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Lu -
Cantonese (and Taiwanese, and other dialects as well, I suppose) can be written with Chinese
characters. People can use the characters used for writing standard Mandarin, and for dialects
some characters are added. Most of this writing can be understood with little difficulty by
speakers of other dialects. That people rarely write in Cantonese (or Taiwanese, or Shanghainese,
etc) is because they are better trained in writing standard Mandarin, and also because, although
speakers of other dialects can understand written Cantonese (etc), it is easier for them to read
standard Mandarin, and therefore one can get a bigger audience when one writes in Mandarin.
You may be right that there is no formal way for writing dialects, but there are ways that people
agree on. There are set characters for the Cantonese 不 and 他, for the Taiwanese 不会, and
for the Shanghainese 你, for example, and many more that I don't know because I never learnt any
fangyan, but I'm sure other people on this forum can tell more about that.
With the 'different character sets' used by HK and mainland China, I suppose you mean simplified
and traditional? They're not that different, and someone who knows one system can easily learn the
other.
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nipponman -
Quote:
lol here we go again, characters "solving" Chinese's problem in its special situation. Characters
created this situation. Saying that Chinese characters are well suited to spoken Chinese's
situation, again, is like saying that heroin is well suited to the situation of an addict.
Not the same thing. People weren't writing before they were speaking. Thats a simple fact, we
spoke before we wrote and therefore we needed a way to solve the problem of writing. In english,
it is easy because we have many thousands of possible syllable combinations etc, but in mandarin
only 1300.
Ferno -
written Chinese, over time, has shaped spoken modern spoken Chinese to fit the writing. One
syllable, one morpheme - forcing every syllable to have meaning. The dialects that were seperated
from written Chinese are very different because of this.
Quote:
Research into early states of Chinese and into certain types of pre-modern colloquial literature
shows a language made up not only of polysyllabic words, but also of polysyllabic morphemes.
Although many of the latter were borrowed into Chinese from non-East Asian sources, some portion
of them either were indigenous or were adopted so early in the language's history as to make the
distinction between borrowed and native vocabulary meaningless. Just how much the spoken language
was characterized by polysyllabic morphemes we will never know, since expressing the language in
writing meant reducing these units to a form compatible with the medium, so that each written
syllable-sized unit had a meaning of its own that could potentially stand by itself. When the
language failed to correspond to the requirements of the writing system, Chinese simply reanalyzed
the term so that it would consist of as many morphemes as it had syllables and characters
representing it, and used one of the new single-syllable morphemes for the whole, either as a
"word " by itself or in new polysyllabic combinations with other single-syllable morphemes.
Quote:
Unlike in modern Mandarin, where polysyllabic words are often the result of recombining
single-syllable morphemes (in some cases just to make the words intelligible in speech), many
polysyllabic words in non-Mandarin Chinese were so from the start. Their relative immunity from
the monosyllabification process plus the fact that they tend as a whole to reflect earlier states
of the language better than Mandarin suggest rather strongly that Mandarin is the anomaly -- not
the other way around. Chinese characters over time imposed their own order on the standard
language that used the system for its "representation," generating by their own logic the
conditions that make written Mandarin, as it is now constituted, amenable to morphosyllabic
writing.
HashiriKata -
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ferno
Quote: [...]
From where? Don't forget giving the source.
Ferno -
HashiriKata -
Quote:
As I already hinted in a reply to one of your earlier posts, these people are very biased and
anti-hanzi, you should read their stuff with extreme care.
geraldc -
Quote:
-A Cantonese speaker in Guangdong on the mainland, however, will never have a single lesson in
Cantonese in school - education and business and higher level vocabulary are carried out in
Mandarin, which he will become a fluent speaker of at a young age.
Business is carried out in Cantonese, and seeing as a lot of investment comes from overseas
Chinese/Hong Kong, a great deal is carried out in Cantonese.
Lugubert -
Lu:
Quote:
With the 'different character sets' used by HK and mainland China, I suppose you mean simplified
and traditional? They're not that different, and someone who knows one system can easily learn the
other.
If I have understood things correctly, the Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set comprises
characters not used outside of HK. However, according to Omniglot, showing examples, they are used
for Cantonese. Is that so?
Lu -
Lugubert: I do not know, but I suppose the characters not used outside of HK are for Cantonese. In
which case they probably are used outside of HK, wherever people want to write Cantonese.
Another issue is that the system HK uses for typing characters on a computer is, so I heard,
different from the system used in mainland China, and it is quite possible that there are
characters in this system that are not in the mainland system. But that doesn't necessarily mean
they are unknown on the mainland.
Ferno -
Quote:
Originally Posted by HashiriKata
As I already hinted in a reply to one of your earlier posts, these people are very biased and
anti-hanzi, you should read their stuff with extreme care.
pinyin.info may be (in dispelling the myths about hanzi), but the readings they list aren't their
own writings, they're chapters taken from books written by experienced Linguists - facts are facts.
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