MANDARIN, not "Chinese" (A pet peeve)

Language Learning Chinese
21

When someone tells me they’re studying Chinese I have absolutely no problem understanding what they mean. I think that probably goes for pretty much everyone reading this thread, except maybe you, Ichbin Jenny – and I’m pretty sure you know perfectly well what they mean, too.

And anyway, as far as it pertains to this site, people seeking information or advice on, say, a Cantonese expression, a Minnan expression, a Hakka expression, a Mandarin expression, and so forth, would naturally gravitate toward the “Learning Chinese” forum, no? So it’s therefore a perfectly reasonable title to use. Or perhaps you’d prefer separate forums for every Chinese dialect? In that case, Maoman would be the one to ask.

22

I’m on board with sandman’s calling it the “Learning Chinese” forum.

An then there’s the pesky “C” in CSL/CFL.

Using Chinese to describe language has wide popular usage as well as usage by academics and professionals that deal with language. Terms more precise than Chinese can be used when distinctions need to be made, but when someone writes on this forum that they want to know how to say so-and-so to 某某 in Chinese, there’s rarely any confusion as to what the target language is.

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[quote=“ichbinjenny”]I’m still in the middle of reading the thread “Why not to study in Taiwan…” and am getting frustrated by the usage of “Chinese.”

Chinese is a language family, consisting of Mandarin, Cantonese and many others that share the common writing system. However, we are not learning all of the languages – we are, for the most part – learning Mandarin.

While I do realize Mandarin specifically describes the spoken part of the language, many countries list “Mandarin” as an official language. This is done to not confuse which dialect of Sino-Tibetan language is used. Also, written Mandarin is, in some cases, written differently than written Cantonese and other languages. Note that Taiwanese (the language) has its own written form, but takes on Mandarin for standardization and understanding of general audiences.

Chinese, in modern usage, is used to describe a native or inhabitant of China, or a person whose ancestry is of China.

Would it be possible to use “Mandarin” when referring to “GuoYu” (the country language, the common language) and “Chinese” to refer to people from China (as opposed to Taiwanese, who are people from Taiwan)?

Please?

ironlady, et al: if this has been discussed before, please let me know. my search came up with many unrelated threads[/quote]

Linguistically speaking, you have a point. Many of the “dialects of Chinese” are different languages that are historically related. Mandarin is the standard and is based on the speech of Pecking.

In this formulation the Chinese languages do not share a common writing system, and have not since the abolition of Classical Chinese as the standard writing system. The current standard is based on Mandarin, thus if your native language is, let’s say, a variant of Wu2, then you will need to learn Mandarin (a different language) to be literate. This is an important point because it made setting the standard very difficult, for it was feared it would put non-Mandarin speakers into a second-class-citizen position (which it has).

Why did you say “which dialect of the Sino-Tibetan language is used”? Linguistically, “dialects” are mutually comprehensible speech variants. There is no such thing as “Sino-Tibetan language”. ST is a language family made up of Chinese and Tibeto-Burman, which includes Tibetan, Burmese, and many languages spoken in southwest China, Thailand, Burma and India.

Culturally speaking, you are totally wrong. Most “Chinese people” say they do not live in a multilingual Chinese society (excluding non-Han of course). And this makes a lot of sense when you consider the history of “the Chinese language” and its current organization. Also, in this light, opposed to the previous one, Chinese does share a writing system, because Mandarin is not a different language, and subsequently the writing system, which is based on Mandarin, is not a different language. Non-Mandarin speakers still need to learn how to speak and write Mandarin, but they are not learning a new language, just the standard. So we can think of Mandarin and the vernacular writing system as a unifying agent, that bonds all the variants into “the Chinese language 中國話” .This is a cultural construction, not a scientific one. I will not go further here, but the first chapter of “The Languages of China” by S. Robert Ramsey does a great job.

Overall, your post is wrong: it is perfectly fine to say you are studying Chinese, because you are. Most likely people will assume it is Mandarin since it is the standard. Why break Chinese up into hundreds of languages when the Chinese themselves don’t do it.

Edit:

I think this may help clarify:

普通話以北景音為標準音，以北方話為基礎方言，意典範的現代白話文著作為語法規範。（〔關於推廣普通話的指示〕，國務院 1956 年 2 月 6 日）

Thus, from its inception Pǔtōnghuà was never considered a unique language but a standard form based on Pecking Mandarin phonology and on northern dialect vocabulary, and it took its grammatical model from exemplary literary works written in the modern vernacular (which was based on Mandarin syntax) . Much like guānhuà during the Míng dynasty.

