Cantonese cuisine features
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Cantonese is a southern dialect that retains more elements of medieval Chinese, and its most prominent feature is that it completely retains the common entering tones in medieval Chinese. Therefore, a large number of Tang poetry and Song poetry, if read in Cantonese now, can only meet the most basic "rhythmic beauty" of poetry.
Take Jiang Xue by Liu Zongyuan, a poet in the Tang Dynasty, as an example;
There are no birds in the mountains,
A thousand roads without footprints.
A boat, a bamboo cloak,
An old man was fishing in the cold river snow.
Modern poems (quatrains/metrical poems) in the Tang Dynasty rarely enter rhyme. If there is rhyme, it must be because the author wants to express an unusually depressed or sad mood. This Jiang Xue by Liu Zongyuan was recited in Cantonese. Because the three words "Jue", "Jue" and "Xue" are entering tone, the ending of the whole sentence will appear extremely short and depressing in pronunciation, which fully reflects the author's depressed mood.
In fact, the author deliberately chooses intonation and rhyme, and then expresses his thoughts by combining the images described between the lines. If you recite in Mandarin, you won't feel the beauty of rhyme, then the beauty of this poem will be less than half.
Preserved a large number of ancient elements in China.
Standard Cantonese/Cantonese Cantonese dialect has many archaic sounds. There are many ancient words, ancient meanings and quaint expressions in Cantonese, and many words in Cantonese, including modal particles, can be directly found in ancient books in China. In the northern dialect of China, these archaic words have been abandoned or rarely used. Grammatical items such as postposition and modifier inversion are preserved 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. Guangdong, which is located in a corner, is rarely in war and has not been affected by too many wars, so it has always retained the language and culture of Han and Tang Dynasties.
Today, the phonetic system of Guangdong dialect has a very strict correspondence with the phonetic system of Sui and Tang Dynasties, that is, the phonetic system of Qieyun (medieval phonetic system), that is, the phonetic characteristics of Guangdong dialect today are very close to those of Chinese in Sui and Tang Dynasties. The first official authoritative work of phonology and prosody in China's history, Guang Yun (full name: Rebuilding Guang Yun in the Great Song Dynasty), in which the pronunciation of the words marked is highly consistent with the current Cantonese.
Reference to the above content: Baidu Encyclopedia-Cantonese