On Sun, 12 Jun 2005 23:16:02 +0800 Robert Delfs wrote:

I quote:
"Spoken Chinese comprises many regional variants, generally referred to
as dialects. However, the mutual unintelligibility of the subvarieties
is the main ground for classifying them as separate languages or dialect
groups. Each dialect group consists of a large number of dialects, many
of which may themselves be referred to as languages. The boundaries
between one so-called language and the next are not always easy to
define. Because each dialect group preserves different features of
Middle Chinese (dating back to early or even pre-T'ang times), they have
proven to be valuable research tools in the phonological reconstruction
of Middle and even to some extent its ancestor, Old Chinese. Most
Chinese speak one of the Mandarin dialects, which are largely mutually
intelligible."

origin:
http://www.chinalanguage.com/Language/chinese.html

Does this explain the different view expressed in this thread....
multiple languages or not?

Seems to me that Chinese 'written vs spoken' has more variety than we
find in most other languages.

http://www.zhongwen.com/
the pictographs here gave me some insight to understand the differences
and points of confusion/disagreement more clearly.

This debate is not likely to have any conclusion... ;)

> On Sat, 11 Jun 2005 20:33:11 -0400, Reef Fish wrote:
>
> >Robert, after several rounds of our conversation ABOUT the
> >Chinese language, all I can definitively conclude is that you
> >ain't Chinese, you don't know Chinese as a language, and you
> >are not a linguist.
> >
> >I'll make it short.
>
> No you didn't.
>
> I don't claim to be Chinese, nor a degree in linguistics.  But I have
> read enough and taken enough courses to know the difference between the
> written graphs that can be and are used to represent words in a
> language and the words themselves.  It's a very basic concept, and its
> difficult to talk about language with someone who doesn't understand
> the difference.
>
> I think if you open a book on the subject by a serious linguist written
> since 1947 you'll find that the idea that the relatedness (and
> separatedness) of northern Chinese and Cantonese or Shanghainese is
> very comparable to the relatedness (and separateness) of Spanish,
> Italian and French is not just widely accepted, it's obvious.  Where
> one draws the line between languages is arbitrary, but we are looking
> for a certain degree of consistency.
>
> If you want to call all the Mandarin, Cantonese, Fujianese etc.all
> dialects of one language you certainly can - I can't imagine that
> anyone reading this would care.  (I can't imagine who's reading this at
> all.)  What you can't do, if you want to be taken seriously, is
> Mandarin and Cantonese a single language, while also calling Spanish
> and Italian and French three different languages, based on the
> irrelevant observatoin that the three Chinese language/dialects you're
> talking about happen to share a common non-phonetic writing system used
> for cognate words.
>
> Try buying or borrowing a good comparative linguistics introductory
> textbook, one with a chapter that discusses the very well-understood
> problem of how to characterize the relationships among the various
> Chinese tongues (which is one term some linguists use to finesse the
> whole problem of "language" versus "dialect") and then, if you want,
> get back to me, ok?
>
> But don't pull the sorry "I'm Chinese and you're not so anything I say
> must be right" shit, ok?  It's a very pathetic way to lose an argument.
>
> Robert Delfs

--
Michael