5 ms·

The hypothesis never mentioned in the post, is i think that apple fears being kicked out of China for promoting cantonese or regional languages, going against t

by bsaul 5y ago

The hypothesis never mentioned in the post, is i think that apple fears being kicked out of China for promoting cantonese or regional languages, going against the will of the CCP to make Mandarin the only official chineese language.

07d046 5y ago
I doubt this is the case here. Cantonese is an official language of Hong Kong and Macau and the mother tongue of tens of millions in Guangdong. Language politics is complicated but I don't think the CCP is so crudely trying to eliminate languages. Apple also has keyboards for Uyghur and Tibetan, which are probably more sensitive languages.
- chemmail 5y ago
  Do you live in Hong Kong? They are slowly but systematically and surely doing that to Cantonese.
  - 07d046 5y ago
    As far as I know, there is a gradual trend to push Mandarin at the expense of Cantonese, and there is reason for concern, but I doubt there's a connection between this and Apple's decision here. (There's a reason I said "crudely".)
- tasogare 5y ago
  > I don't think the CCP is so crudely trying to eliminate languages They are doing it. Sources: few HK friends that were really worried about the future of their language and culture. And this was before the security law.
- The_suffocated 5y ago
  > "...but I don't think the CCP is so crudely trying to eliminate languages." Last time I checked, less than half of the population in Guangzhou knew how to speak Cantonese.
  - throwaway2037 5y ago
    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 of Cantonese. (If you want to discuss Shenzhen, there is virtually zero Cantonese used there, because it was only a fishing village with ~25k people when it was opened for trade. It is nearly 100% internal migrants -- mostly from outside Guangdong province.)
    - yorwba 5y ago
      It's not just recent migration to Guangdong province. The eastern half of Guangdong is traditionally Hakka-speaking. Most Hakkas don't speak Cantonese, and that shouldn't be surprising.
      - throwaway2037 5y ago
        I am confused by this comment. Are you talking about Chaozhou (潮州)? That city is on the border between Guangdong and Fujian (but lies in GD), but the locals are overwelming Canto speakers. There are many who have migrated to Hongkong over the last 75 years.
        yorwba 5y ago
        Isn't Chaozhou mostly Teochew-speaking? Wikipedia claims there are 10 million Teochew speakers in Chaozhou while listing the total population as 2.7 million, which obviously doesn't add up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaozhou#Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaozhou#Language (My guess is metropolitan area vs. city boundaries.) But given that Teochew is named after Chaozhou (modulo romanization) I would've expected it to be locally dominant over Cantonese. But what I was actually talking about were Huizhou, Heyuan, Meizhou etc. Basically, Cantonese extends as far east as Hong Kong and further east of that is marked as Hakka territory in the Language Atlas of China https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a9/Map_of_sinitic_languages_full-en.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a9/Map_of_s... Meixian Hakka from Meizhou in particular has a prominent position within Hakka culture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meixian_dialect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meixian_dialect
thisgoodlife 5y ago
Most likely the people who wrote the feature note didn’t know what they were talking about
yorwba 5y ago
If that were the case, input methods by Chinese companies like Sogou wouldn't support Cantonese either. The opposite is true: here's a description of how to enable Cantonese Jyutping input in Sogou for iOS: https://jingyan.baidu.com/article/60ccbceb100b7c25cab197c4.html https://jingyan.baidu.com/article/60ccbceb100b7c25cab197c4.h... I think the more likely explanation is that Apple has a small team supporting all of the world's languages, mostly focusing on widely-spoken ones, while Sogou has a small team focusing on languages widely spoken in China, so their Cantonese support is better.
ksec 5y ago
Probably true. Half of the teens in the region dont speak the language anymore. So CCP is admittedly quite effective at it. Although Cantonese Voice recognition still works. And somehow Apple Arcade still not available in HK and Mainland China? Edit: Actually this brings back memory. About twenty+ years ago I made an English to Cantonese Translation with Romanization Input Method on Windows and later on Mac using VanillaInput / OpenVanilla so I could use it for IRC and ICQ. At the time voice recognition of anything was sci-fi stuff. Dragon speech recognition sucks no matter how much training time you give it. Twenty years later we are close to real time on devices speech recognition.
- imbnwa 5y ago
  So basically in 50 years Cantonese will largely live on in its disapora, much like the forms of Sicillian and Napolitano and the hundreds of other endagered languages you can find in NYC
  - ksec 5y ago
    Yes. But there is a different. Between Natural Selection of language where it is gone and a planned deliberate attack to get rid of the language. Correct me if I am wrong I believe Sicillian and Napolitano are the former. Cantonese are the latter.
    - imbnwa 5y ago
      I mean, Southern Italians from Calabria and Sicily fled Italy precisely to escape what they perceived as an attack on their culture and society by Northern Italy, given the official government told everybody "you and your children will now be speaking Tuscan from now on, oh, and we're gonna fuck you with high taxes" (Tuscan, the regional language of Tuscany, was promoted to Official Italian by the Nationalist government). This schism between north and south still exists to this day in Italy (it even gets mentioned in The Sopranos!). Perhaps the difference is one of degree rather than an absolute difference
creshal 5y ago
> to make Mandarin the only official chineese language. Or, in more honest terms: To culturally genocide their minorities.
- lugged 5y ago
  To the downvotes: I don't know what you think the purpose of banning languages is, but in every other instance in history it is about destroying a culture and assimilating it's people's. The one China policy is exactly that.
  - yorwba 5y ago
    Cantonese isn't banned, though. Guangdong TV is broadcasting shows entirely in Cantonese (with Mandarin subtitles), e.g. timestamped today: https://www.gdtv.cn/tv/30e784c392efd7d38daa2cf50aa7a1cd https://www.gdtv.cn/tv/30e784c392efd7d38daa2cf50aa7a1cd
  - YouthfulMarxism 5y ago
    Promoting uniform official language is a perfectly fine state policy with a tonn of benefits, including costs reduction, economic integration improvements, increased social and workforce mobility. CCP crimes are countless, but existing of such policy is clearly not one of them. Questions could and should be asked in regard to tools and apparatus used in such transition, for example repressions, violence and forced re-education. IF they were used.
    - creshal 5y ago
      > 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 out entire cultures, followed by bloody rebellions and wars of independence. Plus, well, a world war or two. Wonderful for the economy!

