site banner
PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   3538 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 14, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

3
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

My Chinese coworker says that this image is a reasonable representation of the controversy over whether Mandarin and Cantonese are dialects or languages. What is your opinion on the topic?

He's wrong. The distance between spoken Mandarin and Cantonese is greater than the distance between French and Italian. It's more like the difference between English and Greek.

Here's what ChatGPT suggests for translating your post into various Chinese languages:

  • spoken Mandarin: Wǒ nàge Zhōngguó tóngshì shuō, zhè zhāng túpiàn dàgài néng dàibiǎo dàjiā zài zhēnglùn Pǔtōnghuà hé Guǎngdōnghuà dàodǐ shì fāngyán háishi yǔyán. Nǐ zěnme kàn?
  • spoken Cantonese: Ngo5 go3 Zung1gwok3 tung4si6 waa6, ni1 zoeng1 soeng2 caa1 m4 do1 doi6biu2 zo2 gwaan1jyu1 Pou2tung1waa6 tung4 Gwong2dung1waa2 hai6 fong1jin4 ding6hai6 jyu5jin4 ge3 zang1leon6. Nei5 dim2 tai2 aa3?
  • formal Mandarin: Wǒ de Zhōngguó tóngshì shuō, zhè zhāng túpiàn shì duìyú Pǔtōnghuà hé Yuèyǔ shì fāngyán háishi yǔyán de zhēngyì de hélǐ miáoxiě. Nǐ duì zhège huàtí yǒu shénme kànfǎ?
  • written Mandarin voiced like Cantonese: Ngo5 dik1 Zung1gwok3 tung4si6 syut3, ze5 zoeng1 tou4pin3 si6 deoi3 jyu1 Pou2tung1waa6 waa6 Jyut6jyu5 si6 fong1jin4 waan6si6 jyu5jin4 dik1 zang1ji3 dik1 hap6lei5 miu6haai2. Nei5 deoi3 ze5 go3 waa6tai4 jau5 sam6mo1 hon3faat3?

The inferential gap between modern Anglophones and people from more complex linguistic situations (diglossia or even polyglossia) is quite large and usually makes it a waste of time to argue about such things. Your average English speaker will have only ever encountered languages that are either completely unintelligible to him in writing or in speech e.g. Russian, or that are nearly identical to his own e.g. New Zealand English. If we lived in a world where a billion people spoke Jamaican Patois or Scots and our formal education was in Old English there would be a lot less confusion on the matter.

As to the nature of Chinese specifically, more or less all formal writing in the Sinosphere (including Korea and Vietnam; Japan was more complicated) prior to the early 20th century was in standardized Literary Chinese. No Koreans were under the impression that the language they were speaking was Chinese, even if that was the only language they could write, but your average Chinese scribe would tell you they were speaking and writing the same language, the same way Arabs do with their vernacular dialects and Modern Standard Arabic, or a Carolingian monk might have with Old French and Latin. If you define languages by mutual intelligibility, or from a learner's perspective ("do I need a different textbook for this?"), then they are clearly wrong, but if you then conclude that something like Ottoman Turkish is just a language like any other that you can learn to speak (good luck!) you are also missing something important about how it was used.

When China transitioned to writing in the vernacular, only Mandarin successfully made the jump, which meant that your average educated person in Guangdong went from speaking Cantonese and writing in Literary Chinese to speaking Cantonese and writing in Mandarin. A generation or two ago this person would not have been able to speak Mandarin except as a sort of cipher or word for word translation into Cantonese, but nowadays they will be fully fluent in both spoken forms. While there have been attempts to standardize written Cantonese in Hong Kong and written Hokkien in Taiwan (basically selecting or inventing new characters for all the words without obvious cognates in Mandarin), no one outside of a handful of hardcore separatists and language nerds (and speaking as a language nerd I'd rather they adapted something like Korean Hangul instead) cares about them, and even the spoken forms are on the road to extinction alongside their failed political projects.

speaking as a language nerd I'd rather they adapted something like Korean Hangul instead

Speaking as another self-identified language nerd, hell nah. The survival of the Sinosphere arrangement of one common ideographic writing system functioning, if imperfectly, for multiple distinct languages simultaneously - distributing the translation load between the act of writing and the act of reading in such a way that both can be performed somewhat on the fly - is precious, and I could rant at lengths about how much of a tragedy I see in Vietnam's ditching of Han Nom and Korea's almost-complete ditching of hanja. We have reports of 19th century Japanese who could travel to Vietnam and "talk" to literate elders in writing, without either making a single sound the other could parse!

