According to Portuguese expert Graciete Nogueira Batalha in "Macanese Language - History and Current Situation", the pronunciation of certain word endings in the native language has been diphthongized, for example, mês is pronounced as m is, vez is pronounced as v is, talvez is pronounced as talv is, pos is pronounced as p is, and rapaz is pronounced as rapaiz. In addition, the phenomenon of word endings disappearing is common (Hu Huiming 2000) tries to restore the appearance of the ancient Patua language, pointing out that the phonetic characteristics of the dialect are:
a. The word form is very close to the standard Portuguese word form. Portuguese dialect words derived from standardized Portuguese, in which the pronunciation of characters is lost. For example, in the native Portuguese language margoso (bitter melon) is the deletion of the first sound of the standard Portuguese amargoso sentence; língu (tongue) is the deletion of the final sound of língua; ome (man) is the deletion of the first sound and the final sound of the word homem at the same time.
b. The ending r of infinitive verbs that regulates Portuguese falls off in Portuguese.
c. The double trill rr in standard Portuguese is converted into a single trill r in the native language.
d. The diphthong nasal vowel o is converted into a combination of strong vowel and m. (Press: ~ means nasal sound, strong vowel means heavy vowel) It becomes ám. For example, the dialect chám (地) comes from ch o.
e. There is no distinction between patois and o.
f. In native dialects, ch is not pronounced as [ ], but as [ ]
g. The final vowel is diphthongized.
h. The patois i replaces the standard Portuguese e.
I. The standard Portuguese ei is simplified to i.
j. Standard Portuguese r becomes l.
k. The standard Portuguese lh becomes l.
l. The writing method of dialect is not fixed. For example, "water" is written with agu / ago; "tax museum" is also written with hupu / hoppo. The characteristics of native languages ??are most prominent in terms of vocabulary. It extensively absorbs many words from different languages ??and has a rich vocabulary. For example, words from Malay include: passo (rice bowl), sapeca (coin), sanco (spittoon), pulu (glutinous rice), par (kitchen knife), sara as (turban made of sarom and bajus cloth), baju (a a waist-length blouse worn indoors); words from Indian languages ??include: fula (flower), lacassa (fettuccine), aluá (um doce, a dessert), chale (beco dead end), daia (parteira midwife) ), jambo and jambol o (frutos fruit); the original dialect borrowed very few words from Chinese, and it was only in modern times that the number of words increased significantly, such as amui (Amei), laissi (Rishi, red envelope); there are also many modern loanwords from English, such as adap (financial), afet (obesity).
Western linguists did not pay enough attention to the Cantonese dialect words in the dialect when demonstrating the dialect. In fact, the Cantonese dialect words play an important role in the dialect. Such as: minpao (bread), iamcha (drinking tea), putou (bowl), malau-con (dried horse, a Cantonese dialect describing a thin person), faichi (chopsticks), etc.
Hu Huiming summarized the vocabulary characteristics of Tuyu as follows:
a. Tuyu retains ancient Portuguese words.
b. There are borrowed words from various places in the dialect, among which Malay and Chinese have the most words.
c. Foreign language loan words + Portuguese words = compound words.
d. Two Portuguese words are combined into a patois word.
e. Patois words that are related to standard Portuguese in terms of meaning and meaning.
f. Words and phrases that do not exist in standard Portuguese and are free translations from Chinese. For example: ninho de pássaro (bird's nest, bird's nest), asa de pésse (fish with wings, shark's fin).
g. A word transliterated from Chinese.
h. Cantonese dialect. The overlapping method is used more often. Noun overlap means plural or all, such as casa-casa (house), china-china (Chinese), tudo lugar lugar (everywhere), tudo loja loja (every shop), tudo laia laia (everything); adjective overlap Indicates the degree of strengthening, such as cedo-cedo (very early), azinha azinha (quickly), perto perto (nearly), quenti quenti (hotly).
Confusing morphological flags. The distinction between "sex" and "case" of nouns is confusing, for example, the third person masculine pronoun ele is used to refer to women. "A primary school student whose mother is Chinese told me one day about a difficult incident in his family life. He repeated ele... ele... ele many times, but I never understood who he was referring to. 'Ele quem?' I asked. 'Meu m e!' he replied loudly, surprised at my question.
” (Battaya 1994) Another example is that the first-person pronouns in native languages ??no longer have the distinction between nominative and objective cases: iou falo (I say. I am nominative) and busca iou (find me. I am accusative), both “I” are used. iou, standard Portuguese is eu acho and procura-me. The conjugation forms of verbs are reduced to only a few. In many cases, all persons and tenses are expressed in the original form of the verb or the present tense or the past tense. For example, "I fell down". The standard Portuguese word is eu caí, and the patois word is eu caiu (the first person of the subject, the third person of the predicate); the standard Portuguese word for "they dragged me" is eles puxaram-me, and the patois word is eles puchou-me (the plural first person of the subject, The third person singular of the predicate); "I screamed", the standard Portuguese is eu berei, and the dialect is eu berei-me (reflexive verbs are not used)
It is a word formation that mixes different language formation methods. As for the characteristics of word formation, you can often see word-formation elements from different languages ??appearing in one word, such as a Cantonese dialect with a Portuguese affix, or a Portuguese word with a Cantonese dialect affix, such as avo-gong: avo. It means "grandfather/grandfather" in Portuguese, and gong is the "gong" in Cantonese dialect. It can be used as a suffix in word formation. The word "gong" used as a suffix is ??like Shou Xing Gong and Bo Ye Gong. In addition to avo-gong in dialect, There is also avo-po, which is the word "po" in Cantonese dialect. Avo-po is formed from avo-gong. Another example is Mari-chai ("mari" in Cantonese dialect). It has many functions, and one of the functions can be used as a suffix for nouns that refer to people, such as Hui Zai, Bald Zai, Housheng Zai, Shao Zai, Guai Zai, Fat Zai. In these structures, Zai only means male, not female. The word "chai" in -chai means female. 14
The syntax of the Portuguese language is influenced by the Cantonese dialect, using the Portuguese "yes" sentence pattern of alternating affirmative and negative questions. There are only two types of questions with "no": "is it" (?) and "no" (n o é?). Asking "yes" or "no" depends on the speaker's assessment or intention: when estimating the answer If the answer is mostly negative, then ask "is it?" in the affirmative part. ",n o é? ” and “N o é, é? "Two sentence patterns. This is equivalent to disjunctive questions in English. (It is..., isn't it? and It isn't..., is it?) The dialect has "Is it?" The question form is "é n o é?" ”15 Use double questions to replace the single questions that standardize Portuguese to form a sentence pattern, another example:
Sentence meaning
Do you know?
