The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Scott Martens:

@62, 65: Modern Standard Mandarin was the spoken language of the court and the bureaucracy under the Qing dynasty (thus the name "Mandarin", synonym for bureaucrat in many modern European languages for long and complicated reasons). The written legal language of the court was what's now called "Classical Chinese" - which has the same kind of relationship to modern Chinese as Church Latin to French. However, the bureaucracy, having a near monopoly on literacy in those days, liked smutty novels and cheezy poetry. And, just as writing a smutty novel or cheezy poetry in Church Latin would be exceedingly bizarre, authors in the early modern era in China used the characters of then standard "classical" Chinese to write the spoken language of the Mandarinate - their principal market and audience.

When the Qing were overthrown in 1911 - not by Mao or the Communists but by Sun Yat-sen and the early Guomindang - they knew some kind of language reform was necessary for Chinese, but had considerable disputes about how to go about it. However, they agreed as a first step to officialize as their standard written language the language of the poetry and novels the elite read rather than the stodgy classical language.

Thus, Mandarin became putonghua, "common" language.

At this point, progress in the Chinese Republic stalled and further language reform was shelved. Warlordism took root. Then Japan invaded. Then WWII ended and the Chinese Civil War got underway. And then Mao and the Communists took charge. Mandarin was already long entrenched by the time they gained control of the country, and despite a lot of high minded rhetoric about universal literacy and language reform as a means of uplifting the proletariat, very little was actually accomplished except the officialization of "simplified" characters - a kind of shorthand that practically everyone in China (or rather, everyone who was literate) used and had used in some form since the dawn of grass script 2000 years ago.

The shift to Mandarin predates the Communists and they did very little to meaningfully change that. In Taiwan (legally, the rump remains of the pre-1949 Republic of China) Mandarin is also the official language, in more or less identical form to the PRC except the rejection of simplified characters. Singapore and Malaysia also grant some legal status to modern standard Mandarin, in pretty much identical form to the official usage in China. In all three places, Mandarin is not native to most people who speak some form of Chinese. Hong Kong and Macau have very carefully ambiguous language laws, naming "Chinese" as official without being more specific, in order to tolerate de facto official use of a standardized form of Cantonese.

Mao himself was Hunanese and grew up speaking the rather radically different local variant. He spoke Mandarin with an accent and dysfluency that would mark him as a rural hick. For this reason, very few of his speeches are available in audio form.

"× ×©×¤Ö¼×¨×ך ××™×– × ×“×™×לעקט מיט ×ן ×רמיי ×ון פל×ָט"

Or maybe we should say a ויקיפדיה instead?

Only tangentially related, I was at a conference two weeks ago, and I saw a presentation from RU Groningen on using graph spectral derived from accumulated Dutch dialect data to find the dialect boundaries in the Netherlands. It identified Frisian, Limburgs and Lower Saxon (Nedersaksisch) dialects quite cleanly. It wasn't so good with the internal dialect structure of the Dutch language areas - e.g. separating the Brabants and Zealand dialects, which sound pretty different to me, from "Randstad" Dutch.

Still... if even the computers think Limburgs isn't Dutch, I think it's justifiable to call it a language and not feel like an idiot when you can't understand it.

My Chinese prof in Belgium was for several years a Limburger. Spoke crystal clear Mandarin, but I couldn't hardly understand his Dutch. For the non-Dutch English speakers out there, Limburgish has the same kind of relation to Dutch - in terms of comprehensibility and social status - as Geordie has to BBC English. Anyone who doesn't know Geordie can surely find some audio of it on the web.

Lee @45, I've always thought of it this way.

The sovereignty of Canada is a sort of supernatural spirit. It exists at all times, having been conjured up in 1867 from the depths of wherever such things are conjured from, but is only on rare occasions actually present in the person of a charming elderly woman from London, and is cursed by the Statute of Westminster (a rather powerful spell cast in the early 30s) from ever escaping Canada's national borders.

