Cantonese developement can be hindered by Simplified Chinese

[MakMak]

I wrote about this on my blog and thought I'd share it with you.

http://www.canton168.com/2010/09/simplified-characters-might-cause-lost-in-pronuciation-for-cantonese/

Now before anyone bashes me that I'm a "communist sympathizer" or a "anti-china participator" I don't completely hate Simplified, yet I don't completely love Simplified. Simplified is good for learning Mandarin, however Traditional is still better for Cantonese. What do you guys think?

[Caidanbi]

I do think traditional is better for learning Cantonese. I think either one is good if you're learning Mandarin, it just depends on if you're focusing more on Taiwan or the Mainland. Personally, I learned them both, and have found them both to be very useful. But I think the traditional characters look prettier

[MakMak]

I ended up learning both too! What do you mean by focusing on Taiwan or the Mainland? You mean such as how they use each respectively? By the way are you by any chance cantonese too?

[Guest realmayo]

It's an interesting point, though maybe you could have summarised it here rather than make people go to your blog (or not). I'm just starting learning a little bit of Cantonese so I'm happy to see that in this respect at least it will help my improve my Mandarin. Do you think there are plenty more examples, other than the ones you gave?

[roddy]

Now before anyone bashes me that I'm a "communist sympathizer" or a "anti-china participator"

Yes, because that's what we were going to do . . .

Seems like a bit of a non-issue to me - anyone learning Cantonese is probably going to be using traditional anyway just as that's where most of the resources are, and even if they happen to be using simplified, I can't see it making things all that much harder in the context of learning an entire new language.

[anonymoose]

I agree with Roddy unreservedly.

[MakMak]

Now before anyone bashes me that I'm a "communist sympathizer" or a "anti-china participator"

Yes, because that's what we were going to do . . .

Seems like a bit of a non-issue to me - anyone learning Cantonese is probably going to be using traditional anyway just as that's where most of the resources are, and even if they happen to be using simplified, I can't see it making things all that much harder in the context of learning an entire new language.

Just trying to prevent an accidental flame war or name calling as I've seen prior one time. I don't think that's productive or polite.

Maybe it's not an issue to you, are you a native Mandarin speaker or Cantonese speaker or both? I still believe it will make things harder as people are taught "if you can't pronounce the whole word, try the phonetic" so if you change the phonetics to suit ONLY Mandarin, this won't be as effective for Cantonese, unless you are trying to say that Cantonese is not important (which I hope not). Not all Cantonese resources are in Traditional, I'm pretty sure Guangdong prints a lot of material, it doesn't have to be government sponsored.

It's an interesting point, though maybe you could have summarised it here rather than make people go to your blog (or not). I'm just starting learning a little bit of Cantonese so I'm happy to see that in this respect at least it will help my improve my Mandarin. Do you think there are plenty more examples, other than the ones you gave?

Haha sorry about that, I should have given a brief summary for that. I'm sure there are many more examples, I just never actively went through looking for them, when I do I will post the up to. My website is dedicated to promotion and preservation of Cantonese as a Language and Culture and anyone who feels aligned to this goal is welcomed to join. I'm also glad to hear that you are learning a bit of Cantonese. It makes me sad sometimes to hear people say to me "forget about Cantonese! it's a useless dying language!" So thank you for that.

As a side note, what do you think of my Blog itself?

I agree with Roddy unreservedly.

How so? Can you elaborate? I want to know people's opinions.

[anonymoose]

How so? Can you elaborate? I want to know people's opinions.

I think what you say about simplified and traditional characters is true in principle, but the number of characters that have been simplified to suit mandarin and have thus lost the phonetic connection with cantonese is small, and rather insignificant when considering the whole set of characters needed to be learned when one is learning either mandarin or cantonese.

And furthermore, as Roddy also pointed out, to a large extent, those learning mandarin in the mainland are already learning simplified characters, and those learning cantonese, if they are learning characters at all, are likely to be learning traditional.

So, in summary, this is rather a non-issue.

[roddy]

Is there a one to one mapping of traditional phonetic components to pronunciation in Cantonese? If not, how much worse does simplified make things - marginally, I'll wager.

Incidentally, could you just quote when necessary, there's no need to repost complete posts from directly above - we're smart enough to follow the conversation without having to reread it every three seconds.

[doraemon]

I don't think simplified Chinese will impact too greatly on Cantonese anyway. Anyone who is learning Cantonese will most definitely be using traditional characters and those who learn Mandarin will probably use simplified. They almost seem like two completely different languages to me, and I can't imagine anybody learning Cantonese with simplified characters either.

[MakMak]

@anonymoose

IS the phonetic loss for Cantonese actually not significant? Then if so that's good. And for those learning Cantonese using Traditional... where will traditional Chinese and Cantonese interweave once Hong Kong and Macau completely assimilate into Mainland?

@roddy

Of course there's no one to one mapping, but didn't simplified Chinese try to do that for Mandarin?

Furthermore Roddy, I don't know if you are trying to be confrontational with me because I'm beginning to get a sense of that from you and I hope I am wrong. I don't wish to cause unnecessary commotion.

@doraemon

Perhaps, but what about the people growing up in Guangdong who learn Cantonese from their parents? I mean they'll learn to read the characters in Cantonese too... but most Chinese people in the mainland only know how to guess from context what traditional characters are (and perhaps the rest understand them).

[skylee]

I don't seem to understand this discussion.

