China & Inner Asia: Table of Contents
Organizer: Richard VanNess Simmons, Rutgers University
Chair: S. Robert Ramsey, University of Maryland, College Park
Discussant: Timothy Light, Western Michigan University
Visitors to China who strive to peer beneath the surface veneer of that vast country quickly discover that in all corners of society there exist at least two self-images. There is on the one hand the glorious image of the grand state with its sweeping history of eminent cultural accomplishment stretching across several thousands of years; while in all smaller sectors of society there is the local culture, with its myriad special characteristics often fondly described as the "way we do things in our village." The mark of the regional identity, the identification card, so to speak, that separates the insiders from the outsiders, is the local language or dialect.
This panel seeks to examine the details of Chinese regional society and identity through the lens of local language. The goal is to take a step toward a deeper understanding of the regional texture and colloquial color of the weave that makes up that broad fabric of Chinese language and society. The panels are composed of papers that examine and interpret concrete descriptive material from various locales in China. The overall composition of the presentations is interdisciplinary in approach, each utilizing a selection from the tools of the ethnographer, the historian, the literary scholar, the dialectologist, and the linguist. The papers range in their coverage from inquiry into the local shape of the traditional literary language and investigation of the history of regional dialects, to observation and analysis of contemporary colloquial usage and the social manifestations thereof.
Jerry Norman, University of Washington
It is conventional in Chinese dialectology to make a distinction between "colloquial" and "reading" pronunciations of Chinese characters, but this is just one aspect of a larger problem. All Chinese dialects are comprised of material which is native to the dialect—the popular stratum—and material taken from the written language. In addition, every Chinese dialect appears to possess its own proper way of reading Chinese characters. In this paper I will explore the various components that make up any given dialect and comment on the nature of local reading systems.
David Prager Branner, Yuen Ren Society
The Chinese study of beentzyh ("original characters") has been called the equivalent of Western etymology. A beentzyh is an ancient character considered equivalent to some attested spoken form in a modern variety of Chinese. It compactly symbolizes the morpheme as a direct link between modern spoken Chinese and antiquity, and satisfies a deeply-felt need among literate speakers for a framework accommodating all local language.
Western students of Chinese are often unsatisfied by beentzyh-study. Western linguistics demands sensitivity to the difference between sound and writing, and beentzyh seem to confuse this difference; they are often designated according to very lax semantic and phonological standards.
This paper proposes to make the definition of beentzyh more rigorous by incorporating the concept of the "word family," a group of words of related meanings whose phonological values correspond only imperfectly. The word family is a natural element of Chinese comparative phonology, because the residue of incomplete sound changes is widely observed in Chinese and because Chinese exhibits notoriously irregular dialect diversity. The beentzyh would be defined as a compact symbol, not of a single timeless morpheme, but of a manifold modern word family. Chinese etymology would then consist not of finding ancestral characters for modern words, but of identifying written representatives of an ancient word family that, collectively, would be considered comparable to a word family attested in modern varieties of Chinese.
The argument is illustrated with examples from Fukien dialects from original fieldwork.
Sara Friedman, Cornell University
The predominance of local dialects in China has often been analyzed as a marker of regional identity. In this paper, I discuss both how dialect usage creates local and regional identifications that transcend national boundaries, and how it produces distinctions within local communities based on differential access to education, physical mobility, and state- and locally-defined cultural resources. Using the results of ethnographic research in a village in Huian county in southern Fujian province, the paper will explore how common use of Minnan dialect builds a sense of shared identity among villagers, Taiwanese, and overseas Chinese of Southeast Asia. Moreover, it will discuss how dialect differences influence local perceptions of other dialect areas in Fujian and throughout China, distinctions that are simultaneously grounded in class and cultural hierarchies as well. This paper will also show how the use of Minnan dialect in contrast to standard Mandarin creates and reinforces impressions of villagers and village women in particular as having a low "cultural level" and lacking certain cultural resources. These distinctions, made by both villagers and outsiders, derive in part from evaluations of literacy and educational levels. They also reflect gender and class hierarchies within the village that build upon different perceptions of local customs and what constitutes "modern" cultural practices.
Richard VanNess Simmons, Rutgers University
The affiliation of the dialect of town of Jintarn is the subject of much confusion. Jintarn is a county seat located in the southwest corner of Jiangsu. The city has produced several distinguished scholars from Tarng times to the present. Most notably, it was the ancestral home of the eminent Ching philologist Duann Yuhtsair (1735–1815), who compiled the Shuowen-jieetzyh juh. The nature of the town’s dialect is difficult to pin down because, in fact, two strikingly different local dialects are spoken in present day Jintarn: the Old Jintarn dialect and what is locally referred to as Jiangbeeihuah ‘the dialect of north of the river.’ This mix is due to a large migration of peasants from north of the Yangtze into Jintarn and its immediate environs in the wake of the Taypyng Rebellion (1851–1864). These emigrants settled in the city following a protracted siege of the city by the Taypyng armies. Jiangbeeihuah, also called "New Jintarnhuah," is the dialect spoken by the descendants of the nineteenth-century immigrants, while Old Jintarn is the dialect spoken by people who trace their ancestry back to the generations that lived in Jintarn prior to the Taypying Rebellion. New Jintarnhuah is now considered to be the "city dialect"(cherngliihuah), while Old Jintarn has been relegated to the status of the "country dialect" (shiangshiahhuah). This paper examines the specific dialect affiliations of the city’s two idioms and explores the linguistic and social factors that led to the formation of these labels in the popular consciousness.
Liang Tao, Ohio University
This paper presents a story of some local changes in Beijing, with the discussion of place names, their thriving days during festivities, and the fate of the places and their residents.
Place names in Beijing are closely related to historical, cultural and social changes as well as to the geographical locations of the changes. The names often radiate in the four directions surrounding a historic landmark.
The area in the narrative covers the southwest side of the Tiananmen Square. The main street is called ‘Dong Shuan Ma Zhuangr’ or the East Tie-horse Post, indicating that horse posts used to be the landmark.
Adjacent to ‘Dong Shuan Ma Zhuangr’ there was a small lane called ‘Rongxiar Hutong,’ or the Fine-thread Lane, a prosperous neighborhood with big families of several generations living together in the past. The main narrator of these stories is an old man having lived in the Fine-thread Lane for six decades, witnessing the changes of the area under the warlords, the Japanese, the Nationalists and the Communists. Throughout these changes, many of the residents had to leave their old homes, yet some could stay. The story will tell you the common thread leading to the residents’ fate in this place.
The place names themselves bear many interesting stories to the building and development of the city, and their fate also tells us about the social and cultural changes of the city.