etc/HELLO: On Chinese and Cantonese

[Kai Ma <ksqsf@mail.ustc.edu.cn>]

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