Talk:Taishan dialect

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[edit] Sounds almost like a hybrid of mandarin and cantonese

So i speak a lil taishanese and it almost sounds like a mix between mandarin and cantonese/ And then a korean man said that he can understand taishanese. Is this true?

Hey Matt C.

[edit] Revision Comments

I've copy edited the article a bit. The most noticeable is the change from "Toishanese" (Cantonese) to "Hoisanese" (Taishanese) throughout article. It seems unnecessary to use Cantonese as intermediary. I also changed the 1st person plural "ngoik" to the more correct "ngoi" in the sysnotpic table. The final guttural ("k") appears only in the 2d and 3d person plural pronouns. Szekar

[edit] Transcription

I'd love to avoid edit wars over transcriptions. Is there any definitive transcription (other than IPA) for Toisanese? We've gone through at least two rounds of edits and reversions over the transcription for ɬ (as in "lhaam"). --Waitak 03:13, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] equating Hoisanese to Siyi

Subset and superset are not equal, you cannot say mammals and animals are the same. See also Talk:Taishan Kowloonese 00:59, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] ngoi

I don't know who keeps changing "ngoi" to "ngoik". I don't know which accent this occurs in, but I have never heard "ngoik". I have added a reference (Deng 2000) to support changing "ngoik" back to "ngoi". Please do not change it back if you have no reference to support it.

Deng has also published a dictionary on two varieties of the Siyi dialects, one from Kaiping and one from Taishan.

Aaron Lee 02:30, 10 September 2006 (UTC)

Is this yours? Waitak 04:05, 10 September 2006 (UTC)

I did put this site up several years ago when I was an undergrad at UCLA. The paper has undergone many revisions since, and I have also moved onto more careful, more well researched and more experimentally-based work. I do not consider it to be a good resource on the Taishan dialect. The best research on the Taishan dialect has been done by Deng Jun, who is a retired professor in Changsha (Hunan). Aaron Lee 02:25, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

Fair enough. On the other hand, though, I think that your work is about the only thing on the Web on Taishanese. I wonder if some of his work could be made available on the Web? Are you in touch with him? (Et comment ça se fait que tu parles autant de langues? :-) Waitak 02:55, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Thanks for the updates

I was the original creator of the article. It wasn't very good, as it was one of my earlier articles and wasn't as well researched as it should have been (and I lost Taishanese fluency somewhere in my childhood). I started it with the hope that others would see it, be interested, and maybe pick things up from there. But nice to know that other interested editors are picking up the burden and improving the article with better information. A hearty thanks to ye!--Yuje 06:00, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Lhaam

An anonymous editor has reverted the text on the use of the voiceless alveolar lateral fricative in Taishanese a couple of times now, with some rather strong criticisms of the existing description, but not much in the way of an alternative. They give the impression that they understand what this sound is in Xhosa and other languages (Welsh and Tigrinya also use it), and that the sound in Taishanese is somehow different. Is that true? The actual description of the sound that this person gives is a fairly good layman's description of exactly the sound described in the text that they've deleted. That gives me the impression that they don't really know what the ɬ sounds like, but have somehow decided that it can't be the same sound as in Taishanese. I'm having a lot of trouble understanding why. I'd suggest that you go read the description of "ɬ", and maybe listen to a recording of it if you can find one, and then see if you still think that it's different.

Could I ask, please, that the person who's disagreeing so strongly either:

Give a linguistically sound explanation of what the sound is in Taishanese, including the symbol in IPA, and why it's different from the corresponding sound in all of the other languages, or
Stop changing the text

It's just not good enough to say "You don't know anything and you're all wrong," sorry. Aaron, or others with a lot of linguistics, would you mind weighing in with an opinion from a linguistically informed point of view? Waitak 05:18, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

The first sound in "lhaam" (three) is a voiceless lateral fricative. There are different ways to transcribe the lateral fricative. In linguistic studies, the symbol "ɬ" is most commonly used, but this symbol is not often used in standard orthographies, and one cannot deny that it would be a pain for most people to type "ɬ" using a typical keyboard. The most well-known approach is with "ll" as is done in Welsh. In many languages, among them the Muskogean languages Chickasaw and Choctaw, this sound is written as "lh". In many other languages, notably the Nguni languages, this sound is written with "hl". Author Rev Jack Ong has told me that he used "thl" for this sound. All of these different spellings are equally valid.

I personally prefer "lh" because it conforms to the generalization that "h" always appears second in a digraph, as in "sh" or "ch". This is also the digraph used by Deng Jun in his Taishan and Kaiping dictionaries. Now, this is not to say that all generalizations should be upheld. The digraph "hl" better captures the phonetic fact that the lateral fricative is produced with frication with a lateral approximant release. And the digraph "thl" even better captures the phonetic fact that the lateral fricative is dental in the Taishan dialect. Both of these phonetic properties of the Taishan dialect are discussed by Maddieson and Emmory (1984).

