<story><title>The Invention of Chinese</title><url>https://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/invention-chinese</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ncmncm</author><text>Primarily Mandarin speakers I have known were taught, and believed, that the &amp;quot;dialects&amp;quot; were basically the same as Mandarin, just with different pronunciation.&lt;p&gt;They sincerely believed that when (e.g.) Cantonese speakers read and wrote, they were not wholesale translating from and to Mandarin, but simply, when writing, transcribing Cantonese using the universal ideographic calligraphy.&lt;p&gt;In fact, writing in dialect languages is not taught. The extremely elaborate system dictating which of usually several, often many syllabary characters that sound identical must be used in writing a word in Mandarin (very commonly mistaken for ideographic writing) cannot work for the other sinitic languages.&lt;p&gt;(Sinitic languages admit about 1200 distinct syllables, but the syllabary writing system uses many times that number, so many necessarily sound alike. Mandarin speakers are taught that the characters are not merely syllables with attached historical rules, but ideograms that represent distinct thoughts. (Numerous just-so examples are used to support the notion.) This has often led to belief that ancient documents using the characters could be read and understood without deep knowledge of the actual language and world of the writer, resulting in, at best, comical translations.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tracyhenry</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m a native Mandarin speaker. I don&amp;#x27;t know why you need to stress &amp;quot;taught&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;believe&amp;quot; so much. I&amp;#x27;m not taught by anyone, nor believe that dialects are mostly similar. I experienced it. Most dialects, Cantonese included, use the same Chinese character system. In writing, we would use either simplified or traditional character sets. Note I&amp;#x27;m only talking about modern communication.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; could be read and understood without deep knowledge of the actual language and world of the writer, resulting in, at best, comical translations&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know who you are talking about. I wouldn&amp;#x27;t say that at all. Chinese students would spent 1&amp;#x2F;3 of their high school studying complex ancient Chinese languages (文言文). Nobody would say it&amp;#x27;s not deep knowledge - it&amp;#x27;s so damn hard.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Invention of Chinese</title><url>https://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/invention-chinese</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ncmncm</author><text>Primarily Mandarin speakers I have known were taught, and believed, that the &amp;quot;dialects&amp;quot; were basically the same as Mandarin, just with different pronunciation.&lt;p&gt;They sincerely believed that when (e.g.) Cantonese speakers read and wrote, they were not wholesale translating from and to Mandarin, but simply, when writing, transcribing Cantonese using the universal ideographic calligraphy.&lt;p&gt;In fact, writing in dialect languages is not taught. The extremely elaborate system dictating which of usually several, often many syllabary characters that sound identical must be used in writing a word in Mandarin (very commonly mistaken for ideographic writing) cannot work for the other sinitic languages.&lt;p&gt;(Sinitic languages admit about 1200 distinct syllables, but the syllabary writing system uses many times that number, so many necessarily sound alike. Mandarin speakers are taught that the characters are not merely syllables with attached historical rules, but ideograms that represent distinct thoughts. (Numerous just-so examples are used to support the notion.) This has often led to belief that ancient documents using the characters could be read and understood without deep knowledge of the actual language and world of the writer, resulting in, at best, comical translations.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>yorwba</author><text>&amp;gt; The extremely elaborate system dictating which of usually several, often many syllabary characters that sound identical must be used in writing a word in Mandarin (very commonly mistaken for ideographic writing) cannot work for the other sinitic languages.&lt;p&gt;It can work pretty much the same way, Mandarin isn&amp;#x27;t special in that regard. The only difference is that the conventions for Mandarin are widely known and have been established for a long time.&lt;p&gt;But there was a time when writing in Mandarin was a radical new idea and people were unsure how to write many things, e.g. whether to use 的, 底 or 之 for the genitive particle &lt;i&gt;de&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;Most Sinitic languages are at a similar stage now: traditionally educated people know the pronunciations of many characters that are used e.g. in Classical Chinese poetry, but some frequently used words may not have any corresponding characters assigned, so people substitute others based on meaning and&amp;#x2F;or pronunciation, or make up new ones (this is easier when handwriting).&lt;p&gt;Most likely it will also stay that way for most people, since the benefits of literacy in Sinitic languages other than Mandarin aren&amp;#x27;t all that great, but there are also quite a few enthusiasts trying to make writing their mother tongues a thing, e.g. by developing input methods: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;hanhngiox.net&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;hanhngiox.net&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>