Talk:Mandarin (linguistics)

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To-do list for Mandarin (linguistics):

edit · history · watch · refresh

Sections needed: Geographic distribution Discussions on official status as well as dialects are usually put under this header. Grammar Classification Sections needing improvement: History Good overall section, but in need of more detail. Phonology A comprehensive summary is sorely needed. What phonological traits do Mandarin dialects share? How do they differ from other forms of Chinese? Created by Peter Isotalo 11:09, 25 January 2006 (UTC).

Contents 1 Why is dialect and language used interchangably to describe Mandain? 2 Singapore standardizes on Mandarin 3 Fixed some items: 4 Vote for Deletion? 5 Straying from subject. 6 Number of native speakers 7 Etymology of "Mandarin" 8 Move to Mandarin language 9 On Mandarin or on putonghua / Guoyu? 10 Question about IPA 11 "Mandarin" or "Mandarin Chinese" 12 IPA inconsistency 13 Mistaken disambiguation? 14 Character Encoding? 15 Mandarin vs Other 16 Move to Beifanghua 17 Redid romanization of Taiwanese example 18 Merging Putonghua and Guoyu 19 Swedish translation 20 Mandarin, Japanese, and fustration 20.1 FUSTRATED 20.2 what the 20.3 brainless 21 Official system for approximating foreign words? 22 Request for references 23 Title change 24 Needs More Pics 25 FA-worthiness 26 GA failed 27 Writing system, Sounds of the language 28 Beifanghua is not = to Mandarin 29 Linking 30 Disputed 31 A load of junk 32 Chinese name of Mandarin dialect/language group (not putonghua), is it beifanghua or guanhua? 33 Huge text edit 34 Syllabe timed issue 35 Suggestion which might be outside of the scope of this article 36 Added references to language/dialect

[edit] Why is dialect and language used interchangably to describe Mandain?

If Mandarin is a language, then its sub-branches are dialects. If Chinese is a language, Mandarin is a dialect.

Either

Please put new postings at the botom of this page.

Please sign your postings.

If those terms are used interchangably it is probably because the whole of Chinese is a unity and the distinctions that people introduce are matters of individual covenience. Terms like "language family." "language," and "dialect" grew up in a rather helter-skelter way. There are no authoritative definitions, universally accepted definitions, for where to hack the language tree apart into chunks. So people use their own ideas. You have observed the results.P0M 06:32, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

Mandarin is a language - it's refered to as a dialect for cultural unity purposes, but in reality it's a separate language from Cantonese or Ming Na. Intranetusa (talk) 21:15, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Singapore standardizes on Mandarin

I don't know enough about it to write myself, but the 'Speak Mandarin!' campaign in Singapore is an interesting example of language standardizing where the local dialect of Chinese was not Mandarin.

---

It is hard to standardize on a dialect. People in Hong Kong speak Cantonese. But when they got to know about 1997 a couple of decades ago, people started taking Mandarin classes on their own. Many grade schools and high schools started to include Mandarin as one of their subjects. It is now almost 20 years since the negotiations about China taking back Hong Kong in 1997, but Cantonese still is the dialect (language is more appropriate here) people speak in Hong Kong. However, many more people, especially the young and educated, now know Mandarin.

---

Why "Mandarin Chinese"? That makes no sense; this article should be either under "Mandarin" or under "Mandarin language". Mkweise 06:20 Mar 7, 2003 (UTC)

[edit] Fixed some items:

• I'm using Mandarin Chinese because that's what it is usually called.

• Mandarin Chinese uses the sounds of Beijing, but it's a mistake to say that it is based on Beijing dialect. Beijing dialect contains some non-standard vocabulary.

P0M:Being "based on" something is different from being (nearly) "identical with" something. The explanation I have heard is that the Ministry of Education back in the 1920s had to decide on a single standard pronunciation so that a dictionary and other educational materials could be prepared for use as the language of education throughout China. They decided to use the Chinese regional language (fang1 yan2) with the greatest geographical scope. At that time, that regional language was called "guan1 hua4", or "language of the officials" because that was the regional language that had been used to conduct official business in the imperial court. However, deciding to use that regional language did not end the process because its area reaches from Manchuria in the north-eastern part of China to Yun Nan in the south-western part of China, and there are dialect differences as great as the dialect differences among varieties of English within that area.

P0M:As I understand it, the mother tongue of most people who live in Yun Nan is a dialect of the same language that includes the mother tongue of most people who live in Beijing. I can understand educated speakers from Beijing well, but I could not understand anything said to me in the dialect of Yun Nan -- until somebody repeated it in the Beijing dialect. Then it became clear that if I learned the regularities of phonetic drift (like British "med-cine" vs. U.S. "med-i-cine" or "al-u-min-i-um" vs. "a-loom-i-num") I would easily be able to deal with Yun Nan dialect without much trouble. I would face the same problem if I moved to the outback of Australia, and the time-frame for adapting to all the changes would probably be similar -- a matter of weeks or months. Learning to speak the regional language called Taiwanese, however, would not be a matter of months for me but a matter of years.

P0M: The educational planners originally tried for a kind of compromise pronunciation but fairly rapidly backpedaled to a version of the Beijing dialect that had been shorn of most of its regional quirks. (For instance, Beijing speakers will say something that sounds like "meer gha" (I believe that is a compressed form of "ming2 ri4 ge") for "tomorrow.")

P0M: With the rise to power of the CCP, there appears to have been a reaction against "elitism", and educational authorities were more permissive in regard to regionalisms -- or perhaps they were simply more candid about what passed for "the single language of instruction" in schools whose teachers frequently retained much of their regional accents. At least in the 60s in Taiwan, it was fairly rare for teachers to have a standard pronunciation. But there was at that time strong offical emphasis on raising the level of adherance to the standard pronunciation as defined in the 1920s Guo2 Yu3 Ci2 Dian3 and other educational materials based on that standard.

P0M: Theory and politics aside, comparison of dictionaries produced in mainland China and on Taiwan will show few differences in pronunciation, and most of those differences will be differences in tones. For instance, xing1 qi1 san1 vs. xing1 qi2 san1 for "Wednesday," differs solely in the tone indicated for "qi".

• Pekingese is not wades-giles.

P0M: Wade was one person, and Giles another. The "Wade-Giles" mentioned above is a system of romanization. In Giles's dictionary (1892), he gives honor of place to the pronunciation of Beijing in his own system of romanization -- but he also gives detailed records of the pronunciations used in other regional languages. The Chinese-English dictionary produced by Mathews (1931), however, is rather difficult to use because it does not adhere to the same standard of pronunciation as used by Giles. The pronunciations given by Giles are almost always exactly what one will find in modern dictionaries of "Mandarin." Not so for Mathews Chinese-English Dictionary.

• Mandarin Chinese has not been the official language of China for centuries. Mandarin was only made the official language in the 1920's, and before then one could argue that the official language of China was classical Chinese.

P0M: China did not have an official language of instruction during imperial times because there was no universal system of compulsory education such as now exists in the U.S., in China, in Taiwan... However, there was a de facto standard language, "guan1 hua4" because an official from Guang1 Dong1 could not expect the Emperor or his ministers to learn Cantonese to save the official the trouble of learning what was spoken at court. If you wanted to conduct business at court you needed to be able to speak the language of the people in power there.

P0M: Classical Chinese is not a spoken language. It is a written language, and anyone who speaks any regional Chinese language can read classical Chinese in their own regional pronunciation. To function in government, one had to be able to read and write classical Chinese. In fact, one could not even take an entry level civil service exam without being fluent in classical Chinese.

--- The pronunciation of Hanja in Korean and Kanji in Japanese are closer to Cantonese than Mandarin. Since Japanese and Korean adopted these Chinese writing long time ago, similar pronunciation in Japanese, Korean and Cantonese may reflect what ancient Chinese once sounded like, which may also imply ancient Chinese does not sound like today's Mandarin. Can some linguists and historians try to explain what happened to Mandarin?

