A History of Mandarin: China's Search for a Common Language 

Glad you enjoyed it!

You can't create a definition for "Chinese dialects" without overthrowing western linguistics. Good luck trying to make sense of propaganda.

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@Wesley Kelvin instablaster =)

@Harper Ira i really appreciate your reply. I got to the site through google and Im trying it out now. Takes a while so I will get back to you later with my results.

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China remains as a civilisational country for millennia because of people living on Chinese continent sharing the same writing scripts. Chinese scripts unifies the people and hold the nation.

Most words in most topo--or dialects come from common N orthern/National dialect, current or older. The no. of dialect words is in minority for all. Many dialect words are largely obsolete older N/National in origin + local.pronunciation + tones= dialect use but not dialect origin. Other dialect words are borrowed from others dialects, minority languages or foreign languages. Purely dialect invented words, slang or not, are in a minority.

They are literally 4 different languages not dialects. It's a wrong term to use.

@@sgcl10658 Generally, a language is written as well as spoken, while a dialect is just spoken until it is promoted to the elite status usually for political purposes. In this way mandarin is a language that what you say will be what you write. Others are spoken dialects and cannot be accepted as a formal written language.

@@sgcl10658 As the narrator says, bro... Language is dialect with Navy. Cantonese, Hokkien, they belong to Chinese navy. Portougese is a different language from Spanish because Portugal and Spain have different navies. I like the theory. It is more suitable to say that language is dialect with country. Bayrish is the dialect of southern Getmany, because people from Dusseldorf or Köln in the north, near Holland, won't undetstand it. But Holland is a separate country from Germany, so Dutch is a language, not a dialect, although the language of Holland / Dutch is close to the Koln dialect.....!!

@@augustinepan7991 Language is dialect with nation. I have explained it above....

@@ayi3455 um, no. It must be based on mutual intelligibility. Mandarin, Hokkien, and Cantonese are not; therefore they are separate languages.

Exactly what I was thinking. What's wrong with everyone speaking their regional language alongside a common language? I don't understand how that was even an issue.

what u said about mandarin is only partly true and biaseb, all modern chinese languages are somewhat of a mixture of middle chinese and the local speech. cantonese has a noticeable viet language stratum just like the borrowed tungusic and mongolian words in northern mandarin. shanghainese and min chinese has also many words of baiyue origin.

you can easily proove yourself wrong by reading some vernacular chinese literature in tang and songband yuan dynasty which reflects the midfle mandarin back then

@@TheFelixKang Can you give some examples?

After the Northern Song (959-1126), Mandarin developed based on the dialects of the North China Plain around the capital, it is not Mongolian at all, a lot of people get the history wrong

I think he was talking about the Manchu language when he said Empress Dowger Cixi couldn’t speak it fluently.

Learning characters is actually not difficult, he is just anglocentric

My paternal grandparents were also from 潮汕 region, but my mother's side is Cantonese. My wife is Fujian, mixed with Hakka and Shandong. When it comes to my Children, they will have been the product of so many different regional groups that it's a bit pointless to try and classify them, except to say that they are generally Chinese. In that sense, I think it's enough if they can are fluent in Mandarin.

Southern 'dialects' are actually chinese languages, not dialects.

@@terrytay1774 I fully agree with you that Cantonese, Teochew and others are different languages. I just learn Teochew [an English word found in the Oxford English dictionary] because it is my mother tongue and I have never been schooled in Mandarin. I therefore do not find the language difficult to learn. Apparently, my people i.e. other Teochew people who have been schooled in Mandarin have informed me that learning Teochew is very difficult. I think they try to superimpose Mandarin grammar and sentence structure on Teochew and most of them make the same grammatical errors when writing Teochew.

