What is the language "British"?

[Chong Yu Meng]

On Thu, 2006-08-31 at 04:14 -0400, William Case wrote:
> Same skills, same problems, same results no matter what the language. It
> is nice to know.  Can I ask, does Mandarin have the equivalent of Tongue
> Twisters or other word/language (nonsense) games?

Whoa ! Any comment I make on this will no doubt insult some segment of
Chinese people everywhere. I'm going to be very unpopular or be rebutted
quite robustly before this thread is ended. 

But here goes, anyway... ;)

Well, Mandarin does not lend itself as easily as English to tongue
twisters, because, as you are probably aware, Chinese is composed of
ideograms, and the pronunciation of each character is very discrete.
There is no "liaison" as there is in French, and no concept of
syllables. I suppose there are tongue twisters -- I have not heard any,
but my grasp of Mandarin is not as good as it should be (my family has
been away from the "Old Country" for several generations now).

But Mandarin is the "common language", the ISO standard, if you will.
With dialects, things are different: I have heard some tongue twisters
and puns and general linguistic cleverness in Hokkien and Cantonese
(some of them are unprintable and would not translate well anyway). In
fact, the Cantonese are famed for their cleverness in language.

The thing is, dialects are spoken differently, with a loose form of
liaison/syllables, so tongue twisters are possible and common in some if
not all dialects. I can only speak for Hokkien and Cantonese, though. A
friend in Hong Kong tells me that actually there are over a hundred
dialects in China itself, so I have only a very small representative
sample here.  

So that's my 2 cents. Time to put on my asbestos suit and wait for
replies ! ;)


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