Text original - Xinès - 求救! 中了msn "mystuff.zip" 病毒

Konnichiwa, Ian!

I was wondering whether this not rather Mandarin. What do you think??

Cisa

CC: IanMegill2

This text is Chinese, not Japanese.

Yes, and it is in Traditional Chinese, not Simplified!

CC: Cisa punia goncin

it is in fact Cantonese mixed with English. (probably written by Hongkong person)
I can not understand. It uses wrong words白字。

That is the way Hong Kong person (under educated) writes Chinese (Cantonese).

Pluiepoco,
do you feel you have to call somebody an idiot every time you write a message

I´m totally disappointed by you, even that message you have written in the ´Sad news´ thread.... No comment!!!

No, I don't have to.
In this particular case, Hongkong person who is under-educated likes to write in this way:

let me show you:

when zuzu wanted to say "then", she spoke "than", so she wrote "than" instead of "then" in her messages. That is use of wrong words.

The same case is the way some undereducated Hongkong person would write Chinese.

Ok.

But see you could translate it! So, at least you can understand some written Cantonese??

We don't promote the normalization of using wrong words in place of right words.

For example, the evolution of Chinese affects people in Canton too.

无、勿wu(no)-->不bu
but the Canton people (Cantonese) did not change it, they still pronounce wu, that is ancient voice of the word, but they chose to use a wrong word å””wu, to replace the right word æ— wu;

而er (past particle, a past sense)-->了le
but the Canton people changed it in another way, they changed it to 哩li, vulgar word which is also used by many other dialectal regional Chinese, we all use 哩li, but Cantonese chose to use 口+黎li;

之di (of) --> 的de、地di、得dei
but the Canton people changed it in another way,
they change 之di-->口+既ji.

Chinese is a language, so it can be represented by any alphabet, but we prefer to characters.
Following the history of language evolution, the voice of particular words must change, but the characters cannot change with it. Some undereducated people will use current words which always have other meanings (wrong words) to replace right words. This phenomenon happens in every dialectual regions, but the only difference is, we are all ashamed of using such a replacement, but some undereducated Cantonese are pleased to.

In this particular case, a undereducated resident in Hongkong (Cantonese) wrote this sentence, although we cannot suppose that s/he did not know English nor Chinese, yet the fact is when a well-educated person in Hongkong writes, he must writes in Mandarin or English. Where the Mandarin is mostly represented by traditional characters.

That is not proper for some undereducated Cantonese to use wrong words in place of right words.

In another sense, to use Taiwan flag to represent traditional Chinese is totally laughable.

Yes, you're right about that Taiwan flag, pluiepoco: it's not only in Taiwan that people use traditional Chinese characters...

Also, I was wondering why they used those characters
唔, 既 and 黎
here in this text: I couldn't understand what they were supposed to mean here!

Anyway, would you be able to make a rough, meaning-only translation of this text?
(We could put a note in the Remarks section that it was only a tentative translation.)

I have already translated the text before you asked so.

As to the words newly-coined, I have something to say:

As you know, before the New Cultural Movement 新文化运动 in early 20th century, Chinese language was written in wenyanwen文言文, at that time, the adverbs like 的, 地, 得 as in modern Chinese did not exist. I say, the characters 的, 地, 得 did exist but they were totally substantive words实词, at that time, not used as adverbs (function words虚词). At that time, people in Canton wrote the same Chinese as people in other regions of China.

Following the movement and reforming thoughts, every regions of China became independent from former Qing Dynasty, then came Warlords Segregation军阀割据. Every regions use different currencies, finances, armies, governments, and even languages. You know what happened after Roman Empire fell.

Usually, when Chinese people create new words, they loan from existing words, or change them by adding/deleting some elements.
嘅、啲、嘢、咁、噉、嚟...(for this example, you can see people add 口 before existing words, that is normal, because the new words are supposed to pronounce the same but have different functions or meanings.)

The baihuawen白话文 movement produces today's Chinese, modern Chinese, including Mandarin.

Modern Chinese includes Mandarin and every dialects. We can say that, every dialect has its own words, but usually people don't have characters, they avoid to coin new characters to represent new words, except Canton people.

Maybe, that is because we respect Sun Yat-sen, who was Cantonese and who created the first Republic in Chinese history.

If you ask why Cantonese happens to be different from Mandarin, I tell you that Mandarin comes from North China, and the Chinese governments have been based in Beijing, not in South China. So we select northern dialects to be our National Chinese, and in fact the Chinese characters simplified you can see today are artificially used. As far as I know, not even one dialect uses such words 的, 地, 得 as adverbs. What we write is completely for a substantive normalization. We actually use the similar words as in Cantonese in every dialects. But all these words were from ancient Chinese, you know, following the language evolution, pronunciation of words change, so people have to extend existing words to more uses, or create new words to represent new meanings.

Oh! Sorry pluiepoco! I'm so silly! I didn't see your English translation there!
I'll check it right away!