Cantonese: Since the 19th Century

 ONE OF THE MOST SPOKEN DIALECTS in China, Southeast Asia, and globally, Cantonese was nevertheless deemed a local dialect enjoying little prestige among the intellectuals. Not much was recorded in official documents or gazetteers about the early history of Hong Kong. The Cantonese language and its origin remained much of a mystery until the mid-20th century when scholars started to accord it with increasing attention.

Thanks to dedicated efforts of early missionaries, pedagogues, and linguists, we can now trace back the evolution of modern Cantonese since the 19th century— how differences in sounds, words, and grammar distinguish the old from contemporary speech today.

In this book, Hung-nin Samuel Cheung, an acclaimed scholar on the study of Cantonese, offers profound insights to various firsthand century-old materials including language manuals, Bible translations, and maps of Hong Kong, with findings that will be useful for ongoing efforts to study the development of the Cantonese language that has gone through many rounds of incredible and, at times, dramatic changes during the last two hundred years.

 Foreword ....................................................................................................................................vii

One Language, Two Systems:

A Phonological Study of Two Cantonese Language Manuals of 1888 .....................................1

Cantonese Phonology as Reconstructed from Popular Songs ....................................................33

Completing the Completive:

Reconstructing Early Cantonese Grammar .............................................................................75

The Interrogative Construction:

(Re-)constructing Early Cantonese Grammar ........................................................................109

The Pretransitive in Cantonese ..................................................................................................151

Naming the City: Language Complexity in the Making of

an 1866 Map of Hong Kong ....................................................................................................209

Terms of Address in Cantonese ...................................................................................................247

A Study of Xiehouyu Expressions in Cantonese ..........................................................................287

Appendix: Chinese Abstracts.....................................................................................................357