@@kimeli Kafei is just the pronunciation in mandarin, it's written as 咖啡 in chinese characters and it borrows the sound from the english word of coffee.
Here are examples of some other loan words Irony (from French) Ranch (from Spanish) Enthusiasm (from Latin) Cookie (from Dutch) Cello (from Italian) Grammar (from Greek) Noodle (from German) Have you ever run into a German person telling Americans that the word noodle comes from Germany? No, cus no one cares. Focus on doing better NOW, instead of being nostalgic about something that may have happened several thousands of years ago. The Chinese community is the only community that wastes its time talking about these things constantly.
He does make sense in that Chinese known to foreigners is called the Common Tongue dialect (Putonghua) within Chinese mainland. But it is also named as the National language in both PRC and ROC (Taiwan). But because the writing system had been unified since BC era, it is still quite consistent in meaning. Modern Chinese language (post 1200s) is a political creation to unify all the ethnic and regional Chinese people spoken language which is quite a smart thing to do but still the foundation of Chinese script should not be ignored completely when talking about the Chinese language. Middle Chinese is Latin of Chinese language, likely propagated in surrounding regions by both Han and Tang Dynasty which were considered to be strongest empire in East Asian regions in their time. Definitely agree that modern day Chinese script is the result of multiple refinement of ancient Chinese hieroglyphics. If ancient Egyptians didn't die out, they likely would have done the same to their hieroglyphics over time.
I keep telling people this, Chinese is a written language, and there are many spoken dialect languages such as Mandarin, Wu, Yue, Fujian, etc. because written characters are always displayed on tv shows in mainland China so anyone from anywhere within China can understand the show right away if they don't speak Madarin
the written form on each chinese language is also diferent because al have diferent grammar and vocabulary, and they are NOT dialects from mandarin they are diferent languages from the same language family , all learn to read the mandarin way to write to understand tv, newpapers, etc.
the written form on each chinese language is also diferent because al have diferent grammar and vocabulary, and they are NOT dialects from mandarin they are diferent languages from the same language family , all learn to read the mandarin way to write to understand tv, newpapers, etc.
Sometimes, your efforts to come up with "Asian perspectives" do not pay off well. For example, at 2:44, you said Chinese is a language based on the written language. This is just not true. The written language was invented after the speaking language; this is true in most languages. Even Chinese, the spoken language, came long before the written language. The Chinese written language is more uniform across the land than the speaking language because, for thousands of years, only the ruling elites knew how to write and had a use for writing. Memebers of the ruling class needed to communicate with each other over long distances, so they kept a uniform writing system. You can find local speaking words without official written words, like the famous Xian food Biangbiang noodles. There is no official written word for "biangbiang"
No, it's true. The Qin Dynasty (221 BC) introduced a range of reforms such as standardized currency, weights, measures and a uniform system of writing ( called "small seal script", Chinese: 小篆). Since then, Chinese used the same written language. Today 小篆 is still used in calligraphy, engraving and advertising.
I just recently found something different than your example (Biang). Previously I thought a lot of characters in my own Chinese dialect had no corresponding written forms (like Biang). But just a couple of months ago, I saw people posting written forms of a lot of my dialect characters I didn't know existed (they can be found in dictionaries). So the message is: it is likely that the characters you thought only have spoken forms in your Chinese dialect do have corresponding written forms, but because they are rarely used in modern Chinese writing system, most Chinese people, including me, just don't know they exist.
@@xsr-re6pl ppl just can't type it on computer, due to early computer character coding set. An early standard GB2312 only includes 6763 characters, while the latest version GB18030 includes more than 70000.
It seems like these guys don't understand the basics of comparative linguistics. Middle Chinese is not the "root" of a lot of east Asian languages. It is the root of Sininic languages(or Chinese dialects, whatever you wanna call them) since they are direct decendents of middle Chinese. Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, etc were "influenced" by middle Chinese but are not "decendents" of middle Chinese, and are not genealogically related to middle Chinese, or any Sinic language. In fact, even from the beginning of modern linguistics, these languages have not been linked to Chinese in terms of their origins. There is a profound and fundamental difference between languages that "inherited" another language and languages that were "influenced" by another language. Also, intelligibility of spoken language is the most common and objective criteria to distinguish one language from another in linguistics. Written language is hardly ever a criterion that separates one language from another. This criterion not only applies to Chinese but to other languages. A Russian speaker, for instance, can read Bulgarian and even understand the meaning of a text written in Bulgarian up to a considerable degree since these two languages use Cyrillic and share the same root, but cannot fully understand spoken Bulgarian. So they are considered different languages. Recognizing differences between Chinese languages and analyzing them isn't "westerners applying their standards on China". It's simply modern linguistics
Yea, not really expecting the Fung Bros to really understand linguistics. They're in this for the clicks and views. Even their main criticism that Chinese is more about the written language is incorrect since many Chinese "dialects" have different vocabulary and even grammar that is different from standard Putonghua. When grammar, vocabulary and phonetics are different, they are essentially different languages and are only dialects from a political perspective.
actually not intelligibility is not an objective criteria to distinguish a language from another because there's a phenomenon call dialect continium, that really complicate things. in linguistics dialect and language are practicaly the same.
Language study like all social study is not hard science so does "Modern linguistics". It's very subjective on the definition IMO. I would argue so-called Modern linguistics only apply to phonetic alphabet base language.
I actually agree with the phd Linguistics scholar. I don't see "Chinese" as a language per se either, but a family of related languages. So I disagree (rather strongly) with the assertion that he is looking at the Chinese language through a western lens. He is looking through a linguistics lens. I was a Mandarin teaching assistant at university and currently teach a Cantonese class to adults. I took a course in Taiwanese, lived for a period in Malaysia among Penang Hokkien speakers and understand more or less my grandparents' Toishan dialect. I have also studied French, Spanish, some Portuguese, Japanese, Thai, and also Malay/Indonesian and Tagalog. So as an analogy, I see speaking or reading Chinese as akin to speaking or reading "Romance", with French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Galician, Catalan, Sicilian, etc. as related languages or sub-dialects of the related languages and Latin would be the ancient literary version of "Romance" analogous to literary Chinese 文言文 to modern Chinese. I find the scholar's interpretation and analysis to be more or less linguistically accurate.
Aren't there different languages within categories like "French" and "Spanish" too, though? In France, at least, there are distinct languages like Provencal and Picard. Do you know if these are comparable to the different Chinese languages? I really don't know enough about Chinese languages to compare them. Just based on this video and my knowledge of French languages, it seems like all of these labels are very arbitrary. Based on the linguistics, would you say that it's any less or more accurate to say that "French is not a language" if "Chinese" isn't?
@@cluckcluckchicken A more analogous comparison using French as an example would be to compare French to the Yue family of languages (which the linguistics scholar mentions in the opening scene), of which the Yuehai dialects, which include the varieties of Cantonese used in Guangzhou and Hong Kong and are regarded as forming the prestige or "standard" varieties of the language. There are many subdialects within Yue (Cantonese) family as well, including the Sze-yap dialect that my grandfather spoke, of which Taishanese is the regarded as the standard variety of that. This is analogous to having many sub-dialects of French. So, if we are attempting to comparing apples to apples, then it probably should be along the lines of: "Chinese" which is analogous to "Romance". Romance is not generally regarded as a language per se, but a larger family of languages of which French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, etc. are regarded as "languages" and share the common descent from Latin. Saying one speaks and reads Chinese makes about as much sense (from a linguistical point of view) as saying one speaks and reads "Romance", when actually, they mean one of the Romance languages. "French" or "Spanish" is more analogous to "Yue" (粵語）, the big subgroup under the larger umbrella of Chinese languages mentioned by the linguistics scholar in the video. We also have the Hakka, Northern Min, Southern Min, Wu and other subgroups of Chinese languages which correspond more closely to the concept of "language" in Europe (or what a linguistics scholar might refer to as a "language"). These "languages" are generally not mutually intelligible between each other, but somewhat more mutually intelligible (but not fully) within each other. The "Yue" group of languages includes many dialects, including the standard Yuehai varieties of Cantonese spoken in Guangzhou and Hong Kong and overseas diaspora, as well as, for example, the Sze-yap family of dialects under Yue (which my grandfather's Taishanese dialect is regarded as a standard variety of the dialects under Sze-Yap). These dialects under "Yue" would be more analogous to the dialects of Provençal and Picard under French, as well as overseas varieties like Quebecois, Cajun, and Haitian French. So, this would be the analogy from a linguistics point of view, of which the scholar in the video was speaking from. He was not using the political definition of language. People assume he was speaking from a "western" point of view because in Europe, many languages either have their own political entity or are officially recognized as languages within a political entity. So in Europe, these are also political definitions. The current political regime in China, and many people educated under that regime do not recognizes the various languages in Greater China as separate "languages". A linguistics scholar might see things differently. You are right to state that the "all of these labels are very arbitrary". We can also add the adage that "A language is a dialect with an army and navy". To be honest, I think Brazilian Portuguese is as close, if not closer to the other Romance languages (Spanish and French, etc.) than the Sze-Yap Yue dialect is to "standard" Cantonese. On my first visit to Brazil, I started using Portuguese as soon as I arrived to the airport, without actually studying Portuguese in advance (based on my prior understanding of French and Spanish and attending meetings before in Macau). But a Cantonese speaker in HK would feel pretty lost on their first visit to Taishan and using the local Sze-Yap variety there. Forget about Mandarin. They might as well be speaking Dutch. Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese borrowing words from middle Chinese, is analogous to English borrowing words from Middle French. In conclusion, treating "Chinese" as a "language" is more a political statement than anything. A linguistics point of view may differ, as it focuses on vocabulary, sentence structure pronunciation and usage, and adds in the concept of mutual intelligibility. If, in the future, the present PRC were to break up into separate political entities which had their own army and navy, then it is possible that "Yue" could be the main language of one of the entities and call that language "Cantonese", and maybe Taiwan could revert to using primarily Taiwanese Hokkien (TBH, this is a genuine fear and concern from the current regime.). At that point, from a political viewpoint, they would most certainly be separate languages. Under the Roman empire, there was one standard Latin, and multiple varieties of nonstandard vulgar Latin. After the breakup of the Roman empire, certain varieties of vulgar Latin got labelled as "languages" and certain varieties got labelled as a dialect variety within the standard language. Hence, we now have French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, etc. Is Galician (Galego) a dialect of Portuguese, a dialect of Spanish, or its own separate language? Without political recognition, it is simply dialectal variation. With political recognition, it is regarded as its own language. Now what is it from a linguistics point of view?
There are multiple dialects of German, multiple dialects of English. The way that a Londoner, New Yorker, and Australian would pronounce the same English text ings are very different.
As someone who has lived in Italy and studied Italian, I agree with you. There are certain dialects which are very different from standard Italian, and there are a few cases where the spoken tongue of that area is generally accepted as a distinct language (eg. Friulan).
I remember watching a movie about Japanese air stewardess and in one scene there was a Chinese tourist trying to look for direction so they wrote it down on a piece of paper and the Japanese stewardess figured out that they were trying to look for a zoo
Technically a lot of modern "Chinese words" were initally invented by the Japanese and was brought over to China in the late 1800s to early 1900s. For example, the Chinese word for "Police" and "Police Station" was first found in Japanese documents, then the idea was borrowed back to China after the revolution. There were a lot influence from Japan during that period since a lot of Chinese students also went to Japan to learn modern science and thoughts and brought back quite a lot of new phrases. It's just the modern Chinese historians are too embarrassed to admit it and tends to hide it and say it didn't happen. But modern Chinese, especially the subjects that have to do with modern political, education and science related subjects originated from Japan. So it was always a two way street. And yeah.....even the word "Zoo" (動物園) was first translated by the Japanese and the Chinese adopted it afterwards. So when written in Chinese, any Japanese stewardess who have the ability to read basic Kanji can understand what they want, bacause they translated that phrase first.
That's because Japan imported a lot of Chinese culture and language during the Tang Dynasty, so they learned how to read Chinese in order to read Chinese literature. The average Japanese person learns 1,000s of Chinese characters because they're used in daily life. Native Japanese katakana and hiragana are completely different and largely phonetic.
As a Hokkien speaker, it felt strange when I was a kid that a lot of characters have two readings (e.g. numbers) which no-one explained. Later I found out that there is and old Chinese and a Middle Chinese reading for characters.
It's a pop trivia type of explanation. 'Chinese' is not fully, technically, a language but a language family. But in its common use, it's easier just to say, 'I know Chinese'. Also written Chinese is mutually intelligible among the Chinese language family to a much higher degree than the European languages.
From a linguistic standpoint, there isn't even a Chinese language family since Chinese is a national identity. Linguistically there is a Sinitic language family, and in China there are 6 main Sinitic language groups consisting of hundreds of dialects, and additionally over 50 minority groups that speak non-Sinitic languages.
not exactly, each diferent chinese language is written diferently because each language have diferent grammar and vocabulary, all learn to write in the mandarin chinese way.
Chinese is a family of families of languages. The seven groups are: Mandarin, including Standard Chinese, the Beijing dialect, Sichuanese, and also the Dungan language spoken in Central Asia Wu, including Shanghainese, Suzhounese, and Wenzhounese Gan Xiang Min, including Fuzhounese, Hainanese, Hokkien and Teochew Hakka Yue, including Cantonese and Taishanese
@@arthurmoran4951 wrong. We can still read. Perfectly what the chinese wrote thousands of years ago. The average Italian will not be able to resd what their ancestors wrote thousands of years ago
Koreanic and Japonic languages are grammatically structured Monoglic languages with the Subject Object Verb combination. The reason why Japanese and Korean has Sino words is because the two countries adopted Confucianism along with the characters. But linguistically Korean and Japanese as well as Monolgian doesn't originate from Middle Chinese. The best way to see it is Northern Asian languages are like the Germanic languages that adopted Latin. In Asia the "Latin" is middle Chinese
I don’t believe most linguists would categorize Japanese and Korean as related languages (or at least there isn’t evidence to actually prove the lineage). There are theories which connect non-Indo-European language families together but I think most linguists today do not consider them credible theories (e.g. the Altaic language family) because there isn’t enough evidence to definitely prove their relationships.
