etc/HELLO: On Chinese and Cantonese

etc/HELLO: On Chinese and Cantonese

[Kai Ma]

Hi emacs-devel

I noticed recently in etc/HELLO Chinese and Cantonese are aligned side
to side, which is linguistically incorrect. Though Chinese taxonomy is
complex, there are two main viewpoints regarding Cantonese:

1. Chinese is a single language, and Cantonese is "a dialect of Chinese".
2. Chinese is a family of languages [1], and Cantonese belongs to this
family.

Neither of them sees Cantonese is separate from Chinese -- they both
view Cantonese as a "kind" of Chinese. Putting Cantonese below is like
putting French below Romance languages.

Therefore, I propose to make the following changes.
1. Change "Chinese" to "Chinese, Mandarin".
2. Change "Cantonese" to "Chinese, Cantonese".
This allows for future additions for other Sinitic languages.

Or, since Sinitic languages are similar when written [2], it may be not
very helpful to list each of them:
1. Remove the Cantonese line entirely;
2. Remove "普通话" (which means Mandarin) from the Chinese line;
3. Add "漢語" to the Chinese line -- Chinese has not only one written
system [3].

What do you think?

Regards
Kai


[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinitic_languages
[2] Though the same words are pronounced differently. e.g. 你好 in
Cantonese is pronounced "nei hou", while in Mandarin is pronounced "ni hao".
[3] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_Chinese_characters and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Chinese_characters 

Re: etc/HELLO: On Chinese and Cantonese

[Mingde (Matthew) Zeng]

This email brings me to look at the etc/HELLO file for the first time.

As a Chinese myself, I must point out that there is virtually _no_ Chinese who would say "早晨, 你好" when they greet someone, regardless of whether they speak Mandarin or Cantonese. Although it is technically correct, it is _super_ weird for someone to say it this way.

Basically the meaningful difference between Mandarin and Cantonese on paper is that the former uses simplified Chinese and the latter uses traditional Chinese. Fortuntaely, when it comes to greet someone, both mandarin and cantonese use "你好", which is the same in both simplified and traditional.

Therefore I propose to rmeove the Cantonese line entirely, and change "(中文,普通话,汉语)" to "(中文)"


Matthew


Kai Ma <ksqsf@mail.ustc.edu.cn> writes:

> Hi emacs-devel
>
> I noticed recently in etc/HELLO Chinese and Cantonese are aligned side
> to side, which is linguistically incorrect. Though Chinese taxonomy is
> complex, there are two main viewpoints regarding Cantonese:
>
> 1. Chinese is a single language, and Cantonese is "a dialect of Chinese".
> 2. Chinese is a family of languages [1], and Cantonese belongs to this
> family.
>
> Neither of them sees Cantonese is separate from Chinese -- they both
> view Cantonese as a "kind" of Chinese. Putting Cantonese below is like
> putting French below Romance languages.
>
> Therefore, I propose to make the following changes.
> 1. Change "Chinese" to "Chinese, Mandarin".
> 2. Change "Cantonese" to "Chinese, Cantonese".
> This allows for future additions for other Sinitic languages.
>
> Or, since Sinitic languages are similar when written [2], it may be not
> very helpful to list each of them:
> 1. Remove the Cantonese line entirely;
> 2. Remove "普通话" (which means Mandarin) from the Chinese line;
> 3. Add "漢語" to the Chinese line -- Chinese has not only one written
> system [3].
>
> What do you think?
>
> Regards
> Kai
>
>
> [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinitic_languages
> [2] Though the same words are pronounced differently. e.g. 你好 in
> Cantonese is pronounced "nei hou", while in Mandarin is pronounced "ni hao".
> [3] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_Chinese_characters and
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Chinese_characters


--
Mingde (Matthew) Zeng

Re: etc/HELLO: On Chinese and Cantonese

[Stefan Kangas]

"Mingde (Matthew) Zeng" <matthewzmd@posteo.net> writes:

> As a Chinese myself, I must point out that there is virtually _no_
> Chinese who would say "早晨, 你好" when they greet someone, regardless
> of whether they speak Mandarin or Cantonese. Although it is
> technically correct, it is _super_ weird for someone to say it this
> way.

Is it correct in written language?

