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marafon
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CK
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10 days ago
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ondo
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ondo
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AlanF_US
18 days ago
Hello everyone! 大家好！I'm here to learn and help add sentences to the Chinese/English sections of the project. Hope to be of some use!
on a side note, is it too late to change "Chinese" to Mandarin? This seems a bit strange to me, thanks.
+1
"Chinese" doesn't exist but in the mind of senile communist party leaders...
I hope you don't consider me a senile communist party leader, when I use the word "chinese". Maybe I should go more deeper into the topic of the lingusitic landscape of China, to understand the fervour of your discussion better.
Just for the records: Pretty much everybody agrees that "Chinese" is not a single language, but a family of languages comparable to the Romance languages. Unlike the Romance languages however Chinese languages are connected by a common script that's not sound-based but in its core etymon-based. So while English, Dutch, German and Low Saxon have the related but different words "sun", "zon", "Sonne" and "Sünn" respectively, Chinese script has only one sign for it (let's represent it for our purposes with the Unicode sign for "sun": ☼). The different languages all write ☼, but pronounce it according to their own phonological rules (this however fails if different Chinese languges use unrelated words, similar to how English uses "horse" while the other languages use "paard", "Pferd", "Peerd". Chinese would have two different signs in a case like this). That's why the Chinese always considered themselves members of one culture despite all the differences. Among the Chinese languages Mandarin is the most widely spoken one. Therefore it dominates official contexts and the media and if the West speaks about "Chinese" it almost always means Mandarin.
If you ask me, it would be useful to rename cmn to "Mandarin" in the Tatoeba localization repositories. I however do find it funny, how Sacredceltic starts to grouse when somebody just innocently used the common and widespread term "Chinese" when referring to Mandarin. The reference to "senile communist party leaders" is especially funny because both "Chinese" and "Mandarin" are western terms without any direct correspondence in Chinese. Chinese has its own separate terms to differentiate between the varieties. "Senile communist party leaders" are well able to discern them and probably don't worry much about the English terms. It's even more funny that Sacredceltic suspects the worst political motives if you can find the exact same methods of "everybody who I reign over just speaks a dialect of what I speak, which is a language, not a dialect" all over Europe.
A very revealing discussion! I could imagine You (plural) as authors of a book on this topic.
It is fascinating, most of the different naming conventions are politically motivated, with one country not wanting to call their language the name that the other country uses.
In my experience the usage of the word chinese, i.e. "Do you speak Chinese?" is perfectly legitimate, it is simply contextual. If a cantonese speaker says "Do you speak chinese?" they mean cantonese, if a mainland chinese speaker says "Do you speak Chinese?" they mean Mandarin, etc...
>Unlike the Romance languages however Chinese languages are connected by a common script
Errr...we all use the same letters, more or less...
It's like you would consider two different texts in the same language and call them different scripts because the 2 texts are different...
Everything is a matter of scale.
Western's writing scale is the letter, and it's common to many languages european.
"Chinese"'s writing scale is the ideogramm.
That doesn't make the languages closer...
>Mandarin" are western terms without any direct correspondence in Chinese.
Yes they do: official Mandarin is Putonghua
>Sacredceltic suspects the worst political motives if you can find the exact same methods of "everybody who I reign over just speaks a dialect of what I speak, which is a language, not a dialect" all over Europe.
Could you please elaborate on this? I just don't understand this sentence.
By the way, why did you forget German and English in your list?
German as a concept applying to both a nationality and a language is but a century old, and many Germans, such as you, are actually bilingual in their own country...
You're denying that the current PRC's regime is exterminating and levelling cultures and languages? Do you sometimes read the news? People go as far as to immolate themselves in order to avoid assimilation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6qlVVbmEbo
Why aren't Wuu or Yue official regional languages in the PRC, in your view?
Catalan, Occitan and Sicilian are in their respective countries, although they're spoken by less than a 20th of speakers of Wuu or Yue...
I'll tell you why: Because the senile "communists" leaders of the PRC are terrified by break-up!
Mandarin is also a purely english speaking construct. The terms for it vary from region to region.
In the Peoples republic of china, "Mandarin" would map to "putonghua".
In the Republic of China, "Mandarin" would map to the term "huayu".
I bet Hong Kong, Singapore, and other places have different names for "Mandarin" a well.
Languages names, at the international level, are clearly defined by an international body and norm which is the ISO 639-3.
According to this norm, "Chinese" is a macrolanguage with code "zho", but not a "language" with code "cmn".
The official name corresponding to ISO 639-3 code "cmn" is "Mandarin Chinese" http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/cod...639_3&letter=c
I strongly support following international standards and thus, applying ISO 639-3 languages names in Tatoeba.
