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More like Gaelic or Welsh vs. American English, honestly. Cantonese is significantly different from Mandarin. If it was literally just a regional dialect/accent, no one would care.
Its probably a little closer than Welsh vs american english, but the difference between cantonese and mandarin, there is still some overlap, i would say maybe 30% of the words sounds similar but is spoken differently. When i hear some of my friends speak their dialect that i dont know, i can still understand maybe 20-30% of the words, but i wont be able to speak it.
I agree that it is not just the accents,
Even among the descendants of the various Yue groups, their substrate languages are so varied that they could hardly understand each other today. I take it that Accord2008 is a Cantonese-speaker, can he understand Minnan / Fujian. The video below has Mandarin subtitles, and the singer is from Taiwan.
Per Wikipedia, "Yue or Baiyue were various ethnic groups who inhabited the regions of Southern China and Northern Vietnam during the 1st millennium BC and 1st millennium AD."
Britanica version - "Yue, Wade-Giles romanization Yüeh, aboriginal people of South China who in the 5th–4th century bce formed a powerful kingdom in present-day Zhejiang and Fujian provinces. The name Vietnam means “south of the Yue,” and some Chinese scholars consider the Vietnamese to be descendants of the Yue."
Minnan/Hokkien is the language group geographically next to the Yue. Both are mutually unintelligible to each other. There are many Hokkien living here in Boston and in New York and while they can physically resemble the Cantonese (light brown-yellow skin, shorter height), Cantonese speakers like myself have no idea what they're saying. And yes even among the various Cantonese subgroups, they are mutually unintelligible. A once common form of Cantonese here in North America was Toisanese (Taishanese) originating in a region called Seih Yap (Si Yi in Mandarin) on the western side of the Pearl River Delta. The Chinese that built the railroads here in the 19th century (Union Pacific, Canadian Pacific, etc.) spoke Toisanese for the most part and Toisanese was once the dominant language in San Francisco's Chinatown and many other Chinatowns. Gradually though, Toisanese faded and gave way to Standard Cantonese, the form spoken as a first language in Guangzhou and later Hong Kong but also retained as a second language by many Guangdong residents as a whole. I cannot understand Toisanese and even have a hard time hearing the thick accents of recently arrived Toisanese speakers, that's how unintelligible each language can be. Don't be fooled by anyone who thinks or says that Mandarin is the same all around either. What is commonly referred to as Mandarin is Standard Mandarin based mostly on the Beijing dialect. I once knew an individual from Shandong Province in north central China. She spoke clear and understandable Standard Mandarin and I could understand perhaps 2/3rds-3/4ths of what she said. Her little daughter on the other hand pretty much spoke in Shandongnese dialect and all I could make of it was incoherent babble.
Another good analogy perhaps is comparing Cantonese Chinese to Quebecois French. I was told that Quebecois French derived from what was spoken in medieval and renaissance era France and did not change much due to geographic separation. Likewise Cantonese Chinese much more resembles the Chinese spoken and written during the Tang and Song Dynasties. In fact, read Li Bai's poetry and one can pick out many words still in use in Cantonese today but have since fallen obsolete in Mandarin. Strangely enough, for centuries, Northern Chinese looked down on their southern brethren as yokels who tilled rice fields while they wrote and recited poetry and built stately palaces. It has much changed now of course but for a while to the emperors and their officials, Southern China remained that exotic land with strange customs and languages but good food and warm weather. The sheer distance between Southern China and Beijing, which was the capital for much of China's history, meant that language groups like the Yue could be well preserved with less modern influence.
More like Gaelic or Welsh vs. American English, honestly. Cantonese is significantly different from Mandarin. If it was literally just a regional dialect/accent, no one would care.
No. Celtic languages and English are not in the same language family but Cantonese and Mandarin are. It's more like German and English.