> Basically the meaningful difference between Mandarin and Cantonese on
> paper is that the former uses simplified Chinese and the latter uses
> traditional Chinese. Fortuntaely, when it comes to greet someone, both
> mandarin and cantonese use "你好", which is the same in both
> simplified and traditional.
>
> Therefore I propose to rmeove the Cantonese line entirely, and change
> "(中文,普通话,汉语)" to "(中文)"

The purpose of the HELLO file is to demonstrate the capabilities of
Emacs to display various scripts (and detect problems in that support).

As far as I understand, written Chinese is pretty much always the same
but there are two ways to write the characters: traditional and
simplified.  In contrast, the spoken languages (of which there are many)
can be completely different.

So perhaps we should ideally just replace "Chinese" and "Cantonese" with
these two entries:

Chinese (simplified)
Chinese (traditional)

And then try to find some greetings that are actually different in the
two scripts.  I don't think they need to be natural in spoken language,
but they would have to be technically correct in the written language.
If they are unusual, that is fine, because the purpose is mostly to show
the difference between the scripts.

Does that proposal make sense?

Re: etc/HELLO: On Chinese and Cantonese

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Stefan Kangas <stefankangas@gmail.com>
> Date: Thu, 22 Oct 2020 04:45:23 -0700
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> > Therefore I propose to rmeove the Cantonese line entirely, and change
> > "(中文,普通话,汉语)" to "(中文)"
> 
> The purpose of the HELLO file is to demonstrate the capabilities of
> Emacs to display various scripts (and detect problems in that support).

Indeed.  Therefore, the requirement to be in line with how the
speakers of a particular language would say Hello is secondary.

> As far as I understand, written Chinese is pretty much always the same
> but there are two ways to write the characters: traditional and
> simplified.  In contrast, the spoken languages (of which there are many)
> can be completely different.
> 
> So perhaps we should ideally just replace "Chinese" and "Cantonese" with
> these two entries:
> 
> Chinese (simplified)
> Chinese (traditional)
> 
> And then try to find some greetings that are actually different in the
> two scripts.  I don't think they need to be natural in spoken language,
> but they would have to be technically correct in the written language.
> If they are unusual, that is fine, because the purpose is mostly to show
> the difference between the scripts.
> 
> Does that proposal make sense?

AFAIR, there are some non-trivial aspects here, some of them political
and even ideological.  There's PRC and there's ROC (a.k.a. Taiwan),
and I'm not sure what will each group say about the proposed changes.

So unless we have a representative group of Chinese speakers from both
camps (traditional and simplified), and they agree on some change
without any controversies, I'd rather not touch this ticking bomb with
a 3-mile stick.  The current text might not be 100% accurate, but it
has been there for many years.  I'd rather not risk causing a
diplomatic incident by a change in Emacs.

Re: etc/HELLO: On Chinese and Cantonese

[Stefan Kangas]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

> AFAIR, there are some non-trivial aspects here, some of them political
> and even ideological.  There's PRC and there's ROC (a.k.a. Taiwan),
> and I'm not sure what will each group say about the proposed changes.

FWIW, RFC5646 suggests:

      zh-Hant (Chinese written using the Traditional Chinese script)

      zh-Hans (Chinese written using the Simplified Chinese script)

    https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5646

(Note that locale uses the names zh_CN and zh_TW instead.)

Re: etc/HELLO: On Chinese and Cantonese

[Yuan Fu]

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> 
> AFAIR, there are some non-trivial aspects here, some of them political
> and even ideological.  There's PRC and there's ROC (a.k.a. Taiwan),
> and I'm not sure what will each group say about the proposed changes.
> 
> So unless we have a representative group of Chinese speakers from both
> camps (traditional and simplified), and they agree on some change
> without any controversies, I'd rather not touch this ticking bomb with
> a 3-mile stick.  The current text might not be 100% accurate, but it
> has been there for many years.  I'd rather not risk causing a
> diplomatic incident by a change in Emacs.

Indeed, many people are (unreasonably) sensitive on that area. (Of course, Cantonese is spoken in HonKong, not Taiwan, so the proposed change aren’t really related to Taiwan, but still.)

