[Wikipedia-l] Re: Quenya language request, and Chinese Wikipedia again

Fri Feb 18 11:48:36 UTC 2005

Hello,

Cathy Ma wrote:
> intense discussion I have been asking my friends around - 'have you
> ever seen/written an article in full Cantonese?'
> 
> The answers vary but in sum, none of us have ever written anything in
> full Cantonese in the context of article-writing.  Contrary to what
> you may believe, it is actually hard to write in full-Cantonese
> without mixing in formal Chinese in a passage.

I do agree with Mark that writing an article in Cantonese feels 
difficult is because we've rarely done so. The closest I've seen is, of 
course, in entertainment news. I think a certain author in the late 
80s/early 90s used to mix in a lot of Cantonese in his novels (But Wah 
Lau). I think it'll come easier with practice.

> On the other hand, in Hong Kong, most subtitles we have on TV or
> movies are in formal Chinese, which can be another example showing how
> accustomed we are to converging from Cantonese to formal Chinese and
> vice versa.

Grown-up movies, very true. Kids movies are almost always dubbed into 
Cantonese and have Cantonese subtitles. Sometimes I hate it, sometimes 
it's funnier than the original version. I heard that the "Shrek 2" dub 
was pretty good (I hate it when Miyazaki is dubbed, though: totally 
wrong tone).

> And btw, mainland Cantonese is not the same as HK Cantonese.  We have
> extra terms that mainland Cantonese wouldn't understand and vice
> versa.

I've been to Guangzhou a lot the last few months and I'd say the 
difference is a lot less than you think. The slang is of course much 
different, but if we keep to article-writing, it should be all right.

What I do notice is that we HKers use a lot more English terms and 
phrases than the mainlanders. So much so that in one instance, where a 
salesman is trying to sell an online English learning programme, the 
words he used were 80% English and 20% Cantonese, but the sentence 
structure and grammar were purely Cantonese. It was very odd.

>  So my belief is that unless we are talking about a cultural
> jamming hub, it will not be too hard to foresee that the Cantonese
> page will have a hard time in retaining the critical mass in
> sustaining a viable Cantonese page.

We'd never know until we try. ;)

> most of us were written by Cantonese.  I am proud of my mother-tongue
> and at the same time I do not see that having to write in
> formal-chinese is an insult to us.

I don't see it as an insult; I just think it's "unfair". I probably 
wouldn't even be joining this discussion if all Chinese people are still 
writing in wenyanwen, but we aren't. The point of baihuawen was that we 
should write as how we speak. For us Cantonese, we *aren't* writing as 
how we speak; we're writing as how the Mandarin speaker would speak. 
'Tis all.

>  Simply because there are some
> terms in Cantonese we don't even know how to write -  Cantonese is a
> verbal language and we base on the tone to communication.

Hm, I think a lot of Cantonese words can be written if we look up the 
older dictionaries, since we've kept a lot of the older words (just like 
we've kept a lot of the older pronunciations) when modern Mandarin has 
lost a lot of those words.

I mean, many Cantonese scholars have been saying how some of the older 
poems don't rhyme if you read them in modern Mandarin but still rhyme if 
you read them in Cantonese because Cantonese has kept a lot of the 
ancient pronunciations, etc.

little Alex