Urban legends (Was: Fun with the Origin of Chinese spoken languages)

From: LEE Sau Dan (danlee_at_informatik.uni-freiburg.de)
Date: 10/27/04 

Date: 27 Oct 2004 23:08:38 +0800

>>>>> "PaPaPeng" == PaPaPeng <papapeng@yahoo.com> writes:

    PaPaPeng> This was just after the 1949 Revolution and there was a
    PaPaPeng> national congress on a national language. The Shanghai
    PaPaPeng> clique of course wanted their dialect as the national
    PaPaPeng> language. Somewhere during the conference break the
    PaPaPeng> senior Shanghai delegate used the word "wang something"
    PaPaPeng> in reference to a rickshaw he wanted to hire. However,
    PaPaPeng> to the Peking delegate who overheard him, it sounded
    PaPaPeng> like Turtle, a word that has the power of calling one a
    PaPaPeng> whore. The Peking delegate was enraged and chased the
    PaPaPeng> Shanghai guy out of the hall. The Shanghai guy never
    PaPaPeng> returned to the conference and the Beijing dialect won
    PaPaPeng> by default.

I don't understand why urban legends like this one get believed so
frequently. I've heard another version also for a national language
of Chinese. It was the fight between Mandarin and Cantonese (the
latter being the mother tongue of Sun Yat-sen) and the legend says
that Cantonese lost to Mandarin by 1 vote only.

I heard a similar story about the national language of U.S.A. It says
that they once had a meeting to decide whether German or English
should be the national language, and the former lost to the later by
one vote. (But people spreading this legend aren't aware that there
is no national language at the federal level in the U.S.A.) 

-- 
Lee Sau Dan                     +Z05biGVm-                          ~{@nJX6X~}
E-mail: danlee@informatik.uni-freiburg.de
Home page: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~danlee