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I wonder about the credibility of this article given that it talks about "Chinese" as if it were a single language. There are many spoken languages in China (mo
by zik 14y ago
I wonder about the credibility of this article given that it talks about "Chinese" as if it were a single language. There are many spoken languages in China (most notably Mandarin and Cantonese). They share a common written form but if you're talking about the "most influential language" surely the spoken languages should count for something.
- mbell 14y agoWhere do you draw the line? Is Latin American Spanish separate enough from Spain's Spanish? Is French different from Canadian French? American vs British English? Even southern US English vs northern US English? Being from the north and visiting the south regularly I can attest that its very difficult to understand the 'deep locals', granted its sort of a French-English creole. Northern German vs Southern German? I was in Munich for Oktoberfest 4 years ago and I was surprised to find Bavarians speaking to northern Germans in English most of the time. They told me they couldn't understand each other and hated each others accents so using English was easier. It seems extremely difficult to determine and relatively arbitrary where the distinction between 'explicit' languages is made.
- hetman 14y agoThe various languages in China do not begin to even approach anything like mutual intelligibility. They are not dialects but separate languages, much in the way Spanish and Romanian are different languages even though they both started as Latin.
- zik 14y agoMandarin and Cantonese are different languages, not dialects of the same language.