[HN Gopher] The Invention of Chinese
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The Invention of Chinese
Author : Thevet
Score : 26 points
Date : 2021-12-10 22:34 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.historytoday.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.historytoday.com)
| ncmncm wrote:
| Primarily Mandarin speakers I have known were taught, and
| believed, that the "dialects" were basically the same as
| Mandarin, just with different pronunciation.
|
| They sincerely believed that when Cantonese speakers read and
| wrote, they were not wholesale translating from and to Mandarin,
| but simply, when writing, transcribing Cantonese using the
| universal ideographic calligraphy.
|
| In fact, writing in dialect languages is not taught. The
| extremely elaborate system dictating which of usually several,
| often many syllabary characters that sound identical must be used
| in writing a word in Mandarin (very commonly mistaken for
| ideographic writing) cannot work for the other sinitic languages.
|
| (Sinitic languages admit about 1200 distinct syllables, but the
| syllabary writing system uses many times that number, so many
| necessarily sound alike. Mandarin speakers are taught that the
| characters are not merely syllables with attached historical
| rules, but ideograms that represent distinct thoughts. (Numerous
| just-so examples are used to support the notion.) This has often
| led to belief that ancient documents using the characters could
| be read and understood without deep knowledge of the actual
| language and world of the writer, resulting in, at best, comical
| translations.)
| dwohnitmok wrote:
| There's a lot of complexities and politically-motivated reasons
| behind calling various varieties of Chinese "dialects" but this
| article swings way too far the other direction.
|
| There has been a single lingua franca across all of China since
| at least the Han Dynasty, perhaps even the Warring States period
| or earlier. It has variously been called Tong Yu (the
| mass/common/omnipresent/intelligible language, Tong is a bit
| difficult to translate here), Guan Hua (the official language),
| potentially Ya Yan (elegant speech, this is more controversial
| and earliest mention) and now Pu Tong Hua or Guo Yu .
|
| > Indeed, before the 20th century the idea of a singular, spoken
| Chinese language was a foreign concept
|
| Matteo Ricci explicitly talks about a single language he can use
| to talk with everyone in every province (in his time this was the
| Guan Hua ). And indeed he used the same language as he made his
| way across the entire coast of China. There is an entire Han
| Dynasty compendium of the vocabulary of various regions that
| compares it against the official lingua franca. Indeed the title
| of this work is exactly Fangyan!
|
| > But while Chinese thinkers frequently mentioned 'official
| languages', this was by no means synonymous with a 'national
| language' - a language unified in its sound and script used by
| and representative of a Chinese nation.
|
| These "official languages" were exactly unified in sound and
| script and representative of a Chinese nation! The language Ricci
| encountered was the descendent of one whose pronunciation was
| explicitly codified (there are some asterisks here I can
| elaborate on if people are interested) in the 14th century Hong
| Wu Zheng Yun (Hongwu Proper Sound), and was passed to
| neighboring kingdoms as the official language (and is e.g.
| preserved in Korean rime books on the Chinese language).
|
| The difference in the last 100 years has been a difference in
| degree rather than kind. With the advent of near-universal
| education and literacy and the technological tools offered by
| mass media, the PRC, ROC, and to a lesser extent places like
| Singapore and Malaysia can more effectively carry out the
| language programs that have been attempted in the millennia past.
|
| Granted the difference in degree is vast: the tools at the
| disposal of political regimes today absolutely dwarfs those of
| the past. This also means the effects of standardization are far
| more keenly felt. However, the motivation and policy is one with
| a long and winding history.
|
| It follows a standard story of varying unification and disunity
| both linguistically and politically that has played out many
| times in China's history.
| justicezyx wrote:
| Nice summary!
|
| As a Chinese native and Han people, I have no idea of these
| historical records! Just to say how rich and complex the
| Chinese history is and how profound is this legacy and
| heritage.
| KhoomeiK wrote:
| Related [1] [2]: the Han race was really only constructed in the
| last 100 years, along with the national mythos of several
| millennia of uninterrupted dynastic civilization.
|
| [1] https://www.hrichina.org/en/content/4573
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhFPZL2L8uM
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| The concept of Chinese medicine was also created and promoted
| by Mao since they couldn't afford much real medicine after the
| revolution. It simply didn't exist as a unified thing before
| then.
| justicezyx wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compendium_of_Materia_Medica
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghan_Lun
|
| https://zh.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%B8%A9%E7%96%AB%E8%AE%BA
|
| What's the reasoning behind this theory that Mao invented
| Chinese medicine, which has been in existence for more than a
| thousand years? Are you a fan of Mao, or are you mocking his
| inability to create modern medicine out of thin air? Or his
| manipulation of Chinese culture?
| justicezyx wrote:
| > an ethnically integrated China is, in fact, a modern
| invention linked to the rise of nationalism at the end of the
| nineteenth century.
|
| This idea is a very sensible one in the context of China being
| forced to open up to the world. It's like a man, living in
| wild, has assume he was alone, and have no idea he was actually
| a male. Until one day he run into a similar creature that is a
| female.
|
| The undernote of this is that Chinese society is extremely
| complex. Easily orders of magnitude more complex. Comparing to
| the US continental, the geographical diversity and the cultural
| heritage shows such a vast range of changes that one should
| feel US is probably culturally only equivalent to a typical
| province in China! They eat differently, speak different in
| accent and words of expression, have different customs in
| almost every aspects of the life (child birth, birthdag,
| marriage, funerals etc etc)...
|
| China is indeed a humongous collective of diverse human
| communities that defies any singular or universal
| interpretation.
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