>>18442715
i will never figure out tones for the love of god
how is burmese and karenic like?

>southern china
What causes this? I understand that their languages are all descended from old/middle chinese and they use weird pronouns and words that arent commonly used in mondarn mandarin, almost archaic stuff, like saying thou instead of you.

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>>18442715
I prefer this one

>>18442721
the interesting part is the cantonese and hokkien are very similar to japanese

>>18442737
They arent

>>18442731
Isn't altaic a made up family?

>>18442738
no they are
https://blog.camplingo.com/similar-japanese-cantonese-words.html
you have no source

>>18442742
https://repository.eduhk.hk/en/publications/cantonese-as-seen-from-japanese-eyes/
another source
the gist of it is that cantonese is similar to middle chinese, and japanese itself was mostly derived from middle chinese

>>18442748
Youre fucking stupid. They are completely different language families.

No form of Japanese has any resemblance what so ever to any Sinitic dialect, what the retard anon means is that Chinese loanwords in Japanese somewhat more closely resemble their forms in Cantonese and Hokkien because their consonants are more conservative than those of Mandarin

>>18442741
Its a cope theory made by Turkish suprematists to try claim the Koreans, Japanese and Qing civilizations were turkics

>>18442781
they are extremely similar, you just don't want to acknowledge it
>>18442783
what this anon said, it is easy for a cantonese speaker to navigate japan

>>18442741
It's strongly supported by indirect evidence but the languages claimed to be related are too far diverged for the relationship to be demonstrable with the comparative method. It's like how Amerindian languages logically have to be related, but their most recent common ancestor is too old

>>18442792
No it fucking isn't, you complete imbecile

>>18442795
well i hope it gets better for you anonymous but im right, how can you be correct? you just mentioned one part of it? are you american?

>>18442721
Mountains. North china is a plain, south china is mountains

>>18442800
wenzhounese is an example

>>18442800
Is it always this answer when it comes to languages? That and rivers?

>>18442798
?

>>18442798
Did you know that English is extremely close to Japanese?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gairaigo_and_wasei-eigo_terms

>>18442793
>It's like how Amerindian languages logically have to be related, but their most recent common ancestor is too old
They don't have to be. There were multiple migrations to the Americas across the Bering Strait.

>>18442809
china and japan are right next to each other and they are very similar to each other, japan is the closest analogue to england in the east. they are pretty similar but this is whataboutism. why would i be wrong?

>>18442803
Yes. Look at italian, greece, the Balkan languages. Actually it's a chinese proverb that in the south if you go to another village they speak a whole different dialect. Even in America, Appalachian bills of the hills speak in their own distinct dialect. Maybe even why Californians have a distinct accent. Geography really does prevent the flow of information

>>18442811
Yes but you can't correspond each migration to one language family, there still are a lot of relations that have to be the case but can't be observed by comparative method alone

>>18442816
Im glad that in the era of centralized states and internet, dialects will all die out.

>>18442819
>dialects will all die out.
They haven't and they won't. They metastasize in other ways. The CCP actively tries to minimize other Han Chinese dialects to prop up Mandarin but they often struggle againdt this as Chinese people inside China often identify themselves by cultural group or geography. Even in the internet age, different subgroups and subcultures will retain their own dialects and slang. There will be less dialects but they aren't disappearing, definitely not any time soon.

>>18442822
The difference will be mainly that dialects aren't defined by geographic barriers anymore but by subcultures who refuse to assimilate with their surroundings. We already kind of see this with AAVE.

>>18442818
That doesn't refute my point. "Amerindian languages" is a meaningless categorization because you seem to assume that
1. There was one group of people migrating that spoke the same language
2. They successfully spread their language from Alaska to Patagonia
3. Their subsequent ancestors drove off all competition of successor migrants and the language diversity existed solely due to drift

>>18442833
How the fuck can someone be this illiterate and incapable of reasoning?

>>18442834
You're the one who said Amerindian languages have to be logically related. Only Greenberg and his ilk are stupid enough to make that assumption. Simple cases like the Na-Dene and Eskaleut prove him wrong.

>>18442841
There are over 100 primary families in the Americas. Suggesting that they all come from separate migrations from Siberia is unserious and marks you as a borderline mentally incapacitated person.

what on earth are you two arguing over

>>18442847
Linguistics

>>18442843
As opposed to assuming all those languages come from a single common ancestor? I never even said that all of them have to be. You're the absolutist making sweeping generalizations that are "logical", when they aren't.

