[quote=“TaiOanKok”]
yes, this means you do not have the right font set up. First, make sure you have one of these fonts installed; then follow directions for setting up your browser.[/quote]
Thanks very much!
I suppose you could argue that if “Chinese” is in any sense a “language” (and a lot of people would go along with that) and that Cantonese and Taiwanese and all are varieties of Chinese… well, the usual word for those kinds of “varieties” is “dialect”.
The varieties of Chinese are sometimes referred to as regionalects, to avoid any argument.
Thing is though, the Chinese word for Chinese is “zhongwen”. And in Taiwan at least that doesn’t mean “Chinese and all its regionalects”. It means Mandarin: it’s used interchangeably with guoyu (except on the odd occasion when it refers only to the writing system).
But the thread is supposed to be about dialects of Mandarin, not dialects of Chinese. Even if you hold that non-Mandarin regionalects (Taiwanese…) are separate languages, you can still go along with the idea that say Sichuanese and putonghua are different dialects of Mandarin. Closely related but different pronunciations and tones, without the same differences of grammar and vocab that mark out non-mandarin varieties.
One thing bugs me though. What is the Mandarin term for “Mandarin” in this context? It sure ain’t guoyu or putonghua. Is it Hanyu? Does Hanyu include Sichuanese and Yunnanese, but exclude Cantonese and Taiwanese? If there’s no term in Chinese, then it’s going to be a bit tricky for anyone except foreigners to observe and discuss the notion of Mandarin dialects, and rather rule it out.
Oh, come on. I know you’ve been into Chinese long enough to know just as well as I that there is no firm definition of what “Mandarin” is. If linguists can’t even agree on a definition of the word “word,” then I doubt that all people who take an interest in the Chinese language would be able to agree on a definition of Mandarin.
I will only tell you what I think the definition of Mandarin is. The mainlanders have very prescriptive definitions for what they consider Putonghua/Guoyu, so as a non-native, I’m not going to define it as something different. All I would say is that if we go by the prescriptive descriptions of Putonghua given by mainlanders, then hardly anybody in mainland China and Taiwan speaks Putonghua. Standard Putonghua does not include Shandonghua, Guoyu as spoken in Taipei or even Beijinghua as spoken by most Beijingers, and certainly not Sichuanhua, Hubeihua or Hunanhua. Putonghua is an artificial language. For me, though, the first three are definitely Mandarin. I say they speak Mandarin because as a Mandarin/Putonghua/Guoyu speaker, I can understand them without any real difficulty. I may even go so far as to say that the last three are Mandarin because I can usually understand people who speak those tongues after talking with them for a while. I can not say the same for speakers of Cantonese, Minnan/beihua, Hakka, Chaozhouhua or Wuhua. I can understand a fair amount of Cantonese only because I am surrounded by it, speak a bit of it and hear obscenities in it when my wife is pissed off at me. The others are about as foreign to me as Spanish or French and I think the same is more or less true for all native speakers of “Mandarin.”
Some people do not pronounce Xiandai Hanyu differently. It is a prescriptive, absolute standard. People either speak it or they don’t. Modern Standard Chinese does not have different pronunciations, much less dialects. If it did, then it wouldn’t be “standard.”
It is not just a matter of pronunciation. Syntax and vocabulary also distinguish Xiandai Hanyu/Putonghua from language that I would consider Mandarin. Take a look at any prep book for the PSC. A big section of the exam is choosing the Putonghua word from a group of five words. The others are “dialect.” Even if you speak nothing but Putonghua, there are a lot of items in this section that seem to have two equally correct answers. In the free speaking part of the exam, if you say things like bashi instead of gonggongqiche for bus, jichengche instead of chuzuche for taxi and youdi quhao instead of youzheng bianhao for post code, you will lose marks even though all of these words are easily understood if not used throughout the mainland. Different areas in the “Putonghua speaking zone” have much greater differences in vocabulary than the ones I’ve mentioned above. They also have some differences in grammar. It is not just a matter of slight variation in pronunciation.
I think you are being a bit extreme. I know that you’ve been around long enough to know what I’m talking about. As mentioned by others in this thread, nobody is ever going to come up with a water tight definition for what “Mandarin” or a “dialect” is. For me, as a Putonghua speaker, any Chinese that I can understand without significant difficulty is Mandarin. If the vocabulary or pronunciation is different from the Mandarin I learned but I can still understand it without significant difficulty, then I just consider it as a different dialect of Mandarin from the one I learned. To me, it seems no different from when I hear Irish English, Scots English, English English, Oz English, etc. Their English is certainly different from mine, but not different to the point where I can’t understand it.
Are you sure about that? Are you sure that you were really reading “written Cantonese,” or were you just reading Standard Modern Chinese written by a native Cantonese speaker who included a bit of Cantonese? The reason I ask is that a lot of educated native Cantonese speakers can’t really read written Cantonese. My wife has difficulty with it. If Cantonese is truly written as Cantonese, then almost all the grammar words are different from those used in Standard Modern Chinese. A lot of the content words are different, too.
It’s interesting that you bring this up. It reminds me that when people heard me speak Guoyu in Taiwan, half of the time they said “ah, ni hui shuo zhongwen.” I can’t recall ever having heard that from a HKer or mainlander. For HK people, zhongwen is generally not used to refer to spoken language. It seems that the few times I’ve heard it used to refer to spoken language, it could have meant any form of spoken Chinese. For some people, it is only written Standard Modern Chinese. For others, it may also include written Cantonese.