AFAIK there are a lot of people in Mainland China (e.g. in Guangdong and Guangxi) who speak in Cantonese and use the simplified script. I don't understand why it is better for Cantonese speakers to use the traditional script, or for Cantonese learners to learn the traditional script.

[doraemon]

@doraemon

Perhaps, but what about the people growing up in Guangdong who learn Cantonese from their parents? I mean they'll learn to read the characters in Cantonese too... but most Chinese people in the mainland only know how to guess from context what traditional characters are (and perhaps the rest understand them).

Yeah, I suppose they'd just have to learn both. But I mean, it's not like it's that difficult, right? Once you grasp one type of script the other one should be quite easy to pick up as well.

[MakMak]

@skylee

No, I'm just presenting a statement and I want to know what you guys think. Yes I know people in Guangzhou and Guangdong learn Cantonese using simplified, but I'm saying wouldn't have the simplified script make things harder?

And for the recorded, Cantonese is declining now with Chinese people who move in and speak only Mandarin. Last I remembered, Shenzhen is starting to be like any other part of China now because they all speak Mandarin instead of Cantonese. Correct me if I'm wrong on that part.

@doraemon

yea but like my example of 犧/牺, 西, and 羲 are all pronounced xi1 in Mandarin, but differently in Cantonese.　

[rezaf]

Simplified will eventually dominate Hongkong and Taiwan. I have quite a few Taiwanese and Hong Kongese friends who use a mixture of simplified and traditional characters. In my eyes simplified characters are ugly and logically wrong which is why I don't write them any more but in practise fantizi is no match for jiantizi and unfortunately I don't think that there are so many people from 老百姓 like me who are interested in the beauty and logic behind fantizi. So 敗局已定了

[anonymoose]

IS the phonetic loss for Cantonese actually not significant? Then if so that's good.

I'm not a cantonese speaker, so I can't quantify it, but even in mandarin, the phonetic components of characters at best only provide a clue to the pronunciation, and by no means constitute a systematic or reliable way to determine the pronunciation. To learn to read accurately, one needs to memorise each character on an individual basis. If the phonetic part works as an aide-mémoire, then that's a bonus, but there are hundreds, or thousands of characters even, where it doesn't. So if simplification has increased this number by a few in cantonese (you've given one example - do you have an estimate of actually how many characters this applies to in total?), I still don't see it as significant in the grand scheme of things. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'd need to see some reliable statistics to be convinced.

[rezaf]

In my experience the phonetic component is the last thing that I think about when I learn a new character, which might mean that it is not that important. I don't think that people realy care about the radicals and the phonetic parts. They just want some kind of easy shape to write.

[Guest realmayo]

Did anyone actually read this guy's blog? If not, I guess it's his fault for not posting the meat of the content here. The nub is that it might make sense in Mandarin to simplify the character 羲 [xī] to 牺, because in Mandarin it sounds like 西, also pronounced [xī]. But in Cantonese 羲 is pronounced [hei] and 西 is prounouned [sai], so the simplification actually makes things harder.

Still, I don't see if it's on a big enough scale to be seriously problematic. I mean, any Chinese person these days in Guangdong/Guanxi learning characters is going to be learning Mandarin too, right?

Last I remembered, Shenzhen is starting to be like any other part of China now because they all speak Mandarin instead of Cantonese. Correct me if I'm wrong on that part.

You're wrong on that part. At the very least, this process in Shenzhen began a long time ago. I read something recently suggesting that Cantonese is now gaining in popularity in Shenzhen. That city doesn't really count as Cantonese does it?

[rezaf]

MakMak is right in his article but it's not really a big issue because as everyone is saying the phonetic component doesn't directly tell you the pronunciation to begin with. There are lots of simplified characters which have lost their phonetic component in mandarin and people are using them with no problem. for example: 棉襖——〉棉袄

工廠-〉工厂

[renzhe]

Of course there's no one to one mapping, but didn't simplified Chinese try to do that for Mandarin?

No. There is definitely no one-to-one correspondence in Mandarin between the phonetic element and the pronunciation. I'd assume that the situation is actually much worse than in the more conservative southern dialects. The number of characters where phonetic substitution took place during the simplification process is limited, but hard to quantify.

Like others, I don't think that this would be a major problem. It would make learning a bit more difficult, true, but the problem of the phonetics not matching has been there all along.

But I think that the most important factor is that Cantonese is primarily a spoken language. I don't think that written Cantonese has ever had a large influence on the development of Cantonese. I'd wager that the written Cantonese follows spoken Cantonese, rather than the other way around.

You're wrong on that part. At the very least, this process in Shenzhen began a long time ago. I read something recently suggesting that Cantonese is now gaining in popularity in Shenzhen. That city doesn't really count as Cantonese does it?

I think that Shenzhen is a bit specific since it was a tiny village in the 1970s before it was industrialised and built up in a gung-ho manner. Most of the residents are migrants, who have to rely on Mandarin to communicate with each other. I don't think that there is a Cantonese-speaking majority like there is in Guangzhou and other major cities.

The growing popularity of Cantonese is probably influenced by the fact that the border with Hong Kong is much more open today than it was in the 1990s.

棉袄

Actually, the phonetic element for 袄 is "yao" (see e.g. 妖), which is close to "ao", so in Mandarin at least, the phonetic component is retained. It probably isn't in many other dialects.

Another case where the phonetic was substituted approximately is 讓 -> 让