zh-Hant-xx, zh-Hans-xx

[Mark Davis]

The following information was collected from John Jenkins, Lee Collins, and
Richard
Cook -- Mark

===========

Lexical differences between mainland Mandarin and Taiwan Mandarin are
legion.  The simplest and most obvious is the name of the language
itself, which is 普通話 (the Common Speech) in the PRC and 國語
(the National Language) in Taiwan. But there are many other examples, such
as 電腦 vs. 計算機.

Standard written Chinese as written in Hong Kong tends to be
a bit more colloquial and occasionally has admixtures of Cantonese in
it; you'll see the occasional 冇 or 唔 in the middle of the
subtitles for a Western movie, for example, where standard written
Chinese would have 無 or 不.  And, of course, you have the not
infrequent appearance of Cantonese qua Cantonese in less formal
settings such as advertising or newspapers.  Somewhat more unexpected
is the use of the Japanese kana の in HK signage where standard
written Chinese would use 的 or 之.  (As an example, the Studio
Ghibli film "The Cat Returns" has 貓の報恩 as its official title
in HK.)

There are also vocabulary differences between Hong Kong standard
written Chinese and standard written Chinese, mostly for relative
neologisms such as hard disk (硬碟 in HK, 硬磁盤 in the PRC) or
for English loan-words like taxi (的士 in HK, 出租车 in the PRC, 計程車
in Taiwan).  This is substantial enough that movies will often have
different sets of subtitles for the HK and Taiwan markets.

Singaporean Chinese has got its own admixture of English loan-words, such as
䢂 (lift) for elevator instead of 电梯.

If you were to ask most computer scientists in HK whether or not it makes
sense to distinguish zh-Hant-HK from zh-Hant-TW, they'd say, "Of course, and
don't forget Macao."

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Michael Everson" <everson at evertype.com>
To: "IETF Languages Discussion" <ietf-languages at iana.org>
Sent: Wednesday, March 16, 2005 14:32
Subject: Re: zh-Hant-xx, zh-Hans-xx


> At 14:21 -0800 2005-03-16, Deborah Goldsmith wrote:
> >Apple is also on record as favoring these registrations.
>
> Has Apple, or any of the rest of you, evidence that the distinctions
> made are actual linguistic distinctions?
> -- 
> Michael Everson * * Everson Typography *  * http://www.evertype.com
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