>many Germans, such as you, are actually bilingual in their own country...
was genau meinst du damit?
zum thema: namen sind schall und rauch. es ist völlig unerheblich, wie man eine s(pr)ache nennt, solange man weiß, was gemeint ist. genau genommen müsste deutsch hier übrigens hochdeutsch (standard German/High German) heißen.
>was genau meinst du damit?
I mean that many Germans speak a local dialect + Hochdeutsch.
>es ist völlig unerheblich
Not at all. Maybe in your generation only, but you represent but a fraction of an ageing German population...
According to my experience, many Germans speak dialects, at least in part, in their everyday conversations, and I have seen from my own eyes and heard with my own ears, Germans from different regions of Germany who didn't understand each other AT ALL, although they were supposed to speak the same German language...
I have daily testimonies, including on Tatoeba, that German speakers mix their dialect with Hochdeutsch all the time and stand subsequently corrected. I bet you were a few times yourself, I'll dig into your history when I have some time to check it...
Of course, each individual is convinced he/she speaks a standard language...until others debate that...
A certain friend of mine who just moved from one part of Germany to another, and who ascertained before, the same way you do, that she spoke perfectly standard German, had the honesty to acknowledge that she just discovered that a few words she uses in her home region are just not understood or mean something different in her new home...
Unlike in France, where television and most radio networks are national, German networks are regional, and I think this is instrumental in giving Germans the feeling that their regional way of speaking is the norm...
ich glaube, die meisten deutschen wissen, ob sie gerade hochdeutsch oder dialekt sprechen/hören, da hochdeutsch nun einmal das ist, was an den schulen gelehrt, von allen größeren (meist auch den regionalen) rundfunk- und fernsehsendern, ämtern, behörden und in fast aller schriftichen kommunikation benutzt wird. zwar finden sich auch hier gelegentlich dialektale einsprengsel, aber die gängigsten einsprengsel fremder dialekte sollten allen deutschen mit ein wenig sprachlichem bewusstsein genauso bekannt sein wie die hochdeutsche version. das einzige mir bekannte element, das eine wirkliche spaltung und gröbere missverständnisse hervorruft, ist das hier angedeutete: http://tatoeba.org/eng/sentences/show/1229607
ich bleibe übrigens dabei, dass namen schall und rauch sind.
>ich glaube, die meisten deutschen wissen, ob sie gerade hochdeutsch oder dialekt sprechen/hören
So you eventually admit that they do speak/hear dialects as well as hochdeutsch...
That was my very point ! ("many Germans, such as you, are actually bilingual in their own country."/"was genau meinst du damit?"...)
>>Unlike the Romance languages however Chinese languages are connected by a common script
You cut the most important part from the quote. The script is etymon-based and can therefore overarch much more variety than a sound-based script.
>Yes they do: official Mandarin is Putonghua
And that's a different term.
>By the way, why did you forget German and English in your list?
Because if I had decided to make the list encompass every language that ever did that, it would probably be a list of all the languages ever adopted as official language of any territory.
>You're denying that the current PRC's regime is exterminating and levelling cultures and languages?
Where does this conclusion come from? I do not and I don't think that I said anything that would allow this conclusion.
I don't want to engage in an argument with you, Sacredceltic. That would be pointless, because our opinions are basically the same. We could only battle about the semantic subtleties or minor ambiguities of our sentences.
Politically I'm on your side, I just disagree about some methods. Like calling people senile because you disagree with their supposed opinions. Or denying the existence of an overarching superidentity to protect the overarched subidentities.
>Like calling people senile because you disagree with their supposed opinions.
That's not why I call them senile. The Central Committee of The People's Republic Of China's Communist party's members average age revolves around 75. They're all senile. The cling to power and understand nothing of the modern world, and tremble at any dissent: they imprison artists, pacifists and bloggers, have nuns raped and monks tortured when they do not inoculate tubercolosis to Uyghur prisoners. And why are they so violent? Because they're scared. They are scared of Internet, they are scared of their own old shadows of fighting Kingdoms because they themselves created a society that is on the verge of explosion with such dramatic rifts between North and South, rural and urban, poor and rich, Han and not Han.
They resort to the most disgusting nationalism to make their people forget that they are just inept rulers, just good at poisoning their own grand children in the name of productivity, and spare on the concrete of new school buildings in seismic areas that collapsed on the pupils, while the money to make them earthquake-proof went into their deep pockets...
Chinese rulers make me sick, indeed, and I am not being fooled by their nationalistic propaganda that goes down to languages, in a very effective way. They go as far as to falsify statistics about ethnicities and spoken languages. The actual number of speakers of Mandarin as first language is completely over-estimated.
