Re: Mixed writing systems (WAS: Newbie says hi)

>That sound pretty hard on the Shanghainese - getting taught to speak your L1
>is widely considered more-or-less a human right in this corner of the globe.
>And if Mandarin and Cantonese writing are that different, then the hanzi
>system don't provide more unit to languages than sharing the Latin alphabet
>does to, say, English and German.
Shanghainese people do not feel any restriction about using their LV1. shanghainese writing
is not taugh because it does not exist.

Hanzi indeed provide more unity, because even if the grammar is slightly different,
it is not so much, and the vast majority of vocabular is common. Remember that
to an english reader looking at a german text gives a vague idea about
pronounciation, while a chinese reader looking at a cantonese text has no tip
on phonetics, but on the meaning, most of the vocab is understandable, and the
grammar, even if different, is one of a quite closely related language.


>>         Mandarin being the official language of china, i see nothing bad
>>in having allmost every body learn mandarin. Actualy, every british learn
>>english, right? I consider the linguistic situation in china to be more
>>free than in europe, because the offical language does not replace all the
>>local speech, but cohabitate. Bretons in france, for example, did not enjoy
>>such a tolerant situation.
>
>I don't  consider it bad teaching all inhabitants of China (including
>Tibetans, Uighurs etc) Chinese as a L2. I do consider it bad not to teach
>people to write their L1.
Preventing people from learning how to write their LV1 would actualy be a bad thing. But
the situation is a bit diferent since those LV1 actualy never developed any
writing system of their own. So even if the chinese governement encouraged
teaching how to write the dialect in schools, teacher whould face the problem
that no one knows how to write this.

>And if local forms of
>speech are keeping ground better in China than in Europe, I suspect that may
>have alot to do with less media penetration in China.
probably, but media penetration is improving. Quicly.