After having been "immersed" in teaching Mandarin Chinese with all the mandarin speakers around for the past year, I came to the realization of these thoughts on the language:
~Cantonese IS Chinese! It's sad that people equate Mandarin as Chinese solely based on the number of speakers and the enforcement of the "official language" by the CPC government. There are many Mandarin teachers who keep saying Cantonese is "just" a dialect. I can't be more frustrated whenever I hear this. All we need to do is just to trace back a couple centuries ago and see how close the language then is to today's Mandarin.
~Chronologically Cantonese has a longer and richer history than today's Mandarin, e.g. I realized from teaching that Cantonese still uses the more formal and older form of negations "無" and "未" as opposed to the less formal and later inventions in modern Chinese equivalent of "沒有" and "還沒有".
~Cantonese and Mandarin have technically developed into two separate languages that neither one is necessarily better than the other. They just evolve under different cultures and environments. One can hardly find a native speaker of either being able to speak the other without some sort of, or often times heavy, accent.
~As much as I find simplified Chinese convenient to write, I still prefer traditional Chinese. It makes better sense semantically and is easier to read because of the disambiguation. And aesthetically it is needed to do calligraphy.
~The UN's abandonment of traditional Chinese is a rumor on the net as I suspected but the UN did make a choice to use simplified now simply because of political motivation as it recognizes China as its member nation, not Taiwan, or Hong Kong (part of China already).
~Unfortunately Cantonese is on the verge of being marginalized and I blame it on many speakers' sloppy use of it, especially in HK. People tend to simply "mix" it with English words, while not having a good English command, thus producing a pidgin-like language nowadays. And I see it as a sign of lack of eloquence and vocabulary. It would be just sad the death of Cantonese is due to the speakers lack of effort to refine their native tongue.
~One strength of Chinese, regardless of dialects, is its resilience that it can integrate foreign vocabulary by using Chinese itself, in which Mandarin speakers are doing a way better job than the Hongkongers.
I love Cantonese not only because it's my mother tongue but also due to its culture and "craziness" in retrospect. Its decline means the decline of a culture, I mean the culture of Hong Kong, which is vastly different than that of Mainland. While the assimilation is unavoidable after the turnover, it will simply be phased out if nothing is done on preserving what we have now. It will be tragic for me.
More than ten years ago one night I was working late into the wee hours in front of my dorm room desk at the U of U. Then came a quick shake of the entire room. I jerked my head around and saw my roommate still sleeping soundly. The next day I asked him if he felt it and of course the answer was "no". Later it was confirmed as a real earthquake of a magnitude of about 3. That was my only experience with earthquakes.
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