User Comments - changye

Posted on: 日本人的起源

Hi ysjt,

Good job! Thank you again for such informative postings. I didn’t know at all that Cantonese people call their mother tongue “白话”, which I think is very intriguing.

Cantonese, as well as other dialects, is really a precious linguistic heritage that is beneficial for the study of ancient Chinese and its pronunciation system.

Chinese people are lucky to have abundant cultural heritage all over the country. I always welcome information on languages, especially your language "Chinese".

Posted on: Best Friends

Hi chris and sebire,

I love Tsingtao beer too. It IS beer, and the price is very reasonable. I like Bud too, but its taste is a bit too light for me (and Bud is espensive!).

As for "Tsingtao" and "Qingdao", the former one is a transliterated word in German. 青岛啤酒 was established by a German investor in 1903.

For the record, W.Giles romanization of 青岛 is "chingtao".

Posted on: Best Friends

Hi chris,

Thanks a lot for NICE information, which discourages me from going to Shanghai for sightseeing ...hehe! Beer prices in the metropolice are much higher than I expected, of course, I know there are also cheaper beers there.

FYI, the most expensive draft beer, probably one pint, in my small city in northeast China is 6 kuai, and the cheapest one is 2 kuai. I don't care much about their taste (and safety/hygiene) if the weather is very HOT!

Posted on: 日本人的起源

Hi ysjt,

Thanks for your informative comments. I hear that Chinese language traditionally has abundant derogatory terms and expressions, and I’m very happy to know some discriminatory words against Japan other than 小日本 and 日本鬼子. As the proverb goes, “Expert knows best.” It’s always exciting to learn words that are completely new to me.

As for ”架仔”, “架妹”, and “架文”, you said that 由于日语中不少疑问句都以"が"（ga）音做结尾，所以粤语用“架”字（家牙切）指日本 in one of your comments above. But as far as I know, Japanese interrogative sentences usually end with [か] (“ka”, slightly aspirated), but not [が] (“ga”, not aspirated in Cantonese, perhaps), which makes me a little confused.

My hunch tells me that it’s possible that there are only a few characters that have an aspirated “ka” sound in Cantonese, and therefore Cantonese people had no choice but to make do with other characters, such as 架 (ga), when they transcribed the sound of か (ka) in Japanese. And I guess that  "が" in the sentence is a typo of "か".

Having said that, I’m not so sure about this speculation, because I actually know almost nothing about Cantonese and its pronunciation system. So I would very much like to hear your own opinion on this matter. Judging from a phonological term “家牙切” (反切) used in your comment, I guess that you are relatively familiar with this kind of topics.

Lastly, I’d like to recommend you go through your comment a bit more carefully especially when you copy and paste it from, e.g. 百度知道. Information on the website is not always reliable, although I myself also sometimes use it! 百度百科 is a far more reliable source, but unfortunately it’s too sophisticated to list vulgar words.

http://zhidao.baidu.com/question/49034670.html?fr=qrl

P/S. I couldn’t help but laugh at the “special” use of “日”, in the sense of “f-x-x-k”, as I now know the true reason why the official People’s Daily newspaper (published by the CCP) is titled as “人民日报”.

Posted on: Hanoi

Hi bolilongxia,

Thank you for your further information on Nom characters. I’ve just found a nice “Nom online dictionary” in the website of the Nom foundation. And I’m very happy to know that some Vietnamese people are making a great effort to preserve their brilliant linguistic heritage.

I’ve looked up some characters in the dictionary and found that some chu-nom are the same as Chinese characters, and some are very different from 汉字, as you said. They seem to be a little easier to learn than 西夏文字, which was lucky for ancient Vietnamese people!

http://nomfoundation.org/nomdb/lookup.php

There are also locally invented 汉字 in Korean and Japanese, and they are used together with authentic Chinese characters in text, although their number is very small. Perhaps Korean and Japanese people were a little too conservative to invent their own local characters…hehe.

I don’t know much about Vietnamese, but as far as I know, the language is close to Chinese (or Cantonese?), as you pointed out. Vietnamese is a tone language. More importantly, it’s also kind of an isolating language, where word order plays an important role, just like Chinese.

Posted on: Hanoi

Hi Jenny,

Thank you for the best explanation about 发达 and 发展 I ever heard. I now know the difference very clearly.

Hi sushan,

Here is an example sentence based on Jenny's explanation.

中国发展得这么快，可能在不久的将来会成为发达国家。

Posted on: Hanoi

Hi bolilongxia,

I hear that Vietnamese people began to use “chu-nom” (字喃) around the 14th century. As you know, “chu-nom” are locally invented “Chinese characters”, which are not used anymore today.

I guess that the invention of chu-nom was inspired by the use of dialect characters in Cantonese. I imagine that not a few nom-characters might perhaps have 口 (mouth) radical, just like Cantonese-original characters.

Chu-nom had long been used, combined with authentic Chinese characters, to write down Vietnamese until the language was romanized completely in the middle of the 20th century.

P/S I'm sorry for FOUR chubby-dog avatars. Internet is very slow now here in China, and I had difficulty posting a comment.

Posted on: Hanoi

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Posted on: Hanoi

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Posted on: Hanoi

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