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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.
by 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 agoTo 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 agoA 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 agoCantonese 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 agoCantonese 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 agoNot 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 agoNo, 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 agoExcept 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 agoWell, 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 agoI'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 agoWhat is your point?
- imwillofficial 5y agoMy point is clear
- cycrutchfield 5y agoThat you like to eat downvotes?
- catlikesshrimp 5y agoNo, 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?