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Originally Posted by godwine
I am Chinese, and I grew up speaking and reading both systems, so my knowledge wasn't from an INTRO BOOK.
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Fair enough, and to be fair, I was a bit rude in my post. We're both arguing from valid positions and both of our staked-out positions are backed up by mountains of linguistic scholarship. It's not a settled issue at all.
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You need to look at the history of the language itself. Mandarin was only used in a very small area back in the days, its originated form Beijing.
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This may be correct, but I don't know how it's related to what I said. Feel free to explicate.
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Your example of Hokkien is not correct, Hokkien is a modified form of a dialect known as "Fukien", which is from the "Fukien" province of China, and you should ask your wife again, the "Hokkien" should be what is commonly known as Minnan.
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I may have made a mistake in giving it the name Hokkien. We just call it "Taiwanese" in my family. My wife speaks a language that is unintelligible to Mandarin-only speakers. It is spoken in Taiwan and her parents raised her speaking it (as it were, her father was a diplomat from Taiwan who speaks multiple languages, so I value the family's opinion on matters of language).
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Its still only a dialect.
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Honestly, we're really playing at semantics. It is not a settled issue of linguistics in either direction. Many linguists would say Mandarin/Cantonese/etc. are dialects of Chinese, but many would say that, because the are mutually unintelligible (which they are very much so!), they are absolutely different languages. I fall into the second camp. You fall into the first.
I really think it's silly to call Mandarin and Cantonese the same language because they are mutually unintelligible. My wife speaks natively (among other languages) Taiwanese and Mandarin. She cannot understand Cantonese at all. That being said, I have never met an English speaker whom I cannot understand with a slight bit of effort, and that includes people speaking Geordie and the English of certain areas of Louisiana (two of the places in the world with the most "non-standard" accents I've ever heard of). There probably close to a billion Chinese who cannot understand both Mandarin and Cantonese (only understanding one, or none, of these two), even with a lot of effort.
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In school, the type of "Cantonese" that people are taught (Writing and reading) share the same grammar, structure and meaning as their "Mandarin" counter part. Any Chinese character thats used in Cantonese and not in Mandarin are considered Slang.
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Well of course in a school run by Mandarin-speaking Beijing party elites, the Cantonese grammar taught in school would be Mandarin grammar with a different accent. But, as has been confirmed by multiple friends from Guangdong and Hong Kong, the "Chinese" subtitles at the bottom of movies that is supposed to be standard across all dialects is more than a few times not correct grammar to a Cantonese speaker. It reads like Mandarin to them, and they will tell you "this is not Cantonese; we do not speak/write that way."
All this being said, I don't place much stock in this sort of evaluation of language. I have never studied any French, Italian, or Portuguese, yet I can read all three to a certain degree because I studied Spanish and am a native English speaker.
Even intelligibility is a difficult metric to use well. My wife also speaks Spanish natively, and when we watched The Passion of the Christ (which is in Latin), she turned to me and told me she understood a bunch of it! If I am remembering correctly, she can also understand Portuguese without ever having even studied it for one minute. (This comports with my experience; I can read a bunch of Portuguese simply because I speak Spanish and they are quite similar—I would argue they are more similar than Cantonese and Mandarin!)
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The written system is not call Mandarin, there is no such thing as written Mandarin, its Simplified Chinese. The reason why they call it Simplified Chinese because it was modified from the original "Traditional" Chinese, this was done within the last 100 years (Since 1956ish to be exact), they were once written the same way.
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I absolutely understand the history behind all this. I only called the writing system "Mandarin" in my previous post because I took the position that Cantonese and Mandarin are languages and not dialects. It was merely a rhetorical choice on my part.
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Ok, I accept your argument that I was using just one or 2 character as an example, I didn't say I was correct either, everyone is just posting base on their opinion, myself as well. As I said, I grew up speaking both Cantonese , Mandarin, and some very limited Japanese. And base on my limited knowledge of Japanese, I just find it closer to Cantonese
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Fair enough. Japanese kanji readings did come out of multiple dialects because of the kanji importation and language exchange over hundreds of years from different regions of China, before either modern Mandarin or Cantonese existed!
[/quote]With a bit of effort and access to a scholarship database, I could provide voluminous linguistic papers debating this topic and coming down on my side of the issue. I hope you will accept a bit of return fire in the form of wikilinks instead
Cantonese grammar - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia and other pages on WP:
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Cantonese is an analytic language
Cantonese, or Standard Cantonese, is language originated in the vicinity of Canton
Although Cantonese shares much vocabulary and grammatical structure with Mandarin Chinese, the two languages are not mutually intelligible
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Cantonese grammar - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In any case, I'm sorry I likely sounded hostile in my previous post. You're a good, intelligent poster, and I took a very rigid stance against your position after a very long flight.
*offers handshake*