Re: etc/HELLO: On Chinese and Cantonese

["Mingde (Matthew) Zeng" <matthewzmd@posteo.net>]

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