> 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。"
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。"
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.
Written Chinese is used for anything official or formal, written Cantonese is often used online informally (like using text/SMS language in English)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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".
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.
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.
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.
There are countless example in English as it is spoken around the world, even subtler ones, bless your heart.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.