guānhuà (guān·huà {government official; mandarin} · speech → [(old name for) Mandarin | officalese; bureaucratese; bureaucratic jargon] 官话 官話) ← Tap/click to show/hide the “flashcard”
Why is Mandarin called “Mandarin” in English?
Nope, it wasn’t because of mandarin oranges.
SirSadiq
Wikipedia provides this summary:
The English word “mandarin” (from Portuguese mandarim, from Malay menteri, from Sanskrit mantrī, mantrin, meaning ‘minister or counsellor’) originally meant an official of the Ming and Qing empires. Since their native varieties were often mutually unintelligible, these officials communicated using a Koiné language based on various northern varieties. When Jesuit missionaries learned this standard language in the 16th century, they called it “Mandarin”, from its Chinese name Guānhuà (官话/官話) or ‘language of the officials’.[source]
So, according to the above summary, the English word “Mandarin” comes to us from Sanskrit, Malay, and Portuguese, and was chosen to correspond with this week’s MEotW, “guānhuà (guān·huà {government official; mandarin} · speech → [(old name for) Mandarin | officalese; bureaucratese; bureaucratic jargon] 官话 官話)”. These days, Chinese speakers in general don’t refer to Modern Standard Mandarin as “guānhuà (guān·huà {government official; mandarin} · speech → [(old name for) Mandarin | officalese; bureaucratese; bureaucratic jargon] 官话 官話)”[source], but apparently Chinese linguists still use this term:
Linguists use the term “Mandarin” to refer to the diverse group of dialects spoken in northern and southwestern China, which Chinese linguists call Guānhuà.
(Note that the English word “dialect” is often misused and misunderstood when applied to the Chinese languages, causing many to wrongly believe that Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghainese, etc. are merely dialects of a single Chinese language, when in fact, they are as different from each other as English is different from, say, Swedish or German. It really works better to consider Mandarin, Cantonese, etc. to be different languages, just as Swedish, German, etc. are considered to be different languages, and not just dialects of “European”. I hope to address this further in a future MEotW post.)
Because of its literal meaning of “government officials’ speech”, “guānhuà (guān·huà {government official; mandarin} · speech → [(old name for) Mandarin | officalese; bureaucratese; bureaucratic jargon] 官话 官話)” is sometimes also used to refer to what in English we call “officalese; bureaucratese; bureaucratic jargon”.
2 replies on “guānhuà”
Good but I try to discourage people from saying “Wikipedia says” as if Wikipedia were the final authority (which I know is not what you meant, but I’m afraid some people might read it that way). Wikipedia is actually a collection of other people’s reading notes: they cite their sources and summarise. This can sometimes go wrong. For example, Wikipedia once said Jehovah’s Witnesses are seen as a threat to national security. The source for that turned out to be Singapore, where any refusal to take up arms was interpreted as a threat to Singapore’s national security. Although Wikipedia’s statement (that the Witnesses were seen as a threat to national security) was technically correct, I would argue that summarising this source using words like that, without mentioning that the context was Singapore (not larger countries like the United States), is potentially misleading. Thankfully it was possible to check their source if the reader was willing to do so. I therefore like to encourage that anyone who uses Wikipedia should try to get into the habit of always checking their sources, or at least looking to see what their sources are. Sometimes the source is a book that we might not have easy access to, but at least we can make the situation a little more transparent by saying something like “Wikipedia summarises such-and-such a source as saying” instead of just “Wikipedia says”. In this case Wikipedia is citing a book by sinologist W. South Coblin (who incidentally has his own Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._South_Coblin ) so I think it might be appropriate to mention that this is Wikipedia’s summary of Professor Coblin’s research. (We’d better not say it IS Professor Coblin’s research, unless we’ve actually checked that the source really does say what Wikipedia says it says. But we can still give the professor some credit while mentioning that what we’re actually quoting is Wikipedia’s summary of his research.)
Thanks for your comment, Silas.
I understand and agree that Wikipedia should not be considered as a final authority, but rather, just as an often useful conversation starter.
I have been trying to keep that in mind as I write, but perhaps I have been assuming too much that readers also understand that, as I have been trying to cope with the time pressure that so many of us are under these days.
I have revised this post to remove any suggestions that Wikipedia is a final authority, and have added clearly labelled [source] links to the source information that Wikipedia provides for certain points. Going forward, I will endeavour to do so in future writing as well. (Past writings will be updated as time allows.)