Posts by Chris Waugh
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Speaker: “Foreign forces”, hope and Hong…, in reply to Paul Campbell,
(and I'm slightly biased since I'm learning simplified)
Me too. I don't know how far through your studies you are, but my experience is that once you've got your reading up to a certain level, Traditional becomes a lot less daunting. Context and an understanding of how the characters "work" help a lot. Also KTV, which I prefer to avoid, but I have VCDs (yes! still!) and DVDs, and it seems most of the KTV stuff is imported from HK and Taiwan, or made for HK and Taiwan, but redirected, perhaps.
You'll still see a fair bit of Traditional in the Mainland. Bank signs are the obvious one, but also signage in many upmarket areas. Some Classical Chinese textbooks, but I chickened out and bought the 北语 Simplified textbooks from their "foreigners majoring in Chinese" series, telling myself I'd switch to Traditional when I got my Classical good enough. Yeah, right. I've had friends suddenly decide they're going to text in Traditional for no obvious reason.
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Speaker: “Foreign forces”, hope and Hong…, in reply to Russell Brown,
there were no mysterious masked thugs attacking protesters.
Yeah, that bit's creepy. Par for the course in smalltown Mainland, though. And Zhongnanhai has never been known for its PR savvy.
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Speaker: “Foreign forces”, hope and Hong…, in reply to Paul Campbell,
while those from the mainland may find what they see in Hong Kong as “old-fashioned” a thing of their grandparents –
More "sophisticated", I think.
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Speaker: “Foreign forces”, hope and Hong…, in reply to linger,
though a closer (if less extreme) parallel as far as the writing systems go might be if NZ were to adopt American spellings as standard
Well, yes. As far as the writing goes, we're not talking about a different language or script, just a different orthography. And although there are some cogent arguments for the superiority of traditional characters, what partisans of traditional characters often seem to forget is that the simplified characters weren't simply invented out of nothing, many of them are based on common short-hand, alternative or calligraphic forms of the "standard" traditional characters.
"Original brand" might not be so far off when talking about the spoken languages, though. The "older", more conservative southern langauges like Cantonese preserved some features of Middle Chinese that Mandarin dialects generally lost (though Jin managed to keep the entering tone). So I'm sure Nickkita can confirm that Tang poetry sounds better in Cantonese than Mandarin.
As for the original post:
Why idealise the colonial era? If colonial Hong Kong was so perfectly sweet and innocent, why was the ICAC set up? Care to discuss the political troubles of the '60s?
Is the situation really as simple as "good protestors Us vs. bad anti-protestors Triads and central government hired thugs Them"?
And the rampant xenophobia! Wow!
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Beijing, where old cathode ray tubes go to become fancy new buildings.
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Great show, but each of those three segments left me thinking, "That's all? Come on! More! Give me more of this!" Each segment could so easily have been spun out into a whole show on its own. Which I guess is a sign of the great work you're doing with Media Take.
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Hard News: Doing over the witness, in reply to Kumara Republic,
I also wonder if police speed cameras are less to do with actual road safety, and more to do with gathering revenue
Oh, bollocks. Speed cameras have been around for ages and the entire time they've attracted whinging about revenue gathering. We all know the speed limits and why we have speed limits and that we are required to obey the speed limits. Now can we get back to the real issues? There seems to be a campaign to intimidate journalists and their sources to not go sticking their necks out. Harmoniously stay in line and don't question the authorities. That's what we should be worrying about.
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Hard News: Doing over the witness, in reply to Marc C,
Marc, while I generally agree with you, I find your hyperbole to be considerably less than helpful. Here's an example of how things happen in a real authoritarian state. You may also like to think about how it is you can post comments like yours here without them disappearing and without fear of an unwelcome knock on the door. Is NZ even close to that level of authoritarianism? No. Your comparison with East Germany and Latin American former dictatorships remains ludicrous.
And apart from finding your OTT comparison a little rude - some of us live in properly authoritarian states and do actually need to think about what we say and write in public - I worry that comparisons like yours make it easy for sympathetic but complacently unconcerned people to write off our worries as the ramblings of loony left nutters. Sure, bad things happen, but NZ isn't like that, and besides, he must've had it coming, because all that abuse of power stuff happens overseas in awful little countries, not here in NZ....
So, yes, there is much in this case to be worried about, the government is showing a rather dangerous authoritarian streak, we do need to nip this nonsense in the bud right now because it could easily develop into something truly scary if we don't. But please let's keep it all in a proper, realistic perspective.
Now I've said what I have to say on this particular threadjack. I won't take it any further. Back to Nicky Hager...
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Hard News: Doing over the witness, in reply to Marc C,
Yeah, y'know, I was nodding along in agreement with you until this:
This is stuff that would have happened in places like East Germany until 1989, like in some Latin American former dictatorships, this is what goes on in such countries in some places still now, but I feared the day would come that this happens here.
Get a grip. Really. And perhaps acquaint yourself with a few history books, too. Yes, this government clearly has a nasty authoritarian streak, and there is a lot going on that worries me. But East Germany? Latin America? Really? Nicky Hager was bundled into a helicopter and dropped into Cook Strait from a great height, was he? No. In the real world, New Zealand has a very long way to go until it reaches even Singaporean levels of authoritarianism. As bad as things may be, it is still very much Amateur Hour in the NZ National Party HQ.
