[HN Gopher] The Invention of Chinese ___________________________________________________________________ The Invention of Chinese Author : Thevet Score : 26 points Date : 2021-12-10 22:34 UTC (1 days ago) (HTM) web link (www.historytoday.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.historytoday.com) | ncmncm wrote: | Primarily Mandarin speakers I have known were taught, and | believed, that the "dialects" were basically the same as | Mandarin, just with different pronunciation. | | They sincerely believed that when Cantonese speakers read and | wrote, they were not wholesale translating from and to Mandarin, | but simply, when writing, transcribing Cantonese using the | universal ideographic calligraphy. | | In fact, writing in dialect languages is not taught. The | extremely elaborate system dictating which of usually several, | often many syllabary characters that sound identical must be used | in writing a word in Mandarin (very commonly mistaken for | ideographic writing) cannot work for the other sinitic languages. | | (Sinitic languages admit about 1200 distinct syllables, but the | syllabary writing system uses many times that number, so many | necessarily sound alike. Mandarin speakers are taught that the | characters are not merely syllables with attached historical | rules, but ideograms that represent distinct thoughts. (Numerous | just-so examples are used to support the notion.) This has often | led to belief that ancient documents using the characters could | be read and understood without deep knowledge of the actual | language and world of the writer, resulting in, at best, comical | translations.) | dwohnitmok wrote: | There's a lot of complexities and politically-motivated reasons | behind calling various varieties of Chinese "dialects" but this | article swings way too far the other direction. | | There has been a single lingua franca across all of China since | at least the Han Dynasty, perhaps even the Warring States period | or earlier. It has variously been called Tong Yu (the | mass/common/omnipresent/intelligible language, Tong is a bit | difficult to translate here), Guan Hua (the official language), | potentially Ya Yan (elegant speech, this is more controversial | and earliest mention) and now Pu Tong Hua or Guo Yu . | | > Indeed, before the 20th century the idea of a singular, spoken | Chinese language was a foreign concept | | Matteo Ricci explicitly talks about a single language he can use | to talk with everyone in every province (in his time this was the | Guan Hua ). And indeed he used the same language as he made his | way across the entire coast of China. There is an entire Han | Dynasty compendium of the vocabulary of various regions that | compares it against the official lingua franca. Indeed the title | of this work is exactly Fangyan! | | > But while Chinese thinkers frequently mentioned 'official | languages', this was by no means synonymous with a 'national | language' - a language unified in its sound and script used by | and representative of a Chinese nation. | | These "official languages" were exactly unified in sound and | script and representative of a Chinese nation! The language Ricci | encountered was the descendent of one whose pronunciation was | explicitly codified (there are some asterisks here I can | elaborate on if people are interested) in the 14th century Hong | Wu Zheng Yun (Hongwu Proper Sound), and was passed to | neighboring kingdoms as the official language (and is e.g. | preserved in Korean rime books on the Chinese language). | | The difference in the last 100 years has been a difference in | degree rather than kind. With the advent of near-universal | education and literacy and the technological tools offered by | mass media, the PRC, ROC, and to a lesser extent places like | Singapore and Malaysia can more effectively carry out the | language programs that have been attempted in the millennia past. | | Granted the difference in degree is vast: the tools at the | disposal of political regimes today absolutely dwarfs those of | the past. This also means the effects of standardization are far | more keenly felt. However, the motivation and policy is one with | a long and winding history. | | It follows a standard story of varying unification and disunity | both linguistically and politically that has played out many | times in China's history. | justicezyx wrote: | Nice summary! | | As a Chinese native and Han people, I have no idea of these | historical records! Just to say how rich and complex the | Chinese history is and how profound is this legacy and | heritage. | KhoomeiK wrote: | Related [1] [2]: the Han race was really only constructed in the | last 100 years, along with the national mythos of several | millennia of uninterrupted dynastic civilization. | | [1] https://www.hrichina.org/en/content/4573 | | [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhFPZL2L8uM | seanmcdirmid wrote: | The concept of Chinese medicine was also created and promoted | by Mao since they couldn't afford much real medicine after the | revolution. It simply didn't exist as a unified thing before | then. | justicezyx wrote: | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compendium_of_Materia_Medica | | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghan_Lun | | https://zh.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%B8%A9%E7%96%AB%E8%AE%BA | | What's the reasoning behind this theory that Mao invented | Chinese medicine, which has been in existence for more than a | thousand years? Are you a fan of Mao, or are you mocking his | inability to create modern medicine out of thin air? Or his | manipulation of Chinese culture? | justicezyx wrote: | > an ethnically integrated China is, in fact, a modern | invention linked to the rise of nationalism at the end of the | nineteenth century. | | This idea is a very sensible one in the context of China being | forced to open up to the world. It's like a man, living in | wild, has assume he was alone, and have no idea he was actually | a male. Until one day he run into a similar creature that is a | female. | | The undernote of this is that Chinese society is extremely | complex. Easily orders of magnitude more complex. Comparing to | the US continental, the geographical diversity and the cultural | heritage shows such a vast range of changes that one should | feel US is probably culturally only equivalent to a typical | province in China! They eat differently, speak different in | accent and words of expression, have different customs in | almost every aspects of the life (child birth, birthdag, | marriage, funerals etc etc)... | | China is indeed a humongous collective of diverse human | communities that defies any singular or universal | interpretation. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-12-11 23:00 UTC)