Hello,
Cathy Ma wrote:
intense discussion I have been asking my friends around - 'have you ever seen/written an article in full Cantonese?'
The answers vary but in sum, none of us have ever written anything in full Cantonese in the context of article-writing. Contrary to what you may believe, it is actually hard to write in full-Cantonese without mixing in formal Chinese in a passage.
I do agree with Mark that writing an article in Cantonese feels difficult is because we've rarely done so. The closest I've seen is, of course, in entertainment news. I think a certain author in the late 80s/early 90s used to mix in a lot of Cantonese in his novels (But Wah Lau). I think it'll come easier with practice.
On the other hand, in Hong Kong, most subtitles we have on TV or movies are in formal Chinese, which can be another example showing how accustomed we are to converging from Cantonese to formal Chinese and vice versa.
Grown-up movies, very true. Kids movies are almost always dubbed into Cantonese and have Cantonese subtitles. Sometimes I hate it, sometimes it's funnier than the original version. I heard that the "Shrek 2" dub was pretty good (I hate it when Miyazaki is dubbed, though: totally wrong tone).
And btw, mainland Cantonese is not the same as HK Cantonese. We have extra terms that mainland Cantonese wouldn't understand and vice versa.
I've been to Guangzhou a lot the last few months and I'd say the difference is a lot less than you think. The slang is of course much different, but if we keep to article-writing, it should be all right.
What I do notice is that we HKers use a lot more English terms and phrases than the mainlanders. So much so that in one instance, where a salesman is trying to sell an online English learning programme, the words he used were 80% English and 20% Cantonese, but the sentence structure and grammar were purely Cantonese. It was very odd.
So my belief is that unless we are talking about a cultural jamming hub, it will not be too hard to foresee that the Cantonese page will have a hard time in retaining the critical mass in sustaining a viable Cantonese page.
We'd never know until we try. ;)
most of us were written by Cantonese. I am proud of my mother-tongue and at the same time I do not see that having to write in formal-chinese is an insult to us.
I don't see it as an insult; I just think it's "unfair". I probably wouldn't even be joining this discussion if all Chinese people are still writing in wenyanwen, but we aren't. The point of baihuawen was that we should write as how we speak. For us Cantonese, we *aren't* writing as how we speak; we're writing as how the Mandarin speaker would speak. 'Tis all.
Simply because there are some terms in Cantonese we don't even know how to write - Cantonese is a verbal language and we base on the tone to communication.
Hm, I think a lot of Cantonese words can be written if we look up the older dictionaries, since we've kept a lot of the older words (just like we've kept a lot of the older pronunciations) when modern Mandarin has lost a lot of those words.
I mean, many Cantonese scholars have been saying how some of the older poems don't rhyme if you read them in modern Mandarin but still rhyme if you read them in Cantonese because Cantonese has kept a lot of the ancient pronunciations, etc.
little Alex