Another good analogy perhaps is comparing Cantonese Chinese to Quebecois French. I was told that Quebecois French derived from what was spoken in medieval and renaissance era France and did not change much due to geographic separation. Likewise Cantonese Chinese much more resembles the Chinese spoken and written during the Tang and Song Dynasties. In fact, read Li Bai's poetry and one can pick out many words still in use in Cantonese today but have since fallen obsolete in Mandarin. Strangely enough, for centuries, Northern Chinese looked down on their southern brethren as yokels who tilled rice fields while they wrote and recited poetry and built stately palaces. It has much changed now of course but for a while to the emperors and their officials, Southern China remained that exotic land with strange customs and languages but good food and warm weather. The sheer distance between Southern China and Beijing, which was the capital for much of China's history, meant that language groups like the Yue could be well preserved with less modern influence.
It's not like Quebecois French and metropolitan French at all. All variants of French dialects are mutually intelligible. Cantonese and Mandarin are 100% mutually unintelligible. Mandarin speakers don't understand a sentence of Cantonese.
It's not like Quebecois French and metropolitan French at all. All variants of French dialects are mutually intelligible. Cantonese and Mandarin are 100% mutually unintelligible. Mandarin speakers don't understand a sentence of Cantonese.
That was not my point if you read my post carefully. I was comparing the historical linguistic differences of both languages. Still, if you read up on this thread from the Montreal Forum, you will find that you are not entirely correct in your assessment of the French language https://www.city-data.com/forum/mont...-french-2.html. Read especially the second post on Page 2 by poster Barney G in which he explains that younger kids growing up with standard French these days can only understand half of what traditional Quebecois French says. So yes, French variants are more mutually intelligible but no, they are not fully mutually intelligible and you cannot just assume the speaker of one can carry on a conversation with a speaker of the other and not run into difficulties.
No. Celtic languages and English are not in the same language family but Cantonese and Mandarin are. It's more like German and English.
Irish and English both belong to the Indo-European family of languages as do French, German, Spanish Portuguese, Russian, Farsi, Urdu and Hindi. Cantonese and Mandarin belong to the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. I sincerely wish that you do better research before making wrong assumptions about languages.
That was not my point if you read my post carefully. I was comparing the historical linguistic differences of both languages. Still, if you read up on this thread from the Montreal Forum, you will find that you are not entirely correct in your assessment of the French language https://www.city-data.com/forum/mont...-french-2.html. Read especially the second post on Page 2 by poster Barney G in which he explains that younger kids growing up with standard French these days can only understand half of what traditional Quebecois French says. So yes, French variants are more mutually intelligible but no, they are not fully mutually intelligible and you cannot just assume the speaker of one can carry on a conversation with a speaker of the other and not run into difficulties.
They ARE mutually intelligible. I speak French.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Urban Peasant
Irish and English both belong to the Indo-European family of languages as do French, German, Spanish Portuguese, Russian, Farsi, Urdu and Hindi. Cantonese and Mandarin belong to the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. I sincerely wish that you do better research before making wrong assumptions about languages.
Indo-European is much larger and expansive than Sino-Tibetan. Irish is a Celtic language. English and German are Germanic languages. Mandarin and Cantonese are Sinitic languages. Mandarin and Cantonese are more comparable to English and German.
Actually according to Wikipedia, Cantonese is the 9th most spoken language in the world in terms of number of native speakers. It is going to be very difficult to completely erase Cantonese, but I think pure Cantonese speakers will continue to be marginalised in business uses or in commerce by multi-national conglomerates in Hong Kong.
Big 3 Chinese languages:
1st - Mandarin Chinese (incl. Standard Chinese, but excl. other varieties): about 939 million native speakers
9th - Yue Chinese (incl. Cantonese): about 86.1 million native speakers
12th - Wu Chinese (incl. Shanghainese): about 83.4 million native speakers
Indo-European is much larger and expansive than Sino-Tibetan. Irish is a Celtic language. English and German are Germanic languages. Mandarin and Cantonese are Sinitic languages. Mandarin and Cantonese are more comparable to English and German.
Hey, it's great that you can carry on a conversation with anyone from the French diaspora but that doesn't mean everyone else could. You either didn't the posts from the other thread or think that the guy who wrote that comment is a provincial idiot who doesn't have a complete grasp of the language. And yes I am aware that the Indo-European language family is much bigger. You don't have to come off as a rude know-it-all y'know.
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