A History of Mandarin: China's Search for a Common Language

so yes I've struggling with this thing called the Chinese language for almost 30 years now or more and and doing most of it within China but but a lot of it in and out of China try and explain this language to a lot of people so when penguin approached me with this book the challenge was was really well the the the sort of prescription that gave me was it had to be no less than 25,000 no more than 25,000 words which is about 120 pages and it has to be something that is readable accessible to different readers from different domains and free of academic jargon and so on so the challenge is really to get all this information into a succinct size that can be read on one airplane trip or maybe you know a few trips to the bathroom in the morning you know something they could get out of the way very quickly and get some good background information it's about Putin wahh but but really what I hope that I impress upon you on this talk is the fact that this is really an interesting story of how China basically had to drag its language kicking and screaming into the 20th century and then even now into the 21st century to processes of kicking and screaming and dragging which are which have been which are very fraught with all sorts of Lee not only linguistic problems but political issues and social issues and notions of national identity so it's it's a really interesting tale and it's hard to sum it up especially for people who don't know that much about the Chinese language or Chinese culture in general but everyone here are insiders to all these issues so it should be a lot of fun today and like we could get into question and answers I really anticipate your questions which I enjoy getting into these issues so we're basically talking about the fall of the ching dynasty and the new republican era which starts around nineteen twelve thirteen and the map of china as we all know basically looked pretty much the ching was in charge of pretty much the same landmass that that the later the Republican era people are in charge of and the task ahead of them there's a form something like a modern nation-state rather than a dynastic state and the problem is to to create a state along the lines that they were looking at the model that they were looking at would be the Western model of a sort of one nation one language and one people and this was the sort of model of the advanced Western nations the so called in Viet Young who had invaded them and stomped all over them for the last two dynasties and you know how do we achieve this thing called wealth and power which if you heard that phrase fou Chiang was to sort of spend the sort of Holy Grail for a Chinese leaders since since that time so it was so it's not a mistake to have looked at this this this model of one nation one language because that was sort of the default of these other nations even though that actually is an illusory sort of impression that they had but the Chinese nation is and the Chinese culture and Chinese country was far from a unified country in the sense that they were envisioning and that that's where a lot of the problem occurs here's a here's a top elect map of the Han languages and none of these maps are very useful strictly speaking because they're all fake I mean they're all basically abstractions there's no such thing as these clear dialect lines where people outside of that line don't speak that you know speak another dialect but these are these are useful fictions that we sort of look at as general maps of the terrain and they're if they're in flux they change from time to time but what's instructive is if you look at this map which is basically what the Qin Dynasty had and what the really Republican had a period had you here you have these basic dialect areas of the of these the basic standard there's usually divided into seven basic language groups but but that's also a fiction because these things are all blurry lines but these are all convenient things that linguists linguists have to focus on but the main thing to notice is that if you think of these if you do a counterfactual exercise and think what if Chairman Mao had not had not United kept China political unity after 1949 what would China and it had fractured along the lines of Europe in the Middle Ages after the fall of Roman Empire you know what would China have looked like what China would look like Europe and this could be sort of analogy to Europe so these dialect areas were also not just dialect there is the cultural regions especially when you come to an area like Canton Guangdong Province so you would these would be countries in a certain sense and you would have a country called you know Guang Donia and this would be like Mandarin iya and this would be you know you would have maybe jinniyah yeah you know hockey mini or whatever these and and these would be sort of countries which when you go across these national borders indeed they would feel very much like going from France Italy or from Germany to Poland or something you said because you would you would say oh yes they eat different foods here their cuisine is different their their their their language is different and this is something that probably most Chinese leaders because people accept the problem is that this language unity has a special kind of quality to it and which is why when we use in English we use the term dialects we say that these are the different dialects of Chinese now this is actually a kind of a political convenience and it has to do with the Chinese translation the translation translation from the Chinese term Fung Yan which really just means that the language of a place a speech but there's linguist the English language translation is very crucial to them because the fiction they want to maintain is that these things are not separate languages they're actually merely dialects of this thing called Chinese and that's that's where the problem arises and the problem arises in the conceptualizing of making a national nation-state built upon one language is because these things are from a linguistic substan point these things are not dialects in the way we think of English dialects these are little separate languages if you think if you look at guangdong hua and beijing hua these are mutually incomprehensible languages is different and it's hard to understand as French and Italian or German in English I mean they're that far apart they're the fiction is maintained by the fact that that the entire nation was was using and had