71–80 of 96 posts
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Well that example is rather radical. As long as you know (or can guess) traditional characters you can read a HK newspaper just fine with a stutter here and there.
That's because newspapers in HK are still written in Modern Standard Chinese most of the time. In less formal contexts such as social media, however, written Cantonese is rather more common.
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That's because newspapers in HK are still written in Modern Standard Chinese most of the time. In less formal contexts such as social media, however, written Cantonese is rather more common.
So the subtitles on HK videos, tv etc are usually sanitized to be standard?
(Edit: actually I just rewatched some 100Most content after I wrote the above and no, sadly even their videos are subtitled in Standard Modern Chinese.)
Here is a written example of differences between the Cantonese language and the Modern Standard Chinese (Mandarin) language when written in Chinese characters. I've seen many examples of signs or other written language in public places in Hong Kong that are incomprehensible to literate speakers of Mandarin, and some examples of written Taiwanese in Taiwan that are incomprehensible to people from anywhere else. How yo…
Cantonese to Mandarin is like Ebonics to English. https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-hk/%E7%B2%A4%E8%AF%AD#.E4.BF.9D.... In your example: > 第一及第二人稱用「我」、「你」，與官話相同，但粵語音「我」（ngo5）更保留了中古漢語唐音（*ngɑ̌ ）之疑母（ng-）。第三人稱不用「他」，而是「渠」（俗寫「佢」；東漢《孔雀東南飛》：「雖與府吏要，渠會永無緣」），跟吳語一樣。複數人稱不用「們」，而是上溯至端系的同源形式 [taʔ] 或 [ti]（現代粵語寫作「哋」，本字為「等」，見聖公會的公禱書）。粵語用「係」而不用「是」來代表正面答覆，「係」是明清兩代常用字。這些字眼在中共接管政權初期，仍然有作書面語用，例如李儼《中算史論叢》第一冊 (1955年版本，第210頁) 提及18世紀數學家 Issac Wolfram…
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It's fairly common in English for authors to give phonetic spellings in dialog, to make things seem more "real" or to indicate accents. To pick a random line from my favorite book, "What for? You caint do nothin for it." I'm not sure if that's what OP is asking, but I'm actually curious how you would indicate the same effect (essentially, encoding nonstandard pronunciation in a comprehensible way).
We usually substitute with a different sounding character which results in a non-sensible string of characters, yet still understandable (to native speakers at least) given sufficient context. As an example, we often joke about how the staff of a certain local noodle soup chain often speak in heavily accented Cantonese by writing their speech as "勿演", "懶肉", "生小辣" ("don't act", "lazy meat", "raw little spicy") instead…
>The inflexibility of the Chinese script has always reinforced the inflexibility of the Chinese state. The democratization of Taiwan and Hong Kong must be pretty frustrating to writers who want people to take these kinds of baseless yet simplifying statements seriously.
"reinforced", not "caused".
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I know about 200 words of spoken chinese and can write maybe 4 (including yi er san ;)). Now, admittedly, I'm just picking it up here and there rather than attending classes and spending hours writing characters over and over, but I think learning the strokes for 3-5,000 characters is undisputably 'harder' than learning to write 26 or so letters and a really consistent pronunciation system like pinyin. That's not to…
It's true - Chinese kids age 7 can write less words in Mandarin than American kids age 7 can write in English. However, it doesn't change the fact that the difficulty of the language has nothing to do with literacy rate. China has a low literacy rate because huge swaths of the population don't have access to education. I learned Japanese and Chinese to a fluent level, and at least from my biased point of view Japanes…
To illustrate the difficulty of Japanese for others, I'll provide an example:
生 - raw (nama)
生まれる - to be born (u・mareru)
生きる - to live (i・kiru)
生活 - living; life (sei・katsu)
生地 - cloth; fabric (ki・ji)
The above example is one of many kanji with multiple readings in Japanese. How do you know which reading to use? Context and because you know the word. :) That problem isn't unique to Japanese, English suffers from it as well! Think of homophones like tear and tear. You use context to figure out how it is read. It adds some level of difficulty but isn't impossible.
> But central authorities are also now worried about any regional languages (which it insists on calling dialects) among the Han majority It's not as clear cut that variations of Chinese are languages and not dialects as the economist makes it out. This is very similar to arabic. Wikipedia for instance also calls them dialects. This is very different from Uighur and Tibetan which are pretty clear cut separate languag…
Wikipedia calls them “varieties” because to call them “languages” would result in a giant political flamewar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Chinese , also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Varieties_of_Chinese That doesn’t mean they aren’t distinct languages (and not mere “dialects”) by any definition a modern linguist would typically use. Calling them “dialects” would be similar to calling English,…
Continental western germanic is actually a good example of a group where the distinction between dialect and language is not clear. There's a dialect continuum in the area [1], so you often can't draw clear cut lines what belongs to one language and one to another.
- With Low German the question is wether it is an own language or just a dialect of German.
- With the three frisian varieties the question is wether they are different languages or just different dialects of Frisian.
- Luxemburgish can be considered just a dialect, like the German dialects spoken just behind the border that are essentially the same, or an own language.
- Dutch belongs to a dialect group that also spans over wide parts of Germany and Luxembourg [2]
- And there are many more things to think about like Afrikaans or Yiddish
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_continuum#Continental_...
It is important to note that China had alphabetic systems, like Mongolian, since a long time ago. It was a conscious decision not to use them. Learning to write and read is much easier in alphabetic so the elite opposed it from the start as they viewed it as a menace to their status. They were right, when people in Europe could read Calvino's printed Bible and own one themselves it changed the status quo radically, c…
They use the same written language with multiple spoken languages. That does not work with an alphabet. Signs use the same principle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazard_symbol Though Arabic numerals have become fairly universal.
It can work if you make it work (and ignore side effects).
As attested by the many, many languages have been (forcibly) switched over to invented or completely foreign alphabets, over the millennia.
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They use the same written language with multiple spoken languages. That does not work with an alphabet. Signs use the same principle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazard_symbol Though Arabic numerals have become fairly universal.
They use the same written language with multiple spoken languages. That does not work with an alphabet. It can work if you make it work (and ignore side effects). As attested by the many, many languages have been (forcibly) switched over to invented or completely foreign alphabets, over the millennia.
long A sound = vr in language 1.
Z sound = vr in language 2.
This means if you have 10 languages then ideograms are easier in 9/10 of them.
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It's true - Chinese kids age 7 can write less words in Mandarin than American kids age 7 can write in English. However, it doesn't change the fact that the difficulty of the language has nothing to do with literacy rate. China has a low literacy rate because huge swaths of the population don't have access to education. I learned Japanese and Chinese to a fluent level, and at least from my biased point of view Japanes…
You aren't biased - just educated in the languages. ;) To illustrate the difficulty of Japanese for others, I'll provide an example: 生 - raw (nama) 生まれる - to be born (u・mareru) 生きる - to live (i・kiru) 生活 - living; life (sei・katsu) 生地 - cloth; fabric (ki・ji) I'll stop there. There are more readings for that single kanji but they are obscure or an "alternative" to a more commonly used kanji. To my understanding, this pr…