Miscellaneous News

[B.I.B.]

I know you are not saying it on purpose, but I must make the correction before I reply, it is two regions of the same country, Taiwan and Mainland. Both constitutions on the two sides declares one China covering both regions.

The difference in spoken Mandarin is as big as the difference between British English (BBC English) and American English (CNN English).

Mandarin is a group of dialects that encompass more than two third of China's area. Mainland's (standard) mandarin is based on the pronunciation of a dialect in Luanping county, Chengde city, Hebei province, a variant of Beijing dialect. The vocabulary is based on northern mandarin dialects (north, northeast and northwest). Taiwan's mandarin (国语 national speech) is an evolutiion

The vocabulary also diverted after ROC retreated to Taiwan, something similar to "Pants" in American and "Trousers", such as 激光 vs 镭射, all means LASER, 导弹 vs 飞弹 meaning missile.

Me bad, I must try try harder and avoid making the same mistake again.

You may recall the story of the Chinese defector to Australia who claimed to be a spy.

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Western journalist went crazy with the story. One even interviewed a retired Tawainese spy chief who dismissed the claim by saying that the so called spy Wang's Mandarin was terrible. How bad could it get in dialect usage if a James Bond mainlanders mandarin arouses warning bells to a Taiwanese spy chief. He also pointed all Chinese spies have to know how to speak English, something that Wang could not do, therefore he was a fraud. Coupled with that he could not properly name the Chinese security service he claimed to work for.

Sometimes I come across signage written in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, and often wonder how Korea once used a form of Chinese written language which appears so complex to be now down to simple lines, squares, and circles. Unlike Japanese, I can't see any correlation whatsoever.
You probably tell me to go learn Korean and find out

 

[solarz]

Me bad, I must try try harder and avoid making the same mistake again.

You may recall the story of the Chinese defector to Australia who claimed to be a spy.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Western journalist went crazy with the story. One even interviewed a retired Tawainese spy chief who dismissed the claim by saying that the so called spy Wang's Mandarin was terrible. How bad could it get in dialect usage if a James Bond mainlanders mandarin arouses warning bells to a Taiwanese spy chief. He also pointed all Chinese spies have to know how to speak English, something that Wang could not do, therefore he was a fraud. Coupled with that he could not properly name the Chinese security service he claimed to work for.

Sometimes I come across signage written in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, and often wonder how Korea once used a form of Chinese written language which appears so complex to be now down to simple lines, squares, and circles. Unlike Japanese, I can't see any correlation whatsoever.
You probably tell me to go learn Korean and find out

Korean script is phonetic, so it's like pinyin, except they use their own alphabet instead of the roman one.

 

[Temstar]

Me bad, I must try try harder and avoid making the same mistake again.

You may recall the story of the Chinese defector to Australia who claimed to be a spy.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Western journalist went crazy with the story. One even interviewed a retired Tawainese spy chief who dismissed the claim by saying that the so called spy Wang's Mandarin was terrible. How bad could it get in dialect usage if a James Bond mainlanders mandarin arouses warning bells to a Taiwanese spy chief. He also pointed all Chinese spies have to know how to speak English, something that Wang could not do, therefore he was a fraud. Coupled with that he could not properly name the Chinese security service he claimed to work for.

Sometimes I come across signage written in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, and often wonder how Korea once used a form of Chinese written language which appears so complex to be now down to simple lines, squares, and circles. Unlike Japanese, I can't see any correlation whatsoever.
You probably tell me to go learn Korean and find out

I asked my Korean friend about their script (hangul) before and he told me the lines, squares and circles are actually a phonetic lettering system similar to hiragana/katakana/pinyin, once you understand the system you immediately know how to pronounce it as soon as you see it, even if you don't know what a particular word means.

In theory we could replace hanzi with pinyin, but of course the speed you'll be able to read an all-pinyin Chinese text would be vastly slower than hanzi (to the degree that it would be unusable) because hanzi itself encodes important contextual information. Basically the problem is to map all possible human thoughts to a fairly limited range of sounds a human mouth can make. Other common languages solve this by simply making words longer and longer, while Chinese solve this by having four tones, homophones and when all else fails then multiple characters per concept. It's hard to learn because the text is very information dense. If you look up UN documents the Chinese version of a given document always has the least number of pages.

Because of its density (one could say, richness), Chinese makes excellent medium for word games.

 

[B.I.B.]

it would be interesting to know how long the sub stayed on the surface. That constitutes innocent passage like the first U.S. FONOP passage (non-stop with fire-control radars off) which was actually de-jure recognition of China's claims.

How do you know they were off?

