Talk:Mandarin Chinese

Beifanghua is not = to Mandarin

This article equates beifanghua to Mandarin, ie. beifanghua = guanhua = Mandarin. But is this right?

至于职位低的"老妈妈们"，那是下江人的普通话，"婆子"是北方话。-- 张爱玲, 红楼梦魇

Eileen Chang clearly differentiates the two. Beifanghua is a major subgroup of the Mandarin dialect, but is itself not synonymous to Mandarin. Mandarin = guanhua. If you speak the Nanking dialect you are clearly speaking Mandarin, but not Beifanghua. Mandel 08:26, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

Linking

I think it looks confusing to link the word "Chinese" in the phrase "known in the West as Mandarin Chinese" in the first paragraph because "Mandarin Chinese" is bolded; linking part of "Mandarin Chinese" will make it look like the "Chinese" article is directly tied with the "Mandarin Chinese" article. --Whiteknox 00:05, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Disputed

See next section

A load of junk

But except for a few characters of this nature, the rest of the characters all follow their original meanings — so much so, in fact, that an educated reader of modern Mandarin will hardly find any trouble reading the ancient philosophical text Dao De Jing, which was written around 200 B.C. (Compare this to the fact that most English-speakers would find it nearly impossible to read Beowulf in the original Anglo-Saxon.)

Let me just say that this is a load of BS. Unless by "educated" you mean fluent in 文言文, a language completely distinct from Mandarin, there is no way that a modern Chinese person could read texts from that period. It's equivalent to saying that an educated French person could read texts written by Josephus because French is a Latinate language. It's true that because Chinese characters communicate meaning as well as sound, a Chinese speaker can make reasonably educated guesses about what ancient inscriptions mean. It's also true that because pretty much every Chinese school teaches 古文, most Chinese people who are well educated can piece together the meanings of some Ancient texts (namely, the ones they studied in school). But that's like picking an English speaker who can read Beowulf and suggesting that this implies that the ability to speak English translates into the ability to read Beowulf. No, people who can read Beowulf can do so for one reason and one reason only: instruction in Old English and likely extensive study of Beowulf in particular. The same is true of Chinese who can read the Dao De Jing: instruction in Old Chinese and probably in the text itself are an absolute prerequisite for comprehension. I would be very surprised if your average Chinese person could piece together something like the Dao de Jing. If they were studying for a Master's degree in 语文学, then maybe -- but your typical off the street Chinese person? There is no way.

Furthermore, the paragraph makes it sound as though there's been very little evolution in the meaning of characters, but this is not so. Many exceedingly common characters mean different things in Old Chinese. 书, which currently means book, once meant to write (cf 书法, handwriting, calligraphy). 走, which now means walk, once meant to run. Examples abound, these are just off the top of my head. Whereas Mandarin words are primarily digraphs, in Old Chinese one character was nearly always one word.

This whole "Mandarin speakers can read Ancient texts" thing is a lie that gets spread around by people who either don't speak Chinese or who do and want to make themselves look 牛. It's a bit like Romanians who claim that Romanian and Latin are "nearly the same language". As an encyclopedia, we shouldn't propagate these untruths.

An annoyed linguist, 70.132.11.78 02:16, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

Well, annoyed linguist, what is your evidence for your contentions? Have you gone through the DDJ text and glossed each word? Have you tried giving a class of Western students who have had no prior exposure to Chinese a "trot" showing the definitions and pronunciations of each character (every time it shows up) and seeing whether they can understand most of the text on that basis? It's true that some characters have a range of meanings. You mention how "书, which currently means book, once meant to write," but then you yourself point out that the modern reader who knows what 书法 means also knows that it still means "to write" in certain contexts. And 走 still means "to run" in "走狗."

How many characters can you find in the DDJ that are not defined in a 10,000 字 dictionary in a way that is appropriate to the meaning in the DDJ?

One of the nice things about teaching the DDJ in Chinese is that one rarely has to say, "Don't bother to learn this word. You'll probably never see it again, and if you do it will probably have its first meaning instead of its tenth meaning as it does here." Go back to the time of the 书经,诗经 and you will bump into words like 厥 (=其) that are of extremely low frequency in current Chinese writing. How many words in the DDJ are not included among the 400 most commonly used characters in modern Chinese? How many are not among the 4000 most commonly used characters?

The DDJ is sometimes difficult to read. The most common reason is not because of the writing or the writing system but because the content is abstract and unexpected ("counter-intuitive"). The text is occasionally corrupt, so it helps to have a correctly revised/annotated version.

