Please don't use the term "dialect" or "language" in this case
without
understanding the background.
Thousands of years ago, when Chinese was first written down, the
language was already splitting into different dialects, with very
minor but noticable differences. They were called 方言 or regional
speech (read in modern Mandarin as fang-yan).
Over hundreds of years these dialects diverged further, but being
spoken in a relatively small area (this is still thousands of years
ago), they still were not remarkably different.
When the Chinese empire began expanding, these dialects (still called
"regional speech") were spread to the far reaches of the empire, and
learned as a second language by indigenous people who were eventually
assimilated, and loaned some words, grammar, and phonology to the
dialect of the locale they were in.
Over such a large area, these dialects diverged and by the 1700s could
be counted as languages (語言), but this term was used generally to
distinguish Chinese from foreign tongues and sometimes foreign tongues
from one another. Even as separate languages, they were termed
"regional speech" 方言 because that is really what they are - spoken
within the Chinese empire and related to one another, together forming
the Han family of languages, with a standard based roughly on the
spoken language of around 2000 years before but matching somewhat
closely the modern Cantonese or Hakka.
With the ever-increasing polarized view of the world as Chinese vs
Foreign, the speech, habits, and country of the Chinese were seen as
more and more united, as one opposed to "Foreign". Also, Chinese does
not mark plurals, so "漢語" (modern Mandarin han-yu) can be translated
as both "Han language" and "Han languageS".
However the issue of terminology only came when Western lexicographers
needed to translate Chinese words to Western languages for their
dictionaries. Using a Western linguistic model of the time, "regional
speech" maps almost directly to "dialect".
So in the Chinese languages, this is not really a concern as you refer
neutrally to "the speech of Shanghai" or "Wu speech" or "the
speech of
the northern region".
However, in English, it has been a cause for debate, many people
saying the term "language" should be used, but others saying
"dialect"
should be used.
In fact, the amount of time for which Chinese speech varieties have
been diverging for one another is longer than that between French and
Spanish or Dutch and German.
Mark
On Fri, 4 Feb 2005 19:21:35 -0500, Stirling Newberry
<stirling.newberry(a)xigenics.net> wrote:
On Feb 4, 2005, at 7:15 PM, Felix Wan wrote:
On Thu, February 3, 2005 8:54 pm, Sheng Jiong
said:
Max Weinreich: "A language is a dialect with
an army and a navy". If we
follow that line of thinking, then yes, since there is no public
education
in the world that teaches written Cantonese, we should not have an
encyclopedia in it.
In our case, a language is a dialect that can support the writing of,
and whose readers desire, its own encyclopedia.
I'll leave aside my quarrels with Weinreich's definition of language.
That was a long time ago, in a different professional incarnation.
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