P0M: I'm not a linguist, nor am I a historian, but I can try to pass along the gist of what I have learned. Both Japanese and Korean are as different from Chinese as Chinese is from English -- except that they each (in different ways) borrowed their writing systems from China. Not only that, they also borrowed a great deal of cultural and technological vocabulary items, and these borrowed items tended to retain their Chinese names. In the case of Japan, wholesale importation of Chinese vocabulary items happened more than once, so many time a Chinese character will have two different pronunciations in Japanese relating to the time and the place from which the vocabulary item in question was imported. (Because many Chinese vocabulary items are multi-character units, the same single character could get "imported" at different times in different compounds.) And very frequently the Chinese character will also have a pronunciation that relates solely to the native Japanese word for whatever the character represents. For instance, the word for "home" in Chinese (jia1) becomes used to write "uchi" (house) in Japanese.

P0M: Languages do not hold still. As time passes the pronunciations in any given region will change. So it is risky to argue from the pronunciations of today that they must have come from the region in China that now uses a similar pronunciation. For instance, in current Taiwanese the word for University is (roughly) pronounced "dai hak" and the Japanese for that term is "dai gaku", and that is just one example out of many. But linguists tell me that such terms were not imported from Taiwan or Fujian but from other parts of China, that the Taiwanese pronunciation must have changed over the intervening hundreds of years, etc., etc. So it gets extremely complicated, and non-experts are likely to get tricked.

[edit] Vote for Deletion?

This was the discussion when this page was proposed for deletion. The consensus was to keep the page or rename it

• Mandarin language needs to be deleted, so that the article currently at Mandarin Language can be moved back there. (Someone had moved it to Mandarin (linguistics) for unknown reasons.) Mkweise 08:14, 22 Oct 2003 (UTC)
  • Oppose; See the discussion at Talk:Hakka (linguistics). This was also announced at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (Chinese). Mandarin cannot be considered a "language", but rather a dialect of the Chinese language. We chose this format for all Chinese dialects to prevent taking sides on this issue. Please discuss before you move things next time. --Jiang 08:16, 22 Oct 2003 (UTC)
  • I know nothing about it, but if Mandarin is not a language, should the article start by stating "Mandarin is the official language of..." - Marshman 09:08, 22 Oct 2003 (UTC)
    • It can be considered a language. See the points made by Patrick0Moran at Talk:Hakka (linguistics). The current naming convention is intended to be neutral. --Jiang 09:21, 22 Oct 2003 (UTC)
  • Keep. As Jiang said. -- Jake 14:43, 24 Oct 2003 (UTC)
  • This seems like a technical issue that needs more thought. -Nydigoveth
  • Keep. We should definitely have an article on the language! Panochik 03:16, 28 Oct 2003 (UTC)

P0M: What is really needed is a "language tree" like the one inside the front cover of my Webster's New World Dictionary of the English Language -- something that would show the relations among the regional languages. That general approach is taken in Chinese linguistics books where one speaks not of "languages", "regional languages," or "dialects" but of "yu3 xi4" or "language family ties" (or something like that, it's a bit hard to translate on a word-for-word basis).

P0M: What would also be useful is a comparison of the "Chinese languages" to the "Romance languages". I don't know how one would quantify things, but my general sense is that Cantonese, Fukkienese, Shanghainese, etc. (sorry for using their old names) are about as far from each other as are Spanish, French, Italian, and so forth. Then for a discussion of the regional variations of Mandarin (AKA Guo2 Yu3, AKA pu3 tong1 hua4), it would be extremely useful to get some careful transliterations into IPA or something of the way the most incomprehensible (to me) speakers of Australian English and the most "correct and natural" (to me) speakers of English from somewhere around Des Moines, Iowa, say the same thing. Or perhaps a rich Cockney English compared to the gentle drawl of Georgia in byegone days would be instructive.

P0M: Ees zan Innuit, innit?  ;-) Eye doughn wanna maykya giss! But tay. ;-)

[edit] Straying from subject.

Stuff about the Chinese language in general would belong in that article instead of this one. --Jiang 07:56, 25 Dec 2003 (UTC)

P0M:I do not know anything about the history of the decision to speak of Chinese "dialects" within the Wikipedia community, but historically the decision to refer to Cantonese and other such major divisions as "dialects" was not one that promoted clarity on how the various forms of Chinese are related. I am still tinkering a bit with the maps that show the extend of Mandarin (or the 3 Mandarins), and with the chart that shows the "family tree" of the Chinese language(s). As a practical matter, it costs nothing to put links to these images in more than one place. When discussing how, e.g., Si4 chuan1 hua4 is related to the national language of instruction vs. how Cantonese is related to the national language of instruction, a glance at a map and a chart will probably do the general more good than a paragraph or two of explanation using terms that are muddy because they have been used to represent different meanings.

P0M: It is fairly clear that even though different authorities use different terms in Chinese to discuss the relations between the various kinds of Chinese, they are much clearer in their discussions than most of what has been written in English by people who have not experienced the similarities and differences for themselves. And within the Chinese community it is my impression that a great many people have a clear awareness that, e.g., Tai2 Wan1 hua4 is a little different from the version of Min2 nan2 hua4 spoken across the Straits of Taiwan, and that it is much more different from Hakka and from Guo2 yu3 (Pu3 tong1 hua4). But I suspect that it is rare among non-specialists to realize that Cantonese is closer to Mandarin than is Min2 nan2 hua4.

P0M: I had never heard of the Jin4 language until I started doing these maps and charts, and I think nobody had ever mentioned it to me as a meaningful variety of Chinese. In fact, I had to go back and modify a map to add it in, since the work I was basing my chart on seems to have regarded it as a variation of Mandarin -- despite the fact that it retains archaic elements such as the entering tone. So I think it may be useful to get the basic information down somewhere and then decide how best to discuss the similarities and differences in English.

That tree of languages is Chinese-general, not Mandarin-specific. Mandarin itself could have a tree of dialects. --Menchi (Talk)â 08:22, 27 Dec 2003 (UTC)

P0M: Right. My next job will be to add some "topiary" to the top of the tree. It is getting a bit crowded, so maybe I should "blow up" that part of the diagram and remove the rest of it to somewhere more suited to a discussion of the whole language.

If you haven't already, see my note at the botton of Talk:Chinese language. --Jiang 08:33, 27 Dec 2003 (UTC)

P0M: Chopped the image, and added topiary to give some impression of the sub-dialects or whatever we are going to end up calling them. Also changed maps etc. on your scratch pad.

---

Adding my two-cents worth to the subject (not directed to any person in particular): Mandel

(1) I would have to agree with Jiang and Menchi that some parts of the article, excellent though they are, seems more in place in a general article on the Chinese language than on Mandarin Chinese.

To clarify the discussion for some non-Chinese speaking readers, and to add a bit of my subjective views, here are some clarification points on Mandarin Chinese itself:

(2) The term for language in Chinese is yuwen. For the Chinese language composed of two parts, the verbal (yu) and the written (wen). There has been no confusion over the written script since Emperor Shih Huang-di unified the written language. But the same script can be read differently using different dialects.

Hence, be very careful when applying the nomenclature "language" to the Chinese language. Lots of misunderstanding above stems from the fact that non-Chinese readers take it there are only one way of reading the Chinese script. Unlike the primary European languages where is primarily only one way of pronunciating English, Spanish, French etc, there are many ways to read the Chinese written language using a choice of dialects. Dialectal differences aside, most English, French can still tell what someone else is saying in a dialect of the same language (eg. Scottish, Yorkshire dialect in English) . But with no proper training, a person who knows Mandarin cannot understand Cantonese at all.

(3) "Mandarin Chinese has not been the official language of China for centuries. Mandarin was only made the official language in the 1920's, and before then one could argue that the official language of China was classical Chinese."

P0M is completely right in saying that classical Chinese is only a written language. It has no spoken component to it (see point 2 above). You can read classical Chinese in Mandarin, meaning the two are not mutually exclusive.

Let me add one more thing. Mandarin Chinese had been the official spoken language (or dialect) of China since the Yuan (Mongol) dynasty (1279-1368). It had not been made the official language only since the 1920s. The ancient Chinese had a system of official spoken language of widespread usage since the Han dynasty. Wouldn't it seem very strange if people from one part of the empire couldn't communicate with another verbally?

