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From: John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org>
Subject: Re: More Essentialist Explanations
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Daniel von Brighoff (deb5@midway.uchicago.edu) wrote --

> Now, what I'd really like to see are essentialist descriptions of Chinese
> dialects.  I've heard plenty of Southerners describe Mandarin as
> "barbarian Chinese" or "Chinese spoken by Mongols"; so how do the
> Mandarin speakers describe Cantonese, Shanghainese, Hoklo?  How do these
> describe each others' speech?

Shanghainese is essentially Mandarin spoken with laryngitis.
	--John Cowan

Mandarin is essentially [Southern] Chinese as spoken by servants.
	--Yuen Ren Chao

American English is essentially English after having been wiped
off with a dirty sponge.
	--J.R.R. Tolkien

-- 
John Cowan						cowan@ccil.org
			e'osai ko sarji la lojban
