Comparison of various dialects

[fanglu]

I'm doing a presentation on language policy in China, and as background want to give the audience (who potentially don't know that much about Chinese languages) a taste for the differences between different dialects. The point I want to get across is that different dialects can have different grammar and vocabulary, as well as pronunciation.

Rather than just saying that this is the case, I'd like to show it with an example of a sentence in Mandarin as well as a few other dialects (preferably not ones from the same family, so eg Cantonese, Minnan etc). Has anyone ever seen anything like that around the internet? If there was audio that would be even better.

I've found a few bits and pieces - http://www.omniglot.com has 'useful phrases' in a Mandarin, Cantonese and Shanghainese and some of these overlap, allowing for a comparison. Any other suggestions?

[gato]

How about this: http://www.pearstories.org/

It's been mentioned on the forums before.

[fanglu]

Thanks Gato. I did actually search the forums, although didn't find that link for some reason.

The pear stories site is quite interesting, although not exactly what I'm after since it doesn't allow a sentence to sentence comparison. It seems strange that something like that wouldn't exist, but after a couple of hours searching I didn't come up with much.

[Michaelyus]

One of the best sentences to compare

• the third person pronoun
  
• the plural marker (for pronouns)
  
• the genitive marker & relative complementiser
  
• the demonstrative pronouns
  
• the partitive particle
  

is "Those (lot) are theirs".

"These are mine,... or are they yours? Where are mine? Are they here? They're either here or they're over there! "

These introduce the other pronouns, the disjunctive conjunction in questions and in statements, yes/no question formation, open question formation with question words, the locative verb and location adverbs. But honestly the syntax is mostly the same.

Some fairly large differences in syntax come with the dative verb "to give". That's one of the biggest grammatical differences between colloquial Mandarin and colloquial Cantonese. The method by which verbal complements are formed and are negated also exhibits variation. In fact, a lot of the verbal appendages, including the negative particles, the verbal aspect markers, and the sentence-final particles vary pretty wildly, though it's not really expressed in the syntax as much.

[Gharial]

Charles Hamblin's Languages of Asia and the Pacific allows in its Part III the relatively straightforward comparison of Mandarin, Cantonese and Hokkien (and indeed Japanese and Korean too) by means of identical: basic phrases, numerals, days of the week, 25 sets of related sentences (e.g. 15. Is the restaurant open/closed? Could I see the menu? I would like _____ . The bill, please), and a vocabulary list of hundreds of items. For each language (or dialect) there's also a 3-page sketch of its pronunciation and basic grammar (nouns, pronouns, adjectves, verbs, questions, imperatives, numerals), and forms of address, kinship terms, and name of language. The romanization used for each type of Chinese is Pinyin, Yale, and the book's own system respectively (apparently "Hokkien is more a spoken than a written language; those Hokkien speakers who know Chinese characters would usually read them in Mandarin. This book uses its own romanisation of spoken Hokkien"). There are no hanzi supplied, though. Unfortunately there doesn't appear to be any preview available on Google Books, but you should be able to pick up a used copy cheap on Amazon.

[外国赤佬]

An example from Shanghainese:

侬哪能勿汏衣裳。= 你怎么不洗衣服。

Every single word is different.

[fanglu]

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll look for Languages of Asia and the Pacific in my library.

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[Gharial]

Oh, I forgot about libraries! Hope you can find that book or similar, Fanglu! (I've actually got a bunch of phrasebooks with Mandarin versus Cantonese and/or Shanghainese equivalents, but most of them will probably be out of print or quite difficult to obtain).

[Daan]

Also be sure to check out www.tatoeba.org where you'll find audio for Cantonese and Shanghainese for quite a few sentences. In terms of linguistic literature, Norman's 1988 work Chinese has some pretty nice charts showing the differences between the major dialect groups. It should be easy to get from the library, or you could buy a reprint (it's great as an introduction to Chinese linguistics in general).