Comments by "Wei Fan" (@weifan9533) on "South China Morning Post" channel.

I'm of mainland Chinese origin and I also care about Cantonese, and for valid reasons. 1. Although HK's Cantonese also suffers from oppression from the dominant Mandarin language, it at least has its own media and has some international influence as well. While mainland Cantonese varieties, particularly the ones spoken in Western Guangdong and Guangxi, are in real danger of extinction. And they are often considered to be of lower value than the varieties spoken in Guangzhou and in HK, which is definitely not the case but this does put them in a greater danger cause a lot of youngsters are not learning them from their parents anymore. 2. Cantonese preserves some important details on the history of Guangdong and Guangxi. People tend to focus on Cantonese's connection to Middle Chinese, which I don't deny. However, Cantonese also preserves a substratum Kra-Dai or Daic vocabulary which it shares with neighboring Tai-Kradai languages such as Zhuang or Ong-Be. For instance, the word for to itch or itching in Cantonese is Hang, and in Zhuang it's Hom. The word for to step across or to stride in Cantonese is Nam or Lam, and in Tai-Kradai it's Yam or Kham. There're many such examples. Some even say that the commonly used Cantonese word 佬 which means guy or folk may have a Tai-Kradai origin as well. This means that the natives of Guangdong were likely of Kra-Dai origin and they were forced to sinicize by the medieval Sinitic dynasties such as the Tang or the Song. Those are the reasons why I'm learning both Cantonese and Zhuang at the same time and believe me learning both together definitely helps.
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@CKWong-jk5st Yeah but you tend to only stress on how Cantonese is related to Middle Chinese and don't really want to mention its relation with the various native languages where the most important one being Kra-Dai. And I'm not offended at all I'm simply stating the truth. The Sinitic civilization is way overrated and its mathematic, philosophical, and scientific accomplishments were leagues behind the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, the medieval Arabs, and the Renaissance Europeans. Not to mention that the Sinitic people were quite authoritarian and actively suppressed the natives of South China. The PRC isn't an anomaly in fact it's merely a continuation of the authoritarian Sinitic dynasties of the past. And genetically speaking Cantonese cluster with neighboring Kra-Dai and Kinh people rather than with North Chinese. Hence if you're Cantonese then there's really no reason for you to worship the Sinitic people who might very well have enslaved and tortured your Kra-Dai ancestors and forced them to sinicize.
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The cost of rearing a child is just way too high, especially in large Chinese metropolis like Beijing or Shanghai. I totally understand why couples in Beijing don’t want to have more children.
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@adamnesico Alone maybe, but old and poor definitely not. If I don't have any child then I can save hundreds of thousands of dollars all on myself.
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@CKWong-jk5st Nothing proves that Kra-Dai originated from the Yue kingdom in Zhejiang. AFAIK, the most recent hypothesis proposed by Blench (2018) is that Tai-Kradai originated as a branch of Austronesian which back-migrated to South China from Taiwan and its place of origin was somewhere in Guangdong around the Pearl River Delta. This kind of makes sense to me, as Cantonese is the only Sinitic language to contain a substantial amount of Kra-Dai substratum vocabulary. Anyways, Cantonese definitely has a relation with Kra-Dai, and I feel quite sad that people tend to only focus on its relation to Middle Chinese and completely ignore its connection to the native languages of South China. And I stand firm against any eradication of the indigenous languages of the region, be it Cantonese, Kra-Dai, Hmong-Mien, or others.
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@YorgosL1 Thanks for recognizing your native roots. I can only speak from a genetic POV. Cantonese and Vietnamese are closely related genetically speaking both are predominantly Southern East Asian.
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Great news! Happy to see such a liar gets arrested! Justice might be late, but it's never absent.
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According to recent genetic analysis, the so-called Han ethnic group can be divided into 7 distinct subgroups from north to south, hence Han isn't really a true ethnic group, but a mixture of several different peoples.
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