10 ms·

I'm a native Mandarin speaker. I don't know why you need to stress "taught" or "believe" so much. I'm not taught by anyone, nor believe that dialects are mostly

• yorwba 5y ago
  > Most dialects, Cantonese included, use the same Chinese character system. It depends a bit on what you mean by "the same". The sentence "佢唔喺呢度。" clearly uses Chinese characters, but none of them appears in the translation "他不在這裏。"
  • Aperocky 5y ago
    This demonstrate an lack of understanding of Chinese writing. Everything in "佢唔喺呢度" are used as phonetics in an informal setting, the same way that Pinyin work. Meanwhile "他不在這裏" are the written formal version used universally. The pronunciation between various Chinese dialects are very different, often not mutually intelligible. The written form however is universal. Obviously, you can't use pinyin to spell out Cantonese (as pinyin is a phonetic representation of Mandarin) so that's why cantonese gets represented phonetically like "佢唔喺呢度". There were talks about using pinyin (i.e. latin script) to replace written characters a couple decades back, they weren't that popular and was not carried out. Vietnam is an example that did.
    • United857 5y ago
      To elaborate, there's formal written Chinese (which is close but not identical to spoken Mandarin) and then there's written Cantonese (or other dialects), which is writing the characters as they would be spoken verbatim. Written Chinese is used for anything official or formal, written Cantonese is often used online informally (like using text/SMS language in English)
    • yorwba 5y ago
      > "他不在這裏" are the written formal version used universally. You could also say "他不在這兒。" or "他非在此處。" and they're written differently because they're pronounced differently. It stands to reason that if someone has a fourth way of saying the same thing with different words, they might also want to write it differently.
      • jhvkjhk 5y ago
        A mature language can express one thing with many different styles. Finding many ways to say the same thing don't means you find many unintelligible languages. Australian say "G'day" rather than "Hello", does the difference of greeting makes Australian-English a standalone language? Besides, you didn't refute his main idea: phonetic symbol is not equivalent to formal writing.
        • thereare5lights 5y ago
          Cantonese and Mandarin are not mutually intelligible. Australian English and American English and British English are mutually intelligible. You might as well be claiming that Old English and modern English are the same language.
        • canjobear 5y ago
          Cantonese has different styles and registers, both formal and informal, within itself. 他不在這裏 is Mandarin; it is not a grammatical sentence in Cantonese.
    • pishpash 5y ago
      Not only that, but every one of the characters in 佢唔喺呢度 can be properly written as 其無在爾道. Just because people have decided to write phonetically (even transparently with the 口 radical construction) doesn't say anything about the commonality of the written form of Chinese which from its inception was already multilingual.
      • canjobear 5y ago
        No, 爾 is not cognate to Cantonese 呢 meaning "this" (which is different from Mandarin 呢, a sentence particle, which might be related to 爾).
      • Aperocky 5y ago
        > 其無在爾道 I don't speak Cantonese, but I know this means "He's not seen (your way) here" because those characters mean that. Which reinforce my point.
        • yorwba 5y ago
          Except 呢 means "this", not "you", so you fooled yourself into believing you could understand something which you did not.
          • Aperocky 5y ago
            爾 as a character does have both meanings. As characters are not married to pronounciations, both old (i.e. classical) texts and newer memes can be hard to understand or misunderstood despite knowing all characters. Guesses are often close enough, which is a feature of the logogram.
            • yorwba 5y ago
              Well, 呢 is unambiguous where 爾 is not. Similar reasoning as introducing 你 as a separate character for "you". Out of curiosity, do you speak a variety other than Mandarin? And if so, do you think you'd be able to find "proper" characters for everything you could say, like pishpash did above?
    • canjobear 5y ago
      他不在這裏 is a Mandarin sentence, and Mandarin is taught as the universal common language in China. If Cantonese had been chosen as the standard (which was a possibility in the early 20th century), then you'd be saying that 他不在這裏 is informal and 佢唔喺呢度 is the "universal" written form.
      • thereare5lights 5y ago
        I'm a Cantonese native speaker and this is it. The idea that "written Chinese" just happens to be identical to written Mandarin whereas written Cantonese is also the same and we actually translate our spoken words into a different written form is just historical revisionism and linguistic chauvinism. The plain reality is that modern written Chinese is the way it is because the CCP standardized Mandarin as the national dialect.
        • imwillofficial 5y ago
          “linguistic chauvinism” -_-
          • thereare5lights 5y ago
            What is your point?
            • imwillofficial 5y ago
              My point is clear
              • cycrutchfield 5y ago
                That you like to eat downvotes?
              • catlikesshrimp 5y ago
                No, it is not. Do you have a better term for the concept? Or Do you disagree with the concept? Or Aren't you satisfied with the concept being applied in this situation?
• bradrn 5y ago
  > Most dialects, Cantonese included, use the same Chinese character system. I don’t think GP is arguing about this. The question is about whether they use the same sounds, whether they have the same grammar, and whether people from different dialects can understand each other without special training. Even though Cantonese uses the same character set as other dialects, my understanding is that you can’t just transcribe Cantonese word-by-word onto a page without it becoming unintelligible to a speaker of other dialects — all of which implies that the ‘dialects’ are actually separate languages.
