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In another Linguistics.SE question, an answer makes this claim:

The difference between French and German is so much larger than between Mandarin/Cantonese that one would be hard pressed to say they are of similar distance.

This however contradicts what I find with some very brief googling of the phrase 'lexical similarity':

Wikipedia states that the 'lexical similarity' between French and German is 29%.

While someone else claims that:

According to lexical statistical data of any two languages within the Sinitic branch (for example Wu and Mandarin), the data will always reveal that there is less intelligibility between them than any two Romance languages in Europe. For example, French has lexical similarity of about 75% to several other Romance languages. In comparison, Mandarin has 31% lexical similarity with Wu (Shanghainese) and 19% with Yue (Cantonese). Source

My question is therefore this:

Is it obvious that the difference between French/German is much larger than between Mandarin/Cantonese?

(Indeed, if the numbers in the above sources are to be believed, English is more similar to Russian [24%] than Mandarin is to Cantonese [19%]. Is this possible?)

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    First you say that Mandarin has a 19% "lexical similarity" with Cantonese, but five lines later you say that Mandarin is 19% "different" from Cantonese. Are you sure you know what you are saying?
    – fdb
    Jul 22, 2014 at 13:30
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    These are not fixed figures. These are estimates, compiled from variable and incomplete data, with varying definitions of what "similarity" means. It is not obvious, in other words. There are no reliable statistics on language similarity in the abstract -- individual variables swamp everything here.
    – jlawler
    Jul 22, 2014 at 17:12
  • PS. The mistake to which I drew attention has been (tacitly) corrected. Otherwise, I agree fully with jlawler.
    – fdb
    Jul 23, 2014 at 9:31
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    Lexical similarity is just one measure of language difference though. The lexical similarity between English and French, for example, is likely to be higher than the structural, morphological or phonetic similarities. Certainly, the split between Southern Sinitic and Mandarin is more recent than that between Germanic and Italic.
    – Uri Granta
    Mar 12, 2015 at 11:00
  • I can put together a lexical distance calculation between the two pairs for a group of words and disregarding any other language features.
    – Alternative Transport
    Jun 3, 2017 at 8:43

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No, it's not 'obvious' when you take into account both the lexical distance, and date of divergence.

I don't speak Mandarin or Cantonese, and I feel like it would be good to hear from a historical linguist who speaks both, but seeing as no one has answered this yet...

Historically, Germanic and Romance languages obviously split much earlier than Mandarin and Cantonese did, but the problem with that is that languages change at different rates.

There is not a widely-accepted way of measuring language distance in historical linguistics. There are some proposals like Glottochronology, but the problem with Glottochronology, is again, that languages change at different rates.

If we think about this in the framework of evolutionary biology, then Mandarin and Cantonese probably last shared a common ancestor in early Middle Chinese, spoken around 600 AD, with a rhyme table recorded in the Qieyun in 601.

Since then, Mandarin underwent many radical changes, including the loss of most word final consonants, which in turn created lots of homophones, which in turn caused speakers to make lots of compounds to disambiguate these homophones causing huge lexical changes.

Asking whether or not Mandarin is as lexically distant from Cantonese as English is to French elaborates only one dimension of the picture. Mandarin and Cantonese share a closer recent common ancestor than English and French do.

However, Mandarin and Cantonese are probably much more divergent than say, the Germanic languages, which also began diverging around that time.

I remember one textbook, Anthropology of Language, claiming Mandarin and Cantonese are as lexically divergent as English and Italian. I don't think it cited any sources, and I don't have the book on me.

It is important to keep in mind that Mandarin and Cantonese may be as divergent as English is to Italian, but that this change happened fast with Mandarin; within the last 1,400 years, while English and Italian probably last shared a common ancestor more than 3,000 to 5,000 years ago.

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Unlike Ghoti657, I do speak Cantonese and some Mandarin, but I speak neither French nor German.

I can offer my opinion that German, being a Germanic language, and French, being a Romance language are quite different because of spelling differences and differences in phonology.

The difference between Cantonese and Mandarin, however, is different depending on what you are analyzing. The writing system and vocabulary is largely identical even after accounting for the fact that mainland China uses simplified characters. Common (like pronouns) and colloquial words will be more divergent, but Cantonese does not have too many dialectical characters of its own and the vocabulary is fairly close due to a shared literary tradition, and being nearly directly descended from the same historical language. However, written Cantonese may still be unintelligible depending on the subject. Where the subject matter is more technical, the vocabulary will tend to be very similar like English use of Latin-derived words for this purpose.

Spoken, there is a large difference between the two with the main difference being that Cantonese stop codas are absent in Mandarin, and the rich Mandarin vowel sequences are not present in Cantonese. There is enough correspondence between Cantonese and Mandarin phonology that sometimes the pronunciation of the other language can be guessed with some training and a good command of one's own native language. Multi-syllable words can sometimes be understood between the two and the grammar is comparable, although I have trouble with standard Mandarin Chinese grammar.

So spoken, I would liken the difference between Cantonese and Mandarin, then, as between Italian and French. Written, I would liken it to the difference between Spanish and Italian.

German and French, though, are like Mandarin and Fujianese (which hypothetically split off before Middle Chinese even came into existence).

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  • I speak both Cantonese and Mandarin, know very little German and even less French. I have no training or indeed any learning in linguistics whatsoever, which is why I posted my question here. I would clarify though that although traditionally, Cantonese simply has the same shared written tradition as Mandarin, in fact many Cantonese words are completely different and unknown in Mandarin. This is shown in Hong Kong, where in the past 10+ years or so there've increasingly been Cantonese words in print (mostly to defy China and also to maintain a distinct identity).
    – user3222
    Jul 9, 2017 at 23:32

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