Canto Speakers: If you want to learn Mandarin - Check out our free guide that shows you how to use your Cantonese to help you learn Mandarin faster and easier www.thecmblueprint.com/guide-8906-4277-9454
3:20 at this point they're not merely dialects - they have evolved into separate languages (Mandarin, Min, Wu, Gan, etc). The problem is, it's usually governments who decide the differentiation between dialects and languages, making things, um, complicated. This is why language movements are a thing in some countries.
it really does depend entirely on individual belief. mutual intelligibility can be close to zero in china even going across a river to a neighboring village. drawing the line between language and dialect is pretty much impossible since it's on a continuum, both in space and time. i tend to go with this idea. the han people speak the han language. for example cantonese are largely han people, practice han culture, use han characters, and speak the han language with A LOT of regionalism. beijinger are also largely han people, practice han culture, etc etc. and use a lot of regionalism. the whole "chinese" thing is too much of a misnomer, undermining the chinese minorities.
I tend to just call them full languages if I’m talking about two of them and they are different enough. If I was to be talking about two hokkiens, probably dialects. Canto and Hokkien? probably two languages.
@@musAKulturenah, man, it's not that subjective at all People (countries, society) can say whatever they want, but from a linguistic point of view From a linguistic point of view... Wu and Min are classified as separate languages rather than dialects of a single language due to their significant differences in mutual intelligibility, phonology, morphology, and syntax. They are both part of "the Chinese language family" but are distinct enough to be considered separate languages. And funny enough. There are many languages within China borders that are not even sinitic languages
@@musAKulture Chinese (in the context of China itself) just means a citizen of China. It's a nationality. Non-Chinese foreigners are the ones who try over-equate it with one single culture.
As someone who speaks 7 different languages, this video was really interesting. There is so much culture and history that I learned about that is deeply connected to language. Sometimes I feel it would be easier if there was one common universal language that everybody spoke well enough to communicate with eachother, but I think the points in this video are why it's probably better the way it is now. Looking forward to your next video!
Cantonese is just not one dialect, there are several Cantonese as well, Guangdong hua is a bit different than Guangxi hua, locals there calls it (白话) baihua. Growing up I knew my Cantonese was different and people would make fun of how I say certain words. Of course I changed it to sound more HK by watching TVB and HK movies through the years. I used to think it's just some village Cantonese my parents spoke. Until I discovered the Southern regions of China in Guangxi, specially Dongxing, Beihai, the whole Fangchenggang area up to Guilin. Literally 10's of millions, might even be close to 100M speaking baihua. A HKer might think they are Chinese Vietnamese, makes sense since a lot of words do sound a bit Vietnamese like soup. Baihua is ganh and Vietnamese is canh, much different than 'tong' in HK Canto. We don't say 'Fay gay" for airplane, we say 'Fee gee', the 'ay' sound is replaced with the 'ee' sound. One common language is needed for all countries, makes life easily to communicate. I agree China would not be where it is today if we still speak hundreds of different dialects in every city and village.
@@musAKulture i know what he meant. I wanted to share a fun fact about Taiwanese with them using Mandarin. They translated a few words from Taiwanese into Mandarin, which is one of the examples. 不會 is another example which has the same meaning as 不客氣. Wouldn't make the same sense to 度路人
@@timmychan6282 But Taiwanese Hokkien does not pronounce it as "zao an" which is Mandarin. My point is that in Taiwan some words are literally translated word by word into Mandarin and use them as Mandarin expressions. You would never hear it in China use this way even though these are Mandarin words.
@@crush_override 早安 is not Taiwanese Hokkien. that is just Mandarin. the good morning greeting in Taiwanese Hokkien is 𠢕早 (gâu-tsá). if u studied Hokkien deeply, 早安 doesn't grammatically make sense in hokkien.
My thinking is that if Mandarin hadn't emerged, then Chinese speakers would do what basically every other country in the world has done... they would wind up communicating with people from other regions in English. That's what happens in Europe and India a lot of the time, and also what happens in Asia between countries that speak different languages there. So Chinese people would speak their own dialects locally in their region, and then have to speak English when they travel to another region, just like people do in different countries today when they don't speak one another's languages but do have English in common as a language they speak. Not necessarily good English, mind you, but some kind of semi-standard Chinglish would almost certainly emerge that would get the job done. Then again, who knows, perhaps the CCP would have chosen to make Russian the language of education due to fearing Anglo influence... a lot of things could have happened, really.
You're pretty spot on mate, English was in fact the lingua franca for Chinese revolutionists, along with written Chinese. They're mostly Chinese immigrants living in American west coast and Brittish Malaya
Completely wrong. As long as the state wants to keep Chinese they will nominate a dialect and make it the national language. Cantonese was close, it lost out by one vote, if it won, Cantonese would be the official language, mandarin would be a regional dialect like Cantonese and other regional dialects. Traditionally that's what happened for spoken language, written Chinese is already united and disregards dialect rules.
A common language is critical for development and unity across the country and common prosperity. Regional dialects can be spoken among friends and family. It is not being erased. But some people may choose to anchor to the common language of Mandarin in personal matters in addition to use in school, business and government. I personally speak English, Wu language, and some French.
