- The books in question are written by pretty radical young revolutionaries.
Personally I am more concerned that libraries in Hong Kong seem to keep less and less books in the local version of Chinese and more books written in Simplified Chinese used in Mainland China.
It's like if you are in California and suddenly half of the books in your library are in Russian instead of English or Spanish.
I always thought that most books written with traditional script in Hong Kong would be written in Cantonese, while the simplified would be in mandarin. These are quite different languages.
There is no Cantonese script. It is traditional Chinese characters + low few hundreds (200-300) phonemes that are unique to Cantonese, which is mainly used for informal conversation.
If you publish a book, most likely it will be in the formal Chinese.
Not only a script but also the same written language - Standard Chinese, unless it was very colloquially written Cantonese. That's part of what's so fascinating about Chinese. There are so many dialects that are quite different when spoken, but share the same written language.
It's odd that you include Spanish since until recently the same argument was made about half the books in the library being in Spanish instead of English.
Maybe in other states, but the US purchased much of California from Mexico, so that population isn’t immigrant to that region, but native to it.
That historical basis—of there being (acquired) natural US citizens whose primary spoken language is Spanish—is one of the main reasons that Spanish is a national language. Spanish-language books aren’t at-all strange to see in (Southern) California libraries. They’re part of the region’s heritage, rather than a novelty.
That's.... only sort of true. California was actually almost depopulated at the time of US conquest. The Spanish (mostly via disease) had essentially wiped out the native population, and there was very little hispanic re-settlement of CA by 1846.
A lot of the remaining population was Native, which (shocker!) did not actually speak Spanish as a native language -- they spoke their own native languages. There was a Spanish mission system TRYING to "civilize" the remaining natives, but it was floundering by that time.
The actual real native languages (not Spanish) are gone, for all practical purposes. Arguing whether Spanish or English is the "native" language is sorta nonsensical, given that the Americans only showed up a hundred years after the (mostly failed) Mission system started teaching Spanish.
I don't want to get into a fight as to Spanish or English is a native language or whatever, but it's pretty deceptive to argue that most of the hispanic population in CA is leftover from the US conquest -- actually very little of it is, the vast majority is from immigration after 1846.
> given that the Americans only showed up a hundred years after the (mostly failed) Mission system started teaching Spanish
Much less than 100 years. Mission San Diego, founded 1769. Mission Delores (San Francisco), founded 1776. Yankees started showing up in the 1820s, purchasing land parcels from local cash-strapped rancheros with gold. And the Russians only sold-out Ft. Ross in northern California to John Sutter in 1841. By the time Mexico and the USA went to war in 1846, ostensibly because the Texas Republic joined the Union, the California English and Spanish speaking populations were about evenly split at 5,000 each. More English speaking in northern California, more Spanish speaking in southern.
Most of the So-Cal immigrants are straight from Mexico (in modern history) and not the native hold overs from Spanish conquest. The amount of Spanish speakers in California that can trace their ancestry to that period of time is incredibly small. California was pretty sparse and largely why the purchase was allowed. It wasn't seen as a valuable piece of territory and the Spanish never had much success there.
- Hong Kong's rule of law has disappeared;
- The books in question are written by pretty radical young revolutionaries.
Personally I am more concerned that libraries in Hong Kong seem to keep less and less books in the local version of Chinese and more books written in Simplified Chinese used in Mainland China.
It's like if you are in California and suddenly half of the books in your library are in Russian instead of English or Spanish.