used for thousands of years a one Chinese character set as the language to produce written text as the language of literacy which which gave the allusion to a lot of leaders a lot to foreign observers especially the China already had a common language otherwise how would these people be reading the same books so the whole point of this talk and it's very hard to get your head around it but China China has the same sorts of problems at lots of other countries too in terms of dialects in terms of mutual incomprehensible 'ti in terms of lots of english-speaking parts of the world where you have a dialect issue but in China you have lots of confounding issues such as the existence of wen Yan when the classical language of texts and the hybrid forms that began to arise in later periods these sort of sort of what we call vernacular novels vernacular fiction that were closer to vernacular Chinese but we're not what we're still not actually records of spoken speech they were still an artificially contrived literary language that had vernacular characteristics and then the fact that this also this later period when they were they advocated something called by Hua was also for a time and still to this day it's is not exactly a record of written speech and one of the problems of Chinese language in general and language reformed her in this period is that is that on many fronts spoken as well as written they had to somehow pull Chinese into the domain that had already been the default one for most of them of the Western world in alphabetic languages for hundreds and hundreds of years which is that speech is the primary source of all linguistic forms and the written language is something that's supposed to represent speech albeit in some elevated or or you know literary ways but the speech is the primary function China was the only world culture of this of this extent of Geographic and historical extent that kept a separation between the written and spoken language up into the 20th century so much so that almost challenges the so sory there's a French linguist so Sewer who came up with this notion of the primacy of speech that the Chinese language and script actually is is a counter-narrative or sort of goes against this so serein notion of that's that speech is primary but I'm gonna contend that actually speech is still primary that's still the problem Chinese Chinese and Chinese language have just taken a long time to come to that realization and pull the language into a direction that would make it more conducive to what after wall should be the goal which is literacy getting everyone on the same page literally and figuratively speaking reading and understanding Chinese including foreigners that's the quest that we're after here today and that's the one whether they knew it or not they were always looking for looking towards here's a map of the of the non-han top elects and by the way here's this we're top elect really we should start using the word top elect because that's a better translation of Fung yan but people don't know what you're talking about when you say top elect this victor mayor likes to use this but there are other for other sorts of phrases you can use that besides dialect which is a very unscientific term but we go to these and if you try to include the non Han languages of Mongolia and Tibetan then you get an even more complicated situation and there's maps and we are even more meaningless because the speakers are spread out these things called dialects are continuum there's no such thing as a card cutoff line between a language and a dialect the joke in my book that uses what is it a language is just a dialect with a navy so in other words they're all like version two different levels of comprehension comprehension but where the dividing line is is if this particular dialect has its own political affiliation or a king let's say or a beer or a you know some kind of a independent culture then what we call it a separate language so why is Portuguese not a dialect of Spanish because they have a Navy that's the point here's a question I want to dwell on but here's the Empress Dowager so she tae-ho she was came at the at around this time she was she was the leap so fact default leader of China de facto leader of China at that time what language did she speak well she had a very interesting linguistic background and you would think being a member of the manchu ruling clan that she would speak manchu actually she didn't speak manchu very well she could read it a little bit and speaking of in here she certainly understood it she was part of this imperial class but she was a Beijing girl she was born and raised in the homes of Beijing she was a baitinger er you know she didn't like all these dialects she hated these dialects that she had to contend with in the court she thought they were ugly you know why she she confided into her lots of her lady friends who her foreign friends who invite her up for tea you know that these all these barbarous barbarous dialects you know sound like chickens clucking she wished that China could be unified into some unified natural national language and for her it was Beijing hot and not Manchu I hope which is interesting Manchu is an interesting case because it's a dead language essentially so I don't know if any if anyone can think of another case in world history you have a language that was actually the language of a ruling ethnic group or clan that within a hundred years after the fall of that political unity that language the language of that whole dynasty is dead there's only like a few old ladies who can speak it now although some people trying to bring back manchu and try to restore it and have people learn it more but it's essentially a dead language anyway so that's so she was at the sort of center of this sort of language this polyglot problem the the ching language reformers had spent time in japan and we're very impressed with the way that japan had managed to come up with a national language so the term that the republicans used was gore you which is i'm sorry i didn't put it in Fendi's that I should it's did gore you came from the Japanese term that that they used and they were very impressed with how did the Japanese manage to create this linguistic unity among different kinds of dialects and the other thing was having been trounced by the Japanese in the first sino-japanese war one of the things that the the Chinese military was very impressed with was the efficiency of the Japanese soldiers and it's and the Japanese military