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Comment by hawkice | Hacker News Reader

I'm actually curious if you could help explain the difference between this and Chinese (not sure if characters or radicals are the appropriate metaphor)? I feel that Chinese has a turtles-most-of-the-way-down writing system.

IIRC you tend to understand research finding quite well and can speak/read Chinese.

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To answer your question, Chinese characters still represent SPEECH (not ideas or abstract concepts) and do so in a way that is specific to the particular Chinese (Sinitic) language that one speaks. The long story about this can be found in the books The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy[1] or Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems[2] by the late John DeFrancis or the book Ideogram: Chinese Characters and the Myth of Disembodied Meaning[3] by J. Marshall Unger. The book Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention[4] by Stanislas Dehaene is a very good book about reading in general, and has a good cross-cultural perspective.

I'll give an example here of how Chinese characters reflect speech more than they reflect meaning-as-such. Many more examples are possible. How you might write the conversation

"Does he know how to speak Mandarin?

"No, he doesn't."

他會說普通話嗎？

他不會。

in Modern Standard Chinese characters contrasts with how you would write

"Does he know how to speak Cantonese?

"No, he doesn't."

佢識唔識講廣東話？

佢唔識。

in the Chinese characters used to write Cantonese. As will readily appear even to readers who don't know Chinese characters, many more words than "Mandarin" and "Cantonese" differ between those sentences in Chinese characters.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-DeFranci...

[2] http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Speech-Asian-Interactions-Comp...

[3] http://www.amazon.com/Ideogram-Chinese-Characters-Disembodie...

[4] http://readinginthebrain.pagesperso-orange.fr/intro.htm

By using "會說...嗎" instead of the equally valid "會不會說" for the question pattern in your Mandarin example, you deliberately made the Mandarin and Cantonese grammars different. And you changed "Cantonese" to "Mandarin" in the example text. I don't know Cantonese but I'd ask if you chose your example to maximize the different Hanzi used in each language also?

Using the 會不會-form for both the Mandarin and the Cantonese shows a closer match, as does using "Cantonese" in both examples...

    他會說普通話嗎？他不會。 //your Mandarin using 會嗎-form
    他會不會說普通話？他不會。 //my Mandarin using 會不會-form
    他會不會說廣東話？他不會。 //my Mandarin using 會不會-form and 廣東 instead of 普通
    佢識唔識講廣東話？佢唔識。 //your Cantonese using 會不會-form

...so I'm guessing there's a one-to-one match between the Hanzi in your Cantonese and complex Mandarin examples, perhaps:

    他 => 佢
    會 => 識
    不 => 唔
    說 => 講

Two of those show the same radical i.e. 亻 and 言.

There's just as many differences between the complex and simplified Mandarin scripts also, even though much the same sounds are used to speak it both within and outside China...

    會 => 会
    說 => 说
    廣 => 广
    東 => 东

So I'd dispute your claim.

There are differences. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantonese_grammar#Differences_f...

Notably comparisons:

Cantonese 佢高過我 He taller than me

Mandarin: 他比我高 He compared me tall

開 (habitual aspect) which isn't in Mandarin.

Cantonese doesn't really have passives.

Cantonese can have multiple particles at the end of a sentence.

There's differences in the grammar, just like in English between US "I don't have any..." and UK "I haven't any...". But I was disputing that the differing characters used with Mandarin and Cantonese was to do with the pronunciation of the morphemes/words.

Hang on.

I'm not sure if those two examples actually represent differences between Mandarin and Cantonese. Had you use the same grammar in Cantonese: 佢會說廣東話嗎？ and simply replaces the words, it would still be comprehensible to a Cantonese speaker. It would sound a bit odd but that can be attributed to differences in colloquialism, sort of like how certain phrases are different in the various sub-dialects of American English.

Also, I don't think the Cantonese example you used really means if he is capable of speaking Cantonese, which is what the Mandarin example say. The Cantonese example asks if he speaks Cantonese or not. The difference is subtle but still exists.

Chinese/Japanese characters do seem to be turtles all the way down. To use some examples from another comment in this thread of how those characters decompose like speech does to phonemes and signing does to individual component movements...

    他 = 亻+ 也
    說 = 言 + 兌
    普 = 丷 + 亚 + 日 
    通 = 之 + ( 龴 + 用 )
    話 = 言 + ( 千 + 口 )
    嗎 = 口 + 馬
    佢 = 亻+ 巨
    唔 = 口 + ( 五 + 口 )
    廣 = 广 + 黄
    東 = 木 + 日

The books cited in my earlier reply,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8353518

by authors who know quite a lot about Japanese, dispute this claim. Most Chinese characters used in Japanese are borrowed written forms used for the loanwords in Sino-Japanese vocabulary.

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