Miles Bader wrote:
On Tue, Apr 06, 2004 at 05:42:00PM +0200, Florian Weimer wrote:Furthermore, doesn't Hong Kong use Traditional Chinese? In this case, the issue of writing style is rather independent of the status of Taiwan.Yup. I wonder whether there's any pressure on them these days to change, since ... you know. [Interestingly I've heard that they're still used reasonably often on the mainland, for things like signs &c.]
Probably not. The two main dialects are Mandarin and Cantonese.After the revolution, there was a move to supplant the original northern Mandarin with Pinyin, the new, improved, culturally approved version, but it didn't make much in the
way of inroads after the original fashionable period was over. Most northerners still speak the original Mandarin. But it doesn't stop there. After the Han, which is the group that make up approx. 46% of the population,you have about 52 different minority groups, all with their own separate dialect, if not language.
Most of my Chinese friends speak about five different dialects each. Then, you have another level,of strange intermixtures like a settlement of Moslems left over from the Turkoman Empire,
and even a settlement of Chinese Jews. All of this must have some reflection in the pictorially-based charactersthat make up the writing that formed the basis for the Japanese structures as well.
Regards, David.