Interesting! Is it at all comparable to how Scandinavians can read each other’s languages but most have a hard time understanding the spoken languages?
Much more divergent, less like Danish and Bokmal (Dano-Norwegian) or Swedish than French and Romanian. But Romanians write in French which they can translate on the fly into Romanian as they read though a very different form of Romanian than what people speak. And written Romanian is used for scripts, songs, transcripts and under a 100 novels. French is Mandarin, Romanian is Cantonese. None of the other topolects have a standard written form that’s used much.
I meant it as an analogy where Romanian is Cantonese and French is Mandarin. I’m not certain there are less than 100 novels in Cantonese but I’d happily bet 2% of my net worth on it. The Chinese language page for written Cantonese[1] lists one author and his English language Wikipedia page doesn’t mention his writing. Irish is a dying language and it both has more written in it and a more active literary scene.
