Re: [Ltru] my technical position on extlang

[John Cowan <[e-mail]>]

Leif Halvard Silli scripsit:

>    * Firstly, you should not need to say 'zh' when you have said
>      'zh-cmn', since Web servers wiill see that zh-cmn as a partly
>      match for 'zh'. 

No, that's wrong.  That's the mistake I've been pointing out this
last week.

The way Web servers work is that if you ask for "zh", you will get
anything that begins with "zh" as well.  This is the opposite of the
way locale fallback works, where asking for "zh-cmn" resources and not
finding them will cause fallback to "zh".

>    * Secondly, as I understand it, a Mandarin user very likely
>      understands some Cantonese. 

That's a gross exaggeration.

1) Spoken Cantonese and spoken Mandarin have zero mutual intelligibility,
the same as Norwegian and English.

2) Most Mandarin-speakers never learn any Cantonese at all.  [Most
English-speakers never learn any Norwegian.]

3) Cantonese-speakers in the People's Republic and in Singapore
typically learn Mandarin in school, including how to read and write it.
They then use Mandarin for all written purposes and some spoken purposes,
while of course continuing to use Cantonese for other spoken purposes.
[Norwegians learn and use English this way too, while of course also
learning to read and write Norwegian.]

4) In Hong Kong, people learn Mandarin in written form only, and for oral
purposes pronounce each written word using its Cantonese equivalent.
(I'm simplifying by using the word "word" here.)  This produces unnatural
but intelligible Cantonese.  After that they read and write Mandarin
and speak Cantonese.  [You could imagine a Norwegian learning written
English like this and reading it aloud word by word in Norwegian.]

5) There is *no* standard way to write Cantonese.  When it is necessary
to write it exactly, as in recording the lyrics of Cantonese pop songs,
a variety of hacks are used, similar in principle to the hacks used
to record dialects exactly in English (and, I suppose, Norwegian too).
The more hacks there are (unknown spellings, use of one word to represent
another with no Mandarin equivalent, unusual word orderings), the less
likely that someone who can read and write Mandarin will be able to
understand.  [Norwegian, fortunately, has a written standard, in fact
two of them.]

This set of facts is not reducible to "Mandarin- and Cantonese-speakers
understand each other" or "They don't understand each other."
Understanding is partial, not necessarily mutual, a matter of degree.

-- 
John Cowan      http://www.ccil.org/~cowan      [e-mail]
Be yourself.  Especially do not feign a working knowledge of RDF where
no such knowledge exists.  Neither be cynical about RELAX NG; for in
the face of all aridity and disenchantment in the world of markup,
James Clark is as perennial as the grass.  --DeXiderata, Sean McGrath
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