Written Cantonese
Categories: Chinese language | Logographic writing systems | Cantonese (linguistics)
Written Cantonese refers to the written language used to write colloquial standard Cantonese using Chinese characters.
Cantonese is usually referred to as a spoken variant, and not as a written variant. Spoken vernacular Cantonese differs from standard written Chinese. Written Chinese spoken word for word sounds overly formal and distant in Cantonese. As a result, the necessity of having a written script which matched the spoken verse increased over time. This resulted in the generation of additional Chinese characters to complement the existing characters. Many of these represent phonological sounds not present in Mandarin. A good source for well documented Cantonese words can be found in drama and opera (dai hay) scripts.
With the advent of the computer and stadardization of character sets specifically for Cantonese, many printed materials in predominantly Cantonese spoken areas of the world are written to cater to their population with these written Cantonese characters. As a result, mainstream media such as newspapers and magazines have become progressively less conservative and more colloquial in their dissemination of ideas. Generally speaking, some of the older generation of Cantonese speakers regard this trend as a step "backwards" and away from tradition. This tension between the "old" and "new" is a reflection of a transition that is being undergone by the Cantonese speaking population.
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History
Before the 20th century, the standard written language of China was Classical Chinese, which has grammar and vocabulary based on the Chinese used in ancient China, Old Chinese. However, while this written standard remained essentially static for over two thousand years, the actual spoken language diverged further and further away. Some writings based on local vernacular speech did exist but these were rare. In the early 20th century, Chinese reformers like Hu Shi saw the need for language reform and championed the development of a vernacular that allowed modern Chinese to write the language the same way they speak. The vernacular language movement took hold, and the written language was standardized as Vernacular Chinese. However, the Chinese spoken varieties used across China are not all the same, and because the Mandarin dialects comprised the largest proportion of the Chinese speaking population, Vernacular Chinese was based mostly on the grammar and vocabulary of Mandarin.
The standardization and adoption of Vernacular Chinese as standard written Chinese pre-empted the development and standardization of other vernaculars based on other Chinese varieties. No matter what dialect one spoke, one still wrote in standard written Chinese for everyday writing. However, Cantonese is unique among the non-Mandarin spoken varieties in having a widely used colloquial standard. This is due in part to the fact that Hong Kong, a large Cantonese-speaking city, was outside of Chinese control for over a hundred years before the British handed it over to the People's Republic of China in 1997. Many Cantonese speakers may find it more convenient to write exactly what they actually speak in a conversation. That is a motive of creating written Cantonese. But even so, this kind of writing is considered by some people as informal, non-standard and unprofessional. Cantonese speakers have to use standard written Chinese in most formal written communications, since written Cantonese contains many specific characters and grammatical structures that may be unfamiliar or even unreadable to other speakers of other Chinese spoken variants.
Historically, written Cantonese has been used in Hong Kong for legal proceedings in order to record the exact testimony of a witness, instead of paraphrasing in standard written Chinese. However, its popularity and usage has been rising in the last two deacades, the late Wong Jim being one of the pioneer of using it as an effective written language. Written colloquial Cantonese has become quite popular in certain tabloids, online chat rooms, and instant messaging. Some tabloids like Apple Daily write colloquial Cantonese; papers may contain editorials that contain Cantonese; and Cantonese-specific characters can be increasingly seen on advertisements and billboards. Written Cantonese remains limited outside of Hong Kong, even in other Cantonese-speaking areas such as Guangdong, where the use of colloquial writing is discouraged. Despite the relative popularity of written Cantonese in Hong Kong, some people think that is a bad way to write Chinese. They believe that if one is too accustomed to write in such a way, that would affect his/her ability to write standard written Chinese in the situations that standard written Chinese has to be used.
Cantonese characters
Written Cantonese contains many characters not used in standard written Chinese in order to transcribe colloquially spoken words. Because written Cantonese is not really a standard written language, there can be many discrepancies in the way certain words are written. In the 1990s, the government of Hong Kong attempted to standardize this set of characters and released the Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set for use in electronic communication. Even still, there is often no consensus on what characters are often the "correct" ones to use.
Synonyms
Some characters used to represent words in Cantonese are simply synonyms of words used in standard written Chinese. The most common are the character for the verb "to be" (是) and the character for "not" (不), which are simply replaced by 係; and 唔, respectively. Another example is the third-person pronoun (他/她 "he/she"), which is replaced by 佢. The plural pronoun marker (們) is replaced by 哋. The possessive particle (的) is replaced by 嘅. For instance:
- Is it theirs?
