[KS] Re: Se habla Han'gul?

[Robert Ramsey]

You're probably right that I was oversimplifying a bit.  In any case, I 
didn't mean to make a point about a difference between Chinese usage and 
Korean usage (really, just the opposite).  
	But now that you raise the issue, those other Chinese words you 
meantion really are a bit different, it seems to me.  When speaking to 
foreigners, Chinese do use "Guoyu" or "Putonghua" in the broader sense of 
"Chinese" (that's your point, right?); however they really refer to the 
standard language as opposed to some "dialect". I guess in that usage 
there's an unspoken assumption that the standard is the only kind of 
Chinese a foreigner would ever learn to speak; but I also wonder if the 
usage doesn't represent an extension of what the Chinese might ask other 
Chinese from a different part of the country. In any case, a foreigner in 
Korea would certainly never get asked if they speak <p'yojunO> (or 
<kugO>--though that word means something quite different from Chinese 
Guoyu).  
	I personally have never heard "Zhongguohua" used except in some of 
my beginning Chinese classrooms; is that word really still used in China? 
(I just asked a Chinese colleague of mine about this word, and he told me 
something interesting: he says that "Zhongguohua" is sometimes used to mean 
Mandarin, as opposed to Cantonese--which, he says, is not considered 
Zhongguohua!  Thus, if what he says is right, all of these words are ways 
of differentiating the standard from dialect.) 
	As for Hanyu, that word has a rather literary flavor that's used 
pretty widely in writing.


On Fri, 28 Jan 2000 10:16:48 John Ohnesorge <ohnesorg at law.harvard.edu> wrote:

> Robert Ramsey wrote: 
> 
> >Young-Key: You're quite right.  The colloquial Chinese word for spoken 
> >Chinese is _Zhongwen_, even though it literally means the Chinese written 
> >language (it's the only word I myself can ever recall hearing in the 
> >context 'Do you speak Chinese?', for example).
> 
> I think this is a bit of an overstatement.  "Zhongwen" is used this way,
> but so are "Guoyu," "Putonghua" and "Zhongguohua."  What I've almost never
> heard is "Hanyu," ie. language of Han Chinese, a term which I believe was
> championed by the PRC in an attempt to be a bit p.c. by differentiating
> that language from the languages of other ethnic groups within China's
> borders.  My impression is that it was a failure.  For those of us who
> began learning Chinese at universities which used textbooks from Beijing,
> this was one of the pieces of useless knowledge that we could delete from
> our memories as soon as we got to China.
> 
> I raise this for two reasons (not to nit-pick).  First, I don't think
> Chinese is dramatically less complex than Korean with regard to different
> ways to say the same thing.  Second, the fact that the attempt to impose
> "Hanyu" and other socialist phrases in China ultimately failed might have
> parallels in the North Korean context, but then again it might not.  It
> might provide an interesting lens through which to compare the ambitions
> and effective reaches of those two governments.
> 
> John Ohnesorge

----------------------
Robert Ramsey
sr1 at umail.umd.edu



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