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Yeah and so do Russian and Polish, German and Dutch, Italian and Spanish. All of these language pairs have mapping rules, which can predict to a high degree of accuracy what a word will be in one language if you know it in the other.
Yes. However you did not mention it.
There is no definition of a "language" so we just need to follow conventions.
My Mum is Sngaporean Chinese and like many other Chinese insists that Cantonese is a dialect, I then ask her if she can understand Shanghainese which is also considered a dialect and she says no, she actually thought it was Korean the first time she heard it haha. The concept of Chinese dialects is a cultural one rather than a strict definition on linguistic merit.
Mandarin and Cantonese while somewhat related are still mutually unintelligible for native speakers who have little exposure to the other language, they are obviously separate languages on a linguistic level. If they're not I suppose we should consider reclassifying German, Dutch and Frisian as dialects of English.
My Mum is Sngaporean Chinese and like many other Chinese insists that Cantonese is a dialect, I then ask her if she can understand Shanghainese which is also considered a dialect and she says no, she actually thought it was Korean the first time she heard it haha. The concept of Chinese dialects is a cultural one rather than a strict definition on linguistic merit.
Mandarin and Cantonese while somewhat related are still mutually unintelligible for native speakers who have little exposure to the other language, they are obviously separate languages on a linguistic level. If they're not I suppose we should consider reclassifying German, Dutch and Frisian as dialects of English.
Europeans say Dutch and German are different languages for political reasons, so we Chinese must follow their ideas? I think not. China has a much longer (unified) civilization anyway.
Europeans say Dutch and German are different languages for political reasons, so we Chinese must follow their ideas? I think not. China has a much longer (unified) civilization anyway.
In the case of Dutch and German they sit close to opposite ends of a historical dialectal continuum when you consider their standardised varieties, which are not easily understood by the unacquainted speaker.
There's probably a bit of a grey area in defining the difference between a language and a dialect, but it's clear that Cantonese and Mandarin are separate languages in a linguistic sense. This reality is independent of China's political/cultural unity for however many centuries and the implied similarity of Chinese dialects are similarly overstated for political reasons.
It's ridiculous calling Cantonese another language rather than a dialect of Mandarin.. the writing is the same.. the grammar is similar with a few differences.
Writing has nothing to do with it. Neither language has a "written" form that represents the particular language. Chinese characters are ideographs, which mean the same thing to all readers, regardless of the spoken language that they speak.
A Mandarin speaker and a Cantonese speaker can both read the same newspaper with full comprehension. But neither of them would understand a single word of what the other said if he were reading it out loud.
Grammar tends to be very similar in all languages within an origin group, and all Romance languages have very similar grammar. Yet the languages are completely different, and nobody calls them dialects of Latin..
Writing has nothing to do with it. Neither language has a "written" form that represents the particular language. Chinese characters are ideographs, which mean the same thing to all readers, regardless of the spoken language that they speak.
A Mandarin speaker and a Cantonese speaker can both read the same newspaper with full comprehension. But neither of them would understand a single word of what the other said if he were reading it out loud.
Grammar tends to be very similar in all languages within an origin group, and all Romance languages have very similar grammar. Yet the languages are completely different, and nobody calls them dialects of Latin..
Speakers of standard German (Hochdeutsch) cannot understand Swiss German either. However we still call it Swiss German.
I don't mind if one wants to call Mandarin and Cantonese different languages. The definition is not clear anyway.
However, many seem to ignore the fact that both languages/dialects have exactly the same vocabulary in arts, science, technology, and formal literature. Spanish and Italian do not.
Some colloquial Cantonese words are not used in Mandarin, but are comprehensible. For example, "to eat" is 食 in Cantonese, while in Mandarin 食 usually means "food" and can be used as a verb only in old idioms. However, it'll be naive to assume Mandarin speakers do not understand it when it is used as a verb.
In southeast China, often times residents of neighboring towns do not fully understand each other. It will be stupid to say there are 1000 languages in Fujian or 2000 languages in Zhejiang.
Writing has nothing to do with it. Neither language has a "written" form that represents the particular language. Chinese characters are ideographs, which mean the same thing to all readers, regardless of the spoken language that they speak.
Not completely true.
A Chinese character has only one pronunciation in a given dialect (sometimes two or more pronunciations, but rare), and has a more or less fixed meaning.
People from different parts of China can still tell if their words are supposed to share "the same characters" or not.
For example, in colloquial Cantonese, the word for "he/she" is 佢. Everyone knows it is not the same as 他 in Mandarin, because the sound is too off. Cantonese has 他 too, and the pronunciation is almost the same as in Mandarin.
佢 is found in some Chinese literature and is often written as 渠. It may be related to 其, a commonly used word in classic Chinese. Mandarin speakers with good education can figure it out.
Not completely true.
A Chinese character has only one pronunciation in a given dialect (sometimes two or more pronunciations, but rare), and has a more or less fixed meaning.
People from different parts of China can still tell if their words are supposed to share "the same characters" or not.
For example, in colloquial Cantonese, the word for "he/she" is 佢. Everyone knows it is not the same as 他 in Mandarin, because the sound is too off. Cantonese has 他 too, and the pronunciation is almost the same as in Mandarin.
佢 is found in some Chinese literature and is often written as 渠. It may be related to 其, a commonly used word in classic Chinese. Mandarin speakers with good education can figure it out.
Yea, I speak Hokkien (and a touch of a few other dialects) and there is a substantial body of both words and idioms which are commonly used but have somewhat different roots than Mandarin Chinese. The way things are phrased is often quite a bit different and it's funny when you hear old timers who speak Hokkien natively try to speak Mandarin to their often Hokkien-disabled grandkids via direct word-by-word translations of their sentences. The sort of bad thing though is that there's been quite a bit of backwash from Mandarin into Hokkien now where those who aren't comfortable with the latter but are still able to speak it then bring in words, idioms and structures from Mandarin and drastically change the way Hokkien is spoken and this has been increasingly obvious. It is better than just having the language die and become a relict though.
And yea, I agree with the premise that calling Cantonese and many other highly divergent branches of the Chinese spoken language as dialects makes little sense given that relatively strong diversity of features it exhibits compared to many other languages within the same language family that are considered separate.
Writing has nothing to do with it. Neither language has a "written" form that represents the particular language. Chinese characters are ideographs, which mean the same thing to all readers, regardless of the spoken language that they speak.
A Mandarin speaker and a Cantonese speaker can both read the same newspaper with full comprehension. But neither of them would understand a single word of what the other said if he were reading it out loud.
Grammar tends to be very similar in all languages within an origin group, and all Romance languages have very similar grammar. Yet the languages are completely different, and nobody calls them dialects of Latin..
Exactly. Korean and Japanese also use some Chinese characters, as did Vietnamese and Manchu, but they're not related at all. English could be written using Chinese characters which each character assigned an English word. Thus, a person could 'read' a Chinese newspaper in English.
They're separate languages, I think it should go without saying.
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