>Or denying the existence of an overarching superidentity to protect the overarched subidentities.
Well, there's nothing to prove or deny. "Chinese" speakers do not understand each other as French speakers do. They don't speak the same languages in everyday life. It's a fact.
Wuu, alone, has more speakers than Italian...
>I hope you don't consider me a senile communist party leader, when I use the word "chinese"
If you apply it to refer to an imaginary language, then you're a victim of nationalistic propaganda by the senile so-called "communists" with deep pockets.
If you apply it to the nationality, then you're somewhat right...except two distinct nations claim the name...at the moment...so we don't know what you're refering to, exactly...
If you apply it to History or Art, then we more or less see what you mean, but it remains nevertheless about as vague as "European"...
+1
Just like "Spanish" or "French" or "Italian".
Wuu, for example, has nothing to do with Mandarin, apart from the writing...they call the whole thing "Chinese" which doesn't make sense at all. It's like we would bundle the 400+ languages of India and call it "Indian"...It's completely ludicrous...
Like Catalan or Occitan or Sicilian.
good propaganda, slomox!
Welcome to Tatoeba NTD,
Please indicate in your profile what languages you know.
Saluton karaj Esperantistoj!
Mi ŝatus mallonge peti helpon de vi: Helpu al la *Deutscher Esperanto-Bund e.V.* gajni 1000€ per voĉdoni ĉe https://verein.ing-diba.de/kult...eranto-bund-ev
Bezonas enmeti retpoŝtadreson (mi ne pensas ke ili sendos varbaĵojon) kaj ĉiu retpoŝtadreso povas voĉdoni trifoje - eble vi ja havas duan retpoŝtadreson? Aŭ ĉu vi konas iun kiu eble voĉdonus?
La celo estas iĝi ene de la 1000 unuaj asocioj, ĉar nur tiuj gajnos 1000€n.
Dankegon!
Estas vere grava afero. Kaj subteninda.
Mi jam voĉdonis antaŭ kelkaj tagoj! :)
A little request toward English Native speakers (especially those with a computer sciences background)
As maybe some of you know, I'm currently teaching computer sciences in a foreign country, I would like so to start to input sentences about typical technical sentences I use in my classes in French/English, but as I'm not an English native, I'm reluctant to do that because my sentences in English are likely to be unnatura, and as my students don't speak French, English is the only language we have in common, (though my goal is in the end to have then translated in Chinese)
So if some English natives is ready to review my sentences (I'm not going to add a thousand of, maybe something like 10 a day), I will be very glad.
(and for those who're not yet confident with the tatoeba interface, there's a page to view the sentences of one user in a specific languages, if you wondered how you can keep trace of what I had, and anyway these sentences are nearly the only ones I will enter in English)
Would you be interested in me knocking up a smart phone UI (just html and jquery) which uses fixed settings to quickly get examples of inputword in a preselected destination language but in a "big" smartphone format? e.g I would always want to put in a german word and get sentences in german.
I would be interested. Do you have an example of a similar UI you made before ?
Hodiaŭ estas la reformacia tago - kaj mi ne trovis la tezojn de Lutero en Esperanto. Ĉu enmeti kaj traduki ĉi tie? Mi komencis per tezo 96, http://tatoeba.org/epo/sentences/show/1208169 .
Tezo 86, mi petas pardonon. (Same pro la pluraj provoj dum enmetado...)
Something is wrong with the times on the homepage and elsewhere.
Don't worry, I'm sure now it's ok :P what happened was that at 3 am in France time, we'd return to 2 am (for that "daylight saving time" thing, today in Europe, at 3 am we have to put one hour less in our clocks), so the system got confused, as it cannot register both "2 am" as the same time because they aren't, the first "2 am" happened one hour before the second, so this first "2 am" was turned into "-....". But now that the switch has already taken place, the system has gone back to normal.
So it has.
**** ALERTE ****
les statistiques de langues sont devenues folles ! D'où sortent ces milliers de phrases en estonien, géorgien, etc...
http://tatoeba.org/epo/stats/sentences_by_language
et maintenant ?
ça semble réglé...
je vais regarder cela...
La langue anglaise vient subitement de perdre 20.000 phrases, est-ce normal ?!?
un petit bug, rien de plus, pas de perte, boracasli apprend la programmation (ou à trouver un script tout fait) et s'amusait a changer la langue de sa phrase en boucle, j'ai bloqué son IP (je trouverai une solution plus défnitive bientot)
Ah merde, je pensais qu'on allait enfin se débarrasser de tous les vieux tromblons dont personne ne veut et qui empoisonnent le corpus...Grosse déception !
il y a quand même 4.000 phrases qui sont sorties du compteur...