NB this works both ways on a lot of things. For instance, the Chinese word for "guitar" is 吉他; pronounced "jí tā" in Mandarin, but "gat1 taa1" in Cantonese. S

NB this works both ways on a lot of things. For instance, the Chinese word for "guitar" is 吉他; pronounced "jí tā" in Mandarin, but "gat1 taa1" in Cantonese. Similary for "Canada" (加拿大): jiā ná dà in Mandarin, and gaa1 naa4 daai6 in Cantonese. It's a weird side-effect of two facts: 1) the British interacted a lot more directly with Canton than the rest of China 2) Mandarin and Cantonese are "officially" different dialects of the same language, so once you define the characters in one, you've mostly defined them in the other. (Some exceptions seem to include "bus" and "taxi", which in HK are obviously based on the English words, but Mandarin has their own, self-describing names for.)