I’m reading up on Cantonese. Please don’t ask me why.
All quotes from here.
Yes, I will be looking at this article and applying my own experience. >.>;
I find this statement very interesting: “[Cantonese] is the lingua franca of the Chinese diaspora, spoken by about 70 million people worldwide, less than for example Mandarin Chinese, but still a major language.” I agree with the first part. Consider the fact that when I walked around Chinatown yesterday, I heard Cantonese. Lots and lots of Cantonese. Also consider the fact I didn’t know anyone besides my father who spoke Mandarin until I was 9. And it’s not like my neighbourhood suffered from a lack of Chinese people. Now, the second part about Cantonese being a language… I don’t know if it qualifies as such. Maybe it’s just semantics, but I don’t quite agree with it. It’s generally accepted that Cantonese is a dialect, right? (Well, I suppose until you consider that there are sub-dialects… and then things get complicated.)
“Linguistically, Cantonese is a more conservative dialect than Mandarin.” Which of course implies that Mandarin is a dialect as well. Which it is. Just a really big one, that’s all. There are sub-dialects of Mandarin just as there are sub-dialects of Cantonese; unfortunately I’m not familiar with them. I think the “Chinese language” only exists in writing; spoken Chinese is broken up into a ton of different dialects.
“Cantonese tends to preserve more variations of sound while Mandarin merged many of them.” Yes. Which is why Korean sounds are actually closer to Cantonese sounds. (Long story involving language, writing, status, Korea, and Middle Chinese.) And, well, I don’t know if the initial sound of “you” (as in the second-person pronoun) is closer to a “N” or “L” sound. And no, those sounds aren’t as distinct as you might think.
Oh, and off the record: Cantonese romanization is odd. It makes no sense. I pick up phrasebooks (phrasebooks, mind you: I can understand this stuff) and I have no idea what the sentences are supposed to mean. At all.
“Formally, written Cantonese does not exist[.]” Yup. Which is why learning to write is so hard! What you say and what you write are different. “The written word for “to be” is i”?1/2i”?1/2 in spoken Mandarin (pronounced shi”?1/2i”?1/2) but is i”?1/2S in spoken Cantonese (pronounced hai6). In formal written Chinese, only i”?1/2i”?1/2 is used.” *shakes head* When even sounding out words becomes impossible. It is KINDA possible in Chinese, if you know enough characters; radicals and stems and all that. Some have similar characters and similar pronunciations. It’s possible to guess.
As Winson pointed out a while ago, Cantonese is basically all slang anyway. It’s not a particulary noble or formal language/dialect/sounds that come out of people’s mouths which are supposed to mean something. I actually have no idea what the Chinese words for “strawberry” is. I know what the butchered English word in Chinese is (if that makes any sense; if not, think of the Japanese using katakana for foreign loanwords. It sounds like that. But Cantonese.)
Sarah Says: