WedNESday wrote:Lloyd Gordon wrote:By the way, are all Chinese written languages the same or do we need Cantonese, Mandarin and Peking Chinese forums?
Yes.
Edit: Yes, as in, they are the same.
Well.. This could use some clarification because both 'yes' or 'no' would be misleading.
In writing, there are Simplified Chinese characters and Traditional Chinese characters. In the 1950's or so, mainland China took the existing Chinese characters and developed simplified characters. Elsewhere, simplified characters weren't adopted, and so they're still using traditional.
Many Chinese in China can read conversational text written in traditional Chinese (in part because of imported karaoke and movies which are sometimes only subtitled with traditional characters), but aren't entirely fluent with it and have never written it. They never formally studied it, they can't type it, and they certainly can't write it. As for people who learned traditional characters.. I think it's a bit harder for them. In my experience, they can read the general grammatical structure but stumble on a couple words per sentence, which makes it a pretty big hassle for them. Those who speak Mandarin can become decent at typing simplified characters on a computer within a month or two (once they learn how pronunciation is romanized they can type the pronunciation they're familiar with and then see a limited set of choices that they can guess from), but very few of them have done it.
Worse yet, you can't just change your browser settings to switch between viewing the two. There's no one-to-one mapping between them. Converting between the two is a hard problem comparable to translation. In short, at best a forum that doesn't use their native characters is a little painful to read and they understand that if they ever posted, they'd be using their own native characters which others may not be able to read.
As for speech and how it relates to writing.. I'm not sure. People use traditional characters to write Cantonese, whereas with Mandarin it depends where they grew up. I've been told that Cantonese writing has some differences due to different vocabulary and such. I don't know how major the difference is. Amongst people who write traditional characters, I think Mandarin and Cantonese people probably prefer to use their own forums despite the shared characters, and only just occasionally venture into the other languages' site if they've got a reason. I could be wrong though.
Anyway.. If what you're looking for is a single standard, the consensus is that the movement is toward Mandarin + Simplified Chinese. 1billion+ people is a pretty big headstart. For Chinese, I'd just make a Simplified Chinese forum (or, 'China', as it is now) and leave it at that.