Recently my wife (born and raised in China) was on the phone with her dad. She was trying to tell him something about ticks (you know, the blood-sucking insect), but she didn't know the Chinese word.
She looked it up in the English->Chinese dictionary, and that told her what the character is. But since she was on the phone -- voice only -- she was still unable to communicate it, since seeing the character doesn't provide any help in actually saying the word. She tried to describe the strokes in the character to dad, but just couldn't get it across.
EDIT: to clarify, Chinese dictionaries don't generally (in my experience) provide pronunciation. That's because Chinese is really several completely different spoken languages (Mandarin, Shanghainese, Cantonese, etc.), all mutually unintelligible but sharing the same writing. A given pronunciation would only address one specific local pronunciation of one specific sub-language, so it's not so useful.
Also, his complaints about not being able to figure out new words aren't really valid. Since so much of English consists of building words from roots stolen from Latin and other languages, if you know those roots, it does get you a good deal of the way toward understanding new words.
> ...since seeing the character doesn't provide any help in actually saying the word.
Nonsense. There are about 200 or so[1] chinese radicals, and all chinese characters are either radicals themselves, or composed of two or more radicals. For example, the chinese character for ticks, 蜱, is composed of 虫(bug, the meaning part) and 卑(lowly, the sound part), both very common characters that any chinese literate should know; the character can be described simply as 虫左卑右 (bug on the left, humble on the right).
> Chinese dictionaries don't generally (in my experience) provide pronunciation.
Your experience is not typical. Any decent Chinese dictionary should provide pronunciation, either in pinyin or zhuyin. Or you can simply look it up online[2].
> Chinese is really several completely different spoken languages (Mandarin, Shanghainese, Cantonese, etc.), all mutually unintelligible but sharing the same writing.
Another complete nonsense. I only speak Mandarin, and can communicate with people who only speak Cantonese if we both speak (really) slowly. Normally I would not know how to say something in Cantonese, but when I hear it, I can recognize it. I have never tried this with "Shanghainese", but the same goes for Minnan (spoken in some southern provinces and Taiwan).
It seems some people are keen to diminish the role of Mandarin in China and exaggerate the differences among Chinese dialects, perhaps wishing a fragmented linguistic landscape would lead to a fragmented and weaken Chinese nation. But Mandarin is what is taught in schools, used on tv, movies, etc, and all younger generations speak it. I don't think that's going to change soon.
From experience, Mandarin and Cantonese are fairly close to each other, in my opinion. But Shanghainese (and basically the Wu dialects) is not intelligible to me. 我們 (wo men = "us" in english) in Mandarin is not so far from 我哋 (ngo de) in Cantonese, but is pretty far from colloquial Shanghainese, 阿拉 (a la).
It seems some people are keen to diminish the role of Mandarin in China and exaggerate the differences among Chinese dialects, perhaps wishing a fragmented linguistic landscape would lead to a fragmented and weaken Chinese nation.
That is nonsense, people are people and will do what makes them happy. If they don't care about Mandarin, nothing will stop them from not using it. Personally, I totally enjoy the fact that there are different dialects, each with it's own flavor in expressing certain concepts(especially profanities!). For example, everyone's favorite profanity in Cantonese, 仆街 (pok gai/pok kai) "go to hell" (transliteration is "go lay on the street (and die because you'll get trampled/ran over)". Over time, this has bled over to English and the English bled back over to Chinese speakers into PK. And in today's Taiwan reality shows (I'm sure mainland China uses this term today as well), we have PK rounds where contestants get eliminated from the shows. In these contexts, PK has turned into a term about competition!
Sure, having a standard is good so that there can be less ambiguity in communication between people, but at the same time, diversity is what breeds new ideas and innovations. Take computers, programming languages, designs as an example; 1 processor to do computation and graphics? "unifying" everyone to C# be such a good idea? Is a centralized versioning system the most awesome?
> Chinese is really several completely different spoken languages (Mandarin, Shanghainese, Cantonese, etc.), all mutually unintelligible but sharing the same writing.
At least half the TV in mainland China has subtitles. If you can speak and read one Chinese language/dialect well, you can learn another by immersing yourself in TV with subtitles for a few months. I meet many people here who say, e.g. "they learnt Cantonese because they lived in Guangzhou for a year".
Another complete nonsense. I only speak Mandarin, and can communicate with people who only speak Cantonese if we both speak (really) slowly
I suspect you have some exposure to Cantonese, then. My experience in discussing this with many native Chinese speakers is that Mandarin, Shanghainese, Cantonese, and Fujianese are all mutually unintelligible. And not just slightly so, but as difficult to convey understanding as I (an English speaker with a touch of French) experience in Mexico.
But don't just take my word for it:
Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) (汉语／漢語 Hànyǔ; 华语／華語 Huáyǔ; 中文 Zhōngwén) is a language family consisting of languages which are mostly mutually unintelligible to varying degrees. [1]
(The above quotation bears this footnote: David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. "The mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages." )
As you suggest that I may be prejudiced for political reasons, I respond that in this subject I have absolutely no bias. And let me add that the very same criticism could be directed at you.
A final criterion in differentiating language from dialect involves a language's political status, a factor that is external to the form of the language and sometimes even at variance with the culture of the speakers. Do the political authorities in a country consider two language forms to be separate languages or dialects of a single language? Extremely different, non-mutually intelligible language forms may be called dialects simply because they are spoken within a single political entity and it behooves the rulers of that entity to consider them as such: this was the case with Ukrainian and Russian in the days of the Russian Empire, where Ukrainian (called Little Russian) was considered a substandard variety of Russian (called Great Russian). This could also be said to be the case with the so-called dialects of Chinese in the People's Republic of China.
