Comment by goblin89 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by goblin89 | Hacker News Reader

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Be on the lookout for misinformation obscuring the fact that Cantonese (a.k.a. Yue), spoken in Hong Kong, is a language. It’s not mutually intelligible with Mandarin (unlike, say, Mandarin spoken in Taiwan, which is more or less Mandarin with a different accent and slightly different vocabulary) or other languages of Chinese family. Cantonese uses different transliteration systems as well (Pinyin doesn’t work for it).

Who’s mainly responsible for there to this day being no ISO standard for transliterating Cantonese, and its conspicuous absence from Google Translate (despite the whopping 86 million speakers—consider that Translate supports, say, Welsh, Basque, Dhivehi, and many others that are spoken by fewer than even one million), is probably obvious. That entity is much helped by the issue being opaque to most foreigners, who are sufficiently baffled by a completely different writing system to just not care and bundle all languages written in Chinese script into one basket.

> Who’s mainly responsible for there to this day being no ISO standard for transliterating Cantonese (like Pinyin), and its conspicuous absence from Google Translate (despite having 86 million speakers—consider that Translate supports, say, Welsh, Basque, Dhivehi, and many others that are spoken by fewer than even one million), is probably obvious.

There's no ISO standard because there's no actual standard. Even just within Hong Kong there are multiple systems in use.

Let’s not mix cause and effect. There are multiple systems because there’s no standard, and there’s no standard because there’s strong opposing interest. Cantonese-speaking world would strictly benefit from this standardisation, lack of it impedes business and takes away from language’s legitimacy.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there were attempts to introduce a standardised way of romanising Yue, but certain groups with many votes considered this national interest as they try to maintain authority across a very diverse set of people speaking different languages.

Can you point to a specific instance of a proposed ISO standard that was shot down by committee?

Because otherwise the default explanation for why there's no ISO standard for Cantonese romanization is the same as why there's no ISO standard for romanizing Burmese, or Malaysian Jawi etc. There's little demand internationally for such a standard.

And if the Hong Kong government's standard, or the Guangdong government's standard (this one presumably preferred on the Mainland) is officially blessed by ISO, would people currently using something else really switch just because of ISO?

Myanmar, while spoken by fewer people than Yue, benefits from an official standard for romanization from its own government (not ISO), and Jawi is a dialect of a language spoken by fewer than a thousand people total.

When saying “little demand internationally”, could you clarify what international demand was there for a standard for romanizing Mandarin and why that is somehow not applicable to Yue?

> Myanmar, while spoken by fewer people than Yue, benefits from an official standard for romanization from its own government (not ISO)

Said standard getting ignored by most Burmese people in favor of ad-hoc romanizations, similar to Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong and Guangdong mostly ignoring various standards published by their respective governments.

> Jawi is a dialect of a language spoken by fewer than a thousand people total.

Malaysian Jawi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jawi_script is not a dialect, but an Arabic-derived writing system for Malay. While not all Malay speakers use it, it's certainly more than a few thousand.

> what international demand was there for a standard for romanizing Mandarin and why that is somehow not applicable to Yue?

Mandarin is an official language of the UN, whereas Yue isn't.

We are discussing languages, not scripts.

Standard being ignored by laypeople doesn’t make it any less useful in formal contexts sensitive to ambiguity.

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