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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 transpare
by 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 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?
- Aperocky 5y ago> you think you'd be able to find "proper" characters for everything you could say The matter isn't whether I can find the proper character for everything you could say, but rather whether the spoken variety themselves can be based on written characters. In the example case you gave, it does. The spoken varieties of Chinese can still be mapped to a set of characters, that still means there's a commonality underlying all of these variety. For instance, Beijing dialect/slang "颠儿" means '(he/she) is gone', which wouldn't be readily apparent or understandable to even mandarin speakers. but the first character has the meaning "run/trip".
- yorwba 5y ago> Beijing dialect/slang "颠儿" means '(he/she) is gone', which wouldn't be readily apparent or understandable to even mandarin speakers. but the first character has the meaning "run/trip". Old dictionaries list 颠 as a synonym of 顶 only, without a "run/trip" meaning. Most likely the character was only used for this word because both are pronounced "diān" in Mandarin and people didn't bother to make a new character, e.g. by combining [足颠]. The -儿 suffix is also interesting, because the sound modification it represents is something Beijing Mandarin speakers picked up from the Manchu during the Qing dynasty, it has nothing to do with the meaning of 儿. So 颠儿 is a relatively new addition to the written language that is not shared with non-Mandarin varieties.
- pishpash 5y agoThe earliest known dictionary of Chinese was 爾雅, meaning "Near refinement". It is common for languages to use "near" and "far" to indicate "this" and "that". Of course it would take somebody literate to know this, which most internet junkies today are unfortunately not.
- Aperocky 5y agoIt might be unfortunate that I'm illiterate in classical Chinese, but I thank you, who are literate, for proving my point that all of these dialects have common underpinnings.
- starfallg 5y agoI don't think anybody is arguing that Cantonese and Mandarin doesn't have common underpinnings, but rather that they are not mutually intelligible. French and Spanish, as romance languages, have a lot in common but they are separate languages. Writing Cantonese in standard written Chinese is similar to asking Spanish speakers not to write phonetically, but to rather write in French.
- thuccess129 5y ago> internet junkies today The American Mandarin Society has courses for Professionals. I guess they make quality judgement on what to keep or throwout in use of the Chinese language in their curated walled garden for snooty State official use.
- eloisius 5y agoAnd what is a 馬卡龍 then? A horse card dragon?
- Aperocky 5y agoA popular word or phrase spoken in one geographical location but does not exist elsewhere does not mean that the language is suddenly distinct. There are countless example in English as it is spoken around the world, even subtler ones, bless your heart.