Language Log

David Moser saw this photograph of a child's essay via Twitter:

[This is a guest post by Stephan Stiller.]

This post complements Robert Bauer and Victor Mair's previous LL post titled "Spoken Hong Kong Cantonese and written Cantonese" and addresses, among other things, J. Marshall Unger's comment in the corresponding thread. Please have a look.

Having just returned from a month of living and teaching (in Chinese) on the Mainland (in other words, receiving an intensive dose of Putonghua), I was struck by how different Taiwan Guoyu *sounds* in this video.  It's about a subject that is dear to my heart:  the medieval caves at the Central Asian site of Dunhuang with their magnificent wall-paintings and multitudinous medieval manuscripts.

Of course, Taiwan Guoyu (National Language, i.e., Mandarin) is still basically the same language as Putonghua (Modern Standard Mandarin [MSM]) on the mainland, but the sounds and a lot of the words and typical expressions are somewhat different (judging not merely from this one short video, but from other samples, both written and spoken, as well).  And, of course, the script has radically diverged.