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We've just been through the problems of standard language versus the vernaculars in Arabic (see "Selected readings" below).  Now we're going to look at a photograph, a caption, a book review, and a letter to the editor that encompass these contentious issues in spades — but for Chinese.  Here's the photograph:

Nothing wrong with the photograph.  The students in Chennai, India did a respectable job of lining up to form these three characters:  Xí Jìnpíng 习近平.  The problems start with the caption provided for the photograph by the editors of the Wall Street Journal letters to the editor section where it appeared on 3/9/22:

Students sit in a formation that reads "Welcome" in Mandarin at a school in Chennai, India, October 10, 2019.  (Photo: Reuters)

I dare say that nearly every Language Log reader will quickly catch the gross error in the caption.  But the mistakes in the letter to the editor and in the original book review only compound that of the caption.

Here's the letter to the editor:

"China’s Long Road to Mandarin:  It took Mao’s authoritarianism to impose linguistic conformity."  WSJ (March 9, 2022)

Regarding Hugo Restall’s review of “Kingdom of Characters” (Bookshelf, March 2): The Beijing dialect, known in the West as Mandarin, was voted by the Kuomintang to be the guoyu, or national dialect, in 1932. Since then, an effort has been made to unify the dialect for everyone. But there are hundreds of local dialects in China, and Mandarin couldn’t replace them no matter how hard the Nationalists tried. This changed only after Mao took over, with a uniquely authoritarian government. Today, the Beijing dialect is spoken by most Chinese.

The First Emperor of the Qin Dynasty unified the written language. It took a long time—around 2,200 years—for the spoken dialect to follow.

 Kathleen Yang

All this talk of "the Beijing dialect", "the dialect", "national dialect", "local dialects", and "spoken dialect" is nauseating.  Not one word about "language" except in relation to writing.  You can see whence the problems and the prejudices arise.  The blatant misconceptions in the letter to the editor — privileging of writing over speech and disdaining all topolects except a single politically powerful one (never mind that it differed radically through time and space depending upon who was on top at a given moment) —  also exist in the review it is commenting on, and indeed in the book being reviewed:

"‘Kingdom of Characters’ Review: Strokes of Genius:  Many believe Mandarin to be a language of the future, but it was once considered a stumbling block to Chinese modernization."  By Hugo Restall, WSJ (March 1, 2022)

The caption accompanying the photograph illustrating the review is also seriously misleading:

Learning Mandarin on an iPad.  (Photo: Alamy)

Ugggh!

See if you can spot at least one flagrant falsity in the caption.

Here's a short, simple, straightforward, easy, elegant corrective:

• David Moser, A Billion Voices: China's Search for a Common Language (Penguin, 2016)

And here's a lengthier, more challenging account of what happened with regard to the Sinitic languages and topolects during the 20th century:

• S. Robert Ramsey, The Languages of China (Princeton, 1987)

There is probably no subject on earth concerning which more misinformation is purveyed and more misunderstandings circulated than Chinese characters (漢字, Chinese hanzi, Japanese kanji, Korean hanja) or sinograms.
–Victor Mair
from the foreword to Ideogram, by J. Marshall Unger

Quoted on the homepage of http://www.pinyin.info/

Selected readings

• "Arabic and the vernaculars" (3/6/22)
• "Arabic and the vernaculars, part 2" (3/8/22)
• "Arabic and the vernaculars, part 3" (3/9/22)
• "Arabic and the vernaculars, part 4 — the case of Bible translations" (3/10/22)
• "Language is not script and script is not language" (1/23/22) — there are countless other LL posts that deal with the problems of spoken versus written language, languages versus dialects, and related issues.

[Thanks to Mark Metcalf]

March 12, 2022 @ 9:57 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Dialects, Language and computers, Language and the media, Language teaching and learning, Standard language, Topolects, Writing systems

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