21–30 of 96 posts
In Chrome I get the expected I-agree-to-your-cookies consent form.
Anyone else getting this?
Weird. On Firefox, with ad-blocker and PrivacyBadger disabled, I am stuck on a page with only navigation menus and a title that reads 'Explicit cookie consent'. In Chrome I get the expected I-agree-to-your-cookies consent form. Anyone else getting this?
The Qin dynasty despite its short reign laid the cultural foundations for generations of China (including and up to now). Before that, China was a collection of several warring states with their own written languages that the Qin dynasty immediately abolished. It allowed them to centralize administration of standards and take power from local lords to the central bureaucracy.
What is happening in Hong Kong is a power play by the mainland authorities, just as it was in many instances in mainland history starting from the first emperor.
My mother's family was from southern China, and relocated to Taiwan when the Communists won, my maternal grandparents' family having worked in the Kuomintang government. While my grandparents' native tongue was Cantonese, the only language my mother knows from her years in Taiwan is Mandarin (the Taiwan authorities had a strict prohibition on non-mandarin Chinese dialects).
I forgot about it for years until I learned from Wikipedia that that wasn't just a reaaction against Internet, but a policy that has been going on for centuries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergonha
So the mandarinisation doesn't seem that odd against such a background. The similar effort bore fruit in France as I think now virtually all people in France speak Parisian French compared to 12% or so at the advent of French Revolution and the following policies.
Out of curiosity, how do writers deal with dialog with Chinese characters? It seems like characters would give the meaning but not the voice.
Out of curiosity, how do writers deal with dialog with Chinese characters? It seems like characters would give the meaning but not the voice.
There are some complications when Chinese characters are used to write non-Chinese languages, but in general Chinese characters correspond to sounds (one character per syllable). You might like this article, "The Ideographic Myth". http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/ideographic_myth.html
In Hong Kong, I sometimes see peoples screens when I'm using public transport. WhatsApp audio recordings are very popular, sometimes I can see the entire conversation is just audio recordings back and forth. Other times it's Chinese (I can't differentiate which), sometimes English, often a mix. I've only seen someone drawing characters with his finger once.
Keep an eye out for either Pinyin or Zhuyin. I believe they are somewhat common for texting purposes. You input this stuff and your device starts displaying characters for you to pick from avoiding the slower process of actually drawing characters. Links for those unfamiliar with those two things. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo
It's only drawing if one doesn't write the language. If I have forgotten how to write a character and have to refer to a dictionary, I'll still be writing the character, not drawing it. Compare/contrast with my trying to write Thai, Tamil, Arabic, etc - then I'll be drawing.
Personally I write Chinese on the iPhone/iPad using my index finger much faster than I enter pinyin. I find that iOS's character recognition is fairly good - as long as I get the stroke order right, even though what I have written looks like random scribbling on screen, most of the time it presents the right character.
> 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…
To me, any non-mutually-intelligible dialect is in position to be called a language.
> 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…
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, German, and Dutch “dialects” of “Germanic”.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
As far as we can tell, all writing systems with independent origins started out as logographs that where stylized representations of the words, and then they started to change by adapting the rebus principle--basically, puns based on homonyms rather than their abstract representation. Egyptian, Sumerian, Mayan, and Japanese all made translations thence into syllabaries, whereas Chinese remained primarily logographic.…