Unfortunately many times those regional dialects can be lost as the children of parents who only use their regional dialects at home often end up not speaking that regional dialect with their own children. Especially when the language used outside of the home is considered a prestige language. That’s what happened to Irish, Frisian, Basque, etc. in Europe.
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You forgot the fact that "China" isn't a country, it exist by artificially merged multiple cultures together, forcing a common language into multiple cultures isn't ethical.
I’m trying to learn mandarin because my mom told me to learn and this channel is actually helping me after a week and I’m starting to speak advanced words from this channel
I actually hope they adopt the Old National Pronunciation. Which meshes in a bit of southern languages. However the main issue with that is that it is a constructed dialect so every have to relearn a new language.😂
Just last year, I went to China. I mostly hung out with older folks (my parents' generation and above) and they mostly spoke the local topolect of Wuhan--Wuhanese. The kids can only speak Putonghua though. One child's father is my cousin and he speaks fluent Wuhanese, but the mother is Taiwanese, and the common language in the house would be Putonghua. My other cousin and her husband have 2 children, and both children can only speak Putonghua. I am of the opinion that the Chinese people think geographically when they talk about the hometown's language. It's geographical, not linguistic. By that, my mother's mother, or maternal grandmother, can speak Liyang topolect because she's from there ancestrally. She can understand Shanghainese because Shanghainese and Liyang topolect are mutually intelligible--both part of northern Wu Chinese in linguistic terms. But people normally don't think in linguistic terms so they are unlikely to say that they speak Wu Chinese. During the layover at Hong Kong, I stayed at a hotel near the airport, and I just noticed many Hong Kong words. The English was so British, like using **lift** for elevator. And the Written Chinese leaned more Hong Kong-ish.
It's a shame because Cantonese preserved Tang dynasty terminologies and tones. Hokkien/Minnan preserved pronunciation from Ancient Chinese and Middle Chinese. Some of the examples you showed like 幾多 can be found often in ancient poetry and text. Here's some cool examples of Cantonese vs Korean vs Japanese. Edit - I use Yale Romanization since it makes more sense to English speakers. 復仇 fuk sau, canto fuku shu, jp bog su, korean fu qiu, mando 毒藥/毒薬 duk yeuk, canto doku yaku, jp dog yag, korean du yao, mando 滿足 mun juk, canto man zoku, jp man jog, kor man zu, mando extra Japanese stuff(anime stuff) 斬魄刀 jaam paak dou, canto zan paku tou, japanese zhan po dao, mando 佢/渠 keui, canto, third person pronoun kare, japanese, third person pronoun(archaic? don't think anyone writes 渠 anymore but it can be found in dictionary entry) geu, korean, third person pronoun(only written, not used colloquially) qu, mando, not used
@@musAKulture For sure. But Cantonese tones DID preserve nearly 99% of Tang dynasty tones, this can be confirmed through Tang poetry and 廣韻 which was supposedly based on 切韻. But if it's pronunciation, then Hokkien/Minnan has more preserved.
I think Cantonese preserved older terms is because there are fewer Cantonese evolved less because Cantonese communities are more secluded in the south. I think the more secluded a community is, the more it preserves historical terms and tones. Hakka and Teochew, for instance, is even more historical than Cantonese.
Your premise is wrong. Mandarin is literally just the Hebei dialect, it's called Mandarin because it's been selected to be the national or official language. Throughout Chinese history different dialects have been selected as the official language, the official language hasn't always been the Hebei dialect. In the vote for which dialect would be the national dialect at the founding of the RoC, Cantonese lost by one vote, if Cantonese won, the official language of China would be Cantonese, and Mandarin would just be a region dialect like, Cantonese, Wu dialect etc..
Because most of the Chinese despite different speech are of the same Han ethnicity. Indians are more complex. Non hindi speaking indians belong to different ethnicities based on the language they speak. Among those ethnicities people also identity by their cast. In hindi speaking regions people have no sense of ethnicity rather they identify with their cast and the state they come from. The binding factor of modern India is religion. India and Pakistan were separated based on the majority religion. Another name for India is Hindustan meaning land of the hindus.
It’s completely untrue that a single standard language is crucial to national unity and identity. Chinese identity has existed for thousands of years. India has way more languages than China, and also has an identity going back thousands of years. Not everyone there speaks Hindi.
The culture thing is very much a thing of Han Chinese are in general the same but then each region has lots of things that are very unique. My materal grandparents are from Shanxi and they served my dad those thick ass northern Chinese noodles and that would not fly in my paternal grandparent's home province of Jiangsu (specifically near Changzhou).
A few points missed, Mandarin or 官话 has always existed. It was the dialect of government officials and dependent on the capital. Ie. Mandarin in early Ming was a Nanjing dialect. (Closer to Wu Chinese) Mandarin in a modern sense or the "common tongue" under the PRC (普通话) is not Beijing-based though similar, it is based on a Chengde dialect (northeast of Beijing) China has a unique advantage (which is why it is united despite vastly different linguistics) in its characters. The standardisation of characters > pronunciation. India does not have this luxury with multiple dravidian and indo-aryan writing systems.
