On Thu, 2006-08-31 at 23:14 +0800, Ed Greshko wrote: > Trust me.... I am living here in Taiwan. My wife is "Chinese". So is mine ! You have my sympathies ! (Sleeping in the dog house tonight ...) ;) > I asked her about Tongue Twisters and gave her the example of "She sells > sea shells by the sea shore to sea sick sailors and shell shocked > solders" and asked about tongue twisters. > > She assured me that they also have tongue twisters. If you want, I can > have her tell them to me and write them out for you...but they will be > in "Chinese" Big5 charset. > That's fine ! I believe you -- and her! As I said previously, my grasp of the language is probably not as good as hers because my family has been in outside the Old Country for a long time now, IIRC since 1750. But if you could send over an example in Big5, I'd be very happy to read it! Bring me back to my roots, and an excuse to use the Chinese dictionary again... > Ahh...there is so much more to all of this....Mandarin is not an ISO > standard....but never mind. Well, I was using it in the narrow sense that Mandarin is like a common agreed-upon (canonical?) standard. It isn't an ISO standard of course, and definitely there is a lot to the language. The thing is, it's hard to explain the concept of one written script (well, actually two -- Traditional and Simplified), where each character has a different pronunciation depending on the region and dialect. English has many variations, but they are recognizable when spoken (most of the time anyway), whereas Chinese dialects often sound like entirely different languages. IMHO, Cantonese and Hokkien are as similar as French and German. There is an added wrinkle to the written script, which I am not sure if you are aware of: I had a female Korean colleague whose English was quite poor, but could read Traditional Chinese. I was surprised and asked her where she learned it, and apparently she learned it in school, not as a second language, but because it is a more archaic version of Korean script ! > It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa. > LOL! Very appropriate ! -- Pascal Chong email: chongym@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx web: http://cymulacrum.net pgp: http://cymulacrum.net/pgp/cymulacrum.asc "La science ne connaît pas de frontière parce que la connaissance appartient à l’humanité. et que c’est la flamme qui illumine le monde." -- Louis Pasteur
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