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KeeFung
But the point is, our 'culture', those characters, were heavily influenced and limited by Mandarin 'culture'. If you look at all the Cantonese characters, I can dare say that 8/10 of characters you see will have the mouth radical beside a word that sounds similar.

I don't see what that has to do with Mandarin. During the time these characters were starting to be invented, the literary language of China was still Literary Sintic, not Mandarin. True, Mandarin developed as a written vernacular language earlier than Cantonese, but that doesn't seem very relevant to me. Written Mandarin and written Cantonese were developed in much the same way, and characters like 咁, 嗰 and 唔 are found in Ming dynasty works, predating the Baihua movement by several hundred years. Of course, the vast majority of Chinese characters are written with a radical next to another character that sounds similar. It's true that the mouth radical is used for a large number of Cantonese characters, but not for vernacular Mandarin characters. I'm not sure if early Mandarin baihua texts also used the mouth radical but later dropped it, or if the approaches were different for other reasons, but I don't think Mandarin is to blame for the mouth radicals. Rather, Literary Sintic is the language to blame.

It's an interesting question, though: how come so many Cantonese characters have a mouth radical? Don Snow in "Cantonese as a Written Language" notes that the mouth radicals were probably a reason why written Cantonese managed to survive during times when nobody was educated in how to read it, because they clearly marked characters as non-literary, which considerably eased comprehension.

Anyway, the mouth radical isn't really omnipresent. For some words it's useful, like for differentiating between 係 and 喺, but for most characters you can just drop it. 如果我係甘樣寫黎既, 敢就冇口字邊啦. Well, except for the one in 啦, but for these sorts of particles, surely the mouth radical is quite suitable? If you don't like the mouth radicals, just drop them! This would make written Cantonese look more like written Mandarin in appearence. As I said, a large number of Mandarin grammatical particles, like 的, 得, 地, 沒 and 著, were formed in this way （they originally all had, and still have, completely different meanings）, and many Mandarin words are also written this way, like 花錢, using the character for "flower" to mean "to spend", or 幹甚麼, using the character for "tree trunk" to mean "to do", or 沒事兒, using the character for "child" to represent a pure phonological change. Why do you think 累 has two different pronunciations and can mean both "tired" and "to accumulate"? Why do you think 裡 has a clothes radical? Nobody who reads and writes Mandarin seems to think that this is an issue in using the language for serious academic purposes, so why should it be an issue for Cantonese? Just drop all the mouth radicals, but do keep the one in 喺, because I think it's quite useful. Much like Mandarin added the mouth radical in 哪 to differentiate it from 那.

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HouHou
It's really quite simple. 幾 is perfect the way it is, so I never thought to change it. 嘅 serves an entirely different purpose, and based on that, I decided that it could be changed for the better. Why it is illogical, I have already explained pretty clearly here:

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By all means we can probably write 「𪚥」 as a sentence particle, while all it takes is to write "of" in English or 「の」 in Japanese.

I still don't get it, I'm afraid. It seems to me that you're arguing that it's illogical because it has too many strokes. But 幾 also has a lot of strokes (even more than 嘅), yet 幾 is "perfect the way it is". The difference between them is that 幾 is a grammatical particle regulating quantity, and 嘅 is a grammatical particle regulating posession. But I fail to see any logical connection between possesson and number of strokes. English "how" is also a very short word, much like "of". So how come there's nothing wrong with 幾 but something wrong with 嘅?

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Koreans have once changed their script, and so did Japan, Vietnam, all over Europe, etc. If Cantonese is to have one, then let's make a good one, and then present the finalized and polished product for the world to see.

Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese changed their script because it was cumbersome and not at all suited to their languages. One could argue that the same goes for Cantonese, but then one would have to switch to a non-character-based script (or a combination script like Japanese or Taiwanese Hàn-lô), which you explicitly say you don't want to do. The reason behind most other script changes has been religious or nationalistic. Now, one could surely argue from a Hong Kong nationalism standpoint to change the script to distance it from Mandarin, but this doesn't seem to be the reason you're suggesting. These two reasons, plus the reasons fro the PRC simplification process, are the only reasons I know of, yet it doesn't seem like any of these are the reasons behind your proposed script change.

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Up till here, this is the opinion of 1 person in this imaginary International Cantonese Association. I'm still waiting for the rest of the "council" to make their opinions heard. I do realize that if I go back to the Cantonese root words, people would doubt their authenticity. If I suggest new characters, then that's disrespecting Cantonese culture, and using existing characters that look like simplified variants of a Mandarin word would be no different from communist ideas. It's kind of sad to hear things like this from fellow Cantonese-mates, but regardless, I just hope that everyone keep an open mind about this.