@troykawahara4496 I know that the controversy behind "altaic" categories has not been resolved yet however I am not at all trying to be political here. I've been studying both Korean and Japanese purely for fun. I noticed the grammar structure of Japanee and Korean is identical. Watashi-wah Kyoto-ni ikimasu Nah-nuen kyoto-ae gabnida Just a curious oberservation. The grammar structure is completely identical with particles and verbs placement
Also, i think the same point when it comes to Spain. The Spanish language and accent came from the region of Castile and Leon which was its own kingdom until the mid-late-1400s when it emerged with the Kingdom of Aragon (because of Ferrando II of Aragon and Isabel I of Castile). The point is Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Great Britain, and the Netherlands, like China, are "family" countries of different dialect. Because of Brittany, Normandy, Frisia, Bavaria, Tuscany, Catalonia, Galicia, Wales, and Scotland.
This is a good point. We have VERY distinct languages in France, too. Provencal and Picard sound nothing like stereotypical "French", for example! It seems like this video could apply to any argument about language, not just Chinese.
@@cluckcluckchicken *Langues d'oïl* : Berrichon Bourguignon-Morvandiau Champenois or Campanois Franc-Comtois French Gallo Lorrain Norman Picard Poitevin-Saintongeais Walloon Angevin *Occitan language (also Lenga d'òc, Langue d'oc)* : Vivaroalpenc Mentonasc (Mentonnais or Mentonasque) Auvergnat Gascon including Béarnese (Béarnais) and Landese (Landais) Languedocien Limousin Provençal Nissart (Niçois or Niçart)
He’s analyzing it through the western lens. Ok. What other lens could he analyze it through and what would be the difference in conclusion. Would the other lens say Germanic languages are the same since they are derived from a common ancestor dialect/language?
The spoken Chinese languages have always been very different and had many variations since ancient time. For example Tang Dynasty minister 韩慰 complained he couldn't understand what the Cantonese (of his time) were speaking, he had to write texts on the ground to communicate with the locals when he was exiled to Guangdong. And during Han dynasty, people realized that the writings from Zhou dynasty didn't rhyme when reading using Han dynasty accents, the spoken language had already changed so much. Even back in Zhou dynasty people from central plateau often laughed at the accents of people from Chu state and Yue state, calling it "bird-chirping" accents.
Middle Chinese inspired the many languages of East and South East Asia today. During the greatest period of Chinese dominance (Tang Dynasty 618-756), everyone wanted to be Chinese and learn and incoporate all forms of Tang culture
The linguistics PhD guy is largely correct although he put his point across quite provocatively. The current version of written standard Chinese is based on Mandarin. In HK you can write in vernacular Cantonese.
Similarly Taiwanese Hokkien has its own set (though there are competing and not universally agreed upon) of character standards! Written Vernaculars have existed for quite some time!! Going on Min languages, The Tale of the Lychee Mirror is probably the earliest example of Hokkien literature specifically. Going even older, Old Chinese written, like that of Lao Zi, is certainly different from modern standard written. Because the modern standard is based on vernacular Mandarin, showcasing that Old Chinese is a different beast altogether. Ancestral absolutely but different nonetheless
Where the linguist errs is in failing to acknowledge that not all Chinese dialects stem from Middle Chinese. Southern Min dialects, such as Hokkien, Teochew, and Hainanese, actually trace their origins back to Old Chinese. Consequently, they retain some word pronunciations that differ significantly, such as using "te" for tea instead of "cha," as in Mandarin and Cantonese. Interestingly, the reason we say "tea" is because we borrowed the term from Hokkien rather than from Mandarin or Cantonese.
Cantonese has its own writing system, and so as in Minnan or Taigi (as they call it in Taiwan). We're just forced to learn how to write in Mandarin since we were a kid.
@@chankane yeah kind of, because they assumed that he's biased by a western point of view, linguistics is the same here and china. the guy just used clickbait saying that chinese doesn't exist, the chinese language do exist, but there's confusion in the other chine's languages since they are called chinese too.
The word "library" is a Japanese word constructed from sino-japanese elements; wasei kango(和製漢語) that was translated from the English word "library" in the mid-Meiji period. It was then exported mainly to East Asia.
I believe there are Western scholars of the Chinese language, including notable figures like Jerry Norman and Bernhard Karlgren from Sweden, who have made significant contributions to our understanding of Middle and Old Chinese through their studies of Chinese dialects, as well as languages like Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese. Their findings align with your perspective. Therefore, I'm uncertain about what you mean by a "Western lens." Chinese language study has a long history, and I'm not convinced that it carries inherent biases from the West. Regarding the nature of the Chinese writing system, as you mentioned, characters primarily convey meanings rather than phonetic sounds. This was also noted by the linguist. He highlighted that this characteristic allows for communication using a standardized form of Chinese, based on Mandarin. However, individuals may need to learn Mandarin because the way one writes in standard Chinese, based on Mandarin, can differ from dialects. While there might not have been much disagreement on these points, the linguist was mistaken in asserting that all Chinese dialects originated from Middle Chinese. As you rightly pointed out, Southern Min dialects, for instance, trace their roots back to Old Chinese.
@@k10nn10th these are all based on the concept of the school of thought origin of each civilizations philosophical view, so Latin America would fall under western, Africa has its own school of thought and base for civilization. Obviously not everything is going to fall into a neat little package, but in regards to this video they are talking about the perspective of a man living in a Greco-Roman civilization vs their perspective coming from a more centered east meets west view, granted I do not hold PhD in any of this stuff lol
Yes, I’d say that linguistics has traditionally been a field where the alphabet is prioritized as the main notation system, but Chinese Linguists waaay back in the Tang dynasty also devised a rhyming schemes in Middle Chinese that was similar to how linguists note initial onset, rhyme, and tone of each character base on the charts they made to keep trace of which words rhymed for poetic purposes.
@@andresarias5303 sorry man that was before, now science studies are global , and so linguistics they have to, so the same studies need to be aplied for example on creating a chip to be able to function, so now in the same way modern linguistics are global and it is the more objective way to describe languages, now all sciences are getting improved from scientist from all around the world.
If I recall correctly, after the fall of the Ching Dynasty, with the creation of the Republic of China, there was a vote to establish the official language, and Cantonese lost by a single vote among the delegates.
😂Another rumor version comes from "German almost became the official language of the US". In China, the official language is always where the capital is.
Mandarin is not a language but a made language of multiple dialect to simplify and help centralize all of the different ethnic in China. I'm Hmong and i will always remember our suffering in China and will pass that onto our next generations. It's similar to Africa, different dialect, same forefather along the way due to "chop the old tree, leave the young sapling" phrase
The standardisation of writings helps them understand one another. My aunt read the chinese newspaper in hokkien, another aunt and mom read it in cantonese. Of course, all of them could speak hokkien, cantonese, hakka and teowchew.
You guys are technically wrong. Linguistic focus primarily on the languages spoken, not scripts. So, technically... Chinese language doesn't exist but the names for regional dialects do
@@hatchetenthusiast5545 all the phd guy is saying is right except that chinese langauge doesn't exist, chinese langauge do exist, but also the langauge sub family is called the same
Chinese laguages uses Hylographic Logogram due to that our languages are HImalayan languages, which a key feature of Himalayan languages is that there is a predominant majority of single syllable volabularies (thus one shape correspend to one sound make perfect sense to us) plus our gramatical inflection usually don't invovle modify the base word that we have (if gramatical inflection is needed we often swap out the whole word for another word)
0:52-"Most people in China need to know at least SOME Mandarin".... if you went to school in China in the past 50 years you were taught in Mandarin almost exclusively. He has clearly never been to China or speak Chinese, I do and am in China, peace from Fuzhou 福州。
Not everyone in HK speaks mandarin, it’s a secondary language for most people in GZ and Canton areas. Cantonese is their “original” language. 普通话is taught just to learn and connect with other Chinese speaking other dialects vice versa.
the correct way to state the facts: the is not ONE chinese language , there are many related "chinese " languages that use the same ideograms that have no sound just meaning. If written Han ideograms were phonetic then there would be like 15 different written "chinese languages".
The real Chinese spoken in the ancient kingdoms were close to modern-day Hokkien and Cantonese. Mandarin is not the real Chinese but a dialect of Peking dialect mixed Manchurian accent and loan words.
Depends on dynasty. Tang dynasty writings rhymes when reading using Hokkien or Cantonese, but writings from even earlier Zhou dynasty don't. Zhou had only 4 tones, which is possibly closer to modern mandarin.
I've seen this BS theory go around on the internet, its completely not based on any evidence. Spoken Mandarin "官话“ that we know today has already started to take this form since Ming dynasty. And give me 1 Manchurian loan word that is in standard mandarin vocab today (and no Beijing slang words doesn't count).
Well I think he's right. China is actually a successful empire comprising of many different nations, people, and cultures that got conquered and unified into one rule, and never got around to collapse like the roman. Mandarin was invented to communicate between the people, but the many different languages are their own language just like German and English. Imagine the roman empire never collapsed and every European and Mediterranean countries communicate in Latin but they still speak their own local languages in their areas. Those local languages like Celtic, Turkish, Germanic, Greek, Egyptian, etc are not a dialect of Latin but their own distinct languages. That's China.
yup. i guess it's sort of like what Europe would become it became unified as a single country instead of being made up of many different countries today. it doesn't have to be traced all the way back to the roman empire though. if one nation eg. germany, france, england, spain grew strong enough to conquer or absorb the rest, it might happen. you never know, maybe it is in the process now with the formation of EU. LOL
Nice analysis guys. Not speaking but writing is the key. Cantonese is a great language and difficult to speak. Don't forget that Mandarin only fairly recently became the Spoken word preference and characters became simplified.
what is 図? what is 書? what is 館? Even without this word, I can invent a word that has the same meaning as a library: 藏书楼 阅览室 典籍阁 盟府 石渠台 天录楼 文渊阁 But if you don't have the three characters, what is 図書館?
Fun fact: as someone who speaks german and dutch, they are about as different as Mando and Canto. English is indeed much more different, because it is heavily influenced by other languages and has undergone a lot of simplification
14:35 That's insane. Hong Kong accounted for over 1/4 of China's entire GDP in the 1990s. Today it's barely 2%. This is why China is taking such a heavy hand in Hong Kong. It's just not that special anymore. They don't care if they screw up 2% of their GDP.
In the history of humans, spoken languages came FIRST (the base), then written languages (based on the spoken language) came after. i.e. there are two types of languages, spoken and written. Chinese languages share the same WRITTEN language b/c Hanzi are symbols that represent words (logographs), not sounds (alphabets and syllabaries), so they barely changed throughout the millennia, but the spoken languages did diverge from Middle Chinese. The most logical differentiator between what is and isn't a (spoken OR written) language or dialect is MUTUAL INTELLIGEBILITY. Cantonese, Hokkien, and Mandarin speakers CANNOT understand >50% of each other, but they CAN understand each other in WRITING! Therefore, the different varieties of Chinese are spoken languages but the same written language. Ancient/Old Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese used the same writing system (Classical Chinese) as Middle Chinese, so their written language was borrowed from China, but their SPOKEN languages were never the same. LOANWORDS are the reasons so many words in Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese sound like Cantonese, Hokkien, and Mandarin....LOANWORDS from Middle Chinese, not b/c they descended from Middle Chinese! If a modern Korean speaks a whole bunch of Konglish, they're still speaking Korean with English loanwords, not English.
Teach people to write Chinese again. They can use a notebook to keep a journal with thoughts written on the left page and unknown characters written on the right page. Practicing your unknown characters this way will help you to remember how to write them. This is what I've started to do to learn how to write Chinese, both traditional and simplified characters.
Chinese Language is more like Spanish or Sanskrit Language in that it was the official Imperial language for the empire but the regional dialects are different. Living languages are not static but evolve over time. Traditional Cantonese had 12 tones not 9 tones. Mandarin has only been reduced to 4 tones only in recent memory. Written Chinese has been only recently simplified from its Traditional form. Cantonese has many idioms that do not exist in Mandarin. South Asian Indian languages is like how hindi and punjabi share written form, sanskrit, even when the regional dialect/spoken language are different. Technically, Chinese Language is a family of different dialects that take a great deal of time to master... in that sense the Chinese Language does exist but to Westerners or outsiders could seem incomprehensible.
There is truth in saying, "All arguments are semantic ones." Language, dialect? Does it matter? No matter which dialect or language a Chinese speaks, they are all under one cultural tradition.
Except when the cultural tradition is Tibet, Mongolia or the Uyghurs. Officially now part of China, but not part of the Han tradition. It is important to remember that China is more than just the Han. Even within the Han there is huge difference between the north and south even genetically.
As a Hokkien Chinese kid I always wondered why a lot of Chinese characters in Hokkien have two readings (e.g. numbers) which no-one explained. Later I found out that there is an old Chinese reading and a Middle Chinese reading for the characters.
I think the problem with a lot of the opinions here is that many Chinese try to claim everything. You don't see any European county claiming all of western society. Gotta stop trying to gain prominence by claiming ownership to all history and try to EARN respect. It's kinda like bragging about yourself to get popular, but this will usually have the opposite effect.
You don't see any European country claiming all of western society. that's because none of them can..rome shattered into a thousand pieces and latin is no longer spoken/used by any european countries as their main language.
@@lyhthegreatbut Greece is still around and is considered a greater impact then Rome, modern Greece is closer in language, population genetics and arguably other aspects of culture besides religionn to ancient Greece, but besides a few nationalist Greeks do not try claim all of Western society.
i still think that rome left a larger impact on all of europe than greece, first of all almost everyone in europe writes in latin alphabet not greek alphabets, 2nd of all, rome was the reason why christianity is so widespread in europe not greek gods..@@eagle162
Honestly, generally, based on the 4 main factors it has .First,Vietnamese is siniticly, from 60%to70% of loan words due to the 1000 years of Chinese domination. Second, Vietnam was intergrated into China for the same period of Chinese colonization as one country. Third, Vietnamese is a tonal language as well as chinese . Lastly, the use of Kanji for many centuries as a writing system for the Vietnamese historically. Nevertheless, a lot of my friends and myself as chinese speakers agree that Vietnamese sounds most closest to chinese factually due to those above factures .As the word chao also means poridge in Vietnamese. BTW, Vietnam is an East Asian country also ,i learned this from the AFE geography site.
