Jun. 24th, 2008 03:35 pm
In English and Ohio with subtitles
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muckefuckI was perusing the Reader at lunchtime and came across this curious line in a review of the Chinese film 盲山 (Blind Mountain): "In Mandarin and Shaanxi with subtitles." Curious, because "Shaanxi" is the name of a province, not a language. More curious still because 陝西話 or "Shaanxi talk" is another name for Guanzhong dialect (關中), whose prestige standard is the speech of Xi'an, and Guanzhong dialect is Mandarin. True, some versions of Mandarin are greatly divergent from the Beijing-based standard (Sichuan speakers in particular get singled out for incomprehensibility), but Guanzhonghua isn't one of them. So altogether, it's rather like saying "In English and Ohio with subtitles."
Of course, not everyone in Ohio speaks the same dialect and the same is true of Shaanxi. In the northernmost areas, the local speech varieties are reckoned to the Lüliang (呂梁) dialect of the Jin sublanguage (which, such distinctions being subjective in any case, some linguists consider just another kind of Mandarin). In the mountainous south begins the Southwest Mandarin speech area which stretches thousands of kilometres through Sichuan to the edges of Yunnan and even into northernmost Thailand. This, it turns out, is probably the dialect group intended, as Chinese-language summaries of the film describe it as taking place in the Qinling (秦嶺) range of southern Shaanxi.
But how did the reviewer know this? No mention of "Shaanxi" as a language appears in any other English-language reviews and summaries I've found online, so presumably it's not part of the press packet materials, and it beggars belief to imagine that a reviewer named "Andrea Gronvall" has the technical background to distinguish Chinese speech varieties. My guess is that there must be some reference to dialect differences in the film, which concerns the kidnapping of an "urban university graduate" who is forcibly married to a mountain villager. There may even be something in the subtitles about the coarse, unintelligible "Shaanxi dialect" of the natives.
Of course, not everyone in Ohio speaks the same dialect and the same is true of Shaanxi. In the northernmost areas, the local speech varieties are reckoned to the Lüliang (呂梁) dialect of the Jin sublanguage (which, such distinctions being subjective in any case, some linguists consider just another kind of Mandarin). In the mountainous south begins the Southwest Mandarin speech area which stretches thousands of kilometres through Sichuan to the edges of Yunnan and even into northernmost Thailand. This, it turns out, is probably the dialect group intended, as Chinese-language summaries of the film describe it as taking place in the Qinling (秦嶺) range of southern Shaanxi.
But how did the reviewer know this? No mention of "Shaanxi" as a language appears in any other English-language reviews and summaries I've found online, so presumably it's not part of the press packet materials, and it beggars belief to imagine that a reviewer named "Andrea Gronvall" has the technical background to distinguish Chinese speech varieties. My guess is that there must be some reference to dialect differences in the film, which concerns the kidnapping of an "urban university graduate" who is forcibly married to a mountain villager. There may even be something in the subtitles about the coarse, unintelligible "Shaanxi dialect" of the natives.