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Comment by ncmncm | Hacker News Reader

Primarily Mandarin speakers I have known were taught, and believed, that the "dialects" were basically the same as Mandarin, just with different pronunciation.

They sincerely believed that when (e.g.) Cantonese speakers read and wrote, they were not wholesale translating from and to Mandarin, but simply, when writing, transcribing Cantonese using the universal ideographic calligraphy.

In fact, writing in dialect languages is not taught. The extremely elaborate system dictating which of usually several, often many syllabary characters that sound identical must be used in writing a word in Mandarin (very commonly mistaken for ideographic writing) cannot work for the other sinitic languages.

(Sinitic languages admit about 1200 distinct syllables, but the syllabary writing system uses many times that number, so many necessarily sound alike. Mandarin speakers are taught that the characters are not merely syllables with attached historical rules, but ideograms that represent distinct thoughts. (Numerous just-so examples are used to support the notion.) This has often led to belief that ancient documents using the characters could be read and understood without deep knowledge of the actual language and world of the writer, resulting in, at best, comical translations.)

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I'm a native Mandarin speaker. I don't know why you need to stress "taught" or "believe" so much. I'm not taught by anyone, nor believe that dialects are mostly similar. I experienced it. Most dialects, Cantonese included, use the same Chinese character system. In writing, we would use either simplified or traditional character sets. Note I'm only talking about modern communication.

> could be read and understood without deep knowledge of the actual language and world of the writer, resulting in, at best, comical translations

I don't know who you are talking about. I wouldn't say that at all. Chinese students would spent 1/3 of their high school studying complex ancient Chinese languages (文言文). Nobody would say it's not deep knowledge - it's so damn hard.

While the Sinitic languages are similar, they definitely have distinctions not only in pronunciations but also in grammar and vocabulary, even if you do approximate the writing using Mandarinized characters.

Just as an example, the placement of adjectives in Cantonese vs Mandarin differs. Consider the sentence "I eat first":

- Mandarin: 我[subj] 先[adv] 吃[v]。

- Cantonese: 我[subj] 食[v, Cantonese equivalent of 吃] 先[adv]。

Another example is that some terms that exist in one Sinitic language simply do not exist in another one, e.g. the word for "good night" in Mandarin is 晚安, but there is simply no way to say this at all in Wu (e.g. Shanghainese, Suzhounese) Chinese!

I find that a lot of Mandarin speakers aren't aware of this due to the extensive Mandarinization of Sinitic languages as a whole, and there are a lot of distinctions between a lot of them (e.g. Min Chinese is a lot more closer to Old Chinese and preserves a lot of its traits compared to Mandarin), and perhaps this is a testament to the point the article makes.

> the word for "good night" in Mandarin is 晚安, but there is simply no way to say this at all in Wu (e.g. Shanghainese, Suzhounese) Chinese!

This example is weak because "晚安" is not a built-in in Mandarin, it's a translation word (loanword tried to express in Chinese characters)[1].

We should ignore those loanwords when comparing different terms in Chinese dialects.

[1]: http://www.wenqujingdian.com/Public/editor/attached/file/3/0...

I think the point still stands, right? The word was only loaned into the Mandarin lexicon and doesn't exist in the Wu lexicon: not even as a loanword from Mandarin.

> Most dialects, Cantonese included, use the same Chinese character system.

I don’t think GP is arguing about this. The question is about whether they use the same sounds, whether they have the same grammar, and whether people from different dialects can understand each other without special training. Even though Cantonese uses the same character set as other dialects, my understanding is that you can’t just transcribe Cantonese word-by-word onto a page without it becoming unintelligible to a speaker of other dialects — all of which implies that the ‘dialects’ are actually separate languages.

As a mandarin speaker (not from northern China though), I feel that the OP's anecdotes seem a bit extreme and appeared to imply ignorance in most speakers. Anecdotally I know none to few people who would claim that dialects can be written and then read back in another dialect. It also would strike me and all the mandarin speakers I know as fairly obvious that most dialects don't even have well-defined characters to use. Rather, written Cantonese (or Shanghainese etc.) often use characters for phonetic purposes rather than true etymological meaning (e.g., 海-sea is pronounced "hai" in many dialects, and 嗨 with a 口-mouth character hints that this is now a sound word to represent the "hai" sound, and no longer has any relation to the ocean). And that is if the dialect mainstream enough to actually have a writing convention. A lack of popular non-mandarin convention today is tough, hence the dominance of written mandarin grammar, to the extent that a lot of Cantonese news programs will actually provide captions in written mandarin.

