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Q: Cantonese closer from Vietnamese than from Mandarin?
As a language, to me it sounds more like Vietnamese than Mandarin, more like a Southeast Asian language.
I might be wrong, but I really have that feeling. Also because Guangdong is closer from Vietnam than it is from Beijing maybe.
I have heard people say that Cantonese is close to Vietnamese. Don't know how close though.
It probably sounds very similar to the untrained ear. The written languages couldn't be further apart though. So why should the oral one be any different?
Eorthisio:
Well one of the Japanese "alphabets" come from the one used in China, still Japanese has near zero connections with any of the Chinese languages, in fact it belongs to a completely different family of languages.
Eorthisio:
How come? Japanese language is unrelated to Chinese, only one of their alphabet is similar to traditional Chinese characters. I have heard quite often from Chinese that they can understand spoken Japanese "since it comes from Chinese", when I showed them dramas or tv shows in Japanese they were unable to tell what the people were saying, even when clearly and slowly pronounced. Ethnocentrism at its best. Both languages are unrelated.
jetfire9000:
Because you said that the Japanese language derives one of it's writing systems from chinese characters (kanji) yet also said in the same sentence that the two languages have no connections to each other. That is a connection in my book. Anyway it seems that other people already answered your question, that the Vietnamese language of the of one region sounds similar to the Cantonese language, yet they just don't share nearly enough in common to be of a significant connection. It's a pretty curious matter if the chinese language did penetrate into these southeastern regions though , I'd be interested to know whether or not, and to what extent people developed their languages from looking at chinese tablets and scrolls. This of course Is a big difference from mere linguistic intermingling , say having borrowed words and such. For example, in Russian the word for scroll comes from the word juan卷 . It spread to the Russian language but this was not the result of anything substantial.
And to add to your Japanese example, the word for 人 also seems to approximate one of the ancient chinese pronunciations of the word. It's silly that a chinese would claim to understand Japanese based on such parochialism, but I I possible there may be other similarities. I think the difficulty is that there doesn't seem to be a real sure fire way of pinpointing what ancient chinese sounded like, I mean nobody speaks it anymore.
Northern Vietnam used to be part of the ancient Yue kingdom which comprised Guangdong & Guangxi so the languages possibly have a similar root. My wife tells me that Thai is similar to the Chaozhou dialect/language as well.
Eorthisio:
I don't know about the Chaozhou dialect, Chaozhou in Guangdong right? But I know that the Thai language actually takes its roots in India, it is associated with the many dialects of Myanmar and Eastern India (actual Bangladesh and around). No disrespect to your wife but for obvious reasons I don't believe anything coming from Chinese mouths when it comes to cultures/languages/discoveries,
Hotwater:
No disrespect taken. I may have been getting confused with what she said. There are a number of minorities in Northern Thailand who trace their roots to Southern China (areas such as Yunnan, Guangdong & Guangxi) & I'm sure she said Chaozhou Hua was related to Thai. I'll have to do some more of my own reading on the matter.
Eorthisio:
Yep, Yunnan has a number of Thai people, there called Dai, there are also Lao, just like there are Han in these countries who don't consider themselves as Chinese.
I speak Vietnamese,,, Cantonese does sound like the Northern dialect of Vietnamese (the Southern dialect sounds quite different even if it's mostly the same language), and lots of words are very close, the accents (6 of them) are pretty much the same too. However, it's not close enough to understand Vietnamese if you know Cantonese already.
So, I asked my friends about it, both Guangdong natives and Hongkers, the overall trend is that Cantonese is 10% like Vietnamese, 20% like Mandarin, but you can't understand one or te other if you only speak Cantonese, according to them there are more similarities between Mandarin and Cantonese than Cantonese and Vietnamese.
We are planning a trip to Vietnam and watched some documentaries about the country. My Cantonese wife said she could understand what people were talking about but not the details. She said the language in the video was similar to her hometown dialect. She was very surprised.
Eorthisio:
Weird, my Cantonese friends said they can't. Maybe some word sound like other words in Cantonese but have a completely different meaning.
