> That touched a nerve, didn't it?

Not at all. I'm simply asking you to actually make arguments based upon facts then attacks on a person. Thus, the conversation is meaningful and worth each of our time.

> Let me guess, you don't speak any of these Chinese dialects: Cantonese, Taiwanese, or Mandarin.

My wife is Taiwanese and knows Mandarin. Her father was born on the mainland and his family had to flee to Taiwan when he was 2. He speaks Mandarin and Taiwanese. His parents only spoke Mandarin. We've been together for 15 years and discuss linguistics quite often.

> You probably don't speak any Romance language outside of English, do you?

(1) English isn't a Romance language. It is a Germanic language. Romance languages are direct descendants of Latin. They include Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian, and many smaller languages.

(2) I actually do speak Spanish, and I studied Latin for 11 years. My wife's mother is Latina and her parents (both the Chinese father and Latina mother) live in Latin America. They don't speak English. Thus, my primary way of communicating with them is Spanish.

> you would know there's massive overlap between them, phonetically

Languages sounding the same in no way makes them the same language or closer together linguistically. A great example is the vowels in Spanish and Japanese are identical to one another, purely by coincidence. This makes it much much easier for a native Spanish speaker to become aurally proficient in Japanese and vice versa despite the two languages not being related to each other at all.

> Are they mostly "mutually unintelligible"? For sure. But to claim that they are more distant from one another than the Romance languages? Complete and utter bullshit.

(1) Literally the definition dialects vs separate languages is mostly derived from mutual intelligibility. It is simply a fact that many Romance languages are mutually intelligible to one another. Spanish speakers can understand Italians and vice versa. Portuguese can understand Spanish and Italian, but not the other way around. These are simply facts. Thus, by linguistic definitions, it is indisputable that the Romance languages have less variation from one another / are closer to each other than the Chinese languages are from each other.

Please see this enumeration of which languages are mutually intelligible with one another: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_intelligibility#List_of...

(2) You didn't respond to any of my citations above including one by Fu Maoji, who was a Chinese linguist.

On the Wikipedia page discussing "Mutually intelligible languages or varieties of one language", it states "In addition, political and social conventions often override considerations of mutual intelligibility. For example, the varieties of Chinese are often considered a single language even though there is usually no mutual intelligibility between geographically separated varieties."[1] Translation -- that the PRC has overridden the linguistic definition of what defines languages vs dialects and replaced it with its arbitrary definition that all Sinitic languages are dialects of a single language for political purposes. The reason - the PRC wants to pretend that there is one China and homogenize the people of China into a single entity. It is why it is forcefully reeducating the Uighurs, why it pretends minorities don't exist in China, and why it has been pushing a Mandarin agenda for decades. However, the government realizes that Shanghainese, Taiwanese, Cantonese, etc aren't going away. Thus, it instead likes to pretend like they are all simply dialects of Chinese in order to make the differences seem less pronounced. This aids in supporting Han ethnic nationalism over regional linguistic pride.

This can be seen clearly by the government's push for all Children to simply learn Mandarin in school. The PRC wants to kill diversity as diversity is seen as a threat to their unified control.

"Indeed, promoting Mandarin Chinese among Hong Kong students has been a political task for the Hong Kong government since 1997, when control of the former British colony was returned to China. The Hong Kong government launched a scheme 10 years ago to incentivize schools to use Mandarin instead of Cantonese in Chinese language classes and has spent 180 million in Hong Kong dollars ($23 million in U.S. currency) in assistance to schools since the effort began.

According to official figures, over 70 percent of Hong Kong’s primary schools now use Mandarin in Chinese-language classes.

...

'A dialect cannot be considered a ‘mother [tongue]’,' wrote the former official at China’s Ministry of Education and the State Language Commission. He asserted that since most Hong Kong people belong to the Han ethnicity, their mother tongue 'should be the hanyu (Chinese).'

But Cantonese and languages spoken in southern China such as Hakka and Min are in fact regarded as languages rather than dialects by linguists, said Stephen Matthews, a linguistics professor at the University of Hong Kong. And since a 'mother tongue' is the first language that a child hears from his or her mother, 'it does not make sense to consider written Chinese as the mother tongue of a Cantonese speaker,' said Mr. Matthews."[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_intelligibility#Mutuall...

[2] https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2018/06/05/...