On Wed, 27 Jun 2001, Tim O'Neil wrote:
> At 11:29 AM 6/27/2001, you wrote:
> >What's "cantonese"?
> >And how do you say "thank you"?
> >
> > > I know how to say "thank you" in Cantonese. That's it.
> > > And that I learned from a movie. Not much help. Want the
> > > name of the movie?
>
> Cantonese, the language spoken in Canton. I think its the dialect
> they speak in Hong Kong, as opposed to the mandarin that is the
> "offical" dialect supposedly.
To add a little more info: Canton is a city in southern China, and
yes, Cantonese is what is spoken in Hong Kong. Mandarin is the
official language of China, and is spoken all over Mainland China and
Taiwan.
Canton is called Guang-zhou in Mandarin, and Cantonese Guang-zhou-hua.
Mandarin is called Zhong-guo-hua (China is Zhong-guo), Zhong-wen,
Guo-yu (in Mainland China), and/or Han-yu (in Taiwan). (I may not
have this 100% correct, and I'm sure there're lots of connotations of
the different terms that I'm unaware of.) But Cantonese and Mandarin
are pretty well understood terms.
These "romanizations" of Chinese words are using the Pinyin
romanization system, which is the official one used in Mainland China.
Pinyin uses certain letters and letter combinations to represent the
sounds of Mandarin, so it may be hard to pronounce words written in
Pinyin if you are not familiar with it. For example, "zh" is kind of
like "dg" as in "knowledge" or "j" as in "joe" ("j" is used to
represent a slightly different sound). (I won't even get into tones :-).
> You know how many dialects there are? Like ten or more I think. The
I think there are a lot more than ten. And there may not be agreement
about whether they're different "dialects" or different "languages".
> one word I know, thank you, is shi-shi.
That sounds like "thank you" in Mandarin, which is written xie-xie in
Pinyin ("x" is pronounced like "sh"; "sh" is used for a slightly
different sound). I believe "thank you" in Mandarin is as someone
else posted (m-goi or do-jeh).
Milt Epstein
Research Programmer
Software/Systems Development Group
Computing and Communications Services Office (CCSO)
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
