Dear Ong Yong,

Thank you for your detailed posting about the Chinese wroting system and
pronunciation.

Just one thing:

> so the statement that Cantonese
> (a southern dialect) is closest to Mandarin (a northern dialect) is
> just an urban legend.

I have never heard anybody say this. In fact Cantonese preserves a number
of archaic features in its pronunciation -- in particular the
end-stops -k, -p, and -t which have all been lost in nortehrn Chinese.
These end-stops were still pronunced in medieval Changan and Loyang and
their traces can be seen in the use of certain characters used for
translitering Indic words.

> Xuanzhuang (Hanyu Pinyin).

I thought it was Xuanzang -- are you using the "zhuang" that was a
substitute for the tabooed character "zang" found in the name of the emperor
reigning around his time ?

Best wishes,
Stephen Hodge