The Chengde dialect itself is largely a carryover of the Beijing court dialect in the first place. The city was largely established based on the imperial summer resort located there. After the fall of the Qing, many imperial officials relocated there as well. So, they had always been very closely connected to the court/official dialect of the government....whereas Beijing itself is a much larger place with much more local variety.
Big logical fallacy in this video's hypothetical scanario - most people can learn multiple Chinese languages, and this was the norm in China up until the last 3 generations. Most older people in China are fluent in their local dialect, a more standard regional lingua franca, plus Mandarin (language of capital). For example, my own grandparents spoke Hakka, Cantonese, and Mandarin, all fluently. Your claim about the loss of regional languages is merely the result of brutal government policies. Countries like Spain, Switzerland, Canada, Belgium promote multilingualism and shows that countries can operate even if not everyone has the same native language. You said it, languages are beautiful. And countries like France, Japan, and China refusing to acknowledge their regional varieties as separate languages but rather "dialects" is shameful - they are actively seeking to destroy regional identity in the name of "nationalism"
The "most people can learn..." is not based in any historical fact. Would you bet money on the majority of people learning 3 languages? Let's be serious.
@@darren5597 not a fact, it's my opinion. And I have living example to back my opinion: the Chinese Malaysians. They might only speak one variety of Chinese, but within their community there are Mandarin, Cantonese, Teochew, Hakka speakers all mixed together. Language proficiency isn't me betting money, but simply that they're constantly hear/exposed to multiple languages all the time since they're young. It's out of necessity. BTW, they also know Malay and English as they learn that in school 🥳 My point is, people will pick up languages if the environment encourages it. Conversely, older generations will stop passing down languages to younger generations when governments actively bans them in schools and media. Simple as that.
@@darren5597 looks like u come from monolingual land. in my country, it's normal to be trilingual or quadrilingual. the bare minimum is bilingual for one to survive. monolinguals are only tourists.
@@xXxSkyViperxXx I'm fully bilingual. Just because your country works a certain way doesn't mean it is efficient. All it means is that there are many tribes in your country. Specially, trilingualism and quadrilingualism definitely means that those people are conversational at best. Would they be able to conduct high level discussions about business, science and governance in all those languages? Is this even a serious way to look at the issue from a policy maker's perspective? Be realistic.
The taiwanese characters you used is wrong, but the character for 'Gâu' doenst exist in other dialects so it cannot be written down on computers phones etc. And the 'tsá' is actually the character 'morning' “早” And i know this because i speak hokkien
do take note that mandarin is not solely based on the Beijing dialect. in fact, Modern Mandarin pronunciation standardization was largely done in hebei province. hence beijing being the capital is not a reason, at least not a major reason, why mandarin was chosen as the official dialect. the real reasons are that the vast majority of the chinese population are mandarin speakers (from sichuan to heilongjiang province), and that mandarin had been the court language since ming dynasty (1300s). in contrast, cantonese is only spoken in Canton. so even though the official tripped over you and couldn't make it to the conference, mandarin would be chosen nonetheless.
My native speaking dialect is Cantonese. Though l would like it to be the one to take centre stage in the future of the Chinese as a whole, l can see the importance of having a universally accepted on consensus common language for all Chinese. To my knowledge, unfortunately Cantonese lost out to Mandarin when it came down to the votes not by a wide margin. So be it. Cannot help thinking that if Cantonese had been voted in, the language does have it strong points and it has a probably longer history. It's a dialect that consists of six to nine semi tones compared to only four for Mandarin. It's the general opinion of those who learn Chinese as a second language to be more expressive and colourful.
Cantonese sounds way better than Mandarin. When I listen to Cantonese music I like nearly every song at first glance, Mandarin instead, sounds so heavy, no harmony at all.
Really? That's the first time I see a comment like this. Cantonese speaker here BTW, my impression is that Cantonese tones can be quite harsh and a bit more difficult to rhyme in songs (compared to Mandarin). I love Cantonese and Cantonese songs because it's at times quirky to the ears, not exactly melodic lol
That’s because you’re hearing the northern accent. Southern accent of mandarin is popular among foreigners! Zhang Hao for example speaks in a Fujian Southern accent and it sounds really nice
The first 4 minutes of the video could be omitted by just saying they're not actually dialects, but languages. Theyre only dialects because xi jinping said so, but they don't really fit any definition of dialects because people can't understand eachother
I don't get what he means that Mandarin not exist and no trade and a translator is needed just for the simple things such as "how much does it cost?" You know that Cantonese is spoken way before Mandarin. Mandarin was mostly speak by the area from the north who are un educated hunters. To keep litegacy as a minimum, theyu have use Mandarin and simplified Chinese in order to get more people to spoken and use the language.
