From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Written Cantonese
Written Cantonese
Cantonese has the most well-developed written form of
all Chinese varieties apart from the standard varieties of
Mandarin and Classical Chinese. Standard written Chi-
nese is based on Mandarin, but when spoken word for
word as Cantonese, it sounds unnatural because its ex-
pressions are ungrammatical and unidiomatic in Can-
tonese. As a result, modern Cantonese speakers have de-
veloped their own written script, sometimes creating
new characters for words that either do not exist or have
been lost in standard Chinese.
A good source for well documented written Can-
tonese words can be found in the scripts for Cantonese
opera. Readings in Cantonese colloquial: being selections from
books in the Cantonese vernacular with free and literal trans-
lations of the Chinese character and romanized spelling (1894) Written Cantonese on the packaging of Hong Kong Beverage
by James Dyer Ball has a bibliography of printed works Brand Vitasoy
available in Cantonese characters in the last decade of
the nineteenth century. A few libraries have collections mained essentially static for over two thousand years,
of so-called "wooden fish books" written in Cantonese the actual spoken language diverged further and further
characters. Facsimiles and plot precis of a few of these away. Some writings based on local vernacular speech
have been published in Wolfram Eberhard’s Cantonese did exist but these were rare. In the early 20th century,
Ballads. See also Cantonese love-songs, translated with intro- Chinese reformers like Hu Shi saw the need for language
duction and notes by Cecil Clementi (1904) or a newer trans- reform and championed the development of a vernacular
lation of these by Yue Ou in Cantonese love songs : an English that allowed modern Chinese to write the language the
translation of Jiu Ji-yung’s Cantonese songs of the early 19th same way they speak. The vernacular language move-
century (1992). Cantonese character versions of the Bible, ment took hold, and the written language was standard-
Pilgrims Progress, and Peep of Day, as well as simple cat- ized as Vernacular Chinese. Because they had the largest
echisms, were published by mission presses. The special number of speakers, Mandarin was chosen as the basis
Cantonese characters used in all of these were not stan- for the new standard.
dardized and show wide variation. The standardization and adoption of written Man-
With the advent of the computer and standardization darin pre-empted the development and standardization
of character sets specifically for Cantonese, many printed of vernaculars based on other varieties of Chinese. No
materials in predominantly Cantonese speaking areas of matter which dialect one spoke, one still wrote in stan-
the world are written to cater to their population with dardized Mandarin for everyday writing. However, Can-
these written Cantonese characters. As a result, main- tonese is unique among the non-Mandarin varieties in
stream media such as newspapers and magazines have having a widely used written form. Cantonese-speaking
become progressively less conservative and more collo- Hong Kong was a British colony isolated from mainland
quial in their dissemination of ideas. Generally speaking, China so most HK citizens do not speak Mandarin. Writ-
some of the older generation of Cantonese speakers re- ten Cantonese was developed as a means of informal
gard this trend as a step backwards and away from tradi- communication. Still, Cantonese speakers have to use
tion. This tension between the traditional and colloquial standard written Chinese, or even literary Chinese, in
is a reflection of a transition that is taking place in the most formal written communications, since written Can-
Cantonese-speaking population. tonese may be unintelligible to speakers of other vari-
eties of Chinese.
Historically, written Cantonese has been used in
History Hong Kong for legal proceedings in order to write down
Before the 20th century, the standard written language the exact spoken testimony of a witness, instead of para-
of China was Classical Chinese, which has grammar and phrasing spoken Cantonese into standard written Chi-
vocabulary based on the Chinese used in ancient China, nese. However, its popularity and usage has been rising
Old Chinese. However, while this written standard re- in the last two decades, the late Wong Jim being one of
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Written Cantonese
the pioneers of its use as an effective written language.
