Hi Striling,
I was a little shock seeing you still speculating that Cantonese is merely a "dialect" of "Chinese". Argh. How many times did those witnesses talk about how different other vernaculars are from Mandarin? Believe me, if Cantonese is merely "splitting the language", then all Catalans or Bretons should have been hanged for treachery for thousands of times. "Close to the standard dialect?" I'd like to ask you to click all the sound files in this page: http://www.ctlwmp.cityu.edu.hk/dialects/prolist.htm The same story "North Wind and the Sun", different vernaculars from Beijing, Shanghai, Canton, Chaozhou, Minnan and Hakka. Only after that could we discuss how different these "dialects" are.
Yes, these IS such a problem that in China most speakers of the vernaculars are not used to written forms, but this phenomenon is never able to deny how foreign they sound to each other. And the vernaculars were not written because they are long excluded from national education. In pre-modern times, low literacy rate meant that mostly it were the scholar-officials who would learn writing, and to write in classic Chinese, not even the standard vernacular. Even in this time, there WERE indeed written forms of Cantonese, Minnan, and Wu. Unfortunately, when modern nation-building came, both nationalist and communist government promoted almost exclusively Mandarin, and standardized hanzi only for it, rather than let the vernaculars develop their own written form freely, saying that it was for the sake of "national unity". Too long have these vernaculars been misunderstood, too long have they been deprived the freedom of expressing. I hope people who are not familiar with such fact could reconsider all the messages discussed before. Otherwise the responeses could be so frustrating.
Thanks. Best regards,
[[zh:User:MilchFlasche]]