Chinese languages

Hi Ah-bin: thanks for the info. I will pm you shortly. Foochow is full of in-migrants and yes a lot of local families chose to speak to their children in Mandarin. It is kind of sad to see that a whole generation of Foochow kids becoming monolingual in heavily accented Mandarin. Still, I'm puzzled b...

Hi Mark: In Foochow the language is still alive. People above 40 use it extensively (e.g. on the streets and among friends/family members). I got the impression that it is the kids from rich family and city center that have lost the dialect. My friend told me speaking Hokciu was considered "bad...

It's an off-topic but I guess it's not totally irrelevant. After all Foochow is the capital of Hokkien :lol: Hopefully some of you guys are also interested and will shed some lights. Just took a short trip to Foochow and had been fascinated with the Hok-ciu language. Although more heavily influenced...

Hi everyone! I just got back from my Thanksgiving vacation. Seems like everybody has been busy. SimL: Thanks for your nice words. I agree that it's common for people to think their own lives as normal and boring. It's just that I always consider lives of oversea Chinese (esp Malaysian Chinese) to be...

Maybe an "Arabic"-type solution would've been best: a "reconstructed" "Classic Chinese" language could've been fabricated and installed as a pan-Sinitic lingua franca. In practice, people would've tended to use it as little as possible, and local languages would've bee...

Hi Mark, Great to know your interesting background! One of my good friends from college was from KL. He speaks Cantonese natively but always claimed Mandarin was his mother tongue, and he just "picked up" Cantonese from his family. I think it has to do with the Chinese education in MSia (h...

This implies that Sino languages are somehow inherently superior to Tungusic languages. I'd also support any "retroactive prevention" :lol: of Mandarin becoming THE national language of China, but not b/c it somehow went to seed after being Tungusicized. That kind of reasoning is "me...

Hi SimL, Glad to know that my post stimulated more discussions in this forum. I am trying read to a few old threads everyday. But frankly speaking my Hokkien isn't up to the level to understand many details, but I do enjoy the high-level discussions and interesting stories you guys told. Is this the...

Hi Ah-bin, Thanks for joining the discussion. I look forward to learning more from you! >>I also wanted to welcome Ransek along. It's so rare and wonderful to find any PRC Chinese who cares much about their local language, let alone the languages of other areas enough to go into a detailed study of ...

Hi Mark, Thanks for the books you recommended. I will look them up once I got time. And I read your post on Penang Hokkien. Very interesting and informative. As for the video clip of 宋慶齡's speech, it is more like a "literary reading" largely in her native Wu but still there was some mixing...