On the other hand, language forms that are quite mutually intelligible can be considered separate languages also for purely political reasons. Such is the case with Serbian and Croatian in the former Yugoslavia. Linguistically, these two language forms are more similar than the English spoken in Texas and New York; linguists, in fact, usually called them both by the name Serbo-Croatian. However, for entirely political reasons the Serbs and the Croats have deliberately invented separate literary standards to render their language more divergent than it really is. Furthermore, the Croats, being Catholics, use the Latin alphabet, while the Orthodox Serbs use a version of Cyrillic. A similar situation pertains is other cases, notably Hindi/Urdu, and Bengali/Assamese. [2]
Finally, you note that Mandarin is what is taught in schools, used in movies, etc. This is true for most of the PRC, but is not true for Hong Kong, Taiwan, and (I think) Tibet. But I don't see what it proves in any case. I will add, though, that in Chinese movies I frequently see Chinese subtitles, presumably put there so that those used to different "dialects" can understand.
But in colloquial Chinese, do they reflect the same zoological classifications that we have in the West? Maybe they just have a generic "bug" or something. This is one of the things that's very easy to assume, but not doesn't really have any strong intrinsic logic to support, much like recent conversations here about color perception.
Also, why do we always orient maps with the North pointing up or away from us, and reference those maps based on that assumed orientation? Why not have East pointing up?
unless the other guy quite literally doesn't have experience/knowledge of a tick, I think one can figure out a way to describe it :-)
north: although ptolemy introduced the convention of north/up, I can easily see how the use of a lodestone could naturally give rise to the custom (north --> lodestone points forward; when you tilt the surface perpendicular to the ground, it is up).
> Maybe they just have a generic "bug" or something.
You have an excellent point there. I remember when I was learning Japanese I asked my teacher what the word for 'rat' was (mouse is 'nezumi') and she said just use 'nezumi', or use a qualifier e.g. 'ookii nezumi' (big mouse)
For what it's worth, I saw an Australian stand-up comic once making fun of American English in which all insects are referred to as "bugs". (Australian English tends to reserve the word "bug" for beetles.)
Seconded. One of the most valuable tools for me in Spanish is the ability to describe things I can't say. I don't know the word for tick, but I could say "an insect that [hmmm, don't know the word for 'sucks'...] eats your blood, and it doesn't fly, and it stays there on your skin for an hour or two, and it gets bigger while it eats..." and the person would say, "oh, a tick!" And I'd learn a new word.
And that's how we got kangaroo, which means, "I don't know."
"Hey, you, what's that... that jumpy thing over there?"
"I don't know."
"Ah! An I don't know, eh? Spectacular!"
(note: it appears that there is reason to believe this old story is untrue, but it still serves to illustrate a real and hilarious problem when speaking across languages)
"to clarify, Chinese dictionaries don't generally (in my experience) provide pronunciation"
What? Every Chinese dictionary I've seen says how a word is written in Pinyin, allowing one to pronounce it. Every person in mainland China who has gone to school knows Mandarin and Pinyin. For example Cantonese is just a locally spoken dialect, children learn Mandarin at school.
to clarify, Chinese dictionaries don't generally (in my experience) provide pronunciation
Depends who's Chinese =P If you buy a dictionary in Taiwan, you can look up words using the Zhuying Fuhao system (Bopomofo). There are 37 characters, with about the first 21-24 can be used as the first sound, 3 as a middle sound, and the last 13-16 as the second sound of words (plus the 4 (ok, 5 sorta) intonations).
But yes, it really depends on the sanctioned system and the dialect. Can't really use pinyin for Cantonese...
For example Cantonese is just a locally spoken dialect, children learn Mandarin at school.
Not completely true. In Hong Kong, Cantonese is written as well as spoken. For example, the English phrase's meaning of "do not have" can be translated into Mandarin as 没有, however, in Cantonese, spoken and written, is expressed more commonly as 冇.
But the fact that characters don't give out pronunciation is a big issue when you come across one in your everyday life (restaurant menu for example) and can't pronounce it, nor can ask someone to explain it to you later (unless you remember how to write it).
One possible solution would be to find a dictionary that has either pinyin or zhuyin fuhao to guide pronunciation. I believe zhongwen.com provides this.
In this case pinyin would have worked, since (afaik) it's a representation of Mandarin pronunciation, which happens to be the language they were speaking at the time.
However, (1) we don't have such a dictionary, and I think demanding such a specialized dictionary violates the argument in the OP; and (2) if they'd been speaking Shanghainese, which is her other Chinese tongue, or another dialect, pinyin wouldn't have helped.
I'm not familiar with zhuyin, but given what I understand about the problem, I imagine the same weakness would apply.
She looked it up in the English->Chinese dictionary, and that told her what the character is. But since she was on the phone -- voice only -- she was still unable to communicate it, since seeing the character doesn't provide any help in actually saying the word. She tried to describe the strokes in the character to dad, but just couldn't get it across.
EDIT: to clarify, Chinese dictionaries don't generally (in my experience) provide pronunciation. That's because Chinese is really several completely different spoken languages (Mandarin, Shanghainese, Cantonese, etc.), all mutually unintelligible but sharing the same writing. A given pronunciation would only address one specific local pronunciation of one specific sub-language, so it's not so useful.
Also, his complaints about not being able to figure out new words aren't really valid. Since so much of English consists of building words from roots stolen from Latin and other languages, if you know those roots, it does get you a good deal of the way toward understanding new words.