Maddieson, Ian and Karen Emmory. 1984. Is there a valid distinction between voiceless lateral approximants and fricatives? UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics 59.

Aaron Lee 08:39, 16 June 2007 (UTC)

This has to be a contender for "longest delay between a question and an answer, particularly for a rock solid, informative answer." Thanks, Aaron! :-) While I'm here... is there a difference between voiceless alveolar lateral fricative and voiceless lateral fricative? And am I reading your response correctly as correcting my usage of the former in preference of the latter? Waitak 16:44, 16 June 2007 (UTC)

Using "voiceless lateral fricative" is simply a more general term that is probably the more appropriate claim. Inserting "dental" or "alveolar" makes a more specific claim about the place of articulation that might not be supported by articulatory studies. Most lateral fricatives are assumed to be alveolar, but Maddieson and Emmory (1984) note that in the Taishan dialect this sound is actually a "voiceless dental lateral fricative". Now, this is not to say that "voiceless alveolar lateral fricative" is wrong -- there are probably Taishanese speakers who have a voiceless alveolar lateral fricative, or even vary between using an alveolar and dental version. So in short, using the shortened "voiceless lateral fricative" is more appropriate because it makes the strongest and also least debatable claim; the initial sound in "lhaam" is voiceless, it is a fricative and it is lateral. Aaron Lee 19:36, 16 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Mutual intelligibility?

The current version claims that Standard (Guangzhou) Cantonese and Taishanese are mutually unintelligible. Is it possible to be more precise about the degree of intelligibility? Because I am sure that even an uninitiated Guangzhou Cantonese speaker can pick up bits of a conversation in Taishanese. Perhaps a comparison of Guangzhou Cantonese & Taishanese's degree of intelligibility with that between the Ukrainian, Belarussian, and Russian languages or between Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian languages might be in order? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 128.100.148.206 (talk • contribs • WHOIS) 13:49, 28 January 2007.

From the article:

"Often regarded as a single language, Hoisanese can also be seen as a group of very closely related, mutually intelligible subdialects spoken in the various towns and villages in and around Siyi (the four counties of Taishan, Enping, Kaiping, Xinhui). It is said one can tell the speaker's village or town from his or her accent and vocabulary."

and

"Hoisanese is often mistakenly regarded as similar to mainstream Cantonese, but the two are largely mutually unintelligible."

That's about it. It's a bit contradictory. Since there are several subdialects of Hoisanese a comparison can't really be made. Maybe a bit weasel worded, but there are (I'm not sure how many) native speakers of several subdialects who will argue that Hoisanese and Cantonese basically the same thing. Squids'and'Chips 02:49, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

There is a linguistic study that reported native Cantonese speakers had only 31.3 percent intelligibility of a recording in the Taishan dialect. This number can be compared to the less than 10 percent intelligibility that Cantonese speakers had for Hakka, Chaozhou and Xiamen dialects. The fact that Cantonese speakers understand less than half of what they heard in the Taishan dialect strongly suggests that these two dialects are not "the same thing".

Szeto, Cecilia. 2000. Testing Intelligibility Among Sinitic Dialects. Proceedings of ALS2K, the 2000 Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society.

Aaron Lee 08:11, 16 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Nomenclature: Hoisanese, Toisanese, Taishan Dialect, ... ?

I was about to revert all "Hoisanese" to "Taishan dialect" (see Talk:Taishan_dialect#Revision Comments), but doing so would not solve the fact that there is general disagreement over the nomenclature. Some sort of general agreement should first be reached. The argument for using "Taishan dialect" is based on the naming conventions, which say:

In general, Chinese entries should be in Hanyu Pinyin. Exceptions would include:

When there is a more popularly used form in English (such as “Taoism”)
When the subject of the entry is likely to object to romanization in pinyin

I am willing to accept that there are more popularly used forms in English other than "Taishan dialect", and I mention one below (Toisanese); however, "Hoisanese" is not one of them. The term "Hoisanese" remains faithful to the native pronunciation, but this term fails to be used in the literature. Furthermore, while one may claim that "Hoisanese" stays true to the native speech, we cannot deny that it is a novel term insomuch as it is the novel Anglicization of a native term. It will be difficult to provide documented evidence that "Hoisanese" is the most popular way that native speakers or others refer to their speech -- precisely because it is not.

While certain individuals might object to the Pinyin romanization "Taishan", there is no documented evidence to show the population's general objection to such romanization. The popular term "Toisanese" is apparently more common in spoken English than in published work, where "Taishan dialect" is predominant. I suggest that we follow the trend set in numerous publications over the last century and use "Taishan dialect". Below is a summary of what the literature has used.

