131–140 of 206 posts
this is awesome. thanks for sharing. there is a wealth of resources for learning mandarin but only a smattering for cantonese. two favorites: 1. web dictionary http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/scripts/wordsearch.php?leve... 2. iOS dictionary that is free and comprehensive, also covers mandarin: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pleco-chinese-dictionary/id341... unaffiliated with either company, just a longtime user. othe…
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Do any ideographic languages use spaces? I'm used to it in Asian languages but it still does my head in when I try to read older Latin documents.
How many (modern, written) "ideographic languages" exist? I can think of two: Chinese and Japanese. Old Korean and Vietnamese used some Chinese characters, but the modern languages use none. It is interesting to me when written Chinese and Japanese use commas. It is pretty much never required, but pure style. It does help to breakup a complex sentence, similar to phonetic languages.
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Yeah, the seventh tone in Guangzhou Cantonese that’s gone in Hong Kong Cantonese is the high-falling tone. In Guangzhou Cantonese, 衫 (shirt) and 三 (three) are not homophones, but they are in Hong Kong Cantonese. The Jyutping romanization (from the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong) reflects this change in HK Cantonese (saam1), whereas Yale, based on the older pronunciation, could represent the difference in tone (sāam…
I suspect the difference is more "academic" than otherwise. It would be interesting to give a Hong-Konger a test with pairs of characters, one of 1st tone and the other 7th tone, and see whether they can guess which is which. I suspect with minimal training they'd be able to score significantly better than random chance. (Willing to try it out!)
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Isn't it listed as "Chinese Traditional"?
No, "Chinese Traditional" refers to the character set used to write each character[1], but the actual text is still written according with the vocabulary and grammar of Standard Written Chinese, which is based on spoken Mandarin. As an example, this is the sentence "Please give me his book" written in Standard Written Chinese using "Chinese Traditional" characters: 請你給我他的書。 If you use "Chinese Simplified" characters[…
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Isn't it listed as "Chinese Traditional"?
No, "Chinese Traditional" refers to the character set used to write each character[1], but the actual text is still written according with the vocabulary and grammar of Standard Written Chinese, which is based on spoken Mandarin. As an example, this is the sentence "Please give me his book" written in Standard Written Chinese using "Chinese Traditional" characters: 請你給我他的書。 If you use "Chinese Simplified" characters[…
"Please give me his book" is translated to: 請把他的書畀我。 While it does use the usual Cantonese word for "give" (畀), the rest of the sentence still mostly uses Mandarin vocabulary and grammar, notably the 把 construction, the third-person pronoun 他, and the use of the 的 genitive particle, which aren't typically used in spoken Cantonese.
Conversely, 唔該你畀佢本書我 is translated to: "Please give him this book me." This seems to indicate that it doesn't understand Cantonese's ability to use measure words (such as 本) as genitive particles, nor does it understand that the word order of the direct and indirect objects in the sentence are switched compared to the usual order in Standard Written Chinese.
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No, "Chinese Traditional" refers to the character set used to write each character[1], but the actual text is still written according with the vocabulary and grammar of Standard Written Chinese, which is based on spoken Mandarin. As an example, this is the sentence "Please give me his book" written in Standard Written Chinese using "Chinese Traditional" characters: 請你給我他的書。 If you use "Chinese Simplified" characters[…
I just tried Bing Translate, and even though it nominally supports "Cantonese (Traditional)", their translations don't seem to be much better for the example sentence I gave. "Please give me his book" is translated to: 請把他的書畀我。 While it does use the usual Cantonese word for "give" (畀), the rest of the sentence still mostly uses Mandarin vocabulary and grammar, notably the 把 construction, the third-person pronoun 他, a…
> Translate "please give me his book" to Cantonese.
> > "請俾我佢嘅書" is the Cantonese translation for "please give me his book".
This appears generally fine though stylistically not as colloquial. Using 請 for "please" is considered more formal since it's usually more written than spoken. In addition, it uses the Cantonese genitive particle 嘅, though I think most speakers would prefer to use the measure word 本 in this context, but this is still perfectly grammatical. Lastly, it still retains the same word order for direct and indirect objects as Standard Written Chinese, which while not completely colloquial, is still considered acceptable when spoken.
BTW, since written Cantonese isn't standardized, 畀 can often be seen written as 俾, but they refer to the same word.
> Translate "唔該你畀佢本書我" to English.
> > The Cantonese phrase "唔該你畀佢本書我" translates to "Please give me his book" in English.
Exactly correct.
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Okay, you make a good point. Let's look back at the GGP's comment though: > Same with Chinese language, thus lexing and parsing requires knowing many more words than in languages with spaces between words. In English, can you get away with knowing the meaning of "good" and "morning" and not "good morning", and know that I'm greeting you instead of commenting on the quality of this morning?
Good morning is a bad example because it has a colloquial meaning that is a least a little idiomatic. Most other words/phrases in English don’t have this effect, while many Chinese words are like 早安. 了解, for example, can’t even be pronounced without correctly parsing the word.
Where I've had pain specifically with Thai is that I can't even know where a syllable begins and ends until I read a few "syllables" together and decide whether some vowels go with the consonant in front or behind it, and whether some an -ar should be pronounced as an -aan.
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It needs them because there are too few unique syllables in Mandarin. I'm sure a linguist can provide the proper terminology, but there are only around 400 unique sounds in Mandarin, ignoring tones. Even adding five tones still only increases this to ~1500 (not all are used). Compare this to English, where estimates are in the 10-15k range. There are therefore an enormous number of homophones in Mandarin, which makes…
> but there are only around 400 unique sounds in Mandarin, ignoring tones. Even adding five tones still only increases this to ~1500 (not all are used). Compare this to English, where estimates are in the 10-15k range. Sure, but English needs them because there are only around 26 letters; compare this to Mandarin, where estimates are in the 400 range.
If anything, letters being overloaded limits the number of syllables we can express.
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And to add to that, there are a bunch of sandhis, which are when the tones are shifted or modified when followed by certain other tones. Using tones is so natural that many native Cantonese speakers are unaware that the language even has tones lol.
Your last point: I would say that is generally true for all native-level speakers of tonal languages. It is interesting to watch them try to learn a different tonal language. It suddenly opens all these doors into their own language. "Oh, so that's why foreigners struggle with this sound." Mandarin: zai, sai, cai When you read about tonal languages online, there is so much emphasis on "tonal languages are special". I…