phonetic=uniform? pictographic=diverse?
From Wikipedia:
"The diversity of Chinese variants is comparable to the Romance languages, and greater than the North Germanic languages. However, owing to China's sociopolitical and cultural situation, whether these variants should be known as 'languages' or 'dialects' is a subject of ongoing debate. Some people call Chinese a language and its subdivisions dialects, while others call Chinese a language family and its subdivisions languages."
Clearly, the different dialects of Chinese are MORE than just "different accents", which is what Lu seemed to be implying.
Indeed, there are different accents within each Chinese dialect group. The accents of Mandarin (Putonghua) in Beijing, Ha'erbin, Zhengzhou, and Taipei are all different, as different as Cockney is from Geordie.
But when it comes to comparing Mandarin and Cantonese, the differences are on an entirely different plane.
Estoy de acuerdo contigo, Johnathan Mark, y por eso señalé que no conocía la clase exacta del braille. No sé si el braille es logotáctil/ideotáctil (con táctemas específicos : un equivalent visual or gráfico sería el cuasigrafema <M.> para [møsjø] en francés, por ejemplo) o bien fonotáctil (come indicó : un tactema = un fonema, más o menos —> [a] = una combinación de puntos en relieve, [o] = otra combinación y así sucesivamente para todos los fonemas disponibles en braille).
Se puede ser que el braille funciona como los sistemas visuales/gráficos : un mezcla de logotáctil (logográfico) con fonotáctil (fonográfico). i No lo sé !
Además no sé si el braille para polaco es rigurosamente idéntico al braille para neerlandés.
En cambio, tenemos que saber si la "proporción" — o la distribución — de logotáctil con respecto a fonotáctil en braille se puede, o no se puede, comparar con la repartición logográfico/fonográfico para cada uno de los sistemas visuales de representación de las lenguas orales.
ERRATUM : come indicó : un tactema (...) —> como *indicaste* : un tactema (...).
Well it could also be 'indició', using the usted form instead of the tú form, but that's just me cuz I have overcome my nastalgia. YOU obviously haven't.
Zhiorzhio : tu pourrais nous fournir une déclinaison de <nostalgie> dans un maximum de langues, stp ? En ligure, par exemple.
Oh, pardon : svp !
There is a misunderstanding that should be corrected.
Many Chinese characters do have connections with their pronounciation.
In most cases, people can guess the pronounciation of one character by reading one side part of the character which is know as "xingshengzi".
xingshengzi is one kind of chinese character and occupys more than half of all chinese characters.
take 故 for an example.
this character is made of 古 and 文, and the pronounciation of 故 is much similar with the pronounciation of 古。The only difference is that they have different tone: one is 4 tone and the other is 2 tone.
故 gu4
古 gu2
Therefore 故 is a xingshengzi. All xingshengzi have connections with their pronounciation.
''I'm Chinese and speak three dialects: Mandarin, Shanghainese, Cantonese''
I'm European and speak three dialects: Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.
In near future, Chinese government will call all languages in China ''accents'' . It's more easy to manipulate people, when you leave them with no choice :(
Indian government is a democratic one, respecting all languages (and scripts), and some languages can be written in more than one script: [Goa's language Konkani is written in both Hindi and/or Latin script]
Llorenna how much do you know about chinese language?
please don't let your opinion of language be affected by your attitude toward the government. no dialects is banned in china, and it never will. also they're only dialects, not like "Italian, Spanish and Portuguese"
ANy linguist will say that we should be talking about Chinese languages and not dialects.
Not quite...
The written characters are shared by all the Chinese dialects/languages, which I think is enough to keep them from getting independent titles as languages, since written communication is mutually intelligible, for the most part.
Even within a 'dialect' like Cantonese, there are many variations of the same speech. I am not talking about minor differences in vocabulary but major variation. I am sure Nightingale would understand what I am talking about.
In fact, I'd consider the Toi-san (Taishan) dialect of Cantonese to be almost an entirely different tongue altogether.
PS: Say, Nightingale, how come you are able to speak Shanghainese as well as Cantonese? Are you one of those Shanghainese emigres in HK?
what kind of difference should be identified as 'major'?
Do people in Macau speak Portuguese?
I've visited Macau once and there's a very superficial veneer of a lusophone presence in the tiny enclave: bilingual commercial signs in Portuguese and Chinese, street signs which follow the same convention, etc.
But no, I have not met anybody from Macao who speaks Portuguese. Or at least they do not speak it amongst themselves. Cantonese is by far the lingua franca and Mandarin would definitely get you further than the former colonial tongue. I think even English has gained wider currency than Portuguese.
But Portuguese still remains as one of the official languages of the territory. So it may well be that the language can still be heard in the corridors of power.