The term "Llin-nen" appears in the oldest Western reference on the dialect. It refers to the previous name of Taishan: Xinning.

Don, Alexander. 1882. The Llin-nen variation of Chinese. China Review 11: 236–247.

The term "Taishan dialect" (or a similar variant including "T'ai-Shan") is likely popularized by the trend towards the usage of Mandarin Pinyin. Most publications use the term "Taishan dialect" both within and outside of the field of linguistics. The list below includes several Chinese-language publications, but even if these are omitted, then the number of Western publications that use "Taishan" still exceeds all others; this is list not exhaustive. It is worth noting that Cheng (1973) is perhaps the most widely cited in modern linguistic work on the dialect:

Bao, Xiaolan. 2001. Holding Up More Than Half the Sky: Chinese Women Garment Workers in New York City, 1948-92. University of Illinois Press.
Chao, Yuen-Ren. 1951. Taishan Yuliao. Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Philology (Academia Sinica) 23: 25–76.
Chen, Matthew Y. 2000. Tone Sandhi: Patterns Across Chinese Dialects. Cambridge University Press.
Chen, X.-W. 1966. Taishan Fang-yen Te-shu Bian-diao Chu-tan. Zhongguo Yu-wen 1: 34–36.
Cheng, Teresa M. 1973. The Phonology of Taishan. Journal of Chinese Linguistics 1,2: 256–322.
Liang, Z. and H. Morooka. 2004. Recent Trends of Emigration from China: 1982-2000. International Migration 42 (3), pp. 145-164.
Szeto, Cecilia. 2000. Testing Intelligibility Among Sinitic Dialects. Proceedings of ALS2K, the 2000 Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society.
Wang, Yiman. 2005. The Art of Screen Passing: Anna May Wong’s Yellow Yellowface Performance in the Art Deco Era. Camera Obscura 60, 20 (3).
Yiu, T’ung. 1946. The T’ai-Shan Dialect. Ph.D. Dissertation, Princeton.
Yu, Alan C. L. to appear. Understanding near mergers: The case of Morphological tone in Cantonese. Phonology 24 (1).
Zhan, Bohui & Yat-Shing Cheung (eds.) 1990. A survey of dialects in the Pearl River Delta vol. 3: a synthetic review. Hong Kong: New Century Publishing House.

On the other hand, the term "Toishan (dialect)" might be preferred as it was once the convention used by the United States Post Office. It appeared most recently in internal publications of the United States Census, 2000, which are available online for download. I have a feeling that most speakers of the dialect (yours truly included) would not prefer to use "Toishan". This term can be found in the following sources:

DLI. 1964. Chinese-Cantonese (Toishan) Basic Course. Washington, DC: Defense Language Institute.
Hom, Marlon Kau. 1983. Some Cantonese Folksongs on the American Experience. Western Folklore 42 (2), pp. 126-139.
Lee, Gina. 1987. A Study of Toishan F0. Ohio State University Working Papers in Linguistics 36: 16–30.
Light, Timothy. 1986. Toishan Affixal Aspects. John McCoy and Timothy Light (eds.), Contributions to Sino-Tibetan Studies. Leiden: Brill, 415-25.
McCoy, John. 1966. The Phonology of Toishan City: A Chinese Dialect of Kwangtung Province. (PhD Dissertation, Cornell.)

The term "Toisanese" seems to have a stronger appeal among native speakers than it does in written work. The argument against its use as the main term in the article is that "Toisanese" only marginally used in the literature:

Eng, Nancy. 1995. Lexical Tone in Non-Fluent Chinese-Speaking Aphasics. PhD Dissertation, City University New York.
Pon, Gordon. 2000. The Art of War or the Wedding Banquet? Asian Canadians, Masculinity, and Antiracism Education. Canadian Journal of Education 25 (2), pp. 139-151.

Lastly, the term "Taishanese" was used in the following two publications. I have a feeling it was used elsewhere as well:

Him, Kam Tak. 1980. Semantic-Tonal Processes in Cantonese, Taishanese, Bobai and Siamese. Journal of Chinese Linguistics 8,2: 205–240.
Hsu, Madeline Y. 2000. Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration between the United States and China, 1882-1943. Stanford University Press.