Off the top of my head I can think of only one sentence pattern that has not carried forth into modern Chinese, and that is exhibited in the first two couplets of chapter 21. P0M 04:18, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

You seem to be essentially agreeing with me. You say "the DDJ may be hard to read because ..." and then give me a bunch of reasons. Well, while it's certainly true that the DDJ is simpler than the vast majority of texts dating from the same period or even more recently, the implication of the paragraph I quoted is that, by virtue of the logographic nature of the Chinese writing system, educated speakers of Modern Chinese can read ancient texts without trouble, not that they can read the DDJ and only the DDJ. And as you admited yourself, even for the DDJ, a particularly simple example of ancient Chinese text, a number of complications make comprehension difficult without an "annotated" version.

The fact that the vast majority of characters in the DDJ exist in a character dictionary is not the least bit surprising, given the importance of the text and the fact that one feature of 文言文 is its use of generally simple characters to express complex shades of meaning; one need only look as far as 论语 to see how this is true. While some meanings are easy to discern, others are not. Chinese people buy thick books that are heavily annotated and study them.

Furthermore, suggesting that knowing the meanings of 书法 and 走狗 will be enough to allow the Chinese speaker to simply "know" that 书 and 走，respectively, had different meanings in isolation in archaic Chinese than they do in modern Chinese is ridiculous. In point of fact, I was tutoring a Beijing girl in 古文 just a few months ago who was caught up on a particular passage precisely because she did not know (and could not guess) the original meaning of 书. Once she was told its ancient meaning and given 书法 as an example of a place in modern Mandarin where the original meaning was extant, she understood it, but even given that context she was unable to guess.

I would further note that a bunch of foreigners trying to translate something character for character with a dictionary is not the same thing as a fluent speaker of Mandarin attempting to read the text without one.

At any rate, even assuming for the sake of argument that any educated Chinese person can read the DDJ without any aid, the paragraph is clearly implying that being able to read ancient texts without aid is a common thing thanks to Chinese characters, when in fact it is essentially limited to a few particularly simple texts.

I spend a lot of time studying this stuff, and it bothers me to see this implied because in fact, in most cases, reading ancient chinese texts is as difficult for a modern mandarin speaker as reading Beowulf is for a modern English speaker.

A (still) annoyed linguist, 70.132.11.78 05:38, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

You appear to be a new contributor, so it would be helpful if you would register and get a user name so that you could sign your contributions. One of the expectations that is placed on all of us is that we not use offensive language, even when we are annoyed. From personal experience I know that keeping one's cool is also the most effective way to resolve issues or induce a more enlightened state in the community.

I think we are probably closer in view than it now seems to you. It should be possible to quantify issues such as the occurrence frequency of DDJ vocabulary in modern texts.

I am glad that you brought up the 论语。That text is very definitly not readable with a little initial coaching because of two factors. The first is that there are very many characters that, like 厥, may be in a student dictionary, but probably only because it is something that students will possibily run into when studying the classics in their classes in high school, and will otherwise probably never be used in current writing. The second is that something interesting was going on in grammar during the centuries between 论语 and 荀子。孟子 in the middle seems to be the turning point at which the art of writing and a new standard of grammar and composition came to the fore. There are still some grammatical features that have dropped out, but in general the text is not "archaic" in the way the earlier texts, whereas even the 论语 seems to be another language. Whatever its previous history, the DDJ we have today is not even the DDJ that was written out sometime around the beginning of the Qin dynasty.

The appropriate English text to comare the DDJ with might be Sir Thomas Mallor's Le Morte D'Arthur, which is a fifteenth century text. It has some vocabulary that is used in ways that no longer make immediate sense, and some grammatical structures that may throw the beginning reader until s/he gets used to it. I don't know how things work in a language like Greek, but for English it is a stretch to understand things written as little as 600 years ago. Of course there is nothing in English that even approaches the antiquity of the earliest Chinese language texts.

I'm out of time. P0M 16:13, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

I'm not a new contributor, I've been contributing anonymously since 2001. I do have an account that I use to get around semi-protection, and for nothing else. I'm not sure that "BS" qualifies as offensive language, but I'm not going to argue semantics about that. If an intialism of that nature offends your sensibilities, I'm sorry.

Just for the record, I've been criticized by administrators for using less offensive language in edit summaries. I am changing it. P0M 05:19, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur is considerably simpler than the DDJ, but then I guess at this point I don't really know what to say. It seems we are at an impass. The DDJ is not simple enough that a native speaker of Mandarin without instruction in 古文 would be able to understand it well at all. Heck, grammar like 道可道，from the very beginning of the DDJ, is no longer in anything resembling common use in Modern Chinese. I will concede that for a modern speaker of Mandarin to read texts like the DDJ requires less instruction than might be required for an English speaker to read Beowulf, and that the Chinese characters are the main reason for that. I will further concede that because 古文 is taught in middle schools around China, the truth is that most Chinese speakers with a high school education can piece it together. But I would wager that if teaching Anglo Saxon were the norm in English schools, the average "educated" English speaker would be able to piece together Beowulf, too. On the mainland, analysis of poems and short pieces written in Old Chinese begins in primary school, and pieces of increasing complexity (including 论语) are analysed. This is similar in many ways to the mandatory instruction in Latin and Greek that was common in most European schools up until relatively recently. 100 years ago, it was normal for an "educated" French person to be able to read texts dating from before the time of Christ. Hell, even I studied Xenophon (chosen, like the DDJ, because of the relatively simple grammar in his works, most of which were written around 400 BC).

