Beijing mandarin is a Manchurian created language. based on Nanjing Mandarin i think. but mandarin as you guys know it, did not exist until recently. so whoever that fool was who said Zhou Dynasty official language was Mandarin was wrong. another thing, dont be surprised if some dialects sound like each other. Chinese languages are Sino Tibetan. so obvs. there would be similarities. and BOTH Chinese and Manchu were the official languages during Qing. the Manchurian script was the Jurchen script, based on the Khitan, which was based on Chinese.
that was some interesting read. thanks for that. I would have thought Cantonese would make a better official language. It's certainly harder to learn if you're not a native speaker
is Mandarin, because 100 years ago hongkong and manchu is still in portugness and british's hands as a colony
ok here is another question why is cantonese called the traditional chinese and madarin the simplefied one????
cantonese is not even close to the traditional chinese, and in traditional chinese, all of the pronouncation is different from cantonese, and is developed by Republic of China and is what Taiwanese people are speaking cantonese is just Traditional chinese and Simplified chinese combined, you cant tell the difference on paper because they all chinese words. but cantonese have a completely different pronouncation for each chinese word, is more like a dialect then a language
I'll state that I have no idea whats older... Ming and Qing dynasty, the last two dynasties, used Mandarin. Cantonese looks the most like the official language used during the Tang dynasty and was limited to the south after the dynasty's fall and retreat there. The spoken language was NOT unified in ancient China, only the written language during the Imperial era... I'm willing to bet that the majority of common people didn't spoke the official language that often and many weren't able to. It was mostly used by the Imperial Courts, high-ranking officials and scholars. Common people used their own local dialect. Ehhh... (...) I don't even know what to say... It shouldn't, it only refers to the written language. The first CPC goverment basically reduced the strokes of a few "difficult" characters to make it "simplified". Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan were not under direct control and didn't change the written language. In those places people still use "traditional" written language. It just happens that many speakers that use Cantonese as their main dialect today are from HK and Macau.
thats funny. Chinese linguist to this day havent figured out even if Ancient Chinese was tonal or not. yet somehow you know what traditional sounds like? how great you must be. Taiwan pronunciation is just Mandarin Pronunciation. you are also confusing Cantonese slang as Classical Pronunciation as well.
Mandarin is what Han people speaks, and we Han people had taken over China since the start of the Imperial times. because chinese people refer to Mandarin as this(普通话), and there is many other dialect that came based on Mandarin, dlalect speaker differs from Provindences, there is too many dialects to count in China, but dialect =/= Mandarin(普通话), westerners saw Mandarin as the main language in China, that is not true, Mandarin is one of the dialects in China and Cantonese farther branched, in the guangdong provindence, people speaks Cantonese, but the Cantonese they speaks differs from people in Hong Kong (I know this because the babysitter in my house is from Guangdong, and i know a friend on QQ is from Hong Kong), and what they speaks in Taiwan is called "白话“, which is the true Traditional Chinese because Taiwan is the old Democratic China from way back before the Chinese Civil War. and why do i know this, is because i was born in China and lived there for 11 years before i came to the US, and chinese citizens knows more about China then anyone, in China, we get tv channels from all the provindence, and people in Beijing get all lthe BTV channels and CCTV, but people that living in other provindences can also watch at least BTV-1, also some Hong Kong and Taiwan channels, like the Pheonix channel(凤凰卫视), i used to watch all the channels for fun, and i immidiatly heard the grammer and pronouncation difference
