Ugly in places

[Lu]

Cantonese (and Taiwanese, and other dialects as well, I suppose) can be written with Chinese characters. People can use the characters used for writing standard Mandarin, and for dialects some characters are added. Most of this writing can be understood with little difficulty by speakers of other dialects. That people rarely write in Cantonese (or Taiwanese, or Shanghainese, etc) is because they are better trained in writing standard Mandarin, and also because, although speakers of other dialects can understand written Cantonese (etc), it is easier for them to read standard Mandarin, and therefore one can get a bigger audience when one writes in Mandarin.

You may be right that there is no formal way for writing dialects, but there are ways that people agree on. There are set characters for the Cantonese 不 and 他, for the Taiwanese 不会, and for the Shanghainese 你, for example, and many more that I don't know because I never learnt any fangyan, but I'm sure other people on this forum can tell more about that.

With the 'different character sets' used by HK and mainland China, I suppose you mean simplified and traditional? They're not that different, and someone who knows one system can easily learn the other.

[nipponman]

lol here we go again, characters "solving" Chinese's problem in its special situation. Characters created this situation. Saying that Chinese characters are well suited to spoken Chinese's situation, again, is like saying that heroin is well suited to the situation of an addict.

Not the same thing. People weren't writing before they were speaking. Thats a simple fact, we spoke before we wrote and therefore we needed a way to solve the problem of writing. In english, it is easy because we have many thousands of possible syllable combinations etc, but in mandarin only 1300.

[Ferno]

written Chinese, over time, has shaped spoken modern spoken Chinese to fit the writing. One syllable, one morpheme - forcing every syllable to have meaning. The dialects that were seperated from written Chinese are very different because of this.

Research into early states of Chinese and into certain types of pre-modern colloquial literature shows a language made up not only of polysyllabic words, but also of polysyllabic morphemes. Although many of the latter were borrowed into Chinese from non-East Asian sources, some portion of them either were indigenous or were adopted so early in the language's history as to make the distinction between borrowed and native vocabulary meaningless. Just how much the spoken language was characterized by polysyllabic morphemes we will never know, since expressing the language in writing meant reducing these units to a form compatible with the medium, so that each written syllable-sized unit had a meaning of its own that could potentially stand by itself. When the language failed to correspond to the requirements of the writing system, Chinese simply reanalyzed the term so that it would consist of as many morphemes as it had syllables and characters representing it, and used one of the new single-syllable morphemes for the whole, either as a "word " by itself or in new polysyllabic combinations with other single-syllable morphemes.

Unlike in modern Mandarin, where polysyllabic words are often the result of recombining single-syllable morphemes (in some cases just to make the words intelligible in speech), many polysyllabic words in non-Mandarin Chinese were so from the start. Their relative immunity from the monosyllabification process plus the fact that they tend as a whole to reflect earlier states of the language better than Mandarin suggest rather strongly that Mandarin is the anomaly -- not the other way around. Chinese characters over time imposed their own order on the standard language that used the system for its "representation," generating by their own logic the conditions that make written Mandarin, as it is now constituted, amenable to morphosyllabic writing.

[HashiriKata]

Quote: [...]

From where? Don't forget giving the source.

[Ferno]

sorry, http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/east_asian_languages.html#homonyms

comes from http://pinyin.info/readings/list.html , a very interesting list of readings..

[HashiriKata]

sorry, http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/ea....html#homonyms

comes from http://pinyin.info/readings/list.html , a very interesting list of readings..

As I already hinted in a reply to one of your earlier posts, these people are very biased and anti-hanzi, you should read their stuff with extreme care.

[geraldc]

-A Cantonese speaker in Guangdong on the mainland, however, will never have a single lesson in Cantonese in school - education and business and higher level vocabulary are carried out in Mandarin, which he will become a fluent speaker of at a young age.

Business is carried out in Cantonese, and seeing as a lot of investment comes from overseas Chinese/Hong Kong, a great deal is carried out in Cantonese.

[Lugubert]

Lu:

With the 'different character sets' used by HK and mainland China, I suppose you mean simplified and traditional? They're not that different, and someone who knows one system can easily learn the other.

If I have understood things correctly, the Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set comprises characters not used outside of HK. However, according to Omniglot, showing examples, they are used for Cantonese. Is that so?

[Lu]

Lugubert: I do not know, but I suppose the characters not used outside of HK are for Cantonese. In which case they probably are used outside of HK, wherever people want to write Cantonese.

Another issue is that the system HK uses for typing characters on a computer is, so I heard, different from the system used in mainland China, and it is quite possible that there are characters in this system that are not in the mainland system. But that doesn't necessarily mean they are unknown on the mainland.

[Ferno]

As I already hinted in a reply to one of your earlier posts, these people are very biased and anti-hanzi, you should read their stuff with extreme care.

pinyin.info may be (in dispelling the myths about hanzi), but the readings they list aren't their own writings, they're chapters taken from books written by experienced Linguists - facts are facts.