What is the language "British"?

[Chong Yu Meng]

On Thu, 2006-08-31 at 23:14 +0800, Ed Greshko wrote:

> Trust me....  I am living here in Taiwan.  My wife is "Chinese". 

So is mine ! You have my sympathies ! (Sleeping in the dog house
tonight ...) ;)

> I asked her about Tongue Twisters and gave her the example of "She sells
> sea shells by the sea shore to sea sick sailors and shell shocked
> solders" and asked about tongue twisters.
> 
> She assured me that they also have tongue twisters.  If you want, I can
> have her tell them to me and write them out for you...but they will be
> in "Chinese" Big5 charset.
> 

That's fine ! I believe you -- and her! As I said previously, my grasp
of the language is probably not as good as hers because my family has
been in outside the Old Country for a long time now, IIRC since 1750. 

But if you could send over an example in Big5, I'd be very happy to read
it! Bring me back to my roots, and an excuse to use the Chinese
dictionary again...


> Ahh...there is so much more to all of this....Mandarin is not an ISO
> standard....but never mind.

Well, I was using it in the narrow sense that Mandarin is like a common
agreed-upon (canonical?) standard. It isn't an ISO standard of course,
and definitely there is a lot to the language. The thing is, it's hard
to explain the concept of one written script (well, actually two --
Traditional and Simplified), where each character has a different
pronunciation depending on the region and dialect. English has many
variations, but they are recognizable when spoken (most of the time
anyway), whereas Chinese dialects often sound like entirely different
languages. IMHO, Cantonese and Hokkien are as similar as French and
German.

There is an added wrinkle to the written script, which I am not sure if
you are aware of: I had a female Korean colleague whose English was
quite poor, but could read Traditional Chinese. I was surprised and
asked her where she learned it, and apparently she learned it in school,
not as a second language, but because it is a more archaic version of
Korean script ! 
 
> It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.
> 
LOL! Very appropriate ! 

-- 
Pascal Chong 
email:  chongym at cymulacrum.net 
web:    http://cymulacrum.net
pgp:    http://cymulacrum.net/pgp/cymulacrum.asc

"La science ne connaît pas de frontière parce que la connaissance
appartient à l’humanité. et que c’est la flamme qui illumine le monde."

-- Louis Pasteur
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