English and Mandarin have a number of features in common. Both have simple grammars. Both have large numbers of native speakers. As it turns out those two things are related. From the Cornell Chronicle:
Languages have an intriguing paradox. Languages with lots of speakers, such as English and Mandarin, have large vocabularies with relatively simple grammar. Yet the opposite is also true: Languages with fewer speakers have fewer words but complex grammars.
Why does the size of a population of speakers have opposite effects on vocabulary and grammar?
Through computer simulations, a Cornell cognitive scientist and his colleagues have shown that ease of learning may explain the paradox. Their work suggests that language, and other aspects of culture, may become simpler as our world becomes more interconnected.
They have another feature in common: both are difficult to learn to read and write well but for different reasons. Mandarin’s orthography is difficult while English’s spelling is difficult.
The complexity of English spelling is easy to explain. English is highly syncretistic—it adopts words readily and (again like Mandarin) has a large number of homonyms. English dealt with that by having the variants spelled differently, signalling the words’ origins. Mandarin used different ideographs.
Interesting; although it would have been even better if the paper linked it to real examples. Like how English has far fewer tenses and conjugation vs it closest peers like French and German. Or both languages are pretty flexible with word order.
I do think the papers understate the role history and geography plays in all this. Modern English is heavily influenced by there Norman invasion and the fact that rulers and the rules spoke different languages for several hundred years. Similarly, Mandarin reflects how Mongolians and Manchu interacted and ruled China – Cantonese which is thought to be more similar to how Chinese was spoken 1000 years ago, is a trickier language to learn.
Your comment ties in nicely with observations I’ve made here a number of times over the years. Although Mandarin, Gan, Hakka, Yue, etc. are generally called “dialects” by laymen, they’re actually different languages. The confusion is compounded because under the traditional writing system (the one I was taught) they were all written the same.
Chinese is not the only language family for which that is the case. Arabic is a language family rather than a single language. It’s unified by the orthography which maintains the complication that to learn to read and write you’ve got to learn a different language (unless you’re a Saudi).
It’s complicated; because of how languages are tied to group identities.
Indeed reform of language was a leading goal of Chinese nationalists (in the generic sense) to strengthen China when China was weak or disunited early last century.
In some sense language vs dialect fails to capture the subtleties for Chinese vis a vis Mandarin or Cantonese. As you mentioned, Chinese has diglossia with a common written language – so there is only one literary tradition; not many like the Romance languages. Then one has to factor until 200/300 years, with travel so difficult, writing was the only form of communication possible over long distances – so the written word may be seen as more important then the spoken word.
An interesting alternative history is if Justinian had reunited the Roman Empire the way the Sui reunited China. What would the European languages have evolved; would everyone insist we were still speaking some variety of Latin.
They do anyway. Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Catalan, Provençal, Romanian, and Romansch are all classified as Romance languages, i.e. versions of Latin. This despite French being as arguably a Germanic or Celtic language as descended from Latin.
I had this argument at some length with another linguist. She finally suggested that the Celtic languages and Italic languages were so intertwined that a better classification than Romance would be the Italo-Celtic languages, adding Welsh, Breton, Gaeilge, Scots Gaelic, Gailck, and Cornish to the soup.