LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Cantonese: Cantonese Mandarin
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Cantonese is a tonal language where the meaning of words and sentences is affected by the pitch with which they are spoken. It has either six or nine tones (depending on the method of classification) that interact in complex ways, called tone sandhi. Its tonal system is more complex than the four-tone system in Mandarin. There are seven vowels that may be either short or long. Some distinctive phonological features of Cantonese are the contrastive voiceless aspirates and unaspirated stops, and the lack of palatalized consonants. Unlike Mandarin, Cantonese ... allows consonants to end words. Words in Cantonese are characteristically monosyllabic in contrast to Mandarin where polysyllabic words are frequent.
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Like Mandarin, Cantonese is a topic-prominent language. This means that the topic of the sentence (defined as "old" or "known" information) precedes "new"or "added" information. There are a few syntactical differences between the two diaIects. For instance, in Cantonese, direct objects precede indirect objects, and certain adverbs precede verbs, while the opposite is true in Mandarin.
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Cantonese sounds quite different from Mandarin, mainly because it has got a different set of syllables. The rules for syllable formation are a lot laxer than in Mandarin, for example there are syllables ending in non-nasal consonants (e.g. "lak"). It ... provides a different set of tones. There are seven tones:
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Cantonese is mutually unintelligible with the other Chinese dialects (and this is why they are often considered separate languages) but speakers of other dialects can learn Cantonese at a significant discount. Although one must learn the Cantonese pronunciation and tone of each character, once you learn enough of these you can start to guess how certain sounds will map from one dialect to another (of course there are exceptions.) For example, Mandarin tone 1 usually maps to Cantonese tone 1, tone 2 to tone 4, tone 3 to tones 2/5, and tone 4 to tones 3/6. This applies to other sounds as well, such as Mandarin "xi" often maps to "sai" in Cantonese, "shou" to "sau", etc. There is ... a lot of Chinese vocabulary in Japanese and Korean, so speakers of those languages may enjoy some discount in learning Cantonese. For speakers of non-Asian languages, there will be little transparency.
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Cantonese preserves many syllable-final sounds that Mandarin has lost or merged. For example, the characters 裔, 屹, 藝, 艾, 憶, 譯, 懿, 誼, 肄, 翳, 邑, and 佚 are all pronounced "yì" in Mandarin, but they are all different in Cantonese (jeoi6, ngat6, ngai6, ngaai6, yik1, yik6, yi3, yi4, si3, ai3, yap1, and yat6, respectively). Like Hakka and Min Nan, Cantonese has preserved the final consonants [-m, -n, -ŋ -p, -t, -k] from Middle Chinese, while the Mandarin has been reduced to [-n, -ŋ]. For example, lacking the syllable-final sound "m"; the final "m" and final "n" from older varieties of Chinese have merged into "n" in Mandarin, e.g. Cantonese "taam6" (譚) and "taan4" (壇) versus Mandarin tán, "yim4" (鹽) and "yin4" (言) versus Mandarin yán, "tim1" (添) and "tin1" (天) versus Mandarin tiān, "hum4" (含) and "hon4" (寒) versus Mandarin hán. The examples are too numerous to list. Furthermore, nasals can be independent syllables in Cantonese words, e.g. "ng5" (五) "five," and "m4" (唔) "not".
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As not all Cantonese words can be found in current encoding system, or the users simply do not know how to enter such characters on the computer, in very informal speech, Cantonese tends to use extremely simple romanization (e.g. use D as 啲), symbols (add an English letter "o" in front of another Chinese character; e.g. ã— is defined in Unicode, but will not display in Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0, hence the proxy oæ¶ is often used), homophones (e.g. use æœ as å—°), and Chinese characters of different Mandarin meaning (e.g. 乜, ä¿‚, 俾 etc.) to compose a message.
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Cantonese Mandarin