@D2E80, u wish! That is just so ridiculous. I've asked so many people from so many races., they all agreed that Vietnamese sounds most Chinese. So there . Unlike, Kmer language is unrelated to Vietnamese. Vietnamese is a sinitic and tonal language. Do your research, get educated, why don't try to tune in and wacth some Vietnamese news and try to compare it to the kmer news .. Lol .
@@D2E80 😂 U wish .seriously, I suggest you do your research first . Perhaps, u should watch some Vietnamese ( VPop) videos, some Vietnamese news and try to compare to the kmer ones 😂
Mandarin is more different to Hokkien than English is to German. He’s not wrong there. I speak 3 different Chinese dialects and believe me the difference is huge. Also Hokkien and Cantonese are more Yue origins as opposed to mandarin which is Han. I speak mandarin, Cantonese and Hokkien. The official term for Cantonese in mandarin is literally, translated,Yue language. As opposed to say, Shandong, it’s called Shandong dialect. So there is tacit acknowledgement that in the south, it is a different language.
@@ponuni never said it was, that’s my point isn’t it? They are quite different. And yes it’s a dialect of min Nan, but it’s also the most significant being the imperial language of the Tang dynasty.
@@ryanseet8314 you literally said “ also hokkien and cantonese are more yue origins as opposed to mandarin which is han” and i’m here to tell you hokkien has nothing to do with yue aka cantonese. You goofy for that.
@@ponuni did you read the first part? I said they are all very different. The Yue literally occupied the entire south of China. How those languages evolved or who the progenitors of those tongues are quite a different story. But if indeed Hokkien is not related to the Yue, I’m quite happy to stand corrected. But my point is they are all very different. I speak all 3 so I know.
it doesn't have to do with analizing through western point of you he just use clickbait, he's talking about linguistics and linguistics is the same in western and eastern because linguistics is a science, saying that he's analizing it the western way and is not right by doing it like that , is like saying that a doctor in asia can't apply the same methods to cure people from asia and from europe
here's a comment from a chinese guy: Mandarin is more different to Hokkien than English is to German. He’s not wrong there. I speak 3 different Chinese dialects and believe me the difference is huge. Also Hokkien and Cantonese are more Yue origins as opposed to mandarin which is Han. I speak mandarin, Cantonese and Hokkien. The official term for Cantonese in mandarin is literally, translated,Yue language. As opposed to say, Shandong, it’s called Shandong dialect. So there is tacit acknowledgement that in the south, it is a different language.
None. Cannot compare Cantonese to Mandarin. You can compare Cantonese to Beijing-nese, which are both evolved from Middle Chinese. Mandarin is a constructed spoken variant of standard written Chinese, and therefore, somewhat artificial.
Many people, Chinese people included always deduct to argue that all different Chinese dialects are in fact the same language because the writing is the same. But that’s false logic. Written language is just a set of symbols to represent a spoken language. Chinese at one point almost abolished the Chinese characters all together but the spoken languages will continue to exists. Like Vietnamese. We should not confuse writing as an inseparable part of a language. In fact nowadays Cantonese has pretty much developed a full fledge regional written language separate from the standard mandarin writing. And you would only understand if you actually can speak Cantonese. In support to the professor’s argument, in addition to Latin and Germanic languages, same thing happened to Scandinavian languages, Arabic languages, Slavic Languages, Mongolian languages, Hindu languages, etc. all their off shoots are considered different languages. Why should Chinese be any different?
Chinese and other languages are inherently different, Chinese is ideographic and other languages are epigraphic, they are two different systems, so don't use the standards of an epigraphic language to define an ideographic language
I don't know whether you are Chinese or not, but you lack common sense. Since the Qin Shi Huang unified the writing system 2,000 years ago, there has been no such thing as official written language and local written language, they are one and the same thing. Your so-called "local written language which is completely independent of Putonghua" is a false proposition. There is no such thing as "written language based on Putonghua". The official languages of the Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties were all pronounced differently, but they were all written in the same way. Your so-called Cantonese version of the written language is actually found in every dialect. Guangdong is not special, just because of Hong Kong's relative cultural strength in the 1980s-2000s, some Hong Kong people, as well as anti-Communist Chinese overseas, think they are superior and want to cut themselves off from everything in China. Most of the people who actually speak Cantonese are in mainland China, and only a tiny fraction of Cantonese people agree with you. Anyway, there is nothing special about Cantonese compared to Fujianese, Hakka, Wenzhou, or Shanghainese, they are all Chinese, not a separate language.
@@wyhily9465 @wyhily9465 Thank you for the background but I am very aware of the history of China. First off, common sense means having common knowledge of various subjects and not just one, in this case, Chinese. And yes I am Chinese and I speak several different dialects. Additionally I've learned English, Spanish, Portuguese, and some French as well as some Japanese. But first things first, I understand there's a political rivalry between Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China. But let's not let political opinions affect our discussion. I do not think any Chinese group is more superior than any other Chinese group. That said, I did not say local languages are independent of Mandarin Putonghua; rather, the different Chinese languages are a group of related languages. Similar to various romance languages, arabic languages, mongolian languages etc. If different Chinese languages were the same language, then there’s no need to actually learn how to speak it in school. Yes, you learned mandarin in school and it’s easier for you because it’s closely related to your native dialect even if you don’t already speak Mandarin at home. If Mandarin weren’t a different but related language to my native language, then I wouldn’t have to learn pinyin in order to learn the proper pronunciation and the Mandarin grammar. Likewise if you were to go to any region of China, you actually can learn the local language as a choice, but you cannot just naturally speak their local language without some sort of learning period. As far as writing goes, any language does not need a written language to be considered a different language. Similarly, just because two languages can write in a common language to communicate doesn’t mean they both speak the same language. If two speeches are not mutually intelligible by a large percentage of vocabulary, they are different languages. In the feudal period, Koreans, Japanese, and Vietnamese can all write in Classical Chinese 文言文。but this doesn’t make their languages part of the Chinese languages family. Officially during the Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming an Qing all used Classical Chinese to communicate and it’s only by writing. And yes, they ALL had to learn it because no one spoke Classical Chinese everyday, it only happens on paper, which is similar to Latin in Europe for some period. If I start saying 文言文 to you, you would not understand me. And during the Warring period of China, people had to learn 雅言, a similar language to their native language, to communicate with other Chinese groups. I agree that Cantonese is nothing special compared to Hokien, Hakka, Wenzhou, Shanghainese, Hunanese etc. If fact, because you can named them you are proving to me that they all are different but related Chinese languages. Please understand that China is a very large country with very large population and very long and rich history. To say that over 1 billion people develop uniformly with just one language is absurd. We’re not clones. It’s only natural that over time, different sub groups develop differently. The same thing happens to every original racial group all around the world, we are no different to that development.
@@scorpio252000 Quote - In the feudal period, Koreans, Japanese, and Vietnamese can all write in Classical Chinese. Quote - the different Chinese languages are a group of related languages. similar to various romance languages, arabic languages, mongolian languages etc. There is one major difference between Chinese and the above languages you mentioned, and we can compare it to the United States. The United States is known as a melting pot of races, but the integration process has only been going on for 300 years, whereas China has been integrating its races for thousands of years! Objectively speaking, over the course of thousands of years of integration, the various dialects of China are far more similar to each other, whether it be in script or pronunciation or grammar, than the languages you quoted. The languages you quoted above have not been in constant fusion with each other for thousands of years, as in the case of China. China, on the other hand, has a great deal of integration in all areas of race, religion, culture, writing, pronunciation, etc. Historically, the Han were not differentiated by descent, there were no pure blood Han. Han Chinese are distinguished by culture, and those who identify with and practice Chinese culture in this part of China are Han Chinese. Chinese ethnic identity, cultural identity, and linguistic identity are inseparable. Subjectively speaking, whether Cantonese is a dialect or a language is determined by the Cantonese people's own perception. The fact is that the vast majority of Cantonese people consider Cantonese to be a type of Chinese dialect. Conclusion, Chinese is unique, and only Chinese is a special case in the world. Chinese, as a language system that separates pronunciation from writing, is completely different from epenthetic speech. So the definition of epenthetic language does not apply to Chinese. Therefore, your arguments and conclusions are overly simplistic, crude and factually incorrect.
Language study like all social study is not hard science so does "Modern linguistics". It's very subjective on the definition IMO. I would argue so-called Modern linguistics only apply to phonetic alphabet base language. For Chinese people, Chinese is not just a language but somewhat equal to bible/religion/history. For example, Chinese idioms act as "hyperlink" that tell stories the same way as bible tell story. Chinese culture preservation at its best.
The definition of language and dialect is pretty vague in current Linguistics. Here is an example: local people in Athens Ohio in the USA speak a strong accent. It is so strong that people from Columbus Ohio cannot understand them if Athens people don't switch their speaking more towards the Midwest accent of English , and the two cities are just 1 hour drive away. So if the definition of a language has the component of being able to understand the speaking of each other, then people in Athens and Columbus speak 2 languages? Current western Linguists classify lots of Chinese dialects as languages, but to Chinese people they are just different accents because if you use Mandarin to pronounce it people will be able to fully understand (so just the pronunciation difference). Chinese language is so different than the alphabetical languages that some of the linguistic fields like Morphology and Phonology and Phonemic Orthography are hard to apply to Chinese. The current research of Chinese linguistic is very limited, and it needs more effort than random judgement.
we Hokkeners are technically a mix of second Empire Chinese (middle), First Empire Chinese (old) and the Altaic Nomad our Altaic and middle Chinese heritage came from the Tang Dynasty migrant of solier and bureacrat during the latter day of Tang Dyansty, while the old Chinese influence came form the Qin Dynasty era conquest and settlement to Hokkenland. but we do have some cenetral asian long word in Hokkien, for example our word for dad is "Abba" it is Siberian origin share the same root with modern mongol word for dad "aav", and the Chinese word for roses in Hokkien we say "Mui-Gui" which came from the Persian-Turkic word for flower "gul", also Hokkieners don't have a unified tribal language, Hokkien spoken form China and other countries can drastically different from Each other (for example I am a Taiwanese Hokkien, our Hokkien doesn't sound like the example you provided we have a very different accent and different sets of vocabulary), Holwever, I don't know if my tribal languages ie the Hokkien languages sounds more old or not, but we Hokkieners have this pride for the meoldic feature of our accent, that our langauges soudns like singing sometimes :D
doesnt say it doesnt exist. he says the real form is not used anymore, and the new forms are a collective of different broken languages. hes saying yall using patois, like us jamaicans.
Nevertheless, at one point Vietnam historically had also used Kanji. Do your own research before jumping to conclusions. Little do u know Vietnam and China used to be as one country for 1000 years .
If you grow up w/ multiple Chinese tongues, your brain registers them as dialects as you notice more similarities than differences. If you learn one then the other, your brain will register them as languages.
definitely, if you know a couple of southern chinese dialects and then you start learning east asian languages like japanese or korean you'd notice even more similarities than if you only spoke mandarin.
Chinese is kind of special. There's a reason why we can rrsd what was written in China thousands of years ago if you were a chinese student in this day and age.
That guy is just arguing against a straw-man. When people say "the Chinese language", they are NOT talking about all the languages of China. That's what he's arguing against, but I don't think anyone in the world holds such a view. There are quite a few different Chinese languages. But when we refer to a language called "Chinese", we are ALWAYS referring to Mandarin. It's the same as how we refer to "Spanish", since it's the majority language of Spain. Mandarin is the majority language of China, so we call it Chinese. All the languages descended from Old or Middle Chinese that are not Mandarin are just that: other languages. People often call them dialects, but that's ridiculous. What are they dialects of? Middle Chinese? Yue is a language, and has its own dialects. Same with Mandarin, Wu, Gan, Xiang, Min, Hakka, etc. Yes, it's a special feature of Chinese languages that there is mutual intelligibility in the written form, but that doesn't change the fact that they are separate languages. Mutual intelligibility in written form is not one of the characteristics that make up a language. In fact, if you don't know Mandarin, but can understand text written in Mandarin (people like that are more and more rare, btw), it's just because you learned to read in the Mandarin way. It's not that it's written in the same way in other Chinese languages. And some Chinese languages are only spoken, not written. And some, like Hokkien, can be written, but usually aren't. And a text written in Hokkien isn't that easy to read for people who don't speak it.
Standard written Chinese is one single language with an evolutionary trend similar to all other languages. The variants and diversity you are describing is only the spoken variants, which are somewhat separate languages of their own.
I wish they can adopt new writing system as super easy to write without depending the technology to write. If some future all technology is not working. So all need use write by hand.
People can still write by hands, but many today become too dependent to technology they tend to forget how to write from memory. I was taught to write from memory no computer but am slowly starting to forget if I don't do enough dictation. The technology these days will help with my forgetfulness. Reading is much easier than writing it out.
I’d argue that it is still different Chinese languages because half of the time different Chinese don’t even use the same word to describe the same concept and sometimes the same word have different meanings in different Chinese languages
@@callistoscali4344 there are different dialects of English language but Mandarin and Hokkien are 2 different Chiense tribal languages knowing one absolutely doesn’t guarantee knowing another
@@Laurence0227 hokkien itself is made up of different tribal spoken languages. Mandarin, on the other hand, is an artificial standardization process of standard written Chinese into its spoken form.
@@callistoscali4344 There is a written language for Hokkien as well, but the classical form of it is highly identical to 文言文 and the vernacular form though written sometimes aren’t really used much for literature and compositions But most colonial era provincial records of most Taiwanese provinces are written in Hokkien, cuz Hokkien tribesman are the dominant ethnic group in Taiwan since 18 Century onward
@@Laurence0227 Hokkien is not from Taiwan. Hokkien is a province/state in China. It predates colonial times. I am asking for any written records, literature, books, etc written in Hokkien. 文言文 is just formal written Chinese. 文言文 is not Hokkien.
Cantonese is older than Mandarin too.. mandarin is a relatively recent dialect that got placed as a primary dialect in mainland China. Hong Kong still majority speaks Cantonese, it also has some different written words. Traditional writing is also the main written form, but mainland China uses Simplified.
yeah but they both originated from middle chinese...both old mandarin and cantonese...it's just that mandarin evolved way more than cantonese due to manchurian influences.
cantonese and vietnamese are more similar. modern korean language are closer to japanese in terms of grammar structure and both languages have so many borrowed words from english.
