consultation on cantonese terms

[OneEye]

Maybe I can explain my point above a little more clearly. If AB and BA both exist as words in the language, then of course it's perfectly acceptable to use each of them in their appropriate contexts. If AB is a word but BA is not, then a learner of the language can't use BA just because they think it sounds better. Perhaps a native speaker could, but that's because they understand how the language works and how to be creative in using the language. A learner ought to stick with established usage and finding out what that is. I understand that this is what OP is doing, trying to find out what is acceptable usage. But I believe ample evidence has been presented in this thread that this sort of switching things around is not acceptable, and that 動行 is not a word in Cantonese.

Long story short: if it's a word, then use it. If it isn't, it's probably best not to use it if you want people to understand you.

[Takeshi]

Ok, let me explain my point a little more clearly:

Let's assume the OP is a Cantonese learner and he isn't perfect. He knows that often times Cantonese words are a direct character swap of their Mandarin version.

He has some reason to believe (though in this case he turns out to be incorrect, but of course he is a learner!) that perhaps Cantonese people prefer to say 動行 instead of 行動, and may think of the latter as a "Mandarin-ish way of saying things". These sort of confusions are very common for people who are learning dialects because often times material will point you in the direction to think that A is "correct", but in fact B is what people actually say. But all the bashers wouldn't know this feeling, because how many of you are studying a dialect?

So he makes a thread on this forum to ask people if indeed in Cantonese you can say 動行 or not. He gets his answer from skylee in the second post. The thread should have served its purpose now, but instead many people who don't understand how Cantonese works decide to bash him for some reason, and then both sides are getting personal about their ego. Me and lingo-ling tried to add posts to back up the OP's reasoning, but nobody seemed to care.

Yes, in this case the OP's intuition was wrong, so all the people who like bashing can bash away, but your reasoning supporting your bashing doesn't fit with how Cantonese works. Imagine if the OP made a post like this:

looking for experts on cantonese to consult with. the common term for like is "喜欢 ". but it does not sound that nice too me. i notice some terms, the characters can be swap and it still works. can you swap it to make " 欢喜 " and it still be understand. sound better this way to me. but i had trobule looking this up in online standard dictionary. i did get some references in search engine.

Going by your reasoning supporting your bashing, you'd bash this post too the same way; but in this case he would have turned out to be right.

The OPs reasoning for his question is sound, it's just that he happens to guess the wrong thing, which is normal because I assume he is a learner. If you wanted to hate him for asking a question that's too simple or too stupid then I'd understand, but I don't see why one should hate him for *gasp* "swapping characters".