by bsaul 5y ago

07d046 5y ago

I doubt this is the case here. Cantonese is an official language of Hong Kong and Macau and the mother tongue of tens of millions in Guangdong. Language politics is complicated but I don't think the CCP is so crudely trying to eliminate languages. Apple also has keyboards for Uyghur and Tibetan, which are probably more sensitive languages.

chemmail 5y ago
Do you live in Hong Kong? They are slowly but systematically and surely doing that to Cantonese.
- 07d046 5y ago
  As far as I know, there is a gradual trend to push Mandarin at the expense of Cantonese, and there is reason for concern, but I doubt there's a connection between this and Apple's decision here. (There's a reason I said "crudely".)
tasogare 5y ago
> I don't think the CCP is so crudely trying to eliminate languages They are doing it. Sources: few HK friends that were really worried about the future of their language and culture. And this was before the security law.
The_suffocated 5y ago
> "...but I don't think the CCP is so crudely trying to eliminate languages." Last time I checked, less than half of the population in Guangzhou knew how to speak Cantonese.
- throwaway2037 5y ago
  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 of Cantonese. (If you want to discuss Shenzhen, there is virtually zero Cantonese used there, because it was only a fishing village with ~25k people when it was opened for trade. It is nearly 100% internal migrants -- mostly from outside Guangdong province.)
  - yorwba 5y ago
    It's not just recent migration to Guangdong province. The eastern half of Guangdong is traditionally Hakka-speaking. Most Hakkas don't speak Cantonese, and that shouldn't be surprising.
    - throwaway2037 5y ago
      I am confused by this comment. Are you talking about Chaozhou (潮州)? That city is on the border between Guangdong and Fujian (but lies in GD), but the locals are overwelming Canto speakers. There are many who have migrated to Hongkong over the last 75 years.
      - yorwba 5y ago
        Isn't Chaozhou mostly Teochew-speaking? Wikipedia claims there are 10 million Teochew speakers in Chaozhou while listing the total population as 2.7 million, which obviously doesn't add up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaozhou#Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaozhou#Language (My guess is metropolitan area vs. city boundaries.) But given that Teochew is named after Chaozhou (modulo romanization) I would've expected it to be locally dominant over Cantonese. But what I was actually talking about were Huizhou, Heyuan, Meizhou etc. Basically, Cantonese extends as far east as Hong Kong and further east of that is marked as Hakka territory in the Language Atlas of China https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a9/Map_of_sinitic_languages_full-en.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a9/Map_of_s... Meixian Hakka from Meizhou in particular has a prominent position within Hakka culture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meixian_dialect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meixian_dialect