>>18442853
I did not say literally all of them have one common ancestor, but dozens of these families logically have to be related and cannot be demonstrated to be so with internal evidence. It is very possible that all South American languages are related anyway, since later migrations did not reach there.

>>18442741
It is. It's a cope by turkish wewuzzers who want their own "indo-europeanism" to LARP about.

In fact, the languages share similar words due to sprachbund phenomenon, not because they are related. Just like english has a lot of french words, but you can't say it's a romance language.
If you look further down the past, the languages of the "altaic family" start to get increasingly more different from each other, when it should be the opposite.

>WE WUZ CHANGS AND SHIEET
do japs really?

>>18442859
English and French are related though, so not the best example

>>18442860
No that's Taiwan

>>18442855
We do not know enough about the history of human migrations in pre-Columbian Americas to even confidently claim that about South American languages. Just look at cases like the Arawakan languages, present both in South American and the Carribeans. Who is to say there weren't multiple dispersals from North to South, or vice-versa.

>>18442868
That doesn't change anything.

>>18442870
>that doesn't change anything
>when you just said "it's very possible ALL South American languages are related"
Retard

>>18442873
Languages outside South America possibly being related to them as well does not affect the statement in any way

>>18442811
But we can already correlate the second big migration with the Na-Dene family and the third big migration with the Eskimo-Aleut languages.
But then you have the first big migration (from which 90% of all amerindians descend) without a single family to be correlated, because there are another dozens of families and language isolates without proper genealogy. All of those must have been related in some form, because they are neither Na-Dene or Eskimo-Aleut.

>>18442874
You are actually stupid. No point arguing with you. I'm done.

>>18442863
But the words from english that come directly from french are due to norman influence, not common indo-european ancestry.
A good example then is how brazilian portuguese has a lot of amerindian and west african related-words. Is portuguese related to those languages? Of course not. It's due to shared co-living of different peoples.

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>>18442715
>>18442719
I've tried to learn Chinese for years and I still can't consistently decipher and hear the second and third tones and the difference between them.
First tone is easy, it's just a high tone, sounds sort of like how Japanese speak normally. Kāixīn, Kāfēi, Fēijī, Shēngyīn, easy.
Fourth tone is equally easy, just sounds like barking. Zuìjìn, Xiànzài, Zàijiàn, Dànshì.
The second and third tones? They're complete bullshit. You can just about hear the difference in isolation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6r1QmoD0VA&t=20
But in actual speech? They don't articulate these things. In many cases they just slur the part they don't care about and only bother pronouncing the word that matters.

>>18442731
lol this is so very clearly something one of them braindead turkish nationalists made up just to claim kinship with the universally respected nation of japan it's not even funny

>>18443246
what brand of swarthy near eastern jew worshipping wewuz are you to be this butthurt about a slightly antiquated linguistic theory

>>18443525
Sir, this is the 4 adjective or less thread.

>>18443533
swarthy, near eastern, and jew worshipping are three adjectives and wewuz is a noun saar i am under four

>>18443171
That's because when a third tone comes before another third tone it turns into a second tone. You spent years without knowing that?

>>18443577
I know that. I'm saying the way she pronounces 國 (second tone) and 果 (third tone) sound practically identical to me. And this is a learning video, actual speech would be no where near this well enunciated.

>>18442811
The real problem with categorizing NA languages is that there's just not enough material. The linguistic destruction was so total and the survivors so scattered and mixed (all without writing) there isn't enough "connective tissue" to find any kind of useable gradient or geographical distribution. The few survivors we have like Cherokee and Navajo don't have enough other languages "between" them for us to figure out exactly how far or how closely related to each other they are. It's much easier in Latin America where lots of languages survived even till today.

>>18443601
Fortunately "Latin America" is the vast majority of the population and landmass so this is irrelevant to the point

>>18443171
Tone sandhi is mental and I refuse to believe they can decipher Chinese without context

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>jur shur shi mi ji shao shur sheh shi

>>18443652
Not really, because it would be like having only the Germanic languages as an example of the entire Indo-European family. Sure you can do good work studying inside that subset, but the larger relations outside it will remain mysteries.

>>18443681
Every day I weep that they chose this dogshit language over Cantonese to be the national langauge.
>sounds objectively worse
>further from classical chinese both literarily and linguistically
https://youtu.be/bRQLqxSYJNA&t=110

>>18442783
Listen to this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aodg-slJe7Y

>>18443585
I can't relate because I never had an issue with tone as a Chinese learner and I could always hear and pronounce tones perfectly from almost day 1. My accent is also extremely good. I think I just have a knack for it so I didn't realize how much others struggled.

