides, there are regular correspondences in the phonological change of Hakka from Middle Chinese, so separating it from the line of descent is incorrect. Dylanwhs (talk) 14:26, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

It doesn't correspond to the textual account of Sino-Tibetan classification in that book either. I've removed it. Kanguole 13:42, 10 May 2011 (UTC)

Chinese loaning to Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese?

Languages within the influence of Chinese culture also have a very large number of loanwords from Chinese. Fifty percent or more of Korean vocabulary is of Chinese origin, likewise for a significant percentage of Japanese and Vietnamese vocabulary. Chinese has also lent a great deal of many grammatical features to these and neighboring languages, notably the lack of gender and the use of classifiers.[citation needed]

I doubt this statement. Yes, while some Vietnamese words sound pretty close to certain dialects (particularly the easier ones or transliterations), and Japanese still uses Chinese characters, I don't see it likely that the figure is as high as "50% or more". Korean, maybe, due to the geographical proximity to China. But why is there no source for this? It's quite a large claim. If no one finds it within a week, I'm removing it. Estheroliver (talk) 18:49, 31 October 2010 (UTC)

Forgot to add: if it truly were that high, a lot more Chinese people would be able to understand (or at least partially) what the other three were saying. Each of these languages is totally separate as to the point where even the few "borrowed words" I've seen and heard are pronounced in various ways, differing from Chinese both slightly and significantly. I think it's a regional thing, but they're not as similar as the article makes it out to be. They are not mutually intelligible at all on their own; instead, to be able to understand and speak it requires serious academic study. Looking at the list of references, it smartly omits to provide any for the last two paragraphs of the section. Estheroliver (talk) 18:52, 31 October 2010 (UTC)

See Sino-Japanese vocabulary and Sino-Korean vocabulary. The lack of mutual intelligibility does not necessarily imply the absence of borrowing, and in fact extensive borrowing had occurred and the separate and pervasive sound changes and phonological adaptations upon lexical importation had changed Korean, Japanese (and Mandarin) into almost completely unintelligible languages with modern Chinese, whereas Vietnamese on the other hand has preserved the Middle Chinese pronunciations of loanwords quite well and the meaning of Vietnamese when spoken (especially Vietnamese news) is to some extent guessable by Cantonese speakers. 60.240.101.246 (talk) 09:07, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

Vietnamese are guessable by Cantonese speakers, that is because Cantonese is part of the Hundred Việt (Baiyue) language. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.62.133.132 (talk) 03:01, 9 June 2011 (UTC)

Also note that it says 50% of vocabulary, not of words in daily usage, which makes a huge difference. Generally, it is the more technical nouns and adjectives that are borrowed, while the original verbs and connectives are maintained. So if you hear a Japanese person speak, perhaps less than 5% of it consists of Chinese-originated vocabulary.

I should also note that the Chinese borrowed a lot of terms from Japanese while vernacular Chinese was being developed. Often it is not easy to tell for a particular word whether the Chinese borrowed it from the Japanese or vice versa. Educatedseacucumber (talk) 09:06, 31 May 2011 (UTC)

See East Asian languages which is about these topics. The vocabulary figures are correct and no different from Latin/French vocabulary in English. The lack of gender is not a recent borrowing - no languages in East, Southeast, or North Asia have gender and this apparently has been an areal feature for a long time. --JWB (talk) 04:11, 1 January 2012 (UTC)

Undue?

You are invited to join the discussion at Talk:Rosie O'Donnell#Does the "Chinese language parody" merit inclusion or not?. RightCowLeftCoast (talk) 21:24, 19 April 2011 (UTC) (Using {{pls}})

Cannot be one language

Chinese is a group of languages, like Romance languages. It cannot be regarded as a single language when its "dialects" are mutually unintelligible, and differ greatly. There must be some unbiased scientific research into this topic. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 124.197.15.138 (talk) 06:55, 30 April 2011 (UTC)

From what I understand, most linguists are uncomfortable with the idea of Chinese being categorized as one language, but this is the norm for historical and cultural reasons. I would be glad if more people start referring to "the Chinese languages" rather than "the Chinese Language", but I don't see this happening soon. Educatedseacucumber (talk) 09:02, 31 May 2011 (UTC)

there are still plenty of reputable sources referring to the "chinese language" for various purposes, and plenty of those are linguists. Usage will probably change over time but the Lead does an excellent job explaining what the term "Chinese Language" means, and it is based on unbiased research. Metal.lunchbox (talk) 01:37, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

Referring to the "Move Proposal" at the top of the page, I think we should do it, even if >there are still plenty of reputable sources referring to the "chinese language"<. Currently the article starts with >>Chinese, the Chinese languages, or the Sinitic languages is a language family consisting of languages [...]<< This too, >does an excellent job explaining what the term "Chinese Language" means< (quoting Metal.lunchbox). However, not despite but especially because of this introduction into the article I say it should be moved. After all it's kind of confusing to the 'ordinary user' of wikipedia, who most probably doesn't know much about chinese and simply won't understand at all why it's called 'chinese language' if it's obviously a group of languages. --MarsmanRom (talk) 15:41, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

The definition of "language" as "mutually intelligible dialect cluster" is technical linguistic jargon, not common English usage, as well as being unworkable in practice for nontrivial cases. The common meaning of "language" primarily refers to languages notable enough to be used for public discourse and be learned by nonnatives, what linguists might refer to as a lingua franca, standard language, prestige dialect, orAusbausprache. --JWB (talk) 20:32, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

If that's really what some people think, then they're simply wrong.

The introduction as it is (and the title for that matter) is simply not supported by the sources. They consistently state that Chinese is a language family where the languages are not mutually intelligible, even if some people might mistake it for something else. Munci (talk) 03:25, 2 January 2012 (UTC)