structure they would say wow all of the Japanese soldiers can read and write this is amazing they're able to just write orders and send them by a piece of paper or a hundred miles and then they can get the orders and do the things we can't do that because we have to the soldiers can't read and so they suddenly were confronted as with many other aspects that to follow the Ching you know we have a we have a standing army that can't rewrite how did that happen what's wrong with us and so this became part of the and and part of the realization that this linguistic unity that they were searching was not just a sort of a cultural nicety something that to be able to create great literature or have everyone reading the same novels it was a matter of national survival and existential continued existence as a political unity that's the main thing you have to understand so this conference on the unification of pronunciation convenes and it's doomed from the outset or at least it's not well organized at the outset because you have first of all people from different regions invited because of their expertise but more of their political affiliation I mean they wanted to get people representing the north the South different ethnic minorities and so forth and we want to come up with the standard sounds of Chinese of meeting the sent the sounds of the 6500 standard characters so there's a whole lot of problems first of all is the people there are not really trained in the modern science of Western science of linguistics which is a relatively relatively new to China and Chinese linguistics in the past had always been more concentrated on sounds on notating sounds and on on on indicating or coming up symbols symbolic representations of the sounds of Chinese that was that was what Chinese language studies was mostly about very little about grammar in fact most Chinese were we're kind of under the impression that that Chinese language had no grammar for many many decades of years and so they were more fixated on sounds and they were they were woefully sort of ill-equipped to actually deal with a complex issue of these that I was just talking about was what is a dialect and what is a language and how does dialect and language interact with each other and how do we how do we systematize these sorts of things and then the other thing is that the people that they invited to attend the conference were these very politicized fiery people a guy named Walter Dawei who was a founder of the Guangdong and a very he was if you read Chris Rey's book irreverence you know he was an essayist and sort of the modern Howard Stern you know there's throw salting people and colleagues you know names and insulting the Ching dynasty you know calling well I won't use the words he used polite company here but you know and and he was someone who could you know was was but hold it up holding the South so we had excuse me you had this the different regions vying for the standard standardization and mainly talking about the pronunciation the South a mainly Cantonese contingent had a case to be made he said look the Chinese this thing called Guan hua which is the language of officialdom which is that which is where the word Mandarin comes from from the Portuguese is no longer essential because the Ching State is no longer run with this Ching bureaucracy so we're we can start from scratch and come up with a standard language that doesn't necessary have to do with this kind of hybrid form of Mandarin that had been used to communicate among the Qing Court so why not why not use Cantonese which is after all the language of international Chinese commerce that's why all the immigrants coming that's why it used to be in the China towns of America and California that everyone spoke Cantonese and not Mandarin because they would think that was the language from the southern states and and seafaring merchants that went to the US so why not Cantonese and then you had other people who were saying you know no why not our region we have as much language is much easier grammar and much easier to pronounce and of course the North said no with the center of power and and the Mandarin dialects outweigh that the people who speak the Mandarin dialects outnumber the other dialects by many by many times so they couldn't they if you read my book you there's some sort of amusing accounts of how these fights led to fisticuffs and people you know chasing each other around the hall throwing teacups and showery and Renzi stocks had left out tea cups literally flying during these these supposedly mystic discussions and that was so contentious that the the only thing they could come up with was kind of a hybrid compromise of some of the sounds basically of the north centering around what you would did the Beijing but also some of the other sounds from the southern dialects of these I won't get into going into it too much or not with these Russian sounds that if you if any of you know Cantonese they have these different stops these continental stops at the ends of of syllables like book and you know these things those all those characters phone to to the category of rushan and the southern there's the southern there's always been a thing in Chinese saying these are the more beautiful sounds if you're trying to to recite classical poetry town poetry you're gonna use the Cantonese dialect is much closer to the original Chinese from which these poets that for the the rhymes work better if you use Chinese so they they were using they were using criteria of elegance and beauty rather than practicality and rather than choosing what we in modern linguistics would do was to come up with a descriptive standard and not a prescriptive standard in other words find the standards find the way that people actually speak in a certain area and just let's teach people based upon you know we have a standard based upon an actual living language that we can point to and instead they came up with a hybrid language that was a language that nobody spoke so the results of this ill-advised conference and the results of the uninformed and and not well-educated participants was to come up with a language that was actually an artificial language so and there and there are the original wooja ways handwritten draft these what to convey it familiar to us as the bow poem offal characters from Taiwan basically the same as they are now that's the original manuscript of that so so let me quickly go over this I'm gonna run out of time if I get too much of it but basically they they got the standard after