This has bothered me for a long time. It seems that most foreigners see a lot of the language spoken in China as all part of the same Mandarin langauge. According to our logic, if we as non-native Mandarin speakers can understand it, then it must be some form (or dialect, if you will) of the language we learned. In my admittedly limited readings of Chinese literature on this topic, I have never come across a Chinese word that would be the same in meaning as what you and I call Mandarin. The only thing that came close was the labelling of northern China as the “Putonghua fangyan qu”(edit: should have written “Beifang fangyan qu”). Does that mean all of Putonghua (should have written “Beifanghua”) is considered one “dialect,” or is this a region of many different dialects of Putonghua (Beifanghua)? The book where I saw this did not elaborate.
I agree. The way these terms are defined mean that hardly anybody speaks Guoyu or Putonghua. I think this is especially true on the mainland because their way of describing Putonghua is so prescriptive. The more I read in Chinese on Chinese language education and linguistics, the more I feel that the word “Putonghua” is really only useful when it is used to refer to the prescriptive pedagogical standards followed in Chinese language education. It is not very useful or accurate if used in a descriptive sense.
“Hanyu” seems to include all languages spoken by Han Chinese. That would mean that it includes Cantonese and Taiwanese, but would not include languages spoken by non-Han Chinese minorities. According to the Xiandai Hanyu textbooks I’ve read, Xiandai Hanyu, or Standard Modern Chinese as it is rendered in English, follows the “rules” of Putonghua and Putonghua is the spoken form of Xiandai Hanyu. Xiandai Hanyu does not include spoken or written Cantonese, Minnanhua, etc. I guess Cantonese and Minnanhua speakers can’t call themselves modern. 
[quote=“JT”]This has bothered me for a long time. It seems that most foreigners see a lot of the language spoken in China as all part of the same Mandarin langauge.
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Yes, but it’s bothering me for a different reason: how the Chinese understand what we call “Mandarin”. I know linguists can’t define “word” or “language” or “chinese” etc, but if they can’t even agree on a term in Chinese for Mandarin (“dialects of Mandarin 的 Mandarin” then that means only foreign scholars can take part in discussions of what constitutes a Mandarin dialect. That sort of suggests to me that really there is no such category as Mandarin 
I suppose the mainland lot just lump everything together as Hanyu, as JT says, and its 方言. Actually, I think even Zhuang and Tibetan etc are sometimes considered to be 方言: is that right?
Messed up post.
It’s been a long time since I studied this stuff, but seems to me that Tibetan, for sure, is definitely not a dialect of Chinese. The structure of the language is very different, the word stock is mostly different as well. The “stacked” consonants came about supposedly when a “decision” was made not to go ideographic way back when, as a way to differentiate homophones. (This from six months of Tibetan study years back. All I can remember now is how to do that old Wendy’s commercial: Food food food food food…oh, thank you! in Tibetan. Not terribly useful except at certain select cocktail parties.)
No, it isn’t. Never heard them called 方言 by anyone.
…
This evening I went to Askfor Books 問津堂書局 at No. 3, Lane 240, Section 3, Roosevelt Road, Taibei (west side of the Taipower Building - not the MRT station - the building itself. It specialises in mainland books. There on the shelves was a book called 漢語方言概要 Hanyu Fangyan Gaiyao and sure enough it has a lot of IPA in it. Askfor Books has another branch at No. 165, Shi-Da Road.
Come on, Terry, don’t put down your abilities in Chinese… after all, you’ve been an interpreter for lots of major companies and organizations, I have no doubt that your chinese must be at the highest level. 
Our word ‘Mandarin’ comes from the older word ‘guan1hua4’ 官話, which refered the common language based on Beijinghua that officials spoke to each other in the capital. ‘Guan1hua4’ has dropped out of ordinary use in, well, Mandarin, and that’s why we can’t find an equivalent anymore.
No, it isn’t. Never heard them called 方言 by anyone.
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[quote=“Ironlady”]It’s been a long time since I studied this stuff, but seems to me that Tibetan, for sure, is definitely not a dialect of Chinese.
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I know Tibetan and what not aren’t really dialects of Chinese! But fangyan doesn’t actually mean dialect as such, it means “local speech”. I was under the impression that the Chinese authorities lumped together all of Sichuanese (dialect of Mandarin/Hanyu/Guanhua), Cantonese (separate language/dialect of Chinese) and Tibetan (separate language but still Sino -Tibetan) and Uighur (totally unrelated language from different language family), and called them all fangyan. I thought I read this somewhere.
But if Juba knows different, then I stand corrected.
Come on, Terry, don’t put down your abilities in Chinese… after all, you’ve been an interpreter for lots of major companies and organizations, I have no doubt that your Chinese must be at the highest level. [/quote]
Well, “idiolect” just means a form of the language unique to one individual…and my Chinese surely fits that criterion!! 
I think that if you talk to 99% of the non-Chinese interpreters out there, they will tell you that their Chinese will certainly be at the highest level…in about another 20 years. This is not false modesty - there is just so much to learn. I’m estimating 30 years as I’ve chosen to have a personal life these days. 