Mandarin Chinese is the eventual winner because a) it is spoken by the majority of Chinese (some 50%?) as their native tongue, particularly in the North, Central and Southwest (hence different variations in pronunciation and vocabulary from these regions); b) it is used in and around the capital where the Manchurians held court; and most importantly, c) it has been the undisputed official tongue of exchange and communication since the Yuan dynasty. It is now common in South China to know Mandarin and one's native dialect, and to use it interchangeably at different people and occasions. Today 99 % of Han Chinese speaks and understands Mandarin, whether or not it is their native dialect tongue (just like a Welsh would know English).

Hence Mandarin Chinese has been the official spoken language of China for at least 7 centuries. A simple evidence is the name for the dialect, which literally means "the officials' tongue".

(4) Is Mandarin a "dialect"? Well...hard to say. Mandarin *was* a dialect...at the point if you consider it is just the native tongue of some 50% of Han Chinese. But standard Mandarin (putonghua in China; guoyu in Taiwan) is trying to grow into a language. It is evolving just like Recieved Pronunciation is growing into the standard for English in Britain. Today, if you say spoken Chinese most people take it to be standard Mandarin, meaning it is fairly successful in this evolution. Let's not throttle it because Mandarin really is a unifying force in communication between Chinese and foreigners picking up Chinese.

[P0M:] As I understand the word "dialect," it can have two interpretations. One interpretation assumes that there is a correct language (the first language, or the language the king speaks, or the language that is by some such means declared to be standard), and that all offshoots of that language that a native speaker of that language can still puzzle out are "dialects". The other view is somewhat more objective (or less prescriptive). It says that, for instance, none of the versions of English now spoken are very much like the original. They have all diverged from a common center and so it is wrong to privilege any of them. They should all be regarded as "dialects". Mandel brings in the further idea that in such a situation an attempt may be made to standardize or to reunite the speech of a fairly broad linguistic community by conscious efforts to do so.

[P0M:] Actually, vis-a-vis Cantonese, Hakka, and others, "Mandarin" (or guan1 hua4) is already a language because the aforesaid several forms of speech are mutually unintelligible. The current effort is to make "pu3 tong1 hua4" or "guo2 yu3" the standard for that language. (You could call it "the standard dialect" under interpretation one above.)

Just my two-cents worth. To discuss either go to my talk page or continue along this page. - Mandel

[edit] Number of native speakers

I take issue with the claim in the intro that there are 1.2 billion native speakers of Mandarin. The fact is, despite the efforts of the Chinese government, large segments of Chinese youth simply do not ever pick up Mandarin to anywhere near native levels. And learning in school is not really "native" learning. Furthermore, many older people do not know it at all. These comments apply especially to non-Han groups within China. If, as it appears, this figure is derived directly from the population of China, it seems a gross overestimate. Also, "widely-spoken" (on the main page, not the article here) is somewhat ambiguous in meaning; Mandarin is hardly spoken outside of China and a few nearby Chinese communities, and so could be said to be less widely spoken than English, French, or Spanish. Well, comments? -- VV 11:37, 27 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Jiang seems to have taken care of the main issue I raised here, but I do think some mention of numbers would be helpful, I just want more credible numbers. (Oh, and "widely spoken" remains.) -- VV 21:43, 27 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Not to harp on this, but I still don't agree with the latest, "mother tongue" claim. The "mother tongue" for most Chinese is their local dialect, not Mandarin. Mandarin is a language they are taught and, in many cases, never have use for once they finish school. -- VV 23:15, 28 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Mandel--15 Apr 2004: Just very surprised (stunned even) with the comments that people "never have use for [Mandarin] once they finish school". Surely this comment can't be true within China proper and Taiwan?

The latest effort (ie. "There are more speakers of Mandarin than any other language...") sounds very laudable.

---

[edit] Etymology of "Mandarin"

Besides the Malay word, could there have been a popular etymology or analogy with Portuguese mandar, "to command". Mandarins did mandar a lot.

[P0M:] The trick is always to trace these things back to a "locus classicus," a first occurrence. Then one may hope to find it in a context that indicates clearly how it was originally derived. One issue, which arises around words like "ketchup," is that there probably has always been a lot of borrowing of vocabulary between Nan2 Yang2 and China, especially the southern provinces. There is a word in Taiwanese that may well be the source of "ketchup," but there is a similar word in Malay. Who made it up, and who transliterated it? What if it was a Chinese cook with a Malay wife who mispronounced her husband's Chinese description and made it into a name for a specific product? Probably we will never know. P0M 20:07, 27 Mar 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Move to Mandarin language

I move that this page be moved from Mandarin (linguistics) to Mandarin language, to bring it into line with Wikipedia style guidelines. -- Kwekubo 21:36, 27 Mar 2004 (UTC)

see #Vote for Deletion? --Jiang 18:06, 15 Apr 2004 (UTC)

[edit] On Mandarin or on putonghua / Guoyu?

I think one of the big problems of this article -- and one of the reasons it is so confusing -- is that it is unsure whether it is about Mandarin Chinese, the dialect from which the standard form is derivated, or about standard Mandarin (putonghua or Guoyu) itself. There is no marked distinction between Mandarin the dialect and standard Mandarin, nor any parts about its evolution. I think people generally unknowledgeable about tha language (and the ones who should benefit most from the article) will probably be as lost as enlightened after reading it.

Some parts of the article are fuzzy in conception, unclear or simply untrue. Examples:

"One common misconception is that Mandarin is the same as "Beijing dialect". It is true that the standard pronunciation and grammar of the language of instruction is based on the Beijing dialect, but "standard Mandarin" is a rather elusive concept since it is a set of "constructed" language standards imposed on people who are asked to give up their accustomed regional pronunciations." (Understandable for 1 1/2 sentence but is the latter part at all true?)

"Over the vast area from Manchuria in the north-eastern part of China to Yunnan in the south-western part of China, the home language of most people is Mandarin (in the global sense), but these home languages all differ from the pronunciation, vocabulary, and sometimes even the grammar of the language of instruction." (Misnomering of the term "language" with "dialect". Here it refers specifically to Mandarin as a "dialect" not as a "language")

"People who live in Tianjin also have quite standard pronunciations. People who live in the northeastern part of China frequently change j-initial sounds to g- or k-initial sounds and have difficulty pronouncing initial "ri" sounds. etc etc." (Entire remaining section do not seek to explain the difference between Beijing dialect and Mandarin. Simply move to the next section - "Variations")

"From an official point of view, there are two Mandarins, since the Beijing government refers to that on the Mainland Putonghua, or "Common Language", whereas the Taipei government refers to their official language as Kuo-yü, or "National Language". (NOT two Mandarins BUT "two forms of standard Mandarin". Mandarin has no plural form...ie. one Mandarin, two Mandarins...)

"Officially, Putonghua includes pronunciations from a number of different regions, while Kuoyu is theoretically based on the Beijing sounds only. Comparison of dictionaries produced in the two areas will show that there are few substantial differences. " (I'm skeptical about this. Does the writer mean "accent" or "pronunciation"? Or "vocabulary" for "pronunciation"? So far as I know there is virtually no difference in pronunciation between the two places at all...of course I'm speaking about the standard official version, not about the people residing either places who speak a local variant. I have gone through both dictionaries and found no "substantial" difference.)

"Although Mandarin is considered the standard dialect, speaking Mandarin without the local accent or speaking Mandarin instead of the local dialect can mark a person as being an outsider or as someone who is not "a regular guy." Thus most Chinese, including Chinese political leaders themselves, do not bother to learn to speak Mandarin with the official standard accent." (Either grossly untrue or grossly subjective. Furthermore there is no such thing as an "official standard accent".)

"To the dismay of non-Mandarin speakers, the predominant role of Mandarin has led to the misidentification of Mandarin as "the Chinese language". Although both Mainland China and Taiwan use Mandarin as the official language and promote its nationwide use, there is no official interest or intent in either location to have Mandarin replace local dialect, and as a practical matter, Mandarin is still far from supplanting the local dialects that are in daily use in many locations, particularly in the southern provinces of Mainland China or on Taiwan itself. " (Some parts not very exact, true generally only for Taiwan. 1st part of article misleads and generalizes.)