lots of haggling and then the the the next task was to record it on the gramophone records in order to promulgate it throughout China that was a new technology gramophone so now we had this a way of getting these sounds on a recorded media so they found a guy named Wang Poole who had developed his own pin his Roman romanization method and was a noted linguist he recorded a complete set of these 6,500 sounds syllables and when they examined it they realized I had to ditch the whole thing because womp who was a speaker of Beijing dialect and couldn't reproduce the roush own sounds adequately so the whole thing was just garbage they had to throw it away so they said we've got to get a go show to do this to carry this thing out so they found this guy whose legendary linguist Java and Ren who was a Ching hua professor he had he he was the translator for John Dewey during his trips to China and Bertrand Russell was a polymath he was he was a mathematician and physicist linguist musician a composer he also translated Alice in Wonderland and through the looking-glass into Chinese the first translation those into Chinese and ironically those two translations Alice in Wonderland in Chinese was one of the first published books in by hua which is Lewis Carroll would have loved that and he and he actually created a bunch of nonsense characters to recreate this sounds and nonsense in the Jabberwocky poem when Lewis Carroll a very interesting character he also was it had an amazing ear he could speak many dialects and that he learned after after childhood and he could could mimic even western dialects and accents and he could do something he would amaze audiences with he could get her a late this is later on he didn't do it back then there was a grandmother once we could take a tape recorder and would do this in front of audiences and say an English sentence backwards and not not just where the letters backwards with each of the phonemes backwards into the tape recorder so would come out like yeah I pledged Tara and it would be nonsense and they would take the tape and reverse it and it would come out says it was a beautiful day in Shanghai you know he could he could do this sort of thing so this guy is a linguistic genius and an ear beyond the pale of mortal humans and so they asked him to get him to New York we're gonna record these sounds at 6,500 syllables it goes into Columbia Records probably right there after Billie Holiday had just recorded some jazz songs or something you know and records these stack of phonograph records which by the way I would give my left arm to have recordings of that I mean if they're online somewhere I'd like to know who has those there must be sound files of those I'd love to hear what they said like because these are the sounds of a fictional language these are sounds of a language that was never never spoken and would never be spoken and so that is his jaw and runes quip he says for thirteen years I was the sole speaker of this idiolect meant to be the national language of 600 million speakers so he finishes the recordings brings it back to China and the committee realizes great now we have a record of all these sounds and then they realize where we gonna find the teachers to teach these things you know you can play them but how what teachers gonna say nope that's not how you pronounce this this they've got the greatest linguistic genius in the world to do it but there's but all the teachers and the teacher not linguistic geniuses they're teachers that couldn't even speak puto wah couldn't even speak that you know mad normal normal quote/unquote Chinese so what happened is there was many of these things luckily luckily and I say this ironically war intervened and they sort of lost track of this and and tempers cooled and then after a few more years they actually were in 1932 abandoned this whole silly idea and said all right for the sound system of this new national language call you let's just use the sounds of Beijing dialect puto ha you know and it's so now in the evolutionary process of going from Gwalior up to a present puto moi this is sort of a stage where they've chosen the Beijing dialect and this this is you know the the phonology this way they framed it the phonology of the Beijing dialect in the grammar and vocabulary of the northern northern my Mandarin dialects so the northern Mandarin dialects if you know anything about Chinese and you speak any of those dialects they're quite varied and many of those are not actually mutually comprehensible or marginally mutually comprehensible I mean I can sort of understand Hunan dialect because it just sounds like bad tones but I don't know Shandong dialect no I just can't you know even anyway this that the notice the notion that these northern mandala Mandarin dialects had a sort of unified grammar and syntax is also a bit of a loser II but anyway this is getting into the weeds so I want to get back I want to get to some other aspects so we leave we leave the Goya the national language program right here for a second we'll talk about more in a minute but I want to talk about the other sorts of strands of the linguistic reform that these that the ching and there were the the the the the Republican era reformers were dealing with and that is to do with the written language and the characters so those of you who know Chinese history know that the the may 4th movement and these people that that that were the intellectual of the elites after the fall of the Qing were faced with this problem that for them must have seemed like more than just a linguistic issue as a matter of national survival Chinese economy was in the toilet you had the Japanese invading you had China at the verge of actually being eradicated annihilated as a cultural entity nonetheless not released a political entity and so the proposed solutions to the problem were just as radical and and extreme as this perceived existential crisis was so these are scholars and intellectuals at Ione Pei Liu Xiu and of course everyone knows tensions gentle fussing on Chen do show you should know because they one of the big writers of the may 4th movement leaders of the may 4th intellectuals these people all at various times of course they all advocated the adoption of a vernacular written tradition what would they call by hua you know writing that the average person could enter that's based upon speech of the average people and that could be understood by the by everybody but they also were the beginnings of a movement to abolish the Chinese characters altogether