Moderators note: Split off from"Taiwanese Making Fun of Foreigners in Chinese"
Er, what precisely does “proper Chinese” mean? Are you referring to Taiwan-accented Mandarin generally, or are you referring to people for whom Taiwan-accented Mandarin is not their first language?
And where is “proper Chinese” spoken, specifically?
Er, what precisely does “proper Chinese” mean? Are you referring to Taiwan-accented Mandarin generally, or are you referring to people for whom Taiwan-accented Mandarin is not their first language?
And where is “proper Chinese” spoken, specifically?[/quote]
I think the inability to distinguish between the “zh” “sh” “j” “s” “ch” sounds is a pretty major failing in Taiwanese Chinese. You have to use finger symbols to distinguish between 4 and 10 in Taiwan, because as spoken by Taiwanese they are the exact same words. So yes, in an objective sense, most Taiwanese speak bad Mandarin. It would be the equivalent of someone speaking English as if “big, dig, pig” were all pronounced exactly the same. Accents are accents but you have to draw the line somewhere.
Er, what precisely does “proper Chinese” mean? Are you referring to Taiwan-accented Mandarin generally, or are you referring to people for whom Taiwan-accented Mandarin is not their first language?
And where is “proper Chinese” spoken, specifically?[/quote]
I think the inability to distinguish between the “zh” “sh” “j” “s” “ch” sounds is a pretty major failing in Taiwanese Chinese. You have to use finger symbols to distinguish between 4 and 10 in Taiwan, because as spoken by Taiwanese they are the exact same words. So yes, in an objective sense, most Taiwanese speak bad Mandarin. It would be the equivalent of someone speaking English as if “big, dig, pig” were all pronounced exactly the same. Accents are accents but you have to draw the line somewhere.[/quote]
I’m not at all convinced - 4 and 10, for example, have different tones and are distinguishable even if the retroflex in 10’s case has been considerably softened
Well, it is “inferior” when compared to Standard Mandarin, the Beijing standard. But I agree that it doesn’t really matter, and that it’s the same as the variations in English from BBC/Queen’s English
And there is a strain of decidedly inferior Mandarin spoken in Taiwan. It’s not the most common, but it’s hardly rare - that which leads people to say “hui” for “fei”, “huan” for “fan”, etc. That has the potential to change entire words.
Interesting, although people who do this are clearly native speakers of Taiyu and, as time goes on, increasingly from older generations
Well, it is “inferior” when compared to Standard Mandarin, the Beijing standard.[/quote]The only people I’ve heard this sort of elitism from in the last ten years have all been bigots from PFP ranks wearing orange armbands, or foreigners fresh out of MTC. Like it or not, Taiwan Goyi is now the defacto standard and the tongue-curlers sound a little ridiculous and phony in most settings.
I understand that this thread has deviated somewhat from its original theme, but I have to respectfully disagree with it being moved to “Learning Chinese” because it’s not about learning Chinese. “Living in Taiwan” would have been more suitable, I think.
Well, it is “inferior” when compared to Standard Mandarin, the Beijing standard.[/quote]The only people I’ve heard this sort of elitism from in the last ten years have all been bigots from PFP ranks wearing orange armbands, or foreigners fresh out of MTC. Like it or not, Taiwan Goyi is now the defacto standard and the tongue-curlers sound a little ridiculous and phony in most settings.[/quote]
You’ll note, firstly, that I put “inferior” in quotemarks. I don’t mean it’s inferior as in “grr stamp out evil taiwanese now”. I was using that term as that’s what’s been used throughout.
And by the way, I hate to break it to you, but the only place Taiwan Guoyu is standard is Taiwan. Taiwanese stand out like a sore thumb abroad when in Mandarin-speaking contexts. Your comment is like me saying New Zealand English is the “defacto standard” because that’s all I heard in New Zealand. Whether you like it or not, Standard Mandarin is defined as the Beijing-based Mandarin, just “standard” English is, with the possible exception of American English, Queen’s English. Check it out if you want - Taiwan Mandarin is a dialect of Mandarin, not Standard Mandarin.
