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The New Wave of Indian Type

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Re: The New Wave of Indian Type

#121

Post by echevil »

squiggleblaz wrote: post #86
jacobolus wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These mostly get called “dialects” for political reasons: the Chinese government doesn’t want to acknowledge that they are separate mutually unintelligible languages. Media in Chinese languages other than Mandarin is restricted, children are forced to use Mandarin in school, all official business is done in Mandarin, etc. There is a concerted effort to make other languages economically unviable, and generally to dise…

However, it's worth noting that you call the official language of China "Mandarin" for political reasons. The analogy would be if you called French "Bureaucratese" and said "Yes, but Breton and Occitan are not mutually intelligible with Bureaucratese". The statements "Bureaucratese is not mutually intelligible with Occitan" and "Mandarin is not mutually intelligible with Cantonese" are both true, but we could just sa…

In fact, it's just called "Chinese" by Chinese speakers. I never heard of the word "Mandarin" before I came to US.

Re: The New Wave of Indian Type

#122

Post by kamaal »

vinayms wrote: post #91
nkoren wrote: post #18

> The language and script change every five hundred miles Huh, somebody is making a vast over-simplification, presumably in a well-intentioned attempt to package this in a way the Western mind can comprehend. Which frankly is futile. India is much more diverse than that. In my youth I spent some time bumming around Saurashtra, a region in Gujarat state that's about 150 miles square. Nearly 50 languages are indigenous…

> Nearly 50 languages are indigenous to that one region alone. Not dialects. Languages. I am a native Indian, born, raised and living there (I mean in India). I find it hard to process this claim. I am pretty sure there are about 10 languages in any fairly diverse region of the country, but beyond that what we find are mostly dialects of various languages. I am not sure if you are a 'western mind' (as you self identi…

>>I find it hard to process this claim.

I think me means dialects. Which many times can sound very different. During my first semester engineering we had a electronics lecturer who came from North Karnataka. They speak a fairly different dialect of Kannada. When I heard her talking for the first time, I was quite startled to see that some thing like that would also mean Kannada. In Bangalore we have our typical street slang Kannada, heavily overloaded with English words.

Same is true of Urdu as well. Even the Dakhani Accent has so many varieties, some times it could sound strange hearing some one speak Urdu in Bangalore, then Tumkur and then Mysore(All districts close to each other).

Re: The New Wave of Indian Type

#123

Post by echevil »

HumanDrivenDev wrote: post #117
baobrain wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the Chinese government doesn’t want to acknowledge that they are separate mutually unintelligible languages. Except they are not mutually unintelligible. Put someone from heilongjiang province in Sichuan and they will still be able to understand the language, albeit with more difficulty. Though there are dialects that do have completely different pronunciation, they all use the same underlying script , save a selec…

Cantonese, Hokkien, and Mandarin are not at all mutually intelligible. Mandarin speakers can't even read Hong Kong newspapers fluently. Only Mandarin and Cantonese even have a fully developed way of writing with characters. Up until relatively recently Mandarin itself was considered a spoken language, until a written standard (ie correspondence of characters with the words people actually spoke) was developed. Hokkie…

> Only Mandarin and Cantonese even have a fully developed way of writing with characters. Up until relatively recently Mandarin itself was considered a spoken language

Native speaker here. I have absolutely no idea where you get that.

Cantonese is just one of many dialects, and in fact, it is not a single dialect: People from different parts of Guadong province actually speak Cantonese very differently. Should you consider those different languages?

Cantonese, Hokkien and Mandarin do sound like different languages, but not all dialects are. Most Chinese speaker can understand dialects spoken in central, and north parts of China, even though they usually can't speak those dialects.

Even though some of the dialects sounds very differently, the words, syntax, sentences being used are actually the same. That's how people can read what other people speaking other dialects write, with no problem.

To complicate the issue even more, there're not one, but two writing systems currently being used: Simplified Chinese is used in China mainland and Singapore, while Traditional Chinese is used in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan. That's the reason people from mainland China (no matter what dialect they speak, even Cantonese) cannot read Hong Kong newspaper fluently

The two writing systems are different but they have one to one mapping for each character. So it's also not two unrelated system.

Re: The New Wave of Indian Type

#124

Post by murukesh_s »

yorwba wrote: post #114
murukesh_s wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think numbering system is a recent introduction to European languages - adopted from India in 10th century or so.. but some other words have similarity like maatha- mother, pithaa- father etc! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu–Arabic_numeral_system

The written numerals are relatively recent, but the words for numbers are much older and still very similar across languages.

Wasn't Roman numerals in use, before the Indo-Arabic came to Europe? How come they are similar? They look worlds apart to me..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals

Re: The New Wave of Indian Type

#125

Post by kamaal »

Epenthesis wrote: post #60
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #43

Based on what friends from South India tell me, it looks like South India in particular is embracing English. Even poor people are sending their children to schools where they can learn English. Most of the people I know, when they text on a phone use the Latin alphabet. India has fully embraced the global system which is based on English. I would guess that within 20 years, more people will speak English on a regula…

Part of that is South India tends to be assertively anti-Hindi for various historical/cultural reasons. Given that, English is the only realistic option for communicating outside a given linguistic community.