Mutual intelligibility is funky in Chinese, because Chinese isn't one sole language. Chinese can be seen as either a standard written variety of Mandarin (in Chinese, 書面語, as you probably know) or an entire language family, that being Sinitic. This makes it completely unfair to compare e.g. a Canadian dialect vs an Indian one to Fuzhounese Hokkien vs Ürümqi Mandarin. Also, I disgaree; I am able to understand cognates from Hokkien as a speaker of standard Mandarin, but that's because of exposure (exactly the same as an English speaker who has been exposed to Jamaican Patois, which is not a dialect of English - what you said).
"It made sense to make the national language based on what was being said in the most important city in the country" en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_hegemony
i don't agree that the lack of mandarin to the extent the chinese govt is pushing it would have resulted in a china that didn't become a powerhouse. Europe is and remains many different languages, and despite being actually different countries, they are and remain a superpower (individual countries, and the EU as a whole). China, being one country, could advance things much farther than the EU.
there can also be a "universal chinese language" like what English has become, yet having and maintaining regional languages as first languages, rather than forcing mandarin to essentially become people's sole chinese language.
it works like this. the elites, those who generate most of the economy and technologies in europe, pretty much are all fluent in a lingua franca, like english, german, or french. the difference between many of the european languages can also be minimal; a portuguese speaker can communicate with a spanish speaker if both tried hard. same with dutch, german, danish, etc. with china, even though "mandarin" has been made the official tongue, it functions much like english in europe. 90% of the chinese population barely speak it enough to be comprehensible, and only around 10% can really speak it well enough to be considered "native speakers". also, it's the elite 10% who generate most of the economy and technology. the major difference between "mandarin" in china and english in europe, is that one is being pushed and enforced while the other one is more voluntary. however, even if "mandarin" didn't get enforced, the elites of the nation would have created a common language between themselves anyway. i've been translating a book on the development and history of the chinese language. in short, it's quite complicated and the creation and enforcement of mandarin occurred much more naturally than many people would believe.
I don’t know if I would consider Europe as a superpower similar to other single countries. Germany is still Germany, France is still France. But I do get the point that a Federation of different languages could still function and not be utter chaos. And the term dialect is really a Chinese concept to try and project one common language. In reality, it is more like Europe in the sense that there are many different languages.
@@musAKulture mandarin just inherited its place from its ancestral imperial court language, so of course it was historically natural, since it's the lingua franca of the central plains basin where china's imperial government was always based at as its imperial heartland
Spot on, Sheldon! I have 2 years of Cantonese language and Culture that I picked up in college, and learned these same things. In fact, I understand there are 8 different dialects in China, yet the writing is the same for all 8 dialects. Very interesting! Thanks for sharing! ❤😊
The vast majority of people in China speak two or more languages or rather dialects if u want to put it that way, some people abroad say the government wants to erase a dialect infers they are banning it, which clearly isn't the case. Any country will have a their own default language in which things are run. If you want to go anywhere in USA, you have to know English, by the way some people phrase it, you would then be saying the US government is erasing languages of it's minorities, Asians, Hispanics, native Indians etc , having a common language is different from wanting to erase competing languages. If someone is losing touch with their native culture/ language, well sorry to say that's on your parents. I'm willing to bet the number of people who still speak their local dialect in China is far far greater than say the number of Chinese Americans who can speak any form of Chinese. 😅
It might not be hard banned by the government, but the teachings in school have basically created a soft ban. If you were in a Cantonese speaking region in mainland China and tried to speak Cantonese, you will have a number of kids go up to you and literally scream in your ears to speak Mandarin. It's estimated that Cantonese won't last a few more generations considering how little of the next generation are able to speak or even comprehend Cantonese.
@@patrickwilson2475 what? Northern china and parts of Mongolia and the Russian far east used to be part of a huge Korean kingdom called Goguryeo. I’m not delulu, I’m just blowing minds with obscure historical facts! 🤯
Canto Speakers: If you want to learn Mandarin - Check out our free guide that shows you how to use your Cantonese to help you learn Mandarin faster and easier www.thecmblueprint.com/guide-8906-4277-9454
Cantonese , Hokkien, Hakka ,Shanghainese ,Mandarin ....etc they're different languages , not dialects.
3:20 at this point they're not merely dialects - they have evolved into separate languages (Mandarin, Min, Wu, Gan, etc). The problem is, it's usually governments who decide the differentiation between dialects and languages, making things, um, complicated. This is why language movements are a thing in some countries.
it really does depend entirely on individual belief. mutual intelligibility can be close to zero in china even going across a river to a neighboring village. drawing the line between language and dialect is pretty much impossible since it's on a continuum, both in space and time.
i tend to go with this idea.
the han people speak the han language. for example cantonese are largely han people, practice han culture, use han characters, and speak the han language with A LOT of regionalism. beijinger are also largely han people, practice han culture, etc etc. and use a lot of regionalism. the whole "chinese" thing is too much of a misnomer, undermining the chinese minorities.
I tend to just call them full languages if I’m talking about two of them and they are different enough. If I was to be talking about two hokkiens, probably dialects. Canto and Hokkien? probably two languages.
@@musAKulturenah, man, it's not that subjective at all
People (countries, society) can say whatever they want, but from a linguistic point of view From a linguistic point of view... Wu and Min are classified as separate languages rather than dialects of a single language due to their significant differences in mutual intelligibility, phonology, morphology, and syntax. They are both part of "the Chinese language family" but are distinct enough to be considered separate languages.