>>18443930
I'm big mad because I learned Japanese pretty easily. Only took two years and I can still practically follow any conversation, even advanced ones, without studying it in years.
Chinese? I've spent three times as long and I still need to rack my brain to understand 我很喜歡冰淇淋.
The very reason people say Japanese is hard is why I find it easy, and the very reason people say Chinese is easy is why I find it hard. Convoluted grammar structures make comprehension a breeze, far easier to catch "ことになった" than "變" I miss a single syllable in Chinese and I hwve no idea whwt the fuck is going on. I have to miss like 4 or 5 before Jwpanese loses context, and even then it's easy to pick it back up.

Maybe I'm just too stupid for Chinese.

>>18443739
No, it's more like having everything but Germanic languages to study Indo-European. The discipline would be fine.

>>18444353
You need to study Chinese grammar structures and sentence patterns more.

>>18445084
Already have.
I've tried "just listen more", it's the same pattern. I miss one word and the whole thing becomes incomprehensible to me.
I miss how distinct Japanese words were.
Atatakai vs rè.
Chinese seems to have so much fewer grammar points you can rote memorize and never forget. It's mainly just spamming single/double syllables together. Where the fuck are the particles?

>>18443679
if you watch Chinese television you'll notice the vast majority of programs have subtitles to ease through pronunciation issues.
as the other anon said it's really only the 2nd and third tones you'll have any true trouble with, and contextual clues often save the day.
>>18442822
I wouldn't really say the CCP is struggling against other dialects. they've clearly won the war except against Cantonese and Hokkien thanks to Hong Kong and Taiwan
What will happen is the Chinese language sphere will (mostly) function like countries like Japan or the US or England. where you'll have some dialect variance but with things still 95% the same the vast majority of the time.
I'd point to Okinawa as a good example of what could happen. There generational transmission of the local Ryukyuan languages almost entirely ceased in the 2nd half of the 20th century and apart from a small smattering of 2nd language speakers you'll be hard pressed to find someone under the age of 50 speaking it, but Okinawans have incorporated various words from the languages into their dialect of Japanese which gives it some local distinction.

>>18443747
This is just something stupid Hong Kongers and Chinese Americans (who are Cantonese) say. Cantonese is a monkey language that is only marginally more conservative and has slightly more phonemes than Mandarin. If you were about linguistic conservatism and knew what you were talking about you would say that Teochew, Quanzhou Hokkien, or Suzhounese should have been made into the national standard.

>>18442822
>>18445208
I feel like 90% of the people talking about China have literally no idea what they're going on about and are just regurgitating a mixture of their own perceptions and the perceptions of the Western internet at large.

China isn't "struggling against the dialects" . They actively promote them. Go to radio garden and listen, the government funded and run stations in dialect exist. They're not trying to supress them, the dialects aren't a threat to China in any capacity, on the contrary China do fund services in the dialects to keep old people and different regions happy.

You fundamentally misunderstand the dynamic around the dialects. It isn't that the dialects are fun and hip and rebellious, on the contrary the young people prefer to speak in mandarin than dialects
>ah that's just because the evil CCP has indoctrinated them!
No, that's because Cantonese, Hakka, Hokkein, etc are the language of boring terrestrial television and radio. Only old people like that shit. What language do people use on Douyin, bilibili, and xiaohongshu? That's right, Mandarin. Mandarin allows them to connect to young people all over the country. Their dialect allows them to watch soap operas and talk to their parents. You do the math.

>>18445225
>China isn't "struggling against the dialects" . They actively promote them. Go to radio garden and listen, the government funded and run stations in dialect exist. They're not trying to supress them, the dialects aren't a threat to China in any capacity, on the contrary China do fund services in the dialects to keep old people and different regions happy.
you're essentially conflating the results of their victory as evidence there was no fight at all rather than a token concession. much like the stuff for Gaelic in Scotland it's a token concession to the diehards that reflects it's no longer an issue when 100% of the country knows English anyway.
like of course young people prefer to speak Mandarin why wouldn't they? everything of note is done in Mandarin and unless you're aiming for some extremely niche job the local dialect is useless. this is to be clear a near universal phenomenon when you see language shift and why people do it not just a Chinese phenomenon
so again you're essentially using evidence of their complete victory to say there's no fight at all which is just wrong, we're just at the point where the only true linguistic fight for the Government is against ethnic minority languages.

