Can speakers of Mandarin and Cantonese understand each other

[Ian_Lee]

Some interesting comparison between Mandarin and Cantonese from Encyclopedia4U:

http://www.encyclopedia4u.com/c/cantonese-linguistics-.html

Linguistically, Cantonese is a more conservative dialect than Mandarin. This can be seen, for example, by comparing the words for "I/me" (我) and "hunger" (餓). They are written using very similar characters, but in Mandarin their pronunciation is quite different ("wǒ" vs. "è"), whereas in Cantonese they are pronounced identically except for the respective tones (ngo5 vs ngo6 respectively). Since the characters hint at a similar pronunciation, it can be concluded that their ancient pronunciation was indeed similar (as preserved in Cantonese), but in Mandarin the two syllables acquired different pronunciations in the course of time.

Cantonese tends to preserve more variations of sound while Mandarin merged many of them. For example, the characters, (藝,憶,懿,邑,譯,佚) all pronounced as yi4 in Mandarin, but all different in Cantonese, they are pronounced as ngai6, yik1, yi3, yap1, yik6, yat6 respectively.