And funny enough. There are many languages within China borders that are not even sinitic languages
@@amberwingthefairycat sometimes even two hokkiens or two cantoneses are not mutually intelligible. you will end up with thousands of languages.
@@musAKulture Chinese (in the context of China itself) just means a citizen of China. It's a nationality. Non-Chinese foreigners are the ones who try over-equate it with one single culture.
As someone who speaks 7 different languages, this video was really interesting. There is so much culture and history that I learned about that is deeply connected to language. Sometimes I feel it would be easier if there was one common universal language that everybody spoke well enough to communicate with eachother, but I think the points in this video are why it's probably better the way it is now. Looking forward to your next video!
Very insightful loganl7799. Just curious, what are the seven different languages that you speak?
Cantonese is just not one dialect, there are several Cantonese as well, Guangdong hua is a bit different than Guangxi hua, locals there calls it (白话) baihua. Growing up I knew my Cantonese was different and people would make fun of how I say certain words. Of course I changed it to sound more HK by watching TVB and HK movies through the years. I used to think it's just some village Cantonese my parents spoke. Until I discovered the Southern regions of China in Guangxi, specially Dongxing, Beihai, the whole Fangchenggang area up to Guilin. Literally 10's of millions, might even be close to 100M speaking baihua. A HKer might think they are Chinese Vietnamese, makes sense since a lot of words do sound a bit Vietnamese like soup. Baihua is ganh and Vietnamese is canh, much different than 'tong' in HK Canto. We don't say 'Fay gay" for airplane, we say 'Fee gee', the 'ay' sound is replaced with the 'ee' sound. One common language is needed for all countries, makes life easily to communicate. I agree China would not be where it is today if we still speak hundreds of different dialects in every city and village.
In Taiwan they greet each other in the morning as 早安 (zao an) in Mandarin.
guy meant to say taiwanese hokkien, to be precise.
@@musAKulture i know what he meant. I wanted to share a fun fact about Taiwanese with them using Mandarin. They translated a few words from Taiwanese into Mandarin, which is one of the examples. 不會 is another example which has the same meaning as 不客氣. Wouldn't make the same sense to 度路人
@@crush_override 3:11 He literally said "Taiwanese Hokkien"
@@timmychan6282 But Taiwanese Hokkien does not pronounce it as "zao an" which is Mandarin. My point is that in Taiwan some words are literally translated word by word into Mandarin and use them as Mandarin expressions. You would never hear it in China use this way even though these are Mandarin words.
@@crush_override 早安 is not Taiwanese Hokkien. that is just Mandarin. the good morning greeting in Taiwanese Hokkien is 𠢕早 (gâu-tsá). if u studied Hokkien deeply, 早安 doesn't grammatically make sense in hokkien.
My thinking is that if Mandarin hadn't emerged, then Chinese speakers would do what basically every other country in the world has done... they would wind up communicating with people from other regions in English. That's what happens in Europe and India a lot of the time, and also what happens in Asia between countries that speak different languages there. So Chinese people would speak their own dialects locally in their region, and then have to speak English when they travel to another region, just like people do in different countries today when they don't speak one another's languages but do have English in common as a language they speak. Not necessarily good English, mind you, but some kind of semi-standard Chinglish would almost certainly emerge that would get the job done. Then again, who knows, perhaps the CCP would have chosen to make Russian the language of education due to fearing Anglo influence... a lot of things could have happened, really.
You're pretty spot on mate, English was in fact the lingua franca for Chinese revolutionists, along with written Chinese. They're mostly Chinese immigrants living in American west coast and Brittish Malaya
Completely wrong. As long as the state wants to keep Chinese they will nominate a dialect and make it the national language. Cantonese was close, it lost out by one vote, if it won, Cantonese would be the official language, mandarin would be a regional dialect like Cantonese and other regional dialects. Traditionally that's what happened for spoken language, written Chinese is already united and disregards dialect rules.
Who is here after seeing there channel is hacked?
cant explain how confused i was
Me
Istg i am so mad rn
A common language is critical for development and unity across the country and common prosperity. Regional dialects can be spoken among friends and family. It is not being erased. But some people may choose to anchor to the common language of Mandarin in personal matters in addition to use in school, business and government. I personally speak English, Wu language, and some French.
Unfortunately many times those regional dialects can be lost as the children of parents who only use their regional dialects at home often end up not speaking that regional dialect with their own children. Especially when the language used outside of the home is considered a prestige language. That’s what happened to Irish, Frisian, Basque, etc. in Europe.
You forgot the fact that "China" isn't a country, it exist by artificially merged multiple cultures together, forcing a common language into multiple cultures isn't ethical.
A unified Chinese identity existed for thousands of years before Mandarin became the standardized language for the common people.
@@artugert deal with it
@@patrickwilson2475 Deal with what?
I’m trying to learn mandarin because my mom told me to learn and this channel is actually helping me after a week and I’m starting to speak advanced words from this channel
I actually hope they adopt the Old National Pronunciation. Which meshes in a bit of southern languages. However the main issue with that is that it is a constructed dialect so every have to relearn a new language.😂
They're languages, not dialects. Dialects are mutually intelligible.