As a third self-identified language nerd, I'm largely with you. I think Hangul is an interesting and unique writing system, and certainly more efficient than a syllabary like Japanese Kana, but I do wish that both Korean and Vietnamese used a hybrid script system analogous to Japanese with 1000-2000 characters for Hanzi derived words and the rest in their respective phonetic system. Korean and Japanese in particular have a frustrating amount of homophones due to the dropping of tones that could use the disambiguation. I wouldn't mind if the Chinese did the same from the other direction, though would prefer something like Zhuyin over Pinyin in such a case for largely aesthetic reasons.

Korean mixed script exists and has nice and quirky properties.

Korean and Japanese in particular have a frustrating amount of homophones due to the dropping of tones that could use the disambiguation

I thought Japanese solved the issue of homophones with pitch accent. Many of the more famous examples are clearly distinguishable, to the extent that I feel like "homophones" is a misnomer. Regardless, I don't think need tones for disambiguation and nor am I aware of that they ever had tones, unlike the more mixed situation in Korea.

The pitch accent has far from enough information to actually disambiguate heavily-overloaded phoneme sequences, especially with projected-down Chinese vocabulary. One of the more well-known pairs is 科学 (subject-learning = science) and 化学 (change-learning = chemistry), both read identically as kagaku with a down-pitch after the ka. In an informal context (like students chatting about what they are doing), people often resort to deliberately misreading the latter as bakegaku, essentially just pronouncing the "change" bit using a slightly amusing native reading (bake- is "change" with a heavy connotation of "shapeshift", like masters of disguise), perhaps similar to saying "Lifeology" for "Biology". (Imagine a scenario in which this word was overloaded in English, with "Bi-ology" denoting the study of things that come in twos)

Once you get to heavily overloaded sound sequences like koukai, my dictionary gives over a dozen of words that are read as that with no down-step (like 公開, "publicise", or 更改, "revise"), and at least two that have that reading with a downstep after the ko (後悔, "regret", and 航海, travelling the sea by ship). All of these are common words and you could easily construct contexts where there is ambiguity between them.

For native words, the collisions are fewer, as you have to distinguish between genuine collisions (kami (downstep after mi) as in paper vs. as in hair) and ones where the two words are actually the same etymologically but educated writing demands using different Chinese characters, such as kara[2] = 空 (empty) / 虚 (hollow) / 殻 (husk) or kiku[0] = 聞く (hear) or 聴く (listen) or 訊く (ask). The latter is a fascinating topic in itself, connected to the same thing I hinted at above with writing in these languages also being an act of translation! (Compare to how any EN->RU translator has to decide whether any instance of blue is синий or голубой, or maybe an SE->EN translator has to think about whether a "stark sås" is spicy or just strong.)

I thought Japanese solved the issue of homophones with pitch accent

This is more of a thing with commonly used words. When you get to more technical or literary vocabulary it gets a lot harder to parse the meaning from etymology based on pronunciation alone compared to the less homophonous Greek or Latin derived technical vocabulary in English.

For literary vocabulary i could see that this might be an issue but isn't most technical vocabulary imported words from English and German?

I guess it depends on how you count (e.g. by dictionary entry vs weighted by usage frequency). Names for drugs like aspirin will be direct imports from English. Words for things like economics, maximum, limit, exchange, chemistry, heart attack, etc. will be words constructed from Chinese characters.

Why would homophones / homonyms even be a problem if / when the meaning is obvious from the context.

In Finnish I can say ”kuusi palaa” which could mean ”six pieces”, ”a fir tree is on fire”, ”your moon is on fire” or even ”piece(s) of your moon” but nobody would be confused with any real world use of that piece of sentence.

Even this infamous artificial example is obvious to any fluent speaker with some thought: ”-Kokko! Kokoo kokoon koko kokko. -Koko kokkoko? -Koko kokko, Kokko.” (-[Person named] Kokko! Assemble together the entire bonfire. -The entire bonfire? -[Yes,] the entire bonfire, Kokko)

Does your coworker speak Mandarin as his first language? Is he from the northern PRC? Is he a nationalist? Those are important factors to consider when evaluating his opinion. I agree with others that including Korean is highly suspect. It suggests a level of ignorant northern Han chauvinism, the kind that still sees China as the "middle kingdom" (IMO better translated as the "central kingdom") and all other so-called cultures surrounding it as uppity monkeys who were enlightened by the hoary and superior Han Chinese.