A good way to distinguish between the two can come at the start:

"Mandarin is the most commonly spoken Chinese dialect from which is derivated the official spoken language (called putonghua or guoyu) used in the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China on Taiwan (ROC). "

Mandarin is not the same as standard Mandarin. Mandarin proper is a dialect, which means it of course has variants in enunciation from place to place. Putonghua / Guoyu are the standardized versions of it, meaning the pronounced differences is axed away. The article, in explaining, is simply confusing (and painstakingly longwinded) . For example, the parts about Mandarin and Beijingese can be explained thus:

"Standard Mandarin differs from Beijingese in that while Beijingese is a localized variant of the Mandarin dialect, with its own dialectal quirks [such as the adorning of the end sounds with the -er vowel (儿音)], standard Mandarin removes the pronounced idiosyncracies specific to Beijing while retaining its pronunciations which conform to the majority of the Northern populace."

It at least keeps the distinction between Mandarin proper and standard Mandarin, which it keeps tripping itself over. -- Mandel, Apr 19, 2004

You're right, some parts of this article need to be reworked. Can you splice the paragraphs you wrote above into the article? I'll get around and see what I can do in a couple of days. ran 14:06, Apr 19, 2004 (UTC)

Furthermore there is no such thing as an "official standard accent". -- Actually, there is, and there are standardized tests for putonghua pronunciation as well. It's just that most people (political leaders included) don't bother to follow the standards perfectly, even if they feel that they should. ran 14:18, Apr 19, 2004 (UTC)

I'll think about adding on to it. Cautious to add to the flux...I'm still trying to understand the article.

PS Do you mean an "official standard set of pronunciation" or "official accent? So far as I know, no country on earth has an official standard accent. Or do you simply mean they don't speak standard Mandarin? The word "accent" has a somewhat ambiguous meaning. I don't think standard Mandarin can be termed an accent, just as Received Pronunciation can't be said to be an accent either. - Mandel 20 Apr 2004

What's the difference between "set of pronunciation" and "accent"? If we ignore the "nonstandard" and "nonnative" overtones of "accent", then they're basically the same thing.

Standard Mandarin (Putonghua) isn't just an accent, but it does include rules of pronunciation that are very carefully and rigidly defined. That was what I meant by "standard official accent". - ran 20:34, Apr 20, 2004 (UTC)

Well...I get your idea of a "standard accent". I originally thought "accent" means something that comes from a country or region and so can't be manufactured, ie. accent = 口音, while pronunciation = 发音.

My whole original point is that I think the Chinese officials simply isn't speaking very standard putonghua (a poor or regionalized version) rather than not speaking an "official accent". But I see we define it differently. - Mandel 2 May 2004

§ Right. Guo2 yu3 was established as a standard in the early decades of the 20th century. There are very few differences in the "official" pronunciations given in the Guoyu Cidian produced at that time and the "official" pronunciations given in recent dictionaries produced in the PRC. P0M 03:42, 20 Apr 2004 (UTC)

The infobox and the entire article assumes that Mandarin = 北方话. But look at the first sentence which says, in effect: "Mandarin is the official language of the PRC, ROC, etc." Try putting that into Chinese: 北方话是中国的官方语言。That sounds positively strange. A Sichuan-ren is not going to feel Sichuan-hua is any more official (or unofficial) than Guangdong-hua! A Chinese person would say: 汉语是中国的官方语言。and 普通话是汉语语音标准。Or something along those lines. But certainly not what this article gives right in the first sentence! I don't really know how to fix this without utterly restructuring everything all over again and opening up a new Pandora's Box of confusion and POV. Ideas? -- ran 14:53, May 15, 2004 (UTC)

I've rephrased the first paragraph. Hopefully it's now better, without being too confusing in the process. -- ran 04:45, May 16, 2004 (UTC)

Better in some places, strange in others. Still too confusing I guess. But you get a thumbs-up for effort. Mandel 21:28, Jun 8, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Question about IPA

The chart is neat -- even if it isn't labeled as IPA yet. But there are two "r" sounds in Mandarin, the "final r" and the retroflex r. ɻ is given in the chart as a retroflex. Another source uses ʐ . Is one of these a mistake? Or is there a confusion between the two "r" sounds? Thanks. P0M 01:27, 2 May 2004 (UTC)

Both ɻ and ʐ are initial r-, it just depends on which source you look at. Personally, though, I think ɻ is a better description. ran 17:15, May 2, 2004 (UTC)

Thanks. But what is the final "r" sound in, e.g., yi4 diar3? P0M

Also ɻ, I think: /tiɑɻ/. ran 22:16, May 3, 2004 (UTC)

Retroflex z sounds more familiar to me though, not to mention nicely explains the misspelling of 日本 as Japan (retroflex z sounds like /dZ/ (j)). But then again, no one I talk to can agree on the pronounciation of r. Some just ignore it and pronounce it as in English, some pronounce it as a trill, in addition to those who pronounce it as retroflex r and z. -Zhen Lin 04:17, 4 May 2004 (UTC)

This is how some some people justify Wade-Giles using J for R, as in ju-kuo is not 主括, but 如果. --Menchi 15:16, 15 May 2004 (UTC)

Another tidbit: When I was in Chinese school (3 years ago), I remember having these pronounciation drills. They grouped zh ch sh r together, which translates to /tʂ/ /tʂʰ/ /ʂ/ /ʐ/ more logically than /tʂ/ /tʂʰ/ /ʂ/ /ɻ/ - Zhen Lin 08:02, 5 May 2004 (UTC)

Forgot to mention, I used zh:Image:Pthshmymb.png as my primary source for my initial charts. - Zhen Lin 08:04, 5 May 2004 (UTC)

The thing, though, is that I don't think people actually use a fricative for "r-". There's basically no friction involved, especially if you compare it to, say, English /v/ /z/ /Z/. - ran 14:36, May 5, 2004 (UTC)

§ Right. I think that of the two "r" symbols there is one for what they call an "approximant" or something like that. Unfortunately, I can't figure out how to make it on my own computer. P0M 21:05, 15 May 2004 (UTC)

§ The retroflex "r" involves the tongue vibrating in the air stream, but no actual contact. In that respect it resembles fo, le, he, xi, and ci. According to the chart Zhen Lin linked in above, the final "r" (which is made with the root portion of the tongue, but short of producing the non-trilled (i.e., the standard) German "r" sound) is coded as "er" or, actually I guess, just as a regular "r". P0M 15:34, 5 May 2004 (UTC)

One should note that Zhuyin has two distinct symbols for initial and final R's. I myself never felt them to be even related. But then again, neither did I of the English initial and final R's at first.... --Menchi 15:16, 15 May 2004 (UTC)

§ The same goes for the "i" in "shi" and the "i" in "di". P0M 21:05, 15 May 2004 (UTC)

[edit] "Mandarin" or "Mandarin Chinese"

I think it's important to get the terminology right. I find the terminology "Mandarin Chinese" strange. Why not just call it "Mandarin"? It's not like there's other languages in the region, like "Mandarin English" or "Mandarin French" or whatever. Is it just a western thing to call it "Mandarin Chinese"? Ditto for "Cantonese Chinese" or "Hokkien Chinese" or whatever. I'm currently in Singapore and everyone refers to them as just "Mandarin", "Cantonese" or "Hokkien". Alex.tan 16:04, 17 May 2004 (UTC)

It's probably just an impulse to specify -- either that, or people won't know what "Mandarin" is, and would think that it's different from "Chinese". (This is actually more common that I thought.) -- ran 16:54, May 17, 2004 (UTC)

Well, I think the article on Mandarin states it clearly enough, it's just the reference in all the other articles that mention it that jars me. Well, in the article Chinese language, Mandarin, Hokkien and Cantonese are not referred to as "Mandarin Chinese", "Hokkien Chinese" and "Cantonese Chinese" so why should they be referred to as such elsewhere? Alex.tan 17:19, 17 May 2004 (UTC)

[edit] IPA inconsistency

There are some inconsistencies in the IPA transcriptions of certain vowels or vowel parts between Wikipedia and other sources.