Similarities between Korean and Cantonese are only because of a large number of loan words from Middle Chinese. Linguistically, Korean and Cantonese are very different languages. Korean is an agglutinative language that uses prefixes and suffixes to convey meaning. Note that Vietnamese also has a large number of Middle Chinese loan words, and the reverse is also true in that there are many Cantonese words that share a Viet origin.
Honestly, generally Vietnamese sounds most similar to chinese. The word chao in Vietnamese also means porridge , A lot of my chinese friends and myself as chinese speakers all agree to that.
"圖書館" is actually a word the Chinese "stole" from Japanese. The Japanese "stole" the characters "圖", "書", and "館" from the Chinese, but putting them together to mean "the library" was a completely Japanese idea.
The linguistics term is borrowed/loaned rather than stole. Another example is the term for telephone, it is borrowed from the Japanese invention for "electric speech".
It's funny, in China we call them regression words, but Japan says they are words stolen from China. Who in Japan can read these words “圖、書、館”? Chinese characters are Chinese characters, they exist in history, if you look at the word 圖, you'll see that it looks like a tortoise shell, and it's true, it first appeared 4,000 years ago in the oracle bone inscriptions. 3000 years ago Shang Dynasty bronze tripod .2000 years ago Poetry Scriptures《战国策·秦策》《小雅·常棣》《三国志·诸葛亮传》《仪礼·聘礼》。 It has always meant pictures, with a written symbol in the center of the box, very clearly. Since the center of the picture is a book, the word "書 " needs no further explanation. As for "館", I believe Japanese people can better understand the scale of a pavilion. In ancient China, buildings, pavilions and cities were used. When this word, including these characters, was invented, writing did not even exist on the island of Japan, so how could it be said to be original to Japan, and why would it be said to have been stolen? In addition, like “圖書館”、“經濟”、“警察”、“進化”, they are not original to Japan, but borrowed from ancient Chinese characters, and then taken back by modern China to use with the original. They are just borrowed from ancient Chinese characters and then taken back by modern China to differentiate them from the original ones. Even if you don't use these Japanese words, the words themselves have always been described by other Chinese characters. “藏经阁”“计学”“衙差”“天演” If Japan doesn't use these current kanji, do they have other kanji and phrases to refer to nouns? I'm curious.
Cantonese has its own writing system and grammar, so has Minnan (a.k.a Taigi in Taiwan or Hokkien in South-east Asia). We're just forced to learn how to write in Mandarin since we were a kid.
@@callistoscali4344 Sorry Guys! The standard written Chinese was WenYanWen 文言文 (Classical Chinese) which was based on the Old Chinese before 1919. The so-called Standard Chinese, according to the PRC and the KMT governments, is based on the Beijing dialect. The so-called Standard written Chinese only existed for around 100 years. Mandarin, originally from the Hu people 胡人, actually borrowed words from the Middle and Old Chinese, like Cantonese and Min; not the other way around as dialects. I just wanna make this clear. 😄Cheers.
@@johnnylee3505 文言文 is classical literal written Chinese and it is still used today in writings of books, songs, poems, etc. 白话文 is standard vernacular written Chinese which has existed since the beginning of Ming and Qing dynasties, 1400s to modern era. Many literary works of that era was written in standard vernacular Chinese, e.g. 西游记，三国演义, etc. Standard vernacular Chinese is certainly much more than 100 years old. Try 500 years old.
@@johnnylee3505 胡人 does not mean "Hu people". Rather, the word 胡 is pronounced 'hu', which means non-native, outsider, barbarians, etc. In Chinese culture, there are historically different ethnic groups that are classified as 胡 and they are all from the North of China. They are Xiongnu Xiōngnú [匈奴], Xianbei Xiānbēi [鲜卑], Jie Jié [羯], Di Dī [氐] and Qiang Qiāng [羌].
@@callistoscali4344 Google it, please. I don't wanna argue. Modern written Chinese only happened after the May4 event in 1919. Not the BaiHuaWen that you're talking about. They're totally different things.
That guy is not very smart. If you look at the grammar system, Mandarin, Cantonese, and Fujianese are actually the same. How it “sounds” different is just one aspect of along comparisons. This is why people who know those dialects have a knack for understanding each other.
Chinese dialects are extensive and there have been different versions in fashion throughout history. You had Ming's Beijing/Nanjing dialect, Tang's Chang'an dialect, etc. And Chinese calligraphy have changed throughout eons. China is the root of alot of East Asian tradition, so no we're not most European savages. We are the originators just like Greece was.
that thing have nothing to do with linguistic boy, here's a comment from a chinese guy: Mandarin is more different to Hokkien than English is to German. He’s not wrong there. I speak 3 different Chinese dialects and believe me the difference is huge. Also Hokkien and Cantonese are more Yue origins as opposed to mandarin which is Han. I speak mandarin, Cantonese and Hokkien. The official term for Cantonese in mandarin is literally, translated,Yue language. As opposed to say, Shandong, it’s called Shandong dialect. So there is tacit acknowledgement that in the south, it is a different language.
Yes, Chinese is actually a family group. Cantonese from the majority Han people is considered a dialect by the government, and Mandarin is the official language while Chinese diaspora state the opposite.
If only an "Asian" linguist was in the video and explained the details of this topic. I found it hard that these guys are doing this in which they might have some misinformation.
Chinese believe everything comes out of china.😅 Lmaof. Let's get somethings straight here for the record. Korean language does not stem from chinese language. Japanese language does not stem from chinese language. According to repudable linguists they are of their own language families respectively, or possibly Transeurasian or Altaic, all debatable but all agree definitely not Sinitic which chinese is. Only vietnamese is sinitic, but correct me if I'm wrong on that. Korean is not even tonal language which chinese is. Furthermore, there is a second set of spoken korean called Saturi which only native korean speakers are fluent in is marketably different from written korean language and it has almost zero connection to chinese. It in fact contains thousands of words that are nearly same as tamil language of india. Korean also contains many Sanscrit words. These facts points to the possibility that korean is truely one of a few surviving ancient languages that has died off everywhere else.
Language like cultures that meet, mix and mingle. There’s no one direction, but many, according to need and use. I read somewhere the Japanese language has austronesian roots, as does many pacific islands like Taiwan, Fiji, New Zealand, and Hawaii. Its interesting how much we have in common.
I believe you are onto something there. It is a known fact that a contributing culture to japan is the Jomon culture thought to have originated in coastal s e asia. This may be possible austronesian influence to japan and its language.
Vietnamese is an Austroasiatic language and not Sinitic in origin. However, both Vietnamese and Korean borrowed from Middle Chinese since there was a lot of cultural and economic interaction. It should also be noted that Cantonese which geographically borders Vietnam has loan words from Vietnamese. Of course, you can see that influence even today in the many Chinese signs on ancient buildings in both Vietnam and Korean. For contrast, in China many ancient buildings have Mongolian signs.
Koreans and Chinese are from different tribe groups and settled on different regions, biblically speaking we all came from the middle ancient civilization(Near Israel) since Adam and Eve to post flood of Noah's ark. You'll see legends of the great flood in every ancient cultures and history including the Chinese.
@psforever8888 you are likely correct if we were to source the Bible as authoritative. It places all civilizations and it's languages arising out of somewhere in the middle east area.
I'm American born Mien. Y'all should highlight the different languages spoken in China. And everyone should give a rats fuh about yt people whitesplaining about Asian culture.
That would be a great series, 6 major Sinitic language groups with hundreds of dialects, in addition to over 50 minority groups with their own language dialects.
@@ObscuraiThat'll be great for Han Chinese and other ethnicity in Asia, to learn something new. Lots of history, arts, language and festivals from different ethnic culture & provinces. They should do a series on China's history of war and conflict. Maybe start with the taiping rebellion, boxer rebellions etc. But most of these subjects/topics are taken from Reddit. Man, I'm giving them free content materials. LOL
@@itsatrap4986 There are several UA-cam channels that delve into the history of East China and Asia. The "Cool History Bros" covers many of the topics you mentioned in a light snarky fashion. Other more serious and straight forward channels also exist on UA-cam. The FungBros could do something similar.
Chinese is a written language with a family of spoken languages that are related by sound. Mandarin and formal (eg. songs) Cantonese sound fairly similar in most cases. This point can't be appreciated through tones, which describes the pitch of the sound. Being fluent in Cantonese it's not hard to understand standard mandarin that spoken slowly. Ancient China exported its advanced civilization/technology to neighboring tributary states, that came with language. Hence, the comparison to Latin is inaccurate, it's more like British English, to different types of English but evolved as those countries developed their own language that retained some of the parent language.
@@i0li0il0i It's somewhat subjective and relative. If you're really fluent in both you'll hear more of resemblance. There are dialects of Cantonese that are like super distorted versions of standard Cantonese that are very dissimilar that actually sound 5% similar to the point where I can't make out the words or understand at all. Whereas standard Mandarin, sounding similar enough in many cases to formal (not conversational) Cantonese is quite intelligible to me.
Korean and Japanese words that sound like Chinese are because they’re loan words. Coffee in Chinese is Kafei coz it’s a loan word
A library in pure Korean would be called “ChaekBang” and not Doseoguan which is a loan word from Chinese 图书馆
So coffee in chinese is written in alphabet? Not chinese characters?
@@kimeli Kafei is just the pronunciation in mandarin, it's written as 咖啡 in chinese characters and it borrows the sound from the english word of coffee.
@@kimelithey use an alphabet called pinyin that's how you can txt, otherwise you are stuck with a keyboard with thousands of characters
Here are examples of some other loan words
Irony (from French)
Ranch (from Spanish)
Enthusiasm (from Latin)
Cookie (from Dutch)
Cello (from Italian)
Grammar (from Greek)
Noodle (from German)
Have you ever run into a German person telling Americans that the word noodle comes from Germany? No, cus no one cares. Focus on doing better NOW, instead of being nostalgic about something that may have happened several thousands of years ago.
The Chinese community is the only community that wastes its time talking about these things constantly.
He does make sense in that Chinese known to foreigners is called the Common Tongue dialect (Putonghua) within Chinese mainland. But it is also named as the National language in both PRC and ROC (Taiwan). But because the writing system had been unified since BC era, it is still quite consistent in meaning.
Modern Chinese language (post 1200s) is a political creation to unify all the ethnic and regional Chinese people spoken language which is quite a smart thing to do but still the foundation of Chinese script should not be ignored completely when talking about the Chinese language.
Middle Chinese is Latin of Chinese language, likely propagated in surrounding regions by both Han and Tang Dynasty which were considered to be strongest empire in East Asian regions in their time.
Definitely agree that modern day Chinese script is the result of multiple refinement of ancient Chinese hieroglyphics. If ancient Egyptians didn't die out, they likely would have done the same to their hieroglyphics over time.
I keep telling people this, Chinese is a written language, and there are many spoken dialect languages such as Mandarin, Wu, Yue, Fujian, etc. because written characters are always displayed on tv shows in mainland China so anyone from anywhere within China can understand the show right away if they don't speak Madarin
Mandarin speakers would be slightly confused with written Cantonese, so it's not perfect.
@@Obscurailanguages aren’t perfect or imperfect. They just ARE.
@@CoryPchajek Correct. Languages are constantly evolving.
the written form on each chinese language is also diferent because al have diferent grammar and vocabulary, and they are NOT dialects from mandarin they are diferent languages from the same language family , all learn to read the mandarin way to write to understand tv, newpapers, etc.
the written form on each chinese language is also diferent because al have diferent grammar and vocabulary, and they are NOT dialects from mandarin they are diferent languages from the same language family , all learn to read the mandarin way to write to understand tv, newpapers, etc.
Sometimes, your efforts to come up with "Asian perspectives" do not pay off well. For example, at 2:44, you said Chinese is a language based on the written language. This is just not true. The written language was invented after the speaking language; this is true in most languages. Even Chinese, the spoken language, came long before the written language. The Chinese written language is more uniform across the land than the speaking language because, for thousands of years, only the ruling elites knew how to write and had a use for writing. Memebers of the ruling class needed to communicate with each other over long distances, so they kept a uniform writing system. You can find local speaking words without official written words, like the famous Xian food Biangbiang noodles. There is no official written word for "biangbiang"
I bet they didn’t know that Chinese and Tibetan were related as Porto-Sino-Tibetan based off of the Chinese and Tibetan scripts today 😂
you're correct. See my argument above with another user debating about the same thing.
No, it's true. The Qin Dynasty (221 BC) introduced a range of reforms such as standardized currency, weights, measures and a uniform system of writing ( called "small seal script", Chinese: 小篆). Since then, Chinese used the same written language. Today 小篆 is still used in calligraphy, engraving and advertising.
I just recently found something different than your example (Biang). Previously I thought a lot of characters in my own Chinese dialect had no corresponding written forms (like Biang). But just a couple of months ago, I saw people posting written forms of a lot of my dialect characters I didn't know existed (they can be found in dictionaries). So the message is: it is likely that the characters you thought only have spoken forms in your Chinese dialect do have corresponding written forms, but because they are rarely used in modern Chinese writing system, most Chinese people, including me, just don't know they exist.
@@xsr-re6pl ppl just can't type it on computer, due to early computer character coding set. An early standard GB2312 only includes 6763 characters, while the latest version GB18030 includes more than 70000.
It seems like these guys don't understand the basics of comparative linguistics. Middle Chinese is not the "root" of a lot of east Asian languages. It is the root of Sininic languages(or Chinese dialects, whatever you wanna call them) since they are direct decendents of middle Chinese. Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, etc were "influenced" by middle Chinese but are not "decendents" of middle Chinese, and are not genealogically related to middle Chinese, or any Sinic language. In fact, even from the beginning of modern linguistics, these languages have not been linked to Chinese in terms of their origins. There is a profound and fundamental difference between languages that "inherited" another language and languages that were "influenced" by another language.
Also, intelligibility of spoken language is the most common and objective criteria to distinguish one language from another in linguistics. Written language is hardly ever a criterion that separates one language from another. This criterion not only applies to Chinese but to other languages. A Russian speaker, for instance, can read Bulgarian and even understand the meaning of a text written in Bulgarian up to a considerable degree since these two languages use Cyrillic and share the same root, but cannot fully understand spoken Bulgarian. So they are considered different languages. Recognizing differences between Chinese languages and analyzing them isn't "westerners applying their standards on China". It's simply modern linguistics
Exactly! And not everything that is "modern" should be considered "western."
