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My Chinese coworker says that this image is a reasonable representation of the controversy over whether Mandarin and Cantonese are dialects or languages. What is your opinion on the topic?
Who wrote this and what languages does this person know? The inclusion of Korean speech in the bubble of Chinese language is already highly suspect. Both Japanese and Korean utilize roots from Classical Chinese, analogous to the use of Latin/Greek roots in most European languages, but they are structurally completely different and originated independently. The closest analogy in Europe would probably be something like Hungarian, which uses many of the same Latin/Greek roots as other European languages but has a totally different structure/origin. Including those languages in the bubble of "Latin" or "Greek" would tell me that person knows very little about European languages.
The language/dialect controversy is not that complicated. The distinction is artificial. There is some basis in mutual intelligibility, but this is clinal, so where to put cutoffs is subjective. The cutoffs are generally correlated but can differ between spoken and written language. Written Portuguese is generally more comprehensible to Spanish speakers than spoken Portuguese. Cantonese/Mandarin is just a more extreme version of this, but is only a difference in degree, not in kind. The "Chinese language" is essentially like creating an entity called the "Romance language", of which Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, etc. are "dialects". After all, they also use a shared writing system just with more variation.
China's long history of fracturing looms heavily in their cultural heritage. The government has a vested interest in minimizing any potential source for internal regional conflict and reinforcing the idea of a single, unified China. Having a single national "language" helps tremendously in this regard. Therefore, for largely cultural and political reasons, they push the idea of a "Chinese language", much like a someone who conquered the southern half of Europe might try to push the idea of a "Romance language".
I drew this diagram in an attempt to understand my coworker's opinions, not necessarily as an endorsement of those opinions.
I am fluent in English and know a fair amount of Latin. He is fluent in Cantonese and Mandarin and mostly intelligible in English.
Hanja?
My coworker's argument is that the Romance languages would be dialects of Latin if they all used the same speech-independent writing system (as they used to when they were called Vulgar Latin)—but they use phonetic writing systems, so they're languages instead.
Your coworker is talking complete nonsense. Hanja use in modern Korean rounds to zero (an approximate analogy might be the use of Roman numerals in modern English) and was historically incompatible with its grammar, hence the development of Hangul. By your coworker's logic, English speech should fall under the Arabic language because we borrow their speech-independent writing system for numerals. Japanese use of Kanji or Korean use of Hanja is basically the same concept, extended from exclusively numerals to about 2000 additional ideas.
To say either Japanese or Korean therefore falls under "Chinese language" is the same kind of idiocy as saying "English is actually Arabic".
He said was referring specifically to the Koreans who live in China. The Wikipedia pages for them (English, Chinese, Korean) don't mention whether they use hanja, but I guess he thinks they do.
I didn't say anything about Japanese. He doesn't think that Japanese counts as using the same writing system as Chinese.
If he's talking about Yanbian, from Wikipedia:
So effectively no real use of Hanja there either. My understanding is that these people are basically Korean-Mandarin bilingual in the same way as any other linguistic minority.
Now I'm even more confused. His claim is that forms of communications are dialects if they all used the same speech-independent writing system, but doesn't think this applies to Japanese? Japanese speakers are significantly better equipped to understand a cut-paste Chinese written sentence than Korean speakers.
I'll point out that error to him tomorrow.
Well, maybe I'm misremembering. I asked him about his views on Mandarin and Cantonese today, but we discussed Japanese many months ago. I'll ask him about Japanese again tomorrow. But he may just reiterate that I can't properly understand the situation without learning Chinese, as he told me today when I tried comparing Serbo-Croatian (a speech-first language with two different writing systems that may eventually diverge into two different languages) to Chinese (a writing-first language with two different speech systems that may eventually diverge into two different languages).
Tomorrow edit: Direct quote: (exasperated but smiling) "Stop discussing things that you don't even know what it means!" [sic]
So basically he realizes he was full of shit and isn't happy with being called out. It's not often that something sounds so stupid it lives rent-free in my head for more than a day, so congrats to him I guess.
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