Some questions about written Cantonese / written Chinese in HK

[Takeshi]

About 吴语, I'm not familiar with it myself, but I remember reading somewhere here about people trying to get Shanghainese to read Mandarin in Shanghainese and their confusion/difficulty at the request. Granted I assume the people who were asked were not old. My point really is moot though when you think about it. The only reason Cantonese can be acceptably used to read Mandarin is really because of the existence of HK where it is done so often.

Thanks for the thread.

One post said something like how HK people see Modern Standard Chinese as "the successor" to Classical (as a literary language) rather than "Mandarin". I guess that sums up the whole discussion here really.

[skylee]

One post said something like how HK people see Modern Standard Chinese as "the successor" to Classical (as a literary language) rather than "Mandarin". I guess that sums up the whole discussion here really.

Your discussion perhaps. But probably not the OP's.

[yialanliu]

In Shanghainese, it's easy to read mandarin with a shanghainese dialect. If you want to be 100% accurate, it can be hard but you can just use the shanghainese pronunciation for everything.

For instance, daytime is 白天 in mandarin and the 白 in shanghainese has its own pronunciation different than mandarin. However, day time should be nieti to be 100% accurate. Yet, if you shanghainese the bai, it works and people will understand.

Sometimes when I read outloud in Chinese classes I'd automatically go into Shanghainese on accident since I use it so frequently.

I think why peopel got confused is because it's a request that people don't ever see. For instance, I give you pinyin and tell you to read it like english. Definitely doable and isn't even hard, but you'd probably look at it weird for a few seconds.

[chrisp]

OK, another question. I was just having a read of the Wikipedia article on "Hong Kong Cantonese" and it talks about some specific Hong Kong vocabulary, one example of which is 士多啤梨 (si6 do1 be1 lei2). Now, if the word "strawberry" were written in a formal text in Hong Kong would it ever be written like this, or would 草莓 be written? How about in the market place? Or a supermarket? Are both possible in (all) these situations in HK? Which would be more likely?

Likewise, the book "No Sweat Cantonese" gives 提子 for "grapes", but apparently (according to Wikipedia) the standard term is 葡萄. So which of these terms would I expect to see in: formal written texts in Hong Kong (e.g. newspaper articles/recipe books published in HK), the marketplace/supermarkets, menus in a restaurant?

I find this all fascinating from a linguistic perspective, but also from a practical perspective I'm wondering if, say, I learnt the characters 提子 for "grapes", whether I would actually see this used at all around Hong Kong, or whether 葡萄 would be used, or whether both would be equally common, and it would be handy to be able to recognise both.

I guess what I'm also wondering is whether the use of these characters immediately marks out a text as "written Cantonese", or whether they also occur in the standard written language. Just like British English and American English occasionally use different terms (e.g. pavement vs sidewalk, boot vs trunk), but using one instead of the other doesn't mark the text out as "written dialect" or "non-standard".

[skylee]

both are likely. it will depend on who the target readers are and where the goods come from. In a HK marketplace where strawberries and grapes are sold, 士多啤梨/提子 may be used. but since 士多啤梨 is very long, and in a market place you really don't need to tell people that the berries are strawberries, I would think that it is just as likely that there will be just a price tag without chinese characters. But in spoken Cantonese we do say 士多啤梨/提子. And say if it is cups of ice cream/boxes of juice that we are looking at, if the products are produced for the larger chinese market, they might use 草莓/葡萄, but if they are produced in HK and are for sale in HK only, they might use 士多啤梨/提子.

Would you feel comfortable if I tell you that with writing you need to learn standard Chinese plus Cantonese terms because, really, "written Cantonese" is not what/how people write. People generally write in standard Chinese, sometimes with some Cantonese terms mixed in. This is how I see it.

PS - I think my views might be too old-fashioned. Perhaps people in some circles do write in "written Cantonese" and are comfortable with it (like on internet forums). What I said might not be helpful to chrisp.

[chrisp]

Thanks for your response! What you say is definitely helpful :-) I'm only in Hong Kong for 6 months so won't get anywhere near any kind of fluency, but I am interested in the language for academic reasons as well as practical reasons, so I intend to continue learning when I'm back in the UK (and hopefully I'll return to HK at some point in the future to practice it!). At the moment I'm just trying to learn as much as I can!