Hello Scott,

> Do you know for sure that there are characters that are used in Cantonese
> and not in Mandarin? Since there are both spoken dialect of the Chinese
> language of mainland China I really find that hard to believe. Unless you
> consider Simplified characters to be different then there original complex
> forms. Then you could say that Mandarin is spoken in Taiwan where they use
> the original character and Cantonese is spoken on the mainland where the
> Simplified forms have be standardized, this would make sense. But the way
> you stated it above sounds like saying that there are letter in the English
> alphabet that are use in the Cockney dialect that are not used in the hills
> of Arkansas.
> We were talking about the written forms of JKC?????

Yes, we are!

But you can't really compare the somewhat smallish number or characters in
the Latin/Roman (for Peter: English) alphabet to CJK characters. The han (or
han-inspired) characters are an "open" set, you can't tell for sure how many
of them there are, and people keep making up new ones.
(Just think of a scenario where Canadians invent new fancy characters for
fun ...) ;-)


You are into Japanese, so just have a look at e.g. "hataraku" 働 , a
character which doesn't exist in Chinese - the Japanese invented it (it's a
so-called "kokuji", a character made in Japan). Show it to a Chinese, and
you will see raised eyebrows.



There definitely ARE unique CJK characters, even within China.
E.g. confer:
http://www.info.gov.hk/digital21/eng/hkscs/introduction.html

Here you have an extension of the Chinese character set(s), because there
are some characters in Hongkong just haven't been included in most Chinese
character sets yet. If you write down colloquial Cantonese, you will find
function words (due to a different grammar) you don't have in Mandarin
(putonghua). Or lots of special characters for names and place names.
Another examples are new characters for "elevator" (U+282E2) and "neck tie"
(U+27639) ... (Marco?) ;-)





Regards,
Berthold