Speaking in Hong Kong and Shanghai

I'm sitting in the airport right now on my way back to Beijing from Hong Kong. One thing I find to be quite interesting about Hong Kong is that, when I'm here, I can always relate to Mainlanders who come here and can't communicate with people. Today I spoke with two Mainlanders who speak English. We could relate to each other very well as we spoke about how taxi drivers here understand neither English or Mandarin, so we're left writing out characters for them to figure out what we mean.

I'm not often in a place where I'm surrounded by a language I can't understand, but when I am I get an overwhelming urge to learn it. Yesterday I was in Shanghai and got to hear lots of Shanghainese around me, which made me wish I knew more. I can pick out some things in both Cantonese and Shanghainese, but I'm certainly not at a point of having any meaningful communication in either.

But I can say that if somewhere down the line I find myself in either of those cities for a longer stint, which, I would say, is not entirely unlikely, I'm definitely going to squander some of my free time in an effort to learn the local tongue.

Why do we call Japan "Japan"?

Kelly of Aspiring Polyglot left this comment on my earlier post about how to say "China" in Russian and Japanese:

Would you happen to know why we call Japan 'Japan' and not Nihon or Nippon?

This is one that I dug up a long time ago because I wondered the same thing.

The kanji for "Japan" are 日本. They respectively mean "sun" and "origin", or together "origin of the sun". This is of course from the perspective of China, to the East of which Japan lies in the same direction as where the sun rises. That's also where English gets "land of the rising sun" from, which is simply a more nuanced translation of the characters than "origin of the sun".

Read more...The word in Japanese is pronounced Nihon or, with a bit more emphasis or formality, Nippon. Nihon is actually a relatively recent shortening of Nippon, which in turn is a shortening of the readings of the two characters following normal character combination rules. 日 can be read nichi or jitsu in this case, and nichi is preferred here, while 本 can be read as hon. Typically, when two character are adjacent to each other in a single word, the first ends in chi or tsu, and the second starts with h-, the chi or tsu is dropped, the consonant doubled (or っ is added for all of you who are beyond romaji), and the h- becomes a p-. You thus get Nippon. You can also see the pattern in, e.g., ippon (一本, いっぽん, "one long, slender object") combining ichi and hon, or in happyaku (八百, はっぴゃく, "eight hundred") combining hachi and hyaku.

Once I had figured all this out when I was first studying Japanese, I thought I had figured out where "Japan" came from as well; obviously people had just used the other reading for 日 at some point, i.e., jitsu, which would have resulted in a reading of Jippon, and that's only a linguistic hop, skip and a jump away from "Japan".

As it turned out, I was on the right track but not quite there.

Nihon and "Japan" ultimately share the same etymological roots, but the path to the English word isn't very clear. It's believed that it came to English via one of the Chinese dialects' pronunciation of the characters 日本. It's these same pronunciations that likely supplied both the j in jitsu, and in "Japan", so my guess was a wee bit too high in the etymological tree.

Marco Polo called Japan "Cipangu", which, in Italian, would be pronounced like "Cheepangoo". (The gu is from the Chinese character 国, meaning country or kingdom, and which is currently pronounced guó in Mandarin.) This is thought to have come from a Wu dialect like Shanghainese. The Portuguese also brought words like Giapan over to Europe, which ultimately led to the English word. Below are a few of the Chinese dialects that might have been involved and their modern day pronunciations of Japan:

Cantonese	Jatbun
Fujianese	Jít-pún
Shanghainese	Zeppen

Links:
Names of Japan on Wikipedia
Japan in the Online Etymology Dictionary

Languages, dialects, and politics

When you think logically about where to draw a line between a dialect and a language, it would seem that the place to draw the line would be at mutual intelligibility. If the way two groups of people speak is mutually intelligible but somewhat different in pronunciation, word usage, etc., you're looking at two dialects, whereas if those two patterns of speech are not mutually intelligible, you're looking at two languages.

This standard would generally work well as a rule of thumb. American, British, and Australian English would all be dialects, as would the Kantou and Kansai dialects of Japanese, while Spanish and Portuguese would be languages. However, such a division won't always hold true in all languages, and the big example I'm thinking of is Chinese.

Read more...China is a country full of what I, and apparently most linguists, would call languages. They are all for the most part related Sino-Tibetan languages, but as they are generally mutually unintelligible I'd classify them as languages. Indeed, the English of most of these end in the "-ese" suffix, designating them as languages rather than dialects, e.g., Cantonese, Shanghainese, etc. However, in Chinese they are referred to as fāngyán 方言 ("dialects"). When referring to them directly, Chinese will often use the -huà -话 (roughly, "speak") suffix, which usually designates a dialect, e.g., Guǎngdōnghuà 广东话 ("Cantonese"), Shànghǎihuà 上海话 ("Shanghainese"), etc. Other examples of where this -huà -话 is used to designate a dialect are Pǔtōnghuà ("Mandarin", or literally "normal speak") and Měiguóhuà ("American English", or literally "America speak"). In contrast, the suffixes -yǔ -语 and -wén -文 are generally used to designate languages, e.g., Hànyǔ 汉语 ("Chinese", or literally "the Han language"), Zhōngwén 中文 ("Chinese", or literally "the Chinese language"), Yīngyǔ 英语 and Yīngwén 英文 ("English"), etc.

I often compare Chinese "dialects" to the Romance languages. The differences between Chinese dialects and the Romance languages are similar. The spoken word is generally mutually unintelligible, but you'll be able to pick out at a minimum some words and phrases. They all share a vast vocabulary base, although pronunciations often vary to the point of mutual unintelligibility. Grammar is extremely similar, so if you ever do need to learn another, you'll have little problem doing it. If you know one, you can do a pretty good job of reading another. Indeed, the two words above for Chinese emphasize this fact; -yǔ -语 emphasizes the spoken language, and hence is linked with the Han group and how they in particular speak, while -wén -文 emphasizes the written language, and hence is linked with all of China because of how the written language can largely be understood anywhere in China regardless of the dialect you speak.

So why is one called a dialect and the other a language? Although I'd venture that the gap between the Romance languages might be a bit bigger than the gap between the Chinese dialects, it seems to me that history and politics are at the heart of it. Europe has long been divided into countries, each more or less with its own language, stressing the difference. China, on the other hand, for whom national unity has been a long historical struggle and remains a core policy of the government, prefers to stress the oneness of the Chinese language while downplaying the differences that these dialects actually represent. But, if you consider them dialects, then you can make a pretty strong argument that the Romance languages are dialects of Latin. And if you consider the Romance languages to be languages, then, vice versa, you can argue that the Chinese dialects are mostly separate languages as well.

What does a language learner take home from this? If you speak Mandarin, don't think you're going to nail down Cantonese as easily as you'd go from American English to British English just because it's called a dialect. At the same time, don't think that the differences between Portuguese and Spanish are so great just because they're called separate languages. If you really want to know how far two languages/dialects are apart from each other, talk to some speakers of both languages are take a look at some language family trees, which can be found aplenty on Wikipedia.