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I tend to think of it as classical versus Vulgar Latin. I can write Cantonese phrases word for word (with a few Cantonese only characters) and mandarin only speakers won’t be able to understand it, or I can rephrase it into a “classical” way so that any literate Chinese person from any dialect can read it.

Just to clarify for future readers, "classical" here presumably does NOT mean Classical Chinese (文言文).

> There isn't really a similar way of doing this for French and Spanish. You can't just take a Spanish work, pronounce it using a French pronunciation, and then voila have a French work. It's not even entirely clear for all words what "pronouncing it with a French pronunciation" means.

I guess this is similar to how every written english word has a well defined spanish pronounciation as if it were written spanish. You wouldn't always get something intelligeble from an english listener's point of view, but by the rules of spanish pronounciation, many english words have similar pronounciation when read as spanish. I don't think I've ever heard a song do something like you described between these 2 languages, though, and I'm not sure how it could be made to sound good either.

The rather interesting features about this particular "embedding" is that it results in a written language that is intelligible for both Mandarin and Cantonese speakers and that it also happens quite frequently in certain settings. In fact, it even comes off as "correct." That is it's not as if you're reading broken Mandarin or broken Cantonese and are able to piece together the meaning, as a speaker of a parent language of a pidgin language might feel when reading the pidgin. It's a full-fledged language that reads entirely naturally to a Mandarin speaker and just feels "Mandarinized" but otherwise "correct" to a Cantonese speaker.

The Spanish-English example you give really only is a result of Spanish's regular correspondence between spelling and pronunciation (as far as my limited Spanish knowledge allows me to understand), that allows you to unambiguously pronounce most combinations of Latin letters. For example, there's a "Spanish pronunciation" of the Quecha written Latin script, but it's basically an unintelligible mess of sounds that violates a lot of Spanish sound rules. If you use some conventions to group letters together and settle on a single pronunciation of each of those groupings, you can do the same in English with any Latin letter combinations as well.

Generally speaking, pronouncing written English as Spanish results in something that neither Spanish speakers nor English speakers understand nor accept as part of their language. While there is a subset of vocabulary (most notably -ion words) that shares the same or similar spelling between the two languages, there isn't really a cohesive subset of the written language (that is imagine writing entire sentences and paragraphs) that can be shared.

Ah. I understand now. Man, that's cool for a song to do that!

Like you said, that's not really doable for spanish-english. There's words like "similar" which are written and pronounced the same in both languages, but there's not enough to write sentences.

How different languages interact is always cool :).

FWIW it's not just songs; standard Mandarin is usually the prestige dialect/language so anything that's perceived as being more "prestige" than an everyday conversation (e.g. things that are meant to be formal or official or whatever) tends to become Mandarinized among the different dialects/languages. Cantonese is a special example because of Hong Kong's own interesting social environment.

For most other dialects/languages in the PRC, speakers just switch directly to Mandarin where they might have used a "Mandarinized" part of the dialect/language. Hong Kong is one of the few places where Mandarin comprehension is still not near-universal and so instead of just having Mandarin pop songs, you end up with Mandarinized Cantonese pop songs.

In case you're interested in songs, this is a popular worship song that switches between Chinese and Taiwanese/Hokkien in different verses:

在呼召我之處 The Place Of Calling (國語+台語) - 約書亞樂團 Joshuaband https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31q8w6JpndA

On the topic of cultural crossover, I can also recommend inner Mongolian folk metal (traditional throat singing mixed with electric guitars is brilliant - 九大圣器 Nine Treasures, 杭盖乐队 Hanggai). For Taiwanese, check out 滅火器 Fire EX., 一步 One Step, 閃靈 ChthoniC).

There are some early Bible translators who took their source texts and translated them word-for-word into their target language, preserving even the word order of the source where it differed from the target.

> For example, Cantonese pop music is often written in Mandarin, but sung in Cantonese, which means that each Mandarin character has a proper Cantonese pronunciation.

I don't think that's quite correct. It is true that many older Cantonese pop songs were not written in Cantonese, but they were not written in Mandarin either; instead they were in what's called Written Vernacular Chinese (白話文)[1], which is based on a subset of Mandarin.

As an example of the top of my head, 咱們 is a very common word in spoken Mandarin, but it is never used in formal documents (written vernacular), and a Cantonese only speaker would have trouble pronouncing it.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_vernacular_Chinese

Oh man... there's a long way to go down this rabbit hole...

