Yeah, not a good example. Written vernacular mandarin started in the Ming dynasty and more or less was forcefully promoted in the Qing and later Republic of Chi

Yeah, not a good example. Written vernacular mandarin started in the Ming dynasty and more or less was forcefully promoted in the Qing and later Republic of China as _the_ way to write Chinese, meaning other dialects lost out on developing a common written vernacular form. In this example most Cantonese speakers learned mandarin grammar and vocabulary, at least to read and write it. But did written Chinese not exist before then? Before, the literate people in East Asia used Classical Chinese, which was essentially a similar forced standardization from the dominant vernacular 2000 years ago, very similar to Europe's use of Latin. Issac Newton could read and write Latin because he learned it, not because English naturally gets written as Latin!