klortho (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} klortho) wrote,@ 2007-08-28 23:50:00 |
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Min Nan
Pinyin Info is a great site about the Chinese family of languages and writing systems. The author (Mark Swofford) maintains a blog, and in his most recent post, he points to a paper, originally published in 1991, that has just been made available online, Linguistic Nationalism: The Case of Southern Min. The topic is the Min Nan language (or topolect, if you prefer), and the politics surrounding its use, and it is a fascinating read. It focuses primarily on Taiwan, but the author also mentions Xiamen (where I live) occasionally.
The paper is fascinating, but it's a little disorganized, and it lacks a clear focus. If you decide to read the paper, let me clear up one thing that might be confusing if you're not already familiar with this topic: Min Nan is the local language that is spoken in Xiamen and neighboring areas. There are several other names for it, which all mean more-or-less exactly the same thing: "Southern Min" ("Nan" in Chinese means "South"); "Taiwanese", "Hokkien"; and "Xiamen (or Amoy) Dialect".
There are a number of things that captured my attention in this paper, that I'll briefly summarize here.
Within Min Nan itself, there is a distinct literary, or written form. Historically this was the prestige dialect within Min Nan, but nowadays, it is getting replaced by Mandarin, leaving only the spoken (vulgar) form still in use. This literary form involved using different words for some meanings, and also divergent pronunciations of other words. What's interesting here is that if one uses Chinese characters to write Min Nan, there is no way to indicate the correct pronunciation of words, and so it would be impossible to differentiate between the literary and spoken forms. He mentions:
Perhaps the most interesting part of the paper though is his description of the politics surrounding Min Nan on Taiwan, and, in particular, the repression of the language by the KMT after they took control of the island in 1945. Particularly after 1949, when the KMT government still had aspirations of taking back control of the mainland, the use of Min Nan was associated with separatism, and was repressed. In an ironic parallel, both the PRC on the mainland and the KMT on Taiwan promoted Mandarin over Min Nan in an effort to "reify ‘Chinese culture’as a monolithic entity".
Another point that he makes very clear is that Chinese characters are not ideally suited to writing Min Nan, in particular, spoken Min Nan:
Pinyin Info is a great site about the Chinese family of languages and writing systems. The author (Mark Swofford) maintains a blog, and in his most recent post, he points to a paper, originally published in 1991, that has just been made available online, Linguistic Nationalism: The Case of Southern Min. The topic is the Min Nan language (or topolect, if you prefer), and the politics surrounding its use, and it is a fascinating read. It focuses primarily on Taiwan, but the author also mentions Xiamen (where I live) occasionally.
The paper is fascinating, but it's a little disorganized, and it lacks a clear focus. If you decide to read the paper, let me clear up one thing that might be confusing if you're not already familiar with this topic: Min Nan is the local language that is spoken in Xiamen and neighboring areas. There are several other names for it, which all mean more-or-less exactly the same thing: "Southern Min" ("Nan" in Chinese means "South"); "Taiwanese", "Hokkien"; and "Xiamen (or Amoy) Dialect".
There are a number of things that captured my attention in this paper, that I'll briefly summarize here.
Within Min Nan itself, there is a distinct literary, or written form. Historically this was the prestige dialect within Min Nan, but nowadays, it is getting replaced by Mandarin, leaving only the spoken (vulgar) form still in use. This literary form involved using different words for some meanings, and also divergent pronunciations of other words. What's interesting here is that if one uses Chinese characters to write Min Nan, there is no way to indicate the correct pronunciation of words, and so it would be impossible to differentiate between the literary and spoken forms. He mentions:
in Xiamen for example that the local television station had begun to broadcast news announcements in the literary register of Southern Min, though apparently the news announcer frequently had to consult a senior linguist at the University in order to learn the correct literary Southern Min pronunciation of characters.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the paper though is his description of the politics surrounding Min Nan on Taiwan, and, in particular, the repression of the language by the KMT after they took control of the island in 1945. Particularly after 1949, when the KMT government still had aspirations of taking back control of the mainland, the use of Min Nan was associated with separatism, and was repressed. In an ironic parallel, both the PRC on the mainland and the KMT on Taiwan promoted Mandarin over Min Nan in an effort to "reify ‘Chinese culture’as a monolithic entity".
Another point that he makes very clear is that Chinese characters are not ideally suited to writing Min Nan, in particular, spoken Min Nan:
Characters appeared to be associated too strongly with Mandarin to be widely useful, and it was noted that many Southern Min vocabulary items have no written form. Cheng estimates that 70% of the lexical items of Taiwanese are shared with Mandarin (1985a:353), and could thus presumably be written with the same characters; this leaves 30% non-shared lexical items for which characters would have to be coined.
