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Comment by Aperocky | Hacker News Reader

This demonstrate an lack of understanding of Chinese writing. Everything in "佢唔喺呢度" are used as phonetics in an informal setting, the same way that Pinyin work. Meanwhile "他不在這裏" are the written formal version used universally.

The pronunciation between various Chinese dialects are very different, often not mutually intelligible. The written form however is universal. Obviously, you can't use pinyin to spell out Cantonese (as pinyin is a phonetic representation of Mandarin) so that's why cantonese gets represented phonetically like "佢唔喺呢度".

There were talks about using pinyin (i.e. latin script) to replace written characters a couple decades back, they weren't that popular and was not carried out. Vietnam is an example that did.

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他不在這裏 is a Mandarin sentence, and Mandarin is taught as the universal common language in China. If Cantonese had been chosen as the standard (which was a possibility in the early 20th century), then you'd be saying that 他不在這裏 is informal and 佢唔喺呢度 is the "universal" written form.

I'm a Cantonese native speaker and this is it.

The idea that "written Chinese" just happens to be identical to written Mandarin whereas written Cantonese is also the same and we actually translate our spoken words into a different written form is just historical revisionism and linguistic chauvinism.

The plain reality is that modern written Chinese is the way it is because the CCP standardized Mandarin as the national dialect.

I don’t follow. Written Chinese predates the CCP by a very long time.

More specifically, 他不在這裏 is a phrase that I could imagine being used in official written text in past dynasties. But 佢唔喺呢度 does not.

> 他不在這裏 is a phrase that I could imagine being used in official written text in past dynastie

In informal correspondence, imperial officials may have written things like this, because modern Standard Mandarin is based in part on 官话, the "court dialect" [1]. But any official text would almost certainly have been written in Classical Chinese.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_(late_imperial_lingua...

Thanks, I’m not too knowledgeable on this subject, but given that the phrase 他不在這裏 can be understood entirely by looking up the definitions of the individual characters (which I don’t think have changed much over time), but not so for 佢唔喺呢度, it seems like your original assertion is false, and the root problem is Cantonese just differs too much from traditional written Chinese.

You would not interpret the Mandarin sentence correctly if you just looked up each character in a Classical Chinese dictionary. 他 was not a pronoun in Classical Chinese, but rather meant “other.” 這 was the verb “to meet.”

If you look it up character by character in a Mandarin dictionary, you can interpret it. And if you look up the Cantonese sentence character by character in a Cantonese dictionary, you can interpret it.

I'm not sure I understand, could you confirm/object to this?: - The Chinese characters have no fixed meaning, but they do have fixed pronunciation, so 佢唔喺呢度 sounds like spoken Cantonese when any Chinese pronounces it, but the meaning can only be understood by Cantonese? - The government declared the Mandarin meaning to be the only meaning of the Chinese characters?

> The Chinese characters have no fixed meaning, but they do have fixed pronunciation

No, neither pronunciation nor meaning are fixed, and phonetic drift in general is faster than semantic drift, i.e. people from different parts of China are more likely to ascribe different pronunciations to the same character than different meanings, although the latter is not uncommon. Canjobear above gave two examples where the Mandarin meaning has changed relative to the Classical Chinese meaning.

When people want to write something for which they don't know a character (either because none has ever been defined or they just haven't learned it or the pronunciation differs based on context and they feel this should be reflected by using different characters) they can create a new one based on whatever makes sense to them. The character 佢 was chosen because the word sounds similar to that written 巨 in Cantonese. Nowadays so many more people are literate in Mandarin that they're likely to substitute a character whose pronunciation in Mandarin is similar to what they want to write.

Mandarin or this kind of standardized written Chinese was formalized by a National Commission and chosen during the Republic of China era, this is the document from 1932 now digitally stored in the archives of Taiwan, see: https://taiwanebook.ncl.edu.tw/zh-tw/book/NCCULIB-9900012902...

Even without the CCP, Mandarin would have become the national dialect and dominated Chinese speech, etc. The CCP merely continued on the work because it was so useful and the easiest route to go as there had been so much work done and a system put in place by the previous regime.

EDIT: https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/sites.gatech.edu/dist/d/987/fi...

^this link loaded better, its the same document, seems to be from Georgia Tech.

For non-Chinese readers, the document says that the dialect from Beiping (aka Beijing) should be adopted as the standard and then lists rules on pronunciation, how to pronunce using a Latin-based script, etc.

