Hello,
Sheng Jiong wrote:
Is Baihuawen not the standard Chinese?
Currently, yes.
It was created after the May Fourth Movement in 1919,
Was it? I seem to recall many novels and anthologies, etc. written in something similar before the May Fourth movement. I actually think we have a similar situation here. In the old days, the standard Chinese was wenyanwen and baihua was seen as below par and people shouldn't write in baihua because it's "only a spoken language".
The May Fourth movement changed that. And now...
You are deliberately associating the concept of "standard Chinese" with classic Chinese (Wen Yan), which is actually not the standard Chinese today
I was trying to compare the two situations, which to me there are similarities.
(for it is neither taugt in schools as a way of writing, and neither is it used in most publications).
I can't speak for the situation in mainland China today, but it's definitely taught, not as a way of writing, no, but I've seen many people's attempt at writing it and some attempts are good enough to pass. I think many people, especially the older generations in Hong Kong, still write with a smattering of wenyanwen.
And I seem to recall something on the news a couple of years ago about a young man who managed to write an essay completely in wenyanwen in his university entrance exam or some such.
there is any school teaching Cantonese is to question if written Cantonese has been widely accepted.
And yet as we keep pointing out examples of whether it's widely accepted or not, you keep dismissing it, even when the evidence is valid.
one of the most read Hong Kong tabloids. Among the six headlines in their main page, only one uses Cantonese characters;
It's a weekly magazine, I don't know if the headlines I read are the same as those you've read, but I'd say that more than one uses Cantonese characters and the sentence structure/grammar for all of them are in fact Cantonese.
and if you read the articles, all of them are written in baihuawen (if you prefer using this term and purposely confusing it with classic Chinese).
I don't think anyone is confusing baihuawen with Classical Chinese...
1)Not even Cantonese native speakers can understand an article entirely written in Cantonese written language, if it concerns encyclopediac topics;
I think I understood the examples Felix provided just fine, thank you very much. Mind you, my Chinese education ended at Primary 5. So if I can understand it, it's pretty understandable. And as the article is written by a mainland Chinese, I assume there are at least some mainland Chinese people who can understand an article written completely in Cantonese.
2)Few people have written in Cantonese;
And both Cathy and I have said that we and many Hong Kong people do write often in Cantonese. For short messages, granted, but for the purpose of this experiment, I think it counts. Then again, who knows what's your definition of "few people".
3)Wikipedia should not advocate the use of Cantonese written language. Instead we should only allow it when it has already been accepted by the society.
So says the person who keeps insisting that Cantonese can't even be written.
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.
And baihuawen is based on Mandarin grammar, syntax, etc. So essentially baihuawen *is* Mandarin.
little Alex