> Mandarin and Cantonese share the same writing system in the sense that English and French share the same writing system: mostly the same characters, innumerous cognates, and I can read the back of my cereal box.
Completely wrong. A Chinese character is more or less equivalent to a word in English/French. Are all the words the same in English and French? Can you look at French text and know what it's saying if you didn't speak French already? Someone who speaks only Cantonese can read and understand text written by Mandarin speakers without any issue. The reverse is less true, see below.
> Spoken Cantonese is a different language from spoken Mandarin, with different grammar and vocabulary, and when you write them down you get correspondingly different written languages.
Wrong again. They use largely the same grammar and vocabulary.
Because Cantonese is ancient Chinese, over the years they have lost track of what semantic characters to use for some of the Cantonese words.
Tracking down which semantic character corresponds to which Cantonese word could be done if there's enough interest and funding for such work. Once the mapping is done, you will be able to write down Cantonese and have it understood all over China.
Since the work hasn't been done, you can only write down Cantonese with the help of some phonetic characters, which denote only pronunciation but not meaning. It's not gibberish, but neither is it proper written Cantonese. EDIT: Even in its current form, written Cantonese is still 80% intelligible to Mandarin speakers.
Completely wrong. A Chinese character is more or less equivalent to a word in English/French. Are all the words the same in English and French? Can you look at French text and know what it's saying if you didn't speak French already? Someone who speaks only Cantonese can read and understand text written by Mandarin speakers without any issue. The reverse is less true, see below.
> Spoken Cantonese is a different language from spoken Mandarin, with different grammar and vocabulary, and when you write them down you get correspondingly different written languages.
Wrong again. They use largely the same grammar and vocabulary.
Because Cantonese is ancient Chinese, over the years they have lost track of what semantic characters to use for some of the Cantonese words.
Tracking down which semantic character corresponds to which Cantonese word could be done if there's enough interest and funding for such work. Once the mapping is done, you will be able to write down Cantonese and have it understood all over China.
Since the work hasn't been done, you can only write down Cantonese with the help of some phonetic characters, which denote only pronunciation but not meaning. It's not gibberish, but neither is it proper written Cantonese. EDIT: Even in its current form, written Cantonese is still 80% intelligible to Mandarin speakers.