Yea, not really expecting the Fung Bros to really understand linguistics. They're in this for the clicks and views. Even their main criticism that Chinese is more about the written language is incorrect since many Chinese "dialects" have different vocabulary and even grammar that is different from standard Putonghua. When grammar, vocabulary and phonetics are different, they are essentially different languages and are only dialects from a political perspective.
actually not intelligibility is not an objective criteria to distinguish a language from another because there's a phenomenon call dialect continium, that really complicate things. in linguistics dialect and language are practicaly the same.
Language study like all social study is not hard science so does "Modern linguistics". It's very subjective on the definition IMO. I would argue so-called Modern linguistics only apply to phonetic alphabet base language.
then under that criteria, singlish would be a separate language 🙄 right
I actually agree with the phd Linguistics scholar. I don't see "Chinese" as a language per se either, but a family of related languages. So I disagree (rather strongly) with the assertion that he is looking at the Chinese language through a western lens. He is looking through a linguistics lens.
I was a Mandarin teaching assistant at university and currently teach a Cantonese class to adults. I took a course in Taiwanese, lived for a period in Malaysia among Penang Hokkien speakers and understand more or less my grandparents' Toishan dialect. I have also studied French, Spanish, some Portuguese, Japanese, Thai, and also Malay/Indonesian and Tagalog.
So as an analogy, I see speaking or reading Chinese as akin to speaking or reading "Romance", with French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Galician, Catalan, Sicilian, etc. as related languages or sub-dialects of the related languages and Latin would be the ancient literary version of "Romance" analogous to literary Chinese 文言文 to modern Chinese. I find the scholar's interpretation and analysis to be more or less linguistically accurate.
Aren't there different languages within categories like "French" and "Spanish" too, though? In France, at least, there are distinct languages like Provencal and Picard. Do you know if these are comparable to the different Chinese languages? I really don't know enough about Chinese languages to compare them. Just based on this video and my knowledge of French languages, it seems like all of these labels are very arbitrary. Based on the linguistics, would you say that it's any less or more accurate to say that "French is not a language" if "Chinese" isn't?
@@cluckcluckchickenand this is a good response! The distinctions are quite difficult to make, but I view that there are like soft demarcations haha.
@@cluckcluckchicken A more analogous comparison using French as an example would be to compare French to the Yue family of languages (which the linguistics scholar mentions in the opening scene), of which the Yuehai dialects, which include the varieties of Cantonese used in Guangzhou and Hong Kong and are regarded as forming the prestige or "standard" varieties of the language. There are many subdialects within Yue (Cantonese) family as well, including the Sze-yap dialect that my grandfather spoke, of which Taishanese is the regarded as the standard variety of that. This is analogous to having many sub-dialects of French.
So, if we are attempting to comparing apples to apples, then it probably should be along the lines of:
"Chinese" which is analogous to "Romance". Romance is not generally regarded as a language per se, but a larger family of languages of which French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, etc. are regarded as "languages" and share the common descent from Latin. Saying one speaks and reads Chinese makes about as much sense (from a linguistical point of view) as saying one speaks and reads "Romance", when actually, they mean one of the Romance languages.
"French" or "Spanish" is more analogous to "Yue" (粵語）, the big subgroup under the larger umbrella of Chinese languages mentioned by the linguistics scholar in the video. We also have the Hakka, Northern Min, Southern Min, Wu and other subgroups of Chinese languages which correspond more closely to the concept of "language" in Europe (or what a linguistics scholar might refer to as a "language"). These "languages" are generally not mutually intelligible between each other, but somewhat more mutually intelligible (but not fully) within each other. The "Yue" group of languages includes many dialects, including the standard Yuehai varieties of Cantonese spoken in Guangzhou and Hong Kong and overseas diaspora, as well as, for example, the Sze-yap family of dialects under Yue (which my grandfather's Taishanese dialect is regarded as a standard variety of the dialects under Sze-Yap). These dialects under "Yue" would be more analogous to the dialects of Provençal and Picard under French, as well as overseas varieties like Quebecois, Cajun, and Haitian French.
So, this would be the analogy from a linguistics point of view, of which the scholar in the video was speaking from. He was not using the political definition of language. People assume he was speaking from a "western" point of view because in Europe, many languages either have their own political entity or are officially recognized as languages within a political entity. So in Europe, these are also political definitions. The current political regime in China, and many people educated under that regime do not recognizes the various languages in Greater China as separate "languages". A linguistics scholar might see things differently.
You are right to state that the "all of these labels are very arbitrary". We can also add the adage that "A language is a dialect with an army and navy".
To be honest, I think Brazilian Portuguese is as close, if not closer to the other Romance languages (Spanish and French, etc.) than the Sze-Yap Yue dialect is to "standard" Cantonese. On my first visit to Brazil, I started using Portuguese as soon as I arrived to the airport, without actually studying Portuguese in advance (based on my prior understanding of French and Spanish and attending meetings before in Macau). But a Cantonese speaker in HK would feel pretty lost on their first visit to Taishan and using the local Sze-Yap variety there. Forget about Mandarin. They might as well be speaking Dutch.
Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese borrowing words from middle Chinese, is analogous to English borrowing words from Middle French.
In conclusion, treating "Chinese" as a "language" is more a political statement than anything. A linguistics point of view may differ, as it focuses on vocabulary, sentence structure pronunciation and usage, and adds in the concept of mutual intelligibility. If, in the future, the present PRC were to break up into separate political entities which had their own army and navy, then it is possible that "Yue" could be the main language of one of the entities and call that language "Cantonese", and maybe Taiwan could revert to using primarily Taiwanese Hokkien (TBH, this is a genuine fear and concern from the current regime.). At that point, from a political viewpoint, they would most certainly be separate languages. Under the Roman empire, there was one standard Latin, and multiple varieties of nonstandard vulgar Latin. After the breakup of the Roman empire, certain varieties of vulgar Latin got labelled as "languages" and certain varieties got labelled as a dialect variety within the standard language. Hence, we now have French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, etc.
Is Galician (Galego) a dialect of Portuguese, a dialect of Spanish, or its own separate language? Without political recognition, it is simply dialectal variation. With political recognition, it is regarded as its own language. Now what is it from a linguistics point of view?
There are multiple dialects of German, multiple dialects of English. The way that a Londoner, New Yorker, and Australian would pronounce the same English text ings are very different.
As someone who has lived in Italy and studied Italian, I agree with you. There are certain dialects which are very different from standard Italian, and there are a few cases where the spoken tongue of that area is generally accepted as a distinct language (eg. Friulan).
I remember watching a movie about Japanese air stewardess and in one scene there was a Chinese tourist trying to look for direction so they wrote it down on a piece of paper and the Japanese stewardess figured out that they were trying to look for a zoo
Technically a lot of modern "Chinese words" were initally invented by the Japanese and was brought over to China in the late 1800s to early 1900s.
For example, the Chinese word for "Police" and "Police Station" was first found in Japanese documents, then the idea was borrowed back to China after the revolution.
There were a lot influence from Japan during that period since a lot of Chinese students also went to Japan to learn modern science and thoughts and brought back quite a lot of new phrases.
It's just the modern Chinese historians are too embarrassed to admit it and tends to hide it and say it didn't happen.
But modern Chinese, especially the subjects that have to do with modern political, education and science related subjects originated from Japan.
So it was always a two way street.
And yeah.....even the word "Zoo" (動物園) was first translated by the Japanese and the Chinese adopted it afterwards.
So when written in Chinese, any Japanese stewardess who have the ability to read basic Kanji can understand what they want, bacause they translated that phrase first.
@@mahoslashbruh its the opposite
That's because Japan imported a lot of Chinese culture and language during the Tang Dynasty, so they learned how to read Chinese in order to read Chinese literature. The average Japanese person learns 1,000s of Chinese characters because they're used in daily life. Native Japanese katakana and hiragana are completely different and largely phonetic.
@@votesus9819go look up who translated Socialism into 社会主義, Economics to 経済, and etc.
@@mahoslashis it?
As a Hokkien speaker, it felt strange when I was a kid that a lot of characters have two readings (e.g. numbers) which no-one explained. Later I found out that there is and old Chinese and a Middle Chinese reading for characters.
It's a pop trivia type of explanation. 'Chinese' is not fully, technically, a language but a language family. But in its common use, it's easier just to say, 'I know Chinese'. Also written Chinese is mutually intelligible among the Chinese language family to a much higher degree than the European languages.
From a linguistic standpoint, there isn't even a Chinese language family since Chinese is a national identity. Linguistically there is a Sinitic language family, and in China there are 6 main Sinitic language groups consisting of hundreds of dialects, and additionally over 50 minority groups that speak non-Sinitic languages.
not exactly, each diferent chinese language is written diferently because each language have diferent grammar and vocabulary, all learn to write in the mandarin chinese way.
Chinese is a family of families of languages. The seven groups are:
Mandarin, including Standard Chinese, the Beijing dialect, Sichuanese, and also the Dungan language spoken in Central Asia
Wu, including Shanghainese, Suzhounese, and Wenzhounese
Gan
Xiang
Min, including Fuzhounese, Hainanese, Hokkien and Teochew
Hakka
Yue, including Cantonese and Taishanese
@@arthurmoran4951 wrong. We can still read. Perfectly what the chinese wrote thousands of years ago. The average Italian will not be able to resd what their ancestors wrote thousands of years ago
Nah, it's a branch from a bigger language family. And I speak one language from the other half of the branch.
Koreanic and Japonic languages are grammatically structured Monoglic languages with the Subject Object Verb combination. The reason why Japanese and Korean has Sino words is because the two countries adopted Confucianism along with the characters.
But linguistically Korean and Japanese as well as Monolgian doesn't originate from Middle Chinese.
The best way to see it is Northern Asian languages are like the Germanic languages that adopted Latin. In Asia the "Latin" is middle Chinese
I don’t believe most linguists would categorize Japanese and Korean as related languages (or at least there isn’t evidence to actually prove the lineage). There are theories which connect non-Indo-European language families together but I think most linguists today do not consider them credible theories (e.g. the Altaic language family) because there isn’t enough evidence to definitely prove their relationships.
@troykawahara4496 I know that the controversy behind "altaic" categories has not been resolved yet however I am not at all trying to be political here. I've been studying both Korean and Japanese purely for fun. I noticed the grammar structure of Japanee and Korean is identical.
Watashi-wah Kyoto-ni ikimasu
Nah-nuen kyoto-ae gabnida
Just a curious oberservation. The grammar structure is completely identical with particles and verbs placement
Finally someone said it
Also, i think the same point when it comes to Spain. The Spanish language and accent came from the region of Castile and Leon which was its own kingdom until the mid-late-1400s when it emerged with the Kingdom of Aragon (because of Ferrando II of Aragon and Isabel I of Castile). The point is Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Great Britain, and the Netherlands, like China, are "family" countries of different dialect. Because of Brittany, Normandy, Frisia, Bavaria, Tuscany, Catalonia, Galicia, Wales, and Scotland.
Also Spanish the language you are referring to is actually Castellano as Mandarin is to Chinese.
This is a good point. We have VERY distinct languages in France, too. Provencal and Picard sound nothing like stereotypical "French", for example! It seems like this video could apply to any argument about language, not just Chinese.
@@cluckcluckchicken Agreed. Knowledge added!
@@cluckcluckchicken *Langues d'oïl* :
Berrichon
Bourguignon-Morvandiau
Champenois or Campanois
Franc-Comtois
French
Gallo
Lorrain
Norman
Picard
Poitevin-Saintongeais
Walloon
Angevin
*Occitan language (also Lenga d'òc, Langue d'oc)* :
Vivaroalpenc
Mentonasc (Mentonnais or Mentonasque)
Auvergnat
Gascon including Béarnese (Béarnais) and Landese (Landais)
Languedocien
Limousin
Provençal
Nissart (Niçois or Niçart)
@@andresarias5303 i mentioned the region, so, i know what you mean.
He’s analyzing it through the western lens. Ok. What other lens could he analyze it through and what would be the difference in conclusion. Would the other lens say Germanic languages are the same since they are derived from a common ancestor dialect/language?
There isn't such a thing like Sinocentrism. It's more like a huge scam lol
Yeah that seems to be what they’re going like.
Just like all Romance languages would be Latin dialects
Western lens being phonetic alphabet base language.
Well, he could analyze it through a political lens 😂
From Eastern lens? 😂
The spoken Chinese languages have always been very different and had many variations since ancient time. For example Tang Dynasty minister 韩慰 complained he couldn't understand what the Cantonese (of his time) were speaking, he had to write texts on the ground to communicate with the locals when he was exiled to Guangdong. And during Han dynasty, people realized that the writings from Zhou dynasty didn't rhyme when reading using Han dynasty accents, the spoken language had already changed so much. Even back in Zhou dynasty people from central plateau often laughed at the accents of people from Chu state and Yue state, calling it "bird-chirping" accents.
Even today, some Cantonese speakers make fun of Mandarin speakers for all the swishing sounds since everything sounds like "she" and "sher".
jokes on them, now they all have to speak mandarin.@@Obscurai
@@lyhthegreat The real joke will be when all languages merge into one. It's already started to happen.
Korean also integrated alotttt of english vocabulary into the korean language.
Almost feels like half of it are English
except it's not hahah@@vince4562
@@vince4562 uhmmm no that's impossible. If so most Korean dramas I watch would almost be intelligible to me as an English speaker. R u nuts?
Define "alottt"
Hong Kong Cantonese is called Chinglish for a reason - every 10th word is English.
Middle Chinese inspired the many languages of East and South East Asia today. During the greatest period of Chinese dominance (Tang Dynasty 618-756), everyone wanted to be Chinese and learn and incoporate all forms of Tang culture
east asia yes, south east asia probably not except for vietnam.
Two non professionals guide professional knowledge, which I can only say is very interesting
The linguistics PhD guy is largely correct although he put his point across quite provocatively. The current version of written standard Chinese is based on Mandarin. In HK you can write in vernacular Cantonese.
