Mandarin Carries the Wails of a Violated Chinese Language!
2006/8/15 13:29:56
Although this ID is a Beijinger, I have never found the Beijing dialect pleasant to the ear. As everyone knows, the Beijing dialect derives from the official speech of the Qing dynasty, and it differs greatly from the orthodox Chinese of the great Tang dynasty. For example, from classical poetry we know that orthodox Chinese had entering tone characters (rusheng). In northern dialect systems, entering tone characters have essentially disappeared — a permanent historical scar inflicted by the Yuan and Qing dynasties. Yet these tones have been completely preserved in Cantonese, Wu dialect, and other southern Chinese languages. To put it harshly: Mandarin, built upon the northern dialect system, carries the wails of a violated Chinese language! Not to mention the tragic history that lies behind it!
The entering tone is one of the most important criteria for measuring the orthodoxy of Chinese. Entering tone characters are the essence of the Chinese language. A language without entering tones completely loses the distinctive rhythm of Chinese. The entering tone fills speech with vitality. In a sense, the temporary decline of the cultural vitality of the Chinese nation bears a certain symbolic relationship to the disappearance of the entering tone. This point becomes easy to appreciate intuitively if you simply read classical poetry aloud using pronunciation that includes entering tones — classical poetry read in Mandarin loses all its flavor!
The current Mandarin based on the Beijing dialect has completely failed to preserve this most admirable element of the Chinese language, and this is itself a historical accident. When Sun Yat-sen and his colleagues held their vote to decide the so-called "standard language," because there were more southerners among the delegates at the time, Cantonese should have become the "standard language." But Sun Yat-sen ultimately did not let that happen, in order to accommodate, unite, and — since they were not yet under his control — appease the northern regions. After the founding of the People's Republic of China, the status quo was simply continued. In other words, today's so-called Mandarin is entirely a historical mistake — and history has never been anything more than history.
Clearly, it is necessary to change this situation through legislative procedures. Mandarin based on northern dialects is a historical error. Even if we do not go so far as to legislate the replacement of Mandarin with Cantonese, Wu dialect, or other southern varieties, we should at least consciously reintroduce entering tones and other traditional phonological essences of the Chinese language back into Mandarin. Of course, this is not a process that can be completed in a short time, but it is a necessary one.