Notices by clacke: inhibited exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛 (clacke@libranet.de), page 135

Had #Oppenheimer for breakfast, will have #Barbie for dinner. It's a beautiful day.

#barbenheimer

@Kermode Thanks brutal polar-colored bear for opening up a question of many colors.

I do what I can but ... so many colors.

- Deployment looks good?
- Deployment looks good
- Run?
- RUN

Happy weekend!

Headline:

> dgsgrbfbdvdjfv

Body text:

> adgshsvdhehdvh

#TShirtSpotting

> Cantonese is the second or third largest.

In terms of language groups, second to fourth are Min, Wu and Yue, and Cantonese belongs to Yue, the fourth largest branch of Chinese.

"Jerry Norman estimated that there are hundreds of mutually unintelligible varieties of Chinese."

Ok, so the 120 figure can be safely ignored. =)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_…

Mainland China does support teaching in the languages of local nationalities, including encouraging work in maintaining a written language. But speakers of Chinese languages are not nationalities, they're all of Han nationality and are supposed to be speaking Standard Chinese and writing Written Chinese.

Also Tibetan is being suppressed in spite of being an official local nationality, just because.

> Mainland China still has 120 or so languages and Cantonese is the second or third largest.

I don't remember where I got this figure from. Wikipedia says hundreds. It's all in how you draw the lines.

In terms of mutual intelligibility, Scandinavian is one language with three national prestige dialects and four written dialects.

@Kermode People in Malaysia and Singapore still speak Cantonese even though any Chinese schools will teach in Mandarin.

Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, mainland China, Philippines still have people speaking Hakka, Hokkien, Shanghainese etc without any government support I'm aware of[0]. They're not endangered languages.

[0] in/on Taiwan though, Taiwanese/Hokkien/Minnan is an official language in addition to Taiwanese Mandarin, and next to Hakka and a few other languages, Chinese and non-Chinese

@Kermode Long. I don't see Swedish dying out any time soon and Cantonese has ten times the native speakers, on multiple continents.

Of course the forces are different and Beijing could at any time decide that all local schools in Hong Kong need their language of instruction to be Mandarin (in theory they can't, in practice they can). That would reduce Cantonese, but I don't think it would kill it.

People in Guangzhou still speak Cantonese, they just speak Mandarin in addition to it, as do most Hongkongers already.

Mainland China still has 120 or so languages and Cantonese is the second or third largest.

> Believe it or not, the [hash character] has been around for quite a while. Its use is traced back to Roman times when writers would use the abbreviation “lb” over and over again, adding a line above to indicate that it was an abbreviation of for the phrase “libra pondo” meaning “pound in weight”.

So that's where the idea comes from to call it the "pound key" on the phone! TIL.

eternitymarketing.com/blog/the…