From: John H. Jenkins (jenkins@apple.com)
Date: Thu Jan 25 2007 - 11:22:57 CST
On Jan 24, 2007, at 11:14 PM, William J Poser wrote:
>
> In writing Cantonese the basic principle is that if the
> morpheme is cognate to its Mandarin counterpart it will
> be written with the same character but if it is not cognate
> a distinct character will be used. For example, the 1st
> person pronouns Cantonese ngo, Mandarin wo, and the 2nd
> person pronouns, Cantonese le, Mandarin ni, are cognate and
> are written with the same characters, but the third person
> pronouns, Cantonese keoi, mandarin ta, are not cognate
> so keoi is written with a "non-standard" character (U+4F62).
>
Exactly, which is why there are relatively few Cantonese-specific
sinograms. Almost everything in the Cantonese lexicon is cognate with
Mandarin words. My understanding is that the other dialects of
Chinese are in similar situations.
========
John H. Jenkins
jenkins@apple.com
jhjenkins@mac.com
http://homepage.mac.com/jhjenkins/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu Jan 25 2007 - 11:25:50 CST