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The Languages of China
The description for this book, The Languages of China, will be forthcoming.
355 pages, Hardcover
First published May 21, 1987
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
May 9, 2011
This is a perfectly nice (if dated - 1987) book about exactly what the title suggests and it probably could only appeal to readers like myself who are fascinated by how people speak but aren't linguists or philologists.
If you are a linguist, I think the book is too general as it's more a survey of Chinese languages than an in-depth analysis of any one of them.
And because it was written pre-Tiananmen, pre-fall of the Berlin Wall, pre-Soviet collapse, I don't know how current Ramsey's discussion of the PRC's policies toward minorities is or the status of some of the smaller languages (some of which had only a few thousand speakers in 1987).
While it's not a spell-binding read that will keep you rapt for hours, I did find it fascinating and would recommend it to the interested.
If you are a linguist, I think the book is too general as it's more a survey of Chinese languages than an in-depth analysis of any one of them.
And because it was written pre-Tiananmen, pre-fall of the Berlin Wall, pre-Soviet collapse, I don't know how current Ramsey's discussion of the PRC's policies toward minorities is or the status of some of the smaller languages (some of which had only a few thousand speakers in 1987).
While it's not a spell-binding read that will keep you rapt for hours, I did find it fascinating and would recommend it to the interested.
August 16, 2018
The gold standard for anyone interested in any Chinese language. Concise history, explanations of grammar, social interrelations between different language groups, etc.
July 29, 2014
Ein Land, viele Sprachen
Der konfuzianistische Gedanke des 大同[datong], der "großen Gemeinsamkeit", und die typisch chinesische Fixierung auf die Geschichte, geht so tief, dass Chinesen das linguistische Faktum, dass sie eigentlich ein multilinguales Land sind, nicht anerkennen können. Die Sprache "Chinesisch" wird daher mehr über kulturelle, geschichtliche und politische Faktoren definiert als über linguistische. Besonders faszinierend ist beim "Chinesischen" der Einfluss der Geografie auf die Sprach- und Dialektentwicklung - bei so einem Riesenreich kein Wunder, aber Ramsey arbeitet konsequent und einleuchtend auf, wie Flüsse, Bergketten und Ebenen die Verbreitung von Dialektmerkmalen fördern oder aufhalten.
Manche Rezensenten stört es, dass der vorliegende Text sehr auf diese nicht-linguistischen Faktoren eingeht. Wer schon einmal rein linguistische Lektüre gelesen hat, wird diese neue Perspektive zu schätzen wissen - für Laien sind sprachwissenschaftliche Texte ätzend zu lesen. Für mich waren immer schon die anthropologisch-linguistischen und soziolinguistischen Texte viel spannender als der langweilige Phonetik-, Phonologie- oder Morphologiekrams. Der Laie, der sich für die Sprache "Chinesisch" interessiert, wird dabei nicht überfordert, sondern bekommt einen sehr lesbaren und ausgesprochen erhellenden Einblick geboten.
Aber auch die puristischen Linguisten, die sich dem "Chinesischen" nähern, finden genug Material, insbesondere, wenn es um den sehr interessanten Vergleich des Shanghaier Dialekts, der südlichen Wu-Dialekte, des Minderheitendialekte wie Gan, Min und Hakka, des "Kantonesischen" (Yue) und des nördlichen Standardchinesisch geht.
Die nordchinesischen Minderheiten sprechen dagegen hauptsächlich altaische Sprachen, und dieser Ausflug ist wirklich spannend, da hier auch die unerwartete Frage aufgeworfen wird, wie die Minderheiten mit ihren vom Chinesischen völlig anderen Sprachen je hätten die chinesische Schrift, die für agglutinierende Sprachen ja komplett ungeeignet ist, annehmen können. Kein Wunder, dass sie sich eher den alphabetischen Schreibformen, insbesondere der arabischen und der kyrillischen, zugewandt hatten.
