5 ms·

Comparing Wikipedia versions is not terribly useful, since formal written Chinese tends towards uniformity: previously 文言, now 普通话. Spoken Chinese does not, an

Comparing Wikipedia versions is not terribly useful, since formal written Chinese tends towards uniformity: previously 文言, now 普通话. Spoken Chinese does not, and an accurate transcription of colloquial Cantonese is quite different from colloquial Mandarin: 係唔係佢哋嘅 vs 是不是他們的, and that's despite the grammar of the two sentences being identical (which is not normally the case either).

knolax 6y ago
I was arguing against OP's case claim that Chinese is a "syllabary". But even then your example is far more cherry picked than mine. Translated your phrase means "is it not theirs". It doesn't have any common nouns that aren't pronouns, adjectives, or even a verb that isn't is/是/係. You also managed to do something I couldn't even and provide an example where every word had the same exact grammatical meaning and were arranged in the same order in both examples. Really helps my point about logography more. If Chinese were ideographic and not logographic those words would be written the same. They're not because of differing etymologies. The fact that you can only find colloquial examples that are significantly different is why it's a dialect. AAVE or Appalachian English are also near incomprehensible when spoken/written colloquially. Hell, I could even make the dumb arguement that liberals/conservatives speak a seperate language with something like your example. "was he Latino"/"were they latinx?" Here I found the following sentence on a Cantonese bbs. "推普滅粵係中國政府堅定不移的國策" Perfectly valid Mandarin except for 係/是. You can't claim that a bbs comment complaining about the promotion of Mandarin, written on a forum dedicated to Cantonese of all things is formal language that's "tending towards" "mandarin".

5 ms·

Comparing Wikipedia versions is not terribly useful, since formal written Chinese tends towards uniformity: previously 文言, now 普通话. Spoken Chinese does not, an

by howlgarnish 6y ago

knolax 6y ago
I was arguing against OP's case claim that Chinese is a "syllabary". But even then your example is far more cherry picked than mine. Translated your phrase means "is it not theirs". It doesn't have any common nouns that aren't pronouns, adjectives, or even a verb that isn't is/是/係. You also managed to do something I couldn't even and provide an example where every word had the same exact grammatical meaning and were arranged in the same order in both examples. Really helps my point about logography more. If Chinese were ideographic and not logographic those words would be written the same. They're not because of differing etymologies. The fact that you can only find colloquial examples that are significantly different is why it's a dialect. AAVE or Appalachian English are also near incomprehensible when spoken/written colloquially. Hell, I could even make the dumb arguement that liberals/conservatives speak a seperate language with something like your example. "was he Latino"/"were they latinx?" Here I found the following sentence on a Cantonese bbs. "推普滅粵係中國政府堅定不移的國策" Perfectly valid Mandarin except for 係/是. You can't claim that a bbs comment complaining about the promotion of Mandarin, written on a forum dedicated to Cantonese of all things is formal language that's "tending towards" "mandarin".