[MUD-Dev] RP thesis...

[clawrenc at cup.hp.com]

In <Pine.SOL.3.95.970521135419.19661G-100000 at sun-cc203>, on 05/21/97 
   at 08:29 AM, Ling <K.L.Lo-94 at student.lut.ac.uk> said:

>On Tue, 20 May 1997 clawrenc at cup.hp.com wrote:

>Being Chinese, couldn't help but comment:

There was recent discussion here of the perceived racial predjudices
of the Chinese and other cultures (cf American/negro, Dutch/Surinamer,
Greek/Turkish etc).  I've recently gotten to know several Koreans and
Thai who all report extremely strong anti-chinese predjudices in their
home-towns/family, as well as anti-Korean/Thai treatment by Chinese
from surrounding areas.

Can you comment?

>> cf Mandarin Chinese and Han Chinese.  

>I'm fluent in Cantonese and I've had people trying to talk to me in
>Mandarin thinking the difference would be the equivalent difference
>between American-English and Brit-English.  I don't understand a damn
>word, it's not just an accent, it may as well be a different
>language, okay, the writing is the same but that's the only common
>aspect.

Most of the English dialects fall into this camp.  Compleatly
unintelligable to each other when spoken, but the written language is
unchanged (and everybody understands BBC english (as a variant of
Received Pronunciation)),

>> cf The chinese women's secret language (with its own secret writing
>> too) and the spoken Chinese.

>Oh?  Blimey, never knew about that...  That's why it's secret I
>suppose.

There was considerable news play on this about a year or so ago. 
There had long been stories of a secret formal language as used by
women in traditional warlord-era China which was effective enough to
class them almost as a seperate culture within a culture, one with its
own social strata and power structures.  Up until last year however,
other than oral accounts of its existance and indirect reference,
little was known.  Last year several manuscripts and I *think* some
form of dictionary (or something from which a dictionary was derived)
was found.  A point which I found especially interesting was that the
written form of the secret language had very few commonalities, even
in construction let alone form, with the written language for the
official/common chinese at that time.

--
J C Lawrence                           Internet: claw at null.net
(Contractor)                           Internet: coder at ibm.net
---------------(*)               Internet: clawrenc at cup.hp.com
...Honorary Member Clan McFUD -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...