Besonders faszinierend fand ich die Erklärung des allgegenwärtigen, vielseitigen und jeden Lerner verwirrenden Partikels de: Dass es erst seit ca. 1920 die künstliche schriftliche Unterscheidung in 地, 得 und 的 gibt hat mich sehr überrascht, denn nirgends in meinen Kursen wurde je auf diese erstaunliche Tatsache hingewiesen. Auch das fanqie-System war mir unbekannt - wirklich interessant, dass ich mir nie Gedanken gemacht hatte, wie man jemand die Aussprache eines chinesischen Zeichens schriftlich (ohne Pinyin!) mitteilen konnte. Auch findet man eine Erklärung, woher die mit dem heutigen Ortsnamen eigentlich wenig zu tun habende seltsame deutsch/englische Form "Peking" herkommt - also viele spannende Themen, die es in diesem tollen Buch zu entdecken gilt.
Der konfuzianistische Gedanke des 大同[datong], der "großen Gemeinsamkeit", und die typisch chinesische Fixierung auf die Geschichte, geht so tief, dass Chinesen das linguistische Faktum, dass sie eigentlich ein multilinguales Land sind, nicht anerkennen können. Die Sprache "Chinesisch" wird daher mehr über kulturelle, geschichtliche und politische Faktoren definiert als über linguistische. Besonders faszinierend ist beim "Chinesischen" der Einfluss der Geografie auf die Sprach- und Dialektentwicklung - bei so einem Riesenreich kein Wunder, aber Ramsey arbeitet konsequent und einleuchtend auf, wie Flüsse, Bergketten und Ebenen die Verbreitung von Dialektmerkmalen fördern oder aufhalten.
Manche Rezensenten stört es, dass der vorliegende Text sehr auf diese nicht-linguistischen Faktoren eingeht. Wer schon einmal rein linguistische Lektüre gelesen hat, wird diese neue Perspektive zu schätzen wissen - für Laien sind sprachwissenschaftliche Texte ätzend zu lesen. Für mich waren immer schon die anthropologisch-linguistischen und soziolinguistischen Texte viel spannender als der langweilige Phonetik-, Phonologie- oder Morphologiekrams. Der Laie, der sich für die Sprache "Chinesisch" interessiert, wird dabei nicht überfordert, sondern bekommt einen sehr lesbaren und ausgesprochen erhellenden Einblick geboten.
Aber auch die puristischen Linguisten, die sich dem "Chinesischen" nähern, finden genug Material, insbesondere, wenn es um den sehr interessanten Vergleich des Shanghaier Dialekts, der südlichen Wu-Dialekte, des Minderheitendialekte wie Gan, Min und Hakka, des "Kantonesischen" (Yue) und des nördlichen Standardchinesisch geht.
Die nordchinesischen Minderheiten sprechen dagegen hauptsächlich altaische Sprachen, und dieser Ausflug ist wirklich spannend, da hier auch die unerwartete Frage aufgeworfen wird, wie die Minderheiten mit ihren vom Chinesischen völlig anderen Sprachen je hätten die chinesische Schrift, die für agglutinierende Sprachen ja komplett ungeeignet ist, annehmen können. Kein Wunder, dass sie sich eher den alphabetischen Schreibformen, insbesondere der arabischen und der kyrillischen, zugewandt hatten.
Besonders faszinierend fand ich die Erklärung des allgegenwärtigen, vielseitigen und jeden Lerner verwirrenden Partikels de: Dass es erst seit ca. 1920 die künstliche schriftliche Unterscheidung in 地, 得 und 的 gibt hat mich sehr überrascht, denn nirgends in meinen Kursen wurde je auf diese erstaunliche Tatsache hingewiesen. Auch das fanqie-System war mir unbekannt - wirklich interessant, dass ich mir nie Gedanken gemacht hatte, wie man jemand die Aussprache eines chinesischen Zeichens schriftlich (ohne Pinyin!) mitteilen konnte. Auch findet man eine Erklärung, woher die mit dem heutigen Ortsnamen eigentlich wenig zu tun habende seltsame deutsch/englische Form "Peking" herkommt - also viele spannende Themen, die es in diesem tollen Buch zu entdecken gilt.
