Hacker News Reader

In fact, "dialect" is a political definition. Using Europe as an analogy, it is conceivable that if Rome had not disappeared, today's French language, Italian language and Spanish language would be considered dialects of Latin language (English is not included, because it is a Germanic language). With a few exceptions, the dialects used by the Chinese are descendants of Middle Chinese and have been influenced by the official dialect, so they are all called "Chinese dialects".

Thanks for your input.

> I agree with the general premise that China is way more unified than Europe. In some respects, moreso than the US due to the lack of federalism and the 90%+ Han majority.

In some ways yes, in some ways no? How do Tibet, Xinjiang, Taiwan, and until recently, Hong Kong fit into your theory? In Europe, they don't have 're-education' camps; on the other hand, they also aren't trying to impose a strong central government (the EU is nothing like Chinese central government).

Europe mostly has a unified alphabet, and words are often mutually recognizeable - not the same as China, but not nothing.

> In some ways yes, in some ways no?

Yea I agree, and wrote as much (e.g. revolutions)

> How do Tibet, Xinjiang, Taiwan, and until recently, Hong Kong fit into your theory?

I mean, kinda on a similar level as Yugoslavia, Ukraine, and Western Russia?

What do I mean by 'dialects' is, these dialects/language share same words and similar structure, and they all reflect to same chinese words

again, things are very differenct in China, you can not simply define if a language is a dialect or not by if it's intelligible

for example, the vast majority of northern Chinese cannot understand the Jiangxi dialect(in fact, the dialects in different regions of Jiangxi are to some extent mutually unintelligible), yet the Jiangxi dialect is definitely a dialect

In my understanding, writing is politically related, with different regions under the same political entity using the same script, while pronunciation is regionally related, a relatively isolated area (such as a mountainous region) will develop its own distinct pronunciation

All the Indo-European languages share a very large number of words and of grammatical structures.

While for someone who has not studied languages, German, Spanish and Russian may appear as very different languages, for someone familiar with the evolution of the Indo-European languages it is easy to recognize the word correspondences between these languages, even when seeing some words for the first time.

The same is true for any other group of languages that have separated at most a few thousand years ago, so they are still recognizable as belonging to the same family.

In all languages for which writing has become frequently used, that has slowed significantly the divergence of the languages, at least in their written form, when divergence may have occurred between pronunciations.

> the vast majority of northern Chinese cannot understand the Jiangxi dialect

Indeed, linguists typically group the varieties of Jiangxi under Gan Chinese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gan_Chinese separate from Mandarin.

Written down Cantonese and Mandarin are mutually intelligible. They have regional grammar and vocabulary, but not excessively so. They're mostly pronouncing words differently

Maybe formal spoken Cantonese/Mandarin, but colloquial spoken Cantonese for example is very different from formal written Cantonese. It would sound odd to speak the way things are formally written, if that makes sense.

Perhaps you could say there's a subset of the languages which can be mostly written in a mutually intelligible way. That sounds more like the similarities between, say, Portuguese and Spanish, though, where you can probably write a subset of the languages that is pretty comprehensible by both language speakers, yet the languages are distinct.

that's because people who speak cantonese use mandarin as their written language. theyre not often writing down cantonese

> for speaking, there are only dialects This is extremely wrong.

Completely agree. Shanghai and Suzhou’s languages are different from each other, let alone Mandarin (for example.)