niuc wrote:
It is interesting, for better or for worse, that Hokkien people, unlike Cantonese, usually are very pro-Mandarin... And since most Hokkiens nowadays do understand Mandarin, usually they don’t care much about preserving their own language.
My opinion is that the pro-Mandarin stance adopted by many native Hokkien speakers stems from the
written word. Allow me to qualify my statement: Compared to Hokkien, the Cantonese dialect is lexicon-wise and grammatically closer to Mandarin. As a result, native Cantonese speakers have less of a problem mapping Chinese characters to their corresponding Cantonese pronunciations. No doubt, Hong Kong media has had a role to play in this, too. Let the lyrics flowing from Cantonese karaoke subtitles demonstrate that even non-Cantonese native speakers have no problems reading (or should I say, singing) songs word-for-word what are essentially Mandarin-grammar lyrics.
By contrast, mapping characters to Hokkien pronunciations becomes more of a psychological barrier today for the Hokkien dialect. The problem, as I see it, is four-fold:
1. Hokkien is relatively more distant from Mandarin's lexicon and grammar than Cantonese.
2. The Minnan dialects in general have the added complication of a much higher proportion of
文讀/白讀 couplets, making mapping even more difficult for those not trained to read in Hokkien.
人 jin/lang being one classic example.
3. Hokkien has a large proportion of words that have no cognate in Chinese characters -
ta-po (man),
cha-bo (woman) and
bue (need) being just three simple examples.
4. Lack of media support (though, this is gradually changing, with the increase in Taiwanese TV serials).
To illustrate (2) and (3): How many colloquial Hokkien speakers off-the-street today would be able to rattle the phrase
男女平等 as
lam-lu-p'eng-teng, and not something along the lines of
ta-po cha-bo pae...and they'll probably read
等 as
tan). And yet it would come so naturally to a Cantonese to say
laam-loei-p'ing-dang.
To further illustrate my point on how many native Hokkien speakers today are ignorant of Chinese characters being readable in Hokkien: A friend from Singapore, and a native Hokkien himself, once told me that the only way to write in Hokkien was in some cabalistic script that resembled Japanese! I was not as informed about Chinese dialects then as I am today (and here, I must qualify my statement by stating that I am still nowhere close to being an expert!), or I would have told him that what he probably saw were none other than the
bopomofo symbols used by Taiwanese to indicate the pronunciation of Hokkien words that they could not find the Chinese characters for.
As the saying goes, the easiest way to avoid a problem is to simply ignore it. And so, the native Hokkien speaker today conveniently dismisses Hokkien as an 'unreadable' dialect that is so alien to Mandarin, the form of Chinese that he has been taught to read and write in. And who in his/her right mind would root for an 'unreadable' dialect over a 'readable' one? From there, it spirals into a vicious cycle, where Mandarin is seen more-and-more as the language of the educated, and Hokkien descends to the levels of being equated to some sort of ghetto-originated creole. Fast-forward a couple of generations, and who, then, would know or even believe that once upon a time, Hokkien was used to recite Tang poems?
In a previous thread (
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=4021), I tried to address this issue of how best to educate people in the Hokkien dialect. But here, I will openly admit that I had a hidden agenda in also trying to steer the thread in the specific direction of how best to educate people
to read in the Hokkien dialect
using Chinese characters.
As languages evolve, they affect one another, and invariably absorb the best of each other's features. Cantonese in Hong Kong has evolved today, in no small part because by the adoption of the Mandarin model as the written standard, it facilitated the absorption and adoption of Modern Mandarin vocabulary that emerged from technological and commercial jargon of the last century, thus allowing it to evolve alongside Mandarin as a result (to a certain extent, this evolution also took place with the Shanghai dialect). Hokkien, however, suffered this disadvantage of not being able to get on-board the mainstream of evolution in the Chinese language as a whole. I have little doubt that had Taiwan not suppressed Hokkien in the years between 1949 to the 1990's, the evolution of Hokkien would not have been as stunted as it is today.