and you had lots of intellectuals that looked at the Western model of the alphabet and and could see even though they weren't linguistically trained they could see the advantages of pedagogy and in literacy of the Western alphabet and then also lots of reformers who advocated replacing the Chinese written language with some other language such as English or Esperanto and there was the these were serious proposals by serious scholars that were really earnestly trying to search for a solution to this problem of cultural eradication that they thought was imminent if China didn't you know get pulled kicking and screaming into the 20th century there was this whole school of Esperantists people who are saying let's get rid of Chinese language altogether and just read Esperanto because that way all these cultural feudal relics and old-fashioned ideas can be completely excised and we can just start from a fresh from a modern perspective and Esperanto it by the way is Chinese as a culture that has actually embraced Esperanto almost more than anyplace else in the world they have Esperanto societies they publish in Esperanto Esperanto radio stations I have books at home I have the complete translation of home among in Esperanto believe it or not and also the works of Lou of La Jolla you know chances that agua rest of a in Esperanto which is I can't read Esperanto but I don't believe you couldn't transcend me it's not but anyway the Chinese take it very seriously and they have families that are raising their children in Esperanto but back then it was a very serious agenda and you have people who were actually proposing it who sure was of course I won't read all of this but he was one who advocated well just read a little bit of it what we need today is a readable audible singable speakable dictate able language which we can read aloud without the need to translate into the spoken language in other words the slogan at the time was you know I I write what I hear or I write with my what the sounds that came out of my mouth to make a unity between what comes out of the pen and what comes out of the mouth which was a goal that they had yeah here was here was some of the the the slogans yeah Nguyen Hui was one was the main one this is a letter from Chancery to him to Chen do show about an article he had written in the new youth magazine that was a college in Chi man about criticizing Confucius there was a get rid of Confucius he writes in an earlier essay of yours you strongly advocated one of the abolition of Confucianism concerning this proposal of yours I think it is now the only way to save China but upon reading it I have thought of one more thing if you want to abolish Confucianism you must first abolish the Chinese written language if you want to get rid of the average person's childish uncivilized obstinate way of thinking you know it is all the more essential that you first abolished the Chinese language now if you didn't know the context you would think that this it was a joke or this guy's nuts but I mean this is a serious proposal because because they they were looking they had they saw the Chinese language the legacy of it and especially the crushing legacy not only of the the characters themselves as a pedagogical problem but also of the classical language as not only a hard to learn esoteric elitist but also infused with a kind of a classical tradition that was so so backward and and traditional sort of conservative anti-fan tai women and classes that they it was so disgusting to them that they just saw no way of keeping this tradition going you know all the idioms and the phrasings and the ways of doing things were just so anathema to this modern science and and modernity and democracy agenda that they were pursuing that so there was no other way to but just get rid of it and start anew with English or something else which would be nice for me because they've done that I'd be here in Chinese and we'd all be just speaking English and that I probably wouldn't be here then because it wouldn't be the very interesting Congo way has was someone who had this notional way back in the ching of a sort of a universal language so I'm gonna skip ahead now and get to these other issues but 1949 Mao does win and in fact Mao had spent most of his time or lots of his time on language talking about these very issues that we're talking about Mouse prong from this tradition he was in those that may fourth tradition surrounded by these people with these ideas to which he added the other aspect of communism and to bring you know the people were now the heroes the people must be educated must take place in the political process which means we need an educated literate peasantry or you know citizenry that can take place in with the revolution which means the characters have got to go and we'll talk about that in a minute but Mao stood up there gave his pronouncement you all heard it you know you know and in a put in a Hunan accent so thick that the people in Tiananmen Square different versions of what he had said you know what did he say so Mao didn't speak for you puto ha and neither did tongue shall ping and neither did Johnson min and neither did who's in town really and so finally we have Xi Jinping can speak no ha yeah great you know finally so 1955 the language law this is the modern form that we're now working with Putin has a standard form of modern Chinese with Beijing phonological system as its norm of pronunciation northern dialects as its base dialect and looking to exemplary modern works in by hua for its grammatical forms so you notice they're still not really only looking at a spoken standard it's still a little bit prescriptive in that they're still looking at these literary forms as the basis for grammar but they're looking at them at these northern dialectical forms as the lexicon but none of these are taken taken purely you know as standard information standard as a standard standard to apply for the spoken language you know for example one of the common misconceptions is that Beijing phonology Beijing dialect phonology is the same as Putin wah it's not they had they modified the Beijing phonology took some things out kept some things in there are many examples of that but the words like in Beijing dialect there's a carrot there's a syllable seit so if you want to say pick this paper and slide it under the door you say back saging shoot right but if you won't find that in the dictionary for the wise I so there's also sounds and syllables and things that they took out so so puto moi