Jesus im really tired of this typical bs, so i apologise but im gonna sound real pissy.
I am a native speaker of both since I was born, I grew up with both with equal exposure until school comes in with Mandarin education. They are not different languages in any way, shape or form at all if you know them both equally well. And the differences only get smaller if you compare them properly with standard or classical Chinese instead of just vernacular.
Also, both are dialects of Middle Chinese and the Chinese language (singular) has a dialect continuum that contains 10 major dialect families. And since it is a dialect continuum, they easily get more different through geographic distance and/or barriers.
So when you literally compared two dialects from the opposite end of the spectrum, of course you are gonna think it's different if that's all you look at. Likewise if you look at a rainbow and only look at red and blue, you are going to think red and blue are two different rainbows. In fact, mandarin itself have 6 main sub-dialects, and 2 out of that six are easily understandable by any duo mando-yue/min speaking person without prior exposure due to their closeness to old and middle Chinese respectively.
You also have to look at the other dialects, hakka is literally between canto and mando, I understood what my teacher said when she spoke in hakka and it was the first time i heard it. North of Hakka is gan and they are closer to mando but still have terms that are easily understandable to me as a canto speaker. Same for min-wu-mando. So if you really take a look at all of them comprehensively, you will not see different languages, but a dialect continuum.
In fact, the Mandarin you learn, more accurately Beijing speech, is the one of the biggest outlying variant based on pronunciation alone, Zhongyuan mandarin literally shares as many similarities with beijing mando and with canto and other southern dialects.
So they don't share "some" similarities, they are literally spoken the same damn way besides some pronunciation. You are only exposed to vernacular canto where synonyms are compared to prove their differenceness. In this particular context, that's like saying UK english is a different language from US english because one uses lorry and the other uses truck and when we compare it it's two different words and we say they are not related languages.
If you think that Canto and Mando are different languages, simply go find some set of words that are typed in standard or classical Chinese and then compare them in their exact pronunciations of both dialects and not vernacular translations, then all that differences starts to melt away despite them being on opposite geographical ends.
2023-01-12 15:16