Hello,
Sheng Jiong wrote:
Is Baihuawen not the standard Chinese?
Currently, yes.
It was created after the May Fourth Movement in 1919,
Was it? I seem to recall many novels and anthologies, etc. written in
something similar before the May Fourth movement. I actually think we
have a similar situation here. In the old days, the standard Chinese was
wenyanwen and baihua was seen as below par and people shouldn't write in
baihua because it's "only a spoken language".
The May Fourth movement changed that. And now...
You are deliberately associating the concept of
"standard Chinese"
with classic Chinese (Wen Yan), which is actually not the standard
Chinese today
I was trying to compare the two situations, which to me there are
similarities.
(for it is neither taugt in schools as a way of
writing,
and neither is it used in most publications).
I can't speak for the situation in mainland China today, but it's
definitely taught, not as a way of writing, no, but I've seen many
people's attempt at writing it and some attempts are good enough to
pass. I think many people, especially the older generations in Hong
Kong, still write with a smattering of wenyanwen.
And I seem to recall something on the news a couple of years ago about a
young man who managed to write an essay completely in wenyanwen in his
university entrance exam or some such.
there is any school teaching Cantonese is to question
if written
Cantonese has been widely accepted.
And yet as we keep pointing out examples of whether it's widely accepted
or not, you keep dismissing it, even when the evidence is valid.
one of the most read Hong Kong tabloids. Among the six
headlines in
their main page, only one uses Cantonese characters;
It's a weekly magazine, I don't know if the headlines I read are the
same as those you've read, but I'd say that more than one uses Cantonese
characters and the sentence structure/grammar for all of them are in
fact Cantonese.
and if you read
the articles, all of them are written in baihuawen (if you prefer
using this term and purposely confusing it with classic Chinese).
I don't think anyone is confusing baihuawen with Classical Chinese...
1)Not even Cantonese native speakers can understand an
article
entirely written in Cantonese written language, if it concerns
encyclopediac topics;
I think I understood the examples Felix provided just fine, thank you
very much. Mind you, my Chinese education ended at Primary 5. So if I
can understand it, it's pretty understandable. And as the article is
written by a mainland Chinese, I assume there are at least some mainland
Chinese people who can understand an article written completely in
Cantonese.
2)Few people have written in Cantonese;
And both Cathy and I have said that we and many Hong Kong people do
write often in Cantonese. For short messages, granted, but for the
purpose of this experiment, I think it counts. Then again, who knows
what's your definition of "few people".
3)Wikipedia should not advocate the use of Cantonese
written language.
Instead we should only allow it when it has already been accepted by
the society.
So says the person who keeps insisting that Cantonese can't even be written.
But as I have
suggested both Mandarin and Cantonese are just spoken languages, but
when it comes to writing everyboy today in China, Hong Kong or Macau
uses the same written language: Baihuawen.
And baihuawen is based on Mandarin grammar, syntax, etc. So essentially
baihuawen *is* Mandarin.
little Alex