MilchFlasche, this is impossible because they are the same! Oh no! ;p
Sheng Jiong, you have lied about speaking Shanghainese as your native language. I know this because there are large grammatical differences between Shanghainese and Baihuawen that you seem to overlook, suggesting you don't know it at all.
One example is the existance in Wu of the particle "teuq7" meaning "with", that doesn't exist in Mandarin. There is a character to write it, I have seen it before, but I cannot remember it.
Some examples of Cantonese grammar differences:
Mandarin/Baihua: 他給我三本書. Cantonese: 佢俾三本書我. (notice position of "我")
Mandarin/Baihua: 我先上界買東西. Cantonese: 我去界買冶先. (notice position of "先" and use of 去 vs 上, and vocabulary difference of monosyllabic Cantonese word for "things" vs disyllabic Mandarin word)
Mandarin/Baihua: 他比我高. Cantonese: 佢高過我. (notice use of "過" vs "比", entirely different sentence order)
Mandarin/Baihua: 把他叫來 Cantonese: 噭佢來.
Mandarin/Baihua: 我上北京去. Cantonese: 我去北京.
Mandarin/Baihua: 看不見. Cantonese: 唔睇得見.
Mandarin/Baihua: 你吃不吃飯? Cantonese: 你吃飯唔吃?
So please stop spouting crap about how there is completely the same grammar and that the only difference is these unstandard characters.
Also there is much differences in Shanghainese too, if you want I can maybe type some examples later.
Mark
On Sat, 19 Feb 2005 19:19:02 +0800, MilchFlasche瑋平 robertus0617@gmail.com wrote:
Bonjour,
On Sat, 19 Feb 2005 18:48:13 +0800, Sheng Jiong sheng.jiong@gmail.com wrote:
You have argued that Cantonese is a written language, using the differences between Cantonese and Mandarin as evidence. 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.
formulax
However, the fact is that you can't never make a clear cut between spoken and written language so simply --- although this could be fulfilled in the case of Classic Chinese (Wenyan). Which tongue do you use to read Baihuawen out loud? Do you use your Wu pronunciation to read them and communicate with others? What would such utterance become? Nothing, I guess. We just don't use vernacular way to read Baihuawen. So what's behind it? We all use the same written language Baihuawen, because it came with the same common spoken language: Mandarin. But this has nothing to do with other spoken languages, and neither with the fact that there is Cantonese in written forms on the web everywhere. In Taiwan forums, opinions written in Cantonese are not so unfamiliar, and people are often asked politely to translate them in Mandarin, or even such texts are banned. Now, if there are only FEW people writing Cantonese, then where do these people come from? Links of two major Taiwanese forums are given below: http://forum.moztw.org/viewtopic.php?t=4286 (the official Mozilla forum of Taiwan) discussing whether written Cantonese should be banned. http://forum.palmislife.com/viewthread.php?tid=9277&fpage=1 (the largest Palm PDA site in Taiwan) especially this sentence:"香港朋友也盡可能使用普通話參予討論", asking HongKongers discussing in Mandarin.
Examples are plenty and not hard to find.
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