Yuan

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Re: etc/HELLO: On Chinese and Cantonese

[Yuan Fu]

> On Oct 22, 2020, at 2:45 AM, Mingde (Matthew) Zeng <matthewzmd@posteo.net> wrote:
> 
> 
> This email brings me to look at the etc/HELLO file for the first time.
> 
> As a Chinese myself, I must point out that there is virtually _no_ Chinese who would say "早晨, 你好" when they greet someone, regardless of whether they speak Mandarin or Cantonese. Although it is technically correct, it is _super_ weird for someone to say it this way.

早晨 is a common greeting for Cantonese, and 你好 for Mandarin. I don’t see much problem in it.

> 
> Basically the meaningful difference between Mandarin and Cantonese on paper is that the former uses simplified Chinese and the latter uses traditional Chinese. Fortuntaely, when it comes to greet someone, both mandarin and cantonese use "你好", which is the same in both simplified and traditional.

早晨 is common for Cantonese speakers, AFAIK.

Yuan

Re: etc/HELLO: On Chinese and Cantonese

[Werner LEMBERG]

> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
> 
>> AFAIR, there are some non-trivial aspects here, some of them political
>> and even ideological.  There's PRC and there's ROC (a.k.a. Taiwan),
>> and I'm not sure what will each group say about the proposed changes.
> 
> FWIW, RFC5646 suggests:
> 
>       zh-Hant (Chinese written using the Traditional Chinese script)
>       zh-Hans (Chinese written using the Simplified Chinese script)

If the `HELLO` file is a showcase for scripts, the above makes sense.


    Werner

Re: etc/HELLO: On Chinese and Cantonese

[Eric Abrahamsen]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Stefan Kangas <stefankangas@gmail.com>
>> Date: Thu, 22 Oct 2020 04:45:23 -0700
>> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
>> 
>> > Therefore I propose to rmeove the Cantonese line entirely, and change
>> > "(中文,普通话,汉语)" to "(中文)"
>> 
>> The purpose of the HELLO file is to demonstrate the capabilities of
>> Emacs to display various scripts (and detect problems in that support).
>
> Indeed.  Therefore, the requirement to be in line with how the
> speakers of a particular language would say Hello is secondary.
>
>> As far as I understand, written Chinese is pretty much always the same
>> but there are two ways to write the characters: traditional and
>> simplified.  In contrast, the spoken languages (of which there are many)
>> can be completely different.
>> 
>> So perhaps we should ideally just replace "Chinese" and "Cantonese" with
>> these two entries:
>> 
>> Chinese (simplified)
>> Chinese (traditional)
>> 
>> And then try to find some greetings that are actually different in the
>> two scripts.  I don't think they need to be natural in spoken language,
>> but they would have to be technically correct in the written language.
>> If they are unusual, that is fine, because the purpose is mostly to show
>> the difference between the scripts.
>> 
>> Does that proposal make sense?
>
> AFAIR, there are some non-trivial aspects here, some of them political
> and even ideological.  There's PRC and there's ROC (a.k.a. Taiwan),
> and I'm not sure what will each group say about the proposed changes.
>
> So unless we have a representative group of Chinese speakers from both
> camps (traditional and simplified), and they agree on some change
> without any controversies, I'd rather not touch this ticking bomb with
> a 3-mile stick.  The current text might not be 100% accurate, but it
> has been there for many years.  I'd rather not risk causing a
> diplomatic incident by a change in Emacs.

My 2c: the simplified/traditional script distinction is probably the
right way to go. As Stefan says, the point of the file is showing off
scripts, but more than that, the script distinction is actually
relatively apolitical. It's when you get into Mandarin vs Cantonese and
trying to establish a taxonomical relationship between dialects/variants
that politics comes into it. The simplified/traditional split is pretty
uncontroversial.

Re: etc/HELLO: On Chinese and Cantonese

[Karl Fogel]

On 22 Oct 2020, Eric Abrahamsen wrote:
>My 2c: the simplified/traditional script distinction is probably the
>right way to go. As Stefan says, the point of the file is showing off
>scripts, but more than that, the script distinction is actually
>relatively apolitical. It's when you get into Mandarin vs Cantonese and
>trying to establish a taxonomical relationship between dialects/variants
>that politics comes into it. The simplified/traditional split is pretty
>uncontroversial.

+1 to making this be just about the simplified/traditional script distinction.  

The script distinction is pretty orthogonal to the language [1] distinction here.  And Cantonese and Mandarin are just two of *many* Chinese languages: if the HELLO file were to start down that road, it would encounter many things that it would do better to avoid :-).

