My Internet enemies (you know who you are) love to rip me to pieces over this stuff, but I suspect that is because they operate under the cover of anonymity plus the general loud-mouthed jerk “troll culture” of the Internet combines to provides a Linguisticus Sociopathicus that is seldom found in the hallowed halls of reserved academe.
The funny this is, if this Chinese work is so horrible, why has it earned praise from some of the world’s top Sinologists, who in fact actually assisted me with the project? Perhaps they should answer that. If I “know less about Linguistics than a Linguistics 10 student” then why do I sit on the review board of a peer-reviewed linguistics academic journal? Why did an 80 page paper of mine that will soon be published in a book make through two peer reviews and a dozen editors, including some of the world’s top Turkologists?
The funny thing is that I get along pretty well with other linguists outside of the Internet. We work together calmly, chat about this, that and the other, share papers and gather information from each other, all the things that academics do. I even get addressed as Dear Colleague. And then on the Internet, suddenly I’m so stupid I don’t know what a verb is. Whatever.
Anyway, a huge project of mine, A Reworking of Chinese Language Classification, has received a massive update. It underwent a ton of fixes, a lot of dead links were removed, and many matters were cleared up or explained better. Also the language count jumped by 200 from ~360 to 573. Now some of these may not be full languages and I may be exaggerating but I believe that as Victor Mair said, using the 90% mutual intelligibility criterion, there are a good 2,000 separate languages within Sinitic alone.
We simply cannot carve them out because the Chinese government will go crazy, and no Sinologist wants to make the Chinese government mad. The Chinese government lies and says there is one Chinese language with 3,000+ dialects in it, including such massive lects as Cantonese, Hakka, Min, Hui, Wu, Peng, Gan and Ji? Not to mention that Mandarin itself is of course not a single language but is actually a collection of scores or more languages inside of itself.
The project involves a brief description in English of the Chinese lects, stating such things as names, where they are spoken, the number of speakers, classification, degree of endangerment, linguistic history and development, classification issues, mutual intelligibility issues, dialects within, membership in language groups, the language/dialect question, anthropological history, sociolinguistic issues historical and modern, future trends, controversies, and sometimes more arcane linguistic data.
I am not trying to brag here and I am not real familiar with the literature, but my account of Chinese dialects is the most thorough such account I have ever run across so far in English. Now there may be better publications out there, but I am not aware of them. Further, most do not seem to have tackled the dialect vs. language problem.
Almost all of the good material on this stuff is in Chinese, and I do not read Chinese, so this caused massive problems, but I seem to be able to deal with them ok, as a lot of the research that I referenced was in Chinese and I am able to sort of make my way through it to get the gist of it despite the language barrier. I have also come up with a few native speaker informants who have given me excellent information on their particular lects. For instance, I recently ran into a speaker of something called Cambodian Teochew (I had no idea such a thing existed) who told me that the four SE Asian Teochew lects, Malay Teochew, Thai Teochew, Cambodian Teochew and Vietnamese Teochew, were not mutually intelligible. That is, there are four separate languages within Overseas Teochew alone! Unbelievable.