Talk:Mandarin Chinese

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Questionable origin of name

During my linguistic studies I intended to interview a Chinese student about "Mandarin" words, which immediately caused him to teach me that he does not like this expression, because "man-da-ren" in his view means, "the Man(dzhou are a) great people". This phrase had to be said by visitors to the foreign Mandzhou emperor when they were on the ground in front of him.HJJHolm (talk) 17:05, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

This is mentioned in note (a) in the article. The real etymology is well documented. Kanguole 17:43, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

You mean "A folk etymology deriving the name from Mǎn dà rén (满大人; 滿大人; 'Manchu big man') is without foundation." My sorce was an educated native speaker, and it can be doubted that Razfar/Rumenapp have that qualification.2A02:8108:9640:1A68:9190:E8E5:1304:9E62 (talk) 17:22, 29 September 2024 (UTC)

Expertise in the modern language does not make one an authority on the origin of a term used in European languages for several centuries. The fact that Jesuits like Alessandro Vilignano were using the word for both the officials and the language in the late Ming dynasty seems to fatally undermine the Manchu theory. Kanguole 17:48, 29 September 2024 (UTC)

Lost in translation?

I'm not capable in either, but do Mandarin and Cantonese both use the same translations of the same ideograms? Or would they produce different English transliterations (if that's the word to use from ideogram to letters...)? 184.70.60.42 (talk) 20:04, 20 December 2023 (UTC)

Much of Mandarin and Cantonese vocabulary is cognate (i.e. the same morphemes written with the same characters, but pronunciation shifting over time), but a huge chunk of it isn't—I've seen figures as high as 50% of vocabulary being different between Mandarin and Cantonese. Many morphemes present in both varieties have simply evolved divergently over time. I have been learning Mandarin, I can read some written Cantonese—but I can listen to and understand no Cantonese whatsoever.

For example, the Cantonese copula ('to be', 'is'/'am'/'are', etc.) is 係, which was actually originally used like a copula much more in Classical Chinese, compared to the Mandarin copula 是, which originally meant 'this' (a proximal demonstrative) in Classical Chinese.

There are also some grammatical differences—in Cantonese the indirect object in basic sentences usually comes after the direct object in the sentence, while it comes before in Mandarin: 给我笔 is "give me (a) pen" in Mandarin—in Cantonese, this is usually 畀笔我 "give (a) pen (to) me". (The pen is the direct object, because it is what is being given, while 'me' is the indirect object.)

Also, a lot more loan words from English etc. in Cantonese. hope this helps! Remsense留 00:02, 21 December 2023 (UTC)

It's worth emphasising that the answer is "normally yes", as normally written Chinese corresponds to Mandarin rather than Cantonese: Vernacular Chinese in particular is just written Mandarin, and is widely used even in Cantonese speaking territories such as Hong Kong, even for things meant exclusively for use in HK. --2A04:4A43:903F:F303:659B:EBB6:9243:6050 (talk) 18:05, 29 September 2024 (UTC)

Confusion Between the Group of Languages & Standardised Version

This article is about the group of languages, "官話". However, Reference 1 actually redirects to "普通話", which is the standardised version of Mandarin. Therefore this reference is not relevant to this article, as the statistics only includes those who speaks Standard Chinese. RockyLi0601 (talk) 12:09, 1 November 2024 (UTC)

The full Ethnologue entry is behind their paywall – without a subscription only a small excerpt is shown. There is confusion within the Ethnologue entry: the autonym is given as 普通话‎, but the detailed description is of the group, and the speaker figures refer to Mandarin dialects. Kanguole 12:59, 1 November 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for your information, and that also proves the fact that there is indeed confusion in this regard. We should then seek other references to replace reference 1. RockyLi0601 (talk) 13:21, 1 November 2024 (UTC)