@@skw3125 Did I write that Teochew people are not Han Chinese? Please show me where I have ever said I am not a Han Chinese? Like you have written, my ancestors came from Central China and we have kept old Chinese and we are very proud of it. It is very wrong of you to put words into other people's mouths when they have not said those things. You are just like the English press, Trump and Pompeo spinning lies. This is very bad indeed! However, I like what Lim LungLung has said 潮洲話唔是土話是古話

Hard to learn

How do you mean in terms of AI? I’ve been wondering something similar

@@serenamorris9701 Chinese characters are at a higher level of cognition. For example if one sees a picture of a tree, one would know immediately what it is, regardless of the word in any language. But If one writes “tree”, one has to sound it out to know that it’s a tree, but only in English. That’s why the same Chinese characters can be used in many languages including Vietnamese that only switched to the Latin script in the early 20th century. Chinese also has pinyin which is a Latin script.

Why do we still have ideograms for numbers as in 1,2,3...etc., while pronunciation of them vary from language to language and yet they manage to keep our salaries paid and taxes levied? That’s the reason behind the standardized, but non unilaterally pronounced character set first proposed by the First Emperor - to promulgate uniform expressions while shielding them from bastardization through distance and time. Han characters are written by thousands of languages within China and outside (northern Myanmar, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, etc) for thousands of years. The ideas that were laid down 2300 years since its standardization are still communicating to us in their unadulterated form, sans the complication of vernacular grammar, which changes like meandering river flows.

@@kenh758 The first empire never standardized on accents. Scripts and speeches aint the same.

@@CannibaLouiST that’s exactly what I said. You pronounce 1, “uno” with an accent mark or not, and I pronounce it “yi” , but that character conveys its meaning unchanged through the stretch of time or border. That Arabic set of numbers is a microcosmic representation of the versatility that’s inherent in Chinese characters.

agree

Hahah I understand but in terms of practicality, simplified is soo much better

@@indubitablyso7874 if you're writing it by hand sure... other than that, it's just redundant.

Not necessarily, a lot of simplified characters have been in use for thousands and hundreds of years as well, some are even older than the traditional forms, and they have their own meanings and stories as well, it's just that they were mainly used in books meant for the common people, that did not afford to learn the official characters. For the rest, they are mainly inspired from calligraphy works or cursive script. Simplified characters are a product of Chinese history and culture as well, and regardless of which one you learn to write, it's worth to recognize a bit of the other as well, because both of them offer information about the language and its evolution.

@@TheEllaSan thanks for the perspective. But not all simplified characters had the lineage or were book inspired for the common people. Some if not most where made by the the govt reforms on the language after the CCP took over.

@@skw3125 Excuse me, did you say : southern Chinese grammar is similar woth Japanese...?? I don't get it. Sorry, my Mandarin is not good. I only have Hsk-3, so I try to scrutinize your stayement. Thank-you....

@@skw3125 Oke, thankyou for your information...

@@ayi3455 he was talking about xeno-sinitic prounciation of chinese characters in japanese(onyomi)

Technically superior but for a diverse country like China, it would have failed miserably. Should 中国 be "Zhongguo", "Junggwok", "Tiongkok", or a dozen other different sounds?

I once tried to study Korean writing a little. I was really surprised, it made sense and was easy to at least get started. In a very short time I could look at a sign (I'd seen it a hundred times before) and see a word, I could say it! I thought it was a work of genius. Superficially looks something like Chinese script (if you're illiterate anyway) but phonetic and easy to read. I once read about "Latinhua" (?), an attempt to regularize Chinese and write it phonetically in Latin characters. I thought "The Koreans already did that work!".

But you will also lose the beauty and information in the Chinese character. I know easy to learn and get a hand on quickly is important for a language system. It is also important not to lose the meaning in character. Simplified Chinese already sacrificed a lot just to be easy and fast in writing.