Yep, there is even a Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set (HKSCS) that includes 4702 extra characters not found in Standard Mandarin.
Cantonese has different idioms and word order in some cases.
Similarly Taiwanese Hokkien has its own set (though there are competing and not universally agreed upon) of character standards! Written Vernaculars have existed for quite some time!! Going on Min languages, The Tale of the Lychee Mirror is probably the earliest example of Hokkien literature specifically.
Going even older, Old Chinese written, like that of Lao Zi, is certainly different from modern standard written. Because the modern standard is based on vernacular Mandarin, showcasing that Old Chinese is a different beast altogether. Ancestral absolutely but different nonetheless
Where the linguist errs is in failing to acknowledge that not all Chinese dialects stem from Middle Chinese. Southern Min dialects, such as Hokkien, Teochew, and Hainanese, actually trace their origins back to Old Chinese. Consequently, they retain some word pronunciations that differ significantly, such as using "te" for tea instead of "cha," as in Mandarin and Cantonese. Interestingly, the reason we say "tea" is because we borrowed the term from Hokkien rather than from Mandarin or Cantonese.
"Is it or isn't theirs?"
Standard Chinese: 是不是他們的？(Spoken Cantonese: _Si6-bat1-si6 taa1-mun4 dik1?_ , Spoken Mandarin: _Shì bùshì tāmen de?_ )
Written Cantonese: 係唔係佢哋嘅？(Spoken Cantonese: _hai6-m4-hai6 keoi5-dei6 ge3?_ )
Cantonese has its own writing system, and so as in Minnan or Taigi (as they call it in Taiwan). We're just forced to learn how to write in Mandarin since we were a kid.
Great analysis! Thanks for putting it out there!
actually is not a good analysis, disacrediting a guy just because he is from the wes, linguist is the same in western and eastern, just like medine.
@@arthurmoran4951. I don’t think he’s discredited.
@@chankane yeah kind of, because they assumed that he's biased by a western point of view, linguistics is the same here and china. the guy just used clickbait saying that chinese doesn't exist, the chinese language do exist, but there's confusion in the other chine's languages since they are called chinese too.
The word "library" is a Japanese word constructed from sino-japanese elements; wasei kango(和製漢語) that was translated from the English word "library" in the mid-Meiji period. It was then exported mainly to East Asia.
That is interesting, I don't read Japanese but this 和製漢語 literally means "Together make Han Language" in Chinese. 😂
@@sola4393 The word "和製" is used in Japanese to mean "made in Japan”. ”和" means Japan in Japanese.
@@purittamaneki7221 I figured that is the case but is funny when read in Chinese.😄
I believe there are Western scholars of the Chinese language, including notable figures like Jerry Norman and Bernhard Karlgren from Sweden, who have made significant contributions to our understanding of Middle and Old Chinese through their studies of Chinese dialects, as well as languages like Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese. Their findings align with your perspective. Therefore, I'm uncertain about what you mean by a "Western lens." Chinese language study has a long history, and I'm not convinced that it carries inherent biases from the West.
Regarding the nature of the Chinese writing system, as you mentioned, characters primarily convey meanings rather than phonetic sounds. This was also noted by the linguist. He highlighted that this characteristic allows for communication using a standardized form of Chinese, based on Mandarin. However, individuals may need to learn Mandarin because the way one writes in standard Chinese, based on Mandarin, can differ from dialects.
While there might not have been much disagreement on these points, the linguist was mistaken in asserting that all Chinese dialects originated from Middle Chinese. As you rightly pointed out, Southern Min dialects, for instance, trace their roots back to Old Chinese.
I didn't know there was such thing as "western" linguistics. I thought linguistics is just linguistics?
There is western medicine and eastern medicine, western philosophy and eastern philosophy, even western pillows and eastern pillows
..
@@andresarias5303 Okay, but what does "Western" or "Eastern" even mean? Is Latin America western? What about Africa?
@@k10nn10th these are all based on the concept of the school of thought origin of each civilizations philosophical view, so Latin America would fall under western, Africa has its own school of thought and base for civilization. Obviously not everything is going to fall into a neat little package, but in regards to this video they are talking about the perspective of a man living in a Greco-Roman civilization vs their perspective coming from a more centered east meets west view, granted I do not hold PhD in any of this stuff lol
Yes, I’d say that linguistics has traditionally been a field where the alphabet is prioritized as the main notation system, but Chinese Linguists waaay back in the Tang dynasty also devised a rhyming schemes in Middle Chinese that was similar to how linguists note initial onset, rhyme, and tone of each character base on the charts they made to keep trace of which words rhymed for poetic purposes.
@@andresarias5303 sorry man that was before, now science studies are global , and so linguistics they have to, so the same studies need to be aplied for example on creating a chip to be able to function, so now in the same way modern linguistics are global and it is the more objective way to describe languages, now all sciences are getting improved from scientist from all around the world.
If I recall correctly, after the fall of the Ching Dynasty, with the creation of the Republic of China, there was a vote to establish the official language, and Cantonese lost by a single vote among the delegates.
*Q
😂Another rumor version comes from "German almost became the official language of the US".
In China, the official language is always where the capital is.
@@weigao9430no, it's real. Cantonese lost by one vote.
@@ltlwatcher The result of my search is a rumor, so can you point out which year or which vote? so that I can find the real history.
@@ltlwatcher the reality is just rumor
Mandarin is not a language but a made language of multiple dialect to simplify and help centralize all of the different ethnic in China.
I'm Hmong and i will always remember our suffering in China and will pass that onto our next generations.
It's similar to Africa, different dialect, same forefather along the way due to "chop the old tree, leave the young sapling" phrase
Most Han Chinese are focussed on their own Han ethnicity and have forgotten that there are over 50 minorities in China.
much love fung bros. keep repesenting.
The standardisation of writings helps them understand one another. My aunt read the chinese newspaper in hokkien, another aunt and mom read it in cantonese. Of course, all of them could speak hokkien, cantonese, hakka and teowchew.
You guys are technically wrong. Linguistic focus primarily on the languages spoken, not scripts. So, technically... Chinese language doesn't exist but the names for regional dialects do
You don’t exist.
@@hatchetenthusiast5545We don't exist
@@hatchetenthusiast5545 I'm Chinese but ok. 😁😆
@@hatchetenthusiast5545 all the phd guy is saying is right except that chinese langauge doesn't exist, chinese langauge do exist, but also the langauge sub family is called the same
Chinese laguages uses Hylographic Logogram due to that our languages are HImalayan languages, which a key feature of Himalayan languages is that there is a predominant majority of single syllable volabularies (thus one shape correspend to one sound make perfect sense to us) plus our gramatical inflection usually don't invovle modify the base word that we have (if gramatical inflection is needed we often swap out the whole word for another word)
0:52-"Most people in China need to know at least SOME Mandarin".... if you went to school in China in the past 50 years you were taught in Mandarin almost exclusively. He has clearly never been to China or speak Chinese, I do and am in China, peace from Fuzhou 福州。
Yep, it's all part of the homogenization of China to Mandarin.
Not everyone in HK speaks mandarin, it’s a secondary language for most people in GZ and Canton areas. Cantonese is their “original” language. 普通话is taught just to learn and connect with other Chinese speaking other dialects vice versa.
the correct way to state the facts: the is not ONE chinese language , there are many related "chinese " languages that use the same ideograms that have no sound just meaning. If written Han ideograms were phonetic then there would be like 15 different written "chinese languages".
But there is 1 written standard. It is still used today no matter which spoken Chinese is used.
"Canterbury Tales" is also a very old English that is very similar to German and French.
The real Chinese spoken in the ancient kingdoms were close to modern-day Hokkien and Cantonese. Mandarin is not the real Chinese but a dialect of Peking dialect mixed Manchurian accent and loan words.
Depends on dynasty. Tang dynasty writings rhymes when reading using Hokkien or Cantonese, but writings from even earlier Zhou dynasty don't. Zhou had only 4 tones, which is possibly closer to modern mandarin.
I've seen this BS theory go around on the internet, its completely not based on any evidence. Spoken Mandarin "官话“ that we know today has already started to take this form since Ming dynasty. And give me 1 Manchurian loan word that is in standard mandarin vocab today (and no Beijing slang words doesn't count).
Well I think he's right. China is actually a successful empire comprising of many different nations, people, and cultures that got conquered and unified into one rule, and never got around to collapse like the roman. Mandarin was invented to communicate between the people, but the many different languages are their own language just like German and English.
Imagine the roman empire never collapsed and every European and Mediterranean countries communicate in Latin but they still speak their own local languages in their areas. Those local languages like Celtic, Turkish, Germanic, Greek, Egyptian, etc are not a dialect of Latin but their own distinct languages. That's China.
yup. i guess it's sort of like what Europe would become it became unified as a single country instead of being made up of many different countries today. it doesn't have to be traced all the way back to the roman empire though. if one nation eg. germany, france, england, spain grew strong enough to conquer or absorb the rest, it might happen. you never know, maybe it is in the process now with the formation of EU. LOL
Emojinese? LMAO 😂😂😂 Let's start a new written language.
It’s already started where you been millennials started it lol 😂
Does eggplant really mean eggplant? terrible language.
Nice analysis guys. Not speaking but writing is the key. Cantonese is a great language and difficult to speak. Don't forget that Mandarin only fairly recently became the Spoken word preference and characters became simplified.
but taiwan speaks mandarin too and the characters are not simplified.
5:19 Toshokann= 図書館= library
This is Japanese Chinese character .
Modern Chinese have a lot Japanese word.
what is 図? what is 書? what is 館?
Even without this word, I can invent a word that has the same meaning as a library:
藏书楼 阅览室 典籍阁 盟府 石渠台 天录楼 文渊阁
But if you don't have the three characters, what is 図書館?
Fun fact: as someone who speaks german and dutch, they are about as different as Mando and Canto. English is indeed much more different, because it is heavily influenced by other languages and has undergone a lot of simplification
Do you speak Mandarin and Cantonese?
@@callistoscali4344yes, plus Suzhounese and Hokkien. Also German and Dutch as I live in Germany
14:35 That's insane. Hong Kong accounted for over 1/4 of China's entire GDP in the 1990s. Today it's barely 2%.
This is why China is taking such a heavy hand in Hong Kong. It's just not that special anymore. They don't care if they screw up 2% of their GDP.
In the history of humans, spoken languages came FIRST (the base), then written languages (based on the spoken language) came after. i.e. there are two types of languages, spoken and written. Chinese languages share the same WRITTEN language b/c Hanzi are symbols that represent words (logographs), not sounds (alphabets and syllabaries), so they barely changed throughout the millennia, but the spoken languages did diverge from Middle Chinese. The most logical differentiator between what is and isn't a (spoken OR written) language or dialect is MUTUAL INTELLIGEBILITY. Cantonese, Hokkien, and Mandarin speakers CANNOT understand >50% of each other, but they CAN understand each other in WRITING! Therefore, the different varieties of Chinese are spoken languages but the same written language.
Ancient/Old Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese used the same writing system (Classical Chinese) as Middle Chinese, so their written language was borrowed from China, but their SPOKEN languages were never the same. LOANWORDS are the reasons so many words in Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese sound like Cantonese, Hokkien, and Mandarin....LOANWORDS from Middle Chinese, not b/c they descended from Middle Chinese! If a modern Korean speaks a whole bunch of Konglish, they're still speaking Korean with English loanwords, not English.
Teach people to write Chinese again. They can use a notebook to keep a journal with thoughts written on the left page and unknown characters written on the right page. Practicing your unknown characters this way will help you to remember how to write them. This is what I've started to do to learn how to write Chinese, both traditional and simplified characters.
Chinese Language is more like Spanish or Sanskrit Language in that it was the official Imperial language for the empire but the regional dialects are different. Living languages are not static but evolve over time. Traditional Cantonese had 12 tones not 9 tones. Mandarin has only been reduced to 4 tones only in recent memory. Written Chinese has been only recently simplified from its Traditional form. Cantonese has many idioms that do not exist in Mandarin. South Asian Indian languages is like how hindi and punjabi share written form, sanskrit, even when the regional dialect/spoken language are different. Technically, Chinese Language is a family of different dialects that take a great deal of time to master... in that sense the Chinese Language does exist but to Westerners or outsiders could seem incomprehensible.
There is truth in saying, "All arguments are semantic ones." Language, dialect? Does it matter? No matter which dialect or language a Chinese speaks, they are all under one cultural tradition.
Except when the cultural tradition is Tibet, Mongolia or the Uyghurs. Officially now part of China, but not part of the Han tradition. It is important to remember that China is more than just the Han. Even within the Han there is huge difference between the north and south even genetically.
As a Hokkien Chinese kid I always wondered why a lot of Chinese characters in Hokkien have two readings (e.g. numbers) which no-one explained. Later I found out that there is an old Chinese reading and a Middle Chinese reading for the characters.
If one learns Classical Chinese do you think one should use a reconstructed Middle Chinese pronunciation?
He may have a point but i disagree.
I think the problem with a lot of the opinions here is that many Chinese try to claim everything. You don't see any European county claiming all of western society. Gotta stop trying to gain prominence by claiming ownership to all history and try to EARN respect. It's kinda like bragging about yourself to get popular, but this will usually have the opposite effect.
You don't see any European country claiming all of western society.
that's because none of them can..rome shattered into a thousand pieces and latin is no longer spoken/used by any european countries as their main language.
I honestly agree it's super annoying and simply incorrect regarding history.
@@lyhthegreatbut Greece is still around and is considered a greater impact then Rome, modern Greece is closer in language, population genetics and arguably other aspects of culture besides religionn to ancient Greece, but besides a few nationalist Greeks do not try claim all of Western society.
i still think that rome left a larger impact on all of europe than greece, first of all almost everyone in europe writes in latin alphabet not greek alphabets, 2nd of all, rome was the reason why christianity is so widespread in europe not greek gods..@@eagle162
it doesn' have to do with fighting western and eastern, but linguistics, linguistics is the same in europe and asia, just like medicine.