The only Chinese dialect that sounds better than Mandarin is Shanghainese. The other dialects sound like SEA monkeys.

>>18445237
This is the case in every country in the modern age. It happened in France, Germany, Italy. What do you want the Chinese government to do, have schools conduct all their classes in local dialects which no country in the world does? It would make zero economic sense and not allow people from even different cities in the same region to communicate. Ultimately it's the responsibility of the parents to transmit such things to their children if they really care about It, and they will die out over time gradually because of attrition and nothing can really be done, unfortunately. I suspect you're just using something trivial like this as a more highbrow, cultured excuse to hate China rather than the usual lowbrow sinophobia you see on 4chan like "chinks are bugs, nuke the Three Gorges Dam, 1488!".

>>18445237
Again, you come with more bullshit. Particularly this line:
>we're just at the point where the only true linguistic fight for the Government is against ethnic minority languages.
They have whole fucking TV stations paid for by the government in Korean, Uighur, and Tibetan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanbian_Television
It was launched in the fucking 70s.
Before that they used to have regional minorities singing praise for Mao in their own languages. Which they still promote to this day.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_k10G6XxWg

I don't blame you. The popular conception in the West is that China is an evil totalitarian state and anyone who dares speak in anything other than standard mandarin loses their social credit score and can't use hospitals anymore but it's all bullshit. China's policy in regard to minorities is to suck their dick in return for their loyalty. Think the same thing Russia does witn Chechnya.

>>18445243
did I say I expected anything differently? I'm just stating the reality of it. I find it funny you guy are getting so asshurt despite as you pointed out it's a fact of life in almost every nation. like just because I acknowledge the ryukyuan islands' local languages are virtually dead thanks to japanese government policy doesn't mean I'm going full gas the nips friend.
>>18445244
what part of token concession did you not get as you cite tv (which you just cited as obsolete shit for old people just a post prior kek) and music which is also another infamous token sphere.
probably the most critical areas for language vitality are use in education and perceived benefit of continued transmission. kinda funny you left Mongolian out of your language list because I would point to their phasing out of Mongolian as a language of education in Inner Mongolia as an example of slowly tightening the vice in that regard for minorities.
>China's policy in regard to minorities is to suck their dick in return for their loyalty.
they've been explicitly trying to cut down on the obsessive dick sucking, like the tightening of who exactly who is getting welfare points on the gaokao in recent years. which is hardly a bad thing.
I'm really baffled why you're so sensitive to this when as noted early pretty much every country does or did this?

>>18445251
Wrote a long post refuting this then accidentally deleted it so I'll just give you the bullet points.
1. TV is obsolete in 2026, it was not in the 1970s. This is due to tne internet.
2. Cultural revolution songs were not "token spheres", they were the means the party used to communicate and spread ideas among the people.
3. Mongolians had their own radio service in Mongolian from the 1950s. In the 1970s this became a television service. Again, in Mongolian. It still exists today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner_Mongolia_Radio_and_Television

There are none so blind as those who will not see. You clearly want China to systematically destroy regional dialects and languages because it helps you view them as ontologically evil. I showed you this wasn't the case with dialects, you switched to ethnic minorities. I showed you it wasn't the case with Koreans, you switched to Mongolians, we could do this dance forever but you won't let the facts change your opinion so why bother?

>>18445266
>1
we are talking about modern policy not that of the party back in the day. I will fully concede that the party was much more generous towards cultural minorities before the last 20 years or so. but times change
>2
again, we're talking contemporary policy not in the mid 20th century
>3
we could go in circles but again, tv means nothing when education and reasons are continued transmission die away.
>There are none so blind as those who will not see. You clearly want China to systematically destroy regional dialects and languages because it helps you view them as ontologically evil.
I'm convinced you're reading like half my post then getting mad and ignoring the rest for some reason. hell your original reply ignored how I disagreed with the notion that the government was still struggling against dialects
I have repeatedly noted that the vast majority of countries in the world have engaged in similar policies eradicating dialects and minority languages beyond some small concessions after wiping it out of regular usage. why you continue to get mad that I'm somehow targeting China through this is beyond me. Meiji Japan did the exact same thing to Japanese dialects and minority languages. are you going to claim I'm somehow trying to view them as evil through that fact too?