| > Most Chinese characters are monosyllabic, and most Chinese words are polysyllabic consisting of multiple characters. Most modern Chinese words are polysyllabic, but these words are the same in Cantonese and Mandarin. Your comparison to English and French is still false. > > Someone who speaks only Cantonese can read and understand text written by Mandarin speakers without any issue. > Because we've all been taught to read and write in Mandarin from the very beginning of our education. I doubt that. Suppose you were only ever taught written Cantonese. I believe you'd still be able to read Mandarin writings, simply because you would still recognize all the words. > They share a lot of grammar and vocabulary So they are not so different after all. > Phonetic borrowing is one strategy, and the most common one, yes, but that's no different than characters in standard Chinese, the vast majority of which are a radical with a semantic category (but not a complete meaning) + a phonetic component. Phonetic borrowing, or other ways of making up new characters, might not have been necessary. If we could be bothered to trace the origin of a made-up Cantonese character and find the original Chinese character. For example, 冇 is wholly unnecessary when we already have 無. Even with the lazy approach of making up Cantonese specific characters willy nilly, I counted only dozens of them from the Wikipedia article you linked. So how different is Cantonese really from Mandarin, besides the pronunciation? |