I think someone was talking about moving this conversation somewhere else? I was vacationing in mainland China and didn't catch where this was moved to? Would some kind soul please inform me? Thanks.
There was a discussion about the revival of intlwiki-l, but it lost steam, so currently the discussion is still going on here.
Actually, the attitude in Hong Kong has always been that you must be daft if you can't speak Cantonese with the perfect Hong Kong accent. It's only after 1997 that the various public transportation, etc. have Mandarin announcements. The "official" Hong Kong stance is two written languages and three spoken languages. Most people ended up writing bad English & somewhat sufficient Chinese and speaking perfect Cantonese, somewhat okay English, and lousy Mandarin.
Right - what I meant is that this happens in Hong Kong, but never on the mainland.
Since I've been going to Guangzhou a lot lately, I've noticed that there is a big difference between the attitude about Cantonese in Guangzhou vs. Hong Kong. And in Macao, even the Macanese speaks great Cantonese, though they all speak Portuguese at home.
I'm curious about linguistic issues in Macao - do they share the Cantonese popular culture of Hong Kong?
As to the written system, Hong Kong has always used traditional Chinese and I hope that never changes. I can read simplified Chinese but I think it's the ugliest thing ever. And it's not like it helped the literacy rate or anything, since both Taiwan and Hong Kong have a higher literacy rate than mainland China. But I'm little old me and I'm not stupid enough to go against the whole Chinese government.
I agree here. Stylistically, even on the mainland all calligraphers and the like use Traditional, though Simplified does have some characters which were previously limited mostly to calligraphy (to me, they don't look very good in print). But unfortunately, when it comes to things like the UN, "marginal" Chinese regions using Traditional are trumped by the mainland and on an international level, people seem to use Simplified (I personally use Traditional for such purposes). If I recall correctly there was a poet who talked about the beauty of Chinese characters, comparing some to plants and animals. People have talked about this being lost if hanzi were ever to be discarded in favour of another system (pinyin, bopomofo), but I think it's already diminished by the "simplification" of Chinese characters. (really meaning reduction of strokes and in some cases merging of homophones)
Depends entirely on what you think of as recent, as plenty of popular HK fiction in the 80s are written in Cantonese. But to the older generation, even if they are Cantonese speakers themselves, baihua is simply how you write. It's not just prejudice against Cantonese, but also prejudice against mass culture/pop culture.
What I meant by "relatively recent" was in the last few decades instead of the last few centuries.
Best Mark