31–40 of 125 posts
The picture in this tweet is very timely and appropriate to this post. https://mobile.twitter.com/effyzhangmy/status/10916881464487...
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Um. No. Mandarin is a language. Cantonese, which in your example is used in Hong Kong, is grammatically distinct from Mandarin. Changing from simplified to traditional characters or vice versa is not sufficient to translate from one to the other.
We don’t really have an analogue to this in the West, but Mandarin and Cantonese are very similar in their written forms, yet mutually unintelligible in their spoken forms. There are some differences due to different history and some different vocabulary, but broadly speaking, Chinese characters maintain the same meaning across dialects (and also when they’re used in Japanese), while changing their pronunciations. Si…
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Uh, no. There are fifty five formally recognized by the PRC including ones they're actively trying to exterminate (e.g. Uyghur). Within the Han community there is still a significant amount of diversity including countless dialects of the Mandarin and Cantonese languages. Your comment is a bit like claiming that with all the white people in Europe, it's not a very diverse place. In contrast the Japanese government re…
I don’t think the parent commenter is far off here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China#Ethnic... . Granted, Han Chinese in the modern sense is a bit of a constructed identity ( https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6e312e/is_th... ), but it’s a construction that has held up in China. With the exception of Guangdong and Hong Kong, you aren’t going to find many TV stations or newspapers tha…
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Uh, no. There are fifty five formally recognized by the PRC including ones they're actively trying to exterminate (e.g. Uyghur). Within the Han community there is still a significant amount of diversity including countless dialects of the Mandarin and Cantonese languages. Your comment is a bit like claiming that with all the white people in Europe, it's not a very diverse place. In contrast the Japanese government re…
I don’t think the parent commenter is far off here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China#Ethnic... . Granted, Han Chinese in the modern sense is a bit of a constructed identity ( https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6e312e/is_th... ), but it’s a construction that has held up in China. With the exception of Guangdong and Hong Kong, you aren’t going to find many TV stations or newspapers tha…
Europe is very much a melting pot, to a degree that would surprise many Americans. We don't necessarily have as many black or brown faces, but our cities often have very large populations of recent immigrants with strikingly different cultural values. Britain has about the same number of Muslims as the United States, despite having about a fifth of the overall population.
Fox News ran stories about "no-go areas for non-Muslims" in Britain, which is completely bogus and hugely incendiary but reflects the large and concentrated population of Muslims. The cities of Blackburn, Birmingham, Bradford and Leicester all have Muslim populations of over 20%; it's not unusual to find primary (elementary) schools that are >90% Muslim. There are neighbourhoods where the majority of women wear headscarves and the majority of restaurants and supermarkets sell Halal food. Choosing not to integrate is very much an option in most of Europe, so a lot of places feel very foreign.
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Um. No. Mandarin is a language. Cantonese, which in your example is used in Hong Kong, is grammatically distinct from Mandarin. Changing from simplified to traditional characters or vice versa is not sufficient to translate from one to the other.
We don’t really have an analogue to this in the West, but Mandarin and Cantonese are very similar in their written forms, yet mutually unintelligible in their spoken forms. There are some differences due to different history and some different vocabulary, but broadly speaking, Chinese characters maintain the same meaning across dialects (and also when they’re used in Japanese), while changing their pronunciations. Si…
For example, 火, the character for fire, is a (slightly) stylized brushstroke picture of a fire.
Mutually unintelligible communications that use the same pictures are distinct languages, but there are political implications to acknowledging this, so they’re “dialects”. As the saying goes, a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.
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>With the exception of Guangdong and Hong Kong, you aren’t going to find many TV stations or newspapers that are carrying content in non-Mandarin Chinese. Just a quick clarification: Mandarin is a spoken form of Chinese, and therefore cannot be "printed" in a newspaper. In Guangdong, the newspapers are printed in simplified Chinese characters. In Hong Kong, the newspapers are printed in traditional Chinese characters…
Um. No. Mandarin is a language. Cantonese, which in your example is used in Hong Kong, is grammatically distinct from Mandarin. Changing from simplified to traditional characters or vice versa is not sufficient to translate from one to the other.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>With the exception of Guangdong and Hong Kong, you aren’t going to find many TV stations or newspapers that are carrying content in non-Mandarin Chinese. Just a quick clarification: Mandarin is a spoken form of Chinese, and therefore cannot be "printed" in a newspaper. In Guangdong, the newspapers are printed in simplified Chinese characters. In Hong Kong, the newspapers are printed in traditional Chinese characters…
Not sure why you're getting downvoted, this is correct. Mandarin and Cantonese are regional dialects, Mandarin gained prominence because emperors from about the 1600s resided in Northern China and in Beijing which used a lot of Mandarin Chinese, thus it spread due to being a prestige language used by the royal family and their courtiers. Cantonese is prominent in certain areas of Southern China in the Guangdong and G…
No it's not, because it's fundamentally confused about what it means to write a language down.
> I personally find fangyan as a better descriptor than dialect
The literal translation of fangyan is "topolect", i.e. "the way people talk in a certain place". It only came to mean "dialect" due to some weird miscommunication when Western linguistic terminology was introduced in China. So that's the translation dictionaries give, and it's correct except when it's used to describe languages within China, where the traditional meaning of "topolect" continues to be used.
With China being very homogeneous in terms of race, they never worked through those issues. I don't blame them. My grand parents, who lived in the countryside all their life would react in a similar way. Small anecdote: I attended an English class at a Chinese business university. The teacher (young girl, never left China in her life) told us that everything "French" means "sex/porn/etc", i.e. "french book", "french…
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I thought you were possibly exaggerating. There really is such an ad. Pretty horrible. I never heard of this news almost 3 years after the fact. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/28/china-racist-d...
Racism in China is a big problem, but the laundry advert alone isn't certainty not a big issue and is pretty over blown: being overly political correct around lighthearted comedy. The skin pigment 'melanin' is what causes a black person's skin to be black, and is also the same as in a non-black person's tanned skin. It's a added pigment that the absence of causes light skin. Removal of melanin can happen (through non…
Thanks for enlightening us Professor 26 Year Old.