We are now in a position to say: (1) Pǔtōnghuà is closely related to the vernacular written language and vice versa , and (2) Mandarin is not considered a language distinct from other dialects, and it culturally links the dialects to a Pǔtōnghuà-Zhōngwén-focused, nationally-united whole.

There are other reasons why we should not think of Chinese as a bunch of languages: again, read Ramsey.

The term Pǔtōnghuà (the common language) actually came from federalists in Stalin’s Russia, and the man who brought it to China was executed by the KMT.

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Oh Police…cant we all get along?? :slight_smile::slight_smile:

What do we do bout “English” as well? Shouldnt there be “Ozzie” and “Merican” as well?

But I do agree that “Mandarin” is more definitive then “Chinese”

25

Yeah, well, we shouldn’t say “I’ll xerox it for you” either, because we could very well be using a Canon copier. And I hope no one wipes his nose with a Kleenex…you could be using a cheaper store brand of facial tissue.

Language is what people use, and usage is what people do. You can prescribe all you want, but in the end, the mindless majority and their patterns of usage are going to prevail. Look at poor DB – he hasn’t gotten me to say “bushou” yet either. :smiley:

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Those subordinate mindless majority are a real pain in the butt. Oops, I am one. :smiley:

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Yeah, that’s not a battle I’m going to win. But there are times when prescriptive advice helps solve problems, and times when it’s nothing but pedantry. If a term like ‘radical’ actually misleads people in their understanding of character composition and etymology, it’s a problem (and it sometimes does – if you have learned that radical means the semantic root (radix), and thus think the “radical” under which a two-part character is indexed in the dictionary is automatically and necessarily its one and only semantic component and the other half is necessarily its one and only phonetic, you’re already seriously confused).

So the question here is, does casual use of the term “Chinese” when Mandarin is intended actually mislead people and cause significant misunderstandings? The answer is probably yes and no – yes, when it leads the uninitiated to think Chinese is a language as opp. to a family, and so on; and no, because as has been argued extensively above, context usually supplies the meaning to the initiated.

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To the uninitiated, “Mandarin” means a citrus fruit. Have you never gotten a blank stare when you mentioned “Mandarin” as a language? To the truly uninitiated, “Chinese” transmits more understandable information than “Mandarin”, because in the latter case, they won’t even realize you’re talking about a language that is understood by the majority of Chinese people.

As for ichbinjenny’s pet peeve, she indicated she wanted a change of usage based on her confusion between the usage of “Chinese” as a language and “Chinese” as a people. It wasn’t because the confusion arose from the term “Chinese” being used to refer to different Sinitic languages and dialects in the same thread that she was reading. It’s like getting confused in a thread discussing the English spoken by the English versus the English spoken by Americans. I nobody got confused by the differing usage of “the English” in the last sentence.

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wait…isn’t it called ‘chinese’ in chinese? 中文

Cantonese is called 広東語

Why does the OP think that we should have to call it something different that the Chinese themselves do?

Does not compute.

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[quote=“yamato”]wait…isn’t it called ‘Chinese’ in Chinese? 中文

Cantonese is called 広東語

Why does the OP think that we should have to call it something different that the Chinese themselves do?

Does not compute.[/quote]

The written language is commonly called 中文, yes. But the spoken language of Mandarin, at least officially, is called 普通話 in China and 國語 in Taiwan. So if we’re following what Chinese people call it, should we know it as “The Common Tongue” or the “National Language”?

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‘The written language is commonly called 中文’

i’ve heard a lot of people in Taiwan call the spoken language this. Same for English.

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[quote=“yamato”]‘The written language is commonly called 中文’

I’ve heard a lot of people in Taiwan call the spoken language this. Same for English.[/quote]

True, but I think this is imprecise language. It’s like people saying “England” when they really mean “The United Kingdom”. When the need arrives for people to be precise, they will separate the two. I catch myself saying 中文 sometimes when I mean 華語/國語/普通話, but it’s a synecdoche, as Chinese is bigger than just Mandarin. One could argue that this is a case where more clarity in speech is required - although I think scjma is right that for many people in the West, “Chinese” is a hazy concept at best to begin with - distinguishing Chinese and Mandarin could be confusing.

