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

Florian wrote:
> >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.
So, according to you, a Cantonese person's position vis-a-vis Mandarin is
alot like mine vis-a-vis English. That, as far as I'm concerned, kills off
all arguments that using the hanzi system brings linguistic unity to China
that wouldn't be available with another writing system. (Which, of course,
doesn't bear at all on the quesion whether hanzi writing is more or less
ideal for the Sinitic languages one for one.)


      Andreas

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