John Jenkins wrote:
>
> 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.
Bill Bright claims that the famous three-syllable character for
'library' (transcribed tushuguan in Hockett 2003 and Mair, WWS) exists
almost exclusively to demonstrate that at least one three-syllable
character exists. Can you confirm or deny?
--
Peter T. Daniels
grammatim@...