> Rather, written Cantonese (or Shanghainese etc.) often use characters for phonetic purposes rather than true etymological meaning

This is where the mistake is. Written Chinese does have all those characters - it is the adoption of a "standard Chinese" that caused those characters not to be taught when mass education was introduced. The people were left to transliterate or create new characters for their spoken native tongue, and the correct characters are now known only to researchers.

One very annoying part of Mandarin's effect on modern Chinese is that many words are being replaced by transliterations of/in Mandarin, even when the Chinese word itself exists. Often this is because the source of the word was foreign. To a non-Mandarin speaker, written Chinese is very slowly turning into complete nonsense, and written Chinese is losing its edge in longevity by no longer being a ideograph-based language.

Chinese was never an ideograph based language to begin with. Yes, most characters have that somewhere in their origin, but there's so much corruption, change of meaning and borrowing of sound going on all through history that you really don't get anywhere using ideographs.

Example in Mandarin: 我不知道 : I don't know. But in ideographs: weapon flower root arrow mouth foot head.

It has been a very, very long time since written Chinese was a substantially ideograph-based language.

It is amazing how many literate Chinese people think of it as one.

That's merely refuting the least relevant part.

The ideographs were important in that they could tie together vastly different spoken languages in the same family. Because the writing was unified, all the spoken variants had their own influence on it by way of traders and administrators, and successful changes by proxy affected the speech of other regions. This meant that all the different places effectively evolved their languages around a virtual core based on the communications of the literate class - even the phonetic-based parts; and they could do it peacefully and continuously, constantly realigning their definitions without legal or violent coercion, uninterrupted by the constant evolution of the whole group of spoken languages.

For example, French has had a great influence on English, and they both use the Latin alphabet. Would such influence have been possible in the same time without violent conquest, given the alphabetic system of writing?

Do you have any literature backing this up? It all sounds like pseudoscience to me, but I could be wrong.

> written Cantonese (or Shanghainese etc.) often use characters for phonetic purposes rather than true etymological meaning

This is the case for all Chinese writing, and has been for a very long time. But complicated rules for which character may be used to spell which Mandarin word obscure the fact.

It's the case for about 80% of characters by my very unscientific estimate -- there are of course some logograms and ideographs left even if the meanings have also shifted. But the difference (and maybe one awkward part) in written non-Mandarin today is the flagrant use of 口 + similar sounding word with zero meaning, just as foreign words are sometimes imported for pure sound reasons. Chinese is far from a pure language, but I'd argue that whatever "rules" that created 清，情，晴 are better attempts at capturing both sound and meaning.

I'm in Hong Kong (majority Cantonese), my wife cant for her life help me navigate taobao in Mandarin, even when she transcribes the simplified into traditional without getting annoyed and frustrated.

So while it's not totally unintelligle to her, because it's sort of similar, I think for her to read mandarin is like for me, French, to read Spanish. I can grasp it, it's sort of the same thing, but there are so many little details in divergence it takes me ages just to get a grasp of what it's saying.

I wouldnt dare call Spanish or French a dialect of Italian and I think it's weird to call Cantonese a dialect of Mandarin just like saying humans descendend from modern monkeys: these things are trees with common ancestors but also diverging influences that make them break away further from each other.

I think americans exagerate the oppressive nature of language teaching in China since the guy you replied to has a point: they experience it and they very well must see it's not 1:1 sound transcription.

Just the fact Mandarin has four tones and Cantonese has between six and nine depending on the location is enough for me to fall on the "separate languages" side of the opinion.

Cantonese is not a dialect of Mandarin, rather it is a dialect of Chinese. The fact is that Cantonese is close to classical written Chinese than northern dialects. The writing system was unified thousands years go, but not the spoken language. A classic text written by a Cantonese a thousand years ago could be understandable by someone in Beijing that time. Mandarin was created afterwards and was mainly based on northern dialects.

The difference is that traditional written language was very formal, and far from spoken language. Now whatever written online are very close to spoken language. I wouldn't understand many words the kids in my city use.