I'm imagining that I am keeping an open mind. There are really only two reasons for my skepticism:
1: I believe that an organized, intentionally designed script reform is difficult to realize without government backing.
2: I still fail to comprehend what the problem is with the current system, except that it's not standardized.

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In fact, I think that something more realistic and more useful for an international Cantonese organization to do is to publish a dictionary of the current system, organized by sound (a good way to promote Jyutping) and in each case specifying the most commonly used, and thus the recommended, spelling. It would also include definitions written in Cantonese. It would be the world's first monolingual Cantonese dictionary. If one could use the database of CantoDict, half the job, that of collecting the words, is already done. Of course, writing definitions in Cantonese and deciding on a recommended spelling would still be a lot of work, but it would be feasible, especially if done in much the same way as CantoDict, as a community effort.

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Simon Pettersson
But 幾 is also a really common morpheme and it has huge amounts of strokes and takes ages to write. Why not simplify that, too? The only reason I can see is because you don't seem to consider the Cantonese characters, written by generations of Cantonese speakers for hundreds of years (and in my mind an important part of the Cantonese heritage), to be worth preserving, whilst for some reason the characters that Cantonese has in common with Mandarin are. From my perspective, the character 嘅 is every bit as respectable as 幾. The fact that it's only used in Cantonese doesn't matter. Both characters were invented arbitrarily (though following some general principles of character construction, no doubt) by someone a long time ago and has been adopted for use by lots of people since. I don't understand why the character 嘅 is so bad.

I absolutely agree with you. The current character sets Cantonese has that is used by many Hong Kongers were developed by Cantonese people and is our culture.

But the point is, our 'culture', those characters, were heavily influenced and limited by Mandarin 'culture'. If you look at all the Cantonese characters, I can dare say that 8/10 of characters you see will have the mouth radical beside a word that sounds similar.

This proves that Cantonese culture in terms of written form of Cantonese was heavily limited by Mandarin boundaries, and also influenced by Mandarin. Modern Mandarin today is not true, pure 'Chinese', and Cantonese is. We should be lessening our influences by Mandarin and concentrate on preserving the true culture of China. Even though the capital of China has always been Beijing, Nanking, etc., Kwangtung had the richest culture of all. 7/10 of things called 'Chinese' are all Cantonese or from Kwangtung. Ten Tigers of Canton? From Kwangtung. The infamous Wing Chun? From the Southern Shaolin Temple. Bruce Lee? Hong Konger. Jackie Chan? Hong Konger. Richest culture in the Dynasty Era? Tong Dynasty. Sun Yat-sen? Cantonese - Hakka. Many large parts of Chinese culture is all us Cantonese. But time after time, our credit has been stolen, our ancestor's work, blood and sweat has been stolen by the North and Mandarin in modern times. It's time for Cantonese to split from the North and stop living in the shadows of Mandarin and the North and finally show the world who the true Chinese are.

I don't know if Hou Hou's view is the same as mine, but the point of the current sets of characters of Cantonese was heavily influenced by Mandarin. We should re-design them in the shape and design without the influences of Mandarin, but with influences of Hong Kong (and Kwangtung).

Your use of the final particle really depends on the situation and mood. Otherwise, I think you should add the term 天氣 to indicate that it's the weather that you're talking about.

天氣凍咗 - It's getting cold
(Insert your own final particle)

Same thing for getting warm:
天氣熱咗

It's really quite simple. 幾 is perfect the way it is, so I never thought to change it. 嘅 serves an entirely different purpose, and based on that, I decided that it could be changed for the better. Why it is illogical, I have already explained pretty clearly here:

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By all means we can probably write 「𪚥」 as a sentence particle, while all it takes is to write "of" in English or 「の」 in Japanese.

Koreans have once changed their script, and so did Japan, Vietnam, all over Europe, etc. If Cantonese is to have one, then let's make a good one, and then present the finalized and polished product for the world to see. And in case anyone gets the wrong idea again, let me clarify that we would still be reading Chinese characters, not Arabic.