Honestly, generally, based on the 4 main factors it has .First,Vietnamese is siniticly, from 60%to70% of loan words due to the 1000 years of Chinese domination. Second, Vietnam was intergrated into China for the same period of Chinese colonization as one country. Third, Vietnamese is a tonal language as well as chinese . Lastly, the use of Kanji for many centuries as a writing system for the Vietnamese historically. Nevertheless, a lot of my friends and myself as chinese speakers agree that Vietnamese sounds most closest to chinese factually due to those above factures .As the word chao also means poridge in Vietnamese. BTW, Vietnam is an East Asian country also ,i learned this from the AFE geography site.
cantonese maybe.. but ain’t no way vietnamese sounds like mandarin. It’s wayyy to harsh.
@@ponuni whatever, that definitely depends
Vietnamese sounds like Khmer, spoken with tones, without consonant clusters
@D2E80, u wish! That is just so ridiculous. I've asked so many people from so many races., they all agreed that Vietnamese sounds most Chinese. So there . Unlike, Kmer language is unrelated to Vietnamese. Vietnamese is a sinitic and tonal language. Do your research, get educated, why don't try to tune in and wacth some Vietnamese news and try to compare it to the kmer news .. Lol .
@@D2E80 😂 U wish .seriously, I suggest you do your research first . Perhaps, u should watch some Vietnamese ( VPop) videos, some Vietnamese news and try to compare to the kmer ones 😂
Mandarin is more different to Hokkien than English is to German. He’s not wrong there. I speak 3 different Chinese dialects and believe me the difference is huge. Also Hokkien and Cantonese are more Yue origins as opposed to mandarin which is Han. I speak mandarin, Cantonese and Hokkien.
The official term for Cantonese in mandarin is literally, translated,Yue language. As opposed to say, Shandong, it’s called Shandong dialect. So there is tacit acknowledgement that in the south, it is a different language.
Lmao hokkien (min nan) is a Min dialect and not even close to cantonese.
@@ponuni never said it was, that’s my point isn’t it? They are quite different. And yes it’s a dialect of min Nan, but it’s also the most significant being the imperial language of the Tang dynasty.
@@ryanseet8314 you literally said “ also hokkien and cantonese are more yue origins as opposed to mandarin which is han” and i’m here to tell you hokkien has nothing to do with yue aka cantonese. You goofy for that.
@@ponuni did you read the first part? I said they are all very different. The Yue literally occupied the entire south of China. How those languages evolved or who the progenitors of those tongues are quite a different story. But if indeed Hokkien is not related to the Yue, I’m quite happy to stand corrected. But my point is they are all very different. I speak all 3 so I know.
@@ponuni ok if that’s the case. I stand corrected.
it doesn't have to do with analizing through western point of you he just use clickbait, he's talking about linguistics and linguistics is the same in western and eastern because linguistics is a science, saying that he's analizing it the western way and is not right by doing it like that , is like saying that a doctor in asia can't apply the same methods to cure people from asia and from europe
here's a comment from a chinese guy: Mandarin is more different to Hokkien than English is to German. He’s not wrong there. I speak 3 different Chinese dialects and believe me the difference is huge. Also Hokkien and Cantonese are more Yue origins as opposed to mandarin which is Han. I speak mandarin, Cantonese and Hokkien.
The official term for Cantonese in mandarin is literally, translated,Yue language. As opposed to say, Shandong, it’s called Shandong dialect. So there is tacit acknowledgement that in the south, it is a different language.
Great job guys. Thank you 😊
So would you say mandarin is derivative of cantonese or the other way around
None. Cannot compare Cantonese to Mandarin. You can compare Cantonese to Beijing-nese, which are both evolved from Middle Chinese. Mandarin is a constructed spoken variant of standard written Chinese, and therefore, somewhat artificial.
@callistoscali4344 thanks for the response:)
Middle Chinese sounds closest to Catonese in the south of China. Because that's where many of the Song Royal court migrated due to Mongols.
Many people, Chinese people included always deduct to argue that all different Chinese dialects are in fact the same language because the writing is the same. But that’s false logic. Written language is just a set of symbols to represent a spoken language. Chinese at one point almost abolished the Chinese characters all together but the spoken languages will continue to exists. Like Vietnamese. We should not confuse writing as an inseparable part of a language. In fact nowadays Cantonese has pretty much developed a full fledge regional written language separate from the standard mandarin writing. And you would only understand if you actually can speak Cantonese. In support to the professor’s argument, in addition to Latin and Germanic languages, same thing happened to Scandinavian languages, Arabic languages, Slavic Languages, Mongolian languages, Hindu languages, etc. all their off shoots are considered different languages. Why should Chinese be any different?
Chinese and other languages are inherently different, Chinese is ideographic and other languages are epigraphic, they are two different systems, so don't use the standards of an epigraphic language to define an ideographic language
@@wyhily9465 with all due respect you’re only addressing the written language. But that’s an incomplete concept.
I don't know whether you are Chinese or not, but you lack common sense. Since the Qin Shi Huang unified the writing system 2,000 years ago, there has been no such thing as official written language and local written language, they are one and the same thing. Your so-called "local written language which is completely independent of Putonghua" is a false proposition.
There is no such thing as "written language based on Putonghua". The official languages of the Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties were all pronounced differently, but they were all written in the same way.
Your so-called Cantonese version of the written language is actually found in every dialect. Guangdong is not special, just because of Hong Kong's relative cultural strength in the 1980s-2000s, some Hong Kong people, as well as anti-Communist Chinese overseas, think they are superior and want to cut themselves off from everything in China.
Most of the people who actually speak Cantonese are in mainland China, and only a tiny fraction of Cantonese people agree with you.
Anyway, there is nothing special about Cantonese compared to Fujianese, Hakka, Wenzhou, or Shanghainese, they are all Chinese, not a separate language.
@@wyhily9465 @wyhily9465 Thank you for the background but I am very aware of the history of China. First off, common sense means having common knowledge of various subjects and not just one, in this case, Chinese. And yes I am Chinese and I speak several different dialects. Additionally I've learned English, Spanish, Portuguese, and some French as well as some Japanese. But first things first, I understand there's a political rivalry between Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China. But let's not let political opinions affect our discussion. I do not think any Chinese group is more superior than any other Chinese group. That said, I did not say local languages are independent of Mandarin Putonghua; rather, the different Chinese languages are a group of related languages. Similar to various romance languages, arabic languages, mongolian languages etc. If different Chinese languages were the same language, then there’s no need to actually learn how to speak it in school. Yes, you learned mandarin in school and it’s easier for you because it’s closely related to your native dialect even if you don’t already speak Mandarin at home. If Mandarin weren’t a different but related language to my native language, then I wouldn’t have to learn pinyin in order to learn the proper pronunciation and the Mandarin grammar. Likewise if you were to go to any region of China, you actually can learn the local language as a choice, but you cannot just naturally speak their local language without some sort of learning period.
As far as writing goes, any language does not need a written language to be considered a different language. Similarly, just because two languages can write in a common language to communicate doesn’t mean they both speak the same language. If two speeches are not mutually intelligible by a large percentage of vocabulary, they are different languages. In the feudal period, Koreans, Japanese, and Vietnamese can all write in Classical Chinese 文言文。but this doesn’t make their languages part of the Chinese languages family. Officially during the Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming an Qing all used Classical Chinese to communicate and it’s only by writing. And yes, they ALL had to learn it because no one spoke Classical Chinese everyday, it only happens on paper, which is similar to Latin in Europe for some period. If I start saying 文言文 to you, you would not understand me. And during the Warring period of China, people had to learn 雅言, a similar language to their native language, to communicate with other Chinese groups.
I agree that Cantonese is nothing special compared to Hokien, Hakka, Wenzhou, Shanghainese, Hunanese etc. If fact, because you can named them you are proving to me that they all are different but related Chinese languages. Please understand that China is a very large country with very large population and very long and rich history. To say that over 1 billion people develop uniformly with just one language is absurd. We’re not clones. It’s only natural that over time, different sub groups develop differently. The same thing happens to every original racial group all around the world, we are no different to that development.
@@scorpio252000 Quote - In the feudal period, Koreans, Japanese, and Vietnamese can all write in Classical Chinese.
Quote - the different Chinese languages are a group of related languages. similar to various romance languages, arabic languages, mongolian languages etc.
There is one major difference between Chinese and the above languages you mentioned, and we can compare it to the United States.
The United States is known as a melting pot of races, but the integration process has only been going on for 300 years, whereas China has been integrating its races for thousands of years!
Objectively speaking, over the course of thousands of years of integration, the various dialects of China are far more similar to each other, whether it be in script or pronunciation or grammar, than the languages you quoted. The languages you quoted above have not been in constant fusion with each other for thousands of years, as in the case of China. China, on the other hand, has a great deal of integration in all areas of race, religion, culture, writing, pronunciation, etc. Historically, the Han were not differentiated by descent, there were no pure blood Han. Han Chinese are distinguished by culture, and those who identify with and practice Chinese culture in this part of China are Han Chinese. Chinese ethnic identity, cultural identity, and linguistic identity are inseparable.
Subjectively speaking, whether Cantonese is a dialect or a language is determined by the Cantonese people's own perception. The fact is that the vast majority of Cantonese people consider Cantonese to be a type of Chinese dialect.
Conclusion, Chinese is unique, and only Chinese is a special case in the world. Chinese, as a language system that separates pronunciation from writing, is completely different from epenthetic speech. So the definition of epenthetic language does not apply to Chinese. Therefore, your arguments and conclusions are overly simplistic, crude and factually incorrect.
Some poems you have to read in Henan hua; some in Hainan Hua.....
Chinese is a nationality, the unifying language is the writing system.
13:20 they have chinese because of the heavy cultural and military influence all the way back then
Language study like all social study is not hard science so does "Modern linguistics". It's very subjective on the definition IMO. I would argue so-called Modern linguistics only apply to phonetic alphabet base language. For Chinese people, Chinese is not just a language but somewhat equal to bible/religion/history. For example, Chinese idioms act as "hyperlink" that tell stories the same way as bible tell story. Chinese culture preservation at its best.
They can argue that the Chinese language does not exist, but it does exist to me. We are one family no mather where we live or from. "四 海 一 家".
Brilliant way to mask an agenda and drive traffic 👏🏻
It's akin to telling Catalonia deserves independence which you know Spain would never allow 😅
This video explains best the difference of perceptions between east to west.. totally different lens.. great explanations.. keep it up guys
The definition of language and dialect is pretty vague in current Linguistics. Here is an example: local people in Athens Ohio in the USA speak a strong accent. It is so strong that people from Columbus Ohio cannot understand them if Athens people don't switch their speaking more towards the Midwest accent of English , and the two cities are just 1 hour drive away. So if the definition of a language has the component of being able to understand the speaking of each other, then people in Athens and Columbus speak 2 languages? Current western Linguists classify lots of Chinese dialects as languages, but to Chinese people they are just different accents because if you use Mandarin to pronounce it people will be able to fully understand (so just the pronunciation difference). Chinese language is so different than the alphabetical languages that some of the linguistic fields like Morphology and Phonology and Phonemic Orthography are hard to apply to Chinese. The current research of Chinese linguistic is very limited, and it needs more effort than random judgement.
we Hokkeners are technically a mix of second Empire Chinese (middle), First Empire Chinese (old) and the Altaic Nomad
our Altaic and middle Chinese heritage came from the Tang Dynasty migrant of solier and bureacrat during the latter day of Tang Dyansty, while the old Chinese influence came form the Qin Dynasty era conquest and settlement to Hokkenland. but we do have some cenetral asian long word in Hokkien, for example our word for dad is "Abba" it is Siberian origin share the same root with modern mongol word for dad "aav", and the Chinese word for roses in Hokkien we say "Mui-Gui" which came from the Persian-Turkic word for flower "gul", also Hokkieners don't have a unified tribal language, Hokkien spoken form China and other countries can drastically different from Each other (for example I am a Taiwanese Hokkien, our Hokkien doesn't sound like the example you provided we have a very different accent and different sets of vocabulary),
Holwever, I don't know if my tribal languages ie the Hokkien languages sounds more old or not, but we Hokkieners have this pride for the meoldic feature of our accent, that our langauges soudns like singing sometimes :D
Can you give an example of a book written in Hokkien?
玫瑰🌹
Kra-Dai languages preserve a lot of Old Chinese sounds that are lost in modern Chinese.
It has been said that by 2050 2k languages will no longer exist.😢
doesnt say it doesnt exist. he says the real form is not used anymore, and the new forms are a collective of different broken languages. hes saying yall using patois, like us jamaicans.
If you go back far enough. We all spoke one language. And that's crazy 😂. It's also crazy how quickly languages can evolve especially in isolation.
What about Chu Nom?
nothing special, japanese have their own japanese kanji while koreans used to have their own specially created hanjas too..
Nevertheless, at one point Vietnam historically had also used Kanji. Do your own research before jumping to conclusions. Little do u know Vietnam and China used to be as one country for 1000 years .
@@miming9409 Yeah sure, Pluto was also Chinese for 5000 years
@psforever8888 BTW Vietnamese is a tonal language as well as Chinese .whatever.I can see how well educated u r 😮
@@miming9409 yes great leader Xi taught me well. The whole world, moon and sun should bow down to the great communist party of covid China
"Do you understand the words that's coming out of my mouth?"
If you grow up w/ multiple Chinese tongues, your brain registers them as dialects as you notice more similarities than differences. If you learn one then the other, your brain will register them as languages.
definitely, if you know a couple of southern chinese dialects and then you start learning east asian languages like japanese or korean you'd notice even more similarities than if you only spoke mandarin.
@@lyhthegreatfunny you say that because I noticed that when I lived in Beijing w/ other expats.
Chinese is kind of special. There's a reason why we can rrsd what was written in China thousands of years ago if you were a chinese student in this day and age.
To the OP: So why is this exceptionalism when we are analyzing Chinese?
bro just said cantonese has 9 tones, he dont know what be talkin abt cantonese has 6 tones yall😂
That guy is just arguing against a straw-man. When people say "the Chinese language", they are NOT talking about all the languages of China. That's what he's arguing against, but I don't think anyone in the world holds such a view. There are quite a few different Chinese languages. But when we refer to a language called "Chinese", we are ALWAYS referring to Mandarin. It's the same as how we refer to "Spanish", since it's the majority language of Spain. Mandarin is the majority language of China, so we call it Chinese. All the languages descended from Old or Middle Chinese that are not Mandarin are just that: other languages. People often call them dialects, but that's ridiculous. What are they dialects of? Middle Chinese? Yue is a language, and has its own dialects. Same with Mandarin, Wu, Gan, Xiang, Min, Hakka, etc.
