THOSE CADENCES

By the end of the decade there will be two universal languages in Chinatown: Cantonese and Mandarin. And many of us will be more or less bilingual in both. Oh, and English, of course, but who needs English when you're not on phone hold, and you're trying to purchase fancy fried snackies from Big World Grocery Store? Or at a chachanteng looking with keen interest at the Chinese menu items. Wow, salted egg French toast (鹹蛋黃西多士 'haam daan wong sai do si'). Does that go well with hot milk tea? I think today is the day that we find out!

A speaker of Mandarin, if they grasped the concept, would call it "hsien dan hwang hsi dwo shi". French toast is strictly southern, and you likely will not find it north of the passes. Unless there is a Harbour person lost somewhere in Black Dragon River. Who thinks that a fried heart attack on a plate is perfect to soften that beastly climate.

What I'm getting at, more or less, is that languages such as Chuen Waa (村話、中山閩語 'jung saan man yü'), Hakka, Hailokhong (海陸豐話), Shanghainese, Teochew, and several village versions other than Toisan are largely fading.

That does not mean that I could understand what the heck the coupl near me were saying yesterday, though. It was some version of Cantonese with some mighty peculiar locutions. One word out of five intelligible.

In the last year alone, at a bakery as well as a dumpling house, I've heard people speaking multiple European languages, South East Asian languages, Hindi and Nepali, and several varieties of Chinese. Even Dutch. Plus some Scandinavian fish-daemon tongues.
Spanish, Russian, and everything Middle Eastern.

No, I've rarely spoken to them. Most of those languages are not within my skill-set. And what would I say in any case? "Hi, where are you visiting from (pretending I can't guess)? Do you like Chinese food (or just sweet 'n sour pork and eggrolls)? Are you here long (or just one day after seeing Yellow Stone, Yosemite, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles)?"
Severely strained small talk isn't part of my skill-set either.

But I do like listening in.
It's more interesting.



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