Brilliant explanation for people who doesn’t know about China
How about Europe being one country and china several countries ? How languages will be shaped in these regions ?
Just last year, I went to China. I mostly hung out with older folks (my parents' generation and above) and they mostly spoke the local topolect of Wuhan--Wuhanese. The kids can only speak Putonghua though. One child's father is my cousin and he speaks fluent Wuhanese, but the mother is Taiwanese, and the common language in the house would be Putonghua. My other cousin and her husband have 2 children, and both children can only speak Putonghua.
I am of the opinion that the Chinese people think geographically when they talk about the hometown's language. It's geographical, not linguistic. By that, my mother's mother, or maternal grandmother, can speak Liyang topolect because she's from there ancestrally. She can understand Shanghainese because Shanghainese and Liyang topolect are mutually intelligible--both part of northern Wu Chinese in linguistic terms. But people normally don't think in linguistic terms so they are unlikely to say that they speak Wu Chinese.
During the layover at Hong Kong, I stayed at a hotel near the airport, and I just noticed many Hong Kong words. The English was so British, like using **lift** for elevator. And the Written Chinese leaned more Hong Kong-ish.
It's a shame because Cantonese preserved Tang dynasty terminologies and tones. Hokkien/Minnan preserved pronunciation from Ancient Chinese and Middle Chinese. Some of the examples you showed like 幾多 can be found often in ancient poetry and text.
Here's some cool examples of Cantonese vs Korean vs Japanese. Edit - I use Yale Romanization since it makes more sense to English speakers.
復仇
fuk sau, canto
fuku shu, jp
bog su, korean
fu qiu, mando
毒藥/毒薬
duk yeuk, canto
doku yaku, jp
dog yag, korean
du yao, mando
滿足
mun juk, canto
man zoku, jp
man jog, kor
man zu, mando
extra Japanese stuff(anime stuff)
斬魄刀
jaam paak dou, canto
zan paku tou, japanese
zhan po dao, mando
佢/渠
keui, canto, third person pronoun
kare, japanese, third person pronoun(archaic? don't think anyone writes 渠 anymore but it can be found in dictionary entry)
geu, korean, third person pronoun(only written, not used colloquially)
qu, mando, not used
literally EVERY dialect speaker claims the same thing. there's bits of that in every dialect, including mandarin.
@@musAKulture For sure. But Cantonese tones DID preserve nearly 99% of Tang dynasty tones, this can be confirmed through Tang poetry and 廣韻 which was supposedly based on 切韻. But if it's pronunciation, then Hokkien/Minnan has more preserved.
6清华不请你当教授真是可惜了
@@Aznbomb3r 挺有意思的，想听粤剧和豫剧了。
I think Cantonese preserved older terms is because there are fewer Cantonese evolved less because Cantonese communities are more secluded in the south. I think the more secluded a community is, the more it preserves historical terms and tones. Hakka and Teochew, for instance, is even more historical than Cantonese.
Your premise is wrong. Mandarin is literally just the Hebei dialect, it's called Mandarin because it's been selected to be the national or official language. Throughout Chinese history different dialects have been selected as the official language, the official language hasn't always been the Hebei dialect. In the vote for which dialect would be the national dialect at the founding of the RoC, Cantonese lost by one vote, if Cantonese won, the official language of China would be Cantonese, and Mandarin would just be a region dialect like, Cantonese, Wu dialect etc..
Wonder why india never implemented this. Huge chunks of the population don't speak hindi
Probably to respect regional identities and preserve character., at the same time acknowledging the existence of a neutral language (english).
Bcuz Southern Indians are against leaning Hindi
Because most of the Chinese despite different speech are of the same Han ethnicity. Indians are more complex. Non hindi speaking indians belong to different ethnicities based on the language they speak. Among those ethnicities people also identity by their cast. In hindi speaking regions people have no sense of ethnicity rather they identify with their cast and the state they come from. The binding factor of modern India is religion. India and Pakistan were separated based on the majority religion. Another name for India is Hindustan meaning land of the hindus.
It’s completely untrue that a single standard language is crucial to national unity and identity. Chinese identity has existed for thousands of years. India has way more languages than China, and also has an identity going back thousands of years. Not everyone there speaks Hindi.
The culture thing is very much a thing of Han Chinese are in general the same but then each region has lots of things that are very unique.
My materal grandparents are from Shanxi and they served my dad those thick ass northern Chinese noodles and that would not fly in my paternal grandparent's home province of Jiangsu (specifically near Changzhou).
Why did your main channel turn into Tesla
Hacked
A few points missed, Mandarin or 官话 has always existed. It was the dialect of government officials and dependent on the capital. Ie. Mandarin in early Ming was a Nanjing dialect. (Closer to Wu Chinese)
Mandarin in a modern sense or the "common tongue" under the PRC (普通话) is not Beijing-based though similar, it is based on a Chengde dialect (northeast of Beijing)
China has a unique advantage (which is why it is united despite vastly different linguistics) in its characters. The standardisation of characters > pronunciation. India does not have this luxury with multiple dravidian and indo-aryan writing systems.