Whenever Her Majesty is actually on Canadian soil, the sovereignty of Canada is vested in her person, and she is mystically transformed into the Queen of Canada. However, the moment her plane leaves Canadian national airspace, her Canadian sovereignness exits her body and proceeds instantly (through a sort of political version of quantum entaglement) to Rideau Hall in Ottawa, where it roams free, occasionally venturing out to scare Supreme Court justices whenever anyone sues the government, and from time to time taking possession of the body of the Governor General to compel her to sign bills, read throne speeches, and call elections.

While for most Americans, this all sounds terribly silly, it makes perfect sense to most Discworld readers.

It also makes it a lot easier to explain Canadian constitutional law, since the Queen is also, independent of her role as Queen of Canada, Queen of each of the 10 provinces. Thus, Her Majesty in Right of, say, Alberta, can take legal action against Her Majesty in Right of Canada, before Her Majesty's Supreme Court, without anyone in London having to miss a night's sleep.

That's from V for Vendetta, right?

(I'm kidding!)

Yes, if we're going to talk about Canadian sex scandals, who said that "the government has no place in the bedrooms of the nation"? I know it's attributed to Trudeau, but I think it's apocryphal. My father always used to say that in Canada, we also believe that the nation has no place in the bedrooms of the government.

Y'all are being a little more apocalyptic about the world than is strictly necessary.

True, George W Bush is exactly the type of idiot to whom Londo Molari's advice about the Kingdom of Idiots applies. (BTW, best use of Babylon 5 quote ever, to Zander in #25.) And, he is stupid enough to start an air war in Iran, and is not likely to accomplish any desirable goal with it except by applying a level of genocidal force that, frankly, even he probably can't get away with.

As for the rest, I think the world view being expressed here is excessively pessimistic.

No one will lift a finger to defend Iran, except rhetorically. To the extent that an American war on Iran is rhetorically useful to attack the United States, it will be used that way. The global hostility to war on Iran is simply the belief - well-founded as far as I can tell - that a war with Iran would be worse for international politics than an Iran with nuclear weapons would be. No one will stop the US from attacking Iran, no one will take much action afterwards, except maybe Hezbollah. Rather, most of the world is posturing to make sure that when it all goes to hell (which it will) they can claim that it wasn't their fault.

China has no "debt bomb". Go down to Blockbuster's and pick up a neat little Percy Adlon film called Rosalie Goes Shopping. It has Marianne Sägebrecht from Baghdad Café and the guy who played Bill in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. The film is built around an important economic lesson: When you owe the bank a thousand dollars, it's your problem; when you owe the bank half a trillion dollars, it's the bank's problem.

Russia will almost certainly never be the same kind of threat the Soviet Union was. It can't be no matter how it's GDP improves. The reason is because the Soviet Union - and even less the portion of it that is now the Russian Federation - was never the economic centre of the Warsaw Pact. The Soviet empire was unique in history. Most empires impoverish their periphery to enrich the centre. Russia - even before the communists - enriched the periphery by impoverishing the centre. The economic core of the Warsaw Pact was East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and to some extent Poland. The wealthiest regions in the Soviet Union were Georgia, the Baltic republics and parts of southern Ukraine. Russia was politically the centre of the old communist world. Economically, it was the hinterland. Even if it returns to the level of productivity it had before 1990, it will still be a minor player compared to the economic power the old Warsaw Pact could muster.

There used to be a cheesy restaurant called the Deux Pierrots down by Metro Place d'Armes that was my favourite spot to bring visiting friends.

Twelve years away from Montreal, and I still miss it. Mon pays, ce n'est pas un pays, c'est l'hiver. A few weeks ago, someone told me I had a Belgian accent in French. Without my joual, my last link to Montreal is, I suppose, definitively gone.

When I lived there, they said that it had the largest number of restaurants per capita of any city in the world. And it wasn't just fine food either - Chez Lafleur on Square St-Louis has the perfect greasy poutine as a nightcap after hitting the bars on St-Denis. Peel Pub used to serve a pitcher of beer for two bucks (I suppose it's more now) and chicken wings for 13 cents a piece. There was a fast food place on the corner of Jean-Talon and St-Denis - a block from home - with a kebab-fries-salad plate for five bucks that was to die for.

Belgians make the best fries and beer in the world, but I miss living somewhere with Montreal's diversity and quality of food.

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