Then would you say French and Italian are dialects of Latin - clearly derived bastardized version for a Latin person at the time, same writing ?

Or would you say French and Italian are dialect of "Westernese", the same imaginary concept as "Chinese" would be as a language ?

I don't really know what's the right boundary between dialect and language. I know I use it in a French context when I want to speak of the peasant's language in my region which has no literature, doesn't expand beyond the villages in Normandy, cannot be written and has a grammar that can fluctuate between villages. Then I call that a dialect because I would discourage someone from using it too much lol

What's your definition ? Should we say French is a dialect of Latin if Canto is a dialect of "Chinese" ? And what value would it have, since the Latin world is as divided as the "Chinese" one, politically or linguistically ?

Interestingly, I think French people are a bit more "proud" or happy about the Latin link than Hong Kong people are about the Chinese link. At least, each time we discuss the subject, they get mad fast about how their language (and broader "culture" whatever they think that means) is being a little bit dismissed by the mainland to the profit of a more efficient lingua franca they feel loses some features they like (the butchered simplified writing is to them an anathema). I think they overestimate the value of keeping a culture/language and underestimate the benefit of unity but... touchy subject to say the least :D

"Dialect" normally requires substantial mutual intelligibility. In English we have a Scots dialect with many unique words (many fallen out of common English, but preserved in Scots), that could become a distinct language with a little encouragement and time, but probably won't. American and British English are mutually intelligible dialects with variant pronunciation and small variations in spelling and vocabulary. English and Dutch sound similar, but have little vocabulary in common. Romanian and Portuguese, likewise. Romanian went through a recent scrubbing make it more like Latin.

The Romance languages all started out as local dialects of Latin. After casting loose they have evolved mostly independently, and lost inter-intelligibility. But idioms often cross over, with constituent words substituted literally.

> I think French people are a bit more "proud" or happy about the Latin link than Hong Kong people are about the Chinese link

A little bit off-topic, but I'm curious: do HK people proud or happy about their UK link?

Well it changed the last 7 years. When I arrived, they didnt care and I was surprised they vehemently told me "we're Chinese through and through we just dont like the communists", fast forward 7 years, I m married to a local etc, she's religiously renewing her British National Overseas passport, like most people who are eligible, talk now of the "mainlanders" as the problem more than the communists, and 2 years ago the British flag was flying higher than the red flag...

As a french it annoys me you can imagine so Im not neutral on the subject, but I d say this Britsh link expanded. China managed to make the HK people regress by their mismanagement of the Taiwan murder issue (which turned into insane anti extraditions protests - how the hell did they screw up that much) and I lost many friends and colleagues to the anglosphere (many moved to Canada and US, some UK but life isnt as good there). I hear them say it was better with the UK, forgetting a bit their grandma sleeping on the streets of Sham Shui Po during the worst of the colonial era... but it was probably also the communists' fault if so many left Canton at that time.

Could also be me integrating deeper and seeing the issue as it always was, so take my comment with a grain of salt :D

Oh and linguistically, they're surprisingly less fluent than Singapore weirdly, and there are large pockets of HK where it's impossible to use English (usually poorer parts or more mainland populated) so it's very much a political link, not a love or influence of English as a language itself, unlike Latin in France where random grassroot people would fight against grammar reform to keep the Latin influence even if it's irrational, confusing or hard to write.

There's a saying that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. What people choose to call the communications of a specific language community is often a very political thing.

> I'm not taught by anyone, nor believe that dialects are mostly similar. I experienced it. Most dialects, Cantonese included, use the same Chinese character system. In writing, we would use either simplified or traditional character sets.

Yes, that's true in writing. But it's only true because there are only written forms of Classical Chinese, Modern Vernacular Mandarin and Modern Vernacular Cantonese and the last one is only really used for newscasting and court reporting. Everyone who reads and writs Chinese is thinking in Manadarin, even if they can't speak it. The different Sinitic topolects are as divergent as the Romance languages or the Arabic "dialects". They're mutually unintelligible. FuSha or Modern Standard Arabic, is a foreign language to basically every Arabic speaker, as Latin is to Romance language speakers or Mandarin is to the 60% of Sinitic language speakers who don't speak Mandarin at home.

I say "taught" and "believe" because these things are not, in fact, true.