@@emilygu2840 If we all looked to beauty and information, we will never progress. I will give an example. 1. Metric System (rational > beauty) the metric system that the entire world uses today was thanks to Napoleon Bonaparte and his efforts to standarise rational measurements across Europe. He removed all other arbitrary measurements in favour of a superior and rationalised system. Now, the British imperial system is the only remnant of an arbitrary measurement and is used only in the US. (Liberia and Myanmar are quoted to use it, but only do so in limited circumatnces, they are mostly metric users) everywhere apart fom the US exclusively uses the metric system and look how much better our lives are. Even Americans can understand how annoying it is to deal with the Imperial system, even though it carries on the legacy of British history. If we retain "beauty" because of culture and legacy. Modern science will be very complicated with all the conversions. Beauty is not good enough reason to retain the traditional script. 2. Chinese characters In a way, Traitional Chinese characters are also the same as the metric system in that they are used because Qin Shi Huang Di removed all other scripts in favour of this when he conquered the rest of China. No nonsense with beauty in culture. 3. the purpose of Chinese characters and Mandarin. In modern society, we do not need overly complicated scripts. Learning these complicated Trad scripts is counterintuitive to the purpose of writing - LITERACY. Modern Mandarin doesn't even make sense with its character pronunciation. (工）is gong and (红) is hong, but (江) is jiang !??. It already has no logic. So, you are looking to preserve a script that is ALREADY incompatible with modern Mandarin. Hanzi is a prescriptive script, meaning that it is inflexible and the logic is was created for only works for Classical Chinese and rarely works out when applied in other languages. Just look at Vietnam, Korea, Japan and Mongolia that have already abandoned the Chinese script. To improve Mandarin literacy, I believe our script needs to be rational. So we have no way to make Chinese scipt work with Mandarin unless we change our spoken language back to Classical Chinese or update the script again to be logically compatible with Modern Mandarin. Traditional characters like (蝦) xia are unecessaily long and too small to read on a phone , when simplified characters (虾) xia make more logical sense and is far more intuitive.

@@wongcw08 true, but we are already approaching an age where Mandarin is the de facto Chinese language. IMO, this new system should be applied to Mandarin and Mandarin alone, the other Chinese languages can retain the Trad characters if they want, but the point is that the new script should serve the purpose of improving literacy, not to retain an antiquated and outdated scipt system. A good video by Asia Boss shows that even Mainland Chinese people struggle to write everyday items like (牙膏) toothpaste and (打喷嚏) sneeze

i thought simplify chinese is used in tang dynasty and when ming and qing dynasties they don't use simplify chinese anymore untill under mao,china use simplify chinese again?

A small correction. People who write in simplified Chinese can easily read and understand (not write easily though) traditional Chinese, and vice versa. So the writing system is not actually dividing areas writing in simplified Chinese and areas writing in traditional Chinese, because reading and speaking are not stopped. It is like one of your girl friend have long hair style all the time, but one day changed to a short hair style, or maybe got a Botox, there is different, but you can still easily recognise her.

@@dk.magic.mobile108 no, Simplified Chinese was created under Mao, it was all Traditional before

Obviously you don't know what you are talking about. Most of the characters in the Simplified Chinese retain the exact same characters in Traditional Chinese!

@@Anonymous------ 万 million simplified 萬 million traditional can't really see any similarity or any retainment of it.

yes printing was invented over a millennium ago, around the year 700, in China during the Tang dynasty (618-907), before it spread across East Asia and beyond

笑了，mandarin这词就是明代葡萄牙人起的，胡里改语是阿尔泰语系，跟汉语的关系就像河南跟荷兰的关系。今天连英语那么普及都没法改变汉语的口音，胡里改人何德何能影响汉语口音。mandarin意为官员说的话，而官话是朱元璋搞得，取的是当年明首都南京官话，是金陵官话和洛阳雅言的混，跟满人有p的关系。

@@skw3125 因为官话是明代搞得，压根就不是拿来读几百年前的古诗的。无论粤语吴语乃至北方方言都各自保留了古汉语的方言，说因为胡人影响丢入音的就不能滚去学学蒙古语和胡里改语吗？这帮草原上的土人语言里有巨量的复杂入音，要真受它们影响那今天普通话里入音应该更多。汉藏语族丢入音是传统艺能，藏语丢入音也tm是受胡人影响？还有神tm李世民3/4鲜卑人血统，李世民一家除了李世民外婆她爸宇文泰是鲜卑人其他都是汉人，宇文泰还是个汉人和鲜卑人的混种，哪来的3/4？“夷狄,禽兽也,畏威而不怀德 。”--李世民，建议胡杂多看看秦王和他的好基友魏征的名言警句再来谈李世民是不是胡人，欺负死人不会说话？某些胡杂真是比南朝鲜宇宙人还无耻。