- 係唔係佢哋嘅？ (Cantonese)
- 是不是他們的？ (Standard Chinese)
- literally: "be not be they POSSESSIVE?"
Cognates
There are certain words that share a common root with words in standard written Chinese. However, because they have diverged in pronunciation, tone, and/or meaning, they are often written using a different character. One example is the doublet 來 (standard) and 嚟 (Cantonese), meaning "to come." Both share the same meaning and usage, but because the colloquial pronunciation differs from the literary pronunciation, they are represented using two different characters, 嚟 and 來, respectively. Some people argue that representing the colloquial pronunciation with a different (and often extremely complex) character is superfluous, and encourage using the same character for both forms since they are cognates (see #Derived characters below).
Native words
Some characters are native to Cantonese and have no equivalents in Standard Chinese (though equivalents may exist in other varieties of Chinese). Another situation is that some Cantonese words, with their corresponding characters, did exist in Standard Chinese in ancient times. These words and characters, however, have been discarded in Standard Chinese for long; and the words, not the characters, survive in Cantonese. Today those characters can mainly be found in ancient dictionaries or "rhyme books" (韻書). Some scholars have made some "archaeological" efforts to find out what the original characters are. Most of those proper characters discovered cannot even be typed, though.
On the other hand, some of the characters have only been corrupted in Cantonese, not disappeared in Standard Chinese. For instance, the common word leng3 (meaning pretty) is usually written with the character 靚 in Cantonese (the character has another meaning in standard Chinese). The word should indeed be written with the character 令, as 令 used as an adjective to mean "pretty" still survives in the idiom 巧言令色 (roughly meaning "skillful talk and pretty manners").
Sometimes the pronunciation of a word changes when it is used in a certain phrases in Cantonese, and people cannot recognise the word, trying to write it with a different, often self-made, character. For example, the word 微 (mei4) is a common one in both Cantonese and Standard Chinese, meaning small, soft or weak; in Cantonese we have the phrase siu3 mei1mei1 (smiling softly), which should be written as 笑微微; however, as the sound of 微 has changed from mei4 to mei1, people do not recognise the word, writing the phrase as 笑咪咪, 咪 being a tailor-made Cantonese character.
See Chinese character encoding
Loanwords
These are characters created to represent loanwords borrowed into Cantonese.
Examples:
- elevator - 車立 (single character ""; from British English "lift") /lip1/, composed of the radical 車 ("car", cf. usage of "car" to mean the passenger compartment of "elevator") and the phonetic component 立 /lɐp6/
Particles
Cantonese is famous for the use of particles in speech. Some are added to the end of a sentence while others are suffixed to verbs to indicate tense. There are many such particles; here are a few.
- 咩 - "me" placed at end of sentence to indicate disbelief
- 呢 - "ne" placed at end of sentence to indicate question
- 未 - "mei" placed at end of sentence to ask if action is done yet
- 吓 - (more correctly should be 下) "ha" placed after a verb to indicate a little bit, ie "eat a little bit"
- 緊 - "gan" placed after a verb to indicate an action going on, ie "I am eating"
- 咗 - "jo" placed after verb for past perfect tense, ie "I finished eating"
- 埋 - "maai" placed after verb to indicate an action that will be finishing, ie "I will finish eating"
- 嘩 - "wa" wow!
Cantonese words
In Chinese, distinction is made between single syllable characters, which may represent either a word, morpheme, or particle, and multi-syllabic words. Characters are generally represented by a unique character, while a word may be composed of two or more characters, which may not be necessarily related in meaning. Thus, some Cantonese words may use existing characters to form words which do not exist or possess different meaning in standard Chinese.
Loanwords
Some Cantonese loanwords are not necessarily written with new characters and simply use the pronunciations of existing Chinese characters. Because many loanwords originated from Hong Kong or overseas Chinese, they often use different characters and pronunciations than the Mandarin Chinese equivalents (if they exist).
Examples:
- bus - 巴士 (ba si) (巴士 also used in Mandarin)
- taxi - 的士 (dic si)
- bye bye - 拜拜 (bai bai)
- chocolate - 朱古力 (jyu1 gu1 lik1) Mandarin - 巧克力 (qiǎokèlì)
- sandwich - 三文治 (saam1 man4 ji6) Mandarin - 三明治 (sānmíngzhì)
see [1] for a list of loan words in Cantonese.