Up till here, this is the opinion of 1 person in this imaginary International Cantonese Association. I'm still waiting for the rest of the "council" to make their opinions heard. I do realize that if I go back to the Cantonese root words, people would doubt their authenticity. If I suggest new characters, then that's disrespecting Cantonese culture, and using existing characters that look like simplified variants of a Mandarin word would be no different from communist ideas. It's kind of sad to hear things like this from fellow Cantonese-mates, but regardless, I just hope that everyone keep an open mind about this.

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HouHou
Is there a reason for 漢 to be simplified as 汉, or 強 to be simplified into 强? In both cases I really don't see a reason to do so, and neither makes sense to me, but apparently Mandarin sees the need.

Mandarin doesn't see the need (Taiwan), the CCP sees the need.

I agree with Simon, one cannot forget about the arbitrariness of the way most characters have been chosen for centuries. All one can hope for is that the majority of people agree with the choice taken, which as shown with written Taiwanese is, unfortunately, very difficult. I support the talks about politics when it comes to discussion about Cantonese in these forums, because in Taiwan, despite Taiwanese being most peoples second language, people can, and do, write academic articles in written Taiwanese; whereas in HK, in which Cantonese is the mother tongue of the vast majority of the population, I don't think academics would even dream of doing such a thing, even if the government would allow it. If that is not the influence of politics, what else could it be?

I think a major step would be the widespread promotion of Jyutping in Hong Kong. I am not entirely sure of the current situation, but I think I remember reading a post saying most HKers don't use romanisation to input characters. If they did learn romanisation and input methods predicted characters for them, then it wouldn't matter what characters were chosen, people would soon get used to them.

thanks indiana!

I guess I was looking for a quick reference and you gave me one.

Please check!

It's getting cold (Eng): dung jo la 凍咗啦 (Cant). (or shoud you use 冷?)

Also, how do you say: it's getting warm?

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HouHou
But for a character that makes a sound to serve as a sentence modifier, that needs to be used in almost every sentence, I think it only makes sense for it to be logical, and looks are secondary. Simplifying a sentence particle that wasn't meant to be written the way it is now, isn't the same as simplifying 漢 into 汉 for the purpose of boosting literacy rates.

What do you mean by "wasn't meant to be written the way it is now"? That morpheme probably wasn't meant to be written at all, as when it appeared in speech, everyone was writing Literary Sintic. Chinese characters are largely arbitrary symbols tied to morphemes or sub-morphemic syllables according to some general, fuzzy guidelines. And I really don't get what's so illogical about 嘅.

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My point was never to boost literacy rate, at all. By all means we can probably write 「𪚥」 as a sentence particle, while all it takes is to write "of" in English or 「の」 in Japanese.

But 幾 is also a really common morpheme and it has huge amounts of strokes and takes ages to write. Why not simplify that, too? The only reason I can see is because you don't seem to consider the Cantonese characters, written by generations of Cantonese speakers for hundreds of years (and in my mind an important part of the Cantonese heritage), to be worth preserving, whilst for some reason the characters that Cantonese has in common with Mandarin are. From my perspective, the character 嘅 is every bit as respectable as 幾. The fact that it's only used in Cantonese doesn't matter. Both characters were invented arbitrarily (though following some general principles of character construction, no doubt) by someone a long time ago and has been adopted for use by lots of people since. I don't understand why the character 嘅 is so bad.

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Simon Pettersson
I don't care about for the purposes of this discussion. It's not important.

I think we're done here.

All I meant by that was that for the purposes of comparing your simplification scheme with that of the PRC, a value judgement is not neccessary. I only wanted to see what the differences are, that's all. I'm really interested in having a thorough discussion on this topic and I'm not trying to be unfriendly. I'm really getting something out of this, and I was hoping you were, too. I'm sorry if I come across as provoking you; it's really not my intention. In fact, I think that a lot of what you're saying is interesting and worthy of discussing.

Is there a reason for 漢 to be simplified as 汉, or 強 to be simplified into 强? In both cases I really don't see a reason to do so, and neither makes sense to me, but apparently Mandarin sees the need. Not that I actually care. But for a character that makes a sound to serve as a sentence modifier, that needs to be used in almost every sentence, I think it only makes sense for it to be logical, and looks are secondary. Simplifying a sentence particle that wasn't meant to be written the way it is now, isn't the same as simplifying 漢 into 汉 for the purpose of boosting literacy rates. My point was never to boost literacy rate, at all. By all means we can probably write 「𪚥」 as a sentence particle, while all it takes is to write "of" in English or 「の」 in Japanese.

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Simon Pettersson
I don't care about for the purposes of this discussion. It's not important.

I think we're done here.