Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Promoting uniform official language is a perfectly fine state policy Ask the Slovenians, Finns or Poles about that. The upper class of Imperial Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary obviously had tons of benefits from trying to forcibly erase their culture, and turn them into help- and cultureless drones that could be poured into whatever machine needed to be fed. It also had the downsides of, yknow, almost wiping ou…
> Helpless and culturless drones. What a fine definition for a whole nation of United State of America, modern Germany, France, etc. At this point you should already be tired to substitute culture with a language.
Apple’s new keyboard feature in iOS 15 is insult to Cantonese speaking community
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Re: Apple’s new keyboard feature in iOS 15 is insult to Cantonese speaking community
#92I’ve been learning Cantonese and trying to find resources or support for it is so difficult. It’s easy to take for granted how easy it is to start learning French, German, or Spanish.
By the way, ring me up if you wanna talk in Cantonese with a native speaker :)
Re: Apple’s new keyboard feature in iOS 15 is insult to Cantonese speaking community
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't read this as me trying to defend CCP's policy to discourage non-Mandarin languages in China: What you wrote is somewhat misleading to readers not familiar with the region. There has been massive internal migration to Guangdong province in the last 30 years. These migrants speak Cantonese at varying levels. It would be more accurate to make a comment about multi-generation Guangdong residents and their knowledge…
Yes, one can speak their own first Sinitic language on the mainland (and they do, and many even speak more than 2) and that is not banned. But they can't buy a textbook on their first language because the official policy is that everything that is not Mandarin is a «dialect», and dialects can't be studied (as in «are impossible to study due to not deserving to be studied»), therefore there is no need for textbooks.
Have you tried to buy one?
Re: Apple’s new keyboard feature in iOS 15 is insult to Cantonese speaking community
#94> Why would I type my native language with a foreign language keyboard? Would you type Russian with an American keyboard? I don’t know the intricacies of the Chinese languages but typing foreign languages with English keyboard is pretty common worldwide I guess? It certainly is for Indian languages at least.
English keyboards (especially ANSI-style US English keyboards) are very popular, but that's largely a matter of historical availability and (in hacker circles) bad support for the sort of punctuation you use for programming. Flip it on its head then — would you want to type English on a Cyrillic keyboard? Even just sticking to Latin alphabet keyboard layouts, there's plenty of variations that make different keyboards…
(a̋ is not hungarian and doesn't work)
Re: Apple’s new keyboard feature in iOS 15 is insult to Cantonese speaking community
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, one can speak their own first Sinitic language on the mainland (and they do, and many even speak more than 2) and that is not banned. But they can't buy a textbook on their first language because the official policy is that everything that is not Mandarin is a «dialect», and dialects can't be studied (as in «are impossible to study due to not deserving to be studied»), therefore there is no need for textbooks.
Jingdong has a large selection of Cantonese textbooks: https://so.m.jd.com/ware/search.action?keyword=%E7%B2%A4%E8%... Have you tried to buy one?
I have had no problem buying Cantonese teaching materials, including the Robert Bauer's comprehensive Cantonese dictionary, Victoria Yip's Cantonese grammar book and a quite a few more obscure ones from Western online book sellers.
Re: Apple’s new keyboard feature in iOS 15 is insult to Cantonese speaking community
#96yau mou yan taai dak ming lei duen yeh Hope that keyboard supports this kind of input. That's what comes to my mind for informal phonetic input of Cantonese.
It uses the British spelling of Cantonese that is still in use in HK for the personal and street name transliteration.
Re: Apple’s new keyboard feature in iOS 15 is insult to Cantonese speaking community
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Helpless and culturless drones. What a fine definition for a whole nation of United State of America, modern Germany, France, etc. At this point you should already be tired to substitute culture with a language.
France! Of all the nations, you pick the one that aggressively defines culture and language as identical, and acts like it to the point of being insufferable. You truly have no idea what you're talking about, do you?
> Helpless and culturless drones.
Please repeat this sentence about people of France.
Re: Apple’s new keyboard feature in iOS 15 is insult to Cantonese speaking community
#98I’ve been learning Cantonese and trying to find resources or support for it is so difficult. It’s easy to take for granted how easy it is to start learning French, German, or Spanish.
I think that's because Cantonese does not have an objective way (as I know) to gauge speaker proficiency. And mainly because it is a mostly spoken language. By the way, ring me up if you wanna talk in Cantonese with a native speaker :)
For others reading, one of the best resources I've found is InspirLang: https://inspirlang.com/
Re: Apple’s new keyboard feature in iOS 15 is insult to Cantonese speaking community
#99For example, observe that top-level commenter gaudat is writing in a romanization that is not Jyutping, which the author proposes. The romanizations that the author proposes are really good except for where it matters regarding common usage: it is primarily used by linguists, and most non-Mandarin communities don't have one dominant consistent romanization that everybody understands or learns in school. But everyone learns Mandarin and Pinyin in school in HK and Taiwan.
Most written Cantonese input use some form of stroke order or radical input.
Hence in terms of user-friendliness, the approach that Apple goes with is actually optimal, to the detriment to those with linguistic-nationalist agendas.
Modern Chinese may think that governments are trying to destroy culture by not standardizing written Chinese languages and romanizations and teaching them in a curriculum. But it is more negligence, and a lack of will to pursue a linguistic-nationalist goal than active destruction since it never existed. Rather it is mainland China pursuing (Western) communist ideals that brought writing vernacular Mandarin from a completely low-brow affair to something worthy of educated attention.
It is important to note that the prestige of Mandarin pronunciation pre-dates the CCP and even written Mandarin: it is the spoken language of the Central Plains and was the spoken language of the imperial bureaucracy. It was what anyone who sought advancement in the imperial bureaucracy needed to learn to speak.
Re: Apple’s new keyboard feature in iOS 15 is insult to Cantonese speaking community
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
I never thought it was something special to type English on a Swiss keyboard. Do people switch keyboards when they switch languages? To me it seems an unnecessary hassle, to remember where's the Z or why aren't there umlauts or or or, whenever I send an email to another person in a different language.
Even though the characters are mostly the same for most European languages, the mobile keyboard is often tightly connected to spell checking and auto correct for a specific language. It can be a struggle to "fight" the autocorrect when using the wrong keyboard. Physical keyboards don't have the same issues.