But you’re right, in Taiwan, those that speak Standard Mandarin do sound odd and out of place, just the same as someone speaking Queen’s English would sound out of place in Auckland.
[quote=“zhujianlun”]Interesting, although people who do this are clearly native speakers of Taiyu and, as time goes on, increasingly from older generations
At the risk of appearing facetious, defined by whom? In China’s case these matters were quite inseparable from political interests, with linguists acting under the auspices of the CCP. Obviously the genesis of Mandarin goes back further than that, but my point is, what authority sets the standard, and what happens if that authority is disputed? And what about full-form characters? Presumably these carriers of “5,000 years of Chinese history” are no longer standard. My response? Tell the standard and its enforcers (in this case, Beijing) to mind their own damn business.
Language is the property of human beings and human communities and its custodians are teachers and scholars, not political parties or governments. In China, and to a much lesser extent in Taiwan today, the two groups are too closely wedded.
Compare this to English, where authority is scholastic and the consequences of reasoned defiance toward the OED are called “variations” or “interpretations” (unless you’re being examined as a student, but this is hardly political).
It’s also useful to remember that Mandarin is based on Beijinghua, and therefore has an overwhelming regional bias. In this case, “standard” can sometimes have a sinister feel to it if it is used to actively suppress growth away from the linguistic center. And we’re not talking about permitting obvious misspellings and the like, but rather the inclusion of new words specific to local areas, the introduction of new characters based on local Chinese languages (Taiyu and Cantonese have the best examples). Variations in pronunciation. All of these things are inevitable, but the KMT and the CCP did their level best to stand in the way of this process.
When I first came to Taiwan I had a problem with the retroflex
Well, let’s see:
The definition I mean is by actual linguists. Not just CCP linguists, I mean the bulk of the field.
I mean standard from a phonological and linguistic perspective, not in terms of localized vocabulary. The character issue is seperate, although Traditional and Simplified are considered standard character sets.
You were the first one who said anything about inferiority. There were mentions of failings and lacks, but no-one ever said it was inferior until you put that word in someone’s mouth.
[quote=“Tetsuo”]Well, let’s see:
3) You were the first one who said anything about inferiority. There were mentions of failings and lacks, but no-one ever said it was inferior until you put that word in someone’s mouth.[/quote]
Come on Tetsuo, fair’s fair, I was criticising the connotation of inferiority ascribed to Taiwanese Mandarin, which is quite apparent in the following quotes by other posters:
“I think the inability to distinguish between the “zh” “sh” “j” “s” “ch” sounds is a pretty major failing in Taiwanese Chinese.”
“… very few Taiwanese can speak proper Chinese themselves.”
And your comment, which embraces the word “inferior”:
“And there is a strain of decidedly inferior Mandarin spoken in Taiwan.”
I wasn’t putting words in anyone’s mouth. If these quotes don’t point to an idea of inferiority (which is what is implied if there is a chronic lack of some nature) then what does?
You still haven’t answered my question. When basic consonant sounds in a language are rendered indistinguishable from each other, most people would say that is pronouncing the language poorly. When we teach English pronunciation to non-native speakers, distinguishing between sounds like “f” and “th”, “p” and “b”, “t” and “d”, “s” and “sh” is emphasized and someone who says, “Shelly sells seashells by the seashore” as one blur is judged to be pronouncing English improperly.
The comparison to New Zealanders’ pronunciation of English is innacurrate, because New Zealanders are mostly native speakers who learned to speak English from native speakers. Many Taiwanese, on the other hand, aren’t native speakers of Mandarin, hence their poor pronunciation; and that older generation passed on their bad pronunciation habits to their children. A better analogy would be Filipino English or Singlish; it would be rude to make fun of Filipinos or Singaporeans or Indians or Jamaicans for their non-standard English, but it would be a lie to pretend that it’s proper English. They are creolizations of English that in some cases are incomprehensible enough to straddle the border between thick dialect and outright foreign tongue. Taiwanese Mandarin occupies a similar position.
