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

From: PaPaPeng (papapeng_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 10/27/04 

Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 20:38:15 GMT

On 27 Oct 2004 23:08:38 +0800, LEE Sau Dan
<danlee@informatik.uni-freiburg.de> wrote:

>I don't understand why urban legends like this one get believed so
>frequently.

Original article.

The ECONOMIST January 30th 1999. pages 77 to 79.

Quote: ('...' indicates italics in the original article)
In early 1913, not long after the collapse of the Qing dynasty and the
founding of China's first republic, a conference gathered in Beijing
to standardise the Chinese language. The exercise was a nation
building imperative, but it got off to a bad start. The delegates
from the north, who spoke Mandarin dialects, of which speech of the
capital is the best known example, were evenly matched by delegates
from the south, notably from Shanghai. The southerners resented the
notion that Mandarin should be adopted as China's lingua franca,
fearing that many linguistic distinctions particular to the south
would be lost. Tempers rose. One day Wang Zhao, leader of the
Mandarin faction heard the southern-action leader, Wang Rongbao, use
the Shanghai word 'wangbo ts'o' (rickshaw); he thought what was
uttered was the Mandarin 'wangba dan' (turtle's egg), a curse with the
force of "son of a whore". He attacked Wang Rongbo and chased him
from the hall. The latter never returned, and the Mandarin camp
eventually won the day.

Welcome to the politics of the Chinese language. Ever since 1913,
nationalists given over to the cause of unifying China's vast landmass
have insisted on the need for 'Gouyu' ( a national language). During
the 1930s, Chiang Kai Shek's Kuomintang (KMT) confiscated and burnt
regional literature. In his book, "The Languages of China" (Princeton
University Press; 1987) Robert Ramsey, an American linguist, describes
the exquisite contortions achieved by 'Guoyu' advocates. One
nationalist, worried that 'Guoyu' might be identified with 'Guanhua',
the Mandarin of discredited 'Qing' officialdom, argued that the 'guan'
in 'Guanhua' did not mean "official" so much as "public" as in 'guan
cesuo' (public lavotary). Therefore, he argued, those who wouldn't
use "Guanhua' would, by logical extension, not be able to use public
lavatories either.

End quote.

There is two more pages of this stuff and one couldn't invent them if
one wanted to. No urban legends anywhere.

Do look up the original article for it gives a very good heads up on
China's languages - now formed around the main groups Mandarin, Yue,
Min, Gan, |Xiang, Wu and Hakka provided in a very useful map* showing
the extent of each language group. Quote pp77. "The eight so called
regional "dialects" are all, in fact, distinct language groups.
Although related, the languages are also mutually incomprehensible."

(note. the map named only seven dialects??)

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