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The rather interesting features about this particular "embedding" is that it results in a written language that is intelligible for both Mandarin and Cantonese
by dwohnitmok 9y ago
The rather interesting features about this particular "embedding" is that it results in a written language that is intelligible for both Mandarin and Cantonese speakers and that it also happens quite frequently in certain settings. In fact, it even comes off as "correct." That is it's not as if you're reading broken Mandarin or broken Cantonese and are able to piece together the meaning, as a speaker of a parent language of a pidgin language might feel when reading the pidgin. It's a full-fledged language that reads entirely naturally to a Mandarin speaker and just feels "Mandarinized" but otherwise "correct" to a Cantonese speaker.
The Spanish-English example you give really only is a result of Spanish's regular correspondence between spelling and pronunciation (as far as my limited Spanish knowledge allows me to understand), that allows you to unambiguously pronounce most combinations of Latin letters. For example, there's a "Spanish pronunciation" of the Quecha written Latin script, but it's basically an unintelligible mess of sounds that violates a lot of Spanish sound rules. If you use some conventions to group letters together and settle on a single pronunciation of each of those groupings, you can do the same in English with any Latin letter combinations as well.
Generally speaking, pronouncing written English as Spanish results in something that neither Spanish speakers nor English speakers understand nor accept as part of their language. While there is a subset of vocabulary (most notably -ion words) that shares the same or similar spelling between the two languages, there isn't really a cohesive subset of the written language (that is imagine writing entire sentences and paragraphs) that can be shared.
- jolmg 9y agoAh. I understand now. Man, that's cool for a song to do that! Like you said, that's not really doable for spanish-english. There's words like "similar" which are written and pronounced the same in both languages, but there's not enough to write sentences.
- dwohnitmok 9y agoHow different languages interact is always cool :). FWIW it's not just songs; standard Mandarin is usually the prestige dialect/language so anything that's perceived as being more "prestige" than an everyday conversation (e.g. things that are meant to be formal or official or whatever) tends to become Mandarinized among the different dialects/languages. Cantonese is a special example because of Hong Kong's own interesting social environment. For most other dialects/languages in the PRC, speakers just switch directly to Mandarin where they might have used a "Mandarinized" part of the dialect/language. Hong Kong is one of the few places where Mandarin comprehension is still not near-universal and so instead of just having Mandarin pop songs, you end up with Mandarinized Cantonese pop songs.
- peterburkimsher 9y agoIn case you're interested in songs, this is a popular worship song that switches between Chinese and Taiwanese/Hokkien in different verses: 在呼召我之處 The Place Of Calling (國語+台語) - 約書亞樂團 Joshuaband https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31q8w6JpndA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31q8w6JpndA On the topic of cultural crossover, I can also recommend inner Mongolian folk metal (traditional throat singing mixed with electric guitars is brilliant - 九大圣器 Nine Treasures, 杭盖乐队 Hanggai). For Taiwanese, check out 滅火器 Fire EX., 一步 One Step, 閃靈 ChthoniC).
- 80386 9y agoThere are some early Bible translators who took their source texts and translated them word-for-word into their target language, preserving even the word order of the source where it differed from the target.