What Wikipedia uses	What is found in other sources
[ɤ]	[ə]
[aɪ]	[ai]
[eɪ]	[ei], [ɛi]
[ou]	[əu]
[aʊ]	[ao]
[ɤʊ]	[əu]
[uo]	[uɔ]
[ʊŋ]	[uəŋ]
[yʊŋ]	[yŋ], [iuŋ]
[ɤɻ]	[əɹ], [ər]

Which of these are correct?

Also, other sources claim that the pinyin i is [ɿ] for zi, ci, and si, [ʅ] for zhi, chi, shi, and ri, and [i] for the rest. Nothing about this is stated in Wikipedia.

kelvSYC 04:29, 17 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Since I filled in the table, I should probably explain.

What Wikipedia uses	What is found in other sources	Comment
[ɤ]	[ə]	ə is just plain wrong. Only neutral tone words like "le", "ge" etc are pronounced with a schwa.
[aɪ]	[ai]	/ai/ is more of a phonemic representation. The real sound is closer to [ae] -- Chinese diphthongs don't go all the way.
[eɪ]	[ei], [ɛi]	See above
[ou]	[əu]	[ou] is not the one I'm using in the chart.
[aʊ]	[ao]	ao is the pinyin orthography. As I've said, none of the Chinese diphthongs actually go all the way, so the sound does sound like [ao]. But then, "ai" also sounds like [ae], but I don't think anyone represents it that way.
[ɤʊ]	[əu]	My source also says the second one. But really, the first one is the only one I hear. Perhaps əu is a phonemic, not phonetic transcription.
[uo]	[uɔ]	Yeah, I think yours sounds more correct, though I got mine off a book. Maybe the book is wrong. I had the same suspicion, which is why I put that footnote at the bottom (footnote 2), based on another book.
[ʊŋ]	[uəŋ]	These are two different things. ʊŋ is written as "ong" in pinyin, uəŋ is written as "weng".
[yʊŋ]	[yŋ], [iuŋ]	Yeah, I've seen all of these before. I think they're just different ways of writing the same thing. (The last one, though, isn't really right -- the sound starts with y-, not i-.)
[ɤɻ]	[əɹ], [ər]	This has been discussed above. I think I'll eventually get back to this one and figure out the "right" way of representing this sound.

I think there's some confusion between phonemic and phonetic representation here. For example, /iuŋ/ may be a proposed phonemic representation, but it certainly doesn't represent actual pronunciation.

-- ran 15:39, Jul 17, 2004 (UTC)

Oh, I forgot that last thing:

Also, other sources claim that the pinyin i is [ɿ] for zi, ci, and si, [ʅ] for zhi, chi, shi, and ri, and [i] for the rest. Nothing about this is stated in Wikipedia.

Right now the i of zhi, chi, shi, ri, zi, ci, si are represented in the chart as /z̩/, or a syllabic /z/. It's not the same i as the /i/ you see elsewhere. -- ran 15:42, Jul 17, 2004 (UTC)

Here are the values that I came up with by using sound recordings by a group that has a large website with various aids for IPS use. I've corresponded with one person who is doing his dissertation on a subject in linguistics that required him to make his own assessment. I don't totally agree with him, but all of our values are close. I am still experimenting. It seems that every time I go back I find some little thing that seems to be a minor improvement:

[[1]]

There are two problems that I see with IPA for Chinese. One is that j q x are made with the blade of the tongue, not the tip of the tongue, and IPA doesn't seem to have any way to make the distinction. The other thing is that the tone indications in IPA were not designed for Chinese, so most people seem to use superscript numbers for tone indications. I am in a rush, so I will leave examination of questions raised above until later. (Note that in some places I give two values separated by the "logical or" sign.)

Compare your values with the SIL recordings: [[2]] P0M 17:20, 17 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Here is a chart of the differences between my values and the NPA values in the article. Most are minor. I think I have copied one mistake (marked with a question mark). The divergent items are starred. P0M

I've noted the sounds in NPA and pinyin in the left column and top row. (If I don't do that I never know what I'm trying to do.) I've put in a couple of extras too. P0M 07:55, 18 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I forgot to mention, the "A" symbol is an intermediary value between "a" and the other "a" that looks like a handwritten letter. (This I got from the Ph.D. candidate I mentioned. Makes sense to me.) If you look at the IPA vowel chart, none of the vowel values are more than one hop from their alternatives. Some speakers make slightly different vowel sounds, and sometimes consonants affect vowel sounds too. Please see my on-line chart for the zh, ch, sh, ri symbols. I've shown these to other people (Kenyon Chinese listserve) and I think they all let me pass on those ways of writing things. I'm more worried about "r" in yi4 diar3. I think the tongue is lax, not retroflexed, for that sound. P0M 08:03, 18 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Coming back to this after a night's sleep and some time with the IPA sound producer,

• I realize that I did make a mistake in row two. It should agree with the Wiki version. My typo.
• My row three will be changed to "uo" in agreement with the Wiki version.
• I can't agree with the Wiki version of pinyin (ao). Saying, e.g., "biao" that way sounds wrong to me, almost like a Zhejiang or maybe Anhui accent.
• I definitely disagree with the Wiki (ou). If I work that out with the software it sounds like "ee uh oh" to me. (I give two different values because some speakers pronounce some (ou), e.g. "liu2", differently than they pronounce some other (ou) words.)
• My (an) is actually the same as the Wiki version and should not have been starred in the chart above.
• Pinyin (er) as in yi4 diar3 is made with the base of the tongue, not the tip of the tongue. At least that is the only way I've heard. P0M 16:47, 18 Jul 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Mistaken disambiguation?

§ RedWolf has "fixed" the Sanskrit "mantrin" so it is "disambiguated" as "religious minister". But http://www.tribuneindia.com/2001/20011208/windows/roots.htm says:

Adding new meanings to words is frequently due to the attempt of language to cope with and express all the growing branches of human knowledge. The Sanskrit mantrin is one familiar with Vedic hymns, a magician or a secret-keeper. The Hindi mantrin is also a minister and secretary.

Unless RedWolf or someone else can explain why the current "disambiguation", which goes against several other sources I Googled up, is correct, I will change it. P0M 23:27, 5 Aug 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Character Encoding?

This page, as well as the table above, contains special characters that show as empty rectangles on my standard English Windows 98 system (using Internet Explorer 5.5).

Can someone give me instructions on how to install and/or enable the correct fonts and/or character encodings? Thanks. David 17:21, 2 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I think that you should have all of the necessary fonts. The problem may be that you have not selected any font in the preferences tab for IE that will show Unicode (UTF-8). I don't use Microsoft products unless I have to, so I can't go any deeper into the details. Ordinarily, on my IBM, any font I select will turn out to be a Unicode font. But some Unicode fonts actually have glyphs for only a subset of the entire thing. So you might have a Unicode font that doesn't have any Chinese character glyphs. SimSun is one font that has the Chinese, and I think it is a regular part of the Microsoft package. "Arial Unicode MS" should certainly be on your computer if "MS" means Microsoft. P0M 00:54, 3 Sep 2004 (UTC)

---

[edit] Mandarin vs Other

This link leads nowhere.

To hear a comparison of the same thing said in both Mandarin and in Taiwanese (a type of Minnan Chinese), you may listen to this comparison.

§ I have restored this link because it led someplace until Jiang redirected that brief article to this one. I have "unredirected" that article. I am not sure why Jiang created the circular reference, which effective "disappeared" the short article containing sound recordings of the same thing said in Taiwanese and Mandarin. The result was to create something that did not make sense to Roadrunner. who evidently made the unsigned remark above. Please make fuller edit summaries in the future. Please sign postings in the future. P0M 06:20, 7 Sep 2004 (UTC)

It's not really an article. It's a demonstration containing two sound files. This certainly doesn't deserve a separate page, so I've restored it. It's also bad to refer to the reader directly and assume the reader is reading this article online, so asking them to click anywhere should not be done.--Jiang 08:21, 7 Sep 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Move to Beifanghua

The English term, "Mandarin", is causing us endless problems, such as the confusing introduction paragraph. "Mandarin" in everyday usage is Putonghua/Guoyu, not Beifanghua. Try asking someone speaking Sichuanhua or Nanjinghua whether that is "Mandarin" and the answer would be no.

