Written Cantonese

Early history Before the 20th century, the standard written language of China was Classical Chinese, with a grammar and vocabulary based on the Old Chinese of the Spring and Autumn period, of the 8th to the 5th century BCE. While this written standard remained essentially static for over two thousand years, the actual spoken language diverged ever further. The formation of Yue Chinese occurred among the Han population in the Pearl River Delta across many centuries, with the main linguistic influences being the Middle Chinese of the tenth century CE, corresponding to the end of the Tang dynasty, and that of the thirteenth century CE or late Song dynasty, as well as the Tai-Kadai substrate and some influence from pre-Tang Sinitic varieties. The first Cantonese writings belong to a literary form specific to Canton, called mukjyusyu (, Jyutping: , Hanyu Pinyin: , ), that supposedly has its roots in Buddhist chants accompanied by wooden fish. Mukjyu texts were popular light reading, their primary audience were women, as female (and overall) literacy was unusually high in that region. The Faazin Gei is an example of the "scholar and beauty" genre popular at the time, with its story set in Suzhou. Its text, while still being close to Literary Chinese, contains a lot of specific Cantonese wording and even Cantonese vernacular characters, especially in the dialogue sentences, but also in the narrative text. Other such renowned early works include Ji-Hofaa Si (, Jyutping: , "The Two Lotus Flowers") and Gamso-Jyunjoeng Saanwusin Gei (, Jyutping: , "Coral Fan and Golden-lock Mandarin-ducks Pendant"). Some sources will use only colloquial Cantonese forms, resulting in text similar to natural speech. However, 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 Chinese and colloquial Cantonese as spoken. It has been found that female gender and a middle class-income are demographic factors that promote a clear separation between standard written Chinese and written Cantonese. On the other hand, men, and both blue-collar workers and college-educated high-income demographics, are factors that tend towards a convergence to standard written Chinese. ==Cantonese characters==

Early sources A good source for well documented written Cantonese 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 translations of the Chinese character and romanized spelling (1894) by James Dyer Ball has a bibliography of printed works available in Cantonese characters in the last decade of the nineteenth century. A few libraries have collections of so-called "wooden fish books" written in Cantonese characters. Facsimiles and plot precis of a few of these have been published in Wolfram Eberhard's Cantonese Ballads. See also Cantonese love-songs, translated with introduction and notes by Cecil Clementi (1904) or a newer translation of these by Peter T. Morris in ''Cantonese love songs : an English translation of Jiu Ji-yung's Cantonese songs of the early 19th century'' (1992). Cantonese character versions of the Bible, Pilgrims Progress, and Peep of Day, as well as simple catechisms, were published by mission presses. The special Cantonese characters used in all of these were not standardized and show wide variation. Characters today File:Cantonesebillboard.jpg|A Hong Kong billboard in Written Cantonese with a mixture of English words in the typical code switch style of Hong Kong speech. File:Written_cantonese.jpg|A Hong Kong political advertisement for Professional Commons in Written Cantonese File:Cantopoliticalbanner.jpg|Political banner for the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong in Written Cantonese Written Cantonese contains many characters not used in standard written Chinese in order to transcribe words not present in the standard lexicon, and for some words from Old Chinese when their original forms have been forgotten. Despite attempts by the government of Hong Kong in the 1990s to standardize this character set, culminating in the release of the Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set (HKSCS) for use in electronic communication, there is still significant disagreement about which characters are correct in written Cantonese, as many of the Cantonese words existed as descendants of Old Chinese words, but are being replaced by some new invented Cantonese words. Vocabulary General estimates of vocabulary differences between Cantonese and Mandarin range from 30 to 50 percent. Donald B. Snow, the author of Cantonese as Written Language: The Growth of a Written Chinese Vernacular, wrote that "It is difficult to quantify precisely how different" the two vocabularies are. Snow wrote that the different vocabulary systems are the main difference between written Mandarin and written Cantonese. Today those characters can mainly be found in ancient rime dictionaries such as Guangyun. Some scholars have made some "archaeological" efforts to find out what the "original characters" are. Often, however, these efforts 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. In Southeast Asia, Cantonese people may adopt local Malay words into their daily speech, such as using the term 鐳 leoi1 to mean money rather than 錢 cin2, which would be used in Hong Kong. Particles Cantonese particles may be added to the end of a sentence or suffixed to verbs to indicate aspect. There are many such particles; here are a few. •  – "me1" is placed at the end of a sentence to indicate disbelief, e.g. ？ Is your nickname really Raymond Lam? •  – "ne1" is placed at the end of a sentence to indicate a question, e.g. What is your name? •  – "mei6" is placed at the end of a sentence to ask if an action is done yet, e.g. Are you done yet? •  – "haa5" is placed after a verb to indicate a little bit, e.g. Eat a little bit; "haa2" is used singly to show uncertainty or unbelief, e.g. ? What? Is that so? •  – "gan2" is placed after a verb to indicate a progressive action, e.g. I'm eating an apple. •  – "zo2" placed after a verb to indicate a completed action, e.g. I ate an apple. •  – "saai3" placed after a verb to indicate an action to all of the targets, e.g. I ate all the apples. •  – "maai4" is placed after a verb to indicate an expansion of the target of action, or that the action is an addition to the one(s) previously mentioned, e.g. I'll go after I finish eating the rest. ("eating the rest" is an expansion of the target of action from the food eaten to the food not yet eaten); You can go first. I'll eat before going. (The action "eating" is an addition to the action "going" which is previously mentioned or mutually known.) •  – "waa1 / waa3" interjection of amazement, e.g. Wow! That's amazing! •  – "gaa3 laa1" is used when the context seems to be commonplace, e.g., Everyone is like that. •  – "ze1 maa3" translates as "just", e.g. I just have two pages of homework left to do. Loanwords Some Cantonese loanwords are written in existing Chinese characters. } 貝果 (Taiwan) 趴(Taiwan) ==Cantonese character classification==

