| 单词 | putonghua |
| 例句 | putonghua nounWORD NOTE putonghua Small wonder that today's Chinese are not overly keen to speak a language to which others have long given a name, Mandarin. Since they live in a country they call not China, but the Middle Kingdom, Jung Guo, it is entirely reasonable that their language—if there can be a national language prescribed for so widely spread and disparate a people—has a homegrown name also. For decades it was known as kuo-yü, or "the national tongue," but in the 1950s, once Mao Zedong's revolution had been firmly installed, the northern Chinese dialects of this tongue were assembled together into what was renamed putonghua, or "the common language," and it is this that is taught, and to a very large degree spoken, everywhere from Manchuria to Hainan Island, from Shanghai to the frontiers with Tibet. It is therefore quite wrong and even slightly insulting to seek to learn a language called Mandarin, unless you are planning to do so in Taiwan; the appropriate word is Mao's new invention, and not the word that the elitist Portuguese chose, and which meant "an official." What was spoken before was the language of the elite; what is written and spoken now is the language of the Chinese common man, and to employ the word describing it so, putonghua, is to be on the side of the angels, at least so far as the Middle Kingdom is concerned. — SWConversational, opinionated, and idiomatic, these Word Notes are an opportunity to see a working writer's perspective on a particular word or usage. |
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