The Chengde dialect itself is largely a carryover of the Beijing court dialect in the first place. The city was largely established based on the imperial summer resort located there. After the fall of the Qing, many imperial officials relocated there as well. So, they had always been very closely connected to the court/official dialect of the government....whereas Beijing itself is a much larger place with much more local variety.
Hi Sheldon ❤
Cantomando got hacked, I hope you guys see this Cantomando🙏🙏🙏
Big logical fallacy in this video's hypothetical scanario - most people can learn multiple Chinese languages, and this was the norm in China up until the last 3 generations. Most older people in China are fluent in their local dialect, a more standard regional lingua franca, plus Mandarin (language of capital). For example, my own grandparents spoke Hakka, Cantonese, and Mandarin, all fluently.
Your claim about the loss of regional languages is merely the result of brutal government policies. Countries like Spain, Switzerland, Canada, Belgium promote multilingualism and shows that countries can operate even if not everyone has the same native language.
You said it, languages are beautiful. And countries like France, Japan, and China refusing to acknowledge their regional varieties as separate languages but rather "dialects" is shameful - they are actively seeking to destroy regional identity in the name of "nationalism"
Well said
The "most people can learn..." is not based in any historical fact. Would you bet money on the majority of people learning 3 languages? Let's be serious.
@@darren5597 not a fact, it's my opinion. And I have living example to back my opinion: the Chinese Malaysians. They might only speak one variety of Chinese, but within their community there are Mandarin, Cantonese, Teochew, Hakka speakers all mixed together. Language proficiency isn't me betting money, but simply that they're constantly hear/exposed to multiple languages all the time since they're young. It's out of necessity. BTW, they also know Malay and English as they learn that in school 🥳
My point is, people will pick up languages if the environment encourages it. Conversely, older generations will stop passing down languages to younger generations when governments actively bans them in schools and media. Simple as that.
@@darren5597 looks like u come from monolingual land. in my country, it's normal to be trilingual or quadrilingual. the bare minimum is bilingual for one to survive. monolinguals are only tourists.
@@xXxSkyViperxXx I'm fully bilingual. Just because your country works a certain way doesn't mean it is efficient. All it means is that there are many tribes in your country. Specially, trilingualism and quadrilingualism definitely means that those people are conversational at best. Would they be able to conduct high level discussions about business, science and governance in all those languages? Is this even a serious way to look at the issue from a policy maker's perspective?
Be realistic.
The taiwanese characters you used is wrong, but the character for 'Gâu' doenst exist in other dialects so it cannot be written down on computers phones etc. And the 'tsá' is actually the character 'morning' “早”
And i know this because i speak hokkien
Apparently there exists “𠢕早”, but like you said, I can’t even see it on my computer, and probably very few people actually use it.
@@amberwingthefairycat i can see it full well on my desktop and phone. just need updated drivers.
@@xXxSkyViperxXx That’s good. Font support always slowly improves.
do take note that mandarin is not solely based on the Beijing dialect. in fact, Modern Mandarin pronunciation standardization was largely done in hebei province. hence beijing being the capital is not a reason, at least not a major reason, why mandarin was chosen as the official dialect. the real reasons are that the vast majority of the chinese population are mandarin speakers (from sichuan to heilongjiang province), and that mandarin had been the court language since ming dynasty (1300s). in contrast, cantonese is only spoken in Canton. so even though the official tripped over you and couldn't make it to the conference, mandarin would be chosen nonetheless.
My native speaking dialect is Cantonese. Though l would like it to be the one to take centre stage in the future of the Chinese as a whole, l can see the importance of having a universally accepted on consensus common language for all Chinese.
To my knowledge, unfortunately Cantonese lost out to Mandarin when it came down to the votes not by a wide margin.
So be it. Cannot help thinking that if Cantonese had been voted in, the language does have it strong points and it has a probably longer history. It's a dialect that consists of six to nine semi tones compared to only four for Mandarin. It's the general opinion of those who learn Chinese as a second language to be more expressive and colourful.
Cantonese is a language, not a dialect
Cantonese sounds way better than Mandarin. When I listen to Cantonese music I like nearly every song at first glance, Mandarin instead, sounds so heavy, no harmony at all.
Really? That's the first time I see a comment like this. Cantonese speaker here BTW, my impression is that Cantonese tones can be quite harsh and a bit more difficult to rhyme in songs (compared to Mandarin). I love Cantonese and Cantonese songs because it's at times quirky to the ears, not exactly melodic lol
That’s because you’re hearing the northern accent. Southern accent of mandarin is popular among foreigners! Zhang Hao for example speaks in a Fujian Southern accent and it sounds really nice
@@somethingggggg unfortunately, the northern Beijing accent is prioritized.
@@somethingggggg You are right, I compared both accents, the Southern one sounds pleasant to the ears, while the Northern sounds a little bit harsh.
@@ESC_jackqulen I know D: As a southerner I speak with the southern accent though!