Written Cantonese has become quite popular in certain
tabloids, online chat rooms, instant messaging, and even
social networking websites. Although most foreign
movies and TV shows are subtitled in Standard Chinese,
some, such as The Simpsons, are subtitled using written
Cantonese. Some tabloids like Apple Daily are written
largely in Cantonese, other newspapers (e.g. Hong Kong
Economic Journal) may have editorials or columns that
contain Cantonese discourses, and Cantonese characters
are increasing in popularity on advertisements and bill-
boards.
Written Cantonese advertising banner in Mainland China
It has been stated that Written Cantonese remains
limited outside Hong Kong, including other Cantonese-
speaking areas in Guangdong, China; e.g. (Snow, 2004).
However, colloquial Cantonese advertisements are some-
times seen on the mainland, suggesting that written Can-
tonese is widely understood and is regarded favourably,
at least in some contexts.
Some sources will use only colloquial Cantonese
forms, resulting in text similar to natural speech. How-
ever, it is more common to use a mixture of colloquial
forms and Standard Chinese forms, some of which are
alien to natural speech. Thus the resulting "hybrid" text
lies on a continuum between two norms: Standard Chi-
nese, and colloquial Cantonese as spoken.
Cantonese characters
• A Hong Kong Billboard in Written Cantonese with a
• Written Cantonese on Microsoft Office’s Promotional
mix of English words in typical code switch style of
Webpage
Hong Kong speech.
Written Cantonese contains many characters not used in
• A Hong Kong political advertisement written with
standard written Chinese in order to transcribe words
Cantonese
not present in the standard lexicon. Despite attempts by
• Political Banner in Written Cantonese
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Written Cantonese
Is it theirs?
Language Characters Romanization Transliteration Literal meaning
Cantonese 係唔係佢哋嘅？ Yale haih m̀h haih keúih deih ge? Be, not be theirs (s/he plural possessive)?
Mandarin 是不是他們的？ Pinyin Shì bú shì tāmen de? Be, not be theirs (s/he plural possessive)?
For example, some suggest that the common word 靚
(leng), meaning pretty in Cantonese but also looking into
the mirror in Chinese, is in fact the character 令.[2]
Today those characters can mainly be found in an-
cient rime dictionaries such as Guangyun. Some scholars
have made some "archaeological" efforts to find out what
the "original characters" are. Often, however, these ef-
forts are of little use to the modern Cantonese writer,
since the characters so discovered are not available in the
standard character sets provided to computer users, and
many have fallen out of usage.
the government of Hong Kong in the 1990s to standard-
ize this character set, culminating in the release of the Loanwords
Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set for use in elec-
New characters have been created to represent new con-
tronic communication, there is still significant disagree-
cepts or loanwords.
ment about which characters are "correct" in written
Examples:
Cantonese.
• Lift/Elevator
車立 (single character "?") /líp/, composed of the
Synonyms
radical 車 ("car", symbolising a transportation
Some characters used to represent words in Cantonese vehicle) and the phonetic component 立 /lɐ̀p/.
are synonyms of words used in standard written Chinese.
For example, the character for "not" (不) is the synonym Particles
of 唔, the third-person pronoun (他 "he/she") is a syn-
Further information: Cantonese grammar
onym of 佢, the plural pronoun marker (們) is the syn-
Cantonese particles may be added to the end of a sen-
onym of 哋 and the possessive particle (的) is a synonym
tence or suffixed to verbs to indicate aspect. There are
of 嘅. For example:
many such particles; here are a few.