Aaron Lee 07:59, 16 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Hoisanese and Cantonese

I was sad to read that Hoisanese lost a great number of speakers recently. I know that this is because many of the speakers are gone now and their children or grandchildren cannot speak the language. This saddens me that so many speakers are lost just because the language was not passed down. I wish that the language would be passed on. I am the only person in my whole school who can speak Hoisanese whose parents are not from post-communist China. Everyone I know who speaks Hoisanese has a pinyin lastname, signifying their post-communist China status. I wish that there were more like me who are interested in learning the language, but sadly in America knowing English is what will get one around. Therefore, I have always felt that America is essentially the one killing Hoisanese. Along with the strong influence from Hong Kong in Hoisan, I am afraid of Hoisanese's fate. Even one of my friends who was born in Hoisan told me that she likes Hong Kong; whenever I speak Hoisanese to her she scoffs at it. How can people hate their own kind? Sometimes I feel like Hoisanese people who are not in Hoisan are the only ones who care about the language. It seems like Hoisanese people in China do not care about the language. I am happy that there are so many efforts to save Hoisan language. It makes me feel better that Hoisan will not give way to Cantonese. However, when I speak Hoisanese, I feel as if there is a sacred bond between me and the person I am speaking with. I have never seen a non-Hoisanese person speaking it. Hoisanese is almost like a secret language to me, which only another fellow Hoisan person would understand. One of my friends says that he could not learn it if he wanted to because he grandma does not want him to learn. He said it is because she wants to keep what she says a secret. No matter where you go though, there will always be people with different opinions, and Hoisan people are no exception. My advice to everyone here is to speak Hoisanese to everyone you know and to try to expand it. If Hoisan had a television channel or some movie or CD in the native dialect, it would be preserved better and maybe more popular. I am waiting for the day that Hoisan has a television channel or some type of media. Until then, my mission will never end though.

I talked with a demographer at UCLA who told me that there are actually more Taishanese speakers in North America today than in 1965. But with the number of Chinese in America today at over 20 times the 1965 population, this means that Taishanese make up only a small fraction of the Chinese American community, which is why it feels like it is dying out. Most Taishanese speakers in the United States are first and second generation Taishanese Americans, not third or fourth generation (like yours truly). Such attrition in native speakers is not unusual. Almost all of the younger Taishanese speakers are immigrants or children of immigrants who arrived in North America in the last twenty years; according to Chinese American community organizers on the East and West Coast, these newer immigrants now make up the majority of the Taishanese speakers in North America. In China I found a certain amount of pressure against speaking Taishanese, but while there were no television shows, there were indeed radio programs. When I mentioned the feeling of many overseas Chinese -- that Taishanese is dying out -- I was laughed at. While I can imagine that in 100 years this might be the case, Taishanese is today nowhere near a dying language. If one takes the conservative estimate that 75% of all people in Taishan speak Taishanese, then this large number of speakers means that there are still more speakers of Taishanese than of more than half of the world's languages. That's a lot! (In the future, you should also sign your post.) Aaron Lee 14:19, 14 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Cantonese speakers unable to understand Hoisanese

I find that part of the article interesting. Up to when I was 3½ years old, I lived with my mother's side of the family on the East Coast of the US. 90% of my relatives there were native Hoisanese speakers, so naturally, I picked up the language very quickly in addition to my Cantonese. However, I moved to the West Coast, where my father's side of my family lived. My father's side of the family speaks standard Cantonese, and goes back many generations in Guangdong. As I have lived with my father's side ever since, I have lost my ability to speak Hoisanese. However, when my mother talks with her mother on the phone in Hoisanese, I can understand everything she says, despite my inability to speak it. My father, having never learned Hoisanese, cannot understand a word my mother says.

[edit] Is Toishanese spoken in Hainan?

Are there Toishanese speakers in Hainan Province? Someone should provide evidences. Sonic99 (talk) 00:52, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Taishan (Taicheng) Dialect Summary

I am sorry that I've been MIA for the longest time, leaving much of the page incomplete. I have been meaning to fill out information with the work of Deng Jun on the Taicheng 台成 dialect, but at least for now, work is consuming much of my spare time. You may not have access to his dictionary, but I invite the rest of you to look at his online posts for yourselves, and maybe you can use this info to help boost the quality of this page (http://seiyip.guoho.cn/viewthread.php?tid=142&extra=page%3D1). Although I would have of course included references to other works as well, most of my updates would follow Deng Jun's analysis, which is the most thorough description of Taishanese to date in my opnion. Aaron Lee (talk) 01:00, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Yip 2002

What's currently note 7 in the article points to a reference (Yip2002) that's not in the reference list. Could someone who knows what it's meant to refer to please either supply the reference or delete the note? Thanks! Waitak (talk) 14:27, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

That was my fault. I just added the reference, along with the other missing references. Sorry about that! Aaron Lee (talk) 22:48, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, Aaron! And thanks for all of the great work you've done on this article over the years. It's really appreciated. Waitak (talk) 12:41, 20 April 2008 (UTC)