cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/36752354
Got a 7 day ban on !memes@lemmy.ml after responding to this very abusive commenter with this image:
I reported their abusive comments somewhat expecting to get banned as well. It came as a shock to me when i saw my ban but this commenter got off scot-free. They didn’t even so much as get a single abusive comment removed.
This is the most blatant double standard I’ve encountered on that instance.
Link to the thread: https://lemmy.world/comment/19699062
Cantonese sounds distinct compared to Mandarin, its mutualy unintelligible with each other. Younger people like me who went to school in China would understsnd Mandarin, but older people were never taught Mandarin, and its much harder compared to just accent imitation, its almost as different as two different languages, well… it’s not that different, since both use the same writing system, spoken cantonese is slightly more colloquial, but when it’s written formally, its would be understandable to any Chinese Language Variants (commonly known as “Dialects” but I dislike that term), so you basically pronounce the same characters in a different way. If they can read and write, they don’t really need a translator/interpreter. Just grab a pen xD.
Its not just the tones, but also a lot more amount of pronouncible sounds there is.
(Jyutping and Pinyin represent different sounds btw, its not an IPA replacement)
Like 食 (to eat)
Cantonese Jyutping is sik6
Mandarin Pinyin is si2
時 (time)
Cantonese Jyutping is si4
Mandarin Pinyin is si2
(Difference highlighted in bold)
Not only is there more tones, there’s also the -p -t -k endings to the sound, so you get much more variety, less homophones.
I always love the following two:
劍 (Sword)
Cantonese Jyutping: gim3
Mandarin Pinyin: jian4
箭 (Arrow)
Cantonese Jyutping: zin3
Mandarin Pinyin: jian4
Imagine being at war, and Mandarin speakers lost because they accidentally brought swords to an bow and arrow fight lmao.
Or this:
雪 (Snow)
Cantonese Jyutping: syut3
Mandarin Pinyin: xue3
血 (Blood)
Cantonese Jyutping: hyut3
Mandarin Pinyin: xue3
Imagine this conversation (imagine its happening in Mandarin):
“There’s a lot of [xuě] outside!”
“Oh yea its beautiful, isn’t it. First time seeing [xuě] (snow)?”
“No there’s a lot of [xuě]! SOMEONE DIED, there’s [xuě] EVERWHERE!”
Get it? Because Snow and Blood sound the exact same in Mandarin. Lmfao.
I always love Cantonese more, but yea tankies are gonna call me racist and “han traitor”. I’m like: Homie, northern colonizers are forcibly trying to assimulate Guangdong in to speaking a conquerer’s language, calm down lol. CCP Tankies are just like the early US colonizers forcing the natives to speak a different language.
Well shit, thank you for the fairly comprehensive breakdown there!
Yeah I am not gonna pretend I know… how … any of those pronounciation keys actually work or sound, but I will look them up later, lol!
See this is the sentiment that I naturally lean toward, but am obviously not proficient enough in… any Chinese variant, nor really with the history of China beyond what a Chinese person would probably view as grade school level…
But I have spent a bit of time studying the absolutely fascinating wealth of languages and language groups that… my ancestors basically drove to literal, or near total extinction… and… that makes me very, very sad.
The worst part is that… most of them just usually did not write that much down, it was almost all spoken, so its basically up to the fairly few remaining actual native speakers, and an effort of something like forensic linguistics, to try to reconstruct it as best they can, but the good news is that there are a number of schools that have actual curricula to teach at least some of these native tongues, and prevent more linguistic extinction.
I think at least a few of them now have reserved charsets in some kind of more recent version of UTF, but I am not 100% sure about that off the top of my head.