• 咩 - "mē" placed at end of sentence to indicate
Cognates disbelief
There are certain words that share a common root with • 呢 - "nē" placed at end of sentence to indicate
words in standard written Chinese. However, because question [1]
they have diverged in pronunciation, tone, and/or mean- • 未 - "meih" placed at end of sentence to ask if action
ing, they are often written using a different character. is done yet
One example is the doublet 來 lòih (standard) and 嚟 lèih • 嚇 - (more correctly should be 吓) "háh" placed after
(Cantonese), meaning "to come." Both share the same a verb to indicate a little bit, i.e. "eat a little bit"; "há"
meaning and usage, but because the colloquial pronun- used singly, to show uncertainty or unbelief
ciation differs from the literary pronunciation, they are • 緊 - "gán" placed after a verb to indicate a
represented using two different characters. Some people progressive, i.e. "I am eating"
argue that representing the colloquial pronunciation • 咗 - "jó" placed after verb to indicate a completed
with a different (and often extremely complex) character action, i.e. "I finished eating"
is superfluous, and encourage using the same character • 埋 - "maàih" placed after verb to indicate a future
for both forms since they are cognates (see Derived char- tense, i.e. "I will finish eating"
acters below). • 譁/嘩 - "wa" wow!
Native words
Some Cantonese words have no equivalents in Mandarin-
Cantonese words
based standard modern Chinese (though equivalents may In Chinese, distinction is made between single syllable
exist in classical or other varieties of Chinese). Cantonese characters, which may represent either a word, mor-
writers have from time to time reinvented or borrowed a pheme, or particle, and multi-syllabic words. Characters
new character if they are not aware of the original one. are generally represented by a unique character, while a
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Written Cantonese
Examples
English word Cantonese Mandarin
bus 巴士 (ba1 si2) 公共汽車
taxi 的士 (dik7 si2) 計程車 / 出租車 (but 的士 is increasingly recognized in Mandarin)
bye bye 拜拜 (bai1 bai3) 再見 (zàijiàn) (Also uses 拜拜 in speech)
chocolate 朱古力 (zyu1 gu1 lik7) 巧克力 (qiǎokèlì)
sandwich 三文治 (saam1 man4 zi6) 三明治 (sānmíngzhì)
word may be composed of two or more characters, which 仔(jai), which has the original meaning of "young ani-
may not be necessarily related in meaning. Thus, some mal".
Cantonese words may use existing characters to form
words which do not exist or possess different meaning in Marked phonetic loans
Mandarin. Many characters used in Cantonese writings are formed
Also, some existing Chinese words are used different- by putting a mouth radical (㗎, 口) on the left hand side
ly in Cantonese than they are in Mandarin. For example, of another more well known character, usually a stan-
the word for "to eat" in Mandarin is 吃 (e.g. 吃飯 - to eat dard Chinese character. This indicates that the new char-
a meal). However, 吃 is never used in Cantonese. Instead, acter sounds like the standard character, but is only used
the word 食 is used in Cantonese to mean "to eat" (e.g. 食 phonetically in the Cantonese context. (An exception is
飯 - to eat a meal). 食 is also used in Mandarin, but not 咩, which does not sound like 羊 (sheep), but sounds like
as a verb; instead, it is a noun mainly meaning "food". So the sound that sheep make.) The characters which are
when writing in Cantonese, it is necessary to use the ap- commonly used in Cantonese writing include:
propriate Cantonese word. Some examples include: • 㗎 gaa (function word)
