Thread: Anti-Muslim Bias to the International Kindle
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Old 10-14-2009, 09:56 AM   #157
ahi
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Quote:
Originally Posted by HansTWN View Post
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.
I'm aware of Cantonese and Mandarin being different languages. Is Cantonese widely written though? My understanding was that most Chinese people (regardless of whether they spoke or easily undestood spoken Mandarin) wrote "Mandarin Hanzi" if you will, and that writing Cantonese with Hanzi was done but was the exception rather than the rule.

Is this not the case, or an oversimplification?

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