Blog 4: Similarities of some languages.

The idea for this blog entry came from reading some of the comments that people have left me. I was going to do a nice big explanation about Cantonese Chinese vs Mandarin Chinese, but then I found this video which explains it very well in my opinion. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e73btaVo868 


Just in case you cant watch the video for whatever reason, I will briefly explain it now. Mandarin and Cantonese are both different types of Chinese. They are both mutually unintelligible to an extent. Spoken Mandarin and Cantonese are different, so one wouldn't be able to understand the speech of the other. Its different when it comes to writing though. They both use the same writing system. However, the sentence structure is different. A person who knows Mandarin would recognize the characters in written Cantonese, but be unable to read the sentence. A person who knows Cantonese would be able to read the Mandarin though. The Cantonese speakers can rearrange their words into different orders, therefore making it so they could communicate with a Mandarin speaker through writing, but the pronunciation would still be different, so even with the rearrangement. They wouldn't understand each others speech.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cm7mCmncbvA
This video shows some differences of Taiwanese vs Mandarin. I don't really know much about Taiwanese, except that it uses the same writing system as Mandarin and Cantonese. I just thought it was interesting seeing some differences between the two.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCuZGYEdZ4Y
This video is about the mutual intelligibility of Thai and Laos languages. I originally though that the writing systems were the same, but the speaking systems were different. It seems I was wrong. It is actually the other way around. I will have to do some more studying on these two languages before I say any more about them, but due to time constraints, I probably wont be able to do so before this blog is due. Once I am able to do the research, I will post a comment on this entry explaining my findings.