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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?
The inferential gap between modern Anglophones and people from more complex linguistic situations (diglossia or even polyglossia) is quite large and usually makes it a waste of time to argue about such things. Your average English speaker will have only ever encountered languages that are either completely unintelligible to him in writing or in speech e.g. Russian, or that are nearly identical to his own e.g. New Zealand English. If we lived in a world where a billion people spoke Jamaican Patois or Scots and our formal education was in Old English there would be a lot less confusion on the matter.
As to the nature of Chinese specifically, more or less all formal writing in the Sinosphere (including Korea and Vietnam; Japan was more complicated) prior to the early 20th century was in standardized Literary Chinese. No Koreans were under the impression that the language they were speaking was Chinese, even if that was the only language they could write, but your average Chinese scribe would tell you they were speaking and writing the same language, the same way Arabs do with their vernacular dialects and Modern Standard Arabic, or a Carolingian monk might have with Old French and Latin. If you define languages by mutual intelligibility, or from a learner's perspective ("do I need a different textbook for this?"), then they are clearly wrong, but if you then conclude that something like Ottoman Turkish is just a language like any other that you can learn to speak (good luck!) you are also missing something important about how it was used.
When China transitioned to writing in the vernacular, only Mandarin successfully made the jump, which meant that your average educated person in Guangdong went from speaking Cantonese and writing in Literary Chinese to speaking Cantonese and writing in Mandarin. A generation or two ago this person would not have been able to speak Mandarin except as a sort of cipher or word for word translation into Cantonese, but nowadays they will be fully fluent in both spoken forms. While there have been attempts to standardize written Cantonese in Hong Kong and written Hokkien in Taiwan (basically selecting or inventing new characters for all the words without obvious cognates in Mandarin), no one outside of a handful of hardcore separatists and language nerds (and speaking as a language nerd I'd rather they adapted something like Korean Hangul instead) cares about them, and even the spoken forms are on the road to extinction alongside their failed political projects.
Speaking as another self-identified language nerd, hell nah. The survival of the Sinosphere arrangement of one common ideographic writing system functioning, if imperfectly, for multiple distinct languages simultaneously - distributing the translation load between the act of writing and the act of reading in such a way that both can be performed somewhat on the fly - is precious, and I could rant at lengths about how much of a tragedy I see in Vietnam's ditching of Han Nom and Korea's almost-complete ditching of hanja. We have reports of 19th century Japanese who could travel to Vietnam and "talk" to literate elders in writing, without either making a single sound the other could parse!
As a third self-identified language nerd, I'm largely with you. I think Hangul is an interesting and unique writing system, and certainly more efficient than a syllabary like Japanese Kana, but I do wish that both Korean and Vietnamese used a hybrid script system analogous to Japanese with 1000-2000 characters for Hanzi derived words and the rest in their respective phonetic system. Korean and Japanese in particular have a frustrating amount of homophones due to the dropping of tones that could use the disambiguation. I wouldn't mind if the Chinese did the same from the other direction, though would prefer something like Zhuyin over Pinyin in such a case for largely aesthetic reasons.
I thought Japanese solved the issue of homophones with pitch accent. Many of the more famous examples are clearly distinguishable, to the extent that I feel like "homophones" is a misnomer. Regardless, I don't think need tones for disambiguation and nor am I aware of that they ever had tones, unlike the more mixed situation in Korea.
The pitch accent has far from enough information to actually disambiguate heavily-overloaded phoneme sequences, especially with projected-down Chinese vocabulary. One of the more well-known pairs is 科学 (subject-learning = science) and 化学 (change-learning = chemistry), both read identically as kagaku with a down-pitch after the ka. In an informal context (like students chatting about what they are doing), people often resort to deliberately misreading the latter as bakegaku, essentially just pronouncing the "change" bit using a slightly amusing native reading (bake- is "change" with a heavy connotation of "shapeshift", like masters of disguise), perhaps similar to saying "Lifeology" for "Biology". (Imagine a scenario in which this word was overloaded in English, with "Bi-ology" denoting the study of things that come in twos)
Once you get to heavily overloaded sound sequences like koukai, my dictionary gives over a dozen of words that are read as that with no down-step (like 公開, "publicise", or 更改, "revise"), and at least two that have that reading with a downstep after the ko (後悔, "regret", and 航海, travelling the sea by ship). All of these are common words and you could easily construct contexts where there is ambiguity between them.
For native words, the collisions are fewer, as you have to distinguish between genuine collisions (kami (downstep after mi) as in paper vs. as in hair) and ones where the two words are actually the same etymologically but educated writing demands using different Chinese characters, such as kara[2] = 空 (empty) / 虚 (hollow) / 殻 (husk) or kiku[0] = 聞く (hear) or 聴く (listen) or 訊く (ask). The latter is a fascinating topic in itself, connected to the same thing I hinted at above with writing in these languages also being an act of translation! (Compare to how any EN->RU translator has to decide whether any instance of blue is синий or голубой, or maybe an SE->EN translator has to think about whether a "stark sås" is spicy or just strong.)
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