Here's my point, in case you're missing it: without instruction in old Chinese, a Chinese person would have a very difficult time with even the DDJ. But the quoted paragraph seems to imply that reading the DDJ is trivial for anyone who speaks Mandarin, when it's not. The paragraph says that any educated Chinese speaker can read the DDJ. Let's say that that's true -- I don't really want to argue about whether it's true or not, because my point stands either way. What the paragraph fails to communicate is that the only reason an educated Chinese speaker can read the DDJ is because "educated" in China includes studying ancient Chinese texts! And not just in passing, either, but for close to ten years! To omit this information is not truthful -- it implies to would be students of Chinese that if they learn Mandarin, they'll be able to read the DDJ and similarly ancient texts, when this is not so without study in 古文. Frankly, it surprises me that you, clearly a non-native speaker of Mandarin, are so willing to propagate this untruth.

As I pointed out earlier, there was a time (not so long ago) when any educated person in Europe was expected to be able to at least read Latin. We're talking 3 generations ago or so. Furthermore, if you speak Spanish, Italian, French, Romanian, or any of the other romance languages, most of the roots of Latin words are so familiar that learning to read Latin at least is not particularly difficult, especially if there's mandatory instruction starting from primary school. However, no one in their right mind would imply that the fact that an educated French speaker from the turn of the century can read the Vulgate Bible means that knowledge of French translates intrinsically into knowledge of Latin. And yet, saying "Any educated French person [from the turn of the century] can read the Latin Vulgate bible" is manifestly true, without being honest. Because "educated" in this case means "educated in Latin". Putting that in an article about French (not about Latin) isn't honest.

It feels like I'm rehashing my points here, which I don't want to keep doing. I personally don't see how a Chinese person's ability to read what is essentially a foreign language after ten years of instruction in that language in school is any more relevant to an article on Mandarin than my ability to read Xenophon after two semesters of ancient greek would be relevant to an article on English. 文言文 and 普通话 are not mutually intelligible without study. Chinese people study it. You apparently have studied it. I certainly have studied it. But as someone natively bilingual in English and Mandarin who did not benefit from a classical Chinese education (mostly because I grew up in the states) and who had to learn how to read this stuff later, I can tell you that an ability to read, write, and speak Modern Mandarin absolutely did not translate into an ability to read ancient texts. Furthermore, while I was 北大 studying Chinese, I tutored local kids in 语文, and most of them had a lot of difficulty with the ancient texts, despite their years of study.

So as I see it, it all hinges on the term "educated". In the paragraph, we use the term educated in passing, as if it's not really particularly important. We don't give any hint that in this case, educated means "10 years of study in old Chinese, which is in fact nothing like Modern Chinese at all."

Well, I have better things to do than argue this point with you, as I'm sure you have better things to do than argue this point with me. I hope it gets changed, but I'm not going to get into an edit war about it.

On a completely unrelated point, somewhere above you were talking about Pinyin p b (WG p' p) as being a voice distinction. It's not. Mandarin doesn't voice any of its consonants, except for the nasals. p and b are an aspiration distinction. A number of southern languages do have voiced consonants, and some of them make a three way distinction between unvoiced unaspirated, unvoiced aspirated, and voiced unaspirated consonants (generally slack voice, not actually voice, but the concept is similar.) I do not know much about the Min languages, so I can't comment on Taiwanese with any authority, but it wouldn't surprise me if it's much the same.

A tired linguist, 70.132.11.78 19:51, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

I removed the offending paragraph because, from everything I've heard, including elsewhere on Wikipedia, wenyan is simply not mutually intelligible with baihua. Reading wenyan requires special training, which disproves the idea that meanings have changed so little that it's easy to read the classics. - furrykef (Talk at me) 00:57, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

From everything you've heard? Have you actually studied Chinese? I am a professional language teacher. I have studied both vernacular Chinese (primarily Mandarin Chinese) and wenyan, and I have a published translation of the DDJ in print. The claim that you removed from the article could be argued on two grounds. One is on the percentages or even the absolute number of characters in the Dao De Jing that have either changed their meanings or that have virtually disappeared from contemporary use. The other is pn the number of syntactic devices used in the DDJ that do not occur in modern vernacular Chinese.There is, as far as I know, only one such device. (孔德之容唯道是從.§ 28) It's even rare in the Chinese of that period, which made researching what it actually means a bit difficult.

