Re: THEORY: Expanding in translation?

On 12/03/2008, Philip Newton <philip.newton@...> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 3:00 AM, Herman Miller <hmiller@...> wrote:
>  >  Hmm, isn't Hong Kong Cantonese-speaking?
>
>
> It is. But Mandarin-writing.
>
>  Roughly speaking, at least. As I understand it, Cantonese is rarely
>  written down (sort of like Valley-Girl, or Appalachian, or Yorkshire);
>  when a Cantonese speaker writes, they're likely to use Standard
>  Written Chinese, which is based on Mandarin. (And if they read what
>  they have written, they'll read it with Cantonese pronunciation of the
>  individual characters, but what they say when they're reading out loud
>  won't be idiomatic Cantonese.)
>
>
>  Cheers,
>  --
>  Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
>
Hong Kong is a unique case. If you check out Wikipedia, there rests
evidence of written Cantonese. It actually differs significantly from
Mandarin. It only writes in Chinese characters, which are common to
all Chinese languages/dialects. And of course, with the identical
writing system, loanwords from and to Mandarin make the two, when
written, practically indistinguishable to the untrained eye. It's very
much different from Valley-girl or Yorkshire as they are related to
General American or English.

Eugene

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