@atomicpoet @mayintoronto
I am halfway through my first pot of tea so have enough brain energy now (don't worry, these are small little Chinese pots and little cups... lol)
Looping back to the discussion earlier about whether or not Chinglish is its own language... (note: I am not a linguist, and merely coming at this from a communications angle... of which they did grant me a phd recently so it's not totally based on nothing).
There's a joke you've probably heard somewhere. What's the difference between a language and a dialect? (A language has currencies and armies)
If we weren't conquered by the Ming dynasty, Cantonese and Mandarin are so incredibly different, they would legit be considered distinct languages. But alas, we lost so we get dialect status.
The linguists have a "drop in" test where if you take one person who doesn't speak the other and "drop them in", can they understand and be understood. I heard Finnish and Swedish can mutually understand for example.
So here's where that test gets interesting.
You may recall that before COVID, HK was going through quite a bit of turmoil with democracy protests in what would be known as the yellow umbrella movement.
The gov was using rioting and violence as an excuse to clamp down and arrest people. The organizers insisted the were not encouraging violence (and indeed told people not to give the gov an excuse to arrest them). There were accusations that Beijing was sending down Cantonese speakers from Guandong to act as saboteurs. They would intentionally smash windows and get the violence going kind of thing.
So, the organizers used social media to let people know where the next protest would be, but encoded it in very HK speak. There's a combination of using English sounds in Chinese and vice versa. I don't even fully get all the code. But I can give you a simple example.
的 means belonging to. 我的手 simply means "my hand". 的士 is soooo HK. It is a transliteration for "taxi" because it sounds so similar "dik see".
There's a pop song right now that is popular and there's mention of a 飛的 (flying 的 aka speeding taxi). For anyone outside of HK, that means NOTHING. The words are gibberish that makes no sense in written form. Now multiply this example by a million little things that I can't even wrap my head around. Add this to local slang that just comes about organically too (think place names or local events that will influence this).
Does it count as its own language? Certainly not yet... but there's enough encoded Chinglish that they at least believed it was enough to confuse the saboteurs.
But you can see how over time, this kind of stuff branches away from how Canto would traditionally be spoken and really becomes its own thing where nobody outside of this little island can understand.
It's different now with rapid communication so isolated growth isn't possible the way it used to be but Creole was born in a similar way I'm sure.
But I did want to share this little tidbit how despite being only a strait apart, there are enough linguistic peculiarities that they can openly post a notice and not have it understood by a population they all recognize they descended from.