though it is much closer to a spoken standard and therefore much easier to teach and learn it's still not a a what the Academie Francaise will do this is the language of the Parisians and that's all there is to it right you don't need to like prescribe anything although of course then they try to set it in stone but the but for the Chinese they still have got what we're in other words one thing I've tried to impress on my students this language you're learning it's strictly speaking is not just the naturally occurring language of the Chinese people because there never was such a thing and what they arrived at was not merely a the language of one of those subsets of people they come up with a hybrid sort of Frankensteinian form that is close to Beijing dialect and it's has sort of these Mandarin characteristics but is a kind of a patchwork quilt of different kinds of things that is now being taught and that's what we're stuck with now and that's what we're learning luckily they made the decision to switch over to something closer to the Beijing dialect so they have if you're if you if you're Chinese many of your Chinese you probably had to go through a lot of these Putin wah promotion weeks in school where they you know if you're not from a dialect group you know you probably had to get these sort of classes in school encouraging you to speak patois and stuff like that and some of these some of these slogans here what is it well I joined Gore watched washer junghwa i show up aloha right so there's a little bit of a conflation with you know speaking this language and patriotism right it's a sort of national I like this show how iPhone granny what ha I found this in the I found this in the in the men's bathroom of Capitol Normal University so it's kind of wondering if the word funghi and had a pun here right and then these kinds of slogans dolly quake one puto ha son Janko ha minsu Ning Julie right it's not all these slogans give you the impression that it's not just a linguistic unity issue it's also the fact that this goes back to the ching and the pre post ching them think the mingle reformers there's a feeling in which if you don't speak one national language you're not really a nation we've all got to be speaking the same language otherwise there's always this suspicion that you're not really one of us that we're all not quite in the same boat and so this is a sort of dream there's this a hard to imagine national political and a sort of spiritual unity without a sort of linguistic unity to go along with it they they are to be forgiven for this I think there is a point there is a point there and very often when you talk to you when I talk to Chinese people like my wife who's Chinese you know talk to her about this sort of thing of letting dialects flourish and and having puto all on side of it that the topic always comes up with yeah but they won't really feel that they're Chinese if they're not speaking the same language as the radio and TV something they're always sort of apart from the rest of us meaning the majority who speak this this particular kind of language so these are some other examples you can find them you know when Ming you John puto ha right this is as they were promoting this Putin Ohio Genda in the 1950s and 60s you would have all these editorials and things that were sort of tortured language that was it was very unclear whether we that whether speakers of the non or speakers of the han dialects were being asked to give up their like local dialects or only speak them alongside the standard language so you had this this is a editor from legion she was one of mouths a tongues pals they said they were trying to explain it he said what we mean by national language is a sort of universal language which all the people use to express their ideas everyone may speak it but everyone doesn't have to speak it although everyone doesn't have to speak it we want all the people to be able to speak it for for all our Chinese and should not be that they cannot speak Chinese when they see each other so what does it mean to speak Chinese I mean if I'm speaking Honan dialect as I'm am I not speaking Chinese I mean you call this all parts of the Chinese language you know john de francis was it has a great statement he says asking someone do you speak chinese is that is like asking a european do you speak romance because it's not a language these are all different languages and they're all part of this citic language group these are different languages right here's another one Joe in lies 1956 after the promulgation of the language law he says many unintelligible dialects see I love this many unintelligible dialects to who I mean who speaks an unintelligible dialect you know is it we in this village don't understand what we're saying we just speak some dialect no one can understand is not even our kids they don't even know we're doing you know many unintelligible dialects have hindered the communication between people from different dialect communities and as many inconveniences for China's socialist construction these phenomena must be effectively eliminated in order to protect the interests of Chinese political economic cultural and national defense development so I mean the speakers of these non you know standard dialects will be thought gee am i mad like treason you know unpatriotic am i a traitor to my own country just by speaking this dialect but they were very the official policy shifted they were quite sure they didn't have a solid base they still don't the actual language policy about how how far these languages should be forced to accede to putin wise is still not a clear case and and this and that's just for the non for the han different forms of the han dialects the han languages for the non han top elects like the Xinjiang languages the Tibetan languages of which there are dozens and dozens just Tibet alone has like many many different language regions that are on borderline comprehensible and what how are they supposed to to function here now keep in mind the Chinese Constitution guarantees the right of these minority language groups to both keep their indigenous language and also their indigenous religious practices that's enshrined in the Constitution so they want to keep that out there but there's also a problem that how far do we go in the educational system because we want all the people of these regions to be able to speak putana and understand it and by the way the Ministry of Education tells us as many as one-third of the people in China cannot adequately communicate