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

>Still, this's not what I meant. Assume we have an L1 speaker of, say,
>Cantonese. According to what I've been told, in order to be able to write
>"Modern Standard Written Chinese" (whatever the correct term for that may
>be), he/she first has to learn the syntax and idiomatics, etc, of Mandarin,
>and for this his/her native Cantonese will be about as much help as
>English's syntax etc will help an anglophone learning another Germanic
>language's syntax etc.
Well if he plans to write cantonese, there is nothing such.
If he want's his text to go further than the cantonese spealing region, he will
use mandarin, whose chinese name is Putonghua, that is "the common speech",
just as long ago, european shcolars all used to write latin, and now write
english when you want to talk with people from "everywhere".

Actualy, we are all writing english on this conlang mailing list and happy to do so,
cause we understand eachother. Chinese people enjoy the same thing with
mandarin. exept it is much more common for a chinese to know mandarin, than for
an european to know enlgish. and that mandarin is tied to a central
governement, while english is not.