Cantonese characters are classified into one of several types: Borrowings Refers to Standard Chinese Characters that are reborrowed into Written Cantonese with a different meaning from the character's original meaning, and characters who's usage in Written Cantonese is cognate with the character's (usually archaic) meaning in Standard Chinese. Examples include: Compound formations The majority of characters used in Standard Chinese are phono-semantic compounds – characters formed using two parts, or radicals; one hinting at its meaning, and one hinting at its pronunciation. Written Cantonese continues this practice, most often via putting the "mouth" radical () next to a character that indicates its pronunciation. As an example, the character uses the mouth radical with a , which means "brave", but has no relation to the meaning of and only indicates it's pronunciation. An exception is , which is not pronounced like its radical (joeng4); 羊 means "sheep" and was chosen as the radical of 咩 because the pronunciation of (me1) resembles the sound that sheep make. Other phono-semantic characters unique to Cantonese which are not formed with the "mouth" radical () include: Non-compound formations Characters which are not phono-semantic compounds include: The words represented by these characters are also sometimes cognates with pre-existing Chinese words. However, their colloquial Cantonese pronunciations have diverged from formal Cantonese pronunciations. For example, ("without") is normally pronounced mou4 in literature. In spoken Cantonese, mou5 has the same usage, meaning, and pronunciation as , except for tone. represents the spoken Cantonese form of the word "without", while represents the word used in Classical Chinese and Mandarin. However, is still used in some instances in spoken Cantonese, such as ("no matter what happens"). Another example is the doublet , which means "come". loi4 is used in literature; lei4 is the spoken Cantonese form. Workarounds Although most Cantonese words can be found in the current encoding system, input workarounds are commonly used both by those unfamiliar with them, and by those whose input methods do not allow for easy input (similar to how some Russian speakers might write in the Latin script if their computing device lacks the ability to input Cyrillic). Some Cantonese writers use simple romanization (e.g. using "la" to represent "喇"), symbols (e.g. adding a Latin letter "o" in front of "係" to represent "喺"; using "D" to represent "啲"), homophones (e.g. using "果" to represent "嗰"), or a character that is similiar in form and pronunciation (e.g. using "野" to represent "嘢") in place of certain characters. For example, ==Profanities==

See Cantonese profanity. ==See also==