in puto ha they might be able to passively understand it but they're not adequate and speaking it so that's like four hundred million people here who still can't speak the national language more than the population of United States so we can't let that keep going on but how do we do that well we have to start teaching the puto ha when they're kids in the schools but then the question is is the language of education to be puto ha or is it going to be the language that of the local community whatever it happens to be now if it's if it's the Han dialects they can make a case now you got to if you're in Han Han you're in you're in you're in King you're Qingdao or something you've got to be teaching in the court and Xiao hai here in the courses they teach they teach in puto ha but the kids hi Hawai outside the classroom and in the street stuff okay what about the the weaker areas what about the Mongol areas you know well a lot of it that people are conflicted many parents to say yes teach them food don't walk because I want my kid to graduate and be able to get a good job but then you have other parents that might think otherwise well how if we don't teach my kids if a kids don't ever learn to speak Wawa or Shanghai ha ha then how are they understand grandma and how are they gonna feel one with you know the family and and especially with places like Guangdong where you have a that language has a strong cultural component there's there's yeah first year you and there's you at you you know there's Cantonese opera there's and Kennedy's actually has a special character set designed just to write Cantonese so you can actually publish books and articles in Cantonese so it has a literate tradition as well you're gonna just make that go away that's it like a cultural annihilation it's like genocide you know but in the interest of national unity and is how far are you going to go so you had these riots in nineteen 2010 in okay in Tibet riots in Guangdong when they started taking guangdong programming off off the air lots of the local green room programming and then chengdu rap we're starting to just do rap in Chengdu in Sichuan dialect Chengdu which is a kind of a unity push and then you know the state these the the state whether the the Minister of Education and the State Administration of radio film and television prescribes that all mass media and TV and radio programming has to be done in proton hua now they're exceptions to that and they're always people pushing the boundaries and they're also things like these Tom and Jerry cartoons that they put out on DVD discs they love to dub them in different dialects in Hunan dialect and things they sell really well people really like them and so the censors shut them down no no no dialects in cartoons it has to be you know it has to be don't why but because dialects sell people like dialects they're cool they're fun they're into sting their cultural they don't want them to go away but then the government wants everyone to be so what do you do they even went so far as to in these sort of revolutionary movies and stuff that portrayed Chairman Mao and done shopping they said even the leaders in these in these historical dramas have to speak standard puto ha so then for this you had tango Chong in this mal movie speaking standard put a lot which can you imagine mouth that be like George Bush speaking like an NPR announcer or something like that yeah and yet they tried that out and then they finally decided now we're gonna give some exceptions to that because it was it was it was silly and then finally we have at least someone who now is speaking to us in Putin watch Giuli boy people in Shanghai has been one of the biggest representatives were keeping Shanghai dialect alive and a lot of Shanghai residents are sending their kids to Shanghai language you know kindergartens and stuff to sort of keep Shanghai dialect alive and then I've even seen lately even radio ads and stuff talking about let's go back to speaking Beijing dialect because of the Beijing feel like we're losing our dialect I've heard ads on the radio saying you know teach your kids keep them up to date with Beijing dialect we don't want it to die out well what you prescribe puto Hana schools and in Beijing dialect you're sad that it's dying out I mean and yet this is a serious thing and kids of course Beijing kids don't speak the Beijing waa anymore why should they they've been otherwise in school so as you can see that the the official language policy is conflicted contradictory they're not quite sure what they want and there's the cultural side and the national unity side and there's the pedagogical side it's really quite complicated I want to promote this site phonemic net but it's phonemic Carr I'm sorry it's for oh I left out an a sorry about that typo phonemic canet which is a couple friends of mine have gone across the country asking people to record their local dialect and it could be a nursery nursery rhyme story and anecdote a joke or something and they've got many many hundreds of language files in three files you can listen to the local dialects they have they have the local they have the phonetic transcription they have a puta puta moi translation and an English translation and it's fascinating to read these because either dialects they're dying out at a fast rate but even so if you look at the the the local people these are even some young people who can still talk in the local dialect and tell jokes and things it's still amazing the the the dialectical and linguistic diversity of China even now it's it's just astounding and the fact that they think this is all going to be normalized in a generation too is impossible okay and if two minutes let me just go over this quickly because I hope that this will come up and in question and answer but the Chinese characters Liu Xuan supposedly on his deathbed said this so if for character Chinese slogan on his deathbed I'm sure but he said hansel boom eeeh Jang what be Wong what do you mean by that he was talking about this may 4th idea of universal literacy he was saying if we don't get released Chinese characters we're doomed because impediment and it was back then an impediment to Universal literacy these are the foreign service is two rankings of difficulty for different languages group one two three and if you look at the numbers of hours it takes to learn Chinese as opposed to one of these languages you could learn all three of these languages in the same time it would take you to learn Chinese and why is that is because Chinese