Cantonese character formation
Cantonese characters, as with regular Chinese characters, are formed in one of several ways:
Borrowings
Some characters already exist in standard Chinese, but are simply reborrowed into Cantonese with new meanings. Most of these tend to be archaic or rarely used characters. An example is the character 子, which means "child". The Cantonese word for child is represented by 仔(jai), which has the original meaning of "young animal".
Semantic compound characters
Many characters used in colloquial Cantonese writings are made up by putting a mouth radical (口) on the left hand side of another more well known character to indicate that the character is read like the right hand side, but it is only used phonetically in the Cantonese context. The characters which are commonly used in Cantonese writing include:
- 㗎 (function word)
- 叻 (adj. smart, clever; originally refers to Singapore)
- 吓 (function word)
- 吔 (function word)
- 呃 (v. cheat, hoax)
- 咁 (function word)
- 咗 (function word)
- 咩 (function word)
- 哂 (function word)
- 哋 (function word; to show plural from of pronoun)
- 唔 (adv. not, no, cannot; originally a function word)
- 唥 (function word)
- 啱 (adv. yes, just, nearly)
- 啲 (genitive, similar to 's; sometimes function word)
- 喐 (v. move)
- 喥 (adv. there, here)
- 喺
- 嗰 (adv. that)
- 嘅 (genitive, similar to 's; sometimes function word)
- 嘜 (n. mark, trademark; transliteration of "mark")
- 嘞 (function word)
- 嘢 (n. thing, stuff)
- 嘥 (v. waste)
- 嚟 (v. come, sometimes function word)
- 嚡 (function word)
- 嚿 (function word)
- 囖 etc.
See also: semantic compound characters
Derived characters
Other common characters are unique to Cantonese or deviated from their Mandarin usage, they include: 乜, 冇, 仔, 佢, 佬, 係, 俾, 靚 etc.
The words represented by these characters are sometimes cognates with pre-existing Chinese words. However, their colloquial Cantonese pronunciations have diverged from formal Cantonese pronunciations. For example, in formal written Chinese, 無 (mou4) is the character used for "without". In spoken Cantonese, 冇 (mou5) has the same usage, meaning, and pronunciation as 無, differing only by tone. 冇 represents the spoken Cantonese form of the word "without", while 無 represents the word used in Mandarin (pinyin: wú) and formal Chinese writing. However, 無 is still used in some instances in spoken Cantonese, like 無論如何 ("no matter what happens"). Another example is the doublet 來/嚟, which means "to come". 來(loi4) is used in formal writing; 嚟 (lei4) is the spoken Cantonese form.
See also: derived characters
Colloquial usage
As not all Cantonese words can be found in current encoding system, or the users simply don't 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. 㗎 is defined in recent versions of Unicode, but will not display in many browsers due to lack of proper fonts or the browser's failure to use the correct fonts. hence the proxy o架 is often used), homophones (e.g. use 果 as 嗰), and Chinese character of different Mandarin meaning (e.g. 乜, 係, 畀; etc.) to compose a message. For example, "你喺嗰喥好喇, 千祈咪搞佢啲嘢。" is often written in easier form as "你o係果度好喇, 千祈咪搞佢D野。" (character-by-character, approximately 'you, being, there (two characters), good, (final particle), thousand, pray, don't, mess with, him, (genitive particle), things', translation 'You'd better stay there, and please don't mess with his/her stuff.')
External links
- S. L. Wong's A Chinese Syllabary Pronounced according to the Dialect of Canton, by the CUHK
- A Chinese Talking Syllabary of the Cantonese Dialect: An Electronic Repository, by the CUHK
- Modern Standard Mandarin and Cantonese conversion, by the CUHK
- Yueyu.net
- Cantonese Association
- Learn Cantonese!
Literature
- Snow, Don (2004) Cantonese as Written Language: The Growth of a Written Chinese Vernacular Hong Kong University Press ISBN 962209709X
- Snow, Donald Bruce (1991) "Written Cantonese and the culture of Hong Kong: the growth of a dialect literature", PhD Thesis, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University, Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International.
- Snow, Donald Bruce (1994) "A short history of published Cantonese: what is dialect literature?" in Journal of Asian Pacific Communication, 4(3), pp.127-132.
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| Subcategories of Min: | Min Bei | Min Dong | Min Nan | Min Zhong | Pu Xian | Qiong Wen | Shao Jiang |
| Note: The above is only one classification scheme among many. The categories in italics are not universally acknowledged to be independent categories. | |
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| Other varieties: | Written Vernacular Cantonese |