I don't know where to start on this page's absurd notion that Cantonese is a non-"weird" language, but that Mandarin is weird. This must be some academic nonse

I don't know where to start on this page's absurd notion that Cantonese is a non-"weird" language, but that Mandarin is weird. This must be some academic nonsense based on sounds and disregarding other critical language features. Let's put aside the fact that Cantonese has among the most complex pronunciation systems in the world, with seven tones and both long and short versions of a number of sounds. This is a language which has four different communication modes. Here's how weird Cantonese is. 1. Cantonese speakers speak in Cantonese. 2. Cantonese speakers read and write in a totally different language, namely Modern Chinese, which for all intents and purposes is Mandarin. 3. Cantonese speakers read out loud in Modern Chinese (Mandarin), but pronounce each of the characters with radically different Cantonese sounds. 4. For purposes of comic book dialogue, etc., it is possible to read and write some Cantonese using various co-opted Chinese characters. But you can't pronounce all of Cantonese this way: many words have no written form whatsoever. This has resulted in a bizarre pidgin written form. For example, one very common word ("di1" -- "a few") is actually usually written as "D" rather than as a character. Other characters are impossible to write in current fonts, or are also used in Modern Chinese but for different words than in Cantonese, and so you see Latin letters like "o" and "a" next to them to suggest a different meaning. Mandarin weird my foot.