As an overseas Chinese, I treasure the importance to preserve one’s identity and one’s language in a minority environment. I thus have great empathy for Sir David. (David Tang Wing-cheung’s Cantonese is a rich and subtle language that must be preserved”, August 23)
I want to relate the adoption of Mandarin in South East Asia. My parents, like the overwhelming majority of their generation, received Chinese education in Mandarin at about the turn of 1960s, still converse to each other in Mandarin, never mind that they are both Fujianese.
Many Indonesian Chinese who migrated to Hong Kong, most of whom left Indonesia between 1950s-1960s, still proudly speak Mandarin among them.
These show how readily the South East Asian Chinese accept Mandarin as their own common language despite their different vernacular.
After the Second World War, the South East Asian Chinese educationist and the community had the foresight to install Mandarin as the unifying language.
The major resistance to Mandarin is among the Cantonese peoples in pockets of area where they form the majority. The often cited evidence of Cantonese sophistication is that the Tang Dynasty's poem is best read out in Cantonese.
What is ironic is that there is very sizable number of non-Cantonese in Hong Kong and their second generations are all converted into Cantonese speaking. Isn't Cantonese imposed on these non-Cantonese?
Understandably, this was a deliberate British colonial “divide and rule” policy to promote Cantonese primacy in the school.
It didn’t help that, the former Chief Executive, Mr. C.W Tung introduced the disastrous mother tongue policy by assuming that the mother tongue was Cantonese and worst by promoting Cantonese in post-handover as keeping the "2 systems" in the "one country".
What I find most amusing is that even the recent arrivals from the Mainland are rushing to be Cantonized. When applying for their identity card, they happily swap their name from Pinyin to Cantonese spelling. Abandoning Pinyin spelling supposedly makes them Hong Kongers. Maybe they are not aware that the local are adopting English names such as David as their own.Many locals, with memory of constant turmoil and persecution in the Mainland, have their own skepticism of anything Mainland and these include Mandarin that is seen as imposed top-down.
However, it is still either very clannish or very colonial for Sir David to claim that Hong Kong would fare better politically if we continue to use a language which the northerners did not understand.
The word "northerner" is very segregationist last heard in the era of American Confederacy but I could find myself amused with the word as yet another Sir David's demonstration of caricature with great sense of humor.
Our children started to learn Mandarin half-heartedly only after the handover; and our shopkeepers half-competently only after the SARs.
We should promote Mandarin as the main medium of instruction whilst teaching Chinese in school. This is a historical decision Hong Kong cannot wait.
Cantonese as a vernacular, like the Taiwanese, will always be around, alive and kicking.
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appeared as Overseas Chinese have long used Mandarin as lingua franca, August 28, 2010
The debate continues in The South Cina Morning Post today (Sunday, 29th August 2010) with an interesting comment titled "Regal Cantonese".
Monday August 23 2010
Cantonese is a rich and subtle language that must be preserved
- Sir David Tang
Clark Li continues to rant ('Written version of Cantonese is low-brow', August 16) in his reply to my letter ('Offensive views on Cantonese condescending', August 10).
First, an argument might be 'tired' precisely because it is true. So there is nothing wrong with the true argument that Cantonese is used throughout Chinese poetry.
Secondly, the fact that Cantonese literature has not been translated into a dozen other languages does not mean that it lacks beauty and sophistication.
I remind Mr Li that the English used by Chaucer in his original Canterbury Tales is not translatable per se into other languages. Nor, I would imagine, is James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake.
Yet these are seminal examples of a literary masterpiece. So using the standard of global translation is to use a wrong standard.
For two years I have been writing a Chinese column in a local newspaper, which sets out to use as much vernacular Cantonese as possible, because I believe that there are so many subtleties in the use of Cantonese that we in Hong Kong, with our overwhelming Cantonese population and culture, should preserve.
How dare somebody like Mr Li tell us that we should not be preserving this language and further enhancing it - for a language is a living thing and requires development.
I might also remind him that Mandarin (not 'Putonghua', which is an artificially-invented word) being used throughout the mainland was a decision enforced by Mao Zedong in order to ensure political control of the country, and has got nothing to do with any literary consideration.
In Hong Kong, we would fare much better politically if we had our language which the northerners did not understand.
Therefore, your correspondent should stop calling the speaking of Cantonese a 'linguistic atrocity'. It shows ignorance and condescension.
I see I was also criticised by K.Y. Tan ('Unfair attack on Singapore', August 12) for saying that Singaporeans speak three languages badly.
I should add that when I wrote something like that, I was clearly making a caricature. And a caricature is calculated to amuse and is obviously not all reality.
It's like saying that the French are extremely arrogant; or the Polish are stupid; or the Shanghainese boastful. But a caricature also always carries a grain of truth, and is a useful way of making a point, like a cartoon.
I have always suspected as much: Singaporeans don't have a great sense of humour.
Sir David Tang, Central
Languages die sphere by sphere. If you take spheres (e.g. public education) away from a language, you reduce its vitality. This is happening to Javanese, till recently the most "alive and kicking" language, numbers-wise, south of China and east of India. Have you been to Taiwan in the last 25 years? Hokkien is far from "alive and kicking". In many cities, it's barely even "around". The main cause of this was an official program "to promote the use of Mandarin anywhere anytime".
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