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Comment by tacon | Hacker News Reader

I don't speak Chinese at all, but my understanding is that the writing is common, only the sounds vary from Mandarin to Cantonese. So how does a piece of writing like this help to preserve Cantonese? I would think that would take a song or spoken prose or something audible to maintain the Cantonese dialect. In five hundred years, if Cantonese speaking people have disappeared, will Mandarin speakers be able to read this graphic?

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Not quite. A simple example: "冇" (meaning "don't have") is not present in Mandarin. You can find a list here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Cantonese

Cantonese speaker here. These are Cantonese (the region) proverbs much like "Bob's Your Uncle" is a quintessentially British saying that Americans wouldn't understand.

On another note, mainland China (including Canton) actually uses simplified Chinese writing (which came out from the Deng Xiao Ping era) whereas Hong Kong specifically maintians the traditional writing. The difference is literally less strokes and simplification of the characters. The infographic here uses the traditional writing. Personally I feel the two writings are mostly close enough that people should be able to guess what the other means. And AFAIK, it's a 1-to-1 mapping anyway.

In the meantime, Taiwan maintains traditional Chinese writing while using Mandarin for speech. Table for clarity:

   Simplified + Mandarin -> Mainland China
   Traditional + Cantonese -> Hong Kong, Macau
   Traditional + Mandarin -> Taiwan

It's actually a many-to-one mapping - going from traditional to simplified loses information, and people have to resort to natural language processing algorithms (mainly n-grams) when going back the other way.

Also, many of the "simplifications" are based on Mandarin pronunciations, and were quite incomprehensible to me as a Cantonese speaker when I set foot into mainland China for the first time years ago.

Some of these proverbs are known in mainland China however. 隔墙有耳 for example is a Mandarin saying as well (though perhaps derived from original Cantonese?).

I want to make a correction. It's actually Mao Zedong and not Deng Xiao Ping, which held power much later.

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