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sjiveru t1_iubumg1 wrote

Reply to comment by mirxia in Eli5: How is it possible for someone to speak English, but not be able to read or write it ? by Aboutfun

> What I'm trying to convey is that there's no such thing as "written Fuzhounese" unless you're trying to be super casual by trying to map what you speak to what you write word for word.

That opens the possibility, though, that your grandmother learned to read at least in part via Mandarin (since I imagine that's how reading is taught), and that's another factor in why she can read Mandarin.

> Out of curiosity, what's your experience with Chinese language?

Not as much direct experience as I'd like, but I'm used to Chinese characters via Japanese and have a master's in linguistics. Chinese languages and Chinese characters have come up a lot in the classes I've taken, and I've done some scholarly reading on them now and again (though it's been a while). I've also studied a bit of Classical Chinese, and briefly tried to learn Mandarin a couple of times.

I actually found I can read Classical Chinese rather more easily than modern Mandarin with just my background in Japanese - Mandarin has a bunch of grammatical function stuff I don't recognise and words that have shifted meaning since they were borrowed into Japanese, but I could read short and simple sentences in Classical Chinese fairly easily even before I started studying it.

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mirxia t1_iubvyx3 wrote

Alright, I don't have an academic background on linguistics, just somewhat interested in it.

I'm a native Chinese from Fuzhou, so I speak Mandarin, Fuzhounese, and I understand about 50% of Hokkien due to my mom and my other grandma. These two are about as far as you can get from Mandarin in that they are completely mutually unintelligible. Yet still, there's a pretty direct mapping from sound to characters in all three dialects that when written, they are not very different in most cases.

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sjiveru t1_iubwhhy wrote

I also think we're talking past each other a bit; you're mostly concerned with the ability to read something already written in whatever language and I'm mostly concerned with the ability to write something new fully in your own language. If you were to try and write a full novel in Fuzhounese with Chinese characters, how would that work? How often would you come across a situation where there's no obvious way to write what you want to say?

Basically the point I'm trying to make is that each Chinese language individually needs a conventional way to use Chinese characters; they don't just automatically work. I'll admit that maybe more of that would overlap with the conventions used to write other Chinese languages that I originally understood to be the case.

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mirxia t1_iuc0avw wrote

There's a more formal way of speaking Fuzhounese that would match onto written Chinese more accurately than the casual way of speaking. So if I were to write a novel, which I assume would be in a more formal form, it actually wouldn't be too different from how Chinese is written currently.

This might be a chicken or egg situation, but during public announcements and such, the announcer would read the document word for word, which you might consider grammatically more Mandarin, and it still makes sense to people who speaks Fuzhounese exclusively, even the illiterate ones. Whether they understand it through exposure or it just make sense fundamentally, I cannot say.

And yes, I was also think we're probably talking past each other a bit. I acknowledge that every dialect has some expressions that cannot be represented faithfully in both meaning and spirit using the standard set of Chinese characters. But in my experience, they are usually the more casual expression unique to the dialect. When it comes to formal speaking, it can usually map onto the written language without much trouble.

My primary argument, considering the comment I was replying to, is that there's a clear connection between sound, character and meaning in all Chinese dialects (barring those special expressions). So much so that if it was written out, maybe the ordering of characters can be a little different in some cases due to grammar, and that some character might be switched to another that still has the same general meaning, it still wouldn't be difficult to extrapolate the meaning of the whole sentence in majority of the cases. In that sense, the dialects share the same script and is mutually telligible when written out in most cases even though the spoken dialects are not.

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