[babesh]

There are obvious differences and now the trope about reading old text.

1. Cantonese recognizes the Chinese as a common people and have a word for it. The word isn’t just used historically but is used to this day. The French don’t see the Italians as fellow Latins much less call them that.

2. There is a continuous use of a single written language. It isn’t about reading text from 2000 years ago. It is communication even within a subgroup using the same written language. One job people had not so long ago was to write letters for those who were illiterate to communicate with family and others far away. My grandmother did that.

Sinitic influenced cultures invented their own scripts: Japanese hiragawa, Korean Hangul, Tibet has had its own script. Vietnamese may be the closest, having adopted their own recently.

The French use the French written language to communicate with each other. The Germans use the German written language to communicate with each other.

3. Furthermore, there are continued common cultural traditions expressed in that language (classics) and practiced to this day (Chinese New Year, tomb sweeping festival, moon festival, etc…)

4. Whereas other people’s recognize some of those traditions as coming from China (Art of War) and as coming from another group, the Chinese have always seen them as their own.

This is the case with both people speaking Mandarin as well as Cantonese. My high school classmate would read the Art of War. He spoke Mandarin. My grandfather many decades earlier would read Chinese classics. He spoke what is often called a dialect of Cantonese. Both felt that it was a core part of their cultural inheritance.

The English celebrate Newton as their own. Some French may think highly of him but they don’t recognize him as French.

5. There is this misconception that China was a bunch of disconnected cultural groups till recently. That wasn’t the case. My grandfather from southern Chinese went to a university in Beijing. This was roughly 100 years ago.

I wonder how the various imperial ages of China controlled their empire? I wonder what written language the imperial exam system was in?

6. Also, group affinity in China is far more granular than you think. It isn’t first Cantonese vs Beijing. It is first what is your ancestral village.

You seem to want to look at the distinctions but don’t want to look at the common identity. Whether someone sees another as part of the group or not, these groups have a lot of shared and continuing culture. There are definitely groups in China that don’t have this share this common culture but that is to ignore the many that do. The reality doesn’t seem so clear cut to me.

I don’t know much about the other subgroups in China beyond the several I grew up with and encountered. Perhaps they are different but it would be far more enlightening to hear from people actually from those areas. It would be doubly interesting to hear of the perspectives of their grandparents.

[ncmncm]

Obviously all of central China share a common cultural heritage as parts of a series of ancient empires, similarly as southern Europe was dominated by the Roman republic and later empire.

My remarks were solely about local languages.

[babesh]

It is not a good to compare the Roman Empire to something that ended in 1912, just 2 years before WW1. Hahahaha. Later empires and their languages: Austrian German vs German. Perhaps something more far ranging: Ukrainian vs Russian. Not Polish since it doesn’t share an alphabet. But maybe Polish in spoken form.

[ncmncm]

If you want to bring Germanic and Slavic language families into the picture, they are more proto-Indo-European language families, none mutually comprehensible despite common roots. We can also mention the numerous offshoots of Sanskrit in India, chiefly Hindi today, but with many others in use, likewise traced back to proto-Indo-European. (Thus the "Indo" part of the name.)

We can talk about Chinese political unity up into the modern era, but the shared cultural legacy goes back to the classical period, mediated by traditional literature originating in 14th century. Mandarin has long been the language of imperial administration, and has exerted a regularizing influence on local languages without displacing them. Still, it is certainly a very different language from that used to administer empires many centuries ago, despite relying on a common written syllabary. Meanings drift.

The original topic was how people who speak only Mandarin are taught that other Sinitic languages are "just dialects", and are misled by seeing users of these other languages writing in Mandarin, translating as they go; and not understanding the depth of translation involved. This confusion between translation and mere transcription does not seem to occur outside China. The current government prefers the confusion, probably to help enforce a belief in more unity than exists.

[babesh]

https://youtu.be/s2km_z4-1T8