Stumpy Joe Pete

1,745 reputation

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bio	website	peterthenelson.com
	location	United States
	age	25
visits	member for	11 months
	seen	17 hours ago
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I lived in China for a couple years. My Chinese isn't too bad, but I'm always trying to get better. Special interests in:

Etymology
Historical phonology
Winning arguments in other languages

	1,745 reputation	bio	website	peterthenelson.com	visits	member for	11 months
315 badges		location	United States		seen	17 hours ago

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Mar 31	comment	Why Cantonese is considered as a dialect of Chinese? The formal writing in HK and Taiwan is heavily influenced by Mandarin though. If they just wrote down what they would say in their dialect, it would not necessarily be easily understood (e.g.,`侬今朝下半天有辰光伐？`)
Mar 30	comment	Pronouncing pinyin “c” in Shanxi dialect Many dialects merge zh with z, ch with c, and sh with s. Usually the preference is for the z-c-s series, but it's possible to go the other way too.
Mar 29	comment	Why Cantonese is considered as a dialect of Chinese? Also, what does "Cantonese is anti-foreign" mean? PS, outside of China, many countries speak more than one language (e.g., Swiss people speak German, Italian, French, and Romanche; Belgians speak Flemish and French).
Mar 29	comment	Why Cantonese is considered as a dialect of Chinese? The whole topic of this thread is "Why is Cantonese considered only a dialect instead of a separate language?". Westerners think that two things that are so different must be different languages. Your argument for why they are not different languages was "because they're so different". In the comments, you've presented a perfectly reasonable explanation: all Han languages in China are considered dialects of Chinese for political reasons. Your actual answer doesn't make sense though.
Mar 28	comment	Why Cantonese is considered as a dialect of Chinese? This sounds like a great argument why Cantonese should be considered "a totally different language", not that it "truly is a dialect"...
Mar 28	comment	List of hanzi and their components +1 Awesome resources I haven't seen before.
Mar 27	comment	List of hanzi and their components @qdii Hahaha, well your existing tool seems to have the data you need.
Mar 27	comment	List of hanzi and their components @deutschZuid No I don't. But I'm a computery guy, so Chinese-related datasets are pretty darn interesting to me.
Mar 25	comment	How can I skip characters I can't read when reading aloud? @MatthewRudy马泰 As he says, "什么 or 什么什么 can substitute any numbers of characters".
Mar 22	comment	Translating the idiom “thinking outside the box” @AngelLeliel Please write this as an answer! "框框" is used the same way as "box" is (in a metaphorical context).
Mar 22	comment	Is it possible to use the verb particle 过 for future events? Wrong use of 过. He means the particle, not the verb meaning "to cross".
Mar 22	comment	Is it possible to use the verb particle 过 for future events? @孤影萍踪 I agree, and that's why I commented. Chinese doesn't have grammatical tense, it has grammatical aspect. That's why it's important to show that `了` and `过` are not about tense.
Mar 21	comment	Is it possible to use the verb particle 过 for future events? Deserves upvotes, not downvotes! The distinction between aspect and tense is a major reason that Chinese particles can be difficult to learn (coming from an English-speaking background), so showing examples where particles that could be misunderstood as "past tense" are used in the future is useful in explaining the distinction!
Mar 14	comment	Difference between 喜乐 and 快乐？ tao, many people have pointed out that 喜乐 is a much less common word than 喜悦. Was 喜乐 a mistake? Or were you intending to ask about it.
Mar 13	comment	Why Cantonese is considered as a dialect of Chinese? To give an example in 上海话:`侬今朝下半天有辰光伐？`. 侬 doesn't mean anything in MSM (and the morpheme is unrelated to 你). 今朝 and 辰光 aren't words in MSM, even though they're made of existing characters. 下半天 is in the dictionary, but I've never heard anyone say it. 有 is the same. And 伐 is just a phonetic representation of the shanghainese morpheme (also written w/the uncommon character 𠲎--that' 口＋伐 if it doesn't show up). So... not sure how useful the common script is in terms of mutual intelligibility.
Mar 13	comment	Why Cantonese is considered as a dialect of Chinese? The similarity can be pretty superficial though. Common words are very different, and many morphemes don't even have equivalent characters.
Mar 12	comment	Why Cantonese is considered as a dialect of Chinese? English and Finnish are also unified by a common script.
Mar 1	comment	Where can I find Chinese IPA transcriptions? @Alenanno No one is claiming Pinyin is "valid for any language". If you look again, you'll see both BertR and I only made claims about Pinyin w.r.t. (Mandarin) Chinese. The claim is that Pinyin unambiguously represents the pronunciation of Chinese words, no less so than IPA. It's a claim that's very close to accurate.
Mar 1	comment	Where can I find Chinese IPA transcriptions? @JimmyCallin Jimmy does have a point though that pinyin letters don't have a `1 letter : 1 phone` relationship. Some might argue that it is (almost) `1 letter : 1 phoneme`, but that really depends on your phonemic analysis of Mandarin (There's a lot of things in complementary distribution, so it's not clear at all which phonetically distinct vowels should be collapsed into a single phoneme.). Also, I said "almost" because there are some spelling things that mess it up (only writing umlauts when it's ambiguous, initial y- and w- spelling rules, etc.)
Mar 1	comment	Where can I find Chinese IPA transcriptions? @Alenanno I tend to agree with BertR (mostly). You could just as well make the same point about IPA. In IPA, `ç` is a voiceless palatal fricative. In french, it sounds like [s]. Oh no! Is something wrong with IPA? No, of course not. IPA is not just symbols--it's also a bunch of rules for pronouncing those symbols. The same for pinyin. I think BertR is making the point that pinyin is "universal" for chinese in that you can write down spoken Mandarin in pinyin unambiguously, and (following the established rules for pronouncing pinyin) read it back.