Well, it is “inferior” when compared to Standard Mandarin, the Beijing standard. But I agree that it doesn’t really matter, and that it’s the same as the variations in English from BBC/Queen’s English
And there is a strain of decidedly inferior Mandarin spoken in Taiwan. It’s not the most common, but it’s hardly rare - that which leads people to say “hui” for “fei”, “huan” for “fan”, etc. That has the potential to change entire words.[/quote]
I wouldn’t call it “inferior”, but instead “non-standard”. It’s just an accent, such as when Southerners in the US pronounce “pin” and “pen” in exactly the same way, or say “your all’s” (as they do in Kentucky) for the second person plural possessive pronoun.
Of course, this brings us to the debate on what “standard” Mandarin is. Is it really Beijing Chinese, with all its its “r” sounds finding their way into every other word?
[quote=“Tetsuo”]
But you’re right, in Taiwan, those that speak Standard Mandarin do sound odd and out of place, just the same as someone speaking Queen’s English would sound out of place in Auckland.[/quote]
I’d agree with this. Indeed, waiguoren in Taiwan who speak with a strong Beijing accent (e.g. “Wo de airen tongzhi shang nar qu le?”) sound a little silly here.
This is a pretty daring comparison and a difficult one to prove or refute. I will just say that many things said in this discussion about Taiwan Guoyu can be said about the the way the vast majority of mainlanders speak Putonghua. In fact, if we go by the unrealistic yardstick set by the folks at the
There are a lot of things I want to address in this thread 
Obviously there can be difficulties in communication between people from one area and outsiders; but rarely do the people speaking the language/dialect consider it difficult to tell what the other person is saying. So the problem is not inherent in the language, the speaker, or the listener; it’s just a matter of different habits.
On this particlar point, retroflex initials are a relatively new sound in Chinese in the first place-- as a rule southern Chinese dialects, which are more conservative, don’t have them. Can you imagine when zh, ch, sh, and r were first appearing in Northern China, how some prescriptive linguists would have been constantly correcting people, telling them they were “messing up the pronunciation?” And now we these sounds are considered “standard.”
The 4/10 issue has been discussed-- tone change shows a distinction. And you say most Taiwanese speak “bad Mandarin–” I’ll agree with Chris who prefered “non-standard” (a standard set not as a reflection of what the majority of people speak, bur rather an arbitrary standard set by the government).
However, this “non-standard” Mandarin has gained increasing ground, and while most Taiwanese still consider it “lower class” than speech that employes the retroflex, there is no question of the linguistic trend. Eventually, after a very long period of change, Taiwan may even stop trying to distinguish zh/z, sh/s, ch/c, and r/n-l-[z] in dictionaries.
Also note that older Mandarin speakers in Taiwan who’s native language was Taiwanese speak with an even heavier accent than younger people; it contrasted greatly with the sharp retroflexes of some WSR. There has been a sort of medium, a compromise reached amoung the younger generation, regardless of ethnicity, and it happened within society all on its own, without government interference. Imagine that.
It is indeed an evolution of the language, and indeed can cause communication problems. If I were in Beijing, I would do my best to make the distinction, as they have the habit of the distinction.
But there is nothing holy about a langauge, or even the “standard language.” It will evolve, and does not have an unwavering “correct” standard, and has evolved in Taiwan. The Taiwanese with the heaviest accents have no few to no problems understanding each other. It’s just a matter of habit, not a matter of correct or incorrect. The language teachers and dictionaries are often the last people to catch up to matters of fact. The habit of deciding what is “proper” and “improper” is most often a class based distinction-- the “standard” and “proper” language tends to reflect the language spoken by the ruling class.
For example, English grammar teachers have taught a difference between “who” (Subj) and “whom” (DO). But the distinction has not been reflected in how most people actually speak since about 1500. To quote The Origins and the Development of the English Language (pp 193-194, 4th edition), “Relative who as object of verb or preposition is [frequent,]” and Shakespeare uses it in this way at least a dozen times; “There are . . . a good many instances of whom for the nominative” as well, such as Matthew 16:13 and Tempest 3.3.92. The OED notes that whom is no longer frequent in colloquial speech.
