[jmknoll]

We don’t really have an analogue to this in the West, but Mandarin and Cantonese are very similar in their written forms, yet mutually unintelligible in their spoken forms. There are some differences due to different history and some different vocabulary, but broadly speaking, Chinese characters maintain the same meaning across dialects (and also when they’re used in Japanese), while changing their pronunciations.

Simplified vs traditional is a different issue, and all dialects can be written in either simplified or traditional. Which is more prevalent usually depends on tradition, and relations with the PRC. Singapore and the PRC use simplified, while Taiwan, HK, and Japanese Kanji use traditional.

[yorwba]

The situation is somewhat comparable to English and French, where a significant shared vocabulary with identical orthography allows making educated guesses. That's not enough for fluent understanding, since many words that are common in one language only appear as rare alternatives to more natural expressions in the other. For example, the Cantonese pronoun 佢 doesn't ever appear in Mandarin texts.

[barry-cotter]

Except the average educated Macanese or Hong Kong person can’t write in Cantonese. They write in something much closer to Standard Mandarin, with its grammar and vocabulary, than Cantonese.

It’s much more similar to the sistuation with Arabic where the various “dialects” are as distinct from each other as the Romance languages, i.e. French, Spanish, Italian etc. but the only written standard is Modern Standard Arabic. Mandarin or something close to it is at least someone’s native tongue. MSA is about as close to Maghrebi or Mashreqi Arabic as Latin is to Portuguese or Romanian.

[improbable22]

And if I understand right, the reason is that the written language is more distinct from the spoken one(s) than in the west. Perhaps more like written mathematics, is this a terrible analogy? Russians write the same formulae with the exact same meaning, but say them over the phone completely differently.

[stefanfisk]

Interesting! Is it at all comparable to how Scandinavians can read each other’s languages but most have a hard time understanding the spoken languages?

[barry-cotter]

Much more divergent, less like Danish and Bokmal (Dano-Norwegian) or Swedish than French and Romanian. But Romanians write in French which they can translate on the fly into Romanian as they read though a very different form of Romanian than what people speak. And written Romanian is used for scripts, songs, transcripts and under a 100 novels. French is Mandarin, Romanian is Cantonese. None of the other topolects have a standard written form that’s used much.

[cbnotfromthere]

"And written Romanian is used for scripts, songs, transcripts and under a 100 novels"

You meant that there are only less than 100 novels written in Romanian? If yes, that's one of the most absurd claims I've read in my life.

[barry-cotter]

I meant it as an analogy where Romanian is Cantonese and French is Mandarin. I’m not certain there are less than 100 novels in Cantonese but I’d happily bet 2% of my net worth on it. The Chinese language page for written Cantonese[1] lists one author and his English language Wikipedia page doesn’t mention his writing. Irish is a dying language and it both has more written in it and a more active literary scene.

[1]https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=2&...

[elgenie]

Chinese characters are hieroglyphs: they don’t have any relationship to their pronunciations.

For example, 火, the character for fire, is a (slightly) stylized brushstroke picture of a fire.

Mutually unintelligible communications that use the same pictures are distinct languages, but there are political implications to acknowledging this, so they’re “dialects”. As the saying goes, a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.

[barry-cotter]

Less than 500, probably less than 200 characters are like that. Most are composed of a sound component and a meaning component, except there has been over a thousand years for sound shifts to render the sound component misleading.

If you want to learn more the Wikipedia article is a great place to start.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters