| Thank you for your reply. That's an impressive list of credentials. But it confirmed my suspicion: you don't speak Cantonese, Taiwanese, or Mandarin. >> You probably don't speak any Romance language outside of English, do you? > (1) English isn't a Romance language. It is a Germanic language. Romance languages are direct descendants of Latin. > (2) I actually do speak Spanish, and I studied Latin for 11 years. I stand corrected. >> you would know there's massive overlap between them, phonetically >Languages sounding the same in no way makes them the same language or closer together linguistically. A great example is the vowels in Spanish and Japanese are identical to one another, purely by coincidence. No. I meant that the same word (or more precisely, character) in Cantonese, Taiwanese, or Mandarin often sound the same or similar, not often enough that they are mutually intelligible, but often enough. Again, you'd have to speak at least two of these to know that. > (1) Literally the definition dialects vs separate languages is mostly derived from mutual intelligibility. Let me guess, some euro-centric linguists came up with that definition. It's probably a fine definition in the study of European languages, but it's by no means the only definition. I will concede, however, that judging by this definition, these Chinese dialects may be more distant from one another phonetically than the Romance languages. What you are forgetting (and what those euro-centric linguists failed to account for) though, is the shared written form of the Chinese language. Even when a word sounded wildly different in Cantonese, Taiwanese, or Mandarin, they all know it's the same word. > why it pretends minorities don't exist in China That's a straight up lie. China has long celebrated diversity and the 55 or so ethnic minorities. These minorities even get special privileges, e.g. not being subject to the one-child policy imposed for decades on the majority Han ethnicity, preferential placement in schools, etc. > Indeed, promoting Mandarin Chinese among Hong Kong students has been a political task for the Hong Kong government since 1997... The Hong Kong government launched a scheme 10 years ago to incentivize schools to use Mandarin instead of Cantonese in Chinese language classes. Promoting and incentivizing? What unspeakable evil? Honestly how is this worse than Quebecois or Puerto Ricans having to learn English? > the PRC wants to pretend that there is one China and homogenize the people of China into a single entity. China is what it is today because of the shared language, culture, values, heritage, and history. It behooves you to understand that, instead of simply being outraged because China claims your wife's homeland as part of its territory. |