137
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2024
137 points (100.0% liked)
World News
22009 readers
176 users here now
Breaking news from around the world.
News that is American but has an international facet may also be posted here.
Guidelines for submissions:
- Where possible, post the original source of information.
- If there is a paywall, you can use alternative sources or provide an archive.today, 12ft.io, etc. link in the body.
- Do not editorialize titles. Preserve the original title when possible; edits for clarity are fine.
- Do not post ragebait or shock stories. These will be removed.
- Do not post tabloid or blogspam stories. These will be removed.
- Social media should be a source of last resort.
These guidelines will be enforced on a know-it-when-I-see-it basis.
For US News, see the US News community.
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I actually had a tankie tell me that Chinese is not actually a bunch of what us Americans would actually more properly call different languages altogether, when I told a story about a friend I knew from Hong Kong, speaking Cantonese and a little a English, had to actually go through me (Cantonese, English, capable of translating Cantonese to Vietnamese, but not Mandarin, because my phone waa bugging out), and a nearby Vietnamese shopkeep (Vietnamese, some Mandarin) to communicate to someone who only spoke Mandarin, and effectively nearly no English.
We did this comical routine of my friend typing Cantonese into my phone, translating it to Vietnamese, then to Mandarin via the shopkeep, then to the Mandarin speaking woman, then all the way back the other way, for about 20 minutes, to have a conversation that probably could otherwise have been had in 3 minutes.
There are in fact many regional /dialects/ of Chinese (beyond just Cantonese) that are actually so different that it is very common that one who can only speak one /dialect/ cannot actually communicate nearly at all with someone who knows only a different /dialect/.
I am putting /'s around dialect because actually a growing number of translators who know one or many of these /dialects/, as well as English, think it is more accurate to describe them as being different languages to those who speak English.
Anyway, yeah, had a tankie chew me out for pointing this out and call me a 'gusano', which is incredible because this is an insult popularized by Castro against counter revolutionaries.
I am an anarchist, and gusano is Spanish for maggot or worm.
It was truly a ludicrous exchange.