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00:00 Why film this update?
02:05 Day 1
03:53 Day 2
05:26 Day 4
07:48 Day 6 (plot twist)
10:56 Day 7
12:24 Tragedy
Subtitles in Polish, English, and Cantonese.
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I honestly doubt I need an introduction to the current international Olympic frenzy.
Open any social media, and half of what you see is sports news from Tokyo 2020/2021. (For me, the other half is depressing Hong Kong news.)
And with any luck, or if you’re following any Hong Kong-related accounts, you might have some dramatic moments to follow and celebrate.
In this edition of Bel Canton, where I highlight (new) Cantonese words that are essential to current topics, let’s react to the Olympic Games together!
But first, the basics.
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The Cantonese podcast for fans of linguistics, language lovers, and Cantonese learners. This episode starts with the English and Japanese loanwords in Cantonese and talks about special features of word borrowing among Chinese-influenced languages, as well as calques and the Balkan Sprachbund.
Show notes and links available on the Cantonese page. Transcript below.
This podcast is also available on YouTube. Don’t forget to subscribe!
[intro]
以：係啊係啊係啊係啊。（苗：哦，OKOK）Wiki講㗎。Wiki講一定啱㗎。
苗：哦，原來係噉。
靳：呢個係咪intro嚟㗎，我想問。
以：係啊，呢個應該係intro啊。
苗：呢個係intro喇。
[jingle]
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The Cantonese podcast for fans of linguistics, language lovers, and Cantonese learners. This language is a language-guessing game, like the Great Language Game, where two of our hosts guess Japanese, Korean, French, German, European Portuguese, Thai, Vietnamese, Swedish, Egyptian Arabic, and Polish. They explain their deductive process using phonological features.
Show notes and links available on the Cantonese page. Transcript below.
This podcast is also available on YouTube. Don’t forget to subscribe!
[Intro]
靳：深喉音啦，我哋啱啱講完內爆音，依家又講深喉音啦，係咪？
以：喂，咪玩嘢啊你，我笑點好低㗎
三：呢個……呢個節目係……合家歡節目嚟㗎呢個，係
[jingle]
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The Cantonese podcast for fans of linguistics, language lovers and Cantonese learners alike. With the release of the Netflix reality show Deaf U, the second episode discusses sign languages, Deaf culture, and various ways of communicating without sound.
Show notes and links available on the Cantonese page. Transcript below.
This podcast is also available on YouTube. Don’t forget to subscribe!
[Intro]
苗：有一樣嘢非常之重要嘅，就係叫做……我又唔識講喇，中文。Indexing啊。手指指噉樣……
以：我唔知咩係indexing。
苗：手指……我就叫佢手指指啦，好啦。
[jingle]
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If you watched my polyglot video, you might recall that I was planning to launch a podcast.
The idea sprang up in my mind back in late July, when I was on a plane, bidding my hometown farewell. Well, after two months of planning, brainstorming, and testing, I can finally proudly announce that the first episode is almost ready!
From the initial idea to getting two friends to host it together, it took a lot of discussion to figure out the direction we’d like to take, and the kind of show we would like to create for you. The rough idea is to delve into a language-related topic in each episode, or possibly give a brief introduction to a certain language.
But the core question is, why are we creating a podcast?
Let’s cut to the chase: I’m planning to kill two birds with one stone.
I discovered the online polyglot community back in 2015/16. Polyglot means a person who speaks many languages, but the term has expanded to include people around the world who love languages and learning them. They’re very welcoming to anyone passionate about languages, even if they’re just starting out.
Continue readingIch bin heute auf eine deutsche Seite gestoßen, die versucht, die Beziehung zwischen Kantonesisch und Mandarin, oder dem Begriff Chinesisch, zu erklären. Spoiler Alert: diesen Artikel finde ich total Quatsch. Er behauptet, Kantonesisch sei ein Dialekt von Chinesisch, und Mandarin sei Hochchinesisch.Diese Art Kategorisierung ist ganz politisch motiviert, und von einem rein sprachwissenschaftlichen Standpunkt ist sie sehr problematisch.
In diesem Video werde ich versuchen, als ein Sprachenliebhaber, ein Amateursprachwissenschaftler und ein Sprecher von drei sinitischen bzw. chinesischen Sprachen, zu erklären, was ein Dialekt in diesem Zusammenhang wirklich bedeutet, und abgesehen von der Politik, was Kantonesisch eigentlich ist, und wie man überhaupt diese Sprachen betrachten soll.
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Inject Jyutping is a new Chrome extension that simply does what it says: it adds Jyutping romanisation onto Cantonese texts you see on the internet. This comes in the form of Ruby characters, i.e. small pronunciation guides on top of characters, which are common in all languages that use Chinese characters except Cantonese—until now.
This extension is so simple that you can already see the result in the image above, so this will be more of a recommendation than a review. I love it so much because it does one simple thing so well, but can be immensely helpful towards learners. It’s exactly what I aim to do for the transcriptions in our upcoming Cantonese podcast for intermediate-advanced learners.
Since it’s a Chrome extension, don’t forget that the new Microsoft Edge can use it as well.
It’s just one button. Literally. Click it, and you get jyutping plastered all over whatever Chinese text that happens to be on your screen.
Since the turn of the 20th century, languages in southern China suffered a downturn that extended from high society to the lower classes. When leaders that spoke southern languages began to extol the northern language Mandarin, they quickly propelled the entire society to follow suit.
Our story begins in 1895, when the Qing government lost the First Sino-Japanese War. It was perceived by the rulers as utter humiliation to lose to a nation that once kowtowed to the empire.
Since then, Chinese people increasingly studied abroad in Japan and Western countries, in hopes of bringing home foreign knowledge and know-how.
One of the ideas imported from the West was racialism (racism)—not the ensuing discrimination, but the fundamental idea of dividing human beings into ‘races’.
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