Re: Half of all Chinese people can't speak Mandarin!

>>>>> "Tak" == Tak To <takto@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

>> I did watch it on TV, and I had to laugh. Those people
>> insisted in doing the swearing in [ugly] Mandarin (why not in
>> their most fluent variant of *Chinese* -- Cantonese? hm... to
>> show political affinity, I suppose), and they didn't even spare
>> the time to practise it well beforehand. It's so disgusting.
>> (But even Jiang1ze2min2's Mandarin is ugly: <te4bie2> "special"
>> becomes [t@?5 bI?5].) In the same ceremony, some legal people
>> also had to swear and many of them are non-Chinese. They did
>> the swearing in English. I suppose most of the high-rank
>> officials who did that swearing in ugly Mandarin can do it
>> perfectly in perfect English. Sigh... politics.

Tak> You are probably too political. A lot of Chinese consider
Tak> Mandarin/ Putonghua to be the official "dialect" regardless
Tak> of their political affinity.

Then, how come courts in HK use Cantonese more often than Mandarin?
(I'm not sure if English still dominates in courts.) And the HK
government has even extended the Big5 character set with
HK-Cantonese-specific characters, mainly driven by the need to keep
written record of Cantonese spoken in courts with high fidelity. I
think these have been added to Unicode 3.0 outside the BMP region.

The fact is that Cantonese is recognized as an official "Chinese"
dialect in HK, defacto. Government officials give announcements on
TV/radio in Cantonese, not Mandarin. Dejure, it is not that clearly
defined. The Basic Law only says "Chinese" and "English" are the
official languages. It seems to deliberately leave "Chinese"
ambiguous: it can be Cantonese or Mandarin.



--
Lee Sau Dan 李守敦 ~{@nJX6X~}

E-mail: danlee@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Home page: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~danlee
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