Unconflating Chinese part 0: The Introduction

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2013/11/22, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2013/11/22/10467820.aspx

Not too long ago, I wrote a blog titled Mandarin vs. Cantonese.

In that blog, I chose to semi-intentionally conflate many different issues whose wider conflation by others leads to the reason why Cantonese can.be hard to capture in computers:

• China vs. Hong Kong vs. Taiwan
• Spoken vs. written Chinese
• Dialectic differences of Cantonese in different places
• Simplified vs. Traditional Chinese
• Variations in educational levels in communities
• Rural vs. Urban Chinese
• Tonal differences of Chinese throughout the world
• Defined tones used in different IMEs based on different defined schemes
• National standards like GB 18030 and HKSCS
• International standards like Unicode
• Pronunciation vs. other uses of tone data
• and more....

I've decided, after talking with several regular readers, that I do Chinese in general and Cantonese in particular a disservice if I take advantage of that confusion in a single blog as I did in this case.

Thus this series, trying to unconflate Chinese!

For the record, I know that I'm kinda making up a word here. You know what I'm saying here, so I've decided that the usage is acceptable.

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