Re: Half of all Chinese people can't speak Mandarin!

António Marques <m.ap@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>Lee Sau Dan wrote:
>>>>> The National Language Commission's survey also found that
>>>>> many of the 53 percent of China's 1.3 billion people who can
>>>>> speak Mandarin are not frequent Mandarin users.
>>
>> So, if you think this web-page is credible, then the literal
>> meaning of that quoted sentence tells you that
>>
>> a) 1.3 billion of people CAN speak Mandarin;
>
>I'm sorry but it says
>
>many of
> (the 53 percent of China's 1.3 billion people)
> (who can speak Mandarin)
>are not frequent Mandarin users.
>
>So it's saying that only 53% of the 1.3 billion can speak it, and that
>many of those 53% are not frequent users.
>
>This is the one parsing, and I don't see that yours is possible at all.

Sorry, but I am a native English speaker, and I also followed the
garden path and parsed it at first as:

"Many of the 53 percent of China's (1.3 billion people who can speak
Mandarin) are not frequent Mandarin users.

I conflated the "Many of the" with the 53%, essentially ignoring those
first three words. I agree that only the parsing that associates the
relative clause back to the 53% is plausible looking at the sentence
as a whole, it was worded extremely awkwardly (any sentence that says
"many of the X of the Y" is certain to cause some confusion).

>> b) 53% of these 1.3 billion people are not frequent Mandarin users
>> (but they ARE Mandarin users, as stated in (a) above).
>
>No, the 53% is both the frequent and the many non-frequent.
>
>> (a) implies that 1.3 billion people can speak Mandarin.
>
>Not at all.
>
>> (b) implies that 47% of the 1.3billion, or 611 million, people
>> are frequent Mandarin users.
>
>No, the 47% are those that don't speak Mandarin at all.

There is nothing in the quoted sentence that says *anything* about
people who don't speak Mandarin at all.

>> The article is self-contradictory: On the one hand, it starts
>> by saying that nearly half of the Chinese population *CANNOT*
>> speak Mandarin. However, when it comes to giving the figures,
>> it says 53% of the 1.3 billion *who can speak Mandarin* are not
>> frequent Mandarin users. So, these 53% *ARE* "Mandarin
>> speakers"!!! And they *cannot* speak Mandarin (as claimed in the
>> beginning of the article)? What a ridiculous contradiction!
>>
>> My impression: The author doesn't know what he's talking about.
>
>Or maybe you should reread it.

All that was quoted was one sentence. I respond only to that
sentence; I have no interest in the original article. If the sentence
quoted does not support the implied thesis of the subject line, then
the poster did not make his/her case. One should not be obliged to
read the source article in order to understand what the person posting
was trying to claim.

>> Further, the articles states that: "In non-minority areas,
>> schools must teach in Mandarin and television and radio stations
>> are required to use Mandarin in broadcasts." This is again untrue.
>> In the city of Canton (Guangzhou), Cantonese radio and TV
>> broadcast has never stopped, despite the Putonghua campaign
>> pushed by the Communist Party. Not even during the Cultural
>> Revolution! Canton citizens can and could turn on the radio and
>> listen to news in Cantonese.
>
>Now it's you doing what you mistakenly accused the artcile of: the
>article says they must teach/broadcast Mandarin, not that other
>languages are forbidden. You can teach/broadcast more than one
>language during the day.

"required to use Mandarin in broadcasts" does NOT imply that other
languages can be used as well.

lojbab
--
lojbab lojbab@xxxxxxxxxx
Bob LeChevalier, Founder, The Logical Language Group
(Opinions are my own; I do not speak for the organization.)
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org
.

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