To your question, no, they are not the same language at all. A lazy analogy (in that you could nitpick it to death and probably find a more exact example) is that they are like English and, say, Romanian. Both are Indo European, both use the Roman alphabet. They probably have some words in common that could be identified by a linguist. But day to day, they are mutually unintelligible, and the Romanians do things to the Roman alphabet that make English speaker say "wtf," such as "ă" and "ș". They are only part of the same "Chinese" language in that all Romance languages are part of "Romance," and even that is too generous IMO.

Does your coworker speak Mandarin as his first language? Is he from the northern PRC?

Cantonese is his first language. He's from Guangzhou, in the south.

Is he a nationalist?

I don't know. He has expressed thorough dislike of both the PRC government and Chiang Kai-Shek. He considers "zhonghua ren" to be significantly preferable to "Chinese person" as a moniker, I think since "Chinese" too easily implies "zhongguo".

That's a tricky one. IMHO there's probably nobody on this board who is really qualified to disentangle the nuances there, since AFAIK we do not have any regular born-and-raised-in-the-PRC posters (and even if we did the fact that they post here would make them highly unusual). But my understanding is that zhonghua 中华人 /zhonghuaminzu 中华民族 is used to mean "ethnically Chinese people," and I have heard it used (often as "huaren"华人) in conversations where the speaker was simply a non-PRC Chinese (e.g. from Taiwan) but also by PRC Chinese appealing to the loyalty owed by huaren (or huaqiao 华侨) to the mother country (PRC).

Re disliking Chiang Kai-shek... that's a tough one since AIUI he wasn't a very sympathetic character. I think there are plenty of PRC haters who have little love for Chiang.

I confess to not knowing enough folks from southern China to really grasp their views on Chineseness and compare them with those of northern Chinese (with whom I had much more contact).

My wife is of Chinese descent (though Malaysian for 3-4 generations) born in Malaysia and refers to herself as Malaysia Huaren which is typical for Malaysian Chinese in my experience. Admittedly that has another layer in that a lot of Malaysian Chinese will emphasize their affinity to the Cultural Grouping of Chinese moreso than their geographic location in Malaysia but that's incorporating SEA-idpol on top of China-idpol.

Re disliking Chiang Kai-shek... that's a tough one since AIUI he wasn't a very sympathetic character.

To clarify, IIRC his position is something like "Chiang/the ROC should have admitted defeat like Robert E. Lee/the CSA and permitted the country to be reunited, rather than retreating to Taiwan and permanently dividing people". But I may be misremembering/misinterpreting his opinion.

Here's a direct quote:

ToaKraka: In the video game Hearts of Iron 3, you can play as the PRC and capture/execute Jiang Jieshi rather than allying with him against Japan. ¶ (at the Xi'an Incident)

Coworker: Allying with him was the only option. Different in political affiliation does not make him an enemy of China. Japan was the ultimate enemy. ¶ His sin is that he splits the country into two.

My gut says he's probably a PRC nationalist, though I say so with low confidence. Taiwanese have a generally warm view of Japan despite having been colonized by the Japanese for decades, so not all Chinese see the Japanese as a nemesis. The idea that "Japan was the ultimate enemy" is probably the strongest most unambiguous message in PRC propaganda, closely followed by "we must never forget the Century of Humiliation at the hands of Western powers" and "the CCP deserves undying gratitude for creating the 新中国 which awakened Chinese racial class consciousness and helped unify 中国人 enough to end their exploitation by evil foreigners." Given that, and given that the "Chinese=Han=Standard Mandarin" as an idea is pushed to promote national unity (no criticism here, every European country did it in the 19th and 20th century), I would take his linguistic theories with a grain of salt. Of course, I don't know the guy, so I'm speculating about his beliefs a lot here.

I'd be curious to hear what he actually believes if you feel you can broach this rather sensitive topic with him.

Taiwanese have a generally warm view of Japan despite having been colonized by the Japanese for decades

Is this a “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” thing, since the PRC is the strongest force in east Asia and both are concerned about their sea lanes and territorial integrity because of Chinese moves to expand its territorial waters and claim on Taiwan?

This is mostly because the brutal KMT crackdown on the Japanese-educated upper classes of Taiwan starting in 1947 made the colonial period seem better in retrospect to those who saw a decline in their social and economic status while their friends and relatives were imprisoned or executed.

It's been a while since I studied this, but IIRC the occupation of Taiwan was much less draconian than the occupation of Korea or the wartime occupations of the mainland. The Japanese built a lot of infrastructure there and developed the island somewhat. They also engaged in cultural repression, but again, I think it was less strictly enforced than in Korea.