>>Part of that is South India tends to be assertively anti-Hindi for various historical/cultural reasons.

We are pro-OurLanguage, whatever that language. If that feels anti-Hindi to you, one can't help.

You almost are suggesting to be pro-YourLanguage one has to throw out their their language.

Re: The New Wave of Indian Type

#126

Post by HumanDrivenDev »

echevil wrote: post #123
HumanDrivenDev wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cantonese, Hokkien, and Mandarin are not at all mutually intelligible. Mandarin speakers can't even read Hong Kong newspapers fluently. Only Mandarin and Cantonese even have a fully developed way of writing with characters. Up until relatively recently Mandarin itself was considered a spoken language, until a written standard (ie correspondence of characters with the words people actually spoke) was developed. Hokkie…

> Only Mandarin and Cantonese even have a fully developed way of writing with characters. Up until relatively recently Mandarin itself was considered a spoken language Native speaker here. I have absolutely no idea where you get that. Cantonese is just one of many dialects, and in fact, it is not a single dialect: People from different parts of Guadong province actually speak Cantonese very differently. Should you co…

> Native speaker here. I have absolutely no idea where you get that.

Mandarin wasn't really written until about 120 years ago. Before people would write classical Chinese. It's a "written vernacular/白話文".

> Cantonese is just one of many dialects, and in fact, it is not a single dialect: People from different parts of Guadong province actually speak Cantonese very differently. Should you consider those different languages?

No, I'd consider them different dialects of a language called Cantonese.

> Even though some of the dialects sounds very differently, the words, syntax, sentences being used are actually the same.

Nonsense. Hokkien has a different grammar, even the personal pronouns don't match up 1:1. They're clearly in the same language family, sure, but so are English and German.

> That's the reason people from mainland China (no matter what dialect they speak, even Cantonese) cannot read Hong Kong newspaper fluently

No, it's not. I've seen Taiwanese people try and read Hong Kong newspapers, and they can't do it fluently.

Re: The New Wave of Indian Type

#127

Post by shrikrishna »

drieddust wrote: post #108
nkoren wrote: post #18

> The language and script change every five hundred miles Huh, somebody is making a vast over-simplification, presumably in a well-intentioned attempt to package this in a way the Western mind can comprehend. Which frankly is futile. India is much more diverse than that. In my youth I spent some time bumming around Saurashtra, a region in Gujarat state that's about 150 miles square. Nearly 50 languages are indigenous…

We have a saying in Hindi which translate into this. > " kos kos par badle paani,chaar kos par baani, par ek hai jo nahi badalta vo hai Hindustani" Rough Translation: > Taste of water changes every 2 miles, language changes every 4 miles, but Indian still don't change.

* but what doesn't change is we are Indians

Literal translation doesn't work here (also one of the shortcomings of tools like Google Translate)

Re: The New Wave of Indian Type

#128

Post by echevil »

parthdesai wrote: post #27
nkoren wrote: post #18

> The language and script change every five hundred miles Huh, somebody is making a vast over-simplification, presumably in a well-intentioned attempt to package this in a way the Western mind can comprehend. Which frankly is futile. India is much more diverse than that. In my youth I spent some time bumming around Saurashtra, a region in Gujarat state that's about 150 miles square. Nearly 50 languages are indigenous…

In India, language and food, both change every 200km. When you tell this to people who haven't been to India, they usually think you are exaggerating but it's surreal how diverse India actually is.

I totally believe that as it’s basically the same situation in China

Re: The New Wave of Indian Type

#129

Post by sn41 »

jacobolus wrote: post #106
squiggleblaz wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However, it's worth noting that you call the official language of China "Mandarin" for political reasons. The analogy would be if you called French "Bureaucratese" and said "Yes, but Breton and Occitan are not mutually intelligible with Bureaucratese". The statements "Bureaucratese is not mutually intelligible with Occitan" and "Mandarin is not mutually intelligible with Cantonese" are both true, but we could just sa…

I could call it Beijingese (or Pekingese) if you prefer. But many people might not know what I was talking about. Mandarin is the common name used in English to refer to this language. I don’t have any problem if you want to talk about Parisian French (or pick your preferred other name for it), Castilian Spanish, etc. Parisian French was pushed onto the people within the borders of the French nation-state by force, b…

The word Mandarin comes from the Sanskrit word "Mantri", for minister. I wonder why this word was chosen.

Re: The New Wave of Indian Type

#130

Post by HumanDrivenDev »

echevil wrote: post #120
HumanDrivenDev wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m not sure about Singapore but in Taiwan other Chinese languages were forcefully suppressed. Singapore was much more successful in suppressing Hokkien than Taiwan was. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speak_Mandarin_Campaign

Yes, there was a promotion to speak Mandarin, but suppression of dialects was never a major part of the campaign and Hokkien is still spoken by many Singaporean.

> but suppression of dialects was never a major part of the campaign

From the article:

The initial goal of the campaign was for all young Chinese to stop speaking dialects in five years, and to establish Mandarin as the language of choice in public places within 10 years.

> Hokkien is still spoken by many Singaporean.

Again, the article shows that in 1980 81.4% of Chinese Singaporeans spoke a Chinese language at home that wasn't Mandarin. In 2015 it's 16.1%.

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