To elaborate, there's formal written Chinese (which is close but not identical to spoken Mandarin) and then there's written Cantonese (or other dialects), which is writing the characters as they would be spoken verbatim.

Written Chinese is used for anything official or formal, written Cantonese is often used online informally (like using text/SMS language in English)

> "他不在這裏" are the written formal version used universally.

You could also say "他不在這兒。" or "他非在此處。" and they're written differently because they're pronounced differently. It stands to reason that if someone has a fourth way of saying the same thing with different words, they might also want to write it differently.

A mature language can express one thing with many different styles. Finding many ways to say the same thing don't means you find many unintelligible languages.

Australian say "G'day" rather than "Hello", does the difference of greeting makes Australian-English a standalone language?

Besides, you didn't refute his main idea: phonetic symbol is not equivalent to formal writing.

Cantonese has different styles and registers, both formal and informal, within itself. 他不在這裏 is Mandarin; it is not a grammatical sentence in Cantonese.

Cantonese and Mandarin are not mutually intelligible.

Australian English and American English and British English are mutually intelligible.

You might as well be claiming that Old English and modern English are the same language.

Not only that, but every one of the characters in 佢唔喺呢度 can be properly written as 其無在爾道. Just because people have decided to write phonetically (even transparently with the 口 radical construction) doesn't say anything about the commonality of the written form of Chinese which from its inception was already multilingual.

> 其無在爾道

I don't speak Cantonese, but I know this means "He's not seen (your way) here" because those characters mean that.

Which reinforce my point.

Except 呢 means "this", not "you", so you fooled yourself into believing you could understand something which you did not.

爾 as a character does have both meanings.

As characters are not married to pronounciations, both old (i.e. classical) texts and newer memes can be hard to understand or misunderstood despite knowing all characters. Guesses are often close enough, which is a feature of the logogram.

Well, 呢 is unambiguous where 爾 is not. Similar reasoning as introducing 你 as a separate character for "you".

Out of curiosity, do you speak a variety other than Mandarin? And if so, do you think you'd be able to find "proper" characters for everything you could say, like pishpash did above?

> you think you'd be able to find "proper" characters for everything you could say

The matter isn't whether I can find the proper character for everything you could say, but rather whether the spoken variety themselves can be based on written characters. In the example case you gave, it does.

The spoken varieties of Chinese can still be mapped to a set of characters, that still means there's a commonality underlying all of these variety. For instance, Beijing dialect/slang "颠儿" means '(he/she) is gone', which wouldn't be readily apparent or understandable to even mandarin speakers. but the first character has the meaning "run/trip".

> Beijing dialect/slang "颠儿" means '(he/she) is gone', which wouldn't be readily apparent or understandable to even mandarin speakers. but the first character has the meaning "run/trip".

Old dictionaries list 颠 as a synonym of 顶 only, without a "run/trip" meaning. Most likely the character was only used for this word because both are pronounced "diān" in Mandarin and people didn't bother to make a new character, e.g. by combining [足颠]. The -儿 suffix is also interesting, because the sound modification it represents is something Beijing Mandarin speakers picked up from the Manchu during the Qing dynasty, it has nothing to do with the meaning of 儿. So 颠儿 is a relatively new addition to the written language that is not shared with non-Mandarin varieties.

The earliest known dictionary of Chinese was 爾雅, meaning "Near refinement". It is common for languages to use "near" and "far" to indicate "this" and "that". Of course it would take somebody literate to know this, which most internet junkies today are unfortunately not.

It might be unfortunate that I'm illiterate in classical Chinese, but I thank you, who are literate, for proving my point that all of these dialects have common underpinnings.

I don't think anybody is arguing that Cantonese and Mandarin doesn't have common underpinnings, but rather that they are not mutually intelligible.

French and Spanish, as romance languages, have a lot in common but they are separate languages. Writing Cantonese in standard written Chinese is similar to asking Spanish speakers not to write phonetically, but to rather write in French.

> internet junkies today

The American Mandarin Society has courses for Professionals. I guess they make quality judgement on what to keep or throwout in use of the Chinese language in their curated walled garden for snooty State official use.

And what is a 馬卡龍 then? A horse card dragon?

A popular word or phrase spoken in one geographical location but does not exist elsewhere does not mean that the language is suddenly distinct.

There are countless example in English as it is spoken around the world, even subtler ones, bless your heart.

No, 爾 is not cognate to Cantonese 呢 meaning "this" (which is different from Mandarin 呢, a sentence particle, which might be related to 爾).

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