Best regards,
-Karl

[1] Or "dialects" if you prefer.  אַ שפּראַך איז אַ דיאַלעקט מיט אַן אַרמײ און אַ פֿלאָט.  "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy."

Re: etc/HELLO: On Chinese and Cantonese

[Mingde (Matthew) Zeng]

> Is it correct in written language?

Although Yuan pointed out that it is common greeting in Cantonese (my bad, as I'm not too familiar with Cantonese, apologies for sounding far too certain when I shouldn't be), "早晨" means "good morning", and "good morning" is also a common greeting among English speakers, it definitely shouldn't appear in the file dedicated to HELLO. While "你好", which directly means "hello", same among simplified or traditional, should be only the word appearing in the file HELLO.

> And then try to find some greetings that are actually different in the
> two scripts.  I don't think they need to be natural in spoken language,
> but they would have to be technically correct in the written language.
> If they are unusual, that is fine, because the purpose is mostly to show
> the difference between the scripts.
>
> Does that proposal make sense?

If you _have to_ find a greeting closest to 你好 that's different in simplified and traditional, I propose 你好吗 (simplified) / 你好嗎 (traditional).
However it means "hello?" (with a question mark) or "how are you?", still slightly different from the simple and universal 你好. :-(

--
Mingde (Matthew) Zeng

Re: etc/HELLO: On Chinese and Cantonese

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > AFAIR, there are some non-trivial aspects here, some of them political
  > and even ideological.  There's PRC and there's ROC (a.k.a. Taiwan),
  > and I'm not sure what will each group say about the proposed changes.

I have contacts in Taiwan who can tell us.


-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)

Re: etc/HELLO: On Chinese and Cantonese

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>
> Cc: stefankangas@gmail.com, matthewzmd@posteo.net,
> 	emacs-devel@gnu.org, ksqsf@mail.ustc.edu.cn
> Date: Thu, 22 Oct 2020 23:41:10 -0400
> 
>   > AFAIR, there are some non-trivial aspects here, some of them political
>   > and even ideological.  There's PRC and there's ROC (a.k.a. Taiwan),
>   > and I'm not sure what will each group say about the proposed changes.
> 
> I have contacts in Taiwan who can tell us.

Thanks, that could be useful.

But I'd like to reiterate what I said earlier: I would only remove my
objections for changing this part of HELLO if I hear from a
representative enough group of native Chinese speakers from both sides
of the divide that some change will be acceptable to them, and cause
no controversies on either side.  With all due respect, people who
voiced their opinions in this matter till now cannot be considered
such a group.  In particular, none of them stated his/her country of
origin and current place of living, nor the cultural group to which he
or she belongs, which makes judging the opinions harder.

(We could also decide that this issue is too unimportant to waste
energy on it, but given the past experience, I don't really count on
that happening.)

Re: etc/HELLO: On Chinese and Cantonese

[Mingde (Matthew) Zeng]

>> I have contacts in Taiwan who can tell us.

Verify with a Taiwan native speaker if you really want to invest more time on this, but I'll be 99.98% sure that he/she won't have a problem with "你好". In fact, Taiwan folks write Traditioanl Chinese as well, but speak a local dialect, which is not of our concern here.

> But I'd like to reiterate what I said earlier: I would only remove my
> objections for changing this part of HELLO if I hear from a
> representative enough group of native Chinese speakers from both sides
> of the divide that some change will be acceptable to them, and cause
> no controversies on either side.  With all due respect, people who
> voiced their opinions in this matter till now cannot be considered
> such a group.  In particular, none of them stated his/her country of
> origin and current place of living, nor the cultural group to which he
> or she belongs, which makes judging the opinions harder.

Well, I am a native Mandarin speaker from Guangdong China, where a very large portion of the people speaks Cantonese, and I currently live in Canada.

