A mixture of everything. Written Chinese is legible to anyone who can read Chinese, regardless of the dialect. The spoken versions are not always mutually intelligible. When Europeans started transliterating Chinese words, they did so according to their own languages' pronunciation rules, so there were rival French and English transliterations, for example. Meanwhile, the early European contact with the Chinese came from the southern coast, rather than the northern capital. The word Mandarin, amusingly enough, comes from the Portuguese by way of (maybe?) an Indian language, and Portugal dealt mostly with the places that speak Cantonese today.
(I'm currently reading John Keay's China: A History, which has helped a great deal in understanding some of this, as well as much else. It's reflexively anti-Communist but when I reach that era I intend to supplement it with other and more specialized books. For ancient and medieval history it's been very, very good.)
Some other sources:
A new book on Chinese orthography: https://literaryreview.co.uk/how-the-typewriter-changed-chinese
Edit - As for sound changes, I don't know the specifics but I do know that they've been considerable. Older Chinese poetry has been especially valuable here because the rhymes then are different from the rhymes of today.
Thanks.
As a follow up question, is that based on historical dialects or sound changes, or just the original transliteration being inaccurate?
A mixture of everything. Written Chinese is legible to anyone who can read Chinese, regardless of the dialect. The spoken versions are not always mutually intelligible. When Europeans started transliterating Chinese words, they did so according to their own languages' pronunciation rules, so there were rival French and English transliterations, for example. Meanwhile, the early European contact with the Chinese came from the southern coast, rather than the northern capital. The word Mandarin, amusingly enough, comes from the Portuguese by way of (maybe?) an Indian language, and Portugal dealt mostly with the places that speak Cantonese today.
(I'm currently reading John Keay's China: A History, which has helped a great deal in understanding some of this, as well as much else. It's reflexively anti-Communist but when I reach that era I intend to supplement it with other and more specialized books. For ancient and medieval history it's been very, very good.)
Some other sources:
A new book on Chinese orthography: https://literaryreview.co.uk/how-the-typewriter-changed-chinese
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin#Background:_romanization_of_Chinese_before_1949
Edit - As for sound changes, I don't know the specifics but I do know that they've been considerable. Older Chinese poetry has been especially valuable here because the rhymes then are different from the rhymes of today.
GOOD post. this guy 学's
Cool, thanks. Linguistics is such an interesting subject and something I regret not studying more of since college.