Shameless slogans promoting Mandarin

[geraldc]

It's only dropped if you choose to drop it. A TV news reader wouldn't drop it, but on the street you'd hear people drop it all the time, but I don't think there are formal rules about it.

[studentyoung]

It's only dropped if you choose to drop it. A TV news reader wouldn't drop it, but on the street you'd hear people drop it all the time, but I don't think there are formal rules about it.

Yes, quite right, geraldc! It is called as “lazy pronunciation懒音” in technical term.

There is such a joke to explain what embarrassment that lazy pronunciation might cause. Someone once pronounced “恒生银行 Heng Seng Bank” as “ Hen(痕) Sen(身) 银行”, which sounds like “Itchy Bank” (Note: “Hen” pronounced in Cantonese means “itchy’.)

Of course, some experts worry about l that lazy pronunciation may hurt Cantonese deep to its bones, because people once get used to lazy pronunciation are hard to get back to correct pronunciation. Moreover, it also shows something quite clear that Cantonese has not been formally standardlised as mandarin did. Though Dr. 何文汇 in Hong Kong University香港大学 has been trying his best to promote for so long and published a few books to tell people how to pronounce Cantonese correctly and the importance in it, so many people still have on idea on why they must pronounce Cantonese correctly.

Why should Cantonese be pronounced correctly? Because Cantonese is still a non-mainstream language in the world, even in China, and its communicative function is limited, i.e. in many formal and important fields,(such as in legal files, international political, economic, or technological conferences, medicinal text books, high-tech files, Cantonese almost has no right to show, or showed as the third language), the room for Cantonese to develop is so limited. Less say, if Cantonese became a language might easily cause misunderstanding or hard to understand within its speaking group, it would almost lose its room in the world.

If people would like to look in deep, they can find out that there at least two mortal wounds in Cantonese. 1. Cantonese pronunciation is so complicated that a beginner does find hard to grasp its 9 tones. 2. Cantonese has not been standardlized in characters yet, people usually has no very clear idea on which pronunciation should be fitted in which character, and usually they match pronunciations and characters casually or use some English letter to spell out the pronunciation they need, or finally they all tend to use mandarin-like style to standardlize the characters and the meaning.

Cheers!

[Ferno]

the site in xiaosan's sig handles cantonese pretty roughly

http://www.msllearningcenter.com/mandarin-versus-cantonese.htm

[calibre2001]

Interesting topic about northern dominance.

Mao didnt speak putonghua, in fact I wonder how many of the old leaders did? Did Chiang Kai Shek speak Mandarin with a strong Ningbo accent?

[renzhe]

Did Chiang Kai Shek speak Mandarin with a strong Ningbo accent?

I've never heard him speak, but every TV show I've seen where he shows up, he speaks in a barely intelligible accent (even when everyone else in the show, including the Japanese, speak perfect putonghua). I've been told that his accent was very distinctive and every dramatisation attempts to show this.