Maybe I've lost touch with the current Canto-pop scene, but I seem to recall quite a lot of modern-ish Canto-pop (late 2000s) being written in Mandarin.

白话文 is sort of ill-defined. It really just means "vernacular written language" as opposed to Classical Chinese (文言文). There is a Yue vernacular (粤语白话文), Wu vernacular (吴语白话文), etc. There is also a Mandarin vernacular (which is what 白话文 usually refers to by itself in Mandarin) that you can further specify as 官话白话文 (although that term is getting quite specialized and not every native speaker is necessarily going to have heard of that), but that is exactly what it sounds like, the semi-formal written Mandarin vernacular. This is exactly the same situation as standard written English. While this is a restriction of "English" in some sense (does this include regional-specific terms such as "yous?"), it still is more or less equivalent to what most people think of when they think of "English."

咱们 is common in Northern dialects of Mandarin, but used to be a pretty strong marker for a Northern Chinese speaker. That's changed somewhat over time due to broadcast media and the primacy of some Northern Chinese accents, but you're still not going to hear a ton of older Southern Chinese speakers use 咱们 when speaking Mandarin (and when I mean south I mean essentially anyone from Jiangsu/Zhejiang on down) even if they speak pitch-perfect Standard Mandarin. They almost exclusively use 我们 instead (which is also valid Standard Mandarin, everywhere you would use 咱们 you could also use 我们 although not vice versa).

I think this is the phenomenon you're picking up on, that a lot of Northern Chinese Mandarin terms don't show up in Southern Chinese Mandarin.

More broadly, I think what you're pointing out is that "Mandarin" is really itself a fuzzy category that starts falling apart when you poke a its seams, but really that's just the nature of language. "English" starts falling apart when you poke too hard at its particular words as well.

The central point about the embedding of Mandarin though is that it reads completely fluently to a Mandarin speaker. It's not a pidgin, it's not a situation where the Mandarin speaker can understand it in bits and pieces. It reads like anything a Mandarin speaker would have written.

I totally agree with you that all these terms are ill-defined and falls apart once you "poke at its seams" as you put it. I think my point was that 1) the formal written form across various regions have slowly converged into roughly the same form over the past century or so; and 2) this "formal written form" might be based on Mandarin, and reads like everyday modern, spoken Mandarin, but is not exactly 100% Mandarin.

For modern Cantopop, the recent putsch to match more closely to spoken Cantonese is due to an increasing dislike of Mandarin among the young in Hong Kong.

Ah, but therein lies the rub. What is "100% Mandarin?" :). Is it broadcast news Chinese? Which essentially is just the written vernacular standard just read out loud? Is it the Mandarin that a Northern shop-keeper uses to talk to (Chinese) out-of-towners? Is it the Mandarin that he uses among his friends? Is it the Mandarin that kids learn in public school curriculum? Once these questions start to be relevant, I'd say that it's all just "Mandarin" for the purposes of this discussion.

Ooo... that's interesting. I knew that there's been a rise in regional dialect pride in general and that Hong Kong in general has never really been too fond of the Mandarin-speaking Chinese tourist masses, but hadn't realized it'd spread to modern Canto-pop. Might have to take a gander at some of the latest songs.

Indeed I should have been more careful and said "100% Beijingese" or "100% Mandarin as spoken around Beijing" instead. :)

> There isn't really a similar way of doing this for French and Spanish. You can't just take a Spanish work, pronounce it using a French pronunciation, and then voila have a French work. It's not even entirely clear for all words what "pronouncing it with a French pronunciation" means.

Maybe Bokmål is similar in this regard? The Wikipedia page says it's "Norwegianized variety of Danish": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokmål

Caveat: My knowledge of Norwegian is approximately the level you would achieve with 5 hours of searching on the internet after being exposed to the Ylvisåker brothers and an armchair amateur's knowledge of Old English.

The whole story of how the various Scandinavian languages developed is actually quite interesting and has a lot of similarities to the situation among the different languages/dialects of Chinese. In particular similar questions of mutually intelligibility come up.

However, as I understand it, Bokmål in this particular case is not quite the same. It historically came from Danish, but now is a written standard for Norwegian that competes with Nynorsk (which is in itself a fascinating phenomenon; not many other languages have competing written standards). It's not really a current embedding of Danish into Norwegian so much as it is a written standard for Norwegian that historically developed from Danish.