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What do I mean by 'dialects' is, these dialects/language share same words and similar structure, and they all reflect to same chinese words again, things are v

by suraci 2y ago

What do I mean by 'dialects' is, these dialects/language share same words and similar structure, and they all reflect to same chinese words again, things are very differenct in China, you can not simply define if a language is a dialect or not by if it's intelligible for example, the vast majority of northern Chinese cannot understand the Jiangxi dialect(in fact, the dialects in different regions of Jiangxi are to some extent mutually unintelligible), yet the Jiangxi dialect is definitely a dialect In my understanding, writing is politically related, with different regions under the same political entity using the same script, while pronunciation is regionally related, a relatively isolated area (such as a mountainous region) will develop its own distinct pronunciation

adrian_b 2y ago
All the Indo-European languages share a very large number of words and of grammatical structures. While for someone who has not studied languages, German, Spanish and Russian may appear as very different languages, for someone familiar with the evolution of the Indo-European languages it is easy to recognize the word correspondences between these languages, even when seeing some words for the first time. The same is true for any other group of languages that have separated at most a few thousand years ago, so they are still recognizable as belonging to the same family. In all languages for which writing has become frequently used, that has slowed significantly the divergence of the languages, at least in their written form, when divergence may have occurred between pronunciations.
yorwba 2y ago
> the vast majority of northern Chinese cannot understand the Jiangxi dialect Indeed, linguists typically group the varieties of Jiangxi under Gan Chinese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gan_Chinese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gan_Chinese separate from Mandarin.

by suraci 2y ago

adrian_b 2y ago

All the Indo-European languages share a very large number of words and of grammatical structures. While for someone who has not studied languages, German, Spanish and Russian may appear as very different languages, for someone familiar with the evolution of the Indo-European languages it is easy to recognize the word correspondences between these languages, even when seeing some words for the first time. The same is true for any other group of languages that have separated at most a few thousand years ago, so they are still recognizable as belonging to the same family. In all languages for which writing has become frequently used, that has slowed significantly the divergence of the languages, at least in their written form, when divergence may have occurred between pronunciations.

yorwba 2y ago

> the vast majority of northern Chinese cannot understand the Jiangxi dialect Indeed, linguists typically group the varieties of Jiangxi under Gan Chinese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gan_Chinese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gan_Chinese separate from Mandarin.