oh I have no idea

[kaigou]

Currently having a slight mental breakdown over the tanks that just arrived. Not from a Taiwanese publisher like I'd thought, but from a Hong Kong publisher. Which for a moment made me happy, until I realized, it's traditional. Why is a HK publisher using traditional? As if it's not bad enough that the publisher's using characters that I haven't seen at all (from reading Taiwanese scans), they can't even be arsed to simply keep the original kanji for Japanese place-names. No, they're spelling out names phonetically, like instead of 名古屋 it's 那古野 (na-gu-ye?) so I spent several long minutes utterly baffled. At least most of the personal names (so far) have kept to the original Japanese, and thank the heavens for Wiki including the kanji for non-English names.

But still: why is a Hong Kong publisher, of a work that (according to the inner page) should only be distributed in Hong Kong (ahem), using traditional? Is this some kind of a political statement, or is there something else going on?

Because it just seems to me that if it's a manga that's supposed to be for readers 15-22, wouldn't most of those readers, post-98, have been educated in simplified per the switch back to PRC-rule? Wouldn't traditional be making the text just that much more complicated, comparatively?

Sheesh. It's like I can't win, sometimes. Taiwanese is traditional, and that's hard enough, but at least I've finally got the hang of the more common Taiwanese slang/colloquial... and now, looks like I have to do it all over again with HK.

sob, sob.

Comments

[haya5h1]

I think that for non-official documents, people in Hong Kong use traditional system. I worked on projects for HKU for the past few years, and their Chinese text was always in traditional. I have no idea what it SAID for the most part but I could recognize that it wasn't simplified, at least. As to WHY, I can't say... but I do know that the HK people I worked with were quite particular about being differentiated from mainland Chinese and China.

[chocolatefae.livejournal.com]

This...

I've been to HK quite a few times and have much, much more commonly seen traditional characters being used.

[kaigou]

You'd think I'd be getting used to this, seeing how it takes me a good minute to even tell the difference between traditional and simplified now (been reading scans that are a mix, b/c fonts don't always come in both). But nooooo, still so easily confused. Ugh.

the HK people I worked with were quite particular about being differentiated from mainland Chinese and China.

This really should not surprise me. At all.

[qem_chibati]

I thought Hong Kong usually used traditional too, I thought the majority of countries that use the chinese writing system besides China and Singapore generally used the traditional system.

In general regardless of what is official most countries keep the previous language system for as long as they can. (in Mauritius, the museums were in English but most people speak French or a mostly french creole far better)

[kaigou]

Actually, I think it's the reverse -- Taiwan uses traditional, but Singapore went with simplified as a political statement, when PRC began simplified. Makes sense that HK wouldn't have switched over, since it was under British rule at the time. Then again, I usually steer clear of HK media, since Cantonese scares the bejesus out of me, and even when it's Mandarin, the accent is awfully strange to my ears. Or maybe I've just gotten so used to Taiwanese television and manhua..!

[qem_chibati]

Uh I think there's a miscommunication because I meant that as far as I am aware only china and Singapore that use simplified.

[kaigou]

Ah, probably me, sorry, reading backwards or something. Yeah, that's the extent of what I know -- PRC & Singapore. Well, not counting the fact that chinese classes in the US seem to be dominated by PRC teaching materials, so I guess you could say there's a growing number of non-native students in the US who are also simplified-preferring, or at least simplified-knowing. Somewhat. Well, what counts for "knowing" when learning in a classroom, that is!

(not much, some days, it seems)

[billie]

From what I've been taught at uni, HK still uses traditional in everything. They simply don't teach simplified past the "you might want to be able to recognise these" level. HK is a weird case, really -- it's under PRC rule, yes, but seen as they still use their own currency and have two official languages, I guess the script really isn't that big a deal in the overall picture. :/

[kaigou]

Heh, I had no idea they'd retained their own currency. I know the area remains an independent capitalist zone, so I'm not sure why I'm surprised they'd have retained traditional, too. I mean, in the long run, it's not like you can't read one if you have the gist of the other. I'm just wondering whether Cantonese has any grammatical wackiness that might be making my comprehension just that much harder -- I've spent the past four or five years reading mostly traditional, after all. Or maybe I've suddenly taken a turn for the worse. Oh, fail.

[onthehill]

Yeah they only use traditional here - for almost everything (unless it's for the Mainland market. Those readers would probably be able to guess their way around simplified text, but their everyday reading is traditional.
And after the namecalling of HongKongers by mainland 'scholars' last week, I'mma guess that will carry on!

[kaigou]

Heh, not surprised. Friends who grew up in HK report the same kind of mainland v. island mindset. Any idea if the grammar is slightly different? As mentioned to Billie (above), I've been reading mostly Taiwanese media, but the grammatical constructions I've learned to expect... I find none of. I'm not sure whether it's because I've gotten so used to Taiwanese colloquial, or if HK (influenced by Cantonese, maybe?) is using very different constructions. I guess you could say the patterns are different, and now I'm feeling both kinda stupid, suddenly, and utterly overwhelmed.

(Still kicking myself for two things: idiotically deleting the scans I had of the first 3 volumes, which I could've used to compare to double-check place/personal name translations, and that I hadn't realized I wasn't getting the tanks from a Taiwanese publisher. Not sure that'd make a difference, but right now it feels like it does. Sigh.)

[onthehill]

Sorry to say, yes - apparently there are some differences in grammar! The Cantonese are tricksy like that :D
I don't know how extensive it is.

[kaigou]

apparently there are some differences in grammar

oh no.

way to go self, for not checking beforehand. now I'm feeling doubly overwhelmed. guh.

[ramenkuri.livejournal.com]

I get the impression that Mandarin expressions used in Taiwan may also vary from Mainland Mandarin, so that may also account for some grammatical differences between the HK and Taiwanese publications.

[kaigou]

I went and did some digging, and apparently comics will tend to use spoken Cantonese (not standard Mandarin, per more literary works). And... then discovered that the biggest difference (or the one that gets the most attention/commentary?) is the conjugation of verbs. It seems that where in Mandarin you kind of have to guess from context whether it's "I was going" or "I had gone" or "I am going" or whatever, that (spoken) Cantonese adds extra verbs to make the verb-tense much clearer. Which is fine and all, except that it's characters I've never seen before. On top of that, apparently Cantonese also has additional characters not used in Mandarin -- on top of the standard Mandarin set -- which is probably why a major chunk of the manga, I just can't read.

This does not make me feel any less stupid, however.

Of course, the problem is that a lot of the online explanations I've found are clearly written for someone who's trying to decide whether to learn Mandarin or Cantonese, so the various pages don't use specific terminology. Like calling them "words" instead of "characters" or even "hanzi", so I'm not sure if it's a matter of Cantonese using the same characters, just in different ways, or if it's really a matter of a completely different, additional set of hanzi that you'd never see in Mandarin.

I did finally find a bookstore in Taiwan that carries the Taiwanese published version, but I haven't yet figured out if they'll ship to the US. For that matter, I don't know what I'd do, then, with four volumes in (Cantonese)-chinese. It's not like this is a massively popular series to make it worth selling on ebay. Sheesh. I just wish someone had a clear and simple conveyance, or whatever they call it, when it's two languages together, to show you how they differ. Or something.

*ded*

[ramenkuri.livejournal.com]

Wow, that's fascinating. There must be Cantonese/Mandarin scholars out there who could explain the differences more clearly, but I bet they tend to write in Cantonese/Mandarin rather than English...