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From: donh@netcom.com (Don HARLOW)
Subject: Re: ESPERANTO - SPAM SPAM SPAM, SPAM SPAM SPAM
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Organization: Esperanto League for North America, Inc.
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Date: Tue, 13 Jun 1995 02:22:33 GMT
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hedgesa@silver.ucs.indiana.edu (andrew larry hedges) skribis en lastatempa afisxo <3ri7gj$t02@usenet.ucs.indiana.edu>:

>> [Answering some comments by Martin A. Mazur...]

>It's important to realize that Mandarin consists of a large number of
>dialects which are mutually incomprehensible to other speakers of
>chinese, although apparently the written language can be understood by
>everyone.  So the 1.4 billion chinese speakers doens't mean what it
>seems to mean -- i.e.,that these people can all speak to each other.
>
If you have a threaded news reader, you might want to take a look at some 
other parts of this discussion, where this subject is addressed. In 
short, a majority (exact percentage subject to argument) of the people 
of China speak a particular variant of Mandarin, known to the Chinese 
as the _putonghua_ or "common tongue". The actual figure is probably on 
the order of a billion people, give or take a hundred million or so. 
(Only in China... :) This includes first- and second-language speakers. 
Presumably this is a result of the PRC's long-time policy of using 
this language as the primary language of radio, television, education, 
government, and anything else. (I almost wrote "newspapers", but given 
the nature of the Chinese language, that would have been ridiculous.)

-- 
Don HARLOW			donh@netcom.com
Esperanto League for N.A.       elna@netcom.com (800) 828-5944
ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/el/elna/elna.html         Esperanto
http://www.webcom.com/~donh
