Cantonese Phrasebook

Cantonese (廣東話 Gwóngdūngwáh) is a widely spoken Chinese language. It is the local language in current use within the province of Guangdong, China, official language in the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong, as well as in the Special Administrative Region of Macau, and used in many overseas Chinese communities in South-East Asia and elsewhere, with Kuala Lumpur and Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) being two places where Cantonese is the dominant language in a Chinese community that is in turn huge and influential. Cantonese is also the dominant language in many Chinatowns all over the world, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Chicago, London, Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Vancouver, Toronto, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore.

The word “dialect” means something different when applied to Chinese than it does for most other languages. Chinese “dialects” have not only widely diverging pronunciations of the same words, but also use different words for expressing the same thing, and different grammar such as different word order. As a result, different Chinese dialects can be mutually unintelligible. The difference between one dialect and another can be as small as that between, say, Spanish and Portuguese, or as large as that between German and English. Meanwhile, there are different variations of the Cantonese dialect that differ greatly from one another. For example, the Cantonese spoken in the far west of Guangdong province (eg. Taishan) is hardly or not at all intelligible to a native of Guangzhou city.

Speakers of all Chinese varieties do, in general, use the same characters in reading and writing. Written language is more formal and closer to standard Mandarin Póutūngwáh (Mandarin), even when used by Cantonese speakers. Oral Cantonese contains many words for which there has traditionally not existed a written form. In recent decades, however, characters for many of these words have been created, chiefly by the Hong Kong popular printed media such as newspapers and magazines. It should be noted that the different Cantonese-speaking communities use one of two different forms of writing: in Hong Kong, Macau, Malaysia and many overseas Chinese communities, traditional Chinese characters are in use, whereas the Cantonese-speaking communities in mainland China’s Guangdong province as well as Singapore use simplified Chinese characters.

In many cases the regional varieties are not clearly regionalised but vary gradually across a region. Thus linguists can identify anywhere between seven and seventeen separate Chinese languages where the speakers of different dialects are mutually unintelligible. This list is based on the Cantonese spoken in Guangzhou. Note that the Cantonese spoken in Hong Kong and Macau differ slightly due to Western influences, though standard Cantonese as spoken in Guangzhou would be understood by everyone. The Cantonese spoken in Singapore and Malaysia also differ slightly due to Malay influences.

http://wikitravel.org/en/Cantonese_phrasebook

If arrogant nationalism were a sport, Canada would win gold

 

Why did Gretzky play role in ceremonies – he hasn’t lived here for 20 years

 

By HENRY AUBIN, The GazetteFebruary 16, 2010

 

 

The Olympics are supposed to be uplifting. So far, the Vancouver Olympics are anything but.

The problem starts at the very top: the Own the Podium initiative, that federally sponsored program that aims to overcompensate for the supposed ignominy of Canada’s modest collection of medals at past Olympics by making this country the No. 1 nation in terms of medals won. That’s right, No. 1. Arrogance, not the Olympic spirit, is what inspires Own the Podium.

Yes, let’s not forget the Olympic spirit. It’s that corny but terrific idea that, in the words of Pierre de Coubertin, “The important thing is not to win but to take part.” That idea has become unfashionable in recent decades, but the organizers of these Games have consigned it to oblivion.

The symptoms of the new approach surfaced well before the start of these Games. As early as last September the New York Times reported that Canadian officials were going all out to exploit their home-field advantage for these Games. They were giving U.S. athletes, unlike their Canadian counterparts, minimal opportunities to become familiar with the luge track, speedskating oval and ski hill – the peculiarities of which can can greatly affect performance. The head of USA Luge understandably complained of “poor sportsmanship.”

Certainly little sportsmanship was on display Sunday when the Canadian women’s hockey team piled it on 18-0 against Slovakia. It was embarrassing. Pure humiliation. Never mind that the Olympic Charter says the Games should set a “good example” for upcoming generations.

Arrogance implies insensitivity, and you could see a lot of that at the opening ceremony. Although the organizers bent over backward to give an appropriate place to Canada’s native people, their blind spot in regard to French Canada was staggeringly disrespectful. You’d almost think a sovereignist mole had staged the whole ceremony to stoke Quebec’s resentment.

But it’s not just the organizers’ hubris that’s dispiriting. It’s also their clumsiness in staging the opening ceremony.

To be sure, the soirée included some gems – the snowboarder who sailed through the middle “O” of the Olympics’ five-ring logo, the orcas, the giant illuminated bear, and k.d. lang’s Hallelujah. The dedication of the entire soirée to the memory of the Georgian luger was also right.

But the show as a whole lasted way too long – the Mountie flag-carriers’ slow-mo march, the youth floating over wheatfields, skiers and snowboarders yo-yoing up and down a mountain. Pure tedium. Almost every act could have been shortened by a third or half.

