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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 al
by 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 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?
- zeroimpl 5y agoI don’t follow. Written Chinese predates the CCP by a very long time. More specifically, 他不在這裏 is a phrase that I could imagine being used in official written text in past dynasties. But 佢唔喺呢度 does not.
- canjobear 5y ago> 他不在這裏 is a phrase that I could imagine being used in official written text in past dynastie In informal correspondence, imperial officials may have written things like this, because modern Standard Mandarin is based in part on 官话, the "court dialect" [1]. But any official text would almost certainly have been written in Classical Chinese. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_(late_imperial_lingua_franca) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_(late_imperial_lingua...
- zeroimpl 5y agoThanks, I’m not too knowledgeable on this subject, but given that the phrase 他不在這裏 can be understood entirely by looking up the definitions of the individual characters (which I don’t think have changed much over time), but not so for 佢唔喺呢度, it seems like your original assertion is false, and the root problem is Cantonese just differs too much from traditional written Chinese.
- canjobear 5y agoYou would not interpret the Mandarin sentence correctly if you just looked up each character in a Classical Chinese dictionary. 他 was not a pronoun in Classical Chinese, but rather meant “other.” 這 was the verb “to meet.” If you look it up character by character in a Mandarin dictionary, you can interpret it. And if you look up the Cantonese sentence character by character in a Cantonese dictionary, you can interpret it.
- RedNifre 5y agoI'm not sure I understand, could you confirm/object to this?: - The Chinese characters have no fixed meaning, but they do have fixed pronunciation, so 佢唔喺呢度 sounds like spoken Cantonese when any Chinese pronounces it, but the meaning can only be understood by Cantonese? - The government declared the Mandarin meaning to be the only meaning of the Chinese characters?
- 5y ago
- forkLding 5y agoMandarin or this kind of standardized written Chinese was formalized by a National Commission and chosen during the Republic of China era, this is the document from 1932 now digitally stored in the archives of Taiwan, see: https://taiwanebook.ncl.edu.tw/zh-tw/book/NCCULIB-9900012902/reader https://taiwanebook.ncl.edu.tw/zh-tw/book/NCCULIB-9900012902... Even without the CCP, Mandarin would have become the national dialect and dominated Chinese speech, etc. The CCP merely continued on the work because it was so useful and the easiest route to go as there had been so much work done and a system put in place by the previous regime. EDIT: https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/sites.gatech.edu/dist/d/987/files/2019/03/%E5%9B%BD%E9%9F%B3%E5%B8%B8%E7%94%A8%E5%AD%97%E6%B1%87.pdf https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/sites.gatech.edu/dist/d/987/fi... ^this link loaded better, its the same document, seems to be from Georgia Tech. For non-Chinese readers, the document says that the dialect from Beiping (aka Beijing) should be adopted as the standard and then lists rules on pronunciation, how to pronunce using a Latin-based script, etc.