[pessimizer]

They're written the same, and have basically the same grammar. The characters have hugely different readings, but people can communicate easily in writing. You can call that different languages, but that's certainly a different kind of different than people would expect when you say different.

If there were a version of English where all of the letters designated completely different sounds, but was written exactly the same way, would it be a different language? Would people who said that they were dialects of the same language have to be saying this for political reasons?

edit: I mean, Chinese is how you would expect it to be. How would two people living extremely far apart in China even know how each other would pronounce a particular character? How would they have communicated those sounds 500 years ago? The wide variance in the pronunciation of words even in English is also due to our dogshit orthography (largely imposed by the French), which often fails to give a decent hint for how to say something. Chinese characters are symbols of concepts that usually have a hint of what it's meant to sound like in the northern dialect, 1500 years ago, by referring to another character that there's no reason one would know what it sounded like.

[DiogenesKynikos]

> How would two people living extremely far apart in China even know how each other would pronounce a particular character?

China had an imperial bureaucracy for over 2000 years, which sent officials from one end of the country to the next. In fact, a predecessor of Standard Chinese (a.k.a. "Mandarin") was called "the language of officials" (官話).

[qazxcvbnm]

The phonology differs. Vocabulary differs. Grammar differs. Speaking Cantonese and Mandarin natively, I have no idea what Hokkien or Sichuan people say, whether or not you write it down.

This is especially apparent when speaking to less educated people with less exposure to the standardised, official Chinese language, which is what people do actually write down when intending for a broader audience, of course. Diglossia is real.

[Kolya]

Yep. Anybody who’s ever read written Cantonese or Shanghainese would realise they are often unintelligible unless you speak those languages and understand how they’re written. eg 「佢冇做乜嘢」

And yet the incorrect parent comment has been voted to the top of the thread by those who think it’s helped them.

[lolinder]

> The wide variance in the pronunciation of words even in English is also due to our dogshit orthography (largely imposed by the French), which often fails to give a decent hint for how to say something.

Others have already corrected your other misunderstandings, but this is also false. Spanish has at least as much variance in pronunciation as English and has an orthography that is extremely regular. Brazilian Portuguese and Portugal Portuguese likewise have the same, highly regular orthography and are barely mutually intelligible.

To the best of my knowledge you actually have the causality mostly reversed: English's orthography is useless largely because the pronunciation changed but the spelling didn't, and English has a variety of pronunciations because the pronunciations changed differently in different regions. English has a messier orthography than other languages because of our complicated history of borrowing words, but the evidence shows that even people who start with a highly consistent orthography don't use it to keep their pronunciation static and shared.