In other words, the English term Mandarin refers to:

• Putonghua / Guoyu, in everyday usage
• Beifanghua, in academic usage

The most intuitive solution for this, and the one that will solve all problems once and for all, is to move this article to Beifanghua and make Mandarin a disambiguation.

Comments? -- [[User:Ran|ran (talk)]] 16:31, Sep 23, 2004 (UTC)

Too many pages link here. Trying to split off the content won't make things clearer. The best thing to do is to discuss all of the definitions here. Beifanghua can have a separate article like Putonghua but I think this should remain an overview article. --Jiang 20:45, 23 Sep 2004 (UTC)

If Beifanghua gets a separate article, then most of the content here would have to be moved over to the new page anyways. That would make this page (Mandarin) a pseudo-disambiguation page (basically, with nothing but the introduction that we have so far, explaining all the different terms). And that's what I'm suggesting in the first place.

In any case, the current Mandarin / Putonghua / Guoyu arrangement is a mess. A lot of the information I see here in the Mandarin article would fit much better in the Putonghua/Guoyu articles; yet this page claims to "describe Beifanghua only". If the Mandarin page spends five paragraphs explaining all the different meanings that it has, and then zooms in to just one of them for no apparent reason whatsoever, shouldn't intuition suggest that Mandarin simply be a disambiguation (or at most, a short article explaining terms), and that all the other information be located where they actually belong: Beifanghua, Putonghua, Guoyu? -- [[User:Ran|ran (talk)]] 21:29, Sep 23, 2004 (UTC)

My other suggestion would be to merge Putonghua and Guoyu, since they are basically used interchangeably in everyday speech and that other than the pronunciation of a few words, they are basically completely identical. (If someone asks me: do you speak Guoyu? I'm probably not going to say, no, I speak Putonghua!) Perhaps a standard Mandarin page would work much better? But we'll leave that suggestion for another time. -- [[User:Ran|ran (talk)]] 21:32, Sep 23, 2004 (UTC)

Let's merge Putonghua and Guoyu here and create a separate article for Beifanghua. This way, we give precendence to the common usage of "Mandarin" like is done by convention for disambiguations. --Jiang 23:04, 23 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Okay, I'll tentatively second that proposal... but the thing is, there IS no English term for Beifanghua other than "Mandarin". All the maps we have so far label Beifanghua as "Mandarin"; so does Ethnologue... it'll get pretty confusing like that too. Plus we'd be flying in the face of established convention in all academic contexts.

Personally I think Mandarin (linguistics) should be remade into a page that just explains the terms and then quickly directs everyone to the pages that they're really looking for: standard Mandarin (or Putonghua or Guoyu or whatever), or Beifanghua. -- [[User:Ran|ran (talk)]] 00:50, Sep 24, 2004 (UTC)

Presumably Putonghua and Guoyu would have to merge either here or to Standard Chinese, to avoid political issues over what else to call it. This sounds like a good idea to me. I was going to suggest that this article might could also move to Northern Chinese to avoid excessive foreign-language jargon, but if, as Ran says, "Mandarin" is the only accepted English word, then we should probably stick with Beifanghua. - Nat Krause 00:56, 24 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I for one think that the definition is getting clearer. To branch off to Beifanghua is not that good an idea, IMO, since that usage is basically Chinese and not English, and might cause more confusion. The introductory paragraphs seem good enough to me now. Mandel 16:07, Sep 28, 2004 (UTC)

I think that it is already causing confusion, because Beifanghua is not the standard English meaning of "Mandarin" (although it may well be the standard English meaning for linguists). Usually, in English, Mandarin just means putonghua or guoyu. - Nat Krause 08:30, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I'd like to clarify a few things and to state some things which I disagree with in the above discussions.

(1) According to Nat ("usually, in English, Mandarin just means putonghua or guoyu") and ran ("Mandarin in everyday usage is putonghua/guoyu, not Beifanghua"), in everyday usage Mandarin = putonghua. I really beg to differ. I am no linguist and I have always treated Mandarin to mean Beifanghua, Nanking dialect and Sichuan dialect et al included. Of course Mandarin also mean putonghua, but in a subset sort of way, so that's the way people mean when they refer to the two as equal. It's just the same as Received Pronunciation being referred to as English, but that doesn't mean a Yorkshire dialect spoken can't be called English. I really like to know where people get the idea that Mandarin = putonghua and nothing else and how this so-called idea get perpetuated.

Clearly in Britannica Mandarin means guanhua [3] and is not the equivalent of putonghua (which Britannica calls Modern Standard Chinese). In threads here [4] and [5] of amateur discussions Mandarin is also referred to as Beifanghua. Mandarin as a word has been in currency in the 19th century, hence precedes the idea of either putonghua or guoyu. The fact that Mandarin = putonghua is actually an erroneous misconception IMO perpetuated by poor 1-1 translation.

Hence in my view if a person correctly understands the definition of Mandarin then surely a Sichuan or Nanking dialect speaker would say that they are speaking Mandarin. I'd really like some proof that people take Mandarin = putonghua and nothing else.

If Britannica can state gracefully within a few words the idea of Mandarin, I don't think it's beyond us to do the same.

(2) I also disagree the idea that within Mandarin there are a great number of mutually unintelligible varieties.

Most Mandarin varieties are mutually intelligible. This includes most of the northern varieties. Even within the central regions the Mandarin can be readily understood. Some problems are with the Sichuan dialect, but it is not as unintelligible as it is made out to be. The article makes it sounds as bad as Cantonese or Minnan, whereas a person knowing putonghua can understand Sichuan dialect (it's an accent thing), if with some difficulty. That's because the tonal difference; yet as far as I understand, the consonants and vowels are usually similar as in the Northern Mandarin strain. The article is highly misleading in repeatedly mentioning that are many Mandarin varieties mutually unintelligible. The fact is they are no more intelligible or unintelligible than most regional dialects of English in England, for instance. Mandel 02:47, Oct 4, 2004 (UTC)

To address your first point, now that I'm pressed on it, I'm not sure where I got the idea that Mandarin means Standard Chinese in normal speech. I think it might come from a discussion in Jerry Norman, Chinese (he argued against using it that way, but this assumes that there is a practice to argue against), but I don't have that at hand currently to check. With regard to casual speech, most people who are not linguists don't make the distinctions that we are making here, so it's often hard to tell what they mean. I would think that, ideally, Mandarin should mean exclusively guanhua, since that is a literal translation. However, adding to the confusion, some people use guanhua to mean beifanghua; for instance, Britannica defines Mandarin as as the former and then proceeds to discuss the latter.

It would probably be clearest if everyone avoided saying Mandarin altogether when specificity is required. If we mean pre-modern official dialects, we can say "guanhua" or better yet "pre-modern official dialects". If we mean beifanghua, we can say beifanghua or "Northern Chinese dialects". If we mean putonghua/guoyu, we can say "Standard Chinese" or putonghua or guoyu. This would militate for this page being a disambiguation. - Nat Krause 06:52, 10 Oct 2004 (UTC)

To make matters worse, Beifanghua is now being used to mean the same as guanhua. Beifanghua might seemed to some people to refer only to the Northern variety of guanhua, but ran seems to imply it also take into account Sichuan dialect, which is not in the north, but rather southwest. What are we to do? Sigh. Mandel 16:55, Oct 11, 2004 (UTC)

Well, beifanghua (or rather, beifang fangyan) is used by linguists in Chinese to mean the "Mandarin dialects" — Sichuan and Yunnan included. The problem is that there's no general layperson term for this category in Chinese either. And I'm not sure what a Sichuanren would say if you asked him: "Is Sichuanhua beifanghua?" I think the most likely answer might be: "Well, Sichuan is in the south, isn't it?" So yeah, "sigh" is right...

So far I've continued to use "Mandarin" to mean "Beifanghua": e.g. I say in Jiangsu that people from Nanjing speak a "Mandarin dialect". Let's stick with that for now and see how it goes.