@@skw3125 ​ @ZM Wei “彼狄夷贱种,皆人面而兽心,强则侵寇,弱则卑伏,不侍恩义,特以威服之耳。” --李世民 人秦王都明着骂你们了，要点脸行吗？胡里改人在被汉人收留前天天被朝鲜人欺负，是不是混了太多南朝鲜宇宙人的血？你们那胡杂蛮语都没几个人会说了，胡人就乖乖学点胡语，别整天偷普通话，多影响汉鞑团结。

@@skw3125 别tm南方人北方人了，蒙古人跟色目人跑路的时候几乎把北方汉人杀光了，元末全北方各省除了山西，汉人加起来还没江淮地区一省人多，连福建广东都被色目人屠了大半，明初大移民加去除胡尘腥膻，才使得华夏文明得以在北方延续。建议了解下明初庞大的堕民贱民哪来的，圈地阉童阉的都是谁，黄河以北的蒙古村落去哪了，黄河以南的蒙古人是怎么被赶进云南山沟沟里的。敢取蒙古名字的贬为奴，敢用蒙古服饰的处绞，蒙古人禁止族内嫁娶。在朱称帝前，红巾军破城必屠内城，蒙古色目鸡犬不留。除了部分蒙奸，汉人对蒙古人的报复是彻底的，至于你说的什么狗屁吐蕃人和其他乱七八糟的胡杂，早tm在元初就被蒙古人杀光了。唐代诗人？原文是河湟不是黄河，夷狄老传统了老是喜欢瞎改汉人的典籍，真是沐猴而冠。安史之乱后，吐蕃趁乱攻入萧关，入侵甘肃宁夏，神tm黄河地区，安史之乱平定后，汉人怎么对胡人的你要不要了解下？别说胡人了，就是吃个胡饼都要被老百姓打死，胡人权贵写墓志铭都不敢说自己是胡人，怕被抄家。你们这些胡杂，华夏文明好的东西没学到，阿q精神倒是学了不少，乐观开朗。

@@skw3125 说不过就开始民族团结？你要真团结早tm干吗去了？污蔑汉族的时候没想过民族团结？大敌当前，但非我族类，胡杂从来没跟中国人一条心过，不求团结，你们别拖后退，背后捅刀子就不错了。

Mao was a failure of a leader, his backward policies killed millions of people, China today is basically a rejection of his legacy, even though they will never admit his mistakes to the world

Says the indian 😂

@@Agent-ie3uv I’m Chinese

If you turn your keyboard to chinese you can type the pinyin and the character comes up! 你好 (ni hao) hello

@@slangoftheregions No wonder that many Chinese citizens get so many misunderstanding by the same sound of the word. I know Chinese writing system should re-designer to be more simple to write to do get the society as hard time.

@@zweiwing4435 As if it ain't simple enough already? It has no Indo-European style inflections and cases at all.

@@zweiwing4435 The problem is spoken Chinese ini first place. So, Chinese character is actually best solution. Stop Eurocentric thinking to judge written language.

@@faustinuskaryadi6610 The Character is similar Egyptian hieroglyphs, it is letting the citizen have difficult time in education. At the same time inside the country of China have 57 type different dialect is making more misunderstanding for the citizens. Plus, is 1 of most difficult writing system in entire planet. Unlike the case of Vietnamese writing system is less stressful for the student as without using the technology to write the language.