thisgoodlife 5y ago

Most likely the people who wrote the feature note didn’t know what they were talking about

yorwba 5y ago

If that were the case, input methods by Chinese companies like Sogou wouldn't support Cantonese either. The opposite is true: here's a description of how to enable Cantonese Jyutping input in Sogou for iOS: https://jingyan.baidu.com/article/60ccbceb100b7c25cab197c4.html https://jingyan.baidu.com/article/60ccbceb100b7c25cab197c4.h... I think the more likely explanation is that Apple has a small team supporting all of the world's languages, mostly focusing on widely-spoken ones, while Sogou has a small team focusing on languages widely spoken in China, so their Cantonese support is better.

ksec 5y ago

Probably true. Half of the teens in the region dont speak the language anymore. So CCP is admittedly quite effective at it. Although Cantonese Voice recognition still works. And somehow Apple Arcade still not available in HK and Mainland China? Edit: Actually this brings back memory. About twenty+ years ago I made an English to Cantonese Translation with Romanization Input Method on Windows and later on Mac using VanillaInput / OpenVanilla so I could use it for IRC and ICQ. At the time voice recognition of anything was sci-fi stuff. Dragon speech recognition sucks no matter how much training time you give it. Twenty years later we are close to real time on devices speech recognition.

imbnwa 5y ago
So basically in 50 years Cantonese will largely live on in its disapora, much like the forms of Sicillian and Napolitano and the hundreds of other endagered languages you can find in NYC
- ksec 5y ago
  Yes. But there is a different. Between Natural Selection of language where it is gone and a planned deliberate attack to get rid of the language. Correct me if I am wrong I believe Sicillian and Napolitano are the former. Cantonese are the latter.
  - imbnwa 5y ago
    I mean, Southern Italians from Calabria and Sicily fled Italy precisely to escape what they perceived as an attack on their culture and society by Northern Italy, given the official government told everybody "you and your children will now be speaking Tuscan from now on, oh, and we're gonna fuck you with high taxes" (Tuscan, the regional language of Tuscany, was promoted to Official Italian by the Nationalist government). This schism between north and south still exists to this day in Italy (it even gets mentioned in The Sopranos!). Perhaps the difference is one of degree rather than an absolute difference

creshal 5y ago

> to make Mandarin the only official chineese language. Or, in more honest terms: To culturally genocide their minorities.

lugged 5y ago
To the downvotes: I don't know what you think the purpose of banning languages is, but in every other instance in history it is about destroying a culture and assimilating it's people's. The one China policy is exactly that.
- yorwba 5y ago
  Cantonese isn't banned, though. Guangdong TV is broadcasting shows entirely in Cantonese (with Mandarin subtitles), e.g. timestamped today: https://www.gdtv.cn/tv/30e784c392efd7d38daa2cf50aa7a1cd https://www.gdtv.cn/tv/30e784c392efd7d38daa2cf50aa7a1cd
- YouthfulMarxism 5y ago
  Promoting uniform official language is a perfectly fine state policy with a tonn of benefits, including costs reduction, economic integration improvements, increased social and workforce mobility. CCP crimes are countless, but existing of such policy is clearly not one of them. Questions could and should be asked in regard to tools and apparatus used in such transition, for example repressions, violence and forced re-education. IF they were used.
  - creshal 5y ago
    > 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 out entire cultures, followed by bloody rebellions and wars of independence. Plus, well, a world war or two. Wonderful for the economy!