And another thing: so are we going to merge Putonghua and Guoyu into standard Chinese? -- [[User:Ran|ran (talk)]] 17:34, Oct 11, 2004 (UTC)

If you merged it, merge it into standard spoken Chinese or standard Mandarin, not just standard Chinese. This problem is getting knottier and knottier. Mandel 06:50, Oct 12, 2004 (UTC)

I realize now that Mandel has been using "guanhua" differently than I have all along. But if you include common Sichuan speech in "guanhua", then what do you call 19th century court speech? Although this is hardly definitive, it is true (or at least a lot people say it is) that Sichuan speech is the way it is because of a relatively recent migration from the north, making the term "northern speech" more defensible. - Nat Krause 07:25, 12 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Nat, guanhua does not mean "19th-century court speech". It really means the lingua franca of court officials then, which is Mandarin, then used as the standard official language as in now. Using the linguists' definition, a person from Nanjing will speak guanhua (aka Mandarin [6]). If you check out the Chinese google you will get what I mean. So you see Britannica isn't wrong after all. Mandel 09:11, Oct 12, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Redid romanization of Taiwanese example

Hi. I am working at my Mac with the old version of Netscape, so I couldn't handle all the details perfectly, but I finally located my Taiwanese dictionary and my Taiwanese textbook, so I went over the recording and slowed it down until I could be sure of what I was hearing. He says "women zheli" (in Taiwanese), but he said "women jia" when he explained to me what he put in the recording. That is why I started out to change it. I made the other spellings consistent with the romanization in my textbook. It may not be exactly in agreement with current standards, but at least the romanization is all there. If somebody could do the non-printing spaces, I'd appreciate it. I thought it should be percent-sign followed by 20, but I could see the aforesaid % and 20s on my screen, so I replaced the spaces temporarily with underline glyphs. P0M 01:40, 3 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Merging Putonghua and Guoyu

After some discussion (see "Move to Beifanghua" section above) with no major objections I've decided merge Putonghua and Guoyu over the weekend into Standard Mandarin. If anyone feels strongly against this, please raise your objections here... -- [[User:Ran|ran (talk)]] 04:06, Oct 13, 2004 (UTC)

Okay, I'm going to go ahead and start the move. -- [[User:Ran|ran (talk)]] 15:53, Oct 16, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Swedish translation

This article is being translated for an article on the same subject at the Swedish Wikipedia Project. Any input and assitance will be much appreciated. --karmosin 16:14, Feb 6, 2005 (UTC)

Woot! Translation is all done! For you swedophones out there, scrutinize every sentence for errors and fear not to bash my interpretation of this excellent article. --karmosin 23:27, Feb 6, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Mandarin, Japanese, and fustration

Note: Discussion was moved here from my user page. I have never edited this article before, but I'll be more than happy in helping to ressolving this dispute if you request so. - Mailer Diablo 08:22, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)

diablo isnt editing strongly encouraged by wikipedia so that users get updated and correct information?

when you say that mandarin adapted from japanese are you not being stupid(sorry)it IS a FACT that japanese adapted from mandarin not the other way round. or do you need a lecturer from some prestigous uni like havard to correct you?

me i vandalise? if i had vandalised i wouldnt have wasted my time contributing to various articles ...added anonymously at 04:59, 2005 Mar 19 by User:202.156.2.170

[edit] FUSTRATED

i want a reply to the above ...added anonymously at 04:59, 2005 Mar 19 by User:202.156.2.170

Calm down, get and use an ID, and explain what you're talking about. For a start, it is a fact that Japanese adapted (adopted?) what from Mandarin? -- Hoary 05:15, 2005 Mar 19 (UTC)

Look at the page "MANDARIN" where some idiots wrote Mandarin adopted from Japanese ....Is this a joke or what? WTF? Do you all know your history? ...added anonymously at 05:22, 2005 Mar 19 by User:202.156.2.170

There is no page "MANDARIN". Presumably you're referring to Mandarin (linguistics). Yes, people wrote that Mandarin adopted certain words from Japanese. This is true. It of course doesn't negate the fact that Japanese took a vastly greater number of words (and morphemes) from Chinese.

When you've written a comment, please follow it with ~~~~. -- Hoary 05:34, 2005 Mar 19 (UTC)

[edit] what the

speaking about adoption of foreign language 99% of languages if not all were somewhat derived from others do you need a separate page for it too?

even if it is true the number of chinese words taken from japanese DOES NOT justity for a section of its own.

name more examples of chinese words taken from japanese if you wish to further justify your case ...added anonymously at 05:43, 2005 Mar 19 by User:202.156.2.170

99% of languages if not all were somewhat derived from others True. do you need a separate page for it too How is this an issue here? even if it is true the number of chinese words taken from japanese DOES NOT justity for a section of its own. If this is what you believe, then say so on the relevant talk page, giving your reasons. name more examples of chinese words taken from japanese if you wish to further justify your case I've no wish to "further justify my case". Meanwhile, you might wish to read an academic study of loanwords within the Chinese language.

If you can't be bothered to add ~~~~ to your comments (to identify and datestamp them), don't be surprised if they are ignored or deleted. -- Hoary 05:52, 2005 Mar 19 (UTC)

[edit] brainless

How can you even justify your case when you are wrong?05:58, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)05:58, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)05:58, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)05:58, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)~FOR OUR DEAR EDITOR THE GREAT

Be careful of calling people "idiotic" or "wrong" when it is you who is wrong.

If you want more examples of Japanese loanwords into Chinese, there are dozens, if not hundreds of them here:

[7]

And make the distinction between characters and words. Japanese got Chinese characters from Chinese. Then they used it to make up terminology, which Chinese then borrowed back. -- ran (talk) 06:40, Mar 19, 2005 (UTC)

I don't listen to craps...If they are dozens and HUNDREDS of them, come on show it? Don't just bark...

japanese borrowed WORDS PLUS CHARACTERS from the chinese.

06:44, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)06:44, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)06:44, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)06:44, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Yes, we now know that you can press the ~ key. Well done. Now get yourself a user ID: it's quite simple. In the meantime, did you actually read Ran's comment? Did you follow the link to this page? -- Hoary 06:54, 2005 Mar 19 (UTC)

oh yes i am reading it now. so give me some peace.

Oh btw get diablo here please ...added anonymously (to Mailer Diablo's page) by User:202.156.2.170

opps i forgot the 06:58, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)06:58, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)hairy's gonna make a big fuss again.ok just kidding hoary... ...added anonymously (to Mailer Diablo's page) by User:202.156.2.170

[edit] Official system for approximating foreign words?

I'm not sure this exists. There are certainly customary rules for transcribing foreign names that evolved greatly since May Fourth Movement (e.g. I would perhaps choose tèlìfēng over délǜfēng as a transcription for telephone), but I've never seen any such rules written down. -- Alaz (talk) 04:03, 29 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I think such rules exist, and are specific to language. But they probably aren't followed that closely, considering the amount of difficulty with foreign names and redirects we're having on Chinese wikipedia. ;) -- ran (talk) 05:05, Mar 29, 2005 (UTC)

What I meant was is there an official system? There's a difference between a dictionary summarizing accepted translations and a guidance governing new translations. -- Alaz (talk) 05:32, 29 Mar 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Request for references

Hi, I am working to encourage implementation of the goals of the Wikipedia:Verifiability policy. Part of that is to make sure articles cite their sources. This is particularly important for featured articles, since they are a prominent part of Wikipedia. The Fact and Reference Check Project has more information. Thank you, and please leave me a message when you have added a few references to the article. - Taxman 20:00, Apr 21, 2005 (UTC)

• Added references and replied here. --Umofomia 09:10, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Title change

Having read some of the postings above, I wonder if we shouldn't change the title of this article for a Chinese name instead, in order to avoid ambiguities. This article would be renamed Beifanghua, while the Standard Mandarin article would be renamed Putonghua, and we could created an extra article called Guanhua for the historical variety of Mandarin. This would clearly remove all ambiguities, and it would also conform to the practice of academic circles, who use putonghua, beifanghua, but never Mandarin. Check this academic book for instance: [8]. Hardouin 11:39, 26 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Needs More Pics

We need more pictures, diagrams, etc. Look at the "Deutsch" version, can we add the pictures in it to the english page? It would help a lot on specifying the sections on tones, etc. --67.184.163.248 02:13, 20 September 2005 (UTC)Ikiroid

[edit] FA-worthiness

This article is extremely brief considering it's an FA and, more importantly, about one of the most widely spoken dialect groups/languages on earth. There are big information gaps and the article falls far short of filling out most of the section prescribed by the language template. I've outlined what sections need to be added and/or expanded in a todo list.