The main difference that one finds between vernacular Chinese and classical Chinese is that modern Chinese writes two-character combinations where classical Chinese is almost always satisfied to use single characters.

Consider a sentence from §55:

  文言: 知      和      曰         常  ,   
  白話: 知道    "和"    叫作       "常",  
  Eng: Knowing harmony is called constancy,

       知      常         曰        明, 
       知道    "常"       叫作      "明", 
       knowing constancy is called brightness

       益          生   曰         祥, 
       增益        "生" 叫作       "祥",
       augmenting life is called auspicious 

       心         使               氣         曰        強
       心         使喚             氣         叫作      強烈
       Heart/mind ordering around lifebreath is called violence.

The sentence structures are the same. The meanings of 知, 和. 常, 明, 益, 生, 祥, 心, 使, 氣, and 強 haven't changed. 曰 isn't used in everyday spoken Chinese, but it does appear in 書面語 (shū mìan yǚ, "bookish" Chinese).

The situation is very much different with a book of only a few hundred years earlier. Characters like 厥 (jǘe, their) may turn up in one or two early books and then only be seen when those original passages are quoted.

I made a "trot" of the entire DDJ for students in one of the courses I taught years ago and students who had no previous Chinese were able to figure out the meaning of most passages from the resulting sequence of English glosses, e.g., they could puzzle out something like, "These two (of them, i.e., things) together come out and-yet differently named; together speak-of___-as (←it) dark-and-mysterious." The process requires a little hand-holding to avoid students wandering down the wrong path and taking a long time to get back, but anybody who reads books with deeper content risk taking a wrong turn and getting pretty far off the track before realizing that they have to backtrack to where they knew where they were (i.e., what the text meant) and try to take a better "turn" at that point. There is nothing wrong with that, and in fact the teacher that tells his/her students, "No, that couldn't be the correct interpretation. Let me show you..." risks the usual hazards of hubris. All for a good cause, perhaps, because semesters only last so long and getting the general idea of the text clear at the possible expense of missing a minor is probably reasonable risk.

The difference in sentence structures between 文言 and 白話 is easy to quantify. Chinese is extremely conservative in that respect. The issue of vocabulary would not be so difficult to quantify either. How many characters are there in the DDJ that mean one there but never mean that in contemporary Chinese? I can't think of a single one. How many characters are there in the text that are never used today? Again, I can't think of a single one. That leaves the question of how many characters in the text fall below the level of the 400 most common, the 1000 most commmon, and, let's say, the 6000 most common (since it is said that grad students need about that many to get by in their daily pursuit of a graduate degree)? P0M 05:19, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

Rather than deleting something, it is often better to rewrite so as to clarify the original intent. Calling things "BS" in edit summaries leads to flame wars. P0M 05:29, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

I just checked. Roughly 700 out of the approximately 800 Chinese characters that form the vocabulary of this book are among the 1000 most frequently used characters. That many of the remaining 100 would not be among the 2000 most frequently used characters (not to mention the 6000 most frequently used characters) seems unlikely. I'll see whether I can come up with an on-line list of the most frequently used characters. I don't think I have the time right now to enter another 5000 characters into my computer data base of characters ordered by frequency of use. P0M 05:48, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

I got a better frequency list.

    range           percent of characters
    1-1000          88
    1001-3000        4
    3001-6000        1
    6001-10000       1
    10001 and above  6  

Students in grad school are said to know around 6000, so they should be able to handle all but 7% of the characters, and those characters typically appear only once. P0M 03:06, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

In any case, if the paragraph is to be in the article, I think it needs a citation. - furrykef (Talk at me) 20:25, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

Why don't I add my comment here, if you can find my IP and post here as well? I'd agree with the "annoyed linguistic" here, this is truely a load of craps, I am more than suprised its rated a "B" article. and I am a native Chinese. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 58.31.80.196 (talk) 03:07, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

Chinese name of Mandarin dialect/language group (not putonghua), is it beifanghua or guanhua?

In the article, the Chinese name of the Mandarin dialect/language group (spoken in N and SW China) is given as both beifanghua and guanhua, and only as guanhua in the info box. Is this correct? I thought guanhua refers to the uncodified language spoken by officials in pre-20th century China, which was a lingua franca based on the speech of the capital. LDHan 13:42, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

I'm not sure who the language czar is nowadays. The term "beifanghua" seems inappropriate for use with, e.g., Yunnan hua. I understand the term "guanhua" pretty much as you do, except that linguists writing in Chinese have long referred to what we are calling "Mandarin" in this article as "guan hua." I think it has been clear for many decades, maybe many centuries, that there is something significantly different in the level of difficult for, e.g., somebody from Beijing to learn to speak well enough to communicate with someone in Yunnan and for the same person to communicate that well using one of the Min languages. So if the language of some region was such that a native speaker could learn to get by in Beijing with relatively little ttouble then that place was considered part of the 官話區.

