Hi tracer,
> Sorry for asking but I thought chinese writing was the same
> anywhere they write chinese...ignoring political bounderies
> for centuries... may not SOUND the same but you know what the
> menu says (g) or the numbers. First thing I learned to make
> sure chicken was chicken and not fish (g).
To certain degree, you're right. There's no single spoken
language called Chinese. When we say "Chinese", it means the
written language. For speaking, though, there're plenty of
dialects. The official spoken Chinese is in fact "Beijing
dialect", while in many places outside of
China/Taiwan/Singapore, when people say they "speak Chinese",
they mean they speak "Kantonese", a dialect popular in southern
part of China and the native tong of Hong Kong people.
Risking improperly dragging international politics into this
group, I (and many Taiwanese) have a slightly different view.
Indeed Taiwanese (the language and most of the people) came from
China, but we have been separated for most of the past several
hundred of years, so I tend to think of Taiwanese as a different
language (and people, for that matter).
We use most of the same "characters" to write Taiwanese, but
Japanese and Korean share many of the same characters as well,
you certainly don't call them "dialects". While I don't deny
Taiwanese is closer to Chinese than Japanese, in terms of the
form of the language (especially grammar), the difference
between Taiwanese and Chinese is not insignificant. We have
many words that can't be written in traditional Chinese
characters. The way of expression, some grammar, and many terms
for the same things are different. When People "write"
Taiwanese in newspaper, those who don't speak Taiwanese can
hardly understand it, even though they know most of the
characters. (I guess it's not too hard to understand for most
of you, since many western languages share the same alphabet and
yet are distinctively different languages.)
Now China has forcefully simplified all Chinese writing (same
word, simplified writing), the difference is even greater. While
Hong Kong does share the same character set (for computer) with
us (the big-5 code, which is one of many double-byte Chinese
encoding, in contrast to the popular encoding used by
China--GB), I've always had a hard time reading posts from Hong
Kong in newsgroup.
> Windows not supporting it, well they want to sell to mainland china
> which doesnt want it with the buildin backdoors...
Sorry if I mislead you. It's not that complicated. Taiwanese as
a written language is in its infant period, and there's no
computer coding system for it. I think a better way of saying is
there's no known computer system supporting it, it's just so
happen I use Windows and it's the computer system on my mind at
the time.
Windows does support big-5 code, the de facto standard coding system
in Taiwan (as well as Hong Kong, and maybe Singapore). Aside
from historical reasons (different people tried to teach
computer to read/write Chinese at the same time), why there're
so many different Chinese coding system is because there're
simply too many Chinese characters that no one single coding
system can cover all of them (not even with two bytes).
Computers used by libraries, e.g., need a coding system that
cover much more characters, so they use a triple-byte system.
--
Best regards,
Ming-Li mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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