A comparison of the Cantonese pronunciations recorded in Langwen chujie zhongwen cidian and Zhonghua xin zidian

Abstract

Cantonese, the standard and socially the most prestigious of the Yue dialects, is certainly an important dialect for investigation. Apart from being a regional dialect of the Guangdong province, Hong Kong and Macau, it is also widely used throughout the Chinese communities in the U.S., Canada, Australia and the U.K. In the past seventy years, a number of dictionaries on Cantonese have been compiled. Among them, the Langwen chujie zhongwen cidian 朗文初階中文詞典 and the Zhonghua xin zidian中華新字典 are both widely used and are therefore influential standards on the dialect. Yet, despite their importance, specialist and systematic studies on the Cantonese pronunciations given in them are few and far between. The present dissertation is the first attempt to study the subject.

It is found that many Chinese characters are given surprisingly different pronunciations in the two dictionaries. However, the two dictionaries do not state very clearly how they determine the Cantonese pronunciation given in them. This results in great confusion for dictionary users. The present thesis attempts to analyze differences between the two dictionaries with reference to (1) the number of pronunciations given to each character, (2) the order of listing the pronunciations, (3) tone change and (4) the listing of commonly used pronunciations.