It would be nice if there were some easy way to quantify learning difficulties from place to place. Without such a measure the judgment of "dialect" vs. "regionalect" vs. "language" is subjective. P0M 05:45, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

Less than 10% of "beifang" (Northern) dialect speakers are actually in Southwestern China. A much larger proportion are in the Yangtze Valley, but still to the north of all the Southern dialect groups. However more than 90% of "guanhua" (Mandarin) dialect speakers are not "guan" (officials)! "Beifang fangyan" (North China dialects) is not perfect but still much more accurate than "guanhua fangyan" (Mandarin dialects). "Mandarin dialects" should be identified as one designation but not the only or preferred one. --JWB (talk) 02:20, 20 October 2009 (UTC)

Why is it not named "putonghua"? That's how I learned it. (dvg, will find my login soon) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.84.216.200 (talk) 05:42, 17 January 2011 (UTC)

Huge text edit

59.188.255.131 just removed the "Writing System" text. This is the only contribution from that IP (as of 13:48, 1 February 2007). Here is the link for the revision:

• Revision

I wasn't sure if this was intentional or not, especially given the complaints about "Writing System" above. --Whiteknox 13:48, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

To save others the trouble of looking, I checked this out and it seems that somebody has already put the stuff back into the article where it belongs. P0M 03:09, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

Syllabe timed issue

"Mandarin, like most Chinese dialects/languages, is syllable timed, as opposed to many Western languages, including English, which are stress timed."

If anybody read Syllable-timed_language article will see that "many Western languages" means explicitely here "English and Portuguese", in this article is sugested that overall majority of world's languages are syllabe-timed, not stress-timed. So, is this NPOV?, do we need to rewrite this? --Patillotes 10:15, 29 August 2007 (UTC)

Suggestion which might be outside of the scope of this article

Why is it that in an English language article the first sentence is clogged with various methods of writing the title of the article in various forms of Chinese?
I imagine it's common practice and perhaps a guideline of style that you follow any pinyin or chinese-dervied-english-word with the traditional and simplified equivalent in actual Chinese, but does it really have to take up a full sentence?
Wouldn't "Mandarin, 官話, 官话, or Guānhuà, literally 'speech of mandarins'" do basically the same thing while still being readable?

Moreover, why would we need to know the spellings of this word in Chinese and how would this be relevant to an english language article? I could see them being a footnote to a subheading but for the opening sentence to be expanded into a subparagraph on spelling variations is just plain silly.
24.68.61.121 (talk) 10:17, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

(1) my answer to above: because that's how it is in Chinese, the subject of this article. Think of it as an in-line illustration. It's really Chinese and the pinyin or other representation is not. Also there's no sentence now. Jan 2011 (dvg)

(2) I'd like to see the "two letter symbol for the language", used in google-translate and other places be in each language page. (dvg) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.84.216.200 (talk) 05:47, 17 January 2011 (UTC)

Added references to language/dialect

Added references to "standard: Mandarin Intranetusa (talk) 21:15, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

Suggestion to merge with Mandarin dialects

• No. It's hard enough to say what Mandarin is, in general, without making a long list of regional varieties. P0M (talk) 00:22, 5 July 2008 (UTC)

thank you, that's my point. without making accurate long list of regional varieties here, this article is completely broken into propoganda. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 58.31.80.196 (talk) 03:14, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

AFD proposal

See Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Mandarin Chinese profanity. Badagnani (talk) 16:46, 30 July 2008 (UTC)

move to Mandarin Chinese

Per Wikipedia:Naming conventions, this article should be titled Mandarin or Mandarin Chinese. The very first guideline is "Use the most easily recognized name", and that is "Mandarin Chinese", the customary English expression. "Mandarin (linguistics)" is wrong: Mandarin is not a specifically linguistic topic, nor a technical term, the way, say, register (linguistics) is. We don't do this for any other language family (for example, we don't have Catalan (linguistics)), and there's nothing unusual about the Chinese dialect continuum that we need to treat it so bizarrely. That is, the very title "Mandarin (linguistics)" is POV: Chinese is alien, not a normal language, so we have to treat it as abnormal.

If we choose Mandarin, then the current page would move to Mandarin (disambiguation), just as we do with Latin and Latin (disambiguation). If we choose Mandarin Chinese (which I find preferable), then there is no need for further adjustment. Or perhaps someone has a better suggestion.

