Quote:
Originally Posted by ahi
I imagine it is less like Ebonics--whose arguable cousin Patois is rightly receiving increasingly more serious attention as a separate and unique dialect--and more like Cantonese.
It's a case of people speaking languages that, for cultural reasons, are never written... i.e.: Cantonese people (unless they actually learned to *speak* Mandarin) only speak Cantonese and only read/write Hanzi based on Mandarin.
Another good comparison might be Europeans speaking one language, but writing only in French or Latin. Many Europeans countries' *official* (i.e.: government produced), and often also private, written historical records are almost entirely in Latin until fairly late in history... because those who wrote rarely or never did so in the country's native language.
- Ahi
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A little off topic, but Hanzi are not really based on Mandarin, they fit any other dialect just as well as Mandarin. The characters are just pronounced differently, for Cantonese you sometimes use a slightly different syntax and some additional characters, that are not used in Mandarin. I think you really shouldn't call the Chinese dialects dialects. They are really different languages, in many cases even basic things like the numbers one to ten are totally different. And unless you have studied them, the ones I call "languages" are totally incomprehensible to a Mandarin speaker. Italian and Spanish are a lot closer than Cantonese and Mandarin.