Come or not
Patois
sabe-nunca?
vem nunca?
Cantonese dialect
Do you know?< /p>
Come or not?
Standardized Portuguese
sabe?
vem?
Direct translation of Cantonese dialect The word "hao" in the negative sentence pattern "uhhao + verb" forms a unique "pidgin" sentence pattern:
Sentence meaning
Don't buy
Don’t run away
Don’t be verbose
Patois
ne-bom compa
ne-bom fugi
< p>ne-bom bafo compridoCantonese dialect
It’s not easy to buy
It’s not easy to leave
It’s not easy to be so angry
p>Standardize Portuguese
n o-compre
n o fuga
n o prolixo
The patois "verb + come" + verb + go" sentence pattern obviously comes from Chinese:
Chinese
walk around
Tuyu
anda vem anda vai
Standardized Portuguese
vai e vem Because patois has the characteristics of ridicule, relaxation, and vulgarity, it often appears in comedy works, and occasionally appears in some relaxed situations. For example, a feature published in the Macau Daily News on August 23, 2004 titled "Brother Hua Attends a Dinner and Rarely Easily Learns to Speak Portuguese and Causes a Sensation": "At the dinner, the Portuguese community in Macau arranged a series of performances. The performance of the Macanese band also included the Macanese dialect 'Stand-up comedy', performed by barrister Fei Wenji, who is committed to the development of local drama. During the performance, Fei Wenji suggested to the Chief Executive that patois be listed as an official language. More people in Macau would know patois, which would facilitate communication and popularization. Later, someone suggested that Ho Hau Wah learn a few dialects to facilitate communication.
Ho Hau Wah said with a smile: "I want to learn two dialects. One can be spoken publicly, and the other can only be spoken privately!" ’ Fei Wenji said with a smile: ‘I will teach you two sentences, you can say them loudly and publicly, and I will teach you how to say that everyone will be fine next year and everyone will be happy! Fei Wenji taught Ho Hau Wah and said: "Ano seguinte, Todo gente, Tem aumento", which immediately made the whole room laugh. Don't think that Brother Hua didn't speak well. He spoke clearly and clearly, but these few sentences were in Portuguese. It means 'Everyone can get a salary increase next year! ’ Someone immediately asked: ‘How many people here are civil servants? '" The dialect quoted in this feature is annotated verbatim in Chinese as follows:
Ano seguinte, Todo gente, Tem aumento.
(Year) (Next) (All people ) (increase, noun, salary increase can be understood here)
The standard Portuguese expression should be:
No ano seguinte, Todo a gente, Tem aumento.
The irregularities in dialect are:
(1) The lack of the preposition "in...";
(2) The gender of the masculine adjective "todo" and the feminine noun "gente". The gender of the nouns is inappropriate. Macao's patois is very closely related to Portuguese and also closely related to Chinese (Cantonese dialect). For example, the following patois poem:
Tuyu
Nhonha. na jinela
Co fula mogarim
Sua mae tancarera
Seu pai canarim
Standardize Portuguese
Senhora à janela,
Com flor de jasmim
Sua mae tancareira
Seu pai canarim.
Chinese translation
The girl by the window,
holds a jasmine flower in her hand,
Her mother is a Chinese Dan girl,
Her father is a Portuguese Indian .
This poem shows that the dialect has the following characteristics:
(1) Nhonha may be the abbreviation of Senhora or a corruption of the African Portuguese nhom, which means young women. There are different opinions on the origin of the word. Some say it comes from Malay nyonya or nonya (married Chinese woman), and some say it comes from Javanese nona (European or Chinese single daughter) 13
(2). ) The final nasal sound is omitted: com is omitted from m and becomes co.
(3) Words mixed with South Asian languages, for example, the monosyllabic flor of Indian language is used instead of flor. The word "fula" as disyllabic can also be understood as the syllabification tendency of native languages. Chinese is a language in which consonants do not appear alone and there are very few complex consonants. When translating into Western languages, syllables with vowels are usually used instead of unsyllabic ones. Consonant. The change of flor to fu-la reflects the characteristics of this phonetic correspondence.
(4) The structure of a word has both borrowed sounds from Cantonese dialects and Portuguese word-forming components, for example. tancarera and tancareira in the poem. Tancar or tancá is the transliteration of "danjia" in Cantonese dialect. Danjia means "egg-shaped home" and is named after the shape of the boat like a tunnel-shaped awning. The boat is the home of the boat people, thus referring to the boat people on the boat. eira is the suffix of a Portuguese feminine noun. In native dialects, eira is often written as era, and tancarera is the "daughter of the Dan family".