Baihua

[ala]

m m

[holyman]

cos in most dialects, chinese characters have two pronouciations, the colloquial and official ones, and grammar is slightly different. 'bai hua'(白话) and 'guan hua'(官话). and dialect dictionaries showed them as 'wen du'(文读) or 'bai du'(白读). then there are some colloquial terms that are not supposed to use in official dialogues or dont exist at all. so bai hua means the common tongue. in guanhua its just using cantonese pronouciations to speak sentences in mandarin grammar.

[nnt]

'Baihua' in Beijing and the north refers to the language that forms the basis of modern Mandarin.

Until I came to the south I had never heard it used in the meaning 'Cantonese'. I think most northerners would be slightly confused upon first encountering this usage (I met one in Beihai who didn't know this usage).

白话 (common language) is opposed to 文言, which was the official language before the 五四 movement (not to be confounded with the liu si events...), and LUXun works.

[holyman]

for yunnan and sichuan their common tongues are classified as xi'nan guanhua(southwestern official tongue) in modern chinese language studies, probably bcos the last of the ming emperors escaped there with a bunch of officials and staged a resistance against the qing govt for a few decades. the common tongue there was greatly influenced by this little govt, the people used local pronounciations but standard mandarin grammar. therefore to them mandarin is 'guanhua', they themselves are the in-betweens closer to 'guanhua', and cantonese is the 'baihua'.

[sunyata]

hmm....I met some people from Hunan and Guangxi, who said they could speak 白话 (Cantonese). I was also confused at the time and didn't know what the difference between 广东话 and 白话 was. The way I understand it now is - 白话 is the colloqual Cantonese spoken by most mainlanders (who can speak it), while 广东话 is used to refer to the Cantonese spoken primarily in HK, because the 2 differ in slang and word usage.

Is my understanding correct?

[kayro]

I was recently pondering this the other day and stumbled upon this old thread..

I have heard people from 广州 refer to their version of Cantonese as 广州话, the reason for that being that their version of Cantonese is more "pure" in pronunciation, etc than other regions of 广东. Interestingly enough, they also refer to themselves as 广州人, as opposed to 广东人.

The link below lists Cantonese as having 8 sub-dialects, and I have indeed spoken to people from other parts of 广东, including a guy from the 东莞 part of 广东, who spoke Cantonese with a different accent than so-called 广州话.

http://www.lifeofguangzhou.com/node_10/node_22/node_24/node_217/2006/04/04/1144120825920.shtml

[Matty]

When I first moved to Nanning (Guangxi) I found that many people spoke this "BaiHua" I'd never heard of. After some interrogation I was told by most people that BaiHua is very similar to GuangDongHua but is in fact different and has it's own unique features and some unique vocabulary.

That's what I've been told by the majority of people I question on random train trips. I don't trust asking one person a question once, I rephrase it and ask different people at different times, this seems to be the general consensus.

[alanalian]

粤亮代表我的心is not correct

Should be 月亮代表我的心

月亮means moon.

月亮代表我的心means the moon stands for my heart（My love won't change）

[imron]

Roddy, perhaps you should start a thread entitled: Humour and why if you have to explain it, it doesn't work.