Mandarin is not written Chinese to my knowledge. There are simplified and traditional Chinese in written form. Mandarin is close to how Northern Chinese speak and can be written in both form without any difficulty and most of times equivalent
Edit: perhaps you mean other Chinese dialects use different words to describe something - commonly seen in Southern dialects which inherits more from ancient Chinese. However for many common esp professional sentence the written form is universal
> Mandarin is not written Chinese to my knowledge. […] Source: I’m native Chinese
You are confusing written language with writing system, probably due to domestic and global propaganda efforts that have been going on for 70 years. This really undermines the scientific effort of linguists and just sows confusion, as evidenced by your mislabelling languages as dialects, and forcing the rest of the world to invent new words like "topolect" for existing concepts that the communist party does not like to be true.
My writing system is the Latin alphabet. I can write the languages Danish, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian etc. etc. with it.
Another writing system is the Cyrillic alphabet. I can write Bulgarian, Russian, Serbian etc. with it.
So the writing system is an orthogonal concept to the written language.
As an analogue, the writing system we are discussing is the Chinese characters. One can write with it for example Cantonese, classical Chinese, Hokkien, Japanese, Mandarin, Zhuang, among others.
The distinction between traditional and simplified you mentioned is minor and not a fundamental property of the language written with it. Example: Cantonese can be and is written in both simplified and traditional.
> the written form is universal
That's not true. The languages Cantonese, Hokkien, Mandarin belong to the same family (Sinitic) but have different grammar, lexicon and word order; these differences are also reflected in writing.
"Latin alphabet" is ambiguous, you understood this to mean "the classical Latin alphabet", I was sloppy and meant "the set of letters in the Latin alphabets that make up the Latin script". Now it's my turn to call you out for a very strained sense because in contrast "Latin script" is well defined and I see you are straying away from the definition for some reason.
ø, ç, ß and ő are definitely part of the Latin script.¹ Any Latin letter was added to the set at some point in time; the definition makes no special distinction for this fact.
> here's Russian Cyrillic for "restaurant": PECTOPAH
That's not how scripts work. Those are Latin look-alikes (homoglyphs). These are the correct letters: РЕСТОРАН
Just because the letters have a common ancestor, it does not mean they are the same today.
> a way in which Russian writing differs from Latin script, but Danish writing doesn't?
Russian uses the Cyrillic script (specifically Cyrillic letters from the Russian alphabet), Danish uses the Latin script.² The scripts are distinct sets. It's quite tautological when I write it that way, but I don't know how else I can makeself understood.
¹ In a technical sense, we are constrained here on this Web site by communicating within the confines of Unicode. You could look up the properties of "ø" and see that it is indeed a letter in the Latin script: `\p{General_Category=Letter}` `\p{Script=Latin}` Currently, there are 1335 registered in this set product. The properties don't come from nowhere: Unicode merely codifies what was already linguistically/sociologically agreed upon beforehand. IMO the standard is not quite as expressive as e.g. me sitting next to you with pencil and paper, but good enough for most practical purposes.
² As always, there are exceptions for niche uses and because human language is a messy concept, but we can ignore that and concentrate on the broad strokes. An example for an exception would be that names mentioned in a Latin script embedding are typically transliterated/adapted instead of remaining in Cyrillic, e.g. "Puschkin"/"Puškins"; that's a Russian word, but written in Latin.
I think something is lost in translation since first reaction to normal Chinese is Mandarin == 普通话 whose direct meaning is about spoken form. As I think deeper you are mostly correct although I still think writing language, system and the dialects need a quite formal definition and the difference is subtle. Educated Chinese learns ancient Chinese, read some book written in traditional Chinese, laugh at comedy spoken with “topplect” and watch many Hongkong Movies, there aren’t many gaps in understanding.
Historically many dialects evolves from different races that has invaded China and get absorbed(including CCP). In written form it converges to Chinese system. It makes the topic more confusing - does those count as languages
In China, people refer to written Chinese as 中文, whereas the spoken language as 普通话, 汉语, etc. Colloquially people sometimes say 中文 to mean the spoken language, but that's imprecise.
There's a specific word in Chinese for the written language. The Chinese words for Mandarin are specifically for the spoken "dialect". Your writing system vs language distinction doesn't really apply in this case. Different Chinese languages are mutually intelligible when read by speakers of another "dialect" of Chinese, though another dialect may come across oddly. Ask any Chinese.
Edit: perhaps you mean other Chinese dialects use different words to describe something - commonly seen in Southern dialects which inherits more from ancient Chinese. However for many common esp professional sentence the written form is universal
Source: I’m native Chinese