  • xwolfi 5y ago
    I'm in Hong Kong (majority Cantonese), my wife cant for her life help me navigate taobao in Mandarin, even when she transcribes the simplified into traditional without getting annoyed and frustrated. So while it's not totally unintelligle to her, because it's sort of similar, I think for her to read mandarin is like for me, French, to read Spanish. I can grasp it, it's sort of the same thing, but there are so many little details in divergence it takes me ages just to get a grasp of what it's saying. I wouldnt dare call Spanish or French a dialect of Italian and I think it's weird to call Cantonese a dialect of Mandarin just like saying humans descendend from modern monkeys: these things are trees with common ancestors but also diverging influences that make them break away further from each other. I think americans exagerate the oppressive nature of language teaching in China since the guy you replied to has a point: they experience it and they very well must see it's not 1:1 sound transcription.
    • frenchy 5y ago
      There's a saying that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. What people choose to call the communications of a specific language community is often a very political thing.
    • causi 5y ago
      Just the fact Mandarin has four tones and Cantonese has between six and nine depending on the location is enough for me to fall on the "separate languages" side of the opinion.
• gerdesj 5y ago
  "I'm a native Mandarin speaker. I don't know why you need to stress "taught" or "believe" so much." Chill mate. Phrases using words like "taught" and "believe" are often deliberately used to indicate personal experience or environment received passively. "It happened whether I wanted it to or not". You are a native Mandarin speaker but not quite a native English speaker yet. Your written English is phenomenal but getting its and it's right is not the end of it. Hat tip though: Not many get the its and it's thing right and I don't know why we have allowed it to be a thing - its bloody stupid and probably a joke. The best thing you can do is to still communicate with us lot and us with you. Take care, me old fruit!
• barry-cotter 5y ago
  > I'm not taught by anyone, nor believe that dialects are mostly similar. I experienced it. Most dialects, Cantonese included, use the same Chinese character system. In writing, we would use either simplified or traditional character sets. Yes, that's true in writing. But it's only true because there are only written forms of Classical Chinese, Modern Vernacular Mandarin and Modern Vernacular Cantonese and the last one is only really used for newscasting and court reporting. Everyone who reads and writs Chinese is thinking in Manadarin, even if they can't speak it. The different Sinitic topolects are as divergent as the Romance languages or the Arabic "dialects". They're mutually unintelligible. FuSha or Modern Standard Arabic, is a foreign language to basically every Arabic speaker, as Latin is to Romance language speakers or Mandarin is to the 60% of Sinitic language speakers who don't speak Mandarin at home.
• deleted 5y ago
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• ncmncm 5y ago
  I say "taught" and "believe" because these things are not, in fact, true. Yes, Cantonese speakers write using the same syllabary, but they are not (with occasional exceptions) writing Cantonese, but Mandarin, translating to it as they go.
  • kenned3 5y ago
    Yes, Cantonese speakers write using the same syllabary, but they are not (with occasional exceptions) writing Cantonese, but Mandarin, translating to it as they go. I assume you are aware that there are millions of people in Hong Kong who can't speak Mandarin, correct? How exactly are these people "translating as they go" when many have a total lack of any mandarin?
    • ncmncm 5y ago
      They don't speak it, but they read and write it.
• vore 5y ago
  While the Sinitic languages are similar, they definitely have distinctions not only in pronunciations but also in grammar and vocabulary, even if you do approximate the writing using Mandarinized characters. Just as an example, the placement of adjectives in Cantonese vs Mandarin differs. Consider the sentence "I eat first": - Mandarin: 我[subj] 先[adv] 吃[v]。 - Cantonese: 我[subj] 食[v, Cantonese equivalent of 吃] 先[adv]。 Another example is that some terms that exist in one Sinitic language simply do not exist in another one, e.g. the word for "good night" in Mandarin is 晚安, but there is simply no way to say this at all in Wu (e.g. Shanghainese, Suzhounese) Chinese! I find that a lot of Mandarin speakers aren't aware of this due to the extensive Mandarinization of Sinitic languages as a whole, and there are a lot of distinctions between a lot of them (e.g. Min Chinese is a lot more closer to Old Chinese and preserves a lot of its traits compared to Mandarin), and perhaps this is a testament to the point the article makes.
  • jhvkjhk 5y ago
    > the word for "good night" in Mandarin is 晚安, but there is simply no way to say this at all in Wu (e.g. Shanghainese, Suzhounese) Chinese! This example is weak because "晚安" is not a built-in in Mandarin, it's a translation word (loanword tried to express in Chinese characters)[1]. We should ignore those loanwords when comparing different terms in Chinese dialects. [1]: http://www.wenqujingdian.com/Public/editor/attached/file/3/008/002/250841.pdf http://www.wenqujingdian.com/Public/editor/attached/file/3/0...
    • vore 5y ago
      I think the point still stands, right? The word was only loaned into the Mandarin lexicon and doesn't exist in the Wu lexicon: not even as a loanword from Mandarin.