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2 over lee · Posted: Sat May 17, 2008 12:07 am Post subject:

11:59 wrote

2 over lee · Posted: Sat May 17, 2008 12:16 am Post subject:

so am I right?

Bejing: wo zuo hao le 我做好了

Shanghai: wo zuozuo hao 我做做好

Guaungzhou: wo zuo hao tso 我做好?

Fujian: wo zuo hao e 我做好?

Certainly Hubei is one area I found they spoke a dialect and claimed it to be Mandarin 6, for example would be luo, and liu would sometimes not be understood. I believe Sichuan is anohter area where they think they are speaking Mandarin - but it sounded not much like the Mandarin I heard elsewhere.

2 over lee · Posted: Sat May 17, 2008 12:21 am Post subject:

Or is Guangzhou Mandarin something like: Ngoh zuo ho ahhhhhh!!!!!

Please enlighten

Candoguy · Joined: 09 Apr 2008 Posts: 8

Surfdude18 · Joined: 16 Nov 2004 Posts: 651 Location: China

2 O L, I never heard anyone Wuhanese try to claim their dialect was Mandarin. They seemed to be pretty proud that it was "Wuhanhua"...

2 over lee · Posted: Sat May 17, 2008 11:19 pm Post subject:

right, my point is they would often say 'lou' for six while speaking Mandarin. The would not say 'masi' for shenme shi though, as this is more clearly a wuhanese term. The problem with lou is in their minds they are saying liu.

lumber Jack · Joined: 09 May 2005 Posts: 91 Location: UK/ROK

Just because the people outside what foreign linguists consider the Mandarin native speaking zone do not speak Mandarin very well, it does not follow that there is no Mandarin within that zone. I don't know well about Harbin, but generally in the North East Mandarin is fairly standard, as I said. Shenzhen is an immigrant town, and people speak whatever is suitable at the time, however obviously in many spheres a version of Mandarin - which will often not be a native speakers Mandarin - will be used.

There are all kinds of accents in the UK, and several around the area of London, where RP is centered. However, we still know standard RP when we hear it, we know what we will hear on a British English learners tape. Mandarin is the same.

The Chinese government is responsible for all this confusion, because they refer to many different languages (as well as actual dialects) as dialects of Mandarin. Do not rely on the Chinese government for your information! Thus the people in Wuhan and elsewhere have no idea about the real linguistic situation they are in. They just know that the local dialect differs from the TV to a certain extent, and they refer to the local dialect as my-city-hua.

jwbhomer · Joined: 14 Dec 2003 Posts: 876 Location: CANADA

Candoguy -- Only a Brit would claim that RP is "neutral". Even the BBC is discouraging RP and encouraging various regional accents -- some of them quite grating on the ears -- for the very good reason that RP is perceived as elitist and "posh" by the majority of English listeners. (By "English" I mean residents of England. Ask a Scot or a Welshman what he thinks of RP if you want a real earful.)

lumber Jack · Joined: 09 May 2005 Posts: 91 Location: UK/ROK

That's putting it a bit strongly. The BBC may want to encourage more regional accents, but they wouldn't discourage the standard one, in general.

As we have already established, "neutral" has little meaning.

Anyway, it doesn't really change matters if there are only about 10 speakers of standard Mandarin or BBC English. It is held up as a standard, it isn't "abstract", and it helps ease communication, because people can use it as a touchstone in any inter-regional situation.

As it happens though, NA standard English and standard Mandarin have countless millions of speakers. That's a very big bonus.

arioch36 · Joined: 21 Jan 2003 Posts: 3589

wulfrun · Joined: 12 May 2008 Posts: 167

2 over lee · Posted: Tue May 20, 2008 9:52 am Post subject:

Seriouly I'm still hoping our good friend 11:59 will come back here and answer my above questions - although most of us know the situation on the ground I wouldn't mind learning how academia sees it...

wulfrun · Joined: 12 May 2008 Posts: 167

[quote="Candoguy"]

Kram · Joined: 20 Sep 2005 Posts: 152 Location: In a chair

lumber Jack · Joined: 09 May 2005 Posts: 91 Location: UK/ROK

But the point is that some accents make it hard to communicate with many other speakers - and you don't want all your input to come from a teacher with an accent like that, if possible. (Plenty of students want to avoid sounding low class/weird too, but that's another story).

I worked with a young and not very well educated teacher from Northern Ireland once. I bet no North American could have easily understood him. The poor old Macedonians had a job.

I don't know if 11:59 is giving us the "academic view", since he doesn't appear to have encountered the language map of China before. All right, such a map is a bit arbitrary, but anyway you've got to bear it in mind when making your statements about language in China, I would have thought.

A standard accent, by the way, is generally one that a government or elite of some kind selects and broadcasts all around the place. That makes it well known. Or don't any of you lot watch TV at all? In the places that Britain colonized through a naughty exterminate 'n' replace policy like the US and Australia, there has been a lot of mixing around, and accents/dialects are maybe not varied enough for a standard to be deemed necessary on the TV etc. However if you buy a learners US English tape you will hear what people are referring to as the "neutral accent".