 

[bajingan]

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The author of this article is butthurt that us russia start treaty extended to five years without China
The more they insist China to join the unequal start treaty the more China should avoid it at all cost

 

[localizer]

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The author of this article is butthurt that us russia start treaty extended to five years without China
The more they insist China to join the unequal start treaty the more China should avoid it at all cost

I thought Chinese nukes don't work and missiles explode on launch and our people cheat and got no creativity, idk what they're worried about.

 

[B.I.B.]

I thought Chinese nukes don't work and missiles explode on launch and our people cheat and got no creativity, idk what they're worried about.

Thats the NKorean they are referring to.
the only comments I have read about Chinas nuclear capability was 1/ they got no means of delivery and when China did get missiles, they said Chinese missiles could not hit a barn door even if they were right next to it. Since then nothing.
The Newsweek article is a load of rubbish. The fact that the British and French are allied withe US means it is esssential China needs to build more.

 

[kentchang]

Mandarin is a group of dialects that encompass more than two third of China's area. Mainland's (standard) mandarin is based on the pronunciation of a dialect in Luanping county, Chengde city, Hebei province, a variant of Beijing dialect. The vocabulary is based on northern mandarin dialects (north, northeast and northwest). Taiwan's mandarin (国语 national speech) is an evolution of Nanjing mandarin (near Shanghai if you want to know the geography) before 1949 when ROC ruled China. Nanjing mandarin was the standard because it was the capital of ROC before 1949. However due to the fact that ROC's time was full of wars and fragmentation, Nanjing mandarin was never really spread through the country.

The difference is very obvious to native speakers just like British and American. The general feeling is that Beijing mandarin is thick and robust while Nanjing mandarin is thin and sharp. One important fact is that contrary to the belief of Beijing dialect being the base, standard mandarin based on Luanping dialect does not have the heavy nasal sound and over usage of "er" sound at end of word like Beijing dialect.

The vocabulary also diverted after ROC retreated to Taiwan, something similar to "Pants" in American and "Trousers", such as 激光 vs 镭射, all means LASER, 导弹 vs 飞弹 meaning missile.

Small historical footnote. The term 国语 was actually a committee effort to created a common tongue for China like Esperanto during the Republican era. Unfortunately, by trying to be inclusive of all the major dialects including Hakka, not even the linguists themselves can master the resulting Frankenstein'ish pronounciations let along the 90+% illiterate population. They gave up and after the Northern Expedition, the Luanping/Beijing dialect was adopted as noted. Twenty years later, after the Civil War, The commies retained the same and took what the Soviets did, changed a few things (e.g. replacing double-letters with single letters like Q and X), and called it Pinyin. Some linguists (maybe the children of the original group) wanted to replace Chinese written characters with Pinyin romanizations to ease the learning for the 90+% illiterate population (not much social progress between 1910 and 1950). Thank god they didn't succeed but they settled on Simplified characters. The Koreans succeeded in coming up with a completely phonetic language but they still retained Chinese character-based names.

I wish China will go back to the Traditional character set eventually. With illiteracy eradicated and assistive technologies like keyboards and speech recognition, character complexity is no longer an issue. The traditional character for 'LOVE' embeds a HEART character. The commies removed the HEART. Inexcusable and unforgivable.

 

[Temstar]

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This seems like an olive branch, but Biden's gang is all over the page so it's hard to read. Perhaps its true and they don't really have a plan on how to deal with China.

 

[PiSigma]

Small historical footnote. The term 国语 was actually a committee effort to created a common tongue for China like Esperanto during the Republican era. Unfortunately, by trying to be inclusive of all the major dialects including Hakka, not even the linguists themselves can master the resulting Frankenstein'ish pronounciations let along the 90+% illiterate population. They gave up and after the Northern Expedition, the Luanping/Beijing dialect was adopted as noted. Twenty years later, after the Civil War, The commies retained the same and took what the Soviets did, changed a few things (e.g. replacing double-letters with single letters like Q and X), and called it Pinyin. Some linguists (maybe the children of the original group) wanted to replace Chinese written characters with Pinyin romanizations to ease the learning for the 90+% illiterate population (not much social progress between 1910 and 1950). Thank god they didn't succeed but they settled on Simplified characters. The Koreans succeeded in coming up with a completely phonetic language but they still retained Chinese character-based names.

I wish China will go back to the Traditional character set eventually. With illiteracy eradicated and assistive technologies like keyboards and speech recognition, character complexity is no longer an issue. The traditional character for 'LOVE' embeds a HEART character. The commies removed the HEART. Inexcusable and unforgivable.


View attachment 68602

I see no big deal with simplified characters. You use brain to love, not heart... Learn some biology