BTW, Taiwanese (linguistics) is even worse: linguistically, Taiwanese is not even a coherent concept the way Mandarin is. Rather, it is several Hokkien dialects which happen to be spoken in Taiwan. There is nothing linguistically to unite them again the rest of Hokkien, so "Taiwanese (geography)" would be more accurate. If you think that's ridiculous, then I hope you can see how "Taiwanese (linguistics)" is also ridiculous. Although I can't think of the perfect title, perhaps Taiwanese Hokkien would be acceptable? (There is, after all, also Taiwanese Mandarin, which has equal claim to the title "Taiwanese (linguistics)".) kwami (talk) 21:46, 21 September 2008 (UTC)

You might want to look at the long-term history of this article and related articles. It appears that "Mandarin" needed disambiguation and that "Mandarin Chinese" was confusing, annoying, or whatever. (Does it mean "Chinese who are mandarins"? or perhaps "Mandarin-speaking Chinese people? or what?) The current article title seems to be designed to be interpreted/understood as something like "Mandarin -- as used as a term in linguistics to name a specific language."

Choosing a good article title often involves understanding what people are going to start looking for. For instance, I personally dislike the idea of "breaking horses," because from Xenophon on people have understood that breaking a horse is not what somebody wanting a good mount should try do do. There is a process of gaining the cooperation of a horse so that it will work with humans on the basis of trust. But people are going to look for "horse breaking," and not "horse gentling," or "horse taming." Even if the official title is something else, there has to be a way to get to the article by starting with "horse breaking."

There are over 20 articles that might be titled "Mandarin," or that at least have "Mandarin" as a component. So when one is looking for information about a language called "Mandarin" in English, there is a need for some kind of extension or specification of "Mandarin."

Why it is "Mandarin (linguistics)" rather than "Mandarin (the language)" I could not say. It's "English_language," so why not "Mandarin_language"? P0M (talk) 07:10, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

Ah, the last point is easy. Most Chinese deny that Mandarin is a language. However, there are thousands of articles given titles with ambiguous meanings. Pluto, for examlpe. Often, none has priority, and the basic word is treated as a disambiguation page, as in Pluto's sister Haumea. But when one use of a word is dominant, then the dominant use gets the basic page, and—as with Pluto—we use a 'see also' or 'other uses' line at the top to redirect people who are looking for less common meanings of the word. In English, the only modern meaning of the term "Mandarin Chinese" is the northern Chinese language. Back when China was an empire, it meant specifically the language of the imperial court, what we now call Standard Mandarin, but that hasn't been the case for over a century. Any other use is so rare as to be trivial. kwami (talk) 07:20, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

What facts can you cite to support your assertion that "most Chinese deny that Mandarin is a language"? What do you think they call 普通話 if not a language? Or, to turn the matter around, if you ask somebody from the northern part of China what language s/he speaks, will you always be told "Chinese"? And why do you call it a language if the Chinese won't accept that appellation?

The term 官話 and 官話區 have been around longer than you and I put together. Chinese linguists are clear minded enough to have a trunk, limb, branch, twig analysis of "languages" or "dialects" or whatever English speakers want to call them. They speak in terms of 語系. Traditionally, the term 方言 has applied to what the average American who has anything to say about it will speak of as "Chinese dialects."

Anyway, if "English language" is the acceptable way to speak of the language we call English, what would be wrong with a parallel article on the "Mandarin language" unless you want to reserve "language" for the broader, "trunk" category called "Chinese language"? If you make that choice, then what do you want to call Mandarin? A sub-language (on the analogy of species and subspecies)? A dialect? Or what? P0M (talk) 09:51, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

There are also articles on "French_language," "Catalan_language," etc. Why should Mandarin be any different? It holds roughly the same relationship to Chinese languages as French or Italian hold to Romance languages. P0M (talk) 09:59, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

And there is an article on "Romance_language" so the category and the subcategories are put on the same level in the naming of articles. Again, why not "Chinese_language"s and "Mandarin_language," "Cantonese_language," etc. It's esthetically displeasing to me, but it doesn't seem to have any pragmatic drawback. P0M (talk) 10:15, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

If you can convince people to accept that, I'd be quite pleased. But I'm not holding my breath. kwami (talk) 01:46, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

The recent discussion at Wikipedia:Naming_conventions_(Chinese)#Language.2Fdialect_NPOV decided against the '(linguistics)' tag. However, either Mandarin Chinese, the accepted proposal, or just Mandarin would fit the current naming conventions. If there's debate as to which it should be, I think that's a local issue for this page to decide, as it doesn't affect the overall organization of the Chinese language articles. kwami (talk) 00:37, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

Can user POM just us at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (Chinese). So many similar discussions in every language talk page. Benjwong (talk) 06:59, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

new passage -- removed for discussion

Someone added the following passage:

...it should be remembered that in Cinese each syllable constitutes a separate word, and since the syllables used are intended to signify the same object, we have followed the"European method" of compounding these into a word of several syllables'. )

This formulation is inaccurate. In most cases, each Chinese character represents only one syllable, and that character in turn may represent several different meanings. Sometimes the meanings of the two syllables of a compound are very similar to each other (房屋, fáng wū, house), sometimes they are functionally related to each other (書法, shū fǎ, calligraphy), and sometimes the meanings of the characters are not related at all (那個, nàge, that).

