Advanced English Skills

the linguistic landscape in eastern Eurasia, as well as processes of language variation and change more generally. Critical observations, questions, and exegesis

Chinese is — note the singular form of the verb

a group — not a single entity

language varieties — what is a "language variety"?  how does it differ from a language?  how does it differ from a dialect?

group… forms [a] branch — is "Chinese" a group or a branch? or both?  in any event, whether a group or a branch, by any linguistically acceptable definition, "Chinese" consists of more than a single language, not just a mass of "dialects"

Sinitic — what is this? how does it relate to Chinese?  the authors say that "Chinese" is a "group of language varieties [i.e., languages]" that "forms the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan family"  in other words, Chinese is essentially equivalent to Sinitic, but — in their minds — perhaps the Chinese group is not exactly equivalent to the Sinitic branch  if they are not exactly equal, how do they differ?  it's all very muddy and murky

That's just my critical analysis of the first sentence of the Introduction.  The rest of it reads like AI-generated superficial, vapid blather, which is true of much of the rest of the paper when it is not citing and interpreting data.

Methinks the authors of this paper have been seduced and confused by the compilers of the Linguistic Atlas of Chinese Dialects, the chief source of their data, into thinking that "Chinese" is a single language ("the mother tongue") spoken by 1.2 billion people and that it consists of thousands of mutually intelligible "dialects".

Nothing could be further from the truth, linguistic and otherwise.

My assessment of the paper under review may seem to be unnecessarily harsh.  In actuality, it is not much different from countless other studies in Chinese dialectology that cannot distinguish between family, branch, group, language, dialect, and fāngyán 方言 ("topolect").

—

P.S.:  This has nothing to do with armies and navies, a topic we've fruitlessly discussed ad nauseam on Language Log countless times in the past.

P.P.S.:  As for the mutual intelligibility of so-called "Chinese dialects", listen to this 4-year-old kid from Tianjin, which is close (70 miles) to Beijing, singing in the local Muttersprache.

P.P.S.:  If we can't call all those multitudinous strains of language in China "dialects", what would be a good alternative?  I propose "lect" (see especially the last sentence in the passage below).

In sociolinguistics, a variety, also known as a lect or an isolect, is a specific form of a language or language cluster. This may include languages, dialects, registers, styles, or other forms of language, as well as a standard variety. The use of the word variety to refer to the different forms avoids the use of the term language, which many people associate only with the standard language, and the term dialect, which is often associated with non-standard language forms thought of as less prestigious or "proper" than the standard. Linguists speak of both standard and non-standard (vernacular) varieties as equally complex, valid, and full-fledged forms of language. Lect avoids the problem in ambiguous cases of deciding whether two varieties are distinct languages or dialects of a single language.

(Wikipedia) Selected readings

* "The future Sinitic languages of East Asia" (4/21/24)
* "Language, topolect, dialect, idiolect" (10/3/23) — with extensive bibliography (during the last two decades, the Language Log posts on the classification of Sinitic and its lects, large and small, are countless)
* "Topolect was specifically invented in 1991 by Victor Mair as a translation of 方言 (fangyan) to get around the whole language/dialect bombshell when it comes to Chinese", Hacker News (7/4/21) — with minimal, yet essential, bibliography

[Thanks to Hiroshi Kumamoto]

➖ @EngSkills ➖

(9/3/16)
* "Annals of literary vs. vernacular, part 2" (9/4/16)
* "Shandong vernacular, then and now" (8/1/21)
* "Missionary Linguistics; the joys of interpreting" (12/25/21)
* "Buddhism and languages" (2/28/17)
* "Arabic and the vernaculars, part 5" (8/20/22)
* Si Nae Park, The Korean Vernacular Story: Telling Tales of Contemporary Chosŏn in Sinographic Writing (New York:  Columbia University Press, 2020).
* Victor H. Mair, "Buddhism and the Rise of the Written Vernacular in East Asia:  The Making of National Languages", Journal of Asian Studies, 53.3 (August, 1994), 707-751 — for me personally, the most important linguistic impact of Buddhism was its legitimization of the written vernacular in China

➖ @EngSkills ➖

Language Log
Korean oralization of Literary Sinitic

Si Nae Park came to Penn last Thursday (4/18/24) to talk about kugyŏl / gugyeol / kwukyel 구결 口訣 ("oral glossing"). Gugyeol, or kwukyel, is a system for rendering texts written in Classical Chinese into understandable Korean. It was used chiefly during the Joseon dynasty, when readings of the Chinese classics were of paramount social importance. Thus, in gugyeol, the original text in Classical Chinese was not modified, and the additional markers were simply inserted between phrases.

The parts of the Chinese sentence would then be read in Korean out of sequence to approximate Korean (SOV) rather than Chinese (SVO) word order. A similar system for reading Classical Chinese is still used in Japan and is known as kanbun kundoku.

(Wikipedia)
Park's analyses and explanations were like a revelation to me for a number of reasons.  First of all, I was already familiar with the analogous Japanese method for reading Literary Sinitic, called kundoku, which involves a lot of rearrangement, modification, and annotation of the text to make it more like Japanese, whereas it seems that kugyŏl tries to stay closer to the Literary Sinitic.

I was also long aware of the Sinitic expression kǒujué 口訣, but in Chinese it means something quite different than it does in Korean:

* (religion) orally transmitted esoteric teachings in Buddhism and Taoism
* mnemonic chant; formula; rhyme for remembering (arithmetic tables, character stroke order, etc.)

(Wiktionary)

This is not to say that premodern Chinese did not see a need for making the content of Literary Sinitic available for those who were unable to read it.  For this purpose, socially sensitive individuals resorted to a variety of devices, including oral and written translations into the vernacular, as I demonstrated in "Language and Ideology in the Written Popularizations of the Sacred Edict", in David Johnson, Andrew J. Nathan, and Evelyn S. Rawski, eds., Popular Culture in Late Imperial China (Berkeley and Los Angeles:  University of California Press, 1985), pp. 325-359.

Chinese referred to these devices as zhíjiě 直解 ("direct explanation"), zhíshuō yàolüè 直說要略 ("directly expounded essentials"), yǎnyì 演義 ("elaboration"), tújiě 圖解 ("illustrated explanation"), and many others, which shows that there was a need for making literary texts available to the broader, uneducated populace, and that it was being met by various means.

Nowadays, almost all the major literary and classical Chinese texts have been rendered into Mandarin, and these are called 白話翻譯 ("vernacular translations").

The Koreans during the middle of the second millennium AD also had textbooks for learning vernacular Sinitic. Bak Tongsa (Chinese: 朴通事; lit. 'Pak the interpreter') was a textbook of colloquial northern Chinese published by the Bureau of Interpreters in Korea in various editions between the 14th and 18th centuries. Like the contemporaneous Nogeoldae ('Old Cathayan'), it is an important source on both Late Middle Korean and the history of Mandarin Chinese. Whereas the Nogeoldae consists of dialogues and focusses on travelling merchants, Bak Tongsa is a narrative text covering society and culture.

(source)

Lest I overlook another significant Korean means for annotating Chinese-language texts, I should mention eonhae 언해 諺解, which the Japanese also had, genkai げんかい 諺解 (lit., "aphoristic explanation").

In sum, I will make two main points:  1.there's a sharp difference between oralization and vernacularization, 2. kugyŏl belongs to the former, beon-yeog 번역 / hon'yaku 翻訳 / fānyì 翻譯 to the latter. Selected readings

* "The many meanings and faces of 'vernacular'" (7/26/23)
* "Vulgar village vernacular" (8/21/21)
* "Mixed literary and vernacular grammar"[...]