Re: CJKV ideographic, - Cantonese

From: akerbeltz.alba (akerbeltz.alba@virgin.net)
Date: Tue Feb 27 2001 - 15:47:54 EST


Not kvite, the Cantonese for Kanji is "Hòn Jih" - although the term is
rather uncommon, sounding rather outlandish to Cantonese ears. "Jung Màhn
Jih" [4E2D 6587 5B57] is a lot more common.
Cantonese, highly conservative in it's sound system generally, has been more
innovative than Mandarin in one respect, that is the loss of initial k in
certain words cf. Mand. kè 'guest' Cant. hahk, Mand. kou 'mouth' Cant. háu
etc.
And for the core English vocab you'd have to add "Cantonese ideographs",
because there's quite a bunch of ideographs that have been encoded which are
'strictly Cantonese' such as 5497 [past tense marker], 54CB [plural pronoun
marker] etc

Michael

> And not only "kanji". These terms are all used by specialists:
>
> * 'Hanzi' in Beijing Chinese (with reference to "American English", "ha"
> as in 'hard'; "zi" pronounced like "tsz" where "z" here represents a
> vowel sound similar to English "z" with the tongue tip lowered slightly,
> near also to English "r");
> * 'Kanji' in Cantonese Chinese (kahn jee; "k" as in 'can', "a" as in
> 'father', "jee" as in 'jeep');
> * 'Kanji' in Japanese (pronunciation similar to that in Cantonese);
> * 'Hanja' in Korean (Han as in Beijing Chinese, "ja" as in English "jar";
> * 'chuhan' in Vietnamese [real Chinese chars];
> * 'chunom' in Vietnamese [similar to (i.e., analogical) Chinese
characters].
>
> But for core English vocabulary, I don't think "Chinese ideographs",
> "Japanese ideographs", "Korean ideographs", or "Vietnamese ideographs"
> would be objectionable terms to anyone ... that is, to anyone who
> doesn't find the term "ideograph" objectionable.
>



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