Re: THEORY: Expanding in translation?

On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 5:36 PM, Eugene Oh <un.doing@...> wrote:
>  If you check out Wikipedia, there rests
>  evidence of written Cantonese. It actually differs significantly from
>  Mandarin.
Yes, I've heard of written Cantonese; my understanding, though, is
that this is not all that common.

(And the creation of the Yue Wikipedia was fairly controversial, as
many people felt that people who spoke Yue would usually write -- and
expect to find written information -- in Standard Written Chinese,
rather than written Cantonese.)

>  It only writes in Chinese characters, which are common to
>  all Chinese languages/dialects.
In this case we might be talking about different things; the written
Cantonese I've heard uses a fair number of ad-hoc characters (often
with the "mouth" radical to indicate a "dialect" word) which, as I
understand, are not common to other dialects. Especially for particles
of various kinds.

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>

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