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