Local hua
Recently I blogged about a side dish we were served in Yongning in Yanqing County after the ice festival. We were told it was chao kui le, confusing to me at the time because no matter how I looked up the characters 炒傀儡, I kept getting a pronunciation of chao kui lei and a translation of "fried puppets or stooges." Nothing in any of my translation apps would have shown the obvious, that we were eating fried potato dumplings. I figured we had encountered a real dialect word, the Chinese characters used for their approximate pronunciation, but not their meaning.
A few weeks before that, I had read a few blog posts by a foreigner who actually lives in Yanqing County. These posts are about his experiences with the local languages in that area in the far north of Beijing and beyond. Writing of two particular dialects he encounters, he describes Yanqinghua as very distinct from Huailaihua. So distinct, in fact, that they are nearly mutually unintelligible. In one of the blog posts he seems to have stumbled on a third in a village between Yanqing and Huailai. What is particularly striking about this is that he is writing about three specific villages in that transition between Yanquing (Beijing Municipality) and Huailai (Hebei Province) separated by only 6 or 7 kilometers each. Of course, these dialects, too, are different from Standard Mandarin, which is based on the Beijing dialect.
Tonight after Myles' Chinese lesson I talked with his teacher for a few minutes to explore this further. She is a graduate of Beijing Normal University and during the day she teaches at a local Changping middle school. She grew up in one of the villages in the region north of Changping (and south of Yanqing) called the Ming Tombs Villages. I was especially curious if kui le also existed in Changping, either as words or a dish.
I asked her if Changpinghua was really different than Yanqinghua. She laughed and said they really were different hua (literally words, but can mean dialect). I then mentioned Hualaihua. To this she laughed again, saying that was absolutely a different hua from either of those. At my description of chao kui le, she was completely lost. She had never heard of it, nor had she ever eaten potatoes prepared in this fashion, served as one would chao bing. Definitely words and cuisine of Yanqing County, she agreed.
Still curious, I wondered if the Ming Tombs also had their own hua. She said that no, they basically spoke Changpinghua out there, too. I mentioned her father, our friend and occasional driver, and that when he spoke directly to me, I understood what he said. When I heard him talking to someone down in Beijing, I could still make out what he was saying. But when he was talking to another person I knew was also from Ming Tombs, I could not comprehend a word. She explained that what he was doing was slipping into his kou yu (pronunciation), but it was still Changpinghua.
Were these descriptions confusing? Even actual linguists argue how to delineate delineate between languages, dialects, and mere variations in pronunciation. It is exceptionally difficult in a place like China, where neighboring villages can't even communicate with one another, but the linguists refrain from calling these languages, but rather dialects. Since I'm not a linguist, I can just accept the local words for what I'm observing. It's easier to use hua and kou yu when they do than to try to identify on my own what kinds of differences mean I am hearing just a different kou yu instead of a unique hua.
A few weeks before that, I had read a few blog posts by a foreigner who actually lives in Yanqing County. These posts are about his experiences with the local languages in that area in the far north of Beijing and beyond. Writing of two particular dialects he encounters, he describes Yanqinghua as very distinct from Huailaihua. So distinct, in fact, that they are nearly mutually unintelligible. In one of the blog posts he seems to have stumbled on a third in a village between Yanqing and Huailai. What is particularly striking about this is that he is writing about three specific villages in that transition between Yanquing (Beijing Municipality) and Huailai (Hebei Province) separated by only 6 or 7 kilometers each. Of course, these dialects, too, are different from Standard Mandarin, which is based on the Beijing dialect.
Tonight after Myles' Chinese lesson I talked with his teacher for a few minutes to explore this further. She is a graduate of Beijing Normal University and during the day she teaches at a local Changping middle school. She grew up in one of the villages in the region north of Changping (and south of Yanqing) called the Ming Tombs Villages. I was especially curious if kui le also existed in Changping, either as words or a dish.
I asked her if Changpinghua was really different than Yanqinghua. She laughed and said they really were different hua (literally words, but can mean dialect). I then mentioned Hualaihua. To this she laughed again, saying that was absolutely a different hua from either of those. At my description of chao kui le, she was completely lost. She had never heard of it, nor had she ever eaten potatoes prepared in this fashion, served as one would chao bing. Definitely words and cuisine of Yanqing County, she agreed.
Still curious, I wondered if the Ming Tombs also had their own hua. She said that no, they basically spoke Changpinghua out there, too. I mentioned her father, our friend and occasional driver, and that when he spoke directly to me, I understood what he said. When I heard him talking to someone down in Beijing, I could still make out what he was saying. But when he was talking to another person I knew was also from Ming Tombs, I could not comprehend a word. She explained that what he was doing was slipping into his kou yu (pronunciation), but it was still Changpinghua.
Were these descriptions confusing? Even actual linguists argue how to delineate delineate between languages, dialects, and mere variations in pronunciation. It is exceptionally difficult in a place like China, where neighboring villages can't even communicate with one another, but the linguists refrain from calling these languages, but rather dialects. Since I'm not a linguist, I can just accept the local words for what I'm observing. It's easier to use hua and kou yu when they do than to try to identify on my own what kinds of differences mean I am hearing just a different kou yu instead of a unique hua.
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