Yes, Cantonese speakers write using the same syllabary, but they are not (with occasional exceptions) writing Cantonese, but Mandarin, translating to it as they go.

I assume you are aware that there are millions of people in Hong Kong who can't speak Mandarin, correct?

How exactly are these people "translating as they go" when many have a total lack of any mandarin?

They don't speak it, but they read and write it.

> Most dialects, Cantonese included, use the same Chinese character system.

It depends a bit on what you mean by "the same". The sentence "佢唔喺呢度。" clearly uses Chinese characters, but none of them appears in the translation "他不在這裏。"

This demonstrate an lack of understanding of Chinese writing. Everything in "佢唔喺呢度" are used as phonetics in an informal setting, the same way that Pinyin work. Meanwhile "他不在這裏" are the written formal version used universally.

The pronunciation between various Chinese dialects are very different, often not mutually intelligible. The written form however is universal. Obviously, you can't use pinyin to spell out Cantonese (as pinyin is a phonetic representation of Mandarin) so that's why cantonese gets represented phonetically like "佢唔喺呢度".

There were talks about using pinyin (i.e. latin script) to replace written characters a couple decades back, they weren't that popular and was not carried out. Vietnam is an example that did.

他不在這裏 is a Mandarin sentence, and Mandarin is taught as the universal common language in China. If Cantonese had been chosen as the standard (which was a possibility in the early 20th century), then you'd be saying that 他不在這裏 is informal and 佢唔喺呢度 is the "universal" written form.

I'm a Cantonese native speaker and this is it.

The idea that "written Chinese" just happens to be identical to written Mandarin whereas written Cantonese is also the same and we actually translate our spoken words into a different written form is just historical revisionism and linguistic chauvinism.

The plain reality is that modern written Chinese is the way it is because the CCP standardized Mandarin as the national dialect.

Mandarin or this kind of standardized written Chinese was formalized by a National Commission and chosen during the Republic of China era, this is the document from 1932 now digitally stored in the archives of Taiwan, see: https://taiwanebook.ncl.edu.tw/zh-tw/book/NCCULIB-9900012902...

Even without the CCP, Mandarin would have become the national dialect and dominated Chinese speech, etc. The CCP merely continued on the work because it was so useful and the easiest route to go as there had been so much work done and a system put in place by the previous regime.

EDIT: https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/sites.gatech.edu/dist/d/987/fi...

^this link loaded better, its the same document, seems to be from Georgia Tech.

For non-Chinese readers, the document says that the dialect from Beiping (aka Beijing) should be adopted as the standard and then lists rules on pronunciation, how to pronunce using a Latin-based script, etc.

I don’t follow. Written Chinese predates the CCP by a very long time.

More specifically, 他不在這裏 is a phrase that I could imagine being used in official written text in past dynasties. But 佢唔喺呢度 does not.

> 他不在這裏 is a phrase that I could imagine being used in official written text in past dynastie

In informal correspondence, imperial officials may have written things like this, because modern Standard Mandarin is based in part on 官话, the "court dialect" [1]. But any official text would almost certainly have been written in Classical Chinese.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_(late_imperial_lingua...

Thanks, I’m not too knowledgeable on this subject, but given that the phrase 他不在這裏 can be understood entirely by looking up the definitions of the individual characters (which I don’t think have changed much over time), but not so for 佢唔喺呢度, it seems like your original assertion is false, and the root problem is Cantonese just differs too much from traditional written Chinese.

You would not interpret the Mandarin sentence correctly if you just looked up each character in a Classical Chinese dictionary. 他 was not a pronoun in Classical Chinese, but rather meant “other.” 這 was the verb “to meet.”

If you look it up character by character in a Mandarin dictionary, you can interpret it. And if you look up the Cantonese sentence character by character in a Cantonese dictionary, you can interpret it.

I'm not sure I understand, could you confirm/object to this?: - The Chinese characters have no fixed meaning, but they do have fixed pronunciation, so 佢唔喺呢度 sounds like spoken Cantonese when any Chinese pronounces it, but the meaning can only be understood by Cantonese? - The government declared the Mandarin meaning to be the only meaning of the Chinese characters?