Chinese has many more homonyms than English, and many more homonyms (even two-syllable homonyms) the meaning of which can only be distinguished by context. In has been observed that sentences in English can change their meaning depending on the context. So one should use a great deal of caution in approaching the topic of the meaning of some syllable.

Adding a second character can help to clarify the meaning intended in those cases where the context might be insufficient to do so. On the other hand, in written Chinese one character (e.g., 時）is often used where in spoken Chinese shí probably would be augmented with 候 to make shí hòu.

The meaning of "European method" is likely to be unclear to anyone who has not learned German or some other language that favors terms like "flying machine" more than "airplane." P0M (talk) 00:39, 3 November 2008 (UTC)

ni zai na li? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 112.112.128.158 (talk) 04:08, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

Disagreements with the Article

The following phrase raises a few questions:

"The "standard" in Standard Mandarin refers to the standard Beijing dialect of the Mandarin language."

I am in disagreement with this statement; Standard Mandarin is Standard Mandarin. It is not based off of a specific dialect because its pronunciation IS standard. The Beijing Dialect is VERY distinct from the Standard Dialect. The phonology of the language is derived from 5000 years of spoken standardization, and to state the the Mandarin is based off of a dialect seems illogical. This seems like a definition taken out of a Western dictionary. The Beijing Dialect is very casual, full of slangs, and has a quick, smooth, rapid-fire quality to it. Standard Mandarin is very solemn, occasionally slow, and clearly enunciated.

"Mandarin is also a general term describing any grade of nobility in the Chinese Imperial Court."

I am not certain this is true. Mandarin was an applied term used by Europeans to describe the language of the leaders of the Qing Dynasty (Who were Manchu, whose mother-tongue, when pronounced in Chinese, sounds like "Mandarin"), not all Chinese Imperial Court. WienerDog411 (talk) 21:32, 25 November 2009 (UTC)

The education system of the new Republic of China wanted to unify the language of education in China. Doing so was regarded as a necessity to form China into a modern nation state. There were different ideas on what to settle on for a national language. They ended up settling on the main branch of the Chinese language that had the widest geographical area. If you know Yun-nan hua and move up to the Beijing area, people won't be able to understand you, and vice-versa. But within a few months you will be able to learn the ropes on shifting from one "accent" to the other. So the founders of the Republic settled on that general language group, and on the language that already had some status as the language to speak if you were going to be in government. But they tried to standardize on a version of this "dialect" that removed the "quirky" features such as the "Beijing 'r'".

The "pasteurized" version of Beijing hua was dubbed "Guo2 yu3." When the Nationalists lost the mainland, the PRC renamed the language of instruction "pu3 tong1 hua4." The differences between these standard languages are minor.

The history of the term "mandarin" is well known. There were nine classes of high officials in the Qing court, so the article may be inaccurate to say "any grade" since there were surely officials of lower rank than those nine classes. The individuals who held high office were not necessarily Manchu by birth, and, I think, not necessarily of noble birth. P0M (talk) 03:25, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

Nanjing has been the capital at several periods and its version of Mandarin has also been influential. --JWB (talk) 04:04, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

Strange omission

The box at the top of the article says Mandarin is spoken in many places, some smaller than Taiwan, but Taiwan is not mentioned. Why? P0M (talk) 20:58, 13 March 2010 (UTC)

Total Speakers

Does the "total speakers" list all Chinese speakers, or just Mandarin Chinese speakers? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.145.192.82 (talk) 17:14, 28 March 2010 (UTC)

Re-write first paragraph

I had to look up this article as a user of Wikipedia. I found the first paragraph (opening paragraph) very confusing. It introduces a series of 'other' forms of Chinese without any introductory explanations. Can someone write it again? Politis (talk) 13:25, 20 September 2010 (UTC)

This article and Mandarin dialects

Both this article and Mandarin dialects say they're about the same thing (though this article also includes some disambiguation material and discussion of the standard language). Is there any reason keep them separate? Kanguole 09:35, 8 December 2010 (UTC)

An article about English would, ideally, mention that there are many dialects of that language, and that sometimes speakers of one dialect cannot easily understand speakers of one or more of the other dialects. But most people interested in English would not want a long and detailed discussion of English as it is spoken in Australia, Great Britain (and sub-regions), Canada, etc., etc. Some people may be looking for exactly that kind of information, already know about (and may even be a speaker of some version of) English, and would require only the specialized information in that sub-article.