Yes, it's a special feature of Chinese languages that there is mutual intelligibility in the written form, but that doesn't change the fact that they are separate languages. Mutual intelligibility in written form is not one of the characteristics that make up a language. In fact, if you don't know Mandarin, but can understand text written in Mandarin (people like that are more and more rare, btw), it's just because you learned to read in the Mandarin way. It's not that it's written in the same way in other Chinese languages. And some Chinese languages are only spoken, not written. And some, like Hokkien, can be written, but usually aren't. And a text written in Hokkien isn't that easy to read for people who don't speak it.
Standard written Chinese is one single language with an evolutionary trend similar to all other languages. The variants and diversity you are describing is only the spoken variants, which are somewhat separate languages of their own.
In hmong ( miao )
I notice
But = Chinese = that shee / hmong = that shee
Number 1 = Chinese eee!
In hmong = eee!
I don't think that everyone spoke the same dialect of Chinese several hundreds of years ago.
I wish they can adopt new writing system as super easy to write without depending the technology to write. If some future all technology is not working. So all need use write by hand.
People can still write by hands, but many today become too dependent to technology they tend to forget how to write from memory. I was taught to write from memory no computer but am slowly starting to forget if I don't do enough dictation. The technology these days will help with my forgetfulness. Reading is much easier than writing it out.
@@sola4393 Chinese writing system is 1 of 4 super hardest writing system by hand.
@@zweiwing4435 lol yes it all by memory 😄 Learn each word one by one.
"Emoji-nese" is the de facto language of IG comments. Men of culture know exactly what I mean.
the wriiten he says is also broken, so its a mix as well.
i read somewhere 90% of korean words have mandarin roots. not sure if it's true
90% is too much, probably closer to 60%, common words like anneonghaseyo安宁 and kamsahamida感谢 have chinese origins.
Are u even serious? Just do your research first 😮
it is 60%
@@arthurmoran4951 sure it's not 59 or 61? lol
미친놈이 지랄하고 자빠졌네. Translate these pure Korean phrases. 개꿈은 안 이뤄진다 ㅋㅋ
I’d argue that it is still different Chinese languages because half of the time different Chinese don’t even use the same word to describe the same concept and sometimes the same word have different meanings in different Chinese languages
So American English and British English are different languages?
@@callistoscali4344 there are different dialects of English language but Mandarin and Hokkien are 2 different Chiense tribal languages knowing one absolutely doesn’t guarantee knowing another
@@Laurence0227 hokkien itself is made up of different tribal spoken languages. Mandarin, on the other hand, is an artificial standardization process of standard written Chinese into its spoken form.
@@callistoscali4344 There is a written language for Hokkien as well, but the classical form of it is highly identical to 文言文 and the vernacular form though written sometimes aren’t really used much for literature and compositions
But most colonial era provincial records of most Taiwanese provinces are written in Hokkien, cuz Hokkien tribesman are the dominant ethnic group in Taiwan since 18 Century onward
@@Laurence0227 Hokkien is not from Taiwan. Hokkien is a province/state in China. It predates colonial times. I am asking for any written records, literature, books, etc written in Hokkien. 文言文 is just formal written Chinese. 文言文 is not Hokkien.
Correction. Egyptian hieroglyphs are mostly phonetic and not logographic. In fact, many alphabetic characters have their origins in hieroglyphs.
Cantonese is older than Mandarin too.. mandarin is a relatively recent dialect that got placed as a primary dialect in mainland China. Hong Kong still majority speaks Cantonese, it also has some different written words. Traditional writing is also the main written form, but mainland China uses Simplified.
yeah but they both originated from middle chinese...both old mandarin and cantonese...it's just that mandarin evolved way more than cantonese due to manchurian influences.
Older no. They are both modern dialects of Chinese but Cantonese better maintained the middle Chinese pronunciation.
Yes, Korean and Cantonese are very similar in the similarities are very specific that it only exist when spoken verbally
No way. Not even close!
cantonese and vietnamese are more similar. modern korean language are closer to japanese in terms of grammar structure and both languages have so many borrowed words from english.
Just a few loan words
Similarities between Korean and Cantonese are only because of a large number of loan words from Middle Chinese. Linguistically, Korean and Cantonese are very different languages. Korean is an agglutinative language that uses prefixes and suffixes to convey meaning. Note that Vietnamese also has a large number of Middle Chinese loan words, and the reverse is also true in that there are many Cantonese words that share a Viet origin.
Honestly, generally Vietnamese sounds most similar to chinese. The word chao in Vietnamese also means porridge , A lot of my chinese friends and myself as chinese speakers all agree to that.
these “Korean”guys pretend to be Chinese talking about China is only because China now is a boss country😢come on，你们是韩国人😅
Fung bros isn’t Koreans
They are ethnic Chinese born in America
Why you keep blaming on Koreans?
Do you see any Korean in the video???
"圖書館" is actually a word the Chinese "stole" from Japanese. The Japanese "stole" the characters "圖", "書", and "館" from the Chinese, but putting them together to mean "the library" was a completely Japanese idea.
The linguistics term is borrowed/loaned rather than stole. Another example is the term for telephone, it is borrowed from the Japanese invention for "electric speech".
@@Obscurai I was just using the language they used in the video. More precisely these are wasei-kango.
@@merdufer Indeed, the Fung Bros are not linguists.
@@Obscurai Same for Densha 电车. It is Japanese word for electric trains. But chinese called it 电动车
It's funny, in China we call them regression words, but Japan says they are words stolen from China.
Who in Japan can read these words “圖、書、館”?
Chinese characters are Chinese characters, they exist in history, if you look at the word 圖, you'll see that it looks like a tortoise shell, and it's true, it first appeared 4,000 years ago in the oracle bone inscriptions. 3000 years ago Shang Dynasty bronze tripod .2000 years ago Poetry Scriptures《战国策·秦策》《小雅·常棣》《三国志·诸葛亮传》《仪礼·聘礼》。
It has always meant pictures, with a written symbol in the center of the box, very clearly. Since the center of the picture is a book, the word "書 " needs no further explanation. As for "館", I believe Japanese people can better understand the scale of a pavilion. In ancient China, buildings, pavilions and cities were used. When this word, including these characters, was invented, writing did not even exist on the island of Japan, so how could it be said to be original to Japan, and why would it be said to have been stolen?
In addition, like “圖書館”、“經濟”、“警察”、“進化”, they are not original to Japan, but borrowed from ancient Chinese characters, and then taken back by modern China to use with the original. They are just borrowed from ancient Chinese characters and then taken back by modern China to differentiate them from the original ones. Even if you don't use these Japanese words, the words themselves have always been described by other Chinese characters.
“藏经阁”“计学”“衙差”“天演”
If Japan doesn't use these current kanji, do they have other kanji and phrases to refer to nouns? I'm curious.
Cantonese has its own writing system and grammar, so has Minnan (a.k.a Taigi in Taiwan or Hokkien in South-east Asia). We're just forced to learn how to write in Mandarin since we were a kid.
Force to write Mandarin? Sorry, Mandarin is a spoken standard. You were simply taught to write standard Chinese.
@@callistoscali4344 Sorry Guys! The standard written Chinese was WenYanWen 文言文 (Classical Chinese) which was based on the Old Chinese before 1919. The so-called Standard Chinese, according to the PRC and the KMT governments, is based on the Beijing dialect. The so-called Standard written Chinese only existed for around 100 years. Mandarin, originally from the Hu people 胡人, actually borrowed words from the Middle and Old Chinese, like Cantonese and Min; not the other way around as dialects. I just wanna make this clear. 😄Cheers.
@@johnnylee3505 文言文 is classical literal written Chinese and it is still used today in writings of books, songs, poems, etc. 白话文 is standard vernacular written Chinese which has existed since the beginning of Ming and Qing dynasties, 1400s to modern era. Many literary works of that era was written in standard vernacular Chinese, e.g. 西游记，三国演义, etc. Standard vernacular Chinese is certainly much more than 100 years old. Try 500 years old.
@@johnnylee3505 胡人 does not mean "Hu people". Rather, the word 胡 is pronounced 'hu', which means non-native, outsider, barbarians, etc. In Chinese culture, there are historically different ethnic groups that are classified as 胡 and they are all from the North of China. They are Xiongnu Xiōngnú [匈奴], Xianbei Xiānbēi [鲜卑], Jie Jié [羯], Di Dī [氐] and Qiang Qiāng [羌].
@@callistoscali4344 Google it, please. I don't wanna argue. Modern written Chinese only happened after the May4 event in 1919. Not the BaiHuaWen that you're talking about. They're totally different things.
That guy is not very smart. If you look at the grammar system, Mandarin, Cantonese, and Fujianese are actually the same. How it “sounds” different is just one aspect of along comparisons. This is why people who know those dialects have a knack for understanding each other.
Chinese dialects are extensive and there have been different versions in fashion throughout history. You had Ming's Beijing/Nanjing dialect, Tang's Chang'an dialect, etc. And Chinese calligraphy have changed throughout eons. China is the root of alot of East Asian tradition, so no we're not most European savages. We are the originators just like Greece was.
that thing have nothing to do with linguistic boy, here's a comment from a chinese guy: Mandarin is more different to Hokkien than English is to German. He’s not wrong there. I speak 3 different Chinese dialects and believe me the difference is huge. Also Hokkien and Cantonese are more Yue origins as opposed to mandarin which is Han. I speak mandarin, Cantonese and Hokkien.
The official term for Cantonese in mandarin is literally, translated,Yue language. As opposed to say, Shandong, it’s called Shandong dialect. So there is tacit acknowledgement that in the south, it is a different language.
What is DLLM equivalent in Mandarin?
Kan ni ma.
Yes, Chinese is actually a family group. Cantonese from the majority Han people is considered a dialect by the government, and Mandarin is the official language while Chinese diaspora state the opposite.
I think he's right really. Different way of saying but same writing system
yeah, but chinese is a logograph, abit difficult to compare directly.
If only an "Asian" linguist was in the video and explained the details of this topic. I found it hard that these guys are doing this in which they might have some misinformation.
English is base off other writing systems like Jewish gematria and Latin. Isn't it? ABC easy as 123 A=1 B=2 C=3 A-Z
Chinese believe everything comes out of china.😅 Lmaof. Let's get somethings straight here for the record. Korean language does not stem from chinese language. Japanese language does not stem from chinese language. According to repudable linguists they are of their own language families respectively, or possibly Transeurasian or Altaic, all debatable but all agree definitely not Sinitic which chinese is. Only vietnamese is sinitic, but correct me if I'm wrong on that. Korean is not even tonal language which chinese is. Furthermore, there is a second set of spoken korean called Saturi which only native korean speakers are fluent in is marketably different from written korean language and it has almost zero connection to chinese. It in fact contains thousands of words that are nearly same as tamil language of india. Korean also contains many Sanscrit words. These facts points to the possibility that korean is truely one of a few surviving ancient languages that has died off everywhere else.
Language like cultures that meet, mix and mingle. There’s no one direction, but many, according to need and use. I read somewhere the Japanese language has austronesian roots, as does many pacific islands like Taiwan, Fiji, New Zealand, and Hawaii. Its interesting how much we have in common.
I believe you are onto something there. It is a known fact that a contributing culture to japan is the Jomon culture thought to have originated in coastal s e asia. This may be possible austronesian influence to japan and its language.
Vietnamese is an Austroasiatic language and not Sinitic in origin. However, both Vietnamese and Korean borrowed from Middle Chinese since there was a lot of cultural and economic interaction. It should also be noted that Cantonese which geographically borders Vietnam has loan words from Vietnamese. Of course, you can see that influence even today in the many Chinese signs on ancient buildings in both Vietnam and Korean. For contrast, in China many ancient buildings have Mongolian signs.
Koreans and Chinese are from different tribe groups and settled on different regions, biblically speaking we all came from the middle ancient civilization(Near Israel) since Adam and Eve to post flood of Noah's ark. You'll see legends of the great flood in every ancient cultures and history including the Chinese.
@psforever8888 you are likely correct if we were to source the Bible as authoritative. It places all civilizations and it's languages arising out of somewhere in the middle east area.
I'm American born Mien. Y'all should highlight the different languages spoken in China. And everyone should give a rats fuh about yt people whitesplaining about Asian culture.
facts
That would be a great series, 6 major Sinitic language groups with hundreds of dialects, in addition to over 50 minority groups with their own language dialects.
@@ObscuraiThat'll be great for Han Chinese and other ethnicity in Asia, to learn something new. Lots of history, arts, language and festivals from different ethnic culture & provinces. They should do a series on China's history of war and conflict. Maybe start with the taiping rebellion, boxer rebellions etc. But most of these subjects/topics are taken from Reddit. Man, I'm giving them free content materials. LOL
@@itsatrap4986 There are several UA-cam channels that delve into the history of East China and Asia. The "Cool History Bros" covers many of the topics you mentioned in a light snarky fashion. Other more serious and straight forward channels also exist on UA-cam. The FungBros could do something similar.
With his reasoning English, German and Dutch aren’t languages either. Just stupidity and ignorance.
Beijing language is its own dialect
He's right.
Chinese is a written language with a family of spoken languages that are related by sound. Mandarin and formal (eg. songs) Cantonese sound fairly similar in most cases. This point can't be appreciated through tones, which describes the pitch of the sound. Being fluent in Cantonese it's not hard to understand standard mandarin that spoken slowly.
Ancient China exported its advanced civilization/technology to neighboring tributary states, that came with language. Hence, the comparison to Latin is inaccurate, it's more like British English, to different types of English but evolved as those countries developed their own language that retained some of the parent language.
@@i0li0il0i It's somewhat subjective and relative. If you're really fluent in both you'll hear more of resemblance. There are dialects of Cantonese that are like super distorted versions of standard Cantonese that are very dissimilar that actually sound 5% similar to the point where I can't make out the words or understand at all. Whereas standard Mandarin, sounding similar enough in many cases to formal (not conversational) Cantonese is quite intelligible to me.
Chinese characters are logographs, graphemes that denote words or morphemes of the language.