> The Chinese characters have no fixed meaning, but they do have fixed pronunciation

No, neither pronunciation nor meaning are fixed, and phonetic drift in general is faster than semantic drift, i.e. people from different parts of China are more likely to ascribe different pronunciations to the same character than different meanings, although the latter is not uncommon. Canjobear above gave two examples where the Mandarin meaning has changed relative to the Classical Chinese meaning.

When people want to write something for which they don't know a character (either because none has ever been defined or they just haven't learned it or the pronunciation differs based on context and they feel this should be reflected by using different characters) they can create a new one based on whatever makes sense to them. The character 佢 was chosen because the word sounds similar to that written 巨 in Cantonese. Nowadays so many more people are literate in Mandarin that they're likely to substitute a character whose pronunciation in Mandarin is similar to what they want to write.

To elaborate, there's formal written Chinese (which is close but not identical to spoken Mandarin) and then there's written Cantonese (or other dialects), which is writing the characters as they would be spoken verbatim.

Written Chinese is used for anything official or formal, written Cantonese is often used online informally (like using text/SMS language in English)

> "他不在這裏" are the written formal version used universally.

You could also say "他不在這兒。" or "他非在此處。" and they're written differently because they're pronounced differently. It stands to reason that if someone has a fourth way of saying the same thing with different words, they might also want to write it differently.

A mature language can express one thing with many different styles. Finding many ways to say the same thing don't means you find many unintelligible languages.

Australian say "G'day" rather than "Hello", does the difference of greeting makes Australian-English a standalone language?

Besides, you didn't refute his main idea: phonetic symbol is not equivalent to formal writing.

Cantonese and Mandarin are not mutually intelligible.

Australian English and American English and British English are mutually intelligible.

You might as well be claiming that Old English and modern English are the same language.

Cantonese has different styles and registers, both formal and informal, within itself. 他不在這裏 is Mandarin; it is not a grammatical sentence in Cantonese.

Not only that, but every one of the characters in 佢唔喺呢度 can be properly written as 其無在爾道. Just because people have decided to write phonetically (even transparently with the 口 radical construction) doesn't say anything about the commonality of the written form of Chinese which from its inception was already multilingual.

No, 爾 is not cognate to Cantonese 呢 meaning "this" (which is different from Mandarin 呢, a sentence particle, which might be related to 爾).

> 其無在爾道

I don't speak Cantonese, but I know this means "He's not seen (your way) here" because those characters mean that.

Which reinforce my point.

Except 呢 means "this", not "you", so you fooled yourself into believing you could understand something which you did not.

The earliest known dictionary of Chinese was 爾雅, meaning "Near refinement". It is common for languages to use "near" and "far" to indicate "this" and "that". Of course it would take somebody literate to know this, which most internet junkies today are unfortunately not.

It might be unfortunate that I'm illiterate in classical Chinese, but I thank you, who are literate, for proving my point that all of these dialects have common underpinnings.

I don't think anybody is arguing that Cantonese and Mandarin doesn't have common underpinnings, but rather that they are not mutually intelligible.

French and Spanish, as romance languages, have a lot in common but they are separate languages. Writing Cantonese in standard written Chinese is similar to asking Spanish speakers not to write phonetically, but to rather write in French.

> internet junkies today

The American Mandarin Society has courses for Professionals. I guess they make quality judgement on what to keep or throwout in use of the Chinese language in their curated walled garden for snooty State official use.

爾 as a character does have both meanings.

As characters are not married to pronounciations, both old (i.e. classical) texts and newer memes can be hard to understand or misunderstood despite knowing all characters. Guesses are often close enough, which is a feature of the logogram.

Well, 呢 is unambiguous where 爾 is not. Similar reasoning as introducing 你 as a separate character for "you".

Out of curiosity, do you speak a variety other than Mandarin? And if so, do you think you'd be able to find "proper" characters for everything you could say, like pishpash did above?

> you think you'd be able to find "proper" characters for everything you could say

The matter isn't whether I can find the proper character for everything you could say, but rather whether the spoken variety themselves can be based on written characters. In the example case you gave, it does.

The spoken varieties of Chinese can still be mapped to a set of characters, that still means there's a commonality underlying all of these variety. For instance, Beijing dialect/slang "颠儿" means '(he/she) is gone', which wouldn't be readily apparent or understandable to even mandarin speakers. but the first character has the meaning "run/trip".

