Chinese Dialects / Fangyan

FANGYAN
Name:
Instructor:
Course:
Date:
Fangyan
1. Chinese is a Sino-Tibetan language. Sino-Tibetan is a monophyletic unit since its members come from one common ancestor, and all attested descendants of that ancestor are included in the family. is a genetic group that include languages like those of the Indo-European family where Hindu, French, German and English long. This speech community covers northeast India as well as northeast China. Billions of its speakers can be found in East, South and Southeast Asia.
Chinese and Tibeto Burman are therefore a Dialect continua since it is a close-knit language family. Other branches within big families become dialect continua whereby there exist no clear boundaries that can clearly count, define or identify languages in the family such as Mandarin and Cantonese. However, there exist some instances whereby these languages can be differentiated like Shantung, Nanking and Peking.
Going further down, Gan, Cantonese, Lolo-Burmese and Kachinic become proto-languages as they are mother languages which specific persons have been exposed to since childhood as the root from where languages in the family rise from.
2. Chinese is a language family itself. There exist many variants of the Chinese language and numerous fewer common ones. When considering the Sinitic-languages as among the Sino-Tibetan family, there exist mutually unintelligible dialects like Northern Min, Southern Min, Gan, Cantonese, Wu and Mandarin. Roughly, they are like Swedish, Dutch, English and German groups of the Indo-European language family. They all have variations in them. China is a nation that is very large and old. Distinct areas in the vast terrains can be distinguished by the great distances and the broad impassable topographical. This implies that numerous of the Chinese people in distinct areas cannot comprehend each other when speaking their area dialect. This is like the speakers in diverse regions that have different accents. Therefore, are dialect words that are only known in specific regions as the US and UK English demonstrates or much greater.
When pursuing the analogy further, mutually intelligible dialects become identified like the Mandarin dialect of Shantung, Nanking and Peking like the Cambridge, Texas, Toronto and Boston dialects of English. Numerous of the dialects like the ones identified above have some level of intelligibility among them. This is because they have one history and many similar vocabularies as well as grammar that makes it easy for one Chinese speaker to know another Chinese dialect even if the pronunciations of diverse characters in the languages vary. This can be witnessed across regions like Hong Kong and Taiwan.
4. the author defines the term dialect as a type of the language spoken in a certain area of a nation or by a specific group of people. For instance, the diverse dialects of Chinese have distinct words and grammar.
5. Fangyan literally means spoken language of a certain area. The author gave more correct translation of the term Fangyan as topolect. Topolect means a group of large regional varieties. Thus, the term offers a correct English translation of the term Fangyan.
6. The paragraph is wrong since one cannot equate Fangyan and d...