is really all that hard no it has to do with these all have weird scripts that's the scripts are the you know the problem it's it takes a long time for people that are from a non-alphabetic to learn a non alphabetic system why are these Chinese characters so hard alphabetic or phonetic language is based upon some syllabary or an alphabet they have what I would call a virtuous circle here a virtuous loop where speaking reading and writing is this one composite skill if you can do one you can do the other very easily it's just a matter of learning a few symbols and you can basically mix and match the others the probably the characters is that they break that circle and they create a unvirtuous loop where speaking does not mean you can write anything and you can right stuff and forget how it's pronounced and so and so forth and it it's a pathological burden and it's not just hard for we us foreigners it's hard for the native speakers to attain link literacy in their own language if you don't believe that China's very proud of its of its literacy rate this is up to the nineteen ninety five percent but they don't tell you how long it takes kids to get to that level kids are learning Chinese how to write characters way into junior high in high school and then forgetting them along the way as they says they go off and start using WeChat this poor Bart Simpson has to learn and it's not me saying this as I say Chairman Mao said this to Edgar snow he said we got to get rid of the Chinese characters Chinese characters are so difficult to learn that even the best system of rudimentary characters or simplify teaching does not equip people with really efficient and rich vocabulary this he was already on board with this talking to Kissinger they're just as Chairman Mao speak he says the Chinese language is not bad but the characters are not good Joe and I says you know they're very difficult to learn bah blah Kissinger says there are some attempts to you as an alphabet I'm told friend Johanne life first we must standardize the oral language so even when they're talking to you know this in the 70s they're very aware we still haven't reached a common spoken language not to mention getting a written language and then I want to read this and that's the last thing I'll do her Mao off the record after he sort of failed in because he was on board he was telling in fact let me toward this one first this is a letter he wrote that's Mao's script by the way I mean just very just instantly this a letter he wrote to someone who was criticizing the pinyin agenda and mouse mouse says I've read it I have received and read your steamed letter of last February many thanks blah blah blah blah and then he says pinyin writing is a form of writing that is relatively convenient Chinese characters are too complex and difficult at present we are engaged in reform along the lines of simplification but someday in the future we must inevitably carry out a basic reform he's he's saying eventually we've got to go to opinion system and then this is the one that's off the record he's telling this to a group of catters and in a private conversation says do you approve or not of adopting the Latin alphabet in the future as I see it there's no great problem along the broad masses there are some problems among the intellectuals they say how can China adopt a foreign alphabet however on examination it is better after all to adopt such a foreign alphabet several professors have said to me that Chinese characters are the best writing system of all the countries in the world and cannot be reformed laughter in the in the Latin if the Latin alphabet had been invented by the Chinese probably there would not be any problem so I'm I'm not necessarily advocating what Mao is advocating but the point is these are Chinese people and Chinese educators and Chinese the greatest writers of the 20th century intellectuals who all saw this problem he said this is going to hold us back and I think I think you can make an argument that the the difficulty of not the Chinese language here's the thing we got a separate language from script they are two different things the characters are not the Chinese language and whether or not you can move to pinyin we could talk about in the question/answer I've got strong opinions on that but the characters as beautiful as they are as wonderful as they are as culturally rich as they are as culturally iconic ly Chinese as they are which I love them dearly and I just I write them I've obsessed with it myself they are a hard thing to learn they are an impediment to ease of of reading their and their this is another thing people don't like to hear they are a drain and impediment on Chinese ultimate soft power goals because they make the entry threshold into Chinese language and culture much harder than it needs to be and so now it's not a problem of Jobi Wong you know the end of Chinese culture or the Chinese civilization but it's the it's the success of China as a culture in a nation in the world in which language is so important and we have so many foreigners trying to tackle this Chinese language we have to at least admit that these smart people had a point and we have to rethink how we are using Chinese language in the future so this is separate you know notice from the notion of Putin or the problem of puto ha these are two separate problems but all of these are United in the in the aspect that Chinese reformers and and political figures who in charge of using the China of reforming the Chinese language have faced the same problem which is death somehow pull Chinese language into an accessible language that everyone can read speak easily and that has that can create this goal of national unity but at the same time make it that's user-friendly so that not only the Chinese people can use it effectively but that foreigners trying to get into the club can also learn it and make it part of their vocabulary as well and so these are these are problems that have not gone away that the Reformers have not yet solved and that we're still working and I'm still working on and that's the whole point of the talk that I'm given today I hope that you agree with me or got something out of it so thank you

Channel: NYU Shanghai

Views: 19,604

Rating: 4.8248849 out of 5

Keywords: nyu shanghai, academic events, talks, history of mandarin, what is putonghua, pinyin, Chinese, Mandarin, david moses, shanghai, beijing, chairman mao

Id: 3Wjy0WfKhQc

Length: 51min 56sec (3116 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 22 2018