> Beijing dialect/slang "颠儿" means '(he/she) is gone', which wouldn't be readily apparent or understandable to even mandarin speakers. but the first character has the meaning "run/trip".

Old dictionaries list 颠 as a synonym of 顶 only, without a "run/trip" meaning. Most likely the character was only used for this word because both are pronounced "diān" in Mandarin and people didn't bother to make a new character, e.g. by combining [足颠]. The -儿 suffix is also interesting, because the sound modification it represents is something Beijing Mandarin speakers picked up from the Manchu during the Qing dynasty, it has nothing to do with the meaning of 儿. So 颠儿 is a relatively new addition to the written language that is not shared with non-Mandarin varieties.

And what is a 馬卡龍 then? A horse card dragon?

A popular word or phrase spoken in one geographical location but does not exist elsewhere does not mean that the language is suddenly distinct.

There are countless example in English as it is spoken around the world, even subtler ones, bless your heart.

> The extremely elaborate system dictating which of usually several, often many syllabary characters that sound identical must be used in writing a word in Mandarin (very commonly mistaken for ideographic writing) cannot work for the other sinitic languages.

It can work pretty much the same way, Mandarin isn't special in that regard. The only difference is that the conventions for Mandarin are widely known and have been established for a long time.

But there was a time when writing in Mandarin was a radical new idea and people were unsure how to write many things, e.g. whether to use 的, 底 or 之 for the genitive particle de.

Most Sinitic languages are at a similar stage now: traditionally educated people know the pronunciations of many characters that are used e.g. in Classical Chinese poetry, but some frequently used words may not have any corresponding characters assigned, so people substitute others based on meaning and/or pronunciation, or make up new ones (this is easier when handwriting).

Most likely it will also stay that way for most people, since the benefits of literacy in Sinitic languages other than Mandarin aren't all that great, but there are also quite a few enthusiasts trying to make writing their mother tongues a thing, e.g. by developing input methods: https://hanhngiox.net/

> But there was a time when writing in Mandarin was a radical new idea and people were unsure how to write many things, e.g. whether to use 的, 底 or 之 for the genitive particle de.

The advent of writing in Mandarin has a long and gradual history, starting from the Three Kingdoms onwards. There was some orthographic variation, but nothing too crazy (in fact I'd wager that 80 to 90% of the Song written Mandarin vernacular can be read by a modern Mandarin reader with an hour or two of preparation, probably even Tang).

The radical idea of the 20th century was to effectively abolish Classical Chinese, rather than start writing in the vernacular ab initio.

An elaboration on spelling certainly could work for Cantonese, but would necessarily be different, in detail, from the one for Mandarin.

> Primarily Mandarin speakers I have known were taught, and believed, that the "dialects" were basically the same as Mandarin, just with different pronunciation.

I wonder where they got "taught" such an idea. I'm sure that many "believe" so, but mostly because they never interacted with the Cantonese language, and therefore have a naive misunderstanding. It's certainly not an idea that is taught in the most syllabus; (in fact, Chinese textbooks love to boast about how diverse the Chinese language is, despite not teaching anything specific about "dialects")

> This has often led to belief that ancient documents using the characters could be read and understood without deep knowledge of the actual language and world of the writer, resulting in, at best, comical translations.)

Again, I wonder where they went to school exactly. This is very different from what I experienced growing up (in mainland china). Every single ancient (sometimes not even ancient) passage in textbooks have heavy footnotes, and it is usually an entire independent topic in literature class, from elementary school all the way to college. In fact, from the perspective of most students (and a lot of parents, too), 文言文 (ancient Chinese) is the most impenetrable part of literature class.

> I'm sure that many "believe" so, but mostly because they never interacted with the Cantonese language, and therefore have a naive misunderstanding.

This was my experience having learned only the Mandarin dialect as a child. I kind of assumed that other dialects were merely different pronunciations of the same sequence of characters—more a naive notion than something I was “taught” or “believed”. My naive notion dissipated as an adult as I traveled more and encountered more dialects.

I am a foreigner that has learned to speak/read/write Cantonese. I cannot understand most "formal written Chinese", also known as "standard written Chinese" as the characters used are almost entirely the same ones used in Mandarin. Indeed “佢喺邊度呀" (written/spoken Canto) is very different than "他在哪裡嗎" Mandarin/formal Chinese written form. I can read entire books or comics written in vernacular Canto but can't understand even basic stories written in "formal Chinese". The languages are mutually unintelligible and it's wild how different they can be.

