Quote:
Originally Posted by KyleGoetz
This may be correct, but I don't know how it's related to what I said. Feel free to explicate.
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No offense taken, don't feel that way at all... just an intelligent discussion, and I doget upset at people calling Simplified Chinese "mandarin"... .. thats just simmply how we were taught.... its Simplified and Traditional Chinese...
The relation is that, we are discussing whether its a dialect or a language. And there are also relation to the writing system, which I will try to explain.
China, is a country, consisting of multiple provinces. No debate, we all should agree to that. Mandarin, represent ONLY a small region, relative to the whole of China. Mandarin was the selected dialect as the national LANGUAGE, but its not THE language use by all Chinese. Provinces tend to have their own local dialect, just like how Beijing has Mandarin. And many choose to not use Mandarin to communicate
We cannot call the writing "Mandarin", and the reason is the same as above, there are provinces that uses the exact same writing system - Simplified Chinese, but they do not pronounce it the same as Mandarin. In that case, what do we call their writing? Its definitely not Mandarin, because the original intention was to tie "mandarin" to the dialect itself, but since they don't speak it, are they still writing in "Mandarin"??
And I agree, Cantonese and Mandarin are definitely NOT the same thing. For sure its not, they are 2 very distinctive dialect, belonging to one language group - The Chinese language...
Edit: One more thing, about your comment of the subtitles. The thing you have to understand is that, Cantonese are not spoken the same way as how Cantonese people would write, not officially anyways. I think thats where the confusion stems from. Spoken Cantonese contain a lot of slang, slang that is not used in formal literature. One example. The English word :Them, in Traditional Chinese its written as "他們" - "Taa Moon", in Simplified Chinese its written as "他们" - Tah Mun. Notice that they are very similar, with the only difference being the second character, and they sound very similar. This is how it will be written in any formal (and proper) literature by ALL Chinese, either in the Simplified or Traditional.
BUT, when people speak, only the Mandarin speaking crowd will use Tah Mun, the Cantonese crowd will "Kui Dei". Which is written - 佢哋. This is pure slang, and is not use in any written literature. Hence any Cantonese people will tell you that its different, because it is. But realistically, these 2 character, together or individually, does not carry any meaning of "Them" or "They" when written in any document, and should never be used as such, in fact, the second Character didn't exist until recently (I had to use a special input software to get this)
Another example: Tire (car tire), in Traditional Chinese its written - "輪胎" - lun tai, in Simplified Chinese - "轮胎", loon tai, as discussed above, it will be written as such in official documents, but Cantonese speakers will not read it as such, and will pronounce it as "車呔" - Che Tai. The second character are pronounced the same, but if you notice its not the same as either the simplified or traditional version.
Lets look at the example of a full sentence: The weather is great today
In Traditional Chinese: 今天的天氣很好 - Gum tin dic tin hei hun ho
In Simplified Chinese: 今天的天气很好 - Jin ten de ten chi hun hau
Again, this is how it will be written in proper literature. But Cantonese speaker will not say it like that, it will be 今日幾好天 - Gum yat gei ho tin
In this particular case, its not slang, its not not proper enough to be used in any literature or document.....