I would also like to point out that the coverage of the phonology is quite unsatisfactory. Merely redirecting the reader to Standard Mandarin is not appropriate, considering that this article covers the standard language in it's more officially prescribed form as well as how it is spoken in all of China. This is about northern Chinese dialects, which is quite different. The article needs its own phonology summary, even if it will be more bried and general than the one in Standard Mandarin.

Peter ^Isotalo 11:05, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] GA failed

If it's all there is to say about the #1 language in the world it lacks in something. Hints :

• What about the distribution of Mandarin throughout the world? Demography
• No info about the writing system.

I've tried to supply a minimalist account. It should be linked to a fuller article P0M

• History section is too brief. What was there before Old Chinese?

This question is a bit odd, no? Would an article on Neo-Platonism discuss pre-Socratic philosophy? P0M

• No info about sounds of the letters.

Again, I've provided a minimalist account. Did we lose the IPA, etc. stuff or did it migrate? P0M 05:31, 20 July 2006 (UTC)

• No info on grammar.
• Nothing on morphology/syntax/specialties about the language.
• No examples or samples of the language.
• Lacks on the dispute about being a language or a dialect.
• Is there somebody who regulates the language?

You can look at the article Taiwanese (linguistics) for more insight. Lincher 18:21, 18 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Writing system, Sounds of the language

P0M, thanks for starting these sections, but as of now they only relate to putonghua. As far as I know the Mandarin variants generally do not have a written form. The "sounds part" only describes putonghua, all the sounds of the different Mandarin variants varies quite a lot. LDHan 15:21, 20 July 2006 (UTC)

I just spent an hour writing something and in one poof it all disappeared -- one of the problems with a computer system that sets up so many control-whatever equivalents for things that I never want to do. One typo and the whole thing goes off somewhere.

Anyway, as for your contention that different varieties of Mandarin have different sounds, I am not quite sure what you mean. Let me explain.

Each individual speaks his/her own version of the language of his/her parents and community. My parents grew up in the same small town in the midwest, but their pronunciations and grammar were not the same. My pronunciations reflect theirs -- with an overlay of education to teach me how to (mis)pronounce things like "Yangtse chiang." Even though I've been away from there for more than four decades I still retain certain regionalisms and will mispronounce words like "guess" unless I have my mind on what I am doing. That being said, the first time I encountered a sound that I had not heard before was in my college physics lab where somebody from Brooklyn (?) unconsciously used a glottal stop to replace mid-word "t" sounds, as in "glo‡al stop." Another eight years passed before I encountered people from New Jersey who appeared to use the Chinese version if "j" instead of the ordinary American version.

In Taiwan I saw much the same thing -- a high incidence of "the wrong sound" being used somewhere, e.g., "zège" for "zhège," and maybe some slight relocation of the tongue when forming vowels, but very rarely the presence of some totally different sound except in the case of the aboriginal peoples speaking their own languages or people who were non-native speakers of Mandarin.

The one teacher in my department at NTU whose speech was "Mandarin" but contained odd sounds was a native of Anhui, and probably a speaker of Jin. He made no attempt to make his pronunciation standard, and even native speakers complained to the department chair that they had trouble understanding his lectures. I used to record his marathon lectures and take them back to the dorm to try to figure them out with the help of my dorm mates. The main things that one noticed in his speach were inter-related. He used entering tones that have disappeared in Standard Mandarin, and his sentence rhythm was atypical. We had a teacher who spoke Mandarin as a second language and regularly used "v" instead of "w" as well as many strange sound combinations, but the Anhui teacher really did not have any such easily mimiced peculiarities.

We had several individuals who swept, cooked, joked, and generally took care of us. They were retired army guys with no families of their own. They came from various parts of China and all were Mandarin speakers. None came from any farther away than Sichuan. I don't recall ever hearing any "new" sounds like the teacher's "v" or the trilled r sounds of the aboriginal people who lived in the nearby mountains.

Somebody let me hear some Yunnan regional speech. I couldn't understand it, but once the meaning was explained to me I began to see how there was lots of regularity in the way that sounds "translated" into their language -- kind of like the way many German words "morph" into English once you learn a few equivalances.

What one sees in Taiwanese can be quite different. For instance, their totally unvoiced initial "b" sound, which is hard for me to remember to do because we do not have it in English, is not found in standard Mandarin. I rather doubt that it is found in any variety of Mandarin. P0M 20:03, 20 July 2006 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for your comments. I think we should be clear about what we are talking about. There is putonghua /Standard Mandarin spoken with a regional accent; with varying degrees of approximation to the "standard", ranging from a near-standard accent to a very heavy accent eg your teacher from Anhui, and the actual native local Mandarin dialects spoken in eg Shannxi, Chengdu, Tianjin, Kunming, Guizhou etc. Some of these are very close to or close enough to putonghua for some of those speaker not to bother to try to speak standard putonghua, sort of similar to British and US English. But for Mandarin dialects which are quite different to putonghua but still classed within the Mandarin dialects group eg Chengduhua (Chengdu speech), there are different sounds, even something as close as British and US English have different sounds.

As far as I'm aware the unvoiced initial "b" sound exists in Standard Mandarin, the b in Beijing is a unvoiced unaspirated bilabial in contrast to p which is a unvoiced aspirated bilabial. And I think the unvoiced initial "b" sound also exists in English as an allophone of the voiced initial "b" sound, and this de-voicing is why pinyin b sounds like b to the English ear even though the contrast between English initial b and p is suppose to be voicing, but in practice it is aspiration, as as in Chinese.. LDHan 22:05, 20 July 2006 (UTC)

You're right about Mandarin having a "b" sound that is said to be unvoiced, and a "p" sound that is said to be voiced. (In the older Wade-Giles romanization system the relationship of these two sounds was made clearer by writing the first p and the second with a "rough breathing mark" written as p' -- hence the old spelling Pei-p'ing for 北平.) But in Taiwanese there is a third sound, which is very hard for me to make because it does not occur in English. The difference is that the Taiwanese "b" sound is absolutely unvoiced, whereas both the Mandarin and the English "b" sounds are voiced for a very short period of time while the lips are still closed. I have to imagine myself to be a goldfish just waiting to open its mouth to let out a bubble to be able to make the sound at all. It's irrelevant to Mandarin phonology unless that third "b/p" sound occurs in some Mandarin speech somewhere. Then it would go on our list. I suppose we could write it as "b°" or go back to Wade-Giles and write "p°". P0M 08:10, 21 July 2006 (UTC)

I have found a good source of information: http://www.glossika.com/en/dict/phon/index.php Because of the way their information is organized, it will take quite a while to inventory all of the Mandarin varieties. It is supposed to have sound recordings, but they won't play with the browser I have been using. Just looking at consonant sounds, there are three Labio-dentals that appear in some regions where "b," "p," and "f" appear in Standard Mandarin. There is a voiced dental "z" (as in "zap"), there is a nasal retroflex, and a velar initial "ng" sound. Then in the "ji, qi, xi" series there is a sort of analog to the "ri" in "zhi, chi, shi, ri" so it's the vowel sound of the other three except that it is palatal (farther back in the mouth) and nazalized. And in some regions there are palatal versions of "b, p, f, v" sort, which I believe must sound like the English "j, ch, sh" sounds. Then there are three sounds from Juxian that I haven't figured out yet, and one Jin sound that I haven't figured out. So just counting initial consonants there are about 13 out of 37 that are not shared by Mandarin.

We are writing for speakers of English, at least primarily, so we do not have to spend effort on explaining how the "t" of "ta" is pronounced (even though it is really different from the "t" in "tip" or any "t" initial syllable in English). It's the sounds that are different that really need explanation, primarily j, q, x, zh, ch, sh, r, z, c, s, and some of the other sounds like IPA = pf that are really different from English. We probably should also explain that pinyin romanization has built-in abbreviations, e.g., "hui" where you are to understand "huei."

What else do we need to cover? (Revised) P0M 01:40, 28 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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)

[edit] Disputed

See next section

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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)

[edit] Added references to language/dialect

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