The point for me is that yes, people usually know what you’re getting at, but it’s inaccurate. Chinese languages/dialects include Mandarin, Min, Hakka, Cantonese and so on - I’d rather say exactly what I mean. It also furthers the misconception that Chinese people all speak one language.

Consider:

  1. Most of the 1.4 billion people in China speak Chinese.
  2. Most of the 1.4 billion people in China speak a Chinese language.
  3. Most of the 1.4 billion people in China speak Mandarin.

They’re all true, but (1) is imprecise - (2) and (3) are more precise, although they mean different things.

33

Yes, it’s called that in everyday speech, but as Taffy pointed out, it’s imprecise. Yet, this imprecision is perfectly acceptable and understandable. The same goes 法文, 英文, 德文, etc. Imprecise, but no meaning is lost in everyday use.

It’s called that in Japanese. The Chinese call it 廣東話/广东话 (Guang3dong1hua4) or more formally, 粵語/粤语 (Yue4yu3).

But if we’re splitting linguistic hairs here with precision/imprecision, even “Cantonese” is imprecise (in both English and Chinese) as it is considered a major “dialect” group, even though some of the dialects classified under the Cantonese dialect group is unintelligible to Standard Cantonese speakers (i.e. Taishanese 台山話). Locals within the cultural sphere of influence of Cantonese often differentiate Standard Cantonese to other dialects/languages of Guangdong by calling it 廣州話 (Guang3zhou1hua4), 廣府話 (Guang3fu3hua4), 白話 (Bai2hua4), or 省城話 (Sheng3cheng2hua4), and probably a few others I’ve never heard of.

While using “Cantonese” is imprecise, this imprecision does not come with the cost of increased confusion if the audience are not comprised of linguists. Saying that one knows how to speak Cantonese will not cause the other to go off and wonder, “Hmm…I wonder if he meant Taishanese or Zhongshanese or Standard Cantonese…” although he might go off and wonder, “Hmm…just what the hell is Cantonese!”.

A similar analogy can be made for the word “Chinese”. I think of the term “Chinese”, when used to refer to a language, as a figurative shorthand for the “Chinese national language” unless the context indicate otherwise.

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the only problem have with what you guys are saying is that it doesn’t seem to be supported by what the Chinese themselves say. The word for ‘mandarin’ is either 華語/國語/普通話/中文/中語

Now if we exclude those words which are culturally biased (國語/普通話) we are left with nothing but words which specifically relate to ‘China’. Therefore I can see no problem with using the word ‘Chinese’ to describe a language which is described that way by the people who speak it.

the problem with talking about a ‘language family’ is that laymen generally do not think it those terms. English speakers generally do not say ‘I speak germanic’ or ‘I speak indo-European’ as thus the possibility for confusion is very small. ‘Chinese’ might be employable as a term also meaning ‘Chinese language family’ but the chance of someone getting confused by this is surely infinitesimal. Chinese people (unlike English speakers) are generally bilingual so you’re dealing with cultural difference when discussing this English speakers. However, despite this, most Chinese speakers have ‘Chinese’ as at least 1 of their languages.

35

So we’re in agreement then.

Excellent point.

Apparently, the OP was confused although her confusion rests with the fact that the word ‘Chinese’ was used to describe both a language and a people. Surely, I thought the chances of such confusion is infinitesimal, but I guess I was wrong.

36

[quote=“yamato”]the only problem have with what you guys are saying is that it doesn’t seem to be supported by what the Chinese themselves say. The word for ‘Mandarin’ is either 華語/國語/普通話/中文/中語

[/quote]

中語? Wassat??

Anyway, this funny thread on nomenclature prescriptivism: 終於講完了嗎?

EDIT: :roflmao: :roflmao: :roflmao: :roflmao: :roflmao:

(nobody liked my joke :frowning: )

37

hang on… IMO Mandarin and Cantonese are subsets of the language, Chinese… “Mandarin Chinese” is to be preferred to just “Chinese” for the sake of accuracy, if you were talking to someone who was savvy to the variants of Chinese, but trying to entirely divorce “Chinese” from “Mandarin” when referring to 國語 or 普通話 is overkill… For convenience’s sake when the greater context of “types of Chinese” is already established or understood, using just “Mandarin” or “Cantonese” isn’t a cardinal sin… BUT… to draw a parallel, while a discussion about the nuanced differences between American English and British English is all fair and above board, to say “I’m from the US so I speak American.” would be daft …

38

The thing to remember is that Mandarin is Chinese but Chinese is not necessarily Mandarin? I hope that is plain English!