My gut says he's probably a PRC nationalist

Direct quote:

Yes, the government of the PRC is bad, very bad. I am currently in the US which already proofs it. But there are more colors than just black and white in this world.

Fair enough, sounds like he has more nuanced opinions than the average zealous nationalist. Good on him.

In practice, "a language is a dialect with an army" seems to be the correct rule. There are instances of nations sharing a common language (the Anglosphere and friends), but also plenty of adjacent countries that can understand each other but declare them separate languages (I hear Swedish and Norwegian are almost identical) and countries that can't understand speech, but consider it a single language (China).

I think the language/dialect distinction is a bit like the religion/cult distinction: at the big picture most generally agree on the idea, but any concrete example can be argued over indefinitely.

I'd argue that Korean and Chinese are more separate languages than Italian and French.

Chinese is a tonal language and Korean is not, and they have different writing systems.

Italian and French have nothing that divides them to this extent, either in spoken or written language.

As for Chinese and Cantonese I have no idea, I'm not terribly familiar with them even if I've studied some Mandarin. My general rule though is that languages are separate if they aren't mutually intelligible.

I genuinely don't understand why your coworker put spoken Korean and spoken Chinese in the same bubble, they're mutually unintelligible and come from different language families, even if they used the same writing system for a long period. This on its own makes the rest of your coworkers claims suspect to me.

Take the Nordic languages: Swedish and Norwegian are clearly the same language as they are easily mutually intelligble both in written and spoken form. With Danish it's a bit murkier but seeing as the written form is clearly mutually intelligble with both Norwegian and Swedish, as well as large amounts of the local dialects, even if it can be a bit difficult, I would still put it as being the same language but at the outer edge.

Icelandic on the other hand is its own language seeing as both written but especially spoken Icelandic is not really mutually intelligble with the other Nordic languages.

Broadening things to the Germanic languages it's easy to see that German is separate from the Nordic languages. It uses mostly different words and even has different grammatical structure, it's clearly a separate language even if there are overlaps and a common history.

I'd argue that Korean and Chinese are more separate languages than Italian and French.

Forget Italian and French, in some ways, Chinese and Korean languages are more divergent than Italian and Hindi.

My general rule though is that languages are separate if they aren't mutually intelligible.

This is why I sometimes bear the suspicion that young people aren't speaking English.

I genuinely don't understand why your coworker put spoken Korean and spoken Chinese in the same bubble, they're mutually unintelligible and come from different language families, even if they used the same writing system for a long period.

His position is that a particular speech can be part of multiple languages depending on how it is written. The exact same hanzi/hanja passage of writing can be understood by speakers of Mandarin, Cantonese, and Korean, so they are dialects of the same language, regardless of mutual intelligibility between the three speeches—but Korean speech also forms part of the Korean language when used with hangul.

That is more of an artifact of how logographs work than evidence of that the languages are the same or even meaningfully related.

The characters are pronounced differently in the different languages and and used very differently grammatically.

You could write English nouns with Chinese characters, that doesn't make English Chinese.

Is your coworker perhaps a Han supremacist?

The characters are used very differently grammatically.

He has claimed previously that grammar isn't really a thing in Chinese.

You could write English nouns with Chinese characters, that doesn't make English Chinese.

I think he would disagree, if I'm understanding his position corrrectly.

Is your coworker perhaps a Han supremacist?

I have no idea.

He has claimed previously that grammar isn't really a thing in Chinese.

Do not trust this man.

He sounds like certain Chinese people I knew who would claim that Japanese is also a dialect of Chinese, sign up for some Japanese class (in the $abroad country they were staying in) fully expecting to BTFO the stupid weeaboos, instead getting BTFOed themselves (as it turns out Japanese grammar is actually in some ways more accessible to speakers of reasonably-inflected European languages than to Chinese speakers), and angrily concluding that the racist teacher is discriminating against them.

It was impossible to get them to see reason on that topic; patriotic memes are entrenched very deeply.

Who wrote this and what languages does this person know? The inclusion of Korean speech in the bubble of Chinese language is already highly suspect. Both Japanese and Korean utilize roots from Classical Chinese, analogous to the use of Latin/Greek roots in most European languages, but they are structurally completely different and originated independently. The closest analogy in Europe would probably be something like Hungarian, which uses many of the same Latin/Greek roots as other European languages but has a totally different structure/origin. Including those languages in the bubble of "Latin" or "Greek" would tell me that person knows very little about European languages.