And then there was the lighting of the Olympic cauldron. Let’s not dwell on the failure of an ice pole to rise: We all know about technology’s whims. But it’s the organizer’s considered choice of Wayne Gretzky as the final torch-bearer that’s more disappointing. He hasn’t been a resident of Canada for decades. And, if his expression was any indication, he didn’t seem too honoured

Lighting the cauldron is a symbolic role. It should belong to a person with some relationship to the Olympic movement’s core of amateurism, much compromised though it is. Gretzky, for all his athletic prowess, is not remotely connected to those roots. He personifies professional sport and – as the head of his own clothing line and huckster for soft drinks, beer, fast food, watches, cars and oil – he also incarnates the commercialism that surrounds sport. When the organizers of the Vancouver Games chose Gretzky, they in effect gave an official stamp of approval to this commercialism as it affects the Olympics.

Most of the things I’ve criticized – nationalistic swagger, use of the home-field advantage, poor sportsmanship, insensitivity and an embrace of commercialism – have occurred in earlier Olympics. But if there were medals for taking these traits to new levels, Vancouver would truly own the podium.

© Copyright (c) The Montreal Gazette

kill kill kill, murder murder murder

 

  After Dubai hit, Israelis question Mossad methods

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – The quiet assassination of a Hamas commander gets unexpectedly messy. Exposed and forced to atone before angry allies, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu orders the spymaster responsible to fall on his sword.

World

That was in 1997, when the Mossad director resigned after his men botched the poisoning of Khaled Meshaal in Jordan. Now premier a second time, Netanyahu faces a similar crisis over the death of another Hamas figure, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, in Dubai.

Israel’s official silence on the January 20 killing has been outpaced, in the popular imagination, by UAE police footage of the suspected assassins and revelations some of them had copied the European passports of actual immigrants to the Jewish state.

The idea that the Mossad, having long cultivated a reputation for lethally outwitting Israel’s foes abroad, this time tripped up by underestimating Arab counter-espionage capabilities prompted commentators to demand a public reckoning.

Special scrutiny was devoted to Mossad director Meir Dagan, an ex-general now in his eighth year of service and praised by Israeli leaders for spearheading a “shadow war” against Hamas, Lebanese Hezbollah guerrillas, and Iran’s nuclear program.

Amir Oren of the liberal Haaretz daily went as far as to call for Dagan to be fired, describing him as “belligerent, heavy-handed” and predicting a row with Britain, Ireland, France and Germany — the countries whose passports were used.

“Even if whoever carried out the assassination does reach some kind of arrangement with the infuriated Western nations, it still has an obligation to its own citizens,” Oren wrote.

Several of the foreign-born Israelis who said their identities had been stolen for the Mabhouh assassination voiced fear they could now be vulnerable to murder prosecutions.

Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman did not deny Mossad involvement in Mabhouh’s death but tried to deflect attention, implying in a radio interview that “some other intelligence service or another country” may have had a role.

Israel’s allies recognize “that our security activity is conducted according to very clear, cautious and responsible rules of the game,” Lieberman asserted.

UNNATURAL CAUSES

Other pundits disagreed about the diplomatic price that could be exacted from Israel, which is already fending off foreign criticism of the hundreds of Palestinian civilian deaths during its offensive in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip last year.

But there was little arguing the fact that Hamas had turned the tables on Mabhouh’s assassins by insisting UAE police launch a murder investigation after they initially ruled that his death, in a Dubai hotel room, had been of natural causes.

“What began as a heart attack turned out to be an assassination, which led to a probe, which turned into the current passport affair,” wrote Yoav Limor in Israel Hayom, a pro-government newspaper.

“It is doubtful whether this is the end of the affair.”

Israelis generally rally around the Mossad’s two-fisted image — honed back in the 1970s, when the agency hunted down and killed Palestinians blamed for a deadly raid on Israel’s Olympic delegation at the Munich Games.

But the Mabhouh hit underscored the difficulties spies must contend with in the digital era, with ubiquitous high-resolution CCTV coverage and easily accessed passport databases.

“What happens in the modern world, the cameras everywhere — it changes things not just for those whose trade is terror but also those trying to fight terror,” former Mossad officer Ram Igra told Israel’s Army Radio.

The UAE is holding two Palestinians accused of helping Mabhouh’s assassins. Should they finger Israel, it will deepen the questions about Mossad tradecraft and operational security.

Mabhouh had masterminded the abduction and killing of two Israeli troops in 1989 and, more recently, the smuggling of Iranian-funded arms to Gaza. The attempted discretion of his killing indicated the assassins were not on a vendetta but, rather, trying to eliminate what they saw as a current threat.

Yet the possibility that the Mossad had so quickly come undone led Yossi Melman, author of two books on the intelligence agency, to suggest such assassinations would not be repeated.

Melman said a wider question would be also raised: “Does Israel’s assassinations policy pay off?”

The 1997 attempted assassination in Amman, by two Mossad officers posing as Canadian tourists, unwittingly boosted Meshaal’s status in Hamas. Netanyahu was also forced to free the Islamist faction’s jailed spiritual leader, Ahmed Yassin.