May 4, 2019
The Languages of China
This book is a goldmine of information, and I expect I will have to read it several times to absorb everything. It is the book that I wanted "The Story of Writing" (on the history of writing) and "A billion voices" (on the history of language reform in China) to be. Most of everything that I found lacking in those two books I found in this one.
Although ostensibly a book on the various Chinese languages, the scope of the book is actually much broader. Since the Northern Chinese languages have been influenced by Mongolian and related languages (called the "Altaic" family of languages) while the southern languages have been influenced by those of southeast Asia, the book includes a discussion of these languages as well. Since the writing systems of those languages have in turn been influenced by middle eastern and Indian writing systems, these are also discussed, making the scope of the book broader still. Also, the discussion of the book is not limited to language, but also discusses the histories of the speakers of each language and how this relates to the evolution of the language.
One of the things I found particularly fascinating in this book was a discussion of how various writing systems evolved and moved around the world. This is what I was hoping "The Story of Writing" would be about - instead that book spent most of its time either talking about the process of deciphering various dead languages, or else misrepresenting Chinese. As I had suspected, the writing systems in Thailand and Cambodia are indeed considered to be Indian in origin. What is more interesting, however, is the story of the Mongolian and Manchu writing systems. These writing systems both come from the Uighur (the Muslim minority in Northwest China currently being put into internment camps by the CCP), who in turn borrowed them from the middle east. The Uighur territory is located around the midpoint between the middle east and the Chinese heartland along the silk road. Although the Uigher had been exposed to Chinese characters much earlier than they were exposed to middle Eastern writing, they chose the latter. According to the book, this is because it is very awkward to express Altaic languages using Chinese characters because the grammar is so different. Japan (which is sometimes considered a member of the Altaic family) managed to do this, but only with great difficulty and the result is a writing system that is possibly the most complicated in the world. I'm curious to understand why it is so awkward to express Japanese using Chinese characters, so I've decided to learn (some) Japanese and see for myself.
Another thing I enjoyed in this book was a discussion of how the grammar of Southern Chinese languages such as Cantonese differs from that of Mandarin. Some of the differences amount to nothing more than word order, and are things I noticed when I did my experiment on trying to read Cantonese without having any knowledge of the language. One example is that in Mandarin, modifiers come before the thing they modify, but in Cantonese, it is the other way around. Here are a few examples from the book. For each example, we first write the sentence in grammatically correct English. Then, the first three rows are Cantonese spelt phonetically, Cantonese written in Chinese Characters, and then a word for word English (grammatically incorrect) translation. Rows 4 to 6 then do the same for Mandarin.
Example one: "He gave me three books"
koi pei sam pun su ngo
他給三本書我
he give three volume book me
ta gei wo san ben shu
他給我三本書
he give me three volume book.
Example two: "Did you eat rice?"
nei sik fan m sik?
你吃飯不吃？
you eat rice not eat?
ni chi bu chi fan?
你吃不吃飯？
you eat not eat rice?
Example three: "He is taller than me"
koi kou kwo ngo
他高過我
He tall pass me
ta bi wo gai
他比我高
He compare me tall
Examples one and two, once written using characters, differ only in the order of the characters (and hence the meaning is fairly easy for someone fluent in written Mandarin to guess). Example three, which is actually something that came up in my experiment, is not so simple, however is also fairly easy to guess correctly (and I did so). Reading Cantonese written in Chinese characters with no knowledge of Cantonese but a decent knowledge of Mandarin is similar to reading the word for word English translations and guessing as to their meaning. "He tall pass me" and "He compare me tall" sound strange, but it isn't a huge stretch of the imagination to guess the meaning "he is taller than me".
Another thing I enjoyed about this book was a reasonably in-depth discussion of the logic behind the simplified Chinese characters introduced in mainland China by the Communists. By "logic" I mean "how each simplified character was derived from the corresponding traditional characters" - not "why character simplification is a good thing to do". This is something I have been curious about for some time and which "A billion voices" did not describe in sufficient detail.
The book is, however, a bit dated - it came out when I was two years old. Some of its claims are no longer accepted by experts - for example, the "Altaic family of languages" is apparently no longer accepted as a real language family. In a few places, the age of the book was humorous - for example "Just as the people of East Germany and West Germany will probably never be reunited, so the Mongolians...".
