"Let langauge develop itself" said Chang

出自香港新聞網 - 樹仁新傳系學生實習習作

--045026 林潔瑩 LIM, KIT YING 01:28 2006年十月4日 (UTC)

A Professor urged giving spaces for dialects to develop themselves instead of suppressing them.

Chang Song-hing., a professor of department of Chinese Language and Literature at Chinese University, said yesterday that no matter which languages or dialects used by the journalists, the main use of languages was to express, concerning there are voices opposing journalists using Cantonese to report lately.

Though he disagreed writing articles in spoken languages (Cantonese), he found it was interesting and shall be encouraged to write in spoken language if there was a selection process in languages.

“If there is a help to make the meaning of the words more accurate via the selection process, I do agree writing spoken language is an advantage,” he said.

Chang convinced that there was no such thing called “cheap” language.

“People always think dialect (Cantonese) is cheap and common language (Putonghua) is elegant. But we cannot rank language that way. Many Chinese poems were written by Cantonese while many novels were written by Northern Chinese. They both used their own dialects,” he said.

When asked how he thought about the words invented by the media, Chang emphasized there was a system of languages and dialects.

“The development of languages is free and should not be banned. Languages or dialects just develop and eliminate themselves during the process,” he explained.

He gave an example of “Dit Ja” (跌渣) which was once a popular platitude due to a famous TV show. “It was very popular at that time. Yet, people don’t say it anymore now. That’s the law of languages,” he stated.

“The point is not to restrain dialects from languages but to fuse both of them rationally because dialects can rich the common language’s insufficiency,” he retrieved.