You're absolutely right in theory and in linguistics.
The issue is that among the more common languages that people (outside of language nerds) tend to learn, what I said still holds true for the average learner who's there to learn and whom face the practical difficulties of learning a language, and none of your totally correct linguistic facts really make them less real.
> > […] (and also the general lack of the latter).
> This is the second often repeated myth
The size of written Cantonese corpora was abysmally small up until recent (<10?) years, and much of the content was interwoven with Standard Written Chinese. You still generally can't find written Cantonese on printed materials. Until recent months, LLMs couldn't even write a proper children's story in Cantonese without inadvertently code switching to SWC.
Trust me when I say I'm one of the many people who worked hard to make this "myth" not true (not in linguistic theory but in practice). I never knew it would be thrown back to me like this as a lecture on a random forum lol.
There's a lot more to be done to make Cantonese an assessable language for learners compared with the other major languages. You can compare the linguistic properties of languages all you want, and you'd be absolutely right, but that doesn't make a difference to the prospective learner at all.
The issue is that among the more common languages that people (outside of language nerds) tend to learn, what I said still holds true for the average learner who's there to learn and whom face the practical difficulties of learning a language, and none of your totally correct linguistic facts really make them less real.
> > […] (and also the general lack of the latter).
> This is the second often repeated myth
The size of written Cantonese corpora was abysmally small up until recent (<10?) years, and much of the content was interwoven with Standard Written Chinese. You still generally can't find written Cantonese on printed materials. Until recent months, LLMs couldn't even write a proper children's story in Cantonese without inadvertently code switching to SWC.
Trust me when I say I'm one of the many people who worked hard to make this "myth" not true (not in linguistic theory but in practice). I never knew it would be thrown back to me like this as a lecture on a random forum lol.
There's a lot more to be done to make Cantonese an assessable language for learners compared with the other major languages. You can compare the linguistic properties of languages all you want, and you'd be absolutely right, but that doesn't make a difference to the prospective learner at all.