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by AlchemistCamp
1029 days ago
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This might be true if the speakers were equally distant from each other and had an equal amount of contact with each other. I've spoken Mandarin for over 20 years, studied French and Spanish for a few years each and also learned a bit of Cantonese and a bit of Taiwanese. In my subjective experience, French and Spanish are by far the closest of any two of those languages. Cantonese and Taiwanese would be the next closest and Mandarin is considerably further from either than they are from each other. |
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This is precisely what you would expect from the divergence times.
> Cantonese and Taiwanese would be the next closest and Mandarin is considerably further from either than they are from each other.
This isn't; Taiwanese is the outgroup to the more closely related pair of Mandarin/Cantonese.
It's always possible that learning "a bit of Cantonese and a bit of Taiwanese" doesn't give you a good grasp of what's going on in Cantonese and Taiwanese.