@@skw3125 Thanks for the information. No wonder a Taiwanese commented : Putonghua is not Chinese. It's a language created by the communists.... I have a Japanese friend. He doesn't want to learn Mandarin / Putonghua. Instead, he wants to learn Cantonese. He told me that it is more poetical. As for myself, I only have Hsk-3. I'm Indonesian. Txs..

@@ayi3455 In fact, Putonghua is a artificial form based on Mandarin. Putonghua and “國語” which means "The National Language" are just different uses of terms of a same language created by governments for political uses(propaganda)... However both of them is highly intelligible. In other hand, Cantonese and other varieties of Chinese Languages are almost unintelligible with each other and which some of them have "Checked Tone" (入聲) Mandarin doesn't. Nowadays, Many Linguists define Cantonese, Mandarin and other languages as varieties of Chinese, which developed from the middle ancient common Chinese. Btw, I'm a native Cantonese speaker. I had had no idea to understand any single words said by Mandarin speakers before started to learn Mandarin in school. In my kind of view, there's no any superiority between languages because it's just a medium of communication.

@@samng6571 you are a Hongkonger, right .... ?? I know how it is in Hongkong, though I've never been there, or in China.... Hongkongers until 1990s normally didn't speak Mandarin as the mother language. they learn Mandarin the same way Malaysian or Indonesian learn English as a foreign language...

@@ayi3455 Lol People in Taiwan are actually forced to learn and speak Mandarin even though many of them have Hokkien background. The current Mandarin Chinese have already existed since the Qing dynasty

@@rosemichaelis9519 they were forced to learn Mandarin since the arrival of Chiang Kaishek ...

What part of this is biased? I think you simply misunderstand the point of this lecture, or the intentions of the speaker.

What are better resources for learning about this topic?

Why if we don’t have a uniformed ideogram (Arabic) for numbers? Are we to write one, dos, 三 in accounting ledger books by each national language, or worse the thousands of dialects? There was a reason for the first emperor to unify the language by adopting the unadulterated character set, and doing away with alphabet, which vernacular pronunciation and grammar bastardize through time and by distance. Isn’t Han character still not in use by hundreds, if not thousands, of dialects today? And it would still be in use by countries like Japan, Korea, Vietnam and others if not for political intervention of the 20th century. The two above facts proved that first emperor was way more scientific, and thousands of years ahead, of this “professor”.

@@kenh758 You simply have no idea what his point is if that is your takeaway.

@@franciscoflamenco please elucidate for us. The gentleman was advocating an alphabet for a made up language that’s not used by any Chinese population natively. A best example of current form of Mandarin would be Mid-Atlantic accent, the type of English that’s heard on back and white movies of yesteryears, made up for a compromise between various English accents and dialects. The reason that the Chinese stayed this long simply because she had ditched alphabets that were in use by various kingdoms prior to unification in 221 BC. When the Mongols again imposed vernacular alphabet during the Yuan dynasty, the country rose up and flushed out the invaders.

Exactly!

your*

Caressing the mic indeed

Mainland China uses the simplified Chinese writing but it is still Chinese characters. But history and literature students inside and outside China need to know the complex characters to read historical records.

@@darvidkoh2707 unless you’re historian then you should know characters, everyone else don’t need know characters, duh like English, alphabet that’s all you know to read everything even technology, science, chemistry, discrimination, destitute, history, duh.

@@yuegonghuamei6685 That shows how stupid you are. Besides English and Chinese, I also know Korean and Hindi, and I don't find their non-English alphabet systems a problem.

@@yuegonghuamei6685 Snide remarks are pointless. Why don't Rui Qiang Zeng just say he has limited or even low intellect and limited linguistic ability, and stop making excuses for not being able to master languages that don't use alphabets.

You keep deleting my comments mean you lose argument then get life instead being asshole make fool yrselves in front everybody.