• Mandarin: 走 (v. walk) - Cantonese: 行 (as in Classical • 嚇 háah/háa (function word)
Chinese) • 吔 yaa/yaah (function word)
• Mandarin: 吃 (v. eat) - Cantonese: 食 (as in Classical • 呃 ngāak (v. cheat, hoax) Standard Chinese: 騙
Chinese) • 噉 gám (function word like this) Standard Chinese: 這
• Mandarin: 喝 (v. drink) - Cantonese: 飲(as in Classical 樣 e.g. 噉就死喇
Chinese) (Mandarin has since adapted this from • 咁 gam (function word like this) Standard Chinese: 這
Hong Kong.) 麼 e.g. 咁大件
• Mandarin: 看 (v. look) - Cantonese: 睇 (as in its • 咗 jó (function word past tense) Standard Chinese:
Classical Chinese counterpart, 睼) 了
• Mandarin: 怎麼 (adv. how) - Cantonese: 點 • 咩 mē (function word) 嗎
• Mandarin: 像 (v. resemble, adv. like) - Cantonese: 似 • 哂 saai (function word complete e.g. 搬哂 moved all,
• Mandarin: 還 (adv. still) - Cantonese: 仲 (zung6; as in finished moving) Standard Chinese: 掉, 完
Classical Chinese) • 哋 deih (function word; to show plural from of
pronoun) Standard Chinese: 們
Loanwords • 呢 nī/nēi (adv. this) Standard Chinese: 這
Some Cantonese loanwords are written in existing Chi- • 唔 m̀h (adv. not, no, cannot; originally a function
nese characters. word) Standard Chinese: 不
see [3] for a list of loan words in Cantonese. • 唥 lāang (function word)
• 啱 ngāam (adv. just, nearly) Standard Chinese: 剛;
Cantonese character formation (adv. correct, suitable) Standard Chinese: 是
• 啲 dī/dīt (genitive, similar to ’s but pluralizing i.e. 呢
Cantonese characters, as with regular Chinese charac- 個this one->呢啲these, 快點=快啲=hurry) Standard
ters, are formed in one of several ways: Chinese: 的, 些, 點
• 喐 yūk (v. move) Standard Chinese: 動
Borrowings • 喥 douh (adv. there, here) Standard Chinese: 裡
Some characters already exist in standard Chinese, but • 喺 hái (prep.) At, in, during (time), at, in (place)
are simply reborrowed into Cantonese with new mean- Standard Chinese: 在
ings. Most of these tend to be archaic or rarely used • 嗰 gó (adv. that) Standard Chinese: 那
characters. An example is the character 子, which means • 嘅 ge (genitive, similar to ’s; sometimes function
"child". The Cantonese word for child is represented by word) Standard Chinese: 之,的,底
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Written Cantonese
• 嘜 māk (n. mark, trademark; transliteration of • 攰 guih (adj. tired) Standard: 累
"mark") • 埞 dehng (n. place) often followed by 方 to form 埞
• 嘞 laak (function word) 方. Standard: 地方
• 喇 laa (function word) The words represented by these characters are some-
• 嘢 yéh (n. thing, stuff) Standard Chinese:, 事物 times cognates with pre-existing Chinese words. How-
• 嘥 sāai (v. waste) Standard Chinese: 浪費 ever, their colloquial Cantonese pronunciations have di-
• 嚟 lèih/làih (v. come, sometimes function word) verged from formal Cantonese pronunciations. For ex-
Standard Chinese: 來 ample, 無 ("without") is normally pronounced mòuh in
• 嚡 háaih (function word) literature. In spoken Cantonese, 冇 (móuh) has the same
• 嚿 gauh (function word, piece of) usage, meaning, and pronunciation as 無, except for
• 囖 lō/lo (function word) tone. 冇 represents the spoken Cantonese form of the
• 唞 táu (v. rest) word "without", while 無 represents the word used in
• 喊 haam (v. cry) Standard Chinese: 哭 Classical Chinese and Mandarin. However, 無 is still used
• 咪 maih/máih (v. not be, contraction of 唔係 m̀h in some instances in spoken Cantonese, such as 無論如
haih, used following 係 in yes-no questions) 何 ("no matter what happens"). Another example is the
Standard Chinese: 否, 非; also other uses doublet 來/嚟, which means "come". 來 (lòih) is used in
• 吖 aá (final particle expressing consent and denial, literature; 嚟 (lèih) is the spoken Cantonese form.