This book is a goldmine of information, and I expect I will have to read it several times to absorb everything. It is the book that I wanted "The Story of Writing" (on the history of writing) and "A billion voices" (on the history of language reform in China) to be. Most of everything that I found lacking in those two books I found in this one.
Although ostensibly a book on the various Chinese languages, the scope of the book is actually much broader. Since the Northern Chinese languages have been influenced by Mongolian and related languages (called the "Altaic" family of languages) while the southern languages have been influenced by those of southeast Asia, the book includes a discussion of these languages as well. Since the writing systems of those languages have in turn been influenced by middle eastern and Indian writing systems, these are also discussed, making the scope of the book broader still. Also, the discussion of the book is not limited to language, but also discusses the histories of the speakers of each language and how this relates to the evolution of the language.
One of the things I found particularly fascinating in this book was a discussion of how various writing systems evolved and moved around the world. This is what I was hoping "The Story of Writing" would be about - instead that book spent most of its time either talking about the process of deciphering various dead languages, or else misrepresenting Chinese. As I had suspected, the writing systems in Thailand and Cambodia are indeed considered to be Indian in origin. What is more interesting, however, is the story of the Mongolian and Manchu writing systems. These writing systems both come from the Uighur (the Muslim minority in Northwest China currently being put into internment camps by the CCP), who in turn borrowed them from the middle east. The Uighur territory is located around the midpoint between the middle east and the Chinese heartland along the silk road. Although the Uigher had been exposed to Chinese characters much earlier than they were exposed to middle Eastern writing, they chose the latter. According to the book, this is because it is very awkward to express Altaic languages using Chinese characters because the grammar is so different. Japan (which is sometimes considered a member of the Altaic family) managed to do this, but only with great difficulty and the result is a writing system that is possibly the most complicated in the world. I'm curious to understand why it is so awkward to express Japanese using Chinese characters, so I've decided to learn (some) Japanese and see for myself.
Another thing I enjoyed in this book was a discussion of how the grammar of Southern Chinese languages such as Cantonese differs from that of Mandarin. Some of the differences amount to nothing more than word order, and are things I noticed when I did my experiment on trying to read Cantonese without having any knowledge of the language. One example is that in Mandarin, modifiers come before the thing they modify, but in Cantonese, it is the other way around. Here are a few examples from the book. For each example, we first write the sentence in grammatically correct English. Then, the first three rows are Cantonese spelt phonetically, Cantonese written in Chinese Characters, and then a word for word English (grammatically incorrect) translation. Rows 4 to 6 then do the same for Mandarin.
Example one: "He gave me three books"
koi pei sam pun su ngo
他給三本書我
he give three volume book me
ta gei wo san ben shu
他給我三本書
he give me three volume book.
Example two: "Did you eat rice?"
nei sik fan m sik?
你吃飯不吃？
you eat rice not eat?
ni chi bu chi fan?
你吃不吃飯？
you eat not eat rice?
Example three: "He is taller than me"
koi kou kwo ngo
他高過我
He tall pass me
ta bi wo gai
他比我高
He compare me tall
Examples one and two, once written using characters, differ only in the order of the characters (and hence the meaning is fairly easy for someone fluent in written Mandarin to guess). Example three, which is actually something that came up in my experiment, is not so simple, however is also fairly easy to guess correctly (and I did so). Reading Cantonese written in Chinese characters with no knowledge of Cantonese but a decent knowledge of Mandarin is similar to reading the word for word English translations and guessing as to their meaning. "He tall pass me" and "He compare me tall" sound strange, but it isn't a huge stretch of the imagination to guess the meaning "he is taller than me".
Another thing I enjoyed about this book was a reasonably in-depth discussion of the logic behind the simplified Chinese characters introduced in mainland China by the Communists. By "logic" I mean "how each simplified character was derived from the corresponding traditional characters" - not "why character simplification is a good thing to do". This is something I have been curious about for some time and which "A billion voices" did not describe in sufficient detail.