--
Mingde (Matthew) Zeng

Re: etc/HELLO: On Chinese and Cantonese

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: "Mingde (Matthew) Zeng" <matthewzmd@posteo.net>
> Cc: rms@gnu.org, stefankangas@gmail.com, emacs-devel@gnu.org,
>  ksqsf@mail.ustc.edu.cn
> Date: Fri, 23 Oct 2020 03:55:28 -0400
> 
> 
> >> I have contacts in Taiwan who can tell us.
> 
> Verify with a Taiwan native speaker if you really want to invest more time on this, but I'll be 99.98% sure that he/she won't have a problem with "你好". In fact, Taiwan folks write Traditioanl Chinese as well, but speak a local dialect, which is not of our concern here.
> 
> > But I'd like to reiterate what I said earlier: I would only remove my
> > objections for changing this part of HELLO if I hear from a
> > representative enough group of native Chinese speakers from both sides
> > of the divide that some change will be acceptable to them, and cause
> > no controversies on either side.  With all due respect, people who
> > voiced their opinions in this matter till now cannot be considered
> > such a group.  In particular, none of them stated his/her country of
> > origin and current place of living, nor the cultural group to which he
> > or she belongs, which makes judging the opinions harder.
> 
> Well, I am a native Mandarin speaker from Guangdong China, where a very large portion of the people speaks Cantonese, and I currently live in Canada.

Thanks for the info.

Re: etc/HELLO: On Chinese and Cantonese

[Basil L. Contovounesios]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

> But I'd like to reiterate what I said earlier: I would only remove my
> objections for changing this part of HELLO if I hear from a
> representative enough group of native Chinese speakers from both sides
> of the divide that some change will be acceptable to them, and cause
> no controversies on either side.  With all due respect, people who
> voiced their opinions in this matter till now cannot be considered
> such a group.  In particular, none of them stated his/her country of
> origin and current place of living, nor the cultural group to which he
> or she belongs, which makes judging the opinions harder.

FWIW, I think Eric is also a literary translator of Chinese.

-- 
Basil

Re: etc/HELLO: On Chinese and Cantonese

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: "Basil L. Contovounesios" <contovob@tcd.ie>
> Cc: eric@ericabrahamsen.net, rms@gnu.org,  matthewzmd@posteo.net,
>   ksqsf@mail.ustc.edu.cn,  stefankangas@gmail.com,  emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Fri, 23 Oct 2020 12:16:32 +0100
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
> 
> > But I'd like to reiterate what I said earlier: I would only remove my
> > objections for changing this part of HELLO if I hear from a
> > representative enough group of native Chinese speakers from both sides
> > of the divide that some change will be acceptable to them, and cause
> > no controversies on either side.  With all due respect, people who
> > voiced their opinions in this matter till now cannot be considered
> > such a group.  In particular, none of them stated his/her country of
> > origin and current place of living, nor the cultural group to which he
> > or she belongs, which makes judging the opinions harder.
> 
> FWIW, I think Eric is also a literary translator of Chinese.

Thanks, but the aspects that bother me are not of the technical
nature.

Re: etc/HELLO: On Chinese and Cantonese

[Eric Abrahamsen]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: "Basil L. Contovounesios" <contovob@tcd.ie>
>> Cc: eric@ericabrahamsen.net, rms@gnu.org,  matthewzmd@posteo.net,
>>   ksqsf@mail.ustc.edu.cn,  stefankangas@gmail.com,  emacs-devel@gnu.org
>> Date: Fri, 23 Oct 2020 12:16:32 +0100
>> 
>> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
>> 
>> > But I'd like to reiterate what I said earlier: I would only remove my
>> > objections for changing this part of HELLO if I hear from a
>> > representative enough group of native Chinese speakers from both sides
>> > of the divide that some change will be acceptable to them, and cause
>> > no controversies on either side.  With all due respect, people who
>> > voiced their opinions in this matter till now cannot be considered
>> > such a group.  In particular, none of them stated his/her country of
>> > origin and current place of living, nor the cultural group to which he
>> > or she belongs, which makes judging the opinions harder.
>> 
>> FWIW, I think Eric is also a literary translator of Chinese.
>
> Thanks, but the aspects that bother me are not of the technical
> nature.

Obviously the native speakers on the list are the ones to listen to, but
I've been speaking Mandarin Chinese since 2001 and lived in Beijing for
nearly all that time. And literary translation is very much concerned
with political subtleties! But my real creds are my wife who's a native
speaker (from Zhejiang) and works in localization, where they have to be
super attuned to this sort of thing, and concurs that dividing by script
is mostly politically inert.

But again, we seem to have plenty of native speakers on the list already.