liveliness and irritation, etc.) Mandarin: 呀
There is evidence that the mouth radical in such charac- Use
ters can, over time, be replaced by a Signific, which indi- As not all Cantonese words can be found in the current
cates the meaning of the character. The new character is encoding system, or their encoding or input method may
then a semantic compound. For instance, 冧 (lām, "bud"), be obscure, some Cantonese writers use simple roman-
written with the signific 冖 ("cover"), is instead written ization (e.g. use D as 啲), symbols (add a Latin letter "o"
in older dictionaries as 啉, with the mouth radical. in front of another Chinese character; e.g. 㗎 is defined in
The development of new Cantonese characters is in- recent versions of Unicode, but will not display in many
teresting linguistically, because they have never been browsers due to lack of proper fonts or the browser’s fail-
subject to government standardization, in contrast to ure to use the correct fonts, hence the proxy o架 is of-
Standard Chinese, which has been regulated for over ten used), homophones (e.g. use 果 as 嗰), and Chinese
2000 years[citation needed]. Therefore, a better understand- characters with that have different meanings in Man-
ing can be gained of the linguistics of how Chinese writ- darin (e.g. 乜, 係, 俾; etc.) For example, "你喺嗰喥好喇,
ing evolves, and how the script is modelled perceptually 千祈咪搞佢啲嘢。" is often written in easier form as "你
by the Chinese reader. o係果度好喇, 千祈咪搞佢D野。" (character-by-charac-
ter, approximately ’you, being, there (two characters),
Derived characters good, (final particle), thousand, pray, don’t, mess with,
Further information: Chinese character classifica- him, (genitive particle), things’, translation ’You’d better
tion#Derived characters stay there, and please don’t mess with his/her stuff.’)
Other common characters are unique to Cantonese or are
different from their Mandarin usage, including: 乜, 冇,
仔, 佢, 佬, 俾, 靚 etc. The characters which are common-
References
ly used in Cantonese writing include: [1] [1]
• 冇 móuh (v. not have). Originally 無. Standard: 沒有 • Cheung, Kwan-hin; Bauer, Robert S. (2002). The
• 係 haih (v. be). Standard: 是 representation of Cantonese with Chinese characters.
• 佢 kéuih (pron. he/she/it). Originally 渠. Standard: Journal of Chinese linguistics. Monograph series, no. 18.
他 • Snow, Donald Bruce (1991). "Written Cantonese and
• 乜 māt (pron. what) often followed by 嘢 to form 乜 the culture of Hong Kong: the growth of a dialect
嘢. Standard: 什麼 literature", PhD thesis, Bloomington, IN: Indiana
• 仔 jái (n. son, child, small thing). Originally 子. University, Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms
• 佬 lóu (n. guy, dude) International.
• 畀 béi (v. give) Standard: 給 • ——— (1994). "A short history of published
• 靚 leng (adj. pretty, handsome). Originally 令. Cantonese: what is dialect literature?" in Journal of
written vernacular Chinese: 漂亮 Asian Pacific Communication, 4(3), pp. 127–32.
• 曬 saai (adv. completely; v. bask in sun) • ——— (2004). Cantonese as Written Language: The
• 瞓 fan (v. sleep). Originally 困. Standard: 睏, 睡 Growth of a Written Chinese Vernacular Hong Kong
• 攞 ló (v. take, get) Standard: 拿 University Press, ISBN 962-209-709-X
• 脷 leih (n. tongue) Standard: 舌
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Written Cantonese
See also • S. L. Wong’s A Chinese Syllabary Pronounced
according to the Dialect of Canton, by the CUHK
• Written Hokkien • A Chinese Talking Syllabary of the Cantonese Dialect:
An Electronic Repository, by the CUHK
External links • Modern Standard Mandarin and Cantonese
conversion, by the CUHK
• Chinese and English phrase book : with the Chinese • Yueyu.net
pronunciation indicated in English by Benoni • Learn Cantonese! Cantonese learning, including
Lanctot(published in 1867) Cantonese characters
• Vocabulary of the Canton Dialect: Chinese words and • Orthographic Change: Yue (Cantonese) Chinese
phrases by Robert Morrison (missionary), published Dialect
in 1828)
• Written Cantonese Wiki A collection of written
Cantonese articles from magazines and newspapers.
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Written_Cantonese&oldid=466540573"
Categories:
• Cantonese language
• Chinese language
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