The book is, however, a bit dated - it came out when I was two years old. Some of its claims are no longer accepted by experts - for example, the "Altaic family of languages" is apparently no longer accepted as a real language family. In a few places, the age of the book was humorous - for example "Just as the people of East Germany and West Germany will probably never be reunited, so the Mongolians...".
July 20, 2007
S. Robert Ramsey's THE LANGUAGES OF CHINA is a survey originally published by Princeton University Press in 1987. China is an immense country with a rich linguistic heritage, and it is a challenge to cover even the basics adequately in a mere 340 pages. Ramsey does an admirable job, and this student of historical linguistics was thrilled to see such attention paid to the diachrony of many languages mentioned within.
The "Chinese language", the set of mutually unintelligible dialects belonging to Han people and descended from a relatively recent common ancestor, is by far the most widely-spoken in China, and Ramsey dedicates the first half of the book to it. He begins with a presentation of the historical debate over Han linguistic unification, with the northern dialects winning out over southern dialects like those of Shanghai and Guangdong. Since Mandarin has, for better or worse, been taken as the standard, it is the phonology, morphology, and syntax of Mandarin that Ramsey describes as representative of the entire language. Ramsey clearly wrote for a non-specialist audience, as he tries to debunk older Western myths that Chinese is somehow a "primitive" language due to its lack of inflection. The grammar of Mandarin here is splendidly full for just a few pages, though the debate over the use of the particle "le" isn't mentioned.
Ramsey's coverage of Chinese isn't, however, purely synchronic, for he also devotes space to the earlier stages of the language. He begins with an explanation of the Qieyun rhyming dictionary, the document compiled by Lu Fayan that, in spite of its faults, is our only useful source for the pronunciation of Middle Chinese. Ramsey then gives a colourful presentation of the life and work of Berhard Karlgren, the Swedish scholar who, by applying the comparative method to modern Chinese dialects, worked towards a phonetic reality for the mere algebraic relationships of the Qieyun dictionary. But this is not mere blind adulation, Ramsey does acknowledge Karlgren's faults and lists the younger scholars who followed him and improved on his theories. Ramsey also briefly mentions Old Chinese, the reconstruction of which is quite uncertain, and talks about some of the important changes from Middle Chinese to modern Mandarin.
The second half of the book deals with the many non-Han languages of China. First is the "Altaic family" spoken in the north of China, the Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic languages that may or may not be a valid genetic grouping, but which have significant typological similarities. Here again Ramsey gives abundant space to diachronic issues, showing how various modern languages each differ from their common ancestor. Writing systems, too, are covered. The languages of the south come next, including the Tai, Tibeto-Burman, Miao-Yao, and Mon-Khmer families, as well as unclassified or isolated languages. The story of how these languages have fared under Han domination is a major theme of the book.
If you have little bit of Mandarin under your belt (and you don't need a lot) and are interested in the linguistic diversity of this part of the world, THE LANGUAGES OF CHINESE is worth seeking out. This is especially true for historical linguistics curious about China. I can only wonder why it hasn't been reissued.
The "Chinese language", the set of mutually unintelligible dialects belonging to Han people and descended from a relatively recent common ancestor, is by far the most widely-spoken in China, and Ramsey dedicates the first half of the book to it. He begins with a presentation of the historical debate over Han linguistic unification, with the northern dialects winning out over southern dialects like those of Shanghai and Guangdong. Since Mandarin has, for better or worse, been taken as the standard, it is the phonology, morphology, and syntax of Mandarin that Ramsey describes as representative of the entire language. Ramsey clearly wrote for a non-specialist audience, as he tries to debunk older Western myths that Chinese is somehow a "primitive" language due to its lack of inflection. The grammar of Mandarin here is splendidly full for just a few pages, though the debate over the use of the particle "le" isn't mentioned.
