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Thanks, 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 ch

Thanks, 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 ago
You 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 ago
  I'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?
  - yorwba 5y ago
    > The Chinese characters have no fixed meaning, but they do have fixed pronunciation No, neither pronunciation nor meaning are fixed, and phonetic drift in general is faster than semantic drift, i.e. people from different parts of China are more likely to ascribe different pronunciations to the same character than different meanings, although the latter is not uncommon. Canjobear above gave two examples where the Mandarin meaning has changed relative to the Classical Chinese meaning. When people want to write something for which they don't know a character (either because none has ever been defined or they just haven't learned it or the pronunciation differs based on context and they feel this should be reflected by using different characters) they can create a new one based on whatever makes sense to them. The character 佢 was chosen because the word sounds similar to that written 巨 in Cantonese. Nowadays so many more people are literate in Mandarin that they're likely to substitute a character whose pronunciation in Mandarin is similar to what they want to write.

canjobear 5y ago

You 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 ago
I'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?
- yorwba 5y ago
  > The Chinese characters have no fixed meaning, but they do have fixed pronunciation No, neither pronunciation nor meaning are fixed, and phonetic drift in general is faster than semantic drift, i.e. people from different parts of China are more likely to ascribe different pronunciations to the same character than different meanings, although the latter is not uncommon. Canjobear above gave two examples where the Mandarin meaning has changed relative to the Classical Chinese meaning. When people want to write something for which they don't know a character (either because none has ever been defined or they just haven't learned it or the pronunciation differs based on context and they feel this should be reflected by using different characters) they can create a new one based on whatever makes sense to them. The character 佢 was chosen because the word sounds similar to that written 巨 in Cantonese. Nowadays so many more people are literate in Mandarin that they're likely to substitute a character whose pronunciation in Mandarin is similar to what they want to write.