It would be funny to see them try that, what is the rationale when confronted with the fact Chinese goes back at least 5000 years.
99% of the people couldn't possible understand Middle English today and Modern English is only ~500 years old.
what is the rationale when confronted with the fact Chinese goes back at least 5000 years
Some combination of:
"5000-year-old chicken scratch is still chicken scratch 🤣🤣🤣"
"Listen, any eight-year-old Anglo can just about get the gist of Chaucer. If you can't, maybe you need to go back to school"
"The purported ancientness of Chinese culture is a CCP hoax", possibly embellished by something like "Well, since Taiwan is the historic homeland of the Chinese people, and since none of the records originating on Taiwan are that old..."
its hard to compare the two. "Chinese" is more of a language family than a language, even within Mandarin there are many dialects. it wasnt until the 1900s when the Qing dynasty attempted to standardize an official "Chinese language". before then, someone from northern China and someone from southern China likely wouldnt be able to understand each other. i dont know any Chinese language btw, im just kinda amateurly interested in linguistics
The language/dialect divide doesn't actually exist in linguistics, which has long since moved on to calling things "varieties" instead. So, you have multiple varieties of Chinese just like you have multiple varieties of Arabic or multiple varieties of Romance.
It would be funny to see them try that, what is the rationale when confronted with the fact Chinese goes back at least 5000 years. 99% of the people couldn't possible understand Middle English today and Modern English is only ~500 years old.
Some combination of:
its hard to compare the two. "Chinese" is more of a language family than a language, even within Mandarin there are many dialects. it wasnt until the 1900s when the Qing dynasty attempted to standardize an official "Chinese language". before then, someone from northern China and someone from southern China likely wouldnt be able to understand each other. i dont know any Chinese language btw, im just kinda amateurly interested in linguistics
The language/dialect divide doesn't actually exist in linguistics, which has long since moved on to calling things "varieties" instead. So, you have multiple varieties of Chinese just like you have multiple varieties of Arabic or multiple varieties of Romance.
interesting! thanks for the info!