[KS] Se habla Han'gul?

[John Ohnesorge]

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


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