>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?

At 10:41 AM 12/13/2003, John Jenkins wrote:

>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.)

THANKS BE! Finally, Unicoded goodness for non-"standard" characters!

BTW, you've read Bauer and Cheung's recent publication on
Cantonese characters?

>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.

hrm... I would disagree to some degree...

Sinitic languages, when written, involve not just ditaxia of
"standardized" versus "local/colloquial," but actually involve polytaxia -
Modern Standard Chinese (which is basically congruous with "Standard"
Mandarin/putonghua), Classical Chinese, and local/colloquial versions.
Granted that with the advent of "national language
standardization" in the early 1900s for the Sinitic languages/"Chinese,"
Mandarin has come to the forefront, yet even Written Mandarin/MSC accesses
large amounts of Classical Chinese, which is far removed from any
spoken/colloquial Mandarin form.
The whole situation of reading/writing "Mandarin" is true, BUT, I
would argue that people internally _translate_ into their own vernacular,
where vernacular/colloquial forms are substituted in on not only the
lexical, but also syntactic, level, when read.

>(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.)

I think a better analogy would be using the Scandinavian
languages... where lexical and grammatical differences range from slight to
moderate to extreme.

>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.

and movie subtitling, and personal correspondence, and
traditionally in novels and operatic transcriptions, and.....

>Cantonese and Mandarin are not, strictly speaking, dialects of one
>another, as they are not mutually intelligible.

Well, as Peter will re-assert, to a linguist, "dialect" and
"language" are relatively meaningless in an absolute sense (given the
highly charge socio-political/historical precedents for choice of one over
another... which is often taken into account).
However, aside from the cultural/political unity that usually
accounts for calling Mandarin and Cantonese as dialects of _Chinese_, there
has to be a method for discussing closely related varieties that have
unifying features, in spite of high mutual UNintelligibility, c.f. Arabic -
fusHa (Classical) versus local Arabics.
I agree that the degree of unintelligibility often surpasses that
even of national languages in Europe and often prefer referring to
"Chinese" as 'Sinitic/Sinitic languages' and the 'dialect groups' as
'language families,' but, there's truly no need to _completely_ separate
without acknowledging or downplaying the commonalities (which is the
default mindset for national langauges that are related).

>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.

yet, one could say that Mandarin also has plenty of these as
well... putonghua/Written MSC seems to incorporate these more only because
of the higher percentage of northern speakers using MSC in writing... and
the two are usually congruous.

>Two of the most
>common are the characters used for the Cantonese word for "cockroach,"
>something not infrequently encountered in Canton and Hong Kong.

The only thing I'll say about this is that the written
codification of "cockroach" in Cantonese texts reflects the north-south
isogloss of "Chinese" as a whole. Other 'southern' Sinitic languages, i.e.
Min (Taiwanese/Xiamen/Amoy) and Hakka, as well as some 'central' dialects -
some Wu (Shanghainese? Wenzhou?), Xiang, Gan...

>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.

We can make comparisons with Scots English and Queen's English
here... will the refuting argument still hold in this case?

(yay.. no sniping!)
-Patrick