On Dec 13, 2003, at 8:27 AM, Scott Sullivan wrote:

> Do you know for sure that there are characters that are used in
> Cantonese
> and not in Mandarin?

Oh, heavens yes. (In fact, I'm sitting on a list of well over a
hundred that haven't been added or even proposed for Unicode yet.)

There is one form for standard, modern, written Chinese, namely
Mandarin (modulo the distinctions between simplified and traditional
forms, and some minor lexical differences between PRC Mandarin and TOC
Mandarin). Speakers of other dialects are usually expected to read and
write Mandarin, although they pronounce it using their own language.
(The analogy I usually use is that it would be like having Spanish
children read and write French, but pronounce it is if it were
Spanish.) The major exception to this rule is Cantonese, which is used
on occasion in Hong Kong in comic books, graffiti, billboards and
advertisements, and even (on occasion) magazine or newspaper articles
and novels.

Cantonese and Mandarin are not, strictly speaking, dialects of one
another, as they are not mutually intelligible. The analogy isn't
between the Queen's English and Cockney, but English and Dutch or
French and Spanish. In any event, there are substantial lexical
differences between the two, and Cantonese has a moderately large
repertoire of characters coined for its own use. Two of the most
common are the characters used for the Cantonese word for "cockroach,"
something not infrequently encountered in Canton and Hong Kong. There
are also a number of characters which have dropped out of active use in
Mandarin or have non-cognate pronunciations in Cantonese, and a
smattering of characters only used for place-names in Hong Kong or
Macao.

========
John H. Jenkins
jenkins@...
jhjenkins@...
http://homepage..mac.com/jhjenkins/