The first 4 minutes of the video could be omitted by just saying they're not actually dialects, but languages. Theyre only dialects because xi jinping said so, but they don't really fit any definition of dialects because people can't understand eachother
I don't get what he means that Mandarin not exist and no trade and a translator is needed just for the simple things such as "how much does it cost?" You know that Cantonese is spoken way before Mandarin. Mandarin was mostly speak by the area from the north who are un educated hunters. To keep litegacy as a minimum, theyu have use Mandarin and simplified Chinese in order to get more people to spoken and use the language.
What happened to CantoMando
Mutual intelligibility is funky in Chinese, because Chinese isn't one sole language. Chinese can be seen as either a standard written variety of Mandarin (in Chinese, 書面語, as you probably know) or an entire language family, that being Sinitic. This makes it completely unfair to compare e.g. a Canadian dialect vs an Indian one to Fuzhounese Hokkien vs Ürümqi Mandarin.
Also, I disgaree; I am able to understand cognates from Hokkien as a speaker of standard Mandarin, but that's because of exposure (exactly the same as an English speaker who has been exposed to Jamaican Patois, which is not a dialect of English - what you said).
"It made sense to make the national language based on what was being said in the most important city in the country"
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_hegemony
i don't agree that the lack of mandarin to the extent the chinese govt is pushing it would have resulted in a china that didn't become a powerhouse. Europe is and remains many different languages, and despite being actually different countries, they are and remain a superpower (individual countries, and the EU as a whole). China, being one country, could advance things much farther than the EU.
there can also be a "universal chinese language" like what English has become, yet having and maintaining regional languages as first languages, rather than forcing mandarin to essentially become people's sole chinese language.
it works like this. the elites, those who generate most of the economy and technologies in europe, pretty much are all fluent in a lingua franca, like english, german, or french. the difference between many of the european languages can also be minimal; a portuguese speaker can communicate with a spanish speaker if both tried hard. same with dutch, german, danish, etc.
with china, even though "mandarin" has been made the official tongue, it functions much like english in europe. 90% of the chinese population barely speak it enough to be comprehensible, and only around 10% can really speak it well enough to be considered "native speakers". also, it's the elite 10% who generate most of the economy and technology.
the major difference between "mandarin" in china and english in europe, is that one is being pushed and enforced while the other one is more voluntary. however, even if "mandarin" didn't get enforced, the elites of the nation would have created a common language between themselves anyway.
i've been translating a book on the development and history of the chinese language. in short, it's quite complicated and the creation and enforcement of mandarin occurred much more naturally than many people would believe.
I don’t know if I would consider Europe as a superpower similar to other single countries. Germany is still Germany, France is still France. But I do get the point that a Federation of different languages could still function and not be utter chaos. And the term dialect is really a Chinese concept to try and project one common language. In reality, it is more like Europe in the sense that there are many different languages.
@@musAKulture mandarin just inherited its place from its ancestral imperial court language, so of course it was historically natural, since it's the lingua franca of the central plains basin where china's imperial government was always based at as its imperial heartland
So Sheldon, did you guys have a fall out? Haven't seen you on Cantomando for some time... :)
Spot on, Sheldon! I have 2 years of Cantonese language and Culture that I picked up in college, and learned these same things. In fact, I understand there are 8 different dialects in China, yet the writing is the same for all 8 dialects. Very interesting! Thanks for sharing! ❤😊
actually 200+ dialects
There're 302 languages in China
Why is your main channel a crypto scam
The vast majority of people in China speak two or more languages or rather dialects if u want to put it that way, some people abroad say the government wants to erase a dialect infers they are banning it, which clearly isn't the case. Any country will have a their own default language in which things are run. If you want to go anywhere in USA, you have to know English, by the way some people phrase it, you would then be saying the US government is erasing languages of it's minorities, Asians, Hispanics, native Indians etc , having a common language is different from wanting to erase competing languages. If someone is losing touch with their native culture/ language, well sorry to say that's on your parents. I'm willing to bet the number of people who still speak their local dialect in China is far far greater than say the number of Chinese Americans who can speak any form of Chinese. 😅
It might not be hard banned by the government, but the teachings in school have basically created a soft ban. If you were in a Cantonese speaking region in mainland China and tried to speak Cantonese, you will have a number of kids go up to you and literally scream in your ears to speak Mandarin. It's estimated that Cantonese won't last a few more generations considering how little of the next generation are able to speak or even comprehend Cantonese.
@@Aznbomb3r so sad, they brainwash the kids there.
@@Aznbomb3r so sad, they brainшаsh the kids there.
If mandarin didn’t exist then northern china would still be Korean territory!
delulu
@@patrickwilson2475 what? Northern china and parts of Mongolia and the Russian far east used to be part of a huge Korean kingdom called Goguryeo. I’m not delulu, I’m just blowing minds with obscure historical facts! 🤯
@@MarshalMarrs-eu9yh sure jan korea no.1
Nah just the Liaodong peninsula. Even the rest of the north east was populated by Tungusic and mongolic people
@@MarshalMarrs-eu9yhBefore blowing others' minds with obscure facts, you should educate yourself with basic facts first :)