Whom “purists” are not only using a relatively new rule and insisting it’s traditoinal, but they’re so elitist about it.
Back on topic . . .
Bingo. And there are certain advantages to the government setting a “standard” for convenience-- standardized spelling and to a lesser extent textbook pronunciation being the most obvious.
But when it comes to language, it’s very misleading to call one set of habits “correct,” or “superior” and another “incorrect” or “inferior.”
TaiOanKok pretty much said it, but one more way to put it:
We have to keep straight the distinction between descriptive and prescriptive. When linguistis study language (and I’m referring here to linguistis in modern linguistics departments, which is a sub-area of cognitive science, not historical linguistics, who might be in the Chinese department, etc.), they’re interested in how real native speakers actually speak. And real people don’t follow all the rules as set forward by whatever the standard is. BUT, even if they don’t distinguish between zhi and zi, chi and ci, or whatever, their language still follows rules, they can be said to have an innate knowledge of the grammar of their language. Grammar here just means all that innate, unconscious knowledge of the regularities of the language as spoken by the native speaker. This is the descriptive level. The prescriptive is all the crap that you generally need to be taught, because you don’t have that innate competence for it.
If you are a native speaker of a language, then you by default have a full and complete (unconscious) knowledge of the regularities of that language. This is an innate capacity of the mind (see books by Steven Pinker). You might not like the fact that some Chinese speakers don’t distinguish between zhi and zi or chi and ci, or that some English speakers say ain’t, but according to a linguist these are merely dialectical differences. Those people have no trouble communicating in their particular dialect. If you think speakers of Taiwan Guoyu are somehow deficient or unable to communicate certain things, this can only reflect your lack of proficiency in the language and inability to see that these native speakers do not, in fact, have any trouble communicating with each other.
There might be good reasons for trying prescribe a certain dialect as the standard, but that in no way diminishes from the validity of speakers of “non-standard” dialects. Maybe they’re not so good at learning the rules that others want to enforce on them, or maybe they choose not to. These kind of dialectical differences can be said to be incorrect only according to the prescriptive level of analysis. On the descriptive level, there’s nothing wrong with them at all.
I think when you have an accent when you speak Chinese it adds flavour. Who wants to listen to boring Oxford English? I prefer a (comprehensible) accent any day. Plus, lots of chinese find it really funny that I have the southern Taiwan accent as a foreigner.
First of all, I think people are misusing some concepts here. “Guoyu” and “Taiwan Guoyu” are not the same, and I think people are misconstruing the meaning of the latter term. “Taiwan Guoyu” according to academics I’ve asked refers to the mixture of “Guoyu” and the Minnan-hua, whether it be inserting Taiwanese words, speaking “Guoyu” with Taiwanese grammar, or severely distorting “standard” pronunciation (and not just the retroflex). So, don’t confuse “the Guoyu (Mandarin) spoken in Taiwan” with “Taiwan Guoyu”.
Secondly, my dislike of the Guoyu spoken in Taiwan is not so much the pronunciation (you get used to it after awhile), but the influence of Taiwanese grammar (things like inserting a “you” in front of verbs, or over-using the “bing” structure – like “bing bushi” or “bing meiyou”). I don’t like it because the spoken grammar that I get used to influences the way I write, and this kind of grammar is considered “inferior”, “sub-standard”, and just plain old wrong by all of my professors (many of whom are VERY Taiwanese and speak with very thick accents a la Chen Shui-bian). I’ve had a bit of difficulty trying to keep those things out of my writing, and have had it pointed out to me quite a bit. So, even in Taiwan, there is a “standard” Mandarin that is different from what your average-day Taiwanese speaks.
I also agree, however, that there is no “right” or “wrong” if you are a native speaker. Those kinds of ideas were refuted a long, long time ago by linguists.