File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postcolonial_2001/postcolonial.0110, message 223


From: "Malcolm Thompson" <mac_thompson-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: chinese info for salil
Date: Fri, 12 Oct 2001 07:33:06 +0000


first of all, thanks sooo much for all your info.

secondly, and further to salil's question and evelyn's info, just some 
notes:

'Modern Standard Chinese' as it was formulated after the revolution was 
initiated with the intention of hastening the progress of literacy (that is, 
it's supposed to reduce the time necessary to acquire basic literacy - this 
also involves a reduction in the number of 'essential' characters from over 
2,000 to just over 1,200 - i believe).

Although MSC (Putonghua) is *based* on the Beijing dialect, it's not exactly 
coextensive with it - there are lexical and syntactic elements in Beijing 
Mandarin that aren't 'recognized' as part of MSC.

to say that 'all' dialects on the Mainland use the simplified system would 
seem to indicate that language education there has a uniformity that's 
probably just not possible.

my understanding of the historical promotion of MSC is that it has tended 
not to proceed by the elimination of other systems. i've heard it said (and 
it's easy to see how people would come to this impression) that it amounts 
to linguistic imperialism along the lines of what was often practiced by 
western imperial powers (the residential first nations schools in canada 
come to mind as an example), but i don't know enough about the situation to 
say one way or another. (not that i'm 'accusing' anyone here of holding that 
belief :).) anyone?

finally, and y'all may already know this - 'Mandarin' as a term for the 
spoken language of Beijing and its emanation throughout China derives from 
its use by a very specific social class of rulers (the Mandarins). Since 
then (late 19th-century), the language has actually become very different.

evelyn wrote:

>the simplified script, or jiantizi, is practically the same as fantizi,
>which simply has more strokes per character
>
>a lot of people can read both and weren't taught the simplified system.
>
>cantonese does use some different characters, some characters retain
>classial meanings, etc. but newspapers in hong kong, taiwan, and singapore
>are mutally intelligible -- same written system.
>
>In contrast, Mainland uses the written simplified system, invented to help 
>a
>larger part of the population to learn characters.
>
>cantonese, shanghainese, hakka, mandarin are all different SPOKEN dialects.
>
>hope this is helpful.
>
>Evelyn
>
>on 10/11/01 3:28 PM, Salil Tripathi at salil61-AT-hotmail.com wrote:
>
> >
> > Evelyn,
> >
> > you mention Mandarin-Cantonese. But I thought that Cantonese, in Hong 
>Kong,
> > uses the older Chinese script, with far many more characters, a script 
>the
> > Communists disavowed and simplified, and opted for a simpler script with
> > fewer characters; and that's the one in use in Singapore and PRC, 
>whereas
> > Taiwan and Hong Kong, if I'm not mistaken, use the older script. And 
>while
> > all mainland Chinese dialects use the same, simplified script, each is
> > spoken differently, and are often mutually incomprehensible -- Hokkien,
> > Haka, Shanghainese, Fujian, Mandarin (Putonghua) -- and so on. Could 
>someone
> > throw some light on this?
> >
> > Salil


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