Cantonese (a language in Sino-Tibetan language family) _ Baidu Encyclopedia
Characteristics of Cantonese
Preserved a large number of ancient elements in China.
There are many archaic sounds in standard Cantonese/Cantonese Cantonese dialect, many archaic words in Cantonese, and many words in Cantonese, including modal particles, which can be directly found in ancient Chinese classics. In the northern dialect of China, these archaic words have been abandoned or rarely used. Are there any grammatical items such as postmodifiers and inverted sentences in Cantonese? . In addition, modern Cantonese still tends to use monosyllabic words which are dominant in ancient Chinese. Some words that are regarded as popular by Cantonese speakers can be found in ancient books.
First, two people use "I" and "you", just like Mandarin. The third person does not use "he", but uses "ditch" (popularly written as "he"; Peacock flies southeast in the Eastern Han Dynasty: "Although it is more important than the government, the canal will never have a chance", just like Wu Yu. The plural person does not use "men", but the terminal [ta? ] or [ti] (Miao is written in modern Cantonese with the word "Deng", see the ordinary prayer book of the Anglican Church). Cantonese uses "yes" instead of "yes" to express a positive answer. "Xi" is a common word in Ming and Qing Dynasties. These words are gradually eliminated in the mainstream Mandarin, but they still appear occasionally in the written language. For example, when Li Yan mentioned Issac Wolfram, a mathematician in the1955th century, in the first volume of Arithmetic History (1955th edition, page 2 10), he wrote "the deputy captain of the Dutch artillery regiment in the Canal Department".
In classical Chinese and modern Cantonese, "death and loss" are equivalent to "finally, giving". In ancient times, the commonly used word "Qian Wen" was retained in Cantonese (but the common name was "Mosquito"). Looking for the Sun (Yesterday) can be traced back to the elder sister in Wuchang in Tao Yuanming's Farewell Speech in the Eastern Jin Dynasty, and it can be interpreted as "not long ago", "how much" and "when" can be traced back to Li Yu's How much can you care about, and Su Shi's Mink Head and When is the Bright Moon.
Although some modern Cantonese can be traced back to ancient times, there are differences between ancient and modern usage. In the above table, the yin of the sentence "Only Heaven is Yin, Ying and Xia Min" in Shangshu originally meant silent protection, but later it evolved into the meaning of merit. Taoism's "Wen Bian Di Yin Jun Wen" refers to Wen Chang Dijun teaching people to "practice Yin Wen". Later, Yin Zhi derived two synonyms: implicit merit and implicit virtue. Fang Ruhao, an Amin scholar, used these three words alternately in Du Dongji. But there is a so-called "dark pattern" in folk physiognomy. He said that whoever has this pattern is bound to do bad things. The above three synonyms are also ambiguous, among which "virtue" still refers to merit, but the word "Yin Zhi" has been changed to derogatory meaning. It was a good thing to write in the seventy-third chapter of A Dream of Red Mansions that "saving people is the worst thing", but now the so-called "evil" in Cantonese has become immoral. As for the word "Yin Gong", just as "it's hard to get …" and "it's hard to get …" are synonyms in Mandarin, in modern Cantonese, both "true Yin Gong" and "true Yin Gong" mean misery and pity.
Left behind the elements of ancient South Vietnam.
Huaxia and South Vietnamese aborigines who moved to Lingnan in ancient times lived together for a long time, and their languages, cultures and customs infiltrated each other. Modern Cantonese still contains South Vietnamese elements at the bottom, which is manifested in vocabulary and some remains in grammar. There are many common words in daily life that are close to or the same as modern Zhuang language. Whether these words are the source of ancient Chinese, or the remains of the bottom vocabulary of ancient Baiyue language, or just because other minority languages borrowed these inherent words of ancient Chinese, which led people to think that these bottom vocabulary in Cantonese is the source of ancient Baiyue language, which is impossible to verify. At present, about 20% of these words in Cantonese have not been recorded in ancient Chinese literature, and the proportion is small, but they are frequently used. ? [ 10]?
Absorb foreign words
Cantonese loanwords mainly come from English. Loanwords began to appear in Guangzhou in the Qing Dynasty, but in the colonial history of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Cantonese (Hong Kong Cantonese) absorbed a large number of loanwords, which influenced Cantonese-speaking areas in Guangdong. Many of these loanwords have not been absorbed by Mandarin, such as "store, si? 22 t？ 55), namely "canteen"; Some of them are absorbed, but the translation is different. For example, "salad" means "salad" in Cantonese (SAA1LOET 6); The Cantonese translations of many foreigners' names are also quite different from those in northern China dialect. For example, George Bush, the 43rd president of the United States, was translated into "Bush" in Mandarin, "Bush" in Chinese in the Republic of China, and "bou4 syu 1" in Cantonese in Hong Kong. These translated names often need to be pronounced in the local language to get close to the original sound.
Comparatively speaking, for the transliteration of consonant endings, Mandarin is often transliterated after Canadian dollars, because there is no corresponding rhyme ending, while Cantonese sometimes combines consonant endings. For example, lift sometimes writes the Cantonese word "?" ("car+vertical": left car and right vertical, pronounced lip), simplify -ft to-p.
Since 1980s, with the more frequent exchanges between Hong Kong, Pearl River Delta and other Cantonese-speaking areas and the mainland, many Cantonese loanwords have gradually entered Mandarin, such as "bus", "tip" and "snake gwe1"(Scare: se4gwe1). Sometimes, these words are distorted when they are absorbed by Mandarin. For example, Cantonese "taxi" is absorbed by Mandarin as "taxi". One of the reasons is that there is no corresponding syllable in Putonghua. For example, "GAU2DIM 3" becomes "done" because there is no -m in Putonghua, and the syllable *tin *din does not exist (excluding historical phonetic changes, there is no source afterwards).