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  1. #7
    Player
    Shurrikhan's Avatar
    Join Date
    Sep 2011
    Posts
    12,792
    Character
    Tani Shirai
    World
    Cactuar
    Main Class
    Monk Lv 100
    Quote Originally Posted by DrWho2010 View Post
    isn't the difference here we're talking about like between Cantonese and Mandarin? the two ways they're voiced are completely different.
    How they're voiced has no impact on the written language in this case. The scripts have nothing to do with the pronunciation. I merely used varying spellings as an example because it's the closest analog we could manage with English.

    You can read 你好 as nĭ hăo or néih-hóu, but the characters will still have the same meaning; the pronunciation is dialect-dependent, but also irrelevant when writing to one another. The two languages were mutually intelligible in (and only in) their writing until the majority of mainland China swapped to simplified characters (a way to save time in writing and ease literacy). Traditional Chinese =/= Cantonese. It simply happens that Hong Kong, for instance, has not swapped to simplified characters, and therefore reading the much-trimmed Simplified Chinese writing will often be to them like trying to understand your friend's shorthand notes. That they speak Cantonese would only matter in voice-over, which is beyond the OP's request here.

    If I set my IME to Mandarin and then type 'nihao' and hit space, it appears as 你好, meaning hello. If I swap to Cantonese and type 'neihou' and hit space, it appears as 你好, meaning hello. That phrase is identical in both Traditional and Simplified. I just type it in either dialect, turn it into the any-dialect characters, and voila.

    But now let's say I want to type "cat". In a Mandarin IME, I could type 'mao' in Traditional, hit space (or maybe button 1-6 or so, if that's not the first character with the same pronunciation in Mandarin that the IME guesses I want), and it's 貓. Or I could type 'mao' in Simplified and its 猫. That one's alike enough not to be confusing. But that's not the majority...

    Now take, for instance, dragon -- 龍 or 龙. They look nothing alike, and all the meaning-attributing parts of the original character have been simplified into shape-setting strokes, as if I'd just typed "dn" instead, forgoing all implication of actual meaning. Or, heck, let's take the name for Canton itself, 廣(州) in Traditional but 广(州) in Simplified. The whole meaning element under the enclosing radical was trimmed away.

    _______________________

    Let's put it another way:

    I can take a string of text in a word document written in Simplified Chinese and basically font-swap it to Traditional. That's the extent of the request here.
    (2)
    Last edited by Shurrikhan; 07-02-2021 at 08:04 PM.