At 11:35 AM +0200 6/6/01, Marco Cimarosti wrote:
>
>If I remember correctly (Thomas Chan can help us here), the normal Cantonese
>word for "hanzi" is spelled with the same two characters as in all other
>"CJK" languages, but I don't think they think they write their language in
>"Mandarin characters".
>
Yes, you would still call them (using the Yale romanization) *honjih*.
Strictly speaking, it's considered vulgar to write Cantonese.
Virtually all Chinese written (and read) by Cantonese-speakers is
Mandarin pronounced with Cantonese readings. It's rather like
reading Spanish and pronouncing it as if it were French.
Even when one writes Cantonese and not Mandarin, most of the
characters used are the same. Many common words are completely
different, of course, but the bulk of the vocabulary goes across
without change.
-- ===== John H. Jenkins jenkins@apple.com jenkins@mac.com http://homepage.mac.com/jenkins/
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