不拼音化，现在有几个人能熟练使用电脑。五笔在普通人中几乎已经淘汰，拼音打字目前才是主流，极大便利了我们普通大众进入互联网时代，这就是拼音化的功劳。

@@jackytang3683 先搞清楚拼音和拼音化的区别再出来秀你这点肤浅的认知比较好

@@jackytang3683 好喔

@@Jaytip91 他就没懂“拼音化”是什么。把注音去掉而用拼音标示发音不是所谓的“拼音化”。

@@jackytang3683 對不起,香港人還是用速成倉頡打字,速度亦不比拼音慢.主要是你的教育如何,你的質素也必如何.拼音不是必須拿來作輸入文字.

Wtf are you talking about? Bollywood, the Hindi film industry? Hindi is one the languages in India, there are other film industries of languages that have as many speakers as major European languages.

@@gazibizi9504 TFUYA!

What? What does this have to do with anything????

​​​​​​​@@gazibizi9504 Hindi and Urdu are exactly the same languages.... They are, in fact, the same dialect of the same language.... Except for the fact that they are written in two different scripts, the differences are entirely political and fabricated.... Furthermore, the vast majority of Bollywood songs in Hindi are in fact well-known Urdu ghazals, or Urdu poetry.... During the Early-Modern Period, from c. 1570 to c. 1720, the Mughals united Hindustan and created a strong cultural and political identity in the Indian subcontinent that united Hindus, Jains, Muslims, etc.... Especially after the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the British worked tirelessly to dismantle the solidarity between Hindus and Muslims and the unity and shared identity that the Mughals created in Hindustan..... One of the most important strategies practiced by the British in India was the strategy of "divide and conquer", and they intensified this strategy following the Indian Rebellion of 1857..... The British knew that the Mughals and the Mughal Emperor, despite being mere figureheads by the early-19th century, still had a powerful influence over the people of Hindustan, because the Mughal Emperor was a symbol of the unity of all Indians (Hindustanis) and a reminder of the glory of the old Empire of Hindustan (sarzameen-e Hindustan)..... This had to be dismantled in order for the British to keep a firm grip on India..... Thus, the British created a new country and identity to go with it, called "India", which was nothing more than the Western European idea of India..... This British conception of India therefore replaced the old culture of old Hindustan and the Mughal culture of imperial unity, of solidarity amongst all Hindustanis regardless of religious creed, caste, language, etc and of cultural synthesis..... It is important to understand that concepts today such as the "Hindu nation of India", the national identity of modern Indians, and the modern religion of "Hinduism" all developed during the early-to-mid-19th century by Hindu nationalist literati who were influenced by the conception of India found in the writings of British orientalist scholars and British officials in the British East Indian Company..... If you are wondering how this is relevant to the topic of 20th and 21st century China, it's this: 1. European colonialism, imperialism and Western political and moral ideology have completely took over and transformed the entire globe forcing the whole world to conform to Western ideology... 2. The influence of Communism in Asia and in China, the influence of the Roman alphabet, modern military technology, Western Capitalism, etc all have completely transformed modern China into what it is today...... In other words, what we call "modernization" and "globalization" in reality are aspects of Westernization..... Simply put, every modern Westphalian nation-state and member of the UN is a product and a creation of Western European ideology...... The world of pre-modern Asia and Africa has passed away and in its place is a modern, Western globalized world that has been created in the image of the West.....

I completely disagree.... Mandarin is a beautiful language.... I guess, if someone was screaming in Mandarin, it would sound like screaming, just as screaming in Cantonese would sound like screaming.... smh

What do you mean, biased....???

It would be difficult to find a lecture that doesn’t have bias.

Chinese people are still multilingual

And you’re an idiot for just reading the title and using preconditioned bias. You’re just here to troll, go back to FB and just scroll the comments there.

@@deeb.9250 Then why force Ugyghers, Tibetans and Mongols to speak only Mandarin? How's your Manchu? The Emperor's language is nearly extinct now. How did that happen?

@@TheZachary86 He talks like he's on a DATE! Which is likely why the numbers are so low.

