Talk:Varieties of Chinese/Archive 2
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"Also the amount of "linguistic consciousness" varies between the groups. For example, a speaker of Cantonese dialect living in Hong Kong tends to feel a great deal of common identity with a speaker of Cantonese living in Taishan, even though these two varieties of Cantonese may be almost unintelligible...The Hong Kong and Taishan person would both claim to be speaking Cantonese in the first case, while in the second case only the person from Shanghai would be speaking Shanghainese."
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As someone whose family originated in Taishan, I don't think this is true. We call the Taishan dialect "Taishanese" or "Taishan hua" and the Hong Kong dialect "Cantonese" or "Guangdong hua". We don't claim that the Taishan dialect is Cantonese. In Taishan, most people also know how to speak the Hong Kong dialect (or a heavily accented variation that is meant to be like that dialect). --Jiang 02:01, 16 Sep 2003 (UTC)
Cantonese and Taishanese are not comparatively "unintelligible". --Jiang 06:44, 25 Sep 2003 (UTC)
P0M: Someone added the following sentence: "Chinese dialects can be divided into a number of categories, although it is important to remember that variations within a category be uninteligible." This sentence does not make sense, and I cannot guess what the person is trying to say.
- I tried to make it a bit more clear. Basically, getting at the fact that I can't understand a word that Mao Tsetung is saying even though he is theoretically speaking Mandarin. User:Roadrunner
P0M: I am not sure how the decision was made to use the word "dialect" to name the major subdivisions of the Chinese language family. Americans speak of "the Cantonese dialect," "the Taiwanese dialect," "the Cockney dialect," "the Brooklyn dialect" -- as though they are all the same distance apart.
- Basically, they found the term fangyan and just translated it as dialect. The problem is that the entire system used to classify language in China is *very* different than the systen used to classify them in Europe. User:Roadrunner
But I can pick up Cockney without much trouble, and yet I could not easily understand the Mandarin of a professor at the National Taiwan University who came from Anhui. (The Han Chinese students at the University didn't find it easy either.) Much less could I pick any meaning out of Cantonese as spoken in the nearby restaurant. We need a better way to distinguish the various levels of differentiation.