Talk:Cantonese
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Do Cantonese have 7 or 9 different tones?
- It has 9 tones.Luke! 22:04, 26 November 2006 (UTC)
Informative article, but a couple of comments:
Cantonese is spoken by about 100+ million people worldwide. That's not very much compared to, e.g., Mandarin and since it has never really been a literary language, it is by far not as important as Mandarin.
The above comment strikes me as a value judgement, violating the Neutral Point Of View. Catonese is pretty important to Cantonese people, I would imagine. I would simply point out the number of speakers (which is more than all but maybe a dozen or less languages) and the fact that comparatively few works of literature are written in it.
Linguistically, Cantonese is a more archaic dialect than Mandarin. This can be seen, for example, by comparing the words for "I/me" and "hunger". They are written using very similiar characters, but in Mandarin their pronunciation is quite different ("wo3" vs. "e4"), whereas in Cantonese they are pronounced identically except for the respective tones. Since the characters hint at a similiar pronunciation, it can be concluded that their ancient pronunciation was indeed similiar (as preserved in Cantonese), but in Mandarin the two syllables acquired different pronunciations in the course of time.
Again, this sounds more like an argument that Cantonese is a worse language than Mandarian than an encyclopedia article about it.
- To me it sounds just like an argument that Mandarin developed from Cantonese. Where's the value judgement?
- The real problem was with the word "archaic" which to me implied "obsolete". Robert Merkel
Finally, there are a few points where you have written your article in the first person. While it is appropriate for many sorts of writing, even scientific papers these days, it's not really appropriate in encyclopedia articles.
This article is already informative, and in my opinion just needs a bit more work to be really good.
Cantonese is more often called "guong-dong-wa" than of "guong-zeo-wa". Please edit accordingly ----Ktsquare
- Cantonese is often called "guong-dong-wa" probably because it sound like "guang-dong". Three dictionary I have translates it to "guong zeo wa". The dialect is only spoken in Guangzhou, Hong Kong, and immediate surrounding area.
- Taishan, for example, is about 100 kilometres (70 miles) from Guangzhou, its dialect is very different from Cantonese. (Taishan promotional website explains this in the middle of the page)
Linguistically, Cantonese is a dialect of Yue language. Yue language is a language of Sinitic language family. Toishanese is another dialect of Yue. So it is technically wrong to say Cantonese is "yue yu".
Cantonese is Cantonese. There is only one tone for it. All the other languages in China are not call Cantonese!!
[edit] Min nan vs Teochew
I have problem with the following statement:
Broadly speaking, all people of Guangdong might be classified as Cantonese. However, other Chinese groups in Guangdong include Hakka, Min Nan (specifically Teochew), and Mandarin speakers, and a narrower definition might include only those who speak Cantonese.
I disagree that you should mix Min Nan and Teochew. Though they are very close dialects linguistically, they are not exactly the same, at least not geographically. Besides, technically speaking Min Nan is from Fujian, Teochew is from Guangdong, they are from two separate provinces. Teochew people are often considered Cantonese because of geographic proximity of Teochew to Canton. I would never call a minnan person Cantonese because not only they are not from Canton, they are not even from the same Guangdong province. What I mean is that Teochew are Cantonese geographically though not necessarily linguistically, but Minnan is neither. Kowloonese 22:17, August 11, 2005 (UTC)