Ramsey's coverage of Chinese isn't, however, purely synchronic, for he also devotes space to the earlier stages of the language. He begins with an explanation of the Qieyun rhyming dictionary, the document compiled by Lu Fayan that, in spite of its faults, is our only useful source for the pronunciation of Middle Chinese. Ramsey then gives a colourful presentation of the life and work of Berhard Karlgren, the Swedish scholar who, by applying the comparative method to modern Chinese dialects, worked towards a phonetic reality for the mere algebraic relationships of the Qieyun dictionary. But this is not mere blind adulation, Ramsey does acknowledge Karlgren's faults and lists the younger scholars who followed him and improved on his theories. Ramsey also briefly mentions Old Chinese, the reconstruction of which is quite uncertain, and talks about some of the important changes from Middle Chinese to modern Mandarin.
The second half of the book deals with the many non-Han languages of China. First is the "Altaic family" spoken in the north of China, the Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic languages that may or may not be a valid genetic grouping, but which have significant typological similarities. Here again Ramsey gives abundant space to diachronic issues, showing how various modern languages each differ from their common ancestor. Writing systems, too, are covered. The languages of the south come next, including the Tai, Tibeto-Burman, Miao-Yao, and Mon-Khmer families, as well as unclassified or isolated languages. The story of how these languages have fared under Han domination is a major theme of the book.
If you have little bit of Mandarin under your belt (and you don't need a lot) and are interested in the linguistic diversity of this part of the world, THE LANGUAGES OF CHINESE is worth seeking out. This is especially true for historical linguistics curious about China. I can only wonder why it hasn't been reissued.
June 16, 2024
Imagine marching orders at the dawn of World War I being issued to British troops in the Latin of Marcus Aurelius, and you may understand just how different literary Chinese was from its spoken varieties at the beginning of the twentieth century. Now, however, modern Mandarin is one of those most widely spoken languages in the world, with more native speakers than Spanish and English combined. S. Robert Ramsey’s The Languages of China (henceforth Languages) is a history and survey of the many languages spoken in China, including Mandarin.
The Beijing dialect was selected as the modern literary standard, somewhat surprisingly, by vote. Despite protests from southerners in China that only their dialects reflected the subtleties of Tang-era poetry, northerners outnumbered them enough to choose their own vernacular as the official language in 1913. The Communists retained and entrenched Mandarin as the “common language” (pǔtōnghuà) after 1949, and Zhou Enlai proclaimed an official set of standardised, simplified Chinese characters to be used in newspapers and taught with Mandarin pronunciation in schools throughout southern China.
Among other Chinese languages, only Cantonese maintains a distinct cultural centre of gravity. Cantonese evaded simplification, and retains several features no longer found in Mandarin -- certain final consonants (-k, -m, -p and -t), the placement of the direct object before the indirect ("I gave the fruit to my mother" rather than "I gave my mother the fruit", which is incorrect in Mandarin), and three additional tones. Shanghainese is particularly interesting. It retains final glottal stops (imagine Cockneys saying "little bottle"), as well as the final nasal (imagine, permitting a stereotype, French laughter). Shanghainese also has the consonant -v and many more vowel sounds than Mandarin, and may remind the reader of Vietnamese.
Ramsey also introduces the reader to non-Chinese languages. Fascinatingly, Uyghur inverts the mechanics of vowel harmony found in other Turkic languages: vowels in Uyghur words change to match their suffixes, rather than the other way around ("children" and "brethren" are useful approximations in spoken English). Ramsey describes the versatile h’Phags-pascript, invented by a Buddhist monk to fit the many languages of Yuan Dynasty China, as well as the hieroglyphic symbols of the Naxi people, used until relatively recently as pronunciation aides and mnemonics for traditional storytelling.
Despite the lack of either an introduction or a conclusion, and the exclusion of Tibetan, Languages has much to offer would-be China linguists. It has, however, aged imperfectly since publication in 1987. Ramsey refers to Radio Peking, which was renamed again at least twice before this reviewer was born, and he writes wistfully of Shanghai's pre-revolutionary heyday as an international city. Finally, on China's minority language policies, Ramsey writes, “even today local cadres in places like Xinjiang are probably wary of pushing strict adherence to the rules for fear of precipitating political unrest.” Perhaps the changes in the China of Ramsey's experience, and how it now treats its minority peoples, can be humourlessly captured in the Latin we abandoned so long ago: draco dormiens nunquam titillandus.
