Chinese languages

Don't think in an overly complex manner, if two monolingual people can communicate with each other 90% of the time, they are considered dialects of each other, otherwise they are different languages. The different dialects are compared with the standard dialect of the language. I doubt two dialects...

This should be Cantonese It's Mandarin, just not in Pinyin because Pinyin didn't exist at the time the man first had to write his name in latin letters in his documents. With a bit of guesswork as to what his surename might be, google told me his name is 舒昌譽 (Shū Chàngyù in Pinyin) or in simplified...

I've pretty much given up on the issue of language vs. dialect because it has become more and more clear to me that the two are impossible to clearly define in scientific terms. Yes, the most commonly heard definition is that if two local vernaculars are not mutually intellegible, they are different...

First, You've got to realize that it's all different V-tio̍h structures out there, with different tonal structures. You keep going back to the basic one, the one that we see in: I ah-bōe khòaⁿ--tio̍h. Or I ah-bōe khòaⁿ-tio̍h he lâng. Now we talking about something else, like in a sentence like this...

I just checked the Maryknoll books again and it turns out I remembered incorrectly. They write: Lán ê sé-sa*-ê sé sa* sé-tio̍h chin kín. [tio̍h, kín and both instances of sa* standing, econd ê in "hanging" light tone, the rest running] “tio̍h”字並不轉音，而所有其他的字則該案 一般性規則轉音。 那度詞告訴我們： (1) 什麼行動在進行（...

Hello amhoanna, thanks for your comments! I was already starting to think that maybe I'm the only one left who checks the forum more than maybe once every few months xD I have not given this much thought just now, but I was able to discuss this topic with some linguistically-aware native speakers th...

About a week ago I stumbled upon Philip T. Lin’s newly published “Taiwanese Grammar: A Concise Reference” and resolved to share my thoughts about it with everybody, in case you are thinking of buying it yourself. If anybody else has read it, I would of course be happy to hear your comments as well. ...

most people I know use Pleco, a dictionary app available for pretty much all Android and iOS devices which combines a number of dictionaries. You can search for simplified or traditional, or Pinyin, or a mixture of the three if you want. The entries of monolingual dictionaries appear according to th...

Hey Lafaso this expression indeed doesn't actually add much in terms of meaning but places more emphasis on the statement (in most if not all cases a statement which would in English involve a "should"). The pattern is usually "应该x才对", meaning something along the lines of "x...

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