Re: etc/HELLO: On Chinese and Cantonese

[Stefan Kangas]

"Mingde (Matthew) Zeng" <matthewzmd@posteo.net> writes:

> As a Chinese myself, I must point out that there is virtually _no_
> Chinese who would say "早晨, 你好" when they greet someone, regardless
> of whether they speak Mandarin or Cantonese. Although it is
> technically correct, it is _super_ weird for someone to say it this
> way.

Is it correct in written language?

> Basically the meaningful difference between Mandarin and Cantonese on
> paper is that the former uses simplified Chinese and the latter uses
> traditional Chinese. Fortuntaely, when it comes to greet someone, both
> mandarin and cantonese use "你好", which is the same in both
> simplified and traditional.
>
> Therefore I propose to rmeove the Cantonese line entirely, and change
> "(中文,普通话,汉语)" to "(中文)"

The purpose of the HELLO file is to demonstrate the capabilities of
Emacs to display various scripts (and detect problems in that support).

As far as I understand, written Chinese is pretty much always the same
but there are two ways to write the characters: traditional and
simplified.  In contrast, the spoken languages (of which there are many)
can be completely different.

So perhaps we should ideally just replace "Chinese" and "Cantonese" with
these two entries:

Chinese (simplified)
Chinese (traditional)

And then try to find some greetings that are actually different in the
two scripts.  I don't think they need to be natural in spoken language,
but they would have to be technically correct in the written language.
If they are unusual, that is fine, because the purpose is mostly to show
the difference between the scripts.

Does that proposal make sense?