Articles are not supposed to get too long, and one way that has become commonplace on Wikipedia is to give a short synopsis of some issue such as dialects under the main language article, and then give people the option of accessing a more complete treatment elsewhere.P0M (talk) 16:06, 8 December 2010 (UTC)

Deletions from History section

I am puzzled by these edits[1][2], which remove

• a mention of the proportion of Mandarin speakers in the lead,
• a section header "Old Mandarin" (an important topic that could well later develop into an article of its own),
• an image of the Menggu Ziyun, a major source on Old Mandarin (replaced by an 18th century frontispiece concerning the lingua franca of that time, which is not discussed in this section),
• mention of the 'Phags-pa script and its relation to the Menggu Ziyun.

What is the rationale? Kanguole 00:39, 3 February 2011 (UTC)

The percent of Mandarin speakers is not necessary as the total speakers is already mentioned in the template and is referenced. The Old Mandarin header I thought was unnecessary as the title is History, and that would be redundant given the section is separated from Standard Chinese section. I thought the image of the Zhongguo Guanghua was misplaced in the bottom section, and moved it up, and since there are two historical pictures, I removed one of them, as one of the image is in the Menggu Ziyun article.

You wanted to re-add these content, that's fine. I fixed them so the paragraph includes these links. However the percentage is highly redundant.--TheLeopard (talk) 05:18, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

I had expanded two sentences into three paragraphs; you then replaced the first of these three paragraphs with the original two sentences. The first sentence was vague: there is never a clear dividing point in the stages of a language, but Old Mandarin has a common definition and it should be given. "milestone in the history of Mandarin" is unspecific: the key point is that the ZYYY is a major source on the phonology of the period, as are the structure of the 'Phags-pa script, and the MZ. (There was more to the language than phonology, though our coverage of the rest is presently poor.) The second sentence had been expanded in detail in the third paragraph.

The proportion of speakers is a major aspect of the importance of this group, and any overview of Mandarin would feature it prominently. It's not the same as the total number of speakers. Kanguole 09:44, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

The percentage is unreferenced and does not make much sense, as there are many members of other ethnic groups that speaks Mandarin as a native language, thus it is better to have a total speakers number.--TheLeopard (talk) 20:10, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

I have revised and extended the two sentences that were there originally, as I tried to explain above and you have not responded to. You just keep jamming those two sentences back in, regardless of repetition and the flow of the paragraph. I've explained my reasoning – please explain your issues with the wording you've removed. Kanguole 19:39, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

You do realize that I simply retained explanations from previous versions in which you have removed? All the information about Zhongyuan Yinyun, Menggu Ziyun and the Phags-pa script are in the paragraph, in addition to the added explanation about the features of Mandarin in the Zhongyuan Yinyun and content that mentioned the reduction of final stop consonants, which emphasized on what is different. Basically everything else, the image from Menggu ziyun, the line about northern dialects, the header "Old Mandarin" are kept in the present version.--TheLeopard (talk) 05:17, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

No, you overwrote part of my revision with the two sentences that were there before I expanded them to create this section, without engaging with my explanation above of my revisions or explaining your objections. The result is disjointed and repetitious. To explain yet again:

• The first sentence is less specific than my revision; the peacock phrase "milestone in the history of Mandarin" is not supported by the cited source, and tells us nothing about the book.
• The second sentence has been expanded into two paragraphs, and is foreshadowed by the last sentence of this paragraph. To re-insert the original sentence is to say the same thing three times.

You still haven't said what your actual objections are. Kanguole 00:51, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

Use of Mandarin in Hong Kong and Macau

I'm not sure if the article is correct as it stands - as Mandarin (or strictly speaking putonghua) is the official language of the PRC then one surmises it would be in Hong Kong and Macau too - unless under the terms of the SAR they were granted an exemption. Anybody know? ► Philg88 ◄ ^talk 00:04, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

Neither the Hong Kong Basic Law nor Macau Basic Law specifies what "Chinese" means, so Putonghua is the official spoken language of only the mainland. --HXL's Roundtable and Record 00:40, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

Use of International TLDs in a country article

Hello,

There is currently a debate on whether International TLDs should or should not be included in the article of Singapore. Anyone is free to join the discussion. --RaviC (talk) 06:20, 5 May 2011 (UTC)

Recent change

@kanguole Good change. 的 is a subordinating particle. Its function is analogous to demonstrative (and some other) pronouns in English, e.g.,

      去的人
        ✳
people who go

The passage really did not make sense as it was.P0M (talk) 16:00, 6 May 2011 (UTC)

Why is Mandarin and/or Chinese called 國語 in Taiwan?

國語 when literally translated means "national language." How did this comeabout? Who created this term, and when?

Do you know any country that calls a language their national language in usage? I don't. It's understood, and it's a given. In America, we speak English, and we call it English. We don't say, "do you speak the national language?" We say, "do you speak English?"

A side note, who came up with the word Mandarin? I'm not a linguistic scholar, but I'd just call it Chinese. Or the more politically correct term would be Beijingese, since that is the origin of the language.