The language/dialect controversy is not that complicated. The distinction is artificial. There is some basis in mutual intelligibility, but this is clinal, so where to put cutoffs is subjective. The cutoffs are generally correlated but can differ between spoken and written language. Written Portuguese is generally more comprehensible to Spanish speakers than spoken Portuguese. Cantonese/Mandarin is just a more extreme version of this, but is only a difference in degree, not in kind. The "Chinese language" is essentially like creating an entity called the "Romance language", of which Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, etc. are "dialects". After all, they also use a shared writing system just with more variation.

China's long history of fracturing looms heavily in their cultural heritage. The government has a vested interest in minimizing any potential source for internal regional conflict and reinforcing the idea of a single, unified China. Having a single national "language" helps tremendously in this regard. Therefore, for largely cultural and political reasons, they push the idea of a "Chinese language", much like a someone who conquered the southern half of Europe might try to push the idea of a "Romance language".

Who wrote this and what languages does this person know?

I drew this diagram in an attempt to understand my coworker's opinions, not necessarily as an endorsement of those opinions.

I am fluent in English and know a fair amount of Latin. He is fluent in Cantonese and Mandarin and mostly intelligible in English.

The inclusion of Korean speech in the bubble of Chinese language is already highly suspect.

Hanja?

The "Chinese language" is essentially like creating an entity called the "Romance language", of which Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, etc. are "dialects". After all, they also use a shared writing system just with more variation.

My coworker's argument is that the Romance languages would be dialects of Latin if they all used the same speech-independent writing system (as they used to when they were called Vulgar Latin)—but they use phonetic writing systems, so they're languages instead.

My coworker's argument is that the Romance languages would be dialects of Latin if they all used the same speech-independent writing system (as they used to when they were called Vulgar Latin)—but they use phonetic writing systems, so they're languages instead.

Your coworker is talking complete nonsense. Hanja use in modern Korean rounds to zero (an approximate analogy might be the use of Roman numerals in modern English) and was historically incompatible with its grammar, hence the development of Hangul. By your coworker's logic, English speech should fall under the Arabic language because we borrow their speech-independent writing system for numerals. Japanese use of Kanji or Korean use of Hanja is basically the same concept, extended from exclusively numerals to about 2000 additional ideas.

To say either Japanese or Korean therefore falls under "Chinese language" is the same kind of idiocy as saying "English is actually Arabic".

Hanja use in modern Korean rounds to zero

He said was referring specifically to the Koreans who live in China. The Wikipedia pages for them (English, Chinese, Korean) don't mention whether they use hanja, but I guess he thinks they do.

Japanese use of Kanji

I didn't say anything about Japanese. He doesn't think that Japanese counts as using the same writing system as Chinese.

He said was referring specifically to the Koreans who live in China.

If he's talking about Yanbian, from Wikipedia:

In Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in China, local newspaper Northeast Korean People's Daily published the "workers and peasants version" which used all-hangul in text, in addition to the existing "cadre version" that had mixed script, for the convenience of grassroots Korean people. Starting on April 20, 1952, the newspaper abolished the "cadre version" and published in hangul only. Soon, the entire publishing industry adopted the hangul-only style.

So effectively no real use of Hanja there either. My understanding is that these people are basically Korean-Mandarin bilingual in the same way as any other linguistic minority.

He doesn't think that Japanese counts as using the same writing system as Chinese.

Now I'm even more confused. His claim is that forms of communications are dialects if they all used the same speech-independent writing system, but doesn't think this applies to Japanese? Japanese speakers are significantly better equipped to understand a cut-paste Chinese written sentence than Korean speakers.

So effectively no real use of Hanja there either.

I'll point out that error to him tomorrow.

Now I'm even more confused.

Well, maybe I'm misremembering. I asked him about his views on Mandarin and Cantonese today, but we discussed Japanese many months ago. I'll ask him about Japanese again tomorrow. But he may just reiterate that I can't properly understand the situation without learning Chinese, as he told me today when I tried comparing Serbo-Croatian (a speech-first language with two different writing systems that may eventually diverge into two different languages) to Chinese (a writing-first language with two different speech systems that may eventually diverge into two different languages).

Tomorrow edit: Direct quote: (exasperated but smiling) "Stop discussing things that you don't even know what it means!" [sic]

Tomorrow edit: Direct quote: (exasperated but smiling) "Stop discussing things that you don't even know what it means!" [sic]

So basically he realizes he was full of shit and isn't happy with being called out. It's not often that something sounds so stupid it lives rent-free in my head for more than a day, so congrats to him I guess.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats