cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/36752354
Got a 7 day ban on !memes@lemmy.ml after responding to this very abusive commenter with this image:
I reported their abusive comments somewhat expecting to get banned as well. It came as a shock to me when i saw my ban but this commenter got off scot-free. They didn’t even so much as get a single abusive comment removed.
This is the most blatant double standard I’ve encountered on that instance.
Link to the thread: https://lemmy.world/comment/19699062
Here’s another one:
Tell them you have a friend who tells you they speak Cantonese and literally needs a translator to understand Mandarin, beyond exceptionally basic, like 2nd grade level vocabulary.
Nope, that being a thing I have experienced also makes me racist.
HUH? What lmao? What’s the context of the thread? Got a link/screenshot?
I’m a Cantonese speaker too and I’m just curious how the fuck is speaking Cantonese “racist” lmfao.
That was a while back, on an older account of mine, and, in fairness I guess, that specifically didn’t get me banned or comment mod deleted, it just caused a significant reaction from a bunch of angry commenters telling me that either that was impossible or I am wrong in some way that makes me an obvious either idiot or bad faith liar of some kind.
It also may have been on hexbear, not ml, I do get them confused, and yeah, this was … I think around or over a year ago now?
But uh yeah, I think what was pissing them off was my later assertion that uh, no, Cantonese and Mandarin are so distinct, in so many ways, mutually unintelligible to such a large degree, that… its really more like you have the whole family of Romance languages, and though they share common vocabulary roots and grammatical / syntactical roots… they are different languages more than they are different dialects of the same language, the difference is way more extreme than say, East Coast US English and South African English.
I guess I’d be curious if you agree or disagree with that, as a Cantonese speaker yourself.
Like uh, I myself don’t speak any Mandarin or Cantonese, but a cursory look into this shows fairly extreme differences in vocabulary, and like, Mandarin apparently has 4 tones, whereas Cantonese has 6 tones?
And my Cantonese friend was… the one who told me that just no, Cantonese and Mandarin are different languages, we cannot understand each other.
The fuller scenario was this:
Me and Cantonese friend go to largest asian market in US West Coast city.
She encounters another Chinese woman, a vendor, and … she is trying to formulate a question I have about some food, originally in English, she tries to render this in Cantonese, realizes the vendor speaks Mandarin and far less English than my Cantonese friend.
We futz around with translators on our phones for a while, untill my Cantonese friend randomly finds a Vietnamese woman passing by, who speaks Vietnamese, Cantonese and a bit of English… and we discover that the Mandarin vendor also speaks Vietnamese reasonably well.
So now, we are going me (english) -> my friend (decent english and cantonese) -> Vietnamese passerby (vietnamese, cantonese, tiny bit of english) -> vendor (in vietnamese)… and then back again.
We were all laughing a lot at how silly this all was, but it did end up working, and all of that silliness was because my Cantonese friend could hardly understand any Mandarin… and of course because of myself asking some apparently too linguistically complex question about dumplings and noodles or something, and my Cantonese friend really wanting be able to answer my question, lol.
Cantonese sounds distinct compared to Mandarin, its mutualy unintelligible with each other. Younger people like me who went to school in China would understsnd Mandarin, but older people were never taught Mandarin, and its much harder compared to just accent imitation, its almost as different as two different languages, well… it’s not that different, since both use the same writing system, spoken cantonese is slightly more colloquial, but when it’s written formally, its would be understandable to any Chinese Language Variants (commonly known as “Dialects” but I dislike that term), so you basically pronounce the same characters in a different way. If they can read and write, they don’t really need a translator/interpreter. Just grab a pen xD.
Its not just the tones, but also a lot more amount of pronouncible sounds there is.
(Jyutping and Pinyin represent different sounds btw, its not an IPA replacement)
Like 食 (to eat)
Cantonese Jyutping is sik6
Mandarin Pinyin is si2
時 (time)
Cantonese Jyutping is si4
Mandarin Pinyin is si2
(Difference highlighted in bold)
Not only is there more tones, there’s also the -p -t -k endings to the sound, so you get much more variety, less homophones.
I always love the following two:
劍 (Sword)
Cantonese Jyutping: gim3
Mandarin Pinyin: jian4
箭 (Arrow)
Cantonese Jyutping: zin3
Mandarin Pinyin: jian4
Imagine being at war, and Mandarin speakers lost because they accidentally brought swords to an bow and arrow fight lmao.
Or this:
雪 (Snow)
Cantonese Jyutping: syut3
Mandarin Pinyin: xue3
血 (Blood)
Cantonese Jyutping: hyut3
Mandarin Pinyin: xue3
Imagine this conversation (imagine its happening in Mandarin):
“There’s a lot of [xuě] outside!”
“Oh yea its beautiful, isn’t it. First time seeing [xuě] (snow)?”
“No there’s a lot of [xuě]! SOMEONE DIED, there’s [xuě] EVERWHERE!”
Get it? Because Snow and Blood sound the exact same in Mandarin. Lmfao.
I always love Cantonese more, but yea tankies are gonna call me racist and “han traitor”. I’m like: Homie, northern colonizers are forcibly trying to assimulate Guangdong in to speaking a conquerer’s language, calm down lol. CCP Tankies are just like the early US colonizers forcing the natives to speak a different language.
Well shit, thank you for the fairly comprehensive breakdown there!
Yeah I am not gonna pretend I know… how … any of those pronounciation keys actually work or sound, but I will look them up later, lol!
See this is the sentiment that I naturally lean toward, but am obviously not proficient enough in… any Chinese variant, nor really with the history of China beyond what a Chinese person would probably view as grade school level…
But I have spent a bit of time studying the absolutely fascinating wealth of languages and language groups that… my ancestors basically drove to literal, or near total extinction… and… that makes me very, very sad.
The worst part is that… most of them just usually did not write that much down, it was almost all spoken, so its basically up to the fairly few remaining actual native speakers, and an effort of something like forensic linguistics, to try to reconstruct it as best they can, but the good news is that there are a number of schools that have actual curricula to teach at least some of these native tongues, and prevent more linguistic extinction.
I think at least a few of them now have reserved charsets in some kind of more recent version of UTF, but I am not 100% sure about that off the top of my head.