The Beijing dialect was selected as the modern literary standard, somewhat surprisingly, by vote. Despite protests from southerners in China that only their dialects reflected the subtleties of Tang-era poetry, northerners outnumbered them enough to choose their own vernacular as the official language in 1913. The Communists retained and entrenched Mandarin as the “common language” (pǔtōnghuà) after 1949, and Zhou Enlai proclaimed an official set of standardised, simplified Chinese characters to be used in newspapers and taught with Mandarin pronunciation in schools throughout southern China.
Among other Chinese languages, only Cantonese maintains a distinct cultural centre of gravity. Cantonese evaded simplification, and retains several features no longer found in Mandarin -- certain final consonants (-k, -m, -p and -t), the placement of the direct object before the indirect ("I gave the fruit to my mother" rather than "I gave my mother the fruit", which is incorrect in Mandarin), and three additional tones. Shanghainese is particularly interesting. It retains final glottal stops (imagine Cockneys saying "little bottle"), as well as the final nasal (imagine, permitting a stereotype, French laughter). Shanghainese also has the consonant -v and many more vowel sounds than Mandarin, and may remind the reader of Vietnamese.
Ramsey also introduces the reader to non-Chinese languages. Fascinatingly, Uyghur inverts the mechanics of vowel harmony found in other Turkic languages: vowels in Uyghur words change to match their suffixes, rather than the other way around ("children" and "brethren" are useful approximations in spoken English). Ramsey describes the versatile h’Phags-pascript, invented by a Buddhist monk to fit the many languages of Yuan Dynasty China, as well as the hieroglyphic symbols of the Naxi people, used until relatively recently as pronunciation aides and mnemonics for traditional storytelling.
Despite the lack of either an introduction or a conclusion, and the exclusion of Tibetan, Languages has much to offer would-be China linguists. It has, however, aged imperfectly since publication in 1987. Ramsey refers to Radio Peking, which was renamed again at least twice before this reviewer was born, and he writes wistfully of Shanghai's pre-revolutionary heyday as an international city. Finally, on China's minority language policies, Ramsey writes, “even today local cadres in places like Xinjiang are probably wary of pushing strict adherence to the rules for fear of precipitating political unrest.” Perhaps the changes in the China of Ramsey's experience, and how it now treats its minority peoples, can be humourlessly captured in the Latin we abandoned so long ago: draco dormiens nunquam titillandus.
October 16, 2021
Comprehensive & expertly written. Some negligible typos.
很好，Robert 老师。
很好，Robert 老师。
August 5, 2012
An awesome tour-de-force on all things linguistic and Chinese. It edifies both on how linguists think and do, and on the history of Chinese as both a (collection of related) languages and as a script central to Chinese and neighboring civilizations. Further, its almost equally deep discussions of the languages of the other peoples in the PRC (excluding, unfortunately, Tibetan... why not?) are equally eye-opening. I did not know that there exist so many distinct and indistinct peoples in south China, let alone that some have their own ancient scripts. Even the most obscure scripts are presented with actual text examples, and both phonetic and semantic translation. Most excellent.
April 21, 2012
Not bad as an introduction to the languages of Chinese (language history, "dialects" as well as minority languages), but also a bit shallow. One gets a mere superficial overview of these languages, but not more. On the other hand, Ramsey seems to prefer talking more about the sociolinguistical and historical as well as ethnological factors, rather than the languages themselves. So you get to know more about the history of the speakers than about their languages themselves. It's okay as an introduction, but don't expect much linguistic facts from it; most things are only mentioned, but not elaborated at all. Also note, that it's already a bit outdated.
March 24, 2015
This book is completely engrossing. I knew next to nothing about the history of Cantonese and it's place among the "dialects" of Chinese. Nor was I really aware of the roles played by geography, politics, and cultural influences in shaping a language or even in a language's classification. The writing is concise and lucid; and much of it is accessible to laymen.
January 31, 2012
Excellent introduction to Chinese and the other languages of China.
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