@@audreyandlinCompany You are the ignoramus and anti-China bigot here who has not been to China to ascertain things for yourself, and is gullible enough to believe Western media propaganda. Uighurs, Tibetans and Mongols learn their mother tongues in addition to Mandarin in schools. If you are a Hispanic or Chinese or Turk in USA, do you not want to learn English to communicate and survive in the wider English-speaking society? 1

Fairly on point. I'd still say for people with little to next to no knowledge of Sinitic linguistics at all, who may also advocate the politics of language you're stating here (me included, I totally agree with you), several passages of Moser's exposition are sternly agreeable. Moser seems to implicitly entertain an ideal linguistic system with which all Chinese languages might pressumably be expressable without speech, writing, and grammar loss, absolutely depleted of any and all possible semantic ambiguities; which is plainly unrealistic and even borderline delusional, given the immesurable extension of the entire Chinese linguistic reality, and given that language (in general) is not and has never been something you simply fix and close to morphing, something you can somehow keep from transforming and growing, let alone attempting to control it in the panoptic way the CCP likes to control almost everything else, which kind of mirrors the patriarchal and patronising ways both Chinese political leaders exerted authority and control in past eras (which makes the People's Republic not so much of a revolutionary happening in Chinese history, but rather a highly secularly ideologised continuation of it) and Western scholars have exerted and still extert authority and control (however well or ill-meant) over their areas of expertise. And that's where the agreeable part comes: Moser also knows and openly acknowledges that trying to get so many people from so many, wide, and almost irreconciliably varying sociolinguistic provenance to speak a single, entirely structurally regulated, and state-sanctioned language is straight up impossible. I'd even argue that he, as a professional in linguistics, knows of several other polities and linguistic families where politicians have tried, to no avail, to deploy language as a tool of homogenous and uncritical authority, like Arabic during caliphal times, Russian during both the late imperial and Soviet eras, Turkish during the late Ottoman and the whole current republican era, English itself ever since Anglophone polities have been socioculturally dominant all around the world, and Spanish for as long as the Spanish language as been a clearly discernible thing.

Wow, in so few words you were able to highlight all that is wrong with academia today, of a class that has made one backflip to much… 1. You imagine the “West” as far too powerful. Some colonized people had no writing system, and most of those who did have one before 1600 kept the one they already had throughout the times (the Arab world, Persia, all of Hindustan, Burma etc.). True, Turks and Malays switched the script, but it remained an alphabetic system. The Vietnamese elite dropped the use of classical Chinese in official writing, et voilà - now every peasant can enter the bureaucracy if he knows how to read and write the vernacular in Latin script. Being literate provides access to information and is a force of liberation. Your unreasonable reasoning is just sinocentric. 2. He quoted Empress Dowager Cixi too, who was neither particularly progressive nor liberal. Besides he does not try to make any specific point or argument, but attempts at summarizing the matter for a general audience, which might not be familiar with the terms and the history of the topic. 3. He does not present a paper at a conference on Chinese linguists, but gives a talk for public consumption. How can a presenter fail in something he did not even attempt to achieve? 4. Your comment is a display of ageism, racism and sexism. Quite shocking what people get away with these days. His summary could have been presented by anybody from anywhere. Either his definitions, quotes and facts are correct, or they are not. Did you detect any falsehoods? Or did you resort to ad hominem attacks because there actually isn’t much to be criticized in terms of content? Sciences transcend times and places, that is their ultimate goal; - and you’re not helping.

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@@Hongsawaddy Your views are bigoted.

@@darvidkoh2707 They are not, but yours are.

Says an ignoramus who does not understand the history and beauty of Chinese characters which are still used today in the Chinese-speaking world and in neighboring countries such as Korea (family genealogies are maintained in Chinese characters) and Japan where Chinese characters known as kanji are widely used and where annual calligraphy contests using kanji are popular. Shame on you if you are a Chinese.

@@darvidkoh2707 My prediction is that computers and artificial intelligence will actually give a competitive advantage to Chinese characters. Unlike an alphabet, you don’t need to sound out words for them to have meaning; you just look at the character and you know the meaning no matter how you pronounce it. This is at a higher level.

豎夷妄語