You are definitely correct in saying that in general people view it as simply changing the pronunciations.

Though I would also say that people also appreciate the nuances. There are comedic sketches on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tK51dlpqpSE (~5.30)

> In fact, writing in dialect languages is not taught.

This is actually similar to Western Europe where there was a similar diglossia situation before the Renaissance. All formal writing by the few literate clergy at the time was in Latin, and there wasn't much writing in the vernacular languages spoken day to day.

It's different because in China the dialects are actively suppressed in favor of the standard language (which was also done in Europe in the 19th century for the various national languages).

While I understand the gist of what you're saying, there's quite a large body of work in French, Italian etc. that directly contradicts your point. Unless you consider state administration and literature to be « informal ». Most things switched to vernacular by the 14th c., and writing wasn't at all exclusive to the clergy. There was a healthy class of notary public, magistrates etc. among the laity of the urban societies of the later Middle Ages. The rise of written vernacular was concurrent to the rise of the middle class.

This happens in Spanish with 'vos' pronoun conjugations.

While speakers from Central and Southern South America conjugate verbs using the 'vos' pronoun, none of the keyboard apps I've used support it. And end up autocorrecting 'vos' for 'tú' conjugations.

I hope one day I have enough free time to fork a Spanish dictionary so it supports 'vos'.

> often many syllabary characters that sound identical must be used in writing a word in Mandarin (very commonly mistaken for ideographic writing) cannot work for the other sinitic languages.

It can and has, even historically (see e.g. the Ming Dynasty Min novel Tale of the Lychee Mirror 荔鏡記). The reason it falls flat is the lack of political willpower to really go for it, not fundamental linguistics ones. This is why calling Chinese characters a simple syllabary is also wrong.

The relationship among different Sinitic varieties is more complex than simply different languages. I've talked about this in the past: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16844074

The system designating which of many characters representing the same syllable is to be used in spelling each word obviously cannot be used for words that are not pronounced with that syllable. Analogous systems, one for each other sinitic language, could be invented, but would face barriers to adoption.

> obviously cannot be used for words that are not pronounced with that syllable. Analogous systems, one for each other sinitic language, could be invented, but would face barriers to adoption.

This is not how it is done. Generally the writing uses the underlying morphemes, and pronunciation is then fitted on after the fact (but indeed the pronunciations aren't arbitrarily fitted, there are regular sound correspondences that account for > 95% of the words). This is why the 荔鏡記 can be written (and why other variety-specific novels have also been written using the same script over the centuries). Indeed the simple fact is that variety-specific works have existed since at least the Ming Dynasty (and there are quite a few as soon as we hit the Qing Dynasty) and they have been written with the same script.

This is also why it's not a syllabary (and also why the varieties actually have a lot of similarities). This works precisely because varieties share an overwhelming number of cognates if not just straight up the same words.

This is why I think in China the history of the Chinese languages should be taught (I really do not know why some evolutionary tree of Homo sapiens is in the biology curriculum but this is not in some social science one. Seems like an oversight). Even from Chinese people, you still hear all these myth (debunked in some other comment) that X almost became Mandarin.

"Primarily Mandarin speakers I have known were taught, and believed, that the "dialects" were basically the same as Mandarin, just with different pronunciation."

I am going to take a guess that you do not know many mandarin speakers? if you did, you would know this is utter nonsense.

My ex speaks English/Mandarin/Cantonese. She is well aware these are not "different pronunciations".

Her Cousin speaks Mandarin and Fuzhou dialect. Once we were all out and he bumped into a friend from Fuzhou and they started talking. I asked the ex to translate as I often did, and she turned to me and said she's in the same position as I am, she can't understand any of it.

It isn't a "pronunciation" issue, or she would have been able to guess some of what was being said.

Most people who are fluent in more than one sinitic language know the whole notion is bollocks. But there are plenty of Chinese who know only Mandarin; many of them entertain, and espouse, falsehoods about what they call dialects and their relationship with Mandarin. You see some of them posting such falsehoods in this very thread, and even insisting after they have been corrected.

What is amazing to me is people who know Mandarin and one or more "dialects" yet still promote the falsehoods. George Orwell called this "doublethink".

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